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My Home Page. Email John Ray here. My other blogs: "Tongue Tied" , "Dissecting Leftism" , "Australian Politics" , "Education Watch International" , "Immigration Watch" , "Greenie Watch" , "The Psychologist" (A summary blog). Those blogs are also backed up. See here for details
With particular attention to religious, ethnic and sexual matters. By John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
This page is a backup. The primary version of this blog is HERE
30 April, 2023
Goldberg suggests Bible supports transitioning children!
I can find nothing like that in the Bible. Jesus was concerned with the spiritual welfare of chidren. He said, "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 19:14), but said nothing about hacking off their body parts. Once again Goldberg defiles the Ashkenazi surname she wrongfully uses. Her real name is Caryn Elaine Johnson
Whoopi Goldberg recently made a statement that shocked many people. On Thursday’s broadcast of ABC’s daytime talk show “The View,” she suggested that the Bible would support parents having the right to subject their minor children to sex reassignment surgeries.
“Now, what the hell is going on in this country? That’s what I want to know,” Goldberg began, asserting that Republicans had simply voted to punish Zephyr because they didn’t like being forced to listen to an opposing point of view.
“What are the rules that say, ‘I don’t like what you’re saying, so I’m going to get a whole bunch of people to think like I think and we’re going to ban you from talking,’” Goldberg continued. “When did that become the law of the land?”
The conversation stemmed from a Montana lawmaker, Zooey Zephyr, who is trans-identifying and who faced disciplinary action for breaking the rules of decorum. Zephyr lashed out at Republican colleagues who opposed transgender surgeries for minors.
Goldberg and co-host Sunny Hostin criticized the move, claiming it was proof that Republicans were banning speech.
But Whoopi’s statement was the most shocking. She claimed that if the GOP believed in parental rights then parents should be able to consent to life-altering and irreversible procedures for their children. She even went as far as to say, “God was really clear!”
It’s hard to believe that Goldberg would suggest such a thing. It’s even more disturbing to think of how she could believe that the Bible would support taking away a minor’s right to make their own decision about their body.
Gender transition treatments are not only dangerous, but they can have long-term psychological and physical consequences. No one should be pressuring a child to undergo such treatments. It’s important that parents talk to their children about the risks and give them the opportunity to make their own decisions.
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From transgendered to 'transabled': Now people are 'choosing' to identify as handicapped
A troubling societal issue called "transableism" is attracting attention these days.
Transableism is a newer term for BIID, or "Body Integrity Identity Disorder," in which a person actually "identifies" as handicapped.
BIID has been relabeled to transableism to align with today's trans community, according to some.
The point of "changing the identifier" from a psychiatric condition (BIID) to an advocacy term (transableism) is to "harness the stunning cultural power of gender ideology" to the cause of allowing doctors to "treat" BIID patients by "amputating healthy limbs, snipping spinal cords or destroying eyesight," according to Evolution News and Science Today (EN), which reports on and analyzes evolution, neuroscience, bioethics, intelligent design and other science-related issues.
Culturally, transableism is "the next abyss," that site also notes.
In one case, a woman in her 50s in Oslo, Norway, identifies as disabled and uses a wheelchair, although she has no physical handicap. (iStock)
Why?
Because "some of these persons mutilate themselves; others ask surgeons for an amputation or for the transection of their spinal cord," that site adds of the shocking steps some are taking.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) notes on its website, "Those with BIID desire the amputation of one or more healthy limbs or desire a paralysis."
A North Carolina college student called transableism a "cry for attention."
The 24-year-old told Fox News Digital, "It’s offensive to people who actually suffer from the condition that you say you need, in order to be your true self." "It’s offensive to people who actually suffer from the condition."
He went on, "It’s embarrassing, and I don’t know if you can be considered a serious human being if you alter your body like this, instead of getting the appropriate mental help you need."
In one case of BIID, Jørund Viktoria Alme, 53, a senior credit analyst in Oslo, Norway, identifies as disabled and uses a wheelchair, even though she has no physical handicap.
Alme is also transgender, according to Heraldscotland.com. Alme said on the morning TV program "Good Morning Norway" in 2022 that it had been a "lifelong wish" to have been born "a woman paralyzed from the waist down," the same source noted.
One woman in her 20s (not pictured) identified as blind but wasn't — and even took steps to try to destroy her own eyesight, according to multiple reports. (iStock)
In an even more shocking case, a 21-year-old North Carolina woman who identified as blind actually took steps to destroy her own eyesight, according to multiple reports from a few years ago.
One Arizona internist called today's transableism a "delusional disorder."
"In my opinion, both transgender and transabled persons suffer from a delusional disorder," Jane Orient, a general internist in Tucson, Arizona, and executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, told Fox News Digital via email.
"The Oath of Hippocrates adjures physicians to do no harm," Orient said. "Mutilating the body is an objective harm even if makes the patient subjectively feel better," she added.
"The disability is lifelong and imposes burdens on others — and neither patients nor physicians can duck responsibility for that."
Orient also noted, "With transgenders the follow-up is generally very short — not sure about the [follow-up with] elective amputees," she said.
"The ‘no other way’ [to cope with the condition] excuse is a cop out; we need to find other ways," she also said. "Denial of reality is anti-scientific."
Dr. Marc Siegel, a clinical professor of medicine and a practicing internist at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City — as well as a Fox News medical contributor — told Fox News Digital via email that most doctors will "only perform procedures they feel are medically indicated."
Siegel referred to Munchausen syndrome, which is a "factitious disorder" in which a person "repeatedly and deliberately acts as if they have a physical or mental illness" when they are not really sick, according to WebMd.com.
Dr. Siegel continued, "We deal with Munchausen and Munchausen by proxy, where patients can be quite convincing about illnesses they don't really have — and we need to be on the lookout for this."
https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/transgendered-transabled-people-choosing-identify-handicapped
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The problem with ‘trans women are women’
Once upon a time, pollsters would phone you up and ask how satisfied you were with the railways on a scale of one to ten, or how you intended to vote in the next general election. These days — as in the UnHerd Britain poll, published today — you might equally be asked to pronounce on the deep metaphysics of womanhood. And indeed, on that most vexed of contemporary scholastic questions, namely whether “trans women are women”, it seems the jury is still out. According to the poll, 33% of us agree, 33% disagree, and 34% do neither.
Perhaps puzzlingly, this is despite the fact that, faced with practical questions about women’s spaces and women’s sports, there seems to be significant agreement that trans women should keep out of both. Had the latter results been the only ones revealed today, they surely would have suggested that, when push comes to shove, most people do not believe that trans women are women. For the alternative doesn’t add up: large sections of the British public believe there is a kind of anomalously shaped, baritone-voiced woman out there who also, for some reason, shouldn’t be allowed in a female changing room or on the sports field with other women.
A similar impression of confusion in the public mind emerges when the answers to two further poll questions are compared. A majority of respondents agreed that “people should be able to identify as being of a different gender to the one they had recorded at birth”. However, there was markedly less enthusiasm for making it easier to change “legal gender”. This too looks like a strange juxtaposition, at least at first.
In this case, though, the disparity is presumably explained by the fact that “to identify as being of a different gender” in the first question has been interpreted by respondents as nothing much more meaningful than donning fancy dress. To “identify” here mainly refers to men saying that they feel like women, and women saying that they feel like men (or at least, don’t feel like women) — perhaps with some non-conforming clothing thrown in for good measure. It would be an illiberal state indeed that tried to outlaw any of this, and at odds with our generally tolerant national character to try. Still, for poll respondents, rightly allowing people to express themselves freely doesn’t seem to have entailed that we should start handing out gender recognition certificates on the strength of it.
Yet the “trans women are women” answer remains an intriguing one. To my mind, the fact that 34% neither agree nor disagree is telling. And I don’t blame people for feeling befuddled. Pollsters inherit the limitations of dominant public ways of framing particular issues — and there is no more confusing framing than “trans women are women”. For a start, there’s the fact that the phrase functions like a mantra. As transactivists who frequently deploy the phrase no doubt realise, the repetition of the word “women” produces a slightly hypnotic effect. After all, it looks tautological — a bit like asking whether sausage dogs are dogs, or armchairs are chairs.
More fundamentally, there’s a widespread lack of clarity about who counts as a “trans woman” — a characteristic starkly exhibited in recent days by Scotland’s First Transactivist, Nicola Sturgeon. Is a trans woman someone who has had surgery to remove penis and testicles, and had a simulacrum of a vagina put there instead? Does being a trans woman require you to have taken artificial oestrogen for years, or to have had your natal testosterone suppressed? Do you have to own a gender recognition certificate?
Or does the category include men who don’t have any special legal status, and who only cross-dress, and perhaps don’t even bother doing that? Does it include convicted rapists who suddenly find a feeling of womanhood welling up within their bosoms on the way to a sentencing hearing? The more confusion there is about who counts as a trans woman, the less likely it is that people will be able to answer whether a trans woman is a woman or not with any certainty.
Whatever the source of the public’s confusion, it’s a testament to the dogged persistence of the LGBT+ lobbying sector that there is meaningful disagreement about the matter at all. For however you look at the polling, it still suggests that a significant proportion of the general population now think adult human males can change their sex by some kind of behavioural process — whether that’s a medical, legal, or merely sartorial one, or even just muttering “I’m a woman now” to your lawyer as the prospect of a male prison looms.
This bizarre epistemic situation did not arise on its own. Lamentable as the national standard of secondary school biology probably is, it still seems unlikely that many of us have mixed up human beings with sequential hermaphrodites. Clownfish, for instance, really can change their sex, going from the production of eggs to sperm over the course of a single lifetime. But — not to put too fine a point on it — humans aren’t fish.
And nor, I think, should we pay any attention to academics coughing and spluttering about the supposedly well-understood distinction between “sex” and “gender”. According to some of them, when someone says that a trans woman is a woman, they are not talking about adult human females at all. Rather, the speaker has accurately grasped something much more intellectually sophisticated — that womanhood is a “gender”, which some adult human males can come to possess, and some adult human females can shed.
The makers of this point conveniently ignore the fact that “gender” is used in multiple ambiguous ways these days, including as a polite synonym for biological sex, and alternatively as a name for a set of social stereotypes for femininity and masculinity. If you ask these same academics if they mean that womanhood is a matter of liking pink glittery things and tottering about on high heels, they get quite cross. And if you ask them to further explain what they think womanhood is then, if not conforming to sexist stereotypes, they may try to get you fired from your job. Either way, the idea that the general public is motivated by a deep comprehension of gender studies arcana seems to me somewhat optimistic.
So really, the victory here — if it can be called that — belongs almost entirely to organisations such as Stonewall, Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence, All About Trans, the Scottish Equality Network, and associated pals in the rainbow-hued phalanx. You really do have to hand it to them. Quite astonishingly, they have turned what used to be a boringly factual matter about whether Xs were Ys into a quasi-religious question revealing the respondent’s personal values. And at least to some extent, it has clearly worked.
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Dislike of fat is racist (?)
Some very devious reasoning below
Research has found weight-based shaming to be profoundly damaging when coming from family and friends. Plus, family members and friends often discriminate against larger people by discussing diets, teasing people about their weight, commenting on the shapes and sizes of others, and more. Intense shame can result, which can lead to disordered eating behaviors and the psychological and physiological challenges mentioned above.
Is fatphobia rooted in racism?
According to Sabrina Strings, author of “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia,” fatphobia has its roots in the transatlantic slave trade, in which colonists asserted that Black people were prone to gluttony and sexual excess and that their love of food caused them to be fat. European colonists claimed moral superiority, valuing moderation and self-control, which made them thin, and, according to them, “the superior race.” By the early 1800s, fatness was considered a sign of immorality in the U.S., as well as racial inferiority.
Ultimately, people used body size and shape to distinguish between those who were enslaved and those who were free since skin color wasn’t necessarily a reliable indicator (due to two hundred years of interracial sex, mostly rape, when enslavers bred their enslaved). Essentially, larger bodies were deemed undeserving of freedom. And these anti-fat, anti-Black attitudes persist well into current times due to modern medical practices.
Doctors are some of the most common perpetuators of fatphobia and weight discrimination. Research shows that they spend less time with larger people on office visits, provide them with less medical information, and often hold biased, stigmatizing views of fat people, including that they are non-compliant or undisciplined.1
Is BMI racist and inaccurate?
You’ve likely heard of Body Mass Index (BMI) as a measurement of healthy weight. It’s used everywhere, from doctors’ offices to schools to places of employment. It is even responsible for the infamous “fat letters” many schools sent home to parents of students.
But BMI isn’t actually an accurate indicator of health. It is simply a person’s weight-to-height ratio. It doesn’t take any other factors into account, such as muscularity, biological and environmental influences, bone density, and beyond. For example, someone with a lot of muscle mass may have a BMI that falls in the “obese” range.
Generally speaking, proponents of BMI claim that a high BMI will lead to disease, negative health risks, and even premature death. But research has shown that BMI alone is a poor measurement of health and mortality. In fact, the exact opposite is true.
Research by Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has shown that being overweight is actually associated with a lower mortality rate. Research by Dr. Tomiyama, director of UCLA’s Dieting, Stress and Health Laboratory, has debunked the accuracy of BMI, as well. Her research, which involved measuring health according to glucose, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, and blood pressure, found that over 47% of U.S. adults who fall into the “overweight” range for BMI are healthy, as well as nearly 20 million people who are considered "obese."7
https://learn.withinhealth.com/articles/the-racist-history-of-fatphobia-and-weight-stigma
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28 April, 2023
Single people should be valued and Jesus was single, Church of England says
What a lot of nonsense. Jesus was a bachelor and bachelors have long been regarded as glamorous. Nothing new to see here
Single people “must be valued at the heart of our society” just as much as couples and families, a major new report by the Church of England has stated.
Pointing to the fact that Jesus himself wasn’t shacked up, the 236-page report, Love Matters, said that the church should “not regard [singleness] as lesser than living in a couple relationship”.
“We have an amazing opportunity to reimagine a diverse society in which all families and loving relationships are valued and strengthened, promoting the stability that enables us all to thrive in a variety of family constellations, including being single.”
The result of a two-year commission examining relationships and families ordered by the archbishops of Canterbury and York, Love Matters was the third in a trilogy of commissions; the first two reports dealt with housing and social care.
The report acknowledged that an increased number of people elect to be single, adding that loving relationships matter just as much to singles as to anyone who is married with a family.
“Singleness can be a deliberate choice – sometimes the right partner has not been found, and sometimes separation, divorce or death has resulted in the loss of a partner,” it said.
“Inevitably, singleness does not imply celibacy, although this is the choice some single people in faith communities make.
“The Commission believes strongly that single people must be valued at the heart of our society. Jesus’ own singleness should ensure that the C of E celebrates singleness and does not regard it as lesser than living in a couple relationship. Loving relationships and being able to give and receive love matter to everyone.”
The Church of England was also recommended to offer relationship preparation and support “to be available to all couples planning to marry. Ideally this would also be available to couples planning to cohabit and those planning to marry in a civil ceremony”.
It urged the government “to invest in accessible and affordable relationship support … for all couples facing relationship difficulties, long before the relationship breaks down”.
The call to “honour” singleness comes after the Church of England in February announced it would consider introducing gender-neutral pronouns for God when conducting religious teachings.
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The Truth About America’s History of Slavery
The kids are given the impression that America was uniquely bad and that American slavery was uniquely bad. They learn nothing about slavery elsewhere. Among the many lies they are told are that “black slaves built America” and that America is systemically racist.
Since the only mortal enemy of the Left is truth, here are some truths about slavery.
America’s Slavery Compared to Slavery Elsewhere
If you are interested in morality and committed to truth, you do not ask, “Who had slaves?” You ask, “Who ended slavery?”
Who had slaves?
Every civilization throughout history had slaves: Asian societies, Africans, Native Americans, and other Indigenous peoples around the world, and the Muslim/Arab world, which may have had the most slaves of all.
Who ended slavery?
There was only one thing unique about slavery in the West: It raised the issue of the morality of slavery, ferociously debated it, and finally abolished it there, before it was abolished in any other civilization.
If you care about moral truth rather than, for example, promoting America-hatred, you must recognize—and you must teach—that America was one of the first slave-holding societies to abolish slavery. This even includes Africa.
Cornell professor Sandra Greene, a black scholar of African history, notes, “Slavery in the United States ended in 1865, but in West Africa it was not legally ended until 1875, and then it stretched on unofficially until almost World War I.”
The numbers of slaves.
According to the authoritative SlaveVoyages.org, the total number of black slaves imported from Africa into America was 305,326. The number of black slaves other countries imported from Africa into the rest of the New World—i.e., into the Caribbean and South America—was 12,521,337.
In other words, other countries imported 41 times the number of black slaves into the Western Hemisphere than the United States did, including the years before American independence).
Yet, the American Left never mentions this important moral point—because the Left-controlled education system suppresses facts it finds inconvenient, and the Left is not interested in morality or truth, but in vilifying America.
And then there is Arab/Muslim enslavement of blacks. Professor Paul Lovejoy, in his “Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa” (Cambridge University Press, 2012), reveals that from the beginning of Islam in the seventh century through the year 1600, the estimated number of Africans enslaved by Muslims was about 7 million. After 1600, it was about a million per year.
Do American students ever learn about the Arab/Muslim slave trade? How many know, for example, that a great percentage of the African male slaves were castrated so that they could not have families?
‘Black Slaves Built America’
This is another lie of the Left.
Those who make this argument point to the lucrative cotton manufacturing and trade in the 19th century—the industry in which black slaves were primarily used in the American South.
But University of Illinois professor of economics Deirdre McCloskey answered this:
Growing cotton, unlike sugar or rice, never required slavery. By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860. Cotton was not a slave crop in India or in southwest China, where it was grown in bulk … That slaves produced cotton does not imply that they were essential or causal in the production …
The United States and the United Kingdom and the rest would have become just as rich without the 250 years of unrequited toil. They have remained rich, observe, even after the peculiar institution was abolished, because their riches did not depend on its sinfulness.
But one need not know anything about cotton to understand how false “Black slaves built America” is. All you need is common sense.
First, even if slavery accounted for much of the wealth of the South, the Civil War that brought slavery to an end in the United States wiped out nearly all of that wealth and cost the Union billions (in today’s dollars).
Second, if slavery built the American economy, the most robust economy in world history, why didn’t Brazil become an economic superpower? Brazil imported 4 million black slaves, about 12 times as many as America. Why did the slave-owning American South lag so far behind the North economically?
Why did England, which, though it played a major role in the transatlantic slave trade until the beginning of the 19th century, had almost no slaves, become the most advanced economy of the 19th century?
“Black slaves built America” is left-wing propaganda to vilify America and to discredit capitalism.
“America is systemically racist.”
This is the Great Left Lie.
Four million black people have emigrated to the United States since the 1960s—and tens of millions more would if they could. Are they all fools? Why would anyone move to a country that is systemically bigoted against them? Did any Jews emigrate to Germany in the 1930s?
Blacks have emigrated to the United States because they know what Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the black woman who fled her homeland of Somalia and who now writes and lectures in America, knows:
What the media do not tell you is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans, or what have you.
Blacks emigrating to America know what Algerian writer Kamel Daoud, writing in Le Monde and Le Point, knows:
It is forbidden to say that the West is also the place to which we flee when we want to escape the injustice of our country of origin, dictatorship, war, hunger, or simply boredom. It is fashionable to say that the West is guilty of everything.
As regards American slavery and everything else, always remember this: Truth is a liberal value, and truth is a conservative value. It is not a left-wing value.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/18/slavery-the-left-and-truth
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Why Dems Must Defend Deviancy
It curries favour with their female voters
It must be spring!
Rainbow-colored virtue-signaling yard signs are sprouting up in front of some homes in wealthy suburbs, an indication they are occupied by affluent “white privilege” Democrats. Many of these leftist protagonists are inheritance welfare liberals, the effluent of generational wealth and privilege, who choose to live in the safety and comfort of suburbia, with their enclaves of clubs and finer eating establishments.
These “truly enlightened” Demo elitists harbor fear of and contempt for grassroots Americans, in part because they have little social intersection with those who form the backbone of our nation. They arrogantly deride the foundational family and faith values that are common among grassroots folks. And they certainly don’t understand our embrace of American Liberty, the antithesis of the statist government power they advocate.
Despite their confident facade, these suburban lefties are an insecure lot who are quick to embrace the latest virtue identity fad.
When Donald Trump was president, they displayed their “Hate Has No Home Here” yard signs, expressing their disdain for “We, the [Deplorable] People.” Ahead of the 2020 election, they put out their phony “Black Lives Matter” signs while dispensing barrels of their BLM elixir, thinking it would ingratiate them with those off-color minorities who mostly loathe rich liberals.
They would never acknowledge that black lives don’t matter to the Demo hate hustlers they put in power — those who long ago betrayed the legacies of Frederick Douglass, Booker Washington, and Martin King in order to keep poor black and brown people their dependents.
After the virtue signalers elected Joe Biden, who promptly enabled Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, they laughingly replaced their Biden yard signs with plastic Ukrainian flag signs.
The vast majority of these suburban leftists have never raised their hand to “to support and defend” our country, or anything else. They depend on the grassroots folks for their protection, whether from gangbangers who venture into their neighborhoods or despots in foreign lands.
One of the virtue-signaling signs that reemerges once the other signs have worn out their usefulness is the Rainbow Mafia version — you know, variations of rainbow colors that also adorn the backs of vehicles. That theme, in support of the Left’s gender-confusion cult, has become the most prolific of the Demo virtue projections, an excessive emphasis that at first glance seems curious.
Amid all the issues that Democrats should focus on if they’re serious about “lifting up” their constituents, why do their national, state, and local leftist cadres expend so much highly visible political capital defending abject gender deviance?
That deviance now increasingly includes the most offensive of the aberrant offenders, including “transgender” men competing as women in sports, trans groomers infiltrating elementary schools as teachers, drag queen kindergarten groomers, and now, even the most grotesque of the bunch, child gender mutilators who are profiting from cutting body parts off of children.
Democrats are even passing legislation to remove children from parents who won’t allow their child to be chemically or physically mutilated.
Defending even these absurd outlying manifestations of gender confusion is critical to the Demos’ gender cult agenda, which struck deep into the heartland of normalcy when Biden signed the so-called Respect for Marriage Act — which is anything but. Last week, every House Demo voted against a bill to restrict men from competing as women in sports. Biden had already signaled he would veto it.
So, what is the political strategy behind the Demo defense of their most deviant and delusional constituents? Why expend so much political time and energy on this defense?
So quick are Demos to defend these “special” constituents that after a gender-confused assailant murdered six people at a Nashville Christian school, they pulled out all the stops to deflect attention from the assailant’s gender pathology, including by promoting yard signs that note “Protect Kids, Not Guns.” Ironically, those signs include rainbow lettering.
The Nashville case provides the evidential trail exposing the Demo deviant defense political strategy. Hint: It’s all about female voters
After the attack, Nashville Police Chief John Drake announced, “We have a manifesto, we have some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident,” including “a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.” He added that the assailant was “prepared to do more harm than was actually done.”
Drake indicated the writings would be released to the public, but as I wrote at the time, I doubted that would happen because that “manifesto” might connect the dots confirming this was a hate crime.
Recall that the Nashville attack occurred just ahead of the “Trans Day of Vengeance.” And on that day of vengeance, a gender-confused Colorado Springs man was arrested after the discovery of his hate manifesto detailing his plans to attack schools and churches. (Notably, information about that case was not released to the public until six days after the suspect was arrested for reasons not explained.)
Now, four weeks after the Nashville assault, the assailant’s writings indicating her motive have still not been released. No dots to connect here; move along.
As for why her sociopathic rants have not been released, professor Joseph Giacalone of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice speculated, “I think what the FBI is really concerned here with … is that if there is something in there that is truly damaging for the transgender community, I think they are hesitant to do it because they are afraid of a violent backlash against that protected class of people.”
Actually, there is most definitely concern about a “backlash,” but “against that protected class” is not the backlash Biden and his Demos are worried about.
And herein lies the answer to the question of why Democrats expend enormous political capital defending deviance.
The delay in releasing the assailant’s writings is because she is among the Left’s prized “protected class” of gender-confused constituents. If the release of her rantings indicated that the motive for her attack was hatred for those who disagreed with her identity and ideology, thus fitting the criterion for a hate crime, the Department of Justice would be obligated to classify it as such.
The Biden administration will vigorously reject any effort by the DOJ to do so.
Why?
Because that would result in an immediate political backlash from their Demo base — those who support the whole LGBTQ+++ ad nauseam spectrum of gender deniers, especially if that hate crime declaration implied a connection between her gender confusion and mental illness.
Again, why?
Democrats know they can give no ground regarding defense of their deviant gender-outlier constituents because they connect the dots to the 5% of Demo constituents who are in the “gay and lesbian” category, and that group is broadly supported by the Democrats’ largest and most critical voting bloc, women. As reported in National Review’s gender gap analysis: “In 2022, men voted Republican by a 14-point margin, while women voted Democratic by an 8-point margin. That’s a 22-point gender gap.”
Yes, ironic that a large number of leftist biological women support the tiny but very vocal “nonbinary” identity group.
Democrat strategists believe their female voters are emotionally incontinent idiots who can be manipulated into dependably voting Democrat by promoting emotionally provoking issues.
So, rather than risk offending women voters, make the issue about guns instead of gender pathology. And then give all those emotionally incontinent “white privilege” virtue signalers “Protect Kids Not Guns” yard signs. Throw in some statehouse protests to bolster that diversion.
Of course, we ALL want to protect kids from the Demos’ rising generation of sociopathic killers, the vast majority of whom are killing each other, not schoolchildren. And fortunately, most school kids are protected by resource officers with guns.
If those “enlightened” suburban leftists were really concerned about children, they would be posting yard signs that read: “Protect Kids, Not Groomers.” Tag team that with “Protect Kids, Not Failed Demo Social Policies.”
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Texas Law Enforcement Officials Shut Down Antifa Counter-Protest Of ‘Protect Texas Kids’ Demonstration
Law enforcement officials with the Fort Worth Police Department shut down Antifa agitators over the weekend who counter-protested a small group of demonstrators from “Protect Texas Kids” who were protesting a drag show event.
The Protect Texas Kids group arrived at a restaurant on Sunday to stage their demonstration at the event across the street when the counter-protesters showed up “dressed in black, wearing helmets and outer tactical vests, and many of them were armed with handguns and long guns,” officials said in a statement.
The FWPD monitored both groups using city cameras. The department said that while they respect everyone’s constitutional rights to free speech and assembly, they are also focused on ensuring there is “a safe environment that respects all participants’ constitutional rights, while effectively maintaining public peace and order … those who choose to violate the law and assault others will be arrested and charged.”
During the event, “officers observed a member of the counter-protest group, later identified as 20-year-old Samuel Fowlkes, approach the ‘Protect Texas Kids’ protesters and spray them with pepper spray,” police said.
When police tried to arrest Fowlkes, he allegedly “began to evade officers and then swung his closed fists at officers who tried to stop him.”
“While the officers were attempting to place Fowlkes into handcuffs, another member from the counter-protest group, later identified as 33-year-old Christopher Guillott, interfered with officers’ efforts by swinging an umbrella at officers,” police said. “Guillott struck an officer in the face and was then placed under arrest.”
While officers tried to place Fowlkes and Guillott under arrest, backup was called to help secure the scene.
Police instructed the counter-protesters to stay back on the sidewalk, at which time “a third counter-protester, later identified as 37-year-old Meghan Grant, attempted to charge past FWPD officers multiple times to gain access to the Fowlkes and Guillott.”
Police tried to keep Grant back, but she allegedly did not comply and was later taken into custody.
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27 April, 2023
Now wanting to be THIN is 'white supremacy'
It is true that blacks are more likely to be obese but that is their doing
A guest on NPR's show Fresh Air promoted the idea that the desire to be thin stems from white supremacy while discussing how parents should communicate weight with their children.
Journalist Virginia Sole-Smith appeared on the show on Tuesday to discuss her new book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture which includes the theory that fat phobia can be traced back to the end of slavery in the US.
Her argument is that when slavery was abolished and African Americans started gaining rights, white supremacists sought to maintain old inequalities by demonizing black bodies and glamorizing thinness.
'This is really about maintaining systems of white supremacy and patriarchy,' she said on the show.
'The chronic experience of weight stigma... is similar to the research we see on chronic experiences of racism or other forms of bias,' Sole-Smith said.
Sole-Smith also cited the work of Sabrina Strings, and her recent book Fearing the Black Body. Strings argues that the modern aversion to being fat has nothing to do with health but is instead a way of using weight to perpetuate racism and classism.
'Her research talks about how, as slavery ended, Black people gained rights, obviously, white supremacy is trying to maintain the power structure,' said Sole-Smith.
'So celebrating a thin white body as the ideal body is a way to "other" and demonize Black and brown bodies, bigger bodies, anyone who doesn't fit into that norm,' she added.
Sole-Smith proposes that toxic American attitudes around weight can be combated by encouraging parents to normalize fatness.
She identifies as 'small fat' herself and advocated making the term neutral as opposed to derogatory as a way to 'take all the power out of the word'.
'We make it something that can't be weaponized against us, and that really is the first step towards starting to dismantle anti-fat bias,' she added.
Last year TIME magazine experienced backlash after it published an article exploring a similar theme - claiming that the act of exercising was a form of white supremacy.
The piece, titled 'The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise,' put forward the idea that exercise was a pastime started in the early 1900s by white Americans who sought to strengthen their race amid increasing immigration and the abolition of slavery.
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Transgender Supporters Cause Mayhem Inside Montana's Statehouse
Pro-transgender protesters in Montana forced the House to halt its proceedings after Republicans led an effort to censure Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D), a transgender member, after accusing them of having blood on their hands for passing a bill that stops children from receiving life altering medical treatment in the name of transgenderism.
Zephyr's supporters in the viewing gallery shouted and chanted to show solidarity, forcing the House to suspend its proceedings until the agitators could be removed. Some of the protesters resisted being pushed out by the Montana Highway Patrol, with others banging on the doors to the gallery.
At least five people were arrested. When the sheriff used the wrong pronoun to describe a suspect, the pro-transgender protesters got upset.
The disruption caused by left-wing activist in Montana is the latest in far-left people causing chaos inside statehouses, with pro-gun control protesters wreaking havoc inside Tennessee's statehouse in the aftermath of a shooting at the Covenant School, which was carried out by someone who identified as transgender.
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The great self-esteem experiment mistook the pedals for the steering wheel. Here’s the result
Those of us of a certain age decry the modern sensibilities of “everyone gets a trophy” for participating. Such awards diminish truly worthy accomplishments, and falsely build up people who maybe didn’t even really try. Christopher Gage takes a stab at some of the problems brought about by the self-esteem movement from which such trophies stemmed.
After recounting a bit of history of where it all came from, he declares: “Later studies show the dictums of the self-esteem movement often had the reverse effect.”
In the mid-2000s, researchers sifted through 15,000 studies on self-esteem. They found just 200 matching their rigorous standards. Of those 200 studies, few, if any, backed up the claims of the self-esteem movement.
By then, it was much too late. The faulty concept of self-esteem informed our culture, media, institutions, and everything else.
When I was a teenager, the prevailing psychology was to ensure everyone felt good about themselves.
Our parents and our teachers eschewed all criticism and saturated us in unconditional praise. The self-esteem movement swept away alarming red pens, instead marking our ever-inflating grades in hues of soothing teal green. They traded grade “F” for “U,” “a bit dense” for “minimally exceptional,” knowing useful things for “knowing yourself.” The brutalism of correct answers gave way to the sentimentalism of no correct answers.
The right answers didn’t matter. Neither did grammar. The right answers were passé. What mattered was how one felt inside.
Rather than learn how to write declarative sentences, how to think critically, or how to sift the rational from the emotional, we learned how to love ourselves.
This monstrous miscalculation created generations of praise-addicted, validation seekers frozen by their fear of failure — millions crippled with anxiety and depression — alongside legions of narcissists convinced of their destiny with fame.
Visit any social media feed to witness the results of this experiment.
Gage argues that the movement didn’t even get it right when trying to act out on the teachings of Nathaniel Branden, “the ‘godfather’ of self-esteem.” In fact, they got his message backwards, and dangerously so. Gage concludes with another example to illustrate the big takeaway:
Professor Carol Dweck, the author of Mindset, found praising intelligence over effort led to the opposite of what was intended.
Through her experiments with elementary school children, Dweck identified two mindsets: a growth mindset and a fixed mindset.
Children with a growth mindset see their talents, their intelligence, and their abilities as malleable. They’re unafraid of failure. To them, challenges are opportunities. Children with a fixed mindset see their talents, their intelligence, and their abilities as fixed. They’re terrified of failure. To them, challenges are pitfalls.
In Dweck’s experiments, she gave each child a simple task. Researchers praised one group on their ability: “Wow. You did so well on this. You must be smart.”
To the other group, researchers praised their effort: “Wow. You did so well on this. You must have worked really hard.”
The next challenge proved much more arduous than the last. What happened? Those praised for their ability got frustrated, gave up faster, and claimed they weren’t “smart enough” to do the challenge. Those praised for their effort stayed the course, enjoyed the challenge, and put in the work.
Just one sentence of unearned praise froze those children into a fear of failure. So, what did decades of the very same thing do to the rest of us?
https://patriotpost.us/articles/96780-in-brief-how-to-ruin-your-kids-2023-04-26
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Your credit score is excellent, so prepare to be penalized
by Jeff Jacoby
YOU'VE ALWAYS dreamed of owning your own home. For years you've worked to make that dream a reality, putting part of each paycheck aside as you save up for a down payment. You know that to get a favorable mortgage rate you'll need to have a good credit score, so you've been scrupulous about paying your bills on time, never maxing out your credit cards, and sticking to a budget you can afford.
Now, at last, you're ready to become a homeowner. Thanks to your excellent financial habits, your credit score is a solid 740. You've found the house of your dreams and applied for a mortgage loan. You've accumulated enough in savings to be able to make an extremely respectable down payment of 20 percent. Based on everything you've learned about mortgage borrowing, that should more than qualify you for the most favorable interest rate and fees available. Right?
Wrong.
You've done everything you were supposed to do, so this may come as an unwelcome surprise: Because your credit rating is so good and your down payment is so high, the Biden administration has decided to penalize you with a hefty new fee and a higher mortgage rate. As of May 1, mortgage costs for home buyers with risky credit backgrounds will be reduced, resulting in more favorable interest rates. In order to subsidize that discount for less creditworthy borrowers, someone has to pay more. That someone is you and buyers like you — those with credit scores higher than 680 and down payments of 15 percent or more.
The fees involved are called loan-level price adjustments, or LLPAs. These are charges paid upfront; they apply to all mortgages controlled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant government-chartered finance firms that buy up most home mortgages. LLPA fees are determined by a borrower's credit score and down payment size, and are commonly converted into percentage points that affect the buyer's interest rate.
Lending to borrowers with lower credit scores is risky, since by definition they're less likely to pay back what they borrow. To cover that risk, lenders have to charge them more for mortgages. That makes it harder for low-income borrowers, who are disproportionately Black, to qualify for loans, which exacerbates the racial gap in homeownership. Hence the Biden administration's plan to "increase pricing support for purchase borrowers limited by income or by wealth," to quote Sandra Thompson, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Borrowers with great credit scores will pay higher fees so that those with not-so-great scores can get a discount, thereby enabling more people with poor credit to buy homes.
The only thing wrong with that theory is — everything.
First and foremost, it is egregiously unfair to creditworthy borrowers like you. David Stevens, who headed the Federal Housing Administration under President Barack Obama, has crunched the numbers. He estimates that on a $400,000 loan with a 6 percent mortgage rate, a home buyer in your position, with a credit score of 740 and 20 percent paid down, can expect a $40-a-month hike in your monthly bill. That means a loss of $480 per year, or more than $14,000 over the course of a 30-year mortgage — funds unavailable for home improvement, for a child's education, or for anything else.
Second, it is not a kindness to qualify borrowers for mortgages they can't afford. Doesn't the White House remember the 2008 subprime loan crisis? Lenders went bankrupt, homes were foreclosed on, the housing market collapsed, and the credit of untold thousands of Americans was shredded, largely because of government policies that promoted lending to borrowers who weren't creditworthy.
Third, boosting the buying power of would-be homeowners with lower incomes won't change the number of affordable houses available for sale. It will simply boost demand for houses already in short supply. When demand rises and supply doesn't, the result is higher prices. How will that raise homeownership rates?
Penalizing people who are financially responsible in order to subsidize those who aren't is terribly unwise. Like other Biden administration policies in recent years — such as the plan to unilaterally forgive student debt, preventing evictions for nonpayment of rent, and prolonging unemployment and health care benefits for people who chose not to work — the new mortgage fees amount to a tax on responsible behavior.
The way to expand homeownership is not to undermine credit scores. It is to get lower-income earners to do what you did — pay their bills faithfully, live within their means, and save for the future. You shouldn't be punished for having done the right thing, and no one who didn't should be getting a reward.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26926/your-credit-score-is-excellent-so-prepare-to-be
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26 April, 2023
‘Woke Riots’ And How Democrats Created Them
How many stories have you seen about a group of “teens” wilding their way through a city, looting stores and beating holy hell out of anyone they come across? The word “teens” is used repeatedly, as though there are no other characteristics beyond age that these amoral mobs share. By doing so, the media and politicians are protecting themselves and harming citizens. It’s time to stop pretending and honestly discuss the destructive nature of the Democratic Party.
Find the story and you’ll see the euphemisms – “Chicago, Suburbs Prepare for Potential ‘Teen Takeover’” or “Street takeovers, looting plague Compton businesses” are just two examples where reality is deliberately obscured by the media because these events are of the left’s making.
First, there is no such thing as a “street takeover,” they’re riots. When people loot stores, they’re looting stores in the course of a riot. When they beat the snot out of people who just so happen to be in front of them when the riotous urge hits them, that is evil. Just like a man in a dress, calling it something it clearly isn’t does not make it into that thing.
Second, we have to be honest about who is committing these heinous acts; it’s the only way to address the causes behind them to prevent them from happening in the future. This is where Democrats refuse to go, because they are the cause and doing what is necessary to prevent them in the future will hurt them politically.
Roving bands of black teenagers are committing violent acts and looting stores because, thanks to Democrats, they have been stripped of hope and aspiration.
There isn’t a majority or plurality black major city in the country – where these attacks happen – that is successfully educating their kids. Critical race theory and a genuinely third world education system where unions matter more than results rule the day. Kids are “graduating” without being able to read or do basic math, but they likely can name a couple of dozen genders and would be able to lecture you all day about the horrors of microaggressions.
Lost in this move by Democrats is the fact that if people, particularly people in positions of authority and trust like teachers, preachers and politicians, tell kids they’ll never get ahead because “society is built to keep them down,” that they’ll never succeed because of their skin color, they will start to believe it.
Everyone fails, everyone doesn’t get a job or a promotion they want. Imagine if, when that happens, rather than working to improve your chances the next time and learn from the experience, everyone you’re conditioned to look up to because of their position or impressive title told you it was how things are and will always be. How cynical would you become? Maybe not the first time it happened, but after the next? Or later?
People fail, learn from it and improve. Democrats tell minorities they failed not because it happens to everyone, but because society is stacked against them. It doesn’t stick with everyone, and more and more people are coming to the realization that the people telling them “the system is rigged against them” are the very people who constructed that “system” and have been administering it for generations in these cities. But a lot of people don’t.
Those who don’t are stripped of hope, because how could you have hope about life if you believe you’re eternally screwed because of something you have no control over? Once you’re to that point, why not beat the hell out of someone for stupid reasons? Why not rob a store? That store is part of the system that is screwing you over, it’s “justice” to steal from them.
No one starts off as a cold-blooded killer, but people build to that point through a lack of punishment for lesser crimes (which Democrat prosecutors are currently engaged in). When you see bands of “teens” rampaging “for no reason” or because “it’s warm in the summer months,” know there is more, much more behind it than that. But there isn’t a single Democrat politician, preacher or activist who’ll talk about it because it is to their benefit.
Sure, people will die, others will have their lives ruined, but Democrats will get the votes. Individuals have always been disposable to the progressive left. We’re now seeing the results of their “woke” policies and philosophy marching down the streets of once-great American cities. If it hasn’t hit your town yet, and they keep electing Democrats, it will…
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Vandals Attack Utah Senator's Home After He Supported Bill to Ban Transgender Surgeries
Sen. Mike Kennedy's (R-Utah) garage door was spray painted red with messages reading "fash" — short for fascist — and "These trannies bash back," a phrase that uses a slur for transgender people.
In a statement regarding the incident, Kennedy condemned the attack, saying he would not be intimidated by "cowardly actions."
"To those who seek to use violence, vandalism, and intimidation to deter me from standing up for what is right, let me be clear: you will not succeed. I will not be deterred by your cowardly actions," Kennedy said.
He continued to say that Utah will not stand for violence from extreme Leftists who push the transgender agenda of harming the U.S. and indoctrinating children.
"The recent vandalism to my family's home was not just an attack on me, but on the very principles, our state stands for. We will not let fear and violence control our destiny," Kennedy said. "As Utahns, we will always stand up and push back against radicals who seek to push their agenda in our state. I am more determined than ever to work with the good people of Utah to make our state a better place for all, especially our children, and I won't back down."
Last year, Kennedy sponsored SB16, which bans transgender surgeries, and places an indefinite moratorium on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children and teens. In January, Gov. Spencer Cox (R-Utah) signed the bill into law.
Eleven other states, including Kentucky and West Virginia, have enacted similar bills restricting gender-affirming care for minors under 18. The controversial bills have sparked outrage from the progressive Left, claiming Republicans are putting transgender lives at risk.
Equality Utah, the state's LGBTQ advocacy group that opposed Kennedy's bill, condemned the violence against the senator, saying they would not tolerate hatred towards anyone regarding their views.
"We do not know who participated in this action, but we have been informed this may have been an act of retaliation for his sponsorship of S.B. 16. To the extent this, or any other act of violence or vandalism against our public officials, is related to LGBTQ advocacy, we want to make it clear that Equality Utah condemns these tactics in the absolute strongest terms," the group's statement read. "These heinous acts do not help LGBTQ Utahns. They do not advance a climate of equality,"
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Stop pandering to political correctness, Home Secretary to urge police
Suella Braverman will urge police to stop pandering to political correctness and focus on basics, such as stop and search, to tackle crime.
On Wednesday, as it is expected to be confirmed that ministers have hit their target of recruiting an extra 20,000 officers, the Home Secretary will demand that police concentrate on “delivering criminal justice, not social justice”.
In a speech at the launch of a new “back to basics” think tank, Mrs Braverman will tell police she wants them to focus on pursuing criminals and not “pandering to politically correct preoccupations”.
She is expected to include stop and search as part of the “common sense policing” she believes should be pursued without fear or favour. There has been criticism that black people are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched.
It follows the Home Secretary’s previous calls for police to stop investigating non-crime hate incidents because someone is offended and criticism of authorities for failing to tackle grooming gangs because of fears of being branded racist.
Speaking at the Public Safety Foundation think tank, Mrs Braverman will say: “Everything that our police officers do should be about driving down crime and keeping people safe.
“My vision for common sense policing is as clear as the public’s. It means focusing effort on deterring and catching criminals, not pandering to politically correct preoccupations.
“It means that policemen and women that come from and live in the communities they serve, familiar with local challenges, and familiar to local people. Common sense policing means police focused on delivering criminal justice, not social justice. That’s what the public wants.
“I believe in the police. But the policing in which I believe isn’t riven with political correctness but enshrined in good old-fashioned common sense.”
The foundation has been set up by Rory Geoghegan, a former Metropolitan Police officer who became a crime adviser to Boris Johnson. In an article for The Telegraph, he said he gave up policing because of senior police officers’ disregard for tackling “low-level” crimes that blighted people’s lives.
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Australia: Three cheers for black conservative senator!
Three cheers for Jacinta! Her promotion is good for Dutton, good for the Coalition, and good for the country.
The rise and rise of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price from deputy mayor of Alice Springs to Country Liberal Senator for the Northern Territory, and from there to Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians is one of those rare rapid ascents in political life that promises to be good for the Liberal party, good for Opposition leader Peter Dutton, and good for the country.
Prime Minister Albanese’s brazen request for a blank cheque to create a disembodied Indigenous Voice to Parliament is disingenuous, dangerous, and many would add racist. Price’s opposition to Albanese’s half-baked plan is deeply personal. She is the living incarnation of reconciliation with a Warlpiri mum and an Anglo-Celtic dad. She went on create her own ‘blended family’ with her musician husband who is not Indigenous. As she says in the ‘No’ campaign ad, which is being run by Fair Australia, it was love that brought her parents together and love that brought she and her partner together and none of them want to see the family divided along the lines of race.
Price is a gifted speaker. At the CPAC conference in Sydney last year she and Warren Mundine provided a hilarious double act, brimming with good humour and incisive commentary. They plan to go on tour across the country reminding Australians that there is more to unite us than divide us. The pair will provide ‘Yes’ campaigners with a formidable challenge.
Labor has turned smearing Liberals as racist and sexist into an art form, but the promotion Price makes that task a whole lot harder. Leftists looked stupid, vicious, and paternalistic when they tried to claim that she was providing cover for racists.
Price has been a godsend for Dutton. His new Clark Kent-style black glasses have helped him shed the Voldemort look and with Price at his side, Labor has been put on the back foot in its campaign of character assassination that it perfected in relentless attacks on Scott Morrison. And to Labor’s chagrin Price has been joined at the hip to Dutton on his frequent trips to Alice Springs.
Price has been equally helpful to Dutton within his party. He has been faced with the same rancorous divisions that poisoned the prime ministerial tenure of the last three Liberal leaders. The Voice threatened the usual tectonic divide between the Woke, wet left, and the dry right. After the dismal drubbing in the Aston by-election, Price is the inspirational figure the Coalition needs to bring its warring tribes together. Perhaps not Julian Leeser, who quit the shadow front bench to campaign for the Voice, but Price, a Country National, was backed by the majority of Liberals even though it meant the Nationals have exceeded their quota on the front bench.
Leeser’s departure has also allowed Dutton to promote the very capable Kerrynne Liddle to Shadow Assistant Minister for Child Protection and the Prevention of Family Violence and make the battle-hardened former attorney-general Michaelia Cash the new shadow attorney-general.
And just like that, Dutton has added three impressive women to the ministry making Labor’s stereotypical attacks that much harder.
The announcement by Karen Andrews, the former and then Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, that she will quit the front bench and not contest the next election opened the way for Dutton to promote talented China hawk Senator James Paterson to Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Minister for Home Affairs and cyber security.
Paterson did an impressive job when he was chair of the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security. He scored a major hit on the government in February when he raised the alarm about the threat posed by almost a thousand Chinese-made cameras in Commonwealth buildings.
He joins Andrew Hastie, Shadow Minister for Defence, who gets kudos for being attacked by the overtly pro-China Premier of Western Australia, Mark McGowan, this week. McGowan, either accidentally or on purpose, announced over a hot microphone at a China-Australia Chamber of Commerce lunch during his first trip to China since the pandemic that Hastie had ‘swallowed some sort of Cold War pills back … when he was born, and he couldn’t get his mindset out of that’. Who knows what was going on. What is certain is that most Australians share Hastie’s concerns about the CCP and would see McGowan’s comments in an unimpressed light within the context of his visit to China.
Price, Liddle, Paterson, and Hastie are all part of a younger generation that will eventually carry the Liberals back onto the government benches. A successful campaign against the Voice is a critical first battle and Price is the best person to lead them to victory in that campaign.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/three-cheers-for-jacinta/
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25 April, 2023
General Admits Trans Inclusion Hurts Army Recruiting
The Biden administration has pushed to make the military more diverse and inclusive by introducing measures to accommodate transgender individuals, but the move could be hindering recruitment efforts.
Congressman Matt Gaetz recently asked Army General James McConville if these policies would hurt recruitment of “men from the American South” and the general responded “probably not.” Gaetz argued that such inclusion policies would negatively impact the goal of building a “cohesive team” and that condoning “people with male genitalia showering with female soldiers” would hurt recruitment of women.
Despite Army Secretary Christine Wormuth pushing back against Gaetz’s critiques, the U.S. military has faced challenges to recruiting in recent years, including a growing epidemic of obesity and mental health problems in the American population that have caused 77 percent of young Americans to be deemed unfit for military service. The Air Force recently increased its body fat allowance for recruits in order to combat the dismal recruitment numbers.
The Biden administration’s inclusion measures, such as the Air Force’s gender-neutral written communications policy, may be well-intentioned, but they are likely to come at the expense of security and American defense. The Army missed its FY 2022 recruitment goal by 25 percent, or 15,000 soldiers, and expects continued decline in 2023.
It’s important to remember that the military is not a social experiment. It is a place of service where people are expected to make extreme sacrifices for their country and its security. The Biden administration should be focusing on improving recruitment and retention numbers, not introducing policies that will only hurt them.
The military should be open to everyone who is willing and able to serve, regardless of gender identity. However, its main focus should always be on achieving the highest levels of security and defense for the country, not on pushing the transgender movement.
https://libertyonenews.com/top-general-admits-trans-inclusion-hurts-army-recruiting/
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I was a woke activist but fake feminists just canceled me for speaking this truth
Fifteen years ago, I was living in a queer commune and calling myself "Sebastian." I spent hours on message boards angrily defending the queer theory belief that "gender" is a "performance."
Funny how things change. On Wednesday, my book Feminism Against Progress was due to launch at a venue in New York City. But last week, the venue canceled the event booking at short notice, following anonymous social media pressure.
My thoughtcrime? Saying in public that humans can’t change sex, and that performing gender surgery on kids is "butchery."
No doubt the "me" of fifteen years ago—Sebastian—would have been cheering on this cancelation. So how did I end up doing such a 180?
The story begins at Oxford University, in Great Britain, in the late 1990s. There, as an undergrad majoring in English literature, I met "woke" theories for the first time—and jumped right in. I believed it all, and I set about realizing its ideas in my own life.
Within the worldview I’d adopted, every form of commitment, stability, and structure felt oppressive. I wanted a world completely without power and authority. I tried to create that world and live authentically in it.
I thought feminism meant being independent, constrained only by what I wanted to do. I should be free of expectations, limits, or obligations connected to being a woman—even the limits of my physical body. I should be free to have sex without consequences, like a man. To dress as I pleased. To do any job I liked. To be treated the same as a man, in all situations.
Above all I should not be expected to limit myself to being a mom. The feminists of the "having it all" era taught me that doing so would be evidence of my oppression—or maybe just my lack of ambition. To be "just a mom" was a kind of failure.
After my daughter was born, though, I realized it wasn’t that simple. First, I learned that "independence" and "freedom" don’t really compute when you’re pregnant. Suddenly what you eat or drink or do affects your baby as well as you. There’s no more pretending you can do what you like, whenever you like. When your baby is crying for milk at 3:00 a.m. you can’t just say "No, I don’t want to get up." Talking about "independence" in that context makes no sense.
This realization drove me to rethink everything I’d believed about feminism. Why was a movement supposedly for women selling me on a kind of freedom that’s worse than useless for moms? Are moms not women? Delving into the history of the women’s movement, I came to see that it used to make plenty of space for moms.
Feminism began as women’s response to the way family life changed after the Industrial Revolution, as work left the home. In its early days the movement included women who defended care, motherhood, and the reality of our sexed bodies. It also included women who sought freedom on the same terms as men. These two camps often disagreed, but between them they sought to defend women’s interests as the world modernized.
But in the mid-twentieth century, freedom kicked care off the field. It happened when abortion was legalized, in the name of the feminism of freedom. Figures such as jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg framed abortion as a crucial precondition for women to participate in society.
And ever since, this has been the orthodox feminist view. That freedom is everything: that it must be defended at all costs, even if that cost includes killing an unborn baby whose life depends on a woman’s body. No wonder this "feminism" has a mom-shaped blind spot: pretty much by definition, being a mom means limiting your freedom in the name of love.
And this feminism of freedom at any cost has, in fact, many costs. It’s opened the door to a sexual free-for-all in the name of freedom that leaves young women lonely, injured, and unsatisfied. It’s legitimized the commercial exploitation of women’s bodies in pornography, prostitution, and commercial surrogacy.
And it’s the driving force behind gender ideology. For if freedom is everything, and we’re not free unless we can escape every limit of our sexed bodies, why should this only apply to women? Why not grant everyone the freedom to be whichever sex they like?
But the brutal truth is that we can’t have that freedom, any more than we can change the basic biological drives that underpin desire, reproduction, and motherhood. Every one of us is a union of mind and body. And every one of our bodies is sexed—male or female—from conception onward. Every cell in our body has a sex. And our sex still constrains who we can be, and even what we want, in ways that have nothing to do with culture, or power, or oppression.
I was canceled last week in New York City for speaking the truth about this. I get called all kinds of names by the fake feminists of "freedom at any price." But when I say out loud that humans can’t change sex, and that kids have needs, or that moms and dads aren’t interchangeable, this is not born of ignorance or bigotry. It’s the fruit of experience.
I learned the hard way that more tech and more freedom doesn’t mean more happiness. What brought me peace in the end was not "emancipation" but beneficial constraints. A committed partnership, a stable home, a child—and a willingness to accept that I’m not just "human" but also female.
Accepting these things limited what I could do. But within those limits, joy and love and meaning are infinitely more able to flourish. If there’s one thing I hope for with Feminism Against Progress, it’s that a few young women may read it and figure this out more quickly than I did. And that they’ll join me in taking the women’s movement back from the empty, toxic illusions of "freedom at any price."
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/woke-activist-fake-feminists-canceled-me-speaking-truth
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Is the US losing global credibility? Here is the answer
You won’t read this on the front page or even hear it discussed; but, over the last few weeks, we have seen significant economic moves against the West.
This has, indirectly, and concerningly, security implications.
Brazil, Russia, India, China, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, the United Arab Emirates, countless African nations, and even France have turned against the United States and its allies, via the US dollar.
Let me explain.
Since 1973, all natural resources around the world, most importantly oil, have been traded in the US dollar.
The deal was simple.
The United States would be the world’s policeman.
It would work to crush communism, Islamic radicalism, and any other threat to global peace.
In return, resource-exporting nations like Saudi Arabia, and manufacturing nations like China and India, would sell their goods in the US and use their US dollar reserves to buy US debt.
As a result, the United States has been able to rack up huge debts and deficits and keep interest rates at a manageable level.
This is simple economics; but no longer does this status quo hold.
The gig is up. Over the last three months, the East has turned against the West, shooting the West in its Achilles heel.
Brazil and Argentina have announced that they will build a common currency to trade and transact.
Iraq will sell oil to China in Chinese yuan.
China and France have completed a liquified natural gas transaction in Chinese yuan.
China and Brazil are trading iron ore in yuan.
India and Malaysia are now settling transactions in the Indian rupee.
The Kenyan President told his people to dump their US dollars.
The Namibian President has told Germany to back off and stop lecturing them on how bad China is.
The Rwandan President has told the BBC that it will no longer be lectured by the West, and the list goes on.
Meanwhile, China has surrounded Taiwan with fighter jets and battleships; and in August, all these countries are meeting in South Africa to discuss how to collaborate and advance their geopolitical and economic power.
The point of all of this?
The United States is losing credibility at a rate we haven’t seen in decades.
Countries are fed up with the West lecturing them on gay marriage, climate change, and human rights.
They want to run their own show.
They are fed up with being forced to use the US dollar to trade and invest.
They want change. They want a multipolar world order instead of a unipolar world order. That means they want an end to the United States being the predominant world power, the world policeman, so to speak.
The consequences will be profound.
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Australia: Queensland to decriminalise sex work as review recommends new advertising rules
Queensland will decriminalise sex work after a long-awaited review recommended sweeping changes to the industry to combat violence, discrimination and exploitation.
A landmark review into sex work by the Queensland Law Reform Commission has made 47 recommendations, including scrapping the Prostitution Licensing Authority, repealing some police powers and allowing services to be advertised on radio and TV.
The QLRC also recommended that sex workers not be singled out for public soliciting or street-based sex work, and said planning rules should allow services to operate away from industrial zones.
While sex work is under a licensing framework in Queensland, about 90% of sex workers are in the “unlawful sector” privately or at unlicensed businesses.
Sex workers have long rallied against the laws that prohibit them from employing a receptionist, working with others or texting other sex workers before and after a booking to make sure they’re safe.
In Queensland, police can currently also pose as clients and entrap workers by pressuring them to offer blacklisted services.
The attorney-general, Shannon Fentiman, said the government was “broadly supportive” of recommendations and supported decriminalising sex work.
Fentiman said decriminalisation of sex work would “ensure that some of the most vulnerable people in our community have legal protections at work”.
She confirmed this would mean abolishing the Prostitution Licensing Authority, which regulates the state’s 20 brothels.
“The sex-work industry will be regulated by workplace health and safety laws, planning laws, advertising codes and standards, and public amenity and public nuisance laws,” she told reporters on Monday.
Fentiman said the government hoped to introduce legislation before the end of the year after consulting key stakeholders.
“We will need to work through each of the recommendations to work out how best to implement the intent of the law reform commission,” she said.
The report found the current framework undermined the health, safety and justice of sex workers. Those interviewed said they were reluctant to report crimes to police for fear of arrest or not being believed.
The QLRC said the law should respond to “reality, not myths”.
“Stereotypes about most sex workers being street workers, victims of exploitation or trafficking, or ‘vectors of disease’ are not supported by the evidence or reflected in the diversity of the sex-work industry,” the report said.
“The assumption that decriminalising sex work will increase the size of the industry is also unsupported.”
Sex worker and state coordinator of Respect Inc, Lulu Holiday, said decriminalisation will be a “life-changing policy shift”.
“Decriminalisation would mean I wouldn’t have to worry every time a client contacts me that it might be a police officer. I’d be able to work in a way that feels safe for me without being worried that I’m at risk of arrest,” Holiday told Guardian Australia.
“While it’s going to have a huge impact for us, it’s really not going to have any noticeable impact on the rest of the Queensland community.”
The chief executive of the Scarlet Alliance, Mish Pony, said the announcement “brings Queensland in line with domestic and international best practice”.
“Decriminalisation is a cost-effective, high compliance model for government and supports workplace health, safety and rights for sex workers,” Pony said.
The Queensland government confirmed last month it will also move to scrap an exemption of the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act which allows employers to discriminate against sex workers and gender-diverse and transgender people when working with children.
The exemption will be repealed, along with another clause that allows accommodation providers to lawfully discriminate against sex workers if there is a “reasonable belief” that they are engaging in sex work on the premises.
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24 April, 2023
Elon Musk has opened up our cage
Liberty is a wild animal: it cannot be domesticated, it refuses to be tamed, and it’ll die if you force it to live within a cage.
The chain by which liberty is led to its holding cell is ‘speech’.
Once the government manages to put a collar on civilisation’s voice, its words and thoughts can be yanked around like a puppy being dragged down the road by Cruella de Vil, who is wearing the skins of her former pets as an outfit that shows less taste than Balenciaga.
This is the abusive environment inhabited by citizens of the West since our quaint cobbled streets went silent and the public forum moved into the digital realm of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
Our cheerily rotund town criers have morphed into faceless algorithms while the security measures set up to monitor ‘community safety’ have taken to snatching victims in the night, weeding out the strongest voices from the crowd to ensure society’s conversation remains directionless and incoherent.
And what a noise it is.
Social media has become a roar where domestic politics crashes into the politics of neighbouring nations. Individual countries are capable of reaching a moral consensus on topics – but there will never be a global consensus. It is an argument without end. A permanent conflict that must either dissipate or suffocate the other side. Unfortunately for the Western liberal values of freedom and democracy, there are billions more who favour the prison-planet view of Earth under the red sky of collectivism.
This is a bigger problem than mainstream political commentators understand.
Where the values of the West were once incubated, fed, and subsequently thrived within the British Empire and its rising colonial powers – they are now being actively poisoned by external nations who want to see the people of the West reduced to an idiot mob of mouths that consume. We are baby birds with our feet stuck in the thatch of our nest, pecking at the air for our government parent.
A brief wander through TikTok and the youth it has raised, or even its older cousin Tumblr, reveals a very ill and weak generation that cannot seem to get itself out of the basement, let alone in a position to lead the world. ‘Good citizenship’ has become a banner on their social media profile instead of holding down a job and raising a family. It is a low-effort existence.
Their failure to become adults will eventually mean that Australia becomes infantile.
Some may say, ‘social media is not real life’, but it is raising real people. Not a few – a lot. These under 20s are casting their votes in very real elections. Speak to them. They are the living embodiment of the TikTok app and are already tipping elections and taking control of political institutions.
As one dismayed old-school activist said on Twitter the other day, ‘They can’t formulate an argument. Their brain implodes trying to comprehend different opinions.’
To this I add, you cannot reason with someone who does not understand their own position – let alone yours.
Universities are no longer places of learning, but rather serve as finishing schools for ideological zealots. It would be a very foolish person who maintains an indifference to the power of social media whose offspring are then taken into the frying pan of activism to be seared, crisped up, and served at the banquet. You can call them useful idiots, or snacks, either way – they sustain the upper echelon of society.
I’ve seen this social media generation collapse the entertainment industry and they will do the same to our political system. Look no further than Australia’s Voice to Parliament. The generation that runs around calling everyone a ‘#racist!!!’ is openly advocating for a race-tested, unelected bureaucracy to sit above democracy as a form of historical revenge. Does this sound healthy for a peaceful, stable future?
These individuals genuinely believe that ‘avenging past racism’ will solve alcohol abuse in remote communities. How? They have no idea. There is no evidence that racism is the cause of the problem to begin with. If you push them on the topic and demand to know how a racial bureaucracy can keep a bottle from the lips of an individual a thousand miles away, they simply shout ‘racist!’ and fall silent.
Worse, the youth’s social skills have become so poor that no one can open up a conversation with them to test their views. Any attempt to do so is met with screaming, chanting, drum-beating, and violence.
Compared to today’s activists, the witch-burners were calm and measured. At least they could explain what they were up to and present a case for their manic violence. They were evil, coherent, and devout. We have no such luck with kids raised to believe in apocalyptic death cults and the supremacy of ‘self truth’ over The Truth. Individuals that tie their worldview to ‘feelings’ will remain adrift.
This is not only destructive for civilisation at large, it is a terrible shame and an embarrassment to the legacy of those who fought and died for the very gifts our kids believe to be ‘dangerous’. The sad thing is, they do not fear free speech because it is harmful, but because they are frightened of their own inadequacy to answer questions.
The hill their grandparents died on with truth, freedom, and democracy. Our young are sticking their flags (and there are a lot of those) into dictatorship, identity, and collectivism.
Instead of free-thinking, powerful independent citizens, we have become part-customer, part-product for a fascist digital machine that never sleeps.
Social media weaponised humanity’s love of socialising and found a way to profit from chasing the public from one political outrage to the next – like sheep into a pen where the waiting feed trough is sponsored by Woke brands. Nike in this pen. Bud Light in that one. Gillette in the corner.
People are so used to being barked at that they no longer question where the orders come from – they simply do as they are told, when they’re told. Wear a mask. Buy this product. Go to this rally. Partake in an experiment. Cheer for more tax. Own nothing. Be happy. Eat the bugs. (Or was it ‘the rich’?)
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter represents a fundamental breaking of this well-ordered social prison.
Musk wrestled all the keys off the digital slavers and opened the gates on the pens. The twisting of the keys and clicking of the lock echoed – even in Australia.
He sacked the ‘community safety’ security force and sat back to see what would happen to the former prisoners. There were a few weeks of confusion, marked by period of rage from those who were terrified of unlocked gates (what if the wolves get in?), and others who wandered around in a daze – unaware that they could leave their pens.
It’s been months, and the liberty Musk gifted Twitter has already returned a measure of power to the people. The Covid vaccine narrative was the first victim of free speech, with major Big Pharma companies and government authorities facing a legal backlash against their pandemic actions.
There will be more ideological empires felled by open criticism. Climate Change is losing public confidence, with a general murmur running through the crowd that the apocalypse is nothing more than convenient corporate lies. One day soon, this will turn into shouting and booing until the eco-fascist cult is disbanded.
Another ideology close to unravelling is that of radical gender activism – the sort of ideology that openly attacks biology as ‘fake news’ and creates a new patriarchy where men are once again asserting themselves over women.
Musk himself said: ‘Any parent or doctor who sterilises a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life.’
He has picked up that red flag of collectivist thought and waved it at the bulls, taunting them into the fire of free speech to see if they survive.
Western Civilisation cannot save its children by trying to talk to them. Its pseudo parent – social media – has to be reformed. Musk is doing that. As kids are exposed to free speech on their phones and within their digital safe spaces, the hold of toxic ideology will start to slip. The need to be popular is the strongest force in their lives – and idiocy isn’t popular.
When their ideological positions are mocked and ridiculed, our kids will get the message and finally grow up.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/elon-musk-the-keys-to-the-cage/ ?
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Talk about being on the wrong side of history!
“The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” introduced by Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., passed the House Thursday in a 219-203 vote. The legislation would require that “school athletics comply with the Title IX recognition of a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth,” according to a press release from Steube’s office.
“This bill ensures that biological females compete against other biological females in women’s sports that are operated, sponsored, or facilitated by a recipient of federal funding,” adds the press release.
Not one Republican voted against the bill.
Not one Democrat voted for it.
It’s unlikely the bill will pass the Democrat-controlled Senate. President Joe Biden has already announced he would veto the bill if it came to his desk.
This should be a bipartisan, consensus issue. It should not be controversial that girls deserve a chance to compete in sports against their physical peers, not boys.
Across the country, girls are losing to biological males who now identify as transgender. Here at The Daily Signal we’ve been covering the issue for years. In 2019, we told the story of Selina Soule, a high school runner who “missed qualifying for the 55-meter in the New England regionals by two spots,” reported my colleague Kelsey Bolar.
Two of the athletes who did qualify for the regionals were biological males.
“It’s very frustrating and heartbreaking when us girls are at the start of the race and we already know that these athletes are going to come out and win no matter how hard you try,” Soule told The Daily Signal. “They took away the spots of deserving girls, athletes … me being included.”
How is this fair?
“The simple truth is that males outperform females in regard to speed and strength due to inborn genetics and sex hormones. This has consistently been proven by long-term research on elite athletes when matched for training,” wrote Drs. Michelle Cretella and Quentin Van Meter in an article for The Daily Signal in 2021.
“While it is true that a male using estrogen will lose muscle strength and impair other aspects of his physiology, he does not alter his genetics; he remains male at the cellular level in all body systems,” added Cretella and Van Meter.
Yet across the country, girls must lose to biological males, just because of transgender ideology.
“Congress in 1972, created Title IX to protect women’s sports, to enable women to have an equal playing field in athletics. And in worship to their trans idols, the administration wants to flip that on its head,” said Steube on the House floor Wednesday. “It’s insane. Title IX was created for women’s sports and now the left wants to kill it.”
“In them giving homage to the trans movement, they are abandoning women all across the country,” he added. “Parents do not want biological men in locker rooms with their daughters, nor do they believe its equitable that a male can compete with women in female athletics. It’s the whole purpose that Title IX was created to begin with.”
Steube is right about the locker rooms. But it’s not just parents who object. It’s also the girls themselves.
“A male was in our locker room when volleyball girls were trying to get changed,” Blake Allen, a 14-year-old, told The Daily Signal last fall. “And after I asked him to leave, he didn’t, and later looked over at girls with their shirts off. And it made many people uncomfortable and feel violated. And I left as soon as I could in a panic.”
But the left doesn’t care that girls like Blake feel violated. Her feelings are irrelevant in today’s world.
So much for this being the golden era of feminism. Once again, the patriarchy is winning—even if it’s now under the disguise of the transgender ideology.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/20/not-1-democrat-votes-to-protect-girls-sports
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Roads Are 'Designed' to Kill Minorities, Says Transportation Secretary
Some stupidity is so extreme that it could be dangerous
While ignoring a cornucopia of crises in his two-plus years as Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg has found a supposed crisis that he will address, and it sounds a lot like his previously trotted-out theory that bridges are a tool of racism.
Speaking with Al Sharpton on MSNBC, Buttigieg declared "we've got a crisis when it comes to roadway fatalities in America" before making his usual pivot to frame the problem as one of race.
"We lose about 40,000 people every year," Buttigieg told Sharpton, adding roadway fatalities are "a level that's comparable to gun violence" for emphasis. "And we see a lot of racial disparities," Buttigieg continued.
Specifically, according to Buttigieg, "black and brown Americans, tribal citizens, and rural residents" are "much more likely to lose their lives — whether it's in a car or a pedestrian being hit by a car."
Buttigieg argued that the racial disparity is "related to discrimination" and "even the ways roads are designed and built" such that minorities don't have "access to a safe street design that's got crosswalks and good lighting."
Here's Buttigieg's full meandering argument about how roads are supposedly designed to be racially discriminatory:
"We've got to act," Buttigieg said, despite him not having such urgency to take action to address the broken supply chain, formula shortage, or toxic train derailments — just a few crises Buttigieg ignored or went MIA during.
What's more, Buttigieg should have thought about where his argument would lead before making his proclamation about racist roads. Because if, as Buttigieg claimed, roads were designed to be more deadly for minorities, who is to blame for building those roads?
In cities and states with crumbling infrastructure, members of Buttigieg's party are in charge of roads. Such as South Bend, Indiana, where then-Mayor Buttigieg was unable to address potholes? Was the danger posed by Mayor Pete's potholes a racist design in action?
A new Department of Transportation roadway safety data explorer shows clearly where America's most deadly roads are. The data viewed on a heat map lights up America's big, Democrat-run cities like fireworks. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, New York, and Philadelphia are where these deadly — apparently designed to be so for minorities — exist.
So, did Buttigieg just admit that Democrats are making cities unsafe for minorities? Sure looks like it.
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Matt Walsh unmasks the vicious Left
Online activists are the new revolutionaries and, as with their historical counterparts, they are becoming radicalised and violent in pursuit of their political goals.
The press at large have been ignoring most of this thuggish behaviour because it doesn’t fit with their official narrative of weakness and victimhood. Even when public figures such as female author JK Rowling found themselves receiving rape and bomb threats, the press remained reluctant to openly criticise the trans movement.
Can you imagine if women trying to speak out for their rights had been hijacked and terrified by a group of Neo-Nazis instead of trans activists? Oh no, wait… That happened too, and the press blamed the women, accusing them of ‘consorting’ with the men who mobbed them.
The more powerful these activist movements become, the more dangerous they are. Not only are many of their preachings ideologically unnerving – such as repeated demands to remove gendered language from medical environments where accuracy is crucial – but they have become dangerous in the real world where debate has turned into intimidation, threats, and abuse.
It was only a few weeks ago that Posie Parker was physically attacked in Australia and New Zealand for speaking out against the erasure of women’s spaces, and Victorian MP Moira Deeming was summarily banished by the so-called conservative party.
Increasingly, you must agree with the Left, or you will be hounded until you do. We have seen repeated examples of actors and public figures with social clout voicing simple questions only to find themselves facing cancellation if they did not immediately recant and re-affirm their dedication to the activist cause.
Think about what that means. People are being forced to publicly lie to protect their careers from an online mob whose power extends into the boardrooms of large corporations and the backrooms of Hollywood. This is a state religion. A political religion.
Desperate to paint itself as nothing more than innocent glitter, hearts, rainbows, unicorns, tolerance, and ‘safety’ – progressive politics has more in common with the bullying of Mao’s Cultural Revolution than most realise. It is a movement based on ideological purity and seeks to purge the culture that came before it.
A few days ago, political commentator and creator of the viral documentary, What is a woman? Matt Walsh had his Twitter account hacked.
Walsh has been at the forefront of recognising biological gender as a reality. He speaks bluntly on a position that was, until yesterday, the default among Western nations. Walsh is not lying, but telling the truth about gender has become a social offence.
When Walsh tried to explain the Western ideology of transgenderism to a Maasai Tribe during his documentary, their response infuriated activists who subscribe to identity politics. How could one protected group deny the existence of another? It breaks the ‘maths of oppression’ that goes on behind the scenes of the ideology.
Walsh’s questions were straight forward, but their answers are not. They expose the intellectual incoherence at the heart of identity politics.
The Maasai were simply saying what most Westerners actually think, but are too afraid to admit: gender is immutable.
Rolling Stone reviewed Walsh’s documentary with the headline: Why Are Social Media Companies Taking Ad Money From A Right-Wing Transphobic Doc? And began with the sentence: ‘For years, right-wing commentator, Daily Wire host, and all-round shitty provocateur Matt Walsh has used to his platform to go after trans people.’
There are countless reports like this which manage to avoid the central thesis of Walsh’s documentary, and that is the uncomfortable truth that the West appears to have lost its grip on basic reality. The refusal to define a woman as an adult human female is plainly absurd. Science duct-taped by radical ideology is something we were supposed to grow out of as a civilisation and yet in 2023 science bows to activism and we have the hide to call this ‘progress’.
Walsh ultimately won the culture war, with social media largely taking the view the left is wrong on the topic of biological gender. Adding to the ‘outrage’, Twitter CEO Elon Musk has removed the ban on misgendering trans people – or as others see it, users are no longer compelled to lie about the biology of other people if they do not wish to. To be clear, you cannot abuse people – that is still a violation of Twitter’s overarching terms of service – but the idea that failing to recognise new pronouns is ‘abuse’ has been removed.
Musk then joined the debate about protecting children by tweeting: ‘Any parent or doctor who sterilises a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life.’ Many feel exactly as Musk does – that children must be protected from making life-changing alterations to their body. Others say this is ‘hate speech’. And that is Musk’s point. Who is to judge what is hateful, and what is said in the interests of protecting children?
One can only wonder if, sensing a change in the air, Walsh’s critics decided to up their game and go after his social media account.
It is in this environment that the Twitter hack took place.
Once compromised, Matt Walsh’s Twitter account, which has 1.7 million followers, began to post bizarre and disturbing content.
While we cannot reprint the full set of tweets here, some included statements such as: ‘My Pronouns Are That/N-’, and ‘Ben Shapiro. You Know What You Did etc’. Other tweets made light of shootings and hurled accusations at public figures. The hacker also sent disturbing direct messages to Walsh’s contacts. When it became clear the game was up, the hacker tweeted: ‘Twitter Isn’t Hacked, This Is Just The Real Me Coming Out.’
Ben Shapiro – who was targeted by one of the hacked tweets – said:
‘Over the past few months, my friend Matt Walsh has been threatened to the extent that he’s had to have full-time security at his home to protect his family. Now he’s been hacked. The tolerant and diverse and kind crows are celebrating, of course.’
Ben Shapiro added: ‘They tell you who they are. Believe them.’
Walsh addressed the incident on April 20:
‘Over the last year my family has been harassed, threatened, doxxed, and now we can add hacked to the list. Apparently the hacker had an “insider” who gave him access to my phone. A lot we still don’t know. But we’re funding out. And there will be consequences. I have also made note of the members of the media who openly solicited stolen information from my phone. There will be consequences there too. Fortunately we can afford very good lawyers.’
Elon Musk’s team worked fast to secure the hack. Later on, after Walsh regained control of his account, he tweeted:
‘As soon as the hacking attack started, I was on the phone with our tech team, security team, lawyers, and executives. They all worked around the clock. They’re still working to find out exactly what happened, who did it, and how. Very grateful for the support of the Daily Wire @JeremyDBoreing, @BenShapiro and the whole team. Can’t imagine going through something like this without these kinds of resources. Which of course is the situation most victims face. Yes, I’ve been doxxed, threatened, hacked, stalked, etc, but the other part of that story is that SW provides me with all of the resources I need to respond to all of these attacks. Never have to worry about being thrown under the bus or left to deal with it on my own.’
It is only the latest abusive behaviour that Walsh has suffered at the hands of the ‘peaceful and tolerant’ activist crowd. Around the same time, YouTube demonetised Walsh’s show, with Walsh tweeting:
‘As I announced during my speech tonight, YouTube has demonetised my show and threatened to ban us if we don’t respect the pronouns of trans people. I’d rather take my show off YouTube than cooperate with that nonsense. So I am … I’m not going to forfeit my integrity for the sake of YouTube ad revenue. But I’m also not going to go off to the hinterlands somewhere and languish in obscurity. We’re going to make the show bigger and more accessible on even more platforms. That’s how we’re responding.’
As for the hack itself, there is plenty of fall-out yet to come. This was no trivial event, and Walsh is not laughing it off.
Wired ran a story titled: The Hacker Who Hijacked Matt Walsh’s Twitter was Just ‘Bored’ and then added a whingy preamble: ‘Editor’s Note: Following publication, Twitter permanently suspended this article’s author, WIRED senior reporter Dell Cameron, citing its policy against the distribution of hacked material. WIRED believes Twitter’s actions were unjustified.’
Which sounds serious, until you read the rest of the story.
As reported by The Post Millennial:
On Wednesday, WIRED senior reporter Dell Cameron was permanently suspended from Twitter after he asked for and obtained hacked materials from Matt Walsh’s Twitter account.
“Spoke with the hacker who says he compromised Matt Walsh’s account, and who was able to supply some convincing proof they’d gained access to his personal email account. Story TK,” a tweet from just after midnight on Wednesday read.
And also:
In the article, Cameron stated that the hacker went by the alias “Doomed”, who said, “The intent was to make funny tweets, as Matt Walsh likes to ‘trigger’ people. We caused no financial harm, threatened anyone, [nor] ruined anything.”
Other screenshots given to Cameron allegedly showed the hacker “in the midst of compromising Walsh’s accounts, triggering authenticating requests received on the SIM-swapped device.”
There were various photos published on social media to go along with this.
Wired also released a tweet saying:
‘WIRED Statement on Dell Cameron’s Permanent Twitter Suspension: WIRED learned Wednesday afternoon that senior reporter Dell Cameron’s Twitter account was permanently suspended after he reported on Matt Walsh’s Twitter account being hacked. Neither Dell’s story nor his Twitter feed contained hacked materials. We do not believe his account violated Twitter’s policy. We have not received any further explanation from Twitter and our attempts to reach Twitter’s press office were met with the customary poop emoji. We ask that the account be reinstated, and that Twitter provide an explanation.’
This prompted Matt Walsh to issue a statement in response to Wired, reblogging their tweets with the following messages:
‘Your reporter directed solicited stolen material from my phone. A Twitter suspension is going to be the least of his problems, and yours.’ Walsh also said, ‘That is a flat out lie.’
The solicited materials Twitter rule that the Wired reporter has reportedly fallen afoul of is the same one that was used to suspend the New York Post over its Hunter Biden story – although in that case it was shown that no one hacked Biden’s abandoned laptop. Walsh’s Twitter account, according to Walsh and Twitter, was definitely hacked.
Walsh has said that he intends to pursue this incident, not only with the hacker – but also with media organisations.
It is clear that society has to start drawing some pretty serious lines in the culture wars before the West slides into the same sorts of political behaviours common in third-world dictatorships and collectivist tyrannies. People, like Matt Walsh, have to be allowed to speak out against radical ideology without living in fear of their life from online trolls.
There was a huge amount of fuss made by left-wing media outlets about Islam’s attacks on Salman Rushdie for his criticism of religion, but what are we doing right now in this progressive, tolerant world? Activist movements, particularly those online, are threatening commentators and hounding them with the same kind of blind zealotry. Walsh is exposing them – and let’s hope he exposes this hacker too.
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/matt-walsh-unmasks-the-vicious-left/
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23 April, 2023
I am, damn it, proud to be English
SIMON COOKE voices below a peculiarly English form of patriotism. England is a land of emotional understatement and it shows in their form of patriotism. Their emotional understatement serves them well but is rarely understood by outsiders. I have no feelings similar to those expressed by Cooke below despite being of substantially English ancestry and culturally in many ways English.
But I am a 5th generation Australian and am very much a product of Australian culture -- which is a culture of relaxation. There was a time when Australia had a lot of half-millionaires. When they got to that stage they decided that further financial progress required too much effort and instead retired to the golf course and fishing
I am similar. I got into the lower rungs of being a millionaire via real estate investment but many years ago I sold all my properties and concentrated on blogging instead. My Serbian girlfriend does not understand that decision at all. And her Serbian patriotism is intense
Australian culture is just about the opposite to the hard-driving culture of America and we feel very thankful for that. America seems insane to us
Take in the view and whisper a little prayer of thanks for the men and women who made this place we call England. Because it is beautiful and we should be proud of those who made it beautiful.
In the latest instalment of The Hookland Chronicles, David writes about an encounter with J. G Ballard, that most suburban of England’s great writers. It starts with Ballard’s advice:
In many ways it was a ride in a BBC cab with J.G. Ballard that led to the creation of Hookland. To be achingly specific it was only one sentence. His advice was: “Concentrate on place, nothing without a sense of it is ever any good.”
Much is said about identity and lived experience. A good deal of it is little more than selfish indulgence and much else is a sort of political cosh to strike down the baddies. But identity matters and Ballard was right as are the Hookland Chronicles: our first, longest and strongest identity is with place. When, in opening his poem in praise of Sussex, Kipling spoke about men having small hearts, he described this truth.
So my identity isn’t about my sexuality, my gender or my skin colour. Nor is that identity shaped by an intersectionality implied by those things. No, my identity is defined by a series of places, by where I was born in South London, by Hull, my university, by an adult life in the South Pennines, by Upton Park and Bradford City Hall. Above all, my identity is shaped by the place that contains all these places, the thing that defines so much about what I believe and how I feel.
That place is England.
Where to begin? In my last speech as a Bradford councillor, I spoke about the places I’d represented for all those years:
“I was sat on top of Denholme Edge the other day eating a ham and tomato sandwich, admiring the view. Much of what I see from there is Bingley Rural. And it is beautiful. Anyway I was sat there and I got to thinking. Each way I looked, into every nook of the places in that view there was a story – something that had been done to make the place a little better.”
What you see from Denholme Edge is a picture of England. Denholme isn’t a posh or grand place, most of you will never have been there and, if you have, it is most likely just driving through on the A629. Like all the places I represented, Denholme exists because of wool. The town, don’t ever call it a village, was noted for wool sorting, the process of separating the different qualities of wool. Today it is an ordinary place, a mix of flats, back-to-back terraces, a few streets of semi-detached homes and a couple of modern estates. The Edge is the ridge behind the town, running from Edge Bottom up onto Thornton Moor.
Everything we see from that ridge is shaped by men and women over hundreds of years, thousands if we include the shadowy remains of a Roman camp and the last few stones from an Iron Age fort. This is England, a kempt place without wilderness, a place made by men. When we talk about England's ancient woodland or its wonderful landscape - ‘outstanding natural beauty’ as the bureaucrats call it - we are not talking of the truly natural since even the shape of the hills involves the scars of quarrying and agriculture’s management of the land. What we look at from Denholme Edge is a place shaped by the love and care of people, mostly forgotten, who lived in England.
If you look at the Wikipedia page for the song “There’ll Always be an England”, it comes across ever so slightly sneering: “...the song invokes various clichés of English rural life, liberty, and the Empire”. But while it isn’t the greatest song and filled with clichés, it still makes me stand up a little straighter and smile. On occasion singing it will bring a tear to the eye because the song is uncomplicated and unquestioningly proud of England:
“There'll always be an England
While there's a country lane
Wherever there's a cottage small
Beside a field of grain
There'll always be an England
While there's a busy street
Wherever there's a turning wheel
A million marching feet”
As with all the best patriotism, the sentiment isn’t about the great and good, there is no harking back to glorious victories, ancient monarchs, or great leaders but rather an invoking of the ordinary, of you and me as the definition of England. Everything about England was shaped by the English, not by the list of names you learned in history but, as Kipling’s charm puts it:
“...the mere uncounted folk
Of whose life and death is none
Report or lamentation”
If you are in England, take a moment to pause and look around you. Not for signs of greatness but for signs of love. Look over the wall at the allotment gardens with their neat rows of beans and cabbage lined up behind a rickety old shed. Walk round the park and take in a green space within the busy city. Wander along a suburban street, have a nosey into front gardens. And find a hill to climb where you can look out at the place that your fellow English men and women have made. It doesn’t matter whether that view is a slightly tired old mill town like Denholme, the Georgian wonder of Bath or the rolling Downs of Sussex or North Kent. Take in the view and whisper a little prayer of thanks for the men and women who made this place we call England. Because it is beautiful and we should be proud of those who made it beautiful.
https://simoncooke.substack.com/p/i-am-damn-it-proud-to-be-english
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Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday released his plan to address homelessness in the U.S., which he says has contributed to the decline of America’s once-great cities
“The homeless have no right to turn every park and sidewalk into a place for them to squat and do drugs,” he said in a video statement. “Americans should not have to step over piles of needles and waste as they walk down a street in a beautiful city -- at least, a once-beautiful city. Because they've changed so much over the last ten years.”
The 45th president argued that the majority should not have to “suffer” in these areas because of a “deeply unwell few.” If reelected, Trump said he will get the homeless off the streets and given access to the help they need.
“There is nothing compassionate about letting these individuals live in filth and squalor,” Trump argued.
“For a small fraction of what we spend upon Ukraine, we could take care of every homeless veteran in America,” he pointed out. “Our veterans are being treated horribly. Likewise, with all of the money we will save by ending mass unskilled migration, we will have a huge dividend to address this crisis in our own country.”
Urban camping will be banned and those who violate the bans will be arrested, he said, clarifying that the individuals will be given an option to get treatment if they are willing to be rehabilitated.
As for where they will be taken, Trump said “large parcels of inexpensive land” will be opened where a range of medical professionals, social workers, and drug rehab specialists will care for the homeless to address their problems.
“For those who are just temporarily down on their luck, we will work to help them quickly reintegrate into a normal life,” Trump continued. “For those who have addictions, substance abuse, and common mental health problems, we will get them into treatment. And for those who are severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed, we will bring them back to mental institutions where they belong, with the goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage. It's a tough task, a very tough task.”
He said the plan is better than some of the alternatives being tried—such as housing them in hotels without addressing their underlying issues.
“This is how I will end the scourge of homelessness and make our cities clean and safe and beautiful once again,” Trump concluded. “We will do it. We will bring back America.”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2023/04/19/trump-on-homelessness-n2622124
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Death of meritocracy in Britain: Since the Victorian age, hard work and talent have been the passports to success. But more and more of our institutions are in thrall to a new doctrine
What’s the most important document in modern British history?
Some people might point to a party manifesto, such as Labour’s blueprint for the post-war welfare state in 1945, or Margaret Thatcher’s free-market programme in 1979. Others might dig out a speech by Winston Churchill, an Act of Parliament or perhaps even a bestselling book.
For me, though, the chief contender has to be a long-forgotten report published in the early months of 1854, known as the Northcote-Trevelyan Report. Compiled by two Whitehall officials, it looks pretty dry and dusty today.
Yet the Northcote-Trevelyan Report was the cornerstone of our modern meritocratic age.
Breaking with centuries of aristocratic patronage, it called for a new civil service, based purely on individual merit. With exams to determine the best young candidates, all that mattered was what, not whom, you knew.
And if you wanted to move up the ladder, the only criteria would now be ‘industry and ability’, rather than family ties and upper-class connections.
Back in the 1850s, the Northcote-Trevelyan Report felt like a revolution. Yet it gave Britain the most envied administrative system in the world.
It was the first step in a long series of reforms, from the introduction of grammar schools to the expansion of universities, designed to encourage bright young boys and girls to aim for the top, whatever their backgrounds.
And though the prose may have dated, the principle remains as compelling as ever. Who could disagree with the emphasis on individual merit? Who would deny that people should get their jobs based on effort and talent, rather than accidents of birth?
Yet as shocking as it might seem, the age of individual merit and social mobility may be coming to an end.
And according to one veteran observer of British politics, the reign of the meritocratic idea is ‘threatened as never before’ by the rise of a new aristocracy, greedier and more selfish than ever.
But this isn’t an aristocracy based on birth or breeding. As the former Economist political editor Adrian Wooldridge writes in The Spectator magazine, it’s a new elite united by their obsession with their own virtue, their contempt for our history and their unbending fidelity to a single concept: wokeness.
For those people who swallow the line that wokeness just means being kind, Wooldridge’s argument must sound pretty shocking. But as he shows, the woke revolutionaries explicitly reject the Northcote-Trevelyan emphasis on the hard work and talent of the individual.
At the heart of wokeness, after all, is the idea that group identity trumps everything. There’s no escape from your group’s history: as soon as you are born, you are indelibly stamped as either a victim or an oppressor.
This is, of course, an idea born in the U.S., where the legacy of slavery and segregation has left a generation of academics, teachers and intellectuals with an almost demented obsession with race and gender.
Wooldridge gives the example of the former San Francisco Board of Education Commissioner, Alison Collins, who has actively campaigned against ranking students on merit. At an extraordinary public meeting in October 2020, Collins claimed that the idea of meritocracy was the ‘antithesis of fair’.
Indeed, she went further, insisting that the very idea of standardised testing — as pioneered by Victorian Britain’s civil service exams — was a ‘racist system’.
To most of us this might sound completely bonkers. Yet in the strange world of American education, Collins is far from alone. One of the most controversial prophets of the woke movement, the prize-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi, claims that choosing people based on their ability, without looking at their skin colour, is a relic of the wicked colonial past.
‘The only remedy to racist discrimination,’ writes Kendi in his bestselling book How To Be An Antiracist, ‘is antiracist discrimination.
‘The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.’
In other words, he thinks schools, universities and employers should actively discriminate against white applicants, purely because of their skin colour and their inherited guilt. Never mind that, say, a little girl born in the 21st century can hardly be blamed for the history of slavery. For Kendi, the mere fact of her genetic heritage is enough to damn her.
It’s a sign of how unhealthy the debate in the U.S. has become that instead of being politely but firmly escorted to the local asylum, Kendi has been festooned with awards. But the truth is that he’s merely the ruthlessly entrepreneurial face of a much broader movement.
Ever since the 1960s, the trend in U.S. institutions has been to prioritise the group, not the individual.
As a result, a society that once claimed to be the most open and democratic on earth is now in thrall to the idea of hierarchy — based not on birth or breeding, but on virtue and victimhood.
If you think that sounds overblown, here are a couple of recent examples. The first, reported only a few days ago, comes from the University of Texas, where an award-winning psychology lecturer, Professor Kirsten Bradbury, gave her students a test on personality disorders.
Here’s one question. ‘Which sociodemographic group is most likely to repeatedly violate the rights of others in a pattern of behaviour that includes violence, deceit, irresponsibility, and a lack of remorse?’
You can probably guess the answer. ‘Wealthy white men.’
As it happens, Professor Bradbury is white. And as an academic at one of the biggest institutions in the U.S., she’s almost certainly very well paid. So we might call this a case of the pot calling the kettle . . . well, white.
The second example is even more shocking. This is a chart produced in 2020 by the National Museum of African American History and Culture — part of the Smithsonian Institution, probably the most prestigious U.S. educational body of all.
The chart gives examples of ‘whiteness’ and ‘white culture’, which it clearly regards with disapproval. Sinister aspects of ‘white culture’ apparently include ‘hard work’, ‘self-reliance’, ‘the nuclear family’, ‘competition’, ‘delayed gratification’ and even ‘rigid time schedules’.
You and I might regard these things with approval. But to the Smithsonian’s woke commissars, they are clearly hateful and must be rejected at all costs.
It’s tempting to dismiss all this as Americans being American and to assume that it could never happen here.
In reality, however, this woke ideology — a simplistic, moralistic creed which divides people into oppressors and victims, the damned and the saved — has already seeped into many British institutions, where its pitifully tortured jargon has become depressingly familiar.
Most NHS trusts, for example, have ‘equality and diversity’ programmes; or perhaps ‘diversity and inclusion’; or, if they’re particularly virtuous, like the Solent NHS trust, ‘equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging’.
What’s the difference between inclusion and belonging? Who knows?
In just the first three weeks of this year, the NHS advertised for 19 ‘diversity and sustainability’ posts, with a combined salary of a cool £1 million. Indeed, in total the NHS in England alone employs an estimated 800 diversity and inclusion officers, costing a staggering £40 million a year.
Talk to any nurse or doctor, and they’ll tell you that this is a racket, pure and simple. Like so many woke initiatives, it’s an exercise in cynical back-scratching, of no use or relevance to ordinary punters.
It’s the same story in our universities, queuing up to flagellate themselves — and the rest of us — for the supposed misdeeds of the British Empire.
Here the most flagrant racket is the Athena Swan initiative, an ‘equality charter mark framework’ (that dreadful jargon again) which rewards academics for ‘supporting and transforming gender equality’.
Not only does the Athena Swan programme put on events such as the hideous-sounding Enhancing Good Practice: Intersectionality in Practice, but it has a suffocating stranglehold over British academic research.
To get official research funding from UK Research and Innovation, the main scientific grant-awarding body, you have to complete an equality and diversity statement approved by Athena Swan, including support for transgender rights. And if you think this is all nonsense? No funding.
As one leading barrister, Naomi Cunningham, told The Times, this ‘represents a pretty totalitarian attempt to entrench gender identity beliefs at the heart of all academic endeavour’. But for an academic to question it would be career suicide, since no ambitious young researcher wants to destroy his or her chances of getting funding.
In many ways, then, the spirit of the post-Victorian era — the heyday of openness, scepticism, mobility and meritocracy — has already slipped away.
Instead, thanks to the uncritical adoption of American wokery, we have moved into a new age of religious obscurantism, in which evangelical hucksters tour the land, preaching the good news about diversity and inclusion.
For these woke entrepreneurs, as for the fanatics and witchfinders of centuries past, life is a constant battle between good and evil, saintly victims and imperialist oppressors. Racism, sexism and inequality are lurking everywhere, and every minute of every day must be devoted to the struggle — which is why so many of them piously refer to themselves as ‘activists’, even when they don’t actually do anything.
To question the tenets of their cult is to identity yourself as a heretic, who must be cast out without delay. That explains the hysterical reaction of so many so-called intellectuals to the Oxford scholar Nigel Biggar, who dared to argue that the British Empire wasn’t all bad.
And that explains, too, their vicious response to the political scientist Matthew Goodwin, who sent Left-leaning commentators into paroxysms of rage after making the blindingly obvious point that they constitute a new university-educated elite, utterly detached from the daily concerns of most ordinary Britons.
If you move outside these peculiar circles, as so many millions of people do, you might wonder why all this matters. Why should the rest of us care about the gibberish peddled by a deranged gang of academic misfits?
The answer, sadly, is that it matters enormously. First, because it has already polluted so much of our national life, from the mutilated, bowdlerised versions of Ian Fleming and P. G. Wodehouse in our bookshops to the grotesque waste of NHS funds on so many corrupt non-jobs.
But perhaps even more importantly, because it represents an assault on the very principle of meritocracy. For youngsters to get ahead in the future, they will need to appease what Wooldridge calls the ‘new class of woke bureaucrats’, who have seized control of the entry points to the professions.
Talent and hard work simply won’t be enough, and passing exams certainly won’t cut it. You will either need to show that you’re a victim, or prove your activist credentials.
And if you don’t know the codes — the new transatlantic jargon, the most fashionable new U.S. thinkers, the latest wild ideas about race and gender — then you might as well forget it.
The tragedy, of course, is that most ordinary boys and girls don’t stand a chance. Few want to see themselves as victims and most youngsters are far too sensible (and normal) to waste their teenage years as self-styled social justice activists.
Most don’t have professors for parents, priming them with the latest woke babble. And for those from ordinary, aspirational working-class backgrounds — the kind of boys and girls promoted by the meritocratic ethos of the 19th and 20th centuries — the barriers will soon seem more impassable than ever.
The dark irony is that all this has gathered pace under a Conservative government supposedly dedicated to encouraging aspiration and meritocracy. And if, as the polls currently suggest, Labour take office after the next election, then I suspect it will only get worse.
Needless to say, all this strikes me as utterly monstrous.
No schoolchild should have to carry the weight of the past and nobody should be judged by the colour of their skin, the heritage of their parents or anything other than their own hard work and natural ability.
And our young people should be free to follow the path for which their industry and talents best fit them, without having to tailor their language or opinions to the freakish dictates of a fanatical minority.
For if nothing else, a meritocratic, socially mobile nation is a successful nation. The Victorians learned that lesson and reaped the rewards.
Are we really about to forget it?
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American Jews: Still Targets After all these Years
Jews have been the targets of hate crimes for 2,000+ years. In present-day America, FBI data reveals that some 55% of all hate crimes are directed toward Jews, while they represent only 2% of the population. Thus, Jews are at least 27 times more likely to be the targets of hate crimes than their population numbers suggest.
It seems to many people as if Jews are more prominent and ubiquitous than 2% of the population: They are well-represented in the film industry, academia, and publishing. They have a disproportionately high number of attorneys, doctors, psychologists, and others in professional or healthcare services.
Enduring Targets
How can a group that has been virtually inculcated in all of American history and culture continue to be the target of misdeeds? A central continuing thesis is that because Jews tend to have higher incomes and higher education levels per capita than others in society, there are individuals who resent their success and social standing.
That said, over the years, here is what selected philosophers, authors, and politicians have had to say about Jews:
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: Energy is the basis of everything. Every Jew, no matter how insignificant, is engaged in some decisive and immediate pursuit of a goal... They are the most immortal people on earth...
John Adams: I will insist the Hebrews have [contributed] more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist and believed in blind eternal fate, I would still believe that fate had ordained the Jews be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations... They are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this Earth. The Romans and their empire were but a bubble in comparison to the Jews.
Leo Tolstoy: The Jew... is the symbol of eternity. He is the one who, for so long, had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A person such as this can never disappear. The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.
Winston S. Churchill: Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and most remarkable race which has appeared in the world.
Eric Hoffer: The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese – and no one said a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity more significant than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations, when victorious on the battlefield, dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious, it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.
Mark Twain, Perhaps the Most Insightful
Mark Twain: If statistics are correct, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Appropriately, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, and has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other person, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages, and had done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself and be excused for it.
The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?
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21 April, 2023
The labor force participation rate is the key to understanding employment under Biden
While fretting over an imminent recession that the media will blame on the Federal Reserve (to let Biden and other big-spending Democrats off the hook for causing the inflation that is leading to the recession), The New York Times claims the current employment numbers show the U.S. economy “is strong.” Well, yes and no: yes, a recession is on the way, and no, the economy is not strong.
Here’s how NYT writer Ben Casselman spins the latest employment numbers to suggest that the economy is not a shambles because of Joe Biden and the two years of Democrat control of Congress:
Most of the recent data suggests that the economy is strong. The job market is, incredibly, better today than it was in February 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic ripped a hole in the global economy. More people are working. They are paid more. The gaps between them—by race, gender, education or income—are smaller.
That is false. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the labor force participation rate is lower than it was in February 2020:
The labor force participation rate, at 62.6 percent, continued to trend up in March. The employment-population ratio edged up over the month to 60.4 percent. These measures remain below their pre-pandemic February 2020 levels (63.3 percent and 61.1 percent, respectively).
Labor force participation, not unemployment, is the important number. The latter measures how many people want to work and cannot find jobs, and the former measures how many people are working, which is the real extent of the “job market” to which the Times refers.
skarnick@heartland.org
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Anti-work, pro-welfare Democrats are in a food-stamp fury over attempts to cut costs
“Cutting SNAP will lead to homelessness, incarceration and death for 38 million Americans,” Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-Bronx/Yonkers) howled Monday.
Bowman is enraged by a House Republican proposal to encourage some food-stamp recipients to take a job.
Hysteria over food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is obligatory in the Biden era.
Food-stamp outlays have soared in recent years, costing $140 billion in 2022 — more than twice the program’s price in 2019.
Republicans are seeking to curb costs.
The 1996 Clinton welfare-reform legislation limited how long able-bodied adults without dependents can collect food stamps without working.
That provision had broad bipartisan support. But Democrats no longer even pretend to support self-reliance.
The food-stamp work requirement was suspended at the pandemic’s start. The mandate is scheduled to resume this summer, but the Biden administration and congressional Democrats could make any such requirement an illusion.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack justified waiving the SNAP work requirement in 2021: “Groups with typically higher unemployment, including rural Americans, Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and People of Color and those with less than a high-school education would have been disproportionally harmed by this cruel policy.”
Controversy over the work requirement took center stage at a congressional hearing Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) chaired Wednesday. Most of the senators and witnesses opposed reviving the work requirement.
But Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) dissented. “Our workforce participation rate still has not recovered from government shutting down our economy during COVID and President Biden continuing to pay people to watch Netflix long after the pandemic had ended,” he emailed me after the hearing.
Braun pointed out that 18 states — including New York and California — have waivers that exempt any food-stamp recipient from the work requirement.
That covers half the able-bodied adults without kids in the entire country — even though many live in areas with low unemployment and plenty of unfilled jobs.
In addition, states can arbitrarily cancel the work requirement for up to 12% of SNAP recipients who might otherwise have to toil.
States offer employment and training programs to spur food-stamp recipients to transition to jobs.
But the programs are mostly either a joke or a mirage: Only 3% of SNAP recipients who were subject to work requirements participated in 2016.
The biggest surprise at the Senate hearing came from James Whitford, the co-founder and executive director of Watered Gardens Ministries, Missouri’s largest privately funded poverty-fighting organization.
He stated that SNAP is plagued by fraud and recipients admit “how easy and common it is to liquidate these benefits at 50 cents on the dollar.” One alcoholic would stand on a street median holding a sign:“Food Stamps half price.”
Whitford warned that “SNAP benefits are often more hurtful than helpful.” His experience with his ministries vivified how “work awakens worth,” and he derided the “national epidemic of dependency.”
He quoted a woman named Jocelyn he helped become self-reliant: “It was harder for me to give up food stamps than it was for me to give up heroin.”
But for Democrats, dependents are political assets.
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) promised at the hearing: “I will be doing everything I can to expand and protect federal nutrition benefits.” Warnock won election to the Senate thanks to his campaign fliers that promised voters more COVID benefits: “Want a $2,000 Check? Vote Warnock.”
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) declared that SNAP “needs to become a nutrition program.”
When he was mayor of Newark, Booker endorsed ending SNAP payments for sugar-sweetened beverages. Food-stamp recipients are twice as likely to be obese as eligible non-recipients, and they get 12% of their daily calories from such beverages (twice as much as higher-income groups).
But Democrats now oppose any reform that would reduce handouts to any recipient for any reason. (Booker’s office did not respond to repeated emails.)
Instead, they favor creating or expanding programs to “incentivize” healthy eating. Such tinkering will do nothing to counteract giving recipients blank checks to buy any junk food they please.
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Sanders gets some things right
The Democratic Party has "largely turned its back on the working class," and is "hemorrhaging working-class support," Sen. Bernie Sanders warns in a new book.
I picked up a copy of "It's Ok to Be Angry About Capitalism," with a picture of Sanders on the cover. I was raring to rebut it. Indeed, there turns out to be plenty in there with which to disagree.
The most newsworthy thing about the volume though, may well be the pleasant surprises, the parts in which Sanders accurately diagnoses what he calls a "crisis" facing the Democratic Party.
"The party, in too many cases and in too many places, has lost touch with working Americans. It doesn't know how to speak to them because it doesn't know what is going on with them," Sanders writes.
Sanders notes that Donald Trump got 10 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016. He rejects the idea that those votes were all motivated by racism. "Many of those so-called racist Americans voted for Barack Obama, our first Black president, and for 'hope' and 'change' and 'Yes We Can.' And they voted to reelect him. But their lives did not get better," Sanders writes.
He writes that the Democrats "abandoned" working class voters in favor of "wealthy campaign contributors and the 'beautiful people.'" The Democratic National Committee, Sanders says, "spends almost all of its time trying to keep on the right side of the millionaires and billionaires."
Trying to keep on the "right side of the millionaires and billionaires" is not a problem that afflicts Sanders. There is one possible exception: George Soros, who is a big political spender.
Sanders denounces various billionaires by name — Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Howard Schultz, Jeff Bezos, the Walton family. Soros, however, is conspicuously absent from Sanders' target list, perhaps because at least some of his policy goals intersect with those of Sanders' goals.
Sanders' treatment of rich people is where Sandersism falls apart. He acknowledges that "People like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Buffett, the Waltons, the Kochs, and their ilk are usually smart. They tend to work hard and take risks; they're often innovative."
Yet he wants to eliminate them. "Billionaires should not exist," is the title of one chapter of this book.
Sanders faults Republicans for election-season blame-claims. Sanders characterizes those as "immigrants are the problem," "Black people are the problem," "LGBTQ people are the problem," "Muslims are the problem." Sanders' objection, though, isn't the divisive scapegoating.
His complaint, rather, is that the Republicans have simply chosen the wrong goats. Sanders suggests an alternative for the slaughter: "The very rich," Sanders writes, "are the problem."
The case for that is asserted rather than proven. The contradictions are rampant. Sanders correctly credits Trump for having "actually got something right" with Operation Warp Speed, which partnered with the pharmaceutical industry to develop and deploy effective COVID vaccines at a rapid pace.
In the next breath, Sanders denounces Moderna and Pfizer for "making billions in excessive profits." Funny how the vaccines that generate "excessive profits" are developed and deployed faster, and work better, than those generated by profit-free government laboratories.
Sanders complains that wealthy families "do not share their wealth," but that's just inaccurate, both in terms of philanthropy and also in terms of value generated for customers, shareholders, employees, vendors, and other business partners.
Much of the rest of the Sanders book consists of a catalog of terrible policy ideas that have been tried already either here or elsewhere in one form or another and yielded disappointing outcomes — rent control, a top income tax rate of 92 percent, $35 billion a year of spending on "public media."
Sanders goes on and on denouncing "corporate media conglomerates," by which he means "CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and the rest of the corporate media." Disparaging Disney, he sounds much like Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, who also uses the "corporate media" phrase as a kind of insult.
The Sanders book is published by Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, which is itself controlled by Bertelsmann and its German family proprietors led by Liz Mohn. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates Mohn as being worth about $6.2 billion.
Sanders could have sought to publish his book by means of the U.S. Government Publishing Office or by some independent or nonprofit press. Yet when it comes to actually getting something done, like selling books, there's something, somehow about the profit motive and private ownership that tends to work better than anything else.
One might fault Mohn for helping fuel, in Sanders, an anticapitalist messenger who will ultimately destroy the system in which she prospers. At times Sanders claims confidently that things are heading in that direction: "The future of this country is with our ideas."
He's more believable when he talks about how Democrats have lost touch with working Americans. Now there's a message that will help Bertelsmann sell some books. It may have some truth to it, too, not only as it applies to the Democratic National Committee but also as it applies to a certain independent socialist from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats.
https://www.newsmax.com/ira-stoll/democrats-working-class-voters/2023/04/19/id/1116755/
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America First Legal files civil rights complaint against Anheuser-Busch’s racial and gender hiring quotas
America First Legal Foundation on April 17 filed a civil rights complaint against Anheuser-Busch at the Missouri branch of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition against employment discrimination on the basis of race and sex, blasting the company’s racial and gender hiring quotas, stating “Anheuser-Busch is knowingly, intentionally, and unlawfully discriminating based on race, color, national origin, and sex with respect to employment and job training opportunities.”
The complaint comes on the heels of Anheuser-Busch’s controversial marketing campaign by transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney that has resulted in new scrutiny and boycotts of the 171-year-old beer manufacturer.
The America First Legal letter pointed to the Anheuser-Busch 2023 Leadership Accelerator Program, which according to the company’s job listing is a “formal mentorship, executive interaction, and leadership development curriculum for those who identify with historically underrepresented groups as they join our organization in a full-time capacity. We encourage candidates who identify as Black, Latinx, and Native American to apply, as well as those who identify with a historically underrepresented group.”
America First Legal’s letter by attorney Nicholas Barry alleged, “it is a fast-track program to executive leadership positions at Anheuser-Busch and it is limited to candidates based on race. The proforma Equal Opportunity Employer language at the end of the posting does mask the company’s discriminatory intent and purpose.”
America First Legal also pointed to the company’s 2022 Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) report that outlines racial and gender hiring quotas: “22% women in overall workforce; 35% women in salaried workforce; 28% women in top five leadership levels; 14% women in top three leadership level; 5 out of 15 Board members are women…”
And it is pushing to “drive results” in the company’s 2022 corporate annual report, stating, “while the representation of women in the [Senior Leadership Team] SLT and the senior leadership level directly below the SLT remained constant compared to last reporting year, the overall representation of women in top leadership positions in our company grew by 2 percentage points compared to the last reporting year.”
As America First Legal noted, “Anheuser-Busch’s Annual Report has a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion section almost entirely dedicated to the growth of only women in the workforce.”
The problem is that diversity racial and gender hiring quotas like these appear to run afoul of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on employment discrimination on the basis of race or sex: “It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer… to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or … to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
However, thanks to the 1979 ruling by the Supreme Court ruling Steelworkers v. Weber which ruled that employment policies that racial preferences on the basis of race and sex in favor of women and minorities, which plaintiffs argued was reverse discrimination, were not a violation of the Civil Rights Act, in effect legalizing employment discrimination against whites and males. This was a sharp departure from more racially neutral interpretations of the Civil Rights Act by federal courts that preceded the decision.
Then Associate Justice William Rehnquist, who would go on to become the Court’s 16th Chief Justice in 1986, in his dissenting opinion, compared the Court’s rewriting of the Civil Rights Act to the totalitarian regime portrayed in George Orwell’s 1984, writing that law was written plainly, “Taken in its normal meaning, and as understood by all Members of Congress who spoke to the issue during the legislative debates, this language prohibits a covered employer from considering race when making an employment decision, whether the race be black or white.”
Rehnquist blasted the majority of the court, adding, “the Court behaves much like the Orwellian speaker earlier described, as if it had been handed a note indicating that Title VII would lead to a result unacceptable to the Court if interpreted here as it was in our prior decisions. … Now we are told that the legislative history of Title VII shows that employers are free to discriminate on the basis of race: an employer may, in the Court’s words, ‘trammel the interests of the white employees’ in favor of black employees in order to eliminate ‘racial imbalance.’… Our earlier interpretations of Title VII, like the banners and posters decorating the square in Oceania, were all wrong.”
44 years after the Steelworkers v. Weber decision we are seeing the outcome of corporate and business hiring practices that now fully favor reverse discrimination as a means of achieving perceived equity and inclusion as a means of securing ESG investment, which grew to $8.4 trillion, according to the latest data by the USSIF, The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment.
The majority of the current Supreme Court are all considered acolytes of Rehnquist. All were regarded as constitutionalists, originalists and textualists when they were nominated by conservative presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the latter of whom just secured an historic 6 to 3 majority on the nation’s highest court with Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Today, the question of reverse discrimination posed by ESG’s Diversity & Inclusion corporate policies might be decided differently by today’s Supreme Court more than 40 years later. It would be up to those fired or cancelled to make the case they were discriminated against on the basis of race and/or sex.
This is exactly the Title VII approach this author advocated for in February to more broadly address ESG’s violations in retirement investments of not just civil rights laws but also antitrust with its policies to restrict U.S. carbon-based energy production of oil and coal in favor of green technologies and to drive up prices.
Marketing campaigns aside, this is where the real ESG battle is.
And it need not just be a legal strategy that plays out in federal courts — although that is a necessary component — it could also later be coupled with Labor Department, IRS and federal employee retiree restrictions against retirement investments into companies violating Title VII and antitrust. America First Legal is on the right track. If civil rights and antitrust laws are enforced as written, you can kill ESG for good.
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20 April, 2023
Cleopatra was black?
A further instance of such distortions can be found here, where a British historian claims that there was an African population in Britain during the Roman empire. Also see here
Netflix has been accused of 'blackwashing' history by casting a black actress as Cleopatra in a new docuseries about the Macedonian-Greek ruler of Egypt.
But Egyptians have reacted with horror to the denial of records which show Cleopatra was Macedonian-Greek. An Egyptian lawyer has filed a case with the country's public prosecutor demanding that Netflix be shutdown.
Meanwhile Cairo's former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass condemned the documentary as 'completely fake. Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black.'
Hawass said the only rulers of Egypt known to have been black were the Kushite kings of the 25th Dynasty (747-656 BC).
'Netflix is trying to provoke confusion by spreading false and deceptive facts that the origin of the Egyptian civilization is black,' he added and called on his countrymen to take a stand against the streaming giant.
On Sunday, lawyer Mahmoud al-Semary filed a complaint with the public prosecutor demanding that he take 'the necessary legal measures' to block access to Netflix.
He alleged the show featured content that violated Egypt's media laws and accused Netflix of trying to 'promote the Afrocentric thinking ... which includes slogans and writings aimed at distorting and erasing the Egyptian identity.'
Cleopatra was famously played by white English actress Elizabeth Taylor opposite Richard Burton as Mark Anthony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's historical epic from 1963.
Three years ago plans for a new movie about the queen starring Israeli actress Gal Gadot sparked a backlash from people insisting the role should go to an Egyptian or African actress.
Gadot defended the decision, saying: 'We were looking for a Macedonian actress that could fit Cleopatra. She wasn't there, and I was very passionate about Cleopatra.'
The fury at Netflix's right-on programming comes after it appeared to have ditched the woke messaging last year.
Netflix took a hit in the first half of 2022, losing about 1,170 million subscribers as rivals such as Paramount+ and Disney+ raked them in.
The huge decline was seen by some as a direct consequence of the company's late response to demands from its viewers to tone down their woke agenda.
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Violent mobs are destroying Chicago - but gutless far-left lunatics are defending the thugs... because they want FEAR and TERROR to be the new normal in America
By MEGHAN MCCAIN
America is being gaslighted. We're being told that we should live in fear. Are you ready to accept that?
I'm not. My home is a short drive from the center of Washington D.C. and not a day goes by that I do not worry about rising crime. Our young daughter goes to a playgroup in a city park that I may stop attending because of an alarming rise in carjackings.
It's my worst nightmare that a thug steals my SUV with my toddler helplessly strapped to her car seat inside.
Last week, my hairstylist was carjacked in broad daylight right outside of her salon. As she was unloading her trunk, a group of men pulled up, one jumped into the front seat of her vehicle and took off.
When she called the police at 10am, she was told her incident was the fourth carjacking that morning.
My mother-in-law is a Washington Nationals baseball season ticket owner and for the first time off-duty D.C. police officers may be hired to patrol local sports venues. I now worry about her every time she goes to a game.
Is this the new normal? Apparently, yes, according to Democrats running the nation's cities. What a sorry state of the country.
However well-justified my fears are, they pale in comparison to what millions of other Americans, with far few options than I, face every single day.
For a moment, put yourself in the shoes of 20-year-old Ashley and 22-year-old DJ. They're an out-of-town couple, who were shopping in downtown Chicago this past Saturday night.
After stepping out of Nordstrom, they were looking for a place to eat. It was a perfectly ordinary evening. Then everything spiraled wildly out of control. They were surrounded by a mob of up to 100 teenagers.
'They said they were going to kill us,' remembered Ashley. 'They turned around and started fighting. I got pushed down to the ground and the whole group went to DJ and not to me.'
By now you may have seen the video of the attack. It's terrifying. Ashley shrieks as the crowd swallows her up. Her head dips below the bodies. Her attackers jostle with each other, frantic to get in their punch.
It's one of many stories. Over the weekend, it was absolute mayhem in Chicago.
Hundreds of young people flooded the city's iconic shopping district. Stores were looted and vandalized. Windows were smashed. Traffic was blocked. Tourists were terrified.
Two teen boys were shot. One man was reportedly beaten as he sat in the driver's seat of his car after his windshield was smashed in.
At this point in the decline of America's cities, I don't expect city leaders to be appalled. Those days are long gone.
Mob violence is a regular occurrence in this once great city. And predictably, there were few demands for arrests and accountability for those literally destroying their own community.
In America today, violence, destruction, and nihilism is accepted. It's the new normal.
'Here's the thing,' outgoing Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot told reporters on Monday, long after the full picture of the chaos was clear. 'The vast majority of the young people that came downtown came downtown because it was great weather and an opportunity to enjoy the city… I'm not going to use your language, which I think is wrong, to say that it was mayhem.'
Nothing to see her, folks. Just move along.
Even worse -- the response of Illinois State Senator Robert Peters. He didn't only ignore the vandalism, beatings and shootings – he outright justified it. 'I would look at the behavior of young people as a political act and statement,' Peters tweeted Sunday. 'It's a mass protest against poverty and segregation.'
Arguably, the most troubling reaction of all came from Chicago Mayor-Elect Brandon Johnson. He makes clear that nothing is going to change in the Windy City. 'In no way do I condone the destructive activity we saw in the Loop and lakefront this weekend. It is unacceptable and has no place in our city,' he hedged – a reliable signal that what comes next is going to be bad.
'However,' he wrote, 'it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.'
Let's be clear, no one is demonizing law-abiding teens. They are pleading for basic safety. But in Chicago and across America – that's too much to ask.
Frankly, if you're shocked by these reactions – you haven't been paying attention.
The summer of 2020 was my red pill event. It was the moment that I recognized a paradigm shift in our country. As mobs and criminals exploited justified outrage over the murder of George Floyd to loot and riot – the left defended them.
I watched and listening to all of this and felt helpless. I was disgusted when the neighborhoods of innocent Americans were destroyed. But anyone who objected to this outpouring of anger was labeled a racist.
Recall Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in July 2020 blaming spiking New York City crime on economic desperation.
'They need to feed their child and they don't have money, so they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry,' she said in a virtual town hall.
Of course, shoplifting doesn't explain a reported 130% spike in shootings year over year. But that didn't matter to AOC.
'Do we think this has to do with the fact that there's record unemployment in the United States right now?' she said.
Well, Alexandra, how do you rationalize crime today? Unemployment is at its lowest rates in American history. I'm sure she'll find another excuse, because these far-left lunatics capitalize on the destruction. To them, crime is not the result of lawlessness. It's the result of social ills. When they blame shootings on unemployment they skirt the blame, they let themselves off the hook.
The irony is lost on no one that Chicago has been ruled by Democrats for decades, yet it only continues to circle the drain. Maybe they're to blame?
Now, nearly three years after the BLM Summer of 2020, our society has deteriorated even further. Maybe most sickeningly of all, the people that Lori Lightfoot, Brandon Johnson and AOC claim to represent are bearing the brunt of it.
Sadly, it's not just Chicago. It's Los Angeles, it's New York City, it's Washington D.C., it's Detroit, it's St. Louis, it's Baltimore... When will these thoughtless politicians and the voters who put them in office learn? At this rate, maybe never.
And while I will hold on to city living for as long as I can, I will not put my family at risk. If Washington, D.C. continues getting worse – the McCain's will leave.
We will be ok. But where will that leave our fellow Washingtonians? Some can't flee the chaos.
As people like me escape, the decline of cities will only accelerate.
So, will I accept living in fear? The answer is 'no'. But I'm one of the lucky ones.
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De Blasio’s Victory in New York vs. Florida Debate Is a Wake-Up Call for Conservatives
On April 28, a debate between the Democratic former mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, and the Manhattan Institute’s president, Reihan Salam, will be released. Having watched the taping, I can say it’s a much-watch for liberals and conservatives alike for very different reasons.
I expected Mr. DeBlasio, with a governing record to defend, to be the underdog on the question, “Is Florida Eating New York’s Lunch?” The more than 1.6 million former New Yorkers who now call the Sunshine State home would seem to disprove his side of the argument.
The Census shows more New Yorkers relocated to Florida in 2022 than in any year since it joined the union in 1845. New York also has, at almost 10 percent, the highest income tax in the nation, while Florida has none.
The facts, figures, and comparisons of legal and regulatory climates all favored Mr. Salam, so liberals will enjoy seeing Mr. De Blasio prevail. Still, conservatives would do well to watch, not to suffer, but to see just what they’re up against in the arena of ideas.
The debate — to be shared on public radio, video, and the Intelligence Squared U.S. podcast — was hosted by the non-partisan Open to Debate group, whose mission is to address “the extreme polarization of our nation and our politics.”
Mr. Salam, like many on the right, seemed to interpret avoiding “extreme polarization” as refusing to punch or even block. This posture was striking since he used to be the executive editor of William F. Buckley’s National Review.
Mr. Buckley earned universal praise for his geniality yet never let anyone run roughshod over him. Even when confronting radicals and racists as the host of “Firing Line,” he never showed his belly, marshaling intelligence and humor to lay out the strongest possible case.
Mr. De Blasio, too, has core beliefs. He was unafraid to launch haymakers and score some hits below the belt. Even when the moderator, John Donvan, stepped in to defend Mr. Salam, the mayor would go right on flogging straw dogs.
Like “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” from the Jim Croce song, Mr. De Blasio concealed “a razor in his shoe” and used it to carve up Mr. Salam with such skill, the man seemed not to notice until he grew woozy.
It was like watching a pitcher on a team I don’t root for throw a perfect game. “Why can’t our guy whip a fastball like that?” Mr. De Blasio pulled off the upset because while Mr. Salam aimed for viewers’ brains, Mr. De Blasio zeroed in on their hearts, painting Florida as an intolerant, dystopian hellscape dominated by “MAGA extremism.”
“Florida is choosing a path of banning books,” Mr. De Blasio said, “and disallowing a woman’s right to choose. Florida’s turning against trans youth.” Despite the state having larger black and Hispanic populations, he said it was hostile to “diversity.”
Mr. De Blasio also warned — as the Democratic senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan did in 1969 — that Florida would soon be underwater due to greenhouse gas, and heralded the Empire State’s social spending while sidestepping that its unsustainable deficit is the nation’s largest.
“When I factor in pre-K for my child,” Mr. De Blasio said, quoting a new arrival from Seattle, “my cost of living is actually cheaper.” I could almost hear the picture of Thomas Sowell on the book behind Mr. Salam screaming that this is tempting people to New York on the promise the state will give them cash stolen from their neighbors.
Mr. De Blasio also touted his city’s rent control and $15 minimum wage. Conservatives used to have answers for these subjects: If rent control works, why does Gotham have the highest rent in the country? What about the minimum wage pricing out entry-level jobs, etc.?
The left ought to watch this debate to exalt in victory and the right to relearn the lesson of the 2022 midterms — that statistics won’t win elections for them, and until they learn to wield the rhetorical razor once more, the left is going to go right on charging lunch to their tabs.
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"Nazi" message in Australia
I think the message would more likely be seen as silly rather than as offensive
A worker behind the wheel of a well-known traffic control company vehicle which displayed a racist message on its electronic board last Friday has been sacked according to the company’s senior executives.
On Tuesday morning A2O Traffic Solutions chief executive officer James Bowe and general manager Sean Fitzpatrick said the firm was, “shocked and in complete disbelief over what has occurred”.
“We are completely devastated by such a disgraceful action,” they said.
“Such behaviour goes against every value we hold dear and we shall be taking steps to ensure it never happens again.
“As soon as we were made aware of this incident we instigated a thorough investigation with the allocated driver”.
Mr Fitzpatrick said the investigation included an intense check of the vehicle and its vehicle management system which provides detailed information about its use.
“We have sophisticated monitoring systems and interviewed the driver and concluded it was a deliberate act of serious misconduct,’ he said.
“He admitted liability. The outcome of our investigation has resulted in the swift termination of the person’s employment.”
Mr Bowe said the management and staff of A20 “apologise unreservedly for the offence and distress this disgraceful act has caused in our community”.
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19 April, 2023
Novel Estimates of Mortality Associated With Poverty in the US
That the poor have worse health is as near to a universal finding as you will get but is it a major cause of death and illness? The study below found that the relationship was surprisingly weak: Hazard ratios of less than 2.0. It is only one of many adverse factors
David Brady et al.
The US perennially has a far higher poverty rate than peer-rich democracies.1 This high poverty rate in the US presents an enormous challenge to population health given that considerable research demonstrates that being in poverty is bad for one’s health.2 Despite valuable contributions of prior research on income and mortality, the quantity of mortality associated with poverty in the US remains uknown. In this cohort study, we estimated the association between poverty and mortality and quantified the proportion and number of deaths associated with poverty.
Methods
Statistical analyses were conducted on February 17, 2023. We analyzed the Panel Study of Income Dynamics 1997-2019 data merged with the Cross-National Equivalent File (eTable 1 in Supplement 1).3,4 This longitudinal survey3 observed mortality from surviving family members and was validated with the National Death Index. Innovatively, our higher-quality household income measure included all income sources, cash and near-cash transfers, and taxes and tax credits and was adjusted for household size.5 With use of leading standards in international poverty research, poverty was measured relatively as less than 50% of the median income.1 Current poverty was observed contemporaneously in each year, and cumulative poverty was the proportion of the past 10 years. Cox hazards regression models were estimated using Stata, version 17.0 (StataCorp) for 18 995 respondents aged 15 years or older (135 790 person-years) (eAppendix 2 in Supplement 1). Analyses were robust to adjustment for self-rated health, overweight or obesity, smoking, acute health events, chronic disease, other confounders, and a wide variety of alternative details (see eTable 2 in eAppendix 2 and eFigures 1 and 2 in eAppendix 3 in Supplement 1). We used secondary unidentifiable archival data, so institutional review board approval was not needed.
Results
Current poverty is associated with a greater mortality hazard of 1.42 (95% CI, 1.26-1.60). Cumulative poverty—being always in poverty vs never in poverty in the past 10 years—is associated with a greater mortality hazard of 1.71 (95% CI, 1.45-2.02).
Figure 1 shows that survival of individuals in poverty mainly begins to diverge from survival of individuals not in poverty at approximately 40 years of age. The gap in survival between those in poverty and those not in poverty increases until a peak near 70 years when it begins to converge.
Figure 2 compares the number of deaths associated with poverty with other major causes and risk factors of death. In 2019, among those aged 15 years or older, 6.5% (95% CI, 4.1%-9.0%) of deaths and 183 003 deaths (95% CI, 116 173-254 507 deaths) were associated with current poverty, and 10.5% (95% CI, 6.9%-14.4%) of deaths and 295 431 deaths (95% CI, 193 652-406 007 deaths) were associated with cumulative poverty.
Current poverty was associated with greater mortality than major causes, such as accidents, lower respiratory diseases, and stroke. In 2019, current poverty was also associated with greater mortality than many far more visible causes—10 times as many deaths as homicide, 4.7 times as many deaths as firearms, 3.9 times as many deaths as suicide, and 2.6 times as many deaths as drug overdose.
Cumulative poverty was associated with approximately 60% greater mortality than current poverty. Hence, cumulative poverty was associated with greater mortality than even obesity and dementia. Heart disease, cancer, and smoking were the only causes or risks with greater mortality than cumulative poverty.
Discussion
Because the US consistently has high poverty rates, these estimates can contribute to understanding why the US has comparatively lower life expectancy. Because certain ethnic and racial minority groups are far more likely to be in poverty, our estimates can improve understanding of ethnic and racial inequalities in life expectancy. The mortality associated with poverty is also associated with enormous economic costs. Therefore, benefit-cost calculations of poverty-reducing social policies should incorporate the benefits of lower mortality. Moreover, poverty likely aggravated the mortality impact of COVID-19, which occurred after our analyses ended in 2019. Therefore, one limitation of this study is that our estimates may be conservative about the number of deaths associated with poverty. Ultimately, we propose that poverty should be considered a major risk factor for death in the US.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2804032
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The worm has turned on woke trans issues: Spineless Dem politicians now look anti-women
By Piers Morgan
Sometimes, revolutions begin in unexpected places.
One such example came on Friday night at Bill Maher’s TV studio in Los Angeles where I was appearing on his “Real Time” show alongside rising Democratic star Rep. Katie Porter — the woman who wants to replace Dianne Feinstein as senator for California.
We debated the backlash to 26-year-old transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s controversial promotion of Bud Light beer, and I made the point that far more concerning was Mulvaney’s mockery of sportswomen in a new Nike commercial.
I said that for someone who identified as a gay man until last year to be sporting a women’s sports bra, despite having no breasts, as “they” pranced around like a clueless non-athlete, mimicking how a misogynist would scornfully depict a woman doing sport, struck me as a slap in the face to actual women.
And to my surprise, given how liberal Maher’s audience tends to be, my comments were met with loud applause.
The same thing happened when I interrupted Porter’s disingenuously deflecting defense of trans people’s rights to say: “Nobody’s questioning trans rights to fairness and equality, what I would question is where trans rights to fairness and equality begin to erode or even destroy, as we’re seeing in women’s sport, the rights of women to fairness and equality.”
The audience again clapped enthusiastically when I reminded Porter, who by now was staring at me with withering contempt, what just happened in Scotland, where First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was forced to quit after endorsing a male rapist being sent to a women’s prison because he identified as a woman at his trial.
It was then that a rattled Porter exposed the shocking fragility at the heart of the woke defense of the indefensible when it comes to transgender athletes in sport, by saying she strongly disagrees with Riley Gaines, the swimmer who spoke out against trans rival Lia Thomas’ physical advantage over biological females and who last week was physically attacked by a mob of trans activists at San Francisco State University.
“What do you disagree with, out of interest?” I interjected. “What is it she’s said that’s actually wrong?”
Porter looked startled before stammering, to silence, that Gaines was only campaigning “to get likes and get clicks.”
“That’s not what she’s doing,” I said. “All I’ve seen her do is stand up for women’s rights for fairness and equality.”
“Riley is speaking up for herself,” said Porter. “And that is her prerogative and I respect her free speech.”
“I think she’s speaking up for pretty much every female athlete in the world,” I retorted, to yet more loud applause.
Within minutes, our exchange was trending on Twitter. It felt like a moment of reckoning, when an insane ideology hits the buffers of basic common sense, and the public knows it.
As Maher observed, also to big claps: “Wokeness is the opposite of what I grew up [with] as liberalism. Liberalism was, ‘Let’s give the women an equal shot,’ this is like, ‘Let’s put a male in the swimming pool with women.’ I don’t get it.”
Nor do most people.
Many viewers commented on social media that it was shocking to witness two middle-aged men vociferously stand up for women’s rights, and not the only woman at the desk.
I’d go further and say it was shameful.
Porter’s Senate bid launch video boasted that “California needs a warrior in Washington … I speak hard truths … I demand justice…”
But not, it seems, when it comes to defending her own sex.
On her website, she describes herself as “smart, tough, fearless.”
Yet by so spectacularly failing to defend women on such a clear-cut issue, she came across as unintelligent, weak and cowardly.
Of course, Porter was just following the lead of Democratic leaders like President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, whose endless transgender virtue-signaling includes recently proposing a new rule legally barring schools from prohibiting most biological male trans athletes from competing with females.
By doing this, they’ve become active participants in eroding women’s rights, which is beyond parody for a supposedly “progressive” administration.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/17/spineless-dems-now-look-anti-women/
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Scholastic forced to apologize for telling author to edit ‘racism’ out of kids book
Children’s publishing house Scholastic has apologized to the Asian-American writer of a children’s book about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II for asking her to remove a reference to “virulent racism” from an author’s note.
Maggie Tokuda-Hall, whose 2022 children’s book “Love in the Library” was inspired by how her grandparents first met while they were confined to an internment camp in Idaho during the war, wrote a blog post detailing the publisher’s demands.
“They wanted to take this book and repackage it so that it was just a simple love story,” Tokuda-Hall wrote in the blog post, which was titled “Scholastic, and a Faustian Bargain.”
“Nothing more.”
She added: “Not anything that might offend those book banners in what they called this ‘politically sensitive’ moment.”
In the April 11 blog post, Tokuda-Hall included a screenshot of the author’s note with the suggested edits.
The words “virulent racism” are crossed out, as are references to “the deeply American tradition of racism.”
Tokuda-Hall wrote that her deal with Scholastic was “contingent” upon the changes.
She refused and ended up signing with Candlewick.
In response to the blog post, Scholastic President and CEO Peter Warwick offered an apology and said that the publisher would like to license the book without the suggested edits.
Warwick said in a statement that the publisher was “wrong” to have insisted on the edits, which were “not in keeping with Scholastic’s values.”
“We don’t want to diminish or in any way minimize the racism that tragically persists against Asian-Americans,” Warwick wrote Friday. “Please know that we will always stand against censorship.”
Tokuda-Hall, who was picked by Scholastic as part of its “Rising Voices” series called “Amplifying Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians / Pacific Islanders,” accused Scholastic of “demanding that I strangle my own voice.”
“They want to sell our suffering, smoothed down and made palatable to the white readers they prioritize,” she wrote.
“And excuse my language, but absolutely the f–k not.”
Tokuda-Hall then posted a copy of the letter she sent to Scholastic in which she declined the publisher’s offer to license the book. In the letter to Scholastic, Tokuda-Hall hit out at Scholastic’s “deeply offensive offer” and edit.
“To say yes, we’d like to sell your grandparent’s [sic] story but not in a way that connects them to the suffering of those just like them now for fear of potential bans is, to put it lightly, cowardly,” she wrote.
“They will not have the right to sell this story because they’ve proven to me that they’re not up to the responsibility of it,” she wrote.
Tokuda-Hall ended the letter by writing: “So, to Scholastic, with all due respect: absolutely not.”
“I wish them the best of luck finding safe AANHPI books that cater to the white readership they prioritize.”
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Democrats Dismiss NYC Crime Victims
There are none so blind ...
We’ll say this about House Republicans: They’ve upped their marketing game.
We don’t say this as a disparagement; we mean it as a compliment. And we say it because yesterday, members of the House Judiciary Committee headed up to Federal Plaza in Manhattan, there to hold a “field hearing” — and to thereby shine a bright light on the soft-on-crime policies of Soros-funded New York City District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
The four-hour hearing was the second of its kind in recent weeks, with the first involving a field trip to McAllen, Texas — right on the border, right in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley, right where the nation’s illegal immigration catastrophe is at its worst. And it might be that Republicans are beginning to get under the skin of their Democrat colleagues because while Democrats skipped the border hearing in March, they attended this one.
Of course, it may simply be that woke, wealthy, elitist Democrats feel much more at home in tony Manhattan than they do in hardscrabble McAllen.
In any case, this examination of the Democrats’ “pro-crime, anti-victim” policies was led by Ohio Republican and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, and it featured numerous real-life victims of violent crime, which has surged in Democrat-run cities nationwide, and particularly in New York City under the successive Democrat leadership of former Mayor Bill de Blasio and current Mayor Eric Adams.
New York City has “lost its way when it comes to fighting crime and upholding the law,” said Jordan. “Here in Manhattan, the scales of justice are weighed down by politics. For the district attorney justice isn’t blind — it’s about advancing opportunities to promote a political agenda — a radical political agenda.”
Toward the beginning of the hearing, committee members heard impact statements from several city residents who’ve experienced violent crime up close and personally. Democrat New York City Council member Robert F. Holden also spoke, and he criticized Bragg’s policies.
“On his first day in office, Bragg issued a memo that would decriminalize a broad range of offenses and reduce charges for violent crime,” Holden said. “This was a signal for every criminal that it was open season on law-abiding citizens in New York. … These failed progressive policies reverse 30 years of law and order delivered to the city by the hardworking men and women of the NYPD and professional prosecutors that put victims’ rights ahead of criminals.”
Predictably, Democrats and their colleagues at The New York Times denounced the hearing as a “junket,” a “sham,” a “stunt,” a “MAGA Broadway production,” and an “outrageous abuse of power.” They even called it “an exercise in retribution directed at the prosecutor who indicted the former president on 34 [redundant and ridiculous] felony counts earlier this month” — which is an odd characterization given that Republican committee members didn’t mention Donald Trump’s name once.
Indeed, New York Democrat Congressman Daniel Goodman called the hearing “a charade” to protect Trump. But Madeline Brame, a witness whose Army veteran son was fatally stabbed nine times in 2018, wasn’t in any mood for it. “Don’t insult my intelligence,” she said. “This is why I walked away from the plantation of the Democratic Party.”
We can’t imagine losing a child to a violent crime, but this woman has lived it. And the Democrats dismissed her testimony as part of a charade. Shame on them. What is it that Democrats always say about “moral authority”? Or does that only apply when the witness is one of their own?
“Victims can care less about anyone’s political ideology or party,” Brame said. “Neither do criminals. They don’t roll up to a person and ask them if they’re a Democrat or a Republican before they bust them in the head, or before they push them in front of the train, or before they stab them to death.”
In addition to the Times’s Praetorian Guardsmen, the Democrats also had the usual “fact-checking” suspects out in their defense yesterday. One of their pet peeves is when we mention, rightly, that Alvin Bragg is a Soros-funded DA.
Our Nate Jackson fact-checked this fact-check recently, and it turns out that an anti-police group called the Color of Change PAC announced in May 2021 that it was backing Bragg’s candidacy for DA with $1 million. And it also turns out that, days later, George Soros cut Color of Change a check for $1 million.
Mere coincidence? We think not. “Anyone can see exactly what happened here,” said another fact-checking fact-checker, columnist Matt Palumbo, “yet the fact-checkers were more than happy to further demolish their credibility in arguing the contrary with pure semantics. The fact-checker’s case that Soros didn’t fund Bragg amounts to nothing more than ‘Soros didn’t fund him — the PAC did!’”
“Experts say no legal link between Soros donation, Bragg,” say the fact-checking experts at The Washington Post and PolitiFact and elsewhere.
To which we say: What would we do without experts? And what would New York City’s criminal class do without a soft-on-crime Soros DA like Alvin Bragg?
https://patriotpost.us/articles/96596-democrats-dismiss-nyc-crime-victims-2023-04-18
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Australia: Aged care rules ‘to set off collapses’
This is typical of Leftist thinking. They think they can just pass a law and make something happen that they want to happen. That is rarely so.
The problem is that they do not first do the hard work of undertanding how or why the existing situation exists. It will almost always be the result of several interracting pressures and failing to account for those pressures will cause "unexpected" results.
The situation discussed below is a simple example of that. We would probably all agreee that nursing homes for the aged would ideally have a large, well-trained staff to give individual attention to each resident when required. And the ALP is trying to make that happen by legislation. But it won't happen
To understand why you need to look at the existing situation, where a small staff of not mostly not very bright people are all that are availble in such homes. And why is that so?
Cost. Employing staff is expensive and the normal way of coping with that is to pay only minimal wages. And the only people who will accept such wages are people who do not have much to offer in the way of skills and abilities
So mandate that staff must be paid nore? You can do that but what will be its effect? The care offered by the home will be so expensive that few elderly will be able to afford it. It would cast many frail elderly onto the streeets. You just can't do that.
And the proposal most discussed below is an example of that. A qualified nurse gets wages well above the minimum so where are you going to get the money to pay her? Short of government subsidy you cannot do it. The home could well go broke trying.
So the nurse "shortage" is mainly a shortage of nurses who will acccept nursing home pay. There will be such a shotrage for a long time. The mandate will be unenforceable and will mainly result in a REDUCED availability of nursing home care. Nursing home care will become the preserve of rich families only
It's a devil and the deep blue sea phenomenon. To get assured good care, you have to pay a lot. But not everyone can pay that much so you get the distressingly poor treatment of some residents that we often read about
The chief of the peak nursing professional body says it could take five to 10 years for the sector to recruit enough staff to meet Anthony Albanese’s target for 24/7 nurses in residential aged care facilities, warning there is “absolutely no way” the industry will meet Labor’s July 1 deadline.
Australian College of Nursing chief executive Kylie Ward also expressed concern that providers would be forced to shut down under the legislated requirement to have at least one registered nurse on site at all times.
The warnings come as the Aged & Community Care Providers Association, the overarching body representing residential, home and community care, said the government needed to ensure the pace of change was manageable for aged care providers and did not “exacerbate an already challenging situation”.
The sector is scrambling to implement a suite of reforms including mandated minutes of care per resident, quality and safety standards, and full-time nursing requirements as it adjusts to a new funding model bought in last October as recommended by the Aged Care Royal Commission.
The overhaul comes as financial troubles plague the sector, with the latest figures from the Quarterly Financial Snapshot of the Aged Care Sector revealing 66 per cent of private providers are operating at a loss, with facilities losing an average of $28 per resident each day.
For-profit and not-for-profit providers, which represent 90 per cent of all homes, returned a collective net loss before tax of $465.3m for the September 2022 quarter, off revenues of $5.3bn.
As the sector grapples with a major shortfall of workers and a deteriorating financial outlook, a number of aged care facilities have been forced to close their doors. Aged care provider Wesley Mission was the latest facility to close, announcing on Thursday the shutdown of all Sydney homes, citing difficulties in attracting and retaining staff.
The closure, to take effect next month, will displace about 200 residents but the facility said it was committed to ensuring the elderly had other suitable accommodation.
Professor Ward said the aged care sector was facing a shortfall of 10,000 nurses ahead of Labor’s July 1 deadline, and urged the government to invest in attracting overseas-trained nurses to ensure a sustainable supply of workers to help meet targets. She said the college, which had been fighting for facilities to have a registered nurse to be on site for years – had told the government of the projected staffing shortfalls ahead of the deadline.
“There is absolutely no way the sector is going to meet its legislated target by July 1,” Professor Ward said. “We needed a minimum of 10,000 workers before this came into place … where are the nurses coming from?
“If the government doesn’t start looking at developing skilled migration, or a broader approach to developing a new workforce then you’re never going to meet that target.”
Professor Ward said providers were fearful they may have to close their doors if they were unable to meet the legislated targets.
“I can guarantee you they will close. I have spoken to CEOs who are distressed and say they won’t be able to meet the requirement … the modelling of care needs to be considered as we transition to these reforms but we can’t just pluck these people out of thin air,” she said.
Aged Care Minister Anika Wells said the government would not force the closure of facilities that were unable to meet nursing targets and would work with providers to help them meet new standards. Last month, Ms Wells conceded about one in 20 aged care homes would not meet Labor’s July 1 deadline, but said about 80 per cent had already achieved the target.
Ms Wells said the “vast majority” of residential facilities would meet 24/7 nursing requirements and that around the clock nursing was needed to properly care for some of the nation’s most vulnerable. Exemptions would be available for a small number of facilities in regional and remote areas if they were unable to fulfil the requirements.
Opposition aged care spokeswoman Anne Ruston attacked Labor for failing to consider the challenging circumstances the sector faced due to severe workforce shortages “in their rush to tick and flick election commitments” after the Prime Minister promised to “fix the crisis in aged care”.
Senator Ruston seized on the closure of Wesley Mission’s homes, arguing residential facilities were not adequately supported during the transitional period.
Sue McLean Bolter, whose 98-year-old mother Moira McLean has been a resident of the Wesley Mission home in Narrabeen since 2019, was first informed of the provider’s closure on Tuesday.
She has been scrambling to find suitable accommodation for her mother, having recently flown in from the US to celebrate Ms McLean’s birthday. So far she has been unsuccessful.
“It’s been very stressful … it’s just been horrible … my sister who lives here has been furious,” Ms McLean Bolter said.
“Had (Wesley) even notified the government that they had been planning to close and why were we given just six weeks notice?
“This is the northern beaches where people have their families, doctors and hospitals so to send them over to the other side of Sydney is almost unthinkable. You can’t just drop by to meet your mum, you might have to drive two hours across Sydney in traffic.”
Wesley Mission chief executive Reverend Stu Cameron said Labor’s new national staffing requirements had created challenges for the home as a smaller provider. “The aged care sector is experiencing challenges to workforce and flow-on impacts from the national reforms to aged care,” Reverend Cameron said.
“Wesley Mission supports these once-in-a-generation reforms, improving quality for all care users. It is, however, a challenging environment to be a smaller provider.’
Aged care provider Whiddon chief executive Chris Mamarelis said the Wesley closure was “unsurprising” given the financial pressures many providers were under and forecast more failures.
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18 April, 2023
It's fine when women invade men’s spaces but not so good when trans men invade women's spaces?
The familiar Leftist double standards
Janice Fiamengo
There has been a good deal of talk lately about women’s spaces being invaded by biologically male persons identifying as women. Some women’s campaigners claim that the trans phenomenon constitutes an attack on womanhood itself, an attempt to ‘erase’ women and replace them with men who perform womanhood. Some even call it a new form of patriarchy.
But well before women had their single-sex spaces threatened, something similar had already happened to men. Beginning in the 1970s, men’s spaces were usurped, their maleness was denigrated, and policies and laws forced changes in male behaviour that turned many workplaces into feminised fiefdoms in which men held their jobs only so long as women allowed them to. The very idea of an exclusively male workspace or club – especially if it was a space for socialising (not so much if it was a sewer, oil field, or shop floor in which men did unpleasant, dangerous work) – came to be seen as dangerous. In light of the recent furor over single-sex spaces for women, it is useful to consider the source of some men’s justifiable apathy and resentment.
At my new academic job in the late 1990s, a woman who had been the first female historian hired into her department used to tell a story she’d had passed on to her from a male colleague. After the decision had been made to hire her, one of the historians said to another somewhat dolefully, ‘I guess that’s the end of our meetings in the urinal.’ The joke ruefully acknowledged, and good-naturedly accepted, the end of their all-male work environment.
Though this woman didn’t have any trouble with her male colleagues, who welcomed her civilly, she told the story with an edge of contempt. Even thoroughly modern men, the story suggested, held a foolish nostalgia for pre-feminist days.
But was it foolish – or did the men recognise something real?
No one thought seriously, then, about the disappearance of men’s single-sex spaces. The idea that men and boys need places where they can be with other men (defended, for example, in Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men) would have been cause, amongst the women I knew, for scornful laughter. In 2018, anti-male assumptions had become so deeply entrenched that the female author of a Guardian article titled Men-only clubs and menace: how the establishment maintains male power simply could not believe that any decent man could legitimately seek out male-only company.
The story of women’s appropriation of male space has almost always been presented as an unqualified good. Implicit in the story is the assumption that male spaces did not offer anything positive: on the contrary, they were alleged to be harmful by their nature to both women and men, though especially to women. If men’s needs were mentioned, which they usually weren’t, it was alleged that men would only benefit through contact with women’s much-touted superior empathy, team-building, and communication skills.
An article from Sports History Weekly showcases the stark clarity of the standard narrative. In 2018, an article titled Locker Rooms Open Up to Female Journalists told of the victory achieved 40 years previously when, in 1978, ‘a federal judge ruled that women reporters could not be barred from interviewing [professional sports] players inside the locker room’. The history of female reporters’ entry into men’s change rooms was framed as the triumph of women’s professional dedication over male chauvinism. One of the first two journalists to interview hockey players in the post-game locker room (in 1975), is said to have asserted, admirably if a trifle insincerely, ‘I’m not the story, the game is the story.’
Indeed, the picture chosen to accompany the story shows the reporter bent over her notepad, unselfconsciously focused on recording ‘the story’. Close by her side, a man scantily clad in his briefs is just getting to his feet, but the reporter’s attention does not waver. The message of the picture seemed undeniable: skilled female professionals posed no (sexual or other) threat to male players, so only an old prude or a sexist boor would deny women access.
Prudish was the image presented of Bowie Kuhn, Major League Baseball’s Commissioner, who had tried unsuccessfully to stem the tide of progress. When he prevented individual baseball teams from allowing women to report inside players’ dressing rooms, one of the reporters, Melissa Ludtke, took him to court and won.
By the late 1970s, ‘traditional notions of decency and propriety’ under concerted attack for years, didn’t count for much in a liberated world.
If any men were made uncomfortable by the presence of women in their change rooms, their concerns were not even entertained. No women’s group or feminist advocate seems to have objected either. In the pre-trans 1970s, most women were unfazed by the prospect of being the lone woman amidst high-testosterone near-naked men, and feminist activists saw no disadvantage to women in minimising the fact of sex difference.
The locker room triumph became a paradigm for the equality movement of the 1970s and 1980s, as male bastions fell one by one. The idea that men might claim any space as their own came to seem, almost overnight, an ugly relic of bygone times, as states and cities in quick succession took steps to prohibit male-only businesses or clubs. The coup de grace came in 1987 when, in response to a lawsuit by the Rotary Club of California, the US Supreme Court ruled that it was perfectly constitutional to ban sex discrimination in business-oriented private clubs, making clear that women’s interests outweighed men’s.
Finding that the Rotary Club’s evidence ‘fails to demonstrate that admitting women will affect in any significant way the existing members’ ability to carry out [club] activities,’ the Supreme Court judgment went further to clarify that, ‘Even if the [Unruh] Act does work some slight infringement of members’ rights, that infringement is justified by the State’s compelling interests in eliminating discrimination against women and in assuring them equal access to public accommodations. The latter interest extends to the acquisition of leadership skills and business contacts.’
By the late 1980s, ‘eliminating discrimination’ had essentially been broadened in law to mean equal access by women to anything positive men had made that women now wanted, including the networking opportunities and associations men had built over decades.
As male-only spaces were being equalised, affirmative action and equity hiring initiatives saw women’s numbers swelling in formerly male-majority domains such as newsrooms, courthouses, legislatures, boardrooms, government offices, and university classrooms. By the 1980s, female university students were already at par with (and soon to surpass) their male colleagues, while female lawyers, doctors, and business owners were flooding into once-majority male fields. The two decades demonstrated the relative ease with which women were establishing a dominant presence in a formerly man’s world.
It had been male because men had built it. In North America, men had, within living communal memory, hewn civilisation out of the wilderness, building roads, bridges, mills, farms, centres of trade, industries, sewer lines, and the electrical grid; establishing law, a police force, a judiciary, a military, markets, hospitals, food processing plants, and centres of learning. They had invented labour-saving technologies and had built highly complex city-systems. They had done it because that’s what men do – not as an act of exclusion but because, as Roy Baumeister argues persuasively, ‘system-building and empire-building appeal to the male mind’ (Is There Anything Good About Men? p. 155). Women had been labouring too, of course, bringing children into the world and managing household economies. Until the late nineteenth century and later – and only then in urban centres – it had hardly been possible for women to work alongside men in significant numbers.
It’s not clear that men were under any moral obligation to admit women to the spaces they had made theirs – many men have never felt at home in feminine domestic spaces – and if men had wanted to, they could have resisted women’s call for equal access; for the most part, however, men welcomed and supported women’s professional and business advancement.
The women’s movement, however, not content with measurable gains, was unable to rest until every vestige of the old order had been destroyed. Feminists’ next step was to discover that workplaces were not always perfectly welcoming. Some women didn’t like their bosses or the men they worked with; some felt uncomfortable with men’s sense of humour or manners. With the help of policy-makers and legislators, feminists created an arsenal of rules designed to empower working women under the guise of protecting them from harassment and hostile environments.
But the legislation was always about more than that. The very style of work-life was forced to change under the new dispensation. In particular, every interaction between men and women, including even such minutia as eye contact, gestures, and compliments, was placed under the regulatory and oft-punitive regime of anti-harassment legislation, which Daphne Patai has chronicled as ‘the quixotic pursuit of a sanitised environment in which the beast of male sexuality [would] at long last be vanquished’ (11). Any man who fell afoul of the (elastic and subjective) rules, or was merely claimed to have done so, could see his reputation and career destroyed.
Such policy and legislation changes – many of them undermining commitments to due process and the presumption of innocence – could never have been implemented were it not for the bedrock belief that male spaces were associated (as in ‘locker room talk’) with sexual menace, the degradation of women, and men’s corruption of one another. This belief is at least as old as the feminist movement itself, having galvanised the radical suffragettes who called for ‘Votes for Women’ and ‘Chastity for Men’. Women, of course – allegedly lacking power and the killer instinct – never needed to be monitored or restrained, never encouraged one another in bad behaviour, and would never abuse the destructive license harassment legislation had given them.
It wasn’t surprising that even the Boy Scouts of America, once the byword of decency, modesty, and rectitude, could not be allowed to stand. The most famous feminist organisation in the United States, the National Organisation for Women (NOW), pulled out all the feminist stops in a 2017 press release that championed the demand for the admission of a 15-year-old girl. NOW called on the federal government ‘to prohibit any federal support for the Boy Scouts until the organisation ends its discriminatory ban against girls’. Naturally, NOW did not lobby the Girl Scouts to let boys in, with the result that there are now two scouting associations in the country, one that boasts of equal access, and one that touts the special advantages to girls of a female-only space.
Interviewed about whether the Girl Scouts of America had changed in the wake of the opening of Boy Scouts, the CEO of the Girl Scouts expressed her conviction that, ‘There are very few opportunities for girls to be in a single-gender space where they can rely on one another, build relationships with one another, be themselves, not have to compete for space, not have to show off in any kind of different way.’
It is difficult to avoid incredulity that so few in our culture seem able to understand that single-sex spaces might be just as necessary for boys or even more necessary in a feminised culture that actively dislikes boys and seeks to make them subordinate to their female peers.
Many men, happy in the company of women and fortunate (at least for the time being) in their circumstances, have adjusted to the feminist new normal. For other men, however, the erosion of male space has left them uneasy and justifiably angry. Now, after years of forced accommodation to feminine norms and requirements, men are expected to rise up in defence of female spaces – allegedly against a renewed patriarchy. The gall of the women who demand this male support, regardless of the willingness of many men to give it, seems boundless.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/mens-spaces-were-colonised-by-feminists-first/
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The French Left is becoming anti-woke
Nearly one in two left-wing voters in France believes the country has too many immigrants. When the same polling company conducted a similar survey five years ago the figure was 27 per cent. The fact it is now 48 per cent demonstrates how the gap has widened between left wing politicians and their electorate when it comes to immigration.
The polling company that carried out the survey headlined their findings ‘The Great Taboo (on the left)’. The refusal of left-wing politicians in France to heed their voters’ anxieties about mass immigration is mirrored across western Europe, except in Denmark, where the left has listened and as a result is in power.
The French left, or specifically Jean Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI), has a curious set of values; they hold Marine Le Pen and her 13 million voters in contempt, describing her supporters as ‘fascists’ and refusing to shake the hands of Le Pen and her 88 National Rally MP2s.
But LFI have fewer scruples when it comes to domestic violence. On Tuesday they reintegrated into the party Adrien Quatennens, who was given a four-month suspended prison sentence in December for what his wife called ‘physical and psychological violence’ over a number of years. ‘What shame!’ tweeted the Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. ‘Here is the patriarchy. How can we still be here in 2023?’
The decision to rehabilitate Quatennens, once tipped to replace Mélenchon as the leader of the LFI, has created further divisions within the left-wing coalition of LFI, Socialists, Greens and Communists. When the coalition was assembled last year to contest the parliamentary elections Mélenchon was seen as its strongest asset, the only figure on the left capable of rallying the disparate factions. But he’s failed to hold the unity. In a recent interview, Fabien Roussel, the leader of the Communist party, described Mélenchon and his increasingly radical party as ‘out of touch’, and said that ‘we have to talk to the whole left’.
Mélenchon once did. In the summer of 2020, for instance, as the Black Lives Matter movement swept through the West, Mélenchon rubbished one of its key tenets, declaring that: ‘Those who talk of “white privilege” have never seen a poor white.’
Mélenchon no longer talks like that. He has joined the ranks of the radical progressives and has become what the French call an ‘Ecolo-Bobo’ (an ecological bourgeois bohemian).
Perhaps that is why his approval rating has dropped by 4.5 per cent in the last year. Marine Le Pen’s has risen, on the other hand, by 7.5 per cent, to make her the most popular politician in France in 2023. The only other leader to boast a meaningful increase in popularity is Fabien Roussel, up 2.7 per cent.
Half a century ago the French Communist party boasted five million voters and was a serious political force. But in 1972 they entered a left-wing coalition run by François Mitterrand, ‘a Union of the Left’ that ultimately won the Socialist the presidency in 1981 but reduced the Communists to a fringe party.
Many Communists were unhappy with the alliance from the outset, and transferred their allegiance to a new party they considered better represented them than the bourgeois Socialists: Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front. Between the 1974 and 1988 presidential elections, the National Front vote went from 200,000 votes to 4.3m.
Fabien Roussel’s father remained loyal to the Communists, taking his young son along to factories in the north of France in the late 1970s to distribute tracts. Most of those factories are long gone and the deindustrialisation of that part of France explains why the Le Pens have found it such fertile territory for their cause.
Coming from the region, Roussel understands the people’s despair and when he talks about his Euroscepticism, his support for nuclear energy and his love of a good steak with a glass of red, he is talking to these people, not the progressives in Paris who want nuclear energy and red meat outlawed.
Last weekend Roussel was re-elected National Secretary of the Communists with a huge majority. In his acceptance speech he accused successive governments of having ‘transformed [France’s] borders into sieves.’ In a subsequent interview he doubled down on this remark, saying that there needed to be ‘firmer’ control of the borders.
Progressives reached for the smelling salts. Typical of the many angry retorts was that of the Green MP Sandrine Rousseau, who raged: ‘The term “sieve borders” is a term coming from the nationalist extreme right. You don’t fight the far right by going to its terrain.’ Roussel provoked a similar reaction in 2020 when he said that ‘Islamism is fascism’.
The hysteria that Roussel provokes demonstrates how out of touch the progressive left is with millions of its traditional voters. ‘He sees himself as the heir of a French left, rooted in the political history and geography of the country,’ wrote Le Figaro of Roussel this week. ‘He rejects this new American left, which is more focused on societal struggles. Roussel is the anti-woke left.’
I have seen this division within the left on the pension reform demos in Paris. The workers marching in their overalls are protesting against the raising of the age of retirement; most of the students, with their blue and pink hair, and their LGBTQI flags, are protesting in the name of progressivism, encapsulated by their banner: ‘Burn Their Old World’.
Roussel has been on TV this week warning about the dangers posed by the far right, by which he means Le Pen. But if she poses a danger than so do the Communists because economically and culturally they have a lot in common.
In particular, both have a visceral opposition to ‘wokeness’, described this week by Le Pen’s National Rally as a ‘danger to civilisation’. The National Rally have launched a cross-party parliamentary group to combat the spread of progressive dogma in French society. For them, as for the Communists, it’s a choice between nuclear energy or Net Zero; Red Meat or Vegan burgers and firmer borders or free movement.
Politics in France is no longer a struggle between the left and the right, it’s a fight between the proles and the progressives, and it’s only just begun.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/the-french-left-is-becoming-anti-woke/
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CVS Goes Fully Woke - Look at the Insane Requirements Employees Must Now Follow
CVS Pharmacy, a health care corporation that hires people who presume to embrace science in medicine, has gone fully “woke” and will require all employees — without exception — to buy into the falsehood that people can change their genders.
Employees at the retail giant’s thousands of U.S. stores have recently been given a policy on how to address their “trans” coworkers, which included a note that any restroom is to be used by anyone at any time.
Additionally, employees who tell their supervisors they intend to engage in gender-bending will be entitled to time off, and the company will force their colleagues to address them by their preferred pronouns.
The company’s new “gender transition guidelines” were obtained by Fox Business, and they make it very clear how company executives feel about skeptics of the gender madness consuming so much of the culture.
For employees who intend to undergo a gender transition, CVS told them to let everyone know, so the company can “provide support and to make your transition as smooth as possible.”
“You may also wish to have appropriate medical care to support your transition, including treatments such as hormone replacement therapy and/or gender confirmation surgery,” the guide said.
It added: “During and after the transition has occurred, CVS Health encourages you to continue to partner with your Leader and your Advice & Counsel representative, and to immediately report any issues that you might have with your employment, your work environment, and/or your Leader, co-workers, clients, and customers.”
As if validating the delusions of confused people was not enough, CVS also told its employees that it will poison the working environment in stores by forcing everyone on the payroll to pretend that a man masquerading as a woman — or vice versa — is what they say they are.
Buried among a bunch of other corporate jargon regarding how committed the company is to diversity, CVS included “Guidelines for Supporting a Colleague who is Transitioning.”
It asks employees whose sole purpose is to come to work each day with the hope of making a living and being comfortable while doing so to be hyper-vigilant in regard to ensuring they do not misgender anyone around them.
“People use different terms to refer to themselves, but some terms are universally considered disrespectful and violate CVS’s policy against discrimination and harassment,” the company told its employees. “Terms like transgender, trans-male/trans-female, non-binary or ‘male’ or ‘female’ should be used.”
Meanwhile, women who might not be thrilled by the idea of sharing intimate personal spaces with men no longer have a choice.
Employees are instructed to use bathrooms that are “the most appropriate” to make them feel validated.
“Any colleague, customer, or patient — transgender or otherwise — may choose to use the restroom and/or locker room that is appropriate to the gender they identify with,” CVS told employees.
More likely than not, the person or people who authored this new policy did so under the impression they were being “progressive” in joining the left in its charge to undo the country’s social fabric.
In reality, this is all nothing more than more bad business from “woke” corporate America.
The policy is an immoral directive that reads as though it is intended to intimidate people who might want to simply come to work to help customers while simultaneously not having their employer force them to pick a side on divisive issues.
This guideline is likely to poison relationships among staff members at company stores.
It also raises some serious questions about whether CVS is the right place for people to obtain quality medicine from people who are qualified to sell it.
CVS is asking consumers to trust their medication doses, vaccinations, and other needs to a company that has taken a stance against science.
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Why Is the Race Industry Booming?
Racism, in the purest sense of discrimination against another person due to race, is incredibly low in the United States. According to Eric Kaufmann of the Manhattan Institute, less than 10% of Americans are actually truly bigoted. In fact, when compared to the world at large, the United States is very racially tolerant.
Yet many Americans would be surprised to learn that our country doesn’t have as terrible a time with race relations as is often assumed.
There are several reasons for this. A big one, according to Wilfred Reilly, assistant professor of political science at Kentucky State University, is that the media talks about race and racism overly much.
Reilly says: “Mentions of terms such as ‘racists’ and ‘racism’ have increased by hundreds of percent across virtually every major news outlet since the empirically more bigoted 1970s and 1980s. In The New York Times, that Gray Lady of record, these two words surged from 0.005 percent of all words used in 1970 to 0.02 percent in 2020. In The Washington Post, mentions grew to 0.03 percent of all words appearing in print today. In 2023, headlines like CNN’s ‘There’s Nothing More Frightening… Than an Angry White Man’ and Salon’s ‘White Men Must Be Stopped (the Very Future of the Planet Depends on It)’ are a daily occurrence.”
This over-saturation of the race narrative in news media gives a false impression of racism occurrences. If a lie is told enough times, soon everyone will believe it. That narrative divides the American people and sows chaos and confusion, which leads to those in power taking advantage of the breakdown. A masterclass in this tactic was demonstrated during the riots that followed the George Floyd killing.
In the academic arena, there is a booming business of race grifters. There are several examples such as diversity, equity, and inclusion hires, but a most recent example is of Florida State University Professor Eric Stewart. Stewart, who is black, was making $190,000 a year but last week didn’t show up to his job after he was caught faking data on several of his papers to make racism appear to be a bigger problem than it is. Stewart exploited his position and the trust of his peers and students, all to promote the bigger narrative that America is racist.
Stewart uses the veneer of academics while others use accusations of racially motivated attacks to profit. Jussie Smollett is a perfect example. False accusations of racism can be used another way as well, e.g. the Democrat state legislators — the “Tennessee Three” — who joined the invasion of the state capitol by activists. Two were subsequently ousted for breaking the rules.
Those two individuals happened to be black, so naturally the media and the Biden administration cried racism. The accusation served to confuse and distract the narrative away from the inconvenient truth. There was an actual hate crime committed against Christian school children and teachers in Nashville by a transgender-claiming person. Sadly, it worked. All people could talk about was these three state legislators and not why they were ousted.
Faux racism trumps actual murderers.
Finally, there’s big activism like BLM, which use any perceived social injustice as a platform to manipulate feelings and extort money from people and businesses. Just how much money has BLM received from peddling its neo-Marxist critical race theory nonsense? At last count, $82 billion. And that’s just from corporations.
Why is the race industry blooming? Because it is a lucrative business based on the lie that the United States is the most racist place to live; a lie that has convinced people that more murdered blacks are killed by whites, that unarmed blacks are killed all the time by police, and that straight white men are the worst of oppressors. The reality is far from that. Hatred in a human heart has all skin colors, and that is really what is at the root of racism.
This lie is one of the greatest modern facilitators of injustice in this country, and the only way to fight against it is to keep telling the truth to anyone who will listen.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/96534-why-is-the-race-industry-booming-2023-04-17
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17 April, 2023
How fentanyl became Seattle’s most urgent public health crisis
What is described below is mass insanity. How has America come to this? I think the decline of religion is part of the answer. From the begininng with the Pilgrim fathers, religion has been a powerful influence in America and it has to a considerable extent held America together. And Christianity has a large puritanical streak that for a long time protected Americans from the dangers of artificial sources of satifaction. "Prohibition" is an example of how strong that puritancal influence was. You have to go to Muslim countries to find anything comparable elsewhere. So many Americans have now lost their moral anchors and have nothing to replace them
One interesting question is why there is nothing like the Seattle situation in Australia. Australia is even LESS religious than America. There are any number of disused churches and regular church attenders are a small minority.
One answer is that Australians of British stock DO have a strong moral code. It is an informal one, not found in any holy book. It is simply traditional, an informal code of mutual loyalty. I grew up with it.
It evolved from the English working class values of yesteryear via our convict origins and was essentially a code of giving mutual assistance to the downtrodden. Australia's convict days are long past but the attitudes the convicts held have been passed down. My rough enumeration of that code is here. It includes a strong underlying value for quiet manliness and restraint. Men who cannot "hold their grog", for instance, are looked down on -- and drug dependence is similarly regarded. It is seen as "weak"
One place you can see in Australia widespread deplorable drug and alcohol abuse reminiscent of that described below is among Australian Aborigines, who do not of course have British ancestry and the values that go with it
Illicit fentanyl kills at least two people every day in King County, and the powerful opioid was responsible for over 700 fatal overdoses last year, roughly triple the death toll of traffic crashes and gun violence combined.
How did the little blue pills — which were virtually nonexistent in the local drug supply just five years ago — become the most pressing public health crisis facing the greater Seattle area?
Today, The Seattle Times embarks on a collection of stories about the fast-moving fentanyl epidemic. We’ll explore how the dangerous drug has taken hold, why it’s so potent, and the ways it’s overwhelming emergency responders and the health care system. We’ll delve into how elected officials and social service providers are responding to the crisis. And we’ll explain how the opioid has disproportionately affected some of the region’s most vulnerable communities.
Fentanyl was first introduced in the 1960s to treat severe pain, particularly for patients recovering from surgery. Some pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl made it to the streets, but at $30 to $40 a pill, it was exorbitantly expensive compared with drugs like methamphetamine and black tar heroin.
Now, however, the Mexico-based Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, which have long run street drugs up Interstate 5, are responsible for producing the vast majority of fentanyl smuggled into the U.S.
Making the drug with precursor chemicals from China, the cartels’ chemists aren’t concerned about quality control. So the concentration of fentanyl — cut with acetaminophen when pressed into pills, and with sugars like lactose and mannitol in its powder form — varies widely from pill to pill and batch to batch.
“It is the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced,” Anne Milgram, who heads the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, said earlier this year in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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Protesters demand trans inmates be removed from all-female New Jersey prison, where 10 were born male
Protesters are demanding that transgender women be removed from New Jersey’s only all-female prison — where 10 transgender women, including one who says she has a “taste for blood,” are held out of a total of 356 prisoners.
#GetMenOut activists held a protest at the state Capitol in Trenton on Friday, reading letters from four biologically female inmates at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, where one transgender inmate impregnated two women last year.
The women described from behind bars their fears at being housed with biological men who identify as women.
“I was repeatedly raped as a child until I was in my teens,” wrote Dawn Jackson, 51, who stabbed her adoptive stepfather in 1999 after what she said were years of sexual abuse.
Jackson was featured on Kim Kardashian’s “The Justice Project” on the Oxygen network last year.
“Being subjected to live amongst (trans women) who remain equipped with their manhood is extremely overwhelming and difficult for me.
“Am I living amongst any rapists? (Trans women) do not belong in closed/confined in prison settings meant to house women/females born feminine.”
Activists Jennifer Thomas, 53, and Brittany Ortiz, 35, of Justice Speaks: Free Speech for Women read the letters and spoke on behalf of female inmates.
Forcing women prisoners to be housed with male prisoners is a human rights violation, according to Article 14 of the Geneva Convention, Thomas and Ortiz told The Post.
In one testimony, inmate Kokila Hiatt wrote about what she said was the reality of what happens when biological men who say they identify as women arrive at the prison.
“Many of them are sex offenders,” Hiatt wrote in her letter. “When the males arrive they cease hormone injections and continue living their lives as men.
“In other words, they drop the act and start doing what it is they came here for.
“They engage in sexual relationships with women, manipulate them into purchasing their commissary and have no qualms about bullying anyone who disagrees with them.
Cerf was convicted of murdering a sex worker. She is currently incarcerated at Edna Mahan.
“I personally have been threatened with violence and multiple false allegations for speaking up.”
“The truth about my case?” the murderer told the Daily News in a 2002 jailhouse interview.
“Yeah, I killed her. I punched and kicked her to death, crushing her skull in the process.”
He added: “Since I have a most unusual taste for blood, I drank and licked and lapped up my fill … Let it be known: I am Lucifer’s maiden servant, sent to earth born of sin, to bring suffering and pain, darkness and evil.”
Before he began identifying as a woman and was transferred to Edna Mahan, Cerf was placed in solitary for assaulting other inmates.
He told his prison psychologist in 2005 that he wanted to kill associate administrator Michelle Ricci by beating her up, breaking her neck and choking her, New Jersey court records show.
In 2022, a transgender woman named Demi Minor, who was convicted of stabbing her foster father 27 times, impregnated two female inmates at Edna Mahan.
One woman chose to terminate the pregnancy but the other, Latonia Bellamy, a convicted double murderer, gave birth to their child.
Demi Minor, as a troubled foster kid — then called Demetrius — had a record for burglaries and at least one carjacking at gunpoint before brutally stabbing foster father Theotis “Ted” Butts 27 times in 2011 at age 16.
“It was the worst murder scene I have ever seen,” Brad Wertheimer, one of Minor’s defense lawyers in 2011, told The Post last year. “There was blood everywhere. The community was outraged. “The [foster] dad was considered a great guy, an angel.”
Demi has become a transgender woman activist fighting to be returned to Edna Mahan.
After administrators discovered the pregnancies, she was sent to a juvenile lockup last year where she was for a time the only person identifying as female.
And until recently, a convicted murderer named Dejshontaye Would, now 25, was housed at Edna Mahan.
Would was living under his birth name, Daryl Graves, and was high on drugs when he fatally stabbed his aunt, Patricia Graves, 47 times and beat her over the head with a frying pan in July 2018.
Sometime after his 2019 incarceration, Would began identifying as a woman, although The Post could not locate a female name. Would was listed as an inmate at Edna Mahan in July 2022.
Current New Jersey Department of Correction records indicate Would is being held at the Northern State Prison in Newark, which is for male offenders.
However, Would is listed as “female” in DOC inmate records.
“This just shows how insane the whole system has become,” Ortiz told The Post.
“These male inmates change their gender and their names and so it makes it difficult to even locate them online.”
Thomas said, “Women are the largest growing population in American prisons. Most are women of color, 86% are victims of sexual violence, and few are violent offenders.
“It is painfully obvious that caging this exceptionally vulnerable group of women with men is an abhorrent human rights violation.
“The solution to male violence in male prisons is not male violence in women’s prisons. This needs to stop. Get men out!”
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Bud Light fiasco should wake up corporate America to drop all wokery
“We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” blurred Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Brendan Whitworth on Friday in a belated bid to cap outrage over the Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney idiocy.
Pathetic. At best, this is a confession of sheer out-of-touch idiocy.
Shipping the “influencer” a case of cans bearing her face in hopes she’d share her joy was guaranteed to backfire.
Bud Light execs have already admitted the stunt was a bid to buy some profile with young people. But her followers are a tiny, self-selected sliver of the larger public — people amused by a former man prancing around in a parody of girlhood.
It’s only deeply-siloed progressives (including President Joe Biden’s handlers, sigh) who’ve concluded that Dylan-worship is an “it” thing.
Any marketing professional should know better — and realize how badly appealing to wokery would annoy the brand’s existing customers.
The sales disaster is plainly epic (not to mention the stock-price collapse), or Whitworth wouldn’t be trying to put out the fire with blather like, “We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”
(Heck, that touchy-feely claim probably further infuriates Bud drinkers.)
Let’s hope the lesson sinks in far and wide across corporate America: Neither politics nor culture-war activism is the way to sell anything.
Better still, take it a step further: The minions telling you to embrace everything from climate hysteria to racist “diversity, equity and inclusion” ideology don’t have a clue what average Americans think.
Campuses and the cultural elite may be deep in woke delusions, but business leaders need to keep their grip on reality.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/14/bud-light-fiasco-should-wake-up-corporate-america-to-drop-all-wokery/
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Political correctness out of hand; we must push back
Let's talk political correctness. And the people who enforce it. Who are these people? Who are these unelected officials who tell us what is proper to discuss and what is not? How to phrase things and how not to? Words we can say and words we can't say? Even things we can and can't do? Who are they?
We don’t really know, and that's a problem. There are any number of individuals and organizations tripping over each other to "expose" people for their violations. There is no one entity which can be called to task for its actions.
I refer to whomever they are collectively as the Politically Correct Gestapo. Ironically, long before I came up with that term, I read via Wikipedia that political correctness was first used in the 1930s by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as a forced adherence to an ideological cause.
In the News Tribune about a month ago was a front-page article about a Hamline University teacher who showed some dignified, 200-year-old drawings of Muhammad to her class. Even though she went to extreme lengths to prepare her students and shared a syllabus with the department head and others so they knew, too, what was happening, she was fired , publicly criticized, and humiliated by the administrator. A student said she was traumatized by the images.
The Politically Correct Gestapo came running in from all directions, like a SWAT team, shouting over each other; how shocked and astounded they were over this bigot. One of the first among them, of course, was the university administration. Many Muslims believe it is blasphemous to show an image of Muhammad, but some don't. The administrators apparently didn't know that.
My point is — hold the phone, stop the presses! — how is it that one religion and none other can tell the world what they can and cannot do? Worldwide, there have been bloody reprisals by extremists for violating the Quran.
Political correctness came about in this country for righteous reasons: to protect people's feelings. However, it has warped out of all proportion.
In 1987, there was an art exhibit in New York featuring photographer Andres Serrano. He displayed an upside-down crucifix dunked in a jar of his own urine, a picture of Mary with human feces on it, and other gems. The then-senator of New York, Hillary Clinton, said she didn't like it, but it was art and this is a free country. Try doing the equivalent with Islamic items.
I was sitting on a bus-stop bench, daydreaming, when a guy sat down and we began to chat. I remarked that he seemed kind of down. He said he'd been looking for work for the past few weeks because he was fired for saying, in the lunchroom, “No offense to gay guys, but I'm glad I was born heterosexual. I like the ladies too much." Someone told the boss, and the boss proudly proclaimed he would have no homophobes in his employ.
If the guy was BS’ing me, he was a great actor.
So, it's not just the people in the public eye who have their careers and personal lives ruined for not triple thinking what they're going to say before saying it.
We're supposed to have freedom of speech, but sometimes I think we'd be better off without it.
In Canada, you can face jail time for hate speech. Some people here would prefer that.
And the Politically Correct Gestapo will accept no apologies, so don't bother getting on your knees.
What's with tearing down statues and renaming buildings and institutions? Some people have lived heroic public lives that produced better futures for all of us, but because they said or believed certain things, their existence was later denied.
You simply cannot judge people from the past with today's enlightenment.
Christopher Columbus was far from perfect, but his discovery and exploration brought on many good things along with the bad.
A middle school in New York served chicken, waffles, and watermelon for lunch on the first day of Black History Month. In rushed the Politically Correct Gestapo, flags waving. Those foods, you see, are considered stereotypically African American.
A Catholic high school — Catholic — expelled a student and had him arrested for stating that God created just two genders. The student should have cleared that with the Politically Correct Gestapo first.
If you got into your time machine and went back 60 years and told the people then all of the above, they'd never stop laughing, thinking it was a big joke. But it's not, and we need to push back. We can't allow ourselves to be inducted into others’ beliefs or we, too, will become mindless members of the Politically Correct Gestapo.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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16 April, 2023
Racism in kidney transplants
The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) and the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) are implementing new policies to make skin color a crucial factor in who receives life-saving kidney transplants. The shift is perhaps the most dangerous victory for wokeness in health care to date.
In the name of “equity,” UNOS and OPTN purport to be expanding black patients’ access to kidney transplants. They essentially claim that the longstanding system for such transplants is racist, pointing to how black patients make up 30 percent of the dialysis population and transplant wait list but receive a smaller fraction of kidney transplants.
Activists assert that this disparity reflects bias on the part of treating physicians, particularly when referring black patients for early kidney care. But a study from the Veteran’s Administration found that more referrals for expert care did not improve outcomes or prevent progression of advanced kidney disease to the need for kidney replacement therapy.
If racism doesn’t explain the discrepancy, what does? The list of reasons is extensive, reflecting disheartening, stubborn problems that physicians and policymakers have long tried to address. One is the advanced age and complex medical conditions of many black patients with diabetes-related kidney failure; many of these patients are also relatively satisfied with dialysis treatments and unwilling to undergo extensive evaluation for transplant suitability. Others include insufficient health literacy, concern about the surgical procedures associated with transplantation, and lack of a support system for post-operative patients—an especially important factor in transplant suitability. Black families are also less likely to supply kidney donors from relatives.
UNOS and OPTN ignore these facts to advance a race-based agenda. They are forcing transplant centers to rework the waitlist for cadaveric kidneys in such a way that favors black patients. The rationale is that the longstanding formula used to estimate kidney function, which was race-conscious and required a second calculation for black patients, was racist.
Yet this second calculation was necessary to produce an accurate value for kidney function in black patients. Without it, the measure would be highly inaccurate, dramatically underestimating kidney function. (Research shows that people of African-American descent tend to have higher levels of muscle mass compared with other population groups, which can affect the levels of creatinine, a waste product produced by muscles, in their blood. Creatinine is used as a marker to estimate kidney function in GFR equations, including the MDRD equation; however, African Americans may have higher creatinine levels even if their kidney function is normal.)
Validated in multiple studies involving hundreds of patients, the old approach was long criticized yet never shown to be inaccurate. Nonetheless, activists demanded a new formula, officially rolled out in 2021. Less accurate than the previous method, the new one lowers kidney-function assessment for black patients to the point that some who did not qualify for placement on the transplant list now meet the requirement. It is a case study in politicized manipulation of data to achieve a predetermined goal.
OPTN isn’t just using this new assessment going forward. It is retroactively applying the new formula—potentially tracing back decades—to previous assessments of kidney function in black patients. Many black patients previously regarded as ineligible for the transplantation waitlist will now be listed, and some will even be moved ahead of others already on the waiting list. How many patients waiting for years for a transplant will be forced to wait still longer? Some estimates say that roughly 70,000 black patients could potentially benefit. That’s a huge number, considering that the current kidney waiting list stands at about 90,000 patients.
OPTN is also preparing, in the name of equity, to abandon its longstanding pledge to those who selflessly donated a kidney to a loved one or even to a stranger through a matching program. Currently, these courageous donors are listed at the top of the transplant waiting list should they ever require a transplant. Donating a kidney does not increase the risk of developing kidney failure, so the need is unlikely. Yet this was the only compensation for the charitable act allowed by law. And it helped reassure donors, many understandably worried about the possibility of needing a transplant of their own.
Five times as many whites as blacks donate kidneys, which means that many more whites enjoy this benefit. Activists therefore see it as racist, and they want OPTN to change its policies. The group is considering four proposals; all would eliminate prior donors’ waitlist priority and give them a mere 10 percent–15 percent improvement on their waitlist position. That would virtually eliminate the chance that a white patient might move ahead of a black patient on the wait list, even after he or she donates a kidney. And this policy, which OPTN expects to finalize before the end of this year, risks discouraging kidney donors as a whole. White people are being punished in the name of righting nonexistent wrongs, but patients of every race will suffer from this move.
The corruption of medicine continues apace. Black patients are being pushed toward the front of the kidney-transplant waiting list on the basis of something other than need. Racial reparations have arrived in health care, and kidney transplants are just the beginning.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/medical-reparations-have-arrived
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Trump Commuted His Sentence. Now the Justice Department Is Going To Prosecute Him Again
When Philip Esformes walked out of prison in December 2020, he'd spent four and a half years behind bars, the majority of which were in solitary confinement. He reportedly weighed about 130 pounds. He was, in many ways, a broken man. But Esformes' luck was changing: He had recently received clemency from former President Donald Trump, giving him the chance to rebuild his life after paying a debt to the country.
That fortune has quickly soured.
In a move that defies historical precedent, the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden is using a legal loophole to reprosecute Esformes' case—raising grave questions about double jeopardy, the absolute power of the clemency process, and the weaponization of the criminal legal system against politically expedient targets.
A former executive overseeing a network of skilled nursing and assisted living facilities, Esformes was arrested in 2016. The prosecutors, who were found to have committed substantial misconduct throughout the case, alleged he paid doctors under the table to send patients his way and subsequently charged Medicare and Medicaid for unnecessary treatments. The government held him without bond in the years leading up to his trial, placing him in solitary. He was ultimately found guilty of money laundering and related charges, as well as bribing regulators to give him notice of upcoming inspections so he could attempt to obscure shoddy conditions at those facilities.
But Esformes was not convicted of the most serious charges leveled against him. The government failed to convince a jury, for example, that he committed conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud. So his 20-year sentence—handed down by U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola of the Southern District of Florida—may appear grossly disproportionate to his convictions.
Until you realize the judge explicitly punished Esformes for charges on which the jury hung.
That is not an error. "When somebody gets sentenced [at the federal level]…they get sentenced on all charges, even the ones they're acquitted on, [as long as] they get convicted on one count," says Brett Tolman, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah who is now the executive director of Right on Crime. It is a little-known, jaw-dropping part of the legal system: Federal judges are, in effect, not obligated to abide by a jury's verdict at sentencing. They can, and do, sentence defendants for conduct on which they were not convicted. In this case, Esformes was already sentenced—and had that sentence commuted—for the crimes that the DOJ now wants to retry.
"This defendant, as much as you might not like him…do you think he should be punished two or three times for the same conduct?" asks Tolman. "I don't find anybody who thinks that's fair."
Esformes is just one person. And he's perhaps a convenient bullseye at which the Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland can aim, as many on the left have a particular sort of ire for white-collar crime. But it is difficult to overstate the implications of his case for the broader public, regardless of partisan affiliation.
"While there are a lot of people who disagree with how Donald Trump handled his clemencies, it's his absolute right as a president to issue commutations and pardons. And I think that's an important right to protect," says the prominent left-leaning attorney and advocate Jessica Jackson, who was instrumental in shepherding the passage of the FIRST STEP Act. "Philip is struggling with anxiety and depression. He's been triggered by the threat of being reprosecuted and brought back to a prison where he was assaulted multiple times…. It might be Philip Esformes today, but it could be thousands of young mothers and fathers stuck in the system tomorrow."
A Case Tainted by Prosecutorial Misconduct
The government's misbehavior in the Esformes case was "deplorable," wrote U.S. Magistrate Judge Alicia Otazo-Reyes in August 2018.
In 2016, the FBI raided one of Esformes' medical facilities. The agency, as well as prosecutors, knew that the building contained documents subject to attorney-client privilege, which the government was therefore barred from seeing. That didn't stop them from retaining and reviewing such documents anyway—for months. They also leveraged government informants to secure recordings of private conversations between Esformes and his lawyers.
"This violates any person's right to defend themselves by virtue of the government having access to your communications and therefore your theory of your defense…. If [prosecutors] know in advance what the defense is going to be, and the particulars of that defense, that gives the government a hand up," says Michael P. Heiskell, owner of Johnson Vaughn & Heiskell and President-elect of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). "This intrusion offends bedrock principles of our American criminal legal system and taints the legitimacy of the adversarial process and assurance of justice."
Otazo-Reyes spared few prisoners in her sprawling opinion, which exceeded 100 pages, though she stopped short of barring further prosecution. That was likely to be expected. What was not necessarily expected is that she allowed those same prosecutors to stay on the case after gaining privileged information they were legally barred from seeing.
In November 2018, Judge Scola—the same judge who would later sentence Esformes—agreed the prosecutors had been "sloppy, careless, [and] clumsy." The government "conducted multiple errors over the course of its investigation," he said. And he, too, would ultimately rule that those prosecutors could stay on the case as it went to trial, despite the fact that their misconduct was so comprehensive it necessitated they hire their own private counsel—a significant step when considering prosecutors are protected by absolute immunity and rarely have to worry about consequences for misbehavior on the job.
That development is "remarkable," adds Heiskell. "It is very troubling that prosecutors have been allowed—and still, in many instances, are allowed—willy-nilly to just flaunt their ethical obligations, and even the laws in many respects, to prosecute an individual."
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Washington State To Allow Children to Be Legally Taken From Parents If They Don’t Consent to Gender Transition
Washington state passed a bill allowing children to legally be taken away from their parents for not consenting to gender transition procedures on their child.
According to Senate Bill 5599, shelters could contact the Department of Children, Youth, and Families instead of parents for minors seeking reproductive health services or gender-affirming care.
The proposal would pave the way for more of a "compelling reason" to conceal a child who seeks sex change operations or reproductive health services such as abortion.
Democratic State Rep. Tana Senn praised the bill's passing, saying she supports children who believe they belong in a different body than they were born.
"I am saying tonight to them that I see you, that I affirm you, that I hear you, that I love you," Senn said. "With this bill passage, we say that Washington State does too."
However, the Democrat-led state received much backlash for passing the radical bill, calling it an attack on families and parents by the Left.
State Senate Republican Leader John Braun said the troubling legislation "clears the way" for kids to "game the system" by taking away parent's God-given rights.
"The only thing SB 5599 would do is cause harm by driving a wedge between vulnerable kids and their parents, at a time when a teen lacks the perception and judgment to make critical life-altering decisions," Braun said. "A parent may not even know why the child ran away and could involve law enforcement or other groups in a desperate search… all the while going through an unnecessary emotional nightmare, imagining the worst about what might have happened."
Braun also argued that children's brains are not fully developed until they are at least 22 years of age, which means Democrats are pushing minors to believe they can make a life-altering decision that they may regret one day.
"Right now, [Democrats] are sponsoring a juvenile offender sentencing bill based on 'the expansive body of scientific research on brain development, which shows that adolescents' perception, judgment, and decision-making skills differ significantly from that of adults,'" Braun continued.
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Conservative group Consumers’ Research will ping shoppers about to purchase ‘woke’ products
A conservative nonprofit launched a text alert system this week designed to warn shoppers to avoid products from companies accused of catering to the “woke agenda.”
Consumers’ Research, a Washington, DC-based group poised at the intersection of policy and consumerism, introduced the “Woke Alert” on Friday.
By entering a phone number, conservative-minded shoppers will receive text updates on companies deemed to have strayed too far left in their marketing and other strategies.
“Many corporations are putting progressive activists and their dangerous agendas ahead of customers,” the sign-up page reads.
“They’ll only succeed if we look the other way.”
As of Friday morning, the group had already issued warnings on Bud Light — which recently came under fire from the far right for partnering with trans activist Dylan Mulvaney — and Jack Daniel’s 2021 “Small Town, Big Pride” campaign.
The Woke Alert launch is supported by a six-figure ad campaign to drive interested users, Axios reported.
“We are launching Woke Alerts to help consumers make better-informed decisions about where to spend their money,” executive director Will Hild told the outlet.
“We believe companies should focus on their customers and not woke politicians and progressive activists.”
Left-wing voices, however, were quick to hit back at Consumers’ Research’s efforts.
“I hate to break it to the radical right, but people in this country are a lot more concerned about paying for an eighty-dollar tank of gas than the color of their Budweiser bottle,” Anna Bahr, a political consultant with Left Flank Strategies, told Axios.
“The right wing is hell-bent on moving our country backwards, and this new text service is laughable,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) agreed.
In addition to the Woke Alert, the group’s website features a tracker of environmental, social and governance (ESG) legislation.
Consumers’ Research maintains that the so-called “movement” is another ideological play by the left.
But despite all its public efforts, the self-appointed watchdog remains somewhat mysterious. Consumers’ Research had an $8 million budget in 2021, the Washington Post reported earlier this year — but does not disclose its donors.
Hild, who joined the group in 2020, is also close with Leonard Leo, a Republican lawyer and former executive vice president of the Federalist Society who campaigned for the Supreme Court confirmations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, among others, the Washington Post said.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/14/conservative-group-launches-woke-alerts-for-shoppers/
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14 April, 2023
Walter Reed 'cease and desist' order for Catholic priests violates the First Amendment, GOP lawmakers say
Two dozen Republican lawmakers are demanding answers from the Pentagon after Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC) sent a "cease and desist" letter to Catholic priests to stop providing care during Holy Week, slamming the move as a violation of the First Amendment.
Twenty-four Republican members of Congress penned a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. In the letter, obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital, the lawmakers blast the Biden administration’s "attack on the Christian faith."
"Last week, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to Holy Name College Friary, a group of Catholic priests, ordering them to stop providing pastoral care at their facility," the letter reads. "The same group of priests have served at Walter Reed for almost 20 years, and this order came days before Easter."
"Forcing priests to stop providing care during Holy Week is not only morally wrong, but also a violation of the First Amendment," the members of Congress wrote.
The lawmakers praised the Catholic priests who have "stood alongside our service members through the darkest days of our history."
"They joined American service members on the battlefield and provided care to all in need," the letter says.
The lawmakers are demanding answers from Austin on why the Biden administration sent the "cease and desist" letter and why the administration chose to "terminate the contact" with the Holy Name College Friary.
The lawmakers also claim that the Archdiocese of the Military informed them that the contract for providing pastoral care was "awarded to a for-profit, secular company that does not provide pastoral care."
"Who was awarded the contract and why?" they asked, requesting further contract terms, applications, review comments, the award letter and all internal emails and documents related to the contract.
"This attack on the Christian faith by the Biden administration during Holy Week is unconscionable," the lawmakers wrote, demanding answers by April 21.
The Defense Health Agency told Fox News Digital that there "was no cancelation of Catholic services at Walter Reed, especially during Holy Week."
"Palm Sunday mass was conducted by the Catholic priest assigned to the hospital and there were services on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. On Easter Sunday, confessions were offered as well as mass celebrated by a Catholic priest," the Defense Health Agency spokesperson said.
The Defense Health Agency also told Fox News Digital in an email that "a contract was NOT terminated."
"As with most contracts they have a beginning and an end. This contract originally ended on December 31st and was extended until March 31st. The contractor was aware of the contract end date," the spokesperson said. "A new contract was awarded to a different company effective April 1st."
"When the previous contractor continued to provide services after April 1st, a cease and desist letter was sent stating the former contractor could not perform services since they were not under contract," the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson added: "The current contract is under review to ensure the right services are being provided. But there was absolutely no loss of Catholic Services to the community."
Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., gives remarks after receiving an endorsement during a Save America Rally with former President Donald Trump at the Adams County Fairgrounds in Mendon, Illinois, on June 25, 2022.
Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., gives remarks after receiving an endorsement during a Save America Rally with former President Donald Trump at the Adams County Fairgrounds in Mendon, Illinois, on June 25, 2022. (Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)
The letter to Austin was sent by Reps. Mary E. Miller, R-Ill.; Jim Banks, R-Ind.; Paul Gosar, R-Ariz.; Byron Donalds, R-Fla.; Tom Tiffany, R-Wis.; Scott Perry, R-Pa.; Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.; Andy Biggs, R-Ariz.; Warren Davidson, R-Ohio; Matt Rosendale, R-Mont.; Lauren Boebert, R-Colo.; Ralph Norman, R-S.C.; Bob Good, R-Va.; Keith Self, R-Texas; Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz.; Andrew Clyde, R-Ga.; Josh Brecheen, R-Okla.; Brian Babin, R-Texas; Ben Cline, RpVa.; Andy Harris, R-Md.; Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn.; Michael Cloud, R-Texas; Eli Crane, R-Ariz.; Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla.; and Alex X. Mooney, R-W.Va.
"Priests and pastors guided our troops through the darkest days of our toughest battles. The Biden administration chose Easter weekend to kick Catholic priests out of Walter Reed, violating their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion," Miller told Fox News Digital. "I am proud to lead this letter to Biden's Defense Secretary to demand answers on this unconscionable attack on Christian service members and the First Amendment."
The Pentagon, though, said there was an active duty Army priest providing Catholic coverage for Holy Week and Easter at Walter Reed after the cease and desist letter.
But two senior U.S. defense officials told Fox News that the decision surrounding the renewal of the contract for Catholic Pastoral Care was not handled by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and did not involve the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The officials said the decision was not made by the Pentagon.
Instead, an official said the contract was handled by the Defense Health Agency.
The letter from the lawmakers came after the Catholic archdiocese said in a statement that Walter Reed issued the cease and desist order against Holy Name College Friary, a Franciscan community of priests and brothers that has served at the center for nearly 20 years.
Walter Reed said the contract for Catholic Pastoral Care was terminated at the end of March, just as Holy Week was about to begin. Walter Reed replaced the contract with a secular defense contracting firm that the Catholic archdiocese argues will not be able to provide adequate care.
Walter Reed, though, defended the move over the weekend, saying that Catholic Easter Services were provided to those who "wish to attend," and included a celebration of Mass and the administration of Confession by an ordained Catholic priest.
"For many years, a Catholic ordained priest has been on staff at WRNMMC providing religious sacraments to service members, veterans and their loved ones," Walter Reed said in a statement. "There has also been a pastoral care contract in place to supplement those services provided."
"Currently... the pastoral care contract is under review to ensure it adequately supports the religious needs of our patients and beneficiaries," the Walter Reed statement said. "Although at this time the Franciscan Diocese will not be hosting services on Sunday parishioners of the Diocese while patients at our facilities may still seek their services."
The AMS was created by St. Pope John Paul II to provide the Church’s services to veterans and service members in the U.S. and overseas. The archdiocese, which does not have geographical boundaries, is responsible for the care of 1.8 million Catholics across the globe.
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Expel Them Again
Ann Coulter
The vote to expel two Democrats from the Tennessee House of Representatives last week reminds us of one of the immutable laws of politics: Whenever Democrats accuse anyone of racism, demand to see the videotape.
Hey -- remember the 2016 racist bus attack on three black coeds at the University at Albany that caught Hillary Clinton's attention? They claimed a group of white men shouting racial epithets started hitting them, but no one on the bus cared! Foolishly, in retrospect, they didn't check to see if the bus had cameras. It did. Rallies, hysteria, a Hillary tweet ... and then it turned out they were the ones beating up a white girl.
Or how about the Princeton professor who claimed she'd been the victim of a vicious racist policeman in 2016? "Many women who look like me," she wrote on Twitter, "have a much more frightening end to such arrests." After a hue and cry, the police released the officer's dashcam footage. The officer had been almost comically polite to her, despite her going 20 mph over the speed limit, as well as driving on a suspended license.
In 2015 in Connecticut, another BIPOC lady professor decided that, instead of simply paying a small traffic fine, she'd wreck a cop's life. In a blizzard of letters to government officials, she accused the policeman of racism and demanded that "action be taken against the officer." The police released a recorded transcript of the entire interaction -- and guess what? The officer never said any of the racist things she'd alleged. He, too, was a model of professionalism.
The list goes on and on and on. And on and on. And on and on ... (Though it's important we avoid reflexive cynicism. Only the most callous among us would doubt Jussie Smollett.)
In any case, the moral of the story: Democrats say RACIST!!, you say "Show me the video."
Which brings us to the allegedly racist Tennessee Republicans who expelled two of their colleagues this week just because they were black! (Didn't Republicans notice these guys were black before now?)
MEDIA: The expelled lawmakers did nothing that others didn't do!
Normal people: Show us the video.
MEDIA: Trust us, these lawmakers were the picture of decorum.
Normal people: Show us the video.
MEDIA: We must have left it in the car. We'll try to remember to bring it tomorrow.
There's a reason Tennessee Democrats frantically tried to prevent the playing of the video.
What it shows is two black Democrats, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, on the Tennessee House floor carrying on for more than an hour, shouting into a bullhorn, waving protest signs, banging on the podium like a drum, and leading chants with protesters in the gallery:
Power to the people! Power to the people!
No justice, no peace! No action, no peace!
Whose house? Our house! Whose house? Our house!
Gun control now! Gun control now!
Please explain how the Jan. 6 QAnon Shaman showed more contempt for the democratic process than Jones and Pearson did. How about compared to a representative sending naughty texts to female colleagues outside of business hours -- the casus belli of the last expulsion in 2016.
But according to MSNBC, the only reason Jones and Pearson were expelled was because the "predominantly white, predominantly male" lawmakers refuse to "coexist with representatives who are female or young or black" -- as Nicole Wallace put it. (Nicole: Relax. You've got the job.)
In bafflement, Wallace asked, "Why did they have to be expelled? Why did this come to this?"
Idea: Show the video, Nicole!
Rep. Gloria Johnson, the body-positive white representative, begged not to be expelled, pointing out with some justice that, unlike Jones and Pearson, she broke no House rules -- never shouted, pounded the podium, displayed a protest sign or used a bullhorn.
But as soon as her argument succeeded and she wasn't expelled, Johnson rushed to MSNBC to say racism was the only reason she wasn't. The sole deciding factor, she said, was "the color of our skin."
If so, then why did she flap her gums about not breaking any House rules? Why not just say, Hey, guys! I'm white! (Amazon is now accepting pre-orders for her forthcoming memoir, "Profiles in Craven.")
Some conservatives say the Republicans should have expelled the white lady just to avoid (false) charges of racism. Yes, and innocent whites and Asians should be sent to prison so no one can say our criminal justice system is racist.
I'm sorry if black people break rules out of proportion to their numbers in the population, but we don't punish the innocent to achieve some childish idea of "equity."
Rep. Johnson is a liar, but she didn't break any House rules. Jones and Pearson did.
Johnson defended the assault on democracy by her black colleagues, saying, "The younger generation has a different way of speaking. They have a different way of addressing things." So get used to bullhorns during legislative sessions, America! It's just black style.
Apparently, we've returned to the Treating-Black-People-Like-Children phase of "Diversity." I just wish liberals would state their racism plainly: We simply can't expect black people to abide by white norms of dignity and decorum.
https://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2023/04/12/expel-them-again-n2621890 ?
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The new elite: the rise of the progressive aristocracy: Identity now trumps talent
A new form of Leftist oppression
In the pre-modern world positions in society were largely inherited. Some people were born with saddles on their backs and others booted and spurred to ride them – ‘The rich man in his castle / The poor man at his gate / God made them high or lowly / And ordered their estate’, in the words of the Victorian hymn. The meritocratic idea was the dynamite which blew up this view of the world and provided the materials for the modern era. But its reign is threatened as never before.
The 1960s and 1970s brought a wave of attacks on the meritocracy, starting with criticisms of the workings of the 11-plus exam and then broadening into denunciations of social hierarchy and social mobility. Egalitarians argued that meritocracy replaced a proper socialist idea – equality of results – with equality of opportunity. Radical activists argued in favour of collective rights (based on gender or skin colour) rather than equal opportunity for all based on ability.
The first black studies department was founded at San Francisco State University in 1968 and the first women’s studies department in San Diego State University two years later. Michel Foucault and like-minded thinkers on the far left questioned every imaginable distinction – between the sane or the mad, the criminal and the non-criminal – on the grounds that they were expressions of the sinister workings of power.
The assault on the meritocracy paused for a while at the highest level of politics, though not before doing the immense damage of destroying grammar schools. Margaret Thatcher argued that the real engine of meritocracy is not the well-organised state but the market. Tony Blair embraced league tables and academic schools. But now we are confronted with a new wave of attacks on the meritocratic idea that is far more serious than the one that occurred in the 1960s.
The right has renewed its assault on meritocracy in the form of populist rage rather than High Tory worry about social mobility. A section of the Brexit right rails against the educated elites on the grounds that they are airy-fairy liberals who don’t know the price of a pint of milk. Middle-of-the-road philosophers have also turned against the idea, as seen in two newish books – Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit and Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap.
The radical left is now presenting a critique of meritocracy that is far more extreme than anything that has gone before it, but which also wields far more cultural heft: a woke assault on meritocracy. It starts by repeating standard leftish complaints about meritocracy: that it protects social inequality by dressing it up as cognitive inequality, thereby adding to the already intolerable pressure of modern life. Then it throws the explosive question of race into the heart of the debate. This rests on the demeaning claim that the best way to promote members of ethnic minorities is through ‘equity’ rather than ‘excellence’. It also makes it far more difficult for ordinary people to discuss the subject dispassionately and far easier for radicals to engage in demagoguery and polarisation. Even more importantly, it creates a new hierarchy of virtue at the heart of society. We are thus moving to a more ambitious stage in the left’s long social revolution: from simply dismantling meritocracy to creating a new social order based on virtue, rather than ability.
Meritocracy is ‘racist’ and ‘the antithesis of fair’, pronounced Alison Collins, a former commissioner of education in San Francisco. And the old idea of judging people as individuals? That’s the white man’s game of divide and rule. ‘Colour blindness’ – what we used to regard as the absence of discrimination – is dismissed as a con, designed to draw a veil over millennia of exploitation. The entire machinery of meritocracy is rejected as a legacy of the eugenic movement or imperialism. Or, perhaps, the ‘white’ way of looking at the world. ‘The use of standardised tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade black minds and legally exclude black bodies,’ writes Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist and Antiracist Baby.
The woke revolution does not simply aim to remedy past injustice. ‘The only remedy to racist discrimination,’ writes Kendi, ‘is antiracist discrimination.’ The idea is some groups by virtue of their history of marginalisation and exploitation are wiser and more moral than others. The belief that racism is not confined to intentional acts of discrimination but woven into the DNA of society implies white people are automatically guilty of harbouring racist thoughts and seeing the world through racist eyes. Racial minorities inevitably enjoy a higher moral status than whites but they also enjoy something equally important – greater access to understanding and moral wisdom. This is why the woke habitually invoke ‘lived experience’ and ‘my truth’. Conversely, white people are guilty of original sin until they do what the kulaks were supposed to do and abolish themselves as a class. ‘Abolish whiteness!’ says Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal. ‘White lives don’t matter. As white lives.’
These race-based arguments bring with them the exhumation of the pre-modern habit of judging people based on group characteristics rather than individual achievement. History is repeating itself as both tragedy and farce at the same time.
Rather than progressing towards a post-discriminatory future, we have a pyramid structure once again, but this time it’s inverted. Rather than the upper classes sitting at the top and the lower classes as the bottom, the former outcasts occupy the commanding heights. Under the new hierarchy, the more oppressed groups that you belong to, the more moral virtue you possess. Similarly, the more privileged characteristics you hold, the lower you are on the moral scale and the more you have to do to make amends for the past.
Being born into an oppressed group is not enough in itself. Indeed, minorities who don’t share woke beliefs are treated with particular disdain (as black conservatives have long known and gender-critical feminists are painfully discovering). You must have faith. That means more than just subscribing to a set of beliefs. It means having a heart that has been awakened through a process of conversion and ceaseless struggle. An aristocracy of faith is superimposed upon an aristocracy of caste: struggle can change your place in the caste system, though people who are born into a privileged caste will obviously have to struggle much harder than those who have the privilege of being born unprivileged. Whatever you think of Prince Harry, he is clearly ‘doing the work’.
This aristocracy of faith is hypervigilant and hyperactive – forever discovering signs of racism in even the smallest things and forever organising demonstrations and cancellations. At the same time, it’s also extremely patient. The woke aristocracy’s march through the institutions is an exercise in long-term social change that should put short-term conservatives to shame.
The old notion of IQ is being replaced with WQ – a woke quotient. This phenomenon is at its most advanced in the US, particularly at its universities. University students are selected for their WQ as revealed by their personal statements and extracurricular activities (‘I spent my vacations fighting racism in Guatemala’), as well as by their academic grades. Indeed, a growing number of universities are reducing the weight placed on standardised test scores while increasing their emphasis on more subjective criteria. Aspiring professors are required to submit diversity statements when they apply for jobs as well as conventional academic resumes.
Yale now has as many academic administrators as it does tenured staff. Many of them have titles which include the word ‘diversity’, as in ‘chief diversity officer’ and ‘deputy chief diversity officer’. Chief diversity officers have become such a familiar part of the university scene that one executive recruitment firm, Hunt Scanlon, gushes they occupy ‘one of the most important positions for shaping the vision, culture and very face of institutions of higher learning from coast to coast’.
It’s a golden rule of academia that what US universities do today British universities will do tomorrow, but in a secretive and cut-price manner. A commitment to diversity is increasingly used as a tiebreaker in making academic appointments. When making applications for grants – the bane of the British academic’s life – candidates know that they have a much better chance of success if they explore woke themes. Some subjects – all those ‘studies’ – are predicated on the assumptions of the inverted pyramid of virtue. Others, such as history, have replaced the old history of progress and promise with a new one of oppression and guilt.
British universities may not have access to the same gargantuan bureaucracies as their US cousins, though the bureaucrats they have are cut from the same ideological cloth. But they have got into the habit of relying on pressure groups to do some of the work for them. Stonewall stands ready (for a fee) to certify whether our seats of learning are LGBT+ friendly by measuring them against a diversity index and then enrolling them in its Diversity Champions scheme. Universities cannot receive research grants, the lifeblood of academia, unless they employ Athena Swan accredited ‘leads’ who use Athena Swan accredited measures to show they are inclusive employers. The organisation’s definition of diversity and inclusion involves hitting goals to increase the hiring of minorities, even if minorities constitute a majority of employees, and submitting employees to unconscious bias training.
The global business elite is also screening people for their WQ not just by using ‘diversity’ as a criterion for selection but by soaking everything it does in woke ideology. Business schools devote far more effort to teaching about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) than about maximising shareholder value. Bain, the management consulting firm, celebrates ‘Womxn’s History Month’. Consultants McKinsey talks about ‘equity’, conveniently ignoring that its business model depends on shovelling money into the pockets of partners while new recruits do all the grunt work. HSBC’s advertisements tell a rapturous story about our multicultural future. The ever-expanding list of companies that sponsor the annual gay pride celebrations include BAE, an arms manufacturer.
Human resources departments are expanding their role in corporations from old-fashioned bread-and-butter questions – making sure that everyone is on PAYE, for example – to shaping the workforce. These diversity champions find it just as natural to employ a woke framework in making appointments as the old gatekeepers found it natural to employ an academic or professional framework. ‘Do our latest hires help us to hit our diversity targets? What can we do to eliminate the ever-present danger of discrimination? Are we being inclusive enough? What if our older employees harbour all sorts of unconscious biases?’ The assumption is always the same: that members of ethnic minorities will not be able to make it on the basis of their own merits, but need a helping hand from a virtuous bureaucracy.
The public and charitable sectors are even more prone to such thinking. The NHS employs ‘lived experience’ tsars on £115,000 a year despite the health service’s dire financial state. Oxfam recently found the resources to publish an inclusive language guide that included convoluted arguments about when you can use the term ‘womxn’ and when you can’t. (‘Some trans people object to the phrase on the basis that trans women are women and the use of “womxn” might suggest otherwise.’)
All this is not only changing the criteria whereby people are selected for elite positions; it is changing the people who are doing the selecting. This is not merely a struggle between the educated elite and regular people for control of the culture. It is a struggle within the educated class, with a new class of woke bureaucrats seizing power from the traditional gatekeepers of professional society, taking advantage of a combination of moral power (nobody wants to be accused of being a racist) and the growing self-absorption of professionals (many academics are more interested in publishing research than taking part in time-consuming admissions processes).
The return of inverted-pyramid thinking is replacing the concept of ‘inclusion’ with something more sinister. It is becoming commonplace for US campuses to offer racially segregated orientation programmes, dormitories, graduation ceremonies and social events. ‘People of colour need spaces without white people,’ proclaims Kelsey Blackwell, a writer, teacher and certified Somatic coach. The University of California at Santa Cruz not only has a Social Justice House but a LGBTQ&A floor within the house. Goldsmiths University in London has hosted events which debar white men from attending. A 2018 Young Labour Equalities conference excluded people who were not ‘diverse’. Sir Keir Starmer is doing his best to muzzle such thinking in his party in order not to frighten Middle England, but we can be sure that such ideas will return with force if he wins the next election.
The morality of all this is up for debate. (Though I personally find the return of race-based rights deeply worrying, I realise that many profoundly moral young people disagree with me equally strongly.) But the morality of replacing the old aristocracy of talent with an aristocracy of woke also needs to be weighed against two practical consequences. The first is that it will reduce economic efficiency, as we stuff more square pegs in round holes. Meritocratic societies and institutions are much more productive than non-meritocratic ones. Singapore is a more productive society than Sri Lanka (the two had roughly the same GDPs in 1960 before Lee Kuan Yew pioneered Singapore’s meritocratic revolution). The Nordic countries are more productive than Greece and Portugal. Public companies are more productive than family companies (unless family companies bring in professional managers or subject the younger generation to a vigorous weeding-out process).
The brain drain only flows in one direction: from the non-meritocratic to the meritocratic world. This process will be self-reinforcing. One of the most reliable laws of social affairs is Rowse’s law (named after the great historian A.L. Rowse), that without first-rate people to pull in the right direction, second-raters will always appoint third-raters and fourth-raters and so on in an accelerating avalanche of mediocrity.
Reducing your economic efficiency is a foolish thing to do at the best of times, because it condemns our children to a lower standard of living than we have enjoyed. It is suicidal at a time when an increasingly belligerent China is rediscovering the virtues of meritocracy, but this time by producing scientists and technologists, not Confucian scholars.
The second is that it politicises the distribution of opportunities and jobs. One of the virtues of meritocracy is that it takes some of the heat out of job allocation: people with power try their hardest to give jobs to those who deserve them and people who are disappointed can take comfort from the fact that the system tried to be objective. But once you say there is nothing to the distribution of jobs and opportunities but the raw exercise of power, you encourage a free-for-all. And once you start deliberately privileging some groups over others on the basis of race, you reinforce ethnic enmity and reward ethnic power politics.
The new woke elite, if it continues to gain strength, is destined to rule over an increasingly divided and embittered society as people advance their interests through collective agitation rather than individual effort, and as economic growth becomes a thing of the past. Perhaps we should think a little harder about replacing the aristocracy of talent with the aristocracy of woke
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/the-attack-on-meritocracy/
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The politics of social class are now reversed: The affluent are now Leftist and the workers are now conservative
In the recent US midterms (and the just-held Wisconsin Supreme Court vacancy election), the Democrats massively outspent the Republicans, in some races by as much as six times more than the Republicans spent. Add in the indirect expenditures and the Democrat spending advantage may have been larger. I’ve been saying it in these pages for some time but the simple truth is that (in general terms) wealthy people now vote left. This is true in the US, in Britain, in Canada and here. Moreover, in the US the richest of the rich give huge money to the Democrats. Let’s be honest; Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cooke, Mark Zuckerberg, Jamie Dimon, yes Warren Buffet and a host of non-celebrity capitalists are functional Democrats. (I leave to one side the pernicious effect Bill Gates had in pushing lockdown authoritarianism and other woeful aspects of the pandemic years.) Put differently, George Soros has lots of company on the political left.
Or ask yourself whether you think Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Entertainment, Big Law, Big Energy and Finance align more with the political Right or the political Left these days. It’s not even close, is it? Every fad originating with the hard left of the Democrat party seems eventually to make its way into the corporate boardroom, first in the US and then around the rest of the anglosphere. Certainly all these Bigs seem to have quietly signed on with Biden. You can bet they’ll be going all in to stop the Republicans from winning in 2024.
But let’s just consider Australia. Already some of the big corporates are coming out for a Yes as regards the Voice. Take Coles. Even now they have a poster up in Cairns taking the Yes side. Isn’t that incredibly virtuous of this company, using shareholders’ money (not the board members’ personal money or the CEO’s but shareholders’) to push for a Yes vote on an issue that is party political and that will be a close run thing, at best, for the affirmative case? Can you even imagine a big corporation 50 or 60 years ago taking a side in a constitutional referendum that split the political parties? Yet today this is apparently perfectly fine, certainly no different to, say, Zuckerberg aligning with the Biden administration on, well, near on everything. Or Disney spending shareholders’ money to attack Ron DeSantis over legislation that forbade sex education for children aged six to eight. Disney jumped in bed with the hard Left that called this law the ‘Don’t Say Gay Bill’ though there is no distinction at all about the sort of sex education being disallowed; it was all banned. (DeSantis, at least, pushed back against these woke corporates and took away the special Disney legal exemptions from normal zoning and tax laws which hurt enough that the new Disney CEO Bob Iger last week called them anti-business. Gee Bob, if you’re going to take explicit sides on political issues then being anti-your-political-opponents means being anti-business, doesn’t it?)
Those of us who are conservatives need to realise that the winning conservative coalition today is very different to what it was 50 years ago. We are now the party not just of small business but of the lower-middle and working classes. (Good! For one thing they don’t wallow in insufferable, unendurable virtue-signalling.) We conservatives are now the party of the suburbs. Just as Boris did in 2019 and Trump did in 2016, we can put together winning coalitions of voters who want cheap energy, some backbone on culture issues, protected borders, lower mass immigration and some Thatcher-like husbandry when it comes to the budget (the last of these clearly being more honoured in the breach than the observance, or in the manifesto more than in the execution).
But designing Liberal party policies for the Teal seats is a sure loser. Do that and you lose big chunks of the rest of your conservative coalition in the many more seats that matter. And then you lose big time in WA, SA, Victoria, NSW, nationally.
So ignore the Teal seats. If the economy implodes – a far from implausible possibility with this current Labor team at the helm – then the rich folk in the Teal seats will come back to Team Libs regardless of the non-woke, non-Green policies the party has adopted because these virtue-signalling Teal voters draw the line at losing too much of the moolah, dough, swag, green stuff. If that happens, fine. But making policies explicitly to save Josh Frydenberg’s old seat was plain stupid.
Here’s what follows. For one thing, I like what US Republican Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri said to a big corporate type who was complaining about some Biden administration regulations that were taking money out of the pockets of the corporate class. I paraphrase, but Hawley’s response amounted to this: ‘You’re against us Republicans on all the crucially important culture stuff and protecting the borders and non-activist judges and on free speech issues but now you want us to help you on economic stuff. I agree with you, by the way, on your free market economic positions but why would I lift a finger to help you? You’ve made your bed. Go and lie in it.’
That is exactly my view. If Labor stupidly starts raiding the superannuation accounts and nest eggs of these big corporate types who are spending shareholder monies to push a Yes on this incredibly divisive and horrible-for-Australia Voice referendum, I cannot think of a single digit on either of my hands that I would lift to help them. Stupidly bad policy to attack super? You bet it is. Worth helping these corporates who basically hate our social and cultural and pro-democracy views? Nope. I’m with Senator Hawley.
Meantime here in Australia there is something all of us voters can do who think that this Voice proposal deals in malicious group rights (based on race or whatever you wish to call it), will undermine democratic decision-making, will lead to rent-seeking, will deliver the exact opposite of reconciliation (just look at the name calling galore from the Yes camp already), the list goes on.
We can inconvenience ourselves enough to avoid the corporates who are taking sides in this debate. Coles is out for me. If Woolworths goes down the same road then it’s IGA. You have to put your money where your mouth is a little, readers. And get ready for all sorts of charities to come out in favour of the Voice (since it’s more virtue-signalling that’s cheap and easy for the people who run them).
Well, they ultimately need charitable donations. Don’t give them a penny of your money. And if any university comes out in favour, write to the vice-chancellor and say that you are stopping all donations to your alma mater.
Remember, for the virtue-signalling lefty elites money still talks. DeSantis has the right idea. We only have our tiny spending but we can choose where it goes.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/the-lefty-corporate-class
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13 April, 2023
The Truth That Dare Not Be Uttered About Trump
CONRAD BLACK
The reason the United States reached its present astonishing condition is that a not wholly inadequate but complacent bipartisan consensus was moving the country slowly to the left and appeared to a large number of citizens to be favoring the educated middle-class and the scientifically and financially innovative higher income groups over the traditional working and middle classes and substantial numbers of the traditional minorities.
For some unexplained reason, few of the polls disclosed the vulnerability of the bipartisan governing majority. Donald Trump, long one of America’s most famous and controversial businessmen and celebrities, had been polling comprehensively for many years by 2015. He had developed the theory, after a near-death financial experience, that he could generate a large income by levering on and hyping his own name.
This process was commercially successful, and he suspected that it could be politically successful, also. To this end, he changed his official party designation seven times in 13 years waiting for an opportunity to take an open nomination in a year when the White House would not be defended by an incumbent president.
All will remember the howls of mockery and incredulity that greeted his descent on the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. It became clear as soon as the primaries began that he had tapped into an unsuspected vein of electoral resentment.
The bipartisan arrangement that Mr. Trump called “the swamp” is best illustrated by the fact that in the eight terms, 32 years, ending in 2012, one member or another of the Bush and Clinton families had been president, vice president, or Secretary of State, and a member of each family was seeking the presidency in 2016.
Mr. Trump won almost all of the Republican primaries in every region, but incredulity rose and defied unfolding events. The Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, wrote of dropping “him like a hot rock.” The Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, was the overwhelming favorite to win even though the polls started fairly close and narrowed steadily toward election day.
As Mr. Trump alleged in his powerful and measured speech on the evening of April 4, after his indictment, Mr. Trump’s enemies had begun even before he was inaugurated, the unconstitutional process of using the intelligence agencies, the FBI, and other parts of the Justice Department to persecute and defame him.
We now know that the heads of the national and central intelligence agencies and the FBI lied or disassembled under oath and that senior officials of the Justice Department knowingly signed false affidavits to justify illegal intercepts on the Trump campaign and transition team. We now know that the strenuous effort to pretend that concerns about the Biden family’s financial relations with Ukraine and China were unfounded was an outright fraud that was conducted even though a grand jury had been investigating the same matters for many months.
We now know that President Biden has lied repeatedly to the public about his knowledge of these activities. The failure of the United States attorney in Delaware to produce any findings at all on an investigation of more than three years into the Biden family’s questionable finances is as disquieting about the failure of justice to operate impartially as is its failure to be roused to any action at all about then candidate Hillary Clinton’s destruction of subpoenaed evidence.
We now know that neither President Trump nor his organization had any involvement in encouraging illegalities at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. We also know that then-Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Mayor Bowser of the District of Columbia declined President Trump’s urgings that they accept 20,000 national guardsmen that he was prepared to provide as reinforcements because of his concern that hooligans could infiltrate the large crowd of his supporters that he had invited to Washington to object legally to voting irregularities in the late election.
We now know that both of the Trump impeachments were completely unwarranted. We also know that it is unlikely that he would have been defeated in the 2020 election if there were not millions of unverifiable, unsolicited, mailed ballots voted anonymously in drop boxes; or that he would have been defeated if the public’s awareness of the proportions of the Bidens’ overseas financial dealings had not been improperly suppressed by the FBI’s partisan collusion with major social media platforms.
We now know how feeble and frivolous is the New York district attorney’s spurious indictment of Mr. Trump and we know, because Mr. Trump told us, that the special counsel looking into the preposterous FBI raid at Trump’s home in August and the classified document incident that was invoked as the pretext for it, and into the January 6, 2021 events, is engaging in the United States prosecutors’ customary threat to indict those who do not, with full guarantees against prosecution for perjury, ransack their memories successfully to find inculpatory evidence against the former president.
It is all a disgraceful picture of systematic lawlessness by one of two national political factions of almost equal strength against the other: an act of usurpation and perversion of the institutions of justice accompanied by a total collapse of professionalism and integrity in the national political media, all with no precedent in American history.
His supporters, and the few uncommitted people in the middle, are deeply concerned that this abuse of the justice system and failure of the free press could destroy constitutional government in the United States.
The only positive elements in this crisis are that the vigorous reaction of the old establishment shows that it is not decadent and easily defeated: it has fought tooth and nail with an early and constant recourse to rank illegalities to defend its position. A vigorously abusive governing class is preferable to a defeatist one.
The other positive element is that the forces for change are equally determined; even the most inflamed Trump-hater will acknowledge that he has proved to be a foe of undreamed-of formidability. Nothing in his prior career with its frequent instances of outright hucksterism would have prepared those who did not know him well to expect that Donald Trump would be so indefatigable.
In a phrase of third-party candidate George Wallace, much more accurately applied here, Trump has “shaken the American political establishment by the eye-teeth,” and he has already received more votes for president than anyone in American history.
Now one of these two protagonists must win. For the sake of all the goals identified by Mr. Trump’s opponents, particularly the preservation of the Constitution and the integrity of the American political system, it is Donald Trump that must prevail.
The truth that dare not be uttered, is that he is now leading all the polls. His enemies, in their blind and mindless outlawry, are turning him into the last man standing, the only recourse and salvation for those who believe in the Constitution and in the continued greatness and moral distinction of the United States of America.
https://www.nysun.com/article/the-truth-that-dare-not-be-uttered-about-trump
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Doctors Expose Just How Experimental ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ Truly Is in Florida Medicaid Case
Psychiatrists, endocrinologists, neurologists, and other doctors testified in support of a Florida health agency’s rule preventing Medicaid from funding various forms of “gender-affirming care,” such as “puberty-blockers,” cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries.
“Patients suffering from gender dysphoria or related issues have a right to be protected from experimental, potentially harmful treatments lacking reliable, valid, peer-reviewed, published, long-term scientific evidence of safety and effectiveness,” Dr. Paul Hruz, an endocrinology researcher and clinician at Washington University School of Medicine, wrote in a sworn affidavit provided exclusively to The Daily Signal. (Endocrinologists treat the endocrine system, which uses hormones to control metabolism, reproduction, growth, and more.)
Hruz joined with other doctors in testifying in support of Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, which finalized a rule in August 2022, declaring that Medicaid would not cover “puberty blockers,” cross-sex hormones, “sex-reassignment” surgeries, or other procedures that alter primary or secondary sex characteristics.
LGBT and health activist groups led by Lambda Legal represent four young people who identify as transgender and who filed a lawsuit in September aiming to block the rule. As part of their lawsuit, the LGBT groups asked the court to temporarily block the rule while it considers the full case. In denying that temporary injunction, the court ruled in October that the case centers on whether Florida’s determination that the transgender interventions are “experimental” is “reasonable.”
The AHCA filed a motion for summary judgment on Friday, urging the court to close the case and make a final judgment supporting the rule. In that motion, exclusively provided to The Daily Signal, AHCA referenced the testimony of many doctors warning about “gender-affirming care.”
Hruz and other doctors argue that the medical interventions often described as “gender-affirming care” are experimental and that the organizations that present standards of care supporting them—the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the Endocrine Society—represent more a political and advocacy effort than an objective analysis supporting these alleged treatments.
AHCA asked WPATH and the Endocrine Society to hand over the documents they used to craft their treatment protocols, but the organizations at first declined, then handed over a limited selection of documents that AHCA found insufficient. AHCA calls “the continued reluctance” of these organizations “significant, especially when [the LGBT groups] and their experts rely extensively on the WPATH standards of care and the Endocrine Society’s guidelines.”
Dr. Stephen B. Levine, a psychiatrist and early proponent of transgender medical interventions, joined and briefly helped lead the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, which later became WPATH. A member from 1974 to 2001, he served as the chairman of the eight-person International Standards of Care Committee that issued the fifth version of the standards of care.
In his affidavit, Levine notes that he resigned his membership in 2002 due to “my regretful conclusion that the organization and its recommendations had become dominated by politics and ideology, rather than by scientific process, as it was years earlier.” He condemns the WPATH standards of care as “not an impartial or evidence-based document.”
Levine notes that “WPATH explicitly views itself as not merely a scientific organization, but also as an advocacy organization.” He notes that WPATH welcomes non-doctors into its membership, so long as they identify as transgender. “Skepticism as to the benefits of [‘sex-reassignment surgery’] to patients, and strong alternate views, are not well-tolerated in discussions within the organization or their educational outreach programs,” he said.
While “WPATH claims to speak for the medical profession,” it “represents a self-selected subset of the profession along with its many non-professional members” and it “does not welcome skepticism and therefore deviates from the philosophical core of medical science,” Levine writes.
The psychiatrist explains that “there is no consensus or agreed ‘standard of care’ concerning therapeutic approaches to child or adolescent gender dysphoria.” He notes that gender identity “is not biologically based” and “empirically not fixed for many individuals.” He also warns that social transition “is a powerful psychotherapeutic intervention that radically changes outcomes” and makes it far less likely that young children will “desist” from a transgender identity.
Levine explicitly calls transition and affirmation “experimental therapies that have not been shown to improve mental or physical health outcomes by young adulthood,” and warns that these therapies “do not decrease, and may increase, the risk of suicide.”
He further warns that hormonal interventions “are experimental procedures that have not been proven safe.” So-called puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones can have negative effects on fertility, bone density, brain development, and psychosocial well-being.
Levine concludes that support for childhood medical interventions “is currently being reinforced by an echo chamber of approval from other like-minded, child-oriented professionals who do not sufficiently consider the known negative medical and psychiatric outcomes of trans adults.”
“Rather than recommend social transition in grade school, the [mental health professional] must focus attention on the child’s underlying internal and familial issues,” he concludes.
Endocrinologists Hruz, Michael Laidlaw, and Quentin Van Meter also testify to the problems with “puberty blockers” and cross-sex hormones. Hruz warns that after “an extended period of pubertal suppression,” patients can’t “turn back the clock” and “reverse changes in the normal coordinated pattern of adolescent psychological development and puberty.”
Hruz notes that “there are no long-term, peer-reviewed published, reliable and valid research studies” documenting the percentage of patients helped or harmed by transgender medical interventions. He also notes that attempts to block puberty followed by cross-sex hormones not only impact fertility, but also pose risks such as low bone density, “disfiguring acne, high blood pressure, weight gain, abnormal glucose tolerance, breast cancer, liver disease, thrombosis, and cardiovascular disease.”
In the absence of transgender interventions, children often grow to reject a transgender identity, he observes.
For these reasons, Hruz concludes that “administering hormones to a child whose gender dysphoria is highly likely to resolve is risky, unscientific, and unethical.”
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Want a politically-correct life partner? There’s an app for that
China’s “social credit score” system has taken a dark new twist. What you do, drink, buy and say could now determine whom you are allowed to date.
The Chinese Communist Party commissars of Jinan city in Shandong province are pulling everything they know about the 650,000 citizens under their control into one State-controlled singles dating app.
It’s called Palm Guixi. And it’s the regional response to Chairman Xi Jinping’s order to turn around the nation’s collapsing marriage and birth rates.
The idea is simple. Build comprehensive profiles about eligible young men and women’s personalities, habits, preferences, behaviours - and affiliations. Boil these down to scores. Run them through an AI. Then organise a blind date for the resulting ideal match.
Put simply, the Communist Party of China has got a math problem. There were 7.6 million first-time marriages in 2021. That’s 500,000 fewer than the year before and 5 million less than in 2013.
And marriages are needed to produce future party members.
That’s not happening. Since abandoning a long-standing one-child policy in 2016, national birth rates have plummeted. Only 6.8 children were born for every 1000 people in 2022.
And that’s despite Beijing having mandated three children for every household.
While demographers believe recent birth declines are a statistical anomaly brought about by Beijing’s draconian COVID-19 lockdown policies, it underscores long-standing fears for the nation’s future.
Now the Party has renewed its efforts to bring more of the right kinds of people together to generate more marriages and, therefore, more babies.
But it doesn’t think young unmarried Party members can work it out for themselves.
Chairman Xi Jinping’s tenure as chief of the Chinese Communist Party wants the role of women within Chinese society revisited.
The idea of the People’s Revolution was for gender equality in all things. But Xi wants to bring back elements of traditional Confucian philosophy.
In 2013, during one of his first speeches as a national leader, Xi proclaimed it was crucial for women to be “good wives and mothers” to ensure the “healthy growth of the next generation”.
Ten years later, that idea is being turned into law.
As of January, the updated Women’s Rights and Interests Protection Law formally demands “women should respect and obey national laws, respect social morals, professional ethics and family values.”
And Xi has repeated his expectation that Chinese society must “give full play to the unique role of women in promoting the family virtues of the Chinese nation.”
Those virtues and values have yet to be clearly defined. But the message comes amid loud calls to “pass on the red gene from generation to generation”.
That means young women focused on their studies and careers are now officially out of step with Communist Party policy.
‘Leftover women’
Marriage in China has traditionally been a community affair.
Parents, village elders and business leaders regularly gather to identify suitable pairings. Then the full weight of peer pressure would be brought to bear.
But an emphasis on advanced education in the 1990s and the arrival of internet dating in the 2000s have pushed this practice aside.
Young men and women have become used to finding partners that suit their tastes, needs and styles. And women have chosen careers ahead of children.
The Ministry of Education now considers these to be “leftover women”.
It has instructed schools to teach girl students that not marrying was “self-serving and oblivious to family morality and imperatives of national development”.
“Leftover women” have since embraced the label in ironic protest.
Women, however, aren’t the only target. Beijing is raging against “foreign influences”. It has formally banned men from appearing “too effeminate” in an effort to reinforce what it calls China’s “revolutionary culture.”
The Chinese Communist Party can’t afford such loose ends.
The one-child policy of 1979 resulted in parents choosing boys over girls. While the central government-enforced quota was abandoned in 2016, up to 16 per cent of the Chinese population now has little hope of finding a marriage partner.
And most of them are now of marriageable age.
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Posting memes with black people in them is considered “digital blackface” – a term that only applies to white people
The liberal media and Democrats continue to push to divide the nation, and a prime example of this is the latest nonsensical claim from CNN.com senior writer John Blake, who wrote a column on why posting memes with black people in them is considered “digital blackface” – a term that only applies to white people.
The piece, titled “What’s ‘digital blackface?’ And why is it wrong when White people use it?”, lists examples of possible memes that people online have posted over the years.
These include a viral video of Kimberly “Sweet Brown” Wilkins telling a reporter after narrowly escaping an apartment fire, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”, a meme of supermodel Tyra Banks exploding in anger on “America’s Next Top Model”, and popular GIFs such as the one of NBA great Michael Jordan crying, or of drag queen RuPaul declaring, “Guuuurl…”
According to Blake, “If you’re Black and you’ve shared such images online, you get a pass. But if you’re White, you may have inadvertently perpetuated one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism. You may be wearing digital blackface.”
He then quotes from Lauren Michele Jackson, a cultural critic, and author who bought into this latest made-up grievance from the radical left: “Many white people choose images of black people when it comes to expressing exaggerated emotions on social media – a burden that black people didn’t ask for.”
Blake attempts to explain why the made-up term “digital blackface” is wrong, citing critics who say it is a modern-day repackaging of minstrel shows, a racist form of entertainment popular in the 19th century.
He then goes on to explain that this form of racism is when white people co-opt online expressions of black imagery, slang, catchphrases or culture to convey comic relief or express emotions.
The problem is that John Blake himself has a hard time defining “digital blackface”, admitting that “In trying to define digital blackface, it depends on who you talk to.
The standard for some is comparable to what one Supreme Court Justice once said when asked his test for pornography: ‘I know it when I see it”.
This is yet another example of the liberal media and Democrats trying to divide the country. The concept of “digital blackface” is made-up nonsense, and it is outrageous that people are being accused of racism for simply posting memes.
It’s time for people to wake up and realize that the far left’s woke ideology is nothing more than a ploy to control people’s thoughts and actions. Their goal is to stifle free speech and divide the nation. We must not let that happen.
https://libertyonenews.com/media-declare-memes-racists-digital-blackface/
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12 April, 2023
Pub landlady defies police orders and puts five golliwogs back on display to applause from lunchtime drinkers just days after six officers seized 20 dolls in 'hate crime' probe
An old controversy
A pub landlady today defied authorities and put more of her golliwog collection back on display just days after 20 of them were seized by police as part of an investigation that she and her husband had committed a hate crime.
Benice Ryley proudly placed five of the controversial dolls behind the bar of The White Hart pub in Grays, Essex, which she has run for the past 17 years with her husband Chris.
The couple, who are in their 60s, had six officers enter the pub last Tuesday and take away 20 dolls displayed on a shelf behind the bar after an anonymous complaint was made against them.
They also seized an assortment of golliwog badges and magnets that adorned the bar.
As she placed some of them on a shelf, she told MailOnline: 'The whole thing is ridiculous. It's political correctness gone out of control. I'm not going to let the authorities intimidate me and I'm proudly putting my other gollis back on display in the pub.
'I'm still shocked that six officers came to my pub last week, surrounded me and took away my collection of golliwogs. I've not committed any crime and haven't set out to offend anyone. These gollis are a part of the pub, the customers love them, and they are reminder of our childhood.'
Ms Ryley also posted a notice at the entrance to the pub warning customers that golliwogs are on display inside and that they should not enter if this will offend them. The sign declares: 'We have golly dolls displayed inside on our shelves. If you feel offended. Please do not enter.'
She added: 'The police took 20 of my golli dolls but I've got plenty more of them upstairs. If people don't like them and feel offended by seeing them then they don't have to come into my pub. It's as simple as that. I'm not going to give into this crazy political correctness. We have customers at this pub from all different races and none of them have ever complained about seeing my gollis on display. Why did the police get involved in this?'
The White Hart pub is located on the edge of a council estate in Grays notorious for crime and drug dealing.
Ms Ryley and other regulars fumed that police rarely attend when called out for 'real' crimes and slammed the presence of six police officers who removed the golliwogs from the pub.
Two others waited outside while their colleagues placed the dolls in plastic bags to take them away.
Her husband was away in Turkey at the time with police informing her that they wish to question him for a 'hate crime' when he returns as he is the licensee.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman is said to have been furious about the approach, and has told Essex Police that bosses should be focusing on catching real criminals rather than seizing toys.
The issue of whether the dolls are racist or not often sparks fierce debate. The golliwog was created by Florence Kate Upton in 1895 in her book 'The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwog', where it was described as 'a horrid sight, the blackest gnome'.
After the author created the golliwog, it became a favourite for collectors and was popular in the UK as the mascot of Robertson's jam.
But by the 1980s, it was increasingly seen as an offensive racist caricature of black people.
Some people hark back to fond childhood memories of the dolls, whereas others argue golliwogs are a racist icon of a bygone age.
In a YouGov poll last year 53 per cent of respondents said they thought selling or displaying golliwogs was 'acceptable' compared to 27 per cent who did not.
Asked if it was racist to sell or display a golliwog doll, 63 per cent of respondents said it was not, while 17 per cent did.
Ms Ryley said: 'Surely the police have better things to do. If they arrest my Chris when he gets back, I promise you, the world will know about it.
'I totally agree with the Home Secretary. The police need to focus on real crime and not worry about what dolls people are displaying.'
Pub regular Sue Payne, 57 said: 'It's absolutely stupid and a complete waste of police time and money. You can get stabbed or mugged around here and the police won't come or if they do, it'll be after ages. But somebody complains about some dolls and six officers turn up. You couldn't make it up.'
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Damn the politically correct censors of great art and literature
Greg Sheridan
The idea of rewriting classics to make them conform to the prejudices of today is so spectacularly dumb, so epic in its nuttiness, so complete a form of cultural madness, that it illustrates perfectly George Orwell’s observation that to believe certain things you have to be an intellectual, no normal man could be so stupid.
Even Shakespeare productions have been bowdlerised to avoid offensive words and ideas. Yet The Merchant of Venice was in part about anti-Semitism, race relations are the backdrop of Othello and don’t even begin on the countless ways The Taming of the Shrew offends contemporary sensibilities.
But Shakespeare was the supreme genius of human literature. Are we really so deranged we would censor his words from 400 years ago so we don’t have to endure insights from the past? Are our insights today simultaneously sublimely perfect, and incapable of withstanding exposure to anything different?
Like many others I was most enraged at the ridiculous practice of the publisher in censoring and rewriting Enid Blyton’s books. Primary school children today have to put up with gender fluidity training, if their parents get pay TV they can turn on Game of Thrones and watch endless debauchery and violence, but we protect them from such shocking Blyton dialogue as “Shut up” or “Don’t be an ass!”
The very appeal of reading something from the past is that it’s different from where you are now. Very early in life I discovered that books can take you anywhere in the world, not only anywhere now but anywhere in history, and, given the power of the human imagination, to many places that don’t even really exist. Now we want to cancel literature’s magical visa.
Enid Blyton’s books were the first books I read from cover to cover, specifically the Secret Seven. I read some of the Famous Five but didn’t fall in love with them. The series that most stirred my childish soul was the Five Find-Outers.
Almost everything I liked about it would now, I suspect, be up for censorship. Maybe it has been censored already.
A distinctive joy of literature is unexpectedly finding yourself in a character, or an outlook, an idea or person you instinctively identify with. For me, this happened first when I read The Mystery of Tally-Ho Cottage, when I was about eight or nine. The group’s leader is Frederick Algernon Trotterville. His initials form the word FAT. He first meets the kids destined to become his fast friends in the series’ first book, The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage.
The others don’t like him much at the start. He’s fat, clever, conceited, talks too much, eats too much, likes his ginger beer, he’s a know-it-all and more than a bit bossy. Naturally, I loved him.
Even as a child, my natural shape resembled a potato. The idea that a smart-talking fatty could be a hero was terrifically appealing, perhaps the basis of the rest of my life.
When first given his nickname, Fatty doesn’t like it. But he realises he can’t change it, so he grins and gets on with becoming everyone’s friend.
Body-shaming, hate speech, stereotyping – every offence a children’s book could commit. And yet it’s also marvellously plotted and absorbing to read even today.
Give me Enid Blyton and Fatty every day of the week as opposed to the po-faced, politically correct, supreme censors of silliness who want to ruin her.
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In California, Parents May Soon Effectively Lose Custody of Kids 12 and Older
In California, “stranger danger” may be about to acquire a whole new meaning.
Forget warning kids. It’s the parents in California who will need to be terrified of strangers if a new bill passes.
Snuck into AB 665, legislation ostensibly about extending mental health care to lower-income California youths, is a provision that effectively would terminate parents’ rights over their kids as soon as they turn 12.
The California Family Council warns that this bill “would allow children as young as 12 years old to consent to being placed into state funded group homes without parental permission or knowledge.”
As long as a mental health professional signs off on it, the kids can go to such a group home—and it doesn’t matter what their parents think.
“This bill gives a stranger, a school psychologist, power to decide whether a sixth or seventh grader comes home from school that day, and that’s terrifying,” Erin Friday, a California mom of two teens, tells The Daily Signal.
“This bill is essentially stating that parents are criminals that have to prove their innocence to get their child back,” adds Friday, who is a leader of the parent advocacy group Our Duty.
Seriously?
AB 665, which passed out of the Assembly Judiciary Committee last week, builds on a 2010 measure signed into law by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican. That law, the Mental Health Services for At-Risk Youth Act, allowed California children 12 and older to receive mental health care without their parents’ knowledge if a mental health provider determined it was best not to involve the parents.
That provision was no accident. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, celebrated the California law in a 2010 report as a “useful model for state or federal legislation to address mental illness among LGBT youth.”
“LGBT youth are likely to avoid using public mental health services if they believe that doing so will cause them to have to reveal their LGBT status to their parents or peers,” the Center for American Progress report said.
That same report also made the case that mental health services were vital for suicide prevention for LGBT youth: “Providing LGBT adolescents with access to mental health services is essential to helping them cope with the extreme pressures that have led many of them to consider suicide.”
But the data suggests that California’s Mental Health Services for At-Risk Youth Act hasn’t had the effect its boosters hoped for. In 2010, the year the legislation passed, 92 minors in California committed suicide, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nor was 2010 an outlier: Looking at the years 2000-2010, an average of 82 minors a year committed suicide. From 2011-2020, the last year for which data is available, 106 minors a year on average committed suicide in California.
So much for the success of the 2010 law.
Yet instead of reexamining and reforming the old law—which did allow 12-year-olds to access psychological care without parental permission or knowledge, but not residential services—California legislators are now seriously considering expanding the 2010 law and allowing 12-year-olds to go to residential treatment without parental permission.
Of course, that’s an outrageous slap in the face to parental rights.
But it’s also unlikely to help the kids who are troubled and seeking treatment. Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, a licensed clinical social worker since 1999, wrote on her Substack: “In my experience, working with youth in a school setting without parental involvement was ineffective. It was when the parents gave input, shared their point of view and communicated with their teen, [that] the real healing began.”
Garfield-Jaeger, who testified against the new California bill, also warned about the dangers of placing minors in new residences.
“I worked in group homes I know what they are really like, and they are far from ideal,” the social worker said in her testimony. “Residential facilities lead kids to adopt new harmful habits, such as drug use, self-harm, and violent behavior.”
“Youth residential facilities are usually unlocked, and many kids run away into the hands of sex traffickers,” she added.
Why are California lawmakers trying to make it easier for kids to face such horrible fates?
The unspoken reason seems likely here: California lawmakers know that plenty of parents have concerns about minors who pursue gender transition. These are valid concerns: gender transition medical procedures, even for minors, can be extensive—and some of it is irreversible.
The growing “detransitioner” movement highlights how some people receive transgender treatment, and then have regrets.
“I shouldn’t have been allowed to go through this,” Chloe Cole, a detransitioner who regretted her gender transition after having breast removal surgery at 16, told “The Daily Signal Podcast” in January.
But California lawmakers don’t want parents to be able to stand in the way of their minor children making these life-changing decisions.
“It is apparent that one result of this bill will be the removal of trans-identified children from the family home,” Garfield-Jaeger said in her testimony. “In the dystopian nightmare we are in, if a parent doesn’t use the child’s chosen pronoun or name, they are labeled dangerous.”
In an interview with Fox News, Friday referred to this legislation as “state-sanctioned kidnapping.”
She’s right—and it’s terrifying that California lawmakers are considering legalizing, not penalizing, kidnapping.
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America’s Censorship Regime
Ernest Ramirez, a car-wash technician in a small, south Texas town, led a simple but fulfilling life with his son, Ernesto Junior. Junior was a “wonderful child, full of smiles.” Ramirez had raised his son alone; he’d never known his own father and sought to provide Junior with the paternal love he had missed. A talented baseball player, Junior dreamed of playing professionally. The two lived paycheck to paycheck but were happy because, as Ramirez put it, they had each other.
Then, on April 19, 2021, 16-year-old Junior—who had no previous health problems—received the first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Five days later, the young athlete collapsed while running. By the time the elder Ramirez arrived at the hospital, having been told he could not ride in the ambulance with his son, Junior was dead.
According to the autopsy report, the cause of Junior’s death was an “enlarged heart.” Upon receiving the news, Ramirez lost all desire to go on living. But after the initial shock subsided, Ramirez decided to travel and speak about Junior’s fate, in hopes that he could help other families avoid similar tragedies.
That plan proved more difficult than Ramirez anticipated. In September 2021, GoFundMe removed an account he had opened to raise money for a trip to the nation’s capital to share his son’s story. “The content of your fundraiser falls under our ‘Prohibited Conduct’ section,” the company’s email explained. Ramirez lost the donations he had thus far received. Two months later, Twitter took down a photograph Ramirez had posted depicting him standing beside Junior’s open casket, along with the caption “My good byes to my Baby Boy” followed by three brokenheart emojis. Even a father’s simple expression of grief was apparently forbidden by the social media platform’s government-supported censorship regime.
Around that time, Ramirez met Brianne Dressen, a 40-year-old woman who had volunteered for the AstraZeneca vaccine trials and suffered a severe adverse reaction diagnosed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as “post-vaccine neuropathy.” Her varied and acute symptoms at times required use of a wheelchair and drastically curtailed her ability to participate in her young children’s lives.
For a time after her diagnosis, Dressen fell into a severe depression. However, during the spring of 2021, she discovered online support groups for vaccine-injured individuals and their family members. Connecting to others who understood her plight greatly improved her outlook on life, and she began serving as an administrator of several of the groups.
But in July 2021, less than 24 hours after Dressen participated in a press conference with U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Facebook shut down one support group’s account. Though participants had merely discussed their often-harrowing personal experiences and shared medical treatments that they found helpful, Facebook claimed they were spreading harmful “misinformation” that warranted the group’s removal.
The cascade of shutdowns of support groups and accounts belonging to the vaccine injured on Facebook and other social media platforms continues to this day. Ramirez, Dressen, and others learned that when their accounts weren’t suspended or removed, they were shadow-banned—meaning that the platforms’ algorithms buried their posts so that they were rarely, if ever, viewable, even to like-minded individuals facing similar health problems. In Dressen’s words: “The constant threat of having our groups shut down and our connections pulled apart left me and many other members and leaders frozen, unable to communicate and connect with those who needed our help the most. We spent more time managing the chaos of the censorship algorithms that continued to evolve, than we did actually helping people through the trauma of their injuries.”
The obstacles encountered by Ramirez, Dressen, and thousands of other individuals with similar experiences and opinions were in no way coincidental or accidental. Nor were they the result of a series of errors in judgment made by low-level employees of social media platforms. Rather, they were the products of concerted efforts at the highest levels of the American government to ensure that individuals with opposing viewpoints could not be heard, contrary to the guarantees made to every American citizen in the Bill of Rights. One purpose of these unconstitutional actions to violate the rights of American citizens was political gain.
As COVID-19 inoculations became widely available to the American public, the Biden White House came to view vaccine hesitancy as a significant political problem. Beginning in spring 2021, the administration explicitly and publicly blamed social media platforms for vaccine refusal: By failing to censor “misinformation” about the vaccines, the president infamously alleged, tech companies were effectively “killing people.” The president’s incendiary accusation was accompanied by threats of regulatory or other legal action (should the companies refuse to comply) from various high-ranking members of the administration, including former White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Psaki boasted that government officials were in regular touch with social media platforms, telling them what and in some cases even whom to censor.
Astute social media users noticed that censorship on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook escalated in tandem with the government’s threats, often yielding absurd results. For example, Twitter marked as misleading Dr. Martin Kulldorff’s April 2021 tweet stating that not everyone needed a COVID-19 vaccine, especially children and the previously infected. Dr. Kulldorff is one of the world’s most cited epidemiologists and infectious disease experts. That he was censored for speaking on the area of his expertise by someone almost certainly far less knowledgeable should concern any fair-minded person purely on the basis of preserving the openness that is required for educated scientific debate. (Last month, the World Health Organization revised its official recommendation, saying that children and teenagers may not need COVID-19 vaccines—a position deemed “misinformation” not half a year ago.)
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11 April, 2023
The “most lethal threat” faced by the United States isn’t China or Russia. It’s racist groups
A Leftist fantasy. They are just taking a few blowhards seriously. The attacks on electricity substations are much more likely to be by Greenies
The US intelligence community’s recently released 2023 Annual Threat Assessment is blunt in its warning: Nazis and other racist groups are now the “most lethal threat” faced by the United States.
That’s ahead of the aggressive expansionism displayed by China’s Chairman Xi Jinping. And the invasion of Ukraine under President Vladimir Putin.
And these groups “believe that recruiting military members will help them organise cells for attacks against minorities or institutions that oppose their ideology,” the report warns.
United States think tanks are also increasingly worried.
A new Brookings Institution survey found 16 per cent of Americans agree with the statement: “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
But law enforcement statistics reveal an increasing number of extremists are already choosing to do so.
In 2022 there were 26 “actual physical attacks” on power facilities across the United States. That’s up from eight in 2021.
And that’s just one sign the recruitment drive among US military and police forces is bearing deadly fruit.
Ready recruits
“Extremist groups have long urged members to join the military to get training in weapons, tactics and leadership,” a special report into the emerging crisis by military.com states. “The most common route to extremism may be post-service, when veterans … struggle to make peace with their time in the military and try to forge a new life as a civilian.”
Active recruiters include militias and outlaw gangs such as Patriot Front, Atomwaffen, Oath Keepers and the Boogaloo movement.
Such groups already “ape the military and actively recruit members and veterans because they see them as an asset to whatever cause they are pursuing”.
One such cause is detailed by a manifesto circulating on the Russian social media service Telegram. Called the Hard Reset, the document details military-based tactics to take down public infrastructure.
It’s finding a fertile audience beyond just US military and police enforcement agencies.
The Brookings Institution survey found that one in 10 Americans identify as adherents to “Christian nationalism”. A further 19 per cent say they support many of the movement’s goals.
“There is an underlying ideology of racism among the Christian nationalist movement that connects them to white nationalist groups who rely on old and new tropes to promote white supremacy,” the survey finds.
This is expressed through conspiracy movements, including replacement theory – a belief that non-European immigrants are “invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.”
Unholy War
“The main thing that keeps the anti-White system going is the power grid,” a neo-Nazi manifesto declares. “This is something that is easier than you think. Peppered all over the country are power distribution substations... Sitting ducks, worthy prey.”
Analysts say the only thing uniting the diverse dogmas of US neo-Nazi, White Supremacist and Christian Nationalist movements is a belief in “accelerationism”.
“With the power off, when the lights don’t come back on... all hell will break lose, making conditions desirable for our race to once again take back what is ours,” the Nazi doctrine document reads.
What comes next, including how it will reconcile competing extremist beliefs, is not addressed.
The apocalyptic propaganda calls for supporters to select targets “that do the most damage to the system and spark revolution and chaos. So long as the power turns on, the status quo, the downward decline of our race, and the increase in non-whites in our lands will carry on unhindered.”
But signs are “true believers” have already made a start.
On December 3 last year, two electricity grid transformers in Moore County, North Caroline, came under sniper fire. The resulting outage left 40,000 residents without power for several days, even as temperatures fell below zero.
North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper stated the obvious: “If someone with a firearm can do this much damage and get power out to tens of thousands of people, then obviously we need to look at the different layers of infrastructure and hardening and make better decisions here.”
But College of Strategic Intelligence analyst Scott Englund warns the US isn’t in an ideal place for active government intervention. “In the United States, local, state, and federal governments have a long history of directly engaging in, and later tolerating, domestic terror against people of colour or other marginalised groups. Given that history of state terror, attempts to address inequality may be met with mistrust in these communities, no matter how well-intentioned.”
Upskilling extremism
FBI domestic terrorism statistics recorded 1981 domestic terror attacks in 2013. In 2021, that number grew to 9049.
Such figures prompted the US intelligence community’s official warning. Despite its political unpopularity.
Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, challenged the finding at a Capitol Hill briefing. “Are you serious? You seriously think that racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists are the most lethal threat that Americans face?”
The Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, replied: “Yes, sir, in terms of the number of people killed or wounded as a consequence”.
Part of that reason is the drive by extremist organisations to become more military and professional.
Extreme right-wing militia The Oath Keepers came to international attention after a combat-uniformed cadre led the assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Its leader has since been convicted of sedition.
Its membership primarily consists of people who describe themselves as military or police veterans. But a leaked database of the 38,000-strong body details some of its members’ skills.
These include battle tank operators and one who claims to have worked with nuclear warheads.
According to the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, this is just part of a disturbing trend of political partisanship within the US military.
“The nonpartisan ethic of the armed forces is at greater risk today than it has been in our lifetimes, and maintaining it is essential for the survival of American democracy,” three of its senior analysts write.
“Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 warning that a “house divided against itself cannot stand” remains as relevant today as it was on the eve of the Civil War. If American society becomes so polarised that large numbers of citizens are prepared to take up arms against each other, the United States’ experiment in self-government could ultimately fail.”
But the strength of every recruit’s vow to defend the US Constitution still holds currency, they add.
“Indeed, the 2020 presidential election served as an extreme test case. The US military not only withstood the pressure and did its job; it emerged stronger and even more committed to maintaining its unique nonpartisan role. If it were subjected to a similar test today or during the 2024 election cycle, we are confident it would pass again.”
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Networks Obsess Over 'Far Right,' Oblivious to 'Far Left'
Television broadcast networks tend to slap a “far-right” label onto anything even remotely conservative, often referring to Republican members of Congress, fringe conspiracy theorists, and outright domestic terrorists with identical terminology for all three. Yet these same networks refuse even to acknowledge the existence of a “far-left,” — and in fact, since the 2022 midterms, they have not applied that label to any group or individual even a single time.
An MRC study found that between November 9, 2022 (the day after the 2022 midterm elections) and March 21, broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC used such labels as “far-right,” “extreme right,” and “ultraconservative,” a total of 101 times on their flagship morning and evening shows, as well as their Sunday political talk shows. During that same period, analysts found only one instance in which a journalist used an equivalent “far-left” label.
That single case occurred during the January 22 edition of NBC’s Meet The Press, in which moderator Chuck Todd attempted to frame the overturned Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision as a “middle ground” compromise in the abortion debate:
When you look at the public’s opinion about Roe, and in some ways Roe has become more popular since it was overturned, is that the middle ground, the public — you know, maybe nobody loved it on the far left and far right, but was that actually the right middle ground for the American public?
Across all three broadcast networks, the totality of airtime the fringe left received since November was limited to that single vague reference.
Meanwhile, “far-right” and similar labels were applied to a very wide array of individuals. Republican members of Congress were by far the most heavily labeled group (38 times), followed by general references such as “the far right,” or “extreme rightwing Twitter users,” (19 times).
There were 12 instances of labeling for the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 11 cases for the Oathkeepers, 10 cases for the radical German group that attempted a coup in late 2022, and five for the supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. All others were labeled only once or twice.
This 101-to-1 disparity tracks with the broadcast networks’ well-established habit of obfuscating or outright ignoring extremism from the left.
For example, the pro-abortion radical who attempted to murder Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his family received a tiny fraction — less than 10 percent — of the coverage that Paul Pelosi’s attacker received during the first five days following each incident. The attempt on Justice Kavanaugh’s life also received several orders of magnitude less coverage than the January 6 hearings did during an equivalent time frame.
Back in 2018, ABC and NBC ignored attacks by a left-wing mob on the home of Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson. That same year, NBC covered up an assault on their own camera crew by a pack of antifa members.
And earlier this month, ABC and CBS downplayed a case of violent arson against a police and firefighter training center in Atlanta, Georgia. ABC dismissed the attack as mere “foolishness,” while CBS referred to the arsonists as “demonstrators.”
There is no arguing that far-right extremists exist in the U.S. and abroad. Rather, what’s at issue here is the media’s inability to acknowledge extremism on the left. It seems that whenever they do bother to report on the misdeeds of far-left actors, they meticulously avoid ideological labels
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Cancelled: Catholic intellectual group banned for transgender views
A Catholic intellectual group has been banned from holding its annual forum at a university hall over concerns about its views on transgender issues.
The Hobart-based Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies has for the past seven years held its annual “colloquium” at the University of Tasmania’s Jane Franklin Hall of residence.
It was booked again for the eighth such event, to be held in July this year, but the Hall has since withdrawn the booking out of concern about an advertisement for the event titled “Wokery and How to Deal With It”.
The advert included the claim that “elites” were undermining “objective truth” by teaching in schools that “girls can be boys, that boys can be girls, and that grown-ups should be punished for denying it”.
Jane Franklin Hall principal Joanna Rosewell confirmed and defended the cancellation, understood to follow a complaint about the ad.
“We have asked the Christopher Dawson Centre to find an alternative venue for its annual colloquium, usually held here, as the ideas expressed in the advertisement do not align with our values,” Ms Rosewell told The Australian. “We work with a diverse number of students including those from the transgender community. Our first goal at Jane is and must be supporting the wellbeing of our students.”
Christopher Dawson Centre director David Daintree, a former principal of the Hall for 18 years, said he was “shocked” and “disappointed” by the decision, which he labelled “repression”.
He conceded the ad may have offended some transgender people, but argued transgender people did not need the silencing of views that conflicted with their own.
“If you state something you believe that other people do not believe, you are in danger of offending them,” Dr Daintree said. “I believe in objective truth and one side is wrong when you talk about transitioning to another sex.
“I don’t feel I should apologise for expressing an opinion and that’s all we are doing in this call for papers (for the colloquium). If we had received papers that violently disagreed with that proposition then we would have included them if appropriate.”
Dr Daintree said the centre was set up and funded by the Hobart Catholic Archdiocese but was independently run. “Our brief is to justify and to make better known the Christian intellectual tradition,” he said.
“We’re not in the business of evangelising. We are in the business of saying, it’s a reasonable thing to be a Christian and that plenty of intelligent and thoughtful people have been and that faith and science are not incompatible.”
He was yet to find an alternative venue willing to host the event, which he believed could attract demonstrators. Transgender issues were not intended to be the “central core” of the colloquium. “That was just an instance I gave in the call for papers about the perception of truth but this is shaping up to be a very controversial one,” he said.
The University of Tasmania declined to comment on the cancellation, insisting the Hall was “independent of the university”.
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Seven myths that will shake up what you think about cooking with salt
Standard Australian table salt IS sea-salt and naturally has iodides in it
Salt has been essential to cooking - and the human existence - for thousands of years. Our bodies can’t function without it. Our food is often tastier with it.
Because salt is relatively inexpensive and universal, it’s easy to take this kitchen staple for granted. Your eyes may glaze over those instructions to season to taste, or you may decide to leave it out of a recipe where it doesn’t seem important.
That would be an oversight, because salt is actually important in more ways than you may realise. Sure, it’s crucial for flavour. But salt plays key roles in ensuring your food has the right texture and even colour, among other things.
And yet its very ubiquity is part of what concerns many home cooks attentive to their health. We know that consuming too much sodium, an element in salt, increases the chances of high blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart disease. For many of us, though, there’s an achievable middle ground between using no salt and pouring it into our food with reckless abandon.
Part of getting there is understanding what salt does and does not do in cooking. Unfortunately, plenty of myths and misconceptions about this staple are often repeated as conventional wisdom. So, as I’ve done with persistent baking myths, I’m tackling some of the biggest ones to sort salt fact from fiction, from both food and health perspectives.
1. Salt only makes food taste salty
Not only is salt one of the five tastes, it also impacts others. Salt reduces bitterness. It enhances aromas, which play a big role in our perception of flavour aside from just taste. It can also add texture.
Salt performs other functions that don’t have to do with flavour. When added to boiling water, it keeps pasta from sticking to itself by “reducing the gelatinlike layer that forms on the surface of pasta as it cooks,” Nik Sharma writes in “The Flavor Equation.” For blanching vegetables, “Properly seasoned cooking water encourages food to retain its nutrients,” Samin Nosrat says in “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.”
What else can salt do? It can ward off rubbery scrambled eggs by buffering the proteins from bonding too tightly and squeezing out water. In brining, whether wet or dry, salt helps meat retain moisture; in the case of a dry-brined turkey or chicken, it can contribute to crisp, golden skin.
Salt has long been valued as a preservative and an important element in fermented foods. It’s also key in baking bread and sweets; see below.
2. Different types of salt are interchangeable
Does a recipe call for one type of salt but you want to use another? Before you substitute, think, because the size of salt grains can vary. A teaspoon of one type might not be the same as a teaspoon of another.
Fine sea salt and table salt boast a similar texture of small grains, so they are about equivalent in volume. They are also very close in terms of the amount of sodium. That makes them largely interchangeable. Kosher salt has larger grains, but even that varies depending on what brand you’re using.
3. Adding salt to home-cooked food is a major source of dietary sodium.
Keep in mind that by cooking at home you are already well on your way to managing or even reducing your salt intake, because you can control how much you use. Salt in homemade food is less of an issue than prepared and processed food, where it may show up in large quantities or in unexpected items. More than 70 percent of sodium in American diets comes from restaurant and packaged food, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - in other words, “not the salt shaker.”
4. Salt isn’t important in baking
It’s easy to assume that the contribution of salt to baking is limited to salty flavour. Nosrat makes a compelling point: “The foundational ingredients of sweets are some of the blandest in the kitchen. Just as you’d never leave flour, butter, eggs, or cream unseasoned in a savory dish, so should you never leave them unseasoned in a dessert.”
Salt can bring other flavours into focus, such as the chocolate in brownies or the corn in cornbread, Lauren Chattman says in “The Baking Answer Book.” It is even more effective at counteracting bitterness than sugar, Shirley Corriher says in “BakeWise,” citing research conducted by Gary Beauchamp at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, which studies taste and smell.
Salt also lowers the point at which starches absorb water, swell and set, which is crucial in baking, Harold McGee says in “On Food and Cooking.” With a few exceptions, salt is essential for properly risen and flavoured bread, Chattman explains. Dough without salt will rise too fast on the counter and collapse in the oven.
Salt slows down yeast activity, which has another welcome outcome: browning, a key to colour and flavour. Yeast thrives on sugar in dough (it’s generated by the breakdown of the flour even if the recipe has no added sugar), and if left unchecked, there would be no sugar left to brown in baking, according to King Arthur Baking.
5. Salt makes water boil faster (or slower)
The timing of when you add salt to water will not alter how quickly it boils. Adding salt to water actually raises the boiling point, McGee says, because it competes with the water molecules for the absorption of energy.
Don’t be fooled by the sudden appearance of bubbles when salt is added to simmering water, J. Kenji López-Alt says in “The Food Lab.” That is not a sign of boiling, but rather a result of having a new spot for steam bubbles to form on. It can happen any place there’s an irregularity in the water, including scratches in the pot.
6. Using salt without iodine is bad for your health
Iodine is a trace element, or micronutrient, important for regulating thyroid function, says Michele Smallidge, a registered dietitian and director of the exercise science program at the University of New Haven. Without it, people can develop a goiter, or an enlarged thyroid gland. To address iodine deficiencies that were common in areas away from the coasts (iodine is found in soil and water near the ocean), manufacturers started iodising table salt in the 1920s.
Some home cooks are therefore concerned when recipes call for sea or kosher salts, which are generally not iodised. While long-term studies are underway to determine whether and why there may be an uptick in iodine deficiency on a global scale, Smallidge advises home cooks not to panic about which salt they use, though she notes that pregnant individuals and people with other specific health needs may require more special attention. You only need about 150 micrograms a day, and if you consume fish, dairy and even seaweed, you’re probably set. Iodine also shows up in some fortified foods.
“Testing of the general population indicates that most Americans consume sufficient levels of iodine through their diets,” the Mayo Clinic says. If you like using sea salt for other reasons but want the benefits of iodised table salt, you can use a blend of the two, Smallidge says. Or use the information above to substitute iodised table salt as desired.
7. Fancy salt will make your food taste better
If you have some pink Himalayan or other specialty salt hanging around, you may assume it will elevate whatever you add it to. Not quite.
When used to season food before cooking or stirred into a batter or dough, the unique textures and flavours of your fancy, more expensive salt will probably be lost. Save the nice stuff for when it can shine as a finishing salt, sprinkled on top of a completed dish. Even as a garnish on a slice of bread and butter, you’ll appreciate it better.
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10 April, 2023
Scientists discover women are more competitive with each other than men
The "sisterhood" is a myth, Women can be hugely bitchy towards one-another
Scientists discovered that women were more competitive with other women than men are with other men, upending decades of stereotypes.
“I must admit the findings stunned me,” study author Dr Joyce Benenson, a human evolutionary biologist at Harvard, told London’s The Sunday Telegraph. “The accepted wisdom both within evolutionary biology and psychology is that men are the more competitive sex.”
However, Benenson also found the results only applied for same sex assessments. “Men are more competitive towards women than women are towards men,” she said.
The scientists have not yet found out why women are more competitive with each other than men are, but speculate it may be to do with raising children.
“We do not know why this is, but theoretically it is likely that women with children need resources more than men with children do,” Benenson explains.
“Women generally are the primary caregivers around the world. Therefore, women would be more envious than men of someone with lots of resources that they did not have.
“The implications of the results for understanding human society are important in that they indicate that while women and men employ different competitive strategies and often pursue different goals, women may have an even greater motivation to compete with same-sex peers than men,” the researchers write in their study, published in Scientific Reports.
“Thus, it seems reasonable that women may be more envious than men of same-sex peers who are better able to care for their children.”
Benenson conducted a study on 596 parents of both sexes who had children. Each person was shown a hypothetical individual who had a desirable asset that most people would want, such as a nice car or house, and asked to think about how that person would be judged by their real-life friends and family.
Half of the almost 600 people in the study were asked to think about how this person would be viewed by men in their life, and the other half asked to assess how women they knew would see the individual.
Research into the competitiveness between genders has been ongoing for decades and has often been cited as part of the gender pay gap issue.
A 2019 study found that women were less likely to try again after losing out in a competition, adding to previous findings that women are more likely than men to shy away from any form of competition.
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The Media Washes Its Hands of the Bragg Indictment
There are two ‘medias’. There are the clickbait ranters out front and the smarter folks in the back who address a more literate audience. For the longest time they were on the same page when it came to Trump. Both hailed the Mueller investigation and the associated investigations. But, with the Bragg indictment, there’s a break.
I chronicled a few of those yesterday with Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern and Vox’s Ian Milhiser, the legal people for two of the big names in lefty digital media, washing their hands of the indictment.
The Trump Indictment Is Not the Slam-Dunk Case Democrats Wanted – Mark Joseph Stern/Slate
The dubious legal theory at the heart of the Trump indictment, explained: Ian Millhiser/Vox
There are now even stronger voices in the lefty legacy media backing far away from it.
The Trump indictment is a dangerous leap on the highest of wires – Ruth Marcus/Washington Post
The Trump Indictment Is a Legal Embarrassment – Jed Handelsman Shugerman/New York Times
Both of these are the sorts of media folks you might expect to be using strong language in attacking Trump, not in attacking a case against him.
Much like Communist propaganda, you can read as much into the boosters as the bashers. Here’s Jennifer Rubin, a woman who sold her soul to defend and project virtually any lefty power meme, playing defense. "Bragg doesn’t show all his cards in his case against Trump" – Jennifer Rubin/Washington Post
The confidence here is overwhelming.
The media is moving away from this. It doesn’t want to invest in the Bragg case the way that it did in the Mueller investigation and it’s very loudly signaling not to hold it accountable.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-media-washes-its-hands-of-the-bragg-indictment/
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One MSM blackout needs to happen… here’s why
Professionals have long striven to analyze and treat mental illness. The magnitude of an individual’s degree of mental illness often depends on various circumstances.
Many emotionally challenged people act out in an effort to gain attention. This is somewhat like an emotionally immature child throwing a temper tantrum to get their way.
Some people never grow out of this damaging behavior. It morphs into what is referred to as “Histrionic Personality Disorder” (HPD). The condition is characterized by an unhealthy drive to constantly seek attention.
Psychology experts believe the condition can evolve from “a brain-wiring response to early developmental trauma caused by neglect.”
As America continues to mourn the tragic deaths of dozens of shooting victims, these comparisons are being made about those who commit these heinous crimes. What compels these lunatics to secure a weapon and open fire on innocent people? How can someone justify indiscriminately killing other people?
Some experts believe it’s a thirst for attention. These mentally unstable individuals are starved for attention. As they drift deeper into their mental illness, they realize one sure way to get that attention.
Kill those who they believe ignore them and get themselves plastered all over every television set and computer screen across the nation.
These crazy mass shooters, especially those who are shooting innocent children at our schools, are seeking attention. As soon as the smoke settles from another insane killing spree, a flood of media attention ensues.
These people get exactly what they want: publicity and fame! Liberal talk show host Bill Maher believes this is a huge part of the problem. Many experts agree.
If the media would stop glamorizing these horrific events, the appeal for public notoriety would be erased. Maher thinks we need to take drastic steps.
The HBO host thinks there needs to be an immediate blackout on media coverage of mass shootings. He believes the more media attention given to the killers, the greater the number of those who will be inspired to kill.
This seems like such a logical strategy. The more the drama-seeking media promotes this insanity, the more frequently these tragedies happen. To boost ratings, brainless media moguls are fueling a devastating crisis. If the news cycle would stop glorifying this insanity and the legal system would adequately punish those who kill, we might get a handle on this crisis and at the same time save lives.
https://patriotclash.com/msm-blackout-needs-to-happen-heres-why/
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I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle
I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders. My worldview has deeply shaped my career. I have spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations: children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor.
For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt.
All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, which had been established a year earlier.
The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus.
During the four years I worked at the clinic as a case manager—I was responsible for patient intake and oversight—around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors. The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences—including sterility.
I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.
Today I am speaking out. I am doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue—and the ways that my testimony might be misused. I am doing so knowing that I am putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.
Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.
Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The center’s physician co-directors were essentially the sole authority.
At first, the patient population was tipped toward what used to be the “traditional” instance of a child with gender dysphoria: a boy, often quite young, who wanted to present as—who wanted to be—a girl.
Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.
I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school.
This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then. There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.
The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.
Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).
The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.
To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist—usually one we recommended—who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.
That’s all it took.
When a female takes testosterone, the profound and permanent effects of the hormone can be seen in a matter of months. Voices drop, beards sprout, body fat is redistributed. Sexual interest explodes, aggression increases, and mood can be unpredictable. Our patients were told about some side effects, including sterility. But after working at the center, I came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor.
https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-saving-trans-kids
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9 April, 2023
America's red wave of trans bans continues: Indiana and Idaho become latest Republican states to outlaw sex change surgeries and puberty blockers for children under-18
Indiana and Idaho have become the thirteenth and fourteenth states to ban puberty blockers and sex change surgery for under-18s.
Indiana Gov Eric Holcomb, a Republican, signed his state's ban — which also included hormone therapy — into law yesterday after it passed a vote in the Legislature.
The new law gives minors currently receiving transition care until the end of the year to stop doing so. Starting July 1, transgender youth under 18 will be prohibited from accessing hormone therapy, puberty blockers and surgeries in the state.
The move comes just a day after Idaho governor Brad Little made it a felony to offer any transgender care to minors, saying he was protecting minors from treatments that could do 'irreversible damage'.
They join a growing list of Republican states raising concerns over transgender care for minors, which can be irreversible. But opponents claim they violate children's human rights.
Medical providers maintain that some of the care now prohibited by the law, including hormone blockers are 'reversible treatments'. But supporters of the legislation argue that there is too little evidence on the long-term health consequences of the treatments.
There is no federal minimum age for providing trans youth with gender-affirming care including surgeries, hormone therapies, and pubery blockers. States have therefore set their own policies, resulting in a patchwork of laws across the US.
Upon signing the bill on Wednesday, Holcomb said: 'Permanent gender-changing surgeries with lifelong impacts and medically prescribed preparation for such a transition should occur as an adult, not as a minor.'
There are about 4,100 transgender children in Indiana and 2,100 in Idaho, according to the California-based Williams Institute.
Indiana's ban is set to come into force on July 1, with youths already on treatment required to stop receiving them by the end of the year. Some of the medications affected include gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) analogues, commonly known as puberty blockers, and estrogen supplements that lower the amount of testosterone the body makes.
BMJ editor warns children are being rushed into sex change surgery
Kamran Abbasi said in an editorial in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) that the approach by doctors in the US was 'not in line with the strength of the evidence'.
It also bans gender reassignment surgeries for minors, which hospital representatives in the state say they do not routinely carry out.
Medical guidelines generally do not recommend genital surgeries before a child turns 18.
Mr Holcomb said surgeries and treatments for gender reassignment should only be offered to people as adults.
Idaho's new law, signed by Gov Brad Little on Tuesday evening, goes into effect January 2024.
Mr Little said: 'In signing this bill, I recognize our society plays a role in protecting minors from surgeries or treatments that can irreversibly damage their healthy bodies.
'However, as policymakers, we should take great caution whenever we consider allowing the Government to interfere with loving parents and their decisions about what is best for their children.'
Gov Little's Idaho office said it had received nearly 20,000 calls and 11,500 messages from people who were in favor of the legislation as of Tuesday evening.
Last week the state also signed into law a bill that restricted transgender children's access to school bathrooms. The legislation bars students from using locker rooms, changing facilities, and bathrooms that don't match up with their sex assigned at birth.
Gov Little recently vetoed a bill that would allow parents to sue schools and libraries for $2,500 if they contain material deemed 'harmful to minors' — defined as material related to homosexuality or 'intimate sex acts'.
Idaho and, more recently Indiana, add to at least a dozen other states that have taken steps to ban or severely curtail access to transgender healthcare services.
In response to the Indiana law, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) - a liberal legal advocacy organization that specializes in cases pertaining to reproductive healthcare, voting rights, and discrimination - has filed a legal challenge.
The organization slammed the move as 'devastating' for transgender youth.
Ken Falk, ACLU legal director for Indiana, said: 'This law would be devastating to trans youth and their families, causing them serious injuries and forcing those who can to uproot their lives and leave the state to access the gender-affirming care they need.'
The case was brought on behalf of four transgender youths, a doctor and a health care clinic who allege that the law violates the 14th Amendment and Medicaid requirements.
The 47-page lawsuit also asks the court to find the law unconstitutional and asks for it to block the state from enforcing the measure.
At least 12 other states have enacted partial or total bans on transgender care for minors to date.
Utah, Arizona, South Dakota, Iowa, Tennessee, Mississippi and Florida all ban transgender care for minors.
Bans in Arkansas and Alabama have been blocked by the courts, while the one in West Virginia makes an exception allowing doctors to prescribe medical therapy if a teenager is considered at risk for self-harm or suicide.
Georgia's ban allows a limited exception to continue treatment for those who began receiving care prior to July 1, 2023
And in Texas, Republican Gov Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a directive in February 2022 designating most forms of transgender healthcare for youth as 'child abuse'. This amounted to a de facto ban that has impacted as many as 29,800 transgender youth.
Major US medical organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association have thrown their weight behind gender-affirming care for youths.
President Joe Biden has also signaled support, having met with trans TikTok activist Dylan Mulvaney. At the time, he applauded her 'days of girlhood' video series, which he had watched.
But the US is increasingly becoming an outlier when it comes to transgender care having imposed no federal age limit on treatments.
Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands and swathes of other European countries have taken a more cautious approach — imposing age limits for certain transgender treatments.
The editor of prestigious medical journal the BMJ has also warned that trans children in America are being rushed into sex change surgery 'without any psychological support'.
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Whence the Holy Grail?
If this continued hold on the popular imagination is not rooted in any genuine Christian doctrine or tradition, where does it come from? The answer is weird, and not wholly satisfactory for anyone wanting a simple, straightforward explanation.
In his essay, Reichert does a solid job of quickly explaining where Grail stories originate: namely, medieval France and England, with some pre-Christian Celtic mythological motifs sprinkled throughout. Twelfth- and 13th-century French tales called romances first start to talk about a Grail, and to introduce the figure of Joseph of Arimathea as a key figure, Reichert writes. Joseph of Arimathea is a bit player in the Christian Gospels as the man who takes Jesus’ body after his death and secures a burial site for it. But according to Reichert, 12th-century poet Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie seems to be among the first installments in the Grail extended universe, building out Joseph’s character, and positing that through him the chalice traveled West and ultimately settled in Britain. Python fans will be familiar with Joseph of Arimathea as the figure who may or may not have been dictating his last words on the wall of a cave, promising “he who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of Aaargh.”
The Pythons, it is clear from the Joseph of Arimathea name drop, knew their Grail lore. A gag like the line “She’s been setting light to our beacon, which, I just remembered, is grail-shaped,” assumes an additional layer of humor when you know that it isn’t at all clear what it would mean for something to be “grail-shaped.” The etymology of the word “grail” to mean cup is itself uncertain, and the earliest mentions of a grail in Arthurian lore describe it as a sort of jeweled, not especially intrinsically holy, serving dish carrying food, and not a cup. And the self-important Brits trying to retrieve the Grail (or at least look at it) from a remote castle of taunting French knights is in fact a rather literal representation of how these myths were handed down to us. Far from being quintessentially British, Arthur, his knights, and their quests, were initially French creations, perhaps inspired by legends brought over by Welsh emigres to Brittany, France, in the fifth and sixth centuries.
“Those guys were scholars,” said Brian Cogan, a Molloy College professor currently on sabbatical, and author of Everything I Ever Needed to Know About _____* I Learned from Monty Python. “Those guys were much better educated than we are, with just their Cambridge and Oxford basic degrees.”
I think we all need a quest. It’s a very good way of looking at life. What is our ambition? What are we doing?
Writing just before de Boron was Chrétien de Troyes, the French poet credited with inaugurating the literary Grail tradition with his unfinished (or is it?) work, Perceval ou Le cont du Graal. Throughout the 13th century, certain familiar characters from de Troyes were reimagined and recontextualized in subsequent tellings by other authors, the way superheroes in comic books are today. We all know Bruce Wayne lives at Wayne Manor with his butler Alfred after his parents were killed in front of him when he was a young boy. But fans may choose different continuities where Robin is not a young circus performer named Dick Grayson, but Batman’s son, Damian Wayne.
Medieval scholar Juliette Wood offers a concise summary in a 2002 article for the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium. While noting “there is no simple line of influence,” the various Grail stories from de Troyes onward usually include the following elements in some form or other:
A mysterious vessel or object which sustains life and/or provides sustenance is guarded in a castle which is difficult to find. The owner of the castle is either lame or sick and often (but not always) the surrounding land is barren. The owner can only be restored if a knight finds the castle and, after seeing a mysterious procession, asks a certain question. If he fails, as the knight does, everything will remain as before and the search must begin again. After wanderings and adventures (many of which relate to events which the young hero failed to understand the first time), the knight returns and asks the question which cures the king and restores the land. The hero knight succeeds the wounded king (usually the Fisher King) as guardian of the castle and its contents.
The idea of a (Holy) Grail seems to have kicked off out of nowhere in the 13th century, spawning a variety of weird, eerie stories that involve unidentified disembodied hands extinguishing candles, mysterious chapels in the woods, and talking severed heads. They also often conclude with a lot of narrative loose ends. These mystifying stories with no readily apparent historical catalyst have created what scholars call “the Grail problem” of trying to determine just what the Grail is, and why. Wood describes a “proliferation of theories” as scholars through the years have tried to synthesize the complex nature of the various diverging Grail romances into a single coherent narrative.
According to Wood, our current understanding of the Grail comes to us through the Victorians, the result of an explosion of aesthetic and historical interest in the medieval era in Britain. The British reclaimed Arthur and his knights from the French, and solidified them as part of their national identity. At the same time, a host of ideas about the strange Grail stories began to develop. These ideas assumed the Grail romances contained information about “real or imagined philosophical systems” that could “transform individuals and society, but which threaten the establishment.”
Some contended the tales were Christianized adaptations of Celtic myth. Perhaps, went another line of thinking, they were a coded history of the Knights Templar, or the early days of the Holy Roman Empire? Since they all contain a coming-of-age component, others theorized that the Grail romances were descriptions of pagan initiation rituals that had survived as folklore.
It was the Victorians taking the whole thing too seriously that seems to have appealed to Monty Python’s sensibilities. “They realized how silly things are,” Cogan said. “All authority is essentially silly. All establishment figures are essentially silly, and there’s no particular reason to believe in political leaders.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/holy-grail-legend
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Fight Against Biden ‘Conservatives Need Not Apply’ Hiring Rule
The Biden administration is considering a regulation that would enable bureaucrats to screen out conservatives during the vetting process.
Forty-one people representing 35 organizations wrote a letter opposing the rule in a public comment exclusively provided first to The Daily Signal.
“This regulation twists proven hiring requirements into vague standards that easily slide into ideological capture and away from the actual task of vetting,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who led the effort, told The Daily Signal in an exclusive statement. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation).
“Are you critical of affirmative action? Have you tweeted something negative about the vice president? Then you, too, could be barred from civil service, regardless of qualifications,” Roberts added. “In the Biden regime, the new rule could more simply be written as ‘conservatives need not apply.’”
The comment responds to amendments that the Office of Personnel Management—the federal government’s human resources department—proposed on Jan. 31 in the Federal Register. As Heritage senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky explained in The Daily Signal, OPM aims to amend the “personnel vetting investigative and adjudicative processes for determining suitability and fitness” for government employment (88 FR 6192).
The period for public comment on the “Suitability and Fitness Vetting” amendments ended this week.
The term “suitability and fitness” refers to an agency’s decision “that an individual does or does not have the required level of character and conduct necessary” to work in a federal agency. This assessment has more to do with a prospective employee’s character than any qualifications for the job.
The current regulation, 731.202(b)(7), disqualifies applicants for “knowing and willful engagement in acts or activities designed to overthrow the U.S. government,” a largely uncontested standard. The vast majority of Americans would agree that no one who seeks to overthrow the U.S. government should be allowed to work in that government.
Under Biden, however, the OPM aims to replace that standard with four more ambiguous standards. Under these rules, an applicant would be disqualified for:
Knowing engagement in acts or activities with the purpose of overthrowing federal, state, local, or tribal government.
Acts of force, violence, intimidation, or coercion with the purpose of denying others the free exercise of their rights under the U.S. Constitution or any state constitution.
Attempting to indoctrinate others or to incite them to action in furtherance of illegal acts.
Active membership or leadership in a group with knowledge of its unlawful aims, or participation in such a group with specific intent to further its unlawful aims.
“We are deeply concerned that this rule will encourage discriminatory hiring practices that have nothing to do with an applicant’s qualifications,” Roberts and the other signers write in the letter. “In addition, this rule would add unnecessary confusion and restrictions to the ability of agencies to hire.”
The signatories note that the first standard “is not dissimilar to the current standard,” but warn that “the other three proposed standards are so broad and vague that they would allow hiring managers to reject candidates solely on the grounds of being lawfully critical of government policy. This openly subjective factor in evaluating the ‘character’ and ‘fitness’ of job applicants risks abuse in any administration.”
“For example, opinions on abortion, the Second Amendment, or climate change, or membership in an association that actively works to change the law on such issues, whatever side of the political aisle they are, could be used by a hiring manager to unfairly reject an otherwise well-qualified, excellent employee for any number of federal agencies, even when their duties have no relevance to those issues,” the signatories warn.
“Likewise, agencies could reject anyone who questions the acts and behavior of government officials with no regard for individual competency,” they add. “Should a strong critique of the defense secretary threaten the eligibility of someone who wishes to serve in the Securities and Exchange Commission? In any administration, this sort of ideological discrimination is unwarranted and dangerous, and the terms used in the proposed change, ‘intimidate’ and ‘coerce,’ have become synonymous—wrongly so—in the eyes of some, with vigorous, active speech that seeks to change opinions and federal and state laws.”
Roberts and the other signers argue that “the nebulous nature of the proposed rule’s new standards is counterintuitive to an agency’s objective to evaluate the character and conduct of those seeking to enter civil service.”
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Caitlyn Jenner Backing Candidates Who Oppose Transgender Athletes in Women’s Sports and ‘Gender-Affirming’ Care for Minors
Arguably the best-known transgender person in the world, Caitlyn Jenner, is putting her celebrity behind a political action committee that will support candidates who oppose gender surgeries for minors and transgender women competing in women’s sports.
Ms. Jenner, who won a gold medal in the decathlon at the 1976 Olympics and became a household name starring in “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” launched her political action committee, Fairness First, this week. The PAC is described on its website as “non-partisan in nature,” though Ms. Jenner is a Republican and an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump.
“Our plan is simple,” the website says. “We will protect our children by rejecting radical gender ideology in our schools and in youth sports, from the top of the ballot to the bottom.”
Ms. Jenner, who transitioned to a female from a male in 2015, says she supports equal rights for transgender persons and runs an eponymous foundation that “promotes equality and combats discrimination” against transgender persons through grants. Yet her views on trans women in women’s sports and medical transitions for minors are unorthodox — even heretical — among most transgender activists and the left.
“No radical gender ideology! No boys in girls sports! No life altering surgeries for minors! That’s what Fairness First Pac is all about,” Ms. Jenner tweeted. She also rails against what she calls “the woke plague running rampant in this nation.”
Transgender rights activists aren’t happy. One respondent tweeted plastic surgery before-and-after photos of Ms. Jenner’s daughter, Kylie Kardashian, a beauty mogul who first enhanced her looks at age 15, with the tagline, “Life altering surgeries for minors.”
A blogger and transgender activist who works for the Transgender Law Center, Serena Daniari, tweeted, “As a trans person, when you first came out, I truly felt like you were going to be an advocate for us. Instead, you have gone on to spread lies and have thrown us under the bus constantly. You waited a lifetime to become your true self, why prevent others from doing the same?”
“The Radical Rainbow Mafia is becoming more militant by the day,” Ms. Jenner tweeted back in a long exchange with Ms. Daniari. “Not all trans people march in lockstep with their views. Diversity of thought is a good thing.”
Ms. Jenner first spoke up about her opposition to transgender women competing in women’s sports after a University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer, Lia Thomas, won a NCAA Division I women’s championship and broke records. Winning her races by body lengths and standing on the podium with shoulders wider than any competitor, Lia Thomas’s physical advantages from having gone through male puberty were hard to ignore, her critics say.
“We must protect women’s sports. At all costs. What Lia has done, beating biological women to win a Division I national championship, is anathema to what sports represents and the spirit of competition.” Ms. Jenner wrote in an op-ed. She called Ms. Thomas “one of the worst things to happen to the trans community.”
While Ms. Jenner’s opposition to transgender women competing in women’s sports runs counter to the views of the progressive left and transgender activists, it is in line with the majority of Americans. Nearly 60 percent of Americans think transgender women should not compete in women’s college and professional sports, according to a May 2022 Washington Post-University of Maryland poll. It finds that 68 percent of Americans say transgender women would have “a competitive advantage over other girls” in youth sports.
Lia Thomas is not the only transgender woman beating her female competition. Track, wrestling, and now golf are the latest sports to contend with this issue. This week, a transgender golfer, Breanna Gill, won the Australian Women’s Classic. Ms. Gill is now reportedly facing death threats — a testament to how virulent this debate has become.
The debate about transgender medical care for minors is even more heated, because the risks of getting it wrong are dire. The number of young people identifying as transgender has skyrocketed in recent years, leading to serious questions about how much psychological assessment and time is needed before prescribing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries. Several European countries have hit pause or are rehauling their procedures for medical transitions for minors.
Thirty states have passed or are considering legislation to restrict or ban gender-affirming care for minors, according to the Williams Institute. The issue is becoming a litmus test for politicians on both sides of the aisle.
Florida’s Board of Medicine and Board of Osteopathic Medicine, with Governor DeSantis’s blessing, both passed rules banning the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender surgeries for minors. President Trump released a video on his Truth Social platform in January vowing, if elected, to punish doctors who provide medical transitions to children. “Under my leadership, this madness will end,” Mr. Trump said.
Ms. Jenner isn’t the first celebrity to face backlash for coming out against the traditional leftist orthodoxy on transgender rights, but she is one of the most high-profile. The author of the “Harry Potter” books, J.K. Rowling, is often called a “TERF” — a trans exclusionary radical feminist — for her views on transgender issues.
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7 April, 2023
Working-class voters didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left them
Jeff Jacoby
MARCY KAPTUR, THE longest-serving female member of Congress in US history, has represented Toledo, Ohio, in the House of Representatives since 1983. Nicknamed "Glass City" because of its many glassmaking companies, Toledo is known to fans of TV's "M*A*S*H" as the hometown of Corporal Max Klinger — who was played by Jamie Farr, a Toledo native. It's also the city where Jeep is headquartered and where the Mud Hens have played Minor League Baseball for well over a century. "But perhaps nothing sums up the Glass City better than hard work," the Toledo Blade observed in 2019, describing the city as a place whose "collar was blue" almost from the day it was settled.
Kaptur, a Democrat, was born and raised in Toledo and absorbed its working-class ethos. But her party, she fears, has lost touch with blue-collar voters like the ones she represents.
For years Kaptur — who describes herself as "a hardscrabble working-class person" — has been warning Democratic leaders that they are losing their traditional connection to working-class Americans. She has compiled a chart that ranks every congressional district by median income, with Democratic-held districts highlighted in blue and those held by Republicans in red. The wealthiest district in America, with a median household income of $157,049, is California's 17th Congressional District, represented in the House by Democrat Ro Khanna. At the bottom of the list is the Puerto Rico district represented by Republican Jenniffer González-Colón, with a median household income of just $22,237.
That is no anomaly. In Washington today, Democrats overwhelmingly represent the wealthiest districts in America, while those with lower incomes are far more likely to send Republicans to Congress.
Things were different when Kaptur came of age.
"In the era in which I was raised, Democrats represented those who have less and Republicans represent those who have more," she has said. In an interview with Business Insider last week, she asked: "How is it possible that Republicans are representing the majority of people who struggle? How is that possible?"
The answer is that Democratic priorities are increasingly out of step with the needs and concerns of voters in poorer, working-class communities.
Upholding the dignity of blue-collar work used to be an integral element of Democratic messaging. In 1968, for example, Lyndon Johnson urged Congress to authorize a manpower program that would help unemployed Americans find jobs — not merely for income, but because work would give them "dignity, independence, and self-sufficiency."
But while Democrats continue to pay lip service to the interests of the working class, they have become the party of cultural elites and intellectuals who have little in common with the non-college-educated working people in heartland communities. "The sad truth," University of California, Davis professor Lisa Pruitt wrote last year in Politico, "is that coastal progressive condescension toward workers has become second nature to many Democrats."
At times that condescension is so raw it makes headlines. Speaking at a San Francisco fundraiser during his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama notoriously described blue-collar residents of "small towns in the Midwest" as "bitter" individuals who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." Even more notorious was Hillary Clinton's remark in 2016 that half of all Donald Trump's voters fit in a "basket of deplorables," which she characterized as "the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it."
Such disdain helps explain why so many voters who once would have been firmly in the Democratic camp have migrated to the GOP — and why so many Democrats have been unmoved by their departure. "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania," Senator Chuck Schumer said in July 2016, "we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin." That strategy proved a bust: In the November election four months later, Trump carried Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
At least in a numerical sense, the GOP is now the party of blue-collar America. In 2022, Republicans won an outright majority of working-class votes cast in US House races. Last month, a new Harvard/Harris poll found that in a hypothetical 2024 contest between President Biden and Trump, or between Biden and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, voters without a college degree would support the Republican by a 10-point margin.
Kaptur's valiant efforts to move her party back to its traditional focus on the interests of working people aren't likely to succeed. The Democratic base — blue America — is now in the nation's wealthiest, most highly educated enclaves. Democrats have bid goodbye to the working class, and working-class voters are returning the favor.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26874/working-class-voters-didnt-leave-the-democratic
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Women work harder than men – phooey!
Bettina Arndt
‘Women work harder than men,’ so read a sexist headline for an article earlier this year. Hardly unusual, given that the overburdened woman is a favoured theme with a media intent on singing women’s praises and denigrating men at every conceivable opportunity.
But this anthropological study takes the cake. It involved two female anthropologists who, believe it or not, gave Fitbits to farming and herding groups in the Tibetan borderlands. Fitbits are activity trackers which were used by the herding groups to measure the steps taken by men and women in their working day. The anthropologists found that these Tibetan women walked on average just over 12,000 steps per day, while men walked just over 9,000 steps.
‘Women work much harder than men,’ proclaimed the elated anthropologists, claiming that this ‘sheds light on the gender division of work across many different kinds of society’. That makes the assumption that the number of steps matters more than other metrics for measuring work, such as effort in physical lifting, danger in jobs like the village blacksmith, let alone the value of the job, the skills required, and the income generated.
No matter. More grist to the mill celebrating women and putting down men…
The overworked women theme gets a run every time The Australian Bureau of Statistics publishes data on how Australians use their time. In the past whenever this data set was released, the Bureau pandered to the feminist narrative with press releases highlighting men’s failure to do as much housework and childcare as women, rarely even mentioning the hugely disproportional amount of paid work done by men.
There’s been complaints to the Bureau about this and finally the organisation responded with a more balanced headline last year when the latest results were published. ‘Females do more unpaid work, males do more paid work,’ said the ABS media release, but naturally this resulted in flurry of news reports highlighting women’s burden and not even mentioning the male contribution. Totally omitted from all media coverage was the fact that the amount of extra work done by men is huge – men work 46 per cent more paid hours than women.
The ABS does not make it easy to figure out who really works harder overall. We decided to take a look at total contributions to the household, including childcare, domestic activities, as well as time for education and employment-related activities. That gives a measure of how busy men and women are, but excluding personal activities like recreation, shopping, personal care, social interaction etc.
Looking at the data this way, we find all the previous surveys showed men were busier contributing to their households than women. But last year the results were from a survey taken during Covid lockdowns when there wasn’t so much paid work going on, and this showed women as fractionally busier, namely 15 minutes per day.
But here’s the truth about how men pulled their weight during Covid for their families and the response they should have received if we had a fairer media.
Fathers worked 70 per cent more hours than partnered males without children – an average of 5:33 per day vs 3:16. Thanks Dads for working so hard to provide for your families.
Partnered women without kids worked 27 per cent less time than unpartnered women – 2:34 vs 3:32. That’s so generous of you to support them, guys.
Male sole parents spent 170 per cent more time educating themselves than females. What a great example for your kids.
Male sole parents also coped much better than females – being much less likely to feel rushed or pressed for time. Good job, Dads.
Men spent 38 per cent more time helping out friends and neighbours. Your community appreciates that support.
Men also increased the amount of time spent on domestic activities by 34 per cent (women’s time didn’t change). You showed them that given a chance, men do their bit.
When child-care facilities closed down during Covid, it was mainly fathers who stepped up – increasing child-care time by 67 per cent compared to previous surveys (female increase was 10 per cent). Thanks, Dads. We know many of you loved that extra time with your kids.
All this talk about unpaid work provides a convenient smokescreen diverting attention from the central fact that men’s hugely greater paid working hours make male earnings absolutely critical to the family enterprise. It may be very unfashionable to talk about men as breadwinners but that’s still the yoke that most partnered men bear.
Many years ago, I wrote an article for the Fairfax newspapers’ Good Weekend magazine about who gets the better deal in marriage. It was a real struggle getting the article approved.
In it I told a story about a Victorian teacher, Mary, who had been planning to retire early from her job. But then her surveyor husband, John, accepted his company’s early retirement package to pursue his life-long dream to work as an artist. When I interviewed Mary, her husband was painting three days a week and spending the rest of his time on community work. He was as happy as Larry.
Mary loved her job but wasn’t keen on spending ten more years in a very demanding, stressful position. ‘I’d prefer to be part-time but then I think, “No, I can’t. I have no choice.”’
She envied John’s freedom. ‘Who did you have lunch with today?’ she’d ask him, through gritted teeth. ‘I ask about his day and feel like stabbing him to death!’ she said, with a good-natured chuckle. She admitted she can’t understand why men aren’t complaining more about their side of the deal. ‘I don’t understand why it doesn’t build up more resentment.’
Well, we live in a society that is so busy highlighting women’s drudgery that men simply aren’t allowed to complain about being forced to work full-time all their lives to pay the mortgage, often in jobs they hate, whilst many women still have choices. They often have the option of dropping out of the workforce to care for young children and then, returning to shorter working hours if at all, and retiring far earlier.
The result, of course, is far less superannuation. I wrote two years ago exposing feminist myths about older impoverished women and privileged men, pointing out that women’s lower super is a direct result of a lifetime spent working less than men. They get to spend their partners’ higher earnings – women control the purse strings in most relationships – and they are usually beneficiaries of their partners’ retirement benefits.
Naturally, in a civilised world, there wouldn’t be a competition about who works harder. Sensible folk realise men and women must work as a team to share the burdens and rewards of family life. But that reality doesn’t suit the feminist narrative promoting winners and losers in their endless gender war.
Finally, two funny little good news items.
The first emerged with the release of another survey from the ABS – this time the Personal Safety Survey, the source of Australia’s best data on domestic violence. The Australian reported the exciting news that despite all the alarmist reporting predicting a second ‘pandemic’ of domestic violence during lockdown, that violence actually fell during that period. This important news was ignored by all other media.
Back in August 2021, I wrote a blog about the feminists’ great Covid domestic violence fundraiser which revealed that all the proper evidence at that time was showing no increase in violence. But despite this, the feminist’s lobbying produced an astonishing 150 per cent increase in the domestic violence industry’s annual handout from the Feds – leaping from $100 to $250 million per annum at least until 2022-23.
Surely, we can find some parliamentarians to ask questions in Senate Estimates suggesting this money be paid back, now that official proof is in that it was based on a fraud?
Then there was delightful news from ANROWS, showing we may be winning the propaganda war. Their latest four-yearly survey shows almost half of Australians believe women and men equally commit domestic violence, more than 1/3rd believe that women going through custody battles make up or exaggerate claims of domestic violence, while a similar number believed it is common for sexual assault accusations to be used as a way of getting back at men.
The ABC naturally expressed much alarm at this development. But we were rejoicing. The truth is finally winning through. Hallelujah.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/women-work-harder-than-men-phooey/
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SPLC to Face the Music for ‘Hate Group’ Defamation as Lawsuit Clears Major Hurdle
The Southern Poverty Law Center routinely brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” placing them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, but most lawsuits aiming to hold the SPLC accountable for this alleged defamation have failed.
On Friday, however, a federal judge denied the SPLC’s motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit, allowing the case to proceed.
The SPLC branded the Georgia-based Dustin Inman Society an “anti-immigrant hate group” in February 2018 after the SPLC had previously stated in 2011 that it did not consider the society a “hate group.” The society, named after a 16-year-old Georgia boy killed in a 2000 car crash caused by an illegal immigrant, aims to combat illegal immigration.
“After telling the Associated Press in 2011 that we were not a ‘hate group,’ the SPLC changed their mind and made us an ‘anti-immigrant hate group’ within days of their registering as active lobbyists against pro-enforcement, immigration-related legislation here in the Georgia Capitol,” D.A. King, the society’s founder and president, told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement Tuesday.
King claimed that the SPLC’s “goal was clearly to paint us as the extremists and to marginalize us in the eyes of state lawmakers and the media. That effort was largely successful.”
As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC took the program it used to monitor the Ku Klux Klan—the Intelligence Project—and weaponized it against conservatives and Christians, branding them “hate groups” in an effort to raise money and demonize its ideological opponents. The SPLC has an endowment of more than $500 million and bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. Amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019 that led the SPLC to fire its co-founder, a former employee came forward, calling the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”
King’s lawsuit quotes Heidi Beirich—then-director of the Intelligence Project—who told The Associated Press in 2011 that the SPLC did not consider the society a “hate group,” but rather listed King as a “nativist.”
“His tactics have generally not been to get up in the face of actual immigrants and threaten them,” Beirich said. “Because he is fighting, working on his legislation through the political process, that is not something we can quibble with, whether we like the law or not.”
The lawsuit claims that the SPLC did not indicate that King or the Dustin Inman Society had changed their activities between 2011 and 2018—in fact, many of the statements and activities the SPLC cites as evidence that the society is a “hate group” date back to before 2011.
The lawsuit cites an SPLC definition for “anti-immigrant hate group” that dates back to 2020, which no longer appears on the SPLC website—although the center appears not to have adopted a new definition:
Anti-immigrant hate groups are the most extreme of the hundreds of nativist groups that have proliferated since the late 1990s, when anti-immigration xenophobia began to rise to levels not seen in the United States since the 1920s. Most white hate groups are also anti-immigrant, but anti-immigrant hate groups single out that population with dehumanizing and demeaning rhetoric. Although many groups legitimately criticize American immigration policies, anti-immigrant hate groups go much further by pushing racist propaganda and ideas about non-white immigrants.
While the SPLC brands the society an “anti-immigrant hate group,” it does not point to any specific evidence that King or the society “maligned an entire class of people” or fit the definition cited above. “Further, a cursory review of [Plaintiff] DIS’s website would have revealed that the Board of Advisors of [Plaintiff] DIS is a diverse group of Americans with a variety of racial and immigrant backgrounds,” the lawsuit alleges.
Inger Eberhart, a member of the society’s board and its director of communications, is a black woman; Everette Robinson and Catherine Davis are also black; Mary Grabar is a legal immigrant from Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia); Maria Litland is a legal immigrant who appears on the Austrian Society of America website; and Sabine Durden-Coulter immigrated legally from Germany. Durden-Coulter lost her son in a 2012 car crash caused by an illegal immigrant (with no connection to the crash that killed Dustin Inman).
While the SPLC claimed not to have any knowledge of the society’s board in legal filings, the SPLC’s article on the society notes its “eight-member board of advisors.”
The lawsuit alleges that the SPLC twisted statements from King and Fred Elbel, another member of the society’s board, out of context.
The SPLC quotes King in a 2007 Georgia Republican Club meeting, warning that certain illegal immigrants are “not here to mow your lawn—they’re here to blow up your buildings and kill your children, and you, and me.” King sent The Daily Signal a link to the original report on the meeting, which shows that King was referring to illegal immigrants “from countries with known ties to terrorism.”
The SPLC also quotes Elbel’s words—in which the board member claims to “hate ’em all,” listing a broad swath of ethnic and other groups including White Anglo-Saxon Protestants—from a 2004 internal Sierra Club offshoot discussion group post Elbel says he intended as parody.
King sent a demand letter on Feb. 10, 2020, ordering the SPLC to retract its “hate group” accusation. The SPLC did not respond and continued to repeat the “verifiably false fabrication and accusation,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit notes that “by repeatedly claiming the mantle of specialized knowledge and expertise, and using a specific, fact-based definition to determine what a ‘hate group’ is,” the SPLC’s accusation “causes severe reputational damage and for the target to live in a climate of constant fear for personal safety and that of his family.”
The lawsuit cites the 2012 terrorist attack in which a man targeted the Family Research Council’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., after finding the council on the SPLC’s “hate map.” The man pleaded guilty to committing an act of terrorism and received a 25-year prison sentence. The SPLC condemned the attack, but has kept the Family Research Council on its hate map ever since.
The lawsuit also cites the March 2017 protest against Charles Murray, instigated by the SPLC’s accusation that Murray engages in “racist pseudoscience.”
The lawsuit also lists a plethora of statements the SPLC has made about the society, which King claims to be blatant falsehoods. Among other things, the SPLC has claimed the Dustin Inman Society was incorporated in 2003, when King in fact founded it in 2005; it has claimed that the DIS was previously known as the American Resistance Foundation; it has claimed that King worked on immigration issues since the 1990s, although he did not become interested in the issues until 2003; and it claimed King worked for the Georgia Coalition of Immigration Reduction in the 1990s, which he claims to be false.
“These admissions taken together show that Defendant SPLC not only fails to investigate or have expertise at all on groups it monitors, but instead shows reckless disregard for the truth and does not appear to perform any fact-finding at all, before labeling … DIS a ‘hate group,’” the lawsuit states.
King is seeking a trial, compensatory damages, punitive damages, and a permanent injunction ordering the SPLC to remove its accusations and issue a public retraction and apology.
While a judge dismissed a previous version of King’s lawsuit without prejudice in March 2022, the society’s president filed a new lawsuit in June. Judge W. Keith Watkins denied the SPLC’s motion to dismiss the new lawsuit on Friday. The judge’s ruling allows the lawsuit to proceed to the discovery phase, in which the society can demand the SPLC hand over documents to prove its case and the SPLC can demand society documents to defend itself.
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The Guilty Rich aren't 'Woke', they just want to look 'Woke'
In an excellent essay on Unherd, Kathleen Stock, while looking at whether or not Britain has a liberal elite, hit on a very important social phenomenon: what I call the ‘guilty rich’.
“What they do have is a suppressed sense of guilt for being so rich, a vague fear that they might make the wrong joke, and a fervent hope that the moralising will stop soon so they can talk about the football or cricket instead. Many of them also have children who lecture them about social justice. They can’t stand up to them either.”
We have a generation of successful people who, if not intellectually certainly emotionally, have swallowed the marxist claptrap about their riches being somehow obtained at the expense of people who aren’t rich. This sense of guilt, to my thinking, explains the continued existence of the Liberal Democrats as a sort of scapegoat onto which these guilt-ridden millionaires can offload their sins by voting for trendy-sounding (“Layla’s a pansexual you know”) people espousing right-on policies while not rocking their selfish economic boat by, for example, supporting the building of houses, warehouses or reservoirs.
So when we talk about the ‘British Elite’ we are, in part, talking about these people. As Stock points out, such folk are not personally ‘woke’ or even especially liberal it’s just that while they are “... not intolerant of political disagreements; it’s just that people don’t really have them at dinner parties.” These successful people are, to make a link with a more lower class bunch, just richer posher Deanos.
“Deano is a man in his late 20s or 30s, is married (or is at least in a long-term relationship), works in real estate or some similar service profession, is comfortable but not rich, is too busy enjoying the finer things in life to be engaged in politics and crucially – is a homeowner.”
The question is whether the rich and successful but not politically engaged or interested people - mostly men - who Stock describes represents the elite or just a group of people whose wealth and success insulates them from the worst excesses of the ‘woke’ world? Or maybe they embrace ‘wokeness’ - hyperliberalism - publicly at least partly out of fear. Ed West, writing on the same issue seems to suggest so:
“Why do people consistently think that they have to pretend to be more progressive to rise up in their chosen careers? Because those are the establishment views. If I was advising a young person going to work in any area of the British establishment, whether the civil service, MI5, the National Trust, the judiciary, the Girl Guides, the education bureaucracy or anything else, I would advise them to keep any conservative opinions to themselves.”
Perhaps the rich, as well as being guilty, are increasingly fearful. Stories about ‘cancel culture’ and the hounding of people from office for breaking one or other progressive taboo make these people, regardless of their success, ever more worried about what they say and do. This especially applies to those heading up organisations where the middle management now filled with millennial humanities and social science graduates steeped in the ideologies of hyperliberalism. Peter Klein and Nicholai Foss published some research into this suggestion and argued that:
“Wokeness arises from middle managers and support personnel using their delegated responsibility and specialist status to engage in woke internal advocacy, which may increase their influence and job security.”
We can probably argue all day about what we might mean by ‘wokeness’ but it is noteworthy that Klein & Foss’s contention didn’t get dismissed out of hand. Indeed Ed West in the article I cite above hints at the same issues, pointing at ‘Diversity, Equalities and Inclusion’ (DEI) as a factor in creating a more fearful world for ‘unwoke’ senior executives: “...almost every major institution has sizeable DEI departments whose function is to make progressive ideas the social norm.”
So it isn’t just that, as Kathleen Stock hinted, the powerful and successful are guilty about their riches but that they are also fearful of those who work for them, people granted power by the law to assert rights and protections. Senior management fear accusations of racism, misogyny, transphobia or homophobia and tend therefore to behave like The Bear Who Left it Alone and bend over too far backwards in making sure they don’t offend what they see as the expectations of DEI (and very often Human Resources in general). The problem is that this over-reaction creates a new problem for the organisation by making frankly ridiculous things hard to question or challenge. To continue with James Thurber’s teetotal bear:
“In the end he became a famous teetotaler and a persistent temperance lecturer. He would tell everybody that came to his house about the awful effects of drink, and he would boast about how strong and well he had become since he gave up touching the stuff. To demonstrate this, he would stand on his head and on his hands and he would turn cartwheels in the house, kicking over the umbrella stand, knocking down the bridge lamps, and ramming his elbows through the windows. Then he would lie down on the floor, tired by his healthful exercise, and go to sleep. His wife was greatly distressed and his children were very frightened.”
The downside risk of not being woke (as an institutional leader or senior manager) remains, however, far greater than the downside risk of bending over backwards to accommodate a middle management steeped in hyperliberal ideology. In the latter case the worst might be a critical article in the Daily Mail or a Tory MP spluttering about it at PMQs, in the former case the leader might find themselves out of a job. And while being brave and out of a job sounds heroic, our institutional boss has a big mortgage, school fees to pay and the annual skiing trip to fund. A little bit of public wokeness is as nothing next to the instinctive self-preservation of top managers!
I’ve a feeling that, while the guilty rich (as Kathleen Stock and Ed West suggest) are not especially woke, they do not see hyperliberalism as either a threat to the institutions they lead or as a problem for wider society. They may be privately conservative - married, family, old-fashioned personal values, entirely content with capitalism - but they are ideologically liberal in that their instinct is to support greater ‘rights’ and to protect minorities. Our guilty rich know they can protect themselves and their families from the worst of ‘woke’ and worry far more, at least in private, about the left’s economic agenda than about its social aims. And they see value in projecting something of the hyperliberal to the world since it may, as well as protecting them from cancel culture, provide new opportunities for advancement.
I don’t know who is or isn’t elite. I’ve a suspicion that, ‘woke’ or not, most of the people running the nation’s grand institutions have a genealogy encompassing a lot of people who used to run those same institutions 50, 70 or 100 years ago. The fact that Giles with his Oxbridge degree in English Literature prides himself on being very liberal as he climbs the ranks in the civil service doesn’t mean he isn’t, with his Rear-Admiral grandfather and Oxford professor uncle, firmly part of the nation's establishment, with all the privilege that grants. The problem is that Giles, and hundreds of other Giles’, tell us that they aren’t part of the elite and point to anonymous (or merely Tory) people over there as the people who are really running the country’s institutions.
In one respect those Tories and assorted anonymous bankers and businessmen are running the country but these people are dependent on Giles and his ilk to do that running. So they seek to neutralise hyperliberalism by bringing it inside the tent (such as when the new Conservative government in 2010 enthusiastically completed Labour’s Equalities Act) so as to sound good and look right. PR and HR departments shovel out press releases and policies designed to present the right image to what they perceive as a ‘woke’ millennial market - Pride days, lighting up the HQ on Trans Visibility Day, celebrating ethnic diversity, and encouraging non-Muslim employees to forgo lunch during Ramadan. Sensitivity training is given to staff and rules are passed about pronouns and gender identity. And the guilty rich who run the organisations and institutions feel confident their position is safe, they won’t be called out, won’t get cancelled and will get the big promotion when Sir Gerald retires.
https://simoncooke.substack.com/p/the-guilty-rich-arent-woke-they-just
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6 April, 2023
Defining nationalism
The article below rightly points out that the word"nationalism" is used in several different ways. I like Orwell's definition in his "Notes on Nationalism":
"Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.
Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, NOT for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it IS the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception."
Current debates over nationalism seem to generate more heat than light. Critics claim it amounts to creeping fascism. Champions claim it’s the way out of conservative malaise and failure. Figuring out who’s right is hard to assess, though, since disputants use the word to refer to so many different things.
We might expect this equivocation from critics on the left. But even those who endorse some form of “nationalism” don’t seem to agree on what it means.
Some, for instance, define it as a popular or democratic resistance to a global empire. Others equate nationalism with certain policies, such as those thought to boost working-class jobs. Some understand it as a broader disposition to promote the national good.
It’s fair to ask: If “nationalism” means so many different things to different people, what extra work does the word do, beyond sowing confusion?
Indeed, what some refer to as “nationalism” may be mostly a robust defense of national loyalty. If so, then talking about that might help reverse the ratio of heat to light in the current debate.
Three Nationalists—Four Definitions
Each of the above views figured into a recent panel at the Catholic University of America. It addressed a simple question, “Are nationalism and Catholicism compatible?” The answers were far less simple.
Dr. Bradley Lewis from Catholic University’s School of Philosophy pointed out that what we often refer to as “nationalism” is simply a desire for democratic accountability. And this only exists at the level of nation-states, not in transnational entities like the United Nations.
First Things editor Rusty Reno defined it a bit more narrowly. He called nationalism a “priority-setting word” that signals a regrouping of national identity. Many feel the pendulum has swung too far toward global empire, he argued, so they turn to nationalism to “reconsolidate” power.
The related National Conservative coalition, in which Reno has figured prominently, likewise emphasizes the need to reclaim national sovereignty against an encroaching global regime. The NatCons’ homepage defines nationalism as “a commitment to a world of independent nations,” and their 10 broad principles include the rule of law, national independence, and free enterprise. At this level, NatCons sound like standard conservatives. But they also set forth more specific policy goals, such as provisions to boost domestic manufacturing and realign education to serve the national interest.
At the Catholic University panel, however, Jennifer Frey, a philosophy professor at the University of South Carolina, argued the National Conservative movement doesn’t offer meaningful solutions for working-class Americans. Frey saw nationalism as inextricably linked to “Trumpism.” As a result, nationalism is not likely to repair civic bonds when its advocates often reject civility outright.
Reno disagreed. Yes, Trump plays a role here. But Reno insisted that Trump prompted a shift in elite attitudes toward the middle class. Trump’s focus on the “forgotten man” of middle America went beyond his time in office and signaled to Democrats, including the Biden administration, to pick up the slack.
Reno offered as an example Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, a multi-billion-dollar spending package that will purportedly help the middle class. The Biden administration is right in spending $700 billion-plus to “make American jobs” and “force manufacturing back into the US,” he said. “That’s nationalism, folks.”
Though Reno helped draft the statement of principles, it’s not clear whether this policy opinion would be endorsed by the NatCon movement at large. It is a diverse coalition. As a result, National Conservatism, like its near synonym “nationalism,” is hard to define. It takes on different shapes and colors depending on whom you ask.
Accordingly, the fourth panelist, Michael Dougherty of National Review rightly noted the protean character of nationalism. “The reality is that it’s not one thing,” he said.
A Protean Character
So, the question remains: Is nationalism a set of policy rhetoric and priorities, a disposition, a sense of national loyalty and identity, democratic accountability, resistance to global empire, Trumpism, a bipartisan priority, or a combination of these elements? Or, to reduce this blooming buzzing confusion to three options, is it mostly about policies, a principled defense of the national good, or a populist revolt against elites?
The chameleon-like feature of “nationalism” has long been a problem. The writer Mark Helprin described the word as parametric: a constant parameter applied to variables. Nationalism takes on new shapes depending on the context in which it is applied. The word has different functions in different historical contexts. But the ambiguity persists even within a single historical context and within similar religious circles. So it’s fair to ask how fruitful these debates will be if the disputants fail to settle on a common definition.
And, again, if it means so many different things to different people, what use is the word? For instance, if nationalism just means supporting policies that help, or at least claim to help, boost manufacturing jobs in the US, why do we need the word? Why not just talk about industrial policy? If it’s about reasserting the national interest and embracing national identity, why not call for patriotism?
Indeed, the word seems to hide a deeper ambiguity. Arguments over nationalism often seem to act as proxies for other questions: What is the nation? What is its purpose? Is the national interest something worth pursuing?
Perhaps getting clarity on the answers to those questions might help bring the current debate over nationalism into clearer focus and create common ground between some self-identified nationalists and traditional conservatives.
Humane National Loyalty
French political thinker Pierre Manent and the late Pope St. John Paul II offer visions of humane national loyalty. In his 2006 essay “What Is a Nation?”, Manent argues that, of all available political regimes, the nation-state best integrates communion and consent. The nation, as we now understand it, was a unique development of Christian Europe, the Church having emerged as a “third party” to the ancient conflict between city and empire.
Though not strictly political, the Church reordered the way people viewed human association in antiquity. Manent writes that Christianity’s animating principle, charity, allowed the Church to go “deeper than the city and further than the empire.” But the Church also limited the state’s dominion over souls, while also broadening the outlook of people beyond their village or city. In this way, the nation reflected a broader Christian charity and communion, which had a salutary influence on citizenship and loyalty to the nation.
John Paul similarly describes the development of nations from Christian Europe. In his book Memory and Identity, he describes the nation as a community, based in a territory and distinguished from other nations by its culture. Christianity shaped the European character and contributed to the growth of native and national cultures.
For John Paul, the nation is linked with ideas of native land and patrimony—“the totality of goods bequeathed to us by our forefathers.” A nation’s patrimony was originally conceived merely in terms of the natural generation through family and tribe.
The Church added a spiritual dimension to the idea of patrimony. “The Church herself, in carrying out her task of evangelization, absorbed and transformed the older cultural patrimony,” writes John Paul. Christ’s inheritance orients the patrimony of native lands to an eternal homeland.
Yet this new dimension of patrimony doesn’t diminish its temporal content. Underpinning the idea of nations is a deep bond between the spiritual and the material, the culture and territory. National identity is tied up with territory, but also with language, history, religion, and cultural traditions. Patriotism, for John Paul, is “a love for everything to do with our native land: its history, its traditions, its language, its features.”
John Paul and Manent both acknowledge that the virtue of national loyalty can take on a toxic form. John Paul refers to the distortion of national loyalty as nationalism: an excessive love of one’s country at the expense of others. “Of this, the twentieth century has supplied some all-too-eloquent examples, with disastrous consequences,” he writes.
Manent points out that the spiritual communion of the nation, properly conceived, has “little to do with the toxic nationalisms and exclusive valorization of one’s people” as seen in totalitarian regimes.
Aristotle understood moral virtue as a means between opposing vices of excess and deficiency. The virtue of national loyalty can similarly slip into excess (a toxic nationalism) or deficiency (apathy toward or hatred of one’s home, or “oikophobia” as the late Sir Roger Scruton called it).
Any remedy for these distortions need not sacrifice true national loyalty—the proper appreciation of one’s heritage and home. It is precisely the nation, out of all political options, that best meets the spiritual and temporal needs necessary for human flourishing.
Measuring Perspectives
Both Manent and John Paul II use “nationalism” as a pejorative. As Jennifer Frey noted in the panel, recent nationalist movements have largely rejected civility and law and order outright. Such forms of nationalism, which often place national interest as the highest good, are incompatible with any notion of humane national loyalty, which assumes a properly ordered love of nation, love of God, and love of fellow man.
But, as we’ve seen, this is not the only definition of “nationalism” on offer.
What some refer to as “nationalism” is simply a desire for national sovereignty and democratic accountability. Likewise, the NatCons’ defining feature, abstracting from the details, might be a desire to defend and restore national identity against those who seek to dissolve it.
Notions of national sovereignty and resistance to global empire needn’t be at odds with humane national loyalty in principle. Moreover, if a proper understanding of the “national interest” includes human flourishing, then pursuing the national interest could be compatible with—and even an expression of—humane national loyalty as well.
Industrial policy is another matter and represents a departure from postwar American conservatism. Still, if NatCons’ priority is the national interest rather than specific policy, then perhaps the best way for conservative skeptics of, say, industrial policy, to engage NatCons is not to denounce them. It’s to offer evidence that such a policy is not—despite good intentions—in our national interest.
In sum: if “nationalism” refers principally to loyalty to one’s nation, then surely it’s worth defending. But, then, why call it nationalism? If what we’re talking about is retaining a love for one’s country and homeland, what extra work is that term doing?
Perhaps the answer will turn out to be that it has forced a debate over the virtue of national loyalty. In any case, if we want to defend the good of our nation, then we should try to use our terms carefully.
https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/defining-nationalism
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British PM to consider law change to protect ‘biological’ women
Watchdog says move could offer ‘clarity’ on women-only spaces but create risks on equal pay and sex discrimination
Rishi Sunak is to consider official advice that says changing the definition of sex in law would create greater “clarity” around women-only spaces.
Amending the Equality Act 2010 to specifically refer to “biological sex” merits further consideration, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) concluded after the government asked it to consider the pros and cons of such a change.
But a change in the definition could be “more ambiguous or potentially disadvantageous” when it came to equal pay and direct and indirect sex discrimination, it warned.
The move risks reigniting the row over transgender rights and comes just days after Sir Keir Starmer tried to clarify his stance on the issue.
Sources close to Rishi Sunak said he “remains committed to his campaign pledge” to reinforce rights around biological sex and would support equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, who called for the review, in “taking that work forward”.
In its review, the EHRC found “no straightforward balance” but said it had come to the view that defining sex as biological sex “would bring greater legal clarity in eight areas”.
These include hospital wards where the EHRC said that a “biological definition of sex would make it simpler to make a women’s-only ward a space for biological women”.
When it came to sport, it would mean that organisers could exclude trans women without having to show the move was necessary because of fairness or safety.
But a change in the definition could be “more ambiguous or potentially disadvantageous” when it came to equal pay and direct and indirect sex discrimination, it warned.
It stated: “On balance, we believe that redefining ‘sex’ in EqA to mean biological sex would create rationalisations, simplifications, clarity and/or reductions in risk for maternity services, providers and users of other services, gay and lesbian associations, sports organisers and employers.
“It, therefore, merits further consideration.”
Earlier this week, Sir Keir said that for the vast majority of people “let’s say 99.9 per cent, biology matters” in defining a woman.
But he added that voters were more interested in the cost of living crisis and that Labour was trying to agree a “commonsense, respectable and tolerant position”.
Baroness Kishwer Falkner, the EHRC’s chair, said there should be “due regard to any possible disadvantages for trans men and trans women”.
She said: “Our response to the minister’s request for advice suggests that the UK government carefully identify and consider the potential implications of this change.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/kemi-badenoch-trans-women-biological-b2314144.html
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The rule of lawyers
Rod Liddle
Have you had your fourth Covid booster jab yet? They are being very quiet about it these days. I used to be bombarded with injunctions to attend my local clinic, but not any more. This is a shame because a new study suggests that unless I am properly up to date with my injections, I may soon be involved in a serious car crash.
The research, published in the American Journal of Medicine, shows a very strong correlation between someone’s Covid vaccine status and the probability of them being involved in a very bad road accident. The correlation suggests that those who have not been vaccinated are 72 per cent more likely to be involved in some kind of awful smash-up – a remarkable finding, but one I am prepared to believe. The greater road safety which pertains to the fully vaxxed is not, of course, a direct consequence of Pfizer’s miraculous elixir, but because those who have not had their jabs are more ‘reckless’ and ‘anti-authority’ than those who, like me, did as they were told by the government. Therefore they ignore speed limits and perhaps even have no regard for the median strip, instead hurtling headlong into incoming traffic laughing maniacally and screaming: ‘To hell with you, Bill Gates, 5G and the Zionist occupation government. I do what I want when I wa…’
As I say, this seems to me a reasonable proposition. But then so would a proposition that states if the government told us all to jump off a very high cliff, people who eschewed taking the vaccines would be 72 per cent more likely to continue living by the simple expediency of not actually jumping off a cliff. Or maybe 100 per cent. The study I quoted was clearly intended to show anti-vaxxers as being perverse and stupid – and perhaps they are. But there are health benefits, as well as deficits, in telling authority to get stuffed, surely.
Meanwhile, I am forced to return to a question which I find myself asking at least three times each week: should we intern all the lawyers on vast narrenschiff moored in the middle of our great estuaries, and force them to make the kind of plastic tat the Chinese churn out for western markets? Or just intern the majority of them? We have so many, after all – they are bred like lilacs out of the dead ground. Indeed, we have roughly ten times the number of lawyers per head of population than Japan, and more than any other country except for the USA. They have been our big growth industry these past 40 or 50 years, and there seems no end in sight to their fecundity and malign involvement in how we should run the country.
The latest lot to have done something genuinely malign call themselves ‘Lawyers Are Responsible’ – which they most certainly are, for all manner of wickedness. These 120 largely high-born liberal bellends have signed a ‘Declaration of Conscience’ which they say will prevent them ever having anything to do with the prosecution of anti-oil protestors such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. They also say they will never represent any branch of the oil industry. Among their number is the obnoxious Jolyon Maugham – famous for his hopelessly failed legal actions designed to stop or reverse Brexit and also for bragging about clubbing a fox to death.
There’s also Sir Geoffrey Bindman and Tim Crosland (who should have been jailed when he released the Supreme Court decision on the Heathrow Airport extension, in direct contravention of the law). I wonder if their collective antipathy to the oil industry enjoins them to exist in chambers – and of course private homes – devoid entirely of light and heat? Betcha it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, what does it say about their supposed principles?
But that is not the main issue, of course. Lawyers are duty-bound to represent whoever needs representation, regardless of whether the lawyer in question is in agreement – the so-called ‘cab-rank rule’. The essence of the point, then, is that their own views should not come into the matter – they are there to advocate from a position of neutrality, according to the law of the land. They are not there to pick and choose. Do these ‘responsible’ lawyers believe that BP and Shell are more wicked than serial killers, rapists, kiddie fiddlers? Or are these last named occupations things of which they approve and would be happy to represent? Why single out the oil industry? Similarly, do they believe the protestors should be allowed to cause whatever havoc they wish on the streets of our cities, with no recourse to punishment whatsoever? Even when they are stopping ambulances from reaching hospitals, or simply preventing key workers from getting to work? It is a standpoint of almost unfathomable imbecility.
However, it does highlight the mindset of the modern left. There is no debating with these people: they have no capacity for it. Everything, for them, is cut and dried – a bizarre Manichaean world in which some people are right and others are not merely wrong, but evil. It is the same Stalinist certainty you will hear when Labour MPs tell you that debate mustn’t be ‘fetishised’ and can be harmful. The same impulse which leads them to insist not merely that people can use whatever gender pronouns they feel appropriate, but that the rest of us must, on pain of legal redress, be forced to follow suit. It is the certainty which kept the Tavistock Clinic open for business for too many years and which insists that all white people are racist and there’s an end to it. A totalitarian mindset which is utterly intolerant of opposing views.
Then there is the magnificent, overweening narcissism. These lawyers believe that their personal opinions are more important than the legal system they have been expensively trained to serve. Nothing is more important than their own ridiculous views. Disbar the lot.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/__trashed-87/ ?
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The Australian Labor Party backs cost-linked wage rises for the low-paid
Leftist policies often sound fair and reasonable to start with. But then the adverse results of them start coming in. And the idea of a big wage rise for the lowest paid seems wonderful at first. And puts the government in a very good light as "caring".
But the idea is in fact a policy to throw many poor people out of a job. People who are very low paid are low paid for a reason. Their services are seen as worth only a minimum. And in many cases that will be a bare minimum. Raise what you have to pay them and that pay will exceed the value of what their services are worth. So they will be fired. Employing them will have become a losing proposition and no longer be seen as worthwhile. Not all of the low paid will be laid off but many will be. Not so much of a warm glow in that
Hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers should receive inflation-linked pay rises, the Albanese government has urged, as business warns the economy risks being plunged into recession if unions succeed in their push for a 7 per cent increase for 2.6 million workers.
Urging the Fair Work Commission to ensure the real wages of the lowest paid “do not go backwards”, the government submission to the annual wage review will seek to limit the inflation-linked rises to workers on the national minimum wage and lowest award rates.
Employer groups said granting the ACTU’s “economically reckless” claim for a $57-a-week increase would add $12.6bn a year to employer costs.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry will urge the commission to limit the pay rise to 3.5 per cent, which at $28 a week would represent a real pay cut but be the highest ever proposed by the employer group.
In a joint statement, Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke said economic conditions remained challenging, with Australians facing high inflation due to supply-chain disruptions and the war in Ukraine.
“While nominal wages growth has lifted, high inflation has seen real wages fall behind,” they said.
“This is having the greatest impact on Australia’s low-paid workers and their families – many of whom don’t have the savings to fall back on or wages that cover the rise in living costs.
“These workers are more likely to be women, under 30 years of age and employed as casuals. The government does not want to see them go backwards.”
Labor’s stand in support of low-paid workers came as the government appointed five people with union backgrounds to the commission, declaring it wanted to fix the Coalition’s “shameless stack” of the tribunal with appointees from employer backgrounds
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5 April, 2023
Doctor: This is the 'wild' difference between male and female brains - and why women are healthier, better at decisions and less likely to go to jail
I don't think he has got the whole of the story here but he has got a large part of it
A top psychiatrist has revealed one of the biggest differences between male and female brains.
Dr Daniel Amen, a brain specialist from California, studied over 200,000 SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography) scans to ascertain the key disparities between men and women.
Women have healthier and busier brains, Dr Amen explained, which means they go to jail 14 times less than men do.
The difference is largely due to women having much healthier activity in their prefrontal cortex which is responsible for forethought, judgement, impulse control, organisation, planning, empathy, and learning from the mistakes you make.
Despite the increased activity, women are also more likely to suffer depression than men.
Dr Amen spoke to Lisa Bilyeu, co-founder of Quest Nutrition, about the key differences between male and female brains.
'Females generally have healthier brains, they're busier brains,' he said. 'The limbic part of their brain is very busy - which puts them at a higher risk for depression,' he said in a video.
However, women have stronger frontal lobes which is an indicator of better decision making.
'Women go to jail 14 times less than males,' the psychiatrist said.
Bilyeu was quite shocked by the revelation. 'Is it because [women] are able to assess a danger or the consequence more than a guy?' she asked, to which the psychiatrist agreed.
Dr Amen also went on to explain that a woman's additional predisposition to empathy and care negatively impacts her lifespan.
'Married men live longer than single men, but not only do married women live shorter lives than single ones, they also die sooner,' Bilyeu said.
The psychiatrist revealed that men live longer because they have a woman caring for them.
'A man will live longer because [his wife] makes him go to the doctor and she yells when he's texting and driving.' 'But women [have shorter life spans] because of the chronic stress from men.'
Dr Amen advised that the only way to level the playing field would be if women started taking care of themselves more.
'For example, if you're on a plane, and the cabin pressure goes down, you need to put your own mask on first.' He added, 'Women don't do that. I have seen women take care of everybody else and they don't take care of themselves.'
Many were amazed by Dr Amen's findings and how males and females differ innately.
'I didn't know there was an actual physical difference in the brain!' one woman wrote. 'I always thought differences were explained by hormones.' 'This makes so much sense, and it's so important to educate people.' 'Thank you for this invaluable knowledge, this is so informative.'
But some were sceptical of the findings. 'Measuring blood flow differences between brains doesn’t necessarily correlate with higher or lower performance in cognitive certain skills.'
'Things aren't so clear cut, this is trying to explain complicated processes away.'
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America's strong-arming gender clinics REVEALED: Most parents of trans kids say they were 'pressured' into transitioning their child
A large study of parents of children who identify as transgender has uncovered worryingly large numbers who complain of 'pressure' to transition their children, even though they felt it was not in the child's best interests.
The survey of 1,655 parents, published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, found that more than half of the parents who were referred to gender therapists said they felt directed to put their kids on medical treatments or change their wardrobe.
The paper, by Northwestern University psychology professor Michael Bailey, comes amid concerns over rising numbers of young people identifying as trans and non-binary, and as Republicans push for bans on trans medical treatments for minors.
It also follows the damning testimony of a former employee of a Missouri youth gender clinic, where doctors allegedly told parents that they could either have a transgender child — or one that would commit suicide.
The responses came from parents of children who identified as trans, and who were concerned that the decision was more to do with a mental health issue, social media and peer pressure than a genuine discomfort with their gender.
They were part of an online group called Parents of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria Kids. Rapid onset gender dysphoria is part of a controversial theory that the sharp rise in trans-identifying youths is a social contagion.
Three-quarters of the trans-identifying children were biological females. Most of them came out as trans at the same time as friends and appeared to be responding to cues from social media, the parents said.
'When they turned to their trusted medical professionals for help, they were told they must affirm their child's newly-created identity and support their gender exploration, which means supporting them through social, medical and surgical transition,' the group said in a statement to DailyMail.com.
'If these parents express any doubts, or ask that their child's mental health issues be resolved first, they are warned that they are causing further emotional harm to their child — and might even drive them to suicide.'
As well as describing pressure from gender clinics, they said their children had developed emotional problems on average four years before they expressed a desire to change gender, and that transitioning made their mental health worse.
Bailey that the respondents 'tended to be socially progressive' and voiced support for LGBT persons issues, but did not believe their adolescent and young adult children were actually transgender.
'Instead, they believe these youths are being socially influenced by peers and other cultural factors to assume a transgender identity,' Bailey told DailyMail.com.
'Parents reported a lot of preexisting emotional problems for the youths — on average, the problems began nearly four years before the gender problems did. It is not surprising, then, that many parents were unhappy that the gender therapists they had been advised to see pushed for gender transition.'
The responses were gathered between December 2017 and October 2021. Most of the respondents were mothers and fathers of a trans-identifying child, though some were stepparents, grandparents or adoptive parents.
Critics have derided the survey as self-selecting. Alejandra Caraballo, a prominent male-to-female transitioner and Harvard Law School instructor, dismissed the findings as 'surveys of anti-trans parents recruited from online anti-trans sites.'
Offering sex-reassignment treatment to kids has become a frontline issue in America's culture wars.
Children who identify as trans frequently change their name, pronouns, and how they dress. Some ask for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even surgery.
Trans activists, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and other major US medical groups, and the Biden administration say such care can save lives among a suicide-prone group.
Some say going through the 'wrong' puberty is harmful for trans adolescents.
Opponents of trans ideology say sex is determined at birth and cannot be changed, that medical groups have been hijacked by trans activists and that politicians must step in and stop parents, doctors, or therapists from permanently harming children.
Many are alarmed by the sharp uptick in teenage girls with autism and other mental health woes seeking gender-change drugs in recent years, and of new studies linking puberty blockers to weaker bones and osteoporosis.
America has in recent weeks witnessed a series of seminal moments in the trans debate that are seeing a growing number of pediatricians, parents, politicians, and even young trans people themselves question whether affirmation-on-demand is always the best answer.
In a bombshell whistleblower testimony this month, Jamie Reed, a former employee at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, revealed how the clinic administered a litany of irreparable treatments to minors, often without parental consent.
Reed said doctors would ask questions like 'do you want a dead daughter or an alive son?' to 'bully' children's parents into going ahead with gender transitions — under the pretense that not doing so would make them suicidal.
The Free Press, which published Reed's testimony, on Monday published the story of Caroline, who's 14-year-old son was given a puberty blocker to stop his sexual development and relieve his psychological distress by the St. Louis clinic.
'Instead of providing relief … her son experienced a devastating decline in his mental and physical health after this intervention.
'Within a semester, [he] went from all As and Bs to a report card dotted with Ds and Fs. Many days he found it impossible to get out of bed. He missed so much school that it triggered an official meeting about his truancy that included a circuit court judge.'
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Say, Uncle Sam: Stop Paying People for Not Working
A policy question these days that has befuddled federal lawmakers is why so many millions of people have not returned to the workplace in the post-Covid era. The labor force participation rate among employable adults is near a record low today. There are at least 2 million to 4 million employable adults who could and should be working but aren’t.
Very few people with even minimal skills can credibly say they can’t find a job. Employers report some 10 million job openings. Small business owners say their biggest problem is finding competent workers.
There are many explanations for why so many people aren’t working — fear of Covid, the skills mismatch, more people taking early retirement, and so on. But a major factor is that the federal government is back to doing what it did in the 1970s and 1980s. The welfare state today is paying people not to work — even a single hour.
That problem went away in the 1990s after many states, such as Wisconsin and Michigan, began reforming their welfare systems with work requirements. Speaker Gingrich and the Republican Congress in 1996 passed a historic bipartisan welfare reform bill that President Clinton signed into law.
That law required able-bodied welfare recipients to be in a job or training/education program to qualify for welfare assistance. It also placed time limits on welfare so it would not become a way of life.
Few laws in the last half-century have had such stunning success. Here is a quick summary of the impact, as reported by a Brookings Institution welfare analyst, Ron Haskins:
No. 1: Caseloads declined by 60 percent, and the number of welfare recipients fell to its lowest level since 1969.
No. 2: Between 60 percent and 70 percent of those leaving welfare got a job.
No. 3: The child poverty rate fell every year between 1994 and 2000 because parents were working.
No. 4: The federal government saved more than $50 billion (almost $100 billion in today’s dollars).
Despite these stunning successes, President Biden eviscerated all work requirements during Covid, and they haven’t returned. The House Ways and Means Committee reports that less than half of Americans collecting welfare benefits today are working. The Biden administration opposes work requirements.
Why? Do they want to make people dependent on the government?
Getting welfare recipients back into the labor force is good for the economy and will reduce government debt. But a pro-work policy is good for those who escape welfare dependency.
Every study shows that having a job is highly associated with better health, longer life expectancy, happiness, and improvements in family conditions. Children and spouses of someone who is working are better off.
There is dignity and a sense of self-worth from working.
America is a rich nation, and we should absolutely have a safety net so that those who fall on tough times, lose a job or become disabled — and that happens to almost all of us at some point in our lives — do not go hungry or homeless or suffer from deprivation.
Yet welfare is supposed to be temporary and a hand-up, not a handout. The goal of welfare was to end poverty, not perpetuate it.
The House Ways and Means committee chairman, Jason Smith, a Missouri Republican, said that restoring work for welfare requirements is “a top priority” of his panel. It should be a top priority for our country. Let’s make work, not welfare, pay.
https://www.nysun.com/article/hey-uncle-sam-stop-paying-people-for-not-working
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A Prime minister who doesn't know what a woman is
British author JK Rowling has slapped down the New Zealand PM after he fudged his response when asked by a reporter on Monday to “define a woman”.
Asked by broadcaster Sean Plunkett to give his definition of women at a press conference on Monday, Chris Hipkins responded: “I think people define their gender identity themselves.”
Rowling, who defines herself as “pro-women,” tweeted: “In the interests of balance, someone should now ask women how they define Chris Hipkins.”
The issue was raised in the wake of protests over anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Keen who was forced to leave NZ after she was attacked at a rally in Auckland in March. At the weekend Ms Keen vowed to return, but attacked Mr Hipkins as a “gutless coward”.
Mr Hipkins had condemned the violence at the Auckland rally, but said most of those present exercised their right to free speech respectfully. “I think (exercising the right to free speech” is something we should celebrate,” he said.
Plunkett used recent remarks on the transgender v women issue by UK Labour leader Keir Starmer to pinion Mr Hipkins.
Mr Starmer recently told the London Times that trans rights should not over-ride the rights of women, adding: “99.9 percent of women haven’t got a penis”.
Plunkett, a right-wing broadcaster recently banned from Twitter for life, asked Mr Hipkins: “Keir Starmer has said that he believes 99.9 per cent of women do not have penises, and I know it’s a strange thing for him to say, but given recent events in New Zealand, I’d ask again: how do you define what a woman is?”
Mr Hipkins said the question had “come out of left field,” and as he wasn’t expecting it, “it’s not something I’ve formulated an answer on”.
On Tuesday Mr Hipkins stood by his earlier response. “Ultimately, I’m aware that this is a very emotionally charged issue for some people, and as a leader, I don’t want to contribute to that,” he told NZ media.
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4 April, 2023
Calls for anti-Semitism probe into hard-left Corbynite who is set to become the next leader of British education union
There have been calls into a hard-left Corbynite who is set to become the next leader of Britain's biggest education union after he become embroiled in an anti-Semitism row.
Daniel Kebede, who will succeed joint secretaries Dr Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney as head of the National Education Union (NEU) in September, was seen speaking at a rally where the crowd allegedly chanted a song calling for violence against Jews.
Members of the audience chanted 'Khaybar, oh Jews', a song the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) says 'can be perceived as a threat of armed violence or forcible expulsion against Jews today'.
While Mr Kebede is not thought to have taken part in the chant video of the rally, which took place in Newcastle in 2021, showed him calling for people to 'globalise the intifada' - a phrase referring to uprising against oppression.
The primary school teacher, who was once forced to apologise for using an anti-Semitic slur while defending Jeremy Corbyn, was backed by the NEU, which said he condemns 'all acts of anti-Semitism and any attacks on Jewish people'.
The self-professed 'anti-racist' had been speaking at a Palestine Solidarity Campaign rally in Newcastle two years ago when the video was taken.
In footage he can be seen holding a microphone telling people it's 'time to stand together and oppose Apartheid, oppose occupation and fight for Palestinian liberation'.
He went on to say: 'Let's do it for Palestine, Ramallah, West Bank, Gaza - it's about time we globalise the intifada.'
As he handed the microphone over to someone else, there were chants of 'Allahu akbar' from the crowd.
The term intifada has long been used by people fighting what they see as the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory by Israel, and is commonly used by people to mean a legitimate uprising against oppression.
The Telegraph reports that at the same rally the audience chanted 'Khaybar, oh Jews', a song referring to battles between Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and Jews living in the oasis of Khaybar in modern day Saudi Arabia.
These battles, which the Quran claims took place after treachery by Jewish people, eventually led to the subjugation, mass expulsion, or slaughter of the area's tribal Jewish communities, the ADL says.
It adds: 'Invoking this slogan today at such a demonstration problematically shifts the complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a religious battle between Islam and Judaism.
'Moreover, in celebrating a past military defeat of Jews, this chant can be perceived as a threat of armed violence or forcible expulsion against Jews today.'
Mr Kebede's presence at the rally has sparked calls for an investigation from the Conservative Friends of Education, a Tory campaign group, which said it had 'serious concerns' about the impact these allegations could have on Jewish teachers and students in the union.
'It is essential to ensure that the biggest teaching union is free from discrimination and prejudice, and anti-Semitism,' it said in a statement
It added:' Ensuring a safe and inclusive environment for all members is a priority, and addressing this controversy is crucial to upholding those British values.'
A spokesperson for the NEU told the Telegraph: 'Daniel Kebede was present at a Palestine Solidarity Campaign rally in solidarity with Palestinians facing eviction in Sheikh Jarrah in 2021.
'In speaking to the rally Mr Kebede called for peace and justice in the Middle East and expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people.
'He used the slogan 'globalise the intifada' which is an expression of such solidarity, and of support for civic protests; it did not convey any support for violence.
'He wasn't aware of the chanting of 'Khaybar, oh Jews' and both he and the National Education Union completely condemn such chants, all acts of anti-Semitism and any attacks on Jewish people.'
It comes after Mr Kebede was forced to apologise after using an anti-Semitic slur while defending former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn online.
The 35-year-old claimed those close to the downfall of Mr Corbyn were being paid '30 pieces of silver' for book deals – the price for which Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus Christ in the Bible.
The phrase was used by the Nazis to suggest that the Jews were traitors and responsible for Christ's death.
Mr Kebede told the Mail in January that he was ignorant of its meaning: 'I did not know at the time that can be read as anti-Semitic. As soon as I learned this, I deleted it and my apology remains on my Twitter feed.'
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Is the cult of victimhood turning violent?
Brendan O'Neill
This week I read the most extraordinary and chilling statement. It was issued by a fringe group called the Trans Resistance Network. It was about the horrific gun attack at the Covenant School, a private Christian school, in Nashville this week.
The suspect in the attack is Audrey / Aiden Hale, a young woman who, according to the police, identified as a trans man. Hale was a former student at the Covenant School. She shot her way through the school doors and opened fire on anyone who crossed her path. Three kids, all aged just eight or nine, were killed, as well as three teachers. Eventually Hale was shot dead by cops.
Shockingly, the Trans Resistance Network’s statement contains just one paragraph on the barbarism at the school and six – six – on the troubles facing trans people like Hale. That is, it expresses fleeting sympathy for the slaughtered, and lingering sympathy for the person suspected of carrying out the slaughter.
The statement says there were two tragedies in Nashville yesterday. The first was ‘the loss of life of three children and [three] adults’. The second was that the killer ‘felt he had no other effective way to be seen than to lash out by taking the life of others’. It then goes on at length about the ‘virtual avalanche’ of hate and oppression faced by trans folks. It sounds paranoid in parts. Some right-wingers seek ‘nothing less than the genocidal eradication of trans people’, it says.
It ends by reminding the media not to misgender Hale. ‘[We] remind the media to respect the self-identified pronouns of transgender individuals…’ That is, respect this person suspected of shooting to death three children.
Everything about the statement feels morally warped. To equate the tragedy of the murder of children with the ‘tragedy’ of the suspect’s alleged gender confusions is moral relativism of the most depraved kind. To try to contextualise the grim atrocity that unfolded in the halls of that school by talking about the ‘near constant drumbeat of anti-trans hate’ borders on apologism. It should go without saying that nothing – absolutely nothing – explains extreme violence against children.
There is still much we don’t know about the Nashville massacre. The police have confirmed that Hale is the suspect, and that she was a biological woman who used he / him pronouns, and that her gender identity might have played a role in her decision to carry out the attack. ‘There is some theory to that’, they said. The vast majority of trans people will of course be as horrified by this school shooting as the rest of us are.
And yet, that statement from the Trans Resistance Network does speak to a broader problem today – the increasingly volatile nature of the cult of victimhood. It speaks to that modern urge to view oneself as belonging to the most abused and aggrieved social group on earth. And it points to something we should all be concerned about: the possibility that this fashion for victimhood, this ceaseless coveting of suffering that we see in various identity movements these days, is now giving rise to a belief that ‘lashing out’ is an understandable response to one’s ‘oppressors’.
Is the politics of victimhood moving into its violent phase? It’s something we need to think about. There have been some febrile and heated incidents in recent years that suggest that hyper-victimhood, the belief that your identity group is the most put-upon of all and might even be on the cusp of eradication, is nurturing a vengeful attitude among activists; an unstable level of intolerance against all those you judge as your persecutors.
Consider the events in Auckland on Saturday, when the British women’s rights campaigner Posie Parker was set upon by a heaving, fuming mob of trans activists and their allies. How else do we explain this feral hatred for a diminutive mum other than as an expression of weaponised victimhood, an outburst of the delusions of oppression that have gripped many in the trans lobby?
It was striking that some of the activists who descended on Auckland to abuse Parker talked about her as the great ‘Nazi’ oppressor and about themselves as the poor, puny victims of global transphobia. And yet we all saw with our own eyes that the opposite was the case: Parker was the victim here and it was the activists who covered themselves in the garb and slogans of victimhood who were the oppressors. It seems it is a short step indeed from the narcissistic fantasy that you are the world’s greatest victim to thuggishly lashing out against those you imagine are your victimisers.
Or consider recent acts of Islamist intolerance, such as the hounding of the Batley Grammar schoolteacher into hiding or the mob demands that the ‘blasphemous film The Lady of Heaven be withdrawn from cinemas. Here, too, fantasies of victimhood underpinned the intemperate cries for punishment and censure.
We don’t have to look too far into the past to see how truly menacing the cult of victimhood can become. The massacre at Charlie Hebdo in 2015 – wasn’t that the militant wing of identitarian self-pity? A ‘lashing out’ fuelled by the vain, fact-lite belief that Muslims are wounded even by cartoons?
It remains to be seen what motivated the atrocity in Nashville. But it seems increasingly clear that the self-pity and paranoia that underpin modern identity politics pose a grave threat to the sense of community that is essential in a healthy society. The more we incite people to view themselves as victims, and to view others as their tyrannical erasers, the more we will foster division, intolerance, instability and possibly worse. It is time to end this dangerous victim game.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/is-the-cult-of-victimhood-turning-violent/
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Learn the Lesson From Minnesota: Price Controls Don’t Work
In 2006, when Congress was negotiating the Medicare Modernization Act, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., proposed that a $41 per month cap be placed on premiums for Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit.
He worried insurers might offer a low entry rate, get customers hooked, as it were, then raise the rates to the point they were unaffordable. The proposal was rejected. Premiums opened at about $22 per month on average. Even today, 17 years later, they stand at about $32.
That has made Part D the rare government program that does its job for less than expected. Part D expenditures are down about a third from projections, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says nearly all those savings resulted from the clause in the Medicare Modernization Act that forbids the federal government from being involved in drug negotiations.
Americans have saved billions of dollars because a top limit price control was not enacted. Millions have been saved or given better quality of life by drug makers being incentivized to create new and better products rather than settle for a hefty payday from the government.
Lawmakers may not have learned the lesson behind what happened with Part D, but drug makers have. That’s why, in Minnesota, they are scrambling to influence the legislature to accomplish what Waxman could not and place a series of price restrictions on prescription drugs.
The proposal, HF 17 in the Minnesota House and SF 168 in the state Senate, is to create a seven-member Prescription Drug Affordability Board, appointed by the governor and leaders of the state House and Senate, along with an executive director and staff. It also calls for a 12-member Prescription Drug Affordability Council, appointed by the governor, to represent stakeholders, including patients, health care providers and, of course, pharmaceutical companies.
The Prescription Drug Affordability Board would review the prices of brand-name drugs, biologics, generic drugs and biosimilars based on the wholesale acquisition costs of those drugs within certain time periods or introductory prices. If the board determines a drug is priced too high, it would have the authority to set an upper limit at which insurance companies will have to pay, effectively disincentivizing pharmaceutical companies from ever trying to become more efficient or otherwise take action to lower the price.
Prices should not be based on wholesale acquisition costs, which essentially is a list price and does not come close to reflecting what patients actually pay for drugs after negotiations among pharmaceutical companies, pharmacy benefit managers, insurers and pharmacists. Locking in this higher price as the point of comparison will make Minnesota’s drug program significantly more expensive.
States spend more on health care than they do on higher education, roads, police or corrections. Only welfare payments and schools take bigger bites out of their budgets. So it’s doubly puzzling why Minnesota’s legislature would want to create a two-headed bureaucratic monster that will only make its third-leading expenditure more expensive.
Unless, that is, one considers who supports this measure. State Rep. Carlie Kotyza-Witthuhn, who led the hearing on the legislation in the House Commerce Committee, is the wife of Rory Witthuhn, senior director of actuarial consulting at United Health Group, one of the state’s largest health insurance vendors.
Two other Democratic-Farmer-Labor cosponsors in the House – Kristin Bahner and Steve Elkins – worked for Optum and Optum Technology, respectively. Rep. Jessica Hanson has worked for Anthem, a major insurer in the state, for 14 years. Another, Rep. Liz Reyer, worked for nearly 20 years at Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
Since 2017, employees at United Healthcare and Optum have given more than $25,000 to current sponsors of this legislation.
Two other groups that prominently support left-leaning health measures also are involved – AARP and the National Academy for State Health Policy. Both have conflicts of interest that aren’t mentioned in these debates. The state policy group receives funding from insurance companies and from Arnold Ventures, which funds Civica RX, a prescription drug non-profit attempting to produce its own generics to compete with other drug companies.
AARP receives more than a third of its income from United Health Group and Optum, two of the primary proponents of this measure.
The people who sell us our pharmaceuticals are all for this because they understand what Henry Waxman did not – that fixed prices are higher prices and the customers who are forced to rely on them do not benefit. The drug companies are doing fine. Time for Minnesota’s lawmakers to take care of the people instead.
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There is no good racism: Including anti-white racism
There’s been intense pressure to “do better” on racism over the past few years. Even, surprisingly enough, for children’s entertainment.
Dr Seuss’ books were pulled from shelves for allegedly racist imagery, Roald Dahl was scrubbed of potentially offensive references to race, sex and weight, even The Muppet Show received a content warning for unspecified “negative depictions of people or cultures.”
And the latest example of this activist overreach is Dilbert, whose creator, Scott Adams, has been dropped by every publication known to man just because he…oh, uh, called the whole of black America a hate group and advocated for racial segregation.
During a YouTube live stream, Adams reacted to a Rasmussen poll that asked 1000 Americans whether they agreed with the statement “it’s OK to be white.”
And after discovering that 8% of the 130 black respondents somewhat disagreed, with another 18% strongly disagreeing (that’s 34 black people in total), he offered some advice to any white people thinking about “helping" the black community:
If nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people, according to this poll, not according to me…that’s a hate group…and I don’t want to have anything to do with ‘em.
And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. Just get the f**k away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. […] You just have to escape.
Hmmm…
Setting aside Adams’ tenuous grasp of statistics, you might have noticed that 8% + 18% does not equal 50%. To make the numbers seem as damning as possible, he decided that the 21% of black respondents who weren’t sure how they felt about the slogan were also “not okay with white people.”
You might also have noticed that he chose to ignore the 7% of white respondents who disagreed with the slogan (or 20% if we’re using Adams’ “not sure means hate” counting system).
And last but not least, you might have noticed the odd wording of the question. Participants weren’t asked how they felt about statements like, “black people and white people are equal,” or better yet, “I do/don’t hate white people,” but specifically, “it’s OK to be white.”
The pollsters chose this phrasing because “it’s OK to be white” is a meme (popularised by, amongst others, the former grand wizard of the KKK), used to bait “the libs™” into objecting to a seemingly innocuous statement:
These k*kes will keep saying that if you think it is okay to be white, you are evil. They will be screaming that as they get shoved into cattle cars.
Hmmmmmmm…
Ironically, Adams reacted with all the fragility the trolls and white supremacists were hoping to provoke. Just, sadly, for the wrong team.
So Adams was a dumbass, cancel culture worked its magic, and we can all pat ourselves on the back for solving racism, right?
Well, not quite. Believe it or not, there have been dozens of similar racist remarks in the past few years. And hardly anybody batted an eyelid!
Take, for example, Elie Mystal writing for the Nation back in 2021:
I’ve said, here and elsewhere, that one of the principal benefits of the pandemic is how I’ve been able to exclude racism and whiteness generally from my day-to-day life. […]
I have, of course, still had to interact with white people on Zoom or watch them on television or worry about whether they would succeed in reelecting a white supremacist president. But white people aren’t in my face all of the time. I can, more or less, only deal with whiteness when I want to.
Or pick any one of New York Times editorial board member Sara Jeong’s tweets from her #cancelwhitepeople era:
White people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.
White men are bullshit.
White people have stopped breeding. You’ll all go extinct soon. That was my plan all along.
And who could forget Aruna Khilanani, who shared these thoughts about white people during a lecture at Yale:
White people make my blood boil […] I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a favor.
Hmmmm…
It goes without saying that you couldn’t publish comments like these about any other “race,” right?
I mean, don’t get me wrong, as Adams proved, you can say them, and yes, there are several hate groups dedicated to preaching this kind of bile about people of colour. But you’re not going to hear it during a lecture at Yale. Or see it at the Emmys. Or read it in the broadsheets.
Yet none of these people lost their jobs. None of them had to offer carefully-worded, sycophantic apologies. The New York Times (one of the many publications that dropped Adams) even defended Jeong after her tweets went viral. And while some will claim that this is just payback, or karma, or better yet, that it isn’t racism at all, what it really is, is an attempt to maintain racism under different rules.
Martin Luther King warned against this mistake decades ago:
We will not seek to substitute one tyranny for another, thereby subverting justice. We will not seek to rise from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage. This is why I say that a doctrine of black supremacy is as dangerous as a doctrine of white supremacy.
God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men, but God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race and the creation of a society where all men will live together as brothers.
Try as we might, we can’t have a partial ban on racism. We can’t pick and choose which skin colours we’re allowed to hate. We can’t keep clinging to this corrosive, divisive stupidity and wondering why we’re still not free of it.
Racism isn’t a competition where you win or lose. It’s not a game where you take turns being “it.” It’s a cancer that spreads until it infects everything. The only way to get rid of it is to cut all of it out.
In his spectacularly good essay, I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup, Scott Alexander argues that you only earn the right to call yourself “forgiving” if you forgive things that genuinely hurt you.
And in the same way, I’d argue that you only earn the right to call yourself “antiracist” if you oppose racism, whether or not it affects you.
Adams lived through the end of Jim Crow and contract buying and the war on black people…excuse me, drugs. He read the same news as everybody else about Charleston and Winthrop and Buffalo. He saw what happened to Rodney King and James Byrd Jr and Ahmaud Arbery, and not a word of “advice” for black people.
But one edgy survey and this man’s first idea is to call for racial segregation.
And while Mystal only advocated self-segregation, and Khilanani only fantasised about racial genocide, I think we can all agree that none of this leads anywhere productive.
The goal of antiracism isn’t to swap around who it’s acceptable to be racist towards every few hundred years. The goal is to outgrow this destructive, meaningless tribalism once and for all.
And I speak for at least 34 people (and therefore, apparently, all people) when I say we could all do better.
https://medium.com/illumination-curated/is-it-okay-to-be-racist-5c4fbeb28498
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3 April, 2023
University of Pittsburgh class erupts in laughter when professor claims there is NO difference between male and female skeletons
Anthropologists are usually pretty far Left. It's amazing what a committed Leftist can talk himself into believing. It's close to a mental illness. If blacks believed that the moon is made of green cheese, some white progressives would assert vigorously the cheesiness of our satellite
An anthropology professor at the University of Pittsburgh denied the difference between male and female skeletons to derisive laughter from students during a speaking engagement from college swimming champion Riley Gaines.
Gabby Yearwood is a professor whose research focuses on 'the social constructions of race and racism, masculinity, gender, sex, Black Feminist and Black Queer theory, anthropology of sport and Black Diaspora' according to his bio.
Gaines, a rising star on the conservative speaking circuit, is an advocate to keep student athletes who are born biological males out of women's sports. She spoke at the school recently and posed a question to her audience.
'If you were to dig up a human — two humans — a hundred years from now, both a man and a woman, could you tell the difference strictly off of bones?'
Yearwood responds: 'No' to laughter from the students in the audience, as well as Gaines.
The differences between male and female skeletons
There are notable differences between male and female skeletons, according to experts. 'Males tend to have larger, more robust bones and joint surfaces, and more bone development at muscle attachment sites,' the Smithsonian says.
'However, the pelvis is the best sex-related skeletal indicator, because of distinct features adapted for childbearing.' 'The skull also has features that can indicate sex, though slightly less reliably.'
They note that sex-related differences are not obvious in the bones of pre-pubescent children. However, there are some nuances, especially when it comes to intersex people, those born with a combination of male and female biological traits. About 1.7 percent of babies are born this way, according to Discover Magazine.
In addition, it's been reported that males were often overcounted because scientists would assume all questionable skeletons were male. After 1972, they were classified as 'indeterminate.'
Yearwood doubles down, saying that he's the 'expert in the room' on this issue.
'Have any of you been to anthropological sites? Have any of you studied biological anthropology? I'm just saying, I've got over 150 years of data, I'm just curious as to why I'm being laughed at,' he said.
At one point, Yearwood exclaims: 'I have a PhD!'
The Independent Women's Forum, who posted the clip, wrote: 'This is how far removed the Left is from reality that they must deny basic scientific facts.
'[Gaines] might not have a PhD in anthropology like Professor Yearwood, but she and her teammates know the physical advantages of biological males over females in sport firsthand,' they added.
According to the Smithsonian: 'Males tend to have larger, more robust bones and joint surfaces, and more bone development at muscle attachment sites. However, the pelvis is the best sex-related skeletal indicator, because of distinct features adapted for childbearing.
'The skull also has features that can indicate sex, though slightly less reliably.'
They note that sex-related differences are not obvious in the bones of pre-pubescent children.
Gaines was speaking about her experience competing against transgender women participating on female sports teams after she was forced to go head-to-head with University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas.
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New York progressives are anti-Asian across the board
Because Asians show up blacks by being different in appearance but still economically successful
It’s sure starting to look like New York’s progressives are simply anti-Asian.
Their latest cause célèbre, the “Good Cause Eviction” bill, aims to effectively bring some 2 million apartments in the city alone under a new statewide rent-control regime.
On top of being a sure housing-killer, it’s gotten the city’s Asian community rightfully up in arms.
Strongly represented among the city’s small-landlord community, they see this as yet another oblique attack on them by arrogant, far-off leftists.
Indeed, an association of Chinese landlords, the New York Small Landlords, has been fighting back against prog policies on eviction since the eviction moratorium — disastrous for smaller landlords — was declared in 2020.
But GCE is only the latest in a string of progressives efforts in the city and Albany that have hurt New York’s Asians.
Consider the effort to wreck the Big Apple’s merit-based admissions policies to academically rigorous schools.
The “problem” this aims to correct is precisely that Asian students (many from poorer backgrounds; many the children of immigrants) compete so effectively: 2021 saw them win 54% of freshman seats in selective high schools.
Mayor Bill de Blasio did major damage to the system on his way out of office, banning competitive tests for most “selective school” admissions, but the new administration left it intact in most of the city.
Which leaves Asian-Americans increasingly looking to charters as a way to find excellence in public education.
But the progs hate charters, too: They’re leading the charge against Gov. Kathy Hochul’s bid to allow dozens more charters to open in the city. If the left succeeds, it means no new charters for Asian neighborhoods.
Which explains the recent Asian American parents’ pro-charter rally.
Above all, there’s public safety. The left’s criminal-justice “reforms” helped power a massive rise in anti-Asian hate crimes.
Like the 2022 murders of Michelle Go and Christina Yuna Lee.
When New York’s Asian community raised their voices in response, all they got from the crime lovers in the Legislature and elsewhere was pabulum about “white supremacy” — and a total refusal to budge on the cause of the crimes, i.e. laws that leave murderous thugs free to walk the streets.
It’s no mystery why the left’s policies are so profoundly anti-Asian.
This minority group’s economic and educational attainments blow to smithereens the lies about America being incurably racist that serve as the basis for most progressive policies.
But electoral results — with Asian voters swinging right in the governor’s race and New York’s legislative races — shows that Dems’ policies are driving this key demographic away.
It’s an opportunity for the GOP — and thus for actual democratic rule in the Empire State — if Republicans can only seize it.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/01/democrats-in-new-york-have-a-real-problem-with-asians/
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New 'Mansion Tax' in L.A. will chase away its target
Death from taxes. That’s what could happen to Los Angeles if the wealthy flee or stay away from the city due to a “mansion tax.” Many will look to greener pastures — dollar green.
“Shark Tank” star Barbara Corcoran agrees. TMZ caught up with the real estate mogul in New York City. “People hate to pay taxes on entrances or exits to their homes,” she told the entertainment news outlet. “They feel like they’re hit upon, taken advantage of.”
Last November, voters passed Measure ULA, which levies a 4-percent tax on homes selling for $5 million or more. It also imposes a 5.5 percent tax on properties that sell for over $10 million, according to the New York Times. The tax goes into effect today — April Fool’s Day.
The monies garnered from the tax are supposed to fund affordable housing in L.A. and help to help alleviate the city’s homeless crisis, according to TMZ. The aptly nicknamed “mansion tax” is projected by some to bring in $1 billion annually. How will those projections be met if a slew of wealthy home seekers shies away from the city to avoid the tax? Nobody wants to be a prisoner in their own home.
Corcoran agrees. “The mansion tax is going to give people more motivation for not moving out or moving in.” Escaping L.A. will be tougher and tougher for the wealthy, and those wanting to avoid a self-imposed prison sentence due to a tax burden will avoid the city like the plague.
It’s not that Corcoran is against helping the homeless; just the opposite. She thinks an affordable housing fund is “more than fair” because “it’s the obligation of people with money to pay for people who don’t have money.”
“But a mansion tax is the wrong way to do this,” Corcoran continued, “it sends tax revenue out of the state. Nobody benefits in the end.” The housing market will be paralyzed and wealthy people will not look to L.A. for a home. They will look to cities and states with more favorable tax laws. Corcoran said she believes many will opt for southern states instead of paradise lost — California.
They should have seen it coming. Beware the ides of March. Last month, wealthy home sellers were cutting prices and making last-minute deals in L.A., trying to beat the clock and unload their properties before the mansion tax kicked in, according to the Times.
The selling frenzy saw luxury brokers like Josh Altman, a regular presence on Bravo’s “Million Dollar Listing,” offering agents a $1 million bonus if they brought a buyer in before April 1 for a seven-bedroom Bel Air estate priced at nearly $28 million. It’s no wonder. The mansion tax has to be paid by the seller.
L.A. is Crazy Town. But it’s not just L.A.
At former President Donald Trump’s recent campaign rally in Waco, Texas, rock legend Ted Nugent kicked off the show with an electric guitar rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner,” according to Newsweek. Some might go so far as to claim it rivaled Jimi Hendrix‘s iconic performance of the same tune at Woodstock in 1969.
Same song, different world views. Hendrix, it is safe to say, was no conservative. Nugent is. He added a few choice words between guitar riffs. “I am a guitar player, I have a couple of demands. Secure my border. I have a couple of really good ideas: give me my tax dollars back. I didn’t authorize killing babies at Planned Parenthood … I want my money back.” Needless to say, the pro-Trump crowd cheered.
Nugent also had some colorful words for the Ukraine war and President Zelenskyy, but I digress. The point is, Nugent is right to demand his tax money back. Taxes are spent on crazy things that many taxpayers find wasteful and repulsive.
For example, scientists from Stanford University spent almost $7 million in funds to construct an artificially intelligent toilet system to study health, according to the New York Post. The researchers say your butt has an individually identifiable “analprint.” The scientists admitted that “[t]o fully reap the benefits of the smart toilet, users must make their peace with a camera that scans their anus.”
And there was some pretty nutty stuff tucked away in the McConnell-Schumer omnibus spending bill. According to the Daily Signal, $575 million was slated for a global health section that allocated funds for “family planning/reproductive health, including in areas where population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species.” In other words, the plebes are the enemy of the world, and the elites must stop them from breeding.
That’s just the edge of the quagmire. The omnibus bill also included:
$1.5 million to encourage people to eat outdoors in sunny Pasadena, California.
$1.1 million for a solar array in cloudy Kirkland, Washington.
$2 million for B360, a group that promotes dirt-bike culture in Baltimore.
$3 million for the tiny and remote island of St. George, Alaska, for water infrastructure and $2.5 million for harbor improvements, for a total cost of over $82,000 per resident.
$500,000 for a skate park in Rhode Island.
$4.8 million for an environmental impact report on the possible expansion of Chicago’s rail transit system.
$13 million to expand the airport in the tiny city of Abbeville, Alabama.
$4 million for “Soy-Enabled Rural Road Reconstruction” in Iowa.
$2.35 million for the Leahy Center in Vermont, named after state’s Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy. The member who requested the earmark? Sen. Patrick Leahy.
Funding for a wide array of woke organizations and left-wing activists.
It’s not just L.A. The craziness is spreading from state to state and city to city.
Ted Nugent was right. Your government — local, state and federal — is spending your tax dollars willy-nilly. Are you being represented by your government officials? Or is it all just a tale told by idiots?
In California, taxes such as the mansion tax are scaring away the wealthy. How does scaring away wealth benefit the poor? It doesn’t add up.
Corcoran was right when she told the TMZ reporter the mansion tax is “not good for the country.” Far too many of our politicians are taking advantage of us, rich or not.
Something’s got to give.
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Human rights advocates and bills of rights did nothing to stop goverment abuses during the pandemic
Former UK Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption argued from near the start of the Covid pandemic that what democratic governments were doing to their citizens in the way of lockdowns, mandates, closing businesses, restricting travel and visiting sick relatives, weaponising the police – the list goes on and on – constituted the greatest infringements on civil liberties in the West in the last 300 years. I mention that because from March 2020 I was on the record in this newspaper, in The Spectator Australia and in outlets around the world, arguing precisely the same thing. Now readers can agree or disagree. Likewise, readers might think the costs were worth it for the benefits (though I think not, not with the data out now, including Sweden having the OECD’s lowest cumulative excess deaths from the start of the pandemic to now while we in Australia are currently running at 15-17 per cent excess deaths).
But one thing that is beyond debate is that the self-styled human rights lobby said not a peep about this government heavy-handedness. Nada. Nothing. Zero. Not the usual lawyerly caste that finds rights-infringements everywhere, many of microscopic proportions. Nor any of the eight members of the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) who made not a single condemnatory comment about Dan Andrews’ authoritarianism, about former Prime Minister Morrison’s preventing citizens from leaving their own country, about any of the myriad intrusions into our civil liberties over two years. And for what it’s worth all eight, the President and the seven Commissioners, were appointed by the Coalition – even the so-called Freedom Commissioner. All of them.
I start this article with that background because the AHRC has recently decided to wade yet again into the bill of rights debate in this country. (Did I mention that all eight were appointed by a political party that claims to be overtly against a bill of rights?) Actually, ask around and you learn that the seven Commissioners and President are not unanimous on this initiative. It is mostly being pushed by President Rosalind Coucher. It recycles all the tired and wrong-headed old arguments in favour of handing power via a bill of rights to unelected judges over our elected Parliamentarians; all of them churned out back when Labor was last in power under Rudd-Gillard-Rudd. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. Buy a bill of rights, statutory as well as constitutionalised, and all you are buying is the druthers and policy-preferences of the lawyerly caste from which the judges are chosen. This model even moots social and economic rights. The proposal is as bad as you’d expect under Rudd and Gillard, though possibly your expectations of what AHRC Commissioners appointed by a Liberal/Coalition government might desire would be different from this. (Remember Douglas Murray’s criticism of all anglosphere conservative political parties, that they are congenitally unable to appoint anyone who shares the views of their core voters to anything.)
But here is where it gets galling to the point of rank hypocrisy. In the position paper announcing this initiative and its launch at the law firm Gilbert and Tobin (where else I muse?) the Commission (or perhaps just the President of the AHRC) had the gall to suggest a bill of rights might have helped protect civil liberties during the pandemic. Are you kidding me? First off, look at all anglosphere countries with potent and even constitutionalised bills of rights – so Canada, America, and Britain (with a strong statutory model). There is not one single example anywhere of a bill of rights being used by the judges to lessen or eliminate any of the myriad governmental pandemic inroads on civil liberties. Not one example anywhere! To suggest that a bill of rights would have helped flies directly in the face of what is known in the philosophy of science as ‘the facts’. (There are a few examples in the US of state courts using old-fashioned administrative law principles to say that some executive actions taken during the pandemic were ultra vires or beyond the power of the conferring statute.) That line of attack has a chance because it leaves the elected Parliament with the option of passing a new, more delegatory statute. But in times of panic (especially when the judges are panicking at least as much as anyone else) it is folly to think a bill of rights will help. I repeatedly doled out that advice throughout the pandemic to those against lockdowns who thought a trip to court would be a magic bullet and help. It didn’t in any jurisdiction with a bill of rights.
So this suggestion by the AHRC is as audacious as it is wrong on the facts – ‘during the Covid pandemic, there was a lack of clarity about rights of Australians and how to balance them with public safety measures. A Human Rights Act would have helped navigate those challenges’. No, it would not have helped. What would have helped was an AHRC President who could summon up the courage to speak up about the many inroads on our civil liberties in the way Lord Sumption did in Britain. But instead of the slightest criticism of the police thuggery in Victoria, of the idiocy and heartlessness of many of the pandemic rules, of anything or anyone, we get this after-the-fact attempt at redemption. The problem is that a bill of rights would not have helped (again, see every democratic country on Earth) and meantime it brings it with a massive empowerment of the judiciary and of the lawyerly caste.
This is hypocrisy on steroids I’m afraid. And it’s combined with the tired old prescription of a bill of rights so beloved by the lawyerly left of the Labor Party.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/hypocrisy-on-steroids/ ?
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2 April, 2023
A big Obamacare abuse finally struck down
A U.S. judge on March 30 struck down a provision in the Affordable Care Act that required insurers to cover some preventative services such as cancer screenings.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled that recommendations on preventative care by an unelected task force were unlawful, and forbade President Joe Biden’s administration from enforcing the recommendations.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s recommended preventative services must be covered by insurers under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), colloquially known as ObamaCare. It has recommended anxiety screening for some children and breast cancer screening for some women, among other recommendations.
Plaintiffs in a legal case in Texas argued that the mandated coverage violated their constitutional rights and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act because it forced them to purchase insurance that covered aspects that clash with their religion, including coverage of preexposure prophylaxis drugs for people deemed at high risk of getting HIV.
“The ACA forces these plaintiffs to choose between purchasing health insurance that violates their religious beliefs and foregoing conventional health insurance altogether. It is undisputed that putting individuals to this choice imposes a substantial burden on religious exercise,” O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in a 28-page opinion.
Under the religious freedom act, the government can substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion if it shows that the burden “is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest” and “is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”
Government officials have failed on both fronts, the judge ruled.
While officials said there’s a compelling government interest in inhibiting the spread of diseases like HIV, the question is actually whether the government has a compelling interest in requiring insurers to cover the preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) drugs, he said.
“But neither Congress nor [the task force] expressed that compelling interest and the ACA’s several exemptions for grandfathered plans and small businesses undermine Defendants’ argument that all insurers must provide plans with PrEP drug coverage,” the ruling stated. “Nor have Defendants offered any meaningful argument as to how the PrEP mandate satisfies the ‘exceptionally demanding’ least-restrictive-means test.”
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Department of Justice did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
O’Connor applied his ruling nationwide because the ACA provision and the task force’s recommendations are “constitutionally invalid,” the judge ruled. He ordered Biden administration officials not to enforce the compulsory coverage requirements for the task force’s recommendations.
O’Connor previously ruled that ObamaCare was unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of the Biden administration, finding states lacked standing to challenge the law.
The ruling leaves intact mandated coverage of recommendations from the Health Resources and Services Administration and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which are both affiliated with HHS and subject to the supervision and direction of the department’s secretary. The task force is a volunteer body.
About 100 million people have received preventative care that is required to be covered since 2018, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
If the ruling stands after an expected appeal, many insurers will likely revert to charging copays for the affected preventative services, Lindsay Wiley, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, predicted.
“In many cases, insurance contracts are in place for the calendar year, so people may not immediately have to pay for preventive services,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy for the foundation, said. “But over time, tens of millions of people could be affected by this court ruling.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-judge-strikes-down-key-obamacare-provision_5161268.html
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Pro-Transgender Protesters Arrested at Kentucky Capitol as State Lawmakers Outlaw Gender Transitions for Minors
Nineteen protesters were arrested at the Kentucky Capitol on March 29 as lawmakers voted to override Democrat Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of a bill prohibiting the use of gender transition procedures on children.
According to the Louisville Courier Journal, the individuals were arrested by Kentucky State Police and charged with criminal trespassing after refusing to leave the House gallery, where they were shouting and chanting during the debate.
The protesters have since been released on their own recognizance.
‘Radical’ Ideology in Schools
Commenting on the demonstrations, Republican Kentucky House Speaker David Osborne told the outlet: “Obviously, we welcome everybody to be here, to participate in their government … but we do expect that proper levels of decorum will be maintained to allow us to conduct our business.
“We felt it was important to proceed on with the business thing that we did.”
Present for March 29’s demonstrations were some Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) students—a fact the Republican Party of Kentucky excoriated in a statement.
“Why aren’t our kids in school? Isn’t today a school day?” Republican spokesman Sean Southard wondered.
“Andy Beshear and [Kentucky Department of Education Commissioner] Jason Glass are so committed to radical gender ideology in our schools that they would send students to the Capitol to protest instead of their classes,” he added.
“Understand what’s going on here: Andy Beshear, Jason Glass, and JCPS appear to be working together to implement this agenda in our schools.”
Responding to those comments, JCPS said: “Engaging in civic activities is a valuable part of the educational experience. Today’s field trip to Frankfort was student-led and student-centered. JCPS supports students’ right to free speech.
“Any students who were transported to Frankfort on a JCPS school bus had permission slips signed by their parents or guardians, as is the case with all field trips,” the school district added.
Meanwhile, Glass called Southard’s claims of his support for the move an “invented fanciful conspiracy theory” and described the Republican legislation as “bigoted, hateful, and shameful.”
“Instead of trying to pin this on someone else, legislators who feel uncomfortable with the attention they are getting because of this issue should reflect on their own actions and statements,” he added.
Hormone Therapies
At the core of the tensions on March 29 was Senate Bill 150, which prevents minors from being treated with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormone therapies, gender transition surgeries, and other related procedures.
Additionally, among other provisions, the bill bans sex-based discussions in schools and prohibits schools from requiring staff to use a student’s preferred pronouns if they do not align with the child’s biological gender.
The bill was passed by the Republican-controlled Kentucky General Assembly earlier this month only to be vetoed by Beshear, who held that the legislation “strips freedom” from parents and allows “too much government interference” in families’ health decisions.
“SB 150 also turns educators and administrators into investigators that must listen in on student conversations and then knock on doors to confront and question parents and families about how students behave and/or refer to themselves or others,” he wrote in his March 24 veto message.
The governor also cited his faith as a reason for his decision, noting that “all children are children of God” and asserting that the bill would “endanger the children of Kentucky.”
But proponents of the bill have argued that it protects children and “empowers” their parents.
“Kentuckians overwhelmingly support SB 150’s commonsense student privacy protections in restrooms and locker rooms, along with the right of parents to have a say in their child’s education,” said David Walls, executive director of The Family Foundation, in a statement.
“The off-label use of puberty blockers, along with cross-sex hormones and surgery, in experimental gender ‘transitions’ has no place in children’s healthcare—the irreversible harms that de-transitioners have suffered testify to that.”
Adding that he found Beshear’s position on the matter “deeply troubling,” Walls said the bill would “save the lives of Kentucky children by setting policy in alignment with the truth that every child is created as a biological male or female and deserves to be loved, treated with dignity, and accepted for who they really are.”
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Hyperbole, Hysteria, and Hatred
With yet another deranged lunatic having decided that the best way to get attention is to shoot up a school and murder people, it’s time to look at the role played by the increasingly heated rhetoric that characterizes political, cultural and social debate in this country.
Politicians, admittedly, have done this forever. They demonize their opponents and warn the electorate that electing Candidate B instead of Candidate A will have dire consequences for the city/state/country. Disagreements over policy are routinely spun into moral failings. It has gotten much worse in recent decades; political opponents now compare other candidates to mass-murdering dictators or accuse them (and the party they belong to) of the most malevolent possible motivations. Former President George W. Bush was often compared to Hitler. During the 2012 presidential campaign, studiously wonky Paul Ryan, Republican Mitt Romney’s running mate, was accused of wanting to “push granny off a cliff” -- including an infamous political ad that showed exactly that. It’s not possible for a national election cycle to go by without hearing that this or that candidate hates entire segments of the population, doesn’t care about struggling families or wants poor children to starve.
But nothing can compare to the reaction to Donald Trump’s election, which can only be described as mass hysteria. On his inauguration day and for weeks thereafter, Washington, D.C., and other cities were roiled by riots and violence. People sat in the streets and screamed. Windows were broken, cars set on fire. Johnny Depp and Madonna made unfunny jokes about actors killing presidents and blowing up the White House.
Why? Because Trump’s opponents had decided that the usual political hyperbole wasn’t strong enough, so Trump had to be painted as Satan incarnate who would not stop until he had destroyed the country and democracy with it.
And the public bought it hook, line and sinker.
It would be bad enough were these trends confined to politicians or politics generally. But they aren’t. It isn’t merely the politicians themselves who are evil and to be despised; it’s now their donors, their supporters and anyone who votes for them. Former President Barack Obama called Americans who opposed his policies “bitter” people who “cling to their guns and their religion.” Hillary Clinton called Trump’s supporters “a basket of deplorables.” President Joe Biden’s Justice Department is targeting conservatives, pro-life Christians and irate parents objecting to pornography in schools, warning that they are potential “domestic terrorists.”
Academics seeking tenure publish outrageous social “theories” that smear wide swaths of the population, accusing them of every conceivable form of hatred. These theories then seep out into the general culture, where they are treated as some kind of dogma that cannot be challenged or questioned, only accepted and used as the basis for public policy.
Activists have become accusatory to the point of irrationality. You must overhaul your life in accordance with their computer-generated models of “climate change,” “overpopulation” and “mass starvation,” or else everyone on the planet is going to die.
(Pay no attention to decades of flawed and failed predictions of similar catastrophes.)
If you believe that children need a married mother and a father, reject the notion that “gender is a social construct,” insist that a man cannot become a woman (or vice versa) despite pharmaceutical or even surgical intervention, you are a (fill-in-the-blank)-phobe who has “blood on your hands.”
Terminology takes on quasi-criminal tones: Misunderstandings or perceived slights are “microaggressions.” Due process in campus sexual assault cases is “another form of rape.” And then there’s the all-purpose rage inflator: “Words are violence.”
This is irresponsible and dangerous. Politicians may not believe their own press packages, and social cynics may laugh all the way to the bank, but much of the public believes what they are being told, and they are reacting accordingly.
One horrible irony is that some of those who subscribe to the “words are violence” school of thought are so offended by the mere existence of opposing viewpoints that they feel justified -- with alarming frequency -- in resorting to actual violence. Antifa mobs have made careers out of this in city after city across the country, insisting that they are preventing fascism by rioting, breaking windows, burning down buildings and beating up innocent bystanders. Jane’s Revenge and other pro-abortion groups have been firebombing and vandalizing crisis pregnancy centers. Conservative speakers are shouted down on college campuses -- and some have been physically attacked.
I want to be clear that the only person I am holding responsible for the killings at the Covenant School in Nashville is the woman who pulled the trigger. But her rampage appears to have been fueled by a sordid combination of mental illness and manufactured hysteria. Mental illness needs to be treated. The manufactured hysteria needs to stop.
https://townhall.com/columnists/laurahollis/2023/03/30/hyperbole-hysteria-and-hatred-n2621318
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Conservative Australians should be very angry
John Howard was a conservative. He won, again and again and again. Tony Abbott was a conservative. He won a landslide. Scott Morrison dressed himself up as a conservative and won his first election before shedding his conservative clothes and lost his second one. Turnbull, the luvvies’ preferred Prime Minister, only survived by the skin of his teeth and lost Abbott’s huge majority.
Virtually every state election across the nation in the last decade has seen Woke Liberal parties getting thrashed. Dominic Perrottet is just another in the long list of non-conservative conservatives. Can we please stop this errant nonsense that the Liberal party needs to become more like its opponents in order to win?
What Liberals actually need to do is to start fighting for the freedoms and values at all levels of our daily lives that are being daily tossed onto a Labor and the Greens bonfire of virtues and vanities.
Leftist parties will always win on emotional issues and utopian fantasies. The job is much harder for conservatives. Conservatives must argue from sound principles grounded in hard-earned experience and sell concepts that are anathema to the laptop class – concepts such as thrift, hard work, sacrifice, the Protestant work ethic, dedication, individual freedoms, resilience, and above all equality of opportunity not equality of outcome.
Conservative values, by recognising the weaknesses of human behaviour as well as the strengths, are grounded in reality. Leftist values, grounded in fantasies, lies, and fabrications, are easy to sell but impossible to deliver. Only a strong, single-minded conservative convictions-based leader can ever point this out.
(A classic example: in the Sky News Australia debate, despite performing well, Dominic Perrottet allowed his opponent to repeatedly trash ‘privatisation’, without once pointing out that the only alternative to a market based on the notion of profit is socialism, which always leads to more inequality, not less. How can Liberals ever hope to succeed if they refuse to defend and more importantly explain even the most basic economic free market principles?)
Traditional Australians should be very angry with the Liberals. The factional warlords have squandered the genuine faith mainstream Australians put in the Liberals to be the party to protect them from the ravages of the Left. Instead, they have time after time simply pandered to them. Name a cultural issue, and you’ll find the Liberals have simply vacated the field.
(Another example: after correctly resisting Labor’s calls to stick the Aboriginal flag on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge – a hugely important symbolic victory to the Indigenous activist class of ceding sovereignty – Mr Perrottet, as Premier, turned around and did exactly that before compounding the error by supporting the Voice. Or another: Kean and Morrison capitulated to the climate cult and were lauded by the activist classes, but not only went on to lose the next election but in one fell swoop destroyed their most powerful weapon the Liberals once had against the Left.)
Only Peter Dutton can save the day. Only Peter Dutton can return the Liberals to power within the next three years. But to do so he must fight with every sinew in his being. He must expose the vile agenda behind the extremist trans movement. He must oppose the Voice without further ado. He must insist on the removal of the nuclear moratorium. He must abandon Net Zero. He must rescue our children from the permissiveness of the more extreme parts of the LGBTQ+ activist agenda within our schools. He must fight for small business in the face of Labor’s hard-left industrial relations regime and the unions. He must denounce Labor’s fantasies about EVs and green hydrogen for the snake oil that they are.
No more excuses. No more flirting with the Teal agenda to try and pacify the doctors’ wives. No more selling out conservatives in the name of the supposed ‘broad church’. No more putting ‘moderates’ into key economic or political positions.
Fighters win fights and only fighters win the future. Cowards and appeasers are destined for the dustbin of history. Take a look around you, Liberal Australia. Wall-to-wall Labor. Wokeness means weakness. You have betrayed the people who put so much faith in you. Conservatives want a party they can believe in.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/conservative-australians-should-be-very-angry/
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