With particular attention to religious, ethnic and sexual matters. By John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
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This document is part of an archive of postings on Political Correctness Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written.
28 February, 2023
We Don't Need a 'National Divorce'; We Need More Federalism
Marjorie Taylor Greene says the country needs a "national divorce." "We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government," she tweeted. "Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat's traitorous America Last policies, we are done."
Generally speaking, I'm sympathetic to the idea that the political left is unable to accept a truly diverse nation. Virtually every legislative policy proposal from modern Democrats -- and every policy issued by edict -- strengthens federal power and economic control over states. Modern Democrats are champions of direct democracy, an effort to undercut the choices of local communities and individuals. When they don't get their way, the D.C. bureaucracy steps in to circumvent the will of states. And when courts stop them, Democrats work to delegitimize and weaken the judiciary.
Just this week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) argued states should simply disregard the Supreme Court when they don't agree with a decision. Ignoring the division of power is far more likely to cause a national schism than any Greene tweet.
None of that means a "national divorce" -- really secession, since other states are unlikely to concede to a split -- isn't a reckless thing for someone who took a vow to defend the Constitution to advocate. Even if we took a moment to seriously contemplate the idea, how would it be achieved? We aren't separated ideologically into large geographic regions or even states, but rather urban, suburban and rural areas. Conservatives like to share that map showing virtually the entire country painted in electoral red -- and it matters more than Democrats like to admit. But we can't discount that density also matters. A "national divorce" would create even smaller minorities and divisions, but little difference in the way of policy.
For that matter, where will Greene's Georgia, which Joe Biden won in 2020 and now has two left-wing senators, end up in this split? How about purple states like Virginia or New Hampshire? Will we have 50 separate referendums? Will there be population exchanges like the one India and Pakistan undertook in 1947? If history is any indication, it's the kind of situation that leads to political violence and economic ruin.
And, you know, you already have the freedom to move about the nation and find a place that suits your lifestyle and politics. That's one of the reasons we're a place that has room for a progressive vegan, the evangelical conservative farmer, the suburban moderate and everyone in between.
During the past 42 years, the federal government has been divided for 30 of them. Over the past three presidencies, the president's party lost at least one house after only two years. The instinct of the American public is to split power. The organic state of a divided nation is glorious gridlock -- which is why the 10th Amendment exists. Now, it's also true that leftists struggle with the notion of letting people in red states think, speak and live in ways they dislike. There is a national political and cultural effort to homogenize us.
And when Republicans appropriate the existing local power Democrats have used for decades to implement their own choices -- as Gov. Ron DeSantis has done in Florida -- leftists act as if we're on the precipice of a dictatorship. But they have no power to stop him. Only Florida voters do. This is why federalism exists. It is why some states thrive and others don't. And federalism is not only a more desirable solution than breaking the country into two, but also far more feasible.
None of this is to argue there aren't serious problems facing the nation, but Big Tech's relentless highlighting of every decisive moment, every rabid voice and every radical position clouds our view of reality. The nastier and crazier you pretend to be, the more misleading your tweets and the more partisan you act, the more followers you can expect. The incentive of social media success is corrosive. Most of it just exacerbates political divisions.
In the real world, you probably live in proximity to plenty of people with different religious, cultural and ideological values, yet, despite what you've heard, we're a nation with negligible political violence. In many ways, despite the mess politicians have made, our lives are better than ever. Let's keep it that way.
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The Great Reset Is Really Great Resentment
This fairly new thing, the so-called “great reset,” is more than the political left acting out their bottled-up fury at successes of the land in which they find themselves. Infuriated at how well freedom is working—the opulence, scientific and technological achievements, personal advancements at every level—even for the “downtrodden” compared to the rest of the world—they grouse. They can see (and deny) how poorly socialist utopian schemes they hold dear are doing. Like spoiled brats they nihilistically seek to overturn everything about this nation that is good and decent and pure.
America is in mortal danger from this actual mass psychosis afflicting so many of our countrymen. The psychiatric community calls it mass formation, a term and effect worth studying if you haven’t. The most striking modern example of course was in Germany before WWII, but communist China soon afterwards under the brutal dictator Mao Tse-dung wasn’t far behind. Pol Pot in Vietnam set new standards of depravity and evil, with popular support. Our own witch hunts in New England soon after we achieved independence were a similar thing—hysteria that knows no controls.
Words Are the Key
Using principles learned from Russian, Chinese and North Vietnamese communists, along with George Orwell, whose 1949 dystopian novel 1984 spelled it out with chilling clarity, leftists understand that whoever controls our language controls us. That battle is on. An entire generation of Newthink terms have entered the public mind, infiltrated newsrooms and classrooms everywhere, and threaten our health and liberty.
It boggles the mind how easily that disease has spread. People at the vaunted Associated Press have picked up the gauntlet, and what used to be a descriptive guide for journalists, like a dictionary, the AP Stylebook has become a proscriptive mandate. It now dictates which terms are acceptable and which must be cast aside as intolerant, offensive, biased and other inaccurate derogatory slurs.
It’s not like this sprang upon us unannounced or unnoticed. As early as 1962, the earth-shaking film Manchurian Candidate, directed by John Frankenheimer, woke this nation up to the effective perniciousness of “commie” brainwashing, a tool used to implement Newthink. That was based on Richard Condon’s 1959 novel of the same name, at the height of the Cold War, filled with gut-level fears many of us still viscerally recall. Those forces have been bubbling under and metastasizing since then.
America’s consciousness of this grew in a quantum leap, especially in the enormously influential Second Amendment community with the development and release in the year 2000 of The Politically Corrected Glossary, published by Bloomfield Press, https://www.gunlaws.com/politicallycorrect.htm . It changed some dialog and terminology, jump-starting reassessments, but the powerful mainstream media steamed right ahead regardless. The terribly sexist slur, gunman, appears constantly instead of killer, murderer or even criminal. Inanimate wholesome products like pistols or sidearms became fearsome semi-automatic handguns, which anti-gun forces publicly acknowledged misleads many into thinking machinegun.
To this day, despite constant complaints, reports call mass murderers “shooters,” denigrating 100 million American shooters who shoot for fun, sport and safety. Simultaneously, this linguistic trick avoids casting any shade on the criminal psychopaths who murder innocent people by the thousands annually. Those culprits are further protected by prosecutors and a judiciary that often avoids going after the perps, a shortening of perpetrators, now also frowned upon by the great resetters.
Assault is a type of behavior, not a type of hardware, outlawed everywhere under multiple laws, as it should be. That does little to stop resetters from attaching assault to weapon, so effective in turning the public against household firearms, the commonly used kind you’ll find in millions of American homes. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that the Second Amendment holds extra special protection for such household arms in common use, a point leftists treat with disdain.
Those usual suspects—Marxist socialist democrats and other malfeasants—are actively pushing the overhaul of our language—and our freedoms. Tough to admit, but they’re pretty good at it. You may not even know you’ve been snookered, it’s so subtle and easy to miss. That’s what makes it so effective. Merely declaring yourself pro gun plays into their hands. How? Because they’ve cast guns as horrific instruments of the devil. If you say you’re pro gun you practically are the devil, to their addled minds. Try instead thinking of yourself as pro rights, a term they avoid, because if that’s you, what are they? Anti rights, which is pure truth on a platter, intolerable to them, and now you’re catching on.
Coming next, an installment of The Politically Corrected Glossary, a lexicon of freedom. Use terms that work for you as a liberty-loving individual, and cast intolerant bigots as intolerant bigots.
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Former Disney CEO privately complained to DeSantis about 'pressure' from woke left amid Florida fight
As the showdown between Florida's legislature and The Walt Disney Company heated up over an education bill that liberal activists incorrectly labeled the "Don't say gay bill," Disney's then-CEO called Gov. Ron DeSantis and complained about the "pressure" he faced.
DeSantis recounts the conversation in a chapter of his new memoir, "The Courage to be Free: Florida's Blueprint for American Revival," which will be released Tuesday by publisher HarperCollins. The chapter, shared exclusively with Fox News Digital, reveals what Bob Chapek, who was Disney CEO at the time, told DeSantis as the fight over Florida's education law heated up in the spring of 2022.
"As the controversy over the Parental Rights in Education bill was coming to a head, Chapek called me. He did not want Disney to get involved, but he was getting a lot of pressure to weigh in against the bill," DeSantis writes.
"We get pressured all the time," Chapek told DeSantis, according to the governor's book. "But this time is different. I haven’t seen anything like this before."
Chapek told shareholders that he had called DeSantis on March 9 to urge him not to sign the bill, which restricts schools from teaching gender and sexuality to children in kindergarten through third grade. Activists nicknamed it the "Don't say gay bill" despite the legislation not using those terms.
"I called Gov. DeSantis this morning to express our disappointment and concern that if the legislation becomes law, it could be used to unfairly target gay, lesbian, non-binary and transgender kids and families," Chapek said, according to FOX 35 Orlando.
According to a report from the New York Post, Chapek had privately expressed his hesitancy to involve his company in the political issues in Florida, the home of Disney World, in the months prior. But the pressure campaign within Disney and from Democrats nationwide ultimately convinced him take a stand.
DeSantis, however, issued a warning: If Disney got involved with the legislation, "People like me will say, ‘Gee, how come Disney has never said anything about China, where they make a fortune?’" DeSantis told Chapek.
The Florida governor said if Disney stayed out of the politics, Disney would face 48 hours of outrage when the bill passed. "[And] when I sign it, you will get another 48 hours of outrage, mostly online,'" DeSantis said, adding, "Then there will be some new outrage that the woke mob will focus on and people will forget about this issue, especially considering the outrage is directed at a political-media narrative, not the actual text of the legislation itself."
DeSantis wrote that Chapek and Disney "ultimately caved to leftist media and activist pressure and pressed the false narrative against the bill."
After the bill passed and DeSantis signed it into law, the governor was surprised that Disney chose to "escalate the battle" by vowing to fight the legislation in the courts. DeSantis signaled publicly that he would be willing to reevaluate Disney's special tax district and favorable corporate agreements due to their insistence on "woke" political activism.
Other reports showed that Disney had been pushing messages that conservatives blasted as "woke" — like enforcing gender and sexuality messages in movies and television shows. A show producer reportedly said on a leaked Disney staff call that she had a "not-at-all secret gay agenda" and had been "adding queerness" to kid's programming.
"Behind the scenes, I was not, as a father of children ages five, four, and two, comfortable with the continuation of Disney’s special arrangement," DeSantis wrote in his memoir. "While the Walt Disney Company and its executives had a right to indulge in woke activism, Florida did not have to place the company on a pedestal while they do so—especially when the company’s activism impacted the rights of parents and the well-being of children."
As Florida moved to strip Disney of its Reedy Creek district and revoke the company's self-governing status, DeSantis was surprised to see left-wing voices side with a large corporation.
"Even though Democrats often rail about the nefarious power exerted over politics by large corporations, and supposedly oppose special carveouts for big companies, they all dutifully lined up in support of keeping Disney’s special self-governing status," he wrote.
Chapek left Disney late in 2022, replaced by his predecessor, Bob Iger, who first left Disney in 2020. At a Disney town hall in November, Iger told the company, "Do I like the company being embroiled in controversy? Of course not. It can be distracting, and it can have a negative impact on the company. And to the extent that I can work to kind of quiet things down, I’m going to do that."
The lesson of the Disney saga, according to DeSantis, is that in an environment of "woke capital" where large companies employ their influence to advance left-wing political agendas, "old-guard corporate Republicanism is not up to the task at hand."
DeSantis' book aims to showcase his governing thesis that fighting for conservative principles paid off for Florida and could benefit other states and even the whole country. As a rumored 2024 presidential hopeful, DeSantis has led former President Donald Trump in a few early primary polls. He has not announced whether he will run.
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Australia: Another Leftist discovers reality
Just when you think all hope is lost for the Victorian Liberal Party to ever regain its conservative political roots, along comes a candidate like Moira Deeming. Deeming is the type of grassroots politician the luvvies love to hate; young, articulate, passionate, and an ex-progressive.
Which is precisely the reason they’ve given her the moniker, ‘Labor Party Princess’. Quoting the great Robert Menzies in her maiden speech to parliament, Deeming captured something of your widespread appeal:
‘The real life of this nation is to be found in the home of the people who are nameless and unadvertised. And who, whatever their individual religion or dogma, see in their children their greatest contributions.’
In her own words, Deeming says, ‘She was born and bred on the political left coming from a long line of union leaders, card-carrying Labor Party members, and Labor MPs.’ Indeed, her great-grandfather was John Joseph Holland, a western suburbs Labor MP for over thirty-five years as well as a councillor for the city of Melbourne. All of which is to say, Deeming comes from ‘good Catholic Labor stock’.
What would motivate her then to change to the Liberal side of politics? According to Deeming:
‘There is a long tradition in Australian politics of those raised on the gospel of unity who come to learn firsthand the value of liberty and who then switch to the liberal side of politics. Sadly, they’re often referred to as “Labor rats” but in reality, they were just ordinary people who foresaw the problems which are plaguing all political parties that refuse to tolerate independent thinking and the tragic consequences of idolising economies which are controlled by the State.’
After quoting the famous examples of three former Labor politicians who switched sides throughout their careers – such as former Prime Ministers Joseph Cook and Joseph Lyons as well as Warren Mundine – a former president of the Labor Party to chairman of CPAC – Deeming commented:
‘I grew up idolising the Left, unions, and the Labor Party. But when taken to an extreme, these ideals have a “dark side”. As a teenager, I witnessed first-hand the corruption and the coordinated bullying of anyone who doesn’t think and act in “unity” with the Left.’
For Deeming, her political paradigm shifted though, by concerns she observed firsthand as a teacher in state schools. Deeming said:
‘Lessons on tolerance were being replaced with lessons on inclusion. It wasn’t enough to just accept each other’s differences with respect. Now students were required to affirm and celebrate beliefs which they just did not share. Perfectly reasonable religious and moral differences were being framed as discriminatory, intolerant, and a new vocabulary was introduced categorising people as “allies” or “enemies”.
‘Instead of being inspired by history’s heroes, students were being chastised and even told to stand up in class and apologise for historical crimes they had neither committed nor condoned.
‘They were told that the physical world is on the brink of doom. But rather than assigning research projects to find practical solutions, they were being assigned activism as work. Including, social media awareness campaigns, ideological fundraisers, and even attendance at protests during school hours.
‘Instead of being taught the life-changing value of grit and character, my most vulnerable and disadvantaged students were being weighed down and discouraged with spectres of insurmountable social forces all arrayed against them; capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy.’
These are serious issues. And every Australian citizen should be alarmed at what is occurring in Victorian schools because that particular state seems hell-bent on leading the way socially for the rest of the country. According to Deeming though, the proverbial ‘final straw’ in her deciding to challenge the government was as follows:
‘I discovered that school policies and curriculums had been radically altered to remove almost every child safeguarding standard that we had.
‘Primary school children were being subjected to erotic sexual content.
‘Female students no longer had the right to single-sex sports teams, toilets or change rooms.
‘And teachers – like me – were being forced to secretly lie to parents about their children who were secretly living one gender at school and another gender at home.
‘I realised then that my teaching career was over because I simply would not ever do the things I was being asked to do.
‘I would never ask the class which sexual experiences they’d had and which they were willing to do. I would never tell girls to bind their breasts. I would never accuse gay students of being transphobic. I would never tell my female students they had to tolerate a male teacher supervising their change room. And I was never ever going to lie to parents about what was going on with their own children at school.
‘But I also knew that if I spoke out that I was going to be vilified and that I would never work in a public school again. And that is exactly what happened.’
Somewhat surprisingly, even the Sun Herald joined in accusing deeming of promoting ‘extremist views’ whilst Daniel Andrews resorted to his usual tactic of dismissing Ms Deeming’s concerns as ‘shameful’. But listening to Deeming’s maiden speech, there is nothing extreme, let alone shameful, about it.
Deeming explicitly called on the Victorian government to amend the law in three ways. First, to protect sex-based rights to protect female-only sports, change rooms, and other activities while ‘maintaining the safety and dignity of transgender people’. Second, to make it illegal for children to be present in brothels. And third, to make it legal for parents and clinicians to seek treatment that alleviates gender dysmorphic feelings in children.
Deeming is a politician with the courage which we need right now. Sadly, though, the Liberal Party leadership have basically thrown her under the proverbial bus, distancing themselves from her convictions.
How tragic. When a former ‘Labor Party Princess’ cannot find a home in a party supposed to represent Liberal democratic values. No wonder the Liberty party lost the last election with little prospect of winning the next.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/moira-deeming-former-labor-party-princess/
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27 February, 2023
Grammys 2023: Beethoven and Bach ARE THE WEST, Not Cardi B, Kanye, Rihanna
Ilana Mercer is her usual acerbic self below but I do tend to agree with her on this
The Woke Universe is about inverting reality—turning truth, morality, ethics, and aesthetics on their heads and destroying every categorical imperative bequeathed to us by the ancients. The goal? To make The World safe for Ugly, Evil, Idle, and Aberrant.
Grammys 2023: The end of art, techno-porn caterwauling, and indecent exposure masquerading as music; an erogenous-zone centered extravaganza ~ilana
Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Debussy, César Franck, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky (Russian), Elgar, Fauré and more—they embody The Best of The West, not the Woke pornographers and perverts, the Covid goons; rap, reparations, and the critical race bile ~ilana
The decaying Empire symbolized some of its most putrefying, pornographic cultural products in the week when Burt Bacharach, composer of sublime pop music, departed to the heavens. The beastly bacchanalia unfolded at the 2023 Grammys and the Super Bowl (sic) halftime hump-along, showcasing zero skill, 0 imagination, 0 talent, and 0 beauty. Those vaguely familiar with my prose recognize that I'm being charitable.
Unfortunately, conservative commentators minimize the impetus and significance of this cultural foot-and-mouth, superciliously giggling over and misdiagnosing it.
The postmodern shift in the culture is positively tidal. But with their good-natured, bemused, crushingly stupid reactions to the most meaningful events and situations, conservatives normalize, even aid, and abet the decay. In this instance, the 2023 Grammys—techno-porn caterwauling and indecent exposure masquerading as music.
The staple response I refer to is the reliably diffuse and vapid "insights" offered by The Tucker Carlson Show's giggly guest, Chadwick Moore.
Why is this perennial conservative confusion so essential to correct? For one, thought mediates action. And fuzzy, foolish thoughts about important matters give rise to fuzzy, stupid actions about crucial issues.
Chadwick Moore protested the Pfizer-sponsored (alleged) Grammy performance of one Sam Smith on the grounds of "satanic panic"; that it was "devil-themed."
Moore's other redundant banality was to "reveal" that Smith is a grotesquely ugly transsexual man aiming to grab world attention. You don't say! As if my lying eyes told me otherwise!
THE ONLY SUBSTANTIVE CONSERVATIVE CASE to make over the Grammys is that it signifies the complete loss of immutable artistic standards. While artistic taste is subjective and personal, artistic standards are everywhere and always objective.
Nobody looking at and listening to the 2023 Grammys should dare talk about beauty—of melody or movement—harmony (as in accordance and counterpoint), chord progression, and a facility with musical instruments, for these were nowhere apparent. Instead, better melodic progression is found in "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" and "Three Blind Mice."
Nobody watching these erogenous-zone-centered extravaganzas, for which the celebrity Idiocracy clapped like clapped-out whores, should dare conclude anything but this:
The Grammys were about the end of art—about the loss of all meritocratic, objective standards in art.
THE TRUE MEANING OF THE WEST is not to be found in the staged acts of ugly exhibitionists and filthy pornographers who bedeck our cultural and sporting events, the likes of loud, lousy Lizzo, a mountain of meritless flesh, and the Sam Smith Sicko—demented degenerates who are all engaged in publicly tolerated indecent exposure and tuneless yelping, that not even the Auto-tune magic software, the "holy grail of recording" technology, can correct.
THE MEANING OF THE WEST is not in this dreadful culture, where our kids, liberal and conservative, can wallow in our ugly, grubby, tit-for-tat politics.
IT'S NOT in the Woke; postmodern perverts are degrading the language, literature, music, art, and sciences.
IT'S NOWHERE IN THE COVID CARTEL and its army of goons, medical and bureaucratic, devoid of intelligence and bereft of proficiency in anything but the use of force.
The aforementioned are imposters, interlopers, frauds, freaks, and fetishists.
Beethoven is The West. Men like Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Debussy, César Franck, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky (a Russian homosexual, whose manly music could never be queered), Elgar, Fauré and more—they embody The West. They and the many young performers furthering their work, the work of the Lord, are examples of the best of the West.
"Ode to Joy," inspired by Friedrich Schiller's eponymous poem, is but the soundbite in Symphony No. 9. Sublime as it is, "Ode to Joy" is a popular tune in a more magnificent whole.
One should not seek out exclusively the Ode of the Finale—the fourth movement—without assimilating the typically ballsy build-up by Beethoven throughout the preceding Allegro (first movement), scherzo (second movement), and Adagio (third).
MUSIC IS MAN. These men, to be precise.
Like nobody today, Beethoven instantiates this truth in all his Symphonies. Listen to No. 5, conducted by the great Herbert von Karajan, and tell me this is not the original headbangers ball.
To share with you, I have a satisfactory performance of "Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 'Choral' (1824)." It is that of The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim.
Barenboim's intensity during the performance and the perfection he wrung so effortlessly from these young, eager musicians—beautiful in face and form, hailing from far-flung countries across the Middle East and North Africa—led me to suspect this setting was more than just a celebrity conductor, one of the greatest, for sure, parachuted in for a night.
Indeed, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is a product of the vision of Maestro Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, a Palestinian intellectual. Their collaboration's impetus was to foster peace and transmit immutable beauty through music.
Done.
To speak colloquially, not theologically, neither Allah nor Elohim has ever inspired the transcendence of Beethoven or Bach. Christianity begat the glory and genius of Bach and Beethoven. They are The West, not the Woke perverts trying to drown Western praise with no more than pelvic and genital thrusts parading as music.
A sad but inspirational anecdote: Beethoven had composed the sublime work, the Ninth, utterly deaf.
Via Britannica:
'According to one account of the event, the audience applauded thunderously after the performance, but Beethoven, unable to hear the response, continued to face the chorus and orchestra; a singer finally turned him around so that he could see evidence of the affirmation that resounded throughout the hall.'
And that's The West, too. But, alas, it has become anathema in Neurotic Nation USA to be stoic and heroic like Beethoven.
I shall close with guidance neither fuzzy nor diffuse: Honor Western civilization, not Kanye West: Do it up, parents.
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Victimhood and mudslinging now define American politics
The 2024 campaign has hardly started, but the air is already filled with noxious fumes, most of it from desperate cable TV hosts and anonymous social-media posters. Don Lemon’s sexist comments about Nikki Haley are the latest example, but the vitriol has spread much wider. It reveals a dank corner of American politics, filled with mud-slinging and name-calling, degrading our public square.
Donald Trump specializes in these attacks.. He has already launched several, unsuccessfully, on the man he sees as his most formidable competitor. Calling Florida’s popular governor “Meatball Ron” and “DeSanctimonious” isn’t an argument. It’s an epithet. It has the intellectual heft of giving someone the middle finger.
Lemon’s sour attacks on Nikki Haley have attracted the most attention because he has long been a prominent media personality. Why was it sexist to say she was “past her prime?” Because Haley, now age fifty-one, is actually in her sweet spot as a rising politician. What Lemon undoubtedly meant, without actually saying so directly, is that she is past her sexual prime. That is not usually considered the best reason to pick a president. Nor has it been applied to men seeking the office. When people say Biden is “past his prime,” as they frequently do, they aren’t talking about his sex life. They are worried about his mental confusion and physical frailty.
Lemon’s rant was hypocritical, as well, because he didn’t apply that same standard to his preferred female leaders. He didn’t mention it when he backed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court. She was fifty-one at the time. He didn’t mention it when he backed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. She was born in 1947. He never used it to criticize Kamala Harris. She’s fifty-eight. The list goes on and on.
At least Lemon didn’t resort to racism. But others have, mostly the usual bottom-feeders and hustlers on cable TV. Their rage is amplified by thousands on social media, egging each other on. Their language is not only vile, it’s instructive. When leftists rely on racial attacks to disparage blacks, Hispanics, South Asians, Chinese Americans, and others, what they are really saying is, “If you don’t share our ideology, you are betraying your race. You are supporting ‘white supremacy.’” Although these attacks may be aimed at a specific person — this week, it’s Nikki Haley — they also serve as a warning to others: if you stray from the true path or support anyone who does, you will face our wrath.
These attacks have been launched repeatedly against prominent minority conservatives, including Justice Clarence Thomas, Dr. Ben Carson and Senator Tim Scott. All conservative black intellectuals have endured them. They have been called “Uncle Toms,” whites in black faces and more. Out the window go basic standards of decency, along with coherent arguments. It’s just cursing, flailing, and name-calling.
Criticism of Asian Americans has a different tone. They are vilified as a “model minority,” as if their academic achievements, family cohesion, and rising economic status are worthy of shame. They aren’t. They are traditional bourgeois values, which have provided social stability and lifted millions out of poverty. They are worthy of praise and emulation.
The targets may differ, but there’s a shared political logic behind these attacks. The overriding goal is to sustain a progressive coalition. That coalition is grounded in identity politics, shared hatreds, and a commitment to redistributive justice, which really means transfer payments and positive discrimination for preferred groups. The coalition relies on self-identified victims and those who feel that they are, somehow, to blame.
This loose coalition is especially clear and active on college campuses. The leading victims are African Americans, whatever their socioeconomic background. Among international students, the top spot goes to goes to Palestinians and Muslims in general. Socialists of all stripes are the voice of the coalition’s vague economic ideas. Progressive gays and lesbians are active, though they are finding it harder and harder to identify ways they are discriminated against.
Given the central role of Palestinians, this loose coalition would fracture if it publicly insisted on equal treatment for gays in, say, Gaza or Pakistan. Feminism might be a slight problem there, too. Far better for the group to concentrate on shared hatreds. Israel is a particularly attractive target because it embodies everything they loathe. It is capitalist, prosperous, militarily effective, and willing to defend its territory.
Israel irritates them for another reason, too. Since its founding in 1948, one of Israel’s basic precepts has been its refusal to embrace victimhood. It is unapologetic about its existence and its success. Although it was born in the shadow of the Holocaust, its people know something that America’s progressive coalition never learned. If you define yourself as a victim, however justified that may be, you condemn yourself to lingering in that position, not rising above it.
Given progressives’ focus on victimhood and guilt, the real crimes of black conservatives are that they:
Don’t think of themselves primarily as victims and
Don’t think of America primarily as a machine of oppression, at home or abroad
Those are the unforgivable sins of Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Tim Scott, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter and so many more. Their refusal to embrace victimhood doesn’t mean they ignore racial injustice or slink away from the fight against it. It certainly doesn’t mean they are apologists for white supremacy. That’s malign nonsense. Rather, it means they believe they have real “agency”— an ability to act — and refuse to deny that agency to themselves by living as perpetual victims. It also means they are proud to be Americans.
Of course, they recognize the scars of slavery and Jim Crow, but they also recognize the country’s long, hard struggle to achieve equal rights, as promised by the Declaration and Constitution. They believe, as all conservatives do, that equality means “equality of opportunity,” not equal outcomes.
The apostasy of black politicians, judges, and intellectuals, together with their personal success, is why their adversaries cover them with epithets. They must be stopped before their heresy spreads. The larger goal, then, is to hold together and animate a coalition based on progressive, identity politics, victimhood, guilt, and redistribution. The same attacks have now started on Nikki Haley. They are vicious, personal, and shameful.
This racist, sexist mudslinging should be condemned and rebutted — not with more name-calling but with cogent arguments and serious analysis. Our nation is already angry and divided. More vile rhetoric, blasted from all media, only makes it worse.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/victimhood-and-mudslinging-now-define-american-politics/
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I lived for years in a sexually liberated lesbian commune, but only found true peace and equality when I married a man and became a devoted mother
Up to the point where I got pregnant, I’d taken for granted that men and women are substantially the same apart from our dangly bits.
The experience of being a mother blew this out of the water.
Until then I’d bought uncritically into the idea that individual freedom is the highest good, that bonds or obligations are acceptable only inasmuch as they are optional, and that men and women can and should pursue this equally.
Then I went through the wonderful and disorienting experience of finding my sense of self partly merged with a dependent infant. The kind of absolute freedom I’d accepted as an unalloyed good was suddenly a great deal less appealing to me because I actively enjoyed belonging to my daughter.
It was obviously not in her interests to go on insisting that my obligations to her were optional. Where, pre-baby, I could do more or less what I liked, as a mother I couldn’t refuse to get up and feed my crying newborn at 3.30am just because I didn’t feel like it.
Her interests mattered more than my once-treasured autonomy.
It meant a fundamental break with my past way of thinking. I was in my early teens when I started to notice how Mum would cook dinner and after we’d all eaten, my dad would get up and leave her to clear the table. Then my two brothers began to follow his example. This seemed unfair, to say the least.
It left me with a dilemma. As the household’s other female, I felt a clear solidarity with my mum. But I also believed I had equal status with my brothers. Should I exempt myself from these petty chores like they did?
And if I did, what did that say about how we all saw my mum? In turn, as another female, what did this imply for me when I reached adulthood? Trying to answer these questions led me to feminism and a world in which women were creatures in our own right, rather than second-class support humans.
But I soon learned that membership of the feminist club comes with small print. You cannot pursue feminist goals without signing up to a larger bundle of commitments under the banner of ‘progress’, such as climate justice, racial and gender-minority rights, wealth redistribution and so on. Reject those, and you will be excommunicated from the coalition of the righteous.
I tried living my adult life according to those ideals, pursuing low-carbon life, non-hierarchical social forms and maximum sexual freedom, in a culture hell-bent on individualism and fluid relationships.
By the end of my 20s, however, I had found that being determinedly counter-cultural was taking a great deal of emotional and intellectual effort, for questionable returns. I concluded that sexual freedom brings alienation and that too little interdependence, rather than too much, is actually precipitating a collapse of social life.
A website I co-founded with four others imploded, turning out not to be the harmonious co-operative I’d envisaged but beset by muddled objectives and bitter interpersonal conflicts in which I lost my best friend and my social circle.
Around the same time, I also discovered that the supposedly egalitarian and sexually liberated all-lesbian community I lived in was in fact hierarchical and riddled with competition. Whether the issue was who was cleaning the kitchen or who was sleeping with whom, excluding males from the household did not vanquish rivalry and exploitation.
Even as I wrestled with these discoveries, I met the man who became my husband. Even as my life was falling apart, I had already started to rebuild it — in a different form.
Some years into our life together, I have found more peace and equality, not to mention more freedom from futile power games, in the countless ways we co-operate building a home and family than I ever achieved in my progressive 20s, trying to run away from commitment and constraint.
It turns out that accepting some limits is liberating, not restrictive. And getting to grips with how we divide the countless little jobs that keep a home going hasn’t stuffed me into a patriarchal box at all. Rather, it has produced a set-up that looks fairly conventional but is well adapted to each of us and our shared goals.
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Biden's DOJ Charges Eight Pro-Lifers
President Joe Biden's Justice Department charged eight pro-life activists for an incident outside an abortion clinic in Michigan in 2020.
The eight people were indicted under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE), who was reportedly "engaging in a civil rights conspiracy" and violated the FACE Act by blocking the entrance of the Northland Family Planning Clinic, which performs abortions.
According to the indictment, the group "did willfully combine, conspire, and agree with one another, and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to oppress and intimidate patients and employees of the NFPC in the free exercise and enjoyment of the rights and privileges secured to them by the laws of the United States, namely, the rights to obtain reproductive health services."
The FACE Act makes it a federal crime to use or threaten to use force to "injure, intimidate, or interfere" with a person seeking reproductive health services. Convictions of FACE Act violations carry up to 11 years in prison and up to $350,000 in fines.
According to the DOJ, the pro-life activists physically interfered with employees and patients from entering the facility at the Sterling Heights clinic.
The DOJ also alleges that one of the people from the group advertised their "blockade" on social media while live-streaming the incident.
This is just one of many attempts by Biden's DOJ to attack pro-lifers. The escalation of enforcement of the FACE Act has surged since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Earlier this year, Mark Houck, a pro-lifer and Catholic father of seven, was acquitted of charges against him after allegedly pushing a Planned Parenthood escort outside an abortion clinic in 2021.
His attorney, Peter Breen, argued that Houck's arrest was an "outrageous abuse of power," arguing that the DOJ was out to punish and intimidate pro-life activists.
Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote, condemned the DOJ for not holding those who vandalized pro-life centers and Catholic Churches responsible for their actions and how they treat pro-life activists.
"The shame is that they have no interest in equally pursuing pro-abortion domestic criminals that have vandalized and desecrated hundreds of churches and pregnancy care centers. The Department of Justice should not play favorites when enforcing the law, yet that seems to be the new policy," Burch said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
https://townhall.com//tipsheet/saraharnold/2023/02/22/bidens-doj-indicts-8-pro-lifers-n2619866
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26 February, 2023
Time to Think — what went wrong at the Tavistock gender clinic
The Tavvy has always been a haunt for Leftist know-it-alls
The rise and fall of the Tavistock clinic’s gender identity development service for children (GIDS) is the story of how a well-meaning institution can go awry. Established in 1989 as the UK’s pioneering clinic in its field, it is now set to close this spring after having prescribed puberty blockers to more than one thousand children, many under 16, who were questioning their gender identity.
In the intervening decades the London clinic was the subject of increasing attention and notoriety, in particular after a court case brought in 2020 by Keira Bell, who accused it of having treated her “like an experiment” and rushing her into making irreversible changes to her body.
A book about the Tavistock could easily have been a howl of outrage. But Hannah Barnes has written a meticulously researched, sensitive and cautionary chronicle. Barnes, a BBC journalist whose dogged reporting for Newsnight prompted an investigation into the Tavistock by the NHS regulator, has trawled through scientific studies and Freedom of Information requests, interviewed almost 60 clinicians and many others, to piece the story together.
Under its original leadership, the clinic took a nuanced approach to distressed teenagers, using therapy to work out how best to help them. But it gradually became something more like a conveyor belt to puberty blockers, which were in turn the gateway to cross-sex hormones, and drastic surgery. This shift seems to have been driven by multiple factors, including money, a new chief executive and rapidly increasing demand. In 2007, the clinic was seeing about 50 children a year. By the time its closure was announced, in 2022, it was getting thousands of referrals every year.
Time to Think exposes how shockingly little evidence there was for what worked — the studies cited were based on tiny samples — and how little interest there was in collecting more data. It is not even known how many people detransition. This lack of interest seems to betray a wilful failure to safeguard the wellbeing of the children involved.
The leadership pressed on, even when its own survey showed that not all children thrived on blockers: many saw their mental health deteriorate. Barnes explains that a large number of those who sought help were suffering from multiple problems, including autism. As time went on, the number of prepubescent boys was overtaken by the number of girls, many of them self-harming or suffering from eating disorders. Yet the diagnosis didn’t change. By attending the unit, girls were on a pathway to drastic, irreversible operations such as “top surgery” — the casual phrase for the cutting off of female breasts.
The central voices in Time to Think are those of the many clinicians who became concerned, at different times and in different ways, about the direction the Tavistock was taking. It is striking how nervous they were about speaking up. The leadership seems to have been very keen to please Mermaids, a charity which keeps cropping up in this narrative, making demands.
It is astonishing how long it took for anyone to act. In 2005, concerns led the medical director David Taylor, medical director of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, to write a report — but this was not shown to staff or the public until 2020. In 2018, 10 worried clinicians took their worries to David Bell, a respected senior psychoanalyst, whose subsequent 54-page report branded the clinic “not fit for purpose”. But still nothing happened. The clinic and its overseers at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust closed ranks. It was not until 2022 that NHS England took the decision to close the clinic, after yet another report, this time by Hilary Cass. Paul Jenkins and Paul Burstow, the CEO and chair of the Trust, have both stepped down.
The book offers deeply sympathetic insights into the struggles of the ever-increasing numbers of young people who came through the doors, and of the clinicians trying to help them, amid a crumbling mental health system that was relieved to have somewhere to refer kids on to if they mentioned the word “gender”. Barnes keeps things readable by weaving in the stories of seven young people who were treated by the service: Ellie, Phoebe, Jack, Hannah, Alex, Jacob and Harriet. Some are now living happily in their new gender, others are struggling, and one has detransitioned: a range of outcomes that reflects the challenges the therapists were facing.
It is hard not to conclude that too many children were subjected to treatment that has permanently changed their bodies, without proper evidence. For me, the book also conjured up memories of other NHS cover-ups. When Barnes explained that the gender identity clinic became a money-spinner for the Tavistock Trust, I remembered the 2007 scandal at Stafford Hospital, where managers cut costs to achieve the much-coveted “foundation status”, and hundreds of patients died.
https://www.ft.com/content/a45a9a0b-5d2f-4c4a-b2ef-6a8796ea5d10?shareType=nongift
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Real bigotry in Scotland
Let me get this right. In Scotland’s political class it is de rigueur to believe that someone with a penis can literally be a woman but it is the height of bigotry to think marriage should be for heterosexuals only? It is good and ‘progressive’ to say that men, even rapists, should be put in women’s prisons if they claim to be women, but it is a cancel-worthy speechcrime to say marriage should be between men and women only? Scotland, you are so lost.
We need to talk about the persecution of Kate Forbes. It is revealing so much about our febrile and unforgiving political climate. For me the big takeaway is just how disorientated so-called progressive politics has become. We’ve now reached a situation where if you discard biological science, observable reality and a truth humankind has known since the very beginning – namely, that there are men and women and they are different – you’ll be praised to the hilt. But if you express a view that was completely mainstream for millennia, which in fact was the organising principle of human society – namely, that marriage is something entered into by a man and a woman – you’ll be shamed, damned and all but hounded out of respectable society. This is not normal.
The social-media mauling of Ms Forbes has been horrendous. Simply for expressing her deeply held religious beliefs – such as that marriage is for men and women and that it’s wrong to have children out of wedlock – she has been denounced as a gross, immoral homophobe who has no place in political life. What is essentially being said here is that traditionally minded Christians should be barred from high office. The intolerance of it all is chilling.
There’s a twisted irony in the Forbesphobia. She’s branded a bigot but it’s her hectoring denouncers who are the true bigots. It’s time to remind people what the word bigotry means. Bigotry is ‘intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself’, says the Oxford Dictionary of English. Who does that better describe? Forbes, who has merely given polite and honest expression to her Christian convictions? Or the foaming Twittermobs who’ve responded to her religious utterances by calling her every name under the sun and insisting she mustn’t be allowed to lead the SNP? Bigots, heal thyselves.
The social-media mauling of Ms Forbes has been horrendous
The fire and brimstone is coming, not from Forbes, but from her haters. Forbes has been a paragon of reason and decency in comparison with her seething condemners in right-on circles. It’s they who are behaving like old-world religious hotheads, desperate to damn into obscurity anyone who dares to transgress their eccentric moral code. Surely it’s this neo-religious creed, this fundamentalist opposition to alternative ways of thinking, that has no place in political life?
The Forbes affair has got me thinking about one of the most pernicious claims in public life today – that it’s homophobic to oppose same-sex marriage. It is time to take down this myth. The branding of discomfort with same-sex marriage as a ‘phobia’, a prejudiced malady, instantly makes bigots of millions of our religiously minded citizens. Not just Christians but Muslims, Hindus and Orthodox Jews too. If support for same-sex marriage becomes a condition of engaging in polite society, of entering the political realm, then millions of people will be locked out. That backing same-sex marriage has become a new kind of religious test, a means of measuring someone’s fitness for public life, is nothing short of surreal.
What’s more, there are many non-religious people out there who think same-sex marriage is wrong, or just unnecessary. Including gay people. You can believe that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being gay, and that the dismantling of the vile laws that discriminated against gay people was one of the great progressive gains of the modern era, and still think same-sex marriage is a strange institution that weakens the meaning of marriage and might, in the long run, have problematic social consequences. That’s my view: gay liberation, brilliant; gay marriage, a bit silly.
The ‘progressive’ elites have no idea how ridiculous they look to millions of ordinary people. They have created a world in which kids can’t read the original Roald Dahl books in case they feel offended by the word ‘fat’ but they can be read stories by drag queens with names like Flow Job. A world in which you’re more likely to do well if you believe the violent male tormentor of women is himself a woman than if you believe what the Bible says about marriage. Listen, it isn’t Kate Forbes who’s crazy.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/kate-forbes-isnt-homophobic-for-opposing-same-sex-marriage
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Penguin to publish 'classic' Roald Dahl books alongside new editions after 'censorship' backlash
Publisher Penguin Random House has announced it will publish "classic" unaltered versions of Roald Dahl's children's novels after it received criticism for cuts and rewrites that were intended to make the books suitable for modern readers.
Penguin Random House said the decision was made in response to the debate over the changes
Along with the new editions, the company said 17 of Dahl's books would be published in their original form later this year as The Roald Dahl Classic Collection so "readers will be free to choose which version of Dahl's stories they prefer".
The move comes after criticism of scores of changes made to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and other much-loved Dahl books for recent editions published under the company's Puffin children's label, in which passages relating to weight, mental health, gender and race were altered.
Augustus Gloop, Charlie's gluttonous antagonist in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — originally published in 1964 — became "enormous" rather than "enormously fat." In Witches, an "old hag" became an "old crow," and a supernatural female posing as an ordinary woman may be a "top scientist or running a business" instead of a "cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman".
In Fantastic Mr Fox, the word "black" was removed from a description of the "murderous, brutal-looking" tractors.
The Roald Dahl Story Company, which controls the rights to the books, said it had worked with Puffin to review and revise the texts because it wanted to ensure that "Dahl's wonderful stories and characters continue to be enjoyed by all children today".
Revisions to Dahl's books stokes anger about censorship
Roald Dahl's UK publisher releases a statement on revisions to his books, prompting some bestselling authors to share their thoughts about changing works to suit modern sensitivities.
While tweaking old books for modern sensibilities is not a new phenomenon in publishing, the scale of the edits drew strong criticism from free-speech groups such as writers' organisation PEN America, and from authors including Salman Rushdie.
Rushdie, who lived under threat of death from Iran's Islamic regime for years because of the alleged blasphemy of his novel The Satanic Verses, called the revisions "absurd censorship".
Rushdie, who was attacked and seriously injured last year at an event in New York state, tweeted news of Penguin's change of heart on Friday with the words "Penguin Books back down after Roald Dahl backlash!"
PEN America chief executive Suzanne Nossel wrote on Twitter: "I applaud Penguin for hearing out critics, taking the time to rethink this, and coming to the right place."
Camilla, the Queen Consort appeared to offer her view at a literary reception on Thursday.
Camilla urged writers to "remain true to your calling, unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression or impose limits on your imagination".
Dahl's books, with their mischievous children, strange beasts and often beastly adults, have sold more than 300 million copies and continue to be read by children around the world.
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Transgender Hormone Therapy Increases the Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke, New Study Shows
In recent months, several doctors, lawmakers and the like have sounded the alarm about the dangers of irreversible transgender “gender-affirming” care for minors. These treatments include puberty blockers, hormone therapy treatment, and sex reassignment surgery. Last fall, England’s National Health Service issued guidance stating that most children experiencing gender dysphoria are likely going through a “transient phase” and will outgrow it.
This week, a new study that will be presented at an American College of Cardiology conference in March found that patients who take cross-sex hormones as part of their gender-affirmation therapy face a “substantially increased risk of serious cardiac events, including stroke, heart attack and pulmonary embolism.”
The study pointed out that hormone therapy use is escalating rapidly, as more than a million people in the United States identify as transgender, which Townhall covered. But, this demographic is “historically understudied,” it explained:
Researchers retrospectively examined rates of cardiovascular events in over 21,000 people with gender dysphoria from a national database of hospital records, of whom 1,675 had used hormone replacement therapy. Typically, people assigned male at birth receive estrogen and people assigned female at birth receive testosterone. Overall results found hormone replacements were associated with higher rates of cardiac events, mostly related to dangerous blood clots, but were not associated with higher rates of death.
[...]
In the study, people with gender dysphoria who had ever used hormone replacements saw nearly seven times the risk of ischemic stroke (a blockage in a vessel supplying blood to the brain), nearly six times the risk of ST elevation myocardial infarction (the most serious type of heart attack) and nearly five times the risk of pulmonary embolism (a blockage in an artery in the lung), compared with people with gender dysphoria who had never used hormone replacements. Hormone replacement therapy was not associated with any increase in deaths from any cause or with increased rates of atrial fibrillation, diabetes, hypertension, hemorrhagic stroke or heart failure.
Both estrogen and testosterone are known to increase the clotting activity of blood, which could explain the increase in clotting-related cardiovascular events, researchers said. Those taking hormone replacement therapy also had higher rates of substance use disorder and hypothyroidism.
“Starting transitioning is a big part of a person's life and helping them feel more themselves, but hormone replacement therapy also has a lot of side effects—it's not a risk-free endeavor," Ibrahim Ahmed, MD, who is a third-year resident at Mercy Catholic Medical Center and the study's lead author, said. Ahmed will present the study at the conference next month.
"Looking at a person's medical and family history should definitely be part of the screening protocol before they even start hormone replacement therapy," Ahmed added. "It is also important that people considering this therapy are made aware of all the risks."
This month, Jamie Reed, a former case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, published a tell-all piece with The Free Press about the “morally and medically appalling” way children who walked through the clinic’s doors were treated for gender dysphoria.
"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 â€do no harm.’ Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care,” Reed wrote, adding that “anyone who raised doubts [about the care] ran the risk of being called a transphobe."ť
Reed explained that children were given gender-affirming care after only a couple visits, and that their mental health conditions were often overlooked.
"The mental health of these kids was deeply concerning -- there were diagnoses like schizophrenia, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and more. Often they were already on a fistful of pharmaceuticals"
https://townhall.com//tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/02/23/transgender-study-n2619907
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Australia: I’d have got a medal’: Zachary Rolfe has last word as he flies out
He was a victim of political correctess. Blacks are sacrosanct. If the thug he shot had been white, nothing would have been said
Northern Territory police officer Zachary Rolfe – who fatally shot Indigenous teenager Kumanjayi Walker at Yuendumu – has left the country after claiming that in any other jurisdiction he would have “got a medal” for protecting his partner’s life instead of being painted as a “violent thug”.
Constable Rolfe flew out of Canberra on Thursday after sharing a 2500-word open letter accusing the NT police, coroner and her counsel assisting of trying to publicly vilify him during the “biased” coronial inquest into Walker’s death, which is due to resume next week.
The 31-year-old also accused Police Commissioner Jamie Chalker of refusing to meet with him and called for his resignation.
In the letter, obtained by The Australian, Constable Rolfe says Walker was a violent abuser who tried to kill him and his police partner, Adam Eberl, when their specialist unit was deployed to Yuendumu to arrest him for attacking their colleagues with an axe.
“Walker was a young man with a violent past who abused many in his community, including young girls and boys,” he said. “When he tried to kill my partner and I … I did not think about his race, upbringing or his past trauma, I thought about defending my partner’s life, and that’s what I did.
“In a different state, I would have got a medal for it, and none of you would ever have known my name.”
Constable Rolfe apologised for sending offensive text messages that have been ventilated at the inquest but claims the communications were cherrypicked from thousands extracted from his phone and honed in on at the inquest in a deliberate attempt to paint him as “a racist, violent cop”.
“They had access to every single one of my messages and knew that I did not treat a single race differently from others. In private, I talked shit about nearly every group at times,” he said.
“Yet they released just a tiny snippet to make me out to be a racist. The parties knew that the messages had nothing to do with the death of Kumanjayi Walker.
“They knew the damage they would do once in public – they would hurt the community, the police force and the relationship between them – but they didn’t care. If the coronial’s goal was to ‘heal’, it has failed.”
Constable Rolfe, who grew up in Canberra, said the investigations into his actions at Yuendumu on November 9, 2019 had been “blatantly biased”.
“If all you know of me is through the media then you see me as a violent thug, an ex-soldier with a past,” he said.
The former infantry soldier – who deployed to Afghanistan – defended his policing record, saying he spent three years “protecting people” in Alice Springs before being charged with Walker’s murder. “I was a good cop; I loved the job,” he said. “I did it because I wanted to help people who needed help, to protect those who needed protection; I was good at it.”
He said his three years policing in Alice Springs were spent helping hungry children he found wandering the streets at 3am, stopping teens from committing suicide and protecting the community from violent offenders.
“You don’t see all the countless people I’ve done my best to help,” he said. “I was in the job to protect people, but if you were a violent offender, causing others harm, or you tried to prevent me doing my job to protect and defend, I make no apologies for doing my job.”
Constable Rolfe said police investigating his murder charge ignored advice from the DPP regarding their use of expert witnesses. The Australian has seen a police coronial report, the subject of a coronial non-publication order, that substantiates this claim.
“After arresting me for murder and attempting to put me behind bars for 25 years, the NT police finalised their investigation into the shooting and decided that the only outcome is remedial advice, which I have received via email,” he said.
“Millions of dollars, thousands of wasted hours, exacerbated trauma for families and community, only for the result to be an email to me providing me with remedial advice – which doesn’t even count as a formal disciplinary breach.
“Despite this, the coronial focus is still on me rather than on areas that could improve the circumstances of the NT.”
Constable Rolfe said two weeks ago the executive tried to “medically retire” him on mental health grounds – despite a police psychologist recently clearing him to return to work – and have since served him with a new disciplinary notice for speaking to Channel 7’s Spotlight program in March last year after he was acquitted of all charges related to Walker’s death.
“As for me, I will continue to help people who need help and protect those who need to be protected; if it’s not in the police, it’ll be somewhere else,” he said. “I’ll live my life knowing I have the loyalty of those I worked with and those who know me … I was a good cop, my integrity is intact, and I am proud of that.”
Coroner Elisabeth Armitage this month extended the inquest to include two more sitting weeks from July 31 and August 21 in an attempt to get Constable Rolfe on the stand should he lose his appeal, being heard on April 11, against a decision compelling him to answer certain categories of questions.
On Thursday night, Richard Rolfe told The Australian he knew where his son was but not when or if he was coming home. “He’s gone overseas to try to deal with the trauma he’s suffered and the continuing attacks by the coroner and commissioner,” he said.
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24 February, 2023
Biden To Roll Back Safeguards for Student Religious Groups on Campus
The Biden administration’s plan to repeal a key religious liberties protection for college students could launch an epic struggle aimed at the Supreme Court over whether religious groups on campus can restrict leadership positions to students who follow the groups’ religious tenets.
At issue is an effort to force student religious groups to open leadership positions to “all-comers” — say, an abortion-rights activist as leader of a Catholic student group or a polytheist as leader of an Orthodox Jewish club. The Biden administration wants to appeal protections, known as the “Religious Liberty and Free Inquiry Rule,” established by the Trump administration in 2020.
The question of First Amendment protections for religious student groups first came to a head in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of “all-comers” in a case out of the Hastings School of Law in California. The vote, though, was five to four, with Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia dissenting in favor of religious students.
The Nine ruled that the university had the right to deny student organization status and privileges to a Christian group.
Since then, though, the makeup of the Supreme Court has changed dramatically, with a six-to-three majority that favors stronger religious freedom rights.
In Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, UC Hastings said it had an “all-comers” policy that required all official student groups to accept any willing participant as a member or leader.
UC Hastings said the legal society was ineligible for official school sanction because its statement of faith — required for all members to affirm — upheld traditional Christian teachings on marriage and sexuality, which the school said violated its non-discrimination policy.
In the majority opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the school’s “all-comers” policy was “a reasonable, viewpoint neutral condition” that did not violate the First Amendment. The Christian Legal Society could exist as an unofficial group on campus, the court ruled, but the school was within its rights to deny its status as a registered student organization.
In 2020, the Trump administration sought to bolster federal support for religious student groups facing similar pressures through the Free Inquiry Rule, tying federal funding to protections for religious student groups.
According to these regulations, “students are allowed to say that they only want to have leaders of their student groups who are practicing members of their faith on campus,” the general counsel for the Jewish Coalition on Religious Liberties, Howard Slugh, says.
“Religious student organizations should be able to enjoy the benefits, rights, and privileges afforded to other student organizations at a public institution,” the Trump-era regulations say. “Accordingly, public institutions cannot exclude religious student organizations from receiving neutral and generally available government benefits.”
The Free Inquiry rule in its current iteration allows schools to maintain all-comers policies but notes that schools “may not selectively enforce” policies to target religious student organizations. Political groups would need to accept students who may not align with their missions.
“With respect to a true all-comers policy, pro-choice groups could not bar leader positions from pro-life individuals,” the final rule said, raising the question whether a true all-comers policy is possible. Mission-driven organizations are likely always to select mission-aligned leaders.
On Tuesday, though, the Department of Education announced its intention to open comments on a proposed amendment to the regulation, one that would strip its power to condition funds on the basis of protections for religious student groups.
The Biden administration says these rules are “not necessary” for the protection of First Amendment rights and have “caused confusion” for schools — particularly at the intersection of religious liberties protections and anti-discrimination policy.
The administration noted concerns that the Free Inquiry Rule could mandate “preferential treatment to religious student groups” and “allow religious student groups to discriminate against vulnerable and marginalized students.”
The Department of Education said it was “unduly burdensome” to be involved in investigations about the treatment of religious student organizations and wants to hand these cases back over to the judicial branch.
“Where complex questions over the First Amendment arise, Federal and State courts are best equipped to resolve these matters,” the administration said in its announcement. “In its proposed rule, the Department is proposing to return to this longstanding practice of deferring to courts.”
Should the question reach Supreme Court again, the nation could see the precedent established by Christian Legal Society overturned, given the court’s more conservative leanings — especially at the intersection of religious liberty and education.
The move to overturn protections for religious student groups in higher education comes as the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit prepares to hear a case en banc on the topic at the high school level, Fellowship of Christian Athletes v. San Jose Unified School District.
At a California public school, a Christian athletic group was stripped of its official club status because its student leaders were required to affirm certain principles of faith — including traditional Christian teachings on marriage and sexuality. The case represents an opportunity to relitigate nearly the same principles at stake in Christian Legal Society.
Oral arguments will take place next month
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Fox News’s ‘silent ban’ on Donald Trump
It’s by now well-established that Fox News, the American media behemoth, is no longer on the Trump Train. Trumpworld’s union with Foxworld was never altogether easy and, ever since that fateful election in November 2020, it has fallen apart. Trumpists despise Fox for, as many see it, helping Joe Biden steal the election. And the top brass at Fox News have sought to distance themselves from the Trump movement and what they regard as its increasingly toxic politics. Rupert Murdoch has had enough of the Orange One, by all accounts.
What hasn’t been made entirely clear is the extent of the break-up. One senior Fox figure has let slip, however, that Donald Trump is effectively ‘banned’ from appearing on Fox News at present. He hasn’t been seen on the main channel since he declared his candidacy for the 2024 presidential in November and other Fox sources have confirmed that there’s a reason Donald is not appearing on their network.
A source familiar with Fox insisted that ‘the network would never apply a ban on any presidential candidate’. No doubt that is true.
But, as another source with deep contacts inside the company put it: ‘Fox News digital will write about Trump and give him little phone interviews. But he has not been on the actual channel since he announced. Rupert doesn’t want him to win.’
Other American media insiders say it’s a not very well-kept secret that Fox won’t have Trump on anymore. ‘Everybody knows you just can’t say it out loud,’ said one.
The wider Murdoch empire is showing favour to the Republican hopefuls hoping to beat Trump in the 2024 primaries. The New York Post, Murdoch’s leading American tabloid, has been notably positive in its coverage of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Along with Murdoch’s other big US paper, The Wall Street Journal, the Post has made its editorial line clear: it’s time for the party to move on.
But DeSantis, the just-declared Nikki Haley and even the gonzo newbie runner, Vivek Ramaswamy, have all appeared on Fox in recent weeks. But the Donald remains persona non grata.
Trumpworld is seething with their sense of being snubbed. ‘There is definitely a soft or silent ban on Trump,’ says a source close to Trump. ‘They have clearly gone all in for Ron DeSantis, judging by their fawning coverage of his events week.’
Trump echoed the sentiment this week on his Truth Social Platform, as he said:
So interesting to watch FoxNews cover the small and unenthusiastic 139 person crowd in Staten Island for DeSantis, but stay as far away as possible from coverage of the thousands of people, many unable to get in, at the Club 47 event in West Palm Beach, Florida. I call FoxNews the RINO Network, and their DOWN BIG Ratings accurately reflect the name.
But there is no denying that Trump’s invisibility on Fox represents a significant obstacle to his re-election: it is still easily the nation’s most-watched cable news network.
Media eco-systems are always changing, of course, and right-wing channels, such as Newsmax and OAN, have prospered since 2020. But Fox is the biggest beast in conservative media – a fact that the MAGA movement can’t change.
The Trump ban is not formal policy, of course, more an understanding between senior people at the network that Trump is not somebody they should be booking. But, with the 2024 election starting to take shape, and Trump still easily the frontrunner for the nomination according to most serious polls, how long can Fox afford to freeze him out? ‘They have to be careful,’ says another source close to Trump. ‘They are the most important network on the conservative side, but it’s not their job to be too obviously picking the Republican nominee. People don’t like that.’
Many of Fox’s biggest stars, including their most-watched hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, have often interviewed Trump in the past and have by no means switched their editorial line to favour DeSantis. As one regular Fox guest who is close to the 45th President put it, ‘I’m pretty sure that if one of the big guys, like Hannity, say, said ‘F*** you I’m putting Trump on, nobody would stop them.’ But the fact remains that Trump hasn’t appeared on Fox since November, which suggests the anti-Trump forces are holding sway. “It’s all the mid-level guys who are terrified of losing their jobs who don’t want to upset Murdochs,’ says a Trumpworld source. ‘But if they obviously bash Trump, they get roasted by his fans, many of whom are Fox viewers, on social media. They went quite anti-Trump after the election and their ratings tanked.’
There’s a long way to go. It’s worth remembering that Murdoch is nothing if not adaptable when it comes to siding with the winning ticket. In 2016, as it became obvious that Trump would win the Republican nomination, Fox quickly became his biggest cheerleader. Trump and Murdoch, two billionaires with quite a bit in common, had some kind of relationship, back then. Today, not so much.https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/fox-newss-silent-ban-on-donald-trump
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/fox-newss-silent-ban-on-donald-trump
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Vimeo Removes ‘Affirmation Generation’ Documentary Revealing the Medical Scandal of Transgenderism
The video platform Vimeo locked the account hosting the documentary “Affirmation Generation,” a film exposing the medical scandal of experimental transgender interventions.
“Our film represents that which is currently being silenced because it’s unpopular with the tenets of the mainstream media,” Joey Brite, the film’s executive producer, told The Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday. “First, it was the author J.K. Rowling followed by comedian Dave Chappelle. Vimeo and other platforms have banned many such projects as ours based on newly constructed hateful narratives that cast truth, science and common sense as enemies of the State. We need to move towards conversation and stop fomenting the conflict.”
“This is an issue of free speech and Big Tech removing it from American citizens. Is THIS the America we want to live in?” Brite asked.
Vera Lindner, the film’s producer, sent The Daily Signal a photo of Vimeo’s announcement that the documentary’s account “has been disabled due to a violation of Vimeo’s Terms of Service and/or Guidelines.”
The film had been up for three days and had racked up 19,000 views in that time, Brite said.
“The filmmakers of AFFIRMATION GENERATION – all lifelong West Coast Liberal Democrats, parents and community leaders – made an extraordinary effort to cite peer-reviewed medical research and evidence, to present the issue with deep compassion toward the gender-dysphoric youth, and to back up every argument in the film with science,” the filmmakers said in a statement. “AFFIRMATION GENERATION is the first non-ideological, non-religious documentary focused on the impact of transgender medical practices for youth. Censorship of dissenting voices is incompatible with democratic values, and especially with diversity and inclusion.”
Vimeo did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Brite told The Daily Signal that the filmmakers “expected to get kicked off of Vimeo because of what happened to Dead Name,” a documentary about the parents who struggle when school staff and doctors push experimental medical transitions for their children. “Dead Name” has not been restored to the platform.
Brite also said she posted videos of a large gender-critical conference she hosted in August 2020, and Vimeo removed those videos five months after she posted them.
Brite, a lesbian, said she first witnessed people offering testosterone near lesbian bars in California in the 1990s. She said the “T” in the LGBT acronym “was a Trojan horse.”
“This is all about money, Big Pharma,” she said. “This is just like the opioid crisis except that it is global, and embedded in governments, education, law.”
She said the film features the stories of six detransitioners, interviews with twelve experts, including clinicians, and the findings of over 45 peer-reviewed scientific studies and journal articles in order to expose the medical scandal of the transgender interventions.
Brite criticized the suggestion that transgender identify affirms a person’s “authentic self.”
“Your ‘authentic self’ is now happening through drugs, sterilization, possible surgeries that are all experimental, all in mind with changing to this amorphous thing called gender, which is a social construct, not biology,” she said.
Linder told The Daily Signal that she hopes Vimeo’s ban will have the “Streisand Effect,” the phenomenon whereby banning something actually draws more attention to it.
She said the film has not found an alternate hosting platform because the filmmakers aim to get it distributed more widely.
“Currently we are contacting big distributors for worldwide distribution,” Lindner explained. “For this reason, we will not put the film on alternate platforms as that would preclude Distributors from wanting to pick it up. Instead, we will continue to email it to our focus groups (parents, doctors, gay/lesbian advocates).”
“If fans post it on alternate platforms, these would be bootlegged versions,” she added. “I hope they would not preclude Distributors from considering our film. The Social Media accounts for Affirmation Generation will always have a link where people can see it.”
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The ‘Great Awokening’ Is Transforming Science and Medicine
The “great awokening” touches every elite institution in America, mostly radiating out from our compromised system of higher education. One of the most disturbing and illuminating aspects of this cultural revolution is how much it is transforming science and medicine.
A video of medical students at Columbia University reciting an updated version of the Hippocratic oath that injected elements of critical race theory made the rounds on social media recently. As many have noted, this “student-led initiative” sounds cult-like.
Fox News reported that “the August 2021 ceremony was the first time in the medical school’s 255-year history that the incoming medical students recited their personalized class oath, a spin on the Hippocratic Oath to ‘better reflect the values [students] wish to uphold as they enter their medical training.’”
“We enter the profession of medicine with appreciation for the opportunity to build on the scientific and humanistic achievements of the past,” the oath begins. “We also recognize the acts and systems of oppression effected in the name of medicine. We take this oath of service to begin building a future grounded in truth, restoration, and equity to fulfill medicine’s capacity to liberate.”
All I can say is if you have serious health problems, I suggest looking for an older doctor.
This effort to transform even the most elite institutions of science and medicine into temples of wokeness isn’t just being led by a few radical students. It’s part of a widespread and, yes, systemic effort to convert elite institutions into revolutionary political organizations.
A recent report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine highlights how our most prestigious research and medical institutions are being transformed into engines of fanatical wokeness.
“Calls for the National Academies to pursue such a report had been building for years, the authors write, but took off after the murder of George Floyd and ensuing Black Lives Matter protests in 2020,” Stat News reported. “The authors note that they first started with a literature review ‘to illuminate how historical policies, practices, and laws can have lasting effects’ and note that they use the term racism ‘because it is scientifically accurate … even if it makes readers uncomfortable.’”
The National Academies report doesn’t specifically cite critical race theory or the works of Ibram X. Kendi—the leading public proponent of “anti-racism”—but it clearly relies on a similar network of ideas.
The central premise of this ideology is that the United States and Western societies in general were founded in racism, that their basic institutions inculcate white supremacy, and that racial disparities in nearly any profession or societal outcome proves that structural racism exists. Therefore, it dodges the need to prove individual or literal acts of racism and instead pins the discrepancy of outcomes on “unconscious bias” and other structural barriers.
To correct what is defined as a “systemic problem,” Kendi and the National Academies suggest anti-racism, which often actually means racial discrimination against whites and Asians in the name of equity.
“Racial disparities in [science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine] careers do not rest on individual deficiency in candidates or even primarily on the individual racism of institutional and organizational gatekeepers,” the National Academies report says in its preface. “Racism is embedded in our society.”
Even the mushrooming number of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that are taking over higher education aren’t enough, according to the authors of the report.
“It is incumbent upon organizations and institutions to address racial biases that individual decisionmakers are unlikely to notice, identify, or prioritize because, as evidence shows, they may not recognize how their own, perhaps inadvertent, individual decisions contribute to overall patterns,” the report says.
Got it? The ways of systemic racism are so obscure and mysterious that we need a class of hyper-dedicated inquisitors who can read the tea leaves and stamp out racist heresies. Science be praised.
Notice how seamlessly—and ludicrously—ideology has been wedded to science and medicine—fields once thought to be objective and removed from cultural debates.
Remember the whole “the real pandemic is racism” stuff that was used to justify lifting COVID-19 restrictions for Black Lives Matter protests and creating race-based medical treatment programs? That’s the mentality that dominates elite institutions and continues to accelerate.
Gutting actual science, wearing it as a skin suit, and yelling that this is “scientifically accurate” doesn’t make it so. Instead, our society’s revolutionary vanguard relies on institutional bureaucratic power to simply overcome any opposition to their political designs.
This is the crisis that looms over all other political debate in America.
What kind of country will we live in if this continues to be the guiding ideology of every serious institution? We won’t be a serious country. Eventually, the incredible advances we’ve made in science, technology, and medicine will fall into ruin. We will become a society in which opportunities for advancement and “success” rely on historic grievance and arcane knowledge of a rapidly evolving ideology.
The Soviet Union tried something like that. It didn’t end well.
That’s why we need to use the power we have now to reverse this institutional takeover while enough Americans still have the common sense to understand just how pernicious it is.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/02/21/the-great-awokening-is-transforming-science-and-medicine
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23 February, 2023
Junk psychiatry
Psychiatry is in any case mostly of marginal value. Converting it into Leftist propaganda is unlikely to help anyone
In winter 2019, Leslie Elliott enrolled as a graduate student in Antioch University’s Mental Health Counseling program. At first, she found it to be a stimulating master’s program — informative and clinically relevant. Then she took a required course in “multicultural counseling.”
“We were taught that race should be the dominant lens through which clients were to be understood and therapy conducted,” says Elliott, a mother of four who’d majored in psychology.
Elliott’s professors taught her, for example, that if clients were white, she was supposed to help them see how they unwittingly perpetuate white supremacy. “We were encouraged to regard white clients as ‘reservoirs of racism and oppression.’” White women, one professor told a class, were “basic bitches,” “Beckys” and “nothing special.”
If the client were black, Elliott was told to ask how it felt to sit with her, a white counselor. If the client felt at ease, “my job — regardless of what brought him to therapy — was to make him more aware of how being black compounded, or perhaps caused, his problems.”
After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, the three-year program intensified its emphasis on race and oppression, making clear that counselors were to be foot soldiers in the culture wars. “Incredible as it sounds,” says Elliott, “we were encouraged to see ourselves as activists and remake ourselves as social change agents.”
“Critical social-justice therapists” is what Aaron Kindsvatter and others call this new breed of mental health professional graduating from programs across the country. Last year, Kindsvatter left his tenured position at the University of Vermont to pursue private practice in Burlington, where he has treated a handful of clients who were, in his words, “victims of indoctrination attempts” by their “authoritarian” therapists. To be clear, Elliott and Kindsvatter are not talking about a mismatch in sociopolitical views wherein, say, a client is conservative and the therapist is liberal or progressive. To be sure, such a discrepancy can — though by no means inevitably does — create tension. Studies have shown, in fact, that therapeutic relationships were stronger when clients felt comfortable disclosing their political views to the therapist and when the therapist was accepting of those views.
But even when sociopolitical discrepancies affect therapy, they do so within the confines of a time-honored framework that places primacy on the patient.
Social-justice therapy, SJT, however, overturns that framework. It endows therapists — who understand themselves as activists first, not healers — with the power to define the goals of therapy, overriding the client’s needs and preferences.
“Most damning,” Kindsvatter tells me, “is that the major governing entities in the field have turned a blind eye to blatant ethical breaches, because such breaches align with a preferred ideology.”
The governing council of the American Counseling Association, or ACA, has endorsed “multicultural and social-justice counseling competencies.” According to these competencies: “Multicultural and social-justice competent counselors assist privileged and marginalized clients in unlearning their privilege and oppression, [help] privileged and marginalized clients develop critical consciousness by understanding their situation in context of living in an oppressive society” and “initiate discussions with privileged and marginalized clients regarding how they shape and are shaped by local, state and federal laws and policies.”
Another governing entity is the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs. The council requires programs to include training on “the effects of power and privilege for counselors and clients” and “strategies for identifying and eliminating barriers, prejudices and processes of intentional and unintentional oppression and discrimination.”
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Finland's top transgender treatment expert slams spread of 'disinformation' on children with gender confusion - and says 'four out of five' kids who question their gender grow out of it
Finland's leading transgender treatment expert said 'four out of five' teens who question their gender come to accept their bodies if they don't receive medical intervention.
Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala previously administered gender-affirming treatment only to patients who met restrictive requirements, but after seeing a significant increase in adolescent patients in the 2010s became skeptical that treatment was the solution to the problem.
In a recent interview with the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanoma, Kaltiala laid out a number of points - including that overwhelming evidence showed the desire for gender transitions spiked among female teenage friend groups exposed to social media.
That evidence supported her assertion that far too little is known about the current wave of gender dysphoria to be administering life-altering treatments to children.
She also said physicians often weaponize parents' fears of suicide to push treatments, calling it 'purposeful disinformation, and spreading it is irresponsible.'
Last year, she testified before the Florida Board of Medicine and Florida Board of Osteopathic Medicine and said there was no evidence to support prescribing gender-affirming treatments for patients who experience gender dysphoria for the first time as adolescents.
Kaltiala's findings, used as the basis for treatment in much of Europe, are in stark contrast to the United States' approach to gender treatment.
Kaltiala began handling youth gender transition treatments in 2011 as the chief psychiatrist of one of Finland's two government-approved pediatric centers.
There she initially stuck to a treatment protocol which required patients to have experienced gender dysphoria before puberty and continued into adolescence. Additionally, they could not have had any serious recurring mental health issues, needed to partake in six months of psychotherapy, and have their family's support for hormonal treatment.
After a few years however, Kaltiala found those requirements were not regulating the numbers of patients who came to her and that an increasing number of patients was seeking treatment.
She found the majority were adolescent girls who had never experienced gender dysphoria as a child, and that 75 percent had experienced serious mental health problems before, according to Tablet.
In 2019, Kaltiala and her colleagues published an article saying there was not enough data about the gender crisis teens were experiencing to justify serious body-altering treatments.
'Research on adolescent onset gender dysphoria is scarce, and optimal treatment options have not been established,' she wrote. 'The reasons for the sudden increase in treatment-seeking due to adolescent onset gender dysphoria/transgender identification are not known.'
Her findings resulted in health officials in Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom opening reviews of their processes for administering gender-affirming treatment.
In her recent interview Kaltiala suggested that the kind of gender-affirming treatments administered in the US were likely to solidify problems patients were experiencing, rather than treat them.
She said doing things like using children's preferred names or pronouns could be as severe an act as altering their bodies, because it solidifies in their psyches that there is something wrong with their body.
'It's a message saying that this is the right path for you,' she said, adding that changing names and pronouns is 'not a neutral act.'
Kaltiala also spoke out against the warning that not giving children gender-affirming treatments might lead to their suicides, which has been employed by many doctors across the US to pressure parents into approving treatment for their children.
'It is not justified to tell the parents of young people identifying as transgender that a young person is at risk of suicide without medical treatments and that the danger can be alleviated with gender reassignment,' she said.
She said the suicide narrative might be pushed by 'adults who have themselves benefited from gender reassignment, have a desire to go out and save children and young children. But they lack understanding that a child is not a small adult.'
Debate about whether to restrict child gender care in the US has intensified in recent months, as a growing number of former patients who regret having irreversible procedures as children say their desire to medically transition was not challenged enough.
The data on how many transitioners change their minds and seek to detransition, or are pressured to do so by relatives or employers, is not reliable, but estimates are in the range of 1 to 8 percent.
A report by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) found the number of Americans who identified as trans nearly doubled from 2017 to 2020, with 300,000 now identifying as such.
This rise has been strongest among young people, and that is where legislators have so far focused their efforts. Around 1.5 percent of American teens identify as trans, the highest of any age group.
Many trans-identifying children will undergo hormone treatments, hoping to prevent themselves from developing sex-based characteristics linked to their birth gender.
These often include puberty blockers, which push back the start of the process, and medication that boosts either estrogen or testosterone levels. Puberty blockers are used to pause puberty and consider whether they want to transition.
By stopping the body's production of sex hormones, gendered characteristics like a deeper voice in men or the development of breasts in women can be halted. The long-term effects of these drugs are not fully understood, but it can take years for the body to naturally start producing hormones after stopping the drugs.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved the drugs to stop precocious puberty - when a child goes through the process earlier than when is healthy - but they are used off-label for trans care.
Hormone therapy can then trigger desired sexual characteristics in a trans teen. By giving a person born as a female testosterone, or a person born male estrogen, they will instead develop traits that match their wanted gender.
The long-term consequences of taking these drugs in youth has not yet been determined, leaving many experts fearful of the recent increase in their use.
Gender-affirming operations, often called top or bottom surgery, will either make changes to a child's genitalia or chest to match that of their new sex. These are irreversible and can leave a person infertile.
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I’ll Pass on Celebrating Diversity
There was a time, believe it or not, when leftists said “Celebrate Diversity” and meant it; when it was largely a slogan on a bumper sticker. Now it’s an order: “CELEBRATE DIVERSITY…OR ELSE!” Sorry, I’m not interested.
I’ve always had a natural inclination to push back against anything I was forced to do – insist I’m supposed to care about something and the odds that I won’t increase exponentially. Take, for example, US soccer. During the World Cup all the ads were about “We’re going to do this” or whatever their slogan was. The American public simply doesn’t care about soccer and the US sucks at it compared to the rest of the world, but these corporate sponsors had to do something. It made me root against them, which was easy because I knew they’d lose.
Women’s soccer is much more annoying, by the way, they’re little leftists with purity tests demanding obedience. I’m not interested in cheering for people who hate this country while demanding they be cheered. Hard pass.
When it comes to “diversity,” I have the same attitude. Skin color or who you sleep with are the least interesting parts of what anyone is or does. If that defines you it tells me you’re not bringing anything substantive to the table and I’m not interested.
I’m tall, 6 feet 5 inches; should I demand high fives over that? No. I didn’t have anything to do with it. Hell, I smoked for a long time, so I tried to stunt it.
Yet, we now have a political party that insists the differences be celebrated, exclusively. That people be treated differently based on their skin color. We used to have a word for that, didn’t we?
What I find even more bizarre are the leftists who buy into it and make it individual. Hearing some Democrat in a town hall or whatever talk about how they’re a “diverse individual” is incredibly odd and, honestly, stupid. But we are dealing with Democrats here…
I want nothing to do with it. Not because I care what these people do, I honestly don’t – if whatever they do is done with other adults who are willing, I couldn’t care less. The problem comes in when they seek to force their will on children.
How many graphically sexual books targeting children need to be highlighted before Democrats think, “Hmm, maybe explicit sex between adults and kids isn’t really something that will help kids learn to read or write?” How about just thinking that things Hustler would’ve edited out of their letter section might not belong in school libraries might not be a good thing?
Democrats, rather than deal with the reality they support for grooming purposes (political grooming mostly, though there is little doubt there’s a lot of the other kind too), simply ignore it when they can. Yet, they also demand the sentiments behind it be celebrated.
What kind of creep would “celebrate” a drag queen grinding their genitals in front of little kids? Democrats.
Celebrate diversity…except when it’s a joke you don’t like. Tiger Woods can be attacked over a tampon joke by white ladies because why not? Oddly, these people immediately reverted back to knowing what a woman is when they could take offense at something.
Kamala Harris MUST be celebrated not only because she’s black, but because she’s also Indian (though she rarely mentions that outside of speaking to Indian or Asian women’s groups, weirdly), but Nikki Haley must be attacked for not being Indian enough because she’s a Republican (both of which were done by NBC News, by the way).
Meanwhile, Harris can tweet out, “My message to Black women and girls everywhere: Never ask for permission to lead.” Are women and girls with other skin colors supposed to wait for permission to lead? By the way, what is a woman?
Nothing that comes out of the mouths of Democrats makes any sense or is remotely intellectually honest in any way. They don’t deserve your respect, they have earned your contempt. Don’t play their game.
I will celebrate accomplishments, that’s it, and not even all of those. I will choose which accomplishments I deem worthy of celebration and I can promise you that none of those things will have anything do with what people had nothing do with.
https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2023/02/21/ill-pass-on-celebrating-diversity-n2619765
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Southern Baptists Oust Saddleback Megachurch, 4 Others for Appointing Female Pastors
Good to see that at least some churches respect Bible teachings
The Southern Baptist Convention—a protestant Christian denomination with over 47,000 churches nationwide—voted Feb. 21 to remove Saddleback Church from its group for recently appointing a woman as a pastor.
The Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee ousted Saddleback’s membership—along with four other churches—“on the basis that the church has a faith and practice that does not closely identify with the convention’s adopted statement of faith, as demonstrated by the church having a female teaching pastor functioning in the office of pastor.”
Saddleback Church is a congregation in Lake Forest, California, with more than 30,000 weekly attendees.
When Pastor Andie Wood replaced Saddleback’s founding Pastor Rick Warren last summer, Wood’s wife, Stacie, was also appointed as a church pastor.
In a statement emailed to The Epoch Times, Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee Chairman Jared Wellman said the decision was not an easy one.
“These churches have been valued, cooperating churches for many years, and this decision was not made lightly,” Wellman said. “However, we remain committed to upholding the theological convictions of the [convention] and maintaining unity among its cooperating churches.”
Wellman referred to the Southern Baptist Convention’s guidelines, which stated in Article VI that “while both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”
The guidelines further cite the Scriptures 1 Timothy 2:12, in which the Apostle Paul states, “I do not allow a woman to teach or to have authority over a man.”
In addition to Saddleback Church, the committee removed four other churches for appointing female pastors: New Faith Mission Ministry in Georgia, St. Timothy’s Christian Church in Maryland, Calvary Baptist Church in Mississippi, and Fern Creek Baptist Church in Kentucky.
It also voted to remove Freedom Church in Florida, which allegedly failed to investigate sexual assault claims.
Any of these churches may appeal its removal at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in June, a spokesperson for the convention told The Epoch Times.
At the convention’s annual meeting last June, as the Executive Committee considered removing Saddleback over appointing women pastors, Warren virtually spoke at the meeting and called on Baptists to set aside their differences and work together to spread the gospel message.
However, Warren said on Twitter Feb. 21 he and his wife, Kay, would respond to the Southern Baptist Convention “in our time and way through direct channels” including their social media, newsletter, and radio show.
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22 February, 2023
Censorship of this blog by Google
They don't restrict access to this blog as a whole but they do remove posts that they disapprove of. Posts here of 7th and 10th have disappeared.
They are generally well behind the date of posting when they delete so regular readers here will already have seen the posts before they disappear. So it is not a huge burden.
Additionally, the backups are all available so you can see there what Google has disapproved of. The backups for this month are here so you can just go down to the posts of 7th and 10th to defeat the censorship.
It is not at all clear to me exactly what they did not like but as long as the posts are still available to anyone who wants to read them it is no big deal
The post of 10th headlined well-known scriptures about homosexuality and the post of 7th headlined Biden's misleading unemployment statistics
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Homosexuals are less healthy
Methods
This serial cross-sectional study used 2013 through 2018 NHIS data. Adult participants were classified as lesbian or gay, bisexual, or heterosexual based on responses to a sexual orientation question. This study focused on 3 health status outcomes (self-reported health status, functional limitation, and severe psychological distress) and 3 health care access outcomes (usual source of care, health care utilization, and health care affordability).
Multivariable logistic regression models were used to compute annual outcome rates adjusted for age and region among heterosexual and gay male survey participants and heterosexual female and lesbian participants, and to compare changes within and between sexual orientation subgroups during the study period. Given the small sample size of bisexual adults, another set of models with pooled 2016 to 2018 data was constructed to compare outcomes between heterosexual, gay, and bisexual male participants and between heterosexual, lesbian, and bisexual female participants. The first set of models adjusted for demographic characteristics, and fully adjusted models included comorbidities and substance use. Additional details are provided in eMethods 1 and the eTable in Supplement 1.
This study followed the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) reporting guidelines and did not require approval from an institutional review board because it used only deidentified publicly available data. Details on study limitations are provided in eMethods 2 in Supplement 1.
Results
The study sample consisted of 183 020 adult participants, of whom 177 100 (93.8%) were classified as heterosexual, 3176 (1.6%) as lesbian or gay, and 1744 (0.9%) as bisexual. Between 2013 and 2018, significant annual reductions in poor or fair health status were observed among heterosexual male participants (?0.21%, 95% CI, ?0.40 to ?0.03), but not among gay male participants (Table 1). Significant annual reductions in forgoing or delaying medical care due to cost were observed among heterosexual female participants (?0.48%; 95% CI, ?0.69 to ?0.28), but not among lesbian female participants. Gaps in all measures of health status and health care access between heterosexual and gay male participants and between heterosexual and lesbian female participants did not change significantly during the study period.
During the 2016 to 2018 period, compared with heterosexual male participants, gay male participants had higher odds of poor or fair health status (odds ratio [OR], 1.39; 95% CI, 1.06-1.80), severe psychological distress (OR, 2.30; 95% CI, 1.55-3.40), and forgoing or delaying medical care due to cost (OR, 1.37; 95% CI, 1.07-1.74), and lower odds of lacking a usual source of care (OR, 0.66; 95% CI, 0.50-0.86) and not seeing a health care professional during the past year (OR, 0.44; 95% CI, 0.32-0.60) (Table 2). Similar patterns were observed among bisexual male participants, although there was no significant difference in lacking a usual source of care. Compared with heterosexual female participants, lesbian female participants had higher odds of any functional limitation (OR, 1.34; 95% CI, 1.06-1.70), lacking a usual source of care (OR, 1.51; 95% CI, 1.10-2.07), not seeing a health care professional during the past year (OR, 1.46; 95% CI, 1.07-1.98), and forgoing or delaying medical care due to cost (OR, 1.36; 95% CI, 1.05-1.75). Similar patterns in addition to higher odds of poor or fair health status (OR, 1.67; 95% CI, 1.18-2.34) and severe psychological distress (OR, 2.37; 95% CI, 1.71-3.27) were observed among bisexual female participants.
Discussion
The findings of this nationally representative study indicate that differences in health status and health care access between sexual minorities and their heterosexual counterparts did not change from 2013 through 2018. Nearly all subgroups of LGB adults continued to report higher levels of poor or fair health status, functional limitation, severe psychological distress, and difficulties with health care affordability than their heterosexual counterparts. Study limitations included survey response biases, limited sample size of bisexual adults, and lack of gender identity data.
Health inequities among LGB individuals are posited to be driven by minority group stress and multifaceted societal marginalization.4 The persistence of these inequities highlights the need for renewed action at the policy, legislative, sociocultural, and health system levels. In the midst of attacks on the fundamental rights of LGB individuals by state legislators, federal legislation through the Equality Act5 could ameliorate minority group stress by explicitly prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The health sector could also promote health among sexual minority groups by ensuring that all clinicians receive adequate LGB-related training and by increasing access to practitioners with expertise in sexual minority health
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2801433
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Ancient pagan sex worship returns
Sex worship -- of such Gods as Baal of Peor -- was one of the things that the ancient Israelites struggled against. The pagans concerned would seem to have dedicated successors in the Church of England. The C of E has elevated perverse sex to a defining doctrine of their faith. They worship the right of a man to insert his penis into the behind of another man. They have cast aside the Biblical horror at such behaviour. Their God is as much a penis as it was for the Baals of old
Conservative Anglican archbishops say the Church of England has forfeited its traditional leadership role in the worldwide Anglican Communion by approving the blessing of same-sex relationships, opening a historic rift in one of the world’s biggest Christian denominations.
“The Church of England has chosen to break communion with those provinces who remain faithful to the historic biblical faith,” the archbishops wrote, adding that their fidelity to traditional teaching makes it impossible for them to remain connected to it or to other Anglican churches that have adopted liberal teaching on homosexuality. “This breaks our hearts and we pray for the revisionist provinces to return” to tradition.
The statement said the archbishops were “no longer able to recognise the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, as the ‘first among equals’” among Anglican bishops worldwide.
The outspoken denunciation of the Church of England by 12 leading Anglican archbishops from around the world marks a watershed in a long-running crisis of unity in the Anglican Communion over teaching and practice on homosexuality.
Over the past three decades, Anglicans in Africa and other parts of the global south have become increasingly critical of the socially progressive tendency of churches in the West, clashing particularly on LGBT rights.
Conservative Anglican churches, including some in Africa that represent nearly half of the world’s estimated 100 million Anglicans, have already broken off relations with churches that espouse liberal teaching and practice on homosexuality, including the Episcopal Church in the US.
But a break with the Church of England, the historical progenitor of Anglican churches around the world, could threaten the very survival of the Anglican Communion, a loose federation whose bishops recognise the Archbishop of Canterbury in England as their spiritual leader.
The full impact of the statement will depend on how many of the 42 national Anglican churches sign on. Absent among the signatories was Archbishop Henry Chukwudum Ndukuba of the Church of Nigeria, the largest member church in the Anglican Communion with 25 million adherents in 2020, according to the World Christian Database.
The statement is in any case a clear setback for Archbishop Welby, who has dedicated much of his 10 years on the job to trying to bridge the growing gap between progressives and conservatives over gay rights.
“It would very difficult for Archbishop Welby to restore his position – and that of the Church of England – after this, unless, perhaps, he were to get the English bishops to row back from their recent proposals to bless same-sex sexual relationships,” said the Reverend Lee Gatiss, director of the Church Society, a group that promotes traditional teaching in the Church of England.
Breaking ties would leave progressives in the Church of England freer to pursue their agenda, said some advocates for gay rights. The Church of England’s bishops should stop “looking over their shoulders” at foreign churches and “move toward full affirmation and welcome for LGBTI people”, said the Reverend Andrew Foreshew-Cain, chaplain of Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, who has been in a same-sex marriage under civil law since 2014.
“The recognition that the independent, autonomous churches of the Communion are free to act independently of each other is unsurprising and an indicator of our historic reality,” he said.
The 12 conservative archbishops who called for a break on Monday (Tuesday AEDT) are primates, or elected leaders, of their respective national churches. They are all from countries in the global south except for Archbishop Foley Beach, head of the Anglican Church in North America, a conservative church that was founded in 2009 after the Episcopal Church elected an openly gay bishop in 2003.
The 12 conservative archbishops pointed to Archbishop Welby’s support for the Church of England’s decision on February 9 to allow priests to bless same-sex civil marriages in church.
The Church of England decided not to allow church marriage of same-sex couples, a decision that drew protests from liberal members.
“The deep disagreements that exist across the Anglican Communion on sexuality and marriage are not new,” a spokesperson for Archbishop Welby said on Monday. “It is a fundamental principle of the Anglican Communion that no province can bind another province.”
The archbishop has expressed pleasure at the Church of England’s decision to allow blessings of same-sex relationships but has said that he will not perform such blessings himself so as not to compromise his unifying role in the Communion.
At a meeting of global Anglican leaders earlier this month in Ghana, he stressed his understanding of cultural and theological differences on sexuality within the Communion and repeatedly said that he was ready to renounce his leadership role in the global church if it was no longer accepted.
The 12 conservative archbishops said on Monday they were ready to work with like-minded leaders “to reset the Communion, and to ensure that the reset Communion is marked by reform and renewal”. They didn’t provide details of a proposed reorganisation but said that they were ready to provide “pastoral oversight, guidance and care” to conservative dioceses in countries where the national Anglican church has adopted “revisionist” liberal teachings.
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Objectivity’s out in US newsrooms
In today’s information war, words are weapons, so the advent of new media terms can be telling. A weighty new report on US journalism, Beyond Objectivity, released last month, denounced what it called the ‘dangerous trap’ of ‘bothsides-ism’, an awkward term that seems designed to box, label and dismiss the idea of balance, of two sides to every story. The report said, in a nutshell, objectivity has got to go. (Mind you, plenty would say objectivity has already left the building – try finding sceptical climate change reporting at the ABC.)
The argument goes that if the weight of evidence heavily favours one side, it’s ‘false balance’ to pretend there’s equivalence of credibility. Trouble is, journalism is called the first draft of history for a reason, and must often be recast later. US media has had to do a U-turn on the veracity of the Hunter Biden laptop, for example. And far from being an ‘insurrection’, the January 6 Capitol riot seems increasingly to have been a set-up, and laced with FBI-linked provocateurs. Humans make mistakes, stories get debunked, allow for it.
Given the Left’s flair for propaganda (remember the same-sex marriage slogan, ‘love is love’?), it’s encouraging that ‘bothsidesism’ is the best these wordsmiths could find. It’s an implicit nod to the fact that other terms – balance, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, impartiality – are too respected to be twisted into propaganda.
Conducted by Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, the report emerged from 75 interviews with a roll-call of legacy media heavy hitters, mostly left-leaning – no Fox News interviews, for example. Lead author and ex-Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr wrote: ‘Increasingly, reporters, editors and media critics argue that the concept of journalistic objectivity is a distortion of reality… pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading “bothsidesism” in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change… in today’s diversifying newsrooms, (reporters) feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.’ This is truth in the Oprah Winfrey sense, as in ‘my truth’, ‘your truth’, a great stew of different truths. These truths, self-evidently, cannot all be true, and at some point reality will intervene to give fantasists a good clip over the ears.
To be fair, complete objectivity is humanly impossible. Everyone comes armed with certain opinions and prejudices, and by their persona, tends to elicit certain responses. (An editor once said of a dorky Age colleague: ‘He engenders error in others.’) There’s no issue with an outlet with a declared political bias, such as Green Left Weekly. Trouble arises when an outlet cloaks its reporting in fairness and balance, but instead plays a partisan game, doubly so when it’s a taxpayer-funded medium with a charter requiring impartiality.
Which brings me to my second recent discovery, ‘totschweigetaktik’, or ‘totting’ for short, hat tip New York Post reporter Miranda Devine. It’s German for ‘death by silence’ and is a tactic to kill issues and stories by ignoring them into non-existence. It’s the reporting equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and squeezing your eyes tight shut.
Totting is the preferred tactic of Voice proponents, who sought to fund only the Yes case for the referendum and not the No case, as was traditional in previous referenda, and don’t want to have a constitutional convention. Even details on how the idea would work are not to be provided. Trust us, please, and vote Yes.
The global media is currently totting the Twitter Files and a damaging recent Pfizer expose by Project Veritas, which secretly records highly placed insiders to uncover inconvenient truths. Legacy media has largely ignored Twitter boss Elon Musk’s extraordinary unmasking of the vast, hidden machinery enabling unprecedented US intelligence agency and Democrat censorship of social media.
Similar media quiet reigns on the Pfizer staffer’s revelations that, yes, the vaccines are creating mysterious problems with women’s fertility; that there is a revolving door between Big Pharma and regulators; and that Pfizer is considering ‘directed evolution’ of viruses, which many might call gain-of-function were that not illegal, to get ahead with the creation of more ‘cash cow’ vaccines.
Another useful new (to me) term is ‘limited hangout’, which is not to do with social events, but refers to admitting lesser mistakes while keeping more damaging crimes buried. It’s a spyworld term for allowing some information to be released to extinguish a media clamour; for whatever reason, overuse perhaps, it’s now moving into public discourse. Letting Joe Biden’s classified documents be found in a garage, for example, may be a limited hangout compared with exposing his being on the take from China. When the Chinese spy balloon over the US could no longer be denied, we got a limited hangout on its route and other details, but no reveal on how and why it, and apparently others, had sailed merrily past the mighty US defence forces.
These three newly popularised terms do show where US journalism is going – increasingly self-righteous and opinionated, activist yet incurious, and naively open to manipulation by the powers-that-be. The crisis of trust caused by the last few years of US media failures and hoaxes seems to be going unaddressed; a 2022 Reuters Institute Digital News Report found America’s media the least trusted among 46 nations, with only 26 per cent trusting the news. Indeed, last month the Columbia Journalism Review published a scathing takedown of the New York Times’ reporting on Russiagate – by a veteran Times reporter. Far from learning any lessons to restore public trust, US legacy media seems determined to repeat their errors.
These reflections were prompted by the jarring experience of leaving our conservative Sunshine Coast habitat, where even the tradies and neighbours are like-minded, for a holiday in the woke epicentre of Melbourne. There, we were Yin to their Yang. I had to reposition my conversational settings, and couldn’t help noticing old friends and relatives warily skirting such dangerous topics as politics, climate change, gender identity and the rest, in the certain knowledge that we would disagree.
A refreshing change came at a (necessarily) small lunch with right-wing media colleagues, quickly dubbed the Pariahs’ lunch. A well-known columnist opened the conversation with a loud, angry and frustrated: ‘Our media’s HOPELESS!’ Quite. With the internet, even semi-censored as it has been, truth will out.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/war-of-words-5
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21 February, 2023
Foundation That Denied Grants to Organizations Because They Had White CEOs Changes Tune After Daily Signal Report
Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation revised the eligibility for its three-year, $300,000 grant to advance “healthy food equity” after The Daily Signal reported on the program’s stringent race-based limitations.
Under the original rules, some organizations that employ a majority-nonwhite staff and have a majority-nonwhite board of directors were automatically disqualified from the grant because the CEOs in question are considered white.
“We have received questions about eligibility from organizations that have a majority people of color staff, and staff leadership, and white CEO,” a foundation representative said in a “Healthy Food Equity” webinar Feb. 2. “So given the spirit of this opportunity Sheila and I shared earlier, these organizations are not eligible for this particular opportunity.”
The video of the webinar has since been removed from YouTube.
This week, the foundation released an update, noting that the opportunity is “expanding.”
“Since we released this funding opportunity in early January, we have received inquiries from potential applicants and others working in the community whose work aligns with the goals of this opportunity, yet whose organizations don’t quite match all aspects of the stated eligibility criteria,” the update reads. “After careful consideration, we have decided to expand both the number of organizations being supported by this grant funding, as well as the eligibility criteria for those seeking an award.”
The foundation expanded the grant opportunity from 10 organizations to 14, expanded the grant to focus on rural communities, and waived the requirement for a nonwhite CEO.
“The eligibility requirement that the organization’s CEO be a member of the community served is being waived,” the update adds. The website also announces that the timeline for the grant has been extended and a new deadline will appear on the website later this year.
A spokesperson for the foundation told The Daily Signal that it will not comment further beyond the statement on the website.
Do No Harm, an organization of doctors, nurses, and health care professionals that speaks out against medical abuses, condemned the original grant requirements and responded to the update by saying that the foundation had been “caught red-handed.”
“If ever there was a bad idea, the notion that we should start to separate our country along racial lines is amongst the worst,” Do No Harm Board Chair Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a kidney specialist, told The Daily Signal last week. “The plan by the North Carolina Blue Cross Blue Shield company takes divisiveness to a new level. Even having a leader of an organization who is white is enough to prevent the entity, which apparently serves minority communities, from participating in a grant program.”
“Do Americans really want this sort of apartheid?” he asked.
After the update, Do No Harm Program Manager Laura Morgan announced that her organization, along with North Carolina policymakers, will monitor the foundation’s upcoming changes to the grant.
“BCBS of North Carolina Foundation got caught red-handed when they tried to inject ugly racial politics into their grant-making process,” Morgan told The Daily Signal. “Discrimination should have no place in our society, yet they were prepared to reject grant applications from nonprofits led by white CEOs just because of their skin color.”
“Do No Harm, along with BCBS customers and North Carolina state policymakers, will be watching very closely how the foundation updates the grant’s eligibility criteria,” she added.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/02/17/food-equity-grant-drops-ceo-racial-quota-daily-signal-report
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The states that are falling behind in economic freedom
As people across the nation and indeed across the globe continue to struggle financially due to inflation, lingering coronavirus outbreaks and the effects of the Russian war on Ukraine, we could all use more economic freedom to fill our pocketbooks and improve our quality of life.
That is the lesson from the Fraser Institute’s annual Economic Freedom of North America and Economic Freedom of the World reports.
Drawing upon both its own results and a wealth of other economic research, the Economic Freedom of North America report concluded that “economic freedom is positively correlated with per-capita income, economic growth, greater life expectancy, lower child mortality, the development of democratic institutions, civil and political freedoms and other desirable social and economic outcomes.”
Economic freedom had generally increased slightly in recent years until the COVID-19 pandemic and particularly government policy reactions to it reversed this trend.
“The policy responses to the coronavirus pandemic, including massive increases in government spending; monetary expansion; travel restrictions; regulatory mandates on businesses related to masks, hours and capacity; and outright lockdowns undoubtedly contributed to an erosion of economic freedom for most people,” the report found. Years later, Americans are still trying to recover from both the disease and the supposed cures foisted upon the public by governments at the federal, state and local levels.
Among U.S. states, Florida ranked the most economically free, followed by New Hampshire, South Dakota and a tie between Texas and Tennessee. California ranked 49th, besting only New York. Among the subcategories, the Golden State ranked 49th in government spending, 45th in taxes and 38th in labor market freedom. Rounding out the bottom five were Hawaii, Vermont and Oregon.
These findings are hardly news for California. Numerous surveys and reports analyzing a variety of economic indicators have consistently placed California at or near the very bottom of all states in terms of economic freedom and business climate. The state ranked 48th in the Tax Foundation’s 2023 State Business Tax Climate Index, has been dubbed one of the nation’s biggest “Judicial Hellholes” by the American Tort Reform Foundation for encouraging frivolous and abusive lawsuits, received a grade of “F” in Thumbtack’s most recent Small Business Friendliness Survey and placed dead last — again — in Chief Executive Magazine’s annual Best and Worst States for Business survey of CEOs across the country (Texas, Florida and Tennessee dominate the top of the rankings — stop me if this sounds familiar).
It is no wonder, then, that “California has been a net exporter of businesses for at least three decades,” according to Claremont McKenna College’s Kosmont-Rose Institute 2022 Cost of Doing Business Survey. The study found that, from 1990 to 2019, 44 percent more businesses left California than moved there from other states, resulting in a net loss of nearly 20,000 businesses.
Whether it is high taxes; excessive environmental regulations (which are often abused for non-environmental reasons); restrictive zoning, affordable housing mandates, rent control and other policies that limit homebuilding and drive up the cost of housing; a high minimum wage ($15.50 an hour, as of Jan. 1), which benefits a small portion of workers but only at the expense of reduced hours and fewer jobs for many others (not to mention higher prices for consumers); or arbitrary and unnecessary occupational licensing laws that reduce entrepreneurship and jobs, California has consistently enacted policies that limit economic freedom and opportunity.
When people are free to keep more of their hard-earned money, bargain for their own wages and other working conditions, start a business or work in the occupation of their choosing without having to get permission from the government, prosperity and economic growth inevitably follow.
The historical evidence of the virtues of economic freedom — and the vices of government planning and restrictions on these freedoms — is overwhelming.
We need to include energy for home medical equipment in covered medical costs
Japan is muscling up and locking arms with allies to face China
As the Economic Freedom of North America report asserts, “In some ways, it is surprising the debate still rages because the evidence and theory favoring economic freedom match intuition: It makes sense that the drive and ingenuity of individuals will produce better outcomes through the mechanism of mutually beneficial exchange than the designs of a small coterie of government planners, who can hardly have knowledge of everyone’s values and who, being human, are likely to consider first their own well-being and that of the constituents they must please when making decisions for all of us.”
Regrettably, it is a lesson that still has not been learned in California and many other states and nations.
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3842961-the-states-that-are-falling-behind-in-economic-freedom/
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Angry Bing chatbot just mimicking humans, say experts
Microsoft’s nascent Bing chatbot turning testy or even threatening is likely because it essentially mimics what it learned from online conversations, analysts and academics said Friday.
Tales of disturbing exchanges with the chatbot that have captured attention this week include the artificial intelligence (AI) issuing threats and telling of desires to steal nuclear code, create a deadly virus or to be alive.
“I think this is basically mimicking conversations that it’s seen online,” said Graham Neubig, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s language technologies institute.
“So once the conversation takes a turn, it’s probably going to stick in that kind of angry state, or say ‘I love you’ and other things like this, because all of this is stuff that’s been online before.”
A chatbot, by design, serves up words it predicts are the most likely responses, without understanding meaning or context.
However, humans taking part in banter with programs naturally tend to read emotion and intent into what a chatbot says.
“Large language models have no concept of ‘truth’ — they just know how to best complete a sentence in a way that’s statistically probable based on their inputs and training set,” programmer Simon Willison said in a blog post.
“So they make things up, and then state them with extreme confidence.”
Laurent Daudet, co-founder of French AI company LightOn, theorized that the chatbot gone seemingly rogue was trained on exchanges that themselves turned aggressive or inconsistent.
“Addressing this requires a lot of effort and a lot of human feedback, which is also the reason why we chose to restrict ourselves for now to business uses and not more conversational ones,” Daudet said.
The Bing chatbot was designed by Microsoft and the start-up OpenAI, which has been causing a sensation since the November launch of ChatGPT, the headline-grabbing app capable of generating all sorts of written content in seconds on a simple request.
Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene, the technology behind it, known as generative AI, has been stirring up fascination and concern.
“The model at times tries to respond or reflect in the tone in which it is being asked to provide responses (and) that can lead to a style we didn’t intend,” Microsoft said in a blog post, noting the bot is a work in progress.
Bing chatbot said in some shared exchanges that it had been code named “Sydney” during development, and that it was given rules of behavior.
Those rules include “Sydney’s responses should also be positive, interesting, entertaining and engaging,” according to online posts.
Disturbing dialogues that combine steely threats and professions of love could be due to dueling directives to stay positive while mimicking what the AI mined from human exchanges, Willison theorized.
Chatbots seem to be more prone to disturbing or bizarre responses during lengthy conversations, losing a sense of where exchanges are going, eMarketer principal analyst Yoram Wurmser said.
“They can really go off the rails,” Wurmser said.
“It’s very lifelike, because (the chatbot) is very good at sort of predicting next words that would make it seem like it has feelings or give it human like qualities; but it’s still statistical outputs.”
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/02/18/business/tech/chatgpt-chatbot-mimicking-humans/
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The internet has changed everything
Mark Latham comments from Australia
One doesn’t normally associate David Bowie, the androgenous rock star of the Seventies and Eighties, with piercingly accurate political analysis. But recently I saw an old interview with the Thin White Duke (recorded at a time when the internet was becoming prominent) that seemed incredibly insightful.
Bowie argued that up until the invention of the internet, the human knowledge-set was reasonably well settled. While historians sometimes differed, this was only at the margins, giving us a definitive interpretation of past events. So too, most aspects of science had been resolved.
Social values and norms were framed around mainstream notions of decency and commonsense. The parameters of political debate, while keenly contested at election time, pivoted on the orthodoxy of a handful of major parties.
It was as if the 18th-century Enlightenment had struck an ideal balance: creating new freedoms of speech to debate concepts and ideas, thereby further advancing the knowledge-set, but within accepted boundaries as to what was factual and what was nonsense.
Very few people subscribed to conspiracy theories or wacky notions of information being ‘socially constructed’ and ‘fluid’. Observable truths were respected as the foundation-stone of intellectual enlightenment.
Bowie’s thesis was that the internet would blow this settlement apart. As a mostly unregulated, open-access regime it would give a wide range of political activists the forum and space they needed to create their own self-serving narratives, unchallenged by the disciplines of evidence and facts.
This in turn would fragment society, as people would find their own group with which to associate and support online. Public life would be transformed, becoming more divisive and censorious as political tribes tried to close down their rivals and embed their beliefs in popular culture.
The orthodoxies of history, science, education and major party politics would come under permanent siege. And as this process played out, the internet tribes would dig in deeper, fortifying their positions with fewer facts and even less evidence, talking mainly to themselves (in what we now call the political ‘bubble’).
Bowie said we had to turn and face this change. As ever in his lyrics, strange fascinations fascinated him.
One would have to say, 30 years later, his dismal prophecy has been realised. He has given us a handy framework within which to understand the new politics of ‘fake news’ and ‘cancel culture’.
In the madness of today’s politics, why shouldn’t we take the unexpected wisdom of Ziggy Stardust as a reference point?
It helps to explain why the political centre has hollowed out and the major party vote has declined. They have been cannibalised by movements to the left and right of them.
Five new tribes have emerged in politics, as confirmation of Bowie’s thesis:
The Lunar Right
Some voters are dazed and confused by the extent of change in our public institutions. Old certainties have been lost, replaced by the alien authoritarianism of political correctness, identity politics, gender fluidity, decarbonisation and cancel culture. In seeking out a single, simple explanation, the Lunar Right has latched onto the theory of international conspiracy, through the UN, WEF, Agenda 21, WHO, COP and any other globalist forum that carries an acronym.
I hear from these people often and I can assure them: most of the political madness we have in Australia is homegrown. Adam Bandt, Lidia Thorpe, Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese have been refining their leftist agenda for decades. They don’t receive, or in fact need, memos from the UN every other day to do their worst.
Policy Traditionalists
This is where I have tried to position NSW One Nation, around a belief that Australian public policy reached a high-water mark of effectiveness during the Hawke-Keating-Howard-Costello era. There was never any need for change.
For Traditionalists, our watchword is evidence: to reject the Left’s agenda based on its observable adverse impacts. Why, for instance, would Australia destroy its resource and manufacturing industries and millions of jobs when the elimination of our carbon emissions cannot have any measurable impact on global surface temperatures?
Surreal Teal
This is the new politics of wealthy indulgence: well-heeled women so comfortable in life they have deluded themselves into thinking they can repair any part of society and ultimately, save the planet. They only visit places like the Hunter Valley and Western Sydney by accident, so the loss of blue-collar jobs in these regions is inconsequential to their virtue-signalling.
Woke Identitarians
Labor used to believe in helping people on the basis of their socio-economic status. Now, bizarrely, it sees politics through the prism of things people were born with, the identity politics of race, gender and sexuality. Martin Luther King’s ethos of judging people by their character has been replaced by the primitive habit of judging them by how they look. Thus a privileged, powerful person like Penny Wong can plead disadvantage from being an Asian lesbian, even though no aspect of her life is actually disadvantaged.
The Green Extreme
Authoritarianism is back in fashion, with the Greens seeking to control the language, values, behaviour, family life and employment of other people. If you’ve ever met a Green MP you will know they can barely run their own lives, but this is not a barrier to trying to engineer everyone else’s life in their own image.
Bowie was right: Time can’t change me and I can’t change time. But the internet has changed everything.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/political-oddity/
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20 February, 2023
‘Conservatives Need Not Apply’ Under Biden Administration’s Proposed Hiring Rules
In a move that has gotten little notice in the press, the Biden administration is proposing federal hiring rules that easily could be abused to deny employment to anyone who questions liberal, woke policies, criticizes the government, or belongs to a politically incorrect organization.
The vague, nebulous language of the proposed changes in existing government hiring regulations could be exploited and allow biased government managers to put up a virtual “Conservatives Need Not Apply” sign when it comes to the federal civil service, leaving rejected applicants with little recourse.
The Office of Personnel Management, the human resources department of the federal government, proposed amendments Jan. 31 in the Federal Register to the “personnel vetting investigative and adjudicative processes for determining suitability and fitness” for government employment (88 FR 6192).
The public now has until April 3 to file comments on the proposed “Suitability and Fitness Vetting” amendments.
As the proposal explains, the term “suitability and fitness” refers to “a decision by an agency 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 nothing to do with someone’s qualifications for a job and everything to do with a subjective assessment of a prospective employee.
Under the current regulation, 731.202(b)(7), an applicant is disqualified from employment by the federal government for “knowing and willful engagement in acts or activities designed to overthrow the U.S. Government.”
Certainly, no one disagrees with that standard, since no one should be a federal employee who has engaged in such behavior. It’s a standard question that background investigators ask a prospective employee’s listed references.
The Biden administration, however, is proposing to replace that straightforward standard with four enigmatic standards:
* 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.
The first standard above is similar to the current standard. It is not controversial. But the problem with the other three proposed standards is that they are so broad and so vague—“nuanced,” in the words of OPM’s proposal—that they will give ideologues who predominate the civil service’s ranks the ability to reject almost anyone who is critical of government policies.
Managers also could reject anyone who questions the acts and behavior of government officials or who voices opinions that don’t fit with the accepted political orthodoxy of the times, such as viewing racial preferences in hiring or college admissions as unacceptable, immoral discrimination.
Do you doubt that? Members of the progressive Left long have claimed that words and free speech are a literal form of violence, that they amount to intimidation and coercion.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., notably claims that criticism of her is “not tone, it’s violence,” and in 2018, former Vice President Joe Biden linked the rhetoric of then-President Donald Trump to mass shootings and terror bombings.
After all, if words are “venom and violence,” the Left never needs to engage in a real debate.
These are the same people who canceled “Harry Potter” novelist J.K. Rowling by arguing that her opinions on Twitter represent a violent threat to the trans community. The Left is pushing to classify as criminal hate speech any opinions with which it disagrees on issues such as illegal immigration, racial preferences, and abortion, claiming such speech “marginalizes” certain social groups.
Is expressing the opinion that there is no constitutional right to abortion an act of “intimidation” or “coercion” that denies others “the free exercise of their rights under the U.S. Constitution” under the second new character and fitness standard that the Office of Personnel Management wants to apply?
That’s probably the view of those, including the current president of the United States, who have harshly condemned the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case and claiming the high court is absolutely wrong when it says there is no right to abortion in the U.S. Constitution.
Ask yourself this: Can you imagine a government bureaucrat in charge of hiring ever claiming that opposition to liberal state abortion laws is an attempt “to indoctrinate others or to incite them to action in furtherance of illegal acts,” thereby allowing the applicant to be rejected under OPM’s third proposed standard?
It’s not hard to imagine, is it? If you’re a member or leader of a pro-life group trying to change the law in a state such as California that legalizes abortion up through birth, is that “active membership or leadership in a group” with “unlawful aims” under the fourth proposed OPM standard?
And the same is true if you express an opinion adverse to illegal immigration and illegal aliens in a sanctuary state, or object in a state that has legalized racial discrimination in admissions to state colleges and universities. You could be considered to be attempting to deny such illegal aliens or beneficiaries of discriminatory admissions policies “their rights” under state law.
If the Office of Personnel Management wants to do something to help protect “the free exercise of rights” by the public under the Constitution, it could start by investigating every federal employee within the FBI, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies that have been involved in directing social media companies to censor the opinions and views of American citizens.
Or, if OPM leaders don’t have the backbone to do that, how about investigating every federal government employee who labeled as domestic terrorists the parents who showed up at local school board meetings to complain about the racist propaganda being fed to their children? Or every government employee who targeted Catholics for their traditional views on marriage, abortion, and other issues? Or every government employee who contributed to the political persecutions of pro-life advocates through abuse of the FACE Act?
Don’t count on that happening.
So, rather than do the hard work of holding its current workforce to appropriate standards, the Office of Personnel Management wants to make it even easier on the front end for the federal government to unfairly discriminate in its hiring practices.
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Whistleblower Pulls Back Curtain on Transgender ‘Treatments’ for Minors
How did we let our children get manipulated and mutilated like this?
That’s going to be the question future generations ask about 2023, and the years preceding it, when doctors across America doled out hormones like they were Halloween candy and even in some cases removed minors’ functional body parts.
Don’t take my word for it. Jamie Reed, who describes herself as a “progressive” and who says she is “married to a transman,” wrote a terrifying account of her experience while working at a Midwestern medical center focused on transgenderism.
In her explosive article in The Free Press, Reed, who was formerly employed at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, describes a world where medical professionals rushed to encourage minors’ gender transitions, without any concern about the life-changing consequences of the treatments.
“Many encounters with patients emphasized to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds,” writes Reed. “But the center downplayed the negative consequences, and emphasized the need for transition.”
Reed’s expose comes at a time when, thankfully, lawmakers are beginning to realize that we can’t count on doctors to protect our children. Lawmakers in Georgia, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Kansas have introduced legislation that would put limits on gender transition “treatments” for minors. In Utah, Republican Gov. Spencer Cox just signed legislation banning surgeries and hormone treatment for minors.
This surge comes after a growing awareness of the issue. In 2021, Arkansas banned hormones and gender transition surgeries for minors, and a year later, Alabama followed suit. Arizona bans gender transition surgeries for minors, and in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott declared that certain gender transition medical interventions for minors could be considered child abuse and parents could be investigated and risk losing custody of their children.
Reed’s account makes it clear how crucial such laws are to protecting our kids.
At the Washington University Transgender Center, minors only needed to have seen a therapist twice, an endocrinologist once, and have a letter from a therapist to begin transitioning.
Don’t think that those three medical visits and letter provided any kind of real roadblock or opportunity for thoughtful discernment: Reed writes that the Transgender Center often referred patients to specific therapists and even provided a template letter for the therapists.
This fast track becomes even more concerning when you consider the minors coming to the center. Reed says they were often suffering from “depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity” and “were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms.”
Minors also suffered very real consequences as a result of the “treatments.” Reed writes of one minor patient suffering liver toxicity from a drug used to “block” puberty. Other consequences proved even more horrifying: One girl on testosterone called, saying she was experiencing vaginal bleeding. “In less than an hour she had soaked through an extra heavy pad, her jeans, and a towel she had wrapped around her waist,” Reed recounts.
What had happened? During sex, the young woman’s vaginal canal had ripped—testosterone apparently thins the vaginal tissues.
Reed counseled another young woman on testosterone. As a result of the hormone, her clitoris became “enlarged” and “now extended below her vulva, and it chafed and rubbed painfully in her jeans.” Reed advised her to wear compression garments. “At the end of the call I thought to myself, ‘Wow, we hurt this kid,’” she recalls.
An 18-year-old woman, who had been taking hormones since she was around 16 and who “came from an unstable family, was in an uncertain living situation, and had a history of drug use,” had her breasts removed in surgery. Three months later, she announced she was going back to she/her pronouns and told a nurse, “I want my breasts back.”
Reed relays her growing concern over how children were being treated. She was alarmed to see how the number of patients per month increased over time, and that sometimes new patients would include a group of girls from the same high school. But she was afraid to mention to the rest of the team her worries about social contagion: “Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.”
In 2019, Reed learned about detransitioners—people who began the physical gender transition process, and then stop—and desisters, people who were considering a gender transition, but ultimately do not go through the process. She and another colleague assumed that the doctors would be interested in tracking whether patients desisted or detransitioned.
But: “We were wrong,” writes Reed. “One doctor wondered aloud why he would spend time on someone who was no longer his patient.”
Talk about a compassionate response.
Washington University of St. Louis issued a statement that it was “alarmed” over the allegations in Reed’s article: “We are taking this matter very seriously and have already begun the process of looking into the situation to ascertain the facts.” Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, announced that an investigation into the Washington University Transgender Center: “We take this evidence seriously and are thoroughly investigating to make sure children are not harmed by individuals who may be more concerned with a radical social agenda than the health of children,” he said in a statement.
But for many children, it’s already too late.
The corporate media’s glowing coverage of transgender treatments for minors has allowed this madness to flourish. “Puberty blockers” sounds so much less concerning than cancer drugs prescribed off label that may cause sterilization. “Gender-affirming surgeries” sounds very different than “breast removal surgery,” or dare I say, “genital mutilation surgery.”
Minors do not have the maturity to make these decisions that will haunt the rest of their lives. Just consider Chloe Cole, who had a double mastectomy at 15. A year later, she learned in a phsycology class about how breastfeeding played a “role in the bond between mother and child, and that bond goes on to affect that child’s later cognitive and emotional and social functioning,” she told my colleague Virginia Allen.
“Upon reading this, I felt like a monster,” Cole added. “I realized that I took something not only [from] myself, but also potentially from my future children. I think that’s when the realization really hit that I shouldn’t have been allowed to go through this.”
She’s right: She shouldn’t have been allowed. Let’s hope we’re moving toward an America where fewer teens will be regretting their childhood decisions to permanently mutilate their bodies.
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DeSantis Proposes 5-Point 'Digital Bill of Rights' to Protect Citizens from Big Tech
On Wednesday, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his proposal called the “Digital Bill of Rights” aimed at protecting the people of Florida from big tech companies. This proposal is designed to safeguard citizens from the potential overreach of these companies and their harmful practices.
By now, most of us have seen the “Twitter Files,” and if you haven’t, you should. It’s deeply concerning how rooted Big Tech has been in our politics, FBI, censorship and lives in general.
Something’s got to give, and it looks like DeSantis is doing just that.
Under this bill, Floridians will have the right to participate in online platforms without being subjected to censorship, to engage in private conversations without surveillance by Big Tech and to be informed of how search engines manipulate search results.
The proposed bill will also protect children from “online harms” and prevent companies from selling minors’ information without the consent of their parents. These are great and necessary things that need to be implemented in the social media cesspool.
When you think about our society, and how most of it is lived online, it is frightening to think of the level of censorship, disinformation and breaches of privacy that it has had. If most of the time people are on their devices, then most of the time they are existing in a polluted, parallel reality which is mostly distorted.
The ills that it has caused society are too immeasurable to list. If you lived any of your life as an adult without social media, you remember the tranquility we once had.
We move faster, longer and with less direction than ever before. Therefore, it is imperative that something be done to reign this mess in. Enter the the governor of Florida.
DeSantis explained that unauthorized surveillance through cell phones would not be allowed and companies would be prohibited from collecting and retaining personal information, such as GPS location and biometric data, without express authorization.
You mean we won’t be tracked without our knowledge?
Nice! It’s almost like we live in America where that is part of our unalienable rights. When you think about it: If there were ever going to be a chance to take down America, this is it. It won’t be through military might or muscle, it will be by our own addiction to our devices and social media — and the evil forces who exploit it
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False Australian history
There’s no end to the Woke, cultural-left pushing ‘Yes’ to the Indigenous Voice in the nation’s classrooms. The left-leaning Australian Education Union fully supports the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ and argues Truth-Telling should be taught ‘in schools through and in the curriculum and in the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers’.
Schools across Australia are teaching Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu to students; a book criticised by Peter O’Brien as well as Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe as misleading and inaccurate in its depiction of Aboriginal history and culture as sophisticated.
In Victoria, the Minister for Education Natalie Hutchins, who subsequently tried to walk back on the comment, states that ‘the Voice referendum will be a defining moment in our nation’s history’ and it should be dealt with in schools as students need to understand ‘Victoria’s journey to the Treaty’.
Not surprisingly, a poetry anthology set for Victoria’s Year 12 English titled False Claims Of Colonial Thieves by Charmaine Papertalk-Green and John Kinsella is yet another disturbing example of the school curriculum being used to indoctrinate vulnerable students regarding Aboriginal exploitation and oppression.
According to the reviewer at the Sydney Arts Guide the poetry anthology is ‘a pin prickling polemic’ where the poems are ‘flinty and unflinching’ and act like ‘depth charges of various C-bombs – Colonisation, Capitalism, Culture, and Country’. The reviewer lauds the two authors for exposing the ‘genocide, rape, and apartheid’ inflicted as a result of European settlement.
Bruce Pascoe, made famous by his assertion Aborigines were highly civilised at the time of the First Fleet, also recommends the anthology. Pascoe writes the poets ‘take no prisoners’ and that it is not for the light-hearted as it depicts the ‘darkness’ at the heart of Australia.
The historian Geoffrey Blainey uses the expression the ‘black armband’ view to describe those guilty of painting the nation’s history as violent, oppressive, racist, and Eurocentric. Often ignored is that Blainey also condemns the ‘three cheers’ view.
The Year 12 anthology provides multiple examples of the black armband view. One poem talks about ‘past injustices, cultural cruelty, cultural genocide’ while another begins with the lines ‘the State is killing our souls, the State has murdered the people’.
A third poem titled Always Thieves argues those who arrived as a result of 1788, including ‘colonial officers, convicts, settlers, free man’ are all thieves and that the injustice and theft continues to this day involving ‘mining companies, politicians, governments’ with ‘dirty hands coated with traces of blood’.
A fourth poem called Don’t mine me leaves students in no doubt as to who deserves to be condemned when the poets write: ‘Don’t mind me Australia… While you are busy… Sticking explosives everywhere… Getting a hard-on blowing up land… Pumping chemicals deep into mother… Drip feeding our waters with poison.’
Drawing on post-colonial theory and the Black Lives Matter movement where the assumption is societies like Australia are structurally racist, the anthology tells students Indigenous voices are always silenced when they write, ‘You don’t want me to talk about… The concept and construct of whiteness.’
It’s ironic, at the same time the two poets in the prologue argue mining companies are guilty of inflicting propaganda on schools about the value and importance of mining they appear unaware that students being made to study their poetry is guilty of the same sin.
One of the exercises related to the False Claims of Colonial Thieves anthology, after adopting the persona of an exploited Aboriginal community, asks students to write to mining companies like BHP telling them to stop exploiting Aboriginal land and destroying the environment.
Even worse, as argued by Mark Lopez in School Sucks and who tutors Year 12 students in Victoria, the reality is the poetry anthology is just one of many chosen texts that ‘are overwhelmingly politically correct and left-wing’.
While students across Australia are presented with a jaundiced and one-sided view of Indigenous affairs and the impact of European settlement ignored are the facts, compared to the Uyghurs in China and the Kurds in the Middle East, Aborigines have achieved equality and the sins of the past long since been addressed.
Aborigines are Australian citizens, have equal rights, and at just over 3 per cent of the population receive approximately $30 billion a year in federal government support and benefits. As a result of the High Court Mabo decision, they also have extensive land rights to over 54 per cent of Australia’s land mass.
Instead of schools presenting students with an objective and impartial account of controversial issues like the Voice to Parliament the sad fact is the cultural-left has long succeeded in using the school curriculum to advance its ideology. Worse still, this has happened under both left-leaning and conservative governments, state and commonwealth.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/colonial-thieves/
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19 February, 2023
The dividing line in America “is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.”
In the 1968 presidential campaign, third-party candidate George Wallace, the once and future governor of Alabama, proclaimed: “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican parties.”
That might or might not have been entirely true even back then, 55 years ago, but it’s certainly not true today in 2023.
The political ideologies of the Republican and Democratic parties have never been more diametrically different on virtually every issue than they are today.
In her rebuttal to Democratic President Joe Biden’s by turns schizophrenic and manic-depressive State of the Union address on Feb. 7, Arkansas’ new Republican governor, Sarah Sanders, spelled out those differences with scalpel-like precision and moral clarity, unlike any other explanation we’ve heard in recent memory.
Other Republicans—especially the Mitch McConnell wing of the party in the Senate—could learn from the Sanders speech how to frame the issues and by extension, the debate.
Unlike Biden, who talked a lot but said pretty much nothing, Sanders said more in 11 minutes than he did in 72.
In a series of broadsides, she differentiated the president’s and most other Democrats’ far-left positions on the issues from her own and those of most Republicans.
“I’ll be the first to admit President Biden and I don’t have a lot in common. I’m for freedom. He’s for government control,” she said, warming to her task, beginning with what’s perhaps the starkest of all of the ideological differences between the two parties.
“I’m the first woman to lead my state, and he’s the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is,” she said later.
While most Republican governors and state lawmakers understand the biological distinction between XX and XY chromosomes and have acted on it legislatively by banning opposite-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and body-mutilating surgery for minors and by barring biological males from taking part in girls and women’s athletics, science-denying Democrats are in political thrall to the minuscule but militant transgender lobby and have resisted those commonsense measures supported by large majorities of the electorate.
(Inexplicably, however, there are still some country-club Republicans who appear to regard transgenderism battles as distasteful or even “icky” and are hesitant to deploy them as the effective political wedge issue against Democrats that they could and should be.)
Sanders summarized other partisan ideological divisions equally succinctly, noting that the dividing line in America “is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.”
“In the radical Left’s America, Washington taxes you and lights your hard-earned money on fire, but you get crushed with high gas prices, empty grocery shelves, and our children are taught to hate one another on account of their race, but not to love one another or our great country,” she said, adding: “Whether Joe Biden believes this madness, or is simply too weak to resist it, his administration has been completely hijacked by the radical Left.”
Sanders completely dismantled the president and his party’s policies on a range of other issues as well.
“President Biden inherited the fastest economic recovery on record. The most secure border in history. Cheap, abundant, home-grown energy. Fast-rising wages. A rebuilt military. And a world that was stable and at peace,” she said. “But over the last two years, Democrats destroyed it all.”
So, what’s the takeaway from the Arkansas governor’s State of the Union rebuttal?
Simply this: As Ronald Reagan advised conservatives back in 1975, bold colors beat pale pastels every time. It was as if to answer Wallace and assert that there should indeed be more than “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties.
In his speech to the 1975 Conservative Political Action Conference, Reagan observed: “Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pastels, but bold colors, which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?”
All of this is to say that had the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee consistently employed messaging as pointed as Sanders’ in the lead-up to the November midterms, rather than the predictable “Stupid Party” pabulum, that red wave the GOP was expecting might not have been reduced to a rivulet.
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Scientist Richard Dawkins says he will 'use every one of the harmful words' like 'blind, gender and fitness' that academics want phased out
Acclaimed British biologist Richard Dawkins says he will continue to use 'every one of the prohibited words' amid calls in the scientific community to ban 'harmful' gendered terms.
The British author and scientist, 81, has slammed a project led by three academics saying words such as male, female, man, woman, mother and father should be scrapped.
As part of a crackdown on 'harmful terminology' in science, members of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) Language Project - founded by scientists in the US and Canada - yesterday published a list of 24 'harmful terms'.
Instead, they recommend terms such as 'sperm-producing' and 'egg-producing' or 'XY/XX individual' should be used to avoid reinforcing 'societally-imposed ideas of a sex binary'.
But Professor Dawkins, who has long questioned whether people can choose their gender, said he would not be following the recommendations, The Telegraph reports.
Speaking to the newspaper, he said: 'The only possible response is contemptuous ridicule.
'I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words. I am a professional user of the English language. It is my native language.
'I am not going to be told by some teenage version of Mrs Grundy which words of my native language I may or may not use.'
Prof Dawkins, whose books include The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene, has been joined by other eminent academics who have expressed concerns that the 'absurd' alternative phrasings could lead to confusion in the scientific community.
They argue that 'egg producing' and sperm producing' are not gender-neutral, and are instead simply synonyms for male and female.
Professor Frank Furedi, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, added: 'I think that when you characterise terms like male/female, mother/father as harmful you are abandoning science for ideological advocacy.
'Regardless of intent, the project of re-engineering language will cause confusion to many and the last thing that scientists need is a lack of clarity about the meaning of the words they use.'
The EEB Language Project was launched this month by a team that includes Dr Kaitlyn Gaynor, Dr Alex Moore and Dr Danielle Ignace — three University of British Columbia researchers.
It comes amid a broader push for language to be changed to be less offensive, with doctors last summer claiming the term 'morbidly obese' should be ditched.
Writing in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, researchers said efforts to 'champion inclusive language' in science is 'particularly important for redressing the ongoing marginalization of many groups'.
As well as male and female, the words mother and father are criticised for perpetuating a 'a non-universal' view of 'the parenting and birthing process'.
'Parent', 'egg donor' and 'sperm donor' are suggested as replacement terms.
It also flags 'survival of the fittest' as a problematic term that promotes 'Eugenics, ablelism, and social Darwinism'.
Instead, 'natural selection' or 'survival differences' should be used, it states.
Even the term 'double-blind', which is used to describe studies where neither volunteers or scientists know which participants are taking a drug or a placebo, could be harmful to people with disabilities, the website states.
Writing in the journal, the researchers said: 'Mitigating the institutional problems in EEB will take significant effort and resources, and examining the role of language in these problems must go beyond attention to scientific terms.
'It must also include consideration of how language is used among scientists more broadly, and how English is often treated as the dominant language for scientific work.
'Nevertheless, we propose that inclusion can be fostered by a collective commitment to be more conscientious and intentional about the scientific terminology we use when teaching, mentoring, collaborating, and conducting research.'
Prof Dawkins' comments, meanwhile, come after he was stripped of his 'Humanist of the Year' title in April 2021 after comparing transgender people to the American activist Rachel Dolezal - who posed as a black woman for more than ten years.
The American Humanist Association (AHA) revoked its honour from the evolutionary biologist, 80, after he appeared to question whether people could choose their gender.
The move came 25 years after the evolutionary biologist received the honour for his 'significant contributions' as a science communicator.
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Catholic woman prosecuted for silently praying outside abortion clinic is CLEARED after arrest by police
A Catholic woman who was prosecuted for silently praying outside an abortion clinic has been acquitted.
In a video that went viral, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, director of anti-abortion group March for Life UK, was seen being searched and arrested by three police officers after saying that she 'might be' praying inside her head.
Ms Vaughan-Spruce was confronted by police when she was standing on the street outside the BPAS Robert Clinic in Kings Norton, Birmingham, on December 6.
Her arrest sparked a fierce debate, with supporters saying she was effectively arrested for 'thoughtcrime', a term which her legal representatives ADF UK used - but today she has been cleared of all charges.
Reacting to the not guilty verdict this morning, Ms Vaughan-Spruce said in a statement outside court: 'I'm glad I've been vindicated of any wrongdoing. But I should never have been arrested for my thoughts and treated like a criminal simply for silently praying on a public street.
'When it comes to censorship zones, peaceful prayer and attempts to offer help to women in crisis pregnancies are now being described as either 'criminal' or 'anti-social'.
'But what is profoundly anti-social are the steps now being taken to censor freedom of speech, freedom to offer help, freedom to pray and even freedom to think.
'We must stand firm against this and ensure that these most fundamental freedoms are protected, and that all our laws reflect this.'
Prosecutor Ekene Pruce told the hearing at Birmingham Magistrates' Court that the CPS had dropped four charges of failing to comply with a PSPO brought against Father Gough and charity volunteer Ms Vaughan-Spruce.
The withdrawn charges related to dates in October, November and December last year.
During brief separate hearings on Thursday, Ms Pruce said both cases had been judged not to meet the 'full code test' for prosecutors - which assesses whether prosecutions are in the public interest and if there is sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction.
ADF UK legal counsel Jeremiah Igunnubole said: 'Isabel and Father Sean's cases show that the current plans to introduce censorship zones across England and Wales constitute a dangerous step towards an illiberal society.
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NY Times op-ed defends J.K. Rowling after staffers, celebs blasted paper’s ‘anti-trans bias’
The New York Times published an op-ed on Thursday defending author J.K. Rowling from accusations that the “Harry Potter” author is transphobic — just a day after the newspaper’s staffers and other celebrities criticized its “anti-trans bias.”
Pamela Paul, an op-ed contributor for the Gray Lady, penned a lengthy piece under the headline: “In Defense of J.K. Rowling.”
The op-ed was published a day after GLAAD — the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation — posted an open letter demanding that the Times “improve their coverage of transgender people.”
The letter was signed by several Times staffers as well as high-profile Hollywood celebrities, including Judd Apatow, Gabrielle Union-Wade, Jameela Jamil, Maragaret Cho and Lena Dunham.
Paul on Thursday criticized a “noisy fringe of the internet and a number of powerful transgender rights activists and LGBTQ lobbying groups” of whipping up a “campaign against Rowling” that is “as dangerous as it is absurd.”
She wrote that the accusations of transphobia that have been hurled against the best-selling British author have left Rowling vulnerable to “verbal abuse, doxxing and threats of sexual and other physical violence, including death threats.”
Paul wrote that Rowling’s critics have lashed out at her due to her touting “the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons.”
Rowling has “insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is sufficient,” while “defend[ing]…detransitioners and feminist scholars who have come under attack from trans activists,” Paul wrote.
Paul insisted in her op-ed that “nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic.”
“There is no evidence that she is putting trans people ‘in danger,’ as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist,” Paul wrote of Rowling.
The GLAAD open letter doesn’t mention Rowling by name, though it does denounce Paul as a “noted cisgender heterosexual” who has been granted “space for her unfounded thoughts about how LGBTQ people should describe themselves…”
“For those of us who truly treasured the Times coverage for so many years, it is appalling to see how the news and opinion pages are now full of misguided, inaccurate, and disingenuous ‘both sides’ fearmongering and bad faith ‘just asking questions’ coverage,” the GLAAD letter read.
The group demanded that the Times “immediately” cease “printing biased anti-trans stories.” It also demanded that Times management agree to hold a meeting within the next two months during which the newspaper’s leadership “listen to trans sources, trans people, and organizations working with trans people.”
The Times warned staffers about signing the petition in a statement released Thursday.
“We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums,” the statement said.
Rowling, who became a billionaire after she wrote the best-selling seven-volume “Harr Potter” series of children’s books that was later adapted to a blockbuster movie franchise, has been a subject of controversy on social media over her stance on transgender women.
In 2020, Rowling penned an essay defending her previous comments wading into the hot-button issue of gender status and transgender people.
“When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman … then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside,” Rowling wrote.
In June 2020, she criticized a news article that referred to “people who menstruate” instead of “women.”
In subsequent tweets, Rowling held firm on her stance.
“If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction,” she tweeted. “If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives.”
Rowling added: “It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
https://nypost.com/2023/02/16/new-york-times-staffers-celebs-blast-op-ed-defending-jk-rowling/
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Australia: Doctor scrutiny on gender clinic reveals legal and safety fears
Doctors treating children at a major public hospital gender clinic have questioned the basis of the “gender-affirming” approach in medicine, highlighting sparse evidence justifying the use of puberty blockers, instances of serious side-effects from the drugs, ongoing mental distress following transition and the significant potential for later regret among patients.
Senior physicians at the NSW Children’s Hospital Westmead’s gender clinic have studied the physical and mental health of 79 patients in a rare academic study of the outcomes of children who presented with gender distress and gender dysphoria. The findings cast doubt on the scientific basis of the gender-affirming approach followed by the nation’s other children’s hospitals.
In an open access academic paper, CHW psychiatrists, endocrinologists and other physicians, and a senior medical ethics expert, called for a “much more nuanced and complex approach” as analysis revealed 88 per cent of children presenting at Westmead’s gender clinic had at least one co-morbid mental health condition, with more than 50 per cent diagnosed with behavioural disorders or autism. One in five children who consulted the clinic with gender-related distress later had these feelings resolved, and almost one in 10 with a formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria, some who had taken puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, later discontinued transitioning.
Given this, the adoption of a “neutral therapeutic stance” and provision of “a much more diverse range of treatment options and pathways as an alternative to medical gender transition was necessary”, the doctors concluded.
One of the central justifications for gender-affirming medicine – that it alleviated psychological distress – was not borne out in the experience of the young people studied, with 44 out of 50 patients diagnosed with gender dysphoria reporting ongoing mental health concerns four to nine years after presentation at the gender clinic, many after transitioning.
Parents of children with gender distress are often told their child is at high risk of suicide if the gender-affirming path is not followed. “An unanswered question in the paediatric literature is whether gender-affirming medical treatment improves or does not improve mental health outcomes and quality of life,” said CHW doctors, including paediatric psychiatrist Kasia Kozlowska, paediatric endocrinologists Geoffrey Ambler and Ann Maguire and physician Joseph Elkadi.
Former Yale Law School medical ethics expert Stephen Scher was also a co-author. “In the era of evidence-based medicine, the evidence base pertaining to the gender-affirming medical pathway is sparse and, for the young people who may regret their choice of pathway at a future point in time, the risks for potential harm are significant,” the authors said.
The study comes as the approach of doctors practising gender-affirming medicine comes under scrutiny in court, as parents seeking to block prescription of puberty blockers to their children call expert witnesses to challenge the evidence. One recent Family Court case initiated by a parent seeking to halt their child being prescribed puberty blockers was settled midway through evidence as doctors from a major children’s hospital gender clinic called as witnesses came under scrutiny.
Solicitor Bill Kordos, who acted for the parent, said: “What became apparent to me running the case is that the science and the evidence didn’t seem to support the recommendations of the gender clinic. The unravelling of the science and the medicine was so telling that I in fact became alarmed that, if this is one case, and there are hundreds of children being put on what seems to be a conveyor belt, and young children are being told they have gender dysphoria without the whole picture being addressed, at the end of this court case I felt it was a form of child abuse.
“I also formed the view that they appeared to have politicised healthcare, which directly threatens the welfare of children. An inquiry should be held as to how these clinics are operating. I think they’re exposing themselves to a massive class action.”
The Australian litigation comes as senior doctors from the UK’s Tavistock Clinic spoke out in a new book by British journalist Hannah Barnes at their growing concerns the gender-affirming approach they were following ”wasn’t actually safe” and may amount to a medical scandal. The Cass Review in the UK, which led to the shutdown of Tavistock, has said it was now examining gender-affirming medicine guidelines set by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
The gender-affirming approach has been championed in Australia by paediatrician Michelle Telfer and colleagues at the Melbourne Royal Children’s Hospital. Dr Telfer helped author the Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines for trans and gender-diverse children and adolescents, following The Netherlands model and based heavily on World Professional Association for Transgender Health guidelines.
Australian Professional Association for Trans Health standards are followed by most doctors treating patients with gender dysphoria in Australia, from major children’s hospital clinics to general practitioners. Gender-affirming care is designed to support and affirm an individual’s perceived gender identity, including the prescription of puberty blockers and hormone treatments to medically affirm the patient’s perceived gender. The guidelines stipulate decision-making, including relating to medical intervention and social transitioning, “should be driven by the child or adolescent wherever possible”.
The ABC’s failure to cover the closure of Britain’s Tavistock serves as another example of the national broadcaster… not wanting to tell Australians an “inconvenient truth,” Sky News Digital Editor Jack Houghton says. Media Watch host Paul Barry pointed out the ABC had no trace of the story and, More
CHW doctors disputed that these standards amount to national guidelines. “The title is actually misleading,” the authors write. “In Australia there are no official or authorised government-commissioned standards for assessing or treating gender dysphoria.”
The Royal Children’s Hospital and Associate Professor Telfer, director of the RCH Gender Service, declined to respond to questions surrounding the standards of care, the evidence base underpinning the gender-affirmative model, risk of regret among patients and potential harms of drug treatments.
AusPATH president Clara Tuck Meng Soo did not respond to a request for comment.
The CHW doctors have raised concerns that “many unknowns remain” regarding the long-term effects of puberty blockers, which are described by the Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne as “reversible in their effects”. International evidence is in fact casting greater doubt on whether the effects of these medications are reversible. Endocrine reviews of the CHW patient cohort documented side-effects in 23 of the 49 young people prescribed puberty blockers, including low bone density, hot flushes, weight gain and anxiety. The CHW doctors raised concerns about long-term effects on patients’ sexual function in adulthood.
Within the 9 per cent cohort of patients with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria who had desisted – that is, discontinued the transgender pathway 4-9 years after consulting the gender clinic – three had undergone puberty suppression beginning at the average age of 12. Three had taken cross-sex hormones, one from as young as 15, but not prescribed by CHW. The effects of cross-sex hormones, including infertility, are irreversible.
Transgender activists claim rates of transition are in the order of less than 1 per cent. But the CHW doctors say the “emerging voices of detransitioners are identifying important issues”, and remain concerned that – even when exploratory psychotherapy is emphasised, as per the more conservative Finnish, Swedish and new British guidelines – “a serious problem remains” in identifying those young people who may regret their transition.
The hospital said it appeared many young people were accessing cross-sex hormones from unregulated sources or providers, as 51 of the cohort they studied had commenced treatment outside the institution, 20 of whom were under 16. Six young people studied had undergone gender-affirming surgery such as mastectomy.
The CHW doctors also identified concerns around the increasing prevalence of predominantly female patients with “late-onset, rapid-onset or adolescent-onset gender dysphoria” with no prior history of gender distress presenting at gender clinics. “The absence of prior history raised questions that this particular group of adolescents were being drawn to the construct of gender dysphoria because of some evolving social process,” the doctors said.
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17 February, 2023
Jeff Jacoby: There's only one way to add an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution
I rather like the ERA. It would knock out favoritism to women, including transexual "women". Both at present have favoured rights, not equal rights
IT WAS a running joke in the early days of NBC's "Saturday Night Live." Chevy Chase, the news anchor for "Weekend Update," would announce the night's top story: "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead."
Like the late Spanish autocrat, the Equal Rights Amendment is also still dead. Approved by Congress in 1972, it was sent to the states with a seven-year ratification deadline, only to die when the clock ran out in 1979. Just 35 of the required 38 state legislatures had ratified the amendment, so it never became part of the Constitution. Yet some members of Congress now insist that the ERA didn't fail and actually was ratified. Or, to be precise, that it will have been ratified "to all intents and purposes" if Congress simply adopts a joint resolution retroactively cancelling the ERA's deadline.
Like Chevy Chase, they make their pronouncement with a straight face. Unlike him, they're not funny.
Their claim is self-evident nonsense. Congress cannot undo the results of an amendment ratification process any more than it can undo the results of a presidential election. Yet at a recent Capitol Hill press conference, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland put on a show of amendment denialism that was as divorced from reality as the 2020 election denialism of former president Donald Trump.
On what basis can anyone insist that the ERA never expired? Pressley, Cardin, and the others make much of the fact that three additional state legislatures — in Nevada, Illinois, and Virginia — did eventually vote to ratify the amendment, purportedly bringing the total to the required 38. They did so, respectively, in 2017, 2018, and 2020. That was four decades after the ratification cutoff date established by Congress had come and gone. No matter, the amendment deniers say. That was merely an "arbitrary deadline" and should not be considered binding. It's a ludicrous argument, as preposterous as the claims by some Trump lawyers that he could be "reinstated" as president.
It should be noted that five of the state legislatures that ratified the ERA had a change of heart and voted — within the original seven-year window — to rescind their approval. Yet the same ERA advocates who maintain that any ratification, no matter how belated, is binding, are adamant that a state's timely decision to withdraw its ratification is "a nullity" and that recissions "don't count."
Like the 2020 stolen-election conspiracy theories, the ERA-was-actually-ratified theory has been litigated in court and rejected as meritless.
"Congress set deadlines for ratifying the ERA that expired long ago," ruled Judge Rudolph Contreras of the US District Court for the District of Columbia. "Plaintiffs' ratifications came too late to count." Any finding that the amendment should nevertheless be deemed ratified, he held, "would be absurd." (The case is now on appeal.)
Perhaps the ERA's proponents are merely striking a pose. Maybe, while realizing that the amendment is a dead letter, they find it politically useful to pretend otherwise. But if that's not the case, they ought to quit playacting and heed the admonition of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
An iconic champion of women's equality, Ginsburg was a lifelong backer of the ERA. She was also a sober jurist who would not pretend that an expired deadline could somehow, magically, be reopened. During an appearance at Georgetown Law School in 2020, Ginsburg said the only way forward for the amendment was to restart the process. "I would like to see a new beginning," she told the Georgetown audience. "I'd like to start over."
Ginsburg also acknowledged that the main benefit of an Equal Rights Amendment at this late date would be its symbolic value. As a matter of substance, an addition to the Constitution is no longer needed to guarantee legal equality of the sexes.
In 1972, when Congress approved the ERA, the Supreme Court had not yet clarified that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment protects women from unfair sex discrimination. Things are different now. As far back as 1997, the legal scholar and journalist Jeffrey Rosen wrote that the Equal Rights Amendment had effectively been enacted "by judicial fiat," thanks to Supreme Court decisions holding sex discrimination to be nearly as repugnant to the Constitution as racial discrimination. He quoted Ginsburg's view that "there is no practical difference between what has evolved and the ERA."
Another prominent legal thinker, University of Chicago Law School professor David Strauss, made the same observation in a 2001 Harvard Law Review article. The Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified, he wrote, yet "today it is difficult to identify any respect in which constitutional law is different from what it would have been if the ERA had been adopted. For the last quarter-century, the Supreme Court has acted as if the Constitution contains a provision forbidding discrimination on the basis of gender."
In other words, there is a strong case to be made that the campaign to add an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution achieved its aims even without winning ratification. Symbolism aside, it is hard to see what would be gained by making the ERA the 28th addendum to the Constitution. But if Pressley, Cardin, and their colleagues are intent on enshrining the ERA in the nation's supreme legal charter, their only option is to follow Ginsburg's advice: "Start over." The original ERA is as dead as Generalissimo Franco. Denialism won't bring it back to life.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26748/there-only-one-way-to-add-an-equal-rights
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Righteous Tyrants
They sure don’t make tyrants like they used to.
Tyrants once rose to power the old-fashioned way: defeating the opposition on the battlefield or at the faux ballot box. Despite their atrocities, these despots at least had some swagger—perhaps a way with the ladies, a good sense of humor, strong persuasive abilities, commanding verbal skills, pride in their appearance.
Not so with modern-day martinets. Our 21st-century tyrants possess nothing more than useless degrees from woke institutions and deep contempt for at least half the country, likely born out of a lifetime of social isolation. History, after all, shows that outcasts often seek revenge against their childhood tormentors later in life.
Such appears to be the case with the former Twitter executives who testified before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. Unimpressive by every measure—looks, personality, intellect, persuasiveness, grasp of the facts—the Twitter Four should serve as a reminder of what the defenders of freedom are up against. Thankfully, our enemies, while powerful for now, have the mental, physical, and emotional appeal of overcooked spaghetti.
James Baker, Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth, and Anika Collier Navaroli took the quasi-stand this week at a House Oversight Committee hearing to explain their roles in colluding with the government to suppress free speech during an election year, particularly related to the New York Post’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020. Baker, the former general counsel for the FBI when the bureau used fabricated political opposition research to defraud a secret federal court and obtain a warrant to spy on Donald Trump, was fired by Elon Musk as Twitter’s general counsel after it was discovered Baker was vetting company files made available to independent journalists.
Roth, Gadde, and Navaroli were considered the “custodians of the internet,” Roth boasted in a New York Times opinion column published in November, shortly after he resigned. “The work of online sanitation is unrelenting and contentious,” Twitter’s former head of “trust and safety” lamented. Roth then outlined a series of steps the government, private companies, and Big Tech oligarchs should pursue to rein in Musk.
“In the longer term,” Roth warned, “the moderating influences of advertisers, regulators and, most critically of all, app stores may be welcome for those of us hoping to avoid an escalation in the volume of dangerous speech online.”
That sort of hubris was on full display this week as the Twitter Four defended their crusade to censor users on the Right, including the suspension of Trump in January 2021. In the process, these self-proclaimed warriors of truth and integrity revealed themselves to be nothing short of petulant foot-stompers unfit for employment anywhere outside of Silicon Valley or the government. Further, all four were clearly guided by their hatred for Trump and his supporters, contrary to their solemn assurances that decisions were based on unbiased considerations to protect the site from insidious content.
For example, Gadde retweeted a Nicholas Kristof piece in 2016, emphasizing Kristof’s conclusion that he had “never met a national politician in the U.S. who is so ill informed, evasive, puerile and deceptive as Trump.” She, like 98 percent of people working in Silicon Valley, is a generous contributor to Democratic Party officials and candidates.
She reportedly cried when she learned Musk had acquired the company.
But Gadde’s attempts to hide her partisan stripes failed this week. In a nonsensical explanation only an Ivy Leaguer could love, Gadde told committee members about the inner workings of the social media giant.
“Defending free expression and maintaining the health of the platform required difficult judgment calls,” claimed Gadde, who was largely responsible for the decision to ban Trump’s account after January 6, 2021. “Most applications of Twitter rules were fact-intensive, subject to internal debate, and needed to be made very quickly. We recognized that after applying those rules, we might learn that some of them did not work as we had imagined and that we would need to update them. At times, we also reversed course.”
Coincidentally, just like occurrences in the traditional media, those rules and course reversals only affected one side: the Right. But when challenged to explain the imbalance, Gadde played dumb. She said she could only “make a guess” as to the application of a “search blacklist,” a tool that was frequently used by Twitter to hide the accounts of conservative influencers.
Vaccine-injured Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) angrily confronted Gadde about Twitter’s censorship of contrary views on COVID-19, especially vaccine efficacy. After forcing Gadde to admit she did not graduate from medical school, Mace presented tweets with CDC data on vaccine side effects that Twitter nonetheless labeled “misleading.”
Gadde told Mace she was “not familiar with those particular situations,” to which Mace snarked, “Yeah, I bet you’re not.”
Roth, a big talker behind the scenes and on the op-ed pages of regime-friendly newspapers, sheepishly confessed he “regret[s] the language he used” in some tweets including one that referred to the president and his administration as “actual Nazis.” He then complained that he was subjected to threats after Musk shared what Roth insisted was a “defamatory allegation that I support or condone pedophilia.” Roth said he was forced to sell his house in the aftermath.
Anika Collier Navaroli perhaps best portrayed the emotional fragility and overall duncery of these social media tyrants. The “safety policy team senior expert” worked for months before January 6 to “minimize the threat of violence that we saw coming.” Part of the looming danger, Navaroli claimed, was Trump’s comment for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”—a remark not made on Twitter but during a presidential debate in September 2020.
Navaroli, now a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies, sprang into action. “We crafted what we called a coded incitement to violence policy to address dog whistles like this,” she told the committee. Rather than follow her orders, Navaroli complained, Twitter “bent over backwards to find ways not to approve it.”
She continued her pressure campaign to remove Trump until the events of January 6. “Two days later, when it looked like it was going to happen all over again, I asked management whether they wanted more blood on their hands,” Navaroli said. “Only then did they act.”
Navaroli seemed to detect danger in everything Trump said. “The former president said he liked to send out his tweets like little missiles. To me, that sounded like weaponization of a platform in his own words and yet Twitter was not concerned.”
She left Twitter in March 2021 after her paranoid fantasies got the best of her. Navaroli told the January 6 select committee she “could no longer be complicit in what I saw to be a company and a product that was wantonly allowing violence to occur. [The] platform was going to continue to allow people to die, and I could not be a part of that.”
Just like the tyrants of old, this current crop hides its lust for power behind a cloak of fairness and the “common good.” No, they’re not cutting off food supplies or building labor camps but these modern-day tyrants seek the same ends: crush the opposition and control the masses.
Just with a lot less talent.
https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/09/righteous-tyrants/
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Why Leftist Ideologies Always Fail
I want to discuss, in the brief space I have, the roots of modern Leftist philosophy, and why they believe government and force are the essentials to a more perfect society. There is an inherent contradiction in their system which would nullify it, but the Leftist’s fundamental understanding of human nature is in error, and thus any arrangement based on it is doomed to failure. And has.
Modern leftism has an interesting history, but one I cannot fully elucidate here. Though it has predecessors (Locke, Helvetius), its current manifestation is rooted in Darwinian materialism (one foundation of Marxism). According to this hypothesis, humans evolved, naturally and by chance, from “lower” forms of life. Pure, undiluted Darwinism, thus pure leftism, is atheistic—no God created or controlled the process. That means human beings are nothing more than blobs of matter in motion. The only difference between you and a cockroach is a different configuration of molecules, and that's totally by chance. You can no more help being a human than a cockroach can help being a cockroach. There is, of course, some verity to this.
However, since humans are nothing but groups of molecules in motion, we can react only to whatever environmental forces surround us. There is no freedom of choice in such a system. And no free will implies we are not responsible for what we do. Criminals aren’t guilty of “crimes”; it isn’t their fault, they respond exclusively to environmental factors. Also, poverty has been said to be a root cause of crime. Thus, by changing the environment (a “war on poverty”), human behavior can be modified. Put an apple tree in an environment of good water, soil, sunshine, etc., and bigger, tastier, juicier apples will be produced. The apples have no “choice” in the matter, they only respond to their surroundings. Since humans are, like apples, only molecules formed, by chance, into what we are, then, like apples, we will react only to whatever external stimuli we receive. People thus aren’t “good” or “bad” except as their environment dictates.
Leftist intellectuals believe that humans (especially them) have evolved to the point where they can control the evolutionary process, if only we will give them power. They will create a Utopia, by good laws and education, so that everybody can be in a “good” environment and respond accordingly.
This philosophy is, of course, contrary to Christianity and many world religions, which believe that man is, in some ways, the offspring of a Divine Creator, given freedom of choice by that Creator on how they choose to live. Most conservatives believe in a philosophy like this, whether they are “religious” or not. People are not just naturalistic, materialistic animals, with nothing but instinct and response to environment. Some environmental forces are obviously evident in human behavior (culture, tradition, etc.); no one can, or should, deny this. But, in the conservative mind, humans have free will, and can choose to rise above their circumstances and form their own destiny. Not so, says the liberal, people only do “good” or “evil” in response to their (“systemic”) surroundings, whatever stimuli they receive from without. Again, change the stimuli, change the environment, and behavior will automatically be modified. It’s “science.” When people do evil, it’s the fault of the system (capitalism is usually blamed, or now, “white supremacy” and “racism”), not the fault of the individual.
The difference between liberalism and conservatism is thus based on a fundamentally different belief about human nature. Liberals want power so that they can create an earthly paradise. They believe they can now control all environmental factors, including the climate. Conservatives believe in freedom, but a freedom that has boundaries based on eternal principles of right and wrong. Humans can be, must be, incentivized and disciplined towards virtuous conduct, and thus to use their freedom for good, not evil. Family and religion best do this, not government.
Socialism is a prime example of liberal failure. The government, top-down, controls the economy. It never works because it denies humans the freedom to choose their needs and desires, rather than what the elite thinks is best. Nobody can control what another person wishes to purchase. Only the free market fits with human nature.
Liberal morality also is disastrous. Let Edmund Burke explain: "Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within [freedom of choice], the more there must be without [government tyranny]." People must use their freedom to control themselves—self-government. Or government will have to do it for them. Freedom or tyranny. The Right vs. the Left.
Thus, liberal politicians’ fundamental mistake is believing that human beings can be transformed by legislation, in effect, by force. But they are wrong, and that is why political systems, nations, and dynasties rise for awhile and then collapse. They fail in the most basic concept, viz., that freedom is in the human heart, not produced by government laws. And forcing people to outwardly conform will only lead eventually to resentment, rebellion, and revolution. That is why religion has always existed. Christianity, for example, has survived for 2,000 years through every kind of political system and upheaval. Jesus knew that humans can only truly be changed from within, in the heart, not by external laws. Therefore, religion has always existed, and will continue long after current political tyrannies have either disappeared completely or devolved into something else, something as useless and reprehensible as what they had replaced.
But, religion remains the greatest threat to the self-serving, elitist politicians who lust to control others and create the Shangri-la that gives them totalitarian power. The only people more pitiable than such politicians are the people who believe their lies, lies that have been repeated countless times throughout history, and have cost innumerable people their lives. For, what do you do with the rotten apples, the apples that don’t respond to the perfect environment you created for them?
You destroy them. As many as necessary.
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Western Progressives Loved Stalinism and Maoism
I recently had the opportunity to travel to the Texas Tech University School of Law to debate the merits of capitalism versus socialism with Ben Burgis, a columnist for Jacobin and philosophy instructor at Georgia State University Perimeter College.
It was a riveting discussion, and I hope students left with not just a better understanding of the horrors of socialism but with the inherent morality of capitalism, a system that relies on voluntary action instead of force and state coercion.
There are many issues on which Ben and I disagreed, including his claim that Venezuela was not actually a socialist country, despite the widespread nationalization of private industries. I intend to address this claim down the road, but for now I’d like to focus on Ben’s implication that Stalinism and Maoism were not truly socialist models either.
Ben stated he regretted that so much of the debate involved discussions around the USSR, since he wasn’t advocating socialism along these lines. Since respectable socialists and progressives don’t defend these systems today, why talk about them?
I understand why Ben wouldn’t wish to discuss systems that starved and executed tens of millions of people, and I said as much during the debate. But it’s important to understand what socialists and progressives of the time—who unlike Ben didn’t have the advantage of hindsight—thought of them. And the truth is, they loved them.
‘An Inexpressible Look of Kindness’
In his new book The Power of Capitalism, Dr. Rainer Zitelmann chronicles in painstaking detail how much Western elites were enamored with Lenin and Stalinism, praising the oppressive and violent system in hagiographic language. Here are just a few examples.
“The reality of the ‘Soviet Republic’ is for my consciousness one of the greatest and most gratifying facts. Because here, for the first time in 2,000 years, a very honest attempt is being made to bring justice into the world through energy. If I die tomorrow, the thought of this isolated phenomenon in the midst of a timid and backward world will be the last, the only consolation.”
— German writer and theater critic Alfred Kerr (1933)
“Future historians may well regard the Russian struggle for collectivization as a heroic period in human progress … The backward section of the population would have the chance to obtain what it most needed, namely education … women would have the chance for leisure and freedom as well … whether villages preferred their dirt and ignorance to Progress or not, Progress would be thrust upon them.”
— Walter Duranty, The New York Times’ Moscow correspondent
“Here are happy workers, because they are whole men and women … Dream, thought, love collaborate in the tedious business of making electric parts, since these toilers are not working for a boss.”
— Waldo Frank, American historian and literary critic
“[In Lenin’s Tomb] is the only person in the world who is not asleep … he is the paternal brother who is really watching over everyone. Although you do not know him, he knows you and is thinking of you.”
— French writer Henri Barbusse
It’s not just that the Soviet system these individuals were praising was not a utopia; that could be forgiven. What’s stunning is that these hagiographic comments were used to describe a murderous system that ruled by terror and starved millions of people.
Many would think the horrors of Stalinism would have turned even staunch Marxists away from socialism. That is not the case, however. In his magnum opus Modern Times, the late Paul Johnson showed just how enamored Western intellectuals were with Maoism scarcely a generation after the horrors of Stalinism.
French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir testified that “life in China [under Mao] is exceptionally pleasant.” David Rockefeller lauded “the sense of national harmony” under Mao, arguing that his revolution had succeeded “not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose.”
Johnson pointed out that intellectuals were aware of the horrors of Stalinism, but had convinced themselves that socialism had finally succeeded in large part because of “the extraordinary genius of Mao.”
“‘He was,’ Jan Myrdral wrote, ‘third in line with Marx and Lenin, and had solved the problem of how ‘the revolution can be prevented from degenerating.’ He ‘combined,’ wrote an American political scientist, ‘qualities which rarely coexist in one being in such intensity.’ Han Suyin argued that, unlike Stalin, Mao is extremely patient, and believes in debate and re-education,’ and had ‘an ever-present concern with the practical application of democracy.’ … Felix Greene believed that the hunger for power had been eliminated and that there was ‘no evidence of that jockeying for power or of the personal rivalry that we have seen so often in the Kremlin. Mao was not merely a soldier, a leader, a poet, philosopher, teacher, thinker and charismatic: he was also a kind of saint.”
If you think Johnson is exaggerating that many saw Mao as a saint, consider this quote from the famous Christian communist Hewlett Johnson.
“[I saw in Mao] something no picture has ever caught, an inexpressible look of kindness and sympathy, an obvious preoccupation with the needs of others … these formed the deep content of his thoughts,” he wrote.
This kind, saintly figure was history’s greatest mass murderer, accounting for the deaths of no fewer than 45 million people from 1958 to 1962, and likely as many as 65 million.
‘A Century of Failure’
This is just a sampling of quotes from intellectuals praising the socialist systems under Stalin and Mao. You can find many more examples in Kristian Niemietz’s 2019 book Socialism.
Again, I understand why Ben Burgis, like most socialists, would prefer to ignore this bloody history.
But the notion that “real” Marxists would not support the socialism of Mao, Stalin, Lenin, or Pol Pot—who, as I pointed out in our debate, literally studied Marxism and Stalinism as a student in Paris in the 1950s and founded a Marxist-Leninist student organization (“Marxist Circle”)—is belied by the historical record.
It’s easy, of course, to reject these systems in hindsight. But it doesn’t change the fact that every single political system based on the ideas of Karl Marx over the last century has failed
https://catalyst.independent.org/2023/02/14/progressives-socialism/
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Australia: Outrage after six-year-olds told they must wear 'pride shirts' to play soccer
Parents of primary school age children have been told their kids are required to wear pride t-shirts if they want to play in an A-League half-time game.
The game is taking place during the A-League's inaugural Pride Celebration round held between February 24-26, with a follow-up round on March 4 in New Zealand.
The marquee game of the round is between Adelaide United and Melbourne Victory at Melbourne's AAMI Park on February 26 - when the children will take the field during the break.
'Please note that Melbourne Victory will be celebrating Pride Cup at this fixture. As such, participants playing half time small sided games will be wearing a specially designed pride T-shirt during the game,' the registration form given to one junior coach read.
'By continuing with this registration form you agree to your child wearing the MVFC pride T-shirt,' the form seen by The Herald Sun advises.
A furious parent told the newspaper it was not appropriate and kids should be 'kept out of social and cultural matters'. 'It's deeply disturbing that the Melbourne Victory is forcing 6 year old children to be moving billboards,' he said.
'While I personally agree with the concept of pride and the safety of all LGBTQI+ persons to participate in sport, primary aged schoolchildren are not the correct avenue to express these sentiments.'
One fan wrote to Twitter that they didn't believe 'inclusion was forcing kids to wear pride shirts'.
A spokesperson for Melbourne Victory said the children were not being forced to wear the jerseys and could play another day if they didn't want to.
'The Club has not forced any of its players, staff, fans or junior participants to wear or participate in anything they are not comfortable with,' a spokesman said.
'This game is a celebration of LGBTI+ participation in sport and we have put processes in place to ensure those who are not comfortable to participate in the day as a whole, will have the option to participate in another match day they feel comfortable participating in.'
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16 February, 2023
No, ‘More Sex’ Will Not Cure Loneliness
The critical commentary below on a call for more sex is orthodox and mostly right. There can however be a middle way. At times in my life, I have had a number of "girlfriends" who all knew that they were not the only one in my life but with whom I had good sexual relationships lasting for more than a year. I obviously enjoyed my times with the ladies concerned and eventually parted from them on amicable terms.
The key to the good outcome is that I never lie to women so I deceived none of them at any time. In my experience, women will tolerate a lot as long as you are honest with them. It is lies that engender bitterness. So "more sex" can be good if it is with the informed consent of all parties. In my case there was genuine appreciation of one another and of our times together so that is an important precondition too
The New York Times often promotes socially destructive policies and reckless personal behaviors in opinion columns. The latest example sees self-identified “sex and culture” writer Magdalene J. Taylor promoting promiscuity as a socially desirable cure for loneliness that will benefit society by forging greater levels of “social solidarity.”
In, “Have More Sex, Please!” Taylor laments that Americans aren’t copulating enough. She writes, “Sex is good. Sex is healthy. Sex is an essential part of our social fabric. And you—specifically—should probably be having more of it.”
Taylor offers no preferred social context in which to increase your rate of coitus. She doesn’t recommend more spice as a means of improving romance in marriage. Nor is her focus on intimacy as bonding relationships. Indeed, she makes no mention of the importance of commitment to healthy sexual relations. She simply asserts, “Those of us in a position to be having more sex ought to be doing so. Here is the rare opportunity to do something for the betterment of the world around you that involves nothing more than indulging in one of humanity’s most essential pleasures.”
Talk about diminishing the importance, power, and meaning of sex! Taylor misses the potency of loving the person with whom one shares a bed. She makes scant mention of the importance of sex as a form of self-giving, devotion, family formation, and having children. And she ignores the crucial role of fidelity and trust in intimate partnering.
No, getting it on as often as possible is a “political statement” that will lead—she doesn’t say how—to “the betterment of the world.” Thus, she writes, “Any capable people should have sex—as much as they can, as pleasurably as they can, as often as they can.” She doesn’t even distinguish between what is proper conduct for adults versus that of teenagers.
What claptrap. Promiscuity—because that is what Taylor advocates without using the word—is reckless. Having indiscriminate sex is often harmful—both to those who indulge in the vice and to greater society. But the only warning Taylor offers about the emotional risks of casual intimacy is the potential for “regret,” and that “sex can bring people together, but that only works if it’s good sex.”
The issue is far more portentous than that. Let’s start with the pregnancy factor. Even if one uses birth control, promiscuity increases the chance of an unintended pregnancy. That, in turn, can lead not only to increased abortion—which, to say the least, is morally consequential and potentially causing its own mental health problems—but also to parenthood outside of a bonded familial relationship.
This is a real and growing problem. In 1980, a little over 18 percent of babies were born to unmarried mothers in the United States. In 2020, that figure had exploded to a socially devastating 40.5 percent of all births. That surge didn’t arise in a vacuum but in the context of an increasingly hypersexualized culture. To be sure, children can thrive in this circumstance and single parents are often splendid mothers and fathers. But let’s be candid. Out-of-wedlock births generally lead to greater incidences of poverty and increased potential for family dysfunction.
And let’s talk sexually transmitted disease. Having “as much sex as you can as often as you can” outside of a mutually monogamous relationship increases the chance of contracting sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) such as syphilis, gonorrhea, HIV, chlamydia, and herpes. Having more sex partners can also increase the chance of developing prostate, oral, and cervical cancers. It can even lead to heart disease.
Not enough sex? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that the United States is experiencing an “STD epidemic.” Despite the COVID lockdowns, in 2020 diagnosed gonorrhea increased by 10 percent over 2019 levels and syphilis went up by 7 percent. In 2020 there were about 2.4 million reported cases of STDs—and that’s probably undercounted because many people didn’t go to doctors during the pandemic or didn’t take lab tests. Not only that, but syphilis among newborns increased 235 percent between 2016 and 2020. Especially worrying: A strain of “super gonorrhea” is spreading that’s resistant to most antibiotics.
Promiscuity can also be a significant contributor to depression, anxiety, increased substance abuse, and other mental health disorders. While certainly not everyone who engages in casual sex has adverse mental health consequences, many do. Indeed, particularly among adolescents, having as much sex as you want as often as you can is a potential driver of suicidal ideation.
Look, I know most Americans have a more relaxed attitude toward intimacy than was once the case. We are a secularizing culture in which traditional religious moral precepts about the proper time and place for intercourse exert little sway. Indeed, according to a 2022 Gallup Poll, 76 percent of respondents believe that sex outside of marriage is morally acceptable and 70 percent think having a baby outside of marriage is just fine. Still, only 9 percent think adultery is acceptable—which would seem to be at least part of Taylor’s call for New York Times readers to indulge in all of the sex they can obtain.
But having a more relaxed view of sex isn’t the same thing as endorsing Taylor’s irresponsible call for cavorting whenever and with whomever one can take to bed. Indeed, considering the significant problem of unintended pregnancies, the raging STD epidemic, and the worsening mental health crisis this country faces, what we really need isn’t increased licentiousness but greater probity in the conduct of our intimate lives.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/no-more-sex-will-not-cure-loneliness_5059651.html
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CNN Anchor Left Out Key Detail for MSU Shooting Suspect While He Was at Large
The repeated coverup of black behaviour does nothing to stop it and may encourage it
CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota was on the air when news was breaking about the shooting at Michigan State University Monday evening, she provided details about the suspect after police released information about him but she left out the man police were actively looking for was black.
Camerota referenced a tweet from MSU Police, but did not show it on the screen, and said, "Campus police tweeted that the suspected gunman is a short male with a mask. That's basically all we know."
Except that was not "all we know." MSU Police's tweet stated the following: "The suspect description is a short male with a mask, possibly Black. Please continue to shelter in place. We are still receiving multiple calls of an active shooter on campus."
MSU Police followed up with another tweet that included a picture of the suspect, confirming the man was black. The man, who was not affiliated with the college, died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot.
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'The Woke Cult Has Captured Medicine': Meet Your Future Doctors
During a White Coat Ceremony at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Class of 2025 is seen in a resurfaced video reciting a woke version of the Hippocratic Oath.
In the 2021 video that's currently making the rounds on social media, Lisa Mellman, a senior associate dean for student affairs and the Samuel Rudin professor of psychiatry, leads the class in the CRT-infused pledge.
"We enter the profession of medicine with appreciation for the opportunity to build on the scientific and humanistic achievements of the past. We also recognize the acts and systems of oppression affected in the name of medicine. We take this Oath of service to begin building a future grounded in truth, restoration, and equity to fulfill medicine's capacity to liberate," the class oath starts.
“I promise to self-reflect diligently, to confront unconscious prejudices, and to develop the skills, knowledge, and character necessary to engender an inclusive, equitable field of medicine," it continues in a later section.
As Columbia explains, the class developed the new pledge to reflect their values in the August 2021 ceremony.
Students decided on a new oath that better reflects the values they wish to uphold as they enter their medical training. The oath includes a commitment to “acknowledge and embrace the diversity that exists within all communities, and the formative influence that the Washington Heights community will have on my future as a physician.” This year’s ceremony at the Armory was an in-person event with limited faculty and guests. The ceremony was also available via Zoom.
The idea for a new oath came up in 2020 shortly before the White Coat Ceremony for the Class of 2024. The students did not have enough time to develop a new oath, so members of the Class of 2024 asked to help members of this year’s incoming class develop a class oath. The writing took place over many weeks during the summer, with current MD students trained by the VP&S education office as writing facilitators to work with incoming students and collaborating faculty members. Going forward, each incoming MD class will have the opportunity to create its own oath.
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Critical race theory is anti-rational
A black leftist professor who was all-in on CRT and all its bizarre and evil components wrote this long article describing how he tried to have a seminar with some select college kids about this woke nonsense and how his class got co-opted by a lunatic grad student named Keisha who eventually led a coup that threw him out. Yeah, I threw him out – the professor and three other students who “caused harm” because they mentioned facts. Of course, the program administration refused to act, probably praying to their pagan gods that the commie crocodiles would eat them last. They were totally paralyzed in the face of weaponized leftist ideology, which is not true of this one program. The woke lunatics truly run the academic asylum.
What happened is truly cultlike:
In the 2022 anti-racism workshops, the non-black students learned that they needed to center black voices—and to shut up. Keisha reported that this was particularly difficult for the Asian-American students, but they were working on it. (Eventually, two of the Asian-American students would be expelled from the program for reasons that, Keisha said, couldn’t be shared with me.) The effects on the seminar were quick and dramatic. During the first week, participation was as you would expect: There were two or three shy students who only spoke in partner or small-group work, two or three outspoken students, and the rest in the middle. One of the black students was outspoken, one was in the middle, and one was shy.
By the second week of the seminar, the two white students were effectively silent. Two of the Asian-American students remained active (the ones who would soon be expelled), but the vast majority of interventions were from the three black students. The two queer students, one Asian and one white, were entirely silent. The black students certainly had interesting things to say and important connections to make with their experiences and those of their family members, but a seminar succeeds when multiple perspectives clash into each other, grapple with each other, and develop—and that became impossible.
We need to remember that the idea behind Critical Race Theory is not to promote critical thinking – just the opposite. This is not an academic pursuit but a purely political one that is not about the study of power but the raw exercise of power. CRT is not meant to help discover and explore new ideas and theories. Instead, it is designed to reaffirm pre-existing premises and conclusions, all commie nonsense, and to crush anyone attempting to introduce facts that counter it. Facts cause “harm,” and “harm” in this context is a term of art meaning “goes against the narrative.” “Harm” manifests as someone claiming to feel bad about something. Understand that something can be an objective fact, and the fact that the fact is a fact is no defense:
During our discussion of incarceration, an Asian-American student cited federal inmate demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy. Outside of the seminar, I was told, the black students had to devote a great deal of time to making right the harm that was inflicted on them by hearing prison statistics that were not about blacks. A few days later, the Asian-American student was expelled from the program.
Cry “Harm!” and that trumps anything else, especially objective truth. The proper understanding of CRT, DEI, and all the rest is not an academic exercise or an intellectual undertaking. It is a means of control, pure and simple. It is designed to give the Keishas of the world the power that they crave but could never obtain by achievement or hard work. What is remarkable is the fact that the institutions refuse to simply fire the Keishas and instead choose to coddle and empower them. Keisha should have been sent packing the moment she opened her fascist trap. Instead, the story shows how the people allegedly in charge catered to her insane requirements and accepted her rejection of reason. The more outrageous Keisha became, the more abject the institution surrendered to her. This could have ended in an instant if only someone had simply said “No.”
No to your complaints.
No to your premises.
No to your demands.
No, you cannot be here anymore – pack your bags and get out.
But they did not say no. They said, “Jump? How high?” They figuratively packed their own bags – and in the case of the professor, literally. What was left in the program were the devoted cultists locked in a circular echo chamber of reinforcement of the stupid nonsense that is CRT.
It’s time to fight back. No quarter. To win, you have to be unreasonable with the unreasonable, ruthlessly unreasonable, because these radicals co-opt the ideas of debate and compromise (concepts they totally reject) and use them against us normal and rational people. It’s a very effective technique – normal and rational people assume their opponents are normal and rational too, and when this is not, the attackers have an edge.
You cannot play the game with them because they do not accept the rules. You have to reject them and refuse to allow them to use your values and norms to defeat you. You don’t debate people who do not debate. You crush them. Ron DeSantis in Florida gets this. He is willing to accept and shrug off the predictable pushback (“You are racist for not surrendering to our whims and commands!”), and we must all be too. No argument. No, back and forth. Just “No, you don’t get to do that nonsense.” Remember, these are weak people. They cannot make us do anything. They must convince us to comply via shame, guilt, and mean tweets. They lose when we laugh at them.
So, when someone lies and says, “People who criticize CRT want to ban black history” – and they always do – show them this story. This is why CRT must be destroyed. And we must be ruthlessly unreasonable to do it.
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The Witch Trials of JK Rowling: ‘Not hate to speak truth’
Of all the insults and the indignities heaped upon J.K. Rowling since she dared speak her mind about things that are, as a woman, important to her, it was the burning of her books that spooked.
That is why people do it, of course: book-burning isn’t designed only to destroy the books. It is designed to terrify.
Rowling is not terrified. Or maybe she is, but she is refusing to censor her heartfelt position on women and trans-women (they are not the same thing) and agreeing to take part in a three-part podcast series, commissioned by the equally bold Bari Weiss of The Free Press, to discuss the ways in which her enemies have attempted to vilify her.
A one-minute trailer for perfectly-named The Witch Trials of JK Rowling shot to the top of Apple’s website when it dropped on Wednesday morning.
It features an interview with Rowling conducted by a Megan Phelps-Roper, who knows a little about hate speech, having grown up with a very closed mind in a cult of twisted messaging, before escaping to marry a man she met on Twitter.
The Witch Trials of JK Rowling promises to examine the impact of censorship, vilification, and cancel culture.
Rowling’s Harry Potter books are delightful feats of imagination. They contain important social messages, impressing courage, friendship and loyalty upon children.
Difference is celebrated.
But, as Phelps-Roper said on The Free Press this morning, Rowling has in recent years “become a kind of Voldemort—the villain of villains in her own stories.”
It began with a Tweet: “People who menstruate,’” Rowling wrote, quoting a headline. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
Of course, that word used to be “women” and it’s in danger of being erased, as are the words “mother” and “girl” so as not to offend transwomen, who were of course born male.
“I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives,” Rowling said. “It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
She soon discovered that transgender activists have much louder voices than women in this debate, and they can be far more vicious.
TikTokers started a trend of covering Rowling’s name on her own book jackets. Players tried to rename Quidditch—the fictional sport Rowling invented— and yes, there was burning of her books.
“I never set out to upset anyone,” Rowling says, in the trailer. “However, I was not uncomfortable with getting off my pedestal.
“What has interested me over the last ten years, and certainly the last two or three years, particularly on social media [is the view that] ‘You’ve ruined your legacy’ . . . ‘You could have been beloved forever but you chose to say this’.
She says her enemies in this regard “could not have misunderstood me more profoundly.”
Rowling was herself the victim of male violence, and is passionate about preserving female-only spaces.
Sky News host Rita Panahi says author JK Rowling has again caused a “Twitter stir” for all the right reasons. Ms Panahi said it was for wearing… a t-shirt with the quote “Nicola Sturgeon, destroyer of women's rights”. “Nicola Sturgeon is the First Minister of Scotland, who has More
Her interlocuter knows quite a bit about the importance of debate in driving out hate.
She was born into the Westboro Baptist Church, and says: “From the age of five, I protested with my parents, siblings, and extended family on sidewalks across America—including outside the funerals of AIDS victims and American soldiers – (holding) signs with messages like “God Hates Fags.”
When she took to Twitter to spread those messages, she found gentle friends “who—through kindness, friendly mockery, and civil conversation—helped me see that it was me who needed to change”.
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15 February, 2023
The birth dearth
This is probably a transitional stage. Non-maternal women are self-excluding from the gene pool and the maternal remainder could have quite a high birthrate. So growth will eventually resume from a lower base
And there is a silver lining to it all. The group least likely to have children would have to be feminists. So the genes of these unhappy women will be much less likely to be passed on. To a degree feminists will breed themselves out of existence -- leaving the world a much happier place
China’s population has begun to decline, a demographic turning point for the country that has global implications. Experts had long anticipated this moment, but it arrived in 2022, several years earlier than expected, prompting hand-wringing among economists over the long-term impacts, given the country’s immense economic heft and its role as the world’s manufacturer.
With 850,000 fewer births than deaths last year, at least according to the country’s official report, China joined an expanding set of nations with shrinking populations caused by years of falling fertility and often little or even negative net migration, a group that includes Italy, Greece and Russia, along with swaths of Eastern and Southern Europe and several Asian nations like South Korea and Japan.
Even places that have not begun to lose population, such as Australia, France and Britain, have been grappling with demographic decline for years as life expectancy increases and women have fewer children.
History suggests that once a country crosses the threshold of negative population growth, there is little that its government can do to reverse it. And as a country’s population grows more top-heavy, a smaller, younger generation bears the increasing costs of caring for a larger, older one.
Even though China’s birthrate has fallen substantially over the last five decades, it was long a country with a relatively young population, which meant it could withstand those low rates for a long time before starting to see population losses. Like many developed countries, China’s older population is now swelling — a consequence of its earlier boom — leaving it in a position similar to that of many wealthy nations: in need of more young people.
Countries such as the U.S. and Germany have been able to rely on robust immigration, even with relatively low birthrates. But for countries with negative net migration, such as China, more people requires more babies.
“The good news is that the Chinese government is fully aware of the problem,” said Yong Cai, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who specializes in Chinese demographics. “The bad news is, empirically speaking, that there is very little they can do about it.”
That’s because the playbook for boosting national birthrates is a rather thin one. Most initiatives that encourage families to have more children are expensive, and the results are often limited. Options include cash incentives for having babies, generous parental leave policies and free or subsidized child care.
Two decades ago, Australia tried a “baby bonus” program that paid the equivalent of nearly $6,000 per child at its peak. At the time the campaign started in 2004, the country’s fertility rate was around 1.8 children per woman. (For most developed nations, a fertility rate of 2.1 is the minimum needed for the population to remain steady without immigration.) By 2008, the rate had risen to a high of around 2, but by 2020, six years after the program had ended, it was at 1.6 — lower than when the cash payments were first introduced.
By one estimate, the initiative led to an additional 24,000 births.
Dr. Liz Allen, a demographer at the Australian National University, said that the program was largely ineffective and that publicly funded paternity leave and child care would have been a more effective use of taxpayer money. “Government intervention to increase fertility rates is best focused on addressing the issues that prevent people from having their desired family size,” she said.
Experts say the most effective initiatives address social welfare, employment policy and other underlying economic issues. France, Germany and Nordic countries like Sweden and Denmark have had notable success in arresting the decline in birthrates, often through government-funded child care or generous parental leave policies.
But even the success of those efforts has had limits, with no country able to reach a sustained return to the 2.1 replacement rate. (The U.S. rate fell below 2.1 in the 1970s, slowly rose back up to the replacement rate by 2007, then collapsed again after the Great Recession to a current level just below 1.7.)
“You’re not going to reverse the trend, but if you throw in the kitchen sink and make childbearing more attractive, you may be able to prevent the population from falling off a cliff,” said John Bongaarts, a demographer at the Population Council, a research institution in New York.
Sweden is often cited as a model for increasing fertility rates, thanks to a government-boosted jump in its birthrate. After introducing nine months of parental leave in the 1970s and implementing a “speed premium” in 1980 (which incentivized mothers to have multiple children within a set period), Sweden saw fertility rise from around 1.6 early in the decade to a peak just above the replacement rate by 1990. (The country has since increased its parental leave to 16 months, among the highest in the world.)
After that uptick, however, Sweden’s birthrate fell through the ’90s. Over the last 50 years, its fertility rate has fluctuated significantly, rising roughly in tandem with economic booms. And while the country still has one of the highest fertility rates among the most advanced economies, over the past decade it has followed a trajectory similar to that of most developed nations: down.
Recent research suggests a reason Sweden’s fertility spikes were only temporary: Families rushed to have children they were already planning to have. Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said financial incentives seldom increase the overall number of children born but instead encourage families to take advantage of benefits that may not last. The spikes, he added, can have unforeseen consequences. “When you have 50,000 children born one year, 100,000 the next, and then 50,000 the year after that, it is really bad for planning and education,” he said.
Few countries have embraced pronatalist policies as vigorously as Hungary, whose right-wing populist leader, Viktor Orban, is dedicating 5% of the nation’s gross domestic product toward increasing birthrates. The government encourages procreation through generous loans that become gifts upon the birth of multiple children, tax forgiveness for mothers who have three children, and free fertility treatments.
Around the time these efforts began under Orban in 2010, Hungary’s fertility rate was just over 1.2, among the lowest in Europe. Over the 2010s, that rate climbed to around 1.6 — a modest improvement at a high cost.
It remains to be seen how far China will go to stem its decline in population, which was set in motion when the country’s fertility rate began to plummet decades ago. That drop began even before the country’s family-planning policies limiting most families to a single child, introduced in 1979. Those who defied the rules were punished with fines and even forced abortions.
The official end of Beijing’s one-child policy in 2016, however, has not led to a rise in births, despite cash incentives and tax cuts for parents. The country’s fertility rate rose slightly around that time but has fallen since, according to data from the United Nations: from around 1.7 children per woman, on par with Australia and Britain, to around 1.2, among the lowest in the world. That recent drop could be a result of unreliable data from China or a technical effect of delays in childbearing, but it likely also reflects a combination of various pressures that have mounted in the country over time.
Even though they are now allowed to, many young Chinese are not interested in having large families. Vastly more young Chinese people are enrolling in higher education, marrying later and having children later. Raised in single-child households, some have come to see small families as normal. But the bigger impediment to having a second or third child is financial, according to Lauren A. Johnston, an economist at the University of Sydney who studies Chinese demographics. She said many parents cite the high cost of housing and education as the main obstacle to having more children. “People can’t afford to buy space for themselves, let alone for two kids,” she said.
China’s government could ease the burden on young families through housing subsidies, extended parental leave and increased funding for education and pensions, experts say. Other policy changes, like reforming the country’s restrictive household registration system and raising the official retirement age — female blue-collar workers must retire at 50, for example — could boost the nation’s working-age population, alleviating some of the economic strain that comes with population decline.
Although the Chinese are unlikely to find more success than the Swedes in recovering a high fertility rate, “there is low-hanging fruit that can allow them to squeeze more productivity and higher labor force participation from the population,” said Gerard DiPippo, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
All this points to a Chinese population, currently 1.4 billion, that is likely to continue shrinking. In contrast to economists who have cast China’s population decline as a grim sign for global growth, many demographers have been more sanguine, noting the benefits of a smaller population.
John Wilmoth, director of the Population Division at the United Nations, said that after decades of exponential growth in which the world’s population doubled to more than 7 billion between 1970 to 2014, the doom-and-gloom assessments about declining fertility rates and depopulation tend to be overstated. Japan has been battling population decline since the 1970s, he noted, but it remains one of the world’s largest economies. “It has not been the disaster that people imagined,” Wilmoth said. “Japan is not in a death spiral.”
Worldwide, fertility remains above the replacement rate, which means that allowing more immigration will continue to be an option for many developed nations, even those that historically haven’t relied on it: Before the pandemic, net migration into Japan, while relatively low, had been increasing steadily.
Without immigration, pragmatic and noncoercive measures that encourage parents to have families while pursuing careers — as well as policies that allow people in their 60s and 70s to keep working — are the key to managing negative population growth, Wilmoth said. “Population stabilization is overall a good thing,” he said. “All societies need to adapt to having older populations. What really matters is the speed of change and how fast we get from here to there.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/upshot/china-population-decline.html
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Death Penalty Looms in a New York Courtroom
The commencement of the penalty phase in the trial of a man convicted of killing eight people in a New York City bike lane rampage — Sayfullo Saipov, who was inspired by the Islamic State — surfaces the possibility that New York will see its first death sentence since 1963.
Saipov was found guilty on all 28 counts in a United District in New York. Sensing that a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion, Saipov’s attorney did not call or cross-examine any witnesses at trial. A unanimous jury is required to levy the death penalty; just one dissenter means life in prison for Saipov.
The presiding Judge, Vernon Broderick, told the jury that it “is impossible for me to overstate the importance of the decision before you.” Saipov’s attack, which occurred on Halloween in 2017, claimed the lives of six tourists and two Americans.
Saipov drove a truck into a bike path on the west side of the West Side Highway at Pier 40 and mowed down his victims between there and Stuyvesant High School at Chambers Street. It was the deadliest terrorist attack at New York City since the Twin Towers fell.
One of the prosecutors in the case, Amanda Houle, argued that the death penalty is required because Saipov has not “not abandoned his jihad, his fight,” and because he is “dangerous even in prison.” According to the New York Times, Saipov’s lawyer, Mark Stern, urged jurors to send him to a “harsh and impregnable prison in the middle of nowhere.”
The history of the death penalty in the Empire State is one of abolition and reinstatement. Most recently, an order signed by Governor Pataki reviving the practice via lethal injection was declared unconstitutional by the New York Court of Appeals, the Empire State’s highest judicial body.
Since 2007, death row has been empty, and in 2008 Governor Paterson issued an executive order mandating the removal of all death penalty equipment from state facilities. New York was the first state to execute a man, William Kemmler, via the electric chair, in 1890. The inventor Thomas Edison was an enthusiast.
Saipov’s execution is possible because he was tried in federal rather than state court. The killer was tried in federal court because of his link to foreign terrorism; the prosecutor, Jason Richman, described to the jury how Saipov requested the Caliphate’s black flag be hung in his hospital room after he “turned a bike path into his battlefield.”
If jurors do decide that Saipov’s life is forfeit, they will render a decision at odds with the policy of the Biden administration. While a campaign pledge to abolish the death penalty has as yet gone unfulfilled, a moratorium on executions is currently in place at the direction of Attorney General Garland.
If Saipov is convicted, he could be executed in the event the moratorium is lifted, or by a future president. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, there are 44 men currently on federal death row and more than 2,000 people await execution at the state level.
This approach stands in stark contrast to the one pursued under President Trump. The final six months of his administration witnessed 13 executions in federal cases. Those were the first federal executions in nearly two decades. According to the Associated Press, more people were executed under the Trump administration than in the 56 prior years, combined.
The death penalty has lived several constitutional lives. In Furman v. Georgia, from 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty as applied in a set of state cases was unconstitutional, holding that those executions violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment because of its disproportionate application to minority communities.
Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia, the high court held that capital punishment was not per se unconstitutional and upheld Georgia’s renovated sentencing procedures, which remedied the earlier problem of arbitrary application.
The next year, in Coker v. Georgia, the justices ruled that for an execution to be constitutional, it must be proportional to the crime. Further rulings ruled out the ultimate punishment for minors and cases of child rape where the victim lives.
In seeking to forestall what prosecutors have called the “most severe penalty that the law provides,” Saipov’s attorney, Mr. Stern, told the jury that the “cycle of death has to stop somewhere.”
https://www.nysun.com/article/death-penalty-looms-in-a-new-york-courtroom
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The Sudden Dominance of the Diversity Industrial Complex
Little more than a decade ago, DEI was just another arcane acronym, a clustering of three ideas, each to be weighed and evaluated against other societal values. The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion weren’t yet being used in the singular, as one all-inclusive, non-negotiable moral imperative. Nor had they coalesced into a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life.
They are now.
Seemingly in unison, and with almost no debate, nearly every major American institution – including federal, state, and local governments, universities and public schools, hospitals, insurance, media and technology companies and major retail brands – has agreed that the DEI infrastructure is essential to the nation’s proper functioning. From Amazon to Walmart, most major corporations have created and staffed DEI offices within their human resources bureaucracy. So have sanitation departments, police departments, physics departments, and the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education and energy. Organizations that once argued against DEI now feel compelled to institute DEI training and hire DEI officers. So have organizations that are already richly diverse, such as the National Basketball Association and the National Football League.
Many of these offices in turn work with a sprawling network of DEI consulting firms, training outfits, trade organizations and accrediting associations that support their efforts.
“Five years ago, if you said ‘DEI,’ people would’ve thought you were talking about the Digital Education Initiative,” Robert Sellers, University of Michigan’s first chief diversity officer, said in 2020. “Five years ago, if you said DEI was a core value of this institution, you would have an argument.”
Diversity, equity and inclusion is an intentionally vague term used to describe sanctioned favoritism in the name of social justice. Its Wikipedia entry indicates a lack of agreement on the definition, while Merriam-Webster.com and the Associated Press online style guide have no entry (the AP offers guidance on related terms).
Yet however defined, it's clear DEI is now much more than an academic craze or corporate affectation.
“It’s an industry in every sense of the word,” says Peter Schuck, professor emeritus of law at Yale. “My suspicion is that many of the offices don’t do what they say. But they’re hiring people, giving them titles and pretty good money. I don’t think they do nothing.”
It’s difficult to know how large the DEI Industrial Complex has become. The Bureau of Labor Statistics hasn’t assessed its size. Two decades ago, MIT professor Thomas Kochan estimated that diversity was already an $8 billion-a-year industry. Yet along with the addition of equity, inclusion, and like terms, the industry has surely grown an order of magnitude larger. Six years ago, McKinsey and Company estimated that American companies were spending $8 billion a year on diversity training alone. DEI hiring and training have only accelerated in the years since.
“In the scope and rapidity of institutional embrace,” writes Marti Gurri, a former CIA analyst who studies media and politics, “nothing like it has transpired since the conversion of Constantine.”
Yet in our time, no Roman Emperor has demanded a complete cultural transformation. No law was passed mandating DEI enactment. No federal court ruling has required its implementation. There was no clarion call on the order of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” warning. No genuine public crisis matched the scale of the response.
The sources of this transformation are both deep and fairly recent. On one level, they can be traced back to the egalitarian movements that have long shaped American history – from the nation’s founding, through the Civil War and Reconstruction to the battles for women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and same-sex marriage. In other ways, the rapid transformation can seem no more explicable than an eccentric fashion trend, like men of the late 18th century wearing periwigs. However, a few pivot points of recent history bent its arc in DEI’s direction.
The push for affirmative action is the most obvious influence, a program first conceived during the Reconstruction era but then abandoned for nearly a century. Although triumphs for social justice, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights acts of the late 1950s and 1960s didn’t stop discrimination; the country would need to take more affirmative steps toward assisting minority groups and achieving more equitable outcomes, proponents argued. A controversial policy from the start (with the Supreme Court expected to curb its use in college admissions this term), affirmative action was further complicated by immigration reforms that allowed for more non-European immigrants, setting off a seismic demographic shift that continues to reverberate.
The diversity movement of the early 1990s was in part an attempt to capitalize on the new multicultural reality. Stressing individual and institutional benefits rather than moral failings, early corporate diversity training programs hewed to traditional values of equality and meritocracy. Creating a diverse workplace, R. Roosevelt Thomas wrote in the Harvard Business Review, in 1990, “should always be a question of pure competence and character unmuddled by birth.”
And in many ways it appears to have worked. Just look at the tech industry, where immigrants from East and South Asia have flourished. Nigerian immigrants are perhaps the most successful group in America, with nearly two-thirds holding college degrees. Doors have opened wide to the once-closeted LGBT community.
But in other ways, the recent explosion of DEI initiatives reflects shortcomings of earlier efforts, as suggested by the headline of 2016 article in the Harvard Business Review, “Why Diversity Fails.” Even as high-achieving first- and second-generation immigrants have thrived in certain industries, particularly STEM fields, people of color remain scarce in senior institutional positions. There is also the deeper issue of what many in the post-George Floyd era have taken to calling systemic or structural racism, citing major disparities for black Americans in education, healthcare, homeownership, arrests, incarceration, and household wealth.
More recently, a spate of widely publicized police killings of unarmed African Americans has galvanized a growing belief, especially among progressives and especially since Donald Trump’s election, that America is an irredeemably racist nation. In 2020, in the wake of the Floyd murder and in advance of a fraught election, a moral panic set in. Having increased their ranks, social justice entrepreneurs and bureaucrats were poised to implement an ideological agenda and compound their institutional power.
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Transgender college athletes will be banned from competing in Texas
Transgender athletes will not be allowed to compete in college sports in the Lone Star State, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has vowed.
“This next session, we will pass a law prohibiting biological men to compete against women in college sports,” the governor said during a meeting of young conservatives in Dallas, the NY Post reports.
Under his leadership, the state imposed a similar ban in 2021 on transgender competitors in public schools from kindergarten through high school.
Texas politicians are now turning their attention to universities, with two politicians filing a bill to ban trans women from competing against biological women in college sports.
Alongside Texas, 17 other states have passed laws or placed restrictions on transgender people participating in sports, many of which have subsequently been challenged in court.
Abbott referenced Harvard transgender swimmer Lia Thomas during his remarks.
The 22-year-old University of Pennsylvania swimmer sparked a national debate on whether athletes who were born male should be allowed to compete against biological females.
Thomas, who is originally from Austin, Texas, did not have the support of many of her teammates — sixteen of which argued she had an “unfair biological advantage.”
“We’ve fought for the rights of women to be able to succeed in this world only to have that now superseded by this ideology that men are going to be empowered to compete against women,” Abbott added during his comments.
The 6’1? swimmer dominated in the pool, breaking records and winning titles. She was able to participate due to hormone treatment to lower her testosterone level, a requirement by the NCAA, which updated its policy in the last year to support transgender athletes.
If politicians in the Lone Star state do pass a bill restricting trans athletes, a court battle would almost certainly follow, as it has in many other states.
Florida passed a similar law in 2021, called the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act which banned anyone born biologically male from being able to compete against women at public school and college levels. The Florida law requires players to submit a birth certificate showing their sex when they were born when signing up for a team.
It quickly resulted in multiple legal challenges at court — including from a lawsuit from a 13-year-old trans girl from Fort Lauderdale who was not allowed to continue playing on girl’s soccer teams. However, despite these it is still currently in place.
In Texas, LGBTQ groups were quick to speak out against Abbott’s proposal. “This type of legislation would abandon trans athletes and leave them without a way to express themselves in sports,” Equality Texas tweeted.
Trans people have pushed back on Texas’ law restricting them from competing since it was introduced.
“These laws are not ‘protecting girls’ they are hurting girls because transgender girls are girls. Science supports that transgender people are valid and you should to. Let us play sports,” trans youth Elliot told the It Gets Better project.
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14 February, 2023
The bloody death of a liberal dream: After throwing open its borders to 2million migrants, Sweden has been left with an underclass of alienated teenagers, a murderous gang culture and gun crime that's spiralling out of control
On a bitingly cold morning in Stockholm, two days ago, I stood among 200 mourners in a Muslim cemetery, set in a magnificent pine forest.
They had come to bury a 15-year-old Afghan boy who had been shot dead, allegedly by a gangster of the same age.
Yet as his coffin was lowered into the frozen ground, it seemed to me that we were also witnessing the death of Sweden’s great multi-cultural dream.
Brought to this famously hospitable country three years ago, to escape the impending return of the Taliban, it appears that Ali Shafaei is the latest victim of a vicious war being waged largely by child gangsters from Sweden’s migrant sink-estates.
Among Swedish politicians, the precise causes of this internecine conflict may be a matter for debate.
Yet even those on the liberal Left now grudgingly agree that they are rooted in the country’s disastrously failed immigration policy — which in recent years opened Sweden’s borders. Some 2 million immigrants (20 per cent of the entire population), now live in Sweden, often from the most troubled parts of Asia and Africa — and the country failed to plan for the immense difficulties of integrating them into society.
Many of the offspring of these migrants have morphed dangerously into a lost generation who are effectively stateless.
Though they were born here, many don’t feel remotely Swedish, yet have no allegiance to their parents’ homelands, either. Their alienation and discontentment smouldered for several years.
But in recent weeks it has erupted with a terrifying upsurge in ultra-violent gang crime and, with its hand-wringing justice system, which many feel prioritises young offender’s rights over those of their victims, Sweden evidently has no fix.
Twenty years ago, gun crime was almost non-existent here. Today, the grisly murders we see in Scandi-Noir TV series are no longer fictional. Sweden is awash with real-life crime podcasts, documentaries and books.
Coming soon to Sweden’s cinemas (after special screenings for police chiefs, politicians and criminologists) is Bullets, a docu-drama about a 12-year-old Egyptian boy who lobs a grenade at a police car after being lured into a gang.
In Stockholm alone, 52 gangs are vying for control of the burgeoning drugs trade, according to a recent police report, and they are becoming ever more ruthless.
Last year, the country saw 63 fatal shootings. In the UK, whose population is six times the size of Sweden’s, there were 35 in 2021. This cradle of liberalism is, along with Croatia, the most trigger-happy nation in Europe.
Since Christmas, the spree has reached epidemic proportions in the capital, with 30 shootings and bombings, four of them fatal. Half the suspects are aged under 18.
Elegant Stockholm, hitherto known for its Scandinavian splendour and gentility, is now redolent of Al Capone’s Chicago.
The crisis is so serious that, this week, scores of extra police officers were drafted in from other cities and billeted in hotels. I have watched them blitzing the most notorious crime areas and raiding buildings for weapons and drugs.
Last night, three more people were shot in Fittja, south of Stockholm, an area with high levels of immigration and crime.
And as buildings are randomly sprayed with machine gun fire — a new gangland tactic designed to scare rivals and show strength — it seems only a matter of time before more people are killed.
The youngest boys to have been arrested are aged just 13 and 14. Caught after a car chase through the city streets, they had with them semi-automatic weapons.
Some child gang members reportedly even carry explosives in their school thermos flasks. A police officer tells me that boys aged nine are groomed to serve as street corner lookouts, and to hide drugs and guns.
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Dems Want to Remove 'Shameful' Statue Across from White House Due to Racism - But it's Andrew Jackson a Founder of Their Party
A Democrat House member wants to remove a historic statue in Washington DC because of “racism”, but there is one major inconvenience for the Democrats.
On Wednesday, according to local DC outlet WJLA-TV, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s non-voting delegate to the House, introduced legislation to remove the statue of Andrew Jackson that sits across from the White House in Lafayette Park.
The arguments that she puts forward are the ones that we have heard time and again from the left: Jackson owned slaves and he was apparently responsible for the genocide of indigenous people.
“This prominent location in the nation’s capital, right outside of the White House, should never have honored a man who owned slaves and was responsible for the deaths of roughly 4,000 Native Americans. Jackson’s entire tenure is a shameful part of our history, and I will see to it that he is no longer honored with a statue in Lafayette Park,” Norton said in a statement, according to WJLA.
First off, this is yet another example of the left trying to erase and discredit the achievements of famous Americans just because they do not meet today’s politically correct standards.
Andrew Jackson, regardless of what one may think of him, is a very significant figure in our history. He defeated the invading British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, saving the nation from invasion, and he went on to become the first president who was not born into wealth, but rather worked for it.
The modern left seems to hate America so much, that they seem intent on discrediting their achievements, even those of men like Abraham Lincoln who fought to end slavery.
But there is also a major caveat in this particular tale of far-leftism run amok – Andrew Jackson was one of the founders of the Democratic Party!
According to the Miller Center, what we now know as the Democratic Party first emerged from the large popular following of Jackson when he was president, and became an organized party under his successor Martin van Buren.
Thus, the man who owned slaves and was responsible for the genocide of Native Americans was a Democrat.
The Democrats are not only erasing American history, but they are also erasing evidence of their own party’s historic failures and shortcomings.
The Democratic Party in the 19th century was the pro-slavery party and many of its members had sympathies with the Confederacy during the Civil War. The Republican Party, by contrast, was founded as an anti-slavery party and its first president was the one to end slavery.
But by getting rid of this statue, the Democrats are hoping that Americans will forget that they were not always the righteous, moral, anti-racist party that they claim to be today.
In many ways, the Democratic Party hasn’t changed since the 19th century. It is the party that promotes and celebrates abominable evils like abortion, and it has sided with radical political movements that are trying to divide this nation along racial lines.
Now we see that the problems in this party go back to the very beginning of the party, but the Democrats do not want to acknowledge that.
Instead, they just want to pretend like they are and have always been the good guys fighting against those evil, racist Republicans who are “threats to democracy.”
The problem for them, however, is that history is never that simple.
It is frankly rather messy, and we need to be willing to own up and face the hard facts if we are really interested in learning from the past.
From everything we’ve seen them say and do, however, Democrats aren’t nearly as interested in learning from the past as erasing it. And that’s not good for anyone.
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Texas Boots Big Bank After Discovering Anti-Gun Policy
Banks and corporations should stay out of politics, just like government should stay out of business. But when one or the other crosses the line, the other side has to push back or roll over.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and crew are pushing back.
Paxton’s office has deemed that Citigroup Inc. “discriminated against the firearms sector,” according to Reuters. Because of this, the banking giant was barred from underwriting most municipal bond offerings in the state.
This is no small thing. Citigroup was recently eliminated from the group of banks set to handle the biggest-ever municipal-bond transaction from Texas. The deal was reportedly worth $3.4 billion.
Governor Greg Abbott chimed in on the move, tweeting, “We won’t be bullied or discriminated against by woke ESG policies.”
ESG stands for environmental, social and governance investment practices, criticized by some conservatives as prioritizing ultra-liberal social and environmental justice initiatives over profits.
Lee Deviney, executive director of the Texas Public Finance Authority that oversees borrowing, reported that the Texas Natural Gas Securitization Finance Corporation board convened earlier this month and took action to “reconstitute” the syndicate on the deal, Bloomberg reported. Citigroup, which was approved by the board as one of the underwriting firms in May, is no longer included in the deal.
Citigroup is not the first bank to be sanctioned for playing politics when it should be focused on business and finance. In October, UBS Group AG was booted from the deal after Texas placed it on the list of firms viewed as boycotting the fossil fuel industry, according to Bloomberg.
The $3.4 billion deal is designed to help natural gas utilities impacted by the devastating storm that pounded Texas in February 2021. It aims to spread out exorbitant energy costs over decades to shield state residents from skyrocketing energy bills.
That’s what governments are intended to do: protect citizens.
In this case, Paxton and company are also preventing an end-run by Citigroup that would quietly impact the Second Amendment. If gun manufacturers are held in check by big banks with political agendas, the people’s right to bear arms is diminished. No product, no right.
In a similar move by progressive corporate players, DirectTV dropped the conservative news channel Newsmax in January. This was an obvious play to curb free speech. DirectTV dropped another conservative outlet, One America News, in January 2022.
These are not mere business decisions made by corporate leaders. They are political maneuvers taking place outside the government’s purview. If the Biden regime can’t openly defy the First and Second Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, it welcomes corporate players to step in and do the work for them.
And it’s not just corporate leaders and government officials who advance — by whatever means necessary — the progressive agenda. There are plenty of wokesters in the schools teaching your children what to think, encouraging them to kneel on playing fields for political ideals when they should be striving for excellence. They’re even in our armed forces, where servicemembers should be focused on defending us from enemies both foreign and domestic.
The wokesters are the enemy. And they are minions.
It is clear that wokesters in corporate board rooms, schools and the government aim to advance the progressive agenda — which includes doing away with the Constitutional rights of citizens — by doing their part to control what you hear, what you think, what you say and what businesses you have access to.
These people despise free-market economies. They consider free speech as a threat. And they fear competition because they know, somewhere deep down in their hearts, that what they are doing is wrong.
At bottom, the wokesters are aiming to usurp God. It was God who endowed humans with free will. The wokesters want to take that away.
First and foremost, the government’s job is to protect the inalienable rights of its citizens. In America, the government does not dole out rights to those whom they view as fit. God gives these rights to everyone. They cannot be taken away.
When it comes to business, if the government intervenes, it must be to protect the rights of citizens, not dictate them. More states — all states — should follow Texas’ lead.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/texas-fires-off-big-bank-discovering-anti-gun-policy
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Australian Labor party risks getting on wrong side of religious leaders over school hiring rights
Anthony Albanese’s initial response to the concerns of faith-based schools being severely limited in their rights to hire teachers who share the same faith is true, but risks being seen as tricky.
After the Prime Minister was asked in his own party room about the fears of religious schools being denied the existing right to preference teachers in employment who share the same faith and ethos of the school he said Labor had supported the position “for a long time”.
This is true and it is also true that the Australian Law Reform Commission’s proposal still “allows” schools to preference teachers of the same faith when hiring.
But, the reality, particularly as all the religious schools of all faiths see it, is that the commission’s proposal is such a severe limitation of that right, with so many potential legal hazards, challenges and costs, that it is a denial of that right.
The commission has proposed that faith-based schools only be allowed to preference teachers who would support the school’s ethos in a role where “religion is a genuine requirement” while in all other subjects teachers would not have to share the schools beliefs, ethos or even have to support those beliefs.
The argument is that teachers of religion would be allowed to be hired with a preference over teachers who didn’t share the school’s faith or ethos but all others would be subject to the same employment requirements as state schools.
The religious schools argue this would defeat the creation of an ethos, put a new and uncertain test into employment law, increase litigation and deter schools from hiring a candidate of the same religion in preference to other candidates.
This mix of religious rights, the rights of parents, employment rights and gay rights has dogged governments for more than a decade, cost Scott Morrison dearly in his inability to bring forward religious protection laws and is recognised by Labor as a potent political issue.
Albanese’s reassurance to his colleagues reinforces the ALP argument that religious teachers will be allowed to be hired on the basis of religious belief and that will satisfy the faith-based schools.
But, the faith-based schools are aware of the impact of the detail of the proposal and see a threat to their ability to operate as faith-based schools in the interests of millions of students and parents.
As shadow attorney-general, Julian Leeser, argues: “If the only people that are modelling a life of faith is the religious education teacher then the school is no different to a government school where you have … a special religious education class for a session once a week.”
“This is about schools creating communities of practice. Schools creating teachers that model a life of faith,” he said.
The 30 faith leaders who have reacted strongly to the proposal argue: “The purpose of religious schools is not only to impart intellectual knowledge, but also to instil religious values. In addition to teaching the prescribed curriculum, they provide religious activities that seek to demonstrate to students what a life lived in accordance with the relevant religion looks and feels like in practice.”
Labor needs to recognise that glossing over significant detail with a general affirmation is not going to pacify the religious leaders who are clearly not going to allow the millions of fee-paying parents to be fobbed off with disingenuous claims to longstanding positions.
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13 February, 2023
Tom Grennan sparks backlash over ‘creepy’ comments about Ellie Goulding’s breasts
Regardless of any feminist issues, the comment was simply in poor taste, intrusive.
It can however perhaps be understood in the light of the very high incidence of fake boobs among celebrity women. Half the time, the boobs don't even look natural. Hemispherical breats are not found in nature but the many women displaying them seem to be regarded as more attractive for having them.
Grennan was obviously aware of the ubiquity of fake breasts so it felt natural for him to mention them. And her outfit did invite comment
Tom Grennan has been criticised over an “awkward” and “inappropriate” interaction with Ellie Goulding at the Brits.
The 2023 Brit Awards, hosted by Mo Gilligan, took place on Saturday night (11 February) at London’s O2 Arena.
Goulding, 36, and Grennan, 27, presented the award for Best New Artist together.
Appearing on stage, Grennan asked: “Don’t I look good next to Ellie Goulding?” Gesturing to the singer’s outfit, he said: “I love what you’re doing. Are they your real boobs?” Goulding was wearing a black top that was designed to appear sculpted to her chest.
“No, these are not,” replied the “Burn” singer who fans thought looked “uncomfortable” at the question.
She quipped: “I wish. Mine are a lot further apart. Sadly.” Grennan then apologised. Grennan was criticised for his question by viewers on social media.
https://au.yahoo.com/news/tom-grennan-sparks-backlash-over-100844539.html
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Mum who had her breasts removed while identifying as transgender shares pain and guilt of not being able to feed her baby
A woman who removed her breasts at age 20 when she identified as transgender has shared her grief over not being able to breastfeed her baby.
Elizabeth - not her real name - underwent a chest masculinisation mastectomy (commonly known as top surgery) after being formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria as a teenager.
But four years after getting the controversial procedure done, Elizabeth decided to detransition before falling pregnant at 30.
'It was really hard knowing that he wanted to breastfeed, and I couldn’t give him that. And when they put him on my stomach, he crawled up. He was looking for my breasts and he couldn’t find them,' she said.
Elizabeth has shared her story with researchers from Western Sydney University in Frontiers in Global Women’s Health in what is believed to be the first case study of its kind.
Researcher Professor Karleen Gribble told Daily Mail Australia Elizabeth’s story 'may be the tip of the iceberg' and should serve as an early warning signal to others.
'It is a very serious business to remove the breast of young females and the ramifications for them down the track might be significant and if they do have babies, they are going to need support around that,' Professor Gribble said.
'There needs to be greater respect for breastfeeding and its significance for women and children.
'Once you have a mastectomy there is no such thing as a reversal. This is irreversible surgery it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.'
Elizabeth claimed the surgeon never discussed breastfeeding with her before the surgery.
'I don’t think I would have been receptive. I would have felt insulted, and I would have said it’s triggering my gender dysphoria,' she said.
Elizabeth attributed her gender dysphoria to developing breasts at the age of 10, which led to her being sexually harassed by men.
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FBI Internal Memo Warns against ‘Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology’
Probably a figment of some Leftist's imagination. Leftists see a lot of boogeymen around
The FBI’s Richmond field office released an internal memo last month warning against “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology,” and claiming it “almost certainly presents new mitigation opportunities,” according to a document shared by an FBI whistleblower on Wednesday.
Kyle Seraphin, who was a special agent at the bureau for six years before he was indefinitely suspended without pay in June 2022, published the document, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” on UncoverDC.com.
“In making this assessment, FBI Richmond relied on the key assumption that [racially or ethnically motivated extremists] will continue to find [radical-traditionalist Catholic or RTC] ideology attractive and will continue to attempt to connect with RTC adherents, both virtually via social media and in-person at places of worship,” the document from January 23 states.
It adds that “RTCs are typically categorized by the rejection of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) as a valid church council; disdain for most of the popes elected since Vatican II, particularly Pope Francis and Pope John Paul II; and frequent adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology. Radical-traditionalist Catholics compose a small minority of overall Roman Catholic adherents and are separate and distinct from ‘traditionalist Catholics’ who prefer the Traditional Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teachings and traditions, without the more extremist ideological beliefs and violent rhetoric.”
National Review has reached out to the FBI National Press Office and the FBI field office in Richmond for comment.
The report relied upon information from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal-advocacy organization that has come under fire for including conservative nonprofits like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the American College of Pediatricians on its list of “hate groups” alongside groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Nation of Islam.
The document notes the SPLC has identified nine “RTC hate groups” operating in the U.S. as of 2021.
“We got briefings that SPLC was not legitimate when I was at Quantico,” Seraphin told the Daily Signal.
Seraphin told the outlet a “a real intelligence product would quote [SPLC] and say, ‘unsubstantiated.’” He added that if a document were to cite Salon, as the leaked document does, it would need to cite a separate “source on the other side.”
George Hill, a former supervisory intelligence analyst for the bureau, told the Daily Signal the report is “poorly sourced from sources who use unsubstantiated data to draw their own conclusions and not in compliance with FBI publication guidelines.”
“They would have had to either change the guidelines since I left that you can now use the SPLC or the author and their supervisor who approved the final document knowingly violated the Directorate of Intelligence guidelines,” Hill added, explaining that the directorate previously excluded the SPLC from reports because “there was no analytical rigor or basis for the majority of their assertions that they would write about on their website.”
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Giorgia Meloni, the ‘Most Dangerous Woman in Europe,’ Confounds Her Critics
Giorgia Meloni has now governed as Italy’s prime minister for more than 100 days. She has proven wrong those who warned of Italy’s slide into fascism. Without much fanfare, too, she has taken to fashioning Italy as Europe’s gatekeeper amid what is becoming an intractable migrant crisis – one exacerbated by Russia’s growing influence in Africa.
“The most dangerous woman in Europe” is how in September one German magazine described Prime Minister Meloni. She is out to “transform Italy into an authoritarian state,” it asserted. Similar alarms were sounded by the New York Times, CNN, the BBC, the Economist, all warning that Mrs. Meloni and her party, Brothers of Italy, are authoritarians, nationalists, and, ergo, menaces to democracy.
Yet the pundits’ reality is not quite the reality. For there is little in Ms. Meloni’s agenda that would signal danger, unless, of course, the term is understood to mean a reassertion of traditional Italian identity, support for moderate conservative values, more police, less crime, lower taxes, control over illegal immigration, and the occasional tribute to Sir Roger Scruton.
There is also scant indication of the prime minister’s desire to oversee the European Union’s undoing – at least not yet. While herself a Euroskeptic who once called for Italy to leave the euro, and though beholden to the belief that the EU should do less, and do it better, Ms. Meloni is no arsonist.
Brussels has allotted the largest share of its Covid Recovery Fund – 200 billion euros in loans and grants – to Italy. The payments started to arrive in August and will continue until 2026. For a country whose economy has hardly grown in real terms since the introduction of the euro in 1999, with public debt 147 percent of its GDP, unemployment among the highest in Europe, and burdened by high inflation, the EU funds are nearly existential for Italy. So Ms. Meloni has chosen to tread lightly.
The prime minister has in recent weeks hosted a flurry of bilateral meetings with her European peers, including with Chancellor Scholz with whom she met on Friday for their first one-to-one meeting in Berlin. At the top of the agenda was the tide of illegal migration to the continent – a topic that also featured prominently in Ms. Meloni’s tęte-ŕ-tęte with Prime Minister Kristersson of Sweden and President Novák of Hungary.
There were 330,000 illegal entries into the EU in 2022 – the highest number since 2016. Some 90 percent of entrants were men, a great many from Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. More than 100,000 arrived through Italy’s southern border having set sail off the coast of Libya.
Since Angela Merkel in 2015 opened wide Europe’s doors with her cry of “We can do this,” Italy has found itself on the front lines of these inflows. Now the situation has become worse. As Russia has become isolated from the West it has turned its attention to the African Sahel, where it is arming governments and shaping domestic politics.
Inflows of Russian mercenaries, weaponry, and propaganda into a region prone to upheaval could open another front against Europe. Ms. Meloni appears more aware of this than most. To curb illegal arrivals at Italy’s ports, her government has taken recent measures to complicate the work of charity ships that ferry migrants across the Mediterranean.
In January, Italy signed an $8 billion gas deal with Libya, the largest investment in Libya’s energy sector in two decades. The deal is intended to diversify Italy’s gas supplies away from Russia. It is also intended to boost the Libyan economy – a reflection of Ms. Meloni’s view of African development as a buffer against migration.
The prime minister will present her migration agenda at the EU summit being held in Brussels today and Friday. It is unlikely to be met with much enthusiasm – least of all with any action. Despite tacit agreement among EU leaders that the crisis must be managed, their humanitarian and woke proclivities have prevented them from taking up the task. So, it seems, much could be left to Ms. Meloni and her government. Rather than overseeing Europe’s demise, the Italian prime minister could yet emerge its greatest protector.
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Smithsonian Is About to Get a Brutal Lesson in Constitutional Rights
The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum is about to get a lesson in constitutional rights, which could cost them. A mainstay of DC tourist season decided to kick some high school students out. No, they weren’t committing any acts of vandalism or other activities associated with hooliganism. It was an article of clothing that triggered the museum’s staff, reportedly eliciting mockery until they were finally asked to leave the premises. Staff claimed the location was a “neutral zone.” Their offense: they wore pro-life beanies inside the facility.
Museum staffers don’t have that right; there is no dress code. The Smithsonian is taxpayer-funded—and ejecting kids for wearing pro-life beanies is the definition of bush league. They at least admitted to screwing up, with the museum’s deputy communications director, Alison Wood, saying, “Asking visitors to remove hats and clothing is not in keeping with our policy or protocols. We provided immediate training to prevent a re-occurrence of this kind of incident, and have determined steps to ensure this does not happen again.”
That’s not good enough, as The American Center for Law and Justice announced they intend to sue the museum (via Fox News):
A prominent Christian legal organization has filed a lawsuit on behalf of the parents and Catholic school students who were kicked out of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum for wearing pro-life hats last month.
The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), announced the lawsuit ‘Kristi L. v. National Air & Space Museum’ late Tuesday, alleging that the Smithsonian "targeted, harassed" and "kicked out" a dozen Catholic high school students and their chaperones on Jan. 20 for wearing beanies inscribed with a pro-life message.
The group belonged to Our Lady of the Rosary School based out of Greenville, South Carolina, and had traveled to Washington, D.C., for the annual national March for Life. The students were all wearing matching blue beanies with the words "Rosary PRO-LIFE."
[…]
The lawsuit details an encounter between the personnel and students, some of whom are minors. As they were making their way toward an exhibit, two employees allegedly said, "The f—king pro-life. What a bunch of s—t."
A Smithsonian security guard then approached the group, according to the lawsuit, insisting that they take their hats off or leave.
"One of the security guards approached them, gleefully rubbing his hands together, stating they had made his day," the ACLJ wrote in an online statement.
When the group asked why other visitors in the museum were able to wear their hats and pride masks without issue, they were told that their hats were "political statements," and that they were "not promoting equality," according to the suit.
Forget retraining; if this all is corroborated, every staffer who engaged in this nonsense should be fired at least. Who puts themselves in a position that could get them fired from being a staffer, security guards included, at the Smithsonian? All these people had to do was punch their tickets, ensure no one touched the exhibits or violated any basic safety standards, and keep their mouths shut. Instead, they decided to fight with Catholic high schoolers, who have jammed up their employer in a civil rights lawsuit.
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12 February, 2023
Tate Backed By Dutch Politician who Calls Out Romanian Police"
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Democrat’s Extremist ‘White Supremacy’ Bill Would Silence Political Speech
In January, Democrat Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee introduced the Leading Against White Supremacy Act of 2023. The bill is one of the most radical, unconstitutional pieces of legislation proposed in years.
The Leading Against White Supremacy Act aims to “prevent and prosecute white supremacy inspired hate crime and conspiracy to commit white supremacy inspired hate crime and to amend title 18, United States Code, to expand the scope of hate crimes.”
Under the proposed bill, “A person engages in a white supremacy inspired hate crime when white supremacy ideology has motivated the planning, development, preparation, or perpetration of actions that constituted a crime or were undertaken in furtherance of activity that, if effectuated, would have constituted a crime.”
In other words, Jackson Lee’s legislation would make any crime or an attempt to commit a crime that is arguably “motivated” by white supremacy ideology a hate crime, which would carry with it a harsher penalty than other crimes not motivated by “hate.”
On its own, this provision is extremely problematic. Although ideological views that are truly rooted in white supremacy are undeniably repugnant, Jackson Lee offers no definition of “white supremacy ideology” in the bill, opening the door to wild interpretations that could unjustly increase legal punishments for defendants in court.
Jackson Lee’s legislation doesn’t stop there, however. The most important part of the legislation is its “conspiracy” provision, which would make it illegal to “publish” material that inspires a crime deemed to be motivated by white supremacy — which, again, is not defined by the bill. The legislation specifically lists “social media platforms” as a form of publication.
According to the provisions in Jackson Lee’s bill, if a social media user were to post an article, video, or even just a short message on a website such as Facebook or Twitter, that person could be convicted of committing “a conspiracy to engage in white supremacy inspired hate crime” if someone else consumes that material and then commits a crime motivated by white supremacy.
It doesn’t appear to matter how crazy or mentally ill the person committing the crime is, either. So, under the bill, if a deranged mass shooter allegedly inspired by white supremacy TikTok videos and Facebook posts kills several people, any of the “white supremacy” materials “read, heard, or viewed” by the shooter could make the person who posted those materials guilty of conspiracy.
Some might be tempted to think this would only apply to the most extreme ideological and political views about white supremacy, but recent history has shown that many on the left have a far-reaching, extremely broad understanding of “white supremacy.”
For example, the National Education Association, America’s largest teachers union, claims that although “white supremacy culture” is typically “associated with violence perpetrated by the KKK and other white supremacist groups, it also describes a political ideology and systemic oppression that perpetuates and maintains the social, political, historical and/or industrial white domination.” The NEA further claims, “Organizations that are led by people of color or have a majority of people of color can also demonstrate characteristics of White Supremacy Culture.”
Popular left-wing publications such as The Intercept have suggested that “prominent conservatives” including Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Donald Trump, and Candace Owens propagate white supremacist ideology. Whistleblower documents reveal Google’s “anti-racism” initiative for the company’s employees featured a “White Supremacy Pyramid” that includes both Shapiro and Trump.
In November, ABC News published an article alleging that the “GOP’s white supremacist problems extend beyond Trump.” One columnist for The Hill claimed in November that “Republican officials keep stoking white supremacist tropes.”
Further, a long list of academics including Ruth Colker, a law professor at Ohio State University, has even called America’s founding document “The White Supremacist Constitution.” According to Colker, “The United States Constitution is a document that, during every era, has helped further white supremacy.”
With all of this in mind, it’s not hard to imagine how under the Leading Against White Supremacy Act, a Trump-supporting Republican expressing support for the Constitution on Twitter — a description that fits millions of Americans — could easily be caught up in a charge of “conspiracy to engage in white supremacy inspired hate crime.”
But as nutty as all of this is, Jackson Lee has somehow managed to go even further. Among the relevant kinds of “published material” covered under the Leading Against White Supremacy Act is “hate speech that vilifies or is otherwise directed against any non-White person or group.”
What exactly is “hate speech”? Jackson Lee’s bill doesn’t tell us. Perhaps political commentators writing an article such as this one, which arguably “vilifies” a “non-White person,” could someday find themselves guilty of conspiracy to engage in a white supremacy-inspired hate crime.
The purpose of Jackson Lee’s legislation is not to discourage white supremacy, a noble goal. It’s a blatantly unconstitutional, racist attempt to silence political and social speech.
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Thousands of Californians fleeing to Nevada are upending the fabric of its cities - causing congestion in the streets, straining city services and pricing locals out of homes
Thousands of Californians leaving the Golden State looking to escape the rampant homelessness and high cost of living are landing in neighboring Nevada, overrunning the state's few major cities.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Reno area has seen 25,000 new residents according to reports and is expected to be one of the fastest growing cities in the coming years.
An article published by the Los Angeles Times on Thursday found that the droves of residents are moving to northern Nevada and causing issues with pre-settled residents who are seeing rising prices and traffic troubles.
The former-Californians are searching for the 'perfect elixir — a California bender without the hangover.'
California residents and businesses began moving to the northern Nevada region back in 2014 when Tesla started building a battery pack factory outside Reno.
The Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center has become the world's largest industrial center and covers 166 square miles.
The center is so expansive it is roughly the size of New Orleans, Louisiana.
The biggest appeal for business owners? Massive tax breaks.
Reno's facility also offers companies a quick permitting process, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The business moves and the COVID-19 pandemic spurred a new wave of Californians heading out east and recreating their California lifestyle as a 'technology hub with comfortable communities, economic growth and mountain views — without California's problems.'
'Here, they can retire or work from home or the ski slopes while keeping close ties to the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles,' the LA Times reported.
Along with their move, however, has come the development of luxury apartments and homes, as shopping districts and more amenities.
This has resulted in major issues for native Nevadans. 'Locals are getting priced out of houses and apartments by Californians who can pay higher rents or drop larger down payments,' the LA Times shared.
These issues come as Nevada residents are already struggling with their own issues of homelessness and drug addition.
Additionally, the state continues to see some of the lowest standardized test scores nationwide.
Despite these issues, businesses seem to be doubling down on the state.
In January, Tesla announced it would invest more than $3.5 billion to grow the company's gigafactory. The move will add an estimated 3,000 new jobs.
Tesla was initially granted a $1.3 billion subsidy package to lure the business to Nevada and beat out California offers. Their new factory is 'likely' to qualify a similar advantage.
Notable businesses that have opened operations in Nevada in recent years include companies like Tesla, Panasonic, Apple, Nanotech, Google, and Walmart.
According to a recent Claremont McKenna College Study, aside from New York and Las Vegas, Reno has been the most prominent city to take in the California expats.
The co-developer of the industrial park, Lance Gilman, told the Los Angeles Times he knew the area would be a success due to major trucking routes and cheap land.
'This is the first and only place they can go unless they go clearly hell out in the desert, which is too far,' Gilman said.
The co-developer said a grading permit can be obtained in seven days and a building can be obtained in as little as 30. 'Where in the United States can you do that?' Gilman said.
'It's a giant tax haven,' said Mike Pilcher, president of Northern Nevada Central Labor Council.
The rising cost of living in Nevada does not seem to be deterring the California residents from making the move.
Californians are tired of the state's rampant crime, drug use, and homelessness. In San Francisco, one major open air drug market were blasted by the public for becoming a magnet for crime and other issues.
Residents have also expressed anger over police response times. 'I call the cops; no one comes. There's nothing I can do,' one San Francisco resident told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Down in Southern California, the high cost of living has created an epidemic of homelessness.
In December, newly elected Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass officially declared a state of emergency over the city's homeless crisis.
Bass had sworn to take action on the issue immediately and kept her promise. At the time, she said she was 'using the emergency order is our ability to fast-track things.'
'I will not accept a homelessness crisis that afflicts more than 40,000 individuals and affects every one of us,' the progressive former congresswoman said during her swearing-in.
Earlier this week, Bass officially cleared six homeless encampments as she works with city leaders on her 'Inside Safe' program.
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Far Leftist Grammy Winner
“When Bonnie Raitt won the award for Song of the Year at the 2023 Grammys on Sunday night for her track Just Like That,” The Daily Mail reports this week, “some were shocked that the accolade went to the 73-year-old folk singer - over huge artists like Taylor Swift, Lizzo, Harry Styles, Beyonce and Adele, who were also nominated for the category.”
Much less shocking, given Raitt’s social and political milieu, is this rock and roller’s propaganda ministrations for the only regime in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere to criminalize rock & roll and herd its practitioners and fans into forced-labor camps.
You see, amigos: Back in March of 1999, Bonnie Raitt was among the top acts of a celebrity-studded propaganda extravaganza for Stalinist Cuba titled “Music Bridges Over Troubled Waters." During her visit to the Castro-Family-Fiefdom, Raitt stopped hyperventilating just long enough to compose a song in Fidel Castro's honor titled, "Cuba Is Way Too Cool!" Among the lyrics: "It's just a happy little island!" and "Big bad wolf (the U.S.) you look the FOOL!"
With Woody Harrelson gyrating drunkenly beside her, the rapidly oxidizing chanteuse, she of the big red hair and the famous gray roots, rasped out her ditty at Havana's Karl Marx theater. "Rock Against Freedom" sounds much better to me. A beaming, waving Jimmy Buffet came on after Bonnie.
Then came Joane Osborne. R.E.M's Peter Buck, former Police’s Andy Summers and Stuart Copeland all made the groovy scene and took the stage in turn. In between crooning and strumming, these cheeky free-spirits all dutifully recited their propaganda scripts against the U.S. "embargo."
Against South Africa a decade earlier, of course, their script called FOR an embargo.
A crowd of 5000 Cubans huddled before them, swaying and clapping. All were Cuban Communist Party members and their families. Let's step back and contemplate the scene: here's these troubadours for human rights, here's the same smarmy gang who boycotted South Africa ("I Ain't Gonna Play Sun City!" thundered Bonnie Raitt herself alongside Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Darryl Hall and scores of similar political imbeciles on the 1985 recording titled, "Artists United Against Apartheid.")
But she'll GLADLY play in Havana's Karl Marx theater and bask in the applause of an audience pledging proud fealty to the most murderous ideology in human history. Indeed she'll happily compose a song in their honor—and all on the house!
Here's Bonnie and other shrill foes of capital punishment happily crooning lovesongs to card-carrying members (literally!) of an ideology whose minions shot, starved, strangled, drowned, hacked and worked to death 100 million human beings in the 20th century. According to the late researcher Dr. Armando Lago, many in Bonnie and Jimmy's very audience had a hand in 110,000 of these murders. Here's these do-gooders playing (free-of-charge) because of an invitation from Stalinists!
These musical hipsters composed gushy odes to coolness and happiness of a nation with the highest (youth) emigration, incarceration and suicide rates on the face of the globe.
When Cuba's suicide rate reached 24 per thousand in 1986—making it double Latin America's average, making it triple Cuba's pre-Castro rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal in the world, making death by suicide the primary cause of death for Cubans aged 15-48—at that point the Cuban government ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter. The figures became state secrets. The implications horrified even the Castroites.
But apparently not Diane Sawyer or Barbara Walters. When in his charming presence, neither of these feminists could keep from bursting into those toothy smiles and throwing their arms around the man who drove more women to end their lives than anyone in the world.
Cuba also has the world's highest (or third highest, depending on the source) abortion rate. I say there's a relationship with the suicide rate. They both smack of hopelessness and despair.
In Castroland, Jimmy Buffet and Bonnie Raitt proudly authored paeans to the coolness and happiness of a place that also criminalized Beatles' and Rolling Stones' records—where long hair, blue jeans, and/or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked off the streets by secret police and dumped in concentration camps with "Work Will Make Men Out of You," in bold letters above the gate and with machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG. But the conditions were identical.
Much "wasting away" within their barbed wire, Mr Buffet. But not from Margaritas. Slave labor, disease, malnutrition, beatings, torture and hunger strikes caused the "wasting way." Stepping on pop-tops is no fun, I agree, Mr Buffet. But neither is being bludgeoned to death with the blunt end of bayonets, a pastime much indulged by your charming Castroite hosts. Armando Valladares provides harrowing details of scores of such deaths in his “Against All Hope.”
The blight is also known as Castroism, and is also known as inspiration for happy little jingles by Bonnie Raitt.
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Christian nurse is 'bullied and suspended from NHS course' by 'woke' health chiefs after saying 'being white doesn't make you racist'
A Christian nurse was left with 'crippling anxiety' after she was 'bullied' by 'woke' NHS chiefs for saying that being white doesn't make you racist.
Amy Gallagher, 34, a mental health nurse from Orpington, Kent, was on a forensic psychology course training to be a psychotherapist at the Portman clinic, which is part of The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust.
In an exclusive interview with MailOnline Amy has revealed how NHS bosses caused her 'crippling anxiety' after she challenged their 'racist' and 'offensive' views in lectures she was forced to attend.
Lecturers at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust told her 'whites don't understand the world' and 'Christianity is responsible for racism because it's European' in a series of 'politically biased' talks.
One of the Tavistock's seminars was even called 'Whiteness — a problem for our time' and included a description on the Trust's website that 'the problem of racism is a problem of whiteness'.
The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust was taken to court after Keira Bell, a 23-year-old who began taking puberty blockers aged 16, claimed she was treated like a 'guinea pig' at the clinic.
Ms Bell was injected with testosterone at 17 and had a mastectomy aged 20 before 'detransitioning'. She said doctors did not carry out a proper psychiatric assessment and should have challenged her more over her decision to transition to a male.
After a major High Court battle, judges ruled children under 16 are unlikely to be able to give 'informed consent' to take puberty blockers.
The Trust's Gender Identity Development Service is now being disbanded after a damning independent review.
When Amy challenged these controversial views she was 'bullied' by staff and suspended from the course, pending an investigation into whether she is safe to work with patients.
Almost a year later, no investigation has taken place. It means her dream of becoming a psychotherapist is hanging by a thread.
As if that wasn't enough, a course lecturer also tried to get her banned from her day job as a practising mental health nurse.
However, the 34-year-old is fighting back. Amy is suing the Tavistock for religious and racial discrimination.
It's a case that may be one of the first trials of wokeness. However, it's not the first time the Tavistock Trust has faced scrutiny.
The same trust faced court for giving children puberty-blocking drugs at their Gender Identity Development Service, which is being disbanded after a damning independent review.
Speaking about her treatment by The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust Amy told MailOnline: 'I never attacked anyone. 'I just said we need to have a different viewpoint.
'To be made to feel like I have done something awful, it's been really difficult.
'There's nothing wrong with what I have said. 'I want some justice for what's been done to me. It's had an affect on my mental health. 'I had anxiety. It's been really hard.'
Amy said she had suffered from 'back pain' and 'sleepless nights' as a result.
One of the ideas lecturers presented as 'fact' was Critical Race Theory, a controversial idea that rejects belief of meritocracy or colour blindness in terms of race and says racism is systemic and socially constructed.
Amy disagreed with the controversial theory that many scholars have also criticised.
She said Critical Race Theory was a 'suspect' and 'racist' idea that was 'offensive to all races'.
She said: 'Racism against any race should be wrong. 'Critical Race Theory will only turn itself around when enough people stand up to it.
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Australia: Not everything should be a culture war, but the left started it
Last Sunday, Anthony Albanese told an audience at Labor-aligned think tank the Chifley Research Centre that people with questions about the Voice are “trying to start a culture war”.
Wars are bad, and culture wars are boring. Nobody wants to be constantly at war. Must we frame this latest issue of public policy in terms of war, I wondered? Is every disagreement a culture war? Must everything be a fight?
What the hell even is a culture war? The term is so loosely used that it sometimes seems it’s just an insult or a way to dodge an argument. But the term has serious history. It derives from the German kulturkampf (yes, we wacky Krauts have a word for everything) which was originally used to describe a clash in 19th century Germany between a head of government and the head of the church.
So it started as a struggle between church and state, with all the moral implications that brought with it, and has now come to be used to describe – in the words of the European Centre for Populism Studies – a “cultural conflict between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices”.
James Davis Hunter, the sociologist credited with making the term “culture wars” popular, gave examples of some areas in which they rage in the subtitle to his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics.
The trouble with that is it describes pretty much every source of disagreement that matters.
We can agree to disagree on chocolate or strawberry-flavoured icecream, but just about everything else – so help us contestable deity! – is rooted in values and morality which do not allow compromise.
These days it’s usually the left that accuses the right of waging culture wars whenever there is any resistance to progressive policies. But as Republican Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders made explicit in her response to US Democrat President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, conservatives reject the idea that they are the aggressors in the war over culture.
“Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace,” she said. “But we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight.”
This is a point increasingly being made by the right: along the lines of “we were just moseying along, minding our own cultural business, when progressives jumped out and attacked everything society holds sacred”.
The right is right, to some degree. By definition, it was not conservatives who were seeking a conflict over social values. They were busy conserving the ones we already had. It is progressivism that challenges those social norms, claiming it’s time to move on. To progress to a better place.
And voila, there’s your culture war. From the perspective of conservatives, it’s equivalent to having your house burgled, so you fight back. From the perspective of progressives, they’re peacefully Marie Kondoing a bunch of smelly old values that no longer spark joy, when suddenly the right attacks.
It’s helpful to understand this as we tackle the big-ticket culture issue of this year, the Indigenous Voice to parliament. Even the people who are deadset against it are not, as Albanese claimed, “trying to start a culture war”. Rather, they are acutely aware of the ongoing cultural wrestle in which we are all immersed.
Putting the Voice into the context of replacing the prayer at the beginning of official functions with the Acknowledgment of Country, reinterpreting Australia Day from being a day of national unity to a day of shame, and replacing King Charles with a to-be-determined First Nations person on the $5 note, Sky presenter and Daily Telegraph national affairs editor James Morrow argued this week that “progressives have been conducting a quiet guerrilla war against the symbols and traditions of ‘old’ Australia”. This view sees the Voice as a Trojan horse aimed at trashing, tearing down and ultimately replacing everything British settlers brought to Australia – including, eventually, liberal democracy.
If you think that’s a stretch, just consider the words and actions of Senator Lidia Thorpe, who this week left the Greens because she believes the Voice – as proposed by the prime minister – won’t guarantee to do all of these things. And she’s not alone in wanting a maximalist Voice.
In response to Peta Credlin’s warning that “should this Voice pass … Australia Day will change; there will be more demands to rewrite history; and there will be a multitude of treaties at all levels of government between our country and small groups of citizens”, online publication Crikey dryly observed that it “turns out a lot of positive things could happen if the Voice to parliament passes”.
That’s a million miles away from what most Australians like best about the Voice proposal. Namely, that it will give Indigenous Australians constitutional recognition and a say in their own affairs.
They don’t want a culture war any more than Anthony Albanese does. But you can’t wish away a culture war by accusing the other side of starting it. Only by admitting that we are, whether mildly or wildly, all engaged in the cultural negotiation can we ensure we keep sensible talks alive. The people who desperately want the best of what we have, as well as the best of what we have yet to build, are the ones best placed to stand up for a compromise that they consider acceptable.
I get it. Nobody wants to be part of a war, let alone a culture war. But we must engage or risk ceding the ground to extremists. As the prime minister asked last Sunday: if not now, then when? And if not us, then who?
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10 February, 2023
Archbishop of Canterbury Promises LGBT Activists to ‘Root Out’ Certain People From the Church of England
Will he root out Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13 as well?
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the head of the Church of England, promised LGBT activists that he would “take action” against clergy and lay members of the church’s General Synod who condemn homosexual activity.
The leader of Christian Concern, a group representing a General Synod member whom Welby has threatened to remove, condemned the remarks as “giving a green light for a witch hunt of any Church of England clergy who believe in the traditional view that marriage is between one man and one woman for life.”
Welby responded to an LGBT activist who mischaracterized a quote from an African Anglican bishop, pledging to launch a “disciplinary process” against clergy and lay leaders who utter similar words.
“Here’s a promise: you send me details of a church that is saying something like that and I will ensure that there is a disciplinary process against the clergy who said that,” the archbishop promised. “We’ll root ‘em out! We’ll root them out. Send me the details with that bit of paper and their names at the bottom of it, and I will take action.”
He promised to take action against members of the General Synod, as well as members of the clergy. (An elected body, the General Synod considers and approves legislation affecting the Church of England when it comes to worship and the annual budget.)
Welby was responding to Peter Tatchell, who protested at Lambeth Palace on Jan. 23, holding a sign reading “Church ban on LGBT marriage is homophobic discrimination. SHAME!” Tatchell and other protesters faulted Welby for refusing to personally bless same-sex couples. The Church of England does not endorse same-sex marriage, but it recently approved prayers of blessing for same-sex couples, a move that faced harsh criticism from other corners of the global Anglican Communion.
“I care equally for people round the world and not just for people in this country,” Welby said. Tatchell confronted him, asking, “Do you?” and challenging him to respond to the archbishop of Uganda, Stephen Kaziimba.
“Did you hear what the archbishop of Uganda said at Christmas?” Tatchell said. “He said it would be better for parents to drown their children than let them be gay.”
Yet Kaziimba made no such comment. In his Christmas message (full video here and at the bottom of this article), the archbishop condemned people “who are recruiting children into homosexuality,” quoting the words of Jesus in Luke 17:2.
“I want to alert all students, parents, and teachers that there are bad people trying to attract children into homosexuality by promising them money and sponsorship,” Kaziimba said. “I urge the government to set up a simple system whereby children can report these people to the relevant authorities who can investigate and take appropriate action.”
“To those who are recruiting children into homosexuality, I want to sound a very strong warning to you. These are not my words, but the words of Jesus: ‘If anyone causes one of these little ones…to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea,’” he added.
Welby did not contest Tatchell’s description of Kaziimba’s remarks, but rather said that he had publicly rebuked Kaziimba on exactly that quote. (Welby has condemned Kaziimba’s refusal to attend the Lambeth Conference last July, but there appears to be no record of him responding to the Christmas message.)
Welby did not respond to The Daily Signal‘s request for comment about what kind of comments would lead him to launch such a “disciplinary process” to “root” such people “out” of the Church of England. He did not respond to questions about his alleged condemnation of Kaziimba’s remarks.
Yet recent events may shine light on what Welby’s promise means. On Feb. 2, a week and a half after Welby’s promise on Jan. 23, the archbishop sent a letter to Sam Margrave, a member of the General Synod, demanding that Margrave apologize for Twitter comments and suggesting that Welby might expel him from the synod if he did not. Margrave had made comments opposing the sexualization of children and speaking out against what he described as queer theory
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The deeply flawed campaign for racial reparations
IN DECEMBER, Boston's City Council voted to craft a plan to pay reparations for slavery and its aftermath. The vote was unanimous, and the councilor who authored the resolution called it "the start of a long-awaited yet necessary conversation" about racial reparations.
The start? America's "conversation" about paying reparations for the harm caused by slavery has been underway for decades.
In 1969, the radical civil rights activist James Forman caused a stir when he issued a "Black Manifesto" — first at a prominent economic conference in Detroit, then from the pulpit of New York's Riverside Church — calling for $500 million in reparations. In 2000, Randall Robinson made an even bigger splash with "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks," a bestselling book advocating financial compensation for the descendants of enslaved people. The New York Times reported the following year that "the call for reparations has taken on substantial force," with support from leading Black organizations and respected US newspapers. The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates drew enormous attention with a 2014 article in The Atlantic headlined "The Case for Reparations." He was invited to expand on his ideas at a congressional hearing on reparations in 2019 — by which point the 2020 presidential primary season was underway and leading Democratic candidates, including Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and then-Senator Kamala Harris of California, were telling voters of their support for reparations.
Present-day advocates of reparations cite redlining and other 20th-century harms. But the heart of the argument has always been that Black Americans should be repaid for the 240 years that their forebears were enslaved in this land. That's far from a new idea. But it is also far from a sound idea.
The problems with reparations are both practical and ethical.
To everything there is a season, as sages from Ecclesiastes to the Byrds have observed, and the time for slavery reparations was when those who suffered enslavement could still be compensated. It is tragic that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's 1865 order to distribute 40-acre plots of land to the formerly enslaved was never implemented across the South. The collapse of Reconstruction a decade later in the face of massive Southern resistance is one of the bitterest calamities of American history. But no white American living today bears any responsibility for the cruelties of that era. No Black American living today suffered those cruelties.
For exactly that reason, the great civil rights leader Bayard Rustin — the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and a close adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr. — rejected calls for reparations as "ridiculous." He regarded Forman's demand for $500 million as demeaning. "If my great-grandfather picked cotton for 50 years, then he may deserve some money," Rustin said, "but he's dead and gone and nobody owes me anything."
Reparations are equitable only when they provide redress to victims who suffered unjustly. In 1988, for example, the US government paid reparations to more than 26,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. In the 1970s, the federal government agreed to pay $10 million to the surviving patients of the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Study, who were deliberately denied proper medical treatment by doctors working for the US Public Health Service. But there is nothing equitable about paying reparations in the 21st century for wrongs committed in the 18th and 19th centuries.
"Reparations, by definition, are only given to victims," the contemporary Black writer and scholar Coleman Hughes told a congressional committee. "So the moment you give me reparations, you've made me into a victim without my consent."
Rarely do those who campaign for reparations acknowledge that for more than half a century, the country has made a concerted effort to provide Black Americans what amounts to reparations for historical mistreatment. Much of the War on Poverty was designed to improve the status of those who had been discriminated against for so long because of their race. President Lyndon Johnson didn't use the word "reparations," but in a major address at Howard University in 1965, he explicitly cast the government's vast new role in providing housing, health care, nutrition, and welfare benefits as a conscientious effort to address the heritage of African slavery and the century of widespread oppression and segregation that followed.
"You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair," declared Johnson. "It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates."
To date the War on Poverty has spent $25 trillion (not including Medicare), and whether those outlays ultimately helped or hurt Black Americans has been widely debated. But there is no disputing that they were intended, to a significant degree, to redress the harms caused by the racist policies of the past — to give Black people "the same chance as every other American," as LBJ put it. That's even truer of affirmative action in all its varieties — the decades of racial preferences by federal, state, and local governments, the minority set-asides, the de facto racial quotas in hiring and contracting.
In short, there has been for years in America a considerable, well-funded attempt to make amends for the legacy of slavery and segregation. Those today who wish to argue that an outstanding debt is owed to Black America have an obligation to account for all that has been done, in good faith and at great expense, to pay down that debt.
That isn't what they are doing. As the reparations bandwagon gathers speed, the demands being made are growing increasingly extreme. In San Francisco, a commission tasked with drafting a reparations plan came up with one that would obligate the city to make a $5 million lump-sum payment to every eligible Black resident. In addition, the 60-page plan calls for a cornucopia of other financial benefits, including a guaranteed annual income of $97,000 for life, plus a "comprehensive debt forgiveness program that clears all educational, personal, credit card, [and] payday loans."
To implement such a scheme would obviously bankrupt San Francisco many times over. And yet there are city officials who insist it doesn't go far enough. All this in a city (and state) where slavery never existed.
As the clamor for racial reparations grows more aggressive, will it lead to healing and closure and reconciliation? Hardly. It will further inflame our already antagonistic public discourse and further widen our angry social divisions. Moreover, as John Murawski notes in a shrewd essay for RealClear Investigations, it will spur efforts to enact reparations for a host of other aggrieved claimants: "The causes include gay reparations, climate reparations, colonial reparations, university reparations — and Roman Catholic Church reparations for officially sanctioning colonization, slavery, and genocide in the New World." To Duke University economist William Darity, a reparations supporter who advises the California Reparations Task Force, such a development would be all to the good. "I would encourage the people who are concerned about these histories of injustice to do the work and make the case," he told Murawski. The scale of potential claims, he said, "could be immense."
As the clamor for racial reparations grows more aggressive, will it lead to healing and closure and reconciliation? Hardly. It will further inflame our already antagonistic public discourse and further widen our angry social divisions.
When all is said and done, the reparations movement is grounded in a belief in collective racial entitlement and collective racial guilt. No belief could be more repugnant to America's ideals — however imperfectly realized — of tolerance, individual equality, and the right of each of us to be judged on our own merits, not by our bloodline or skin color or ancestry. Perhaps reparations promoters mean no harm. What they are seeking would prove harmful indeed.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26733/the-deeply-flawed-campaign-for-racial-reparations
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British police Launched ‘Hate Crime’ Probe Into Anglican Leader for Tweets Opposing Sexualization of Kids
A Church of England bishop reported an elected church leader to the police over his tweets condemning so-called queer theory and the sexualization of children. Last week, the head of the entire church also sent a letter seemingly threatening to remove the man from leadership over his remarks.
“There’s a vocal minority that control the church and are using its resources to bully me into silence,” Sam Margrave, an elected member of the Church of England’s General Synod, told The Daily Signal in an interview last week.
Margrave provided The Daily Signal with letters from the offices of the bishop of Coventry, the Rev. Dr. Christopher Cocksworth, from Cocksworth’s lawyer, and from the leader of the church himself, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby.
Margrave described a campaign of harassment and death threats from LGBT activists leading up to his appearance at the General Synod in July 2022. (An elected body, the General Synod considers and approves legislation affecting the Church of England, formulates new kinds of worship, debates national issues, and approves the church’s annual national budget.)
Margrave, a former community worker in the church, won his election on a platform pledging to “stand for Biblical Truth on life, death, sex, and Marriage” and to “campaign against sexualisation of Children.” [This article preserves English spellings in written material.]
He proposed a motion urging bishops to outline the church’s position on “pride”—as many in Great Britain refer to the LGBT movement—and to declare it incompatible with the Christian faith if it is. He noted that many churches raise rainbow flags outside, a violation of the Church of England’s official rules.
“I thought it would be a useful thing to raise,” Margrave told The Daily Signal. “I ended up getting death threats, threats from clergy, threats from LGBT groups. I had phone calls day and night.”
He attended the General Synod in July escorted by security. He installed CCTV cameras on his home and a panic button on his phone.
According to a letter Cocksworth’s office sent to Margrave on Nov. 11, the bishop of Coventry had contacted Margrave seven times between June 22 and Aug. 6, raising concerns about his posts on Twitter. In that letter, the bishop told Margrave that his office “had no option … [but] to report your offending tweets to the West Midlands Police.”
West Midlands Police confirmed to The Daily Signal that the office opened an investigation “into an alleged online hate crime” on June 24. The police spoke with Margrave last October.
“After reviewing the case and after speaking to all parties, the case has now been closed with no further action to be taken,” Mike Woods, the police news manager, wrote in an email statement.
Jenny Dymond, Cocksworth’s legal secretary, sent Margrave a letter on Jan. 30, alleging that Margrave’s tweets constitute defamation, harassment, and malicious communications. Among other claims, she highlighted Margrave’s tweets saying that “Queer theology builds on the work of paedophiles”; “Pride is the Nation’s next Jimmy Saville”; and “You don’t belong on General Synod. You belong on a register.”
Christian Concern, which represents Margrave, explained that Margrave traces queer theory back to the Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s. The Gay Liberation Front pushed the sexualization of children as part of its case for banning therapy for homosexuality, and it targeted Christianity and Judaism with the idea of “smashing heteronormativity.”
Gayle Rubin, a founder of queer theory, defended pedophilia as a sexual orientation. Queer theory, like critical race theory, is a Marxist approach to challenge longstanding social norms regarding sexuality and normalize LGBT identities and lifestyles.
Margrave explained the Jimmy Saville reference to The Daily Signal. Police posthumously concluded that Saville, an English DJ, was a sex offender after hundreds of people came forward with sexual abuse allegations against him after his death. An April 2022 Netflix documentary on Saville explored why so many of his victims kept silent during his lifetime.
Margrave argued that both pride and Saville demonstrate “a culture where people are too scared to speak up. In order to protect people, you have to have a culture where you can debate issues.” He posted disturbing pictures of a sexual performer in front of children.
Margrave also admitted that he told Winnie Frigerio, another lay member of the General Synod who is a member of the pro-LGBT “Inclusive Church” movement, that she belongs “on a register.”
Frigerio had condemned Margrave for retweeting a message calling the rainbow flag “the preferred flag of nonces,” a slang term for sex offenders. She said she was “mortified” by Margrave’s retweet and said the Synod needs “an enforceable code” of conduct.
“You want to limit freedom of speech and protect those who sexualise and groom children,” Margrave responded. “You don’t belong on General Synod. You belong on a register.”
Margrave told The Daily Signal he did not mean a sex offenders register, but he said that “because some on her side of the argument were saying those of us who are Bible believing should be put on a naughty list.”
“By addressing the growing influence of queer theory in the church, Mr. Margrave has been accused of calling gay people paedophiles, which he categorically denies,” Christian Concern’s Tom Allen told The Daily Signal.
Welby, the head of the Church of England himself, joined the Archbishop of York, the Rt. Rev. Stephen Cottrell, in sending a letter to Margrave on Thursday. They wrote that Margrave’s tweets “failed to distinguish between serious allegations of criminal behaviour of specific individuals and the wider law-abiding LGBTQI+ community.”
Welby and Cottrell demanded that Margrave apologize publicly, “moderate your language in future on social media,” and “refrain from making generalised allegations of the behaviour of LGBTQI+ people.”
They ended the letter with a potential threat: “Membership of the General Synod is a privilege and a way in which we serve before our God.”
“I will not apologise for speaking the truth,” Margrave said in a public response to the Welby-Cottrell letter. “I do not believe I have done anything wrong. I have been honest, transparent and faithful.”
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The Battle Over Free Speech
In a free society, why should only one political side dominate the media? Yet social media, the networks, the cable channels, newspapers, and satellite programming are all completely dominated by the left.
Recently, we saw quite a kerfuffle when DirecTV, owned by giant AT&T, decided to ignominiously drop Newsmax-TV from their lineup.
AT&T did the same a year ago to a much smaller conservative outlet, One America News (OAN). Why does it seem that the corporate decisions of companies like AT&T always push in only one political direction?
Numerous leaders have spoken against this censorship by the left against Newsmax, including:
•Dennis Prager
•Mike Huckabee
•Florida Governor Ron DeSantis
•Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy
•Senator Ted Cruz
•Actors Jon Voight and Kevin Sorbo
Many are calling for a boycott of DirectTV. Others are calling for Congressional hearings because of the potential impact on our political debate.
My big question is: Why must the left strangle what few conservative voices are heard on the other side?
When the founders of America produced the Constitution, a frequent criticism was that it did not spell out specific rights. So the founders agreed that if the Constitution were to be ratified, they would attach a Bill of Rights. These were the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution.
The First Amendment deals, first and foremost, with freedom of religion. But other rights enumerated there include the freedom of the press and free speech.
AT&T is a corporation. It is not a part of the government. But these companies wield a great deal of political power. Why are they using it to essentially stifle free speech?
There is no question that the mainstream media, the legacy media, the major networks, and so on present news from a skewed and biased perspective. National Public Radio (NPR), which receives government funding, has a program called “All Things Considered.” I remember whenever I would hear that title, I would think to myself---“Yeah, All Things Considered, from a leftist perspective.”
The founders envisioned a free society with a robust and free press. But today’s mainstream media is dominated by the leftist perspective, with only Fox News offering a significant counterweight.
Thankfully, even under dire conditions, there is always an alternative media. In the days of the American War for Independence, there were Committees of Correspondence, disseminating information to the 13 colonies contrary to royal-controlled sources.
There are different skirmishes in the battle over free speech, and some speech of more eternal significance than others. But let me use an analogy from the history of Christianity.
When the Apostles of Jesus set out to proclaim His saving message in first century Rome, the overwhelming power of the state was dead set against them. But God used them to eventually win over many converts. One of the ways was through letters that were written largely in prison.
Ultimately, there is a battle between good and evil, and the proclamation of the truth is often at the heart of that battle.
As the hymn “Once to Every Man and Nation” puts it, “Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone is strong. Though [truth’s] portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong, yet that scaffold sways the future.” God is watching and making sure that truth will prevail, which it will---even if for a time, times, and a half a time, it suffers setbacks.
Of course, this is not to equate a commercial network like Newsmax with the Gospel. But it’s beyond question that elite interests often suppress truth wherever it comes from. I’m grateful to live at a time where there is readily available an alternative media. I’m sure if some elitists in our culture had their way, they would over-regulate the Internet, talk radio, satellite programming, Christian broadcasting, and so on, to make them essentially toothless---as sometimes happens in other countries.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter late last year, he suffered the ire of many on the left, as he opened up the Twitter files and exposed a great deal of censorship against conservative speech. Musk tweeted in late November: “This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.”
Dr. Richard Land, president emeritus of the Southern Evangelical Seminary, said of the left’s censorship of conservative speech in general: “They want to enforce conformity, they do not want to hear viewpoints, they want to stifle viewpoints that they disagree with. They’re acting like fascist Blackshirts….They can only get away with taking away our rights if we let them.”
Indeed, must the left strangle the flow of information? As the Bible notes: “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.”
https://townhall.com/columnists/jerrynewcombe/2023/02/09/the-battle-over-free-speech-n2619350
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9 February, 2023
Is the myth of left-wing authoritarianism itself a myth?
I am glad I have lived to see this. Psychologists have long been unable to find Leftist authoritarianism anywhere despite the huge example of the late unlamented Soviet regime.
I spent my 20 year research career from 1970 to 1990 pointing out the absurdity of saying that conservatives are the only authoritarians. But I was essentially ignored.
So I am glad that the the group of psychology researchers below have taken up the cudgels. Reality may dawn in the minds of most psychologists yet
Lucian Gideon Conway III et al.
Abstract
Is left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) closer to a myth or a reality? Twelve studies test the empirical existence and theoretical relevance of LWA. Study 1 reveals that both conservative and liberal Americans identify a large number of left-wing authoritarians in their lives. In Study 2, participants explicitly rate items from a recently-developed LWA measure as valid measurements of authoritarianism. Studies 3–11 show that persons who score high on this same LWA scale possess the traits associated with models of authoritarianism: LWA is positively related to threat sensitivity across multiple areas, including general ecological threats (Study 3), COVID disease threat (Study 4), Belief in a Dangerous World (Study 5), and Trump threat (Study 6). Further, high-LWA persons show more support for restrictive political correctness norms (Study 7), rate African-Americans and Jews more negatively (Studies 8–9), and show more cognitive rigidity (Studies 10 and 11). These effects hold when controlling for political ideology and when looking only within liberals, and further are similar in magnitude to comparable effects for right-wing authoritarianism. Study 12 uses the World Values Survey to provide cross-cultural evidence of Left-Wing Authoritarianism around the globe. Taken in total, this large array of triangulating evidence from 12 studies comprised of over 8,000 participants from the U.S. and over 66,000 participants world-wide strongly suggests that left-wing authoritarianism is much closer to a reality than a myth.
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Democrats’ ‘Equity’ Scheme Threatens America’s Suburban Idyll
The "affordable" mandate is of particular concern. Welfare housing of any kind tends to bring crime in its wake.
If you’ve worked hard to afford a suburban house with a patch of lawn where your kids can play, you’re under attack.
The Biden administration and Democrats in New York, Connecticut and other states are fighting local zoning laws in order to build high-rise apartment buildings with “affordable” units in tree-lined, single-family neighborhoods.
All in the name of equity, meaning everyone can live in a tranquil suburb, whether they’ve earned the money to pay for it or not.
The Biden administration announced January 19 that it will require all towns across America to submit “Equity Plans” showing how they will make it possible for low-income people to live there by providing affordable housing, transportation and other resources.
Towns that don’t meet the cookie-cutter requirement for economic diversity will lose federal funding.
No one’s denying there’s a housing shortage. Governor Hochul is pushing some reasonable proposals such as allowing mother-in-law apartments and relaxing environmental restrictions on residential building.
Yet Ms. Hochul’s biggest proposal, the Housing Compact, is another misguided attack on local control and single-family zoning.
It will compel each town and village in the New York metro area to increase its housing stock to meet a uniform, state-imposed target and rezone for high-density housing — apartment buildings — within a half-mile of every MTA train stop.
Say goodbye to quaint downtowns lined with two-story buildings and older houses.
If a town fails to meet state targets, the Compact will allow developers to build big in defiance of local zoning boards in almost all cases.
Ms. Hochul is seeking legislative approval for her plan by April. Suburban homeowners are battling a powerful alliance of real estate developers in it for the money and social justice warriors determined to end single-family zoning.
Local control will be obliterated. Albany will call the shots on what your town looks like, how much traffic there is and ultimately what your home is worth.
Slate Magazine’s Henry Grabar bashed Ms. Hochul’s critics as “a band of recalcitrant, remorseless ne’er-do-wells.” He’s wrong. Their concerns are legitimate. For most people, their home is their biggest asset.
Opponents of single-family zoning are also playing the race card. ERASE Racism’s president, Laura Harding, says she’s fighting for a Long Island “free of structural racism and de facto segregation.” The same phony pretext is being trotted out everywhere.
Racial discrimination is abhorrent and should be prosecuted. But as a Brookings Institution analysis of the 2020 census shows, race isn’t a barrier to suburban living. Blacks are moving to the suburbs at a faster pace than whites.
Anybody can be suburban. It just takes money — especially in Connecticut. In 2017, developer Arnold Karp purchased a colonial house on tree-lined Weed Street in small, ultra-wealthy New Canaan.
There are no commercial or multifamily buildings on the street. He now wants to build a five-story, 102-unit apartment complex with 30 percent set aside for affordable housing.
Weed Street is only a 10-minute drive, or a 17-minute local train ride, to Stamford, a midsize city where the quantity of affordable housing (nearly 16 percent) exceeds state guidelines.
Ensuring a supply of affordable housing within a region is more reasonable than demanding every town alter its character.
Local officials explain that New Canaan’s six-person fire department doesn’t even have hoses or trucks to fight a fire in a building as big as Mr. Karp’s design.
Weed Street neighbor Chris DeMuth Jr. warns Mr. Karp’s plan “is to cram over 300 people into a lot currently occupied by a single-family home.”
“If they destroy Weed Street, they could come for your neighborhood next,” says a flier Mr. DeMuth circulated to his neighbors.
In fact, Connecticut’s Senate Democrats announced they’re making housing equity “in every community in the state” a top priority.
https://www.nysun.com/article/democrats-equity-plans-threaten-americas-suburban-idyll
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Our 21st-Century Klansmen No Longer Have Sheets and Hoods
By Gary Franks, who is black
I have had classic KKK experiences. Here are some examples:
- As a youngster I was a victim of the KKK when they burned a cross in front of our home. They also shot dead a dog on our lawn thinking it was ours, placed a dead possum that was dripping with blood wrapped in a white sheet in our mailbox for me to pull out, and made incessant and life-threatening phone calls (saying they wanted to blow up our house).
- As a 23-year-old working for a Fortune 500 company, the wallet of my boss accidently fell on the floor at dinner, revealing his KKK membership card.
- Then as a congressman the local Grand Dragon fulfilled his pledge to leave the state upon my election.
But during these episodes and after, I would always remember my mother's advice, "Do not allow a few bad apples in the barrel to cause you to throw out all the apples. Most of the apples are good! Proof? I was elected six times in a 92% white area including three times for Congress.
For the record, the Ku Klux Klan lynched over 4,000 Black Americans, killed a countless number of others with nearly no convictions, while terrorizing millions. Due to slavery, many states in the South were majority or near majority Black before the domestic terrorism of the Klan caused the great migration of Blacks from the South to the North and West.
It is time to take the sheets and hoods off the 21st-century Klansmen.
Believe me, the Klan has been evolving. Unlike many Black Democrat leaders who are still fighting for some of the previously won Civil Rights, like voting rights, that does not interest the Klan anymore. They know the truth. Blacks are voting in record numbers and nothing will prevent that, other than political apathy. Seeing Black elected or appointed officials fail is their wish.
With strategic help from bad and misguided Black people (similar to the help Africans gave to European slave traders) the Klan can get what they want without burning crosses.
Black leaders often side with promoting Black abortions that, percentage wise, dwarf white abortions. This must bring a smile to the Klan which wants fewer Blacks on the streets anyway. There is power in numbers.
Racists are pleased that they do not have to outwardly fight against desegregating schools anymore. Black Democrat leaders have been inadvertently blocking school integration by blocking "school choice" for decades.
While donning expensive tailored suits, racists can keep Blacks trapped in poor areas via unfair employment practices. With no school choice, it would force Black people to go to failing neighborhood schools.
They can achieve their objectives today through the "Jussie Smollett model." The Black actor claimed racist MAGA supporters had beaten him. But prosecutors later proved that Smollett had paid for the beating as part of an elaborate charade to gain attention.
Today the big charade is over issues that would cause all the 1960s Civil Rights leaders to roll over in their graves. Imagine the time and energy companies have spent on name or logo changes, like getting rid of Aunt Jemima pancakes and syrup or Uncle Ben's rice. Add to that all the fuss over removing statues or memorials in various cities. Who cares? Will any of that produce even one long-term good paying job for a Black person to be able to take care of their family?
And of course, there is the fallacy of being "fair" to Black people which is tantamount to "hurting" white people. This is the true mantra of the Klan, which they call being "woke." It is not a term that would roll off most Black peoples' tongues. However, getting just one Black face to espouse warped ideas on race is enough to promote the Klan's points, thanks to the media.
The Klan's trick is to make you believe they do not exist. They work through others now to achieve their objectives which have not changed. They still abhor Black people, believe they are inferior, and that they should not have the same rights as whites.
They want good white people to be outraged over these "made up causes and demands" just like Smollett wanted voters to hate Trump because of his "beating." It is highly likely that funding comes from the bad guys themselves or Klan sympathizers just like Smollett funding his own little charade.
The more outrageous they can depict so-called Black movements like "Defund the police," the more normal white people would side with them and against Black people.
Remember, it is and always will be "all about the Benjamins." Unfair employment practices are the premier and preferred methods to "kill" Black people in the 21st-century's Klan playbook, especially the best and brightest.
For Biblical backup, here is Sirach (Chapter 34, verses 25 & 26): "To take away a neighbor's living is to commit murder; to deprive an employee of wages is to shed blood."
This ultimately hurts America. Good white people and our government must stand up and engage!
The Ku Klux Klan and their sympathizers, whether in white robes or Brooks Brothers' suits, are good at what they do. They have centuries of practice, and they train their next generation well.
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Race Everywhere on the American Left
Recently an unarmed 29-year-old African American, Tyre Nichols, was brutally beaten to death by five Black Memphis police officers. They were charged with murder. All belonged to a special crime unit known as the Scorpions.
Both the victimizers and victim were Black. The Memphis police chief is Black. The assistant police chief is Black.
Nearly 60 percent of the police force is Black. The white population of Memphis is about 25%.
The now-disbanded Scorpion unit of mostly Black officers was created as a response to grassroots appeals to stop spiraling crime in mostly Black neighborhoods.
The death of Tyre Nichols could be attributed to many things: a basic lack of humanity on the part of the officers, poor police training, lax administrative supervision, and lowered hiring standards.
Instead, no sooner was the beating death announced than accusations of "systemic racism" surfaced.
Van Jones, the former Obama Administration green czar and recent recipient of Jeff Bezos' $100 million "courage and civility award," pronounced on CNN that the Black police oppressors were acting out white racism.
Some claimed that charging the five Black officers with murder was itself racist. Others alleged that creating the unit in the first place to reduce Black-on-black crime was racist.
Yet, when everything becomes racist, then nothing in particular can be racist.
About the same time, the city of San Francisco, along with the state of California, was exploring paying out huge cash reparations to its African-American residents for the ancestral sin of slavery.
That evil institution was abolished some 158 years ago through the Civil War that killed some 700,000 Americans.
Yet California was always a free state with no history of slavery.
No resident of America in six generations has been either a slave or slave owner.
Such multibillion-dollar payouts apparently are to be funded by a nearly bankrupt state facing a $25 billion budget shortfall.
How do we quantify either current eligibility or culpability in multiracial California where 27% of the residents were not born in the United States? Whites make up only 35% of the state's population.
College campuses increasingly greenlight racially segregated resident housing.
These reactionaries seem eager to return to "separate but equal" apartheid, supposedly outlawed nearly 60 years ago by the 1964 Civil Right Act.
A recent National Association of Scholars study found that of some 173 schools surveyed, 42% provided racially segregated residences. Some 46% offered racially segregated orientation programs. An overwhelming 72% hosted racially segregated graduation ceremonies.
So-called "safe spaces" on campus exclude students on the basis of race, especially whites who are reduced to stereotyped members of a toxic collective.
Race-based admissions have transmogrified from proportional representation - the entering class should reflect roughly the racial make-up of the nation - to reparatory or compensatory admittance.
So, for example, Stanford University's incoming class of 2026 lists white students at 22% of the enrolled, roughly one-third of their percentage of the nation's general population.
Ironically, current racial engineering resurrects the old quota systems used in the past to discriminate against Jews.
"Whites" - to the extent we can determine any race in an intermarried, multiracial society - do not fit the now ossified definition of an exploitive majority.
They no longer even compose a majority in most major American cities and in some states.
They rank well behind many non-white ethnic groups in terms of per capita income and millions of working-class Americans certainly don't fit the tired stereotype of "privileged."
In racist fashion, white males are often smeared as exhibiting collective "white rage."
Yet they commit suicide at double their demographics - and more than twice as frequently as Blacks and Latinos.
They were also killed in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq at twice their numbers in the general population.
In terms of hate-crime offenders, whites are demographically underrepresented. The most overrepresented victims of hate crimes are whites of Jewish background.
Whites commit violent crimes against those of different races at rates below their percentages in the general population.
In sum, class, not race, remains the best litmus test of being underprivileged in America. It is no longer synonymous with race.
No wonder the identity politics industry now strains to attach prefixes such as "systemic" or "implicit" to "racism," or "micro" to "aggression," purportedly to ferret out bias that otherwise is not apparent.
Pause to reflect that America is the only successful multiracial constitutional republic in history.
To survive in an increasingly dysfunctional and hostile world abroad, the unique idea of the United States requires concord.
But national cohesion is only possible through citizens subordinating their tribal interests to a common culture. Only then do they cease being automatons of warring tribes and collectives.
https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2023/02/02/race-everywhere-n2619055
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8 February, 2023
Canadian farmer forced to Dump 30,000 Liters of Milk—as Dairy Prices Surge
Milk at $7 a litre! It's $2 a litre in Australia. In Canada's punishing climate, dairy farming is difficult and costly so the price has to be kept up to give Canadian farmers a return commensurate with their costs. Canada must produce its own milk, apparently
The alternative, getting most of their milk from those two big countries to their South, is apparently not on. That would be free trade, which is un-Canadian. You could probably even ship milk up from Australia's contented cows for less than $7 a litre
In a video shared on TikTok by Travis Huigen, Ontario dairy farmer Jerry Huigen says he’s heartbroken to dump 30,000 liters of milk amid surging dairy prices.
“Right now we are over our quotum, um, it’s regulated by the government and by the DFO (Dairy Farmers of Ontario),” says Huigen, as he stands beside a machine spewing fresh milk into a drain. “Look at this milk running away. Cause it’s the end of the month. I dump thirty thousand liters of milk, and it breaks my heart.”
Huigen says people ask him why milk prices are so high.
“This here Canadian milk is seven dollars a liter. When I go for my haircut people say, ‘Wow, seven dollars Jerry, for a little bit of milk,” he says, as he fills a glass of the milk being dumped and drinks. “I say well, you have to go higher up. Cause we have no say anymore, as a dairy farmer on our own farm. They make us dump it.”
The (Old) Folly of Destroying Food
Before you chalk the milk dumping up to those crazy Canadians, it should be pointed out that milk dumping is also quite common in the United States (though for different reasons).
During the early stages of the pandemic, FEE wrote about farmers dumping millions of gallons of milk even as prices for dairy products were increasing. Nor was this some kind of pandemic quirk. It’s been going on for years.
“More than 43 million gallons’ worth of milk were dumped in fields, manure lagoons or animal feed, or have been lost on truck routes or discarded at plants in the first eight months of [the year], according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” the Wall Street Journal reported in 2016.
The reasons are different in Canada than the United States, but they both stem from the highly-regulated nature of the marketplace.
In the United States, the primary regulations are high-level price-fixing, bans on selling unpasteurized milk (which means farmers have to dump their product if dairy processors don’t buy it), and “price gouging” laws that prevent retailers from increasing prices when demand is low, which incentivizes hoarding.
In Canada, the regulations are even worse.
While the price-fixing scheme for milk in the US is incredibly complicated and leaves much to be desired—there’s an old industry adage that says “only five people in the world know how milk is priced in the US and four of them are dead”—in Canada the price is determined by a single bureaucracy: the Canadian Dairy Commission.
The Ottawa-based commission (technically a “Government of Canada Crown Corporation”), which oversees Canada’s entire dairy system (known as Supply Management), raised prices three times in 2022, citing “the rising cost of production.”
Food price inflation remains a serious issue in Canada, but the problem is particularly acute in regards to dairy products, which has seen their annual inflation rate triple over the past year, to almost 12 percent.
One needn’t have a PhD in economics to see why prices in Canada are surging. Ordering farmers to destroy tens of thousands of liters of perfectly good milk is hardly a solution to rising prices. The same goes for production quotas.
Canada’s milk dumping spectacle calls to mind FDR’s New Deal debacles, including the “1933 Emergency Hog Slaughter,” which saw American farmers ordered to destroy their own pigs in an attempt to raise the price of hogs.
Under the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), the federal government levied new taxes on the agricultural sector and used the funds to oversee the wholesale destruction of cattle and crops.
“Federal agents oversaw the ugly spectacle of perfectly good fields of cotton, wheat, and corn being plowed under. Healthy cattle, sheep, and pigs by the millions were slaughtered and buried in mass graves,” explained FEE President Emeritus Lawrence Reed.
This destruction took place, mind you, during the worst food crisis in American history.
‘This Time I’m Going Public’
This might seem like economic madness—and it is. So why does it persist?
One reason is old-fashioned protectionism. High tariffs protect producers from competition, and the quotas that cap production also are designed to keep out new dairy producers. This keeps prices high, which is supposed to make farmers happy; it also pleases the government, which makes revenue from the tariffs.
It’s lousy for consumers, of course, and as Huigen’s milk dumping episode shows, even the farmers who benefit by the protection have grown angry with quotas that prevent them from producing more milk (which would have the dual benefit of earning farmers more profit and lowering milk prices for consumers).
Another reason is that very few people—Canadians or Americans— realize the milk dumping is happening and the production quotas exist. It’s a very opaque process, but Jerry Huigen is trying to change that.
“This time I’m going public,” Huigen says in his video. “I want the people to see the pain that us growers have…our little bit of profit goes down the drain.”
Hopefully people take notice and begin to realize that functioning markets are the real solution to rising prices, not government production quotas and price-fixing.
That would ease not just Jerry Huigen’s pain, but the pain of consumers as well.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2023/02/07/farmer-dump-milk-canadian/
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A Midsummer Night's Dream goes woke: Globe puts 'misogyny and racism' warning on Shakepeare classic
For the past 400 years, it has been performed countless times, particularly at the Globe. But now the historic theatre has given Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream a ‘misogyny and racism’ warning.
The comedy, telling the tale of four rebellious lovers who get lost in a magical forest, is set to run from April as part of the venue’s summer programme.
But when theatregoers buy a ticket on the Globe’s website they are now confronted with a trigger warning for potentially sensitive themes in the 1590s play.
The website’s warning reads: ‘Content guidance: The play contains language of violence, sexual references, misogyny and racism.’ The online guidance ends with a plea to those concerned about its themes to contact the ticketing team for further details on the play’s content.
The venue is a replica of the original Globe theatre, where Shakespeare’s plays were first seen, so is closely associated with the Bard.
A spokesman for the Globe told the Daily Telegraph: ‘Content guidance is written in advance of the creation of each production and based on what is present in the play. These will be updated as the production comes to life.’
The website’s warning comes after education experts at the theatre, which has links to Shakespeare, who intend to ‘decolonise’ Shakespeare’s work, also attacked the play for its misogyny.
A major comic plot line is King Oberon giving a love potion to Queen Titania so she falls for the ass-headed character Bottom.
But academics have claimed this is troubling because Titania is drugged, so she cannot consent.
Hailey Bachrach, the founder of the education project Shakespeare and Consent, said that this kind of plotline can ‘make Shakespeare problematic’.
Another ‘problematic’ plot line is Hermia fleeing Athens because she must choose between marrying against her will, or being executed or placed in a convent. Some academics say Shakespeare creates a ‘dark/light binary’ which casts dark or black as negative and white or fair as positive.
The Globe has sought to address the more troubling aspects of Shakespeare’s work with its Anti-Racist Shakespeare seminars.
In these seminars education experts have said the Bard’s language was ‘racialising’. For example, the first line of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is said to set out the racial divide clearly straight away: ‘Now, fair Hippolyta.’
Unlike Othello, which features a key non-white character, the play is not typically viewed as a ‘race play’ but experts believe racial slurs lie in the insults used by the play’s characters.
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Dying to Escape Socialism
“At least five people have been confirmed dead and five others are missing after a makeshift raft smuggling migrants from Cuba sank off the Florida coast,” reported the Daily Mail last week. “The U.S. Coast rescued nine migrants and recovered one body after the boat capsized Saturday about 50 miles off the shores of Little Torch Key, an island in the Florida Keys. The U.S. Coast Guard's 7th District said that at least 19 people were in the vessel and four drowned immediately after the boat capsized.”
Any cursory review of recent news will turn up numerous headlines like the one above. And yet:
“People enjoy life in Cuba like in few other places. They’re safe, literate and healthy!” Time magazine crowed in their World’s Greatest Places Issue, from March, 2015.
And back in 2011 Newsweek magazine hailed Cuba among “The Best Countries in the World,” in terms of quality of life. “Cuba outdoes its fellow middle-income countries in quality of life,” explained the 1993 “National Magazine Award for General Excellence” winner.
“Fidel Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all… Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education…We greeted each other as old friends.” (Former President of the United States and official "Elder Statesman” of the Democrat Party.)
"A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in... And how many want out," famously quipped Tony Blair. Well, prior to the Castro brothers’ and Che Guevara’s Stalinist coup in 1959, Cuba took in more immigrants (primarily from Europe) as a percentage of population than did the U.S., including the Ellis Island years. In the 1950s, when Cubans were perfectly free to emigrate with all their property and U.S. visas were issued to them for the asking, fewer Cubans lived in the U.S. than Americans lived in Cuba.
You’d never guess this from the Fake News media, Hollywood, or your professors, but in 1953 more Cubans vacationed in the U.S. (and voluntarily returned to Cuba) than Americans in Cuba. Yes, for pre-Castro Cubans the U.S. was a “tourist playground.”
“What?” you say. But you’ve always heard that it was the other way around? That Cuba was a tourist playground for Americans? Indeed it was—but the tourist traffic went both ways, as befit a nation described by a 1957 UNESCO report thusly: "One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class.” So check it out here—and please click links for thorough documentation.
Given their record, a few such statements are probably out there, but I never heard a liberal crowing about the superb quality of life in East Germany, with “its free healthcare, education…blah, blah.” And yet over 10 times as many people (and counting) have died attempting to flee Communist Cuba (which liberals routinely praise) than died trying to flee Communist East Germany.
In fact, when liberals hail the Castros and Che Guevara’s communism as somehow “different” from typical Iron Curtain communism they have a point:
It’s WORSE!
Between two and three hundred people died trying to breach the Berlin Wall. Between twenty five and forty thousand people (men, women, and children, entire families at a time) have died trying to escape Castro and Che Guevara’s Cuba.
In 1992, former East German dictator Erich Honecker was tried (to no avail) for the deaths of 192 Germans killed while attempting to cross the Berlin wall. Some human rights groups estimate that actually three hundred people (out of an average East German population over the decades of 18 million) died trying to breach the Berlin Wall or otherwise escape East Germany.
After the thousands of many machine-gun blasts from their Frontier “Guards,” (the Berlin Wall itself was officially titled the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart") kept disturbing Castro and Che’s coastal subjects, the Castro brothers hit upon the scheme of having the Soviet helicopters flown by their “Guards” to hover over the escaping freedom-seekers, often consisting of entire families—but to hold-off on shooting.
Instead of machine-gunning the families to death as years of tradition called for, they switched to dropping sandbags onto the rickety rafts and tiny boats to demolish and sink them. Then the Tiger Sharks and Hammerheads could do the Castroites' deputy-work. Screams, groans and gurgles, after all, don’t carry nearly as far as machine-gun blasts.
"The best revolutionary German man I've ever known was Erich Honecker,” said Fidel Castro on June 1th 2012 commemorating the 18th anniversary of the East German Stalinist’s death. “I maintain feelings of profound solidarity with Honecker."
“What a chump!” Castro was probably thinking. “A measly 192?”
“In one week during 1962 we counted over 400 firing squad blasts from the execution yard below our cells," recalled former Cuban political prisoner and freedom-fighter Roberto Martin Perez to this writer.
"This is the most savage kind of behavior I've ever heard of," said Robert Gelbard, deputy assistant secretary of state for Latin America during the Clinton administration. "This is even worse than what happened at the Berlin Wall!" Gelbard had watched desperate Cubans trying to swim to our Guantanamo Base when machine-guns opened up and the water around them frothed in white, then red.
The corpses were retrieved by gallant Cuban Frontier “Guards” in a boat using the same type of gaffing hooks the lucky contestants in the Castro-regime-sponsored “Hemingway Fishing Festival” were using in nearby waters to yank thrashing Tuna and Marlin aboard their Cuba-registered yachts.
In September 2011, Spanish medical examiners found that an airline stowaway from Cuba named Adonis G.B. had his throat crushed. He probably died upon takeoff, meaning he probably died more quickly and painlessly than the many others who perished escaping Cuba’s free and fabulous healthcare.
It was a different story for the tens of thousands of dead Cuban rafters. Most of these desperate rafters probably died like captives of the Apaches, staked in the sun and dying slowly of sunburn and thirst. Others perished gasping and choking after their arms and legs finally gave out and they gulped that last lungful of seawater, much like the crew in The Perfect Storm. Still others were eaten alive—drawn and quartered by the serrated teeth of Hammerheads and Tiger sharks much like Captain Quint in Jaws. Perhaps these last perished the most mercifully. As we've all seen on the Discovery Channel, sharks don't dally at a meal.
"In space no one can hear you scream," says the ad for the original Alien. Same for the middle of the Florida straits—except, of course, for your raft-mates. While clinging to the disintegrating raft, while watching the fins rushing in and water turn red—they hear the screams all too clearly.
All during the decades coinciding with Castroite Cuban rule, the Coast Guard has documented hundreds of such stories. Were the cause of these horrors more politically-correct we'd have no end of books, movies, documentaries, TV interviews, Survival-Story specials, etc.. We'd never hear the end of it. Alas, the agents of this Caribbean holocaust consist of the Left's premier pin-up boys.
https://townhall.com/columnists/humbertofontova/2023/02/04/dying-to-escape-socialism-n2619119
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Must not praise Cardinal Pell
A great Australian and a true man of God
An associate professor of criminal justice says he was subjected to “abuse and vitriol” and cast aside from a victim support service after a personal social media post was viewed as being supportive of Cardinal George Pell.
Terry Goldsworthy, a Bond University academic whose fields of expertise include miscarriages of justice, has hit out at the stifling of freedom of speech and the “shutting down of public debate on contentious issues”.
He says it’s just the latest instance in which he has been targeted for voicing an opinion, and warns future generations are at risk of being denied fearless, independent views that run counter to those of “the baying mob”.
Dr Goldsworthy’s post on LinkedIn stated that anyone who studied miscarriages of justice should examine Pell’s case “to see how we can improve the criminal justice system”.
The former Queensland Police Service detective inspector included in the post a link to the High Court’s unanimous judgment quashing Pell’s child sexual abuse convictions.
“Vale Cardinal George Pell,” Dr Goldsworthy wrote in his post.
“His pursuit by the Victorian police on historical child abuse charges highlighted how poorly our justice system performs in certain cases where emotions run high. To quote the High Court of Australia, who overturned his convictions 7-0, there was, consistently … ‘a significant possibility that an innocent person has been convicted because the evidence did not establish guilt to the requisite standard of proof’.”
The post ended with a series of hashtags including #crime #justice #miscarriageofjustice and #wrongfulconviction. Dr Goldsworthy said a high-profile person, whom he declined to name, attacked him online in response.
He was also told his post did not align with the values of the victim support service he has helped for the past decade. The issue was due to be raised by the support service at a meeting in his absence, so he resigned as a committee member out of principle.
Pell, who died in Rome in January at the age of 81 after complications from hip surgery, spent 404 days in custody on charges of assaulting two teenage choirboys in the late 1990s when he was archbishop of Melbourne. He constantly maintained his innocence and was acquitted by the nation’s highest court in 2020.
At his funeral last week, he was described by former prime minister Tony Abbott as “the greatest man I’ve ever known” and a scapegoat for the Catholic Church, while protesters clashed with worshippers outside.
Dr Goldsworthy said he commented on Pell “as an aside” as someone who taught in the area of criminal justice. “I thought it was pertinent. It just struck me that there was a real intolerance around dealing with factual debates.
“The High Court ruled 7-0 in this case, and identified that it had been problematic. Yet there seem to be topics now where you can’t point to those facts, or if you do, you’re shouted down. In my field of criminal justice, there’s a number of contentious issues now where if you try to argue one point of the argument there’s almost this demand that you cease.
“People engage in personal attacks, rather than engaging in critical inquiry looking at the scholarly or scientific evidence you’re putting forward, and allowing some kind of public discourse to take place without fear or favour.”
Writing in The Australian, Dr Goldsworthy says that as a Catholic he is reminded in the Pell debate of the denial of Jesus by his disciple Peter.
“The message here is that you must stand by your convictions and beliefs, to fail to do so is a betrayal of the contest of ideas and a surrender to the absolutism of populist narratives where only one viewpoint is acceptable.”
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7 February, 2023
Medicaid enrollment has skyrocketed 20.2 million to 91 million since Feb. 2020
Trump lowered the unemployment figures by making more jobs available. Biden lowered unemployment figures by helping millions to stop working, to exit the labor force. Many fewer people are now looking for jobs. It makes the figures look good but it is in fact a disaster. There are now many fewer goods and services available
By Robert Romano
Thanks to 2020 changes to federal law and regulations during the Covid pandemic not to disenroll Medicaid patients who no longer qualified for the program during the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) public health emergency which began in March 2020, Medicaid enrollment has skyrocketed by 20.2 million to more than 91 million since Feb. 2020, according to the latest data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
That was more than the entire period of expanded enrollment from 2010 through all of 2019, when the number went from 56 million before the Affordable Care Act was passed, to 71 million in 2019. It had reached 75 million in 2016, but continued decreases of the unemployment rate during the Trump years drove down eligibility.
And then in 2020, suddenly 25 million jobs were lost, unemployment claims soared, and suddenly, millions of Americans who had income suddenly qualified for Medicaid. Without any change to the law, that would have been true, but to nail it down, Congress enacted a law, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, that prohibited states from disenrolling Medicaid patients when they no longer qualify on the basis of income, so-called “continuous enrollment”.
Naturally, in the middle of a national emergency, it passed with veto-proof majorities in Congress without much debate, and certainly with little to no discussion about how this would expand. I doubt very many members read through or understood the implications of the provisions.
Every year, under traditional Medicaid, patients are supposed to be reevaluated on the basis of income to see if they still qualify, requiring financial documentation to keep receiving the benefit. But under Covid that stopped happening.
By the end of 2020, more than 16 million of the 25 million Americans who had lost their jobs and returned to work, but between Feb. 2020 and Sept. 2020, 10 million were on continued unemployment claims and yet Medicaid rolls had swollen by 10 million that year, a process that would continue through 2021 and 2022 via churning in the U.S. labor force when Americans would temporarily lose their jobs and get Covid or get Covid and lose their jobs, go to the hospital and, lacking insurance, be automatically enrolled in Medicaid.
As a result, thanks to continuous enrollment, these recipients—and their families—were never removed from the Medicaid rolls even after they got their jobs back, driving the number up 20.2 million to 91 million today. More people got added to Medicaid under Covid than after a full decade under the Affordable Care Act.
One of the mechanisms for the expansion was automatic enrollment into Medicaid by hospitals for patients who lacked health insurance. As millions of patients were contracting Covid, many of them would go to hospitals for care and, lacking insurance, were pushed into Medicaid. In 2020 alone, there were 20 million cases, according to data compiled by the Institutes for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Not everyone went to the hospital for care, but those that did and, importantly, were temporarily out of work were enrolled in Medicaid.
The largest increases came from California (2.3 million), Texas (1.5 million), New York (1.3 million) and Florida (1.2 million).
Now, Congress has lifted the prohibition for states to begin disenrollments again in the year-end omnibus spending bill that just passed, beginning March 31.
Here’s the strange part. For the past three years, I cannot find a single statement by House or Senate Republicans specifically about the continuous enrollment provision. There was a House Republican Oversight Committee letter about potential improper payments to Medicaid during Covid in Aug. 2021, but with no mention of the program’s expansion. By then, the program had already expanded by 13 million.
There were a few opeds in the Wall Street Journal about the expansion of the program but not until in mid-to-late 2022, and only a few hard news pieces by the paper in late 2022 when Congress was said to be ending the provision. Fox News had no national reports on the topic but I could identify a single oped mid-2020 that warned about “continuous coverage” and the costs involved. There are likely more not turning up in search results, but you get the point.
What’s strange about this is Republicans have been railing against socialized medicine for more than 50 years and fought Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, and this was one of the largest expansions of government-run health care in the country’s history. Seems like it might have been an important issue to talk about in 2022, especially as it related to the Covid emergency.
Did they even know about it? If they didn’t, it will be because Republicans lack representation in these institutions, and so nobody would have been there to raise the alarm. Or worse, did they know about it, and not say anything for fear of upsetting a massive potential voting bloc? Questions should be asked by conservative news outlets, to the extent they are at all capable of introspection on their side of the aisle.
This is an institutional reporting failure but you had to know to look for it. I missed it, too, and only caught it when my wife who works at a managed care organization told me about the disenrollments beginning this year.
Leaving aside the apparent lack of bipartisan Congressional input or even public input and comment into this massive expansion of government-run health care, overall this appears to explain the crude impacts of the prolonged economic lockdowns by states, which kept people out of the labor force much longer than was expected or was necessary, keeping children and adults locked in their homes so Democrats could achieve universal health insurance.
But the outcomes could not have been good, either. For every perfectly healthy working age adult who was enrolled in Medicaid, the system had to keep track of them as well as those needy and with special conditions, the developmentally disabled, the elderly — who were left waiting in line for evaluations and assessments. Labor turnover in the health profession has been abysmal and, anecdotally, federal workers unions have complained of being overworked. Now we know why.
Even the disenrollment, which the Department of Health and Human Services says could impact 15 million Americans, will tax the system, as every patient will have be reevaluated on the basis of income. Instead of dealing with real patients, the system will be tracking people down, who in turn will have a perverse incentive to conceal income and finances.
The 11 million plus job openings after Covid? Now we know why. With Medicaid coverage, many Americans who were put into the program might have been unaware of the continuous coverage provisions and either opted not to go back to work or did so off the books to retain the benefit long term — a perverse incentive. The amount of fraud that will be prevalent in the disenrollment alone will be gargantuan, all the while those elderly or infirmed who actually need the system will be left with lackluster care.
Hospitals were overwhelmed by Covid intake and also a lack of private insurance to pay for the costs, and then in turn dumped more than 20 million people into socialized medicine, drowning the bureaucracy and the public health system that was never supposed to administer to the healthy. President Joe Biden used this situation to prolong the national and public health emergencies indefinitely. Why wasn’t Congress raising the alarm bells?
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Woke Disney sparks outrage with new kids cartoon that claims America was 'built on slavery'
Disney has been slammed for going woke yet again after a new cartoon series features black children rapping about reparations – saying 'slaves built this country'.
The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder has sparked outrage by showing the characters discovering that their town was built by slaves and then giving a presentation to their school.
As part of the rap, which as been branded 'blatant anti-white propaganda', a white character is seen standing on a stage with a poster that says 'still not atoned'.
It is echoing the current situation in California, with a reparations board insisting that every long-term black resident get $5million in reparations.
During the episode the characters, who are predominantly black, rule that Abraham Lincoln had no desire to end slavery – and so stage a petition to get his statue removed.
Disney claim that the show 'follows the adventures and misadventures of newly 14-year-old Penny Proud and her Proud Family as they navigate modern life with hilarity and heart.'
But it has sparked a major backlash with viewers, who have accused the broadcasting giant of 'beaming woke BLM propaganda straight into your living rooms'.
Others started using the hashtag #BoycottDisney after watching the footage, which also depicts police officers in riot gear turning up at their protest.
In the episode Penny learns the meaning of Junteenth, and discovers a 'terrifying truth' about the town – that it was founded by a slave owner.
Part of the rap on the show, which is aimed at a younger audience, says: And we, the descendants of slaves in America, have earned reparations continue.
'And continue to earn reparations every moment we spend submerged in the systemic prejudice, racism, and white supremacy that America was founded with and still has not atoned for.'
Once the scene is over, the rest of the school erupts into applause, and then a protest over Abraham Lincoln is planned – with the characters deciding something needs to be done.
They were shocked to discover that 'Lincoln was not against slavery' and questioned why they were not told this before.
In another scene the kids are peacefully protesting when the cops in riot gear show up.
A basketball-spinning black man says then says to the group: 'Officers, please put these little kids in cuffs, y'all. Audience, no photos, please.'
It turns into a standoff between the cops and the children, with one yelling 'stand your ground' and a police officer pushing a black bystander.
One viewer said the was ‘nothing short of woke propaganda’ while another said ‘imagine paying money to Disney to teach your kids to hate themselves and hair their country’.
Fox News contributor Rob Smith said: ‘When The Proud Family was made 15 years ago, it was a sweet, funny cartoon sitcom about a Black family. ‘Rebooted by Disney+ in the Woke Era it is now this. The reboot also features an interracial gay couple with a child… why?’.
Other were quick to suggest that Disney should be banned, with one even suggestion that Elon Musk should buy the platform.
It is the latest accusation to be leveled
The giant has taken numerous strides to become more inclusive in recent years including changing park policy to stop staff from using gendered greetings, and implementing an anti-racism training course for employees.
They have also given old characters progressive makeovers, and removed offensive imagery from rides and movies.
It included a gay kiss between two female characters in the movie Lightyear, and black actress Halle Berry was cast as Ariel in its upcoming, live-action re-make of The Little Mermaid.
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The Pushback Against Gender Ideology Proves Conservatives Can Win The Culture War
Scott Morefield
As a lifelong conservative, it’s tough to get out of the mentality that the arc of history seems to always flow against us. We all know the saying that what happens in California now will be happening everywhere else five years from now. It’s depressing, demoralizing even, but it’s also true, or it’s seemed that way for as long as I’ve been alive.
Even good causes originally espoused by the ‘left’ side of politics of a given age - like civil rights and early feminism - have morphed into monsters devouring every semblance of logic and common sense. Despite the fact that we’ve gone far beyond what the originators of those movements dreamed, there’s always “more work to do,” because grifters need to keep the attention on them and, most of all, keep those fat paychecks coming. Consequently, we’ve gone from creating a society based on equality under the law to one which elevates certain ‘preferred’ groups above others and even seeks the absolute destruction of the one building block that has held civilization together for thousands of years - the nuclear family.
How long can this last? Until humanity destroys itself from within and the earth is swallowed by the sun? If you subscribe to a certain type of futurist Christian eschatology (in fairness, most do), you probably think this is all part of the plan and that Jesus will come soon enough to put an end to all this insanity. If that makes you sleep better at night, more power to you. But I’ve got news for you: Christians have been thinking the exact same thing for more than 2,000 years, so odds are you’ll die thinking that way, as will your children and grandchildren and countless succeeding generations.
As for me, I prefer to think the culture war shouldn’t just be fought out of duty, although we should certainly do what is right. I also think it should be fought because it can actually be won. Here. In this life. Right now. If we fight effectively, we really can make the world a better place for our descendants. And if your theology is telling you to give up because we can’t win, you should consider ditching that theology because it is toxic and self-defeating. (But that’s a column for another day, isn’t it?)
“But but but,” you say, “what about that first paragraph, all that stuff about the arch of history? Don’t the failures of the past prove our point, that all is indeed lost?” Maybe, but it also ignores the ebbs and flows taking place over hundreds of years that we can’t witness personally because our lifespans are too short. Might it have been harder for Christians in early Roman times, for example, when they were more worried about getting crucified than being forced to bake a cake that goes against their convictions? More recently, consider how many millions of lives were snuffed out during the various communist regimes of the 20th century. Would you rather live there then or here now? Today, Russia and much of eastern Europe is much more of what we would define as ‘conservative,’ particularly socially, than Europe or the United States (which is one reason the leftist establishment here hates them so much). They’ve been there, done that, and they aren’t particularly interested in a repeat.
Hopefully, we won’t have to go through what the people under 20th-century communist oppression went through for decades in order to turn the tide. Sure, it could happen, but another thing that could happen is enough hearts and minds are changed on a particular culture war topic and our side finally gains some ground. Then, like dominoes, another could fall, then another, and so on.
The best recent example of this potential is the ongoing pushback against gender ideology. Instead of bending and giving in to their insanity, conservatives and many old-school liberals and even ardent feminists like author J.K. Rowling are doubling down and refusing to budge, particularly on the most pernicious aspects like women’s sports, biological males in female prisons, and child mutilations. It’s inspiring, really. Despite leftists’ best efforts at portraying the transgender movement as the civil rights issue of our time, a majority of the population - nearly all of which are sympathetic to the ACTUAL civil rights movement - aren’t buying it. Even as they continue to push the envelope, polls consistently show they are outkicking their coverage.
The pushback on social media, particularly Twitter, is even starker. From Libs of TikTok to Matt Walsh to Rowling and countless others, people are just not afraid to openly say the emperor indeed has no clothes. And it hasn’t gone unnoticed:
“People are really done with this nonsense,” Walsh wrote in a Twitter post about a man who thinks he’s a woman named “Kaelie” who posted a video complaining about wanting to use a women’s bathroom without pushback. “I’m seeing a lot more intolerance of the trans agenda recently and it’s a great sign. A decade too late but still, finally, people are fed up. I figured we’d be able to defeat the child mutilators but I thought it would take many more years to bring down the trans agenda as a whole. Maybe I should be more optimistic. The public seems to be reaching a breaking point on this issue.”
In a world where there’s so much to be negative about of late, a little justified optimism may be the best tonic around. Don’t lose hope. It’s a battle we can win, but the only way that’ll happen is if we all keep fighting.
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Italy's new Centre Right government proves the critics wrong
Macho Italy’s first woman prime minister Giorgia Meloni has now governed for 100 days and I cannot help but notice the enormous elephant in the room: the failure of the global media even to acknowledge, let alone apologise for, how wrong they were to warn the world that Italy was on the verge of a far-right, ergo fascist, take-over.
During the election campaign and immediate aftermath the crčme de la crčme of the world’s media were chock-a-block with warnings that Meloni and her party – Brothers of Italy – were the equivalent of a Biblical plague of locusts in jackboots about to engulf Italy and from there Europe.
These awful people were the heirs to the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, we were relentlessly told. They were authoritarians, ergo dictators, who threaten democracy – it was insisted – and nationalists, ergo deplorables, itching to destroy the noble serenity of the supranational EU.
A much discussed piece in the New York Times entitled ‘The Future is Italy – and It’s Bleak’ claimed that Meloni’s programme is ‘nakedly reactionary’. It offered no evidence.
Virtually everyone, including CNN, the BBC, and the Economist, even the Daily Telegraph, defined the coalition government Meloni leads as the most right-wing in Italy since Mussolini.
One German magazine defined Meloni in its cover story that late September election week as ‘the most dangerous woman in Europe’ who ‘wants to transform Italy into an authoritarian state’.
Their truth – as must surely now be clear – was not the truth.
Yes, the roots of Brothers of Italy which Meloni co-founded in 2012 as a centre-right party are in neo-fascism, but she has repeatedly condemned the evil done by fascism.
When I interviewed her during the election campaign, Meloni defined herself as a conservative whose inspiration is not the revolutionary socialist founder of fascism, Mussolini, but two quintessentially English Tories: J. R. R. Tolkien, and Sir Roger Scruton.
Not even Italy’s media, which like the media everywhere in Europe and America is predominantly left-wing, call her far right, let alone fascist.
Their truth – as must surely now be clear – was not the truth
They would love to do so but they cannot. Their audience – the Italians – know what is, and is not, fascist. So they are forced to call her ‘centro-destra’ (centre-right).
Ask her accusers for evidence to support their claims that she is far right, ergo fascist, and the best they can do is to say things like: she wants to stop abortion. But she does not even want to do that. She may well be against abortion, like many people, especially Catholics, but she respects the right of a woman to choose. Ah, they say, but she wants to restrict access to the RU486 abortion pill. Are they sure? Yes, they insist, look at Le Marche, where Brothers of Italy is in charge of the regional government. There, the abortion pill can be prescribed only in hospitals, not GP surgeries.
Oh well, okay, I see, if you insist. But how fascist is that? To say that to oppose abortion is to support fascism is nonsense.
Anyway, the only real obstacle to abortion in Le Marche, as in Italy as a whole, is that a large majority of gynaecologists refuse to conduct abortions as conscientious objectors – nationally it’s 64.6 per cent and in Le Marche it’s 70 per cent.
But that has got nothing to do with Meloni. So it is as dishonest as it is ridiculous to claim that Meloni’s government is the most right-wing since Mussolini.
The global media also warned us about Meloni’s alleged aggressive nationalism which would place her in constant conflict with the European Commission. And yet, as I predicted immediately after her election, that has not happened either. Indeed, in January EU President Ursula von der Leyen flew to Rome to meet Meloni for a perfectly cordial encounter. She is on good terms with both French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz who she met yesterday for their first one to one meeting in Berlin at which she repeated her unequivocal support for arms to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia.
As I wrote just after her election victory, Italy’s new prime minister would avoid confrontation with Brussels for a very simple reason.
The EU has earmarked almost 200 billion euros (Ł180 billion) in grants and loans to Italy from its 800 billion euro Covid recovery fund – far more than for any other member state – to be activated in stages until 2026 but conditional on a large number of structural reforms.
This EU cash injection is of existential importance to Italy whose economy has hardly grown in real terms since the introduction of the euro in 1999.
Italy’s public debt as a percentage of GDP – 147 per cent – is one of the highest on the planet, its fertility rate one of the lowest, its youth unemployment rate among the highest in Europe, and its population the oldest.
Like everyone else, Italy is in addition now also plagued with high inflation.
But one of the achievements Meloni is proudest of is the $8 billion (Ł6.6. billion) off-shore gas production deal signed in her presence in Tripoli last week between the Italian energy giant Eni and Libya’s National Oil Corporation.
The deal is the largest single foreign investment in Libya’s energy sector in 25 years and part of Italy’s determined drive to find alternative sources of energy to Russia on whom it used to rely before the war in Ukraine for 40 per cent of its gas – but now for only 10 per cent. This also involves a similar deal in Algeria by Meloni’s predecessor Mario Draghi.
Meloni’s ambition is to make southern Italy the EU’s new energy hub.
We were also told, of course, that Meloni and her party are racists who are – among other things – dead keen to deploy the Italian navy to blockade Libya to stop refugees reaching Italy. Nothing of the sort has happened.
It would for a start be impossible to blockade such a huge coastline as Libya’s. Just look at the trouble the French have stopping migrant trafficker boats putting to sea in the by comparison miniscule coastline of the Pas de Calais.
Quite apart from that, the Libyan coastguard is already equipped, trained and paid by Italy and the EU to intercept migrant boats setting off from Libya. This has been done with the approval of successive left-wing Italian governments. While more than 100,000 migrants made it from Libya to Italy in 2022 – not far off double the 2021 total – the Libyan coastguard caught and turned back an additional 22,000.
But as Meloni told me: the only real solution is for the EU at long last to take responsibility for its southern border and set up hot spots in Libya to process asylum claims. Such hot spots would demonstrate not just that the vast majority of claimants – usually single men of fighting age – are not refugees but also solve the problem that it is virtually impossible to deport bogus asylum claimants once they are in Europe.
Meanwhile, Meloni has astutely chosen to avoid for the moment head-on confrontations with the charity ships that ferry across the hundreds of miles of Med about 15 per cent of the migrants that each year reach Italy by sea.
Instead, she has decided to use legal small print to make their lives difficult.
Yes, she is a Eurosceptic who once called for Italy to leave the euro. And she believes the EU should do ‘less better’, and be a confederation of states, a Europe des Patries, not a federal superstate.
But she will only pick fights she can win.
My words in September at the time of her election victory now seem most prescient:
‘Her way of doing things will be like the Chinese: softly, softly catchy monkey – in a very non-confrontational, non-far right or fascistic way. She will try to persuade not bludgeon – to slowly build a consensus to get what she wants both in Italy and in Brussels… She cannot threaten Europe in the way so many analysts imagine. But nor would she want to from a position of weakness – unless forced to by severe economic crisis or war. Expect her though to be a far less strident figure than today’s often-hysterical reaction suggests.’
Above all, perhaps, the markets are on her side.
The spread – the all important difference between the yield (interest rate) on German ten year government bonds and those of other Eurozone countries – is often seen as the litmus test of how well or badly that Eurozone economy is doing.
In 2011, the spread became so large between German and Italian bonds that it led to the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister amidst much talk about Italy being compelled to abandon the euro.
Well, since Meloni became prime minister the spread has narrowed dramatically from 236 point to 175 points.
Meanwhile, Meloni’s popularity rises. At the election, Brothers of Italy got 26 per cent of the vote which enabled the right-wing coalition Meloni leads to win a large majority of seats in Parliament. It is now polling around 30 per cent.
All this, plus the continued state of disarray of the opposition mean that unlike most Italian governments Meloni’s looks well set to complete its five-year mandate.
And – would you believe it? – a couple of weeks ago, Italian police arrested the capo di tutti i capi (the boss of all the bosses) of Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, who had been on the run for 30 years.
As the Economist grudgingly conceded: ‘Few governments approach the end of their first 100 days in such good shape as Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing coalition.’
You could not have thought such a state of affairs would be even remotely possible if you had paid heed to what the global media were telling us 100 days ago.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/georgia-melonis-first-100-days-have-proved-her-critics-wrong
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Let children walk by themselves
It was Super Bowl Sunday in February 2019. Cynthia Rivers and her husband decided that their children, 7 and 9, deserved a long-promised treat for cleaning their rooms: the chance to walk to Dunkin’ Donuts, a mile away, by themselves. (I changed her name to protect the family’s anonymity.)
This was in a suburban town in western Connecticut. The tots gathered $7, and off they went. A few minutes later, the Rivers heard a knock at the door. It was the police.
The first cop to show up “said he didn’t think it was safe for the kids to walk by themselves,” said Ms. Rivers. “We told him that while we did feel it was safe, we agreed to not allow them to walk around town unsupervised.”
“We thought that would have been the end of it,” Ms. Rivers added, “until three more officers showed up.” (I have read the police paperwork, which confirms all this.)
The first cop sent Ms. Rivers’ husband to retrieve the tots, who had only made it a couple blocks. Then mom, dad and children faced a barrage of questions.
“They told us that it wasn’t safe for kids to walk down the street... that drug dealers were going to give them drugs, and that it was ‘a different world now.’”
When Ms. Rivers said she didn’t think that was true, “One of them responded, and I quote, ‘Don’t you watch the news? I mean, I know it’s all fake, but still!’ That made my head spin,” Ms. Rivers said.
Upset, she went back inside. She found out later from her husband that at that point the arresting officer said to him, “‘If she talks to me again, I’m going to arrest you both and take away your kids.’”
Ms. Rivers’ husband was back home quickly after the arrest, and they began searching for a lawyer. A few days later, a police sergeant visited the house and let the Rivers know that they were dropping the charges.
The officer admitted that the law concerning child negligence was open to interpretation on the question of letting children walk by themselves. Happily, the Rivers told the lawyer that his services wouldn’t be necessary after all because everything was settled.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. The police charges had gone away, but the Department of Children and Families pursued its own investigation.
A caseworker visited the family twice and interviewed everyone about their complete history. “She was looking for problems,” says Ms. Rivers.
Ms. Rivers tried to explain that the police had overreacted, but the caseworker was not moved. When Rivers revealed that she had received therapy for depression some years before, the caseworker weaponized this information — and insisted she return to therapy.
Eventually, the department closed the case, too. While this may seem like a happy ending, it has had a lasting, negative impact. Ms. Rivers says she waited three years — until her daughter turned 12 — to finally let her go for another walk with a friend, unsupervised.
That’s an extra quarter of the girl’s life that was spent without any freedom to enjoy bike rides, walking to the park or getting a doughnut without an adult minder.
Let Grow, the nonprofit I helm, is trying to change the neglect laws so that simply trusting your children in the outside world is not reason enough to trigger investigations like this.
Connecticut is contemplating a “Reasonable Childhood Independence” bill that would establish a clearer bar for neglect: obvious danger, rather than any danger an imaginative person might think of.
“I’ve lived in this area most of my life,” says Ms. Rivers. “I’ve gone walking and jogging all around this town, by myself, at all hours of the day and night, and met and talked to many local people.”
She concluded: “I have never felt threatened by a single person in this town until meeting those officers and the social worker.”
https://www.nysun.com/article/the-dunkin-donuts-case?u
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6 February, 2023
The Stench of Fascism Is suffocating our democracy
The stench of fascism and betrayal is suffocating our democracy, but nobody wants to talk about it. We sanitize our language so that classified documents strewn over unsecured garages and centers of Chinese influence are talked about as though it’s a matter of carelessness and not design. The indisputable brute fact is this: our commander-in-chief and his family have made themselves wealthy by taking bribes from foreign powers, chief among them our mortal enemy Communist China. Nobody seems to be asking, but how exactly were the inexplicable decisions to turn Afghanistan over to China and the Taliban made, and what American interest was served by this?
In classic fascist fashion, the Biden administration has suborned the intelligence community and the Department of Justice to censor and harass its political opponents. These include school parents and Capitol trespassers whom it libels and imprisons as “domestic terrorists” and (unarmed) “insurrectionists.” In typical fascist moves, it has suborned corporate America into spying on its political opponents with the goal of cancelling them and silencing their opinions. Just this week AT&T shut down the fastest growing and fourth largest cable news network, Newsmax TV, depriving 13 million viewers of access to its reporting. This attack on the First Amendment came on the heels of Twitter’s exposure of the way the FBI had put its platform on the federal payroll and dictated its censorship of tweets that could have changed the results of the last presidential election. The same fascistic arrangement was made with other tech social media giants like Facebook.
The Democrats have targeted their chief political opponent Donald Trump, who received 74 million votes in the last election, with the longest, most determined, and most vicious campaign of character assassination in modern history, and possibly ever. They have warned other potential presidential contenders like Governor Ron DeSantis that they will get the same treatment. They have smeared Republicans as racists, white supremacists and white nationalists, and has done this in the service of rigged elections in its drive to establish a one-party state.
How to stop this juggernaut? First by standing up and calling their actions by their right names. In particular by calling out the treason of the Biden family and the military brass who have turned America’s armed forces into indoctrination centers of Woke racism. And who botched the Afghanistan withdrawal so badly that an arsenal of the most advanced weapons and billion-dollar airbases were delivered into the hands of our terrorist enemies, and their Chinese Communist friends.
Second by organizing and fighting back. Through his rallies, Trump has created the first mass movement of conservatives in American history. The revolt of America’s parents against the Left’s Nazi-like experiments on pubescent children – already a billion dollar industry – is another example of the entry of patriotic, religious and conservative forces onto the battlefield. Secure the polls, stop Democrat efforts to cheat in the elections, defend constitutional rights – enter the fray.
Distrust of government and love of freedom are ingrained in the American people. We can win this battle, but only if we fight it.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-stench-of-fascism/
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How the British saved India’s classical history
In India, a generation has been brought up on the academic Edward Said’s unhistorical prejudices towards the British and what he called the ‘colonial gaze’. In his eyes, British Orientalists were guilty of what is now termed ‘cultural appropriation’.
To his followers it therefore may come as a surprise to learn that it was British Orientalists who in fact rediscovered India’s classical history and heritage and made it available to the rest of the world.
Sir William Jones, a brilliant polymath, contributed more than any other individual to India’s national renaissance. Alongside his day job as a judge in Calcutta, Jones mastered Sanskrit, translated Indian classics and used it to unlock the glories of India’s long forgotten Hindu and Buddhist past.
Indian neglect for antiquity extended not merely to the distant classical past, but also to far more recent Mughal monuments
Jones said he found Sanskrit: ‘more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either…the warriors of the Mahabharata appear greater in my eyes than Ajax or Achilles appeared when I first read the Iliad.’
Unlike ancient Greece and Rome, India’s classical past had left behind no written histories, so it had to be reconstructed from ruins and buried treasures. In 1784, with the patronage of the first British Governor-General, Warren Hastings, Jones founded the Asiatic Society to take on this giant task. It became the beacon for a huge volunteer army of amateur antiquarians across the subcontinent. They were enthusiastic British civil and military officers who scoured the mofussil (countryside) for ruins and artefacts, wrote articles about them and sent their findings to be studied in the cities.
When Jones returned to England a decade later, his health shattered by overwork, the Asiatic Society was taken over by his protégé, James Prinsep, another polymath, whose day job was at the East India Company’s Benares mint. Prinsep’s labours produced the biggest ever breakthrough in Indian historiography, deciphering the long-forgotten Brahmi script and through it discovering the Mauryan empire that had briefly united the subcontinent in the third century BCE.
The task began with the mystery of enormous, polished granite pillars that had been popping up all over northern India. The most famous is the pillar a British official unearthed with its triple lion capitol that’s now the official emblem of the government of India.
Prinsep, aided by local British officials in places as diverse as Nepal, Punjab, Rajasthan and Bihar, spent many years painstakingly transcribing hundreds of coins and inscriptions and then collating them with the writing on the pillars, before he finally broke the code and discovered the Brahmi script, from which modern India’s Devanagari script has evolved.
The stick figures on the pillars were found to be edicts of the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka. Prinsep announced his discoveries in a paper to the Asiatic, then suffered a physical and mental breakdown brought on by overwork and had to be shipped home to England in 1838, where he died soon after.
The Ashokan edicts announced the emperor’s conversion to Buddhism, but little was yet known about this then obscure religion and the man who had founded it. There were rumours that he had been Egyptian or perhaps even Ethiopian.
The discovery of the Buddha’s Indian roots was again the work of dedicated British explorers. In the late 1790s, a British naturalist heard reports that the Buddha was a Bihari from India, explored Bihar and discovered the Bodh Gaya Buddhist ruins.
In later decades, the Buddha’s Indian roots were confirmed by the excavation of a series of stupas or reliquary temples. First came the discovery in 1819 of the great stupas at Sanchi by a Captain Fell. Bemused by their dome-like shapes, never seen before, he wrote in a Calcutta journal that he felt unable to give ‘even a very faint idea of the magnificence of such stupendous structures and exquisitely finished sculpture’.
Sanchi had long lain buried in forests, thus escaping destruction by either Hindu Brahmins or Muslim invaders. The stupas became the focus for further excavations by the man regarded as the father of Indian archaeology, Lieutenant Alexander Cunningham. Like many British Indian officers, he came from a modest Scottish family. He arrived in India in 1833, served the Royal Engineers in various military campaigns and used his military travels to remote places to collect antiques.
In 1834, Cunningham used his engineering skills to drill deep down into the main stupa at Sanchi, where he discovered evidence that Buddhism had been widespread for several centuries from the Mauryan period onwards. He went on to excavate a large collection of Buddhist sculptures at Sarnath in Bihar, the best of which he shipped off to Calcutta.
On a later visit, Cunningham was dismayed to find that many of the sculptures he had left behind were being used to dam a nearby river. It was typical of the constant battle British archaeologists fought to rescue their finds from the Indian habit of using old stones for new buildings. Forty years later, when Cunningham discovered the 2,000-year-old Indus Valley ruins at Harappa, he found bricks from the site being used nearby to lay a new railway line. Much later, in the 1920s, it was British archaeologists who linked Harappa to Mohenjodaro in the Sind desert and identified both as belonging to a pre-Aryan civilisation.
After retiring from the army, Cunningham spent the rest of his long life leading the newly established Archaeological Survey of India, which still administers the country’s artistic heritage. His last major discovery was the Bharhut stupa, full of Mauryan Buddhist treasures which he sent off to the Calcutta museum, to be beautifully restored by the enthusiastic antiquarian Viceroy, Lord Curzon.
Cunningham was struck by the fact that the large crowds of locals who watched his excavation at Bharhut were deeply disappointed that he unearthed no buried treasure. He grumbled in his diary ‘…few natives of India have any belief in disinterested excavations for the discovery of ancient buildings… Their only idea of such excavations is that they are really intended as a search for hidden treasure…’ As at Sarnath, when he returned three years later, every remaining stone of the Bharhut stupa had been cannibalised by locals to build their own homes.
Indian neglect for antiquity extended not merely to the distant classical past, but also to far more recent Mughal monuments. Emperor Aurangzeb’s mosque in the Delhi Red Fort, still under Mughal rule, was found dilapidated with foliage growing through it in the early 1800s. It was restored by the British Resident, as was Emperor Humayun’s crumbling tomb and the imperial Jama Masjid. British visitors to the later Mughals at the Red Fort were appalled to find the imperial halls of audience turned into slums, their semi-precious, inlaid stones stolen from their marble friezes.
The Taj Mahal at Agra, described by Kipling as ‘the ivory gate through which all dreams pass’, was the Mughal monument most beloved of the British, who repaired it from the 1780s onwards. Lord Curzon restored its gateway, gardens and surrounding buildings and declared: ‘If I have never done anything else in India, I have written my name here, and the letters are a living joy.’ Curzon had a passion for Mughal gardens and also restored them at the Agra and Delhi forts and at Humayun’s and Akbar’s imperial tombs. He brought a British romantic sensibility for wild gardens to the more formal Mughal layout, producing the wonderful synthesis we see today.
Cunningham’s Buddhist excavations coincided with various British discoveries of important Hindu temple ruins, ranging from Mahabalipuram in the south to the Elephanta and Kanheri caves near Bombay, and Khajuraho, with its then shocking eroticism, in Central India. The most influential discovery was of the Ajanta caves, with their wonderful frescoes dating back to the first century BC.
A young British cavalry officer stumbled on Ajanta during a hunting expedition in the wilds of Berar. He braved fierce tigers and even fiercer Bhil tribals, then the main occupants, to explore the caves. In 1836, the Asiatic Society published his report on Ajanta’s wonders, and it provoked much debate as to whether the frescoes were Hindu or Buddhist and why sites like this had been abandoned in such remote places. Some even wondered if they were the work of Greek settlers left behind from Alexander’s invasion.
As the frescoes were deteriorating, it was decided to copy as well as conserve them. A Major Robert Gill, an artistic soldier, arrived at Ajanta and spent the next 27 years copying the paintings. His entire collection was sent off to be exhibited in London, but was tragically destroyed in the Crystal Palace fire of 1866. Gill returned to Ajanta undeterred and started all over again, but died a year later, an unsung hero of art conservation. His work was continued for the next 13 years by John Griffiths of Bombay’s British-led School of Art. The results were displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and, in an extraordinary run of bad luck, again destroyed by fire. But luckily this time they had been photographed first and went viral in London, with photo features in the Burlington Magazine and Illustrated London News and an Ajanta-style ballet at Covent Garden performed by the great Russian ballerina, Anna Pavlova.
As important as archaeological finds was the emergence of an entirely new approach to Indian art, giving it equal status with its western counterparts. The pioneer here was the art historian Ernest Havell, who came to India in 1890 as principal of the Madras School of Art and left 20 years later as head of the Calcutta School of Art. He saw the Indian aesthetic as being conceptual, rather than representational, its images stylised, not naturalistic as in Greco-Roman art, its emphasis on anonymous spirituality, rather than the individuality of its subject or the identity of the artist.
In 1910, at a stormy meeting of the Royal Society of Art in London, Havell clashed with his opponents, who maintained that India only excelled at decorative rather than fine art. He argued that multi-limbed and many-headed Hindu deities, so alien to the Western eye, were allegorical representations of divine attributes and no more physiologically impossible than Christian angels. He emphasised the continuity from ancient Ajanta down to recent Mughal miniatures of a distinctively Indian aesthetic, crediting the Indian artist with the ability ‘to see with the mind, not merely with the eye, to bring out an essential quality, not just the common appearance of things; to give movement and character in a figure, not only the bone and muscle; to reveal some precious quality or effect in a landscape, not merely physiographical or botanical facts; and above all to identify himself with the inner consciousness of the nature he portrays…’
In recent times, the artistic discoveries of the Raj have raised questions of cultural ownership. The Indian equivalent of the Elgin Marbles demanded by Greece are the so-called Elliot marbles, also housed in the British Museum in London. The marbles are in fact pale limestone friezes from the Mauryan stupa at Amaravati in southern India, intricately carved with scenes from the life of the Buddha. A young Scottish surveyor, Colin Mackenzie, first stumbled on them in 1798. Half a century later, another Scotsman, Sir Walter Elliot, returned to excavate the site, rescued it from being pillaged by locals and carted off some of the finest sculptures to the Madras Museum, whence some later found their way to the British Museum. Elliot’s career was typical of many Orientalists. While serving for 40 years as a revenue official in Madras, he was also a linguist, naturalist, ethnologist and numismatist and wrote learned books on everything from cobras and exotic birds to rare coins.
Today Elliot’s Marbles are displayed in a climate-controlled gallery specially created for them at the British Museum, admired by millions from around the world. Back in India, the stupa at Amaravati is sadly neglected, while the Madras museum’s collection of its sculptures is one of its least visited rooms. That hasn’t stopped the Archaeological Survey of India from demanding the return of the BM’s collection, a request politely declined in 2010. It’s hard to imagine that they would really be better appreciated or conserved in the land of their birth. The cultural treasures the British took home with them are, after all, only a tiny fraction of what they salvaged, protected and left behind for us Indians.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/01/how-the-british-saved-indias-classical-history/
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Capitalism brings the diversity that people want
Are chain stores and chain restaurants wrecking the world and turning our colorful, quirky, diverse world into a uniformly bland, corporatized dystopia, where every place looks like every other place, leaving every place with no sense of place? Hardly. More chains might mean Minneapolis, Montgomery, Montreal, and Milan all resemble one another, but they resemble one another because they offer ever-expanding arrays of options for people looking to feed, clothe, entertain, and express themselves. They make us richer financially and culturally. First, they make our dollars go further. Second, they free up time and money for other pursuits. Is it so bad that chains make places look alike?
I don’t think so, at least to the extent that places start looking alike in their abundance of options. No visit to Canada is complete without a stop at Tim Hortons. Not content to simply be the iconic coffee and donut brand of the True North strong and free, Tim Hortons is expanding its footprint south of the border, beyond the northeast and parts of the midwest with “priority new markets,” including California, Texas, Illinois, and Florida. Would it be such a bad thing if people in Ontario, California could get coffee from Tim Horton’s as easily as people in London, Ontario? Or if people in London, Ontario could get In-N-Out Burger as easily as those in Ontario, California? If both chains expanded to London, England, and made money doing it, their profits would indicate they are making the world a better place.
In any case, it’s not for cultural and culinary critics to decide. The free market is a continuous real-time election, where every dollar at every moment is a vote on what to do. Entrepreneurs and managers are subject to a perpetual referendum. The dollars I’m not spending right now are votes for more goods and services later. The dollars we spent on groceries today are votes for the things we keep in our fridge and pantry. The dollars we spend at Chick-fil-A when we’re traveling are votes for chicken sandwiches, and the dollars we spend at fancy restaurants are votes for haute cuisine. When have the purveyors of these goods served consumers wisely and well? The proof is in the profits.
What if people make the wrong choices? First, “wrong choices” are in the eye of the beholder. “A choice I wouldn’t make” is not a “wrong choice.” There are exceptions. Responsible parents don’t let their kids eat yellow snow or play in the street during rush hour. But those are exceptions, and deciding to go to faceless, corporate McDonald’s instead of locally owned McDowell’s is hardly comparable to playing in traffic. Second, grown men and women are not pieces on a chessboard we can arrange as we see fit. If you’re free to choose only what professional busybodies know you should want, you’re not free.
Recently, I read that a Florida barbecue chain is looking to expand into Alabama. I confess I was frustrated. I love barbecue, but I would rather have more places to get Vietnamese noodles, Chinese dumplings, Korean fried chicken, and Ethiopian anything than another barbecue place. That’s not my decision to make, however. The “right” number of barbecue restaurants is like the right number of varieties of underarm deodorant. If there’s still money to be made, consumers are voting for more, and it is not my prerogative, nor yours, or Bernie Sanders’, or anyone else’s to suppress those votes.
Maybe we’re not being honest with ourselves. I attended a talk by Virginia Postrel based on her book The Substance of Style in graduate school. If I remember correctly, she said that when local officials and leaders turn their noses up at Starbucks and describe what they want in a local coffee shop, from the aesthetic to the ambiance to the variety, they describe Starbucks. In short, they want the Starbucks experience but not the Starbucks name.
Of course, intervention distorts retail markets. Local officials devote substantial time and energy (and dole out lots of goodies) to land “whales” like Walmart, Target, and other Big Box retailers that promise tantalizing tax revenue. Chains can take advantage of economies of scale that come with having executives and entire departments dedicated to regulatory compliance. Saying “stop doing this,” is like telling a lifelong heroin addict to “just say no,” but at least we can recognize the problem at its source. If we want more local flavor, getting governments out of entrepreneurs’ way is much better than banning chains.
People enjoy quirky, unique, and local places. I know I do. They also enjoy reliable, consistent, and predictable places, which is why chains succeed. As chains expand to new areas, those areas start to look alike. But they’re more alike in their diverse options for reliable, consistent, and predictable cuisine, clothing, car care, and other goods and services. If Bonchon, In-N-Out Burger, and Tim Hortons make their way to my neighborhood, I don’t think I’ll shed any tears, but if I do, they’ll be tears of joy at my new opportunities to get food and coffee I previously wouldn’t have been able to get without getting on a plane.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14406&omhide=true&trk=title
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Interracial dating in Australia
This article seems to be largely anecdotal so it is a pity that statistics are not given. If the rate of interracial marriage is low, that would in part be explained by many migrant groups marrying within their ethnicity.
There are some statistics showing a lot of intermarriage between people of different national origin but most of those would be between Australian-born people and people from Britain and other Anglospheric countries.
The most striking type of interracial relationship I see about the place is between Chinese girls and tall Caucasian men, I do see a lot of Chinese young women as a part of couples and the partners concerned are rarely all Chinese. Chinese ladies overwhelmingly favour Caucasian men --- probably because they --like most women -- like their man to be tall. Chinese are Australia's largest minority -- at about 5% of the population
And the prevalence of those relationships is clear testimony to the low level of racism in Australia.
Australia’s leaders often say it is the most multicultural society on Earth, but when it comes to mixing those cultures in marriage, it seems Aussies stay in their lanes.
Sociologist Dr Zuleyka Zevallos says it’s “still the norm that most marry within their race”, despite more than 200 years of migration since colonisation.
“When you look at the out-marriage rates, very few second-generation migrants will marry outside their race.” If they do, she adds, people are more likely to marry a person from a similar ethnic or racial group.
“It’s not about exposure or education, but because of social forces and this sense of difference,” she says.
Of course, interracial relationships in Australia are not new, dating back to colonisation when racial intermixing was a way of ensuring whiteness prevailed. Migration, too, means that Australia’s demographic make-up is becoming increasingly diverse.
So, what about those who do couple up with someone outside their race?
‘We didn’t see interracial couples like us growing up’
Sue Kang, 28, and her boyfriend Midy Tiaga, 29, met in high school and have been best friends for 10 years. They became a couple three years ago. “We were both ready to settle down,” Kang says. Kang, who is Korean-Australian, and Tiaga, a Sri Lankan-Australian, say they didn’t see interracial couples like themselves growing up.
When Kang began modelling full-time during COVID, her agent asked her to bring along her partner to be in the shoot. From there, they continued to model together and Tiaga was eventually signed to her agency. The pair have modelled together for campaigns that include Tourism Australia and Commonwealth Bank.
Kang says it’s been great to see “authentic real couples” like themselves “rather than it being left up to the casting director”.
Both being from culturally diverse backgrounds, they say they share a common understanding. “There’s a cultural shorthand in the relationship where things don’t need to be explained,” says Tiaga. “We’re able to understand each other as we share similar intersections.”
Nigerian-American Valerie Weyland moved to Australia from the United States in her 20s. She settled in Perth, where she met her now husband Robert on Tinder. The couple has been together for more than eight years, and have a nine-month-old baby. She describes their relationship as “open and loving”.
She says that her experience of dating as a black woman in California was different to her experience in Perth, where it’s rare to see couples that look like them. “When I was dating [in California], of course there were racial tensions, but it was not the same as in Australia,” she says. ”I dated whoever I connected with in conversations and through passion, there was a whole rainbow of people.“
Valerie and Robert Weyland live in Perth and are expecting their first child. She is a very good-looking African lady, obviously with substantial white ancestry
She notes that while Perth is becoming more diverse with pockets of migrants, she doesn’t always feel accepted in the community. The couple often encounters people who stare or openly voice their disapproval. “People don’t really have a healthy filter when they see a couple like us,” she says.
“Australians love to banter and crack jokes, but they don’t always have an understanding of what is appropriate or inappropriate.”
For Robert, being with Valerie has made him more aware of the discrimination many non-white people experience. “If you’ve never gone through it, it’s hard to understand,” Valerie sympathises, who says that it’s about “being patient with people’s process of understanding things”.
And she says Robert is always the first to defend her. “When I’ve been in situations where I’m being attacked for my race, he steps up. He will be the first to say something.”
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5 February, 2023
Biden Team Makes First Move Towards Promoting Radical National Rent Control Laws
They are always disastrous, greatly reducing the supply of properties to rent
By Steve Straub
As a conservative I am deeply troubled by President Biden’s recent announcement to move forward with radical national rent control policies.
This type of government intervention in the housing market not only undermines the property rights of landlords but also will discourage new construction and investment in housing, thus creating a shortage of rental properties.
Rent control policies have been proven to be ineffective and even harmful in the past.
It creates an artificial market and distorts the natural supply and demand dynamics of the housing market.
It also limits the income of landlords and discourages them from maintaining and upgrading their properties.
Furthermore, it can also make it harder for low-income families to move to better neighborhoods, as landlords are less likely to accept Section 8 vouchers or other forms of government assistance from tenants if they’re not getting the full market rate for their units.
As conservatives, we believe in the importance of a free market economy and the protection of property rights. We must oppose any attempts by the government to intervene and control the housing market.
The solution to the affordability crisis is not to impose price controls but to increase the supply of housing through deregulation, tax incentives and other pro-growth policies.
Furthermore, It’s important to note that rent control doesn’t increase the housing supply and it only serves to protect current renters at the expense of future renters.
Rent control policies tend to benefit long-term tenants at the expense of new renters, who can have a harder time finding affordable housing.
It is a dangerous proposition to impose nationwide rent control laws, as it will hurt landlords, discourage new construction and investment, and make it harder for low-income families to find affordable housing.
We must focus on policies that will increase the supply of housing and promote economic growth.
In conclusion, I strongly urge President Biden and Congressional Democrats to reconsider their support for national rent control policies.
This type of policy will only serve to harm the economy and make it harder for American families to find affordable housing.
We need to focus on solutions that will truly address the housing crisis, such as deregulation and pro-growth policies, rather than harmful government intervention.
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Georgia Police Officer Resigns After Being Put on Leave for Facebook Post on Homosexual Marriage
A Georgia police officer has resigned after he was told by superiors that he could not share his personal religious views on social media.
“If someone somewhere considers an opinion I have—that isn’t a direct quotation from Scripture—to be offensive, then that would be a fireable offense,” Jacob Kersey, the former officer, told The Daily Signal.
Kersey, 19, who began working last May at the Port Wentworth Police Department in a jurisdiction just outside Savannah, says “everything was going well” until the start of the new year.
On Jan. 2, Kersey posted a 20-word message about his view of marriage on Facebook.
“God designed marriage. Marriage refers to Christ and the church,” he wrote, paraphrasing the Apostle Paul’s teaching in the Book of Ephesians. “That’s why there is no such thing as homosexual marriage.”
The next day, Kersey said he received a phone call from his supervisor, who told him that someone had complained about the post and to take it down.
When Kersey refused, the supervisor warned him that failure to delete the Facebook post on marriage could result in his termination.
Kersey said he then was contacted by Lt. Justin Hardy, who told him that the Port Wentworth Police Department didn’t want to be held liable in a “use of force” situation involving someone in the LGBTQ community. Kersey still refused to delete the post.
The police officer received a phone call later that day from the police department’s Maj. Lee Sherrod, ordering him to come to the office the following morning, Jan. 4, and turn in everything he had that belonged to the city.
Kersey told The Daily Signal that he believed he was going to be terminated.
When he arrived at the police station, the young officer met with Sherrod, Hardy, Capt. Nathan Jentzen, and Police Chief Matt Libby.
He was told that he was “being placed on administrative leave while the city investigated to see if I could keep my job,” Kersey said. “I was told that I was wise beyond my years, an old soul, and that they brag on me all the time, but that I couldn’t post things like that.”
Kersey said Libby told him that his Facebook post on marriage was the “same thing as saying the N-word and ‘F— all those homosexuals.’” Kersey said his captain told him that his free speech “was limited due to my position as … a police officer.”
The Port Wentworth Police Department, which serves a city with a population of just under 11,000 in 2020, did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
After a week of paid administrative leave, Kersey met again with the leadership of the police department. He says he was informed that he no longer was on administrative leave and would not be fired, but that he could not share opinions on social media that could be considered offensive.
Kersey says he was told he could post Scripture verses, but could not work as one of the department’s officers if he continued to share his “interpretation or opinion on Scripture if it was deemed offensive.”
“Separation of church and state” was the reason given for why he could not post such views, Kersey said.
Kersey said police officials told him that they were developing a new policy to guide officers on what they were and were not allowed to post on social media.
Next, Kersey received a “letter of notification” from Sherrod dated Jan. 13. The letter explained that although Kersey is entitled to his own personal beliefs, he should be “reminded that if any post on any of your social media platforms, or any other statement or action, renders you unable to perform, and to be seen as [unable] to perform, your job in a fair and equitable manner, you could be terminated.”
Four days after the date on the letter, on Jan. 17, Kersey formally resigned from the Port Wentworth Police Department.
“I decided to resign … because I just didn’t think it wise to go back and play their game,” Kersey told The Daily Signal, adding that “the way things went down, I didn’t feel as if my command really had my back.”
Looking back, the former police officer says he felt he was being bullied, through the fear of termination, into taking down his Facebook post:
Even though I resigned, it was made clear to me in the meetings by my command staff that if I was to go back to work, they could fire me at any time for any reason, as I was still in my work test period. Those aren’t very encouraging statements to make to an officer who is on administrative leave after being led to believe he was terminated.
The surprising thing, Kersey said, is that despite having his own Christian conservative podcast for years on which he discussed issues such as gender ideology and election reforms, it didn’t lead to “people complaining about things that I said when I was off duty on my own time on the podcast.”
“I’m sure people disagreed. I’m sure people didn’t agree with everything that I said as a conservative Christian, and that’s fine,” Kersey said of his podcast. “But I came to work, I did my job, I was professional, and I had a great relationship with all my co-workers, who come from all different backgrounds and belief systems
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Reality bites Scottish leader for the crime of woke transgression
Is Nicola Sturgeon a bigot? I ask because this week she said something we’re forever being warned not to say. She expressed an idea that is apparently so hateful that instant cancellation normally awaits those who utter it.
What was her speechcrime? She said trans women are not quite the same as women. Not always. Not in every situation. Transphobe! Ready the stake.
The First Minister of Scotland committed her act of wrongthink in response to questions about violent trans women being housed in women’s prisons. “Are all trans women women?” a reporter asked.
“Trans women are women but in the prison context there is no automatic right for a trans woman …” said Sturgeon, before our intrepid interrogator butted in. “So there are contexts where a trans woman is not a woman?” he said.
There it was: the question that threatened to expose not only Scotland’s folly of putting violent born males in jails full of vulnerable women, but the entire ideological edifice of the trans worldview.
Namely that trans women are women. This is the mantra of our age. It’s become a borderline religious chant. Virtually every individual and institution that wants to be thought of as pure and good has at some point recited this woke catechism.
Failing to genuflect to the idea that a man can transform into a woman is the modern equivalent of refusing to believe that bread transforms into the body of Christ during mass.
It’s heresy. Only today heresy is punishable by social death rather than literal death, which is progress, I guess. So it wasn’t surprising that Sturgeon seemed rattled by the reporter’s query; knocked for six by his suggestion that Scotland’s different prison rules for trans women proves that trans women are not women after all.
She knew how much was riding on her response. Her reputation, her woke credentials and the entire belief system of gender self-ID, which holds that people are whatever sex they say they are.
Sturgeon laughed nervously. Then she said: “There are circumstances in which a trans woman will be housed in the male prison estate …”
Right, said the reporter, so now we know: trans women and women are “not equal”. It was an extraordinary exchange. And an important one.
It might just mark the point at which the trans doctrine started to unravel.
The grilling of Sturgeon sprung from some serious missteps she has taken on the gender issue in recent months. First there was the Scottish parliament’s passing of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which would streamline the process by which a person can legally change his or her sex.
The government in Westminster is taking steps to block the bill on the basis that it threatens women’s rights. After all, if it’s made even easier for a man to “become a woman”, what will become of female-only spaces such as changing rooms, domestic violence shelters and, indeed, women’s prisons? All would effectively be thrown open to any man who claimed to be a woman, whether that be a genuine trans person or a chancer, a voyeur, possibly even a predator.
Then there was the prison scandal. Mere weeks after the gender bill was nodded through, a Scottish trans woman called Isla Bryson was found guilty of raping two women. Bryson – whose birth name is Adam Graham – will be looked upon by the vast majority of people as a man. He has male genitalia. And he repugnantly forced his genitalia into two women. And yet following his conviction he was sent to a women’s prison.
There was uproar over this, rightly, and before long Sturgeon announced Bryson was being moved to a blokes’ jail. So it seems this trans woman is not a woman. Not really. And that all trans women, in Sturgeon’s words, do not have an “automatic right” to be treated as women, at least in the context of criminal justice.
Perhaps it’s time we thought the unthinkable. Perhaps it’s time we said the thing you’re not meant to say. Whisper it: trans women are not women.
Of course trans people should be treated with courtesy, as should all people. They should be allowed to dress as they please and refer to themselves as they please without facing any persecution whatsoever.
Trans prisoner pause was to give clarity, says Sturgeon
The decision to pause the placing of transgender prisoners with a history of violence against women in the female prison estate was taken to… provide “clarity”, Nicola Sturgeon has said.
But let us also bring reality to bear on this most tetchy of issues. If you were born male and went through male puberty, can you subsequently be a woman? Literally, legally a woman?
I say no. And it’s not transphobia to say no. My belief in biological science and women’s rights demands that I reject the idea a man becomes a woman simply by declaring himself to be one.
As a lapsed Catholic I no longer believe in transubstantiation. And as a rationalist I don’t believe in transgenderism’s core tenet – that we can choose our sex. If that makes me a blasphemer, so be it. It is important to follow the dictates of one’s conscience, even when the consequences are rough.
For too long, women in particular have been demonised and cancelled for saying sex is real, men are not women, and biology matters. Enough. All voices deserve a hearing in this debate, including those voices, such as JK Rowling’s, that insist womanhood is not some costume any Tom, Dick or Harry can pull on.
Sturgeon’s admission that trans women will sometimes need to be treated differently to born women is a potential game-changer. It’s a tacit confession that the so-called “TERFs” have a point. Maybe reason will finally find its way into this discussion.
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Biden Blocking Airline Merger That Could Boost Competition, Lower Fares
If you want to see a classic case of how President Biden’s regulatory tendencies are strangling the American economy and raising prices, look no further than the latest Justice Department efforts to kill an airline merger that is pro-consumer.
JetBlue has its sights on merging with a smaller and financially ailing airline, Spirit.
JetBlue’s management believes the synergies between the two airlines will save over $300 million in costs. Spirit’s shareholders (i.e., the airline’s owners) have voted to approve the merger.
Spirit is like a cancer patient in chemotherapy. Industry analysts say that there’s a 50-50 chance Spirit will go bankrupt without a suitor.
A bankruptcy would crush Spirit shareholders, cause thousands of airline workers to lose their jobs, and enable other bigger airlines to swoop in and purchase its assets and its valuable airport landing rights at fire sale prices.
No one benefits from that scenario.
So, what’s the holdup here? The Biden Justice Department is holding up the marriage on questionable antitrust grounds.
A strong case could be made that a successful merger between the two smaller airlines will enhance competition and lower prices by creating a larger discount airline. Today, about 70 percent of domestic flights are on four carriers — American, Delta, Southwest and United. JetBlue controls just about 6 percent of the market (while Spirit’s has shrunk to about 4 percent).
A merger like this is hardly going to allow JetBlue to monopolize the market or drive up prices. Regulators are concerned that in certain markets like Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where the two airlines directly compete, ticket prices may rise. This ignores that without the merger, Spirit may simply close.
JetBlue is ranked as one of the best airlines for customer satisfaction. To compete more effectively with the big boys, it needs scale.
According to JetBlue’s merger plans, the airline will leverage the infrastructure, employees and management of Spirit to schedule 1,700 more flights to 125 cities in 30 countries. This benefits — it doesn’t hurt — consumers with more choices.
JetBlue’s market niche has always been to compete in crowded markets by offering discount prices.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study has found that when JetBlue enters a market, it reduces airline fares by $32 each way on average.
Federal regulators in the Biden administration don’t seem to understand that mergers and acquisitions are a routine and vital component of an innovative and entrepreneurial economy.
Investors are willing to put millions of dollars at risk to launch startups in the hope that they will have an exit option at some point of being bought out by more sizable competitors.
How many people will invest in a startup airline in the future if the feds would prohibit the company from ever being sold? Or prohibit the company from growing by acquiring other assets as it grows?
The birth of the modern age in air travel began some 40 years ago when airline pricing and routing were almost entirely deregulated.
Thanks to steadily falling airfares, airline travel, which was once the purview of the rich, has become affordable to middle- and even low-income travelers with fares as low as $100.
The irony of all of this is that if the JetBlue-Spirit marriage is prohibited or killed through interminable delays, the people who will be uncorking the champagne bottles will be the executives at American, Delta, Southwest and United.
In the name of helping consumers, the Biden administration may take the side of the biggest and most expensive airlines instead of the pro-competitive forces of a disruptive and lower-price carrier. How this would help consumers is anyone’s guess.
https://www.nysun.com/article/biden-blocking-airline-merger-that-could-boost-competition-lower-fares
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Women must defend their single-sex spaces
A woman who works for the Australian Defence Force (ADF), has been asked by the Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Response Office (SeMPRO) to find an alternate bathroom to the female toilet if she finds the presence of a male in the facility unsafe. The only other bathroom in her office is for males.
SeMPRO was set up in response to the recommendation of a review into the treatment of women in the ADF and provides advisory services around sexual misconduct in the workplace to staff and service personnel. The review found that sexual harassment and assault existed in the ADF and that there was ‘significant under-reporting of sexually based incidents from victims because of fear of victimisation; concerns about negative impact on career progression; and personal trauma’.
SeMPRO is meant to ‘coordinate timely responses, victim support, education, policy, practice and reporting for any misconduct of a sexual nature’. SeMPRO considers the violence ‘gender based’, but evidence strongly suggests sexual violence is based largely in sex. The key error in government bodies and structures that considers gender to be behaviourally significantly dominant to sex, is causing a cascading list of problems for progressive and conservative politicians alike.
Nicola Sturgeon this week was so tongue tied over the previously simple question of whether ‘trans women are women’, she looked as if she might overheat in the midst of a bitter Scottish winter. Sturgeon had been forced by public outcry to intervene and place a trans identifying man into the male prison. To me, it felt like press were rebelling from draconian editorial guidelines by reporting the man had allegedly raped women with ‘her penis’, echoing Ricky Gervais’ latest controversial Netflix special.
When the ADF employee, (I’ll call her Jane) contacted SeMPRO to seek assistance, she told them that a male was utilising the female toilet facility she had been provided and he was making her feel unsafe in her work environment. SeMPRO allegedly replied with a warning to Jane, that if the male person identifies as a ‘transgender woman’ it would be ‘discrimination’ to deny them access to the female facility. The social worker from SeMPRO, with she\her pronouns, apparently went on to suggest that Jane ‘utilise a different bathroom’.
‘Female’ is now an identity category throughout the Australian government. All males who identify into the category of female, which they can do with a simple declaration, are given the assumption that they are free of male pattern violence.
According to the Australian Bureau of statistics, 97 per cent of all sex offenders are male. Under the doctrine adopted by all our government departments, it is theologically impossible for a male with a ‘trans’ declaration to exhibit male pattern sexual behaviour. Women, however, are doomed to inhabit the mortal world where physical bodies still matter a great deal in interactions.
The ADF is a ‘principal partner’ of ACON’s Pride Inclusion Program, gaining a ranking of ‘bronze’ in their latest Australian Workplace Equality Index (AWEI) publication, having fallen from the dizzy heights of ‘silver’ in previous years. According to ACON the Pride programs:
‘Help make the places where our community members live, work, study and play more inclusive of LGBTQ people, improving the mental health and wellbeing of our community through the reduction of stigma, discrimination and social exclusion.’
The higher your employer is in the AWEI ranking, the less likely they will be to have any accommodations at all for the special needs of female bodies, and certainly not with the security, privacy, and dignity of a facility that is separate from males. The AWEI has a 43 question ‘scoring guide’ for employers to gain ranking toward equity greatness. Item 15 in the ‘advanced’ section of the guide is the question: ‘We have (or are working towards) having “gender neutral” or “all gender” bathrooms.’
The AWEI will not give equity points to a Unisex facility because it ‘reinforces a binary’. Disability facilities are not to gain points for being ‘gender neutral’ because people with disabilities have specific bodily needs. Catering to the needs of female bodies is also without any points benefits in the AWEI, only feminine gender stereotypes are respected, the stereotypes feminist have long been critiquing.
When told to use another facility, Jane asked the social worker from SeMPRO if she should use the male facility or go home to use her own bathroom, to which she was given no response. Jane further inquired as to how serving female soldiers and officers will fare in the field when they are expected to shower and undress in a common facility. Will women be expected to shower naked in front of males? She was allegedly not given a response, although it is a fair question given the history of the ADF in failing to safeguard women from sexual assault and harassment.
A woman like Jane has no way to make her concerns heard about a trans identified male without the accusation of transphobia. Given that SeMPRO already know that under-reporting occurs because of ‘fear of victimisation; concerns about negative impact on career progression; and personal trauma’, it’s a wonder that they appear to continue the same patterns of silencing and shaming women for speaking up.
Sexual coercion, intimidation, and assault of women by trans identified males is impossible in gender identity theology, in the same way that it once was for a sexual predator to be in the priesthood. This is a religious belief, not a factual one. Not all priests were sex offenders, but the assumption that none of them could be, led to more harm than our society was ultimately able to bear.
The logical extension of trans activism and indeed the constant demand on women and their facilities, is that we should normalise the sight of the penis in a female-assigned public space where one might typically expect female nudity. Women and their children must become comfortable with the presence of males in facilities where they attend to personal bodily needs, of which they have many.
Last year, the Wi Spa controversy, saw a man in the women’s section of a Korean Spa, sport a semi erect penis in front of a naked female child. In response, prominent British trans activist Laurie Penny replied to a mother on Twitter asking what a she might tell a girl child to in such a situation by saying she should tell her daughter, to ‘not to stare at other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude’. This advice aims at shaming the girl child for being uncomfortable around a grown man’s semi-erect genitalia.
The trans identified man in the Wi Spa incident was later confirmed to be a registered sex offender and was charged for indecent exposure, even though he had every legal right under California law to be in the facility. The woman who brought the story to the public’s attention, by confronting the staff on video, was vilified in the press and roundly accused of lying and transphobia.
Women are being forcefully recruited into a project of cultural re-engineering that requires women and girls to bury natural instincts and natural trauma responses in the presence of adult males, even if the men are exposing their genitalia.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates that 1 in 6 women have been sexually assaulted as adults and more than twice that as children. So, if any given female facility is being used by more than five or so people we can safely assume it is being accessed by a survivor of male pattern violence and specifically sexual assault.
Women have a disproportionate need for facilities in the workplace, not just because of the complexities of the female protective instincts and trauma responses, but because of menstruation, pregnancy, breastfeeding, and the kind of problems that can be caused by birth injuries.
Not many women want to talk to their boss about sexual trauma, incontinence, or heavy bleeding. The dignity of attending to our issues in a single sex environment is a luxury we are being forced to abandon along with our knowledge that humans don’t change sex.
The mental health comfort and ongoing safety of women and girls is never a consideration in any modern equity bench-marking or progressive policy. The policies that now dominate the management of women’s facilities, stand in stark contrast to the reality of sex that women face in workplaces every day. Sexual abuse survivors are given no consideration as to their feelings about having males in female spaces, and no impact studies are being done on the mental health of women who are self-excluding from facilities, services and events that now include males.
What we are being asked for, instead, is to present evidence that Self ID is negatively impacting the lives of women and girls with rising cases of sexual assault. What they want to see is the bodies of raped women and children, and that in vast number, and that peer reviewed, before they will even consider reversing harmful loss of sex-based rights and protections for women and girls.
Girls between 10 and 14 are the most vulnerable individuals in our society to sexual assault, and that is just on conviction statistics. These girls are being told by ‘progressive’ government funded sexuality education that their instincts are discriminatory, and that they have no natural or legal right to seek a space that excludes males. Girls are being told that they must trust the word of a male if they tell you they are a female ‘inside’, and to trust self-declared ‘women’ in the same way they trust a woman.
Government funded groups like ACON, who dominate workplace bathroom policy, should be legally held to account, in my opinion, for the experience of women at work and the lies they teach our daughters. Women need to make political trouble for these organisations. Ask your union if they guarantee single sex facilities, and remember, any shame they place on you for asking for a boundary between you and a male is rape culture and the shame belongs to them.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/women-must-defend-their-single-sex-spaces/
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3 February, 2023
LGBTQ+ 'Pride' Is Totalitarian
This past Saturday night, the New York Rangers National Hockey League (NHL) team did something almost unbelievable. Though scheduled to wear LGBTQ "Pride" jerseys during pregame warmups, not one member of the team did so.
Another recent example of defying LGBTQ+ "Pride" jersey demands in the NHL -- which is run by people who are as governed by cowardice as those who run Major League Baseball, the National Football League and the National Basketball Association -- was a player for the Philadelphia Flyers, Ivan Provorov, who refused to wear a "Pride" jersey 10 days earlier.
As reported by Fox News:
"Provorov refused to participate in pregame warmups where players wore Pride-themed jerseys and wielded hockey sticks wrapped in rainbow Pride tape. 'I respect everyone,' he told reporters after they won the actual game against the Anaheim Ducks. 'I respect everybody's choices. My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion.'"
Provorov is Russian Orthodox. (Question: has one Protestant or Catholic NHL player refused to wear a "Pride" jersey?)
Perhaps the New York Rangers organization was aware of the amount of support Provorov received: "Multiple news outlets including the Post Millennial, OutKick and Washington Examiner have since reported that the Philadelphia Flyers Provorov jerseys have been selling out in multiple stores online."
The Flyers and, apparently, the Rangers learned the truth about their fans: the vast majority of them -- and presumably of Americans and Canadians in general -- do not wish to discriminate against those who are LGBTQ+ but they do not want their teams to go on record as expressing "Pride" in those who are LGBTQ+.
This mirrors society at large. The vast majority of Americans believe in tolerance of LGBTQ+ individuals but not in organizations expressing pride in them.
Why is this?
Because "Pride" is not about tolerance. "Pride" is totalitarian. Tolerance is about behavior. "Pride" is about thought.
The proof is that while there are laws governing tolerance, there are no laws governing pride. And if there were, most people would understand that such laws would enter the realm of thought control.
Most people could not articulate the totalitarian nature of LGBTQ+ "Pride." But they do sense it. That is why Provorov's jersey became the Flyers' best-selling jersey. Contrary to the pablum written by virtually every sports writer in North America (there is no more sheeplike group than sports writers), people do not oppose LGBTQ+ jerseys, nights, hockey sticks, illumination and other displays of obsequiousness because they hate gays. They do so because they intuit that this is totalitarian -- that they and their teams are being forced into groupthink.
That is why the Left chose the word "pride" and not "tolerance" -- "pride" is about thought. Unlike liberalism and conservatism, leftism is totalitarian. And totalitarianism controls thought as well as speech.
The only difference between the American Left and communist totalitarianism is opportunity. All leftists want to control speech and eventually thought. Thus, if you treat gays in your daily life just as you treat heterosexuals, it is not enough. You must go much further. You must express "pride" in gays and lesbians -- and not in just gays and lesbians, but in the bisexual, the transgender, the "queer" and the nonbinary. You must not only say, but think, "I am proud of people who consider themselves neither male nor female" -- as if such mental illness is an achievement.
So, too, you must refrain from thinking, let alone saying, that having a mother and father is generally best for a child or that one man married to one woman is best for society. And you must refrain from expressing any reservations about teachers no longer calling their students "boys and girls"; about "drag queen story hours" for 5-year-olds; or about giving hormone blockers to children.
The next time you read about "thought control" in North Korea, understand that North Korea's thought control differs from "Pride" days and nights at sporting events -- and from the rest of the Left -- only by degree. The Left in America, like the Left in North Korea, demands your mind, not just your behavior.
https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2023/01/31/lgbtq-pride-is-totalitarian-n2618937
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Pro-Life Activist Acquitted After FBI Raid in Front of His Kids
On Monday, pro-life activist Mark Houck was found not guilty of federal charges alleging he violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act over an incident outside an abortion clinic in Philadelphia in October 2021.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the FACE prohibits violent, threatening, damaging, and obstructive conduct intended to injure, intimidate, or interfere with the right to seek, obtain or provide reproductive health services.
As Townhall reported, Houck, 48, was accused of shoving a Planned Parenthood abortion escort named Bruce Love in 2021. As a result, Houck was charged with two counts of violating the FACE Act over the alleged “attack of a patient escort.” Reportedly, Houck claimed that the pro-abortion volunteer was verbally harassing his 12-year-old son.
In September, Houck was arrested at his home in front of his wife and children.
Houck’s wife, Ryan-Marie, told LifeSiteNews that a SWAT team of 25 to 30 agents in 15 vehicles surrounded their home in Pennsylvania, with rifles at 7 a.m. Though a U.S. district court previously tossed out the case.
“They started pounding on the door and yelling for us to open it,” Ryan-Marie said, adding that the rifles were “kind of pointed throughout the house.”
As Sarah covered, Houck’s arrest raised questions as pro-life lawmakers, organizations, and the like pointed out that the arrest occurred nearly a year after the incident in front of the abortion clinic took place. Houck pleaded not guilty and faced 11 years in federal prison if convicted, according to the DOJ.
The jury began deliberations on Friday but was “deadlocked.” They resumed deliberations Monday, and Houck was acquitted of the charges.
“We are, of course, thrilled with the outcome,” Houck’s attorney, Peter Breen, said in a statement.
“Mark and his family are now free of the cloud that the Biden administration threw upon them. We took on Goliath - the full might of the United States government - and won,” he added. “The jury saw through and rejected the prosecution's discriminatory case, which was harassment from day one. This is a win for Mark and the entire pro-life movement. The Biden Department of Justice's intimidation against pro-life people and people of faith has been put in its place.”
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The Globalist Elite Are Psychopath Fascists
I have argued that the Left generally is psychopathic
John Pepin
It seems to me, China went from poverty to wealth by abandoning communism and embracing corporatism, not capitalism. Having seen that our globalist elite want to adopt the fascist model globally. The progressives are in fact the American globalist fascist party, renamed. People mistakenly think our rulers hated fascism, because they killed so many of us fighting it, but the reality was, they love fascism, but hated German nationalism more. Hitler thought FDR would come into the war on his side, since they were identical in progressive political ideology, he underestimated the world elite’s hatred of German nationalism however. China continued along the path of socialism, but marshaled by fascism, instead of Marxism. Which the elite believe by manifest destiny is our future as well.
The Chinese Communist Party recognized at the end of the Cold War they had to innovate else die. Communism had been proven a failure by 1990, economic, humanitarian and social. Since it is all about the Party, the CCP innovated. They pretended to allow capitalism, but in fact it was corporatism, (fascism) that they fostered. Even as the discredited academics, who had gone full retard in favor of Marxism, scrambled to find another justification for them to have despotic totalitarian power. They invented post modernism and the CCP adopted fascism. Two names for the same. Since the elite killed so many of our grandparents, to stop German nationalism, but had used anti fascist propaganda to justify it, fascism or corporatism as Goebbels called it, had to be rebranded… into Post modernism.
The elite the world over despise free enterprise. Why? Didn’t they get rich from free enterprise? Why yes, many of them did, but as Joseph Schumpeter so presciently pointed out, the moment someone gets rich by capitalism, they immediately turn around and close the door behind them, (by regulations). So they will not face competition from someone younger and hungrier. If a capitalist has this nature how much more so of someone who despised capitalism from the beginning? The elite know that Marxism is a proven failure. Since they hate the ignorant masses, and indeed all freedoms, they needed to find another system to glom onto. The academics have long said there are “only three” economic systems, capitalism, corporatism and communism. Since capitalism and communism are out…
Elitists think the hoi polloi are expendable. Hitler wrote about how the common man should be willing to sacrifice his life for the State. Very gracious of him to volunteer our lives for his ideas eh? Mao killed millions in his experiments, even as Lenin committed genocide against the Kulaks, to enhance his political power. This is a common thread connecting all authoritarian despots, their willingness to slaughter people. They loath us because they think we are stupidly manipulatable. Like any psychopath does his or her victims. They lack the brain power to understand that most people are busy. We have lives to live, children to raise, jobs to do and a world to build. Many of us simply do not have the time to pour over journals to discern the truth. So the elite use propaganda to manipulate the trusting.
Our elites are moving us inexorably away from free markets, limited government and individualism… and towards a brave new world of corporatist totalitarian oligarchy. Using the fascist model that the elite believe worked so well, economically, in China. Why not? They believe us stupid and malleable, not even human beings but something less… masses. If we can be made to think and act against our own interests, simply because we heard a slogan, then we must be foolish. Else they are psychopaths manipulating people who trust them. What would a rational decent person think? That people who trust the manipulators, deserve it, or that psychotics who use trust to pathologically manipulate people into self harm, are glistening pieces of feces? I know what I think… what do you think?
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The inconvenient virtue of the British Empire
After the recent passing of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and accession of King Charles III, we have heard, among other things, about the evil of the British Empire. While a good faith response to the claim that Her Majesty was the head of a ‘thieving raping genocidal empire’ and that her ‘pain be excruciating’ in her death (while surrounded by loving and adoring family members, the way any one of us would be lucky to die) is unnecessary, it is still worthwhile addressing the vitriol Her Majesty and the British Empire have faced in recent years.
Before any analysis of the virtue of empire can be discussed, it is necessary to understand the origin of the world’s greatest empire. Britain is a small country, slightly larger than Victoria, yet its people ventured to all ends of the globe establishing an empire ‘compris[ing] nearly one-quarter of the world’s land surface and more than one-quarter of its total population’ on which the sun never set by a mere population of 32 million people. By any measure, it is a truly extraordinary feat.
The British Empire provided for their conquered lands. The British spread the English language, the lingua franca of the world. This put all decolonised countries and faithful dominions in a position superior to that of the inhabitants of the French, Russian, Japanese, and any other empire through the very language they read and write. The British also left a legal system to protect victims and enforce contracts – the bedrock and necessary requirement of any democracy. The British spread the virtues of the Christian faith around the globe, giving their peoples a hope of salvation after death.
Put more bluntly in the words of Monty Python, ‘But apart from the language, the legal system, God, medicine, public health, and the roads, what has the Empire ever done for us?’
And of course, there was arguably mankind’s greatest achievement: the costly and forceful ending of slavery in the Empire. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, after the waving of King William IV’s pen, made the sale and ownership of slaves illegal in the Empire, the cost of which to the public purse was extraordinary. King William’s government paid ‘Ł20 million to fund the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 [which] was equivalent to approximately 40 per cent of the Government’s total annual expenditure’. A sum so great that it was only fully repaid in 2015 meaning that in our lifetime, the British were still paying to end slavery.
In enforcing the ban on slavery to end the Atlantic slave trade, the British created the West African Squadron to patrol West Africa, the success of which cannot be overstated. ‘Between 1807 and 1860, the Royal Navy, West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1600 ships involved in the slave trade and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard these vessels.’
In righting the wrongs of slavery, no country has paid so much in blood and treasure, and has been so committed to the ending of the practice than the British Empire. Without the insistence, and costly enforcement of which including the ‘1,587 men [who] died on the West Africa Squadron’ slavery would have continued on at great expense in lives, and in the continued the allowance of evil.
This is enough to prove the value and glory of the British Empire alone, but we must also consider from what the British made their empire. Yes, through war and conquest like all empires, but from the dirt and sticks in faraway lands, armed only with their ingenuity and cunning made a modern society, and left achievements that the peoples before them could not even comprehend or achieve themselves.
The British Empire made the life of its subjects better, and it is a shame, not a celebration, that it is no longer with us today. The British built entire countries up from the ground in faraway lands and provided for the people because it was the right thing to do. Were it not for the British and for their Empire, the world would have been a much worse place. This is undeniable to any honest observer.
With the turn of the 20th century, we saw Britain once again take leading roles taking down the bellicose German Empire and Third Reich, providing freedom and safety to the peoples of Europe, and returning stability to the continent with enormous sacrifice at home and to the Empire.
In combating Germany and its allies in two world wars, Britain sacrificed more than any other nation on Earth. Britain’s debts to the United States ‘remain resolutely unpaid … [worth] Ł866m at 1934 exchange rates’, and suffered, ‘715,000 military deaths (with more than twice that number wounded), the destruction of 3.6 per cent of its human capital, 10 per cent of its domestic and 24 per cent of its overseas assets, and spent well over 25 per cent of its GDP on the war effort between 1915 and 1918’. That war alone cost Britain ‘$48,000,000 a day [in 1941 USD]’.
The second world war not only cost Britain and its dominions 373,372 lives and an additional 6,877 in its other colonies, but also its pride. Roosevelt urged Churchill to ‘consider dispatching the British fleet to Canada or the United States in case of German invasion’ calling German control of the fleet ‘the end of hope’ for the war. Additionally, the Destroyers for Bases Agreement required the surrender of British imperial territory to the US for 40 ancient US Destroyers (and if that was not enough, they must all be renamed after American towns and cities).
The world wars shrank and ended the Empire, made Britain poorer, and replaced on the world stage with a new global hegemony. All of this was in the service of combating evil and bringing Britain’s ideals to the world – even if it meant the destruction of the very Empire it was acting to defend.
While the end of the Empire is a shame, there could be no nobler cause to end it. God Save the King and thank God for the British Empire!
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/the-inconvenient-virtue-of-the-british-empire/
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2 February, 2023
Blackwashing
Just a side issue to something Malcolm Smith mentions below: The "Greek" heroes in Homer were repeatedly described as blond or having golden hair: ?????? ?? ????? ??? ???????? …. That is very rare in modern Greece. Modern Greeks are usually swarthy with black hair
Felice Vinci has solved that puzzle by pointing out that the events recorded by Homer probably took place in the Baltic many years before Homer was recorded. The attack on Troy was the work not of Greeks as we know them but of proto-Vikings. It was decribed by a Greek but that was not where the action originally took place
A further instance of the distortions that Malcom mentions can be found here, where a British historian claims that there was an African population in Britain during the Roman empire. Also see here
Over the last few years, I've noticed a peculiar trend in Australian TV ads. They are constantly featuring African Americans. The trouble is, despite the flood of non-white immigration, sub-Saharan Africans - negroes - remain the rarest of racial groups in this country. There are more full blooded Aborigines in Australia than negroes. There are more South Sea Islanders. There are more of every race with the exception of Eskimos and Amerindians. At first it seemed the ads were of big cosmopolitan brands, and were made in the US, but now I see them more and more in ads for Australian companies. I don't know where they get the actors. They are clearly not African Australians.
There are two reasons I say this. The first is the simple rarity of potential actors. The second is that they don't look like African Australians. A high proportion of those who actually are here are refugees from the Southern Sudan, and these belong to the Nilotic branch of the Negroid race: very tall, very slim, and very dark. They are as remarkable as they are impossible to overlook, and none of them appear on Australian TV ads.
Of course, in Africa they have the reverse problem. The Nigerian Government got tired of the airwaves being dominated by American company ads full of white faces, that they passed a law requiring television ads to have only black faces. I wonder what would happen if we took a similar attitude.
Now, before we go further, I now have to make a point which shouldn't need to be made. Some ignorant people are bound to take umbrage at the use of a single, honourable word, "negro" instead of triple word term like "Sub-Saharan African". Promoted in the antebellum years of the US by abolitionists and freed slaves as a substitute for "nigger", it remained the standard polite term for the race for all and sundry. Martin Luther King called himself a negro.
Back in 1974 the residential college where I was staying contained a large number of student teachers from all over the Commonwealth. I shall always remember a Uganda commenting jocularly to one of his compatriots, "You're not supposed to say 'negro' any more, but 'black'."
At that point, my friend, Rachel, who was as black as the Ace of Spades, objected. "I am not a black!" she asserted. "I am a negro!" Whether she is now reconciled to the use of "African American" I don't know. I suppose you could say that Guyana, which is where she came from, is American.
Now, back to the subject. These advertisements are a sign of a peculiar new phenomenon: "blackwashing", the insertion of black people into places such as movies, literature, and history where they don't or didn't exist, usually by displacing white people. In Australia it is not easy to pull off, but in the rest of the world it is going full swing.
Certain people get upset by "whitewashing" i.e. using a white actor to play a character which was non-white in the original story. But they don't seem to have any problem with the reverse.
Thus, the 2022 movie, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris was a really delightful experience, but it made a few changes to Paul Gallico's 1958 novel. For a start, Mrs Harris' best friend was a black woman. In 1957 London this was theoretically possible, but unlikely, and not in accordance with the book. Even more egregious was the black Dior models. Not only did they not exist at the time, but they could not. Dresses must co-ordinate with the wearer's complexion. What looks stunning on a dark skinned model would be pedestrian against pale skin, and vice versa. (I noticed none of the prospective buyers where dark.)
The British 2022 remake of All Creatures Great and Small doesn't actually have black people in major roles, but you see them move across stage as if they were part of the background. In a pre-war Yorkshire village? I don't think so.
And whatever was the management of Disney thinking when they cast a black woman as the lead in their 2023 live action version of The Little Mermaid? Now, I am sure that Africa has its own legends of humanoid sea creatures. However, this is a Danish fairy story, based on Northern European legends, and over there mermaids are always depicted as white. Also this was a remake of Disney's 1989 cartoon of the same name, and in that film, the mermaid was white. The change of colour must have been deliberate, yet they have the hide to accuse us of racism! This is gaslighting.
What about the 2018 BBC/Netflix series, Troy: Fall of a City, in which Achilles is black? He was a Greek, for heaven's sake! And according to Homer, he was blond. [In Greek either xanth? or khrusos]
Currently in the UK there is a stage production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in which all four Pevensey children are black. Remember, these were English children evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz. Right now the BBC is producing a remake of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, in which the lawyer is black and a couple of other characters chosen from other racial minorities, all of which were exceptionally rare in England at the time.
Simon Webb, a vlogger who has picked up a number of these absurdities, has pointed out that, although there are far more people from the Indian sub-continent in Britain than negroes, they seldom get a look-in. However, Jules Verne's 1872 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days concerns the adventures of Phineas Fogg, an Englishman, and his French servant, Passepartout as Fogg attempts to win a bet circling the world in the said eighty days. On the way, they save an Indian widow from being burnt on her husband's pyre and take her with them. In the end, Fogg marries her. Here's a good interracial marriage we can all admire. But in the latest television incarnation of the story, the Indian woman is dispensed with, to be replaced by a black British reporter, who could never have existed in 1872, who accompanies them all the way.
Blackwashing has reached a point where the authors clearly have complete contempt for their audience. The 2021 Netflix production of Vikings: Valhalla presents us with a black queen of a small Viking kingdom. Do they really think we don't know how preposterous this is? The backstory they tried to palm off to us was that her Viking grandfather met his royal African bride on a trading expedition to Alexandria, Egypt. Egypt is not black. The chances of a black princess from the south turning up in Alexandria is close to zero, and the chances of a white Viking leader falling in love with one even closer.
It gets even worse when historical figures are involved. Take Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, and the mother of Queen Elizabeth I. In 2021 the UK's Channel 5 decided to have her played by a woman who is not just olive skinned, or even slightly swarthy, but completely, unadulterated, full-blooded black. Do they think we are complete idiots to accept this? Once more, they tried to gaslight us by insisting that the resulting outrage was "racist".
Another story doing the rounds is that Queen Caroline, the wife of George III of England, was, despite all the official portraits to the contrary, "black". The argument is that one of her ancestors 15 generations removed, was a Moorish concubine of a Portuguese king (maybe). Talk about the "one drop" rule! 15 generations means diluting the bloodline more than 30,000 times, assuming no inbreeding. Besides which, the historian who made this "discovery" apparently doesn't know the difference between a Moor and a Blackamoor. The Moors of the Iberian peninsula were Berbers and Arabs from Morocco and related parts of North Africa, and these people were, and remain, white - olive skinned, like the Portuguese themselves, but white nevertheless.
Netflix has now come up with another blackwashing series, Bridgerton, set in upper class Regency England, commencing 1813. Here again Queen Charlotte is shown as black, or at least one quarter negro, but they also did a lot of "colour-blind casting", which is code for blackwashing, for arbitrarily portraying lords and ladies as black. Again they gaslight us as racists for criticizing the "historical inaccuracy", which they put in scare quotes as if it weren't real.
This time, however, a historian did attempt to justify it. True, she admits, there were no black lords and ladies, but there were a lot of others lower down the chain. There were "thousands" of slaves brought over by their masters from the West Indies, and "thousands" of black Loyalist soldiers from the failed American Revolutionary War, who then settled in England.
This would have come as a surprise to A.B.C. Merriman-Labor, an educated black man from Sierra Leone who, in 1909, wrote an amusing book, Britons through Negro Spectacles (there's that word again!), in which he declared that there were only about 100 negroes in London. Not all of these would have been residents; many would have been visiting sailors etc. Photographs of crowds during late Victorian and Edwardian times reveal that England was racially homogenous at the time. Coloured immigration really only took off after World War II, and even then was more of a trickle than a flood until the 1980s.
Here we have a clue to the motives of the (mostly white) people responsible for blackwashing. In one of the episodes of "Dr Who" the Doctor went back to Victorian England and his (coloured) companion commented on the unexpected number of black people in London. The Doctor said they had been "whitewashed" out of history. No! They were being blackwashed into it. One of the writers, in a rare moment of candour, admitted that they were falsifying history, but they were showing history as it ought to have been.
In the U.S. there is a tendency among the politically correct to try to place various minorities in every venue available, no matter how inappropriate it might be. In the U.K. their motives are worse: knowing that many Britons resent the way their country has been transformed without their consent, they are trying to indoctrinate the younger generation with the lie that the U.K. has always been multi-racial. Now, if only I could divine the motives of the Australian ad-men.
No doubt certain elements will denounce me as "racist" for this article. People with such a mentality are immune to logic, but it would be helpful if they told us what their expanded definition of "racism" might be, and why it is a bad thing.
I have had African friends in the past. I have nothing against Africans in their place. And what is their place? Simply the places where they live, and use to live, in the correct proportions. Is that too much to ask? Stop colonising our advertisements, literature, and history.
https://malcolmsmiscellany.blogspot.com/2023/02/blackwashing.html
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Democrats’ Spending Threatens American Standard of Living
The average American home is almost 2,200 square feet. An average home in the United Kingdom is a minuscule 818 square feet, in Finland 880 square feet and in Germany less than 1,200 square feet. Cramped.
Americans have bigger houses and a higher material standard of living — more appliances, clothing and cars — largely because they can keep more of what they earn. The U.S. is a low-tax nation — for now.
Europeans, in comparison, have to fork over much more of their earnings to the government. They enjoy paid maternity leave, free health care, nearly free college and many other government benefits. But they settle for a lower standard of living.
Are Americans willing to settle for less, too? As Washington politicians fight over the debt ceiling and whether to limit government spending, the real issue is whether Americans are ready to pay more taxes and have less spending money in order to finance European-style government benefits.
In America, two-thirds of the nation’s gross domestic product is spent on things people want for themselves — cars, computers, housing, furniture, vacations, you name it. In Europe, only 50 percent goes for these things. Government sucks up the other half.
Workers in Europe spend half the workday toiling to prop up their government’s socialistic programs.
Advocates for a liberal welfare state slam our materialistic lifestyles — our giant refrigerators with built-in ice machines, and in-sink garbage disposals.
Bloomberg columnist Allison Schrager deplores Americans’ “overconsumption” and argues we should learn to live like Europeans. That’s her opinion.
Americans who disagree, and don’t want to trade their take-home pay for cradle-to-grave benefits, need to speak up.
Democratic politicians won’t admit there’s a trade-off. They want you to believe taxing “the rich” will pay for big government programs without taking a dollar out of your pocket.
President Biden told Steamfitters Local 602 last week: “As long as I’m president, no one making less than $400,000 will have a single penny of their taxes raised. Period.”
That’s the Democrats’ script. They’re hawking magic. There aren’t enough rich people to pay for all the programs Biden Democrats are pushing.
Manhattan Institute economist Brian Riedl added up all the extra revenue that would be produced by Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent tax on income over $10 million, plus Senator Warren’s proposed corporate tax rate hikes and payroll tax hikes, and Senator Sanders’ wealth and estate tax measures.
Together, these soak-the-rich proposals can’t close the current budget deficit, much less finance the Biden nanny state agenda.
Paying for that agenda would actually require draining the middle class. “If America wants to spend like Europe, it must tax like Europe — and that means large payroll and value-added taxes on the middle class,” says Mr. Riedl.
That brings us to the drama in Washington, D.C., over House Republican demands that any debt ceiling hike be linked to future limits on government spending. Senator Schumer opposes any conditions, bashing Republicans for “hostage-taking.”
Mr. Schumer’s out of touch. A staggering 86 percent of registered voters polled say Democrats should agree to negotiate, including 44 percent from Mr. Schumer’s party.
Fifty-eight percent of voters say the Biden administration has been “reckless and loose” with people’s money, including 44 percent of Democrats, according to the same Harvard/Harris poll.
Treasury Secretary Yellen claims raising the debt ceiling should be automatic: “This is something you can't negotiate or bargain about.” That’s B.S.
History proves that the expiration of the debt ceiling, which happens every year or two, is the biggest opportunity to rein in Washington spendaholics.
Over the last 25 years, Congress has hammered out eight laws to control spending. All eight were tied to debt ceiling hikes.
At stake in this current debt ceiling struggle is preserving what sets the United States apart from Europe.
In the United States, working people get to keep most of what they earn and decide how to spend it.
Don’t let the Washington pols treat your paycheck as if it belongs to them.
https://www.nysun.com/article/democrats-spending-threatens-american-standard-of-living
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Bibi makes a strangely compelling case for his own necessity
Benjamin Netanyahu remains the king of Israeli politics and the critical figure in the Middle East.
In a truly masterful hour-long interview with CNN, the Israeli Prime Minister revealed, without quite explicitly using these words, that Israel has undertaken a series of drone attacks against Iranian weapons facilities.
These attacks are designed both to serve Israel’s interests and to hinder Iran’s ability to supply drones and other weapons to Russia for its use against Ukraine.
Israel faces a period of intensified violence in the Palestinian territories, along with some dangerous internal polarisation, but Netanyahu looks like a politician in the box seat who has faced all these problems before and knows what he’s doing.
CNN’s worldview is left liberal and it’s not remotely sympathetic to Israel, but the condition of the interview was obviously that Netanyahu be allowed a reasonable chance to finish his answers and that the dialogue be polite. TV networks should try this style with subjects they don’t view sympathetically more often.
Netanyahu confronts a sea of troubles. Some nine Palestinians, including one certainly innocent civilian, were killed a recent anti-terror operation in Jenin. Seven innocent Jewish worshippers were murdered in a terrorist attack outside a Jerusalem synagogue and a couple of days later a Palestinian child shot and wounded another group of Jewish Israelis.
Recently 100,000 Israelis protested at Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms. And his right-of-centre coalition certainly contains a couple of unsavoury characters.
Netanyahu dealt with all these issues convincingly and pragmatically. He has his pluses and minuses but Israel has never produced a more fluent political leader.
Israel was never more peaceful or safe, Netanyahu pointed out, than in his previous 10 years as PM. There was a marked increase in terrorist incidents in the territories under the previous Government and now something similar was happening in east Jerusalem.
Israel has formally annexed east Jerusalem but Palestinians claim it as their own territory. Most nations regard east Jerusalem’s sovereignty as contested.
Netanyahu was clear that Israeli security forces would increase counter-terrorist operations both in the territories and in east Jerusalem, but this was not, he said, to escalate conflict but to reduce violence.
The Israeli government contains a couple of politicians who can legitimately be called far-right and who have said in the past unacceptable and deeply offensive things.
Netanyahu made three points in response. A lot of people say weird things when they don’t have power but moderate when they do have power. The last Israeli coalition government, notionally of the centre-left, contained a party which owed allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood. Nobody criticised their presence in the coalition, instead it was seen as a sign of new inclusiveness. Israel’s hyper proportional representation system does make some strange coalitions.
But, Netanyahu said, he has a long record of running coalition governments effectively. He was in charge and his government would not be embracing extremist policies. In this, Netanyahu actually makes a strangely compelling case for his own necessity.
On judicial reform, Netanyahu pointed out his key change is to have governments, with a panel, appoint judges, just as they do in the Australia, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and almost every other democracy. Israel has the peculiar situation in which judges appoint their own successors. Judicial activism has become extreme in Israel and judicial power has become unaccountable. In moving Israel towards common Western practice he was not destroying democracy and he was further open to compromise on the reforms.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has just visited Israel, and while he said the obligatory things about a two-state solution, his visit was one of solidarity with Israel, not opposition to it.
Netanyahu made it clear that the contemporary version of a two-state solution, which he would be prepared to negotiate, must involve Israel retaining security control over the new state. That would not be perfect sovereignty for the new state. But, and here Netanyahu’s point is incontestable, when Israel walked out of Gaza and southern Lebanon it didn’t get peace. Instead the territories became ruled by terrorist groups — Hamas and Hezbollah respectively - — which have fired tens of thousands of rockets at Israel.
His priorities in office, Netanyahu said, are: thwarting Iran’s nuclear weapons program; forging more peace treaties with Israel’s Arab neighbours; and boosting Israel’s already vibrant economy.
That’s a pretty plausible program from a pretty plausible Israeli leader.
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‘Being a controversial figure is not a crime’: Andrew Tate’s lawyer defends jailed influencer
Jailed influencers Andrew Tate and his brother are controversial but have committed no crime, their new lawyer says.
The former kickboxer and Tristan Tate are being held in a Romanian jail as part of a rape and human trafficking probe, The US Sun reports.
Tina Glandian, defending the pair, said they should be presumed innocent until proven guilty as no charges have been laid.
She said on Piers Morgan Uncensored the brothers have been subject to “huge injustice” after their arrest on December 29.
Tina, who has defended the likes of Chris Brown and pop star Kesha, told the Sky News Australia show: “This is a huge injustice as we see it, they should not be detained at this point.
“They are controversial public figures, but that is not a crime.
“At this point we have not been provided any proof of their crimes, nor have they been charged. “So I would ask that people presume them innocent as they are.”
Andrew, 36, and Tristan, 34, were arrested alongside two others in Bucharest on December 29.
As well as the human trafficking and rape probe, they were also held on suspicion of forming an organised crime group.
Piers went on to highlight an allegation made by a woman who claims Andrew Tate told her in a voice message: “I love raping you.”
Tina said allegations presented outside of a court of law must be questioned for validity.
The lawyer added: “Somebody could easily set someone up by saying they have certain fantasies.
“You can’t take a text message out of context. You have to keep all of that in mind.”
Romanian prosecutors launched their investigation last March after one of the brothers allegedly raped a trafficked woman.
The brothers are accused of recruiting their victims by seducing them and falsely claiming to want a relationship.
The victims were then allegedly taken to properties outside Bucharest where it is claimed they were forced “through physical violence, mental intimidation and coercion” to make porn.
Two Romanian women in custody, Georgiana Naghel and Alexandra Luana Radu, are suspected of having acted as the brothers’ accomplices.
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1 February, 2023
The contact hypothesis rides again
In the Financial Times, no less. See below. It's an old bit of Leftist optimism that has never had more than equivocal support. There have in fact been research findings that say the opposite to the theory: Sometimes getting to know minority groups is so far from being beneficial that it actually causes you to dislike that group.
And most of the "findings" in support of the theory have in fact been guesswork. People have observed a favourable attitude change and guessed that it is due to increased interpersonal contact. The report below is an example of that. It boldly says, "The key, in both cases: everyday contact".
How do they know that? They don't. They claim, for instance, that increased interaction with homosexuals is the cause of a more favourable attitude towards them in recent years. That may not be what is at work at all. The more favourable attitude to homosexuals may simply be a result of the flood of Leftist propaganda valorizing them. Or it may be due to the decline in Christian belief and its concomitant claim that homosexuality is an abomination unto the Lord. Determining cause and effect in the matter is just guesswork.
But it does not have to be guesswork. I started research into the question in 1974 and 40 years ago I presented both a review of the existing findings on the question plus some new research that actually tested whether the alleged relationship existed. I was not content with guesswork. I directly tested the hypothesis by survey research.
What I found is what we should have suspected all along: It depends on the situation. Sometimes contact can be beneficial to intergroup relations and sometimes the effect can be extremely negative: Getting to know some groups better can actually heighten dislike towards them. In particular, increased contact may cause groups that really are problematic to be seen more negatively rather than more favourably. Sorry about that
Just after midnight on April 1 2001 the world’s first four gay marriages were sealed in Amsterdam town hall. Five months later, the world changed again, this time for the worse: on September 11, planes hit the Twin Towers.
The two events put two minority groups, gay people and immigrants, on opposing trajectories. Gay people rapidly gained acceptance across the west. Today, 32 countries recognise same-sex marriage, and hardly anybody to the left of the US Supreme Court still worries about the issue. By contrast, after 9/11, immigrants, already stigmatised as the “other”, fell under suspicion of terrorism. But in recent years we’ve seen a quiet yet momentous shift: immigrants are becoming accepted as gay people were. The key, in both cases: everyday contact.
It was the American psychologist Gordon Allport who theorised, in the 1950s, that contact could reduce prejudice. He’d been particularly struck by data on the rare cases when black and white servicemen had served together (against the rules) in the US Army in the second world war. When that happened, the number of white servicemen expressing prejudice against black people was nine times lower than in segregated army companies.
As more gay people came out and demanded their rights, straight people realised they had gay acquaintances, friends, even children
Contact theory has since established itself as one of the most robust insights in social science. Why did acceptance of homosexuality in the US jump fivefold from 1973 to 2016? Thanks to increased contact, argues sociologist Daniel DellaPosta of Penn State University. As more gay people came out and demanded their rights, straight people realised they had gay acquaintances, friends, even children. The case study was Ohio senator Rob Portman, an opponent of gay marriage who announced his “change of heart” after his son came out. Gay people entered what philosopher Peter Singer called the “expanding circle of altruism”.
Now that’s happening with immigrants. Contact theory works when the contact is positive. If you only see immigrants from a distance – perhaps speaking a foreign language across the street – your fleeting interactions might increase your prejudices. But, in many places, positive contact has become an everyday experience as people of immigrant origin entered schools, workplaces and formerly native neighbourhoods. I see this with my children: whereas I was raised in an almost entirely white small town, they have grown up in multiracial Paris, go to school with kids of different ethnicities and take the mix for granted. Contact theory is how they live.
Surveys show a remarkable growth of acceptance of immigrants across the west. “Attitudes towards migrants across Europe have become more positive year-on-year for the last 20 years or so,” sum up James Dennison and Andrew Geddes of the European University Institute. British attitudes to immigration “transformed” positively from 2002 through 2018, says the Institute for Public Policy Research. French racial tolerance is at an all-time high, according to the annual survey by the National Consultative Commission of the Rights of Man. Over nine in 10 Germans are satisfied with the living together of people from different cultural backgrounds, reports the Sachverständigenrat für Integration und Migration, an independent research body. No wonder the European Commission plans to make legal migration easier.
Meanwhile, in the US in 2020, the percentage of Americans saying they wanted less immigration was the lowest since Gallup began polling on the issue in 1965. “Attitudes toward immigration are more positive now than at almost any time in US history,” says Ran Abramitzky of Stanford. These trends continued through apparently earth-moving events like the 2008 financial crisis, Europe’s migrant influx of 2015, Brexit, Donald Trump’s election and Covid-19. Other trends have helped. Fear of Islamic terrorism is giving way to fear of far-right violence. Labour shortages, especially in healthcare, are creating demand for more immigrants, and that will only increase as western populations age.
Of course, some people, especially older ones who rarely mix with immigrants, still fear multiculturalism. They have grown more vocal and politically organised precisely because they feel they’re losing the argument.
These anti-immigration movements have had to seek their scapegoats further afield. Instead of bashing migrants who already live in their countries, they now bash those trying to arrive through illegal routes. Desperate people crossing the Channel or the Mexican border, seen only in chaotic TV images, haven’t yet benefited from contact theory.
But I suspect they’ll get there, as will other contemporary scapegoats. Meanwhile, one pariah group continues to live happily outside the circle of altruism: liberal elites, who have practically no contact with the people who despise them.
https://www.ft.com/content/514617c5-dc74-4438-957f-0bb99535f80f
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The Left Is Fueling a New Racism
It’s my firm belief that the number of Americans holding racist views is small, whether white, black, or Hispanic. At this point in our history, the vast majority of Americans try to live up to the challenge delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. We keep moving toward the hard-fought dream he envisioned of an America where a citizen’s character would mean more than the color of their skin.
We are a different country today. I’ve presented leadership programs to hundreds of companies over the last 40 years. I’ve seen the work they’ve done to embrace diversity and advance capable employees and leaders from all races. Many minority members have advanced and earned their rightful place in making this great American economy work. At a time we should be celebrating and furthering our progress, our American culture is under attack from the left. Angry race-baiters are doing everything they can to increase our racial divide through pushing the 1619 Project, CRT, and BLM. They make extreme racist claims with a clear goal—to expand the government gravy train that only racial “victims” can justify.
I lived in pre-civil rights Atlanta where there were separate schools, separate bathrooms, and the baseball team was the Atlanta Crackers! Today, it’s more likely that leftist blacks are the ones who want separate schools, separate rights, and special reparations for their race.
As one anonymous post asserted, “Only in America can an ethnic group of black awareness month, black holiday, black only colleges, black only dating sites, and black only bars and clubs…and turn around and call everyone else racists!” You don’t have to look far to find evidence of extreme black racist demands.
In California, the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee released a report calling on the city to pay every qualifying black California resident $5 million and absolve them of their outstanding personal debt. This is madness. California was a free state and did not condone slavery, but the committee is doing all it can to justify reparations: "While neither San Francisco, nor California, formally adopted the institution of chattel slavery, the tenets of segregation, white supremacy and systematic repression and exclusion of Black people were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement." To the left, this “failure” warrants millions of innocent California citizens being forced to pay higher taxes to fund exorbitant benefits to one race they haven’t abused in any way.
In Washington, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) is proposing a law that could codify black racism in America. There is a common mantra in her political speeches: White America is defined by institutional racism, systemic racism, white supremacy, and white nationalism. She attacks “white” America and seems to see the clan in the face of every white citizen. Such general attacks are evidence of a new racism—black racism.
Read for yourself Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s proposed law, the Leading Against White Supremacy Act of 2023. The legislation promises to criminalize criticism of any minority that is subsequently used to incite anybody else to commit a hate crime. The law reads: “A conspiracy to engage in white supremacy inspired hate crimes shall be determined to exist between two or more persons, at least one of whom published material advancing white supremacy, white supremacist ideology, antagonism based on ‘replacement theory,’ or hate speech that vilifies or is otherwise directed against any non-White person or group could, as determined by a reasonable person, motivate actions by a person predisposed to engaging in a white supremacy inspired crime.”
This is a chilling attack on freedom of speech against one race—caucasians. In short, if you criticize a minority and another person states that your statement was all the motivation needed to do a hate crime, you may be jailed because your criticism “motivated” a hate crime you did not commit. Get the message—be silent and conform or we will put you away.
Black racism is real and just as evil as white racism. Both must be soundly rejected by responsible citizens. As a Christian, I affirm my Savior’s claim that all God’s children matter! No responsible citizen should be shamed into silence by the irresponsible racist attacks of the left. Be proud of yourself and of America. Whether black, brown or white, success as a small business person or advancement as a good employee had to be earned by hard work, long hours, and diligent sacrifice. As with Americans for generations, it was not handed to you. You didn’t depend on government handouts to get ahead, you had to find a way to earn your own American Dream.
Reparations will never happen! Politicians can’t even afford to fund the entitlements they’ve already promised. Special black racist demands are unethical, divisive, and risk fueling a new racism backlash. Politicians from the left keep making the promises to fuel racist anger and secure special interest donations and votes.
Don’t fall for their racist rants and demands. Depending on government entitlements is never the answer. Instead, get busy following the models and learning from citizens of all races who have made America work for themselves and their families.
Let’s reclaim the American Dream Martin Luther King, Jr. affirmed. Do not judge a fellow citizen by the color of their skin. Celebrate the character of the vast majority of good American citizens you meet. Keep rejecting racism of any kind. It’s time to stand proud and applaud hard work and success wherever we find it, no matter what the race. May it always be so in this great republic we treasure…America!
https://townhall.com/columnists/terrypaulson/2023/01/30/the-left-is-fueling-a-new-racism-n2618841
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George Santos is our bastard
In the 1950s, Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza kept his country in the anti-communist camp. FDR's Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, once said "Somoza's a bastard!" And Roosevelt replied, "Yes, but he's our bastard."
Let’s make no mistake – perhaps the most important and consequential Republican of the current era is one George Santos. AKA Anthony Devolder. AKA drag queen Kitara Ravache. He is an absolute hero, and he has done more for the cause of conservatism than a thousand GOP suits parroting Cato Institute and/or Chamber of Commerce clichés.
Sure, he has a track record of shocking scams, scores and shenanigans that would make a lesser man (assuming that’s how he’s identifying this week) blush. Not George – perhaps the greatest politician to bear that first name since the father of our country. No, in spite of his controversies and creative CV, he ran for a Democrat-leaning seat and he won. His vision and perseverance, and refusal to take “No” or “That’s a violation of federal law” for an answer, won us an extra House slot. George Santos is now 20% of the Republican majority. What makes it even sweeter is that he was running in the pompous, failing New York Times’s backyard and the tacky tabloid never figured out that this guy was a one-man crime spree. He fooled them all. Way to go, George, if that is your real name.
Naturally, the Democrats are in a tizzy over the recent revelations about his unusual past. Aided by the regime media, they are demanding that he resign his seat, which means a special election and a likely replacement by some pinko communist. A few Fredocons are joining in the chorus, but our boy George is hanging tough, to quote New Kids on the Block, of which I am pretty sure George will be shown to have once claimed to have been a founding member.
And, more importantly, Kevin McCarthy is refusing to call for him to resign. This is huge. This is momentous. This is long overdue. The Speaker is playing by the New Rules, and using them as an over-sized suppository for the Democrats.
The Old Rules were pretty clear. As a politician, you were pretty much expected to be a dishonest schmuck. You just had to portray yourself as not being one, and you had to hide your lies, dissembling, and corruption sufficiently to create an air of deniability. We all knew they were rotten. They just had to have the decency to not rub their rottenness in our faces and we could all go on pretending that the sordid business of politics was not really that sordid.
Under the Old Rules, George Santos would be hounded out of office at the first major scandal revelation. But the Old Rules have been replaced. See, the Old Rules would have required the Democrats to police their own at the cost of a short-term political loss – though not much of one, since their most vivid villains come from deep blue states that happily re-elect their own bad guys. Let’s review the rogues gallery of dirtbags whose retention led to the New Rules that keep George Santos a congressman…
There’s Dick Blumenthal, the hero of the Tet Offensive. He was never near Vietnam, but that did not stop him from preening about like a war hero. He’s from Connecticut, and the Connecticutters did not mind. Back to the Senate goes Fauxdi Murphy!
In the nearby pseudo-state of Rhode Island is Sheldon Whitehouse. He allegedly belongs to an all-white beach club. But that’s cool with his Democrat constituents. Back to the Senate he goes to pontificate about white supremacy, of which he is an expert.
Let’s go across the fruited plain to California, where Eric Swalwell allegedly bared his Fang Fangs. He’s still in Congress, though not on the Intel Committee anymore. California Senator Feinstein had a Chinese spy for a driver for two decades, but she can plead lack of intent on account of the fact that she is totally senile. It’s actually sad.
Heading back, let’s stop in Minnesota to attend Ilhan Omar’s combination wedding anniversary and family reunion. Then on to New Jersey to visit Senator Robert Menendez. You don’t even want to know what that guy is into, though the feds keep trying (not very hard) to find out.
And then back up north again to say “How” to Senate squaw Elizabeth Warren. Actually, for Massachusetts, reelecting a fake Indian is nothing. For decades they reelected Ted Kennedy and he killed a chick.
So please, tell us more about how George Santos is diminishing the awesome credibility of our Congress. Explain how his presence lessens the mighty moral firepower these solons wield. Enlighten us on why this petty chiseler and idiosyncratic LGBTQA+%^b>?]&G trendsetter – hilariously, one accusation is that he is faking being gay – is unfit to sit among the rest of the perverts, bunko artists, and fabulists in Congress. Frankly, the addition of George Santos to the 534 other legislators probably raises their average decency.
The continued presence of George Santos – I hope he serves every single day of his term and I am not ruling out strongly endorsing him for reelection – is a welcome and refreshing repudiation of the Democrats’ use of cheesy double-standard to screw over the GOP. “You have to repudiate him!” they cry. Nah, he’s a sure GOP vote. Do you think he’s going to go off the reservation – sorry Liz – and vote against the GOP that’s backing him? Ha! If Kevin McCarthy asks him to come help move his apartment, George is so in debt he’ll do it. Do they really think we will lose 20% of our majority because George Santos was naughty? Not happening.
George Santos is a potent middle finger in the face of our enemies. We are not going to apply one set of rules to ourselves that helps Democrats while the Democrats apply another set of rules to themselves that helps Democrats. The age of sap Republicans is over. And if you want to go back to the Old Rules, we’ll know it when we see Blumenthal doing the duffle bag drag and Warren walking off into the sunset down the trail of tears.
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2023/01/30/george-santos-legend-n2618820
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Court win for Christian foster care applicants is a victory for common sense and a fair go
In 2017, West Australian couple Byron and Keira Hordyk were rejected as ‘unsafe’ by fostering agency, Wanslea Family Services, to provide foster care to vulnerable infants and toddlers in the child protection system. Their application was rejected because of their traditional Christian views on marriage and sex.
Five years later, the Hordyks have won their legal case against Wanslea and been awarded damages. The WA State Administrative Tribunal found that Wanslea had treated the Hordyks unfairly on the basis of their religious beliefs.
This decision is good for all Australians. The Hordyk decision is a victory for common sense and provides an antidote to the polarised public discourse in Australian culture.
While the Hordyks are deservedly vindicated by this decision, the real losers in this case are vulnerable children who were robbed of the opportunity to be placed in a loving, caring, and stable home.
This landmark case demonstrates how societal hostility to religion – and especially Christianity – is increasing and is a threat to common sense pluralism. Christians who established, grew, and then gave to Western cultures their key social institutions such as hospitals, universities, aged care facilities, and foster care agencies are now facing increasing exclusion from those very institutions.
In its decision, the Tribunal firmly rebuffed Wanslea’s assertions that their rejection of the Hordyks had nothing to do with their religious beliefs.
The evidence showed that Wanslea takes a flexible approach to approving carers who are smokers and can’t foster babies, carers with disabilities, or unique home circumstances that made them unsuitable for certain types of children. However, when Wanslea was faced with conservative Christians, it changed the rules.
The Hordyks hold to the views of their Church on sex and morality.
Wanslea considered the Hordyks’ views unacceptable and rejected their fostering application – not because they were unsuitable to provide a temporary home for vulnerable toddlers, but because they held unacceptable religious views now out of step with the prevailing Australian cultural norms. This is increasingly common with many Australian institutions.
The Tribunal found that key Wanslea evidence on this point was ‘avoidant, defensive and crafted to cast events in the most favourable light for Wansela’. There was religious discrimination which they attempted to cover up as ‘business as usual’.
The Hordyks are not alone in falling afoul of such ideological purity tests. In 2022, Andrew Thorburn at the Essendon AFL club was forced to resign because he held the wrong views. In 2021, the Australian Christian Lobby had venue bookings cancelled by the WA government because their Christian beliefs were inconsistent with ‘diversity, equality, and inclusion’. In 2020, the WA government refused to give Pastor Margaret Court’s Perth charity the funding needed for a freezer truck to distribute food to the needy because of her publicly stated views on marriage.
This increasing animosity to religion can be attributed to a variety of potential factors: the increasing secularisation of Australian society generally, the simplistic and sensational reporting of religious issues in the media, the ascendancy and triumph of LGBTQ+ advocacy in Australian culture, the hard fusion in popular discourse of Christianity with the evils of colonialism or the fragmentation and polarisation of cultural dialogue in a social media age.
Whatever the causes, these cultural trends should be of concern to all Australians. While Christians are the target today, there is no reason why this cultural trajectory will not progress to declare other social and political convictions as anathema and beyond the pale, both religious and irreligious.
The recent Essendon public apology to Andrew Thorburn and the Hordyk decision are a welcome dose of balance and common sense in an otherwise febrile cultural environment.
The tenacity of the Hordyks in seeking vindication through a gruelling 5-year process demonstrates that there is value in pushing matters to Courts past the loud cultural voices that have captured many of Australia’s institutions and which have declared Christianity anathema and unsafe.
These voices seek to impose a narrow secular vision of Australia rather than a pluralistic multicultural vision of Australia.
For Australia to flourish, it requires the participation of a variety of people with diverse and conflicting religious beliefs, political convictions, and personal opinions. The friction lines between competing views will often be difficult to adjudicate, but the Courts have shown that, regardless of the prevailing ideological fashions of the day, religious and even heteronormative Christian Australians must be given a fair go.
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Feminist supremacists
They are not at all interested in equality
Bettina Arndt
Man hating feminism? The question is whether there is any other kind. I used to think so. I started calling myself a ‘feminist’ as a young woman in the 1970s after reading Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, ironically whilst working a university vacation job as a Hertz Rent-a-car girl, dressed in my bright yellow perked cap and mini skirt, flirting with American tourists.
I convinced myself that feminism was all about equality, about creating a level playing field where women could take their rightful place in the world, embracing opportunities once denied to them. But then I watched with increasing alarm as the current misandrist culture took hold, with the male of the species as the punching bag, and women shamelessly promoted and protected, infantilised, and idealised. Feminism had gone off the rails, I concluded.
But it turned out that was wrong. Now I know the truth about feminist history – thanks to my recent re-education by the formidable Janice Fiamengo, who has spent much of the last year putting out videos based on a powerful body of scholarship that shows feminism was never about equality. The result of Fiamengo’s deep dive into feminist history is that this normally calm, measured scholar now seethes with righteous indignation.
Listen to Fiamengo’s passionate serve in a recent video interview:
‘Feminism was never sane. It was never without deep rancour and bitterness against men, never free from the claim that women were absolute victims of male predation, never uninterested in destroying the family, never accurate in its claims about women’s social situation, never unwilling to slander men in the most vicious and unpitying ways, and it never expressed any appreciation for men nor recognition that men had made any contribution to society or that men had ever acted out of love and concern and compassion for women in the laws that had been made or social instruments that had been developed over time. It was always a deeply misandrist, man-hating, man-blaming kind of movement.’
Whoa! Strong words from this rather reserved former professor of English from the University of Ottawa, a solid academic with a slew of books and scholarly journal articles in her name. Fiamengo’s education into the true face of feminism started when she found herself on university promotions committees witnessing the increasing discrimination taking place against male scholars. She bravely started to go public about bias against men, attracting outrage from student audiences. Fiamengo then went on to produce her video series The Fiamengo Files exposing key men’s issues and feminist wrongdoing. (Unfortunately, YouTube has censored Fiamengo’s work and deleted most of those videos).
Last year she embarked on a new series, Fiamengo File 2.0, which traces the history of feminism from its origins in the late 18th Century to the present. That’s come as quite a revelation to me, exposing how effectively feminists have succeeded in whitewashing their early history to inflate their achievements, and demonise and denigrate men.
The exciting news is that Jordan Peterson has asked Fiamengo to teach a course on the true history of feminism in Peterson Academy, his new online education platform, which aims to teach students how to think, not what to think. The Peterson initiative promises to be a very interesting new venture, offering renowned teachers from across the world, teaching about topics that really matter.
Like the truth about feminism, it matters that our society has been indoctrinated to believe in a version of our social history that is totally wrong. Like the notion that the women’s movement has rescued women from the tyranny of a patriarchal society where men denied women the vote, were free to rape their wives, seize their property and earnings, and assert their privilege to keep women firmly under their thumb.
The reality was very different, as Fiamengo explained in recent correspondence with me:
‘Men and women in earlier centuries lived interdependent lives in which the fragility of life and the presence of disease, the high infant mortality rate, the lack of a social safety net, and the complexities of housekeeping and childrearing meant that most women and men divided their prodigious labours into separate spheres of domestic and public. Women of the 19th century were not powerless – many worked in trades, owned their own businesses, and made a living as educators, healers, and writers. They were honoured as advisers and charity workers and usually voted in municipal and schoolboard elections. They did not see themselves as helpless and did not, on the whole, see men as their enemies.’
Yet we find, in the most famous and revealing document of the early 19th Century American women’s movement, Declaration of Sentiments, the claim that the ‘history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpation on the part of man towards woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her’. This declaration, written mainly by feminist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was full of fire-breathing allegations about the brutality and injustice of male treatment of women, and blatant misrepresentation of women’s situation.
Mistruths such as the claim that men were determined to destroy women’s confidence forcing them to live dependent lives. As Fiamengo points out, at the time this statement was published many colleges had already been established specifically for women’s education and many women were making respectable careers for themselves as authors, educators, scholars, and businesswomen.
Or that men denied women’s right to vote. ‘This is simply not true,’ Fiamengo explains. In fact, at that time most men could not vote in national elections – only rich men with property. Poll taxes, literacy requirements, and property qualifications restricted male rights to vote, and enfranchised men acquired voting rights in return for the obligation of risking their lives to defend their country in war.
The declaration also wrongly stated that men could seize a wife’s property and wages but a Married Women’s Property Act had already been passed in the New York state where the declaration was first declared, a fact the feminists conveniently ignored.
‘The Declaration of Sentiments was a declaration of war,’ pronounced Fiamengo, explaining this important document used the same strategies of vilification that is found in war propaganda. ‘In this case, the enemy consisted of women’s fathers, brothers, sons, and husbands,’ she added.
But what about Britain’s brave suffragettes?
Fiamengo reveals Emmeline Pankhurst and her woman’s suffragette movement have a very dark history, having used militant tactics that included vandalism and violent protest such as firebombing the homes of members of Parliament. As for their much-lauded achievements, Fiamengo points out that throughout the 19th Century, subjects on which women agitated for reform – like women’s higher education, changes to divorce law and child custody, women’s property rights, age of consent – saw an all-male Parliament quick to act.
When it comes to the right to vote until the later 19th Century, the vast majority of British men lacked that right. But voting rights were steadily being extended throughout this century. In fact, it was the first world war that decided the matter of suffrage, with women’s service on the home front – their work in munitions factories and farms – which changed public attitudes towards women, and in 1917 a vote sailed through British Parliament to extend the franchise to servicemen who had previously been voteless and to women aged 30 and above. ‘Feminist activists like Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, now considered the great heroines of the noble suffrage struggle, contributed little or nothing to the victory,’ concludes Fiamengo. Pankhurst and her fellow suffragettes did play a crucial role in the outrageous White Feather campaign, where women humiliated men who were not in military uniform.
Another lasting contribution from these pre-war feminists was their anti-male sexual disgust. Vilification of all men as sexually depraved was a central plank of early feminism, encapsulated in the suffragettes’ double demand: Votes for women and Chastity for men! Fiamengo provides ample evidence of the early feminists’ hate-filled rhetoric and sneering attitudes to male sexuality – quoting, for instance, social purity activist Frances Swiney’s comments on ‘a selfish, lustful, diseased manhood’ which ‘sought in woman only a body’.
This sowed the seeds for anti-male sexual revulsion, which for many men led to male sexual guilt, self-loathing, and deference to woman’s moral superiority, one of the major feminist legacies of the past 150 years, according to Fiamengo.
Could men rape their wives in the 19th Century? Well, a man could not be criminally prosecuted for this act, but it certainly wasn’t true that marital rape was accepted or that its harms were ignored, says Fiamengo, detailing the legal history whereby a wife at that time was understood to give consent to sexual relations just as men had contractual obligations including being responsible for all his wife’s debts, even if that landed him in prison. The moral harm of marital rape was, in fact, widely acknowledged and family members frequently intervened in cases where it became known a man was abusing his wife.
So, it goes on. Fiamengo’s exposé of these misrepresentations of our social history has important lessons for us all. It’s a real step forward that this impressive scholar will have the opportunity to enlighten a larger audience about what she has discovered. She concludes a recent video with the forlorn words: ‘It remains to be seen how much longer we will be willing to allow public conversations to be dominated by a female supremacist ideology – while still justifying and whitewashing its origins.’
Janice Fiamengo, through her videos and substack blogs, is doing her best to ensure those conversations change very quickly.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/01/feminism-was-never-about-equality/
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