Biden Energy Secretary Doubles Down on Electrifying US Military’s Vehicle Fleet by 2030

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Nuts! The United States will lose to China with this kind of idiotic, feckless and delusional leadership.

They are destroying EVERYTHING. When these morons plug in their vehicles, where do they think the energy comes from?

Biden energy secretary doubles down on electrifying US military’s vehicle fleet by 2030: ‘We can get there’

By Yahoo, April 30, 2023

Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Wednesday that she supports efforts from the Biden administration to require the U.S. military to implement an all-electric vehicle fleet by 2030, telling lawmakers that she believes “we can get there.”

Granholm’s remarks came during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing following questions from Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who asked the Biden administration official whether she supports the military’s adoption of an “EV fleet by 2030.”

Read more.

AUTHOR

 Pamela Geller

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The US Marine Corps: Missing in action

RELATED VIDEO: Woke Policies Are Driving Away Our Best Soldiers

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

THE WEB OF DYSTOPIAN TYRANNY: Medical and Societal Perversion

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“Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity.” — Nikola Tesla

“We must not lie to ourselves that loving our neighbor means waving a Pride flag, putting pronouns in our bios, and doing nothing while children are psychologically traumatized, medically altered, physically mutilated, and rendered infertile and damaged for life.” — Reagan Scott

“Satan cannot create anything new, cannot create anything at all. He must steal what God has created. Thus, he twists love and God’s wonderful gift of sex into lust and sadism and myriad perversions. He disfigures the heart’s deep desire to worship God and persuades us to bow before lesser gods of lust or money or power.” — Catherine Marshall

“Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.” —  Michel Foucault

What happened to Biology 101? It was taught in high school in the early 1960s.  It is so simple, yet the latest Supreme Court Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, doesn’t know the simple definition of a female.

A man has an X and a Y chromosome.  A woman has two X chromosomes.  Chromosomes cannot be changed no matter what you cut off, add on, or how many hormones you take.  You are forever either male or female.

“So, God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:27)  There are only two genders, not 40 as the National Institutes of Health claim.

The promotion of this perversion is not only part of the WOKE insanities, but it is also steeped in Marxism and the hatred of our Creator.

Remember the mantra from the media, “It’s for the children.”

How could this be “for the children?”  Perversion is being taught in America’s schools as early as kindergarten. America’s children are encouraged by their teachers to have themselves butchered in gender clinics.

Both the Old and New Testaments agree regarding how God’s people are to behave concerning sexual relationships.

Torah’s Book of Leviticus Chapters 18 to 20 tells us the standards of God’s people were not to be dictated by the practices of Egypt or Canaan, but by the Lord Himself.  The New Testament’s Romans 1:25-31 echoes Leviticus. Verse 28 states that the Lord gives them up to a reprobate mind.

Origins of Sex Ed

In 1930, the first sex reassignment surgery was performed in Germany by gynecologist Kurt Warnekros.  The patient died from complications of the fifth surgery.  (Timeline)

It was Alfred Charles Kinsey, an American sexologist, biologist, and professor of entomology and zoology who, in 1947, founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.   Kinsey conducted more than 17,000 face-to-face interviews with a broad set of people, college students, prostitutes, and prison inmates, to understand their sexual experiences. His most infamous research subject was the 1944 interview of a sexual omnivore, who had a history of having sexual encounters with men, women, boys, girls, animals and family members, and which took about 17 hours to be recorded.

While some hailed Kinsey’s research, others considered Kinsey a pedophile, a pornographic film maker and an addict whose sole objective was to “normalize and legitimize his many illegal fetishes.”

In the 1960s, “Gender identity” and “sexual orientation” terms were coined by a man named Dr. John Money, who was not a certified physician at all. Money’s experiments with a set of twin boys resulted in disfigurement, sexual torture and ultimately suicide. Dr. John Money Used Kinsey’s model of human experimentation to develop his concept of transgenderism and sex “re-assignment.”

Money was a renowned psychologist and sexologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital who built off of the work of Dr. Kinsey whose theories on the sexual lives of prepubescent children, it turned out, were actually based on the diaries of a prolific pedophile who had molested hundreds of children.

His “conclusions” later formed much of the sexual education curriculum that was implemented at public schools and continues to this day.

Judith Reisman held a Ph.D. in communications from Case Western Reserve University, and was a visiting professor of law at Liberty University.  She was a conservative author who set the record straight on Alfred Kinsey in her highly researched book, Sexual Sabotage: How One Mad Scientist Unleashed a Plague of Corruption and Contagion on America. The graphic content will disturb you, but it tells the story of how we arrived at where we are today.  In Dr. Reisman’s book, Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences, she revealed that Kinsey conducted human experiments in a soundproof laboratory built to his specifications at Indiana University, and that the sexual abuse of at least 317 infants and young boys was a scientific protocol for Kinsey’s 1948 report.

Kinsey and Money appear as two appendages of the same perverse and cruel creature.

Kinsey partnered with Planned Parenthood Medical Director Mary Calderone to create sex education curricula. Link

The Claremont Institute’s report shows that Planned Parenthood carefully controls and coordinates the entire policymaking process to promote its goal of sexual revolution. In Congress, it seeks riders and findings to make the funding of abstinence-only sex education more difficult; it has spearheaded the effort to favor programs that reduce sexual risk as opposed to avoiding sexual risk.

This process results from concerted action at the highest levels of government, led by an iron triangle of activist pressure groups, legislative allies, and aligned administrative activists. We know who they are.  Planned Parenthood is grooming children to be the vanguard of sexual perversity and degeneracy in a new, sexually liberated America.

Not only does the influence of Planned Parenthood spearhead the sexual revolution in America’s schools and beyond, but its activity also illustrates how Big Government funds and supports leftist political activity. The left depends on funneling national tax dollars toward its favored causes and so-called conservatives have all but abandoned the field to such efforts. In fact, the majority of Republicans, including Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, disdain speaking about social and moral issues.

Gender Clinics

Don’t let people tell you Big Pharma isn’t raking in the dough on puberty blockers, hormone therapy medications and sexual surgeries.

Puberty blockers and sex hormones do not have U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for children’s gender care. No clinical trials have established their safety for such off-label use. The drugs’ long-term effects on fertility and sexual function remain unclear. In 2016, the FDA ordered makers of puberty blockers to add a warning about psychiatric problems to the drugs’ label after the agency received several reports of suicidal thoughts in children who were taking them.

Across the United States, thousands of youths are lining up for gender-affirming care. But when families decide to take the medical route, they must make decisions about life-altering treatments that have little scientific evidence of their long-term safety and efficacy.

No large-scale studies have tracked people who received gender-related medical care as children to determine how many remained satisfied with their treatment as they aged and how many eventually regretted transitioning. The same lack of clarity holds true for the contentious issue of de-transitioning when a patient stops or reverses the transition process.

Dr. Chrystal Cole, founder of the Akron Children’s Hospital’s Center for gender affirming medicine tells parents of her patients that, “Suicide in young men and women who are wanting to transition is as high as 40%.”

Not everyone agrees with Dr. Chrystal Cole.

An article on Cureus’ website entitled, Suicide-Related Outcomes Following Gender-Affirming Treatment: A Review, tells us the odds of suicide were higher in transgenders who underwent surgery.

According to journalist, Brandon Showalter, most people are unaware of just how insidious the transgender movement truly is or how much it is fueled by the greed of pharmaceutical companies. Terms like “gender-affirming” care and politically correct euphemisms popularized by many in the media, he said, are both dangerous and misleading. He slammed the idea that children experiencing gender dysphoria frequently die by suicide as “manipulative,” adding: “Suicide is a very complicated phenomenon. You cannot reduce it down to just one cause.”

Showalter detailed how, after a prepubescent child is diagnosed with gender dysphoria, they are prescribed puberty blockers such as Lupron, a drug that has been used to treat prostate cancer in men and endometriosis and women and has been used to chemically castrate sex offenders.

“There’s never been an FDA stamp of approval for that use,” he said. “Even the FDA just last year slapped a warning label that this drug causes vision loss and brain swelling. There are disastrous side effects. It impedes brain development. It basically freezes your endocrine system from allowing the pubertal signaling in the brain to happen.”

Even if a male has surgery to transition to a female, he can still get prostate cancer, which just proves he was born a male and he’s still a male, but sadly has become a eunuch.

Gender Dysphoria Surgery

In 15 years, pediatric gender clinics have gone from two to over 100 across America.

Gender-affirming care, as defined by the World Health Organization, encompasses a range of social, psychological, behavioral, and medical interventions “designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity” when it conflicts with the gender they were assigned at birth.

Treatments for gender dysphoria, besides male or female hormones, may include surgery, such as feminizing surgery or masculinizing surgery to change the chest, external genitalia, internal genitalia, facial features and body contour.  Medications are required throughout one’s life after transition.

Encouraging Gender Dysphoria

Today’s academic education is non-existent, but the promotion of sexual activity and the encouragement of gender dysphoria is an absolutely despicable act occurring daily upon America’s youngest school children. Every parent should realize that when their children enter public schools, they are put in a perilous and chilling position.

Propaganda has reached new heights which spreads throughout schools like a virus that chokes truth, mutilates, and kills our youngest generation.

Biden has stated that parents give up control of children once they enter the classrooms, that they belong to the teachers and the administration inside the classroom.

Schools are in charge and if a child shows gender dysphoria tendencies, the parents end up in a battle with the government over their child’s health care. California actually began paying for “gender transitions” for minors who are not in their parents’ custody.

Daily Signal, a Heritage Foundation media organization, wrote about a child who ended up committing suicide because of mental health issues.  The article stated that school officials told social services that Abigail’s daughter would be “better off out of the house.”  She was put into foster care, and despite her mother’s persistent attempts to get mental health treatment for her daughter, the system stonewalled her.

Promoting Perversion

One article I skimmed stated, “While leftists continue to deny ulterior motives in their mission to allow hyper-sexualized and pornographic materials in schools along with the promotion of Drag Queen Story Hour, evidence only further suggests a concerted effort toward normalizing pedophilia.”

The infamous Bill and Melinda Gates organization donated millions into a radical nongovernmental organization (NGO) promoting education of “commercial sex work” and “sexual rights, regardless of age.” The U.S. abortion advocacy nonprofit is listed as one of International Planned Parenthood Federation member associates.  This insanity was originally created in the 1950s by a eugenicist, Margaret Sanger, who founded the pro-abortion population-control group, Planned Parenthood.

In Washington state, a new bill was passed which seeks to undermine parental rights by allowing “shelters” to provide gender transition medical services to minors without parental consent.  Children can be legally taken from parents by the state if they don’t consent to gender transition.

The State of Texas has continued their efforts to restrict the assaults on young bodies in gender affirming care clinics.  Biden has signed an executive order to protect transgender children.  (Biden is making new laws through EOs without the consent of congress.)

An 18-year-old transgender “female” walked into a high school freshman locker room and showered with four 14-year-olds in Wisconsin.  The biological male exposed his genitals to the shocked freshman girls.  This is the idiocy promoted by our government, public education, media and even some religious denominations.  These people are mentally ill, some of them are simply voyeurs who get their jollies looking at pubescent females.

An LGBT activist recently took to Tiktok to threaten anyone who would bar him or other male transvestites from entering women’s washrooms, daring concerned parents to try to protect their children.

Despite these and other threats made both before and after the Nashville massacre, when six Christians were murdered by transgender, Audrey Hale, Thomas Jay White‘s account remains active on the platform.

Fox News reports that the CDC is linked to pervasive curriculum sweeping public schools nationwide.

“Educators at over 120 districts across the country are implementing a pervasive school curriculum that has been denounced by opponents as an effort to manipulate children’s values and beliefs and replace parents as the primary moral authority in their child’s lives, with many critics specifically pointing to similarities with programs from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a major point of contention.

“Instead of academic education, the CDC’s “Whole Child” approach places its focus on psychological counseling and social services for students and teachers to further the “collaboration between education leaders and health sectors to improve each child’s cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development,” which is often referred to as social emotional learning (SEL).” It’s the central pillar of a nefarious attempt to remake and control society.

And where is the National Organization of Women (NOW) whose mouthpieces screamed about their equal rights for decades.  Women’s sports and competition are now destroyed because of the foolishness of these directors who believe males can become females and dare not speak the truth.  Men can wear dresses and clomp around in high heels, but if they are born with a penis, they are still biological men and they don’t belong competing in women’s sports.

Mental Illness

The Tennessee Star featured an article on Dr. Mark McDonald, a psychiatrist who treats both children and adults.

Dr. Mark McDonald wrote that the deaths at a Nashville Christian school at the hands of a transgender former student are a “logical end point of transgenderism,” since “the response to it reveals an embrace of the denial of reality and inversion of morality that can produce only more of the same atrocities.”

“Transgenderism is a mental illness,” the Los Angeles-based psychiatrist observed in his Dissident MD Substack column.

“It stems from a social contagion rampant in American urban centers, spread by social media and the support of corrupt schoolteachers and administrators who have chosen to pursue child sacrifice rather than the education and protection of young people,” he explained. “It feeds on narcissism and victim culture, two toxic wells we have been digging for a number of years.”

Conclusion

This is child abuse that ends in mutilation and often times, suicide.

©2023 Kelleigh Nelson. All rights reserved.

Feds Admit Offshore Wind Turbines Can Kill Whales!

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Despite public proclamations of innocence, it turns out BOEM and NOAA clearly acknowledge the deadly threat of offshore wind development to marine mammals. Not surprisingly they do it in documents that are subject to judicial review, lest they be caught fibbing.

Of course these admissions are well hidden, buried in the depths of thousand page documents, but they are there to be found. These are the Draft Environmental Impact Statements (DEIS) that precede each offshore wind project. They are jointly prepared by BOEM and NOAA.

The key is that the overall project EIS includes the EIS for NOAA’s harassment authorizations for the construction of that project. In fact you can find this language by searching the DEIS for the word “harassment”. I am told that this is standard language which varies little from project to project.

The standard language says just what we have been saying! Harassment is likely to lead to dangerous behavior, including increased likelihood of deadly ship strikes and entanglements. It also says, as we have, that having multiple projects increases these risks.

Here is a good example of admitting that harassment is can cause harm. I could not have said it better.

“It is possible that pile driving could displace animals into areas with lower habitat quality or higher risk of vessel collision or fisheries interaction. Multiple construction activities within the same calendar year could potentially affect migration, foraging, calving, and individual fitness. The magnitude of impacts would depend upon the locations, duration, and timing of concurrent construction. Such impacts could be long term, of high intensity, and of high exposure level. Generally, the more frequently an individual’s normal behaviors are disrupted or the longer the duration of the disruption, the greater the potential for biologically significant consequences to individual fitness. The potential for biologically significant effects is expected to increase with the number of pile-driving events to which an individual is exposed.”

Empire Wind DEIS v.1, Page 3.15-14, PDF page 372

This warning is about risks created by pile driving but all forms of acoustic harassment fit this description. NOAA harassment authorizations are based on the estimated number of critters that will be exposed to unsafe sound levels. The source of the dangerous sounds is irrelevant. What matters most is the volume. Sound is a pressure wave; the louder the sound the greater the physical pressure on the hearing system. Pain and physical damage are possible.

In fact the infamous sonar surveying sounds, implicated in the whale deaths to date, can be much louder that the incredibly loud pile driving. Driving the enormous piles for the proposed wind projects is estimated to create sounds around 190 decibels, which is painfully loud in humans.

But some sonar equipment deliberately emits sounds over 200 decibels. Decibels is a log scale so this is not just 5% greater than 190; it is much greater.

Thus it makes no sense that NOAA claims sonar surveys have no significant impact and so do not fall under NEPA, while pile driving does. This is especially true when, as just happened, a dozen different projects are given simultaneous authorization to acoustically harass large numbers of whales.

What is important is that NOAA and a BOEM are clearly stating that the acoustic threats we have been warning about and suspecting are real. The telling correlations between sonar blasting and increased whale deaths cannot be waived away.

Correlation is not causation, but correlation between cause and predicted effect is very strong evidence that the cause is effective. NOAA and BOEM’s repeated insistence that there is no evidence offshore wind development is killing whales is clearly contradicted by their own Environmental Impact Statements.

Harassment kills.

Author

David Wojick

David Wojick, Ph.D. is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. For origins see here. For over 100 prior articles for CFACT see here. Available for confidential research and consulting.

UPDATE: The Biden Administration is preparing to rush approval for the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project, which is located approximately 10-20 miles off the coast of New Jersey between Atlantic City and Barnegat Light, despite the risk it poses to marine mammals — particularly the severely endangered right whale.

They are poised to allow NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to grant Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind the right to harass, and potentially kill through a generous IHA (Incidental Harassment Authorization) permit, the following numbers of marine mammals:

42 Whales
2,534 Dolphins
142 Porpoises
1,472 Seals
Total = 4,190 adversely impacted marine mammals

CFACT just submitted a detailed comment to NOAA opposing this authorization and urging them to pay attention to the potential harm that could be wrought on the natural world.

Read CFACT’s full submission at CFACT.org.

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Metaphors, ticking bombs and climate change

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We should beware of allowing figures of speech to distort the debate.

Since linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson published their monograph Metaphors We Live By in 1980, scholars have devoted considerable attention to the use of metaphor as a cognitive tool that enables people to apply what they know from their direct physical and social experience to understanding more abstract things.

For example, a common metaphor used with respect to argumentation is that “argument is war”. This metaphor shapes our way of viewing and talking about arguments, so that it is not uncommon to hear people say things like “He won that argument,” “I attacked a weak point in his argument” or “My argument got shot down at the last board meeting.”

The very way an argument is conceptualized is shaped by this metaphor. An argument can of course be seen in other ways than as a battle, but we use this concept to shape the way we think of argumentation and the way we go about arguing.

Because metaphors make abstract things concrete, they are a powerful tool for influencing the way that people think of certain things and phenomena. For instance, the common conception of demographic growth is heavily shaped by the metaphor “population growth is a bomb”, which was popularized by Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book entitled The Population Bomb. The implicit content conveyed by this metaphor is that population growth is a powerful force which has been suddenly unleashed and which is expanding rapidly in all directions, destroying everything around it.

In actual fact, peak world population growth was reached in 1963 with an annual growth rate of 2.3 percent. In 1968 when Paul Ehrlich published his book, it had already started to decline. Since then the increase of the world population has slowed every year and today is only growing by 0.9% per annum, as the graph below shows.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE OUR WORLD DATA INFOGRAPHIC: World population growth, 1700-2100.

If one were to propose a metaphor to describe what is actually happening population-wise, a much more appropriate one would be that of a boat sailing up a large river which has cut its engines and is now drifting upstream on its initial inertia but is gradually slowing as the current of the river acts upon it. In only 50 years from now, the boat will stop moving upstream and start to be pushed back downstream.

Recently, the bomb metaphor has started to be applied to climate change. Its very first recorded use in relation to this issue was in a report by the Stockholm Environment Institute published in 1988 intitled “The Greenhouse Effect: Impacts on Nordic Countries and Possible Remedial Measures.” However, we are hearing more and more frequently that “the climate bomb is ticking.”

On the other hand, climate scientists have determined that the warming effect of each molecule of CO2 decreases logarithmically as its concentration in the atmosphere increases.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW CO2COALITION INFOGRAPHIC: CO2 Concentration, C, in ppm.

This is why there was no runaway greenhouse warming when the concentration of CO2 was approaching 20 times that of today during the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago. This inconvenient truth is kept very well hidden and is rarely mentioned, as it undermines the theory of future catastrophic climate change.

On top of this, water vapour, not CO2, is Earth’s most abundant greenhouse gas, and is responsible for about half of the greenhouse effect.

In the light of these facts, a more apt metaphor for the impact of CO2 on the rise of global temperatures would be that of an ocean liner with a balloon full of hot air attached to its prow.

AUTHOR

Patrick Duffley

Patrick Duffley is Professor of English Linguistics at Université Laval, in Canada. More by Patrick Duffley

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

ABC Censors RFK, Jr.

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ABC heavily edited its interview with Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Thursday because it didn’t like what he said about vaccines. In doing this, ABC demonstrated that it thinks the people who are unfortunate enough to watch the network are too stupid to think for themselves or evaluate truth claims on their own. It also showed that it thinks Leftist “news” outlets properly have the authority to determine what the American people see and hear and what they do not. The Left is growing increasingly censorious and authoritarian; RFK Jr. is a lone voice on the Left standing against this trend, and so it’s no surprise that he would fall victim to it along with an increasing number of patriots.

ABC’s Linsey Davis poisoned the well from the start, introducing Kennedy as “one of the biggest voices pushing anti-vaccine rhetoric, regularly distributing misinformation and disinformation about vaccines, which scientific and medical experts overwhelmingly say are safe and effective based on rigorous scientific studies.” Then ABC cut Kennedy’s own words about the vaccines, not allowing him to make his case. The network did, however, did show a part of the interview where Kennedy was discussing opposition among his own family to his views on vaccines.

Davis was upfront about the network’s censorship of the video, explaining:

We should note that during our conversation, Kennedy made false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines. Data shows that the Covid-19 vaccine has prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths from the disease. He also made misleading claims about the relationship between vaccination and autism. Research shows that vaccines and the ingredients used in the vaccines do not cause autism, including multiple studies involving more than a million children and major medical associations like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the advocacy group Autism Speaks.

Davis also said: “We’ve used our editorial judgment in not including extended portions of that exchange in our interview.” Yet Davis’ own claims were unproven. Kennedy’s own website, The Defender, features an April 14 article with the headline: “45 Times as Many Deaths After COVID Shots in Just 2 Years Compared With All Flu Vaccine-Related Deaths Since 1990, Data Show.” The subtitle: “The authors of a peer-reviewed meta-analysis of national and international COVID-19 vaccine adverse events during the first two years of the rollout said their findings highlight the importance of reevaluating public health policies that promote universal mass injection and multiple boosters for all demographic groups.” Did Davis offer any specific refutation of these claims? Of course not. ABC just did its best to ensure that the public didn’t hear about them at all.

In the portion of the interview that aired, according to a report in the Daily Caller Friday, Davis challenged Kennedy “over his claims that there is a correlation between vaccinations and autism.” Davis asserted that what Kennedy was saying had been “debunked.” Kennedy asked: “Wait a minute, who debunked it?” Davis replied: “We have not seen any kind of scientific connections from the CDC, the World Health Organization…” Kennedy said: “They’re captured agencies.” Indeed. They reflect the establishment line rather than letting the truth lead them where it may. For her part, Davis doesn’t seem to have bothered to refute that, either. Censorship is so much easier.

Kennedy charged that what ABC did was actually illegal:

47 USC 315 makes it illegal for TV networks to censor Presidential candidates but Thursday, ABC showed its contempt for the law, democracy, and its audience by cutting most of the content of my interview with host Linsey Davis leaving only cherry-picked snippets and a defamatory disclaimer. Offering no evidence, @ABC justified this act of censorship by falsely asserting that I made “false claims.” In truth, Davis engaged me in a lively, informative, and mutually respectful debate on the government’s Covid countermeasures. I’m happy to supply citations to support every statement I made during that exchange. I’m certain that ABC’s decision to censor came as a shock to Linsey as well. Instead of journalism, the public saw a hatchet job. Instead of information, they got defamation and unsheathed Pharma propaganda. Americans deserve to hear the full interview so they can make up their own minds. How can democracy function without a free and unbiased press? As President, I will free FCC from its corporate captors and force the agency to follow the law by revoking the licenses of networks that put the mercantile ambitions of advertisers ahead of the public interest. #Kennedy24

RFK’s confidence that Linsey Davis was herself shocked by the censorship was a trifle naïve. Censorship is the hallmark of the contemporary Left. But he is standing against it: “I don’t believe that we should be the party of war. I don’t believe that we should be the party of Wall Street. I don’t believe that we should let neocons dictate our foreign policy and I don’t believe in censorship, for starters.”

Sounds great. But will the Leftist media establishment let the American people hear him saying it?

AUTHOR

Robert Spencer

RELATED ARTICLE: RFK Jr.: “Mega-Billionaires” are Using Climate Change to Usher in Totalitarian Controls of Population

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Government’s Sprawling Effort to Censor [True] Information During the Pandemic

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In July 2022, Twitter permanently suspended Rhode Island physician Andrew Bostom after awarding the epidemiologist and longtime researcher at Brown University a fifth strike for spreading “misinformation.”

A July 26 tweet alleging that there was no solid evidence Covid-19 vaccines had prevented any children from being hospitalized—”only RCT data we have from children reveals ZERO hospitalizations prevented by vaccination vs. placebo”—was apparently the final straw.

The funny thing was, it appeared Bostom’s tweet was true.

Dr. Anish Koka, a cardiologist and writer, said he was initially skeptical of Bostom’s claim. But after speaking with him for more than an hour, he realized Bostom was citing the government’s own data, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) briefing document that included randomized controlled trial (RCT) data on children.

“…Dr. Bostom’s tweet appears quite correct as per the FDA documents,” Koka wrote on Substack. “In the RCTs available, there does not appear to be evidence that the vaccine prevented hospitalizations.”

Bostom’s permanent suspension was one of many anecdotes shared by journalist David Zweig in a December Twitter Files thread viewed by more than 64 million people, which exposed how the government worked with Twitter to try to “rig the Covid debate.”

It turns out this was not the only one of Bostom’s tweets that was true but was nevertheless flagged for “misinformation.”

“A review of Twitter log files revealed that an internal audit, conducted after Bostom’s attorney contacted Twitter, found that only 1 of Bostom’s 5 violations were valid,” Zweig notes. “The one Bostom tweet found to still be in violation cited data that was legitimate but inconvenient to the public health establishment’s narrative about the risks of flu versus Covid in children.”

In other words, all five of Bostom’s tweets that had been flagged as “misinformation” were legitimate. At the very least, four-out-of-five were, and that’s according to Twitter’s own internal audit.

How this happened was partially explored by Zweig, who explained Twitter’s convoluted censorship process, which relied heavily on bots, contractors in foreign countries who lacked the expertise to make informed decisions, and Twitter brass who carried their own biases and incentives. This structure led to a predictable result.

“In my review of internal files,” writes Zweig, “I found countless instances of tweets labeled as ‘misleading’ or taken down entirely, sometimes triggering account suspensions, simply because they veered from CDC guidance or differed from establishment views.”

The CDC had effectively become the arbiter of truth.

This is alarming for at least two reasons. First, for anyone familiar with the government’s track record on truth, there’s reason to be skeptical of putting any government agency in charge of deciding what is true and false. Second, the CDC has been, to put it kindly, fallible throughout the pandemic. Indeed, the agency has been plagued with so much dysfunction and made so many crucial mistakes that its own director announced less than a year ago the organization needed an overhaul.

So there’s some reason to believe that Bostom and people like him—including epidemiologists like Dr. Martin Kuldorff (formerly of Harvard) and mRNA vaccine creator Dr. Robert Malone—were being suspended, banned, and de-amplified simply because Twitter was poorly situated to determine what was true and what was false.

There’s reason to doubt this claim, however.

Months after Zweig published his report on the Twitter Files, journalist Matt Taibbi published a separate deep dive exploring the Virality Project, an initiative launched by Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center.

The project, which Taibbi described as “a sweeping, cross-platform effort to monitor billions of social media posts by Stanford University, federal agencies, and a slew of (often state-funded) NGOs,” is noteworthy because officials made it clear that a goal was not just to flag false information, but information that was true but inconvenient to the government’s goals. Reports of “vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway,” “worrisome jokes,” and “natural immunity” were all characterized as “potential violations,” as were conversations “interpreted to suggest that coronavirus might have leaked from a lab.”

In what Taibbi describes as “a pan-industry monitoring plan for Covid-related content,” the Virality Project began analyzing millions of posts each day from platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Medium, TikTok, and other social media sites, which were submitted through the JIRA ticketing system. On February 22, 2021, in a video no longer public, Stanford welcomed social media leaders to the group and offered instruction on how to join the JIRA system.

In contrast to Twitter’s previous internal guidance, which required narratives on Covid-19 to be “demonstrably false” before any censorship actions were taken, the Virality Project made it clear that information that was true was also fair game if it undermined the larger aims of the government and the Virality Project.

Specifically noted were “true stories that could fuel [vaccine] hesitancy,” personal testimonials about adverse side effects of vaccination, concerns over vaccine passports, and actual deaths of people following vaccination, such as Drene Keyes.

As NBC noted in 2021, Keyes, a 58-year-old black woman, died after receiving the Pfizer vaccine in February 2021. Described as an “elderly Black woman” by the Virality Project, Keyes’s death became a “disinformation” event after it garnered attention from “anti vax groups”—even though no one denied that she died within hours of taking the vaccine.

No autopsy was conducted on Keyes and there’s no way of knowing if the vaccine caused her death. But merely raising the possibility could have resulted in a ban. Officials at the Virality Project warned platforms that “just asking questions”—at least the wrong questions—was a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation.”

Ironically, Taibbi notes, the Virality Project itself was often “extravagantly wrong” about Covid science, describing breakthrough events as “extremely rare events” (a fact it later conceded was wrong) and implying that natural immunity did not offer protection from Covid.

“Even in its final report, [the Virality Project] claimed it was misinformation to suggest the vaccine does not prevent transmission, or that governments are planning to introduce vaccine passports,” Taibbi writes. “Both things turned out to be true.”

‘You Can’t Handle the Truth’

It’s clear that the Virality Project’s primary purpose was not to protect Americans from misinformation. Its goal, as Taibbi notes, was to get the public to submit to authority and accept the state’s Covid narrative, particularly the pronouncements of public figures such as Drs. Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky.

The official policy can be summed up in the immortal words of Colonel Nathan Jessup, the villain portrayed by Jack Nicholson in Aaron Sorkin’s popular 1992 film A Few Good Men: “You can’t handle the truth.”

It’s important to understand that public officials, just like Col. Jessup, genuinely believe this. Jessup utters these words in anger in a wonderful monologue, after he is baited by Lt. Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) into telling the court how he really feels. Similarly, the Twitter Files reveal a program designed to control information—even true information—because it serves the state’s plan.

The last word—plan—is important, because it calls to mind Ludwig von Mises’s warning about those seeking to plan society.

“The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans,” Mises wrote. “He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute preeminence of his own plan.”

‘Sometimes They Are Five’

Mises’ words apply perfectly to the Virality Project, a program designed specifically to get people to submit to the government’s narrative and objectives, not their own. The preeminence of the plan is so important that it requires censoring information and targeting individuals—as the Virality Project did—even if it’s true.

It’s difficult to overstate how Orwellian this is.

In Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, the protagonist of the story, says, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four.”

Absent any context, the quote doesn’t make much sense. But it’s important to understand that Orwell saw statism and politics as forces destructive to the truth. His own brushes with state propaganda during the Spanish Civil War left him terrified that objective truth was “fading out of the world,” and he saw the state as inherently prone to obfuscation and euphemism (regardless of party).

“Political language,” he wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Within the context of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the meaning of Winston Smith’s words becomes crystal clear. Saying “two plus two makes four” might be an objective truth, but sometimes objective truth runs counter to Big Brother’s plan. Winston Smith is a slow learner, state agents tell him, because he can’t seem to grasp this simple reality.

“How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”

“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder.”

Many people who lived through the Covid-19 pandemic likely can identify with the terror of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Orwell’s fear that objective truth is “fading out of the world.” We witnessed public officials say things that were demonstrably false and face no consequences, while Andrew Bostom and countless others were exiled from public discourse because they said things that were true, but ran counter to the state’s narrative.

Fortunately, in large part because of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, we now know how this happened.

“Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging,” Taibbi writes.

All of it was designed to control information. And in doing so, the state—which actually attempted to create a “Disinformation Governance Board,” which critics promptly dubbed a Ministry of Truth—created an environment hostile to free speech and truth.

Ironically, despite the egregious abuse delivered upon the truth over the last three years in the name of fighting “misinformation,” polls show roughly half of Americans believe social media companies should be censoring such material from their sites. Few seem to realize this will almost certainly involve those with influence and power—especially the government—deciding who and what are censored.

This is a recipe for disaster. History shows there’s no greater purveyor of falsehood and propaganda than the government itself. The Twitter Files are a reminder of that.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. (Follow him on Substack.) His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

In a World Full of Robots, Humans Wanted

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The K-12 district schools I went to while growing up in a Boston suburb look nearly the same today as they did when I attended them in the 1980s and 90s, when they also looked quite similar to how they did when my father attended those same schools in the 1950s and 60s. Sure, there are some new technologies and updated curriculum—and more testing—but for the most part, traditional schools haven’t changed much over the past few generations.

The world around those schools has, of course, changed beyond measure. The disconnect between the outdated structure of standard schooling and the economic and cultural realities of the innovation era is growing harder to ignore.

At a time when top jobs didn’t even exist a decade ago, and many jobs of the next decade haven’t yet been invented, most young people today continue to learn in conventional classrooms that train them to be passive bystanders, rather than active, agile pathmakers in a complex, constantly changing culture.

This conditioning starts early. The exuberance and inquisitiveness that young children naturally display is quickly constrained within a system of coercive schooling that favors obedience and compliance over originality and curiosity. With the growth of universal preschool programs, more children today are beginning this standard schooling path when they are just barely out of diapers. They learn to color in the lines, to wait to speak, and to ask permission to use the bathroom. They learn that their interests and ideas are irrelevant, that their energy and enthusiasm are liabilities. They learn to need to be taught.

​​Indeed, as Ivan Illich wrote in his classic book, Deschooling Society: “School makes alienation preparatory to life, thus depriving education of reality and work of creativity. School prepares for the institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.”

This may have been more tolerable at the dawn of the industrial era, when compulsory schooling statutes were first passed and when conventional schooling created a pipeline to factory jobs that required obedience and compliance. Even then, parents like Nancy Edison recognized that standard schooling could crush a child’s creativity. She pulled her son Thomas out of school after only a few short weeks when his teacher called him “addled.” From then on, Thomas Edison mostly directed his own education as a homeschooler, following his own interests and passions.

Later in life, while working in his massive laboratory in New Jersey, one of Edison’s chemists concluded: “Had Edison been formally schooled, he might not have had the audacity to create such impossible things.” [i]

Today, we need more young people to grow up with the audacity to create the impossible things that will brighten our lives, enhance human flourishing, and improve our planet. We need more young people to nurture the qualities and characteristics that separate human intelligence from artificial intelligence. These human qualities—including curiosity, critical thinking, ingenuity, and an entrepreneurial spirit—are the same qualities that are so often eroded in our dominant system of traditional schooling.

To successfully coexist, compete, and cooperate with ever-smarter machines, humans need the chance to cultivate the cherished qualities that make us distinctly human. The type of rote, by-the-book, standardized behaviors that conventional schools inculcate are exactly what AI and other technologies are increasingly automating. To thrive in the economy of tomorrow, children need to learn how to both harness and rise above the robotic.

There are some who believe that conventional schools, both public and private, can successfully change to meet the economic and social realities of the 21st century, but I am doubtful. The continued stagnation, and in some instances increased standardization, of conventional schooling demonstrates why any meaningful educational change will come from outside the prevailing model, not in it.

I already see signs of these changes in my work spotlighting the stories of the entrepreneurial parents and teachers who are creating innovative learning models beyond the conventional classroom, including many that emphasize self-directed learning. These everyday entrepreneurs recognize the growing gap between how most schools teach and what humans need to excel in the innovation era, and are doing something about it.

Take the story of James Lomax, for example. He and his wife enrolled their daughter in a top private preschool at the age of two, thinking they would set her up for a successful path to college and career. “What we found was that the preschool was very, very, very focused on academics, on being kindergarten ready,” Lomax told me in a recent podcast episode. “So we got progress reports home saying she can only count to 100, but she should be counting to 150 at this point. And her Spanish comprehension is not where we want it to be. And around this time, it’s starting to click with me that maybe these aren’t the important things.”

Lomax had other questions for the preschool staff, such as what was happening on the playground? Was his daughter making friends? Was she learning to solve conflicts? “And I just kept getting this blank stare,” Lomax said in response to his inquiries. He felt there had to be a better way.

Simultaneously, Lomax saw in his work as an engineer that many of the young engineering new hires coming straight from college lacked important competencies. “A lot of these engineers went to very top universities with perfect grades. We get them on the job, and it’s very clear, very soon that the only thing they really learned how to do in their education was to take tests. So they can’t critically think, they can’t solve a problem without the exact path given to them to solve the problem. They don’t have basic life skills,” said Lomax.

“I started to think this is not the path I want for my daughter, because the skills we need are different skills than what’s being taught in school,” he added.

Lomax founded Life Skills Academy, an Acton Academy affiliate in Las Vegas, Nevada. Acton Academy is a leading network of learner-driven microschools that was founded in 2009 in Austin, Texas and now has approximately 300 affiliate microschools across the US and around the world. Acton Academy puts learners in charge of their own education and “hero’s journey,” in collaboration with their mixed-age peers and adult guides.

Acton Academy is one of the fastest-growing educational networks to challenge the schooling status quo by empowering learners, but there are others as well. Liberated Learners is a network of self-directed learning centers for tween and teen homeschoolers that was modeled after one of the first microschools, North Star, that launched in 1996 to provide maximum freedom and autonomy to young people. Agile Learning Centers also use a self-directed learning model that emphasizes youth agency. Similarly, Sudbury schools, inspired by the original Sudbury Valley School that was founded in 1968 and continues to flourish today, use no adult-imposed curriculum, and no grades or evaluations, while allowing young people to fully direct their own lives and learning.

Research on Sudbury Valley alumni has found that even though their education is entirely self-directed, graduates go on to lead fulfilling lives, pursue higher education without difficulty if they chose, and work in a wide variety of careers. Research on grown unschoolers, or homeschoolers who learn in a self-directed way with no forced curriculum, reveals similar findings, including a high percentage of entrepreneurial individuals who were working in fields connected to interests that emerged in childhood and adolescence.

Independent microschools that aren’t affiliated with a national network, such as Bloom Academy in Las Vegas, Wild Roots in Dallas, Wildflower Community School in Kansas, and Moonrise in Georgia, all incorporate unschooling principles that allow young people to direct their education, with support and without coercion.

We may have left the industrial era long ago, but our culture’s dominant educational model continues to be defined by top-down, teacher-directed, curriculum-driven, coercive schooling. As we now get further into the innovation era, there is a deepening mismatch between how most children learn in school and what they will actually need to know and do to live meaningful, purposeful lives in a rapidly-changing, technology-molded world.

Fortunately, schools and learning models that nurture curiosity and creativity and enable young people to direct their own paths, in pursuit of their own goals, do exist—and more are continually being invented. These schools and models are also growing increasingly accessible to all learners, as education choice policies that enable funding to follow students become more widespread.

As A.S. Neill wrote in Summerhill, his 1960 book about the self-directed school that he founded in England in 1921 (and that recently celebrated its centennial): “The function of the child is to live his own life—not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows what is best. All this interference and guidance on the part of adults only produces a generation of robots.”

In a world full of robots, humans wanted.

[i] Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992), 412.

AUTHOR

Kerry McDonald

Kerry McDonald is a Senior Education Fellow at FEE and host of the weekly LiberatED podcast. She is also the author of Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom (Chicago Review Press, 2019), an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, education policy fellow at State Policy Network, and a regular Forbes contributor. Kerry has a B.A. in economics from Bowdoin College and an M.Ed. in education policy from Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and four children. You can sign up for her weekly email newsletter here.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Threat of a Super-EMP

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It’s a staggering prediction, something reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic, mega-disaster movie that has the winnowing characters scavenging for anything they can in a desperate search for water and food. But this is no movie, and it isn’t fiction. This frightening estimate has the consensus of the U.S. government, well-known, pro-electric-grid “protectionists” screaming into the winds of congressional resistance, and a number of think tanks that follow this issue closely.

Peter Pry, a former CIA analyst and executive director of the congressionally chartered EMP Commission shared the estimate with Newsmax:

“‘Within 12 months of an EMP attack or a massive solar flare between two-thirds to 90 percent of the U.S. population would perish’ from lack of electricity, Pry said, quoting the conclusions from the EMP Commission’s two public reports.”

That’s well beyond a stunning and chilling augury, one that should make Congress take the threat so seriously that it puts aside all else and acts immediately to protect our electric grid. But so far—and we’ve known about the effects of this weapon since the Starfish Prime nuclear test in 1962—it hasn’t generated the kind of legislation that would help prevent an extinction-level event.

In this, second of two articles about the threat, we discuss how the threat comes from the detonation of a Super-EMP device 300 miles in our exo-atmosphere and right over the center of the United States. Because a Super-EMP is an EMP “device” as opposed to a conventional nuclear weapon, the nuclear yield is far less, while its load of gamma rays is far greater. That is what makes it so utterly destructive. The damage caused by the E1 pulse to our electric infrastructure is complete, long-lasting (a decade or more), and incalculable cost-wise. It’s the aftermath of the impact that would open the door wide to the grim reaper carrying an enormous, razor-sharp scythe, especially for city and suburban dwellers.

The gamma rays focused on the center of the country radiate out horizontally, not into the ground. They then form a circular impact on the nation’s entire electric grid depending on its altitude (300 miles up seems optimum).  The E1 wave is an extremely fast electrical pulse that will take out objects dependent upon electrical conductivity, such as many cars (save for those manufactured before 1974), most of the technological gadgets to which we are addicted, and, unfortunately, far too many military assets that will be useless after the attack. Importantly, greater damage is done to such targets when they are powered on at the time the pulse hits the earth.

The truly existential threat of a Super-EMP attack on the U.S. comes courtesy of North Korea, a disgruntled and paranoid rogue state that has been trading nuclear secrets with Iran in a mutual pact to destroy us. As we pointed out in Part One of these two articles, Iran has pulled a brilliant end run around Obama, Kerry, and the P5+1, and is reported to have a base just south of the Chinese border.

Kim Jong Un harbors schizophrenic delusions, chief among them is his belief that an imminent attack is coming from the U.S. and South Korea. Kim, likely with Iran nuclear physicists standing beside him, tested what may have been a hydrogen-based Super-EMP on January 6 of this year. Evidence of its highly efficient and destructive power came in just three words from North Korean news broadcasts. Their experts contend that they will destroy us, “all at once.”

All at once? The phrase struck us like an epiphanic sledgehammer when we read the story on Breitbart:

“In a commentary feature on its website, North Korea’s state media outlet boasted that its nation’s scientists are in ‘high spirits’ to detonate nuclear weapons capable of destroying America ‘all at once.’”

No nuclear or any other kind of attack could destroy the entire country “all at once” except a Super-EMP with the core component being hydrogen. A thermonuclear bomb is 1,000 times more powerful than the strongest conventional nuclear weapon. But the North Koreans were not acting on their own and the yield from the test was minimized.

At first, the reports from those testing air samples in the area claimed that it wasn’t a hydrogen bomb test. However, retesting had scientists saying that there was evidence of elements decidedly hydrogen in origin, but it was not a major thermonuclear bomb. So what was tested?

We realized when that question arose that the test hadn’t been of a full-blown hydrogen bomb, but a far smaller thermonuclear device that would serve as a Super-EMP weapon possibly developed by the North Koreans and the Iranians working together.

That degree of evil-axis cooperation brings a wintry chill up and down the spines of those of us who have studied this threat in depth. Those doing all they can to get Congress to take action on this issue include R. James Woolsey, ex-CIA director, and Peter Vincent Pry, who established the EMP Task Force, a site where you’ll find a map detailing the EMP threat from North Korea.

The video highlights how North Korea’s KSM-3 satellite  (already circling the globe) has, “the capability to deliver a small nuclear warhead to intercontinental ranges–against any nation on Earth.” It’s small enough to put into a faux satellite. The KSM-3 already passes over the U.S. from south to north, instead of west to east. That’s due in part to the absence of a strong missile defense system protecting our southern flank.

There are many other experts worthy of mention, in particular, Frank Gaffney, author of Guilty Knowledge, a book that highlights the U.S. government’s knowledge of the vulnerability of the grid, but willfully neglects to address the threat.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-A.Z.), a member of Congress has been tireless in his efforts to pass a number of bills to fix the problem. He has carried the torch to illuminate the issue in Congress numerous times, including his introduction of HR 2417, the Secure High-Voltage Infrastructure for Electricity from Lethal Damage Act (Shield Act), which has stalled in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The cost to protect the grid is modest at $20 to $30 billion. But there’s an added problem. Some 3,200 utility companies who would have to cooperate are risk averse to pass the cost onto ratepayers. If they did so, the actual cost would be $3.30 per month, according to the Testimony of George H. Baker before the Joint Hearing on “The EMP Threat: The State of Preparedness against the Threat of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Event” May 13, 2015. Considering the nature of the threat, that’s a tiny price for a huge problem. A story published by The Hill explains the difficulty of getting serious legislative action to the president’s desk.

A Super-EMP attack or a cyber-attack that removes the grid is extremely serious. It’s made all the more so because the North Koreans are about to test-launch another missile. They could very easily be launching a new satellite, this one carrying a Super-EMP device, in which case, if it is detonated over the center of the country, it could leave us in the dark “all at once” for as long as a decade or more.

James Hyde contributed to this article.

©2023 Amil Imani. All rights reserved.+

An open secret: Social contagion is driving the astronomic rise in teen gender dysphoria

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And adults are not immune either.

Social contagion is at least partially responsible for the upsurge in gender dysphoria in the past three decades, but this is vehemently denied by most social institutions charged with the safeguarding of children and young people, including governments, universities and schools, human rights commissions, legal institutions, and sporting bodies.

The misguided adherence to a scientifically bankrupt gender ideology has had, as yet unfathomed negative impacts on young people, their families, and the wider society. The reason that this phenomenon is never debated is that it would detonate and topple the edifice of gender ideology.

The prevailing view regarding this unprecedented upsurge is that the social and cultural milieu into which the current generation of children and adolescents has been born has permitted disinhibition of expression of their transgendered identity in the same way that left-handedness and homosexuality were permitted freer expression in previous decades, hence leading to increased numbers of those “coming out.”

This explanation is unsatisfactory and alternate explanations for this 21st century phenomenon of gender dysphoria and transgenderism must be canvassed. Social contagion is the prime candidate.

What is social contagion?

The term “psychic epidemic”, now called social contagion, describes the “spread of phenomena (e.g., behaviours, beliefs, and attitudes) across network ties.” Members of a network play different roles in the dissemination of innovations. A small number will adopt early (i.e., early adopters). Some of these will become opinion leaders who are central to the network, who contaminate their “peers” who in turn will influence others at different levels of the network. Networks with high centrality are the most effective in disseminating information or innovation.

Other characteristics of networks include cohesion (number of connections within a network) and shape (distribution of ties within the network).  A key example with respect to this discussion are the gender affirming organizations that have achieved remarkable success in a short time in changing health care, educational practices, and legislation related to transgender declaring young people.

With the arrival of Covid-19, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that there would be an “infodemic” of misinformation spawned by social contagion. This did in fact occur, but those false beliefs did not take centre stage and sweep all science before it in the manner of transgender ideology because it was contained by responsible social and governmental bodies.

Not so for gender dysphoria.

What are the mechanisms of social transmission?

Social contagion in several adolescent behaviours (e.g., mood and emotion, eating disorders, drug use, self-harm, and suicide) has been well established empirically. For example, Madelyn Gould  concluded that… the existence of suicide contagion no longer needs to be questioned. We should refocus our research efforts on identifying which particular story components promote contagion under which circumstances and which components are useful for preventive programming.

Four mechanisms that may be involved in the social contagion of these behaviours and gender dysphoria are:

  1. Peer contagion: Peer contagion is a process of reciprocal influence to engage in behaviours occurring in a peer dyad/group.  By middle childhood, gender is the most important factor in the formation of peer associations, highlighting the significance of gender as the organizing principle of the norms and values associated with gender identity.
  2. Deviancy training as a mechanism of social contagion: A process whereby deviant attitudes and behaviours are rewarded by the peer group. Young people are particularly vulnerable to peer contagion if they have experienced peer rejection, hostility, and/or social isolation from the peer group.
  3. Co-rumination as a form of social contagion: A process of repetitive discussion, rehearsal, and speculation about a problematic issue within the peer dyad or peer group that underlies peer influence. It is more common among adolescent girls. Being in a friendship that engages in perseverative discussions on deviant topics has been associated with increased problem behaviour over the course of adolescence.
  4. Social media: Nathan and Kristina have argued that: “…[u]nlike the broadcasts of traditional media, which are passively consumed, social media depends on users to deliberately propagate the information they receive to their social contacts. This process can amplify the spread of information in a social network.”

Targeted marketing campaigns on and offline generate additional influence. Peer influence and homophily (intrinsic peer similarity) are major factors influencing the behaviour of those embedded in social networks. Peer influence is more likely to trigger positive, self-reinforcing feedback loops, where the imitation of the target individual’s behaviour by peers enhances that behaviour in the target individual so that s/he does more of the behaviour which becomes more extreme over time, creating a social multiplier effect.

This effect also occurs in online communities which is enhanced by introducing certain features into the market design of products, such as, in this case, puberty blockade, cross sex hormones, and sex reassignment surgery, and identifying the influential and susceptible users.

Online activity enables, enhances, or triggers potential risks of “copycat” behaviours such as self-harm, suicide, and eating disorders through the normalization of pathological behaviours, or vicarious and social reinforcement of these behaviours.

Is gender dysphoria socially contagious?

Given the strong evidence of social contagion in suicide, self-harm, substance abuse, eating disorders, and emotion/mood, especially among adolescents, the role of social contagion in gender dysphoria demands urgent attention. There are already strong indicators in the affirmative. For example, positively framed media reports of transgender issues result in increases in referrals of self-declaring transgender and gender diverse (TGD) children and adolescents to specialist gender services.

If we examine the gender dysphoria epidemic in social network terms, we see several features operating. It is an open-system network with nodes and ties expanding across the oceans to the USA, UK, Asia, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand. Most countries are reporting sharp increases in the number of young people seeking services and treatment for gender dysphoria. Many are ramping up services and setting up new gender clinics to cope with demand, despite the recent closure of the Tavistock Gender Identity Service in the UK following the Cass review. This network is highly centralised with only one voice–unquestioning gender affirmation.

Opinion leaders of this position operating at the centre of these networks are very influential. The level of density in a network has two effects–firstly, it enhances the circulation of information between members and secondly, it blocks the introduction of dissenting ideas and evidence.

Peer contagion may be a relevant factor in the sharp increases in young people presenting with gender dysphoria. There are a number of mechanisms.

Low gender typicality, peer victimization, ingroups and the “trans lobby” *. Low gender typicality (i.e., perceived lack of fit within one’s binary gender) has a significant impact on social acceptance within one’s peer group. As children progress to adolescence, peer as opposed to parental acceptance becomes paramount. Peers therefore take over the role of gender socializing agents from parents. Adolescent peers tend to be critical of behaviours, dress, mannerisms, and attitudes that are not gender typical as a way of policing and reinforcing gender norms and respond with criticism, ridicule, exclusion and even intimidation of non-conformers.

Perhaps these groups of young people, searching for homophily (i.e., like peers) started to exaggerate their points of difference from their gender-conforming peers rather than to hide and minimize them to avoid being bullied and excluded. In so doing, they left the “outgroup” of nonconformers and formed an ingroup of extreme gender-nonconformers, transcending the gender barrier altogether and declaring themselves transgender. Suddenly, the discomfort and fear of not being gender typical becomes a virtue and rather than fearing the disapprobation of their peers, their open revolt in declaring themselves transgender is valorised by a politically powerful transactivist lobby.

Ingroups behave in stereotypical ways with respect to outgroups – they favour ingroup characteristics, assigning more positive attributes to its members and derogating outgroups in order to enhance the status of their ingroup.

It is not surprising, then, that members of the transgender ingroup exaggerate the characteristics of the “trans” gender they take on – becoming more “feminine” or “masculine” than heteronormative groups of cismen and ciswomen. Transactivist groups have proliferated and consolidated in a short time frame by exploiting the characteristics of ingroups and outgroups. For example, social projection (i.e., the belief that other members of the group are like oneself) has been a powerful integrating process that simultaneously creates protection for its own members and distance from outgroup members. Those disagreeing with the ideology of the trans lobby are labelled “transphobic” and publicly denounced.

Rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) and the role of social media: There has been a disproportionate increase in the number of female adolescents, and a change in the historically greater ratio of preschool boys compared with adolescent girls in earlier decades. Rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) figures from the Tavistock gender service in Britain 2019-2020 show a peak in presentations at 14-15 years, comprising mainly girls.

DSM 5 (2013) estimated prevalence at one in 10,000 males and 1 in 27,000 females. Now studies are frequently recording incidence of transgender young people at 1-2%. Current adolescent estimates are between 140 (males) and 350 (females) times higher than that for transgender adult males and females. Social forces must be at play to account for this unprecedented overall rise and increase in female prevalence in transgender declarations over the past decade. Pang et al. concluded that… increased media content (specifically via social media) might act as a … means of social contagion, whereby some individuals erroneously come to believe through exposure to such media that their nonspecific emotional or bodily distress is due to gender dysphoria and being transgender/gender diverse (p. 7).

Regret and detransition

Trangender proponents argue that social contagion is not at play because regret/detransition rates are low. However, Vandenbussche observed that the average time lag from transition to detransition was five years and that any study reporting on shorter time periods would underreport the true rates of detransition.

The 237 detransitioners in this study reported receiving no medical assistance with their medical detransition (e.g., how to safely stop cross-sex hormones) or with the complications arising from “gender-affirming” surgery. The majority reported lack of support and other negative experiences from their former treating medical and mental health professionals and from the LGBT+ community generally. The reason? They are bad publicity for transgender apologists.

A profiling study of 100 detransitioners reported that 70 percent were white female college graduates, 56 percent of whom reported experiencing pre-pubertal gender dysphoria. If gender dysphoria and gender transition are socially contagious, particularly among adolescent females, it would be expected that there would be a greater proportion of female detransitioners and this in fact the case. There was an average of four years between transition and detransition for the female participants.

Social contagion also affects doctors, professional bodies, legislators, courts, sporting bodies, educators, and parents

Social contagion is by no means limited to vulnerable, suggestible children and adolescents. Social contagion has been documented in medical practice, professional bodies, law and legislation, sport, education, universities, and politicians. We live in a “woke” society and have adopted a fearful herd mentality when it comes to speaking out against scientific fallacies like gender identity and the gender spectrum when personal loss is at stake.

Despite a lack of consensus internationally regarding safety, ethics, and benefit of the global trend to prescribe puberty blockade to increasingly younger patients, prescription of GnRHa has steadily risen over the past decade on the unfounded assumption that placing puberty on hold affords time for children to “decide” their “true identity,” while reducing suicide risk, although recent evidence confirms that puberty blockade conveys no benefit in reducing suicide and puberty blockade actually derails the normal developmental trajectory.

Many professional bodies that should be thought leaders appear less concerned about scientifically verifying their stances regarding the transgendering of young people and more concerned about falling foul of the dominant political stance of gender affirmation since they rely in a circular manner on a small oeuvre of flawed transgender affirming “research” that is underpinned by the essentialist notion propagated by trans ideologues that gender, not sex, is primary.

According to DSM 5 (APA, 2013), 98 percent of gender confused boys and 88 percent of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty. However, the American Psychological Association (APA, 2015) and the Australian Psychological Society (APS) (2023) ignore the evidence in favour of appeasing an increasingly strident trans lobby.

Legal protections for children have been progressively eroded internationally, with the courts withdrawing from their gate-keeping roles and legislators being persuaded to mandate treatment of “transgender” children using only gender affirmation pathways. They have also been successful in lowering the age at which young people can access sex re-assignment surgery without parental consent. Some courts have ruled that “a mature minor” is capable of giving consent to transgendering medical procedures.

Bills have also been passed allowing transgender people to change their birth certificates without undergoing sex-reassignment surgery. Under the legislation a person can self-nominate their sex and list as male, female or any other gender diverse or non-binary descriptor of their choice. Children can alter the sex on their birth certificate with parental support and a statement from a doctor or registered psychologist saying the decision is in the best interests of the child.

Medical, legal, and human rights organisations have been acting synchronously (i.e., contagiously) to produce their position statements, denying the science of biological sex, and abrogating their duty of care to young people. The Australian Human Rights’ Commission has provided guidelines about sports participation that clearly disadvantage natal females, and which may well have a profound effect on female participation in sport.

Education curricula internationally are introducing elementary school children to concepts like the gender fairy, the gender unicorn, the rainbow spectrum, and the freedom to choose their gender. These biologically incorrect precepts are instilled unchallenged in vulnerable, receptive audiences, a clear demonstration that educationists have succumbed to social contagion to adopt these policies. School principals have discretion to socially transition children at school without their parents’ knowledge or permission, undermining parental authority and setting a dangerous precedent allowing children to make decisions about their wellbeing for which they are not prepared.

In Bostock vs Clayton County (2020), the US Supreme Court held that an employer who terminates an individual’s employment merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII (p. 4–33). “Transgender” became a legally protected category for employment purposes. By analogy, this ruling implies that schools should treat trans students in a similar manner.

There are now strict policies within the police and media that there will be no reporting in the press or digital media of youth suicide. The reason: publication of the details of a suicide spawns copycat suicides in the same age groups of young people. So, there is no mention in the media of these tragic events. We are very aware as a society of the potential for social contagion in all our behaviours and the best way to stop the contagion is to remove social exposure.

When it comes to transgendering children and young people, it appears that we are unable to learn from history. As Ryan T. Anderson (2018) concluded:

The [transgender] movement has to keep patching and shoring up its beliefs, policing the faithful, coercing the heretics, and punishing apostates, because as soon as its furious efforts flag for a moment or someone successfully stands up to it, the whole charade is exposed. That’s what happens when your dogmas are so contrary to obvious, basic, everyday truths. A transgender future is not the “right side of history,” yet activists have convinced the most powerful sectors of our society to acquiesce to their demands. While the claims they make are manifestly false, it will take real work to prevent the spread of these harmful ideas.

Fortunately, and belatedly, social contagion can serve a positive function in this debate. A class action of 1000 families treated by the Gender Identity Disorder Service at the Tavistock Clinic in London has just been announced. This will be the first of many class actions against gender clinics as the long-term devastation wreaked by the worst medical experiment in history unfolds.

AUTHOR

Dianna Kenny

* I use this shorthand term to describe the multitude of organizations that have policies and practices associated with unquestioning gender affirmation

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EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

House Passes Bipartisan Bill To Repeal Biden’s China Solar Rules

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The House passed a resolution Friday morning to repeal President Joe Biden’s moratorium on solar panel tariffs to several Southeast Asian nations, where Chinese firms linked to slave labor have reportedly been assembling their products to avoid U.S. tariffs.

The resolution passed 221 to 202, with the support of most Republicans and 12 Democrats, with supporters arguing in the preceding debate that the legislation was necessary both to support the U.S. solar industry while simultaneously holding China accountable for avoiding tariffs. Democratic detractors pointed to opposition from industry trade groups, arguing that the moratorium was set to run out next summer, and that it was necessary to grow the U.S. solar industry in the interim.

Biden has threatened to veto the legislation should it reach his desk. Several Democratic senators have announced support for the resolution.

The resolution would reinstate tariffs on four Southeast Asian nations — Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam — which a Commerce Department investigation found were being used by Chinese firms to avoid U.S. tariffs on their products. The four nations account for roughly 80% of U.S. solar panel inventory, according to Bloomberg.

The resolution has drawn criticism from trade groups in the solar industry, who have argued that the tariffs were necessary to help U.S. manufacturing find its legs, Bloomberg reported. The moratorium gives U.S. solar manufacturers time to establish domestic solar supply chains while ramping up production, according to supporters.

The solar industry has faced a significant crackdown under the Uyghur Forced Labor Production Act (UFLPA), which aims to penalize Chinese firms using the forced labor of Uyghur Muslims, an ethnic minority in the nation’s Xinjiang province. U.S. Customs and Border Protection impounded approximately 2,600 Chinese solar imports worth more than $800 million for violations of the UFLPA between October 2022 and January 2023.

AUTHOR

JOHN HUGH DEMASTRI

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘The President Got This One Wrong’: Senate Dems Revolt Against Biden’s Chinese Solar Rules

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

‘License To Kill’ Whales, Dolphins Handed to Offshore Wind Power Companies in Biden’s Green Energy Push

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Since December, Dozens Of Whales And Dolphins Have Washed Up Dead Along East Coast Beaches, Especially The New Jersey Coast.

Greenpeace launched its “Save the Whales” campaign on April 27, 1975. But in the ensuing years, Greenpeace has gone full Orwell. Greenpeace is no longer interested in saving the whales. It may actually be aiding and abetting the Biden administration and the offshore wind industry in killing whales supposedly to “save the planet.”

Since December, dozens of whales and dolphins have washed up dead along East Coast beaches, especially the New Jersey coast. There are no eyewitnesses to, and no video of, the deaths so no one knows for sure what is killing the animals.

The deaths are coincident, however, with an increase in activity by the offshore wind industry as it surveys locations to erect its turbines. These surveys include seismic testing that involves bouncing sounds off the bottom of the ocean. It is possible that these sounds impair sound-sensitive whales and dolphins in such a way that deaths can result.

Green activists certainly believed as much when the Natural Resources Defense Council sued the U.S. Navy over its sonar testing in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Greens also oppose seismic testing when conducted by the oil industry in its offshore activities.

The Biden administration denies that there is evidence that the whales and dolphins are being harmed by the offshore wind industry.

“At this point, there is no evidence to support speculation that noise resulting from wind development-related site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales, and no specific links between recent large whale mortalities and currently ongoing surveys,” says the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

And not only does Greenpeace embrace the agency’s denial, but it denounces links between offshore wind seismic testing and the whale and dolphin deaths as a fossil fuel industry-funded “right-wing disinformation campaign.”

So what’s the truth?

Once again, there are no eyewitness or video. But there is some inconvenient paperwork.

As it turns out, the federal agency has actually issued permits to the offshore wind industry to kill whales, dolphins and even seals. And not just one or two members of the species.

A currently proposed permit would allow New Jersey-based offshore wind developer Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind, L.P., , a partnership of foreign-owned wind companies, to kill 42 whales, 2,678 dolphins, and 1,472 seals.

Not very green. But it gets worse.

Among the 42 whales that Atlantic Shore Offshore Wind has been licensed to kill are 13 whales that are listed as “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act. Three whales are the North Atlantic right whale, a species federal regulators are wielding to wreck the Maine lobster and groundfishing industries on behalf of the offshore wind industry.

And this is not the only such permit. There are others already issued with more on the way. Each one allows for the killing of dozens of whales and thousands of dolphins and seals. And all this permitted killing is just for the survey phase of construction. There is the actual erection of wind turbines, and their operations and maintenance still to come.

So while we have the federal government telling the public that there is no evidence that the offshore wind industry is killing whales and dolphins, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration seems to know there is actually enough evidence that the industry needs permits to kill and even permits it to kill protected species.

The Supreme Court in Winter v. NRDC allowed the Navy to continue its sonar testing despite potential harm to whales and dolphins because of national security. So maybe the killing of a few dozen whales and thousands of dolphins and seals by the offshore wind industry could be justified in order to save the planet from climate change.

But regardless of your view of climate change science, the reality is that there is no amount of offshore wind that can be built that would affect weather or the climate in the slightest. So… save the whales.

Author

Steve Milloy

Steve Milloy publishes junkscience.com and is a Senior Fellow with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow.

RELATED VIDEO: Watch: new video calls to pause offshore wind projects to protect whales, wildlife

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

TAKE ACTION: M·A·C· Cosmetics Is Proud to Support the LGBTQ Lifestyle

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Parents should be aware that M·A·C· Cosmetics has a dedicated VIVA GLAM line that financially supports the LGBTQ lifestyle. M·A·C· uses transgenders, drag queens, and particularly, trans social media influencers to push this lifestyle onto impressionable teens who see the influencers glamorize their lifestyle. In truth, M·A·C· is pushing an agenda of sexual confusion instead of just selling makeup.

This perverted behavior is portrayed as a normal occurrence as M·A·C· embraces the LGBTQ community by glorifying the transgender and drag lifestyle even though it is an unhealthy lifestyle. M·A·C· camouflages their agenda as good by calling themselves Mactivists.

The official M·A·C· Cosmetics website states: “27 years of giving a glam! Since 1994, M·A·C VIVA GLAM has raised OVER $500,000,000 globally – and counting! – to support healthy futures and equal rights for all. That’s over 9,713 grants given to 1,818 organizations in 92 countries. And over 19,000,000 lives changed around the world.”

Yes, M·A·C· has donated 100% of the VIVA GLAM lipstick selling price of $19 each to help the LGBTQ community and people living with or affected by HIV/AIDS. Ironically, M·A·C· claims to support healthy futures when it is proven the LGBTQ lifestyle is unhealthy.

The M·A·C· website also brags, “Our founding credo – All Ages, All Races, All Genders – remains more integral to who we are now than ever before, as we fight for the rights and freedoms of all our friends and fans around the world.”

M·A·C·’s website clearly celebrates pride all year long, and the cosmetic retailer is proud to celebrate what they call beauty without gender boundaries.

But 1MM finds it extremely dangerous to share lies and deceit while propagating what God calls an abomination, camouflaged as kindness, love, and inclusivity. Yes, we are instructed to love one another, but we must also hold others accountable and speak out against sin.

Take Action

Please sign our petition stating you will not support M·A·C· Cosmetics as long as they honor and glamorize the LGBTQ lifestyle.

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EDITORS NOTE: This One Million Moms column is republished with permission. Copyright © 2023 American Family Association. All Rights Reserved.

Do We Have A Mental Health Problem?

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These are indeed strange times we live in today. It is nothing like the America I grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s. Today, we hear of such things as armed attacks on our schools, something never thought possible in my day. The knee-jerk reaction is to increase gun control and disarm the populace. There is little thought about the state of mind of the person pulling the trigger. Even if all of the guns were eliminated, there would still be people finding new ways to take the lives of others. So, the problem wouldn’t be solved. This is what got me thinking of Mental Health in the United States, something neglected for far too long.

Let me give you an example, for many years, the country had several psychiatric hospitals funded by the government. As I grew up, I knew of one in Chicago and another in Cincinnati. Perhaps you knew of one in your home town as well. They all served a vital purpose; to help those experiencing mental disorders. However, over the 1970’s and 1980’s, these were all shut down for funding reasons, and the patients transferred to jails, institutions that are not as well suited for treating people than the old psychiatric hospitals. At least 25% of the inmates in jail today suffer from some form of mental illness, and I’m told that number is on the rise.

Mental Illness affects our intellectual and emotional potential and, as such, influences our behavior. This, of course affects our socialization skills and ability to process what we are doing (problem solving). We now live in a world with people who possess hair-triggered tempers, resulting in primal speech laced with vulgarities, and reactionary violence. Even worse, the rest of us are suppose to accept it. The days of common courtesy are long behind us, which is discouraging. These are weak minded people who either have a physical deformity in their head or are prone to suggestions from others, right or wrong, thereby altering their perceptions and thought patterns.

There are two elements to be a sane person:

A. Perceptions – being able to correctly interpret the world around us through our five senses. Our perceptions can be impaired through such things as mental defect, drugs, alcohol, exhaustion, lies and deception, etc. As an old systems man, I can tell you authoritatively, if the input is wrong, everything that follows will be incorrect.

B. Processing – being able to produce logical conclusions. This too can be impaired as mentioned above, but add “lack of education” to it.

Understand this, all of our actions and decisions are based on these two variables.

What we are witnessing is a significant change to our culture as a result of our neglecting mental illness. Probably all of us have asked ourselves why this is happening. Beyond prisons, let us consider other indicators. To illustrate:

* The “Karen” movement, something that was nonexistent just ten short years ago. A “Karen” is a person, either female or male, who possesses a false sense of reality (only sees things from his/her perspective, not others), has no sense of empathy, possesses a sense of entitlement (that laws, rules, regulations do not apply to them), and are rather obnoxious in their interpersonal behavior to get their way, aka “Bullying.” Shouting and repetition in speech is a common weapon used by them. They are so convinced they are right, they are shocked and agitated when law enforcement arrests them and a judge finds them guilty of their behavior. The “Karen” phenomenon is becoming rather commonplace as we see it in retail stores, banks, offices, hospitals, on aircraft, “road rage,” just about everywhere. Such people are not ashamed of their actions and they are unapologetic for attacking others. Their focus is on themselves exclusively and nobody else. This suggests ego problems and the need to dominate others.

* Sovereign Citizens (aka, SovCits) – this is closely related to “Karens.” These are passive-aggressive people who resist law enforcement personnel and decisions by the courts. They are commonly found on our roadways where law enforcement pulls someone over for such things as speeding, not having a license plate (or an expired one), having a light out, failing to signal properly. When the officer pulls them over and asks to see their driving license, registration certificate, and proof of insurance, the SovCits refuses claiming his/her Constitutional rights do not require producing such documents. This often turns ugly as the driver is forcibly removed from his/her vehicle, handcuffed, and arrested for failing to comply. It is amazing how much these people do not truly understand the law. This is not simply a matter of a different point of view, but rather, they do not recognize state and local laws and resist police authority. By doing so, they are undermining public safety and the U.S. Constitution, which stipulates states can implement other laws not included in the Constitution, such as handling traffic. Basically, SovCits want to do whatever they want, whenever they want, and to hell with law enforcement authority as they do not believe it has a bearing on them. Very naïve. Quite simply, they are looking for reasons not to cooperate and comply with local laws. This suggests problems with their reasoning capabilities and hatred for authority, or they are simply trying to cheat the system.

* Schools – are much different than my day when all we had to learn is reading, writing, and arithmetic. There were also courses in language, music, Social Studies, History, and Civics where we learned how the government functioned. These last two items are incredibly weak today in schools. As such, students do not have a grasp of American History, the Constitution, and how local government works. They are also being taught the corporate world (Big Business) is evil, as is capitalism. This is where “entitlement” is learned and why the concept of workmanship suffers, and no corporate loyalty. At the college level, walk outs and demonstrations have become common place, and civil debate has been replaced by “shout downs.” How does this apply to mental illness? It demonstrates how false perceptions can be taught and embraced by the student, thereby affecting their mental patterns.

* Workplace – here, we occasionally hear about “office rage.” This is often caused by failing to respect authority, and an employee takes on a “Karen” approach to life, thereby disturbing the harmony of the corporate culture. Like Schools, many offices have lock down procedures should an employee blow a gasket.

In nonprofit organizations, the goal should be to promote harmony and cooperation through common goals. However, most today are run with an iron fist through autocratic rule thereby creating a highly charged political nightmare, and membership suffers.

* Morality – for several years, Gallup has been monitoring trends in morality. Their latest report announced a study whereby 50% of Americans thought the morality of the country was poor. Only 12% thought it was good. This is a big shift and may explain why religious institutions are on the decline. Television and movies have more influence today than the clergy. There is also a war on Christians underfoot. Consider this: years ago, divorce and declaring bankruptcy were considered shameful. We’re way past this point. Now, cheating is considered a perfectly acceptable form of behavior, and we are expected to accept things like trans-gender men in women’s sports. WOKEism, which is designed to teach us how to think about society, is actually a form of brainwashing and, as such, mental illness.

* Jails/Prisons – besides accommodating mental patients, our jails have become breeding grounds for drugs and crime. I know of one sheriff’s deputy, who worked in the local county jail, that estimated 99% of all inmates were taking illicit drugs smuggled into the facility. Such institutions also represent schools for learning how to violate the law. A young person going into such a facility will undoubtedly learn new scams and mayhem. In other words, instead of learning to adapt to society, most are likely to reoffend and extend their criminal careers.

All of these anomalies are caused by mental illness and, as mention, it can be caused by some physical defect, or learned either willfully or accidentally. As to the latter, how exactly is this caused?

* The rise of a drug culture that goes way beyond the 1960’s (or the last ten years for that matter).

* Excessive addiction to personal technology which gave birth to “instant” behavior, e.g., we demand something NOW, not later, and have no patience for waiting.

* The obsolescence of parental responsibility who are suppose to offer advice, and become role models of “right and wrong” for their offspring.

* Journalism and political irresponsibility who flagrantly lie to the public. This is reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels, the famed Nazi propagandist, who is remembered for saying, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

SO, WHAT CAN BE DONE?

No, gun control is not the answer, unless it is to check a person’s stability in order to own one. Even then, teaching gun safety to the schools and general public is imperative. Here are some other suggestions (in no particular order):

  1. Re-institute psychiatric hospitals. Separate those who truly need help from the prison population.
  2. Intensify the war on drugs, do not soften it. Make penalties for taking or selling drugs much harsher. Also, secure the borders as this has increased drug trafficking and placed an unneeded burden on our entire country.
  3. Regulate the use of personal technology, particularly in the classroom, stop the addiction.
  4. Have youth visit a court house, jail, and explain the process of booking and observe a trial. While we’re at it, let’s beef up History and Civics classes.
  5. Improve parenting skills to breed a new sense of responsibility. Conduct classes for parenting. The objective is to teach youth: Discipline, organization, accountability, responsibility, sacrifice/empathy. This can be aided by…
  6. Develop an apprentice system. A stint in the military or Peace Corps is nice, but understanding what is required to function in a workplace can greatly affect a youth’s perspective on life.
  7. Follow the rules and adapt to change. If the rules are inconsistent and need to be updated. Do so. And remember, try to achieve consensus; create Win-Win scenarios.
  8. Re-institute a censorship board over movies and television. They obviously do not know how to regulate themselves.
  9. Take the news media to task for fallacious reporting. Impose stiff penalties for inaccuracies. Editorials are one thing, facts are quite another.

Years ago, schools and the military added salt peter to meals, thereby having a calming effect on people, particularly males. Maybe it’s time to bring it back as well.

One of the things I learned from all this, is Mental Illness can be taught. Sure, there are physical abnormalities, but teaching people a different perspective on life or that 2 + 2 = 5, can be just as damaging.

So, do we have a Mental Health problem? Hell yes and it is growing every day, yet this country doesn’t seem to be too interested in solving this horrible problem. We can hope the problem will just go away, but as we all know, it will not.

Keep the Faith!

P.S. – For a listing of my books, click HERE.

Note: All trademarks both marked and unmarked belong to their respective companies.

©2023 Tim Bryce. All rights reserved.

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Biden Reelection Bid Promotes Abortion, Pornographic School Library Books as ‘Personal Freedom’

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President Joe Biden officially announced he plans to seek reelection in an online video message that indicates he plans to wage a social issues-focused campaign that presents unrestricted abortion-on-demand and same-sex marriage as “our rights” to “personal freedom.”

Biden chose to launch his reelection campaign, not with a traditional campaign speech, but with a previously recorded video posted online around 6 a.m. Tuesday morning. Abortion is among the ad’s first political messages, as the camera pans a protester holding a sign that reads, “Abortion is healthcare.”

The campaign video, which cites no presidential accomplishments in the president’s tenure, seemingly seeks to paint Republicans as extremists who threaten America’s spiritual health. “When I ran for president four years ago, I said we were in a battle for the soul of America. And we still are,” Biden says. “The question we’re facing is whether in the years ahead whether we have more freedom or less freedom, more rights or fewer rights.” But, the president asserts that “MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms,” including allegedly “dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love all while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.”

Conservatives say the ad shows Biden’s newly discovered focus on social issues. “Five seconds. That’s how long it took Joe Biden to endorse abortion in his new campaign ad,” noted SBA Pro-life America. “It’s what he’s running on. It’s what he stands for: taxpayer funded abortion on demand up to birth.”

Biden’s reference to “banning books” apparently refers to outraged parents’ efforts to remove books heavy with graphic depictions of sexual acts from public school libraries serving children under the age of 18. Among these titles is “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe, which “has detailed illustrations of a man having sex with a boy,” as well as “fellatio, sex toys, masturbation, and violent nudity.” Another book that frequently generates parental outrage, “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison, “describes a fourth-grade boy performing oral sex on an adult male” and remembering the experience fondly. The content of books that parents removed from Florida school libraries proved so sexually explicit that TV networks cut away from a press conference in which Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) showed their contents publicly. One such concerned parent pushed back against such characterizations, telling “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” last July that removing pornography from school libraries is “not Kristallnacht.”

Biden’s campaign appears to have adopted the talking points offered last summer by a Beltway Democratic polling firm, Hart Research Associates, which advised Democrats to attack “Republicans’ culture war attacks on schools” and accuse the GOP of “banning books and censoring curriculums,” while reassuring voters that Democrats want to “put politics aside.”

Biden’s launch video also appears to indicate that he will highlight his signature accomplishment of the so-called “Respect for Marriage” act, which imposed a nationwide redefinition of marriage on all 50 states. As he refers to “telling people who they can love,” the camera features Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff in the 2015 Supreme Court opinion that invented the right to same-sex marriage. Swing-state voters in Ohio rejected Obergefell in a landslide loss last November.

The ad says Biden intends to advance “personal freedom,” to “protect our rights,” and “to make sure that everyone in this country is treated equally.” As president, Joe Biden attempted to impose a COVID-19 vaccination mandate on every employer with 100 employees or more, doubled fines for travelers who refused to wear masks, and shoehorned discriminatory race- and gender-based equity policies into every aspect of government.

“I know America,” Biden insists in the ad.

Biden’s campaign intends to enroll inner-city Christians in his coalition. Near the end of the video, a shorter-than-normal screen cut featured two shots containing a cross-shaped Baptist church sign and a black minister opening his church door, separately.

Critics showed no surprise that the president chose not to highlight his record, which has included inflation unseen in 40 years, a poorly executed withdrawal from Afghanistan, and divisive efforts to brand his political opponents as incipient domestic terrorists.

“This particular president has been a sad story for the United States,” Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Tuesday. “We’re exposed to so many weaknesses in consequence of it abroad.” The last 27 months have inflicted “debilitating damage,” Bishop stated.

Entirely apolitical figures have criticized Biden’s promotion of gender ideology, threatening to cut off school lunch funding to schools that refuse to give men access to women’s private facilities and the “right” to compete against females in sports. “More and more women are realizing their biological reality is being attacked by politicians pandering to their base instead of protecting women’s rights,” said 12-time NCAA All-American swimmer Riley Gaines. “Protecting the girls’ and women’s sport category is common sense and should not be a partisan issue.”

Whatever issues his handlers highlight, Joe Biden faces an uphill battle in 2024. Biden currently has an approval rating of just 39%, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll. A new CBS News/YouGov poll shows that 72% of Americans say the nation is “out of control,” and 71% say it’s Joe Biden’s fault.

“In terms of inflation and other problems in our economy, it’s time to turn a page,” Bishop told Perkins. “But he’ll do what he’s going to do, I guess.”

A whopping 70% of Americans, including 51% of Democrats, say they do not want President Biden to seek a second term in office. He currently faces two Democratic primary challengers: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and New Age author Marianne Williamson.

The Democratic National Convention currently plans to hold no debates during the 2024 primaries.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Comer Threatens Kerry’s ‘Powerful, Unchecked’ Climate Office With Subpoena

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Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky has threatened to subpoena the office of special climate envoy John Kerry, over a failure to disclose documents to the House Oversight Committee, in a letter released Tuesday.

Comer slammed the Biden administration for failing to respond to nearly two years of oversight requests from the House Oversight Committee — which Comer chairs — and requested information related to the budgets, names of staffers, internal communications and activities of Kerry’s office. The congressman threatened to take further action if the administration failed to respond by May 9, including “compulsory processes.”

“John Kerry continues to negotiate deals with foreign governments, including the Chinese Communist Party, that potentially undermine the United States’ interests and the Biden Administration has refused to respond to Committee requests for information on Kerry’s powerful, unchecked position,” the House Oversight Committee wrote in a press release.

The committee in February called for Kerry to provide information regarding his negotiations with China, which the committee alleged “undermine” both U.S. economic interests and congressional authority. In Comer’s Tuesday letter, the committee questioned Kerry’s ability to negotiate binding agreements on behalf of the U.S., despite the fact his position did not require Senate confirmation.

“Envoy Kerry is engaging in activities that skirt congressional authority, threaten foreign policy under the guise of climate advocacy, and could undermine our economic health,” wrote Comer Monday. “Yet, Envoy Kerry and his office are refusing to be transparent about their activities, spending, and staffing with the Committee—and the American people.”

In early 2021, the Boston Herald filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the payrolls of Kerry’s staff, which the State Department estimates will not be completed until late 2024, despite the availability of the relevant records, according to the outlet.

Comer’s office directed a Daily Caller News Foundation request for comment to the Oversight Committee’s statement. The White House did not immediately respond to a DCNF request for comment.

AUTHOR

JOHN HUGH DEMASTRI

Contributor.

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