‘Obvious Violation Of Federal Law’: Forthcoming Litigation Could Gum Up America’s Largest-Ever Offshore Wind Farm

  • Legal proceedings against the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) could threaten to disrupt the timelines for the construction of the largest offshore wind farm in U.S. waters to date, Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project.
  • The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and The Heartland Institute requested that BOEM and the NMFS begin to revise an allegedly inadequate environmental review and associated North Atlantic Right Whale harassment authorizations within the next 60 days, or the organizations will go to court to challenge the agencies’ actions, an outcome which could possibly disrupt CVOW’s timeline.
  • “This letter officially puts BOEM on notice that CFACT is prepared to file suit in order to expose the agency’s clear violation of federal law in failing to protect the North Atlantic right whale,” Craig Rucker, CFACT’s president, said of his organization’s filing and its implications.

Pending legal challenges against the Biden administration could disrupt the timeline for construction of a Virginia offshore wind farm poised to be the largest in the U.S.

The Heartland Institute and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) filed a 60 day notice of intent to sue the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), a subagency of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), on Monday, citing an allegedly deficient biological review underlying the agencies’ authorizations for construction teams to legally harass a number critically-endangered North Atlantic Right Whales. The two groups request that the agencies rescind the allegedly deficient review, known as a “biological opinion,” within 60 days and issue a revised number of harassment authorizations.

If the agencies choose to disregard the request and do not rework the number of authorized whale disturbances to align with a new assessment, the organizations will take to the courts to challenge the biological opinion, according to the notice’s text. The notice and the possibility of expensive, time-consuming litigation adds to the risks that Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project faces, according to CFACT.

“This letter officially puts BOEM on notice that CFACT is prepared to file suit in order to expose the agency’s clear violation of federal law in failing to protect the North Atlantic right whale. By refusing to consider the cumulative impact of the dozens of industrial offshore wind facilities, consisting of several thousand individual turbines planned for the East Coast, it adopted a piecemeal approach, which only considered each individual offshore wind project in isolation,” Craig Rucker, CFACT’s president, said of his organization’s filing and its implications. “This is clearly a ploy to artificially reduce the total impact of these projects on the North Atlantic Right Whale. This obvious violation of federal law was ignored by the oversight agencies but will not be tolerated by the courts.”

The notice asserts that the CVOW project’s biological opinion, issued by NMFS and adopted by BOEM, runs afoul of the Endangered Species Act primarily because the assessment does not adequately consider the cumulative impacts that other East Coast offshore wind projects will have on migrating North Atlantic Right Whales that travel near the other developments in addition to CVOW, according to its text.

The Biden administration announced that it had greenlit CVOW development on Oct. 31, setting the project on course to become the largest offshore wind farm in U.S. waters. The administration’s approval followed months of speculation that the offshore wind industry is driving a massive spike in North Atlantic Right Whale deaths along the East Coast.

A considerable uptick in baleen whale deaths has coincided with the 2016 beginning of East Coast developments, a timeline which generally aligns with NOAA’s declarations of “unusual mortality events” for North Atlantic Right and Humpback Whales in 2017 and 2016, respectively, according to its website.

While critics of offshore wind have suggested that offshore wind-related sonar activity could be disorienting the whales and their sensitive hearing, which in turn makes them far more likely to transit dangerous areas or struggle to find food in ways they otherwise would not, government agencies and several major eco-activism organizations maintain that there is no available science demonstrating that there is a link between offshore wind and whale mortality. The government’s current position is that climate change and vessel strikes are primarily responsible for the increase in mortalities rather than ocean industrialization.

Offshore wind is a key aspect of the Biden administration’s overall green energy agenda, which aims to have the U.S. power sector reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2035 and net-zero for the entire U.S. economy by 2050. The administration is striving to have offshore wind generate enough power to satisfy the demand of 10 million American homes by 2030, but concerns over the industry’s ecological impact and its substantial economic struggles have put that target in jeopardy.

Representatives for BOEM and NMFS declined to comment, stating that they are unable to comment on matters of litigation. Dominion Energy and the White House did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden Admin To Green Light Another Massive Offshore Wind Farm Amid Industry Troubles, Mounting Whale Deaths

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VIDEO: Unveiling the ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’

Thanks to a bombshell report released by Congressman Jim Jordan, the tangled web of organizations involved in keeping the truth from you has been unveiled.

Watch our full report here and support our work.

The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a Stanford and University of Washington project, served as the spearhead to funnel reports discrediting and censoring my work along with many other voices on the right.

EIP worked with DHS’s CISA (Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency) to hand off their reports to the media, including the New York Times.  From there, Facebook and other social media platforms used the articles and reports from self-professed “experts” to label stories as “disinformation.”

The result of this highly coordinated effort at censorship was keeping YOU from learning the truth about ballot harvesting and other incidents of election fraud in the lead-up to Election Day.

And you can count on history repeating itself in the 2024 Elections.

Astonishingly, the lengths companies, universities, and even our government will go to discredit, censor, and misinform the public under the authority of “fighting disinformation.”

The censorship efforts took an Orwellian turn with the involvement of our federal government, but congressional leaders are watching and listening.

After our report was released last night, Rep. Thomas Massie tweeted, “I’m offering an amendment tomorrow to defund this program.”

However, can they be defunded when this program is also funded by the Atlantic Counsel, a foreign think-thank paid for by Facebook, and even Burisma (yes, THAT Burisma)?

We shall see.

Watch OMG’s report, and please help us continue our work by donating today.

EDITORS NOTE: This OMG exposé is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

CFACT Issues ‘intent to sue’ over offshore wind, releases new study…

CFACT is not just talking about the tragic mistake of offshore wind, we are taking action.

This week CFACT, partnering with The Heartland Institute, filed their joint intent to bring a lawsuit against the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) for abrogating their responsibility to protect the endangered Right Whale from the rush to construct wind turbines.

As we state in our press release,

“The North Atlantic right whale is listed as ‘critically endangered’ by the governments of both the Commonwealth of Virginia and the United States. Numerous studies by federal and environmental organizations have found that only about 350 North Atlantic right whales remain in existence.”

Unprecedented numbers of whales have been found dead along our coasts as wind turbine construction proceeds.  BOEM released its “biological opinion” giving Dominion Energy a green light to proceed with building its 2,600 MW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project 27 miles off Virginia Beach. This biological opinion has numerous pitfalls, including a failure to rely upon the “best available science” and employing a piecemeal approach to assessing risk to marine mammals that minimizes their actual lethality.

If bureaucrats refuse to do their jobs, we aim to force them!

To make matters worse, the Biden Administration energy strategy is terribly misguided in claiming offshore wind will meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  CFACT released a study this week which concludes, among other things, that “the net ‘carbon’ (carbon dioxide) reduction effects of offshore wind development are hugely negative and cannot justify further investments in this industry.”

You can read the entire study by David Wojick, Ph.D. and CFACT senior policy advisor Paul Driessen at CFACT.org.

The verdict is in regarding offshore wind. When one considers the incredible costs, its threat to the power grid, and the potentially severe threat to marine life, the way forward is simple…

Stop building offshore wind.

Read CFACT’s wind turbine study here

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

OB-GYN Testifies Before Congress on Alarming Miscarriage Spike Among Vaxxed Women, ‘I’ve Never Seen This Before’

The greatest medical crime in human history.

OB-GYN Testifies on Alarming Miscarriage Spike among Vaxxed Women

By: Frank Bergman, Slay News, November 14, 2023:

A leading American obstetrician-gynecologist, or OB-GYN, has testified before Congress regarding an alarming spike in miscarriages among women who have received Covid mRNA injections.

On Monday, Dr. Kimberly Biss, an OB-GYN who has been involved in 8,000 pregnancies, joined a panel of experts to testify before Congress in the “Injuries Caused by COVID-19 Vaccines” hearing on Capitol Hill.

“I’ve never seen this before,” Biss warned congressional lawmakers.

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who led the hearing, asked Biss:

“How many of your patients or pregnant women that you know of experience miscarriages after taking the COVID-19 vaccines — or injections?”

Biss first explained that the vaccination rate among her patient population was about 60%.

She revealed that most of the patients received three injections.

“Very few received four or more,” Biss noted.

Read more.

AUTHOR

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE RELATED COVID VACCCINE ARTICLES

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

COVID-19 Vaccine Reckoning is Coming

Covid vaccine lawsuits are coming in numbers that will blow you away.

“No One Is Safe”

A QUARTER of Americans Say Someone They Know Died from COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects

Vaccine Injury Data Is Clear: COVID Vaccines Are Killing an Estimated 1 Person Per 1,000 Doses (676,000 Dead Americans)

A COVID-19 vaccine reckoning is coming for the DOJ over federal gov mandates

By: Miranda Devine, NY Post, Nov. 12, 2023:

The Justice Department has just posted a new jobs ad — it’s looking for eight new attorneys to defend the federal government in vaccine injury cases.

Presumably, the hiring spree is in anticipation of a surge in COVID vaccine lawsuits, as people who were forced by government mandates to take the jab, and suffered serious side effects as a result, try to extract compensation from a system that is stacked against them.

“The office is currently expanding to address workload created by an increase in cases filed under the Vaccine Act,” reads the ad posted by the Torts Branch of the DOJ on the USAJobs website.

The recruitment drive comes on the heels of a little-noticed lawsuit filed in Louisiana last month by six vaccine-injured plaintiffs against the federal government.

[…]

Mandates & misery

Meanwhile, almost 13,000 Americans who claim the COVID vaccine caused them or their dead loved ones adverse reactions —such as the life-threatening heart ailment myocarditis or the debilitating immune disorder Guillain-Barre Syndrome — remain in limbo after doing what they were told was “the right thing”: heeding government mandates to submit to the jab.

The unaccountable, understaffed government tribunal that presides over the so-called Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), for vaccines administered under emergency measures, is a “kangaroo court,” says the lawsuit filed by attorney Aaron Siri, partner at New York firm Siri & Glimstad.

“The CICP is akin to a Potemkin village . . . an elaborate façade designed to hide an undesirable reality.

“Claims are consistently lost, ignored, denied, or caught up in the years-long purgatory of government bureaucracy. The compensation, if any, is neither timely nor adequate.”

Just six people had been compensated by October this year, of more than 12,775 COVID injury claims submitted to the CICP since Jan. 31, 2020, when the Trump administration declared a public health emergency.

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

RELATED VIDEO: Congresswoman MTG Holds Hearing on Injuries Caused by COVID-19 Vaccines with Special Witnesses

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

A Massive Carveout In Dems’ Climate Law Is Boosting Foreign-Made EVs

A key carveout in President Joe Biden’s signature climate bill is allowing companies to take advantage of federal tax credits to lease foreign-made electric vehicles (EVs).

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) features a $7,500 tax credit to incentivize Americans to purchase EVs that meet certain “made in America” sourcing and manufacturing standards, but the tax credit is still available to some foreign-made EVs if they are leased rather than sold. EV leases appear to have become more popular in recent months as dealers try to move growing backlogs of EVs off their lots, as consumer demand has cooled off and manufacturers have cut prices.

“Anecdotal information is that leases are going up, in some cases dramatically, due to the applicability of federal tax credits to commercial tax credits,” Brian Maas, president of the California New Car Dealers Association, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We have heard reports that, for some brands, leasing is exceeding 50% of all EVs sold by the dealer, especially for brands that cannot qualify with the domestic content and manufacturing requirements.”

The dynamic could complicate the White House’s goal to have 50% of all new car sales be EVs by 2030, a target which it has already spent billions and regulated aggressively to reach.

The Biden administration announced that leased EVs not assembled in North America were eligible for the tax credit in December 2022; between then and July 2023, the share of retail EV sales that were lease sales jumped by almost 15%, according to Cox Automotive. Given the shorter-term and temporary nature of leasing an EV compared to buying one, leasing may be the better deal for consumers who want to access the value of federal tax credits while also hedging against the possibility that the EV they buy today will become obsolete in short order as battery technology improves or charging standards change, according to Consumer Reports.

The lessor, or financial institution that mediates the lease agreement with the lessee, can claim the tax credit on the vehicle, Mass told the DCNF. However, the lessor is not obligated to pass that value on to the consumer, and can instead keep the credit’s value for themselves.

One potential outcome is that the lessor could keep the tax credit, meant to incentivize the purchase of domestically-sourced and manufactured EVs, for themselves by leasing foreign-made EVs that would not qualify for the tax credit if purchased outright.

Lessors may be inclined to pass on most of the value to the lessee by offering a discounted lease offer, which makes their deal more competitive or appealing, according to Kiplinger. However, they could still hold on to part of the tax credit’s value for themselves given their ability to set the terms of the lease agreement, and the carveout allows foreign manufacturers to capture the value of tax credits ostensibly designed to favor their American competitors, even if they pass on the full value to a lessee.

The White House did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Toyota Is Right: We Need More Hybrid Cars and Fewer EVs. Here’s Why

Plans for one of the largest EV battery manufacturing plants have fallen through — here’s how this may affect the future of EVs

Biden Poses In Electric Car That Has A Higher Carbon Footprint Than A Gas-Powered SUV

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.

Biden Admin’s Regulatory Overhaul Is Poised To Burden Americans In The Name Of Fighting Climate Change

President Joe Biden’s administration finalized guidance Thursday likely to burden Americans with costlier regulations to fulfill administration priorities such as combating climate change.

Biden’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is enacting new guidance that would require regulators to consider priorities like inequality and climate change when analyzing the costs and benefits of regulation. The White House argued the guidance is necessary so that regulations are issued with up-to-date analysis and information.Critics, however, argue the new guidance would lead to costlier regulations in the name of the Biden administration’s agenda.

“Adjusting how cost-benefit analysis is conducted in a way to make it easier to issue heavy-handed and costly regulations is unwise at anytime, particularly when Americans continue to suffer under punishingly high inflation,” Republican Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford stated, according to The New York Times.

The new regulations will in practice allow for stronger climate regulations by factoring in the projected economic costs of climate change and global warming, according to the NYT.

The regulations are based on Biden’s January 2021 “Memorandum on Modernizing Regulatory Review,” which accounts for contributions to progressive policies when considering proposed rules.

“We write to express our opposition to the proposed revisions, which are seemingly designed to fast-track progressive policies that do not have a majority of votes in Congress necessary for passage into law,” Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and a coalition of Senate Republican committee ranking members wrote in a letter pushing back on the memorandum.”

The rules are also based on an April “Executive Order on Modernizing Regulatory Review,” according to the White House fact sheet on the final guidance, which the OMB pointed the Daily Caller News Foundation toward.

The order references regulatory moves that likely would lead to “adversely affect[ing] in a material way the economy, a sector of the economy, productivity, competition, jobs, the environment, public health or safety, or State, local, territorial, or tribal governments or communities” and takes “equity” into account.

Americans may also bear the regulatory cost for other nations because “effects occurring beyond the borders of the United States can result in benefits and costs that accrue to U.S. citizens and residents,” according to the fact sheet.

The OMB’s White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) finalized the regulations.

“This updated guidance will help agencies more accurately estimate the impacts of their regulations and thereby enable them to craft better regulations which, in turn, means lower costs for consumers; cleaner food, air, and water; less fraud and exploitation; increased workplace safety; more innovation; and a stronger economy,” the White House OIRA fact sheet asserts.

The White House did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

JASON COHEN

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Biden Admin Proposes Nearly $15 Billion In New Regulations Over Just One Week

Grassroots activists winning battles against powerful Greens

Watch Morano on Watters on Green New Deal collapse

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.

Must Watch Interviews by Tucker Carlson and with Elon Musk on X

These two interviews with the two titans of freedom of speech Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk are a must watch.

Tucker’s interview with Douglass Mackey shows how the First Amendment is done. Mackey is about to go to prison for simply mocking Hillary Clinton on the internet.

WATCH:

Elon Musk did an extensive and wide ranging interview on the Lex Fridman Podcast. Elon and Lex talked about war and peace, AI, physics, politics, video games, and the future of humanity.

WATCH:

It appears that X is now the go to platform for the truth. X is participating in a revolutionary act. X is the platform of the revolution.

Bravo to Elon Musk for making X the media site that everyone is going to for the truth, the whole truth and noting but the truth.

©2023. Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

The Left Wants Pro-Lifers to Despair after Tuesday’s Election. Don’t.

Unlike a lot of things in life, losing doesn’t get any easier the more you do it. If anything, the sting turns to despair, as pro-lifers, who’ve slogged through seven bitter defeats since June of 2022, know well. Over the last several months, the jubilation of seeing Roe fall has been replaced by a sinking feeling that the cause of the unborn is doomed in the very place the justices have entrusted it: the states. But is that true — or are we just experiencing the pains of a battle we only just started fighting?

There had been real hope that Ohio, the first conservative state to weigh in on a radical abortion measure, would reverse the string of losses since Dobbs. When that didn’t happen, and Buckeyes voted 56-43% to let parents take their child’s life right up to the moment of birth, the media’s taunts that life is a political loser felt truer. Maybe, as notorious squishes like Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) are already saying, the movement should just give up. Stop talking about abortion.

But, as the editors of National Review so powerfully write, “In the mind of anyone who knows the truth that abortion deliberately kills an innocent human being, giving up on the most important human-rights cause of our time is unthinkable. After five decades of Roe and less than two years from Dobbs, the fight for life in the democratic arena has barely begun.”

Remember, they told discouraged readers, “Advocates of same-sex marriage suffered a string of 32 losses at the ballot box before succeeding for the first time, in the bluest of states, in 2012. … Their success serves as a reminder that a string of defeats at the ballot box is no reason to believe a cause is lost.”

For a half-century, pro-lifers have marched, prayed, volunteered, voted, suffered blows, and stepped right back into the ring — not because the cause was politically advantageous, but because it was morally right. That cause didn’t end when the Supreme Court righted one wrong. It ends when every square inch of this nation is a safe place for children in the womb. Anyone who thought that would be easy has quickly forgotten the lessons of the last 50 years.

We have to do what we’ve done since the beginning — stand up, dust ourselves off, and, as the NRO editors urge, “Take the long view on the fight on life.” “Do not despair,” pro-life scholar Michael New insists. “We were never promised a smooth glide path to victory. This is an important lesson. Because history tells us, when we persist, we win!”

Does that mean we don’t have things to learn? Absolutely not. We’re in a new and volatile political environment that Dobbs created, and if we’re going to turn the tide, it’ll take time. And while we don’t need to rethink our principles, we do need to rethink how we talk about them — if, in some cases, we even are.

In one of the more astonishing statistics from Tuesday night, a whopping 24% of self-described “white evangelical or born-again Christians” supported Ohio’s Issue 1, which not only puts the Buckeyes on par with California’s abortion extremism but gives the green light to minor transgender surgery — without parental consent. We’re expecting voters to act with moral clarity when the church won’t even speak to it. Until that changes, pro-lifers will have a much steeper hill to climb. If Christians have been complacent after the Dobbs victory, we need to ensure they’re no longer complicit after defeat.

Why would Christians be voting for abortion anyway? Family Research Council’s Joseph Backholm thinks the answer “could be the silence on these issues in many parts of the church. Many churches don’t want to be divisive, so they choose to say nothing, but when you say nothing you say something. Many Christians have been left with the impression that it doesn’t really matter what Christians think about abortion because the people they look to for guidance on these issues live and act like it doesn’t matter.”

Elsewhere, in Virginia, where abortion was the only messaging point Democrats had to run on, the media rushed to gloat that conservative agendas like Governor Glenn Youngkin’s had been rebuked. Among the more creative post-election name-calling was Fox Business’s Dagen McDowell, who labeled Youngkin a “damp Dorito” for putting so much emphasis on life.

But the reality is, NRO’s Jim Geraghty points out, “Virginia is shifting from narrow GOP control of the state House and narrow Democratic control of the state Senate, to narrow Democratic control of both chambers. Control of the state legislature is probably going to come down to a couple thousand votes in a handful of districts. It’s a frustrating result for the GOP, but not a sweeping rebuke.”

That step-away-from-the-ledge rationale was echoed by politicos like John McCormick, who noted that what happened Tuesday night isn’t all that different from what happened the year Youngkin won. “The House of Delegates went 52R-48D [to] 51D-49R house now.” And let’s not forget, he posted, Virginia is “a Biden +10 state,” and voters were still “evenly divided [46-47%] on a 15-week [abortion] limit.” Oh, and by the way, the damp Dorito has a 54-38% approval rating. Biden hasn’t sniffed a percentage like that since inauguration.

So losing the legislature by 1%, especially after Democrats banked their whole campaign on the outrageous lie that Republicans want to ban “all abortions without any exceptions” isn’t exactly a death knell for conservatism in the Commonwealth. And yet, McCormack shakes his head, “Twitter is treating it like a political earthquake.”

Even more encouraging, at least in the winning hearts and minds category, is that Americans believe the Democrats’ position on abortion is more extreme — by a two-to-one margin. Pro-lifers just have to figure out a way to continue driving that point home on the road to reasonable compromise.

In other words, Geraghty emphasizes, “The results last night are no reason to panic.” “The elections in the year before the presidential election are a little odd — much lower turnout, governors’ races in a trio of Southern states with their own quirky histories and dynamics, and intense waves of advertising in state legislative races that usually fly under the radar.”

But, he continues, “If you look back eight years to 2015, you see Republicans won two governors’ races (Kentucky, Mississippi) and lost one (Louisiana). This year, Republicans won two governors’ races (Louisiana, Mississippi) and lost one (Kentucky). (Jeff Landry won the Louisiana governor’s race in the first round in October, and everyone seems to have forgotten about that.)”

Tuesday night’s results were disappointing, to be sure, but they don’t negate all of 2023’s other victories. In a year that’s seen the beat-back of Pridea surge of anti-woke boycottsan education revolutionthe repudiation of ESG19 signed SAFE Actsa nationwide parents’ revolt, and the election of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), America is a long ways from writing social conservatives’ obituary. The cultural undercurrents continue to be strong on the Right, even if the electoral fruit doesn’t always bear that out.

The outcome in Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, and other states may not have been what we hoped for, worked for, or anticipated, but even in the midst of it, we shouldn’t once question what we did or what we stood for. In days like these, we have to keep an eternal perspective, remembering that, as Christians, we go from victory to victory. That doesn’t mean every election ends with a parade, because our battle is not temporal; it’s spiritual. Voters may reject the values that have sustained this nation for more than 240 years — but an election is not going to change the sovereignty of God.

Our charge is to not lose heart, to stay faithfully engaged in the struggle, and to pray. “In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus warned. “But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

“It took us 50 years to get here,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins told TWS. “But the way forward is the same way we arrived at this point — continuing each and every day to win the hearts and minds of people by telling truth. Now, the volume has been ratcheted up where the lies are being fueled by millions of dollars, but that just means we need to speak the truth with more passion and more consistency to break through Left’s deception.” Even so, he insisted, “We’re not going to retreat. We’re not going anywhere.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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.

Ohio’s Issue 1 Erases Parenthood

If Issue 1 passes in Ohio, it will effectively deny parents the ability to protect their minor daughters from predatory neighbors, family members, or industries favored by the Democratic Party. But perhaps its greatest offense comes in its attempt to legally dismantle parents’ rights to direct, guide, or even be aware of the most consequential decisions in their children’s lives.

Issue 1 would establish the right of an “individual” of any age to make “reproductive decisions,” including “but not limited to” abortion. Its sponsors tacitly acknowledge the real battleground in Ohio is the way the amendment affects parental consent. Their latest ad turns the concept on its head, irrationally claiming the amendment somehow protects young girls from child molesters.

In reality, Issue 1 empowers predators to victimize young girls twice, sexually exploiting them and then using abortion to dispose of the evidence. Sadly, Ohio has already proven this.

In 2003, John Haller, a 21-year-old soccer coach, began abusing a 13-year-old eighth grader, getting her pregnant shortly after she turned 14. He took her to a southwest Ohio Planned Parenthood for an abortion, posing as her father to authorize the abortion. Issue 1 would save him the trouble; Planned Parenthood, which has a history of covering up sexual abuse and human trafficking, would not have to go through the motions of asking about parental consent. Issue 1 transforms the child’s rapist into a crusading hero helping the girl exercise her “reproductive freedom” (which her parents might seek to deny). If Issue 1 passes, the Ohio-based pro-life group Created Equal accurately notes, “A sexual abuser could drive your daughter to an abortion, and you’d be left in the dark.”

But a cynic would be tempted to believe the abortion industry (which constitutes the heart of the coalition sponsoring the amendment) specifically designed Issue 1’s sloppily-worded amendment to stave off future legal issues. How did the abortionist react when they learned of their role in covering up the sexual molestation of a young teenage girl? Planned Parenthood sued all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court to deny her parents the right to see full medical records that could establish whether the facility engaged in a pattern of concealing minors’ sexual assaults. Issue 1 would allow the abuse-facilitating abortion industry to say parents have no standing to interfere in their children’s “reproductive decisions” and wash their hands clean of it.

Indeed, one of the sponsors’ ads says the quiet part out loud: Voting yes on Issue 1 “gets government out of the way” and gives the abortion industry free rein when it comes to your daughter.

Even when an underage pregnancy does not result from rape, Issue 1 renders loving parents incapable of shielding their daughters from the harmful mental and emotional impacts of abortion. A 2011 meta-analysis from Bowling Green State University’s Priscilla Coleman found “a moderate to highly increased risk of mental health problems after abortion.” (The evidence of abortion’s harms is far from restricted to Coleman’s work.)

“There are physiological, psychological, emotional consequences of abortion, and the pro-abortion side doesn’t ever want to talk about that,” said Ryan Bomberger, founder of the Radiance Foundation, on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Thursday. “That’s why when they say things like, ‘It’s no different than having a tooth pulled,’ well, there aren’t support groups for people who have their teeth pulled, but there are many hundreds, if not thousands of support groups across the United States for those who are post-abortive.”

That is why the abortion industry refers to its product only in “euphemistic” phrases “about ‘reproductive health and freedom’” — or, in the case of Issue 1, “reproductive decisions,” he said. “When they minimize this and they trivialize the impact of the violence of abortion, it shows which side actually cares about women, which side actually cares about the dignity of human life,” Bomberger insists.

One final point worth pondering: Each state legislates the age of statutory rape. Honest question: If Issue 1 establishes a constitutional right for “individuals” of all ages to make “reproductive decisions,” how would that affect Ohio’s age of consent laws? Isn’t having sex the ultimate “reproductive decision”? Even when statutory rape is illegal, left-leaning legal authorities often forbid parents from protecting their minor daughters on a mass scale. A human trafficking ring victimized more than 1,400 young girls under the nose of British authorities; records show police and social workers often told parents to accept that their 12-year-old daughters were “growing up.” The London Telegraph reported about “two separate cases where fathers who had tracked their daughters down and were trying to remove them from houses where they were being abused, were themselves arrested.” They watched helplessly as their daughters were abused, threatened, and trafficked around the United Kingdom, unable to defend them.

Issue 1 creates the legal environment in which all of this could occur. Every parent has a duty to vote no.

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.

Nashville Police Chief Confirms Authenticity Of Leaked Shooter Manifesto Pages, Launches Investigation

Nashville Chief of Police John Drake confirmed the authenticity of the leaked pages of the Covenant Christian School shooter’s manifesto and announced an investigation into the “unauthorized release” of the documents.

Conservative political commentator Steven Crowder released three pages of the manifesto written by Audrey Hale, the now-deceased individual who shot and killed six people inside the Christian school in March. An official with the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD) fatally shot Hale on the second floor during an open fire.

Drake condemned the “unauthorized release” of the pages and vowed to “identify the person responsible” for the leak.

“I am greatly disturbed by today’s unauthorized release of three pages of writings from the Covenant shooter,” Drake said in a Monday statement. “This police department is extremely serious about the investigation to identify the person responsible. This action showed a total disregard for Covenant families, as well as the court system, which has control of the shooter’s journals at the present time due to litigation filed earlier this year.”

“It is now pending in Davidson County Chancery Court and the Tennessee Court of Appeals. We are not at liberty to release the journals until the courts rule. Our police department looks forward to the ultimate resolution of the litigation concerning the journals,” Drake said.

Crowder posted the three images to Twitter and read the words on his show, “Louder with Crowder,” early Monday. The first page, titled “DEATH DAY,” details Hales’ plan to open fire inside the school and create a “high death count.” On the next page, the shooter wrote, “Kill those kids!” and wrote about her plan to specifically kill the white children.

“Kill those kids! Those crackers,” an image of the page posted by Crowder reads. “Going to private fancy schools with those fancy kwackis + sports backpacks with their daddies mustangs + convertibles. Fuck you little shits. I wish to shoot you[r] weak ass dicks w/your mop yellow hair, wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little faggots w/your white privileges fuck you faggots.”

The next page shows a schedule of the day leading up to the shooting, listing 12:33 p.m. as the time to “open fire” and then “die” soon after, according to a photograph posted by Crowder.

The MNPD initially told the Daily Caller and other outlets that it was unknown whether the pages were authentic or not, and were “aware” of a possible leak. The department said the images were not “crime scene images” in a Monday statement.

An attorney representing Hale’s parents said he was “not in a position” to confirm or deny the pages’ authenticity.

“We have never seen a manifesto at any time. We’re not in a position to authenticate these pieces of paper. We have absolutely not released anything, but we certainly did not release this,” David Raybin told WSMV4, an NBC local affiliate. “It’s inappropriate for me to make any further comment about it.”

Shortly after the shooting, authorities said Hale wrote a manifesto before carrying out the attack. The documents had not been publicly released since it is under ongoing investigation by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), a Nashville city council member told the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) in late March. The city council member assured the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) that the manifesto would eventually be released to the public.

AUTHOR

NICOLE SILVERIO

Media reporter. Follow Nicole Silverio on Twitter @NicoleMSilverio.

RELATED ARTICLE: Nashville School Shooter Identified As Transgender Artist

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

Nashville Police Department Releases Statement Addressing Alleged School Shooter Manifesto

The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD) said Monday the three images alleged to be part of the Christian Covenant School shooter’s manifesto are not “crime scene images.”

Conservative political commentator Steven Crowder posted photographs of three pages which he alleged are part of a manifesto written by the now-deceased Audrey Hale, who killed six people inside the Covenant School with a firearm in Nashville, Tennessee, back in March. An officer killed Hale as she continued opening fire on the second floor of the building.

“The MNPD is in communication with the Metropolitan Department of Law as an investigation, begun this morning, continues into the dissemination of three photographs of writings during an on-line discussion about Covenant School. The photographs are not MNPD crime scene images,” the statement reads.

Authorities confirmed they discovered a manifesto written by Hale in which she had allegedly planned the attack for several weeks. Following the shooting, authorities obtained the manifesto, which is under an ongoing investigation by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU).

The MNPD told the Daily Caller earlier Monday that they currently “don’t know” whether the three pages are authentic.

“I don’t know at this time,” a spokeswoman told the Daily Caller via phone call in response to whether they could confirm the authenticity of the pages. A spokesperson later told the Caller they had no update on the information as the department is still looking into the matter.

“The police department has been in contact with a representative of Covenant families,” the statement continues. “Police department counselors are available to assist them in coping with the emotional trauma caused by the dissemination.”

A police spokeswoman also told Fox News they are “aware” of a possible leak of the manifesto. David Raybin, an attorney representing Hale’s parents, said he could not confirm the pages’ authenticity, according to WSMV4, a local NBC affiliated outlet.

“We have never seen a manifesto at any time. We’re not in a position to authenticate these pieces of paper. We have absolutely not released anything, but we certainly did not release this,” Raybin said. “It’s inappropriate for me to make any further comment about it.”

Crowder posted photos of a notebook, in which the first page was headlined “DEATH DAY,” where it describes the writer’s excitement to shoot people inside the school and have a “high death count.” The next alleged page reads “kill those kids!” at the top, followed by “those crackers,” a derogatory term for white people.

“Kill those kids! Those crackers,” the page posted by Crowder reads. “Going to private fancy schools with those fancy kwackis + sports backpacks with their daddies mustangs + convertibles. Fuck you little shits. I wish to shoot you[r] weak ass dicks w/your mop yellow hair, wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little faggots w/your white privileges fuck you faggots.”

https://twitter.com/scrowder/status/1721545965402726734

The next alleged page shows a schedule of the day leading up to the shooting, listing 12:33 p.m. as the time to “open fire” and then “die” soon after, according to the photograph posted by Crowder.

Shortly after the shooting, authorities revealed that Hale was a female who identified as a male and worked as an artist. She had bought seven firearms legally despite medical professionals’ concerns about her mental state, and law enforcement previously said they would have confiscated her firearms if they had been made aware of the concerns.

Nashville Metro Police Department told the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) in late March that they were not publicly releasing the manifesto due to an “open investigation.” The BAU was investigating the manifesto that had been previously reported to have “maps” and “writings” detailing Hale’s plan to shoot up the building.

A Nashville city council member assured the DCNF that the manifesto would eventually be released to the public.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include the MNPD’s statement released Monday afternoon.

AUTHOR

NICOLE SILVERIO

Media reporter.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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RELATED POST ON X:

https://twitter.com/MattWallace888/status/1721599284171174343

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

War of the worldviews: Science as a political tool

Is science as objective as we might like to think? Not necessarily. As I discovered when writing my new book Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets, the scope for deliberate misuse of science for political ends is large indeed.

The Nazis and Soviets are indelibly associated in the public mind with all kinds of often rather unpleasant forms of pseudoscience, from bogus fascist concepts about human genetics which led to the mechanised murder of six million, to equally fake Marxist notions about plant genetics whose misguided agricultural application starved millions more.

But, as I show, there were also far, far weirder such ideas abroad in the 20th century’s twin worst dictatorships too, albeit much less well-known. Was homosexuality a transmissible disease? Were stars a fake concept? Was chemistry inherently Communist? The answer to these questions was, of course, ‘no’.

But under totalitarian rule, this fact was frequently irrelevant. What really mattered was what the answer to these questions was politically, not factually: and the official answer to each of the above was often thought to be ‘yes’. To disagree could easily be considered a crime not only against science, but, far worse, also against the State.

People in the West today tend to look back on such absurdist horrors as mere cautionary tales of the past, like lurid tales about medieval witch-burnings or the beheading of heretics. They couldn’t happen over here anew today, in our own contemporary advanced liberal Western democracies like the United States, Great Britain and Australia, could they? I’m afraid, as my book conclusively demonstrates, they already have – and here are just a few recent examples.

History repeats itself

Not long after the end of the Cold War, a new front suddenly opened up within the West’s replacement internal conflict of opposing political cultures – the Great Map War of 1991. The so-called ‘problem’ centred upon the standard global map known as the ‘Mercator Projection’, after the 1569 chart’s original creator, the supposedly depraved white Belgian racist Gerardus Mercator (1512-94) – the very man after whom this very website is now named.

Due to arcane technical reasons, the Mercator Projection does not depict landmasses by their actual true size-ratios to one another, with nations near the equator, like those in black-majority Africa, appearing smaller relative to the (currently) majority-white nations of Europe. Evidently, this was racist, certain terminally over-sensitive left-wingers thought, so an alternative map, the ‘Peters Projection’, was devised by morally superior German historian Arno Peters (1916-2002) to counter such imperialist “European arrogance”, making Africa look larger.

The US National Council of Churches, now worshipping at the altar of political correctness, not Christ, released a statement strongly approving of the Peters map, which they intended to make use of henceforth, in spite of criticisms of its actual accuracy. But accuracy did not matter to the churchmen. “The political implications of this map are true, whereas the political implications of the Mercator map are false,” they said, like true Party cadres. “The question for the Church is not one of scientific reliability. We see this map as being very central to the establishment of a correct worldview.”

But correct in what way? No map, being drawn upon a flat sheet of paper, can ever properly recreate the actual layout of our broadly spherical globe (technically, it’s an oblate spheroid), not even the Peters Projection.

Mercator pragmatically chose to draw his map in the way he did because, whilst it did indeed distort the relative size of various nations, its layout happened to be more practically accurate for sailors to navigate with, not to pointlessly belittle Congolese egos.

Peters’ new map may have been more politically correct, but any ships actually using it to cross the oceans would have been more likely to get lost or run aground. Still, this did not matter, as “the political implications of this map are true” — pure cartographic Lysenkoism.

It sounds like a cautionary parable, and indeed it is…

The sick men of Europe (and everywhere else)

Across the entire world, new forms of ethnic, political and religious pseudoscience are today engaged in a process of deadly combat over what constitutes reality itself, exactly as they once were in the days of the Soviets and the Nazis.

Just consider the following different national (or nationalist) responses to the recent Covid-19 pandemic:

  • In India, patriotic Hindu science promoted by the Far-Right BJP government tells citizens cow-pats and cow-urine, produced as they are by animals considered sacred in native religious lore, can act as coronavirus cure-alls.
  • In China, worthless traditional Chinese medicines are promoted by the ruling Far-Left Communist Politburo as a plausible means of alleviating symptoms of the disease their bio-labs very possibly unleashed upon the world in the first place.
  • In Iran, Islamic clerics solemnly warn against injecting Western-produced COVID-19 vaccines into human bodies, as their infidel biowarfare side-effect is to twist good Muslims into hellfire-bound homosexuals.
  • In Germany, long memories of Nazi-era abuses of medicine lead numerous sceptics to decline jabs and claim to be living under a new “vaccine dictatorship”.
  • Across Europe, thousands of blacks refuse vaccines on the grounds they are secret white plots to kill them off or render them infertile, whilst white nationalists in these very same nations reject them too, thinking their race-traitor rulers are seeking to do something similar to them.
  • In the US, Republicans are statistically shown to be less likely to accept vaccines than Democrats, with medicine becoming a new and potentially fatal partisan battlefield.

This is pure epistemic balkanisation, and within Western nations, demographically transformed by decades of uncontrolled mass immigration, whites, blacks, Hindus, Muslims, Chinese and others all now mixed endlessly with one another, providing a wide-open target for our enemies to aim at.

If different demographic groups inexorably grow to possess different internal scientific maps of the world, like the Mercator and Peters Projections, then why would an avowed enemy of the West like, say, Vladimir Putin, refrain from exploiting this fact to widen existing societal rifts even further?

Scientific narratives could easily become effective misinformation weapons, unleashed upon societies by their external foes to undermine them from within under the modern-day Russian tactic of hybrid warfare – an attack-method the Kremlin inherited from Soviet times, when the KGB spread the lie that the white-led US military had created AIDS as a way to kill off their troublesome black population, a lie swallowed eagerly by racial extremists of an Afrocentrist persuasion, helping foster racial unrest in inner-city areas.

Toilet papers

This could all easily lead to disaster, with a world split asunder between different views of what scientific reality itself is, even in terms of simple, commonsense things like what constitutes a biological woman.

In order to try and raise awareness of this growing problem, a rash of fake science papers have appeared in recent years, in which whistle-blowing scientific hoaxers have devised deliberately absurd theories that could never possibly actually be true, but which did appear to contain ideas, implications and data which could prove useful to politically motivated scientific partisans. They then submitted these hoax papers to ideologically captured journals to see if they would publish them anyway – which, with alarming frequency, they actually did!

One of the most telling was devised in 2018 by Gary Lewis, a senior lecturer in psychology at a London university, hoping to expose how many ‘scientific’ journals these days are simply profit-making exercises that will publish literally anything in return for cash.

Posing as a fictional academic from the equally fictional Institute of Interdisciplinary Political and Faecal Studies, Lewis’ paper Testing Inter-Hemisphere Social Priming Theory purported to provide “compelling evidence”, based upon “structural equation modelling”, that the hand a person used to wipe their bum clean with after visiting the toilet was determined by their political preferences, left-wingers using their left hand, right-wingers their right one.

A suggestion for a follow-up study was to see how political centrists operated: “Do they alternate hands, or do they use both hands at the same time?” Naturally, Lewis’ paper was accepted for publication, the journal in question even agreeing to waive their usual publication fee, feeling the text’s absurd conceit would gain them some good publicity.

Lewis’ paper stands as a great allegory for the way many people’s opinions about what constitutes scientific reality increasingly now seem determined more by the position they occupy on the political spectrum than anything else. The US military has deemed such trends in fake research to be an actual national security threat, their DARPA research unit pledging up to US$7.6m to create an AI-driven “bullsh*t-detector” program intended to sift out the genuine research from suspect, non-repeatable twaddle in the social (pseudo-)sciences like psychology, sociology and anthropology, all of which the armed forces make use of when analysing things such as enemy morale or troops’ likely reactions to different scenarios on the battlefield.

Divide and conquer

If the US military now has an academic bullsh*t-detector, perhaps Vladimir Putin’s Russia might equally usefully develop an academic bullsh*t-generator (presuming much of Western academia has not already become one of its own accord, that is).

Hoping to increase Western overreliance upon Russian gas and oil, thereby allowing it to blackmail short-sighted nations like Germany militarily, the Kremlin has in recent years sought to both downplay concern about global warming, while simultaneously pushing Green-style environmental concerns about alternative Western sources of energy.

In 2018, Putin warned that wind turbines “shake so hard the worms crawl out of the ground”, making such items environmentally unfriendly, and has in the past point blank denied global warming is substantially driven by mankind. Yet, at the same time, Russia can secretly fund anti-fracking protestors in Britain, dubiously arguing such sources of fuel cause dangerous earthquakes and only supercharge climate change ever more.

If these positions sound mutually contradictory, then all the better: they help further sow political division in the West, while simultaneously encouraging Europe’s continued future dependency upon Russian gas.

Come the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Russia spied further potential to foster division, with State media and online campaigns pushing ludicrous claims Britain’s AstraZeneca vaccine, which used a chimpanzee-virus as part of the development process, had the unfortunate side-effect of transforming patients into monkeys.

Images of the UK’s then-PM Boris Johnson photoshopped to make him look even more like a yeti than usual were captioned, ‘I like my Bigfoot vaccine!’ while a video of vaccinated astronauts shows them devolving into violent apes on their spaceship.

The point of the propaganda campaign was not only to make Westerners distrust their yeti-led governments, but also to persuade nations like India and Brazil to reject Western vaccines in favour of buying Russia’s own Sputnik V version instead.

This is all part of Russia’s ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’ of hybrid warfare, named after Russian Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov, who argues that “the role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of [physical] weapons.” In other words, epistemic warfare is often now more cost-effective and efficient than actual warfare.

Welcome to the dawning new age of the Science Wars. You’d better get used to them. They won’t be ending any time soon – and that’s a pure scientific fact!


Edited and extracted from Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets by S.D. Tucker, out now in hardback (Pen & Sword/Frontline Books, ISBN: 9781399073158). All references for material cited above can be found within.


AUTHOR

STEVEN TUCKER

Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name.

RELATED ARTCILE: Is climate change a problem for Africa?

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

The Green Energy Industry Just Had An Absolutely Brutal Week

The past week has been marked by worrying developments for the state of the green energy industry, suggesting that President Joe Biden’s sweeping climate agenda could be imperiled.

Offshore wind companies are cancelling projects and executives are sounding the alarm on the state of the industry, while solar companies and indexes have seen their value continue a months-long slide that has resulted in diminished earnings forecasts and a solar-oriented loan provider’s bankruptcy. These developments suggest that Biden’s sweeping green energy plans could be in trouble, especially given the intractable nature of some of the crucial economic problems plaguing the industries.

“Boosters for this energy transition bet the farm on three rent-seeking industries: wind, solar and electric vehicles. Two legs of that three-legged stool are now showing signs of financial distress despite massive subsidies they’ve already received from multiple levels of government,” David Blackmon, a 40-year veteran of the oil and gas industry who now writes and consults extensively on energy, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “American consumers, who are paying the price for this in the form of skyrocketing costs of all forms of energy, should demand their representatives hang up the phone when the calls come in from wind and automaker executives asking for even more.”

Orsted, a Danish offshore wind company, announced on Tuesday that it cancelled two major developments off the coast of New Jersey. Company executives blamed factors like inflation, interest rates and supply chain woes, saying that the problems had left the firm little choice but to walk away from the major projects.

Since the cancellations, the company’s stock price has fallen even further and S&P has indicated that it is considering downgrading the company’s credit rating. But Orsted is not the only offshore wind company showing signs that the industry may be in an extremely precarious position.

The U.S. offshore wind industry appears to be “fundamentally broken” due to problems with permitting and rising costs, Anja-Isabel Dotzenrath, the head of gas and low carbon energy for British Petroleum (BP), said at a conference on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg News. “There’s a fundamental reset needed,” she said, suggesting that there could be solutions and that her company is working with its partner to assess “options for their U.S. offshore wind projects to mitigate the effect of inflationary pressures and permitting delays.”

Under Biden’s leadership, the federal government has heavily subsidized the offshore wind developments, primarily via the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), in a bid to have the industry provide enough power to source electricity for 10 million American homes by 2030. The state of the industry is so dire that numerous energy market experts told the DCNF that a government bailout for the industry may be just around the corner.

The offshore wind goal is just one slice of the administration’s efforts to decarbonize the American energy sector by 2035 and then have the entire U.S. economy reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

Like offshore wind, the administration is counting on solar power to emerge in the coming years as a replacement for the energy generated by fossil fuel infrastructure. Solar power is also similar to wind power in that it is intermittent and currently more expensive than power sourced by natural gas and other fossil fuels, according to Peter Grossman, an emeritus professor of economics for Butler University.

Solar companies have generally had a rough 2023 so far, and this past week has been no different: while stocks are down for several leading solar producers, Sunlight Financing, a company which provided loans to consumers to buy residential solar systems, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday. Several leading home system installers pared back their outlooks for the year this week as well, as higher interest rates and inflation have cooled consumer demand, according to Bloomberg News.

“The green industry makes products that are both very expensive and mostly ineffective,” Larry Behrens, the communications director for Power The Future, told the DCNF. “Yet, instead of admitting reality, we have an administration in Washington that is doubling-down and working overtime to force these terrible products into our lives,” he continued, adding that “thanks to the laughably-named Inflation Reduction Act, Joe Biden has a $369 billion dollar green slush fund and he’s put a political operative in charge of it… Joe Biden knows that when the green agenda fails, his legacy will sink even further, so there will be no dollar amount too high to keep green boondoggles afloat for as long as possible.”

The White House, Orsted, BP and Sunlight Financing all did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

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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.

The Curious Case of Caster

Caster Semenya, the “woman” runner who made waves years ago dusting female competition while appearing very male, is back in the news. The athlete has just written a new book, The Race to Be Myself; the problem is that most media reporting on Semenya either don’t know, or won’t say, what the runner’s physical “self” actually is.

Reporters may focus on Semenya’s “struggle” to compete — in 2019, rules took effect barring high-testosterone “female” athletes from running in certain events without suppressing their testosterone levels — as if the issue here is the allegedly unjust persecution of a minority. This leaves many observers with the impression that the runner is just another MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, aka “transgender”) individual. But here’s what the media don’t relate:

Leaked results of medical tests performed years ago informed that while Semenya apparently has external female genitalia, the runner has no womb or ovaries; moreover, Semenya does have an XY (male) genotype, internal testes and, consequently, male-range testosterone levels.

Thus is it clear to me that Semenya is a male who underwent abnormal intrauterine sexual development. Years ago, such a person was typically called a hermaphrodite.

So when claiming womanhood, Semenya probably isn’t trying to fool others (though the runner is likely being self-delusive; i.e., rationalizing). The larger issue, however, is that the controversy surrounding the athlete reflects how our society is fooling itself.

Unlike MUSS individuals, who clearly have psychological/spiritual issues, a biological condition does explain Semenya’s woes. It’s called 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency (5αR2D), a genetically induced problem that causes abnormal development in the womb and during puberty. It’s extremely rare and afflicts only males — or, as the establishment puts it, children “genetically male.” The condition causes a lack of dihydrotestosterone (DHT), which is necessary for the proper development of external male genitalia before birth.

This results in either ambiguous genitalia; poorly developed male genitalia; or frequently, genitalia that appear female at birth. Semenya apparently occupied the last category.

This means the runner’s family perhaps had every reason to believe, prior to puberty, that their child was a girl (except that Semenya was likely a “tomboy” to end all tomboys). At puberty, however, male characteristics began appearing (e.g., a deepening voice).

Whatever Semenya’s family might’ve suspected at that point, maybe deep in their minds’ recesses, it likely wouldn’t be anything with which they’d come to terms. So even during Semenya’s adolescence, they would’ve had a strong emotional vested interest in believing the runner was “just a girl” (though a bit different). Semenya clearly had, and has, the same overriding desire.

Because such an abnormality is a cross to bear, Semenya deserves compassion. For this reason, while I will studiously refer to a MUSS individual with pronouns reflecting his actual sex, I won’t reference the runner with either male pronouns or Semenya’s preferred female ones; I’ll just write “CS.”

But while sympathy is warranted, what CS doesn’t deserve is to compete with women. Understand that the runner is profoundly masculine. How much so? Well, many years ago, before CS’s medical evaluation, I predicted that an examination would show what one ultimately did: that CS had internal testes.

No, it wasn’t precognition, but that CS was not merely a muscular woman. It wasn’t just that the runner had the physique and voice of a teen boy and no mammary glands, either; rather, CS also exhibited male facial structure, mannerisms and behavior. As an example, take a look at the following video, of CS setting a South African national women’s record, paying particular attention to the 0:09 through 0:21 segment.

And below is an interview from mere days ago, in which CS’s masculine nature is also clear.

Personality and mannerisms are significant because, in reality, psychological sex differences may be even greater than the physical ones. The most extreme tomboys (and I’ve seen more than a few) may be athletic; may when young play sports with the boys, look for frogs with the boys and even fight with the boys; but they’ll still in significant ways have female personalities. The loudness, boisterousness and playful mischievousness characterizing small lads will, perhaps invariably, be absent.

Now, one commenter under the second above video wrote, “It’s not caster’s [sic] fault that she’s like this.” No, it’s not — but it’s not society’s fault, either. Nor is it society’s obligation to completely overturn its social norms to accommodate the rarest of problems. In our gratuitous focus on individuals and “rights,” we often forget that the “many” comprises individuals, too — and that the “good of the many outweighs the good of the few.”

This error occurs partially because the plight of an individual, as in CS’s case, will often become a human-interest story that tugs on heartstrings, as people’s emotions are manipulated; in contrast, the “many” are often left as a faceless collective, or mass, and are lumped into “society.” It then appears a matter of societal discrimination, of the many bullying the one, of a “brave soul” batting an oppressive, ossified “system” — despite the system being wholly on the anomalous individual’s side.

Yet to illustrate how silly this is in CS’s case, just consider how different this story would’ve been had CS had been born with poorly developed male external genitalia, which CS’s 5αR2D disorder could just as easily have induced:

We wouldn’t even be talking about CS — no one would even have heard of the athlete.

Yet the difference would be just superficial. In fact, it’s reasonable to conclude that a male MUSS individual who has had sexual-distortion surgery (sex glands removed) has less of an athletic advantage. After all, CS still has those testosterone-producing male sexual organs.

This said, none of this would mean as much were the issue just a matter of women losing some sporting titles and medals. Athletics is, after all, frivolity. The deeper problem is that whether it’s a CS-type situation or the MUSS agenda, the propaganda warps people’s sense of reality — and most egregiously, that of children.

CS can embrace the illusion, as the athlete does, of being a “different kind of woman” if CS wants. I’ll treat the runner kindly, too, given the cross CS bears. But legitimate compassion never extends to the deep societal indulgence of illusion, and a legitimate individual “right” never includes the requirement that everyone else must lie.

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