The New Ugly Americans

The old cultural imperialism was supposedly greedy corporatism like Disneyland, McDonald’s, and Starbucks sprouting up worldwide to supplant local competitors.

But these businesses spread because they appealed to free-will consumer demand abroad. They were not imposed top down.

The U.S. presence in Afghanistan collapsed in August 2021 amid the greatest American military humiliation in modern history. A billion-dollar new embassy was abandoned. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of new infrastructure at the huge Bagram Airbase was dumped.

We still do not know how many billions of dollars of sophisticated new weapons were left to the Taliban and now are making their way through global terrorists’ marts.

Yet, in our skedaddle, the LGBTQ flag still flew high from our new Kabul embassy. A George Floyd mural was prominent on city streets.

And gender studies programs – to the tune of $787 million in American subsidies – were showcased at Kabul University, in one of the most conservative Islamic countries in the world.

Rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter banners have hung from our embassy in South Korea.

Such partisan cultural activism is a diplomatic first.

The woke Left has now weaponized the country’s diplomatic missions abroad to advance highly partisan and controversial agendas that can offend their hosts, and do not represent the majority of American voters at home.

American foreign policy toward other nations seems now to hinge on their positions on transgender people, LGBTQ promotion, abortion, climate change, and an array of woke issues from using multiple pronouns on passports to showcasing transgender ambassadors.

The Biden Administration in January 2022 stopped the EastMed pipeline. That joint effort of our allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel sought to bring much needed clean-burning Mediterranean natural gas to southern Europe.

Apparently, our diplomats felt it violated our own New Green Deal orthodoxies. So we imperialists interfered to destroy a vital project of our closest allies.

The White House manifesto called the “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” offers a blueprint for how to massage nations abroad to accept our values that are increasingly at odds with much of the world’s.

Do Americans really believe that embracing drag-queen shows at military bases, abortion to the moment of birth, transgender men competing in women’s sports, and the promised effort to ban the internal combustion engine are effective ways to ensure good relations with the United States?

No wonder the Biden Administration’s new cultural imperialism is proving disastrous for a variety of reasons.

One, these imperialistic and chauvinistic agendas are pushed abroad at the very time the respect for the U.S. military is at an all-time low. It was humiliated in Afghanistan. It is now unable to recruit sufficient qualified soldiers. Its stocks of critical weapons are depleted.

The Pentagon leadership of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, along with Joe Biden, do not radiate competence.

But they do exude woke pieties.

While we offend Middle East oil exporters and Central Europeans, China allies with Russia and Iran. India and Turkey triangulate away from the United States. Sanctimonious hectoring while appearing weak is a bad combination.

Two, these warped standards are incoherent. Is an abortion-on-demand, totalitarian China therefore an ally? How could we damn supposedly non-woke Saudi Arabia as we begged it to pump more of its non-green oil before the 2022 midterms?

Some of our most loyal allies are in Eastern Europe – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania. These countries have experienced traumatic histories on the front lines against Islamic Ottoman expansionism, czarist and Soviet aggression, and German Nazi bullying and invasion.

They are democratic and pro-American. Yet they are now targeted by our woke imperialists because they remain steadfast as the most religious and traditional of our European allies.

Yet these nations would be more likely to dispatch credible forces for NATO’s defense than many of our left-wing, woke, and militarily less capable Western European nations.

Three, most of the 7.9 billion people in the world are not woke. They are aspiring to obtain a modicum of the luxury and affluence taken for granted in America.

The rest of the planet worries whether it will have enough food, energy, security, and shelter to live one more day. For most, the incessant, woke virtue-signaling from affluent Americans comes across as the whiny bullying of pampered, self-righteous – and increasingly neurotic – imperialists.

Four, traditionally the party that controls the State Department does not politically weaponize its embassies with wedge issues that have not won majority support among Americans.

Such abject politicalization rattles and alienates foreign nations. They do not want to be drawn into the American Left’s internal propaganda efforts that they know are bitterly controversial inside the United States.

How odd that those on the Left who in the past decried “American imperialism” are now proving the greatest imperialists of all.

AUTHOR

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.

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

What the Imposing of Ideological Fantasies Reveals

Father Jerry J. Pokorsky: Science is the study of the handiwork of God. Christians must not object to legitimate science, but we must object to the abuse of science.


There is an instructive story about an American hostage who asks his Iranian captors to listen to reason. They agree, but add, “Then we kill you.” Ideologues are not open to dialog.

The diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), now everywhere in our society, is an ideology that repackages René Descartes’ dictum. “I think, therefore I am.” We are “ghosts in a machine.” Our thinking – actually fantasies – determine our reality. But this projection of delusions, disconnected from empirical reality, requires us to deny or distort human and historical experience.

Secularists occasionally ask, for example, “Where is transgenderism forbidden in the Bible?” An informed Catholic, eager to persuade an errant soul, might naively acknowledge that the Bible does not list transgenderism as a sin. But we understand the Bible in the historical context of Church teaching and Tradition.

So let’s stipulate that the moral legacy of Western Civilization identifies many sins and errors that the Bible never mentions:

  • Reckless driving.
  • Targeting civilians with nuclear bombs.
  • Driving on the wrong side of the road.
  • Beating your wife.
  • Not flossing your teeth.
  • Insider trading.
  • Blowing up a school lavatory toilet with a cherry bomb.
  • Overdosing on drugs.
  • Pedophilia.
  • Using prisoners of war for medical experimentation purposes.
  • Using aborted baby tissue for medical experimentation purposes.
  • Harvesting organs for profit from Chinese prisoners.

Broadly construing the end of Saint John’s Gospel (cf. Jn. 21:25), the whole world could not contain the books written on the  principles of morality in a civilized world. Natural law – God’s law imprinted on every soul – gives us much to discuss as we wade into the hot-button issues of the day, such as abortion and LGBTQ quagmires.

The precept, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder,” (Mt. 19:6) for instance, has implications beyond questions of divorce.

“Diversity, equity, and inclusion” are the new “self-evident truths” governing the nation and the hollowed-out moral shells of many religious denominations (and too many senior members of the Catholic hierarchy).

Questions like, “Where does the Bible condemn transgenderism?” are dishonest. Those who put the question that way have no intention of understanding Biblical teaching, only a desire to undermine confidence in obvious realities. Borrowing Sola Scriptura techniques (“Where do you find purgatory in the Bible?”), DEI interlocutors intend to shame realists: realists are intolerant, mean-spirited, and judgmental. DEI advocates “celebrate diversity.” (The contradictions are glaring, and not lacking a certain irony. All are welcome, except Bible-believing realists, etc.)

DEI advocates accuse Catholics of hate and irrational fears unknown to earlier medical science: “homophobia” and “transphobia.” But they too have “irrational,” non-inclusive fears. Would “inclusivity” accept a drunken pilot in the cockpit or would they “celebrate the diversity” of dangerously chaotic traffic? The inevitable inner contradictions of DEI proponents promise endless controversy governed by emotion-driven power politics. “You will obey the state’s demand to mutilate your confused children, or. . . we kill you – and not only metaphorically!”

Our DEI ideologues assume we must accept transgender ideology because the only real Christian teaching is “all are welcome.” Besides, the Christian faith is an anti-scientific superstition. But realists point out that allowing DEI fantasies to determine reality violates not only morality but scientific facts, e.g., when surgeons remove healthy genitals and doctors prescribe “puberty blockers” to counter naturally-produced hormones.

The DEI religion holds we are “ghosts in a machine.” Our physical bodies do not express who we are. Individual will – disconnected from the body – determines sexuality. But empirical science exposes the folly of the DEI religion. Bizarre surgical procedures justified by transgender fantasies disguise the ugly brutality of genital mutilation.

Christians are realists. We are either male or female. The Bible affirms: “God created man [the community of persons] in his own image. . .male and female he created them.” (Gen. 1:27) The Bible and science agree. We have a soul. And our body – as we observe it – expresses our soul. As Chesterton once remarked, the body even discloses the sin of gluttony.

The Incarnation is the foundation of the Catholic faith. The Word of God – the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity – took flesh and dwelt among us. In Jesus, God and man are reconciled. The reconciliation affirms several fundamental facts of our existence. Human nature is compatible with God. Faith does not contradict reason; faith elevates and purifies reason. The Resurrection is reasonable but beyond scientific grasp. The Cross and Resurrection are historical realities.

Science is the study of the handiwork of God. Christians must not object to legitimate science, but we must object to the abuse of science. Medical experiments that harvest aborted babies are evil. So is the claim that “following the science” obliterates the differences between male and female. We are moral and scientific realists.

Catholics believe the Catholic Church is “the one true Church.” The claim seems arrogant until we ask why anyone belongs to any faith group, including the DEI religion. Even atheists subscribe to their “one true faith,” which includes the unverifiable dogma that death is the end.

Catholic realists are less interested in persuasive compromises than witnessing to objective truth. Not so with the DEI ideologues. As “ghosts in a machine,” they must force their imaginary concoctions on us. Those who disagree with their projections are not merely wrong. They are dangerously “transphobic” and “hateful.” In a word, evil. The power of the state replaces God  in the  DEI world. DEI (Latin for “of God”) become the latest version of a Communist re-education camp, inflicting politically-correct fantasies on realists.

Good faith arguments will not persuade most DEI religionists of their metaphysical folly. But the power politics forcing compliance with their inherent lies reveals what’s really going on. Christian truth affirms that the Word became flesh. DEI fantasies mutilate human flesh.

Speaking the truth about these matters has already begun to create anti-Christian persecution, for the truth, Christ Himself, provokes unjust suffering. The suffering of the Cross is real and terrible. But the realism of the Resurrection promises final victory.

You may also enjoy:

David W. Fagerberg’s Our (Not So) Secret Idolatry

Anthony Esolen’s Imagine . . . What We Already Are

AUTHOR

Father Jerry J. Pokorsky is a priest of the Diocese of Arlington. He is pastor of St. Catherine of Siena parish in Great Falls, Virginia.

Bud Light Parent Cans Ad Agency In Wake Of Dylan Mulvaney Debacle: REPORT

Anheuser-Busch told its U.S. beer distributors it had fired the advertising agency responsible for the partnership between Bud Light and transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, according to The New York Post.

Anheuser-Busch, Bud Light’s parent company, recently sent a commemorative can of beer to Mulvaney to celebrate the influencer’s “365 Days of Girlhood” series, sparking swift backlash, boycotts and plummeting sales. Anheuser-Busch told distributors that the specialty can was not designed by Anheuser-Busch and wasn’t created in one of its facilities, and that the company had ended its relationship with the advertising firm behind the idea, according to The Post, who cited multiple sources.

Ad agencies send out hundreds of influencer kits a year, some of which have a customized can included. This was one of those situations,” one Texas-based distributor told The Post.

The identity of the advertising firm isn’t clear, according to the Post.

Anheuser-Busch has been publicly distancing itself from the marketing effort, and CEO Michel Doukeris walked back the company’s initial defense of the partnership in a Thursday earnings call.

“We need to clarify the facts that this was one camp, one influencer, one post and not a campaign,” he said.

Bud Light Marketing Vice President Alissa Heinerscheid also took a leave of absence from the company following blowback over the Mulvaney ad, along with comments she made disparaging Bud Light’s prior target demographics.

Bud Light sales fell more than 36% the week ending April 22, 21% the week prior and 11% the week before that, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 

Anheuser-Busch did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

LAUREL DUGGAN

Social issues and culture reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: REPORT: Bud Light Plans Heavy Marketing Push After Fallout From Dylan Mulvaney Partnership

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 Boy Who Knew Too Much for His School

Exposing trans madness in education doesn’t require advanced degrees, political influence, charisma, or even 18 years of life, as one plucky middle-schooler demonstrated. At the April 13 School Committee Meeting for Middleboro, Mass. Public Schools, 7th grader Liam Morrison, a student at Nichols Middle School, stepped up to the microphone for two minutes of public comment — and then reached up to turn it down towards his mouth. He then narrated for the school committee what might be the silliest reason any student has ever been sent home from school: wearing a shirt conveying factually accurate information.

“I never thought the shirt I wore to school on March 21 would lead me to speak with you today,” began the pint-sized culture warrior. He described how he was removed from his Tuesday gym class “to sit down with two adults for what turned out to be a very uncomfortable talk. I was told that people were complaining about the words on my shirt, that my shirt was making some students feel unsafe.”

“What did my shirt say? Five simple words: ‘There are only two genders,’ Morrison emphasized. “Nothing harmful. Nothing threatening. Just a statement I believe to be a fact.” And not only a fact, but a bedrock principle to many lessons Morrison would likely have encountered in both biology class and grammar class.

“Yes, words on a shirt made people feel ‘unsafe,’” repeated Morrison. If people did complain, they lacked the courage to tell Morrison to his face. In this instance, the accused was not accorded the right to face his accusers, making their very existence unverifiable. Morrison recalled, “Not one person, student, or staff, told me that they were bothered by what I was wearing. Actually, just the opposite. Several kids told me that they supported my actions and that they wanted one, too.”

“I was told that I would need to remove my shirt before I could return to class,” Morrison continued. “When I nicely told them that I didn’t want to do that, they called my father. Thankfully, my dad supported my decisions [and] came to pick me up.” In other words, because Morrison’s shirt proclaimed a fact of biology and language that he learned (or should have learned) in school, school personnel sent him home — which would hinder his ability to learn — to quarantine his knowledge from other students.

School personnel tried to justify their decision to Morrison, who said, “Their arguments were weak, in my opinion.” The Nichols Middle School dress code does not prohibit students from wearing clothing that displays a message — which is sometimes the case in a controversy of this nature — and school personnel did not object to Morrison’s shirt on that basis. Instead, they claimed that the shirt was disruptive and targeted a protected class.

The dress code does provide:

  • “Clothing that … inhibits learning is not allowed.”
  • “Clothing must not state, imply, or depict hate speech or imagery that target groups based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation, or any other classification.”

“I was told that this shirt was a disruption to learning,” said Morrison. But “no one got up and stormed out of class. No one burst into tears. I’m sure I would have noticed if they had. I experience disruptions to my learning every day. Kids acting out in class are a disruption, yet nothing is done. Why do the rules apply to one yet not another?” A healthy measure of common sense lies underneath the crew cut.

“I have been told that my shirt was ‘targeting a protected class,’” explained Morrison. But he had questions. “Who is this protected class? Are their feelings more important than my rights? I don’t complain when I see pride flags and diversity posters hung throughout the school. Do you know why? Because others have a right to their beliefs just as I do.” Here Morrison argues for the basic principle of free speech, that merely holding and stating a political opinion does not count as hate speech against anyone who disagrees.

It’s not the dress code itself that Morrison spoke out against, but the illegitimate, arbitrary, and unequal way school personnel enforced it against him for his disfavored political views.

Per the dress code policy, Morrison was asked to change. “If students wear something inappropriate to school, they will be asked to call their parent/guardian to request that more appropriate attire be brought to school.” Since he was unwilling, and his father supported his decision, he was sent home. Yet Morrison could face “disciplinary action” if he wears the shirt to school again.

Even while they were enforcing the dress code policy against Morrison, the school officials seemed reluctant to admit what they were doing. “They told me that I wasn’t in trouble, but it sure felt like I was,” said Morrison. “I feel like these adults were telling me that it wasn’t okay for me to have an opposing view.”

But Morrison responded, “I know that I have a right to wear the shirt with those five words. Even at 12 years old, I have my own political opinions, and I have a right to express those opinions, even at school. This right is called the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

In Lee v. Weisman (1992), the Supreme Court prohibited prayer at high school graduations because “adolescents are often susceptible to pressure from their peers towards conformity.” They reasoned, “What to most believers may seem nothing more than a reasonable request that the nonbeliever respect their religious practices, in a school context may appear to the nonbeliever or dissenter to be an attempt to employ the machinery of the State to enforce a religious orthodoxy.” Now, the logic of the opinion is working in reverse, as “the machinery of the State” enforces the anti-religious orthodoxy of transgender ideology on adolescents who are just as susceptible to outside pressure as they were 30 years ago (although Morrison stands out as a remarkable contradiction of this generalization).

Alas, this is the state of public education in America today. Pride flags and other ostentatious celebrations of sexual deviance go unchallenged. But if a single 12-year-old wears a shirt stating the biological and grammatical truth, “there are only two genders,” two adults will pull him out of class to berate him for “targeting a protected class.” Content to let classroom disruption slide most of the time, if any young person has the temerity to wear a truth-telling shirt to class, the school will disrupt his education to call him disruptive.

What other shirt messages might, for simply telling the truth, fall afoul of this ridiculous interpretation of the dress code? Here’s a few likely candidates: “2+2=4 is math, not white supremacy,” “Life begins at conception,” “Latinx is bad Spanish,” or “Jesus is the only way.”

“I learned a lot from this experience,” concluded Morrison. “I’ve learned that a lot of other students share my view. I’ve learned that adults don’t always do the right thing or make the right decisions. … Next time, it might not only be me. There might be more students that decide to speak out.” Education experts have determined to train students as activists, calculating that they can harness their convictions into a left-wing political agenda, but with just a few brave freethinkers like Morrison, teaching students to stand up for truth and right may just backfire.

Just about any young person would find it intimidating to stand up and speak before nine adults in a formal setting — not least one beginning to experience the awkward and uncomfortable physical changes of puberty. But Morrison was not deterred; after all, it’s his future education and free expression that he’s fighting for. His generation (and every other one) could use a few more courageous men willing to stand up for what’s right.

“I didn’t go to school that day to hurt feelings or cause trouble,” Morrison told the school committee. “My hope in being here tonight is to bring the school committee’s attention to this issue. I hope that you will speak up for the rest of us, so we can express ourselves without being pulled out of class.”

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer 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.

Trans Procedure Bills Signal Growing Consensus around Protecting Children

On April 28, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte (R) signed into law SB 99, a bill that prohibits puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and genital-mutilating surgeries for minors. A similar bill was sent to the governor’s desk in Oklahoma on April 27. Both pieces of legislation passed their respective state legislatures by a wide margin, signaling the broad public support that these types of laws are receiving despite intense pressure from left-wing activists to torpedo the bills.

In Montana, in spite of the use of highly dramatic language by a transgender identifying representative that earned him a censure, and despite the necessity for police to arrest several protestors and clear the state capitol in riot gear, the state House and Senate easily sent the measure to the governor’s desk by votes of 65-33 and 31-17, respectively. In Oklahoma, where a group of around 150 pro-trans protestors descended on the state capitol in early February to denounce an early version of the bill, the state senate easily passed SB 613 last Thursday by a vote of 38-8. The bill now goes to Governor Kevin Stitt’s (R) desk, who is expected to sign it.

The large margin by which both measures passed appears to be a reflection of widespread societal consensus that minors are not capable of adequately considering the ramifications of life-altering hormonal and surgical procedures that are often irreversible. Recent polling on this issue shows that nearly 80% of Americans agree that children should not be allowed to undergo transgender procedures.

Montana and Oklahoma will join 13 other states that have passed similar legislation that gives minors some level of protection from gender transition procedures in the last two years. They include Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.

The growing cultural agreement on the issue is reaching unexpected quarters. On Sunday, Paul Stanley, a member of the rock group KISS, tweeted in part: “There is a BIG difference between teaching acceptance and normalizing and even encouraging participation in a lifestyle that confuses young children into questioning their sexual identification as though [it’s] some sort of game and then parents in some case allow it. … With many children who have no real sense of sexuality or sexual experiences caught up in the ‘fun’ of using pronouns and saying what they identify as, some adults mistakenly confuse teaching acceptance with normalizing and encouraging a situation that has been a struggle for those truly affected and have turned it into a sad and dangerous fad.”

In addition, Bill Maher, a liberal comedian and host of HBO’s “Real Time,” has also recently expressed misgivings about the growing trend among minors to identify as the opposite sex, pointing to “social contagion” as a phenomenon that proves that transgender identities do not develop as organically as activists say they do: “[I]t is also somewhat trendy — I know people hate to hear that, but it’s obviously true — there is an element of social contagion, or else it wouldn’t be so prevalent in here [California] and not in Indiana, it wouldn’t be regional.”

Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, director of the Center for Family Studies at Family Research Council, was encouraged by the wide margins with which the Montana and Oklahoma bills passed, along with other cultural indicators of a growing accord on the issue.

“Common sense is prevailing in the midst of a media narrative that is saying the opposite of what most people can readily see,” she told The Washington Stand. “They don’t need scientific studies that have been distorted for the purposes of the medical and research elite. It’s very encouraging to see. When people are actually exposed to what’s happening, they come out in force and reject such atrocities happening to children.”

Bauwens, a clinical psychologist who has provided trauma-focused treatment to children, went on to point out the lack of evidence-based proof in the transgender activists’ arguments in favor of transgender procedures for minors.

“I think it’s interesting that the arguments from the other side are basically coming down to attacking those who are bringing out the common sense but also bringing out the research and showing how bad it is,” she noted. “And those who are practitioners of some sort, whether they’re doctors or mental health professionals, are coming out and saying, ‘This isn’t okay.’ So, the proponents are basically bringing personal attacks because they have no other argument. Because if you have great science, then why not argue from that standpoint? But instead, all they can do is say the same thing over and over again, which is, ‘If they’re not given this surgery, they’re going to commit suicide’ or ‘This is lifesaving care’ or ‘You have blood on your hands’ — all of these poor arguments and personal attacks.”

Bauwens concluded by providing an analogy between gender transition procedures and plastic surgery.

“There [are] permissions for someone to get plastic surgery before 18,” she explained. “There are safeguards about how someone is treated after surgery, and preparing them for that, and possible depression and disappointment that might come because that plastic surgery didn’t achieve the results they hoped it would. But we don’t have that over these transgender procedures. Where is the advocacy for people who have body dysmorphia — those who have a fixation about a finger that bothers them and they want to get surgery and remove that finger? Where are the advocates that say we should pay for all fingers to be removed? It just tells you how much this is not about science. They’ve made it a civil rights issue. They’re not even looking at the effects that [gender transition procedures] have. To them, it’s an identity, and they classify it on par with race.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior 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.

New York State To Ban Gas Stoves

UPDATE JUNE 16, 2023: 181 House Democrats just voted to ban gas stoves


Democrats hate you. Natural gas is one of the cleanest forms of energy. This is a deliberate attack on our very way of life.

Where do these morons think the electrical energy comes from?

NY State has Fallen – Gas Stoves & Peaker Plants Banned in Budget

By: Marcellus Drilling News, May 2023:We’re not even sure how to process this, or where to begin. We previously warned MDN readers that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, an extremist, is trying to ban natural gas hookups in every single new home and business across the “Empire” State (see NY Gov. Hochul Loses Her Mind – Wants to Ban Gas in New Buildings). She even wants to ban gas in existing homes, but that’s too much even for NY’s Democrats to stomach (see New York Legislators Block Hochul NatGas Ban for Existing Homes). As part of the 2023-2024 budget deal, Hochul got her way. Beginning in 2025, if you build a new home (or business) in New York State, you will not be allowed to connect it to an existing natural gas pipeline system. You will be banned from installing a gas (or propane) stove in the house. We now live in a Communist, non-free state. New York has fallen.Read more.

New York would ban gas stoves in new buildings under potential budget deal

By Tim Meads • Apr 29, 2023 • DailyWire.com:

Remember a few months ago when Legacy Media and their Democrat allies called conservatives a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists for warning that the Left wanted to ban gas stoves? That Democrat-Media Complex episode occurred despite numerous bureaucrats and liberal politicians advocating the ban of fossil fuel power appliances and more.

Well, now, New York is one step closer to banning gas stoves in new buildings. On Thursday, Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) announced that a budget deal had been reached that would prohibit gas hookups in new buildings. Existing buildings and gas stoves not be affected under this deal, it should be noted. According to Hohcul’s office, this would be an airtight ban as well.

Katy Zielinski, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office, said on Friday that no such measure was included in the deal.

“The new law will not have any loopholes that will undermine the intent of this measure,” Hochul’s spokeswoman Katy Zielinski told The New York Times. “There will not be any option for municipalities to opt out.”

This would obviously make future construction costs more expensive, as pointed out by New York Republican politician Lee Zeldin.

“The Democrats enthusiastically pummeling New York into the ground are about to pass a statewide ban of gas hookups on new construction,” he tweeted. “Such a terrible idea! Kathy Hochul and her cohorts are fast tracking the downward spiral of a once greatest state.”

Hochul isn’t alone. At the federal level, the Biden administration is considering a proposed energy efficiency rule from the Department of Energy (DOE) that could remove up to 50% of current gas stoves from the U.S. market if it is enacted. That means if you have a gas hookup in your building, buying a new stove down the road could be significantly more expensive.

Read more.

AUTHOR

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The Transgender Follies––More Madness from the Left

Growing up in the 1950s, I remember distinctly that all of my high school classmates were obsessed with figuring out who they really were, males or females. Every conversation, the special clubs we formed to talk about this issue, the heated arguments we had with our parents who didn’t “get” that the children they thought were boys or girls were not at all what those dinosaurs imagined sex and gender to be, and the total lack of understanding we got from the powers-that-be, including teachers, counselors, coaches, doctors. It was truly a horrible time to be a girl or boy.

All that my girlfriends talked about, starting about the age of 11 or 12, was having their budding (or in some cases, formidable) breasts cut off, and the hormones coursing through their systems somehow, magically, eliminated altogether. The same with the boys. “How can we cover up our Adam Apples,” they lamented. “How can we hide our penises and put barrettes in our hair and be the girls we were really meant to be?”

After high school, I married and became a young mother at 18. And my son told me that when he was in high school in the 1970s, the same thing took place, although more intensely. “All we talked about,” he told me, was “who was a real boy and who was a real girl, and how the tomboys could become real boys and the guys who liked cooking could become real girls.”

“But at least things had progressed,” he said, “and there were teachers and guidance counselors willing to encourage the girls who were tomboys and the boys who liked cooking to stick to the genders “they were born to be and not to allow parents to interfere.”

REALITY CHECK

Please re-read every word of the above four paragraphs and know that NOT ONE WORD of them is true! In the 1950s––and for centuries before and decades after––girls knew they were girls; boys knew they were boys and that was that.

And in the 1970s, the exact same thing. There was no such word as “transgender.” There was not one micro-syllable of a word that suggested girls with breasts and boys with penises weren’t, ahem, girls and boys!

There was not one case of a surgeon cutting off the breasts of 13-year-old and 14-year-old girls because these far-from-fully-developed females claimed they were “born into the wrong gender.” Nor were there medical doctors prescribing hormone blockers to teenage boys to stem the tide of their surging testosterone.

Same in the 1980s and the 1990s and the 2000s and the 2010s. In fact, right up until about 2015…. just eight years ago!

ARE THERE RARE EXCEPTIONS?

Of course. In the early 1950s, there was––at-that-time––the “strange” case of Christine Jorgenson who, after serving in the U.S. Army as George Jorgenson,  traveled to Denmark and underwent a series of operations that converted her from George to Christine, after which she enjoyed a successful career as an author, lecturer and entertainer until she died at age 62.

Christine Jorgenson

In the mid-1970s, former athlete Richard Raskind, who was recruited by the NY Yankees and attended Yale University (where he was the captain of the men’s tennis team), ultimately became a successful ophthalmologist, and an officer in the U.S. Navy. He then became Renée Richards (French for “reborn”), practiced medicine, and died at the age of 88.

Renée Richards

More recently, there was the case of Bruce Jenner, the macho former Olympic gold medal-winning decathlete.of 1976.

The handsome hunk married three times and had six children, but came out as a transwoman in April 2015 as Caitlin Marie Jenner.

According to Rachel Scheinerman, with a Master’s Degree from Harvard Divinity School, a Ph.D. in Rabbinic Literature from Yale University, and editor of My Jewish Learning, there were no fewer than eight genders recognized in the Talmud over 3,500-hundred years ago, including:

  1. Zachar, male.
  2. Nekevah, female.
  3. Androgynos, having both male and female characteristics.
  4. Tumtum, lacking sexual characteristics.
  5. Aylonit hamah, identified female at birth but later naturally developing male characteristics.
  6. Aylonit adam, identified female at birth but later developing male characteristics through human intervention.
  7. Saris hamah, identified male at birth but later naturally developing female characteristics.
  8. Saris adam, identified male at birth and later developing female characteristics through human intervention.

But leave it to that leftist bastion, the City University of New York (CUNY) to outdo the Talmud! This vast system, which includes 25 colleges and 243,000 students, lists 15 genders to choose from on one of their forms! As they say, can’t make it up!

WHAT HAPPENED?

Did the massive quantity of estrogens women started taking with the advent of the birth-control pill in 1960 produce future generations of boys who “feel” like girls? And did it produce girls with such an overload of estrogen that they somehow developed an autoimmune disease to their own hormones and now “feel” like boys?

Where, through sweat and urine, did this huge amount of estrogens go, which multimillions of women ingested not only with The Pill but with the Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) they took to quell the unpleasant symptoms of menopause? Did all this estrogen go into the soil and plants and foods we eat or into the water we drink? And what about the tremendous amount of xenoestrogens that are found in plants and also introduced into the environment by industrial, agricultural, and chemical companies?

I think about these questions when I remember watching the first gay pride march in New York City in 1970 on TV, featuring several hundred protestors. I didn’t quite understand the march…. was their goal to be accepted or did they simply want me and millions of other Americans to know what they did in bed? Yet today, such marches feature literally hundreds of thousands. Is this numerical explosion the result of the Atlantic Ocean’s worth of estrogens their mothers and grandmothers ingested over the past almost-65 years that permeated our ecosystem and found its way into their bodies?

Notice that every expert and doctor and scientist––and even “woke” companies like Budweiser ––and many other major industries that support and even promote transgenderism––never ever cite even a micron of hard scientific research that either affirms or disproves that this burgeoning phenomenon has a scientific basis at all. Indeed, where are the studies? Where is the empirical evidence?

Spare yourself the search…. there are none!

WHAT ARE THE NUMBERS?

Today, the Williams Institute – which says it conducts independent research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy––asks: What Percentage of the Population is Transgender 2023 (worldpopulationreview.com)?

They state that transgender people are part of the LGBTQ+ community and there are 1.4 million adults who identify as transgender in the United States. About 0.5% of adults 18-24 identify as transgender, and 0.3% of adults 65 and older identify as transgender.

The Pew Research Center found that five percent of young adults claim that their gender is different from their sex and that “the share of U.S. adults who are transgender is particularly high among adults younger than 25,” then adds that “in this age group, 3.1% are a trans man or a trans woman, compared with just 0.5% of those ages 25 to 29.”

And a Reuters report found that diagnoses of youth with gender dysphoria have skyrocketed in the U.S. in recent years. While there were just over 15,000 cases in 2017, the number has shot up to more than 42,000 in 2021.

Nevertheless, those numbers––even if they add up to a million-and- a-half people––amount to a drop in the ocean when compared to our country’s overall population of over 330 million.

And yet, Transgenderism has become an industry!

THE LEFT’S LATEST FETISH?

Is this transgender shtick simply the Left’s newest fetish––the biggest one being the colossal hoax of global warming, er, climate change, as explained here by Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, here by the late John Eidson and here by Catherine Salgado. In short, today, according to over 1,540 respected experts, there is no scientific data to indicate that climate change is anything but political propaganda.

Or is the real goal of the transgender movement to separate children from their parents in order to achieve their rosy vision of a Communist America in which these same children look not to their parents but to BIG GOVERNMENT as their caretakers, protectors, providers.

As journalist and author Linda Goudsmit explains in her recent blockbuster article: “Such children raised by the state become adults who want the state to go on raising them. When they’re hungry, the state feeds them, when they’re cold, the state shelters them and when they’re unhappy, the state tells them whom to blame. When their relationships fall apart or when their feelings are hurt, they turn to the state to soothe them with a dose of revenge.”

Revenge––or at least justice––is what increasing numbers of phenomenal female athletes want, now that trans males have, in essence, destroyed women’s competitive sports.

Just recently, as reported by Pamela Geller, a trans biological male marathoner defeated 14,000 women in a race after competing as man months earlier.

And we all know the case of Riley Gaines, the 12-time All-American swimmer with five Southeastern Conference titles, who was forced to share a locker room with and compete against the biological male Lia Thomas–– who ranked #554 competing against men––at the 2022 NCAA Women’s Swimming Championship. When Gaines tied with Thomas––down to the hundredth of a second––she was told that the NCAA hadn’t planned for a tie and that Thomas had to have the trophy for photo purposes.

Gaines is fighting this travesty. “The Democrat ‘Party of Science’ doesn’t believe in biological differences.” she says. “The ‘Party of Women’ doesn’t support women. Democrats are erasing our dreams in the name of wokeness.”

Then there is Austin Killips, a biological man who was awarded first place in the women’s category in New Mexico’s Tour of the Gila cycling race.

Not to omit that before he began taking experimental hormones, Laurel Hubbard competed in men’s weightlifting for New Zealnd at the 2020 Olympics and finished dead last. Nevertheless,  Hubbard was named “sportswoman of the year” by New Zealand’s University of Otago.

No less an authority than Caitlin Jenner has recently launched the Fairness First PAC to keep men from competing in women’s sports. “Our advocacy, “Jenner said, “is to align athletes with sports that are at a chromosomal or DNA level — not birth certificate,” adding that the transgender movement “ boils down to parental rights,” and its true goal is “destroying the family unit.”

Recently, Republicans in the House have introduced a bill that would ensure that biological girls will have an equal playing field. But Joe Biden is threatening to do just the opposite – to cement into law the destruction of women’s sports.

A MENTAL DISORDER?

Writer Larry Sand calls this extreme form of gender-bending a dangerous fad, but unlike the various eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia of the 1970s, which “were treated as physical disorders and serious mental-health problems,” Sand writes. Today, “they have been replaced by gender dysphoria, which is being used as a political cudgel by many with a nefarious agenda.”

Sand quotes Dr. William Malone, a board-certified endocrinologist: “We are dealing with what may be the biggest medical and ethical scandal of modern times. Transgender medicine is big business, and youth who are transitioning today will be medical patients for life…for the next 60-plus years.”

“We know we are living in a psychotic world,” writes Jason D. Hill in FrontPage.com, “when professors are explicitly told that under no circumstances can they ever utter these words in class: Men cannot give birth to children. We know the psychosis is real when two men who look and act like linebackers, but who identify as women, claim they are in a lesbian relationship because they identify as women…”

A statue of a naked, bearded man breastfeeding a baby has been placed outside the former Women’s Museum in Denmark.

We know that the small identity alterations that trans people make are simply to change their names from Gordon to Gigi or from Jenny to Jasper. Much more extreme, according to urologist Maurice Garcia, MD, director of the Cedars-Sinai Transgender Surgery and Health Programs, males who claim to be females agree to the following:

And females who claim to be males agree to:

In fact, it’s gotten so depraved in the Golden State that a California School Board voted to uphold a “parental secrecy policy” that withholds the gender transition of its students from parents.

Significantly, the American College of Pediatricians has stated that there is no evidence that transgender interventions are safe for children. “There is not a single long-term study to demonstrate the safety or efficacy of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for transgender-believing youth,” the ACPeds.org stated.

“This means that youth transition is experimental, and therefore, parents cannot provide informed consent, nor can minors provide assent for these interventions. Moreover, the best long-term evidence we have among adults shows that medical intervention fails to reduce suicide.”

In fact, puberty blockers may cause depression and other emotional disturbances related to suicide, and they may cause permanent physical harm.

To compound the horror, many of the treatments children are subject to can have catastrophic side effects. For instance, Lupron, the number one prescribed puberty blocker––an experimental drug used to chemically castrate violent sex offenders––lists mood disorders, seizures, and “emotional instability” as side effects and warns prescribers to “monitor for development or worsening of psychiatric symptoms during treatment. 

And studies indicate that females who receive testosterone can develop multiple psychiatric problems such as mania, major depression, and psychosis.

In The Left’s Disposable Transgender Children, Scott Hogenson writes: “Transgenderism was classified by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) as a mental disorder until 2012. But the behavior of transgenders mirrors the APA’s definition of delusions: “an often highly personal idea or belief system…that is maintained with conviction in spite of irrationality or evidence to the contrary.

“If a man maintains with conviction that he is a woman in spite of chromosomal, anatomical, endocrinological and other evidence to the contrary, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that man is delusional. This, according to a WebMD item reviewed by Dr. Smitha Bhandari, is “a type of serious mental illness called a psychotic disorder.”

Hogenson goes on to write that Leftists exploit these young and confused people because they are “politically useful.” Instead of dissuading them from obtaining the medical treatment they need, “they instead force them deeper into mental illness by promoting the lie that they can simply alter natural law on a whim.”

According to writer Laurel Duggan, adolescents with autism are over-represented in the youth transgender population, and some medical professionals attribute this to autism spectrum traits such as obsessive thinking, vulnerability to body image issues, and a sense of social rejection and isolation.

Dr. Susan Bradley, a Canadian psychiatrist, who began working with gender dysphoric children in the 1970s, said she believed most of the children who sought gender transitions had high-functioning autism and were being exploited by the medical industry.

As just one of many such victims, Chloe Cole, a young woman who underwent cross-sex hormones and a double mastectomy between the ages of 13 and 17 and now regrets medically transitioning, said that doctors failed to meaningfully address her autism spectrum traits and the ways they had an impact on her gender identity.

“There is also unpublished evidence that after a year on [puberty blockers], children reported greater self-harm, and the girls also experienced more behavioral and emotional problems and expressed greater dissatisfaction with their body—so puberty blockers exacerbated gender dysphoria.”

THE MEDICAL PROFESSION IS COMPLICIT

So, why on earth do doctors participate in these drastic measures and why do hospitals allow it? Here is now it works. When the administration in power––in this case the Biden regime––sends out a mandate to hospitals and doctors, they must comply or be deprived of all federal funds that literally keep most medical institutions and doctors’ practices alive.

Simple as that, exactly what we witnessed with the highly dangerous Covid19 vaccines, which found pilots experiencing blood clots in mid-air, thousands of young athletes dropping dead on playing fields across the world, huge numbers of teenage boys contracting myocarditis, a mountain of miscarriages, the horrific list of casualties goes on and on. Here, Dr. Joseph Mercola describes exactly how this malevolent scheme worked and works to this day.

Writer David Strom sums it up nicely when he writes: “Insanity is being normalized.”

To prove it, here are some recent headlines:

Biden’s Pentagon Doctors Claim Seven-Year-Olds Can Consent to Puberty Blockers.

Biden’s DOJ challenges Tennessee’s ban on genital mutilation.

In Zeal for Transgenderism, 2 Blue States Poised to Muscle Parents Out, Get Control of Their Kids.

Washington Passes Bill Allowing Children to Legally Be Taken from Parents if Parents Don’t Consent to Gender Mutilation.

Children’s Hospital in Oregon Offers Consultations on Transgender Treatments to Kids Younger Than 10.

Bearded Man with Hairy Chest Featured on Cover of Bridal Magazine.

Planned Parenthood Now Sells Millions in Hormones to Mutilate Children— often while explicitly withholding this information from parents.

Dylan Mulvaney, the Bud Lite Spokesperson Wants to Jail Those Who ‘Misgender’ Him.

Convicted male rapist of children sent to woman’s prison after changing his pronouns to she and her.

70-Year-Old Bearded Man Wins Ladies’ World Poker Tour Event in Florida.

Emerson College to Provide Menstrual Products in Men’s Bathrooms.

18-Year-Old Male Showers with Terrified 14 Year Old Girls at Wisconsin High School.

Vermont Elementary School Will Use” Person Who Produces Sperm” or “Person Who Produces Eggs” Instead of Male and Female in Health Sciences Lessons.

Biden Regime Gives ‘International Women of Courage Award’ to a Man.

Pennsylvania child sex-change clinic helps teachers turn elementary classrooms into breeding grounds for transgenderism.

PARENTAL FAILURE

At 12 years old, Johnny starts each school day by downing two shot glasses of Scotch. When his mother dares to question him, he says that the liquor “gives me energy and makes me feel good. You know that Mom because you and Dad drink the same thing every night!” Of course, a sane mother would punish Johnny for transgressing house rules and take him to a psychiatrist. But a mother who worships the Feelings God would “respect” Johnny’s emotions and maybe even suggest that he substitute vodka to avoid detection.

Then there is 13-year-old Keisha, who has developed a habit of lighting fires because, she said, “it gets rid of my bad feelings and makes me feel good. Besides, Mom, you clapped and cheered when you and Dad watched Antifa and Black Lives Matter light cars on fire and smash windows and you even sent them money!” Of course, a sane mother would take the young girl to a psychiatrist, but the Feelings God worshipper would “understand” and let it go, maybe buy the young girl a portable fire extinguisher.

Let’s now take the case of 14-year-old Sebastian who has taken to wearing his sister’s skirts and his mother’s make-up. “I think I’m more girl than boy,” he tells his parents and I want to become a girl.

Of course, sane parents would tell their son––or daughter––that he or she is not old enough to make such a life-changing decision, that he can’t vote, and he can’t drive, and he can’t even get a paying job, so no! Wait until you’re 18 or 21 to see how you feel, and then explore your options.

But thousands of modern parents never say this to their preteen or teenage children. They simply accede to their feelings and their demands.

Why? Because they are afraid of their children! They don’t want to alienate them or make them angry. They want to be their pals, not their parents. They want to smoke pot with them, not discipline them and be the grown-ups in their lives who set boundaries, discourage blind conformity, exert authority.

All of  these parents should be compelled to watch Lindsay Graham, a mother from Arizona, dressed as a cat, speak to her local school board. As described by Sloan Oliver, she greeted them with “meow, meow” and then asked if they believed she was a real cat. Not one person did because––ta da–– they knew she was not a cat.

And yet, displaying both weakness of character and moral cowardice, they unquestioningly believe a son who says he’s a girl and a daughter who says she’s a boy.

Few sane people could disagree with Elon Musk, who recently tweeted, “Any parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life.”

FIGHTING BACK

You would think that women who call themselves feminists would be at the forefront of fighting for the young girls who are genuine victims of incompetent parents and depraved doctors, but with very very few exceptions, all we’ve heard from this retro cult is a thunderous silence.

Only word limitations require that I include a very short list of those who are fighting this abomination:

  • Lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, the Founder and CEO of The Center for American Liberty, has launched a landmark case against the hospitals and doctors who coerced Chloe Cole to transition to a “boy” at the age of 13.
  • Sharron Davies, a female Olympic swimmer, is leading a boycott against Nike after the brand partners with trans biological male to promote women’s sports bras.
  • The World Athletics Council has banned transgender track-and-field athletes from international competition.
  • 11 States Move to Ban Child Sex Changes as Surgery Demand Soars.
  • More than twenty bills aimed at criminalizing child sex changes have been introduced at the beginning of the 2023 state legislative sessions, reports the Associated Press.
  • Republican state lawmakers are seeking to ban so-called gender-affirming care for youth due to the complete lack of quality evidence to support it, the invasive and irreversible nature of the interventions, and the sharply rising rates of detransition and regret.
  • Eleven states––Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia––have proposed legislation to protect children and adolescents from what one pediatric neurosurgeon recently called “an extraordinary medical atrocity.”
  • Lawmakers in South Carolina and Kansas seek to ban doctors from performing experimental sex changes on anyone under 21, while similar legislation in Oklahoma would ban sex changes for all youth under age 26.

©2023 Joan Swirsky. All rights reserved.

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THE WEB OF DYSTOPIAN TYRANNY: Medical and Societal Perversion

“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!

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.+