Reducing CO2 Hurts the Planet and Humanity: Time to Reconsider Massachusetts v. EPA

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“This August marks the 15th anniversary of  Massachusetts v. EPA. We believe it is time for the Supreme Court to reconsider their ruling given the vast amount of science now available on CO2 and its impact on climate change.” — Dr. Richard M. Swier

In the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA,

[T]he Supreme Court found that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can regulate greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, as “air pollutants” under the Clean Air Act. In section 202(a)(1) of the Clean Air Act, Congress stated that EPA is to issue standards applicable to the emission of

“air pollutants” from new motor vehicles, which in EPA’s “judgment cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare . . . .”

The Massachusetts v. EPA ruling has caused incalculable harm to our planet in general and specifically to mankind.

According to the Department of Justice brief on Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007)

In 1999, private organizations filed a petition requesting that EPA issue rules to begin regulating four greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, emitted from new motor vehicles. After taking extensive public comment, EPA denied the petition, stating that:

  1. it did not have authority under the Clean Air Act to issue mandatory regulations to address global climate change because Congress would have explicitly directed EPA to do so if Congress so intended. As a result, greenhouse gases could not be considered “air pollutants” under the Clean Air Act.
  2. even if it did have authority, it would be unwise to set greenhouse gas emission standards at this time because:
  • there was uncertainty regarding the link between greenhouse gases and global warming;
  • mandatory regulation was a piecemeal approach that would interfere with the President’s more comprehensive approach; and
  • it might hamper the President’s ability to persuade developing countries to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

But this did not stop the Supreme Court under Justice John Paul Stevens which ruled,

“The Court then held that under the language of the Clean Air Act, [the] EPA has authority to regulate greenhouse gases as ‘air pollutants’.”

From this moment on CO2 became the symbol of climate change fanatics to mandate reductions and regulations infinitum. The power shifted from the people to the EPA and its puppet masters.

CO2 and the Climate

Since this ruling the science has proven green house gasses specifically CO2 has little or no impact on the climate.

On February 26th, 2021 a revised and expanded third edition of scientific look at climate change titled Hot Talk, Cold Science by the distinguished astrophysicist Dr. S. Fred Singer, with the assistance of renowned climate scientists David R. Legates and Anthony R. Lupo, wrote,

As alarmists clamor to impose draconian government restrictions on entire populations in order to combat “climate change,” this book reveals some startling, stubborn contradictory facts, including:

  • CO2 has not caused temperatures or sea levels to rise beyond historical rates.
  • Severe storms have not increased in frequency or intensity since 1970—neither have heat waves nor droughts.
  • Global change is not harming coral reefs.
  • Any increases in CO2 concentrations across huge time spans (there have been a few) haven’t preceded rising global temperatures; they’ve followed them by about six to eight hundred years—just the opposite of alarmist claims.
  • Alarmist climate scientists have hidden their raw temperature data and deleted emails—then undermined the peer-review system to squelch debate.

In sum, despite all the hot talk—and outright duplicity—there is no “climate crisis” resulting from human activities and no such threat on the horizon.

In the below video we learn that 5 million years of climate data shows the Sun is the driving factor not CO2.

 

The Bottom Line

This case must be overturned because both parties were really on the same side. Both wanted CO2 regulated.

There are three important findings on what impacts the earth’s climate:

  1. Earths warming and cooling periods over millions of years has been due to activity on the sun.
  2. H2O (water vapor) is driving green house gas models, not CO2. It is H2O that keeps earth at a livable temperature for mankind.
  3. CO2 has little to do with global warming. CO2 actually helps keep the planet green.

Climate change is a myth used for political purposes to punish each and every human being on this planet. The idea that mankind can in anyway control the weather, let alone the climate is preposterous. Yet, this is the mantra of the global elite, from the United Nations, to the World Health Organization, to the Biden administration.

Without a doubt the SCOTUS ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA has done no good and created great harm.

It is time to abort Massachusetts v. EPA in order to save mankind.

As John F. Kennedy said,

“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”

It is past time to deal with the discomfort of thought that mankind can do nothing to impact the climate, nothing at all!

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

REFERENCES:

Watts Up With That? The world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change 

MASSACHUSETTS V. EPA: The Inconvenient Truth About Precedent—Virginia Law Review

Massachusetts v EPA

How and why the Supreme Court made climate-change history—The Harvard Gazette

Companies Jumping on the LGBTQ+ Bandwagon: TARGET

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Target (1.72) and other retailers are jumping on the LGBTQ+ bandwagon with both feet.  Please do not even try to tell us that it takes courage to support the movement that is grooming children for pedophilia.  Caving to the politically correct stance may be the least courageous thing you can do.  Sure, you will be applauded by the media and the pro-ESG investment crowd as well.  But if you want to take a courageous stand, stand up and oppose these destructive initiatives publicly. Now.

Here’s the latest Pride month promotion from Target.  They have a t-shirt with the message “Trans Rights are Human Rights,” displayed on a child-sized mannequin in store and on a toddler on their website.  They are TARGETING our children with their over-sexualized propaganda.

Do you remember the days when the gay rights movement told our government to “stay out of our bedrooms”.  They shouted flamboyantly that the person with whom they sleep is purely a private, personal matter and should not be the subject of legal, political or public discourse.  “All we want is equality”.  Remember those days? If only we could revert to an equal approach for all and the elimination of this LGBTQ+ stridency from political and economic interactions instead of having the LGBTQ+ agenda rammed down our throats at every turn. But equality was never their agenda.

Similarly, we can recall the days when people were annoyed that the top 1% ran everything and told us what to do.  Of course, they were referring to the rich in their anti-capitalist sentiment.  But, strangely enough, that perspective isn’t too far off today.  We have deviant behavior, in which less than 1 percent of the people actually engage, being pushed as acceptable and mainstream.  This new one percent are running the show at Target, at many other retailers and across most of our publicly traded companies.

If you want to support companies that are at least neutral on these radical social topics, you really need to check their 2ndVote score frequently. We help you shop at, invest in and support organizations that just want to provide a good service or product and generate fair returns for their shareholders without these other distractions.  In the digressive left’s business world, its hard to keep up with the landscape. From supposedly trans-gender babies to ESG initiatives for business, the battle is complex. Find out who is voluntarily wasting resources on these initiatives instead of providing the best possible products and services so that shareholders get the best possible returns on their investment. And since 2016, we have continued to push #AnythingButTarget .

AUTHOR

2ndVote Contributor

EDITORS NOTE: This 2ndVote column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Top 10 Telling Tweets on the Roe v. Wade Decision

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Thought that we would provide some tweets from those who wanted to really tell you what they believe. Here they are:

And finally Senator Townsend asks will there be a June 24th Committee?

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

Education Is the State’s Greatest Tool for Propaganda

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“It is not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought.”

In chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom, Hayek describes how some of the worst people always end up rising to the top of the political heap. Continuing to touch on this theme in the eleventh chapter, Hayek digs even deeper and discusses the control of information and the very basis of truth in a planned society.

In a society where totalitarianism reigns, truth is found not in objective principles, but in a government’s desired ends. Once these ends have been established, all other forms of information are tailored to reinforce that “truth.” Reason is henceforth thrown out the window and the state’s version of truth is beyond contestation. As George Orwell wrote:

Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as “the truth” exists. … The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened”—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.

But this on its own is not enough to sway entire nations. Instead of the people merely accepting these “truths,” it is important that the state convince them that these truths are their own. When individuals begin to tie their interests to the state’s interests, a terrifying unity occurs, the likes of which can be seen in almost every deceptive dictatorship throughout history.

As Hayek says:

The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends.”

In order to do this, all propaganda is orchestrated to reinforce these ends in order to push individuals in the desired direction. Common themes and slogans are repeated over and over again in order to beat these goals into the minds of the people. Anything contrary to the end goal must be squashed immediately. Anyone speaking out against them must also be destroyed in the name of national security. As Hayek says, “But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced.”

And while most people associate propaganda with political posters and multimedia, there is no greater tool for propaganda than a nation’s education system.

State-Controlled Education

No matter how intelligent an individual may be, almost every person is susceptible to propaganda. This is because, in many instances, most are unaware that they are falling prey to it. It seeps into our lives through all forms of entertainment but most especially through state-sponsored education.

In Nazi Germany, indoctrinating the youth was one of the easiest ways to ensure the fervent support of future generations. Adolf Hitler himself said, “He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.” Children were forced into youth groups where their role in the Third Reich was reinforced continually. Germany even tailored toys, games, and books towards the desired ends of the Reich, ensuring that children would believe whatever they wanted them to believe.

Hayek writes:

If all the sources of current information are effectively under one single control, it is no longer a question of merely persuading the people of this or that. The skillful propagandist then has power to mold their minds in any direction he chooses, and even the most intelligent and independent people cannot entirely escape that influence if they are long isolated from all other sources of information.”

And this was the aim of the Third Reich. If the German people were to not only accept but condone the acts of their government, there was no better way to do it than to teach them young, and lead them to believe that this has always been the case.

Touching on this, Hayek says:

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before.”

Or, to pull from Orwellian speak, the goal is to make these children believe that “we have always been at war with Eastasia.”

But this deliberate molding of minds does not only occur in young students. In fact, once these children’s minds have been sufficiently indoctrinated, they are passed off to institutions of higher education where a belief in intellectual elitism is then instilled.

The Educated Elite

Trained to learn by rote methods rather than critical thinking, young adults, eager to assert their independence, were thrown into colleges and universities and told that they are now part of the intellectual elite. But from this comes the dangerous tendency to stop questioning the information that is presented to you. After all, your professors are highly regarded for their intellect. Why would they steer you in the wrong direction?

But when these professors begin to present state opinion as unquestioned truth, this is where the real problems arise.

The field of eugenics, for example, was once taught as if it were doctrinal truth. If racial superiority could be “scientifically” proven, or, rather, if the state could assert that this was fact, then questioning this doctrine became heresy.

As Hayek says:

The need for such official doctrines as an instrument of directing and rallying the efforts of the people has been clearly foreseen by the various theoreticians of the totalitarian system. Plato’s “noble lies” and Sorel’s “myths” serve the same purpose as the racial doctrine of the Nazis or the theory of the corporative state of Mussolini. They are all necessarily based on particular views about facts which are then elaborated into scientific theories in order to justify a preconceived opinion.”

And, as has been seen throughout history, once a theory becomes part of the scientific narrative, it contributes to the direction of all societal ends. Hayek comments on this saying, “Thus a pseudoscientific theory becomes part of the official creed which to a greater or lesser degree directs everybody’s action.” While the eugenics example may seem rather extreme, it was very applicable to the time that Hayek was writing.

And while it is not easy in hindsight to understand how an entire population could fall for theories this callous, Hayek reminds us, “It is not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought.”

It may be easy to cast blame on the media and the entertainment industry for being natural propaganda machines, but history tells a different story. As we have now seen, state-controlled education is one of the worst and most effective propaganda tools that has ever existed.

AUTHOR

Brittany Hunter

Brittany is a writer for the Pacific Legal Foundation. She is a co-host of “The Way The World Works,” a Tuttle Twins podcast for families.

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

Planned Parenthood Wages Insurrection at Wisconson State Capitol

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Planned Parenthood and abortion insurrectionists took over the Wisconsin state Capitol building on Wednesday, as the GOP was set to uphold a pro-life law that will take effect if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

Governor Tony Evers (D-WI) signed an executive order this month calling for the special session to repeal a 173 year-old ban on abortion, noting, “While the governor has the authority to call lawmakers into a special session, lawmakers are not obligated to take action on any bills.”

“Whose choice? Our choice!” dozens, if not hundreds, of protesters chanted inside the Capitol rotunda, protesting the GOP’s expected refusal to overturn the ban. “If we don’t get it, shut it down! If we don’t get it, shut it down! If we don’t get it, shut it down!”

“The people of Wisconsin support access to abortion! Our legislators need to listen and pass the Abortion Rights Preservation Act!” Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin tweeted Wednesday.

Many protesters were wearing Planned Parenthood gear and sporting the abortion provider’s signs.

Despite pressure from loud protesters inside the Capitol, the Republicans in the Senate and Assembly quickly gaveled in and out of Evers’ special session without taking votes to repeal the state’s abortion ban.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA)

274 Known Connections

PPFA opposes any limitations on access to abortion, including the procedure commonly known as partial-birth abortion, and also opposes mandatory parental notification for minors wishing to undergo the procedure. Approximately one-third of PPFA’s clients are girls younger than 18 who live with one or both parents. Some 97 percent of these girls qualify for federal assistance to reimburse a provider of social services. This is because PPFA teaches its affiliates how to exploit federal “family planning” programs by qualifying as many clients as possible for federal subsidies of pregnancy tests, contraceptives, and abortions covered by Medicaid…

To learn more about Planned Parenthood, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

“Without Logos, the West is lost”

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Western society is crumbling as it loses the vital link between faith and reason.

This book provides a wonderfully accessible overview of the evolution of a concept which has been the key to the development of Western civilisation, or we might better say is the hallmark of Western civilisation: the mutual interplay of faith and reason. Gregg shows how this key was sought by the Greeks, found by Judeo-Christianity, and progressively lost during the Enlightenment. He examines the kinds of pathologies which are produced by both faith and reason respectively when they are decoupled from one another.

Gregg starts out with “The Speech That Shook the World” — the Regensburg Address of Pope Benedict XVI in 2006, in which Ratzinger warned of the danger of the uncoupling of faith and reason. The fact that Ratzinger hit the nail on the head with his words here were — sadly — borne out by the violent (and sadly in some cases fatal) reaction of fundamentalists across the Islamic world. But Ratzinger’s words were for the West as much as for anyone else, for the integration of faith and reason which had been the hallmark of the West has been in crisis for a long time now, and the disasters of recent Western history are the bitter fruit of that crisis.

Ancient Greeks

Western civilisation begins with a Greek word and concept: logos, which refers to rational order — one we embody in words. This is in a way the Greek discovery, and it unleashed their philosophical speculations. The irrationality of the gods of Greek religion always seriously trammelled philosophical speculation. Vastly different was the religion of the Jews with its supremely rational God, and the advent of Christianity revealed fully the hidden depths of this rationality (the logos was made flesh) and on the rationality of God is founded the rationality (and freedom) of man.

In the thought of St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), this synthesis of faith and reason is brought to a supreme realisation. At the very same time, however, significant fissures between faith and reason began to appear in the incipient rationalism of the Latin Averroists as well as the incipient fideism of elements within the Franciscan order.

Various developments

Gregg prefaces his discussion of the great disjunction between faith and reason which takes place in the Enlightenment with an important proviso. He cautions the reader against an overly simplistic dismissal of all of Enlightenment thought tout court as anti-Christian. He is at pains to point out that much of the Enlightenment movement was quite compatible with Christianity, citing the historian Ulrich L. Lehner as saying “only a small fraction of Enlighteners were anti-religious; the overwhelming majority were interested in finding a balanced relation between reason and faith.” He points out the critical engagement of many Catholic intellectuals with the Enlightenment.

Gregg also reminds us that there was not just one Enlightenment, but several, and they differed in their attitude to the faith. The Scottish Enlightenment for instance involved a number of particularly religious men, such as the Presbyterian minister Thomas Reid (1710–1796). The leaders of the American Enlightenment similarly, despite their declarations of separation of Church and State, were mostly very well disposed towards religion in general, and Christianity in particular.

This was, however, not the case in the French Enlightenment. Gregg quotes Joseph Ratzinger’s distinction between “the Anglo-Saxon trend [in Enlightenment thought], which is more inclined to natural law and tends towards constitutional democracy,” from that associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which “ultimately aims at complete freedom from any rule.”

New religions

And even though the work of such Englishmen as Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke never shares in the French animus against Christianity, they mark a decided shift away from metaphysical speculation in favour of utility and the empirical and so pave the way to scientism and the two great secularist ideologies of the nineteenth century: Marxism and liberalism. Ironically, although these two systems are prefaced on a rejection of religion (though in a much more virulent manner in Marxism), Gregg points out the quasi-religious character of both:

Like Judaism and Christianity, Marxism has its own canon of sacred books — the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, among others — which its adherents study as Jews and Christians study the scriptures. Marxists join a church-like organisation — the Party — with its own faithful (party members), clerical hierarchy (the Central Committee, the Politburo, the general secretary), theologians (Marxist theoreticians), saints (Che Guevara or Lenin, whose embalmed body is venerated in a shrine), and doctrines from which party members may not stray without compromising their orthodoxy.

Even the intellectuals that John Stuart Mill envisages overseeing the implementation of liberalism function as a kind of “clerisy”. It took Nietzsche of course to bring things to their logical conclusion: with the disappearance of God also goes any claim to objective truth (a delusion for the herd), and all we are left with is the will, and in particular the will to power.

Faith alone

In a sense, Nietzsche marks the culmination of the rationalist pathology stemming from the decoupling of faith and reason. The faith side of this binomial has a pathology of its own: fideism. In chapter five, Gregg discusses the origins and implications of the fideism which has come to dominate (as Ratzinger warns in this Regensburg address) the world’s greatest bastion of fideism, which is Islam.

He describes the fateful showdown which took place in Islam between the ninth and twelfth centuries, in which the pro-reason school — the Mutazilites — were defeated by the fideistic, voluntaristic school of the Ash’arites. The implications of this defeat went far beyond Islamic theology, into every aspect of the Islamic worldview, and in a dramatic way into political thought: the perceived mode of divine rule sets the standard for political rule, and so if God’s power is envisaged as tyrannical and mankind’s correct attitude is one of submission (“Islam” means submission) then similarly, political power is conceived of as despotic over a submissive population.

Gregg does not despair for Western civilisation. Decline, he thinks “ is not inescapable”. He considers that those who conceive of a reason as closed to faith must acknowledge that this view created Marx and scientism — with all the destruction they have wrought on the world. On the other hand, those more sympathetic to faith must acknowledge that the Enlightenment has been part of a bulwark against the kind of fideism which has come to dominate the Islamic world. But above all, there will be no recovery without the rediscovery of what made Western civilisation in the first place: the interplay of faith and reason. “Without Logos, the West is lost.”

AUTHOR

Fr Gavan Jennings

Rev. Gavan Jennings studied philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland and the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome. He is co-editor of the monthly journal Position Papers. He teaches occasional… More by Fr Gavan Jennings

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

$30K a year, and my kid can’t tell the difference between a boy and a girl

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Parents must hold their local school systems accountable for what is taught to their children.

Everything has a price.

Like every American family, our family runs a constant cost/benefit analysis on our lives. There are the small decisions: is it worth the time to drive to Target for the cheaper diapers? Or should I just get the pricier ones at the grocery store? And there are the bigger ones: like, should I live in the suburbs and pay lower taxes but more for car expenses and gas? Or flip that decision?

For our family, one of the toughest decisions was where to send our kids to school. We could send them across the street to the poorly performing public school for free. They’d meet a wide variety of kids and learn some valuable self-advocacy skills, but they would not be academically challenged. For $30k, I could send them to the nearby private school, where they’d benefit from engaged teachers, kids, and families. We’d have to drop the music lessons and fancy trips, but hey — I don’t like Disneyland anyway.

So, with some scholarships, sacrifices, and family assistance, we made the choice to send our kids to a fancy private school. The benefits have been great: warm, caring, patient teachers; outstanding academics; beautiful buildings; even a pretty good lunch. But there’s been a hidden cost, beyond the incredibly painful tuition bills: my kids can’t tell the difference between a boy and a girl.

This seems shocking, I know. How can a concept so obvious, so instinctual that nearly every 2-year-old on the planet can master it, be an idea that my very expensively-educated children don’t understand?

Simple-minded educators

Because some teachers don’t understand it. Because some administrators don’t understand it. And this is where I have to remind myself of something true: half the world is dumber than average.

I know this sounds incredibly snobby. I know this sounds judgmental and awful, but this is true. And this fact helps me take a breath, find some compassion, and slow down.

These teachers are good people. They are kind. They like kids, and want the best for children. They believe that education can make the world a better place. And additionally, they were hired for their people skills: they are empathetic, good communicators, patient, and open-minded. Those are exactly the skills my tuition dollars are paying for.

But these teachers are not well-trained critical thinkers. They were not hired for their ability to analyse complex research studies, nor to follow the various paths of different complex scenarios. They are not philosophers, ethicists, or religious scholars. They are not lawyers or developmental psychologists. They are not endocrinologists or pediatricians. They are experts at connecting to kids and explaining the types of K-12 content that kids should learn. Thank god for teachers and their talents and skills. Our society needs them. But they are not the experts here. They are just trying to do their jobs.

So when faced with the concept of “gender identity” — the idea that “people have an innate feeling of being female or male,” the typical teacher will say “Sure — that makes sense. I’m female, I know it. That’s not a controversial idea.”

When faced with the diagnostic definition of “gender dysphoria”, the idea that “some people have great distress with their biological sex, and wish they were the opposite sex,” these teachers say, “Sure — I know about Jazz Jennings and Caitlyn Jenner. That’s a real thing.”

When faced with the fact of “Disorders of Sexual Development” (formerly known as Intersex conditions), the scientifically observed and natural phenomena of various biological sexual characteristics and markers, teachers say, “Yep — I learned about that once.”

And when urged to consider the negative impacts of the difficulty of being an outlier, and the impacts of social isolation and/or ostracism, the teachers say, “Not on my watch. My cousin was gay and poorly treated. I won’t let any of my kids be bullied or left out.”

So when teachers combine all these ideas and impressions and blend them into their natural “be nice” personalities and “open-minded” natures, they are primed to become believers and advocates of transgender ideology. If Johnny likes skirts and thinks he’s really a girl inside, who are we to judge? We really can’t blame the teachers. They were born this way.

So our society has laid yet another burden of expectation on teachers. They must educate kids, they must socialise kids, they must address and resolve the emotional and behavioural dysfunctions of these kids. And now they must be responsible for nurturing, protecting, and advocating for the “internal feeling of being female or male” for a kid, otherwise they’ll be held responsible for the kid’s ostracism.

This is nuts. These teachers don’t stand a chance.

To the top

So we can’t fight the teachers. We’ve got to get the administrators and school boards to stop, listen, and think. These people were hired to be critical thinkers, to balance different opinions, to consider the different consequences of different choices. They still aren’t likely to read the studies or think through the ethical or philosophical consequences of different complex scenarios, but they are primed to consider one thing above all: legal threats.

Right now, principals and school boards are hiding behind the guidelines that WPATH (an activist-led organisation), the American Psychological Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, and the National Association of Secondary School Principals have created. These organisations have good intentions, but they are also human and flawed (and remember — half their members are below average). Even the ACLU seems to have lost its mind on this topic.

I suggest American parents adopt the “Maya Forstater Approach.” This strategy, based on the case in England, relies on fundamental and constitutional American legal rights: free speech and free religion. I don’t care if you haven’t been to church ever. This is what you say to your school board:

“For scientific, religious, and social reasons, I do not believe that you can change your sex, and I do not want my children to be taught “gender identity”, the belief that you have a gendered soul, and that your gender soul feelings trump your biology. How is your school protecting my family’s religious beliefs and our right to be free from compelled speech?”

Ask your school’s principal this question every Fall. Send it as a statement to your kids’ teachers every fall. Tell them to inform you of any lesson on gender identity before it happens so that your children can have a substitute lesson. Ask them what their policy on requesting pronouns is, so that your child does not feel compelled to use certain speech. Ask them how they balance different opinions on this topic in the community.

I can guarantee you they do not see this as a religious issue, but as a social justice issue. Say the magic words “freedom of religion/freedom from religion” and “freedom of speech” and see if that works. We’ve got a long history of protecting underdogs in this country, and right now the culture glorifies the status of victim. Use this knowledge wisely.

And here’s the thing: this is going to cost you. Be ready. Do the cost/benefit analysis. Whether your kids are getting a free public education or an expensive private one, when you ruffle the feathers of the principal, the winds blow. Then again, if you remain silent, your kid may not understand that sex never changes. Be prepared. Everything has a cost.

This article has been republished from Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT).

BY

Anonymous author

In exceptional circumstances, MercatorNet allows contributors to publish articles anonymously. Sometimes the author’s privacy or safety might be at risk. More by Anonymous author.

RELATED ARTICLE: “Without Logos, the West is lost”

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3 Things Biden Has Done That Increased Gas Prices

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President Biden isn’t entirely to blame, but his anti-market policies have contributed to the problem.

Average gas prices recently passed $5 per gallon nationwide, setting a new record. This is bad news for workers’ budgets, and since it’s happening under President Joe Biden’s watch, it’s bad news for the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects.

The White House has tried to deflect blame for the insane surge in gas prices onto Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And, to be fair, gas prices are definitely not completely within any president’s control. They absolutely are influenced by global factors, and the disruption in the global energy market caused by Putin’s invasion certainly has contributed to higher prices.

But Biden isn’t off the hook. Gas prices started rising long before the invasion, and the president still has direct responsibility for how his policies have contributed to this problem.

Here are three specific things Biden has done that have led to increased gas prices.

Since taking office, Biden has taken too many steps to count to limit domestic production. These include halting federal permits for oil and gas drilling and leasing shortly after taking office and blocking drilling in a major oil-rich Alaskan region.

To be clear, these decisions will mostly affect future production. But that does still significantly affect gas prices because companies factor in their expectations about the future into the decisions they make today.

“Some say that new leases … would have taken time and would not yet be online, but even so, there is evidence that expectations of increased future supply has a beneficial impact on current prices and expectations of future supply drying up has a negative impact on current prices,” the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ben Lieberman said.

“At a day-to-day level, I am hearing from drillers that they are having a very hard time getting all the approvals they need from [the Environmental Protection Agency] and other agencies in order to produce on existing wells, and of course, new federal leasing has come to a halt,” Lieberman added.

It’s just basic economics that when the government throttles future supply in an industry, that will lead to higher prices both now and in the future. Biden was warned by many critics at the time that this would happen, but he proceeded anyway.

Speaking of basic economics, it’s well established that when businesses’ costs rise, that puts upward pressure on the prices they charge consumers. The oil and gas industry is no exception.

And unfortunately, the Biden administration has both proposed and implemented a wide array of regulations on the energy sector, inflicting billions in direct financial costs and incalculable indirect compliance costs — plus further harming expectations for the future.

“The regulatory chokehold imposed by the Biden administration on oil production in place of a Green New Deal has drastically raised gasoline prices, thereby hurting lower-income people the most,” said conservative economist Vance Ginn, who served in the Trump administration.

“This is yet another example of the high cost of big-government environmentalism when the better approach is to remove government barriers so that free markets can better let people adapt to changes in the environment at a much lower cost,” Ginn concluded.

Rhetoric matters. While words don’t literally do anything to change gas prices, the signals coming from policymakers absolutely do affect the long-term investment decisions businesses make.

And even as a presidential candidate, Biden sent very negative messages about what his leadership would mean for the gas industry.

In just one example, as Americans for Tax Reform pointed out, Biden said during a campaign stop: “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels. … We’re going to phase out fossil fuels.” Then, upon taking office, the president followed these words with actions such as canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, blocking leases, restricting imports, and pursuing regulations.

In general, Biden’s open hostility toward the oil and gas industry has almost certainly curbed investment into production that otherwise would’ve occurred.

“Such extinction rhetoric, coming from the now-president, has an unprecedented chilling effect on investment,” Lieberman said. To put it simply, less investment means less supply — which means higher prices.

It’s absolutely true that our high gas prices aren’t entirely Biden’s fault. But the president is not the helpless bystander his defenders would have you believe.

This article originally appeared in the Washington Examiner. 

AUTHOR

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education.

RELATED ARTICLE: Why High Gas Prices Are a Signal of (More) Inflation to Come

Fairfax County School Board Votes To Make It A Potential Crime To Call A Boy A Boy

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The ruling class has lost its collective mind and they mean to take us all and every good thing down with them.

Fairfax County School Board Votes To Make It A Potential Crime To Call A Boy A Boy

Dissenting students at school will now be suspended and possibly charged with a crime.

By: Auguste Meyrat, The Federalist, June 21, 2022:

Last Thursday, the school board at Fairfax County School Public Schools (FCPS) voted 8-4 to increase penalties for students who misgender or “dead-name” transgender-identifying students. This will now be classified as “discriminatory harassment,” which means offenders “could face weeks-long suspensions and referrals to local law enforcement,” according to the Washington Examiner.

The most charitable interpretation anyone could make of this move is that the school board is trying to cultivate a kinder environment by removing hateful language and attitudes from campuses. This would allow transgender students and their allies to feel safer and happier while those who oppose transgenderism have an opportunity to reflect on their intolerance and make better choices.

However, like most leftist gimmicks in education, all of this is based on false premises and will only create more dysfunction in an already dysfunctional school system. Specifically, there are three major problems with this new policy, two of them concern the idea behind it while the third has to do with its implementation.

Not an Expression of Hate

The first problem is that the school board conflates the refusal to accommodate a transgender student with an expression of hate. However, the two things are completely different. In the case of accommodating transgender classmates, a student is refusing to betray his own senses and reason to conform to the classmate’s fabricated reality; in the case of expressing hate, a student is actively seeking to harm and demean a classmate with hateful language.

Of course, the usual rebuttal to this is asking what the big deal is. After all, if objective reality (otherwise known as truth) is as relative and meaningless as transgender activists suggest, then why not humor people who live by a different truth? Professor Patrick Grzanka’s defensive interview with Matt Walsh in “What Is a Woman?” reflects this sentiment perfectly, as he asserts, “You keep invoking the word ‘truth,’ which is condescending and rude.”

On the contrary, it’s the exact opposite. Forcing someone to abide by another person’s arbitrary truth is “condescending and rude.” Empowered by the school faculty, trans-identifying students in FCPS can force every other student to lie and go along with the delusion. This isn’t much different from a big kid putting a smaller kid in a headlock and asking him to say “uncle,” and if he doesn’t — in this case, he will face severe consequences from a school administrator.

Is Transgender Identity on Par with Race and Sex?

This brings up another more fundamental problem with FCPS’s new policy: how should one properly view transgenderism? Is it really fair or accurate to say that transgender identity is on par with one’s race or sex? Shouldn’t it matter that race and sex are based on biology while transgenderism is based on feelings?

It most definitely matters because sometimes people’s feelings can be wrong, and if those feelings aren’t corrected by reason, they can become harmful. Researcher Jared Eckert argues this point in The American Conservative with the example from two decades ago of young people suddenly developing Body Identity Integrity Disorder (BIID), the belief that there is something wrong with one’s body.

They would go online and read blog posts about others seeking to amputate healthy limbs because they felt like they didn’t belong — and then these young people started feeling it too. The same thing happened with young people developing eating disorders because they felt like they were overweight.

Fortunately, as Eckert explains, social media platforms censored material that promoted these disorders because of the harm it was doing to young people. Unfortunately, in the case of transgenderism, censorship goes the other way — anyone who dares to question the idea that feeling like a woman makes one a woman will be censored. It’s the equivalent of punishing people who tell an anorexic woman she’s not fat, or an able-bodied man that he shouldn’t dismember himself.

Read the rest…..

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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

Germany’s ‘Green’ Energy Disaster Is A Warning To The United States

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“No nation has anything approaching a clean energy economy. And those that have promised to build one are all struggling.”

Germany’s ‘Green’ Energy Disaster Is A Warning To The United States

By: David Harsanyi, The Federalist, June 21, 2022:

As gas hit historic highs, leftists keep arguing it’s a perfect time to transition to a “clean energy” economy. “Now is the moment to double-down, triple-down, and quadruple-down on clean energy,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted on Friday, linking to a CNN piece that contends “wind and solar” have been “bailing out” Texas during its recent heat wave.

In the piece we learn that wind, solar, and nuclear have “powered about 38% of the state’s power in 2021, rivaling natural gas at 42%.” That’s quite the sleight of hand; tantamount to bragging about how Babe Ruth (60), Lou Gehrig (47), and Joe Dugan (2) combined for 109 home runs in 1927. True, but deceptive.

Subsidized solar power generates less than 2 percent of Texas’ energy during the year. Nuclear power generates around 10 percent and wind nearly 20. Coal accounts for nearly 15 percent and natural gas for more than 52 percent of electricity generation. It would be far more accurate to say that coal, nuclear, and gas are bailing out Texas.

No nation has anything approaching a clean energy economy. And those that have promised to build one are all struggling.

More than a decade ago, after a major earthquake caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster, German chancellor Angela Merkel announced her nation would close down all its nuclear power plants, at the same time quadrupling down on the decarbonization of its economy—energiewende. Once there were 17 reactors in Germany. Now there are only three remaining, all of which are scheduled to go offline by the end of the year.

The move to “clean energy”—without nuclear—has accomplished three things:

1. It has prompted Germany, and the rest of the EU, to begin relying more heavily on Russian natural gas as it “transitioned.” Putin, who has begun demanding EU nations pay for their energy in roubles, is now able to undercut the European economy at will.

2. It has created the highest global electricity prices per household in the world. In 2019, German households were paying 34 cents per kilowatt-hour compared to 13 cents in the United States. The price of energy has doubled since 2000, when Germany first mandated decarbonization, an effort that forced energy companies to purchase long-term inefficient renewables at high, fabricated prices.

3. It has meant the burning of coal. Even before Russia began cutting off supply, Germany was more reliant on coal than the United States. This week, Germany’s Economy Minister Robert Habeck, who earlier this year rejected a European Union label of nuclear energy as “green,” announced that in an effort to avoid future gas shortages—because cars can’t run on wind—the government would incentivize the use of more coal-fired power plants.

The “transition” to green that Germany began 30 years ago has not worked. In 2000, Germany obtained 84 percent of its energy from fossil fuels. By 2019, it was 78 percent. As Vaclav Smil pointed out a couple of years ago, at this rate, Germany would still be deriving 70 percent of its energy from fossil fuels by the year 2050. With a move back to coal in 2022, it will surely be even later, if ever.

Setting aside the high cost of transitioning to renewable energy, and the failure of wind turbines and solar panels to produce energy in the winter, the intermittency problem is not going to be overcome in any season. To pull back on the only reliable “clean energy” source that can mitigate this problem has been suicidal.

Unlike Germany, we don’t even have to worry about pipelines from Russia; we are situated on a continent with abundant energy sources. Germany’s problems are self-inflicted. Ours will be, as well, if we follow its lead.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLES:

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Green-pushing Germany turns to coal to offset gas crisis from Russian gas restriction

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

VIDEO: ‘The Vanishing American Adult’ One of the Most Remarkable Discussions We’ve Ever Seen

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Sissy: “A person regarded as effeminate or cowardly.”

Soy boy: “A pejorative term often used in online communities to describe men lacking masculine characteristics.”

A reader sent is a link to the Hoover Institution’s interview with Senator Benjamin Sasse by Peter Robinson to discuss his book The Vanishing American Adult. Our reader BL stated, “One of the most remarkable videos we have seen in years.”

The Vanishing American Adult is a 2017 book by United States Senator Ben Sasse published by St. Martin’s Press. In the book, Sasse describes Americans as “a drifting and aimless people — awash in material goods and yet spiritually aching for meaning.”

We fully agree. It’s time for every American to hear what Senator Sasse said in 2017. Why? Because the cultural war against manhood is happening now and it must be stopped.

Please watch the Hoover Institution’s interview with Senator Benjamin Sasse:

We have written about how a war is being waged against manhood and womanhood. In our January 22nd, 2022 column “America’s Sissy Problem” we wrote:

A reader of ours sent a link to a very interesting The American Mind article titled “China’s Sissy Problem—and Ours” by John Mac Ghlionn.

We have been concerned about the “sissyfication” of America’s boys, and girls, for some time.

Claremont Institute researcher and essayist John Mac Ghlionn wrote:

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made a concerted effort to banish so-called “sissy men” from society. “Morally flawed” men are no longer welcome. Men, we’re told, should look a certain way—no makeup, no high heels. Moreover, they should have resilience and a desire to seek meaningful employment. Some prominent authors argue that Beijing’s effort will backfire. Will it? Possibly, but when it comes to crackdowns, the CCP is frighteningly effective. If in doubt, just look at what is occurring in Hong Kong, a sprawling, once free-wheeling city with a population of 7.5 million, where free speech has died a swift and brutal death.

But perhaps worse we are now seeing free speech dying a swift and brutal death here in America, with a population of 330 million. Social media has now censored the truth about gender being binary and have banned it, because it doesn’t fit their narrative, as being against their collectivist social justice “community standards.”

This has led to our youth growing up not understanding what is happening to them culturally. In America today young boys are being neutered via verbal fiat.

Generation Z boys, and girls, are growing up without strong male, and female, role models.

The Sissyfication of America

Ghlionn in his column China’s Sissy Problem—and Ours notes:

It’s important to make clear that this piece is not an attack on homosexual men; it’s an attack on sissies. There is a difference between the two. In his latest special, Sorry, Louis CK finished the show with a joke about American men. Today, according to Louis, gay men carry themselves with an air of authority, purpose, and meaning. They keep themselves in good shape and dress appropriately. Straight men, on the other hand, have become notably weaker, both physically and mentally; many of them lack the characteristics that we would have associated with previous generations of men. They are sloppy, weak-willed, and overly apologetic. They dress terribly. At the end of the joke, which is much funnier than I just made it sound, the audience applauded and let out a collective roar. Why? Because Louis’s joke resonated. He articulately expressed what so many of his fans were already thinking. The United States, too, has a crisis of masculinity—one even worse, perhaps, than China’s.

QUESTION: Aren’t gays by definition sissies?

Actually if you go to a gay pride parade you see men dressed as sissies, wearing chains, in dresses with heavy make-up and acting effeminate. Not sure who Louis CK is referring to.

QUESTION: Are Ghlionn and Louis CK afraid of being labeled homophobic? So, does this make Ghlionn and Louis CK sissies?

We are seeing more and more films featuring gays and lesbians. We are seeing non-binary (a.k.a. gender queer) athletes competing in women’s sports. We are seeing men dressed up like a woman reading books to elementary school students. We are seeing graphic under age sex oriented books in public school libraries. And we have reported on the growth of Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) clubs in our public schools.

This is all part and parcel of the culture war against boys in general and manhood in particular.

Mainstreaming Pedophilia

In our column “CULTURE WAR: The Mainstreaming of Pedophilia by Targeting Your Children” we warned:

Sadly we have seen the mainstreaming of pedophilia. Most recently we have seen pedophilia:

We have reported on efforts by groups such as B4U-ACT and the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN) to indoctrinate children into believing that sex with men by children is not only normal but encouraged.

Dr. Judith Reisman in her 2016 column “They’re mainstreaming pedophilia!” wrote:

Alfred Kinsey’s ongoing sexual anarchy campaign has no end in sight.

Matt Barber, associate dean of the Liberty University School of Law, and I attended the “B4U-ACT” pedophile conference Aug. 17 [2015]. To eliminate the “stigma” against pedophiles, this growing sexual anarchist lobby wants the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to redefine pedophilia as a normal sexual orientation of “Minor-Attracted Persons.”

Adhering to the Kinsey principle of lulling “straights” into a false sense of security, pedophile dress was largely conservative – short hair, jackets, some ties and few noticeable male ear piercings.

Matt Barber and I sat in the back of the meeting room among roughly 50 activists and their “mental health” attending female enablers. “Pedophilia, Minor-Attracted Persons, and the DSM: Issues and Controversies,” keynoted “Fred Berlin, M.D., Ph.D., as founder, National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma; Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic.”

However, the sex clinic was initially founded by John Money, Ph.D., to give judges “leeway” to keep child molesters out of jail. Money (deceased), a pedophile advocate, also called for an end to all age-of-consent laws. Dr. Berlin was his disciple.

Sissies and Soy Boys

We do have men, real men, who carry themselves with an air of authority, purpose and meaning. Most of these men are active duty military, in law enforcement, are first responders and veterans of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Today instead of real “alpha” males we have “soy” boys.

As Ghlionn reported:

For generations, the sissy has been a frowned-upon character in American life. Only recently it has become a respected, even institutionalized lifestyle. California’s Silicon-Valley stereotype of the “soy boy”, a demasculinized consumer of a meatless, synthetic diet, is now national. [Emphasis added]

Sadly, since the end of the draft, those who serve are all volunteers and make up about 1% of our male population. The other 99% have never sacrificed themselves in service to the nation. The problem lies in the group of Gen Z boys that have never become real men by serving, rather they are demanding bigger government to serve them regardless of their needs to work for a living. Because Gen Z boys vote for a living.

Sissyfication and Single Parenthood

Today we have seen manhood, and womanhood, denigrated to the point where if you mention that gender is binary you are ostracized from society. We are seeing men competing in women’s sports. We are seeing the normalization of sodomy to the point that sissy men dressed as a woman are reading books to grade school students.

But there’s something deeper going on in America.

As Ghlionn points out:

[A]ccording to a Pew Research Center study, rates of children living in single-parent households have never been higher. In fact, the U.S. now boasts the highest rate of children living in single-parent households in the world. As the study notes, “3% of children in China, 4% of children in Nigeria, and 5% of children in India live in single-parent households.” In the U.S., meanwhile, the rate is a staggering 23 percent. At least 80 percent of the country’s single-parent homes are headed by single mothers.

Absolutely nothing good comes from father absence—which, according to a report published by the U.S. Department of Justice, “has a strong and significant effect on both female and male levels of violence,” including “homicide and robbery.” Children look to their fathers to lay down the rules and enforce them, and learn to do so through imitation.

The Bottom Line

On August 10th, 2019  reported:

Beyond the main point of the signatures of the founders and main thinkers of the French, postmodern philosophers all demanding that pedophilia be made legal, these guys make a lot of good points.

Also, it is food for thought about how similar the push to make little boys into drag queen strippers for adult men mirrors Afghan Muslim culture.

H/T Xanthippa

So there you have it.

Pedophiles are looking at recruiting the next generation of your children as their perverted sex slaves.

They will brainwash your child into thinking first that he/she are neither just male or female (binary) but they can choose their (non-binary) gender pronoun at will. If this doesn’t emasculate our boys, and girls, I don’t know what will!

Then they push your little boy, and girl, into the LGBTQ+ community where by then they’re to far along to resist.

If parents and grandparents fail to stop this then our children are lost for ever!

It’s time to man up.

Ditch the soy, stop being a sissy. Take charge of your lives or we will see Generation Z sissies take over our nation.

We need real men, and women, to take charge in our families, communities, culture, society and nation.

Cowards don’t lead and leaders aren’t cowards.

Edmund Burke wrote:

 “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Sissies are evil. We need good men!

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

Why It Matters That Fauci Got Covid-19

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In the end Dr. Fauci was no more successful in avoiding the virus than Prince Prospero, the villain from Poe’s imagination who believed his castle could protect him from the plague.

I recently returned from a week-long vacation in the north woods of Wisconsin. We played beach volleyball, went fishing and boating, had a lively game of Wiffle Ball with the kids, and swam until our skin was prune-like.

Even without a cell phone, I managed to stumble on a bit of breaking news from an unusual source: television. (It was virtually the only media I had up there.) Naturally, I had to share this bit of news.

“Fauci has Covid,” I told some of my companions, stuffing beer into coolers.

A discussion quickly broke out over whether the news was relevant.

“So what?” a friend responded. “I accepted a long time ago that everyone is going to get this thing.”

I partly agreed with my friend. Even during the early stages of the pandemic, I harbored suspicions that the virus was going to spread regardless of any interventions politicians or bureaucrats enacted—and those interventions could prove to be destructive, perhaps more destructive than the virus itself.

But I told him not to underestimate the importance of Fauci contracting Covid.

It’s important to understand that Fauci isn’t just the president’s top medical advisor. Fauci, whose official title is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is “America’s Doctor,” as The New Yorker described him in April 2020.

More importantly, for better or worse, Fauci became the architect of the US Covid response.

It was Fauci who, early in the pandemic, proposed a Covid strategy that was simultaneously radical and simple: keep Americans apart from one another, using state force, if necessary.

In March 2020, Fauci told “Face the Nation” that the strategy was working.

“The kinds of mitigation issues that are going on right now, the things that we’re seeing in this country, this physical separation at the same time as we’re preventing an influx of cases coming in, I think that’s going to go a long way to preventing us from becoming an Italy,” Fauci said.

The “mitigations” Fauci was referring to were lockdowns. Schools closed. Parks closed. Businesses closed. Any enterprise or activity not deemed “essential” by state authorities was illegal.

Americans were told these efforts were only temporary. “Fifteen days to slow the spread,” became a national mantra.

Six months later, however, nothing had changed. In fact, Fauci was now saying it would have to continue until 2022.

The idea that humans could hide indefinitely from an airborne pathogen if government bureaucrats turned the dial just right has more than a touch of madness to it, but what few seem to realize is that for Fauci, this was just the first step in a larger revolution.

Writing at the Brownstone Institute, Jeffrey Tucker points to an August 2020 Cell article written by Fauci wherein the doctor explains his ideological vision, which rings of Rousseauian idealism.

“Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.

In such a transformation we will need to prioritize changes in those human behaviors that constitute risks for the emergence of infectious diseases. Chief among them are reducing crowding at home, work, and in public places as well as minimizing environmental perturbations such as deforestation, intense urbanization, and intensive animal farming.”

The article, Tucker points out, makes it clear Fauci’s pandemic response was not just about Covid, but a larger technocratic revolution that was hard to define—and one Americans had not signed up for.

“It’s not socialism or capitalism. It’s something else entirely, something very strange,” Tucker writes. “No one has voted for such a thing. It is something Fauci and his friends dreamed up on their own and deployed all their enormous power to enact just as a test, until it fell apart.”

And this is what makes Fauci’s infection—which comes more than two years after the first lockdowns were imposed—so important.

“It’s a sign and symbol that [Fauci’s] entire theory of virus control was wrong,” Tucker writes. “He got his way with policy and it did not work. The virus finally landed on him, as if to reenact Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional story of Prince Prospero in his castle that he believed would protect him.”

In his 1974 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the economist F.A. Hayek concluded with a warning: he urged humans to act humbly with the immense power of modern science.

“There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered,” Hayek said, “and which tempts man to try, ‘dizzy with success,’ to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will.”

He continued:

“The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

A careful look at Dr. Fauci reveals that humility is not one of his stronger attributes, and his actions show the fatal conceit that Hayek warned against infects public health officials as well as economic planners.

Despite all his efforts, Fauci was no more successful in avoiding the plague than Prince Prospero. But his mad, arrogant effort to extinguish the virus through force is a tale worthy of its own parable.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. 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. This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.

From ‘your choice’ to familism: A path for 21st century feminism

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The discussion which should follow the Supreme Court decision on abortion.

This is the second part of a review of The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, by Erika Bachiochi. The first part is here.

When the US Supreme Court in its 1992 Casey decision doubled down on Roe v Wade, the court majority claimed that “an entire generation has come of age free to assume Roe’s concept of liberty in defining the capacity of women to act in society”.

What was Roe’s concept of liberty? That of the autonomous individual, the hero of American libertarianism and a parody of the self-governing (virtuous) individual of the founding era.

Roe’s heroine is the one who “chooses”, behind the veil of “privacy”, all by herself, what to do about an “unplanned” child she has conceived.

Her options are stark. Will she keep the baby and risk her marriage or career, or both? Is she prepared to see the last of her uncommitted partner, and face years of poverty and loneliness as a single parent, trying to balance work/welfare and care of her child?

Or will she “get rid of it” and simplify her life, make progress in the job market – and hope for better circumstances next time around?

Since 1973 American has, through its laws and economy, told women that they are on their own in this matter. Caring for children is a choice, a private thing. Society is interested in women as workers, not mothers. Workers just like men.

As Erika Bachiochi observes in her book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, “When Casey reaffirmed the ‘right to choose’ abortion, employers and other public institutions remained ‘free’ to be unchanged by women’s participation in them.”

In support she quotes a pro-choice law professor, Deborah Dinner:

“The discourse of reproductive choice continues to legitimate workplace structures modelled on the masculine ideal [with no caregiving responsibilities] as well as social policies that provide inadequate public support for families.”

“In the end,” adds Bachiochi, “it may just be that an unmitigated right to abortion serves of profit-driven market above all else.”

How did “women’s rights” end up in this blind alley?

In the second-last chapter of her book, Bachiochi explores the work of Harvard legal luminary Mary Ann Glendon to throw light on this question.

Family law in America vs Europe

Glendon, whose early experience of single parenthood was formative for her views, traced the source of the problem to the libertarianism of the Anglo-American rights tradition and its effect on family law and culture.

By the mid-twentieth century, she found, “self-sufficiency” had become the guiding principle in US family law, leading to the removal of legal protection from the family unit (through, for example, no-fault divorce) and to the idea of marriage as, “an association of individuals”.

In Europe, things were different. In many countries the civil law, reflecting classical and Christian ideas about human dignity and the common good, had more to say about spousal rights and duties, and envisaged marriage as a community of persons for the nurture of children. As women won equal status during the twentieth century, marriage law was not emptied of content as in the US.

In most modern European constitutions the basic social institution of the family (and often the status of motherhood itself) remained protected, as it had been in the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Thus, in 1970, the Federal Constitutional Court in West Germany stated:

“The concept of man in the Basic Law [i.e. the Constitution] is not that of an isolated sovereign individual; rather, the Basic Law has decided in favour of a relationship between individual and community in the sense of a person’s dependence on and commitment to the community, without infringing on a person’s individual value.”

Though European countries have since bought into autonomy and individualism, most have far better supports for families. They are also more conservative regarding abortion.

A dignitarian vision of marriage

Glendon pointed out that while American law advanced women’s rights in the sphere of work and public life, it simultaneously devalued women’s role in reproduction and the concrete caregiving work they had traditionally done at home, and which still had to be done by parents – or someone. She wrote, in 1996:

“[In modern times, women] have adapted to that situation in two ways. They are having fewer children, and they are maintaining at least a foothold in the labour force even when their children are very young. But that strategy still does not protect mothers very well against the risk of the four deadly Ds: disrespect for non-market work; divorce; disadvantages in the workplace for anyone who takes time out; and the destitution that afflicts so many female-headed households.”

Having men do half the caregiving and other domestic work, as advocated by mainstream feminists, could never remove these risks because of the deep “asymmetry” (not simply “difference”) between their reproductive roles. Like Mary Wollstonecraft, Glendon advocated not strict equality but, as Bachiochi puts it,

“an equal dignity that admits the special ‘power’ and ‘privilege,’ and ‘disability’ too, of childbearing and childrearing, seeking not the erasure of these facts of life, but a reconciliation of them within reciprocal relationships of mutual respect, interdependence, and collaboration in all realms of life.”

To make this dignitarian vision a reality for women Glendon called for a cultural turn towards the family, in recognition of the fundamental importance of stable, self-governing families to public order and a flourishing society.

As Wollstonecraft insisted: “If you wish to make good citizens, you must first exercise the affections of a son and a brother. This is the only way to expand the heart; for public affections as well as public virtue must ever grow out of private character…”

Familism, communities and society

This would entail a “social ecology” in which smaller groups and systems (“communities of memory and mutual aid”) would play their supportive role in the neglected space between the state and the family or individual.

With others, she proposed to the Clinton administration in the early 1990s that society should:

  • Support infant-parent bonding in the home until the age of one year. This through a combination paid leave (for six months at least) flexitime and work-from-home arrangements.
  • Provide a generous, European-style child allowance, and tax policies which did not favour those who work outside the home.
  • Foster a culture of familism to shore up the essential work parents do and reaffirm the value of children over “excessive careerism or acquisitiveness”, so parents could put their children first.

The aim, here, was not some kind of “work-family balance”, but a fundamental change in the way parents in the workforce – both men and women – are seen: not as employees first and caregivers second, but as caregivers first and employees second. The economy should serve families and not vice-versa.

Coming to the present, the fate of those ideas can be judged, perhaps, by President Biden’s recent (failed) attempt to spend more than $200 billion on subsidising childcare for millions of poor and middle-class families where both parents work, while offering nothing to families who would like to have one parent stay at home with their young children – as many would.

Reimagining feminism

Yes, despite more flexibility in the workplace and diversity in familial arrangements in the direction of “gender equality”, Glendon’s call for a family-friendly culture remains unfulfilled. And some things are worse.

College-educated fathers may be doing a larger share of caregiving and domestic work, but further down the social scale they are often simply missing. More than a third of children in the US live without their father in the home, Bachiochi notes. Marriage rates and fertility are at historic lows, and the happiness of women has also fallen. Where there are two spouses or partners, they often both need to work full-time to keep the small family afloat.

In the face of all this, most feminists remain obsessed with the gender pay gap and abortion rights.

However, there is nothing inevitable about the present, and Bachiochi concludes her historical study of the rights of women by imagining a 21st century feminism shaped by the dignitarian values of Wollstonecraft and Glendon.

The new feminism, while preserving the real gains for women of the last two centuries, would correct mistakes and carry forward the work of harmonising marriage, parenthood and the social and economic equality of women.

Importantly, it would disentangle the sexual revolution from the movement for women’s rights. Given the role abortion has played in enabling the sexual chaos and in delaying proper recognition of the work of the home, repudiating abortion would be a good place to start, Bachiochi suggests.

It’s a big ask, but Bachiochi’s own history is proof that it is possible. She was a pro-choice feminist when, at 20, she read Mary Ann Glendon’s Rights Talk, with its appeal to human dignity as the basis for human rights, and could not shake off its arguments.

Later, when she started her research on theories of women’s rights, she was stunned to discover Mary Wollstonecraft’s view that male chastity was the precondition for equality between the sexes.

There is much, much more in her book, but by bringing the thought of these two women to light for today’s scholars and students, Bachiochi has done them a great service. And the timeliness of her work is only enhanced by the pending Roe and Casey decision, since it lays out the terms of the discussion that should follow.

AUTHOR

Carolyn Moynihan

Carolyn Moynihan is the former deputy editor of MercatorNet More by Carolyn Moynihan

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

While Abortion Activists Vandalize Pro-Life Clinics, Senate Dems Want Google to Ban Them

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The political and terrorist arms of the American Left are in sync.

A few weeks after the Buffalo mass shooting, another domestic terrorist attack occurred in the upstate New York city. CompassCare, a pregnancy care clinic guiding new mothers away from abortion, was firebombed by the pro-abortion hate group, Jane’s Revenge. The group has been linked to the firebombing of at least two other pro-life offices and organizations last month.

Its threatening graffiti included the warning, “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either.”

“We demand the disbanding of all anti-choice establishments, fake clinics, and violent anti-choice groups within the next thirty days,” the Jane’s Revenge communique threatened. “We are forced to adopt the minimum military requirement for a political struggle.”

Since then the abortion domestic terror group has claimed responsibility for more attacks. And Senate Dems appear to be working in tandem with it.

A group of Democratic senators and representatives called on Google to look into search results and ads tied to “anti-abortion ‘fake clinics’” amid a recent report that showed their prevalence in 13 states with so-called “trigger laws” that would almost immediately ban or severely restrict abortion should Roe v. Wade be overturned by the Supreme Court.

Thirteen senators and eight representatives signed a letter to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google parent company Alphabet Inc., dated Friday in which they highlighted a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) that showed that in 13 states with trigger laws, searches for “abortion pill” or “abortion clinic near me” showed clinics that did not provide those services 11 percent of the time.

CCDH, as I’ve noted in the past, is a ridiculous organization.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate is a British leftist group run by Imran Ahmed, a former adviser to future London Mayor Sadiq Khan, now operating out of Washington D.C. CCDH Senior researcher Sophie Wilkinson used to write pieces for Vice and The Guardian. Samples include “I Posed as a Man Online for Sex”, “Slutdropping: the Dancefloor Move That’s Bringing Women Together”, and, “I Got My Faeces Tested to See If It’s ‘Super-Poo’”.

Absolutely the folks that Senate Dems should be relying on for intel, instead, they want Google to get rid of pro-life pregnancy centers from its search results.

This is the same agenda as their domestic terrorist allies are following, except they’re using Big Tech allies to do the destroying.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

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

RELATED VIDEO: Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Stalin: Leftists Give Away Game with Chants

Florida remains the only state not to pre-order COVID-19 vaccine shots for children under-5

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The only state that loves their children.

‘Our department of health has been very clear, the risks outweigh the benefits,’ DeSantis said at a news briefing Thursday morning.

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Florida remains the only state not to pre-order COVID-19 vaccine shots for children under-5

Florida has not ordered COVID-19 vaccines for children aged six months old to five years old ahead of their potential rollout date of June 21

Officials cite the ‘inconsistent and unsustainable COVID-19 policies’ of the federal government as reason why they refuse to order

The White House has targeted June 21 as the date for the shots to first become available nationwide to the last age group eligible for the shots

Covid cases have flattened over the past week, at just over 100,000 per day, but deaths have fallen 25% to 301 per day

By Mansur Shaheen U.S. Deputy Health Editor For Dailymail.Com, 16 June 2022:

Florida is the only state in America that has not pre-ordered shots of COVID-19 vaccines for children aged six months old to five in the wake of the jabs receiving recommendation from a panel of FDA advisors – sticking by its recommendation issued earlier this year for children not to get the shots.

The Miami Herald reports that the state missed a Tuesday filing deadline to request the shots be delivered into to roll them out starting June 21. In every other state, the jabs will be distributed to vaccine providers, pharmacies and pediatric clinics starting next week.

It comes after state health officials said in March that children and teens in the state do not need to get vaccinated because of the comparatively limited risk they face from Covid when compared to adults. According to most recent official data, children make up around 0.1 percent of U.S. deaths from the virus.

Governor Ron DeSantis reaffirmed his state’s stance Thursday, blaming media hysteria for the fear some parents have of the virus, despite limited evidence children are at risk from the virus.

The shots will begin to rollout as risk from the virus recedes as well, with cases staying flat over the past week at 103,995 per day, and deaths falling 25 percent to 301 per day.

Our department of health has been very clear, the risks outweigh the benefits.,’ DeSantis said at a news briefing Thursday morning.

‘That’s not the same as banning it, people can still access it if they want to, and patents can to, but if you look at when they were doing the hearing, we had one physician say parents are really really frightened and we know that the risk is low, we’re not sure how this is gonna work, but parents are frightened about Covid for their kids.’

He said that fear, not science, is not a reason to approve the shots for kids, and pointed at the mainstream media as the reason for budding fear among parents.

‘Why would they be frightened about it? It’s because of media hysteria. It’s because of a lot of misinformation, that’s why they’re scared,’ he added.

Both the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 shots for children as young as six months received clearance from a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel this week, setting them up for controversial emergency use authorization in the coming days.

After the FDA authorizes the shots, a green light from the CDC is expected soon after. The White House had targeted June 21 – the day after the Juneteenth holiday on Monday – as the day where shots will first become available nationwide.

Shots are purchased at the federal level, with the White House forking over the needed cash to acquire the shots. Then, states are to request allotments of the shots based on expected need, for which the federal government will fulfill to the best of its ability.

Floridians will not be able to access the shots unless the governor puts in an order, though the option to cross into another state and receive the shot there will exist for families that are desperate to receive it.

‘The Florida Department of Health has made it clear to the federal government that states do not need to be involved in the convoluted vaccine distribution process, especially when the federal government has a track record of developing inconsistent and unsustainable COVID-19 policies,’ Jeremy Redfern, said in a statement.

Read more…

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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