Why SVB and Signature Bank Failed so Fast – and Why the U.S. Banking Crisis Isn’t Over Yet

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With over $1 trillion of bank deposits currently uninsured, the banking crisis is far from over.

Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed with enormous speed – so quickly that they could be textbook cases of classic bank runs, in which too many depositors withdraw their funds from a bank at the same time. The failures at SVB and Signature were two of the three biggest in U.S. banking history, following the collapse of Washington Mutual in 2008.

How could this happen when the banking industry has been sitting on record levels of excess reserves – or the amount of cash held beyond what regulators require?

While the most common type of risk faced by a commercial bank is a jump in loan defaults – known as credit risk – that’s not what is happening here. As an economist who has expertise in banking, I believe it boils down to two other big risks every lender faces: interest rate risk and liquidity risk.

Interest rate risk

A bank faces interest rate risk when the rates increase rapidly within a shorter period.

That’s exactly what has happened in the U.S. since March 2022. The Federal Reserve has been aggressively raising rates – 4.5 percentage points so far – in a bid to tame soaring inflation. As a result, the yield on debt has jumped at a commensurate rate.

The yield on one-year U.S. government Treasury notes hit a 17-year high of 5.25% in March 2023, up from less than 0.5% at the beginning of 2022. Yields on 30-year Treasurys have climbed almost 2 percentage points.

As yields on a security go up, its price goes down. And so such a rapid rise in rates in so short a time caused the market value of previously issued debt – whether corporate bonds or government Treasury bills – to plunge, especially for longer-dated debt.

For example, a 2 percentage point gain in a 30-year bond’s yield can cause its market value to plunge by around 32%.

SVB, as Silicon Valley Bank is known, had a massive share of its assets – 55% – invested in fixed-income securities, such as U.S. government bonds.

Of course, interest rate risk leading to a drop in market value of a security is not a huge problem as long as the owner can hold onto it until maturity, at which point it can collect its original face value without realizing any loss. The unrealized loss stays hidden on the bank’s balance sheet and disappears over time.

But if the owner has to sell the security before its maturity at a time when the market value is lower than face value, the unrealized loss becomes an actual loss.

That’s exactly what SVB had to do earlier this year as its customers, dealing with their own cash shortfalls, began withdrawing their deposits – while even higher interest rates were expected.

This bring us to liquidity risk.

Liquidity risk

Liquidity risk is the risk that a bank won’t be able to meet its obligations when they come due without incurring losses.

For example, if you spend US$150,000 of your savings to buy a house and down the road you need some or all of that money to deal with another emergency, you’re experiencing a consequence of liquidity risk. A large chunk of your money is now tied up in the house, which is not easily exchangeable for cash.

Customers of SVB were withdrawing their deposits beyond what it could pay using its cash reserves, and so to help meet its obligations the bank decided to sell $21 billion of its securities portfolio at a loss of $1.8 billion. The drain on equity capital led the lender to try to raise over $2 billion in new capital.

The call to raise equity sent shockwaves to SVB’s customers, who were losing confidence in the bank and rushed to withdraw cash. A bank run like this can cause even a healthy bank to go bankrupt in a matter days, especially now in the digital age.

In part this is because many of SVB’s customers had deposits well above the $250,000 insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. – and so they knew their money might not be safe if the bank were to fail. Roughly 88% of deposits at SVB were uninsured.

Signature faced a similar problem, as SVB’s collapse prompted many of its customers to withdraw their deposits out of a similar concern over liquidity risk. About 90% of its deposits were uninsured.

Systemic risk?

All banks face interest rate risk today on some of their holdings because of the Fed’s rate-hiking campaign.

This has resulted in $620 billion in unrealized losses on bank balance sheets as of December 2022.

But most banks are unlikely to have significant liquidity risk.

While SVB and Signature were complying with regulatory requirements, the composition of their assets was not in line with industry averages.

Signature had just over 5% of its assets in cash and SVB had 7%, compared with the industry average of 13%. In addition, SVB’s 55% of assets in fixed-income securities compares with the industry average of 24%.

The U.S. government’s decision to backstop all deposits of SVB and Signature regardless of their size should make it less likely that banks with less cash and more securities on their books will face a liquidity shortfall because of massive withdrawals driven by sudden panic.

However, with over $1 trillion of bank deposits currently uninsured, I believe that the banking crisis is far from over.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

AUTHOR

Vidhura Tennekoon

Vidhura S Tennekoon is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. Vidhura earned his BSc degree in Engineering from the University of Peradeniya and an… More by Vidhura Tennekoon.

RELATED ARTICLE: Silicon Valley Bank collapse: go woke, crash the economy

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

Woke Universities Sacrificing Science on the Altar of Ideology and Profit

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Three case studies from Canada and Australia about suppression of heterodox opinions in universities.

Two thousand five hundred years ago the Greek playwright Aeschylus is reputed to have said “the first victim of war is truth.” Recent events in the academic world have demonstrated that truth is also a casualty when ideology and commercial interests are at stake.

The most recent case occurred last month at Laval University in Canada, when professor and RNA expert Patrick Provost was suspended without pay for anti-mRNA vaccine comments. Patrick Provost has run an RNA lab for 20 years and has published nearly 100 peer-reviewed studies. In 2003, Provost’s work on the role of microRNA in gene expression was named one of the 10 discoveries of the year by the Quebec Science Magazine.

Based on the government’s own hospitalization and mortality statistics for children, which are both very low, Provost said he believed the risks of Covid-19 vaccination in children could outweigh the benefits because of the potential side-effects from mRNA vaccines, which have only gone through two of the usual four stages of testing required before vaccines are approved for general use.

“I was just doing what I was hired to do,” he said in an interview. “I had some concerns about something, I searched the literature and I prepared a talk and I delivered it to the public. Being censored for doing what I’ve been trained to do — and hired to do — well, it’s hard to believe.”

“As soon as you raise some concerns about vaccines, or side-effects, or complications related to vaccines, then it’s worse than the N-word,” he continued. “You’re condemned by the media, by the government and you’re chased and put down …. We should be able to discuss any ideas — any opinions — and because I expressed opinions that went against the government narrative, I was suspended.”

Regarding the University’s reaction, one might well wonder about the fact that the top 20 pharmaceutical companies spent C$139 billion on Research & Development in 2022, a portion of which went to university researchers. Faculties of medicine are particularly favoured beneficiaries of such funding. And Patrick Provost is a professor at the Faculty of Medicine.

In an entirely different field, geophysicist Peter Ridd was sacked in 2018 by James Cook University, in Australia, for criticizing the work of a colleague studying the Great Barrier Reef. In an email to a journalist, he said the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority “is grossly misusing some scientific ‘data’ to make the case that the Great Barrier Reef is greatly damaged.” Ridd maintained that scientific organisations were “quite happy to spin a story for their own purposes, in this case to demonstrate that there is massive damage to the Great Barrier Reef.”

In a report published last year based, like Provost’s talk, on publicly available data, from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, aka the AIMS, Ridd notes that “the average coral cover as of 2022 is (…) the highest level on record. Figure 2 makes it clear that AIMS has effectively hidden the very good news about the reef between 2016 and 2022 by not publishing the Great Barrier Reef average data since 2017.”

Since 2014, the Australian government has committed A$4 billion to saving the Reef. The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, based at James Cook University, has been a major recipient of this funding. It should be no surprise that Ridd’s colleagues did not take kindly to someone undermining the claims on which their research, and the government funding that subsidizes it, is based.

Back in Canada, Frances Widdowson, a professor of economics, policy, and justice at Mount Royal University in Alberta was fired last year after colleagues and activists called for her termination because she dared to challenge groupthink on indigenous issues. Widdowson had made the self-evident claim that residential schools provided access to education that otherwise might not have been available, which was not an endorsement of the residential school system, but a mere statement of fact. A large percentage of Indian parents willingly opted for residential schools as they were the only way for their children to get an education. Despite the factuality of the claim, she was vilified and called a “denialist.”

Widdowson observes that no one dare question indigenous leaders in Canada these days, which makes it difficult to check their claims about buried remains of children. Widdowson has remarked that while lurid talk of buried indigenous children has circulated for more than 25 years and is “now firmly ensconced within the Canadian consciousness,” there is still no hard evidence to support it. Not a single body has been found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School where 215 bodies were allegedly detected by ground-penetrating radar.

Widdowson’s words in her last hearing at the disciplinary committee just before being fired are worth quoting as a moral to these stories:

“My final thought is that I don’t think it’s understood, not just at Mount Royal but in universities generally, that there is a fundamental conflict between academic universities, academic values and these ideological types of intrusions which are put forward under a number of different names, whether it be diversity, inclusion or equity policies. (…). I’m being pushed out because I can’t accept things that I believe to be untrue. I can’t say that I think something is true when I don’t think it’s true and I think it would be a violation of my academic position to do that. And unfortunately there are people who are either opportunistic or just afraid who won’t stand behind the academic foundation of the university.”

The university is now a house without foundations. We all know what eventually happens to such houses.

AUTHOR

Patrick Duffley

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

RELATED ARTICLE: Mr. President, Fire Your Woke Minions And Appoint Some Competent People

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

Why We Should Let Bad Banks Fail

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Bad banks need consequences. Let them fail.

By now, you’ve likely heard about regulators closing down Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and now Signature Bank as well.

While I’m not going to go into all the details, the basic story is described well in this article on Seeking Alpha. Essentially, SVB received a large influx of deposits as the Federal Reserve flooded the market with dollars during COVID.

From there, SVB went out and bought government bonds to store that money. But then, the Federal Reserve started enacting policies which moved interest rates up. The problem? As interest rates rose, the bonds SVB purchased in the past declined in value.

Bond prices and the interest rate have an inverse relationship. If interest rates increase, you can earn a higher return on financial assets purchased today. When that happens, bonds issued at a previously lower rate must sell at a discount to compete.

So when rates rose, SVB’s assets (composed largely of old lower-rate government bonds) plummeted in value.

The key question now is, what are we going to do about it?

I have a modest proposal—let them fail.

Allowing banks to fail may sound extreme, but it’s really the most reasonable solution. It’s true there will be some costs if the banks fail. Any time a business fails, other investors tied financially to the company lose.

But here’s the rub—people who invest in bad businesses should lose. SVB’s failure is a reflection of the fact that it was a wealth shredder. It took depositors’ perfectly good cash, and converted it into now severely devalued bonds.

Banks that destroy wealth shouldn’t be allowed to continue to do so indefinitely. And when depositors make a “run” on bad banks, they’re performing a public service.

At this point, a bank bailout not only would mean the taxpayers will be left holding the bag for bankers’ mistakes—it would mean screwing up incentives in the banking industry even more.

To see the incentive problem, consider an example. Imagine a world where, no matter the circumstances, the government will pay to fix cars after every accident. What do you think this would do to the number of car accidents per year? It would sky-rocket.

If you never need fear paying a price for crashing your car, why drive carefully? There is still some incentive to avoid serious accidents due to injury, but the point is this system lowers the cost of risky behavior, and therefore lowers an individual’s incentive to be careful. Economists call this a moral hazard problem.

And this is the primary issue with bank bailouts. If the government sets a precedent that all bank failures will be ameliorated by using taxpayer money, banks will engage in risky behavior which they otherwise would not. Why be cautious with depositors’ money if you get a bailout no matter what?

You cannot have a healthy free market when you privatize the profits and socialize the losses. The taxpayer’s wallet, if treated like common property, will be subject to the tragedy of the commons.

And I don’t just mean that I’m against a formal bailout to save investors. I’m opposed to taxpayer dollars being reallocated to save the bottom line of anyone involved. Some may worry about small depositors, but the FDIC already insures up to $250,000 (regardless of what I or anyone else thinks about that policy), meaning every depositor who has less than that in their account is getting their money back already.

And for the larger depositors? Business deals have risks. We cannot pay people to ignore that fact. If you want to house more than a quarter of a million dollars in any one institution you should be very careful in picking.

If some individual wants to come along and buy SVB or these other failing banks and try to resuscitate them, I invite them to try. Maybe there is a profit opportunity there. But if the choice is between a bailout and letting them fail, the answer is clear to me.

If they can have the profits, they should have the losses as well.

AUTHOR

Peter Jacobsen

Peter Jacobsen teaches economics and holds the position of Gwartney Professor of Economics. He received his graduate education at George Mason University.

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

How the Democrats Bake Systemic Fraud Into Our Elections

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Last week, I told you about individual wrongdoers – mostly Democrats – who were arrested and sent to jail for voter fraud.  But criminal wrongdoing in our elections is also perpetrated – again, mostly by Democrats – by election officials, Democrat and left-wing advocacy groups, and other systemic players engaged in wholesale fraud.

Starting with election officials, a Republican county elections commissioner in New York was charged with 12 felony counts of using other people’s identifications to request, complete, and submit absentee ballots.  A Democrat township clerk in Michigan who was also a candidate was convicted of felony ballot tampering for opening a sealed ballot canister, invalidating the votes inside.  The Democrat New Mexico Secretary of State is accused of unlawfully receiving county election totals before counties certify results and using an uncertified software program to add up the totals.  Elections officials in Oakland, California are accused of ignoring a court order, unsealing ballot boxes without public observation, and making it impossible for citizen observers to monitor and understand the vote tallying process.

Lawless election officials are not the only source of systemic wrongdoing in our elections.  Left-wing and Democrat advocacy groups are major sources, as well.  The Virginia Democratic Party ballot harvesting manual instructs party activists to include dead people and bad addresses when compiling voter contact lists.  This information goes into a party database which is used to target likely Democrat voters.  The Democrat Party did not respond when asked about this.

Left-leaning nonprofits like the Center for Voter Information and the Voter Participation Center are abusing their 501(c)(3) tax status by registering likely Democrat voters.  Targeting particular demographic groups likely to vote Democrat skirts IRS rules preventing tax-exempt organizations from engaging in partisan activity.

In Wisconsin, a leftist group paid voters $250 if they succeeded in persuading their friends to vote for the Leftist candidate in the state Supreme Court race.  Under state law, it is felony bribery to give anything of value to any person for inducing others to vote or not vote for or against particular candidates.

The Federal Election Commission received but has ignored information about campaign ‘money mules’ operating in Missouri, Georgia, and elsewhere.  Democrat Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia was the top beneficiary identified in the scheme.  To give you some idea of how the scheme works, ‘Steven in Missouri’ was somehow able to make over 14,000 campaign donations totaling $180,000 in two years despite being unemployed.  Something’s not right with this picture.

Yet more systemic election fraud is found in a Florida county where felons vote illegally, dead voters are sent mail-in ballots, voter addresses are changed without request, and individuals are putting multiple ballots into drop boxes despite being limited under state law to two.  This information came from a whistleblower inside an elections office who was upset these problems were not being addressed.  The office is run by a Democrat and would not respond to questions.

Here is one more way systemic fraud can occur:  County officials can change the zip code of tens of thousands of voters all at once.  Mail ballots go out, but the ones with the wrong zip code are undeliverable.  Someone scoops them up, then the elections office changes the zip codes back.  Voters go to the polls, only to be told they already voted, their ballot has already been cast by somebody else.  A new data company uncovered this kind of fraud in Wisconsin and Florida, including one county where more than 31,000 zip codes were changed this way.  The company bought daily voter rolls and tracked zip code changes, discovering how the game is played.

We are supposed to have representative government in this country.  But we cannot be assured of true representation unless systemic fraud, perpetrated mostly by Democrats, is rooted out from the elections process.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

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BIDEN BANK CRISIS: Dow Plunges 700 Points, ‘First Domino To Drop’

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Stock indexes are on pace for one of their worst days this year.
Woke and broke. And still Biden and the Democrats are pushing, legislating and imposing these fatal polices.

This is the poison fruit of the diversity, equity and inclusion hiring practices that elevates whining whiners and demonizes talent, intelligence and skill.

Life was golden under Trump.

Dow Plunges 700 Points As BlackRock Chief Warns SVB Collapse Merely ‘First Domino To Drop’

By: Derek Saul, Forbes, March 15, 2023: Forbes Staff

U.S. stocks plunged in Wednesday trading as concerns about the health of the global banking industry continued to weigh on the market, with one high-profile Wall Street bigwig cautioning the contagion of Silicon Valley Bank’s failure could spread further than previously anticipated.

Key Facts

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 717 points, or 2.2%, by 1 p.m. ET; the S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq similarly slid 2% and 1.4%, respectively.

The domestic losses come amid broad declines in stocks abroad, with the Zurich-based bank Credit Suisse’s 24% slide to a record low in share prices amid capital concerns headlining the losses.

Also stoking concerns about the fallout of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and Silvergate Capital’s recent closures was a bleak letter from Blackrock CEO Larry Fink warning the failures could simply be the first “domino[es] to drop” before a potential “cascade throughout the U.S. regional banking sector with more seizures and shutdowns coming.”

Regional bank stocks captained Wednesday’s sinking ship, with share prices of PacWest sinking 20% and First Republic dropping 23%.

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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WATCH: Biden Says Opposing the Mutilation of Children Is ‘Close to Sinful’

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Old Joe Biden appeared on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show Monday night, where the guest host Kal Penn, star of the deathless classic Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, asked him about same-sex marriage and boys who want to become girls and girls boys. In response, Biden struck a moral tone, suggesting that support for same-sex marriage and the genital mutilation of children in pursuit of delusions and fantasies was simply the decent position to take, and darn it, Lunchbucket Joe didn’t see why it had to be any more complicated than that.

As we have all come to expect by now, Biden lied when he told a story that he has told before about his alleged “epiphany” on same-sex marriage. As Matt Margolis shows here, Biden claims to have begun to support same-sex marriage as a teenager, when he saw two men kissing. This was the 1950s, when no one was talking about same-sex marriage and it was extremely rare to see homosexuals kissing in public, so his story is dubious on its face. But Matt demonstrates that Biden opposed same-sex marriage decades after that, casting his entire “epiphany” into doubt. Old Joe even threw in his patented insistence “I’m not joking,” which he often says when he’s in the middle of telling a lie.

Then, when Biden turned to discussion of today’s fashionable gender madness, the conversation got even worse.

Penn had asked the ostensible president about what the government could do to protect the “trans kids who are dealing with all these regressive state laws that are popping up right now.” Biden replied, “Transgender kids is a really harder dnnnn. Thing. What’s going on in Florida,” and here he paused, shaking his head, weary at the evil of it all, “is, as my mother would say, close to sinful.”

What’s going on in Florida? Last October, the Florida Board of Medicine voted to ban the mutilation of children in the name of attempting to aid them to pretend that they’re of the opposite sex. At a Board workshop on this issue, a woman named Chloe Cole, who had embarked upon the path that she thought would make her a man, described the monstrousness of the procedures involved in abetting these delusions:  “My breasts were beautiful, now they’ve been incinerated for nothing. Thank you, modern medicine. At 13, I started taking puberty blockers and testosterone, and at 15, I underwent a double mastectomy in which my breasts were removed and my nipples were grafted. And yet, at 16, after years of medically transitioning, I came to realize that I severely regretted my transition.”

Woke doctors sold Cole a lie: “During my diagnosis for dysphoria and the consultations for these treatments, the overall picture of my life just went completely unaddressed….I was introduced to inappropriate content and an echo chamber of far-left ideology, such as that sex and gender are separate, women are inherently victims, men are inherently superior in every way, and that dysphoric children need hormones and surgeries in order to live.” This Mengelian manipulation is what Old Joe Biden was saying it’s “close to sinful” to stop.

Old Joe rambled on semi-coherently, claiming to be on the side of the good and loving: “It’s terrible what they’re doing. It’s not like a kid wakes up one morning and says, ‘You know, I decided I want to become a man’ or ‘I want to become a woman’ or ‘I want to change.’ I mean, what are they thinking about here? They’re human beings. They love. They have feelings. They have inclinations that are… I mean, it just, to me, is, I don’t know, is, it’s cruel.” No. What’s cruel is putting children on a path that they think will help them attain their delusions, only to find that it’s impossible for them to discard what they are and become something else.

What’s cruel is Old Joe Biden pretending that any of this butchery and mutilation is compassionate. But he is determined to protect these Frankensteinian, life-destroying procedures by law: he said that we need to “make sure we pass legislation like we passed with same-sex marriage. You mess with that, you’re breaking the law and you’re going to be held accountable.”

Will Biden himself ever be held accountable for the human cost of his misplaced “compassion”? Almost certainly not. He’s more likely to get a Nobel Prize than to face the repudiation and shame that should be coming to him for endorsing this inhuman social contagion. Still, Biden’s appropriation of religious language to support this disgusting barbarism is one of the most disgraceful episodes of this singularly repulsive man’s noxious career.

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

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

Thousands of Schools Won’t Tell Parents About Kids’ Gender Transition: Report

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More than 5,000 schools across the nation allow teachers to hide a child’s decision to identify as a member of the opposite sex from the child’s parents. The parental exclusion policy — which is heavily advocated by LGBT lobbying groups and applies to more than 3.2 million children nationally — has already resulted in the sexual trafficking of at least one young girl.

A total of 5,904 schools in 168 school districts nationwide allow, or require, teachers to conceal children’s transgender “social transition” — in which children change their name or preferred pronouns, or begin using the locker rooms of the opposite sex — from their parents. School districts keeping legal guardians ignorant about their children’s life-altering decisions stretch from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, and from Alaska to Arizona.

“This investigation shows that parental exclusion policies are a problem from coast-to-coast — and that living in a red state doesn’t mean that families are automatically shielded from this issue,” said Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education (PDE), which compiled the list. PDE discovered four districts in deep-red Kansas that have adopted the policy, crafted by LGBT activists. For example, Wichita Public Schools’ teacher training claims, “The lack of using [a child’s preferred] pronouns could lead to death.”

In all, PDE reports, such policies affect 3,268,752 students — and their parents — in 28 states and the District of Columbia.

“This list is not comprehensive,” the report notes.

A Virginia high school’s decision to conceal a teenage girl’s gender transition ended with the teen being drugged, gang-raped and, on two separate occasions, sexually trafficked. In August 2021, 14-year-old Sage began attending Appomattox County High School. Her biological grandmother, Michele, who legally adopted her, said Sage told her “all the girls there were bi, trans, lesbian, emo,” and Sage soon decided she “wanted to wear boys’ clothes.” But Michele added, Sage told school officials “she was now a boy named Draco with male pronouns. Sage asked the school not to tell me, and they did not tell me.”

After a group of boys accosted and threatened to rape her in the boys’ restroom, Michele took Sage home and found a pass made out to “Draco.” Michele said Sage was too afraid to return to school, so she ran away to meet an online “friend,” who sexually trafficked her through Washington, D.C. and Maryland. By the time the FBI found her locked inside a room in Baltimore nine days later, Michele recalled, Sage had been “locked in a room, drugged, gang-raped, and brutalized by countless men.”

“One of the expert witnesses in the hearing [on January 30] confirms that online predators do target social media accounts of children who list themselves as ‘ftm’ or ‘female to male,’” Delegate David LaRock (R-Berryville) told The Daily Signal.

But Sage’s nightmare had only begun. A judge accused Michele and her husband of inflicting “emotional and physical abuse” by “misgendering” their granddaughter. The judge had Sage committed to the male section of a children’s home, where she was “repeatedly beaten” and “given street drugs,” Michele said. Sage ran away from the home, but the FBI found her in the grips of a sexual trafficking in Texas. Sage had again “been drugged, raped, beaten, and exploited.”

“Sage isn’t unique,” LaRock told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on February 9, although “the degree to which she’s been violated is, hopefully, rare.”

Reports of schools allowing or encouraging minors to “socially transition” to another gender have trickled out, as outraged parents have taken legal action against the districts on PDE’s list. A coalition of parents sued Iowa’s Linn-Mar Community School District last summer. Last month, Amber Lavigne filed a lawsuit against the Great Salt Bay Community School in the coastal Maine village of Damariscotta — population 2,300 — after she found a chest binder in her 13-year-old daughter’s belongings. A social worker facilitated the child’s decision to identify as another gender, and the school withheld all information from her mother, according to her legal counsel. “The school never stopped trying to keep me in the dark at every turn, repeatedly stonewalling me when I tried to find out what was going on,” said an exasperated Lavigne, who is represented by the Goldwater Institute. “My parental rights aren’t up for debate: I deserve to know what’s happening to my child in school.”

“Counselors and teachers didn’t tell Sage’s family about the fact that she was transgender. And she got caught up in some horrific human trafficking issues, and they almost lost her,” Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) told a CNN townhall last Wednesday. “There’s a basic rule here, which is that children belong to parents — not to the state, not to schools, not to bureaucrats, but to parents.”

Last September, Youngkin enacted model school guidelines that affirm, “School personnel shall keep parents fully informed about all matters that may be reasonably expected to be important to a parent.” Parents may “determine (a) what names, nicknames, and/or pronouns, if any, shall be used for their child by teachers and school staff while their child is at school, (b) whether their child engages in any counseling or social transition at school that encourages a gender that differs from their child’s sex, or (c) whether their child expresses a gender that differs with their child’s sex while at school,” the guidelines add.

Despite Youngkin’s actions, the report lists seven school districts in Virginia that continue to hide social transition from parents.

To remedy the situation, LaRock introduced “Sage’s Law” (H.B. 2432), which requires school officials to contact parents if a child begins using names or pronouns not consistent with his or her sex. The bill passed the House of Delegates on February 6 by a narrow 50-48, party-line vote. (Democratic Delegate Cliff Hayes also intended to vote no.) It is currently under Senate consideration.

The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives is taking steps to assure no American parent is frozen out of his or her child’s life decisions. Last week, House Republicans advanced a measure barring any federally funded elementary or middle school from changing a “minor child’s gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name” on any school form, or allowing students to use the restrooms and changing facilities of the opposite sex. The House Education and the Workforce Committee adopted the measure — originally introduced as a separate bill, the Parental Rights Over the Education and Care of Their (PROTECT) Kids Act, by Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) — as an amendment to the Parents Bill of Rights (H.R. 5). Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) introduced a companion bill in the Senate (S. 200).

Walberg, an ordained pastor who once worked for the Moody Bible Institute, found it “unconscionable that some believe that parents should be kept in the dark regarding gender transitions of their own children. He urged Congress to “ensure that schools do not hide important information about children from their own parents,” “increase transparency, and defend the God-given authority and rights of parents.”

President Joe Biden is all but certain to veto such a bill. The president’s now-inactive nonprofit, the Biden Foundation, partnered with Gender Spectrum, a group whose “Gender Support Plan” tells schools to have “contingencies in place” if parents find out their child is “being supported” against their will. Since taking office, Biden has said transgenderism reflects “the image of God.”

You may see PDE’s incomplete list of the school districts that have adopted anti-parental rights transgender policies here. The group asks citizens to report such policies to PDE.

“Frighteningly, this only begins to scratch the surface of what is taking place behind closed doors in America’s schools,” said Neily. “Without a doubt, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of others with similar policies on the books.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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

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

Justice Department Prosecutors Respond To Tucker Carlson’s Capitol Riot Footage

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Federal prosecutors responded to Fox News host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson’s newly released Capitol riot footage in a court filing Sunday.

Prosecutors rejected Carlson’s argument about the Justice Department (DOJ) withholding evidence from defendants and accused him of cherry-picking footage of “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley.

“In fact, the videos of Chansley’s movements throughout his time in the Capitol are highly inculpatory of Pezzola, Chansley, and other rioters captured on them. Pezzola’s argument seems to be that the snippets of Chansley’s movements that were televised by Carlson establish that there was no emergency necessitating the suspension of proceedings,” prosecutors argued in the court filing.

“The televised footage lacks the context of what occurred before and after the footage. Chansley entered the building as part of a violent crowd that gained access as a result of Pezzola’s destruction of a window and he traveled with Pezzola during the initial breach.”

The filing was connected to Proud Boys member Dominic Pezzola’s motion to dismiss the government’s seditious conspiracy case against him based on Carlson’s footage of Chansley. He argued the DOJ was monitoring his communications, destroyed evidence and fabricated evidence involving confidential human sources.

“The televised footage shows Chansley’s movements only from approximately 2:56 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Prior to that time, Chansley had, amongst other acts, breached a police line at 2:09 p.m. with the mob, entered the Capitol less than one minute behind Pezzola during the initial breach of the building, and faced off with members of the U.S. Capitol Police for more than thirty minutes in front of the Senate Chamber doors while elected officials, including the Vice President of the United States, were fleeing from the chamber,” prosecutors continued.

Carlson’s footage appeared to show Capitol Police officers escorting Chansley through the Capitol building. Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger on Tuesday accused Carlson of airing selective footage and coming to “misleading conclusions.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, led the criticism of Carlson for airing the footage and his commentary about the Capitol riot. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy provided Carlson with the footage and defended his decision to do so Wednesday.

Chansley’s former defense attorney Albert Watkins told the Daily Caller on Thursday that he is calling for the Justice Department to publicly state it failed to provide Chansley with all of the footage during his prosecution. He told various outlets he did not receive the footage of his client aired by Carlson.

Prosecutors rejected accusations of withholding footage taken by the Capitol Police’s surveillance system (CCTV) in the filing. “First, all the footage of Jacob Chansley that aired on Tucker Carlson earlier this week has been produced to these defendants in discovery,” the prosecutors said.

“While discovery in this case is voluminous, the government has provided defense counsel with the necessary tools to readily identify relevant cameras within the CCTV to determine whether footage was produced or not. Accordingly, the volume of discovery does not excuse defense counsel from making reasonable efforts to ascertain whether an item has been produced before making representations about what was and was not produced, let alone before filing inaccurate and inflammatory allegations of discovery failures,” they added.

Chansley was sentenced in November to 41 months in prison followed by 36 months of supervised release for his role in the Capitol riot. His charges included disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building; violent entry and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building; and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building.

Pezzola’s charges include seditious conspiracy; assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers; obstruction of an official proceeding; destruction of government property and aiding and abetting; and robbery of personal property of the United States, according to a superseding indictment. He allegedly used a stolen riot shield to smash windows of the Capitol building and threatened to kill then-Vice President Mike Pence.

Pezzola is on trial with four other high-ranking members of the Proud Boys, an extremist group known for violent demonstrations.

“Our team’s review of available surveillance footage of Mr. Chansley is consistent with our reporting,” “Tucker Carlson Tonight” senior executive producer Justin Wells said in a statement to the Daily Caller.

AUTHOR

JAMES LYNCH

Reporter.

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

THANK YOU DEMOCRATS: America’s Average IQ Declines for First Time in Nearly 100 Years

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Biden finally leading the way in—DECLINE.

The Democrats will solve this by designating IQ as “racist” and ban the tests altogether.

Is It Any Wonder? America’s Average IQ Declines for First Time in Nearly 100 Years

By: RedState, March 13, 2023;

And there it is. A new study has found that the intelligence quotient (IQ) of the average American citizen is now on the decline for the first time in nearly 100 years. Again, is it any wonder?

Of course, there’s no wonder. We can start with the left’s insidious drive to dumb down public school education, curricula standards, and elimination of minimum graduation requirements, all in the name of promoting so-called equity and inclusion.

Or, as it was called in saner times, the soft bigotry of low expectations.

As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, the study, published in the psychology journal Intelligence, Analyzed the time period between 2006 and 2018. Unsurprisingly, the study’s authors noted that the greatest decline in IQ occurred among Americans between the ages of 18 and 22, and “may” be due to poor quality education. I know — try to control your shock and amazement.

Look, when you “teach” (indoctrinate) students to believe that getting the right answers in math is “racist” — rather than the process used to get to the wrong answer — it’s just a matter of time.

According to the report, the findings could indicate “that either the caliber of education has decreased across this study’s sample and/or that there has been a shift in the perceived value of certain cognitive skills,” according to the report.

Why not both?

So we must ask ourselves, what’s changed? Did teenagers and young adults simply just get dumber for no apparent reason, or can we point with specificity to the dumbing down of public education — and the declining educational quality of teachers who first believed that mixing their personal politics into their classroom “instruction” was reasonable and that finally full-blown woke was a “moral” requirement.

I’ve written previously about the decline in honors programs across America. In one recent example, the Culver City School District in Los Angeles eliminated honors curricula from high schools in the name of racial equity. The district rightly faced a backlash from parents of honor students who lost opportunities to enroll in accelerated programs. One parent observed:

It’s not working and we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

The hateful parent is obviously a racist. [sarc]

In August 2021, then-Oregon Gov. Kate Brown eliminated statewide math, reading, and writing proficiency standards for high school graduates. A Brown spokesman at the time offered this lame excuse: “SB 744 gives us an opportunity to review our graduation requirements and make sure our assessments can truly assess all students’ learning.”

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED TWEET:

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

Therapeutic Nihilism by The Lords of Healthcare—Part One

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“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.  They want rain without thunder and lightning.  They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.  This struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.  Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never did and it never will.” —  Frederick Douglass

“History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster.” — General Douglas MacArthur

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.  Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.” —  H. L. Mencken

“The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government.” —  Dr. Marty Makary

I believe the entire hospital protocols were purposely murderous.  Remember, five governors put C-19 patients in nursing homes and killed off hundreds of thousands of elderly Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security residents.  Governors Newsom (D-CA), Whitmer (D-MI), Cuomo (D-NY), Wolf (D-PA), and Murphy (D-NJ) all stated that hospitals were running out of room, but what were their real motives?

Those hundreds of thousands of deaths helped to plant fear, and the oldsters needlessly died alone and without their loved ones.

The public was poisoned against repurposed cheap drugs that prevented and/or cured the virus called COVID.  Taking Hydroxychloroquine early in treatment for C-19 kept the virus from gaining a deadly foothold.  When C-19 had progressed, Ivermectin twice a day according to weight gave quick recovery to most of those without extensive comorbidities.  Adding Azithromycin and prednisone, an antibiotic and anti-inflammatory, helped to quell the cough and respiratory problems in short order.

In Argentina, Dr. Hector Carvallo’s prevention trials, with many of the repurposed-drug early treatments and prophylactic treatments, showed a 100% prevention of acquisition of Sars-coV-2 on patients who were on prophylactic ivermectin.  The molecule in ivermectin doesn’t just treat parasites, it has 22 mechanisms of action against Sars-coV-2, has seven or eight anti-viral mechanisms and it has multiple immune modification mechanisms.  In Dr. Carvallo’s study, two months of healthcare workers taking one ivermectin a week, zero contracted COVID.  In the placebo control group of 400 people, 57% contracted COVID.  This is how effective ivermectin was in prevention in a hospital setting.  You cannot make the same claim for these “vaccines.”

Those inexpensive repurposed drugs would have saved a majority of the lives lost.  Instead of allowing physicians the ability to save their patients by trying various treatments that would attack the symptoms the government, i.e., unelected councils…NIH, CDC, FDA, AMA, Medical Journals and mainstream media, claimed the 50- and 60-year-old drugs of IVM and HCQ were dangerous.

Why?

Because money was to be made, and massive reports of death created fear.  And fear created compliance and compliance was necessary to create the goal of a cure via inoculations.

The incompetent, devious and nihilistic Lords of Healthcare laughed all the way to the bank while Americans died.

Fear porn had won.

Murder for Gain

Allowing inexpensive treatments to restore health would not fill Big Pharma’s pockets. All of the unelected entities were slobbering over the filthy lucre flowing into their pockets.  The deaths didn’t matter, money was to be made.  Mass murder via government protocols was collateral damage that fueled depopulation advocates’ goals and saved government funding of the elderly who were quickly dispatched.  Hospitals loved the federal payouts for C-19 deaths.  Why wouldn’t they?  The government allocated $175 billion for hospitals and other providers in April of 2020.

Control won…first we donned the masks, then we locked down for months, closed our businesses, declared bankruptcy and when we got sick, most physicians would do nothing for us until we couldn’t breathe and then we entered the hospital to die. Most who tested positive for C-19 ended up on a ventilator…and 80% of them died. The C-19 tests were faulty, never should have been used and resulted in excessive positive results.

Ultimately, the majority of Americans willingly signed up for untested experimental injections available through Emergency Use Authorization and given “free” by the government.

If anything goes awry, Big Pharma has total immunity from legal liability under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act).  The controversial Act was signed into law by George W. Bush in December of 2005.  It provides immunity for the “manufacture, testing, development, distribution, administration, and use of covered countermeasures.”  Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declared COVID-19 an emergency and invoked the PREP Act on February 4, 2020.

On march 27, 2020, Congress quickly enacted legislation thru the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) which provided over $2 trillion in funds to address the economic impacts of the pandemic. Brookings reported unheard of massive waste, fraud and corruption.

Federal funds were disbursed to hospitals to help them cope with the C-19 emergency.  The feds paid hospitals a fee for giving a C-19 test, another fee for admittance of the patient to hospital, plus the full daily Medicare with 20% added onto the hospitalization rate, no matter the insurance status. Admission nets the hospital $13K, but when they ventilate a patient, it soared to $39K.

Medicare even announced it would pay 20% more as an add-on if hospitals used the new FDA-approved drugs for C-19!  In other words, hospitals can rake in even more if they give three treatments of Remdesivir at $3100. per treatment.  Kidney or liver failure didn’t matter to the hospital administrators…more money in their pockets. WHO recommended against using Remdesivir, but Gilead raked in over $7 billion on the sale of their drug which cost them about $10.00 per dose to manufacture.

Early HCQ or IVM treatment for COVID would have jeopardized all the hospital payments.

As Minnesota State Senator, Scott Jensen M.D. told us in countless interviews, hospitals were incentivized to code admissions as having COVID-19 even when they didn’t have positive tests!  I know of too many elderly family members who, upon autopsy, were found to have bacterial pneumonia or flu, which could have been treated and saved their lives.  Oh, that every C-19 diagnosed patient who died been autopsied.  And now with the poisonous injections, we even need more autopsies to document the effects of the jabs.

The CARES Act also provided immunity for guess who…healthcare workers treating C-19 patients.  State governors added more immunity via executive orders.

Check out the state-by-state National Survey of COVID-19 Medical Malpractice Immunity Legislation (As of November 18, 2020).

States like New York covered civil liability for injury or death alleged to have been sustained directly as a result of an act or omission by person/persons covered.

Persons included in coverage were physicians, physicians assistants; specialist assistants; nurse practitioners; licensed registered professional nurses; licensed practical nurses.

The only conduct not covered was gross negligence.

But wait a minute…isn’t “gross negligence” exactly what we saw with the promotion of these one-size-fits-all hospital protocols and the untested, unstudied, untrialed Big Pharma medications?

Remdesivir Kills

Remdesivir, sold under the brand name Veklury, is a broad-spectrum antiviral medication developed by the biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences.  It was a pre-existing drug candidate developed by Gilead Sciences as part of an antiviral development effort, with initial results against Ebola virus (EBOV) reported in 2015.

Dr. Anthony Fauci claimed Gilead’s remdesivir would aid in COVID recovery.  The National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, (NIAID) headed by Fauci, asserted remdesivir studies proved it effective against COVID-19.

It actually can damage your kidneys and liver.  Despite the lack of positive studies, the FDA approved Remdesivir with another Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).

Remdesivir didn’t work.  Results were terribly negative.

In late August 2020, a disproportionately high number of reports of liver and kidney problems in patients receiving remdesivir were reported compared with patients receiving other drugs for COVID-19. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) also announced that its safety committee had started a review to assess reports of acute kidney injuries in some patients taking remdesivir.

Patients who knew that remdesivir was not a reliable or safe drug, were told they could instead receive Veklury, which is remdesivir.  One has to wonder; how many were fooled into being given the drug.

The oral C-19 medication, Paxlovid, wasn’t much better.  Paxlovid didn’t significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization or death in people. 

And that’s not all!  What about Operation Warp Speed Death Jabs?

Jabs, Jabs and More Jabs

You can’t tell me that pharmacists, physicians and nurses didn’t know that vaccines were supposed to be tested for years and that you never vax during a pandemic.  And what about if you’d had and recovered from C-19?  Why would you need a jab if you have natural immunity?  Common medical knowledge was thrown to the wind…and the media hawked the jabs day and night…even offering incentives.  Now this evil poison is to be given to our children before they enter the perverted government schools.  Children don’t even get COVID, so why?

Can you believe the horrific number of injections our children must now submit to?

The documents of Pfizer and Moderna, those they wanted to keep hidden for 75 years, tell the story of betrayal. The infertility, the miscarriages, the heart damage, the blood clots, the cancers, the evil destruction of healthy young bodies and the sudden deaths, all caused by one, two or five injections of the Big Pharma poison to depopulate.

Zoetis is a subsidiary of Pfizer and has quietly injected 100 million animals with the horrific mRNA technology. Livestock has also started to receive mRNA injections.

Why?

Worse yet, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation just announced a $4.7 million grant for a company that sells face masks for cows to stop their methane belches.  This is the most insane thing yet. 

It isn’t evil enough that they’re forcing these injections on our babies when they enter school. Messenger RNA and abusive and abrasive contraptions on cattle for a fabricated non-existent problem.

Mass murder of man and animals.

If ever truth fully comes to light and the American people wake up, those culpable will stand trial.

“I was just following orders” won’t hold any more water today than it did in 1945-1946.

Those who have needlessly lost loved ones want to see justice today.

The gallows await them.

“Vengeance is mine,” sayeth the Lord.

Ivermectin Saves

How many people were able to secret Ivermectin (IVM) into sick family or friends in hospital with Sars-coV-2?  I know of several, especially where the hospitals still allowed family to visit.  When this life saving drug was given, the recovery was rapid.  Within a couple days, the patient was feeling so much better and within a few more days was released to go home.

The resistance by hospitals for Ivermectin was incredibly difficult, even when an attorney had taken the case to court and the judge had instructed the hospital to give IVM.  The court battles were unconscionably difficult with IVM witnesses being called quacks.  Dying men and women were fighting for the last chance to save their lives and many were denied their “right to try” a cheap, FDA and WHO approved drug as their last and only hope since nothing but remdesivir was being offered.  Hospitals retained “godlike power” over the patients, telling them they could not choose their own care. As John Leake explains in his and Dr. Peter McCullough’s book, The Courage to Face Covid-19, “for most gravely ill patients and their families, this power resulted in death.”

The patient’s families would state in writing they would indemnify the hospitals of liability for any adverse effects of IVM and that their primary care physicians would administer the drug.  In many cases, if the court told the hospital to give the drug, one pill would be given, the patient would improve, but then the hospital would refuse to give additional medication.

Dr. Pierre Kory had testified before the Senate and showed the studies proving IVM was a valid treatment for Sars-coV-2.  Yet, the resistance was phenomenal.  After one dose, attorneys would need to return to court to order the hospital to give more than one dose of IVM.  Families would beg and plead with the hospitals to no avail.  Many had to fight to have the family doctor administer IVM or to be able to take the patient home. The hospitals demanded the patient’s physician come to the hospital to administer the drug.

Many had to find ways to smuggle IVM in to patients before they were put on vents, and those who were successful had a 100% recovery rate.

Every medical facility had bought into the government lies by the unelected councils, which used to be called Soviet, but now are pure American.  Those unelected county health departments decided masks, lockdowns, closures, mandates etc.

Conclusion

Dr. Vernon Coleman, who refers to himself as “the old man in a chair,” has been telling us the hard facts regarding the destruction of our medical industry.

He states, “The goal of healing has been replaced by the goal of perpetual treating. The ugliest part of this new business model is that, to keep overhead cost as low as possible, when severely handicapped and older people become ill, hospital staffs increasingly are discreetly prescribing kill shots for them, much like what might be given to an old dog or cat to end their misery. This is not a conspiracy theory, not hyperbole, and not even unusual. It is now a recognized policy in every country in which the medical system has been captured by the pharmaceutical cartel – which is most of them.”

In Part Two, we’ll discuss America’s modern-day eugenics, revived again from the 1920s and expanded to parallel Hitler’s murder of the physically and mentally unfit.

©Kelleigh Nelson. All rights reserved.

‘Murder!’: Jane Fonda’s Homicidal Call to Action Against Pro-Lifers

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Friday morning, on the infamously progressive talk show “The View,” 85-year-old actress Jane Fonda made a disturbing recommendation for dealing with pro-lifers: murder. The remarks came amid a conversation regarding Fonda’s pro-abortion activism, particularly in the months following the Dobbs Supreme Court decision last June. As hosts Sonny Hostin and Joy Behar simpered sweet nothings about Fonda winning a Nobel Prize, the conversation quickly turned awkward when Behar asked Fonda how to extend pro-abortion activism beyond merely marching and protesting.

“Well, I’ve thought of murder,” Fonda asserted, repeating the word “murder” as the women gathered around her laughed uncomfortably.

Despite the audience’s amusement and assurances from the show’s hosts that the actress was simply joking, viewers were left to wonder — does Fonda really believe that advocating for life in the womb is justification for someone to be murdered? And in a culture where progressives are keener than ever to claim that mere words can be violence, how can Fonda get away with literally suggesting murder?

Perhaps Fonda’s comments wouldn’t hit home for pro-lifers so acutely were it not for the barrage of terrorism that the pro-life community has suffered in the last year. Family Research Council has tracked over 125 instances of pro-abortion violence against pro-life pregnancy resource centers, churches, and individuals in the past year; just this week, a pregnancy resource center in Minneapolis was vandalized with the same familiar message that pro-lifers have learned to expect: “If abortions aren’t safe, neither are you.”

In many instances, pro-abortion harassment has gone far beyond vandalism and threats. A CompassCare pro-life pregnancy resource center in Buffalo, New York was firebombed in June of 2022; the attack caused $500,000 in damages and forced the center to spend the next 52 days rebuilding. Despite the violence already occurring against these charity centers, radical abortion lover Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) accused pregnancy resource centers of “torturing” women and called for their doors to be closed — a move that, were the partisan tables turned, would certainly have been characterized as an incitement of violence.

In light of Fonda’s incurable enthusiasm to do harm to those who advocate for the life of the unborn, it’s important to consider her personal background on the issue. Fonda’s mother, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and eventually died by suicide, aborted nine of Jane’s older siblings before finally giving birth to her. Both Fonda and her mother suffered sexual assault and childhood sexual abuse. While there is certainly zero excuse for her abortion advocacy, much less her calls for violence against pro-lifers, understanding Fonda’s background helps paint a fuller picture of why she is so desperate to preserve social acceptance and celebration of abortion as a moral good rather than as the affront to human dignity that it truly is.

Just last week, conservative pundit Michael Knowles was accused of advocating genocide against people who identify as transgender because of a statement he made during a speech at CPAC. Even White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre slanderously accused Knowles of calling for the “eradication of transgender people.”

What Knowles actually said was, “For the good of society and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely, the whole preposterous ideology — at every level.”

While Knowles’s circumstances are more akin to misrepresentation, given that he never actually proposed violence against human beings, the incident still serves to prove a significant cultural point: progressives can’t have it both ways. Either words must be chosen with extreme delicacy and sensitivity because they will be construed as calls to violence — or not. And, if calls for political violence against other human beings are something to be condemned, then they must be universally condemned — even when the call is coming from inside the house.

A final (and significant) point to consider is that, even when pro-abortion advocates are not calling for murder against born people, they are nevertheless fighting desperately to perpetuate the shedding of innocent blood. Every “successful” abortion ends the life of a unique, unrepeatable human being. There can be no peaceful or nonviolent support of abortion, because to support abortion is inherently a promotion of violence.

Thankfully, given what the pro-life movement has demonstrated the willingness to withstand in the last year for the sake of protecting unborn children, it’s clear that the thoughtless snark of a Hollywood celebrity will do little to deter pro-life activism.

AUTHOR

Joy Stockbauer

Joy Stockbauer is a correspondent for The Washington Stand.

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

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.

‘Horrifying’: Huge Proportion Of Children Pursuing Gender Transitions Are Actually Autistic, Experts Believe

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  • Adolescents with autism are overrepresented 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 during adolescence. 
  • 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. 
  • “When somebody happens to mention that, you know, they’re trans or they hear about trans kids and go online, even if all they do is say, ‘I wonder if I’m trans,’ a lot of these kids are automatically accepted. ‘Well, you must be trans if you’ve even thought about that.’ And for them, that is a very helpful reaction, because all of a sudden, they feel as though that explains all of the trouble all the way along,” Bradley told the DCNF.

Children with autism make up an outsized proportion of the transgender-identified population, and autism spectrum traits make them particularly vulnerable to thought patterns that can lead youth to pursue gender transitions, according to research and medical professionals.

Transgender individuals are about three to six times more likely to be autistic than non-transgender people, research shows; the connection between transgenderism and autism has been a subject of interest for researchers since at least 2010, and the Gender Development Identity Service at Tavistock, the world’s largest pediatric gender clinic, came under fire in recent years over allegations that as many as 97.5% of its gender patients had autism. Dr. Susan Bradley, a Canadian psychiatrist and pioneer in treating gender dysphoria, told the DCNF that she now believes most pediatric gender patients are actually on the autism spectrum and are being exploited by medical professionals.

“When we were seeing these kids from a very young age, we had kids who would come into the clinic, a little girl who thinks she’s a boy or vice versa. It wasn’t uncommon to find that one of them thought they were a dog or a cat or something else,” said Bradley, who chaired the DSM-IV Subcommittee on Gender Disorders.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the official manual of the American Psychiatric Association, which is used for classifying and diagnosing mental disorders; Bradley led eight other doctors in establishing those guidelines in its 1994 edition.

Bradley began treating children with gender dysphoria around 1975, and over the years she observed that many of the patients had the traits of high-functioning autism, she told the DCNF. People with autism tend to focus very intensely on their subjects of interest and have great difficulty letting go of something once they believe it’s true, both of which make autistic adolescents particularly susceptible to issues with their gender identity and body image, she said.

“They have early difficulty with social understanding and the feeling that they don’t fit in; they struggle to understand that they are different in a certain kind of way that other people don’t understand either, and they often feel left out in peer groups. Many of them don’t have a good friend. They’ll often say other kids tease them or leave them out,” she said. “These kids are even less well equipped than your average teen to manage strong feelings, and they just get totally disregulated at times. That’s why they become so much more vulnerable, they get suicidal, they get anxious, depressed, very down on themselves.”

“When somebody happens to mention that, you know, they’re trans or they hear about trans kids and go online, even if all they do is say, ‘I wonder if I’m trans,’ a lot of these kids are automatically accepted. ‘Well, you must be trans if you’ve even thought about that.’ And for them, that is a very helpful reaction, because all of a sudden, they feel as though that explains all of the trouble all the way along,” Bradley told the DCNF.

Children with high-functioning autism previously showed up at eating disorder clinics with suicidal and anxious depression and body image distortions, but as pediatric gender clinics began cropping up, autistic adolescents began gravitating more toward those, Bradley said.

Chloe Cole, a young woman who underwent cross-sex hormones and a double mastectomy between ages 13 and 17 and now regrets medically transitioning, told the DCNF that doctors failed to meaningfully address her autism spectrum traits and the ways those impacted her gender identity.

“I’ve spoken to a non-transgender person who also was on the spectrum about some of my symptoms of dysphoria and how things like puberty felt for me, and she told me that’s literally just how it feels to be autistic and going through puberty,” Cole said. “It’s common for girls who have autism to present with some more traditionally masculine behaviors or more tomboyish personality. That was definitely my experience growing up and it made it more difficult for me to relate personally with other girls my age.”

Cole is suing the hospital and medical professionals who participated in her gender transition. Her attorneys argue that doctors should have offered her psychotherapy to address her autism spectrum symptoms and mental health issues, but instead made her gender dysphoria the top priority.

“It’s horrifying that none of these kids are really getting an appropriate screening, not only for autism, but really for a lot of other parts of their background that might play a role in the development of their dysphoria,” she said, listing social anxiety, personality disorders, depression and histories of abuse. “They’re just being allowed through the system and [their gender dysphoria] is just being treated as a completely standalone issue.”

The Clarke Institute of Toronto, which is now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, opened its pediatric gender clinic in the mid-1970s, when clinicians were offering a therapy-centered approach and 80% to 90% of patients outgrew their gender confusion and came to terms with their biological sex, according to Bradley. The clinic eventually began putting minors on puberty blockers to alleviate gender distress in keeping with practices emerging out of the Netherlands; Bradley views this as a mistake, noting that blockers cement what would otherwise likely be a temporary transgender phase and carry serious physical side effects.

Dr. Lawrence Fung, a psychiatrist at Stanford University, believes there may be a biological factor that drives autistic people to identify as transgender and believes autistic people tend to be more androgynous; he told NPR more research was needed on the subject.

“Females on the spectrum seem to have more testosterone and masculine features on their faces. On the other hand, males on the autism spectrum – they have more feminine features,” he told the outlet.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which vocally supports medical transitions for minors, acknowledges that “autistic/neurodivergent transgender youth represent a substantial minority subpopulation of youth served in gender clinics globally,” and the group encourages providers to pursue additional training on the needs of their autistic patients in its latest standards of care. The group notes that autism traits, including rigid thinking and differing abilities to consider and plan for the future, necessitate extra time and support for gender transition patients.

“The autistic mindset tends to see things in black and white, and so if a child doesn’t feel like a girl — and this might be because they don’t feel pretty enough to be a girl — then they believe they must be a boy,” Stella O’Malley, a psychotherapist and founder of Genspect, an organization that’s critical of child transitions, told the DCNF. (RELATED: ‘Chilling Effect’: Here’s How Lawsuits Could Take Down The Child Sex Change Industry)

“Autistic people also tend to be very literal and so they can believe if people use their preferred pronouns and names, then they must be a boy. Children on the spectrum also tend to be gender nonconforming, and nonconforming in many other ways, and this leads them to believe that perhaps they must be a boy,” O’Malley said.

Transgender identification has exploded over the past decade, especially among the youth population, and clinics offering gender transition procedures to children have boomed from approximately zero 15 years ago to a current estimate of 100 in the U.S., according to Reuters. About 300,000 minors in the U.S. now identify as transgender, and approximately 10,000 to 30,000 are seeking some form of gender-related medical intervention.

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

LAUREL DUGGAN

Social issues and culture reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: Unearthed Emails Show Rachel Levine Discussing ‘Potential Revenue’ From Child Sex Change Procedures

RELATED VIDEO: Trans Munchausen-by-Proxy Syndrome.

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.

January 6 Prison Choir Has The Number One Song In The Country

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A new song featuring former President Trump topped iTunes’ charts.

The single “Justice for All” debuted March 4 by the J6 Prison Choir, reaching No. 1 on iTunes top songs Saturday, according to Variety.

The track consists of the choir singing “The Star Spangled Banner” behind bars, interspersed with audio of Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The song concludes with chants of “USA! USA!”

The J6 Prison Choir is composed of prisoners incarcerated for the involvement in the January 6 Capitol riot.

Trump’s contribution was recorded for the project at his Mar-a-Lago residence per the request of a group supporting Jan. 6 prisoners, according to CNN.

The third-time presidential candidate’s 2024 campaign was not motivation for his involvement in this production, advisers claim. Trump has consistently expressed his support for those imprisoned, promising full pardons if he wins re-election and financially supporting some Jan. 6 defendants.

At least 1000 individuals have been arrested for participating in Jan. 6, according to CNBC.

“Justice for All” retails for $1.29 on iTunes. It is also available for play on Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube.

Money raised by the song will be distributed to families of Jan. 6 prisoners via a group organized by conservative commentator Ed Henry, according to Newsmax.

Trump-era White House official Kash Patel was also involved in the project, having released an exclusive music video for the song on The War Room with Steve Bannon.

AUTHOR

JULIANNA FRIEMAN

Contributor.

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

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

‘Economic Meltdown’ Looming On Monday, March 13th

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Bill Ackman predicted the lack of government intervention to guarantee SVB FDIC insured deposits would lead to an ‘economic collapse.’

Risks include:

1. Depositors at small banks move to JP Morgan
2. Everyone moves from cash to treasuries & money markets
3. Bank assets are no longer backed by deposits
4. More runs on banks
5. Socialists cheer on demise of small banks
6. Execs at big banks get mega rich

‘Irreversible mistake’: Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman warns of ‘economic meltdown’ following Silicon Valley Bank collapse

By Jesse O’Neill, NY Post, March 12, 2023:

Hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman predicted that an “economic meltdown” was looming on Monday following Friday’s collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

In a rambling, 649-word, one-paragraph tweet Saturday, the billionaire predicted that uninsured bank customers would rush to withdraw cash Monday unless the government steps in to guarantee their funds and “fix a-soon-to-be-irreversible mistake.”

The 16th largest bank in the US, which provided financing for a large chunk of the country’s venture backed tech and health companies, was taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Friday as its stock plummeted due to liquidity concerns tied to rising interest rates.

It marked the largest bank collapse since the 2008 financial crisis, and it stranded billions of dollars belonging to companies and investors, whose deposits in excess of $250,000 are not covered by the FDIC.
Bill Ackman, the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management in Manhattan, predicted the lack of government intervention to guarantee SVB funds would lead to an ‘economic collapse.’
Bloomberg via Getty Images

“Absent @jpmorgan@citi or @BankofAmerica acquiring SVB before the open on Monday, a prospect I believe to be unlikely, or the gov’t guaranteeing all of SVB’s deposits, the giant sucking sound you will hear will be the withdrawal of substantially all uninsured deposits from all but the ‘systemically important banks’ (SIBs),” Ackman wrote.

The FDIC was said to be looking to find a bank that would merge with the failed California institution over the weekend, as the US weight the creation of a fund that would allow regulators to reinforce deposits if other banks fail in the wake of the collapse, according to Bloomberg.

Read more.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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

Top Democrat On J6 Committee: We Actually Didn’t Review Any Of The Surveillance Video

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The country is being run and ruined by villains, clowns and morons. It will not end well.

Top Democrat On J6 Committee: We Actually Didn’t Review Any Of The Surveillance Video

By: Tristan Justice, 

SAfter Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired Capitol surveillance footage this week exposing yet more falsehood from the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 and leaving Democrats and their media allies irate, the committee chair on Wednesday said the panel never actually analyzed the crucial footage.

On Monday’s edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News aired the footage of the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, undermining the select committee’s narrative of a “deadly insurrection.” Given access to the video by Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Carlson’s team reviewed over 40,000 hours of footage, which offered proof the committee manipulated audio and video to dramatize the riot for its made-for-TV hearings in an election year.

But in a Wednesday night statement to CNN, select committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., claimed the panel never analyzed the blockbuster footage Fox News aired this week.

“I’m not actually aware of any member of the committee who had access,” Thompson said. “We had a team of employees who kind of went through the video.”

Hiring investigators who “kind of went through the video” doesn’t sound like a very thorough investigation.

However, Thompson’s admission that his committee lacked due diligence makes no sense. Since when do lawmakers have no access to the same material as their own staffers? Did none of the nine panel members view the footage that was played for the cameras? Does Thompson not know who had access to the tapes? Was it just the former television executives they hired to produce their show trials? Either Thompson is lying and knows exactly who had access, or he handed the key to Vice Chair Liz Cheney and had nothing to do with it while the committee leaked exclusives to CNN.

Thompson’s office did not immediately respond to The Federalist’s inquiries.

The committee clearly had access to the footage Carlson aired this week that contradicted the panel’s key narratives. After all, members of the committee endlessly bragged about how many documents, more than 35,000, investigators reviewed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who used the committee to dodge responsibility for her own failure to secure the Capitol, just refused to make the tapes public — and after Carlson’s revelations, it’s clear why.

Carlson’s program showed that the man who became the face of the “insurrection,” known as the “QAnon Shaman,” was given VIP treatment by police. The tapes showed since-deceased Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick walking around “vigorously” after altercations with protesters who had allegedly murdered him. The footage also showed that mysterious rioter Ray Epps lied to congressional investigators about his whereabouts the day of the riot, yet the committee protected the “insurrectionist.”

On Monday, Carlson announced his team discovered proof that Democrats on Pelosi’s probe came across the same footage Fox made public.

“We can be sure because the footage contains an electronic bookmark that is still archived in the Capitol’s computer system,” said Carlson. “That means that investigators working for the Democratic Party saw this tape. They saw it, but they refused to release the tape to the public.”

Committee staffers even used some of the footage to show Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., allegedly fleeing the Capitol. All Carlson did was extend the footage a few seconds longer than what was televised in the committee’s show-trial hearings, and it became clear Hawley departed the Capitol along with other members of Congress. The clip published by the committee was always demonstrably dishonest.

Read more.

WATCH: The J6 Tapes:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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