WHO Says LGBTQ/Sex Ed Starts…At Birth?!?! thumbnail

WHO Says LGBTQ/Sex Ed Starts…At Birth?!?!

By Catherine Salgado

The World Health Organization (WHO), which is beholden to and enamored of the genocidal Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and whose horrendous advice triggered the destructive COVID-19 measures such as masking and lockdowns, has more awful advice for you. According to the WHO, “sexuality education starts from birth.”

It’s never too early to teach your infant about sex and how they should chop off body parts! And this is the organization to which governments (including the Biden administration) want to give complete control over pandemic responses in future?

Notice the mention in the screenshot below of “early childhood masturbation” and “gender identity.”

“[The UK Telegraph, May 13] Outrage over WHO advice on sexuality for infants

Guide argues that ‘sexuality education starts from birth’

The World Health Organisation (WHO) is under pressure to withdraw guidance for schools recommending that toddlers ‘ask questions about sexuality’ and ‘explore gender identities.’”

God help us.

*****

This article was published at Pro Deo et Libertate and is reproduced with permission.

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Leaked Policy Exposes Fox News Stances on Woke Ideology thumbnail

Leaked Policy Exposes Fox News Stances on Woke Ideology

By Mary Margaret Olohan

Fox News employees are allowed to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity, rather than their biological sex, and are permitted to dress in alignment with their preferred gender. They must also be addressed by their preferred name and pronouns in the workplace.

These are just a few of the policies outlined in the company handbook, dated January 2021, a copy of which was shared with The Daily Signal. Fox also offers to help employees come up with a “Workplace Transition Plan” to ease their gender transition at work.

The revelations come amid conservative consternation at Fox Digital’s use of activist language like “gender-affirming care” in stories on its website, as well as the site’s consistent use of female pronouns for biological males like TikTok celebrity Dylan Mulvaney and swimmer Lia Thomas (formerly known as Will Thomas).

Fox also drew strong backlash for a June 2022 on-air segment praising a child’s gender transition as an “inspiration to others.” That segment briefly depicted California state Sen. Scott Weiner, a far-left Democrat who led the move to soften sex offender registry requirements for sodomy with minors, and highlighted the activist claim that a child might commit suicide if he or she is not permitted to transition.

The Daily Signal talked to current and former Fox employees who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the company.

“They want you to think it’s this place that supports traditionally conservative values,” a former producer for “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” told The Daily Signal. “But in reality, they’re pushing this nonsense behind the scenes.” 

Carlson’s show was canceled on April 24, days after he delivered a viral speech at The Heritage Foundation’s 50th-anniversary gala. Fox News Media has not given a reason, simply stating that the two parties “agreed to part ways.”

A source who still works at Fox News told The Daily Signal that after Carlson’s show was canceled in April, producers for the new 8 p.m. “Fox News Tonight” program was told not to bash Mulvaney. That directive came from high-level executives, the source said. 

Fox News did not respond to The Daily Signal’s multiple requests for comment.

Under the category “Gender Transition,” Fox’s employee handbook promises that the company is dedicated to “expanding and strengthening” efforts to “sustain a more inclusive work environment.” The Fox employee handbook is posted on Workday, where employees can see company guidelines or policies, a former employee told The Daily Signal.

“Employees who are transitioning their gender have the right to be open about their transition if they so choose, and to work in an environment free of harassment, discrimination, or retaliation, and without fear of consequences or transphobia for living openly,” the policy says.

Citing the Human Rights Campaign, one of the most prominent LGBTQ organizations in the country, the Fox handbook defines a slew of LGBTQ terms, including cisgender, gender expression, gender-fluid, gender identity, gender non-conforming, gender transition, LGBTQ, non-binary, and transgender.

For the past several years, Fox received a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, “the nation’s foremost benchmarking survey and report measuring corporate policies and practices related to LGBTQ+ workplace equality.” A former Fox News employee told The Daily Signal that the company frequently mentions this perfect score in employee training materials.

“Fox News devotes hours of programming to attacking ‘woke companies,’ but ironically Fox is as woke as the rest of them,” another former Fox News employee told The Daily Signal, emphasizing that Fox viewers would be “astonished to find out what the company is like.” 

Fox’s policies appear to be aligned with the legal requirements in New York City, where the company is headquartered, as well as California, where a large number of its employees work.

The New York City Human Rights Law requires employers to use the name, pronouns, and title with which a person identifies, regardless of their biological sex. It is a violation of the NYCHRL to intentionally or repeatedly refuse to use a person’s preferred name, pronoun, or title.

Additionally, the New York City law requires that people “be permitted to use single-gender facilities, such as restrooms or locker rooms…that most closely align with their gender, regardless of their gender expression, sex assigned at birth, anatomy, medical history, or the sex or gender indicated on their identification.”

If a biological woman objects to sharing a bathroom with a trans-identifying man, her objection will not be considered a “lawful reason to deny access” to the trans-identifying individual: “In those circumstances, a covered entity may offer alternatives for the individual expressing discomfort, by, for example, providing a single-occupancy restroom to change in.”

The law also specifically states that it is “unlawful” to require a trans-identifying person to use a single-occupancy restroom “because they are transgender, non-binary, or gender non-conforming.” New York also outlines the “Workplace Transition Plan” mentioned in the Fox handbook.

California’s Fair Employment and Housing Council adopted new regulations in 2017 pertaining to trans-identifying employees. These regulations similarly include an employee’s bathroom use, transitioning, dress, preferred name, and pronouns. 

For example, on bathroom use, the regulations state: “Employers shall permit employees to use facilities that correspond to the employee’s gender identity or gender expression, regardless of the employee’s assigned sex at birth.”

And on names and pronouns, the regulations give individuals a means to take action against their employer: “If an employee requests to be identified with a preferred gender, name, and/or pronoun, including gender-neutral pronouns, an employer or other covered entity who fails to abide by the employee’s stated preference may be liable.”

Traffic on Sixth Avenue passes by advertisements featuring Fox News personalities, including Bret Baier, Martha MacCallum, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity, adorn the front of the News Corporation building. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Employees who are attempting transitions are encouraged to “inform and educate” their co-workers about their experience, according to the Fox policy obtained by The Daily Signal, which emphasizes that only transitioning employees may disclose that they are trying to change their biology, and anyone who might know about their colleague’s gender transition must respect that person’s right to privacy.

Fox’s handbook notes that the man or woman attempting to transition may find the experience “stressful and trying,” and states that “with advance preparation, the road for someone to be able to express their true self can be made smoother.”

Fox also offers to help employees come up with a workplace gender transition plan.

“During the initial and any subsequent meetings, you and the Company should develop and maintain a Workplace Transition Plan,” the handbook says. “This Plan will outline the steps that need to be taken to ensure a successful transition at work.”

Those steps include when employees want to start using a different bathroom aligning with their gender identity and assuming a new gender identity at work. It also provides employees with time off for treatment (possibly hormonal treatments, like testosterone and estrogen) or medical procedures (such as the removal of breasts or testicles, facial feminization or masculinization, or the creation of fake genitalia).

Additionally, Fox and the employee would plan out “the manner in which, and to what extent, coworkers and non-employees in the workplace will be made aware of your transition,” and when the company will change the employees’ name or make other “administrative or personnel changes.”

Fox employees can go by their preferred name and pronouns, the handbook states, at least to the “extent possible.” But for apparently logistical reasons, until a transitioning employee gets a legal name change, their legal name (often referred to by LGBTQ advocates as a “dead name”) must remain on the company payroll, insurance, and personnel documents.

The handbook explicitly states that any employee “may access the restroom corresponding to their gender identity.” 

“If a transitioning employee expresses a desire for increased privacy they will be provided access to a single occupancy restroom where available,” the handbook says. “However, no employee shall be required to use a single-occupancy restroom if they do not wish to do so.”

The former Fox employee who spoke with The Daily Signal scathingly critiqued the network for running “hours of programming attacking companies for having leftist policies.”

“Fox is no different,” the former employee said. “It’s a standard American mega-corporation with all the same types of policies and employees as those other companies.”

The Daily Signal sent Fox’s corporate public relations staff detailed questions about the policy and the accusations from former employees last week. As of publication, Fox did not respond.

The handbook specifically acknowledges that “individuals who are transitioning their gender will be encouraged or required by their health care practitioner to live full-time in their impending gender role before gender reassignment surgery can be performed.” This is called “Real Life Experience” or “Real Life Test,” Fox notes. Fox employees are told that they are “permitted to express their gender” in accordance with company dress code policies.

Tucker Carlson speaks during 2022 Fox Nation Patriot Awards at Hard Rock Live at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood on Nov. 17, 2022 in Hollywood, Florida. (Photo: Jason Koerner/Getty Images)

When trans-identifying TikTok star Mulvaney was first gaining prominence last year, producers for “Tucker Carlson Tonight” had to fight to be able to refer to Mulvaney with male pronouns in the show’s chyrons, the former “Tucker Carlson Tonight” producer told The Daily Signal. 

Carlson’s team also fought to be able to host The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh on trans issues, the producer said, but the team was repeatedly met with resistance from Fox on this due to Walsh’s frank condemnation of transgender ideology. This may have also been due in part to Fox’s view of The Daily Wire as a competitor, the former producer suggested.

In a phone interview with The Daily Signal, Walsh said he was aware of the alleged blacklisting and believes it began after he slammed Fox for the June 2022 segment praising a child’s gender transition. Since then, Walsh appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” a few times, but he was aware that Carlson’s team had to fight for these appearances.

“Fox’s viewers think that Fox shares their values,” Walsh said. “And it’s very clear that that’s just not the case. Gender ideology is as far radical Left as you can possibly go. They have embraced radical leftism in its most extreme form.”

“There’s no daylight at all between Fox News and MSNBC when it comes to gender,” Walsh added. “And I think that’s something that Fox’s viewers need to know. … If it were up to me, Fox would get the Bud Light treatment.”

*****

This article was published by Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

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As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

We Need to See Transgender Shooter’s Manifesto thumbnail

We Need to See Transgender Shooter’s Manifesto

By Josh Hammer

A transgender lunatic named Audrey Hale shot up a private Christian elementary school March 27 in Nashville, Tennessee.

The shooter, who tragically killed three adults and three children before being neutralized by well-trained Metropolitan Nashville Police Department officers, was a 28-year-old biological female who had “transitioned” to a public-facing male “gender identity”. Nashville police also confirmed that the shooter once attended the school herself.

Based simply on those established facts, one might offer a reasonable educated guess as to the likely motive of this horrific school shooting: A one-time Christian seems to have spurned the faith of her upbringing, adopted a vogue new worldview that is in irreconcilable tension with Christianity, and lashed out in one final kamikaze act to vindicate her new paganism and vanquish the foes of her youth.

The reasonable educated guess, in short, was—and remains—that this was an ideologically motivated, anti-Christian hate crime, an act of domestic terrorism.

The veracity of that guess was only bolstered by the revelation, which recently resurfaced on Twitter, that at some point during the murderous rampage, the shooter took precious time to divert from the school, scurry over to the adjacent church, and unload seven rounds into a stained-glass figure of Adam—that is, Adam from Genesis.

Let’s think this one over: Why, exactly, would a transgender former student of a Christian school return to that school to murder innocent Christian children and shoot up a stained-glass representation of no less symbolic a biblical figure than Adam himself? We don’t necessarily need Sherlock Holmes on the case to figure this one out.

In fact, shortly after the slaughter at The Covenant School, Nashville police revealed that the murderer had, in an act all too common in this gruesome genre, left behind a manifesto. But that manifesto thus far has never seen the light of day.

In the days following the massacre, as President Joe Biden and national Democrats stopped mourning the murdered Christian children and began pleading not to blame the “transgender community” at large, some transgender activists even took to social media to not-so-subtly threaten Nashville police against releasing the manifesto: “Don’t release it, or else.”

In the immediate aftermaths of the horrific mass shootings committed by vile white supremacists in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 and Buffalo, New York, in 2022, the national conversation immediately gravitated toward condemnations of the ever-looming specters of white supremacy and anti-black racism.

But somehow, nearly two months after a mass school shooting that has all the hallmarks of being an anti-Christian hate crime committed by a transgender Christophobe, the manifesto left behind by the shooter has not even been made public.

In fact, the manifesto’s release is now the subject of litigation. At least two lawsuits have been filed against the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department in an attempt to force the manifesto’s release, and a third legal challenge—technically, an administrative appeal—has been made against the FBI. According to the National Police Association, which has sued both the city of Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee, to expedite the manifesto’s release, a decision is expected in June.

It is inexcusable that the manifesto has not been released already. But unfortunately, it is also unsurprising. The reality is that the gender ideology lobby is an extremely powerful political force in today’s Democratic Party, and for the American ruling class more generally. Transgender activists, with the possible exception of Black Lives Matter activists, best represent the tip of the spear of today’s intersectional Democrats.

Same-sex marriage was constitutionalized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015, and the Left’s sexual revolutionaries long since have identified their new pet cause in which to invest considerable political and social capital. In short, if transgender activists demand something, then today’s Democrats—and no small number of right-liberal Republicans terrified of being called “transphobic”—will present it to them on a silver platter.

To demand the release of Hale’s undoubtedly deranged manifesto is not to “politicize” a tragic act of mass murder. Indeed, Biden, national Democrats, and their apologists in the corporate press already have done precisely that.

Rather, it is merely to demand the same treatment as similar tragedies in the past, after which the mass murderers’ evil motives invariably become the center of public attention. But Christophobia, much like antisemitism, remains one of the final remaining forms of politically acceptable animus in the United States.

Accordingly, nearly two months after the mass shooting and well after Nashville police and the FBI deemed it prudent to comply with a braying transgender activist mob, whether Hale’s manifesto is released is a legal matter awaiting its fate before an ever-fickle judge.

The manifesto must be released. For that matter, moreover, we also should demand a toxicology report: If Hale’s actions were in any way affected by injections of testosterone, that is important for the public to know.

Justice requires nothing less.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

Weekend Read: The Four Pillars of Medical Ethics Were Destroyed in the Covid Response thumbnail

Weekend Read: The Four Pillars of Medical Ethics Were Destroyed in the Covid Response

By Clayton J. Baker, MD

Much like a Bill of Rights, a principal function of any Code of Ethics is to set limits, to check the inevitable lust for power, the libido dominandi, that human beings tend to demonstrate when they obtain authority and status over others, regardless of the context.

Though it may be difficult to believe in the aftermath of COVID, the medical profession does possess a Code of Ethics. The four fundamental concepts of Medical Ethics – its 4 Pillars – are Autonomy, Beneficence, Non-maleficence, and Justice.

Autonomy, Beneficence, Non-maleficence, and Justice

These ethical concepts are thoroughly established in the profession of medicine. I learned them as a medical student, much as a young Catholic learns the Apostle’s Creed. As a medical professor, I taught them to my students, and I made sure my students knew them. I believed then (and still do) that physicians must know the ethical tenets of their profession, because if they do not know them, they cannot follow them.

These ethical concepts are indeed well-established, but they are more than that. They are also valid, legitimate, and sound. They are based on historical lessons, learned the hard way from past abuses foisted upon unsuspecting and defenseless patients by governments, health care systems, corporations, and doctors. Those painful, shameful lessons arose not only from the actions of rogue states like Nazi Germany, but also from our own United States: witness Project MK-Ultra and the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.

The 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics protect patients from abuse. They also allow physicians the moral framework to follow their consciences and exercise their individual judgment – provided, of course, that physicians possess the character to do so. However, like human decency itself, the 4 Pillars were completely disregarded by those in authority during COVID.

The demolition of these core principles was deliberate. It originated at the highest levels of COVID policymaking, which itself had been effectively converted from a public health initiative to a national security/military operation in the United States in March 2020, producing the concomitant shift in ethical standards one would expect from such a change. As we examine the machinations leading to the demise of each of the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics during COVID, we will define each of these four fundamental tenets, and then discuss how each was abused.

Autonomy

Of the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics, autonomy has historically held pride of place, in large part because respect for the individual patient’s autonomy is a necessary component of the other three. Autonomy was the most systemically abused and disregarded of the 4 Pillars during the COVID era.

Autonomy may be defined as the patient’s right to self-determination with regard to any and all medical treatment. This ethical principle was clearly stated by Justice Benjamin Cardozo as far back as 1914: “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body.”

Patient autonomy is “My body, my choice” in its purest form. To be applicable and enforceable in medical practice, it contains several key derivative principles which are quite commonsensical in nature. These include informed consent, confidentialitytruth-telling, and protection against coercion.

Genuine informed consent is a process, considerably more involved than merely signing a permission form. Informed consent requires a competent patient, who receives full disclosure about a proposed treatment, understands it, and voluntarily consents to it.

Based on that definition, it becomes immediately obvious to anyone who lived in the United States through the COVID era, that the informed consent process was systematically violated by the COVID response in general, and by the COVID vaccine programs in particular. In fact, every one of the components of genuine informed consent were thrown out when it came to the COVID vaccines:

  • Full disclosure about the COVID vaccines – which were extremely new, experimental therapies, using novel technologies, with alarming safety signals from the very start – was systematically denied to the public. Full disclosure was actively suppressed by bogus anti-“misinformation” campaigns, and replaced with simplistic, false mantras (e.g. “safe and effective”) that were in fact just textbook propaganda slogans.
  • Blatant coercion (e.g. “Take the shot or you’re fired/can’t attend college/can’t travel”) was ubiquitous and replaced voluntary consent.
  • Subtler forms of coercion (ranging from cash payments to free beer) were given in exchange for COVID-19 vaccination. Multiple US states held lotteries for COVID-19 vaccine recipients, with up to $5 million in prize money promised in some states.
  • Many physicians were presented with financial incentives to vaccinate, sometimes reaching hundreds of dollars per patient. These were combined with career-threatening penalties for questioning the official policies. This corruption severely undermined the informed consent process in doctor-patient interactions.
  • Incompetent patients (e.g. countless institutionalized patients) were injected en masse, often while forcibly isolated from their designated decision-making family members.

It must be emphasized that under the tendentious, punitive, and coercive conditions of the COVID vaccine campaigns, especially during the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” period, it was virtually impossible for patients to obtain genuine informed consent. This was true for all the above reasons, but most importantly because full disclosure was nearly impossible to obtain.

A small minority of individuals did manage, mostly through their own research, to obtain sufficient information about the COVID-19 vaccines to make a truly informed decision. Ironically, these were principally dissenting healthcare personnel and their families, who, by virtue of discovering the truth, knew “too much.” This group overwhelmingly refused the mRNA vaccines.

Confidentiality, another key derivative principle of autonomy, was thoroughly ignored during the COVID era. The widespread yet chaotic use of COVID vaccine status as a de facto social credit system, determining one’s right of entry into public spaces, restaurants and bars, sporting and entertainment events, and other locations, was unprecedented in our civilization.

Gone were the days when HIPAA laws were taken seriously, where one’s health history was one’s own business, and where the cavalier use of such information broke Federal law. Suddenly, by extralegal public decree, the individual’s health history was public knowledge, to the absurd extent that any security guard or saloon bouncer had the right to question individuals about their personal health status, all on the vague, spurious, and ultimately false grounds that such invasions of privacy promoted “public health.”

Truth-telling was completely dispensed with during the COVID era. Official lies were handed down by decree from high-ranking officials such as Anthony Fauci, public health organizations like the CDC, and industry sources, then parroted by regional authorities and local clinical physicians. The lies were legion, and none of them have aged well. Examples include:

  • The SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in a wet market, not in a lab
  • “Two weeks to flatten the curve”
  • Six feet of “social distancing” effectively prevents transmission of the virus
  • “A pandemic of the unvaccinated”
  • “Safe and effective”
  • Masks effectively prevent transmission of the virus
  • Children are at serious risk from COVID
  • School closures are necessary to prevent spread of the virus
  • mRNA vaccines prevent contraction of the virus
  • mRNA vaccines prevent transmission of the virus
  • mRNA vaccine-induced immunity is superior to natural immunity
  • Myocarditis is more common from COVID-19 disease than from mRNA vaccination

It must be emphasized that health authorities pushed deliberate lies, known to be lies at the time by those telling them. Throughout the COVID era, a small but very insistent group of dissenters have constantly presented the authorities with data-driven counterarguments against these lies. The dissenters were consistently met with ruthless treatment of the “quick and devastating takedown” variety now infamously promoted by Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins.

Over time, many of the official lies about COVID have been so thoroughly discredited that they are now indefensible. In response, the COVID power brokers, backpedaling furiously, now try to recast their deliberate lies as fog-of-war style mistakes. To gaslight the public, they claim they had no way of knowing they were spouting falsehoods, and that the facts have only now come to light. These, of course, are the same people who ruthlessly suppressed the voices of scientific dissent that presented sound interpretations of the situation in real time.

For example, on March 29, 2021, during the initial campaign for universal COVID vaccination, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky proclaimed on MSNBC that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus” or “get sick,” based on both clinical trials and “real-world data.” However, testifying before Congress on April 19, 2023, Walensky conceded that those claims are now known to be false, but that this was due to “an evolution of the science.” Walensky had the effrontery to claim this before Congress 2 years after the fact, when in actuality, the CDC itself had quietly issued a correction of Walensky’s false MSNBC claims back in 2021, a mere 3 days after she had made them.

On May 5, 2023, three weeks after her mendacious testimony to Congress, Walensky announced her resignation.

Truth-telling by physicians is a key component of the informed consent process, and informed consent, in turn, is a key component of patient autonomy. A matrix of deliberate lies, created by authorities at the very top of the COVID medical hierarchy, was projected down the chains of command, and ultimately repeated by individual physicians in their face-to-face interactions with their patients. This process rendered patient autonomy effectively null and void during the COVID era.

Patient autonomy in general, and informed consent in particular, are both impossible where coercion is present. Protection against coercion is a principal feature of the informed consent process, and it is a primary consideration in medical research ethics. This is why so-called vulnerable populations such as children, prisoners, and the institutionalized are often afforded extra protections when proposed medical research studies are subjected to institutional review boards.

Coercion not only ran rampant during the COVID era, it was deliberately perpetrated on an industrial scale by governments, the pharmaceutical industry, and the medical establishment. Thousands of American healthcare workers, many of whom had served on the front lines of care during the early days of the pandemic in 2020 (and had already contracted COVID-19 and developed natural immunity) were fired from their jobs in 2021 and 2022 after refusing mRNA vaccines they knew they didn’t need, would not consent to, and yet for which they were denied exemptions. “Take this shot or you’re fired” is coercion of the highest order.

Hundreds of thousands of American college students were required to get the COVID shots and boosters to attend school during the COVID era. These adolescents, like young children, have statistically near-zero chance of death from COVID-19. However, they (especially males) are at statistically highest risk of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine-related myocarditis.

According to the advocacy group nocollegemendates.com, as of May 2, 2023, approximately 325 private and public colleges and universities in the United States still have active vaccine mandates for students matriculating in the fall of 2023. This is true despite the fact that it is now universally accepted that the mRNA vaccines do not stop contraction or transmission of the virus. They have zero public health utility. “Take this shot or you cannot go to school” is coercion of the highest order.

Countless other examples of coercion abound. The travails of the great tennis champion Novak Djokovic, who has been denied entry into both Australia and the United States for multiple Grand Slam tournaments because he refuses the COVID vaccines, illustrate in broad relief the “man without a country” limbo in which the unvaccinated found (and to some extent still find) themselves, due to the rampant coercion of the COVID era.

Beneficence

In medical ethics, beneficence means that physicians are obligated to act for the benefit of their patients. This concept distinguishes itself from non-maleficence (see below) in that it is a positive requirement. Put simply, all treatments done to an individual patient should do good to that individual patient. If a procedure cannot help you, then it shouldn’t be done to you. In ethical medical practice, there is no “taking one for the team.”

By mid-2020 at the latest, it was clear from existing data that SARS-CoV-2 posed truly minimal risk to children of serious injury and death – in fact, the pediatric Infection Fatality Rate of COVID-19 was known in 2020 to be less than half the risk of being struck by lightning. This feature of the disease, known even in its initial and most virulent stages, was a tremendous stroke of pathophysiological good luck, and should have been used to the great advantage of society in general and children in particular.

The opposite occurred. The fact that SARS-CoV-2 causes extremely mild illness in children was systematically hidden or scandalously downplayed by authorities, and subsequent policy went unchallenged by nearly all physicians, to the tremendous detriment of children worldwide.

The frenzied push for and unrestrained use of mRNA vaccines in children and pregnant women – which continues at the time of this writing in the United States – outrageously violates the principle of beneficence. And beyond the Anthony Faucis, Albert Bourlas, and Rochelle Walenskys, thousands of ethically compromised pediatricians bear responsibility for this atrocity.

The mRNA COVID vaccines were – and remain – new, experimental vaccines with zero long-term safety data for either the specific antigen they present (the spike protein) or their novel functional platform (mRNA vaccine technology). Very early on, they were known to be ineffective in stopping contraction or transmission of the virus, rendering them useless as a public health measure. Despite this, the public was barraged with bogus “herd immunity” arguments. Furthermore, these injections displayed alarming safety signals, even during their tiny, methodologically challenged initial clinical trials.

The principle of beneficence was entirely and deliberately ignored when these products were administered willy-nilly to children as young as 6 months, a population to whom they could provide zero benefit – and as it turned out, that they would harm. This represented a classic case of “taking one for the team,” an abusive notion that was repeatedly invoked against children during the COVID era, and one that has no place in the ethical practice of medicine.

Children were the population group that was most obviously and egregiously harmed by the abandonment of the principle of beneficence during COVID. However, similar harms occurred due to the senseless push for COVID mRNA vaccination of other groups, such as pregnant women and persons with natural immunity.

Non-Maleficence

Even if, for argument’s sake alone, one makes the preposterous assumption that all COVID-era public health measures were implemented with good intentions, the principle of non-maleficence was nevertheless broadly ignored during the pandemic. With the growing body of knowledge of the actual motivations behind so many aspects of COVID-era health policy, it becomes clear that non-maleficence was very often replaced with outright malevolence.

In medical ethics, the principle of non-maleficence is closely tied to the universally cited medical dictum of primum non nocere, or, “First, do no harm.” That phrase is in turn associated with a statement from Hippocrates’ Epidemics, which states, “As to diseases make a habit of two things – to help, or at least, to do no harm.” This quote illustrates the close, bookend-like relationship between the concepts of beneficence (“to help”) and non-maleficence (“to do no harm”).

In simple terms, non-maleficence means that if a medical intervention is likely to harm you, then it shouldn’t be done to you. If the risk/benefit ratio is unfavorable to you (i.e., it is more likely to hurt you then help you), then it shouldn’t be done to you. Pediatric COVID mRNA vaccine programs are just one prominent aspect of COVID-era health policy that absolutely violate the principle of non-maleficence.

It has been argued that historical mass-vaccination programs may have violated non-maleficence to some extent, as rare severe and even deadly vaccine reactions did occur in those programs. This argument has been forwarded to defend the methods used to promote the COVID mRNA vaccines. However, important distinctions between past vaccine programs and the COVID mRNA vaccine program must be made.

First, past vaccine-targeted diseases such as polio and smallpox were deadly to children – unlike COVID-19. Second, such past vaccines were effective in both preventing contraction of the disease in individuals and in achieving eradication of the disease – unlike COVID-19. Third, serious vaccine reactions were truly rare with those older, more conventional vaccines – again, unlike COVID-19.

Thus, many past pediatric vaccine programs had the potential to meaningfully benefit their individual recipients. In other words, the a priori risk/benefit ratio may have been favorable, even in tragic cases that resulted in vaccine-related deaths. This was never even arguably true with the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.

Such distinctions possess some subtlety, but they are not so arcane that the physicians dictating COVID policy did not know they were abandoning basic medical ethics standards such as non-maleficence. Indeed, high-ranking medical authorities had ethical consultants readily available to them – witness that Anthony Fauci’s wife, a former nurse named Christine Grady, served as chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, a fact that Fauci flaunted for public relations purposes.

Indeed, much of COVID-19 policy appears to have been driven not just by rejection of non-maleficence, but by outright malevolence. Compromised “in-house” ethicists frequently served as apologists for obviously harmful and ethically bankrupt policies, rather than as checks and balances against ethical abuses.

Schools never should have been closed in early 2020, and they absolutely should have been fully open without restrictions by fall of 2020. Lockdowns of society never should have been instituted, much less extended as long as they were. Sufficient data existed in real time such that both prominent epidemiologists (e.g. the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration) and select individual clinical physicians produced data-driven documents publicly proclaiming against lockdowns and school closures by mid-to-late 2020. These were either aggressively suppressed or completely ignored.

Numerous governments imposed prolonged, punishing lockdowns that were without historical precedent, legitimate epidemiological justification, or legal due process. Curiously, many of the worst offenders hailed from the so-called liberal democracies of the Anglosphere, such as New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and deep blue parts of the United States. Public schools In the United States were closed an average of 70 weeks during COVID. This was far longer than most European Union countries, and longer still than Scandinavian countries who, in some cases, never closed schools.

The punitive attitude displayed by health authorities was broadly supported by the medical establishment. The simplistic argument developed that because there was a “pandemic,” civil rights could be decreed null and void – or, more accurately, subjected to the whims of public health authorities, no matter how nonsensical those whims may have been. Innumerable cases of sadistic lunacy ensued.

At one point at the height of the pandemic, in this author’s locale of Monroe County, New York, an idiotic Health Official decreed that one side of a busy commercial street could be open for business, while the opposite side was closed, because the center of the street divided two townships. One town was code “yellow,” the other code “red” for new COVID-19 cases, and thus businesses mere yards from one another survived or faced ruin. Except, of course, the liquor stores, which, being “essential,” never closed at all. How many thousands of times was such asinine and arbitrary abuse of power duplicated elsewhere? The world will never know.

Who can forget being forced to wear a mask when walking to and from a restaurant table, then being permitted to remove it once seated? The humorous memes that “you can only catch COVID when standing up” aside, such pseudo-scientific idiocy smacks of totalitarianism rather than public health. It closely mimics the deliberate humiliation of citizens through enforced compliance with patently stupid rules that was such a legendary feature of life in the old Eastern Bloc.

And I write as an American who, while I lived in a deep blue state during COVID, never suffered in the concentration camps for COVID-positive individuals that were established in Australia.

Those who submit to oppression resent no one, not even their oppressors, so much as the braver souls who refuse to surrender. The mere presence of dissenters is a stone in the quisling’s shoe – a constant, niggling reminder to the coward of his moral and ethical inadequacy. Human beings, especially those lacking personal integrity, cannot tolerate much cognitive dissonance. And so they turn on those of higher character than themselves.

This explains much of the sadistic streak that so many establishment-obeying physicians and health administrators displayed during COVID. The medical establishment – hospital systems, medical schools, and the doctors employed therein – devolved into a medical Vichy state under the control of the governmental/industrial/public health juggernaut.

These mid- and low-level collaborators actively sought to ruin dissenters’ careers with bogus investigations, character assassination, and abuse of licensing and certification board authority. They fired the vaccine refuseniks within their ranks out of spite, self-destructively decimating their own workforces in the process. Most perversely, they denied early, potential life-saving treatment to all their COVID patients. Later, they withheld standard therapies for non-COVID illnesses – up to and including organ transplants – to patients who declined COVID vaccines, all for no legitimate medical reason whatsoever.

This sadistic streak that the medical profession displayed during COVID is reminiscent of the dramatic abuses of Nazi Germany. However, it more closely resembles (and in many ways is an extension of) the subtler yet still malignant approach followed for decades by the United States Government’s medical/industrial/public health/national security nexus, as personified by individuals like Anthony Fauci. And it is still going strong in the wake of COVID.

Ultimately, abandonment of the tenet of non-maleficence is inadequate to describe much of the COVID-era behavior of the medical establishment and those who remained obedient to it. Genuine malevolence was very often the order of the day.

Justice

In medical ethics, the Pillar of justice refers to the fair and equitable treatment of individuals. As resources are often limited in health care, the focus is typically on distributive justice; that is, the fair and equitable allocation of medical resources. Conversely, it is also important to ensure that the burdens of health care are as fairly distributed as possible.

In a just situation, the wealthy and powerful should not have instant access to high-quality care and medicines that are unavailable to the rank and file or the very poor. Conversely, the poor and vulnerable should not unduly bear the burdens of health care, for example, by being disproportionately subjected to experimental research, or by being forced to follow health restrictions to which others are exempt.

Both of these aspects of justice were disregarded during COVID as well. In numerous instances, persons in positions of authority procured preferential treatment for themselves or their family members. Two prominent examples:

According to ABC News, “in the early days of the pandemic, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo prioritized COVID-19 testing for relatives including his brother, mother and at least one of his sisters, when testing wasn’t widely available to the public.” Reportedly, “Cuomo allegedly also gave politicians, celebrities and media personalities access to tests.”

In March 2020, Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine directed nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients, despite warnings against this by trade groups. That directive and others like it subsequently cost tens of thousands of lives. Less than two months later, Levine confirmed that her own 95 year-old mother had been removed from a nursing home to private care. Levine was subsequently promoted to 4-star Admiral in the US Public Health Service by the Biden Administration.

The burdens of lockdowns were distributed extremely unjustly during COVID. While average citizens remained in lockdown, suffering personal isolation, forbidden to earn a living, the powerful flouted their own rules. Who can forget how US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi broke the strict California lockdowns to get her hair styled, or how British Prime Minister Boris Johnson defied his own supposedly life-or-death orders by throwing at least a dozen parties at 10 Downing Street in 2020 alone? House arrest for thee, wine and cheese for me.

But California Governor Gavin Newsom might take the cake. At first glance, given both his BoJo-esque, lockdown-defying dinner with lobbyists at the ultra-swanky Napa Valley restaurant The French Laundry, and his decision to send his own children to expensive private schools which were fully open for 5-day in-school learning during the prolonged California school closures, one might think of Newsom as a COVID-era Robin Hood. That is, until one realizes that he presided over those same punishing, inhumane lockdowns and school closures. He was actually the Sheriff of Nottingham.

To a decent person with a functioning conscience, this level of sociopathy is difficult to comprehend. What is crystal clear is that anyone capable of the hypocrisy that Gavin Newsom displayed during COVID should not be anywhere near a position of power in any society.

Two additional points should be emphasized. First, these egregious acts were rarely, if ever, called out by the medical establishment. Second, the behaviors themselves show that those in power never truly believed their own narrative. Both the medical establishment and the power brokers knew the danger posed by the virus, while real, was grossly overstated. They knew the lockdowns, social distancing, and masking of the population at large were kabuki theater at best, and soft-core totalitarianism at worst. The lockdowns were based on a gigantic lie, one they neither believed nor felt compelled to follow themselves.

Solutions and Reform

The abandonment of the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics during COVID has contributed greatly to an historic erosion of public trust in the healthcare industry. This distrust is entirely understandable and richly deserved, however harmful it may prove to be for patients. For example, at a population level, trust in vaccines in general has dramatically reduced worldwide, compared to the pre-COVID era. Millions of children now stand at increased risk from proven vaccine-preventable diseases due to the thoroughly unethical push for unnecessary, indeed harmful, universal COVID-19 mRNA vaccination of children.

Systemically, the medical profession desperately needs ethical reform in the wake of COVID. Ideally, this would begin with a strong reassertion of and recommitment to the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics, again with patient autonomy at the forefront. It would continue with prosecution and punishment of those individuals most responsible for the ethical failures, from the likes of Anthony Fauci on down. Human nature is such that if no sufficient deterrent to evil is established, evil will be perpetuated.

Unfortunately, within the medical establishment, there does not appear to be any impetus toward acknowledgement of the profession’s ethical failures during COVID, much less toward true reform. This is largely because the same financial, administrative, and regulatory forces that drove COVID-era failures remain in control of the profession. These forces deliberately ignore the catastrophic harms of COVID policy, instead viewing the era as a sort of test run for a future of highly profitable, tightly regulated health care. They view the entire COVID-era martial-law-as-public-health approach as a prototype, rather than a failed model.

Reform of medicine, if it happens, will likely arise from individuals who refuse to participate in the “Big Medicine” vision of health care. In the near future, this will likely result in a fragmentation of the industry analogous to that seen in many other aspects of post-COVID society. In other words, there is apt to be a “Great Re-Sort” in medicine as well.

Individual patients can and must affect change. They must replace the betrayed trust they once held in the public health establishment and the healthcare industry with a critical, caveat emptor, consumer-based approach to their health care. If physicians were ever inherently trustworthy, the COVID era has shown that they no longer are so.

Patients should become highly proactive in researching which tests, medications, and therapies they accept for themselves (and especially for their children). They should be unabashed in asking their physicians for their views on patient autonomy, mandated care, and the extent to which their physicians are willing to think and act according to their own consciences. They should vote with their feet when unacceptable answers are given. They must learn to think for themselves and ask for what they want. And they must learn to say no.

*****
This article was published by Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

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WATCH: FBI Shows Up at Childhood Home of Pro-Life Activist thumbnail

WATCH: FBI Shows Up at Childhood Home of Pro-Life Activist

By Mary Margaret Olohan

Two agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation visited the childhood home of a pro-life activist and told the woman’s mother that they wanted to speak with her, according to footage obtained by The Daily Signal.

Elise Ketch is a member of the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, a group of mostly left-leaning activists who believe that abortion is the murder of a human child. PAAU particularly gained prominence after the group exposed the bodies of five premie-sized aborted babies, known as “The Five,” from the clinic of Washington, D.C., abortionist Cesare Santangelo.

The 26-year-old officially joined PAAU in December 2022 after volunteering with the group for a few months.

Her entrance into the pro-life group came as PAAU activists Lauren Handy, Jonathan Darnel, and Herb Geraghty faced charges from the Justice Department for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which “prohibits threats of force, obstruction and property damage intended to interfere with reproductive health care services” (the DOJ has commonly used “obstruction” in charging pro-life activists with blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic).

Ketch has participated in PAAU’s “Pink Rose Rescues,” wherein activists attempt to enter an abortion facility and “quietly hand out pink roses to people in the waiting room”—then leave upon being told that they are trespassing. The roses have information about pregnancy resources, such as the phone number for Let Them Live, Ketch explained.

She also participated in a nonviolent demonstration on March 23, 2022, where she and other PAAU members were arrested for blocking the street outside the Rayburn House Office Building as they sought to draw attention to “The Five.” It had been a year since their discovery of the baby bodies, and D.C. authorities have thus far stonewalled investigations into the babies’ deaths.

On April 18, around 2:45 p.m., FBI agents went to the home of Tracy Ketch, Elise Ketch’s mother. Ring camera footage provided to The Daily Signal shows two women standing on the front porch of Ketch’s childhood home in Woodbridge, Virginia. The women identified themselves as Ashley Roberts and Kathleen Brown.

“We are both with the FBI,” Roberts told Ketch’s mother. “We just need to speak with her regarding some information that was sent to us.”

When Tracy Ketch informed the agents that Ketch no longer lives at that residence, Roberts asked for Ketch’s residence or phone number.

“She’s not in any trouble,” Roberts assured Tracy Ketch with a smile, the footage shows. “We just have some information we need to ask her about.”

“We would tell you all the information because, like I said, she’s not in any trouble, but just out of respect for her, we’d like to speak with her first,” Roberts says, adding with a shrug, “and then, if she feels like talking to you, which I’m sure she will because it’s nothing … ”

The incidents that these activists were involved in all took place before they were members of PAAU, the group’s founder, Terrisa Bukovinac, told The Daily Signal. Ketch does not believe that she has ever been involved in any kind of activity that would allow authorities to bring FACE Act charges against her.

More Ring camera footage viewed by The Daily Signal shows Ketch’s mother stepping onto the front porch and calling her daughter.

“I have two FBI agents at the front door,” she tells her daughter.

“FBI agents,” Ketch can be heard repeating, as Roberts breaks into a smile. “Mom, don’t tell them anything.”

“Ok, what do you want me to do?” she asks her daughter. As Ketch speaks, her mother waves the agents off the porch and opens the front door, stress written across her face.

The FBI did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Daily Signal for this story.

Elise Ketch told The Daily Signal that she has “no idea what information the FBI was sent” that would require her to talk to them. But she has a few guesses.

“My colleague at Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, Lauren Handy, is indicted under the FACE Act and is being prosecuted by the federal government,” she said. “It’s plausible that these FBI agents aimed to collect information from me to help build their case against her.”

“While they reassured my mother that I was not in trouble, it’s also possible that they see me as a threat due to my pro-life activism and intended to investigate me,” Ketch speculated. “Yet, to my knowledge, they never attempted to follow up with me or my attorney, so I believe the FBI’s true motive behind their visit to my parents’ home was to intimidate me and my team.”

The visit made her concerned for her family’s safety, Ketch said, adding, “I refuse to back down.”

“This weaponization of our government institutions protects the abortion industrial complex, and it reinforces that we must disrupt these unjust power structures,” she said. “The most prevalent domestic threat to our country is the murder of thousands of preborn people by abortion each day. It is not terrorism to nonviolently intervene and rescue these powerless children before their slaughter. I’m willing to risk my own freedom and sacrifice my rights in order to secure theirs.”

Bukovinac, PAAU’s founder, told The Daily Signal that she believes “the feds are desperate to find a reason to shut us down and they’re not above coming to our parents’s homes to try to find what they’re looking for.”

“The FBI is targeting PAAU members because our activism challenges the property lines of and disrupts commerce for the abortion industrial complex,” Bukovinac said. “We are especially a problem for them because we are nonviolent and therefore our efforts and ideas are rapidly catching on.”

The incident comes as Republicans accuse the Department of Justice of targeting pro-life activists, like Catholic father Mark Houck, who was arrested at gun point in front of his children (a jury later found him not guilty of the DOJ’s FACE Act charges).

Meanwhile, despite over 100 leftist attacks on Catholic churches and pro-life pregnancy centers across the nation since the leak of the draft opinion showing Roe v. Wade would be overturned, the DOJ has only charged four people with FACE Act violations for these offenses.

And in December 2022, Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said herself that the DOJ has been targeting pro-life activists through the FACE Act as a response to the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision to overturn of Roe v. Wade.

The associate attorney general described the overturn of Roe v. Wade as a “devastating blow to women throughout the country” that took away “the constitutional right to abortion” and increased “the urgency” of the DOJ’s work—including the “enforcement of the FACE Act, to ensure continued lawful access to reproductive services.”

As of early May 16, there have been at least 87 attacks on pregnancy resource centers and 157 attacks on Catholic churches since the May 2022 Dobbs leak, according to CatholicVote trackers. Many of these buildings have been vandalized with threats such as, “If abortions aren’t safe, neither are you,” making the attacks incidents of suspected pro-abortion violence.

Pregnancy resource centers are typically run by pro-life women who seek to offer expectant mothers alternatives to abortion. Such centers provide diapers, baby clothes, and resources for both mothers and fathers, empowering them to care for their children, overcome addictions, build community, and find jobs.

Houck and his wife Ryan-Marie previously told The Daily Signal that they believe they were targeted by President Joe Biden’s Justice Department in an effort to intimidate, silence, and scare the family for their pro-life work—praying outside abortion clinics for the women headed inside to abort their unborn babies.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

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Over 100 Behavioral Treatment Centers, Sober Living Homes Accused of Medicaid Fraud thumbnail

Over 100 Behavioral Treatment Centers, Sober Living Homes Accused of Medicaid Fraud

By Cole Lauterbach

Arizona State officials say dozens of behavioral health and sober living homes have perpetrated a years-long Medicaid fraud scheme.

Gov. Katie Hobbs, Attorney General Kris Mayes, Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System Director Carmen Heredia, Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community President Martin Harvier, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy Stone announced the findings Tuesday morning in Phoenix.

Hobbs said the alleged crimes amount to “hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Patients primarily from reservations, she said, were enticed with food and shelter only to be encouraged into continuing their addictions while the facilities billed Medicaid for care that never happened.

“For years, these providers have allegedly defrauded the state of millions of dollars while creating a large-scale humanitarian crisis that disproportionately affects Arizona’s tribal communities,” Hobbs said Monday. “People have had to escape out of windows and jump over fences in the middle of the night just to access a phone to reach the outside world.”

Hobbs said payments to these facilities saw state payments stopped Monday and that she directed AHCCCS to implement additional safeguards.

The alleged fraud took place largely on tribal land to deceive state officials.

“Generally, they began with fraudulent treatment facilities recruiting Native Americans, typically those residing on a reservation or part of the urban homeless population,” Mayes said. “These vulnerable individuals were incentivized to participate in ‘treatment’ at an outpatient clinic with offers of things like free food, cash incentives or free rent.”

Mayes said the facilities would convince AHCCCS that the patient was eligible for benefits, even if they weren’t via a tribal health program.

Officials expect the charges to result in facility closures.

The Arizona Council of Human Service Providers, a provider association representing more than 125 of the type of facilities in question, said in a statement that they’d work with law enforcement and state officials.

“As an association, we are also acutely aware of the impact that this may have on clients who rely on these services for their mental health needs,” the council said. “We understand the importance of continuity of care and are committed to working with our members, as well as government agencies and MCOs, to ensure that all affected clients are able to receive the care they need during this transition.”

*****

The article was published by The Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

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Trans Inc. thumbnail

Trans Inc.

By Kali Fontanilla

I was recently on a Vice debate panel about education. If you aren’t familiar with Vice debates, it’s a series of discussions between conservatives and liberals debating hot topics in a controlled environment. The series has gone viral, receiving millions of views. I was chosen for this panel because I am a former public school teacher of 15 years and have been vocal about the leftist takeover and agendas in our educational system.

At one point in the debate, I mentioned that students identifying as trans are a rising trend amongst young people, particularly teens. One of the left-leaning teachers who identifies as trans, surprisingly agreed with me. “You’re seeing trends, and I am too. Last semester when I was teaching, I had a trans kid in every classroom, and I was like, whoa! When I started teaching there was none!”

Rising Trend

Historically, gender dysphoria only affected a small percentage of children, less than 0.01 percent, and almost all the cases were boys. Today, the U.S. has seen an estimated 1,000 percent rise in gender dysphoria over the past decade, and the UK has reported a more than 4,000 percent rise in girls demanding gender “treatments.” And 70 percent of “sex reassignment” surgeries were done on girls. And now this teacher admits to having a trans student in every classroom.

A recent viral clip exposed by Project Veritas echoes the same observation. The assistant superintendent of curriculum for the East Meadow School District was secretly recorded admitting, “After the pandemic, we had an explosion of trans kids!” I saw this rise in trans-identifying students during my tenure as a public school teacher in California. As the leftist teacher in the Vice debate described, I saw it go from one trans student per school to one in every classroom.

What is causing this sudden rise in teens identifying as trans in America? Even if, for argument’s sake, you believe that gender dysphoria should be met with “gender-affirming care” (what I’d call radical hormone treatments and child mutilation), do you want “changing your gender” to be a social contagion amongst our nation’s young people?

This is a serious issue. Gender dysphoric children have been prescribed puberty blockers as young as eight, gender-questioning girls have double mastectomies at 16, and trans teens take body-altering hormones by 14. Everyone should be alarmed that this is becoming a trend considering the lifelong effects of having children make these decisions.

Some blame TikTok for this sudden rise in trans students. It is easy to go viral and receive attention for sharing one’s transition journey. Others may point to left-leaning teachers who purposely separate children from their parents and become self-designated gender-affirming counselors. While teachers and TikTok are playing their part in this rising trend, we should not dismiss key players working behind the scenes to support and fund this rapidly rising trend of transitioning youth.

Nonprofit Indoctrination

Enter the nonprofit the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the public charity component of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). A quote from its website gives an idea of the mindset and agenda behind the foundation: “Together, we elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, won the Georgia runoffs and achieved pro-equality majorities in the House and the Senate. Now we’re going to pass the Equality Act through Congress and ensure protections for LGBTQ+ people nationwide.”

Organizations like HRC have been working behind the scenes, fueling the explosion in kids identifying as trans by funding conferences to push this radical ideology. Every year HRC hosts an annual Thrive Conference, where they train 15,000 youth-serving professionals, including teachers and counselors on how to “create safe, inclusive, and welcoming environments for LGBTQ+ youth.” These training sessions include lesson plans given to teachers nationwide to use in the classroom. Lesson titles for some of their kindergarten–2nd grade lesson plans include “Jacobs New Dress: Understanding Gender Expression”; “They, She, He, Easy as ABC: Understanding Names, Pronouns, and Gender Expression”; “Chimera Butterflies: Non-Binary Animals”; and “I am Jazz: Understanding Transgender Children.”

The practice of training and indoctrinating teachers and those who work with our nation’s youth has long been a strategy of the Left. An ideology doesn’t spread widely by just one person pushing it on another. Far more effective is to have a teacher of a large group as your conduit. To truly change the culture of a nation requires indoctrinating and training large groups of teachers, and thus the multitudes of their students in turn. In this effort, nonprofits like HRC are a crucial component, and not enough light has been shed on their radical agenda-setting work.

But the fruits are all around us. Their product is the destroyed lives of our nation’s children.

*****
This article was published by Capital Research Center and is reproduced with permission.

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Children’s Hospital Trained Schools to Help Young Kids Be Transgender thumbnail

Children’s Hospital Trained Schools to Help Young Kids Be Transgender

By Catherine Salgado

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) apparently wants to CHOP off more kids’ body parts. The Daily Caller did an exclusive report on how CHOP was training teachers to help elementary school kids and even kindergartners “transition” to the opposite sex. CHOP was previously caught referring “kids as young as 14 years old for cross-sex surgeries, such as mastectomies or breast construction.”

A study published at the end of last year found a 4.5 times higher rate of psychiatric illness in transgenders. This is what leftists are pushing on young children.

But they do it because it’s lucrative. The “transgender” surgery industry is projected to be worth $5 billion by the end of this decade. Transgenders tend to stay dependent on the medical system and they tend to be loyal and zealous leftists.

“[The Daily Caller, April 30] A representative of the Gender and Sexuality Development Program at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) trained school faculty to advise them on how to support a kindergartner changing their gender, according to documents obtained through a public records request by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

CHOP’s gender clinic has come under fire for providing children beginning at age eight with medical interventions such as puberty blockers.

‘I believe this is a great starting point for our education, not just as a school but, district wide,’ Stephanie Hultquist, principal of Edgewood Elementary, a school within the Council Rock School District, wrote following the meeting with King in 2021.”

This is demonic child abuse. It is biologically impossible to become the opposite sex, and children as young as six or eight cannot decide to change their sex. All of this insanity is just a money-making and control scheme.

“In 2021, Samantha King, the manager of education initiatives at CHOP’s gender clinic, met with elementary school staff at Pennsbury School District to discuss how to support an incoming kindergartner whom they referred to as transgender. Additionally, in 2019, King presented a PowerPoint to a handful of teachers from schools within Council Rock School District on helping gender-transitioning students in the district…

Pennsbury School District’s Director of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Dr. Cherrissa Gibson reached out to King in November 2021 asking her to host a training for K-12 teachers on how to create ‘gender inclusive and affirming educational environments.’ The district donated $1,200 to CHOP for two training sessions, one for K-5 teachers and another for 6-12 grade educators, that were held in April 2022…King taught 6-12 grade educators that gender exploration is ‘normal and valid’ no matter the age of a child.”

It’s not “normal and valid” at any age, let alone in elementary school. These pedophiles and mutilators must be stopped.

*****
This article was published by Pro Deo et Libertate and is reproduced with permission.

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Here’s How You Can Fight Biden’s Crusade to Put ‘Transgender’ Males in Women’s Sports, From the Comfort of Your Own Home thumbnail

Here’s How You Can Fight Biden’s Crusade to Put ‘Transgender’ Males in Women’s Sports, From the Comfort of Your Own Home

By Tyler O’Neil

Your teenage daughter is training seven days a week, going for that college scholarship. She’s worked her whole life to excel, only to come up short thanks to a biological male who claims to identify as a girl. This nightmare could be yours, courtesy of President Joe Biden.

Every day, it seems the federal government is taking more and more control over the way we live our lives, driving up the cost of gas, making our money worth less, and forcing woke transgender ideology down our throats.

We often feel powerless to do anything about it, but the Biden administration is required by law to listen to the American people when it implements a major new rule or regulation.

Federal agencies open rules up for “notice and comment,” a process by which everyday citizens can weigh in on forthcoming rules and regulations. Agencies are required by law to read what you send in, and sometimes courts will cite these public comments, even if the government decides to go forward with the rule anyway.

Heritage Action for America, the grassroots advocacy arm of The Heritage Foundation, launched a portal this week that makes it easy for Americans to make their voices heard in opposition to a consequential new regulation forcing K-12 schools to allow males to compete in women’s sports. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

Biden’s Department of Education proposed a new rule that would require schools to allow males who claim to identify as transgender to compete against girls in sports. This rule twists the plain meaning of Title IX on its head—removing the law’s protections for women in sports by redefining the word “sex” to include what it clearly did not mean in 1972, when Congress passed Title IX of the education amendments.

Title IX aims to prevent discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs that receive federal government funding. This critical law protected women’s sports programs, leveling the playing field for female collegiate athletes. It is supremely ironic that the Biden administration now is twisting this very rule beyond recognition—to disadvantage women and deprive them of opportunities for fair play and academic scholarships.

The Department of Education summarizes the new rule this way: “Under the proposed regulation, schools would not be permitted to adopt or apply a one-size-fits-all policy that categorically bans transgender students from participating on teams consistent with their gender identity.”

The rule provides some flexibility for schools to limit male participation in women’s sports, so long as they “serve important educational objectives, such as ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.”

Heritage Action, argues, however, that “this is a false standard that puts girls on defense, making them justify the existence of their own sports and places.” Young female athletes will have to fight with their schools and against the federal government for their own safety and equal educational opportunities.

By endorsing the claims of a nebulous gender identity over the biological markers of sex, this regulation would erode the very grounds on which schools could limit males—whose muscles and hearts tend to be larger than those of females, especially after testosterone-fueled puberty—from competing against girls and women.

The Department of Education needs to know that its transgender policy is not commonsense or moderate, as the rulemaking document suggests. Transgender ideology promotes identity over biology, and so long as it is the foundation on which this rule rests, it cannot support a level playing field in women’s sports.

Take swimmer Lia Thomas, for example. In his freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas competed on the men’s swim team, recording the sixth-fastest national men’s time in the 1,000-yard freestyle and within the top 100 in the 500-yard and 1,650-yard freestyle races. Yet after Thomas joined the women’s team, he racked up record times at the Ivy League Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships in February 2022, in the 100-yard, 200-yard, and 500-yard freestyle races.

Riley Gaines, a woman who is a 12-time All-American and three-time Southeastern Conference champion, tied with Thomas in the 200 freestyle at the NCAA Division I Women’s Championships last year, yet only one person received the trophy—the male swimmer.

Gaines told The Daily Signal’s Virginia Allen that the NCAA official told her, “Well, for photo purposes, Lia has to have it. You can pose with this one, but you go home empty-handed. Thomas takes the trophy.”

Males claiming to identify as women have finished first in women’s sports such as track, volleyball, weight lifting, cycling, and swimming, along with other sports.

Duke Law School professor Doriane Lambelet Coleman warned that if women’s sports must admit biological men, “the very best women in the world would lose to literally thousands of boys and men, including thousands who would be considered second-tier.”

Parents, grandparents, teachers, girls, boys, and all Americans who value fair play must make their voices heard in opposition to this rule—not because they harbor any animus toward people who identify with the gender opposite their biological sex, but because they want to make sure that girls and women do not lose vital opportunities because some guy uses a dress to steal their trophies.

You can voice your opposition to this regulation and send the Biden administration a message through the portal here.

*****
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‘Why Doesn’t Anybody Talk About That?’: Bill Maher Says Most Shootings Are ‘Young Black Men’ Killing Each Other thumbnail

‘Why Doesn’t Anybody Talk About That?’: Bill Maher Says Most Shootings Are ‘Young Black Men’ Killing Each Other

By James Lynch

Comedian and HBO Host Bill Maher discussed the perpetrators and victims of inner city crime and potential solutions during a panel on his late night show Friday.

Maher talked about crime with Brown University economist Glenn Loury and international relations scholar Daniel Bessner in the context of Chicago electing a soft-on-crime mayor and shoplifting in New York City.

“It seems like crime is kind of out of control, I was reading that in New York, a third of all the shoplifting cases are by 327 people in a city of 8 million, because they keep getting returned to the streets, which has to be terrible for the morale of the cops, that they keep arresting people and the same people. It’s groundhog day for them, I mean I know we have problems with the cops. I’ve certainly not been shy talking about them on this show, but I don’t understand how we’re going to get this situation under control unless they feel like what they do has some meaning as opposed to just a turnstile,” Maher said.

Loury, a black Chicago native and longtime commentator on racial issues, advocated for tougher prosecution and enabling cops to do their jobs. Bessner disagreed and said redistribution would be needed to reduce incarceration rates without condoning individual criminal behavior.

“Like Chicago: Most of the shootings are young black men killing other young black men. Is that not correct?,” Maher responded. “Much more than what the cops do. Why doesn’t anybody talk about that? I mean, why aren’t there, you know, 100 giant black celebrities who would have the respect of those people saying ‘What are you doing to yourselves? Why are you killing each other?’”

Loury agreed with Maher, saying “it’s no way to live, this dishonors our community, come on, we’re better than this.”

“Right!,” Maher interrupted. “I feel like it’s never addressed,” he continued.

Bessner advocated for material wealth distribution to address the problem and criticized the media for refusing to talk about it. Maher challenged his belief that giving people more money would reduce crime and pointed to the money America has spent on welfare designed to fight poverty.

Bessner went on to criticize capitalism and the negative individual behavior he attributes to it. Loury called Bessner’s claims “speculative” and said reducing crime would be needed for voters to support Bessner’s reforms to capitalism.

Loury encouraged Chicago’s next mayor Brandon Johnson to come out against criminal behavior and support the city’s police officers.

*****
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Activists’ Harassment And Threats Force Venue To Cancel Austin, Texas “Identity Crisis” Film Screening About The Harrowing Stories Of Detransitioners thumbnail

Activists’ Harassment And Threats Force Venue To Cancel Austin, Texas “Identity Crisis” Film Screening About The Harrowing Stories Of Detransitioners

By Press Team Independent Women’s Forum

AUSTIN, TX — An upcoming “Identity Crisis” film screening and panel discussion event faces a targeted harassment campaign being conducted by radical transgender activists. Identity Crisis documentary films, produced by Independent Women’s Forum, tell the stories of individuals who’ve experienced the harms of the gender ideology movement firsthand. Activists sought to intimidate the business owners and employees of the venue where the event was originally scheduled to take place on Wednesday, April 19, in Austin, Texas. Due to those threats, Independent Women’s Forum and its partnering organizations for this event had to secure a new venue and employ increased security for guests and attendees.

After promoting the “Identity Crisis” Austin screening online, bigoted haters launched a coordinated campaign to cancel the event, in which they doxxed the names and personal phone numbers of the venue owners and employees that Independent Women’s Network’s Round Rock Chapter, along with Partners for Ethical Care (PEC), and the Leander Area Republican Women (LARW), had booked for the event.

A flood of phone calls, voice messages, and emails with direct threats against the business led the owners to cancel the event out of fear for the safety of themselves, their employees, and their business.

“The agitators don’t want the public to hear the stories of detransitioners, they want to deny their existence,” said Michelle Evans, Independent Women’s Network Round Rock Chapter Leader.

“It is deeply misogynist and anti-feminist to shut down an event organized by women to tell the stories of how transgender ideology has harmed women and girls,” said Executive Producer Kelsey Bolar, who works for Independent Women’s Forum. “The fact that pro-transgender agitators would harass, doxx, and even threaten an innocent small business into shutting down our event shows the extent to which those pushing this ideology are willing to go in order to cover up for its catastrophic effects.”

“Let’s be clear: Any attempt to shut down the voices of the brave subjects we’ve featured in our ‘Identity Crisis’ series will only strengthen our resolve to continue telling these stories and ensuring the voices of detransitioners and parents whose children have fallen prey to this ideology are heard,” Bolar continued. “Independent Women’s Forum prides itself on fostering compassionate, civil debate surrounding difficult issues, and on the issue of gender ideology’s impact on vulnerable children, we won’t be bullied into silence.”

“We are not afraid,” said Jeannette Cooper, mother and co-founder of Partners for Ethical Care. “There is nothing that will stop us from exposing the gender industry. One event at a time, one person at a time, we will tell our stories, and people will come to realize the harm happening to children and families.”

“Children and their parents will be the victims when the truth about this ideology is suppressed. Children are seen as an easy target, and the mothers and grandmothers in our community will not tolerate bullying of those who have suffered at the hands of those who want to deceive these vulnerable kids,” said Kate McDonald, president of Leander Area Republican Women. “These ladies are exercising their right to free speech. If we don’t fight for free speech in Leander, we can’t fight for it in our state, or our nation. We will always speak up for injustice.”

A new venue has been secured, and the host groups will move forward with holding the event with extra security in place tomorrow evening.

This marks the second screening for IWF’s documentary series to show the public what’s happening inside school systems, doctors’ offices, and beyond.

EVENT DETAILS

WHAT: Identity Crisis Film Tour: Real-life stories from victims of the transgender movement

WHEN: Wednesday, April 19, 2023

6:00 PM | Reception

6:30 PM | Screening

WHERE: Cedar Park, TX

Exact location will be provided upon RSVP

WHO: Event Hosts:

  • Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Network (Austin, TX Chapter)
  • Leander Area Republican Women (LARW)
  • Partners for Ethical Care (PEC)

Participants Available for Interview:

  • Prisha Mosley: Mentally Ill teen betrayed by health professionals who left her ‘mutilated’ and ‘broken”
  • Chloe Cole: a young teen who pursued puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery to remove her breasts which failed to address underlying struggles with anxiety, depression, and undiagnosed autism
  • Jeannette CooperChicago mother loses custody of her daughter – for insisting that her daughter is a girl
  • JenniferA mom from Washington state who took on her local public school after teachers attempted to ‘transition’ her 11-year-old daughter without her consent

The reception and screening are on the record and reportable.

To RSVP, contact press@iwf.org

ABOUT THE DOCUMENTARY SERIES: 

“Identity Crisis” seeks to change that by offering perspectives—mothers whose daughters fell victim to gender ideology, detransitioners who warn of the harms of socially and medically transitioning, and a mental health professional who rails against her profession for prioritizing political correctness over public health.

Watch the series online: LINK

*****
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Kansas Legislature Overrides Democrat Governor’s Veto of Bill Defining a Woman as ‘a Human Female’ thumbnail

Kansas Legislature Overrides Democrat Governor’s Veto of Bill Defining a Woman as ‘a Human Female’

By Debra Heine

Kansas on Thursday became the first state to pass a bill defining a woman as “a human female,” preventing courts and government officials from redefining the word to include biological men who identify as women.

The measure, which is being called “the most sweeping transgender bathroom law in the U.S.,” defines a person’s sex as their “biological sex, either male or female, at birth” based on their reproductive systems.

The Kansas Legislature voted 84-40 and the Senate voted 28-12 to override Democrat Governor Laura Kelly’s April 20 veto of Senate Bill 180, known as the Women’s Bill of Rights.

“The terms ‘woman’ and ‘girl’ refer to human females, and the terms ‘man’ and ‘boy’ refer to human males,” SB 180 states. The new law, which will take effect on July 1, will apply to schools, locker rooms, prisons, domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers.

The measure also has accommodations for those born with sexual development disorders.

Independent Women’s Voice (IWV) spokeswoman Riley Gaines applauded the Kansas Legislature’s achievement on Twitter.

“This bill doesn’t create any new laws or prohibit laws from being made. It simply codifies the term ‘woman’ to apply to all legislature that uses that word,” the former competitive swimmer said. “It brings clarity/uniformity to Kansas law. Thank you to @IWV for working so hard to get this passed! This is a huge win!!”

When she vetoed the bill, Gov. Kelly argued that it was discriminatory and would hurt the state’s ability to attract businesses, the Associated Press reported.

The Kansas law is different than most other states’ laws in that it legally defines male and female based on the sex assigned at birth and declares that “distinctions between the sexes” in bathrooms and other spaces serves “the important governmental objectives” of protecting “health, safety and privacy.” Earlier this week, North Dakota enacted a law that prohibits transgender children and adults from having access to bathrooms, locker rooms or showers in dormitories of state-run colleges and correctional facilities.

Kansas’ law doesn’t create a new crime, impose criminal penalties or fines for violations or even say specifically that a person has a right to sue over a transgender person using a facility aligned with their gender identity. Many supporters acknowledged before it passed that they hadn’t considered how it will be administered.

The bill is written broadly enough to apply to any separate spaces for men and women and, Kelly’s office said, could prevent transgender women from participating in state programs for women, including for female hunters and farmers. As written, it also prevents transgender people from changing the gender markers on their driver’s licenses — though it wasn’t clear whether that change would occur without a lawsuit.

“As a woman and a female athlete, I can attest first hand to the importance of women having private spaces when safety and fairness are at risk,” said Gaines. “Now that the Women’s Bill of Rights will be Kansas law, women have clarity that when they enter a space labeled for ‘women’, biological men will not be inside.”

*****
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Maybelline Gets Burned by the Latest Round of Dylan Mulvaney Boycotts thumbnail

Maybelline Gets Burned by the Latest Round of Dylan Mulvaney Boycotts

By Suzanne Bowdey

While Anheuser-Busch reels from the backlash over its partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, another brand is jumping feet-first into the fire.

Over the weekend, media personality Oli London retweeted a post of Mulvaney “getting glam” with Maybelline, which has apparently joined the ranks of companies like Nike who think the best way to sell products to women is by mocking them. But if Bud Light’s $6 billion nosedive is any indication, the damages will be much more than cosmetic.

Within hours, the March 13 video went viral, lighting up social media with calls to #BoycottMaybelline. Several of London’s followers were at a loss, trying to make sense of the company’s rationale. “Why are all of these companies so intent on insulting women?” one asked. This is “a dude who portrays women as ditzy bimbos,” another fumed.

Melanie Johnson agreed, pointing out that “craziest thing about all of this” is that “we do not act like this when we put on our makeup [and] workout and honestly most of us don’t have time for a six pack of bud light while taking a bubble bath… We are usually taking care of children, our homes and working. This is not a representation of women at all. WTF[.]”

Several couldn’t believe Maybelline’s folly, insisting that the L’Oréal-owned line will become the new Budweiser. Together, they derided the brand’s longtime slogan: “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.” In this case, consumers pointed out, “He definitely wasn’t born with it.”

Of course, this isn’t the first cosmetic company that’s gotten torched for its relationship with Mulvaney. Back in October, Ulta Beauty brought the 26-year-old on its podcast to talk about “The Beauty of … Girlhood,” triggering an instant, nationwide uproar.

Along with “gender-fluid” host David Lopez, “You had two grown men tell actual women what it’s like to be a girl, as if they could have any earthly idea,” “Relatable’s” Allie Beth Stuckey tweeted. “That has nothing to do with beauty; it’s lunacy, and it’s insulting.”

Frankly, Madeleine Kearns argued on National Review, “transgenderism is the new blackface.” “Perhaps the greatest silver lining of the transgender movement has been how it exposes the follies of disregarding sex and sexual difference. ‘Womanface’ is the new blackface. It’s time to get outraged.”

Meanwhile, in St. Louis, the cautionary tale that is Anheuser-Busch continued in full disaster-recovery mode. After a two-week shellacking, CEO Brendan Whitworth finally took the hint and put marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid on leave for her prominent role in the fiasco. The millennial executive, who insisted hyping gender dysphoria was the way to grow the brand, was quickly disabused of that notion by everyone from national distributors to country music stars.

“Given the circumstances, Alissa has decided to take a leave of absence which we support,” an Anheuser-Busch spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal. “The decision,” the Journal notes, “wasn’t voluntary, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Her boss, Daniel Blake, also didn’t escape the senior management’s wrath. Blake, “who oversees marketing for Anheuser-Busch’s mainstream brands,” had been with the company almost a decade when he and Alissa approved the Mulvaney-faced cans that plummeted the company into global chaos and made the beer a mainstream pariah.

According to the latest numbers from NielsenIQ, Bud Light sales were down an astonishing 17% in dollars and 21% in volume for the week that ended April 15. “These numbers are staggering,” Insights Express insisted. “Right now, this is an extremely difficult scenario for Anheuser-Busch, the Bud Light brand, and for AB distributors.”

Budweiser’s implosion should have scared off plenty of CEOs, but as The Political Forum’s Stephen Soukup has argued, most executives fall into two categories: the true believers (the honest woke) and a much larger group of executives who don’t buy the radicalism they’re embracing. But the honest woke are the dangerous ones. They’re the group that doesn’t care about money nearly as much as ideology. If they need to financially kamikaze to advance their agenda, they’ll do it.

“I think we’re way past the point where companies are dabbling in trans activism simply to appeal to a wider audience in order to grow their bottom line,” Family Research Council’s vice president for branding, Jared Bridges, told The Washington Stand.

“They think they’re doing a moral good by making people like Mulvaney as the face of their brand. And in their ‘moral’ universe, this is more important than the company’s profit margin. Corporations who are still beholden to shareholders should take a long look at whether or not they want these ideologues running their brands,” Bridges warned. “They might just run them into the ground.”

Misery loves woke companies. And if Nike, Disney, Bud Light, and others can’t quit their trans extremism, recent history proves: Americans will quit them.

*****
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Four Underused Tools to Stop School Shootings thumbnail

Four Underused Tools to Stop School Shootings

By James D. Agresti

In the aftermath of school shootings, media outlets often amplify calls for gun control while ignoring or spurning evidence-based ways to protect students. Here are four life-saving tools they are missing or dismissing.

Shatter-Resistant Entryways

As documented in the academic journal Victims & Offenders, an “immediate and economical” way to protect students “is to tighten” access to school buildings. Many school administrators have done this simply by locking doors. However, there are roughly 460 million firearms in the U.S., and the bulk of them will quickly shatter the glass entrances that are a common feature of schools, allowing killers to enter in a few seconds.

That is precisely what happened in the Covenant Christian school shooting in Nashville where the killer took the lives of three 9-year-old children and three staff after shooting out the school’s glass doors and walking into the building.

Likewise, the perpetrator of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, CT broke into the building by shooting out a glass panel at the school’s entryway. He then proceeded to slaughter 20 students and 6 adults.

These and other such tragedies may be prevented if schools took a simple and affordable action: apply a security film that prevents glass entryways from shattering when bullets hit them.

Note that the treatment doesn’t make glass bulletproof or impenetrable. Instead, it makes the glass shatter-resistant. This slows down intruders and affords precious time for students to flee or help to arrive.

Nor does every piece of glass in a school need to be treated. Just installing the film on exterior entryways can substantially improve safety, and selecting other strategic locations can help as well.

Security film is relatively inexpensive and quickly installed. From large public schools to small private ones, the cost of this potential lifesaver is typically less than 1% of a school’s annual budget. Once applied, it lasts for the lifetime of the glass.

For example, it took one day and cost $5,000 in materials and labor to treat a church with more than 20 glass entryway panes on the front, side, and back of the building. Similarly, public school administrators who were hesitant to install security film due to cost concerns found they were able to apply it in a lot more locations than they originally anticipated because it was so affordable.

Seemingly unaware of this life-shielding opportunity, ABC News recently reported:

Brad Garrett—a retired FBI agent and an ABC News contributor, who has done security audits on schools—said fortifying entrance doors with material like bulletproof glass, is cost prohibitive for most schools, especially a small Christian school like Covenant. He said metal doors are a cheaper option, but they make schools feel dark and “prison-like.”

Thus, it appears that a massive media outlet and a former FBI agent who specializes in school security are unfamiliar with an option that addresses those concerns.

Don’t Make Celebrities of Mass Murderers

The 1999 Columbine High School massacre was the first mass shooting that received wall-to-wall media coverage, and ever since then, the press has made the perpetrators of such slaughters into household names. During this same era, fatal school shootings have occurred every year in the United States.

Documenting the impact of this and offering a simple solution, Dr. Peter Langman, a Ph.D. psychologist and one of the world’s leading authorities on the “psychology of school shooters and other perpetrators of mass violence,” writes that:

because of the frequency of mass killers citing previous perpetrators as role models or sources of inspiration, it is critical that media outlets give careful consideration to how they cover such incidents. It seems likely that the more the media focuses on the perpetrators rather than the victims, the more people who are at risk of violence will be influenced to commit their own attacks, whether due to imitation, inspiration, idolizing, perceived similarities, sympathy with the cause, or their desire for fame.

Compulsory Mental Health Treatment

While the vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent, the perpetrators of mass shootings are far more likely to suffer from serious psychiatric disorders than the general population. This is especially true of people who commit indiscriminate mass shootings in which an attacker wantonly kills people in a public setting like a school, park, or church.

A study published in the journal Criminology & Public Policy found that 35% of people who committed indiscriminate mass shootings from 1976 to 2018 had paranoid schizophrenia, and 60% of the shooters “had been either diagnosed with a mental disorder or demonstrated signs of serious mental illness prior to the attack.” Some examples include the perpetrators of the slaughters at:

  • Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
  • Sandy Hook Elementary School.
  • Virginia Tech.
  • Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
  • the Orlando Pulse Nightclub.
  • an Aurora, Colorado movie theater.
  • a Boulder, Colorado grocery store.
  • Fort Lauderdale International Airport.
  • the Tucson, Arizona “Congress on Your Corner” event with Gabby Giffords.

In comparison, less than 1% of the U.S. general population have schizophrenia or a related disorder, and 4.6% of noninstitutionalized U.S. adults have a serious mental illness.

Perhaps more telling, the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology published a study of people who committed a mass shooting from 1982 to 2019 and survived. The study focused on the survivors, as opposed to those who died, because the ensuing legal proceedings revealed “the most reliable psychiatric information.” Among the 35 mass shooters who survived, 51% had schizophrenia, and 80% had a psychiatric diagnosis.

Although 18.8% of U.S. adults received mental health services in 2021, people who desperately need such help often refuse care. For instance, the:

  • Parkland killer “received extensive mental and behavioral health services until he turned 18 and decided himself to stop treatment.”
  • Sandy Hook killer “refused to take suggested medication and did not engage in suggested behavior therapies.”
  • Virginia Tech killer “was the biggest impediment to stabilizing his mental health.”

It is important to understand that correlation does not prove causation, but there is a very strong correlation between the rise of indiscriminate mass shootings and the mass deinstitutionalization of psychiatric patients that occurred in the U.S. from 1955 to around 2010.

During that period, the portion of the U.S. population in public psychiatric hospitals declined by 96%. Highlighting the implications of this, a 1997 academic book about “America’s mental illness crisis” explains:

  • “The magnitude of deinstitutionalization of the severely mentally ill qualifies it as one of the largest social experiments in American history.”
  • About “763,391 severely mentally ill people (over three-quarters of a million) are living in the community today who would have been hospitalized 40 years ago.”

Over the periods before, during, and after the U.S. experiment in mass deinstitutionalization, the rates of indiscriminate mass shootings sextupled.

With no regard for those facts and without presenting any evidence to support his claims, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D–CT) has declared, “Spare me the bullshit about mental illness. We don’t have any more mental illness than any other country in the world. You cannot explain this through a prism of mental illness, because we don’t—we’re not an outlier on mental illness. We’re an outlier when it comes to access to firearms and the ability of criminals and very sick people to get their hands on firearms. That’s what makes America different.”

Likewise, media outlets such as the Washington Post and New York Times allege that the only material difference between the U.S. and developed countries with vastly lower murder rates is that America has more guns. Thus, they conclude that guns must be the problem—commonly using Japan as a comparator because it has very low gun ownership and murder rates.

In reality, however, a major difference is that the U.S. has one of the lowest rates of psychiatric institutionalization in the developed world, and Japan’s rate is about 10 times greater.

It is not easy to craft policies to ensure that people who seriously need help get it without forcing others to undergo unnecessary mental health treatments. However, cases like the Virginia Tech massacre—the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history—show there is much room for improvement. As detailed in the official report of this tragedy that cost the lives of 32 students and faculty:

  • “It is common practice to require students entering a new school, college, or university to present records of immunization. Why not records of serious emotional or mental problem too? … The answer is obvious: personal privacy.”
  • In social and classroom settings, the student engaged in a pattern of “threatening behavior,” such as taking out a knife at a party and “stabbing the carpet.”
  • A poetry professor “began noticing that fewer students were attending” her class, so she “asked a student what was going on, and he said, ‘It’s the boy … everyone’s afraid of him’.”
  • While the chair of the English department was personally working with the student, she wrote a letter to a dean stating that “all of his submissions so far have been about shooting or harming people because he’s angered by their authority or by their behavior. … I am encouraging him to see a counselor––something he’s resisted so far.”
  • After numerous incidents and a finding by a clinical social worker that the student “was mentally ill, was an imminent danger to self or others, and was not willing to be treated voluntarily,” the student was involuntarily hospitalized for one night. However, he was released after he falsely denied “any previous mental health treatment.” The psychiatrist took his word for this because that’s the “standard practice” and “privacy laws impede the gathering of collateral information.”
  • Upon his release, a special justice ruled that the student “presents an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness” and ordered him “to follow all recommended treatments.” However, the counseling center he went to had a “policy” of allowing “patients to decide whether to make a followup appointment,” and the student did not.

Similar circumstances surrounded the mental health of the mass murderer in Parkland and the perpetrators of other such massacres.

Arming Selected Teachers

Despite knee-jerk reactions to arming teachers, this action can significantly and discretely improve the safety of students for a fraction of the cost of employing officers or security guards. This is because teachers and other school employees:

  • who are willing and able to protect students can be quickly trained to be as safe and proficient with a firearm as police.
  • are ubiquitous in schools and can provide ample coverage of buildings and campuses, something that has been severely lacking in school massacres.
  • would covertly carry, giving them an advantage of surprise over would-be attackers.
  • can be seriously trained, appropriately armed, and generously paid for about 1% of what is already spent on schools.

Large crowds—like those found in schools, concerts, and sporting events—are prime targets for mass murderers. That’s why the Superdome in New Orleans—which has a seating capacity of 73,208 people—has more than “900 public safety personnel” on duty in the stadium and surrounding area during “large events such as football games.”

That amounts to one security personnel for every 80 people, including “armed public safety officers, non-armed game day security guards along with officers from the Louisiana State Police, New Orleans Police Department and Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Department.”

In comparison, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School—which had about 3,200 students at the time it was attacked—had only one armed guard on duty. This is about 1/40th of the security per person at the Superdome.

Columbine had about 1,900 students and one armed guard, or 1/24th of the Dome’s.

During the Virginia Tech slaughter, the campus had 26,370 students and “131 major buildings spread over 2,600 acres,” while “only 14” officers were on duty, including “5 on patrol and 9 in the office.” In other words, each patrol officer was responsible for protecting about 5,000 students, 25 buildings, and 500 acres.

Such security is grossly inadequate because killers can easily find a soft spot without guards. This need not be the case. Given that the average pupil/teacher ratio in public schools is about 16 to 1, arming one out of five teachers would equal the Dome’s ratio of 80 to 1.

Moreover, teachers would carry the weapons covertly, making it nearly impossible for assailants to determine who is armed and who is not. This can provide an element of surprise crucial to saving lives.

Contrary to claims spread by CNN and NBC, teachers can rival the firearm skills of police officers. This is because even recreational shooters fire as accurately as police, and most officers only receive a modest amount of firearm training.

In 2015, the International Journal of Police Science & Management published a study on the risks of “deadly police shootouts.” This involved testing “the level of shooting accuracy demonstrated by law enforcement recruits upon completion” of “their firearms training in comparison with novice” recruits who had not yet received this training. The study found:

  • “no difference” in accuracy at any distance between recruits who had completed law enforcement or military handgun training and those who only had “recreational” handgun experience.
  • trained officers were “only 10% more accurate” than recruits with “minimal/no experience” at ranges of 3 to 15 feet, which is where a “majority of gunfights and critical situations will likely” occur.

On average, police receive 71 hours of firearms instruction in their initial academy training and less than 15 hours per year thereafter. They also get very little real-world experience with firing guns. A 2017 Pew poll found that “only about a quarter (27%) of all officers say they have ever fired their service weapon” in the line of duty.

These facts point to the conclusion that selected and well-trained teachers would be very effective in protecting the lives of students. Even the general public saves far more lives with guns than are lost in accidents. U.S. civilians use guns to stop potentially lethal violence more than 100,000 times per year, while there are less than 600 fatal firearm accidents per year.

Despite claims that arming teachers would be too costly, it would amount to a drop in the bucket of current school spending. Even under a high-cost scenario where teachers receive five times more gun training than police and are well paid for their training time, the annual cost of equipping, training, and supervising one out of five teachers would be about 1% of government spending on schools.

Summary

Assumptions, politics, and sentiments aside, people can quickly and inexpensively reduce the risk of school shooting deaths by:

  • hardening the glass entryways to schools by treating them with films that prevent the doors from shattering if shot.
  • limiting the amount of fame bestowed on the perpetrators of mass murders.
  • implementing policies to ensure that people with serious psychiatric disorders get the help they need, even if they are unwilling to be treated.
  • arming and training selected teachers who are willing and able to protect students.

*****
This article was published by Just Facts and is reproduced with permission.

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The Transgender Cult Owns the Democratic Party thumbnail

The Transgender Cult Owns the Democratic Party

By Matt Margolis

Make no mistake about it, the transgender cult owns the Democratic Party. On Thursday, the United States House of Representatives voted to pass the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, but not a single present Democrat voted in favor of it.

The legislation, introduced by Rep. Greg Stuebe (R-Fla.), would amend Title IX by codifying protection based on biological sex, by making it “for a recipient of Federal financial assistance who operates, sponsors, or facilitates athletic programs or activities to permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls” and to clarify that “sex shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”

The final vote was 219 to 203, with 13 House members abstaining from voting.

“Today is a great day for America, for fairness for families, and most importantly for female athletes,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said after the bill passed. “House Republicans pledged before the last election our commitment to America to protect women and girls in sports. Today, we kept that promise.”

He added, “Unfortunately, today on the floor, not one Democrat could stand up for Title IX, or stand up for women in sports. I believe that’s wrong.” McCarthy then acknowledged a number of female athletes who testified before Congress and told their stories about how they were robbed of opportunities they’d worked so hard for because biological males were allowed to compete with them.

“These incredible women have dedicated their lives to the sports they love. We watched in hearing after hearing to hear their stories. For years of waking up early and training late into the evening. They pushed themselves to the limit as humanly possible, made sacrifice and they never gave up. They strive for excellence and they achieved it. And they learn the value of teamwork and hard work. But because they were forced to compete against biological men, they lost out on opportunities that they deserved. They watched their peers lose out on opportunities they deserved as well. So these women did something courageous: they spoke out. They spoke out for equal opportunity for privacy. For safety. For truth. For everything the previous generations of women who fought hard for Title IX. They are the current champions of those women 50 years ago, who fought for equality and fought for fairness in sports. And today, they had victory.”…..

*****

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Musk to Build New Chinese Factory, Despite CCP Crimes and Abuses thumbnail

Musk to Build New Chinese Factory, Despite CCP Crimes and Abuses

By Catherine Salgado

Twitter Inc. has apparently changed its name to the highly unimaginative X Corp., but that, in my opinion, isn’t the most important news this week related to Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk. Musk is once again selling out his supposed pro-free speech humanitarian principles for profit.

If a country’s government is committing genocide and religious persecution, runs a tyrannical censorship regime, demands every major business answer directly to the government, and is openly hostile to your country (the U.S.), would you be worried about doing business there? If you’re Elon Musk, the answer is an emphatic “no.” The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) many and ongoing crimes evidently do not disturb Musk, who is planning to expand his Tesla China branch with a huge new factory.

CCP state media outlet Xinhua News excitedly announced on April 9, Easter, that Tesla would be building a new “mega factory” in China to produce Megapack, the company’s huge energy-storage batteries. I guess labor really is a lot cheaper in China. So much for Musk calling himself a “free speech absolutist” and pontificating that he “love[s]” humanity; it’s profit over principles for the Tesla and Twitter CEO.

Musk’s hypocrisy is not shocking, however. Tesla workers were reportedly being forced to work in very inhumane conditions during China’s insane zero-COVID lockdowns in early 2022, and Musk endorsed the CCP’s unjust claims on Taiwan.

Tesla is set to break ground on the new battery plant in 2023’s third quarter, per Xinhua. The plant will then begin production in 2024’s second quarter, according to Tesla representatives at a signing ceremony in Shanghai and Xinhua. All major businesses in China are surveilled by and answerable to the CCP, and the CCP practices “civil-military fusion”–where everything in the economic and tech spheres is accessible to the Chinese military. The CCP is also history’s greatest mass murderer, having killed over 500 million people.

Musk is acting like a greedy traitor. It is time American businessmen started putting principles and patriotism ahead of profit and power.

*****
This article was published by Pro Deo et Libertate and is reproduced with permission.

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EXCLUSIVE: This Department Was at the Center of COVID-19 Overreach. Here’s What a Conservative President Should Do With It thumbnail

EXCLUSIVE: This Department Was at the Center of COVID-19 Overreach. Here’s What a Conservative President Should Do With It

By Tyler O’Neil

A coalition of conservative leaders and former federal government political appointees has compiled a game plan for the next conservative president to restore the Department of Health and Human Services to a focus on health care rather than forcing a leftist agenda down Americans’ throats.

From the COVID-19 pandemic to abortion funding and transgender mandates, HHS has twisted federal law and the pursuit of public health to marginalize people of faith and promote bureaucrats and leftist activism, warns a report edited by Roger Severino, former director of the HHS Office of Civil Rights under President Donald Trump. He argues that the next conservative president must reverse these abuses and return HHS to its proper role: the promotion of public health.

“Few areas of life are more important, and more subject to abuse, than public health,” Severino, vice president of Domestic Policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday. “Unfortunately, our public health agencies have replaced science and medicine with politics and ideology, and Americans now face shorter life spans as a result. Reform can only happen if entrenched special interests, from lawless bureaucratic leaders and Big Pharma, are reined in and rooted out.” (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)

Severino organized and edited a major report in the book “Mandate for Leadership,” compiled by the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, noting that after the COVID-19 pandemic was over, U.S. life expectancy continued to drop precipitously. A copy of the report on HHS was provided exclusively to The Daily Signal for this article.

The Heritage Foundation helped launch the 2025 Presidential Transition Project (also known as Project 2025) to equip a potential conservative president to govern effectively from Day One.

HHS has an outsized impact on the federal government, from its role in declaring public health emergencies to its management of Medicare and Medicaid to its $1.6 trillion annual budget. Under Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, HHS has also used its power over health policy to promote abortion and transgender ideology.

Severino’s team lays out five overarching goals for a conservative president intent on reshaping HHS: (1) protecting life from conception, protecting the rights of conscience of health care workers, and defending biological reality against gender identity ideology; (2) empowering patients to make their own health care choices, enabling providers to offer more options, and unleashing markets to drive down costs and improve quality; (3) promoting stable and flourishing married families instead of LGBT activism and single motherhood; (4) correcting the errors of the COVID-19 pandemic and preparing for the next health emergency; and (5) closing the “revolving door between government and Big Pharma,” where regulators leave government and work for companies they have regulated and pharmaceutical executives move from industry into regulatory agencies.

Severino’s team breaks down the massive bureaucracy of HHS and presents specific recommendations for each branch of the behemoth agency. This article focuses on a few of the specific issues that motivate the major changes he recommends.

1. COVID-19
Many of the report’s critiques and recommendations for a future HHS trace back to the department’s abuses during the COVID-19 pandemic. It notes that while the HHS secretary declared a public health emergency, “the threshold for what constitutes a public health emergency—how many cases, hospitalizations, deaths, etc.—was never defined.”

Severino’s team recommends that Congress “restrict HHS’s ability to declare indefinite public health emergencies,” in part by establishing a set time frame for any emergency.

The report also recommends that the HHS secretary “investigate, expose, and remediate any instances in which HHS violated people’s rights by” colluding with Big Tech companies to silence dissent on COVID-19.

Severino’s team says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should be broken up into two separate organizations: one dedicated to gathering scientific data and one responsible for making public health recommendations—”an inescapably political function.” The report notes that the CDC previously held back public health information on COVID-19 partially due to “fear that the information might be misinterpreted.”

“CDC should report on the risks and effectiveness of all infectious disease-mitigation measures dispassionately and leave the ‘should’ and ‘must’ policy calls to politically accountable parties,” the report suggests. “Congress should ensure that CDC’s legal authorities are clearly defined and limited to prevent” an “arbitrary and vacillating exercise of power,” as the U.S. experienced during the pandemic.

Severino’s report recommends that the Food and Drug Administration, not the CDC, should regulate vaccines, and calls for reforms to prevent the National Institutes of Health’s “inappropriate industry ties that create serious conflicts of interest.”

The report notes that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—Anthony Fauci’s division of the NIH—”owns half of the patent for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, among thousands of other pharma patents.” According to NIH documents, NIH Director Francis Collins, Fauci, and Fauci’s deputy director, Clifford Lane, all received royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies between 2009 and 2014.

The report faults NIH for funding “gain-of-function viral research that may have been responsible for COVID-19.”

2. Abortion
Severino’s team recommends HHS change many policies to protect unborn life and maternal health and to honor the religious convictions of Americans who object to the use of aborted baby body parts in medical research.

The CDC “should fund studies into the risks and complications of abortion” and require states to report abortion complications and babies born alive despite an attempted abortion, the team writes. It should prohibit research on aborted baby body parts, since such research can be “easily” replaced with research on adult stem cells. And it should avoid promoting abortion as health care.

The report condemns the CDC’s current abortion and maternal mortality reporting systems as “woefully inadequate,” since states provide those statistics on a voluntary basis. “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.”

Severino’s team urges the FDA to reconsider its approval of chemical abortion drugs, an approval that currently faces a court challenge. The report notes that the complication rater for chemical abortion is “four times higher” than that of surgical abortion and that the chemical abortion drug mifepristone has been associated with 26 deaths of pregnant mothers, over 1,000 hospitalizations, and thousands more adverse events. It also calls the approval of this drug “politicized and illegal from the start.”

The report also calls for the FDA to loosen its restrictions on foreign-made vaccines that were not derived through or tested on aborted baby cells, reinstituting a Trump-era waiver for Japanese-made vaccines.

It urges the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to block Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds and to redirect funds to “health centers that provide real health care for women.”

Severino’s team urges HHS to audit the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for compliance to the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal funding of abortions, and to perform a “full review” of HHS efforts to promote abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning Roe v. Wade.

The report also urges various HHS departments to rescind “ideologically motivated fearmongering” guidance that the Biden administration released in the wake of the court’s ruling, such as warnings about state governments “targeting” women for getting abortions.

3. Transgender Ideology
“Radical actors inside and outside government are promoting harmful identity politics that replaces biological sex with subjective notions of ‘gender identity,’” Severino’s team warns. The report urges a potential conservative president to reverse this trend.

Biden’s HHS has interpreted Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in health care, to forbid discrimination on the basis of “gender identity” and sexual orientation as well. Severino’s team urges a future HHS secretary to explicitly revoke this guidance, as HHS did under Trump.

The report says that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services should reissue and expand upon its 2016 decision that it cannot recommend “gender reassignment surgery” for Medicare beneficiaries, citing the “growing body of evidence that such interventions are dangerous.” (Many doctors recently testified in favor of a Florida rule blocking Medicaid coverage for experimental transgender interventions.)

The report also urges HHS to withdraw guidance allowing taxpayer funds to pay for cross-sex transitions.

It faults the NIH for having been “at the forefront in pushing junk gender science,” and encourages the agency to “fund studies into the short-term and long-term negative effects of [cross-sex] interventions, including ‘affirmation,’ puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries, and the likelihood of desistence [abandoning the desire to change one’s sex] if young people are given counseling that does not include medical or social interventions.”

4. Restoring Religious Liberty
Severino’s team notes that under liberal administrations, the office of HHS that he led, the Office for Civil Rights, “has amassed a poor record of devoting resources to conscience and religious freedom enforcement and is often complicit in approving or looking the other way at the administration’s own attacks on religious liberty.”

The report encourages a prospective conservative president to direct the Office for Civil Rights to return to the Trump-era policies that “initiated robust enforcement of these conscience laws.” It urges HHS to reestablish waivers for state and child welfare agencies, especially for faith-based adoption and foster care agencies, which had previously been excluded from federal programs because they were unwilling to place children with same-sex couples.

5. Restoring Medicare and Medicaid
Severino’s team warns that Medicare and Medicaid operate “runaway entitlements that stifle medical innovation, encourage fraud, and impede cost containment, in addition to which their fiscal future is in peril.”

The report urges the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to increase Medicare beneficiaries’ control over their own care; reduce regulatory burdens on doctors; ensure sustainability and value for both beneficiaries and taxpayers; and reduce fraud, waste, and abuse. It favors Medicare Advantage and urges Medicare to pay the same amount for outpatient procedures that it does for inpatient hospital services. It also encourages Medicare to reform payments along the lines of intensity and value of service, as opposed to a fee-for-service model.

Severino’s team warns that Medicaid has a higher percentage of improper payments than any other federal program, and encourages the program to stop covering nonmedical services like air conditioning and housing. The report says the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services should give states more flexibility to strengthen program integrity and to incentivize personal responsibility through work requirements and private insurance.

6. Medical Ethics
Severino’s team encourages HHS to decommission the CDC and NIH Foundations, nonprofit entities “whose boards are populated with pharmaceutical company executives.”

“Private donations to these foundations—a majority of them from pharmaceutical companies—should not be permitted to influence government decisions about research funding or public health policy,” the report urges.

“We must shut and lock the revolving door between government and Big Pharma,” it adds. “Regulators should have a long ‘cooling off period’ on their contracts (15 years would not be too long) that prevents them from working for companies they have regulated. Similarly, pharmaceutical company executives should be restricted from moving from industry into positions within regulatory agencies.”

Severino’s team recommends more changes to HHS, including a prioritization of fatherhood in the many social programs HHS controls, and the elimination of the Head Start preschool program and the NIH Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.

Correction: This article has been corrected to reflect the authorship of the Project 2025 HHS report.

*****
This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

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Transgender Inc.: A Running List Of Corporate Gender Insanity Insulting Women, Kids, And Reality thumbnail

Transgender Inc.: A Running List Of Corporate Gender Insanity Insulting Women, Kids, And Reality

By The Federalist Staff

Rather than highlight the dangerous and irreversible procedures associated with transgenderism, such as chemical castration and genital mutilation, many major corporations have opted to champion trans ideology — even for unsuspecting children. In order to help Americans hold these companies financially accountable, The Federalist has compiled a list of major businesses promoting and glorifying gender dysphoria.

24. Ulta
The women’s beauty company, Ulta, featured two men on its new “Beauty Of…” podcast last fall, including transgender-identifying TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney.

23. Calvin Klein
Calvin Klein has been advertising its underwear line with transgender models for years.

In May last year, the company celebrated Mother’s Day with a feature of transgender partners, one of whom was pregnant and bearded.

22. Nike
The athletic fashion company advertised its women’s products through a paid partnership with woman-imitator and TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney.

21. Build-a-Bear
The once family-friendly toy company decided to throw its hat in the rainbow ring with the March 2023 launch of a teddy bear inspired by drag performer RuPaul. According to Breitbart, the bear comes with “exaggerated drag make-up” and “a gold-sequined dress, gold pumps, and a flowing blonde wig.” On the Build-a-Bear website, the company refers to the bear with female pronouns.

20. The Hershey Company
For International Women’s Day 2023, the popular chocolate company put the face of Fae Johnstone, a man who masquerades as a woman, on its candy bar wrappers.

19. Anheuser-Busch
In a statement provided to Fox News, the beer company confirmed that its Bud Light brand has officially partnered with Dylan Mulvaney, a man who parades around in women’s clothes. On April 1, 2023, Mulvaney revealed on social media that Bud Light had sent him a beer can with his face on them to celebrate a year of “girlhood,” calling it his “most prized possession.”

18. Country Music Television
Several days after a woman who apparently identified as transgender killed six people, including three children, in a shooting at a Nashville Christian school, country singer Kelsea Ballerini took the stage at the 2023 CMT Awards to perform “If You Go Down (I’m Going Down Too)” alongside drag performers from “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

In an Instagram post, CMT declared itself and Ballerini to be “proud supporters” of the Trevor Project, an activist organization that assists young people in obtaining so-called “gender-affirming care,” meaning “hormones and genital surgeries rather than counseling to accept one’s biological sex.”

17. Apple
Apple users who visited the App Store on International Women’s Day 2023 were greeted with a giant poster of Naomi Hearts, a man who pretends to be a woman. Clicking on the poster directed users to an article detailing Hearts’ campaign for “self-love” and advocacy for dangerous trans procedures.

16. Google
Google India released an ad on International Women’s Day 2023 that featured Prakriti Soni, a man “who expressed the belief that he was a woman starting in 2020.”

15. Seafolly
The notable Australian swimwear company chose a bearded man posing as “nonbinary” to be the star of its advertising campaign prior to International Women’s Day 2023.

14. KitchenAid
Ahead of Women’s History Month, KitchenAid featured woman-pretender Dylan Mulvaney on the cover of its 2023 Color of the Year campaign launch and newsletter.

13. Disney
Arguably the most notable child entertainment corporation in the world, The Walt Disney Company has become obsessed with forcing leftists’ radical gender theory on unsuspecting children. In March 2022, unearthed videos revealed Disney’s plans to incorporate a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” into its children’s programming. Around the same time, the company publicly denounced Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education” law, which prevents school officials from instructing students in kindergarten through third grade on concepts such as “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”

The company has bent over backward to insert LGBT characters into its programming in recent years, including the Disney Plus show “Baymax!” and Marvel’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”

12. National Hockey League
In November 2022, the professional sports league posted a tweet promoting a tournament “comprised entirely of transgender and nonbinary players.” In response to fan criticism, the NHL doubled down, tweeting “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Nonbinary identity is real.”

11. Netflix
In March 2023, the streaming platform released an episode of “Ridley Jones” — a Netflix Jr. cartoon show created for preschoolers — in which a bison character comes out as “nonbinary” and explains the concept of pronouns.

10. M&Ms
In January 2022, the candymaker announced that the M&Ms in the company’s television ads would “dress and act in more gender-neutral ways.”

“We took a deep look at our characters, both inside and out, and have evolved their looks, personalities and backstories to be more representative of the dynamic and progressive world we live in,” said Jane Hwang, the global vice president for M&Ms.

In September 2022, M&Ms separately announced the creation of its purple “spokescandy,” an M&M “designed to represent acceptance and inclusivity.”

9. Cartoon Network
After President Joe Biden declared March 30, 2023, to be “Transgender Day of Visibility,” the children’s entertainment network posted a tweet commemorating the so-called holiday.

“Addressing someone using their pronouns and name shows that you RESPECT them as their authentic self!” the tweet reads. “We celebrate the journey of our trans and gender-non-conforming friends on this #TransgenderDayofVisibility!”

8. Paramount
The company’s streaming service, Paramount Plus, celebrated 2023’s “Trans Day of Visibility” by posting a tweet highlighting trans-identifying characters in its programming. The Paramount Plus Twitter account also posted a video of former “RuPaul’s Drag Race” contestant Kylie Sonique Love, who claimed “we are born this way, obviously.”

7. Black Entertainment Television
On March 31, 2023, the entertainment outlet posted a tweet highlighting Bré Rivera, a man pretending to be a woman who is purportedly the first so-called “Black Trans woman to lead a Black Trans fund.”

“There’s power in knowing who you are not only on #transdayofvisibility but every day,” the BET account wrote.

6. Twitch
In celebration of 2023’s “Trans Day of Visibility,” the streaming platform posted a tweet highlighting four transgender streamers.

5. Freeform
The television network posted a banner on its Twitter account that reads, “Trans Rights Are Human Rights,” to commemorate “Trans Day of Visibility.”

“This statement stays true 365 days, but using #TransDayofVisibility to make sure y’all are aware that this is and will always be a safe space,” the tweet reads.

4. WNBA
“Today we support #TransDayOfVisibility,” the NBA-subsidized league wrote in a March 31, 2023, tweet. “To our trans and gender-fluid community, we celebrate and will continue to stand with you.”

3. NASCAR
The motor sports organization announced it was partnering with the Carolinas LGBT+ Chamber of Commerce in January 2022. The Christian Post reported that the latter “describes itself as ‘an organization of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and LGBT+ and allied businesses, corporations and professionals throughout western North Carolina and most of South Carolina’ with a mission to ‘foster equity, inclusion and economic prosperity for the LGBTQ community through strategic policy, professional enrichment, ally partnerships and economic development.’”

2. Kate Spade
Similar to other major corporations, Kate Spade has partnered with social media influencer and woman-wannabe Dylan Mulvaney. In March 2023, Mulvaney posted a TikTok video of himself prancing around the company’s New York store, while promoting the Kate Spade 2023 women’s spring fashion line.

1. Nickelodeon
For “Pride Month,” the children’s entertainment network released a video in June 2021 in which drag queen Nina West sings about the meaning behind each color on the “pride flag.” That same month, the network also confirmed it had cast its first transgender-identifying teen actor in one of its children’s shows.

The network released a separate video featuring West as a cartoon that same year in its most recent adaptation of “Blue’s Clues.” During the sing-along, West discusses different kinds of families, including “those with trans, non-binary, lesbian and gay parents,” as the New York Post noted.

*****
This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

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The US Government Creates New Races thumbnail

The US Government Creates New Races

By Craig J. Cantoni

It has the divine power to create races but can’t fix the serious problems facing Americans.

The Book of Genesis has nothing on the US government.

The book tells the biblical story of how God created Adam, and, using one of his ribs, created Eve.  This happened in the Garden of Eden, which was probably located in sub-Saharan Africa, thus making the couple and their billions of descendants African.

Using its supernatural power, the US government is thinking of creating new “races.” It is not known if any ribs will be involved.

It is known, however, that one of the new races would be split off from an existing race, similar to how God split Eve from Adam.  The existing “race” would continue to be called White, and the new “race” would be called MENA, which stands for Middle East and North Africa.

The cockamamie notion behind the proposed split is that European Whites are a different race than MENA Whites.

At the same time, the current ethnic category of Hispanics would be miraculously transformed into a separate and distinct race.  In other words, the numerous ethnic groups, nationalities, and skin shades in the Hispanic category would become homogenous by decree. Hey, if Jesus could turn water into wine, the government can turn ethnicity into race?

These changes would leave the US with seven races:  White, MENA, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American.  This means that the hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups in the world and in the US would be reduced to these arbitrary seven, in a mockery of diversity.

There is little basis in science for any of this, whether it is the science of genetics, anthropology, ethnography, or sociology.  But the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving US government doesn’t have to follow the science.

If the new races were to come to be, almost all of America’s institutions and citizens would obediently follow the government’s lead and, without question, begin to categorize themselves and everyone else accordingly.

After all, most Americans didn’t question the original six racial categories when they were first created.  Nor did they understand how the categories came to be and how they would be used for nefarious purposes.

I know the history, for the simple reason that over my career I was at the vanguard of equal rights and equal opportunity.  I saw firsthand how the categories interfered with those goals.

David E. Bernstein knows the history even better than I do.  He details the history in his scholarly book, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America.  What began as a noble effort to help African Americans overcome the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow turned into identity politics, in which other groups lobbied to be classified as disadvantaged races and minorities.  That in turn led to a feeding frenzy in which the groups fought for such racial spoils as race-based set-asides, small business loans, government contracts, and college preferences.

Today, the racial categories are used in diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which is a misnomer, because the programs are intended to exclude Whites, even the roughly 30 million ones in poverty, and increasingly, to exclude Asians.

Admittedly, I take the exclusion personally.  You see, my impoverished and unskilled immigrant grandparents were considered non-White and treated accordingly when they immigrated to America.  The same for my working-class parents for much of their lives.  And the same for other Southern Europeans, as well as for Eastern Europeans, Jews, Armenians, and many others.  Now all of us are considered White, privileged, and racist.  It’s as if our DNA had been suddenly replaced by the DNA of Anglo-Saxons.

Curiously, Hispanics are not seen as White in the new racial scheme, although many of them have ancestors from a part of Europe that is at the same latitude as most of Italy, which is considered White by those obsessed with color.  As such, Hispanics escape being stereotyped as privileged and racist and aren’t blamed for slavery, although Hispanics brought more slaves to the Americas than the English and Dutch did—and began doing so long before 1619.

So, what is my real race?  The answer can be found in history and geography, but the government’s race classifiers apparently don’t know history and geography.  For example, they don’t seem to know how close North Africa is to Italy, or that invaders and traders from the Middle East and North Africa spread their DNA across the Italian peninsula over millennia, as did Greeks, Persians, Goths, Gauls, Neanderthals, and others.  Romans also spread their DNA in other lands, including in England, where they taught the locals how to bathe.

Anyway, to answer the question, my race is a mongrel.

It’s a similar story of cross-fertilization and genetic exchange throughout history and throughout the world.  Take the most prolific DNA spreader in history, Genghis Khan.  One of every 200 people alive today has some of Khan’s DNA. His empire, the Mongolian Empire, covered the largest amount of contiguous territory in history, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Danube, to the Persian Gulf.  Mongolians were colonizers par excellence.

Present-day Mongolians are not into cancel culture and the removal of statues of notorious people in their history.  They are proud of their warrior history and their subjugation of other peoples.  That’s evidenced by the stainless steel statue of Genghis Khan on horseback, which is located 33 miles from the nation’s capital.  The statue is 130 ft. tall and is on top of a three-story museum/monument.  Visitors can walk up a stairway through the horse’s chest and neck to reach a vantage point with a panoramic view of the countryside.

So, what race are Mongolians?  Are they Asian?  Well, in spite of what the US government believes, Asia is a geographical area, not a race.

These questions about Mongolians are very germane to the issue of the government’s seven races.  That’s because the word “Mongoloid” is derived from the word “Mongol” and was once used to designate a race.  Here’s what Wikipedia says about that:

Mongoloid is an obsolete racial grouping of various peoples indigenous to large parts of Asia, the Americas, and some regions in Europe and Oceania. The term is derived from a now-disproven theory of biological race. In the past, other terms such as “Mongolian race”, “yellow”, “Asiatic” and “Oriental” have been used as synonyms.

The concept of dividing humankind into the Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid races was introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History. It was further developed by Western scholars in the context of racist ideologies during the age of colonialism. With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: “The belief in ‘races’ as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past.”

Mongolian Americans expose the fallacy and lie of DEI, which claims to want social, economic, and political justice for so-called minorities.  Mongolian Americans are a true minority, in that they have small numbers and little political power.  Yet they are forgotten in pushes for diversity on boards of directors, in college admissions, and in political offices.  Virtue-signaling companies don’t feature them in TV commercials and ads.  No one takes to the streets on their behalf.  And, to add insult to injury, their heritage is erased by force-fitting them into one of the official “races.”

Mongolian Americans are not the only forgotten people.  Scores of other true minority groups are also forgotten.  The “minority” groups that are not forgotten are the ones that have large numbers and considerable political and media power.

I’ll end on a personal note

My immediate family includes a married couple who would be characterized as an interracial couple by those who see everyone in terms of the government’s official races.  My wife and I see them as loved ones and good people.

They will soon be the parents of a baby girl.  She will not fit into any of the official racial categories, but the government and the DEI industry will want to assign her to one.

They should mind their own business and stop playing God.

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Former Champion Swimmer Riley Gaines Assaulted While Advocating For Women in Sports thumbnail

Former Champion Swimmer Riley Gaines Assaulted While Advocating For Women in Sports

By Rick Moran

The scene at San Francisco State University was surreal. A champion female athlete speaking about maintaining the integrity of women’s sports was shouted down, assaulted, and chased from a speaking engagement sponsored by Turning Point USA.

The woman screaming “Trans rights are human rights” needs some sort of intervention — or a straitjacket.

Gaines has become a leading advocate for women in sports and has thus had a bullseye stuck on her back by radicals.

The Independent Women’s Forum issued a statement of support for Gaines and condemned the violence against her.

“We strongly condemn the violence perpetrated against [IWF] spokeswoman Riley Gaines on SFSU campus. Riley was violently accosted, ambushed, and physically assaulted during a speech on sex discrimination women face in their own single-sex sports category,” the group wrote on Twitter.

Gaines’s agent, Eli Bremer, said the attack would not prevent Riley from speaking out.

“Instead of a thoughtful discussion tonight at SFSU, Riley was violently accosted, shouted at, physically assaulted, and barricaded in a room by protestors. It is stunning that in America in 2023, it is acceptable for biological male students to violently assault a woman for standing up for women’s rights,” Bremer said in a statement. “This will not stop Riley from boldly educating people of the dangers of biological males in women’s sports. She will continue to speak the truth against the radical left that no longer understands the difference between men and women.”

After being physically assaulted and driven from her speaking venue, Gaines was forced to barricade herself in a room for three hours while police tried to get the mob to disperse. She was finally able to leave with a police escort…..

*****

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