Majority of Americans Support Restrictions on Abortion As Nation Awaits Supreme Court Ruling thumbnail

Majority of Americans Support Restrictions on Abortion As Nation Awaits Supreme Court Ruling

By Casey Harper

As the nation awaits a landmark abortion ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, newly released polling data show that the majority of Americans support limits on abortion.

Convention of States Action, along with the Trafalgar group, released a new poll showing that 57.6% of Americans say “abortion should only be legal in specific circumstances.” Those limits vary based on the voters’ preferences but include limiting which trimester abortions can be performed or allowing abortions only in cases of rape or incest.

Overall, though, unfettered abortion access has very little support. The poll found that only 11.6% of those surveyed said “abortion should be legal up until the moment of birth, including partial-birth.”

“The left is pulling out all the stops in an attempt to create the perception that a majority of Americans support unrestricted abortion,” said Mark Meckler, president of Convention of States Action. “But as these numbers show, American voters – including more than a third of Democrats – have paid attention to the science of fetal development, and support a variety of restrictions on abortion.”

After documents were leaked from the Supreme Court, the high court is now expected to overturn Roe v. Wade and allow individual states to determine their own abortion laws. That decision, though, has not been finalized.

The issue has become a major political football with the upcoming midterm elections. Republicans have focused on economic issues, and are expected to make big gains in November. Democrats, though, have said the abortion issue could be used to turn the tables this fall.

The poll, though, found independents favor restrictions, with 54.6% of surveyed independent voters saying abortion “should only be legal in specific circumstances.” On top of that, one out of three Democrats supports strict limits on abortion.

According to the poll, 45.3% of surveyed Democrats say “abortion should be legal in the first and second trimesters” while only 18.8% say abortion “should be legal up until the moment of birth, including partial-birth.”

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

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White House Press Secretary ‘Encourages’ Angry Mobs Surrounding Supreme Court Justices’ Homes thumbnail

White House Press Secretary ‘Encourages’ Angry Mobs Surrounding Supreme Court Justices’ Homes

By Kennedy Kruse

[Former] White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki  voiced support for the pro-abortion mobs gathering outside U.S. Supreme Court justices’ homes as the justices are being protected with increased security amid threats against their lives and family members.

“I know that there is an outrage right now about protests that have been peaceful to date,” Psaki said in a May 10 press briefing. “We certainly continue to encourage that outside of judge’s homes.”

Since the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion that would return abortion policy to elected representatives through overturning Roe v. Wade, pro-abortionists have vocally and violently expressed their fury in an attempt to influence the court’s decision. Recently, their actions expanded to congregating outside justices’ homes with signs and chanting phrases such as “Our bodies, hands-off.”

Psaki condemned the right-wing as hypocrites for criticizing these protests while remaining silent about other public demonstrations, such as those outside homes of school board members or the Michigan secretary of state. However, according to the Federal U.S. Code 1507, it is illegal for anyone to picket or parade outside homes where judges reside “with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge.” The Biden Department of Justice has so far refrained from enforcing this law while angry mobs surround the homes of constitutionalist Supreme Court justices.

A poll conducted by the Convention of States Action, in partnership with The Trafalgar Group, found that a majority of Americans do not support the protests.

In their survey, they asked 1,000 likely voters for 2022 nationwide the question, “Do you believe that publishing the home addresses of the five U.S. Supreme Court Justices and calling for protests at their private homes is an acceptable way to protest the High Court’s upcoming decision on Roe v. Wade?”

Three-quarters of American voters answered “no.”

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

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America is now aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called disinformation a “threat” that needs to be addressed with federal law enforcement power. (Is it coincidental that Elon Musk will shortly take Twitter private and re-establish a free speech platform in America?)

This new DHS office is the Biden Speech Police and represents an existential threat to our First Amendment and our Republic. Please click the adjacent red TAKE ACTION link for the resources to inform your Senators and Representatives about this unconstitutional and tyrannical assault on American Free Speech and our fierce rejection of it.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen Says Abortion Restriction is Bad For the Economy thumbnail

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen Says Abortion Restriction is Bad For the Economy

By Neland Nobel

Usually, the abortion issue is so difficult, because at least one side of the argument contends a baby is being killed. One side sees a human that has value and standing, while the other side tries to argue it is not human life independent of the mother. A pregnancy becomes sort of like a mole to be removed at the discretion solely of the mother, even though a man is not involved in forming a mole and the mole can never live an independent life.

One side says the living thing must be “viable”, although that is not defined. Those of us who have been parents might contend that might be around the age of 25.

If the standing of the baby is put on an equal legal and moral footing with the mother, the argument devolves to the discussion of whether new human life is worth the inconvenience to the mother. Oh, we all know that some contend the baby in early stages are a clump of cells. But these cell clumps cannot become asparagus, they are human cells that form a baby much earlier in pregnancy than was thought back in 1973.

Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury has decided to wade into the emotionally tangled abortion argument with a novel moral free view. According to her, abortion is good for the economy

A prominent economist in her own right, and the wife of a Nobel Prize-winning economist, and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, she said this before Congress with the obvious timing of trying to urge the Senate to pass Federal abortion legislation, which it failed to do.

What triggered her remarks, besides the question asked, is her belief that the recently illegally obtained leaked opinion means the end of abortion, and that therefore the Federal government should act.

It doesn’t. It means it will be decided democratically by the states. Thus, some states may have no restrictions, some states might have some restrictions, and some states may outlaw it.  She does not know how this will turn out any more than anyone else. So, her first assumption is wrong.  But what about her economic argument?

She tacitly admits that we are talking about is a baby because she goes on to argue that women, having to take care of a baby, have to modify their educational and professional choices and that these decisions could reduce female productivity and potential, and hence economic growth

Data on abortions often comes from the Guttmacher Institute, which is part of the abortion industry, so should be suspect. They suggest that 1 in 4 women have abortionsWhat they don’t say is that they are highly concentrated in the Black community. Thus, abortion is among a minority of women, therefore an even smaller portion of the entire population, and concentrated among the poor. Abortion is not ongoing but rather concentrated among women in their 20s. Pregnancy itself only affects a portion of a woman’s life. Assuming the validity of the argument, that seems unlikely to move a $20 Trillion economy.

Notice the implicit argument that abortion is birth control. It isn’t. It results from a lack of birth control. Birth control today is reliable, available, and very inexpensive. Birth control allows women to be sexually active and allows them to complete their education.

Before birth control, most people knew not to engage in sex until they were ready emotionally and financially. Often that meant, waiting for a good life partner. So, between birth control, and self-control, women will have a wide latitude to acquire skills. Their opportunities will not disappear because some restrictions might be placed on abortion.

It is pretty clear the economy grew quite rapidly after the industrial revolution and the standard of living climbed higher and higher, from roughly $2 a day in 1750 to about $300 dollars a day today. During most of that period, there was no state-subsidized unrestricted abortion. How did the economy manage to grow before Roe if most women were being inconvenienced by children?

Oh, because children were needed for agriculture. Really? After World War II, the global economy boomed despite a gigantic baby boom. How come all those kids did not slow down the economy? There is a better case to be made, that they helped the economic boom, with all the cars and furniture, housing developments, and schools that needed to be built. Exactly how does a shrinking population stimulate demand?

Economic growth, boiled down to its essence, is productivity plus population growth. Rampant abortion certainly reduces one part of the equation and it is not clear if it adds to the other.

There is also scant evidence that among poor blacks where abortion is most frequent, those special skills are acquired whereby productivity is increased.  Indeed, the skill that seems developed is generational welfare cases.

There is another obvious flaw in her argument. The dreaded tradeoff between economic conditions and raising children must be made by women who have children all the time. In fact, it is the story of most families.Most women manage to get educated and work and yet have children. We marvel at the tradeoffs most working mothers perform. Working mothers, and mothers that work after children, are among our most productive workers.

Some mothers even leave the workforce for a while, only to return later. Motherhood is not an economic ball and chain.

In many families today, the woman makes more money than does the man, and men are expected to participate in household activities far beyond what their grandfathers did. In short, most families with children work it out, with both parents working. Sometimes Dad has to alter his plans as well.

She seems to imply if you don’t abort the baby, the family, and the nation will be impoverished. That clearly is not the case. Abortion rates have continued to fall since 1973 and the economy grew pretty nicely. If what she alleges is true, how does she explain that?

Many women quite sensibly wish to have a male partner when having children. Studies show that married men with children work harder and are generally more successful than unmarried men. That would seem an economic offset. Therefore, it is hard to see her argument unless her view is narrowed to only the poorest women, who cannot, or will not pair with a man.

It is also interesting that Democrats make the argument that children from poor women are a burden to the economy and society when their immigration policies are geared towards importing as many poor women with children as possible. These female “migrants” don’t abort their babies, they have them at our expense in our hospitals.

Fewer children create a problem for the economy on a variety of levels. It means less demand, and fewer taxpayers to support our unfunded social entitlement system. This Ponzi-like system was never actuarily designed to support a large population on the back of a shrinking one. That is why Social Security and Medicare are going broke. Sure, there are other problems with those two gigantic programs, but the most severe problem is that in 1954 there were about 14 workers supporting one retired person. Today there are about 3 workers for each retired person, and even that low level is shrinking.

In the broader sense, Yellen misses another important economic principle. There are two kinds of capital: human capital and physical capital. Of the two, human capital is far more important as it is the grey matter between the ears that invent new machines, new technology, and new ways of doing things. Without human capital, there can’t be physical capital.

Even natural resources are not valuable without human capital. For example, Native Americans roamed over vast lands that had oil, gold, and copper. However, given their state of technology and nomadic lifestyle, it was completely worthless to them. It was not until human capital found ways to use those resources that they became valuable.

The trouble with Progressives is that they see people as mouths to feed in an economy that is a zero-sum game. More kids take resources from something else. Or as Paul Ehrlich and some environmentalists see it, more kids harm the earth.

Conservatives certainly see a mouth to feed, but they see two hands and a brain that can deal with the problem. The ultimate resource is the human brain, which if unleashed by freedom, can take sand and turn it into a semiconductor that can process more data than a stadium full of abacuses.

Human brains can only come from humans, new humans to replace those that die. When you abort a large segment of the future population, you produce less human capital, the basis for all wealth.

How many craftsmen, inventors, teachers, soldiers, statesmen, scientists, and musicians have we killed off? It is estimated more than 60 million. That is a lot of human capital to destroy.

Abortion is both a difficult legal and moral issue. But bottom line, the question is do you like people, and do you think humans are worthwhile? Progressives seem to hate people but love mankind.

It is clear that the party that says they support the aspirations of Black people doesn’t seem to mind if a Black mother is 8 times more likely to abort than and Caucasian mother. Black women account for 38% of all abortions, yet are only about 6% of the population. But reducing the Black population was always the aim of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. She wanted only the “right kind of people” to have babies. Yellen quite inadvertently gets uncomfortably close to the assumptions of Sanger.

Finally, if we want to discuss what harms the economy, it would be worthwhile to review how Yellen as Federal Reserve Chairman, and as Treasury Secretary, helped unleash the worst inflation in 40 years, distorted capital markets with huge Fed bond purchases, zero interest rates, and massive Covid relief with printed money.

Want to look for causes of economic malaise? The lady should look in the mirror.

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America is now aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called disinformation a “threat” that needs to be addressed with federal law enforcement power. (Is it coincidental that Elon Musk will shortly take Twitter private and re-establish a free speech platform in America?)

This new DHS office is the Biden Speech Police and represents an existential threat to our First Amendment and our Republic. Please click the adjacent red TAKE ACTION link for the resources to inform your Senators and Representatives about this unconstitutional and tyrannical assault on American Free Speech and our fierce rejection of it.

The Homeless Election Battle thumbnail

The Homeless Election Battle

By Bruce Bialosky

When I had the opportunity to engage one of the major candidates for Mayor of Los Angeles, I stated there are only two issues in the race.  The first being proper funding and use of the police and the second being the Homeless.  The candidate agreed with me and the issues for the June 7th election were defined.

Karen Bass announced her candidacy soon thereafter and took the lead in the polls.  She released with great fanfare her own detailed policy on Homelessness.  The policy is linked here https://karenbass.com/policies/homelessness/.  I contacted her campaign to query them on what they had proposed, but they were fearful of answering legitimate questions from journalists who were not from sycophantic press outlets.

Their proposed plan left open significant items, to which I asked the following questions:

  1. The city, county, and state have been spending extensively on this issue. How specifically does your plan differ from what has been done in the last few years?
  2. Mayor Garcetti committed close to a billion dollars for the current fiscal year. Can you tell us how much has been spent by the city on the homeless issue during the last four years of the Garcetti administration?
  3. Most if not all of us would like to know who Ms. Bass has in mind as the Homeless Chief since this is a critical issue in Los Angeles, so who would that be?
  4. The plan calls for ending street encampments in the first year of her term. How exactly are you planning to clear all the encampments which appear more like MASH units moving from property to property?
  5. I am working on a homeless issue that involves city, county, and state land. I am getting the runaround about who is responsible to do what.  Specifically, how do you plan to remedy this as residents do not care whose land it is within the city’s confines?  What is your response?
  6. You state that 50% of the homeless are either mentally ill or on drugs. How did you derive that figure?
  7. You cite that 59% of homelessness is because of economic issues. Where did you get that figure?
  8. Are you saying that these people are gainfully employed or employable and just cannot afford housing? If so, how many homeless are currently employed as a percentage?  How many go to work each day?
  9. I have had discussions with people on the front lines of the homeless issue and have been told a significant percentage of people who are homeless in the Los Angeles area are transplants. In other words, they moved here because of the weather and particularly the government benefits provided.  Your plan did not address this issue.  Did the studies you cited address this issue? Why should the residents of Los Angeles pay for the costs of extensive housing, medical and other benefits to homeless people who relocate from other urban areas?

The candidates talk about how they are going to cure the homeless problem, but rarely speak of the ongoing costs.  They certainly do not delve into how many of these people are not Los Angeles residents which brings to question why the people of Los Angeles are bearing the cost.  People do not realize that the current combined budget for Los Angeles City and County is about $1.5 billion.  That is a stunning figure which is enlarged by the amount the State of California is pouring into the problem.

The question the Bass Campaign does not want to answer is why they believe these figures — that 59% of homelessness is due to economic issues and not drugs or mental illness.  Multiple workers have told me most of the people they relocate off properties where the Homeless are squatting want to stay where they are.  In the case I dealt with in Studio City, some moved elsewhere while others just relocated to adjacent sites where their removal from the area was delayed for another few months.

Then Rick Caruso jumped in with his tough-guy campaign claiming he can solve the problem: https://carusocan.com/issues/homelessness/.  His plan does not answer the same questions — again how much he is spending of our money housing people who are not even from this area.  Building housing units without curing these people of their drug use and properly medicating them for mental health challenges is a waste.  At least Caruso’s campaign consultant who drafted his plan does not perpetuate the lie that these people are homeless due to economic issues, but even their figure of how many are on the streets because of economic issues is far too high.

One highly placed source tried to help me access where this money is being spent in the city of Los Angeles.  We found it was impossible to obtain the details even for highly placed city officials.

Candidates like Joe Buscaino, Kevin de Leon, and Mike Feuer need to tell us what their plans are and whether they are going to continue draining the wallets of local residents as elected officials have in the recent past with negative results.

We need answers unless you want the crime, harassment, squalor, and other despicable effects of this homeless issue to go on for another decade or more.

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This article was published by FlashReport and is reproduced with permission from the author.

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America is now aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called disinformation a “threat” that needs to be addressed with federal law enforcement power. (Is it coincidental that Elon Musk will shortly take Twitter private and re-establish a free speech platform in America?)

This new DHS office is the Biden Speech Police and represents an existential threat to our First Amendment and our Republic. Please click the adjacent red TAKE ACTION link for the resources to inform your Senators and Representatives about this unconstitutional and tyrannical assault on American Free Speech and our fierce rejection of it.

Biden White House Refuses to Condemn ‘Disgusting’ Efforts to Intimidate Supreme Court Justices thumbnail

Biden White House Refuses to Condemn ‘Disgusting’ Efforts to Intimidate Supreme Court Justices

By Laurel Duggan

White House press secretary Jen Psaki refused to say if President Joe Biden condemned efforts to intimidate Supreme Court justices by posting their addresses online and protesting outside their homes.

A left-wing group called Ruth Sent Us published the home addresses of the court’s six conservative justices online, called them “extremist,” and on Tuesday announced a May 11 protest outside their homes after a leaked draft opinion revealed the likely overturning of Roe v. Wade Monday. Psaki refused to say whether Biden supported the group’s actions in a Thursday press conference.

“Look, I think the president’s view is that there’s a lot of passion, a lot of fear, a lot of sadness from many, many people across this country about what they saw in that leaked document,” Psaki said when asked by Fox News’ Peter Doocy whether Biden supported these actions.

“We obviously want people’s privacy to be respected. We want people to protest peacefully if they want to—to protest,” Psaki said. “That is certainly what the president’s view would be.”

Psaki said the protests occurring at justices’ homes that day were peaceful, not extreme, and added that people were protesting because they were afraid they were going to lose their rights.

Conservative legal commentators condemned Psaki’s refusal to condemn the intimidation attempt.

“Disgusting that the White House is refusing to condemn this,” said Judicial Crisis Network President Carrie Severino.

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

TAKE ACTION

America is now aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called disinformation a “threat” that needs to be addressed with federal law enforcement power. (Is it coincidental that Elon Musk will shortly take Twitter private and re-establish a free speech platform in America?)

This new DHS office is the Biden Speech Police and represents an existential threat to our First Amendment and our Republic. Please click the adjacent red TAKE ACTION link for the resources to inform your Senators and Representatives about this unconstitutional and tyrannical assault on American Free Speech and our fierce rejection of it.

Justice Alito’s Leaked Majority Opinion Draft of Dobbs v. Jackson thumbnail

Justice Alito’s Leaked Majority Opinion Draft of Dobbs v. Jackson

By Shawnna Bolick

Editors’ Note. The following is a message to the supporters of AZ Representative Shawnna Bolick (LD 20) who is currently a Republican candidate for the Arizona Secretary of State. We share Ms. Bolick’s timely message about the egregious leak of the SCOTUS opinion and the left’s partisan attack on the judiciary, the correctness of overturning Roe v. Wade and Casey, and the central issue of states’ rights with the readers The Prickly Pear.

Two things are true about Justice Alito’s leaked majority opinion draft of Dobbs v. Jackson:

  1. This unprecedented disclosure is damaging to SCOTUS and our judicial system. Motivated by a partisan agenda, the Democrats are threatening the foundation of our institutions to raise money and GOTV efforts. If they are willing to undermine SCOTUS just for a few bucks and a few votes, there’s nothing they won’t do to tip the scales their way. I’m glad an investigation has been launched to find out who has caused irreparable harm to SCOTUS.
  2. Conservatives have reason to be cautiously optimistic that we might see the day that Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey are finally overturned and the egregious decision that has wrought chaos on our country is finally put to rest. The leaked draft is not official, but let’s remain hopeful that SCOTUS doesn’t succumb to the Democrats’ tactics to pressure the justices to change their vote.

But even in the leaked majority opinion draft, Justice Alito is 100% correct: “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision…Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”

This has always been about states’ rights, no matter how the Democrats try to spin it. That’s why I signed on to a pro-life amicus brief last fall to ensure that America’s laws match the science and reflect our commitment to human rights. I was also proud to vote to limit abortion after 15 weeks, which our Governor recently signed into law.

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Learn more about Shawnna Bolick at www.bolickforarizona.com.

TAKE ACTION

America is now aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called disinformation a “threat” that needs to be addressed with federal law enforcement power. (Is it coincidental that Elon Musk will shortly take Twitter private and re-establish a free speech platform in America?)

This new DHS office is the Biden Speech Police and represents an existential threat to our First Amendment and our Republic. Please click the adjacent red TAKE ACTION link for the resources to inform your Senators and Representatives about this unconstitutional and tyrannical assault on American Free Speech and our fierce rejection of it.

What the West Got Wrong About China thumbnail

What the West Got Wrong About China

By Habi Zang

In believing that China would one day become a liberal democratic society, Western elites demonstrated their ignorance of Chinese culture.

Until recently, for the past four decades, the myth that helping China get rich would make it into a democracy was part of the everyday “wisdom” in the West. However, China—the second-largest economy in the world—continues steering a totalitarian course with a new “core leader” of the Chinese Communist Party at the helm who builds massive concentration camps in Xinjiang, throws human-rights lawyers and Christians into jail, aggressively brandishes its military force at Taiwan, and even harasses Chinese Americans living in the US.

It’s often said that those egregious transgressions are an indication of the CCP regime’s rejection of “fundamental freedoms, human rights, and democratic norms,” as FBI director Christopher Wray stated on January 31, 2022. Wray was speaking about the Party’s decades-long operation on American soil of targeting, threatening, or kidnapping former Chinese nationals or American residents who openly criticize the Chinese government or advocate democratization in China. They even went further to interfere with the U.S. congressional election by threatening a military veteran who once was a student leader of the 1989 pro-democracy protest in Tienanmen square.

But what’s been violated here is not so much Chinese Americans’ human rights but their political rights as American citizens. Liberties stipulated in the Constitution of the United States are not abstract human rights, but have a political nature. Freedoms Americans have enjoyed are a legacy bequeathed by their forefathers. Americans must understand that freedom in the Land of Free is a tradition, not a conventionally-assumed axiom—a “self-evident” moral truth—that is unproven and unprovable, and more importantly, nonexistent in other societies. American freedom is prior to the American republic.

The reason why China would brazenly “disregard the international law” that many other nations voluntarily abide by is that the rule of law is not, and has never been, a moral principle in Chinese society.

Arendt and Confucius

Political theorists Hannah Arendt observed that the problem of freedom is crucial to the question of politics, and no political theory can afford to remain unconcerned with it. So, the question of freedom will serve in this piece as the Rosetta stone for our understanding of Chinese politics.

Mistakenly, freedom has always been positively associated with democracy, notwithstanding the precaution taken by America’s founding fathers and the penetrating insight offered by Tocqueville. It is probably due to this reason that Western democratic nations always invoke individual freedoms as the moral principle to legitimate their criticism of the CCP regime’s suppression of free speech, an independent press, and religious freedom. Within the framework of the Western political tradition, this is a legitimate and valid argument when examining human affairs. But all criticisms or indictments are a fool’s errand, exerting no effect whatsoever on the CCP regime, because Chinese society views humans and human affairs entirely differently from the West.

Juxtaposing Arendt’s account of freedom with Confucianism, we can start to make sense of why the CCP unabashedly behaves the way it does.

Distinct from the common definition of freedom, such as Isaiah Berlin’s treatment, Arendt defines freedom as the human capacity to start something new in the man-made world and attributes it solely to the fact that we are born into the world. For Arendt, freedom is not a value or a proposition, as it is now commonly interpreted, but a fact simply by virtue of our natality. “God created man in order to introduce into the world the faculty of beginning: freedom,” says Arendt.  Freedom to Arendt is humans’ raison d’etre, and it is the prerequisite for action which is the essence of politics for Arendt. “Men are free . . . as long as they act . . . for to be free and to act are the same.” Note that the Arendtian term action includes both speech and action, and it is the “only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter.” In other words, action is the only human activity that is exclusively political.

As intriguing and persuasive as her treatment of freedom is, Arendt’s conclusion does not go beyond the Western framework. Confined in her self-referential imagination which is anchored to the Judeo-Christian world, Arendt attributes freedom to natality. But it works only if we believe humans are born into the world as an individual being endowed with human dignity and rights because we are created in the image of the Creator.  

The traditional Chinese philosophy presents a different outlook on human nature, however. For Arendt, humans are the beginning of something new because birth is a beginning. But Confucianism, the predominant school of thought in Chinese tradition, sees birth as a derivative of the family line.

Confucius’ The Classic of Filial Piety (400–300 BC) provides the window through which we see the Confucian definition of humans. The very first teaching of filial piety states that “Our bodies—to every hair and bit of skin—are received by us from our parents, and we must not presume to injure or wound them.” This is the beginning of filial piety, and its end is to glorify one’s parents in the future by bringing fame and fortune to the family. Humans are not recognized as beings of intrinsic value but as a bundle of utilities.

Thus, we see filial piety stands in stark opposition to such liberal ideas as individual sovereignty. The liberal man is a rights-bearing individual entitled to his “life, liberty, and property,” whereas the Confucian man does not presume to own his own body. He only assumes his personhood through integrating himself into the family line. Liberalism postulates an autonomous self, while Confucianism negates the self.

In the despotically ruled society, such as China, where the man-made world is not “the scene for action and speech,” as Arendt put it, “freedom has no worldly reality.” What constitutes the social facts in China are obedience and uniformity, not freedom and individuality as in the West.

The Polis and Under Heaven

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim defines moral authority as a higher end, the good, that prescribes human affairs and legitimates moral judgment. In traditional Chinese society, it is filial piety that authorizes morality, in stark contrast to the modern Western political thought which states that the individual is sovereign. Filial piety, in Confucius’s words, is “a perfect virtue and all-embracing rule of conduct . . . filial piety is the root of (all) virtue, and (the stem) out of which grows (all moral) teaching.”

To understand Confucian ethics is to understand Chinese political culture, as historically political issues in China were essentially moral issues. Unlike Western politics, which is about administering justice or securing rights according to a consensus among citizens, the Chinese view politics as the making of moral judgments concerning right and wrong in accordance with Confucian ethics. Filial piety is the ethical solution Confucius proposes to end political conflicts, once and for all. “By the practice of it (filial piety) the people were brought to live in peace and harmony, and there was no ill-will between superiors and inferiors,” notes Confucius.

It was the rule of morality, not the rule of law, that defined Chinese politics.

In The Classics of Filial Piety—primarily a moral code of conduct—Confucius teaches that “of all the actions of man there is none greater than filial piety. In filial piety, there is nothing greater than the reverential awe of one’s father. In the reverential awe shown to one’s father, there is nothing greater than the making him the correlate of Heaven.” We can therefore conclude that the Durkheimian sense of the sacred object—the source of moral authority—is the father in both the literal and metaphorical sense. With this understanding, Confucianism can be viewed as a religion as manifested in the ritual of ancestor worship.

What the individual sovereignty is to liberalism, ancestor worship is to Confucianism. In Chinese society what the ruling class—the Party—and the subjects have in common is the patriarchal hierarchy itself. Rights of any sort do not have worldly reality.

When writing about authority, Arendt reminds us to differentiate between authority and coercion or persuasion. In “What Is Authority?” Arendt untangled the common, mistaken conflation of authority and power. Arendt’s treatment of authority is philosophical and therefore is different from Durkheim’s term which is a sociological construct. For Arendt, coercion (the external force) is used when authority breaks down. Persuasion, on the other hand, presupposes an egalitarian order and operates in argumentation. “Where arguments are used, authority is left in abeyance,” notes Arendt. By contrast, authority indicates the authoritarian relation—a hierarchy order rooted in statuses and allegiances—which is acknowledged and respected by both the one who commands and the ones who obey.

In contrast to the Greek city-state, the 20th-century Chinese philosopher Fung Yu-Lan characterizes the Chinese state as the family-state. In the Chinese tradition, household rule is vested solely in the household head—the despot in the Greek translation.

The way the Greek city-state handles domestic issues is through persuasion, whereas the household rule of the Chinese family-state is authoritarian. In the Greek polis reside citizens who participate in public affairs in the agora via arguing and reasoning, while under Heaven, the Chinese subjects obey the ruler (the Son of Heaven) who ought to be “benevolent” and “righteous,” acting like a father who disciplines and provides for his children.

Chinese Political Culture

China is the only ancient civilization that continues to exist today. Twenty-five dynasties constituted the long history of imperial China starting from the Qin dynasty (221-206 BC) and ending with the Qing in 1912. Those 25 different households have come and gone, but they have passed on the same mores and values, making the cultural continuity possible. The People’s Republic of China is but the twenty-sixth dynasty.

Despite Mao’s (ostensible) hatred for Chinese traditions, the CCP regime has in effect modeled itself on the imperial family state, taking over not just the land but its subjects too. Today, the public officeholders in China are still referred to as “父母官,” literally meaning the “father and mother officials.” On the other end of the hierarchical spectrum, the people still address themselves as “老百姓,” literally meaning “old hundred surnames.” It is a term that emerged with the founding of the Qin dynasty that ended feudalism in China. The nobility and the slaves disappeared, and in their stead emerged the class of the “old hundred surnames,” a submissive population of probably the world’s first centralized state.

The only difference between imperial China and the CCP regime is that in the past, there was a perpetual, unresolvable conflict between one’s filial piety to the state and to the family, but now this contradiction is solved by playing an intellectual sleight of hand. I grew up listening to the propaganda that the Chinese word “国家” (country) is combined with two characters: “国” meaning the state and “家” meaning the family. Without the state, the family cannot survive, as revealed in the sequence of this word. What’s been inculcated in the minds and hearts of the “old hundred surnames” is that the state is prior to the family.

For too long has the West remained ignorant of the deep structure of the Chinese society that has preserved entirely the traditional political culture. It is this culture, not the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, that explains the voluntary submissiveness among the “old hundred surnames” and their preference for stability over “dangerous freedom” (in Thomas Jefferson’s words). This is why the government brutally sent troops in 1989 to massacre peacefully protesting students. It is why the three student representatives, supposedly fighting for democracy, nevertheless knelt on the steps of the Great Hall while holding a petition paper over their heads—the typical manner of the subjects seeing the emperor—when petitioning for a dialogue with the government officials. It is why China unabashedly breached the Hong Kong Handover Treaty merely two decades later after the signing. And it is why in the spring of 2022, Xi Jinping, the “Emperor Xi,” was able to place Shanghai’s 26 million people under a lockdown that led to the separation of babies from their parents and even deaths due to starvation, lack of medical care, or suicide.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Human rights exist to the degree that they are respected by people in relations with each other and by government in relations with their citizens.” Well, in Chinese society what the ruling class—the Party—and the subjects have in common is the patriarchal hierarchy itself. Rights of any sort do not have worldly reality.

If only Washington politicians, think tanks, or pundits had understood the Chinese political culture, the delusion that a rich China would ultimately become a free China would never have passed into everyday “wisdom,” jeopardizing America’s interests and security. 

*****

This article was published in Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.

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America is now aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called disinformation a “threat” that needs to be addressed with federal law enforcement power. (Is it coincidental that Elon Musk will shortly take Twitter private and re-establish a free speech platform in America?)

This new DHS office is the Biden Speech Police and represents an existential threat to our First Amendment and our Republic. Please click the adjacent red TAKE ACTION link for the resources to inform your Senators and Representatives about this unconstitutional and tyrannical assault on American Free Speech and our fierce rejection of it.

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I Just Got Back from a Trip

By Bruce Bialosky

To Saturn. I was there for six years. Boy, have things changed. I am not talking about Joe Biden being President which is shocking enough. I am referring to the fact that the hottest issue in America is not even climate change. It is people changing gender, what gender you are, how you refer to yourself, and teaching children about their gender identity. Wow, things sure changed while I was gone.

When I left, the country was just adjusting to the Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage. Many people were delighted and the issue of being gay was now a thing of the past. From 1969 to 2015, not even 50 years, Gays went from The Stonewall Riots to being fully accepted. People didn’t care anymore whether someone was gay except for the odd person behind the tree. I had not cared for a long time as certified by the fact my Best Man at my wedding in 1986 was and is gay.

When I left for Saturn, the entire issue was settled. I returned to a massive uproar. I knew the Sparks song All You Ever Think About is Sex, but I figured it was obscure, now it had taken over the nation.

The groups supporting gay rights and gay marriage did not want to say, “we won, we are done.” So, they found a new cause – Transgenders. Thus, these activists are still in business and raising more money than ever. I asked many others if they ever thought there would be so much focus on such a small group of people, and they just looked at me in amazement that this has happened.

The problem is if you are not on board with people changing their gender, you are branded a bigot. Most people do not care if someone wants to change genders, they just do not want to hear about it and they do not want to pay for it.

A fracas broke out about males becoming females and participating in either high school or college sports. When anyone questioned the right to do so, they were branded a bigot. Here is something I noticed when I returned – not one of the people who were against former males participating in women’s sports had ever argued against former females participating in male sports. Why is that? If they only argued one way because they said it was unfair to the female athletes to compete against former males, can you really brand them a bigot? Doesn’t that provide validation that they are not arguing against Transgenders but instead arguing for fairness in sports competition?

Discussion about gender has become all the rage. What you call yourself is now a thing. When I left people referred to each other as men or women, he or she, her or him. Now there is a laundry list of names you can call yourself. There are new terms like “cisgender.” Who makes this stuff up? Don’t they have real jobs? And all the pronouns. And stating what you want (preferred) to be called. I was referred to a professor at U.C. Berkeley who is the sister of a childhood friend. I went on her Wiki page which stated her preferred pronoun was “They.” I read her bio and was deeply confused by the references made every time “They” was used. It reminded me of when people used to use the royal “We.” Our response looking at the person was always “What, do you have a mouse in your pocket?”

Boy, have things changed. It seems it is now mandatory to teach children about gender identity even as early as kindergarten. We used to focus young children on other matters like getting an education and learning how to read. One state decided that teachers may not discuss the matter with kids 5-8 years old and World War III broke out. I saw a video of three grown women skipping down a hallway arm-in-arm saying “Gay, Gay, Gay.” What has happened folks? Do six-year-olds need to hear this stuff? Will it not just confuse them? Can’t they just be kids? They will have plenty of time to deal with these matters and choose their preferred pronouns. In the end, isn’t that the role of their parents to discuss this with their children?

Then I saw a video of a teacher saying that because of this law he could not share the weekend activities he had with his gay partner with his students. I do not have a perfect memory, but I searched back in it and could not think of an instance where a teacher conveyed anything about their personal life to me. Not even when I was president of the School of Business at San Diego State and spent hours and hours with professors and the Dean. Certainly, my third-grade teacher never discussed even going to see the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra with George Szell or the Indians or Browns. It just did not happen, and I cannot see a reason it should. My, have things changed.

Yes, coming back from Saturn was shocking. Not only was all this going on, but the Chicago Cubs had won a World Series. Now we know the world has totally been turned upside down.

TAKE ACTION

America is now aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called disinformation a “threat” that needs to be addressed with federal law enforcement power. (Is it coincidental that Elon Musk will shortly take Twitter private and re-establish a free speech platform in America?)

This new DHS office is the Biden Speech Police and represents an existential threat to our First Amendment and our Republic. Please click the adjacent red TAKE ACTION link for the resources to inform your Senators and Representatives about this unconstitutional and tyrannical assault on American Free Speech and our fierce rejection of it.

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How The Climate Crusade Hijacked the Environmental Movement

By Tom Harris

Modern environmentalism has been taken over by an extremist cult that threatens to destroy the movement. This cult preys especially on young and impressionable people who lack the life experience to recognize when their goodwill and altruism are being taken advantage of. Like most cults, it is not backed by sound science, engineering, economics, or public policy. Yet it has been adopted by the elites in society—media, government, educators, corporate leaders, and even church officials—as a de facto social good that cannot be contested.

The cult is a belief in dangerous man-made climate change, of course. This entirely bogus crusade now thoroughly dominates the environmental movement. Take Earth Day, just past April 22nd, for example.

On Earth Day, “climate” appeared 10 times on the earthday.org home page. The first action item on the Greenpeace USA home page was a link to a new climate communications report. The United Nations International Mother Earth Day home page cited “climate” no less than seven times. Pollution was referenced once. Land once. Water and air not at all. Even Earth Day’s Google home page doodle took you to a page that showed the supposed impact of climate change.

Do a Google web search for any of the environmental movement’s most important days and you will see the same. Whether it’s Earth Hour (March 28 this year), Earth Month (April), Environment Day (June 5 this year) or Earth Day, climate change has completely hijacked the movement.

This has been going on for years. Instead of concentrating on issues affecting people today, the environmental movement has been taken over by long-term concerns about climate change no matter what else is happening in the world. For example, two years ago, UN Climate Chief Patricia Espinosa “urged the international community to remain focused on Earth Day 2020’s overarching theme of climate change, despite the COVID-19 crisis…” The Earth Day 2020 website went further and called, climate change “the biggest challenge to the future of humanity and the life-support systems that make our world habitable.”

But most people in the world apparently do not agree. For the almost 10 million people who voted in the UN’s “My World” poll that was on the web between 2013 and 2020, “Action on climate change” ranked dead last, despite the agency listing that priority first among issues to be selected from.

Such results are inconvenient for UN climate bureaucrats, so, after ending the My World survey, they are essentially running the poll again. This time, they ask the public to tell them: “WHICH SIX OF THE FOLLOWING GLOBAL GOALS ARE OF IMMEDIATE CONCERN TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILY?” So far, 582,106 people have voted and “Climate Action” is currently ranked 9th out of the 17 goals, securing about 10% of the votes cast.

When their surveys showed relatively low concern about environmental issues in their 2015 poll, Gallup proposed several causes of the decline, one of which should trouble the environmental movement strategists: they are, in effect, focused on the wrong issue. Gallup explained,

“The primary focus of the environmental movement has shifted toward long-term threats like global warming — issues about which Americans tend to worry less than about more immediate threats like pollution. Importantly, even as global warming has received greater attention as an environmental problem from politicians and the media in recent years, Americans’ worry about it is no higher now than when Gallup first asked about it in 1989.”

Most sensible people are environmentalists and want clean air, land, and water. Yet climate change now dominates, not just Earth Day, but the entire environmental movement, sucking funding and energies away from tackling important short and mid-term issues such as pollution and species at risk. Besides the strategic blunder of focussing on an issue the general public seems to not really care much about, there is a serious ethical problem that will eventually come back to haunt the movement.

Documents such as the Climate Change Reconsidered series of reports from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change illustrate that debate rages in the scientific community about the causes of climate change. Scientists cannot yet even agree on whether cooling or warming lies ahead, let alone how much we affect the climate. Yet global warming campaigners assert that “the science is settled.” We know for certain, they claim, that our carbon dioxide emissions will cause a planetary emergency unless we radically change our ways.

This makes no sense, of course. Uncertainty is inherent to all science, especially one as complicated as climate change.

The consequence of this overconfidence is tragic. According to the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative, of the over one-half trillion dollars that is now spent annually across the world on climate finance, 91% goes exclusively to mitigation, trying to control future climate states. Only 7% of global climate finance is dedicated solely to helping vulnerable people cope with climate change in the present. Based on a hypothesis about the causes of climate change, we are letting people suffer today so as to possibly help those yet to be born. As the public comes to understand this, they will soon regard the climate crusade as fundamentally immoral and today’s environmental movement as wholly misguided.

That scenario, not theoretical future climate, is what should most concern sensible environmentalists.

*****

This article was published by CFACT, Committee for A Constructive Tomorrow and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

America is now aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called disinformation a “threat” that needs to be addressed with federal law enforcement power. (Is it coincidental that Elon Musk will shortly take Twitter private and re-establish a free speech platform in America?)

This new DHS office is the Biden Speech Police and represents an existential threat to our First Amendment and our Republic. Please click the adjacent red TAKE ACTION link for the resources to inform your Senators and Representatives about this unconstitutional and tyrannical assault on American Free Speech and our fierce rejection of it.

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Here’s What to Watch Following Dobbs Draft Leak

By Melanie Israel

Politico leaked a draft version of a Supreme Court decision for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization late on May 2. It would uphold a Mississippi law protecting unborn children when they can feel pain—15 weeks of pregnancy—and overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Dated Feb. 10, the draft decision is not final. Pro-life Americans are feeling more hopeful than ever that the Supreme Court may soon correct a grave error and leave Roe in the dustbin of history. But the leak is a nakedly political attempt to get the justices to back down. The court must issue its Dobbs decision without delay.

Roe v. Wade was a poorly reasoned, wrongly decided decision that legalized abortion on demand across the country in 1973. Sixty-two million lives and half a century later, it has poisoned our laws, our courts, and our country.

But a new day might soon be dawning. Here’s what you need to know about the shifting policy landscape on abortion and what to watch for in the days and weeks to come.

Quick Facts: Abortion in America

To set the stage for discussions about the leaked draft and the fallout, here are some key facts to keep in mind.

The United States is an outlier when it comes to abortion policy, thanks to Roe. We’re one of only a handful of countries that allows elective late-term abortion—in the company of human rights violators like China and North Korea.

Despite charges to the contrary, the law at issue in the Dobbs case, which protects unborn children after 15 weeks gestation, isn’t remotely extreme compared to the rest of the world. In fact, 47 out of 50 European countries restrict elective abortion before 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Take polls purporting to show strong support for Roe v. Wade with a grain of salt. Most Americans don’t realize that a) Roe permits abortion at any time and b) overturning Roe doesn’t prohibit abortion overnight, but returns the issue to the American people.

Most Americans don’t support Roe’s radical regime that permits abortion on demand. Rather, Americans support key protections for unborn children.

Overturning Roe has never been the final goal of the pro-life movement. When that day comes, hopefully soon, the next phase of work—especially in state legislatures—will begin in earnest. Freed from the shadow of Roe, policymakers can protect many more women and unborn children from an abortion industry that profits from their deaths.

The Radical Left’s Response

Leaking the draft opinion was a shameless act of intimidation, coercion, and destruction. It was clearly meant to try to get one or more justices to change their mind. But the left won’t stop there.

Already, activists—and senators—are calling for the Senate to eliminate the filibuster, which is the Senate’s rule for extended debate. In the Senate, a 60-vote threshold is required to end debate on a piece of legislation. Doing away with this proud tradition of extended debate—which in previous years has been praised by some of the very members who today want to end it—would mean the Senate could pass radical pro-abortion legislation by a simple majority vote.

Many of the left are happy to change rules and norms when it doesn’t suit them or frustrates efforts to impose a deeply unpopular policy. Thus, they’re renewing their calls to “pack” the courts. Under this scheme, Congress would create new judicial vacancies so that President Joe Biden could nominate activist judges.

The goal, of course, would be for activist judges, once approved by the Senate, to impose the left’s abortion policies. Such a scheme of course amounts to a “hostile takeover of the judiciary.” It would politicize the courts and undermine the fundamental principle of separation of powers.

The left is also renewing its attempts to “codify” Roe v. Wade. What it really means is legislation like the so-called Women’s Health Protection Act. This act is far more radical than Roe, which itself permits abortion for any reason throughout pregnancy.

The Women’s Health Protection Act would repeal existing state laws, expressly prohibit future laws that regulate abortion and the abortion industry and place at risk long-standing federal policies that reflect more than 40 years of bipartisan consensus.

It also would threaten policies that disentangle tax dollars from abortion, conscience-protection laws, and state-level pro-life laws such as informed consent requirements, reflection periods, parental involvement laws, and more.

Beyond Congress, abortion advocates are turning to the Biden White House. They’re urging the Food and Drug Administration to argue that its regulations permitting telemedicine abortion preempt state laws to the contrary. This would mean that abortion providers would be able to circumvent laws in over a dozen states that prohibit telemedicine abortion.

They’re also calling for the federal government to lease land to abortion clinics. This could mean that an abortion clinic could operate on federal land even within a pro-life state.

What Next?

Our laws should reflect the simple truth that every life, from the moment of conception, has inherent dignity and should be protected.

For too long, Roe has been a barrier to enacting laws that protect women and unborn children from the brutality of abortion. The Supreme Court justices in the majority must refuse to cower to the left’s appalling tactics of intimidation. They should issue their opinion without delay, allowing a new day to dawn in our country.

States can then revive old laws. These include unenforced pre-Roe statutes, conditional laws in the event Roe is overturned, and laws like “heartbeat” bills that had been blocked by lower courts. They can also enact new laws that protect the youngest and most vulnerable.

Congress, for its part, must use all its constitutional authority to protect innocent unborn children in states that refuse to protect them from abortion after their heartbeats can be detected. It must continue the work to protect babies who survive abortions, stop the interstate flow of abortion drugs, and stop taxpayer dollars from funding the abortion industry.

Congress must also ensure that nobody is forced to violate his or her moral or religious convictions by participating in abortion.

Finally, policymakers at all levels of government must commit to the central goal of the pro-life cause: to see the day when every person, from the moment of conception, is protected in law and welcomed in life.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

America is now aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called disinformation a “threat” that needs to be addressed with federal law enforcement power. (Is it coincidental that Elon Musk will shortly take Twitter private and re-establish a free speech platform in America?)

This new DHS office is the Biden Speech Police and represents an existential threat to our First Amendment and our Republic. Please click the adjacent red TAKE ACTION link for the resources to inform your Senators and Representatives about this unconstitutional and tyrannical assault on American Free Speech and our fierce rejection of it.

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The End Of Tolerance

By John Hirschauer

Thomas Aquinas argued that human law, because it is “framed for a number of human beings the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue,” should not criminalize every vice. Instead, he argued, the civil power should ban “only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain.”

Needless to say, Aquinas was not a relativist. Thomas never denied that the acts in question were, in fact, vicious—violations of the divine law for which the offender could lose his eternal soul. His suggestion that the state “tolerate” certain vicious behaviors was a prudential concession to human nature, not an endorsement of vice.

Tolerance, both as a prudential concession to human nature and as a liberal value, has fallen out of fashion. In part, this is because tolerance is judgmental. To “tolerate” something—a poorly cooked meal, an annoying houseguest, the garish paint job on your neighbor’s house—acknowledges the existence of a standard from which the tolerated thing deviates. You “tolerate” your neighbor’s stupid yard sign not because “Science Is Real” qualifies as penetrating insight, but because you want to be polite.

British philosopher John Gray made this point in a 1992 essay, “Toleration: And the Currently Offensive Implication of Judgement.” He argued that, in spite of its hippy-dippy connotations, exercising tolerance actually requires “strong moral convictions.”

“When we tolerate a practice, a belief or a character trait, we let something be that we judge undesirable, false or at least inferior,” Gray wrote. “[O]ur toleration expresses the conviction that, despite its badness, the object of toleration should be left alone.”

It is because of this implication of judgment that tolerance has fallen out of fashion in favor of what the White House calls “affirmation,” that is, an unqualified endorsement of a person’s beliefs and choices. Behind this shift is the belief that nothing is really true or false, that what matters is not whether the emperor has clothes, only whether he’ll be really upset if you tell him he’s naked. The demand for affirmation always comes from a place of insecurity.

Secure people don’t care that other people hold them and their beliefs in contempt. There are plenty of people who merely “tolerate” my Catholic faith, for example, and some believe I’m going to suffer unthinkable torments for all eternity for failing to reverence Muhammad or observe the Jewish Sabbath. A few of them will tell me that to my face, which, given their convictions, is an act of charity. The fact that people might disapprove of my religious profession and think worms will pick at my flesh in eternal hellfire doesn’t particularly bother me, partially because I can’t control what they believe, and partially because I think they are wrong.

If you are insecure, however, if you don’t believe in your heart of hearts that your beliefs are aligned with reality or your actions are defensible, then the fact that “tolerance” implies a judgment of the behavior or belief in question leads you to demand affirmation instead. The demand for affirmation has reached the heights of our institutions. The Biden White House, for instance, has promoted “gender-affirming care,” hormonal and surgical interventions coupled with emotional reassurance, for people experiencing gender dysphoria. A Washington University report similarly called on the school to “create campuses at which sexual minority people would not be merely tolerated, but in fact, validated, affirmed, and celebrated as a vital part of the mosaic of diversity.” In both cases, the people involved are presumed to be so insecure that if even one person refuses to acknowledge their chosen identity, their entire sense of self will crumble like a house of cards.

We don’t extend this principle of affirmation to people with other “identities.” We don’t tell the Democratic activist to accept the premises of Republican politicians so as to protect that politician’s partisan identity. We don’t tell the Muslim who sincerely believes this author will spend an eternity mired in the flame that he must “affirm” and “validate” the specific religious claims made by Christianity so as to preserve my feelings. But the Colorado Civil Rights Commission will drag an obscure religious baker through the court system for years for refusing to bake a cake to affirm a gay couple.

Tolerance, whatever its demerits, at least allow people with serious convictions to amicably disagree with one another. Affirmation demands universal participation, even if we think the thing that we’re being asked to affirm is wrong. The former has become unfashionable because, as Gray put it, we live in a “post-Christian age” allergic “to the thought that we are flawed creatures whose lives will always contain evils.”

*****

This article was published by The American Conservative and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

America is now aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called disinformation a “threat” that needs to be addressed with federal law enforcement power. (Is it coincidental that Elon Musk will shortly take Twitter private and re-establish a free speech platform in America?)

This new DHS office is the Biden Speech Police and represents an existential threat to our First Amendment and our Republic. Please click the adjacent red TAKE ACTION link for the resources to inform your Senators and Representatives about this unconstitutional and tyrannical assault on American Free Speech and our fierce rejection of it.

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Amazon Employees Melt Down Over ‘Traumatic’ Conservative Children’s Book in Leaked Video

By Katrina Trinko

Once again, Amazon has shown it’s on the side of leftist activists, not free speech.

Matt Walsh, a popular conservative podcast host and writer at The Daily Wire, just released a children’s book titled “Johnny the Walrus.” The book, according to the description on Amazon, tells the tale of Johnny, who likes to pretend to be a dinosaur or a knight.

But one day “when the internet people find out Johnny likes to make-believe, he’s forced to make a decision between the little boy he is and the things he pretends to be—and he’s not allowed to change his mind,” states the description.

Amazon is clearly trying to squash Walsh’s book. 

According to Walsh, his picture book has been removed from the category of children’s books and moved to political books. Ads for the book on Amazon also have been rejected by the tech giant as not being “appropriate for all audiences”—an umbrella term for standards that ban advertising for books promoting incest and pedophilia, among other things.

Amazon did not respond to The Daily Signal’s emailed request for comment.

Despite all this, Walsh’s book is soaring on Amazon, becoming No. 1 in books Wednesday.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has targeted conservative books. Last year, Amazon blocked ads for the new book, “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution,” by Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and editor. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation, which attempted to purchase the ads.)

After The Daily Signal reported on its actions against the Gonzalez book, Amazon reversed its decision and claimed the ads initially were blocked due to “inaccurately enforced” policies.

Last year, Amazon also banned Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan T. Anderson’s book,  “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.”

In response to a letter from four U.S. senators inquiring as to why Amazon had stopped selling Anderson’s book, Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president for public policy, responded, “We have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” Anderson, however, notes that his book doesn’t characterize LGBTQ+ identities as a mental illness.

Meanwhile, while Anderson’s book is too dangerous, Amazon continues to sell Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” 

And just like every other Big Tech company, Amazon never seems to censor or block leftists. Nor does it treat leftist books as too political to be classified as children’s books.

Here’s a sampling of woke children’s books that Amazon still lists under the children’s books category:

1. “Jacob’s Room to Choose,” by Sarah and Ian Hoffman, is a picture book about Jacob, who likes to wear dresses and gets kicked out of the boys’ bathroom, and his friend Sophie, who has a similar experience in the girls’ bathroom.  “When their teacher finds out what happened, Jacob and Sophie, with the support [of] administration, lead change at their school as everyone discovers the many forms of gender expression and how to treat each other with respect,” states the description on Amazon.

2. “Antiracist Baby,” a board book by “How to Be an Antiracist” author Ibram X. Kendi, who champions critical race theory.

3. “I Am Jazz,” by Jessica Herthel, is a picture book that tells the story of TV personality Jazz Jennings. “From the time she was two years old, Jazz knew that she had a girl’s brain in a boy’s body,” states the description on Amazon, which adds that ultimately a doctor “said that Jazz was transgender and that she was born that way.”

4. “Jack (Not Jackie)” by Erica Silverman is about Susan, who realizes that her little sister “doesn’t like dresses or fairies-she likes ties and bugs!” The Amazon description continues, “Will she and her family be able to accept that Jackie identifies more as ‘Jack’?” and notes: “This book is published in partnership with GLAAD to accelerate LGBTQ inclusivity and acceptance.”

I could go on—there’s a shockingly robust selection of propaganda books for little leftists—but you get the point. On Amazon, it’s OK for people with the “right” views to write about gender identity for kids. But it’s not OK for Walsh, just because the views he holds aren’t seen as acceptable. 

Doubt that? Popular Twitter account Libs of TikTok released two videos Tuesday that appears to show an Amazon internal meeting where company employees discuss Walsh’s “Johnny the Walrus.”

“‘Johnny the Walrus’ is a bit of a problematic book—not a bit—it is not a bit of a problem, it’s one hell of a problem,” states a man who appears to be the meeting host. He adds at another point, “I also saw someone mention that this is really tough content if you’re transgender, if you’re gender nonbinary … and this is super triggering … I would understand if you needed to leave.”

Amazon did not respond to The Daily Signal’s email requesting comments on the videos.

And if you’re still wondering what the popular sentiment is at Amazon, consider this: In 2020, donations from Amazon employees to President Joe Biden’s campaign totaled $2.3 million, per Open Secrets. Donations to President Donald Trump’s campaign totaled a measly $289,000. 

It’s clear that Amazon is not committed to a level playing field for all books, regardless of ideology.  Once again, another Big Tech company is making clear that there’s one set of rules for leftists and another set for conservatives.

*****

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

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America is on to the LGBTQ…., transgender, gender fluidity, sexualizing agenda the Walt Disney Company is openly grooming our nation’s children with. It is timely and imperative that we inform Disney of our rejection of their indoctrinating, far leftist and godless attempt to sexually groom our youngest generation…

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The Grave Dangers of Politicizing Medicine

By Joe Wang

For the past 20 years, medical practitioners (nurses and doctors) were ranked the most trusted professions by the Gallup Honesty and Ethics poll. When a patient visits a doctor, he or she can assume that the doctor will only consider treatments benefiting the patient. This is because hundreds of years of medical practice have established a tradition of trust in which the patient believes that the doctor adheres to the ancient Hippocratic Oath (first do no harm) and the modern-day Declaration of Geneva, the ethics of medical practice published by the World Medical Association.

The Declaration of Geneva’s Physician’s Pledge states in part: “I will not permit considerations of age, disease or disability, creed, ethnic origin, gender, nationality, political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, social standing or any other factor to intervene between my duty and my patient.”

Political affiliation should not be a consideration when a doctor sees a patient.

Of course, things are seldom as simple as they seem. Politics and medicine have been around as long as human civilization, and the two have been intermingled at the individual level since ancient times. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the Western world particularly, we have started to see the politicization of medicine at the institutional level, and this should worry us all.

About 1,800 years ago, in ancient China’s Three Kingdoms era, warlord Cao Cao invited renowned doctor Hua Tuo to treat his chronic headaches, thought to be caused by a brain tumor. Hua wanted to open up Cao’s skull to remove the tumor, but Cao suspected that Hua was hired by his political enemies to kill him, so he had Hua imprisoned. Eventually, Hua died in prison, and Cao died from the tumor that Hua had sought to remove.

When politics intersect with medicine, the trust between doctor and patient breaks, and both parties suffer.

Fast forward to 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) became the ruling regime in China. Under the CCP, suspicion such as Cao’s became policy, and everything was politicized. They took control of every aspect of people’s lives, from the cradle to the grave.

Amid COVID, authorities in the West have been making medical decisions for millions of its citizens, some even without solid scientific support. As a Chinese Canadian who grew up in communist China, I would like to warn people of the dangers of this unprecedented approach.

My Body, the CCP’s Choice

The CCP even makes a woman’s womb political.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when Mao wanted to increase the Chinese population so that he would have more people to fight American imperialism, women were encouraged to have more babies. I was born during that time, the ninth child in my family.

But in the 1970s, the CCP decided that Mao was wrong, and China had too many people, so they implemented the brutal one-child policy, with forced abortions killing millions each year. That went on for four decades.

Then in 2016, when the regime saw population decline as a threat to China’s economy and to its own power, it wanted women to have more babies again and changed the one-child policy.

The CCP’s flip-flop “family planning” practice is not only inhumane, but it also failed to achieve the intended goal in some ways. In my case, I was born as part of Mao’s desire to have more people fighting the Americans, but here I am siding with the Western democracies against the CCP’s authoritarian policies.

COVID: a Political Opportunity for the CCP

Similarly, when SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, the CCP immediately treated the outbreak as political. Facts became irrelevant; Beijing’s political narrative was paramount.

On Dec. 30, 2019, when Dr. Li Wenliang took to his personal social media platform to alert a few friends and colleagues about this new pneumonia he was seeing in Wuhan, he was punished by the authorities as what he wrote was not politically correct. He later tragically died from COVID-19 himself.

The politically correct narrative at that time was that the new pneumonia cases in Wuhan did not exist. A couple of weeks later, when the CCP could not deny the existence of the cases, they told everyone, including the World Health Organization, that the virus was not transmissible from human to human.

Then, from late January 2020 to March 2020, the CCP’s lies became so crazy that their narratives would contradict one another. On one hand, they locked down Wuhan and prevented domestic travel from the city to the rest of China; on the other hand, they continued to allow international travel from Wuhan to the rest of the world, while accusing anyone suggesting a travel ban from Wuhan as being racist.

Many now believe it was the CCP’s political intention to spread the virus to the rest of the world while trying to control it in China.

The question must be asked: If an international travel ban had been implemented, could the virus have been contained inside Wuhan, thereby avoiding the pandemic and the deaths of more than 6 million people worldwide?

In any case, the CCP’s behavior cannot be explained scientifically—it only makes political sense. And it was aligned perfectly with the regime’s global view. The pandemic could serve as an opportunity to prove to the Chinese people and the world that the CCP system is superior to Western democracy. Through stringent and even draconian lockdowns, and through lies and total media control, the CCP was able to convince the Chinese people that it had stopped the spread of the virus in China. At the same time, the media played up the inefficiency of western democracies as being incapable of controlling the spread of the virus, leading to millions of deaths.

Zero Omicron, Lots of Xi

It has been two and a half years since the start of the pandemic, and during that time the CCP has boosted its model of pandemic control. Up until last month, it seemed that the CCP was able to control the spread of the virus—even with the fast-spreading Omicron variant and holding a big international event like the Beijing Winter Olympics. Xi Jinping claimed that the achievement was made possible under his personal vision and leadership. The core of his strategy is zero COVID—eliminate the virus with all of the mighty power of the CCP.

Then late last year, COVID appeared in Xi’an, a city of 13 million people. The city was locked down from Dec. 23, 2021, to Jan. 24, 2022, with a total of only 2,053 COVD cases detected. Although there is no official statistics on the deaths caused by the lockdown, individual cases of death were reported due to a lack of access to health care. It was clear that the damage of the lockdown was more severe than the disease itself.

In early March 2022, COVID arrived in Shanghai, China’s biggest city. As no deaths were reported at that time, top scientist Dr. Wenhong Zhang, head of the city’s COVID task force, advocated coexistence with the virus. Given the lessons learned from Xi’an, one would think a lockdown, with all the hardship it brings for people, would not be implemented in Shanghai. Unfortunately, the whole of China is under Xi’s personal leadership, and Shanghai is no exception.

Starting April 3, more than 20 million residents in Shanghai were barred from exiting their homes, leaving many struggling to obtain food, water, and medical care. Stories of deaths occurring as a result of the hardline measures were circulated online. By April 12, at least 15 million residents were still being locked in their homes.

We have no way of knowing how many lives were lost due to the lockdown, but it’s probably in the thousands given the size of the population. Here is one example. Professor Larry Hsien Ping Lang, a Wharton graduate, well-known economist, and TV host in Shanghai who openly endorses Marxist ideology, could not help his mother. She died outside a hospital as she waited for hours for her COVID test result, which she needed to enter the hospital for her routine treatment. The brutal lockdowns affect everyone, including the CCP elites.

Just as Mao’s policy didn’t succeed in forcing me to become a CCP-loving anti-American soldier, Xi Jinping’s lockdowns lack common sense given that the measure has now proven to be useless in fending off Omicron. As a result, we are witnessing another man-made catastrophe happening in Shanghai and possibly other Chinese cities. One can only hope that the zero-COVID lockdown madness stops before more people die. The Chinese people have suffered enough.

Stop Politicizing Medicine in the Free World

With most of the population vaccinated or naturally immune from having been infected by SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19 has become a manageable disease in the United States and Canada. Although it can still be deadly, this now-endemic flu-like disease could be managed with minimal deaths, while society returns to normal life.

In some jurisdictions and sectors, however, masking and vaccination are still mandatory. But why? It doesn’t make any sense at this stage of the pandemic.

In fact, it was the CCP’s tactics that fueled the politicization of COVID, not only in the United States and Canada but pretty much worldwide. This led to the lockdowns, dividing people against one another, governments strong-arming their mandates, and public health officials having far too much control.

We also had the Donald Trump factor. Americans seemed to be divided into two opposing camps: Trump supporters and never Trumpers. With the legacy media in the never Trumper camp, anything Trump supported became controversial, particularly advocating for drug therapy to treat COVID-19.

How far are we from the CCP’s complete politicization of everything in our lives? Warlord Cao’s suspicious approach was passed on to generations of Chinese, but it never became an institutional practice to completely destroy the trust between doctor and patient. When the CCP took control, however, they proceeded to politicize everything and destroyed the doctor-patient trust in just a few short years, because they did it with state power.

If the authorities in the West make politicizing medicine a policy, it could quickly destroy the doctor-patient trust beyond repair. We should never allow what the CCP did in China to happen in the free world. We still have some time. We should remain aware and be willing to fight to preserve the integrity of modern medicine.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

America is on to the LGBTQ…., transgender, gender fluidity, sexualizing agenda the Walt Disney Company is openly grooming our nation’s children with. It is timely and imperative that we inform Disney of our rejection of their indoctrinating, far leftist and godless attempt to sexually groom our youngest generation…

Liberal Corporations Are Confused and Scared Because Conservatives Now Fight Back thumbnail

Liberal Corporations Are Confused and Scared Because Conservatives Now Fight Back

By Kurt Schlichter

It’s always fun when progressive jerks try to leverage their bizarre perceptions of our beliefs to get us to do what they want. It can be some smug Twitter blue check informing us that “Actually Jesus was a socialist who would want us to cancel student debt for spoiled rich kids who got degrees in Transgender Visual Arts” or, more recently, some newly-minted Milton Friedman acolyte goofsplaining that we must submit to the skeevy whims of California corporations and accept the imposition of grooming mandates because, after all, they are private businesses. And sometimes it works, even on alleged conservatives – David French has made whatever passes for his C-list career out of striving to twist conservatism to conform to his lib masters’ version of it.

But this cheesy ploy is not working anymore, at least not on the rest of us.

Ron DeSantis, the Scourge of Odd sitting on his growing throne o’ skulls in Tallahassee, is fresh from laughing off the howls of broken libs enraged that he gerrymandered them in Florida like they gerrymandered us in New York and Illinois. Ron is not one for accepting two sets of rules, one for the ruling caste and another, crappier one for us peasants. He identifies the applicable rule and applies it good and hard. It’s about time the left learns that norm-breaking has consequences. And one consequence is frequent broken-norm suppositories.

And in the case of Disney, it was so objectively insane that you had to wonder about the thought process, but only for a moment until you realize that this is 2022 and everything is utterly stupid. Disney got welcomed into America’s homes and hearts by purveying safe and wholesome kiddie fare to American families and has decided, to please a pack of mutant employees, to administer a coup de grace to that rep by leaping into the arena to fight against a law that all normal people agree is so manifestly proper that it really should not have to be a law at all – that pervs can’t talk to little kids about sex in schools. But no, Disney had to weigh in on the side of groomers because the consensus in the rarified circles its leadership circulates in and among the weirdo contingent on its staff is that the world must be made safe for bizarre sexuality.

Oh, and it did not help that a bunch of Disney employees recently got swept up in a child porn sting, and that the strange-os in its bureaucracy decided to brag on leaked Zoom calls about how they were injecting their freak show gender nonsense into its once sacrosanct movies and shows. You know what Buzz Lightyear was missing? Some not-hot girl-on-girl action. We are one revision away from changing the title of “The Lion King” to “The Otherkin Non-Binary Member of the Royalty.” “Hakuna matata” is supposed to mean “No worries,” not “It’s okay to lop off your junk if you’re not feeling like a boy today.”

So DeSantis decided that Disney needed some discipline, and that stepping to him (and, therefore, us) cried out for a response. Some folks worry that this is an attack on the First Amendment, but this was not just because Disney chose to weigh in on an issue (though it’s unclear why you are obligated to continue providing juicy tax breaks to political opponents – the Founders would have tossed you in a madhouse for arguing that). No, Disney has launched a broad offensive against normal people using political, cultural and economic power to change our society without our permission. This is not just about Disney expressing an opinion, though its groomer-tolerant opinion is creepy and gross.

*****

TAKE ACTION

America is on to the LGBTQ…., transgender, gender fluidity, sexualizing agenda the Walt Disney Company is openly grooming our nation’s children with. It is timely and imperative that we inform Disney of our rejection of their indoctrinating, far leftist and godless attempt to sexually groom our youngest generation…

White Fragility: Unpacking the Kafka Traps of Robin DiAngelo’s NYT Bestseller thumbnail

White Fragility: Unpacking the Kafka Traps of Robin DiAngelo’s NYT Bestseller

By Julian Adorney

Robin DiAngelo’s popular book ‘White Fragility’ breaks from the established rules of scholarship in several way

The biggest issue with Robin DiAngelo’s New York Times bestseller White Fragility is that it throws the rules of good scholarship out the window. That’s a bold claim, but multiple quotes from DiAngelo’s book readily back this up.

If You’re White You’re Racist

DiAngelo’s biggest claim is that, if you’re white, you’re automatically and unavoidably racist. Now to be clear, DiAngelo doesn’t mean that all white people have a conscious anti-minority bias. Rather, she claims that all white people employ racist assumptions and patterns that harm people of color and display an underlying bias.

To quote DiAngelo: “racism is unavoidable and…it is impossible to completely escape having developed problematic and racial assumptions and behaviors.” Speaking of herself (DiAngelo is white), she says, “I also understand that there is no way for me to avoid enacting problematic (racial) patterns.”

If DiAngelo, an affiliate professor of education at the University of Washington, were simply outing her own biased patterns, that would be one thing. Where her argument breaks the rules of good scholarship is that she makes it in a way that’s unfalsifiable.

DiAngelo considers multiple objections to her claim that all white people are racist. What if you’re married to a black person, have black children, do mission work in Africa, or marched during the Civil Rights Movement? She rejects all of these objections. That is, if you’re white, even if you have a black spouse and adopt black children and risk life and limb helping poor people in Africa (many of my friends are missionaries, and missionary life as a rule is neither safe nor well-paying), you’re still racist.

For DiAngelo, you are racist even if you actively try to promote racial equality—for instance, by marching with Dr. Martin Luther King in the 1960s. If you’re white, there is no way for you to not be racist.

A good scholar will present a hypothesis and test it. This is the scientific method, and it applies as much to the social sciences (DiAngelo is a sociologist) as to the physical sciences. The reason scholars do this is that we’re all human, and none of us has all the answers. Therefore, we must discuss and debate ideas, and marshal evidence for and against them, in order to reach the truth. At the root of good scholarship is the humility to accept that you might not have the world completely figured out.

DiAngelo takes a different tack. She presents her hypothesis as axiomatic and therefore as beyond question. If you’re white, you’re racist; full stop.

DiAngelo further breaks from the established rules of scholarship by explicitly adopting a mentality of: believe all accusers.

DiAngelo says that if you’re accused of racism, the only acceptable response is to thank the person for pointing out your racism and to promise to do better. For DiAngelo, acceptable responses include, “I appreciate this feedback,” “It is inevitable that I have this pattern. I want to change it,” “This is very helpful,” “Thank you,” and “I have some work to do (so as to stop enacting this racist behavior in the future).”

And to be clear, these are all great responses if the accusation is valid. If you make a racist joke (for instance, you walk into a primarily black movie theater and claim it’s like walking into Planet of the Apes, like Joe Rogan did), and people point it out, you should sincerely apologize and try to do better (as Rogan did).

The problem is that accusations aren’t always true. Sometimes the person making the accusation has misunderstood the situation. They might mishear, lack context, or simply have an underlying assumption that’s incorrect. We are all human, both those making accusations and those on the receiving end. Accusations need to be weighed on their merits, not just assumed to be true.

DiAngelo’s approach is a refutation of the idea of, “innocent until proven guilty.” But it’s bigger than that, too. It’s a rejection of the scientific method, wherein claims (even claims such as, “John’s a racist”) are weighed according to things like evidence and can be disagreed with.

If you’re accused of racism, under DiAngelo’s approach, even asking a third party to weigh in is considered unacceptable. DiAngelo says that sometimes, if someone calls her a racist, she’s tempted to ask another person of color for their perspective. But she dismisses this urge as “inappropriate” and something that “upholds racism.”

Even weirder, for DiAngelo, denial of the accusation of racism is proof of your racism. In a telling passage, DiAngelo talks about, “white people who think they are not racist, or are less racist, or are in the ‘choir’ or already ‘get it’.” Those people, she asserts, “cause the most daily damage to people of color.”

That is: if you deny that you are racist, you are part of the group that (according to DiAngelo) does more actual damage to people of color than the KKK.

This is a logical fallacy known as a Kafka trap. A Kafka trap is when someone is accused of something, and if they defend themselves then it’s considered proof of their guilt.

Crucially and disturbingly, DiAngelo doesn’t play by her own rules on this one. John McWhorter, a black conservative and Columbia University professor, wrote a review of White Fragility in The Atlantic that accuses the book of racism. The review is titled, “The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility” and includes lines like this: “Few books about race have more openly infantilized Black people than this supposedly authoritative tome.”

When an interviewer brought up McWhorter’s criticism, DiAngelo dismissed it. Her response: “I think that that is a disingenuous reading on the part of John McWhorter.”

And to be clear, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with saying that a critic is being disingenuous. But notice how sharply her response differs from the range of acceptable responses that she offers her white readers. Kafka trap rules for thee, but not for me.

Besides the idea that all white people are racist and that any accusation of racism must be accepted (unless it’s a black conservative calling DiAngelo racist), there’s a third core of the book that’s in some ways equally troubling: another Kafka trap.

DiAngelo argues that, if you’re white, you are automatically fragile when it comes to any discussion of race. She uses the term “white fragility” to describe how difficult she finds it in her workshops to get white people to talk about race, racial identities, and racial hierarchies in the United States.

And to be clear, having real conversations about race can be difficult. It’s something that many Americans don’t want to talk about, and probably a majority of those Americans have white skin. But just like the rest of her book, DiAngelo takes what could be a nuanced point and approaches it without any respect for the ideals of good scholarship.

How does she claim this fragility manifests? Via behaviors and emotions such as “argumentation” “silence” “leaving the stress-inducing situation (that is, the room where the person is being informed of how fragile they are),” “guilt” “tears” and “anger.”

That is: if you’re white, you are fragile. If you disagree that you’re fragile, it’s proof of your fragility. If you agree, of course that’s proof of your fragility too. If you remain silent, it’s also proof of your fragility.

DiAngelo doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that someone might disagree with her argument, not because they’re fragile, but because her argument is simply flawed. Are some white people fragile? Of course. Do all 204 million white Americans share such similar psychology that you can accuse them all of the same character flaw, and do so with such confidence that disagreement is seen as just more proof of your rightness? That’s a little more difficult.

Weirdly, even wanting to promote racial equality is a sign of white fragility. For DiAngelo, the guilt is the point; if you’re white, the work is to embrace this guilt. And, “wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to ‘solutions’” is one of the patterns at the, “foundation of white fragility.”

The idea that white people are innately fragile would be a bold hypothesis even if she tried to back it up. But in practice, it’s just one more unfalsifiable claim.

The other big issue with DiAngelo’s book is that I got a consistent sense, from the stories she told, that her empathy for her fellow human was tied to skin color. In Chapter 8, she tells a story of how she co-facilitated a workshop and one participant described herself as being, “falsely accused” of racism. Apparently being accused of racism by the workshop leaders was not a trivial thing for this participant. As DiAngelo reports:

“Her friends wanted to alert us to the fact that she was in poor health and ‘might be having a heart attack.’ Upon questioning from us, they clarified that they meant this literally. These coworkers were sincere in their fear that the young woman might actually die as a result of the feedback.”

How did DiAngelo respond to the fact that a white woman might have died during one of her workshops? I don’t know how she responded in the moment, but in the book she described it as a, “cogent example of white fragility.” She bemoaned how it took attention away from the people of color in the room: “Of course when news of the women’s (sic) potentially fatal condition reached the rest of the participant group, all attention was immediately focused onto her and away from engagement with the impact she had had on the people of color.”

If someone almost dies in your workshop and your response is to complain how it distracts from the real issues in the room, you may want to check your priorities. More perniciously, if your empathy for a potentially dying human being is tied to their skin color (I’m hopeful that DiAngelo would respond less breezily to a black woman almost dying because of her actions), then that’s a huge problem–and that’s true whatever the skin color in question is.

To be clear, there are genuine racial barriers in the United States, and in a lot of ways black Americans and white Americans receive unequal seats at the table. In her book The New Jim Crow, for instance, former United States Supreme Court clerk Michelle Alexander documents the existence of phenomena like white privilege and systemic racism in the criminal justice system. And those barriers are things we should all be trying to fix. But DiAngelo’s book, full of calls to self-flagellate and light on actual ideas, is unlikely to get us there.

*****

This article was published by FEE, Foundation for Economic Education and is reproduced with permission.

Mainstream Media Finally Recognizes There Might Be Something Wrong With Child Sex Changes thumbnail

Mainstream Media Finally Recognizes There Might Be Something Wrong With Child Sex Changes

By Laurel Duggan

  • Legacy media outlets published several articles this week criticizing sex change treatments for transgender children.
  • One transgender individual told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the media is opening up to critical perspectives because reporters are discovering that transgender medicine is experimental.
  • A New York Times columnist predicted that in the near future, both liberals and conservatives would view child sex change procedures as a politically-motivated medical scandal. 

Mainstream media outlets are publishing articles challenging the “gender-affirming” method of medical treatment for transgender children, which emphasizes speedy biomedical intervention over psychotherapy.

“As more reporters investigate the motives of legislators, I’m sure they’re discovering that pediatric transition is experimental medicine and that some regulatory framework is needed when children are involved,” Corinna Cohn, who identifies as a transgender woman and wrote a Washington Post op-ed expressing regret over receiving a sex change surgery at 19, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times each published articles Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday respectively on the sudden, sharp uptick in transgenderism in young people and the speed with which medical practitioners give them irreversible treatments such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries.

Cohn pointed to increased exposure to the issue of childhood transitions and conservative efforts to regulate the procedures to account for the media opening up to more critical perspectives on sex change procedures.

“Professionals who set the standards of care for pediatric transition are becoming more cautious due to a lack of evidence in the efficacy of the treatments,” Cohn told the DCNF. “For example, the Swedish Karolinska Hospital which pioneered pediatric gender transition has decided to discontinue prescribing hormone blockers and cross-sex hormones as a standard practic

Are the Environmental Impacts and Human Atrocities Worth an EV Battery? thumbnail

Are the Environmental Impacts and Human Atrocities Worth an EV Battery?

By Ronald Stein

EV buyers should be aware that they may be contributing to the pursuit of “blood minerals” to achieve their efforts to go green.

The worldwide movement toward the electrification of everything, from more electric vehicles (EVs) to more intermittent electricity by wind turbines and solar panels, the political actions are supportive of jumping onto the green train, most likely not knowing there is a darker side to green technology, associated with environmental degradation, humanity atrocities, and other embedded costs for materials.

It should concern everyone that those toxic components come from mining for the exotic minerals and metals that are required to manufacture EV batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels. This mining is occurring mostly in less-developed countries with yellow, brown, and black-skinned people with a lack of transparency about the human rights abuses and environmental degradation in those locations.

In an attempt to make the embedded costs of going “green” transparent to the world, the Pulitzer Prize nominated book, Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energy   highlights how Asians and Africans, many of them children from the poorer and less healthy countries, are being enslaved and are dying in mines and factories to obtain the exotic minerals and metals required for the green energy technologies for the construction of EV batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and utility-scale storage batteries.

The Tesla EV has a one-thousand-pound battery that contains 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside the Tesla battery are 6,831 individual lithium-ion cells

The environmental impact of battery production is significant. The production of lithium is either carbon dioxide polluting or wasteful of water — up to 500,000 gallons per ton of the mineral. Cobalt mining produces radioactive contaminants, including uranium. About 80 percent of the weight of a Tesla battery –requires mined materials. In practice, that means mining about 50 tons of raw ore per vehicle. If 10 million U.S.-based electric cars are sold in 2030 (about half of sales), that would translate to 500 million tons of new mining with all the accompanying emissions from mining equipment and the accompanying pollution.

All those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just – one – Tesla EV battery.

There was already a huge challenge in just making enough EV batteries. As physicist Mark Mills pointed out in the Wall Street Journal: “The International Energy Agency (IEA) finds that with a global energy transition like the one President Biden envisions, demand for key minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel and rare-earth metals would explode, rising by 4,200 percent, 2,500 percent, 1,900 percent and 700 percent, respectively, by 2040”.

Amnesty International has documented children and adults mining cobalt in narrow man-made tunnels,  and the exposure to the dangerous gases emitted during the procurement of these rare minerals, not to mention the destruction of the local ecosystems when the wastewater and other unusable ores are let loose onto the environments they have no choice but to live in because their wages are so infinitesimally small, it should cause us to take a step back and examine our moral obligations to humanity.

Not only might the planet not have the capacity to meet this demand, but many of these materials come from places that are hostile or that we do not control – such as China/Mongolia, the Congo, and Bolivia – leading to an unpredictable supply.

Most electric vehicles in use today are yet to reach the end of their cycle. The first all-electric car to be powered by lithium-ion batteries, the Tesla Roadster, made its market debut in 2008. This means the first generation of electric vehicle batteries have yet to reach the recycling stage. An estimated 11 million tons of spent lithium-ion batteries will flood our markets by 2025, without systems in place to handle them.

The actions of society are currently supportive of jumping onto the EV train, knowing that EV’s have a very dark side of environmental atrocities, and the non-existing transparency of human rights abuses occurring in other countries, both of which are directly connected to the mining for the exotic minerals and metals that are required to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries.

 America could promote sustainable mining in those developing countries by restoring the land to a healthy ecosystem after the mine closes and by leaving surrounding communities with more wealth, education, health care, and infrastructure than they had before the mine went into production. Like mining in America, mining in developing countries must be the objective of corporate social responsibilities and the outcome of the successful ecological restoration of landscapes.

America’s passion for EV vehicles to reduce emissions must be ethical and should not thrive off human rights and environmental abuses in the foreign countries providing the exotic minerals and metals to support America’s green passion.

*****

This article was published by The Heartland Institute and is reproduced with permission.

NYT Columnist Admits Schools Are Grooming Children Into LGBT Identities thumbnail

NYT Columnist Admits Schools Are Grooming Children Into LGBT Identities

By NATHANAEL BLAKE

A New York Times columnist has again confirmed that social conservatives were right: educators are pushing LGBT ideology on students.

Is Michelle Goldberg a conservative plant at The New York Times? Although she claims to be a liberal feminist, some of her recent columns are essentially admissions that social conservatives have been right all along. In another entry in this genre, she purports to critique the “freakout over sex and gender identity in schools” — only to tacitly admit that schools are indoctrinating children into LGBT ideology and grooming them into LGBT identities.

Goldberg accuses conservatives of stoking a “moral panic” akin to the “‘satanic panic’ of the 1980s, a frenzy of accusations of ritual child abuse that resulted in the conviction of dozens of innocent people.” Yet she then demonstrates the current fears are reality-based.

Her evidence that this is a panic consists of highlighting some unfounded rumors about educators indulging students with a furry fetish. She then admits that “there’s been a great evolution in how students think about gender and sexuality” with “an even bigger generational shift with trans issues. Many middle-aged liberal parents I know have different ideas about gender than their more radical adolescent kids, and I assume the gulf must be even larger in many conservative families.” In short, the sexual orientation and gender identity revolution is real, even if a few internet rumors about it are not.

Similarly, in response to the huge increase in LGBT identities among the young, Goldberg writes that “It’s obvious that more kids are going to come out in high schools where they’ll be accepted and celebrated than in those where they’ll be bullied and abused.”

True, and it is also obvious that this does not explain the mass conversions of adolescents, especially girls, to rainbow identities. Goldberg herself relays, without dispute, the example of a summer camp from which “a third of the girls came back saying that they were nonbinary or queer or gender nonconforming.”

This self-refutation continues to Goldberg’s conclusion. She does reiterate her ugly victim-blaming regarding the infamous Loudoun County rape case — why is a supposed feminist shaming a teenage girl for being raped in circumstances inconvenient to the agenda of men in dresses?

Yet she ends with a quote the victim’s mother had given to the Daily Wire, noting how her daughter was still drifting along with the gender revolution: “’Where does she get these ideas? From school, obviously,’ the mother said. ‘It’s not from our home.’”

The Left’s Contradictions

Once again, Goldberg has confirmed that social conservatives were right: educators really are leading students in a sexual and gender identity revolution, which is then furthered by social media and peer pressure. Nonetheless, Goldberg is probably not a closet conservative writing esoterically to get past her editors.

Rather, she seems to be ensnared by the contradictions of the left’s current orthodoxy on sex and gender. This sort of confusion, along with her apparently unwitting confirmations that conservatives were right, is inevitable because the LGBT movement’s justifying mantra of “born this way” is false, as demonstrated by what is happening in schools.

The born this way creed posits that sexual orientation and gender identity are innate and immutable, and that an authentic and flourishing life requires accepting these inborn identities. Thus, teaching young children about sexual orientation and gender identity is necessary to help them discover and live as their true selves, otherwise they will be repressed, miserable, and perhaps even suicidal. This is the logic behind the constant references to “LGBT youth” and “trans kids,” as well as President Joe Biden’s support for chemically and surgically transitioning children.

The True Source of Gender

But this view has been discredited. There is no gay gene. Nor is there an established biological basis for transgender identification. The case for transition rests on shoddy social science; some researchers even lie about their results. This is why transgender advocates rely on the abusive emotional blackmail of suicide threats.

The truth is that sexual inclinations and one’s sense of gender arise from a mix of biological, environmental, and cultural factors, of which genes are only a minor part. The interactions of these elements are complex and are not the same for everyone. We may have predispositions, but no one is predestined to identify as LGBT.

We can see this complexity and fluidity playing out in our culture, especially among the young. It is not just that youth are much more likely to identify as LGBT, but that they are deconstructing and recombining sexual and gender identities, often encouraged by their educators and under the influence of social media.

Educators Pushing LGBT Ideology

Nonetheless, the legacy of the (very politically successful) creed of “born this way” persists. It encourages teaching children about rainbow identities at young ages, justified by the presumption that some of them are already among the LGBT elect, even if they don’t know it yet. But rather than drawing out and nurturing intrinsic identities, instructing young children in LGBT ideology shapes their identities. Activist educators claim to protect trans children, but they are actually helping create trans children.

Horrifying examples are emerging of educators pushing young children into trans identities, even against the wishes of parents (some schools even hide these changes from parents). The Libs of TikTok Twitter account exposes a steady stream of such abuses — and these are just the activists dumb enough to boast online about what they are doing. In New Jersey, new state teaching standards have school districts distributing sample lesson plans instructing first and second graders in gender ideology and sexual orientation.

The LGBT educational agenda has more red flags than the Soviet army, from teachers talking to young children about sex to school counselors helping them to keep sexual and gender secrets from their parents. Groomer is as good a term as any for pedagogues who are eager to inform five-year-olds about sexual orientation, or who respond to the gender confusion of a troubled adolescent girl by encouraging her to inject testosterone, grow a beard, and have her breasts amputated.

The youth LGBT revolution is not a natural development among children expressing innate identities. Rather, it is an artificial social contagion encouraged by adult ideologues indoctrinating students — a six-year-old does not conclude on his own that a boy can have a vagina and a girl can have a penis. This is why parents are in revolt against the education establishment and why a liberal feminist writer can’t help admitting that the grooming is real.

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

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Zero COVID Horror Show in Shanghai

By David Waugh

Shanghai, the financial capital of China with a population of 25 million people, currently faces its third week of steep increases in cases of COVID-19.

In response, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) implemented harsh COVID-19 restrictions in Shanghai, sending an army of healthcare workers to enforce them. Citizens cannot leave their homes. They can only receive medical care upon presenting a negative COVID test. Healthcare workers are forcing COVID-positive individuals into quarantine camps and stripping children from their parents. Government officials are even executing pets in the street when the pet owners test positive for COVID. People are running out of foodscreaming from their windows, and jumping out of buildings in protest.

These measures follow the CCP’s “zero COVID” pandemic policies. These policies use extensive government intervention to “control” the coronavirus, disregarding all costs. During the past two years, the strategy gained admirers throughout the Western world, including Australia and New Zealand, each implementing similar zero COVID policies.

Zero COVID is a failed strategy. Data does not support it. Lockdowns, mass quarantines, strict border closures, and other policies do not stop COVID. New Zealand and China are experiencing increases in COVID cases. The societal and economic carnage severely outweighs any potential benefits of Zero-COVID policies.

Horrific Hubris

Unfortunately, the CCP refuses to recognize that zero COVID is ineffective, and the starving, trapped, exasperated people are using social media to share their stories.

Individuals across the city are audibly screaming from their windows in protest.

On Weibo, the highly censored social media platform, the following comment went viral: “We are not killed by Covid, but by the Covid control measures.” A tweet from a lawyer trapped in his home also went viral:

Further, NPR reports that citizens created makeshift indoor grass mats for their dogs to defecate on.

I’ve talked with friends who have created these – they call them DIY nature toilets inside their homes. So they, like, bought a patch of grass. They collected some old leaves as a place for their dogs to…Do their business.

The CCP’s response uses militarism and media gaslighting. The CCP-controlled media claims citizens should “be confident, trust the policy, not to panic or be overly anxious, and not to make up and believe rumors.”

Drones fly throughout Shanghai, telling citizens, “Please comply with covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.”

The zero-COVID measures in Shanghai ought to be recognized for what they are: human rights abuses. The policy ends (zero COVID) are not possible, so they cannot justify the means (locking down a city of 25 million). Similar to its abuse of the Uyghurs in China, the CCP’s national socialist policies are causing significant harm to the Chinese people. Like all national socialist policies, they result in human suffering rather than human flourishing.

State Capacity Hurts

China’s zero COVID approach is yet another example of the devastating risk introduced when totalitarian regimes implement centrally planned policy via brute force. Under the classical liberal ideal, governments are formed to protect individual rights. Nothing could be further from this in Shanghai. A city of over 25 million people is being dehumanized because of a spike in largely asymptomatic COVID-19 cases.

We were dangerously close in the United States to implementing zero COVID adjacent policies, particularly in our larger cities. Admirers of this approach are still with us in the Western world, even if they are in apparent retreat. 

The experience in Shanghai permanently discredits their opinions with respect to COVID-19 policy. The rest of the world should take note and ensure “zero COVID” ideas are placed squarely in the past.

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This article was published by AIER, The American Institute for Economic Research, and is reproduced with permission.

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Judicial Watch Victory: Historic Court Ruling against Race, Ethnic, LGBT Quotas

By Tom Fitton

We won a significant victory last week in the California Superior Court when it declared that the state’s racial, ethnic, and LGBT quota for corporate boards of California-based corporations violates the California Constitution.

This week the court released its full opinion. It found that only in “very particular cases should discrimination be remedied by more discrimination.”

The ruling and opinion come in the case (Robin Crest, et al. v. Alex Padilla, in his official capacity as Secretary of State of the State of California (No.20STCV37513)) granting our motion for summary judgment in our lawsuit. We sued on behalf of taxpayers who are asking the court to declare the quota scheme unconstitutional and seeking to enjoin its enforcement.

This historic California court decision declared unconstitutional one of the most blatant and significant attacks in the modern era on constitutional prohibitions against discrimination. In its ruling today, the court upheld the core American value of equal protection under the law. Judicial Watch’s taxpayer clients are heroes for standing up for civil rights against the Left’s pernicious efforts to undo anti-discrimination protections.

We filed this lawsuit on October 2, 2020, in the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Los Angeles, on behalf of three California taxpayers (Robin Crest, Earl De Vries and Judy DeVries) to prevent California from enforcing Assembly Bill 979 (AB 979). The law requires that boards of directors of California-based, publicly held domestic or foreign corporations satisfy a racial, ethnic, and LGBT quota by the end of the 2021 calendar year.

In his opinion striking down the gender-quota law, Judge Terry A. Green found the law “violates the Equal Protection Clause of the California Constitution on its face.” The judge elaborated on why the California Legislature exceeded its authority in mandating the composition of boards:

The difficulty is that the Legislature is thinking in group terms. But the California Constitution protects the right of individuals to equal treatment. Before the Legislature may require that members of one group be given certain board seats, it must first try to create neutral conditions under which qualified individuals from any group may succeed. That attempt was not made in this case. [Emphasis in original]

The court concluded:

The statute treats similarly situated individuals – qualified potential corporate board members – differently based on their membership (or lack thereof) in certain listed racial, sexual orientation, and gender identity groups. It requires that a certain specific number of board seats be reserved for members of the groups on the list – and necessarily excludes members of other groups from those seats.

The Secretary has not identified a compelling interest to justify this classification. The broader public benefits produced by well-run businesses do not fit that bill.

California must treat its citizens equally as individuals under the law, and not give discriminatory, preferential treatment to some based on race, ethnicity or LGBT status. This court ruling marks a watershed in the core American value of equal protection under the law for all Americans. And it warns against the pernicious racialism of the radical Left.

This is not our only action in this area.

We completed a trial in a separate lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of California taxpayers to prevent the state from implementing a 2018 law (SB 826) requiring publicly-held corporations headquartered in California to have at least one director “who self-identifies her gender as a woman, without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth” on their boards by December 31, 2019 (Robin Crest et al. v. Alex Padilla (No.19ST-CV-27561)).

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This article was published by Judicial Watch and is reproduced with permission.