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I Just Got Back from a Trip

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 non–binary … 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.

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…

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The Grave Dangers of Politicizing Medicine

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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…

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Liberal Corporations Are Confused and Scared Because Conservatives Now Fight Back

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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…

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

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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.

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

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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?

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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.

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NYT Columnist Admits Schools Are Grooming Children Into LGBT Identities

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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.

*****

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

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Zero COVID Horror Show in Shanghai

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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 food, screaming 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.

*****

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

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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)).

*****

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

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An Easter Essay: Why Did Jesus Come?

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By James Rousseau

As we approach Easter, we might ask ourselves what is its real meaning? Is it about Easter egg hunts and cute bunnies or is it more than that?

Nowhere else do we celebrate two events each year focusing our attention on one person, Jesus. The first event is Christmas. The word has “Christ” in it. At Christmas we celebrate the Virgin birth of the Savior, Jesus Christ, Jesus being his name and Christ his title. Jesus is the Lord’s human name given to Mary by the angel Gabriel (Luke 1:31). The meaning of ‘Christ’ comes from the Greek word Christos, meaning ‘anointed one’ or ‘the chosen one’. This is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word Mashiach, or ‘Messiah’. His birth, His coming and His earthly mission was prophesized many times throughout the Old Testament.

The second event, Easter Sunday, acknowledges and celebrates the resurrection of Jesus. He told us in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (gospel meaning ‘good news’) that He would rise from death three days after His death and burial. The resurrection would confirm to the world that Jesus was more than mere man. He came to us as God in human form, called the Son of man, i.e., the Son of God in the form ‘of’ man.

Why would Jesus Christ come from the pristine environment of heaven, being in the presence of God the Father, to a world marred by sin, strife and bitter dissension? The answer is that God is totally devoid of sin. Man’s nature is flawed and sinful in its natural state. God, the creator of all things, is devoid of sin. Man is unable to have a relationship with God in his fallen, sinful state. Jesus came to earth to bring forgiveness and redemption to fallen man, opening the path to eternal life beyond our mortal life.

Jesus, as man, was unlike any other human being. He was born of a Virgin mother, lived on earth without sin and without a fallen nature. He went to a brutal, cruel death by crucifixion, shedding His precious blood and life as the price for forgiveness of our sinful debt. On the third day, He rose from the dead, a resurrection witnessed by many and accepted by so many for over two thousand years since His presence on earth.

As a consequence of His death and resurrection, all who accept and embrace Him, believing in Him as Savior has relationship with the three persons of God’s Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and a path to eternal life. In the Bible, God’s word, we are told in Romans 6:23 “the wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” In John 14:6 Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me.”

What Jesus accomplished for fallen man costs us nothing, but cost Jesus, as man, everything. Prior to His crucifixion He was spat upon, flogged and mocked by Roman soldiers who placed a crown of thorns upon His head and a purple robe around Him, laughing as they said “hail, King of the Jews!” He was punched in His face so much that His visage was marred. This was only the beginning of His incredible suffering and pain. As He went to the cross, stripped of His garments, spikes were driven through His wrists and feet as He lay on the cross, and He was again mocked by bystanders: “He saved others but He cannot save Himself.” How did Jesus respond? “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

It is instructive to consider an incident before Jesus’s crucifixion involving Nicodemus, a Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin, a ruler of the Jews. In Chapter 3 of John’s gospel, we find Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night. Perhaps he came when it was dark not wanting the Jews to see him talking to Jesus. He said to Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that you have come from God as a teacher, for no one could do these signs unless God is with Him.” Of what signs was Nicodemus speaking? Well known for His miracles, including turning water into wine, healing people with leprosy, restoring sight to the blind, and driving out demons from people, Jesus said to Nicodemus “you must be born again”. Jesus was speaking of a spiritual birth but Nicodemus thought Jesus was referring to a physical birth. Nicodemus should have realized that Jesus was no mortal man since he was a teacher of Israel. Old Testament scripture in many places pointed to Jesus, the coming Messiah. Several of these scripture prophesies are in Jeremiah 31:15, Isaiah 53: 3-7, Psalm 22: 17-18, Micah 5:2, and Daniel 9: 24,25,27.

The Word of God was written by 40 authors over a period of 1400 years – written by men but inspired by God with its ultimate purpose to point us to the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who came that we might have life and have it to the full. Life is full of choices and decisions, but it is my belief that knowing Jesus as Savior is life’s most important decision because it determines our destiny after we have passed from our earthly life. This life changing decision also greatly impacts the way we live in the present life. I believe the more we know about Jesus, the more we learn to love Him. We love Him because of what He provided for us as He went to the cross and His resurrection. As we learn who He was, we are encouraged to be like Him: kind, compassionate, forgiving, loving, always caring for the needs of others, without pride and deceit, so humble and so much more.

My hope for you as you read this article is that you too may come to know Jesus Christ as Savior. The gospel of John is a very good starting point to learn, know and begin or strengthen your relationship with Jesus. As so many Christians for so long have come to know so well, this is the real meaning of Easter. It is about His gift of redemption for us and a relationship with the Lord that brings forgiveness, peace and righteousness in this world and a path to eternal life in the next.

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The BLM Scam

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By Thomas C. Patterson

I don’t know about you, but the first time I heard the slogan “Black Lives Matter“ I thought it was, well…curious. Who said otherwise these days? Wasn’t that obvious?

I soon discovered the depths of my naïveté. The tip-off was realizing that “All Lives Matter“ was not a more inclusive iteration of the same concept, but its opposite – racist fighting words. People were vilified and fired for saying them.

It turned out that BLM was a “social justice“ organization focused primarily on “intervening in violence inflicted on black communities by the state and vigilantes“, i.e. police.

But this wasn’t your typical well-intentioned social advocacy group. Its founders were Marxist activists. BLM’s goals included not only stirring racial violence but destruction of the nuclear family and eliminating capitalism.

BLM started as a loose confederation of underfunded organizers. But their fortunes changed after George Floyd’s death in 2020.   Suddenly, radical racism became a lucrative business. Over $90 million came pouring in, even though BLM did no solicitation and was not even IRS qualified to receive it.

BLM became wildly popular. Its tenets became influential in crafting Democratic party policy. Corporate executives, ever vigilant to burnish their woke credentials, praised it and donated lavishly. Sports teams stitched BLM onto their uniforms.

BLM initially parked the money with sister organizations that had IRS certification. After BLM’s nonprofit status was established, $66.5 million was immediately transferred into its account.

Here’s where the story gets murky. BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors issued an “impact report” in February 2021, claiming operating expenses of $8.4 million and $21.7 million in grants to local affiliates, but no further detail was provided. The rest of the funding was unaccounted for. Moreover, BLM has yet to file its IRS annual report required last November.

Meanwhile, Cullors resigned last May amid reports that absent any other known sources of income, she had purchased millions of dollars worth of prime real estate. The two activists she appointed to assume the helm of BLM declined the offer.

The worm had turned. Charity Watch described BLM as a “ghost ship full of treasure with no captain, no crew no, and no clear direction“. Other philanthropy watchdogs also withdrew their endorsements.

Washington and California ordered BLM to cease fundraising and Amazon kicked BLM off its charity platform. Antagonizing California, Washington and Amazon had to be unprecedented for a radical leftist outfit!

The BLM scam, wasting the funds, was actually a good thing. According to the website Candid, non-profits devoted to “racial equity“ raised $25 billion total post-George Floyd. Yet the “accomplishments“ of these groups have been demonstrably harmful to blacks.

Their main policy goal was to “defund the police”, the prime cause of the everyday genocide purportedly inflicted on young black men. That didn’t turn out well.

In 2019, 7777 Blacks were murdered, 53% of all homicide victims. After the “defund the police“ movement succeeded in jurisdictions across the country, 9941 Blacks were murdered the next year, indicating that 2000 lives were lost due to a failed ideology.

Blacks are repeatedly informed that thousands of unarmed black victims are killed by police each year, but the numbers tell a different story. As Heather Mac Donald points out, in 2019, the year 7777 blacks were killed, police accidentally shot a total of nine unarmed blacks, one for each 800 murder victims.  Decimating and denigrating the thin blue line was a tragic mistake, especially for Blacks themselves.

BLM can’t be reformed because it is based on the concept that there is a social good in driving the races apart since one is inherently predisposed to oppressing the other. Media and academic elites, playing upon the historical realities of black victimhood and white guilt, insist racism is deeply ingrained in American culture, the core influence in our history.

Americans must decide. Do we concede the future of permanent tribalism advanced by BLM, the 1619 Project, and Critical Race Theory?

Or do we still believe in the vision of Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and MLK that Americans can achieve another historic first? We can establish a multi-racial society where race really doesn’t matter and we all share the Dream of living united as Americans.

*****

Thomas C. Patterson, MD is a retired Emergency Medicine physician, Arizona state Senator and Arizona Senate Majority Leader in the ’90s. He is a former Chairman, Goldwater Institute.

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Big Abortion’s Big Tech Allies Aim to Censor Pro-Lifers. They Won’t Win.

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By Douglas Blair

The future of abortion law in the U.S. hinges on the forthcoming ruling in a Supreme Court case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, but the pro-life movement must begin gearing up to fight another insidious foe—Big Tech censorship. 

Organizations standing for the sanctity of life are well aware of the uphill battle they face.

The prominent anti-abortion group Live Action had its content censored online long before the docket put the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion nationwide in the crosshairs.

In 2019, social media platform Pinterest added Live Action’s website to its blacklist of banned sites. The blacklisting meant users were unable to link to Live Action’s content or post it on Pinterest. 

The Daily Signal reported that after Live Action attempted to appeal the ban, Pinterest took things a step further and permanently banned its account, claiming the organization violated Pinterest’s misinformation policies.

Andrew Moore, digital and creative director at pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List, says his organization also has been hit by Big Tech censorship on several occasions.

“In 2017, Twitter prevented SBA List from running an ad featuring a pro-life quote by Mother Teresa, claiming our ad violated their policy on promoting the sale of health and pharmaceutical products,” Moore said in a statement to The Daily Signal.

“In 2020, citing a factually incorrect ‘fact-check’ by the Dispatch, Facebook banned our ads stating that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris support late-term abortion. Meanwhile, Big Abortion was permitted to run comparable ads without any restrictions.”

The examples of Big Tech censorship of pro-life causes are innumerable. But what it all leads back to is that Big Tech is hostile to the anti-abortion movement and has openly thrown its considerable weight behind leftist pro-abortion causes.  

That isn’t really shocking. It’s an open secret that platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter are run by leftists whose sensibilities align more with rabid pro-abortionists.

Where this is likely to become an issue is when pro-abortion activists and their kindred spirits in the Silicon Valley hubs of Big Tech see Roe pared back or even struck down by the high court.  A ruling is expected in late June.

The doomsaying surrounding a possible end to Roe already has the far left reeling. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which the tech titans would push even harder to censor dissenting voices seeking to end or restrict abortion across the country.

Moore says Susan B. Anthony List is expecting a new wave of censorship.

“We are prepared for a crackdown on any messaging on abortion that does not fit the narrative of Planned Parenthood and their numerous allies in Silicon Valley,” he said, adding:

If the Supreme Court hands the question of abortion back to the people through their legislatures, Big Abortion will stand to have everything to lose. This new reality will motivate their friends in Big Tech to enact even more draconian measures.

As a silver lining, pro-life conservatives are at least aware that censorship will occur and have time to prepare. Pro-abortion forces already have shown their hand, so the pro-life movement knows what to expect if Roe is struck down.

Conservatives should demand transparency and accountability from Big Tech companies that censor them. The tech titans shouldn’t have the power to hide behind shadowy algorithms and selective enforcement as they repeatedly remove pro-life content.

Recent bills in Georgia and Florida provide a model for consumer protections at the state level. The Georgia legislation has a provision under which Big Tech companies would be forced to provide a report on how frequently they censor content and why they took action. That would give users proof that they’d been censored.

But even if the online gatekeepers prevent pro-life messages from reaching a digital audience, pro-lifers can still take the movement offline.

“If Big Tech increases their censorship of pro-life speech in a post-Roe America, pro-life Americans must step up by fostering person-to-person communications, through word of mouth, email, text, alternative messaging, and social media platforms that have more respect for freedom of speech,” Moore said.

The biggest pro-life event each year is the March for Life. Tens of thousands of Americans dedicated to protecting the unborn gather each year in Washington, D.C., to make it clear that life matters.

As it becomes more likely Roe will be struck down, or at least curtailed, the March for Life has begun spinning off marches in states such as Connecticut and California. Pro-life conservatives should attend these marches and organize their own, free from the censoring power of Big Tech.

The radical left will use every trick it has to keep abortion unrestricted, but the pro-life movement ultimately will win. Big Tech can try, but life won’t be censored.

*****

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

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The Green Con Job on Energy Independence: Their Dream is Our Nightmare

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By Neland Nobel

If there is one thing we can expect from the Green Movement is that it will do its best to mislead the public with very clever public relations. But a lie is a lie, even if cleverly told.

This has manifested itself in two ways rather recently.

First, they continue to claim that “renewables” specifically wind turbines and solar, can replace quickly the energy output of coal and natural gas. A subset of that argument is that wind and solar are less impactful to the environment than oil and gas.

Neither of these assertions is true.

We urge you to view the adjacent video by Michael Shellenberger, an environmentalist who has come to see the contradictions and errors in Green policy.

Secondly, they claim that since the Russian-Ukrainian War has left especially Europe, and the rest of the world, short of energy, the only way to get energy “independence” is to double down on their Green agenda. But it was their Green policies that made the West so vulnerable and dependent on Russian oil and gas. Having succeeded in making Europe especially vulnerable, their solution is more windmills and solar panels.

The latter position explains the nonsensical response of the Biden Administration, which has done everything possible to suppress domestic oil and gas production while at the same time putting enormous funds towards wind and solar, some $555 Billion, in his so-called Build Back Better Plan.

Obviously, expanding U.S. oil and gas production is an alternative answer, and a good one. We benefit economically from the expansion, our citizens find employment, and our extraction of hydrocarbons is more efficient and cleaner than other sources outside of the U.S.

But Biden and the Greens are opposed to that, even as a short-term expedient.

It wasn’t the choice of consumers or utilities, but the European government’s top-down policy to shut down coal, oil, and nuclear, and then put total reliance on renewables. And because renewables are so expensive and unreliable, they then had to get the energy they need from Russia.

So, dependence was not a natural development but a byproduct of mostly German policy.  France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear power and is not nearly as vulnerable as Germany.

Given the evidence that Russian money is behind many of the environmental groups, it could be said dependence was not a byproduct of policy, but in fact the purpose of the policy.

Thus, the Green movement offers this twisted proposition: Our Green policies have made you dependent when you need not be, but the further adoption of our plans is the only road to energy independence! Heads we win, tails you lose.

The hidden losing proposition they have for us is they want to substitute energy dependence on Russia or Saudi Arabia ( because they won’t let us produce our own energy) and shift to solar, wind, and electric vehicles,  so we can be dependent on China, Congo, and Peru for rare earth metals.   This is a false choice.  At least for the US, we need not be dependent.  The Green policies make us dependent.  Not long ago, we were a net exporter of oil and gas.  Even Europe has considerable oil and gas production they could tap into. So the trade they propose, if solar and wind actually can be brought to scale, is to substitute mineral dependence for energy dependence.

Besides mineral dependence, there also is manufacturing dependence.  Overwhelmingly, solar panels and windmills are made in China.

We have just seen how Russia is squeezing Europe over energy. Why would we want to become more dependent on China for the production of energy equipment and vital minerals? That seems beyond naive and into the realm of a national security death wish.

Biden joined the European Greens by shutting down a pipeline from Israeli gas fields that would have brought gas to Europe, and felt somehow the environment would find Russian gas more wonderful that Israeli gas. This is the same sort of thing we saw domestically:  Biden shuts down U.S. production and goes begging for oil from Iran and Venezuela as if their hydrocarbons are “better” than ours for the environment.

Biden and California Democrats also have joined the European Greens by inflicting German-like policies in the United States. There is no reason why clean natural gas from Pennsylvania cannot be augmented by clean natural gas from adjacent New York. The US has lots of clean-burning gas. Expensive gas is purely a political decision by Democrats.

It is also obvious that green technology, even after years of subsidies, is not ready to take over the heavy lifting of energy production. Natural gas has to back up “renewables” because they are intermittent and storage of electricity is not yet feasible. If this transition to total renewables is even technically feasible, it is likely at least 30 to 40 years out. Yet the Green Movement insists there are no technical, environmental, or economic problems. For them, it is simply a lack of political will. With political will, they believe it can all be done NOW. That is simply impossible.

One sure sign of an environmentalist that tells you they simply are not serious about their dreams, is their opposition to nuclear power.

As Shellenberger shows, nuclear power is safe, reliable, and clean, and even with all the environmentalist’s lawsuits driving up costs, it is far cheaper. It has much less impact on the land and animals.  And very importantly, we are not dependent on the Chinese.

The Greens also have a very narrow view of oil and gas. They see it only in terms of energy. All they can think about is closing down production, and driving up the price of hydrocarbons, to make their pet projects look better by comparison.

What they fail to notice are the second-order side effects.  Two of these have become quite evident.

Greens don’t seem to understand that thousands of products from plastic, chemicals, and fertilizer are derived from oil and natural gas. Drive up the price of natural gas, and it not only makes windmills look more viable, but it also drives up the price of fertilizer, which drives up the price of food, which will kill millions in the third world.

It also heavily contributes to “cost-push” inflation, which causes interest rates to rise, and lowers the standard of living for everyone, especially the elderly on a fixed income, which in turn could induce severe economic recession and privation in both the developed world and less developed countries.

Thus, in order to make their pet projects look better in relative terms, they in essence are willing to literally starve people to death and cause millions to lose their jobs.  We are already seeing food riots in Peru and Sri Lanka, and likely food turmoil is just starting.

Inflation and recession, coupled with food shortages, are a prescription for social and political turmoil.

Such turmoil could not only destroy the standard of living for many people, but it can also create social violence and a loss of personal freedom.

Covering massive amounts of land with windmills and solar panels itself has a significant environmental impact.  And, a lot of energy is consumed to make these things.

As Shellenberger notes, we may be destroying the environment to save the climate, which fluctuates by itself anyway.

What kind of a dream is this?

Add up all the first and second-order problems with the Green agenda and you realize what a high price we will all pay for their unrealistic dreams.

Their dream is our nightmare.

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Cancel Culture Is Helping Marxists Achieve Their Revolution in the West Without the Bloodshed

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By Mike Gonzalez

Cancel culture is sometimes mistaken as the central problem in the life of the West. This happens, I have noticed, more among our U.K. cousins than stateside. Cancel culture, however, is merely a tool, the enforcement mechanism with which the woke left retains the cultural territory it has conquered.

The central problem facing citizens of Western countries is that a very hardcore, Marxian left has scored significant victories in its steady march toward the takeover of cultural institutions. This is a strategy first thought up by an Italian, Antonio Gramsci, who co-founded Italy’s Communist Party in 1921.

Gramsci taught Marxists that, to achieve Karl Marx’s goal of abolishing private property, the family, the church, and the nation-state, they did not need the bloody revolution that Marx had also called for. In Western countries, with their rich civil societies, it was better to infiltrate the cultural institutions, take them over, and indoctrinate the people into abandoning their love for the family, nation, etc., which Gramsci called “false consciousness.”

Indoctrination would raise their consciousness. This led to struggle sessions, which had harrowing results from China to the fields of Cambodia to the West in the 21st century.

Marxism needed coercion, despotism, and outright terror from the start, and Marx called for all three. In 1948, Marx spelled this out in his essay “The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna,” where he wrote, “There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”

In our Western societies, state coercion of free speech must be presented in less truculent a fashion. This is why Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School neo-Marxist who did so much to promote critical theory and the sexual revolution in the United States, came out with something called—we kid not—“Repressive Tolerance.”

In a 1969 essay by that name, Marcuse wrote that “In this society … false consciousness has become the general consciousness—from the government down to its last objects. The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities.”

Marcuse then called for the “withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements before they can become active; intolerance even toward thought, opinion, and word, and finally, intolerance in the opposite direction, that is, toward the self-styled conservatives, to the political Right—these anti-democratic notions respond to the actual development of the democratic society which has destroyed the basis for universal tolerance.”

That was canceled culture in its germinal stage. What it does is prevent the retaking of the ground lost to the left.

That doesn’t mean it is less of a danger. When people’s lives are canceled, they can lose their freedom of expression, their ability to make a living, and sometimes even their friends. When you have been totally canceled, Franz Kafka becomes your best friend, for only that turn-of-the-20th-century master of the absurd can make sense of your henceforth Kafkaesque existence.

That this fate can lurk around the corner in the free West is something that should concern us all and give us the encouragement we need to fight cancel culture in every way we can. We should expose it for what it is, decry it when it happens, and also summon the courage not to repeat a lie because saying the truth may result in our own canceling.

An area where people have become very cautious of late has been transgender issues. To say that a person can never become a woman, and vice versa, can get you thrown out of polite society, virtual or physical. And yet, most of us know that no matter how many puberty blockers a person takes, or how many healthy organs are mutilated, a man cannot menstruate, conceive, etc.

Indeed, Twitter this week suspended the account of The Babylon Bee, a very popular satirical website that has 1.3 million followers because it gave a transgender man who is a Biden administration official its Man of the Year Award.

The transgender issue is smack in the middle of the culture wars in America. There are many willing to take a stand and say, “No, I won’t live by lies.” Cancel culture is the left’s instrument to force them to do so.

*****

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

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Fentanyl From China: Biden Should Stop Chemical War on America

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By Bruce Bialosky

Since Russia has not rolled through Ukraine as was speculated by many people, some have argued that Putin would use more extreme measures. The same people began speculating and the Biden Administration followed stating that Putin was poised to use chemical warfare against Ukraine. Biden should first start with stopping the current chemical war waged against the United States.

When most Americans think about the use of chemical weapons, they think about World War I. The scenes of soldiers wearing gas masks in trenches where chemical weapons were used early on by both sides. Interestingly, there was a pre-war agreement not to fire projectiles carrying the dangerous chemicals so canisters were strategically placed so the wind would cause the chemicals to drift into the opposition’s bunkers.

The destructive aspect of chemical warfare was so universally recognized after World War I that an agreement was made called the Geneva Protocol which was passed in 1925. It was put into force in 1928 to prohibit the use of chemical and biological weapons.

That did not stop the use of these deadly chemicals in multiple military conflicts after the adoption of the Protocol. The most ominous use was by the Germans in their death camps where millions of Jews and others were murdered, now commonly referred to in the civilized world as The Holocaust.

In 1997, the Chemical Weapons Convention prohibited the use of these weapons. As of last year, 193 countries had signed on to the agreement. Russia is a party to the agreement. They have been accused of using chemical weapons in Chechnya and Syria but have denied it at U.N. meetings. Certainly, there is a concern that Russia has chemical weapons, but whether they will use them in Ukraine is unknown.

We do know that one specific country has been willing to use chemical weapons and continues to do so. The focus of those chemical weapons has been the United States. We know where these chemical weapons come from. At least one President has asked the country that is shipping these deadly chemical weapons to stop the manufacturing. Everyone knows if they wanted to, they could.

This chemical weapon is so deadly that consuming just two milligrams is deadly to most humans. There are one million milligrams in a kilogram which is 2.2 pounds, about the size of one Tomahawk steak. A kilogram (a kilo) could kill 500,000 Americans. Recent seizures by the border patrol and DEA have netted 588 pounds of weapon which is about 267 kilograms or enough of this drug to kill 133,500,000 Americans. 

The DEA estimates that in one year, from May 2020 to April 2021, 64,000 Americans died from the ingestion of this deadly chemical weapon.  

We know where this weapon comes from. We know where it is shipped to for entry into our country. This is not new. This has been going on since at least 2013. Both the Obama and Trump Administrations confronted the adversary and asked them to stop the illicit production of the chemical. This country has complete control over what goes on within its borders, but somehow cannot shut down the factories manufacturing this chemical. At this time, hundreds of thousands of Americans have died. Their families have been pillaged, towns have been devastated and children have lost their parents, yet we have been unable to stop this mass murder.

The same country has recently shut down entire cities and provinces because of the threat of COVID. Yet it cannot seem to stop the manufacture of fentanyl, however, because it seems it does not want to do so.

If you have not figured out by now what this is about, it is the illicit manufacturing of fentanyl in China that is shipped to America. A 2020 study by the Left-wing Brookings Institute stated “The government of China at first tends to deny the existence of a problem. Under international or strong domestic pressure, it eventually moves to tighten regulation. But its enforcement tends to be limited and subverted by powerful vested interests of industry representatives, officials of line ministries charged with regulating or promoting the industry, and government officials.” We all know that Xi Jinping could shut this down immediately if he wanted to, but he does not care to do so.

China states it has cracked down on illicit production. It states to the world that it cannot find any smuggling of the drug out of their country. The Chinese government’s responses have been bald-faced lies. They are guilty of chemical warfare against the United States and potentially other countries.

While the Biden Administration decries a potential Russian chemical weapon attack in Europe it ignores a real, existing, and ongoing attack on our own citizens. Biden once again proves his distorted focus on Russia while ignoring the real threat – China. Mr. President, put a stop to this before another 100,000 Americans are buried and thousands of children are left without a parent.

*****

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

Transgenderism: Why Stop There? thumbnail

Transgenderism: Why Stop There?

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By Deroy Murdock

Editors’ Note: As the sign says, trans rights are human rights. By logical extension, if one becomes in law what one says one “identifies” as, there is no logical or legal reason why people cannot identify with another race, sex, nationality, or species. And if this is a “human right”, who are we to deny this right? This is more than just a slippery slope, this is a black diamond course on the way to total social and mental confusion.

“Identifying” as someone who one is not has become all the rage. If you think you’re somebody you’re not, the whole world is expected to nod its collective head, if not stand up and cheer.

This is especially true for gender identity, as William “Lia” Thomas has demonstrated so vividly in collegiate swimming pools. Unheralded male swimmer William Thomas became NCAA champion female swimmer Lia Thomas—Shazam!—just by saying so.

What a cool magic trick.

Gone are the days when a guy had to put some skin in the game to pull this off. Or, more accurately, pull something off to get some skin out of the game; namely, his penis. The old carving-station requirement for gender transition has gone the way of the rotary telephone. Today, mere affirmations will suffice.

“Hey, I’m a girl!” And you are.

As Yogi Berra might say, if he were alive and not in shock: “Only in America.”

Since simple declarations of identity can change people more swiftly than scalpels, what’s next after the triumph of transgenderism?

Why not transnationalism?

Visualize Lupita Martinez. She lives in poverty in Honduras. The mean streets of Tegucigalpa keep her at her wits’ end. A crime surge on public transportation is the last macaw that breaks the branch of her patience.

So, Martinez joins a caravan and heads north, to the U.S.-Mexican frontier.

When she comes face to face with a Border Patrol agent, Martinez says the magic words: “I identify as an American.”

“Welcome home, Lupita!” the federal agent says with a warm smile, as he waves this Honduran American citizen back where she belongs.

And why not transracialism?

Picture Ludwig Von Thannhausen, age 18. He lives in suburban Chicago with his native German parents who brought him to America as a baby. He has blond hair, blue eyes, and looks like a young man born in Oberpfaffenhofen who also happens to be white.

But Von Thannhausen can’t get enough of things black.

He is obsessed with the Harlem Renaissance. He knows the literature of Langston Hughes better than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the paintings of Aaron Douglas more than Max Ernst, and the music of Duke Ellington deeper than Richard Wagner.

His heroes stretch from Frederick Douglass to the Tuskegee Airmen to Denzel Washington. He listens to everything from Motown to Parliament Funkadelic to Prince to Kanye West.

He dreams of majoring in black studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C., a historically black college. In fact, he’s applying as a black student and seeks scholarships intended for black applicants.

Von Thannhausen resembles a recruit for the Aryan Nation, but he said the secret words: “I identify as black.”

Who are we to disagree? If that’s his identity, that’s his identity.

And if his good grades, decent SAT scores, and impressive baseball record land him a spot at Howard, plus a $50,000 minority scholarship, then who are we to say that he is not really black?

But what would we say to the kid who actually is black (you know: dark skin, dark hair, etc.), applies to Howard, and misses out on admission, a scholarship, or both? If not for Von Thannhausen, those blessings would be hers.

Why not transindividualism?

Imagine that Bob Glenwood has multiple-personality disorder. He identifies as Bob Glenwood, but also as Steve Jones, Myron Shapiro, Jackie Washington, and Concepcion Gomez.

So, he fills out five voter registration applications and requests five absentee ballots.

Who are we to say that Glenwood deserves just one ballot? How dare we disenfranchise the other four people who live inside his brain? That would be Jim Crow 3.0.

As these (for now) fictional scenarios show, America will plunge into ever deeper chaos if we simply let people “identify” as those they are not and then deprive others of goods and benefits meant for people who legitimately embody those identities.

I identify as Walter Cronkite, and that’s the way it is.

*****

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

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