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

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.

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

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.

Fentanyl From China: Biden Should Stop Chemical War on America thumbnail

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.

‘Genocide’ And ‘Eugenics’: Bipartisan Commission Releases Stunning Human Rights Report On China thumbnail

‘Genocide’ And ‘Eugenics’: Bipartisan Commission Releases Stunning Human Rights Report On China

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By Philip Lenczycki

  • The Congressional-Executive Commission on China published its annual report on Thursday outlining human rights violations within Communist China.
  • Among other findings, the report reiterated the State Department’s 2021 determination that China’s attack on the reproductive rights of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities constituted “genocide,” and even went so far as to amount to “eugenics.”
  • The report also proposed 18 legislative recommendations concerning the protection of human rights in China for policymakers to consider, many of which are echoed in a letter the commission sent to ranking members of the House and Senate on Monday.

A bipartisan commission released a report detailing Communist China’s gross human rights violations on Thursday.

The annual report published by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) determined that China had perpetrated “systematic violations of human rights” and that it posed a “challenge to the rules-based international order,” a press release accompanying the report’s publication stated. 

The report’s findings cover a wide range of issues, including freedom of religion; the rights of women and refugees; as well as rights for repressed peoples, such as those in Xinjiang, where the commission determined China is perpetrating both “genocide” and “eugenics.” (RELATED: Genocide Games: How China’s Human Rights Abuses Went From Unthinkable To Undeniable)

‘Genocide’ And ‘Eugenics’

Echoing the Department of State’s 2021 determination, the report states “abundant evidence” was found showing “Chinese authorities had committed genocide.” 

The justification for the determination hinges on the United Nations’ definition of “genocide,” which is satisfied when actions against groups “prevent births.”

The report found that “many of the most egregious abuses” targeted women and included “rape” perpetrated by concentration camp “officials and government employees.”

The report also concluded, among other atrocities, Uyghur and ethnic minority women were subject to forced sterilizations and abortions, which has caused a “drop in birth rates.” The commission characterized these practices as amounting to “eugenics.”

The report also states the CCP sought to “further the ‘sinicization’ of religions practiced by ethnic minority groups.”

Arslan, a Uyghur who asked not to have his full name publicized in fear of retribution upon his family who remain under CCP rule, told the Daily Caller News Foundation, “People used to go [to the mosque] every day for their daily prayer. Now it’s forbidden … They’ve turned it into a tourist site.” (RELATED: ‘Heinous Human Rights Atrocities’: Bipartisan Legislation Aims To Relink China’s Human Rights Record With Trade)

*****

This article was published by The Daily Caller News Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

How a Faith in Feelings Can Enslave Your Mind

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By Barry Brownstein

Editors’ Note: After all the kerfuffle about the Will Smith “slap” at the Oscars, the following essay is of some importance. It also applies to the many political radicals today, whose internal mental issues now seem to form public policy. We see this constantly on our university campuses and now quite frequently in our major corporations.  The “feelings” of the employees of Disney for example, must take precedent over the protection of your children, or even the company’s profits.

We have been taught to trust our feelings. Being authentic, we are told, is the key to success. On college campuses, feelings have been elevated to the sacred.

Gillian McCann, a professor of religion at Canada’s Nipissing University, relates the story of her graduate school supervisor advising her “to do whatever [she] felt.” A friend listening to her story quipped, “That kind of advice has ruined a generation.”

Writing with co-author Gitte Bechsgaard, McCann observes that problems with emotional self-regulation and addiction are rapidly growing. They add that

we are living in a culture with an expectation to be authentic and expressive in all life situations—quite independent of context or consequences.

McCann and Bechsgaard pointedly write,

A mind that is left undeveloped (or not attended to) is… potentially our worst enemy.

One morning after setting up my breakfast in my Instant Pot, I sat down and prepared for my workday by watching my thoughts arise. I was attending to my mind, especially noticing grievances, even mild annoyances, that could undermine my purpose for the day.

As I sunk into my meditation, I heard the steam hissing furiously from my Instant Pot. The pot had not been sealed.

I could blame the Instant Pot for my rage, or I could acknowledge my thoughts of frustration, irritation, and blame ready to erupt.

Mindless, I found myself back in the kitchen screaming in frustration.

In seconds, I was shocked by the intense emotions seething beneath my placid surface. The hissing steam exposed what was lurking in my mind.

If I was ready to learn, the hissing steam was about to teach me a lesson. I could blame the Instant Pot for my rage, or I could acknowledge my thoughts of frustration, irritation, and blame ready to erupt.

Haven’t we all blamed our circumstances or other people for our feelings? Feeling resentment, we blame our partner for not offering enough support. Feeling anxiety and stress, we blame a traffic delay. Feeling depressed, we are sure it is coming from the state of the world.

We have reversed cause and effect. As the late author Michael Crichton observed, “Wet sidewalks don’t cause rain.” Likewise, feelings don’t cause thoughts.

You can’t have a feeling without having a thought first. Take a moment now; try to feel anger. Can you feel anger without first conjuring up angry thoughts?

As our feelings become more intense, so do the physical sensations in our bodies. We seek relief from our swirling thoughts.

Splitting your thoughts from your feelings and pretending something outside yourself is causing them is the beginning of psychological enslavement. The Instant Pot didn’t cause my frustration; its hissing steam revealed my frustration. Traffic doesn’t cause anger; it reveals our anger. Relationships don’t cause resentment; they reveal resentment we are carrying within ourselves.

Yet, we stubbornly insist that our wet sidewalks cause our rain. The more intense our feelings, the more certain we are that other people and circumstances are to blame for the feelings we experience.

As our feelings become more intense, so do the physical sensations in our bodies. Our heart rate may rapidly rise. Our muscles may constrict. Our thinking swirls with rapid-fire thoughts; an external situation has hijacked our attention. We seek relief from our swirling thoughts. For many of us, reaching for our smartphones is an escape from the swirl. Addictions form to escape that swirl.

This past week, you may have experienced anxiety, fear, depression, worry, resentment, frustration, or another intense feeling. I have never met a person who claims to be immune to negative feelings. What is crucial is how we choose to process our feelings: outside-in or inside-out.

Typically, we process feelings in an outside-in manner. We believe our feelings are giving us feedback about other people, our circumstances, past events, or future possibilities.

Most of us pay special attention to some negative feelings while easily overlooking others. Judging by the growing number of prescriptions written for anxiety, many pay special attention to anxious thoughts. For some, when anxiety arises, their thinking speeds up. They are gripped by thoughts of Why am I feeling this way? How can I get rid of this feeling? The more their head is filled with thinking, the less present they are in the moment. Taking a prescription drug may seem like the only way to calm the mind.

There are no feelings that can ever exist separate from our thoughts. We are always experiencing our thinking and our feelings from the inside-out.

Looking at feelings through an outside-in mindset, it seems we have a lot of external circumstances to process and manage. After all, if an endless supply of other people and circumstances are causing our feelings, it is natural to have a lot on our minds.

However, we misunderstand how the mind operates when we attempt to get to the bottom of our feelings from an outside-in mindset.

There are no feelings that can ever exist separate from our thoughts. We are always experiencing our thinking and our feelings from the inside-out.

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote, “Our life is what our thoughts make it.” From an inside-out mindset, our feelings are a barometer, giving us feedback on the quality of our thinking at the moment.

Understanding that we can only experience life inside-out, not outside-in, is the beginning of taking responsibility and experiencing psychological freedom.

In 1895, the first silent movie was shown in Paris, France. The less-than-a-minute movie simply showed a train arriving in a station. There are perhaps apocryphal accounts of audience members rushing out of the theater in fear. The audience experienced the train bearing down on them; the experience of projection was new.

Apocryphal or not, the story provides a good metaphor. Gripped by an outside-in mindset, we try to flee our mind’s theater by resisting the thoughts and feelings we have created. The feelings we are having at any given moment are arising from our thoughts, not from our external circumstances.

Each moment we choose whether to take responsibility for our experience of life. This outside-in mindset leads to blame.

We project our thinking onto the world. In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey wrote, “We see the world, not as it is, but as we are.”

Each moment we choose whether to take responsibility for our experience of life. When we look at our experience through the lens of an outside-in mindset, we believe our feelings are giving us honest feedback about our circumstances and other people. This outside-in mindset leads to blame.

The alternative is to experience life through an inside-out mindset. Moment by moment, we can interpret our feelings as signals, giving reliable feedback on the quality of our thinking.

Life requires action. When action is needed, an inside-out mindset allows us to act from our highest purpose and values. In contrast, using an outside-in mindset, we approach a problem with a built-in lack of clarity. This lack of clarity undermines our problem-solving ability. Indeed the harder the problem, the more the lack of clarity in the outside-in mindset works against us. As the popular saying goes, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”

We can go through life kicking and screaming, or we can be happy learners. To stubbornly maintain that life is being lived outside-in is to be devoted to misery.

To be a happy learner, remember that your interpretation of an “external” situation is a big clue to your state of mind.

Observe when intense feelings arise. Observe any thoughts of blaming other people or circumstances for your feelings.

For example, do bad drivers piss you off? Perhaps you are a good driver but inconsiderate in other situations.

For example, do bad drivers piss you off? If so, observe the accusations you are making. Perhaps you are a good driver but inconsiderate in other situations. If you are willing to learn, life gives you insight into the contents of your thinking.

Understanding that life is lived inside-out, practice the subtraction solution: have a little willingness to say, I must be mistaken because I’m blaming.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus began his life as a slave. He overcame physical bondage and then attended to his mind to free himself of his own inner chains. In the collection of his writing The Enchiridion, he shared his timeless discovery: “People are not disturbed by things, but by the views they take of them.”

Epictetus continued:

When therefore we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never attribute it to others, but to ourselves; that is, to our own principles. An uninstructed person will lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others.

The good news is that life’s situations—even hissing steam—will instruct us if we are willing to learn to attend to our minds from an inside-out mindset.

*****

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

Law Schools Fall To Revolutionaries – A Commentary on SCOTUS Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson thumbnail

Law Schools Fall To Revolutionaries – A Commentary on SCOTUS Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson

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By Rod Dreher

Here’s a very, very powerful addition to my danger of conservative complacency post.

Writing on Bari Weiss’s invaluable Substack, Aaron Sibarium details the corruption of the American legal profession by wokeness. Y’all, this is a five-alarm situation. Excerpts:

Read it all. Seriously, every word. As scholar Eric Kaufmann said over the weekend (see my link in the first graf), conservative voters and politicians have to make fighting wokeness in the culture war their No. 1 priority. If they don’t, we are going to lose our freedom. It really is that simple.

The people who lived under totalitarianism in the Soviet bloc were the first to understand the true nature of the changes sweeping over America in this last decade. I tell their story in Live Not By Lies, and share their advice on how to resist it. If you have previously thought the idea of “soft totalitarianism” was unduly alarmist, I invite you to read Sibarium’s report and reconsider. If you are the kind of person who thinks that wokeness is a fad among the young, and that they’ll grow out of it, you are not only wrong, you are dangerously wrong.

This [past] week,   is appearing before the Senate in her Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Two years ago, in a law school lecture, she discussed Critical Race theorists who were influential in shaping her thinking. Here is a link to the text of the lecture. She also praised the fraudulent 1619 Project. Well, Critical Race Theory came up yesterday in questioning:

But it was a question about whether or not infants were racist that drew the first detectable sign of exasperation from Judge Jackson, who sits on the board of trustees at Georgetown Day School, a private school in Washington where the city’s elite — both conservative and liberal — send their children.

Wielding a stack of children’s books, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, had an aide display several large color photos from a children’s book called “Antiracist Baby” by Ibram X. Kendi.

“This is a book that is taught at Georgetown Day School to students in pre-K through second grade,” Mr. Cruz said from the dais. “Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids that babies are racist?”

Judge Jackson audibly sighed before leaning into the microphone.

“Senator,” she said, “I do not believe that any child should be made to feel as though they are racist, or though they are not valued, or though they are less than, that they are victims, that they are oppressors. I do not believe in any of that.”

During his 30 minutes of questioning, Mr. Cruz questioned Judge Jackson on her views of race, racism, and critical race theory. Critical race theory is a field of study in law schools that argues that laws and institutions can incorporate structural racial bias, but Republicans have used the term as a way to criticize educational materials that describe ideas of racism, racial privilege, or inequality.

After he was done with “Antiracist Baby,” Mr. Cruz asked Judge Jackson about whether or not she had read any of the children’s books. And she continued to tell the senator that she was not sure how the children’s books related to her work as a judge.

“I have not reviewed any of those books, any of those ideas,” Judge Jackson said. “They don’t come up as my work as a judge, which I am respectfully here to address.”

Earlier in his questioning process, Mr. Cruz quoted Judge Jackson’s praise of Georgetown Day’s “rigorous progressive education that is dedicated to fostering critical thinking, independence and social justice.” Judge Jackson replied that the school was private, and every “parent who joins the community does so willingly, with an understanding that they are joining a community that is designed to make sure that every child is valued.”

It’s a fair line of questioning. Someone who was against the principles of Critical Race Theory ought to have been eager to criticize the school’s racist policies. Moreover, it ought to have been easy for the judge to give to Sen. Marsha Blackburn the definition she asked for:

“Do you interpret Justice Ginsburg’s meaning of men and women as male and female?” Blackburn pressed. Jackson did not comment on the matter.

“Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman?’” the senator asked.

“Can I provide a definition? No,” Jackson responded. “I can’t.”

“You can’t?” Blackburn asked.

“Not in this context, I’m not a biologist,” the judge replied.

“Do you believe the meaning of the word woman is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?” Blackburn pressed.

“Senator, in my work as a judge, what I do is I address disputes. If there’s a dispute about a definition, people make arguments, and I look at the law, and I decide,” Jackson said.

This is completely disingenuous. Judge Brown knows well that judges like her are required to make these decisions in cases involving transgender civil rights claims. Her refusal to answer the question straightforwardly tells us what we need to know.

Judge Jackson is both a radical and a mainstream 2022 liberal, in the sense that Aaron Sibarium means in his piece. That is, it’s clear that she would be a reliable vector to Supreme Court deliberations of the kind of culture-war radicalism that has consumed law schools. I have a relatively expansive view of SCOTUS nominations, thinking that presidents should generally get their nominees confirmed absent some grave reason not to. In these times, though, and with the serious threat that gender ideology and CRT pose to the fundamental social and constitutional order, I would not vote to confirm any judicial nominee who was not explicitly opposed to both. This is too important to the country’s present and future.

This is morally insane. You don’t need to be a biologist to answer this question. The fact the Judge Jackson can’t do it — or rather, will not do it — tells us everything we need to know about her. I would vote against her nomination for this reason alone. A potential Supreme Court justice who declines to define “woman” is not fit for the office.

*****

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

High-Quality Study Finds Preschool Enrollment Makes Children Learn Less And Misbehave More thumbnail

High-Quality Study Finds Preschool Enrollment Makes Children Learn Less And Misbehave More

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By Joy Pullmann

The children more likely to be brought up mostly by their own families, by contrast, were happier and learned better. Low-income children who attended Tennessee’s highly praised preschool program performed significantly worse on every academic and social measurement by sixth grade compared to peers who did not attend the program, a recent high-quality study found.

“[T]he children randomly assigned to attend Pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade,” summarize the Vanderbilt University study authors. “A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services…”

Enrollment in preschool programs has exploded in the United States since 1980, the study authors note, from very few four-year-olds to approximately two-thirds today. But approximately half of four-year-olds who attend preschool do so part-time. Tennessee’s statewide Voluntary Preschool (TN-VPK) program, by contrast, was relatively time-intensive, requiring its low-income students to be in classrooms of up to 20 total children for at least 5.5 hours a day.

This study suggests family care is better for four-year-olds than TN-VPK. The only positive results for TN-VPK participants compared to non-TN-VPK peers occurred at the end of preschool. Then from third through sixth grade, only negative results were documented for TN-VPK participants, and the negative effects increased over time.

“On the sixth grade TNReady tests, control children [who mostly didn’t attend preschool] continued to outperform the TN-VPK children in reading, mathematics, and science, with statistically significant differences larger than those observed in third grade,” the study says.

This trend of increasingly negative disparities over time among preschool attendees also affected student behavior records, the study says: “All analyses revealed higher rates of recorded disciplinary events for TN-VPK participants than non-participants, and these differences were statistically significant except for the weighted analysis for major offenses.”

These negative behavioral findings included decreased rates of school attendance, violations of school policies such as cheating and disobeying the dress code, being held back a grade, and being diagnosed with a learning disability or emotional disturbance.

The study authors expressed surprise at their results, as did their 2018 report that looked at the third-grade outcomes for the same 2,990 children. But they stood by their data.

“If the programs we have created do not produce the desired effects, the findings themselves should not be dismissed simply because they were unanticipated and unwelcome,” write the authors, Kelley Durkin, Mark Lipsey, Dale C. Farran, and Sarah Wiesen, in the study.

Farran told NPR, “This is still the only randomized controlled trial of a statewide pre-K, and I know that people get upset about this and don’t want it to be true.”

But a longtime preschool teacher and nanny writing for the Institute of Family Studies about the Tennessee results, Tara Thieke, wasn’t surprised by these results at all.

“I observed that even the highest quality care could elicit sustained traumatic responses,” she wrote. “…I believe that what is celebrated as adjustment (‘see, they’re fine!’) was more frequently a sign of the child learning the futility of crying out. … Separation from the staff with whom they spent most of their time became as traumatic as separation from parents. Stressful transitions and confusion flooded the child’s body: as repeated studies have shown, the levels of the stress-hormone cortisol remain elevated for children in institutionalized care compared to children in a home setting.”

This is not the only study, or the only good-quality study, to find similarly negative consequences of enrolling children in preschool. Many do.

For example, recent studies of a large government childcare program for children ages 0 to 5 in Quebec found participants experienced significant increases in anxiety, aggression, hyperactivity, and crimes committed. One study on the Quebec program found “children exposed to the program were 4.6 percent more likely to be convicted of a crime and 17 percent more likely to commit a drug crime. Their health and life satisfaction were worse.”

Leftists devote plenty of discussion to the “school-to-prison pipeline” they say is the result of school discipline for unruly children. Based on the most robust evidence about mass early childhood institutionalization, however, it seems it’s more statistically legitimate to suggest a “preschool to prison pipeline.”

Federal studies on nonmaternal care for preschool-age children have repeatedly found:

the more time children spent in any kind of non-familial child care, and sometimes specifically in centers, the more aggressive and disobedient they proved to be at two (but not three) and 4.5 years of age, as well as across their elementary school years; and the more impulsive they proved to be at age 15, at which age they also engaged in more ‘risky’ behavior than children who experienced far less non-familial care across their first five years of life.

The only other randomized trial of preschool enrollment besides this TN-VPK project, conducted on the federal Head Start program, found that preschool enrollment did not measurably improve life and academic outcomes for the children enrolled. If anything, children enrolled in Head Start showed worse math and emotional outcomes than peers who did not. That study extended only to third grade, and the release of the results was delayed.

These studies demonstrate the bankruptcy of politicians’ desire to increase government subsidies for separating young children from their families. TN-VPK has been widely touted by politicians and media as a model for other states and is ranked as having 9 out of 10 elements of a “high-quality” program by the National Institute of Early Education Research.

“Tennessee’s pre-K program is the kind of state initiative that President Obama wants to provide incentives to states to expand,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a 2013 speech. President Joe Biden’s signature Build Back Better cradle-to-grave welfare proposal includes a massive expansion of government childcare. The proposal aims to institute universal government preschool for three- and four-year-olds and subsidized daycare for children as young as babies.

Tennessee’s program includes what preschool advocates say are marks of high-quality programs: paying teachers as much as K-12 public school counterparts, hiring only state-licensed teachers, putting a teacher’s aide in every classroom, and following a state-determined curriculum. But none of these, the study authors note, has been proven to actually benefit children.

In fact, studies have also thrown cold water on the idea that teacher certification improves teacher quality, as measured by students’ academic growth: “There have been three very large studies, the latest one in 2018, which are not showing any relationship between quality and [teacher] licensure,” Farran also told NPR.

As a randomized, controlled trial, the highest quality available to social science, the Tennessee study is rare. Most preschool studies are less rigorous and conducted by open advocates for large-scale child-parent separation. The 79 TN-VPK locations that had more applicants than room awarded entrance randomly, allowing for a robust test group of 2,990 children.

Of the control group, 63 percent were cared for at home in their preschool year. The rest attended a mix of government and private preschools and daycares. This suggests the negative effects of preschool might be even stronger than this study indicates since two-fifths of the control group also experienced preschool environments at age 4.

*****

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

If You Don’t Know What a Woman Is, You Are Disqualified thumbnail

If You Don’t Know What a Woman Is, You Are Disqualified

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By Neland Nobel

Under questioning from Senator Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee, Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson said she could not define what a woman is because she (Ketanji Jackson) is not a biologist. This was among the most revealing of some of her muddled answers.

This was obvious pandering to the Transgender Lobby and is disqualifying on a number of levels.

She will have cases pertaining to this social controversy and she already is prejudiced herself. We cannot afford to have such a confused brain sitting on the Supreme Court.

Likewise disqualifying is the cowardice displayed, in that she could have answered the question as a reasonable person would, but chose to be evasive because she either thinks the question is very complicated or she is more a politician with her finger in the wind than a judge. Both positions are disqualifying.

She also pandered to the credentialed crowd and the idiotic notion that one has to have a degree to think. We have to possess a degree in biology now to know the difference between a man and a woman? Good grief, humans had that figured out long before universities were formed and degrees granted. They had to have known the difference or all of us wouldn’t be here!

So now a stallion has to have a degree in biology to recognize a mare? A degree as a veterinarian is necessary to recognize a dog? A degree in geology is necessary to identify a rock? A degree in law is necessary to know this candidate is not worthy of a seat on the Supreme Court?

What condescending drivel!

Since the case of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who “identified” as being black and became the head of the Seattle area NAACP a few years back, some felt a person’s race can be changed by mere declaration or affirmation. Interestingly, the NAACP was not among those that felt that way as they fired her promptly.

Senator Elizabeth Warren at least did not “identify” as a Native American, she simply lied about her family background in order to advance her academic and political career. She may have actually believed her family stories about the origins of high cheekbones.

Those positions are less breathtaking than the idea that sex can be “changed” by a simple declaration. Progressives seem to believe this can be done, while Conservatives generally believe that one’s sex is biological and genetic makeup, is not a function of self-declaration.

The genetic difference between one white female and one black female is very slight.  But the difference between a man and a woman is much greater.  But in neither case can one’s internal identification and later public declaration change the facts of sexual organs, the hormones they produce, and DNA.

But thanks to “Gender Studies” at universities, we find ourselves as a society questioning our own sanity.

If I declare that I now identify as Peter Pan, does that mean I can fly? Does it mean I can remain a child for the rest of my life? This is fairy tale stuff, not reality. Need proof?  Let our newly identified Peter Pan jump off a building and see if gravity cares one wit about personal identification.

Thus, if a person’s self-declaration of what they are determines their sex, how would being a biologist help? If anything, a biologist would be confused because the physical evidence and DNA could conflict with the declaration of the person being examined. As a biologist, you are not trained to weigh psychotic statements any better than the rest of us. So, why does Judge Brown even make that argument?

Joe Biden says he wants to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court. This should not be the criteria for such an important appointment, but Biden has made his political calculations and made his choice based on the idea that he can find a black female for the job. How can that be done if the President is unable to define what both a black and a woman are? Moreover, if he is able to determine what a black woman is, but his candidate for the Supreme Court cannot, what does that tell you about the process? Perhaps the President is a biologist?

Either the President is terribly wrong or the judicial nominee is mistaken. You can’t have it both ways.

It is time, well past time, for both women and men to stand up and say to the transgendered advocates that your declarations or affirmations do not change reality. It is not prejudiced in any form to resist being sucked into another person’s mental illness. Delusional behavior is bad enough on the individual level, without elevating it to the societal level. None of us are under any moral or ethical requirement to join in this dangerous fiction. Rather, we have a moral and ethical obligation to resist it.

Our position should be as follows: We are sorry for your sexual confusion and we hope you get help. But your psychosis is damaging to the rest of us, our families, our children, and we will not accept as fact your emotional outbursts, no matter how sincerely felt.  You may do what you wish with your own life, but we will not change our laws, customs, and manners, just to accommodate your psychosis.

The transgendered have the rights to be treated as a human beings and be free of violence and coercion. But we also have the right not to share their mental illness. We also have the right to be free of violence and coercion from the transgendered. Seen any videos lately of campus behavior among this crowd?

If one cannot determine what a woman is even for the purposes of sport, how is this inability going to influence the functioning of the law?

We have Title 9 and other laws creating opportunities for women in sport and education. But if women cannot be identified, then how do these benefits get allocated?

What the heck does “women’s rights” even mean, if there is no ready way to know what a woman is?

Equal pay for men and women?  How could you possibly know how to apply such a concept if you cannot determine who is male and who is female?

Sexual harassment of women? How can one harass something that does not exist, except in the mind of whomever? Only biologists can know it would seem and thus be guilty or not.

Generally, women get benefits from marriage and justified or not, get additional economic support in divorce, and usually child custody. Well, how can that be accomplished if you don’t know the difference between the man and the woman?

If a Federal judge cannot define what is a man or a woman, how are the rest of us supposed to enforce those employment and family laws that apply particularly to either men or women?

So, do today’s feminists have any idea how damaging this embracing of transgenderism is to their cause?

On an even more prosaic level, if a Federal judge cannot define what is a man or a woman, how are we supposed to describe a criminal to the police if we cannot either determine their sex or race? Kind of hard to provide a description, would it not? We could not know unless we interviewed the perp and got to know how they identified.

If it is impossible to know the difference between a man and a woman, who will be eligible for the draft, should that be needed again?

Besides her inability to answer a simple question, it would appear the candidate selected by President Biden is very soft on crime, particularly sexual crimes involving children, and very much has bought into the sexual insanity in vogue at universities. On other matters, she seems to side with criminals embracing the fashionable left-wing notions that society is at fault and thus, no one is really a criminal.

Our Senators should vote NO on her nomination.

Republicans will no doubt waver, afraid as always, they might in any way confirm the racist calumny Democrats have hung on them.

This really has nothing to do with the race of the candidate. This is a clear-cut case of poor judicial judgment, activism, and temperament.

Marsha Blackburn Previews GOP Strategy To Vet Ketanji Jackson thumbnail

Marsha Blackburn Previews GOP Strategy To Vet Ketanji Jackson

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By Emily Jashinksy

All the way back in 2008, Marsha Blackburn recalled an anecdote from her first congressional campaign. A man in a coffee shop asked, “Little lady, what qualifies you to run for the United States House of Representatives?”

Blackburn, so the story goes, “quickly ticked off her time as a choir director and Girl Scouts cookie mom.”

After a brief exchange, the man asked another question. “Little lady, if you win this thing, what we gonna call you — congresslady? Congressgirl?”

“Sir, congressman will be just fine,” Blackburn replied.

And it was. In the House, Blackburn famously went by “congressman” instead of “congresswoman,” although she never made a big deal of it.

When I asked the senator on Tuesday why it matters that she’ll be the only Republican woman on the Judiciary Committee during Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing, Blackburn’s answer was that she plans to “give voice to the questions and concerns that conservative women have as they look at the federal bench and the individual that is going to take the seat.”

Those concerns, according to Blackburn, involve Jackson’s “respect” for the Constitution and rule of law. She’s convinced Democrats’ reprehensible conduct during the Kavanaugh confirmation is “why now people want it to be focused on the issues. They want it to be very thorough, they want to go into someone’s record.”

Blackburn, a mother of two who’s been married to her husband since the 1970s, worked her way from a career in sales and marketing up to Tennessee’s state senate and then to the House of Representatives, where she served from 2003 until voters sent her to the upper chamber in 2019. (Against the wishes of Taylor Swift.) In the Senate, Blackburn has become a reliable voice for the new GOP, zeroing in on big technology companies and America’s enemies in the Chinese government.

The Kavanaugh confirmation undoubtedly marked a turning point for many Republicans, not just in Washington. Blackburn joined the judiciary committee in time to question Amy Coney Barrett and, ultimately, vote in favor of her advancement to the court. In an empty meeting room on Capitol Hill, spring sunshine pouring through the windows, Blackburn and I briefly revisited those ugly confirmations during an interview less than a week before the start of Jackson’s time in the hot seat.

“Tennesseans,” Blackburn told me, “were just shocked at the conduct of some of the Democrats” during Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation. They watched Barrett’s confirmation “intently.”

Rightfully so, given how Democrats and their allies in media accused Kavanaugh of gang rape with no credible evidence. Justice Barrett faced heinous attacks on her faith and family from the press. One best-selling author implied she was akin to a “white colonizer” for adopting black children.

With that in mind, I asked for Blackburn’s response to an increasingly popular sentiment on the right. “If Democrats are going to break all of these norms, why should we not fight their norm-breaking with our own norm-breaking? If they’re fundamentally transforming the country with activist judges—and I think it Judge Jackson’s record suggests that’s the kind of jurist that she is—if they’re doing that, is the only way to stop it not breaking norms on our own?”

“The way to stop it is to show the record,” said the senator, “of the individuals, whether it is Judge Jackson, whether it is nominees for any of the other federal courts. Sunlight is the best on this. And to bring attention to the records, to the writings, the rulings, the opinions, the number of times that have been overturned, respect for the Constitution, respect for the rule of law. That is the best way to bring attention to an issue and preserve this nation’s founding and the fundamentals of the Constitution which have kept us as a democratic republic.”

I then asked Blackburn about the particular norm I had in mind as a potential sticking point for Jackson’s confirmation. Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee killed Sarah Bloom Raskin’s nomination to the Federal Reserve this week by boycotting a committee vote, denying Democrats the quorum needed to advance her nomination. Raskin pulled out of the running.

Months ago, Rachel Bovard explained in The Federalist how Senate Republicans could use the same rule to leave Biden’s Supreme Court nominee in procedural limbo.

“By failing to show up to vote on the nomination in committee, Republicans could prevent the nomination from reaching the Senate floor by appealing to the Senate’s Rule 26, which requires that a majority of members, physically present, report the bill out of committee,” Bovard wrote.

Referencing the Raskin case, I asked Blackburn, “Are there any circumstances in which you could envision Republicans denying Judge Jackson a quorum depending on how the hearing goes?”

“The best thing for us to do right now is to prepare for opening statements, prepare for our questions, and approach next week in a thorough vetting mindset process,” she told me.

I started to push one more time on the question of norms, noting how Senate Republicans haven’t forced Vice President Harris to break many ties and even voted to confirm some of President Biden’s nominees. Blackburn politely interrupted me. (It was fair, I was rambling.)

“Republicans,” she said pointedly, “should lead the way in saying, ‘This is the Constitution. This is what we’re required to do by the Constitution. This is where the Constitution places responsibility. And this is what is required of us.’ And I think that it is a very good thing for Republicans to show that we believe in the Constitution and the rule of law and have respect for the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, I asked Blackburn about another norm, one she’s challenged very effectively. When Justice Breyer announced his retirement, I noted, some voices on the left were lamenting the corporate bias in Breyer’s record on antitrust, an issue on which Blackburn has become a major leader in challenging GOP orthodoxy.

“We are looking very closely at her record with companies and anything that she has written or said about antitrust,” the senator replied.

The effort to vet Jackson is an “all-hands-on-deck operation for us,” Blackburn explained.

Democrats are scrambling to confirm the judge before Easter. “Democrats really want to push this forward,” said Blackburn. “They are afraid. We’re at a 50-50 Senate. And they may not have the votes at some point. So they’re wanting to get the hearing out of the way and get her ready to go to the floor while they still have the votes.”

*****

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

Soft on Crime? Here’s Jackson’s Record on Sex Offenders and Other Criminals thumbnail

Soft on Crime? Here’s Jackson’s Record on Sex Offenders and Other Criminals

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By Fred Lucas

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson once expressed concern about a “climate of fear, hatred, and revenge” surrounding sex offenders.

Jackson later opposed the confinement conditions of a Taliban leader suspected of running a terrorist cell.

The judge also routinely ruled against the Trump administration on immigration enforcement cases, as detailed here.

Now, as President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Jackson faces questions about her legal career and record on crime when her Senate confirmation hearing convenes Monday.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., this week noted that during a crime wave, Jackson is a favorite among interest groups that are soft on crime. 

“Amid all this, the soft-on-crime brigade is squarely in Judge Jackson’s corner,” McConnell said Tuesday in a Senate floor speech. “They wanted her above anyone else on the short list. And they specifically cite her experience defending criminals and her work on the Sentencing Commission as key qualifications.”

The liberal nonprofit group Demand Justice promoted Jackson as one of its top picks on a list of potential Supreme Court nominees for Biden. Arabella Advisors, a major bankroller of left-of-center causes, sponsored the launch of Demand Justice.

Since June, Jackson has been a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. From 2013 to 2021, she was a judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. From 2003 to 2005, she was an assistant special counsel for the Sentencing Commission, then a public defender until 2007.

President Barack Obama nominated Jackson, in private practice at the time, to serve on the Sentencing Commission itself starting in 2009. She became vice chairwoman.

‘Alarming Pattern’ on Sex Offenders

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, tweeted Wednesday that he sees “an alarming pattern when it comes to Judge Jackson’s treatment of sex offenders, especially those preying on children.”

While on the commission, Hawley noted, Jackson said a “less serious child pornography offender” is motivated by “the use of technology.” She also said that some of those who possess child porn “are in this for either the collection, or the people who are loners and find status in their participation in the community.”

Hawley’s tweets referred to seven separate cases in which Jackson ruled.

“On the federal bench, Judge Jackson put her troubling views into action. In every single child porn case for which we can find records, Judge Jackson deviated from the federal sentencing guidelines in favor of child porn offenders,” Hawley wrote on Twitter.

Jackson authored 585 rulings while on the D.C. District Court, but has written only two opinions as a D.C. Circuit judge.

The lower court cases Hawley highlighted include:

  • U.S. v. Hawkins, where sentencing guidelines called for up to 10 years in prison for a man convicted of possession of multiple images of child pornography. Jackson sentenced him to three months.
  • U.S. v. Stewart, where sentencing guidelines called for 97 to 121 months in prison for a man convicted of possessing thousands of images of child porn and attempting to travel across state lines to abuse a 9-year-old girl. Jackson sentenced him to 57 months.
  • U.S. v. Cooper, where the guidelines called for 151 to 188 months for a sex offender convicted of posting 600 images and videos online. Jackson sentenced him to 60 months, the lowest sentence allowed, according to Hawley.
  • U.S. v. Chazin, where the guidelines called for 78 to 97 months for possession of child porn. Jackson’s sentence  was 28 months.
  • U.S. v. Downs, where the guidelines called for 70 to 87 months for someone convicted of posting sexual images of children, including at least one under age 5. Jackson handed down 60 months.
  • U.S. v. Sears, where the guidelines called for 97 to 121 months for a perpetrator convicted of distributing 102 child porn videos as well as photos of his 10-year-old daughter. Jackson gave him 60 months. (Jackson, however, later denied him compassionate release in 2020 when he said diabetes mellitus and asthma placed him at greater risk of serious complications from COVID-19, according to a Congressional Research Service report.)
  • U.S. v. Savage, where the guidelines called for 46 to 57 months for a man convicted of traveling with the intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct and also transporting child porn. Jackson sentenced him to 37 months.

White House spokesman Andrew Bates told a Washington Post reporter that Hawley used selective information.

“This is toxic and weakly presented misinformation that relies on taking cherry-picked elements of her record out of context—and it buckles under the lightest scrutiny,” the Post quoted Bates as saying.

‘Advocating Lighter Sentencing’

Democrats support the Jackson nomination and technically control the 100-member Senate by holding 48 seats, enjoying the support of two independents, and having Vice President Kamala Harris available to cast a tie-breaking vote.

Shortly after Biden nominated Jackson, the watchdog group American Accountability Foundation first flagged her 1996 Harvard Law Review article arguing that the justice system was unfair to sex offenders.

For a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, Jackson’s lifetime of legal views should be evaluated by senators, said Matt Buckham, a founder of the group.

“Maybe the article was written in the past about how the law is unfair to sexual predators and sex offenders, but she has had a long legal career advocating for lighter sentencing for crimes across the board,” Buckham told The Daily Signal.

Jackson’s Harvard Law Review article is titled “Prevention Versus Punishment: Toward a Principled Distinction in the Restraint on Released Sex Offenders.”

“In the current climate of fear, hatred, and revenge associated with the release of convicted sex criminals, courts must be especially atten­tive to legislative enactments that ‘use … public health and safety rhetoric to justify procedures that are, in essence, punishment and detention,’” Jackson wrote.

Jackson went on to compare laws on sex offender registries to the precedent set by the Supreme Court in the case of Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, where it struck down laws denying national citizenship to draft dodgers as unconstitutionally punitive.

In her article, Jackson wrote:

Judges should abandon the prevention/punishment analyses that rely on legislative intent, that routinely apply the Kennedy factors, and that assess the ‘excessiveness’ of a sex offender statute’s punitive effects in favor of a more principled approach to characterization. Although ‘[a precise] analytical solution is almost impossible to construct,’ this note suggests that such a principled approach in­volves assessing the impact of sex offender statutes and deeming the laws ‘punitive’ to the extent that they operate to deprive sex criminals of a legal right in a manner that primarily has retributive or general­ deterrent effects.

The American Accountability Foundation’s Buckham said Jackson’s record on crime demonstrates that she isn’t qualified to serve on the high court.

“She has a record of being an activist for a social justice agenda, not an arbiter of justice,” Buckham said. “If more Americans were aware she wants the law to go lighter on sex offenders, they would be horrified. Biden had a lot of candidates to draw from and should go back to the drawing board.”

Jackson’s record on such crimes is a fair issue to raise, said Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative legal nonprofit.

“To minimize child pornography is certainly not a positive for a Supreme Court nominee,” Severino told The Daily Signal.

If the issue is limited to opposing a sex offender registry, as outlined in Jackson’s law review article, liberal judges have opposed this before, noted Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, another conservative nonprofit.

In a 2003 case, Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer—the justice whom Jackson hopes to replace—were in a 6-3 minority disputing the constitutionality of Alaska’s sex offender registry. The same year, the high court unanimously upheld a Connecticut sex offender registry.

Defending Terrorism Suspects

Jackson’s broader record on crime will be a significant issue in her Senate confirmation hearing as well, Severino said, including the judge’s time as a public defender.

Jackson was a lawyer for terrorism suspects held at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including a Taliban officer believed to be a leader of a terrorist cell. In defending the Taliban leader, Khiali-Gul, Jackson accused the U.S. government of engaging in torture tactics.

Objecting to Gul’s confinement conditions, Jackson wrote:

Many of the most egregious interrogation techniques used in the Abu Ghraib detention center and other detention facilities in Iraq—such as the use of aggressive dogs to intimidate detainees, sexual humiliation, stress positions, and sensory deprivation—were pioneered at Guantanamo.

In the D.C. Federal Public Defender’s Office, Jackson primarily represented clients in appeals in firearms, tax evasion, and fraud cases. Legal experts note that senior public defenders have discretion about cases they are assigned.

“Obviously, the duty of a public defender is to advocate on behalf of their client as best as possible, but you can’t make just any argument,” Severino said. “Arguments can’t go beyond what is fair and reasonable.”

Severino said Jackson made “nitpicky” arguments as a public defender in two 2007 cases, one involving illegal firearms possession and the other drug possession.

In the firearms case, Jackson argued on appeal that the defendant couldn’t be charged with two separate firearms charges at the same time.

In the drug case, police had pursued a driver who made an illegal turn, then found drugs in plain sight in his vehicle, Severino said. Jackson argued that the driver shouldn’t have been pulled over, saying the turn wasn’t illegal if the police were able to pursue him.

*****

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

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Black Lives Matters Failure is a Blessing In Disguise

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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 their 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 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 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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Trans Tyranny in Public Schools

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By Pedro Gonzalez

Schools across the country have adopted a controversial policy of hiding the LGBT statuses of students from their parents. Sold to the public as an effort to protect children from abuse, the policy effectively circumvents parental consent and notification about their children’s health, safety, and well-being.

One Texas family told Chronicles how they fought to protect their children from transgender ideology. After finding out that staff of a public school had encouraged their daughter to transition to a male gender, they withdrew their children from the school. But that wasn’t the end of the story. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) came knocking at their door, demanding to conduct a safety assessment of their family environment.

In telling us his family’s story, the father, who we’ll call John, asked Chronicles to protect their identities, for fear of retaliation. He gave Chronicles copies of all the documents he received and sent to DFPS during the agency’s investigation.

What John and his family experienced is the result of a countrywide effort to push through schools radical ideas about sex and gender to influence children at their most vulnerable developmental stages. Even more sinister, their story shows how the enforcement arm of the government is being used to punish and harass those who resist. A war for the hearts, minds, and bodies of America’s children, which can often result in devastating and irreversible consequences—is being waged in every state, red or blue, and there is no opting out of the conflict.

John is a native Texan. He and his family live—or so they thought—outside Austin’s progressive sphere of influence. Over the last two years, John and his wife noticed their daughter, whom we’ll call Jane, acting strange. Jane cut her long, light brown hair to a much shorter, militaristic style during her freshman year of high school and adopted a more masculine style of dress. She withdrew from family life altogether, and her parents began practically begging her to interact with them as she used to do. Jane asked to start seeing a therapist, but wouldn’t explain why. Worried about her state of mind, they agreed to arrange mental health therapy sessions.

The truth about what was bothering Jane came out “in bits and pieces,” John said, but they never could have anticipated what was behind it all. The moment of revelation came when the family met with the high school guidance counselor last autumn. It was a routine appointment to review a catalog of classes and plan for their daughter’s future. John and his wife noticed that Jane had an uncanny rapport with the counselor. John said the counselor and Jane were finishing each other’s sentences and seemed privy to a whole world impenetrable to the parents. He appeared to have the kind of intimate relationship with Jane that John and his wife had lost and were struggling to reestablish.

After the meeting, John asked Jane about what was going on, and she revealed the truth. The guidance counselor and other staff at the school had encouraged their daughter to adopt a new identity as a boy, and to hide that from her parents. She had lived a secret life as a boy for her freshman and sophomore years, and the school staff had conspired to keep her parents in the dark.

The family decided the best thing to do was to prepare to withdraw their children from the school district. John and his wife did as much research as they could on homeschooling, even joining the Texas Home School Coalition. Then, one Friday last October, the kids spent their final full day in the district. John and his wife filed the proper forms with the schools, stating that Jane and her brother were beginning home schooling the following Monday.

When Monday came, John received a call from DFPS. Someone had filed a report “concerning the safety of the child(ren) in your family,” according to a later DFPS letter. A social worker showed up at their house the next day to perform a child welfare check that left the family confused and disturbed. Later that week, DFPS notified John that someone else had filed a second report alleging abuse.

It was easy enough to refute the allegations. DFPS personnel even told the family that the reports appeared retaliatory. Someone was trying in bad faith to get John’s kids taken away. Moreover, the charges were so specific that it made the family suspicious of how anyone could know so much about them.

John sat down with Jane and laid out the stakes. He said that the people who had filed these reports “were willing to tear you and your brother away from your family and probably separate you from each other, simply because your parents aren’t going along with this.” Her eyes widened, and the weight of what was happening dawned on her. John relayed what the reports alleged: that Jane had been kept in isolation, denied medical care, and locked inside the house with a security system. “But, we have our own codes to the security system,” she said, just as confused as her father. Then it clicked.

Jane remembered a counselor asking her leading questions, including whether she had been denied medical care. Jane mentioned that at a routine health check-up her parents had declined a doctor’s suggestion to put her on anti-depressants, saying they had enrolled her in mental health therapy instead. The counselor also asked about her living situation, including, oddly, about her house’s security system.

John and his daughter realized together that the leading conversation she had with the guidance counselor seemed to inform the allegations of child abuse, and that he had made an erroneous assumption that the security system was some kind of device to keep Jane locked up. They suspect a teacher at the school may have been involved as well, and may have filed one of the abuse reports. At any rate, it became clear that the school’s staff had exploited Jane’s trust and used it to attack her parents.

Unfortunately, this kind of subversion has become common in public schools everywhere. State by state, examples abound of teachers and administrators actively pushing LGBT ideology on children behind their parents’ backs, causing chaos and division within families.

Jeffrey and January Littlejohn, of Leon County, Florida, in October filed a lawsuit against their school district after discovering that the staff of their middle school had secretly met with their 13-year-old daughter to develop a transgender “support plan.” The Littlejohns’ lawsuit alleges that the district was involved in “training district staff to conceal from parents information regarding their children’s assertion of a discordant gender identity, including, inter alia, assumption of a new name, use of different pronouns, use of opposite sex privacy facilities and use of opposite sex lodging on off campus trips.”

The journalist and author Abigail Shrier reported in November on her Substack newsletter that Buena Vista Middle School teachers Lori Caldeira and Kelly Baraki “stalked”—a term used by Caldeira—students’ online activity to identify candidates for an LGBT club. Parents responding to Shrier’s story characterized the teachers’ efforts as “grooming.”

The Spreckels Union School District—of which Buena Vista Middle School is a part—now faces a lawsuit alleging teachers manipulated a woman’s daughter into changing her gender identity and kept it hidden under its “Parental Secrecy Policy.”

And, in November, a Wisconsin family and the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal firm that tries cases on religious freedom and parental rights, sued the Kettle Moraine School District because of its policy allowing students to change their names and gender pronouns without parental consent. The lawsuit alleges that staff at the school’s mental health center didn’t help their 12-year-old daughter with depression and questions about her gender, but “quickly ‘affirmed’ that she was really a transgender boy and encouraged her to transition to a male identity.”

The proliferation of LGBT ideology in schools is connected to the expansion of “social-emotional learning” (SEL) curriculum. In a nutshell, parents and parents’ rights activists describe SEL as a Trojan horse for introducing children to “critical race theory and gay and transgender advocacy,” as the Washington Examiner put it. It also cuts out parents from caring for children’s mental health, shifting that responsibility onto those versed in SEL. In other words, teachers assume the role of parents.

For all their talk about family values, Republican politicians are reluctant to act. Three of them—Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and State Rep. Dade Phelan—took a combined $2.47 million in campaign funds from political action committees affiliated with pediatric gender-modification clinics, according to an analysis of Transparency USA campaign finance records by Katy Christian Magazine. The three later helped kill bills that would have prohibited the gender modification that goes on at such clinics.

John, the father from Texas, and his family were cleared by the DFPS of child abuse allegations in October. John said the agency’s caseworker told him that there have been more and more retaliatory actions against parents who don’t go along quietly with the highjacking of their children’s gender identities. Although the Texas DFPS keeps the names of those reporting child abuse confidential and protects them from civil or criminal liability, it is, nevertheless, a felony to falsely report child abuse or neglect under the Texas Family Code. Yet overzealous or disingenuous reporting is more common than people think. As the Houston Chronicle reported in 2018, a Texas judge ordered the state to pay a family $127,000 after caseworkers wrongly accused them of child abuse.

The formal process of uncovering who filed a report against John’s family takes months. In the meantime, they are left waiting and wondering. John believes the point of the reports was to threaten the loss of his children for interfering with the educational establishment’s vision of progress. He said he’s distraught at the thought that even if his family come out of this okay, other families may not. Some parents may lose their kids or be cowed into going along with gender transitions, hormone therapies and surgeries.

John said he is encouraged, however, by Jane slowly emerging from her shell. “My wife, my daughter, and I now all go to a family counselor because we want her to know she can open up to us,” he said. Above all, they want her to see that she was a victim of a dangerous ideology, one that nearly tore her family apart.

*****

This article was published by Chronicles and is reproduced with permission.

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Gov. Ron DeSantis Proves Conservatives Can Beat LGBT-Obsessed Left

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By Douglas Blair

The Florida state Senate on Tuesday passed a parent’s rights bill, a media-maligned piece of legislation that will prohibit primary school teachers from talking about sexual orientation with children in pre-K through third grade.

Senate passage of the Parental Rights in Education bill by a vote of 21-17 marks a milestone in parents’ efforts across the nation to fight back against the radical left in the classroom. The legislation also represents a model for other states to use as they push back the woke tides.

The Florida House of Representatives passed the legislation last month, 69-47. It now goes to Gov. Ron DeSantis for his signature.

Opposition to the Parental Rights in Education bill has been fierce, with many on the left attempting to reframe the law as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. The left has attempted for years to indoctrinate children with LGBT ideology in public schools, and now activists are furious at attempts by conservatives to push back.

To be clear, the Florida legislation is not an “anti-gay” bill. It is instead a bill aimed at protecting children—and preventing educators with an agenda from infecting young kids with radical ideology. 

DeSantis, a Republican, has expressed as much. In an exchange with a local reporter during a Monday press conference, the governor reiterated that the legislation was about protecting kids and that the corporate media was lying about what it would do.

DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw went one step further and argued that the bill, which takes effect July 1, was more of an “anti-grooming” measure.

They’re both correct, of course.

Americans are just waking up to how tight a grip the radical left has on the education system, and what dire consequences can result from that amount of control. 

In Howard County, Maryland, eighth-grade students were subjected to a video in English class featuring a biological woman who identifies as a man talking about transgender issues. The video begins with discussions surrounding genital surgery, sex, and public restrooms before devolving into a screed about transgenderism in general.

Or consider the two California teachers who aided a 12-year-old girl with a gender transition without telling her parents, then called Child Protective Services when the parents found out and tried to stop it.

Parents and states must be empowered to counter the left’s complete and utter control of the education system. And when states take actions to empower parents, they should be praised.

DeSantis and Florida Republicans deserve credit for their aggressive efforts to push back against transgender idealogy. It’s not a given that lawmakers—whether local, state, or national—will take a stand and fight the left.

Last year, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, failed to stand up for biological reality when she vetoed a bill to ban biological males from participating in girls and women’s sports. Noem’s actions empowered the radical left, which viewed her refusal to ban men from ruining women’s sports as a jab in the arm toward its warped worldview.

Although Noem since has backtracked and signed  South Dakota lawmakers’ Fairness in Women’s Sports bill last month, it came on the heels of DeSantis’ signing an identically named bill last June.

DeSantis and his team understand deeply that the radical left won’t stop and doesn’t care about parental concerns about the negative effects of its agenda on children. The left, alongside allies in the corporate media, will continue to lie about conservative efforts to counter its propaganda war in America’s classrooms.

That’s why it’s so important for DeSantis and his fellow conservatives in state legislatures and governor’s mansions to fight back actively. Because as passage of the Florida bill proves, conservatives can win.

DeSantis’ achievement in Florida should cause a cascade of similar legislation across the country. Americans who are rightfully concerned about leftist indoctrination deserve recourse against the activists who are hellbent on harming children.

There’s a long road ahead. But DeSantis and his team, along with GOP state lawmakers, can take credit for a huge first step.

*****

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

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National Advocacy Groups Sound Alarm, Call on Arizona Republicans to Oppose State LGBTQ Bill

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By Mary Margaret Olohan

National family and culture advocacy organizations are targeting an Arizona LGBTQ bill, warning state lawmakers that the legislation does not protect religious liberty and enshrines sexual orientation and gender identity into law as protected categories.

“No Arizonan should be forced to live in a society that denies the biological differences of men and women,” says the letter, first obtained by The Daily Signal, from the advocacy groups to Arizona lawmakers. “No Arizonan should be coerced by the government to act in accordance with falsehoods about human nature.”

The letter calls on Arizona Speaker of the House Russell “Rusty” Bowers to withdraw support for the Equality and Fairness for All Arizonans Act (HB 2802), and is signed by Citizens for Renewing America President Russ Vought and Executive Director Wade Miller; American Principles Project Executive Director Terry Schilling and its director of policy and government affairs, Jon Schweppe; and State Freedom Caucus Network President Andrew Roth.

“Fairness for All paints itself as a compromise in the culture wars, but is nothing but a concession founded on untruths about human nature,” Vought warned The Daily Signal on Wednesday. “Its very basis relies on a sexually progressive ideology that rejects the design of men and women; to accept it is to enshrine into law a lie about who we are fundamentally as human beings.”

Bowers, a Republican, has positioned HB 2802 as an opportunity for state lawmakers to choose unity over anger.

“I’m grateful for the opportunity, as the apostle Paul wrote in Romans 14:13, to not place a stumbling block in front of my brother,” Bowers said in early February, according to the Deseret News. “For too long, we have held to opinions and thoughts that are stumbling blocks to each other.”

But the advocacy group leaders maintain that the bill’s federal counterpart is HB 1440, the woke and highly disputed Fairness for All Act, warning that the Arizona legislation is masquerading as a “compromise in the culture wars,” but will only “guarantee further dissolution.”

“Republicans need to realize that cultural wars are winning,” Vought told The Daily Signal. “So far, conservatives have put out the threat of a national Fairness for All effort. Now, we are shifting this battle to the states.”

The letter tells Bowers and his fellow state lawmakers that the bill’s religious liberty protections are “wholly inadequate” and based on notions that religious Americans only practice their faith in houses of worship or as part of a religious organization. Contrasted with the bill’s broad language on transgender nondiscrimination provisions, the leaders wrote, those religious freedom protections are very narrow.

“HB 2802 attempts to temper this radical change in our laws, culture, and society with a religious liberty exemption for churches and religious institutions,” the letter said. “The exemption drafted is insufficient to resolve the religious liberty and freedom of conscience concerns that are inherent to the Fairness for All project.”

The leaders wrote that the bill would codify “self-evident falsehoods about human nature in state law” and “assumes that the only citizens in need of protection from the consequences of this ideology once it is embedded in anti-discrimination law are religious.”

“Some Republicans really need to read the room,” Schilling told The Daily Signal. “Nationwide, the disastrous consequences of the left’s radical agenda have become crystal clear: biological males taking over girls sports, kids being coached into sex changes by teachers behind the backs of parents, women being sexually assaulted in prison by ‘transgender’ inmates, and more. Every day, it seems, a new outrage emerges.”

Americans are furious at these developments, Schilling said, and they want their leaders to fight back.

“A growing number of Republicans, such as [South Dakota] Gov. Kristi Noem and Rep. Elise Stefanik [of New York], have heard these calls and are taking a more aggressive stance on these issues,” the American Principles Project executive director said. “Yet, there are still too many in the party who seem to think waving the white flag in the culture war is the right approach. “

“These Republicans need to be put on notice,” Schilling added. “If they refuse to defend their constituents from the radical left, they will face political consequences. A party that caves in the face of this evil is one headed for permanent defeat.“

*****

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

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The Big Money Behind Abortion Activism

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By Hayden Ludwig

Warren Buffett’s charitable foundation has poured nearly $5 billion into pro-abortion advocacy.

There’s no shortage of cash for the war on the unborn. That its biggest bankroller is the Wizard of Omaha—famed investor Warren Buffett—may surprise you.

Buffett is almost certainly the largest funder of abortion in human history. In the two decades since 2000 he has funneled an incredible $4.7 billion to abortion providers as well as the vast array of activist, lobbying, and research groups insulating them in Washington.

That’s enough to pay for close to 4 million 20-week abortions, according to estimates from the Guttmacher Institute, the leading pro-abortion think tank.

These billions are moved through the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, a little-known channel to left-wing causes funded almost exclusively by Warren and named for his late ex-wife, herself an advocate of population control who left $2.5 billion to the foundation upon her death.

Sadly, the foundation is a mainstay of the billionaire’s twisted definition of “philanthropy,” a term that has its roots in the Christian commandment to “love thy fellow man” (phil-anthropos).

Few are aware of what Buffett’s biographer has called the billionaire’s “Malthusian dread” of global overpopulation among the world’s poor. Abortion, apparently, is one answer to the alleged “problem” of too many humans. Prior to the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973, Buffett and his business partner Charles Munger operated a fake church that helped women cross state lines to reach abortion clinics.

In a 1997 interview with the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Suzie Buffett—the couple’s eldest daughter and Buffett Foundation chair—said that funding population control is “what my father has always believed was the biggest and most important issue, so that will be the [foundation’s] focus. I feel as his child that it’s important to carry out his wishes. It’s his money.”

In 2020 the Buffett Foundation sent $58 million to the National Abortion Federation’s (NAF) Hotline Fund to help pay for abortions—an extra impressive sum considering that the group brought in $30 million in 2019 (its 2020 finances are unavailable). Buffett gave another $8 million to NAF, which administers the Hotline Fund, accounting for 85.5 percent of its $9.5 million revenues in 2020 and effectively making it the Buffett Foundation’s lobbying arm.

Planned Parenthood and its affiliates, the biggest abortion provider in the United States, have received $785 million from the Buffett Foundation since 2000.

At least $525 million went to Marie Stopes International, an overseas abortion funder in Africa and Asia named for a British eugenicist and white supremacist ally of Margaret Sanger. Stopes once sent Adolf Hitler a book of her poems in 1939 out of admiration for his forced sterilization policies—policies “progressives” also sought to foist upon Britain and America. The nearly 50-year-old organization renamed itself to MSI in late 2020 to circumvent that embarrassing association.

One marvels that the Buffett Foundation has given $89 million to Save the Children, which despite its name provides “family planning” services to “delay, space, or limit pregnancies” in the developing world. (It’s worth pointing out that “family planning” was coined a century ago by Sanger and allies as the population control movement’s key marketing phrase.)

Buffett has also given $418 million to Ipas, which trains local abortion providers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Then there’s the $467 million Buffett has sent to Population Services International, another overseas abortion provider busily aborting the global poor.

The foundation has given $259 million to DKT International, a nonprofit which sells inexpensive contraceptives to poor countries. DKT was founded in 1989 by Philip Harvey, the founder of the mail-order erotica and pornography site Adam & Eve. Its name is an homage to D.H. Tyagi, a 1960s assistant commissioner to India’s Family Planning agency, the site of many early forced population curbing policies envisioned by Western elites.

Buffett has moved $57 million to Pathfinder International, a little-known juggernaut for aborting Africans founded in 1957 by Clarence Gamble of the Procter & Gamble fortune, a close friend of Margaret Sanger and major population control advocate.

The Hopewell Fund, part of a $1.7 billion “dark money” empire run by the consultancy Arabella Advisors, has pulled in nearly $66 million from the Buffett Foundation since 2015. These funds were almost certainly used to support pro-abortion “pop-up” groups—websites that appear to push policies and then zap out of existence—Hopewell’s specialty. Buffett has also donated $70 million to Hopewell’s “sister” group New Venture Fund.

The list doesn’t end there. More recipients include:

The abortion activism industry is one of the most powerful pillars of the left. With a virtually bottomless well of cash to draw upon, it isn’t hard to see why. But despite all the money, the Supreme Court finally has Roe v. Wade in its sights with a decision expected next June. What will the fate of the unborn be? God only knows.

*****

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

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One Feminist’s Perspective On How The Transgender Agenda Harms Women & Girls

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By Beverly Hallberg & Kara Dansky

The following is the transcript for the She Thinks podcast:

And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg. And I’m so excited about today’s guest. Kara Dansky joins us to share why she is furious with her party, the Democrat party, for pushing gender identity or what she refers to as gender insanity. Her premise is that the redefining of the meaning of the word sex and gender victimizes women and children. In our conversation, we’ll discuss things that often aren’t allowed to be said in mainstream media. We’ll get into how gender identity has seeped into our laws and the resulting implications, how parental rights are being ignored, and what it has meant for her to speak out on such a controversial issue.

Now to Kara Dansky. Kara Dansky is a feminist, attorney, Democrat, and public speaker. She serves as the chair of the committee on law and legislation for the global human rights campaign, the WHRC, and is president of the WHRC’s U.S. chapter. She has a 21-year background in criminal law and criminal justice policy. Having worked at the mayor’s office of criminal justice in New York, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Stanford Criminal Justice Center at Stanford Law School and the Society of Council Representing Accused Persons in Seattle. She’s also the author of the new book, “The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” Kara, thank you so much for joining us on She Thinks.

Kara Dansky:

Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Beverly Hallberg:

There’s so much I want to get into on this topic, but I’d first like to start with why you decided to spend your days fighting for women in an area that is so controversial? Many people don’t dare to touch it. What made you brave enough to not just deal with this issue but put yourself out there in the spotlight?

Kara Dansky:

Thanks for the question. It doesn’t really feel like bravery to me to just stand up and say that women are female and men are male. But the answer to the question is that in 2014, I was talking with a friend and I’ll say, I’ve always considered myself to be a feminist. And as you mentioned in my bio, my career trajectory took a little bit of a different turn. I went into criminal justice, but I still considered myself a feminist. And in 2014, a very good friend of mine brought my attention to the danger of the so-called transgender agenda or gender identity, as we like to say, and I started paying attention and I looked into it and in 2015, I joined the organization Women’s Liberation Front. And in 2016, I joined the board of that organization. That year, Women’s Liberation Front or WLF sued the Obama Administration over a policy memo that the administration had put out. And I’ve been doing the work ever since.

Beverly Hallberg:

Now you talk a lot about how the redefining of the words sex and gender makes victims of women and girls. First of all, explain to us why the words matter so much and what the implications have been?

Kara Dansky:

So the words are absolutely critical. And so I will never use the word transgender without putting it in quotes. And I make the case in my book or at least I try to make the case. I don’t know how well I do it but I make the case that the word transgender was simply invented. And the reason it was invented is that it comes from so-called queer theory, which is an academic theory that essentially obscures the meanings of words that point to material reality. But if the queer theorists had tried to sell Americans on the idea that sex isn’t real, it wouldn’t have worked. Americans know how babies are made. We all know the basic facts of biology. And so they had to make up a word. And the word that they made up is transgender.

Feminist Janice Raymond wrote a book in 1979 called “The Transsexual Empire,” which predicted all of this. And she re-produced it in 1994 with an introduction that talks about the invention of the word transgender and how it’s going to harm women and girls in particular, though we need to be clear, it harms everybody. The abolition of sex harms everybody. We can talk a little bit about that. But I just refuse to use the language of the opposition. And I think it’s really important that feminists and conservatives who are in this battle for material reality and of the right to privacy and safety of women and girls to not use the language of the opposition ever, I think that’s absolutely critical.

Beverly Hallberg:

And so let’s talk about what these words, where they have seeped into. So we may say, it’s fine if people want to use these words on their own, but we are talking about word choice. You were mentioning the Obama administration that has seeped into executive orders, how government agencies work, government departments, that is in pieces of legislation, especially under the Biden administration. Is there a concerted effort to try to change the meaning of words within legislation and bills that come to Capitol Hill?

Kara Dansky:

Literally yes. So, a little bit of history on this, in 2004, the United Kingdom enacted a new law called the Gender Recognition Act. And what that did was provide a legal mechanism for people who underwent a certain amount of hormone change and surgical change to get what in the UK is called a gender recognition certificate. Fast forward to today and we have the United States Congress inserting new language to literally redefine the word sex. So for example, in the Violence Against Women Act, I think it was 2013, Congress redefined the word sex to include the words “gender identity,” which are essentially just made-up words that have no coherent definition. They did it again this year in the Infrastructure Bill and they are seeking to do it in the so-called Equality Act, which would literally redefine the word sex in civil rights law to include things like gender identity, even though the definition of gender identity in the Equality Act is completely vague and incomprehensible.

So that’s what’s happening in Congress. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration for the first six months or so of this year, literally ordered federal agencies to redefine sex to include gender identity throughout federal administrative law. Those orders are the subject of a lawsuit that was filed by 20 states and in which my organization, the Women’s Human Rights Campaign’s U.S. chapter, has filed a brief arguing that in fact, the complete redefinition of the word sex to include gender identity violates numerous provisions of the U.S. Constitution, federal law and several provisions of state law.

Beverly Hallberg:

And what has really surprised me when I think about the women’s movement, feminism, often people think about the decades-long work to try to get women thought of as equal in the workplace. There are a lot of things that we could think of. I even know today, myself as a small business owner, I’m thankful for the strides that women made before me, so that I could be where I am today. And then when we see where it’s gone, it’s now to the point where people are saying somebody who is a biological man, that if he identifies as a woman, then he can break the glass ceiling for women. It’s really just shocking whether it’s in sports or in careers, how they lift up biological men as women and say that this is shattering the glass ceiling. I find that offensive, do most women find that offensive?

Kara Dansky:

I think so, certainly, feminists do. Literally, yesterday was the anniversary of a massacre of 14 women at a school in Montreal and a Canadian news program decided to acknowledge the anniversary of that massacre. And we need to be clear a man murdered 15 young women because they were women, several decades ago. And yesterday was the anniversary and a Canadian broadcasting corporation decided to acknowledge that anniversary by having a man who identifies as a woman speak on their behalf. And it’s just grotesque.

Beverly Hallberg:

Well, you talk about the abolition of sex, it’s the name of your book. When we hear people want to use the terminology “gender identity,” it’s usually under the auspices that they’re trying to prevent discrimination, that we don’t want to discriminate, we want everybody to feel welcome and we want to be inclusive. Tell us how dangerous it is to abolish sex.

Kara Dansky:

Well, part of the problem here is that really across the political aisle, it seems to have been generally accepted that the phrase “transgender people” or “transgender athletes” or “transgender students,” that all of these words describe a coherent category of people for whom sex is irrelevant. That’s not true. And if we’re going to win the battle to fight for the right to privacy and safety of women and girls, we have to be very clear about that. So one implication that I think is not well understood is the phenomenon that we are literally seeing playing out today in prisons in the United States is that convicted rapists and murderers who are men are being housed in women’s prisons. A lot of people know that this is happening in California thanks to the Women’s Liberation Front for filing a lawsuit, challenging the law that allows that, mandates that. It’s also happening in Washington State but it’s also happening across the country.

And most Americans are kept in the dark about this because the media will not talk about it. So again, thank you for allowing me to talk about it here. Something else that I think most Americans just don’t understand because they don’t have a way to know this, is that the FBI tracks crime statistics by sex. And to the best of my knowledge the latest data available is from 2020, and it tracks crime according to male and female. And of course, as we all know, the overwhelming majority of violent and sex crime is committed by men against women. If we’re not allowed to acknowledge the reality of biological sex, we can’t talk honestly about the phenomenon of male violence against women. And that’s really, really dangerous.

Beverly Hallberg:

What do you say then — let’s take a specific example or a hypothetical example about a young biological boy, let’s say 13, 14 years old, feels that he is a woman, is bullied in the men’s locker room and wants to be able to use the females’ locker room because that is how he identifies. What do you do with these individual cases where somebody does feel bullied? Because these are the stories we often hear as the reason we need to change. Even the way locker rooms and schools deal with their policies.

Kara Dansky:

This is not a girls’ problem. If boys are bullying stereotypically effeminate men, young men, if boys are bullying gay boys, if boys are bullying other boys who like to wear stereotypically feminine clothing, then that’s a problem for the boys to solve. They need to stop doing that. They need to stop bullying young homosexual boys. They need to stop bullying boys who adopt stereotypically feminine characteristics and just accept these boys for who they are. But the solution is not to subject girls to having boys in intimate spaces. We know, for example, in Loudoun County, Virginia, the school district adopted a policy of allowing young boys into girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.

And a young girl was sexually assaulted in a bathroom in a high school in Loudoun County, Virginia. And there seems to have been a concerted effort on the part of the school district to cover that up in order to justify its policy of allowing boys, in this particular instance, the boy wore a skirt, and he was allowed access to the girls’ bathroom on that basis. And he has been convicted of sexually assaulting a girl. The answer is not to allow these young men into girls’ spaces. The answer is to persuade boys to stop bullying them.

Beverly Hallberg:

And when it comes to young people and we think about education, it’s also what they’re being taught, the curriculum, trying to encourage teachers. There have been reports of teachers or counselors at schools trying to encourage young people to embrace a gender identity that is different from their biological sex. And also leaving parents out. The parental rights are not part of even having this discussion with their children. There’s also the cult, as we have seen. Abigail Shrier has written about this, about young girls wanting to or identifying as the opposite sex. So there seems to be almost a way for young girls to become popular if they talk about themselves as being a boy versus their biological sex. So do you see that there is an agenda at schools within the schooling system, education system, to try to encourage young people to identify as something else?

Kara Dansky:

Absolutely. And it’s deliberate. And we know this because there’s documentation of the deliberate nature of this industry, as I describe in the book, to indoctrinate children, to confuse them into thinking that there’s some kind of identity that is unrelated to their actual sex. We need to understand that there is a tremendous amount of money behind this movement to persuade young people to disassociate from their bodies. This is all documented for example, in Jennifer Bilek’s blog, the 11th Hour Blog, she tracks the industry. She has done an incredible job of investigative journalism in understanding the power and the money behind this movement.

I want to get to your question about Abigail Shrier’s book but first I just want to make very clear, as you alluded to earlier, there seems to be an assumption that the movement to abolish sex is a bottom-up, grassroots movement to secure civil rights for a defined category of people. That is not what’s going on here. This is a very top down, top heavy, heavily funded industry that is pushing this into our schools, into our boardrooms, into our living rooms. It is capturing almost all aspects of American society. It’s extreme-

Beverly Hallberg:

Yeah, it’s damaging young people in the process. I just wanted to ask you this question about the fallout of this, there is a woman, 23 years old, who’s been very brave in talking about her story of taking hormone treatments, testosterone in her teens. It was encouraged by people in her school. And she’s now talking about the harms of that. Are we hearing more stories from young women talking about what the harms have been, whether it has been through different pills, medicines they took, or even those who did go as far as to have surgery?

Kara Dansky:

Just curious, are we talking about Keira Bell?

Beverly Hallberg:

We are not. It’s someone else, I’m trying to remember her name offhand, but she started to become outspoken on this.

Kara Dansky:

Yeah, we are definitely hearing more and more. To its credit, I want to give 60 Minutes credit for having a segment that did cover some stories of young people who did go through hormonal and surgical procedures and came to regret it. We’re hearing more and more stories about this. I have personally spoken with a young woman who contacted me for help because she was having trouble at her place of employment. And she had thought she was a boy. She had a double mastectomy and she regretted it. And we need to talk about how heartbreaking this is, especially for girls, and all credit to Abigail Shrier for writing about the phenomenon. It’s very difficult in many ways to be a teenage girl, to start developing, to feel the physical discomfort that comes with that, to feel the discomfort of all of a sudden men starting to pay more attention to our bodies.

It can be a very difficult adjustment and it’s especially hard now because it was hard when I was growing up but today with the total onslaught of pornography, we’re seeing boys watching pornography at younger and younger ages. Of course, it’s hard to be a girl. Of course it’s easier in many ways to be a boy. And it’s understandable why some young women would want to find their way out of being hypersexualized in a society that hypersexualizes young women. But we have to also understand that all of these children, girls and boys both, are receiving hormones that are highly likely to result in permanent sterilization and potential lethality. These are very dangerous drugs that children are being permitted to take and young people, there’s a reason that we don’t allow young people to buy cigarettes or alcohol or vote or drive.

And even though in our society, reasonable people can disagree about what age it’s appropriate to allow children to buy cigarettes or drive, we can have those policy conversations, but if we’re going to limit the choices that young people can make, why on earth would we allow children to make the decision to permanently sterilize themselves? It’s horrible. And yes, the answer to your question is more and more young people are coming to regret their decision. They are also coming to understand, the vast majority of them understand, that what they were dealing with was sexuality and that they were same-sex attracted. And they were struggling with realizing that they were same-sex attracted. And so they made decisions to identify out of their actual sex.

Beverly Hallberg:

I think so much as we start to uncover more and more, as you were saying, the money, the power behind this, the agenda behind this, we find that so much about this is to cover up what they’re really trying to do. So the less that people know, the better it is for them to be able to move forward with their agenda. One area where I think it’s been hard for the transgender movement to gain traction, or at least there has been pushback, has been in the area of women’s sports. For example, there is a recent story that was widely circulated this past week, where a biological boy who identifies as female, name is Lia Thomas, 22-year-old transgender swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, has been shattering women’s records, no surprise, because Lia is a biological man. Do you find in the area of women’s sports that this is where people can really look at what the agenda is and say, “Hey, this isn’t fair. This is absolutely not fair.” Do you find traction in this area for those who view this as we do?

Kara Dansky:

Yes, and shoutout to my friend Beth Stelzer at an organization that she founded called Save Women’s Sports. She’s done a tremendous amount of work in helping lawmakers, especially at the state level, but also at the federal level, succeed in getting legislation passed to protect women’s sports for women. I just want to pause for a second and ask what you mean in your question, you used the phrase, “transgender swimmer,” that’s the kind of language I’m trying to get away from.

Beverly Hallberg:

No, teach me, teach all of us. That’s helpful.

Kara Dansky:

Yeah, I really… So, as you said in the introduction, I’m a feminist, I’m a lifelong Democrat. And I have been spending a lot of time, or the past couple years, working across the political aisle because I think this is very important. I think that this should not be a partisan issue and the media has done a tremendous job of framing it as a partisan issue. And I’m very frustrated with most media outlets for doing that. But one of my frustrations is that the Republicans, that I am very happy to work with, often use phrases like transgender athletes or transgender swimmer or transgender students. That’s hurting us. It’s hurting the movement to push back against gender identity, using their language makes it much more difficult for us to gain ground in the movement to push back against the enshrinement of gender identity in the law. So I appreciate you letting me say that.

Beverly Hallberg:

Yeah. So out of curiosity then, is the correct thing that you would always encourage people to say in that specific example would be biological boy, just say a boy?

Kara Dansky:

Boy. Yeah.

Beverly Hallberg:

That makes sense. That makes sense. And so I’m glad you brought up the media. I wanted to ask you just a little bit about what it has been like for you as a Democrat, talking about these issues. I read your piece that you had published in the Federalist, it was entitled “Democrats Like Me are Furious with Our Party for Pushing Gender Insanity.” So first of all, can I ask you why as a Democrat, you chose to submit your piece to a conservative outlet, would more left-leaning outlets not publish your opinion?

Kara Dansky:

Absolutely not. So I mentioned the 2016 lawsuit that WLF filed against the Obama Administration, Tucker Carlson invited WLF to appear on his show. And I was happy to do it. That happened in early 2017. I’ve been on the show several times since. I was very grateful to the Federalist for publishing that piece. I was very grateful to the New York Post recently for publishing another piece. Feminists like me, who publish in conservative media, get a lot of pushback for it. We get in trouble with a lot of radical feminists who don’t think we ought to be doing that, but we have a story to tell.

And we’re grateful to the outlets such as yourself, who are willing to give us a platform to tell our story. What a lot of Republicans, I think, do not know because there’s no way for you to know this, is there are countless Democrats, rank and file Democrats all over the country who are furious at our party leadership for what they’re doing. You have a lot of allies in a lot of rank-and-file Democratic communities, but the reason you don’t know that is because the media won’t say it.

Beverly Hallberg:

Final question I have for you before, well, actually our final, final question will be about your book but the final question I have for you before we get to that, is something that we often hear. And this goes back to the language and the words that we use, we often hear people using different pronouns than the biological sex of a person. So if you, let’s take that athlete, the male athlete competing against women, do you ever use the pronoun “she” for a biological boy or even if one, let’s say, you could take Caitlyn Jenner, do you refer to Caitlyn Jenner as a he or a she?

Kara Dansky:

“He,” of course, because he is. But we should say there are efforts around the world to actually criminalize the use of accurate sex pronouns. And it’ll be very interesting to see whether our first amendment protects us in a way, for example, that Canadian law does not protect Canadians. There’s an effort right now to make the use of accurate sex pronouns a hate crime. And it’s also happening in the UK. It’s happening in Scotland. It’s happening in a lot of places. It may not happen here. Our first amendment may protect us from that but we’ll see. The district attorney of San Francisco has recently issued an order, all of the staff in his office are now required to use so-called preferred pronouns in court, which could potentially mean that a rape victim might be required to refer to a male alleged rapist as “she” on the witness stand, which I would argue would constitute perjury.

But we haven’t seen any of this play out quite yet in the legal system, but it’ll be very interesting to watch. There is one case in the Sixth Circuit coming out of Ohio, where a professor refused to use so-called preferred pronouns. He was disciplined by the public university, his employer, but he was vindicated in court at the appellate level. So that’s a good sign that our first amendment might protect us in a way that, for example, Canadians aren’t protected.

Beverly Hallberg:

Final question for you. You tell us about your book. I know we’ve talked about it here but who is the book for? What can people expect if they read it?

Kara Dansky:

So the book is called “The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” And I wrote it really for average rank and file, across-the-political-aisle Americans who either might be very confused about what is going on here. And it’s completely legitimate to be confused about what is going on, on topics of sex and gender because there’s a deliberate effort to confuse us or Americans who see what’s going on and want to speak out about it but may not quite feel comfortable doing so for the reasons you laid out in your introduction. These topics can be hard to talk about but it’s not impossible. And I really want Americans to have the tools to talk with one another. If you’re a Republican talk with other Republicans, embolden other Republicans to speak out about this using accurate language. If you’re a Democrat and you agree with me but you’re scared to speak out, I understand that, that’s very understandable but we’ve got to do it if we’re going to make headway here.

Beverly Hallberg:

Well, we thank you for your bravery. Kara Dansky, author of “The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” We so appreciate you joining us on She Thinks today.

Kara Dansky:

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

*****

This interview was conducted on December 10, 2021, and the transcript was reproduced with permission from  The Independent Women’s Forum.

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Dobbs V. Jackson: An Easy Opinion

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By George Liebmann

The rejection of a “compelling state interest” test will remove abortion from national politics.

A simple Baltimore lawyer here tenders a short opinion to dispose of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the abortion case from Mississippi in oral arguments before the Supreme Court today.

This case presents the question: “Whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” It involves a limitation of abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Similar limitations are found rational in many nations including France and Germany with their 12-week cutoff point. In Roe v. Wade, we said that states could limit second-trimester abortions if there was a rational basis to do so, but in the companion case of Doe v. Bolton, decided on the same day, we effectively applied a “compelling state interest” test.

We can dispose of this case by overruling Doe v. Bolton and Casey, but the avoidance of further controversy and confusion makes it desirable that we dispose of Roe also, thus withdrawing the Court from an area of public policy that we should not have entered in the first place and allowing further discussion to be divorced from claims of absolute right not inducing tolerance.

Five tests are conventionally used to justify overrulings: quality of reasoning (ever-shifting in this case); workability (belied by the constant flow of litigation over the “undue burden” test); inconsistency with prior law (patent in light of state legislation as of 1973); reliance (scarcely present, despite Casey, in view of Casey’s concession that “reproductive planning could take almost immediate account of any sudden restoration of state authority to ban abortions,” a conclusion reinforced by the two-thirds drop in births to teenagers following the withdrawal of 18 years of guaranteed AFDC payments by the Welfare Reform Act of 1996); and finally, and most importantly, as stated in Casey, “whether Roe’s premises of fact have so far changed to render its central holding irrelevant or unjustifiable” and whether an overruling decision would provide “a response to facts that the country would understand but which the court of an earlier day as its own declarations disclosed had not been able to perceive.”

These standards for overruling are now more than fully met. The Roe court did not even consider the potential effect of abortion-on-demand on sexual mores, unwanted pregnancies, and births out of wedlock. It recognized that anti-abortion statute might be the “product of a Victorian social concern to discourage illicit sexual conduct” but declared “Texas does not advance this justification in the present cases and it appears that no court or commentator has taken the argument seriously. The appellants and amici contend moreover that this is not a proper state purpose at all.” So much for the mostly religious lawgivers memorialized in the frieze at the top of the Supreme Court building and Justice Holmes’ observation that “the law is the external deposit of our moral life.”

It is nonetheless the duty of the Court to consider not only the state’s actual arguments but those it might have made, lest the inadequacies of a single lawyer deform the Constitution. As stated in Flemming v. Nestor, 363 U.S.603 (1960): “we cannot with confidence reject all those alternatives which imaginativeness might bring to mind save that one which might require invalidation of the statute.”

Instead, the Roe court, excluding the possible effect of its decision on promiscuous sexual behavior and increased pregnancies and births out of wedlock, made opposite assumptions. It alluded to “concerns about population growth, pollution, poverty, and racial overtones.” The Second Circuit, invalidating a Connecticut statute, postulated that “population growth must be restricted not enhanced and thus the state interest in a pro-natalist statute such as this is limited,” citing the Rockefeller Commission report on “Population Growth and the American Future” (1971).

Subsequent research by the present secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, and her Nobel-prize-winning economist husband, George Akerlof, which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Brookings Review in 1996, made clear that Roe had dynamic effects on American society, legitimating free love and the hookup culture by providing what looked like an assured back-up to birth control pills.

Thus the percentage of births to unwed mothers increased from 5.7 percent in 1970, when birth control pills were already in wide use, to 29 percent in 2018. Among black Americans, whose out of wedlock births were of great concern to “birth controllers,” the percentage of births out of wedlock increased from 38 percent in 1970 to 71 percent in 2018. Similarly, the “deal with it” syndrome that abortion-on-demand produced among consorts caused the percentages of marriages to those pregnant out of wedlock (“shotgun weddings”) to fall from 43 percent in 1970 to 9 percent in 2018.

“Inability to provide for the nurture and care of the infant is a cruelty to the child and an anguish to the parent,” the well-intentioned Justice Harlan stated in concurring in Roe. But after 50 years, there is much more such cruelty and anguish.

This Court, like the president and Congress, is subject to checks and balances. The confirmation process is one of these and can be given effect after 48 years. Several decisions have been overruled after long periods, including Lochner v. New York (work hours) after 50 years; Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (minimum wage) after 14 years; Plessy v. Ferguson (segregation) after 58 years; Bowers v. Hardwick (sodomy) after 18 years; Baker v. Nelson (homosexual marriage) after 43 years; and Korematsu v. United States (racial distinctions) after 74 years.

The public will now understand what the Court did not in Casey when it, echoing Justice Wayne’s concurring opinion in Dred Scott, called “the contending sides to end their division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution.” Dred Scott failed because the fugitive slave provisions of the Constitution and the Compromise of 1850 rendered Northern states complicit in the permissiveness of the South. Casey failed for the same reason, by imposing coastal rules on “flyover” country.

Our decision reversing the Fifth Circuit judgment is of little direct consequence. Some four percent of abortions per year are performed after the 15th week, many in states that will continue to have liberal abortion laws. But our decision will send a powerful message to young women and their consorts that abortion is no longer a sure thing and that they should choose sexual partners more carefully than at present. The rejection of a “compelling state interest” test will remove abortion from national politics as in Western Europe and will restore the American judiciary to what Aristotle and Aquinas regarded as judges’ proper function: “corrective justice” vindicating agreed settlements, not “distributive justice” changing agreed rules, which is the prerogative of the ruler in authoritarian states and the legislatures in democratic ones.

In Ferguson v. Skrupa, 372 U.S. 726 (1963), Mr. Justice Black stated for a unanimous court: “We emphatically refuse to go back to the time when courts used the Due Process clause ‘to strike down state laws, regulatory of business and industrial conditions, because they may be unwise, improvident, or out of harmony with a particular school of thought.’” To “business and industrial” we add “social,” thus definitively repudiating Dred Scott, the first adventure in substantive due process. We justify this overruling decision not merely by the prolix five tests of the legal academy, but in the words of Fiorello La Guardia: “When we make a mistake, it’s a beaut.”

The judgment is reversed.

*****

This article was published on December 1, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The American Conservative.

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Dispelling 3 Common Myths About Abortion

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By Melanie Israel

With the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case before the Supreme Court and the ongoing litigation over the Texas heartbeat law, the issue of abortion looms large in our national discourse.

Too often, pro-abortion actors make claims that are simply not true, and those claims are repeated without challenge in the media. Therefore, it’s vital that the American public be made aware of facts that challenge the pro-abortion narrative.

Here’s the truth you need to know about three core claims of abortion activists:

Myth 1: Abortions Are Safer Than Childbirth

Abortion activists claim that abortions are safer than childbirth. But that’s the exact inverse of reality—and for a number of reasons.

First, this framing of the debate denies the humanity of the unborn child from the outset. Because every fetus is a human possessing fundamental dignity, their health and safety must also be taken into consideration.

No procedure that destroys life can be considered safe. By definition, abortion is always fatal for at least one party involved; namely, the unborn child. Therefore, by definition, abortion is never “safe.”

Second, besides the fact that abortions necessarily involve the killing of unborn children, abortion is not necessarily the safer option for women.

After getting an abortion, women have approximately an 80% higher risk of experiencing mental health issues, including suicidal tendencies and substance abuse.

According to Dr. Ingrid Skop, an obstetrician-gynecologist, potentially fatal complications from abortions include “vaginal or intra-abdominal hemorrhage … infection … incomplete removal of the remains of the aborted baby, damage to the cervix, uterus, or other pelvic or abdominal organs … anesthetic reactions or overdoses, amniotic fluid, septic, or thrombotic embolisms, cardiac, or cardiovascular events.”

Such complications hardly render abortion safe for women.

Third, the assumption that abortion is the safer option for women ultimately rests on incomplete data.

The federal government as well as 22 states do not require abortion providers to report critical data on postabortion complications. This inevitably skews abortion activists’ numbers, especially when a state like California, one of the states that doesn’t require abortion providers to report data, is estimated to have over a quarter of all abortions performed in the U.S.

Likewise, according to data collected in  2019, there were no states that required doctors, coroners, or emergency rooms that don’t provide abortions to report abortion-related deaths. So, if a woman goes to an emergency room with abortion-related complications and dies, the hospital is not required to report it as an abortion-related death. That skews abortion-related mortality rates.

Therefore, abortions aren’t safe for unborn children, and they aren’t always safe for women.

Myth 2: Abortion Is a Woman’s Only Practical Option

Studies show that most abortions are chosen for reasons related to factors such as finances or personal relationships.

According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, 74% of abortions are chosen out of a fear that the baby would interfere with education or work, or that the baby would make it difficult to take care of dependents.

An overlapping 73% claimed they could not afford a child, and nearly 50% had relationship issues or did not want to become a single mother.

Even among third-trimester abortions, as reported by Dr. James Studnicki, “most late-term abortions are elective, done on healthy women with healthy fetuses.”

It’s clear from these numbers that medical emergencies do not motivate most abortions.

In contrast, the pro-life movement stresses providing the resources women need to give birth and raise their children.

Pregnancy resource centers help pregnant women and their families navigate challenges such as the pregnancy itself, financial management and needs, threats to job security, unsupportive partners and family members, and more.

According to one study, in 2019, pregnancy centers performed ultrasounds for 486,213 mothers-to-be free of charge and provided mothers and families with material resources such as diapers, baby clothes, and the like.

In total, they provided $266,764,916 worth of services, and 9 out of 10 people working at pregnancy resource centers do so on a voluntary basis.

Despite activists’ claims, abortion doesn’t solve any of those problems. By reducing “care” for women to the elimination of the unborn life, the mother is not helped.

Myth 3: Most Americans Support Abortion

The claim that most Americans support abortion is misleading when checked against data from a 2021 Knights of Columbus/Marist Poll.

Despite a slight majority (53%) of Americans identifying as “pro-choice,” 55% of pro-choice individuals are in favor of abortion restrictions.

According to the poll, 76% Americans support significant restrictions on abortion, with 70% of Americans in favor of restricting abortions after the first trimester—which would bring U.S. law in alignment with the rest of the world, including 47 out of 50 European countries.

Likewise, when asked if they support abortion based on a diagnosis of Down syndrome, 70% of participants opposed such an abortion. Additionally, 58% opposed taxpayer money going to abortions.

Ultimately, these numbers reflect a nation that wants to do more to protect unborn children and is not remotely aligned with the abortion lobby’s position of abortion on-demand, for any reason, through all nine months of pregnancy.

Sadly, that hasn’t kept Democrats from calling for the elimination of the Hyde Amendment, which would clear the way for taxpayer-funded abortions.

Conclusion

The facts indicate that abortions are not safe for unborn children and carry significant risks for the mothers who receive them.

Most abortions are not done for cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. Lastly, most Americans do not support radically permissive abortion policies. In fact, most Americans support policies that further protect unborn children than what is currently permitted under Roe v. Wade, which allows for elective abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.

We are being presented with the greatest opportunity of our lifetime to turn the tide for life. We must tell the truth about abortion and not allow pro-abortion arguments to rule the day unopposed.

*****

This article was published on December 1, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

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Horrific Waukesha Deaths Preventable Result of Ill-Considered Bail Policies

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By Amy Swearer

After a summer of wildly destructive civil unrest followed by the looming shadow of the high-profile trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, residents of Wisconsin suffered another blow in the form of unspeakable tragedy.

Five people were killed and more than 40 injured when a driver plowed through participants of an annual holiday parade, appearing to intentionally speed up and swerve into lines of marchers, before speeding off.

Hours later, police arrested 39-year-old Darrell Brooks as the suspected driver of the vehicle. He is charged with five counts of homicide.

Investigators are still looking into possible motives, including, according to some reports, the possibility that Brooks did not necessarily target the parade but was instead attempting to flee from a knife fight.

Whether the act was intentional or merely reckless and without regard to others, one thing is already clear—what happened in Waukesha was entirely preventable.

Darrell Brooks should have been in jail several times over. The devastation he wrought happened only because grossly reckless bail policies touted by local officials enabled the release of an unrepentantly violent man whose actions routinely placed members of the community in serious danger.

Brooks is a career criminal with a long rap sheet. His history of violence—including violence toward women—is well documented, and wide-ranging.

In 1999, Brooks pled guilty to felony battery with intent to cause bodily harm, and was sentenced to six months in jail and three years’ probation. Over the next seven years, Brooks had a series of short stints in jail for various drug and obstruction charges.

In 2006, he was convicted of felony statutory sexual seduction for impregnating a 15-year-old girl. Brooks was 24 years old at the time. He was sentenced to probation and required to register as a sex offender.

In 2010, Brooks pled no contest to felony strangulation and suffocation charges, as well as to violating the terms of his probation. He was sentenced to 11 months in jail and three more years of probation.

Brooks spent much of 2011 and 2012 in jail, serving two separate 180-day sentences for charges of drug possession and bail jumping, and a 37-day sentence for misdemeanor resisting arrest.

In 2016, Brooks was arrested and charged with failing to obey Nevada’s sex offender registration laws. He posted bail, then fled the state and never returned to court. He still has an active warrant out for his arrest in Nevada.

In July 2020, Brooks was again arrested after allegedly getting into a fist fight with his nephew over a cellphone and then firing a gun at the nephew’s car as the nephew drove away. Arresting officers found Brooks still in possession of the firearm as well as a small amount of meth. He was charged with a slew of serious felonies, including possession of a firearm as a firearm and two counts of second-degree recklessly endangering public safety with the use of a firearm.

Brooks’ bond was initially set at $10,000 but was quickly lowered to $7,500. He remained in custody until his Feb. 9 trial was postponed. His attorney then successfully argued for Brooks’ bail to be dropped even lower, and on Feb. 21, Brooks posted $500 bond and was released.

On Nov. 5, with his 2020 charges still pending, Brooks was again arrested and charged with several serious felony offenses after a woman—reportedly the mother of Brooks’ children—told police that he purposefully ran her over with a vehicle after an argument. According to reports, the vehicular assault left tire marks on the woman’s pants and injured her so severely that she was hospitalized.

Incredibly, despite two decades of violent behavior, an open felony warrant in Nevada, routine failures to abide by his probation or bond conditions, and an active case involving the violent use of a weapon, Brooks was allowed to post $1,000 cash bail. By Nov. 11, he was back in the community.

When all relevant information comes to light about possible motive or premeditation, it seems incredible that no one could have reasonably foreseen that Brooks would commit this specific type of violence and leave this amount of carnage in his wake.

Brooks’ propensity for violence and his lifetime spent disregarding the safety of others made a violent tragedy anything but unforeseeable.

It also could have been foreseen that this kind of tragedy would inevitably occur as a result of the well-intentioned but ill-thought-out and poorly executed bail reform policies that progressives are putting into effect across the country.

In fact, John Chisholm, the rogue George Soros-backed prosecutor in Milwaukee County who released Brooks when he should have sought no bail, issued a prophetic statement in 2007. He said: “Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into [a] treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody? … You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen.” He went on to argue, though, that “does not invalidate the overall approach.”

We disagree. And now that the dire consequences of these rogue prosecutors’ policies are sparking public backlash, Chisholm has called for an investigation into Brooks’ “inappropriately low” bond.

Unfortunately, this is emblematic of the rogue prosecutor movement more generally. They take a criminal-first, victim-last, passing-the-blame approach.

And while the consequences here were undoubtedly tragic, it’s far from the only example of rogue prosecutors’ lax bond policies wreaking havoc on their communities.

In Philadelphia, for example, rogue District Attorney Larry Krasner’s policies led to the murder of Philadelphia Police Cpl. James O’Connor by an individual whom Krasner released through his lenient policies. Former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain said, “The murder was the direct result of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s pro-violent defendant policies.”

In Chicago, police have pointed to the “skyrocketing use of electronic monitoring as a key factor in the city’s shocking 50% rise in killings” last year.

And no wonder. In Kim Foxx’s Chicago, there are apparently no consequences for violating bail terms. According to the Chicago Tribune, “About 400 people are charged every year with felony escape. During [her predecessor’s] last three years in office, she dropped a total of 55 such cases, compared with 420 for Foxx.”

And then there’s San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin. As two of us (Cully and Zack) have previously written, “Since taking office, Boudin has also been criticized for releasing suspects with long criminal records who have gone on—surprise, surprise—to commit other crimes.”

The events in Wisconsin were tragic. But the nightmare was a completely avoidable consequence of a criminal justice system run by Soros’ rogue prosecutors.

*****

This article was published on November 23, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

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