Legacy media outlets published several articles this week criticizing sex change treatments for transgender children.
One transgender individual told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the media is opening up to critical perspectives because reporters are discovering that transgender medicine is experimental.
A New York Times columnist predicted that in the near future, both liberals and conservatives would view child sex change procedures as a politically-motivated medical scandal.
Mainstream media outlets are publishing articles challenging the “gender-affirming” method of medical treatment for transgender children, which emphasizes speedy biomedical intervention over psychotherapy.
“As more reporters investigate the motives of legislators, I’m sure they’re discovering that pediatric transition is experimental medicine and that some regulatory framework is needed when children are involved,” Corinna Cohn, who identifies as a transgender woman and wrote a Washington Post op-ed expressing regret over receiving a sex change surgery at 19, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times each published articles Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday respectively on the sudden, sharp uptick in transgenderism in young people and the speed with which medical practitioners give them irreversible treatments such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries.
Cohn pointed to increased exposure to the issue of childhood transitions and conservative efforts to regulate the procedures to account for the media opening up to more critical perspectives on sex change procedures.
“Professionals who set the standards of care for pediatric transition are becoming more cautious due to a lack of evidence in the efficacy of the treatments,” Cohn told the DCNF. “For example, the Swedish Karolinska Hospital which pioneered pediatric gender transition has decided to discontinue prescribing hormone blockers and cross-sex hormones as a standard practic
Cohn wrote that medically transitioning did not resolve the issues that motivated the decision in the first place: anxiety and confusion about experiencing same-sex attraction.
“Surgery unshackled me from my body’s urges, but the destruction of my gonads introduced a different type of bondage,” Cohn wrote. “From the day of my surgery, I became a medical patient and will remain one for the rest of my life.”
Cohn regretted losing the ability to have children and losing sexual function before having ever had sex. Cohn was also concerned about youths undergoing medical procedures without having the chance to grow into their natural bodies and explore their identities through the process of growing up.
“I shudder to think of how distorting today’s social media is for confused teenagers. I’m also alarmed by how readily authority figures facilitate transition,” Cohn wrote.
Another transgender individual agreed with Cohn that teen social pressure plays a role in prompting childhood transitions. Erica Anderson, a transgender psychologist who claims to have helped hundreds of youths transition, told the LA Times in a Tuesday article that the surge in transgenderism among young people was related to its trendiness and that young people were being rushed through sex change treatments without undergoing therapy.
Anderson also pushed back on the idea that soaring rates of transgenderism among young people are strictly the result of more widespread acceptance in the Tuesday article.
“To flatly say there couldn’t be any social influence in formation of gender identity flies in the face of reality,” Anderson told the LA Times. “Teenagers influence each other.”
Conservative columnist Ross Douthat pointed out that some liberals stifle debate about the treatments by claiming that critical discussion of the issue puts transgender youths at an increased risk of suicide in a New York Times opinion piece Wednesday.
“Within not too short a span of time, not only conservatives but most liberals will recognize that we have been running an experiment on trans-identifying youth without good or certain evidence, inspired by ideological motives rather than scientific rigor, in a way that future generations will regard as a grave medical-political scandal,” Douthat wrote.
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EV buyers should be aware that they may be contributing to the pursuit of “blood minerals” to achieve their efforts to go green.
The worldwide movement toward the electrification of everything, from more electric vehicles (EVs) to more intermittent electricity by wind turbines and solar panels, the political actions are supportive of jumping onto the green train, most likely not knowing there is a darker side to green technology, associated with environmental degradation, humanity atrocities, and other embedded costs for materials.
It should concern everyone that those toxic components come from mining for the exotic minerals and metals that are required to manufacture EV batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels. This mining is occurring mostly in less-developed countries with yellow, brown, and black-skinned people with a lack of transparency about the human rights abuses and environmental degradation in those locations.
In an attempt to make the embedded costs of going “green” transparent to the world, the Pulitzer Prize nominated book, Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energy highlights how Asians and Africans, many of them children from the poorer and less healthy countries, are being enslaved and are dying in mines and factories to obtain the exotic minerals and metals required for the green energy technologies for the construction of EV batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and utility-scale storage batteries.
The Tesla EV has a one-thousand-pound battery that contains 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside the Tesla battery are 6,831 individual lithium-ion cells
The environmental impact of battery production is significant. The production of lithium is either carbon dioxide polluting or wasteful of water — up to 500,000 gallons per ton of the mineral. Cobalt mining produces radioactive contaminants, including uranium. About 80 percent of the weight of a Tesla battery –requires mined materials. In practice, that means mining about 50 tons of raw ore per vehicle. If 10 million U.S.-based electric cars are sold in 2030 (about half of sales), that would translate to 500 million tons of new mining with all the accompanying emissions from mining equipment and the accompanying pollution.
All those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just – one – Tesla EV battery.
There was already a huge challenge in just making enough EV batteries. As physicist Mark Mills pointed out in the Wall Street Journal: “The International Energy Agency (IEA) finds that with a globalenergy transition like the one President Biden envisions, demand for key minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel and rare-earth metals would explode, rising by 4,200 percent, 2,500 percent, 1,900 percent and 700 percent, respectively, by 2040”.
Amnesty International has documented children and adults mining cobalt in narrow man-made tunnels, and the exposure to the dangerous gases emitted during the procurement of these rare minerals, not to mention the destruction of the local ecosystems when the wastewater and other unusable ores are let loose onto the environments they have no choice but to live in because their wages are so infinitesimally small, it should cause us to take a step back and examine our moral obligations to humanity.
Not only might the planet not have the capacity to meet this demand, but many of these materials come from places that are hostile or that we do not control – such as China/Mongolia, the Congo, and Bolivia – leading to an unpredictable supply.
Most electric vehicles in use today are yet to reach the end of their cycle. The first all-electric car to be powered by lithium-ion batteries, the Tesla Roadster, made its market debut in 2008. This means the first generation of electric vehicle batteries have yet to reach the recycling stage. An estimated 11 million tons of spent lithium-ion batteries will flood our markets by 2025, without systems in place to handle them.
The actions of society are currently supportive of jumping onto the EV train, knowing that EV’s have a very dark side of environmental atrocities, and the non-existing transparency of human rights abuses occurring in other countries, both of which are directly connected to the mining for the exotic minerals and metals that are required to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries.
America could promote sustainable mining in those developing countries by restoring the land to a healthy ecosystem after the mine closes and by leaving surrounding communities with more wealth, education, health care, and infrastructure than they had before the mine went into production. Like mining in America, mining in developing countries must be the objective of corporate social responsibilities and the outcome of the successful ecological restoration of landscapes.
America’s passion for EV vehicles to reduce emissions must be ethical and should not thrive off human rights and environmental abuses in the foreign countries providing the exotic minerals and metals to support America’s green passion.
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A New York Times columnist has again confirmed that social conservatives were right: educators are pushing LGBT ideology on students.
Is Michelle Goldberg a conservative plant at The New York Times? Although she claims to be a liberal feminist, some of her recent columns are essentially admissions that social conservatives have been right all along. In another entry in this genre, she purports to critique the “freakout over sex and gender identity in schools” — only to tacitly admit that schools are indoctrinating children into LGBT ideology and grooming them into LGBT identities.
Goldberg accuses conservatives of stoking a “moral panic” akin to the “‘satanic panic’ of the 1980s, a frenzy of accusations of ritual child abuse that resulted in the conviction of dozens of innocent people.” Yet she then demonstrates the current fears are reality-based.
Her evidence that this is a panic consists of highlighting some unfounded rumors about educators indulging students with a furry fetish. She then admits that “there’s been a great evolution in how students think about gender and sexuality” with “an even bigger generational shift with trans issues. Many middle-aged liberal parents I know have different ideas about gender than their more radical adolescent kids, and I assume the gulf must be even larger in many conservative families.” In short, the sexual orientation and gender identity revolution is real, even if a few internet rumors about it are not.
Similarly, in response to the huge increase in LGBT identities among the young, Goldberg writes that “It’s obvious that more kids are going to come out in high schools where they’ll be accepted and celebrated than in those where they’ll be bullied and abused.”
True, and it is also obvious that this does not explain the mass conversions of adolescents, especially girls, to rainbow identities. Goldberg herself relays, without dispute, the example of a summer camp from which “a third of the girls came back saying that they were nonbinary or queer or gender nonconforming.”
This self-refutation continues to Goldberg’s conclusion. She does reiterate her ugly victim-blaming regarding the infamous Loudoun County rape case — why is a supposed feminist shaming a teenage girl for being raped in circumstances inconvenient to the agenda of men in dresses?
Yet she ends with a quote the victim’s mother had given to the Daily Wire, noting how her daughter was still drifting along with the gender revolution: “’Where does she get these ideas? From school, obviously,’ the mother said. ‘It’s not from our home.’”
The Left’s Contradictions
Once again, Goldberg has confirmed that social conservatives were right: educators really are leading students in a sexual and gender identity revolution, which is then furthered by social media and peer pressure. Nonetheless, Goldberg is probably not a closet conservative writing esoterically to get past her editors.
Rather, she seems to be ensnared by the contradictions of the left’s current orthodoxy on sex and gender. This sort of confusion, along with her apparently unwitting confirmations that conservatives were right, is inevitable because the LGBT movement’s justifying mantra of “born this way” is false, as demonstrated by what is happening in schools.
The born this way creed posits that sexual orientation and gender identity are innate and immutable, and that an authentic and flourishing life requires accepting these inborn identities. Thus, teaching young children about sexual orientation and gender identity is necessary to help them discover and live as their true selves, otherwise they will be repressed, miserable, and perhaps even suicidal. This is the logic behind the constant references to “LGBT youth” and “trans kids,” as well as President Joe Biden’s support for chemically and surgically transitioning children.
The True Source of Gender
But this view has been discredited. There is no gay gene. Nor is there an established biological basis for transgender identification. The case for transition rests on shoddy social science; some researchers even lie about their results. This is why transgender advocates rely on the abusive emotional blackmail of suicide threats.
The truth is that sexual inclinations and one’s sense of gender arise from a mix of biological, environmental, and cultural factors, of which genes are only a minor part. The interactions of these elements are complex and are not the same for everyone. We may have predispositions, but no one is predestined to identify as LGBT.
We can see this complexity and fluidity playing out in our culture, especially among the young. It is not just that youth are much more likely to identify as LGBT, but that they are deconstructing and recombining sexual and gender identities, often encouraged by their educators and under the influence of social media.
Educators Pushing LGBT Ideology
Nonetheless, the legacy of the (very politically successful) creed of “born this way” persists. It encourages teaching children about rainbow identities at young ages, justified by the presumption that some of them are already among the LGBT elect, even if they don’t know it yet. But rather than drawing out and nurturing intrinsic identities, instructing young children in LGBT ideology shapes their identities. Activist educators claim to protect trans children, but they are actually helping create trans children.
Horrifying examples are emerging of educators pushing young children into trans identities, even against the wishes of parents (some schools even hide these changes from parents). The Libs of TikTok Twitter account exposes a steady stream of such abuses — and these are just the activists dumb enough to boast online about what they are doing. In New Jersey, new state teaching standards have school districts distributing sample lesson plans instructing first and second graders in gender ideology and sexual orientation.
The LGBT educational agenda has more red flags than the Soviet army, from teachers talking to young children about sex to school counselors helping them to keep sexual and gender secrets from their parents. Groomer is as good a term as any for pedagogues who are eager to inform five-year-olds about sexual orientation, or who respond to the gender confusion of a troubled adolescent girl by encouraging her to inject testosterone, grow a beard, and have her breasts amputated.
The youth LGBT revolution is not a natural development among children expressing innate identities. Rather, it is an artificial social contagion encouraged by adult ideologues indoctrinating students — a six-year-old does not conclude on his own that a boy can have a vagina and a girl can have a penis. This is why parents are in revolt against the education establishment and why a liberal feminist writer can’t help admitting that the grooming is real.
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Shanghai, the financial capital of China with a population of 25 million people, currently faces its third week of steep increases in cases of COVID-19.
In response, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) implementedharsh COVID-19 restrictions in Shanghai,sending an army of healthcare workers to enforce them. Citizens cannot leave their homes. They can only receive medical care upon presenting a negative COVID test. Healthcare workers are forcing COVID-positive individuals into quarantine camps and stripping children from their parents. Government officials are even executing pets in the street when the pet owners test positive for COVID. People are running out of food, screaming from their windows, and jumping out of buildings in protest.
These measures follow the CCP’s “zero COVID” pandemic policies. These policies use extensive government intervention to “control” the coronavirus, disregarding all costs. During the past two years, the strategy gained admirers throughout the Western world, including Australia and New Zealand, each implementing similar zero COVID policies.
Zero COVID is a failed strategy. Data does not support it. Lockdowns, mass quarantines, strict border closures, and other policies do not stop COVID. New Zealand and China are experiencing increases in COVID cases. The societal and economic carnage severely outweighs any potential benefits of Zero-COVID policies.
Horrific Hubris
Unfortunately, the CCP refuses to recognize that zero COVID is ineffective, and the starving, trapped, exasperated people are using social media to share their stories.
Individuals across the city are audibly screaming from their windows in protest.
On Weibo, the highly censored social media platform, the following comment went viral: “We are not killed by Covid, but by the Covid control measures.” A tweet from a lawyer trapped in his home also went viral:
Further, NPR reports that citizens created makeshift indoor grass mats for their dogs to defecate on.
I’ve talked with friends who have created these – they call them DIY nature toilets inside their homes. So they, like, bought a patch of grass. They collected some old leaves as a place for their dogs to…Do their business.
The CCP’s response uses militarism and media gaslighting. The CCP-controlled media claims citizens should “be confident, trust the policy, not to panic or be overly anxious, and not to make up and believe rumors.”
Drones fly throughout Shanghai, telling citizens, “Please comply with covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.”
The zero-COVID measures in Shanghai ought to be recognized for what they are: human rights abuses. The policy ends (zero COVID) are not possible, so they cannot justify the means (locking down a city of 25 million). Similar to its abuse of the Uyghurs in China, the CCP’s national socialist policies are causing significant harm to the Chinese people. Like all national socialist policies, they result in human suffering rather than human flourishing.
State Capacity Hurts
China’s zero COVID approach is yet another example of the devastating risk introduced when totalitarian regimes implement centrally planned policy via brute force. Under the classical liberal ideal, governments are formed to protect individual rights. Nothing could be further from this in Shanghai. A city of over 25 million people is being dehumanized because of a spike in largely asymptomatic COVID-19 cases.
We were dangerously close in the United States to implementing zero COVID adjacent policies, particularly in our larger cities.Admirers of this approach are still with us in the Western world, even if they are in apparent retreat.
The experience in Shanghai permanently discredits their opinions with respect to COVID-19 policy. The rest of the world should take note and ensure “zero COVID” ideas are placed squarely in the past.
*****
This article was published by AIER, The American Institute for Economic Research, and is reproduced with permission.
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We won a significant victory last week in the California Superior Court when it declared that the state’s racial, ethnic, and LGBT quota for corporate boards of California-based corporations violates the California Constitution.
This week the court released its full opinion. It found that only in “very particular cases should discrimination be remedied by more discrimination.”
This historic California court decision declared unconstitutional one of the most blatant and significant attacks in the modern era on constitutional prohibitions against discrimination. In its ruling today, the court upheld the core American value of equal protection under the law. Judicial Watch’s taxpayer clients are heroes for standing up for civil rights against the Left’s pernicious efforts to undo anti-discrimination protections.
We filed this lawsuit on October 2, 2020, in the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Los Angeles, on behalf of three California taxpayers (Robin Crest, Earl De Vries and Judy DeVries) to prevent California from enforcing Assembly Bill 979 (AB 979). The law requires that boards of directors of California-based, publicly held domestic or foreign corporations satisfy a racial, ethnic, and LGBT quota by the end of the 2021 calendar year.
In his opinion striking down the gender-quota law, Judge Terry A. Green found the law “violates the Equal Protection Clause of the California Constitution on its face.” The judge elaborated on why the California Legislature exceeded its authority in mandating the composition of boards:
The difficulty is that the Legislature is thinking in group terms. But the California Constitution protects the right of individuals to equal treatment. Before the Legislature may require that members of one group be given certain board seats, it must first try to create neutral conditions under which qualified individuals from any group may succeed. That attempt was not made in this case. [Emphasis in original]
The court concluded:
The statute treats similarly situated individuals – qualified potential corporate board members – differently based on their membership (or lack thereof) in certain listed racial, sexual orientation, and gender identity groups. It requires that a certain specific number of board seats be reserved for members of the groups on the list – and necessarily excludes members of other groups from those seats.
The Secretary has not identified a compelling interest to justify this classification. The broader public benefits produced by well-run businesses do not fit that bill.
California must treat its citizens equally as individuals under the law, and not give discriminatory, preferential treatment to some based on race, ethnicity or LGBT status. This court ruling marks a watershed in the core American value of equal protection under the law for all Americans. And it warns against the pernicious racialism of the radical Left.
This is not our only action in this area.
We completed a trial in a separate lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of California taxpayers to prevent the state from implementing a 2018 law (SB 826) requiring publicly-held corporations headquartered in California to have at least one director “who self-identifies her gender as a woman, without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth” on their boards by December 31, 2019 (Robin Crest et al. v. Alex Padilla (No.19ST-CV-27561)).
As we approach Easter, we might ask ourselves what is its real meaning? Is it about Easter egg hunts and cute bunnies or is it more than that?
Nowhere else do we celebrate two events each year focusing our attention on one person, Jesus. The first event is Christmas. The word has “Christ” in it. At Christmas we celebrate the Virgin birth of the Savior, Jesus Christ, Jesus being his name and Christ his title. Jesus is the Lord’s human name given to Mary by the angel Gabriel (Luke 1:31). The meaning of ‘Christ’ comes from the Greek word Christos, meaning ‘anointed one’ or ‘the chosen one’. This is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word Mashiach, or ‘Messiah’. His birth, His coming and His earthly mission was prophesized many times throughout the Old Testament.
The second event, Easter Sunday, acknowledges and celebrates the resurrection of Jesus. He told us in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (gospel meaning ‘good news’) that He would rise from death three days after His death and burial. The resurrection would confirm to the world that Jesus was more than mere man. He came to us as God in human form, called the Son of man, i.e., the Son of God in the form ‘of’ man.
Why would Jesus Christ come from the pristine environment of heaven, being in the presence of God the Father, to a world marred by sin, strife and bitter dissension? The answer is that God is totally devoid of sin. Man’s nature is flawed and sinful in its natural state. God, the creator of all things, is devoid of sin. Man is unable to have a relationship with God in his fallen, sinful state. Jesus came to earth to bring forgiveness and redemption to fallen man, opening the path to eternal life beyond our mortal life.
Jesus, as man, was unlike any other human being. He was born of a Virgin mother, lived on earth without sin and without a fallen nature. He went to a brutal, cruel death by crucifixion, shedding His precious blood and life as the price for forgiveness of our sinful debt. On the third day, He rose from the dead, a resurrection witnessed by many and accepted by so many for over two thousand years since His presence on earth.
As a consequence of His death and resurrection, all who accept and embrace Him, believing in Him as Savior has relationship with the three persons of God’s Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and a path to eternal life. In the Bible, God’s word, we are told in Romans 6:23 “the wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” In John 14:6 Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me.”
What Jesus accomplished for fallen man costs us nothing, but cost Jesus, as man, everything. Prior to His crucifixion He was spat upon, flogged and mocked by Roman soldiers who placed a crown of thorns upon His head and a purple robe around Him, laughing as they said “hail, King of the Jews!” He was punched in His face so much that His visage was marred. This was only the beginning of His incredible suffering and pain. As He went to the cross, stripped of His garments, spikes were driven through His wrists and feet as He lay on the cross, and He was again mocked by bystanders: “He saved others but He cannot save Himself.” How did Jesus respond? “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).
It is instructive to consider an incident before Jesus’s crucifixion involving Nicodemus, a Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin, a ruler of the Jews. In Chapter 3 of John’s gospel, we find Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night. Perhaps he came when it was dark not wanting the Jews to see him talking to Jesus. He said to Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that you have come from God as a teacher, for no one could do these signs unless God is with Him.” Of what signs was Nicodemus speaking? Well known for His miracles, including turning water into wine, healing people with leprosy, restoring sight to the blind, and driving out demons from people, Jesus said to Nicodemus “you must be born again”. Jesus was speaking of a spiritual birth but Nicodemus thought Jesus was referring to a physical birth. Nicodemus should have realized that Jesus was no mortal man since he was a teacher of Israel. Old Testament scripture in many places pointed to Jesus, the coming Messiah. Several of these scripture prophesies are in Jeremiah 31:15, Isaiah 53: 3-7, Psalm 22: 17-18, Micah 5:2, and Daniel 9: 24,25,27.
The Word of God was written by 40 authors over a period of 1400 years – written by men but inspired by God with its ultimate purpose to point us to the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who came that we might have life and have it to the full. Life is full of choices and decisions, but it is my belief that knowing Jesus as Savior is life’s most important decision because it determines our destiny after we have passed from our earthly life. This life changing decision also greatly impacts the way we live in the present life. I believe the more we know about Jesus, the more we learn to love Him. We love Him because of what He provided for us as He went to the cross and His resurrection. As we learn who He was, we are encouraged to be like Him: kind, compassionate, forgiving, loving, always caring for the needs of others, without pride and deceit, so humble and so much more.
My hope for you as you read this article is that you too may come to know Jesus Christ as Savior. The gospel of John is a very good starting point to learn, know and begin or strengthen your relationship with Jesus. As so many Christians for so long have come to know so well, this is the real meaning of Easter. It is about His gift of redemption for us and a relationship with the Lord that brings forgiveness, peace and righteousness in this world and a path to eternal life in the next.
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I don’t know about you, but the first time I heard the slogan “Black Lives Matter“ I thought it was, well…curious. Who said otherwise these days? Wasn’t that obvious?
I soon discovered the depths of my naïveté. The tip-off was realizing that “All Lives Matter“ was not a more inclusive iteration of the same concept, but its opposite – racist fighting words. People were vilified and fired for saying them.
It turned out that BLM was a “social justice“ organization focused primarily on “intervening in violence inflicted on black communities by the state and vigilantes“, i.e. police.
But this wasn’t your typical well-intentioned social advocacy group. Its founders were Marxist activists. BLM’s goals included not only stirring racial violence but destruction of the nuclear family and eliminating capitalism.
BLM started as a loose confederation of underfunded organizers. But their fortunes changed after George Floyd’s death in 2020. Suddenly, radical racism became a lucrative business. Over $90 million came pouring in, even though BLM did no solicitation and was not even IRS qualified to receive it.
BLM became wildly popular. Its tenets became influential in crafting Democratic party policy. Corporate executives, ever vigilant to burnish their woke credentials, praised it and donated lavishly. Sports teams stitched BLM onto their uniforms.
BLM initially parked the money with sister organizations that had IRS certification. After BLM’s nonprofit status was established, $66.5 million was immediately transferred into its account.
Here’s where the story gets murky. BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors issued an “impact report” in February 2021, claiming operating expenses of $8.4 million and $21.7 million in grants to local affiliates, but no further detail was provided. The rest of the funding was unaccounted for. Moreover, BLM has yet to file its IRS annual report required last November.
Meanwhile, Cullors resigned last May amid reports that absent any other known sources of income, she had purchased millions of dollars worth of prime real estate. The two activists she appointed to assume the helm of BLM declined the offer.
The worm had turned. Charity Watch described BLM as a “ghost ship full of treasure with no captain, no crew no, and no clear direction“. Other philanthropy watchdogs also withdrew their endorsements.
Washington and California ordered BLM to cease fundraising and Amazon kicked BLM off its charity platform. Antagonizing California, Washington and Amazon had to be unprecedented for a radical leftist outfit!
The BLM scam, wasting the funds, was actually a good thing. According to the website Candid, non-profits devoted to “racial equity“ raised $25 billion total post-George Floyd. Yet the “accomplishments“ of these groups have been demonstrably harmful to blacks.
Their main policy goal was to “defund the police”, the prime cause of the everyday genocide purportedly inflicted on young black men. That didn’t turn out well.
In 2019, 7777 Blacks were murdered, 53% of all homicide victims. After the “defund the police“ movement succeeded in jurisdictions across the country, 9941 Blacks were murdered the next year, indicating that 2000 lives were lost due to a failed ideology.
Blacks are repeatedly informed that thousands of unarmed black victims are killed by police each year, but the numbers tell a different story. As Heather Mac Donald points out, in 2019, the year 7777 blacks were killed, police accidentally shot a total of nine unarmed blacks, one for each 800 murder victims. Decimating and denigrating the thin blue line was a tragic mistake, especially for Blacks themselves.
BLM can’t be reformed because it is based on the concept that there is a social good in driving the races apart since one is inherently predisposed to oppressing the other. Media and academic elites, playing upon the historical realities of black victimhood and white guilt, insist racism is deeply ingrained in American culture, the core influence in our history.
Americans must decide. Do we concede the future of permanent tribalism advanced by BLM, the 1619 Project, and Critical Race Theory?
Or do we still believe in the vision of Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and MLK that Americans can achieve another historic first? We can establish a multi-racial society where race really doesn’t matter and we all share the Dream of living united as Americans.
*****
Thomas C. Patterson, MD is a retired Emergency Medicine physician, Arizona state Senator and Arizona Senate Majority Leader in the ’90s. He is a former Chairman, Goldwater Institute.
The future of abortion law in the U.S. hinges on the forthcoming ruling in a Supreme Court case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, but the pro-life movement must begin gearing up to fight another insidious foe—Big Tech censorship.
Organizations standing for the sanctity of life are well aware of the uphill battle they face.
The prominent anti-abortion group Live Action had its content censored online long before the docket put the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion nationwide in the crosshairs.
In 2019, social media platform Pinterest added Live Action’s website to its blacklist of banned sites. The blacklisting meant users were unable to link to Live Action’s content or post it on Pinterest.
The Daily Signal reported that after Live Action attempted to appeal the ban, Pinterest took things a step further and permanently banned its account, claiming the organization violated Pinterest’s misinformation policies.
Andrew Moore, digital and creative director at pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List, says his organization also has been hit by Big Tech censorship on several occasions.
“In 2017, Twitter prevented SBA List from running an ad featuring a pro-life quote by Mother Teresa, claiming our ad violated their policy on promoting the sale of health and pharmaceutical products,” Moore said in a statement to The Daily Signal.
“In 2020, citing a factually incorrect ‘fact-check’ by the Dispatch, Facebook banned our ads stating that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris support late-term abortion. Meanwhile, Big Abortion was permitted to run comparable ads without any restrictions.”
The examples of Big Tech censorship of pro-life causes are innumerable. But what it all leads back to is that Big Tech is hostile to the anti-abortion movement and has openly thrown its considerable weight behind leftist pro-abortion causes.
That isn’t really shocking. It’s an open secret that platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter are run by leftists whose sensibilities align more with rabid pro-abortionists.
Where this is likely to become an issue is when pro-abortion activists and their kindred spirits in the Silicon Valley hubs of Big Tech see Roe pared back or even struck down by the high court. A ruling is expected in late June.
The doomsaying surrounding a possible end to Roe already has the far left reeling. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which the tech titans would push even harder to censor dissenting voices seeking to end or restrict abortion across the country.
Moore says Susan B. Anthony List is expecting a new wave of censorship.
“We are prepared for a crackdown on any messaging on abortion that does not fit the narrative of Planned Parenthood and their numerous allies in Silicon Valley,” he said, adding:
If the Supreme Court hands the question of abortion back to the people through their legislatures, Big Abortion will stand to have everything to lose. This new reality will motivate their friends in Big Tech to enact even more draconian measures.
As a silver lining, pro-life conservatives are at least aware that censorship will occur and have time to prepare. Pro-abortion forces already have shown their hand, so the pro-life movement knows what to expect if Roe is struck down.
Conservatives should demand transparency and accountability from Big Tech companies that censor them. The tech titans shouldn’t have the power to hide behind shadowy algorithms and selective enforcement as they repeatedly remove pro-life content.
Recent bills in Georgia and Florida provide a model for consumer protections at the state level. The Georgia legislation has a provision under which Big Tech companies would be forced to provide a report on how frequently they censor content and why they took action. That would give users proof that they’d been censored.
But even if the online gatekeepers prevent pro-life messages from reaching a digital audience, pro-lifers can still take the movement offline.
“If Big Tech increases their censorship of pro-life speech in a post-Roe America, pro-life Americans must step up by fostering person-to-person communications, through word of mouth, email, text, alternative messaging, and social media platforms that have more respect for freedom of speech,” Moore said.
The biggest pro-life event each year is the March for Life. Tens of thousands of Americans dedicated to protecting the unborn gather each year in Washington, D.C., to make it clear that life matters.
As it becomes more likely Roe will be struck down, or at least curtailed, the March for Life has begun spinning off marches in states such as Connecticut and California. Pro-life conservatives should attend these marches and organize their own, free from the censoring power of Big Tech.
The radical left will use every trick it has to keep abortion unrestricted, but the pro-life movement ultimately will win. Big Tech can try, but life won’t be censored.
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If there is one thing we can expect from the Green Movement is that it will do its best to mislead the public with very clever public relations. But a lie is a lie, even if cleverly told.
This has manifested itself in two ways rather recently.
First, they continue to claim that “renewables” specifically wind turbines and solar, can replace quickly the energy output of coal and natural gas. A subset of that argument is that wind and solar are less impactful to the environment than oil and gas.
Neither of these assertions is true.
We urge you to view the adjacent video by Michael Shellenberger, an environmentalist who has come to see the contradictions and errors in Green policy.
Secondly, they claim that since the Russian-Ukrainian War has left especially Europe, and the rest of the world, short of energy, the only way to get energy “independence” is to double down on their Green agenda. But it was their Green policies that made the West so vulnerable and dependent on Russian oil and gas. Having succeeded in making Europe especially vulnerable, their solution is more windmills and solar panels.
The latter position explains the nonsensical response of the Biden Administration, which has done everything possible to suppress domestic oil and gas production while at the same time putting enormous funds towards wind and solar, some $555 Billion, in his so-called Build Back Better Plan.
Obviously, expanding U.S. oil and gas production is an alternative answer, and a good one. We benefit economically from the expansion, our citizens find employment, and our extraction of hydrocarbons is more efficient and cleaner than other sources outside of the U.S.
But Biden and the Greens are opposed to that, even as a short-term expedient.
It wasn’t the choice of consumers or utilities, but the European government’s top-down policy to shut down coal, oil, and nuclear, and then put total reliance on renewables. And because renewables are so expensive and unreliable, they then had to get the energy they need from Russia.
So, dependence was not a natural development but a byproduct of mostly German policy. France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear power and is not nearly as vulnerable as Germany.
Given the evidence that Russian money is behind many of the environmental groups, it could be said dependence was not a byproduct of policy, but in fact the purpose of the policy.
Thus, the Green movement offers this twisted proposition: Our Green policies have made you dependent when you need not be, but the further adoption of our plans is the only road to energy independence! Heads we win, tails you lose.
The hidden losing proposition they have for us is they want to substitute energy dependence on Russia or Saudi Arabia ( because they won’t let us produce our own energy) and shift to solar, wind, and electric vehicles, so we can be dependent on China, Congo, and Peru for rare earth metals. This is a false choice. At least for the US, we need not be dependent. The Green policies make us dependent. Not long ago, we were a net exporter of oil and gas. Even Europe has considerable oil and gas production they could tap into. So the trade they propose, if solar and wind actually can be brought to scale, is to substitute mineral dependence for energy dependence.
Besides mineral dependence, there also is manufacturing dependence. Overwhelmingly, solar panels and windmills are made in China.
We have just seen how Russia is squeezing Europe over energy. Why would we want to become more dependent on China for the production of energy equipment and vital minerals? That seems beyond naive and into the realm of a national security death wish.
Biden joined the European Greens by shutting down a pipeline from Israeli gas fields that would have brought gas to Europe, and felt somehow the environment would find Russian gas more wonderful that Israeli gas. This is the same sort of thing we saw domestically: Biden shuts down U.S. production and goes begging for oil from Iran and Venezuela as if their hydrocarbons are “better” than ours for the environment.
Biden and California Democrats also have joined the European Greens by inflicting German-like policies in the United States. There is no reason why clean natural gas from Pennsylvania cannot be augmented by clean natural gas from adjacent New York. The US has lots of clean-burning gas. Expensive gas is purely a political decision by Democrats.
It is also obvious that green technology, even after years of subsidies, is not ready to take over the heavy lifting of energy production. Natural gas has to back up “renewables” because they are intermittent and storage of electricity is not yet feasible. If this transition to total renewables is even technically feasible, it is likely at least 30 to 40 years out. Yet the Green Movement insists there are no technical, environmental, or economic problems. For them, it is simply a lack of political will. With political will, they believe it can all be done NOW. That is simply impossible.
One sure sign of an environmentalist that tells you they simply are not serious about their dreams, is their opposition to nuclear power.
As Shellenberger shows, nuclear power is safe, reliable, and clean, and even with all the environmentalist’s lawsuits driving up costs, it is far cheaper. It has much less impact on the land and animals. And very importantly, we are not dependent on the Chinese.
The Greens also have a very narrow view of oil and gas. They see it only in terms of energy. All they can think about is closing down production, and driving up the price of hydrocarbons, to make their pet projects look better by comparison.
What they fail to notice are the second-order side effects. Two of these have become quite evident.
Greens don’t seem to understand that thousands of products from plastic, chemicals, and fertilizer are derived from oil and natural gas. Drive up the price of natural gas, and it not only makes windmills look more viable, but it also drives up the price of fertilizer, which drives up the price of food, which will kill millions in the third world.
It also heavily contributes to “cost-push” inflation, which causes interest rates to rise, and lowers the standard of living for everyone, especially the elderly on a fixed income, which in turn could induce severe economic recession and privation in both the developed world and less developed countries.
Thus, in order to make their pet projects look better in relative terms, they in essence are willing to literally starve people to death and cause millions to lose their jobs. We are already seeing food riots in Peru and Sri Lanka, and likely food turmoil is just starting.
Inflation and recession, coupled with food shortages, are a prescription for social and political turmoil.
Such turmoil could not only destroy the standard of living for many people, but it can also create social violence and a loss of personal freedom.
Covering massive amounts of land with windmills and solar panels itself has a significant environmental impact. And, a lot of energy is consumed to make these things.
As Shellenberger notes, we may be destroying the environment to save the climate, which fluctuates by itself anyway.
What kind of a dream is this?
Add up all the first and second-order problems with the Green agenda and you realize what a high price we will all pay for their unrealistic dreams.
Their dream is our nightmare.
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Cancel culture is 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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.”
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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.
Wet Streets Don’t Cause Rain
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.
Feelings Don’t Cause Thoughts
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.
The World Is Experienced Inside-Out
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.
Taking More Responsibility
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.
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.”
Learning From Life
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.”
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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.
“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.
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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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