Go See ‘Sound of Freedom’ for the Truth on Millions of Trafficked Children thumbnail

Go See ‘Sound of Freedom’ for the Truth on Millions of Trafficked Children

By Catherine Salgado

The movie Sound of Freedom will finally come to theaters the week of July 4, based on the stories of real-life heroes and their work to free children from the hellish and lucrative world of child trafficking.

Toward the end of the trailer above, actor Jim Caviezel (who played Jesus in the magnificent Passion of the Christ) says that “an estimated 2 million children are trafficked” every single year. These children are raped, abused, tortured (and many of them later killed by having their organs harvested). The fact that anyone could do such horrific things to any other human being is unimaginable, but to do it to innocent children is a truly Satanic level of evil.

As Caviezel said, the movie is “heartbreaking” but tremendously important, because these children’s stories need to be known as a first step toward justice and help for them. Caviezel said he hopes for 2 million attendees at the movie’s opening, one for every precious child trafficked annually. It has taken Caviezel and the others behind Sound of Freedom years to bring this movie to the public, because they’ve been canceled and delayed. The powers-that-be don’t want you to know about this trafficking, but you need to know.

Sound of Freedom will be in theaters for the week of July 4, Independence Day. In honor of our Founders who were willing to sacrifice everything to secure freedom to themselves and others, make the small sacrifice to go see Sound of Freedom and learn about the most innocent victims in need of liberty.

Search for locations and buy tickets HERE. You can also pay for someone else’s ticket as a donation to help spread the word and ensure as many people as possible attend. As Caviezel urged, let’s start a movement to ensure that “God’s children are no longer for sale.”

*****

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

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‘We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Coming for Your Children’: 6 Scenes From NYC Pride Events thumbnail

‘We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Coming for Your Children’: 6 Scenes From NYC Pride Events

By Gigi De La Torre

Editors’ Note: There are uncomfortable scenes that we must share with you. If not, you might not know the extent to which sexual extremists are taking their argument. Otherwise, you might think we are mean and against gay people. Earlier, we had written about this subject (see Get Your Bedroom Out of My Government) and made the point that a proper concept of liberty suggests that you are free to do what you want to do as long as you do not harm others or use force or coercion. Society has reached its level of tolerance with “pride.” What consenting people do in private should be respected, but this invasion of our schools, and ghastly public displays deserves strong condemnation and resistance. Further, some 21 Federal Agencies and numerous local authorities have sanctioned “pride events” and the flying of pride flags on government buildings. We need to get the “bedroom” of the LGBTQ crowd out of our government and especially out of our schools. Their movement now is using coercion by hijacking the government and is doing harm to our children and to society at large. Enough.

New York City held its 53rd Pride parade Sunday.

Here are some of the scenes from that parade and related events shared on social media.

1. ‘We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Coming for Your Children.’

In a clip that has gone viral on Twitter, marchers at the New York City Drag March, which was held Friday, chanted, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”

One holds a sign that says, “Drag isn’t for CISsies.”

2. Twerking

Men wearing almost nothing but Speedos twerked and danced on a parade float sponsored by the Chinese Rainbow Network, an organization that claims to be the “largest Mandarin speaking LGBTQ+ network in North America.”

The float also featured a woman wearing a red dress and boot stilettos pole dancing.

At the end of the float, one woman fully dressed stood in the corner and filmed the others sexually dancing on her phone.

3. ‘Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Don’t Assume Your Kids Are Straight!’

Some marchers shouted, “One, two, three, four, open up the closet door! Five, six, seven, eight, don’t assume your kids are straight!”

Kids wearing pink shirts and rainbow gear marched along with the adults.

One little girl on a man’s shoulders wore a transgender pink, white, and blue flag as a cape.

4. ‘Stop Touching Me!’

K. Yang, an activist advocating for female rights, was verbally harassed and assaulted while protesting in the middle of a Pride gathering.

The video shows ralliers closely shouting in Yang’s face, swatting her signs down and stomping on them, and grabbing and pushing Yang. Yang repeatedly shouted, “Stop touching me.”

5. ‘Clothing Optional’ Water Party

A massive reportedly “clothing optional” water party took place in Washington Square Park. Attendees are seen wading in one of the park’s fountains.

6. We’ll Love Our Son Even If He’s Straight.’

A couple paraded their child down the street, holding a sign saying, “We’ll love our son even if he’s straight.”

They were followed by a group of men clad in leather underwear.

*****

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

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Genital Mutilation for the Masses thumbnail

Genital Mutilation for the Masses

By TT Exulansic

The gory details and irreversible horrors of “gender-affirming” surgery laid bare.

Gender identity ideology, the worldview surrounding the core belief that sometimes men are women and other times women are men, have gotten the foothold that it has because people naturally trust that medical authorities, especially surgeons, know what they are doing. We believe that if patients were being harmed, those patients would certainly speak up first. Proponents of gender ideology claim that fewer than one percent of people regret surgical sexual transition, often contrasted with the 20 percent regret rate for knee surgery. But is this purportedly low regret rate reflective of reality? Rather than prove that sex-organ origami is wildly successful, what this reflects is that patients who are subjected to these highly-experimental procedures are unable, for whatever reason, to express levels of regret one would reasonably expect from an evidence-based surgical intervention.

Could it be that other factors, including withdrawal of community support and loss of reputation and standing, once one becomes known as a “transphobe” who was “never really trans,” are discouraging patients from being open about their regret? Could mental illness or emotional immaturity be preventing these individuals from rationally evaluating their situation or acknowledging and naming their emotions? Having looked at dozens of these first-hand narratives of individuals who “do not regret their surgery,” yet take to the internet to warn others anyway, I have concluded that these patients fear backlash for saying their actual, authentic truth out loud. Even people who suffer horrific complications requiring unimaginable revisions—likened to open hot dog buns by the surgeons themselves, as Ashton Williams discovered—are loath to say, “I regret having my arm skin cut off, stitched up, and sewn to my pubic area, and it was foolish of me to dream of peeing standing up at all costs.” But instead, she dreams of the day when it will all have been worth it, when she will look back on this hardship as a “bump in the road.”

Gender-affirming surgery patients face community scorn if they discuss the harm being done to them, their bodies, their pain levels, their wallets, their career or educational advancement, and their sexual-urologic function. The opportunity cost of the time spent dilating, tending to a colostomy bag, or financing a revision, is significant. And yet, patients who discuss the cost are cast as contributing to the zeitgeist that is “taking life-saving healthcare away from trans kids.” A predictable comment on any such surgical narrative is, “Be careful! Your story might be used by a transphobe to hurt trans people.” “Regretters,” as some term them, detransitioned or not, are accused of being “cis” because only “true trans” benefit from these interventions (making them tests of faith). The same network which “doxxes” (publicizes documents containing identifying information about) activists pushing back against gender identity ideology is ready and willing to subject even members of the trans community who have given their literal pound of flesh to this same mistreatment. For a movement so focused on the importance of inclusivity and tolerance, they are quick to scorn and shirk those branded non-believers.

Doxxing ignites firestorms many of us, including myself, have been subject to. This behavior seeks to divest us of our jobs, our homes, and our sense of personal safety as punishment for misgendering and other crimes. I have had the names and addresses of myself and my family members identified and circulated. As a former trans person who has become a vocal critic of the ideology and its attendant policy demands, I have received threats and other attempts at intimidation, such as frivolous professional complaints from foreign nationals and harassing phone calls. I’ve had long-time friends condemn me as a bigot on the basis of my gender-critical views, despite knowing first-hand that I would aid and befriend a trans-identifying person.

Surgical Simulacra

So what are these surgeries? Let’s discuss them in more depth. Graphic description of genital modification surgery will follow. Reader discretion is advised. Many of these interventions were initially designed for and continue to be performed on people with disorders of sexual development, some of whom are minors. It is important that people with a medical necessity for obtaining these surgeries still have access to them, in light of legislative attempts to ban these interventions. However, these interventions have the same complications regardless of the reasons for obtaining them, and there is a significant complication rate for genital construction performed for any reason. The following will be a discussion of these surgeries as they relate to transgender-identifying individuals. These surgeries all fall under the general category of “bottom surgeries.”

Vaginectomy is performed on trans-identifying female patients alone or as part of another procedure. Using either a scalpel or a laser, the interior wall of the vagina is surgically excised, and the remaining flesh is then sewn together so that it scars shut. Patients are typically told this eliminates the need for routine pap smears to check for cervical cancer. Hysterectomy (removal of the uterus) including removal of the cervix may or may not be done at this time.

Hysterectomy is the removal of the uterus. For trans-identifying females, this is either for non-medically necessary alleviation of “dysphoria” (a Greek term meaning “bad mood”) or in many cases, it is made medically necessary through the administration of cosmetic doses of testosterone, which cause fibroids to form, resulting in pain. These fibroids can form after just a few years on testosterone, as confirmed via dissection of removed uteruses of trans-identifying women. A child put on testosterone in middle school may require a hysterectomy before she graduates high school. Testosterone (a known human teratogen, i.e., a substance which causes birth defects) can also change the endometrial tissue (the tissue which is excreted during menstruation), raising the risk of endometrial cancer. This has been confirmed by microscopic examination of uteruses removed from trans-identifying young women. The ovaries also become scarred due to exposure to high doses of testosterone. In addition to pain, fibroids can cause excessive bleeding and reproductive problems such as uterine-factor infertility and pregnancy loss. Oopherectomy, removal of the ovaries, may or may not be completed at this same time. Either procedure can put the trans-identifying woman into early menopause and place her in an increased risk category for early-onset dementia.

Metoidioplasty is a surgery performed on female-to-male transgender individuals. The vaginal tissue may be discarded or utilized in urethral lengthening (see below). The clitoris, which has been irreversibly enlarged through the use of cosmetic testosterone, is “released” from the connective tissue that holds it in place, allowing the head of the clitoris to point outwards from the body when erect. The inner labia are then sewn together, partially or fully, and connected to the elongated and “released” clitoral head, leaving a tube down the middle through which the individual can complete the holy trans rite of “standing to pee.”

Phalloplasty is a term that refers to the construction of a neophallus using skin from elsewhere on the body. This skin may be a transplanted radial forearm free-flap phalloplasty, a rotated (non-free) flap of skin from the abdomen, or transplanted from the leg or back. When transplanted from the leg, the thickness is typically excessive, resulting in a girth that has been likened by recipients to being the size of a soda can, requiring multiple “de-girthing” procedures that involve liposuction. Of course, if the person gains weight, their neophallus may again enlarge. The phalloplasty recipient also faces the issue of “shrinkage,” as the lack of connective tissue structure of a penis means that over time, the transplanted skin will change in size and shape to become smaller. This has been documented in photos by recipients and their providers, published in peer-reviewed journals and to social media platforms like Reddit. This lack of structure also makes the individual prone to pressure sores internally, which result in strictures where the skin inside the tube has become inflamed and scarred together, obstructing the flow of urine and requiring an individual to wear a second, suprapubic catheter that goes into the bladder through the abdomen, as well as a catheter inside the skin tube to keep it open.

Repeated insults to the bladder itself in some cases result in severe and recurrent bladder stones, all of which may contribute to the eventual loss of the bladder and need for a permanent urostomy bag. Additionally, individuals who get vaginectomy are vulnerable to fistula, which is an abnormal connection between two areas of the body. For one person I interviewed, “Ryan,” a fistula formed between the excised vaginal space, the “natal” (original) urethra, and the colon, allowing bacteria from the colon to repeatedly infect the urethra and bladder. To prevent sepsis, Ryan’s doctors re-routed the intestine to a stoma, or opening, cut in the side of the abdomen, to which a colostomy bag was attached to collect stool. This reduced the frequency of infections, but did not stop them. At the time of the interview, Ryan had been living half a life due to this imposed, severe digestive disability for a year and a half, with no end in sight.

Overall phalloplasty complication rates range from 60 percent to 100 percent higher when performed on females versus males, depending on the nature of the complication, with studies loath to provide an overall complication rate across complication subtypes. The studies that do provide such a figure estimate rates as high as 76 percent. “[C]urrent evidence of the various phalloplasty surgical techniques and their expected postoperative outcomes is weak.” Even without complications, “post void dribbling,” which many “trans men” liken to a “squirt gun” they have to “milk,” was found by one study to occur in 72 percent of female phalloplasty recipients.

One unfortunate phalloplasty recipient has needed eight surgeries (and counting) including the initial and all the revisions. She also spent five weeks in the hospital, of which two were spent in the ICU on a ventilator during COVID because her arm-skin phalloplasty had predictably become septic. She nearly lost her leg from a giant blood clot that formed as a result of a combination of factors, including the sepsis and the extended time spent immobile. The clot was likely partly a result of testosterone poisoning, which may have caused her, as she stated in a video response to me, to discontinue testosterone shortly after that incident. Yet this individual is still looking forward to having an erectile device implanted into this transplanted skin tube. These erectile devices, which are acting within floppy arm skin, are typically either balloon-based (requiring a pump to be implanted in the labial skin which has been revised to look like a scrotal sack) or a rod that clicks into place, similar to a futon frame. Romantic partners of phalloplasty recipients that have agreed to be in their videos state it does not work well for sexual intercourse, and this reality can leave recipients despondent.

In addition to phalloplasty, recipients often get additional cosmetic procedures so that the skin tube more closely mimics a real penis. These may include “medical tattooing,” which seeks to create the appearance of veins or the glans from a distance. They may also get additional surgical interventions to create the cosmetic shape of a penis via additional nips and tucks. Nerves from the location of the graft site may also be transplanted and joined (similar to soldering) to the clitoral nerve itself, which may require severing the clitoral nerve from the tip of the clitoris, resulting in loss of clitoral sensation (in addition to the loss that occurs when the phalloplasty “buries the clitoris”). This may result in some amount of sensation in parts of the skin tube. Since it is an arm or leg skin tube, however, it does not acquire the erogenous sensitivity or specificity that a real penis has. Recipients will describe having mild sensation at the tip or base, to the extent they can feel if something is touching it or not.

In both phalloplasty and metoidioplasty, patients are increasingly asking that their vaginas be left open and accessible, known as a “vagina-sparing” procedures. One metoidioplasty patient had her vagina “spared,” and subsequently, she became pregnant from having heterosexual intercourse with her male husband. She expressed in a video, “we did not think it was possible and were very shocked,” because in her mind, she was a gay man having sex with another man. Her baby was exposed prenatally to her cosmetic testosterone use, which she resumed against medical advice shortly after her infant had to be born prematurely. Her daughter has had developmental issues, including apparent motor and speech delays, as well as plagiocephaly (misshapen head), which required a prescription helmet.

Buccal grafts may be required during phalloplasty, metoidioplasty, or vaginoplasty (explained below), all with the aim of providing the mucous membrane lining that is present in normal genitalia. Consequences of this procedure include nerve damage, scarring, and impaired ability to chew, control the muscles of the mouth, or speak clearly.

Urethral lengthening is a procedure done during metoidioplasty as well as phalloplasty (explained below). The purpose is to connect what’s termed the “natal urethra,” otherwise known as the urethra, to the skin tube extension so that the individual can pee from the tip of the skin tube. This may be completed in various ways. The doctor may utilize tissue from the vagina. The doctor may also implant a straw in the arm of the patient for several months in hopes of creating a tube around the straw, which will then transplant with the rest of the arm skin during a radial forearm free-flap phalloplasty. The surgeon may also utilize skin from the inside of the cheek (buccal graft) or mastectomy (“top surgery”) to create this new urethra. Because this tissue did not develop for the purpose of carrying urine through a skin tube, the neo-urethra and neo-phallus lack the internal structure to sustain itself and have a tendency to scar together as well as create holes or cul-de-sac pockets in which urine collects and bacterial infections can thrive. This neo-phallus is not regularly flushed with semen as in a healthy male, nor does it have normal tension and pressure of a healthy male urinary stream, both of which make neo-urinary tract infections easier to develop and harder to eliminate. These infections create conditions which promote chronic bladder and kidney infections, and from there an infection can advance to one or multiple episodes of sepsis (systemic bacterial infection circulating in the blood throughout the body). Sepsis can result in brain and other organ damage as well as necessitate amputation of limbs.

Men’s Department

Transgender vaginoplasty is a procedure in which tissue from the penis, scrotum, mouth, other portions of the digestive tract (sometimes from a pig), or a tilapia fish is used to line an excavated hole in a man’s pelvis. Patients such as Jazz Jennings, child star of the show I Am Jazz, will often start with a penile inversion, in which the bulk of the internal portion of the penis and the glans is removed, the shaft skin is separated and inverted, and the urethra is split open and connected to the shaft skin to create a wider canal, all of which is then sewn to the posterior of the pelvic wall. Unlike a woman’s vagina, penis shaft and urethra skin is, of course, not very stretchy, which allows these structures to resist the pressures of urination as well as engorgement with blood occurring during erection. Once these tissues are removed, dissected, and inverted, the tendency of this tube is to become inflamed. Inflamed tissue that stretches scars and calcifies. The doctors want it to scar to the interior of the pelvis (or else the result is neo-vagina prolapse), but this tendency to scar means it will also try to shrink, reducing in length and girth.

To compensate for this, doctors advise vaginoplasty recipients to dilate using rods of a fixed length and graded girth. Dilation involves lying back and inserting this rod into the neo-vagina in an attempt to either expand the internal volume or at least prevent collapse. This process is extremely time consuming, and dilation regimens seem to vary greatly from patient to patient, ranging from one hour a few times a week to multiple hour-long sessions per day. This process is typically painful and may be ineffective. Like the strictures that form in the skin tube neo-urethra of the neo-phallus, this penile-inverted skin tube was not designed to be resting against itself for long periods. This is, however, unavoidable. Therefore, the tissue within this tube is prone to strictures, or what doctors will call “vaginal stenosis” to get insurance to pay for the revision as a result of pressure necrosis (the tendency of tissue is to inflame, die, and scar to surrounding tissue as a result of extended periods of pressure).

This can make dilation impossible, resulting in a warm, moist, non-self-cleaning pocket that is an ideal environment for bacteria which is now adjacent to a shortened urethra, capable of causing chronic infections and sepsis. Additionally, dilation, which is sometimes performed by physicians under anesthesia so that more force can be used, may cause tears or fistulas between the neo-vagina and other structures such as the urethra or rectum. One unfortunate vaginoplasty recipient I covered learned he had a recto-”vaginal” fistula when he farted through it. This fistula was allegedly caused by the anesthesia-enabled, surgeon-performed dilation.

At this point, gender doctors may recommend a revision. This revision may be what is known as a “colon vaginoplasty.” In a colon vaginoplasty, an eight-inch segment of colon is removed, and the remaining colon is rerouted to the rectum and recombined (creating a risk of fistulas and internal infection which may show up years later). This colon segment is then sewn shut at one end and is used to replace the scarred, shrunken, strictured, and fistula-ridden inverted penile shaft skin. It is advertised as “self-lubricating,” but as one recipient explained, what the doctors may not tell patients is that this lubrication is tied to food consumption, not sexual arousal.

Orchiectomy is the removal of the testicles. Orchiectomy is typically performed to eliminate a biological source of unwanted male hormones and to salvage the tissue present in the testicles, including a portion of skin called the “vagina” (Latin for “sheath”), to be repurposed to line the neo-vagina.

Nullification surgery is a term for a procedure performed on either male or female people that results in an outcome that is reminiscent of female genital mutilation. The penis, vulva, vagina, and testicles, as applicable, are completely removed, and the overlying tissue is sewn together to create a smooth surface with a small hole for urination. This may be done in the name of “eunuch” gender identity. Eunuch is a term which traditionally refers to a castrated male with no penis, but in this modern era, of course, sex is not gender and so “gender identity,” which would include “eunuch gender identity,” is not limited to any particular “sex assigned at birth.”

Cui Bono?

As if the horrors of the surgeries themselves were not enough, the reality is that these interventions are mind-bendingly expensive, entirely cosmetic, and medically unnecessary, yet are covered by insurance (including tax-funded insurance such as Medicaid and Medicare because not funding these surgeries demanded by the trans lobby is considered “discrimination” equivalent to not covering medically-necessary care for a car accident victim who happened to be Asian). Some recipients have posted medical bills totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars accrued in just a few years, sometimes months—even during the COVID-19 pandemic—of which they brag they paid up to their deductible of, for instance, $5,000. Many are rushing to get as many cosmetic modifications as possible before they age off of their parents’ policy (which typically occurs at age 26). The reader is encouraged to recall a time where they or a loved one were denied or delayed coverage for a medically-necessary treatment, such as one which returned mobility, independence, or reduced chronic pain. Did their insurance cover gender-transition related drugs and surgeries at that time?

Transgender surgeries are medically-unnecessary interventions, not intended to diagnose or treat a medical problem, performed on physically healthy tissues for reasons of gender identity or subjective psychological distress perceived to be related to a sense of gender identity (two distinct justifications, only one of which requires a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, a term referring merely to the distress a person with a perceived conflict may experience). Not every trans-identifying person receiving these interventions is professionally diagnosed or experiencing subjective distress. When no distress (“dysphoria”) is present, individuals are able to still access these procedures via an Orwellian process called the “informed consent model,” which does not require a psychological evaluation to rule out delusional disorders or confirm a gender dysphoria diagnosis.

When these interventions are performed on detransitioners, who no longer claim to experience a conflict in identity versus body, these interventions may not be covered. In fact, trans activists fight to remove guaranteed coverage for so-called detransitioners from laws guaranteeing “trans healthcare.” Gender-affirming surgeries, or as some call them, sex lobotomies, are as Byzantine as they are treacherous, an endless complexification of human-to-boondoggle body modification that the taxpayer and insurance purchaser, ultimately, have to fund, both directly at the time of the surgery, and forever after, as foolish and confused people purchase disabilities that are not as reversible as their good health once was.

*****

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

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University Erases ‘L’ in LGBTQ, Redefining Lesbians as ‘Non-Men’ thumbnail

University Erases ‘L’ in LGBTQ, Redefining Lesbians as ‘Non-Men’

By Jarrett Stepman

The woke well is bottomless.

Johns Hopkins University recently updated the “LGBTQ Glossary” in its so-called inclusive language guide with a new definition for “lesbian.”

A lesbian, according to the famed Baltimore university’s guide, should be referred to as a “non-man attracted to non-men.” A broad definition, right?

The guide states that “while past definitions refer to ‘lesbian’ as a woman who is emotionally, romantically, and/or sexually attracted to other women, this updated definition includes non-binary people who may also identify with the label.”

No more “women” or “womyn” or any of that. Just complete erasure of the “L” in “LGBTQ.”

In the war on women, isn’t it ironic that the latest shots are being fired by that fanatical campus Left? One wonders how much longer the “G” has to keep its place in the gender ideology pantheon before the new letters come for the old.

The move by Johns Hopkins University was mocked by “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, a liberal feminist who has become “she who must not be named” to many of her once-adoring fans (or is that “not-he who must not be named?” It’s hard to keep track).

It’s important at a modern university to know what counts as blasphemy, you see. Saying “lesbian” isn’t nearly inclusive enough. Somebody, somewhere might be offended. And that somebody is likely to be a transgender man, who is in the upper echelons of intersectional hierarchy.

Wouldn’t you know it, the program director of “LGBTQ+ equity and education” at Johns Hopkins University is Paula Neira, a transgender man. That is, Neira was born a man, but now says he identifies as a woman.

I’d say this is an example of how an institution is returning to the Dark Ages, but that’s really an insult to the Dark Ages. We now live in the age of diversity, equity, and inclusion, when all common sense is abandoned for fanatical ideological commitment.

Johns Hopkins removed the LGBTQ Glossary after it gained online attention. As usual, when left-wing media picked up on the story, it became about how Johns Hopkins backed down to the backlash rather than the obvious absurdity of the university’s message.

The glossary page has been updated.

“While the glossary is a resource posted on the website of the Johns Hopkins University Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI); the definitions were not reviewed or approved by ODI leadership and the language in question has been removed pending review,” the page now reads.

This wasn’t even the only campus absurdity at Johns Hopkins in the past month.

On May 30, the New York Post reported that employees of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine “have been issued a new guidebook with a list of 50 different pronouns—including ‘aerself’ and ‘faerself’—that staff may use after a new ID badge policy was implemented.”

Among other pronouns in the guidebook were “xe, ve, per, and ae,” and it gives recommendations for using such a pronoun in a sentence, like “I gave faer the key.”

We’ve clearly hit the Newspeak stage of the revolution.

American higher education is consuming itself with absurdities and contradictions. Unfortunately, our ideologically compromised higher education establishment shapes and feeds into all other elite institutions.

This is the established, secular church of the modern West.

But maybe it’s time we disestablish this church. Once the power of the woke gatekeepers is broken—in universities, corporate America, and government—maybe then we can begin to restore our free society.

*****

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

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Reparations thumbnail

Reparations

By Bruce Bialosky

Anyone who has previously read my columns will quickly conclude that I believe reparations (as being currently discussed) are a tragically stupid idea. You have probably read a multitude of opinions telling you why that is so. You are about to get a significantly different take on the issue.

The first aspect comes from my reading of a novel years back which I believe is The Winner by David Baldacci. It is combined with my personal and concurrent experience. Remember a good novel often has a significant basis in fact.

The premise concerns a genius criminal who figured out how to fix the Powerball lottery. He realizes that if he fixed it for himself, he would soon get caught. He also realized that the vast majority of people who buy lottery tickets are financial underachievers, so to speak. He would hand-pick someone from that underachieving population and create a deal with them. He would rig the lottery so the person would win and then the person would turn the money over to him to manage, ultimately splitting the monies 50/50. That is basically how the story goes until a smart detective comes on the scene.

The smart detective noticed a pattern that there were these people who would win the lottery and retain their wealth many years later. Here is the true part: that just does not happen. Nearly all people who win these sums — unless it is the mega multi-million-dollar winners — have little winnings left in just a few years or less.

Every friend and relative comes out of every sinkhole to gladhand for money. Every con artist in the world surrounds them to separate them from their money. These “winners” are generally people who do not have a trusted financial advisor to protect them from the wolves and they have no means of determining who they should turn to as a trusted advisor. I have experienced people with money not knowing who to turn to. This part of the plot line was so true to me.

I had someone who was referred to me who had won $350,000 in the lottery. He came too late. By the time he came to me, he had invested almost all the monies: He bought public pay phones. This was right after I had gone to my annual continuing education class at the usual location. They always had an alcove packed with wall pay phones. When I arrived that year, I found the pay phones were all gone as no one was using them any longer. My thought was what a sucker this person was to put his money into this investment and why had he not come to me six months earlier so I could save him from himself.

For my money, the same likely outcome applies to reparations. You drop the kind of dough the reparations people are proposing for some Californians; and, considering their background in financial affairs, five years later for most of them it will all have gone poof.

If the recipients of reparations are not financial underachievers, then why would they be recipients of funds; obviously they have not been harmed by the perceived grievances. They have systems in place to protect their wealth with qualified and reliable personnel.

The amounts that are being talked about are just numbers that are being thrown around for attention. They are stalking horses for the real numbers which will be significantly reduced. Politicians can then say, “See how good we are? We cut those crazy numbers in half, a third or whatever.” The real answer should be “No, we are not committing taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars to this travesty.” That will not happen.

In addition, I believe this will just be the beginning. Different groups will come from all over fully sold on their rationale that they should be recompensed. A group is already stating they deserve money for the land that sits under Dodger Stadium. Without the building of Dodger Stadium on that site the land would be of little value.

Members of Congress led by Cori Bush have proposed $14 trillion for reparations as if it were a trivial amount.

For my money, there are three simple solutions to the conditions plaguing blacks in California as there are across the country:

1. Stop having 80% of children outside of marriage. Put a premium on fathers.

2. Rid the black community of the racist public school systems controlled by the racist teachers’ unions. Give them universal school choice.

3. Stop telling them they are victims. I grew up in a disadvantaged household and my mother never told us or permitted us to have a victim mentality. If you keep telling people they should believe they are victims, they will ultimately believe it.

Reparations will only reinforce in their minds that victim mentality. That is what the proposers of these plans want so as to achieve perpetual power over them. These proposals are as bad as they get for the reasons above, and a good deal more.

*****

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

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An Estimated 200K Babies Saved from Abortion Since Dobbs thumbnail

An Estimated 200K Babies Saved from Abortion Since Dobbs

By Catherine Salgado

Once again in America do unborn babies have the right to life, as the Declaration of Independence said all men have. A recent estimate said around 200,000 babies have been born instead of aborted since the landmark June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision overruling the infamous Roe v. Wade and Casey. That’s 200,000 precious, irreplaceable human beings saved from brutal murder in the womb!

“An estimated 64,443,118 abortions were carried out during the 50 years after Roe v. Wade, according to National Right to Life,” a horrific death toll. I noted last year that the number of babies lost to abortion is 52 times more than the total of all US war casualties, combined. That’s mind-blowing genocide. But Dobbs was the first step toward a more pro-life America.

Across America, pro-life crisis pregnancy centers outnumber abortion clinics by an estimated 3 to 1, all those centers ready and eager to help mothers with supplies, medical care, adoption services, and other aid for their unplanned pregnancies. There’s a waiting list of literally millions of couples waiting to adopt babies—including down syndrome babies—in the US too. Having an abortion puts women at risk of mental health issues, suicide, drug abuse, and other serious issues, and it’s never necessary to save a mother’s life. Abortion is not a solution—it’s murder. But pro-death Democrats don’t want you to know that.

“[LifeNews, June 26] As the nation celebrates the first anniversary of the Supreme Court decision returning abortion to democratic control, national leaders celebrated the birth of tens, or hundreds, of thousands of unborn children saved by pro-life laws.

Although precise estimates vary, “the best guess that we have is about 200,000 children were born this year that would not have been born” apart from the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, said Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) at a news conference Tuesday. ‘That’s 200,000 kids. That’s 200,000 smiling faces on playgrounds. That’s 200,000 silly songs, starting in kindergarten. That’s 200,000 families that will be blessed with looking in the eyes of a child.’

The Dobbs decision, which took the shackles off voters and lawmakers to enact life-saving protections for the unborn, eliminated 96% of abortions in the 13 states that enacted pro-life protections between the June 24 decision and year’s end, The Daily Caller found. Although abortion rates had risen early in 2022, state pro-life laws prevented 32,260 abortions in the first six months following the ruling, according to the WeCount report from the Society of Family Planning released in April. A total of 25 states have since enacted some pro-life protections, since they ‘now have an opportunity in the United States to see this message in the hands of lawmakers and the people,’ Family Research Council President Tony Perkins told Newsmax on Friday.

Saving 200,000 babies — the upper end of an estimate analysis from Susan B. Anthony Pro-life America — would be enough people to fill a city the size of Grand Rapids, Michigan; Vancouver, Washington; or Chattanooga, Tennessee.”

Let us pray that babies will continue to be saved from abortion as Democrats try to bring back universal abortion on demand and infanticide (Democrat states are more pro-abortion than ever). Dobbs wasn’t the end of the fight, it was only the beginning.

*****

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

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Popular Genetic Testing Pits Unborn Siblings Against Each Other, And The Highest Scorer Gets To Live thumbnail

Popular Genetic Testing Pits Unborn Siblings Against Each Other, And The Highest Scorer Gets To Live

By Jordan Boyd

Technology that replaces the inherent value of life with a numeric placeholder makes the precious gift of living seem expendable.

What would you say if you discovered that your parents chose to birth and raise you over any of your other siblings because they believed your genes to be superior?

That’s exactly what Pennsylvania couple Malcolm and Simone Collins did for their third child, Titan Invictus, who, as an embryo, was selected for implantation based on the results of a preimplantation genetic test (PGT).

The specific brand of polygenic screening that the Collinses bought attached physical scores to certain portions of the embryo’s DNA which reportedly predict the likelihood a child has of contracting diseases and illnesses like cystic fibrosis, cancer, diabetes, schizophrenia, and depression. A composite numeric score projecting the overall health of the embryo was also provided.

“We already had all of our embryos that we needed to have seven kids. We had 26 embryos, good to go. But we did a whole new round just to be able to do this because it’s so much additional information,” Simone explained in a recent interview with Vice News.

You read that right. This family manufactured 26 lives, only to undergo yet another round of physically draining IVF, and then paid thousands more dollars so they could handpick the child with their preferred genetic makeup. As VICE noted, that could include optimizing “traits like intelligence.”

The Collinses didn’t just settle for the “simple report” they received from biotech company Genomic Prediction. Instead, they filled out their own data sheets with calculations that they believed would lead them to the best outcome — er, child.

“The Titan here, who turned out to be the one we selected, had the best score from our own internal, like, additional data calculations and Genomic Prediction’s best,” Simone cheerfully explained.

“Oh my gosh, hey Titan. You’re number one!” the Vice interviewer replied.

Handpicked breeding has long been under scrutiny for multiple reasons, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a normalized part of the reproductive technologies scene.

The Collinses didn’t edit any of their child’s genes, a technological process that, despite knowingly “wreak[ing] chromosomal mayhem,” has become cheaper, easier, and more popular for potential parents to use to fulfill their designer baby dreams. They did, however, pit their child and her microscopic siblings against each other in a biological battle that belittled their future children’s very souls and being. And they did that just a few years after the first baby chosen by her parents after undergoing PGT testing with polygenic screening as an embryo was born.

Genetic testing is often marketed to parents as a tool that will help them give their kids “the best chance at life.” The less-acknowledged consequence of these unreliable screenings is that they provide parents with justification for depriving their already created children of life altogether, based on the physical qualities their unborn child may or may not possess.

The Collinses claim they plan to “keep on having kids at a similar cadence until this no longer proves biologically possible.” At first glance, that objective seems commendable since more than 1 million embryos have little to no future outside of freezers.

Considering Simone’s age, however, the Collinses’ nearly three dozen babies stuck in cryo tanks will only be born if they commit to several multiples pregnancies, something that hurts the embryos’ and mother’s chance of survival, or opt for renting another woman’s womb. Those embryos that do not get implanted in Simone or a surrogate will eventually be ditched or handed over to researchers who will destroy them.

Pandora’s Box Is Open

Simone and Malcolm operate by a strange list of rules, like refusing to name their daughters “strictly female names because data shows that it has a lot of negative outcomes” and committing to advancing a global natalist agenda. “According to [the couple’s] calculations,” Business Insider reported, “as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population.”

Media outlets, which dubbed the Collinses the “’elite’ breeding couple,”  either try to write off the couple’s obsession with breeding as a product of their “terminally online” presence or accuse them of advancing the “alt-right” agenda.

The Collinses reject allegations that their use of genetic testing equates to eugenicism. Yet, there’s no denying that they are using, enabling, and promoting technology that replaces the inherent value of life with a placeholder that’s based on generated numbers and, when desired, is made expendable.

If that sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same rationale used by infamous eugenicist and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, whose legacy lives on through those who promote abortions based on the baby’s sex or race, or the assumption that the baby’s “quality of life” might not be worth living for.

Humans are not commodities to be discarded or manipulated. That’s why several states have already banned the murder of children based on pre-birth diagnostics, which have an exceptionally high error rate.

Embryos, similarly, are not experiments to be tinkered with — especially by the people who ordered their creation. Yet, the same laws protecting babies in utero from discrimination don’t apply to preimplantation genetic testing on embryos.

Many European countries bar or at least regulate genetic testing. In the U.S., however, as long as someone can pay to sift through and possibly even tinker with their child’s DNA, they are allowed to do it. In fact, researchers are already pondering how they can expand the technology’s reach so that it’s not “only available to couples who can afford” it.

Innovation That Injures

The Collins family is proudly among the rich who believe science and technology will help mend falling birth rates and help humans create capabilities beyond their current physical and mental limitations.

“The reason why you see Silicon Valley people disproportionately being drawn to this is they’re obsessed with data enough, and wealthy enough, to be looking at things — and who also have enough wealth and power that they’re not afraid of being cancelled,” Malcolm told The Telegraph in April.

In other words, as one media outlet noted, “the evolutionary logic associated with transhumanism is an important theme in their plans.”

The problem with attempting to “solve” Americans’ increasing infertility with reproductive technologies that reduce humans to their capabilities is that it monetizes and multiplies irreversible depravity.

Children created via assisted reproductive technologies are often distanced or completely deprived of their mother and father in harmful ways. Even those who will be raised by their married biological parents like Malcolm and Simone must live with the knowledge that the only reason they were not sentenced to stagnant tenure on ice was because of their genetic traits.

That’s not “progress” that so many in the multimillion-dollar fertility industry brag about. In fact, it’s merely a reversion to the kind of reasoning that has led to the deaths of millions of humans — born and unborn — across the globe.

*****

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

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Get Your Bedroom Out of My Government thumbnail

Get Your Bedroom Out of My Government

By Neland Nobel

Those old enough might remember in the early days of the sexual revolution, the common refrain was to “get the government out of the bedroom”.

The thought was that the police powers of the state had no business involving themselves in the private sexual practices of consenting adults.

This principle was applied first to heterosexual relationships and later was applied successfully to gay and lesbian relationships.

This generally “libertarian” view is based on basic principles of liberty.  There is a private sphere in life, that government should not intrude into, as long as violence, coercion, and fraud are not involved. Private acts which do not intrude upon the rights of others, are to be permitted, with the consent of adults participating.

There may well be moral reasons to object to this behavior, but it was believed that these religious precepts should not be enforced by the state.  This thinking went even further though, when moral objections by private actors were also disallowed.  This may well have been a mistake.

Now it seems, states like Colorado wish to force a baker against his will to make cakes for gay weddings.

The thinking on some of these matters has become so twisted it becomes easy to violate laws because there seems to be little consistency.

One cannot “discriminate”, and soon we saw the destruction of the Boy Scouts from two opposite sides.  One side attacked them because they did not show common sense by having Scoutmasters that were attracted to young men being in charge of young men, an obvious incentive for abuse.

Then they got attacked because they would not allow gay men to be in charge of young boys.

Indeed, society seems quite confused as to what government should be allowed to do in regulating sexual behaviors and what private organizations are allowed to do.  Within this confusion, a small determined group of sexual radicals has staked out territory that does not belong to them.

And a small minority that felt it was discriminated against, now wishes to discriminate against the vast majority of citizens.

Part of the problem is the application of civil rights laws where they don’t apply.  Being Black is a skin pigment, not a set of behaviors.

One cannot deny services to a Black man in interstate commerce.  But I am not required to do business with you if I don’t like the way you behave or what you are offering.

Here is a problem to challenge your thinking: is it OK not to hire a male gay therapist to take care of a young autistic boy?  A boy that is nonverbal, naïve, and socially completely helpless?

Commonsense suggests parental discrimination should not only be allowed, but it would be foolish not to exercise it. In any case, the parents should have the choice.

However, there is no interest relating to private or public safety invading the home of a quiet lesbian couple, exposing them to prosecution or public humiliation.  Their private acts do not, and most likely cannot violate the rights of anyone else.  Moreover, it is just none of the government’s damn business or that of private individuals or organizations.

Besides this evolution in legal thinking, the novel argument was made that gay people were “born that way”, and that not having free will on the matter, it was unjust and just plain stupid to make them guilty of a crime.  They are just doing what they are compelled to do and the sex drive is quite powerful.

Because of that concession, it was argued that their sexual practices were just as valid as the majority’s normative heterosexual activities and that gay and lesbian people should be allowed to marry and form long-lasting relationships.  This was thought would be beneficial both to the individuals involved, and society at large.

Many homosexuals felt finally their sexual practices were “equal” in validity to the normative majority and they were now out of the closet and “proud” of their sexual practices.

This is a bit odd, because the majority of heterosexuals never expressed “pride” in their sexual proclivities.  They were doing what is most natural for all animals that reproduce to continue the survival of their species.

The counterargument is that heterosexuals were never discriminated against so therefore they have no reason for “pride.”

Humm.  Jews don’t strip naked in parades as recompense against past discrimination, nor do the Chinese, Italians, or Irish.  American Indians would seem to have a special claim to get naked in parades. Past discrimination is not a permission slip to be publically obnoxious.

“Pride” as practiced today (lots of randy videos up on Twitter) is very public.  Apparently, only gays have the right to offend in our society today.

A few years back my wife and I got caught accidentally in such a parade while just strolling around Zurich.  The Swiss are pretty self-controlled lot but this was over the top.  Most participants were older men in thongs.  With some difficulty, we sought refuge from what was quite a wrinkled and tawdry display.

Then society moved another step, this time in another direction, and it gets even a bit more confusing.  Now we are told people are not “born that way”, but rather sexual desires are chosen solely by the internal “identification and feelings” of the participant.  Further, the person having these feelings is the sole judge of their own condition, and all parental influence and medical advice must “affirm” the conclusion made by the internal “feelings and sensibilities” of the person.

Are people born gay or is it chosen?  You can’t have it both ways.

The claim is further expanded to the affirmation of the internal feelings of children, who have no idea what it feels like to be a man or a woman.  Such young people are too inexperienced to give informed consent.

However, lacking parental consent, or informed consent of the child, teachers now secretly “affirm” the child’s new “identity” and doctors will “affirm” by cutting off their sex organs.

What other medical condition allows the patient to determine their own medical diagnosis absent any tests or scientific proof other than self-described feelings?  What other medical condition requires physicians to play along with hysteria?

Now the government wants taxpayers and insurance companies (both of which the public funds) to pay for sex change operations.

We have come a long way from “getting the government out of the bedroom” and letting consenting ADULTS indulge in PRIVATE sex acts, as long as NO HARM is done to anyone else.  Now we have the government encouraging and subsidizing certain sexual proclivities that are both public and harmful.

Moreover, the idea of sexual privacy has met “pride.”  What was supposed to be limited to private bedrooms, perhaps certain controlled clubs, now is as public as a 4th of July parade, replete with floats, flags, and crowds of children.

Today we must put up with public displays of vulgarity and sexual provocation in public because we too must show pride in these proclivities and fetishes.

No, we don’t.

The movement now has its own month of mandatory celebration month where corporations and sports teams compete with each other for the approval of a tiny sexual minority.  So much for being marginalized.  Did you get to vote on this month-long celebration?

California is considering legislation, that if parents do not “affirm” the sexual identity of their children, that state with its guns can come to take your kids from you.  And they can brainwash your kids in schools against your consent and without your knowledge.

Transgenderism is now so powerful of a social movement, they have their own flag, which our government dutifully places alongside the nation’s flag.  We even display it overseas at our embassies.  Can you think of any other group with such power and privilege?  Having and displaying your own flag is a very PUBLIC act.

So, it would seem, the bedroom activities of LGBTQ+ are now in our government, which not only displays flags but run school curricula to inculcate children.  Our armed forces even put on drag shows, at public expense.

Our President solemnly intones that “Transgenderism is the soul of the nation.”

This is no longer “private” and it requires coercion and punishes those who don’t consent.  One can easily lose one’s job if the correct required pronouns are not used at a publically funded university.  The FBI will start monitoring non-compliant families and put them on a terrorist watch list if they object to LGBTQ indoctrination in schools.

To oppose this group is “hate”, which involves curtailing the freedom to speak for the vast majority.

For a group that says it is “marginalized,” they have the support of the major news networks, have their own flag, their own political party, and even their own film studios.

Apple even makes sure that “pride month” is marked on my personal calendar, without my permission or consent, just in case I am not aware of the mandatory celebration about to take place.

Some of this is being socially reinforced but much of this is now being legally enforced using the police powers of the state.

Today sexual revolutionaries don’t like consent but require compulsion.  Moreover, they seemed determined to direct their attention to our children and grandchildren.

Conservatives can object on solid grounds that public compulsion should not be allowed, that these acts are not private, and that the movement seeks to recruit children who cannot give informed consent.

The alphabet alliance does not hold logically together.  The QT portion of the alliance regularly mocks and degrades women.  It is the new misogyny. And we think there are many gays and lesbians who are appalled by the brazen behavior, boorish proclamations, and the endangerment of children.

We hope they start speaking up more forcefully.

The QT portion of the coalition also demands that the rest of us believe falsehoods.  The idea that men can have babies, that they menstruate, and can change their DNA by simply putting on a dress is nonsense.  Yet school districts insist on putting feminine products in boys’ bathrooms and letting men compete in women’s sports.

Again, the state and its agencies should not be involved in subsidizing a nonsensical secular religion using our tax dollars.  Nor should they be putting the state’s imprimatur on these activities.  If the Bible cannot be read in class, then rainbow propaganda should not be in classrooms.

There are many steps that must be taken to untangle the logic and law which got us where we are today.  But for one small minority to endanger the lives of children and make their acts public, is a clear violation of the first principle that launched the sexual revolution in the first place.

Now we must reverse the process.  We need to get the coercion out of the process. The first step is to get the LGBTQ+ bedroom out of our government.

In particular, the QT needs to be divided from the rest.  While that is a job best left to those within the coalition, most of the demands for government involvement are coming from the QT brigade.  When the government starts spending public funds and uses its police powers, it becomes the business of all citizens.

What should be protected are the private acts of consenting adults, that do no harm and do not violate the rights of others.

However, public displays of indecency and the grooming of our children should not be permitted, and certainly not sponsored, endorsed, or subsidized by our government.

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Katie Hobbs’ Office of Tourism and the Arizona Lottery to Sponsor ‘Child-Friendly’ Drag Show thumbnail

Katie Hobbs’ Office of Tourism and the Arizona Lottery to Sponsor ‘Child-Friendly’ Drag Show

By Jordan Conradson

Katie Hobbs’ Office of Tourism and the Arizona Lottery is set to sponsor an all-ages drag show this weekend in Flagstaff, Arizona.

The “Pride In the Pine’s Official After Party” event is at the Orpheum Theater in Flagstaff on June 17 at 9 pm. AZ Free News reports, “The event is open to all ages, with those under 16 years old requiring a parent or guardian chaperone. Cost of admission is $14 plus fees.”

This is the latest in Katie Hobbs’ anti-children and anti-Arizona campaign during pride month. To kick off June, Katie Hobbs rolled out LGBTQ flags and multiple pride flags outside her office at the Capitol above the American flag and state flag, likely in violation of the U.S. flag code.

Last week, The Gateway Pundit reported that Hobbs vetoed a bill that would require Arizona public schools to “provide a reasonable accommodation to a person who is unwilling or unable to use specified facilities designated for their sex in a public school building or multi-occupancy sleeping quarters while attending a public school-sponsored activity.” Because of this, young female students may be required to use restrooms and locker rooms with male students who “identify” as females.

Earlier this month, Hobbs also vetoed a law making it illegal to film or facilitate sexually explicit acts in government buildings and classrooms months after a teacher in Arizona was fired for shooting a porno in her classroom and posting it to OnlyFans. Students were reportedly “mortified over the situation.”

Arizona Free News reports,

Hobbs selected an executive officer from Arizona Community Foundation, one of the event sponsors, to be director of the Office of Tourism in January: Lisa Urias. Hobbs appointed Tereza Fritz last month to oversee marketing for the lottery. Fritz hails from Western Alliance Bank and formerly worked for Lavidge marketing company.

The event is part of the 27th annual Pride in the Pines. Drag queens featured in the event include DJ Lezbein McKenzie, Anya C. Mann, Salina Es Titties, and Dillon Duvet, as well as Miss Gay Arizona America 2022 winner Janee Star…..

*****

Continue reading this article at The Gateway Pundit.

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In Loco Parentis Gone Loco thumbnail

In Loco Parentis Gone Loco

By Peachy Keenan

This isn’t your parents’ parental authority.

You had a baby? Look at you—you’re the captain now!

Or are you?

The words on a poster taped to a teacher’s classroom door at a New Jersey public school expose the precarious corner American parents have been painted into. “If your parents aren’t accepting of your identity, I’m your mom now.” The poster featured a drawing of a mama bear tending to her bear cubs, who are each painted the color of a different LGBTQ flag.

Parents, I have bad news. You’ve got competition. Someone posted a job listing looking for a new authority figure in your house, and they hired everyone who applied. Lots of other adults, most of them unpleasant strangers, would like to raise your children for you—or at least get your children to hate you.

This may already be happening—and you’ll be the last to know! All your hard work to keep creeps, perverts, and kiddie-sniffers away from your kids may get reversed in an instant when you’re not looking.

Some parents are okay with this. They can barely handle “adulting” themselves and are thrilled not to make any tough parental decisions. Abdicating their natural role as master and commander of the household is lazy, but it’s a defensive posture. They live in terror of accusations from other parents of “closed-mindedness,” or worse, being a prude.

American parents have either forgotten their innate, God-given authority over their household or surrendered it in the face of relentless pressure over many years from the outside. Just as millennia of trickling snowmelt can hollow out mighty granite mountains and turn them into canyons, a half-century of unchecked influence by feminists and far-left progressives have chipped away at the role of parents in their children’s lives. What is left is a barren wasteland, a valley of shadows, where mothers and fathers have been reduced to nothing more than the oldest dependents in the house.

Your job as a parent is not easy, but it’s simple: feed, nurture, love, and protect. In the face of life-and-death danger—say, an escaped tiger or an ax-wielding lunatic—probably 100 percent of parents would risk their lives for their children, even die, without hesitation. So why are so many reluctant to defend their children from less obvious, but equally dangerous, scenarios?

You can tell when you’re about to be trampled by elephants. It’s trickier when the trampling is invisible and being committed by a young teacher with peace stickers on xe/xer’s car. I’ll grant that having pro-nouns in your bio is not quite the same red flag as cruising a playground in a car with no door handles on the inside, but it’s still a red flag parents need to fear.

People who manage to produce offspring are too often seduced into voluntarily surrendering their authority over them. They allow various “experts” to hold sway over their kids. Exhausted and confused, they willingly hand their kids off to the local public school teachers’ unions, the DEI struggle-session facilitators, the storytelling drag queens, and the sex-education consultants who arrive at school with teaching props, including wholesome kid-friendly items like dildos and anal lube.

They all share a common goal: to dilute your authority and increase their own. They aim to groom America’s children from birth to become compliant consumers of all they wish to sell them: bespoke genders, any-term abortion, strictly enforced racial hierarchies, a lifetime of therapy, prescription drugs, and whatever political and social ideology they choose to upload into their brains.

God forbid you are the only parent at your school who keeps your fifth grader home on Share Your Favorite Sex Toy Day. What will people say?

Allow me to remind you gently: it’s your job to steer the ship, avoid icebergs, prevent scurvy, and stave off mutinies. Parenting is not a game. There is no do-over. You are all that stands between your small charges and the roiling storms ahead—and the band of purple-haired nonbinary pirates that’s about to storm the deck.

Sexualized Early and Often

Imagine being the only one at the PTA meeting who stands up and objects to your second grader studying detailed diagrams of adult genitalia, or your middle schoolers instructed on how to grant consent to anal sex. (These are real sex ed guidelines introduced in New Jersey public schools in 2020.)

Your choices are stark: assert your authority over your children and get called a bigot or go along with the madness and let them take your child to places you don’t want them to go.

How bad is it? Bad enough that Tiara Mack, a “reproductive justice advocate” and “child sex educator” running for state senator in Rhode Island tweeted this in 2021: “Really excited for the house sex ed bill hearing later today. Teaching comprehensive, queer inclusive, pleasure-based sex ed was a highlight of my time teaching.”

This is who wants to talk to your six-year-old about how to “pleasure” themselves and their partner!

The first step in any cult, or any abusive relationship, is to get the victim to sever ties to their outside friends and family. Maybe you’ve seen this happen to people you know. They suddenly change their phone number, delete their social media, and have a new friend now—one that has them spellbound. Once children come to believe their mom and dad are clueless bigots and racists who are holding them back from being who they are, the cult leaders own them.

Government-run public schools have accomplished “regime change” in America and transformed us, slowly, from a society centered around the family, where the schools work for the parent, into a society centered around government employees, where families are required to supply the raw goods for the teachers’ unions to mold as they see fit.

Year after year, their assembly lines have been left unsupervised to churn out freshly minted graduates. These graduates move on to college, where their high school indoctrination is hardened and polished by professors. The end product is a citizen who will go to his grave believing a set of Ministry of Truth–approved lies: “whiteness” is intrinsically evil, abortion is health care, there are dozens of genders, America was founded on racism and must be dismantled, marriage is oppressive and bad for women, children hold you back, and unchecked sexual “exploration” with a variety of partners of every gender is the surest path to emotional happiness.

Sane people have a terrible choice to make: exercise parental authority over what their children are taught and risk financial ruin, social blackballing, and permanent cancellation—or allow their kids to be turned against them.

When a teacher or government official replaces the parent as the ultimate authority in the child’s life, all bets are off. Educators know that any adult with the authority to influence a child has the power to expose said child to any radical or extreme ideas they want.

To them, you are the extremist if you don’t think young children need to learn about sex and gender dysphoria yet. You are the extremist if you question a teacher or school administrator’s choice of books to read or lessons to teach. You are an extremely racist extremist if you’d rather not force a five-year-old to feel bad about the color of his skin and apologize for it.

In California, students in middle school can ask their school to change their names and genders in the school computer system, and the school is not permitted to inform the parents. The school authorities and the teachers are legally allowed to conspire with eleven-year-olds in sixth grade to induct them into a cult and keep it secret. Literally “it’ll be our secret,” a classic groomer move.

These government educational bureaucrats may not drive window-less vans and carry dirty magazines and candy bars to lure young boys (although let’s be honest, some do), but they are even more dangerous. Any parents who send a child into an environment like this, either knowingly or blindly, are forfeiting their authority over their kid.

The Regime’s child-catchers are prowling the locker rooms and cafeterias looking for lost, confused pre-teens to cart off to Pleasure Island, where they can get transformed into donkeys without their parents’ consent.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Disney is working on a new version of Pinocchio where he asks the Blue Fairy to turn him into a real girl.

Parental Surrender

Too many sentient adults seem to simply wait for a new update to the operating system to decide what to do with their kids. They unquestioningly accept the Current Parenting Thing, the rancid gruel served up as “education” at the local public school.

They surrender their kids to the authorities, in all their forms: teachers, principals, pediatricians, drag queens reading stories, social media influencers, YouTubers, Disney, Netflix, TikTok, the Kardashians—anyone who is credentialed as a “kid expert” or “important” now holds more sway over American kids than their own mothers and fathers. “Who am I to tell my kids how to behave, or what to learn, or how to think about the world? I’m just a random person who had a baby. I made plenty of mistakes in my life. How can I possibly ask my children to obey me?”

This is why we can’t have nice things. This is why healthy toddlers were kept in COVID masks for two years while they sat in sandboxes alone, outside, in rain or sleet. This is why you see massive brawls happening at middle schools, where kids punch their own teachers. This is why children are indoctrinated into the cult of trans, coached and groomed to say their pronouns, to switch genders, to explore various “sexualities” and “identities.” This is why mothers pimp out their own children as “drag kids” and put little boys in princess dresses and post the photos on Instagram while thousands of likes wash over them.

This is what abdicating the parenting throne looks like. Childless weirdos have taken over every institution we look to for guidance on how to raise good citizens, and no, I’m not talking about Catholic priests.

It has become only too clear what this absence of parental authority has wrought. Truly insane people have taken over the American education system, Big Pharma, and Big Tech. They know the best way to reach the Final Solution of the American family is to focus on young, impressionable minds.

We are enjoying the fruits of their labor now: an explosion of teen depression and suicide, an epidemic of children who are confused if they’re boys or girls, and an incredible 40 percent of Gen Z reporting that they are some letter in the ever-expanding alphabet soup known as LGBTQ+.

Everywhere, in every way, the fertile, fallow minds of children are being terraformed by people who identify as “fur baby” parents.

I wouldn’t let fur baby parents walk my dog, let alone educate my eight-year-old.

Authority Atrophied

This is why you must exercise your parental authority early and often. You must speak up!

No, I don’t want you to ask my teenage son if he’s comfortable with his gender during his doctor visit.”

No, you can’t wear your sister’s Elsa dress to school today, because boys don’t wear dresses, now get in the car and never ask me that again.”

No, you can’t buy those shorts that display the entire lower half of your rear end.”

No, you can’t have a TikTok account, and if I find it on your phone, say goodbye to the phone.”

Parental authority makes you the heavy in the house and the bouncer at the door. Pull on your big boy pants and lay down the law, or the law is going to lay down all over you.

*****

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

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Target Makes Itself A Target

By Neland Nobel

As we pointed out not long ago, we think we may be at “peak wokeness.”  Corporations are really beginning to get stung.  If you want to become a soldier in the culture wars, you must expect to take some incoming fire.  But for years, Conservatives sat on their weapons too confused to fire back.  Corporations thought it would always be so.

As evidence, we cited that Conservatives have become awakened themselves, and are now coordinating economic boycotts without any centralized leadership.  Social media has allowed a degree of unity many felt impossible to get from Conservatives, who typically are both pro-business and about as hard to guide as stray cats.

The reaction has been slow in coming, with Conservatives engaging in skirmishes in isolation from each other while suffering multiple offenses committed against them without drawing many reactions from such disparate companies like Nike, Disney, and North Face.  Not anymore.

While there are many offending corporations to choose from and thus a “target-rich” environment,  the reaction against Bud Light seems to be of a whole measure of magnitude different, not only in size but in intensity.  And, it was almost instantaneous.

Clueless executives thought it was a temporary public relations crisis that could be solved by issuing a camo-colored beer can, reissuing traditional Clydesdale horse scenes with the flags flying, and other sops to placate angry customers.  None of these clumsy maneuvers have worked and the boycott has persisted for weeks and we suspect may be permanent. Insulting your clients and putting transgenderism first has proven to be a monumentally costly mistake.  What construction worker after hours wants to be caught dead with a beer identified as transgendered?

Budweiser and its marketing arm appear amazingly ignorant or perhaps contemptuous of their customers.  However, the latest flap has some involved in a bit of a panic.

The rebellion it would seem has been among white working-class and college students.

Since Conservatives don’t control the culture as the Left does, from a tactical standpoint it is best if we concentrate our fire on a few corporations at a time, hoping that we hurt them severely and cause a change of attitude in the boardroom.

The next target seems to be Target, a most appropriately named corporation. To date, the company has lost over $15 billion in market capitalization, harming employees and executives alike that own the stock, as well as the investing public. Shareholders should be enraged with management. Hopefully, the next front will be the constant and growing legal expense of shareholder lawsuits.

Some have tried to minimize the meaning of these losses, suggesting it has been a soft stock market. While it is true it has been a largely sideways market except for Big Tech and all things AI, this assertion is clearly false. Over the past few weeks, Walmart stock has dropped about 2 1/2%  while Target has dropped almost 20%.  Clearly, it is the actions of Target executives and not the stock market.

At this point, we should add that we don’t care what consenting adults do in private as it relates to sexual behavior.  Live and let live.  However, when that behavior becomes aggressively public, people start to lose their jobs for failing to use approved pronouns, the law is invoked, and an attempt is made to recruit children; then an important demarcation line has been reached.  This crosses the line into doing harm to others.  Your freedom to swing your arms stops when you start hitting other people.

Target’s offense goes beyond their promotions of all things homosexual during the Left’s mandatory celebration of “pride.”  This corporation went into the sexualization of children of the worst kind.  They just didn’t produce hooker-like wear for little girls, which is also quite bad.  Rather, their sexualization went into transvestitism and transgendering of children.  It didn’t help that the designer is a Satanist. Most parents object to schools or corporations sexualizing children, even if it is normative heterosexual sex. But to push transgenderism on little kids, was a bridge too far.

In this case, the response is much more on the part of mama bears as it is by male customers, and again, this reaction has been slow in coming.  Women, being a bit more compassionate, just did not see the threat of transgenderism and its goal of erasing women or its depraved desire to recruit children. It has gone well beyond the acceptance of homosexuality and into outright pederasty.

We wonder how long it will take the other “partners” within the LGBTQ+ community to discover how contradictory and dangerous this alliance has become.  There is some fleeting evidence of that with organizations such as Gays Against Groomers. And, most experts acknowledge that the vast majority of children suffering from sexual dysphoria grow out of it and the small remainder likely will be gay.  Moreover, the social blowback created by transgender philosophy may well harm the progress gays and lesbians have made over the years.

The economic calculation by the corporation is bizarre.  As the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, the most recent census data shows about 1% of couples are homosexual. We can only guess that an even smaller percentage are same-sex couples with children.  And, it is likely there is even a smaller percentage of transgendered couples with children.

With such a tiny part of the market for children’s clothing and household goods, why would a corporation risk its market share to cater to such a small minority?  Because it is not an economic calculation rather it is a political signal that Target wants to align itself with the values and practices of the transgender community and the Left in general.  Either that or they thought they could pander to the Left calculating Conservatives would stay asleep and never fire back.

Moreover, as Fox Digital News has uncovered, Target backs many other outright communist causes.  They have been a big supporter of Black Lives Matter and executives control a budget that flows through a non-profit corporation that supports the disestablishment of the US military, and the destruction of Mt. Rushmore, and they seem to support just about everything that is un-American.  They also just seem to hate white people and everything they have contributed to the country.  They even support the ending of Israel as a Jewish state. It seems as if Howard Zinn and Hamas live within their corporate culture.

While most of what you read about is the disgust Conservatives have with Target, it now appears they are being attacked by the Left as well.  It seems Target is insufficiently “woke” and now over 200 LGBTQ organizations are angry with Target. 

Given the asymmetry in buying power between heterosexual and transgendered households, this put the company into a most uncomfortable bind.

History may not always repeat exactly, but one feature of cultural revolutions is that the revolutionaries sooner or later get around to eating their own.

We will let the Left carry their own grievances. But from a Conservative perspective, this hapless corporation is a super target for our collective wrath.  And, it is a name and a cause easy to remember.  They wish to be active participants in the culture war and they are the aggressor. They went to war with us.  My family was happy to shop there for years.

War is never a one-way street.  There will be casualties on both sides.  Lucky for us, we still have plenty of choices from whom to purchase what we need.  They need us, we don’t need them. $15 billion in losses should just be the beginning. 

Sears, Montgomery Ward, Radio Shack, Blockbuster Video, Comp USA, Borders, Woolworths, and many others, have all died at the hand of the free market’s creative destruction.  Target must die at the hand of Conservative Americans.

Make yourself a promise not to shop there.  You’ve got to do this for the children and for the country.

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

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

By Catherine Salgado

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

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

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

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

Guide argues that ‘sexuality education starts from birth’

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

God help us.

*****

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

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Leaked Policy Exposes Fox News Stances on Woke Ideology

By Mary Margaret Olohan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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We Need to See Transgender Shooter’s Manifesto

By Josh Hammer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Justice requires nothing less.

*****

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

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

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

By Clayton J. Baker, MD

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

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

Autonomy, Beneficence, Non-maleficence, and Justice

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

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

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

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

Autonomy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beneficence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Non-Maleficence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solutions and Reform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Mary Margaret Olohan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

By Cole Lauterbach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Officials expect the charges to result in facility closures.

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

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

*****

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

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Trans Inc. thumbnail

Trans Inc.

By Kali Fontanilla

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

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

Rising Trend

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

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

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

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

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

Nonprofit Indoctrination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Catherine Salgado

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tyler O’Neil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TAKE ACTION

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