‘A New Way Forward’? Harris Campaign [Finally] Announces 2024 Policies thumbnail

‘A New Way Forward’? Harris Campaign [Finally] Announces 2024 Policies

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By Family Research Council

One day ahead of her debate with former President Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris has unveiled a policy agenda that could compel Christian businesses to participate in abortion and LGBT events that violate biblical morality, sign a national abortion expansion bill, pack the Supreme Court, give amnesty to the entire illegal immigrant population of the United States, strip law-abiding U.S. citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process, double-down on inflationary economic policies, continue criminal lawfare against Trump, and promote universal daycare.

Until Monday morning, the “issues” section of Kamala Harris’s campaign website did not exist 49 days after the Democratic Party coronated Harris without a primary. Harris has dubbed her policy plan “A New Way Forward” — the same name President George W. Bush gave to his 2007 surge in Iraq, intended to end terrorism against U.S. soldiers and transform Muslim Iraq into a pluralistic Western democracy.

Equity for the LGBTQ movement, bankruptcy for Christian businesses: The cornerstone of Harris’s LGBTQ policy, which she brands as promoting “civil rights,” would prevent Christian business people from living out their faith in the private sector and economically impoverish believers. After noting she began unlawfully officiating same-sex marriage in 2004 as California attorney general and “refused to defend” a marriage protection amendment democratically passed by California voters, Harris promises “to pass the Equality Act to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more into law.” The so-called Equality Act would add sexual preference and, in some versions, gender identity, to landmark civil rights legislation designed to protect racial minorities and women from discrimination. By raising homosexuality and transgenderism to the same legal status as race and religion, the Equality Act could force Christian doctors to perform gender-reassignment surgeries and require Christian business owners to take part in services that violate their religious beliefs — or go out of business. State and local statutes modeled after this bill have resulted in such lawfare prosecutions as the never-ending legal disputes of Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips.

Throughout the issues section, Harris contrasts her policy positions, not with the radically truncated 2024 Republican Party platform which Trump campaign operatives foisted on rank-and-file delegates at the Republican National Committee on July 8, but with “Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda.” The Trump campaign publicly opposed the project, which the Heritage Foundation subsequently shut down. Trump replaced GOP’s historic commitment to a Human Life Amendment, and Republican vice presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) confirmed that Trump will veto any national pro-life protections that cross his desk during the next four years.

The “Project 2025 agenda will eliminate federal rules that protect LGBTQI+ Americans from discrimination,” says the website, referring to laws like the SAFE Act that prevent the predatory transgender industry from targeting minors for puberty blocks, cross-sex hormone injections, and life-altering surgeries.

A national abortion expansion act: The website continues the Harris campaign’s rebranding of abortion as “reproductive freedom,” vowing that, as president, “she will never allow a national abortion ban to become law. And when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom nationwide, she will sign it.” The Biden-Harris administration has endorsed the so-called “Women’s Health Protection” Act (WHPA), which would strike down more than 1,300 state pro-life protections including laws protecting children from late-term abortions (including some after the point of viability), repealing parental consent and notification laws, and repealing conscience protections for pro-life healers.

“If elected, Trump will ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control, force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions, and jeopardize access to IVF,” it claims, although no law nor proposal would curtail IVF, and Trump controversially promised to force insurance plans, or U.S. taxpayers, to fund the procedure, which has resulted in unknown millions of abortions and abandoned embryos.

“He even called for punishment for women who have an abortion,” says the website — based on an off-the-cuff remark Trump reversed the day after he made it in a March 2016 interview with Chris Matthews, who resigned from MSNBC four years ago. Trump explained during the 2016 campaign, “I didn’t mean punishment for women like prison” but rather that women who have abortions “punish themselves.” Numerous surveys show women suffer psychologically, and often physically, after enduring an abortion.

The section apparently praises her own administration’s foray into compelling taxpayers to fund abortion. “Vice President Harris and Governor Walz believe we have a sacred obligation to care for our nation’s service members, veterans, [and] their families,” says the website. Last July, the Biden-Harris administration Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, called paying for abortions a “foundational, sacred obligation of military leaders.”

Amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants: Harris promises to “secure our borders and fix our broken immigration system,” which her website ranks below promoting gun control. She “will bring back the bipartisan border security bill,” which she called “the strongest reform in decades.” Harris promises to reward tens of millions of illegal immigrants who broke U.S. immigration law with U.S. citizenship, calling her amnesty plan “an earned pathway to citizenship.” The Biden-Harris administration has presided over record-breaking levels of illegal immigration every year in office, not counting new legal pathways they have been established for immigrants from nations such as Haiti. Previous historic levels of illegal immigration came when candidates promised, or delivered, amnesty. This “is her attempt to make permanent what we have seen, which is lawlessness,” Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.) told Fox Business on Tuesday morning.

The Democratic candidate blames the broken border on Donald Trump. “Trump fail to tackle violence in our communities or fix our broken immigration system — he will make us less safe,” the Harris website states. “He’ll advance his cruel immigration agenda which includes separating children from their parents,” a policy carried out by the Obama-Biden administration and continued by the Biden-Harris administration.

The fentanyl crisis: “This past year, the number of overdose deaths in the United States declined for the first time in five years,” the website boasts. But the Biden-Harris administration presided over record-breaking numbers of overdoses, largely driven by fentanyl crossing the Southern border from Mexico. The administration’s drug policy aimed to decriminalize marijuana and promoted so-called “harm reduction” policies, which distributed crack pipes to addicts as part of taxpayer-funded “smoking kits.”

Supreme Court packing: Harris supports a plan that would overhaul the U.S. Supreme Court by “requiring [j]ustices to comply with ethics rules that other federal judges are bound by and imposing term limits.” The recent term limits plan embraced by prominent Democrats would sideline the most conservative justices and transform the court from a lifetime appointment to one continually threatened by, and responding to, political pressure.

More gun control: Harris promises to “ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.” The Biden-Harris administration has applied the term “assault rifle” to America’s most popular rifle, the AR-15; California law also bans magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. The vice president’s pledge to “require universal background checks” would require the government to pry into all sales, and potentially gifts, of guns between private individuals. She also vows to pass “red flag laws,” which unconstitutionally remove guns from the home of law-abiding citizens without due process, if their neighbors, criminals, or vengeful ex-boyfriends report them as mentally troubled. The laws would render those reported defenseless in their own homes.

The website notes, “As head of the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, she spearheaded policies to expand background checks and close the gun show loophole. Under her and President Biden’s leadership, violent crime is at a 50-year low, with the largest single-year drop in murders ever.” In fact, the U.S. homicide rate rose again in 2021 to 8.2 out of 100,00 according to the CDC. The homicide rate in 2022, the most recent year for which data are available, stood at 7.7, significantly higher than the 5.9 rate in 2018.

The website complains that Donald Trump “wants to arm teachers in our classrooms” in response to an ongoing string of school shootings.

Prosecuting Donald Trump? The Harris campaign website promises the Democratic presidential candidate will “fight to ensure that no former president has immunity for crimes committed while in the White House.” That comes in response to a Supreme Court ruling which granted presidents extremely limited immunity for actions carried out in his official capacity as president of the United States — not for private actions. Legal experts warn the threat of prosecution would criminalize political differences and turn the United States into a banana republic.

Nonetheless, the website claims President Trump will “bring the Department of Justice and the FBI under his direct control so he can give himself unchecked legal power and go after his opponents.” Similarly, at the first night of the Democratic National Convention, Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow (D) warned, “Under Project 2025, Donald Trump would be able to weaponize the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents.”

“Donald Trump is a convicted criminal who only cares about himself,” the website says.

Recycling lies about Donald Trump: The issues section also misleads about the two candidates’ biographies and policy positions. “Vice President Harris grew up in a middle[-]class home as the daughter of a working mom,” says the website. But Kamala Harris grew up in the famously left-wing city of Berkeley where her father, Donald J. Harris, was “a renowned Marxist professor” and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a cancer researcher. The vice president also grew up in Montreal.

Donald Trump has “said he would let Russia ‘do whatever the hell they want’ to our NATO allies. And he calls soldiers who gave their lives in defense of American democracy ‘suckers’ and ‘losers,’” it says. Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton — a neoconservative who has persistently criticized Trump’s non-interventionist foreign policy — called reports that President Trump disparaged fallen U.S. soldiers “simply false.” The comments from Trump, a master of overstatement, about NATO came in response to a question from a foreign leader about whether the U.S. would defend a nation that steadfastly refused to meet its obligations under the treaty to spend a requisite amount of funds on its own national defense. For decades, Trump has criticized one-sided deals in which foreign nations freeload off U.S. taxpayers.

Demonizing Trump: “Someone as dangerous as Donald Trump should never again be allowed to serve as commander-in-chief,” says the website. “Top American military generals and national security officials — including those who worked for Trump — have warned that he is ‘dangerous’ and ‘unfit’ to lead, and now he is surrounded by ultra-loyalists who enable his worst impulses.” These remarks come despite a near-fatal assassination attempt against the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, which missed by a fraction of an inch, something the president has credited to divine intervention.

Civil rights: Kamala Harris commits herself to securing “$2 billion in funding for Offices of Civil Rights across the federal government,” which will supersize federal lawsuits against private employers who refuse to implement Woke policies on the basis of race, sexual preference, and gender identity.

Inflationary economics and price controls: Kamala Harris says that “guilding up the middle class will be a defining goal of her presidency.” Yet on her watch, inflation reached a 40-year high of 9.1% in 2022, lifting costs and squeezing families across the nation. Overall groceries have risen nearly 20% over four years. The median price of a new house has more than doubled since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office. Americans must spend an extra $13,000 a year under the Biden-Harris administration to have the same standard of living they enjoyed under the Trump administration, according to one expert analysis. The spike in prices, which critics dub Bidenflation, has reduced Americans’ savings levels by 3.2%. The website notes “[h]er tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act,” which economists say carried a real price tag of $1.2 trillion and sparked inflation, in addition to piling more money onto the $35 trillion national debt. As the site also points out, “Vice President Harris cast the deciding vote on the” $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan.”

Harris has promised to implement national price controls on food and rent. She will implement the “first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries,” says the website, although grocers have an extremely thin profit margin. She also promises national rent control. “Vice President Harris knows rent is too high and will sign legislation to outlaw new forms of price fixing by corporate landlords.” She claims she’ll build three million more rental units and “Vice President Harris will provide first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 to help with their down payments, with more generous support for first-generation homeowners.” Economists agree the policy will simply raise the price of houses by $25,000 while price controls, which failed in the 1970s, will restrict supply.

“Trump would raise rents and add $1,200 a year to the typical American mortgage,” she claims without proof.

Harris’s campaign promises she “will take on Big Pharma,” although the Biden-Harris administration passed vaccination mandates that the White House claimed applied to two-thirds of all U.S. workers, including attempting to force the approximately 25 million people employed at a workplace with at least 100 employees to take the COVID-19 shot or be fired. They also dismissed 8,400 members of the U.S. armed forces who refused to take the shot. Researchers have subsequently linked the injection to an increased risk of myocarditis and excess deaths.

“Vice President Harris will protect Social Security and Medicare against relentless attacks from Donald Trump,” who has steadfastly opposed any reform of the entitlement programs. Social Security is scheduled to become insolvent in 2033. Medicare faces the same fate in 2036.

Environmental globalism: Meeting the “global challenge” of climate change “will require global cooperation,” and she is committed to continuing “the United States’ international climate leadership,” says the Harris campaign website. The U.S. will lead global compacts on fossil fuels. “[S]he will unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advances environmental justice.” Harris, who promised she would “absolutely” end fracking in the 2020 Democratic primaries, claims this will result in “lowering household energy costs” and “record energy production.”

Kamala warns Trump will increase gasoline prices: “Trump asked Big Oil executives to give his campaign money so he could roll back regulations and cut taxes for Big Oil to boost their profits, and Trump’s plans would push gas prices up,” she asserts. The cost of a gallon of gasoline has increased from $2.33 when President Donald Trump left office in January 2021 to a record high of $5.02 in June 2022 under Biden-Harris, despite releasing nearly half of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The cost now sits at $3.62 a gallon.

“Trump’s economic plans would also trigger a recession by mid-2025,” she said, although some economists agree America is already in a recession. The U.S. experienced the textbook definition of a recession — two consecutive quarters of economic contraction — under the Biden-Harris administration in the first two quarters of 2022. But the administration has denied the recession took place, since the panel tasked with declaring a recession, the Business Cycle Dating Committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research, did not formally make such a pronouncement.

PRO Act/public sector unions: “She’ll sign landmark pro-union legislation, including the PRO Act to support workers who choose to organize and bargain and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act to make the freedom for public service workers to form unions the law of the land.” The PRO Act would force millions of workers to pay union dues against their will, cripple freelance work, erase free speech and privacy rights, skew elections in favor of unionization, and radically increase the federal government’s intervention into everyday workplace disputes. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed the 1935 Wagner Act codifying Americans’ right to union representation, believed public-sector unions should not exist and called militant labor tactics “unthinkable and intolerable.”

“She’ll fight to raise the minimum wage, end sub-minimum wages for tipped workers,” radically altering the landscape of tipped work.

Harris’s agenda will be paid for by “making millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.” The top 1% of U.S. income earners pay 46% of all federal income taxes, while the bottom 50% pays 2% of taxes.

Manufacturing jobs: “Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 1.6 million manufacturing and construction jobs have been created,” Harris claims. But most of these are jobs destroyed during COVID-19 lockdowns coming back online. The Biden-Harris administration has in fact added 147,000 manufacturing jobs above the level in January 2020.

Universal preschool: “Vice President Harris will fight to ensure parents can afford high-quality child care and preschool for their children. … [E]nsuring hardworking families can afford high-quality child care, all while ensuring that care workers are paid a living wage and treated with the dignity and respect they deserve,” the website states. However, surveys consistently show most mothers would like to remain home with their own children, at least part of the time, during their child’s formative years.

Transferring student loan debt and medical costs to taxpayers: Harris will “continue working to end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt,” she promises. “As Vice President, she also announced that medical debt will be removed from credit reports, and helped cancel $7 billion of medical debt for 3 million Americans. As President, she’ll work with states to cancel medical debt for even more Americans.”

Promising not to raise taxes on most Americans, but … : Harris is also “committed to ensuring no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes.” But the Biden-Harris administration has already raised fees on the middle class and working poor by:

  • expanding the number of items that must be registered under the National Firearms Act, with a $200 fee for each item;
  • reinstating the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and $695-per-person penalty, which President Trump eliminated;
  • imposing a carbon and/or methane tax. One proposal would charge companies $1,800 per ton of methane they handle (not emit), with the cost rising 2% above inflation each year;
  • increasing corporate taxes, which pass on approximately one-third of increased costs to consumers by raising prices (and another third by reducing payroll costs/hours); and
  • hiking cigarette taxes, which fall disproportionately on the working class.

She also praises tax-and-spend policies, claiming that “when the government encourages investment, it leads to broad-based economic growth and creates jobs, which makes our economy stronger.” But Paul Mueller of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) described Harris’s economic interventionism as “extensive government involvement, huge amounts of spending,” and “a giveaway campaign.”

She also plans more Woke equity, pledging to “increase access to capital for small businesses and bring venture capital to parts of middle America that have for too long been overlooked … tripling the Small Business Administration’s lending to [b]lack-owned businesses, and more than doubling small-dollar lending to Latino and women-owned businesses.”

Harris also supports increasing taxpayer-funded subsidies for the Obamacare health care exchanges.

Foreign policy: Harris says she “will always stand up for American interests in the face of China’s threats.”

“Vice President Harris will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself,” the website avers. “She and President Biden are working to end the war in Gaza, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”

The vice president’s website also notes her strong support for Ukraine. Under the Biden-Harris administration, U.S. taxpayers have spent more than $175 billion aiding Ukraine, despite its stalled war with Russia, the Zelensky government’s well-documented corruption, and persecution of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

The website boasts that Kamala Harris has been “advising on tough decisions in the Oval Office and the Situation Room.” Harris bragged about being “the last person in the room” before Joe Biden decided on the details of the calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan, which cost the lives of 13 U.S. service members and left an unknown number of Americans stranded behind the Taliban’s lines.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: President Trump ROASTS the ABC moderators for not debunking Kamala’s lies!

RELATED PODCAST: The Deep State with Eric Teetsel

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

FRACK YOU KAMALA! thumbnail

FRACK YOU KAMALA!

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By The United West/ Defend The Border

WATCH: FRACK YOU KAMALA!

Hey Guys, should I put this billboard up in Pennsylvania? I designed it with my friends over at @TheUnitedWest.

Listen carefully to tonight’s Presidential Debate in Pennsylvania between President Trump and Komrade Kamala @KamalaHarris , and you will hear how she changed her view and now loves fossil fuels and oil production, especially “Fracking!”

This lie is from a person who worships at the altar of the Climate Lunatics and will say anything to fool the good folks of Pennsylvania.

Don’t believe her!

America produces 13 MILLION barrels of oil per day and 9 MILLION barrels are from hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as “fracking,” including 81.5 BILLION cubic feet of natural gas per day!

Pennsylvania is one of the states leading the production of oil and natural gas through this very sophisticated process, which builds up the state economy by increasing jobs, lowering fuel rates, creating more transportation and cheaper food prices.

President @realDonaldTrump Trump led the United States to become the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer resulting in record LOW gas prices and NO inflation!

Komrade Kamala and @JoeBiden purposely destroyed all the work that Trump did regarding American energy, resulting in record HIGH gas prices and astronomical inflation.

Pennsylvania, when you listen to Kacklin’ Kamala in the debate tonight, share this message

FRACK YOU KAMALA!

Drill Baby Drill! #Trump2024

Let me know in the comments if you want me to put my billboard up all over Pennsylvania!

H/T Laura Loomer

LAURA ON X: @LauraLoomer

©2024. The United West/ Defend The Border. All rights reserved.

We need to fight the misinformation campaign waged by the trans lobby thumbnail

We need to fight the misinformation campaign waged by the trans lobby

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By MercatorNet – A Compass for Common Sense

Several key medical journals, including JAMA, have identified the profound harms caused by medical and health misinformation. They assert that health misinformation on social media disproportionately harms female adolescents, racial and ethnic minority youth, LGBQT+ youth, and other marginalized groups.

The recent conference of the American Psychological Association in Seattle, USA, offered a session titled Safeguarding public health in the misinformation era. The abstract stated:

There’s been a backlash against the very concept of misinformation. Independent researchers who study how to halt it are under attack by activists and advocacy groups. Many social media platforms are scaling back their content moderation programs. Institutions working to stop misinformation and improve health communication are facing lawsuits to halt their work. Health misinformation … is a global harm with drastic consequences, like disrupting population health efforts and increasing health inequities.

The most recent egregious example of misinformation occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic during which a strident diaspora of lay people and medical practitioners decried vaccinations and recommended ineffective and dangerous treatments like ivermectin to treat the virus.

In a commendable display of assertion and common sense, the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) revoked certification for two physicians who fronted an organization that promoted ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19 and that offered treatments for people who had suffered “vaccine injury.” The physicians challenged the decision on the grounds that it was an attack on freedom of speech but they lost their appeal, leaving them limited to no avenues for re-certification. ABIM spokesperson said, “There are limits to what you can do.”

This is apparently not the case when it comes to gender identification and medicalized gender treatments for minors. In this realm, the misinformers have been granted immunity to do harm using treatments that have no sound evidence base.

I have reached this conclusion after reading a paper published last year and endorsed by the National Institute of Health, Current Opinion in Paediatrics:

Medical treatments for GD have a positive effect on mental health, suicidality, psychosocial functioning, and body satisfaction…Political targeting and legal interference into social inclusion for TGD (transgender and gender dysphoric youth) and medical treatments for GD are rooted in scientific misinformation and have negative impacts on their wellbeing.

Almost every word in this statement is demonstrably false. Reviews in the UK, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, many systematic reviews, amicae briefs in various states of the USA, including a recent one from Alabama, and the Cass review all beg to differ.

I have recently written about the shameful organization, WPATH, whose muddled, misguided misinformation about “gender affirming care” is a scourge on a generation of children, adolescents and their families. Yet the very organization and the journal that elsewhere recognizes the harms of misinformation, JAMA, wrote an endorsement of the WPATH guidelines, citing its expanding evidence base of mostly flawed and rejected studies!

NSW equality legislation

Against this background of misinformation about the nature of sex and gender, in Australia, Alex Greenwich, independent state MP, and the Greens party in the state of New South Wales are attempting to push through the Equality Legislation Amendment (LGBTIQA+) Bill 2023.

The primary objective of the Bill is “to provide full equality for LGBTIQA+ communities in New South Wales by amending various Acts to address discrimination and promote inclusivity.” This Bill affects no fewer than 20 other pieces of legislation. This proposed legislation creates disturbing cognitive dissonance and downright confusion. Below are a few of the proposed amendments consequent to the passing of this Bill.

  • Amendment of Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 No 48: Schedule 1[3]–[5] provides that for the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 a transgender person is a person who lives as a member of another sex. This is an extraordinary definitional assertion of how to define a transgender person, using the terms “another sex” with no mention of “gender identity” that is purportedly the foundational definitional identifier.
  • Amendment of Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Act 2002 No 103 Schedule 15[9]: provides that a strip search must not be conducted in the presence or view of a person who is a different sex to the person being searched, except for a parent, guardian or personal representative of the person being searched, or a medical practitioner, with the consent of the person being searched.

Again, sex is asserted to be primary. Will the legislation allow for a transman (biological woman) to strip search a transwoman (biological male)? Or a cisman to strip search a transman?

  • Amendment to the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 1995. Proposed changes will allow individuals to alter the record of their sex. But it seems that the Bill cannot explain itself without reference to the prohibited binary or the conflation of sex with gender/gender identity. An example of the incomprehensibility of the text of this Bill is contained in Schedule 14.

“… a word or expression that indicates one or more particular genders is taken to include every other gender. A word or expression that indicates a person’s relationship with another person by reference to the person’s gender is taken to include any person in the same relationship, regardless of gender. A word or expression that indicates one or more physical or body attributes or body capacity by reference to a particular gender are taken to be a reference to every person with the physical or body attribute, regardless of gender.”

In general, the language throughout the Bill is inconsistent, referring in various places to “recognised transgender person” (Section 38B), “another sex” (s.38A), “acknowledgement of sex” (Schedule 2), “male and female” and “opposite sex” (s.23 & s.34A), “former sex” and “different sex” [s. 38B(1)(c)].

Bizarrely, there is no mention of gender identity, or those citizens who choose to identify as non-binary, queer, genderqueer, genderfluid, or agender. Are these descriptors referring to different sexes? Does this proposed legislation even address these identification categories? Is it sufficient in law to identify as a sex other than one’s anatomical sex if that person has not undergone any medicalized sex altering interventions?

On what hospital wards do we place non-binary persons or self ID trans females who remain fully male bodied? This section of the proposed legislation appears to require only a “recognition certificate” to permit an individual to be treated as if s/he were of the sex stated in the recognition certificate.

Further, there are no provisions in the Bill for children under the age of 18. Lower age limits are not even mentioned. How could the political leaders of a nation draft such a nonsensical Bill?

As concluded in the Genspect submission in relation to this Bill:

…the amendments are profoundly anti-women and anti-parent and present a danger to children. Legal recognition of a supposed change of sex is a powerful psychological message for a gender questioning child that will lock them into a pathway of lifelong medical treatment and health harms. Allowing a change of “sex” on a birth certificate (including to categories that are not sexes) falsifies data, perpetuates a myth that sex change is indeed possible, and does not encourage an individual [to develop] a healthy acceptance of [his/her] body.  

Tickle v Giggle

The recent Federal Court of Australia ruling in the matter of should fill us with disquiet. The case was essentially a legal contest about the category “woman” and who can properly qualify for membership. It is the first case brought to court arguing gender identity discrimination in which a trans female was banned from a women only app on the grounds that she was not a woman. It is no surprise that the Federal Court ruled in favour of Tickle, disseminating the message that sex can be changed at will, and that gender identity trumps biological sex, which, of course, is the basis of the proposed Self ID legislation.

In addition to erasing the meaning of biological sex, this proposed legislation boasts in its title that it is an “equal legislation amendment.” In fact, it does the reverse—it renders other categories including women and lesbian and gay communities disadvantaged by denying them safe single-sex spaces and criminalizes those who assert their rights under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984.

Australia now lags far behind our more enlightened counterparts in the northern hemisphere. Can we please return to a semblance of sanity regarding the nature of reality and the immutable fact of biological sex? And perhaps we can send Alex Greenwich, at taxpayers’ expense, to enrol in courses in logic, English expression, and biology.

Forward this article to your friends!  

AUTHOR

Dianna Kenny

Dr. Dianna T. Kenny is a retired Professor of Psychology at The University of Sydney and currently an expert psychologist who offers a range of services including individual adult psychotherapy, child, adolescent, couple, and family therapy, mediation and family dispute resolution, and medico-legal consultancy. She specializes in psychotherapy for gender dysphoric young people and their families. Her book, “Gender Ideology, Social Contagion, and the Making of a Transgender Generation” will be published later this year by Cambridge Scholars Press.

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Highly disturbing video from Dr. John Campbell on peer reviewed study on nano-structures in blood caused by mRNA injections thumbnail

Highly disturbing video from Dr. John Campbell on peer reviewed study on nano-structures in blood caused by mRNA injections

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By Vlad Tepes Blog

Welp. This is one. Has Campbell jumped the shark on this one? Or is the unbelievable true? or is it as he says, given that he links to peer reviewed papers from Japan and South Korea. Or was he set up to publish this to destroy his credibility for being over the target for so long now on so much government and phrama-fraud?

Watch and decide.

Also it is possible that this is a sort of crystallization phenomenon and may not be a deliberate effect of the vaxx, but some sort of Crystal structure that forms from some component in the vaxx.

No idea.

Link to peer reviewed study.

Several more related links.

RELATED ARTICLE: What’s Tim Walz’s Connection With the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column with video posted by Eeyore is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

A Subscriber’s Perspective on U.S. K-12 Education. With an interesting comparison to our European counterparts… thumbnail

A Subscriber’s Perspective on U.S. K-12 Education. With an interesting comparison to our European counterparts…

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By John Droz, Jr.

I get LOTS of correspondence — typically 200 to 300 emails a day. I try to read most of them, but I do have a life otherwise.

I’ve decided to periodically post an email I receive if it covers something slightly different than I have discussed, and I think it would be of general interest to my Substack readers. Here is a recent good example from a Professional Engineer…

Hi, John,

I greatly appreciate your good work.

My comments are about the NASA article (in your last Media Balance Newsletter) regarding uncreative behavior being learned in school.

In his seminar, “Creative Problem Solving,” the late Victor Papanek (best known as the author of Design for the Real World), told us that 90% of children entering school are inquisitive and creative, and that after first grade, the ratio switches: only 10% retain their inquisitive and creative traits!

In my own family, my mother observed that all three of us children were inquisitive and creative before starting school, but while those traits in me seemed to be accelerated by my school experience, both my brother and sister had traumatic experiences in first grade that resulted in a significant loss of those traits. My mother had the opportunity to investigate two of our teachers some years later. She found that students who had my first-grade teacher typically graduated high school in the top quarter of their class. In contrast, students who had my sister’s first-grade teacher typically graduated high school in the bottom half of their class.

The matter became of direct interest to me when my son was in first grade. His mother and I were able to effectively counteract the destructive methods of his teacher, and were relieved when in second grade his natural creativity was enjoyed and encouraged by his teacher. This positive experience helped him to weather occasional mediocre teachers in the years that followed, and I am happy to report that he continues to be an inquisitive and creative adult.

Partly due to my son’s rough start, I ran for a seat on the school board. During my 12 years on that board, I discussed this topic with several educators, all of whom affirmed that this inversion of inquisitive and creative traits after first grade was well known to them. (My local administrator was the first, and when he nodded in agreement, I immediately asked about the continued assignment of a particular teacher to first grade. I was not the only board member who had been prompted to seek election after having a child experience that teacher.)

NASA broke new ground in the 1960s, with their study conducted by the then-young George Land. After that study was done, Dr. Land did further research, concluding that the problem is systemic and ongoing. He spent his life pursuing ways to remediate the ill effects of public school education. His work inspired others so that today there are numerous post-school programs to help folks regain their natural creativity.

In my view, one of the roots of the problem is the U.S. approach to schooling. Here is an area of public policy where we truly could improve life in the U.S. by emulating the Europeans.

A fundamental difference between U.S. and European public schools is in teacher education requirements. While in the U.S., the easiest course of study at all levels—Bachelor’s to Ed.D—is in education, European nations take an entirely different tack. First off, there is no push to get everyone into the university. On the contrary, every effort is made to make sure only well-qualified and committed students are admitted. The statistics are difficult to nail down, but a case can be made that getting into the universities requires being in the top 5-10% of the student population.

Next, “Education” is not a field of study. All teachers earn degrees in academic fields. The small-town German Mittelschule (not college preparatory) I attended, had at least two teachers with PhDs. My homeroom teacher had a PhD in geography. Our history teacher had a PhD in that field. Our physics/chemistry teacher had schoolmates who were at the Max Planck Institute. To teach a foreign language, one had to earn a degree in it, of course, but also have a year of study at a university in a country where that was the official language. Our English teacher had spent a year at Oxford. Our French teacher had spent a year at Strasbourg.

There were major differences in curriculum, too. Here in the States, we had six periods a day—one of which was a study hall—and every day’s schedule was the same. In the Mittelschule, we had school Monday through Friday and half a day on Saturday. The curriculum was the same for everyone. There were five core subjects, which met five times per week. There was a second tier of subjects that met four times, then there were classes that met twice. All told, we had something like a dozen subjects. This broad curriculum encompassed a well-balanced education: math, science, history, languages and literature, art and music, religious instruction, athletics, and wood shop (for the boys).

[ … ]

One of the subtle side effects of the fundamental difference in academic preparation of teachers, is that ALL the teachers in German schools had been gifted students, while FEW of the teachers in U.S. schools had been. As a consequence, teachers in German schools readily identify and encourage gifted students. Even though my school was not college preparatory, there were gifted students in my class who were encouraged to take the bridge year and entrance exams to attend the university. One is a chemical engineer, another majored in geography, and a third earned his PhD.

In contrast, teachers in U.S. schools generally do not do well with gifted students. I believe this is rooted in the fact that not being gifted themselves, they cannot relate to gifted children. Additionally, the curricula are not encouraging to gifted students.

The result is that gifted students have unmet needs that compound over the years. As a school board member, this was a continuing source of vexation for me. When budget cuts had to be made, the gifted program—such as it was—would be the first thing to get trimmed, until it was finally eliminated altogether.

There are exceptions, of course. The school system that serves Princeton University faculty children is an example. My hometown (Bartlesville, OK) has fallen on hard times, but when I was coming up through school there, the management of Phillips Petroleum Company was intent on recruiting and retaining the top talent from the nation’s best universities. As a result, we had—with the exception of a few teachers, as noted—amazingly good schools, with ample encouragement and opportunity for gifted students.

Clearly, a commitment to good schools by local power brokers helps, but after it got going, in Bartlesville, it was in large measure self-sustaining. My grade school of 400 students had a gymnasium packed with parents for the monthly PTA meetings. My parents got sitters for us, so they could both go. Parents were activists.

Sadly, that was then, and this is now.

What we face nationally goes far beyond a concern with robbing children of their inquisitive and creative traits. There is an organized effort to standardize schools in the U.S. so they share a common curriculum objective. We must be aware of and then closely examine those objectives, which are often hidden.. We must ask who the people and groups are that are doing this. We must ask who is funding them. This is all the more urgent because of what has been found in US K-12 subject standards (like Science) and because of their widespread adoption.

Under the Clinton administration, Congress enacted Goals 2000 in 1994, an outcome-based education initiative that codified certain National Education Goals and offered grants to states that committed themselves to specified reforms.

In 1996, the governors of 43 states, together with one corporate CEO from each state held the National Education Summit which created Achieve, a business organization reportedly “to help states raise academic standards, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability.” Achieve was instrumental in coordinating the development of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) introduced in 2013, which are comprehensive for K-12 school programs.

Nearly parallel to this development was that of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) sponsored by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers and introduced in 2010.

These standards have been adopted by numerous states — 49 in the case of the NGSS. The Achieve organization has been the subject of at least one critical review, “The Organization Named Achieve: Cradle of Common Core Cronyism,” by Richard P. Phelps.

It is well known that leftist political and economic agendas are not popular. To get elected, leftist politicians regularly claim to champion “centrist” positions, even masking their true intentions once in office by various forms of subterfuge. They have several strategies for gaining and keeping power, one of which is to change the nature of the voting population by changing the nature of public education.

Training children to be conformists and to trust the opinions of publicly acclaimed experts helps rid the electorate of folks with critical thinking skills. An examination of the 400± page foundational document (A Framework for K-12 Science Education – 2012) reveals that it heavily promotes compliance with political correctness — e.g., an entire chapter on Equity.

Beyond the 3R’s (readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic), the most important objective of an education must be the teaching and cultivation of Critical Thinking. The subject area of Science is the best place to introduce and nurture it. Scientists are naturally questioners, and Critical Thinking is largely about questioning.

To ensure that our children gain the skills they will need to be informed citizens, we must continually assess the curricula in our schools and demand that they not falter in pursuing this objective.

Hope you found this worth reading!

David W. Pennington, PE
Marathon, Florida

ABOUT DAVID W. PENNINGTON

David W. Pennington is a long-time licensed Professional Engineer whose field is mechanical engineering. His experience in school encouraged his creativity, broadened the spectrum of his interests, and provided him with ever more tools with which to pursue them. While employed by a major medical device company he was a part of teams that produced intellectual property covered by 12 U.S. patents. In addition, David submitted over 30 invention records detailing his original ideas.

©2024. All rights reserved.

Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time – but why would you?

This is not fake news: U.S. Surgeon General warns that parenting is a health hazard thumbnail

This is not fake news: U.S. Surgeon General warns that parenting is a health hazard

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By MercatorNet – A Compass for Common Sense

The US Surgeon General, Dr Vivek Murthy, just issued an official advisory warning against the stressful nature of parenting and labelling it “an urgent public health issue.” The document says Surgeon General Advisories “require the nation’s immediate awareness and action.” So, according to the Surgeon General, what exactly is the urgent issue and what immediate actions should be taken to rescue parents from the stress of raising their own children?

In short, the advisory cites data showing that parents experience more stress than non-parents and that sometimes, some parents’ stress levels are so high they cannot function. It says parental stress can negatively affect children. It says major sources of parental stress include “financial strain and economic instability, time demands, concerns over children’s health and safety, parental isolation and loneliness, difficulty managing technology and social media, and cultural pressures.”

All true.

I’m a mom of five children, and I birthed four of them within a time span of roughly five years. 12 years later, I had a baby in my 40s. We had diapers and dating going on at the same time. I’m no stranger to stress. I have known financial strain, the instability of layoffs, bone-deep fatigue, and so much more.

As for not being able to function, that depends on your definition of the word “function”. (Does inventing games where I lay motionless on the bed while my kids pile heaps of clean laundry on top of me count as “functioning”?) Parenting has beat the stuffing right out of me at times. But through all these years, I never saw my children as a threat to my mental health.

Children are a danger to their parents

This Surgeon General’s Advisory is the first time I recall seeing an official government entity framing children as a clear and present danger to their parents. It reminds me of radical feminist Sophie Lewis’ assertion that babies in utero commit “fetal violence” toward their mothers by introducing health threats to and demanding nourishment from their unfortunate maternal hosts. Likewise, Suzanne Sadedin says an unborn baby employs “manipulation, blackmail, and violence” against its mother while floating in the womb and usurping whatever sustenance it can suck from her body.

Collectivism is always the answer

What does the Surgeon General say should be done about this assault on parents’ health? The “We Can Take Action” section of the advisory starts with this preface: “[W]hile parents and caregivers may have the primary responsibility for raising children… [it] is a collective responsibility.” It then gives a laundry list of collectivist solutions including the following:

  • “Bolster support for childcare financial assistance programs such as childcare subsidies and child income tax credits; universal preschool; early childhood education programs.”
  • “Establish a national paid family and medical leave program.”
  • Prioritise “poverty reduction, prevention of adverse childhood experiences… and improve access to healthy food and affordable housing.”
  • “Strengthen public and private insurance coverage of mental health care.”
  • Expand workplace policies, including “paid parental, medical, and sick leave” and “access to childcare (in the community or on-site)”.

Unsurprisingly, most of the solutions call for more government intervention and lots more childcare. (Sorry, but universal preschool has not been shown to improve the situation of the majority of children or their parents.) We will never fix the problem by encouraging less family unity and more government “help” that comes at the cost of higher taxes.

There doesn’t seem to be acknowledgment in the Surgeon General’s Advisory that the separation of parents and children for most of the waking hours of every day and the reality of both parents focusing most of their time and efforts outside the home may be contributing to the very problem they’re trying to solve: the widespread breakdown of the mental health and happiness of both children and their parents.

The advisory does have some solid suggestions that deserve kudos. For instance, it urges friends and family members to offer practical support to parents, including “lending assistance with household chores, childcare responsibilities, or running errands” and “looking for ways to support parents and caregivers so they can take breaks, attend needed appointments, and engage in self-care activities.” Bravo.

Humble solutions

Here are some additional suggestions for policymakers and individuals:

  • Live near family. Grandparents and others can offer vital support. Studies show that living near grandparents can benefit children, parents, and grandparents.
  • Ease parents’ financial burdens by lowering taxes; do this by eliminating social programs, not increasing or expanding them. Largely let families solve their own problems with their own money.
  • Cultivate an economy in which one parent can primarily support the family financially, and one parent can primarily focus on the physical and emotional needs of their children.
  • Spend more time and effort preparing children for parenthood. Cultivate selflessness, sacrifice, and responsibility in children (Hint: Large families often foster this.)
  • Limit time spent on electronic devices for both parents and children (for more vital information on this, see my articles here and here.)
  • Revitalise THE NEIGHBOURHOOD. Initiate simple neighbourhood gatherings to get to know the people around you. Use social media neighbourhood groups to support each other, like offering to pick up a gallon of milk, etc., for the family next door.
  • Don’t wait for the government to save you. If you are overstressed — as I was at one time when my kids were young — ask another parent to swap babysitting with you every week (or as often as needed.) Doing this reduced my stress level significantly.
  • Reconsider and revise your priorities. If work has become more dominant than home life, or if your life is overrun with too much to do, simplify and sacrifice in order to focus on what matters most to you.

Despite the often chaotic and stressful nature of parenting, most parents see their children as a deep and satisfying source of joy — despite the pain. There is work and struggle in parenthood. That’s part of what you sign up for when you decide to welcome a helpless person into your life.

But you also sign up for a life of purpose and boundless adventure beyond what you could have imagined. And almost all parents rise to the occasion. They embrace the adventure of raising a family, and it gives them both daily and lifelong purpose. At the end of the day — and at the end of their lives — most parents consider themselves better off rather than worse off for having embarked on the irreplaceable adventure of becoming parents.

What do you make of the US Surgeon General’s advisory? Leave your thoughts below.

AUTHOR

Kimberly Ells

Kimberly Ells is the author of The Invincible Family. Follow her at Invincible Family Substack.

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Let’s ask a Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton about CO2 and Global Warming thumbnail

VIDEO: Let’s ask a Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton about CO2 and Global Warming

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By Dr. Rich Swier

WATCH: Princeton University Professor Dr. William Happer, ‘CO2 is actually good for the world’

Full text:

“CO2 is actually good for the world, so people ought to be encouraged to make more of it.” – Dr. William Happer, Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton University. According to Dr. Happer, carbon taxes are being pushed by “opportunists who are making a good living out of frightening everybody, and sucking money out of the common man, to push idiotic energy solutions on them that make everyone poorer and provide less reliable energy, less affordable energy”. “Let’s hope that there are enough people of common sense in the world… Let’s hope that they’ve got the good sense to throw out the rascals before they do too much damage.”

Credit:

@ALEXNEWMAN_JOU

@NewAmericanMag

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column with video posted by  is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

World Economic Forum finally tells the truth about Covid: It was a ‘test’ of our obedience to rapidly forming new world order thumbnail

World Economic Forum finally tells the truth about Covid: It was a ‘test’ of our obedience to rapidly forming new world order

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By Leo Hohmann

They wanted to know how many people would comply with a complete re-ordering of their lives based on no science at all, just random orders, some of which bordered on absurdity. 

I have long said that Covid 19 was launched by design by a small number of people in the globalist predator class for one reason and one reason only — as a beta test for the coming technocratic new world order.

Now, we’ve got the World Economic Forum coming out and all but admitting that was exactly why the Covid-19 “pandemic” had to happen.

The WEF gleefully posted the following snippet to the “My Carbon” page of its website where they make a pitch for so-called smart cities, which is just another term for 15-minute cities.

The first of three “developments” that the WEF says must be in place before the world can evolve into its utopian vision of “smart and sustainable cities,” is compliance with restrictions on our freedom. It writes:

1. COVID-19 was the test of social responsibility – A huge number of unimaginable restrictions for public health were adopted by billions of citizens across the world. There were numerous examples globally of maintaining social distancing, wearing masks, mass vaccinations and acceptance of contact-tracing applications for public health, which demonstrated the core of individual social responsibility.

They were testing us. That’s what Covid was all about. They wanted to see how many of us would give up our individual freedom and individual sovereignty by complying with a “new normal” that consisted of restrictions bordering on the absurd. Why, for instance was it “safe” to shop at Lowe’s or Home Depot but unsafe to shop at a small business or attend church? Why was it OK to go to strip clubs in Michigan but you couldn’t buy seeds for a garden?

What the WEF is implying with its above statement is that in order to be “sustainable,” people and societies will need to be compliant with a new more authoritarian global order. Don’t ask questions. Don’t resort to logic. Just obey.

Would we be obedient in the face of idiotic new laws and regulations, like wearing face diapers to stop what was said to be an aerosolized virus, and standing six feet apart in public, and submitting to a never-before-used, unlicensed mRNA gene-based injection? They said it was good for you, so roll up your sleeve. Don’t ask questions. If you did, you could lose your job and be treated as a societal outcast. Many people lost friends or even close family members to this monstrous “test” of our willingness to unquestioningly do what we’re told.

Nearly five years later, arguably the most powerful nonprofit public-private partnership in the world, the WEF, admits it was all a test of our wills and celebrates the fact that most of us failed the test (or passed with flying colors depending how you look at it).

They wanted to find out how many of us would prove our servitude to the lawless, fascistic beast system by complying with “unimaginable restrictions,” many of which were created out of thin air with absolutely no scientific evidence to back them up as contributing anything to public health.

The U.S. government’s top health bureaucrat, Dr. Anthony Fauci, admitted recently that there was no science behind his decision to require Americans to socially distance six feet apart.

They just wanted to see how many of us would prove our fealty to the “authorities,” people wearing white coats or suits and ties.

The beta test known as Covid-19 proved once again the validity of the The Milgram Experiment. This experiment was conducted in 1961-1962 by Yale University professor Stanley Milgram. It showed that the overwhelming majority of Americans would obey a law or command that they knew was wrong if the order were to come from an official authority figure. An alarming 65 percent of Americans would reluctantly violate their own conscience and obey the order even if they knew it would result in the death of an innocent person.

From Wikipedia:

Beginning on August 7, 1961, a series of social psychology experiments were conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, who intended to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a “learner.” These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.

The experiments found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, with every participant going up to 300 volts, and 65% going up to the full 450 volts. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology[1].

Below is a short video on the Milgram Experiment.

In case the WEF decides to take down this damning link about Covid being a test of public compliance with medical tyranny, I’m inserting a screenshot of it here.

©2024. Leo Hohmann. All rights reserved.

Please visit Leo’s Newsletter Substack.

Our COVID-19 Policies Were a Disaster! And there are no acknowledgments or apologies for errors made… thumbnail

Our COVID-19 Policies Were a Disaster! And there are no acknowledgments or apologies for errors made…

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By John Droz, Jr.

Reference my earlier commentary about the entire medical establishment (until recently) being completely wrong in their treatment of Ulcers — for over a hundred years. My point was to show that ALL the medical experts were wrong on this important national matter. The main reason why was that none of them had applied real Science (e.g., the Scientific Method) to their hypothesis on Ulcers.

The evidence indicates that essentially the same situation has happened several times before. A recent disturbing example is with COVID-19 — although in this case there were many medical practitioners who DID object to the wrong (i.e., unscientific) direction, that COVID-19 policies were going.

Some examples of COVID-19 medical mistakes made were (are):

Essentially nothing was said (much less emphasized) about the importance of people taking steps to optimize their health (maximizing their immunity). Clearly, those in better health to begin with who did catch COVID-19 would (by and large) end up with better outcomes than those who were in poorer health.

Taking Vitamin D is a good example. This was (is) an inexpensive preventative, with scientifically proven COVID benefits, and with almost zero downsides. EVERY person in the country should have had that info drilled into them…

Based on a subset of ALL the studies available (and not acknowledging the full list of related studies), the CDC took an unscientific position regarding COVID-19 Masks. This was especially problematic for children all day in school.

Scientific medical studies are generally focused on one (or both) of two main concerns: Effectiveness and Safety. When ALL the Mask studies are examined, and looked at from an objective (not political) perspective, a reasonable person would conclude that Masks are not Effective and are not Safe. To mandate an unsafe, ineffective treatment on a trusting public (esp. children) is simply atrocious.

Note: I purposefully did not update my 2022 Mask Report, so that you can see how the CDC continually modifies their web pages to adhere to political correctness. On the other hand, there is no apparent effort to update their web pages to reflect the latest scientific findings — unless it coincides with political correctness. For example, I found over a hundred studies on Masks back in 2022, and there are more now. The CDC should show a complete list of ALL Mask studies — but they do not.

To supposedly provide COVID-19 help sooner, significant scientific shortcuts were made from our traditional methodology of testing and producing treatments, etc.

It is understandable that emergencies might warrant some changes in procedures for approval of treatments (e.g., medications). HOWEVER, where shortcuts are made, our medical agencies (esp. the FDA) should publicly acknowledge that we have major gaps in the data. For example, the FDA should mandate that EUA Fact Sheets for Healthcare Providers (see this sample) should have a statement like this:

“This EUA was granted after a very limited scientific assessment of this product for this medical condition. As a result, the FDA has a low confidence level regarding the safety or efficacy of this product for this condition.” Currently, there is nothing like this warning.

Our government medical agencies dismissed scientifically-based COVID-19 therapies not coming from Big Pharma, as ineffective — with zero proof.

The classic example is Ivermectin. Medical agencies publicly ridiculed IVM as a horse treatment.

Again the criteria for approving any medical treatment are Safety and Efficacy. The evidence is that: 1) Ivermectin has been found to be one of the safest pharma-ceuticals on the planet, and 2) scientific studies have shown that IVM has early treatment effectiveness of 60±%! Consider how many hundreds of thousands (!) of American lives could have been saved if the medical establishment promoted and made available a 60% effective, safe, low-cost, early treatment option….

In late 2023 three courageous physicians sued the FDA regarding some of FDA’s unscientific and biased positions against Ivermectin, and WON! Kudos to them!

When Big Pharma finally did produce COVID-19 treatments (e.g., Paxlovid), all of a sudden the use of a treatment was now acceptable.

However scientific studies to date show that they were less safe and less effective than several treatments that the FDA did NOT approve (e.g., Vitamin D, IVM, and HCL. [E.g., compare Paxlovid’s 20%± effectiveness to the reported effectiveness of Vitamin D (60%±), IVM (61%±), and HCL (66%±).]

The FDA officially approved Remdesivir as a later-stage treatment for hospitalized patients — with insufficient scientific proof of safety or efficacy. The end result was predictably bad — zero percent effectiveness, plus serious safety risks!!!

We all make mistakes, even genuine scientists. That said, when new evidence is revealed, real scientists admit their errors and then go to great lengths to correct any public misconceptions that their prior bad actions contributed to.

However, rather than admit their mistake, the FDA STILL lists Remdesivir as an officially approved late treatment for COVID-19 patients. (For more info see here.)

There are more examples where the Medical Establishment replaced real Science with political science in their dealings with COVID-19 (e.g., the FDA [against their own advice [p 60]!] allows relative risk (not absolute risk) to be reported in the studies they are involved with [see here]) — but I try to keep my commentaries relatively short.

What about the experimental bio-chemical COVID injections? If you have absorbed the message in the above six points, it should be very clear that the FDA, etc. would not suddenly make a 180-degree turn regarding practicing real Science…

For another perspective on this disturbing situation, I strongly encourage you to watch a video of Dr. Scott Atlas (at least the first 10 minutes) — who was in the room when top-level decisions were being made on US COVID-19 policies…

All this boils down to two things we need to ensure that our children are properly taught in K-12 schools: 1) how to be Critical Thinkers, and 2) how to apply the traditional Scientific Method. By and large, neither of these is happening today!

©2024. John Droz, Jr. All rights reserved.

Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time – but why would you?

EXCLUSIVE: ‘Totally Silent’: Donald Trump Jr. Says Media Won’t Give Walz Family The Mary Trump Treatment thumbnail

EXCLUSIVE: ‘Totally Silent’: Donald Trump Jr. Says Media Won’t Give Walz Family The Mary Trump Treatment

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By The Daily Caller

Donald Trump Jr. explained he does not believe the media will cover that several members of Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s family, including his own brother, are reportedly supporting his rival, former President Donald Trump, in an exclusive Wednesday interview with the Daily Caller.

A photo circulated the internet earlier in the day of eight people reportedly related to the Democratic Vice President nominee Walz, all wearing “Walz for Trump” shirts. They were all also standing in front of a “Trump 2024,  Take America Back” flag. The Caller asked Trump Jr. about the photo and if he thinks it will make a difference in the election, to which the former president’s eldest son said he believes the media will be “totally silent” on the issue. He compared it to his father’s niece, Mary Trump, who has been an outspoken critic of his father, but who Trump Jr. says he has seen once in 25 years for a brief period of time.

The photo was originally shared by a friend of the family, then posted by former Republican Nebraska gubernatorial candidate Charles W. Herbster, Newsweek reported.

“It’s interesting how the media is totally silent on that. They made Mary Trump into the biggest Trump family, like ‘knowledgeable person.’ This is someone I literally think I’ve seen her once in 25 years and that was at my aunt’s birthday party at the white House for like 90 minutes, maybe two hours. Somewhere in the middle of my father’s presidency. I hadn’t seen her since I was probably early teens prior to that. But they put her on TV as the most knowledgeable person on the Trump family. We’ve never even seen this person in years. It’s just part of the grift,” Trump Jr. told the Caller.

Mary Trump published a book about Trump calling him “the World’s Most Dangerous Man” and has continued to criticize him throughout his presidency. She has accused Trump of using racist slurs and more, something he has continued to deny. In September 2021, Trump filed a $100 million lawsuit against The New York Times and Mary Trump, alleging his confidential tax documents were shared improperly and that his niece was pressured into sharing the information.

Walz has come under fire for signing legislation in favor of putting tampons in boys bathrooms, accusations of stolen valor regarding him claiming to have served in combat and his history and relationship with China. These were just some of the issues Trump Jr. mentioned to the Caller regarding the VP nominee.

“So I hope the media gives them as much attention as they gave Trump family members that didn’t like my father or were willing to lie about him or whatever it may be. That won’t actually happen. But if by the media’s own rules, we should take everything that they say into great consideration,” he continued. “And frankly, based on the rest of Tim Walz’s policies, based on the way he let his home state burn to the ground, based on the prioritization of putting tampons in boys bathrooms, based on his stolen valor and continued lies about all of this, the guy doesn’t seem like a good guy.”

The former president’s son went after Walz and the coverage he and his campaign have been receiving.

“It doesn’t seem like someone you’d ever want in charge of anything, let alone potentially the presidency of the United States. But again, it’s easy to get away with being a liar and a scumbag if you’re a Democrat and you have the media propaganda machine doing all your boosting for you,” Trump Jr. added.

AUTHOR

Henry Rodgers

Chief national correspondent. Follow Henry Rodgers On Twitter.

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Protecting the Elderly from Scams Through Mental Health Awareness

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By Amil Imani

Mental health is a critical aspect of overall well-being, particularly in the elderly population. As people age, they often face challenges such as cognitive decline, isolation, and changes in social dynamics. These factors make older people more vulnerable to mental health issues, which, in turn, can increase their susceptibility to scams. Understanding the connection between mental health and scam vulnerability is essential for protecting our elderly loved ones.

The Importance of Mental Health in Scam Prevention

Mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, and dementia are prevalent among the elderly and can significantly impact their decision-making abilities. Depression and anxiety can lead to feelings of hopelessness or fear, making individuals more likely to respond to scams that offer a false sense of security or companionship. Dementia, conversely, impairs memory and judgment, making it difficult for individuals to recognize fraudulent activities.

Mental health professionals play a crucial role in identifying and addressing these issues. Regular mental health assessments can help detect early signs of cognitive decline or emotional distress, allowing for timely intervention. Improving mental health can enhance older adults’ ability to recognize and resist scams.

Common Scams Targeting the Older People

Scammers often target older people due to their perceived vulnerability. Some common scams include:

  • Phishing Emails: Scammers send fraudulent emails that appear to be from legitimate organizations, tricking older people into revealing personal information or clicking on malicious links.
  • Grandparent Scams: A scammer poses as a distressed grandchild, requesting money for an emergency. Driven by fear and concern, older adults may quickly send money without verifying the situation.
  • Romance Scams: Scammers establish fake romantic relationships with lonely elderly individuals, eventually manipulating them into sending money.
  • Telemarketing Fraud: Scammers use high-pressure sales tactics over the phone to convince elderly individuals to purchase unnecessary products or donate to fake charities.
  • Investment Scams: Promising high returns with little risk, these scams exploit older people’s desire to secure their financial future, leading them to invest in fraudulent schemes.

These scams exploit older adults’ vulnerabilities, such as loneliness, fear, and cognitive decline, making it vital to raise awareness and provide protection.

Signs of Mental Health Decline and Scam Vulnerability

Recognizing early signs of mental health decline can help in identifying elderly individuals at risk of falling victim to scams. Some warning signs include:

  • Changes in Behavior or Personality: Sudden mood swings, irritability, or confusion may indicate mental health issues.
  • Difficulty Remembering Things: Frequent memory lapses, particularly concerning finances or personal details, can be red flags.
  • Social Withdrawal: Isolation from family and friends may make the elderly more susceptible to scams, as they lack the support network to discuss suspicious activities.
  • Increased Anxiety or Depression: Heightened feelings of anxiety or depression can cloud judgment and increase vulnerability to scams that prey on emotions.
  • Unusual Spending Patterns: Sudden, unexplained transactions or investments may indicate that the older adult is being scammed.

These signs should prompt caregivers and loved ones to safeguard older people from scams proactively.

Strategies for Protecting the Elderly from Scams

Protecting older adults from scams requires a multifaceted approach that includes education, support, and vigilance. Here are some practical strategies:

  • Educate Them About Common Scams: Regularly inform older people about the latest scams and how to identify them. This can be done through community programs, family discussions, or educational materials.
  • Encourage Caution with Personal Information: Remind older people to be wary of sharing personal or financial information, especially over the phone or online.
  • Help Develop a Support Network: Encourage older people to stay connected with friends, family, and community groups. A strong support network can provide advice and a second opinion on suspicious activities.
  • Seek Professional Help for Mental Health Concerns: If there are signs of mental health decline, consult with a mental health professional for assessment and treatment.
  • Monitor Financial Transactions: Regularly review financial statements for unusual transactions or patterns. This can help catch scams early and prevent further losses.

Open communication and trust between caregivers and older adults are vital to implementing these strategies effectively.

The Role of Mental Health Professionals and Attorneys

Mental health professionals and attorneys play crucial roles in protecting the elderly from scams. Mental health professionals can assess and address mental health concerns, improving the elderly’s ability to make sound decisions.

Attorneys can help safeguard older people’s assets by reviewing financial documents, providing legal advice, and, if necessary, filing for guardianship or conservatorship. This legal oversight can prevent scammers from exploiting older adults’ financial resources.

Protecting the elderly from scams is a collective responsibility that requires awareness, proactive measures, and support. Mental health awareness is vital to this effort, as it directly influences older people’s vulnerability to scams. By staying vigilant, educating our loved ones, and seeking professional help, we can safeguard older people from the growing threat of scams.

©2024. Amil Imani. All rights reserved.

‘Gender-Industrial Complex’ Worth Billions Annually: Report thumbnail

‘Gender-Industrial Complex’ Worth Billions Annually: Report

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By Family Research Council

The most mysterious feature of the 2023 SAFE Act Wars was that virtually every major hospital system — across 20+ states — lobbied vehemently against the bills. At nearly every public hearing, the speaking roster was saturated by three groups speaking in opposition: transgender activists, families with trans-identifying youth who hadn’t yet come to regret the procedures, and medical professionals, typically associated with a local hospital system.

Yet 2023 was a tipping-point year, in which the number of states with laws protecting minors from gender transition procedures increased from four to 22. This dramatic shift occurred because the dangerous, experimental nature of these surgeries became increasingly apparent. Otherwise progressive European countries such as the U.K., Norway, and Denmark pulled back on providing gender transition procedures to minors. Even state legislators, many of whom lack a medical background, were able to clearly grasp the lack of medical evidence and the potential for harm with these procedures, often articulating those reasons in the legislation they passed.

This raises the question, if the fundamental unsoundness of providing gender transition procedures to minors was evident to everyone from Norway to North Dakota, why couldn’t hospitals see it? A recent report from the American Principles Project suggests an explanation: hospitals and drug manufacturers were blinded by the Benjamins — billions of dollars’ worth.

The American Principles Project (APP) commissioned business consulting firm Grand View Research to conduct a market analysis measuring the volume of the gender-reassignment surgery industry. They recently estimated its value at a whopping $4.12 billion in 2022, with a compounded annual growth rate of 8.4% through 2030. The APP published those numbers this summer in an 88-page report.

Estimate Is Likely an Undercount

Due to various complications in data collection, nearly all estimates of the U.S. gender transition industry will be conservative (tending to undercount rather than overcount), the APP report stated, including the one they commissioned. American health care lacks the comprehensive, centralized data collection of socialized medicine, so researchers must compile data in other ways. For instance, a 2022 study by Komodo Health analyzed insurance claims and found 42,000 minors diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021, but this necessarily excluded all medical activity not covered by insurance.

Other studies have also struggled to find complete datasets. For example, studies that analyze gender transition procedures based on their medical code will necessarily fail to detect gender transition procedures labeled with a generic medical code. In a 2019 video, Dr. Shayne Taylor explained that this was a deliberate strategy. “For the patient who gets a big bill because their insurance doesn’t cover any transgender-related codes, I usually write ‘endocrine disorder not otherwise specified’ to allow me to order the labs that I want,” Taylor said.

Taylor was influential in convincing Vanderbilt University Medical Center to practice gender transition procedures because “these surgeries make a lot of money.” Based on figures from the Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery, “female-to-male chest reconstruction could bring in $40,000,” and “around $20,000 for a vaginoplasty,” Taylor cited. “That doesn’t include your post-op visits. That doesn’t include your anesthesia, your OR. So I would think this has to be a gross underestimate. I think that’s just, like, the surgeon’s piece of it.”

Leaked video of the profit rationale behind the gender transition program at Vanderbilt University Medical Center may have played a role in Tennessee enacting legislation to protect minors from gender transition procedures in March 2023.

Another reason to believe these numbers represent an undercount is that estimates of the number of trans-identifying people in America are significantly higher. The pro-LGBT Williams Institute estimated in June 2022 that 1.6 million Americans identify as transgender, including approximately 300,000 youth aged 13-17. While it’s possible that the Williams Institute has a political motive to inflate these numbers, it still yields a much larger estimate than studies that look at medical data.

Transgender activist Robbi Katherine Anthony “(who prefers going by RKA),” APP notes, multiplied the number of transgender-identifying Americans with the “average cost of transition,” estimated at $150,000, to speculate that the potential gender transition market could be valued in excess of $200 billion, “larger than the entire film industry.”

Even if these studies are significant undercounts, they do serve to show the trend. Every study shows a dramatic increase over time in people seeking treatment for gender dysphoria, especially among young people. One study reviewed for the APP report showed that “health system encounters for gender identity disorder rose from 13,855 in 2016 to 38,470 in 2020.”

Costly Procedures

Why such staggering costs? Gender transition surgeries are attempting to reshape — or more accurately, war against — a person’s natural biology. Advanced plastic surgery techniques can recreate the appearance if not the function of different organs. But, as Taylor suggested, the price tag for each individual procedure can be pricey. The APP includes a list of common procedures and their prices:

  • Augmentation Mammoplasty, $6,000-12,000
  • Voice Feminization Surgery, $5,000-9,000
  • Reduction Thyrochondroplasty, $3,500-7,000
  • Orchiectomy, $5,000-8,000
  • Vaginoplasty, $10,000-40,000
  • Chest Masculinization Surgery, $6,000-10,000
  • Scrotoplasty, $4,000-6,000
  • Hysterectomy, $9,500-22,500
  • Phalloplasty, $20,000-150,000
  • Mastectomy, $15,000-50,000
  • Metoidioplasty, $20,000-30,000
  • Facial Feminization Surgery, $20,000-50,000+
  • Electrolysis, $50-200 (one-hour session)
  • Laser Hair Removal, $200-1,000
  • Vocal Training, $50-200 per hour

In general, these are surgeries to a person’s face, throat, chest, or genitalia that result in him or her looking more like the opposite sex. Readers who want more specificity can do their own research. It will not be family-friendly or conducive to good digestion. You have been warned.

These costs add up as trans-identifying individuals pursue multiple procedures. The APP estimated that the “total cost of fully transitioning” ranges from $87,300-410,600 for males and from $66,500-605,500 for females. This assumes five years of puberty blockers (at $3,000-$25,000 per year) and 60 years of cross-sex hormone use (from age 16 to age 76, the average life expectancy, with estrogen estimated at $240-2,400 per year and testosterone at $200-4,200 per year).

These cost estimates do not factor in related medical costs, such as hospital stays and anesthesia. Nor does it factor in the potential for secondary surgeries. “A study in the medical journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery found that up to a third of patients ‘undergo secondary surgical revision to address functional and aesthetic concerns after penile inversion vaginoplasty,’” cited the report. “A similar study in Aesthetic Plastic Surgery reported that revisions for transfeminine vaginoplasty are frequent. These are lifetime, repeat customers, and there are more of them all the time.”

Market Competitors

Whether the market is worth $4 billion annually or a somewhat larger amount, that’s a large pot to split between relatively few players.

According to the market analysis from Grand View Research, 11 hospital and surgery systems account for nearly half (48.7%) of the sex reassignment market revenue in 2022, with other medical systems comprising the rest. Seven of these are in California and New York (including Cedars Sinai, Mount Sinai, and Kaiser Permanente), and the other four are: Regents of the University of Michigan, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and The Johns Hopkins University.

(Keep in mind, however, that hospital and surgery centers operate in somewhat location-specific markets; coastal surgery centers are likely not competing for clients with, for instance, Sanford Health, the pro-transgender hospital giant of the upper Plains states.)

Grand View Research also attempted to construct a snapshot of the top drug companies providing gender transition hormones. However, this picture was far less complete; many puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are prescribed off-label, making them harder to track, the APP explained.

The research only accounted for an estimated 14.6% of the market, totaling $234 million in 2022. The top five companies Grand View Research tracked were Pfizer, Inc. (4.6% estimated market share), AbbVie, Inc. (3.2%), End International plc (2.9%), Novartis AG (2.1%), and Lilly (1.8%).

Disaggregated data such as these contribute to the reliability of Grand View Research’s overall estimates. It shows their work, demonstrating that the overall estimates were not invented out of thin air, but represent the aggregate of more minute and concrete estimates, which are more likely to be accurate.

Lobbying Incentive

With such large potential profits on the line, it puts in perspective the efforts by hospital lobbyists seeking to defeat bills protecting minors from gender transition procedures.

If hospitals view gender-confused children as potential lifelong patients, then state laws protecting children from the depredations of gender transition procedures are a direct threat to their business model. Not only does it delay their ability to profit off these children for five years or so, but it also threatens their ability to recruit that child as a lifelong patient at all. Research cited by the Indiana State Medical Association in 2023 has shown that 60% to 95% of minors with gender dysphoria will eventually embrace their biological sex, if puberty is allowed to occur normally, whereas 95% of children who begin puberty blockers will proceed to cross-sex hormones and surgery.

These lobbying campaigns cannot be reduced to the simple question, what is the best practice medical care for children? The APP report notes, “There lurks beneath the surface of ‘best practices’ an incentive structure and a market, both real and potential.” That incentive structure and market are preventing medical systems from seeking the best interest of their gender-confused patients.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: On the ‘Weaponization of U.S. Healthcare System’ from FDR to Today by Dr. Tamzin Rosenwasser

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

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National Epidemic Reported

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By Dr. Tamzin A. Rosenwasser, M.D.

Events compel me to sound a public alarm about a disease that has reached epidemic proportions in the United States, and that threatens the stability of the nation.

I speak of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and springing, as I do, from a long line of hand-washers, list-makers, and stove-checkers, I consider myself eminently qualified to make the diagnosis—despite my lack of Board Certification in Psychiatry, Participation in Recognized Psychiatric Quality Improvement Activities, Demonstrations of Continued Competence in Psychiatry, Letters of Recommendation from Peers in the psychiatric field, a satisfactory score on a Certifying Examination in Psychiatric Diagnosis, completion of Physician Self-evaluations or Practice Assessments, or documentation of Psychiatric Patient Satisfaction Surveys.

After all, I do make up for it in Home Study.

Indeed, I began the study of this fascinating but insidiously deadly disorder as a child, when I observed male members of the immediate and extended family not only compiling lists of people’s birthdays—harmless enough, even useful—but also dates on which light bulbs had been changed, and other small mechanical tasks completed. On two occasions, female members of the family perceived a deficit in their stove-checking, and insisted, once by phone from 12 miles out at sea, on having the fire department check. A friend of mine who is a former administrative law judge informs me that the obsessive-compulsive characteristic of saving newspapers is the most common problem cited by people who put their relatives into institutions.

Currently, our national obsessive-compulsive neurosis takes the form of an urgent quest for total cleanliness, absolute safety, and complete uniformity and conformity, usually to government directives that seek to force people to “comply” with rules and regulations covering ever more minute areas of life.

Recently, upon encountering efforts to make us “safer” in the United States, I have pondered such things as this warning on a child’s Halloween “Batman” costume: “Warning: Cape does not enable user to fly.” On a college campus, “Warning: Unpaved pathways may contain ruts, obstacles or ice.” Multiple warnings on ladders. All these, I suppose, are from the sage, widely respected luminaries in Congress to the idiots who populate the remainder of the nation. True, it is also an obsessive retreat from militaristic lawyers; but I note that it is a retreat, rather than a defense.

On the other side of the coin, I read in the Wall Street Journal that some place in Germany performed an experiment to cut down on road sign clutter; they eliminated all road signs, and found that the number of accidents went down. I theorize that this occurred because it made drivers rely more on being watchful themselves, than rather counting on road signs to substitute for their own senses and judgment, and that the sheer number of commands on the signs distracted drivers. I would cite the article, but with all the newspapers around here, I cannot find it.

On contemplating the journey of Lewis and Clark from St. Louis to the Pacific Northwest in 1800, it has been a puzzle to me how they did it without the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to tell them that their boat was designed for several fewer people than crossed various rivers in it, and that without personal flotation devices, they were subject to fines and impoundment; that Seaman, Lewis’s Newfoundland dog, was not up to date on his rabies shots; that the guns should have trigger locks on them; and Sacajawea’s newborn baby would have to be given its hepatitis B shot forthwith, or the expedition would not be allowed to proceed.

A.J. Liebling, the correspondent for The New Yorker who covered World War II, reported the American soldiers’ ingenuity and initiative when they encountered the famed hedges of Normandy, planted on berms, which exposed their tanks’ undersides as they attempted to punch through in pursuit of the Germans. The soldiers went down to the beaches, cut up the hideous Belgian gates the Germans had fruitlessly used to fortify the beaches, and attached them to the tanks, so that they could slice right through the hedges, berm and all. Likewise, he described what he termed the “lordly Negroes” who, understanding that the jeeps full of soldiers racing alongside their quartermaster corps trucks on the way to Paris would need food, simply took the initiative: They made the decision on their own to distribute the provisions in the most efficient way, by tossing boxes of food expertly into the jeeps as they passed by.

Contrast those stories with the accounts of those who raced to the assistance of fellow Americans after hurricane Katrina. Trucks full of supplies were turned away because government functionaries wanted to control every aspect of the situation. Refugees from the hurricane in University City, Missouri, were harassed because they did not have an “occupancy permit” for the house in which they were sheltered, which the government considered to be not big enough for the number of people in it. Policemen in New Orleans went from house to house, illegally confiscating guns, leaving citizens defenseless, even as other New Orleans policemen went AWOL.

True leaders inspire by example. George Washington developed great self-control, worked industriously, and stayed with his troops. He did not, from a distance, simply tell others what to do. We now have a woman running for President who says she has a vision for America. Well, I have a vision for myself, and it does not include having her obsessions foisted on me. The other 299,999,999 or so of us also have our own visions of our own America.

The candidate says that says she has a lot of plans for America, but the country cannot afford them all. She is quite right about that. We cannot afford to have any of them foisted on us. She says she has a national “Health Care” plan, and that we will all be forced to subscribe to it, whether we want to or not. There will be an “enforcement mechanism,” she concedes. However, medical care is not a proper function of government. Citizens should not be wards of the state, whether voluntarily or not. She does not own us. We are not stock on her ranch, and our nation is not her ranch.

On a narrower but still nationwide matter, the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) frets and fusses about ways to make certain, by expanding their revenue stream and usurping power, that physicians “retain skills throughout their careers.” I have a good idea: Harass the physicians enough, and they will give up their careers in medicine before their skills atrophy, or before they even fully develop. Maybe even before they enter medical school, they will think better of a decision to subject themselves to the nagging of the FSMB and all the state apparatchiks, and a life of frustration and annoyance.

FSMB members seem to imagine that physicians, who have demonstrated drive, initiative, industry, and responsibility through a very rigorous educational process, will become deadheads without their nagging. They want “self-evaluation,” and “practice assessment,” letters of recommendation, patient satisfaction surveys, home study courses, some demonstration of “continued competence” in patient care and medical knowledge, more exams. This seems reminiscent of the attempts to ensure loyalty in the old Soviet Union: a vast bureaucracy dedicated to busywork, to enchaining the creativity and energy of professionals, and distracting them from their work.

The FSMB claims to be responding to “a greater public demand for physician accountability” and a call for “greater attention to patient safety.” This is a manifestation, once again, of obsessive- compulsive neurosis. Americans have the best medical care in the world. They live in a safety unheard of until very recent times. They themselves also must take responsibility for their own safety.

Of course, we can expect the criticism that “You’re against safety!?” “You don’t think safety is a good thing!?” That is a logical fallacy. It is just that the pursuit of safety above all else will not be worth any marginal benefit, because it is destroying freedom.

The freedom to learn, invent, attempt, and investigate, free of the nagging restraints of tyrannical regimes, has made our nation the leader in world medicine just 232 years after our founding. Europe sneered at us as rubes, but we have left them far behind, and we did it without the FSMB, or the nagging interference of government, which is a more recent phenomenon.

Our earlier freedom still yields dividends, but it may be the dividend that the waning western light of day still yields those working in the late afternoon. There is no guarantee that the Gulliver of our nation’s energetic and inventive people will survive being fettered by government Lilliputians’ niggling, wearying, degrading rules and regulations, hedges, and leashes not fit for fourth graders. We have “followed after knowledge and excellence.”1 We are not slaves, or commodities, even though we and our care and services are taken for granted, as a given to which all are entitled.

My best-loved professor once told me a story of a farmer who was trying to get ahead in life. He worked hard on his farm, and he had two mules to help him. Since he controlled the mules’ freedom and food supply, he gradually took advantage of them, without regard for their need for rest, or their general well being. He reached a point of equilibrium, where he gave the mules just enough food and rest to enable them to do the work he wrung out of them by force and blows. One day, he had hitched the mules to an overloaded wagon, to take his harvest to market, but the exhausted mules stopped on an incline, too spent to go further. Despite his whip, they would not budge, so he got out and built a fire under the mules’ bellies. That induced them to begin hauling again; they hauled the wagon just far enough that it rested above the fire, and the wagon and the farmer’s produce burned up.

It is past time for us to realize that the major obsession, regardless of its named excuse, among all the petty bureaucracies, the municipalities large and small, and the many branches of the Federal government, as well as quasi-governmental bodies, is to extend power over us in all our life activities. In considering these matters, I had recourse to Alexis de Tocqueville, whose masterpiece Democracy in America I had never read. He foresaw the kind of oppression with which democratic peoples are threatened:

…[A]n immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power, if, like that, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?

So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of free will from each citizen …

Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd. 2

©2024. Dr. Tamzin A. Rosenwasser, M.D. All rights reserved.

REFERENCES

1 Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy.

2 Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America. Mansfield HC, Winthrop D., ed., trans. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press; 2002:663.

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A Short History of American Medicine, 1955 –

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By Dr. Tamzin A. Rosenwasser, M.D.

In one of Mark Twain’s masterpieces, Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher wandered deeper and deeper into a cavern, and got lost. It is much easier to penetrate deeply into such a labyrinth than it is to find the way out. Such appears to me to be the history of the plight of modern American medicine from about 1955 on.

By1955 wewere10yearspost-war,emerging from what seem now to be primitive medical practices. I would venture to say that most of what we know in science and medicine we have learned in the last 65 years or so. Our nation entered a long period of relative prosperity, and we far surpassed there’s to the world in medical and scientific research and practice.

But just as a stupid idea to enter a cavern with only a few candles can lead to disaster, so can a stupid or immoral idea in politics. Once we realize we are stuck in a figurative labyrinth, we are so lost that we do not even identify the decision(s) that led to it.

When “leaders” in prewar/wartime Germany came up with ideas for which they needed scientists, they used the scientists’ expertise to help them to destroy their nation, and to stain its name. The scientists became like zombies, acting in their own bodies, but controlled by outside, evil forces. The scientists abdicated their human responsibilities to these false leaders, and were complicit in their crimes.

Meanwhile in America, a disastrous immoral idea took hold. It shunted our founding principle aside in a malignantly insidious fashion. Our law contains no “duty to rescue” for a very good reason—it could and would totally drain citizens. If you see someone in need, and have something to give, you are perfectly free to give all you wish—but it is your decision, not a duty.

Until Franklin Delano Roosevelt, no American president dared to lay a claim on one citizen for some other favored citizen. A coup d’etat took place in the 1930s when the Constitution was traduced. Instead of the single category, “American citizen,” citizens were de facto divided into officially favored and disfavored groups. Some citizens were statutorily burdened with the duty to rescue others, not necessarily from disaster, but from responsibility for their own lives.

The Entitlement Labyrinth

Lyndon Baines Johnson went further down this path in 1965, when he bestowed Medicare/Medicaid on favored groups, thus relieving old people and poorer people from responsibility for their decisions about education, work, and health. Politicians who “give” things to citizen groups give other people’s things, not their own. With other people’s labor, and other people’s money, they give favors in exchange for votes. We live in a transfer society now, where government forcibly transfers some citizens’ property and the fruit of their labors to other people. Those other people are not necessarily even in need. Many of them are quite well off. To help the fleeced citizens accept this, politicians excite envy among groups.

Many of the politicians who currently practice the politics of envy are millionaires, but they engage in vilifying others who have done useful work, who created jobs and wealth, not to mention useful products and services, and who freely bestowed voluntary charity on others The politicians who do this may be trying to deflect envy, which they may fear might be directed toward themselves, onto the producers in the nation, such as . “corporations” and “doctors.”

When LBJ decided to make political hay by pretending to “save” the groups now called “seniors” and “the poor,” his chosen method enlisted physicians. Despite early resistance, due to recognition of the destruction socialized medicine would cause, physicians were nevertheless eventually seduced, just as scientists had been by other regimes. By the time many of us currently practicing medicine came of age, Medicare and Medicaid were firmly entrenched, and we were enrolled into them, barely knowing they existed, while we were in medical school.

The original Medicare/Medicaid legislation provided that there would never be interference in the practice of medicine. We were reassured that the programs would never cost more than $9billion a year, maximum. So much for predicting the future: the cost was up to $406billion in 2006. The sage, widely respected luminaries who came up with the $9 billion figure do not seem to have been acquainted with human nature.

In this process, true charity was greatly diminished. Why give to the needy when your labor and money are already being confiscated by government, which pretends to “take care of” so many needs and problems?

Wolf Crying

An interlocking chain of events ensued. As patients realized they could get medical care that was free to them, or almost free, they stepped up their use of the emergency room(ER), they went to physicians’ offices for ever slighter reasons, and they did such things as having their joints replaced not just to keep walking, but to keep playing tennis. All fine, except that the people burdened with the bills for their care might want time and money to play tennis and lead their own lives, with the money that they earned. It wasn’t just the spending. Once, if a person presented at the ER with, say, a headache, we could presume that there was a real problem: a headache out of the ordinary. No more. Since it costs many people little or nothing to come to the ER, they come in for the slightest of reasons. Maybe they could have taken some aspirin. But

maybe in the ER they can get Tylenol with codeine, which has a resale value, or maybe the headache is connected with family problems, and they can score some points against the other side by taking on the sick role.

Maybe they have just learned to be dependent. Maybe they don’t feel as important if they treat the headache themselves as they do if they “have to” go to the ER for it. So we are now faced with an influx of the mildly indisposed, “just wanted to be sure” people drowning out the truly sick, making decision-making much more complicated for the physician. There is a limit to how many people can get head CTs and MRIs. Also gone unremarked is the likelihood that physicians are not immune to the mindset induced by people crying “Wolf!” After a certain number of false-alarm headaches, the physician may be more likely to overlook, for example, a leaking berry aneurysm.

False Turns

Physicians, whose motto has been “First, do no harm,” at first resisted government interference in medicine, but eventually they saw no harm in making taxpayers pay the bills for the medical care their patients received. Naturally, the bills mounted.

As things got out of hand, the politicians got scared. Most of them are too cowardly to face reality. Instead of forthrightly stating that the Medicare/Medicaid system was out of control because there is no brake whatsoever on the medical desires of the population segments the system favors, they attacked the physicians and hospitals.

There was no appreciation of how much worse they could make the problem of giving people total personal discretion in spending their fellow taxpayers’ money by distorting medical care with perverse incentives.

The diagnosis-related group (DRG) system was imposed sometime in the 1980s to pay hospitals a flat rate per diagnosis, regardless of the actual cost of the care of the patient. It provided incentives to make hospital care more efficient—or at least speedier. Discharge planning became more important, with a kind of game to figure out the best (most remunerative) way of stating the diagnosis, and the quickest discharge, ready or not.

As John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis has pointed out, there is a tuning fork-shaped graph that results from tracking all the fixes government has tried. Without radical surgery on the entitlement system that bestows favors on some at the expense of others, tinkering with it can reset the point on the graph showing what our present spending is, but it has no effect on the growth rate.

When DRGs did not work, a big “waste, fraud and abuse” hunt was launched, with Medicare patients told their physicians might be committing fraud, and to look over their “Medicare Beneficiary Notices.”

In order to recover some money, the government now employs “bounty hunters”—people who get part of the loot when they “find” overcharges. Unlike defense contractors, physicians have no big money sluice for sliding cash to politicians, so we mean nothing to them.

With the burdens mounting, and fewer willing to carry them, politicians have decided—again without clearly stating their aims—that we need a huge influx of foreigners to shoulder the burden. And to meet the demand for taxpayer-funded medical services, physicians began using “physician extenders” (sounds like “hamburger helper,” doesn’t it?). Nurse practitioners, a new category, got into the act, supposedly to take care of the less sick, the worried well, the slightly indisposed. Of course, sometimes things did not work out that way. Sometimes the truly sick ended up with a nurse practitioner unable to handle the problem.

An explosion of “initiatives” has been designed to corral people, force vaccinations on their children, monitor their prescriptions, visit their babies at home, and have them beg for permission to take drugs that the government does not approve of.

Instead of studying diseases and therapeutics, physicians waste time learning “correct coding.” Not for their patients, but for the bureaucrats. Some physicians have retired early. Others have fled to an area not “covered”—especially cosmetic surgery—where there is freedom, but which removes them from the heavy lifting in medical care. Some just game the system, meeting absurdity with dishonesty. Some over-treat the patients paid for by government in order to make more money. Now that there is such an outcry about spiraling costs, some under-treat patients, because government has made it a money-losing proposition to treat Medicare and Medicaid patients, by paying less and less for that care.

Very few people saw where this path was leading, as they voted for politicians who promised to give them money taken from their fellow citizens. It supposedly represents some kind of pact between the generations, except that members of the younger generation never gave their permission. But now the giant Ponzi scheme is unraveling, and the nation is going bankrupt.

There’s no guarantee at all that the U.S. will not end up like a Third-World nation. As long as we do not recognize that medical care is not, and never can be, free of charge, people will continue to respond to perverse incentives, and never recognize that third-party control is the whole problem with our medical care. Things can get a lot worse than they are now. To some, the house of medicine may look fine, but it is like a house riddled with termites.

Away Out

But there is good news. We could fix things overnight, by seceding, dropping out of the system. Tom and Becky survived being lost in the cave because they saw a gleam of light, and found a way out. We can do the same. No need to retrace our steps in this Byzantine labyrinth of “compliance” and control. At some point, Medicare and Medicaid will implode, just as the U.S.S.R. did. When it happens, people will still need medical care.

In the meantime, every physician should think about a fallback plan for an alternate livelihood. We should be ready to be independent. We can grow food, modify a house for passive solar heat, install windmills, save money, invest in some other thing to learn or do to support ourselves, and take care of our patients without Big Brother in the room with us.

©2024. Tamzin A. Rosenwasser, M.D. All rights reserved.

Going Full Orwell: Harris-Walz Equate Fighting ‘Climate Change’ With ‘Freedom’ thumbnail

Going Full Orwell: Harris-Walz Equate Fighting ‘Climate Change’ With ‘Freedom’

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By Marc Morano from Climate Depot

Shh. A moment of ‘climate silence’ being observed on live TV – Morano on Fox & Friends on Harris-Walz ‘climate silence’ & pushing climate solutions as ‘freedom’

Harris Goes Full Orwell! 

NYT: Harris’s New Strategy: Equate Fighting Climate Change With ‘Freedom’ – Framing As ‘Patriotism’ – ‘A novel way of framing climate change’

New York Times – Aug. 23, 2024: Vice President Kamala Harris mentioned climate change just once in her speech before the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, wrapping it into her larger campaign theme of freedom. … Ms. Harris declared that along with reproductive choice “many other fundamental freedoms are at stake” in the November election. Those include “the freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis,” she said. …

Via Study.com’s Analysis of George Orwell’s 1984 & the meaning of ‘Freedom is Slavery:  “The slogan coined by Big Brother goes on to explain that freedom is slavery…Big Brother justifies this confusion by saying that someone who is free under the typical conception, able to operate according to their own will, is ultimately unsuccessful. Rather, true freedom is serving the state, which allows one to operate with more freedom than they ever would have had if they went out into the world on their own.”

Marc Morano: This is this is the biggest con I’ve seen in modern politics. Kamala Harris in 2019 was the co-sponsor of The Green New Deal — the AOC original Green New Deal, and as you mentioned, Harris cast a breaking vote in 2022 for the Inflation Reduction Act. Climate is supposed to be an existential threat. Climate is supposed to be in crisis —  an emergency. The Biden-Harris Administration was talking openly — as The Washington Post and Associated Press reported — declaring a National Climate emergency — and all of a sudden, summer of 2024, everything went silent. And why is that? Because according to the Washington Post, the New York Times, they have found in focus groups, they have found in polling, they have found this across the board — that there’s just no concern over climate change in America. It’s dropped even in these polls by the mainstream media, out of the top 20 issues, it’s not even in the top half, and so what’s happened is they’ve just moved on, and they’re framing it now, according to the New York Times, as an issue of ‘freedom’ —  climate ‘solutions’ will bring ‘freedom.’ This is after they talked about banning gas-powered cars, restricting meat eating, banning gas stoves and thermostat controls, and CNN promoting ‘carbon passports’ for travel. But now they’ve just gone silent on this existential threat of the 21st century. We’re being conned.

Partial Transcript: 

Rachel Campos-Duffy: Even the Washington Post has taken notice, saying the split-screen approach suggests that Democrats see talking about the environment as a lose-lose proposition. Here to discuss is Climate Depot publisher Marc Morano. Marc, it is really interesting she cast the deciding vote on the Big Green New Deal, or some call it a scam, and she should be bragging about it, and no one’s talking about this issue. Why, what’s happened?

Marc Morano: This is this is the biggest con I’ve seen in modern politics. Kamala Harris in 2019 was the co-sponsor of The Green New Deal — the AOC original Green New Deal, and as you mentioned, Harris cast a breaking vote in 2022 for the Inflation Reduction Act. Climate is supposed to be an existential threat. Climate is supposed to be in crisis —  an emergency. The Biden-Harris Administration was talking openly — as The Washington Post and Associated Press reported — declaring a National Climate emergency — and all of a sudden, summer of 2024, everything went silent. And why is that? Because according to the Washington Post, the New York Times, they have found in focus groups, they have found in polling, they have found this across the board — that there’s just no concern over climate change in America. It’s dropped even in these polls by the mainstream media, out of the top 20 issues, it’s not even in the top half, and so what’s happened is they’ve just moved on, and they’re framing it now, according to the New York Times, as an issue of ‘freedom’ —  climate ‘solutions’ will bring ‘freedom.’ This is after they talked about banning gas-powered cars, restricting meat eating, banning gas stoves and thermostat controls, and CNN promoting ‘carbon passports’ for travel. But now they’ve just gone silent on this existential threat of the 21st century. We’re being conned.

Morano: This is a huge opening for Trump. They need to ridicule what Harris has said and done. Remember, she was the one who said climate change was the root cause of immigration on the southern border, and she actually went down to investigate. They can’t let her get away with this.

Gov. Tim Walls, by the way, is the exact same way. He was actually —  going back a decade — trying the same tactic of avoiding climate change by telling Minnesotans to support then Pres. Obama’s climate bills because ‘we would all be rich from it’ — they’re all emphasizing this fake government-supported green jobs so-called, and they’re getting labor unions involved and the ideas we’re going to subsidize through trillions of dollars. Remember, the Inflation Reduction Act was only a couple hundred billion dollars, but now the latest estimates are without Congressional authorization of spending of over $1 trillion and rising. So this money is being pumped in. That’s how they’re trying to sell climate change now,  as some kind of cash scam for people to get rich off of.  No longer do we face the tipping point 12 years or the existential threat. They know the public’s not buying that scientific claptrap.

Morano: 2030 was AOC’s climate tipping point deadline, and the clock is ticking, but usually, when it expires, they cross it out and put a new date.

Rachel Campos-Duffy: Tick-tock, tick-tock. Thank you, Marc. So great to have you on.

Morano: Thank you, Rachel. Appreciate it.

RELATED ARTICLES:

NYT: ‘Harris Goes Light on Climate Policy. Green Leaders Are OK With That’ – ‘If she takes a strong position on climate…it will make her look too progressive’

Harris-Walz push ‘climate silence’! WaPo: ‘Why Democrats are so quiet about climate change right now’ –

Dem ‘Party leaders appear to have calculated that climate silence is the safest strategy’ as ‘most voters rank other issues as more important’

‘Third Rail’: Here’s Why Team Kamala Isn’t Peddling The Typical Dem Climate Panic This Election – Morano: ‘No one is buying their ‘climate emergency’ claptrap anymore’

Shhhh. Despite climate silence, Harris Planning ‘Bold Action’ on Climate Change, Adviser Says

Kamala Harris Barely Mentioned Climate at the DNC

Harris, Walz frame climate change in context of ‘freedom’ as only ‘glancing references to climate’ made by Harris & Walz – ‘Climate was muted’

Watch: Interior Sec. Deb Haaland says Kamala Harris will ‘fight climate change’ in speech to DNC

Climate is missing from climate groups’ $55 million ad splurge! – Part of new ‘strategy from Democrats & allies’ –

Ads ‘don’t mention climate change or global warming’

Harris & Walz Are ‘Climate Champions’ Says Former Obama EPA chief Gina McCarthy

Harris’ VP Pick Walz Has Pushed Green Energy Mandates More Aggressive Than Gavin Newsom’s – ‘Walz signed over 40 climate-related initiatives into law’

©2024. Marc Morano from Climate Depot. All rights reserved.

CO2 Has Been Indicted by Consensus, Not Real Science or Critical Thinking thumbnail

CO2 Has Been Indicted by Consensus, Not Real Science or Critical Thinking

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By John Droz, Jr.

When asking those who believe that CO2 is a major climate antagonist to make their strongest argument, their most common response is: “CO2 has been identified as the primary Climate culprit by the majority of experts (e.g., climatologists) and scientific organizations (e.g., the IPCC).” This is clearly a consensus claim.

I’ve repeatedly warned that one of the major fights we are in, is to defend genuine Science, as its enemies are actively trying to replace it with political science. This situation is a dead giveaway, as consensus is the currency of politics, NOT Science!

Put another way, the claim of consensus is deference to authority. They are saying don’t ask any questions! Just be quiet as others know a lot more about this matter than you do. Further, they continue, it’s not possible that all those experts would be lying to us!

Both of these are very reasonable viewpoints. However, whether or not they should end the conversation is the question. Let’s look at a recent very close Science parallel for enlightenment. Here is a layperson’s history of what happened…

There are roughly 8 Billion people on the planet who periodically experience stomach ailments (i.e., gastrointestinal distress). The concern often is: will these common human pains turn into something much more major — like an ulcer?

An ulcer is a perforation of the stomach lining, which is a serious matter, and there are about 4 Million cases of these in the US, every year — so it is relatively common.

For nearly 200 years the medical establishment believed that stomach ulcers (technically peptic ulcers) were caused by stress. The hypothesis was that stress produced excess (gastric) acid in the stomach, which (in turn) eventually ate away some of the stomach’s lining. (The first connection between these was made in 1822.)

In this case when I say “medical establishment” I mean worldwide 100% of relevant PhDs, MDs, RNs, PAs, etc. Also 100% of hospitals (like the Mayo Clinic). Also 100% of universities and medical schools (like Johns Hopkins). Also 100% of medical textbooks. Also 100% of medical journals (like the Lancet, and NE Journal of Medicine). Also 100% of medical organizations (like the AMA). Also 100% of government medical agencies (like the FDA, CDC, DOH). Also 100% of pharma-ceutical companies (like Pfizer, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol Myers Squibb). This was also the position of the MD’s bible: the Physician’s Desk Reference.

As a point of reference, the combined number of worldwide medical experts here is roughly a hundred times the amount of worldwide anti-CO2 experts.

The basic reason that these many thousands of highly educated people were wrong, is that none of them actually applied the Scientific Method to the accepted and sensibly sounding hypothesis about the cause of stomach ulcers! Instead of taking the time and effort to perform a genuine Scientific assessment of this common worldwide issue, they relied on intuition — plus the fact that other experts were on board. (This is very similar to what is going on regarding Climate and the faulting of CO2.)

The Truth regarding stomach ulcers was discovered when two Australian scientists (Dr. Robin Warren and Dr. Barry Marshall) decided to apply the Scientific Method (!) to the medical establishment’s ulcer hypothesis. (Note that what we still have regarding CO2 is a scientifically unproven hypothesis as to its full relationship with Climate.)

The short story is that in 1982 Drs Warren and Marshall proved that most stomach ulcers are caused by a bacteria: H. pylori — NOT stress-induced excess acid production! (Read sample stories here, here, and here.) Note that this scientific finding is not even remotely similar to the stress/acid hypothesis that tens of thousands of medical experts had fully bought into, for many decades…

This was a VERY BIG DEAL. This NIH study says about their work: “Advances in drug therapy for peptic ulcer have had a significant impact on quality of life and work potential of many millions of affected persons and have contributed to a remarkable decrease in the prevalence of the disease, frequency, and severity of complications, hospitalizations, and mortality.”

This failure is particularly hard to understand regarding pharmaceutical companies, which have thousands of qualified experts (e.g., PhD Biologists and Chemists). Why didn’t those scientists figure out the truth through scientific experiments, since they have the experts, labs, and money?

Because, exactly like the IPCC, they started with an unproven assumption. In this case, it was that excess acid was causing most ulcers (and that stress was causing the acid)… A cynic would say that there is a second major reason: they didn’t want to get to the Truth, as that was not in their financial best interest!

In any case, following the unproven ulcer hypothesis, pharmaceutical companies produced two types of “solutions”: 1) drugs to reduce stress (anti-anxiety meds like Xanax and Valium) plus 2) drugs to reduce stomach acid (Nexium, Tums, etc.). But neither of these do anything meaningful to address the primary cause of ulcers!

There is an exact parallel with industrial wind energy and solar proposed (by experts) as “solutions” for the climate issue, as neither of those has genuine scientific proof that they work (i.e., save a consequential amount of CO2).

What followed Drs. Warren’s and Marshall’s published peer-reviewed study is also instructive.

To begin with, there was great skepticism by the medical establishment (aka the “experts” who have been wrong for many years).

In 1996 (14 years after Drs. Warren’s and Marshall’s findings were published and verified) the FDA finally approved the first antibiotic for treatment of ulcer disease.

In a 1997 study (15 years after their findings were published and verified), data show that about 75 percent of ulcer patients were still treated primarily with antacid type medications, and only 5 percent receive antibiotic therapy!

This shows the powerful resistance by “experts” to accept the Truth — especially when it exposes the fact that said experts were totally WRONG, for decades…

Prompted by this study, in 1997 the CDC, with other government agencies, academic institutions, and industry, launched a national education campaign to inform health-care providers and consumers about the link between the H. pylori bacteria and ulcers.

Drs. Warren and Marshall subsequently won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine for following the Science.

Please reflect on the original question: can tens of thousands of well-educated experts, universities, medical journals, textbooks, medical organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and government agencies, be dead wrong? Absolutely YES!!!

Is this because they are ignorant? (Not in general, but they certainly were ignorant about how Science works.) Is this due to a conspiracy? (Hard to say.)

Summary: the experts were wrong as they lazily went with intuition, plus the comfort of consensus of their peers Furthermore, they decided it was too much trouble to apply scientific rigor via the Scientific Method to their ulcer hypothesis. Lastly, for some of the medical experts, it was in their financial interest to not reveal the truth.

Today we have an almost identical situation with the hypothesis against CO2…

PS — A strong argument can be made that the same departure from Science (short-cutting) happened with COVID-19. That will be another commentary.

©2024.   All rights reserved.

Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time – but why would you?

The 16 Most Extreme and Exotic Moments of the 2024 Democratic National Convention thumbnail

The 16 Most Extreme and Exotic Moments of the 2024 Democratic National Convention

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By Family Research Council

The 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) has closed but, like its candidate’s views on the issues, much has not been reported. Here are 16 of the most significant events not covered by the legacy media.

1. Planned Parenthood Carried Out Eight Abortions and Nine Vasectomies at the 2024 DNC

Like official statistics about the jobs created by the Biden-Harris administration, the number of abortions and vasectomies carried out during the 2024 Democratic National Convention has been revised downward.

Pro-life sources on the ground reported that Planned Parenthood carried out 25 abortions in a mobile unit near Chicago’s United Center during the first two days of the DNC, which nominated Kamala Harris for president and Tim Walz for vice president. Thankfully, abortion officials have subsequently clarified that they dispensed the abortion pill mifepristone to fewer than half that many mothers.

“The 25 you refer to was the approximate number of available patient slots,” the Planned Parenthood Great Rivers, based in St. Louis, told The Washington Times via email Wednesday. “We served [sic] 9 vasectomy and 8 medication [chemical] abortion patients between the two days.” The organization claims it did not commit any surgical abortions on site.

Of course, that’s nine more abortions than took place in conjunction with the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, the Constitution Party convention in Salt Lake City, and the Libertarian Party convention in Washington, D.C., combined.

The 2024 DNC became so abortion-focused that Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) wondered at one point, “Will any abortions be performed on stage?”

2. A U.S. Senator Praised a Riot that Tried to Burn Policemen Alive

Vice President Kamala Harris has attempted to distance herself from her administration’s record by ignoring the last three years (except scattered discussion of her appointees’ sex or ethnicity) and focusing her campaign almost exclusively on her time as California Attorney General — a position she left nearly eight years ago. In her acceptance speech, she asserted (inaccurately) that voters should reject Donald Trump, because he “sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers.”

Yet speakers at her own convention praised a crowd that assaulted police and attempted to burn them alive.

“I believe in America, because our fighters fought at Stonewall,” said Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) on Wednesday night. He was referring to the Stonewall riots, often considered the birthplace of the so-called Gay Liberation movement (which actually originated in Bethlehem, Pa.). On June 29, 1969, the Stonewall Inn became the site of anti-police violence as thousands of LGBT rioters attempted to burn the seedy, Mafia-run bar to the ground … with six New York City police officers inside. “I wanted to kill those cops,” said rioter John O’Brien.” Then-President Barack Obama, who spoke at the DNC Tuesday night, named the Stonewall Inn a national monument in 2016.

It seems only fitting the party of the 2020 BLM/Antifa riots salutes the Woke anti-police rioters of old, as well.

Speaking of incitement …

3. Al Sharpton Accused Former President Donald Trump of Racial Incitement

Few people embody racial incitement as fully as Al Sharpton, the founder of the National Action Network (NAN). His accusation that President Donald Trump fans “racial flames” must qualify as one of the greatest acts of projection in modern American political history.

Sharpton described Trump as “a fellow New Yorker I’ve known for more than 40 years.” He claimed when Trump took out a full-page ad calling for the execution of whomever brutally raped Central Park jogger Trisha Meili in 1989 that “it was then that I saw Trump love to fan racial flames.”

If Al Sharpton considered Donald Trump a racial arsonist in 1989, he should have told Al Sharpton. Before the last presidential election, Sharpton tweeted a photo of himself and Trump at the 2006 NAN convention holding a pleasant conversation with soul singer James Brown and Jesse Jackson. Trump described Sharpton as “[j]ust a conman at work!”

But it takes more than a con’s shamelessness to accuse others of your sins; as Bill Clinton said at a previous Democratic convention, that “takes a lot of brass.” As this reporter has noted:

“Al Sharpton founded the National Action Network shortly before the racially charged August 1991 Crown Heights riots. Sharpton led crowds in chanting, ‘No justice, no peace’ before rioters claimed the life of rabbinical student Yankel Rosenbaum. Sharpton’s ‘vile rhetoric incited the rioting,’ said Rosenbaum’s brother, Norman. A month earlier, Sharpton challenged New York’s Jewish community, ‘If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.’ In 1995, Sharpton would lead months-long demonstrations against Jewish ‘white interlopers’ at Freddy’s Fashion Mart, who raised the rent of a black business owner; ultimately, a protester burned the store and killed eight people, including himself.”

This record has earned Sharpton the revulsion of most decent society, as well as appointments to the Biden-Harris administration’s National Parents and Families Engagement Council and a council allegedly dedicated to keeping churches safe.

Sharpton, who was ordained a minister at age nine before becoming a protégé of James Brown, engaged in aggressive rhetoric later in his 2024 DNC speech, promising, “We are going to join with whites and browns and Asians, and we going [sic] to do a job on those that have done a job on us.”

4. Kamala Harris Is ‘Tough as Nails’ on Border Security

As part of the Projection Party’s extreme makeover, Kamala Harris now presents herself not only as a prosecutor but a border hawk. “For 20 years, Kamala Harris has been tough as nails when it comes to securing our border,” stated Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) without proof. “Kamala on the other hand has been fighting border crime for years,” alleged Sheriff Javier Salazar of Bexar County, Texas (D). “She’s taken on gangs trafficking across the border,” insisted former President Bill Clinton.

In hailing Harris, Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) praised the Biden-Harris administration’s latest quasi-amnesty, as the president in June promised to allow half a million illegal immigrants married to legal residents to Parole in Place (PIP). “We don’t have to choose between a secure border and building an America for all,” he said. “As president, she will fight for pathways to citizenship.”

In reality, “Biden-Harris-Mayorkas open border policies have facilitated the escalation of human trafficking for both sex and labor in the United States. Modern-day slavery and ultra-violent gangs,” noted Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies. The Office of Inspector General reported that, as of May, ICE had lost track of “more than 291,000” minors who crossed the border during the Biden-Harris administration. Just as the DNC kicked off, officials uncovered a new sex trafficking program of Venezuelans in the United States.

Yet the worst years for illegal immigration before the current administration transpired during years when a president or presidential candidate promised amnesty to illegal immigrants, in 1986 (1,692,544) and its close second in 2001 (1,676,438). The Biden-Harris administration has presided over three record-breaking years of illegal entries at the U.S. southern border:

  • Fiscal Year 2021 saw a historic 1,734,686 illegal entries at the southern border (not including other means of entry).
  • FY 2022 (2,378,944)
  • FY 2023 (2,475,669)

Border Czar Kamala Harris will go down as “one of the most catastrophic failures in American history,” said Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.).

Even some of Harris’s fellow Democrats felt the party had ignored the border. “Clearly, the Democratic Party, my party, is not interested in talking about what matters,” Chicago City Council member Alderman Raymond Lopez (D) told Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “How are you going to keep people safe? How are you going to secure the border? And how are you going to deal with the eight million undocumented individuals that they let in on Kamala Harris’s lead?”

5. Planned Parenthood CEO Tells Democrats, ‘We Will Decide This Election’

As part of the Democratic Party’s most abortion-centric election to date, the leaders of the abortion industry addressed the DNC on Wednesday; one of them declared bluntly, “We will decide this election.”

“We trust Kamala Harris!” exclaimed Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson during her address at the DNC on Wednesday. Planned Parenthood believes this is a pivotal election for its survival. “Our future is on the ballot,” she declared. “And come November 5, we will decide this election.”

Planned Parenthood Action enthused at her participation, posting on X, “That’s our President and CEO! ?’? #WeDecide.”

PPAct need not have exulted; the DNC indulged the entire abortion apparatus. Earlier in the day, former Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards said abortion makes American women “unstoppable.” EMILY’s List President Jessica Mackler insisted, “In 2022, Democrats didn’t just run on reproductive freedom; we won on reproductive freedom. And in 2024, we are coming back to the polls to finish the job.”

All the abortion leaders agreed Harris was sycophantic on maintaining their murderous source of income. Johnson vouched that Harris “has always and will always” hew to the abortion industry’s party line. “Her record shows it.” EMILY’s List posted on social media. “She’s with us, always.” Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America) — whose CEO, Mini Tammaraju, spoke at the DNC, as well — stated, “We can’t wait to vote for @KamalaHarris and @Tim_walz in November.”

Being in favor of a candidate is not enough: Alexis McGill Johnson bashed the 45th president, falsely stating that “Donald Trump wants women to be less free and pregnancy to be more dangerous.”

She seemed concerned about the industry’s survival. “Our future is on the ballot,” said the Planned Parenthood CEO.

6. School Lockdown Advocates Endorse Kamala Harris

Aside from the abortion industry, the Harris-Walz ticket has the full-throated support of the organization responsible for ruining the lives of the second-largest number of children: those responsible for prolonging school lockdowns, the teachers unions. The leaders of the largest two teachers unions, Becky Pringle of the National Education Association (NEA) and Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), addressed the DNC on Thursday.

“Donald Trump and J.D. Vance can’t claim they’re pro-child while gutting funding for public schools. That means that being pro-family means we support access to good union jobs, affordable housing, health care, and higher education,” said Weingarten. Gutting funding for public schools seems less hostile to children than dismemberment abortion, which the Biden-Harris administration has pledged to legalize in all 50 states.

“We are all in” for Harris, declared Weingarten.

7. Dem Rep: We Must March for Abortion for Our Daughters and Granddaughters

Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.) told the convention they must preserve abortion for their children. When it comes to “our reproductive freedom,” Meng told the DNC, “our mothers and grandmothers marched for us. Because of them, my husband and I were able to choose if and when to start a family. … Now, it is our turn to take up the torch for our children and grandchildren.” President Donald Trump, she implied, would be bad for the abortion plans they have for their children and grandchildren. “He will not stop at banning abortion. He will let states track pregnancies. He’ll put birth control and fertility treatment at risk,” she said without proof. “Trump’s plan is cruel. It’s dangerous,” she said, giving a limp thumbs-down sign. “But it is not inevitable.”

In fact, it’s not even his plan.

8. Openly Gay Governor Tore a Book Defining Marriage as the Union of One Man and One Woman

The Democratic National Convention repeatedly turned the nation’s focus to Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation document produced for more than four decades, as though it represents the Republican Party’s platform. While no president has ever implemented the policy-dense guidelines, Donald Trump has actively disparaged it.

Not only did one governor discuss the project, but he tore out a page that defines a family as the union of one man and one woman.

“Tonight, let’s talk about freedom, including our most intimate freedom,” which is “choosing if and when to have children,” said Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D), who is openly gay. He held up an oversized prop book of Project 2025. “Page 451 says the only ‘legitimate’ family is a married mother and father where only the father works. You know what, I’m going to take that one out; I’m going to put it in my pocket so I can share it with undecided voters, so they can better understand what’s at stake this election. Project 2025 would turn the entire federal government and bureaucracy into a giant machine. It would weaponize it to control our reproductive and personal choices.”

The actual page from Project 2025 says nothing about “legitimate” families, stating:

Goal #3: Promoting Stable and Flourishing Married Families.

Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on “LGBTQ+ equity,” subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.

Working fathers are essential to the well-being and development of their children, but the United States is experiencing a crisis of fatherlessness that is ruining our children’s futures. In the overwhelming number of cases, fathers insulate children from physical and sexual abuse, financial difficulty or poverty, incarceration, teen pregnancy, poor educational outcomes, high school failure, and a host of behavioral and psychological problems. By contrast, homes with non-related “boyfriends” present are among the most dangerous place for a child to be. HHS should prioritize married father engagement in its messaging, health, and welfare policies.

In the context of current and emerging reproductive technologies, HHS policies should never place the desires of adults over the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them. In cases involving biological parents who are found by a court to be unfit because of abuse or neglect, the process of adoption should be speedy, certain, and supported generously by HHS.

Another book also defines marriage exclusively as the union of a man and a woman. Jesus said, “a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh. … What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:1-6).

9. Dem Governor: ‘Democrats Welcome Weird’

The same governor, Jared Polis of Colorado, stated forthrightly, “Democrats welcome weird.” He went on to contrast the Democratic Party’s form of “weird” — which featured transgender delegates and an abortion unit — with “these Project 2025 people like Trump and Vance” who allegedly “aren’t just weird; they’re dangerous.” He referred to Taylor Swift song: “We’re not going back, like ever-ever-ever.”

10. Oprah Calls Kamala’s Marxist Dad ‘Idealistic’

Oprah Winfrey called Harris’s parents “idealistic.” The New Yorker described Harris’s father, Donald J. Harris, as “a renowned Marxist economist” and professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Marxist “idealism” claimed the lives of 100 million people in 100 years — and counting. Americans have gratefully been spared their murderous rampage in this country.

11. Former Republican: Vote for Kamala, because the GOP ‘Is No Longer Conservative’

Despite such a radical convention, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) made a pitch for Republicans to support the Harris-Walz ticket, because “The Republican Party is no longer conservative.” Apparently, he believes conservatives should instead vote for the candidate promising price controls, open borders, abortion until birth, pornographic books in school libraries, and transgender surgeries for children.

Kinzinger’s former colleagues expressed disappointment with his about-face. “I served with Adam Kinzinger in Congress when we voted for the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act requiring medical care for babies surviving abortions,” replied former Congressman Mark Walker, who served as a Republican from North Carolina. “How sad to now see Adam speaking at the DNC where abortions are available on the street in the back of a truck.”

12. Dem Raised Possibility of Invalidating Donald Trump’s Election?

Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) of th Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) touted the benefits of giving Democrats control of the House of Representatives. Americans “don’t want tax cuts for the wealthy, not a national abortion ban,” DelBene said. “And yes, a Democratic House means a Speaker Jeffries will certify the 2024 election.”

That dogwhistle hinted Democrats may not certify a Trump victory. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said in an online clip that the Supreme Court seemed poised to fail its “very clear duty to disqualify Donald Trump from the ballot, under Section three of the 14th Amendment.”

“And what that might mean, if their decision says that it’s really up to Congress, on January 5th – or January 6th, 2025, to disqualify him at the counting of the Electoral College votes,” he said.

13. Democrats Mispronounce ‘Kamala’

Kamala Harris’s grand-nieces taught the crowd how to pronounce the name properly. They could have instructed Al Sharpton, who mispronounced the nominee’s name earlier in the evening. So did President Bill Clinton on Wednesday, as he dubbed her the “president of joy.”

14. The Democratic National Convention Featured the National Anthem as a Performance Piece?

The band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks (now “The Chicks”) sang the national anthem — a few hours into the proceedings. Typically, the national anthem opens any public meeting. Former President Barack Obama regularly treated the United States like just another nation. Apparently, the Democratic Party treats the national anthem like just another tune.

15. A Country Singer Crooned a Trump-like Anthem

The DNC featured a performance by country singer Mickey Guyton singing, “All American.” Yet the lyrics seem to fit the Trump campaign better than that of Harris. The lyrics state:

“We’re the stars in the Texas sky
And the jukebox vinyl
We’r? the New York City lights
And a hotel Bibl? …

millionaires, spare some change
And everything in between

“We got the same stars, the same stripes
Just wanna live that good life
Ain’t we all?
Ain’t we all all-American?

“We’re different in a million ways
But at the end of the day
Ain’t we all?

Ain’t we all all-American?”

The message seems an inexact fit for the DNC, which began its morning sessions by holding meetings that segregated delegates by race and ethnicity. The lyrics read more like a refrain from one of Donald Trump’s stump speeches:

“There’s one allegiance that unites us all, and that is to America — America; it’s the allegiance to America. No matter our background, or income, or geography, we’re all citizens of this blessed land. And no matter our color or the blood, color of the blood we bleed, it’s the same red blood of great, great patriots — remember great patriots. We all salute with pride the same American flag, and we all are equal, totally equal in the eyes of Almighty God.”

Ultimately, our true unity comes from being children of God.

16. As Democrats Sounded Patriotic Themes, Protesters Burned the American Flag

As Democratic strategists told friendly media outlets the 2024 Democratic National Convention intended to “reclaim” patriotism, protesters representing the Democratic Party’s base burned the American flag and assaulted a man who tried to stop them. Reporter Ben Bergquam attempted to intervene as demonstrators set Old Glory ablaze while chanting, “Free, free Palestine!” only for a masked man wearing a keffiyeh to shove him. He attempted to reason with the mob, saying the flag represents America herself.

“It’s our country!” said Bergquam.

“F*** this country! Burn it down! Burn it down!” shouted a masked protester. As he threw the stars and stripes on the fire, he yelled, “This is what we think of your rag.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that his assault, on America and the patriotic citizens who tried to defend her, received no coverage from the legacy media, which refused to cover the proceedings taking place inside the convention hall — many of which you likely learned about for the first time in this article.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

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LGBT Group Walz Founded Wants to Trans Kids, Defund Police, and Abolish Borders

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By Family Research Council

Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has boasted of founding the local chapter of an organization that demands the “abolition of the police, abolition of borders,” “reparations for all indigenous and black peoples,” placing males in female correctional institutions, and transgender procedures for minors without parental consent — all while concealing children’s transgender identity from their parents. An LGBTQ website has said Walz’s behavior toward his students would get him labeled a “groomer” today. Walz’s wife, Gwen, is equally supportive of indoctrinating children in this group’s agenda, because she considers it part of her religious faith that “God created … some people gay.”

Tim Walz founded the local chapter of the GSA Network at Mankato West High School in the late 1990s. Numerous delegates highlighted Walz’s connection to the organization as he prepared to speak on the third night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

“I want to hear from the man who stepped up to create the Gay-Straight Alliance in the late ‘90s — the coach who stood up for the kids who needed him,” a teary-eyed Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told MSNBC’s Joy Reid early Wednesday evening. In a video that night, the Minnesota governor’s wife, Gwen Walz boasted, “When one of our students started the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, Tim agreed to serve as faculty adviser, because he knew how impactful it would be to have a football coach involved.”

Both called the group by its former name, the “Gay-Straight Alliance.” But the organization renamed itself the Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network (GSA Network) in 2015 to prove that its 4,000 affiliates “have moved beyond the labels of gay and straight, and the limits of a binary gender system.” (The Mankato West chapter has also changed its name.)

The GSA Network codified its political beliefs in a document on its resources page titled “Truth Nine Point Platform.” The platform calls for “the Abolition of the Police,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), “Borders and the Judicial System”; “an End of the Cisgender Heterosexual Patriarchy”; “Reparations for all Indigenous and Black Peoples,” including “Indigenous reclamation of stolen lands”; and “free and non-compulsory education for all ages.”

“We demand abolition! Abolition of the police, abolition of borders and ICE, abolition of the current punishment-based justice system. [sic.] We demand for our communities to be empowered to take care of themselves, for no borders, for rehabilitation and healing justice,” the manifesto declares.

The diminutive revolutionary screed claims that it “builds upon the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program,” although the FBI has confirmed that the Black Panther Party “advocated the use of violence and guerilla tactics to overthrow the U.S. government.”

“We are in a moment which calls for us to bravely and ferociously fight for our communal liberation,” which will be launched “in the name of our transgender and gender nonconforming ancestors who struggled before us,” proclaims the GSA Network’s document. “The revolution is a relationship.”

The Walz family signaled its solidarity with the George Floyd/BLM riots, which touched off in Minnesota in May 2020. Gwen Walz said she inhaled the smell of burning tires through her open window in order to feel close to the revolutionary BLM movement. Whistleblowers say Tim Walz ordered police to abandon the third precinct to arsonists, whom Kamala Harris urged her followers to bail out of jail.

The organization’s revolutionary platform, adopted in 2018, is anything but a dead letter: The GSA Network referred to “our TRUTH Nine-Point Platform” last November (specifically, its call for reparations) and quoted the manifesto in its most recent press release in March. (The November press release also demanded U.S. taxpayers furnish “aid to Gaza” and decries “the ongoing colonization and cultural genocide of black and brown peoples.”)

The GSA Network’s Extreme Transgender Agenda

The GSA Network believes in promoting transgender ideology and facilitating children’s transgender “transitions” with or without parental consent. “Know the laws in your state around students’ privacy rights and what you do and don’t have to tell parents/ guardians/families. This is important so you don’t inadvertently out a student as a member of the GSA,” states the GSA Advisor Handbook, aimed at public school teachers like Walz. “When calling youth, it may not be safe to mention ‘GSA club’ or another trans or queer reference.”

The Nine-Point Platform also states “trans youth” should have “self-determination” over “all aspects of our lives.” The GSA Network slammed state laws that protect children from the predatory transgender industry. Laws against “providing gender-affirming healthcare to trans youth … effectively deny trans youth basic human rights and dignity,” claimed GSA in 2020.

At the local level, Mankato West High School’s GSA chapter walked out of class in April 2022 to protest Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, which says teachers should not “encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” before the fourth grade.

The GSA Network also believes in placing teenage boys who say they identify as transgender in female juvenile detention facilities. In a 2017 report co-authored by the Soros-funded Center for American Progress, the GSA Network complained, “LGBTQ youth are frequently placed in facilities according to the sex on their birth certificate or based on their genitalia. … [T]ransgender youth should be housed based on the gender identity they express rather than based on anatomical sex or the sex on their birth certificate.”

Tim Walz has put many of the GSA Network’s political priorities into action as governor of Minnesota. He signed a bill (House File 146) that would take minors into state emergency custody if the child has been “unable to obtain gender-affirming health care” because his parents objected, as well as banning compassionate therapeutic care for people suffering from unwanted transgender feelings. The roots of these policies date back to Walz’s days as a teacher.

Walz’s Action Would Get You Called a ‘Groomer’: LGBT Website

Walz has said publicly that Mankato students came to him about founding a GSA chapter — but his advocacy of the LGBT agenda predates his time at Mankato West High School. While teaching at a high school in Nebraska in the early 1990s, Tim and Gwen Walz took a student who identified as homosexual to a concert by the Indigo Girls, an openly lesbian folk rock group.

The LGBTQ website Them stated that, today, the Walzes’ behavior would be “liable to get you called a ‘groomer.’”

In 1997, two years before the founder of Mankato West’s GSA chapter ever thought of the idea, Gwen Walz announced “out of the blue” on the first day of her 10th grade English class that it would be “a safe space for gay and lesbian students,” according to former student Jacob Reitan. He reportedly told Mrs. Walz about his sexual preference before he told his own parents.

Tim Walz also encouraged children to have frank discussions about adult subject matter at school. One of Walz’s former students, 2004 graduate Seth Elliot Meyer, remembered that Walz “wanted me to be OK with who I was” by embracing a bisexual identity as an impressionable teenager. Another of Walz’s former pupils — Micah Kronlokken, who described himself as “a young, closeted, queer kid” when Walz coached him in the seventh grade — said Tim Walz believed that teenagers should be “treated a little more like adults and trusted to have tricky conversations, and that high school is a microcosm for our world at large.”

Walz later confessed, “To create a culture in a school that was welcoming, open, and understanding” of the LGBTQ movement and its aims “was something that Gwen and I always strove for.”

“Both Tim and Gwen were incredibly supportive of their gay students,” said Reitan, who is now a lawyer and LGBTQ activist. Walz “showed the bully a better path forward, and I can think of no one better than Tim Walz to show that better path forward for America.”

Walz did not defend these policies during his debut on the national stage Wednesday night. Instead, the Harris-Walz campaign appears to be relying on media tropes that brand their political enemies as intolerant hatemongers. In the DNC video, Walz’s former student Noah Hobbs said Walz “stands up to bullies,” repeating the common LGBTQ activist tactic of bullying people of faith, who do not celebrate extreme transgender ideology or sinful sexual relationships, as “bullies.”

Walz has used the same language throughout his political career. While running for governor, Walz asserted that he — as “an older, white, straight, married football coach” — could assure “that there’s no bullying.” During his 2023 his State of the State address, Walz alleged that Republicans “want to put bullies in charge of your health care,” while he would “put bullies in their place. And that’s why we protected access to gender-affirming health care.”

Walz, who has been accused of opportunism, may believe his association with the GSA Network boosts his standing with the Democratic Party’s left-wing base. In a 2018 campaign ad for governor, Walz cited his founding of his school’s GSA chapter as proof that he “can actually deliver on those progressive promises,” because he had “done it in the past.”

Walz’s ties to GSA would send a more concerning signal to the parents of children suffering from Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). Yaeli Martinez first encountered transgender ideology at an LGBTQ high school club. In time, she began to identify as a boy named “Andrew” and ran away from home. Upon learning that her mother, Abigail Martinez, did not support her gender transition, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services put the underage Yaeli into a group home. In 2019, Yaeli committed suicide by stepping in front of a moving train. (Her heartbreaking story is illustrated in the movie “Gender Transformations: The Untold Realities,” an original production of The Epoch Times.)

The Walz Family: ‘God Creates People … Gay or Straight’

Stories such as these, or those of other detransitioners left with the scars of poor adolescent decisions facilitated by adults, seem unlikely to sway Tim Walz and his wife, who appear to have a religious devotion to LGBT ideology.

“For Ms. Walz, being an ally for gay students was a matter of living up to the tenets of her Christian faith,” reported The New York Times. A spokeswoman for Gwen Walz, Claire Lancaster, told the newspaper that Mrs. Walz holds a “strong belief that God creates people in the way they are supposed to be, whether that is gay or straight.” President Joe Biden has expressed similar sentiments.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has described Tim Walz as “steeped in the Catholic social justice traditions of his parents.” However, the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that sodomy is a grave sin that can never be approved:

“Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.”

If Tim Walz rejects the Roman Catholic Church’s binding doctrine on faith and morals, he is also out of step with U.S. voters. Earlier this month, former President Donald Trump contrasted Walz’s extreme views with the mainstream of the American electorate. “This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner,” said Trump. “He’s very heavy into transgender — anything transgender he thinks is great.”

“He’s not where the country is on anything,” Trump concluded.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

American Voters Don’t Like Dems’ Plans to Reshape SCOTUS

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Kamala Harris Promises to Impose Abortion on All 50 States as President thumbnail

Kamala Harris Promises to Impose Abortion on All 50 States as President

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By Family Research Council

Kamala Harris promised to use the federal government to expand abortion nationwide, because Americans cannot “truly be prosperous” without abortion, and pro-life Americans are “out of their minds,” said Harris while accepting the Democratic presidential nomination Thursday night.

Harris basked in the glow of the audience as she stood at the podium of the United Center in Chicago to deliver an acceptance speech long on personal history but slight on policy specifics, aside from a vow to extend the abortion industry into all 50 states, irrespective of each state’s individual laws.

“When Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law,” candidate Harris vowed.

Jarringly, as Harris made those remarks, the official DNC video feed of the acceptance speech panned out to feature a baby in the crowd.

Although Harris did not name a specific bill, the Biden-Harris administration has endorsed, the so-called “Women’s Health Protection” Act, which goes far beyond the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling by striking down more than 1,300 state pro-life protections including laws:

  • Prohibiting sex-selective abortions;
  • Barring many abortions after viability;
  • Preventing abortions on babies 20 weeks or older, who are capable of feeling pain;
  • Disallowing abortions undertaken without parental consent or notification;
  • Prohibiting telemedicine abortion drug prescriptions, which involve no in-person medical examination;
  • Banning unlicensed individuals from carrying out abortions;
  • Allowing pregnant mothers to receive scientifically accurate information about their babies’ development, or to see an ultrasound or hear the child’s fetal heartbeat; and
  • Allowing pro-life medical professionals the right to refuse to participate in an abortion.

A more modest national abortion expansion bill, dubbed the Reproductive Choice Act co-sponsored by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), would reestablish the guidelines of the Roe and Casey decisions. However, Senate Democrats and the Biden-Harris administration have favored the more sweeping, top-down WHP bill.

The abortion issue emerged as the convention’s defining issue, referred to by one speaker after another. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), an outspoken advocate of national abortion expansion and regulation of pro-life pregnancy resource centers, promised earlier in the evening that Kamala Harris will “take on the right-wing extremists who think they should decide who has access to abortion or IVF. Kamala will protect abortion rights nationwide.” Warren inadvertently put abortion in a separate category from health care, stating that the Democratic Party’s agenda consisted of “groceries, gas, housing, health care, taxes, abortion.” Earlier in the evening, former Rep. Gabrielle Gifford of Arizona, who was shot while in office, said, “Kamala can beat the gun lobby. … She will protect abortion access!”

Harris’s acceptance speech signaled a further break with past candidates such as President Bill Clinton, who spoke on Wednesday night; as candidate, Clinton said abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Harris, who has spent much of the last two years since the Dobbs decision as the White House point person on abortion, extolled abortion as a vital component of American liberty.

“I believe America cannot truly be prosperous unless Americans are fully able to make their own decisions about their own lives,” said Harris moments before invoking “reproductive freedom,” the convention’s preferred euphemism for abortion-on-demand. Her words echoed those of Oprah Winfrey on Thursday night that abortion is part of “the American dream.”

Pro-life advocates pushed back forcefully on the notion. “Not being allowed to kill your child does not equate to slavery,” responded Bryan Kemper, an Ohio-based pro-life advocate.

In office, Harris has seen her administration give the green light for abortionists to mail the abortion pill, mifepristone, to pro-life states in violation of federal law and furnish taxpayer-funded leave to pregnant members of the military who travel out of pro-life states to undergo an abortion.

Moments after promising to allow surgical abortion throughout the country, Harris slammed her political opponents for pro-life positions they never adopted. “We know, and we know what a second Trump term would look like. It’s all laid out in Project 2025,” insisted Harris, although CNN’s fact-checker ranked Democrats’ continual references to the Heritage Foundation project — which President Trump has publicly disdained — false.

Trump “and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion, and enact a nationwide abortion ban, with or without Congress,” Harris claimed. “And get this — get this! He plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator, and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.”

“Simply put, they are out of their minds,” Harris thundered.

The demur 2024 Republican Party platform does not promise to enact any federal pro-life protection and leaves all new legislation protecting the unborn to the states, a position President Trump has reiterated consistently. His campaign and allies denied Harris’s allegations. “Fact Check: there is no circumstance in which Trump wants to track and monitor miscarriages,” retorted Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah). “President Trump has REPEATEDLY stated he will not sign a federal abortion ban. Kamala is a liar,” said Trump 2024 National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Yet Harris’s speech indicates efforts to distance the GOP from the pro-life issue have failed, and that the Democrats see abortion as anything but a state issue.

In economic policy, Harris vowed, “We will pass a middle-class tax cut that will benefit more than 100 million Americans.” To date, the Biden-Harris administration has proposed $7 trillion in tax hikes, according to the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee.

She also promised “to create jobs, to grow our economy and to lower the cost of everyday needs like health care and housing and groceries,” as well as to “end America’s housing shortage, and protect Social Security and Medicare.” The Biden-Harris administration presided over near-record inflation levels that peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, increasing the prices of all household staples. “A loaf of bread costs 50% more today than it did before the pandemic,” admitted Harris last Friday. “Ground beef is up almost 50%.” The price of a gallon of gasoline has increased from $2.33 in January 2021 to $3.62. “It costs a family an extra $13,300 per year for the same house compared to January 2021,” reported Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation.

Harris accused President Trump of seeking to enact “a national sales tax, call it a Trump tax, that would raise prices on middle-class families.” She is referring to his statement that he may consider an across-the-board tariff on foreign-made goods.

Like the Democratic campaign before President Joe Biden exited the race, much of the party’s rhetoric aims at demonizing President Donald Trump and placing him beyond the pale as a figure committed to overturning “our democracy.”

“The consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious,” Harris insisted on Thursday night. “He sent an armed mob to the U.S. Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers. When politicians in his own party begged him to call off the mob and send help, he did the opposite — he fanned the flames.” In fact, President Trump encouraged marchers to walk to the Capitol “peacefully” and posted a video online asking them to disperse — a video online platforms later suppressed or removed.

“Consider what he intends to do if we give him power again. Consider his explicit intent to set free violent extremists who assaulted those law enforcement officers at the Capitol; his explicit intent to jail journalists, political opponents, and anyone he sees as the enemy; his explicit intent to deploy our active-duty military against our own citizens,” said Harris.

The threat her opponent may lock up journalists rang hollow to investigator David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress. Daleiden and Sandra Merritt published undercover videos showing officials at the highest levels of Planned Parenthood describing how they perform a potentially illegal partial birth abortion to harvest and sell aborted babies’ organs to scientific researchers. After pushback from the abortion industry, then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris prosecuted the undercover reporters for filming Planned Parenthood without their express permission—something Daleiden’s lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon, likened to “60 Minutes” investigations.

Daleiden accused Harris of being “‘unburdened by what has been’ in 2016.” Daleiden reminded Harris, “As a citizen journalist, I had my home raided, work product seized at gunpoint, and spent an afternoon behind bars because of your fealty to” Planned Parenthood.

Harris attempted to appeal to moderate and undecided voters, promising to abide by the rule of law. “I know there are people of various political views watching tonight. And I want you to know, I promise to be a president for all Americans. You can always trust me to put country above party and self,” Harris proclaimed.

That echoes a promise repeatedly made at the outset of the Biden-Harris administration, which critics say turned out to be false. “I will work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did,” Biden promised just one day after the media declared him winner of the 2020 election. Biden made the same promise in his inaugural address.

Once in power, the Biden-Harris administration oversaw the first FBI raid on the home of a former president, prosecuted peaceful pro-life advocates such as Mark Houck, and attempted to recruit informants inside traditional Roman Catholic churches. This administration’s targeting of its political enemies has become so outlandish that the House Judiciary Committee formed a subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to investigate it on a case-by-case basis.

Harris’s critics, especially her Republican opponent, noted that Harris has attempted to distance herself from her own record over the last three years, and to feign powerlessness as the sitting vice president of the United States.

“Why didn’t she do the things that she’s complaining about?” asked Trump immediately after the speech on Fox News “She could have done it three and a half years ago … and she could still do them. She’s got four-and-a-half, five months left.”

“She didn’t talk about China. She didn’t talk about fracking. She didn’t talk about crime. … She didn’t talk about housing really, the trade deficit. She didn’t talk about child trafficking that she’s allowed to happen, because she’s the Border Czar and she’s presided over the weakest border.”

“She talks, but she doesn’t do. There’s no action.”

Harris’s speech concluded the 2024 Democratic National Convention. You can read The Washington Stand’s coverage of day one, day two, and day three.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

American Voters Don’t Like Dems’ Plans to Reshape SCOTUS

Court Rules in Favor of Christian Teacher Forced to Use Trans Pronouns

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

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Tim Walz Doubles Down on Pornographic Books in School at DNC

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By Family Research Council

Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz sided with radical LGBTQ activists and public school administrators in their bid to make pornographic books available to minors during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Wednesday night.

Walz, the governor of Minnesota, told the assembled DNC delegates he happily opposed parents’ wishes to protect their children’s innocence. “While other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours,” said Walz.

The book “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, which is consistently reported as the book parents object to the most, contains multiple graphic images illustrating homosexual sex, sometimes between adolescents.

Another controversial book, “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison, features a character who casually reveals that, as a child, he performed fellatio on a grown man. “I was in fourth grade. It was no big deal,” the character said. “It wasn’t terrible.”

Concerned parents would like to see these books, which are often available to minors of any age, moved to an age-restricted area of the library, where they would be available to minors only with their parents’ permission. But Democrats have repeatedly accused them of censorship and voted to keep the books on school shelves.

“This is a big part of what this election is about: freedom,” said Walz in a 17-minute address. “When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office.” It was not clear if Walz’s comments referred to transgender procedures for minors or abortion-on-demand until the moment of birth, both of which he favors.

Accusing parents who refuse to furnish pornography to their children of supporting “book bans” has been a leitmotif of the 2024 Democratic convention, with former First Lady Michelle Obama sounding similar themes on Tuesday. Just before Walz took the stage, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D) — whom Harris ruled out as a potential running mate to avoid offending anti-Israeli protesters — defined children’s ability to override their parents’ wishes vis-à-vis reading sexually explicit material as an essential component of freedom.

“It’s not freedom to tell our children what books they’re allowed to read. No, it’s not!” said Shapiro. “And it’s not freedom to tell women what they can do with their body.”

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg concluded his speech Wednesday night by shouting that Democrats “embrace the leaders who are out there building bridges and reject the ones who are out there banning books!”

Longstanding talk show host and New Age practitioner Oprah Winfrey made her first appearance at a Democratic convention Wednesday night and joined in on the “book ban” bandwagon, decrying “people who want to scare you, who want to rule you, people who would have you believe that books are dangerous.” She also warned about “tricks and tropes meant to distract us from what really matters.” Democrats often define GOP opposition to left-wing culture wars as a “distraction.”

Walz and his fellow Democrats went on to include the ability to take unborn life as an unalienable aspect of “freedom.” Walz boasted, “We also protected reproductive freedom” in Minnesota, where he signed a bill essentially codifying abortion until birth, with no protections for the unborn child at any stage of development.

“We are the party of real freedom,” Shapiro declared to his fellow Democrats. “Real freedom comes when [an American] can join a union, marry who she loves, start a family on her own terms,” a euphemism for abortion-on-demand. In a video aired at the DNC on Wednesday evening, a man said he defined freedom as being able to love his “husband.”

Winfrey tied the availability of abortion to the American dream. “If you do not have autonomy over this,” she said, gesturing to her midsection, “if you cannot control — women — how you choose to bring your children into this world and how they are raised and supported, there is no American dream.”

Walz and others went further, comingling their support for the taking of unborn life (and, at times, for sodomy) with the Golden Rule and other biblical themes. “We respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make — even if we wouldn’t make these same choices for ourselves. We’ve got a Golden Rule: Mind your own damned business,” said Walz, misquoting the Golden Rule laid down by Jesus to love all human life.

Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who acted as emcee for the evening, also invented Bible verses as he vowed Kamala Harris would support “LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, the right to marry who you love, the right to be free.”

“We’re not going to lose our faith,” Booker said. “I believe in America, because our elders told us, as the Gospel says, ‘We shall overcome.’” The Bible does not say, “We shall overcome,” which is the title of a Gospel song that became associated with the 1960s civil rights movement.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who would be the next Speaker of the House if Democrats take control of the lower chamber, alternately quoted Taylor Swift and the Book of Psalms as he promised to “protect our DREAMers, and always protect a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive health care decisions.”

“We are one nation under God,” said Jeffries just moments later. “In the Old Testament, Book of Psalms, the Scripture tells us that weeping may endure during the long night, but joy will come in the morning.”

His predecessor, Speaker of the House Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) saluted Kamala Harris as “a person of deep faith,” a trait for which Harris has not been known. “She is a leader of strength and wisdom and eloquence on policy, most recently demonstrated fighting for a woman’s right to choose” abortion on demand. Pelosi also saluted Harris for “quickly securing the nomination.”

In a speech MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow called “weird and meander-y,” 78-year-old former President Bill Clinton put the fight for abortion and sexual liberation in a different worldview. “We know that we’re being asked to fight the same fight that the forces of progress have had to fight for the last 250 years,” he insisted.

Buttigieg, who often accused his opponents of using “faith as a cudgel” during the 2020 primaries, said Wednesday night that his Republican foes support “darkness — darkness is what they are selling.”

“I believe in a better politics,” he said, citing his Episcopalian church background. Proof of a brighter future, to him, came in the nation’s rapid about-face on redefining marriage. The legal recognition of same-sex marriage “was literally impossible” 25 years ago, he noted. “This kind of life went from impossible to possible … in less than half a lifetime.”

Buttigieg also claimed same-sex marriage triumphed through “persuasion” and “politics.” In fact, voters in 31 states (including California) protected natural marriage, only to have their elections overturned by judicial activists on the Supreme Court in 2015’s Obergefell opinion.

Kamala Harris will deliver her acceptance speech on Thursday night.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

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