Monday, February 20, 2023



‘Conservatives Need Not Apply’ Under Biden Administration’s Proposed Hiring Rules

In a move that has gotten little notice in the press, the Biden administration is proposing federal hiring rules that easily could be abused to deny employment to anyone who questions liberal, woke policies, criticizes the government, or belongs to a politically incorrect organization.

The vague, nebulous language of the proposed changes in existing government hiring regulations could be exploited and allow biased government managers to put up a virtual “Conservatives Need Not Apply” sign when it comes to the federal civil service, leaving rejected applicants with little recourse.

The Office of Personnel Management, the human resources department of the federal government, proposed amendments Jan. 31 in the Federal Register to the “personnel vetting investigative and adjudicative processes for determining suitability and fitness” for government employment (88 FR 6192).

The public now has until April 3 to file comments on the proposed “Suitability and Fitness Vetting” amendments.

As the proposal explains, the term “suitability and fitness” refers to “a decision by an agency that an individual does or does not have the required level of character and conduct necessary” to work in a federal agency. This assessment has nothing to do with someone’s qualifications for a job and everything to do with a subjective assessment of a prospective employee.

Under the current regulation, 731.202(b)(7), an applicant is disqualified from employment by the federal government for “knowing and willful engagement in acts or activities designed to overthrow the U.S. Government.”

Certainly, no one disagrees with that standard, since no one should be a federal employee who has engaged in such behavior. It’s a standard question that background investigators ask a prospective employee’s listed references.

The Biden administration, however, is proposing to replace that straightforward standard with four enigmatic standards:

* Knowing engagement in acts or activities with the purpose of overthrowing Federal, State, local, or tribal government.

* Acts of force, violence, intimidation, or coercion with the purpose of denying others the free exercise of their rights under the U.S. Constitution or any state constitution.

* Attempting to indoctrinate others or to incite them to action in furtherance of illegal acts.

* Active membership or leadership in a group with knowledge of its unlawful aims, or participation in such a group with specific intent to further its unlawful aims.

The first standard above is similar to the current standard. It is not controversial. But the problem with the other three proposed standards is that they are so broad and so vague—“nuanced,” in the words of OPM’s proposal—that they will give ideologues who predominate the civil service’s ranks the ability to reject almost anyone who is critical of government policies.

Managers also could reject anyone who questions the acts and behavior of government officials or who voices opinions that don’t fit with the accepted political orthodoxy of the times, such as viewing racial preferences in hiring or college admissions as unacceptable, immoral discrimination.

Do you doubt that? Members of the progressive Left long have claimed that words and free speech are a literal form of violence, that they amount to intimidation and coercion.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., notably claims that criticism of her is “not tone, it’s violence,” and in 2018, former Vice President Joe Biden linked the rhetoric of then-President Donald Trump to mass shootings and terror bombings.

After all, if words are “venom and violence,” the Left never needs to engage in a real debate.

These are the same people who canceled “Harry Potter” novelist J.K. Rowling by arguing that her opinions on Twitter represent a violent threat to the trans community. The Left is pushing to classify as criminal hate speech any opinions with which it disagrees on issues such as illegal immigration, racial preferences, and abortion, claiming such speech “marginalizes” certain social groups.

Is expressing the opinion that there is no constitutional right to abortion an act of “intimidation” or “coercion” that denies others “the free exercise of their rights under the U.S. Constitution” under the second new character and fitness standard that the Office of Personnel Management wants to apply?

That’s probably the view of those, including the current president of the United States, who have harshly condemned the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case and claiming the high court is absolutely wrong when it says there is no right to abortion in the U.S. Constitution.

Ask yourself this: Can you imagine a government bureaucrat in charge of hiring ever claiming that opposition to liberal state abortion laws is an attempt “to indoctrinate others or to incite them to action in furtherance of illegal acts,” thereby allowing the applicant to be rejected under OPM’s third proposed standard?

It’s not hard to imagine, is it? If you’re a member or leader of a pro-life group trying to change the law in a state such as California that legalizes abortion up through birth, is that “active membership or leadership in a group” with “unlawful aims” under the fourth proposed OPM standard?

And the same is true if you express an opinion adverse to illegal immigration and illegal aliens in a sanctuary state, or object in a state that has legalized racial discrimination in admissions to state colleges and universities. You could be considered to be attempting to deny such illegal aliens or beneficiaries of discriminatory admissions policies “their rights” under state law.

If the Office of Personnel Management wants to do something to help protect “the free exercise of rights” by the public under the Constitution, it could start by investigating every federal employee within the FBI, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies that have been involved in directing social media companies to censor the opinions and views of American citizens.

Or, if OPM leaders don’t have the backbone to do that, how about investigating every federal government employee who labeled as domestic terrorists the parents who showed up at local school board meetings to complain about the racist propaganda being fed to their children? Or every government employee who targeted Catholics for their traditional views on marriage, abortion, and other issues? Or every government employee who contributed to the political persecutions of pro-life advocates through abuse of the FACE Act?

Don’t count on that happening.

So, rather than do the hard work of holding its current workforce to appropriate standards, the Office of Personnel Management wants to make it even easier on the front end for the federal government to unfairly discriminate in its hiring practices.

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Whistleblower Pulls Back Curtain on Transgender ‘Treatments’ for Minors

How did we let our children get manipulated and mutilated like this?

That’s going to be the question future generations ask about 2023, and the years preceding it, when doctors across America doled out hormones like they were Halloween candy and even in some cases removed minors’ functional body parts.

Don’t take my word for it. Jamie Reed, who describes herself as a “progressive” and who says she is “married to a transman,” wrote a terrifying account of her experience while working at a Midwestern medical center focused on transgenderism.

In her explosive article in The Free Press, Reed, who was formerly employed at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, describes a world where medical professionals rushed to encourage minors’ gender transitions, without any concern about the life-changing consequences of the treatments.

“Many encounters with patients emphasized to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds,” writes Reed. “But the center downplayed the negative consequences, and emphasized the need for transition.”

Reed’s expose comes at a time when, thankfully, lawmakers are beginning to realize that we can’t count on doctors to protect our children. Lawmakers in Georgia, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Kansas have introduced legislation that would put limits on gender transition “treatments” for minors. In Utah, Republican Gov. Spencer Cox just signed legislation banning surgeries and hormone treatment for minors.

This surge comes after a growing awareness of the issue. In 2021, Arkansas banned hormones and gender transition surgeries for minors, and a year later, Alabama followed suit. Arizona bans gender transition surgeries for minors, and in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott declared that certain gender transition medical interventions for minors could be considered child abuse and parents could be investigated and risk losing custody of their children.

Reed’s account makes it clear how crucial such laws are to protecting our kids.

At the Washington University Transgender Center, minors only needed to have seen a therapist twice, an endocrinologist once, and have a letter from a therapist to begin transitioning.

Don’t think that those three medical visits and letter provided any kind of real roadblock or opportunity for thoughtful discernment: Reed writes that the Transgender Center often referred patients to specific therapists and even provided a template letter for the therapists.

This fast track becomes even more concerning when you consider the minors coming to the center. Reed says they were often suffering from “depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity” and “were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms.”

Minors also suffered very real consequences as a result of the “treatments.” Reed writes of one minor patient suffering liver toxicity from a drug used to “block” puberty. Other consequences proved even more horrifying: One girl on testosterone called, saying she was experiencing vaginal bleeding. “In less than an hour she had soaked through an extra heavy pad, her jeans, and a towel she had wrapped around her waist,” Reed recounts.

What had happened? During sex, the young woman’s vaginal canal had ripped—testosterone apparently thins the vaginal tissues.

Reed counseled another young woman on testosterone. As a result of the hormone, her clitoris became “enlarged” and “now extended below her vulva, and it chafed and rubbed painfully in her jeans.” Reed advised her to wear compression garments. “At the end of the call I thought to myself, ‘Wow, we hurt this kid,’” she recalls.

An 18-year-old woman, who had been taking hormones since she was around 16 and who “came from an unstable family, was in an uncertain living situation, and had a history of drug use,” had her breasts removed in surgery. Three months later, she announced she was going back to she/her pronouns and told a nurse, “I want my breasts back.”

Reed relays her growing concern over how children were being treated. She was alarmed to see how the number of patients per month increased over time, and that sometimes new patients would include a group of girls from the same high school. But she was afraid to mention to the rest of the team her worries about social contagion: “Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.”

In 2019, Reed learned about detransitioners—people who began the physical gender transition process, and then stop—and desisters, people who were considering a gender transition, but ultimately do not go through the process. She and another colleague assumed that the doctors would be interested in tracking whether patients desisted or detransitioned.

But: “We were wrong,” writes Reed. “One doctor wondered aloud why he would spend time on someone who was no longer his patient.”

Talk about a compassionate response.

Washington University of St. Louis issued a statement that it was “alarmed” over the allegations in Reed’s article: “We are taking this matter very seriously and have already begun the process of looking into the situation to ascertain the facts.” Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, announced that an investigation into the Washington University Transgender Center: “We take this evidence seriously and are thoroughly investigating to make sure children are not harmed by individuals who may be more concerned with a radical social agenda than the health of children,” he said in a statement.

But for many children, it’s already too late.

The corporate media’s glowing coverage of transgender treatments for minors has allowed this madness to flourish. “Puberty blockers” sounds so much less concerning than cancer drugs prescribed off label that may cause sterilization. “Gender-affirming surgeries” sounds very different than “breast removal surgery,” or dare I say, “genital mutilation surgery.”

Minors do not have the maturity to make these decisions that will haunt the rest of their lives. Just consider Chloe Cole, who had a double mastectomy at 15. A year later, she learned in a phsycology class about how breastfeeding played a “role in the bond between mother and child, and that bond goes on to affect that child’s later cognitive and emotional and social functioning,” she told my colleague Virginia Allen.

“Upon reading this, I felt like a monster,” Cole added. “I realized that I took something not only [from] myself, but also potentially from my future children. I think that’s when the realization really hit that I shouldn’t have been allowed to go through this.”

She’s right: She shouldn’t have been allowed. Let’s hope we’re moving toward an America where fewer teens will be regretting their childhood decisions to permanently mutilate their bodies.

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DeSantis Proposes 5-Point 'Digital Bill of Rights' to Protect Citizens from Big Tech

On Wednesday, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his proposal called the “Digital Bill of Rights” aimed at protecting the people of Florida from big tech companies. This proposal is designed to safeguard citizens from the potential overreach of these companies and their harmful practices.

By now, most of us have seen the “Twitter Files,” and if you haven’t, you should. It’s deeply concerning how rooted Big Tech has been in our politics, FBI, censorship and lives in general.

Something’s got to give, and it looks like DeSantis is doing just that.

Under this bill, Floridians will have the right to participate in online platforms without being subjected to censorship, to engage in private conversations without surveillance by Big Tech and to be informed of how search engines manipulate search results.

The proposed bill will also protect children from “online harms” and prevent companies from selling minors’ information without the consent of their parents. These are great and necessary things that need to be implemented in the social media cesspool.

When you think about our society, and how most of it is lived online, it is frightening to think of the level of censorship, disinformation and breaches of privacy that it has had. If most of the time people are on their devices, then most of the time they are existing in a polluted, parallel reality which is mostly distorted.

The ills that it has caused society are too immeasurable to list. If you lived any of your life as an adult without social media, you remember the tranquility we once had.

We move faster, longer and with less direction than ever before. Therefore, it is imperative that something be done to reign this mess in. Enter the the governor of Florida.

DeSantis explained that unauthorized surveillance through cell phones would not be allowed and companies would be prohibited from collecting and retaining personal information, such as GPS location and biometric data, without express authorization.

You mean we won’t be tracked without our knowledge?

Nice! It’s almost like we live in America where that is part of our unalienable rights. When you think about it: If there were ever going to be a chance to take down America, this is it. It won’t be through military might or muscle, it will be by our own addiction to our devices and social media — and the evil forces who exploit it

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False Australian history

There’s no end to the Woke, cultural-left pushing ‘Yes’ to the Indigenous Voice in the nation’s classrooms. The left-leaning Australian Education Union fully supports the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ and argues Truth-Telling should be taught ‘in schools through and in the curriculum and in the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers’.

Schools across Australia are teaching Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu to students; a book criticised by Peter O’Brien as well as Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe as misleading and inaccurate in its depiction of Aboriginal history and culture as sophisticated.

In Victoria, the Minister for Education Natalie Hutchins, who subsequently tried to walk back on the comment, states that ‘the Voice referendum will be a defining moment in our nation’s history’ and it should be dealt with in schools as students need to understand ‘Victoria’s journey to the Treaty’.

Not surprisingly, a poetry anthology set for Victoria’s Year 12 English titled False Claims Of Colonial Thieves by Charmaine Papertalk-Green and John Kinsella is yet another disturbing example of the school curriculum being used to indoctrinate vulnerable students regarding Aboriginal exploitation and oppression.

According to the reviewer at the Sydney Arts Guide the poetry anthology is ‘a pin prickling polemic’ where the poems are ‘flinty and unflinching’ and act like ‘depth charges of various C-bombs – Colonisation, Capitalism, Culture, and Country’. The reviewer lauds the two authors for exposing the ‘genocide, rape, and apartheid’ inflicted as a result of European settlement.

Bruce Pascoe, made famous by his assertion Aborigines were highly civilised at the time of the First Fleet, also recommends the anthology. Pascoe writes the poets ‘take no prisoners’ and that it is not for the light-hearted as it depicts the ‘darkness’ at the heart of Australia.

The historian Geoffrey Blainey uses the expression the ‘black armband’ view to describe those guilty of painting the nation’s history as violent, oppressive, racist, and Eurocentric. Often ignored is that Blainey also condemns the ‘three cheers’ view.

The Year 12 anthology provides multiple examples of the black armband view. One poem talks about ‘past injustices, cultural cruelty, cultural genocide’ while another begins with the lines ‘the State is killing our souls, the State has murdered the people’.

A third poem titled Always Thieves argues those who arrived as a result of 1788, including ‘colonial officers, convicts, settlers, free man’ are all thieves and that the injustice and theft continues to this day involving ‘mining companies, politicians, governments’ with ‘dirty hands coated with traces of blood’.

A fourth poem called Don’t mine me leaves students in no doubt as to who deserves to be condemned when the poets write: ‘Don’t mind me Australia… While you are busy… Sticking explosives everywhere… Getting a hard-on blowing up land… Pumping chemicals deep into mother… Drip feeding our waters with poison.’

Drawing on post-colonial theory and the Black Lives Matter movement where the assumption is societies like Australia are structurally racist, the anthology tells students Indigenous voices are always silenced when they write, ‘You don’t want me to talk about… The concept and construct of whiteness.’

It’s ironic, at the same time the two poets in the prologue argue mining companies are guilty of inflicting propaganda on schools about the value and importance of mining they appear unaware that students being made to study their poetry is guilty of the same sin.

One of the exercises related to the False Claims of Colonial Thieves anthology, after adopting the persona of an exploited Aboriginal community, asks students to write to mining companies like BHP telling them to stop exploiting Aboriginal land and destroying the environment.

Even worse, as argued by Mark Lopez in School Sucks and who tutors Year 12 students in Victoria, the reality is the poetry anthology is just one of many chosen texts that ‘are overwhelmingly politically correct and left-wing’.

While students across Australia are presented with a jaundiced and one-sided view of Indigenous affairs and the impact of European settlement ignored are the facts, compared to the Uyghurs in China and the Kurds in the Middle East, Aborigines have achieved equality and the sins of the past long since been addressed.

Aborigines are Australian citizens, have equal rights, and at just over 3 per cent of the population receive approximately $30 billion a year in federal government support and benefits. As a result of the High Court Mabo decision, they also have extensive land rights to over 54 per cent of Australia’s land mass.

Instead of schools presenting students with an objective and impartial account of controversial issues like the Voice to Parliament the sad fact is the cultural-left has long succeeded in using the school curriculum to advance its ideology. Worse still, this has happened under both left-leaning and conservative governments, state and commonwealth.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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