Goldberg suggests Bible supports transitioning children!

I can find nothing like that in the Bible. Jesus was concerned with the spiritual welfare of chidren. He said, "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 19:14), but said nothing about hacking off their body parts. Once again Goldberg defiles the Ashkenazi surname she wrongfully uses. Her real name is Caryn Elaine Johnson

Whoopi Goldberg recently made a statement that shocked many people. On Thursday’s broadcast of ABC’s daytime talk show “The View,” she suggested that the Bible would support parents having the right to subject their minor children to sex reassignment surgeries.

“Now, what the hell is going on in this country? That’s what I want to know,” Goldberg began, asserting that Republicans had simply voted to punish Zephyr because they didn’t like being forced to listen to an opposing point of view.

“What are the rules that say, ‘I don’t like what you’re saying, so I’m going to get a whole bunch of people to think like I think and we’re going to ban you from talking,’” Goldberg continued. “When did that become the law of the land?”

The conversation stemmed from a Montana lawmaker, Zooey Zephyr, who is trans-identifying and who faced disciplinary action for breaking the rules of decorum. Zephyr lashed out at Republican colleagues who opposed transgender surgeries for minors.

Goldberg and co-host Sunny Hostin criticized the move, claiming it was proof that Republicans were banning speech.

But Whoopi’s statement was the most shocking. She claimed that if the GOP believed in parental rights then parents should be able to consent to life-altering and irreversible procedures for their children. She even went as far as to say, “God was really clear!”

It’s hard to believe that Goldberg would suggest such a thing. It’s even more disturbing to think of how she could believe that the Bible would support taking away a minor’s right to make their own decision about their body.

Gender transition treatments are not only dangerous, but they can have long-term psychological and physical consequences. No one should be pressuring a child to undergo such treatments. It’s important that parents talk to their children about the risks and give them the opportunity to make their own decisions.

https://libertyonenews.com/god-was-really-clear-goldberg-suggests-bible-supports-transitioning-children/

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From transgendered to 'transabled': Now people are 'choosing' to identify as handicapped

A troubling societal issue called "transableism" is attracting attention these days.

Transableism is a newer term for BIID, or "Body Integrity Identity Disorder," in which a person actually "identifies" as handicapped.

BIID has been relabeled to transableism to align with today's trans community, according to some.

The point of "changing the identifier" from a psychiatric condition (BIID) to an advocacy term (transableism) is to "harness the stunning cultural power of gender ideology" to the cause of allowing doctors to "treat" BIID patients by "amputating healthy limbs, snipping spinal cords or destroying eyesight," according to Evolution News and Science Today (EN), which reports on and analyzes evolution, neuroscience, bioethics, intelligent design and other science-related issues.

Culturally, transableism is "the next abyss," that site also notes.

In one case, a woman in her 50s in Oslo, Norway, identifies as disabled and uses a wheelchair, although she has no physical handicap. (iStock)

Why?

Because "some of these persons mutilate themselves; others ask surgeons for an amputation or for the transection of their spinal cord," that site adds of the shocking steps some are taking.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) notes on its website, "Those with BIID desire the amputation of one or more healthy limbs or desire a paralysis."

A North Carolina college student called transableism a "cry for attention."

The 24-year-old told Fox News Digital, "It’s offensive to people who actually suffer from the condition that you say you need, in order to be your true self." "It’s offensive to people who actually suffer from the condition."

He went on, "It’s embarrassing, and I don’t know if you can be considered a serious human being if you alter your body like this, instead of getting the appropriate mental help you need."

In one case of BIID, Jørund Viktoria Alme, 53, a senior credit analyst in Oslo, Norway, identifies as disabled and uses a wheelchair, even though she has no physical handicap.

Alme is also transgender, according to Heraldscotland.com. Alme said on the morning TV program "Good Morning Norway" in 2022 that it had been a "lifelong wish" to have been born "a woman paralyzed from the waist down," the same source noted.

One woman in her 20s (not pictured) identified as blind but wasn't — and even took steps to try to destroy her own eyesight, according to multiple reports. (iStock)

In an even more shocking case, a 21-year-old North Carolina woman who identified as blind actually took steps to destroy her own eyesight, according to multiple reports from a few years ago.

One Arizona internist called today's transableism a "delusional disorder."

"In my opinion, both transgender and transabled persons suffer from a delusional disorder," Jane Orient, a general internist in Tucson, Arizona, and executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, told Fox News Digital via email.

"The Oath of Hippocrates adjures physicians to do no harm," Orient said. "Mutilating the body is an objective harm even if makes the patient subjectively feel better," she added.

"The disability is lifelong and imposes burdens on others — and neither patients nor physicians can duck responsibility for that."

Orient also noted, "With transgenders the follow-up is generally very short — not sure about the [follow-up with] elective amputees," she said.

"The ‘no other way’ [to cope with the condition] excuse is a cop out; we need to find other ways," she also said. "Denial of reality is anti-scientific."

Dr. Marc Siegel, a clinical professor of medicine and a practicing internist at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City — as well as a Fox News medical contributor — told Fox News Digital via email that most doctors will "only perform procedures they feel are medically indicated."

Siegel referred to Munchausen syndrome, which is a "factitious disorder" in which a person "repeatedly and deliberately acts as if they have a physical or mental illness" when they are not really sick, according to WebMd.com.

Dr. Siegel continued, "We deal with Munchausen and Munchausen by proxy, where patients can be quite convincing about illnesses they don't really have — and we need to be on the lookout for this."

https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/transgendered-transabled-people-choosing-identify-handicapped

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The problem with ‘trans women are women’

Once upon a time, pollsters would phone you up and ask how satisfied you were with the railways on a scale of one to ten, or how you intended to vote in the next general election. These days — as in the UnHerd Britain poll, published today — you might equally be asked to pronounce on the deep metaphysics of womanhood. And indeed, on that most vexed of contemporary scholastic questions, namely whether “trans women are women”, it seems the jury is still out. According to the poll, 33% of us agree, 33% disagree, and 34% do neither.

Perhaps puzzlingly, this is despite the fact that, faced with practical questions about women’s spaces and women’s sports, there seems to be significant agreement that trans women should keep out of both. Had the latter results been the only ones revealed today, they surely would have suggested that, when push comes to shove, most people do not believe that trans women are women. For the alternative doesn’t add up: large sections of the British public believe there is a kind of anomalously shaped, baritone-voiced woman out there who also, for some reason, shouldn’t be allowed in a female changing room or on the sports field with other women.

A similar impression of confusion in the public mind emerges when the answers to two further poll questions are compared. A majority of respondents agreed that “people should be able to identify as being of a different gender to the one they had recorded at birth”. However, there was markedly less enthusiasm for making it easier to change “legal gender”. This too looks like a strange juxtaposition, at least at first.

In this case, though, the disparity is presumably explained by the fact that “to identify as being of a different gender” in the first question has been interpreted by respondents as nothing much more meaningful than donning fancy dress. To “identify” here mainly refers to men saying that they feel like women, and women saying that they feel like men (or at least, don’t feel like women) — perhaps with some non-conforming clothing thrown in for good measure. It would be an illiberal state indeed that tried to outlaw any of this, and at odds with our generally tolerant national character to try. Still, for poll respondents, rightly allowing people to express themselves freely doesn’t seem to have entailed that we should start handing out gender recognition certificates on the strength of it.

Yet the “trans women are women” answer remains an intriguing one. To my mind, the fact that 34% neither agree nor disagree is telling. And I don’t blame people for feeling befuddled. Pollsters inherit the limitations of dominant public ways of framing particular issues — and there is no more confusing framing than “trans women are women”. For a start, there’s the fact that the phrase functions like a mantra. As transactivists who frequently deploy the phrase no doubt realise, the repetition of the word “women” produces a slightly hypnotic effect. After all, it looks tautological — a bit like asking whether sausage dogs are dogs, or armchairs are chairs.

More fundamentally, there’s a widespread lack of clarity about who counts as a “trans woman” — a characteristic starkly exhibited in recent days by Scotland’s First Transactivist, Nicola Sturgeon. Is a trans woman someone who has had surgery to remove penis and testicles, and had a simulacrum of a vagina put there instead? Does being a trans woman require you to have taken artificial oestrogen for years, or to have had your natal testosterone suppressed? Do you have to own a gender recognition certificate?

Or does the category include men who don’t have any special legal status, and who only cross-dress, and perhaps don’t even bother doing that? Does it include convicted rapists who suddenly find a feeling of womanhood welling up within their bosoms on the way to a sentencing hearing? The more confusion there is about who counts as a trans woman, the less likely it is that people will be able to answer whether a trans woman is a woman or not with any certainty.

Whatever the source of the public’s confusion, it’s a testament to the dogged persistence of the LGBT+ lobbying sector that there is meaningful disagreement about the matter at all. For however you look at the polling, it still suggests that a significant proportion of the general population now think adult human males can change their sex by some kind of behavioural process — whether that’s a medical, legal, or merely sartorial one, or even just muttering “I’m a woman now” to your lawyer as the prospect of a male prison looms.

This bizarre epistemic situation did not arise on its own. Lamentable as the national standard of secondary school biology probably is, it still seems unlikely that many of us have mixed up human beings with sequential hermaphrodites. Clownfish, for instance, really can change their sex, going from the production of eggs to sperm over the course of a single lifetime. But — not to put too fine a point on it — humans aren’t fish.

And nor, I think, should we pay any attention to academics coughing and spluttering about the supposedly well-understood distinction between “sex” and “gender”. According to some of them, when someone says that a trans woman is a woman, they are not talking about adult human females at all. Rather, the speaker has accurately grasped something much more intellectually sophisticated — that womanhood is a “gender”, which some adult human males can come to possess, and some adult human females can shed.

The makers of this point conveniently ignore the fact that “gender” is used in multiple ambiguous ways these days, including as a polite synonym for biological sex, and alternatively as a name for a set of social stereotypes for femininity and masculinity. If you ask these same academics if they mean that womanhood is a matter of liking pink glittery things and tottering about on high heels, they get quite cross. And if you ask them to further explain what they think womanhood is then, if not conforming to sexist stereotypes, they may try to get you fired from your job. Either way, the idea that the general public is motivated by a deep comprehension of gender studies arcana seems to me somewhat optimistic.

So really, the victory here — if it can be called that — belongs almost entirely to organisations such as Stonewall, Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence, All About Trans, the Scottish Equality Network, and associated pals in the rainbow-hued phalanx. You really do have to hand it to them. Quite astonishingly, they have turned what used to be a boringly factual matter about whether Xs were Ys into a quasi-religious question revealing the respondent’s personal values. And at least to some extent, it has clearly worked.

https://unherd.com/2023/02/the-problem-with-trans-women-are-women/?cx_testId=4&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=3&cx_experienceId=EXHVQEIQA4S9#cxrecs_s

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Dislike of fat is racist (?)

Some very devious reasoning below

Research has found weight-based shaming to be profoundly damaging when coming from family and friends. Plus, family members and friends often discriminate against larger people by discussing diets, teasing people about their weight, commenting on the shapes and sizes of others, and more. Intense shame can result, which can lead to disordered eating behaviors and the psychological and physiological challenges mentioned above.

Is fatphobia rooted in racism?

According to Sabrina Strings, author of “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia,” fatphobia has its roots in the transatlantic slave trade, in which colonists asserted that Black people were prone to gluttony and sexual excess and that their love of food caused them to be fat. European colonists claimed moral superiority, valuing moderation and self-control, which made them thin, and, according to them, “the superior race.” By the early 1800s, fatness was considered a sign of immorality in the U.S., as well as racial inferiority.

Ultimately, people used body size and shape to distinguish between those who were enslaved and those who were free since skin color wasn’t necessarily a reliable indicator (due to two hundred years of interracial sex, mostly rape, when enslavers bred their enslaved). Essentially, larger bodies were deemed undeserving of freedom. And these anti-fat, anti-Black attitudes persist well into current times due to modern medical practices.

Doctors are some of the most common perpetuators of fatphobia and weight discrimination. Research shows that they spend less time with larger people on office visits, provide them with less medical information, and often hold biased, stigmatizing views of fat people, including that they are non-compliant or undisciplined.1

Is BMI racist and inaccurate?

You’ve likely heard of Body Mass Index (BMI) as a measurement of healthy weight. It’s used everywhere, from doctors’ offices to schools to places of employment. It is even responsible for the infamous “fat letters” many schools sent home to parents of students.

But BMI isn’t actually an accurate indicator of health. It is simply a person’s weight-to-height ratio. It doesn’t take any other factors into account, such as muscularity, biological and environmental influences, bone density, and beyond. For example, someone with a lot of muscle mass may have a BMI that falls in the “obese” range.

Generally speaking, proponents of BMI claim that a high BMI will lead to disease, negative health risks, and even premature death. But research has shown that BMI alone is a poor measurement of health and mortality. In fact, the exact opposite is true.

Research by Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has shown that being overweight is actually associated with a lower mortality rate. Research by Dr. Tomiyama, director of UCLA’s Dieting, Stress and Health Laboratory, has debunked the accuracy of BMI, as well. Her research, which involved measuring health according to glucose, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, and blood pressure, found that over 47% of U.S. adults who fall into the “overweight” range for BMI are healthy, as well as nearly 20 million people who are considered "obese."7

https://learn.withinhealth.com/articles/the-racist-history-of-fatphobia-and-weight-stigma

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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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Single people should be valued and Jesus was single, Church of England says

What a lot of nonsense. Jesus was a bachelor and bachelors have long been regarded as glamorous. Nothing new to see here

Single people “must be valued at the heart of our society” just as much as couples and families, a major new report by the Church of England has stated.

Pointing to the fact that Jesus himself wasn’t shacked up, the 236-page report, Love Matters, said that the church should “not regard [singleness] as lesser than living in a couple relationship”.

“We have an amazing opportunity to reimagine a diverse society in which all families and loving relationships are valued and strengthened, promoting the stability that enables us all to thrive in a variety of family constellations, including being single.”

The result of a two-year commission examining relationships and families ordered by the archbishops of Canterbury and York, Love Matters was the third in a trilogy of commissions; the first two reports dealt with housing and social care.

The report acknowledged that an increased number of people elect to be single, adding that loving relationships matter just as much to singles as to anyone who is married with a family.

“Singleness can be a deliberate choice – sometimes the right partner has not been found, and sometimes separation, divorce or death has resulted in the loss of a partner,” it said.

“Inevitably, singleness does not imply celibacy, although this is the choice some single people in faith communities make.

“The Commission believes strongly that single people must be valued at the heart of our society. Jesus’ own singleness should ensure that the C of E celebrates singleness and does not regard it as lesser than living in a couple relationship. Loving relationships and being able to give and receive love matter to everyone.”

The Church of England was also recommended to offer relationship preparation and support “to be available to all couples planning to marry. Ideally this would also be available to couples planning to cohabit and those planning to marry in a civil ceremony”.

It urged the government “to invest in accessible and affordable relationship support … for all couples facing relationship difficulties, long before the relationship breaks down”.

The call to “honour” singleness comes after the Church of England in February announced it would consider introducing gender-neutral pronouns for God when conducting religious teachings.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/single-people-should-be-valued-and-jesus-was-single-church-of-england-says/news-story/306e60c3826c08218173eb2ee89281f6

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The Truth About America’s History of Slavery

The kids are given the impression that America was uniquely bad and that American slavery was uniquely bad. They learn nothing about slavery elsewhere. Among the many lies they are told are that “black slaves built America” and that America is systemically racist.

Since the only mortal enemy of the Left is truth, here are some truths about slavery.

America’s Slavery Compared to Slavery Elsewhere
If you are interested in morality and committed to truth, you do not ask, “Who had slaves?” You ask, “Who ended slavery?”

Who had slaves?

Every civilization throughout history had slaves: Asian societies, Africans, Native Americans, and other Indigenous peoples around the world, and the Muslim/Arab world, which may have had the most slaves of all.

Who ended slavery?

There was only one thing unique about slavery in the West: It raised the issue of the morality of slavery, ferociously debated it, and finally abolished it there, before it was abolished in any other civilization.

If you care about moral truth rather than, for example, promoting America-hatred, you must recognize—and you must teach—that America was one of the first slave-holding societies to abolish slavery. This even includes Africa.

Cornell professor Sandra Greene, a black scholar of African history, notes, “Slavery in the United States ended in 1865, but in West Africa it was not legally ended until 1875, and then it stretched on unofficially until almost World War I.”

The numbers of slaves.

According to the authoritative SlaveVoyages.org, the total number of black slaves imported from Africa into America was 305,326. The number of black slaves other countries imported from Africa into the rest of the New World—i.e., into the Caribbean and South America—was 12,521,337.

In other words, other countries imported 41 times the number of black slaves into the Western Hemisphere than the United States did, including the years before American independence).

Yet, the American Left never mentions this important moral point—because the Left-controlled education system suppresses facts it finds inconvenient, and the Left is not interested in morality or truth, but in vilifying America.

And then there is Arab/Muslim enslavement of blacks. Professor Paul Lovejoy, in his “Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa” (Cambridge University Press, 2012), reveals that from the beginning of Islam in the seventh century through the year 1600, the estimated number of Africans enslaved by Muslims was about 7 million. After 1600, it was about a million per year.

Do American students ever learn about the Arab/Muslim slave trade? How many know, for example, that a great percentage of the African male slaves were castrated so that they could not have families?

‘Black Slaves Built America’

This is another lie of the Left.

Those who make this argument point to the lucrative cotton manufacturing and trade in the 19th century—the industry in which black slaves were primarily used in the American South.

But University of Illinois professor of economics Deirdre McCloskey answered this:

Growing cotton, unlike sugar or rice, never required slavery. By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860. Cotton was not a slave crop in India or in southwest China, where it was grown in bulk … That slaves produced cotton does not imply that they were essential or causal in the production …

The United States and the United Kingdom and the rest would have become just as rich without the 250 years of unrequited toil. They have remained rich, observe, even after the peculiar institution was abolished, because their riches did not depend on its sinfulness.

But one need not know anything about cotton to understand how false “Black slaves built America” is. All you need is common sense.

First, even if slavery accounted for much of the wealth of the South, the Civil War that brought slavery to an end in the United States wiped out nearly all of that wealth and cost the Union billions (in today’s dollars).

Second, if slavery built the American economy, the most robust economy in world history, why didn’t Brazil become an economic superpower? Brazil imported 4 million black slaves, about 12 times as many as America. Why did the slave-owning American South lag so far behind the North economically?

Why did England, which, though it played a major role in the transatlantic slave trade until the beginning of the 19th century, had almost no slaves, become the most advanced economy of the 19th century?

“Black slaves built America” is left-wing propaganda to vilify America and to discredit capitalism.

“America is systemically racist.”

This is the Great Left Lie.

Four million black people have emigrated to the United States since the 1960s—and tens of millions more would if they could. Are they all fools? Why would anyone move to a country that is systemically bigoted against them? Did any Jews emigrate to Germany in the 1930s?

Blacks have emigrated to the United States because they know what Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the black woman who fled her homeland of Somalia and who now writes and lectures in America, knows:

What the media do not tell you is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans, or what have you.

Blacks emigrating to America know what Algerian writer Kamel Daoud, writing in Le Monde and Le Point, knows:

It is forbidden to say that the West is also the place to which we flee when we want to escape the injustice of our country of origin, dictatorship, war, hunger, or simply boredom. It is fashionable to say that the West is guilty of everything.

As regards American slavery and everything else, always remember this: Truth is a liberal value, and truth is a conservative value. It is not a left-wing value.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/18/slavery-the-left-and-truth

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Why Dems Must Defend Deviancy

It curries favour with their female voters

It must be spring!

Rainbow-colored virtue-signaling yard signs are sprouting up in front of some homes in wealthy suburbs, an indication they are occupied by affluent “white privilege” Democrats. Many of these leftist protagonists are inheritance welfare liberals, the effluent of generational wealth and privilege, who choose to live in the safety and comfort of suburbia, with their enclaves of clubs and finer eating establishments.

These “truly enlightened” Demo elitists harbor fear of and contempt for grassroots Americans, in part because they have little social intersection with those who form the backbone of our nation. They arrogantly deride the foundational family and faith values that are common among grassroots folks. And they certainly don’t understand our embrace of American Liberty, the antithesis of the statist government power they advocate.

Despite their confident facade, these suburban lefties are an insecure lot who are quick to embrace the latest virtue identity fad.

When Donald Trump was president, they displayed their “Hate Has No Home Here” yard signs, expressing their disdain for “We, the [Deplorable] People.” Ahead of the 2020 election, they put out their phony “Black Lives Matter” signs while dispensing barrels of their BLM elixir, thinking it would ingratiate them with those off-color minorities who mostly loathe rich liberals.

They would never acknowledge that black lives don’t matter to the Demo hate hustlers they put in power — those who long ago betrayed the legacies of Frederick Douglass, Booker Washington, and Martin King in order to keep poor black and brown people their dependents.

After the virtue signalers elected Joe Biden, who promptly enabled Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, they laughingly replaced their Biden yard signs with plastic Ukrainian flag signs.

The vast majority of these suburban leftists have never raised their hand to “to support and defend” our country, or anything else. They depend on the grassroots folks for their protection, whether from gangbangers who venture into their neighborhoods or despots in foreign lands.

One of the virtue-signaling signs that reemerges once the other signs have worn out their usefulness is the Rainbow Mafia version — you know, variations of rainbow colors that also adorn the backs of vehicles. That theme, in support of the Left’s gender-confusion cult, has become the most prolific of the Demo virtue projections, an excessive emphasis that at first glance seems curious.

Amid all the issues that Democrats should focus on if they’re serious about “lifting up” their constituents, why do their national, state, and local leftist cadres expend so much highly visible political capital defending abject gender deviance?

That deviance now increasingly includes the most offensive of the aberrant offenders, including “transgender” men competing as women in sports, trans groomers infiltrating elementary schools as teachers, drag queen kindergarten groomers, and now, even the most grotesque of the bunch, child gender mutilators who are profiting from cutting body parts off of children.

Democrats are even passing legislation to remove children from parents who won’t allow their child to be chemically or physically mutilated.

Defending even these absurd outlying manifestations of gender confusion is critical to the Demos’ gender cult agenda, which struck deep into the heartland of normalcy when Biden signed the so-called Respect for Marriage Act — which is anything but. Last week, every House Demo voted against a bill to restrict men from competing as women in sports. Biden had already signaled he would veto it.

So, what is the political strategy behind the Demo defense of their most deviant and delusional constituents? Why expend so much political time and energy on this defense?

So quick are Demos to defend these “special” constituents that after a gender-confused assailant murdered six people at a Nashville Christian school, they pulled out all the stops to deflect attention from the assailant’s gender pathology, including by promoting yard signs that note “Protect Kids, Not Guns.” Ironically, those signs include rainbow lettering.

The Nashville case provides the evidential trail exposing the Demo deviant defense political strategy. Hint: It’s all about female voters

After the attack, Nashville Police Chief John Drake announced, “We have a manifesto, we have some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident,” including “a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.” He added that the assailant was “prepared to do more harm than was actually done.”

Drake indicated the writings would be released to the public, but as I wrote at the time, I doubted that would happen because that “manifesto” might connect the dots confirming this was a hate crime.

Recall that the Nashville attack occurred just ahead of the “Trans Day of Vengeance.” And on that day of vengeance, a gender-confused Colorado Springs man was arrested after the discovery of his hate manifesto detailing his plans to attack schools and churches. (Notably, information about that case was not released to the public until six days after the suspect was arrested for reasons not explained.)

Now, four weeks after the Nashville assault, the assailant’s writings indicating her motive have still not been released. No dots to connect here; move along.

As for why her sociopathic rants have not been released, professor Joseph Giacalone of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice speculated, “I think what the FBI is really concerned here with … is that if there is something in there that is truly damaging for the transgender community, I think they are hesitant to do it because they are afraid of a violent backlash against that protected class of people.”

Actually, there is most definitely concern about a “backlash,” but “against that protected class” is not the backlash Biden and his Demos are worried about.

And herein lies the answer to the question of why Democrats expend enormous political capital defending deviance.

The delay in releasing the assailant’s writings is because she is among the Left’s prized “protected class” of gender-confused constituents. If the release of her rantings indicated that the motive for her attack was hatred for those who disagreed with her identity and ideology, thus fitting the criterion for a hate crime, the Department of Justice would be obligated to classify it as such.

The Biden administration will vigorously reject any effort by the DOJ to do so.

Why?

Because that would result in an immediate political backlash from their Demo base — those who support the whole LGBTQ+++ ad nauseam spectrum of gender deniers, especially if that hate crime declaration implied a connection between her gender confusion and mental illness.

Again, why?

Democrats know they can give no ground regarding defense of their deviant gender-outlier constituents because they connect the dots to the 5% of Demo constituents who are in the “gay and lesbian” category, and that group is broadly supported by the Democrats’ largest and most critical voting bloc, women. As reported in National Review’s gender gap analysis: “In 2022, men voted Republican by a 14-point margin, while women voted Democratic by an 8-point margin. That’s a 22-point gender gap.”

Yes, ironic that a large number of leftist biological women support the tiny but very vocal “nonbinary” identity group.

Democrat strategists believe their female voters are emotionally incontinent idiots who can be manipulated into dependably voting Democrat by promoting emotionally provoking issues.

So, rather than risk offending women voters, make the issue about guns instead of gender pathology. And then give all those emotionally incontinent “white privilege” virtue signalers “Protect Kids Not Guns” yard signs. Throw in some statehouse protests to bolster that diversion.

Of course, we ALL want to protect kids from the Demos’ rising generation of sociopathic killers, the vast majority of whom are killing each other, not schoolchildren. And fortunately, most school kids are protected by resource officers with guns.

If those “enlightened” suburban leftists were really concerned about children, they would be posting yard signs that read: “Protect Kids, Not Groomers.” Tag team that with “Protect Kids, Not Failed Demo Social Policies.”

https://patriotpost.us/alexander/96835?mailing_id=7454&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.7454&utm_campaign=alexander&utm_content=body

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Texas Law Enforcement Officials Shut Down Antifa Counter-Protest Of ‘Protect Texas Kids’ Demonstration

Law enforcement officials with the Fort Worth Police Department shut down Antifa agitators over the weekend who counter-protested a small group of demonstrators from “Protect Texas Kids” who were protesting a drag show event.

The Protect Texas Kids group arrived at a restaurant on Sunday to stage their demonstration at the event across the street when the counter-protesters showed up “dressed in black, wearing helmets and outer tactical vests, and many of them were armed with handguns and long guns,” officials said in a statement.

The FWPD monitored both groups using city cameras. The department said that while they respect everyone’s constitutional rights to free speech and assembly, they are also focused on ensuring there is “a safe environment that respects all participants’ constitutional rights, while effectively maintaining public peace and order … those who choose to violate the law and assault others will be arrested and charged.”

During the event, “officers observed a member of the counter-protest group, later identified as 20-year-old Samuel Fowlkes, approach the ‘Protect Texas Kids’ protesters and spray them with pepper spray,” police said.

When police tried to arrest Fowlkes, he allegedly “began to evade officers and then swung his closed fists at officers who tried to stop him.”

“While the officers were attempting to place Fowlkes into handcuffs, another member from the counter-protest group, later identified as 33-year-old Christopher Guillott, interfered with officers’ efforts by swinging an umbrella at officers,” police said. “Guillott struck an officer in the face and was then placed under arrest.”

While officers tried to place Fowlkes and Guillott under arrest, backup was called to help secure the scene.

Police instructed the counter-protesters to stay back on the sidewalk, at which time “a third counter-protester, later identified as 37-year-old Meghan Grant, attempted to charge past FWPD officers multiple times to gain access to the Fowlkes and Guillott.”

Police tried to keep Grant back, but she allegedly did not comply and was later taken into custody.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/texas-law-enforcement-officials-shut-down-antifa-counter-protest-of-protect-texas-kids-demonstration

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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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Now wanting to be THIN is 'white supremacy'

It is true that blacks are more likely to be obese but that is their doing

A guest on NPR's show Fresh Air promoted the idea that the desire to be thin stems from white supremacy while discussing how parents should communicate weight with their children.

Journalist Virginia Sole-Smith appeared on the show on Tuesday to discuss her new book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture which includes the theory that fat phobia can be traced back to the end of slavery in the US.

Her argument is that when slavery was abolished and African Americans started gaining rights, white supremacists sought to maintain old inequalities by demonizing black bodies and glamorizing thinness.

'This is really about maintaining systems of white supremacy and patriarchy,' she said on the show.

'The chronic experience of weight stigma... is similar to the research we see on chronic experiences of racism or other forms of bias,' Sole-Smith said.

Sole-Smith also cited the work of Sabrina Strings, and her recent book Fearing the Black Body. Strings argues that the modern aversion to being fat has nothing to do with health but is instead a way of using weight to perpetuate racism and classism.

'Her research talks about how, as slavery ended, Black people gained rights, obviously, white supremacy is trying to maintain the power structure,' said Sole-Smith.

'So celebrating a thin white body as the ideal body is a way to "other" and demonize Black and brown bodies, bigger bodies, anyone who doesn't fit into that norm,' she added.

Sole-Smith proposes that toxic American attitudes around weight can be combated by encouraging parents to normalize fatness.

She identifies as 'small fat' herself and advocated making the term neutral as opposed to derogatory as a way to 'take all the power out of the word'.

'We make it something that can't be weaponized against us, and that really is the first step towards starting to dismantle anti-fat bias,' she added.

Last year TIME magazine experienced backlash after it published an article exploring a similar theme - claiming that the act of exercising was a form of white supremacy.

The piece, titled 'The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise,' put forward the idea that exercise was a pastime started in the early 1900s by white Americans who sought to strengthen their race amid increasing immigration and the abolition of slavery.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12016149/NPRs-Fresh-Air-says-peoples-desire-stems-end-slavery.html

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Transgender Supporters Cause Mayhem Inside Montana's Statehouse

Pro-transgender protesters in Montana forced the House to halt its proceedings after Republicans led an effort to censure Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D), a transgender member, after accusing them of having blood on their hands for passing a bill that stops children from receiving life altering medical treatment in the name of transgenderism.

Zephyr's supporters in the viewing gallery shouted and chanted to show solidarity, forcing the House to suspend its proceedings until the agitators could be removed. Some of the protesters resisted being pushed out by the Montana Highway Patrol, with others banging on the doors to the gallery.

At least five people were arrested. When the sheriff used the wrong pronoun to describe a suspect, the pro-transgender protesters got upset.

The disruption caused by left-wing activist in Montana is the latest in far-left people causing chaos inside statehouses, with pro-gun control protesters wreaking havoc inside Tennessee's statehouse in the aftermath of a shooting at the Covenant School, which was carried out by someone who identified as transgender.

https://townhall.com//tipsheet/juliorosas/2023/04/25/transgender-supporters-cause-mayhem-inside-montanas-statehouse-n2622408

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The great self-esteem experiment mistook the pedals for the steering wheel. Here’s the result

Those of us of a certain age decry the modern sensibilities of “everyone gets a trophy” for participating. Such awards diminish truly worthy accomplishments, and falsely build up people who maybe didn’t even really try. Christopher Gage takes a stab at some of the problems brought about by the self-esteem movement from which such trophies stemmed.

After recounting a bit of history of where it all came from, he declares: “Later studies show the dictums of the self-esteem movement often had the reverse effect.”

In the mid-2000s, researchers sifted through 15,000 studies on self-esteem. They found just 200 matching their rigorous standards. Of those 200 studies, few, if any, backed up the claims of the self-esteem movement.

By then, it was much too late. The faulty concept of self-esteem informed our culture, media, institutions, and everything else.

When I was a teenager, the prevailing psychology was to ensure everyone felt good about themselves.

Our parents and our teachers eschewed all criticism and saturated us in unconditional praise. The self-esteem movement swept away alarming red pens, instead marking our ever-inflating grades in hues of soothing teal green. They traded grade “F” for “U,” “a bit dense” for “minimally exceptional,” knowing useful things for “knowing yourself.” The brutalism of correct answers gave way to the sentimentalism of no correct answers.

The right answers didn’t matter. Neither did grammar. The right answers were passé. What mattered was how one felt inside.

Rather than learn how to write declarative sentences, how to think critically, or how to sift the rational from the emotional, we learned how to love ourselves.

This monstrous miscalculation created generations of praise-addicted, validation seekers frozen by their fear of failure — millions crippled with anxiety and depression — alongside legions of narcissists convinced of their destiny with fame.

Visit any social media feed to witness the results of this experiment.

Gage argues that the movement didn’t even get it right when trying to act out on the teachings of Nathaniel Branden, “the ‘godfather’ of self-esteem.” In fact, they got his message backwards, and dangerously so. Gage concludes with another example to illustrate the big takeaway:

Professor Carol Dweck, the author of Mindset, found praising intelligence over effort led to the opposite of what was intended.

Through her experiments with elementary school children, Dweck identified two mindsets: a growth mindset and a fixed mindset.

Children with a growth mindset see their talents, their intelligence, and their abilities as malleable. They’re unafraid of failure. To them, challenges are opportunities. Children with a fixed mindset see their talents, their intelligence, and their abilities as fixed. They’re terrified of failure. To them, challenges are pitfalls.

In Dweck’s experiments, she gave each child a simple task. Researchers praised one group on their ability: “Wow. You did so well on this. You must be smart.”

To the other group, researchers praised their effort: “Wow. You did so well on this. You must have worked really hard.”

The next challenge proved much more arduous than the last. What happened? Those praised for their ability got frustrated, gave up faster, and claimed they weren’t “smart enough” to do the challenge. Those praised for their effort stayed the course, enjoyed the challenge, and put in the work.

Just one sentence of unearned praise froze those children into a fear of failure. So, what did decades of the very same thing do to the rest of us?

https://patriotpost.us/articles/96780-in-brief-how-to-ruin-your-kids-2023-04-26

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Your credit score is excellent, so prepare to be penalized

by Jeff Jacoby

YOU'VE ALWAYS dreamed of owning your own home. For years you've worked to make that dream a reality, putting part of each paycheck aside as you save up for a down payment. You know that to get a favorable mortgage rate you'll need to have a good credit score, so you've been scrupulous about paying your bills on time, never maxing out your credit cards, and sticking to a budget you can afford.

Now, at last, you're ready to become a homeowner. Thanks to your excellent financial habits, your credit score is a solid 740. You've found the house of your dreams and applied for a mortgage loan. You've accumulated enough in savings to be able to make an extremely respectable down payment of 20 percent. Based on everything you've learned about mortgage borrowing, that should more than qualify you for the most favorable interest rate and fees available. Right?

Wrong.

You've done everything you were supposed to do, so this may come as an unwelcome surprise: Because your credit rating is so good and your down payment is so high, the Biden administration has decided to penalize you with a hefty new fee and a higher mortgage rate. As of May 1, mortgage costs for home buyers with risky credit backgrounds will be reduced, resulting in more favorable interest rates. In order to subsidize that discount for less creditworthy borrowers, someone has to pay more. That someone is you and buyers like you — those with credit scores higher than 680 and down payments of 15 percent or more.

The fees involved are called loan-level price adjustments, or LLPAs. These are charges paid upfront; they apply to all mortgages controlled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant government-chartered finance firms that buy up most home mortgages. LLPA fees are determined by a borrower's credit score and down payment size, and are commonly converted into percentage points that affect the buyer's interest rate.

Lending to borrowers with lower credit scores is risky, since by definition they're less likely to pay back what they borrow. To cover that risk, lenders have to charge them more for mortgages. That makes it harder for low-income borrowers, who are disproportionately Black, to qualify for loans, which exacerbates the racial gap in homeownership. Hence the Biden administration's plan to "increase pricing support for purchase borrowers limited by income or by wealth," to quote Sandra Thompson, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Borrowers with great credit scores will pay higher fees so that those with not-so-great scores can get a discount, thereby enabling more people with poor credit to buy homes.

The only thing wrong with that theory is — everything.

First and foremost, it is egregiously unfair to creditworthy borrowers like you. David Stevens, who headed the Federal Housing Administration under President Barack Obama, has crunched the numbers. He estimates that on a $400,000 loan with a 6 percent mortgage rate, a home buyer in your position, with a credit score of 740 and 20 percent paid down, can expect a $40-a-month hike in your monthly bill. That means a loss of $480 per year, or more than $14,000 over the course of a 30-year mortgage — funds unavailable for home improvement, for a child's education, or for anything else.

Second, it is not a kindness to qualify borrowers for mortgages they can't afford. Doesn't the White House remember the 2008 subprime loan crisis? Lenders went bankrupt, homes were foreclosed on, the housing market collapsed, and the credit of untold thousands of Americans was shredded, largely because of government policies that promoted lending to borrowers who weren't creditworthy.

Third, boosting the buying power of would-be homeowners with lower incomes won't change the number of affordable houses available for sale. It will simply boost demand for houses already in short supply. When demand rises and supply doesn't, the result is higher prices. How will that raise homeownership rates?

Penalizing people who are financially responsible in order to subsidize those who aren't is terribly unwise. Like other Biden administration policies in recent years — such as the plan to unilaterally forgive student debt, preventing evictions for nonpayment of rent, and prolonging unemployment and health care benefits for people who chose not to work — the new mortgage fees amount to a tax on responsible behavior.

The way to expand homeownership is not to undermine credit scores. It is to get lower-income earners to do what you did — pay their bills faithfully, live within their means, and save for the future. You shouldn't be punished for having done the right thing, and no one who didn't should be getting a reward.

https://jeffjacoby.com/26926/your-credit-score-is-excellent-so-prepare-to-be

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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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‘Woke Riots’ And How Democrats Created Them

How many stories have you seen about a group of “teens” wilding their way through a city, looting stores and beating holy hell out of anyone they come across? The word “teens” is used repeatedly, as though there are no other characteristics beyond age that these amoral mobs share. By doing so, the media and politicians are protecting themselves and harming citizens. It’s time to stop pretending and honestly discuss the destructive nature of the Democratic Party.

Find the story and you’ll see the euphemisms – “Chicago, Suburbs Prepare for Potential ‘Teen Takeover’” or “Street takeovers, looting plague Compton businesses” are just two examples where reality is deliberately obscured by the media because these events are of the left’s making.

First, there is no such thing as a “street takeover,” they’re riots. When people loot stores, they’re looting stores in the course of a riot. When they beat the snot out of people who just so happen to be in front of them when the riotous urge hits them, that is evil. Just like a man in a dress, calling it something it clearly isn’t does not make it into that thing.

Second, we have to be honest about who is committing these heinous acts; it’s the only way to address the causes behind them to prevent them from happening in the future. This is where Democrats refuse to go, because they are the cause and doing what is necessary to prevent them in the future will hurt them politically.

Roving bands of black teenagers are committing violent acts and looting stores because, thanks to Democrats, they have been stripped of hope and aspiration.

There isn’t a majority or plurality black major city in the country – where these attacks happen – that is successfully educating their kids. Critical race theory and a genuinely third world education system where unions matter more than results rule the day. Kids are “graduating” without being able to read or do basic math, but they likely can name a couple of dozen genders and would be able to lecture you all day about the horrors of microaggressions.

Lost in this move by Democrats is the fact that if people, particularly people in positions of authority and trust like teachers, preachers and politicians, tell kids they’ll never get ahead because “society is built to keep them down,” that they’ll never succeed because of their skin color, they will start to believe it.

Everyone fails, everyone doesn’t get a job or a promotion they want. Imagine if, when that happens, rather than working to improve your chances the next time and learn from the experience, everyone you’re conditioned to look up to because of their position or impressive title told you it was how things are and will always be. How cynical would you become? Maybe not the first time it happened, but after the next? Or later?

People fail, learn from it and improve. Democrats tell minorities they failed not because it happens to everyone, but because society is stacked against them. It doesn’t stick with everyone, and more and more people are coming to the realization that the people telling them “the system is rigged against them” are the very people who constructed that “system” and have been administering it for generations in these cities. But a lot of people don’t.

Those who don’t are stripped of hope, because how could you have hope about life if you believe you’re eternally screwed because of something you have no control over? Once you’re to that point, why not beat the hell out of someone for stupid reasons? Why not rob a store? That store is part of the system that is screwing you over, it’s “justice” to steal from them.

No one starts off as a cold-blooded killer, but people build to that point through a lack of punishment for lesser crimes (which Democrat prosecutors are currently engaged in). When you see bands of “teens” rampaging “for no reason” or because “it’s warm in the summer months,” know there is more, much more behind it than that. But there isn’t a single Democrat politician, preacher or activist who’ll talk about it because it is to their benefit.

Sure, people will die, others will have their lives ruined, but Democrats will get the votes. Individuals have always been disposable to the progressive left. We’re now seeing the results of their “woke” policies and philosophy marching down the streets of once-great American cities. If it hasn’t hit your town yet, and they keep electing Democrats, it will…

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2023/04/23/woke-riots-and-how-democrats-created-them-n2622291

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Vandals Attack Utah Senator's Home After He Supported Bill to Ban Transgender Surgeries

Sen. Mike Kennedy's (R-Utah) garage door was spray painted red with messages reading "fash" — short for fascist — and "These trannies bash back," a phrase that uses a slur for transgender people.

In a statement regarding the incident, Kennedy condemned the attack, saying he would not be intimidated by "cowardly actions."

"To those who seek to use violence, vandalism, and intimidation to deter me from standing up for what is right, let me be clear: you will not succeed. I will not be deterred by your cowardly actions," Kennedy said.

He continued to say that Utah will not stand for violence from extreme Leftists who push the transgender agenda of harming the U.S. and indoctrinating children.

"The recent vandalism to my family's home was not just an attack on me, but on the very principles, our state stands for. We will not let fear and violence control our destiny," Kennedy said. "As Utahns, we will always stand up and push back against radicals who seek to push their agenda in our state. I am more determined than ever to work with the good people of Utah to make our state a better place for all, especially our children, and I won't back down."

Last year, Kennedy sponsored SB16, which bans transgender surgeries, and places an indefinite moratorium on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children and teens. In January, Gov. Spencer Cox (R-Utah) signed the bill into law.

Eleven other states, including Kentucky and West Virginia, have enacted similar bills restricting gender-affirming care for minors under 18. The controversial bills have sparked outrage from the progressive Left, claiming Republicans are putting transgender lives at risk.

Equality Utah, the state's LGBTQ advocacy group that opposed Kennedy's bill, condemned the violence against the senator, saying they would not tolerate hatred towards anyone regarding their views.

"We do not know who participated in this action, but we have been informed this may have been an act of retaliation for his sponsorship of S.B. 16. To the extent this, or any other act of violence or vandalism against our public officials, is related to LGBTQ advocacy, we want to make it clear that Equality Utah condemns these tactics in the absolute strongest terms," the group's statement read. "These heinous acts do not help LGBTQ Utahns. They do not advance a climate of equality,"

https://townhall.com//tipsheet/saraharnold/2023/04/22/utah-lawmakers-home-vandalized-after-he-introduced-bill-to-ban-transgender-surgeries-n2622289

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Stop pandering to political correctness, Home Secretary to urge police

Suella Braverman will urge police to stop pandering to political correctness and focus on basics, such as stop and search, to tackle crime.

On Wednesday, as it is expected to be confirmed that ministers have hit their target of recruiting an extra 20,000 officers, the Home Secretary will demand that police concentrate on “delivering criminal justice, not social justice”.

In a speech at the launch of a new “back to basics” think tank, Mrs Braverman will tell police she wants them to focus on pursuing criminals and not “pandering to politically correct preoccupations”.

She is expected to include stop and search as part of the “common sense policing” she believes should be pursued without fear or favour. There has been criticism that black people are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched.

It follows the Home Secretary’s previous calls for police to stop investigating non-crime hate incidents because someone is offended and criticism of authorities for failing to tackle grooming gangs because of fears of being branded racist.

Speaking at the Public Safety Foundation think tank, Mrs Braverman will say: “Everything that our police officers do should be about driving down crime and keeping people safe.

“My vision for common sense policing is as clear as the public’s. It means focusing effort on deterring and catching criminals, not pandering to politically correct preoccupations.

“It means that policemen and women that come from and live in the communities they serve, familiar with local challenges, and familiar to local people. Common sense policing means police focused on delivering criminal justice, not social justice. That’s what the public wants.

“I believe in the police. But the policing in which I believe isn’t riven with political correctness but enshrined in good old-fashioned common sense.”

The foundation has been set up by Rory Geoghegan, a former Metropolitan Police officer who became a crime adviser to Boris Johnson. In an article for The Telegraph, he said he gave up policing because of senior police officers’ disregard for tackling “low-level” crimes that blighted people’s lives.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/stop-pandering-to-political-correctness-suella-braverman-to-urge-police/ar-AA1alVES

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Australia: Three cheers for black conservative senator!

Three cheers for Jacinta! Her promotion is good for Dutton, good for the Coalition, and good for the country.

The rise and rise of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price from deputy mayor of Alice Springs to Country Liberal Senator for the Northern Territory, and from there to Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians is one of those rare rapid ascents in political life that promises to be good for the Liberal party, good for Opposition leader Peter Dutton, and good for the country.

Prime Minister Albanese’s brazen request for a blank cheque to create a disembodied Indigenous Voice to Parliament is disingenuous, dangerous, and many would add racist. Price’s opposition to Albanese’s half-baked plan is deeply personal. She is the living incarnation of reconciliation with a Warlpiri mum and an Anglo-Celtic dad. She went on create her own ‘blended family’ with her musician husband who is not Indigenous. As she says in the ‘No’ campaign ad, which is being run by Fair Australia, it was love that brought her parents together and love that brought she and her partner together and none of them want to see the family divided along the lines of race.

Price is a gifted speaker. At the CPAC conference in Sydney last year she and Warren Mundine provided a hilarious double act, brimming with good humour and incisive commentary. They plan to go on tour across the country reminding Australians that there is more to unite us than divide us. The pair will provide ‘Yes’ campaigners with a formidable challenge.

Labor has turned smearing Liberals as racist and sexist into an art form, but the promotion Price makes that task a whole lot harder. Leftists looked stupid, vicious, and paternalistic when they tried to claim that she was providing cover for racists.

Price has been a godsend for Dutton. His new Clark Kent-style black glasses have helped him shed the Voldemort look and with Price at his side, Labor has been put on the back foot in its campaign of character assassination that it perfected in relentless attacks on Scott Morrison. And to Labor’s chagrin Price has been joined at the hip to Dutton on his frequent trips to Alice Springs.

Price has been equally helpful to Dutton within his party. He has been faced with the same rancorous divisions that poisoned the prime ministerial tenure of the last three Liberal leaders. The Voice threatened the usual tectonic divide between the Woke, wet left, and the dry right. After the dismal drubbing in the Aston by-election, Price is the inspirational figure the Coalition needs to bring its warring tribes together. Perhaps not Julian Leeser, who quit the shadow front bench to campaign for the Voice, but Price, a Country National, was backed by the majority of Liberals even though it meant the Nationals have exceeded their quota on the front bench.

Leeser’s departure has also allowed Dutton to promote the very capable Kerrynne Liddle to Shadow Assistant Minister for Child Protection and the Prevention of Family Violence and make the battle-hardened former attorney-general Michaelia Cash the new shadow attorney-general.

And just like that, Dutton has added three impressive women to the ministry making Labor’s stereotypical attacks that much harder.

The announcement by Karen Andrews, the former and then Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, that she will quit the front bench and not contest the next election opened the way for Dutton to promote talented China hawk Senator James Paterson to Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Minister for Home Affairs and cyber security.

Paterson did an impressive job when he was chair of the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security. He scored a major hit on the government in February when he raised the alarm about the threat posed by almost a thousand Chinese-made cameras in Commonwealth buildings.

He joins Andrew Hastie, Shadow Minister for Defence, who gets kudos for being attacked by the overtly pro-China Premier of Western Australia, Mark McGowan, this week. McGowan, either accidentally or on purpose, announced over a hot microphone at a China-Australia Chamber of Commerce lunch during his first trip to China since the pandemic that Hastie had ‘swallowed some sort of Cold War pills back … when he was born, and he couldn’t get his mindset out of that’. Who knows what was going on. What is certain is that most Australians share Hastie’s concerns about the CCP and would see McGowan’s comments in an unimpressed light within the context of his visit to China.

Price, Liddle, Paterson, and Hastie are all part of a younger generation that will eventually carry the Liberals back onto the government benches. A successful campaign against the Voice is a critical first battle and Price is the best person to lead them to victory in that campaign.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/three-cheers-for-jacinta/

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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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General Admits Trans Inclusion Hurts Army Recruiting

The Biden administration has pushed to make the military more diverse and inclusive by introducing measures to accommodate transgender individuals, but the move could be hindering recruitment efforts.

Congressman Matt Gaetz recently asked Army General James McConville if these policies would hurt recruitment of “men from the American South” and the general responded “probably not.” Gaetz argued that such inclusion policies would negatively impact the goal of building a “cohesive team” and that condoning “people with male genitalia showering with female soldiers” would hurt recruitment of women.

Despite Army Secretary Christine Wormuth pushing back against Gaetz’s critiques, the U.S. military has faced challenges to recruiting in recent years, including a growing epidemic of obesity and mental health problems in the American population that have caused 77 percent of young Americans to be deemed unfit for military service. The Air Force recently increased its body fat allowance for recruits in order to combat the dismal recruitment numbers.

The Biden administration’s inclusion measures, such as the Air Force’s gender-neutral written communications policy, may be well-intentioned, but they are likely to come at the expense of security and American defense. The Army missed its FY 2022 recruitment goal by 25 percent, or 15,000 soldiers, and expects continued decline in 2023.

It’s important to remember that the military is not a social experiment. It is a place of service where people are expected to make extreme sacrifices for their country and its security. The Biden administration should be focusing on improving recruitment and retention numbers, not introducing policies that will only hurt them.

The military should be open to everyone who is willing and able to serve, regardless of gender identity. However, its main focus should always be on achieving the highest levels of security and defense for the country, not on pushing the transgender movement.

https://libertyonenews.com/top-general-admits-trans-inclusion-hurts-army-recruiting/

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I was a woke activist but fake feminists just canceled me for speaking this truth

Fifteen years ago, I was living in a queer commune and calling myself "Sebastian." I spent hours on message boards angrily defending the queer theory belief that "gender" is a "performance."

Funny how things change. On Wednesday, my book Feminism Against Progress was due to launch at a venue in New York City. But last week, the venue canceled the event booking at short notice, following anonymous social media pressure.

My thoughtcrime? Saying in public that humans can’t change sex, and that performing gender surgery on kids is "butchery."

No doubt the "me" of fifteen years ago—Sebastian—would have been cheering on this cancelation. So how did I end up doing such a 180?

The story begins at Oxford University, in Great Britain, in the late 1990s. There, as an undergrad majoring in English literature, I met "woke" theories for the first time—and jumped right in. I believed it all, and I set about realizing its ideas in my own life.

Within the worldview I’d adopted, every form of commitment, stability, and structure felt oppressive. I wanted a world completely without power and authority. I tried to create that world and live authentically in it.

I thought feminism meant being independent, constrained only by what I wanted to do. I should be free of expectations, limits, or obligations connected to being a woman—even the limits of my physical body. I should be free to have sex without consequences, like a man. To dress as I pleased. To do any job I liked. To be treated the same as a man, in all situations.

Above all I should not be expected to limit myself to being a mom. The feminists of the "having it all" era taught me that doing so would be evidence of my oppression—or maybe just my lack of ambition. To be "just a mom" was a kind of failure.

After my daughter was born, though, I realized it wasn’t that simple. First, I learned that "independence" and "freedom" don’t really compute when you’re pregnant. Suddenly what you eat or drink or do affects your baby as well as you. There’s no more pretending you can do what you like, whenever you like. When your baby is crying for milk at 3:00 a.m. you can’t just say "No, I don’t want to get up." Talking about "independence" in that context makes no sense.

This realization drove me to rethink everything I’d believed about feminism. Why was a movement supposedly for women selling me on a kind of freedom that’s worse than useless for moms? Are moms not women? Delving into the history of the women’s movement, I came to see that it used to make plenty of space for moms.

Feminism began as women’s response to the way family life changed after the Industrial Revolution, as work left the home. In its early days the movement included women who defended care, motherhood, and the reality of our sexed bodies. It also included women who sought freedom on the same terms as men. These two camps often disagreed, but between them they sought to defend women’s interests as the world modernized.

But in the mid-twentieth century, freedom kicked care off the field. It happened when abortion was legalized, in the name of the feminism of freedom. Figures such as jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg framed abortion as a crucial precondition for women to participate in society.

And ever since, this has been the orthodox feminist view. That freedom is everything: that it must be defended at all costs, even if that cost includes killing an unborn baby whose life depends on a woman’s body. No wonder this "feminism" has a mom-shaped blind spot: pretty much by definition, being a mom means limiting your freedom in the name of love.

And this feminism of freedom at any cost has, in fact, many costs. It’s opened the door to a sexual free-for-all in the name of freedom that leaves young women lonely, injured, and unsatisfied. It’s legitimized the commercial exploitation of women’s bodies in pornography, prostitution, and commercial surrogacy.

And it’s the driving force behind gender ideology. For if freedom is everything, and we’re not free unless we can escape every limit of our sexed bodies, why should this only apply to women? Why not grant everyone the freedom to be whichever sex they like?

But the brutal truth is that we can’t have that freedom, any more than we can change the basic biological drives that underpin desire, reproduction, and motherhood. Every one of us is a union of mind and body. And every one of our bodies is sexed—male or female—from conception onward. Every cell in our body has a sex. And our sex still constrains who we can be, and even what we want, in ways that have nothing to do with culture, or power, or oppression.

I was canceled last week in New York City for speaking the truth about this. I get called all kinds of names by the fake feminists of "freedom at any price." But when I say out loud that humans can’t change sex, and that kids have needs, or that moms and dads aren’t interchangeable, this is not born of ignorance or bigotry. It’s the fruit of experience.

I learned the hard way that more tech and more freedom doesn’t mean more happiness. What brought me peace in the end was not "emancipation" but beneficial constraints. A committed partnership, a stable home, a child—and a willingness to accept that I’m not just "human" but also female.

Accepting these things limited what I could do. But within those limits, joy and love and meaning are infinitely more able to flourish. If there’s one thing I hope for with Feminism Against Progress, it’s that a few young women may read it and figure this out more quickly than I did. And that they’ll join me in taking the women’s movement back from the empty, toxic illusions of "freedom at any price."

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/woke-activist-fake-feminists-canceled-me-speaking-truth

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Is the US losing global credibility? Here is the answer

You won’t read this on the front page or even hear it discussed; but, over the last few weeks, we have seen significant economic moves against the West.

This has, indirectly, and concerningly, security implications.

Brazil, Russia, India, China, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, the United Arab Emirates, countless African nations, and even France have turned against the United States and its allies, via the US dollar.

Let me explain.

Since 1973, all natural resources around the world, most importantly oil, have been traded in the US dollar.

The deal was simple.

The United States would be the world’s policeman.

It would work to crush communism, Islamic radicalism, and any other threat to global peace.

In return, resource-exporting nations like Saudi Arabia, and manufacturing nations like China and India, would sell their goods in the US and use their US dollar reserves to buy US debt.

As a result, the United States has been able to rack up huge debts and deficits and keep interest rates at a manageable level.

This is simple economics; but no longer does this status quo hold.

The gig is up. Over the last three months, the East has turned against the West, shooting the West in its Achilles heel.

Brazil and Argentina have announced that they will build a common currency to trade and transact.

Iraq will sell oil to China in Chinese yuan.

China and France have completed a liquified natural gas transaction in Chinese yuan.

China and Brazil are trading iron ore in yuan.

India and Malaysia are now settling transactions in the Indian rupee.

The Kenyan President told his people to dump their US dollars.

The Namibian President has told Germany to back off and stop lecturing them on how bad China is.

The Rwandan President has told the BBC that it will no longer be lectured by the West, and the list goes on.

Meanwhile, China has surrounded Taiwan with fighter jets and battleships; and in August, all these countries are meeting in South Africa to discuss how to collaborate and advance their geopolitical and economic power.

The point of all of this?

The United States is losing credibility at a rate we haven’t seen in decades.

Countries are fed up with the West lecturing them on gay marriage, climate change, and human rights.

They want to run their own show.

They are fed up with being forced to use the US dollar to trade and invest.

They want change. They want a multipolar world order instead of a unipolar world order. That means they want an end to the United States being the predominant world power, the world policeman, so to speak.

The consequences will be profound.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/alan-jones-is-the-us-losing-global-credibility-here-is-the-answer

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Australia: Queensland to decriminalise sex work as review recommends new advertising rules

Queensland will decriminalise sex work after a long-awaited review recommended sweeping changes to the industry to combat violence, discrimination and exploitation.

A landmark review into sex work by the Queensland Law Reform Commission has made 47 recommendations, including scrapping the Prostitution Licensing Authority, repealing some police powers and allowing services to be advertised on radio and TV.

The QLRC also recommended that sex workers not be singled out for public soliciting or street-based sex work, and said planning rules should allow services to operate away from industrial zones.

While sex work is under a licensing framework in Queensland, about 90% of sex workers are in the “unlawful sector” privately or at unlicensed businesses.

Sex workers have long rallied against the laws that prohibit them from employing a receptionist, working with others or texting other sex workers before and after a booking to make sure they’re safe.

In Queensland, police can currently also pose as clients and entrap workers by pressuring them to offer blacklisted services.

The attorney-general, Shannon Fentiman, said the government was “broadly supportive” of recommendations and supported decriminalising sex work.

Fentiman said decriminalisation of sex work would “ensure that some of the most vulnerable people in our community have legal protections at work”.

She confirmed this would mean abolishing the Prostitution Licensing Authority, which regulates the state’s 20 brothels.

“The sex-work industry will be regulated by workplace health and safety laws, planning laws, advertising codes and standards, and public amenity and public nuisance laws,” she told reporters on Monday.

Fentiman said the government hoped to introduce legislation before the end of the year after consulting key stakeholders.

“We will need to work through each of the recommendations to work out how best to implement the intent of the law reform commission,” she said.

The report found the current framework undermined the health, safety and justice of sex workers. Those interviewed said they were reluctant to report crimes to police for fear of arrest or not being believed.

The QLRC said the law should respond to “reality, not myths”.

“Stereotypes about most sex workers being street workers, victims of exploitation or trafficking, or ‘vectors of disease’ are not supported by the evidence or reflected in the diversity of the sex-work industry,” the report said.

“The assumption that decriminalising sex work will increase the size of the industry is also unsupported.”

Sex worker and state coordinator of Respect Inc, Lulu Holiday, said decriminalisation will be a “life-changing policy shift”.

“Decriminalisation would mean I wouldn’t have to worry every time a client contacts me that it might be a police officer. I’d be able to work in a way that feels safe for me without being worried that I’m at risk of arrest,” Holiday told Guardian Australia.

“While it’s going to have a huge impact for us, it’s really not going to have any noticeable impact on the rest of the Queensland community.”

The chief executive of the Scarlet Alliance, Mish Pony, said the announcement “brings Queensland in line with domestic and international best practice”.

“Decriminalisation is a cost-effective, high compliance model for government and supports workplace health, safety and rights for sex workers,” Pony said.

The Queensland government confirmed last month it will also move to scrap an exemption of the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act which allows employers to discriminate against sex workers and gender-diverse and transgender people when working with children.

The exemption will be repealed, along with another clause that allows accommodation providers to lawfully discriminate against sex workers if there is a “reasonable belief” that they are engaging in sex work on the premises.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/apr/24/queensland-to-decriminalise-sex-work-as-review-recommends-new-advertising-rules

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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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Elon Musk has opened up our cage

Liberty is a wild animal: it cannot be domesticated, it refuses to be tamed, and it’ll die if you force it to live within a cage.

The chain by which liberty is led to its holding cell is ‘speech’.

Once the government manages to put a collar on civilisation’s voice, its words and thoughts can be yanked around like a puppy being dragged down the road by Cruella de Vil, who is wearing the skins of her former pets as an outfit that shows less taste than Balenciaga.

This is the abusive environment inhabited by citizens of the West since our quaint cobbled streets went silent and the public forum moved into the digital realm of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

Our cheerily rotund town criers have morphed into faceless algorithms while the security measures set up to monitor ‘community safety’ have taken to snatching victims in the night, weeding out the strongest voices from the crowd to ensure society’s conversation remains directionless and incoherent.

And what a noise it is.

Social media has become a roar where domestic politics crashes into the politics of neighbouring nations. Individual countries are capable of reaching a moral consensus on topics – but there will never be a global consensus. It is an argument without end. A permanent conflict that must either dissipate or suffocate the other side. Unfortunately for the Western liberal values of freedom and democracy, there are billions more who favour the prison-planet view of Earth under the red sky of collectivism.

This is a bigger problem than mainstream political commentators understand.

Where the values of the West were once incubated, fed, and subsequently thrived within the British Empire and its rising colonial powers – they are now being actively poisoned by external nations who want to see the people of the West reduced to an idiot mob of mouths that consume. We are baby birds with our feet stuck in the thatch of our nest, pecking at the air for our government parent.

A brief wander through TikTok and the youth it has raised, or even its older cousin Tumblr, reveals a very ill and weak generation that cannot seem to get itself out of the basement, let alone in a position to lead the world. ‘Good citizenship’ has become a banner on their social media profile instead of holding down a job and raising a family. It is a low-effort existence.

Their failure to become adults will eventually mean that Australia becomes infantile.

Some may say, ‘social media is not real life’, but it is raising real people. Not a few – a lot. These under 20s are casting their votes in very real elections. Speak to them. They are the living embodiment of the TikTok app and are already tipping elections and taking control of political institutions.

As one dismayed old-school activist said on Twitter the other day, ‘They can’t formulate an argument. Their brain implodes trying to comprehend different opinions.’

To this I add, you cannot reason with someone who does not understand their own position – let alone yours.

Universities are no longer places of learning, but rather serve as finishing schools for ideological zealots. It would be a very foolish person who maintains an indifference to the power of social media whose offspring are then taken into the frying pan of activism to be seared, crisped up, and served at the banquet. You can call them useful idiots, or snacks, either way – they sustain the upper echelon of society.

I’ve seen this social media generation collapse the entertainment industry and they will do the same to our political system. Look no further than Australia’s Voice to Parliament. The generation that runs around calling everyone a ‘#racist!!!’ is openly advocating for a race-tested, unelected bureaucracy to sit above democracy as a form of historical revenge. Does this sound healthy for a peaceful, stable future?

These individuals genuinely believe that ‘avenging past racism’ will solve alcohol abuse in remote communities. How? They have no idea. There is no evidence that racism is the cause of the problem to begin with. If you push them on the topic and demand to know how a racial bureaucracy can keep a bottle from the lips of an individual a thousand miles away, they simply shout ‘racist!’ and fall silent.

Worse, the youth’s social skills have become so poor that no one can open up a conversation with them to test their views. Any attempt to do so is met with screaming, chanting, drum-beating, and violence.

Compared to today’s activists, the witch-burners were calm and measured. At least they could explain what they were up to and present a case for their manic violence. They were evil, coherent, and devout. We have no such luck with kids raised to believe in apocalyptic death cults and the supremacy of ‘self truth’ over The Truth. Individuals that tie their worldview to ‘feelings’ will remain adrift.

This is not only destructive for civilisation at large, it is a terrible shame and an embarrassment to the legacy of those who fought and died for the very gifts our kids believe to be ‘dangerous’. The sad thing is, they do not fear free speech because it is harmful, but because they are frightened of their own inadequacy to answer questions.

The hill their grandparents died on with truth, freedom, and democracy. Our young are sticking their flags (and there are a lot of those) into dictatorship, identity, and collectivism.

Instead of free-thinking, powerful independent citizens, we have become part-customer, part-product for a fascist digital machine that never sleeps.

Social media weaponised humanity’s love of socialising and found a way to profit from chasing the public from one political outrage to the next – like sheep into a pen where the waiting feed trough is sponsored by Woke brands. Nike in this pen. Bud Light in that one. Gillette in the corner.

People are so used to being barked at that they no longer question where the orders come from – they simply do as they are told, when they’re told. Wear a mask. Buy this product. Go to this rally. Partake in an experiment. Cheer for more tax. Own nothing. Be happy. Eat the bugs. (Or was it ‘the rich’?)

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter represents a fundamental breaking of this well-ordered social prison.

Musk wrestled all the keys off the digital slavers and opened the gates on the pens. The twisting of the keys and clicking of the lock echoed – even in Australia.

He sacked the ‘community safety’ security force and sat back to see what would happen to the former prisoners. There were a few weeks of confusion, marked by period of rage from those who were terrified of unlocked gates (what if the wolves get in?), and others who wandered around in a daze – unaware that they could leave their pens.

It’s been months, and the liberty Musk gifted Twitter has already returned a measure of power to the people. The Covid vaccine narrative was the first victim of free speech, with major Big Pharma companies and government authorities facing a legal backlash against their pandemic actions.

There will be more ideological empires felled by open criticism. Climate Change is losing public confidence, with a general murmur running through the crowd that the apocalypse is nothing more than convenient corporate lies. One day soon, this will turn into shouting and booing until the eco-fascist cult is disbanded.

Another ideology close to unravelling is that of radical gender activism – the sort of ideology that openly attacks biology as ‘fake news’ and creates a new patriarchy where men are once again asserting themselves over women.

Musk himself said: ‘Any parent or doctor who sterilises a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life.’

He has picked up that red flag of collectivist thought and waved it at the bulls, taunting them into the fire of free speech to see if they survive.

Western Civilisation cannot save its children by trying to talk to them. Its pseudo parent – social media – has to be reformed. Musk is doing that. As kids are exposed to free speech on their phones and within their digital safe spaces, the hold of toxic ideology will start to slip. The need to be popular is the strongest force in their lives – and idiocy isn’t popular.

When their ideological positions are mocked and ridiculed, our kids will get the message and finally grow up.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/elon-musk-the-keys-to-the-cage/ ?

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Talk about being on the wrong side of history!

“The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” introduced by Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., passed the House Thursday in a 219-203 vote. The legislation would require that “school athletics comply with the Title IX recognition of a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth,” according to a press release from Steube’s office.

“This bill ensures that biological females compete against other biological females in women’s sports that are operated, sponsored, or facilitated by a recipient of federal funding,” adds the press release.

Not one Republican voted against the bill.

Not one Democrat voted for it.

It’s unlikely the bill will pass the Democrat-controlled Senate. President Joe Biden has already announced he would veto the bill if it came to his desk.

This should be a bipartisan, consensus issue. It should not be controversial that girls deserve a chance to compete in sports against their physical peers, not boys.

Across the country, girls are losing to biological males who now identify as transgender. Here at The Daily Signal we’ve been covering the issue for years. In 2019, we told the story of Selina Soule, a high school runner who “missed qualifying for the 55-meter in the New England regionals by two spots,” reported my colleague Kelsey Bolar.

Two of the athletes who did qualify for the regionals were biological males.

“It’s very frustrating and heartbreaking when us girls are at the start of the race and we already know that these athletes are going to come out and win no matter how hard you try,” Soule told The Daily Signal. “They took away the spots of deserving girls, athletes … me being included.”

How is this fair?

“The simple truth is that males outperform females in regard to speed and strength due to inborn genetics and sex hormones. This has consistently been proven by long-term research on elite athletes when matched for training,” wrote Drs. Michelle Cretella and Quentin Van Meter in an article for The Daily Signal in 2021.

“While it is true that a male using estrogen will lose muscle strength and impair other aspects of his physiology, he does not alter his genetics; he remains male at the cellular level in all body systems,” added Cretella and Van Meter.

Yet across the country, girls must lose to biological males, just because of transgender ideology.

“Congress in 1972, created Title IX to protect women’s sports, to enable women to have an equal playing field in athletics. And in worship to their trans idols, the administration wants to flip that on its head,” said Steube on the House floor Wednesday. “It’s insane. Title IX was created for women’s sports and now the left wants to kill it.”

“In them giving homage to the trans movement, they are abandoning women all across the country,” he added. “Parents do not want biological men in locker rooms with their daughters, nor do they believe its equitable that a male can compete with women in female athletics. It’s the whole purpose that Title IX was created to begin with.”

Steube is right about the locker rooms. But it’s not just parents who object. It’s also the girls themselves.

“A male was in our locker room when volleyball girls were trying to get changed,” Blake Allen, a 14-year-old, told The Daily Signal last fall. “And after I asked him to leave, he didn’t, and later looked over at girls with their shirts off. And it made many people uncomfortable and feel violated. And I left as soon as I could in a panic.”

But the left doesn’t care that girls like Blake feel violated. Her feelings are irrelevant in today’s world.

So much for this being the golden era of feminism. Once again, the patriarchy is winning—even if it’s now under the disguise of the transgender ideology.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/20/not-1-democrat-votes-to-protect-girls-sports

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Roads Are 'Designed' to Kill Minorities, Says Transportation Secretary

Some stupidity is so extreme that it could be dangerous

While ignoring a cornucopia of crises in his two-plus years as Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg has found a supposed crisis that he will address, and it sounds a lot like his previously trotted-out theory that bridges are a tool of racism.

Speaking with Al Sharpton on MSNBC, Buttigieg declared "we've got a crisis when it comes to roadway fatalities in America" before making his usual pivot to frame the problem as one of race.

"We lose about 40,000 people every year," Buttigieg told Sharpton, adding roadway fatalities are "a level that's comparable to gun violence" for emphasis. "And we see a lot of racial disparities," Buttigieg continued.

Specifically, according to Buttigieg, "black and brown Americans, tribal citizens, and rural residents" are "much more likely to lose their lives — whether it's in a car or a pedestrian being hit by a car."

Buttigieg argued that the racial disparity is "related to discrimination" and "even the ways roads are designed and built" such that minorities don't have "access to a safe street design that's got crosswalks and good lighting."

Here's Buttigieg's full meandering argument about how roads are supposedly designed to be racially discriminatory:

"We've got to act," Buttigieg said, despite him not having such urgency to take action to address the broken supply chain, formula shortage, or toxic train derailments — just a few crises Buttigieg ignored or went MIA during.

What's more, Buttigieg should have thought about where his argument would lead before making his proclamation about racist roads. Because if, as Buttigieg claimed, roads were designed to be more deadly for minorities, who is to blame for building those roads?

In cities and states with crumbling infrastructure, members of Buttigieg's party are in charge of roads. Such as South Bend, Indiana, where then-Mayor Buttigieg was unable to address potholes? Was the danger posed by Mayor Pete's potholes a racist design in action?

A new Department of Transportation roadway safety data explorer shows clearly where America's most deadly roads are. The data viewed on a heat map lights up America's big, Democrat-run cities like fireworks. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, New York, and Philadelphia are where these deadly — apparently designed to be so for minorities — exist.

So, did Buttigieg just admit that Democrats are making cities unsafe for minorities? Sure looks like it.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2023/04/17/buttigieg-says-roads-are-designed-to-kill-minorities-n2622046?utm_source=thdailyvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&recip=6139244

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Matt Walsh unmasks the vicious Left

Online activists are the new revolutionaries and, as with their historical counterparts, they are becoming radicalised and violent in pursuit of their political goals.

The press at large have been ignoring most of this thuggish behaviour because it doesn’t fit with their official narrative of weakness and victimhood. Even when public figures such as female author JK Rowling found themselves receiving rape and bomb threats, the press remained reluctant to openly criticise the trans movement.

Can you imagine if women trying to speak out for their rights had been hijacked and terrified by a group of Neo-Nazis instead of trans activists? Oh no, wait… That happened too, and the press blamed the women, accusing them of ‘consorting’ with the men who mobbed them.

The more powerful these activist movements become, the more dangerous they are. Not only are many of their preachings ideologically unnerving – such as repeated demands to remove gendered language from medical environments where accuracy is crucial – but they have become dangerous in the real world where debate has turned into intimidation, threats, and abuse.

It was only a few weeks ago that Posie Parker was physically attacked in Australia and New Zealand for speaking out against the erasure of women’s spaces, and Victorian MP Moira Deeming was summarily banished by the so-called conservative party.

Increasingly, you must agree with the Left, or you will be hounded until you do. We have seen repeated examples of actors and public figures with social clout voicing simple questions only to find themselves facing cancellation if they did not immediately recant and re-affirm their dedication to the activist cause.

Think about what that means. People are being forced to publicly lie to protect their careers from an online mob whose power extends into the boardrooms of large corporations and the backrooms of Hollywood. This is a state religion. A political religion.

Desperate to paint itself as nothing more than innocent glitter, hearts, rainbows, unicorns, tolerance, and ‘safety’ – progressive politics has more in common with the bullying of Mao’s Cultural Revolution than most realise. It is a movement based on ideological purity and seeks to purge the culture that came before it.

A few days ago, political commentator and creator of the viral documentary, What is a woman? Matt Walsh had his Twitter account hacked.

Walsh has been at the forefront of recognising biological gender as a reality. He speaks bluntly on a position that was, until yesterday, the default among Western nations. Walsh is not lying, but telling the truth about gender has become a social offence.

When Walsh tried to explain the Western ideology of transgenderism to a Maasai Tribe during his documentary, their response infuriated activists who subscribe to identity politics. How could one protected group deny the existence of another? It breaks the ‘maths of oppression’ that goes on behind the scenes of the ideology.

Walsh’s questions were straight forward, but their answers are not. They expose the intellectual incoherence at the heart of identity politics.

The Maasai were simply saying what most Westerners actually think, but are too afraid to admit: gender is immutable.

Rolling Stone reviewed Walsh’s documentary with the headline: Why Are Social Media Companies Taking Ad Money From A Right-Wing Transphobic Doc? And began with the sentence: ‘For years, right-wing commentator, Daily Wire host, and all-round shitty provocateur Matt Walsh has used to his platform to go after trans people.’

There are countless reports like this which manage to avoid the central thesis of Walsh’s documentary, and that is the uncomfortable truth that the West appears to have lost its grip on basic reality. The refusal to define a woman as an adult human female is plainly absurd. Science duct-taped by radical ideology is something we were supposed to grow out of as a civilisation and yet in 2023 science bows to activism and we have the hide to call this ‘progress’.

Walsh ultimately won the culture war, with social media largely taking the view the left is wrong on the topic of biological gender. Adding to the ‘outrage’, Twitter CEO Elon Musk has removed the ban on misgendering trans people – or as others see it, users are no longer compelled to lie about the biology of other people if they do not wish to. To be clear, you cannot abuse people – that is still a violation of Twitter’s overarching terms of service – but the idea that failing to recognise new pronouns is ‘abuse’ has been removed.

Musk then joined the debate about protecting children by tweeting: ‘Any parent or doctor who sterilises a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life.’ Many feel exactly as Musk does – that children must be protected from making life-changing alterations to their body. Others say this is ‘hate speech’. And that is Musk’s point. Who is to judge what is hateful, and what is said in the interests of protecting children?

One can only wonder if, sensing a change in the air, Walsh’s critics decided to up their game and go after his social media account.

It is in this environment that the Twitter hack took place.

Once compromised, Matt Walsh’s Twitter account, which has 1.7 million followers, began to post bizarre and disturbing content.

While we cannot reprint the full set of tweets here, some included statements such as: ‘My Pronouns Are That/N-’, and ‘Ben Shapiro. You Know What You Did etc’. Other tweets made light of shootings and hurled accusations at public figures. The hacker also sent disturbing direct messages to Walsh’s contacts. When it became clear the game was up, the hacker tweeted: ‘Twitter Isn’t Hacked, This Is Just The Real Me Coming Out.’

Ben Shapiro – who was targeted by one of the hacked tweets – said:

‘Over the past few months, my friend Matt Walsh has been threatened to the extent that he’s had to have full-time security at his home to protect his family. Now he’s been hacked. The tolerant and diverse and kind crows are celebrating, of course.’

Ben Shapiro added: ‘They tell you who they are. Believe them.’

Walsh addressed the incident on April 20:

‘Over the last year my family has been harassed, threatened, doxxed, and now we can add hacked to the list. Apparently the hacker had an “insider” who gave him access to my phone. A lot we still don’t know. But we’re funding out. And there will be consequences. I have also made note of the members of the media who openly solicited stolen information from my phone. There will be consequences there too. Fortunately we can afford very good lawyers.’

Elon Musk’s team worked fast to secure the hack. Later on, after Walsh regained control of his account, he tweeted:

‘As soon as the hacking attack started, I was on the phone with our tech team, security team, lawyers, and executives. They all worked around the clock. They’re still working to find out exactly what happened, who did it, and how. Very grateful for the support of the Daily Wire @JeremyDBoreing, @BenShapiro and the whole team. Can’t imagine going through something like this without these kinds of resources. Which of course is the situation most victims face. Yes, I’ve been doxxed, threatened, hacked, stalked, etc, but the other part of that story is that SW provides me with all of the resources I need to respond to all of these attacks. Never have to worry about being thrown under the bus or left to deal with it on my own.’

It is only the latest abusive behaviour that Walsh has suffered at the hands of the ‘peaceful and tolerant’ activist crowd. Around the same time, YouTube demonetised Walsh’s show, with Walsh tweeting:

‘As I announced during my speech tonight, YouTube has demonetised my show and threatened to ban us if we don’t respect the pronouns of trans people. I’d rather take my show off YouTube than cooperate with that nonsense. So I am … I’m not going to forfeit my integrity for the sake of YouTube ad revenue. But I’m also not going to go off to the hinterlands somewhere and languish in obscurity. We’re going to make the show bigger and more accessible on even more platforms. That’s how we’re responding.’

As for the hack itself, there is plenty of fall-out yet to come. This was no trivial event, and Walsh is not laughing it off.

Wired ran a story titled: The Hacker Who Hijacked Matt Walsh’s Twitter was Just ‘Bored’ and then added a whingy preamble: ‘Editor’s Note: Following publication, Twitter permanently suspended this article’s author, WIRED senior reporter Dell Cameron, citing its policy against the distribution of hacked material. WIRED believes Twitter’s actions were unjustified.’

Which sounds serious, until you read the rest of the story.

As reported by The Post Millennial:

On Wednesday, WIRED senior reporter Dell Cameron was permanently suspended from Twitter after he asked for and obtained hacked materials from Matt Walsh’s Twitter account.
“Spoke with the hacker who says he compromised Matt Walsh’s account, and who was able to supply some convincing proof they’d gained access to his personal email account. Story TK,” a tweet from just after midnight on Wednesday read.

And also:

In the article, Cameron stated that the hacker went by the alias “Doomed”, who said, “The intent was to make funny tweets, as Matt Walsh likes to ‘trigger’ people. We caused no financial harm, threatened anyone, [nor] ruined anything.”
Other screenshots given to Cameron allegedly showed the hacker “in the midst of compromising Walsh’s accounts, triggering authenticating requests received on the SIM-swapped device.”

There were various photos published on social media to go along with this.

Wired also released a tweet saying:

‘WIRED Statement on Dell Cameron’s Permanent Twitter Suspension: WIRED learned Wednesday afternoon that senior reporter Dell Cameron’s Twitter account was permanently suspended after he reported on Matt Walsh’s Twitter account being hacked. Neither Dell’s story nor his Twitter feed contained hacked materials. We do not believe his account violated Twitter’s policy. We have not received any further explanation from Twitter and our attempts to reach Twitter’s press office were met with the customary poop emoji. We ask that the account be reinstated, and that Twitter provide an explanation.’

This prompted Matt Walsh to issue a statement in response to Wired, reblogging their tweets with the following messages:

‘Your reporter directed solicited stolen material from my phone. A Twitter suspension is going to be the least of his problems, and yours.’ Walsh also said, ‘That is a flat out lie.’

The solicited materials Twitter rule that the Wired reporter has reportedly fallen afoul of is the same one that was used to suspend the New York Post over its Hunter Biden story – although in that case it was shown that no one hacked Biden’s abandoned laptop. Walsh’s Twitter account, according to Walsh and Twitter, was definitely hacked.

Walsh has said that he intends to pursue this incident, not only with the hacker – but also with media organisations.

It is clear that society has to start drawing some pretty serious lines in the culture wars before the West slides into the same sorts of political behaviours common in third-world dictatorships and collectivist tyrannies. People, like Matt Walsh, have to be allowed to speak out against radical ideology without living in fear of their life from online trolls.

There was a huge amount of fuss made by left-wing media outlets about Islam’s attacks on Salman Rushdie for his criticism of religion, but what are we doing right now in this progressive, tolerant world? Activist movements, particularly those online, are threatening commentators and hounding them with the same kind of blind zealotry. Walsh is exposing them – and let’s hope he exposes this hacker too.

Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/matt-walsh-unmasks-the-vicious-left/

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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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