Farage for Westminster

The Farage factor is inbound and on board for the July 4 UK General Election in what is fast becoming a metaphorical D-Day.

The political difference between now and 80 years ago?

This isn’t a Battle for Britain, it’s a fight to save what’s left of Britain.

By entering the race, Nigel Farage’s former Brexit Party has put what he calls the social democrat uniparty – made up of the Conservative-lite Tories and Marxian-Woke UK Labour – on notice.

His chief political aim is modest.

Prompted by political realism, Farage isn’t overestimating his chances, or underestimating those of his opponents.

With conservative infighting and relentless inaction, he believes the election is done and dusted.

UK Labour will win government, Nigel predicted, adding all that’s left to find out is what kind of majority UK voters will hand them.

Alongside widespread concerns about uninvited Islamification, and un-vetted mass immigration, Nigel Farage said his decision to step up was influenced by supporters.

In an intimate update on X, Farage explained his reasons, saying, he realised the reluctance to lead Reform UK into the carnage was letting millions of supporters down.

‘How could I. In fact, how dare I, let down these millions of people who helped me gain the biggest constitutional win for centuries by getting the UK out of the EU.’

He added, ‘I changed my mind. I’m going to do it.’

Crediting Tony Mack for stepping aside – Mack will take on a role as campaign manager – Farage said, first, ‘I’m going to stand, and I’m going to stand in Clacton.’

Second, ‘I’m coming back as the leader of Reform UK, not just for this election, for the next 5 years, up until the 2029 General election.’

Farage said he believes the election is ‘done already’, stating, Labour will win and there’ll be no real opposition, because the Tories will be too busy fighting each other.

‘They will not form a coherent opposition to a Labour government led by socialist, Sir Keir Rodney Starmer, that is going to be at best incompetent, perhaps even worse than that,’ Farage argued.

‘They’re going to nationalise energy production, to turn us all Green; well, I think, goodness only knows what that’s going to cost everybody.’

Determined to make Reform UK a tour de force with serious political punch, he said,

‘For Democracy to function there needs to be a proper coherent opposition voice, and that is the short-term aim of Reform UK.’

The aim is to ‘get a bridgehead into that Parliament to provide the voice of opposition’.

Farage then welcomed any conservatives on the ‘right side of the argument’ to join Reform UK.

‘We’re not here as wreckers. We’re here as builders.’

As Caldron Pool reported in January, Farage’s decision to enter the fight is neither a backflip, nor is it an act of desperation.

Although cagey, Farage has never completely ruled out another Westminster re-run.

He also polled well in Clacton earlier this year, suggesting he could win the Essex seat.

Notably, the Brexit pioneer’s bombshell announcement triggered the usual left-wing double standard on extremism and political violence.

In what could have been anything from acid to anthrax, Labour supporter, and OnlyFans ‘model’ Victoria Thomas-Bowen, allegedly lunged at Farage, throwing her milkshake over him, as he left a pub on the campaign trail.

Responding, popular public thinker, Konstantin Kisin, said the acceptance of left-wing political violence is ‘largely a product of the fact that left-wing extremism is never actually described as extremism’.

‘What is considered extreme is pointing out that there is a problem with any of this.’

‘Destroying your country’s history and culture is not considered extreme, but defending it is,’ he concluded.

Tommy Robinson, another ‘Stand up to Racism’ target, rightly criticised the left’s intimidation tactics, saying, ‘Whatever you think of Farage, he shouldn’t have to live like this.’

Woke-Marxian extremism is another reason for Farage’s fight to save what remains of Britain.

He was infamously debanked in 2023 for political reasons. He was berated, threatened, and accused of spreading misinformation when he called that out.

To this is said, ‘If they can do it to me, they can do it to you.’

Reform UK isn’t just the party of BREXIT, it’s also the first anti-lockdown party. In April 2020, an initially supportive Farage baulked at Covid rules saying, ‘I will not be put under house arrest by police and politicians, or anybody else.’

Farage furthered the Left’s hatred by joining the groundswell of discerning voters who rejected the West’s ‘ridiculous,’ walk hand-in-hand with the CCP down lockdown lover’s lane.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/farage-factor-anchors-reforms-fight-to-save-britain/

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Parents, Not Lax Regulation, To Blame for Tweens' Excessive Screen Time

Instead of calling on the federal government to regulate tween and teen use of social media, perhaps we should look a little closer to home. A new study suggests parental policies and habits around screens are a significant predictor of problematic use among adolescents.

One major finding: Kids getting too much "screen time" are more likely to have parents who get too much screen time.

"One of the biggest predictors of adolescents' screen use is their parents' screen use," pediatrician and lead study author Jason Nagata told The Washington Post.

'Associations Between Media Parenting Practices and Early Adolescent Screen Use'

This was a massive study looking at the screen habits of more than 10,000 kids ages 12 and 13. Published in the journal Pediatric Research, the study—"Associations between media parenting practices and early adolescent screen use"—looked at how often parents used cellphones or other screens around their kids and family policies surrounding technology, such as whether screens were often employed during meal times (35.6 percent said yes), whether kids had access to screens in their bedrooms (46.2 percent said yes), and whether parents monitored and/or limited screen time during the week (67.4 percent and 76.2 percent said yes).

Researchers also examined how often the children of these parents engaged in tech-based activities (including using social media, playing video games, and being on a cell phone generally) and how this affected various aspects of their lives.

The researchers found that "parent screen use, family mealtime screen use, and bedroom screen use were associated with greater adolescent screen time and problematic social media, video game, and mobile phone use."

In addition, "parental use of screens to control behavior (e.g., as a reward or punishment) was associated with higher screen time and greater problematic video game use."

On the flip side, "parental monitoring of screens was associated with lower screen time and less problematic social media and mobile phone use," and "parental limit setting of screens was associated with lower screen time and less problematic social media, video game, and mobile phone use."

Challenging Conventional Wisdom

The findings challenge several prominent ideas in the teens and tech space, including the idea that parents are powerless to influence their children's screen-time habits. That alleged parental powerlessness is often offered as a reason for regulating digital spaces by setting age minimums for joining social media sites and banning "addictive" features like algorithmic feeds and endless scrolling.

Likewise, the study challenges the idea that tween and teen peers are the main influence on their screen habits, suggesting that parental habits as well as family policies around screens can have a significant—maybe more significant—effect.

There are various ways in which this influence could work.

Perhaps ample screen time by parents has an instructive influence, normalizing the idea that it's OK to be on one's phone or computer all the time. Perhaps parents who use screens a lot are just more permissive of kids' screen use. Perhaps excessive childhood screen time is spawned as a response to a lack of attention or guardrails from parents who are enmeshed in their own screens.

In any event, the findings "were consistent with various prior studies, which have suggested that greater parental screen time use is associated with greater screen time in younger children and more frequent co-use of screens with children," note the researchers.

A Missing Link in the Mental Health Puzzle?
The new findings could also represent a missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to technology and youth mental health.

There are a lot of folks intent on blaming social media—or screens more broadly—for a rise in teen mental health issues. Megan Moreno, co-director of the American Academy of Pediatrics Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health, told the Post that the message about social media and mental health has spread "almost to the edge of moral panic" despite the fact that the evidence "hasn't been there."

Part of the trouble with these "tech makes teens sad/anxious/etc." narratives is that they tend to ignore other explanations for rises in self-reported symptoms, self-harm activities, or mental illness diagnoses. The other big issue is that they look at links between symptoms and screen usage and simply assume the direction of causality, positing that too much screen time causes social, psychiatric, or behavioral problems when it's possible that existing problems lead some kids to turn to screens as an escape.

If kids who spend too much time on screens also have parents who spend too much time on screens, that could suggest other mechanisms for the mental health and screen time association.

Parents who find themselves susceptible to addiction-like behavior with screens may possess some genetic traits that their offspring share, predisposing both to problematic tech use.

Ample parental screen time could mean a parent has a heavy workload that leaves too little time for their kids, and this lack of parental investment could lead to both mental or behavioral problems and a lot of screen time.

Or perhaps too much parental phone use signifies a sort of parenting style that spawns various negative issues with children.

Any or all of the above scenarios seems plausible and posits a link between screen time and mental health issues that goes beyond the simplistic idea that using social media or smartphones directly triggers depression and anxiety.

https://reason.com/2024/06/17/parents-not-lax-regulation-to-blame-for-tweens-excessive-screen-time/#:~:text=A%20new%20study%20suggests%20parental,get%20too%20much%20screen%20time .

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Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto Released Despite FBI Resistance

A Leftist transgender!

The 2023 Nashville Covenant School murders understandably received massive news coverage when they occurred. The fight over obtaining the murderer’s diary also received news attention. But when “nearly four dozen pages” of the murderer’s diary were finally released earlier this month, the mainstream media completely ignored it.

It turns out that behind the scenes, the FBI had fought hard against the diary’s release. Some Covenant School parents also opposed releasing the diary because it would force families to re-live the nightmare. The Tennessee Star’s parent company, Star News Digital Media, successfully filed two lawsuits to obtain the diary.

Five days after the release of the diary, with the exception of the New York Post, which is a national news outlet, the news coverage was limited to seven other conservative outlets such as The Daily Wire and Newsbusters.

The school murderer was transgender, and her diary reveals a suicidal left-winger who hated whites. The FBI expressed concern that the release of the diary from a transgender person could lead the public “to dismiss the attacker as mentally ill,” which would “further permeate the false narrative that the majority of attackers are mentally ill.” It worried that the diary could “potentially inflam[e] the public.”

The FBI worried that releasing the diary could have “unintended consequences for the segment of the population more vulnerable or open to conspiracy theories, which will undoubtedly abound.” Self-professed “experts,” the FBI fears, will “proffer their perspectives” in the press.

But there is a lot of important information in the diary. As is very typical of mass public shooters, the murderer was suicidal: “A terrible feeling to know I am nothing of the gender I was born of. I am the most unhappy boy alive. I wish to be dead.” She was also on the anti-anxiety drug Buspirone, whose potential side effects include “abnormal dreams, outbursts of anger, tremors, and physical weakness.”

The FBI worries that the diary will help create a link in people’s minds between mass murderers and mental illness, but suicidal people presumably have some mental health problems. Nor should the link be particularly surprising given that the Crime Prevention Research Center shows that 51% of mass public shooters in the last 25 years were actually seeing mental health care professionals before their attacks. That is 2.5 times the rate in the general public.

The FBI acknowledged that Americans want to “understand what led to such tragic events.” But the FBI argued these statements “seldom provide the answers” and the diaries and manifestos were “often misleading.” Yet the national media appears completely uninterested in why these murderers pick the targets they do and how their motivation to get media coverage is important in understanding how to stop these attacks.

The diary showed that the murderer had picked the Covenant School because it was a soft, unprotected target. Even if the national media ignored these comments, Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake, who had access to the diary, said on the day of the attack, “There was another location that was mentioned, but because of a threat assessment by the suspect of too much security, they decided not to.” A couple of days later, Nashville Council member Robert Swope stated that the murderer “looked at” two other Nashville public schools before deciding “the security was too great to do what she wanted to do.”

While the FBI worries that many of “the offenders themselves do not fully grasp or comprehend” what they are writing, there is a logic to attacking facilities assumed to be gun-free zones, like the Covenant School, and trying to maximize the amount of media coverage that they receive. The FBI may not want to acknowledge this, and the media may not want to cover these points, but we see it consistently in these attacks.

The mass murderer wanted to get attention for the difficulties facing transgender individuals. She compared trans individuals to other groups in a way that indicates she clearly believed that transgender people didn’t have the same rights: “Disabled have rights, civil races have rights, LGBTQ have rights, gun owners have rights.” But referring to the life of transgender people, she declared: “ … with no rights, anyone’s country is a s—– dictatorship.”

The news media and the FBI under the Biden administration are attempting to control the information available to Americans about a mentally troubled woman who identified as a man. The Biden administration is free to argue against linking transgender issues to mental illness or mass murder, but censoring the information is not the right approach.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/17/nashville-shooters-manifesto-released-despite-fbi-resistance/

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Texas Doctor Faces Prison for Whistleblowing on Secret Child Gender Procedures

The Department of Justice is targeting a Texas whistleblower who exposed Texas Children’s Hospital secretly performing attempted gender-transition procedures on children.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas announced Monday that it had indicted 34-year-old Eithan Haim for “obtaining protected individual health information for patients that were not under his care and without authorization.”

If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 maximum possible fine.

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Texas Children’s had publicly said in March 2022 that it would no longer perform attempted gender-transition procedures on kids. In May 2023, Haim provided journalist Christopher Rufo with documents showing that Texas Children’s was “lying to the public about the existence of its transgender-medicine program,” as Haim later revealed in an explosive January 2024 piece.

“I worked at the hospital as a surgery resident, and I knew that these interventions didn’t stop,” Haim wrote. “Three days after the announcement, a surgeon implanted a hormone device in a healthy 11-year-old girl for gender dysphoria. Over the next year, the frequency of these procedures increased, and potentially hundreds more children received hormone interventions for gender dysphoria.”

“Meantime, the director of a program that supposedly no longer existed was given the opportunity to speak at the hospital’s most prestigious lecture series in January 2023,” he continued. “I knew that it was my moral responsibility to expose what was happening to these children.”

Haim told The Free Press that before he gave Rufo any of the documents, he made sure that the patient’s names and identifying information were redacted (to protect himself from violating HIPAA and to protect the patients’ privacy).

The very next day after Rufo published Haim’s (then anonymous) May 2023 expose, the Texas Legislature banned these experimental gender-transition attempts for minors.

A month later, two federal agents came to Haim’s home to speak with him. They told him that he was a “potential target” of an investigation into federal criminal violations related to medical records.

“It was clear to me that this was a political investigation; I refused to submit to an interview without an attorney,” he wrote in City Journal.

After this, Haim went public with his story.

“To these agents, the prosecutor, and their political handlers, I was a criminal because I had told the truth,” he wrote. “It didn’t matter that we exposed the fact that the largest children’s hospital in the world was lying to the public about the existence of a program in which children were manipulated, mutilated, and even sterilized. It didn’t matter that the practice that they were lying about had now become illegal. It didn’t matter that I had committed no crime.”

“None of this mattered, I believe, because I had exposed a truth that threatened their ideology,” Haim added. “This was the reason for their frightening show of force. The intent was to intimidate me. If I agreed to stay silent, though, I would be legitimizing their lies and sacrificing the truth. Instead, I decided to fight back.”

Haim is now set to make his initial appearance before U.S. Magistrate Yvonne Y. Ho in Houston, Texas.

“The four-count indictment alleges Haim obtained personal information including patient names, treatment codes and the attending physician from Texas Children’s Hospital’s (TCH) electronic system without authorization,” says the U.S. Attorney’s Office release. “He allegedly obtained this information under false pretenses and with intent to cause malicious harm to TCH.”

Texas Children’s did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Daily Signal.

Haim joined “The Daily Signal Podcast” in March to share his story.

“What’s going to happen now is we’re going to do everything we can, [with] every fiber of my being, to hold them accountable,” Haim told The Daily Signal at the time. “We’re never going to stop until we succeed. So they thought they were going to intimidate me. They thought I was going to bend the knee to their evil ideology, like most doctors would have done. But as they were coming to find out, they had knocked on the wrong door.”

Haim is one of a number of Americans who have faced DOJ charges related to hot-button culture war issues. Armed FBI agents arrested Mark Houck, a Catholic father of seven and pro-life activist, in front of his children over an incident outside an abortion clinic that had been dismissed by local authorities.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/17/texas-doctor-faces-prison-for-whistleblowing-on-secret-child-gender-procedures/

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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)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

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

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