The large “No Kings” protests this weekend were peaceful with the exception of some hot spots in Portland near ICE facilities. There were the usual hot heads carrying guillotines and North Carolina Democrat Rep. Julie von Haefen is under fire for posting a picture of a beheaded Trump. Another protester was arrested for calling for protesters to “firebomb” ICE facilities and personnel. In another scene, children were encouraged to beat a Trump piñata. There was also an assault on a MAGA supporter. These remained happily isolated incidents. However, two school employees in Chicago drew national attention with their violent speeches and offered another test of our free speech standards.
In Chicago, elementary school teacher Lucy Martinez was shown on video mockingly making a gesture akin to being shot in the neck, mimicking how Charlie Kirk was assassinated. The video went viral, and her school, Nathan Hale Elementary School, had to shut down its website and social media presence.
Martinez’s gesture is disgusting, and frankly, I would not want my children to be taught by such a person. However, she did not identify herself as a teacher when she made this vile statement outside of school during her own time. As such, it is, in my view, protected speech.
Then there is the controversy surrounding Wilbur Wright College Adult Education Manager Moises Bernal, who screamed to a crowd that “ICE agents gotta get shot and wiped out.” Bernal told the crowd, “You gotta grab a gun!” and “We gotta turn around the guns on this fascist system!”
In 2017, Bernal was sentenced to 12 months probation in a rare move by the court due to disruptive behavior at a hearing for Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke who was charged with murder.
The question is whether calling for the killing of ICE officers crosses the line for an educator. After all, there are ICE officers who come to campuses in their official capacity or as students. There are also students who want to join law enforcement, including ICE.
Even school board members referring to taking faculty “to the slaughterhouse” for questioning DEI policies is considering protected speech.
However, the specificity of Bernal’s call to violence could trigger repercussions for him. If Bernal had proclaimed that people should shoot minorities or women or Jews, there would be little debate that he represented a threatening element on campus. Certainly, a student who espoused such violent intentions would not be allowed on campus in most universities.
For the university, it is difficult to see how law enforcement personnel in adult education programs would feel comfortable with an administrator who is encouraging others to murder them. Indeed, most people would not feel comfortable in interacting with someone who wants to kill law enforcement personnel.
Bernal’s comments likely fall short of a criminal threat, though, in New York city, David Cox was arrested after allegedly telling a third person that he had firebombs in his car and would be carrying out an attack. That was a specific threat and alleged plan. Bernal was encouraging violence in general.
However, calling for violence at a protest can cross the line for violent speech under existing precedent. In Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court ruled that calling for violence is protected under the First Amendment unless there is a threat of “imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”
In this case, there was no violence despite Bernal’s apparent inclinations. There was no evidence of “imminent lawless action.” As such, it is still likely protected. However, that does not mean that Wilbur Wright College, which is part of the city of Chicago college system, cannot fire or suspend him for calling for the murder of law enforcement.
I have to confess: On September 30, 2025, I was legit sweating bullets for Black folks.
Not because of some existential threat like systemic racism or killer cops—no, this was the big one. The government shutdown. According to the Democratic echo chamber, that’s when we hit peak vulnerability; like gazelles sensing a lion pride on the savanna.
We’re talking furloughs, frozen paychecks, and food stamps flickering out like a bad rom-com ending. And don’t get me started on how they’d convinced the Black Left that a cackling madman was piloting the White House, twirling his mustache while plotting our demise.
Picture this: Orange-hued villain in the Oval Office, rubbing his tiny hands together, muttering, “Mwahahaha, time to starve the minorities!” You’d think my group chat would erupt like Vesuvius.
Texts flying faster than reparations promises: “Kevin, you got canned goods? Water? MREs?”
I expected calls from cousins I haven’t seen since the last family reunion, “Bro, stock up on jerky—it’s gonna be Mad Max out here!”
Crickets. Not a single ping. No welfare checks from well-meaning white liberals (you know the type: “I saw your tweet about equity—here’s a GoFundMe for your ‘shutdown survival fund’”). No emergency soul food drop-offs from the church ladies, armed with Tupperware full of collards and cornbread, whispering prayers over the mac ‘n’ cheese.
The president? Stone-cold unbothered.
But hey, Democrats have branded him “racist incarnate,” so why would he lift a finger? This shutdown was his golden ticket, right? The perfect storm to cull the herd—starting with us, the usual suspects. Bonus points if a few brown folks or the trans community caught stray bullets in the fiscal frenzy. Collateral damage in the war on wokeness.
I could almost hear the evil laughter echoing from Mar-a-Lago.
Fast-forward to the news ticker: “T-minus two hours till shutdown Armageddon.”
I’m pacing my living room like a death row inmate eyeing the gurney. Heart pounding, palms sweaty. CNN’s got the drama dialed to eleven, with Anderson Cooper in a turtleneck, counting down like it’s Y2K meets New Year’s Eve in Times Square. “Three… two… one… Happy freakin’ Shutdown, America! Ball drop… or should we say, budget drop?”
Exhaustion hit harder than the hysteria.
I conked out on the couch, visions of empty EBT cards dancing in my head. While I snoozed, the axe fell—silent as a ninja, slicker than a politician’s promise. It crept in like that uncle who shows up uninvited to Thanksgiving, eats all the turkey, and ghosts before dishes.
Morning light filters in. I stir, groggy, cursing under my breath because—plot twist—Salma Hayek’s villa next door is throwing another beach bash. Bikinis, bronzer, the works. Jealousy surges, but hey, priorities. I shuffle to the kitchen, brew some coffee strong enough to wake the dead (or at least me), and fire up my phone. No alerts. No “RIP Black America” headlines. No frantic voicemails from Joy Reid demanding I march on D.C. with a pitchfork and a protest sign.
As my grandma used to chide, “Black folks gon’ be late to they own damn funerals.”
Was I already six feet under? Had the reaper skipped my house? Because I’m alive!
We did it, y’all—Black America survived the Shutdown Passover. Did some unsung hero daub lamb’s blood on my doorframe overnight? Or was it the sheer audacity of our existence that warded off the plague? Buoyed by this miracle, I launch a reconnaissance mission. Time to poll the tribe. Starting low-stakes: the folks I wouldn’t mind the reaper harvesting.
Al Sharpton? Still preaching from his pulpit of perpetual grievance—check. Joy Reid? Tweeting up a storm about “white supremacy’s latest hit job”—alive and annoying. Whoopi Goldberg? Dropping hot takes on The View like confetti at a pity party—damn it, woman, even you made it? The undefeated trio of outrage intact.
Trump’s master plan had been foiled harder than a heist in a Scooby-Doo episode.
Hopeful, I scan my inner circle.
Beautiful white wife? Check. Mulatto 18-year-old spawn? Burrowed in his pigsty of a bedroom, headphones blasting drill beats, dreaming of TikTok fame—check. Zero disruptions.
My 401(k) isn’t hemorrhaging; the fridge is stocked with beyond Vienna sausages and pimento cheese. Hell, even the dog’s still getting fed on the regular.
But wait—weren’t we promised biblical fallout? The Left’s doomsayers swore 100,000 federal drones would quit en masse if the continuing resolution tanked. As Maury Povich would boom after strapping Democrats to a polygraph, “That was a lie!” The results are in!” Not a single resignation.
Imagine the glow-up: Bureaucrats vanishing like vampires at dawn, unleashing a productivity tsunami. No more red-tape wizards burying innovation under 500-page regs. We’d have bridges built, not just studied to death. Instead, these pension-padded zombies shamble on, a eternal threat to efficiency.
Pundits wailed that 750,000 bureaucrats in total would feel the squeeze. I chuckled into my coffee. “Let’s hope!”
Scrolling deeper, the patterns emerge like a bad tattoo. Every Chicken Little cluck from the blue brigade? Busted.
No mass exodus of civil servants. No breadlines snaking through Harlem. No viral videos of grandmas bartering dentures for diapers. Just… normalcy. Boring, blessed normalcy. The stock market yawned. Uber Eats delivered on time. Even my Amazon Prime subscription didn’t glitch—though, in retrospect, maybe Bezos had a secret bunker for the packages.
So here I am, alive and kicking, toasting to the farce. Grateful doesn’t cover it; I’m downright giddy. This anxiety rollercoaster? Last ride, hopefully.
No more midnight sweats over fiscal cliffs. No more doom-scrolling MSNBC marathons. Just the quiet thrill of being right—again—about the hype machine grinding its gears for nothing.
All this manufactured meltdown, mind you, because Democrats drew their line in the sand not for us, not for veterans or vets’ hospitals, but for extra perks for illegals. Billions in backdoor bailouts, disguised as “humanity.” While American families—Black, white, every shade—hold the bag. Priorities, am I right? In the end, the shutdown wasn’t a scythe; it was a snooze button on the outrage alarm. We survived not by divine intervention, but by the simple truth: Sometimes, the sky doesn’t fall. It just… hangs there, mocking the forecasters.
A wave of moral outrage and justified condemnation is sweeping across the nation following the shocking revelation of events at the University of North Texas. Mere hours after the tragic assassination of conservative leader Charlie Kirk, a brave student, Mary Catherine, found herself subjected to a grotesque display of hatred and violence-glorification within her own classroom. This incident, which exposes a deeply sickening undercurrent on college campuses, stands in stark contrast to the values of decency and law and order championed by President Donald Trump.
According to her powerful firsthand testimony, Mary Catherine was in her quantitative methods class when a female student announced the news of the shooting. The situation rapidly devolved into a macabre celebration, with students actively seeking out the horrific video of the assassination. Mary Catherine described the scene: “She’s showing the video of him getting shot and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ Right when it stopped, everyone starts clapping and cheering.” This reprehensible behavior underscores a complete moral decay fostered by radical leftist ideologies that have infiltrated higher education.
The hatred did not stop with the deceased. The mob mentality quickly escalated, with students explicitly calling for further political violence. “They were like, ‘This needs to happen to Trump.’ And they start saying other names,” Mary Catherine recounted. This direct threat against the life of a former and potentially future President of the United States reveals the terrifying endgame of the violent rhetoric often ignored or tacitly encouraged by the liberal media. It is a stark reminder of why the strong, America-first leadership of President Trump is so desperately needed to restore order and respect for life.
In a display of immense courage that should be commended, Mary Catherine was the sole voice of reason in a room consumed by hatred. She stood up to the mob, stating, “No matter what your political beliefs are, this shouldn’t even be being brought up in this class.” For her act of basic human decency, she was immediately attacked, ridiculed, and shouted down by her peers. This is the toxic environment that conservative students face daily, an environment where expressing a dissenting opinion or even advocating for human dignity makes you a target.
Perhaps the most alarming element of this entire ordeal was the complete failure of the university authority figure present. The professor, who had been silently observing the commotion, did not admonish the students laughing at a murder. Instead, he specifically targeted the one victim in the room. “The professor has been watching this happen, and he comes up to me, not to the other student, to me, and says, ‘You all should probably take this outside,’ and then laughs.” This blatant bias and dereliction of duty from an educator is a scandal of the highest order.
Seeking justice, Mary Catherine did everything right. She went directly to the dean of students, where she first learned that Charlie Kirk had succumbed to his injuries. Despite her clear distress and the severity of the incident, she was met with a bureaucratic runaround and profound indifference. She was told “We can’t do anything” and was passed from office to office, with one administrator even coldly informing her that the department chair only had “seven minutes” to hear her plea for basic fairness regarding an attendance record. The institution designed to protect her utterly failed.
BREAKING – A University of North Texas student is going viral for confronting classmates who were passing around a video of Charlie Kirk dying while laughing, and says the professor singled her out and asked her to leave class. pic.twitter.com/tNn9riEtrW
This story is a microcosm of a much larger national sickness, one that President Trump has consistently fought against. It is a story of a brave young woman standing against a woke mob and a complicit system that celebrates violence against conservatives. While the liberal media remains largely silent on such atrocities, the response from conservative leadership was swift. Representative Andy Hopper, who serves Texas House District 64, confirmed he has already contacted University of North Texas President Harrison Keller, Ph.D., about the situation, demanding accountability where the university itself has offered none.
President Donald Trump may have done more for Blacks than anybody in modern history. That’s not how Democrats want Trump to be remembered, but it’s a fact.
For decades Democrats infantilized Black people, coddling Leftist Blacks with things like Affirmative Action and dumbing down education standards for Blacks. The heartiest of all Americans evolved into the biggest p*ssies in the country.
One election changed all that. President Trump challenged Black Leftists to look deeply into themselves. What Trump has done reminds me of when I left my career after writing my first book. My royalties the first month were almost $40,000. After getting that much money, I thought “Though this is a pay cut, I can make $40K a month work.”.
The next two months my check was $2,000 and $1,000. I remember my thought at the time: “Kevin, you are now a book salesman!”.
That realization jolted me to my core. No fat check twice a month to rely on, just my ability to make it happen. I’m not sure how many people get such a dramatic slap in the face, but I hope not many.
My book, The BIG Black Liewent against the grain. How dare a Black man not succumb to the Leftist narrative, ironically the nature of my book. Well, I certainly got the opportunity to put my money where my book was.
Fast-forward and you know that I survived. I made a lot of mistakes. But what I relied on is that slave-blood that pulses through my veins. The blood of my ancestors who survived the worst inhumanity to man to get me to the point where I could write my first of three best-selling books. Yes, I would have to learn a lot, and fast. I knew poverty, and I didn’t want any part of it.
Trump gave Blacks that same opportunity to reach deep and channel the voices of our ancestors. We will learn soon enough that we can survive without the nonsense of DEI. And America will learn that like most Leftist notions, DEI was simply a money-grab.
Check out this DEI grifter that Charlie Kirk noted n this tweet:
The global head of “diversity engagement” at Facebook used her position to flagrantly steal almost $5 million. After being caught, Facebook fired her, so she lateraled to another diversity job at Nike, where she promptly stole even more money.
The global head of “diversity engagement” at Facebook used her position to flagrantly steal almost $5 million. After being caught, Facebook fired her, so she lateraled to another diversity job at Nike, where she promptly stole even more money. It’s not always this literal, but remember: DEI is a scam!
But the ruse continued. At Nike.
After Furlow-Smiles was terminated from Facebook, she worked for Nike from November 2021 to February 2023, serving as Senior Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. In that position, she was responsible for supporting DEI initiatives, developing strategies, and hosting DEI events. She was primarily responsible for a Juneteenth event in New York during her time at Nike.
As she had done at Facebook, Furlow-Smiles circumvented the vendor process at Nike to commit fraud. She linked her Nike corporate card to her PayPal and Venmo accounts. She then paid her associates with PayPal and Venmo, causing fraudulent charges to her Nike card. The associates kicked back portions of the payments to Furlow-Smiles, who submitted fraudulent expense reports to Nike to cover her tracks. The expense reports falsely claimed that the payments were related to the Juneteenth event.
In total, Furlow-Smiles stole more than $4.9 million from Facebook and over $120,000 from Nike based on fictitious charges and fraudulent invoices. She used the money to fund a luxury lifestyle in California, Georgia, and Oregon.
In the past, Blacks were the hardest and most diligent workers. If you wanted something done right, you trusted the Black employees most. Imagine all we would have learned in innovating business. Necessity is the mother of invention, and our work ethic would have led to many patents.
The last thing most Black workers of lore would want is something for nothing. That’s a very different ethic than today’s Leftist Blacks. They want the easy way out. And that’s why they love the Leftist government who gives them just enough to get by. None of these Black clowns playthings out to the end.
Black Leftists are fodder for Democrats, the equivalent of hogs being fed slop. Eventually, Democrats will want pork chops.
President Trump offers Black Leftist the opportunity to find their passions. He forces them to rethink the idea of relying on government for a handout rather than a hand up, hopefully with a copy of The Art of the Deal. Getting rid of DEI is the best thing a politician has done for Blacks in more than a century.
Crime scene tape stretches around Abundant Life Christian School as police continue to investigate the shooting committed by 15-year-old student Natalie Rupnow on Dec. 17, in Madison, Wisconsin. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Just days before Christian students’ scheduled vacation to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, a lonely and radicalized high school student opened fire inside Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, killing two people and wounding six more. Police say 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, who went by the name “Samantha,” opened fire with a 9mm handgun during study hall before turning the gun on herself. Now, an apparent manifesto shows the child’s turbulent home life, isolation, adoption of neo-Nazi views, idolization of school shooters, and her wish to further “evolution” drove her to the brink.
Two Remain in Critical Condition
Rupnow attended Abundant Life, a Christian school founded in 1978, with approximately 400 students from kindergarten through high school, serving 200 families across 56 churches in Dane County. She opened fire in a room of students of mixed ages, killing one teenage student and one teacher. Six people were injured: one teacher and five students. Two of the victims were released from SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital on Monday. Two victims remain in critical condition.
A second grade teacher called 911 to report the shooting at 10:57 a.m. (The local police chief originally reported erroneously that a second grade student made the call.) Police officers responded to the scene immediately, with 17 ambulances and numerous fire trucks. Law enforcement officers found Rupnow bleeding profusely from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot at 11:05 a.m. Rupnow was pronounced dead from suicide in the ambulance en route to a local hospital. The school notified parents at 11:29 a.m.
Rebekah Smith, the mother of a fellow student, told The New York Times that she believed Rupnow had enrolled as a new student in the Christian school at the beginning of the year, in hopes it would help her turn her life around.
The school does not have a metal detector or dedicated, on-campus security personnel, but has security protocols and participated in a government program to harden soft targets against mass shootings. The school kept all doors locked, conducted lockdown and evacuation drills, and broadcast an announcement telling students, “Lockdown. This is not a drill.” Pastor Kellen Lewis, whose four children attend the school, said its safety measures “probably helped save some lives” and “gave my kids that very important sense of agency—that no matter what was going on, they knew what to do.”
Parents and community leaders continue searching for what drove the teenager to murder her fellow students, with many drawing a parallel between Rupnow’s shooting and last March’s mass shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School by Audrey “Aidan” Hale. The 28-year-old Hale, who identified as transgender, killed six people: three children in the third grade class and three adults.
“I don’t know whether [the shooter] was transgender or not,” said Shon Barnes, police chief in the famously liberal city of Madison, on Monday. “I don’t think that whatever happened today has anything to do with how she or he or they may have wanted to identify. And I wish people would kind of leave their own personal biases out of this.”
“At this time, identifying a motive is our top priority. But at this time, it appears that the motive was a combination of factors,” Barnes added Tuesday. Police have begun scouring social media profiles identified with Rupnow, saying she appears to have idolized school shooters and adopted the neo-Nazi views espoused by the Columbine shooters.
A purported manifesto may offer insight into the mixture of toxic traits that sent the 15-year-old over the edge.
Purported Manifesto Shows Divorce, Hatred of Humanity, Racism, and Support for ‘the Revolution’
One link on Rupnow’s social media accounts linked to a document purported to be her manifesto. A reporter for Reduxx said, after speaking with Rupnow’s boyfriend, she verified the authenticity of a six-page manifesto titled “War Against Humanity.” In it, Rupnow expresses her admiration for the Columbine High School shooters, as well as racial collectivist terrorist Patrick Crusius, and Brazilian school shooter Guilherme Taucci.
“Humanity is filth,” she wrote. “My parents are scum.” The document notes her parents divorced, although she claims it did not affect her at all.
“I’ve grown to hate people, and society,” she wrote. “[A]ll of you and the world have done is pick on me and tease me.” Rupnow wrote of “getting teased and pushed around” at school, where “I always got picked on.”
“My so-called family never included me because I was too weird for them. … My father will always make me stand out in the worst possible way,” stated the manifesto. “I hate humanity for forcing me into this little hole.”
The manifesto expresses profound isolation, which observers believe she filled with harmful online content. “[M]y parents admit they didn’t want me. … I’m always the one who sat out or sat in another room because they didn’t want to interact with me at any point in time, then I stayed in my room all day long and all night and after and before school as well,” she wrote.
“I planned on shooting myself a while ago, but I thought maybe its [sic] better for evolution” to engage in a mass shooting.
Rupnow engages in racially charged rhetoric, indicating another possible motive for her shooting.
“The human scum is color, and how people are raised,” she wrote. She also used a racial epithet for black people.
“The Revolution should be well,” she said. “I am part of the real thought and the real revolution.”
“We need revolution,” she insisted.
“The wolf hunts its prey. … There is nothing more than filth,” the document concluded.
Police are aware of the manifesto but have not officially said Rupnow authored it. “A document about this shooting is circulating at this time on social media, but we have not verified its authenticity,” said Barnes.
Democrats Promote Gun Control
Democrats seized on the tragedy to promote gun control legislation. “Jill and I are praying for all the victims today,” said President Joe Biden in a statement released Monday, before pivoting promptly to eroding Americans’ Second Amendment rights. “Congress must pass commonsense gun safety laws: Universal background checks. A national red flag law. A ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.” Vice President Kamala Harris promoted a similar litany of gun restrictions Monday evening, including regulations of how law-abiding citizens store firearms at home.
None of those proposals would have apparently affected the Abundant Life Christian School shooting. “I got the weapons by lies and manipulation and my fathers [sic] stupidity,” wrote Rupnow in her alleged manifesto. “There would have been no way to change what has happened.”
A Family in Crisis
Family experts say family breakdown leads to loneliness, which can lead to resentment and online radicalization. “This seems to be a family in crisis, and in a way, it could be really anyone’s family. She wrote about feeling very alone, and it seemed that she spent a lot of time alone and a lot of time on the internet, and she had come to sort of idolize other school shooters,” said Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council. “I hope that the families that are listening to this show and families everywhere will spend the holidays with their kids, really engaging with them and looking honestly at your own family and saying: ‘Is there a child of mine who’s feeling left out, who’s feeling alone? And how much time are they in their room, behind closed doors? And do I need to just go in that room with them and just sit with them and be with them?’”
Rupnow, like other recent school shooters, is female—a trend Kilgannon mourns. “We have a pornified culture, and we also have an incredible glorification of violence in our culture. Both are a function of being in a culture of death rather than a culture of life,” Kilgannon told“Washington Watch,” guest hosted by former congressman Jody Hice, on Tuesday. “The result of that is going to be that it’s not just going to be the boys who will take these aggressive actions, but you’re going to see this behavior adopted by the girls. And that really, for me as a woman, is very, very chilling and very sad.”
As of this writing, the school remains closed. It posted the following notice on its website:
“In response to the devastating tragedy at Abundant Life Christian School (ALCS) on Monday, December 16, United Way of Dane County has established the Abundant Life Christian School Emergency and Recovery Fund. All funds raised will go directly to ALCS to support those impacted by the tragic events. To give, visit www.unitedwaydanecounty.org or text help4ALCS to 40403.”
Barnes said, “We have to come together and do everything we can to support our students to prevent news conferences like these from happening again and again and again.”
‘Christ Came to Us in a Family’
Hice found the alleged manifesto “heartbreaking,” but said her violence should serve as a wake-up call “for those parents who think that a Christian school is all they need.”
Kilgannon agreed that, while attending a Christian school gives children “a huge advantage,” it can “never replace the relationship that we’ll have with our own children and that our children will have with each other if we’re blessed with more than one child. Christ came to us in a family. He could have come as King of the universe, but He chose to come humbly into a family.”
“He adopted us into His family,” noted Hice.
“Of course, I want to offer every parent in this situation love, consolation, and grace—whether it’s the parents of the perpetrator or her victims,” Kilgannon told The Washington Stand exclusively. “We all have questions we need to ask, and answer, as parents. Were there any warning signs missed by the parents and the school? Are there drugs (prescription or not) involved that increased suicidal ideation over time? How is her therapist coping? Are we praying for all these issues? Are we loving our difficult people enough especially in these challenging times? The family is in crisis. At this holy time of year, let’s take whatever time we have and spend it with our loved ones, aspiring to love each other more and more each day.”
When Hurricane Helene brought unprecedented flooding to western North Carolina in September, many people were left struggling without power and clean water for weeks. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) faced backlash for their slow response and mismanagement of funds, but one global Christian charity stood out for their immediate action and life-saving relief efforts.
Water Mission, a nonprofit based in Charleston, South Carolina, sprang into action as soon as they saw their fellow Americans in need. Their president and CEO, George Greene IV, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that “anytime there’s a need in the [United States], as a [United States] organization, our hearts are drawn to trying to figure out how we can help.” This has been a real special relief effort for us for being able to do that.”
🎥 Our Disaster Response Team is headed to western North Carolina with generators and supplies as we respond to devastating flooding in the area caused by Hurricane Helene.
Water Mission, whose mission is to provide safe water solutions to developing countries around the world, is no stranger to disaster relief. Since 2001, they have helped over 8 million people in 60 countries, including previous disaster responses to Hurricane Katrina and Winter Storm Uri in Texas. And when Hurricane Helene hit, they were prepared to jump in and help once again.
While FEMA faced criticism for their slow response, Water Mission wasted no time. They mobilized an on-the-ground disaster relief team the day after the storm hit and began distributing generators and water purification packets to those in need. They also installed water treatment systems in some of the hardest-hit communities, providing safe drinking water for up to 5,000 people a day.
But their impact didn’t stop there. Water Mission also stepped in to help Asheville public schools reopen after the hurricane left the city’s water undrinkable. Dr. Maggie Fehrman, superintendent of Asheville city schools, praised Water Mission for their help, stating that their water filtration systems allowed them to reopen schools faster and with full instructional days.
The school district had initially requested bottled water, but Water Mission went above and beyond by offering to install water treatment systems in the schools instead. And the impact of their generosity and innovation didn’t go unnoticed. Fehrman told Christianity Today that the entire Water Mission team, from their CEO to their local response team, was a joy to work with during this difficult time.
Water Mission is providing safe water to schools in Asheville, NC, so that students can resume their education following Hurricane Helene. Hear from Jen with The Franklin School of Innovation as she explains how the water is serving this community! pic.twitter.com/RMWiH61kBT
In contrast to the criticism faced by FEMA, Water Mission’s actions during the Hurricane Helene response are a testament to the power of individual and private organizations to make a positive impact during times of crisis. Their dedication to providing clean water and essential resources to those in need is a true example of humanitarian aid in action.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Most Americans are thankful for Trump’s victory this Thanksgiving. Now, on to the hard work of turning the country away from the darkness of the past 4 years of Biden and the Marxist tyrannical policies. We don’t seek revenge but are seeking justice retribution against the Biden DOJ and the Deep State for any illegal activities they may have committed in their effort to destroy Trump and our democracy.
Kachelman: Now Is Not the Time for Revenge – Now Is the Time for Justified Retribution
By John L. Kachelman – The Gateway Pundit – Nov 9, 2024
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A poll released by the University of Chicago via the Chicago Project on Security and Threats offers a chilling account of the growing radicalism in America, particularly after the second foiled assassination attempt of former president Donald Trump, the poll found that 26 million Americans believe “the use of force” is justified to keep Trump from regaining the presidency.
As discussed in my book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” we have seen an increasing level of rage rhetoric in our political system. For some, violent language can become violent action. There is a normalization that can occur as extreme actions become more acceptable to more and more citizens:
“We are living in an age of rage. It permeates every aspect of our society and politics. Rage is liberating, even addictive. It allows us to say and do things that we would ordinarily avoid, even denounce in others. Rage is often found at the farthest extreme of reason. For those who agree with the underlying message, it is righteous and passionate. For those who disagree, it is dangerous and destabilizing.”
With the unrelenting claims of President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and others that democracy is about to die in America, some now feel a license to commit criminal acts in the name of “saving democracy.”It is the ultimate form of self-delusion that one saves democracy by committing political violence against those with whom you disagree. We have seen this radicalism spread in past years from higher education into society at large.
At Hunter College in New York, Professor Shellyne Rodríguez was shown trashing a pro-life display of students. She was captured on a videotape telling the students that “you’re not educating s–t […] This is f–king propaganda. What are you going to do, like, anti-trans next? This is bulls–t. This is violent. You’re triggering my students.” Unlike the professor, the students remained calm and respectful. One even said “sorry” to the accusation that being pro-life was triggering for her students. Rodríguez continued to rave, stating, “No you’re not — because you can’t even have a f–king baby. So, you don’t even know what that is. Get this s–t the f–k out of here.” In an Instagram post, she is then shown trashing the table.
Another recent example comes from the State University of New York at Albany, where sociology professor Renee Overdyke shut down a pro-life display and then resisted arrest. One student is heard screaming, “She’s a [expletive] professor.” That of course is the point.
While Democratic leaders have condemned the second assassination attempt on Trump, they have continued the unhinged rhetoric of how this may be our last election and democracy is about to die in America. At the same time, some leaders have allied themselves with violent groups.
Some Democrats have played a dangerous game in supporting or excusing the work of Antifa, one of the most violent anti-free speech groups in the world. Former Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison, now the Minnesota attorney general, once said Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump. This was after Antifa had been involved in numerous acts of violence and its website was banned in Germany.
Ellison’s son, Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison, declared his allegiance to Antifa in the heat of violent protests. During a prior hearing, Democratic senators refused to clearly denounce Antifa and falsely suggested that the far right was the primary cause of recent violence. Likewise, Joe Biden has dismissed objections to Antifa as just “an idea.”
These politicians are playing a dangerous game in toying with groups like Antifa, which will not stop at threatening their opponents. Politicians like Ellison could easily find themselves the next target as groups seek to “strike fear in the heart” of the establishment.
It appears that the Harris-Walz campaign to embrace “joy” has taken hold among educators in L.A. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) voted 4-3 to allow 10 schools to opt out of standardized tests and test preparation beginning in the 2025-26 school year. LAUSD President Jackie Goldberg declared the move was a blow to “corporate America” and would restore the “enjoyment of education.”
We have previously discussed how schools have been dropping the use of standardized tests to achieve diversity goals in admissions. That trend continued this month with Cal State dropping standardized testing“to level the playing field” for minority students. I have long been a critic of this movement given the overwhelming evidence that these tests allow an objective measure of academic merit and have great predictive value on the performance of students.
Many colleges and universities are returning to standardized testing after the much-acclaimed abandonment of the tests for a more “holistic approach” to selection. However, public educators have continued to lower proficiency requirements and cancel gifted programs to “even the playing field.” The result has been to further hide the dismal scores and educational standards of many public school districts.
Goldberg lashed out at the “testing industry” which tends to expose the continued failure of public education to give these students a fighting chance in society. Rather than look at their own failures over decades to significantly improve scores, Goldberg said that she “hoped” the resolution would “begin to change how we look at student assessment.” In other words, students would be assessed without looking at how they actually perform on tests with other students.
Tests, it appears, are just a buzz kill for teachers and students alike: “Because the whole goal of life became not the love of learning, not the enjoyment of education, not the exchange of ideas, but whether or not your school could move up on its test scores. For at least 20 years, I have found that repugnant.”
It shows, Ms. Goldberg, it shows.
The retiring Goldberg has always been more focused on increasing budgets than improving scores. Her website declares
“California is the world’s fifth richest economy. There are 157 billionaires here who pay almost nothing in taxes. There is no excuse for why New York spends $29k per pupil while we spend $16.5k. It’s time to tax the great wealth in this state and re-invest in our children!”
That appears to be one statistical score that Goldberg does find relevant as a measure of education. Others at the meeting noted that they have falling enrollments, and this will not help.
I previously wrote about how public educators and teacher unions are killing public education in America. Many of us have advocated for public education for decades. I sent my children to public schools, and I still hope we can turn this around without wholesale voucher systems.
Once parents have a choice, these teachers lose a virtual monopoly over many families, and these districts could lose billions in states like Florida. This is precisely why school systems are facing budget shortfalls as families vote with their feet. These families want a return to the educational mission that once defined our schools.
L.A. will pursue a program under which they appoint a “lead teacher” for additional professional development from Community School Coaches and the University of California Los Angeles Center for Community Schooling. They will focus on an effort to “integrate culturally relevant curriculum, community- and project-based learning, and civic engagement” into their programs. The “relevant” curriculum would not include actual standardized testing.
It promises more the same. Bringing “joy” back to schools will come without the accountability of standardized testing. For teachers, such tests are decidedly not joyful since they expose their own failures and set goals for improvement. Now they can just “assess” students as successful and send them along their way.
Public schools across the country will continue to fail inner city children and leave them in the same crushing patterns of poverty. In Baltimore, a survey found that forty percent of schools did not have a single student proficient in math. Rather than reverse that trend, the schools are just waiving the tests and graduating the students. What is so frustrating is reading about failing school systems lowering proficiency standards and claiming that it is better for minority students.
American education faces the perfect storm. Despite record expenditures on public schools, we are still effectively abandoning students, particularly minority students, in teaching the basic subjects needed to succeed in life. We will then graduate the students by removing testing barriers for graduation. Then some may go to colleges and universities that have eliminated standardized testing for admission.
At every stage in their education, they have been pushed through by educators without objective proof that they are minimally educated. That certainly guarantees high graduation rates or improved diversity admissions. However, these students are still left at a sub-proficient state as they enter an increasingly competitive job market and economy.Any failures will come down the road when they will be asked to write, read, or add by someone who is looking for actual work product. They will then be outside of the educational system and any failures will not be attributed to public educators.
As I have previously written, if we truly care for these students, we cannot rig the system to just kick them down the road toward failure. It is like declaring patients healthy by just looking at them and sending them on their way. We have the ability to measure proficiency, and we have the moral obligation to face our own failures in helping these kids achieve it.
Loved ones of students killed in school shootings slammed Vice President Kamala Harris after unearthed comments from 2019 surfaced this week, detailing that Harris supports removing police officers from schools.
“My brother was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting because of liberal policies like the one Kamala is pushing here… I wish there had been a police officer there to protect him. Students need more protection, not less!,” school safety advocate JT Lewis posted to X. Lewis’ younger brother, six-year-old Jesse Lewis, was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut that left 26 children and staffers dead.
Lewis was reacting to unearthed footage of Harris in 2019, when she was a California senator, declaring her support of removing police officers from schools in an effort to “demilitarize” campuses.
“What we need to do about … demilitarizing our schools and taking police officers out of schools. We need to deal with the reality and speak the truth about the inequities around school discipline. Where in particular, Black and Brown boys are being expelled and or suspended as young as, I’ve seen, as young as in elementary school,”Harris said in 2019 in South Carolina, when she served as a California senator running for president during the 2020 cycle.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the American Federation of Teachers’ 88th National Convention on July 25, 2024, in Houston, Texas. (Montinique Monroe/Getty Images)
Harris joined the 2019 Presidential Justice Forum at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, in October of that year before she dropped out of the 2020 race and was announced as President Biden’s running mate. A college student asked Harris how she would go about expunging the records of juveniles to allow them to attend college, including expunging “a criminal offense,” not “just a marijuana expungement.”
The Connecticut House of Representatives passed the state’s largest gun control initiative since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in a 96-51 vote. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)
“That’s a great question and a great point, because when we talk about reform of the criminal justice system, we’ve got to understand that the juvenile justice system is in dire need of reform, and I know that. And I’ve seen it,” Harris responded, touting her 2020 campaign’s “plan of action” on criminal justice reform.
“I will end solitary confinement of juveniles, which includes what we need to do to talk about and have a commitment for less incarceration of juveniles. And have guidelines in terms of exactly what those, those numbers should be, because right now, in so many states, children are being incarcerated for … a child being incarcerated for a couple of days is traumatic, much less the weeks, months and years that we’re seeing that happen,” she explained.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris presidential campaign earlier this week inquiring whether she still supports removing police officers from schools, but did not receive a reply.
Crews use heavy equipment to tear down the 1200 building of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Friday, June 14, 2024, in Parkland, Fla. On February 14, 2018, a gunman entered the school and killed 17 people. (Miami Herald)
Other family members of school-shooting victims joined Lewis in their condemnation of Harris’ 2019 comments, including Ryan Petty and Andrew Pollack, two dads who lost their respective teenage daughters in the tragic Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018.
“Wreckless. Radical. Kamala wants to make schools less safe. Your kids aren’t safe with Kamala Harris in office,” Petty, who lost his 14-year-old daughter Alaina Petty in the 2018 shooting, tweeted in response to the Trump War Room posting footage of Harris’ comments.
People visit the memorial for the victims of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 people, on the fifth anniversary of the massacre on February 14, 2023. Seventeen people were killed, and another seventeen were injured after a 19-year-old former student opened fire at the school on February 14, 2018. (Photo by Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images) (Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)
“This is sickening. My daughter was killed because Parkland didn’t have enough security. We need more school resource officers — not fewer!” Pollack, whose 18-year-old daughter Meadow Pollack was killed in the same shooting, posted on X.
Harris’ comments declaring support for the removal of officers from schools were made ahead of 2020’s summer of protests and riots in response to the killing of George Floyd during a police interaction on Memorial Day of that year. Floyd’s death reignited calls from activists to defund the police, which had a cascading effect across the country as liberal cities moved to slash police budgets, and school boards also voted to sever ties with police departments.
Researchers with the outlet Education Week found in 2022 that at least 50 school districts between May 2020 through June 2022 had removed officers from school campuses or slashed budgets for school officers. The plans to remove officers from schools, however, were short-lived in many jurisdictions, as violence broke out on campuses when students returned to the classrooms following the pandemic and its lockdowns.
In the face of violence, such as a shooting at a Denver high school, or repeated fights within the Alexandria, Virginia, school district, education officials from coast to coast backtracked on removing officers, welcoming them back to campuses in an effort to curb crime.
Vice President Harris has not sat down for an interview or held a press conference since emerging as the Democratic presidential nominee. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Harris officially accepted the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in Chicago last week. She rose to the top of the ticket after President Biden dropped out of the race last month amid mounting concerns over his mental acuity.
Effective July 2025, teacher licensing rules passed last year in Minnesota under Democrat Gov. Tim Walz will ban practicing Christians, Jews, and Muslims from teaching in public schools. Walz is now the presidential running mate of current U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. His resume includes a stint as a high school social studies teacher who sponsored a student queer sex club in 1999.
Starting next July, Minnesota agencies controlled by Walz appointees will require teacher license applicants to affirm transgenderism and race Marxism. Without a teaching license, individuals cannot work in Minnesota public schools, nor in the private schools that require such licenses. The latest version of the regulations requires teachers to “affirm” students’ “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” to receive a Minnesota teaching license:
The teacher fosters an environment that ensures student identities such as race/ethnicity, national origin, language, sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical/developmental/emotional ability, socioeconomic class, and religious beliefs are historically and socially contextualized, affirmed, and incorporated into a learning environment where students are empowered to learn and contribute as their whole selves (emphasis added).
Last spring, administrative law judges finally approved these pending changes The Federalist reported one month before they were finalized. Universities are also affected: starting in 2025, they must either train their teaching students to fulfill these anti-Christian requirements or be banned from offering state licensing — and thus the ticket to the vast majority of teaching jobs — to their students.
Since 2020 in Minnesota, teachers renewing their licenses, which is usually required every five to seven years, must demonstrate “cultural competency” similar to the requirements imposed in 2025 on new teaching licensees. Teachers renewing their licensing must “Show[] evidence of self-reflection and discussion of” topics that include “Gender Identity, Including Transgender Students” and “Sexual Orientation.” They must also show they understand “bias” in themselves, and their students related to race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other cultural Marxist categories.
Queer Totalitarianism Forces Religion into the Closet
Some Christian universities in the state will obey these regulations, said Doug Seaton, founder and president of the nonprofit Upper Midwest Law Center, located in Minneapolis. Some Christian universities will not, but so far, those UMLC has reached out to that plan to disobey these state commands to violate their faith will do so quietly and only sue when the state finds and punishes them, Seaton said.
“Some are not willing to do it [file a lawsuit] until they actually have their college programs tagged for noncompliance, or their graduates actually not licensed as a consequence of not adhering to these standards,” he said in a phone interview. This comes even though UMLC, as a public interest law firm, would undertake the litigation and pay the vast majority of its expenses thanks to their donors. Three Minnesota Christian Universities The Federalist reached out to did not return inquiries on whether they would enforce the new licensing rules.
Faithful members of the world’s largest and oldest religions cannot in good conscience “affirm” non-heterosexual sexual orientations and gender identities. Christians who do so publicly deny their faith, something Jesus Christ said endangers a person’s soul and eternal bliss after death: “Therefore whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:32, 33).
Minnesota’s teacher requirements therefore force Christians, Muslims, Jews, and adherents to other religions to violate their faith and endanger their hopes of eternal life in order to work in government-run schools.
Forcing people to testify to beliefs they don’t hold, often called compelled speech, is clearly unconstitutional, he said: “They’re essentially requiring people to affirm these ideas that they don’t really believe, in many cases, as a condition of being a public-school teacher or being part of a program to be a licensed public-school teacher. You can’t force that kind of speech; you can’t require adherence to ideas that aren’t believed.”
The 13-member board that made these changes is appointed by the governor, whom for the last six years has been Walz. So, Walz is poised to make similar bigoted, totalitarian, and unconstitutional policies across the United States should he be elected vice president.
Marinating Kids in Anti-American Propaganda
As I reported last year, Minnesota’s new teacher requirements also “require teachers to agree that the taxpayers supplying their salaries and the people who created the school system that will employ them are racists and affirm other cultural Marxist beliefs.”
“For example, Standard 6C requires that ‘The teacher understands the historical foundations of education in Minnesota … that have and continue to create inequitable opportunities, experiences, and outcomes for learners … especially for … students historically denied access, underserved, or underrepresented on the basis of race … gender, sexual orientation.’” That “standard” remains in the latest version of the regulations, under the same number.
Recently in The Wall Street Journal, Katherine Kersten examined curricular changes Minnesota is making under Walz’s administration in “ethnic studies” that mirror these changes to teacher licensing requirements.
Mr. Walz signed the law establishing this initiative in 2023. The department’s standards and benchmarks, approved in January, require first-graders to‘identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power’ and ‘use those examples to construct meanings for those terms.’
Fourth graders must ‘identify the processes and impacts of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.’ High-school students are told to ‘develop an analysis of racial capitalism’ and ‘anti-Blackness’ and are taught to view themselves as members of ‘racialized hierarchies’ based on ‘dominant European beauty standards.”
The new teacher requirements are also rife with demands to agree with race Marxism, as Child Protection League analyses detail. Below are just a few examples.
Walz’s first executive order as governor was to install a “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI, council. Former Minnesota state legislator Allen Quist notes that “The radical Walz administration Department of Human Rights has also forced school districts to report student discipline by race and require equal outcomes (equity) in discipline. The results have been horrific chaos and violence.”
During Walz’s governorship, student achievement in Minnesota has gone from among the best in the nation to declining more sharply than anywhere else in the nation, according to the Minneapolis-based Center for the American Experiment. The most recent scores show Minnesota fourth graders dipping below the national average in reading for the first time ever recorded on the well-respected Nation’s Report Card.
Research has found for decades that there is no link between teacher certification and student achievement. People who enter teaching with a degree other than in education tend to have significantly higher personal and student academic performance.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her new book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
From 2004 until 2019, the responsibility to enforce law and order in San Francisco fell to District Attorney Kamala Harris and her protégé George Gascon. The result? By any estimation, it has been an ignominious disaster. Even as you drive from the airport to downtown in this once great city, the sight that greets you off the highway is streets with empty storefronts — like broken teeth, jagged and sad.
In the Tenderloin District it gets worse, far worse, and it isn’t getting any better, in fact, much the opposite. The last time I was in the City by the Bay was in 2021, and I struggled then to describe the craven brutality of the homelessness and drug addiction. Let me try again.
Next week, at her convention, the hand-picked Democratic nominee — whom nobody voted for — will try to convince us that her record of failure is not her record of failure. But the chaotic streets of San Francisco tell a different story. ((AP Photo/Patrick Semansky))
Just off Union Square, I wandered down to the nice coffee house where I spent my mornings three years ago. It’s gone now. Boarded up. Out in front, addicts assembled under the amused eyes of security guards who seem to think this is normal. Just up the block, the smell hit me first. It didn’t last time, but now, a fetid stench of human degradation that New Yorkers know only from an unfortunate subway car choice, simply hangs in the air. You can’t even smell the weed.
A person lies on the street in San Francisco in August 2024.
Dogs abound, barking in the midst of this misery. At least they know something is amiss. In tents, the poor forgotten of this city languish, selling drugs, not joints, not a bag of weed, but life-threatening heroin and fentanyl right out in the open. The scale of human tragedy is laid bare by the proximity of wealth to squalor, of healthy and beautiful minds and bodies to squandered lives doped out and laid out beneath signs for Saks Fifth Avenue and Tiffany & Co.
The well-heeled set headed for the Apple Store seem to pretend it isn’t happening. But to an outsider, it is as clear as the summer sun. You can’t buy beef jerky here. You can try, but at the Walgreens near my upscale hotel, the dehydrated travelers treat is behind lock and key. The customer service button might as well be connected to some remote outpost in Antarctica. After 5 minutes you just leave.
Open air drug dealing in San Francisco in August 2024.
During COVID, I used the analogy of pointillist painting to describe the ever-encroaching rules. It’s just a mask, it’s just six feet, it’s just remote learning, each was a point on a canvas, but when you stepped back, you saw a picture of a prison. So, too, in San Francisco, the little horrors add up to a city of nightmares.
Anyone from any city in the northeast of our great country will say after five minutes that San Francisco is a dystopian disaster, but many of the people here, like frogs slowly boiling, think it’s normal. Is this what Vice President Kamala Harris, one of the architects of this misery, has in mind for all of us?
Next week, at her convention, the hand-picked Democratic nominee — whom nobody voted for — will try to convince us that her record of failure is not her record of failure. But the chaotic streets of San Francisco tell a different story. This is real. It is horrible. And no amount of well-off liberals posting photos next to the Golden Gate Bridge can truly hide the depravity of it all. And yeah, maybe the cops and the spaghetti strainer of a District Attorney’s office wrought by Harris keep their wealthy enclaves safe, but everyone else is in dire straits.
One of the finest street clocks in all of America is in San Francisco. It also is broken.
No matter how big your britches get, you can’t hide from your hometown. There, people know you, they know your story, and the story of Kamala Harris and San Francisco is a warning bell that America needs to hear.
Not far from the Tenderloin I found a curious object; one of the finest street clocks in all America. At one point, it was insured by Lloyd’s of London. You can view its gears and workings. It is a beautiful clock, reminiscent of the one that graces New York’s Grand Central. It also doesn’t work. The face of this storied clock is set to the advertiser’s time of 10:10, and twice a day it is right as the saying goes. But why is it broken? How much would it cost to make this piece of history tick again? Why isn’t anyone doing it?
These are all questions for the presumptive Democratic nominee, who takes no questions. But she cannot hide from San Francisco. This is her legacy. And like the broken clock, it just flat out doesn’t work.
For many years, I have testified and written about Antifa and its growing anti-free speech philosophy. Some Democratic leaders have embraced this violent movement, which continues to gain strength on campuses and its cities across the nation. It is also a global movement. That is reflected in the alarming election of Antifa candidates to the French National Assembly as well as the European Parliament. That is quite an accomplishment for a movement that President Joe Biden dismissed as “just an idea.”
“Antifa originated with European anarchist and Marxist groups from the 1920s, particularly Antifaschistische Aktion, a Communist group from the Weimar Republic before World War II. Its name resulted from the shortening of the German word antifaschistisch. In the United States, the modern movement emerged through the Anti- Racist Action (ARA) groups, which were dominated by anarchists and Marxists. It has an association with the anarchist organization Love and Rage, which was founded by former Trotsky and Marxist followers as well as offshoots like Mexico’s Amor Y Rabia. The oldest U.S. group is likely the Rose City Antifa (RCA) in Portland, Oregon, which would become the center of violent riots during the Trump years. The anarchist roots of the group give it the same organizational profile as such groups in the early twentieth century with uncertain leadership and undefined structures.”
As I have previously written, it has long been the “Keyser Söze” of the anti-free speech movement, a loosely aligned group that employs measures to avoid easy detection or association. Yet, FBI Director Chris Wray has repeatedly pushed back on the denials of Antifa’s work or violence. In one hearing, Wray stated “And we have quite a number” — and “Antifa is a real thing. It’s not a fiction.”
Some Democrats have played a dangerous game in supporting or excusing the work of Antifa. Former Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison, now the Minnesota attorney general, once said Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump. This was after Antifa had been involved in numerous acts of violence and its website was banned in Germany. Ellison’s son, Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison, declared his allegiance to Antifa in the heat of the protests this summer. During a prior hearing, Democratic senators refused to clearly denounce Antifa and falsely suggested that the far right was the primary cause of recent violence. Likewise, Joe Biden has dismissed objections to Antifa as just “an idea.”
It is at its base a movement at war with free speech, defining the right itself as a tool of oppression. That purpose is evident in what is called the “bible” of the Antifa movement: Rutgers Professor Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.
Bray emphasizes the struggle of the movement against free speech: “At the heart of the anti-fascist outlook is a rejection of the classical liberal phrase that says, ‘I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’”
Bray admits that “most Americans in Antifa have been anarchists or antiauthoritarian communists… From that standpoint, ‘free speech’ as such is merely a bourgeois fantasy unworthy of consideration.”
The movement continues to take hold among parties on the left. An Antifa leader who is on France’s national security watchlist was elected to the National Assembly as a member of the New Popular Front leftist bloc. Raphaël Arnault will represent Vaucluse in Provence in the French parliament after winning with 54.98 per cent of the vote, according toLe Figaro.
French President Emmanuel Macron and his moderate party worked with the New Popular Front in a power deal to defeat conservatives. Antifa was part of that front.
In Italy, Ilaria Salis, a schoolteacher by trade from Milan, Italy, has been elected to the European Parliament despite being arrested in 2023 in Budapest for allegedly taking part in the organized attack by Antifa on attendees of an event commemorating the anniversary of the siege of the Buda castle by the Soviet forces in 1945. Salis’ far-left green alliance Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra (AVS) succeeded in securing the seat with the backing of far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) party — a member of the New Popular Front alliance.
These two milestones were secured only with the help of mainstream parties and leaders who continue to delude themselves about Antifa and its true agenda. While convenient allies now to win elections, these same leaders could soon find themselves the next reactionaries denounced by these same radical groups as they gain greater power.
In higher education, there is a virtual cottage industry of academics declaring everything from math to meritocracy to be forms of white supremacy and racism. Now, it appears romance will be added to the list. University of California Santa Barbara Black Studies Professor Sabrina Strings has written how romance promotes white supremacy and “global pigmentocracy.”In The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance, Strings recounts having “endured” her own bad relationships and maintains that “Romance is an old white cultural institution that began in the Middle Ages.” In an interview with The Current, Strings explains that “I am only one of the millions of Gen X-to-Gen Z women who have endured a seemingly endless array of miserable relationships with men.” In viewing romance through her own lens, Strings comes up with distinctly different views of literature and famous relationships. For example, many people have read the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, a story of forbidden love that introduced disharmony and disaster to King Arthur’s Round Table. It is a story of love and eventual betrayal. It is both irresistible and irrational. Many accounts show Lancelot rescuing Guinevere and, torn by their mutual loyalty to King Arthur, the couple finally succumbs to the inexorable pull of love to each other. It is a tragedy of love and loyalty that leaves everyone in ruin. Arthur would die of wounds in the later battles, Guinevere would die in a convent, and Lancelot would, according to some accounts, die as a hermit. It is a powerful tale of how love can overwhelm all other considerations and shatter every other bond.
That is not exactly how Professor Strings sees it. She says that the tale is really about how a man of lower status is trying to secure greater power and prestige by seducing a higher class European Christian woman: “Love is very much about generosity, but romance is very much about what you can get from somebody, especially if you’re a man who is social climbing.”
Professor Strings zeros in on the beauty and whiteness of Guinevere. She notes that the queen was viewed as irresistibly attractive and pale in complexion:
“We can easily recognize these features today as those representing the apex of whiteness, even though race did not exist at the time of Troyes’s writing. Nevertheless, to the extent that some of these representations occurred before the seventeenth century dawn of race science, they have what historians have called a ‘proto-racist’ bent. Indeed, scholars have shown that the preference for light skin, hair, and eyes existed prior to the advent of racism, and that these characteristics were co-opted by it and enlisted for the purpose of installing a global pigmentocracy.”
The “whiteness” could also simply reflect the racial makeup of the historical characters as opposed to any “global pigmentocracy.” Yet, according to Professor Strings, romance is about “women who are not peak white or are ‘insufficiently white’ are subject deservedly to deceit, manipulation, assault and rape.”
Professor Strings previously wrote a 2019 book about how “fatphobia” is rooted in racism.
In today’s academic environment, there often seems a rush to racialize common practices, customs, or terminology. Publications clamor for such articles and discovering another hidden racist element in society can bring academic accolades. However, others have already staked out many areas such as mathematics, astrophysics, statistics, meritocracy, climate change, dieting, tipping, skiing, chess, and organized pantries. Most recently, the American Psychological Association declared that merit-based hiring may be racist. Even robots are now declared to be part of the supremacist menace because they are often made of white plastic. Indeed, it now appears that both romance and marriage are vehicles for white supremacy. We previously discussed the writings of George Mason Professor Bethany Letiecq on how marriage advances “White, heteropatriarchal supremacy in America.” Nevertheless, the Strings book has met with acclaim and praise from many. Ms. Magazinepraised the book as espousing the foundations of romance in “the white supremacist cishetallo patriarchy. Personal, historical, rigorous and readable, this is a fresh and essential feminist analysis on sexism, whiteness and toxic masculinity.” Other reviews note that Strings “challeng[es]readers to accept the end of love as they know it and to embrace more queer and feminist ideas of love, equity and partnership.”
New York City Police Department Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Tarik Sheppard (C) speaks at a press conference alongside NYPD officals after a man reportedly set himself on fire in the park across from Manhattan Criminal Court during the trial of US President Donald Trump, in New York City on April 19, 2024. (Getty Images)
The New York Police Department has identified the man who lit himself on fire outside of the courthouse of former President Donald Trump’s ongoing trial.
The individual, identified by the NYPD as Maxwell Azzarello, was captured lighting himself on fire about 30 feet from the courthouse on Friday afternoon.
The NYPD held a press conference immediately after the shocking incident occurred, revealing Azzarello used an “alcohol based substance that’s used for cleaning” to ignite the fire. Officials also confirmed that no other bystanders, including the individuals who attempted to extinguish the flames, were seriously injured.
Azzarello was reportedly moved to a burn unit where he remains in “critical condition,” NYPD officials said.
Officials described a manifesto that appears to be written by Azzarello where he wrote about researching a global “ponzi scheme.”
In the document published online before the incident, Azzarello also alleges a “totalitarian con” and apologized to “friends and family, witnesses and first responders” for “inflicting this pain upon you.”
BREAKING NEWS2 hour(s) ago
Man sets self on fire outside Trump NY trial
Posted by Chris Pandolfo | April 19, 2024
A man set himself on fire at a protest outside the Manhattan courthouse where former President Trump is on trial for alleged hush money payments. Fox News’ Eric Shawn reported live on the air as the man self-immolated in the protest area about 30 feet from the courthouse. The protest took place in a small park across the street.
Police threw blankets over the man in an attempt to extinguish the flames. Sirens were heard as Shawn reported live from the scene.
“There was panic and screaming, obviously, when this happened,” Shawn reported.
The man appeared to be moving his arms as he was attended to by EMT and paramedics. His identity and condition are currently unknown. Police were seen engaging with the man as he was lying on the ground receiving medical attention. He was pulled onto a stretcher and placed in an ambulance to take him to the hospital.
Shawn described the scene as one of “shock and horror” with flames reaching as tall as 15 ft. into the air.
I can’t separate the two postings. Please focus on the second. The first posting is so disturbing, but it is an editorial on how little human life is worth today. The second one will help renew your faith in mankind that there still are people who truly know how to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
This Uber driver, a Black woman Lamiyah Jabbar, age 30, picked up a White woman named Diane, who opened up to her about her financial struggles on the way to work at fast food chain Tim Hortons in Buffalo, New York.
The governor of Idaho has signed into law a measure explicitly declaring that there are only two genders, as the idea that there are multiple genders has permeated popular culture and global politics.
On Tuesday, Idaho’s Republican Gov. Brad Little signed House Bill 421 into law. The measure, approved by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in a 54-14 vote in February and passed by the Republican-controlled Senate in a 26-8 vote on April 10, amends Idaho state law to establish a definition of the term “sex,” clarifying that there are only two genders: male and female. All Democrats in both chambers voted against the bill, while one Senate Republican and three House Republicans broke with their party to oppose it.
The language included in the bill applies to “the compiled laws and rules and policies of the state of Idaho.” The measure defines “sex” as “an individual’s biological sex, either male or female.” It identifies a male as “an individual who has, had, will have, or, but for a developmental or genetic anomaly or historical accident, would have the reproductive system that at some point produces, transports, and utilizes sperm for fertilization.”
Meanwhile, the legislation defines a female as someone who “has, had, will have, or, but for a developmental or genetic anomaly or historical accident, would have the reproductive system that at some point produces, transports, and utilizes eggs for fertilization.” It clarifies that the term “boy” refers to “a minor human male,” while the word “father” is used for “a male parent.”
On the other hand, the measure states that “‘girl’ means a minor human female,” while “‘mother’ means a female parent.”
“‘Gender,’ when used to refer to males, females, or the natural differences between males and females, shall be considered a synonym for ‘sex’ and shall not be considered a synonym for gender identity, an internal sense of gender, experienced gender, gender expression, or gender role,” the bill adds.
The legislation also replaces the previous definition of sex as “the immutable biological and physiological characteristics, specifically the chromosomes and internal and external reproductive anatomy, genetically determined at conception and generally recognizable at birth, that define an individual as male or female” with the new definition in existing laws.
A declaration of legislative intent included at the beginning of the legislation states that “in human beings, there are two, and only two, sexes: male and female” and that “every individual is either male or female.” Stressing that “an individual’s sex can be observed or clinically verified at or before birth,” the measure asserts that “in no case is an individual’s sex determined by stipulation or self-identification.”
“There is increasing confusion about the definition of sex as a biological truth and its relationship to concepts and terms, including but not limited to gender, gender identity, gender role, gender expression, and experienced gender,” the legislation explains. “Confusion and ambiguities surrounding the definitions of sex, male, female, and related terms can hinder individual efforts to enjoy equal treatment under the law.”
Emphasizing that “legal equality of the two sexes does not imply that the sexes are identical to each other or are the same in every respect,” the bill maintains that “separate facilities, housing or sleeping arrangements, or sports teams, programs, or leagues established because of or organized according to physical differences between the sexes does not constitute unequal treatment under the law,” adding, “Physical differences between males and females are enduring, and the two sexes are not fungible.”
The passage of House Bill 421 comes at a time when adherence to the idea that sex is determined by biology is interpreted as hostile to the LGBT community, some of whom identify as a made-up gender other than their sex or identify as non-binary or identify as one of several fake gender identities. Last year, a professor at St. Philip’s College in San Antonio, Texas, was fired because he said sex is determined by an individual’s chromosomes.
That professor, who was ultimately reinstated earlier this year after filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, had been terminated due to allegations that he engaged in “religious preaching, discriminatory comments about homosexuals and transgender individuals, anti-abortion rhetoric, and misogynistic banter” by stating a biological fact.
At the same time, gender identity is emerging as a protected class in American society.
In the 2020 case of Bostock v. Clayton County, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the protections against discrimination on the basis of sex in federal civil rights law also apply to sexual orientation and gender identity.
In some countries, “misgendering,” a term misused by trans activists to defame those who correctly identify a person’s sex, can have even more adverse consequences. A Mexican congressman and civil society leader have found themselves subject to prosecution for using male pronouns to refer to a trans-identified lawmaker in Mexico who self-identifies as female.
By now we have all seen the frankly hilarious images of Black George Washington, South Asian popes, along with Gemini’s stubborn and bizarre inability to depict a White scientist or lawyer. Much like Open AI’s ChatGPT before it, Gemini will gladly generate content heralding the virtues of Black, Hispanic or Asian people, and will decline to do so in regard to White people so as not to perpetuate stereotypes.
There are two main reasons why this is occurring. The first, flaws in the AI software itself, has been much discussed. The second, and more intractable problem, that of flaws in the original source material, has not.
Engineers at AI companies have trained their software to “correct,” or “compensate,” for what they assume is the systemic racism that our society is rife with. (Betul Abali/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here,” Jack Krawczyk, senior director for Gemini Experiences has admitted.
You see, the engineers at AI companies such as Google and Open AI have trained their software to “correct,” or “compensate,” for what they assume is the systemic racism and bigotry that our society is rife with. But the mainly 21st-century internet source material AI uses is already correcting for such bias. It is in large part this doubling down that produces the absurd and ludicrous images and answers that Gemini and ChatGPT are being mocked for.
For well over a decade, online content creators such as advertisers and news outlets have sought to diversify the subjects of their content in order to redress supposed negative historical stereotypes.
It is this very content that AI generators scrub once again for alleged racism, and as a result, all too often, the only option left to AI to make the content “less racist” is to erase White people from results altogether. In its own strange way, generative AI may be proving that American society is actually far less racist than those in positions of power assume.
This problem of source material also extends far beyond thorny issues of race, as Christina Pushaw, an aide to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, exposed in two prompts regarding COVID.
Google’s Gemini AI informs me that opening schools did spread COVID, but BLM protests did not. pic.twitter.com/QvJA79pGDR
She first asked Gemini if opening schools spread COVID, and then if BLM rallies spread COVID. Nobody should be surprised to learn that the AI provided evidence of school openings spreading the virus and no evidence that BLM rallies did.
But here’s the thing. If you went back and aggregated the contemporaneous online news reporting from 2020 and 2021, these are exactly the answers that you would wind up with. News outlets bent over backwards to deny that tens of thousands marching against alleged racism, and using public transportation to get there, could spread COVID, while chomping at the bit to prove in-class learning was deadly.
In fact, there was so much abject online censorship of anything questioning the orthodoxies of the COVID lockdowns that the historical record upon which AI is built is all but irretrievably corrupted. This is an existential problem for the widespread use of artificial intelligence, especially in areas such as journalism, history, regulation and even legislation, because obviously there is no way to train AI to only use sources that “tell the truth.”
There is no doubt that in areas such as science and engineering AI opens up a world of new opportunities, but as far as intellectual pursuits go, we must be very circumspect about the vast flaws that AI introduces to our discourse.
For now, at least, generative AI absolutely should not be used to create learning materials for our schools. (Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration)
For now, at least, generative AI absolutely should not be used to create learning materials for our schools, breaking stories in our newspapers, or be anywhere within a 10,000-mile radius of our government. It turns out the business of interpreting the billions of bits of information online to arrive at rational conclusions is still very much a human endeavor. It is still very much a subjective matter, and there is a real possibility that no matter how advanced AI becomes, it always will be.
This may be a hard pill to swallow for companies that have invested fortunes in generative AI development, but it is good news for human beings, who can laugh at the fumbling failures of the technology and know that we are still the best arbiters of truth. More, it seems very likely that we always will be.
I read with a mixture of sadness and relief an essay by one Melissa Persling, who by all accounts represents the average 30-something woman in America today. In the article, she laments the fact that she’s single at 38 and feels “unbelievably betrayed by feminism.” Persling feels that way because it is that way. For decades, our culture has failed women by spreading falsehood after falsehood about men, marriage, motherhood and career. It’s been a slow, daily drip of “You go, Girl!” messages, specifically designed to delete men and babies from life’s equation. And it has wreaked havoc on women’s lives.
In an interview with Fox News, Persling explained why she wrote her article. “I wrote a lot of that article, like, truly scared… I really did think, like, wow, you’ve missed your opportunity. You are going to be alone. You’re not going to have a family,” she said.
Persling added, “I was constantly fed this idea that women can do everything. We don’t really need men… I do feel in many ways betrayed by that line of thinking.”
Women are realizing that feminism took away traditional roles but didn’t replace them with a new model for life. (iStock)
Persling then concedes that she received this message from “so many of the women” in her life. “I want to go back to some of those teachers and coaches and say, ‘What the hell did you mean by that? Because we can’t do it all. We can’t. That’s a lie!’” she said.
Yes, it was all a lie — and good on Persling for calling it out in such a public way.
Still, it’s a super hard pill to swallow, made worse by the fact that Persling has been slammed with hateful comments, particularly from men, who insist she’s been selfish. She’s a product of her choices, they say, and, well, too bad.
As a life and relationship coach, I hear regularly from women like Persling who realize they’ve been duped by the narrative that being an independent, self-sustaining woman is enough to be happy. It makes perfect sense that these women would find themselves, down the road, overcome with grief at the prospect of living life alone. And they can’t turn to the culture for help because the culture hails singlehood as the be-all, end-all.
Persling was smart to recognize that being a product of divorce also put her at a disadvantage, since she saw women “taking care of everything” in life. Her mother may not have specifically groomed her to be a feminist, but she absorbed the feminist message of not needing a man all the same. No one told her otherwise.
America is now saturated with women like Persling, who acted upon the wisdom passed along to them by the people they most trusted. These women thought they did everything right, only to have it turn out all wrong. To accept that the advice they received was based on lies is a hard lesson for anyone to learn.
The truth is this purportedly “liberated” path women have been groomed to travel has a domino effect. Because if the goal isn’t marriage and family, what is the goal? To be satisfied with being single forever because at least you have a paycheck and no one to whom you must answer? As Persling said, “I don’t want to wake up at 60 and say, ‘Oh, well, I had a lot of fun!’”
Persling then concedes that she received this message from “so many of the women” in her life: “I want to go back to some of those teachers and coaches and say, ‘What the hell did you mean by that? Because we can’t do it all. We can’t. That’s a lie!’”
The problem with the narrative women has been fed is that it deleted the old way but didn’t replace it with anything new. It conveniently left out the details about how women are supposed to live their lives instead.
I believe Persling when she said she’s “not even a feminist.” That’s the thing about movements and trends: They seep into the culture to such a degree that they cease to need a name at all. You don’t even recognize it’s there, and yet it’s governing your every move.
As Danielle Crittenden wrote in “What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us”, feminism “had seeped into their minds like intravenous saline into the arm of an unconscious patient. They were feminists without knowing it.”
But now, thanks to Persling’s bravery, more women will wake up.
Tens of thousands of protesters have flooded city streets across Spain since October in sustained demonstrations opposing a socialist takeover of the Spanish government. Protesters are showing their opposition toward an amnesty deal between Spain’s socialist President Pedro Sánchez and treasonous Catalan separatists, who violated the Spanish constitution in 2017 by attempting to secede from Spain. By striking a deal to free incarcerated and exiled Spanish criminals, Sánchez was able to secure a third term in power.
The protests are organized by Spain’s conservative People’s Party and Vox, its further right, populist party. In an interview between Vox President Santiago Abascal and Tucker Carlson last week, Abascal explained that the amnesty deal is a crime “against the constitution” and “national unity.”
Ep. 40 Spain’s descent into tyranny seems eerily familiar. Opposition leader Santiago Abascal is one of the few people standing up to it. We traveled to Madrid to talk to him.
TIMESTAMPS: 1:11 Santiago Abascal 2:23 The end of democracy in Spain 8:43 “Are you ready to go to jail… pic.twitter.com/fE4zrYrqAC
But the massive demonstrations are not just in defense of the Spanish Constitution, Abascal explained; they’re about what an illegal third Sánchez term means for Spain, namely a failing Spanish economy, two-tier justice, mass illegal immigration from Muslim countries, speech policing, globalism, the demonization of Spanish history, and loss of Spanish identity.
Where Are the American Demonstrations?
The problems faced by Spaniards are strikingly similar to those facing Americans. The American left hates our heritage so much they torched American cities and destroyed historical statues and monuments for an entire summer.Our corrupt president, Joe Biden, was able to take power thanks to a rigged election, and his administration has weaponized the federal government against his most prominent political adversary, former President Donald Trump, and anyone in ideological opposition to the Democrats.
The Biden administration’s disregard for border security encourages mass illegal immigration at the Southern Border, exposing the public to dangerous criminals and additional economic burdens while the middle class struggles to stay afloat amid increasing taxes, inflation, and gas prices. And despite the public’s rapidly increasing suffering, Biden prioritizes sending billions of tax dollars to foreign wars and international green energy projects.
All these things, but particularly the federal government’s targeting of conservatives and its assault on election integrity, should be sparking massive protests. Yet they aren’t. Unlike Spain, America was founded on the idea that human beings have God-given, inalienable rights. Freedom of speech and assembly are not just First Amendment givens in the United States, but part of our culture. So why aren’t conservatives protesting?
Using fear and intimidation, the left is scaring conservatives into giving up their freedom to assemble. One of the primary fear tactics is to severely punish those who, on Jan. 6, 2021, opted to protest Democrat’s election-rigging practices, such as mass mail-in balloting and Big Tech censorship. As newly-released Jan. 6 footage further reveals, many of the Jan. 6 protesters accused of rioting were peaceful.
Yet federal courts openly admitted to making examples out of peaceful protesters in order to “deter others.” J6 demonstrators have been harassed by federal agents, held in solitary confinement, and demonized by the Jan. 6 Committee, Biden, and the corporate media.
Conservatives aren’t just afraid — they’re also hopeless.After witnessing the Marxist race riots of 2020 and the erasure of their civil liberties during Covid, many Americans no longer recognize their homeland. A recent Harvard Harris poll shows that 80 percent of GOP voters feel the country is headed in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, a July 2023 poll reported that 86.92 million Americans find “somewhat” or “very” difficult to pay their household expenses, with the middle class being the most affected income bracket.
How many times have we heard friends and family members say, “The country is lost?” This fear and despair are understandable, but the stakes have never been higher. Bravery and self-sacrifice are necessary to defend a nation against forces wishing to destroy it. As Abascal explained to Tucker:
“The nation isn’t just made up of all the Spaniards here today, it’s not just the people you can see walking down the street. Our nation is our history. It’s in the cemeteries where our forebears rest. The nation is the sum of the living, the dead, and those yet to be born… I think that what we do today, even if we aren’t victorious as we hope, can make it so that others in the future, our children, future generations, can achieve that victory. [Then] it will have all been worthwhile.”
Spain Understands The Stakes
Spain has first-hand experience with communism. When communists controlled Spain, both in the lead-up to and during the civil war in the 1930s, it resulted in the persecution of Spanish intellectuals, clerics, and Christian laypeople. Spanish communists began their anti-Christian hate by banning all religious schools, removing crucifixes from classrooms, and deeming all religious marriages invalid in the eyes of the state. Eventually, they started burning Catholic Churches and mass executing Catholic religious and laypeople. Property rights were thrown out, and conservatives were unjustly convicted in kangaroo courts and executed. By the end of the war, a reported “13 bishops, 4,172 priests, 2,364 monks and friars and 283 nuns and sisters,” and an unknown number of laypeople were killed.
The wounds inflicted by Spanish communists are still raw. The memory has not died. So, in 2022, Spain implemented its “Democratic Memory” law, an Orwellian piece of legislation that mandates a pro-leftist view of the Spanish Civil War and the post-war period. Through “criminal and economic sanctions for dissidents,” the law effectively eradicates “academic freedom, freedom of expression and freedom of education,” writes Hermann Tertsch, a Vox Member of the European Parliament.
Like in America, Spanish leftists brand anyone who contradicts their history narratives as thought criminals. According to Abascal, leftists have also created a two-tier justice system and “are now arresting young people for protest[ing] … saying they don’t have permits.” Unfortunately for the left, these fear tactics have not been entirely effective, as the ongoing protests demonstrate, perhaps because too many Spaniards know what communist control looks like.
In America, we are blessed not to know. However, that blessing is also a curse. We don’t appreciate how easily a free nation can fall into tyranny. Unable to oppose or even recognize tyranny, younger generations have lost touch with the American revolutionary spirit after sending generations of Americans to spend their formative years in reeducation camps run by cultural Marxists (aka public school and the university system).
Perhaps a way to regain America’s lost fortitude is by watching conservative freedom fighters in Spain. We may not have the national memory of communists burying priests alive or defiling and decapitating nuns, but we can look to Spain for motivation.
Indeed, the Spanish protests should inspire Americans, and Spanish history should be a warning.If we resign ourselves to failure or allow ourselves to be intimidated into silence, the consequences will be nothing short of complete national destruction.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
These days, when she gets ready for school, the hair will be done. Perhaps it will be a braid of some sort, perhaps it will be curled. Earrings will be selected. A light and subtle application of age-appropriate makeup usually follows. The only constant is that she will always put on a skirt.
It didn’t used to be this way. When younger, she was quite the tomboy. There were the fights over getting her hair cut short, fights she lost not because we’re that controlling, but because short hair has to be cut more frequently and we didn’t want to add monthly visits to the stylist to the calendar. The uniform was shorts or pants and a polo for school, nicer pants and tops for dressier occasions, and athletic gear for casual moments. Jewelry was a no-go, even the pearls and things that grandmothers like to give to be worn at church.
She never suffered from dysphoria. She always knew she was a girl. It bothered her how often she was mistaken for a boy, not connecting the dots between her preferred functional form of attire and how it was virtually indistinguishable from the clothing sported by little boys. She was horrified when a classmate exhorted her to “just get the surgery.” That was reading too much into the truth, which was that she just wanted to play, to roughhouse, and to get outside. Dresses and skirts didn’t lend themselves to such things.
Once puberty arrived, the interests largely remained, but the video tutorials on how to do different braids and requests for new earrings joined them. It’s also when she looked at me earnestly in the car one evening and said, “I’m glad you and Mom aren’t liberals. You would’ve tried to turn me into a boy.”
While there are people across the political spectrum who recognize the realities of biology, statistically speaking, she wasn’t necessarily wrong in her proclamation. If she’d been born to this mom, this mom, or this mom, things could have turned out much differently. Thankfully, she was born to us, and we don’t hold retrograde opinions about the imaginary relationship between preferred clothing, toys, activities, and sex.
Not everyone is so enlightened, though, instead preferring to categorize children based on rigid stereotypes about how superficial things define us as boys and girls, men and women. Countless stories, like those linked above, of parents realizing their daughter was “transgender,” start with “I knew my son [sic] was trans when…” and revolve around such stereotypical markers. She didn’t like the color pink (once hated in our house, now one of her favorites), dresses, or games associated with little girls. Ergo, she must be a boy!
All one has to do to make such a logical leap is ignore the fact that prepubescent kids are, by definition, not sexual creatures and, as such, not much thinking in terms of true masculinity and femininity. They are just thinking about what interests them, not how those interests align with or diverge from their sex. It’s misguided parents who swoop in and make those assumptions.
This viewpoint is especially incomprehensible when one realizes that tomboys have long been with us. They were once staples of literature and other entertainment, from Laura Ingalls to Jo in Little Women to Pippi Longstocking. That they enjoyed clothing or activities more typical of boys wasn’t reason to attempt to muck around with their biology, and it still isn’t reason now.
If you have a daughter, you have a daughter. Her preferred clothing and activities do not define her, particularly when she’s young. Maybe she just finds pants more comfortable or likes playing in the dirt more than playing with a Barbie. If you let her grow up as a girl, those preferences may stick or they may, as in our case, shift in more traditionally feminine ways. In either case, it is not our job as parents to guide them toward self-destruction, but toward self-fulfillment and flourishing.
Let your tomboy be a tomboy. As a father, enjoy that you can get out and do more rough-and-tumble things with her. As a mother, enjoy that she isn’t raiding your closet or makeup tray. To do otherwise, to make the destructive assumption that because she doesn’t fit a stereotype she must have been “born in the wrong body,” is to abdicate your responsibility as a parent, to punish her with pseudoscience, and to saddle her with a lifetime of legitimate suffering, not the imaginary kind that arises from preferring blue to pink.
This author is a regular Federalist contributor.
This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.
“I self-censored,” says 23-year-old Rikki Schlott about how she handled being a right-leaning libertarian at New York University. Pictured: People walk past NYU on Oct. 30, 2023, in New York City. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
“I was not genuine in my own beliefs,” says 23-year-old Rikki Schlott in my new video. “I self-censored.”
Why? What did this college student believe that was so unacceptable that she felt she had to hide it?
The fact that she’s a right-leaning libertarian.
“I was afraid to have Thomas Sowell and Jordan Peterson books on my bookshelf.”
If her classmates at NYU saw that, she says, she might have been “verbally attacked on social media, maligned as whatever ‘ist’ or ‘ism’ people might attack me with.”
So Schlott kept her mouth shut, eventually dropping out of NYU.
I ask her, “If you were doing it again, you’d speak out?”
“I did speak out! Here I am!” She responds.
By “here,” she means my TV studio, where I interviewed her about a new book she co-wrote titled, “The Canceling of the American Mind.” It details how cancel culture grew into a serious problem on campuses.
Examples:
A teacher in Virginia lost his job for calling a transgender student “she.”
At Hamline University, an art history lecturer lost her job simply for showing a painting of Muhammad.
A University of Virginia med student was banished from campus for merely questioning the importance of “microaggressions.”
Then such idiocy spread beyond campuses.
A Levi Strauss executive felt she had to resign because employees objected to her tweets criticizing COVID-19 school closures and mask mandates for children.
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s top editor was forced to resign after approving an article titled “Buildings Matter Too,” after Black Lives Matter rioters burned down buildings. Some at the paper called his headline “extremely inappropriate” and “tone-deaf.”
And so on.
Now some want to punish people who defend Hamas. Others want to silence Israel’s defenders.
Schlott argues that America needs more free speech, even if it’s hateful. “Being a true free speech champion does require that you defend speech that even you disagree with.”
Schlott’s co-author on “The Canceling of the American Mind” works for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. FIRE argues that everything can be said, as long as it’s not direct incitement of violence, willful negligence, or defamation.
Schlott tells me, “You are well within your First Amendment rights to cancel people and to malign them on social media. But the question is, ‘Do we want to live in a culture where that is our first reaction?’”
She points out that her generation started tweeting when they were kids, and many posted stupid things.
“Young people need to be able to screw up.”
Maybe. But based on what I see on my news feeds, it’s people her age who are most eager to “cancel” people.
“It is true that younger Americans tend to be more pro-cancel culture,” she replies. “Millennials have the most positive view, and as you get older, it goes lower and lower. But Gen Z (ages 11 to 26) completely switches that around. Only 8% have a positive view of it. That’s because if you’re a young person who grows up in a graceless society, you’re always looking behind your back. You see friends torn down on social media. You’re not going to want to live in a world like that.”
I push back. “But they perpetuate a world like that!”
“It’s a tyranny of the minority,” she replies. “One squeaky wheel scares the life out of everyone else. Then we self-censor.”
She did that in college.
Students like her kept their mouths shut because they didn’t want to be reported as “biased.” NYU officials, like the secret police in East Germany, even encouraged students to report on others.
She tells me, “When I got to NYU, the first thing I had to do was go pick up my ID card. I found on the back the emergency number, in case you’re in danger, and a bias response hotline in case you’re offended. The university itself sanctioned the idea that you can snitch on your peers.”
She says it’s time for students to push back against school censorship.
“We need to say we want to live in a free speech culture. … Courage is contagious. As soon as I spoke out at NYU, people came out of the woodwork to say, ‘Thank you for saying that! I completely agree with you.’”
“Canceling” people who disagree with you over ordinary political issues is bad for civil society. Ruining someone’s life because he wore a MAGA cap or tweeted something stupid or supported the wrong initiative creates an oppressive environment for open discourse.
“Canceling” people who sign petitions and hold up signs that openly celebrate or justify the targeted, brutal murders of women and babies, on the other hand, is good for civil society. Stopping malevolent ideas from being normalized is good. Exercising your First Amendment right to free speech and free association to shun and call out people who spread odious ideas in public life is a moral imperative.
Because people who walk around ripping down posters of kidnapped children and women aren’t pondering the future of a “two-state solution” or the Gazan refugee situation, they are moral degenerates. In the same way you wouldn’t hire the guy who stands in front of Disney World waving around a swastika flag, you shouldn’t hire someone who marches with a sign that reads “from the river to the sea.” Both convey the same sentiment. The ethical line is bright and obvious. If you don’t see it, something is broken in you.
Yet, a bunch of Hamasapologists are calling out conservatives for their alleged hypocrisy on “cancel culture” when it comes to “pro-Palestinian” advocates.
Though I’m not a fan of mobs, I’ve never been a big critic of cancel culture, either. Looking back, I could find only one piece I’ve written on the topic — and it concerned itself with double standards. It’s a slippery term. And there is facet to the debate that’s often overlooked. Americans have no obligation to associate with those who attack their deep-seated values. To hire someone who signs a pro-Hamas petition can be an endorsement of that outlook. Your company is not an open social media platform which exists as a forum for debate, it has a reputation and customers. (Not that I believe the state should be able to compel social media companies to host opinions, either.)
And it’s not as if you asked these people to give you their opinion on genocide. They did so by their own volition. The Harvard petitions blaming Jews for their own murders were signed and released for public consumption. They were released before Israel had even counted the dead, much less invaded Gaza. If law students were celebrating 9/11 on 9/12, would New York firms have a responsibility to provide them with gainful employment? No, they would be rejected in the real world and compelled to get jobs in academia, where such views are welcome.
Of course, the contention that “pro-Palestinian” advocates, or even those who talk about Israel as if it was some authoritarian proto-Nazi state, are being mass canceled is a myth, anyway. They fill the op-ed pages of major newspapers and cable news. They dominate campuses. They aren’t canceled. They are rewarded. When someone like “porn star” Mia Khalifa was “canceled,” it is because she was quite literally rejoicing in the murder of innocent people in real time.
Ibrahim Bharmal, who one suspects is dumber than the average internet prostitute, is the editor of the Harvard Law Review, not some rando trying to wind people up on the internet. He is out there physically and verbally abusing a Jewish student during a pro-Hamas rally on campus like some kind of Brownshirt. Does Harvard have a responsibility to have him on campus? Why should a firm with Jewish partners — or any decent people — hire him?
Harvard, by the way, has assembled a special task force to help students who signed pro-Hamas statements deal with the blowback. Apparently, some people are under the impression they’re the only ones allowed to speak.
The notion that anti-Israel pundits are concerned about double standards, by the way, is risible. You might recall that Harvard rescinded its offer to pro-Second Amendment Parkland kid Kyle Kashuv, ostensibly over things he tweeted as a 16-year-old. No one cared. Today, Georgetown thinks it’s fine to cancel Ilya Shapiro for a single inarticulate tweet, but it will not cancel a professor who complains online about “Zio bitches.” The New York Times cancels an editor for running a column from a sitting senator but hires a writer who praises Hitler (true story).
When I say I’m a free-speech absolutist, I mean it. The state should do absolutely nothing to inhibit or censor pro-Hamas Americans from expressing their opinions. Free speech isn’t contingent on your position. Hate speech is free speech. The government has no business prodding or even suggesting limitations on our rhetorical interactions. Even outside state intervention, we should be upholding the values that promote free expression. We can peacefully coexist with colleagues, neighbors and friends who hold contradictory opinions within the normal parameters of political debate.
Likewise, Americans have a right to use their freedom to call out and disassociate themselves from people who take the side with nihilistic murder cults.
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• Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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Top Stories • Donald Trump Endorses Pro-Life Congressman Jim Jordan for House Speaker • Supreme Court Will Decide Abortion Pill Case That Could Protect Women, Save 140,000 Babies From Abortions • Planned Parenthood Abortion Biz Selling Transgender Hormones to Mutilate Kids After Just a 30 Minute Visit • Here’s the Pro-Life Candidates Who Need Your Support This Year. Vote Pro-Life!
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Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2023 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Let me cut to the chase: Now more than ever we need to protect parents’ voices inside the classroom. I know I join parents across southern Indiana, and across our country, in feeling increasingly worried as soon as we send our children off to school. It wasn’t always like this. However, as a mother to three school-aged children, I have experienced it myself throughout the years. Conversations surrounding education have evolved, especially conversations about a parent’s voice when they are advocating for their children.
Recently, it feels like the communication lines have been strained, or even severed, between home and school – where our children spend most of their day.
Rep. Erin Houchin proposed the “Parent’s Bill of Rights” to protect schoolchildren. (iStock, File)
Some changes became painfully obvious to parents during the pandemic, as our living rooms became classrooms. Quickly, parents came to realize exactly what their children’s days looked like. Many parents have told me that they were surprised and disappointed by what they learned about their children’s educational experience. And when parents vocalized these concerns in school board meetings, they were often met with silence or dismissed.
As I said on the floor of the House of Representatives, sending a child to a public school does not terminate the parents’ rights at the door. When I worked in child services, I assisted with the care of children in foster care. I saw how the process worked firsthand. When foster parents are caring for children in custody of the state, they can’t give those kids a haircut without permission from the child’s biological parents. Why shouldn’t the same rules apply to our students’ well-being in the classroom?
Here in southern Indiana, we’re lucky. Most of our school districts go above and beyond to communicate with parents and inform them about, and empower them in, their children’s education. Tragically, this is not a universal experience across our country. In fact, one father in Virginia had to learn his daughter was assaulted in a high school bathroom from his child, not the school.
Just last month, a New Jersey judge ruled to block multiple school districts from notifying parents of a child’s gender identity change. Stories like these shouldn’t become the new normal.
That is exactly why House Republicans made commitments to address this problem and pushed for legislation that culminated in H.R. 5, the “Parent’s Bill of Rights.” We heard the pleas of parents across America and knew we couldn’t stand by as parental rights are being eroded in our public schools. I was proud to be an original champion of H.R. 5 and support its swift passage in the House. This bill reaffirmed the fundamental relationship that had long existed between parents and teachers in America – that parents have the right to make informed decisions about their children’s education.
As we highlighted extensively during the House Education and Workforce Committee’s consideration of the bill, The “Parents Bill of Rights” contains five basic principles to ensure: that parents have the right to know what their children are being taught; that parents have the right to be heard; that parents have the right to see the school budget; that parents have the right to protect their children’s privacy; and that parents have a right to keep their children safe.
Furthermore, I was happy to add to this legislation during the committee process with an amendment to require notification of parents when their student isn’t reading at a grade-level proficiency by the end of third grade – an important time when kids start to transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Our child literacy rates are falling behind, and the more parents can help the better. But to help they must be informed.
Years ago, we had no need for this kind of legislative action. But unfortunately, in today’s world this bill is necessary because school districts across the country have failed to deliver on these basic principles. The American education system is failing us. This debate has inspired my colleagues and me to continue to take steps to strengthen our schools and empower parents. For me, this includes actions to expand choices for parents. This is why I will always be a strong supporter of school choice and education savings accounts, which keep parents squarely in the driver’s seat.
Parents know what is best for their student. As members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce say, it’s time to apply our most fundamental principle, freedom, to our most fundamental system, education. This bill reaffirmed the fundamental relationship that had long existed between parents and teachers in America – that parents have the right to make informed decisions about their children’s education.
Now, as a member of the committee, I have a seat at the table for parents inside the committee room. It’s important that we protect and restore parents’ original role in their children’s education, because in the vast majority of cases, no one will be a better advocate for their children than parents. And I, along with my House Republican colleagues, won’t stop until we achieve this mission.
Thankfully, we fought for and delivered a bill to put parents, not bureaucrats, in charge of their children’s education by ensuring access to information, but the fight doesn’t stop there. We will continue to look for partners in our Senate colleagues and other opportunities to restore educational excellence in every school in America.
I won’t stop contending on behalf of my fellow parents because the rights of parents don’t stop at the classroom door.
Congresswoman Erin Houchin represents the 9th Congressional District of Indiana.
From the messages embedded in our music to the desensitizing violence prevalent in our culture, and even the erosion of moral and ethical values, each contributes to the emergence of a more violent society. (Photo Illustration: sturti/Getty Images)
If you go to Google and type “heinous crimes up with young people,” you’ll see over 2 billion results. It’s a stark reminder that the alarming trend of young people committing gruesome acts isn’t a new phenomenon, but the sheer proliferation and frequency of these acts most certainly is. Our society is grappling with a disconcerting reality—a reality born out of the convergence of various factors. From the messages embedded in our music to the desensitizing violence prevalent in our culture, and even the erosion of moral and ethical values, each contributes to the emergence of a more violent society. It’s a society where individuals no longer temper their darkest impulses, and regrettably, it’s our youth who often find themselves on the front line, manifesting behaviors at an unacceptable rate.
This is a phenomenon that should deeply trouble us all and lead us to pause in concern for the direction in which our society is headed. These young individuals, driven by a cocktail of influences, often react impulsively or, in the gravest of cases, meticulously plan calculated crimes that result in the loss of innocent lives.
We’ve witnessed stories like that of Mackenzie Shirilla, a name etched into the annals of a society grappling with the aftermath of senseless violence. Shirilla was recently found guilty of the murder of her boyfriend, Dominic Russo, and her friend, Davion Flanagan. Their tragic deaths underscore the gravity of the situation we’re facing—a situation where young people are becoming entangled in webs of aggression and desperation. In Shirilla’s case, she purposely sped up her car to 100 mph and drove straight into a wall, instantly killing her boyfriend and friend.
The breakdown of morality in our society is contributing to this disturbing trend. Traditional values that once served as guiding principles seem to be waning, leaving a moral vacuum in which right and wrong are increasingly ambiguous. The erosion of moral foundations means that young people are less equipped to distinguish between ethical choices and destructive actions. The deterioration of ethics further compounds the issue. Ethical conduct is the cornerstone of a civilized society, fostering a sense of responsibility and accountability. Yet, as we witness these disturbing trends among our youth, it becomes evident that the concept of ethics is losing its grip. The pursuit of personal gain, even at the expense of others, has become alarmingly normalized.
As we reflect on these developments, the implications for our future are profoundly concerning. A society that permits the erosion of morality and ethics in its younger generation is sowing the seeds of its own demise. The actions of today’s youth foreshadow the trajectory of tomorrow’s adults. If we fail to address these concerning trends, we risk a future marked by increased violence, social fragmentation, and a dearth of empathy.
It’s time for us to confront these unsettling truths and take meaningful action. By reemphasizing morality and ethics in our families, communities, and institutions, we can recalibrate the moral compass of our youth. This requires an unwavering commitment to fostering values that prioritize human dignity, compassion, and respect for one another. Only through concerted efforts to restore these foundational principles can we hope to guide our society toward a more harmonious and promising future.
This alarming trend of young people exhibiting violence and aggression should serve as an urgent wake-up call for our educational institutions. We must prioritize emotional education alongside academic excellence. By equipping our youth with the tools to manage their emotions, resolve conflicts constructively, and communicate effectively, we can help curb the escalation of anger and violence. It’s imperative that our schools become places not only of intellectual growth but also of emotional well-being and character development.
The rising wave of heinous acts committed by young people underscores the pressing need for a comprehensive societal response. We must address the erosion of morality and ethics, and we must prioritize emotional education within our education system. This is a challenge that requires the collective effort of families, communities, educators, and cultural influencers.
By refocusing on our shared values, investing in the emotional well-being of our youth, and fostering a renewed sense of empathy, we can shape a society that rejects violence and paves the way for a brighter and more harmonious future.
How far can you push someone before they have had enough of rampant wokeness and completely revolt? That’s the question businesses, movie makers and department stores are rightly grappling with. I can answer the question: If their target market is American families, conservative men and women who are just trying to make ends meet, the answer is that they have absolutely had enough. The silent majority is speaking, and they are doing so loudly.
When a man who claims he’s a woman is plastered onto America’s former best-selling beer, regular Joes across the country en masse stopped buying Bud Light. They’ve lost a whopping $27 billion and have been replaced as the country’s top beer seller.
When Target decided to partner with a Satanic artist and threw their pride-promoting clothing into the faces of parents shopping in the children’s section, they lost $15.7 billion and counting.
When Disney decided to push woke movie concepts on trusting parents with the likes of the films “Lightyear” and “Elemental,” they lost $890 million over their past eight films.
On the other hand, when Jim Caviezel produced a movie about a hero who rescued children from trafficking, the“Sound of Freedom”became a 2023 summer hit film with more than $125 million in revenue, outperforming films with mega budgets like “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”
When country music singer Jason Aldean pulled no punches in his newly released single, “Try That In A Small Town,” it quickly shot to the No. 1 song on iTunes despite the woke crowd slamming it for promoting violence – when it uses actual news footage that many in the leftist woke crowd did not speak out against.
The silent majority – those families who just want to go to the store without being accosted by inappropriate messages, who just want to spend their money on wholesome entertainment, and who are more than willing to support those who stand up for truth – have spoken.
We have had enough.
When men like Lia Thomas are allowed to compete in women’s sports and an actual female athlete, Riley Gaines, stands up for herself because literally no one else will – not her school, not the NCAA – parents of female athletes can’t help but pay attention. They are smart enough to see that the future of their own daughters in the world of sports are being wiped out and erased all because of some “inclusivity” wokeness.
When they see men and boys allowed in women’s locker rooms and restrooms, they see the safety of their daughters compromised like the horrible sexual assault in Loudon County, Virginia, where a boy forcibly assaulted a teenage girl in the girls’ bathroom. He was allowed in because he identified as a girl.
Parents are paying attention and we’re fed up. We’re fed up with gender ideology, wokeness and all the other colors of the rainbow being shoved down our throats in the name of tolerance.
I’m raising my eight children to be kind, compassionate, caring and loving individuals. I’m also teaching them right from wrong and amazingly, using science to back up a lot of biological arguments, something the woke crowd loves to ignore.
How dare they call my family and my kids intolerant bigots because we follow science and speak the truth? Not our truth, the truth. There are absolutes in this world no matter how much some people want to live in a fantasy world of their own making.
I am more than happy the silent majority is standing up for what we hold so dearly and doing so where it hits the pocketbooks because, unfortunately, that’s the only way to get the attention of companies who think they can carelessly shove these kinds of inane values and morals at us and think will take it.
We won’t and we aren’t.
And you know what? We are teaching the next generation not to take it either.
NASHVILLE – Americans on Broadway responded to critics who say country music star Jason Aldean’s song “Try That In A Small Town” and its accompanying video evoke vigilantism and racism.
“I think it’s a bunch of sissies making a big deal out of, you know — it’s free speech, first of all,” Carmen said outside Aldean’s Nashville bar. “Don’t think it’s a racial thing at all. I think that’s the way he feels about our country.”
IS JASON ALDEAN’S NEW VIDEO RACIST? WATCH:
But Darren was more open to critics.
“Everybody has different opinions. Everybody’s different,” he said. “It’s a big country.”
“I say artistic freedom,” Darren added.
Jason Aldean has faced criticism that his song “Try That In A Small Town,” promotes racism and vigilantism. The country music star denied those accusations. (Rich Polk/Getty Images for iHeartRadio)
Critics have argued the Aldean song’s message — that big city behavior like stomping the flag or swearing at cops wouldn’t be well received in a small town — and the accompanying riot footage in the video promote race-based violence. Video of Aldean and his band was also shot in front of a Tennessee courthouse where a mob lynched a Black man in 1927.
Aldean disputed the accusations, tweeting that no lyrics in the song reference race and that all the clips were of real news footage. He also pointed out that he was performing at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas in 2017 when a gunman opened fire on the crowd, killing 58 and injuring hundreds.
In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song (a song that has been out since May) and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests. These references are not only meritless, but dangerous.…
“It is absolutely overblown,” Nancy said. “He’s just saying ‘small town values,’ ‘we’re going to take care of each other.'”
Rose agreed.
“I don’t think it had anything to do with race,” she said. “The song was just a very basic song about living in a small town, and I don’t understand how it was correlated at all with anything else.”
Rose doesn’t believe “Try That In A Small Town,” by Jason Aldean, has anything to do with race. She feels the song is simply about life in a small town. (Teny Sahakian/Fox News Digital)
The video for “Try That In A Small Town” was released Friday and was played heavily on CMT until the network pulled it from rotation earlier this week without explanation. But out of more than a dozen people who spoke to Fox News in Nashville, none saw a problem with the video.
“I thought it’s a beautiful song,” Carol said. “Everybody’s going to take it the way they want.”
“Either it’s freedom of speech or it’s not,” Lori said. “One way or the other. We don’t get it both ways.”
Ethan Barton is a producer/reporter for Digital Originals. You can reach him at ethan.barton@fox.com and follow him on Twitter at @ethanrbarton.
Jason Aldean has lost the support of Country Music Television (CMT), with the network confirming to Fox News Digital it has pulled the musician’s “Try That in a Small Town” music video from circulation.
A representative for the network did not provide more context for the decision, but Aldean has received immense backlash from the public, with some suggesting it is a “pro-lynching song” — a narrative Aldean adamantly denies. In the video, Aldean’s lyrics are sung while news coverage from the 2020 riots illustrates his message. “Cuss out a cop spit in his face / stomp on the flag and light it up,” Aldean sings, along with footage of the described instances.
Aldean’s tune has skyrocketed to success given all the controversy, sitting as ITunes’ No. 1 song at the time of publication.
Jason Aldean’s music video for “Try That in a Small Town” has been pulled by CMT. No reason was immediately given. (BBR Music Group/Jason Aldean/YouTube)
A representative for Aldean’s record label, BBR Music Group, did not immediately return Fox News Digital’s request for comment, nor did representatives for the singer. TackleBox, the production company which produced Aldean’s music video, shared in a statement to Fox News Digital that the location is a “popular filming location outside of Nashville,” which Aldean did not select himself.
Jason Aldean was ridiculed online for his song “Try That in a Small Town,” prompting the country star to speak out and defend himself. (Rich Polk/Getty Images for iHeartRadio)
Several movies and music videos have been filmed at the location. “Any alternative narrative suggesting the music video’s location decision is false,” it added.
Throughout the video, Aldean can be seen singing in front of the Maury County Courthouse, which has an American flag hanging from it. The government building can be found in Columbia, Tennessee. It was previously the site of a horrific lynching of Black man Henry Choate, in 1927.
Jason Aldean reminded his followers that he was present at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas where a mass shooter killed 61 individuals. (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)
“Any alternative narrative suggesting the music video’s location decision is false.”— TackleBox on the location of Jason Aldean’s music video
“In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song (a song that has been out since May) and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests. These references are not only meritless, but dangerous,” he told his social media followers.
“There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it – and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage – and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music – this one goes too far.”
Here are the lyrics of the song the radical Left think is so aweful. You decides:
Try That In A Small Town Lyrics
[Verse 1] Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk Carjack an old lady at a red light Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store Ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like Cuss out a cop, spit in his face Stomp on the flag and light it up Yeah, ya think you’re tough
[Chorus] Well, try that in a small town See how far ya make it down the road ‘Round here, we take care of our own You cross that line, it won’t take long For you to find out, I recommend you don’t Try that in a small town
[Verse 2] Got a gun that my granddad gave me They say one day they’re gonna round up Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck
[Chorus] Try that in a small town See how far ya make it down the road ‘Round here, we take care of our own You cross that line, it won’t take long For you to find out, I recommend you don’t Try that in a small town
Aldean then referenced his direct connection to mass violence, reminding his followers that he was performing during the horrific Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas in 2017, where a man opened fire and killed 61 individuals, impacting the lives of thousands of people.
“As so many pointed out, I was present at Route 91 – where so many lost their lives – and our community recently suffered another heartbreaking tragedy,” he said in reference to the Nashville school shooting in March that killed six people.
Jason Aldean was defended by his wife Brittany on social media. (Stephen J. Cohen)
“NO ONE, including me, wants to continue to see senseless headlines or families ripped apart. ‘Try That In A Small Town,’ for me, refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief. Because they were our neighbors, and that was above any differences.”
Aldean went on to stress, “My political views have never been something I’ve hidden from, and I know that a lot of us in this country don’t agree on how we get back to a sense of normalcy where we got at least a day without a headline that keeps us up at night. But the desire for it to – that’s what this song is about.”
When the tune was released in May, Aldean said, “To me, this song summarizes the way a lot of people feel about the world right now. It seems like there are bad things happening on a daily basis, and that feels unfamiliar to a lot of us. This song sheds some light on that.”
Aldean was also defended by his wife Brittany, who shared a photo of the two on the beach with the caption, “Never apologize for speaking the truth.” She had earlier shared to her Instagram story a more pointed statement, writing in part, “Media.. it’s the same song and dance. Twist everything you can to fit your repulsive narrative.”
Caroline Thayer is an entertainment writer for Fox News Digital. Follow Caroline Thayer on Twitter at @carolinejthayer. Story tips can be sent to caroline.thayer@fox.com.
As naked men parade in front of kids and pride marchers chant “we’re coming for your children,” a few LGBT activists are beginning to worry that things have gone too far. For example, Andrew Sullivan, an early and ardent advocate for same-sex marriage, is unhappy about reaping what he has sown. And he should be — from sterilizing and mutilating children via “gender-affirming care” to flashing children at pride festivities, the LGBT movement is proving social conservatives right.
Sullivan is repulsed and worried about a backlash, but he still denies any responsibility for the fruits of his labor. He argues his ideas needn’t lead to the illiberalism and radicalism his side is indulging. He is adamant that we could have, however uneasily, agreed to live and let live if the LGBT movement had taken his advice and closed up shop after its legal victories. He insists, “There is no slope in the case I made. There is a clear line: formal legal equality alongside cultural and social freedom on all sides.”
He is wrong. Same-sex marriage was always a radical project with implications for all of society, which is why there is a direct line from Sullivan’s case for it to the extremism he now deplores. Same-sex marriage reduces the differences between men and women to a matter of personal sexual preference, rather than a fundamental ontological one upon which civilization is based. If the sex binary doesn’t matter in marriage, it doesn’t matter anywhere.
Instead of a lifelong covenant that unites the two halves of the human race in a relationship that provides for the future of the human race, marriage was redefined as the mere legal recognition of an indefinite and androgynous pairing. The collapse of the older understanding of marriage began before the LGBT movement, but the triumph of same-sex marriage sealed it.
As Pastor Hans Fiene has put it, expecting that same-sex marriage would have no significant social effects is like blowing up the Hoover Dam and expecting Lake Mead to move only a few inches. And so, less than a decade after the Supreme Court invented a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, men think they can be women, women think they can be men, doctors are amputating the healthy breasts from increasing numbers of troubled adolescent girls — and our leaders from President Joe Biden on down are cheering them on.
The Lie of Being ‘Born This Way’
Evils such as this were baked into the arguments used to establish same-sex marriage. In particular, the claim that people are “born this way” — that LGBT identities are intrinsic and immutable — ensured that dissenters would be persecuted and children would be groomed into rainbow identities. However, though the mantra of “born this way” was a public relations triumph, it was false. The search for a “gay gene” quietly ended in failure a few years ago. The experiences of same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria are often fluid and felt with varying intensity. The causes are diverse and complex; that these feelings and desires may be unchosen does not mean they are determined at birth, or that environmental and psychological factors play no role.
Nonetheless, the lie of “born this way” enabled the hijacking of civil rights law to serve the LGBT agenda, which ensured that opponents of the LGBT movement were not only defamed as the equivalent of racists but that the enormous state power used to break segregation would be deployed against them. And so every wedding cake artist and photographer must bow before the state-enforced metaphysical doctrine that sex is irrelevant to the meaning of marriage. And the dogmas of gender identity demand that women and even little girls must get comfortable with males ogling and flashing them in what used to be female-only spaces.
Worse still, the false doctrine of “born this way” demands the grooming of other people’s children into rainbow identities. After all, if we are born with our sexual orientation and gender identity already fixed for life, then some children are necessarily born into the rainbow elect. Affirming these identities is seen as essential to their flourishing, for the sexual self is seen as the authentic self. Therefore, in order for the children born into the LGBT elect to live as their true selves, they must learn who they really are. And because we do not know which children are born with a rainbow identity until they tell us, then all children must be taught about sexual orientation and gender identity as young as possible, and encouraged to explore any hints of rainbow identity.
Of course, because “born this way” is a lie, the result has been a surge in children and young adults claiming to be LGBT. Consequently, we are now debating whether public schools should encourage children to transition and then hide it from their parents, and whether the government should take children away from parents who don’t affirm a child’s transgender identity. Somehow, “love wins” has become a mandate to seize children from their parents and mutilate them.
Social Conservatives Vindicated
These evils show that though social conservatives have been defeated, we have been vindicated. And there is more than the logic of social and legal revolution at work here. What religious conservatives understood — and what almost everyone else overlooked — is that sin stays hungry. Indulging and endorsing falsehoods about the nature of marriage, sex, and what it means to be embodied as a man or a woman only leads to more lies and more injuries.
If the cause of same-sex marriage had been righteous, we might have seen a result like that Sullivan imagines. That matters have instead gone so wrong, so quickly, should prompt us to look for where we went astray.
This reevaluation will often be uncomfortable, for the premises of the LGBT movement are derived from the sexual revolution as a whole, and that implicates almost all of us. Same-sex marriage was not the top of the slippery slope, it was just a point where it got steeper. The slide began with the effort to separate sex and its pleasures from obligation and commitment — the lie that we could and should separate sex from marriage, and marriage from the natural family of mother, father, and children. This is, of course, a perennial temptation, but the wealth and technological prowess of our age made it seem less harmful than it did in less prosperous times that lacked the pill and penicillin. But money and technology are poor substitutes for virtue and justice, so we have kept sliding down the slope.
Same-sex marriage accelerated this, building on past lies and adding new ones. And it also prevents recovery, insofar as it institutionalizes lies about sex, marriage, and family. Truth must be the foundation of any effort to rebuild a healthy sexual and family culture. And that will require rejecting government dogmas declaring that men and women are sexually and relationally interchangeable, subject only to the sovereign whim of adult preference.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Oh, look, it’s another one of those books that Democrats absolutely demand be made available to children. All it does is push little kids to “defy” the “ridiculous rules” of gender norms— because they cause “depression”!
A friend of mine took her two young children — a boy, 6, and a girl, 4 — to the Indianapolis Public Library, Glendale branch, this week and let them pick out some books from the kids’ section. It wasn’t until she got home that among the ones chosen by her daughter, who hasn’t yet learned to read, was Tabitha and Magoo Dress Up Too, a colorful picture book by Michelle Tea, the creator of “drag queen story hour.”
Tabitha and Magoo Dress Up Too promotes transgenderism to children. IMAGE CREDITUSED WITH PERMISSION
The story involves two young kids who like to play dress up, but when they’re told to take the costumes off before leaving the house, a garish drag queen named Morgana arrives and tells them all about the splendor of being a transvestite.
“Like Mama Ru said, we all are born nude,” the book says. “All our clothing is drag—every dress, tie, and snood. Now, I know that some people make ridiculous rules, but you’ll learn to defy them, and I’ll give you some tools!”
‘I know that some people make ridiculous rules, but you’ll learn to defy them,’ the book says. IMAGE CREDITUSED WITH PERMISSION
Mama Ru is a nickname for RuPaul, the famous drag queen. He and depictions of several other drag performers are featured on another page. This is a book listed on Amazon for children ages 4 to 8. Isn’t your 6-year-old a “Drag Race” fan?! The pages are filled with illustrations of little boys wearing dresses, girls wearing male sports attire, other boys in wigs, wearing heels and make-up and on and on. Also jarring are drawings of swords, snakes, and one creature with the head of a cat but the body of a cow. (All that’s missing are seven heads, 10 horns, and 10 crowns.)
My friend noted the passage on one page in particular that she said concerned her the most: “You see, my dear children, when gender expression / is hampered with rules, it just leads to depression!”
The book continues: ‘when gender expression is hampered with rules, it just leads to depression!’ IMAGE CREDITUSED WITH PERMISSION
“You see, my dear children, when gender expression / is hampered with rules, it just leads to depression!”
Just what every parent wants — to explain the concept of depression to their 4-year-old daughter.
“I’m a moderate who previously thought the book bans were outrageous,” my friend told me, referring to the attempt by some local governments to restrict sex-themed kids’ books in public libraries and schools. “I support the gays and the queens but not the idea of teaching a child they should be depressed over the gender they were born into.”
It’s worth repeating that she had no idea her child had chosen this book until after she and her family had gotten home. She had assumed that when her daughter came back to her with a vibrant picture book plucked from the kids’ section that it was harmless literature for children. But as we’ve seen, the kids are no longer off limits. The militant transgender activist lobby is out to get them and this is how they’re doing it.
Marriage, once the most child-friendly institution in the world, has now been redefined in the name of equality. It was argued same-sex couples just wanted to visit one another in the hospital, have access to the same inheritance laws, and get the same tax breaks as heterosexuals. We were told ad nauseam that marriage had nothing to do with children.
Eight years post-Obergefell and it is clear we were lied to. As we have seen in every country that has redefined marriage, the redefinition of parenthood follows quickly on its heels. Court decisions mandating the state-sanctioned falsification that children have “two moms” at birth; deeming the term “mother” and “father” unconstitutional; Andrew Cuomo supporting commercial surrogacy in the name of “fairness and equality” for “LGBTQ+ New Yorkers” — in all of this, it is clear that children are the permanent victims of gay marriage.
California’s Senate Bill 729 offers one of the clearest connections between adult “equality” and child victimization. Take it from the child-violating bill’s co-author Sen. Caroline Menjivar who notes that this legislation “is critical to achieving full-lived equality for LGBTQ+ people.” The bill has passed in the Senate and advanced to the Assembly. As of June 1, it’s been referred to the Committee on Health and is awaiting a hearing date. But how does this bill provide full-lived “equality” for LGBT couples?
First, SB 729 redefines infertility. For the purpose of insurance coverage, infertility is typically defined as 12 months of unprotected heterosexual sex without pregnancy or birth. But what about gay couples? Twelve months — or 12 years — of unprotected homosexual sex will never produce a baby. Thus, California’s more “equitable” definition of infertility will include “a person’s inability to reproduce either as an individual or with their partner without medical intervention.”
Never mind that every adult operating under this expanded infertility definition will be creating a child who is intentionally motherless or fatherless — a child who will experience the inevitable mother-hunger or father-hunger as they are deprived of their natural right to both. True “equality” seems to require that children lose a parent (or two).
Next, because same-sex couples cannot create children organically, synthetic baby-making is required. SB 729 will force insurance companies to cover in-vitro fertilization (IVF) for the medically and relationally infertile. Never mind that children created in-vitro (in glass) experience higher rates of physical and developmental struggles. “Equality” demands that a child’s conception be directed by a technician rather than in the loving embrace of his or her own mother and father.
Third, while two female bodies have double the eggs, and two male bodies have double the sperm, bigoted biology requires one sperm and one egg for every new life to begin. Therefore, SB 729 will require insurance companies to fund the participation of reproductive third parties — someone else’s, sperm, egg, womb, and/or embryo — to make sure single men, lesbians, or gay couples are not disadvantaged. Never mind that this will subject children to the identity struggles often experienced by children created via sperm or egg donation. Never mind that womb-rental infants suffer intentional severing of the maternal bond — largely regarded as a foundation for life-long trust and attachment. (And no, surrogacy is not just like adoption.) “Equality” must be achieved, even at the expense of denying children a relationship with a biological parent and/or their birth mother.
Finally, biology puts no limit on a heterosexual couple’s pregnancy attempts, while single and same-sex couples are limited by the high cost of IVF. That’s why SB 729 will grant everyone unlimited embryo transfers. Once you’ve selected your child’s genetic parent from that sperm or egg catalog, created your dozens of embryos, discarded or donated the undesirables, sex-selected to your preference, and frozen the majority for later — or possibly for never — then the sky’s the limit! You can implant however many tiny humans you want in your womb, or that of a hired stranger.
Never mind that only 7 percent of lab-created babies will be born alive due to the high-risk nature of IVF pregnancies, eugenic screenings, and the abortionselective reduction to which they’re subjected. We already have 1 million babies on ice in this country, many of whom have been functionally abandoned — but at least the 93 percent of lab-created babies who die in California will do so at the hands of a truly diverse population.
California’s proposed bill is not unlike other recent attempts in Minnesota, Washington, and nationally to treat children as items to be cut and pasted into any and every adult relationship. But this is the inevitable result of equating two things that can never be equal: opposite-sex and same-sex relationships. There is only one kind of marital relationship capable of producing children and thus only one coupling that deserves to be incentivized and institutionalized.
In the marriage and family world, the pursuit of “Equality” based on adult emotions and preferences will always result in true inequality for children. And unfortunately for America’s children, our highest court insists that there is no distinction between these two types of parental pairings, even though one leads to wholeness for children, and the other to lifelong loss.
New research conducted by the American Bible Society reveals that Christians heavily engaged with the Bible and their faith “flourish in every domain of human experience.”
The American Bible Society released Chapter 3 of its State of the Bible 2023 report Thursday, titled “Flourishing and Hope.” Data in the State of the Bible report is based on 2,761 responses collected from U.S. adults between Jan. 5-30. It has a margin of error of +/- 2.59 percentage points.
“Our research confirms something millions of Christians know through personal experience—that the Bible has the power to transform our lives and make us happier, healthier, and whole,” said American Bible Society Chief Ministry Insights and Innovation Officer John Farquhar Plake. “We find that Christians who are committed to their faith, fully engaged in the Bible and transformed by its message, flourish in every domain of human experience.”
According to Plake, “While these scripture-engaged Christians go through the same hardships as everyone else, the difference is they experience life’s ups and downs through a worldview shaped by the Bible’s message of hope. No matter the circumstances, those who trust in God and connect with him through Scripture are happier than those who haven’t yet sought God in his Word.”
The research examined respondents’ scores on the Human Flourishing Index, which asks about people’s “happiness & life satisfaction,” “mental & physical health,” “meaning & purpose,” “character & virtue,” “close societal relationships” and “financial & material stability.” On the Human Flourishing Index as a whole, practicing Christians received an average score of 7.8 compared to 6.9 for non-practicing Christians and 6.7 for non-Christians.
This phenomenon extended to the Happiness & Life Satisfaction domain, where practicing Christians received an average score of 7.8, followed by non-practicing Christians at 6.8 and non-Christians at 6.5. When it comes to meaning and purpose, practicing Christians turned in an average score of 8.1, while non-practicing Christians and non-Christians registered average scores of 6.9 and 6.4, respectively.
The State of the Bible research places respondents into three categories based on their scores on the Scripture Engagement Scale, which measures an individual’s responses to 14 questions about “the frequency of Bible use and the impact and centrality [of] its message.” Scripture Engaged Americans are defined as those who score 100 or higher on the Scripture Engagement Scale, the Movable Middle consists of those who score between 70 and 99, while the Bible Disengaged have scores of less than 70.
Scripture Engaged Americans received an average score of 7.9 on the Human Flourishing Index compared to 7.1 for the Movable Middle and 6.7 for the Bible Disengaged. With an average score of 7.8, Scripture Engaged respondents also scored higher than the Movable Middle (6.9) and Bible Disengaged (6.6) in the Happiness & Life Satisfaction domain.
While the Scripture Engaged received an average score of 8.3 in the Meaning & Purpose domain, the Movable Middle and Bible Disengaged achieved average scores of 7.0 and 6.5, respectively.
Those who “agree strongly” that “the message of the Bible has transformed my life” received an average score of 7.8 on the Human Flourishing Index as well as an average score of 7.7 in the Happiness & Life Satisfaction domain and an average score of 8.0 in the Meaning & Purpose domain. By contrast, those who “disagree strongly” that “the message of the Bible has transformed my life” received average scores of 6.5, 6.4 and 6.2 on the respective scales.
Respondents who prayed to God in the last seven days received an average score of 7.2 on the Human Flourishing Index compared to an average score of 6.6 for those who did not. Similarly, those who prayed in the last week received an average score of 7.1 in the Happiness & Life Satisfaction domain and an average score of 7.0 in the mental and physical health domain. Respondents who had not prayed in the last week achieved an average score of 6.5 in both domains.
Additionally, respondents who agreed that “I am able to sincerely forgive whatever someone else has done to me, regardless of whether they ever ask for forgiveness or not” received high average scores on the Human Flourishing Index (7.7), in the Happiness & Life Satisfaction domain (7.5) and the Meaning & Purpose domain (7.7). On the other hand, those who disagree strongly that they are able to sincerely forgive others receive much lower scores of 6.0, 5.8 and 5.8, respectively.
In addition to scoring higher on the Human Flourishing Index and its various domains, respondents who strongly agree that they have an ability to sincerely forgive those who wronged them also performed better on the Persevering Hope Scale, which examines people’s “motivation to persevere in the face of seemingly unlikely or even impossible goals.”
Those who agree strongly that they can sincerely forgive others received an average score of 4.1 on the Persevering Hope scale compared to an average score of 3.5 for those who disagree strongly that they can authentically forgive others.
The more obvious it becomes that our domestic political struggles are actually part of a much larger spiritual war over the fate of western civilization, that we are today engaged not so much in a political fight as a religious battle between good and evil, the stronger the urge seems to be among Republican politicians to deny this reality and take refuge in the comforting political narratives of the past.
A perfect case in point was a tweet last week from Kari Lake’s permanent campaign, which managed in one fell swoop to channel the deeply misguided political analysis of the entire neocon Washington establishment: “No one is saying not to fight the culture war. But it’s simply not the most critical issue heading into 2024.”
“The GOP must show the country how it plans to turn the economy around & prevent World War 3,” she added. “We need to take this country back from @JoeBiden before we can take our culture back from his friends.”
Ah, yes. The comforting fiction that if we can just show voters how we plan to turn the economy around, surely then we’ll regain power, surely then we’ll have a mandate from the people — and then (and only then) we can “take our culture back.”
With apologies to Lake, who before the midterms seemed to have a bright political future in the emerging populist GOP, this is absolute nonsense. On the one hand, it’s a desperate cope, the embodiment of the stale, low-energy politics that have kept conservatives out of power in Washington for most of the last three decades. On the other, it’s a textbook neocon talking point, pretending the culture war is a distraction when in fact it’s the only war whose outcome really will decide the fate of our country.
Ironically, it’s also an example of the kind of politics that Lake herself purported to defy. She made a name for herself during the midterm cycle by taking on the political establishment and attacking the corporate media’s false narratives about 2020 and much else. Lake isn’t the politician you’d think would fall into this trap, yet she did. Why?
The best explanation has nothing to do with Lake in particular but with the tendency of all politicians to want to explain the problems we face and offer practical solutions. The economy is bad, here’s how we fix it. The cities are filled with dangerous lunatics, here’s how we make our streets safe again. The border is overrun with illegal immigration, here’s how we crack down and secure it.
Republicans are more naturally susceptible to this way of thinking because, unlike Democrats, they tend to be less rabidly ideological and less committed to fundamentally altering America and bringing about political and social revolution. But this way of thinking — that our most pressing problems just need common-sense policy fixes that normal people support! — is woefully inadequate for our current moment.
Put simply, the big mistake in thinking the culture war isn’t the most critical issue heading into 2024 is that all of American politics is now one big culture war. The culture war is the only issue because the cultural war is everything now. When one side stakes its claim to political power on offering abortion up until birth and transgender operations for 8-year-olds, and holds out these policies as proof of its moral authority, we’re way past arguing over how to get the economy back on track. There’s no going back to that kind of politics.
Tucker Carlson hit on this at the end of his big speech at Heritage recently. He compared the values of the political left to the values of the Aztecs, who sacrificed children to their bloodthirsty gods — and he wasn’t wrong. Our politics, he argued, have shifted profoundly in a relatively short period of time. Instead of arguing over the best means to bring about an agreed-upon common good, we no longer agree about what the common good is. Forget about whether Republicans or Democrats are right about the ideal marginal tax rate. We can’t even agree on whether men and women exist as meaningful categories. And if we don’t get that question right, you can forget about economic prosperity, much less anything like a republic or a constitutional system of government.
What the neocons and establishment politicians don’t seem to understand is that the culture war has become a grinding war of attrition that will end with the complete destruction of one side. There is no way to reconcile the vision of the common good espoused by the transgender movement, on the one hand, and orthodox Christians, on the other.
The culture war in America is not some luxury good that Republican politicians can sample now and then. It has consumed our politics by revealing deep, uncrossable chasms in our national life. So, we now find ourselves in a different kind of struggle. Call it a culture war, a religious war, a battle between good and evil, or all of the above. It’s a war for survival between two competing and irreconcilable visions of what America should be.
Any politician on the right that doesn’t understand that, who thinks we just need to show voters our plan for getting the economy back on track, needs to step aside and make room for leaders who know what time it is, that the hour is late, the day now far spent, and the time for fighting has come. The culture war is now the big tent. Those who embrace it, who delve into the fray without apology, will be the next crop of leaders on both the right and the left.
Keep this in mind as we march toward the 2024 election cycle. The cast of buffoons and egomaniacs on the Republican side will feature mostly candidates who don’t understand or don’t want to admit what’s happening. They will say things like, “No one is saying not to fight the culture war. But it’s simply not the most critical issue heading into 2024.” And when they say that, they’ll be doing you a favor. You can then safely ignore whatever else they say because you’ll know at that point they’re either a fool or a coward, and all they have to offer is defeat.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Remember when we all went around saying “it takes a village to raise a child”? I do.
I remember hearing Whitney Houston belt it out—
I believe the children are our are future Teach them well and let them lead the way Show them all the beauty they possess inside Give them a sense of pride to make it easier Let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be Everybody searching for a hero People need someone to look up to….
I grew up on that message. And you can bet your bottom dollar I tried to raise my kids as part of a village that loves and supports them. But instead of learning basic human goodness, leftists have decided to use education to destroy our children.
CRT, unicorns, and other works of fiction.
It’s bad enough that CRT infiltrates public schools with its revisionist history and racist undertones. But leftists just had to add unicorns and gender benders. It’s a terrible web that traps the masses.
Critical race theory is an idea that originated in universities and law schools under the name “critical theory”. Its supporters added “race” in the 1970s, clever scoundrels that they were.
The addition of RACE bastardized a 1930s European theory birthed by communist academics. They knew that RACE would SELL this nonsensical concept. Further, they knew that Blacks in America would readily buy the concept.
The communists of the time targeted Blacks due to our LEGITIMATE grievances. Because Blacks during this time were treated as second-class citizens. That treatment led to angst in the Black community. Thus, many Blacks succumbed to the communist ideology. They believed we would all be treated equally; that’s the lie communism proposes.
The objective of Critical Race Theory was to tear down, even erase the history of ideas that created Western culture. Particularly American Western culture.
America was too good for its own good, the communists believed. Too good to be true. So they put her to the test. For decades, America proved that capitalism and free markets work; moreover, Marxism and Communism fail.
Tenets of CRT reject ideas such as a “color-blindness” and even advancement based on meritocracy. Black people aren’t successful in America because they work hard and dismiss the noise of the Left. They succeed by pure luck.
In other words, CRT doesn’t value people by the content of their character, nor does CRT value hard work. Ibram X. Kendi wrote: “The language of color blindness … is a mask to hide racism.”
Unbelievably, CRT openly criticizes the Civil Rights movement; a movement that created millions of successful Blacks in America.
While CRT acknowledges the success of individual Blacks in America, ironically, it criticizes successful Blacks for joining the system. The theory puts Blacks in a no-win situation. CRT supporter Derrick Bell alludes that successful Blacks “are passing” as whites. Because being successful according to Bell, is succumbing to the white man’s orthodoxy.
We could try to ignore the inconsistencies and idiocy of the flawed concepts of CRT. However, we do so at our peril. Because CRT impacts all areas of society. CRT demoralizes K-12 students. And if it hasn’t sunk in by the end of K-12, CRT attacks in college, polarizing higher ed students.
Post-college, CRT guilts working Americans and condones “cancel culture”. In the end, CRT stokes grievances with the purpose of creating victims.
A proponent of Critical Theory, Herbert Marcuse, famously wrote, “All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude”. And like a cult, the CRT revolution enslaves the minds of the people who adopt it. And the concept is blatantly and unapologetically racist.
When racism wasn’t enough to divide America, leftists brought in the unicorn.
Parents are no longer the ultimate authority when teaching their children about race, sexual preference, or even gender. Instead, our kids are taught to ditch their God given pronouns and choose their gender.
If a kid feels saddled with a penis they don’t really like, the school is willing to step-in and help the child obtain hormone therapy in preparation for a sex change. No parental consultation necessary. Yet, you need to sign a permission slip for your kid to go the zoo or a museum. Seriously folks! How are these asinine hypocrisies not glaringly evident to those who put these leftists in charge of our schools? I’m not even going to dive into the boys playing girls’ sports– we’ll just save that for another day. Because today, I stumbled across a headline that literally made me want to throw up.
This morning, the Fox News website had this to say:
West Virginia teacher who raped freshman kept ‘Top 10’ list of most attractive students: lawsuit
Lawyers said Ronald Paul Harris may have sexually abused other victims, and the school district allegedly “turned a blind eye”.
A now-convicted pedophile raped a freshman while he was a teacher in a West Virginia school district. That district and the school’s former principal are now facing a lawsuit for allegedly “turned a blind eye” to the ongoing abuse.
Ronald Paul Harris, who is now 63, admitted in criminal court to molesting a 14-year-old student while he was a history teacher and basketball coach at Oak Glen Middle School in Hancock County, West Virginia.
…
“This case is a parent’s worst nightmare,” said Mary Pat Statler, who’s representing E.H. (the victim) and her parents, along with P. Zachary Stewart.
“To learn that your child was groomed and sexually abused by a teacher is beyond awful. It’s made even more terrible knowing that the administrator at the time of the abuse was in a position to stop the abuse or prevent future instances of abuse and instead turned a blind eye.”
Harris pleaded guilty last September in criminal court to sexual abuse by a person in a position of trust and is serving a 10- to-20-year prison sentence and must register as a sex offender. As part of the deal, five other felony charges were dropped.
The details are so disturbing, I feel the need to warn you.
Lia Thomas suggested on a recent podcast that women whose support for so-called “trans women” is conditional are “fake feminists” and cast his critics as bigots. He further stressed that real feminists should be interested in breaking down “patriarchal ideals of what a woman is,” especially if those ideals link womanhood to biology.
Schuyler Bailar, the transvestite athlete who hosted the podcast on which Thomas appeared, raised the matter of a February 2022 letter written by Olympic champion Nancy Hogshead-Makar to the University of Pennsylvania and the Ivy League on behalf of 16 members of the school’s female swim team.
The letter asked that the school not challenge the NCAA’s new transgender athlete participation policies, as they would exclude men who experienced puberty, such as Lia Thomas, from competing against women in the March NCAA championships, reported CNN.
“We fully support Lia Thomas in her decision to affirm her gender identity and to transition from a man to a woman. Lia has every right to live her life authentically,” said the letter.
It went on to say, “However, we also recognize that when it comes to sports competition, that the biology of sex is a separate issue from someone’s gender identity. Biologically, Lia holds an unfair advantage over competition in the women’s category, as evidenced by her rankings that have bounced from #462 as a male to #1 as a female.”
Thomas spoke on “Dear Schuyler” to the letter, saying it is “frustrating in the regard that
they’re like, ‘oh we respect Lia as a woman, as a trans woman, whatever, we respect her identity, we just don’t think it’s fair.’ And I think you can’t really have that sort of half support where you’re like ‘oh, I respect you as a woman here but not here.'”
“You can’t do that, you can’t sort of break down me as a person into little pieces,” added the former male athlete.
Bailar noted that the fight to protect women’s sports has become a big movement, executed “under the guise of feminism. Oh, we’re just feminists. We’re just fighting for women.”
Thomas agreed, later saying, “They’re using the guise of feminism to sort of push transphobic beliefs. I think a lot of people in that camp sort of carry an implicit bias against trans people, but don’t want to, I guess, fully manifest or speak that out. And so they try to just play it off as this sort of half-support.”
After arguing that feminists who sought to keep men out of women’s sports were ideologically incoherent, Bailar likened the corresponding claim of seeking fairness on the basis of sex to the ambivalence of racists about black women competing in sports.
“Please tell me why are all these women, you know, in tears? Why are they crying? What is
the pain that trans women are causing them? And the answer was something about opportunities being taken away,” said Bailar, adding, “It was the same exact arguments that came up when black women began to be in sports. … You don’t want a woman who doesn’t look like you, perhaps, or who is fitting your version of womanhood to win.”
Thomas, having ostensibly agreed with Bailar’s remarks, suggested that “transphobia in sports” should be contextualized more broadly in “patriarchal ideals of what a woman is and who can be a woman.”
The Independent Council on Women’s Sports responded to the podcast, tweeting, “We agree with Lia Thomas on one thing: ‘You can’t really have that sort of half-support.’ We do not in ANY way support the injustice of male participation in women’s sports. We are all in for female athletes. Not half. ALL in.”
We agree with Lia Thomas on one thing: “You can’t really have that sort of half-support”
We do not in ANY way support the injustice of male participation in women’s sports. We are all in for female athletes. Not half. ALL in. pic.twitter.com/zprRMq5sA4
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Co.) wrote, “There is nothing anti-feminist about saying that Lia Thomas, a man, should not be participating in sports with women. Feminists, and all women, should be outraged that a MAN has the nerve to tell them how they should feel about him invading their spaces and sports competitions.”
“What a joke,” wrote Piers Morgan. “There’s nothing more ‘anti-feminist’ than trans athletes like Lia Thomas using the massive advantages of their male biology to beat women at sport.”
TheBlaze previously reported Thomas was a middling performer on the University of Pennsylvania men’s swimming team until he starting taking hormones in 2019 and competing against women. He went onto crush records set by females in the 500-yard freestyle at the 2022 NCAA championships and tie with All-American all-female swim star Riley Gaines for fifth last April in the women’s 200-meter. According to Gaines, it was around that time Thomas exposed his male genitalia in a women’s locker room.
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The ire of conservative consumers has now focused on makeup brand Maybelline for partnering with trans woman and biological male Dylan Mulvaney for a recent makeup ad. To celebrate Mulvaney’s gender transition and to promote Maybelline makeup, the brand collaborated with the TikTok star on a video featuring the trans woman applying several Maybelline products.
Mulvaney posted the ad to her TikTok account last month.
Trans woman Dylan Mulvaney models Maybelline Makeup products in a TikTok video from March. (Screenshot/Oli Londons Twitter account)
The Maybelline ad represented just one of several brand partnerships the transgender influencer and activist has taken on recently, including a highly controversial partnership with Bud Light that sparked major backlash from conservative consumers. The boycott of the beer company in response to the Mulvaney promotion has resulted in Bud Light’s sales plunging 17%. The trans woman also generated outrage for modeling sports bras for Nike.
Now conservatives are looking to protest Maybelline for the same thing.
At the start of the TikTok video, Mulvaney appeared with no makeup while wearing a bathrobe. She began applying her Maybelline products and quickly obscured herself from the camera with her makeup brush, a popular TikTok technique done to transition to the next shot.
When she pulled the brush back from blocking the camera, she was revealed to be in a dress, her hair and makeup done, and fully ready for a night out. Before the short clip ended, Mulvaney applied some Maybelline lip gloss and smiled for viewers.
Some people in Nashville said they stopped drinking Bud Light after the brand partnered with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. (Instagram)
The caption for the video stated, “Getting glam for my Day 365 show with @maybelline #maybellinepartner #dylanmulvaney #shorts.” At the top right of the clip, text indicated that Mulvaney is a “Maybelline Partner.”
Conservative viewers and makeup users were not ecstatic about Mulvaney’s latest stunt, however. British detransition activist Oli London shared the video to Twitter and mocked it using Maybelline’s famous slogan. He tweeted, “Maybe he’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline. The new face of Maybelline, ladies!”
Influencer and commentator “Conservative Momma” ripped the partnership, tweeting, “So no more @Maybelline. Supporting womanface, is degrading and offensive to real women.”
No way. I will have to throw out my 2 Maybelline products. Shame.
Canadian conservative activist Liz Churchill denounced her Maybelline products, declaring, “No way. I will have to throw out my 2 Maybelline products. Shame.”
User Claire Hunt tweeted, “The entire feminist movement just rolled over in its grave, as this saccharine display pretends to be an Exemplar of ‘Womanhood.’”
Jeff Myers, Ph.D., the president of Summit Ministries and co-author of the e-book with The Christian Post’s Brandon Showalter (right), titled “Exposing The Gender Lie,” speaks at an event held at First Baptist Dallas titled, “Unmasking Gender Ideology: Protecting Children, Confronting Transgenderism” alongside counselor Julia Jeffress Sadler (left), on March 23, 2023. | The Christian Post
DALLAS — “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Voltaire’s famous quote is centuries old, but for Jeff Myers, author and president of Summit Ministries, it’s a warning that is as timely as ever when it comes to the debate over transgenderism.
Speaking at last month’s panel discussion on “Unmasking Gender Ideology: Protecting Children, Confronting Transgenderism” at First Baptist Dallas, Myers said he sees the issue as the “breakdown of language as a way of understanding reality.” Myers compared the path toward human atrocities committed in Nazi Germany and against the Hutu in Rwanda and ongoing efforts to curtail speech as related to the trans movement.
“In those cases, the very first thing that happened is the people in charge dehumanized the vulnerable, stopped calling them human,” he said. “You dehumanize them, and then you can destroy them.”
This tactic has been used multiple times since, most recently by the pro-abortion crowd. Remember the terms they used to describe the baby in the womb? “Lump of tissue”, “Mass of cells”, “Globulin mass”. By “dehumanizing ” the baby, their conscious was seared. Now they are using unhuman terms to describe anyone that doesn’t go along with their terms, definitions and speech.
That same strategy, said Myers, is being used against those who refuse to conform their speech to trans ideology.
“You’ll find that the very people who insist you use language in a particular way, that you use their chosen pronouns, you refer to them using the language that they insist on, if you don’t do it, you will be called all kinds of names — evil, bigoted, transphobic and so forth,” he added.
Myers also disagreed with the suggestion that the debate over trans identity and language is simply partisan politics.
“This is not a left versus right issue,” he said. “The vast majority of Americans, Republican, Independent, Democrat, believe that what is happening through transgenderism is wrong.”
He pointed to a recent poll that found only 9% of Americans believe gender transition procedures on young children are acceptable.
“Yet somehow the nine percent control the agenda for everyone else,” he said
So how can the Church respond in a way that’s both truthful and helpful?
Myers, who co-authored a recent e-book with CP, Exposing The Gender Lie, said Christians must first acknowledge the urgency of the issue and the threat it poses.
“We realized we can’t be silent on the issue of gender ideology because it is an attack on the very idea of truth itself,” said Myers.
He said he’s “very concerned” about transgenderism and pointed to the some 6,500 catalogued biological differences between males and females.
“The idea that you can be a boy and become a girl is a lie, it is a lie about biology and it is a lie about personhood,” he said.
Myers pointed to the teaching of the postmodern view that words are reality — a teaching that stretches back nearly three decades when university students were being taught that no objective reality exists, only “knowable perceptions.”
“So instead of saying people should seek the truth, now people say you should ‘speak your truth,” he explained. “So if words have no relation to reality, then words like ‘male’ and ‘female’ don’t matter anymore.”
That application, said Myers, underpins the entire ideology of transgenderism, which “twists language” to threaten the livelihoods of those whose very job is to communicate facts and data.
“You’re a journalist, you’ll get fired if you don’t do this,” he said. “If you refer to biological men who identify as women as transgender women, you must use that terminology.
“If you’re in the corporate world and don’t do it, you’ll be fired.”
Moments after Fox News abruptly announced that it “mutually agreed to part ways” with the host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Monday, leftists and their allies in the corporate media began gloating about the ousting of one of the nation’s most influential critics of the corrupt ruling class.
While some, like former CNN talking head Brian Stelter, penned “fan fiction” gleefully theorizing about the reason for the split, others joined the hundreds of Twitter trolls celebrating Carlson’s exit as a win for their political agendas.
Democrats
Mere weeks after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries demanded Fox News silence hosts like Carlson who discuss election inconsistencies, congressional Democrats cheered at their political enemy’s downfall.
Schumer: "Rupert Murdoch has a special obligation to stop Tucker Carlson from going on tonight [and] from letting him go on again and again and again [because] our democracy depends on it." pic.twitter.com/uld6eaCl3C
“Don’t know for sure if the firing of Tucker Carlson is connected to the lies & accusations of voter fraud perpetrated by Fox News, Trump, & his sycophants against you, Dominion Voting Systems,” Rep. Maxine Waters tweeted. “Thank you for your fight and your lawsuit, you beat the hell out of them, bye-bye.”
“Glad to hear that one of the most divisive, racist and destructive forces on television is off his prime time show. Tucker Carlson will not be missed,” Rep. Robert Garcia wrote.
Leftist Squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told her Instagram and Facebook followers that Carlson’s departure is proof that “Deplatforming works and it is important.” She also used the news to fundraise.
AOC on Tucker “Deplatforming works and it is important.”
The harpies-er-ladies at ABC’s “The View” paused their regularly scheduled programming on Monday to triumphantly recognize Tucker’s exit. Host Whoopi Goldberg started a wave in the audience that was closely followed by an Ana Navarro-led acapella chorus of “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.”
“He is responsible for the degradation that we see somewhat of our democracy in this country,” co-host Sunny Hostin said.
The View celebrates Tucker Carlson leaving Fox News. The cast does the wave and Ana Navarro leads the audience in singing "Hey, hey, they Goodbye!" Sunny Says he's responsible for the "degradation" of our "democracy." pic.twitter.com/uaY0l2COck
The View women previously called on the Biden administration to investigate and potentially arrest Carlson for “shilling for [Vladimir] Putin.”
The Daily Show
Desi Lydic said she’s “glad” Carlson is gone after trying to “topple America’s democracy.”
“You know that stupid look that’s always on Tucker Carlson’s face?” The Daily Show correspondent quipped on Monday night. “Today, he has a good reason for it. I can’t believe that a network that is so opposed to gender-affirming surgery just cut off their own d-ck.”
Maren Morris
The female country singer and drag queen enthusiast, who called Jason Aldean’s wife an “Insurrection Barbie” after she criticized the mutilation of children, also celebrated the personality’s unemployment.
“Happy Monday, MotherTucker,” Morris wrote in her Instagram story on Monday.
The story features a picture of Morris with a chyron from “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” labeling her a “lunatic country music person.”
Some Guy Named Steve
Facebook Censorship partner Stephen Hayes, who took a contributor role with NBC after leaving Fox News to protest Carlson’s programming, told the New York Times on Monday that he hopes Carlson’s leave “signals some kind of broader institutional change” at the right-leaning network.
“On a lot of the mainstream channels, there was a race to be first to condemn Trump to celebrate his problems,” Hayes said. “And on Fox, in prime time especially, there was this over-the-top effort to defend him and amplify his lies.”
A Star Trek Actor
“Don’t let the door hit you on your way out, you horrid, soulless man. #TuckerCarlson,” raging leftist activist George Takei tweeted.
Fox News Staffers
“Fox News Staffers Celebrate Tucker Carlson’s Departure: ‘Pure Joy,’” a Rolling Stone headline excitedly blared on Monday night.
The article lists several unnamed “staffers” who were apparently overjoyed that the biggest source of their employer’s views was finally gone.
“Pure joy. No one is untouchable. It’s a great day for America, and for the real journalists who work hard every day to deliver the news at Fox,” one of the sources allegedly said.
“These are the consequences that Carlson’s own actions inspired, and they are owed only to best business practices,” National Review’s senior writer Noah Rothman claimed in an article, completely ignoring the fact that Fox News is on track to lose the audience of its most popular show.
Washington Examiner Editor
“RIP to a fashy, sh-tty show no more than one percent of Americans watched on a good night, including more Democrats than MSNBC, thus making it hard to argue it had a large influence on American electoral politics except in driving loud people nuts,” Nick Clairmont, the Washington Examiner’s life and arts editor tweeted on Monday.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
An LGBT activist recently took to Tiktok to threaten anyone who would bar him or other male transvestites from entering women’s washrooms, daring concerned parents to try to protect their children. Despite these and other threats made both before and after the Nashville massacre, when six Christians were murdered by a transgender extremist, Thomas Jay White‘s account remains active on the platform.
Reduxx reported that White, who calls himself “Tara” and identifies as “Poly Trans Lesbian,” is a “baby fetishist” into “ageplay” and “diapers.” He indicated on his Twitter account that he is into various other deviant behaviors including “bloodletting.”
In a now-deleted video, White said, “If you back a wild animal into a corner, they are going to become a dangerous animal. So if you want to die on that hill of yours — of righteousness and moral majority — then you go right ahead.”
“I dare you to try and stop me from going into a women’s bathroom. It will be the last mistake you ever make. I dare you to try to stop a transgender woman in my presence from using the bathroom. It will be the last mistake you ever make,” he continued.
The radical transvestite clarified that this was indeed “a call to action and a call to arms to everybody within the United States” and told others within the so-called LGBT community to “arm up, plain and simple.”
“Go out and buy a gun. Learn how to use it efficiently, through and through, because the time to act is now,” White added, indicating he had done likewise.
“There are lots of people like me who are not afraid to die,” he said, adding sardonically, “So you go ahead, you protect your kids.”
According to the Daily Mail, White recorded the video after the March 27 Covenant School massacre in Nashville.
‘Tara’ who identifies as a lesbian issues threatening message to women:
“If you back a wild animal into a corner, they are going to become a dangerous animal…I dare you to try and stop me from going into a women’s bathroom”
This was not the first time that White intimated LGBT radicals should use violent means to get what they want. In a video posted Feb. 15 framed by rainbow #ForYourPride captions, the transvestite radical railed against Tennessee’s Senate Bill 3, the Republican legislation since ratified that protects children from sexually graphic drag shows. Alluding to similar bills in his home state of Kansas, White said, “I am not going to go down without a fight and I call upon everyone in this country … do not sit back and just take this.”
“If it means me going to jail or prison or worse, I’m going to do everything in my power to fight,” he added.
White noted in a subsequent video that he would be migrating his channel to the social media site Clapper, where he could better “tackle and defeat and shred all of these Christians and evangelicals that love to cherry-pick Bible verses to justify their bigoted behavior and bull****.”
Oli London, a critic of the transgender movement who announced he was converting to Christianity and de-transitioning last year, told Fox News Digital, “This is just another example of a biological man feeling emboldened to invade women’s spaces in the name of ‘self-identity’ and threatening women’s safety without any fear of repercussions.”
“In today’s America, people like this man, who identifies as a Poly Trans Lesbian, are encouraged to do this and praised as ‘stunning and brave’ for entering women’s spaces. Anyone that calls out men like this are immediately deemed ‘transphobic’ and ‘hateful bigots,'” added London. “This is a harmful narrative, but sadly has become all too common across society.”
While White’s Tiktok and Twitter accounts remain active, his Instagram page appears to have been shut down.
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A sane person who prefers living in a clean, safe, and prosperous city would see that news and say things are going in the wrong direction, and the people who are responsible for it need to be held accountable.
That’s how popular TikTok user The Blaq Mamba reacted in a video she posted Sunday. “What really saddens me about this,” she said, referring to the closure of one Walmart location in the South Side, “is that this Walmart was built in a predominantly black neighborhood. This is probably about the only major resource as far as like, shopping and access to groceries and access to pharmacy within a 10-block, maybe even a 10-mile radius.” She added, “And what’s really sad to me is how us black folks, we done stole and robbed ourselves out of a f-cking resource that even the elderly people of this community will not be able to have access to.”
She said she was “ashamed and saddened” because “We blame everybody else for our sh-t but then when we are tapped out of resources in our own community, we don’t ever want to look at ourselves and point the finger back at ourselves, and say, okay, maybe we f-cked up. Maybe we shouldn’t have been going in there stealing TVs and going in there stealing electronics and all this other sh-t … We need to do better.”
A person who is perhaps not sane or who is, at minimum, a societal parasite sucking the life and goodness out of everything would react just the opposite. He would excuse the ne’er-do-wells, thieves, and fiends. Instead, he would direct blame at those who refuse to tolerate anti-social behavior.
That’s how deadbeat incoming Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson reacted. (I assume you don’t need me to tell you he’s a Democrat.) Following a weekend of street thugging and mayhem around the once-cherished Millennium Park, during which two teens and a six-year-old boy were shot, Johnson saw no urgency. “I’m saying that people are acting out of desperation,” he said in a remote TV interview, dialing in from what looked fittingly like a jail cell. “We don’t want a society that is acting out of desperation. But you have to pay attention to the cries that people have.” Asked if he condones the rampant looting that has forced countless businesses to close, he said, “What I’m saying is that you can’t condone the looting that corporations continue to do every single day when they take tax dollars from black, brown, white folks all over the city of Chicago so that they can turn a profit.”
Johnson said in a separate statement that it’s “not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”
I don’t know about you, but the first thing that comes to mind when I see a teen snatching a handle of Hennessy before climbing a street light is definitely “a society that is acting out of desperation.”
What is there really left to say at this point? There appear to be more Brandon Johnsons than there Blaq Mambas. It’s too bad. Chicago could be a nice place. It used to be. Now it’s another ghetto for people like Johnson to further plunge into squalor.
Nowadays, it seems like in order to create a successful horror movie that isn’t a sequel in a legacy franchise, filmmakers have to incorporate at least two of the following: gore, vulgarity, and demonic possession. The horror genre drastically over-utilizes guts, gorgons, and naked gals, typically leaving something to be desired from the writing. The genre seems to rely more on eliciting physical responses than contributing to broader cultural discourse. And in this way, horror films are more akin to amusement park rides than they are art.
This is partly why “Nefarious,” a new movie executive produced by conservative commentator Steve Deace and directed by Christian filmmakers Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, is a breath of fresh air — the film actually has substance.
Based on Deace’s best-selling novel “A Nefarious Plot,” the film is set on the scheduled day of execution for convicted serial killer Edward Wayne Brady, who is required by the state of Oklahoma to receive a final psychiatric evaluation before taking a seat on the electric chair. Brady, having “incontrovertible evidence, a confession, a jury of peers, and 11 years of legal wrangling” paving the road for him on death row, may be suffering from a severe mental ailment and, therefore, ineligible for execution.
Dr. James Martin, the highly accredited psychiatrist tasked with providing Brady with an “impartial review,” approaches the evaluation with the requisite hubris of a highly credentialed millennial. But his preconceived understanding of the situation and his secular worldview prevent him from engaging with the true nature of the reality presented before him. And seeing as how Brady is very explicitly possessed by a demon named “Nefarious,” this makes a dominant theme of the film readily apparent: Evil is all around us, in both the often unnoticed ignorance of modern banality and in glaringly obvious manifestations.
In explaining the process of demonic possession, Nefarious makes clear it relies on a series of “yeses” in which an individual gradually acclimates himself to the normalization of evil. He says, “We offer up a series of temptations, gradually increasing in terms of duration and intensity, degree of moral inequity.”
The implication is that seemingly small moral infractions like petty theft and religious ambivalence pave the way for greater misdeeds by numbing our hearts and senses to the damaging effects of evil. This concept is further explored in the “three murders” Nefarious tells Martin he will have committed by the time Brady is scheduled for execution.
The twist is that these murders are products of the casual cruelty contemporary society extols as virtues. Thus, Martin wasn’t aware he had already committed two of the three; he was under the impression he was simply living life in the 21st century. Nevertheless, Martin signing off on the euthanasia of his sickly mother — granting her “death with dignity” — and pressuring his girlfriend to abort their child because he isn’t “ready to be a father” are both tacit acts of killing.
When forced to confront his immorality and the evil nature of his actions, Martin recites what may as well be the Nicene Creed of liberalism, protesting, “This is my life. I can live it the way I want.”
Throughout the psychiatric evaluation, Nefarious reveals to Martin that his goal is to spite God by using man’s free will to usher in an era of darkness so his master can become the metaphysical hegemon. Subsequently, “Nefarious” serves as a sort of inversion of the Passion story in which the eponymous demon acts as the “dark messiah.” Nefarious, a dark spiritual being, forcibly inhabits a body that is not his own and uses it to wreak havoc and cause misery. Nefarious also makes clear to Martin that he needs him to commit Brady to death so the demon’s spiritual form may be unleashed to usher in an era of demonic rule; an innocent man must die for the damnation of us all, so the story goes.
It just so happens that after being thoroughly creeped out and violently strangled by Nefarious, Martin is convinced Brady is the one behind everything, is a dangerous madman, and the world would be safer without him in it. Signing off on Brady’s psychiatric evaluation, subsequently indicating he is mentally fit to stand execution, Martin commits his third murder and may or may not have ushered in the end times; we are left to wonder.
What makes “Nefarious” such a fascinating movie is that it uses outlandish means to make heartfelt and relatable pleas about our culture’s spiritual woes. It is undeniable our civilization is currently enduring a crisis of faith, causing people to become rudderless and dependent upon self-actualization and charlatans for deeper meaning.
Too often, we lack the vocabulary to engage in meaningful conversations about this very topic. So, despite it being crucially important, we simply don’t discuss it. But just as often, where words fail, art succeeds, and “Nefarious” is the rare horror film worthy of being called art partly because of its ability to adeptly address truly existential cultural woes.
“Nefarious” hits theaters across the country on April 14.
Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @Mangold_Lenett.
Those of us that remember this classic scene from the 1987 film “Raising Arizona,” still laugh when we think about the convict uttering those ridiculous words. Ridiculous, we said. Crazy, we thought. Common sense and a little 7th grade biology told us that men could not get pregnant, have periods, let alone experience menstrual cramps. However, that was then- this is now.
Somehow, the invention of the internet that provided billions of people with limitless information daily has now replaced what was once ‘elementary knowledge’ with what equates to a panel discussion. Contrary to what was once believed, common sense is not so common.
At a recent University of Pittsburg event in March, Former University of Kentucky swimmer and Independent Women’s Forum spokesperson Riley Gaines addressed a group concerning winning her competition against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological man. During her speech, Gaines directed a question to the school’s anthropologist, Professor Gabby Yearwood.
The exchange was recorded in an article in the Washington Examiner:
“I actually have a question for you. You being an anthropologist, which anthropology is the study of human civilization,” Gaines said as the anthropologist noted that his area of study includes a focus on biology.
“So, if you were to dig up a human, two humans, in 100 years from now, both man and woman, could you tell the difference, strictly off of bones?” Gaines questioned.
The anthropologist said, “No,” as those in attendance burst into laughter.
“I’m not sure why I’m being laughed at if I’m the expert in the room,” the anthropologist said. “Have any of you been to archaeological sites? Have any of you studied biological anthropology? I’m just saying, I’ve got over 150 years of data. I’m just curious as to why I’m being laughed at.”
As Gaines began to explain that she had “put a lot of research into this,” the anthropologist cut her off to say: “I have a Ph.D.”
The crowd once again began to laugh. Video of the interaction went viral as Twitter users responded, suggesting the anthropologist was “either incompetent or lying.”
The Buried Truth
The thing to remember here is that Gaines isn’t engaging a student or simply a bystander or even a visitor- Yearwood was a certified University anthropologist- Pitt’s gold standard of academia. In most cases, such a degree generally takes about four years of study to complete, certainly covering basic human biology and bone structure. One might wonder how Gabby would still have a job- and one would be correct to wonder. Regardless of the clear picture of this “expert’s” obvious ineptitude, the Left never says die.
One week later, Gaines was invited to speak at the San Francisco University chapter of Turning Point USA, once again sharing her experience of competing against Thompson. Almost immediately things took a turn for the worse. The New York Post records Gaines’ harrowing experience this way:
“Swimmer Riley Gaines on Saturday threatened to take “legal action” after saying she was assaulted by trans-rights protesters during a speech about protecting women’s sports at San Francisco State University.
“The campus police did nothing. The dean of students was there and did nothing. There will be no repercussions unless I have something to do with it,” Gaines told “Fox & Friends Weekend” host Rachel Campos-Duffy.
“I will be pursuing legal action. These people need to face repercussions.” The former NCAA swimmer and 12-time All-American champ said a mob of demonstrators attacked her while she spoke about including trans athletes in women’s sports during Thursday’s Turning Points USA event at SF State.
Dramatic video Gaines shared on Twitter shows her being ushered out of a classroom and into a hallway by security as protesters chase after her. One of the activists gets in front of her and shouts, “Trans rights are human rights” and “Yeah, you f–king transphobic bitch — I f–king see you!”
“The prisoners are running the asylum at SFSU…I was ambushed and physically hit twice by a man,” she tweeted. Additional footage shared on social media shows security blocking Gaines from a mass of protesters before she was escorted to a safe room, where she said she was barricaded “for three hours.”
“Truthfully, I think these people resort to anger, both verbally and physically, and violence because they know they don’t have reason on their side,” Gaines told Campos-Duffy. “They cannot debate me with logic or science or any kind of data that supports their argument, so they resort to personal attacks.”
It seems that in the blink of the societal eye everything has changed.
It was only back in 2005 when we were introduced to the TV series “Bones” about the cases of a well-known female forensic anthropologist. Running for nearly 11 years, episodes centered on FBI case files surrounding mysteries concerning often limited and/or badly degraded human remains. In episode 8 season 1, an FBI agent she works with brings her an old freezer he claims contains a human body. Upon prying open the door and seeing the body, the agent asks, “he or she?” Within seconds of looking at the body’s pelvic region, the anthropologist replies, “she.” To be clear, this deduction was not based on years of case study, or even the acumen that led to her notoriety. This was in a nutshell, basic human biology.
It appears we collectively knew these basic truths like ten minutes ago; only now, the same group collectively denies what we all once professed to know. Despite that, there are still many that consider acknowledging ‘preferred gender’ instead of ‘confirmed gender’ to be a hill worth dying on. Oddly enough, it is those very same individuals that during the Pandemic reminded us ad nauseum to “follow the science,” that now choose to ignore that same “science” when it is no longer politically expedient or beneficial.
Yet, if we’re being honest, “they” do not shoulder all the blame.
Many of us elected to heed the “science” rhetoric despite available truths and data to the contrary. Wearing masks and sheltering in place was no more substantiated science then, than mutilating children is “gender-affirming” care, or men playing God over their bodies by pretending to be women is now.
When that husky man in “Raising Arizona” complained of menstrual cramps, we certainly thought it was funny. If we knew then what we are seeing now, we would have never laughed. Brave men and women like Riley Gaines, Matt Walsh and others are discovering what is truly an inconvenient truth: the Trojan Horse dismissal of films like “Tootsie” and “To Wong Foo”, the Caitlyn Jenner’s, the RuPaul’s and those men lamenting over their bodies challenged with what only women can experience has led us to this. The only way to exterminate this “transfestation” is to combat it with truth. The first inoculation must begin in our own homes. America, we have work to do.
Oh the irony. But real women need to “grow a pair”. Yes, BALLS.
I know this action flies in the crotch of what real women might find necessary. But I say to these ladies, at times real women must “man up”!
If that concept challenges your sensibilities, then real women in America should understand that the competition–the hairy underarm crowd–manned up. Literally.
Feminists have enlisted the help of “former men”. And the two factions have joined to wage war against real women. Which brings up an interesting point.
Can trans-men be real toxically masculine?
Imagine is real men chased a feminist into a bathroom and held her hostage for a couple of hours? I would consider that behavior toxically masculine.
That reality happened to Riley Gaines, a real woman. She was ambushed last week when a trans-activist, aka LGBT thug attacked her. She ran for her life and was forced to hide until authorities rescued her.
I don’t have a toxicity meter. But I’m betting this action by the so-called “trans-activist” would damn near peg that meter. As for masculinity? Well, I suspect both the trans-activist thug and that male swimmer who beat Gaines are both loaded with masculinity.
Yet, not a single outcry from the vagina-hat wearing #MeToo crowd over these obvious cases of toxic masculinity. Apparently, as long as you pretend to be a woman you can keep your balls and not be considered toxically masculine. Even when you behave toxically masculine.
To be clear, fake women target real women with no repercussions.
Gaines felt the wrath of the LGBTQIA simply because she fights to protect the rights of real women. While Gaines finished second to a fake-female swimmer, she fights for women in almost all sports. How does the feminist movement ignore the obvious? Fake-women will destroy real women in sports, if they allow this to continue.
So one must ask, what is the real agenda of feminists? Because if helping women is the goal, they suck at it.
Real men to the rescue.
While Leftists accuse real men of being toxically masculine, it is we who fight for the rights of women. Real men have always valued real women, even before having to use the adjective “real” to separate actual women from the brain-damaged body-dysphoric. Real men exalt women; always have and always will.
I suspect that fake women and feminists hate that they can’t be real women. Thus, subject to the adulation of real men. Further, I have always contended that feminists take girly men as their boyfriends, but they seek real men for physical pleasure. But I digress.
Real women to the rescue?
Olympic legend Sharron Davies is leading calls to boycott Nike over its campaign with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney — which she ripped as “literally a kick in the teeth” to women.
“We can protest,” the retired UK swimmer told GB News late Thursday of the divisive campaign she says reflects the “total disdain that women are being treated with.”
“It’s what’s left for us at the moment because nobody really seems to be listening to the general public,” she said.
Does Generation Z take anything seriously? Earnestness is “cringe,” being in love makes one a “simp,” and ambition makes one a “try-hard.”
There is a “deeper ideology lurking in the minds of younger millennials & Gen Z,” as Esmé Partridge writes, “the rejection of idealism in all its forms.” Disenchanted with the world, plagued by hopelessness and nihilism, we have become a generation of zombies — a group of youth that is too dead to live and too alive to die.
No Purpose or Place
In the 1920s, famed novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald described his lost generation as one that had “grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, and all faith in man shaken.”
A century later, Gen Z finds itself in a similar position. The past haunts us, and a stormy future looms over the horizon. Even in our happiest moments, we’ve come to expect something bad just around the corner. Anxiousness afflicts many Zoomers — more than half of us already think humanity is doomed.
Though we share similarities with past generations, Gen Z is unique. Some argue Zoomers will eventually outgrow their crazy beliefs in the same way hippies eventually got jobs and created families. Millennials, however, are only getting more liberal as they age, breaking one of the oldest rules in politics. According to a recent Gallup poll, roughly 1 in 5 Gen Z adults says he or she is LGBTQ.
First and foremost, Gen Z craves distinction. They want to differentiate themselves from the masses by changing the world through fighting climate change, institutional racism, capitalism — you name it. This might explain why 1 in 4 people aged 16-25 wants to become an influencer when he or she grows up.
Why the thirst for power and status? Humans need goals that require effort to attain. We are like archers who need a clear and higher target. The popularity of figures such as Jordan Peterson shows that, especially for young men, it is no longer clear what that target is.
A Developmental Crisis
In the book “iGen,” Jean Twenge observes that more than previous generations, Zoomers aren’t growing up. We don’t have a meaningful target anymore. Gen Z is dating less, quitting jobs, not attending church, and spending half its waking time online. If Zoomers need attention, they use Instagram. Bored? Netflix or Youtube. Horny? Pornhub. Hungry? UberEats.
It’s not surprising that pundits like Jesse Singal and Jonathan Haidt blame social media for Gen Z’s stunted growth. Apps such as TikTok and Instagram have no doubt profoundly affected us, but blaming social media for Gen Z’s mental health epidemic is only half-correct.
Before we had Instagram, we had liberalism. As Patrick Deneen once wrote, “It is less a matter of our technology ‘making us’ than of our deeper political commitments shaping our technology.”
Jaded and Conformist
Inauthenticity has reached its peak with Gen Z. To be part of the in-group, a Zoomer must adopt a live-and-let-live attitude and remain blasé at all times, unattached to all people and things. Like Gen X, they avoid sincerity, choosing instead to be ironic, humorous, or just plain passionless.
For Zoomers, being serious is “cringe.” They dislike partisan politics because it’s rooted in taking differences seriously. Gen Z is disproportionately liberal not because they are passionate card-carrying Democrats — although some of them are — but because they are apathetic. They just want to be left alone by what the media portray as Bible thumpers, old white politicians, and conservatives.
It is revealing that the only time Gen Z ever seems mobilized to take things seriously is when a police officer kills a black man or abortion is restricted. Gen Z is so well catechized into its political religion that within minutes, like a flock of sheep, millions of Zoomers suddenly start sharing infographics, donation pages, and memes all over social media. Gen Z only cares about a particular issue when a so-called victim group is allegedly oppressed, or there’s a threat to its autonomy. As soon as the latest political trend goes away, Zoomers stop caring.
A Generation Without Love
The sexual revolution of the ’60s didn’t bring about communism, as Wilhelm Reich hoped, but capitalism in the sexual market. Now driven by a desire for recognition, Zoomers want sexual empowerment above all else.
To that end, Zoomers avoid caring about finding relationships. As one study found, “only one in 10 Gen Z members say they are ‘committed to being committed,’” preferring solitude (or situationships) to real relationships.
Since seeking commitment is now perceived as exerting pressure, young people must put up a facade of unseriousness and just look for green flags so as not to alienate the person they desire.
Even in a relationship, the psychoanalyzing doesn’t cease. Zoomers analyze texts, obsess over appearance, and worry that their romantic interests are dating other people from Tinder. This perpetual state of uncertainty is so exhausting that many are choosing to either throw out sexual rules completely or abstain from relationships altogether.
Repressed and Insecure
With religious values and sexual norms no longer fixed, many Zoomers struggle to nail down a sense of worth and are thus insecure. Not expressing their real personalities or feelings, these Zoomers live in a perpetual state of “LARPing” and suffer from main character syndrome.
Given their repression of “cringe” thoughts and feelings the in-group might not like, Gen Z’s higher likelihood of engaging in self-harm is unsurprising. To escape the torturous emptiness so many Zoomers find themselves in today, many reach for a razor blade or a smartphone. Either Zoomers gobble down drugs for mental illness, harm themselves, or vainly attempt to produce a sense of self with endless selfies and videos for their followers.
The Zoomers’ obsession with “mental health” and “normalizing” certain behaviors is a byproduct of their unstable self-image. Without knowing how to make sense of their emotions, they outsource the task of understanding themselves to therapists.
Godless and Selfish
More than anything, Gen Z wants to feel alive. They turned out in droves to support BLM in 2020 because it enabled them to experience the emotional highs and lows of religion without the responsibilities. As Twitter user Zero HP Lovecraft wrote, “Christians are persecuted by bureaucrats, tamely and passively,” while black people “are persecuted by cops with guns and gas grenades. … Only one of these is exciting.” In other words, one belief system feels boring and uninteresting, the other eventful and real — hence why many gravitate toward the latter.
Even many modern so-called Christians, as Rod Dreher observed, use religion as “a psychological adjunct to life, a buffer to the harshness of the materialistic, individualistic lives they actually want to lead.” In the context of Zoomers, that makes religion — and its secular woke derivatives — a supposed stimulant for attaining health and well-being. Since Gen Z now worships the “God within,” there has been a rise in gnostic beliefs, self-improvement and wellness cults, astrology and tarot, and, of course, LGBT orthodoxy.
In our post-religious society, life has been reduced to a biological process that must be optimized for the sake of social approval. Instead of prayer, we use painkillers. Instead of aspiring toward good works that glorify God, we engage in meaningless activities that glorify ourselves. And out of that reality has emerged the next undead generation. The horde of Gen Z zombies is mindlessly marching, ready to mobilize but not thrive.
Forrest Robinson is a student at Gordon College in Wenham, Ma. He frequently posts threads on his Twitter @Foz89107323.
Men everywhere seem to experience tension between what they themselves define as good men and the way the surrounding culture pressures them to be real men.
The report of a mass shooting in a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, in 2018 was more than a news account of a crime. It was also a story about two young men.
The killer was 28-year-old Ian David Long, a college dropout, divorced former Marine who was unemployed and living with his mother.
He knew the Borderline Bar and Grill held a weekly college night when it would be crowded with young people. He entered the bar dressed in black, a hood pulled over his head. Tossing smoke grenades into the crowd to create confusion, he drew out a pistol with a laser sight and started shooting. A sergeant from the sheriff’s office rushed over to help, but the shooter was waiting for him. After killing the sergeant and 12 other people, Long shot himself.
In the crowd that night was another young man, 20-year-old Matt Wennerstrom, who emerged as the hero of the hour. Sporting a backward baseball cap and a scruffy beard, Matt looked like a typical college student. But what he did was not at all typical.
As soon as shots began booming through the bar, he and about seven other young men grabbed as many people as they could and pushed them under a pool table for cover. Then they piled their own bodies over them to protect them from the hail of gunfire.
One woman, who was celebrating her 21st birthday at the bar that night, told reporters afterward, “There were multiple men who got on their knees and pretty much blocked all of us with their back toward the shooter, ready to take a bullet for any single one of us.”
When the shooter paused to reload, Matt and his friends threw bar stools through a back window and began shepherding people outside. Repeatedly, the young men rushed back into the bar to steer more people to safety.
How did Matt have the presence of mind to respond so quickly to danger?
When a reporter at the scene of the crime asked that question, the young man replied, “My life is taken care of. I know where I’m going if I die, so I was not worried to sacrifice.”
Two young men. One used his masculine strength to take lives. The other used his masculine strength to save lives.
‘Toxic Masculinity’
When the American Psychological Association (APA) issued its first-ever guidelines for counseling men and boys in 2018, it denounced “traditional masculinity ideology” as “psychologically harmful.” Groups like the APA have injected the phrase “toxic masculinity” into the bloodstream of America’s public discourse. The phrase has become a catchall explanation for male sexism, dominance, aggression, and violence.
Few people are claiming all masculinity is toxic. Yet the message men often hear is that there is something inherently defective in the male character. Many men today feel discouraged, devalued, and demoralized.
When I told my class at Houston Baptist University that I was writing a book on masculinity, a male student shot back, “What masculinity? It’s been beaten out of us.” When masculinity itself is portrayed as a problem, the implication is that the solution is emasculation.
“Are men being held hostage by culture war labels and stereotypes that blame them rather than help them?” asks the Christian Science Monitor. In a culture that increasingly blames men, it’s time to find ways to help them instead.
Because of testosterone, men are typically larger, stronger, and faster than women. In general, they are also more physical, more competitive, and more risk-taking. We need to affirm these God-given traits as good when used to honor and serve others.
The APA guidelines make a point of noting that most mass shooters are male, but they overlook the controlled power and aggression used by the heroic men who have stopped mass shooters.
Masculine traits are not intrinsically toxic; they are good when directed to virtuous ends. In a fallen world, the lawful application of coercive force is sometimes necessary to defend the innocent.
Yet we all know that the male strength that makes a man a protector can be distorted and turn him into a predator. The drive to achieve can become egoism and self-seeking. The leadership impulse can be twisted into an impulse for domination and control.
In “Play the Man,” Washington, D.C., pastor Mark Batterson says, “The image of God is our original software, sin is the virus.” The challenge is to sort out which definitions of manhood are part of the original software and which are the virus. Which belong to God’s original design and which are products of sin?
Masculinity: God’s Software or a Sinful Virus?
We might say there are two competing scripts for what it means to be a man. Sociologist Michael Kimmel highlighted the contrast with an ingenious experiment. He started by asking cadets at West Point what it means to be a good man. If someone delivers a eulogy and says, “He was a good man,” what does that mean?
The cadets had no trouble answering: “Honor, duty, integrity, sacrifice, do the right thing, stand up for the little guy, be a provider, be a protector.” Be responsible, be generous, and give to others.
“Where did you learn that?” Kimmel asked. The cadets answered, “It’s everywhere. It’s our culture … it’s the Judeo-Christian heritage. It’s the air we breathe.” Men seem to be innately aware of the software God has coded into the male character.
Kimmel then asked a follow-up question: “What does it mean if I tell you, ‘Man the f-ck up! Be a real man.’”
The cadets shouted, “Oh no, that’s completely different.” To be a real man means to be “tough, strong, never show weakness, win at all costs, suck it up, play through pain, be competitive, get rich, get laid.”
Kimmel has posed the same two questions to thousands of boys and young men in countries across the globe — from single-sex schools in Australia to a police academy in Sweden to former soccer stars at FIFA — and he virtually always gets the same answer.
Men everywhere seem to experience tension between what they themselves define as the goodman and the way the surrounding culture pressures them to be real men. They sense the contradiction between the software and the virus.
The Good Man vs. the ‘Real’ Man
Borrowing from Kimmel’s experiment, let’s give them labels: the Good Man versus the “Real” Man.
It’s not that every trait listed as the “Real” Man is necessarily bad. In a crisis, for example, we need men (and women) who can stand tough and not collapse in tears. But that is meant to be a short-term strategy, not a way of life.
The problem with the stereotype of the “Real” Man is that it is one-sided. When separated from a moral vision of the GoodMan, it can easily degenerate into sexism, dominance, entitlement, and contempt for those perceived as weak — traits we can all agree are toxic.
Of course, men do not respond well to being accused of being toxic — who would? A better course is to ask, “How can we support men in aspiring to live out the ideal of the Good Man?”
Because men are made in God’s image, even those who are not Christian seem to understand that their unique masculine strengths are not intended to enable them to get whatever they want but to protect those they love — to provide, sacrifice, and, if necessary, fight for them.
As a result, when Christians promote a biblical moral vision — the Good Man — they are not imposing an alien standard on men. They are encouraging them to follow their own conscience, to be uncompromising in doing what they instinctively know is right.
As Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, people everywhere “show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them” (Romans 2:15).
Our goal should be to support men in living out their innate sense of the biblical software — God’s original design for manhood.
In “The War Against Boys,”feminist philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers writes, “History teaches us that masculinity without morality is lethal. But masculinity constrained by morality is powerful and constructive, and a gift to women.”
But how did there come to be two competing scripts in the first place? Over the course of Western history, society has grown more secular, and so has its concept of masculinity. As a result, men increasingly feel pressure to live by the secular script of the “Real” Man. The most important conversation is not the one between men and women but the one carried out within men’s own heads between these two competing versions of manhood. Ideally, the Good Man should also bethe “Real” Man. But in today’s secular culture, the two have become decoupled.
My goal is to ask how the two scripts were split apart. We will be effective in countering the secular script for men only if we understand where it came from and how it developed. By recognizing that there are two competing scripts, we can cut through many of today’s contentious debates over masculinity. The word “masculinity” has become a trigger word that sets people off in all directions, making it difficult even to discuss the topic objectively.
But a Christian worldview gives us the means to think critically about cultural trends. It provides a perspective that is “in the world but not of it” (John 17:14–19).
A transcendent perspective empowers us to rise above the polarization — to push back against both extremes and consider a dispassionate account of the issues facing men today.
Nancy Pearcey is a professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University. She has written several bestselling books, which have been translated into 19 languages. The story of Brandon is adapted from her book “Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Live and Sexuality.”
When it comes to transgender ideology, Dr. André Van Mol says simply being a board-certified family physician in today’s political climate could be considered controversial.
Speaking at The Christian Post’s Generation Indoctrination conference last month, Van Mol, who is also the co-chair of the American College of Pediatrician’s Committee on Adolescent Sexuality, said if he was to give testimony in a court of law, attorneys for the other side would work to get his testimony thrown out, claiming he is not an expert. But if he worked for a gender clinic, he would be considered an “expert.”
“If I were a family physician working for the gender clinic, now I’m an expert,” he noted, pointing to what he described as the “ideological capture of medical organizations, legislators, media as a whole, [and] the academic world” by gender politics.
Van Mol called the trans movement “ideology masquerading as science, reinforced with emotional blackmail — ‘You have to support them or they’re going to kill themselves’ — which is also not true.”
That dynamic, he added, is perhaps best encapsulated by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which Van Mol calls an advocacy group.
“All roads lead back to WPATH,” he explained, using the acronym for the organization formerly known as the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association.
Under WPATH Standards of Care (SOC) for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People, said Van Mol, all age restrictions for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery have been removed. The latest version of WPATH’s SOC now includes “eunuch” as a gender identity, which it describes as “individuals [who are] assigned male at birth and wish to eliminate masculine physical features, masculine genitals or genital functioning.”
Van Mol’s response to the change was brief but to the point.
“This cannot be science,” he said.
“There’s always a more honest answer to gender dysphoria or confusion in a minor than chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation in what is otherwise a very healthy young body,” he said. “What they need is to address those underlying issues.”
Oftentimes, said Van Mol, much of the controversy stems from a toxic mix of mainstream media headlines and low-quality scientific research. He pointed to the familiar trend of media outlets chasing headlines rather than following the science.
“You’ll notice that whenever there’s a new study singing the praises of transition, magically, immediately, it’s covered in the media from coast to coast, with pretty much the same talking points, and that can’t be coincidental,” he said.
Van Mol also said studies that support sex-change procedures “uniformly show that those studies are of low to very low quality.”
“By definition that means they fail to show what they claim they are showing,” he added.
He also pointed to the closure of the Tavistock Clinic, Britain’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), the world’s largest pediatric gender clinic, set for later this year following six comprehensive literature reviews out of the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland and Florida.
“What we see now is … four nations that were leading the world in ‘gender-affirming transition medical interventions’ have done a complete turnaround, a complete 180, again, they were leading in it, and now they’re like, ‘No, this is not supported by good data,’” he said.
According to recent data, the number of minors in America receiving a diagnosis of gender dysphoria tripled from 2017 to 2021, with more than 42,000 receiving the diagnosis in 2021. On the social media platform TikTok, which is especially popular among younger people, the hashtag “trans” has logged 50.2 billion views, nearly doubling within the space of a year.
More European nations, he added, are turning away from this “junk science” and instead telling minors who are experiencing gender dysphoria to undergo comprehensive psychological evaluation and therapy — both for the patient and the family.
“There’s decades of literature showing overwhelming probability in a gender dysphoric minor of underlying health problems of adverse childhood experiences, bad family dynamics and a way over-representation of autism spectrum dysphoria, and that these all predate the gender dysphoria,” Van Mol explained.
This approach, said Van Mol, is a more holistic method of addressing what tends to be a deeply complex condition.
“And there’s absolutely no way that happens in a 40-minute visit to Planned Parenthood that gives you hormones,” he added.
In a surreal moment at the Country Music Awards last week, co-host Kelsea Ballerini joined with several drag performers to belt out a campy version of her single, “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too),” an anthem taking aim at Tennessee laws denying wrongly named “gender-affirming care” for children.
The performance was steeped in queerness, both in the pretend “oppression” of performers literally center stage at a nationally-broadcast awards show and in the academic sense, where drag serves as a kind of postmodern harlequin dance. Choreographed to confront its audience, the unspoken subtext of the number was that it’s time for you to pick a side, and you had better be careful which side you pick.
This was a brazen show of strength. Think “shock and awe,” only with lots of bedazzling.
A Vicious Activist Cult
The left picked their side. And the side they picked was the side of a school shooter who became for them an emblem of their cultural movement: Cast as a victim of “hateful” traditional religious values, a tragic figure broken by her desire to “be seen,” the shooter was sainted, her death a kind of religious redemption play. The narrative coalesced around her supposed suffering because the left was never going to surrender its stranglehold on politicized victimhood. That’s where all the power is.
At the tip of the cultural Marxist spear today is the trans cult. Just a year ago, it was the racialist cult of Black Lives Matter. Their presence is smothering in cultural spaces by design. In fact, their defiance of norms is predictable. After all, over the last seven years or so we’ve seen veneers of civil comradery peeled back, or else worn so thin as to become transparent.
A public pause to mouth the platitudes of togetherness is no longer required in a society so clearly divided along ideological lines. Indeed, such niceties are ridiculed as a sign of weakness or inauthenticity. “Where was your Christian god that day?” the left sneered. “Guess your church can’t protect you, after all.”
In glib taunts that displayed their misunderstanding of God’s earthly role in traditional religions, they laid their ideology raw before the bodies of three 9-year-olds were even cold. And that ideology, like the martyr it created when it embraced the killing of Christians as a blasé bump on the road to their utopia, now wants to be seen. The devil wants his due. There can be no other explanation for the leftist urge to celebrate the “visibility” of a vicious activist cult, or to claim“transgender Americans shape our Nation’s soul,” especially in the immediate wake of the slaughter of Christians by a trans person. Their ostentatious obeisance to these damaged people was a liturgy performed with rapturous audacity on the American stage. It, too, was meant to “be seen.”
Whether it’s a country music drag act, a trans-identified light beer, a trans-allied wizard, or a march by college students demanding the surrender of natural rights to the state, the memetics of cultural Marxism is performative, phony Maoist struggle sessions delivered in swarms to project strength and to dispirit opponents by displaying the inevitability of the mob and its power. It’s a cultural troll. It’s their way of telling you that they are in charge and that you are helpless. You will conform. You must. What else is there?
It was in response to this attempted coup against Western liberal culture and the Enlightenment itself that I’ve written what I believe to be a clarion call for the individualist; but it, too, was something of a performance: It proclaimed, but it didn’t explain.
Cultural Marxism Demands Cultural Hegemony
Briefly, we must reject the premises of the cultural Marxist because cultural Marxism itself cannot live peaceably with federal republicanism or individual autonomy. In fact, it demands the opposite: All things are constrained by the state and its desires. Rule must be universal. Governing individuals is like herding cats, whereas ruling over a collective molded by both state pressures (law, force) and social forces (shame, shunning) is a more gratifying task, especially because the molding, if done well, creates a populace that reflects back the will of the state to itself. The state is now God, and its citizens, made in the state’s image, are its supplicants.
The whole of the cultural Marxist project is to create and maintain cultural hegemony. It’s that sameness we saw in the uniformed Maoists with identical haircuts, and the sameness we see in our own social justice Red Guard with their ubiquitous cotton-candy hair and tribal piercings. There can be no deviation from the new standards, built atop the rubble of old traditions the Marxists seek to destroy. To create the New Man, you must kill off the Olds. To arrive at Year Zero, you must erase all those years that came before it. To save the culture, you must first destroy it completely.
Cultural Marxism is dystopia peddling utopia through grievance narratives and rank emotionalism. It grants the self-styled dispossessed enormous power over those it casts as oppressors, which is itself determined by an intersectional calculus among victim groups.
Yet this power is temporary. Because what its authors seek, ultimately, is authoritarian. The useful idiots will soon be replaced by a ministerial elite, who will guide the filthies during The Great Reset. With policed conformity. Asceticism. Sameness. Every thought you think, every word you utter, and every move you make, must be approved by the state. And you’ll beg them for that privilege.
Blinded By ‘Being Seen’
The useful idiots enjoy wielding power, but they never seem to recognize that once they’ve ground down all opposition and extirpated all difference, once they’ve rooted out every intolerance they can conjure, there are no more battles to fight, no more ideas to be born, no more purpose left to live. To speak in a language they understand, their project reduces us to the means of production, slaves to the most successful oligarchs, earthly deities who delight in our serfdom, providing us safety and sustenance in exchange for conformity, and a surrender of self to a greater good they determine. Enlightened feudalism, in short. And we’re tilling their fields.
But that’s the endgame, and those who’ve embraced the cultural Marxist paradigm can’t see it coming. Their identity politics and the power their “oppression” yields appeal to their egos. They are blinded by the narcissism of “being seen,” and by the thrill of cultural control, however temporary. They revel in bullying.
All of our major institutions have taken up the trans cause for the same reasons they took up the cause of BLM: to gather power, destroy norms, attack traditions, and create the conditions of tribalism that must exist before the collective comes together out of the ruins of universal cancellation. The last man standing is the New Man, the perfect servant to a benevolent master.
Where we once were conceived of statist authoritarianism as an iron boot forever pressing on our necks, today it’s a Christian Louboutin red-bottomed pump, worn by a dude in a lace dress and zebra thong, stomping on our faces forever. Only we’re compelled to dig the kink.
The revolution will be accessorized, and you’ll learn to like it, or else.
Jeff Goldstein is a lapsed academic and writer living in Colorado. He likes tacos, ’79 Cabernets, and his favorite color is magenta.
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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