A.F. Branco Cartoon – The left will hate this. Still, I’m asking for thoughts and prayers for the victims and their families due to the transgender shooting attack at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minnesota.
WATCH: Tim Walz Speaks at Press Conference Following Church Shooting by Transgender, Refuses to Mention Hate Crime Against Catholics or Shooter’s Trans Identity – Leftist Mayor Blames Guns and Hate Towards Transgenders!
By Jordan Conradson – The Gateway Pundit – Aug 27, 2025
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey spoke during a press conference on Wednesday, hours after the shooting at a Catholic church and K-8 school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As The Gateway Pundit reported, a transgender gunman opened fire, shooting through the windows of the church at Annunciation Catholic School as students attended mass during the first week of the school year. His manifesto was posted to YouTube before the shooting, and it was revealed that he wrote “kill Donald Trump” on one of his guns. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara confirmed that the shooter, a male in his early 20s, opened fire on children as they attended mass at the school, killing at least two children and injuring 14 children and three adults. Police say he… READ MORE
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, Elon Musk, and President Trump.
Not only is the U.S. failing to create enough new Americans through birth — it is also failing to turn immigrants into Americans in any meaningful sense.
“First world nations are dying,” Pat Buchanan warned in his 2002 book The Death of the West. “They face a mortal crisis, not because of something happening in the Third World, but because of what is not happening at home and in the homes of the First World.”
And what was not — and still is not — happening at home is childbearing. Buchanan was referring to fertility rates, which have been on the decline for decades.
Data released on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows U.S. birth rates are dropping to levels of civilizational suicide, with women having on average 1.6 children. According to the CDC data, birth rates dropped for women aged 15-34 between 2023 and 2024 while rising for women aged 40-44. The general fertility rate (GFR), which is the number of births per 1,000 females ages 15-44, “is down 22% from 2007 to 2024.” While fertility rates are down, the number of births increased by roughly 1 percent between 2023 and 2024, according to the data.
Women are delaying having children or completely casting it aside — thanks in part to the rise of the obnoxious hyper-independent girl boss mentality that has asserted that marriage and motherhood are shackles, along with the “loss of religiosity” and “availability of birth control” and abortion, as pointed out in these pages by David Harsanyi.
The result? The country is dying.
As Buchanan warned, a nation that will not reproduce will not survive. A shrinking native population leads to one inevitable outcome: mass immigration.
As noted by The Heritage Foundation’s Jonathan Abbamonte, “without a substantial increase in fertility, the United States will continue to be increasingly dependent on immigration to slow down population ageing and prevent population contraction.”
One of the most obvious results of a shrinking population is a shrinking workforce. But a workforce is rather interchangeable. A country can always import labor — the United States can import labor for the foreseeable future if there is a shortage of workers. But what a country cannot import is a culture, a heritage, a set of particular values that will help the republic endure.
America simply cannot outsource her future to people from other places. And it’s not about “xenophobia” or whatever other “phobia” the left will throw at Americans. A country — any country — that replaces its population with people from somewhere else because its own people will not reproduce becomes something else entirely. If we don’t make more Americans, we won’t have any more left. And without Americans, there will be no America.
Not only is the U.S. failing to create enough new Americans through birth — it is also failing to turn immigrants into Americans in any meaningful sense — making the prospect of boosting the dying population with foreigners even more problematic. Of course, this hasn’t always been the case. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the U.S. successfully assimilated millions of immigrants — Germans, Italians, Poles, Irish, and so on and so forth — because they shared a foundation of similar cultural and social norms, values, and religion. They often became Americans within a single generation.
But since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, that assimilation process has broken down. America has seen a wave of mass migration from nations that are dissimilar to it. Different languages, cultures, religions, and political philosophies are all things that act as barriers to assimilation. And the one thing that could ease the assimilation process has been undermined by the left — that thing being a shared national identity. The left abhors American exceptionalism. They demonize it, teaching children and young adults that America is an evil place that must atone for her sins. So how are we supposed to assimilate foreigners into America’s culture and way of life when we ourselves have vilified and rejected our own heritage?
American birth rates have now dropped to levels of civilizational suicide. And in the vacuum left by a people that won’t reproduce, another people will — but they won’t be American.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
U.S. President Donald Trump and Pastor Paula White-Cain, the head of the White House Faith Office, bow their heads in prayer during a White House Faith Office luncheon in the State Dining Room at the White House on July 14, 2025 in Washington, DC. White-Cain hosted the luncheon with members of government and faith-based and community organizations. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
President Donald Trump and the White House Faith Office hosted the inaugural Summit of Faith and Business Leaders on Monday to celebrate what he calls “core values that built this country,” which include “freedom, hard work, risk-taking, and above all, trust in Almighty God.”
Held in the State Dining Room, the event was attended by dozens of CEOs and business leaders, honoring those who have donated to faith-based charities.
In addition to remarks from Trump, Paula White-Cain, senior advisor to the White House Faith Office and a Charismatic televangelist, also addressed the gathering.
While Trump touched upon multiple topics during the discussion, encompassing both foreign and domestic policy, the importance of the Christian faith loomed large.
Here are four highlights from the meeting.
1. Trump highlights faith of notable entrepreneurs
U.S. President Donald Trump attends inauguration ceremonies in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Donald Trump takes office for his second term as the 47th president of the United States. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The president began his remarks by naming notable entrepreneurs throughout American history who strongly embraced the Christian faith. He repeatedly asserted that Christianity has had a positive influence on American society.
“From the earliest days of our republic, the steady compass of faith has guided the strong hands of American workers, builders and entrepreneurs like really no other,” he said. “Our country was founded by pilgrims and believers. And every generation since, Americans of faith have built our communities and forged new industries and enriched our country by millions and millions of people and ways.”
Trump listed John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, clothing entrepreneur J.C. Penney, inventor Charles Goodyear, and Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy as examples of business leaders “inspired by their love of God.” He insisted that there were people he could name in the room whose “names are every bit as big as that,” adding that “the proud tradition continues with all of you.”
“This group reminds us [that] a nation that prays is a nation that prospers,” he added. “I think one of the reasons we went so bad is they really wanted to take God and religion out of your lives, and there was nobody to … look up to.”
“We have to bring religion back into the country, and we’re starting to do that, I think, at a very high level.”
WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 05: People use IRS Direct File at the Internal Revenue Service Building on April 05, 2024 in Washington, D.C. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Economic Security Project
2. Trump touts new policy allowing pastors to endorse political candidates
Much of Trump’s remarks at the event consisted of highlighting what he viewed as the major accomplishments of his administration so far.
“As president, I’ve ended the radical left war on faith, and we’re once again protecting religious freedom like never before in our country,” he said.
Trump touted “getting rid of the Johnson Amendment that didn’t let the pastors and ministers and everybody speak about politics.” He contended that in the absence of the Johnson Amendment, which was passed in 1954 to prevent nonprofits from endorsing political candidates, pastors now have the ability to say, “I don’t like that guy.”
In a legal filing last week, the IRS confirmed that religious leaders who endorse political candidates from the pulpit or through their church communications will not lose their tax-exempt status, drawing praise from conservative and progressive Christian leaders and criticism from secular legal groups.
The president recalled how many religious leaders supported him in his first presidential bid in 2016. But he claims they declined to endorse him because of concerns of losing their tax-exempt status under the Johnson Amendment. He described how, during “a meeting with 50 faith leaders” in 2015, then-candidate Trump informed them that “I’d love to have your endorsement.”
Trump expressed concern that the religious leaders “didn’t say anything” due to their concerns about the Johnson Amendment, maintaining that he was unaware of the longstanding provision because he was new to politics.
In a subsequent meeting with religious leaders ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Trump vowed to get rid of the Johnson Amendment. In 2017, Trump instructed the IRS to relax enforcement of the Johnson Amendment on churches.
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is rushed offstage after an assassination attempt on his life during a rally on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. Butler County district attorney Richard Goldinger said the shooter is dead after injuring former U.S. President Donald Trump, killing one audience member and injuring another in the shooting. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Image
3. Trump says his life was ‘saved by God to make America great again’
As Trump continued to talk about what has transpired during his administration, he noted that the White House gathering took place one day after the first anniversary of the Butler, Pennsylvania, campaign rally, where an assassin’s bullet nearly ended his life.
“It’s remarkable to think that it was only one year ago this week that my time on earth nearly ended,” Trump asserted. “And if you look at that, God was with me because that’s something,” he added. “In theory, I should not be with you today.”
After the attendees erupted into applause, Trump insisted that “my life was saved by God to really make America great again.” The president echoed what he has articulated in previous remarks about his assassination attempt, noting how his sons, who are avid shooters, informed him that “at that distance with that gun, you didn’t have a chance.”
“Some people say it was lucky, and some people say something else. I say something else. I think God helped us,” he concluded.
Paula White-Cain, senior advisor of the White House Faith Office, delivers remarks at a White House Faith Office luncheon, July 14, 2025. | Screenshot: Paula White Ministries
4. Paula White calls America’s business leaders ‘stewards on divine assignment’
The Rev. Paula White-Cain, a Florida-based pastor who has served as Trump’s spiritual advisor, called Trump “the greatest champion of faith of any president that the United States of America has ever had.”
She told the attendees that the Trump administration “understands that people who are of faith who are entrusted with wealth and influence, as you are, are essential to building a stronger, freer, and more compassionate nation.”
“You’re more than just CEOs and business leaders and entrepreneurs,” she said. “You’re stewards on divine assignment, builders of legacy and vessels of impact. You’ve been called by God to His kingdom for such a time as this.”
White-Cain claimed that “America’s spiritual and moral foundations have been restored.”
“And it’s only the beginning,” she continued. “Today’s not just a luncheon. It is a moment of divine alignment, a commissioning. And we believe that God is raising up business leaders who don’t separate faith from enterprise but who see their platforms and their pulpits as their businesses and instruments for eternal impact.”
Parental rights are emerging as one of the major civil liberties movements of this generation — and one of the greatest conflicts between the right and the left in this country. For example, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled schools can hide a change of gender in young children from their parents. Now, Colorado is poised to pass a law that would threaten the custody rights of parents who “deadname” or “misgender” their own children. If a parent does not adopt a child’s new pronouns or name, they could be found to have exercised “coercive control” and lose custody in divorce proceedings in favor of a more enlightened parent.
As someone who grew up in an Italian family, I must confess that I thought “coercive control” of a parent was called . . . well . . . parenting. I can still remember my Sicilian mother brandishing a broom in front of our door to prevent one of my sisters from going out with a boy that she did not like. She simply declared “I gave you life, I can take it away” and my sister went back upstairs.
I admit the Italian parental style can be a bit shocking for outsiders and misunderstood by many. (My Irish father would sit bemused in the kitchen). In reality, it was all drama, but you knew that it conveyed not anger but love.
Under the new proposal, House Bill 25-1312, Colorado would use the “Kelly Loving Act” to make “deadnaming” and “misgendering” children a factor in child custody disputes. Referring to your child’s biological gender or given name or pronoun would now be considered harmful and abusive, inviting a court to take your child away from you as a coercive parent.
“Section 2 provides that, when making child custody decisions and determining the best interests of a child for purposes of parenting time, a court shall consider deadnaming, misgendering, or threatening to publish material related to an individual’s gender-affirming health-care services as types of coercive control. A court shall consider reports of coercive control when determining the allocation of parental responsibilities in accordance with the best interests of the child.”
So, the state will require parents to adopt a gender, name, and pronoun that they believe are harmful for their children. Many such parents may believe that a young child should proceed slowly and not make such changes as they consider the implications of such decisions.
One question is whether this would be limited to custody proceedings or eventually expand to families generally. If this is deemed abusive or harmful during custody battles, it would also be presumably abusive or harmful outside of such proceedings. The fear is that the underlying conclusions could support a view of a household being abusive and not being in the best interests of the child.
Notably, the Supreme Court will now be considering a Colorado case involving a ban on counselors offering “conversion therapy” for children. Under the state rule, a counselor can lose her license if she agrees to such counseling at the request of her parents. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit tossed the challenge, ruling that conversion therapy is harmful and the rule is part of an effort to regulate the healthcare profession.
“This bill is the bare minimum of what we can do as a state, and the fact that we have to legislate for people to not bully and misgender and deadname people because of whatever insecurities they might have is sad to me. Why can’t we just respect one another? Why can’t we just understand that someone else’s identity has nothing to do with me or you?”
The bill passed the committee on a straight party vote with Republicans in opposition. I believe that the Democrats are not just ignoring parental rights but political realities. They will find that this is not a partisan issue. It is a primal issue. For parents, Democratic politicians like Garcia fail to “understand” that it has a lot “to do with them.” They are the parents of these children. If Democrats do not “understand” that, they are likely soon to find that out.
A Texas man identified as Seth “Andrea” Gregori has been apprehended for allegedly orchestrating a “mass casualty event” targeting law enforcement officers. According to a police source, Gregori was in the process of “transitioning” genders, which has become a focal point of the case. Even though his driver’s license lists him as male, the Nueces County jail records reportedly registered Gregori as “female.” This revelation has fed into the speculation surrounding his gender identity, especially as different names are being used by law enforcement agencies in their communications regarding the suspect.
Described by some as a ‘would-be terrorist’, Gregori was allegedly attempting to carry out an attack on the Corpus Christi Police Department (CCPD). The FBI’s Houston office revealed that Gregori’s plans were reminiscent of the horrific 2016 Dallas police ambush where Micah Xavier Johnson executed a brutal attack, killing five officers and injuring nine, motivated by racial tensions between black communities and white police officers.
Amid the media spotlight, Gregori’s gender identity has been inconsistently reported. A local news outlet referred to Gregori using female pronouns, whereas others have used his birth name. Pictures released by the CCPD show Gregori with long hair, which only served to intensify the debate regarding his transition. The Daily Caller’s line of questioning underscores a desire to cut through obfuscation often seen in mainstream media’s treatment of similar subjects.
The case, already fraught with tension, took an even more sinister turn with a tip-off received by a joint FBI task force in early February, revealing Gregori’s alleged affinity towards certain police officers and documenting his recent purchase of an AR-style rifle. Citing an affidavit, a report stated that Gregori had the rifle in his backpack at the time of arrest.
Questions arise over why Gregori was targeting “white cops,” as per KENS5 News, who would leave “Black and Mexican cops” unharmed. Given this backdrop, mainstream media’s varied coverage perhaps obscures the real motivations behind Gregori’s intentions, avoiding a deeper conversation on why divisions in discussions about law enforcement and race persist.
#BREAKING FBI Corpus Christi and local partners have thwarted another mass casualty attack!#FBI Corpus and @CorpusChristiPD arrested Seth aka Andrea Gregori today on state charges filed by @NuecesCoDA after he planned an attack on police similar to the 2016 Dallas ambush. #CCTXpic.twitter.com/0JtCCJFRIu
In a separate episode in 2018, Gregori, aged only 14, was listed as missing alongside Jonathan Gregori but was later found. Now aged 21, Seth “Andrea” Gregori is involved yet again with law enforcement, with a pre-file case listed under the name “Andrea Lozano Gregori.” This person, who through this horrifying episode has been thrust into the national conversation, also had prior misdemeanor charges including fleeing from the police in 2023 and criminal trespassing in 2024.
The FBI has arrested Seth "Andrea" Gregori for allegedly making plans for a mass killing of Corpus Christi officers in Texas.
The FBI says "Andrea" allegedly planned to carry out a mass shooting similar to the 2016 Dallas mass killing of police officers by a black nationalist… https://t.co/6IsHd6sgBgpic.twitter.com/qJSVH2r2vC
This raises valid questions about Gregori’s history and how many chances were given before the ultimate plan for a deadly assault was discovered. In this era of progressive narratives often found in liberal media, one must ask if an overemphasis on gender identity clouds the real threats to public safety and the pressing concerns this case raises.
In March the Republican-led House passed H.R. 3391, which would continue funding research of pediatric diseases like childhood cancer. The legislation never went anywhere in the Senate under the leadership of Democrat Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. But now Democrats are trying to use sick kids with cancer as leverage to pass 1,500-plus pages of pork.
On Wednesday Speaker Mike Johnson unveiled a 1,500-page so-called “continuing resolution” that was really nothing more than a stuffed omnibus bill that included money for censorship, sweetheart deals for Congress, and other unnecessary expenditures. Almost immediately the pork-stuffed “continuing resolution” was rebuked by millions of Americans, including President-elect Donald Trump and incoming co-director of the Department of Government Efficient (DOGE) Elon Musk.
Following public pressure, the House released a trimmed-down version (116 pages) on Thursday. That measure funds the government through March 14. The new version keeps the $110 billion in disaster relief and farmer assistance from the original bill and suspends the debt ceiling for two years. The new version also removed the funding for childhood cancer.
And suddenly — after H.R. 3391 has collected dust in the Senate under the leadership of Schumer for months –Democrats are outraged about funding for pediatric cancer research.
The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote that after “pediatric cancer research advocates spent years” working to get funding, “Elon began tweeting.” Elon “killed the budget deal,” according to Stein, and with it funding for childhood cancer research.
Hawaii Democrat Sen. Brian Schatz posted on X: “F-ck cancer. Especially pediatric cancer. These people want to punish these precious little kids to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest corporations in human history.”
Pod Save America host Jon Favreau blamed Musk: “Congrats to Elon Musk for giving the people what they want: less funding for child cancer research.”
But where was the condemnation from Favreau or Schatz or Stein when Schumer sat on H.R. 3391? Why haven’t they begun pressuring Schumer to do something with the legislation he already has?
If the only time you come out swinging in defense of funding for childhood cancer research is when you can use it to smear your political opponents and push through pork spending, but you stay silent when your own party sits on the legislation (after Republicans passed it), you’re not the good guy. You’re a hypocrite using sick children as leverage to further your pet projects.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
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.”
The shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, immediately prompted renewed calls for gun control from President Joe Biden and others. As I have previously written, these calls often appear entirely disconnected from the actual crime or the constitutional protections afforded gun owners, including President Biden demanding a ban on assault weapons after a shooting with a handgun.
President Biden’s call for greater background checks and enforcement was a bit incongruous after he pardoned his own son on gun charges. More importantly, the Wisconsin case only highlighted why these standard demands for gun control would not have impacted that case.
This was a juvenile who is believed to have used a 9mm handgun in the attack. Natalie Rupnow, 15, was not supposed to have a gun and would not have gone through background checks. While both Biden and Kamala Harris have raised limiting or banning the popular 9mm, Harris admits that she is one of millions with the weapon and it would not be subject to any of these proposals.
The president once again denounced the availability of what he collectively calls “assault weapons,” a common reference to such popular models as the AR-15. Efforts to ban this model have already failed in the courts on constitutional grounds, though litigation is continuing on that issue.
In 2008, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, recognizing the Second Amendment as encompassing an individual right to bear arms. The Supreme Court further strengthened the right in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen.
That is why laws to ban or curtail sales of the AR-15 run into constitutional barriers. Even the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down a California ban on adults under 21 purchasing semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15.
These calls for greater gun controls remain either factually ambiguous or legally dubious. For example, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe declared after the Wisconsin shooting that it is time to “change the context of gun ownership.” While admitting that he did not know all of the facts, McCabe said:
We’re [going] nowhere because it keeps happening. We know it’s going to happen again. It’s happening today. It’s going to happen again in the near future. I can guarantee you that and every time it happens, we do just about nothing. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can’t do. We could do things. We could — we could support and enact legislation that changes the — the — the context of gun ownership in this country and emphasizes gun safety and responsibility with the firearms that you own and keeping them out of the hands of children and doing — and really vigorous, consistent background checks across the country. We could stop selling people — stop — you — eliminate the ability to purchase guns without a background check.
It is unclear what “changing the context” means, particularly when the context is first and foremost constitutional.
Likewise, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) called for his House colleagues to “stand up to gun manufacturers” but stopped short of explaining what that would actually mean:
Thoughts and prayers without action means more school shootings, more dead kids.
More ACTION is needed by our elected officials.
And more BACKBONE to stand up to gun manufacturers.
This is uniquely a United States problem that doesn't have to happen.
Pocan has previously called for “common sense” laws without tackling the more difficult question of how to produce the sweeping changes given the narrow scope of constitutional limits for an individual right.
Wisconsin has robust gun control laws that did not prevent this shooting because Rupnow was not subject to the background checks and other regulations. She was not supposed to have the weapon and 9mm is not one of the guns that Democrats are calling to ban.
None of this means that people of good faith should not work on new initiatives and measures to combat gun violence. However, politicians like President Biden have misled the public for years about the narrow range of constitutional options for gun control legislation. The suggestion is that “this did not have to happen” despite the fact that none of these proposals would have stopped this from happening.
In a tragedy of this magnitude, our leaders have a duty, first and foremost, of honesty in speaking with the public.
Wisconsin’s capital city is in shock after a 15-year-old girl pulled out a 9mm pistol Monday morning and shot up her study hall, killing a teacher and a fellow student at the Christian school she attended before turning the weapon on herself and ending her life, Madison Police confirmed.
Natalie Rupnow injured six others, including two students with life-threatening wounds and a teacher and three other students who suffered non-life-threatening injuries in the attack on Madison’s Abundant Life Christian School, according to police.
While Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes wasn’t commenting on motive Monday evening, an unidentified law enforcement source told the Associated Press that the shooter “had been dealing with problems and expressed some of those in writings,” CNN reported. There were reports that Rupnow, who police say liked to go by “Samantha,” had penned a manifesto, although Barnes said police had yet to verify the authenticity of the document. “The good news,” the chief said, is that Madison police have shared the information with its partners at the FBI.
There’s no doubt the suspected killer was disturbed, as evidenced by her violent outburst at the K-12 private school with a mission “to develop students who are committed disciples of Jesus Christ through an excellent, comprehensive, Biblically-integrated educational program.”
She planned the attack in advance, a “law enforcement official familiar with the investigation” told CNN.
‘I Don’t Think That’s Important’
There was speculation Monday that the shooter was transgender, although other sources disputed the claim. Some said she had an “online obsession with school shooters.”
Barnes insisted that he doesn’t care whether Rupnow was transgender, as some reports indicated. It’s not important, he said, when asked by a leftist reporter about “misinformation” online. The Madison journalist effectively wagged her finger at parental rights group for claiming the shooter was transgender, “which is a reaction that we see across the country linked with mass shootings to claim that trans people are dangerous.”
Barnes, a far-left police chief in one of the most LGBTQ agenda-pushing cities in America, said he wished people would “leave their own personal biases out of this.”
“I don’t know whether Natalie was transgender or not and quite frankly I don’t think that’s even important. I don’t think that’s important at all,” the chief told reporters at an evening press conference. “I don’t think that whatever happened today has anything to do with how she or he or they may have wanted to identify …”
Barnes subsequently acknowledged that Rupnow’s gender identity “is something that may come out later.”
While investigators continue to search for answers, the transgender question could prove to be very important. Just ask the families at Nashville’s Covenant School.
‘It is Vitally Important’
In March 2023, a 28-year-old woman who identified as a transgender man stormed into the private Christian elementary school and murdered three third-graders and three staff members before Metro Nashville Police officers fatally shot the killer.
Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO and editor-in-chief of Star News Digital Media, has been seeking the release of the Covenant killer’s manifesto for a year and a half. He’s a plaintiff in a lawsuit demanding the police department turn over the shooter’s voluminous writings. Leahy’s flagship publication, the Tennessee Star, has obtained and published dozens of pages of the writings, screeds that offer a glimpse into the twisted mind of a mass shooter.
“We clearly have a huge mental health problem with young people in America today,” Leahy told The Federalist Monday night in a phone interview. “It is very clear that the killer in Nashville suffered severe mental health problems and had in fact been treated for psychiatric difficulties for 22 years. Now, the reports indicate that a 15-year-old girl is responsible for the heinous murders today at a Christian school in Madison, Wis. She purportedly left behind a manifesto, according to some sources.”
“It is vitally important that these documents left behind by young mass murderers be released to the public so that we can understand the deep problems of mental illness that drove them to these actions, so that we can prevent such terrible crimes in the future,” Leahy added.
As the Tennessee Star has reported, the FBI hastily acts to thwart the release of such documents. In the Covenant killer case, the federal agency sent a memo to the Nashville PD “strongly” discouraging the disclosure of so-called “legacy tokens” left behind by mass shooters. The memo was sent just two days after Star News Digital Media filed a federal lawsuit against the FBI demanding the agency release the trans killer’s writings. As former national political editor at the Star News Network, I, too, am a plaintiff in that lawsuit, plodding in federal court for the better part of two years.
The memo explains that mass shooters “often leave behind items [memory tokens] to claim credit for the attack and/or articulate the motivation behind it.” The 90 pages the Tennessee Star published include a wealth of insight from a severely mentally ill 28-year-old woman who identified as a male named Aidan.
As the Star reported, the FBI recommended withholding such items from the public, citing concerns about “conspiracy theories,” copycat attacks, and advancing “the false narrative that the majority of attackers are mentally ill.”
“The FBI also raised the ‘existing precedent’ for the destruction of ‘legacy tokens,’ noting ‘the decision to destroy the ‘Basement Tapes’ produced by the offenders of the Columbine High School attack,’” the publication reported.
Leahy notes the memo also argues that releasing manifestos and other legacy tokens could have negative impacts on “certain vulnerable communities.” The Biden administration has joined LGBT activists in painting the trans population as under the constant threat of violence.
Madison’s police chief on Monday repeatedly thanked the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for their quick response and assistance at the Christian school.
“In this instance it appears to me the FBI may have done the same thing in Madison that they did in Nashville in 2023, that is swoop in and take control of information and refuse to release it,” Leahy said.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
At least two people were killed, and six others were injured in a school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin, on Monday, with police saying the suspected shooter was found dead at the scene. During an update Monday afternoon, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said a teacher and a teen student were killed. Barnes added that two students are also in critical condition, with life-threatening injuries.
A handgun was used by the shooter and the shooting was confined to one space, Barnes said. A motive for the shooting has yet to be determined.
Emergency vehicles are parked outside the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, where multiple injuries were reported following a shooting on Monday, Dec. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Scott Bauer)
“Every child, every person in that building is a victim and will be a victim forever. We need to figure out and try to piece together what exactly happened,” Barnes said.
Barnes added that the shooter’s family was cooperating with police.
He said he did not believe that the school, which serves 200 students according to the school’s website, had a resource officer.
Police say that they train for active shooter situations “almost quarterly,” and that they had most recently conducted the training roughly two weeks ago.
At roughly 10:57 am local time, police responded to reports of an active shooter at the Abundant Life Christian School. They identified a “juvenile” deceased at the scene who they believe was responsible for the shooting. They are encouraging local residents to avoid the area.
Emergency vehicles are staged outside the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wis., where multiple injuries were reported following a shooting, Monday, Dec. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
Barnes said officers did not fire their weapons when responding to the scene.
“This is something you prepare for, but that you hope you never have to do,” a police spokesman told reporters. “Today is a sad, sad day.”
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers ordered the flags of the United States and the state of Wisconsin to half-staff across the state immediately until sunset on Sun., Dec. 22, 2024
“There are no words to describe the devastation and heartbreak we feel today after the school shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison this morning,” Evers said in a statement.
“As a father, a grandfather, and as governor, it is unthinkable that a kid or an educator might wake up and go to school one morning and never come home. This should never happen, and I will never accept this as a foregone reality or stop working to change it.”
My full statement on the school shooting at Abundant Life Christian School today in Madison.
I'm directing flags across the state to be immediately lowered to half-staff as we honor those whose lives were senselessly taken in this tragedy. pic.twitter.com/HYIjVYcqaF
Police said this remains an active and ongoing investigation and more information will be released as it is available.
“We currently need people to avoid the area,” police added.
Students have been fully evacuated from the school, and police have conducted multiple clears of the building. Barnes said they were conducting a third check using bomb-sniffing dogs “just in case.”
Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wis., where multiple injuries and deaths were reported following a shooting, Monday, Dec. 16, 2024. (Google Maps)
Police say they set up a unification center for students and parents immediately following the shooting.
The school also acknowledged the shooting in a post on Facebook, requesting prayers from the community.
“Prayers Requested! Today, we had an active shooter incident at ALCS. We are in the midst of following up. We will share information as we are able. Please pray for our Challenger Family,” the school wrote.
Emergency vehicles are parked outside the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, where multiple injuries were reported following a shooting on Monday, Dec. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Scott Bauer)
A former student of the school, Aaron Nienaber, told Fox News Digital that he attended high school at Abundant Life Christian from 2000 to 2004 and was shocked and saddened to see this happen at a place he cherished.
“It’s very sad to see this happening at a place where I have so many fond memories with the students and faculty and especially playing on the sports teams. This is not something that anyone would have ever seen coming at this small tight-knit school and community,” Nienaber said.
The FBI’s Milwaukee bureau says it has deployed agents to the scene to assist in investigating.
The White House has also confirmed that President Biden has been briefed on the shooting.
Anders Hagstrom is a reporter with Fox News Digital covering national politics and major breaking news events. Send tips to Anders.Hagstrom@Fox.com, or on Twitter: @Hagstrom_Anders.
In the aftermath of the contentious Supreme Court arguments in United States v. Skrmetti over state bans on puberty blockers and gender-altering surgeries, the United Kingdom reaffirmed that it finds the risks far outweigh the benefits of such treatments for minors under the currently available scientific evidence. The move by the liberal Labour Party stands in sharp contrast with the portrayal of the Biden Administration and the treatment of the subject by the liberal justices. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was widely criticized for analogizing puberty-blocking drugs to taking aspirin. It appears that doctors in the UK are not ready to tell minors to just “take two puberty blockers and call me in the morning.”
UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting said last week, “Children’s health care must always be evidence-led. The independent expert Commission on Human Medicines found that the current prescribing and care pathway for gender dysphoria and incongruence presents an unacceptable safety risk for children and young people.”
The decision follows the release of the Cass Review, which was raised by the conservative justices as contradicting the factual representations of the Biden Administration, even leading Justice Samuel Alito to suggest that Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and the government might not have fulfilled their duty of candor to the tribunal. He noted that the Cass study found scant evidence that the benefits of transgender treatment are greater than the risks. He then delivered the haymaker: “I wonder if you would like to stand by the statement in your position or if you think it would now be appropriate to modify that and withdraw your statement.”
🔥🔥🔥Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito presses Elizabeth Prelogar on the experimental nature of "gender-affirming care."
Streeting cited significant doubts about the benefits of puberty blockers while noting the “significant risks” to children.
The government will allow puberty blockers to be administered to children in clinical trials. It is not clear if the Supreme Court will take “judicial notice” of the new decision, but it can.
In fairness to Sotomayor, she was trying to argue that all treatments have risks in making her aspirin analogy. Yet, the comment was taken as trivializing the alleged harm and trauma raised by many in this debate. These studies clearly show greater risks than those associated with aspirin. However, what the Biden Administration was arguing (and the liberal justices were seemingly supporting) is that states would be barred by the Court from reaching the same conclusion as the UK and other countries. Indeed, Streeting echoed what the states argued to the Supreme Court that the government must “act with caution and care when it comes to this vulnerable group of young people, and follow the expert advice.”
Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the president the authority to pardon offenses against the United States, a power intended to provide fairness and avoid prosecutorial abuses. Alexander Hamilton envisioned this clemency as a tool to “restore the tranquility of the commonwealth.” But in the hands of Joe Biden, the pardon power looks less like a tool for justice and more like a sledgehammer wielded to shield a crumbling empire of corruption.
Biden’s recent pardon of his son Hunter has spotlighted the blatant hypocrisy of the Left’s use of clemency. After years of moral grandstanding, claiming the high road on justice and accountability, Democrats are now orchestrating mass pardons to shield themselves from the fallout of their own malfeasance.
Pardons as Preemptive Damage Control
During Trump’s presidency, Democrats practically dared him to issue preemptive pardons for his family, projecting their own propensity for guilt on the former president. When Trump pardoned Jared Kushner’s father, the media spun it as though he had pardoned Kushner himself. That narrative stuck, fueling the perception of Trump as corrupt, even as his actual record on pardons tells a different story.
Trump, notably, did not pardon his children or any close associates preemptively or otherwise. Why? Because they weren’t guilty of anything. Contrast that with Biden, whose pardons aren’t just reactive—they’re preemptive damage control for an administration rife with misconduct.
Leaks suggest Biden is for a laundry list of allies, including Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, and members of the January 6th Committee. These aren’t minor players; they are key figures in the systemic abuse of power targeting Donald Trump and his supporters. The January 6th Committee alone violated so many laws it could be a semester-long case study at any law school.
Then there’s Fauci. A pardon for Fauci essentially extends to the entire health bureaucracy—NIH, FDA, CDC—that oversaw the disastrous COVID-19 policies. Lockdowns, vaccine mandates, suppression of dissent, and the mishandling of public trust—it’s no wonder Biden would want to sweep this under the rug.
A Record-Breaking Abuse of Power
Historically, presidents have used pardons sparingly, often to right specific wrongs. Franklin D. Roosevelt holds the record with 2,819 pardons and 3,796 total acts of clemency, largely for people convicted under Prohibition laws. Barack Obama granted 1,927 acts of clemency, including a controversial commutation for Chelsea Manning.
But Biden’s pardon spree could make FDR’s record look modest. Biden’s administration isn’t dealing with isolated cases of injustice—it’s mopping up the collateral damage from years of systemic corruption.
Consider the scope:
The FBI: With over 37,000 employees, including 10,000 special agents, the agency’s involvement in targeting Trump and MAGA supporters is well-documented.
The CIA and NSA: These agencies, with a combined workforce exceeding 50,000, played their parts in surveillance and misinformation campaigns.
IRS and FISA Courts: From targeting conservative groups to enabling dubious investigations, their roles can’t be ignored.
Biden’s pardons could easily extend to thousands of individuals across these institutions, creating a tsunami of public outrage. This isn’t about restoring tranquility; it’s about cementing a legacy of corruption while protecting a broken system.
Democrats: Masters of Projection
The hypocrisy is staggering. Democrats who lambasted Trump for imagined abuses of power are now actively orchestrating the largest clemency cover-up in history. When Joy Reid and Adam Schiff criticized the idea of preemptive pardons, they framed it as an admission of guilt. Yet here we are, watching Biden prepare to issue blanket pardons to his political allies without a shred of irony.
Biden is now considering preemptive pardons, including one for Adam Schiff.
That makes this clip one of the best ever. 🤣
December, 2020. Joy Reid and Adam Schiff discuss family member and preemptive pardons. 🤪 pic.twitter.com/9oorNUFT79
Hunter Biden’s pardon set the tone: a sweeping, decade-long absolution for crimes ranging from tax evasion to illegal firearm possession. The message? Rules are for the little people.
Trump: A Study in Contrast
Trump’s approach to pardons highlights the glaring differences between the two administrations. While Biden’s pardons shield the guilty, Trumps were measured and purposeful. Trump used his clemency power to address specific injustices, such as Alice Johnson’s over-sentencing or the persecution of Michael Flynn. More importantly, Trump didn’t shield himself or his family. His restraint underscores the integrity of his administration compared to the flagrant abuses we’re witnessing now.
Rebuilding Trust in Justice
Biden’s pardon spree will leave a lasting stain on America’s institutions. But it also presents an opportunity for renewal. When Trump returns to office, he will face the monumental task of rebuilding trust in law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This starts with accountability. Anyone receiving a Biden pardon should be immediately dismissed from public service. A pardon may erase legal culpability, but it doesn’t absolve moral or professional failure. The system must be purged of those who abused their positions for political gain.
Restoring faith in justice won’t be easy, but it’s essential. Americans need to believe that no one—not even the president—is above the law.
The Firestorm to Come
Biden’s mass pardons will ignite a firestorm in the American psyche. The fallout will resonate for decades, exposing the depth of corruption in our government. But it also serves as a rallying cry for reform.
The Left’s strategy of weaponizing clemency to protect their own has backfired. Instead of tranquility, they’ve sown chaos. And as the dust settles, what America will see is the scattered carcasses of Democrats who participated in this farce.
Justice must prevail, not as an act of revenge, but as a restoration of the principles that made this nation great.
Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania has been struggling for years with falling revenue and difficulty attracting applications. It has had to reduce faculty and even shutdown a historic journal to stay afloat. Students have raised the alarm of how their institution is “slowly inching toward a financial precipice.” In the midst of this crisis, the college is now facing a new controversy after its admissions counselor and representative for Long Island and New York City went on a tirade against any supporters of former President Donald Trump as “pieces of s**t.”
Lupe Lazaro previously featured on the college website as a “first-generation student” who came to Gettysburg and was wowed by being able to see stars: “it was the first time I’d ever seen the stars. I love the stars, but I live in New York City. On my bus ride home, I applied Early Decision immediately because I knew [seeing the stars] was my sign.” That feature appears to have been removed from the website but can be seen here at another site.
If the claim seemed a bit hyperbolic, it was downright restrained given her recent tirade on Instagram. Lazaro notes that “[n]ot all Trump supporters are xenophobic. But they all decided that xenophobia wasn’t a deal breaker.” She added that “homophobia . . . misogyny . . . rape . . . [and] overthrow[ing] democracy” are also not “deal breaker[s].” According to the conservative site Campus Reform, she accused Trump supporters of having little problem with “misogyny,” “rape,” “homophobia,” “xenophobia,” attempting to overthrow democracy or trying to “lynch the vice president.”
She declared that “You are no different than the piece of s**t human you stand behind.”
Pennsylvania is famously divided right down the middle between Trump and Harris supporters. Long Island also has some of the highest numbers of supporters for Trump in New York. It is difficult to see how some applicants would feel that they had a fair chance with the college if they are openly supporters of the former president.
The fact is Lazaro is just a counselor, and her views should not be ascribed to the college. Moreover, I have long supported the right of academics to speak on social media and outside of their institutions, even when they espouse hateful views.
I just finished a debate at Harvard over that school’s lack of diversity among the faculty and the maintenance of an academic echo chamber. The vast majority of faculty today run from the left to the far left.
The difference is that Lazaro is the face of the college for new applicants and the snarling social media posts send a message of intolerance at the college. If you are one of those little Trump-supporting “pieces of s**t,” the controversy may lead you to think twice about applying.
I am still opposed to sanctions for students and faculty generally for social media postings expressing their political views. Lazaro is a representative of the college and has added obligations as part of that public role outside of the university.
As a recruiter, the college can ask for Lazaro to avoid public comments that denigrate or abuse groups of applicants. It can also issue a statement that these views are not those of the institution. However, it does not appear that Lazaro’s comments specifically referred to students or applicants and she should be allowed to be actively and vocally involved in this election.
It is admittedly a tough line to walk as an administrator, but labeling all Trump supporters as democracy-killing, rape-supporting, women-hating people is not exactly conducive toward drawing more applicants to the struggling school. It does not help an already tarnished image for the school. Gettysburg College ranked a dismal 217th on the annual ranking of colleges and universities on free speech. The school is already viewed as intolerant of opposing viewpoints by many and this does not help. Yet, it will have to establish a clear guideline on how public comments are addressed on social media for admissions personnel.
As I discuss in my book, The Indispensable Right, the trust of higher education is at an all-time low. Academics are destroying our institutions with a culture of viewpoint intolerance and orthodoxy.
Gettysburg College is an old and revered institution. It is now struggling like many to maintain its faculty and programs. Administrators seem willing to do most anything but restore free speech and intellectual diversity as part of the appeal to new students.
New data shows U.S. hospitals performed at least 5,747 gender-disfiguring surgeries on minors between 2019 and 2023, according to a database released by Do No Harm, an advocacy group of medical professionals. The data also show 13,994 American children received other transgender treatments, such as puberty-blocking and opposite-sex hormones, in those four years.
Most of the children receiving such procedures were girls between the ages of 12 and 17, the database indicates. Medical practitioners made more than $119 million from the procedures, the data says.
This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) kicked out of its vendor hall four young Americans who returned to affirming their given sex after experiencing transgender medicine. A similar group of “desisters” met a warm welcome last month in Orlando, Florida, at the Catholic Medical Association’s Annual Educational Conference. That medical conference hosted 750 medical practitioners from around the nation and featured a panel of detransitioned young adults.
At the CMA event, seven young adults who were permanently injured by sex-transition procedures publicly explained the harm these treatments cause. These young adults were given a voice at a U.S. annual medical conference for the first time, to inform and educate health practitioners about the irreparable harm caused by “gender medicine.”
“CMA’s decision to invite detransitioners to speak at this year’s conference signals a deepening in the divisions in the medical community about how to best address gender distress in young people,” a CMA press release notes. “It also shows the commitment by CMA leaders to recognize and provide care to those harmed by these common practices.”
Particularly in American “gender medicine,” negative and harmful effects have been ignored, and at times suppressed, by some major medical organizations, said Tim Millea, MD, the chairman of CMA’s Conscience Rights Protection Task Force. He said this contradicts the long-held scientific tradition of allowing “ideas to be discussed and debated in an open, honest and transparent manner.”
‘Medicine’s Ability to Harm Is Nearly Limitless’
Pediatrician Patrick Hunter, a Florida Board of Medicine member, organized the panel. He said he was aiming to “bring to light to the harm that is being done, and to improve the overall care for trans-identified youth.”
“No one should want what is happening to these youth and young adults,” Hunter said. “The fact that harm and regret is happening should not be tolerated by our profession. The lack of concern and the unwillingness to acknowledge it should concern everyone in the medical profession.”
One detransitioner, Prisha Mosley, told CMA attendees she was manipulated by activists and therapists into accepting testosterone injections and a double mastectomy as a minor.
“It is important for doctors to learn how to stop the damage and to try and heal what’s been done. It is wrong for the very profession who hurt detransitioners to also routinely turn us away,” she said in the CMA’s press release about the event. “I’m grateful for any medical professional who is willing to listen.”
Hunter said he has heard from nearly 100 youth who regret their transitions and found the panelists’ stories “very painful.”“Medicine’s ability to harm is nearly limitless, while the ability to cure does have limitations,” Hunter said.
“This is why the principle of ‘First, do not harm’ is sound and universally accepted,” he said. “It acknowledges our need for humility, our need to know where our limits lie, and when we should and should not act.”
Refusing to Acknowledge Detransitioners
Hunter said he proposed the panel to multiple medical organizations, encouraging more groups to hear detransitioners speak. Both the AAP and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) rejected the proposal, he said, matching the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) stance of ignoring detransitioners. WPATH’s leadership has said that recognizing these patients is “considered off limits for many in our community.”
“Patients are being harmed by sex transition. That cannot be disputed,” Hunter said. “Medical evidence fails to show that patients will reliably benefit. If the medical profession will not recognize and learn from those that are being harmed, we are failing as professionals, but more importantly we are failing the patients that are being harmed. The medical profession has lost its way.”
The Stop the Harm Database highlights a “dirty dozen” of the U.S. hospitals that perform the most sex-disfigurement surgeries on minors. They are:
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Connecticut Children’s Medical Center
Children’s Minnesota
Seattle Children’s
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
Boston Children’s Hospital
Rady Children’s Hospital
Children’s National Medical Center
UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland
Children’s Hospital Colorado
UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
The database also lists the employers of the U.S. doctors who billed the most for performing child mutilation surgeries from 2019 to 2023. The top-billing doctor for child sex surgeries in that timeframe worked at Boston Children’s hospital and charged more than $5 million for the procedures.
“California, one of the first states to declare itself a ‘sanctuary state’ for transgender procedures, also had the most irreversible surgeries, with 1,359 minors undergoing surgical procedures, followed by Oregon with 357, Washington with 330, Pennsylvania with 316 and Massachusetts with 300,” Fox News reported on the Do No Harm data.
Warring Medical Organizations
Many European countries have curtailed or halted gender medicine interventions in approximately the last year, based on experience and research demonstrating its serious damage to children. Yet most American medical organizations have remained staunch advocates, dismissing well-documented risks and complications associated with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries.
The United Kingdom’s release of the Cass Review in April and leaked WPATH files indicating that organization pushes medicine without informed consent sent clear messages about transgender medicine that American medical organizations such as the AMA and the AAP have largely dismissed or ignored. They are ignoring “objective and evidence-based data,” Millea said.
Still, some U.S. medical organizations do oppose gender mutilation, including the American College of Pediatricians, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, American College of Family Medicine, and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. The “Doctors Protecting Children Declaration,” published by ACPEDS, represents thousands of health care workers who want such practices ended.
“A number of cases have been and will continue to be filed in courts around the country, challenging the federal and state mandates for transgender interventions and the freedom of medical professionals to challenge these methods and refuse to participate in them,” Millea said.
The CMA will support court cases to halt this harm in medicine, joining other organizations’ challenges in the form of amicus briefs, and if necessary, serving as plaintiffs, Millea said.
Last month, state attorneys general sent a letter to the AAP president demanding the AAP defend its support of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions for minors with gender dysphoria. The attorney generals requested a thorough explanation of this non-evidence-based policy by October 8.
“I heard from many attendees that the panel discussion was the most important thing they heard all week, and maybe at any conference,” Hunter said. “The medical profession cannot remain silent any longer. We must take action and speak out. We must seek regulation of the profession so that evidence-based, ethical, and effective care is provided for trans-identified youth. We must return medicine to its roots where we care for the individual, and not use the patient to make money, or forward social or political agendas.”
Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute and blogger for Ascension Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. Ashley is a board member at a Catholic homeschool cooperative in Virginia. She homeschools her four incredible children along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband.
Residents in the Lake Lure area of North Carolina recounted the powerful floods that struck last week. John Payne, a volunteer firefighter who was born and raised in one of the hardest hit areas says the village ‘will bounce back.’ (AP video by Erik Verduzco and Mike Stewart/Production by Takahiro Kinoshita)
A mass of debris, including overturned pontoon boats and splintered wooden docks and tree trunks, covered the surface of Lake Lure, a picturesque spot tucked between the mountains outside Asheville.
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Debris is strewn on the lake in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Lake Lure, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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A home is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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Two Sheriff deputies walk on the main street in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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Debris is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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Homes are seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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Iraq War veteran Chris Canada, right, stands among debris resting on a bridge in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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Mayor Peter O’Leary, right, and town administrator Stephen Duncan confer over papers outside the volunteer fire department in Chimney Rock Village, N.C., on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Allen. G. Breed)
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Debris is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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An American flag flies half-staff on top of Chimney Rock mountain in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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Workers survey damage where a road once existed in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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Debris is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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A road sign sticks in the mud where a road was in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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Homes are seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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Business are seen in a debris field in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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Debris is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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Debris is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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Businesses are seen in a debris field in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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Debris covers a field in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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A washed out road is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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Homes are seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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The town of Chimney Rock, N.C., is seen after flash flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
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Volunteer firefighter Ric Thurlby checks messages as Hickory Nut Falls flows above and the ruined town of Chimney Rock Village, N.C., lies below on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)
CHIMNEY ROCK VILLAGE, N.C. (AP) — The stone tower that gave this place its name was nearly a half billion years in the making — heated and thrust upward from deep in the Earth, then carved and eroded by wind and water. But in just a few minutes, nature undid most of what it has taken humans a century and a quarter to build in the North Carolina mountain town of Chimney Rock.
“It feels like I was deployed, like, overnight and woke up in … a combat zone,” Iraq War veteran Chris Canada said as a massive twin-propped Chinook helicopter passed over his adopted hometown. “I don’t think it’s sunk in yet.”
Nearly 400 miles (644 kilometers) from where Hurricane Helene made landfall Sept. 26 along Florida’s Big Bend, the hamlet of about 140 souls on the banks of the Broad River has been all but wiped from the map. The backs of restaurants and gift shops that boasted riverfront balconies dangle ominously in mid-air. The Hickory Nut Brewery, opened when Rutherford County went “wet” and started serving alcohol about a decade ago, collapsed on Wednesday, nearly a week after the storm.
The buildings across Main Street, while still standing, are choked with several feet of reddish-brown muck. A sign on the Chimney Sweeps souvenir shop says, “We are open during construction.”
In another section of town, the houses that weren’t swept away perch precariously near the edge of a scoured riverbank. It is where the town’s only suspected death — an elderly woman who refused entreaties to evacuate — occurred.
“Literally, this river has moved,” village administrator Stephen Duncan said as he drove an Associated Press reporter through the dust-blown wreckage of Chimney Rock Village on Wednesday. “We saw a 1,000-year event. A geological event.”
A monster wall of water strikes Chimney Rock hours after making landfall in Florida
About eight hours after Helene made landfall in Florida, Chimney Rock volunteer firefighter John Payne was responding to a possible gas leak when he noticed water spilling over US 64/74, the main road into town. It was just after 7 a.m.
“The actual hurricane hadn’t even come through and hit yet,” he said.
Payne, 32, who’s lived in this valley his entire life, aborted the call and rushed back up the hill to the fire station, which was moved to higher ground following a devastating 1996 flood. Former chief Joseph “Buck” Meliski, who worked that earlier flood, scoffed.
“There’s no way it’s hitting that early,” Payne recalled the older man saying.
But when Payne showed him a video he’d just shot — of water topping the bridge to the Hickory Nut Falls Family Campground — the former chief’s jaw dropped.
“We’re in for it, boys,” Meliski told Payne and the half dozen or so others gathered there.
Suddenly, the ground beneath them began shaking — like the temblors that sometimes rock the valley, but much stronger. By then, muddy water was seeping under the back wall of the firehouse. Payne looked down and saw what he estimated to be a 30-foot-high (nine-meter-high) wall of water, tossing car-sized boulders as it raced toward the town. It appeared as if the wave was devouring houses, then spitting them out.
“It’s not water at that point,” Payne said. “It’s mud, this thick concrete-like material, you know what I mean? And whatever it hits, it’s taking.”
A house hit the bridge from which he’d been filming not 20 minutes earlier. The span just “imploded.” Payne later found its steel beams “bent in horseshoe shapes around boulders.”
At the firehouse, some business owners among the group began “crying hysterically,” Payne said. Others just stood in mute disbelief. The volunteers lost communications during the storm. But when the winds finally began to quiet down around 11 a.m., Payne said, the radios began “blowing up with calls.”
Workers survey damage where a road once existed in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
Scenic Lake Lure becomes a wet pit of rubble
The pieces of what had been Chimney Rock Village were now on their way to the neighboring town of Lake Lure, which played a starring role as stand-in for a Catskills resort in the 1987 Patrick Swayze summer romance film, “Dirty Dancing.”
Tracy Stevens, 55, a bartender at the Hickory Nut, took refuge at the Lake Lure Inn, where she also worked. She watched as the detritus from Chimney Rock and beyond came pouring into the marina, tossing aside boats and thrusting the metal sections of the floating Town Center Walkway upward like the folds of a map.
“It looked like a toilet bowl flushing,” she said. “I could see cars, tops of houses. It was the craziest.”
A home is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
Some of the debris coalesced into a massive jam between the two bridges linking the towns — a utilitarian concrete affair carrying Memorial Highway across the Broad River, and an elegant three-arched span known as the Flowering Bridge.
After 85 years carrying traffic into Chimney Rock, the 1925 viaduct was converted into a verdant walkway festooned with more than 2,000 species of plants. Now partially collapsed, the bridge’s remains are draped in a tangled mass of vines, roots and tree branches.
Some residents see signs of hope amid almost complete destruction of their town
Canada, 43, who co-owns a stage rental and event production company, was at a Charlotte music festival when the storm hit. Returning to uniformed troops and armored personnel carriers kicking up dust in the streets awakened memories of his three combat tours in the Middle East.
“I saw the whole war and I’ve been through many hurricanes,” said Canada, an Army airborne veteran. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Canada and his wife, Barbie, moved here with their two daughters in October 2021 from South Carolina, in part to get away from hurricanes. Barbie had vacationed here as a child, and it was close to the Veterans Administration hospital in Asheville.
As he walked the banks of the Broad on Wednesday, Chris Canada found himself sniffing at the warm air for the telltale odor of death.
And yet, all around are signs of hope.
Payne — who climbs the rock in full gear each Sept. 11 to honor first responders who died in the Twin Towers attacks — was heartened to see members of the New York City Fire Department in his town helping with door-to-door searches.
“We’re more hard-headed than these rocks are,” said Payne, whose day job is as a site coordinator for a fast-food chain. “So, it’s going to take more than this to scare us off and run us out. It’ll be a while, but we’ll be back. Don’t count us out.”
Outside the Mountain Traders shop, someone has leaned a large wooden Sasquatch cutout against a utility pole, the words “Chimney Rock Strong” painted in bright blue.
When park employees cut their way to the top of the mountain and raised the American flag on Monday, Duncan says the people below cheered, and some wept.
“It was spectacular,” he said.
Iraq War veteran Chris Canada, right, stands among debris resting on a bridge in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
Mayor says his little town has the spirit and determination necessary to rebuild
The flag is flying at half staff. But Mayor Peter O’Leary said it’s that spirit that will bring Chimney Rock Village back.
The town’s legacy of hospitality and entrepreneurial spirit dates back to the late 1800s, when a local family began charging visitors 25 cents for a horseback ride up the mountain, according to brief online history by village resident R. J. Wald. It soon became one of North Carolina’s first bona fide tourist attractions.
O’Leary came to town in 1990 to take a job as park manager, before it became part of the state parks system. Two years later, he and his wife opened Bubba O’Leary’s General Store, named for their yellow Labrador retriever.
“Most of these people here, if you look around, almost all of them are from somewhere else,” he said as he stood outside the firehouse, the waters of the 404-foot (123-meter) Hickory Nut Falls gushing forth from the ridge high above. “Why’d they come here? They came here and fell in love with it. It gets ahold of you. …
“It got ahold of me.”
The 1927 portion of the general store has caved in, but O’Leary believes the larger addition built in 2009 is salvageable. Duncan, who drafted the village charter back in 1990, sees this as an opportunity to “take advantage of the new geography” and build a better town. But for some, like innkeeper and restaurateur Nick Sottile, 35, the path forward is hard to see.
When Helene hit, Sottile and wife Kristen were vacationing in the Turks and Caicos Islands — their first break since October 2020, when they opened their Broad River Inn and Stagecoach Pizza Kitchen in what’s believed to be the village’s oldest building.
In photos taken from the street, things looked remarkably intact. But when Sottile returned home and walked around to the river side, his heart sank.
“The back of the building is, like, a whole section of it is gone,” the South Florida native said Friday. “It’s not even safe to go in there right now.”
About all that’s left of the adjacent Chimney Rock Adventure miniature golf course is the sign.
“You can’t even rebuild,” Sottile said. “Because there’s no land.”
Sottile has been hearing horror stories from fellow business owners about denied insurance claims. Without help, he said he has no money to rebuild. But for now, he’s just volunteering with the fire department and trying not to think too far into the future.
“This is a small town, but this is, this is HOME,” he said. “Everybody helps everybody, and I know we’ll get through this. I know we’ll rebuild. I’m just praying that we can rebuild with US here to see it.”
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AP National Writer Tim Sullivan contributed from Minneapolis.
MUST LISTEN 🚨 Kamala Harris Admin ARRESTED a man for bringing helicopter full of supplies to Hurricane Helene victims
“There was a man that took off yesterday in his helicopter to go up in the mountains to drop off food. He landed and got arrested and said he was interfering… pic.twitter.com/I0OjFyVqMq
“It’s over, the choice is clear. You don’t have to like him but you see what America first was and now we see what America last is. You can’t defend this administration.”
WEAPONIZATION: Elon Musk posted that one of his SpaceX engineers on the ground in North Carolina is reporting that FEMA is blocking and seizing shipments of aid including Starlink receivers. The engineer reports that all Starlink shipments are on hold until they can get an escort… https://t.co/E3PqcsmHSapic.twitter.com/YwkzZjjsU1
This is disturbing. Land grab of Chimney Rock, NC. Town to be bulldozed before removal of the deceased. Sicking and disrespectful. America is truly lost. Lord help us. pic.twitter.com/lXMg2nvWx9
Biden has ordered a stand down of over a thousand military helicopter crews in the south. Every branch is reporting that they are waiting on orders while people die. This is an unprecedented action by the Biden/Harris crime syndicate. The hurricane conveniently destroyed the… https://t.co/YdcE7y3Tpd
A group of private helicopter pilots working *on their own* at great risk to rescue people deep in the mountains of storm-ravaged Western North Carolina. Their time, money, heart, soul. Their day started like this. pic.twitter.com/XUChBt8AjW
“They are literally allowing this people to fvcking die in the mountains right now because we can’t get helicopters.”
Jonathan Howard with the Florida State Guard Special Mission Unit who is assisting Aerial Recovery says they desperately NEED… pic.twitter.com/EtWrkYtYc4
Hurricane Helene: Tennessee Resident Says Tennessee/ FEMA Sending Out Text Messages Telling Everyone Do Not Help Neighbors In Need
Messages saying “We don't want you to donate stuff to other people. You need to just donate money and stuff to us and get your instructions from us… pic.twitter.com/gzuF8owjmF
MUST WATCH & MUST SHARE ! If you don’t fear the government yet , you will after watching this 👇 Apply logic to your question WHY ! So they can make life of disaster victims as miserable as possible ; where people give up , leave their homes never to return…. #AbandonedAmericapic.twitter.com/GtdzuTTBqz
Aclassical charter school that was preserved after Republican-backed candidates took over the local school board just posted the top state test scores in the district. Students at Merit Academy, a 3-year-old K-11 public school that opens its 12th grade in 2025, also posted the best scores among the four districts that families in the Woodland Park exurb of Colorado Springs can choose from under open enrollment.
While test scores scratch the surface of student and school academic quality, these do help vindicate Teller County parents dissatisfied with extended school lockdowns, an increase in screen-based schooling, and creeping politicization of taxpayer-provided education. Due to these frustrations, this group of parents started a new public classical school in 2021 and took over their school board that fall to keep Merit open and growing. Merit nearly doubled in size the year after that. Charter schools are public schools run by independent boards that can be closed if students perform poorly.
The Denver Gazette offers a data visualization tool for state English and math tests. It shows Merit Academy’s top standing in the Woodland Park Re-2 district on both measures of academic performance.
The below graph that Merit Academy Headmaster Gwynne Pekron sent to parents, teachers, and staff last week shows the classical school’s test scores at No. 1 compared to the Woodland Park School District, Manitou Springs, Park County, Colorado Springs Early College, and Colorado Springs District 11.
The state scores for the last school year, 2023-24, came out for specific schools and districts on Aug. 29. Like their counterparts across the United States, Colorado children are still struggling to overcome lockdown-caused learning declines. This year, some grade levels of Colorado children performed as well as the same grade level in 2019, but many average results remained below pre-lockdown levels.
High schoolers have particularly shown less recovery of lockdown losses than younger students. Math scores are especially abysmal. Here are two graphs illustrating Colorado high schoolers’ PSAT results, from Colorado Public Radio.
Merit’s high schoolers — it had no eleventh grade in 2024 — also outperformed these state averages on the PSAT, a college entrance prep exam.
“We are extremely proud of these results and the work they represent, but aren’t done striving for improvement by a long shot,” Merit Academy founding board member John Dill told The Federalist.
The school board majority has publicly pledged support for high student achievement and parent choice at all Woodland Park schools, and points to Merit as an example of the effectiveness of their leadership on behalf of all local taxpayers and students. In the last three years, the board has raised teacher pay 16 percent and instituted performance-based raises.
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.
Ronald Clark, a youth minister, talks about learning of the shooting at Apalachee High School and the final moments of victim Mason Schermerhorn.
Mason Schermerhorn last texted his mom from the restroom before he was discovered as one of the four killed in a mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, a chaplain and youth minister who tried to help find the teen said. Ronald Clark had stopped at a store on his way home Wednesday morning, when he learned of the shooting from his wife via phone call. He rushed to the scene, and quickly offered his services to law enforcement at the command post. He was instructed to assist crews on the investigative side.
About an hour later, he said he started seeing the students, who were “hurt.”
Mason Schermerhorn, 14, was killed in a shooting Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024, at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. (Fox News)
“You want to have the arms big enough to grab everybody, but it’s only so much that you can do,” he said, calling the situation “challenging.”
He described the look on victims’ faces as “shock,” and said those who provided their testimonies to him in an attempt to cope were “strong.”
About 30 minutes later, Clark said he began assisting Schermerhorn’s mother, who is his coworker, with trying to find him.
“It was hard, because we were just talking about her kids on Tuesday this week,” Clark said. “She was saying that the bond and the connection she has with her kids is unbreakable.”
Wes Robertson, area county teacher and former teacher of slain student Mason Schermerhorn, lays flowers at the entrance sign of Apalachee High School on September 5, 2024, in Winder, Georgia. (Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
Schermerhorn’s mother told the chaplain she believed that the 14-year-old autistic student was okay.
“‘Hey, I can’t find him,” Clark remembers her saying. “‘I’m just here to pick him up. I know he’s safe. He text me that he’s in the restroom. Can you please help?'”
Clark then took a photo of the teen to the command post, where he quickly learned that Schermerhorn was one of the “confirmed” dead.
From left to right: Math teachers Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie were killed at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, along with Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, officials say. (Fox News)
“He was a great kid, from what I was told. Loved life, didn’t have any issues with anyone. He was autistic, but that didn’t stop his glow,” Clark said.
As for any advice the youth minister could give parents, it is to maintain communication with their kids.
“You don’t understand how much we are valued at home,” he said, adding that some children’s faces lit up on Wednesday when they were reunited with their parents following the school shooting. “Pay attention to your children.”
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.
As Donald Trump and Kamala Harris race for the presidency, their boosters are insisting the stakes couldn’t be higher for the future of our nation. But Americans have already given up on the future and are demonstrating this despair in the most fundamental way: Americans are not begetting more Americans.
The birthrate in the USA has hit another record low. Though the U.S. is not yet at complete demographic collapse (e.g. South Korea or Japan), American fertility is still way below replacement rate. Regardless of whom voters choose in November, they are already issuing a vote of no confidence in the future by literally refusing to beget people to live in it.
Collapsing fertility will cause a plethora of problems — good luck sustaining economic growth and paying for entitlement programs with an aging, shrinking population. Importing high levels of immigrants to maintain workforce levels is beset with its own difficulties. But highlighting the challenges of a future with few children will not encourage people to have more kids; people will not decide to breed just because it might boost GDP in a few decades. Indeed, dwelling on the problems of a below-replacement world might even be counterproductive from a pro-natal standpoint, as it just reinforces anxiety about the future.
Neither candidate can fix this. Harris may be trying to float on a media froth of “Joy!” but the DNC’s celebration of sterility and abortion, including Planned Parenthood providing not just free vasectomies but even free abortions right outside the convention, is perhaps the most grotesque example of baby-hating anti-natalism ever in American politics. And though the GOP might look better by comparison, Trump has been stampeding the GOP away from social conservatism (to say nothing of his personal example).
Politicians are not going to save America from despairing self-extinction. And tempting as it is, we cannot just blame them for the failures of American men and women to form stable relationships and have children together. Yes, there have been unfavorable cultural, economic, and political forces, but though these may be mitigating factors, they do not negate personal responsibility. Americans have chosen the decline of America.
However, there is an upside to this, which is that we can improve matters without relying on politicians. Yes, political action is important; policies from taxes to education to housing and more matter enormously to family formation and flourishing and thank God for the people doing good work on these issues.
But we should not sit around waiting for government to fix everything. It is not just that even well-intentioned and generous pro-family policies have often proven disappointing but that individual choices still matter. People can choose to prioritize family life even when culture, policy, and the economy make it difficult.
However, we need more than just exhortations to individual virtue: We need the help of others. Fortunately, government is not the only domain of collective action. As the process of family formation — from dating to raising children and sustaining a marriage — is breaking down to the point of incomprehensibility in much of our culture, America’s churches in particular have an opportunity to step into the gaps left by the fraying bonds of family and community.
Men and women need guidance in coming together to form and sustain marriages. Likewise, it is not good for parents to have to handle child-rearing all by themselves. It does take a village — but the government, and especially the federal bureaucracy, is a behemoth, not a village.
As important as help, from meals to rides to babysitting and beyond, can be, churches can provide that which is even more valuable: instruction, examples, belonging, and love. This community is what will actually make people want to marry, have children, and stay married while raising their kids well. Pundits worrying about the long-term political and economic implications of declining marriage and low birthrates won’t actually do it. What will work is if people believe in family life as important to what it means to live well and if they believe it is not only desirable but also attainable. For this, they need examples and assistance.
To be meaningful, pro-natalism has to mean more than just pumping out babies for the future of the nation. Rather, it must explain why babies are good in themselves and why marriage and parenthood are the vocations to which most of us are called and which we should joyfully embrace. Indeed, this will likely be one of the church’s most effective means of evangelization. Amid our cultural and relational wasteland, it will increasingly fall to the church to teach people how to live well despite the troubles of this life. And valuing babies’ overindulgence, ambition, and avarice is a good place to start.
Even the best efforts may not be enough to save our nation. But it is clear that there is only hope for our nation’s future if citizens place their hope in something greater than America.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Louisiana’s attorney general announced Monday that she is asking a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit that seeks to overturn the state’s new law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public-school classroom by Jan. 1.
The suit was filed in June by parents of Louisiana public school children with various religious backgrounds who contend the law violates First Amendment language forbidding government establishment of religion and guaranteeing religious liberty. Proponents of the law argue that it is not solely religious but that the Ten Commandments have historical significance to the foundation of U.S. law.
As kids in Louisiana prepare to return to school this month, state officials presented large examples of posters featuring the Ten Commandments that Attorney General Liz Murrill argues “constitutionally comply with the law.” The Republican said she is not aware of any school districts that have begun to implement the mandate, as the posters “haven’t been produced yet.”
Murrill said the court brief being filed, which was not immediately available, argues that “the lawsuit is premature and the plaintiffs cannot prove that they have any actual injury.”
“That’s because they don’t allege to have seen any displays yet and they certainly can’t allege that they have seen any display of the Ten Commandments that violates their constitutional rights,” she added.
Murrill pointed to more than a dozen posters on display during Monday’s press conference to support her argument that the displays can be done constitutionally. Some of the posters featured quotes or images of famous figures — late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Martin Luther King Jr., Moses and U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson.
No matter what the poster looked like, the main focal point was the Ten Commandments. Additionally, each display, at the bottom in small print, included a “context statement” that describes how the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.”
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed the legislation in June — making Louisiana the only state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in the classrooms of all public schools and state-funded universities. The measure was part of a slew of conservative priorities that became law this year in Louisiana.
When asked what he would say to parents who are upset about the Ten Commandments being displayed in their child’s classroom, the governor replied: “If those posters are in school and they (parents) find them so vulgar, just tell the child not to look at it.”
In an agreement reached by the court and state last month, the five schools specifically listed in the lawsuit will not post the commandments in classrooms before Nov. 15 and won’t make rules governing the law’s implementation before then. The deadline to comply, Jan. 1, 2025, remains in place for schools across the state.
Louisiana’s new law does not require school systems to spend public money on Ten Commandments posters. It allows the systems to accept donated posters or money to pay for the displays. Questions still linger about how the requirement will be enforced and what happens if there are not enough donations to fund the mandate.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
“We are pleased with the court’s decision recognizing that students can, in fact, challenge unconstitutional policies implemented by school boards in Virginia,” America First Legal attorney Andrew Block told The Daily Signal.
Fairfax County Public Schools in Northern Virginia requires all students to refer to “students who identify as gender-expansive or transgender by their chosen name and pronoun, regardless of the name and gender recorded in the student’s permanent pupil record.”
Conservative public interest law firm America First Legal sued the district on behalf of a Roman Catholic student who believes the policy opposes her religious beliefs. The student believes God made only two genders—male and female—and that to reject one’s biological sex is to reject the image of God within that person.
The school district argued that the student, who was followed into the girls’ bathroom by a boy and is compelled to use preferred pronouns under the school district’s policy, did not have standing to sue. In Wednesday’s hearing, the court overruled that motion, recognizing that students can challenge unconstitutional policies. The court held that the student did not allege “discriminatory purpose or intent.”
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, a Fairfax County mom of three who has followed this issue closely, celebrated the decision.
“I’m joining other parents across Fairfax County today as we collectively inhale the fresh scent of common sense with the court’s verdict,” she told The Daily Signal. “We knew all along that it was tyrannical and completely wrong to try to compel our children’s speech with forced pronoun usage in their public schools. It is such a relief that justice has prevailed this time to preserve our children’s constitutional rights.”
Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Brett Kassabian gave the plaintiff 21 days to file responsive pleadings.
BETHEL PARK, Pa. – Thomas Matthew Crooks’ father was spotted in public on Monday for the first time since the 20-year-old gunman opened fire at former President Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, according to a local business employee and a neighbor who identified a picture of him.
Snipers killed Crooks after the Bethel Park resident nicked Trump’s ear, killed bystander Corey Comperatore and injured two others at the July 13 rally, David Dutch and James Copenhaver. Investigators have spent the last week visiting Crooks’ family home in their suburban Pittsburgh neighborhood. The man locals identified as the father and a masked woman he was with declined to answer questions when approached by Fox News Digital.
Matthew Crooks, left, leaves a store on Monday, July 22, 2024. He was seen in public for the first time since his son, Thomas Crooks, attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13. (Derek Shook for Fox News Digital)
Matthew Crooks said, “we just want to try to take care of ourselves right now.” (Derek Shook for Fox News Digital)
Matthew Crooks, right, was seen in public more than a week after his son killed one man and injured three others at Trump’s rally. (Derek Shook for Fox News Digital)
“We’re going to release a statement when our legal counsel advises us to do so – until then, we have no comment,” he told Fox News Digital before beginning to load items into the vehicle. “We just want to try to take care of ourselves right now. Please, just give us our space.”
Crooks’ family members have cooperated with the FBI as the agency tries to pin down a motive for the near assassination.
Fox News Digital previously reported that Crooks’ parents, Matthew and Mary, called police hours before the shooting, saying that he was missing and that they were concerned about his welfare. It is unclear whether they knew that he was in possession of the AR-15 registered to his father.
Both Matthew and Mary Crooks are licensed as professional counselors, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State Licensing System Verification Service.
An undated image of Thomas Matthew Crooks. (Handout via AFP)
Crooks graduated from Bethel Park High School in 2020. In May, he earned an associate’s degree in engineering from the Community College of Allegheny County. Crooks reportedly planned to enroll at Robert Morris University after being accepted there and at and the University of Pittsburgh.
Two investigators, who appeared to be federal agents, enter Trump shooter Thomas Crooks’ home. (Derek Shook/Fox News Digital)
Investigators are trying to piece together how Crooks was able to evade security around the site of Trump’s rally on July 13 at the Butler Farm Show property. He climbed onto the roof of an AGR manufacturing building about 150 yards from Trump’s podium and fired off several shots before snipers killed him.
Undated file photo of Thomas Matthew Crooks in a yearbook photo. Crooks is alleged to be the shooter in the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday, July 13, 2024. (Obtained by Fox News Digital)
Crooks was spotted with a rangefinder before the shooting, and investigators are looking into how he was able to avoid law enforcement and climb onto the roof with his father’s rifle.
Lawmakers visited the shooting site on Monday as Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle testified before Congress about the security failures for the rally.
A motive for the shooting remains unclear. Crooks was a member of a local gun club, and he bought ammunition before the attack.
FBI agents canvas Thomas Matthew Crooks’ neighborhood in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania on Monday, July 15, 2024. Investigators are speaking with neighbors about Crooks, who was killed on Saturday after attempting to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. (Derek Shook for Fox News Digital )
A former classmate of Crooks told Fox News Digital the killer had confronted him years earlier about his support for Trump and expressed a “smug” dislike for politicians.
Crooks’ online searches before the shooting included dates and times of the Democratic and Republican national conventions, photos of Trump and President Biden, and major depressive disorder.
Christina Coulter is a U.S. and World reporter for Fox News Digital. Email story tips to christina.coulter@fox.com.
In a growing environment of left-wing activism in schools, especially related to LGBT ideology, parents who have not been able to influence curriculum have had the option of opting their kids out of classes. Not any longer, at least according to a federal appeals court in a Maryland case of three families suing for the right to religious freedom for their elementary school-aged children in public schools.
In August of 2023, three families — one Muslim, one Christian, and one Jewish — brought a case against the Montgomery County Board of Education for a recent policy change removing the opt-out option for curriculum. Previously, parents received advanced notice of materials that would be read to their children and could opt out. The school board announced that parents would no longer receive advanced notice of materials, and they could no longer opt out of readings or lessons.
A year prior, according to the case, “In the spring of 2022, the School Board had determined that the books in its English language arts curriculum were not sufficiently representative because they did not include LGBTQ characters.” Maryland law requires schools to give parents the opportunity “to view instructional materials to be used in the teaching of family life and human sexuality objectives.” The school board also has an opt-out policy for religious exemptions in place.
However, there is a clause that states that “if such requests become too frequent or too burdensome, the school may refuse to accommodate the requests. Schools are not required to alter fundamentally the educational program or create a separate educational program or a separate course to accommodate a student’s religious practice or belief.” Deciding that LGBT inclusion in the curriculum was fundamental to the educational program and the requests were too burdensome, the school board simply declared parents could not opt out of LGBT content any longer.
Judge’s Ruling
Last week, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman dismissed the parents’ concerns and noted that every court that has reviewed similar mandatory public-school curricula has found that “mere exposure in public school to ideas that contradict religious beliefs does not burden the religious exercise of students or parents.”
She insisted, “The parents still may instruct their children on their religious beliefs regarding sexuality, marriage, and gender, and each family may place contrary views in its religious context.”
“No government action prevents the parents from freely discussing the topics raised in the storybooks with their children or teaching their children as they wish,” Boardman wrote in Thursday’s order.
The decision was upheld by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Their reasoning was that the parents could not demonstrate how the LGBT-themed books would be used in the classroom and therefore could not determine if they would infringe on their beliefs.
Contrary to the First Amendment
Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, argued, “That runs contrary to the First Amendment, Maryland law, the School Board’s own policies, and basic human decency.”
“Parents should have the right to receive notice and opt their children out of classroom material that violates their faith,” he added.
In contrast to the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning, reviewing the Montgomery County Public Schools website makes it clear why these books are in the classroom. The website has a dedicated LGBT section stating, “We have welcoming, affirming schools, classrooms, teams, and clubs. We value all of our children, youth, teachers, staff, and parents.” The section provides an extensive list of LGBT content, resources, and “How to” guides for students, staff, and parents.
Students are provided a Coming Out as YOU! guide that instructs them on how to come out, including a “safety plan,” which tells the students to make sure they have a safe place outside their home to stay; someone, seemingly besides their parents, that they can trust; and to “Consider letting a friend know that you’re planning on coming out and if you don’t text them by a certain time you might need help because your safety might be in danger.” The guide tells students they should decide what they identify as daily, which can change day by day.
The school’s Culturally Responsive Supplemental Elementary ELA Collection is the biggest concern point for parents, as it details the content students will be provided. Students grades kindergarten to second grade are provided more than eight separate LGBT titles, half of which are trans-focused. One book, titled Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope, states in its description, “Penelope knows that he’s a boy. (And a ninja.) The problem is getting everyone else to realize it.”
Three books focus on a character named Max, a transgender-identifying elementary school-aged student who dedicates time to educating friends, teachers, and parents about what being transgender means. Several books are focused on same-sex relationships: one about a prince and a knight who fall in love, one about a child’s gay uncle getting married, and a book for 4- to 8-year-olds titled Love, Violet, about an elementary-aged girl who falls in love with another girl.
Not being subtle, another title for this age group is IntersectionAllies: We Make Room for All, a book on intersectional feminism that teaches kids how to be activists, and a book titled Let’s Eat Bugs! for fifth graders provides recipes on eating insects. The school also offers an LGBT club for elementary school students.
The Obvious Purpose
The school system’s agenda is pretty obvious.
Is it any wonder that religious parents would be concerned about their children — again, kindergarten to fifth grade — being exposed to extreme LGBT ideology? Critics pretend kids are just being told stories that include LGBT characters and that only bigots would oppose kids learning about different types of people. The first judge dismissed the parents saying they “failed to show that the lack of an opt-out policy would result in the ‘indoctrination of their children’ or ‘coerce their children to violate or change their religious beliefs.’”
However, these are books designed to teach kids about being LGBT themselves, not simply about LGBT experiences, history, or health education. This is an environment where kids are heavily encouraged to explore sexuality and gender ideology, with expansive resources, instruction guides, and clubs. Of course, religious parents would consider this to be an invasive level of activism and indoctrination.
It should be obvious to anyone that forcing parents to accept this instruction for their children violates their religious freedom, and the obnoxious dismissal from a judge that parents can simply undo whatever their kids learn in school further mocks these sacred rights. Left-wing, LGBT activists simply want full control over children’s education and have constructed a system that not only excludes parents but intentionally isolates their children from them in school.
LGBT activists believe they know best for all students, and that all students need to learn about LGBT ideology in an open, proactive, and affirming way, and if parents oppose this instruction, they don’t need to know about it, or worse, have no power to stop it. Unfortunately, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals just strengthened this abuse of power by school systems, degrading parental rights and religious freedom even further.
Chad Felix Greene is a senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of “Surviving Gender: My Journey Through Gender Dysphoria,” and is a social writer focusing on truth in media, conservative ideas and goals, and true equality under the law. You can follow him on Twitter @chadfelixg.
In 2023, 138 Dutch people chose to end their lives because of psychiatric suffering. (Photo: ArtistGNDphotography/Getty Images)
Once, we told stories of rescuing women in distress. Now, we hand them a prescription for assisted suicide.
Two young women in the Netherlands, Jolanda Fun and Zoraya ter Beek, have recently done media interviews explaining their respective decisions to pursue euthanasia, despite being physically healthy.
Fun, who planned to end her life on her 34th birthday late last month, has struggled with depression for years. “Most of the time I just feel really sh—-,” she told The Times, a British newspaper, in an interview published April 14. “Sad, down, gloomy. People don’t see it, because that’s the mask I put on, and that’s what you learn to do in life.”
In the Netherlands, euthanasia has been legal since 2002. (The legislation passed in 2001, and went into effect the next year.) Fun started exploring the possibility two years ago, when a counselor mentioned it. For Fun, who has parents and a brother and a boyfriend, death still seemed like a better reality than staying alive.
“My father is sick, my mother is sick, my parents are fighting to stay alive, and I want to step out of life,” she told The Times. “That’s a bit strange. But even when I was seven, I asked my mother whether, if I jumped from a viaduct, I would be dead. I’ve been struggling with this my whole life.”
Meanwhile, ter Beek, 28,told The Free Press she plans to die by assisted suicide this month. Ter Beek, who is autistic and suffers from depression, has a boyfriend she loves and with whom she shares a home and cats. Her psychiatrist told her, “There’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never [going to] get any better,” ter Beek told The Free Press, saying those words triggered her decision to end her life.
Zoraya ter Beek is one of a growing number of people across the West choosing to end their lives rather than live in pain. Pain that in many cases can be treated.
Ter Beek and Fun are not alone in their decisions. (So far, no media outlets have confirmed that either one has died.) In 2023, 138 Dutch people chose to end their lives because of psychiatric suffering, according to Spanish newspaper El Pais, which reported that represented a 20% increase from 2022. The trend is undeniably upward: The Netherlands had a mere two assisted suicide deaths for mental health reasons in 2010 and 68 in 2019, according to the Times.
In general, euthanasia has grown in popularity in the Netherlands over the past two decades. More than 9,000 Dutch people chose euthanasia in 2023, reports El Pais, noting that euthanasia deaths made up more than 5% of all deaths in the Netherlands last year.
Canada—which initially legalized assisted suicide in 2016 for those with terminal illnesses and later for those with a “grievous and irremediable medical condition”—is similarly experiencing an upward trend. Over 13,000 Canadians died by assisted suicide in 2022, a 31% jump from the 2021 numbers. In 2017, the first full year assisted suicide was legal in Canada, 2,838 people chose to die that way.
Canada was slated to further follow in the Netherlands’ path and allow assisted suicide for mental health reasons this year, but due to concerns over straining the medical system, it has postponed that to March 17, 2027.
If you value life, you should be worried.
Already in the United States, 10 states and the District of Columbia allow assisted suicide under certain circumstances. If mental health continues to deteriorate in the U.S., as unfortunately seems likely, we could well face advocacy for allowing suicide for the mentally ill.
Of course, mental illness is a “real” illness, and its suffering can be acute.
But there is a reason we fight so hard against suicide, try to help and encourage and to provide medical assistance to Americans who struggle with depression and anxiety and other mental illnesses.
Not only do we love them, and want them to remain in our lives, but we also know that as long as someone is alive, there is hope—hope that he or she might heal, fully or partially, from mental illness and be able to live life more joyfully, less burdened by rapacious negative emotions. That belief is hard to hold when you are struggling with depression, making it all the more critical that the non-depressed in society vociferously advocate for the value of life.
⭕️ Jolanda Fun, qui est en bonne santé physique aux Pays-Bas mais qui veut mettre fin à ses jours par l'euthanasie parce que sa psychologie n'est pas bonne, mettra fin à ses jours en appelant ses amis le jour de son anniversaire.
Furthermore, plenty of those who have suffered from depression or other mental illnesses have, as their health has improved, become grateful they did not die by suicide. “I am extremely thankful that I did not take my life,” Olympian medalist Michael Phelps said in 2018 when discussing his history of depression.
In a 2023 Washington Post essay, Billy Lezra described a planned suicide attempt.
“I’d been drinking whiskey mixed with flat Coke all afternoon to work up the nerve to jump in front of the train, and I was drunk enough that my plan felt within reach. I was 23,” Lezra wrote.
“Two months earlier, my mother had tried to take her life, and I had interrupted her attempt. This experience, compounded by years of depression and addiction, made me long to stop feeling. It’s not that I wanted to die, exactly, it’s that I didn’t want to live.”
But then “a wiry woman with pink hair and a titanium lip ring” asked Lezra to take a photo. By the time the photo was taken, the train was gone—and now, seven years later, Lezra remains alive.
Lezra cannot recall the face of the pink-haired woman, but “what has stayed with me is a feeling of sharp, profound gratitude.”
Statistics back up Lezra’s experience. About 90% of suicide survivors will not ultimately die by suicide, according to the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. That suggests that many depressed people do, in fact, get better, at least to some extent.
And what does it say about us as a culture that we allow people to end their lives, that we publicly support it?
As Western civilization further becomes divorced from its Christian roots, it’s perhaps not surprising that there is renewed interest in suicide. The belief that God gives life and that it is not ours to take is less widely held. In modern thinking, where the individual becomes a free agent encouraged to pursue his own truth and happiness, obedience to the timing of a Creator is about as unfashionable a virtue as it gets, especially when such obedience includes chronic suffering.
“In the absence of Christianity, suicide and euthanasia become, perhaps, the ultimate and extreme (if mistaken) vindication of human choice and human dignity: My life is mine, and I can end it when I want to. In this way, individual liberty is reduced to a kind of death cult,” wrote John Daniel Davidson in “Pagan America.”
How bleak.
In addition to embracing individualism in our time, we constantly talk of kindness—but it is often a limp kindness, never deployed in tough times. Sometimes, the truest kindness is to fight for someone when she can no longer fight for herself.
Laws often more shape, than reflect, cultures. If the Netherlands had not legalized assisted suicide, perhaps both Fun and ter Beek would be trying new doctors, new treatments, and other ways to ease their very real suffering.
Instead, their government’s laws are telling them their lives may well not be worth living.
The Biden administration’s Department of Education unveiled a sweeping set of rules on Friday that effectively erase protections for sex-based spaces by expanding the Title IX prohibition against sex discrimination to include “gender identity” — a term that’s never mentioned in the original law.
A majority of Americans agree that males who claim to identify otherwise should not be allowed to infiltrate girls’ and women’s sports teams. As of now, some 25 states have laws or regulations aimed at keeping boys and men out of female-only spaces, on and off the field. Yet, come Aug. 1, the Democrat regime’s radial redefinition of “sex-based discrimination” poses a threat to sex-based protections and welcomes males into female spaces including athletic competitions, locker rooms, and sex-specific clubs such as sororities, despite state laws.
“The final regulations will help to ensure that all students receive appropriate support when they experience sex discrimination and that recipients’ procedures for investigating and resolving complaints of sex discrimination are fair to all involved,” the rules claim.
The regulations do even more damage, however, such as by undoing Trump-era due process safeguards for those accused of sexual misconduct, which could include merely using accurate pronouns. They also encroach on parents’ rights and threaten academic free speech by incentivizing schools to censor students and teachers with traditional views on sex and marriage, so they don’t lose federal funding.
In the regulations, the Biden administration openly admits it relied on the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision to inform its rulemaking. In that case, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch joined their Democrat-nominated colleagues to expand the prohibition against employment discrimination based on “sex” to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”
A draft of the rules released in June 2022 received a “record number” of comments from Americans warning that enacting such extensive provisions and redefining terms like “sexual harassment” would bully schools into mandating the spread of radical gender ideology.
In response to Biden’s Department of Education ignoring some 240,000 comments, “a coalition of organizations” including the Independent Women’s Forum andIndependent Women’s Law Center are suing the administration, according to an IWF press release. In 2022 and 2023, those groups sentlegal and policyobjections to the new rule.
“Title IX was designed to give women equal opportunities in academic settings. It forbids discrimination on the basis of ‘sex,’ which it affirms throughout the statute is binary and biological. The unlawful Omnibus Regulation re-imagines Title IX to permit the invasion of women’s spaces and the reduction of women’s rights in the name of elevating protections for ‘gender identity,’ which is contrary to the text and purpose of Title IX,” Director of Independent Women’s Law Center May Mailman said, noting the rules are illegal.
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.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday overturned a West Virginia law that prohibited transgender girls from competing against biological girls in sports. The 2-1 ruling came from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The ruling found the law violated Title IX – in favor of the American Civil Liberties Union, its West Virginia chapter and Lambda Legal.
A federal appeals court struck down West Virginia’s transgender sports ban. (ALLISON DINNER/AFP via Getty Images)
The court said the law cannot be applied to Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 13-year-old girl who had been taking puberty blockers and has identified as a girl since the third grade.
“This is a tremendous victory for our client, transgender West Virginians, and the freedom of all youth to play as who they are,” ACLU West Virginia attorney Joshua Block said.
West Virginia’s “Save Women’s Sports Act” was signed into law in 2021. The law ordered student-athletes to compete and play against those of their biological gender. Lawyers for the girl originally had sued the school board after Gov. Jim Justice signed the bill into law, claiming it violated the 14th Amendment and protections under Title IX.
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice signed the bill in 2021. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, File)
U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin ruled against the transgender girl in January 2023 and also ruled the laws did not violate Title IX protections. However, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to reinstate a preliminary injunction.
The Supreme Court ruled last April that the transgender girl could compete with biological girls on the middle school’s girls’ sports teams. Supreme Court justices refused to disturb an appeals court order that made it possible for the girl to continue playing on her school’s track and cross-country teams. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from the decision.
West Virginia was one of at least 24 states that had laws barring transgender women and girls from competing against the gender they identify as.
“I will keep fighting to safeguard Title IX. We must keep working to protect women’s sports so that women’s safety is secured and girls have a truly fair playing field,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said. “We know the law is correct and will use every available tool to defend it.”
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.
Americans filling their tanks up at a gas station in Alexandria, Virginia, reacted to gas prices rising over 50% since January 2021, when President Biden took office. Rising gas prices under President Biden’s watch have led some Americans to face “painful” and “ridiculous” receipts at the pump, drivers at a Virginia gas station told Fox News.
“There’s no saving,” Donovan said, adding that the cost is “killing” his bottom line. “Gas price has to go back down in order for everybody to really maintain.”
“Paychecks are not rising,” the Virginian said. “It takes about two or three checks to cover all the bills instead of just one.”
Americans filling their tanks up at a gas station in Alexandria, Virginia, reacted to gas prices rising over 50% since January 2021, when President Biden took office.
But one Virginia woman said she’s used to the high costs.
“I don’t really feel it honestly,” she said. “Obviously, nobody wants to pay so much for it, but we need it.”
On Wednesday, gas prices were over 50% higher than when Biden was inaugurated, according to AAA. The national average for a gallon of gas was nearly $3.62, up from $2.39 on Jan. 20, 2021, when the president was sworn in.
Gas prices were 50% higher on Wednesday compared to when Biden took office in January 2021, according to AAA. (Fox News Digital/Megan Myers / Fox News)
“That’s more money out of the pocket that I can be spending on groceries and other everyday items that I need,” Davis, of Washington, D.C., said. “You definitely feel it.”
A Florida man said he can afford the price surges but knows many families are struggling. The cost of filling up his Chevrolet Suburban “drives me absolutely insane,” he added.
“I do fairly well in business, and I just feel for all the people who are trying to make ends meet,” he said. “I can make it work, though it’s painful, but I don’t know how the young family of four gets along. Not just with this inflation, but with all inflation.”
Inflation has cooled from a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022, but has remained persistent, with prices climbing 3.5% year-over-year in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The national average for a gallon of gas has also dropped from its June 2022 peak when it surpassed $5, but that’s been rising steadily since March, according to AAA.
On March 11, the White House said “costs have fallen for everyday purchases from a gallon of gas to a gallon of milk,” but several Americans told Fox News they hadn’t noticed lower prices.
Americans at a Virginia gas station reacted to gas prices’ steady increase. Many drivers still felt the pain at the pump, but a few said they were used to the high costs since the COVID-19 pandemic. (Fox News Digital/Megan Myers / Fox News)
“Prices are still super high,” Donovan said. “It hasn’t gone down. They’re just trying to pull wool over the eyes.”
One Virginia woman said she hasn’t felt the pain at the pump as much, but her grocery bills are “ridiculous.”
The cost of several everyday items has dropped from recent peaks, though some are still higher than when Biden entered office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In March, the average gallon of milk, for example, was $3.89, 43 cents higher than in January 2021. The price of eggs was up to nearly $3, an increase of more than $1.50.
Davis, of Washington, D.C., fills up his gas tank at a Virginia gas station. He said he feels the rising prices at the pump. (Fox News Digital/Megan Myers / Fox News)
David, a lifelong Washingtonian, said gas prices and other surging costs are “ridiculous.” He hopes the 2024 election will bring out a candidate willing to work for the people and lower skyrocketing prices.
“We have to do something,” David said. “There’s more people who are in the shelters, in the streets, because they can’t afford it.”
“Everybody who’s come in the White House has some accountability,” he said. “I’m praying that things will turn around as we go into a new season of who’s in the seat of power in the nation’s capital.”
The White House did not immediately provide comment.
It’s often said that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Of late, too many seemingly good men have done nothing to protect their daughters from transgender-identified athletes competing in girls’ sporting events. Let’s not mince words. These male athletes are harming and hurting their daughters under the guise of “equality” and “fairness.”
Just last week, a Massachusetts high school girls’ basketball team forfeited a game after a male on the opposing team injured three female players. The team decided to forfeit because the injured girl’s female teammates were afraid of getting hurt themselves.
The girls made the right call, to be sure. But why was it necessary in the first place? And why was it up to teenage girls to make that call?
Last year, also in Massachusetts, a male high school field hockey player, identifying as a girl, hit a ball so hard it knocked out a female player’s teeth. Video of the incident shows the female player crumpling to the ground and shrieking as her teammates cover their mouths with their hands and walk around in shock.
Every time I see another story like this — and the number of incidents is surging — I wonder: Where were their fathers?Why have so few fathers, especially after their daughters were injured by a male, stepped forward and said, “Not on my watch”?
Recently, former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines shared a similar sentiment, telling Joe Rogan on his podcast, “I thought someone with political power, someone within the NCAA — quite honestly, I thought someone’s dad — would come down there and yank this man out of our locker rooms.”
Yet it never happened. “I’m standing on the podium, and we’re clapping, and we’re smiling, and we’re cheering, and it hit me, I’m like, what in the world are we clapping for?” she said.
How many injured female athletes will it take for one father to stand up and manfully assert, “Enough is enough. I refuse to let my daughter be physically harmed by a male in her sport.”
How far men should go to protect their daughters is a conversation that needs to be had. But to have that conversation, first, men must do something. Anything.
Even when men competing against women doesn’t cause female athletes bodily harm, it is no less unjust. In New Jersey, transgender-identified swimmer Megan Cortez-Fields competed for three years on the Ramapo College men’s swimming team before switching to the women’s team. He’s since set school records in the women’s 200 Individual Medley.
Over the course of three years in Connecticut, two male athletes broke 17 girls’ track meet records, took more than 85 opportunities to advance to the next level of competition, and won 15 women’s state track championship titles. It’s past time for women to stop paying the price for men taking away their places, their awards, and their health and safety.
Women should not be forced to sacrifice their bodies on the altar of political correctness. It’s time for men to do their duty and confront other men — even if those men identify as women. Call a spade a spade and do not apologize for doing so.
Now consider the most vocal advocates for women’s sports. Think about those activists who are boldly standing up for truth, common sense, and women’s safety. Here’s a few: J.K. Rowling, Riley Gaines, Megyn Kelly, Selina Soule, Alanna Smith, Ashley Nicoletti, and Bethany Hamilton. Notice a pattern? They’re all women. And good for them, because the more women who stand up and speak out, the better. But where are the men?
In his book The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis spoke about men who lack conviction and fortitude. “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise,” Lewis wrote. “It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.”
Such could be said of the state of America’s men today. We’re too comfortable. We’re too apathetic. And we’re too nice. We could use a little more righteous indignation from America’s men.
Perhaps I’m just old-fashioned, but I was raised to respect and care for women. I know that men are supposed to protect and provide for their families. I refuse to stand idly by as the women of America suffer at the hands of men.
If you’re a father who’s still reticent to stand up for your daughter, here’s a suggestion: Don’t go it alone. Join forces with other fathers. The Good Book says, “Though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him — a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12).
Courage is contagious. So, fathers of America, the ball is in your court. Your daughters are waiting for you to protect and take care of them. This is your job. This is your responsibility. This is your duty.
Zachary Mettler works as a staff writer and communications liaison for the Daily Citizen at Focus on the Family. In his role, he writes about current political issues, U.S. history, political philosophy, and culture. Mettler earned his Bachelor’s degree from William Jessup University and is an alumnus of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation. In addition to the Daily Citizen, his written pieces have appeared in the Daily Wire, the Washington Times, the Washington Examiner, Newsweek, Townhall, the Daily Signal, the Christian Post, Charisma News and other outlets.
NHS England admitted Tuesday that puberty blockers are neither safe nor effective.
Luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone agonists, also called GnRHa drugs, have long been used to chemically castrate sex offenders. In recent years, these sex offender drugs were rebranded as puberty blockers and offered to confused children — despite ample evidence that such treatments create sexless adults, deplete victims’ bone density, hamper cognitive development, and produce a myriad of adverse emotional effects.
While these transmogrifying treatments remain legal in American blue states, across the Atlantic, resistance is growing among some early adopters. That’s certainly the case in the United Kingdom, where England’s top health authority has pumped the brakes on the victimization of children captive to the notion that their sex and gender are somehow misaligned. National Health Service England confirmed Tuesday that minors will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at so-called gender identity clinics.
NHS England has been working up to this decision for years, having commissioned an independent expert review of gender identity services for minors in September 2020.
The health service figured it was prudent to pursue such a review in light of the massive spike in referrals for minors to the Gender Identity Development Service run by the scandal-plagued and soon-to-be shuttered Tavistock clinic and the Portman NHS Foundation Trust. Whereas there were 250 referrals to the NHS’ gender clinic in between 2011 and 2012, that number skyrocketed to over 5,000 between 2021 and 2022.
NHS England also noted at the outset of the review that “a significant number” of children seeking puberty blockers were mentally compromised and presenting with “other mental health needs and risky behaviors,” prompting careful consideration and additional research.
A policy document dated March 12 states, “Puberty suppressing hormones (PSH) are not available as a routine commissioning treatment option for treatment of children and young people who have gender incongruence / gender dysphoria.”
The document notes that “[g]ender atypical behavior is common among young children and may be part of normal development. … Children who meet the criteria for gender incongruence / gender dysphoria may or may not continue to experience the conflict between their physical gender and the one with which they identify into adolescence and adulthood.”
often just a fleeting fad, the NHS noted that puberty blockers don’t do what LGBT activists claim they do. The NHS-commissioned review found that across nine observational studies, “there was no statistically significant difference in gender dysphoria, mental health, body image and psychosocial functioning in children and adolescents treated with GnRHA.”
In addition to recognizing that the supposed problem puberty blockers are supposed to resolve is
This finding resonates with the explosive Finnish study published last month in the esteemed journal BMJ Mental Health that found sex-change medical interventions “do not have an impact on suicide risk.” Extra to noting that puberty blockers effectively don’t help, the NHS noted that they can actually do considerable harm: “GnRHa may reduce the expected increase in lumbar or femoral bone density during puberty.”
“We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of PSH to make the treatment routinely available at this time,” concluded NHS England.
The Independent reported that the NHS will be rolling out two new services, one in London and the other in Liverpool. Rather than sterilize children, these clinics will provide patients with access to mental health and pediatric health experts, “resulting in a holistic approach to care.” The Conservative government applauded the decision.
Health Minister and parliamentarian Maria Caulfield said she welcomed “this groundbreaking change as children’s safety and well-being are paramount.”
Caulfield told the Independent, “Ending the routine prescription of puberty blockers will help ensure that care is based on evidence, expert clinical opinion and is in the best interests of the child.”
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Dozens of conservative leaders demand that House Republicans adopt Rep. Chip Roy’s amendment protecting Americans who support traditional marriage. (Photo illustration: Image Source/Getty Images)
Dozens of leaders of conservative organizations planned to send a letter Friday to members of Congress demanding that the lawmakers adopt protections for religious Americans who support the traditional idea of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The signees urged House Republicans to protect religious freedom by prioritizing passage of the so-called Roy Marriage Amendment, named after Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, according to a copy of the letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Advancing American Freedom, a conservative policy organization founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, spearheaded the letter. It also includes signatures, among others, of Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Joe Waresak, president of the James Dobson Family Institute; and Tom McClusky, director of government affairs for Catholic Vote.
If adopted, the Roy amendment would prohibit the government from engaging in “any discriminatory action against a person, wholly or partially on the basis that such person speaks, or acts, in accordance with a sincerely held religious belief, or moral conviction” regarding marriage between a man and a woman, according to the text. The amendment also would prevent the federal government from eliminating a religious group’s tax exemption status for their beliefs on marriage.
Roy submitted the amendment to the House in 2022 in an attempt to include it with the Respect for Marriage Act, which requires all 50 states to recognize same-sex marriages from other states and was passed in December of that same year.
The House has been attempting to avoid a partial government shutdown after failing to pass a new budget for fiscal year 2024 in September. Members voted Thursday to extend the deadline to March 8, prompting Advancing American Freedom to encourage lawmakers to push the Roy amendment through before a potential shutdown.
“This provision is needed now more than ever, for no one should ever fear government punishment for holding to traditional marriage as the unique blessing that it is for all. We strongly encourage you to once again include the Roy ‘Marriage Amendment’ in upcoming appropriations bills,” the conservative leaders’ letter concludes.
A transgender rights supporter protests outside the Indiana Statehouse on Feb. 20, 2023, in Indianapolis. (Photo: Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/Light Rocket/Getty Images)
A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed Indiana’s child sex change ban to take effect.
The order, issued by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, lifts a June 2023 injunction by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana against the law. Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, signed the legislation banning child sex changes in the state last April.
“Our commonsense state law, banning dangerous and irreversible gender-transition procedures for minors, is now enforceable following the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeal’s newest order. We are proud to win this fight against the radicals who continue pushing this horrific practice on our children for ideological and financial reasons,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a Republican, said Tuesday in a statement.
The injunction was previously issued under the presumption that the law may violate the First Amendment and 14th Amendment.
Some 23 states in the U.S. have passed bans on child sex changes or other transgender procedures, including Montana, Idaho, Utah, and North Dakota. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, issued an executive order implementing a child sex-change ban in January after vetoing a similar bill, a move that was subsequently overridden by the state legislature.
“This ruling is beyond disappointing and a heartbreaking development for thousands of transgender youth, their doctors, and their families. As we and our clients consider our next steps, we want all the transgender youth of Indiana to know this fight is far from over, and we will continue to challenge this law until it is permanently defeated and Indiana is made a safer place to raise every family,” the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana wrote Tuesday in a news release.
“Hoosiers who are too young to drive shouldn’t be subjected to these permanent and drastic procedures. Proud of our state for leading the way!” U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., said when the law was passed.
Among young women aged 12 to 17, the rate of antidepressant prescriptions jumped 129.6% per month after March 2020 and for women aged 18 to 25, it rose to 56.5% per month, according to research published by the American Academy of Pediatrics. (Photo Illustration: seb_ra/Getty Images)
Antidepressant prescriptions for young girls skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to research published by the American Academy of Pediatrics Monday. Among young women aged 12 to 17, the rate of prescriptions jumped 129.6% per month after March 2020 and for women aged 18 to 25, it rose to 56.5% per month, the research shows.
In March 2020, then-President Donald Trumpdeclared a state of emergency, resulting in many governors initiating lockdowns to slow the spread of COVID-19, including businesses, restaurants, gyms, stores, and many schools, and many Americans suffered a serious mental health crisis as a result.
“Our study provides important information on changes in mental health utilization patterns among young adults after the COVID-19 outbreak,” the researchers wrote. “As with adolescents, changes varied markedly by sex, with little change in antidepressant dispensing to males and an increase among females. Although this increase was smaller compared with the increase among female adolescents, findings suggest mental health may have similarly worsened among female young adults after the outbreak.”
The study pulled the numbers from the “IQVIA Longitudinal Prescription Database, an all-payer national database” and focused on Americans between the ages of 12 and 25.
Antidepressant prescriptions for Americans aged 12 to 25 increased overall by 66.3% between January 2016 and December 2022, according to the research, and the dispensation rate increased by 63.5% following the pandemic.
Adolescent males did not see a rise in antidepressant prescriptions and instead actually dropped off in March 2020, while prescription levels for young men between the ages of 18 to 25 remained relatively the same, according to the research. The dispensing rate was -7.1% lower than predicted in December 2022, while female adolescents’ dispensing rate was 12.7% higher than predicted.
The researchers claimed that the disparity between the sexes was likely due to young men having access to less care and not that they had improved mental health during the pandemic compared to young women. For females, the increase was most notable in the Southern U.S., while adolescent males saw more antidepressant prescriptions in the Midwest.
Many Americans have been unable to make appointments with mental health professionals since the COVID-19 pandemic, with nearly 56% of psychologists unable to take on new patients due to the demand and the rise in the mental health crisis.
Several studies published in January found that religious communities’ mental health fared better in the U.S. and the United Kingdom during the pandemic due to the practice of their faith during lockdowns.
A Catholic couple in Indiana is asking the Supreme Court to hold the state accountable for keeping their child out of their home after they declined to use his chosen name and pronouns. In M.C. and J.C. v. Indiana Department of Child Services, Mary and Jeremy Cox are appealing to the Supreme Court after they were investigated by Indiana officials for refusing to refer to their son using pronouns and a name inconsistent with his biological sex.
Becket is pursuing the case on behalf of the Coxes, arguing state courts allowed Indiana to keep the child from living in his parents’ home due to their disagreement with the child’s gender identity because of their religious beliefs. Notably, upon completing the investigation, the state determined the allegations of abuse against Mary and Jeremy were unsubstantiated, but still argued that the disagreement over gender identity was distressing to their child.
Lori Windham, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, told Fox News Digital that no parent should ever have to endure what Mary and Jeremy have been forced to go through.
“Keeping a child away from loving parents because of their religious beliefs—even when the state admits there was no abuse or neglect—is wrong and it’s against the law,” she said. “The Court should take this case and make clear that other states can’t take children away because of ideological disagreements.”
In 2019, Mary and Jeremy’s son told them that he identified as a girl, but in line with their Catholic religious beliefs that God created human beings with an immutable sex, male or female, they did not believe in referring to him using pronouns and a name inconsistent with his biology.
In addition, the Coxes believed their son was struggling with underlying mental health conditions, including an eating disorder, so they sought therapeutic care for both.
But, in 2021, Indiana officials began investigating the Coxes after a report found they were not referring to their child by his preferred gender identity, removing the teen from their custody and placing him in a “gender-affirming” home. Despite the unsubstantiated claims of abuse, they claimed the Coxes made the child’s eating disorder worse even though it worsened after he was removed and placed in a transition-affirming home.
The Indiana Department of Child Services declined a Fox News Digital request for comment, saying, “DCS does not comment on ongoing litigation.”
Protesters of Kentucky Senate Bill SB150, known as the Transgender Health Bill, cheer on speakers during a rally on the lawn of the Kentucky Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., March 29, 2023. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)
“This is what every parent is afraid of,” Mary and Jeremy Cox said in a press release. “We love our son and wanted to care for him, but the state of Indiana robbed us of that opportunity by taking him from our home and banning us from speaking to him about gender.”
“We are hopeful that the Justices will take our case and protect other parents from having to endure the nightmare we did,” they added.
When the case was first heard in trial court, Indiana officials argued the child “should be in a home where she is [ac]cepted for who she is” and restricted the Coxes’ visitation time to a few hours once a week, which barred them from speaking to him about their religious views on human sexuality and gender identity. Even though the court determined the Coxes were fit parents, it upheld the removal of their child which was later upheld by the appeals court.
“If this can happen in Indiana, it can happen anywhere,” Windhamn said. “Tearing a child away from loving parents because of their religious beliefs, which are shared by millions of Americans, is an outrage to the law, parental rights, and basic human decency. If the Supreme Court doesn’t take this case, how many times will this happen to other families?”
The proportion of children who live with two parents has been inching upward for some time. After increasing from 67.3% to 69.4% between 2005 and 2010, the number has steadily crept upward from 69.2% in 2015 to 71.1% by the end of last year. (Photo: MoMo Productions/ Digital Vision/Getty Images)
Newly published data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates that the proportion of American children living in two-parent families increased to 71.1% in 2023, continuing a slight upward trajectory since 2015. The numbers appear to contradict a popular narrative in the mainstream media that American society no longer aspires to establish households with a mother and father to parent children.
As noted by Nicholas Zill, a research psychologist and a senior fellow of the Institute for Family Studies, the Census Bureau data “includes children living with a birth parent and stepparent and couples who are cohabiting without being married.”
Zill goes on to observe that the proportion of children who live with two parents has been inching upward for some time. After increasing from 67.3% to 69.4% between 2005 and 2010, the number has steadily crept upward from 69.2% in 2015 to 71.1% by the end of last year. The numbers appear to contradict widely accepted narratives offered by writers at legacy media outlets like The Atlantic, The New York Times, and a number of others about the supposedly inevitable decline in two-parent family structures.
As Zill observes, “The trends reviewed here show us that those who predicted a relentless increase in family instability or single parenthood were simply wrong. There seem to be growing numbers of young adults in all racial and ethnic groups who realize the economic, educational, and emotional benefits of marriage for themselves and their future children.”
Zill further points out two recent trends that he argues could “extend the resurgence of the traditional family—the older ages at which adults embark on parenthood nowadays and the increased numbers of recent immigrants in the U.S. population. Women and men who begin having children in their 30s and 40s are more likely to marry beforehand and stay married. Likewise, recent immigrants have shown a propensity to marry before having kids and then to remain married.”
Experts are also noting how the increasing number of children living with two parents is an indication of how the stable presence of a mother and father in the home strengthens a culture of life that leads to fewer abortions.
“The [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] data on the number of children killed through an abortion shows things have gotten worse over the past few years with one exception,” Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at the Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand.
“Women who are married have had fewer abortions each year since 2018. The 2021 data shows that only 12.7% of women who underwent abortions were married. We know that the very best environment for a child to be raised in is one where there is a loving mother and father,” Szoch said. “Clearly, the positive impact of growing up in a two-parent household begins long before birth, and in many instances, it is the difference between life and death for a child.”
Members of the pro-family group Moms For Liberty—seen here attendng an event in Vero Beach, Florida, on Oct. 16, 2022—hosted a forum on the many failures of the New York City school system on Thursday night. (Photo: Giorgio Viera/AFP/Getty Images)
Moms for Liberty held an event in New York City on Thursday night to discuss and diagnose the woeful state of education in the Big Apple. Residents and local representatives were invited to take part in the education organization’s town hall on the Upper East Side and the follow-up discussion.
Moms for Liberty has been treated with hostility by left-wing groups in the city, so it was a full house for the event—not just inside the building, but outside, too.
A gaggle of protesters showed up to crowd the front of the building and chant slogans. The New York Police Department kept watch at the entrance and helpfully guided me to the door. The protesters held up a large sign “Keep NYC Fascist-Free!” as they blockaded the door and yelled at the people going inside.
As is its reflexive habit, the Left brands anyone who opposes their agenda as “fascist,” in this case Moms for Liberty. (Photo: Jarrett Stepman/The Daily Signal)
“This group is anti-LGBTQ, supports book bans, harasses teachers & school librarians, and has been labeled by [the Southern Poverty Law Center] a ‘far-right extremist organization,’” Levine wrote in a statement before the event took place.
#NOW Manhattan president @MarkLevineNYC joins protest against 'Moms for Liberty' townhall on the UES in NYC – "Exhibit A right here of what we are up against" he addressed the crowd outside. "Get Out of here!" an attendee of the event shouts in response. pic.twitter.com/pUCQYYx2KJ
As I left the event, one of the demonstrators—in a pink unicorn costume—followed me down the street. I was able to snap a picture of this person when I stopped and she/he/they/them—or whatever it was—said, “We don’t like you. You smell.” Needless to say, this was not the beginning of a Socratic dialogue.
As I left the @Moms4Liberty townhall I was approached by this furry, whose comment was “we don’t like you, you smell.” Some high minded rhetoric right there. The picture is very close up because she was right in my face https://t.co/o7hDdqtJC6pic.twitter.com/ogVn9GeGyR
I live in New York, so I’ve definitely been followed by much worse, but all I could think was: “That’s the best line you could come up with?”
For what it’s worth, the person in the pink unicorn costume was apparently not a “furry,” according to internet trolls. My apologies for not knowing the difference.
As for the actual event, the following are some of my takeaways from a panel discussion about the problems with New York City schools.
Poor Return on Education Investment
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice led a panel discussion about how New York City schools have failed children and parents alike.
“A third of the kids in the United States are reading on grade level. That’s atrocious, but here in New York City, where you spend about $40,000 a year on each child’s education, only a quarter of the children are reading on grade level,” she said in opening remarks.
Justice said that in New York, black and Hispanic students are particularly struggling, as only 13 in 100 are proficient in reading. That’s despite the New York City school district spending the most money per student compared with any other district in the nation.
Justice contrasted New York City’s record against that of Miami, which spends $11,000 per student, yet “40 out of 100 fourth graders are reading and math proficient.” She said that’s nothing to brag about, “but for heaven’s sake, right?”
The Moms for Liberty co-founder said that the results in New York City schools were declining even before the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, but there was a complete collapse during and afterward.
Misguided Focus on Identity Over Merit
Wai Wah Chin of the Chinese Americans Citizens Alliance of Greater New York spoke about how a focus on “equity” has moved the school system away from evaluating the individual skills and talents of students.
“Our schools should be providing the best education for the children as they are, and that means you cannot dispel and get rid of merit,” she said. “Merit must exist, because if you do not have merit, you do not have good education.”
Chin explained that she was referring specifically to academic merit—“reading, writing and arithmetic.”
“If you can’t do that, you’ve failed as a school,” she said.
Teaching students to be activists first before teaching students to think—Chin cited the people protesting outside—is a failure of education, she added.
“If you do not respect facts, and you do not respect logic, you are not capable of making the decisions that are important for yourself in life and in the world,” she continued. “And that’s what our schools must do: Provide that kind of environment so that you have facts and not ideology.”
Paul Rossi, a New York City teacher, followed up on Chin’s comments about ideology in the school system. He spoke about his previous teaching experience at Grace Church School, an elite New York private school. He said that the school pushes ideas such as “anti-racism, critical race theory, gender ideology, these progressive beliefs, which have really come through the universities and dominated education, because most of the people who go through the [education] schools and teachers are inculcated in these ideas.”
Rossi said that he teaches math, but that the ideology that dominates in schools denies that objectivity exists and calls objectivity an element of white supremacy. He said that he has seen a shift away from building character to a focus on group identity.
‘Fund Students, Not Systems’
Corey DeAngelis, the executive director of the Education Freedom Institute, spoke about policy solutions that could improve education in New York City. He explained that New York has a cap on the largely successful charter schools because “the Democratic Party is owned by the teachers unions. It’s that simple.”
Almost all the political campaign contributions from teachers unions go to Democrats, DeAngelis said, and that constitutes a “nonstop money-laundering operation.” He said that while New York is dominated by this political dynamic, there’s been a sea change in other states because teachers unions have overplayed their hand and “awakened a sleeping giant” of parents.
That has led to parents pulling money out of failing public schools and creating school choice programs, he explained. “We should fund students, not systems,” he said.
The education scholar spoke about how states such as Arizona have created Education Savings Accounts and other programs that have allowed parents to directly pay for the education they want for their child, whether that be a public school, a private school, a charter school, or a home-based education.
“The money follows the child,” he explained.
It’s Worse Than You Think
Nicholas Giordano, a professor of political science at Suffolk County Community College, spoke about how the education system has been transformed and how “it’s 10 times worse” than what most people think. He said that in his two decades of teaching, he’s noticed a pattern that students increasingly don’t have the knowledge they need when they enter higher education.
He said that he began instituting a citizenship exam on basic civics and history questions when students took his classes. He said that very few pass it.
“Students aren’t learning. They are simply being cycled through the system,” he said.
Giordano said that, according to national assessments, only 13% of students are proficient in history and just 23% are proficient in civics. He said that this failure has been the product of two main problems. The first is that parents became less involved in their children’s education. In many cases, both parents are working or the child comes from a single-parent household. He said that began to change during the COVID-19 lockdowns when the “veil” was lifted, and parents saw what was being taught in classrooms as a result of the switch to online instruction. Many people saw for the first time the “anti-Americanism” that has crept into K-12 instruction, he said.
That’s a huge problem, Giordano said, because as the Founding Fathers insisted, our “small-r” republican institutions must be nourished by an education grounded in furthering those institutions.
“Our education system should be linking us together. Instead, it divides us,” he said.
The Democrats who run California love “transitioning” kids, including chemically and surgically sterilizing them. But a courageous group of residents is betting California voters are less radical than their politicians and that the tide can turn against gender ideology even on the West Coast.
A proposed ballot initiative by Protect Kids California would put the Golden State’s radical “trans kids” agenda — which has previously been checked only by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s presidential ambition — before the people.
The initiative would enact three policies:
First, it would end the practice of government schools socially transitioning children without telling parents. Schools would be required to inform parents about mental health issues, including gender-identity issues, and to have parental permission before pretending a boy is a girl, or vice versa.
Second, the law would require that sex-specific spaces and sports be based on sex, rather than self-declared “gender identity.” Boys would no longer be allowed to participate in girls’ sports or share the girls’ locker room, showers, and other private spaces.
Finally, the law would prohibit medically transitioning children with chemicals, hormones, and surgeries in an impossible quest to change a child’s sex. Chemically castrating boys and amputating the healthy breasts of troubled adolescent girls would be illegal.
These worthy goals might seem impossible. Even as many other states have enacted such policies, California’s leaders have doubled down on radical gender ideology and transitioning children. But the organizers of the initiative point to polling to argue that California’s voters are on their side on this issue, even if Californians tend to vote for Democrats who are in the grip of gender ideology and the transgender lobby. Erin Friday, one of the leaders of the effort, is a lifelong Democrat, and she is convinced there are many more like her who find the transgender industry’s targeting of children abhorrent.
She may be right. The campaign’s website highlights polling showing that the public is with them, and in an email to me, Friday shared additional polling commissioned by the feminist Women’s Liberation Front showing overwhelming support for the child-protection policies this ballot initiative would enact.
This ballot initiative would protect children from outside California as well. As Friday has explained, California is a sanctuary state for sexual experiments on children. In the name of gender ideology, California now refuses to return runaways to their out-of-state parents, pays for minors to be chemically and surgically castrated, and shields doctors who flee to California after breaking the laws of other states. Winning in California is a victory for everyone.
Thus, California’s Democrat establishment will do everything it can to stop this. The state attorney general has already written a biased and inaccurate summary of the measure (the title line is literally “RESTRICTS RIGHTS OF TRANSGENDER YOUTH”) that by law is included on the petition pages. And additional resistance is sure to follow — for example, petition signatures will be rigorously scrutinized by people who otherwise denounce election-integrity measures as racist.
The debate over the measure will be ugly. Its opponents will undoubtedly resort to suicide threats early and often, declaring that this law will push kids to kill themselves. It won’t, but telling kids to take themselves hostage is the transgender movement’s main weapon. After all, the only harm that can come from not transitioning is self-harm. Furthermore, there is no good evidence that castrating or mutilating kids reduces suicides. And in other contexts, we recognize that constantly threatening suicide is manipulative and abusive.
The ugliness won’t end just because the election does. If this measure gets on the ballot and passes, there will be lawsuits. There will be protests that turn into riots. There will be promises of noncompliance from government officials and employees. But it will all be worth it.
If gender ideology goes down in California, it will fall everywhere. Even the most committed Democrats (and the most craven Republicans — looking at you, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine) will have to acknowledge that it is a political liability. And the collapse could be swift. Many people went along with radical gender ideology not out of conviction, but because they were afraid of being caught on the wrong side of the latest front in the cultural revolution. They will happily abandon it if their fear is taken away, and defeating transgender radicalism in California will do that.
There is work to do before that happy future is realized. The initiative has yet to qualify for the ballot, let alone pass. California residents can print out the petition, sign it, and mail it in. They can also volunteer. And everyone can donate to help fund the effort. Collecting more than a half-million valid signatures isn’t free, to say nothing of countering the mass of lies the media will tell about it.
But it is worth the attempt. 2023 brought a lot of victories in protecting children in Republican states from transgender insanity, but victory requires going on offense, even — especially — in California.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: Joe and Serena Wailes revealed last month that their 11-year-old daughter was assigned to share a bed with a boy who identifies as a transgender girl on an overnight school trip. Their story has led to more parents coming forward with similar allegations, according to a new demand letter first obtained by The Daily Signal.
“There has been an outpouring of support for the Waileses from the Jefferson County community,” writes Katherine Anderson, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom and director of ADF’s Center for Parental Rights. “We have been approached by many parents who are similarly concerned about your current policy and practice. We also discovered that what happened to the Wailes family was not an isolated incident within your district.”
“In fact,” she continues, “we have spoken with other families whose children were placed in the same room with children of the opposite sex at Outdoor Lab.”
Outdoor Lab is an outdoor education program in the Western United States where “students are immersed in an outdoor academic setting where they spend their time learning about themselves and how they fit into the world around them,” according to the program’s website.
The program, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Daily Signal, is “a distinct program within Jeffco Public Schools,” and engages about 5,000 sixth-grade students every year.
“As you know,” writes Anderson, “Outdoor Lab is a longstanding, highly anticipated, and required component of the sixth-grade curricula in JCPS.”
Anderson then revealed that ADF has received reports of sixth graders of the opposite sex being placed in the same cabin, as well as a high school counselor being placed in the same cabin as children of the opposite sex.
ADF shared with The Daily Signal that in the first scenario, sixth grade girls were placed in the same room as a sixth grade boy who identifies as a transgender girl. In the second scenario, an 18-year-old high school girl who identifies as a transgender boy was placed in the same room as sixth grade boys.
This incident involving the 18-year-old is particularly concerning, Anderson indicated, since “in addition to staying in the same cabin as sixth graders, counselors at Outdoor Lab are also in charge of supervising showers to ensure students do not take too long.”
Families are specifically asked not to visit their children during the week while they attend Outdoor Lab, according to the organization’s “Parent Packet & Packing List” materials, since this may contribute to homesickness.
Students also “do not have phone privileges,” the guidance notes.
Anderson highlighted this fact in the letter to the school district, saying: “Considering that students at Outdoor Lab cannot contact their parents during the trip, it would be up to an eleven-year-old to face this invasion of privacy alone.”
“Here,” she added, referencing the situation in which the 18-year-old biologically female counselor stayed in a cabin with sixth grade boys, “the child did not feel comfortable speaking up during the trip, and the parents did not discover this invasion of their child’s privacy until the trip ended. This cannot be the ‘individualized arrangement’ your policy envisions.”
In the Waileses’ case, their daughter was able to call her mother from the hotel bathroom to share that her bedmate was, in fact, a boy.
The Wailes family had called on the Colorado-based Jefferson County School Board and Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Tracy Dorland in early December to clarify “whether JCPS will continue this practice of intentionally withholding information about rooming accommodations from parents like the Waileses, who object to their children rooming with a student of the opposite sex, regardless of the other student’s gender identity.”
WATCH:
This practice renders it impossible for these parents to make informed decisions about their children’s privacy, upbringing, and participation in school-sponsored programs,” reads their December demand letter, which The Daily Signal previously reported.
“Additionally, our clients request information related to JB R-1 and the ability to opt out of this rooming policy for all future school trips.”
The Waileses describe how their daughter, who is in fifth grade, went on a JCPS-sponsored trip to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in June 2023. JCPS had repeatedly told parents that the boys and girls on the trip would be roomed on different floors—and chaperones told the students that boys would not even be allowed to visit the girls’ floor, as well as vice versa, according to the letter.
Serena Wailes also went on the trip, though she was not a chaperone.
The Waileses’ 11-year-old daughter, who is identified in the letter as “D.W.,” was assigned to a room with three other students, according to the demand letter. Two of these students were girls from her school, and the third student was a boy who identified as a girl (named in the letter as “K.E.M.”) who went to a different school.
D.W. and K.E.M were told that they would share a bed, and that evening, when the students were in their room together, K.E.M. reportedly revealed to the girls that he is a boy who identified as a girl.
“We were definitely not aware of that before we went on the trip,” Serena Wailes told The Daily Signal. The mother shared that this young boy was presenting as a girl, wearing girls’ clothing, and had longer hair.
Uncomfortable at the thought of sharing both a room and her bed with a boy, D.W. snuck into the bathroom and called her mother. Then she went downstairs and met her mom in the lobby to discuss the matter.
School chaperones called one of the trip leaders, Principal Ryan Lucas, who called the boy’s parents, according to the letter. “K.E.M.’s parents confirmed their child’s transgender gender identity and that K.E.M. was to be in ‘stealth mode,’ meaning students on the trip would not know about their child’s transgender status,” the letter reads.
After a good deal of trouble, chaperones finally agreed to move the male student, with a different female student, to another room.
“Throughout the entire evening, K.E.M.’s privacy and feelings were always the primary concern of JCPS employees,” the letter states. “After JCPS disregarded D.W.’s privacy and the Waileses’ parental rights, JCPS then silenced D.W., thus infringing on her freedom of speech, when a JCPS teacher told the three girls that they were not allowed to tell anyone that K.E.M. was transgender, even though K.E.M. voluntarily chose to share this information.”
According to the demand letter, the school district’s policy is, “in most cases,” to room students based on the gender they identify as, rather than their sex.
The Wailes parents have two fourth-grade children registered to attend a trip to New York, Washington, and Philadelphia in 2024, and they emphasize in their letter that the district must clarify its policies for room assignments for students, as well as parental ability to opt children out of sharing rooms with children of the opposite sex.
WATCH:
NEW: This week we sat down with Joe + Serena Wailes, the parents of an 11-year-old girl shocked to discover on her school trip that she had been assigned to share a bed with a boy who identified as a trans girl.
In the Thursday demand letter, ADF expresses concerns that the school district failed to state whether parents can opt their children out of any policy that rooms children by their gender identity rather than their biological sex.
Jeffco Public Schools had responded to ADF on Dec. 21, according to a letter reviewed by The Daily Signal, claiming that neither the supervising chaperones nor the private tour operator knew that the student in question was a boy who identified as a transgender girl.
ADF responds by asserting, “That’s not the relevant question here. This was a Jefferson County-sponsored trip, so the district’s knowledge, rather than that of the individual teachers on the trip, is pertinent.”
“Policy JB-R requires that the ‘school shall maintain a mandatory permanent student record that includes a student’s legal name and legal gender,’” ADF continues. “Therefore, even if the student ‘enrolled for the trip as a female,’ the district’s permanent record still reflects the student’s male sex. The district knew about the student’s sex and allowed the student’s parents to choose whether their child was roomed with male or female students. Our clients are merely asking for similar treatment. They would like the same opportunity to decide whether their daughter is roomed with male or female students.”
“Your stated policy allowed one family to make an informed decision beforehand, while the Waileses were not given that consideration,” the letter continues.
Parents Joe and Serena Wailes were horrified to discover that their 11-year-old daughter had been assigned to not only room with, but also to share a bed with, a boy on her school trip. (Photo: Screenshot/YouTube)
DENVER—Parents Joe and Serena Wailes were shocked and horrified to discover that their 11-year-old daughter had been assigned to not only room with, but also share a bed with, a boy on her school trip. That boy identified as a transgender girl, the Wailes say, and his parents had allegedly told the school district that he was operating under “stealth mode”—meaning that his gender identity was to be kept secret.
In an interview with The Daily Signal earlier this month, the Wailes shared their experience in detail—how their daughter felt, how the school trip chaperones handled the matter, and what they want from the school district moving forward.
Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, the Waileses are calling on the Colorado-based Jefferson County Board of Education and Jefferson County Public Schools to clarify “whether JCPS will continue this practice of intentionally withholding information about rooming accommodations from parents like the Waileses, who object to their children rooming with a student of the opposite sex, regardless of the other student’s gender identity.”
1. The four creators of the Charlie Brown Christmas special were veterans of the U.S. military.
Charles Schulz, the creator of Charlie Brown and the writer of the script for the Christmas special, was a U.S. Army combat veteran of World War II. The show’s producer, Lee Mendelson, served in the United States Air Force. Vince Guaraldi, who composed the music for the special, was a U.S. Army veteran, as was the program’s director and animator, Bill Melendez. When an interviewer asked Schulz what his proudest accomplishment was, Schulz pointed to a framed military award he kept on his studio wall — his Combat Infantryman’s Badge, which is awarded to infantrymen who have fought in active ground combat.
2. CBS executives were dismayed when they first screened ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’
The executives were shocked by the animation’s poor quality and by the show’s amateur voice talent. They were dismayed by the use of jazz music in a Christmas special and by the absence of a laugh track (something Schulz had refused to insert). The executives were particularly put off by the show’s overt religiosity (“The Bible thing scares us!”). They concluded by pointedly telling Lee Mendelson, the show’s producer, that they would not be ordering any more specials from him or Schulz.
3. Neil Reagan, President Ronald Reagan’s older brother, played a role in the special’s production.
In 1965 Neil Reagan, the younger brother of the future president, was plotting his brother’s first run for political office. Neil was also the West Coast manager of Coca-Cola’s advertising firm. When the TV special was in the pre-production stage, the adman was shown the storyboards for the holiday program and a rough version of the animation.
Reagan was aghast at the show’s slow plodding. He told Schulz and Mendelson, the show’s producer, that if he gave his honest opinion of the program to his superiors back in New York City, they would shut down the production immediately. Mendelson pleaded that the show would be much better once it had a soundtrack and when color was added to the animation. Reagan pondered for a long time before responding, “OK, it might cost me my job, but I’m not going to say anything.”
“A Charlie Brown Christmas” has become an iconic part of every Christmas season. (Photo by ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)
4. The Peanuts characters were very difficult to animate
Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” characters were incredibly difficult to render in animation. They had large round heads, making it difficult to gather them together in a scene without their oversized skulls banging into one another. Their arms couldn’t reach the top of their heads, restricting certain movements, and their short stubby legs made walking look awkward.
Ironically, the minimalism of Schulz’s drawing also made them more difficult to animate. Because there were so few reference points on their faces, if an eye were a little too far to the left or right, the character would look disfigured.
5. The special contains many continuity errors
For example, when Lucy approaches her psychiatric booth it has no snow on it, but when she arrives, she has to wipe away snow before sitting down to consult with Charlie Brown. In the same scene, her sign sometimes says “The Doctor is Real In” while at other times it says “The Doctor is In.”
In a later scene, Charlie Brown’s nose disappears when he is addressing Lucy and discussing the need for a Christmas tree. Also, at times, the sad Christmas tree has three branches, while at other times it has six or more.
6. In the climactic scene of ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas,’ Linus’s blanket plays a key but little-noticed role
During the special’s climactic scene, when Linus recites from the Gospel of Luke, he drops his security blanket at the exact moment he utters the words “fear not.” The moment is handled subtly, but it is rich with significance, both in the context of the character and the words being spoken.
Linus had been clinging to the blanket since its introduction into the comic strip on June 1, 1954. The words “fear not” or “be not afraid” are reportedly the most common phrases in the Bible, found 365 times in Scripture.
7. A Mexican immigrant directed and animated the special
Jose Cuauhtemoc “Bill” Melendez immigrated to Arizona with his mother and siblings as a young boy before relocating to Los Angeles. An excellent student, Melendez mistakenly thought that since he was not a U.S. citizen, he could not attend college at UCLA, so he went to work at a lumberyard.
His talent for drawing led him to the animation training program at Disney in the 1930s. Melendez was drafted into the Army during World War II where he was sworn in as a U.S. citizen. Melendez first animated the “Peanuts” characters for Ford commercials in the 1950s. He quickly developed a close friendship with Schulz and became the only person Schulz would ever entrust to animate his cartoon characters.
The cover of Michael Keane’s book, “Charlie Brown’s Christmas Miracle: The Inspiring, Untold Story of the Making of a Holiday Classic.”
8. The Golden Gate Bridge played an important role in the special’s soundtrack
In 1963, Mendelson was working on a documentary about Schulz and was desperately in need of finding music for the show’s soundtrack. While driving across the Golden Gate Bridge and listening to his car’s radio, he heard a captivating tune — “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” by jazz musician Vince Guaraldi.
Mendelson reached out to Guaraldi and asked him to compose the music for the documentary. Just a few days later, while Guaraldi himself was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, inspiration would strike the musician. He rushed home and sat down at his piano and played the tune that had entered his head. The melody became known as “Linus and Lucy” and is the signature song of the Peanuts franchise.
9. Schulz insisted on keeping Linus’s recitation from Scripture in the special, against objections
When Schulz proposed having Linus recite from the Gospel of Luke in the Christmas special, he was met with objections by both the producer, Mendelson, and the show’s director, Melendez. “We can’t do this, it’s too religious,” said Melendez. Mendelson agreed, arguing that religion didn’t belong in a cartoon.
Ironically, the minimalism of Schulz’s drawing also made them more difficult to animate. Because there were so few reference points on their faces, if an eye were a little too far to the left or right, the character would look disfigured.
Schulz’s proposed scene would expose the special to attacks from both religious and non-religious viewers. Churchgoers might object that animating from the Bible and having its sacred verses spoken by cartoon characters was sacrilegious. Those who were less religious might be turned off by what they perceived to be preachy moralizing. Schulz, however, was insistent. “If we don’t do it, who will?” he asked.
10. Some of the child actors were too young to read their scripts
Some of the children who were the voice talent for the special, when handed their scripts with their lines of dialogue, stared back at Melendez, the special’s director, in stunned silence. They had not yet learned how to read.
This necessitated Melendez having to recite the lines to his young talent, and then having each actor repeat the words back. At times, a single word had to be broken down into bite-sized syllables, even for the actors who could read. The end result was that much of the dialogue in the special has an uneven, choppy cadence to it.
The harms social media poses to children are well documented. People agree that kids shouldn’t be exposed to certain content. Here’s an age verification system that wouldn’t infringe on the First Amendment. (Photo: Flashpop/Getty Images)
A bipartisan group of senators is about to take Big Tech CEOs to task on Jan. 31, 2024, by having them publicly address their failures to protect kids online. And the CEOs need to! The harms social media poses to children are well documented and, at this point, indisputable—even by the companies themselves.
In it, he writes that YouTube “can’t do it alone … [and] support[s] policymakers, families, researchers, companies, and experts coming together to define a set of consistent standards for companies serving young people online.” He then advocates for policies that provide more parental rights, age-appropriate content for minors, and “appropriate safeguards.”
Even with this call for legislation, policymakers are finding it hard to impose basic measures, such as age restriction requirements to protect kids using these services.
Age restrictions on a deliberately addictive product that targets children should be a no-brainer. Various levels of government impose age restrictions on these types of offerings all the time. For example, kids can’t get tattoos or piercings without parental consent. Or attend movies that are rated R or PG-13. Or purchase video games rated “M.” But somehow, social media services are distinct, even though they trigger a similar addictive response as nicotine withdrawaland gambling.
So, why haven’t we done it?
State legislatures are making unforced errors by not considering the full internet stack—e.g., the operating system, the app store, or the app—when imposing such measures. Arkansas’ social media law is a prime example of an unforced error. Its law would have required some, but not all, social media companies to verify the age of their users. The law didn’t apply to YouTube, for example.
Failing to take a holistic approach when crafting legislation for the social media market unnecessarily opened the state up to a First Amendment challenge. This is because for the state to require such a measure, it would have to show that the requirement is both “narrowly tailored” to not impact adult users’ speech and also necessary to address the harms alleged.
According to federal District Court Judge Timothy Brooks, the state failed because excluding some social media companies made little sense if the law’s stated goal is to protect kids from the harms social media imparts. Brooks pointed out that even though “YouTube is not regulated by [Arkansas social media law],” the state oddly cited YouTube as being particularly harmful to children and “[a]mong all types of online platforms, YouTube was the most widely used by children.”
So, if Arkansas’ law doesn’t apply to YouTube, how can the state justify an imposition on adult speech on services that aren’t even favored by most children?
But it’s not all bad news. Brooks may have provided legislatures a path forward to get age verification without implicating the First Amendment—by going through the app stores.
Brooks seemed to be more upset that Arkansas’ law imposed duties on social media companies rather than on Google and Apple, the companies that run two of the biggest app stores on the internet. Throughout his opinion, he noted that Apple and Google provide parents several tools to shield kids from certain apps and wondered why the state needed to go through social media platforms to do what the app stores ought to.
He’s got a point. Social media apps rely on users to self-certify their age when they create an account, but they can’t fully confirm that the user is being truthful—whereas Apple and Google know the precise age of the owner of the device. How? Well, their software is integrated at every level of the mobile device. They own the two dominant mobile operating systems (i.e., iOS and Android, respectively), app stores (i.e., the App Store and Play Store), and browsers (i.e., Safari and Chrome).
Candidly, not including Apple and Google in age verification legislation makes little sense, because doing so would almost certainly resolve the First Amendment concern.
Why? Because all the law would have to require is for Apple and Google to give the app a thumbs up or thumbs down when a social media app asks to verify the device is owned by an adult or a child. The social media company would no longer have to guess how old the user is, which limits, or even eliminates, the risk of denying an adult the ability to engage on American social media platforms.
What’s more, going through the app stores makes parental consent more doable, because, as the court noted, parents have more control over the device than the apps themselves and the app stores are already required to obtain express parental consent for in-app purchases to comply with consent decrees from the Federal Trade Commission.
If the child’s device’s app store prohibits the child from downloading apps without a parent’s credentials (e.g., entering a password, providing a fingerprint, or using facial recognition), then parents immediately get more agency over the apps their children can access.
Better yet, it wouldn’t require the consumer to provide more information about the user to social media companies. If social media companies could simply send a request to the device (leveraging the data already available from the device’s operating system) to confirm (almost instantaneously) that a person is above the age of 18, then two things occur: 1) The user doesn’t provide more data other than what he has already provided to Apple or Google; and 2) the social media company only gets a thumbs up or a thumbs down in response to its inquiry, which limits the amount of new information the company receives.
State legislators should learn from these mistakes in order to effectively protect kids online. The biggest lesson so far is to look to both the apps and the app stores when it comes to age restrictions.
As Americans celebrate the holidays with their families, the Biden administration is laying the groundwork to destroy families by taking children away from their parents in order to sterilize and sexually mutilate them.
The Biden administration has proposed new rules for foster care, which would treat any parent rejecting LGBT ideology as a child abuser. The public comment deadline is today, the Monday after Thanksgiving, a bureaucratic middle finger to the public it is supposed to serve. The proposed regulations state that “to be considered a safe and appropriate placement, a provider is expected to utilize the child’s identified pronouns, chosen name, and allow the child to dress in an age-appropriate manner that the child believes reflects their self-identified gender identity and expression.” In short, those who don’t believe the superstition that a child can somehow be born into the wrong body are, per the Biden administration, unfit to be foster parents.
This won’t stop with foster parents.
Cutting Christians and other dissenters from the sexual revolution out of the foster care system is only the start. Given the government control of the foster care system, this is a convenient place for the left to establish the precedent that rejecting gender ideology and the rest of the LGBT movement’s dogmas is abusive and harmful to children and that those who do so are unfit parents. Once they have set this point, they’ll expand it to everyone else — after all, if it’s abuse for foster parents, it’s abuse for biological parents as well.
This should not be a surprise. Democrats have been suggesting taking children away from “non-affirming” parents for years now, but they have thus far been too scared to go through with it. But the folks in Biden’s administration — led by Babylon Bee “Man of the Year” Rachel Levine — are going to see if they can get the ball rolling this time.
The justification for these new rules is based on the usual junkscience, created and pushed by activist organizations and those whose reputations and livelihoods depend upon validating transitioning children. For example, the Biden administration repeatedly cites a survey by the activists at The Trevor Project. This survey consisted of a self-selected online sample. The Biden administration wants to keep kids away from loving homes because the science told them to — the science of a self-selected online survey created by an activist group.
These sorts of garbage studies are necessary for the LGBT movement to justify itself, especially as it has shifted to an obsession with “LGBT youth.” They long ago dropped the pretense that this is about consenting adults, or that they seek some sort of live-and-let-live settlement. Rather, they are determined to claim other people’s children for themselves and their movement.
Trying to take children away from “non-affirming” parents is the predictable result of the lies that children are born LGBT, and that sexual and gender identities are the essential core of our being. The belief that nothing is more authentic or important than sexual desire and “gender identity” is what lies behind the LGBT movement’s fanatical drive to groom other people’s children. It is why educators are eager to push sexually explicit material onto even very young children. It is why schools fill kids’ minds with gender ideology, and then encourage them to transition without telling their parents. And it is why the left has wholeheartedly embraced medically “transitioning” children, sometimes starting before they are even teenagers.
This wrongly termed “gender-affirming care” is incredibly abnormal medicine. It attempts to treat psychological distress by radically remaking the patient’s body in a way that is completely medically unnecessary, indeed, medically harmful. As the proposed Biden administration rules make clear, there is no objective physical or psychological diagnosis for being transgender; rather, it is a purely subjective, self-diagnosed identity — a “self-identified gender identity and expression.” And there is never any medical need to transition.
When someone who identifies as transgender does not chemically and surgically transition, his or her body continues its natural, healthy development and functioning. The only harm that can come from not transitioning is self-harm, which is why the transgender movement has become totally reliant on threats of suicide. This suicide narrative is used to rush children into transition, with almost all the power centers of our nation pushing them on. But studies show that children overwhelmingly desist from transgender identification if given time and counseling. The Biden administration nonetheless relies on threats of self-harm in making its case for the proposed rules for foster care. It is pure hostage-taking, done to enable the sterilization and sexual mutilation of children on the superstition that they are being born into the wrong bodies.
In short, the Biden administration plans to treat parents who object to this grotesque medical malpractice as child abuse. They are coming for your children, and they aren’t bothering to hide it anymore.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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.
Britain’s High Court effectively executed a sick 8-month-old girl early Monday morning.
Dean Gregory and Claire Staniforth of Derbyshire fought desperately in recent weeks to see that their daughter, Indi Gregory, would continue receiving treatment for her mitochondrial disorder or potentially undergo experimental treatment abroad so that they could spend more time with her.
Hope came in the form of support from Italy, not just from the Vatican but from the government, which gave Gregory citizenship and paved the way for her to be treated at the Vatican’s Bambino Gesu Children’s Hospital in Rome.
Despite international pressure, a fully comped alternative, and the parents’ desperate pleas, England’s High Court determined that Gregory would be better off dead sooner rather than later.
In a statement released by #IndiGregory 's father, Dean Gregory, during the night, he said:
"Indi's life ended at 01.45am. Claire and I are angry heartbroken and ashamed. The NHS and the Courts not only took away her chance to live a longer life, but they also took away Indi's… pic.twitter.com/IdbJRuzI2k
Indi Gregory was born on February 24 with a rare degenerative mitochondrial disease that saps energy.
The staff at Queen’s Medical Center in Nottingham recently decided to give up on helping the girl and sought to take her off life support, noting that death was in the girl’s best interests, reported the BBC.
High Court Justice Robert Peel granted the medical center’s application to stop life support in October, suggesting that despite the parents’ moving “belief in Indi’s resilience, courage, and fortitude,” the medical evidence justifying termination was “unanimous and clear.”
Peel’s ruling cleared the way for the physicians’ plan to wean the girl off of intubation and let her die, “at home or at a hospice.”
Gregory’s parents were evidently unwilling to let a London judge and some masked strangers determine the fate of their daughter.
“The doctors painted a terribly bleak and negative picture of Indi’s condition during court proceedings,” said the girl’s father. “Indi can definitely experience happiness. She cries like a normal baby. … We know she is disabled, but you don’t just let disabled people die. We just want to give her a chance.”
With the backing of the British advocacy group Christian Concern, Gregory and Staniforth made repeated attempts to have their little girl moved to a hospital that might actually try to keep her alive. The parents attempted to persuade Court of Appeal judges in London as well as judges at the European Court of Human Rights in France to overturn the fatal decision, reported the Telegraph.
Italy ultimately intervened, granting Gregory citizenship on Nov. 6 and agreeing to cover the cost of Indi’s medical treatment at the Vatican’s pediatric hospital. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni pledged to do what she could to “defend her life” and pressured Britain’s lord chancellor to help facilitate the girl’s transfer to Rome.
Simone Pillon, a lawyer and former senator who helped secure a spot for Indi Gregory at the Vatican hospital, said in a statement, “A place is ready and waiting for Indi at a leading paediatric hospital, which will be funded by the Italian government. I hope there will be no further delay in the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust cooperating with the specialist Air Ambulance Service and to work with the family rather than cruelly denying them this chance.”
On Thursday, the girl’s Italian guardian, the consul in Manchester, Matteo Corradini, reportedly made a plea to the U.K. High Court, calling on Justice Robert Peel to cede the case to him under Article Article 9§2 of the 1996 Hague Convention.
The next day, the High Court ruled that the Italian efforts to save the child from the British health care system were “wholly misconceived” and that the baby’s life support had to be removed “immediately,” reported the Catholic News Agency.
Dean Gregory responded to the ruling, saying, “Claire and I are again disgusted by another one-sided decision from the judges and the Trust. The whole world is watching and is shocked at how we have been treated.”
“This feels like the latest kick in the teeth, and we will not give up fighting for our daughter’s chance to live until the end,” added Gregory.
Justices Peter Jackson, Eleanor King, and Andrew Moylan all denied the distraught parents the ability to appeal the ruling, thereby sealing Indi Gregory’s fate.
On Sunday, Christian Concern indicated that the baby had been transferred from Queen’s Medical Care Center to a hospice, apparently with a security escort and police presence.
Indi had been moved to a hospice as opposed to home because Justice Peel reneged on his earlier order last Wednesday.
“Indi’s life ended at 01:45. Claire and I are angry, heartbroken and ashamed,” said Dean Gregory. “The NHS and the courts not only took away her chance to live a longer life, but they also took away Indi’s dignity to pass away in the family home where she belonged.”
“They did succeed in taking Indi’s body and dignity, but they can never take her soul. They tried to get rid of Indi without anybody knowing, but we made sure she would be remembered forever. I knew she was special from the day she was born,” added Gregory.
The grieving father indicated that Indi ultimately passed in her mother’s arms.
While not religious, Dean Gregory had Indi baptized in September, telling an Italian newspaper, “When I was in court, I felt as if hell pulled at me.”
“I thought that if hell exists, then heaven must exist too,” said the father, noting he wanted his daughter to go to heaven.
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Last week in Denver, several hundred people gathered in person for the Genspect conference, “The Bigger Picture,” while many more from all over the world joined online. Genspect’s founder, Stella O’Malley, has the intentional strategy of hosting their annual conference at the same time and in the same location as the annual World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) meeting.
Last year they gathered in Killarney, Ireland, when WPATH met there, and next year they will host their gathering in Lisbon, Portugal, piggybacking off of the WPATH dates and location. It’s an interesting strategy offering WPATH attendees to come to Genspect’s sessions for free whereby they can engage with a different perspective, as well as putting WPATH on notice that there is a growing movement of those who want to offer a “healthy approach to sex and gender.”
I was unable to attend their gathering last year in Ireland, but when O’Malley invited me to speak at the Denver conference, I was happy to accept. The speaker’s list was a who’s who of those fighting gender ideology, some for many years.
On the Front Lines of the Gender Wars
Michael Shellenberger opened the conference with a bold claim that time is up for WPATH and that soon he would release his “WPATH files” on his Substack, where he will show the receipts he has on the pseudoscientific standards of care and practices of WPATH. Amid robust applauses, attendees were encouraged to post on X using #TimesUpWPATH. A lifelong member of the Democrat Party, he lamented how far the left has fallen from the principles that drew him to that party.
Highlights for me were hearing from the brilliant Leor Sapir on “Institutional Capture (How gender ideology has been embedded within America).” Sapir chronicled Obama’s 2010 anti-bullying initiative, which was at first sex-based directed, and then expanded in 2011 to include gender language in the antibullying initiative.
Following this was the 2015 letter from James Ferg Cadima in the Office of Civil Rights, stating, “The Department’s Title IX regulations permit schools to provide sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, athletic teams, and single-sex classes under certain circumstances. When a school elects to separate or treat students differently on the basis of sex in those situations, a school generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”
Wonder how America got to this place? Perhaps a well-intentioned initiative to combat bullying quickly led us down the path where boys can have access to spaces that were once protected for girls.
Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright and scientist Heather Heying did an excellent job, patiently and thoroughly stating the obvious, that there remain only two sexes no matter what others assert. They marveled at the fact that even once-trusted scientific journals are now claiming that “The idea of two sexes is overly simplistic.”
Two mothers, January Littlejohn and Erin Friday, gave impassioned speeches about their daughters who believed the lie that they were born in the wrong body. Littlejohn spoke about her daughter’s middle school working behind their back to encourage this idea and talked about her decision to bring forth a lawsuit, restoring rights and protections to parents over their own children.
Friday, an attorney by training who works with Our Duty, had many in tears using Hans Christian Anderson’s story of “The Snow Queen” to parallel her own efforts to save her daughter from the evils of gender ideology. She is a force in the state of California, fighting laws passed by Gov. Gavin Newsom while trying to raise funds to get initiatives on the ballot to put before voters which will protect children and parental rights. She appealed to the audience that if the transing of children can be stopped in California this will have an enormous positive effect across the whole country.
Stories of Destransitioning and Whistleblowers
Any conference like the one hosted by Genspect naturally needs to include the voices of those most harmed by “gender affirmation therapy,” those who transitioned and have now detransitioned once they realized their decision to transition didn’t fix any of their mental health issues, and as is often the case, made things worse. Chloe Cole and Prisha Mosley both spoke about their deeply personal experiences. Many other detransitioners attended the conference as well. It was wonderful to see how their tragic stories have brought them together in the spirit of camaraderie.
And who doesn’t love a good whistleblower story like Jamie Reed? Reed blew up the internet back in February with her expose, “I thought I was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.”
Since 2018, Reed served as a case manager at Washington University, in their Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, until she came to the realization that she could no longer condone the treatment children were receiving. Her remarks at Genspect were a rallying cry for the political left to wake up and stop harming children. As a lifelong leftist, she implored the audience not to give up on the left, but to help them return to principles.
The title of my own talk — “Transgender Assisted Reproduction: where is this going?” — was a convergence on my years of work in assisted reproductive technology and how this technology will most likely be needed by trans-identifying people, especially children who are fast-tracked to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
When I first found out that children were being offered fertility preservation procedures, knowing
that “gender affirmation care” harms natural and normal fertility, I began speaking up and producing documentary films about the lack of medical ethics and evidence-based medicine supporting these practices. Pre-puberty, children are offered to cryopreserve their ovarian or testicular tissue because their gametes, (ova and sperm) are not yet mature. Post-puberty, the child will have mature ova and sperm, so they are offered to freeze and bank their gametes.
The data is clear. Most assisted reproductive technology cycles fail. Data is coming out about the harms and risks to children being created by these technologies. The maxim, “First, Do No Harm” is being ignored in offering hope of future children, when in fact this is considered an experimental procedure with no data on this population. From the audience’s reactions and comments, it was clear that this is a whole new level of doubling down on harming children to advance an ideology that ignores biological reality, evidence-based medicine, and medical ethics.
Times up, WPATH.
Jennifer Lahl, MA, BSN, RN, is a filmmaker and founder of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. She is on X @JenniferLahl
A female Massachusetts high school field hockey player was sent to the hospital Thursday for “significant facial and dental injuries” during a state tournament game after a male on the opposing team hit her in the face with a field hockey ball. In the video circulating social media, viewers can see the male player (No. 2) hit the ball, which launches up and hits his unnamed female opponent in the mouth. After the hit, the girl is heard screaming while her teammates look on with their hands laced over their mouths in shock.
The game was between the number No. 12 Swampscott Big Blue and the No. 21 Dighton-Rehoboth Falcons.
It's reported that male player (#2 for Swampscott) knocked the teeth out of female player. Males are allowed to play on female teams in MA because of the "equal play act"
According to the Media Research Center, the male player in question is Sawyer Groothuis, who plays for Swampscott and is a “Northeastern Conference All-Star in the women’s league.” The Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association handbook effectively allows for men to compete in women’s sports and vice versa.
While speaking with the media, Dighton-Rehoboth Superintendent Bill Runey called for the MIAA to take a “renewed approach” to protecting student athletes, but stopped short of saying men should be prohibited from competing in women’s sports.
Rather than highlight the unnamed female players’ injury, at least one local news outlet completely ignored the egregious nature of a man dominating Thursday’s game. In its brief “roundup” of local sporting events, for example, ItemLive ran with the headline, “Big Blue, big-time performance from Groothuis,” and didn’t even mention Groothuis sending the opposing female player to the hospital.
“Swampscott led at the break thanks to a goal from Northeastern Conference All-Star Sawyer Groothuis,” the article reads. “The Big Blue had a corner and the ball was loose in front of the goal. Groothuis was quickest to react, and poked it home for the early cushion. In the second half, it was Groothuis again finding the back of the net and sealing the game.”
You’d like to believe that a girl screaming out in agony and being sent to the hospital after getting a ball to the face would warrant at least brief mention, if not a paragraph. Especially when considering that the ItemLive write-up of the game is about Groothuis and his performance.
But at the end of the day, many local media outlets are just as bad at their jobs as their national counterparts. It doesn’t matter that the aforementioned female athlete got knocked out of a state tournament game because a male decided he wanted to impose his will on women’s athletics. All that matters is advancing the leftist agenda — no matter what.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
When a tragedy happens, there are inevitably a rush of “how to talk to your children…” articles about how to break down what happened into manageable, kid-appropriate language.
Jews right now are facing a different issue: how not to talk to your kids about what happened on October 7th when it’s all you want to talk about.
How do we move on with life, yell at the kids to put on their shoes or do their homework, while also hugging them too often in our despair for the people whose lives cannot move on.
We are consumed by it. Jews around the world, who don’t know each other, are all posting the same thing. We haven’t slept since that Saturday. We see each other and our eyes are wide saucers, dark circles, full of pain. We refresh the news and absorb new, horrifying, details.
How do we protect our children from our despair and rage but also our fear?
We consider where we can no longer send our Jewish children to college, which countries we can no longer visit. We pass around the familiar stories of Jewish-owned businesses targeted, Jews shouted at, Jews chased, Jews beaten. We parse which friends are suddenly not. We think about which of our neighbors would happily load us on the train.
Pro-Hamas protesters at Harvard surround Jewish student and shout “Shame” “Shame” “Shame” pic.twitter.com/wy4n64KcQ8
My own children are blessedly too young for most of it. They know something bad happened and they know Israel is at war. The eldest, at 13, knows there was an attack in southern Israel where many died, knows hostages were taken but not much else.
I don’t want her to know about the rapes, the details I can’t unknow about the way children who look just like her were killed. In a few years she will be going to music festivals. I don’t want her to live a life of fear, worried that someone is coming to kill her. I don’t want her to know what monsters live on the earth with us and what they are capable of doing.
Our sons are 10 and 7. The eldest boy is a history buff. He knows about historical atrocities. He’s read about torture. But he’s still a baby who calls for me when he’s sick, reaches for me when he’s hurt. I don’t want him knowing that kids were stolen while screaming for their mama, that their parents could not save them. I don’t want him to hear that parents were killed in front of their children and children in front of their parents. And that’s before the truly gruesome particulars. I don’t want him to also not be able to sleep at night thinking of beheaded, burned, baked babies. I want him to believe it when I say I will always protect them, that no one is getting by me. I want to believe it too.
The youngest is too young for any of it. Israel is a faraway land he doesn’t know. He knows he has family there but still can’t quite put together who is related to who. His grandmother’s twin, her husband, her children and grandchildren, we go over the connections to him. He doesn’t know Israel is a safe haven for Jews around the world who are just like him. I’ll tell him, someday, about the hatred and the violence, but when I look at his sweet, innocent face, I think “not yet.”
Not telling them anything is no cure either. Recently a Jewish acquaintance wrote a long piece about how Israel just doesn’t matter to him. I knew before he noted it that his family had been in America since the turn of the last century. Those are always the Jews shrugging their shoulders. They did not experience the Holocaust and they also did not know pogroms in Russia, mass graves in Ukraine, murder and expulsion from Arab states. They have lived ensconced in a safety and security that has simply never been the norm for Jews. So sure, who needs Israel, pass the lox.
🚨 Breaking: Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad says they will repeat October 7-like massacres until Israel is annihilated.
I will have failed as a parent if that is my child. It’s my life goal to not raise my children to feel so blindly privileged. It was the luckiest twist of fate that they were born Jews in America and I will not let them forget that.
I want to tell them the truth, that we’re mostly alone in this world, that most people will not stand up for you. That will include their fellow Jews who had spoken up for others, posted all the right things, but when they see their own comrades are against them, they will quiet and shrink from view until they nearly disappear. Do not count on these Jews. Remember that there are always Jews who imagine they will be killed last. They won’t be. It’s a lesson they never seem to learn.
But if you do life right, there will be people who do reach out to you in bad times like these and offer support. They will pray for you, offer you safety should you need it, say the words to defend you and feel your fear.
I don’t say all this. I tell them for the 5th time to get their cleats on and to put their plate in the sink. I try not to show the darkness I’m feeling. They’ll know it all someday. It can wait.
Karol Markowicz is a columnist for the New York Post and writes frequently for Fox News Opinion. She has also written for Time, USA Today, The Observer, Heat Street, Federalist, Daily Beast and other publications. She is the co-author of the new book, “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.” Follow her on Twitter @Karol.
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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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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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