President Joe Biden took another ax to American energy Wednesday with the cancellation of Trump-era leases for oil and gas development in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In 2017 through the landmark Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Congress opened up a 1.6-million-acre patch along Alaska’s north coast for drilling leases. The section amounts to less than 10 percent of the entire refuge, which spans 19.6 million acres in northeast Alaska and is about the size of South Carolina.
“My Administration is canceling all remaining oil and gas leases issued under the last administration in the Arctic Refuge and proposing to protect 13 million acres in the Western Arctic,” Biden wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “There’s more to do,” he added ominously.
Biden previously paused leases in 2021 while their environmental effects were assessed — months after signing an executive order on his first day in office to halt any new drilling leases on public land. In August, a federal judge upheld the administration’s pause on development in the region over Alaskans’ objections.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland celebrated the cancellation of leases in a Wednesday press release.
“President Biden is delivering on the most ambitious climate and conservation agenda in history,” Haaland said. “The steps we are taking today further that commitment, based on the best available science and in recognition of the Indigenous Knowledge of the original stewards of this area, to safeguard our public lands for future generations.” The indigenous tribe closest to the area in question, however, only turned against drilling after unsuccessfully trying to lease out its own land for oil and gas development.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates between 4.3 and 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil remain underneath the frozen tundra of the north slope’s refuge.
The decision to terminate leases issued under President Donald Trump follows Biden’s order in March to choke off another 16 million acres of Alaskan territory from oil and gas development. Biden has made locking up 30 percent of the nation’s land and waterways by 2030 a top White House priority.
“Once again, the Biden administration has shown it cares nothing about following the law when it comes to its climate crusade,” Rick Whitbeck, the Alaska State Director for Power the Future, told The Federalist. “Canceling fully-executed leases and putting congressionally-authorized development areas off-limits only weakens America’s domestic energy situation. You have to wonder who is pulling the strings: OPEC? Russia? China?”
Biden has routinely turned to Middle Eastern nations to ramp up oil production nearly every time oil prices rise.
Republican Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who’s been repeatedly frustrated by the administration’s antagonism towards development in his state, blasted the latest episode of Washington interference Wednesday.
“Federal agencies don’t get to rewrite laws, and that is exactly what the Department of the Interior is trying to do here,” Dunleavy said. “We will fight for Alaska’s right to develop its own resources and will be turning to the courts to correct the Biden administration’s wrong.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Automatic voter registration (AVR) may sound obscure, but it’s a fast track to permanent Democrat power — so, naturally, activists are working around the clock to pass it in the states and Congress.
Modern elections are usually won by the party that turns out the bigger base. Left-wing strategists believe their victory hinges on astronomically high Democratic turnout. Whether that’s true or not matters less than their perception that it worked to oust President Donald Trump in 2020 and saved the left from catastrophe in the 2022 midterms, even when Republicans won the popular vote nationwide by a bigger percentage margin than Hillary Clinton won in 2016.
Under normal rules, eligible Americans must register to vote on their own initiative, usually at their county registrar or online through the state motor vehicle department. It’s a simple, fair thing to ask people to show an interest in voting and then verify their identity before they cast a ballot; that’s how our country has run elections for nearly 250 years.
AVR transforms that opt-in system into an opt-out mess by adding virtually everyone with a heartbeat to state voter rolls, instantly and dramatically expanding the pool of registered voters for the left to cynically tap into. Don’t want to be added to a publicly accessible list? Too bad — it’s on you to take the initiative to unregister, Democrats say.
How many voters are we talking about? 158 million ballots were cast in 2020. Yet Demos, the think tank of the far left and an AVR champion, estimates there are as many as 77 million eligible-but-unregistered individuals nationwide — folks who couldlawfully vote but may notuntil they’re registered to vote in their respective states. Not every one of them would support Democrats if registered, of course, but even winning a fraction would be enough to ensure Democratic presidential wins for a generation or longer. That’s why AVR is supported by the Brennan Center, the origin of the left’s most odious election “reforms,” and the Center for American Progress, which boasted in 2018 that AVR could add 22 million newly registered voters nationwide in just its first year. Note that Minnesota’s recent election law includes AVR alongside “non-English voting materials” and the pre-registration of 16-year-olds to vote. To hear leftists crow, you’d think the United States never ran a free election in centuries without AVR laws. The LGBT Movement Advancement Project, which dinks red states for their voter ID laws, considers AVR essential to the health of a state’s “democracy.”
Conservatives have been too shortsighted to pay attention, but leftists have been tapping this goldmine for years. Of the 23 states with AVR laws, only three are consistently run by Republicans: Georgia, West Virginia, and Alaska. Michigan enacted AVR in 2018 after a lobbying campaign by the ACLU, Sierra Club, United Auto Workers, and socialist group Our Revolution. In my home state of Virginia, where legislators are capped on the number of bills they may introduce in a single session, Democrats made introducing AVR a top priority when they held total power in 2020. It passed on a partisan split.
Incoming congressional Democrats, fresh from retaking the House of Representatives in 2018, demanded Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi, D–Calif., “expand automatic voter registration across the country” as part of their “upcoming democracy bill.” They got their wish with the 2019 “Voting Rights Advancement Act,” then again with the 2021 “For the People Act” and “Automatic Voter Registration Act,” and most recently with the 2023 “Freedom to Vote Act.”
Recall that running elections and maintaining voter rolls are the duty of the states, not Uncle Sam, yet Democrats would force all 50 states to severely bloat their voter files. America’s voter rolls are already in bad shape, despite (mostly red) states’ best efforts to clean them up.
Georgia recently announced it removed 432,000 inactive voters from its rolls since 2021. Virginia removed 114,000 inactive voters in 2021; Oklahoma another 90,000 in 2019; Kentucky dropped 127,000 in 2023; Arkansas may remove 300,000 inactive voters this year; Pennsylvania dropped 180,000 in 2023; and Rhode Island removed another 60,000 inactive voters earlier this year. Texas and Mississippi are weighing bills that would allow them to more aggressively cull inactive voters from their rolls.
States are required by law to keep accurate voter files, to the left’s chagrin. Ohio, which culled 116,000 inactive voters from its rolls in 2021, knows best how much leftists loathe what they call “voter purges.” In 2017, then-attorney general Eric Holder tried to block Ohio from removing inactive voters as one of the last acts of the Obama administration — only to lose the next year in a landmark Supreme Court ruling.
The truth is obvious: Democrats don’t want accurate voter rolls; they want swollen voter rolls. Left-wing NPR admits as much. This is bad election policy, and it isn’t cheap. Nevada’s AVR policy cost taxpayers $4.8 million to implement, plus more to maintain it.
It’s no surprise that the left’s big-money donors are in on the action. We’ve traced hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2017 to implementing AVR in the states from the Tides Foundation, Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, the Joyce Foundation (whose board once included then-Sen. Barack Obama), and the Carnegie Corporation. One six-figure Carnegie grant to the University of Southern California is even tagged for studying “the state-level impact of automatic voter registration … [on] the national Latino electorate.”
For Republicans, fighting AVR is a no-brainer. To the detriment of election integrity, Congress and the states have already made registering to vote and casting a ballot extremely easy. What we need are cleaner voter rolls and more secure elections, not a public subsidy for the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote machine.
Hayden Ludwig is director of research for Restoration of America.
Mike Pence lashed out Monday at President Joe Biden after a chilling Wall Street Journal report revealed a combined Russian and Chinese naval force had last week patrolled the Alaskan coast just outside U.S. territorial waters.
The fleet — the largest such flotilla to approach American shores — was made up of 11 Russian and Chinese ships, and was shadowed by four U.S. destroyers and P-8 Poseidon aircraft, the Journal reported.
The former vice president in the Trump administration — now a 2024 GOP presidential contender — blamed the incident on Biden’s weak leadership.
“Under President Biden, Russia and China threaten to conquer their neighbors & their new Axis is now operating together off the American coast. China & Russia & their ‘no limits’ partnership now conducts joint blue water naval operations off the American coast & the arctic north,” Pence wrote on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter.
“America needs a new Commander-in-Chief who understands the threat and will build a much bigger navy, new shipyards and a military fitted to the widening threats of the 21st Century. The enemies of freedom only understand strength,” Pence wrote.
The blatant aggression comes amid heightened tensions between the United States and China and Russia, particularly surrounding Taiwan and Ukraine, The Hill noted.
The Journal reported a spokesperson for the U.S. Northern Command confirmed the stunning report, but didn’t provide details on the number of ships or the precise location of the Chinese and Russian ships.
“Air and maritime assets under our commands conducted operations to assure the defense of the United States and Canada. The patrol remained in international waters and was not considered a threat,” the official told the Journal.
Alaska’s GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan applauded the U.S. response amid a “new era of authoritarian aggression,” the news outlet reported.
According to the Journal, Russia’s Defense Ministry on Friday said Russian and Chinese vessels had carried out drills involving communications training, helicopter landings and takeoffs from the decks of each other’s ships — and in a joint anti-submarine exercise in which a mock target was detected and destroyed.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington told the Journal the patrol wasn’t aimed at Washington.
“According to the annual cooperation plan between the Chinese and Russian militaries, naval vessels of the two countries have recently conducted joint maritime patrols in relevant waters in the western and northern Pacific Ocean. This action is not targeted at any third party and has nothing to do with the current international and regional situation,” said the Chinese embassy spokesman, Liu Pengyu, the Journal reported.
The USS John S. McCain, the USS Benfold, the USS John Finn, and the USS Chung-Hoon responded to the flotilla, tracking its movement, the Journal reported. The four destroyers were in addition to the American maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft.
FIRST ON FOX: The Biden administration acknowledged in a memo, accidentally leaked on Friday, that charging fossil fuel companies less to drill would provide “greater energy security” despite its plans to hike royalty fees.
Former Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) Director Amanda Lefton recommended late last year that, as part of its climate agenda, the Department of the Interior (DOI) move forward with higher royalty fees for an oil and gas lease sale spanning 958,202 acres in the Cook Inlet off the coast of Alaska, according to the memo obtained by Fox News Digital. DOI Assistant Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis ultimately signed off on the recommendation.
“If a Cook Inlet prospect would be developed, there would be additional government revenues and greater energy security for the State of Alaska, especially if development of natural gas resources in the Cook Inlet ameliorated the long-term supply challenges facing the Anchorage area,” Lefton wrote in the memo.
“Nevertheless, because of the serious challenges facing the Nation from climate change and the impact of [greenhouse gasses] from fossil fuels, BOEM is not recommending this option since it would not include an appropriate surcharge to account for those impacts,” she continued.
The internal Biden administration memo noted that charging fossil fuel drilling companies less would increase energy security, but said climate considerations were more important. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Lefton’s specifically recommended the federal government charge drillers with a royalty fee of 18.75% as opposed to an alternative of 16.67% which she said would attract more bids and “be more likely to facilitate expeditious and orderly development of [offshore] resources.”
Daniel-Davis stated in her record of decision — published in November after she signed off on Lefton’s recommendation — that she selected a fee of 18.75% “because this rate constitutes the most reasonable balancing of environmental and economic factors for the American public.” She didn’t mention the alternative would produce greater energy security as highlighted in the memo.
BOEM ultimately held the auction, known as Lease Sale 258, on Dec. 30. The sale garnered just one bid worth $63,983 for a single 2,304-acre tract, according to federal records.
In May, the White House canceled Lease Sale 258, which had been proposed under the Trump administration, in an unexpected decision that was promptly criticized by the fossil fuel industry and Republican lawmakers. However, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) mandated that the administration reverse the decision and hold the sale by the end of 2022.
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., speaks during a hearing on May 4, 2022. Manchin blasted the Biden administration after the oil and gas document was leaked Friday. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“The Department of the Interior mistakenly posted an internal memo making recommendations to Acting Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management, Laura Daniel Davis, on the Cook Inlet Oil and Gas Lease Sale 258 mandated by the Inflation Reduction Act,” Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who helped author the IRA, said in a statement Friday.
“I am appalled by its contents, which make crystal clear that this administration is literally putting their radical climate agenda ahead of the needs of the people of Alaska and the United States,” he continued.
Manchin blasted the administration for ignoring Congress’ intent and seemingly pandering to environmental groups “at the expense of shoring up American energy security and keeping Americans safe.”
“The contents of this memo speak volumes – if this is what this Administration truly believes and is how they are going to make decisions, it is unacceptable,” the West Virginia senator continued. “It’s a clear and intentional threat to energy security and the all-of-the above energy policy Congress has consistently reinforced.”
“I will not support anyone who agrees with this type of misguided reasoning.”
BOEM didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
As different states and municipalities across the country adopt ranked-choice voting, it’s become obvious this mind-boggling election system deserves a new name: rigged-choice voting.
After nearly two months of tabulation, Alameda County, California, — one such ranked-choice voting (RCV) adoptee — announced it got the count wrong for its Nov. 8 election. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the California county admitted it made systemic errors while tabulating ballots. As a result of the snafu, an Oakland School Board race flipped: The top vote-getter (and certified winner) must now hand his board seat over to the third-place finisher.
While gross negligence on the part of some Alameda County election officials is not only probable but likely, RCV’s Byzantine election system must also take the blame. In it, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of votes in the first round, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his voters are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate. The process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes. For the Oakland mayor’s race, it took nine baffling rounds of RCV for one candidate to receive the narrow majority. The local NAACP chapter demanded a manual recount but scrapped it due to the expense.
In the case of the Oakland School Board election, officials blame a software configuration problem for the error (even the machines were confused about how to count the RCV-way). But is it right for a candidate who receives a plurality of votes on the first go-through to eventually lose to someone who finishes last? Often, the victors that emerge from ranked-choice voting are not the candidates a majority of voters favor. Case-in-point: Democrat Mary Peltola won Alaska’s lone congressional seat despite nearly 60 percent of voters casting their ballots for a Republican.
What’s behind the RCV takeover? As The Federalist has previously reported, partisan Democratic activists and moderate Republicans are pushing RCV as a legal mechanism to push out more revolutionary (read: populist) candidates in favor of establishment-backed contenders. As Project Veritas has documented, the moderate, nominal Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski was behind the campaign to change Alaska’s primary to an RCV system, ensuring the defeat of her Trump-backed challenger Kelly Tshibaka. Had Alaska not implemented RCV, Tshibaka likely would have defeated Murkowski in the primary.
There is a myriad of problems with RCV, as the Alameda County debacle shows. The Foundation for Government Accountability notes that ranked-choice voting causes ballot exhaustion (when a ballot is cast but does not count toward the end election result), diminishes voter confidence, and lags election results. It can take weeks or even months for a ranked-choice race to be counted, threatening the security of the process.
If Americans desire democracy and election integrity, rigged-choice voting is clearly not the way to go.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
After more than a decade away from electoral politics, former GOP Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is going back on the ballot for the at-large House seat left vacant by deceased Rep. Don Young who died last month. It’s past time for the former vice-presidential candidate reclaim her stardom as a serious policymaker after the media nearly killed it in 2008.
Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris is everything the media frantically portrayed Palin was about to be 14 years ago. Ignorant, extreme, unprepared, and merely one 70-year-old’s heartbeat away from the presidency. Except while Arizona Sen. John McCain was 71 in 2008, President Joe Biden governs today at 79.
Harris offered her latest word salad this week in what’s become routine for the vice president dragging the administration down with abysmal favorable ratings. Watch what she had to say at a White House event with the prime minister of Jamaica on Wednesday:
VP HARRIS: "One of the issues that has been presented as an issue that is economic in the way of its impact has been the pandemic… we will assist Jamaica in COVID recovery by assisting in terms of the recovery efforts in Jamaica that have been essential." pic.twitter.com/fVSr8Km6co
If it were Palin at the podium, Saturday Night Live (SNL) would lead this weekend’s program with Tina Fey returning to reprise her role as the 2008 vice-presidential candidate. In fact, Fey will probably be back on the late-night skits as Palin once again by the end of the year mocking Palin’s run for the House of Representatives as the comedian did when the conservative lightning rod endorsed Trump in 2016.
Wednesday’s nonsense from Harris at the White House was relatively tame compared to the prior 14 months of nonsensical commentary from the nation’s president on stand-by.
Just last month, Harris appeared to confuse Ukraine as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), despite its pending membership of the western security apparatus at the heart of the conflict in eastern Europe.
“I will say what I know we all say and I will say over and over again: the United States stands firmly with the Ukrainian people in defense of the NATO alliance,” Harris said at the annual DNC meeting.
Harris made the same mistake again in a tweet days later.
Palin, in contrast, was depicted as a dunce when she suggested governing the state closest to the Kremlin-controlled landmass along its arctic border enhanced her foreign policy credentials with Russian land visible from Alaskan territory.
“I can see Russia from my house!” Fey mocked the governor on SNL who returned to the weekly comedy program to play the part.
Just 55 miles with islands in between on the Bering Strait however, even Slate conceded that yes, Palin’s was right when she claimed on ABC “you can actually see Russia from land, here in Alaska.”
Palin was asked again later in the campaign by Katie Couric, then at CBS, how governing Alaska equipped her to navigate complex global affairs. Her response wasn’t well-articulated, but it wasn’t outright inaccurate either, certainly not on the scale of misidentifying Ukraine as a NATO state when Russia’s invasion was launched over that very issue.
Palin, the most popular governor in the country wasn’t treated fairly in 2008, whose folksy attitude on the campaign trail was the subject of mockery from reporters who often trapped her in “gotcha questions” in nearly every memorable moment of the election. The same could not be said of Harris, whose unpopularity and extremism failed to propel her own presidential campaign even to the Iowa caucuses. GovTrack rated Harris, not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, as the most liberal senator in 2019.
Harris’s pattern of quotable moments, on the other hand, has almost always come unprovoked in prepared speeches, or, as shown above, in a written tweet, with few exceptions. One exception stands out below where Harris explains the crisis in Ukraine as if she were a kindergarten teacher to an audience who are not kindergarteners:
Even after the media’s hostile coverage of the former Alaska governor in 2008, Palin’s popularity never dipped below 50 percent among constituents during her time in office despite her national reputation wrecked by the beltway circus. No vice-presidential candidate ever faced the kind of viscous and sustained character assassination as Palin did, by both the media and her own campaign.
While Biden’s team protected Harris on the trail, Palin’s handlers, Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace, were working to undermine the success of their own ticket selling out stories to reporters before the election was over. Wallace didn’t even vote for the campaign that employed the future MSNBC host.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
President Joe Biden’s Press Secretary Jen Psaki tried to evade White House responsibility for soaring gas prices Monday, casting blame solely on overseas turmoil in Ukraine. Gas prices hit a national average of $4.06 a gallon, according to AAA, this week reaching a new high not seen since 2008 when prices reached their all-time peak at $4.11.
“The increase,” Psaki said, “is a direct result of the invasion of Ukraine,” adding “there was an anticipation” of rising prices.
PSAKI: “The increase [in gas prices]…is the direct result of the invasion of Ukraine"
In anticipation, however, the White House has only exacerbated a self-inflicted crisis by doubling down on the administration’s war on domestic energy production in the name of climate change and environmental justice. As the impending invasion of Ukraine foreshadowed turbulence in global energy markets, President Biden’s Department of Justice reinstated the administration’s suspension of new oil and gas leases on federal lands through a legal filing in Louisiana.
Despite Psaki’s blame on Russian aggression for the spike in energy costs, gas prices began to soar upon Biden’s first days in office after the president’s inaugural orders shut down the Keystone XL pipeline and unilaterally suspended new oil and gas leases on public land.
According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), American gas prices eclipsed an average of $3 per gallon by May as President Biden unleashed a cascade of taxes and regulation on the industry while moving to lock down lucrative reserves. In other words, gas prices have been rising since Biden took office, not since Russia launched its invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
Biden’s suspension of new drilling on federal lands, while temporarily overturned by a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana mid-summer, killed incentives in the capital- and labor-intensive industry for operations to keep up with demand, suppressing production. Producers require long-term planning and assurance their operations will remain in place before they pledge billions in new capital to drill in a particular area. That means new leases must always be on the horizon.
Cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline alone axed some 830,000 barrels of Canadian crude flowing to Gulf refineries while the U.S. simultaneously doubled imports of Russian oil. Last year, the U.S. welcomed an average of more than 600,000 barrels of Russian crude and related petroleum products daily, financing the Kremlin war machine. As the world’s third-largest oil producer providing more than 10 percent of global supply, Russia raked in $119 billion in resource revenues.
Biden is reluctant to sanction President Vladimir Putin’s energy sector, with the White House claiming the solution to rising prices is to pivot in favor of cleaner energy sources that are often unreliable and more expensive. Russian gas operations, meanwhile, produce 30 percent more methane than American operators. Iran, where the administration is hoping to lift sanctions and welcome its oil, hosts operations with 85 percent more intense methane emissions than their U.S. counterparts.
Biden could have brought down energy prices at any point in his presidency but instead has continued to escalate the administration’s animosity towards domestic production and the American worker. An enhanced regulatory regime combined with Wall Street pressure to restrict investment in the capital-intense industry has limited diplomatic options to counter Russian aggression by limiting domestic capacity to supplement supply shocks.
In Alaska for example, Democrats have sought to lock down decades worth of oil and gas reserves stored under a fraction of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) with reinstated environmental protections poised to become permanent.
Instead of unleashing American energy potential to reclaim the independence once briefly achieved under the Trump administration, Biden officials are now pleading with authoritarian adversaries in Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to ramp up production abroad.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
It’s a strange case out of a small Alaska town that’s attracted national attention — all because of what it says regarding school bathrooms and transgender access.
According to The Washington Post, a female student was expelled from North Pole High School in North Pole, Alaska, after she kneed one of several boys who had entered the girls’ room in an incident on April 4. The male students had allegedly entered the bathroom, The Post reports, as a protest against a transgender student transitioning from female to male who had taken a selfie in the boys’ room.
Fairbanks North Star Borough School District Superintendent Karen Gaborik said the boys had entered the bathroom “as a form of protest.” When the seven boys entered, however, the protest was swiftly ended when one of the girls kneed one of the boys in the groin. Now, her family says she’s been expelled.
The case went national when state Rep. Tammie Wilson, a Republican who hails from North Pole, commented on it during a House Majority news conference on Friday.
“We had an incident last week to where some boys entered the girls’ bathroom, and a girl kneed a boy, feeling threatened. They were blocking her way. And she was suspended from school because she used too much force,”Wilson said, according to KTUU-TV.
Wilson said that the girl had been prevented from leaving the bathroom by the boys and had defended herself.
“If you ever feel threatened, for your safety, whatever force you think you have to go give, I will stand by you and so will your community, and not for those boys who were where they didn’t belong,”Wilson said.
The representative told the station the girl was suspended and missed her prom — the boys were allowed to attend, she said. But the student’s sister took to Twitter to say the girl had actually been expelled. The school wouldn’t confirm what happened to the female student, merely stating that the boys had also been disciplined for “attempting to enter the girls’ bathroom.”
“Gaborik said that in her Fairbanks-area school district, which is geographically ‘larger than the state of Connecticut,’ transgender students can choose to use a gender-neutral, single-stall bathroom that corresponds with the student’s gender identity, or the one that corresponds with the student’s gender at birth,”Meagan Flynn reported in The Post on Monday.
“The decisions are made on an individual basis for each student based on whatever is most comfortable, she said. At North Pole High School, about 16 transgender students have attended the school in the last three years, she said.”
She told The Post that students are encouraged to seek out school staff when they feel threatened, not to act out themselves.
“We do not advocate physical or psychological violence as a means to attain safety,” Gaborik said.
“The entire school community needs to work together to ensure that all students feel welcomed, safe and are able to learn and thrive. We recognize that parents, students and members of our community feel strongly about these issues, but advocating for the use of violence does not contribute to a safe learning environment.”
As for the threat, Gaborik told The Post that an investigation by school administrators found that there was “not evidence that the boys were threatening any student or using any type of force toward students.”
Leaving aside the initial question of the transgender student taking a selfie or the reaction of the boys to it, exactly what wouldn’t make seven males in the girls’ room threatening to the girls inside? Yet the school apparently wants us to pretend nothing threatening happened and that this girl’s reaction was somehow worthy of an expulsion.
“She did the right thing, and we should be backing her, not having her sitting at home wondering whether she made the right decision or not,”Wilson told KTUU.
In another interview with the Fairbanks News-Miner, Wilson framed the question as self-defense.
“Was she supposed to not protect herself?”she said. “She was where she belonged. They were not.”
Meanwhile, Gaborik told The Post that all students disciplined in the situation have the right to appeal any measures taken in the incident. The girl’s family says that they will — and we can only hope that sanity prevails.
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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 (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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