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Posts tagged ‘children’

Georgia, Iowa Overcome Near-Unanimous Democrat Opposition To Ban Child Mutilation Surgeries

BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | MARCH 23, 2023

Republican Georgia and Iowa lawmakers sent bills banning sex-change procedures for minors to their governors’ desks this week. Iowa has passed its bill into law, while Georgia’s bill awaits Gov. Brian Kemp’s signature. Kemp has not said whether he’ll sign it.

Georgia Senate Bill 140, which passed along party lines, prohibits injecting children with hormones and surgically mutilating their bodies “for the treatment of gender dysphoria.” Doctors may still be able to prescribe puberty-blocking drugs, however, as the bill only blocks “irreversible procedures or therapies.” Puberty blockers do inflict irreversible physical damage, but their proponents claim otherwise.

Parental rights advocates still welcome the bill as a step in the right direction.

“This new measure will give Georgia children the legal protections they desperately need,” Kimberly Fletcher, founder and president of Moms For America, said in a press release. “Too many states continue to defend sexual mutilation of children by refusing to implement laws that would properly protect them. This must change.”

On Wednesday, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed SF538 into law, which states that Iowa medical professionals “shall not knowingly engage in or cause any” treatments “for the purpose of attempting to alter the appearance of, or affirm the minor’s perception of, the minor’s gender or sex, if that appearance or perception is inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” The law also prevents doctors from removing a healthy or non-diseased body part or tissue, as well as banning the prescription of hormone blockers to complicate puberty.

“Children should not be pushed to receive experimental medical treatments that can leave them permanently sterile and physically marred for life,” Jeff Edler, a Republican state senator, told The Des Moines Register. “Iowa has a duty to protect its citizens, especially our children.”

In addition to banning body mutilation surgeries for children, Reynolds also signed SF482, a law that would prevent transgender-identifying students from using the opposite sex’s public-school bathrooms.

“Denying the truth that we are either male or female hurts real people, especially vulnerable children,” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Matt Sharp said in a press release. “By enacting this legislation, Iowa has taken critical steps to protect children from radical activists that peddle gender ideology and pressure children into life-altering, experimental procedures and drugs. Young people deserve to live in a society that doesn’t subject them to risky experiments to which they cannot effectively consent.”

Georgia and Iowa join eight other states that have passed protections for children from sex-change surgeries, including Mississippi, Florida, Utah, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, South Dakota, and Tennessee. Missouri and Kentucky’s legislatures have passed similar bills that are awaiting their governors’ signatures.

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.

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Missouri AG imposes ‘guardrails’ on gender transition interventions for minors

By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter | TUESDAY, MARCH 21, 2023

A hand holds up a small transgender pride flag. The blue and pink stripes represent the colors for a boy and girl, while the white stripe represents self-declared gender identities, such as transitioning, intersex, neutral and undefined gender. | Getty Images

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has implemented an emergency regulation imposing what his office calls “guardrails” on gender transition interventions for minors as the push to ban the controversial practices continues on a state-by-state basis.

In a statement Monday, Bailey said he is “issuing an emergency regulation clarifying that, because gender transition interventions are experimental, they are covered by existing Missouri law governing unfair, deceptive, and unconscionable business practices, including in administering healthcare services.”

“As Attorney General, I will protect children and enforce the laws as written, which includes upholding state law on experimental gender transition interventions,” Bailey said. “Even Europe recognizes that mutilating children for the sake of a woke, leftist agenda has irreversible consequences, and countries like Sweden, Norway, and the United Kingdom have all sharply curtailed these procedures. I am dedicated to using every legal tool at my disposal to stand in the gap and protect children from being subject to inhumane science experiments.”

The new regulation “clarifies that state law already prohibits performing experimental procedures in the absence of specific guardrails.” The guardrails require medical professionals to inform patients that “the use of puberty blocker drugs or cross-sex hormones to treat gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria is experimental and is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)” and that “the FDA has issued a warning that puberty blockers can lead to brain swelling and blindness.”

The Attorney General’s office characterized the move as “necessary due to the skyrocketing number of gender transition interventions despite rising concerns in the medical community that these procedures are experimental and lack clinical evidence of safety or success.”

The emergency regulation will hold the force of law for either 30 legislative days or 180 days, “whichever is longer.”

Additional mandatory disclosures outline how Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare determined in a February 2022 report that the risks associated with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones “outweigh the possible benefits.”

The regulation also urges providers to cite the Endocrine Society’s finding that “the large majority (about 85%) of prepubertal children with a childhood diagnosis did not remain GD/gender incongruent in adolescence.”

“One scientific study notes that an individual whose friend identifies as transgender is ‘more than 70 times’ as likely to similarly identify as transgender, suggesting that many individuals’ incorrectly believe themselves to be transgender and in need of transition’ because of social factors,” the release from the attorney general’s office states.

The regulation also bans gender transition interventions if the patient has not “received a full psychological or psychiatric assessment” consisting of at least 15 hour-long therapy sessions over a period of 18 months “to determine, among other things, whether the person has any mental health comorbidities.”

An additional requirement imposed on providers seeking to perform gender transition interventions on minors seeks to ensure that “any existing mental health comorbidities of the patient have been treated and resolved.”

The regulation also stipulates that doctors must “adopt and follow a procedure to track all adverse effects that arise from any course of covered gender transition intervention for all patients beginning the first day of intervention and continuing for a period of not fewer than 15 years.” Doctors seeking to provide such interventions must also screen patients for autism and examine whether or not their gender dysphoria results from “social contagion” on an annual basis.

The regulation comes after the attorney general announced an investigation into the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital after a former employee submitted a sworn affidavit stating that the clinic has sterilized hundreds of children and even lied to parents. The clinic has denied Bailey’s request for a moratorium on prescribing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones as his office investigates the claims.

The new regulation is opposed by LGBT advocacy groups, including Planned Parenthood. Dr. Colleen P. McNicholas, the chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, called the claims made in the announcement “medically false and harmful.”

“Scientific evidence shows — and the medical community agrees — that gender-affirming care is safe, effective, and life-saving,” McNicholas said in a statement shared on Twitter. “We denounce this government interference in the practice of medicine, and we demand politicians leave health care between providers and their patients. Shame on any politician who uses trans youth for political theatrics.”

More than a half dozen states have implemented bans on some or all gender transition interventions for minors, specifically Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee and Utah.

In the absence of action by the state legislature, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Texas Commissioner of Family and Protective Services Jaime Masters have issued formal opinions characterizing gender transition services as a form of child abuse. The moves by state legislatures and executive officials related to gender transition interventions for minors come in response to concerns about the long-term impacts of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender transition surgeries.

The American College of Pediatricians has identified the potential side effects of puberty blockers as “osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment” as well as sterility. The organization has listed “an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers across their lifespan” as some of the potential long-term impacts of cross-sex hormones.

As for gender transition surgeries to remove and/or create synthetic body parts in order to align a person’s sexual organs with their stated gender identity, graphic images posted on social media last week by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office reveal scars left behind from double mastectomies that remove healthy breasts from trans-identified females as well as scarred forearm tissue used to create synthetic penises in trans-identified females.

Last year, the U.K’s National Health Service proposed new guidelines warning doctors not to so easily encourage minors to socially transition by changing their names and pronouns because many children dealing with gender dysphoria may be going through a “transient phase.”

The proposed guidelines followed an independent review led by Dr. Hillary Cass, the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, which found that “social transitioning” is not a “neutral act” and could have “significant effects” in terms of “psychological functioning.”

“The clinical management approach should be open to exploring all developmentally appropriate options for children and young people who are experiencing gender incongruence, being mindful that this may be a transient phase, particularly for prepubertal children, and that there will be a range of pathways to support these children and young people and a range of outcomes,” the guidelines state.

Detransitioner Chloe Cole has emerged as a prominent voice for a community of young adults who formerly identified with the opposite sex but saw their gender dysphoria subside as they got older.

Cole is suing doctors, attributing the suicidal thoughts and deteriorating state of mental health she experienced as a teenager to the life-altering double mastectomy she received at the age of 15.

While Cole was “advised that the distress she experienced because of her gender dysphoria would resolve as she transitioned,” she discovered that her “distress always came back worse” following the “initial relief” that occurred after “each phase of transition.”

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

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Biden Admin Pushes Transgender Medical ‘Care’ While Quietly Bankrolling Research Showing Its Risks

BY: ANONYMOUS | FEBRUARY 28, 2023

hormone blockers — NIH is funding many studies premised upon how little research has been conducted on the long-term health risks of cross-sex hormones. Yet HHS is pushing for more transgender ‘care.’

ANONYMOUS

As the Biden administration pushes the Department of Health and Human Services to make “gender-affirming health care” more widely available, HHS’s own National Institutes of Health is funding multiple studies premised upon how little research has been conducted on the long-term risks of taking cross-sex hormones and whether they improve mental health. The NIH research on transgender issues also emphasizes intersectionality and about half has been on HIV prevention.

The NIH Reporter database, which lists active federally funded research projects, shows 74 with “transgender” in the title, totaling more than $26 million of taxpayers’ money annually. Several NIH-funded studies examine specific health risks of cross-sex hormone treatment — such as associated bone loss and possible increased risk of thrombosis, drug overdose, heart attack, and stroke.

Only a few studies evaluate the risk of infertility, even though “the impact of long-term cross-sex hormone therapy on reproductive health is largely unknown,” as one such project states and experts have warned. In contrast, seven studies examine stigma and disparities in health care for transgender people, in response to NIH’s Notice of Special Interest in understanding the role of alleged intersectional stigmas and how they harm health.

Many studies address higher incidence of sexually transmitted infections in transgender people, and whether hormone therapy might increase that risk. About half of all NIH-funded research on transgender health, including that which has been completed, relates to HIV prevention among the transgender population, totaling approximately $80 million since 1985.

Transgender males “have some of the highest concentrated HIV epidemics in the world, with a pooled global prevalence of 19% and a 49-fold higher odds ratio of acquiring HIV than non-transgender adults,” according to one project summary. Behavioral factors contribute, another project says, but the role of sex hormones needs further study, since they “are known to modulate the immune response, resulting in changes in host susceptibility to pathogens, vaccine efficacy and drug metabolism.”

Many Ongoing Projects Highlight Lack of Research

While suicide prevention is often cited as a major reason to give dysphoric children puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, only one of the current studies is focused specifically on suicide risk, although several emphasize the lack of long-term studies of cross-sex hormones administered to children and their relation to mental health.

Medical professionals “say more specific research is needed to determine whether medically transitioning as a minor reduces suicidal thoughts and suicides compared with those who socially transition or wait before starting treatment,” according to Reuters.

One NIH-funded project summary acknowledges that the long-term effect of puberty suppression on mental health needs further study and will evaluate children already taking puberty blockers.

During puberty, hormones change the structure and organization of the brain. Puberty blockers “may also disrupt puberty-signaled neural maturation in ways that can undermine mental health gains over time and impact quality of life in other ways,” the Nationwide Children’s Hospital project summary says. “The overall impacts” of puberty blockers “have not been systematically studied,” the summary says.

One of the larger NIH-funded transgender studies, funded at $743,000 annually, is at Boston Children’s Hospital. It notes, “Little is known [emphasis added] about how pubertal blockade, the first step in the medical management of a young transgender adolescent, affects bone health and psychological well-being. … In an exploratory aim, we will also consider the effect of pubertal blockade on anxiety, depression, and health-related quality of life.”

Another research project, “Psychological consequences of medical transition in transgender youth,” begun last year at Princeton University and anticipated to end in 2025, notes the lack of quality research in this area:

Five studies to date have longitudinally examined the relationship between one or both of these interventions [puberty suppression and hormone therapy] and mental health in transgender youth. However, these studies have had relatively small samples, none have been able to isolate the effects of endocrine interventions, none have included a cisgender [non-transgender] comparison group, and none have examined the mechanisms by which endocrine interventions might improve mental health.

A longitudinal study that began in 2015 and will run through at least 2026 acknowledges, “Transgender children and adolescents are a poorly understood and a distinctly understudied population in the United States. … Continuing our current research is imperative to expand the scant evidence-base currently guiding the clinical care of TGD [transgender and gender diverse] youth and thus, is of considerable public health significance.”

As the summary of one ongoing NIH-funded research project on sex hormones’ effects on the developing brain says, “There is little to no empirical data guiding clinical practices” of cross-sex hormone therapy in early pubertal adolescents, “highlighting the need for further research to address the critical knowledge gap.” The research, funded at $3 million so far to Stanford University, “will provide a much-needed foundation for understanding the longitudinal impact of treatments that are already being used [emphasis added] in clinical settings.”

The project will elucidate “how sex hormone therapy alters sex-specific risk for disease … and [its] impact on neural networks implicated in psychiatric disorders.” The research proposed “has never been conducted in early pubertal adolescents,” the summary reads.

NIH Acknowledges Limited Evidence, FDA Hasn’t Approved

The NIH, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, told Reuters that “the evidence is limited on whether these treatments pose short- or long-term health risks for transgender and other gender-diverse adolescents.” Additionally, the Food and Drug Administration has not approved puberty blockers and sex hormones for children’s transgender medical interventions. As Reuters reported:

No clinical trials have established their safety for such off-label use. The drugs’ long-term effects on fertility and sexual function remain unclear. And in 2016, the FDA ordered makers of puberty blockers to add a warning about psychiatric problems to the drugs’ label after the agency received several reports of suicidal thoughts in children who were taking them. More broadly, no large-scale studies have tracked people who received gender-related medical care as children to determine how many remained satisfied with their treatment as they aged and how many eventually regretted transitioning.

Countries such as Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have begun to limit children’s access to transgender health interventions. Early, foundational research from 2011 on transgender medical interventions has been criticized as failing to meet basic research standards.

Before 2012, “there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all,” according to Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage.” Studies show most children grow out of gender dysphoria, Shrier says.“There are no good long-term studies indicating that either gender dysphoria or suicidality diminishes after medical transition,” according to Shrier.

Yet Biden Administration Pushes Transgender ‘Care’

Meanwhile, despite all the possible health risks, President Joe Biden has issued executive orders charging “HHS to work with states to promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” The administration has issued directives that federal health insurance benefits must “provide comprehensive gender-affirming care.” The administration also opposes “conversion therapy — efforts to suppress or change an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”

Taxpayers are already paying for transgender procedures, as they are covered by some insurers and Medicaid in some states.

I’ll ask again. WHY ARE THESE MENTAL PATIENT LEFTEST SO HYPER ABOUT MUTILATING AMERICA’S CONFUSED CHILDREN? WHAT IS THEIR END GAME?

HHS’s Office of Population Affairs, which is overseen by transgender Dr. Rachel Levine, states there’s no debate: “Research demonstrates that gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents.” Other proponents acknowledge a lack of research on these hormones’ effect on brain development, but say the pros outweigh the cons.

Growing Transgender Identification

The number of transgender adults in the U.S. is estimated at 1.4 million to 2 million, with an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 transgender children. The number of American children who started on puberty blockers or hormones totaled 17,683 from 2017 to 2021 and has been increasing, according to Reuters.

From 2019 to 2021, at least 56 patients ages 13 to 17 had genital surgeries, and from 2019 to 2021, at least 776 children that age had mastectomies, not including procedures that weren’t covered by insurance, according to Reuters.

The transgender surgery industry grosses more than $2 billion annually and expects to double that by 2030.

Debate Among Medication Providers

“Puberty delay medications are safe and effective,” according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), a pro-transgender organization that sets standards for trans medical interventions. “Every person, including every TGD person, deserves an opportunity to be their true selves and has the right to access medically-necessary affirming care to enable this opportunity,” WPATH says.

When WPATH recently updated its guidance, authors “were acutely aware that any unknowns that the working group acknowledged — any uncertainties in the research — could be read as undermining the field’s credibility and feed the right-wing effort to outlaw gender-related care,” The New York Times reported. The newspaper is in the midst of an internal fight about its coverage of transgender issues, with some saying it has been too critical of transgender medical interventions.

A draft of the WPATH chapter for adolescents included minimum recommended ages for hormone treatments and breast removal or augmentation, but after criticism from providers and transgender activists, “it was determined that the specific ages would be removed to ensure greater access to care for more people,” WPATH said.

The final guidelines also walked back a recommendation that preteens and teenagers should provide evidence of several years of persistently identifying as transgender, to differentiate from kids whose change in identification is recent, and changed it to a vaguer “sustained” gender incongruence. “In the end, the chapter sided with the trans advocates who didn’t want kids to have to wait through potentially painful years of physical development,” according to the Times.

The final guidelines acknowledged that because of the limited long-term research, treatment without a comprehensive diagnostic assessment “has no empirical support and therefore carries the risk that the decision to start gender-affirming medical interventions may not be in the long-term best interest of the young person at that time.”

Reuters found that gender facilities across the country are not conducting recommended months-long assessments before administering hormones to children. Parents of 28 of 39 minors who had sought transgender interventions told Reuters they “felt pressured or rushed to proceed with treatment.” Gender-care professionals also said some of their peers are “pushing too many families to pursue treatment for their children before they undergo the comprehensive assessments recommended in professional guidelines.”

Studying Causes of Gender Dysphoria

Some of the taxpayer-funded studies may bring clarity to the issue of gender dysphoria by examining its causes. One study will examine social media’s influence on children becoming transgender. A second will study “the life history calendar to examine young transgender women’s trajectories of violence, mental health, and protective processes.”

Another government-funded study will help determine how chromosomes, sexual organs, and hormones combine to create sex differences. Another will “uncover genetic underpinnings of female sexual orientation.”

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.

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Micharl Brown Op-ed: Satan is beginning to show his hand more clearly

By Michael Brown, CP Op-Ed Contributor | Thursday, February 09, 2023

Sam Smith performs onstage during the 65th GRAMMY Awards at Crypto.com Arena on February 05, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. | Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy

This past Monday morning, I was teaching hundreds of ministry school students at Christ for the Nations in Dallas on the topic of demons and deliverance. During the class, I stated that in the days ahead, I believed that satanic manifestations would become much more open and overt in our society. Rather than hiding himself in the culture, the devil will reveal himself more clearly.

After teaching, I got back to my room and began to read headlines and receive emails that confirmed the very thing I was saying. (More on that in a moment.)

Of course, we’ve been seeing this trend for years now.

One prominent example would be the rise of Drag Queens in our culture, some of them in overtly satanic attire, reading to toddlers in libraries, and performing at churches.

Another prominent example would be the “Shout Your Abortion” movement and the celebration of radical, pro-abortion legislation. This is in stark contrast to the old Bill Clinton adage that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a radical feminist group with the acronym WITCH, standing for the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. (I kid you not.) They certainly got their message across!

But most groups are not that overt (even if tongue in cheek), and gay activists learned decades ago that the in-your-face, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” approach was not working. Instead, gay strategists adopted a policy of presenting themselves to be exactly the same as the couple next door, just like you in every way, except gay. (This was laid out in the watershed 1989 book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer It’s Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s.)

So, from a strategic viewpoint, most groups wanting to bring about radical change to society do so in more covert, incremental ways rather than announcing, “We’re a terrorist conspiracy from Hell!”

In the same way, Satan doesn’t march around as a huge, horned dragon carrying a pitchfork.

As a senior demon counseled a younger demon in C. S. Lewis’s classic book The Screwtape Letters, “The fact that ‘devils’ are predominately comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.”

These days, however, it’s as if Satan is coming out in full force, red tights and all — if not literally, then metaphorically. What else can be said of the performance of “Unholy” at the Grammy Awards this past Sunday night? As the Breitbart headline announced, “Non-Binary Pop Star Sam Smith Performs BDSM, Devil-Themed ‘Unholy’ at the Grammys.” How lovely!

But even that only told part of the story.

As explained in more detail by the American Family Association, “During the annual Grammy Awards ceremony on Feb. 5, originally designed to recognize outstanding artists in the music industry, Pfizer pharmaceutical company felt it fitting to sponsor performers Sam Smith, who claims to be non-binary, and Kim Petras, who claims to be transgender. These two gave the nation a Satan-themed performance of their song ‘Unholy,’ in which Petras performed inside a cage with drag queens dressed in devil costumes, while Smith gyrated in a costume with devil horns sticking out from a top hat.

“The entire ‘performance’ depicted a hellish scene with lots of darkness, blood red colors and flames.”

So, you have: 1. the name of the song, “Unholy”; 2. both lead performers denying their biological realities, one of them wearing devil’s horns; 3. drag queens in devil costumes; 4. BDSM-related themes; 5. and the fires of Hell. I would say that is pretty clear!

No wonder podcaster Liz Wheeler tweeted, “Don’t fight the culture wars, they say. Meanwhile demons are teaching your kids to worship Satan. I could throw up.”

Compared to some other past hits (whose lyrics are virtually unrepeatable in moral circles), the lyrics to “Unholy” are relatively tame. It is the overall message of the Grammy performance that shouts out its depravity loudly and clearly.

Similar to this is the announcement from The Satanic Temple that it is raising funds to provide “free religious [meaning Satanic] telehealth medication abortion care in New Mexico.”

But this could be good news for us as followers of Jesus. The greater the darkness, the clearer our light is seen. May it shine brightly in front of the whole world! And may we shine as lights without shame, without compromise, and without hypocrisy.

And don’t be surprised if, in the days ahead, in front of your very eyes, you witness scenes as if taken straight out of the Bible where, in broad daylight, visibly demonized people get set free in Jesus’ name — dramatically, gloriously, and in full public view.

Things are heating up.

(For a great “holy” version of “Unholy” by a contemporary Gospel artist, go here. It’s titled, “If Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ ‘Unholy’ were a Christian song by Beckah Shae.”)

Dr. Michael Brown(www.askdrbrown.org) is the host of the nationally syndicated Line of Fire radio program. His latest book is Revival Or We Die: A Great Awakening Is Our Only Hope. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.

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Mister Rogers Tried to Warn Us About the Dangers of Transgenderism

BY: SPENCER DALKE | FEBRUARY 01, 2023

“Boys are boys from the beginning. Girls are girls right from the start.” No, those aren’t the words from a tweet banned for “hate speech” — though they could be. They’re prophetic lines from none other than Mister Rogers, who put the immutable truths to a tune decades before the trans craze.

Resurfaced in a recent TikTok, the clip shows Fred Rogers, host of the classic children’s show “Mister Rogers Neighborhood,” singing his ditty “Everybody’s Fancy,” which goes:

Boys are boys from the beginning
Girls are girls right from the start
Everybody’s fancy
Everybody’s fine
Your body’s fancy and so is mine

Girls grow up to be the mommies
Boys grow up to be the daddies
Everybody’s fancy
Everybody’s fine
Your body’s fancy and so is mine

TRIGGER WARNING. ⚠️ This is the most upsetting thing you will see all weekend. pic.twitter.com/eVLPZ3J3RI
— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) January 14, 2023

In his first appearance on “The Tonight Show” starring Johnny Carson in 1980, Rogers delved into the song’s importance. When Carson asked Rogers a series of lighthearted questions about his show and asked how Rogers communicates important themes to his audience of children, it didn’t take long for the host to pivot to the topic of sex. “Are they too young for that?” Carson asked.

That’s how they learn the difference between boys and girls, Rogers replied. “Sometimes children think that they might change, they might have to change after a while,” he continued, to which the audience laughed.

But Rogers wasn’t laughing. “You know, we laugh about that now,” he said, “but it’s because we had that concern when we were little.”

Some have argued that Rogers was simply the product of his generation or speculated that he was a homosexual to explain his gentle demeanor. In a 1969 Senate Commerce Committee hearing, however, Rogers made his case clear: “I’m very much concerned about what’s being delivered to our children in this country.”

And he was right to be. Gone are the days of Andy Griffith and “Hogan’s Heroes.” Now taxpayer-funded libraries stock their children’s shelves with books teaching kids about masturbation and affirming gender dysphoria. Drag queen story hour chapters bent on exposing children to sexual atypicality have sprouted up from coast to coast. Now even young children, like this 8-year-old boy, are encouraged to parade around in drag.

And of course, some of Disney’s most recent productions have forged ahead with an increasingly explicit LGBT agenda for children. The latest “Toy Story” installment, “Lightyear,” boasted a lesbian kiss. “Baymax!” taught kids that men can have periods.

“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” was not a political program, but it tackled issues, both big and small, that troubled children. This included not only instilling truths about the immutability of the sexes, but reassuring kids that they wouldn’t get sucked down the bathtub drain or lose an ear during a haircut.

“Children are concerned when they get their first haircut that the barber’s going to cut more than hair,” Rogers said on “The Tonight Show.” So to assuage kids’ fears, he visited a barber to ask whether the trimmer cuts more than hair.

It isn’t that Rogers hated children who wanted to be unique—far from it. As he stated in the Senate hearing, he merely wanted to address the “inner drama of childhood.” Long before libraries began hosting drag queen story hour, Rogers tried to warn us about the dangers of gender-bending. But in true Mister Rogers’ fashion, he did so while celebrating each person for being “fancy” and unique, no transgender interventions required.

In his words, “I like you just the way you are.”

SPENCER DALKE

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Minor Targets

A.F. BRANCO | on January 25, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-groomers/

Democrats justify male indecent exposure to children at the YMCA by claiming the perpetrator is transgender.

YMCA and Transgender — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.**

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.

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Pro-Family Conservatives Must First Be Pro-Men

BY: DELANO SQUIRES | JANUARY 05, 2023

father and son with a hula hoop — **Republicans interested in crafting pro-family policy must focus on the well-being of America’s boys and men.**

DELANO SQUIRES

Those conservatives who want to shape the nascent pro-family movement emerging on the right must be willing to embrace a controversial — and countercultural — reality: Healthy families require strong, stable, and secure men. That means Republicans interested in crafting pro-family policy must focus on the well-being of America’s boys and men.

Democrats have spent decades supporting policies that make men and fathers economically and socially obsolete. They’ve promoted the notion that families and societies flourish when women are empowered, even to the detriment of men. For instance, they see the fact that women outnumber men in the college-educated labor force as a win for gender equality.  

It’s not all progress, however, from the perspective of modern feminists. So-called access to abortion, a major plank in the women’s empowerment agenda, was dealt a serious blow when the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision struck down Roe v. Wade and returned the issue of abortion to the states. 

This seismic shift, combined with the economic challenges brought on by Covid-19 shutdowns and parental discontent with public schools, has opened the door for some conservatives to seek to rebrand Republicans as the party of families.  

The initial push for this political pivot came from Republicans in the U.S. Senate. The most recent iteration of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney’s proposed Family Security Act would provide between $250 and $350 a month per child, based on age. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s Provide for Life Act would expand the child tax credit, enable parental leave, expand support for pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, and fund mentoring services for low-income mothers. Conservative social commentators have also made the case that limited government and support for families are compatible policy goals.

Whatever the merits of these efforts, the success of pro-family policies will depend on more than bipartisan support in Congress. The social and economic outcomes conservatives want to see must start with the understanding that men and women are not generic, interchangeable parts in the machinery of family life. 

Recognizing Roles

Men have played the role of provider throughout human history, though in recent decades that role has been shared. Still, no culture teaches that it’s a woman’s responsibility to take care of an adult male and the children they have together. This is why women generally seek men who earn more than they do. One analysis of U.S. Census data found that female physicians married men in the same field. Male doctors, however, often married nurses and teachers.

This is not an argument against women in the workplace. It’s an appeal for conservatives to recognize that disregarding the natural order in the name of “women’s empowerment,” whether through public policy or cultural norms, will make it harder for Americans to form strong, stable families.  

Conservative politicians and pundits need to become comfortable talking about what boys and men need in terms of education, economic opportunity, religion, social norms, and relationships. 

Their political speeches, op-eds, and podcast appearances need a renewed emphasis on vocational education that is aspirational, not framed in terms of a fallback option for young men who are unable — or unwilling — to attend college. Conservatives need to speak with a similar sense of clarity and concern when it comes to men, sex, and family formation.  

Every conservative bill, statute, policy, or regulation that directly affects families should include some version of the following statements:

Children have a right to the love and support of the man and woman who created them.
The ideal family structure for every child is to be raised by his or her married biological parents in a stable and loving home.
Men, not the state, are ultimately responsible for the children they father.

These self-evident truths should function as the “iron triangle” of social conservatism. Men need something they are willing to both live and die for. The responsibilities that come with a family give them both.  

Critics on the left — as well as some on the right — will undoubtedly accuse conservatives focusing on men of promoting a regressive return to the rigid sex roles of the 1950s. What they fail to realize is that the sexual revolution and 60 years of liberal social policy did not destroy patriarchy — they distorted it by minimizing the importance of men while maximizing the influence male-dominated institutions have in every area of American family life.  

Different Forms of Patriarchy

“Bureaucratic patriarchy” was introduced through the war on poverty’s expansion of the welfare state and policy incentives that provided aid and basic necessities for unmarried mothers. It has grown because of the symbiotic relationship between elected officials seeking votes, social service administrators overseeing the poverty economy, and single mothers who need financial support.  

Conservatives have a hard time criticizing “corporate patriarchy,” by contrast, because it promotes financial independence for women and exploits conservative deference to the private sector. A recent video from the pro-life organization Live Action satirizes an unfortunate reality brought about by the right’s allegiance to corporations: Many businesses would rather fund abortions than paid maternity leave for their female employees. Perhaps business executives are simply taking cues from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who said, “eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades.” 

The advent of “trans patriarchy” further complicates the pro-life, pro-family movement because men who believe they are women are committed to erasing biological sex altogether. In addition to attacking the foundation of human existence itself, this deformed version of patriarchy also seeks to usurp the family’s role as the primary shaper of children’s values.  

Many conservatives fail to see how the daycare-to-demisexual pipeline was built over time by politicians increasing funding for childcare and schools, corporations offering generous benefits in exchange for employee loyalty, and gender ideologues who want access to shape the next generation of children.  

The actors involved in all three deformed patriarchies are cruel taskmasters because they take a utilitarian view of women and children. A man who accepts his God-given responsibilities has a completely different orientation toward his family. His relationship with his wife is a covenant, not a contract. His children are the fruit of that union and the linchpin to multi-generational prosperity. They’re not mere “consequences” of sex and burdens to be overcome for the sake of economic productivity.  

In a sense, some form of patriarchy is inevitable. The question conservative policymakers need to answer is which form they believe produces the best outcomes for men, women, and children. This is why clear thinking about families must be preceded by honest reflection on the different natures of men and women and how they can be harnessed to fortify American households. That is why now is the perfect time for conservatives to lean into the connection between strong men and stable families. 

Delano Squires is a research fellow in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @DelanoSquires.

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If Your Kids Are Unhappy, Take Them to Church

BY: MARY ROSE KULCZAK | DECEMBER 28, 2022

Altar boy praying in church with his rosary — **A huge burden could be lifted from our children if they had a place to go each week that offered them grace and refuge from anxiety.**

MARY ROSE KULCZAK

It seems like every time I turn around, an editor assigns me a story related to the mental health crises of our children. Most of the health experts I speak to correlate Covid lockdowns and our children’s fragile state. Closing schools played a major role in this phenomenon, but what if other crucial factors are being overlooked?

Another story, seemingly unrelated to the mental health crisis, is making the rounds in the corporate press. Church attendance is on a rapid decline. The “nones,” survey respondents who say they have no religious affiliation, are the fastest-growing group in the United States every year. We now have a generation of adults that grew up not attending worship services weekly, and they are raising their children in a similar fashion.

The “nones” seem to prefer a parenting style that says: “We’re fine without church and worship and religious instruction and institutions, thank you very much.” But they are not fine. Their children are not coping and managing the day-to-day stresses and inconveniences thrown at them. They are fragile and increasingly so.

The “nones” will tell you it is because we need to better embrace children’s differences and preferences (like their pronouns) while empowering them with positive affirmations and encouraging personal acceptance through self-esteem workshops. We clutter their calendars with sports, theater, STEM clubs, and dance classes. If none of that pans out, we allow our kids to self-medicate with hours spent on social media.

Parents will do all of this, but won’t take their families to church. Yet research shows that children who attend weekly worship services have higher GPAs, score higher on standardized tests, and are less likely to be held back a grade. They also are more likely to achieve a bachelor’s degree in college.

So why aren’t parents taking their children to weekly worship?

When surveyed, parents often respond that their children and teens do not want to attend worship. This democratic approach to family decision-making only seems to apply to church attendance, however. For other important decisions like wearing a seatbelt or vaccinations, parents balk at giving their children voting privileges. A child’s vote carries more weight when it aligns with a parent’s desire to stay home in pajamas on a Sunday morning.

Why should church attendance be considered a powerful tool for parents to boost their children’s mental health? We can look to the research for the answer.

In a 2018 study, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found some surprising benefits to children and adolescents who attend weekly worship. It turns out that children and teens who attend church grow up to be young adults with higher rates of reported happiness and life satisfaction. They were less likely to suffer from anxiety and depression, less likely to use illicit drugs, and less likely to engage in early sex and contract sexually transmitted infections.

In addition, these same young adults were more likely to embrace volunteering and reported feeling a sense of mission and purpose than their non-church-attending counterparts.

With all of these positive outcomes for children who attend weekly worship, should we be surprised that children who do not have a similar structure in their lives experience an inverse phenomenon? Is it any wonder that anxiety and depression among children and teens are on the rise when every day, their still-forming brains are bombarded with information about doom and destruction while they drown in a sea of gender confusion and racial animus?

We think we can combat all the negativity by telling children: “You are perfect! You are awesome! You keep being you!” We put these pithy platitudes on T-shirts and backpacks and stickers with unicorns and rainbows. At the end of a bad day, our kids know that this is no substitute for the real deal.

Each of us knows these sentiments are superficial. We are poor, miserable sinners in need of forgiveness. Where do we go with all our baggage when the church is not an option? We go to therapists and pharmacists, but trends show that the last place parents want to go is the place actually offering a solution.

What could families find at church that they won’t find anywhere else? Hopefully, something that is woefully lacking in the world around them: the truth.

Newsflash, kids! You are not perfect! You know that mean thing you did to your classmate in the cafeteria? That was a sin. And that nasty thought you had about that person? That was a sin. And the snide comment you made to your mom when you were hangry? Yep. Are you starting to see a pattern here?

Good news: you’ve come to the right place! Jesus came for sinners. As a matter of fact, the church is filled with them. Each week, they come to hear the message that even though we are sinful human beings, Jesus died for those sins. When we confess those nasty thoughts and horrible things we did, we can receive forgiveness — a clean slate!

Will we mess up again on Monday? Of course. But that’s why we can look forward to church. Can we try harder to be better people? Kinder people? Yes, we can. Does our forgiveness depend upon what we do and how we perform each week? Nope. You are forgiven because God loves you that much, so much that he sent his son to take the punishment that should have been yours and mine.

Imagine what a burden could be lifted from our children if they had a place to go each week that offered them that grace. How much better could they cope with a bad day, knowing that each moment offers a fresh start? How much more resilient could our children become?

Parents, we put our children at a disadvantage when we do not give them the very thing they need for their mental and spiritual health. It is time to put a new priority on the family calendar every Sunday. If we won’t do it for ourselves (and we should), let’s do it for our children. The next generation depends on it.

Mary Rose Kulczak is a writer for various parent and child publications. She is a wife and mother of three sons, and currently resides in Saline, Michigan.

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COMMENTARY: How I Lovingly Guided My Child Away from Transgenderism — And How You Can Too

BY: ANONYMOUS | DECEMBER 02, 2022

transgenderism flag written with sidewalk chalk — **I had to accept my limits, but that didn’t mean I was helpless. Parents are still the most important influence on their kids.**

ANONYMOUS

About a year and a half ago, I noticed that my son — let’s call him Andy — was putting rainbow stickers on his phone. And a friend alerted me that Andy rebuked her daughter in a group chat for being “so cisgender.” I did some delicate digging, and it became clear: My child, then 13, was flirting with going “trans.”

He’s not alone. The number of transgender-identifying kids is up 20 to 40 times since a decade ago, to 1.5 percent of all teens. And the gender facilities that say they are the experts have been unmasked. Videos and statements have revealed that doctors in these so-called clinics are willing to give 15-year-old girls double mastectomies and call it treatment.

I wasn’t about to send my son off for experimental medical interventions that didn’t treat any underlying psychological issues. In this, I think I’m representative of the silent (and bullied) majority. Still, what could I do?

The first thing I had to do was to realize that the gender cult is powerful, and I can’t control the choices and feelings of my kid. I had to accept my limits, but that didn’t mean I was helpless. Parents are still the most important influence on their kids.

Finding a New School

I was lucky: My son was at a private school that did not push kids, behind their parents’ backs, into exploring alternate sexualities and getting “treated” by lifetime medicalization. If my son had been at a trans-affirming school — which means just about any public school — I would have been undermined at every turn.

At this school, however, he did have a cohort of “rebel” friends who all seemed to identify themselves as gender-questioning. And the school itself was not academically challenging enough for Andy. So I focused on academics, and we looked for a new school that would be a better fit on that score — and still supportive of my values. Finding one gave him a fresh start and a new peer group.

Building Real Identity

Next, I decided I would not provoke Andy by debating gender and trans issues. Maria Keffler in her book “Desist, Detrans, and Detox” reminds parents that transgenderism in adolescents is less about sex and more about identity, identity, and identity. A few decades ago, Andy probably would have worked through his teenage crises by going goth or arguing with me about religion. These days, becoming one of the letters in LGTB is the shortcut to being interesting, not “basic.”

Well, I didn’t want to make gender-bending the way he was going to differentiate himself from his parents. If he had been openly claiming a different so-called gender identity, maybe I would have been more confrontational about it. But since he was just flirting with being trans, not yet eloping, I decided not to make the topic of the sexes even more important than it already was. Instead, I focused on helping him build an identity in a healthy way.

I made it a priority to compliment him, every day, praising him for all the good things he is. Every time I “caught him” being funny, smart, helpful, generous, thoughtful, or kind, I noted it out loud. Every day, multiple times a day. I tried to help him see that these things are more important to his identity than some exotic “gender.” I also tried to help him feel more at home in his skin. He was given lessons in a sport he enjoys, so he could experience his body being strong and agile. Whatever reduced his alienation from his body, I encouraged.

Open-Ended Questioning

Next, I focused on building our relationship. I asked a lot of open-ended questions, and I made goofy jokes. We laughed a lot. I learned about him and signaled that I was interested in learning more. De-escalating tension and increasing the joy between us was key.

If Andy wanted to wear a vintage shirt that looked like it belonged on a French aristocrat from a few centuries ago, I just shrugged and let it pass. As long as what he chose was somewhere within the boundaries of socially acceptable male clothing, I didn’t make a fuss. After all, being a man (or a woman) is large enough to encompass differences in style, personality, and interest. It’s the trans movement that stereotypes the sexes, telling us that a sensitive, artistic boy must actually be a girl. Nonsense! My son could be a man and wear pastels.

When opportunities arose in everyday life, I pointed out the differences between men and women. In talking about school athletics, I would casually observe, “Oh, in high school, the athletic teams are divided by sex, because by puberty, boys develop more muscles and have more lung capacity than girls.” I never made these into arguments, just objective remarks.

In fact, we didn’t talk about so-called gender much, although I was prepared to. I coached myself on how to respond with neutrality and interest. I was determined only to ask questions. “I’m not clear how, if gender is socially constructed, that it is also an infallible identity deep inside the person?” “Help me understand. If gender is fluid and changeable, why should people get surgeries to alter their bodies permanently?” Books and essays pointing out transgenderism’s inconsistencies helped me clarify my thoughts. Still, I vowed I would only provide my own answers when Andy asked me a question — only, that is, when he was truly curious about my thinking.

I did take Andy to one talk on gender by a speaker who was calm and sympathetic but still supportive of my values. When he asked why he had to go, I simply said, “It’s an important topic, and this point of view is not well-represented in the culture.” Afterward, when I asked him what he thought, he said, “It was fine,” in a tone of voice that indicated the opposite. I dropped it; the talk still gave him a lot to chew on, even if he didn’t want to admit it.

Limiting Technology

One other piece was key: technology. Much trans proselytizing happens online, with anonymous adults love-bombing vulnerable kids. These adults sell the idea that acceptance can be found only in their new trans family and not in their real home. Some parents need to take drastic steps regarding their kids’ online presence. Fortunately, the screen problem was one I had been addressing for a long time, so I could be more moderate.

Andy did not have a smartphone, although even flip phones these days have internet browsers. I gave him a new phone designed for kids, one that had some carefully curated apps but no internet browser. For computer time, he was limited to an hour a day, and I trusted the internet filters I managed on his computer to keep him off the porn sites and the sexually explicit forums that cater to trans-questioning kids. All that limited (but didn’t eliminate) his exposure to pro-trans pressure. As a bonus, I got a much more cheerful kid at home who wasn’t always in front of a screen.

The point of all of this was threefold: to be the good guy, to distract him from all gender talk all the time, and to provide other identity options than the trans one.

Upping My Parenting

Lastly, I played the long game. Even when I didn’t believe it, I kept repeating to myself that the universe wouldn’t give me a kid that I couldn’t care for. That I had his best interests at heart — and online trans gurus didn’t — and I could wait this out with patience. I prioritized him when we had downtime in the evenings, not my phone. And I did the things I needed to, like sleeping enough and getting my own support system, so I could be available to him. Should I have been doing all of this all along as a parent? Well, of course, and in fact, it’s not like I had to do a total 180 when this emergency happened. Some of these things I was already doing, sort of. But I still needed to level up my parenting.

This summer, when he decorated a new phone, there were no rainbow stickers on it.

I wouldn’t say we are out of the woods, but he seems uninterested in the whole gender question. His wardrobe choices are less outrageous, and he’s not anxious, angry, and approval-seeking. Instead, he’s engaged and happy at school and at home, and he doesn’t need to be “different” according to the trans script. He’s happier being different just as himself. That makes me one happy parent.

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.

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How Safe Are Your Parental Rights? It Increasingly Depends on Your Politics

BY: PAULA RINEHART | NOVEMBER 07, 2022

Mom and daughter holding hands on a porch bench — **If the issue at hand is your child’s confusion about his sex, then your parental rights can be bargained away in court far too easily.**

PAULA RINEHART

Michigan voters will decide Tuesday whether children in that state can obtain puberty blockers at Planned Parenthood facilities without parental consent. Proposal 3 would also give Michigan children a constitutional right to be castrated or surgically sterilized — again, without the consent of a parent.

Parental rights have become a fiercely contested battleground. Historically, your right to determine what’s in the best interest of your child has gone without question. It’s the oldest, most fundamental liberty we know, enshrined in legal doctrine since 1690.

But too often today, ideology determines whether your parental rights will actually stand in court. If a parent opposes her child’s desire to pretend to be the opposite sex, courts increasingly treat that parent’s rights as expendable. The sexual confusion of children overshadows parents’ rights to remain in their children’s lives as a potent force.

In a courtroom down the hall, however, the rights of neglectful or drug-abusing parents are treated with kid gloves, under the theme of family preservation. Activist courts stand ready to protect your parental rights, but only when your narrative matches their own.

‘I’m God in this Case’

Less than a year ago, Abigail Shrier shocked readers with her story of a California judge who stripped a father of his parental rights because he showed insufficient support for performing irreversible medical procedures on his sex-confused son. These cases are popping up all around the country. Sexual ideology is becoming the governing factor in a child’s placement, trumping the will and the voice of a parent. In a state whose governor was elected on a parental rights platform, Virginia Del. Elizabeth Guzman brazenly introduced a bill that would charge a parent who fails to affirm a child’s “sexual orientation or gender identity” with a felony. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed legislation that makes his state a “refuge” for trans-identifying minors who seek irreversible medical procedures. Just make it to the Golden State … and there is nothing your objecting parents can do.

One case in the sleepy university town of Charlottesville, Virginia, provides some insight into how a parent can suddenly get framed as “the bad parent” in a custody battle, merely for questioning a child’s sexual confusion.

Sarah Schultz told me she spent more than a half-million dollars trying to retain joint custody of her 15-year-old daughter who first claimed she was bisexual and then began to question her sex. Schultz pled for a “wait and see” approach and for the right to have an influence in her daughter’s maturing adolescence. Despite Sarah’s ex-husband’s earlier fentanyl overdose, she says, a judge gave primary custody of the daughter to her dad, who permitted both bisexual and heterosexual sleepovers. In the past four years, Schultz has seen her daughter fewer than five times.

Schultz said the appointed guardian ad litem viewed her faith as a threat to her daughter’s emerging sexuality. “I’m God in this case,” Schultz recalled her daughter’s guardian ad litem saying. The court saw her daughter as a girl in an “authentic process to discover her identity,” Schultz explained, while the father was commendable because he was “allowing her sexuality to blossom.”

Courts often use the “safety of the child” as a guise to award custody to a parent who mirrors the left’s narrative. Note the irony here. How can you be a good parent unless you are willing to oppose something harmful your child thinks she wants at the time? A teenager sees hormones and irreversible surgeries as a mirage of liberation. A concerned parent sees what a disfigured body and the inability to have children will mean 10 years from now.

A Pernicious Double Standard

Treatment of parental rights in the world of foster care and adoption, meanwhile, is a vastly different story.

A mother can give birth to a baby who spends two months in the NICU, crying for endless hours as he detoxes from the heroin his mother ingested during pregnancy, and she or her mother can still take the baby home. Parental rights are treated as sacrosanct, even though most of the maltreatment of children actually occurs at the hands of parents or their paramours.

“Family preservation” is the holy grail courts and welfare agencies pursue, often at the expense of the actual safety of children. As Naomi Schaefer Riley explains in her book, “No Way To Treat A Child,” “child welfare workers and family-court judges … believe that foster care, to the extent that it should be used at all, is an endless holding pattern for a child while parents get their affairs in order.” Sadly, many never do.

In an effort to preserve parental rights, children languish in care for years. The common complaint in foster care is “the clock.” Though a child is legally eligible for adoption after roughly two years in care, drug-abusing parents can play out the clock, attend a few recovery meetings, fulfill a requirement or two on the reunification plan — and the clock starts over. Many children age out of the possibility of adoption because the court favors parental rights over children’s attachment needs.

The Use and Abuse of Parental Rights

Given the current capricious approach of many courts, the question to ask is: Just how safe are your parental rights? If the issues at hand are related to your child’s confusion about his sex, then your parental rights can be bargained away in court far too easily. But if the court frames those rights as a matter of “family preservation,” they are nearly carved in stone.

The contrast between how parental rights are viewed, depending on the left-wing bias of courts and state agencies, should disturb everyone. The right of conscientious parents to shape their child’s life is among the most cherished of all human freedoms. That right is increasingly threatened, as the militancy of transgender ideology invades the private realm of parent and child.

How safe are your parental rights then? Only as safe as the left wants them to be.

Paula Rinehart, LCSW, is a therapist in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the author of the book “Sex and the Soul of a Woman.” She writes about family and culture.

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Trans Activists Offer Gender-Confused Minors Cash And Uber Rides To Get Them Away From Home

BY: STEPHANIE LUNDQUIST-ARORA | OCTOBER 27, 2022

screenshot of Discord messages — **‘We can pay for Ubers, Lyfts, and other passes if you need to leave immediately,’ wrote one Pride Liberation Project leader to adolescent members.**

STEPHANIE LUNDQUIST-ARORA

From coast to coast, transgender activists are working to push chemical castration and genital mutilation on minors at all costs. In September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 107 into law, blocking officials from enforcing other states’ laws that hinder access to transgender medical procedures and drugs for minors.

Meanwhile, in Virginia, the Pride Liberation Project (PLP) is organizing resources to help confused minors whose parents are not supportive of their gender and/or sexual identity experimentation to run away from their homes to stay with a “queer-friendly” adult. The potential for predatory behavior with this initiative is alarming.

PLP leader, Aaryan Rawal, now a college student, does not seem to be concerned about the risks of sending confused children into strangers’ houses “within 1-2 days” of their separation from their families. He sent messages to PLP members, mostly high school and middle school students, that the organization could offer rides and money promptly.

As reported by Asra Nomani, on July 15, 2022, Rawal wrote on Discord, “We can pay for Ubers, Lyfts, and other passes if you need to leave immediately. … In the short term, we can provide a couple of hundred dollars … through Venmo or Zelle.” For the longer term, he offers more money. “We can also set up a dedicated ActBlue fundraising page for you and get allies to donate. In the past, this has led to thousands of dollars in donations. All of this money is yours.”

At best, PLP is helping children run away from home. But it seems there is a sinister drive behind this network. Children are among our society’s most vulnerable, and those confused and separated from their parents are ripe prey. It is suspicious that identity disagreements within families, notably during this era of the social contagion of gender dysphoria and confusion — particularly among middle schoolers, would ever justify removing children from their families and placing them with strangers. Would these same actors argue that we take away a 13-year-old conservative girl from her liberal parents who refuse to affirm her political identity and place her with a random identity-affirming adult male stranger?

This is illegal and absurd. Saying so is common sense, not bigotry, as members of groups like PLP and Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) Pride suggest on social media. These groups are manipulating the political landscape to obliterate parental rights and push transgenderism on children — even in elementary schools.

On its website, PLP boasts that it has advocated for the books “Gender Queer” and “Lawn Boy” to remain in public school libraries. Its members have promoted compelled speech (via mandatory pronouns). Multiple PLP members spoke at a July 2022 Fairfax County School Board meeting in favor of proposed changes to the Family Life Education (FLE) curriculum that include lessons on transgender transitioning as early as fourth grade and co-ed FLE instruction to make students who identify as transgender feel more comfortable.

Arguably not by coincidence, the students who spoke at the board meeting all carried the same message: “Queer” students feel frightened and depressed. The PLP speakers repeatedly cited 50 percent as the community’s depression rate and suggested that changes to the FLE curriculum would help them feel supported. Their messages were so consistent, in fact, it would not be surprising if someone else wrote them.

On Sept. 25, 2022, Rawal sent PLP members detailed talking points and provided media training for the student walkout that occurred later that month. The walkout was meant to object to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s efforts to preserve parental rights and roll back Ralph Northam’s heavily politicized “Model Transgender Policies.” Rawal encouraged students to say that these efforts would “hurt Queer students,” “erase [their] existence,” and cause depression and potentially suicide.

In Q&A forums with PLP walk-out participants, Rawal further told a student who was not permitted to hang flyers in the school to proceed. “My honest response is do it anyway. Admin won’t penalize over flyers distributed manually…” Rawal also offered reimbursements of up to $25 for walkout expenses. When he realized he needed megaphones for the walkout and nearby stores were sold out of them, he wrote “f—, let me dm rigby.” Notably, Robert Rigby, a retired teacher and co-chair of FCPS Pride appears to be helping to organize and support PLP initiatives as well.

Adults organizing groups such as PLP are providing resources to help children run away from home. These minors, who are not permitted by law to drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, could potentially travel to California — now a so-called “gender-affirming” sanctuary state — to obtain permanent and irreversible surgical procedures, and/or medication, without their parents’ consent.

These transgender ideology pushers are not simply accepting, they are aggressive in encouraging medical experimentation among children and keeping parents in the dark. Permanently scarring children behind a parent’s back is a particular kind of evil we will, hopefully, look back on in disbelief.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a mother, author, and member of the Independent Women’s Network.

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NHS backpedals on transgender treatments for minors, says most children are just going through a ‘phase’

By CANDACE HATHAWAY | October 24, 2022

**Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images**

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In an astonishing turn of events, the National Health Services of England announced that most children who believe that they are transgender are just going through a “phase,” the Telegraph reported on Sunday. The publicly funded health care provider stated that it would take a more cautious approach when treating minors with gender dysphoria.

Doctors should not encourage children to socially transition, because transitioning is not a “neutral act” and it could have “significant effects” in terms of “psychological functioning,” according to the new NHS report.

The NHS also announced that it would ban prescribing minors puberty blockers “outside of strict clinical trials,” the Telegraph reported. Treatment for those under 18 years old will be heavily restricted.

In July, the NHS stated that it would be closing down the controversial Tavistock Centre, a gender identity clinic for children led by therapists and hormone specialists. Following an independent review, the gender dysphoria clinic received criticism for failing to collect data on puberty blockers and for taking an “unquestioning affirmative approach” to treating children with gender dysphoria.

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Instead, the NHS will open two regional clinics based in specialist children’s hospitals led by medical doctors who are experts “in pediatric medicine, autism, Neurodisability and mental health.” The new clinics will follow guidelines that “reflect evidence that in most cases gender incongruence does not persist into adolescence.” Therefore, the NHS recommended that medical professionals should consider that a child expressing gender dysphoria might only be going through a “transient phase.” Doctors will be encouraged to take “a watchful approach” to monitor how a child’s gender dysphoria develops.

Going forward, the NHS will no longer recommend that medical professionals urge children to change their names or pronouns. Instead, socially transitioning will be recommended only in cases in which the child “is able to fully comprehend the implications of affirming a social transition” and in which a social transition may likely prevent “clinically significant distress.”

“The clinical approach has to be mindful of the risks of an inappropriate gender transition and the difficulties that the child may experience in returning to the original gender role upon entering puberty if the gender incongruence does not persist,” the NHS report stated.

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Oregon pub advertises event with child drag performer: ‘Vanellope is here to show you what a 11-year-old drag queen can do’

By ALEX NITZBERG | October 18, 2022

**Screenshot taken from video posted on Old Nick’s Pub Facebook page**

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Old Nick’s Pub in Eugene, Oregon, is advertising an upcoming event where an 11-year-old drag queen will be among those performing.

“Are you excited for Drag queen story time brunch this Sunday morning!? Well, lets meet our performers! Vanellope is here to show you what a 11-year-old drag queen can do. With all the charm and sweetness of a bowl of sugary cereal, Vanellope is here to brighten up your morning with all her drag talent,” a Facebook post reads.

The event is being billed as open to people of all ages. According to a Facebook post, the event will be free for kids under the age of 11.

“Join us for an all-new journey into Fantasy and Story with local favorite drag queen, Maliena! She will enchant us with fairytales new and old! With special guest queens and performances woven within, this is a new All Ages Drag event you won’t want to miss!” a post on the establishment’s website reads.

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According to the Daily Mail, the child has performed at the establishment before — the outlet refers to the child as a girl. In September, the pub posted what appears to be a photo of the child reading a book. “Move over Maliena because Vanellope may be our new favorite!” the post declares. The pub is standing behind its move to allow the child to perform and is arguing that drag is not necessarily sexual in nature.

“Dear friends, our youngest drag queen is being targeted by a hate campaign on Twitter right now. We LOVE AND SUPPORT VANELLOPE. Drag is an art form. It is not an inherently sexual act to dress in drag, and those sexualizing her are falling into a very typical societal trap of misogyny that views any female performance as sexual,” the pub declared in a Facebook post. “We think she’s gonna be a star on the big screen someday, so if you can come pack the house on Sunday and show her how loved and supported she is, we will force the darkness out once again with our light.”

Old Nick’s posted a video last month advertising a drag queen story time event. In the video, a drag queen said there would be “queens of all ages” at that event.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=611681283943907

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Brittany Aldean Has Nothing To Apologize For

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | SEPTEMBER 07, 2022

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

What started out as an innocent remark on Instagram has left Brittany Aldean, the wife of country music singer Jason Aldean, as the target of an unhinged wave of attacks from America’s demented “Trans the Kids” crowd.

In a late-August video reel showing herself transforming “from a relatively makeup-free face into fully ready glam,” Aldean captioned the post by saying she’d “really like to thank [her] parents for not changing [her] gender when [she] went through [her] tomboy phase” and that she “love[s] this girly life.”

While only an anodyne caption, the comment evoked the ire of self-proclaimed country artist Cassadee Pope, who took to Twitter to lash out at Aldean for comparing her “‘tomboy phase’ to someone wanting to transition.”

“You’d think celebs with beauty brands would see the positives in including LGBTQ+ people in their messaging,” Pope said.

Fellow country singer Maren Morris also decided to throw her irrelevant opinion into the mix, saying, “It’s so easy to, like, not be a scumbag human” and calling Aldean “Insurrection Barbie,” in an apparent reference to the Aldeans’ previously expressed support for former President Donald Trump.

Rather than back down and cower in the face of the latest left-wing, angry mob, Aldean is doubling down and openly criticizing the demonic practice of forcibly mutilating children seemingly being championed by Pope and Morris.

“Advocating for the genital mutilation of children under the disguise of love and calling it ‘gender affirming care,’ is one of the worst evils. I will always support my children and do what I can do [to] protect their innocence,” Aldean said on Instagram. “Some parents want to be accepted by society so badly that they’re willing to make life-altering decisions for their children who aren’t old enough to fully comprehend the consequences of those actions. Love is protecting your child until they are mature enough as an adult to make their own life decisions.”

“Karen Morris, thanks for calling me Barbie,” Aldean added in response to Morris’s tweet.

Since the social media spat, Aldean has continued in professing her advocacy for children being exploited by deranged, pro-trans leftists, with the beauty-line entrepreneur recently reaffirming her views during an interview on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

“I think that children should not be allowed to make these life-changing decisions at such a young age,” she said. “They are not mature enough; they should have parents who love them and advocate for them regardless. We have ages on everything. We have it for cigarettes, driving, military, voting. … Yet for some reason people think that we can let a child choose their gender so young? It’s very baffling to me.”

She continued, saying that “[t]here are so many consequences of doing that a[t] such a young age” and that “[s]ociety should be able to sit back, speak our minds about it and fight for these children.”

Aldean has since released a Barbie-inspired T-shirt with the phrase “Don’t tread on our kids,” with profits from the apparel line benefiting Operation Light Shine, a charity dedicated to helping “fight child exploitation and human trafficking.”

Aldean Is Right

Despite the hyperbolic virtue signaling from elitists like Pope and Morris, Aldean’s remarks about the realities of “transitioning” minors are 100 percent correct. Medically mutilating children’s genitals and pumping them full of wrong-sex hormones in the name of “care” is not compassionate; it’s satanic.

Just as is the case with any other weighty subject matter, most children have no clue what sex is, let alone transgenderism. The idea that minors are well-rounded and knowledgeable enough to understand the long-term implications associated with removing one’s penis or breasts is a hair-brained narrative that only the most hardcore leftists in society could convince themselves is true.

As noted by Federalist Contributor Samantha Stephenson, even among youth with gender dysphoria, “studies indicate that in all likelihood, symptoms will resolve in 93 percent of these children by the time they reach adulthood or even earlier — an outcome that is taken off the table for children subjected to experimental hormones with largely unknown effects, whose bodies are mutilated and fertility stolen.”

Ultimately, parents signing off on mutilating their child’s genitals are not doing what’s best for their son or daughter, but for themselves. From its inception, medically “transitioning” minors has always been about adults inflicting their will upon innocent, unsuspecting children, who are forced to live with the consequences of their parents’ ill-advised decision-making.

But rather than stand up and join Aldean in defending these kids, woke-ified celebrities like Pope and Morris will continue to attack anyone who dares to defy their twisted, pagan religion, which somehow convinces them that castrating and sterilizing children is both virtuous and humane. To them, who cares if these kids grow up to regret the procedure or become suicidal as a result? All that matters is getting a pat on the back from America’s residential, left-wing mob.

At the end of the day, Brittany Aldean has nothing to apologize for. The dangers of medically mutilating children are simply too horrific for society to sit in silence. Following Aldean’s lead, any and every sane American who understands the evils associated with this barbaric practice must speak up and get active, lest our children continue to pay the price.

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves 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

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Success in school more favorable for students who live with married, biological parents: study

By Leonardo Blair, Senior Features Reporter | August 19, 2022

While society has increasingly embraced alternative families like single-parent homes and stepfamilies, a new Institute for Family Studies research brief suggests students who live with their married biological parents perform better in school.

The brief, written by Nicholas Zill, a research psychologist and IFS senior fellow, and Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a fellow at The Future of Freedom at IFS, was based on data from the 1996 and 2019 National Household Education Surveys.

These surveys were completed by parents whose children were enrolled in elementary and secondary schools nationwide. The 1996 survey covered 17,535 students in kindergarten through the 12th grade, while the 2019 survey covered 15,990 students in the same age range.

In their analysis, Zill and Wilcox looked at the frequency of teacher and school interventions for students from both non-traditional and traditional families. They examined whether or not the child repeated one or more grades, if the child was suspended or expelled, the frequency with which schools contacted parents about their child’s schoolwork and how often parents were contacted about the child’s behavior.

The researchers found that the overall frequency of school interventions fell from 1996 to 2019.

In 1996, parents of 21.9% of students were contacted about their child’s schoolwork. By 2019, this share fell to 17.4%. Over the same period, the percentage of parents contacted about their child’s behavior dropped from 27% in 1996 to 21.6% in 2019. The share of children who repeated a grade fell from 12.9% in 1996 to 6% in 2019. The share of children suspended or expelled also decreased from 18.8% to 9.4%.

Despite the overall decrease in the frequency of school interventions from 1996 to 2019, the odds of school interventions increased for students in non-traditional families on all measures. However, the increased risk was only considered statistically significant for suspensions and parental contact about student behavior.

“It is only for suspension and parental contact about behavioral problems that the increases were statistically significant,” the researchers wrote. “But it is striking that the odds ratio increased for all four outcomes in the last quarter-century. Our results are consistent with the theory that marriage matters more than ever for today’s children.”

When the data were adjusted to control for differences across family types in racial composition and parent education levels, as well as for the ages and sexes of the students in each group, the researchers found that the greater risks of school intervention faced by students from non-traditional families declined.

Still, according to Zill and Wilcox, “students from non-intact families continue to have nearly triple the risk of suspension and double the risk of grade repetition as students from intact, biological families.” Specifically, students who grow up in non-traditional families are 2.92 times more likely than their peers in intact families to get suspended from school while those who live in non-traditional families are 2.01 times more likely to end up repeating a grade than children from intact families.

Parents of students growing up in non-traditional households are 2.18 times more likely than parents of students raised by a nuclear family to have schools contact them about their children’s behavior. At the same time, parents of students living in a non-traditional household were just 1.63 times more likely than parents of children from two-parent homes to have schools contact them about their children’s schoolwork.

“Despite the declines in the frequency of school interventions for students from single-parent, stepparent, and other non-intact family types, in both surveys, these students were significantly more likely than those from married, biological families to receive each of these interventions,” the researchers explained. “And the over-time declines in the frequencies of school interventions were greater for students from married, biological families. So, the relative risk faced by students from non-traditional families has actually increased or remained the same.”

The researchers clarified in their brief that their findings should not be interpreted as saying students from non-traditional families cannot succeed in school, only that the odds of academic success are “more favorable” for students from traditional ones.

“These results reaffirm the conclusion that children from stable, married families have a better chance of receiving the guidance and support they need to succeed academically and adapt confidently to the classroom environment than children from disrupted or reconstituted families,” they noted. “This does not mean that children from non-traditional families cannot do well in school. Many do, despite the conflict, turmoil, or curtailed parenting they may experience at home.”

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COMMENTARY

Watch: Police Put in Horrifying Situation as 4-Year-Old Opens Fire While Dad Is Being Arrested

By Richard Bledsoe | July 22, 2022

Police are often placed in situations where they have to make life-or-death decisions in an instant.

Thanks to the attitudes of the establishment media, the results of those consequential choices usually only get publicized if police can be blamed for making the wrong call.

However, now dramatic body cam footage was released where police successfully handled a dangerous situation in which a 4-year-old boy used his father’s gun to open fire on the officers. They were able to disarm the child before anyone got hurt.

Multiple versions of the body cam recordings were shared in a YouTube video. Watch:

ABC4 in Utah linked highlights from the videos and summarized the events that took place on February 21. The police were summoned when “employees reported that a man brandished a gun in the drive-thru after his order was incorrect.”

Sadaat Johnson, 27, was in the McDonald’s drive-thru with two children in the car, a 4-year-old and a 3-year-old.

Johnson did not comply with police instructions, and the situation escalated until officers were forced to pull Johnson from the vehicle.

The video does not show what happened next in the car. While the police were making the arrest of Johnson, the 4-year-old boy picked up the gun. An officer saw the weapon and shouted “Gun!”

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ABC4 reported, “The officer used his hand to sweep the gun away and the gun went off, hitting the upper part of the McDonald’s building. The officer then yelled at the person inside of the car to drop the gun, and after looking inside the car, realized that it was a small child.”

The children can be heard crying as they exit the car. The officers ask “Are you all right, kid?” and try to reassure them: “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

The discharge may have been accidental. However as reported in the New York Post, “The investigation showed that Johnson then ‘told the child to shoot at the police,’ authorities said. It was not clear exactly when he gave the order and it was not caught in the bodycam clip.”

“The boy — who was taken into protective custody — said he shot at the cops because ‘he wanted his daddy back,’ according to court records obtained by ABC4.”

Johnson also explained to the authorities “this wasn’t the first time his 4-year-old child had gotten his hands on a gun.”

Johnson ended up pleading guilty to two third-degree felonies, child abuse or neglect and aggravated assault. Johnson was sentenced to 120 days in jail, three years of probation and courses on anger management and parenting. He can no longer own guns.

A huge contributing factor to this near-disaster was Johnson’s disrespect and disregard for the police. This attitude leads to more danger in police interactions, despite the absurd progressive activist campaign to defund the police based on claims that it’s police presence that starts the problems.

This is not to say law enforcement does not need some reform. But it needs to be reform that puts police back into serving and protecting communities, rather than abusing citizens on behalf of the political class.

Police should also question even their own self-serving agendas. The Utah body cam footage was in stark contrast to footage from the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. There, the cams caught almost 400 law enforcement personnel unable to handle a lone shooter for almost an hour, while kids died.

In the Utah case though, it is a testament to God’s mercy and the police that no one was killed or injured through the careless abuse of firearms. There could have been causalities of officers, kids or both.

The trouble was caused due to a series of bad decisions and actions by Sadaat Johnson, as much as some want to blame the gun or the cops instead.

Richard Bledsoe

Contributor, Commentary

Richard Bledsoe is an author and internationally exhibiting artist. His writings on culture and politics have been featured in The Masculinist, Instapundit and American Thinker. You can view more of his work at Remodernamerica.com.

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Daniel Horowitz Op-ed: Portugal as an enduring embarrassment of the failure of the mass vaccination campaign

Commentary by Daniel Horowitz | June 09, 2022

Next week, the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will meet to likely offer emergency use authorization for Moderna and Pfizer’s biological products to be injected into babies as young as six months old. No amount of evidence demonstrating negative efficacy and enormous side effects will factor into its decision. Never mind the fact that there never was an emergency for young children to begin with, and there certainly isn’t one now.

Yet the FDA will undoubtedly approve a shot that has failed and is outdated – so much so that two weeks later, it will meet about updating the formula for new variants, of course, after having injected the outdated formula into the arms of babies and toddlers. One data point that certainly will be missing from the meeting is the observation about Portugal.

According to Statista, Portugal has the highest vaccination rate of any country in Europe aside from the tiny island of Malta. Nearly every adult is vaccinated in this nation of 10.3 million, 94% of all people (including young children) have received at least 1 dose, and 70% have received boosters. In fact, the New York Times ran an article about Portugal last year, noting that “there is no one left to vaccinate” there.

Yet, Portugal now has the highest case rate and COVID death rate per capita in Europe and the second highest COVID fatality rate in the world behind Taiwan, according to Our World in Data.

Here is the case rate map of Europe:

And here is the death rate map:

At 2,293 cases per 1 million individuals, as of June 7, Portugal’s 7-day rolling average case rate is seven times greater than that of the United States and is now higher than the worst peak of cases in America. Moreover, it’s not that Portugal never had a big wave – it has already experienced a peak in the winter that was three times as great as the worst days in the U.S. So even after many people already had the virus, officials keep testing positive for the virus despite – or perhaps, because of – the near universal vaccination rate.

It is true that Portugal has a high rate of testing, but not that much higher to account for exponentially higher case rates. As of June 1, Portugal’s positivity rate was nearly four times that of the U.S.

Then there are the COVID deaths. At 4.1 deaths per million, Portugal is now far outpacing all the other European countries with high case rates by over 60%. Its current death rate is more than four times that of the U.S. This simply should not be happening now that everyone is vaccinated and everyone who is vulnerable is boosted if the shots are anywhere near as effective as we are told.

The Portugal News reported that between May 24 and May 30, the southern European nation “recorded 175,766 infections, 220 deaths associated with COVID-19, and an increase in hospitalizations and intensive care.” Health Minister Marta Temido said last week that “Portugal is probably the European country with the highest prevalence of this sub-lineage and this partly explains the high number (of cases) we are seeing.”

But that really doesn’t explain it. Why would Portugal have a much worse problem with these variants than the country in which they were first detected — namely South Africa? Is this not a fulfillment of Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche’s warning that the sub-optimal evolutionary pressure of these shots, originally designed for the Wuhan strain, would work against the body for future variants?

Let’s a take a look at South Africa’s BA.4/BA.5 wave from late May as compared to Portugal’s? Can you even detect it?

South Africa’s recent peak, which is now over with, was one-twentieth the size of Portugal’s – and this is after Portugal already had exponentially more cases from the previous wave. However, even as it relates to death rates, the afflicted country is outpacing South Africa.

Keep in mind that Portugal is still experiencing higher death rates even after having already incurred a lot of deaths from the original pool of vulnerable people during the first winter. It simply makes no sense for Portugal to be experiencing this many deaths with Omicron, which does not replicate well in the lungs. Remember, while Portugal has run out of people to vaccinate, according to the New York Times, less than a third of South Africans are vaccinated with very few having had boosters. Also, South Africa’s life expectancy is 18 years lower, and 20% of the population has AIDS.

For how much longer is the FDA going to be allowed to ignore a year’s worth of signals not just indicating cataclysmic safety concerns but negative efficacy – and downright perpetuation – of the virus? Just look at this week’s Walgreens COVID-19 testing index, and you can once again see that higher positivity rates are associated with those with more shots, especially as time goes on.

The mendacity of obfuscating the truth about these shots has gotten so ludicrous that the media and medical associations are now chalking up the rash of sudden cardiac deaths among young people as an unexplained “sudden adult death syndrome.” And now they want to inject these products into the final group of unvarnished children. What does that say about who we are as a people if we let it happen?

In the New York Times article from October crowing about “no one left to vaccinate” in Portugal, Laura Sanches, a Portuguese clinical psychologist, is quoted as bemoaning the fact that Portugal doesn’t “really have a culture of questioning authorities.” Well, here in America, we once did have such a culture. Reagan once said that “freedom is the right to question, and change the established way of doing things,” an understanding “that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions … to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people.” Will we finally exercise that freedom?

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Daniel Horowitz Op-ed: What have we gotten from two years of mask-wearing?

Commentary by Daniel Horowitz | May 31, 2022

It’s truly hard to overstate the damage done to a generation of children by the two-year masking regime. From language and developmental inhibition to social and behavioral anxiety, these Chinese cloths have created a generation of bumbling fools. So, was it worth it?

In a preprint published in the Lancet, Ambarish Chandra of the University of Toronto and Tracy Beth Høeg of the University of California at Davis replicated a CDC study comparing counties with school mandates to those without mandates. However, rather than using the CDC’s artificial and arbitrary number of counties and duration of study, they extended the study using a larger sample of districts and a longer time interval, employing almost six times as much data as the original study. Using this updated method to measure the relationship between mask mandates and per-capita pediatric cases, they found “no significant relationship between mask mandates and case rates.”

The study observed over 1,800 counties from July through October 2021, which is presumed to be the largest observational sample ever conducted on the mask issue.

In fact, for most weeks, there was a non-statistically significant higher case rate among the masked counties. What this demonstrates is that with all of the CDC’s observational studies, arbitrary endpoints were clearly manipulated to show results they knew did not reflect reality.

Similarly, a study of fatality rates in 35 European countries during the 2020-2021 winter peak found no positive relationship between reduced mortality rates and mask compliance. If anything, there was a reverse correlation. “While no cause-effect conclusions could be inferred from this observational analysis, the lack of negative correlations between mask usage and COVID-19 cases and deaths suggest that the widespread use of masks at a time when an effective intervention was most needed, i.e., during the strong 2020-2021 autumn-winter peak, was not able to reduce COVID-19 transmission,” concluded the author in an April study published in Cureus. “Moreover, the moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe also suggests that the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences.”

Several months ago, an observational study published in Medicineby German doctor Zacharias Fögen compared the overall case fatality rate in 81 counties in Kansas without mask mandates compared to the 24 with mandates. He actually found a statistically significant higher fatality rate in the mask counties. “Results from this study strongly suggest that mask mandates actually caused about 1.5 times the number of deaths or ∼50% more deaths compared to no mask mandates.”

Dr. Fogen posits as a potential reason for negative efficacy that the mask-wearing can make the virions smaller and cause them to penetrate deeper into the alveoli, where they can cause pneumonia instead of bronchitis. “A rationale for the increased RR (risk ratio) by mandating masks is probably that virions that enter or those coughed out in droplets are retained in the facemask tissue, and after quick evaporation of the droplets,hypercondensed droplets or pure virions (virions not inside a droplet) are re-inhaled from a very short distance during inspiration.”

While negative efficacy is still a hypothesis, there have been documented negative side effects to mask-wearing. A preprint Italian study from earlier in May found that short-term surgical mask usage was associated with an increased inhaled CO2 level greater than 5000ppm in 90% of 10- to 18-year-olds in the sample. “Shortly after wearing surgical masks, the inhaled air CO2 approached the highest acceptable exposure threshold recommended for workers, while concerningly high concentrations were recorded in virtually all individuals when wearing FFP2 masks,” concluded the authors. “The CO2 concentration was significantly higher among minors and the subjects with high respiratory rate.”

Yet here we are, over two years into this saga, and schools are still masking children, while some that stopped are bringing back this barbaric practice. To this day, people with severe mental and physical disabilities are being forced to wear masks when seeking medical attention at health care facilities. Trauma survivors who suffer panic attacks from having their faces covered are forced to choose between panic attacks and loss of medical care.

But children will, by far, be the most harmed by this policy. The language development impediment that will result from the past two years of inhumane mask mandates is incalculable. The head of the U.K.’s Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills found that children suffer from “limited vocabulary,” while some babies “struggled to respond to basic facial expressions,” partly due to interacting with people wearing face masks.

Talk about a cost-benefit analysis!

To this day, only a few states have banned mask mandates from coming back. The New Hampshire governor recently vetoed a bill from the state legislature banning local school boards from implementing such immoral policies upon children. What we really need is a ballot initiative in every state to spell out in the state’s constitution that a person has a fundamental right to refuse to wear a medical device and cannot be discriminated against in the realm of public accommodations for exercising that right. Moreover, there should be criminal penalties for any adult who forcibly masks a child.
If we plan to wait for “the science” to catch up to reality and morality, we will be waiting a long time. It might be obvious to us that masking is cruel and ineffective, but not to the megalomaniacs in power. That power needs to be stripped permanently.

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4th Grader Who Survived Uvalde Reveals What Shooter Said, Did After Entering Classroom

Reported By Jack Davis | May 26, 2022

A new report says that the Texas school shooter told fourth graders what was coming after he shot his way into their classroom Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. The report from KENS-TV was based on the account of a fourth-grade pupil it did not name. The gunman killed 19 children and two adults before he was killed in a shootout with law enforcement. The fourth grader explained that the ordeal began with a gunshot.

“He shot the next person’s door, and then, we have a door in the middle, and he opened it. And then he came in. He crouched a little bit, and he said, ‘It’s time to die,’” the boy said.

The boy was doing all he could to survive.

“When I heard the shooting through the door, I told my friend to hide under something, so he won’t find us. I was hiding hard. And I was telling my friend to not talk because he is going to hear us.”

Four boys hid with the child who spoke to KENS, partially shielded by a tablecloth. The boy recounted a harrowing moment near the end of the ordeal.

“When the cops came, the cop said, ‘Yell if you need help!’ And then one of the persons in my class said ‘help.’ The guy overheard, and he came in and shot her,” the boy said.
“The cop barged into that classroom, and the guy shot the cops. And the cops just started shooting,” he said.

Then came silence.

“I just opened the curtain. And I just put my hand out,” he said. “I got out with my friend. I knew it was the police when I saw the armor and the shield.”

The boy recalled the actions of his slain teachers, Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles.

“They were nice teachers,” he said. “They went in front of my classmates to help. To save them.”

Fear ran through the school as the attack began, according to another child.

“We were scared, and the teacher started telling us we can pray,” Timothy Silva, 8, told CBS.

His second-grade teacher alerted the students, he said.

“She started yelling, and I didn’t think it was a drill because they would have announced it. The teacher just went out there and started yanking on our door to go hide.”

Jack Davis

Contributor, News

Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.

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Stop The Gaslighting. Conservatives Did Not Inflame the Culture War Over Trans Ideology

POSTED BY: CASEY CHALK | MAY 24, 2022

man in drag costume reads book to children at library

Leftists push their gender ideology on children, yet conservative parents complaining about Drag Queen Story Hour are blamed for starting a culture war.

Author Casey Chalk profile

CASEY CHALK

Can the gaslighting on gender and sexual identitarianism from the left get any more absurd? The Washington Post last month ran a story about how a decision by the community center in McLean, Virginia to co-sponsor a “Drag Story Book Hour” for children during Pride Month has, in their awkward wording, “set off culture wars.”

The May election for three open seats at the community center has attracted nine candidates, including Katharine Gorka, a former Trump administration official who has criticized the diversity, inclusion, and equity policies that resulted in the drag event. WaPo reporter Antonio Olivo observed, with editorial flourish, that this is “an example of how nothing is safe from the nation’s raging culture wars.”

A suburban community center hosts a drag queen story hour (DQSH) for elementary school students, yet it’s conservatives who are the ones stoking the culture war by complaining about it? A Florida school board member last year chaperoned a group of elementary school children on a field trip to a gay bar and the state’s community centers promote DQSH, but it’s conservatives who are the dangerous extremists for supporting a Florida parental rights in education bill?

Drag queens do bizarre, borderline pornographic acts in front of children, but it’s conservatives who are responsible for miseducating and damaging American youth? Come on.

Anything but Innocent

DQSH, as Gorka recently told me, “is not, as the American Library Association dishonestly describes it, an effort to combat ‘marginalization and underrepresentation.’” Rather, as the DQSH website itself declares, it is “drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores” in order to “capture the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.”

That word “play” is a bit concerning, especially given the sexually explicit nature of DQSH, and the many allegations that this pedagogy equates to grooming. A drag performer at one DQSH event in D.C. last year sang shirtless with duct tape on her breasts, sported a thong, and pretended to have fake sperm over her mouth.

Another DQSH event in Portland, Oregon in 2019 showed photos of children “lounging atop of the costumed queens on the floor, grabbing at false breasts, and burying their faces in their bodies.” This is not exactly light-hearted, appropriate public entertainment, notes Gorka.

A Concerning National Phenomenon

It would be more accurate to say that DQSH events bring the culture war directly to America’s children, with an ideological gameplan expressly dedicated to sexualizing our nation’s youth and urging children to consider themselves gender dysphoric. The first DQSH event in the United States was held in San Francisco in 2015. Since then, the events have spread across the country.

As of 2020, the official DQSH website boasted almost 50 independently operated chapters across the United States, including in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. It is also supported by the American Library Association, whose extensive resource page includes information on how libraries can resist and censure people in local communities who object to these events.

Terrifyingly, the grooming charge is reality. In 2021, the former president of an organization that served as a sponsor for the Milwaukee Drag Queen Story Hour was charged with possessing child pornography depicting the sexual abuse of underage boys, including toddlers. In 2019, the Houston Public Library admitted a registered child sex offender to read to kids in a DQSH event. Allyn Walker, a transgender former assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University in Virginia, sought to defend people who are attracted to minors.

As I noted in a recent Federalist article, the media and schools aggressively promoting transgenderism have created a national crisis. There has been a dramatic, unprecedented surge in people identifying with sexual identities other than heterosexual.

As Abigail Shrier documents at length in her alarming book “Irreversible Damage,” the consequences for those who seek hormone treatment and/or sexual reassignment surgery are lifelong. DQSH marks an attempt to push the boundaries even further, not only for children entering puberty but to early elementary school and pre-K.

This truly is a national challenge. DQSH now reportedly has chapters in 29 different states, which means there is plenty of local political work to be done. As Gorka notes, “pornographic books such as ‘All Boys Aren’t Blue’ can be found in hundreds of school libraries across the country, thanks in part to the fact that The Young Adult Library Services Association (a division of the American Library Association) put the book at the top of its Teens’ Top 10 book list in 2021.”

Malevolent Gaslighting

This makes the left’s abusive and hyperbolic rhetoric on conservative resistance to DQSH and other grooming activities all the more insulting and infuriating. The Washington Post provocatively featured a political cartoon in April portraying Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as responsible for the deaths of trans children. Liberal media outlets are claiming that conservatives should be held responsible for the suicides of children struggling with dysphoria.

Yet who encouraged prepubescent children to think about myopic topics like gender dysphoria in the first place? I certainly never heard of such things when I was in grade school in the 1990s. Who told children that their gender and sexual identity were the most important thing about them, and that misidentifying or misgendering amounted to the worst possible offense? Who is making millions of dollars off lying to and emotionally damaging impressionable, easily-manipulated children?

The answer is those advocating DQSH and the many other ubiquitous forms of sexual and gender propaganda influencing millions of American youth. It is they who are deceiving — and often permanently damaging — an entire generation of Americans for the sake of their own ideological agenda, the normalizing of bizarre, pornographic behavior.

No, conservatives did not inflame the culture war over trans ideology and drag queens. But we sure would like to stop it.

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.

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Disney launches LGBT clothing line for kids; critics blast company for promoting ‘sexual confusion’

Reported By Samantha Kamman, Christian Post Reporter | Thursday, May 19, 2022

**People from the Walt Disney Company participate in the annual LA Pride Parade in West Hollywood, California, on June 9, 2019. | DAVID MCNEW/AFP via Getty Images**

Disney has released a new “Pride Collection” clothing line for children amid controversy surrounding the corporation’s reaction to Florida’s new parental rights in education bill and reported efforts to include LGBT advocacy in its children’s programming. The family entertainment company launched the new fashion line on Monday, featuring merchandise such as sweaters, T-shirts, baby clothes and other items, all bearing the rainbow pride flag that symbolizes the LGBT movement. The collection’s launch comes two weeks before the start of so-called pride month, which LGBT activists recognize each June.

Many of the products also include LGBT-themed images of iconic Disney character Mickey Mouse and the company’s Star Wars, Marvel and Pixar franchises. The company is selling the items through its “shopDisney” online store, Disney retail shops and theme parks.

“The Disney Pride Collection was created by LGBTQIA+ employees and allies at The Walt Disney Company and is a reflection of their incredible contributions and place at the heart of the company,” the corporation wrote in a statement announcing the clothing line. “We stand in solidarity with our LGBTQIA+ community everywhere.”

In an opinion piece published by The Daily Citizen, Zachary Mettler, staff writer and communications liaison for the Christian organization Focus on the Family, contended that Disney is “targeting” children with an LGBT agenda.

“The new clothing line is just a part of Disney’s continued push to promote sexual confusion in children,” Mettler told The Christian Post. “Children weren’t designed to carry the weight of adult sexuality.”

He further suggested that Disney is trying to plant the idea into children’s heads that same-sex couples marrying is morally the same as a marriage between a man and a woman. He said the family entertainment company is attempting to teach children that gender is malleable, something he envisions will “confuse” and negatively impact them when they become young adults.

In its announcement of the clothing line, Disney pledged to donate the entirety of the collection’s proceed’s now through June 30 to various LGBT activist organizations, including: Ali Forney Center, GLSEN, LGBTQ Center OC, Los Angeles LGBT Center, PFLAG National, SF LGBT Center, The Trevor Project and the Zebra Coalition.

Mettler views this as a sign that the corporation has become more vocal about its stance on LGBT issues than in previous years.

According to Fox Business, the corporation has produced pride-themed clothing for children every year since 2018 but previously donated only a small percentage of the profits. This year, the company also renamed the fashion line from Rainbow Disney Collection to the Disney Pride Collection.

“I think parents especially need to be aware of the content that their children are consuming and, ideally, will proactively discuss these issues with them. Particularly topics on sexuality and gender identity, so that their children know how to navigate the content that these organizations promote,” Mettler said.

On March 11, Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Chapek apologized to employees via a letter for not taking a firmer stance against Florida bill HB 1557. The law prohibits sexual orientation and gender identity instruction for students in kindergarten through third grade and requires schools to notify parents about their child’s healthcare services on campus. Disney initially remained neutral about the legislation that critics derided as a “Don’t Say Gay” bill, changing its stance after criticism from LGBT employees and supporters. The company condemned the bill in a March 28 statement, declaring that it “should never have passed and should never have been signed into law.”

A few weeks after the company first criticized the bill publicly, leaked video footage obtained by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo showed Disney employees discussing their efforts to promote an LGBT message in the company’s children’s programming. During the meeting, Latoya Raveneau, an executive producer at Disney, praised the showrunners of the company’s “Proud Family” reboot for adhering to her “not-at-all secret gay agenda.” The spinoff of the children’s animated series features new characters, including a same-sex couple.

Franklin Graham, CEO of Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said Disney has

“gone too far” in a Facebook post last month.

“What has happened at Disney is moral failure,” Graham insisted. “Walt Disney had a vision for wholesome family entertainment. He was committed to the family. The morals of the corporate leadership of Disney today are in the gutter, and they want to redefine family counter to God’s original design and flaunt sin.”

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Left-Wing Teachers Ditch Teaching to Indoctrinate Kids About Sex Against Parents’ Will

REPORTED BY: CHAD FELIX GREENE | MAY 13, 2022

Activist teachers and school administrators have lost sight of their fundamental purpose and their obligation to parents.

Author Chad Felix Greene profile

CHAD FELIX GREENE

VISIT ON TWITTER@CHADFELIXG

Examples of LGBT activist teachers seem to be pouring in weekly. One gaining attention comes from Cape Coral, Florida where, as LGBTQ Nation describes it, “Pansexual art teacher fired after allowing students to draw Pride flags.“

Casey Scott, a middle school art teacher, described the incident as simply a discussion that happened in class in which students volunteered details about their sexuality and gender identity. Initial reporting indicated she decided to take the opportunity to provide details about her own sexuality and then asked her students to draw pictures.

In another state, teachers in San Francisco held a Zoom meeting in which the question came up as to how to handle a parent who asks teachers to use her child’s given name and biologically correct pronouns. One teacher answered by conveying an experience in which a parent stated to them, “I know you were using a different name than my child’s given name at birth and the pronouns we gave them, and I’m respectfully asking that you use the name and the pronouns that we gave them.”

The teacher proudly described their defiance saying in return, “So, in my classroom, I will refer to your child by whatever name and pronouns that they’ve told me they feel most comfortable with.”

When I was outed in high school in 1998, I attempted to talk to a sympathetic teacher, who firmly explained this was simply not something she could discuss with me. I even decided to force the issue by bringing it up in class and she, again, firmly instructed me to stop, recognizing that the classroom was not an open forum for me to express my personal issues.

Yet another example, shared by Libs of Tiktok, displays a teacher excitedly announcing the teacher came out to peers, supervisors, and students, showing the teacher dressed up as a woman with a full beard.

Keeping Parents in the Dark

Many teachers now seem to feel an obligation and certainly a sense of entitlement to use their classroom as a group therapy session, viewing students as peers they can share secrets with. Unfortunately, this has grown into its own culture in which teachers position themselves as the sole source of safety for vulnerable students, who are assumed to have no one else to turn to. Many in this generation of teachers see themselves as an underground railroad of sorts to ensure students can freely express their “true selves” without the judgment or restrictions of their parents.

This has been demonstrated by the growing discovery of “Transition Closets,” where schools offer students the opportunity to change into opposite-sex clothing once out of the watchful eye of their parents. The entire system seems to be designed to hide children from their parents and teach them to rely on teachers or other administrators for protection and validation.

The motivation behind all of this can be seen in my own generation’s experience with coming out in the late ’90s and how we felt isolated, abandoned, and stigmatized, often by the adults who were supposed to be teaching us about life. We grew up to become teachers ourselves or professors educating a new generation of teachers, and we wanted to make sure students never experienced that again.

The problem that manifests is the teachers behave as activists rather than educators, seeing their defiance of school policy, parental requests, and even the law as a righteous battle for the greater good. Either arrogantly entitled or defiant, activist teachers seem to believe they have free reign in the classroom.

Casey Scott, for example, argued she was not made aware of any restrictions on topics of discussion with the students, saying, “Not once did anyone from my administration ever explain to me any topic that I was not to allow or discuss … as a first-year art teacher in a reinstated class with zero art teaching experience it is reasonable to expect … a mentor to help oversee and give me guidance but, none was offered?”

But why would she think it would possibly be appropriate to discuss complex ideas of sexuality and gender identity with students aged 13 and under? The pictures drawn by the students were of pride flags, which Scott took a picture of for the news. These photos show a lesbian pride flag, an asexual pride flag, a genderfluid flag, and a rainbow flag, among upwards of 10 crumpled pieces of paper. She herself boasted of going into details of what being pansexual meant for her as an educational exercise.

In the San Francisco school Zoom discussion, a teacher argued, “in my school district, LGBTQ+ students have a bill of rights — and the fourth one is that they have the right to be referred to by their gender pronouns and a name that fits their gender identity.” She went on to brag that when a parent complained about the policy, the school responded saying, “No, sorry. Like, our district-wide rule is that the student determines that, not you.”

When Activism Overruns Curriculum

Teachers and many school administrators have lost sight of their fundamental purpose and their obligation to parents. There was no reason for a teacher to explain that she is pansexual and what that means for her. There is no reason for a teacher to “come out” as though he is a teenager, in order to gain approval and validation from students.

Students are being taught to explicitly lie to their parents, with full school administrative support. Non-LGBT students also feel the impact of this, as they are made to feel excluded from these special activities.

Think for a moment of the situation in which the teacher allegedly encouraged her students to draw pride flags. There are hundreds of flag variations representing the full extent of gender and sexuality, except for 95 percent of the population who are heterosexual and accept their physical sex as fact. Imagine being a middle school student with a teacher who announces she is queer and begins encouraging queer classmates to draw pictures of how special and celebrated they are. Imagine the pressure they must feel to find something, anything, to fit in and be a part of the activity.

Sadly, LGBT organizations support the efforts of these teacher activists and the overwhelming message that all students should explore their potential sexuality and gender identity. GLAAD, for example, explicitly encourages teachers to change their language, ask their students for pronouns, provide LGBT resource materials and openly defend student identities.

The answer to all of this is more transparency for parents and for those parents to be active in their children’s schools. There is no justification for keeping school projects, discussions, or curricula from parents. Parental rights, especially in education, must continue to be a top priority for Republican leaders. The more examples like this that are discovered, the more active we all must become in ensuring children are learning appropriately in school rather than being indoctrinated by left-wing ideologies.

Chad Felix Greene is a senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of the “Reasonably Gay: Essays and Arguments” series 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.

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Georgia advances legislation that outlines a ‘Parents Bill of Rights’ in education

Reported by SAMUEL MANGOLD-LENETT | April 04, 2022

In Georgia, lawmakers advanced legislation that, if signed into law by Republican Governor Brian Kemp, will give parents more direct input over what their children are being taught in the state’s public schools. Just the News reported that on Friday, the Georgia state senate voted 31-22 in favor of House Bill 1178. The bill outlined a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” that proponents of the legislation say allows parents adequate recourse if they are opposed to the curriculum being taught in their local public schools. The bill passed the Georgia house of representatives on March 4 with a vote of 98-68.

The reader summary provided for the bill by the Georgia legislature said that bill will provide a “review of removal of students in elementary and secondary education, so as to provide for the protection of the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their minor children from undue infringement by a state or local government entity, local board of education, or any officer, employee, or agent thereof.”

Frontline Policy Action, a group that according to its website, advocates for “God-honoring legislation that protects family values and advances freedom for Georgians,” took to Facebook to declare its support for the bill. The group said, “Once signed into law by the governor, this bill will codify parental rights as fundamental in Georgia law and strengthen parents’ control over their children’s education.”

It is expected that Kemp will sign the bill, now passed by both chambers of the Georgia legislature, into law.

“Parents have a right to be actively involved in their child’s learning experience,” Kemp said. “This bill will ensure transparency in education by promoting a partnership between parents [and] educators.”

This legislation has worked its way through the Georgia legislature in the midst of similar legislation in its neighboring state of Florida making national headlines. Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed the “Parental Rights in Education” bill into law much to the chagrin of liberal legacy media, leftwing institutions, and transnational corporations. These groups inaccurately characterized the legislation as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill despite the proposed law barring schools from teaching about “sexual orientation or gender identity” to students in kindergarten through third grade or “in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards” and not the utterance of the word “gay.”

In response to DeSantis signing the “Parental Rights in Education” bill into law, the Walt Disney Company — one of Florida’s largest employers —announced that it would work to get the law repealed or overturned by the court system.

Similarly, in 2019 after Kemp signed a bill into law that banned abortions after the detection of a fetal heart beat in Georgia, Hollywood studious and celebrities vowed to boycott the state.

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Biden declares support for trans surgeries, puberty blockers for kids, adolescents

Reported By Michael Gryboski, Mainline Church Editor | Thursday, March 31, 2022

President Joe Biden declared his support for allowing children and adolescents with gender dysphoria to undergo body mutilating surgeries or use puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to look more like the opposite sex despite unknowns about longterm side effects. In multiple documents released Thursday, which is observed by some as the Transgender Day of Visibility, the Biden administration backed what it described as “gender-affirming health care” for children.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs released a document titled “Gender Affirming Care and Young People.”

The document states that “early gender-affirming care” for non-binary or trans-identified minors “is crucial to overall health and well-being as it allows the child or adolescent to focus on social transitions and can increase their confidence while navigating the healthcare system.”
The document lists “top” surgeries — elective mastectomies and breasts enhancements — and “bottom” surgeries — removal of genitals — as “gender-affirming care.”
The document states that the surgeries are “[t]ypically used in adulthood or case by-case in adolescence.”
“Gender-affirming care is a supportive form of healthcare. It consists of an array of services that may include medical, surgical, mental health, and non-medical services for transgender and nonbinary people,” stated OPA.
“Medical and psychosocial gender affirming healthcare practices have been demonstrated to yield lower rates of adverse mental health outcomes, build self-esteem, and improve overall quality of life for transgender and gender diverse youth.”

HHS’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Child Traumatic Stress Network released a document titled “Gender-Affirming Care Is Trauma-Informed Care.”

The network’s document defined gender-affirming care as including so-called “evidence-based interventions such as puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones” and proclaimed that “gender-affirming care is neither child maltreatment nor malpractice.” The statement comes as officials in Texas have defined administering puberty-blocking drugs on children who question their gender as “child abuse” and experimental since the Food and Drug Administration has not approved such drugs for that use.

“There is no scientifically sound research showing negative impacts from providing gender-affirming care,” the network’s statement adds. “[Transgender, gender diverse, and intersex] youth can thrive when they are supported and affirmed in their identities and their identity development.”

An entry on Mayo Clinic’s website states that drugs aimed at blocking puberty “might” help reduce depression among youth. “However, puberty suppression alone might not ease gender dysphoria,” said the clinic, adding, Using medication to delay puberty “beyond one’s peers can be stressful,” and thus, a child “might experience lower self-esteem.”

The conservative American College of Pediatricians, an association of physicians and healthcare professionals “dedicated to the health and well-being of children,” has long voiced its opposition to using puberty-blocking drugs on children suffering from gender dysphoria.

“There is not a single long-term study to demonstrate the safety or efficacy of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for transgender-believing youth,” the organization said in a statement.
“This means that youth transition is experimental, and therefore, parents cannot provide informed consent, nor can minors provide assent for these interventions. Moreover, the best long-term evidence we have among adults shows that medical intervention fails to reduce suicide.”
“Temporary use of puberty blocker Lupron has also been associated with and may be the cause of many serious permanent side effects including osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment and, when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility,” the American College of Pediatricians added. “In addition to the harm from Lupron, cross-sex hormones put youth at an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers across their lifespan.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued medical guidelines that support the surgical and hormonal transition of trans-identified children and adolescents.

“Often, pubertal suppression creates an opportunity to reduce distress that may occur with the development of secondary sexual characteristics and allow for gender-affirming care, including mental health support for the adolescent and the family,” an October 2018 AAP guideline states.

Supporters of puberty blockers have long claimed that puberty blockers’ impact on children is reversible and are designed to give children with gender dysphoria more time to decide which gender they identify as. Proponents also claim that once adolescent users stop taking puberty blockers, their puberty resumes. The new OPA document claims that puberty blockers are reversible.

However, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service reports that “[l]ittle is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria.”
“Although GIDS advises this is a physically reversible treatment if stopped, it is not known what the psychological effects may be,” the NHS website explains. “It’s also not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones. Side effects may also include hot flushes, fatigue and mood alterations.”
As teens who are 16 or over and have been on puberty blockers for at least a year are eligible to start cross-sex hormones in the U.K., the NHS warns that those “hormones cause some irreversible changes,” such as breast development and deepening of the voice.
“Long-term cross-sex hormone treatment may cause temporary or even permanent infertility,” the NHS website added. “There is some uncertainty about the risks of long-term cross-sex hormone treatment.”

The state of Texas has made headlines in the last year as Gov. Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton and the state’s child services agency have questioned whether prescribing puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones to minors could constitute “child abuse.” In February, Paxton issued a formal opinion stating that prescribing puberty blockers or conducting sex-change surgeries on children with gender dysphoria “can legally constitute child abuse under several provisions of chapter 261 of the Texas Family Code.” Texas is also investigating whether AbbVie Inc. and Endo Pharmaceuticals, Inc., manufacturers of puberty blockers, have been engaging in deceptive advertising practices. Paxton’s office had issued Civil Investigative Demands against the two companies, seeking to determine “whether these manufacturers of puberty-blocking drugs deceptively advertised and promoted hormone blockers for unapproved uses without disclosing the potential risks to children and their parents.”

“Companies should never promote or supply puberty blockers for uses that are not intended or approved,” stated Paxton. “I will not allow Big Pharma to misleadingly promote these drugs that may pose a high risk of serious physical and psychological damage to Texas children who cannot yet fathom or consent to the potential long-term effects of such use.”

The Biden administration has challenged Texas, with the president claiming that his administration is putting “Texas on notice that their discriminatory actions put children’s lives at risk.” The administration issued guidelines saying that it may violate federal law for Texas to charge doctors who administer gender reassignment surgeries or puberty blockers on children with “child abuse.”

Earlier this month, Paxton sued the Department of Health and Human Services and argued that the federal government is misinterpreting federal law and that Texas law does allow him to label such acts as “child abuse.” A state appellate court struck down Abbott’s directive instructing the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to “conduct a prompt and thorough investigation of any reported instances of these abusive procedures.”

The attorney general’s office has asked the Texas Supreme Court to reverse the lower court decision blocking the directive.

As a result of the governor’s directive and attorney general’s opinion, the Houston-based Texas Children’s Hospital stated earlier this month that it will pause “hormone-related prescription therapies for gender-affirming services.”

Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook

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A Timely Poem for Dr. Seuss Day: ‘The List with a Fist’

POSTED BY: FATHER GOOSE | MARCH 02, 2022

Read Across America Day, also known as Dr. Seuss Day, is March 2. It celebrates both the birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel and the importance of reading.

Dr. Seuss can not whine,
Though he was canceled this day,
By President Biden,
And the cold NEA.

Seuss sat there for decades,
His birthday they used,
To encourage kids’ reading,
To instruct and amuse.

Too racist is Seuss,
And too old, dead, and pale,
Too old for the times,
Too cruel and too male.

So all they could do was to
Nix!
     Nix!
         Nix!
         Nix!
And pull Seuss’s books.
Take him out of the mix.

But then,
The Booklist went WOKE!
And how that woke made us choke!

So we looked!
Then we saw the List scatter like glitter!
We looked!
And we saw it!
Like a book list from Twitter!

And it told us,
“Why do you read old books like Seuss?”

“I know they appeal
To every daughter and sonny.
But the joy found inside them
Is no longer funny!”

“I know some new books you can read,”
Said the List.
“I know some new tricks,”
Said the List with a Fist.
“A lot of good tricks.
I will show them to you.
Your parents
Won’t mind at all if I do.”

Then Americans
Did not know what to say.
Moms ‘n dads aren’t librarians
Who take Seuss books away.

But our conscience said, “Woah! Woah!
Make this list far less woke.
Tell the List with a Fist
We don’t want it to stoke
Any fire but love
Between family and friend.
The List is too woke.
It’s designed to offend.”

“Now! Now! Have no fear.
Have no fear!” said the list.
“My tricks are not bad,”
Said the List with a Fist.

“Why, we can have
Lots of good books, if you wish,
With a game that I call
Shut-up-the-conscience!”

“Put me down,” said our conscience,
“As one happy to see
You remove from your List
Ibram X. Kendi.”

“Have no fear!” said the list.
“I will offer much more.
I will offer X. Kendi,
And authors galore!
There’s a book about a Hawaiian girl,
Who sorely wished,
To be androgynous!”
Said the List…

“Look at this!
Look at this now!” said the list.
“Here’s a prince in a dress!
Prince Sebastian with a twist!
He’s Lady Crystallia,
Dressed in drag by night!
He hires a seamstress,
Who sees the light!

And look!
This book is Common Core aligned!
But all that is fine.
Oh, yes.
All that is fine….”

“Look at this!
Look at this!
Look at this NOW!
It is fun to read fun
But you have to know how.
I can hold up these books!
I can hold up another!
Here’s a Muslim sister and brother,
And the sister’s teen, lesbian lover.
They lie to the parents,
But then make them quite sad.
It’s erotic in places,
And old customs are bad.
It’s a confusing, grim tale,
For young teens it’s designed.
But that’s all fine.
Oh, yes.
That’s all fine.”

That is what the list said…
Then it slipped into kids’ heads!
The kids took it, they took it all.
And the American conscience,
It saw the kids fall!

And our conscience fell, too.
It fell into a think!
It said, “Do I like this?
Some of it stinks.
But some of it’s good,”
Said our conscience quite split.
“But I don’t like it,
Not one little bit!”

“Now look what you did!”
Said our conscience to the list.
“You mixed good with bad,
You List with a Fist.
You took things we love,
Like love among races,
Then mostly removed
Any trace of white faces.
You added to friendships,
Trans-sexy things,
When kids need some time
To grow free of such stings.”

“But I like to trans sex.
Oh I like it a lot!”
Said the List with a Fist
As the conscience it fought.
“I will not unmix my list.
I do not wish to change.
And so,” said the List with a Fist,
“So
so
so…
I will show you
Another good book that I know!”

And then it went on,
As clever as a fox,
And handed the conscience
An Amazon box.
A cardboard package.
It was clearly a book.
“Now look at this trick,”
Said the list.
“Take a look!”

Then the list shook the box,
With a wink of the eye:
“I call this game Two-in-One-Fun!”
Said the list.
“In this box is a child,
I will show you now:
He’s two things and one child!”
Said the list, with a bow.

“I will open the box.
You will see something new.
One child. And I call “him”
Thing One and Thing Two.
These Things will not bite you.
They want to have fun.”
Then out of the box,
Came Things Two, but Child One!
“See the child was a boy,
Who then dressed like a mermaid.
With lipstick and jewelry
He played and he played.

In his mind the poor boy
Grew out long flowing hair.
Then he dolled himself up
Till his nana just stared.”
But our conscience said, “Woah!
Those things should not be
In this list. Make them go!
They should not be here
When the logic is wrong.
One boy. Two Things?”
Our conscience stayed strong.

“Have no fear, little conscience,”
Said the List with a Fist.
“These Things are good Things,”
With a wink said the list.
“They are good. Oh, so good!
They have come here to free
Every child from the sorrow
Of having to be.”

“Now here is the freedom they like,”
Said the list.
“They like to make lists!”
Said the List with a Fist.

“No, not another list!”
Said the conscience dismayed.
“They should not make a list
With the gender “mermaid”!
Nor Trans Man, nor Two-Spirit,
Pangender, nor Fluid,
Not Transmasculine, Intersex,
Nor Cisgendered Druid!”

The American conscience
Saw new lists unfurl.
With one child called two Things:
Both girl and demigirl.
“Fists! Lists!” cried the List with a Fist,
“Two is one; fun is fun!”

Things Two and Child One!?
It’s unhappy and sad!
It’ll string out one kid.
It’s a dangerous fad.
Encouraging boys
To wear mother’s gown
Will end with far worse
Than a lip-sticky frown.

Things Two in Child One
Will tear him to bits,
Pull his heart this way
And that till it splits!
And America said,
“I do NOT like the way the list plays!
Mother Nature can see that
One child has one way!”

Then our conscience said, “Look! Look!”
And our conscience shook its own fist.
“Mother Nature is coming!
And she has no such list.
Through the flowers she’s humming,
And she’s something to say.
Oh, she will not like it
To find kids this way!”

“So, DO something! Fast!” said the conscience.
“Do you hear!
I saw her. Your mother!
Mother Nature is near!
So, as fast as you can,
Think of something to do!
You will have to get rid of
‘Child One is Things Two’!”

So, as fast as we can,
We’ll get on to the net.
And we’ll say, “On the net
We can help kids, we bet.
We bet, with the net,
We can set things right yet!

“Or better, get kids to set down the net!
Set it down with a PLOP!
And avoid hurtful lists
So the Two Things will stop.”
Said the conscience aloud.
And then with clenched fists,
The Americans said,
“Be gone, mixed up list!”

“Oh dear!” said the list.
“You did not like our game…
Oh dear.
What a shame!
What a shame!
What a shame!”

Then the list took Two Things
From its list full of books.
And the list went away
With a sad kind of look.

“That is good,” said the conscience.
“The list’s gone away. Yes.
But Mother Nature will come.
She will find a big mess!
And this mess is so big
And so deep and so tall,
But we must pick it up,
Or the country will fall!”

And THEN!
Who was back in the house?
Why, Mother Nature, of course!
“Have no fear of this mess,”
Said the Nature of Things.
“I always heal the list’s nasty stings.

And so…
I will show you a different
Good trick that I know!”

Then we saw her pick up
All the kids that were down.
She called to the merboy:
“Dear, put down that gown,
And the silk, and the necklace,
And the lipstick, and heels.
Use your head and a mirror,
Not your murkier feels.”
And she stood them up fresh,
And free and true.
And she said to each one,
“You know God loves you!”

Then Mother Nature gave way
And a voice from above
Gave a choice to our conscience,
The choice of Love.

And the American conscience,
Now knows what’s at stake:
“Love what you are,
Or you’ll love what is fake.”

Should we tell kids about this?
Now, what SHOULD we do?
Well…
What would YOU do
If the list with a fist came for you?

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Education, Family, Political

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‘Dangerous by design’ metaverse apps allow children to access immersive digital sex clubs

Reported by SAMUEL MANGOLD-LENETT | February 23, 2022

A researcher who went undercover in the metaverse as a 13-year-old girl witnessed grooming, graphic sexual material, and threats of rape. The researcher, the BBC reported, used an app with a minimum age rating of 13 and visited virtual reality rooms where other users’ avatars were simulating explicit acts. The researcher, whose online presence depicted that of a 13-year-old girl, was shown sex toys and condoms and approached by several adult men. One man told the researcher that in the metaverse, users’ avatars can “get naked and do unspeakable things.” Other users approached the researcher while in the metaverse and discussed “erotic role-play.”

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a British charity dedicated to the welfare of Great Britain’s children, warned that some of the apps in the metaverse are “dangerous by design” as there is very little content moderation in the metaverse.

For instance, the app used by the researcher to access the metaverse, VRChat, allows its users to access any number of immersive chatrooms. Some of these rooms are as innocuous as digital McDonald’s, while others allow users to watch and participate in pole dancing or even attend digitally immersive strip clubs.

Mr. Burrows of the NSPCC said, “It’s children being exposed to entirely inappropriate, really incredibly harmful experiences. This is a product that is dangerous by design, because of oversight and neglect. We are seeing products rolled out without any suggestion that safety has been considered.”

Jess Sherwood, the researcher who went under cover, said, “I was surprised how totally immersed in the spaces you are. I started to feel like a child again. So, when grown men were asking why I wasn’t in school and encouraging me to engage in VR sex acts, it felt all the more disturbing.”
She said, “VRChat definitely felt more like an adult’s playground than a child’s. A lot of the rooms were overtly sexualized in pink neon, similar to what you might see in the red-light district in Amsterdam or in the seedier parts of London’s Soho at night. Inside, sex toys were on display.”

Catherine Allen, founder of a UK-based augmented and digital reality consulting firm, said that while VR can be “fun and surreal,” it also tends to be “quite traumatic and disturbing.” She described an incident in a Meta-owned app where she and a 7-year-old girl were surrounded by a group of men who joked about raping them.

VRChat said that it was “working hard to make itself a safe and welcoming place for everyone” and that “predatory and toxic behavior has no place on the platform.”

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Business, Family, Law, Political

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Daniel Horowitz Op-ed: GOP governors must ban shots for babies and toddlers

Commentary by DANIEL HOROWITZ | February 01, 2022

It’s utterly senseless. Pfizer is now asking to authorize a dangerous, outdated shot for babies and toddlers, for whom the virus does not pose a statistical risk and for a virus against which the shots have failed to show any benefit. Yet, just as taxes and death are a certainty in life, you can bank on the FDA never turning down any Pfizer request. This is where Republican governors must serve as the safety net for the people. They must actively oppose expanding the shots to the final control group against the greatest experiment on mankind.

In one of the most shocking and immoral moves since the beginning of the pandemic, Pfizer is submitting its request this week for emergency use authorization of its COVID shot for babies as young as 6 months old through 5 years old. They are quite literally pushing a shot with the hopes of ameliorating symptoms (not stopping transmission) of a virus that is a cold for young children and much less dangerous than RSV. But here’s the kicker: The trial they conducted showed that two doses failed to even produce positive results, and they are still working on a trial for a three-dose regimen. Plus, we have a new variant. So, what exactly are they seeking authorization for?

As other countries are already recommending against vaccinating those under 12, our government will likely approve this shot for babies and young children based on a failed trial. There was never any efficacy in the shot because no child in the trial got seriously ill to begin with. So, they chose a trial endpoint around levels of antibody titers. Putting aside for a moment the premise that higher antibody titers (as opposed to T cells) are necessarily a good thing and won’t cause original antigenic sin, their own trial failed to achieve these endpoints in 2- to 4-year-olds. Which is why Pfizer announced in December that it was beginning a trial on a three-dose regimen. So how can they seek authorization of the failed two-dose trial for what is essentially a new virus?

One of the precepts of the Nuremberg Code: “The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.” There is no way pursuit of an already flawed vaccine can be justified on young children, even if it still had a degree of efficacy and wasn’t outdated. A recent study from the U.K. showed that even immunocompromised children were not at an elevated risk for severe COVID. The study of 1,527 immunocompromised children and young adults found “no increased risk of severe SARS-CoV-2 infection.” None of those even more vulnerable children died.

While there likely have been a tiny number of severely ill children who have died of the virus, it’s extremely hard to tell how many of the recorded deaths were legitimately caused by the virus itself. A large COVID study conducted in Germany found just three pediatric COVID deaths out of a million. The same analyst found zero deaths occurred in children under 5.

Already among older children, no positive benefit was found in the vaccine, even when the vaccine was working better. An Israeli study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found ZERO deaths or severe illnesses BOTH in the vaccinated and in the control (unvaccinated) groups of 12- to 18-year-olds in a 29-day follow-up of their vaccination. Under what pretext could the government possibly justify COVID as an emergency in this age group, and based on what evidence does this vaccine address that “emergency?”

On the flip side, the CDC, in a study in published in JAMA just conceded that the VAERS data on myocarditis was indeed an accurate reflection of an increased risk of heart inflammation following the vaccines. “Based on passive surveillance reporting in the US, the risk of myocarditis after receiving mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines was increased across multiple age and sex strata and was highest after the second vaccination dose in adolescent males and young men,” concluded the CDC researchers. “This risk should be considered in the context of the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination.”

More broadly, over 22,600 vaccine deaths and over 1 million injuries have been reported to VAERS. We already know from previous studies that VAERS only captures 1% of adverse events, and no other shot has come with such a stigma against reporting it for harm, often at the threat of the physician losing his job. Medicare data seems to hint at a much broader cohort of vaccine casualties. The military’s epidemiological database also seems to indicate a very disturbing trend of neurological and cardiological disorders rising in association with the take-up of the vaccine.

How can this be foisted upon the youngest children — with no apparent benefit — when they concede, “Long-term outcome data are not yet available for COVID-19 vaccine–associated myocarditis cases”?

There are no long-term cancer studies, there are no long-term studies on what this does to one’s immune system, and there are no long-term studies on autoimmune diseases, even though the VAERS data and the Pfizer surveillance data from early 2021 raises some concerns. Plus the vaccine is for a virus that is not a threat to children.

Think about it: Monoclonal antibodies can get their existing EUA pulled based on the arrival of a new variant, yet shots that have already proven to be outdated – and are associated with greater infection rates – can secure official full approval and then EUA for babies with a new variant that was never run through a clinical trial.

As such, for a governors to merely take a neutral stance while allowing this travesty to plague the children of their states is unacceptable. Governors have a responsibility to direct their respective health departments to conduct the proper oversight that the FDA has abdicated and demand a moratorium on shots for children until a proper cost-benefit analysis can be conducted. At a minimum, they should join together in a lawsuit to enjoin the EUA because Pfizer has failed to prove the shots meet the eligibility thresholds in the EUA statute.

Moreover, Republican governors and legislators have an obligation to treat Pfizer like Planned Parenthood and cut all political ties with the company’s lobbying groups. Bio-medical fascism and the breach of informed consent is a greater pro-life cause than opposition to abortion right now, because its practitioners are encouraging all children to get something with only a potential downside. It is the equivalent of forcing abortions upon us, not just permitting them.

The final precept of the Nuremberg Code reads as follows: “During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.” If after everything we have learned, they won’t even discontinue this experiment on babies, then we truly have learned nothing since that dark era of history.

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Health, Opinion, Political

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No, Those Who Pushed Lockdowns Can’t Hide from the Consequences Now

Reported BY: JOY PULLMANN | JANUARY 11, 2022

Americans are starting to feel the increasing collateral damage from our unprecedented, ineffective, and ill-advised Covid lockdowns. It was known before March 2020 that lockdowns would cause lifelong and avoidable damage to billions, yet the world’s ruling classes who claim to have earned their place atop a “meritocracy” strenuously demanded such damage be inflicted especially on children and other vulnerable people.

This ruling class used all their massive financial, communications, and government powers to ensure these tragic outcomes, even though anyone who was an actual expert—or, like me, just someone who reads and has common sense—predicted this false “cure” would hurt worse than the disease.

Now that people are beginning to more deeply feel the foreseeable evil consequences of ruling class responses to a novel virus, that ruling class is pulling what propaganda experts call a “limited hangout.” That’s admitting to bits of the truth in order to re-establish yourself as a credible authority while attempting to keep the whole truth hidden.

Why are they all of the sudden simultaneously changing the narrative, and effectively admitting that they have been over-counting Covid hospitalizations? Why is it so coordinated and simultaneous? pic.twitter.com/CXpqY2G0nT
— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) January 4, 2022

So we have outlets such as The Atlantic and The New York Times, which have throughout the Covid era worked as government butt-coverers, now publishing articles admitting that lockdowns and continued rolling blackouts of school instruction is irrevocably damaging Americans, especially children and even more especially the poorest. The kids, as I pointed out in April 2020 and numerous times thereafter, will never as a generation recover.

Now that the damage is done, major corporate media organizations have decided to pivot to acknowledge just enough of the truth to cover their complicity. The Atlantic, for example, last week published an article titled “America’s Covid Rules Are A Dumpster Fire” (It took you two years to figure out what was apparent within the first month?).

CNN’s Brian Stelter recently did a segment acknowledging the foreseeable “mental health crisis” from lockdowns that is causing suicides, ruining marriages, putting formerly perfectly normal kids into rocking fetal positions, and erasing the credibility of formerly mostly ignored “public health experts” at institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Stelter made multiple statements that have gotten numerous conservatives punished by and erased from social media, such as that “Covid zero is…an impossibility” and “the CDC has turned into a punchline.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter: “It’s so sad, but it’s true, the CDC has turned into a punchline.”

When you've lost CNN's chief propagandist… you've truly, truly lost. pic.twitter.com/4hjCuh2H5g
— Jason Rantz on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) January 9, 2022

Where was Stelter a year and a half ago, when data reflecting the exact same outcomes were also plentiful? Heck, Stelter was still legitimizing Covid panic one month ago, when CNN and other news organizations reinstituted lockdown measures amid omicron panic they helped inflame. Six months ago, Stelter was indicating Fox News had “blood on its hands” for reporting less hysterically than all the other major media organizations about Covid.

Clearly, Democrats are becoming ensnared by their own trap, and they’re trying to get out with this public reversal of their messaging. The limited hangout is afoot.

Brave NYT truth-teller David Leonhardt also recently published an article and an accompanying tweetstorm on the topic.

“The number of E.R. visits for suspected suicide attempts by 12- to 17-year-old girls rose by 51 percent from early 2019 to early 2021, according to the CDC,” he tweeted.

“Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value in controlling the virus’s spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. Other interventions, like forcing students to sit apart from their friends at lunch, may also have little benefit,” he noted in the article.

No sh-t, Sherlock. So why did The New York Times run hit pieces on Trump medical advisor Scott Atlas for being one of the few scientists courageous enough to point this long-ago known data out more than a year ago, when the damage could have been mitigated? Why did Stanford University colleagues and formerly respected medical journals, boosted by corporate media attack campaigns, try to discredit Atlas and colleagues such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for saying things The New York Times, Atlantic, and CNN are admitting now?

Why did the CDC punish world-renowned vaccine scientist Dr. Martin Kulldorff for publicly disagreeing with them on vaccine safety? Why does Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook shadowban nearly every Federalist article on anything touching Covid-19, and why did they spend two years on massive information suppression campaigns against scientists, politicians, podcasters, and just ordinary citizens who had some questions, contrary data, and objections to elites’ demanded Covid response?

Because it was politically expedient to sacrifice science, Americans’ civil rights, human lives, and the world’s future then, and it is not politically expedient to face the consequences for that choice now. And they think nobody can or will hold them accountable for their deadly and despicable lies.

All the misery these too-late admittals underscore appears to be true, but it also could have been prevented. CNN and The New York Times not only did nothing to help prevent this kind of irreversible damage, they willingly, even gleefully, participated in this completely unwarranted mass abuse of Americans. The left lied, children committed suicide.

The corporate left’s morally abominable Covid propaganda operation demands justice. The people who could and should have known, and in fact likely did know, that lockdowns would harm millions of innocents while not protecting the vulnerable can never be trusted again.

Did any of these people tell the truth back when it could have saved the generation that comprises the world’s future? Nope. They not only watched it happen, they cheered it on and viciously ostracized all who told the truth.

All these people have erased all their moral authority and their claims to expertise. The same goes for all the education “experts” and “leaders” who didn’t spend the last two years screaming at the top of their lungs that school shutdowns are a stupid, scientifically unwarranted, and evil idea. Yes, that’s basically all of them.

Experts who knowingly allow mass child abuse because they don’t want to harm their careers are not experts, they are cowards. They deserve not one ounce of public trust or even to retain their jobs. They certainly should have no public funds nor authority over any portion of the upbringing of American children.

Not one parent or elected official should give these education and public health “experts” the time of day. In a time of dire need, these keepers of the nation’s children and controllers of billions in public funds piled American children on a funeral pyre, lit it on fire, and cheered as it burned. Requiring that they find a more honest line of work would be an act of mercy.

These “experts” and “leaders” have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent at discharging their crucial public trust and duties. They should be relieved of those duties as soon as possible. If state lawmakers will not do it, citizens must. If they do not, they are also complicit cowards and also deserve to be sanctioned and socially shamed for their willingness to sacrifice the most vulnerable for their personal comfort.

For a long time now, American parents have registered deep dissatisfaction with the public schools they feel forced to stick their kids in. Even before lockdowns, unscientific and education-damaging forced masking in schools, ridiculous repeated quarantines of healthy kids, and rolling “brownouts” of in-person schooling, polling shows most American parents wish they didn’t feel like the public schools in their ZIP code were their only option.

After all this incompetence-imposed life chaos, the current surge of parent outrage at local school board meetings is only the tip of the spear. As more evidence emerges of the unnecessary harms we knew beforehand would result from lockdowns, public anger will only grow. It won’t be limited to schools, either.

If more exciting school board meetings, primaries for craven politicians, and parents yanking funding from schools that don’t serve them are what it takes to run every one of these moral cretins out of every position of power they’ve abused throughout their careers, then go, Americans, go. Do it for the kids. Our future will remember who stood up for the truth, lives, and liberties, and who made billions of precious humans needlessly suffer.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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Political

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Kendall Qualls Op-ed: It’s Time for Black Americans to Embrace a Post-Racial America

Commentary BY KENDALL QUALLS | DECEMBER 27, 2021

This is the least racist period in the history of our country. If black Americans want to address disparity, we must start with the black nuclear family.

In some respects, I feel as if we are living through a time like Charles Dickens, “The Tale of Two Cities,” of which he wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.”

We are bombarded with messages claiming America is overflowing with systemic racism and white supremacists. Even the National Council on Family Relations now labels the traditional two-parent family an extension of white privilege.

If you listen exclusively to the news media, the entertainment industry, and the academic-industrial complex, you will be surprised to learn this truth: This is the least racist period in the history of our country.

Having lived in the Jim Crow south, my parents and grandparents would have loved to have grown up in the America I grew up in. A large percentage of the country has been operating in a post-racial America for many years. Across our nation, people have been interacting with each other with respect, dignity, and compassion regardless of race. They have been judging people by the content of their character.

We can pass laws that allow me to enter the front door and reserve a room in any hotel in this country, but we can’t pass laws to force people to open their hearts and their homes to people who don’t look like them. But that is precisely what Americans have done for decades. So how do we explain the differences in the realities on the ground and what we hear in the media?

My family is a classic example of the “best of times – worst of times” and of the disparity between reality and rhetoric. My children, who are now adults, grew up in a two-parent family. They had their challenges, but they also had stability, unconditional love, and clear boundaries.

Unfortunately, there is a stark contrast with their cousins on my side of the family. Of my four siblings, my children are the only ones who grew up with both a mother and father in the home. As a result, the lives of my siblings’ children have been interwoven with trauma and tragedy.

How do we explain these differences? Was it systemic racism built into American society? Or was it something else? We have two tales from the same family with the same skin color, yet the disparities are quite broad.

On the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, I was five years old. At that time, nearly 80 percent of black children were born into two-parent families. Sadly, in my lifetime, we have seen the black community transform from 80 percent two-parent families to 80 percent fatherless homes without one national initiative to reverse the trend.

If the American black family was a spotted owl or a gray wolf, it would be on the endangered species list. Instead, what has happened to the American black family is nothing short of a cultural genocide.

This is not the dream King had in mind, and it has been a nightmare for children born during this period. The black community has been used as a political pawn for 50 years.

Therefore, I have taken on this crusade to begin a transformation back to cultural roots in the black community and reverse a trend that has devastated generations of families, including helpless children born into situations not of their own making.

I know from personal experience that this country is not systemically racist. My parents and grandparents lived through systemic racism. I did not.

Unfortunately, my siblings made different decisions in their lives. All four of them used drugs and three were incarcerated. Far worse, their children were left to be raised without fathers in their lives. Theirs are the stories of many families ravaged by the lack of father involvement, personal responsibility, faith, and most importantly, hope.

I mourn deeply for what has happened to their lives. My children live in wide disparity from their own cousins, and it is not because of the color of their skin.

To be clear, we do have racist people in our country that do bad things to people, but the country is not systemically racist. To put it another way: If you look for racism in this country, you’ll find it. If you look for opportunities, you will find them 100 times over.

How do we resolve this “Tale of Two Cities,” the 80 percent fatherless homes and the chronically low graduations rates for black high school students? Ironically, the power to change ultimately lies in the hands of black Americans. I would like to direct the following comments to black Americans throughout the country.

For far too long, we have watched our black communities destroyed from within. As a community, we are worse off now than we were before the Civil Rights Era.

We have it within our power to move forward and begin a transition of healing and growth that is long overdue. And we do not need government help or funds to accomplish this transformation.

We are missing out on opportunities in this country to which we are fully entitled as American citizens, opportunities that seem to be clearly visible to nearly everyone except native-born black Americans. Many of us are blinded by tears of anger, mistrust, and misunderstanding that lead to decisions that are not in our own best interests.

Today, black American citizens who have legally immigrated from the Caribbean Islands and African countries like Nigeria earn significantly higher incomes than native-born black Americans. They achieve higher levels of education. They are living the American dream civil rights leaders desired for us.

Many of these new citizens came to the country with intact families, which helped with their achievement and integration. Another reason for their success is they have not been indoctrinated by years of anti-white, anti-American, and anti-capitalist hatred.

Now more than ever, it is imperative that we reconcile with the past sins of our nation, re-establish two-parent families, and rebuild our culture and join other Americans around the “Table of Prosperity” as fellow citizens of this great country. How do we get started?

I believe it starts with tapping into the strengths of our cultural roots, which are linked to our Christian faith. Forgiveness is the cornerstone of Christianity. Just as God extends forgiveness to us in Christ, we are called to forgive others.

As we forgive the country for the sins of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and many other forms of bigotry that followed, the heavy burden of bitterness, anger, and resentment will be lifted from our shoulders. Our eyes will be opened so we can clearly see the path forward allowing us to focus on what is best for our future and the future of our children.

To forgive is an act of strength, not weakness, and we must begin the healing and strengthening process in our communities. This is our Prodigal Moment. It is time to come home.

Now, to all Americans: Our shared history transcends political parties, race, religion, and class. It is a shared humanity that binds us together like the intertwined roots and branches of trees in a dense forest.

Organized groups are igniting forest fires to divide and destroy our unique American culture. It’s imperative that we not only extinguish their efforts, but foster a new movement that nurtures, unites, and strengthens us as Americans, regardless of race, for generations to come.

Kendall Qualls is the president of TakeCharge, which strives to unite Americans regardless of background and to inspire black and other minority communities to take charge of their own lives and not to rely on government and politicians for prosperity. He has been married for 35 years and has five children.

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Political

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Twitter Users Notice Big Mistake the Bidens Made with the Stockings Above Their White House Fireplace

Reported By Grant Atkinson | November 30, 2021

First lady Jill Biden revealed the 2021 White House Christmas decorations on Monday, and the State Dining Room was adorned with stockings above the mantel. But there was one blatant problem with the decor.

According to Daily Mail reporter Emily Goodin, the stockings were meant to represent the Bidens’ grandchildren, with each one having the name of a different grandchild.

Trees in state dining room decorated with old photos of first families. Stockings on fireplace have names of Biden grandkids pic.twitter.com/pkFjrAPyhy
— Emily Goodin (@Emilylgoodin) November 29, 2021

However, Twitter users quickly noticed a glaring omission from the mantle. Only six stockings hung above the fireplace despite the fact that President Joe Biden has seven grandchildren.

According to Marie Claire, Biden has three granddaughters from his son Hunter: Naomi, Finnegan and Maisy.

He has two more grandchildren from his late son, Beau: Natalie and Robert, who goes by Hunter after his uncle.

So who is Biden’s seventh grandchild? That would be Hunter Biden’s son with adult entertainer Lunden Alexis Roberts. The boy was born in 2018 and Hunter was proven to be the father in 2020, according to Marie Claire.

So that makes a total of seven grandchildren, one more than the number of stockings on the mantle.

Multiple people pointed out the omission on Twitter, including reporter Amber Athey of The Spectator.

Despite this seemingly obvious exclusion, the establishment media refused to report on it. (At The Western Journal, we fight to bring you the news other outlets will not. You can support us in the fight for truth by subscribing.)

Many social media users also speculated that Hunter Biden’s child with Roberts was the one grandchild who was left out.

In the photo above, some letters can be seen on the stockings. The beginnings of the names “Naomi,” “Finnegan” and “Natalie” appear to be written.

Since all the names cannot be seen, it is hard to confirm that Roberts’ child is the one left out. However, that does not make the Biden family look much better.

If the family left out Hunter’s son with Roberts, they were essentially ignoring him because they view him as an embarrassment. If it was a different grandchild who was left out, the family simply forgot one of their grandchildren.

Trees in state dining room decorated with old photos of first families. Stockings on fireplace have names of Biden grandkids pic.twitter.com/pkFjrAPyhy
— Emily Goodin (@Emilylgoodin) November 29, 2021

In either case, the Bidens’ mistake is humiliating.

Nothing says Christmas like leaving out a family member.

Grant Atkinson, Associate Reporter

Grant is a graduate of Virginia Tech with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He has five years of writing experience with various outlets and enjoys covering politics and sports.

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Political

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Michael Brown Op-ed: Why a Virginia middle school is removing urinals from the boys’ bathrooms

Commentary By Michael Brown, CP Op-Ed Contributor | Monday, August 23, 2021

It’s bad enough that a middle school in Loudon County, Virginia, has decided to remove “male” and “female” signs from its bathrooms. But in an even more extreme nod to social insanity, this same school is removing the urinals from the boys’ bathrooms. Why? It’s because a number of biological females, who identify as males, are offended by the presence of urinals.

So rather than point out to these females that they are not really males (otherwise, they’d have no problems with urinals), the school turns the world upside down to accommodate them.

This is the direct result of school policy 8040, which states, “LCPS staff shall allow gender-expansive or transgender students to use their chosen name and gender pronouns that reflect their gender identity without any substantiating evidence, regardless of the name and gender recorded in the student’s permanent educational record.”

So, no substantiating evidence is needed, and, the policy states, all teachers must comply with the students wishes.

In other words, impressionable students, including young children who haven’t the foggiest idea about sexual and gender realities, can simply declare their new identity, and the school must change their records accordingly. And woe be to the teacher or administrator who dares question this cultural madness.

Appropriately enough, the policy is titled, “Rights of Transgender and Gender-Expansive Students.” Gender-expansive? What does that even mean? Welcome to the new reality.

Of course, the problem with this new reality is that it has nothing to do with reality at all.

A biological boy who calls himself a girl is still a boy, and vice versa, no matter how much compassion we want to show them in the midst of their gender confusion. That’s why that girl cannot use a urinal: because she is not a boy. And saying this is neither hateful nor bigoted. It’s simply telling the truth.

But alas, we live in an age when truth has been displaced by perception, resulting in men’s bathrooms on college campuses having tampons on hand, because “men can menstruate.” And “breastfeeding” is replaced by “chestfeeding,” lest “men” breastfeeding their children feel offended.

And when you read stories stating, “When Jesse Ballard found out he was pregnant, he was shocked yet excited.” (Jesse, the “husband,” is the biological female, impregnated by his “wife,” who is the biological male.) And this is something we are supposed to celebrate. In reality, for all involved, it is heartbreaking. Surely, God has a better way.

Unfortunately, these decisions do not only affect the individuals making choices for themselves. Instead, they affect others living or working or going to school with them.

As David Kubal pointed out in his article about the urinals being removed from a school in his district, the perceived needs of roughly 0.3% of the population, now turn the world upside down for the other 99.7%.

Accordingly, he writes, because of this tiny percentage of people in Loudoun County:

46,000 junior high and high school students were given permission, by the school system, to believe they may not be a male or female as their chromosomes have determined by God’s design.
23,000 young women will be required to share a bathroom and locker room with young men.
Thousands of young women’s positions on teams are now in jeopardy by men who are now allowed to participate in female sports on female teams.
These school bathrooms may now become the scene of sexual assault and sexual immorality in ways that will mark the lives of these young men and women forever.
Teachers will have to remember a person’s desired pronouns or other “gender-expansive” terminology (I must confess, I have never heard this term, nor do I know what it means).

That’s why, in 2011 in the context of the trajectory of LGBT activism, I asked, “How far have we already deviated from the path? Where will this current trajectory take us? If our college kids can describe themselves as ‘genderqueer dykes’ and ‘transgender gay males,’ what is coming next? How about the ‘trans child’? How about ‘queer in the crib’?”

How about the bathrooms in your children’s schools removing male or female identification and all urinals removed lest they offend biological females who identify as males?

The reality is that, based on where things have been going for several decades now, none of this should surprise us. The big question should be: if we don’t stand together and help turn the tide, what’s coming next?

I’m all for helping kids who are deeply confused about their gender identity and suffering real internal pain. I’m also sure that the current LGBT trajectories will do far more harm than good. Can we not all see where this is going now?

Dr. Michael Brown (www.askdrbrown.org) is the host of the nationally syndicated Line of Fire radio program. He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University and has served as a professor at a number of seminaries. He is the author of 40 books. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.

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Education, Political

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Teachers Union Publishes Instruction Manual from Hell – Here’s the Sick How-to Guide

Reported by Mike Landry | August 5, 2021

Prepare to be patted on the head.

And listen for the “Tsk, tsk, you don’t really understand what we’re about, dear.” That’s how it will be in Minnesota and probably elsewhere if a leftist teachers union can spread its ideas on how to respond to its promotion of critical race theory.

Before reading the following, you might want to take a deep breath and exhale or whatever it is you do to reduce stress. You might have to do that after reading it, too.

Education Minnesota is trying to counter growing community pushback against CRT around the state, so it has published a guide on how teachers should respond, a copy of which was obtained by Powerline and publicized by Minnesota’s Alpha News. First of all, the union tells teachers not to call what they’re teaching critical race theory. They know parents are catching on. And the guide presents buckets of mush designed to obscure the issue and talk down to critics.

It’s a classic snow job using the special language of “educanto,” a term coined by the late Paul Greenberg, public school critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning Arkansas newspaper editor. Education Minnesota tells teachers that when asked why they teach kids that all white people are racist, they should give the following response:

“First off, I’m thrilled you’re taking such a deep interest in how and what our kids are taught, a conversation that I feel is long overdue.
“What I know most Americans believe is that we expect our students — whatever their color or background — to be able to learn hard truths and handle honest history and civics.”

May I pat your head?

“I believe in children’s potential to meet new challenges and have an honest reckoning, and when we try to edit and distort our history, we are doing them, and our future, a disservice. My loyalty is to children and who and what they can become.”

That’s how teachers should respond to your question about their “evil white people” push. And, of course, as the left always says: It’s for the children.

Education Minnesota does more than purr in its teacher voice. In its guide for its union members, it provides does some hard-knuckle political messaging against CRT critics by presenting “Key Concepts for Responding.”

Here are excerpts:

“Seize the moral high ground and engage on our terms. With attention on education, let’s talk about the teaching and curricula we support and communicate how it benefits all students.”
“Ascribe motivations to the opposition. Instead of reflexively repeating the opposition’s claims to dispel them (e.g. ‘we are not teaching grade schoolers about XYZ’) talk about why they’re attacking standards, equity and classroom educators.”
“Bring the conversation back to what we want. Don’t stay on defense.”
“Avoid the academic term ‘critical race theory. This phrase, unfamiliar to most audiences, has been redefined by the political right as an all-purpose racial dog whistle. Talk instead about the more honest and more complete education our students deserve.”
“[I]t is so disappointing to see that a few billionaires, and the promoters and talking heads they pay for, have launched a national campaign to mislead Americans about the lessons educators teach about history, culture, gender and politics.”
“Once again, they’re trying to distract and divide us so we don’t demand the richest 1 percent and the largest corporations pay what they owe for what our communities need, like affordable health care for all.”

Leftist educators try to hide what they’re teaching, but word is getting out. The Center for the American Experiment has been monitoring CRT in Minnesota and produced a video noting instances of it. It found that in Burnsville, fourth-graders were reading a book that said police officers were “mean to black people but nice to white people” and deliberately shot black men.

The video cited officials in the Minneapolis suburb of Hopkins as saying school operations were built on “white supremacy” values of logic, linear thinking, perfectionism, objectivity and “requiring black students to turn in assignments on time.” Letter grades are gone since they are part of “a dominant white culture.”
White Bear Lake sixth-graders were divided into groups based on race, sex, religion and place of birth and told to address issues of oppression and privilege.
Edina kindergarteners through second-graders did an exercise on how to identify themselves by their skin color. Kindergarten through second grade!
St. Louis Park scrapped the gifted and talented program, opening it to everyone and focusing on “anti-racist talent development.”
Minnesota teachers are taking anti-racism training, which, in effect, advocates new forms of racial discrimination, according to the video.

It’s not known if Minnesota schoolchildren are learning, like first- and second-graders in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, that “whiteness is a bad deal” and that if you are white, you essentially are a devil oppressing people of color, as reported Wednesday in a RealClear Policy piece that included shocking curriculum photos.

Education Minnesota defines CRT as “an academic framework that is more than 40 years old and is centered on the idea that racism is systemic, not just a product of individual bias or prejudice, and embedded in our policies legal structure.”

Indeed, CRT came from legal theorists during the 1970s and ’80s. The problem is it left the campus, and no matter how groups like Education Minnesota try to hide it, it is gumming up primary and secondary education.

Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist scholar and social commentator whose gravitas stems from also having been a farmer, points out a problem with woke nonsense being dreamed up on the college campus. College professors, Hansen has said, were once like court jesters of old. They could say all kinds of crazy things and no one was offended, not even the king, because everyone knew professors, like jesters, had no real power. Now, according to Hansen, crazy ideas have escaped the campus and are setting public policy.

It’s part of corporate wokeness, too.

Classic Marxism may have hit some resistance since its call for dividing people by income and class could be hindered by the relative affluence of most of the U.S. population, at least by world standards. But for sure, today’s Marxists are focused on dividing by race and gender to class. And critical race theory fits right in.

There’s a lot to process here: lying teachers, overt racism, emotional oppression upon very young children. You might want to take that deep breath.

Mike Landry, Contributor,

Mike Landry, PhD, is a retired business professor. He has been a journalist, broadcaster and church pastor. He writes from Northwest Arkansas on current events and business history.

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Graphic Content Warning: Crowd Gasps as Fed-Up Parents Read School’s Pornographic Books Out Loud at Board Meeting

Reported by Christine Favocci | July 30, 2021

If there’s one good thing that came out of school closures, it’s that parents finally had a window into what their kids were being exposed to in the classroom — and many were horrified by what they saw.

That’s exactly what happened in Carmel, Indiana, where parents learned the full scope of the perversion being peddled to their children. The school libraries there are filled with storybooks pushing radical transgender ideology, lessons on masturbation for middle schoolers, and novels with explicit sexual scenes including one describing a bloody rape.

At a meeting of the Carmel Clay School Board on Monday, outraged parents took turns reading excerpts from these materials. They are so objectionable that it’s necessary to issue more than our usual warning of graphic content. Watch at your own risk — but keep in mind, this smut is being made available to schoolchildren.

WARNING: The following video contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.

One parent spoke out against the “global campaign to promote sexualized material to grade school children which is heralded by the UN, championed by Planned Parenthood and is now making its way into the Carmel schools.”

She noted some of the titles available at elementary schools, including “Introducing Teddy: A Gentle Story About Gender and Friendship,” which uses a teddy bear to teach kids that gender isn’t determined by biology. There is also “Sparkle Boy,” about a toddler’s cross-dressing tendencies, and “Call Me Max,” in which a kindergarten girl gets a teacher to call her by a boy’s name.

(Whatever happened to reading Dr. Seuss books to schoolchildren? Oh, right — canceled by the woke mob.)

Another parent read from a novel available to Carmel high schoolers that includes a pornographic scene explicitly describing characters engaged in various sex acts. It’s too obscene to even summarize.

A third parent read from the book “It’s Perfectly Normal,” which is available to middle school children and promoted by Planned Parenthood. It teaches kids how to masturbate and is filled with nitty-gritty details.

A book called “Crank” details a disturbing rape that transpires when a young couple goes into the woods to get drunk and high on meth.

“If I had known you were just going to lay there, I wouldn’t have bothered,” the rapist tells his victim on the car ride home.

The video of Monday’s school board meeting was uploaded to YouTube by the group Unify Carmel, which is raising the alarm on the wokeism pervading the city’s public schools.

Alvin Lui, a parent activist, told WIBC in May that he fled California to escape radical leftist ideology — only to find it in his new home in Indiana.

“If I [raised] my daughter in California, the schools and the culture there would teach her that her two most important things in life [are] that she’s Asian and she’s female,” he said.

Lui said he began to worry about his daughter’s new school when he saw ideas like critical race theory make their way into the curriculum, a change that no doubt came about when the district hired its first “diversity, equity and inclusion officer” in January.

“We saw a lot of little things before other people saw it because we’ve lived through it previously,” Lui said. “So for my wife and I, it kind of feels like we’re living through that same nightmare all over again except in the very beginning.”

Parents have already begun pushing back against other items on the woke agenda, but Monday’s meeting in Carmel revealed the sexual indecency introduced to children in public schools.

“If I were to read it to you, you wouldn’t be able to air it because it would be against FCC obscenity laws,” Lui told WXIN-TV. “Everyone was uncomfortable, and these are adults.”

To his credit, Carmel Clay Superintendent Dr. Michael Beresford said he wasn’t aware of the books until the meeting and pledged to look into them. Carmel certainly isn’t the only place where so-called educators are sexualizing children — leftists are hard at work across the country. They know that sexually active kids make great abortion clients for Planned Parenthood and turn into Democratic voters when they become impoverished single parents.

Transgender advocates know that if they can get a hold of kindergarten minds, they can recruit a generation of confused children. The doctors who prescribe the puberty blockers and perform the “transition” surgeries can get that much richer.

Beyond the political sphere, what we have here is a battle for the hearts and souls of American children. This perversion tailored to kids stems from a diabolical determination to spoil their innocence and set them up for a life of servitude to sin. Whether they know it or not, the teachers giving smut to their students are cooperating with the dark powers that would turn us away from God by shackling us to our basest desires. There’s no surer way to do that than to expose children to this filth early and often.

Americans now have the opportunity to see and hear exactly what’s going on in public schools — and it’s our job to do exactly what these parents did on Monday.

Christine Favocci

Christine earned her bachelor’s degree from Seton Hall University, where she studied communications and Latin. She left her career in the insurance industry to become a freelance writer and stay-at-home mother.@CFavocci Facebook

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Education, Political

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Political Science Quackery

A.F. BRANCO on July 29, 2021 at | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-political-science-quackery/

With no science that supports children wearing masks, this is pure child abuse.

Masking the Children — Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.

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HUMOR, Political

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Results of Johns Hopkins Study Are All but Conclusive: People Pushing for Forced COVID Measures on Kids Are Fighting Against the Science

Commentary: A child receives a shot in the stock image above. (Melinda Nagy / Shutterstock)

Commentator Mike Landry | July 26, 2021

Get your children vaccinated for COVID. That’s the official position of experts at Johns Hopkins University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — at least for children 12 and over. But there are growing doubts as to whether all children need the COVID vaccines, including uncertainty from Johns Hopkins faculty member Marty Makary.

In an Op-Ed last week for The Wall Street Journal, Makary wrote that he and a research team reviewed about 48,000 cases of children under 18 reported to have COVID between April and August of last year.

“Our report found a mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia,” he added.

Got that? Among that sample, no individuals under 18 without pre-existing conditions died of COVID.

Not one.

Zero.

None.

Overall, the CDC has reported that 335 children with a COVID diagnosis have died.

“Yet the CDC, which has 21,000 employees, hasn’t researched each death to find out whether Covid caused it or if it involved a pre-existing medical condition,” wrote Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Bloomberg School of Public Health and Carey Business School.
“I’ve written hundreds of peer-reviewed medical studies,” he said, “and I can think of no journal editor who would accept the claim that 335 deaths resulted from a virus without data to indicate if the virus was incidental or causal, and without an analysis of relevant risk factors such as obesity.”

Makary is not the only one who has raised questions about whether it’s really necessary to vaccinate children. Amid debate, the U.K., unlike the U.S. and Canada, has delayed vaccinating most children, according to the venerable British medical journal The BMJ.

On Friday, the journal published an article that indicated a government agency had recommended vaccinating 12- to 15-year-old children who had medical conditions (at-risk 16- and 17-year-olds already were eligible) or who were living with someone with immune system problems. In a point-counterpoint debate published in an edition of The BMJ earlier this month, three professors argued against vaccinating children, saying the risks outweigh the benefits and citing limited supplies of vaccines.

They referenced a U.S. CDC slide presentation that outlined the risk of myocarditis, mainly for young males, following vaccination. In boys aged 12 to 17, there were 56 to 69 cases of myocarditis per 1 million vaccine doses over a 120-day period, the CDC presentation said.

“… the risk of myocarditis, mainly for young males, following vaccination. In boys aged 12 to 17, there were 56 to 69 cases of myocarditis per 1 million vaccine doses over a 120-day period, the CDC presentation said. “

These instances may be rare. But they’re something that should go into parents’ decision-making process.

And that’s the key — parents ought to be the ones deciding whether or not their children will get vaccinated, not the government or any other parties that want to get involved. It’s up to the parents to evaluate the risks and benefits, and then decide what they want to do.

And the truth of the matter, as Makary’s research appears to show, is that for most children — not all, of course — COVID poses a much less serious risk.

It isn’t that COVID is something to take lightly (it’s not) or that children can’t get sick or die from it (they can, especially if they have pre-existing conditions). But politicians and others must be wary of pushing parents to just shut up and get their children vaccinated — the science simply isn’t on their side.

About the Commentator:

Mike Landry, Contributor,

Mike Landry, PhD, is a retired business professor. He has been a journalist, broadcaster and church pastor. He writes from Northwest Arkansas on current events and business history.

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Health, Political

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Girl Tells School Board Her Teacher Wanted To Keep Woke Class Questions A Secret From Parents

Jul 27, 2021

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Political

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17 AGs back Arkansas law banning puberty blockers, trans surgeries for minors: ‘Protect kids’

Reported By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter| Monday, July 19, 2021

Demonstrators protest for transgender rights with a rally, march through the Loop and a candlelight vigil to remember transgender friends lost to murder and suicide on March 3, 2017 in Chicago, Illinois. | Getty Images/Scott Olson

More than a dozen state attorneys general have come to the defense of an Arkansas law banning the use of puberty blockers on children with gender dysphoria amid a legal challenge, arguing that states have an obligation to “protect kids.”

Led by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, the Republican attorneys general of Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas filed an amicus brief in federal court last Tuesday. They asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas to reject the ACLU’s motion to block Arkansas’ Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act. The law, the first of its kind to be passed in the nation, prohibits physicians from providing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and elective cosmetic gender surgeries to children under 18.

Additionally, the measure prohibits state tax dollars from funding such practices and allows insurance companies to deny coverage for sex reassignment surgeries. The legislation was passed by the Republican-led state legislature in March. But Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson vetoed the measure when it reached his desk. The legislature overrode the veto, enabling the SAFE Act to become law.

Shortly after, the progressive legal nonprofit ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of four Arkansas families seeking to invalidate the law. The complaint argues that the law “denies adolescents medically necessary treatment and prevents parents from obtaining medically necessary care for their children.” Although the ALCU claims that the law prohibits “doctors from treating their patients in accordance with the well-established standards of care,” the attorney’s general’s friend-of-the-court brief argues that the lawsuit is “misleading” and ignores “risks such experimental treatments pose.”

“They ignore the fact that children cannot fully understand the long-term risks associated with the procedures,” the brief argues.
“They threaten that Arkansas’s law will result in increased suicides even though the research does not support such a claim. And they assert that the State’s protection of its children is ‘animus’ against transgender youth, even though, among other problems with the statement, most of these children will not identify as transgender as adults since their dysphoria will have resolved naturally so long as they can be protected from Plaintiffs’ preferred experiments.”

The brief was filed over a month after the ACLU first asked the court to rule in favor of Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge and the other defendants seeking to uphold the SAFE Act. The attorneys general argue that states have been forced to step in to protect children because children with gender dysphoria are being given “puberty blockers, then cross-sex hormones, then surgical interventions such as ‘chest reconstruction surgery’ … to ‘masculinize’ … a girl’s chest …”

The plaintiffs argue that not taking such measures “can result in debilitating anxiety and depression, self-harm, and suicide,” the brief explains.

“States have been forced to step in to protect kids from experimental treatments,” the brief argues. “Because “the medical establishment has abandoned the field to the political zeitgeist, which labels dissenting opinions as ‘animus’ (or worse) and closes its ears to the tragic and growing chorus of detransitioners who feel betrayed by the adults who should have been caring for them.”

The “peculiar vulnerability of children,” specifically their “inability to make critical decisions in an informed, mature manner,” is listed as a justification for state action.

The attorneys general warned that cross-sex hormones and other medical interventions to address gender dysphoria could lead to “irreversible, lifelong consequences.” They include “complications such as infertility, loss of sexual function, increased risk of heart attacks and strokes, bone-density problems, risk of altered brain development, social risks from delayed puberty, and mental health concerns.”

The document cited the decision by the Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital at Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden “to change course and prohibit the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in minors except in clinical trial settings.”

A statement from the hospital contends that “these treatments are potentially fraught with extensive and irreversible adverse consequences such as cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, infertility, increased cancer risk, and thrombosis.”
The attorneys general maintained that “the evidence that does exist shows that most cases of gender dysphoria resolve naturally by adulthood.”
“At the end of the day, it was the responsibility of the Arkansas legislature to determine the best way to protect children suffering from gender dysphoria and other forms of gender-related psychological distress. The medical uncertainty in the field does not relieve that responsibility, but only heightens it,” the brief reads.
“Based on the evidence, the legislature determined that the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions are still experimental in nature and that the risks of such procedures outweigh their benefits. That determination does not discriminate against children suffering from gender dysphoria, but seeks to protect them.”

The Biden administration believes that Arkansas law is unconstitutional.

In a court filing in support of the ACLU’s lawsuit, the U.S. Department of Justice asserted that “federal law bars the State of Arkansas from singling out transgender minors for specifically and discriminatorily denying their access to medically necessary care based solely on their sex assigned at birth.”

Such action, the Justice Department argues, would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

The consequences of allowing minors to undergo medicalized gender transitioning have received heightened attention in recent weeks. The CBS news magazine program “60 Minutes” profiled detransitioners who underwent some form of gender transitioning as minors only to regret their decision later in life. A mainstream media outlet giving a platform to detransitioners outraged transgender activists, who accused the program of doing “harm” to the transgender community by reporting on the transgender debate from that particular angle.

Journalist Lesley Stahl defended the production.

“Their point is that they were not getting proper healthcare,” Stahl said in a follow-up segment. “That was their point and that’s the point we wanted to emphasize: that these were young people that were not getting proper healthcare advice.”

LGBT activists also slammed the American Bookseller Association for promoting the book Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier, which highlights the rapid acceleration in the number of girls seeking to undergo gender transition surgery in addition to the long-term consequences associated with such procedures.

In response to the outcry, the ABA apologized for promoting a book that “goes against ABA’s ends policies, values and everything we believe and support,” describing their previous action as “inexcusable.”

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

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White Student Born in Drug and Alcohol Abuse Home Asks School Board How She Can Have ‘White Privilege’

Reported by Michael Austin | June 29, 2021

One brave girl from Fishers, Indiana, had some important questions for members of her local school board last week. Fighting back tears, the girl explained to the board members how they have “failed [her] as a student.” Her comments can be seen starting around the 41:57 mark in a video on the Hamilton Southeastern Schools website.

“I have been in counseling as long as I can remember because I was adopted from foster care at age 4,” she said at the school board meeting on Wednesday.
“The things I’ve learned along the way are being challenged now when my science or math teacher is trying to teach me how to be emotionally — and why are they teaching me about sexuality and how to identity?” the girl said.
“I don’t want to hear about sexuality during class in front of other students because that should be a private thing. This should be left in the homes and between students and counselors or one-on-one conversations.‘
“This has been a very traumatic part of my past, and the more that the school focuses on sexuality, the more it affects me and my anxiety.”

Following that, she revealed that she had been accused of having “white privilege” by school staff members.

“I was told I have white privilege. How can a child born in an abusive, drug and alcohol abuse home who lost her entire biological family, that has experienced all forms of abuse and neglect, be privileged?” the girl asked.
“If you found a child at 15 months in a home with holes in the floor eating cat poop, would you consider them privileged? Just asking, because when I was told that, I was upset and cried myself to sleep.”

A quick look at the website of the girl’s school district confirms that far-left “equity and inclusion” propaganda is being disseminated to students. Just as she said, this propaganda focuses on sexuality and anti-racism (which teaches about the supposed prevalence of “white privilege”).

An “Equity and Inclusion” web page on the district’s website offers various “Anti-Racism/Bias Resources,” presumably for teachers, students and parents to use for educational purposes.One resource recommended by the district encourages educators to read a book by Ibram X. Kendi, a controversial scholar known for pushing the philosophy of “anti-racism.” According to Kendi, you are either an anti-racist — a progressive political activist who agrees with Kendi’s vague redefinition of racism — or a racist. In his view, there is no in-between.

“What’s the problem with being ‘not racist?’” Kendi wrote. “It is a claim that signifies neutrality: ‘I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.’ … One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist.”

In other words, vote for Democrats and radical socialist policies such as welfare redistribution — the very same policies that have impoverished the African-American community for decades — or you are a racist. These are the sorts of ideas that Hamilton Southeastern officials push on their students.

Another resource offered by the district links to a video defending the political goal of equity, also known as equality of outcomes.

In its argumentation for the necessity of equity policies, the video uses a popular meme that supposedly shows how equality, or treating people as equals, is not good enough to address supposed systemic inequity. Instead, the proponents of equity argue, in order to reach true equality of outcomes, minorities must be afforded special privileges in order to address the unique disadvantages they face.

Not only is such thinking illogical, but it is also deeply racist due to the fact that it treats minorities as helpless children in need of government aid. Moreover, as conservative commentator Ben Shapiro explained in a Feb. 2 Op-Ed, such reasoning is faulty because it fails to take into account group differences.

“This philosophy is both idiotic and perverse. It’s idiotic because all human groupings — literally all of them — will result in differential outcomes. Draw a line down the middle of any room in random fashion and the result will be unequal income distribution, criminal records, educational histories,” Shapiro wrote.
“When culture takes a hand, disparities can be more deeply rooted than random chance. Discrimination would still not be the cause of such disparity. As a basic logical matter, discrimination is not the cause of all disparity.’
“This philosophy is perverse because it attributes malice to those who have none; it fosters policy that actively discriminates, supposedly in order to alleviate unproven discrimination.”

Indeed, when it comes to the Hamilton Southeastern Schools, this philosophy certainly attributed “malice” to someone who has none.

A girl who has suffered abuse and neglect was called “privileged” just for being white.

Michael Austin

Michael Austin joined The Western Journal as a staff reporter in 2020. Since then, he has authored hundreds of stories, including several original reports. He also co-hosts the outlet’s video podcast, “WJ Live.”@mikeswriting

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Education, Political

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Daniel Horowitz Op-ed: A group of Florida parents cultured their children’s masks and found dangerous bacteria

Commentary by DANIEL HOROWITZ | June 16, 2021

The idea of children, including preschoolers, walking around with bacteria traps on their breathing orifices all day so shocked the conscience that last summer, a bunch of internet parodies were produced illustrating such absurdity. Then, within weeks, most local governments mandated this cruel form of child abuse for an entire year without any study of the side effects. Now a group of parents from the Gainesville, Florida, area have shown that such masks are traps for harmful bacteria that potentially make children much sicker than from COVID — the virus for which the masks were required, but failed to mitigate.

In a press release obtained by TheBlaze and posted at RationalGround.com, six Alachua County, Florida, parents reported the findings of the lab cultures of their children’s masks worn in school. The parents sent the six masks to the University of Florida’s Mass Spectrometry Research and Education Center after they were worn for five to eight hours, most during in-person schooling by children ages 6 through 11. Although many students across the country likely wore dirty masks indefinitely for numerous days, the face masks studied in this analysis were new or freshly laundered before wearing. One of the masks submitted was from an adult who wore it at work as a cosmetologist.

The resulting report found that five masks were contaminated with bacteria, parasites, and fungi, including three with dangerous pathogenic and pneumonia-causing bacteria.

The lab used a method called proteomics to extract proteins from the masks and sequence them. The analysis detected the following 11 alarmingly dangerous pathogens on the masks:

Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumonia)
Mycobacterium tuberculosis (tuberculosis)
Neisseria meningitidis (meningitis, sepsis)
Acanthamoeba polyphaga (keratitis and granulomatous amebic encephalitis)
Acinetobacter baumanni (pneumonia, bloodstream infections, meningitis, UTIs — resistant to antibiotics)
Escherichia coli (food poisoning)
Borrelia burgdorferi (causes Lyme disease)
Corynebacterium diphtheriae (diphtheria)
Legionella pneumophila (Legionnaires’ disease)
Staphylococcus pyogenes serotype M3 (severe infections — high morbidity rates)
Staphylococcus aureus (meningitis, sepsis)

“Half of the masks were contaminated with one or more strains of pneumonia-causing bacteria,” according to the release. “One-third were contaminated with one or more strains of meningitis-causing bacteria. One-third were contaminated with dangerous, antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens. In addition, less dangerous pathogens were identified, including pathogens that can cause fever, ulcers, acne, yeast infections, strep throat, periodontal disease, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and more.”

For a control, the parents submitted a T-shirt worn by one of the children at school and unworn masks. No pathogens were found on the controls.

Obviously, the naysayers will immediately jump on this and criticize it as being a rudimentary study and small sample size. But that is the entire point. Of course, this issue needs further study. But why has this not been done over the course of the entire year by our government or any well-funded institution? How can we mandate such draconian policies without studying the side effects, including the spread of pathogens? Why is this left to helpless parents trying to raise awareness of these concerns?

It’s not like these concerns are novel. On March 8, 2020, Dr. Fauci told “60 Minutes” that masks can only block large droplets, they give a false sense of security, and they cause people to get more germs on their hands by fiddling with them. Several weeks later, Surgeon General Jerome Adams punctuated this point about the counterproductivity of wearing masks in public. Appearing on “Fox & Friends” on March 31, Adams said that based on a study that shows medical students who wear masks touch their faces 23 times more often, one has to assume that “wearing a mask improperly can actually increase your risk of getting disease.”

A 2014 study of hospital workers wearing surgical masks in a Bangkok hospital found their masks to be saturated with Staphylococcus aureus (found on some of the masks in the Alachua study) and the fungus Aspergillus. Another study of hospital workers in China from 2019 observed that after more than six hours of use, masks worn by medical personnel also contained viruses, including adenovirus, bocavirus, respiratory syncytial virus, and influenza viruses. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to hypothesize that a warm and humid microclimate cultivated by a mask is going to serve as an incubator for all sorts of pathogens. Not surprisingly, studies have shown that pathogen density on masks grows exponentially after two hours of use.

To this day, Fauci and CDC researchers have never answered how those concerns were no longer valid after their political U-turn on masks, given the terrible conditions with which we’ve witnessed the entire country wearing and reusing masks. The same reason why Fauci said last summer they never planned to embark on a randomized controlled trial of the efficacy of masks is likely why they never studied the side effects of masks either. They didn’t want to discover the truth that they themselves originally understood.

These findings are important for two reasons. First, there is a need to ensure that mask mandates are never implemented again. The Boston Globe is already advocating their use for the flu season. Second, as much as the mask mandate has ended for most consumers, workers in many professions are still required to wear them for hours on end without regard for the hazards they pose. A Florida appeals court has already ruled that the mask mandate in Alachua County is presumptively unconstitutional because it violates bodily autonomy. The risk of masks cultivating and spreading other pathogens is just another reason why something this personal to the body must remain a personal choice.

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Parents ‘furious’ at NYC private school over graphic sex ed videos shown to 1st graders

Reported By Brandon Showalter, Christian Post Reporter | Tuesday, June 01, 2021

students, elementary school, classroom — Getty Images

Parents of children at an elite private school in New York City are speaking out against videos on masturbation and gender identity being shown to their first-graders.

According to the New York Post, parents of first-grade students at Dalton School, which costs $55,000 a year, were outraged when they learned that “health and wellness” educator Justine Ang Fonte — who had previously led an explicit “porn literacy” workshop at another prestigious prep school in the city — had shown 6 year olds a cartoon video in which “touching themselves” for pleasure was explained.

“Hey, how come sometimes my penis gets big sometimes and points in the air?” a boy in the cartoon inquires, which then prompts an explanation about erections.

The boy nods his head and says that he touches his penis “because it feels good.”

A young girl in the cartoon video subsequently adds: “Sometimes, when I’m in my bath or when Mom puts me to bed, I like to touch my vulva too.”

The children were also reportedly taught lessons about giving “consent,” which included giving permission before their relative can hug them.

The health education lessons also included topics on “gender identity,” a nebulous phrase used by transgender activists to describe an internal feeling about their gender apart from their biological sex.

Mothers who spoke with the New York Post about their disgust did so anonymously for fear of social repercussions.

“Kids have no less than five classes on gender identity — this is pure indoctrination,” one Dalton mother told the NY Post.
“This person should absolutely not be teaching children. Ironically, she teaches kids about ‘consent’ yet she has never gotten consent from parents about the sexually explicit, and age-inappropriate material about transgender to first-graders.”

Another mother said that she was “furious,” and that she and others “were horrified to learn this was shown to our first-grade 6- and 7-year-old kids without our knowledge or consent. But it’s so hard to fight back because you’ll get canceled and your child will suffer.”

When the parents complained, the school officials made it seem as though they misunderstood, but they were undeterred.

“We are not ‘confused.’ We are in fact just seeing very clearly for the first time what a ‘progressive’ education really means at Dalton,” another mother said. “The fact that the school then gaslit parents into thinking we are confused is abysmal.”

A school spokesperson defended the lessons, saying that the videos are age-appropriate and “align with nationally recognized methodologies and standards.”
“We consistently review our Health curriculum, making sure that the content is developmentally appropriate and, if necessary, we adapt our curriculum accordingly. We will continue to listen carefully to parent feedback, respond thoughtfully to community concerns, and develop lessons that are in the best interest of our students, respect our community’s values, and correspond with best practices,” the school said.

The fury at the elite private school comes amid greater scrutiny and parental pushback against the sex-ed curricula being taught in schools throughout the country.

In May of last year, the Family Research Council released a comprehensive report highlighting how Planned Parenthood and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS) are sexualizing children with extreme content.

The report showed that among the lessons being taught are “how-to” sex workshops where youth are instructed on how to consent to sex and what’s known as “fake abstinence” — abstaining from sex until the next steady boyfriend or girlfriend. The FRC report also explained how contemporary sex-ed curricula teach girls how to obtain abortions and hide it from their parents. It also encourages students to declare themselves LGBT “allies” and promote the transgender identity claim that they might have been “born in the wrong body.”

Send news tips to: brandon.showalter@christianpost.com Listen to Brandon Showalter’s Life in the Kingdom podcast at The Christian Post and edifi app Follow Brandon Showalter on Facebook: BrandonMarkShowalter Follow on Twitter: @BrandonMShow

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Amazon reverses ban on book helping parents rescue kids from transgenderism after pushback

Reported By Brandon Showalter, Christian Post Reporter | Thursday, April 15, 2021

Amazon, the second-largest U.S.-based corporate employer in the world. | Reuters/Charles Patiau

With no notification given, Amazon banned a new book aimed at helping parents sever the influences of gender ideology and then reversed its decision in its latest move against voices that scrutinize transgenderism.

The online retail giant blocked the book Desist, Detrans, & Detox: Getting Your Child Out of the Gender Cult by Maria Keffler, the co-founder of the recently-formed Partners for Ethical Care, from being sold on its platform six days after its publication.

The book’s removal comes on the heels of a similar move earlier this year when Amazon scrubbed scholar Ryan Anderson’s book, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, which had until recently been allowed on the platform since its initial publication in 2018. Last summer, Amazon also prohibited the publisher of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by journalist Abigail Shrier from purchasing ads to promote the book.

Keffler told The Christian Post in a phone interview on Wednesday that she wasn’t surprised Amazon blocked her book, though she had hoped it would last longer than six days.

“We fully expected it to happen. We knew it was going to. We decided to launch it on multiple platforms because we expected it to be canceled. And so that’s why we also put it on Smashwords as well as Lulu, a print platform,” Keffler said.

Shortly after CP’s interview with Keffler Wednesday, the author said that the online retailer sent her an email, which she shared with CP, explaining that the scrubbing of the book was an “error.” The Kindle version went live and the paperback version should be reactivated soon. Amazon had previously told her that the book had violated their terms of service, which she challenged. In a subsequent email to CP, Keffler said it was possible that “a calling and emailing onslaught may have affected the outcome” as “lots and lots of people were contacting Amazon to complain.”

Keffler believes that Big Tech and large corporations are intent on silencing critical voices of transgender ideology because there is big money in the “gender industry,” referencing The 11th Hour Blog, a website where the revenue streams fueling transgender ideology worldwide have been traced and documented.

Fifteen years ago, the trend in young adult literature was vampire and werewolves, she explained, noting that she was glad to see that trend come to an end. Yet today, the dominant genre is transgender literature.

“There are hundreds of these trans books out there and there’s a lot of money in it … this is a huge money-maker for the medical industry. I think there’s a lot of unconscionable profiteering going on.”

Keffler’s organization, Partners for Ethical Care, has received an uptick in traffic in recent weeks as increasing numbers of parents have reached out for help because their children have been harmed by the medicalization of gender, such as the use of cross-sex hormones in teenagers in pursuit of appearing as the opposite sex.

“We talk to new parents all the time and several support groups for parents on social media, and there’s just more and more of an influx of them coming in. It’s heartbreaking. Honestly, I’ve felt this way about the book for almost a week now, and every time someone buys it my heart hurts a little bit because I know that this is another family that’s been impacted by this,” she lamented.
“I think a critical mass is growing and people are going to realize that this isn’t just a trend with bad families or people who don’t parent well or some weird sub-set. This is actively being strategically put in our schools and on social media.”

Parents who are reaching out are politically diverse, conservative and liberal alike, she noted.

“[Gender ideology] is non-discriminatory across the spectrum with people whose kids are getting sucked into this,” Keffler said.

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New Mexico Democrat’s bill could criminalize parents teaching kids how to shoot, according to gun group

Reported by SARAH TAYLOR | February 03, 2021

A New Mexico Democratic state senator has introduced a bill that could criminalize parents who teach their children how to shoot firearms if the children is not considered an “authorized user,” according to a state pro-gun group.

State Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez (D) introduced State Bill 224, which says in part, “It is an offense for a firearm owner or authorized user to store or keep a firearm in any premises unless the firearm is secured in a locked container or secured by a gun lock or other means so as to render the firearm inaccessible or unusable to any person other than the owner or other authorized user.”

The Daily Wire stated that a minor “may be an authorized user only if the minor is at least twelve years of age and has successfully completed a firearm safety training course.”

SB 224 adds, “If a firearm owner or authorized user knows or reasonably should have known that a minor, an at-risk person or a prohibited person could gain access to a firearm belonging to or under the control of that owner or authorized person, and if a minor, an at-risk person or a prohibited person obtained access to that firearm, it is an offense if the firearm owner or authorized user failed to secure the firearm in a locked container or by a lock or other means so as to render such firearm inaccessible or unusable to any person other than the firearm owner or other authorized user.”

In response to the bill, the New Mexico Shooting Sports Association said that the bill’s “storage mandate” would “make it a crime for a child to handle your firearm unless the child was 12 or older and had previously completed a firearms safety class.”

“You would become a criminal for taking your child to go shooting if they had not previously taken some kind of formal class,” NMSSA said in a statement on the proposed legislation. “The bill is an uneducated attempt to demonize firearms. … It is already a crime to place a child in a situation that endangers their life, this law does nothing to add to a child’s safety.”

The association added that the bill as-is is “completely unenforceable” unless the government intends on conducting door-to-door inspections.

“If a prohibited possessor gains access to your firearm you are liable as well,” NMSSA added. “Albuquerque is the property crime capital of America; if your home or vehicle was broken into and a convicted felon stole your firearm, you could be charged with a crime under the bill. Instead of taking on the issue of the crime wave that has engulfed Albuquerque and other parts of the state, Sedillo Lopez wants to blame you, someone just seeking to defend yourself, if your firearm is stolen.”

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The Trump Purge Makes Living In America More Like Living In China

After the terrifying ransack of the U.S. capitol Wednesday during a Donald Trump “stop the steal” rally, big tech companies are joining leftist elites in the media and government in their effort to squash the Trump movement once and for all. Seizing on the backlash from the riot, they have seamlessly banned President Trump from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.

What happened at the capitol was an embarrassment for our country. Now, the hypocritical outcries from Democrats, who proudly condoned left-wing Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters as they terrorized American cities all summer, are ushering in a great reckoning.

The Jan. 6 demonstrators, the vast majority of whom were peaceful, were there to protest legitimate claims of election irregularities and voter fraud. But Google-owned YouTube doesn’t want you to know that. They announced Thursday that they will ban all videos about voter fraud in the 2020 election.

The one free speech haven, Parler, Apple is keying up to ban from its app store and bar from iOS devices, claiming content on the website contributed to the capitol unrest. Google has already jumped the gun, banning Parler yesterday.

Every corner of the Trump movement is being publicly purged from the internet. Thursday, Shopify stripped all online stores for President Trump, including the Trump Organization and Trump’s affiliated campaign account.

Anyone who has supported the president is in for it, as well. Rick Klein, the political director at ABC News, in a now-deleted tweet said that getting rid of Trump is “the easy part.” The more difficult task will be “cleansing the movement he commands.” Democrats have already created a “Trump Accountability Project,” an enemies list to ban, cancel, or fire anyone who staffed, donated to, endorsed, or supported President Trump and his administration.

Trump subverted the elites who run our country. He took on big pharma and China. He negotiated, renegotiated, and destroyed trade deals in his mission to put America and American workers first. He went to war with critical race theory institutionalized in our schools and in government.

He stood for things that those who run our biggest corporations and hold our highest government positions detest. For virtually his entire presidency, they tried everything to delegitimize his administration, beginning with the now-debunked Russiagate. Trump showed their corruption, and now he will pay.

The man, the administration, and his supporters will likely go down in history books as delusional and dangerous. Why? Because the left has a monopoly on power, so they can control what people see and therefore think.

As the left’s arbiters of “truth,” big tech has been banning users they don’t agree with and suppressing stories like The New York Post’s blockbuster investigation into Hunter Biden‘s laptop and sketchy deals with foreign governments and companies with ties to the Communist Chinese government. With the help of their partisan “independent fact checkers,” big tech and the media made sure average Americans never knew about this before they went to the polls.

Following the riot among Trump supporters in the capitol, Facebook removed President Trump’s video calling for peace and rule of law, claiming it instigated violence. Then Facebook de-platformed him. Trump’s speech didn’t fit the narrative that he was a pro-violence, lawlessness insurrectionist.

This disturbing reality we live in, where one political party now has the power to control the narrative in all aspects of our lives — school, work, social media, and government — might make us feel eerie echoes of living under Chinese Communist Party influence instead of in the United States of America.

Perhaps what’s most troubling, and something that we might not have even considered in the chaos of the last few days, is the long-term impact this will have on American children. Generation Z or Zoomers, aged 13 to 21, may be one of the first generations that is more influenced by what they see and read on social media and the internet than what they hear at the dinner table from mom and dad.

A Business Insider’s poll found that 59 percent of Zoomers listed social media as their top news source. While technology used to serve as a way to make information accessible, a way to have the world at your fingertips with just a quick search, it has become something much different. It is teaching the youngest and most impressionable among us that suppression is normal and personal censorship is an important survival mechanism.

Children are being taught to watch what they say and think, lest they be labeled a racist, white supremacist, homophobe, or xenophobe. Indeed, making a pro-Trump TikTok video can get your college admission rescinded and subject you to intense personal harassment. A three-second insensitive or politically incorrect Snapchat video from 2016 can get you featured in a New York Times article and your college admission rescinded, and subject you to bitter bullying.

For young people today, it’s becoming normal to see political leaders in our country deemed “dangerous” to be ousted from public platforms and ostracized from society. They watch their parents self-censor at work, fearful of backlash from employees or coworkers that could get them fired.

Americans used to support the right of people to hold and express opinions others disagree with. Yet the newest generation believes feelings are more valuable than freedom. Study after study finds that younger people are more supportive of limiting speech than are older generations.

A recent survey found that an overwhelming majority of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison think the government should be able to punish “hate speech.” Of course, “hate speech” is simply the left’s ambiguous term for anything veering from the leftist orthodoxy on issues such as abortion, sex, race, and immigration.

Silicon Valley oligarchs have an agenda. They aren’t platforms, they are publishers, which should nullify the privileges they enjoy under Section 230. Will the Democrats who are now running our government do anything to stop big tech tyranny? Of course not.

This problem is not going away. America’s ethos of free speech and expression is going extinct at the hands of big tech and the leftists controlling media and government.

The U.S. Capitol riots are over, thanks to law enforcement. However, the censorship that followed has created a dangerous precedent.

For young people, their “normal” is beginning to feel increasingly like it’s heading towards life in China. It’s less free and tolerant than the America their parents grew up in. Imagine how much worse things will be when today’s youths are running the country.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Evita Duffy is an intern at The Federalist and a junior at the University of Chicago, where she studies American History. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, & her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1

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‘Sanctuaries of Learning’: Churches nationwide help students navigate virtual school

Reported By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter | Monday, November 09, 2020

Tutors assist students with schoolwork at the Restart Learning Center, a distance learning center set up by the Los Angeles Dream Center, a faith-based nonprofit organization based in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, 2020. | Los Angeles Dream Center

As the pandemic has forced many of America’s public schools to begin the school year with remote learning, several churches and faith-based groups nationwide have opened their doors to students who don’t have internet access at home or whose parents can’t stay home with them. Among those institutions are 14 Houston-based churches belonging to the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church that partnered with the Houston Independent School District to serve as distance learning centers.

The distance-learning centers were attended by hundreds of children before the school district’s return to in-person learning in late October. The eighth-largest school district in the United States, with the help of the UMC conference, birthed the “Sanctuaries of Learning” program to aid approximately 500 students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. The program helped the students navigate the waters of virtual learning, a new experience for most K-12 students in the U.S.

“They lived in the neighborhood, they registered through the school, they called the school to save a place, … [and] their parents were notified about it,” said Rev. Jill Daniel, an elder in the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.

Although the program concluded in mid-October when the school district resumed in-person learning, the program’s impact can be felt nationwide as some school districts have not yet returned to in-person classes.

In an interview with The Christian Post, Shannon Martin, director of communications for the Texas Annual Conference, explained that their regional church body “birthed this program.”

“But then as people started hearing about it … it started catching on across the country. So there are people all over the country doing this,” she said. “Other people have adopted the same name, Sanctuaries of Learning. We certainly did not copyright it. We wanted people to use it and certainly utilize the same model of working with school districts. Once there’s a good model, we want other churches and other people to be able to follow along with … the same model because it’s worked.”

Daniel said the conference started receiving calls from all over the U.S., specifically recalling phone calls from New York City, California, Colorado, Oklahoma, the Carolinas and elsewhere in Texas. They asked: “What can we do to make this happen?”

“We probably had … well over 120 or so Zoom meetings with people all over the United States and we walked a little closer with some of them,” she explained. “And it’s been amazing to just watch God doing this very new thing and blessing it so mightily.”

The pastor predicted that the establishment of the Sanctuaries of Learning program would lead to a “rebirth” of neighborhood churches because “during quarantine, we had all this time where … our churches have been that mission depot in the neighborhood, where we’ve had food distributed and people have done dinners for their neighbors and checked on one another.”

While schools in Houston have returned to in-person learning, schools in California’s Los Angeles Unified School District are not likely to return to in-person learning before January. This week, the district released data based on 10-week interim assessments showing that poor grades surged in the district’s lower-income communities.

In addition to churches, faith-based organizations have also worked to set up distance learning centers.

The faith-based nonprofit Los Angeles Dream Center established the Restart Learning Center, a “safe, socially distanced outdoor learning environment” in the parking lot of its Echo Park campus. The parking lot contains a solar panel shed that shields against heat and precipitation.

Like the Sanctuaries of Learning in Texas, the Restart Learning Center draws in students residing within walking distance of the surrounding neighborhood. Participants include attendees of both public and private schools. The Restart Learning Center operates five days a week from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The center is free of charge.

“This will all be executed in an effort to support parents, work schedules and schooling, to cheerlead kids and to provide them a safe place and motivation center,” Matthew Barnett, pastor of the Los Angeles Dream Center, told CP.

Barnett explained that about 80 children each day attend the learning center along with a “rotating group” of students that come and go. According to Barnett, the lockdowns in Los Angeles have had an adverse impact on “the poorest of the poor.”

“I don’t think maybe people understand how much of a gap has been left between those that are in need and those who have,” he surmised.

“We had to supply more than half of the 80 kids learning tablets with our own money,” he continued. “I would say 75% of the kids get them from us.” The remainder of students use school-issued computers, he added.

How Sanctuaries of Learning came to be

Students gather outside as members of the Houston Texans visit a Sanctuaries of Learning campus in Houston, Texas on Houston Texans’ Founder’s Day. The Sanctuaries of Learning were distance learning centers set up by the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church for children in Houston, Texas, 2020. | Jill Daniel

Daniel, who serves as director of a Texas Annual Conference initiative called “We Love All God’s Children,” explained how the Sanctuaries of Learning program came about. The initiative aims to “change the trajectory of the lives of children from birth through the end of elementary school.” It also aims to help families in underserved areas through a holistic approach that includes discipleship and early education.

“We work with all 683 United Methodist Churches in the Texas Annual Conference,” she said.

“We Love All God’s Children” has worked to set up UMC Children Centers, which the elder described as “state-of-the-art early childhood centers.” Several United Methodist Children Centers were planned to open in 2020. But because of the coronavirus pandemic, they couldn’t open this year.

“We immediately shifted from doing what we had been doing to [figuring out] how can we help our churches … in this new crazy time,” she said.

“And so one of the things I tried to keep in mind was that … my ministry area focuses on underserved children. And so it would be the children who I focus on who were not going to have access to technology, who didn’t have Wi-Fi in their house.”

Over the summer, the pastor said she began praying and trying to figure out how churches could join together to help the public school systems since it was looking very likely schools would return for the 2020-2021 school year virtually.

“And so I worked on a proposal. I went to one of our district superintendents, who’s the district superintendent over the … Central South District — that’s all the United Methodist churches within Beltway 8 in Houston,” she said. “And I pitched that idea to him. And he said, ‘I’ll tell you what … let my churches be the guinea pigs.’”

After the bishop approved her idea in early June, Daniel reached out to Dr. Grenita Lathan, the interim superintendent of the Houston Independent School District. However, she did not hear back from her right away. At the end of July, Daniel received an e-mail from Lathan, who said that she would announce the district’s plans for reopening later that week and asked if she wanted to meet with her.

“I know now that the reason she never responded was because she had no idea what Houston ISD was going to do,” Daniel explained.

“She kind of took the reins on our Zoom meeting. She wanted to join with us. She wanted to make use of all the United Methodist churches that she could that are near a neighborhood elementary school.”

District sent support staff to churches

According to Daniel, the churches needed people to oversee the safety of the students while teachers taught live from their classrooms.

“We just needed people to oversee the safety of the kids, to help if one of them has trouble logging on or that sort of thing,” the UMC elder explained.

Daniel said that the school district sent support staff to assist students at all distance-learning campuses.

“Those were people they were paying already, like cafeteria workers or bus drivers,” the reverend explained. “They were paying them but they didn’t have any work to do.”

In addition to deploying support staff, the school district also provided breakfast, lunch and an afternoon snack to all of the children participating in the program. The school district also provided personal protective equipment and a “cleaning crew that came in every afternoon” to clean the churches.

“They even came before we ever started and did a deep clean to start with. And then they also came every night and did it,” she recalled.

Daniel was amazed at what the school district provided.

“We never dreamed of that or imagined that,” she said. “If we didn’t have enough bandwidth, they brought boosters over so that everything would be good for the kids. They also sent their safety team and their property management teams around all of our churches.”

Also, the Houston Independent School District even added the churches to its liability insurance.

The Sanctuaries of Learning program was paid for in part by coronavirus relief that the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church received. Each church that participated in the Sanctuaries of Learning program received a $1,000 check.

“We were so thankful to be able to provide a safe, healthy, affirming Christian environment, positive environment for those kids to be in,” Daniel said.

Every Friday was “fun Friday” for students participating in the Sanctuaries of Learning program. Daniel told CP that on Houston Texans’ Founder’s Day, Oct. 6, the football team came out to some of the churches. Daniel recalled one cheerleader reading a book to all the kids in that school. All the children received a free T-shirt.

“One fun Friday, we had ice cream sundaes and we gave … each child a whole library from the Barbara Bush Literacy Foundation,” Daniel stated. “Each child had 25 books on their reading label to save and to take home.”

The Sanctuaries of Learning program did not come without challenges.

On the second day of school, a student at one of the campuses tested positive for coronavirus. This forced the campus to close down and anyone who worked closely with the infected student had to quarantine. For the remainder of the program, no one at any of the Sanctuaries of Learning campuses tested positive for coronavirus, however.

Daniel described the Sanctuaries of Learning program as a “game-changer for our children.”

“It’s a game-changer for mama or for daddy or for whoever is raising that child who doesn’t have to be worried every day about whether they’re safe and how and whether they’re going to get … what they need at school,” she said.

While in-person schooling has resumed in the Houston Independent School District and other large school districts nationwide, the Sanctuaries of Learning program is ready to restart should the district decide to move to online learning again.

No end to remote learning in sight for Los Angeles

A tutor assists a student at the Restart Learning Center, a distance learning center set up at the Los Angeles Dream Center, a faith-based nonprofit based in the Echo Park Neighborhood of Los Angeles, 2020. | Los Angeles Dream Center

Barnett explained that the Los Angeles Dream Center has the resources to continue operating the Restart Learning Center for the remainder of the semester. But he is “terrified of the fact that [remote learning] could go on for a whole year.”

“With the teachers afraid to go back and the union battles that are going on, this thing, I fear it will be the whole year long,” he said. “So that’s going to really test our ability to keep it going. But we’re going to give it a try.”

The Restart Learning Center program provides one tutor for every three students.

“The best thing about it is that they have somebody who’s a cheerleader next to them, pulling for them to succeed and celebrating their accomplishment,” Barnett stated. “So I think that’s the … most important thing.”

He assured that tutors are there “every step of the way” to help students with whatever questions they may have.

Barnett estimated the cost of running the center is about $300 per month per student. It costs about “$20,000 a month to operate all these stations and school.”

“We’ve invested a lot of money that we really expect not to get back,” the pastor explained. “We just did it in a labor of love. … If people want to support, they can. … It’s been a kind of a missions work for us and it’s almost like we just started helping people and we’re trying to catch up.”

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The Victims of Childhood Transgenderism Have Spoken Out; It’s Time for Joe Biden To Listen

Reported By Michael Austin | Published October 20, 2020 at 2:44pm

During Joe Biden’s ABC News town hall Thursday night, the Democratic presidential nominee expressed support for the radical idea of young children changing their gender.

“I’m the proud mom of two girls, 8 and 10,” Mieke Haeck from State College, Pennsylvania, said during the event in Philadelphia. “My youngest daughter is transgender.”

She then asked Biden how he would “ensure that the lives and rights of LGBTQ people are protected.”

“The idea that an 8-year-old child or a 10-year-old child decides, you know, ‘I decided I want to be transgender. That’s what I think I’d like to be. It would make my life a lot easier,’” the former vice president said. “There should be zero discrimination. … So I promise you there is no reason to suggest that there should be any right denied your daughter or daughters, whichever one or two –”

“One,” Haeck said.

“One, your daughter — that your other daughter has a right to be and do. None, zero.”

Over the past several years, the left has increasingly supported the notion of childhood transitioning — allowing teen, adolescent and even pre-adolescent children to decide what gender they are and whether they wish to undergo life-altering gender reassignment therapies and/or procedures.

Before Biden and his fellow progressives continue their trans-children crusade, however, there are some important voices they should listen to.

Walter Heyer

Walter Heyer, an outspoken advocate against the transgender movement, at one time identified as female.

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“My grandmother dressed me as a girl when I was 4, 5, and 6 years old,” Heyer wrote last year. “I was far too young to comprehend the long-term consequences of being encouraged to cross-dress at such a young age, much less fight back. In my child’s mind, it felt good to be the center of her attention. Now I call what grandma did to me ‘child abuse’ because her grooming of me as a female negatively affected my entire life.

“In adulthood, I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria and underwent unnecessary cross-gender hormone therapy and surgical gender change. I lived eight years as a woman and tried my best to make it work, but after surgery I still had gender dysphoria. Even worse, I was suicidal. Before giving me hormones and surgery, my medical providers should have helped me explore the possible psychological roots of my desire to escape into a female persona, but none did.”

Heyer spoke to The Western Journal about Biden’s statements in support of childhood transitioning, saying that “poor, disoriented, babbling Joe” is simply “following orders” from the LGBT lobby.

“If he did not support transgender kids, his campaign would have been over,” Heyer said in an email.

David Reimer

Although widely touted as proof positive of the efficacy of childhood transitioning, the case of David Reimer is the first example of the child-trans ideology being exposed for what it was: child abuse.

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US Marshals Liberate 39 Missing Children, 15 Sex Trafficking Victims In Georgia

Reported by Published Aug 27, 2020 | By Richard Moorhead

URL of the originating web site: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/us-marshals-liberate-39-missing-children-15-sex-trafficking-victims-in-georgia/

The US Marshals have revealed an operation that has rescued 39 missing children, 26 of whom were in danger of being sexually trafficked by a criminal enterprise.

Operation Not Forgotten recovered the at-risk children from 20 counties across the state of Georgia, mostly around metro Atlanta. Director Donald Washington of the US Marshal’s Service said that the authorities fear some or all of the children were being held in the clutches of an organized sex trafficking operation.

Nine suspects have been arrested in suspicion of involvement in child and sex trafficking activity as a result of the operation. The US Marshals have named Moradeyo Bandele, Trayon Moore, James Garcia, Faye Smith, Sally Garcia, Zachary Bailey, Stanson Causey, Kirk Waters, and Trevonte Shareef as the arrestees brought into custody as a result of the operation.

Some of the individuals charged are facing counts of rape, human trafficking, gun crimes, and child molestation, and were already wanted on outstanding arrest warrants.

“We will never stop looking for you. That’s the message,” said Director Washington at a press conference summarizing the operation. “There is no more meaningful work that law enforcement does than rescuing children. Our children are not for sale and they are not ever forgotten.” A press release also recounts the accomplishments of the child trafficking bust, which may be one of the most significant in the United States in years if not decades.

The Marshal’s service is primarily tasked with apprehending fugitives, but it’s also tasked with combating human smuggling in the United States. Sadly, many Democrats and progressives continue to demonize local and federal law enforcement, ignoring the role the police play in preventing some of the most serious criminal conduct known to society.

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HE’S BACK FROM VACATION. Here are Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Pawn Stars

A.F. BRANCO | on July 27, 2020 at 7:30 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-pawn-stars/

Science says that kids are better off in school but the teachers union prefer to play politics and use the kids as pawns.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – The Anti-Deplorables

A.F. BRANCO | on July 28, 2020 at 7:40 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-the-anti-deplorables/

Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Anarchy, and the Democrats are teaming up to destroy America with the help of the Marxist-Mainstream propaganda media.

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.

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Political

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Ignored by the Media and Dr. Fauci: Nearly Twice as Many Children and Young Adults Died from Flu than from China Coronavirus in Past Year

Reported By Jim Hoft | Published July 23, 2020 at 10:31pm

URL of the originating web site: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/07/ignored-media-dr-fauci-nearly-twice-many-children-young-adults-died-flu-china-coronavirus-past-year/

Elementary school children boarding school bus, Mount Shasta, California

Most US schools have been closed since March due to the Wuhan Coronavirus. Democrats want to keep the schools closed. They say its because of coronavirus. But it’s only because of politics.

So far this year, via the CDC— since February, there have been 226 deaths of children and young adults under age 24 in the United States caused by coronavirus or possibly linked to coronavirus.

The last full flu season from 2018-2019, via the CDC, saw 477 deaths of children and young adults under age 17 in the United States from the seasonal flu.

That means nearly twice as many children died from the seasonal flu last year as from the China Coronavirus this year.

The media won’t tell you this. The COVID-19 is LESS DANGEROUS to children than a typical influenza!

And after four months of the pandemic we now know that children are more likely to die from the flu than from the coronavirus!

Andrew Bostom posted this on Twitter.

And yet CDC officials are still scaring Americans over the reopening of schools this fall!
We need better medical officials.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jim Hoft

Jim Hoft is the founder of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.

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Political

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After Years of Common Core, Betsy DeVos Announces ‘Devastating’ Results

Posted By Jared Harris | Published October 31, 2019 at 3:55pm

URL of the original posting site: https://www.westernjournal.com/years-common-core-betsy-devos-announces-devastating-results/

Years after Common Core made its debut in many state education systems, the disastrous long-term results of the program are finally being seen. The revelation came as part of the Department of Education’s 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress report.

“Every American family needs to open The Nation’s Report Card this year and think about what it means for their child and for our country’s future,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a media release. “The results are, frankly, devastating.”

“This country is in a student achievement crisis, and over the past decade it has continued to worsen, especially for our most vulnerable students,” she added.

The NAEP is a test administered in alternating years to students in the fourth and eighth grades. The government-mandated assessment covers both math and reading proficiency. The students’ reading assessment paints a grim picture of educational readiness, with tested fourth and eighth graders failing to best the previous test’s results. This year’s results were only marginally better than those from 1992.

The mathematics scores show the most damning results — an upward trend until the year 2015, when the momentum seemed to grind to a halt. Although there were double-digit gains since the ’90s, fourth graders only managed to score a single point above their previous tests. Eighth graders failed to meet that low standard, sinking below their predecessors from two years before.

“This must be America’s wake-up call,” DeVos said. “We cannot abide these poor results any longer. We can neither excuse them away nor simply throw more money at the problem.”

The dip doesn’t seem to be without cause, either. By 2015, most states had implemented some form of Common Core standards, according to the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Studies have linked Common Core to declining test scores and generally poor student performance.

This failure in U.S. schools comes at a time when Chinese students appear to be blowing American children out of the water. Results from the Program for International Student Assessment, which tests students internationally on their proficiency in math, science and reading, show that China ranks a full 21 spots ahead of the United States.

The 21st century needs to remain an American century. Letting the Chinese take the global lead would have disastrous results across the world. If we expect our future engineers, scientists, and mathematicians to compete in an increasingly globalized world, it’s clear that Common Core needs to be abandoned.

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Education, Political

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Felon Illegal Alien Arrested on 16 Counts of Sex With Underage Children

Posted by Steven Ahle | September 10, 2019

URL of the original posting site: https://steadfastandloyal.com/politics/felon-illegal-alien-arrested-on-16-counts-of-sex-with-underage-children/

Alejandro Alcala-Avala, a 33-year-old illegal alien from Mexico, who has been using the alias of “Hermelindo Lorenzo Guapillo-Chavaria,” who was deported in 2015 after serving 87 months for the distribution of Meth, has been charged with 16 counts of sex with 2 children under the age of 14.

The charges include 10 counts of child molestation, two counts of statutory sodomy, one count of first-degree statutory sodomy, first-degree statutory rape, endangering the welfare of a child, and child abuse.

He is being held without bail and a detainer has been issued against him. He will have to serve time for his sex crimes and possibly for reentering the US after being deported which is a felony.

From Breitbart News

According to the Sedalia Democrat, Alcala-Avala’s two child victims told police that they were repeatedly raped on nearly a regular basis by the illegal alien. One of the victims said the rapes “happened all the time,” while the second victim said the rapes occurred two to three times a month.

The victims, both of whom are under 14-years-old, told police that Alcala-Avala also touched them inappropriately with their clothes on.

A law enforcement official confirmed to Breitbart News that Alcala-Avala, who had been used the alias “Hermelindo Lorenzo Guapillo-Chavaria,” was deported from the U.S. in 2014 after serving 87 months in federal prison for distributing meth.

Sometime after his deportation five years ago, Alcala-Avala re-entered the country illegally through the southern border, a felony.

Alcala-Avala is being held at the Pettis County Jail without bond and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has requested that should he be released from custody at any time, that he be turned over to them for arrest.

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Political

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Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘children’

BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | MARCH 23, 2023

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.

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By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter | TUESDAY, MARCH 21, 2023

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

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BY: ANONYMOUS | FEBRUARY 28, 2023

Many Ongoing Projects Highlight Lack of Research

NIH Acknowledges Limited Evidence, FDA Hasn’t Approved

Yet Biden Administration Pushes Transgender ‘Care’

I’ll ask again. WHY ARE THESE MENTAL PATIENT LEFTEST SO HYPER ABOUT MUTILATING AMERICA’S CONFUSED CHILDREN? WHAT IS THEIR END GAME?

Growing Transgender Identification

Debate Among Medication Providers

Studying Causes of Gender Dysphoria

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.

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By Michael Brown, CP Op-Ed Contributor | Thursday, February 09, 2023

Dr. Michael Brown(www.askdrbrown.org) is the host of the nationally syndicated Line of Fire radio program. His latest book is Revival Or We Die: A Great Awakening Is Our Only Hope. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.

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BY: SPENCER DALKE | FEBRUARY 01, 2023

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Minor Targets

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BY: DELANO SQUIRES | JANUARY 05, 2023

Recognizing Roles

Different Forms of Patriarchy

Delano Squires is a research fellow in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @DelanoSquires.

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BY: MARY ROSE KULCZAK | DECEMBER 28, 2022

Mary Rose Kulczak is a writer for various parent and child publications. She is a wife and mother of three sons, and currently resides in Saline, Michigan.

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BY: ANONYMOUS | DECEMBER 02, 2022

Finding a New School

Building Real Identity

Open-Ended Questioning

Limiting Technology

Upping My Parenting

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.

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BY: PAULA RINEHART | NOVEMBER 07, 2022

‘I’m God in this Case’

A Pernicious Double Standard

The Use and Abuse of Parental Rights

Paula Rinehart, LCSW, is a therapist in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the author of the book “Sex and the Soul of a Woman.” She writes about family and culture.

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Trans Activists Offer Gender-Confused Minors Cash And Uber Rides To Get Them Away From Home

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a mother, author, and member of the Independent Women’s Network.

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By CANDACE HATHAWAY | October 24, 2022

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By ALEX NITZBERG | October 18, 2022

Old Nick’s Pub in Eugene, Oregon, is advertising an upcoming event where an 11-year-old drag queen will be among those performing.

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BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | SEPTEMBER 07, 2022

Aldean Is Right

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By Leonardo Blair, Senior Features Reporter | August 19, 2022

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Watch: Police Put in Horrifying Situation as 4-Year-Old Opens Fire While Dad Is Being Arrested

By Richard Bledsoe | July 22, 2022

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Commentary by Daniel Horowitz | June 09, 2022