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June 2023

Christopher F. Rufo Thrown to the Wolves A physician reveals the nightmare of transgender ideology in a major children’s hospital. Christopher Rufo

https://www.city-journal.org/article/transgender-ideology-and-the-corruption-of-medicine

I have been engaged in an ongoing dialogue with a physician who works in a major children’s hospital in a blue city. This physician has witnessed firsthand how transgender ideology has captured the medical profession and jeopardized the first commandment of the healing sciences: do no harm.

He has now chosen to speak out, on condition of anonymity, because he is alarmed by the sudden corruption of the medical community. His colleagues, many of whom oppose transgender interventions, have so far chosen to stay silent. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Christopher Rufo: Please begin by setting the scene. What’s it like in a major children’s hospital in the United States regarding transgender interventions for children?

Physician: I think the best way to answer that question is to talk about the cultural shift that happened in 2020, because transgender ideology and Covid are inextricably linked. Normally, doctors operate by the authority of the professional societies that govern our specific practice. That worked because the individuals in those institutions were reliable, intelligent, and thoughtful. But with Covid in 2020, we started getting medical decrees without peer review or evidence—you saw this with masks, social distancing, and emergency-use authorizations. These decrees were expressed as something that everyone had to do, without justification based on sound science. The other thing was censorship. If you were to ask questions or express doubt about these medical decrees, you would be ostracized within your department, and you stood a good chance of being publicly humiliated, severely reprimanded, or fired.

That’s when transgender ideology really took off. Within these academic institutions, so-called experts in the field of transgender medicine would simply declare that puberty blockers and other interventions were the gold standard of care. The evidence to support this is completely fraudulent, but no dissent was permitted. Everyone within the medical community knew that if he questioned transgender ideology, he would suffer the same type of repercussions that had happened during Covid. The best way to describe the environment would be as an authoritarian, censorious culture that discourages any meaningful debate and encourages the demonization of anyone who asks questions.

The IRS Whistleblower’s Biden Tune Gary Shapley’s testimony will be hard for Democrats to ignore.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/irs-whistleblower-hunter-biden-probe-gary-shapley-joe-biden-bc42321d?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

One thing for readers to look for on Friday is what and where they read about Thursday’s testimony by a pair of Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers. Their claims, under oath at a House Ways and Means hearing, are newsworthy and politically explosive.

We’ve heard enough whistleblower tales over the years to be skeptical about claims that can be exploited by partisans, which is one reason we’ve been cautious about reporting the second-hand accounts about the IRS investigators from House Republicans. We wanted to see specific claims from specific individuals, and on Thursday we did.

Our Kimberley Strassel recounts some of the highlights from the testimony nearby. The details are shocking if true because they charge political interference and favorable prosecutorial treatment in the IRS probe of Hunter Biden. President Biden’s son agreed to a deal this week to plead guilty to two minor counts of failing to make proper tax payments.

But agent Gary Shapley claims his IRS unit recommended more serious felony charges based partly on what he described as a scheme to hide payments from Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that hired Hunter as a consultant and board member. Mr. Shapley claims U.S. Attorney David Weiss was blocked from pursuing those charges, which the Justice Department denies.

Mr. Shapley also recounts that his team obtained a July 30, 2017 WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to Henry Zhao, a Chinese businessman. The testimony says Hunter wrote:

“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”

Another NAEP Text Score Disappointment Learning loss for 13-year-olds has become entrenched.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/naep-scores-13-year-olds-math-reading-nces-peggy-carr-education-schools-covid-bda47967?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

“National Assessment of Educational Progress scores decline” is a familiar story; the last installment was in May, with a report that 8th-grade U.S. history test scores hit an all-time low. The latest dispiriting data from the Nation’s Report Card is more evidence that learning loss from public-school closures won’t be easily recovered.

NAEP scores for 13-year-olds declined by nine points in math and four in reading between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported. The math decline is the largest ever for this NAEP assessment. For the lowest-performing students, math scores were the worst since the 1970s, and reading scores were lower than the first data collection in 1971.

“There are signs of risk for a generation of learners in the data we are releasing today and have released over the past year,” NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr said.

In the rare silver-lining department, NCES reports that Catholic school scores “were not measurably different” between 2019-20 and 2022-23. The reasons for the difference can’t be proven, but Catholic schools reopened much faster while teachers unions kept public schools closed. The educational devastation of remote school is well documented, and it’s becoming clearer that this effect won’t dissipate merely because students are back in buildings.

The Toughest Job In D.C. — Transcribing Biden’s Remarks

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/22/the-toughest-job-in-d-c-transcribing-bidens-remarks/

Watching President Joe Biden try to make his way through a speech is painful enough. Reading a transcript of it is worse. Not just because Biden’s words are even more confusing in print, but because you start to feel a strong sense of pity for the person responsible for figuring out what he is trying to say, how much of it to transcribe verbatim, and which facts to correct.

We looked through Biden’s remarks from just this month and found 15 instances where the transcriber felt compelled to make corrections on things the president said.

Here’s an example from one 11-minute speech he gave over the weekend in Palo Alto.

Forty million — 40 million Americans already drinking water that thousands of farmers rely on for — for integration [irrigation].  And 40 million count on that river and so do the farmers….

Folks, flood mitigation: $3.5 million [billion] to reduce or eliminate the risk of repetitive flood damage to buildings, plus $1 billion in funding mitigation measures to increase community resilience, like supporting adaptations of hazard-resistant building codes

And maybe most important, I’ve committed by 2020 [2030], we will have conserved 30 percent of all the lands and waters the United States has jurisdiction over and simultaneously reduce emissions to blunt climate impacts.

Other examples from this month as they appear in the official White House transcripts:

“Mary Robinson [Barra], the Chairman of the Board of General Motors …”
“Instead, I signed into law the Bipartisan Safers [sic] Community Act, which you’ve referenced several times today …”
“Last summer, I had the honor of bestowing the Presidential Meda- — Medal of Freemon [sic] — Freedom on distinguished Americans …”
“The ticket seller, SeatGreek [SeatGeek], is also set to give customers the option of seeing all-in, upfront prices …”
“And I’m pleased we’re also joined by x-pay [sic] — xBk, a small venue in Des Moines, Iowa, that’s going be using all upfront pricing for its hundred events at — a year as well …”
“Let me tell you, the Inflation Reduction Act includes $369 billion to comat [sic] — combat climate change …”
“We made clear — they made clear that we’d rather th- — they’d rather threaten the default of the U.S. economy than cut or get rid of, for example, $30 billion in taxpayer subsidies to oil companies who made $200 million [sic] last year — billion.  I said ‘million.’  Billion dollars last year …”
“When we were at the G7, we talked about — one of the meetings was — they used to call the Build Back Better World. It’s not that now. It’s the PIII [PGII] — P-triple-I [sic] …”
“At the G7, it was originally called Build Back Better World, but we were talking about — there’s a new PPI [PGII] — anyway — an industrial policy that we’re all signed on to …”
“As Commander-in-Chief, I was proud to have ended the ban on transgester [sic] Americans — transgender Americans serving in the United States military …”
“And finally, this executive order means more resources, especially when it comes to improving military families’ access to quality, defendable [dependable], and affordable — affordable childcare …”
“This could have been the week that a catastrophic — catastrophic devault [sic] — default happened …”

The Tyranny of the Clerks What the 2024 election is really all about. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-tyranny-of-the-clerks/

The Framers of our Constitution were well-versed through experience and history in the dangers of tyranny. Their education in Classical history and literature familiarized them with the political theory and practice of the world’s first constitutional governments like democracy and republics. Their European influencers like Montesquieu and David Hume were similarly trained. From these sources, and their own take on their experiences with King George III, the Framers learned that concentrated and centralized power ultimately leads to tyranny–– the degradation of civil liberties, freedom, and equality.

One form of despotism, however, they could not have anticipated is our modern tyranny of the clerks, the functionaries in hypertrophied government bureaucracies that degenerate into instruments of political factions to be used against rivals. For over a century the Constitution has been weakened and compromised by these unaccountable, mostly anonymous bureaucracies––as the excesses of federal agencies over the last seven years are now making obvious.

The idea of technocracy or rule by “experts,” of course, was not unknown in antiquity. Plato’s famous utopia in the Republic (c. 375 B.C.) imagined a state run by cognitive elite “guardians” created by covert eugenic marriages, and trained for five decades in philosophy and virtue. Subsequently the idea of the “philosopher king” remained a staple of political fantasy all the way down to Marxism’s “vanguard” of the elite intelligentsia who could discern what Marx called the “inner but concealed essential pattern” of economics and history.

But Plato’s ideal has always encountered the problem that Roman satirist Juvenal identified: “Who will actually guard the guardians?” Such utopian notions foundered on the empirical reality of a flawed, irrational, universal human nature driven by “passions and interests.” And one of the most dangerous and destructive is the lust for power that seldom is sated, and always craves more.

That tragic realism, an inheritance from both our Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman cultural traditions, was also shared by the Founders. As historian Walter A. McDougall writes, “[A]ll Federalists believed human nature was flawed . . . envisioned no utopias, put little trust in republican virtue, and believed the only government liable to endure was one taking mankind as it was and making allowance for passion and greed.” Hence the Constitution’s structure of divided, mutually checking balanced powers.

The progressives at the turn of the 20th century, however, believed that the Constitution was an anachronism based on outmoded beliefs like mankind’s flawed nature. Progressives like Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Croly, in contrast, argued that new “sciences” such as economics, sociology, and psychology had made obsolete tradition, faith, and history as guides to human nature––and Darwinism’s “natural selection” had shown that human nature, rightly guided by technocrats, similarly could progress beyond the old realist view of it as flawed and unchanging.

America Wakes Up to Woke Americans are rejecting wokeism because they finally are realizing that if they do not, they will not have a civilization left.  By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/21/america-wakes-up-to-woke/

Wokeness was envisioned as a new reboot of the coalition of the oppressed. 

Those purportedly victimized by traditional America would find “intersectional” solidarity in their victimhood owing to the supposed sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other alleged American sins, past and present. 

The so-called white male heterosexual victimizing class was collectively to be held responsible for their sinful triad of white “rage,” “supremacy,” and “privilege.” 

Class considerations became passé. The Duchess of Sussex, and the billionaires Oprah Winfrey and LeBron James, shared grievances against all whites, whether they hailed from Martha’s Vineyard or impoverished East Palestine, Ohio. 

A bicoastal elite would draft the woke agenda and the oppressed would follow as ordered. 

That top-down blueprint would embrace massive multibillion-dollar reparations to blacks. 

In lockstep, all victims would rally around a Green New Deal that mandated high energy costs to discourage consumption of fossil fuels. 

The new transgender canon mandated three sexes. Sex is socially rather than biologically determined. And there is a large, oppressed, and transgender population: this presents the next great civil rights struggle for America. 

Historical wokeism lodged a list of grievances against the supposedly flawed American past. Indicting the dead required statues to be toppled. Names had to be changed. Histories were to be rewritten. Even the foundational date of America was to be reconsidered and altered. 

Yet, the rainbow fabric of woke is now fraying—and for a variety of reasons. 

For one thing, woke took off after the perfect storm of the COVID pandemic, the devastating lockdown, the 120 days of violent rioting and looting following the death of George Floyd, and years of endemic Trump Derangement Syndrome. Most of those catalysts are waning. Temporarily unhinged Americans are slowly reviving. Millions of the comatose are waking up to normality—and don’t recognize their own country. 

Two, woke is retrogressive, reactionary, and anti-civilizational. Decriminalizing the legal code, defunding the police, failing to apply norms to the homeless population, and destroying meritocracy have all hollowed out our major cities. 

San Francisco was a far cleaner, safer, and kinder city 20, 40, or 80 years ago than it is today. 

A woke FBI, Pentagon, or airline industry becomes a matter of life and death. 

Three, in modern America, class is now a far more accurate metric of oppression than race or gender. 

It is one thing to restrict fossil fuel development if you are in the upper one percent income bracket, quite another if you commute 50 miles a day in a used car. If there are to be reparations, why include Eric Holder or Al Sharpton, but not indigent Hispanics, Asians, and poor whites? 

The Indoctrination of the American Mind New research shows that the ideological transformation of our schools is widespread—and should concern anyone who cares about open inquiry and free speech. Eric Kaufmann

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-american-schools-indoctrinate-kids?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

If you read The Free Press, you know that over the last decade, an illiberal ideology that goes by various names—Critical Race Theory; Critical Social Justice—has transformed key institutions of American life. It is remaking the law, Hollywood, medicine, higher education, psychology, and more.

No area, however, is more important than our schools, which shape the minds of future citizens. And across the country, teachers are now engaged in the wholesale indoctrination of their pupils.

The Evanston–Skokie School District teaches K–3 students to “break the binary” of gender. Seattle Public Schools tell teachers that the education system is guilty of “spirit murder” against black children, while a Cupertino, California elementary school forces third-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” In Portland, K–5 students are taught to subvert the sexuality of “white colonizers” and explore the “infinite gender spectrum.” And thousands of similar examples, perhaps in your own community.

Yet many refute the claim that this ideological transformation is happening at all. Which is why we thought it was crucial to ground the anecdotes that sometimes make headlines in representative, large-scale data. We wanted to understand the impact that this reprogramming is having on young people’s ideas about race, gender, identity and more.

A recent survey of 1,500 Americans aged 18–20 that I conducted with Zach Goldberg for the Manhattan Institute proves just how widespread and pernicious this issue has become. It has implications that should concern anyone who cares about open inquiry and free speech.

We asked a random national sample of 18- to 20-year-olds whether they had heard (from an adult in school) of pro–Critical Race Theory (CRT) concepts such as “white privilege” or “systemic racism” as well as radical gender concepts such as the idea that gender is separate from biological sex. An astounding 90 percent had been exposed to CRT and 74 percent to radical gender concepts at school. In 7 of 10 cases these beliefs were presented as fact, or as the only respectable view to hold. 

Why does this matter? Increasingly, evidence is pouring in that young people are intolerant of opposing views.

For instance, nearly 70 percent of undergraduates polled in a 2021 study said that if “a professor says something students find offensive,” they should be reported to the university. The massive Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveys of 2020–2022 find that 65 to 85 percent of American undergraduates believe universities should not permit speakers on campus who argue that some transgender people have a mental disorder, BLM is a hate group, or abortion should be illegal. 

When compared to older age groups, young people are far more intolerant, even when taking their politics into consideration. As I show in this report, over two-thirds of 18- to 25-year-olds think Google was right to fire programmer James Damore in 2017 for raising evidence-based questions in an internal memo about the firm’s gender equity policy. This compares to just 36 percent of those over 50 who backed Damore’s termination. Among liberals, I found that 82 percent of 18–25-year-olds support his firing while a much lower 57 percent of liberals over 50 do. 

Not only are educated young people intolerant of opposing ideas, they are increasingly unwilling to date or befriend Republicans. According to original data that I analyzed from FIRE’s 2020 survey, just 7 percent of female and 19 percent of male college students who are not Republican would feel comfortable dating a Trump supporter. 

Palestinians: We Prefer Terrorism to Peace with Israel by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19746/palestinians-terrorism-peace

The findings of the poll, which was conducted between June 7 and 11, show that the Biden Administration and all those who continue to talk about reviving the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians are living under an illusion. The results of the poll indicate that most Palestinians are more interested in killing Jews than making peace with them. The results, in addition, show that most Palestinians want as a successor to their current leader, PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who has ties to terror.

According to the poll, the largest percentage of Palestinians (24%) believe that the rise of extremist Islamist terror groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) was “the most positive or the best thing that has happened to the Palestinian people since the Nakba.”

[A] majority of the Palestinians see terrorist groups and the murder of Jews — not the construction of schools and hospitals — as their proudest accomplishment over the past seven decades.

More than half of the Palestinians, the poll showed, prefer an “armed struggle” (terrorism) against Israel to negotiations with it.

The only thing that seems to disturb the Palestinian public is the possibility that Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority security forces might go after the terror groups.

The armed terrorists of these groups are regularly hailed by Palestinians as heroes and martyrs.

The Palestinians want the gunmen to remain on the streets and continue their terror attacks against Jews. The vast majority (86%) say that the PA does not have the right to arrest members of these terrors groups to prevent them from carrying out attacks against Israel. This view seems to be one of the reasons that Abbas is reluctant to order his security forces to crack down on these terror groups and confiscate their weapons. Abbas is undoubtedly aware of the widespread support the terrorists enjoy among the Palestinian people. He undoubtedly knows that if he goes against the terrorists, he will be denounced by his people as a traitor and Israeli collaborator. Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are already facing severe criticism for conducting security coordination with Israeli security forces in the West Bank.

According to the latest PSR poll, support for the concept of the “two-state solution” stands at 28% and opposition stands at 70%. A poll conducted by the same center three months earlier showed that support for the “two-state solution” stood at only 27%, while opposition to it stood at 71%.

When it comes to choosing their leaders, Palestinians again showed that they prefer a candidate who killed Jews and wants to destroy Israel to anyone who is perceived as being overly moderate towards Israel.

While the Biden administration seems to have confidence in Abbas and his Palestinian Authority, 84% of the Palestinians — with good reason — believe that PA institutions are corrupt. Moreover, the level of dissatisfaction with the performance of Abbas, the poll showed, stands at 80%.

The results of the latest Palestinian poll show that the Biden administration and the European Union, by believing that they can promote the idea of a “two-state solution” between Israel and the Palestinians, continue to engage in self-deception. The Americans and Europeans appear blithely oblivious to the sentiments of the Palestinian street and prefer to listen only to what senior Palestinian officials tell them behind closed doors in Ramallah. The Palestinian officials are clearly misrepresenting the situation when they talk about the Palestinians’ desire to achieve peace and establish a Palestinian state next to Israel. They are saying that because they are hoping to get a state in the West Bank which they could then use as a launching pad from which to attack Israel. This is exactly what the Palestinians did after Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005 and handed it over to the Palestinian Authority: they started firing rockets from the Gaza Strip at Israel.

The radicalization is the direct result of decades of brainwashing and incitement against Israel taking place nonstop in mosques, throughout the media, in schools, on university campuses, in sports, at summer camps and even in crossword puzzles.

If anything, the results of the poll show that the Americans and Europeans are wasting their time trying to convince the Palestinians to return to the negotiating table with Israel.

Are the EU or the Biden Administration putting any pressure on Abbas and the Palestinian leadership to crack down on the terror groups and cease their incessant incitement against Israel? No, instead the EU is sending equipment to the Palestinians to help them illegally build on land to be negotiated. The US, for its part, not only pretends that fighting terrorism is morally equivalent to committing terrorism, but also, in defiance of the US Congress, continues to reward Mahmoud Abbas’s “pay-to-slay” “jobs program” with fungible money, still incentivizing Palestinians to murder Jews.

The Biden Administration has resumed its efforts to relaunch peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

On June 19, US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf arrived in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and met with Hussein al-Sheikh, a senior Palestinian official who serves as Secretary-General of the PLO Executive Committee.

Disney’s ‘Elemental,’ which features ‘non-binary’ character, flops in opening weekend It was the worst opening weekend ever for Pixar, according to The New York Times

https://www.foxnews.com/media/disneys-elemental-features-non-binary-character-flops-opening-weekend

Pixar film “Elemental,” which features the studio’s first “non-binary” character, according to a voice actor for the film, earned only $29.5 million in its opening weekend. 

It was the lowest opening weekend ever for Pixar, The New York Times reported Sunday. That was despite creative direction from Pixar, one of the most famous studios in the entertainment business, and support from Disney, which owns Pixar. 

Outlets around the country took notice of the movie’s dismal performance.

The movie “fell short of already-low expectations,” Variety reported. “Pixar’s ‘Elemental’ falls flat,” The New York Times headlined Sunday. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the move was “iced by moviegoers” along with “The Flash,” a superhero flick that has suffered from its leading actor, Ezra Miller, becoming the center of scandal in 2022 after he was arrested multiple times.

“Elemental” acquired some notoriety of its own after it featured the first non-binary character in its history, “Lake.” The actor who voiced Lake, Kai Ava Hauser, posted about the role on Twitter.

Migrant Crossings Surge 25% At Key Border Ports As Biden Admin Pushes Phone App

https://dailycaller.com/2023/06/20/migrant-crossings-surge-25-at-key-border-ports-as-biden-admin-pushes-phone-app/

Migrant crossings at the ports of entry along the southern border increased roughly 25% between April and May as the Biden administration pushes an entry program through a phone application, according to new data U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released Tuesday.

The number of migrants jumped from roughly 28,000 in April to nearly 35,000 in May, according to CBP data. The Biden administration has increasingly pushed migrants to use a phone application known as CBP One to book appointments for entry at U.S. ports along the southern border following the end of Title 42 on May 11.

There were 28,696 migrants that appeared for CBP One appointments at the ports in May, according to CBP.

 A sign is posted at the U.S. Border Patrol station where lawyers reported that detained migrant children had been held unbathed and hungry on June 26, 2019 in Clint, Texas. Nearly 100 children were sent back to the troubled facility yesterday after it had been cleared of 249 children just days earlier. Acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) John Sanders submitted his resignation in the wake of the scandal. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The Biden administration says the use of such programs is driving down illegal immigration.