RUTHFULLY YOURS

The more this information comes out, the more the public can understand what’s really going on with the debate over treatment for gender dysphoria.

Transgender activists and their hard-left political supporters have erected a wall of propaganda to block any objections founded in science, reality, or genuine compassion for sufferers of gender dysphoria. In a testament to their political skill, these activists have managed to shut down biologically based responses to their remarkable argument that gender is unrelated to biology and can be changed at will. But cracks in the wall are starting to show.

First came online discussion groups for parents whose teenagers (primarily girls) suddenly announced they were “trans” and asked for medical intervention to attain a masculine appearance. Websites such as 4thWaveNow and Transgender Trend (in the United Kingdom) allowed parents to compare notes about their remarkably similar experiences with this “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD)—when an average teen gets involved with “trans”-identifying individuals, usually peers, then discovers via Internet videos that whatever adolescent stresses she’s experiencing are certainly due to gender dysphoria and can be resolved with cross-sex hormones and mutilating surgery.

Then came a study from Dr. Lisa Littman at Brown University, demonstrating that such psychological and environmental factors can indeed contribute to ROGD. Although the transgender activists swung into action and, to no one’s surprise, bullied Brown into removing the press release about the study and otherwise groveling, the truth the study illumined lingers. Troubled parents now have scientific validation that they’re not crazy for believing their daughters are girls and their sons are boys—and for resisting the imposition of harmful, perhaps irreversible medical treatments.

Hard on the heels of the Brown controversy came news from the U.K, where the government “equalities minister” ordered an investigation into the reasons for the enormous increase (4,500 percent over a decade) in girls seeking so-called gender reassignment. The government wants to determine causes and “long-term impacts” of the phenomenon.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/10/15/kirsten-gillibrands-calculated-convictions/

Friend of Bill yesterday, ‘Me Too’ stalwart today

In the Senate, you’re either a work­horse or a show horse. Kirsten Gillibrand, despite the dynamism with which she pushed into law such blockbuster legislation as the Merchant Marine Academy Improvement Act of 2017 and her noble fight for the Quiet Communities Act of 2018 (which stands a 5 percent chance of passing, according to Skopos Labs), doesn’t seem much like a workhorse. It used to be said among New York newspaper reporters that the most dangerous place to be was between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera. Now Schumer is the shy one in the New York senatorial delegation.

Gillibrand’s publicity-seeking engine is forever running, and the sound it makes is Notice me notice me notice me. She even voted against James Mattis as secretary of defense: Leave the Pentagon rudderless to own Trump? Sure, whatever. She cast the only vote in opposition to Mattis. As of early this year, she’d voted against Trump more than twice as often as Schumer had. Though she denied (this was a year and a half ago) that she is running for president in 2020, a Washington Post headline on a piece tracking her behavior this year read, “It sure looks as if Kirsten Gillibrand is running for president.”

At least that’s the way it looks to you and me. The way it looks to Mr. and Mrs. U.S. Voter is: Who the heck is Kirsten Gillibrand? An August Politico poll found that should she be the Democratic nominee against Donald Trump, he would win only 29 percent of the vote. Um . . . yay? Except Gillibrand received 24 percent in the same poll. Forty-seven percent were undecided. Michael Avenatti managed to get 20 percent, and no one had even heard of him until about six months ago. Hence Gillibrand’s nonstop effort to get in front of the cameras: Notice me notice me notice me.

Gillibrand is always up for a quote, no matter how half-thought or appalling. When lawyers for Christine Blasey Ford spent two days arguing that their client couldn’t possibly come and testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee until a nice leisurely FBI investigation had concluded — before dumping that excuse and moving on to others — Gillibrand made a beeline for the news crews. Though Ford did not allege a federal crime, which made the demand for FBI involvement look like an obvious slow­down tactic, Gillibrand said the dispute obviously indicated that Ford was telling the truth and Judge Kavanaugh was lying. “Someone who is lying does not ask the FBI to investigate their claims,” she said. “Who is not asking the FBI to investigate these claims? The White House. Judge Kavanaugh has not asked to have the FBI review these claims. Is that the reaction of an innocent person? It is not.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-anonymous-allegation-amid-bungled-process/

Grassley could have told committee Democrats that, having abused the process, they had waived the right to present more evidence.

My main concerns all along about the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing have been (1) abuse of the process and (2) relatedly, the more delay you permit, the more delay you will have — which matters when one side’s objective is, precisely, delay.

Following Wednesday’s Avenatti circus, ably chronicled in our editorial, there has now been a fourth allegation lodged against Judge Kavanaugh. This one is wholly anonymous, coming into the office of Senator Cory Gardner (R., Colo.) with no attribution and no contact information. According to NBC News, the letter alleges that in 1998, an inebriated Kavanaugh, then 33 years old and a partner at a prominent D.C. law firm, got rough with an unidentified woman outside a Washington bar.

The woman making the accusation is not the woman who was allegedly assaulted; nor did she even see the alleged assault. She claims, instead, that she is the mother of a friend of the victim. The friend is said to have witnessed the incident — in which the victim was “shoved . . . up against the wall very aggressively and sexually,” whatever that means.

The complainant maintains that there were at least four witnesses, including her daughter, all of whom were drinking. None of them, nor the victim (described as “still traumatized” after 20 years), has come forward or identified anyone involved.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/27/the-truths-

Are there any guiding principles that can make sense of the sensational news that now overwhelms the senses seemingly every hour?

What is common to blaring headlines about the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings, an anti-Trump “resistance” buried deep in the permanent bureaucracy and the improper behavior by top officials of the Obama administration, FBI, and Department of Justice?

There are a few subtexts to all these spectacles, scandals, and melodramas.

First, those in power had never imagined that Donald Trump either could or should win the 2016 election.

That reality emboldened federal employees to take risks and step over the line in efforts to ensure that Trump would be humiliated at the polls. Officials assumed that incoming President Hillary Clinton would either overlook or reward their zealotry.

FBI kingpins such as James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok either broke the law or made a mockery of the FBI’s ethical guidelines. They acted as if Clinton would win, or should have won, the election.

Had Clinton won the presidency, we would have absolutely no knowledge of any prior misconduct at the FBI, the Department of Justice, the National Security Agency or the CIA under the Obama administration. Trump prompted all that hysteria by winning.

Second, both the Democratic and Republican establishments, as well as the proverbial “deep state” bureaucracy, agreed that President Trump was so crude and uncouth that he must not continue in office.

The idea that any means necessary were justified by the noble ends of destroying Trump explains everything from the anonymous op-ed in the New York Times detailing formal White House resistance to Trump’s governance, to Bob Woodward’s latest unsourced expose of purported Trump chaos, to Robert Mueller’s investigation that was mandated to find “Russian collusion” and has ended up desperate to find any crimes that might prove Trump guilty of something.

Third, had Trump simply failed, as predicted, there would be far less frenzy. His Democratic opponents and many in his own party would have quietly found ways to remove him.

But instead, the economy is booming in a way previously unseen in the 21st century, with near-record-low unemployment and stock market highs. The economy is growing faster than it has in years. Domestic energy production is also hitting record highs.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271441/avenattis-freak-show-matthew-vadum

On the eve of a historic Supreme Court confirmation hearing, two more women have materialized out of thin air to accuse President Trump’s high court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual improprieties – bringing the total number of accusers to four.

Even more eleventh-hour character-assassination attempts may be coming given the enraged Left’s determination to prevent the judge’s ascent to the Supreme Court at all costs. Whether the claims are true is irrelevant to these people. Only the seriousness and luridness of the charges matter as they get aired over and over again in the 24-hour news cycle. They don’t care about the victims they create. Only the headlines.

The new allegations surfaced yesterday as the Senate Judiciary Committee battens down the hatches for a hearing today to receive oral evidence from the first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, 51, who claims Kavanaugh, 53, tried to rape her decades ago when he was a high school student.

The third accuser is Julie Swetnick, a 55-year-old certified systems engineer, who on Wednesday claimed that in the early 1980s Kavanaugh and others spiked the drinks of young women at high school parties with intoxicants to clear the way for them to be gang-raped.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/26/cowardly
The logic of a premise will drag you to its conclusion. When Senate Republicans accepted the premise that Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh was a legitimate personal complaint rather than a political maneuver orchestrated by the Democratic Party, they placed themselves in the grips of a logic leading them through bargaining about how to accommodate her as he was dogged by a nationwide campaign of personal and political vilification.

The logic’s next step is likely to come Thursday, when Ford does not show at the Judiciary Committee hearing amidst renewed Democratic and media accusations of a litany of sins by now all too familiar.

Republicans will be left with the same option they had when the Democrats first brought up their last-minute landmine—to press ahead with confirmation. But by accepting a premise they knew was false, they energized the Democrats’ constituencies and dispirited their own.

They embarrassed themselves by volunteering to be played for suckers, as well as looking callous toward victims of sexual assault. Brilliant.

The substance, the manner, and the circumstances of Ford’s accusation shouted that it is a hoax—that the Democrats had conjured a political bludgeon of last resort, and never intended for Ford to testify. But the Republicans, being pusillanimous, refused to acknowledge the reality of what they were getting into.

The accusation’s substance advertised its unseriousness. The total lack of specifics about the time and place of the alleged assault, of anything that might be an investigation’s staring place, was red flag enough. But the contradiction between the original report to a therapist about four men in the room—and nothing about Kavanaugh—and the subsequent account of two, Kavanaugh and Mark Judge, was as obvious to the Democrats making the charge as to the Republicans. When Judge denied any knowledge of the alleged party, followed by all others who Ford named as having knowledge of it, the Republicans had no reason to refrain from labeling the accusations the very definition of slander. No reason except cowardice.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-endorse-avenatti-1538004075

Now comes a third accuser against Brett Kavanaugh, this time claiming the Supreme Court nominee was part of a gang of high school boys who spiked the drinks of teenage girls in order to assault and rape them. Really? Does even Mazie Hirono believe this?

The charge comes from Julie Swetnick, a Washington-area woman elevated to accusatory fame on Wednesday by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for porn actress Stormy Daniels. She claims that Mr. Kavanaugh and high school friend Mark Judge drank to excess at numerous parties and then assaulted girls and women with abandon. She says in a sworn statement that the gang would “‘target’ particular girls” who were alone or shy for serial rape.

So we are supposed to believe that the boys at Georgetown Prep, amid their dreams of Yale, conspired to commit drug and sex crimes on multiple occasions over many years. Yet word of this rape gang at an elite Jesuit high school never made it to anyone in authority. None of the rape victims spoke up—not to a teacher, parent or other official—then or since. None of the boys bragged about it to friends who spoke to a parent or priest.

As for Ms. Swetnick, she says in her statement that she was personally assaulted in 1982 at one of these parties, yet she admits that she attended “well over 10” of these parties from 1981-1983. This means she would have returned to these parties even after she was gang-raped. She suddenly recalls it all now after 35 years, though somehow this never came up during FBI investigations of Mr. Kavanaugh’s background over more than two decades.

Messrs. Judge and Kavanaugh deny the accusation, with Mr. Kavanaugh calling it “ridiculous and from the Twilight Zone.” But that’s unfair to the late Rod Serling, who was more subtle than this kind of character assassination. We wouldn’t even report the details of this latest smear if Democrats and the left weren’t treating the accusation as disqualifying for the Supreme Court.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/26/senate-gop-has-bent-over-backwards-to-get-testimony-evidence-from-kavanaugh-accusers/

Within minutes of The New Yorker breaking the story of a second woman alleging improper behavior by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Senate GOP investigators reached out to accuser Deborah Ramirez’s attorneys asking for any and all evidence she had to support her allegations. The article was based on a foggy accusation of misconduct and admitted that the accuser was not sure of her memory even days before it was published.

Over the next 48 hours, attorneys for the Senate Judiciary Committee repeated their requests for testimony and evidence another six times. Yet more than three days later, attorneys for the woman have still refused to provide any evidence or formal statements beyond what she told The New Yorker.

At 7:43 p.m. on Sunday, Mike Davis, chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee, emailed Ramirez’s attorneys asking when she’d be available for an interview with Senate committee investigators. “[W]e are determined to take Ms. Ramirez’s statement and investigate further as necessary as quickly as possible,” he wrote. He followed up later that evening and again the following morning. Her attorneys said they’d respond later.

Throughout Monday, he asked again if Ramirez had “any other evidence, including other statements, in addition to those that are contained in the New Yorker article?” At 3:03 p.m., the attorneys responded with vague, non-committal statements about possible future compliance.

At 3:11 p.m., Davis immediately reiterated his request for any additional information beyond what had been published in the New Yorker article. A few hours later, Ramirez’s attorneys put off the request again. So Davis emailed again at 7:11 p.m. pleading with them for additional information.

Still not receiving the information necessary to proceed by Tuesday morning, Davis implored Ramirez’s counsel at 10:05 a.m. to answer whether she had any other evidence and whether she was willing to provide it direcxtly to the committee. He did so again at 7:45 p.m. on Tuesday night, and again at 8:05 p.m. after another non-responsive email.

Rather than making Ramirez available for an interview, providing a formal statement, or providing any evidence to support her claims, her attorneys instead sought to delay and obstruct at every opportunity. This mirrors the behavior of the attorneys of Christine Blasey Ford, who has yet to provide a sworn statement to the Senate, instead making a seemingly unending list of demands for delays.

Correspondence from Grassley and his staff make clear that they have repeatedly sought to make accusers comfortable and safe so that they can formally testify to their allegations.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/metoo-becomes-a-political-ploy-1537915920

Pity Lady Justice; she’s had a rough couple of weeks. On “State of the Union” Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper tossed Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii what should have been a grapefruit: “Doesn’t Kavanaugh have the same presumption of innocence as anyone else in America?” Ms. Hirono responded: “I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches cases.” Conservative jurists in America have been put on notice: They are to forfeit their most basic rights as punishment for their judicial philosophy.

In the national circus that is the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing, sexual assault is very much beside the point. Christine Blasey Ford claims that 36 years ago she suffered an attempt at the most terrifying act of brutality a woman can live through. But in the hands of Senate Democrats, this is one more bit of materiel flung at the other side. Ms. Ford is merely the expedient means to a desirable end.

I have no idea what if anything happened to Ms. Ford. (Is it necessary to say this?) I have no idea whether she is more credible than Leland Keyser, whom Ms. Ford places at the party, though Ms. Keyser has no memory of it and says she’s never met Brett Kavanaugh. Neither do any of the senators, including Dianne Feinstein, who learned of the accusation and withheld it from her Republican colleagues and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for six weeks, knowing as every good gunslinger must, that if you’ve only got one bullet left, you don’t let it go to waste.

Imagine if we treated murder this way. Imagine if a woman had written to Mrs. Feinstein alleging that the man who was about to be appointed to the Supreme Court had murdered her brother 36 years ago. What would we say of a senator who failed to turn this evidence over immediately to the authorities? That the question is so easily answered indicates how much less seriously we already take crimes of sexual violence.

Mrs. Feinstein was elected in 1992, the year after Justice Clarence Thomas’s appointment. When he was accused, we were told the woman is always right. Why else would Anita Hill have brought these claims? A few years later, when the accused was Bill Clinton, elite opinion cried we shouldn’t rush to believe the accuser. He was a good feminist—and Paula Jones, not nearly our sort of girl. In both cases, we knew that the point was not any of the accusations. It was to shelter powerful men with views we liked or punish men with views we didn’t.

Then came #MeToo. For a moment, it seemed everything might change. Public opinion was on the side, not of all women exactly, but of those women with credible, corroborated claims who were willing to name powerful men—even those men with the right political allegiances. In this light, Bill O’Reilly and Harvey Weinstein seemed more alike than different; they met the same disgrace not for their political beliefs but for behavior that Americans of every political stripe should want to stop. For the first time in years, even Bill Clinton seemed less a gift to women than a Trojan Horse.

But now we’re back to our cheap tricks, using sexual assault as a political ploy. If Judge Kavanaugh were liberal, Sen. Hirono makes clear, she would give him the benefit of the doubt. If he adjudicates like a conservative, that’s evidence of rape. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.weeklystandard.com/adam-j-white/brett-kavanaugh-christine-blasey-ford-and-the-senates-burden-of-proof
Understanding where the burden of proof really rests.

As the Senate considers Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation that Judge Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her 30 years ago, senators find themselves asking a basic question familiar to all lawyers: Who bears the burden of proof—the accuser or the accused?

But the greater burden is the one borne by the Senate itself, which now must come to a decision on Kavanaugh’s nomination, and do so in the manner that will best promote transparency and fact-finding in this nomination and all future nominations.

The “burden of proof” issue is the crux of the debate surrounding Dr. Ford’s accusations against Judge Kavanaugh precisely because she has produced no evidence to support her accusations against him. She has no physical evidence, though that is unsurprising given that she is alleging a three-decades-old-crime. More surprising, and more disconcerting, is the fact that the direct witnesses that she identified disclaim any knowledge of the crime she says they were present for; the fact that her therapist’s notes of her statements neither name Kavanaugh nor square with her other specific allegations; and the fact that Senator Feinstein herself did not pursue the allegations until after the regular confirmation hearings had ended and Kavanaugh was poised for a successful vote.

In sum, Dr. Ford’s accusation against Kavanaugh is unsupported save for the accusation itself, and those who say that she told them about Kavanaugh in the last handful of years, three decades after the alleged incident. And Kavanaugh, for his part, denies the accusation categorically—he denies assaulting her at any time or any place, including at the unspecified house party in an unknown house during an unknown year.

So is that enough for the senators to decide to vote for Kavanaugh, Ford’s accusation notwithstanding? Judge Kavanaugh’s supporters think so, pointing to the traditional criminal-law standard of presuming the defendant’s innocence and requiring the prosecutor to prove otherwise.