RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/illinois-governor-signs-bill-to-make-official-titles-gender-neutral/

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker (D.) signed a bill this week to change the titles for elected officials in the state from “alderman” and “congressman” to “alderperson” and “congressperson” to be more gender-inclusive.

“We see a lot of ‘hes’ and ‘hims’” in state statute, said the bill’s co-sponsor, State Representative Maurice West (D).

“And now we have, you know, not just women in office, but we have people who may not identify with any gender,” he added. “We want to make sure that our voting and our election cycle process is inclusive for everyone.”

The change was included in Democratic legislation, first introduced in February, that amends Illinois’s state election code to postpone the 2022 Illinois primary until June. 

It comes after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) introduced new congressional rules in January to remove all mention of gender-specific pronouns and terms like “man,” “woman,” “mother” and “son.”

Pelosi’s new rule sparked backlash from Republicans, including House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy who wrote in a tweet, “This is stupid. Signed, – A father, son, and brother.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-takes-steps-to-offer-gender-transition-surgery-through-va-health-care-report/

Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough is taking steps toward making gender transition surgery available to veterans through Veterans Affairs health-care coverage, according to a new report.

A VA department spokesperson reportedly told CNN that McDonough plans to announce the move at a Pride event at the Orlando Vet Center in Florida on Saturday.

“We are taking the first necessary steps to expand VA’s care to include gender confirmation surgery — thus allowing transgender vets to go through the full gender confirmation process with VA by their side,” McDonough is expected to say.

The VA Health Benefits package currently covers mental-health services and sex-change hormones, but does not cover gender-transition surgery. 

McDonough’s prepared remarks note that “there are several steps to take, which will take time.” Policy changes will need to be made and the process of creating a new federal regulation can take years.

A VA spokesperson told CNN the department plans to start the federal rulemaking process to make the change this summer.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/why-has-ivermectin-become-a-dirty

On December 8, 2020, when most of America was consumed with what The Guardian called Donald Trump’s “desperate, mendacious, frenzied and sometimes farcical” attempt to remain president, the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on the “Medical Response to Covid-19.” One of the witnesses, a pulmonologist named Dr. Pierre Kory, insisted he had great news.

“We have a solution to this crisis,” he said unequivocally. “There is a drug that is proving to have a miraculous impact.”

Kory was referring to an FDA-approved medicine called ivermectin. A genuine wonder drug in other realms, ivermectin has all but eliminated parasitic diseases like river blindness and elephantiasis, helping discoverer Satoshi Ōmura win the Nobel Prize in 2015. As far as its uses in the pandemic went, however, research was still scant. Could it really be a magic Covid-19 bullet?

Kory had been trying to make such a case, but complained to the Senate that public efforts had been stifled, because “every time we mention ivermectin, we get put in Facebook jail.” A Catch-22 seemed to be ensnaring science. With the world desperate for news about an unprecedented disaster, Silicon Valley had essentially decided to disallow discussion of a potential solution — disallow calls for more research and more study — because not enough research and study had been done. Once, people weren’t allowed to take drugs before they got FDA approval. Now, they can’t talk about them.

“I want to try to be respectful because I think the intention is correct,” Kory told the committee. “They want to cut down on misinformation, and many doctors are claiming X, Y, and Z work in this disease. The challenge is, you’re also silencing those of us who are expert, reasoned, researched, and extremely knowledgeable.”

Eight million people watched Kory say that on the C-SPAN video of the hearing posted to YouTube, but YouTube, in what appears to be a first, removed video of the hearing, as even Senate testimony was now deemed too dangerous for public consumption. YouTube later suspended the Wisconsin Senator who’d invited Kory to the hearing, and when Kory went on podcasts to tell his story, YouTube took down those videos, too. Kory was like a ghost who floated through the Internet, leaving suspensions and blackened warning screens everywhere he went.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/doctors-for-progressive-conformity-11624055333?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The American Medical Association is a lobby of doctors that’s supposed to promote policies that improve public health and medicine. But it seems to be evolving into another arm of progressive politics, like the teachers unions. See the AMA’s policy-making meeting this week.

Delegates spent much of the time discussing systemic racism in health care and adopted guidelines for workplaces to establish training requirements for explicit and implicit bias and microaggressions. AMA trustee Willarda Edwards called systemic racism “the most serious barrier to the advancement of health equity and appropriate medical care.”

Many doctors would disagree with that statement. But the AMA seems to want to enforce ideological conformity in its ranks, including on social media. Delegates also voted to encourage social-media platforms to “crack down on medical misinformation,” including by “altering underlying network dynamics or redesigning platform algorithms.”

Social-media platforms have been removing content by doctors who disagree with the progressive lockdown consensus or who suggest that the virus may have leaked from a Chinese lab. Many doctors say their videos recommending early treatment with repurposed antiviral drugs have been censored, including one from a Senate hearing.

Social-media censorship suppressed debate on important issues during the pandemic, and the AMA wants to extend the information control to other health subjects. The new AMA policy would ostensibly encourage Facebook, YouTube and others to remove posts by doctors who question progressive orthodoxy on race and identity politics.

AMA delegates also voted to endorse an intellectual property waiver that progressives have been pushing for Covid vaccines at the World Trade Organization. President Biden endorsed it last month. But even European leaders say it won’t increase global vaccine supply and will set a dangerous precedent that will retard innovation in new medicines.

None of these new AMA policy positions will help patients or physicians, and they risk eroding public trust in the medical profession. Whatever happened to “first, do no harm”?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/06/17/with-juneteenth-feder

With the stroke of his pen Thursday, President Joe Biden signed legislation giving millions of federal employees Friday off to celebrate Saturday’s new federal holiday, Juneteenth.

This makes 44 paid days off for the average federal employee annually, which is nearly nine full weeks of paid-time off each year.

Juneteenth is celebrated on June 19 to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. The Civil War was America’s bloodiest war, with between 752,000 and 861,000 soldiers dying on the battlefield. 49 states have already recognized Juneteenth as a holiday (South Dakota is the only holdout), though only a handful give it as a paid holiday to state employees.

On Wednesday, the U.S. House passed the bill to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, after the U.S. Senate passed it the day before.

Signing it into law on Thursday, Biden made Juneteenth – observed this year on Friday, June 18 — a federal holiday for which “most” federal employees will have off.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/mustsee_tv_black_medical_professional_denounces_crt_at_school_board_meeting.html

Critical Race Theory opponents are the new Tea Party, a grassroots phenomenon all over the country, mobilizing both activists and people with a political background at all to oppose the teaching of race hatred.  There is nothing quite as powerful in exciting passions in adults as threatening their children.  And make no mistake: Critical Race Theory harms children deeply, teaching Blacks that they are victims and can’t succeed on their own, and teaching non-Blacks that they are born evil.

If you spend two minutes and forty-seven seconds watching the following cell phone video of a Black medical professional denouncing the teaching of Critical Race Theory at a school board meeting, you will understand the panic that is starting to hit Democrats and their media apparat.  The passion and the intelligence of this self-described holder of two medical degrees, a man who worked his way through college, “up from the streets,” are inspiring.  He told the mostly White crowd gathered there that he “gives orders” to people who look like them every day, so how can he be oppressed?

https://nypost.com/2021/06/17/tide-turning-against-the-woke-liberal-blob-that-misrules-us/

For the past year, liberals unleashed on the nation an avalanche of ideological nonsense, coupled with brutal pressure to conform. Those who bucked the party line found themselves canceled and unpersoned and had their opinions subjected to mockery and claims of delusion and “anti-science” prejudices.

Until now. Because the tide is turning. And sometimes the break from the party line comes from surprising places. 

Late-night comics are usually reliable parroters of the message of the day. So it says something that last week, Bill Maher launched an impassioned critique of “woke” culture, while this week, Jon Stewart went on Stephen Colbert’s show to say in no uncertain terms that it looks like the Wuhan coronavirus came from … the Wuhan lab.

Using a term from Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, Maher accused liberals of “progressophobia” — “a brain disorder that strikes liberals and makes them incapable of recognizing progress.”

That is, they’re unwilling to admit that things have gotten better. To hear them talk about race, you’d think we were still in the era of Selma and Bull Connor. (My dad marched with Freedom Riders and at Selma; trust me, things have changed.) To hear them talk about women’s rights, you’d think it was still 1958. And gay activists, despite “Pride Month” being celebrated by pretty much every corporation, are still somehow stuck in the pre-Stonewall era.

Maher’s right.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-screamers

You think it’s over? It’s not o-ver,” my Great-Aunt Lee used to warn me, in a singsong voice, her forced smile wrapped up with some sort of awful knowing. “Antisemitism isn’t over. It’s never o-ver.”

My dear Aunt Lee was clearly crazy, I’d think. Superstitiously spitting-after-compliments crazy. What antisemitism?

Then the mayor and city council of my hometown of Durham, North Carolina, enacted a resolution in support of what Jewish Voice for Peace dubbed “Deadly Exchange,” a toxic campaign to spook well-intentioned people into blaming Israel for policing issues in the United States. Suddenly, Durham Jews found themselves having to deny that Israeli Jews were instructing local cops on how to torture Black Americans. And deny that hating people of color was a Jewish thing. And deny that we were the most sinister, vile people on the planet. Anyone feel like going to the Hope Valley Diner while wearing a Jewish star necklace tonight?

We began hearing rumors that similar campaigns were afoot in cities nearby. So I plunked down the $600 AIPAC registration fee and bought a long Tory Burch dress at T.J.Maxx, figuring a serious dress would help me get taken seriously. Surely someone, someone, among the twinkling constellation of Jewish muckety-mucks at that conference would listen to my story and then help me fix what left me sitting in numb disbelief on my cold bathroom floor night after night, once the kids were asleep.

My husband designed business cards for me. “Fight Back Now,” they said, with a Jewish star. We printed an optimistic 200 cards on flimsy stock at FedEx, and then to Washington, D.C., I went. I didn’t care that I’d be spending my birthday alone. It was 2019. The world was on fire.