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The Origins of the Transgender Movement By Madeleine Kearns

Posted By on October 15th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/the-origins-of-the-transgender-movement/

We must not ignore cultural blind spots that put children at risk of abuse.

Editor’s Note: This article has been adapted from remarks delivered at a Heritage Foundation summit.

I’ve been asked to talk about the origins of transgenderism and how it relates to children and their exploitation. But first, I would like to start with a little story.

Yesterday I was wandering around outside the Supreme Court chatting with some people who were there to support what’s known as the LGBTQ+ community. I spoke with a lovely guy who identified as homosexual and then four teenage girls who identified as lesbian and queer. They asked me what I thought of the Human Rights Campaign, so I told them up front that I think it’s a force for tremendous harm in this country. Then, I asked them what they thought of Martin Luther King’s idea, the one about not defining people by irrelevant characteristics like their skin color, or in this case their sexual desires. They said it sounded like a very good idea.

Later, two men who were slightly less open-minded wanted to tell me about some horrible feminists called “terfs” who are apparently in cahoots with an even more horrible right-wing institution I probably hadn’t heard of because I’m Scottish. It’s called the Heritage Foundation. So, if anyone knows anyone from there, just let me know, because I want to make sure I don’t die by association.

The reason I mention this story, of course, is — other than the Heritage Foundation being a symbol for all that is evil and far-right in American politics — my experience with the LGBTQ+ community was that it wasn’t really a community so much as it was a big mishmash of people who feel they belong to a certain cause for very different reasons. Yet they were all there at the end of the rainbow to claim their pot of gold, which they had been promised by the Human Rights Campaign.

I’ve been asked to get to the origins of this movement, and I’m going to try to do that. Of course, as you know, it’s just one stripe of the rainbow, and I couldn’t possibly do it justice in ten minutes, but I’ll do my absolute best. There are three things that I think have been changing since the mid-20th century. The first is in medicine, the second is what I like to call an ontology of desire, and the third is what I and others call the politicization of everything.

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Three Nations That Tried Socialism and Rejected It By Lee Edwards

Posted By on October 15th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/failure-of-socialism-israel-india-united-kingdom-adopted-free-market-policies-and-prospered/

Israel, India, and the United Kingdom each lifted itself from economic stagnation by switching to free-market policies.

Socialists are fond of saying that socialism has never failed because it has never been tried. But in truth, socialism has failed in every country in which it has been tried, from the Soviet Union beginning a century ago to three modern countries that tried but ultimately rejected socialism — Israel, India, and the United Kingdom.

While there were major political differences between the totalitarian rule of the Soviets and the democratic politics of Israel, India, and the U.K., all three of the latter countries adhered to socialist principles, nationalizing their major industries and placing economic decision-making in the hands of the government.

The Soviet failure has been well documented by historians. In 1985, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev took command of a bankrupt disintegrating empire. After 70 years of Marxism, Soviet farms were unable to feed the people, factories failed to meet their quotas, people lined up for blocks in Moscow and other cities to buy bread and other necessities, and a war in Afghanistan dragged on with no end in sight of the body bags of young Soviet soldiers.

The economies of the Communist nations behind the Iron Curtain were similarly enfeebled because they functioned in large measure as colonies of the Soviet Union. With no incentives to compete or modernize, the industrial sector of Eastern and Central Europe became a monument to bureaucratic inefficiency and waste, a “museum of the early industrial age.” As the New York Times pointed out at the time, Singapore, an Asian city-state of only 2 million people, exported 20 percent more machinery to the West in 1987 than all of Eastern Europe.

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Political correctness versus common sense By Robert Curry *****

Posted By on October 15th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/political_correctness_versus_common_sense.html

The masters of political correctness in America are moving fast. 

For example, consider the explosion of so-called gender identities.”  In 2016, New York City released a list of 31 genders approved by the city’s Commission on Human Rights.  While writing my book Reclaiming Common Sense, I consulted Google to find out how many genders there were then and was told that the answer was 63.  Today, while writing this article, I re-Googled that question, and it was revealed to me that the latest number is 112.

Political correctness about gender identities is metastasizing rapidly, making it difficult for ordinarily busy people to keep up.  And keep up we must, just as people living in the Soviet Union had to keep up with the constantly changing Communist party line.  Not long ago, everyone understood the unchanging commonsense reality that human beings are either male or female.  Today in New York City, the rules have been changed — and failure to keep up can have dire consequences.  New York City’s special 31 genders are surrounded by special legal protections.  Businesses can now be fined as much as $250,000 for refusing to address someone by his preferred pronoun.  As we have seen in the news, even in cities that have not yet have caught up with New York City in terms of imposing legal penalties, failing a test of political correctness about genders can result in public shaming or the loss of a job.

There is more to this story.  Consider the names given the genders officially approved by New York City’s Commission on Human Rights.  The names include “drag king,” “drag queen,” “butch,” “femme queen,” “gender fluid,” “gender blender,” “gender gifted,” “gender bender,” and “femme person of transgender experience.”  Talk about rubbing our noses in it!  The commissioners have gone out of their way to be outrageously transgressive.  This is not accidental.  They are making it abundantly clear they are ridiculing normal people and the world of common sense — the more outrageous, the better.

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Destroying America’s History One Icon at a Time By Fletch Daniels

Posted By on October 15th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/destroying_americas_history_one_icon_at_a_time.html

Americans were furious in 2001 when they saw that the Taliban had destroyed Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan. Less than two decades later, destroying monuments is becoming a national sport in America with little outcry and support from the media.

Columbus Day brought a refreshing reminder that leftists are effectively erasing America’s heritage as an important step in transforming America into a socialist state. 

As I look, “Happy Indigenous Peoples” day is approaching 100K tweets, which is simply advancing the narrative that was already set in motion by leftists across America. 

A teacher posted some of the proud pictures from her propagandized little ones with sayings like “Christopher Columbus didn’t find America,” and “Christopher Columbus is a really mean man.”  How charming. 

A Christopher Columbus statue was torn down in Los Angeles in 2018 and several others were vandalized this year. 

Americans were furious in 2001 when they saw that the Taliban had destroyed Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan.  The prevailing cultural zeitgeist at the time ran clearly against toppling statues.  Don’t these third-world barbarians know that they are destroying world culture?  It helped elevate the Taliban’s evil in the eyes of the world. 

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Corrupt Senators Took Ukraine Cash By Daniel John Sobieski

Posted By on October 15th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/corrupt_senators_took_ukraine_cash.html

While Democrats are pushing the bogus Trump-Ukraine quid pro quo story invented by that great storyteller, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, two groups of Democratic senators have been colluding with Ukrainian interests to advance their own agenda and political careers.

Kudos to Steve Hilton for pointing out the corruption of the first group on the Oct. 13 edition of his Fox show “The Next Revolution” – a group of Democratic senators took cash from a Ukraine lobbyist to push Ukrainian gas interests at the same time the Democrats are pushing the Trump-Ukraine yarn. As Hilton states in a transcript of his show available on Fox Opinion:

Remember Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner? He had previously been a top fundraiser for John Kerry, who was Secretary of State at the time. And soon after Devon and Hunter joined the Burisma Board, the company channeled $90,000 to a lobbying firm called ML Strategies, which was headed by none other than David Leiter, John Kerry’s former chief of staff.

That’s handy because then-Secretary of State John Kerry himself has visited Ukraine with promises of U.S. aid and assistance. Well, Leiter registered as a Burisma lobbyist in mid-2014. But in the year leading up to that, he gave close to $60,000 to Democrats, including a select group of U.S. senators who would later be instrumental in pushing cash towards Ukraine’s energy sector, directly in line with Burisma’s interests.

He donated to Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., four times and to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., three times. A month after the last of those donations, both Markey and Shaheen were among four senators who wrote a letter to President Obama that said, “We should leverage the full resources and expertise of the U.S. government to assist Ukraine in improving its energy efficiency, increasing its domestic production and reforming its energy markets.”

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Give President Trump’s Non-interventionist Turkish/Kurdish Plan a Chance By Mark Ellis

Posted By on October 15th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/give-president-trumps-non-interventionist-turkish-kurdish-plan-a-chance/

It is host Chris Wallace’s job to ask the tough questions on Fox News Sunday.

That’s exactly what he did Sunday, grilling Secretary of Defense Mark Esper on President Trump’s decision to authorize a deliberate withdrawal of U.S. military forces as Turkish forces invade Northern Syria to battle hostile Sunni Muslim Kurds along a shared border.

Wallace’s questioning was framed around Trump’s “abandonment” of the Kurds, which has been roundly characterized as a betrayal of an ally in the fight against ISIS

Early reports coming out of the battle zone are troubling: executions by Turkish-backed militias are allegedly being carried out, and many ISIS fighters have apparently escaped imprisonment. It is a terrible situation. But though the president has stated that his administration will act to destroy the Turkish economy with severe sanctions should President Erdogan persist in or expand this incursion, he has also made clear that he’s not going to send American soldiers to fight and die in another potential Middle East quagmire.

His non-interventionist withdrawal strategy should be given a chance to succeed.

Trump’s authorization of the pullout call did not come out of a foreign policy vacuum; he campaigned on extricating us from epochal conflict in the unceasingly war-torn region. Nonetheless, he will now be inundated with criticism and admonitions from the left and right, insisting we must rescue the Kurds out of fealty to a discredited globalist foreign policy, the costs of which under sane leadership would have been unthinkable.

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Inside the media’s relentless crusade to destroy President Trump By Kimberley Strassel

Posted By on October 15th, 2019

https://nypost.com/2019/10/13/inside-the-medias-relentless-crusade-to-destroy-president-trump/

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the mainstream media has shed its once-noble mission — the pursuit of the truth — and instead adopted a new purpose: to take down the president. In an excerpt from her new book, “Resistance at All Costs: How Trump Haters are Breaking America,” out Tuesday, KIMBERLEY STRASSEL examines how far the press will go in its relentless crusade . . .

Last week The Washington Post revealed the alarming news that House Democrats were considering having their anonymous “whistleblower” testify from a remote location, and in disguise. Just as shocking as the details of this plan was the justification the Post ladled on this Democratic effort to hide impeachment information from the public.

It explained, high up in the story, that the cloak-and-dagger approach was merely Democrats expressing “distrust of their GOP colleagues, whom they see as fully invested in defending a president who has attacked the whistleblower’s credibility and demanded absolute loyalty from Republicans.”

This, from a newspaper with a tagline of “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Maybe the better journalistic epitaph is: Democracy dies in bias. How did journalism get here?

I’ve never engaged much in media criticism, because it’s almost too obvious. Yes, the mainstream media is liberal and biased. But at least in the past, that bias was largely a function of insularity. Most reporters weren’t even fully aware they were prejudiced politically; everyone they worked and socialized with held the same left-of-center views.

That’s changed in the age of Trump. The press has embraced its bias, joined the Resistance and declared its allegiance to one side of a partisan war. It now openly declares those who offer any fair defense of this administration as Trump “enablers.” It writes off those who question the FBI or Department of Justice actions in 2016 as “conspiracy” theorists. It acts as willing scribes for Democrats and former Obama officials; peddles evidence-free accusations; sources stories from people with clear political axes to grind; and closes its eyes to clear evidence of government abuse.

This media war is extraordinary, overt and increasingly damaging to the country.

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The Bidens Concede Do CNN and NBC still want to defend the family business model? By James Freeman

Posted By on October 15th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bidens-concede-11571078740

Not even the Biden family seems willing to stand behind their questionable financial arrangements. A business associate in Shanghai doesn’t seem to have an explanation yet, either. Are the bitter-enders at CNN and NBC News finally ready to stop defending the indefensible?

Last week this column noted that former Vice President Joe Biden once again declined to offer a defense of his family’s business model even in an op-ed ostensibly responding to attacks on this model. Over the weekend, his son Hunter Biden quit another of the overseas engagements for which he seemed eminently unqualified.

The Journal’s Ken Thomas and Thomas Grove noted on Sunday:

Hunter Biden is stepping down from a director’s position at a Chinese private-equity firm and said he wouldn’t serve on any foreign boards if his father, Joe Biden, is elected president, lowering his controversial business profile as it becomes embroiled in the 2020 election and Democrats’ efforts to impeach President Trump.
…The former vice president’s son, 49 years old, served on the board of Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings Ltd. while his father oversaw U.S. policy on Ukraine as vice president. Hunter Biden stepped down from the Burisma board in April. The younger Biden remained a director of BHR (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Co., a Chinese investment firm, where Mr. Trump also alleges inappropriate conduct by the Bidens. Hunter Biden said Sunday he would remove himself from the firm’s board on Oct. 31. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Mike Pompeo’s Predicament The Syria withdrawal worried allies, divided the GOP, and made his job a lot harder. By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on October 15th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-pompeos-predicament-11571093624

Foreign leaders have found much to dislike in President Trump’s policy—the aggressive stance on trade, the chaotic policy process, the disregard for convention and past agreements. Yet they’ve seemed willing to work with the administration anyway. However much it pained them, they appeared to believe that Mr. Trump had a strong enough political coalition behind his foreign-policy program that, on the whole, it was better to deal pragmatically with the administration than to try to wait out his presidency.

That changed last week. The sudden decision to break with the Syrian Kurds, the shambolic execution of the decision, and the administration’s evident inability to manage the easily foreseeable political consequences in the Republican Senate crystallized a perception that the White House is in over its head. Unless that changes, foreign powers will increasingly act on the belief that the American executive is both politically weak and intellectually unfocused. The consequences for political stability and economic prosperity around the world are not good.

Mr. Trump’s trade diplomacy is particularly at risk. China is much less likely to make significant compromises if it thinks the president is a lame duck. As the Europeans shift from dealing with Mr. Trump through gritted teeth to waiting for his administration to end, the European Union will likely stiffen its trade stance as well.

The geopolitical consequences of a weakened Trump administration will also be significant. Revisionist powers large and small are more likely to take risks and challenge American power when they believe the U.S. is distracted and divided. Russia’s attack on Georgia came in the summer of 2008 when George W. Bush was an unpopular lame duck and the building financial crisis was beginning to distract Americans from international news.

Russia, far from seeking any kind of special relationship with Mr. Trump, is likely to revel in his weakness. In the western Balkans, in Syria, and in hot spots like Venezuela, Russia must be expected to move more aggressively.

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The Syrian Kurds Are Not America’s Problem Brandon J. Weichert

Posted By on October 15th, 2019

https://spectator.org/the-syrian-kurds-are-not-americas-problem/

All of Washington has been atwitter with the president’s recent decision to draw down American forces from their ongoing mission in Syria. The reason is the purported American abandonment — betrayal, in the eyes of many — of the Syrian Kurds. But the situation is more complicated than that. There has been much conflation of both the American mission in Syria and the disposition of America’s erstwhile Kurdish friends.

The fact is, despite being the world’s largest stateless ethnic population, sharing a contiguous landmass that cuts across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran — roughly a 500,000-square-kilometer area — the Kurds are by no means a monolithic entity. What’s more, the United States government has never officially endorsed the concept of a Kurdish state in the Middle East.

Don’t let those facts stop the experts from trotting out many falsehoods and half-truths about the messy situation that is Syria, though. Obviously, the Kurds who have been fighting alongside Americans throughout the entirety of America’s three-decade-long series of Middle East conflicts should be rewarded for their courage. It is utterly confounding, however, that the same “serious” foreign-policy “thinkers” in Washington and media who continually lambaste President Trump for his supposedly destabilizing actions in the Middle East are also in favor of massively destabilizing the region to midwife the birth of an independent, Kurdish state.

The rejiggering of the Middle East map would require more than the paltry American force currently fighting alongside the Kurds of northern Syria. It not only would require the United States to understand the various tribal and regional dynamics between the numerous Kurdish communities throughout the Mideast but would also mean that any potential Kurdish state would have to be cleaved from Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. This could never be achieved peacefully. It would entail some degree of violence and inevitably invoke ethno-religious tribal backlash against the United States at precisely the moment America does not need that headache.

Further, what critics do not understand is that the Kurds have been rewarded for their loyalty to the United States. They also confuse the Marxist elements of northern Syria’s Kurds with the pro-American Peshmerga of northern Iraq.

Here’s Why Everyone Is Upset About the Kurds