RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/from-transgender-homecoming-queen-to-transhumanism/

Last week, a biological male named Tristan Young who “identifies” as a female beat out several young ladies for the title of “homecoming queen” at Oak Park High School in Kansas City, Missouri.

In July, the Netherlands crowned a biological male identifying as a woman as its first transgendered Miss Netherlands.

Leaving aside the question of who is spearheading this annihilative agenda, we should be clear on what is the intended goal of the perpetrators. When a biological male who looks like a man in drag is crowned as homecoming queen, the adults behind this agenda are sending a clear message that this is a socially endorsed beauty contest. And further, that teenage boys should find male homecoming queens attractive and even sexually alluring.

There are two issues here to consider. One is the normalization of transgenderism. Its mainstreamed nature will brand as a homophobe or transphobe anyone who claims not to be attracted to trans “women” since they are to be regarded as actual women. The perception of discrimination, and discrimination associated with transwomen of color will increase. America will be viewed as less tolerant, more systemically racist and—if heterosexual men reject biological male transwomen—as irredeemably misogynistic.

The second factor to consider is that a form of socio-sexual eugenics is spreading like an epidemic in our society.  Boys who normally would not have been attracted to biological male trans-women will be increasingly attracted to such persons. The result will be a further increased segment of the copulating population incapable of reproducing. According to a recent survey of over 1,000 members of generation Z, 27% don’t want to have kids. When asked why, 89% of generation Z women said they enjoy the flexibility in their lives of not having children and 70% responded that they value their alone time.

Since it is women who both grant access to sex and determine if children come into the world, one can imagine a scenario in which an already declining U.S. population could precipitously slip further into an irreversible decline if a significant portion of transwomen become the partners not of gay men (not likely) but of re-socialized and sexually re-engineered heterosexual males.

The other factor to consider is that the agenda has as its end goal—the elimination of the male pronoun, men as we know them and any memory of a term such as heroic masculinity. Think about it: a biological male/ trans-woman is a feminized woman; a trans-man (biological female identifying as a biological male) looks often like a diminutive male with none of the primal and elemental raw masculinity of men. Although we live in a culture that problematizes the definition of women, it is men who are being erased.

https://www.thefp.com/p/coleman-hughes-is-ted-scared-of-color-blindness

TED Conferences, LLC is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan “ideas worth spreading”.

Like any young writer, I am well aware that an invitation to speak at TED can be a career-changing opportunity. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I was invited to appear at this year’s annual conference. What I could not have imagined from an organization whose tagline is “ideas worth spreading” is that it would attempt to suppress my own.

As an independent podcaster and author, I count myself among the lucky few who can make a living doing what they truly love to do. Nothing about my experience with TED could change that. The reason this story matters is not because I was treated poorly, but because it helps explain how organizations can be captured by an ideological minority that bends even the people at the very top to its will. In that, the story of TED is the story of so many crucial and once-trustworthy institutions in American life.

Let’s go back to the start.

This past April, I gave a talk at the yearly TED conference in Vancouver, Canada. In my talk, I defended color blindness: the idea that we should treat people without regard to race, both in our personal lives and in our public policy. (This is also the topic of my forthcoming book.)

Even though a majority of Americans believe that color-blind policies are the right approach to governing a racially diverse society, we live in a strange moment in which many of our elite believe that color blindness is, in fact, a Trojan horse for white supremacy. Taking that viewpoint seriously—while ultimately refuting it—was the express purpose of my talk.

https://apnews.com/article/philadelphia-store-mob-thefts-teenagers-f2351d631f691aa081233b1df1bee54d

Groups of teenagers swarmed into stores in Philadelphia’s Central City on Tuesday, stuffing plastic bags with merchandise and fleeing, although police made several arrests, authorities and witnesses said.

An Apple Store was hit at around 8 p.m. and police chased fleeing teenagers, recovering dropped iPhones and a “pile of iPads” at one spot, a police statement said.

More than 100 people who appeared to be teenagers looted a Lululemon store, NBC10 Philadelphia reported, citing a police officer.

Video posted on social media showed masked people in hoodies running out of Lululemon and police officers grabbing several and tackling them to the sidewalk, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

No injuries were immediately reported but CBS Philadelphia said a security guard was assaulted at the Foot Locker.

The flash mob-style ransacking followed an earlier peaceful protest over a judge’s Tuesday decision to dismiss murder and other charges against a Philadelphia police officer who shot and killed a driver, Eddie Irizarry, through a rolled-up window.

However, several police commanders said that the store ransacking wasn’t connected to earlier demonstrations, CBS Philadelphia reported.

The thefts also occurred on the same day that Target announced it will close nine stores in four states, including one in New York City’s East Harlem neighborhood, and three in the San Francisco Bay Area, saying that theft and organized retail crime have threatened the safety of its workers and customers.

http://Is the Left Happy That They Got Their Wish?

America has been in a veritable cultural revolution since the 1960s. Nearly all our major institutions finally became woke—the administrative state, traditional and social media, universities, K-12, the corporate boardroom, entertainment, professional sports, and the foundations.

So the Obama and the Biden administrations finally seemed to have achieved their aims, in what the Obamas once boasted would be the “fundamental transformation” of America into something unrecognizable by its Founders. But what they gave us was nihilism—the destruction of norms, laws, and customs. There is no border, no criminal justice system, no real president any more.

The citizen is a serf, the illegal alien the veritable citizen. The former needs a passport to reenter the country, the latter is waved on through. There is a slob in gym shorts and a hoodie establishing dress codes for the Senate, teen murderers bragging that they won’t spend a day in jail, and a would-be state legislator filming herself doing sexual gymnastics while begging for cash only to be upset over the invasion of her “privacy.” So the Left got what it wanted and gave us our new America.

The curious result, however, is that even the elite Left is now forced to live among, and cannot always escape, the ruination it created—and for the first time is becoming slightly unhappy with what it birthed.

Critical legal theory has now trickled down into most of our large cities. It insists that criminals are not criminals at all, but rather victims of prior racial and class oppressions. Thus their victims should blame society for their injuries, not their predatory victimizers. Critical legal theory is a sort of Marxist redistribution schema—the middle class almost deserves its equal share of violence commensurate with that of the inner city.

As a result, in Chicago and Oakland and hundreds of other cities, prosecutors let out criminals without bail or sometimes even indictments—in part out of spite and hatred of middle- and upper-middle-class America that supposedly deserves a payback for its bourgeois indifference, in part out of sheer ignorance of the unleashing of human nature once all deterrence is removed.

And the result?

https://victorhanson.com/the-origins-of-the-biden-disaster-part-one/

In a much-heralded Washington Post column, David Ignatius recently called for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris not to run again.

But to justify such a Draconian call, he first reviewed their tenures and concluded of Joe, “In sum, he has been a successful and effective president.” Consider the logic: the more successful a president, the quicker he must get out of office?

Obviously, if Ignatius really believed that assessment, then he would not be calling for Joe to step aside. While Joe has deteriorated a great deal cognitively since his January 2021 debut, even before his inauguration he was clearly unfit physically and mentally for the job—a fact of course known to liberals like Ignatius and others.

So the subtext of this new ridiculous argument that a successful Joe must suddenly depart is essentially the following:

In 2020, Joe Biden was health-wise unfit to become president. The Left backed him, however, by persuading virtually the entire field of 2020 primary candidates to step aside—given his competitors, many of whom had polled well ahead of Joe and won primaries, were deemed either too socialist (Sanders), too shrill and off-putting (Warren), too sanctimonious and insufferable (Buttigieg), too nutty (Spartacus-Booker), and too boring, condescending, and effusively rich (Bloomberg) to ever get elected.

A previously inert Joe was then coronated as the only hope left by the leftwing donor class. And in lockstep, the Democratic minority-base was then persuaded (quid-pro-quo-ed) to back the heretofore losing Biden.

Suddenly Joe won the primary in South Carolina. Or as a giddy NPR said of his late February 2020 South Carolina victory:

The 77-year-old former vice president has now notched an expected yet much-needed victory in the South Carolina primary, according to The Associated Press’s projection. Just days ago, the press and the pundits had declared his candidacy dead. (emphasis added) “Now, thanks to all of you—the heart of the Democratic Party—we just won and we’ve won big because of you, and we are very much alive,” an energized Biden said at an event with supporters in Columbia, S.C.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-moral-order-is-already-crumbling-climate-europe-immigration-australia-25d21439?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The new moral order our secularist elites have been busy constructing since the end of the Cold War is collapsing around them.

Over the past 30 years, the values of Judeo-Christian belief that had inspired and sustained Western civilization and culture for centuries have been steadily replaced in a moral, cultural and political revolution of the postmodern ascendancy. But the contradictions and implausibilities inherent in this successor creed have been increasingly exposed, and its failure to supply the needs of the people is discrediting it in the popular mind.

This new edifice has been built around three principal pillars: First, the ethical primacy of global obligation over national self-interest, in economic and geopolitical terms, but most directly and consequentially in a rejection of the morality of national borders and an embrace of something like open-door immigration. Second, a quasi-biblical belief in climate catastrophism, in which man’s essential energy-consuming sinfulness can be expiated only by massive sacrifice of economic progress. Third, a wholesale cultural self-cancellation in which the virtues, values and historic achievements of traditional civilization are rejected and replaced by a cultural hierarchy that inverts old prejudices and obliges the class of white, male heterosexuals to acknowledge their history of exploitation and submit to comprehensive social and economic reparation.

This fall, throughout the West, on three continents, each of these three pillars is crumbling,

In Lampedusa, the Italian island midway between Europe and Africa, and at Eagle Pass, Texas, and elsewhere along the visible and increasingly invisible frontiers that separate the global North from the South, the idea of permissive migration in an economically unequal world is being tested to destruction. Lampedusa was inundated last week with another surge of migrants from Africa, larger than the population of the island itself. In Texas, the influx across the border with Mexico became a torrent.

The demographic tsunami from the global South as the North’s population shrinks is in its early stages, and most people can see clearly what happens when leaders insist on a moral code that suggests our obligations to indigent foreigners are as great as those to our own citizens. It won’t survive the political backlash now under way in both Europe and America, as even U.S. Democrats and Brussels Eurocrats are slowly starting to grasp.

The second pillar, the moral imperative of self-abasing action to combat climate change, is falling too—most interestingly again in Europe and the U.K., where it has long been the official religion of the secularist priesthood.

Last week, Britain’s notionally Conservative government took a small but symbolically important step in climate apostasy, announcing some sensible tweaks to a program of regulatory decarbonization mandates, such as pushing back by a few years the phasing out of new gasoline-powered cars. The move was precipitated by the high and rising costs to ordinary citizens of these measures and didn’t actually involve—yet—a formal retreat from the ambitious goal of making the country “carbon neutral” by 2050. But the howls from almost the entire establishment were an encouraging sign that the priesthood knows its days are numbered.

In observance of Yom Kippur.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

For Queen Elizabeth, 1992 was her annus horribilis. I had my own – far less significant – diem horribilis last Sunday. Unlike Elizabeth’s year, some of what happened to me was, surely, age related. I had tested positive for Covid that morning. Then, feeling groggy and with slurred speech, I fell twice. Apart from a bumped head, bruised hip and ego, no damage was done. Nevertheless after the second fall, we called health services. Shortly thereafter I was taken by ambulance to a clinic and later to Middlesex Hospital. Tests showed no signs of a stroke or brain injury, and on Tuesday I came home, with a cane but that was because of the bruised hip.

The effects of age are not necessarily chronological, and they differ greatly from one individual to another. My father died at 58, while his father died one day shy of 90 and his mother at 92. While they became physically frail, both had their wits until they died. Cancer, heart disease, and senility are more common as one ages. Muscles lose tone and bones become brittle. But there are those like Henry Kissinger who are physically able and mentally alert at 100. Many people don’t let age stop them.  The Wall Street Journal, last June 25th, published an article, “Why High-Powered People are Working in Their 80s.” In it they quoted data from the Census Bureau that roughly 650,000 Americans over 80 were working last year. My younger brother who turns 81 in October continues to work as a partner in an investment firm. My father-in-law went to work most every day as an admiralty lawyer, until he died at 77. Old age, mental acuity, and employment are not incompatible. For some, but not for all.

While Republicans have been vocal about the President’s physical and mental failings – based on visible evidence of dementia – the question of age has now been raised by Independents and Democrats. An August CNN poll conducted by SSRS found that “roughly three-quarters of Americans say they’re seriously concerned that Biden’s age might negatively affect his current level of physical and mental competence…” On the other hand, Alex Keyssar of the Harvard Kennedy School takes a more nuanced view. According to the July 17, 2023 issue of the Harvard Gazette, he “believes Democrats who cite age as a major election concern are probably really expressing ‘a desire for energetic leadership, a force for new ideas, new spirit, and new energy.’” Perhaps. But it seems more likely that the Democrat leadership is concerned that fibs, gaffes, and stumbles now define Mr. Biden – not good for his re-election chances, especially when his Vice President’s approval numbers are lower than his.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/09/youngkin_and_the_reconciliation_monument.html

Though he never claimed to be a populist, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has ridden the wave of public anger against hostile school boards pushing radical race and gender ideologies.  As I noted in a previous commentary, Youngkin’s selection of leftist advisers and personnel for his gubernatorial team sent up warning signs of danger ahead for Virginians.  Now his actions concerning the removal of the 109-year-old Reconciliation Monument in Arlington National Cemetery confirm that Youngkin is no conservative.

The now disbanded Congressional Naming Commission targeted for removal the Reconciliation Monument that was conceived and built with the sole purpose of healing the wounds of the Civil War and restoring national harmony.  Moses Ezekiel, a world-renowned American sculptor and first Jewish cadet at Virginia Military Institute (VMI), was chosen to create the memorial to mark Section 16, the burial plot for the reinterred graves championed by President William McKinley, and to commemorate the reunification of North and South.  The memorial became the grave marker for Ezekiel, who is buried at its foot.  Some historians question whether the removal of the monument is the first step in a larger, more sinister plan that begins with the removal of the centerpiece of the Confederate Circle with eventual mass exhumation.

Numerous articles by historians Scott S. Powell and Ann H. McLean, as well as former senator Jim Webb’s recent WSJ piece, illuminate the importance of this memorial in healing North and South divisions. On a basic level, the indecency of removing a headstone in our foremost cemetery calls to mind the Nazi’s destruction of Jewish graves in Czechoslovakia in World War II and gives one pause about Youngkin’s fitness for high office. What American leader ignores previous presidential customs in honoring crucial healing of the nation, allowing Marxist revisionism to prevail?

A Freedom of Information Act document reveals that Youngkin pre-negotiated with Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin to move the monument to state property in Virginia. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/09/22/dr_jay_bhattacharya_accepts_rcps_samizdat_prize_government_should_not_censor_and_smear_scientists.html

Real Clear Foundation president David DesRosiers explains: “What does Samizdat mean? It translates as ‘self-published’ in Russian. Samizdat was the underground literary network in the Soviet Union that distributed Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Are we suggesting the American mind and society are closing and becoming more Orwellian and Soviet? Yes, we are. This is why we inaugurated the Samizdat prize, to celebrate those great few who stand for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of science, even at great personal cost.”

Read Dr. Bhattacharya’s remarks:

DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA, HEALTH POLICY PROFESSOR AT STANDFORD UNIVERSITY: I’m overwhelmed, you guys, thank you… In 1970, I looked this up before I got here, the New York Times Albert Parry published an article about the Soviet dissident intellectuals who would covertly pass around ideas to each other in the form of handcrafted, typed written documents called Samizdat. There are people in this room, scientists in this room, that I passed Samizdat to. David mentioned one, Scott Atlas. From the earliest days of the pandemic, we would pass papers to each other. My colleague Yaron Ben David, we’d secretly talk to each other in whispers in the corridors of Stanford…

We would tell each other, “Here’s what the data are showing,” “Why aren’t people seeing this?” And if you tried to share it, God forbid that happened.

Let me read to you from this New York Times piece:

“Censorship existed even before literature, says the Russians. And, we may add, censorship being older, literature has to be craftier. Hence, the new and remarkably viable underground press in the Soviet Union called samizdat.

Samizdat – translates as: “We publish ourselves” – that is, not the state, but we, the people.