RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/miss-netherlands-is-the-face-of-western-self-cancellation

Once upon a time, progressives sneered at beauty pageants. Whether the Miss America or the Miss Universe contest, all such “meat markets” objectify women, we were told. They turn females into sex objects! Reinforce patriarchal stereotypes! Teach girls that being in a state of partial undress, rather than learning how to code, is the path to success!

For girls in the 1970s, getting hotheaded about such chauvinist-pig traditions was a rite of passage, providing nearly as much satisfaction as biting off a hapless male’s head for holding open a door or helping with overhead luggage. Males soon got over such atavistic instincts, liberating females to lug their suitcases up subway stairs on their own, as able-bodied males unconcernedly pass them by. But the beauty pageant would not die. Organizers responded to the feminist critique by accentuating the social-activism component of the competition, eliciting from the contestants ever more fervent recitations of their aspirations, say, to found organizations for battered women.

Leftists were not impressed. For them, the beauty pageant remained an object of derision. Until now. For much of last week, the mainstream media breathlessly covered the coronation of “Miss Netherlands,” as she continues on her teary journey toward an ultimate goal of being crowned Miss Universe. One might even hear Bert Parks crooning “There She Is” in the background. And the reason for this sudden interest in an obscure preliminary stage of the contest? Miss Netherlands is really a Mister. Suddenly, even the swimsuit competition has become a worthwhile endeavor in a female’s life, as long as that female is a biological male.

An old school feminist might respond: isn’t that just like a man! Not content to dominate 99.99 percent of the world, males in all their toxic maleness have to jump in and take over the last .01 percent of what has been left to females. And the females are supposed to step aside and fall in line for the new top dog, even if he wears a dress.

The mystery is that females, by and large, are doing just that.

But if males are going to muscle females aside and claim to be not only the top male dog but also the top female dog, they could at least have offered some interesting new ways of being female. Instead, the most striking aspect of the trans revolution is its embrace of the most allegedly regressive female stereotypes. For the finals of the Miss Netherlands contest, Rikkie Valerie Kollé, né Rik, appeared in a cherry-red satin gown, slit all the way up the side to reveal the entirety of his long, gorgeous leg, predictably shod in strappy five-inch stiletto heels. The sleeveless, backless plunging dress was held up by the slenderest of spaghetti straps over Rikki’s suspiciously broad shoulders. Rikki’s long tresses were blow-dried into wavy smoothness, his foundation and blush exquisitely modelled to create the illusion of flawless skin. In short, the very image of Las Vegas glamour.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-new-censorship-2

On March 9, in the bowels of the Capitol building, a gathering took place of a type that might be possible only in Washington, D.C. The host was Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, chair of the curiously named House Select Committee on the Weaponization of Government. The guests: Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, semi-famous for revealing, in the “Twitter Files,” the deeply tangled relationship between the social-media platform and the federal government. The subject was freedom of speech in the digital age.

The Republicans had recently won a slim majority in the House and were eager to score points off the Biden administration. Taibbi and Shellenberger had been invited because they had a troubling story to tell about the abuse of power—what Jordan meant by “weaponization.”

According to Taibbi, federal entities, from the White House to the CIA, had developed a “formal system” to convey their demands to the digital platforms regarding what could be said online and who could say it. A gaggle of “quasi-private” organizations, many of them recipients of government funding, acted as force multipliers, repeating the same demands. Rather than question these practices, the news media aped them, becoming “an arm of a state-controlled thought-policing system.” Shellenberger called it the “censorship-industrial complex.”

The substance of the Twitter Files appeared to confirm these allegations. The FBI loomed large in Twitter’s content-moderation decisions. The agency dedicated as many as 80 staffers to hunting transgressors on the platform, overwhelming Twitter executives with requests for action and ultimately paying the company $3.4 million for its troubles. During the controversies surrounding the 2020 presidential campaign, Twitter leaned heavily on the judgment of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

Federal intervention in digital speech followed a tendentious pattern. Any opinion that offended establishment sensibilities was a target for suppression. That included left-wing populist views and eccentrics like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but most of the heretical voices belonged to Donald Trump and his Republican supporters. During the 2020 campaign, Trump was “deamplified” by Twitter—meaning that he was essentially talking to himself. After the January 6 riots in Washington, Twitter booted him off the platform, though it never identified how he had violated its terms of service. FBI personnel took jobs with Twitter in significant numbers, intensifying the partisan tilt. James Baker, who played a leading role in the Trump investigation while at the FBI, became a persistent advocate of expelling Trump after moving to Twitter.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/18/kamalas-population-bomb/

Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris received a round of applause when she said “​​when we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water.” And with that, she pulled back the curtain to expose one of the many horrors that is usually endorsed not quite so openly by the political left.

We acknowledge that Harris might have lost another one of the many battles she and her White House boss have with teleprompters and public speaking in general. The official transcript scrubs “population” and replaces it with “pollution,” as if that was the term the speech called for.

Maybe it is the word she was supposed to use. But we can’t rule out the likelihood she made a Kinsley gaffe, revealing a truth she didn’t intend to, because her side of the aisle has long been aligned with population-reduction cranks.

One Democrat who hasn’t been shy about population limits is Bernie Sanders, the Vermont bedlamite. During a 2019 town hall meeting, Sanders said “yes” when asked if he asked about “the need to curb population growth” in order to “address climate catastrophe.” He spoke for many that day.

Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich was not the first to advocate cutting the planet’s population, but he did blow up the world in 1968 with “The Population Bomb,” in which he shared his conviction that unless humanity was culled, the near future was one of “mass starvation” on “a dying planet.” To get to the beginning we’d have to go back at least as far as the late 18th century, when Englishman ​​Thomas Robert Malthus wanted to “court the return of the plague” and forbid “specific remedies for ravaging diseases” to stop what he thought was the pestilence of overpopulation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sexual-ideology-identity-trans-gender-school-dysphoria-puberty-blocker-parent-rights-seattle-new-jersey-florida-nea-777ffa84?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

A campaign is under way to introduce schoolchildren to the latest ideas about sexual orientation and “gender identity.” Pupils in New Jersey are expected to understand the differences between these concepts by fifth grade. An official of the National Education Association, the largest U.S. teachers union, recommends asking preschoolers their “preferred pronouns.” The NEA’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer+ Caucus has a reading list for elementary-school children that includes titles such as “My Princess Boy” and “Jacob’s New Dress.”

It’s important that children learn to accept differences; but indoctrinating them or promoting an agenda is another matter. Parents, many of whom find such ideas objectionable or exotic, are often kept in the dark about what their children are being taught, or told they have no right to opt out if they are informed. Parents around the country have filed lawsuits alleging that school officials withheld vital information about their own children from them.

Children develop at their own pace. Many aren’t psychologically or emotionally ready to discuss or think about their “identity.” I have seen many young adolescents overwhelmed by the need to know “who and what I am” in a heated and socially pressured environment. I have even had teen patients tell me that “identifying as heteronormative”—yes, they’ve been trained to talk that way—is stressful in an environment that idealizes being “queer.”

Preadolescent children are only beginning to discover who they are. All children (adults too) have both masculine and feminine parts of their personalities, which they should be free to explore in play. If a girl doesn’t like wearing dresses and a boy enjoys playing with dolls, it’s cruel and destructive to lead them to believe they’re actually members of the opposite sex.

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/my-native-english-must-i-now-forgo/

The decline of our language may have been certified when the new term for teaching English in K-12 schools, “Language Arts,” substituted vague complexity for simple precision, as it is in K-12 that English dies. For anyone of the old school, recent graduates have made reading even the leading newspapers exquisite torture.

When language is ungrammatical, asyntactical, or illogical, everything follows—the practice of medicine, flying of airplanes, building of bridges, writing of love letters, and ars gratia artis. Carelessness in expression infectiously hastens the general decay. Here are just a few choice examples from publications that should know better.

Whereas one advocates for a person, one advocates a policy—of which, not for which, one is an advocate. You do not arrive to, but in or at a place. As Cleopatra might say, there is no such thing as an ask: it is a request. You don’t resolve obstacles, you overcome them, just as you don’t solve questions, but answer them. Although an issue can be a problem and a problem can be an issue, they are not synonymous, and when they are used as such it’s a problem, not an issue. “This” is not an indefinite article. Missing an antecedent, you don’t say, “I saw this dog,” but “I saw a dog.”

Unlike The New York Times’s bedeviling usage, now everywhere as people pretending to be journalists migrate from one asylum to another, “on” is not the universal preposition—as a study of, not on, this would show. One expresses concern for or about—not on—something and finds clues to, not on, it. Even my favorite newspaper, for which I wrote for decades, has decided that national adjectives are too much to bear. Hence, “Turkey restaurant” (you wouldn’t know if you were getting cranberry sauce or shish kebab), the “Italy government,” though not yet the “America Constitution.”

Battlefield momentum is not taken; it is achieved or restored. China’s population does not “take a drop,” it drops, although falls or decreases would be better. Residents and fellows are not “unique from other healthcare workers,” although they may be different. “Majority” requires a quantity of at least three. There is no such thing as the majority of Paris, rather than most of Paris. Assuming it isn’t simultaneously specious and fallacious, and doesn’t use a cigarette holder and sip martinis, no weapon is sophisticated; rather, it is complex, advanced, or highly capable. An acute problem is not necessarily intense, but of limited duration. “Like” is a comparative for nouns, “as,” for verbs, as I just said.

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-antiracist-racket/

Beyond its falsity, there is no current idea so destructive as the fiction that America is systemically racist. It harms black Americans by shrinking their horizons and stoking their resentment; it has fueled crime and disorder in our cities; and by replacing our national faith in the unique excellence of our self-governing republic with a sense of its pervasive injustice and oppression, it makes us more vulnerable in a dangerous world. Confidence that we have a civilization worth defending is vital to our future.

After all, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s succeeded. In what was the defining political experience of a generation, that movement turned the nation inside out in order to remedy the overt racism that then marred America’s promise of civil equality. Two decades of sit-ins and marches, of sermons and voter registrations, yielded changes that fully opened political, educational, and employment opportunities to blacks, while society grew dramatically more welcoming. Just compare the advertisements or movies—or college alumni magazines—of the 1950s to today’s to get a sense of the revolution in racial attitudes that occurred. Or consider the change in the percentage of Americans who tell pollsters they approve of interracial marriage—4% in 1958 versus 94% in 2021.

But as the number of Americans who remember the civil rights era dwindles, the harangues of Black Lives Matter and the critical race theorists have obscured that era’s accomplishment. The Gallup Poll tracks this trend: in 2014, respondents’ satisfaction with U.S. race relations reached a high of 55%, versus 35% dissatisfied, but it began dropping thereafter, in the wake of Eric Garner’s death in July of that year. Only 28% expressed satisfaction in 2022.

Because what people believe affects their actions as much as their real circumstances do, the imaginary world these propagandists have conjured up—in which racial injustice pervades everything, racist insults wound blacks at every turn, racism closes off advancement and shuts out fellowship—really does constrict black opportunity by denying it exists. By and large, the civil rights pioneers assumed that, once their movement succeeded, black Americans would gear up to seize the new opportunity, especially through wider educational choices. But the schools and colleges that were to arm black Americans for success now teach systemic racism, infusing a strange mix of suspicious resentment, fatalistic victimology, and aggrieved entitlement that doesn’t fuel initiative but instead feeds a resentment or hostility that hinders advancement and poisons race relations again. The poet William Blake wrote strikingly of “mind-forg’d manacles”; for many black Americans, the schools rivet them on, and BLM reinforces the chains.

https://jamieglazov.com/2023/07/16/glazov-gang-marijuana-psychosis-and-mental-illness/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Heidi Swan, the author of  ‘A Night In Jail’. Visit her at ANightInJail.com.

Heidi discusses Marijuana, Psychosis and Mental Illness, revealing the dark and frightening side of usage, legalization and denial. 

Don’t miss it!

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/while-the-culture-war-rages-americas?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

When I was in my teens and 20s, I used to chuckle at the older guys who complained about the state of the country and America’s young people. As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to realize that each generation worries about societal changes and those coming behind them. Despite a few bumps in the road, America keeps rolling and the kids turn out just fine. The old worries eventually become fodder for good conversations between generations. I’m mindful of this pattern as I get older. But now, like the old guys I laughed at when I was young, I find myself looking around at the state of our young people and seeing some disturbing trends.

I wanted to be sure these trends are real and that I wasn’t being a worrywort, so I checked the data. Unfortunately, my intuitions were correct. America’s young people are floundering. The cumulative effect of the data I present below is a bigger threat to America’s future than any of the culture war issues pundits and politicians argue about. People who care about America should care about the state of its children and young people. It’s the right thing to do. It’s also in everyone’s best interest, because too few of our children are becoming the productive adults we need to sustain our economy and institutions. Fewer still are capable of becoming leaders of those institutions.

I’m worried. Others should be worried, too, when 14% of America’s high school girls say they’ve been forced to have sex. They should be worried when 14% of America’s teachers say they’ve been victims of physical violence from students. They should be worried when high percentages of America’s young people say they’re having mental health issues, 18% of high school students have created a suicide plan, 10% of them have attempted suicide, and 3% of them required medical treatment as a result. And let’s not forget about those whose suicide attempts were successful. Suicide was the third leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 15 and 24 in 2020 according to the CDC’s WISQARS (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System) database.

A review of multiple data sources suggests that alarming percentages of America’s children and young people are struggling. Too many of them are

Born to economically disadvantaged single mothers
Living in single-parent households
Overweight or obese
Suffering from mental health issues
Victims and perpetrators of violence
Struggling academically
Unable to transition into stable, self-supporting adulthood.

Here’s a high-level summary of each of the topics mentioned above.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/07/10_paradigm_shifts_that_shatter_establishment_illusions.html

Sometimes it feels as if we are drowning in a torrent of bad news.  I would suggest, however, that the worse people feel, the more they are waking up to the serious contests of our time.  If you are unhappy with the political, economic, and social powers manipulating the world today, the critical first step in fighting those forces is changing the way people think about them.  By that measure, people today are changing their minds about the culture and institutions around them faster than ever.  Consider some of these fundamental shifts in thinking:

(1) Good vs. evil

Not long ago, it was common for conservatives to see the Marxist left as foolishly mistaken — a collection of young and inexperienced troublemakers who would eventually “snap out” of their common delusions once forced to confront reality.

Now people understand that the left’s real mission is to reject reality.  Castrating boys so that they can pretend to be girls is not “healthy.”  Perpetuating racism as social policy is not “justice.”  Imposing a “woke” State religion over personal conscience is not “moral.”  Aiding and abetting child sex–trafficking and drug-smuggling at our borders is not “compassionate.”  Stealing property is not “equitable.”  Just as with Leninism and Maoism before, today’s leftism is evil.

(2) Parties vs. uniparty

There has been a seismic shift in the way Republican voters see political parties.  After Obama forced government-controlled health care on America, the Tea Party movement began a desperate fight against socialism’s advances.  From the energy of that movement, Republicans eventually took back the House and Senate.  Despite those triumphs, Paul Ryan rubber-stamped Obama’s budgets, while refusing to build Trump’s border wall.  McConnell’s Senate Republicans, who had run on repealing Obamacare, cemented socialized medicine with McCain’s decisive betrayal.

Grassroots voters finally rejected Establishment Republicans and catapulted outsider Donald Trump into office.  In response, Republicans quietly assisted Democrats in their attempt to remove Trump through the Russia hoax.  In the space of a decade, most Republican officeholders were outed as RINOs, before voters properly concluded that they were actually part of a single D.C. Uniparty all along.  

(3) Science vs. political manipulation

The only good thing to come out of the government’s COVID lockdowns, forced medical experimentation, and masking theater was its inadvertent creation of a Eureka! moment for tens of millions of Americans who realized that “science” has become irredeemably politicized.  When health authorities opted for experimental injections over known medical treatments, they sacrificed lives to push an agenda.  When hospitals separated families and forced vulnerable patients onto ventilators, they acted inhumanely.  When politicians and corporations censored public dissent, destroyed livelihoods, hobbled childhood development, and terrified the public with known lies, they not only proved that objective science is dead, but also committed crimes against humanity.