RUTHFULLY YOURS

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The fragile facade of transgender ideology has cracked over the past year. Whistleblowers from within the medical profession have emerged to provide damning evidence that doctors are performing procedures based on shoddy scientific evidence under the label of “gender-affirming care,” as outlined in the WPATH Files and the Cass Review. Former patients who received “gender-affirming” care as adolescents have now detransitioned and are suing the doctors who cut off their breasts and put them on hormones that permanently damaged their bodies. Businesses ranging from Target to NFL teams are scaling back or eliminating Pride-themed merchandise and promotions. The public, too, is increasingly turning against transgender ideology. The tide is shifting.

The Left has adopted a new approach in response: political persecution of those speaking out against trans dogma. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice indicted Eithan Haim, a surgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) who exposed the hospital’s secret continued use of irreversible sex-change procedures on minors after having publicly stated that it had stopped. By indicting Haim, the DOJ is seeking to silence future whistleblowers and to signal its disregard for the mounting evidence that gender-affirming care is harmful, and often irreversible.

Haim had anonymously sent City Journal’s Christopher Rufo documents proving that doctors at TCH were still prescribing hormone replacement therapy drugs and implanting puberty blockers in minor-age patients more than a year after the hospital announced it had stopped its pediatric gender-affirming care program. A month after Rufo published his article in May 2023, federal agents from the Department of Health and Human Services knocked on Haim’s door to let him know that he was a “potential target” in an investigation of alleged violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This week, an unsealed indictment revealed that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas is charging Haim with four felony counts of violating HIPAA. A press release on the indictment alleges that Haim accessed patient information “under false pretenses and with intent to cause malicious harm to TCH.”

https://tomklingenstein.com/trumps-conviction-is-doubly-abusive/

Last year, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed in New York state court the so-called hush money case against Donald J. Trump. In brief, Trump was found “guilty” of making a $130,000 payment in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential race—via his former lawyer Michael Cohen (who himself pleaded guilty in 2018 to what the judge overseeing his case described as a “veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct”)—to buy the silence of porn actress “Stormy Daniels,” who claimed that she and Trump had sex, all in an effort to interfere in the election, according to the prosecution.

For those who are understandably confused about the exact nature of Trump’s wrongdoing given that, in civil litigation, settlements paired with nondisclosure agreements are quite common, the supposed illegality is that when Cohen was reimbursed, the payments were recorded as legal expenses, which prosecutors contended was an unlawful attempt to mask the true purpose of the Trump-Daniels transaction—to influence the 2016 election.

In any event, on Thursday, May 30, 2024, a mere five months from the 2024 election, a jury, after a little more than nine hours of deliberations, found Trump guilty of every single one of the 34 charges DA Bragg brought against him. Consequently, the Associated Press reports that Trump “became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes.” As Kenin M. Spivak has noted in The American Mind, the proceedings are riddled with more than a dozen reversible errors. Nonetheless, Trump is set to be sentenced on July 11, by the judge who oversaw the trial, Juan Merchan—just four days before the start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Of note with respect to Judge Merchan’s rather dubious impartiality, his daughter, Loren Merchan, is the president of Authentic Campaigns—a group that represents Democrat politicians and political action committees and which has collected at least $70 million in payments from Democrat candidates and causes since she helped found the company in 2018.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/24/swifties-need-to-grow

EXCERPTS

Taylor Swift was in London last week, and it felt like a collective mania had briefly taken hold of the capital.

As Swift’s seemingly never-ending Eras tour was in town, you could hardly move for millennial women wearing cowboy hats and glitter. But it wasn’t just hardcore Swifties who were in the grip of Taylor-mania. Transport for London released a special Swift-themed Tube map to mark her presence, with lines renamed after her albums, stations renamed after her songs and the map’s colours jazzed up with sequins. On Friday, the Changing of the Guard outside Buckingham Palace was performed to the tune of Swift’s ‘Shake It Off’. Walls across the city were decked in Taylor Swift murals.

When you think of a ‘Swiftie’, you’re probably imagining a teenage girl – or a thirtysomething professional who thinks she’s a teenage girl. But some of the guests at the London concerts over the weekend were a long way out from even those demographics.

Prince William, the heir apparent to the British throne, posed for a selfie with Swift before attending the concert for his 42nd birthday. Although he did have his two older children, Charlotte and George, in tow, his vigorous, frenetic dancing to ‘Shake it Off’ made it all too clear that he was the biggest Swift superfan of the bunch.

Even Keir Starmer was out among the Swifties. The Labour leader posted a snap of him and his wife, Victoria, at the concert on X, noting that he was making a ‘“Swift” campaign pitstop’, to groans all round.

What is going on here? Why are fully grown, adult politicians fawning over a star who makes pop music for teenagers? Or at least, in any sane era, should be making pop music mainly for teenagers. It surely can’t be down to her underwhelming lyrics. After all, this is the musical genius whose latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, contains such lyrical masterpieces as: ‘We would pick a decade / We wished we could live in instead of this / I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists’; ‘You smoked, then ate seven bars of chocolate’; and ‘Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto’.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/braggs-double-standards/

Left-wing progressive Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg decided to drop all charges against thirty-one of the forty-six pro-Hamas agitators who were arrested after breaking into and seizing Hamilton Hall at Columbia University’s campus on April 30th. Fourteen of the remaining agitators still facing charges were offered “Adjournments in Contemplation of Dismissal,” which would have resulted in dismissal of their cases if they did not engage in additional criminal conduct during the next six months. They refused the offer. The fifteenth defendant is James Carlson, a forty-year-old privileged scion of a wealthy family who is considered a “possible leader” of the Columbia University rioters who broke into Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside. He has been charged with criminal trespassing, on top of additional charges for other crimes he allegedly committed.

The thirty-one rioters who invaded Hamilton Hall and got off scot-free were initially charged with trespassing in the third degree, which is a misdemeanor. They would have received no jail time in any event with let-the criminals-go District Attorney Bragg still in office. But even a slap on the wrist for the rioters was too much for Bragg to consider.

One of DA Bragg’s prosecutors cited a lack of evidence as justification for the decision to drop the charges against the thirty-one pro-Hamas rioters. He claimed there was no proof sufficient to tie each specific hooligan who was arrested to illegally taking part in the invasion of Hamilton Hall and in the destruction of property or injury of anyone during the course of the building’s seizure and occupation. The prosecutor blamed the problem in part on the absence of security-camera video, thus rewarding the rioters who had disabled or covered the cameras in the first place while wearing masks to hide their identities.

Judge Kevin McGrath went along with the charade by announcing in court that “All these matters are dismissed and sealed in the interest of justice.”

Judge McGrath has it backwards. Dismissing even the mildest of charges against the pro-Hamas thugs is a gross miscarriage of justice. But what else can we expect from DA Bragg’s office, backed up by cooperative criminal judges?