RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-was-vilified-youth-gender-care?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The author uncovered the truth about the dangers of transitioning minors—and stood up to bans, boycotts, and smears.

Some researchers, who at great personal risk challenge the received wisdom of their day, never get the satisfaction of seeing their work vindicated. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened to Abigail Shrier.

Shrier is the author of the groundbreaking 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. It is a meticulous, humane, and harrowing account of the sudden and explosive rise in teenage girls declaring themselves to be males. The book is also an examination of a new branch of medicine that has encouraged, and profited from, swiftly putting these distressed girls on powerful hormones, and performing double mastectomies and other surgeries on them.

In working on the book, Shrier found that the claims that daughters could be, and should be, turned into sons was reckless, and that transgender medicine was functioning more like a cult than a scientifically based specialty. The truth of what she revealed has been comprehensively substantiated.

She documented how devastated parents were lied to and coerced. A favorite tactic of gender clinicians was to tell parents that if they didn’t consent to life-altering treatments with a long list of side effects, including sterility, their girls were likely to commit suicide. Parents were routinely asked, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/12/17/has-anyone-seen-joe-biden/

America and Britain share a rightful pride in the peaceful transfer of power. But they conduct the transfer very differently. The British vote in a day, count the votes that night, and install a new government almost immediately. Shadow ministers are ready to take over. 

Not in America, which takes weeks to cast ballots and, often, just as long to count them. This year, analysts were shocked to find the winner could be called on election night, a rarity due to Donald Trump’s victory in all seven “swing states”. It took longer to count the votes for other federal offices, sometimes much longer. In California, one congressional seat wasn’t decided until early December. Soviet workers got new cars faster.

Even if the votes had been counted swiftly, America’s new government would still have waited over two months before taking office. It used to take even longer. Until 1933, when the 20th Amendment was passed, the new president didn’t take office until early March. The vote was still held in early November.

Despite the Amendment, there’s still a two-month pause before the new president takes office. That gap poses dangers internationally and domestically. Foreign foes may choose to act while the old team is still in power, fearing the new administration may be tougher (as they do now) or less predictable. Domestically, the incumbent administration and lame-duck Congress have a last-minute chance to push through their priorities. The outgoing Congress can pass laws, the outgoing president can issue executive orders, and departing White House aides and Cabinet members can rush money out the door before the new administration cuts off funding for their pet projects.

Although such problems recur at the end of every presidency, they are always more serious when the other party is about to take power. They are even worse when the incoming president will have a new majority in Congress, as Trump will this time. That’s why president Biden’s team is trying to push through as many lifetime judicial appointments as possible before the Senate switches to Republican control.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/18/censorship-has-a-perfect-failure-record/

Free speech is under assault from all angles. States across the West are arresting purveyors of so-called hate speech, and cracking down on alleged mis- and disinformation. Even the US government, despite the First Amendment, has been caught leaning on social-media firms in order to outsource censorship to the private sector. Universities, once places of vigorous, robust debate and unfettered inquiry, have been transformed into ‘safe spaces’ where contrarian views are Not Platformed. We’re not only losing the right to free speech – many seem to have forgotten why it matters at all.

As legal expert Jonathan Turley explains in his new book, The Indispensable Right, free speech is fundamental to our humanity. Without the ability to articulate our beliefs, we become not only less free, but also less human. Jonathan was the latest guest on The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: How are crusades against speech, particularly those driven by the state, undermining free speech?

Jonathan Turley: The Biden administration has created three categories for censorship: disinformation, misinformation and malinformation. Of the three, malinformation is my favourite. It’s defined as the use of true facts in a misleading way. It isn’t hard to imagine how the government might abuse that definition.

Current proponents of censorship make arguments that I find very disingenuous. For example, they will raise an issue like child pornography, which is an act that is against the law. They have a habit of taking the most extreme forms of conduct and using it to justify sweeping and ambiguous forms of censorship. If you take a look at the UK, France, Germany and Canada, you begin to see what happens when you allow censorship to take hold. It develops an insatiable appetite.

My book poses the challenge to name a single censorship system that has succeeded in stopping an idea or movement. Censorship has a perfect failure record and my book tries to explain why. In my view, it is because freedom of speech is a human right. It’s something we’re hard-wired for. I even refer to medical studies that show how parts of our brain can shrink if we don’t express ourselves. We are so designed for free speech that we can have a physical response when we fail to use it.