Behind the Curtain of Planned Parenthood's 'Gender Factories'

by Tony Perkins: They come with other girls, a woman inside the clinic explains, giggling like they're at the mall. Only they aren't at the mall. They're shopping for another gender. And Planned Parenthood is more than willing to oblige.

It started in 2016, when then-President Cecile Richards -- fresh off of the baby body parts scandal -- decided the organization needed to make money another way. This time, the group announced, it was getting into the transgender treatment business, announcing that the nation's largest abortion network wasn't just content destroying lives -- it wanted to ruin the younger ones too. "We're expanding access to care -- from pioneering research on self-injectable birth control to offering new services for our transgender patients," Richards wrote in the intro of the organization's annual report.

What she didn't say is that surgical abortions across the U.S. were dropping, and Planned Parenthood was looking for ways to make up the shortfall. Five years later, they've done that -- and more. According to Abigail Shrier, the group that already enjoys more than a half-billion of your hard-earned tax dollars a year has gone from 26 clinics that offer testosterone to an astonishing 210. Believe it or not, Planned Parenthood is not only the largest killer of unborn babies in America, it's also the second largest provider of "gender affirming hormone care." And employees on the inside are having a hard time watching the consequences.

One, a whistleblower in a small town of 30,000, says her office saw one to two new biologically female teen patients looking for hormone treatments every day. According to her, "the girls would often arrive to the clinic with a group of friends," Shrier wrote. "It smacked more of the gleeful trips teen girls once took to the mall for ear piercings than the sober medical treatment of a genuine mental health disorder." When Abigail asked her what the mood in the waiting room was for these friends, the worker replied, "Super cheerful... [like it was] a fun thing."

But it was far less enjoyable for staff, who struggled to watch as Planned Parenthood helped these teenagers on the path to self-destruction. "I'll tell you," the woman admitted, "I struggled with the morality and reconciling of our actions in giving these kids testosterone and estrogen and stuff. I struggled with that more than I did being in operating room for like a 20-week abortion." Asked if other staff members felt the same and worried about what the organization was pushing, she replied soberly, "Yeah. Every Day."

Making matters worse, "There were no doctors at the clinic where she worked. Nurse practitioners were the professionals with the highest medical training, she said. The clinic employed a gender counselor who had ‘no actual professional credentials or formal training other than'" identifying as a transgender himself. The "clinic manager" -- who wrote the prescriptions that could harm these teenagers for life -- spent her last job "managing a Wendy's." In fact, the whistleblower explained, she had no medical experience whatsoever. That hasn't mattered at Planned Parenthood headquarters, who sees these kids are nothing but "cash cows."

And unlike abortion, they become lifetime patients, "kept on the hook for the foreseeable future for follow-up appointments, bloodwork, [drugs], and meetings..." In other words, this is one lucrative service -- and Planned Parenthood is never going to let caution or patient safety get in the organization's way. And worse, these irreversible treatments are being funded by people like you and me. Americans who would never consent to these devastating life choices are bankrolling these gender factories in at least 38 states. "Gender Affirming Care," as they call it, is a state-by-state policy -- but most Medicaid programs use taxpayer dollars to fund it. As of 2019, only 12 states specifically banned this type of coverage. The other 38 either explicitly cover it or default to covering it.

And if you think these profit-first radicals are going to involve parents -- think again. Just like abortion and radical sex ed and everything else Planned Parenthood offers, "you can walk into a clinic at 15 in some states -- without your mom or dad's permission, without so much as a therapist's note," Abigail warns, "and get a course of testosterone that day." (The same testosterone, incidentally, that can cause "deepened voice, enlarged clitoris, increase in red blood cell count, and greater risk of heart attack, infertility, vaginal and uterine atrophy, endometrial cancer -- as well as all the unknown risks" that come with a dangerous and radical puberty intervention.)

FRC's Mary Szoch is sickened by the organization's greed and negligence, but not surprised. "For years, Planned Parenthood has exploited women and killed unborn babies for the sake of making money. They've denied the scientific fact that abortion takes the life of an unborn child." Now, they're rejecting the fact that "a child with XX chromosomes is a girl, and a child with XY chromosomes is a boy. This isn't much of a stretch for an organization that profits off denying a human being is a person who inherently has the right to life."

But it is a stretch for taxpayers to fund it. Contact your state leaders and urge them to introduce legislation that ends this outrageous forced partnership between Americans and Planned Parenthood.
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Tony Perkins writes for Family Research Center.

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Dr. Death

Governor Cuomo is responsible for the death of thousands of elderly in New York due to COVID.
Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

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Tracking Big-Tech Attacks

by Paul Jacob, Contributing Author: Instagram is further restricting what users may say in direct messages, and the company will eject any user who utters hate speech. Instagram will also provide information about account holders to UK police.

But what is hate speech?

Nasty utterances that we’d all agree are hateful. Sure. But it also appears to be disagreeing with someone about “gender identity” or supporting Melania Trump. In other words, “hate speech” is whatever offends the authoritarian sensibilities of whoever operates the delete-account button at the social-media giants.

A lot of this has been happening lately.

YouTube has deleted the YouTube channel of LifeSiteNews, a Christian news outlet.

YouTube and Facebook have banned a documentary about pandemic policies called “Planet Lockdown,” and GoFundMe has cancelled a fundraising campaign for the film.

China will start accrediting reporters based on their social media histories, and it will penalize companies who employ unaccredited reporters. “Citizen journalists” (people with cell phones) will also have to be accredited.

Every day, tyrannical governments and their private-sector allies — the big-tech hall monitors now dropping all pretense of providing neutral forums — act to smother discussion and dissent on the net. In self-defense, we need to know about these anti-speech efforts. But keeping track is a big job.

Fortunately, ReclaimTheNet is doing this big job for us. Its regular e-letter (subscribe here) reprints the latest stories published on their website.

This job has to be outsourced, as far as I am concerned. Were I to report on all of it here, I wouldn’t be able to talk about anything else.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Paul Jacob (@Common_Sense_PJ) is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacob is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service.

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DeSantis vs. Biden, Someone Lied & Seniors Died, Biden Bows To Beijing

Gary Bauer

by Gary Bauer: DeSantis vs. Biden
We reported yesterday that the Biden Administration was considering imposing a COVID travel ban on the state of Florida. Not surprisingly, Governor Ron DeSantis hit back.

At a press conference, DeSantis blasted the idea as "unconstitutional, unwise and unjust." He said a travel ban would be a "purely political attack" on Florida.

DeSantis also ripped Biden for "restricting the right of Americans to travel freely throughout our country while allowing illegal aliens to pour across the southern border."

If we're going to start targeting states for travel bans based on their coronavirus statistics, we should be talking about New York, not Florida. According to the latest CDC data, New York reported nearly 61,000 new cases over the last seven days while Florida reported 52,622.

Clearly, the situation in New York is a bigger problem, and Governor Andrew Cuomo is in big trouble. (See next item.)

Someone Lied & Seniors Died
A top aide to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo admitted this week that the Cuomo Administration lied to state and federal officials about the true extent of nursing home casualties caused by Cuomo's policies. Of course, it was all Trump's fault.

As you know, Cuomo issued an order forcing New York nursing homes to accept sick COVID patients even though the other residents were at extreme risk. But Cuomo issued the order in the name of diversity so that makes it okay, at least in the left's fevered mind.

When the bodies of defenseless, elderly nursing home residents predictably began piling up, the coverup began. First they tried flushing Cuomo's order down the memory hole, as if simply deleting it would make everyone forget about it.

But when Trump demanded a federal investigation and the Department of Justice started asking questions, Cuomo's staff got desperate. They cooked the books to deliberately undercount the number of nursing home deaths and hid the ugly truth from everyone. That effort was exposed after a recent investigation by the state's attorney general.

Legislative leaders demanded answers after the attorney general's report, and Wednesday Melissa DeRosa confessed. Referring to the Trump Justice Department investigation, she said:

"We were in a position where we weren't sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren't sure if there was going to be an investigation. That played a very large role into this."

Sorry, Ms. DeRosa, but that's called obstruction of justice.

This should be a huge problem for Cuomo, but will it? Biden just fired almost all U.S. attorneys.

There's a real irony here. The two governors the media most admire for their leadership during the pandemic are Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo. In fact, Cuomo had the audacity to write a book on leadership and he even won an Emmy for his performance.

Well, apparently that's all it was – just a performance, an act. In reality, his so-called "leadership" was an unmitigated disaster, a travesty for thousands of families. And Gavin Newsom is on the verge of facing a recall vote.

Meanwhile, the governor the media harassed most because he fought hard to keep his state open is Ron DeSantis, and Florida has experienced significantly fewer COVID death than either California or New York.

Biden Bows To Beijing
Remember when Barack Obama bowed to Chinese President Hu Jintao? Well, Joe Biden appears to be continuing the tradition of his former boss, only virtually this time due to the pandemic.

Presidents Biden and Xi Jinping spoke this week over the phone, and communist China's state media are gushing with praise for Biden's demonstration of "respect for President Xi and China" in his Lunar New Year call.

If communist China is happy after a U.S. president calls, Americans should be worried!

According to the White House readout of the call, Biden brought up "Beijing's coercive and unfair economic practices, the crackdown in Hong Kong, human rights abuses in Xinjiang" and China's "increasingly assertive actions" toward Taiwan.

Of course, the Deep State will never leak transcripts of Biden's calls with foreign leaders, so we will never know what was really said. But such a statement was never sufficient for the Trump Administration. Left-wing media hacks always demanded specific answers on every issue.

But they didn't press the Biden White House on what it is prepared to do about the suppression of free speech in Honk Kong, the persecution of Chinese Christians or the communist regime's genocide against the Uighurs.

Meanwhile, right in front of our eyes, Biden and his team of Beijing apologists are recasting our relationship with communist China.

It has been obvious for years that communist China is an adversary at best, if not an outright enemy. But the Biden Administration is attempting to recast China as merely "a competitor."

They believe the most important thing about our relationship is working with China on global warming. So, trade issues, national security issues and human rights will be pushed aside.

Just two years ago, Biden mocked the idea of communist China "eating our lunch." Yesterday he suggested they just might. But he meant it economically, not in terms of national security or the influence operations they are running in the U.S. and in other western countries.

There's another irony here. When the left talks about beating China economically, it usually has to do with green jobs and climate change. (They've already lost that battle!)

Yet it often seems like the left is trying to be like communist China in its efforts to silence dissent and suppress religious liberty here in America. Adopting an enemy's worst behaviors is a strange way of trying to beat them.

Closing Arguments
Today President Trump's lawyers will get their chance to refute the wild accusations made by Speaker Pelosi's impeachment team. There are reports that Trump's attorneys may not use the entire time allotted to them. No doubt they don't believe it will take 16 hours to convince senators that the First Amendment still means something.

But if "incendiary rhetoric" is the standard for impeachment, I certainly expect them to show lots of video featuring Democrats, including Joe Biden, using over-the-top rhetoric to demonize conservatives and even justifying physical violence, which Donald Trump did not do on January 6th.
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Gary Bauer (@GaryLBauer)  is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

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The Republican Party Won't Fall Apart This Time Either

by Michael Barone: When you've been consuming and producing political commentary for many years, you get used to certain recurring themes. One is the imminent disappearance or relegation to permanent minority status of the Republican Party.

This was widely predicted after the Barry Goldwater defeat in 1964, after Watergate in the 1970s, after the elections of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in 1992 and 2008, respectively, with considerably larger Democratic congressional majorities (a 57-43 Senate majority and 259-176 House majority for Clinton, and 58-41 and 257-178 majorities for Obama) than President Joe Biden now enjoys (51-50 and 222-213).

Those predictions didn't pan out then, and I suspect they won't pan out now.

The Republicans do face some difficulties. Donald Trump gave them a presidential victory they didn't expect, and some policy victories and new support from modest-income constituencies such as those in Appalachia and Hispanics.

But nothing is free in politics; there is only some question about when you pay the price. Trump's idiosyncratic approach to COVID-19 and his refusal to propitiate hostile constituencies produced defeat by an even narrower margin (42,918 votes in three states) than his victory in 2016 (77,736 votes in three states).

His delusional insistence that he had won by a "landslide" and his recklessness in urging supporters to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6, plus the subsequent disruption of the constitutional process of reporting the Electoral College results, produced his second impeachment by the House, this one on nonfrivolous grounds.

Democrats hope impeachment will split Republicans and provoke continuing fights between pro- and anti-Trump factions that will undercut Republican nominees and discourage Republican turnout, as in the two Georgia Senate races on Jan. 5.

Maybe, maybe not. Only 10 House Republicans voted for impeachment. But attempts to oust one of them, Rep. Liz Cheney, from her leadership position was rejected by a 145-61 vote. And freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was persuaded to renounce her bizarre conspiracy-minded tweets in the process.

The Senate trial looks likely to be desultory. Trump can't be removed from office, because he's not in office, and the votes aren't there to disqualify him from office in the future. The Constitution is ambiguous on whether former officeholders can be impeached, and there are good arguments on both sides. That gives Democrats a reasonable basis to vote for conviction and Republicans a reasonable basis to vote against, as apparently all but five or six will do.

Similarly, there were plausible arguments for convicting Bill Clinton (he lied in federal court and thus didn't faithfully execute the laws) and against (the lie was about personal, not professional, misconduct). Then all but a few members voted with their party and impeachment had no perceptible electoral effect in 1998 or 2000. I don't expect it to have much effect in 2022 or 2024.

But heavy majorities of Republican members against impeachment and conviction as he was leaving or had just left office don't mean that Republican politicians and voters will remain as unanimously supportive of him as they were when he was in office.

There are signs already that that support is diminishing. Polls conducted for the Republican consulting firm Echelon Insights in October, during the campaign, showed 59% of Republican voters supporting Trump primarily and only 30% supporting the Republican Party. After the election, November and December polls showed them evenly split. In January, after the assault on the Capitol, only 38% primarily supported Trump, and 48% primarily supported the party.

That polling showed the share voting for Trump in 2024 falling from 65% in December to 45% in January, with 21% of Republicans saying the Senate should vote for conviction and 30% saying he should be barred from federal office. Those findings are corroborated by a January Pew poll showing Trump job approval declining significantly among Republicans.

Perhaps they had noticed that Trump's delusional claims that his "landslide" was "stolen" by crooked voting machinery cost the party the two Georgia Senate elections and its Senate majority.

That's in line with historic perspective. Democrats, perhaps because their party has always been a coalition of out-groups, have tended to celebrate their presidents as philosopher-kings. Republicans, confident that their party is centered on a core constituency of people regarded by themselves and others as typical Americans, have tended to be less starry-eyed. They have regarded their presidents as utilitarian appliances, to be disposed of or upgraded as necessary. Or, as columnist Joseph Alsop said during the Watergate years, "Politicians are like toilet fixtures: they need only serve the intended purpose; they need not be beautiful."

In that spirit, 2020s Republicans may decide that Donald Trump has served his purpose and focus on emerging issues and new leaders, as they did with considerable success after 1964, 1976, 1992 and 2008.

Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
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Michael Barone article shared by Rasmussen Reports.

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Dark Winter of a Grand Old Party

by Patrick Buchanan: There may have been a worse 90 days in Republican Party history, but it is difficult to recall exactly when.

It has been a dreadful three months for the Grand Old Party.

On Nov. 3, President Donald Trump seemed to have lost the White House by narrowly losing three crucial blue states he had won in 2016 — Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — and Georgia and Arizona as well.

Trump immediately mounted an acrimonious two-month campaign to prove the election had been “rigged” and “stolen,” enlisting virtually the entire party behind his claim.

On Jan. 5, after an intra-party battle between Trump and the Georgia Republican leadership, the GOP lost both of Georgia’s Senate seats and control of the U.S. Senate.

On Jan. 6, a mob, after storming the Capitol to block a formal vote to confirm the election of Joe Biden as president, rampaged through the building for hours.

On Jan. 13, Trump was impeached by Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House for “incitation of insurrection.”

The trial began Tuesday, featuring endless reruns of footage from the Jan. 6 occupation, showing thugs invading and trashing the Capitol and searching out Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence.

Trump’s defense: He directed the crowd on the mall to march to the Capitol “peacefully” not violently, and the White House was unaware there might be a mob assault.

In the month since the attack on the Capitol, says The New York Times, 140,000 Republicans in 25 states have renounced their party by changing their registration. And Joe Biden’s approval rating has been in the 50s, a level Trump did not reach in four years.

There may have been a worse 90 days in Republican Party history, but it is difficult to recall exactly when.

There was the Goldwater defeat of 1964, which left the party with less than 40% of the presidential vote and less than a third of the seats in the House and Senate.

There was the Watergate year 1974, which saw Richard Nixon resign in August and the party lose 49 House seats that fall and then lose the presidency to Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Yet, the years following these political disasters were not all that bad.

Goldwater’s defeat was followed by the Nixon-led comeback in 1966, with the party picking up 47 seats and then recapturing the White House in 1968. And while Watergate was followed by the loss of Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter’s presidency opened the door to the winningest Republican of them all, Ronald Reagan.

In short, it is not always true as Sen. John McCain mordantly observed, that the darkest hour is often just before it turns totally black.

What are the prerequisites for a Republican restoration?

As Nixon’s victory in 1968 and Reagan’s in 1980 showed, a party comeback requires, first, the perceived failure of the opposition on issues of major concern to the great majority.

In 1968, LBJ’s Great Society program had ushered in five summers of race riots, soaring crime rates, a social and cultural revolution on the campuses, and a war in Southeast Asia that was consuming 200 to 300 American lives a week.

Under Carter in 1980, there were 21% interest rates, 13% inflation, 7% unemployment and 52 U.S. hostages being held in Iran.

A second and indispensable element of a party comeback is party unity, which Nixon and Reagan produced, as Eisenhower had before them.

Whether the GOP will be united in 2022 or 2024 depends, very much today, on one man.

Still, as of today, though Biden appears personally popular, he seems to be moving leftward in a way that will play into the GOP’s hands on several issues.

Shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline, for example, is a policy decision that will kill thousands of jobs to prevent an “existential crisis” millions of workers do not see.

Second, Biden has moved the racial goalposts from equality of opportunity to “equity” for all, which can only be attained by socialist action to even out incomes and wealth through quotas, affirmative action and set-asides. Yet, voters in ultra-liberal California last fall crushed Prop 16, which would have empowered public agencies, universities and colleges to consider race, gender and ethnicity when making decisions on contracting, hiring and student admissions.

Moreover, the liberal immigration policy Biden promised last fall has already caused a stampede to our Southern border. Some 78,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended by the Border Patrol crossing in January alone. They are now being caught at the rate of 3,000 a day.

Securing the border is a populist and national security issue.

Other Trump add-ons to the traditional GOP agenda remain popular with large majorities of Americans.

Consider the “America first” issues of economic nationalism, the return of manufacturing to the United States, and keeping U.S. troops out of foreign wars where no vital U.S. interests are imperiled.

The questions of the hour are these: Will the GOP be united against an incumbent party that is moving visibly leftward and dragging the country with it — and what will Donald Trump do?
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Patrick Buchanan (@PatrickBuchanan) is currently a blogger, conservative columnist, political analyst, chairman of The American Cause foundation and an editor of The American Conservative. He has been a senior adviser to three Presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and was the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000. Image Source: Ben Garrison at Grrraphics.com…

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The Dem Party Is Radicalizing against the Constitution

by David Harsanyi: Republicans are "radicalizing against democracy" because they rely on our constitutional process when governing.

This is the essence of Chris Hayes' recent Atlantic piece contending that the GOP is descending into authoritarianism. The MSNBC host notes, without any suggestion of self-awareness, that "the Constitution puts a wind at the backs of Republicans and makes them more competitive than they would be otherwise."

What does "otherwise" mean here, exactly? A return to the British Empire? Or does it mean functioning as the centralized direct democracy that progressives covet, but that's never existed in this country? There is no "otherwise."

The idea that the Constitution allows "minoritarian control" might be popular in certain quarters, but it remains a faulty way of looking at our system. The American republic is democratic, yes; but it also protects the rights of the individual, the power of the states and the dignity of the minority, and it does so openly and deliberately.

Federalism, far from representing a modern plot, has existed from the start as a means by which to diffuse power and prevent the subordination of smaller states — read: communities — by bigger ones. There is nothing preventing California from passing whatever laws it wishes at the state level. There are provisions making it hard for California to pass whatever laws it wishes in West Virginia. That's not a bug; it's the point.

To bolster the claim of this minoritarian autocracy, Hayes is impelled to create the impression that the overriding national consensus is being thwarted. "Democrats have established a narrow but surprisingly durable electoral majority, holding control of the House, winning back the Senate, and taking the presidency by 7 million votes," he argues. This is wishful thinking. Voters are fickle and mercurial, and the fleeting vagaries of public sentiment are constantly changing. Four years ago, Republicans controlled everything, too. What has changed? Not much, really.

Even in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic and subsequent economic downturn; even with Donald Trump's boorishness and self-destructive behavior; even with a sloppy election that showered paper ballots on nearly everyone in the country — even then, Republicans came somewhere within 45,000 to 90,000 votes of controlling all of Washington's institutions once again.

There is a good chance that the GOP will take back the House in 2022; the Senate is tied; and nobody has a clue what will happen in the presidential election of 2024. 1932 this was not.

Perhaps the most dangerous thing about anti-constitutionalists such as Hayes is their inability to comprehend their own authoritarianism. Hayes asserts that, in the future, the national fight will revolve around "whether the United States will live up to the promise of democracy." "On that crucial question," he suggests, "we've rarely been so divided."

But he doesn't really mean "democracy" so much as he means "things I personally like." Rest assured, Hayes wasn't a fan of majoritarian "democracy" when the vast majority of Americans opposed gay marriage. He's not really a fan of catchall "democracy" when it doesn't serve his philosophical interests.

As for "authoritarianism" — well, that also seems to depend upon whose ox is being gored. One can only imagine the kind of raging screeds we'd be subjected to if Republicans were talking about a national domestic-terror act — a Patriot Act for Americans — that was explicitly designed to weed out the left-wing extremists that burned their way through last summer. And how many Hayes-approved protestors do we think would hit the streets if the Biden administration had instructed the military to stand down so it could ferret out thought-crimes?

Forget the hypotheticals: Where are Hayes's passionate objections to President Biden's having signed a slew of acutely undemocratic executive orders — including international agreements — without the consent of the legislative branch? How loud has he been in criticism of Chuck Schumer's imploring the executive to strip Congress of its power? Where was he when the Obama administration went after the conscience rights of nuns? Clearly, for many left-wingers — and, no, it is no longer accurate to call them "liberals" — "democracy" and "authoritarianism" are wholly situational ideas. I won't be lectured by them any longer.

To believe the "Biden era of American politics is shaping up as a contest between the growing ideological hegemony of liberalism, and the intensifying opposition of a political minority that has proved willing to engage in violence in order to hold on to power," one has to ignore reality — starting with the endless supply of leftist riots that broke out across the country last summer to unfailingly rave reviews — and, in concert, to pretend that the Capitol rioters were not only magically "different," but represented the core of the conservative argument.

Well, I won't do either. I'm for the rule of law — as it actually exists, not how others would like it to exist. I am for the Constitution. I am for both houses of Congress. I am for the states. I am for the Bill of Rights. I'm for all those things because I reject authoritarianism.
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David Harsanyi @davidharsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist and the author of “The People Have Spoken (and They Are Wrong): The Case Against Democracy.” This article was shared by Jewish World Review.

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Technology Tension

by Kerby Anderson: Why is there so much panic and tension in our world today? There are probably lots of explanations, but Michael Brendan Dougherty puts his finger on our smartphones. He acknowledges that the pandemic and the lockdowns have contributed to the unease we feel. He also concedes that the polarization of our politics is also having a significant impact.

But he goes on to explain that the smartphone is a “novel substance in our environment.” He believes it is “inducing people to a kind of low-level panic and paranoia, especially in conjunction with social media.”

Much of the impact, he believes, is physiological. For example, a smartphone uses a small, backlit screen that emits blue light. There is quite a bit of research that documents the effect of blue light on circadian rhythms that are an important part of our sleep. Blue light apparently suppresses the secretion of the hormone melatonin.

Another physiological factor is the posture many have while holding a cell phone. People spend time with their shoulders falling forward, hunched over with a sunken chest, and head tilted downward. This apparently dramatically increases the release of stress hormones.

He also provides some documentation on brain activity. For example, online gamers shows gray-matter atrophy in the motor areas of the brain. This can have an negative impact on impulse control, planning, and organization.

Add to all of this to the reality that social media can leave typical users nervous, frazzled, and overstimulated. The physiological factors coupled with the electronic stimulation may explain so much of the tension we feel in our society today.

I think it time for us to consider a digital fast. Turn off the phones. Log out of social media.
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Kerby Anderson (@KerbyAnderson) is an author, lecturer, visiting professor and radio host and contributor on nationally syndicated Point of View and the "Probe" radio programs.

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Sharp Shooter

. . . Joe Biden isn’t quite hitting the target of implementing his COVID vaccine program.
Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

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UN Human Rights Office Prepares Global “LGBT Hate Groups” Blacklist

Victor Madrigal-Borloz

by Stefano Gennarini: The UN rights office is collecting the names of anyone who opposes the LGBT agenda in any way.

Politicians, religious leaders, and organizations from around the world who defend life and family will likely be put on a blacklist by the UN office for human rights. The drastic new measure may be used to impose sanctions on pro-family advocates and expose them to terrorist attacks.

“Who are the main actors who argue that the defenders of human rights of LGBT individuals are furthering a so-called ‘gender ideology’?” reads a call for inputs from the UN rights office published last month, primarily addressed to LGBT groups.

In the broadly worded prompt, the UN rights office asks for examples of “public expressions or statements by political and/or religious leaders” who challenge LGBT rights.

“What are their main arguments?” the UN rights office asks. “Have they been effective in regressing the human rights of LGBT individuals? Have their strategies directly or indirectly also impacted on the human rights of women and girls?” they add.

The UN rights office’s call for input denigrates defenders of life and family who dispute “gender ideology” as conspiracy theorists. It gives for granted that “gender theory” is not an ideology, but an unquestionable truth. The “meanings” attached to sex and gender are “socially constructed” it claims.

In contrast to this true gender theory, it asks for details of the “narratives” of pro-life and pro-family groups who oppose gender ideology. These narratives, the UN rights office claims are “used to fuel violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and their particular impact on sexual and reproductive rights.”

The UN rights office is especially focused on religions of pro-life and pro-family groups.

It asks for any “examples where the concept of gender has been used in religious narratives or narratives of tradition, traditional values or protection of the family” in opposition to new LGBT laws and policies.

And it asks for information on protections for freedom of religion, belief or conscience that would limit “the enjoyment of human rights (including sexual and reproductive rights) of LGBT persons.” The UN rights office even refers to conscientious objection as a mere “figure” instead of a basic human right that can be vindicated.

The inputs provided to the UN rights office will be used in the next report of the United Nations independent expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The UN LGBT czar appears to be adopting the approach of the Southern Poverty Law Center, of creating a list of “hate groups.” The hate list of the Southern Poverty Law Center was notoriously used by domestic terrorist Floyd Corkins in an armed attack on the Family Research Council in 2015. The use of such hate lists has been widely criticized.

Democrats introduced a bill in the U.S. Congress to create a similar international backlist last year, called the Global Respect Act, imposing sanctions on all foreigners who oppose LGBT rights.

It is not the first time the UN LGBT expert has attempted to focus on religion. In a 2019 report he called on states to “take decisive action” against religious leaders who oppose LGBT rights.
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Stefano Gennarini is the Vice President for Legal Studies at the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam).

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TIME: ‘Shadow Campaign Saved 2020 Election.’ Is that True?

Political outsiders reading this shockingly brazen piece believe it proves a ‘cabal’ colluded against Trump. Political insiders say this is just how politics works.
by Catherine Mortensen: A Time magazine article, ‘The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,’ written by Molly Ball, TIME’s National Political Correspondent, is getting a lot of attention in conservative circles because it seems to make the case that the election was, in fact an insider hit job on President Trump.

From TIME:There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted.Some conservatives believe this proves there was “coordinated voter manipulation to swing votes against President Trump.” However, at least one conservative political insider says the piece is “needlessly provocative and unsupported” by the facts. For two different takes on the piece, we go the political newcomer Brett Kimball, a guest columnist for the Daily Torch and Dan McGlaughlin, senior writer at the conservative National Review Online. For McGlaughlin’s take on the piece, we pulled from his National Review Online column, Irresponsible Hype from Molly Ball and Time Magazine.

Is the Time piece worth reading?

Kimball: Everyone should read the full article, if only to see firsthand the excruciating details with which Ball describes the efforts, pre and post-election, to secure a Joe Biden victory.

It’s interesting to note Ball’s choice of the word “saved” as used in the title of her article. It’s clear she sees the work of this shadow campaign as unobjectionably good and necessary. But conservatives read Ball’s words as an admission of guilt on the part of the institutions they had already suspected of conspiring against their candidate, and with good reason. She’s just admitted as much. She claims this “well-funded cabal of powerful people” was not attempting to “steal” the election; “they were fortifying it.” But anyone who reads this shockingly brazen, pretentious piece knows exactly what they were “fortifying” against: the possibility of a victory for Donald Trump.

McGlaughlin: [Writer] Molly Ball would like to convince you that, if you’re worried about a conspiracy run by a wealthy, invisible cabal to rig the election against Donald Trump, you’re right. But the facts in her own story don’t entirely support her own breathless rhetoric. Are she and her editors at Time withholding more evidence? Letting overeager sources hang themselves in their headlong rush to burnish their reputations and fundraising lists? Or just being completely reckless and irresponsible in feeding the conspiracy-theory machine for clicks? Ball’s article raises some legitimate concerns, but it is written in a needlessly provocative style. Time’s article is irresponsible hype.

What is your reaction to these particularly provocative sections of the article?This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. . . . The participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. Kimball: This is a stunning admission. Many on the Left just last month vilified anyone who dared encourage the idea that Trump was right about his claims of conspiracy against him.

The surest example of this group’s secret efforts came when the New York Post released their expose of Hunter Biden just weeks before the election, detailing highly credible accusations of corruption and wrongdoing on the part of the Biden family. Almost immediately the Silicon Valley tech infrastructure united to bury the story and claim “misinformation.” Twitter banned the account of one of the oldest papers in the country’s history while other sites did their part to bury the story as well. Mark Zuckerburg, under pressure from Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and other “civil rights activists,” agreed to crack down on content on his site deemed to be “false information.” Gupta, who runs in social and professional circles that include Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and tech giants, has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden.

McGlaughlin: There is a lot going on here. In Ball’s framing of the story, a single conspiratorial cabal that started with “the galactic center for a constellation of operatives across the left” united progressive activists, Big Tech, media, state elections officials, lawyers, business, labor, street activists, and a handful of Republicans. They worked to change voting rules to advantage Democrats, and plotted to thwart Republican efforts to challenge the rules they had already changed or the outcomes they had helped create.

Ball mixes and matches together into a single stew the story of efforts to (1) strategize among Democrats to beat Trump, (2) change voting rules to allow more mail-in balloting, (3) convince voters to vote by mail, (4), finance protective equipment for polling places, (5) win preelection lawsuits for Democrats over Republicans, (6) enlist Big Tech leaders such as Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook to actively police “disinformation” on their platforms, (7) spread public awareness of the challenges of vote-counting in 2020, (8) promote in-person and mail-in turnout by black voters in particular, (9) control the timing of street protests on the left, and (10) pressure or convince Republican elections officials and state legislators to resist Trump’s post-election schemes. Ball presents this narrative as if it were a single, unified plan directed by the people that she interviewed. We are given no evidence, however, of which people and groups were involved across multiple different tasks, or how coordinated those efforts really were.

Does the writer prove their was a nefarious scheme, or does she just explain how insider politics works?

Kimball: It was total hit job on Trump. Ball admits that Trump was right to question the quick push to declare Joe Biden president. According to Ball, the “architect” of this secret alliance to “protect” the election, was a man named Mike Podhorzer. As senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, Podhorzer has “marshaled the latest tactics and data to help its favored candidates win elections… [for nearly a] quarter century.” If that isn’t concerning enough, she goes on to describe how Podhorzer created a group ironically titled the “Democracy Defense Coalition,” whose first goal was “overhauling America’s balky election infrastructure.” This group of leftist activists from various institutions and ideologies worked hard to implement the messy and unsecure voting practices which raised concerns for millions after the election.

Many had expressed concern over new voting procedures allowing for an unprecedented amount of mail in votes which historically offer a high probability of potential fraud. Coupled with new rules allowing for ballot harvesting on a scale never seen before, and with the encouragement to vote by mail coming from all corners of the leftist institutional spectrum, there certainly seemed a case to be made for fears of potential malfeasance in the process of distributing and counting those largely unverifiable ballots. Those making claims such as those were quickly dismissed, but it seems they had good reason to suspect there was something larger at play.

McGlaughlin: The reaction to this story among those on the right has been precisely what anyone familiar with American politics would have predicted. The most egregious example of the story’s slanted, partisan framing is its efforts to have progressives take credit for the actions of Michigan House speaker Lee Chatfield, Michigan Senate majority leader Mike Shirkey, Detroit canvasser Aaron Van Langevelde, and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, all Republicans who did their jobs under pressure from Trump to undo the results of the election. The article spins hypothetical theories about what Trump could offer these people, and tries to portray its progressive heroes as important to their decisions. But no evidence whatsoever is presented to show that any of the groups in the article had any influence on Republican decisions to act honorably — decisions that, unlike those of the Democrats quoted throughout this article, were not simply a matter of advancing their own partisan self-interest.

What is your biggest takeaway from the article?

Kimball: Trump and his supporters were right to question the unprecedented voting procedures being implemented in the lead-up to the election in various key states. They were also right in questioning the motives of those who pushed so feverishly to accept the initial results of the election just one day after. This came after the Left claimed for months that it may take weeks to fully count the votes and that any premature declaration of victory on Trump’s part would be nothing short of a “threat to democracy.”

McGlaughlin: Ball and her editors had to know, with absolute certainty, that this is how her article would be received. So why write it that way? When you look closely, there is less than meets the eye in some places, and more than a few reasons to think that her sources are puffing up their own roles in order to advance their own standing in the progressive world as master operators and saviors of democracy. And there are many unanswered questions, some that cast doubt on her premises, others that should justifiably raise conservative eyebrows.

Ball has typically been a diligent reporter, and there are things in this article worth knowing and exploring. But she really should have been much more careful about throwing around terms like “conspiracy” and “cabal,” and asked harder questions about what her sources were really up to.
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Catherine Mortensen is Vice President of Communications at Americans for Limited Government.

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If Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Is the Standard, What About Democrat ‘Kingmaker’ Rev. Al Sharpton?

by Larry Elder: Because of offensive tweets posted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., before she won office, House Democrats joined by 11 Republicans voted to strip her of her committee assignments.

If this is the new standard, can we apply this to the Rev. Al Sharpton, aka a Democratic “kingmaker,” whose support was solicited by every major 2020 Democratic presidential candidate?

About Sharpton’s power and stature, The Atlantic, in 2019, said: “The 2020 Democrats’ courting of Sharpton is well under way. He says he expects his endorsement to make a difference when he makes it. … Sharpton occupies a distinct space. Other than Barack Obama, there is no better-known Black leader in the country, nor one with bigger reach: The National Action Network has 100 chapters across America, and Sharpton himself hosts a radio show on 70 stations every weekday and a TV show on MSNBC on Saturdays and Sundays.”

Once upon a time, normal people found Sharpton offensive. Take former Rep. Joe Scarborough, now a cozy colleague of Sharpton on MSNBC, where both host cable shows. How offensive did Scarborough once find Sharpton? When then-Republican Scarborough served as a House representative from Florida in 2000, he introduced the following resolution, entitled “Condemning the Racist and Anti-Semitic Views of The Reverend Al Sharpton”:

“Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton has referred to members of the Jewish faith as ‘bloodsucking (J)ews’ and ‘Jew bastards’; … referred to members of the Jewish faith as ‘white interlopers’ and ‘diamond merchants’; … was found guilty of defamation by a jury in a New York court arising from the false accusation that former Assistant District Attorney Steven Pagones, who is white, raped and assaulted a fifteen year-old Black girl; … has refused to accept responsibility and expresses no regret for defaming Mr. Pagones; … Sharpton’s vicious verbal anti-Semitic attacks directed at members of the Jewish faith, and in particular, a Jewish landlord, arising from a simple landlord-tenant dispute with a Black tenant, incited widespread violence, riots and the murder of five innocent people; … Sharpton’s fierce demagoguery incited violence, riots and murder in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, following the accidental death of a Black pedestrian child hit by the motorcade of Orthodox Rabbi Menachem Schneerson; … Sharpton led a protest in the Crown Heights neighborhood and marched next to a protester with a sign that read ‘The White Man is the Devil’; … has insulted members of the Jewish faith by challenging Jews to violence and stating to Jews to ‘pin down’ their yarmulkes. …

“Now, therefore, be it resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), that the Congress —

“(1) condemns the practices of the Reverend Al Sharpton, which seek to divide Americans on the basis of race, ethnicity, and religion;

“(2) expresses its outrage over the violence that has resulted due to the Reverend Al Sharpton’s incendiary words and actions; and

“(3) fervently urges elected officials and public servants, who have condoned and legitimized the Reverend Al Sharpton’s incendiary words and actions, to publicly denounce and condemn such racist and anti-Semitic views.”

At the 1995 Million Man March, Sharpton said, “O.J. is home, but Mumia Abu-Jamal ain’t home, and we won’t stop till all our people that need a chance in an awkward and unbalanced criminal justice system can come home.” Of course, O.J. Simpson, whose acquittal was celebrated by Sharpton, murdered two people. As for Abu-Jamal, a Black man, he was convicted in 1982 for the execution-style murder of a white Philadelphia cop. The prosecutor called the case “the strongest I ever had.” CNN host Michael Smerconish co-wrote, along with the slain officer’s widow, a book called “Murdered by Mumia.” Smerconish criticizes “ignorant” supporters of Jamal who, like Sharpton, call Abu-Jamal innocent. Smerconish also said that the cop killer’s multiple post-conviction appeals “made a mockery of the judicial system.”

Ladies and gentlemen, make way for Al Sharpton, Democratic kingmaker.
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Larry Elder (@larryelder) is a best-selling author and radio talk-show host, an American lawyer, writer and radio and television personality who is also known as the "Sage From South Central." To find out more about Larry Elder. Visit his website at LarryElder.com for list of other articles.

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Smithsonian’s Clarence Thomas Exhibit Guilty of ‘Irresponsible Bias,’ Black Conservatives Say

Justice Clarence Thomas

by Virginia Allen: A group of black conservative leaders has called on the National Museum of African American History and Culture to update its exhibit on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to correct what it calls “irresponsible bias” in the display.

“Black history cannot and should not be political,” Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., wrote in a letter last week to the museum originally reported by Fox News.

“The American people deserve an unbiased assessment of the trailblazers in the Black community,” he wrote, “[I]t is time to honor Justice Thomas with this long-overdue documentation of his whole life and history, and not the disingenuous effort displayed today.”

Donalds’ letter—which was also signed by Rep. Burgess Owens, R-Utah; Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.; Heritage Foundation President Kay C. James; Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, Alveda King; and Republican commentator Paris Dennard, among others—draws attention to the disparity between the museum’s exhibit on the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and that of Thomas.

"As a Black man who has a profound respect for the contributions Justice Thomas has propitiated for generations to come, this museum must encapsulate his life as it does for hundreds of other monumental Black figures,” Donalds wrote.

He said the museum does not currently reflect Thomas’ “achievements and life compared to his counterpart, the Honorable Justice Thurgood Marshall.”

When the museum opened it 2016, the only mention of Thomas was in connection with Anita Hill, a former staff member of his who made unproven sexual harassment allegations against him during his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings.

About a year after opening, the museum unveiled a new joint display to highlight the life and work of Thomas and Marshall. Thomas said he was not consulted in the creation of the new exhibit.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture exhibit on former
Justice Thurgood Marshall and Justice Clarence Thomas. (Photo: NMAAHC)

The exhibit features a few photos of Thomas, including one of him while he was attending Holy Cross College and another of him on the cover of Jet magazine.

The text below the images of Thomas compares the way in which Marshall’s and Thomas’ opinions of the law were formed:The University of Maryland Law School would not admit Marshall because he was black. Instead, he attended Howard Law School, and later won a case for another student denied admission to Maryland.

Thomas attended Yale Law School, where he felt that whites resented him and assumed he was admitted because of racial quotas—a slight that shaped his view of affirmative action policies.

For both justices, their experiences with educational institutions informed their perspective on the Court’s role in protecting equal opportunity.

Information and photos of Justice Clarence Thomas are seen in a National
Museum of African American History and Culture exhibit. (Photo: NMAAHC)

“This museum is a national treasure for our nation’s fabric—this is especially true for me as a Black American and Republican,” Donalds wrote in the letter to the museum. “Black History transcends political correctness and partisanship. Overall, the NMAAHC honors its mission, but it is unfortunate to see pitfalls likely driven by irresponsible bias.”

A museum representative responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on the letter by explaining that since its inception, “the museum has sought to document the life, history, and culture of African Americans in this country.”

“While all our exhibitions are based on rigorous research, they are still open to interpretation,” the statement said.

The museum’s statement also addressed the concerns over the way in which Thomas is presented in the exhibit:As one of only two African American Supreme Court Justices in the history of the United States, Justice Clarence Thomas is featured in the museum along with Thurgood Marshall. As part of the museum’s one-year anniversary in September 2017, the Museum installed a display about the Supreme Court within ‘Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation,’ one of the Museum’s inaugural exhibitions.

Justice Thomas is featured in a case with Justice Thurgood Marshall. We believe the display indeed honors Justice Thomas’ contribution to the legal field and his status as the second African American on the Supreme Court.“As one of the only two Black men to serve on our nation’s highest and most distinguished court, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas deserves unbiased recognition from the National Museum of African American History and Culture,” Owens, the Utah Republican lawmaker who co-signed the letter, told Fox News.

Owens—who, like Donalds, is black—also urged the museum to “appropriately honor the continued legacy of Justice Thomas, especially as we celebrate Black History Month and the many trailblazers who faced the odds to secure the dreams of future generations.”
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Virginia Allen (@Virginia_Allen5) is a news producer for The Daily Signal.

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Heads Up, Biden: FDR Saw the Folly Of Appeasement

Conrad Black

by Conrad Black: Impeachment will likely prove the most disastrous political initiative since Richard Nixon involved himself directly in the Watergate defense strategy. Joe Biden had a perfect opportunity to be a president of unity and bipartisanship by watering down to a censure vote this second annual spurious impeachment of Donald Trump or forcing its abandonment altogether.

If he had wished to couple such a statesmanlike gesture with a backhanded continuation of the malicious assault upon President Trump that has been uninterrupted these five years, he could have informally assured some sort of prosecution in the courts of the District of Columbia, where any Republican, the party of between 3% and 5% district residents, will be convicted of any charge, as if every juror were Congresswoman Maxine (“Impeach Trump!”) Waters.

The strategic direction of the Democrats seemed extraordinarily astute at times in the last year: parachuting a discarded Joe Biden in ahead of a rampaging Bernie Sanders, invoking the coronavirus to keep the candidate in his basement while the airtight Democratic-media and social-media cartel conducted the Democratic campaign, and pushing mail-in voting and other changes to the electoral system under cover of the pandemic.

There are many precedents for political leaders and strategists to be much more expert in gaining office than in executing it. If the Biden regime had opted for a de-escalation of hostilities by forcing through (and they would have had some Republican support for it) a reasonably worded censure of the president for his reckless exhortation on January 6, while leaving it to the D.C. kangaroo courts to tie up the former president in years of pretrial, trial, and appellate activity to get clear of the ludicrous complaint about to be pitched in the U.S. Senate, they could have extended their honeymoon, distracted the country from their already obvious shortcomings, and severely aggravated the fissiparous forces within the Republican Party.

If the Democrats insist on producing witnesses and stretching the case out, they will strangle a Biden honeymoon that has already been largely wasted by their ostentatious refusal to make any compromise on an extravagant Covid-19 relief bill, by pandering to the open-borders minority of their followers, by a full-metal-jacket assault on the energy industry, by starting to dismantle the alliance Mr. Trump had forged between Israel and the principal Arab powers, and by warming up to the appeasement of the beastly theocracy in Iran.

President Biden has rearranged the portraits and other decor in the Oval Office, as all incoming presidents do. He has placed a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt among the Founding Fathers of the country, removed the flags of the six armed forces, and prominently placed busts of John F. and Robert F. Kennedy. This is all perfectly reasonable, particularly for a Democratic president.

It implies that he is conversant with FDR’s formulation in two speeches to the Congress in 1941 that revealed the basis of subsequent American foreign policy. In the State of the Union message of January of that year, FDR said: “We must always be wary of those who ‘with sounding brass and tinkling cymbal’ would preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement.”

In his war message after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he said: “We will make very certain that this form of treachery never again endangers us.”

The enemies of America and of Western civilization devised a crude method of evading the determination of Roosevelt and all his successors to avoid appeasement of evil and to deter evil by any nation, by subsidizing terrorism whose national origin is difficult to trace and punish appropriately.

By preparing to appease Iran, this president is sidling up to a policy that amounts to peace through weakness. All those with an interest — not just China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, but those who have come to rely on American strength and vigilance regarding its international strategic interests — will adjust their policies appropriately if this unpromising tendency is confirmed.

Anonymous Homeland Security Department officials allegedly wrote last year that white supremacists are a greater threat to American national security than international terrorists. If that is the position of the new administration in national-security matters, this administration has already begun its descent into ignominy and failure, a journey that will be hastened by the contemptible farce of an impeachment trial of a retired president.

That trial will also be the greatest possible revival of the political career that it is designed to end.
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Conrad Black is a Canadian writer with an interesting past. Article shared in The New York Sun

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No, Homeschoolers Are Not The Problem

by Thomas Griffin: Conservative homeschooling groups have “very successfully undermined children’s basic physical safety and right to an education all across the U.S.,” wrote Jill Filipovic. She is a lawyer, New York Times contributor, and the author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness whose ideologies are taking on new adversaries with her latest attack on homeschool families across the nation.

Her latest piece is entitled “One of the most controversial ideas in America is that children should have rights: Let's talk about homeschooling.” Essentially, her claim is that children’s rights are violated by parents who homeschool because they are not educated and their conservative Christianity acts as a facade for abuse to occur. Filipovic is speaking, not only of the abuse of a flawed education, but the physical abuse of young people by their own parents. She claims that homeschooling is a manner of covering up the crimes of these parents as well as an example of far-right Christians’ desire to indoctrinate their children in ancient falsehoods.

“It is absolutely the case that if you so much as write about homeschooling, and certainly if you try to legislate anything related to it,” Filipovic tweeted, “you will be incessantly harassed by a right-wing mob. Children's rights are as threatening to them as feminism is.” Her major claim is that homeschooling families are anti-children and anti-women. What Filipovic neglects to mention is the fact that the majority of homeschool families choose this route of education because their local school district has failed to produce both good test scores and character-driven human beings.

Parents had the pride of place in educating their children until the public school system took off in American in the 1800s. The indisputable fact is that public schools gifted the economy with more workers while it tore apart the ancient understanding that parents ought to be involved in their children’s education. The wedge was driven between familial-based raising of youth and government-crafted education.

Filipovic, however, argued that Christianity and conservatism are ruining families. “One of the most controversial ideas in America is that children have rights. And the people who are most opposed, who keep us as one of just three nations that refuse to recognize the rights of the child, are ‘pro-life, pro-family’ homeschooling advocates.” Filipovic makes out that those who say they are for the unborn and defend the rights of the family are somehow culprits who should be convicted of abuse. Homeschool families are more often Christians or conservatives, but that does not mean they are automatically ill-advised because they believe in investing everything in forming their children.

This is yet another example of how an entire population is viewed as outcasts and abusers because of their political or religious affiliation. Filipovic focused much of her time on the abuse of minors in homeschool families and how these environments protect the abusers. If the topic is the physical abuse of children then the debate often centers on the scandals in the Catholic Church regarding the abuse of children by priests. While the media always aggressively gravitates towards bashing the Church, there is much more evidence of abuse in public schools then there is among Catholic clergy.

“Think the Catholic Church has a problem?” says Charol Shakeshaft, Hofstra University researcher on abuse in the public school system and former adviser to the Department of Education. “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.” To argue that homeschooling is child abuse is simply the creation of an empty straw-man argument that cannot stand.

The fact is that the “United States state and local child protective services (CPS) estimated that 686,000 children were victims of maltreatment in 2012.” The same reports also noted that abuse by school employees is estimated to impact roughly 10 percent of children in the public school system with more than 27 percent of children being 3 years old or younger. This is not the only reason for homeschooling, but in response to the abuse accusation thrown at them we must investigate the issues with our public schools.

While somewhere between 4 and 5 million children are homeschooled in the United States each year, this number has also increased with the negative impacts on education during the pandemic. COVID has not just caused problems in education but has revealed the true state of the public school system. Teachers would rather have months off then return to the classroom, and the administrations and departments of education are more afraid of offending the teachers unions than fighting for the well-being of their students.

To state that homeschool families are ultra-conservatives and abuse their children is yet another example of outlandish rhetoric that further divides the nation. Some parents may choose to educate their children at home, that is not a crime. It is actually a right. Some parents may choose tos send their children to private school or public school which is also their right. If anything is clear, there are imperfections with all current methods of education. However, what is also the staunch truth is that parents are necessary agents in aiding their children in becoming knowledgeable and virtuous citizens.

That being said, more and more people are seeing that homeschooling is a real option that binds the family together and places more onus on the student to become all that they can be. Homeschooling is not abusive and it is not neglectful of children's rights. On the contrary, when done well it allows children to flourish and become the leaders our country desperately needs.
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Thomas Griffin teaches at a Catholic high school on Long Island and lives with his wife and son. He received a master’s degree in theology and is currently a master’s candidate in philosophy whose latest content can be viewed at EmptyTombProject.org. Article shared in Life Site.

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