Gender Follies
March 8, 2022 — John Hinderaker
It’s pretty much a daily occurrence–Democrats spreading disinformation about Florida, one of America’s most prosperous, fastest growing, and freest states. I suppose it is the last part they really hate. The current smear is propagated by Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and the disgusting Jen Psaki: .@POTUS and his Administration stand with LGBTQI+ students everywhere, including in Florida where they have passed hateful legislation targeting vulnerable students. https://t.co/WAB2Ksdbqf — Jen
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March 1, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reports: “As Russia Wages War, US Army Trains Officers on Gender Identity.” Subhead: “Mandatory military training program pushes soldiers to undergo gender reassignment surgery.” Kredo’s story opens: While Russia wages a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Army is putting its soldiers through training on gender pronouns and coaching officers on when to offer soldiers gender transition surgery, according to an official military presentation
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January 25, 2022 — John Hinderaker
The Mars candy company has gone woke, updating its M&M characters to fit today’s weird zeitgeist. That prompted this response by the Babylon Bee, featuring a “trans” Peanut M&M who *identifies* as a Skittle. It is funny, but it also is not far off from the lunacy that we see in today’s world. Which makes for good satire: M&Ms Introduce First Trans Character Who Identifies As A Skittle ⏩ https://t.co/5I8aG1axAH
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December 27, 2021 — John Hinderaker
The word “gender” is a slightly more genteel way of saying “sex.” That is was how it was always understood until leftists hijacked the word a few years ago, asserting that while there are only two sexes, male and female, defined by XX vs XY chromosomes, there are a large and growing number of “genders.” This never made any sense, and it is nice to see that hardly anyone buys
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December 22, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Abigail Shrier is the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Standing athwart the trans craze shouting stop, she and the book have achieved a certain notoriety. Having been invited to give a speech at Princeton, she was of course canceled, only to emerge off campus before a limited audience of 35. She gave a wonderful speech addressed to young people. The theme, as Bari Weiss aptly
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December 16, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Remember how the left not long ago went on and on and on about the supposed “war on women” from the right? The irony is that according to current leftist dogma, women no longer exist. After all, the Biden Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services is insisting in referring to mothers (once understood as a significant subset of beings known as “women”) as “birthing persons,” because current leftist dogma
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November 18, 2021 — John Hinderaker
The precepts of Critical Race Theory are only taught to law school students, right? Sure. And also to pre-schoolers. Check out this new program from the University of Texas called GoKAR!. KAR stands for Kids Against Racism. UT is looking for parents “caregivers” who have preschool children ages four to five. They must “identify as white.” This is so the four and five year olds can be subjected to an
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November 5, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Last Sunday, the Washington Post ran a frivolous article about a self-proclaimed teenage witch. On the front page. Why did the Post give front-page coverage to a non-story like this? I believe the answer can be found in passages like this one: Bennett [the so-called witch], who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, starts by meditating and selecting a tarot card from a deck on a small wooden table.
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October 28, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Worried about the Virginia governor’s race, Barack Obama says that concerns over Critical Race Theory and transgenderism in the public schools are “phony trumped-up culture wars”. But Americans overwhelmingly disagree, as Rasmussen Reports finds today: Most Americans believe parents are right to be concerned about controversial teaching in public schools, and reject the claim that these are “phony” issues. A new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports and
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October 27, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Democratic orthodoxy is inconsistent with the preservation of the United States or even of civilized society. As for destruction of the United States, consider the erasure of our southern border that the Biden administration has promoted. As for the destruction of civilized society, consider the news broken by Joe Simonson in his Free Beacon story “White House ‘Gender Equity’ Plan Calls for Elimination of Cash Bail.” Simonson quotes the 42-page
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October 11, 2021 — John Hinderaker
The Man of Steel has disappeared into space, and I take it that DC Comics is desperate for some kind of relevance. Thus, the Telegraph headlines: “New Superman revealed as bisexual in latest DC Comics series.” But the article actually sounds a little worse than that: In the new Superman: Son of Kal-El series of comics, Jonathan Kent, the son of Lois Lane and Clark Kent who has disappeared off
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October 11, 2021 — John Hinderaker
A remarkably large number of laws are enacted not because they will do any good, but for their symbolic value, especially when such value is perceived strongly by a constituency of one party or the other. This is, in my opinion, one of many signs of the decadence of our democracy. A case in point is the much-touted law, just passed in California, that has been described as requiring gender-neutral
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September 23, 2021 — John Hinderaker
I suppose that is an evergreen headline, since America’s public schools are a disaster in pretty much every way. But what prompts it at the moment is the Richfield, Minnesota school district. Richfield is a modest suburb of Minneapolis, not the kind of tony place you might expect to go off the deep end. Richfield’s schools are in the news today, with this headline from a local TV station: “Richfield
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September 5, 2021 — Steven Hayward
We commented last week on how our “nation builders” thought it was important for Kabul University to have a master’s program in gender studies, but it turns out someone had the bright idea that modern art was also a necessity for Afghan women, starting with Duchamps’ “contextual art” urinal (from a 2015 British documentary—just 43 seconds long, but take in the looks on the faces of the Afghan women subjected
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August 22, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Everyone used to ridicule the foolish “win hearts and minds” sentimentalism of the liberals who planned and ran the Vietnam War, but our foreign policy establishment never learned a thing from that debacle. (Aside: How do you win “hearts and minds” in a place like South Vietnam circa 1965 or Afghanistan, circa now: you kill the enemy in large numbers.) Here are a few choice excerpts from a CIA report
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July 4, 2021 — John Hinderaker
At a Los Angeles spa, a “trans woman” used the women’s locker room and waved his unit around in front of a group that included small girls. The women were understandably unhappy. Violence erupted between dueling protesters outside an upscale California spa Saturday after viral video showed a woman complaining about a transgender female being allowed to disrobe in the women’s section — allegedly exposing their penis in front of
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May 25, 2021 — Scott Johnson
We continue our preview of the new (Spring) issue of the Claremont Review Books with Mary Eberstadt’s review/essay “Girls will be boys.” Subhead: “The trans-kid craze must be stopped.” The left’s war on nature has manifested and taken root in the transgender movement with astonishing speed and success. Eberstadt takes up the new books by Abigail Shrier and Debra Soh that challenge it in its trans kids aspect (“specifically, minor
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