Politicians speak about following the science to set COVID-19 policy, but their decisions are more about political objectives than they are about medical efficacy. Why else did California Gov. Gavin Newsom shut down retail businesses in March when the state had under 300 cases per day but allow them to be open in July when the state clocked in at over 10,000 cases per day?
But as badly as our lockdowns have damaged local businesses, a potentially even bigger problem is created by the physical closure of schools. One of the most important functions of a civil society is to protect and educate its children, and the cancellation of in-person education stands to become one of the most detrimental acts of collateral damage during this pandemic.
California currently expects its 5-year-olds to complete kindergarten exclusively through online distance learning. For this dubious undertaking, the politicians are given passionate political cover. The Los Angeles Teachers Union maintains that “the only people guaranteed to benefit from the premature reopening of schools amidst a rapidly accelerating pandemic are billionaires and the politicians they’ve purchased” -- as if billionaires typically send their kids to L.A. public schools. The wealthy will send their children to in-person private schools or hire additional tutors, while most American families will suffer from a widening education gap that could set their kids back years. Worst of all, none of this is medically substantiated.
Children Are Safe
There is a great deal of fear generated in the media about risk to children, but the truth is that children are incredibly resistant to coronavirus. So much so that children are far more likely to die from the flu, or even just from driving to school, than from COVID-19.
The CDC has recorded a total of 20 COVID-19 deaths in children ages 5-14 compared to almost 2,000 deaths from non-COVID causes in the same time period for the same age group. It means children have been 100 times more likely to die from non-COVID causes during the pandemic than from COVID. This puts the risk of COVID death for children 5 to 14 in the same ballpark as deaths by lightning.
Claims of long-term damage or mystery illnesses have not been backed by any definitive evidence and they therefore serve more as a scare and intimidation tactic than as a medical guide. The truth is that children so far have had around a 1 in 20,000 rate of COVID-19 hospitalizations, according to the CDC. While controversial to some, Sweden’s policy of keeping primary schools open even at the height of the pandemic serves as an excellent counterpoint. With over 1 million children, Sweden did not have a single death of a school-aged child despite full attendance and no masks.
Sweden is not alone in sending kids to school. Denmark opened its schools back up in April. Finland kept normal class sizes when it reopened. Parts of Montana opened schools back in May, as did parts of Canada and Germany. The Netherlands announced that Dutch students didn’t even need to socially distance anymore as they experienced very low transmission rates. Schools all across Europe have reopened successfully, both with and without masks. The risk to the children themselves therefore cannot be used as a justification for the massive damage created by ceasing in-person education. But what about the teachers?
A study in Switzerland, including a review of World Health Organization contact tracing, failed to find evidence of a single case of a child passing coronavirus to an adult. A comprehensive study in Iceland isolated SARS-CoV-2 samples from every positive case, sequenced the virus genome, and tracked the mutation patterns. This analysis, along with contact tracing, allowed researchers to identify definitively who passed the virus to whom. The study concluded “[E]ven if children do get infected, they are less likely to transmit the disease to others than adults. We have not found a single instance of a child infecting parents.” A study of schools in Ireland found “no evidence of secondary transmission of COVID-19 from children attending school.”
New Zealand conducted a study across 15 schools in which 18 individuals with COVID-19 were in close contact with 735 other students and 128 staff members, yet no teacher or staff member contacted COVID-19 from any of the initial 18 cases and only two students out of the 735 would later test positive. The New Zealand study concluded: “Our investigation found no evidence of children infecting teachers.”
Cases and close contacts among teachers and students in 10 New Zealand high schools showing one secondary case in a student. Source: “COVID-19 in Schools – the Experience in NSW”
Since there could still be a rare school outbreak, such as experienced in Israel, students with high-risk household members should be given a distance education option, and teachers who believe themselves or their households to be at high risk should be allowed to teach remotely, balancing the risk for all parties. This way healthy students can be be educated by healthy teachers. With science overwhelmingly pointing to reopening schools, why do so many schools intend to remain closed?
The Politics of Teaching
If children are at minimal risk, transmission to adults is rare, and both can be accommodated with optional distance learning, why are some schools suspending all in-person education? It’s certainly not because of the parents, who would be the last people to send their children into a dangerous situation. The vast majority of parents support reopening schools with modifications, perhaps because they best understand the cost-benefit of depriving their children of a full education.
The reason many schools won’t open, just like why so many places originally locked down, comes back to fear and politics. The Los Angeles’ teachers union, for example, recently came out with a list of demands before returning to teach in person. These included defunding the police, ending charter schools, “Medicare for All,” and a new wealth tax. It was not until the union came out with these demands that Newsom announced closure of nearly all schools in California -- overriding individual school districts that had planned to open.
In a brazen announcement, the union put in bold words the conclusion of their argument: “Normal wasn’t working for us before. We can’t go back” – openly conveying that this negotiation was more about changing what they didn’t like about American education and society before the pandemic, and certainly not about what is best for children. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence pointing to the safety of school reopenings, union President Cecily Myart-Cruz labeled doing so “anti-science.” Yet, it’s also no wonder that so many teachers have concern for their safety now, as media outlets like CNN continue to run sensationalized stories building up school reopenings as dangerous while downplaying the actual science and evidence.
Day Care at School Gives the Game Away
Cities left with little choice due to their political environment are trying to mitigate the situation for parents. New York City will offer day care for 100,000 students attending schools that are only partially reopening, though this largely defeats the point of keeping children from being at school in the first place. If school closing advocates are correct, this would only expose children to a broader cohort of peers and would make teachers, children, and their caretakers less safe.
Some districts in California are offering day care right on school campus for half and full day programs, at a cost. So parents can pay to send their kids to school to be watched but not to be taught. Ironically, a student might be physically at a school under the watch of paid day care while simultaneously “attending” the very same school online.
It is clear that science is not the driving principle behind any of these policies, which helps explain why both the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics have advocated for opening on-campus education.
Teachers Are Essential Workers
There are few functions in society more essential than educating our children. “Education of our children is an essential Texas value,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently wrote in a letter directing that health officials cannot completely close schools, and they certainly cannot preemptively close schools with no evidence of local school spread.
The CDC recently concluded that “in-person schooling is in the best interest of students, particularly in the context of appropriate mitigation measures similar to those implemented at essential workplaces.”
The education of our children is too essential to be used as a political bargaining chip. If nurses can come to work every day and treat the sick and infected, then certainly teachers can be expected to come to work and teach the young and healthy.
Yinon Weiss is a tech entrepreneur, a U.S. military veteran, and holds a degree in bioengineering from U.C. Berkeley.
During the last night in my condo in DC, I had to walk my dog an extra lap around the block because a crazy person was outside screaming obscenities. I wasn’t afraid. I just didn’t feel like getting into it with him or having to listen to his story—his “Let me just tell you something,” attempt to get money from me. It was 1 A.M., and I was tired from a night out—but more so, just tired in general. Tired of it all.
I’m a city kid, through and through. And not a recent one. Not some Nebraska transplant who moved to the city and immediately thinks of himself as a local. A woman tried that on me once. With her affected upspeak cadence, where declarations sound like interrogatories, she told me she was from “Brook-LAN?” “No, you’re not,” I retorted (obnoxiously, being the 6th generation New Yorker that I am). “You LIVE in Brooklyn. People who are really from there don’t pronounce it like that.”
My uncle Bob, the family historian (and former Congressman representing our neighborhood from Queens) traces our family in Manhattan since the 1840’s. Between my Irish dad, from the Irish part of Manhattan, and my Italian Mom, from the Italian part of Brooklyn, we have family or friends in practically every part of the city. New York is not just where we live; it’s like a family member, as loved as offspring, as revered as a grandparent, as formative as a mom and dad.
City-living in America, for decades, meant tolerating mild inconveniences so that you could be left alone, alongside millions of others.
I left that family member in 2003, when I moved to Washington, DC for work. It’s not New York, but it’s still the city, and, for the past 17 years, it’s been an exciting time to call it home. I’ve witnessed the birth of entire neighborhoods: Shaw, 14th Street, The Atlas District, Navy Yard, Ivy City, The Wharf. Parts of DC you couldn’t even drive through at one point now had Michelin Star dining and outdoor beer gardens. From abandoned streets with burnt-out buildings—many still bearing the scorched marks from the fires of the ‘68 riots—multi-million-dollar row houses were restored, new condos arose, and wine bars and gyms multiplied like Abraham’s offspring.
We put up with a lot in order to live in the city: lousy transportation, noise, traffic, pollution, and our fair share of homeless people. It’s all just a part of living in urban America. But I’ll gladly tolerate sirens and car horns in exchange for a new restaurant on the corner. For major league sports, performing arts, museums, and bars, I will put up with the occasional crazy guy on the street, metro derailment, or gridlocked traffic because an intersection is blocked by some group “raising awareness” about something or other. That’s just the price of the urban lifestyle, and as a life-long city dweller, I knew what I was paying for—and with what.
I did my part, too. My role in the fabric of urban society, overlooked but essential, was to spend my money. Eat, drink, shop, spend, tip, pay. And man, did I pay: taxes, rents, then a mortgage and HOA fees. I paid taxes on things the government deemed “bad” for me, like alcohol and cigarettes; taxes on services which organized labor deemed “bad” for them, like rideshare. I paid gas tax, cable tax, cell phone tax, and, of course, income tax. Lots of income tax.
All I asked in return was relative safety and to be left alone to enjoy the city. City-living in America, for decades, meant tolerating mild inconveniences so that you could be left alone, alongside millions of others. That was the tacit pact.
The Democrats' presumptive presidential nominee is courting a million Muslim voters by calling for children in public schools to study Islam.
Speaking to the Million Muslim Voters Summit this week from his home in Delaware, former Vice President Joe Biden touted the Islamic faith:
"[Islam is one of the] great confessional faiths. I wish we taught more in our schools about the Islamic faith. I wish we talked about all the great confessional faiths. It's one of the great confessional faiths."
Calling all Muslims
After being endorsed by Emgage Action in April, the pro-Muslim group hosted the online summit for Biden in order to secure one million Muslim voters' ballots for the Democratic nominee in November's presidential election, with many Muslims in office supporting him, as well.
"A number of Muslim American officials – including Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Rep. Andre Carson (D-Ind.) – signed a letter organized by Emgage Action endorsing Biden on Monday," CBN News reported.
Omar – who came to the United States as a Somali refugee – has been notorious for her anti-Semitic statements, and her district in Minnesota has been ranked as the worst for race relations of all the 435 districts represented in Congress.
"Omar – one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress – served as a high-profile surrogate for [self-proclaimed socialist] Bernie Sanders before he exited the presidential race in April … making her support for Biden potentially helpful as the former vice president seeks to mobilize Muslim voters this fall," Fox News recounted.
Biden made it clear that he would push Islam into prominence – if elected.
"We all come from the same root here in terms of our fundamental basic beliefs, and I just want to thank you for giving me the opportunity, for being engaged, for committing to action, this November," Biden expressed to those attending the online summit.
All faiths the same?
However, in an argument against Islam being included with Christianity and Judaism as a confessional-type faith, Jihad Watch co-founder Robert Spencer noted how proponents of Islam have aimed to exclude all other religions and that Muslims have strived to get into public office for power, as he said in a piece quoting Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) co-founder Omar Ahmad.
"Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant," Ahmad declared, according to Spencer. "The Koran – the Muslim book of scripture – should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."
Even though Ahmad adamantly refused to acknowledge this statement, Spencer cites evidence of his claim being factual. "[T]he original reporter, Lisa Gardiner of the Fremont Argus – hardly a hardline 'Islamophobe' with an axe to grind – stood by her story," Spencer stressed.
Spencer also quoted CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper.
"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future," Hooper said, according to the watchdog.
Spencer also brought up the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been linked to Islamic terrorism and credited for the Arab Spring uprising in the Middle East – a movement supported by former President Barack Obama.
"[T]he Muslim Brotherhood – to which all the major Muslim groups in the U.S., including CAIR, are linked – is dedicated in its own words to 'eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within, and sabotaging its miserable house … so that it falls, and Allah's religion is victorious over other religions,'" he informed from a captured internal document.
Islam 101?
Teaching Islam in America's public schools has been pushed for some time.
"Groups like CAIR encourage Muslim input into textbook selection and the shaping of Islamic curricula for the public schools, which only adds to many people's concerns about Biden's suggestion to broaden Islamic studies in America's schools," CBN News disclosed.
"The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) – a religious liberty watchdog – reports numerous cases in recent years where teaching of Islam has moved from general knowledge of the religion to indoctrination of school children. On its website, the ACLJ cites some assignments that have raised concern from parents, like middle-school children in Tennessee being told to write 'Allah is the only God' and recite the Islamic conversion creed. An assignment in a Wisconsin public school told students to 'Pretend you are Muslim.'"
Similar stories were reported by the leftist media.
"It is important that students understand the differences between each of these religions to help them understand the tensions that exist in the region, the state standards – known as the Georgia Performance Standards – say," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (ACJ) reported.
A homework assignment critiqued by one parent was also mentioned in the report, which read, "Allah is the ___ (fill in the blank) worshiped by Jews and Christians," according the document divulged by ACJ, with the suggested correct answer being, "same God."
Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, which is pastored by influential theologian and author John MacArthur, announced Friday that it would continue holding in-person services, saying state mandates restricting worship are an overstep of government authority and thus they have no duty to follow them.
Pastor MacArthur argued in a blog post published on Friday that "government officials have no right to interfere in ecclesiastical matters in a way that undermines or disregards the God-given authority of pastors and elders."
"Therefore, in response to the recent state order requiring churches in California to limit or suspend all meetings indefinitely, we, the pastors and elders of Grace Community Church, respectfully inform our civic leaders that they have exceeded their legitimate jurisdiction, and faithfulness to Christ prohibits us from observing the restrictions they want to impose on our corporate worship services," MacArthur wrote.
On July 13, California indefinitely closed churches— as well as restaurants, bars, fitness centers, hair salons, and barbershops — in at least 32 counties. A group of churches from the state also recently sued California Gov. Gavin Newsom after he instituted a ban on singing in churches as a way to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
"The biblical order is clear: Christ is Lord over Caesar, not vice versa. Christ, not Caesar, is head of the church," MacArthur wrote. "Conversely, the church does not in any sense rule the state. Again, these are distinct kingdoms, and Christ is sovereign over both."
He also argued that because the church is by nature an assembly, any restrictions goes against the nature of the church "in principle."
"As government policy moves further away from biblical principles, and as legal and political pressures against the church intensify, we must recognize that the Lord may be using these pressures as means of purging to reveal the true church," MacArthur wrote. "Succumbing to governmental overreach may cause churches to remain closed indefinitely. How can the true church of Jesus Christ distinguish herself in such a hostile climate? There is only one way: bold allegiance to the Lord Jesus Christ."
Just months after Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a new bill prohibiting gay couples from adopting, the state is getting a new foster care organization exclusively serving LGBTQ+ homeless youth.
True You TN is in the beginning stages of opening, having just acquired their 501(c)3 and preparing to fundraise. The group, founded by Executive Director Stephanie Lowe, will build a group home for LGBTQ+ teens and youth and recently moved into their first office space.
True You will be the first group home to serve exclusively LGBTQ+ youth in the state, working to help the nearly 40 percent of homeless youth who identify as queer. Lowe said her own past drove her to create the organization, and although she has reconciled with her family, her coming out at 30 years old didn’t go as planned.
“It crushed me when my family turned their backs on me, so I can’t imagine that trauma as a youth,” Lowe said. “But it gets better and being true to yourself is necessary, even in the face of hatred.”
Stephanie Lowe (Photo: LinkedIn)
Lowe said True You is in a unique position as a state-licensed organization that won’t be contracted by the government. Lowe said the Family First Prevention Services Act signed into law by President Trump in 2018 severely limits government spending on group homes. True You will be a self-funded organization, meaning the group is free to focus on strictly LGBTQ+ youth and not subject to as many regulations on who they can serve.
The freedom is a double-edged sword, and Lowe said fundraising will be critical. While spending the last year creating policy and guidelines designed to ensure long-term success, True You is now focused on raising money. Their first major fundraiser, scheduled in April, was cancelled due to COVID-19, but will launch “any day” according to Lowe. True You was also designated as an official PayPal charity.
Lowe said True You’s mission is incredibly important considering how homelessness impacts LGBTQ+ youth. Lowe said Tennessee is 4,000 beds short of being able to accomodate all homeless youth in the state, and that 78 percent of LGBTQ youth report being further abused after arrival into the system.
“Once a teen lands on the streets, statistically, we have 72 hours before they are willing
to participate in ‘survival sex’ to meet basic needs such as food or housing,” Lowe said. “In fact, 20 percent of all homeless youth interviewed were victims of human trafficking.”
In addition, these youth are often not accepted at local shelters, who are sometimes operated by religious organizations that don’t welcome the queer community. Lowe said some will even put out signs telling LGBTQ+ people not to enter. Because many foster programs in the state also refuse to help LGBTQ+ youth, Lowe said True You will do outreach both to youth on the streets and to the state, to prevent kids going to discriminatory foster homes.
AdoptUsKids.org states that there are currently around 7,500 children in foster care and that 1,000 of them age out of foster care every year without ever finding a permanent home. In their most recent annual report for the fiscal year 2017-2018, the Tennessee Department of Child Services reported there were 2,921 foster care families or homes with at least one vacancy, and that while 69 percent of kids spend 0 to 12 months in state custody for various purposes, 23 percent spend 24 to 36 months in state custody.
It crushed me when my family turned their backs on me, so I can't imagine that trauma as a youth. But it gets better and being true to yourself is necessary, even in the face of hatred. – Stephanie Lowe
Lowe said that while some foster parents take on foster kids for the money, as they receive a monthly check for each child in their home, True You will be a group home, and will not work with foster parents or provide compensation to them.
“Since our entire purpose is to allow the youth in our care to be supported for who they are, their safety is our utmost priority,” Lowe said. “There are many people who foster for compensation and not for the best interest of the youth. You can’t not compensate the foster parents; it is expensive to bring youth into your home. But that needs to be better monitored.”
Devin Deltori, a floral designer and wedding planner, understands the negative effect of discrimination and a rough foster care system all too well. Deltori said he entered the foster care system in Tennessee voluntarily after losing both his parents before turning 11. His mother was killed in a car crash when he was nine years old, and his father died shortly after from a heart attack. Deltori said his stepmother and living situation were so unstable he approached the Sumner County juvenile court system himself to ask for help.
Deltori said he was placed in foster care in 1990, and remained there for more than five years before being abruptly returned home, and then kicked out while trying to finish cosmetology school. Deltori said he did not openly identify as LGBTQ+ until the end of his foster care experience, and although he can’t be sure, said he thought coming out may have also resulted in him being kicked out.
True You logo.
Deltori said being LGBTQ+ in the foster care system is incredibly difficult and acknowledged the ways it impacts queer youth differently.
“Better educate counselors to identify the behaviors of youth and better equip them with proper information because these youth are delicate, and [at a] higher rate of suicide,” Deltori said in an email interviewt.
Lowe said that while True You is figuring out the details, the organization will offer counseling and therapy for kids in their group home.
Earlier in January, Gov. Bill Lee signed the first bill to become law in 2020, a new law allowing religious adoption organizations to discriminate against gay couples. Deltori said he opposes legislation preventing gay couples from adopting, and Lowe feels much the same way.
“We believe all loving, approved homes should be allowed to foster and adopt youth in need,” Lowe said. “Any legislation that prevents that can only be considered harmful to the youth in need of a home.”
While True You won’t be able to change the entire foster care system, Lowe hopes to help as many as possible.
“You are perfect, you are worthy, and you are loved, exactly as you are,” Lowe said when asked what advice she’d give to kids in the system. “All youth in the system are worthy of a loving home. LGBTQ+ youth want the same things any other youth do—a safe loving home.”
A revival is taking place on the sandy shores of Huntington Beach, California where hundreds of people are gathering to worship, pray, and receive salvation.
"Saturate OC" began on July 3 in an effort to share the gospel and spread the good news about the Kingdom of God.
The idea for the seaside evangelical movement started in 2016 when it's organizers, Parker and Jessi Green had a vision of thousands of people being baptized along the Huntington Beach Pier.
Jessi told The Christian Post that she felt God speak to her in January about a massive movement to take place this year.
"It would be like a threshing floor movement where God was going to start to separate the wheat from the tares," she said.
Despite Gov. Gavin Newsom's mandatory closing of churches due to COVID-19, Jessi's vision was fully revealed, and Saturate OC was underway.
She wrote in a Facebook post, "California just announced this week that the church can't meet inside - The Good News is that on Friday we declared "The Church has Left The Building." You cant stop the Kingdom of God!"
The outreach has taken place every Friday during July. Jessi's goal is to reach 2,000 people who can then go out and disciple to thousands more.
"We believe that these collective evangelism events will activate The Church and Orange County will never be the same," she wrote. "We are believing for 50+ ministry partners and 2,000 attendees prepared and expectant to lead 50,000 people to salvation."
Bethel Music's Sean Feucht told Fox News that the movement reminds him of the Jesus People Movement from the 60s and 70s.
"It's eerily similar," Feucht said, "There were protests, racial and social strife. Hippies were getting saved. A movement happened in California and swept across America, and even major news outlets covered it."
In a video shared on Twitter, Feucht declared that a movement is rising up as people are stepping forward to give their lives to Jesus Christ.
"We just had an amazing time of worship. We are here baptizing people in the Pacific Ocean and God is moving in California, he added. "I know it's the middle of a global pandemic and things are crazy, but in the midst of it all, God is moving."
"Thank you Lord for those who said YES tonight at Saturate OC!" Alli Joy Vazquez wrote in a Facebook post. "What a beautiful harvest of souls getting baptized in Jesus name! California for Jesus! The fearless ones are arising with the pure love of God."
And the revival is reaching children who are accepting Jesus Christ as their personal savior.
"This revival is really moving among the children," Jessi explained. "We are seeing tons, and I would say within the last two weeks 60 children chose to be baptized — ages 3 years old to 16."
Those attending Saturate OC are encouraged to wear a mask and practice social distancing.
The event organizers announced on Saturday that Saturate OC will be extended to Aug. 7.
Shootings and other crimes spike in the poorest neighborhoods when cops pull back.
New York City needs more arrests. More arrests in the subways. More arrests in housing projects. More drug arrests. More arrests of gang members.
And it isn’t alone.
If there’s one lesson from the unrest and anti-police agitation in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, it’s that poor minorities living in distressed neighborhoods pay the highest price — in fear and in blood — when the cops retreat and the worst elements feel emboldened.
The spikes in shootings in cities around the country haven’t taken place in high-end neighborhoods, not in Billionaire’s Row in Manhattan, not in Buckhead in Atlanta, not in Forest Glen in Chicago.
No, they blight the most marginal neighborhoods and make everyday life a hazard for people who have no option but to live in a tough place. The last couple of months should have made it obvious that what these people have to fear most is not the cops or white supremacy but the violent, vengeful, and heedless young men in their midst
Stopping or discouraging the cops from disproportionately policing these neighborhoods isn’t a blow for justice. It’s an obstacle for upstanding, low-income citizens who are trying to lead decent lives and shouldn’t have to routinely hear gunshots or worry every day about their kids getting shot.
Consider New York City. The New York Times ran an extensive piece the other day on the spike in shootings in the city. Clearly, a driver of the violence is a marked reduction in arrests:
Arrests have declined drastically this summer, falling 62 percent across the board for the last four weeks compared with the same period last year, police data show. Narcotics arrests fell 85 percent. Detectives in the gang unit made 90 percent fewer arrests. There were similarly steep drops in the number of arrests by officers that patrol the subways and housing projects.
Gun arrests have dropped 67 percent during the same four weeks compared with last year, even as shootings have continued to spiral upward.
So what we’ve seen is a crude version of Black Lives Matter policing — a “defund the police” approach, in which many fewer African-American males are arrested. Has this made heavily African-American communities better or safer? Emphatically not.
If there’s one lesson from the unrest and anti-police agitation in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, it’s that poor minorities living in distressed neighborhoods pay the highest price — in fear and in blood — when the cops retreat and the worst elements feel emboldened.
The spikes in shootings in cities around the country haven’t taken place in high-end neighborhoods, not in Billionaire’s Row in Manhattan, not in Buckhead in Atlanta, not in Forest Glen in Chicago.
No, they blight the most marginal neighborhoods and make everyday life a hazard for people who have no option but to live in a tough place. The last couple of months should have made it obvious that what these people have to fear most is not the cops or white supremacy but the violent, vengeful, and heedless young men in their midst.
Stopping or discouraging the cops from disproportionately policing these neighborhoods isn’t a blow for justice. It’s an obstacle for upstanding, low-income citizens who are trying to lead decent lives and shouldn’t have to routinely hear gunshots or worry every day about their kids getting shot.
Consider New York City. The New York Times ran an extensive piece the other day on the spike in shootings in the city. Clearly, a driver of the violence is a marked reduction in arrests:
Arrests have declined drastically this summer, falling 62 percent across the board for the last four weeks compared with the same period last year, police data show. Narcotics arrests fell 85 percent. Detectives in the gang unit made 90 percent fewer arrests. There were similarly steep drops in the number of arrests by officers that patrol the subways and housing projects.
Gun arrests have dropped 67 percent during the same four weeks compared with last year, even as shootings have continued to spiral upward.
So what we’ve seen is a crude version of Black Lives Matter policing — a “defund the police” approach, in which many fewer African-American males are arrested. Has this made heavily African-American communities better or safer? Emphatically not.
The story is the same in cities around the country. The equation is simple: A less robust police presence equals more shootings.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Ninety-three people were shot in Atlanta during the four-week period of May 31 to June 27, up drastically from 46 in the same period last year, the latest complete data available. And fourteen people died of homicide in that span, compared to six during the same time frame in 2019.”
Why? “‘There seems to be withdrawal by police,’ said Russell Covey, Georgia State University criminal law professor. ‘The lack of a police presence may create something of a vacuum of authority.’” The president of the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers agreed that there’s been a pullback. “Officers are afraid to do their job,” he said.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported late last month, “So far this year, ShotSpotter activations and 911 calls about gunshots in Minneapolis have more than doubled from a year ago, according to a Star Tribune analysis of police data. Out of 3,218 such shots-fired calls this year, nearly half have been filed since George Floyd was killed on May 25.”
Amazingly enough according to the paper, “Some council members and activists see the focus on crime stats as a way to stoke public fears and distract from the issue of police reform.” In other words, don’t let the number of people getting shot distract you from the need to kneecap the peace officers necessary to keep people from getting shot.
We don’t need to settle here the dispute over why there is now a less robust police presence in urban neighborhoods. Is it a function of the cops being overwhelmed by work related to the protests on top of their ordinary duties? Are cops overly cautious because of the anti-cop hostility of elected officials? Are they engaging in a deliberate work-slowdown? All of the above?
What matters at the most basic level is that if there are fewer cops arresting fewer dangerous people, shootings go up.
This dynamic should put paid to the lazy analysis that says that disproportionate police interactions with minorities must be a result of racist policing. It’s the opposite: Only people who have no regard for the welfare of poor communities would want fewer, less active cops patrolling them.
An expression of this simplistic way of thinking, by the way, was New York City’s decision to disband a plainclothes anti-crime unit that was involved in controversial shootings. Maybe this was because the unit was out of control. But maybe it was because it was engaged in the hard work of keeping communities from being overrun by gangs and illegal guns.
(In response to the spate of violence, New York City has launched a new initiative that, in part, puts more cops on the streets of violence-plagued areas of Brooklyn.)
Of course, it’s true that bad cops should be held to account, and the police should have the best relationship possible with the communities they serve. This can and should happen without exposing vulnerable people to the depredations of dangerous malefactors the way we’ve seen in recent weeks.
People who live in the affected communities know this and, to their credit, often say it. But their voices don’t get the megaphone of anti-police agitators. The cultural gatekeepers in our country could elevate them and highlight the rise in shootings as a direct threat to black lives.
The media could drive home their concerns, not simply in straight news accounts, but with the sympathetic wall-to-wall coverage of the protestors. Celebrities could take up their cause. Corporations could shower little-known activists desperately trying to improve the lot of their neighborhoods with resources.
But, no, this isn’t the narrative these gatekeepers are interested in — for them, black lives can only be put at risk by the cops, never made more secure and safe
The government’s disease-fighting agency is conflating viral and antibody tests, compromising a few crucial metrics that governors depend on to reopen their economies. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, and other states are doing the same.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conflating the results of two different types of coronavirus tests, distorting several important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic. We’ve learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus. The upshot is that the government’s disease-fighting agency is overstating the country’s ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19. The agency confirmed to The Atlantic on Wednesday that it is mixing the results of viral and antibody tests, even though the two tests reveal different information and are used for different reasons.
This is not merely a technical error. States have set quantitative guidelines for reopening their economies based on these flawed data points.
Several states—including Pennsylvania, the site of one of the country’s largest outbreaks, as well as Texas, Georgia, and Vermont—are blending the data in the same way. Virginia likewise mixed viral and antibody test results until last week, but it reversed course and the governor apologized for the practice after it was covered by the Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Atlantic. Maine similarly separated its data on Wednesday; Vermont authorities claimed they didn’t even know they were doing this.
The widespread use of the practice means that it remains difficult to know exactly how much the country’s ability to test people who are actively sick with COVID-19 has improved.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told us when we described what the CDC was doing. “How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.”
Viral tests, taken by nose swab or saliva sample, look for direct evidence of a coronavirus infection. They are considered the gold standard for diagnosing someone with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus: State governments consider a positive viral test to be the only way to confirm a case of COVID-19. Antibody tests, by contrast, use blood samples to look for biological signals that a person has been exposed to the virus in the past.
A negative test result means something different for each test. If somebody tests negative on a viral test, a doctor can be relatively confident that they are not sick right now; if somebody tests negative on an antibody test, they have probably never been infected with or exposed to the coronavirus. (Or they may have been given a false result—antibody tests are notoriously less accurate on an individual level than viral tests.) The problem is that the CDC is clumping negative results from both tests together in its public reporting.
Mixing the two tests makes it much harder to understand the meaning of positive tests, and it clouds important information about the U.S. response to the pandemic, Jha said. “The viral testing is to understand how many people are getting infected, while antibody testing is like looking in the rearview mirror. The two tests are totally different signals,” he told us. By combining the two types of results, the CDC has made them both “uninterpretable,” he said.
The public-radio station WLRN, in Miami, first reported that the CDC was mixing viral and antibody test results. Pennsylvania’s and Maine’s decisions to mix the two tests have not been previously reported.
Kristen Nordlund, a spokesperson for the CDC, told us that the inclusion of antibody data in Florida is one reason the CDC has reported hundreds of thousands more tests in Florida than the state government has. The agency hopes to separate the viral and antibody test results in the next few weeks, she said in an email.
But until the agency does so, its results will be suspect and difficult to interpret, says William Hanage, an epidemiology professor at Harvard. In addition to misleading the public about the state of affairs, the intermingling “makes the lives of actual epidemiologists tremendously more difficult.”
“Combining a test that is designed to detect current infection with a test that detects infection at some point in the past is just really confusing and muddies the water,” Hanage told us.
The CDC stopped publishing anything resembling a complete database of daily test results on February 29. When it resumed publishing test data last week, a page of its website explaining its new COVID Data Tracker said that only viral tests were included in its figures. “These data represent only viral tests. Antibody tests are not currently captured in these data,” the page said as recently as May 18.
Yesterday, that language was changed. All reference to disaggregating the two different types of tests disappeared. “These data are compiled from a number of sources,” the new version read. The text strongly implied that both types of tests were included in the count, but did not explicitly say so.
The CDC’s data have also become more favorable over the past several days. On Monday, a page on the agency’s website reported that 10.2 million viral tests had been conducted nationwide since the pandemic began, with 15 percent of them—or about 1.5 million—coming back positive. But yesterday, after the CDC changed its terms, it said on the same page that 10.8 million tests of any type had been conducted nationwide. Yet its positive rate had dropped by a percent. On the same day it expanded its terms, the CDC added 630,205 new tests, but it added only 52,429 positive results.
This is what concerns Jha. Because antibody tests are meant to be used on the general population, not just symptomatic people, they will, in most cases, have a lower percent-positive rate than viral tests. So blending viral and antibody tests “will drive down your positive rate in a very dramatic way,” he said.
The absence of clear national guidelines has led to widespread confusion about how testing data should be reported. Pennsylvania reports negative viral and antibody tests in the same metric, a state spokesperson confirmed to us on Wednesday. The state has one of the country’s worst outbreaks, with more than 67,000 positive cases. But it has also slowly improved its testing performance, testing about 8,000 people in a day. Yet right now it is impossible to know how to interpret any of its accumulated results.
Texas, where the rate of new COVID-19 infections has stubbornly refused to fall, is one of the most worrying states (along with Georgia). The Texas Observerfirst reported last week that the state was lumping its viral and antibody results together. On Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott denied that the state was blending the results, but the Dallas Observerreports that it is still doing so.
Black Lives Matter leader states if US 'doesn't give us what we want, then we will burn down this system'
Published
Greater New York Black Lives Matter president Hawk Newsome joined "The Story" Wednesday to discuss the direction of the movement in the wake of George Floyd's death in police custody and the subsequent demonstrations across the country, many of which have sparked destruction and violence.
"You ... have said that violence is sometimes necessary in these situations," host Martha MacCallum told Newsome. "What exactly is it that you hope to achieve through violence?"
"Wow, it's interesting that you would pose that question like that," Newsome responded, "because this country is built upon violence. What was the American Revolution, what's our diplomacy across the globe?
"We go in and we blow up countries and we replace their leaders with leaders who we like. So for any American to accuse us of being violent is extremely hypocritical."
MacCallum clarified that her question was based off comments she had heard Newsome utter in various interviews.
"I said," Newsome told the host, "if this country doesn't give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. All right? And I could be speaking ... figuratively. I could be speaking literally. It's a matter of interpretation.
"Let's observe the history of the 1960s, when black people were rioting," he went on. "We had the highest growth in wealth, in property ownership. Think about the last few weeks since we started protesting. There have been eight cops fired across the country."
"I don't condone nor do I condemn rioting," Newsome added. "But I'm just telling you what I observed."
Later in the interview, Newsome insisted the Black Lives Matter movement is about "saving lives" and its adherents should be "applauded" for upholding the Second Amendment.
"Nobody's talking about ambushing police officers. We're talking about protecting lives," he said. "There's nothing more American than that. We talk about uplifting and upholding the Second Amendment but it seems to be the hypocrisy of America that when black people start talking about arming themselves and defending themselves, [that] talk is 'violent'. But when white people grab assault rifles and go to our nation's, their state capitals, it's all good."
The interview took a turn after MacCallum read a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. and asked Newsome if he agreed with it.
"Let us be dissatisfied," King told the Southern Christian Leadership Conference convention in 1967, "until that day when nobody will shout, 'White power!', when nobody will shout, 'Black power!', but everybody will talk about God's power and human power.'"
"I love the Lord and my Lord and savior," Newsome responded to MacCallum's prompt. "Jesus Christ is the most famous black radical revolutionary in history. And he was treated just like Dr. King. He was arrested on occasion and he was also crucified or assassinated. This is what happens to black activists. We are killed by the government."
At the conclusion of the interview, Newsome told MacCallum, "I just want black liberation and black sovereignty, by any means necessary."
MURFREESBORO, Tennessee – Dr. Damon Petty, team physician of the Tennessee Titans, presented to the Conservative Caucus Saturday his analysis of data related to the excess in deaths and found they are not due to COVID-19.
An economics-degreed Harvard graduate who then went on to medical school, Dr. Petty’s goal was to analyze the data in order to make his presentation reflect the University’s veritas – or truth – shield. The motto of the University, “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae,” translated from Latin meaning “Truth for Christ and the Church,” was adopted in 1692.
Petty presented the number of worldwide deaths by COVID-19 as well as several other viruses and other causes of death in a bar graph.
The numbers were so disparate that it made it a challenge to make any comparisons, particularly against the 1918 Spanish Flu. So, the team physician scaled the world death numbers by a factor of 10, offering a better perspective that the number of COVID-19 deaths is less than the average flu and close to that of suicide and the 2009 swine flu.
In looking at deaths in the U.S., Dr. Petty’s analysis revealed that those from COVID-19 are still far less than the 1918 Spanish flu or cancer and even less than accidents and strokes.
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Comparing the average count of deaths in the U.S. by week and age group over the five-year period of 2015 to 2019, Petty found a very repeatable pattern resembling a smile for deaths in people aged 45 and older.
In 2020, Petty’s analysis shows a spike in excess deaths is visible in all but the youngest age group of under 25 years between the 10- and 20-week mark which is between March 1 and May 16. The spike increased more dramatically over the other five age groups, with the most severe spike being in the 85 years and older population.
When looking at the excess deaths by cause, Petty found an uptick in respiratory disease-related deaths. But, the spike is not nearly as significant as that for deaths related to circulatory diseases or Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.
Drilling into more specifics related to deaths due to respiratory diseases, he demonstrated that in the worst week, the spike for influenza and pneumonia amounted to excess deaths of about 600.
Meanwhile, Petty’s further examination of the circulatory disease-related causes of death showed that hypertensive diseases accounted for 1,100 excess deaths and ischemic heart disease accounted for 2,000 excess deaths in their respective worst week.
Other causes that contributed to excess deaths in the U.S. included diabetes with 700 and Alzheimer’s disease and dementia with 1,900 in the worst weeks.
Presented in another way, Petty displayed the total number of deaths in the U.S. above the average since February 1, 2020 by the cause of death. Influenza and pneumonia, the category in which COVID-19 falls, ranks sixth.
Alzheimer’s disease and dementia – 16,913
Hypertensive diseases – 9,303
Ischemic heart disease – 6,249
Diabetes – 5,510
Cerebrovascular disease – 4,080
Influenza and pneumonia – 2,878
Heart failure – 2,352
Malignant neoplasms – 2,149
Other diseases of the respiratory system – 1,472
Chronic lower respiratory disease – 571
Renal failure – 542
Other diseases of the circulatory system – 339
Sepsis – 297
In Tennessee, the number of deaths above the average since February 1 is much less dramatic with influenza and pneumonia falling to 10th.
Alzheimer’s disease and dementia – 464
Hypertensive diseases – 417
Diabetes – 217
Malignant neoplasms – 180
Ischemic heart disease – 110
Chronic lower respiratory disease – 103
Cardiovascular diseases – 71
Other diseases of the respiratory system – 60
Heart failure – 58
Influenza and pneumonia – 35
Other diseases of the circulatory system – 30
Renal failure – 19
Sepsis – 8
Meanwhile, Petty reports, the census in Tennessee hospitals was at 10 percent.
As another point of comparison, he reviewed motor vehicle accident deaths per one million population against COVID-19.
For 20 states, including Tennessee, a person is less likely to die from COVID-19 than they are in a motor vehicle accident.
In fact, the doctor’s data indicates that Tennesseans are at least 60 percent more likely to die in a motor vehicle accident than from COVID-19, and yet there have been no restrictions on motor vehicle travel.
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Laura Baigert is a senior reporter at The Tennessee Star.
NASHVILLE, TN (WSMV) - News 4 profiled a self-proclaimed ANTIFA activist, who was at the riots on the day that people vandalized and burned the Nashville Historic Courthouse.
Corey Lemley celebrated on May 30. He posted on his FaceBook page, "the city is ours," over an aerial shot of the courthouse on fire with its windows broken out.
"The city was ours that night," Lemley said.
Lemley refers to himself as an ANTIFA activist and an anarchist. ANTIFA is short for anti-fascist.
Lemley said a group of about ten Lemley activists went downtown with the goal of protecting Black Lives Matters protesters from a possible disruption by white supremacists.
The night turned violent, as vandals smashed windows, toppled a civil rights statue, spray painted graffiti, and damaged a Metro Police patrol car.
Amid the chaos, Lemley posted: "riots and uprisings keep the system in check."
"So you think rioting is a good thing?" Amons asked Lemley.
"It's a useful tool, yes," Lemley said.
"Do you condone the violence that happened that night?" Amons asked.
"I condone everything that happened that night," Lemley said.
Lemley is a 29-year-old native of East Nashville and a video producer. He travels with antifa activists to rallies in other cities. He said its to fight white supremecists.
Lemley has made the news before as protests turned violent.
Lemley posted video of himself in Charlottesville Virginia in 2017 smashing a photographer's video camera and bragging about it.
He told Amons he wanted to stop the photographer from taking video of someone who was injured.
"If the same thing happened again, would you do the same thing again?" Amons asked.
"Yeah, without a doubt," Lemley said.
During Nashville's day and night of violence, Lemley posted videos of himself at the Central police precinct as it was under siege. In a FaceBook Live - posting the 'police precinct is ours."
He also posted a picture of himself burning a "blue lives matter flag," writing, "I was afraid that Nashville would not live up to this historic moment. I was proven wrong."
Amons asked Lemley about burning the flag.
"I hope this makes people uncomfortable," he said.
Lemley denies taking part in setting fire to the courthouse and News 4 asked if the arson was justified in any way.
"That's a broad question. I mean," Lemley said.
"I'm asking your for a very specific answer, " Amons said, "do you think the arson at the courthouse was justified?"
"I think the outrage is justified," Lemley said.
Amons repeated, "do you think the arson is justified?"
"It can be rebuilt. It can be replaced. Black lives can't be replaced," said Lemley.
"I'm not going to worry about property damage at a time when racism is at an all-time high, " he said.
Lemley said he doesn't know any of the people who have been arrested in connection with the arson at the courthouse. He denies that he incited violence, saying instead he was with a community frustrated with the system.
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Dennis Prager: They had to invent 'microaggressions' because there were few "macroaggressions'
By Dennis Prager, Published July 13, 2020 at 11:29pm
The left-wing charge that America is a racist country is the greatest national libel since the Blood Libel against the Jews. America is, in fact, the least racist multiracial, multiethnic country in world history.
Neither the claim that America is a racist society nor the claim that it is the least racist country can be empirically proven. Both are assessments. But honest people do need to provide arguments for their position. I have found every argument that America is racist, let alone "systemically" racist, wanting. For example, the police almost never kill unarmed blacks, and on the rare occasions they do (about 15 times a year), there is almost always a valid reason (as in the infamous 2014 case in Ferguson, Missouri); police kill more unarmed whites than blacks; the reason there are proportionately so many more blacks in prison is that blacks disproportionately commit violent crimes; and so on.
There are very powerful arguments against the charge that America is a racist society
No. 1: If there is so much racism in America, why are there so many false claims of racism and outright race hoaxes?
I offered 15 recent examples. Moreover, there were probably no racist hoaxes when America really was racist, just as there were no anti-Semitic hoaxes in 1930s Germany, when there was rampant anti-Semitism. You need hoaxes when the real thing is hard to find.
No. 2: The constant references to slavery.
If there were a great deal of racism in America today, there would be no reason to constantly invoke slavery and the Confederacy. The very fact that The New York Times, the leader in racist dishonesty, felt it necessary to issue its "1619 Project," which seeks to replace 1776 as the founding of America with 1619, when the first African slaves arrived in America, is a perfect illustration of the point. The fact that "The 1619 Project" was labeled false by the leading American historians of that era (all of whom are liberals and at least one of whom led a campaign to impeach President Donald Trump) adds fuel to the argument. Even regarding the past, the promoters of the "America is racist" libel need to lie to paint America as bad as possible.
No. 3: The reliance on lies.
"The 1619 Project," which will now be taught in thousands of American schools, is based on lies. All Americans who care about America and/or truth should inquire if their children's school will teach this and, if so, place their child in a school that does not.
Two of the biggest lies are that preserving slavery was the real cause of the American Revolution and that slavery is what made America rich.
Even the charge of endemic racist police brutality is a lie. There are undoubtedly racist police, but racism does not characterize police interactions with blacks.
No. 4: The large African immigration to the United States.
Nearly 2 million black Africans and more than 1 million blacks from the Caribbean have emigrated to the United States in just the last 20 years. Why would so many blacks voluntarily move to a country that is "systemically racist," a country, according to the promoters of the "America is racist" libel, in which every single white is a racist? Are all these blacks dumb? Are they ignorant? And what about the millions more who would move here if they were allowed to? How does one explain the fact that Nigerians, for example, are among the most successful immigrant communities?
No. 5: The preoccupation with "microaggressions."
According to the University of California's list of racist "microaggressions," saying, "There is only one race, the human race," is a "racist microaggression." This is, of course, Orwellian doublespeak. Anyone who believes there is only one race is not, by definition, a racist. If everyone in the past had believed there was one race, the human race, there would never have been racism, let alone a slave trade based on racism.
The very fact that the left came up with the intellectual farce known as "microaggressions," like the race hoaxes, proves how little racism there is in America – because the entire thesis is based on the fact that there are so few real, or "macro," aggressions.
The race riots, the ruining of people's careers and lives over something said or done at any time in their lives, the ruining of professional sports (especially basketball and football), the tearing down of America and its history, the smearing of moral giants like Abraham Lincoln – all of this is being done because of a lie.
As I wrote in a column three years ago: "The Jews survived the Blood Libel. But America may not survive the American Libel. While the first Libel led to the death of many Jews, the present Libel may lead to the death of a civilization. Indeed, the least oppressive ever created."
After Governor Bill Lee weighed in on the State Capitol Commission (SCC) vote regarding the removal of the Nathan Bedford Forrest bust from the second floor of the State Capitol, by a 9 to 2 vote the body complied with his request.
The original motion of removing just the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest was amended to include the monuments to two of Tennessee’s other military heroes, Admirals David Farragut and Albert Gleaves.
Lee issued remarks the day before the SCC meeting, The Tennessee Starreported, saying that the meeting has been more than a year in the making as appointments have been made to the SCC.
State Representative Mike Sparks (R-Smyrna) addressing his comments on issue of the Nathan Bedford Forrest bust mainly to Governor Bill Lee and fellow legislators including (from left to right) Senator Brenda Gilmore (D-Nashville), Representative G. A. Hardaway (D-Memphis), Representative Mike Stewart (D-Nashville) and Representative Harold Love, Jr. (D-Nashville).
It appears that he also rushed to hold the meeting before signing a bill that would have added two private citizen members to the SCC selected by the Speaker of the Senate and the Speaker of the House.
Lee then attended the Thursday meeting, making opening remarks and staying for a good portion of the three-hour meeting that he reportedly called.
Of the 12-member SCC, there is currently one vacancy from the State’s Historical Commission.
More than half of the remainder of the SCC’s membership are Lee’s appointees, either by virtue of their position in his cabinet, or the three citizens representing each of the state’s grand divisions.
The other members include the state’s three Constitutional officers, which are elected by the General Assembly, and two members of the General Assembly representing each of the two chambers.
Once Lee finished his opening remarks, members of the General Assembly who had asked to speak also made comments.
Legislators who spoke in favor of moving the bust were Senator Brenda Gilmore (D-Nashville), Representatives Harold Love, Jr. (D-Nashville), Mike Stewart (D-Nashville) and G. A. Hardaway (D-Memphis).
Gilmore gave an emotional plea, causing her to pause about midway through her remarks when she said that tears come to her eyes every time she gets off the elevator and looks at the Forrest bust.
She questioned why some people do not see Black people as humans and said that, while there is a tremendous amount of work to be done, removing the Forrest bust will make one small step to correct a mistake made in 1978, which was actually the result of Democrat Senator Doug Henry’s 1973 resolution.
Comparing the removal of the bust to the doom and gloom predictions associated with women’s suffrage, Love said, “I promise you, the world will not end, mountains will not fall into the sea, and the rivers will not dry up.”
As a veteran, Stewart said the military record of Nathan Bedford Forrest had to be looked at. Forrest’s alleged actions at Fort Pillow, he said, would disqualify him from a place of honor.
Asking the Commission to do the right thing, Hardaway in his nearly 15 minutes of commentary referenced the protesters outside the meeting room, who could be heard shouting through the closed doors of the meeting room, demanded to have a seat at the table that was not set for them.
The agenda, however, failed to mention a physical location for the meeting, providing only a link to a WebEx livestream.
SCC Chairman Butch Eley later said the restrictions on attendees in the room was because of the ongoing COVID-19 situation.
Hardaway asked for consideration as to how disrespectful and insensitive it is for all of the African-American legislators to endure walking past the statue every day when they go to make law for the six million Tennesseans without regard for their gender, race, creed or color.
Senator Joey Hensley (R-Hohenwald) is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and talked about the suffering and terrible times during and after the Civil War, having three great grandfathers who served in the Confederacy.
He refuted the then-fake news about the battle known as the Fort Pillow massacre of 200 mostly Black Union soldiers that had surrendered. “That’s just not true. It was a terrible battle, but they had not surrendered,” he said.
Hensley expressed that Tennessee should be a leader by keeping the bust in its location and showing that historical figures should be judged in the context of the times.
Representative Mike Sparks (R-Smyrna) largely addressed his comments to Lee and his fellow members of the General Assembly, drawing them into his weaving but interrelated thoughts.
He briefly touched on an incident where Forrest was called upon to defend the husbands, brothers and sons of crying women he encountered. The men were being held in a courthouse, which sits near Sparks’ district, going to be executed by Union forces. Forrest, at the time was riding with dozens of Black troops, which Sparks called remarkable.
In attending a protest at Middle Tennessee State University, Sparks said he asked the students four questions. As he again asked the questions during the meeting, with almost no one knowing the answers he gave to his own questions.
Who was Samson Keeble? Besides having a bust on the second floor of the State Capitol, Sparks schooled that Keeble was a Confederate soldier who was a Republican who became the first African-American state representative.
To the question of who is John Newton, Sparks got no response and advised that he was a slave ship captain who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace as a story of redemption.
Continuing on the theme, Sparks said that the governor and secretary of state know that William Wilberforce freed the slaves in Great Britain, suffering persecution for it.
And, as to the question of who had the most African Americans at their funeral, Sparks said that Nathan Bedford Forrest had 3,000 to 5,000 in attendance.
Sparks talked about the 1875 Independent Order of Pole-Bearers Association event in Memphis with thousands of African Americans in attendance to which Forrest was asked to speak, “with some jeers of white folks who think I’m doing wrong.”
After reading further from Forrest’s speech published in the July 6, 1875 edition of The Memphis Daily Appeal, Sparks concluded, “That’s history folks.”
He talked about the oppression that is going on in the state right now, turning around to ask Democrat legislators directly if they knew that payday loans unfairly target minorities especially single females at a rate five times higher than any other group.
Once the legislators concluded their comments after about an hour, comments from eight citizens primarily through via video conferencing were limited to three minutes each.
Eley, who is also Lee’s appointee as the Commissioner of Finance & Administration, made the formal motion for a petition for a waiver to the Tennessee Historic Commission (THC) allowing the Nathan Bedford Forrest bust to be moved from the State Capitol to the Tennessee State Museum.
Eley said that Lee’s remarks from the prior day would be included to substantiate the compelling interest for the moving of the bust.
Fellow State Commissioners Branscom and Salyers, after making comments on their reasoning, both said they would be voting in favor of the motion.
Citizen-member of the Commission from East Tennessee, Hallerin Hill said Forrest’s Pole-Bearers speech reflected redemption, which is turning away from something toward something else. Hill saw that as a move to a new position, and that a bust could change positions to tell the whole story.
Hill concluded that he would support the governor to move the bust.
Senator Jack Johnson, as the Senate representative, said that he polled his fellow Senate members and received 19 votes to not remove and 14 votes to remove the bust. He said that was a similar vote to about three years ago, when he was also a member of the SCC
While not compelled to vote according to their wishes, Johnson said he felt it was important to have the conversation and would be voting accordingly.
It was at that point, which was approximately two hours into the meeting, that Eley announced a 15-minute recess.
Upon return from the recess, SCC citizen member from West Tennessee, Dr. Logan Hampton, made the point that the Commission’s action or vote will have no impact on the history of the individual they debate.
He told the story of the surrender at Appomattox and the tip of the hats between General Grant and General Lee in honor of each other, expressing hope that “we tip our hats to one another, to live out our true southern heritage and hospitality.”
While Representative Matthew Hill (R-Jonesborough), said he had no additional comments, but as Johnson indicated before the recess, he would be voting to represent the House.
Comptroller of the Treasury Justin Wilson proposed an amendment to the original motion that would add the statues of Admirals Farragut and Gleaves also be moved from the second floor of the State Capitol to the state museum to be part of an honoring of Tennessee’s military heroes and that the alcoves vacated would be used to commemorate federal or state elected officials or events that have occurred on the second floor, as determined by the Tennessee General Assembly.
Wilson went on to explain that the bust was placed on the second floor of the Capitol as part of a 1973 resolution to recognize General Forrest clearly and unambiguously for his military achievements, and passed unanimously by both houses.
“But a portion of our population has come to view this statue as something very different,” Wilson continued.
As a very practical matter, Wilson said, “the original focus and intent cannot be appreciated today.”
Wilson elaborated on the reasons for his amendment and his thoughts on the Capitol’s second floor honoring.
He then set the record straight about the 1973 resolution for the Forrest bust, saying that for those that said it was designed for white supremacy are misinformed.
Discussion ensued on the amendment, including concerns expressed by citizen member from middle Tennessee, Howard Gentry that adding two busts to be moved would delay the move of the Forrest bust, making it clear he was there to vote on the removal of the Forrest bust.
Executive Director of the Tennessee State Museum Ashley Howell came forward to confirm that they are prepared to take all three busts as long as the time frame is open and they can properly plan for it and include the appropriate scholars as part of the process.
When Gentry expressed further concern that the THC has the ability to sever the additional two busts in order to preserve the moving of the Forrest bust, Commission Counsel Christi Allen was called upon for an opinion.
Allen advised that, though she had not been through the process with the THC before, a single petition for a waiver would be prepared and filed with supporting documents and no sooner than 60 days later the THC would hold a de novo hearing on it. Her assumption is that the THC would then take whatever action they deem appropriate, regardless of what the SCC proposes.
Wilson’s amendment to the main motion passed with 8 yes votes, 1 no vote and 2 abstentions.
Before voting on the amended motion, closing remarks were made by Secretary of State Tre Hargett as well as Gentry.
The vote for the amended motion for moving the statues of General Nathan Bedford Forrest and Admirals David Farragut and Albert Gleaves passed with 9 yes votes and 2 no votes from the legislative members Johnson and Hill.
For those concerned about the erasure of history and the proverbial slippery slope of the removal of the bust may start, Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen already urged the removal of the bust and the renaming of the Nathan Bedford Forrest Park before the meeting of the SCC.
Of the 29-member THC, 24 members are appointed by the governor and five ex officio members include the governor himself, the state historian, the state archaeologist, the commissioner of environment and conservation, and the state librarian and archivist. It takes a two-thirds majority vote by roll call to grant the waiver.
The Commission usually meets in February, June, and October.
After the meeting’s conclusion, Sparks told The Star that he thought it was a good meeting and discussion.
He voted against moving the bust in House committee meetings and recognized that people are going to be disappointed with the outcome.
Sparks was very positive, however, about the ability to tell the full story of Forrest, including his advocacy for Black Americans and the attendance of Black Americans at his funeral. “Let’s tell Forrest’s story.”
He also wants the story of Sampson Keeble to be told, as the Confederate soldier who, as a Republican, was the first African-American state representative.
Reflecting on the outcome of the meeting, various incidents that occurred when he has tried to tell the story of Nathan Bedford Forrest, as well as the removal of State Representative John J. DeBerry, Jr. from the ballot by white elitists, Sparks reassured, “God’s got this.”
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Laura Baigert is a senior reporter at The Tennessee Star.
Between high school and college, young people face many significant changes: they move away from home for the first time, determine what jobs interest them, grow independent, and learn to hate the United States.
A recent poll of high schoolers and college students highlights the growing disparity in patriotism between the two groups. Colleges have long been known to be bastions of leftist thought at best and actively indoctrinating students at worst, but these numbers show a severe change in opinions about America after university attendance.
Luckily, the totaled numbers still demonstrated a sizably high degree of patriotism, but when separated between college and high school, college students showed substantially less love for this great nation.
The United States’s favorability amongst high schoolers is 88 percent, but only 69 percent among college students. The majority of high schoolers, 63 percent, are proud to be Americans. Most college students don’t share that pride: only 40 percent feel the same way.
Likewise, the majority of high schoolers consider themselves to be patriotic, while the majority of college students are not patriots, at 58 percent and 35 percent, respectively. Eighty-five percent of high schoolers are glad to live in the United States; 73 percent of college students feel the same way.
High schoolers have a far more favorable view of the American flag than college students, respectively at 91 percent and 73 percent. However, college students are more likely to approve of the United Nations flag, at 51 percent to high schoolers at 44 p ercent. Neither a majority of high schoolers nor college students are willing to sacrifice for their country, at 48 percent of high schoolers and 32 percent of college students.
In terms of the respondents, 93 percent were identified as full-time students. Forty-two percent were in high school, 13 percent in college for an associate’s degree, 31 percent in college for a bachelor’s degree, and 7 percent were graduate students. Fifty-three percent of respondents were female, and 47 percent male. Conservatives comprised of 21 percent of the respondents, liberals 33 percent, and moderates 33 percent.
Paulina Enck is an intern at the Federalist and current student at Georgetown University in the School of Foreign Service. Follow her on Twitter at @itspaulinaenck
Rep. Ilhan Omar advocated for the "dismantling" of the U.S. economy and its political system during a speech on Tuesday.
"As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality," Omar, a Democrat, said. "So, we cannot stop at [the] criminal justice system. We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.”
An outspoken promoter of the Black Lives Matter movement, Omar has repeatedly called for systematic change to law enforcement, housing, and healthcare systems.
"I will never stop saying: Not only do we need to disinvest from police, but we need to completely dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department," Omar, a representative for the district that covers the city of Minneapolis, said at a rally last month. "The Minneapolis Police Department is rotten to the root. And so, when we dismantle it, we get rid of that cancer, and we allow for something beautiful to arise, and that reimagining allows us to figure out what public safety looks like for us."
A member of "the Squad," Omar has aligned herself politically with fellow Democrats such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, who have railed against capitalism as a system of oppression used by the rich against the poor.
Similarly, Black Lives Matter organizers, who are upset with the continued mistreatment of minorities by police and a lack of meaningful action on the part of the government to rectify unequal justice, have threatened to "burn down" the current system of government if elected leaders do not comply with their demands.
"I said if this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down the system and replace it. All right? And I could be speaking figuratively. I could be speaking literally," said Hawk Newsome, a co-founder of Greater New York Black Lives Matter. "It’s a matter of interpretation."
President Trump has labeled Black Lives Matter as a group with a "hateful" message and threatened to crack down on demonstrations he says unfairly target American ideals and symbols.
"Make no mistake: This left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress," Trump said during a speech over the July 4 weekend. "To make this possible, they are determined to tear down every statue, symbol, and memory of our national heritage."
Omar has called Trump a racist and a liar since being elected to Congress as part of the blue wave in 2018.
"Imagine him saying this if it was Black Lives Matter protesters," Omar said in reaction to Trump's comments urging the Democratic governor of Michigan to listen to and work with citizens upset with coronavirus lockdown measures. "Miss us with your hypocrisy!"
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In a decision issued Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that states can punish presidential electors who break their pledge to support the presidential candidate preferred by the citizens of their states.
The ruling affirms the Electoral College as an important part of our constitutional structure—one that balances popular sovereignty with the benefits of a federal system in which state governments play a vital role.
Every four years, Americans cast votes for their preferred presidential candidate. But what voters in 48 states are actually selecting is a slate of electors who have pledged to vote, as members of the Electoral College, for the candidate who wins a majority of their state’s popular vote. (Maine and Nebraska employ a slightly more complex allocation system based on the winner of the popular vote and congressional districts).
While we all vote in November, the electors meet in state capitols in December to cast their votes.
The number of Electoral College votes to which each state is entitled is the total of their two U.S. senators and the number of members they have in the House of Representatives. This arrangement balances the interests of the larger states with larger populations and the smaller, often more rural states with smaller populations so that presidential candidates won’t ignore those smaller states and campaign only in the large, urban population centers.
But what happens when one of those electors defects?
Say, for example, an elector pledged to vote for candidate A (who wins the state vote), breaks her promise and instead votes for candidate B—or possibly some other person who wasn’t even on the ballot. Can the state remove that “faithless elector”? Can it punish or at least fine the faithless elector?
The Supreme Court confronted those questions and answered “yes” to both.
These questions were not hypothetical. In 2016, three electors from the state of Washington pledged to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Hoping to throw the election into the House of Representatives (which happens if no candidate receives a majority of Electoral College votes—currently 270), the three cast their votes for Colin Powell—even though Clinton carried the state. Washington fined them $1,000 each, in accordance with state law.
The faithless electors sued in state court arguing the fines violated the Constitution and their right to exercise a different choice in casting their vote, but the Washington Supreme Court upheld the law and the fines.
Similarly, in Colorado, three electors pledged to cast their Electoral College votes for Clinton in 2016 and announced they would instead cast their votes for former Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
Only one actually did so, because after he voted for Kasich, the Colorado secretary of state immediately removed him from his position, cancelled his vote, and replaced him with a different elector who voted for Clinton. The other two electors saw this and begrudgingly cast their votes for Clinton, too, despite their expressed desire to vote for Kasich.
All three electors sued in federal court, and the 10th U.S. Circuit Court found that Colorado had violated the Constitution by removing the elector who had actually voted for Kasich and nullifying his vote.
These “faithless” electoral votes in Washington and Colorado were both part of a concerted effort in 2016 to convince electors to break their pledges in order to throw the election into the House of Representatives. Only “seven electors across the Nation cast faithless votes—the most in a century but well short of the goal.”
Why did the U.S. Supreme Court decide that the Washington Supreme Court was right and that the 10th Circuit was wrong? It looked at the text of the Constitution.
Article II of the Constitution is very straightforward. It says that states can appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.”
Eight Justices agreed that “Article II, § 1’s appointments power gives the States far-reaching authority over presidential electors, absent some other constitutional constraint,” meaning that as a condition of appointment, a state “can demand that [an] elector actually live up to his pledge, on pain of penalty.”
Going further, Justice Elena Kagan, writing for these eight, noted that “nothing in the Constitution expressly prohibits States from taking away presidential electors’ voting discretion.”
Justice Clarence Thomas, who concurred in the judgment, rejected the majority’s Article II analysis because he believes this last point really holds the key to the outcome.
He said, “The Constitution does not address—expressly or by necessary implication—whether States have the power to require that Presidential electors vote for the candidates chosen by the people. Article II, § 1, and the Twelfth Amendment provide for the election for the President through a body of electors. But neither speaks directly to a State’s power over elector voting.”
Regardless, all nine justices agree that the Constitution does not prohibit states from limiting electors’ discretion.
The majority did give nod to the idea that both John Jay in Federalist 64 and Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 68 seemed to indicate that electors would exercise some discretion. But, “Whether by choice or accident, the Framers did not reduce their thoughts about electors’ discretion to the printed page.”
The “sparse instructions [in the Constitution] took no position on how independent from—or how faithful to—party and popular preferences the electors’ votes should be.”
Essentially, whether electors can exercise discretion is up to the states. Though, as the majority went on to point out, historical practice from the earliest days of the Republic shows that electors have long pledged to vote for particular candidates rather than to act as free agents.
Out of more than 23,000 electoral votes cast in our nation’s history, only 180 have been faithless votes. And more than a third of those 180 occurred in 1872 when one of the major party’s candidates died after Election Day but before the electors cast their votes. Faithless electors have never affected the outcome of a presidential race.
Justice Joseph Story was an early and authoritative source on American constitutional law. In 1833 he wrote that any “exercise of an independent judgment [by electors] would be treated as a political usurpation, dishonourable to the individual, and a fraud upon his constituents” because in nearly all cases the electors had already “silently” or “publicly pledge[d]” how they would vote.
Echoing Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concerns at oral argument, this result is faithful to the text of the Constitution and avoids creating chaos if all states had to allow their electors to act as free agents.
After all, while chaos might make for compelling television, it makes for terrible governance.
Kagan emphasized this point by describing what happened in the 1796 election when political rivals John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, “the leaders of the era’s two warring political parties—the Federalists and the Republicans—became president and vice president respectively.”
According to Kagan, “One might think of this as fodder for a new season of ‘Veep,’” the hit HBO series. In reality, though, it made actual governance difficult and created some degree of chaos.
To hammer home this point, Kagan needed to look no further than the next election in 1800 and the popular Broadway show “Hamilton.”
She explained how, when the 1800 election ended up in the House of Representatives because Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied in the Electoral College, “Alexander Hamilton secured his place on the Broadway stage—but possibly in the cemetery too—by lobbying Federalists in the House to tip the election to Jefferson, whom he loathed but viewed as less of an existential threat to the Republic.”
Fortunately, in 1804, the states ratified the 12th Amendment requiring electors to cast separate votes for the president and vice president. That alleviated the chaos caused by the original workings of the Electoral College.
As Heritage Foundation President Kay Cole James succinctly summarized, the court’s decision safeguards our “Electoral College system, which has protected our democratic process and provided unprecedented stability in our form of representative democracy for more than two centuries.”
Through the mechanisms established in our Constitution, including the Electoral College, “We the People” choose our leaders and retain ultimate sovereignty over our own affairs. The Supreme Court has just helped us maintain that sovereignty.
Parents shouldn't allow themselves to be bullied into agreeing to radical, experimental medical procedures they know deep down are bad for their child.
Although temporarily eclipsed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the transgender industry will ramp up again once the crisis has passed. Radical activists and their medical and pharmaceutical allies reap political and financial profit from preying on troubled children and adolescents — plying them with dangerous puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones, and wielding the scalpel to remove healthy organs and create nonfunctioning facsimiles of others.
Evidence mounts that these medical interventions increase the risk of stroke, heart disease, blood clots, cancers, and a host of other maladies no young person should ever have to face. They almost certainly result in infertility or sterility and put children on a lifelong path of medicalized warfare against their own bodies. Because there are no long-term studies of the effects of some of these interventions, they constitute a ghoulish experiment on confused but innocent kids.
Generally the trans industry must obtain parental consent before chemically or surgically altering the bodies of minors. But in light of the horrific known and potential consequences of the interventions, why would parents ever consent?
In most cases, as Maria Keffler recently explained in The Federalist, they give in because they’re being lied to. The industry emotionally blackmails them by warning that if denied access to experimental interventions, their children will kill themselves. The threat is so frequent, it has become a macabre cliché among trans-industry practitioners: “Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?”
Faced with this bleak choice, even sensible parents can be bullied into submission. But is that really the choice? Does evidence show that trans-identifying kids are uniquely at risk for suicide? Thankfully, no.
Suicide Among Trans Kids Is Rare
Any suicide is a tragedy, and all suicide threats must be taken seriously. However, suicide among trans-identified youth is rare, and comparable to that of other at-risk groups of youth, such as those with anorexia and autism. More importantly, there is no long-term evidence that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or “transition” surgeries prevent suicide. On the contrary, the best long-term research shows that people who go through medical transition kill themselves at a rate many times greater than the general population.
Swedish child and adolescent psychiatrist Sven Roman, who is no conservative, sums up the research: “There is currently no scientific support for gender-corrective treatment to reduce the risk of suicide.” Psychologists Dr. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University and Dr. Ray Blanchard of the University of Toronto agree: “[T]he best scientific evidence suggests that gender transition is not necessary to prevent suicide. … There is no persuasive evidence that gender transition reduces gender dysphoric children’s likelihood of killing themselves.”
Bear in mind that in no other medical or psychological condition is a suicidal patient — let alone a child — allowed to dictate treatment. Children and adolescents are cognitively immature, and their thinking is further impaired under psychological distress. This is gross medical negligence.
Perspective is always helpful, and on this issue, the evidence shows that suicide risk among trans-identified youth is less than or comparable to that of other at-risk groups of youth:
Being trans-identified increases suicide risk by a factor of 13
Anorexia increases risk by a factor of 18-31
Depression multiplies it by a factor of 20
Autism raises the risk by a factor of 8
These figures are significant because youth with gender dysphoria often also suffer depression, anorexia, autism, and other psychological conditions predisposing them to suicide. Self-harm among trans-identified youth may be due to the dysphoria, but maybe not. It could stem from other psychological conditions or a combination of both. If that’s the case, radical chemical and surgical interventions administered to help the patient mimic the opposite sex won’t resolve the underlying psychological problem.
Suicide prevention for trans-identified youth is the same as for youth who suffer other psychological distress: talk therapy and Food and Drug Administration-approved psychiatric medications. As reported by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, “Ninety percent of people who die by suicide have an underlying — and potentially treatable — mental health condition.”
One study found that 96 percent of U.S. adolescents who attempt suicide suffer from at least one mental illness. There is no evidence trans-identified children who commit suicide are any different. In fact, the most up-to-date research shows the effectiveness of psychotherapy for resolving gender dysphoria in children and adolescents.
The Science Speaks for Itself
But what about studies arguing that medical interventions are more effective than psychotherapy in reducing suicides among trans-identifying youth? Objective medical researchers have dismantled those studies’ conclusions (see here and here for example). Problems found with these studies include unreliable sampling, manipulated numbers, and admitted political intent.
A report co-authored by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which claimed that 41 percent of gender-dysphoric individuals have attempted suicide, was based on flawed data. Among myriad other problems, the study “did not directly explore mental health status and history, which have been identified as important risk factors for both attempted and completed suicide in the general population.”
In other words, the study provided no reliable information about whether suicide attempts were caused by gender dysphoria or by other mental-health issues. As one analyst of the study concluded, “Given the flawed data available to us, the leap in logic to assume the only viable choice is to medically transition or die ought to shame any provider, researcher, or journalist worth their salt.”
The conclusion of another study — supposedly finding that surgical “gender affirmation treatment” reduces psychological distress— is also sketchy at best. Dr. Mark Regnerus observed that the study’s own data didn’t support this conclusion.
Instead, Regnerus found that the study results signaled “an abandonment of scientific rigor and reason in favor of complicity with activist groups seeking to normalize infertility-inducing and permanently disfiguring surgeries. … Clinicians are being bullied into writing a radical prescription based on fear, not on sensible conclusions from empirical data.”
The politicized nature of research in this area is apparent from the policy statement of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which supports medical intervention rather than traditional psychotherapy and “watchful waiting” for trans-identifying youth.
Psychologist Dr. James Cantor found that AAP misrepresented myriad studies to justify its claim that medical transition is the best way to support these kids. “AAP’s statement,” Cantor reported, “is a systematic exclusion and misrepresentation of entire literatures.” In other words, AAP lied about the science.
The trans industry and its media collaborators insists that trans-identifying kids are driven to suicide by the societal stigma they face. But the leading study drawing this conclusion was so thoroughly debunked by the scientific community that the authors eventually retracted it. That major blunder hasn’t stopped trans radicals from clinging to the study’s conclusions and continuing to cite it as though it were still valid.
Psychiatrist Dr. Paul McHugh and epidemiologist Dr. Lawrence Mayer conducted an exhaustive review of all research on the topic of stigma-induced suicide and concluded, “[I]t is impossible to prove through these studies that stigma leads to poor mental health, as opposed to, for example, poor mental health leading people to report higher levels of stigma, or a third factor being responsible for both poor mental health and higher levels of stigma.”
Even without these studies, the argument that stigma drives trans-identified youth to suicide simply doesn’t make sense. Epidemiologist Hacsi Horvath — himself a “detransitioner” who accepted his sex after living 13 years as a woman — points out that the suicide rates for such adolescents were significantly lower in 1950, “when gender roles, sex-specific dress codes, laws regulating sexuality and other aspects of social control were much more rigidly ‘enforced’” than they are now. If social rejection didn’t cause suicide then, why would a much-diminished level of social rejection cause suicide now?
Transition Makes Matters Worse
Beyond the scant evidence that medical interventions reduce suicidality, the best evidence suggests that such interventions actually increase psychological distress.
As Bailey and Blanchard have reported, the two largest and most complete studies of suicide among trans-identifying patients found that those who did go through medical interventions had a much higher suicide rate than in the general population. These studies came from the Netherlands and Sweden, both socially liberal countries with little “stigma” directed toward transgenderism. The studies thus support the conclusion that “transitioning” merely masks the underlying psychological problems that are producing the dysphoria. It treats the symptoms rather than the disease.
Other research suggests that medical interventions can do more harm than good. Discussing an experimental trial of puberty blockers in the United Kingdom, Oxford University Professor Michael Biggs wrote that “after a year on [puberty blockers,] children reported greater self-harm, and … girls experienced more behavioral and emotional problems and expressed greater dissatisfaction with their body — so puberty blockers exacerbated gender dysphoria.”
Not only puberty blockers but cross-sex hormones may disrupt mental health. Women who identify as men receive megadoses of testosterone, enough to raise their levels 10-40 times above the female reference range. Past studies have documented multiple psychiatric problems — mania, hypomania, major depression, and even psychosis — with similar high doses of anabolic steroids like testosterone.
Estrogen also affects mood in complex ways. Post-menopausal women treated with even normal doses of estrogen often experience severe anxiety. Because men who identify as women receive megadoses of estrogen, this intervention could worsen both anxiety and depression.
Because administering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones is such a recent phenomenon, there’s no long-term research about the medical and psychological consequences. But the trans industry seems unconcerned. Propaganda trumps science.
Don’t Be Bullied by Suicide Stunts
Tragically, suicide is prone to social contagion among young people. The more it’s discussed and predicted, the more likely troubled kids are to kill themselves. This self-fulfilling prophecy of transgender suicide is actually useful to the industry. It shapes the narrative. It frightens parents and legislators. It thus puts money in the bank.
The Federalist’s Casey Chalk has reported that industry collaborators such as Dr. Wallace Wong even encourage trans-identifying kids to threaten suicide to get what they want: “So what you need is, you know what? Pull a stunt. Suicide, every time, [then] they will give you what you need.” Wong added that trans-identified kids “learn that. They learn it very fast.”
Horvath calls out this manipulative use of the suicide threat:
The trans industry’s insistence and hype that [trans-identified adolescents] are constantly on the brink of transphobia-related suicide at rates that far exceed those of other highly relevant populations is a shameful social engineering strategy to keep society’s focus preferentially on transgenderism — perhaps to cast themselves as visionary pioneers in the field. … [T]rans activist adults and some clinicians effectively threaten suicide on behalf of the young people. They do this to socially-engineer, manipulate and intimidate non-industry doctors, politicians, community leaders and families of [these adolescents]. They are well aware of the emotional responses they will get with this rhetoric.
Faced with a suicide threat from their trans-identifying child, parents must take it seriously and get help immediately from a legitimate psychotherapist (i.e., one who isn’t affiliated with the trans industry). They shouldn’t, however, allow themselves to be bullied into agreeing to radical, experimental medical procedures they know deep down are bad for their child.
Those interventions aren’t the only option for handling the problem. They aren’t the best option. In a sane world, they wouldn’t be an option at all.
Jane Robbins is an attorney and a retired senior fellow with the American Principles Project in Washington DC. She is a graduate of Clemson University and the Harvard Law School.
Commentary: The Destruction of Marriage and Family-Building Is the Destruction of Civilization Itself
by Robert Romano
Marriage and families are the cornerstone of not only civilization but of nature itself, without which humans would have never survived as wandering nomads and early farmers, let alone building cities, an economy and governments to represent the people in state-to-state relations.
Without families as a basic building block, children are not nurtured, educated and empowered to raise and sustain families themselves, and the human race could not continue, always being but one generation away from extinction.
That is why declining fertility and marriage rates not only in the U.S. but around the world, should be cause for alarm not merely from a cultural or policy perspective, but a biological one.
In the U.S., fertility was already below 2 births per woman since 2010 and has continued dropping, and with the COVID-19 pandemic will surely plummet further this year amid temporary male infertility from those who experienced high fevers, not to mention the breakdown of the dating scene as the economic lockdown response to the virus keeps many Americans cooped up in their homes. Weddings are being postponed.
Overall, the marriage rate in the U.S. has dropped from 67 percent in 1970 to 53 percent today among men, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Marriage among white males has dropped from 68 percent in 1980 to 56 percent today, among blacks from 57 percent to 37 percent today, among Hispanics from 57 percent in 1990 to 47 percent today and among Asians has remained steady at 61 percent from 1990 to today.
The divorce rate has been between 8 percent to 9 percent since the 1990s and the never married rate has risen from 27 percent in 1970 to 35 percent today among men. Never married is most pronounced among blacks, rising from 35 percent in 1970 to 51 percent today. Among whites it rose from 27 percent in 1970 to 32 percent today, among Hispanics it rose from 37 percent in 1990 to 45 percent today and among Asians it remained steady at 35 percent.
Females have the same trends, although the percentages are lower in each category owing to there being 8 million more women than men in the Census.
So, marriage is on the decline and so is child-rearing. As for the why, take your pick, although a combination of the advent of birth control, the decline of the influence of religion in interpersonal relations, the rise of a permissive pop culture, the destruction of heroes leading to the emasculation of men and radical feminism all seem to be among top cultural culprits.
But leaving aside those more controversial lines of analysis, the largest determinative factor in this where the rubber meets the road is the steadily increasing median age of marriage from the low 20s to the high 20s for men and women, owing to the increasing length of education, finding a job and career and certainly the higher costs associated with living. In other words, the longer you wait to get married, the less likely you are to do so.
This will have detrimental effects both immediately and down the road. Immediately, fewer weddings and babies can hit the market for marriage and baby-related products. Longer term, lower fertility will ultimately lead to a slowing and ultimately a contraction of the civilian labor force, which will be a major detriment to economic growth, as it has been in Japan and other countries that committed demographic suicide.
The fewer marriages and births, the fewer homes that will need to be built and ultimately purchased and fewer resources will be consumed.
But the effects of the collapsing marriage institution are not merely economic and demographic, they are affecting our nation’s heroes. A 2015 study from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) found “Suicide decedents were more likely than nonsuicide patients to be young, male, and unmarried…” Almost twice as likely to be precise with 50 suicides per 100,000 for those widowed, 41 per 100,000 for those separated and 53 per 100,000 for those divorced versus 27 per 100,0000 for those married. On sex, there were 38 suicides per 100,000 for males and 13.8 per 100,000 for females.
This week, the Trump administration is renewing focus on the epidemic of suicides among veterans, and President Donald Trump has already acted via executive order in March 2019 to automatically qualify veterans for mental health services. Based on the 2015 VHA study, additional focus should be paid to marriage counseling and even dating services, and focus mental health resources on veterans who were recently widowed, too.
These trends of declining marriage and family-building did not start yesterday, but they are affecting everything, and it will likely take a culture changing event to shake us to our senses.
A healthy society is one that is growing, and sadly, unless there is a dramatic turnaround in the quality and longevity of familial relations, we won’t have one. The destruction of marriage and family-building is the destruction of civilization itself.
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Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
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