Daily Archives: May 22, 2021

Since announcing a gubernatorial bid in California, Caitlyn Jenner has ignited a conversation about who the qualified Republican candidate to run in the left-wing stronghold is. Jenner sat down with Sean Hannity on Fox News and ridiculed Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom for his hypocrisy in handling COVID-19. Jenner also released a campaign video about the California dream that displayed clips of the retired athlete competing in the 1976 Olympics decathlon.

Jenner deserves a fair critique and to be considered based on all his public policy proposals. The Federalists Emily Jashinsky laid out several key questions those in the GOP would be wise to ask him.

Still, as you may have noticed, I used the pronoun he to refer to Jenner. The reason for this is quite simple. Bruce Jenner was born a biological male in 1949, changed his name to Caitlyn in 2015, and is still a man regardless of any attempts to look or act like a female. It is not imprudent to adhere to science in describing his sex. It is the moral thing to do.

Some on the political right, particularly those who are more fond of fusionism or libertarianism, are quick to pump the brakes on using a biological pronoun. It is rude to the person and it is important to be friendly, the person will often plead. If they wish to be called by a false pronoun, I will honor that request. Its a free country! One conservative I spoke with said using inaccurate pronouns for transgender identifying people is being respectful and every single conservative ought to do so.

This could not be further from the truth. In actuality, it is disrespectful to both you and the transgender person to use the anti-science pronoun. It demeans your knowledge of reality and perpetuates lies harmful to you and the transgender person, as well as to the rest of society.

Jenner is running as a Republican. This means many conservatives who determine that there are two sexes, and most do, could punch the ticket for his female name in 2022. Yet these voters should not feel obliged to forfeit their intrinsic and prescriptive understanding of sex in order to accommodate another persons feelings about what sex he or she claims to feel like.

If a person knows Jenner can only be a male or a female, and that he is in fact a biological male, that person is contradicting his own knowledge by referring to the candidate as she. One should not have to abandon ones morals and sanity to appease gender activists, those who have been brainwashed by such ideology, and those struggling with gender dysphoria. Being manipulated into telling what you know to be a lie is not good for anyone.

Second, conservatives ought to foster the common good. What is good includes what is true. It is harmful to perpetuate false gender theories. The person using a false pronoun violates the truth and obfuscates our cultures understanding of biology. Since truth and goodness are intertwined, bowing to transgender ideology threatens both.

Given that identifying as transgender has been considered by physicians to be a mental disorder, promoting its anti-biological basis renders no ultimate good to transgender people either. One poll from 2019 found 29 percent of transgender and non-binary youth respondents have attempted suicide, and 47 percent of the sample underwent psychological or emotional counseling. 90 percent of transgender veterans, in particular, were found in a 2016 study by The Endocrine Society to have at least one mental health diagnosis.

It is important to be kind and recognize humans struggle with mental health, especially on the tail end of months of lockdowns. Pew Research Center data from March indicated that a fifth of Americans experienced high levels of psychological distress in a portion of the second year of coronavirus transmission.

But using the incorrect pronoun only furthers the false notion that biological sex is interchangeable. Biology is fixed, and human nature cannot be transformed with words.None of this means being impolite to transgender-identifying people, because being kind is part of what makes a good person. But it does mean being honest and polite, and using the pronoun that recognizes a persons genuine sex.

Manipulating words erodes our language and therefore thinking. Graham Hillard, an English professor at Trevecca Nazarene University, made this argument in National Review a few years ago. What is at stake, however, is the irreplaceable right to say of one thing, true, and of another, false to define the basic realities from which our politics proceed, Hillard wrote. A man is a man. A woman is a woman. Let us not pretend otherwise.

When Big Brother arrives in the 21st century, he will appear not on posters but in grammar handbooks, HR manuals, and social media, the professor concluded. Not as a tormentor but as a disappointed neighbor or friend.

Conservatives should seek to be kind and foster the common good, but using the wrong pronoun to refer to Jenner is neither. It is giving into perverse postmodernism and its subset known as queer theory, an academic discipline built on the subjectivism of poststructuralism.

This also does not mean Jenner is necessarily the wrong candidate for the GOP in California given other considerations in play. That is a calculation for those on the right to make based on the policies he brings to the table and the voters he must appeal to.

But in order for conservatives to faithfully engage in the ensuing culture war, which one libertarian writer claimed Wednesday gets conservatives too worked up, Americans have to practice what they preach. If one knows a man is a man and a woman is a woman, then referring to Jenner as feminine violates the truth. Worse, doing so concedes to a powerful left ambitious enough to attempt an overhaul of reality.

Jenner has been a public figure for decades, and his decision to enter the political sphere bolsters the number of people attentive to his transgenderism. The broad standards for the candidate require us all to critically deliberate on our positions, in any regard, including on sexuality.

One might decide to use the opposite pronoun when referring to a psychologically struggling transgender friend or family member to preserve an fragile relationship. But preserving order in the public square in discussions of someone who has chosen to become a public figure means always telling it like it is. It means ensuring we are doing our part to preserve basic and necessary human truths.

How people refer to Jenner wields immense influence on the trajectory of the culture given how it could sway, among other things, gender-dysphoric children. Reinforcing a frequent cycle of self-harm is the danger. If Americans wish to uphold the societal order, now is the time to not waver on affirming false pronouns the left recognizes can fundamentally shift hearts and minds.

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Conservatives Who Call Caitlyn Jenner 'She' Forfeit The Truth - The Federalist

Leftist publications ridiculed California Republican lawmaker Devin Nunes this week over a Trump Justice Department subpoena withdrawn under the new Biden administration that sought to unmask a parody Twitter account.

The Justice Department under Trump, went the tale narrated in an MSNBC column Thursday, attempted to abuse its power with a grand jury subpoena to find the identity of an online troll who was targeting one of the presidents top allies.

Twitter filed a motion in response to quell the subpoena and protect the anonymous users identity, who goes by @NunesAlt. The company mocked Nunes in the process as a thin-skinned politician engaging in repeated efforts to unmask individuals behind parody accounts critical of him.

Other outlets perpetuated the narrative peddled by MSNBC and Twitter that the Trump Justice Department took undue advantage of its subpoena power to intimidate an anonymous parody Twitter personality. The usual culprits participated, including Vanity Fair,Washington Post, and New York Magazine.

Subsequent reporting from The New York Times on Wednesday evening, however, shows Nunes likely had nothing to do with the subpoena filed by the Trump Justice Department.

The Times wrote the DOJ effort to identify the user behind the account was related to an online threat targeted at Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The paper explained in the first line:

The Trump-era Justice Departments attempt to identify the person behind a Twitter account devoted to mocking Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California, stemmed from a U.S. Capitol Police investigation into a purported online threat to Senator Mitch McConnell, not to Mr. Nunes, according to two law enforcement officials.

While MSNBC reported federal prosecutors who pursued the case failed to show the specific threat to warrant the reveal, the Times wrote, the offending post had since been deleted or removed, citing one of the officials consulted.

The paper reported law enforcement officials said the post in question came from a threat to McConnell around the time he drew bitter backlash from Democrats when he pledged to move forward with the confirmation process of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

The new information suggests that Mr. Nunes, whose office has not responded to a request for comment, may have had any role in the subpoena, the Times wrote.

A Nunes spokesman did respond to The Federalist.

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Lefties Mock Nunes On Twitter Troll Subpoena He Had Nothing To Do With - The Federalist

The woke may regret going after Jane Austen. Last month it was reported that exhibits at the Jane Austen Museum were being revamped as staff arere-evaluating Jane Austens place in Regency-era colonialism in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests. This attempt to evaluate Austen according to the American upper classs current racial obsessions mostly reveals the blind spots those obsessions encourage.

Many of Austens fans were furious at this attempted denigration of the great authoress. This anger was intensified by the paucity of the charges against her. Personally, she was accused only of having enjoyed tea and cotton, which were produced in questionable surroundings. Of course, so are Nikes and iPhones; then as now, it is difficult to avoid some contact with morally compromised goods in a global market. And as the museum itself acknowledges, Austen is generally thought to have opposed slavery.

The outcry induced the museum to quickly backtrack. It issued a statement protesting that it had been misrepresented and that its plans were meant to highlight Jane Austens brilliance and that placing Austen in the context of her time at her home will only make her genius shine more brightly. Even if one buys this excuse, it is nonsensical to evaluate Austen and her work by current American ideological fashions. But when America has an ideological fever, the rest of the world is in danger of inflammation.

Indeed, the folks who want to read Austen through the lens of Black Lives Matter are just the sort who would make fine comic characters in her novels. It is much more informative to consider them through Austens lens of class, character, and society than to look at her through their racial preoccupations.

The realities of social class with its combination of money, manners, family, education, and connections are the foundation of Austens novels. But they are often absent or downplayed by the same current agitators who are keen to emphasize other group differences. The American left has all but abandoned class analysis in order to focus on almost everything else: race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and so on.

This new version of cultural leftism is more compatible with upper-class life than old-fashioned economic leftism. Indeed, emphasizing non-economic divisions may even serve upper-class interests.

For instance, the current emphasis on race lets the upper classes off the hook. They can excuse the decline of the white working class as the natural comeuppance of racists, and blame the plight of poor and working-class minorities (especially blacks) on racism, rather than on economic and social policies that serve the professional and upper classes.

But such cynically utilitarian benefits are far from the minds of most of those eagerly parroting the latest racial dogmas. Todays elites may be less concerned with ancestry than those of Austens day, but class is still about more than money. Manners, connections, and fashion still matter a great deal, and caring about the anti-racism of someone like Ibram X. Kendi is a marker of status, which is why Kendis core constituency iswhite readers of The Atlantic.

That Kendis anti-racism is a lot like the old racism is irrelevant to those primarily concerned with having the correct views for the class they belong to, or at least aspire to. Therefore, it is no surprise that upscale white progressives are to the left of even black voters on race. The survey data just confirms the observable predominance of Black Lives Matter signs in upscale white neighborhoods.

As would therefore be expected, most of the elite response to racial grievances consists of symbolic gestures. It is much easier to focus on renaming things than to, say, reform the public school system that encourages all those white BLM supporters to cluster together.

As Megan McArdle has put it, a lot of high-performing public schools are really private schools that come bundled with hardwood floors and granite countertops. Rhetorical radicalism provides cover for the class disparities that, especially in strongly Democratic urban areas, often follow racial divisions.

But critical race theorys march through schools, both public and private, is creating dilemmas for these well-to-do radicals. On one hand, if they give in to ideological instruction and mediocrity, such as Virginias plan to abolish most accelerated math courses in the name of equity, then the schools that they have fought to get their kids into will lose the academic excellence that makes them worth attending. On the other hand, standing up to the radicals is social suicide.

For example, consider the recent kerfuffle at Manhattans expensive and exclusive Grace Church School. A teacher who spoke out against the indoctrination of critical race theory was effectively fired, only to then release audio of the schools head admitting that the school is demonizing white people for being born. The alternative to the administrators cowardly hypocrisy would have risked not only his career, but his status, and so he publicly supported what he privately knew to be wrong.

In contrast, the outcry over the Jane Austen museum shows how this toxic racial ideology may be beaten back. In a word, it is love. People who love Jane Austen do not want a museum dedicated to her to become one more source of insufferable Black Lives Matter posturing.

This shows how to defeat this ideology elsewhere. In schools, for example, critical race theory will be defeated when parents love their children enough to challenge it, even at the risk of status. Love is likewise the answer to the racial divisions that this ideology only exacerbates.

In this, Jane Austen is an excellent teacher. She did not write about race, but she wrote about people. She could analyze folly, individual and social, with the best of them, but we may, like her heroines, learn to resist such errors.

Austen refused to reduce people to their social memberships. Although she gave social status and class their due as realities her characters must navigate, her heroines exceed them.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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Jane Austen Is The Latest Victim Of Rich Whites' Obsession With Race The attempted denigration of - The Federalist

Federalist Publisher Ben Domenech said on Fox News Thursday the obsession with race in K-12 education threatens to undermine the constitutional ban on government favoring one religion over another, warranting school choice as a constitutional right.

Domenechs comments came after former Attorney General Bill Barr critiqued President Barack Obamas opposition to school choice programs to keep inner-city children locked in failing institutions while the White House children attended private school.

The real issue of systemic racism is our public school system in the inner cities, Barr said.

One of the things that really comes out in this speech, Domenech said, where Barr demanded school choice as a constitutional right given public schools entrenchment of far-left indoctrination, was him branding this new woke religion as such that it threatens the Establishment Clause in essentially creating a religious document, a religious set of rules that are being propagated at taxpayer expense.

The leftist theology infecting K-12 classrooms nationwide, Domenech said, possesses nearly all the elements of a religion.

They have sins, they have indulgences, they have demands, and guilt put on you, but they dont have grace, and they dont have forgiveness, Domenech said. Thats something that I think we all should come to appreciate as being at the center of Americas culture war today.

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Domenech On Bill Barr: Critical Race Theory Is Schools Pushing Religion - The Federalist

One of the top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials who was included in emails between the agency and the nations second-largest teachers union on schools reopening will step down from her position this summer, POLITICO reports.

Anne Schuchat, the CDCs principal deputy director, was one of multiple government health officials included in emails between The American Federation of Teachers union, who repeatedly lobbied against in-person schooling, and the agency over the school reopening guidelines which were released earlier this year.

Schuchat says she is leaving the agency to allow more time for creative passions after spending the last seven years in her spot as the CDCs second-in-command. And while the shifting sands and reported clashed with current Director Rochelle Walensky could be a contributing factor, it is still unclear why she chose to resign now.

Schuchat is the second major CDC official to resign in the last few weeks. Days before Schuchats announcement, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the former director of the National Center for Immunization and Diseases, announced that her last day would be May 14.

Messonier was the center ofa disproven theory peddled by corporate media outlets and leftist anchors such as CNNS Jake Tapper that claimed she was silenced by the Trump White House for urging American preparedness in the early stages of the pandemic.

Tappers claims, however, simply echoed the false and unsubstantiated talking points from the Biden Campaign in March 2020 about Messonnier, along with others, being silenced and removed from giving public briefings soon, which were already debunked by factcheck.organd givenfour Pinocchiosby the Washington Post.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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The Federalist Top CDC Official Steps Down After Emails Surface Showing Collusion With Teachers Union Anne - The Federalist