Category Archives: Federalist

The Houthis, Ansar Allah, [are] doing what [Monkey D.] Luffy would do, streamer Hasan Piker gleefully cheered during a recent livestream interview with a Yemeni influencer seemingly aligned with the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, likening the Shia terrorist groups attacks on Western cargo ships in the Red Sea to the romantic idealism of anime characters locked in nautical combat against an evil global government.

If that sounds stupid, I promise it gets worse.

Timhouthi Chalamet, aka Rashid Al Haddad, the individual being interviewed by Piker, became an online sensation after sharing a TikTok of himself sailing around and walking aboard the Galaxy Leader, a Houthi-seized cargo ship.

In a show of solidarity with residents of the Gaza Strip, following Israels response to Hamas Oct. 7 attack, the Yemeni Houthis began firing upon and seizing ships in the Red Sea associated with the Jewish state or heading toward its ports. The U.S. and its allies subsequently provided the Houthis with an ultimatum: Stop the attacks, or else. Naturally, or else occurred, and according to The Wall Street Journal, the Western allies responded by striking Houthi weapons caches and bases of operation.

But this deals with the facts of the matter, not the ideologically poisoned topic at hand.

Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, Piker (who has millions of viewers across multiple platforms) has routinely used his time to run cover for Hamas and the atrocities carried out by radical Islamists.

[Read: Leftist Streamer Hasan Piker Justifies Hamas Baby Beheadings As Both Legal And Moral]

This interview was no different. It was nothing more than glad-handing the literal piracy of a probable terrorist whose cause is to cause destruction to the shipments that Americans have interest in until [Israel] stops bombing Gaza.

What is the mood in Yemen overall since America started bombing positions in Sanaa and other places? and What do you think about [how] American media, in general, keeps claiming that Yemeni militants are intercepting vessels is for completely belligerent reasons and not for Palestine? Piker asked.

Most of the time, Timhouthi would simply respond by expressing his solidarity with Palestine.

Pikers interview, along with the overwhelming majority of the discourse surrounding Israel and Hamas, is steeped in and poisoned by the faux messianic oppressor-oppressed worldview of leftism.

For these people, the world is cleanly split into good (oppressed) and bad (oppressor). Anything resembling Western civilization, as it is the hegemonic model for society and culture, is deemed oppressive. Anything not outwardly presenting as excellent within this system is deemed oppressed. No other factors are taken into account.

It is a profoundly unserious way of perceiving reality that presents real consequences. Its only mechanism for salvation correcting historical injustice is through revolution. The oppressed must cast off their oppressors shackles and implement their ideal version of society.

Ibram X. Kendi even acknowledged this when he wrote, The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

The goal isnt an end to whatever the intersectional coalition is currently bemoaning, such as so-called occupation, systemic racism, etc. The goal has always been to destroy the metaphysics through which people perceive reality and implement new hierarchies that allow for seamless friend-enemy distinctions to be made, subsequently facilitating perpetual animus until they can actually oppress (realistically, kill) those they hate.

Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @smlenett.

Samuel Mangold-Lenett

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Oppressor Matrix Gives Leftists Like Hasan Piker Brain Worms - The Federalist

Have you ever met a college admissions officer? Who does he or she remind you of?

The answer is: someone who works at the DMV. Put nicely, theyre people whove done the best they could with limited options. Put cruelly, theyre midwits on a power trip. Perhaps a tad less cynical. A little skinnier. Glasses a bit higher end. But platonically speaking, college admissions officers and DMV workers emanate toward the same form: the ultimate low busybody.

DMV workers afflict the immense class of drivers with their mediocrity. Admissions officers victims are a smaller set people who go (or dont go because of them) to college. An even smaller set are those who go to colleges that matter, usually measured at about 200 or 300 schools in the mass field of 4,000 predatory loan farms that offer college degrees. And even smaller still are those who go to the best of the best, the places that supposedly mint the leaders of the Western World, the Ivy League.

All higher education institutions share more or less the same middle layer: admissions officers and an army of related bureaucrats that effectively run the institution. Stanford, for instance, has 15,750 non-teaching employees nearly double the amount of undergraduates at the school and almost seven times the number of faculty.

The responsibility for the destruction of the Ivy League lies not with wokeness nor diversity hires nor a naive donor class, but with the people who are supposed to be keeping the lights on. Middle management.

Robert Conquest, an eminent historian and funnily enough, a longtime research fellow at Stanford Universitys Hoover Institution, coined three laws that go as follows:

Taken as a whole, these laws depict the decomposition process of institutions. They reveal why they inevitably swim left, at least in countries like America, where explicitly right-wing internal policy has been all but abandoned, even in supposedly right-wing organizations.

This covers the first two Conquest Laws, but its the third incomprehensible at first glance where the real magic lies. Its a modified Occams Razor: Institutions decline along the same leftward course so reliably that, when they arrive into our perceptive field, the simplest way (the best way) to understand them is to assume theyve been taken over by such parasites.

What hes saying, put simply, is that most operating non-reactionary institutions are zombies. They might look alive, going about their business making widgets, but in reality, they seek only to survive long enough to bite another institution and spread their disease.

Another way to think of this is POSIWID, an acronym used by systems engineers that stands for the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does. Essentially, the idea is outcomes are a more reliable way to determine what a system is about than the stated intentions of the people who created it.

An example of POSIWID is what happens with most SaaS (software as a service) companies. Founders create SaaS companies because they earnestly want to make systems cheaper and more efficient. But what happens over time? Does their product actually make anything or anyone more efficient? If youve ever worked at a major corporation, you know the answer is almost never. Many corporations that adopt expensive software systems find that over time, things arent any more efficient than back when they used paper for everything. People work more hours in the day, and its all more expensive than it used to be.

What most SaaS companies do is make things less efficient while costing more money. This isnt because the company has failed, its because the company has succeeded in its true purpose, which is to serve as a blood feast for the enemies of its original founders those who want things to be more expensive and less efficient because they dont have the ability, knowledge, or desire to do better.

If theres ever been an institution more clearly run by a cabal of its enemies, its Americas elite universities. Harvards original 1636 mission statement was:

Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.

Quite obviously, Harvard exists today to do precisely the opposite. If we take this as its true mission, then its run by its worst enemies. But lets take a more practical view, which is that Harvards 1836 motto VERITAS is the purpose of the institution. Even then, it would appear that Harvard exists mostly, if not entirely, to obfuscate the truth, rather than reveal it. This is because its enemies, who run it, cant determine the truth and resent anyone who can.

I dont mean woke diversity hires like Claudine Gay, as she (in some ways) still benefits from VERITAS, at least insofar as speaking her truth as a black woman is concerned. Its also not cynical elitist donors looking for ways to one-up each other at dinner parties, nor is it even wokeness itself, with all its manipulative agitprop. The true enemies of Harvard University are exactly the people Conquest warned us about the midwit managers in charge of the institution itself: the admissions department.

DMV workers hate you. You know it. They know it. Its obvious. Similarly, the Harvard admissions department hates Harvard students. The elite students are (or were) the class enemies of the admissions officers, who are always middles, lower middles, or even proles. Thus the admissions officers did what middle managers always do to institutions over time, actively dismantling the reactionary rules that gave the institution its original form. There are no greater explicitly right-wing rules than extremely high admissions standards. They kept the Ivy League important for a long, long time, but inevitably the rot became too great, and the managers, the enemies of the institution of truth, found a way to destroy those standards and open the floodgates to their own class.

The result is not the mass elevation of proles to elite status, which is of course impossible, but chaos. And chaos has a certain look. It looks like this:

In a recent Atlantic article, the reader learns that members of ultra-elite Yale secret society Skull and Bones ripped down posters of old white guys and replaced them with woke apologia. Then you learn that Skull and Bones classes have been exclusively non-white since 2020. Then you learn that on a visit to Skull and Bones alumni George Bushs home, this new cohort confronted and denigrated the ex-president, accusing him of war crimes and racism.

An institution run by its enemies.

Chaos is not random. It has a look of its own. Its poop on the street. Its open-air drug markets. Its food deserts and bread lines. Chaos is not a sandwich. Its not the Chicago Bears. Its not just anything. Chaos is the shape of things when a better shape isnt forced, isnt mandated by people who care.

This is Conquests point about institutions. If we dont enforce reactionary right-wing rules such as elitism and meritocracy inside them, they wont just dissolve into nothing. They will become the undead, hellbent on turning every institution into hideous monsters like themselves. Its happened in almost every experiment with communism the world over. And its quite obviously happening here.

Theres a bitter irony in the fact that Conquest became famous as a historian for exposing the mass murder and atrocities when communists took over governments. But he was also a poet of some note, and aside from his famous laws about institutional decline, it was in verse where he explicitly warned what would happen when bureaucrats came to dominate academia:

Those teach who cant do runs the dictum, But for some even thats out of reach: They cant even teach so theyve picked em To teach other people to teach. Then alas for the next generation, For the pots fairly crackle with thorn. Where psychology meets education A terrible bullsh-t is born.

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How And Why The Ivy League Will Die - The Federalist

In Wednesdays oral arguments, the right-wing legal world reached an inflection point it had been working towards for decades.

The 6-3 supermajority conservative Supreme Court got the chance to scrap Chevron deference, a pillar of agency power. Chevron deference is the principle that when laws are silent or ambiguous on the particulars of how they should be enacted, courts should let regulatory agencies and their experts fill in that gap, as long as their interpretation is reasonable.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose past writing formed the spine of the briefs for those fighting to hobble agency power, abandoned any pretense at neutrality Wednesday in even his earliest colloquies with the lawyers.

Who decides? Gorsuch asked, interrupting the lawyer opposing the government to better make his argument for him. Is the judge persuaded at the end of the day, with proper deference given to a co-equal branch of government, or does the judge abdicate that responsibility and say, automatically, whatever the agency says wins?

Its not hard to tell where Gorsuch comes down, as he twists agency deference into a heads big, scary government wins, tails judges are hamstrung and ordinary citizens lose proposition.

Chevron has long been an obstacle to these right-wing forces efforts to unspool and defang regulation, to create an even friendlier legal environment for business. Unwinding it has been the driving thrust of the movement, the source of its endless funding and resources.

Gorsuch, son of a mother who boasted about eliminating Environmental Protection Agency regulations while she was the agencys Reagan administration chief, is the perfect face for the nearly successful effort and served as its spokesperson during the oral arguments. With his abstract libertarianism, the justice maintained that Chevron means the government never loses a surprise to those of us who have watched Biden agency actions from student debt forgiveness to power plant regulations fall at the hands of this Court. With Chevron in hand, Gorsuch waxed, the tyrannical government can run roughshod over Congress, judges and the citizens pitted against its might.

Flanked by his right-wing colleagues, many of whom were incubated in the same environments, Gorsuch is poised to lead the Court in overturning or at least, fatally weakening Chevron and fulfilling the promise for which they were chosen.

The right-wing justices strained credulity Wednesday in their argument that its the little guys who Chevron hurts, the everyday Americans who supposedly keep getting ensnared in an aggressive regulatory scheme.

This is what niggles at so many of the lower court judges: the immigrant, the veteran seeking his benefits, the social security disability applicant, who have no power to influence agencies, who will never capture them and whose interests are not the sorts of things on which people vote, Gorsuch bemoaned (switching out his earlier preference for the word alien for the more sympathetic immigrant). I didnt see a case cited perhaps I missed one where Chevron wound up benefiting those kinds of peoples.

He added that the other side, which makes the argument powerfully, asserts that Chevron has a disparate impact on different classes of persons.

Again, he leaves out certain details. This case, for example, is nominally about federally mandated monitors on commercial fishing vessels to prevent environmentally damaging overfishing. The lawyers for that side made much of the thin margins in the fishing industry, the struggle for those blue collar workers to keep afloat. If thats what this case was truly about, we would have heard much more about herring Wednesday and much less philosophical debate over agencies place in society.

This case, like all of those gunning for strong regulatory agencies, is backed by the much less pitiable interests of big business, powerful corporations who want to dump waste in rivers or underpay their workers without threat of government-inflicted punishment. These lowly, maligned fisherpeople are backed by the might of Koch Industries CEO Charles Koch. Lawyers working for the nonprofit he funds are arguing the case for free, hidden behind a shell law firm, according to New York Times reporting.

Gorsuch himself also has reported close and long-standing personal ties to an oil and gas billionaire who has given money to the Koch-funded right-wing nonprofit for whom these lawyers work.

The right-wing justices hit talking points that have grown very familiar to anyone who has listened to recent oral arguments.

Empowering agencies, they argued, shifts power to unelected agency staff from Congress, the peoples branch. If Congress had wanted to afford the agencies the option to interpret a given law in a range of possible ways, the lawmakers would have said so explicitly. This vein of argument has helped the conservatives spin up the major questions and nondelegation doctrines: the first of which demands a level of specificity rarely present in congressional delegations of power in matters of great economic and political significance, and the second of which holds that Congress cant outsource its legislative responsibilities. In this Courts hands, these largely made-up and embellished notions have become tools to beat back Obama and Biden administration actions the conservatives dont like.

What Gorsuch and co. dont say is that weakening agencies does not actually empower Congress. The legislature, hamstrung by the Senate filibuster, a polarized Congress and a lack of interest in policymaking on the right, can barely fund the government each year, much less pass a bill every time the Occupational Safety & Health Administration wants to tweak a factory workplace regulation or the Food and Drug Administration has to decide if a new product qualifies as a dietary supplement or a drug. It also lacks the expertise to do those things, given that much of what agencies do is highly technical. This is the reason justices devised Chevron in the 1980s the recognition that neither Congress, nor the courts, had the ability and expertise to speak to all questions in American federal policy.

What went unsaid in Wednesdays arguments is what a post-Chevron administrative state would look like. With a handicapped Congress and handcuffed agencies, the remaining branch the judiciary is itself the arbiter of what agencies can do.

Im worried about the courts becoming uber-legislators, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said. If were talking about a policy question there are several reasonable meanings why should courts make that determination? Couldnt we be in a world where Congress intended for the agency to actually decide which choice is best?

Gorsuch and his peers, completing the trifecta of disingenuousness, feigned great distress at the chaos Chevron had introduced into the legal system, as agency actions change based on which party currently holds the White House.

The reality is you say dont overrule Chevron because it would be a shock to the system but the reality of how this works is that Chevron itself ushers in shocks to the system every four or eight years when a new administration comes in, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said, talking over Biden administration Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar.

The justices seemed less interested in Prelogars recurring point, that overturning Chevron could reopen dozens of Supreme Court cases and thousands of lower court cases that rest on the judges showing some level of deference to agencies experts. Doing away with Chevron would also, she reminded the Court, not sweep away the many cases arising from statutory ambiguity, and would deprive judges of a useful tool for deciding them which also serves as a check against judges acting in accordance with their own partisan preferences.

Jackson questioned the merits of stability itself.

I suppose judicial policy making is very stable but precisely because we are not accountable to the people and have lifetime appointments, she said.

Whether Gorsuchs bloodlust or Chief Justice John Roberts mealy-mouthed hand waving the Court barely uses Chevron deference anymore, he said the right-wing, decades-long quest to kill Chevron seems very near victory.

The issue were deciding here is more like the countless policy issues that are going to confront this country in the years and decades ahead, Justice Elena Kagan said. Will courts be able to decide these issues as to things they know nothing about, courts that are completely disconnected from the policy process, from the political process and that just dont have any expertise and experience in an area? Or are people in agencies going to do that? Thats what this case is about.

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Gorsuch Gleefully Leads Right-Wing Cohort In Fulfilling Their Federalist Society Quest - TPM

Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky remains the least popular politician in the country, according to a new poll out Monday.

AMonmouthsurvey of more than 800 adults 18 and older indicates that 60 percent of respondents disapprove of the GOP Senate chiefs job performance. Only 6 percent of respondents said they approve ofit. McConnell earned the lowest overall approval ratingamongcongressional leadership and is the only leader to receive a net negative score from his fellow partisans. Just 10 percent of Republicans said they approve of his performance, and 41 percent said they felt otherwise.

The Monmouth University survey also found President Joe Bidens approval rating at an all-time low with particularly poor marks for his handling of immigration and inflation.

Only 3 in 10 Americans say the incumbent is giving enough attention to the issues most important to them, which is worse than for his predecessor, Monmouth reported.

The poll, conducted between Nov. 30 and Dec. 4 with a 4.8 percent margin of error, means McConnells approval could be as low as 1 percent.

The surveys findings corroborate similar results from previous polls highlighting McConnells unpopularity. According to RealClearPolitics aggregate of favorability ratings for both Republicans and Democrats, McConnell has remained the most unpopular political leader in the country for years. As of writing, the Republican Senate leader suffers a nearly -40 percent approval rating in the RealClear tracker. Vice President Kamala Harris follows with a net-negative approval rating of nearly -20 percent, and Bidens approval rating is nearly -17 percent. President Donald Trump, whom former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley claimed in August was the most disliked politician in all of America, has about a -16 percent approval rating in the RealClear aggregate.

[RELATED: Nikki Haley Says Trump Is The Most Disliked Politician In America, Polling Shows Its Mitch McConnell]

RealClearPolitics popularity tracker has yet to be updated to include rankings for Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana.

McConnells low approval ratings reflect a Republican Senate chief unpopular both with Democrat opponents and grassroots conservatives in the Kentucky senators own party. Last fall, McConnell undermined Republican efforts to reclaim the upper chamber by redirectingscarce resources from competitive races in key states to a contest between two Republicans in Alaska. In November last year, despite his unpopularity, McConnell survived a challenge to his perch at the top of Senate leadership.

Despite a series of recent public health scares, the Republican Senate leader says he has no plans to leave Capitol Hill before his latest term expires in 2027.

On Sunday, 15 Senate Republicans blasted the GOP leader for working behind the scenes with Democrats to pass new funding for the proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson led the letter with 14 GOP colleagues demanding Republican Conference Chairman John Barrasso of Wyoming call a meeting to discuss border security.

[READ: Republicans Deserve A Senate Leader Willing To Defend Their Interests Over Democrats]

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Only 6% Of Americans Approve Of GOP Leader Mitch McConnell - The Federalist

A recently elected Pennsylvania school board president made his priorities clear this month when she was sworn in using controversial books, including sexually explicit material.

On Dec. 4, Karen Smith, a Democrat who was elected to lead the states third-largest school district in November, was sworn in with a stack of books, including sexually explicit material.

Thank you for your trust in me, I do not take this hand lightly, Smith said when she became president of the Central Bucks County School Board. To my supporters, I am so very thankful. To those of you who have challenged me, I will do all I can to hear your voices and concerns.

However, based on the books upon which she swore an oath, Smiths pledge to keep an open mind to parental concerns was hardly austere.

According to Fox News, one of the books used in the swearing ceremony included Flamer, by Mike Curato, published in 2020.

[Flamer] tells the story of a character who is bullied at a Boy Scouts summer camp for acting in a manner considered stereotypical of gay men,' Fox News reported. The graphic novel includes characters discussing pornography, erections, masturbation, penis size, and an illustration that depicts naked teenage boys.

Other books included in the stack upon which she was sworn in were Night, by Elie Wiesel; The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison; and All Boys Arent Blue, by George M. Johnson. At least three of the books Smith was sworn in on were listed in the top 5 of the American Library Associations (ALA) most challenged books of 2022. The national library groups activism promoting these books in local curriculums has led conservative policymakers in at least nine states to begin severing ties with the ALA. Last week, Texas, which ended its tax-subsidized affiliation with the ALA in August, passed new rules to keep sexually explicit books out of school libraries.

Smiths decision to use material endorsed by far-left activists to infiltrate classrooms illustrates how identity politics has become embraced as a cynical, secular religion. Had Smith been genuine with a pledge to hear district parents concerns, she might have chosen different material to be sworn in on.

Silvi Haldipur, a mom of two boys in Bucks County schools, said she was previously horrified by LGBT and antisemitic remarks in the boardroom of the east Pennsylvania district. However, parents in this district could have more difficulty being involved in their childrens education moving forward. The school boards new Democrat majority immediately voted to freeze two policies related to library books that passed last year along with other policies. This includes halting a previous update to the Library Materials policy that allowed parents to challenge certain books in the classroom.

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PA School Board President Sworn In With Pornographic Books - The Federalist

By now, as President Joe Biden proposes sending another $61 billion from American taxpayers to Ukraine, most Americans realize supporting the war in Ukraine has been a massively expensive failure. When the Russian army initially invaded, the foreign policy establishment insisted the United States could successfully train and arm the Ukrainians to resist the Russian onslaught. This, it was said, would benefit Americans by preventing Putin from invading American allies in the rest of Europe and promoting democracy. Somehow, the corrupt oligarchy in Ukraine was more democratic than the corrupt oligarchy in Russia.

Hundreds of thousands of lives and more than $100 billion later, its clear nothing about this war is going to change. Now, the only people who want to keep the war going are defense companies and their shills in Washington, D.C. They will fight Putin to the last Ukrainian and happily sink our country even further into debt to do so.

Moreover, as former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen celebrated in a recent essay, these war profiteers are legion and quite proud of the business theyre bringing to American workers almost as proud as they were when they hypedVolodymyrZelensky as this generations Winston Churchill.

Funds that lawmakers approve to arm Ukraine are not going directly to Ukraine but are being used stateside to build new weapons or to replace weapons sent to Kyiv from U.S. stockpiles, Thiessen points out. Also, all this aid has become a major cash infusion into factories across the country that directly benefits American workers and is also reinvigorating ourdangerously atrophied defense industrial base.

For good measure, Thiessen calls out Republican politicians who oppose this military aid to Ukraine, especially U.S. Sens. J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley. In his view, these men pretend to champion factory workers, but wont support them where it counts. Now, thanks to the Ukraine aid that Vance opposes, the Pentagon signed a$624.6 million contractlast year tobuild Stinger missilesin Tucson, to replace about 1,400 sent to Ukraine, Thiessen asserts. He accuses Hawleyof impoverishing his constituents in Missouri bytrying to cut fundingfor these [Patriot missile] systems being built in his state.

At no point does Thiessen mention who exactlyis paying for these weapons: American taxpayers. Nor does he mention the other crucial fact that all this money could be going to a whole slew of other things that would benefit the American industrial base far more than producing weapons for endless war. Those include building a wall to keep out cheap foreign labor, promoting domestic energy production, and investing research into new industrial technology.

As the French economist Frederic Bastiat explained almost two centuries ago, Destruction is not profitable. He illustrates this point with the Parable of the Broken Window, in which a boy breaks a window, forcing the store owner to pay for a new one. Some might conclude this is good because it keeps window-makers in business: Good comes out of everything. Accidents like this keep production moving. Everyone has to live. What would happen to glaziers if no window panes were ever broken?

Bastiat points out that people only arrive at this conclusion because they can see the store owner paying to have his window replaced, but they cannot see what the store owner would have done with that money otherwise. For instance, he could have bought shoes, enriching the shoe salesman. As for the glazier, he could have made a window for a new building instead of repairing an old one that was just vandalized.

Saying that pointless wars are good for business follows the same logic. It focuses on what people can see new Abrams tanks, the factories in Ohio making them, and the plants in Mesquite, Texas arming them and neglects what they cannot see: new cars (that are actually affordable), the factories in Ohio making them, and plants in Texas equipping them with GPS systems. Instead of shoveling money to a corrupt foreign government that wants to buy American weapons, American taxpayers could use that money to buy American consumer goods. More jobs, more happy customers, and far fewer dead Ukrainians and Russians.

Without this argument that war is good for business, Thiessen and other Ukraine boosters are only left with the same old arguments used to initially justify American intervention in Ukraine: decimating the Russian military threat to NATO, restoring deterrence with China, dissuading other nuclear powers from launching wars of aggression, and improving American military preparedness for other adversaries.

But all of these reasons are subject to serious questions at this point: Was the Russian military ever a real threat to NATO? Is China really deterred from taking military action in Taiwan? Are any world leaders more afraid of the U.S. military after seeing Ukraine laid wastedespite the support it received to say nothing of the despicable Biden administration withdrawal from Afghanistan? Its time for our leaders to admit that continuing support for Ukraine is a mistake. It has been an utter waste of lives and money, and to suggest otherwise only ensures further destruction. For the sake of everyone involved, the Biden administration should just broker a peace deal and move on or better yet, focus on domestic affairs. American workers should focus their efforts at home, beat their swords into plowshares, and rebuild a once proud country thats currently falling apart.

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The 'Ukraine War Is Good For Business' Argument Is Vile And Also A Lie - The Federalist

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to 26 state laws at least partly based on studies claiming conversion therapy increases LGBT Americans suicide risks. Yet every existing study that makes this claim is seriously scientifically unsound, several research reviews recently found.

Not only do all these studies depend on unscientific methods, but the data from one highly cited such study actually shows the opposite of what its authors claim, says a sociologist who reran the studys data with standard scientific controls the authors omitted.

The evidence shows that SOCE [sexual orientation change efforts] is fairly effective at preventing suicide attempts, said Paul Sullins, a research professor at Catholic University and senior researcher for the Ruth Institute, in a press conference released Friday.

These majorly flawed studies have boosted efforts to ban therapists from helping distressed people across the United States and the world. According to Sullins, some 20 states and the District of Columbia ban therapists from helping people struggling to resolve homosexual desires or gender dysphoria. Six states partially ban such therapy. That means in those states, therapists may only nudge children toward, rather than help prevent, transgender mutilation.

Last week, Republican-appointed Justices John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch joined the courts leftists in refusing to resolve a circuit-court split over whether states can punish therapists who talk to willing clients about unwanted sexual attractions and gender dysphoria. Barrett also voted to let stand a lower-court decision striking laws against children attending transvestite shows.

Every study published since 2009 on therapy for people struggling with sexual orientation distress used the same major scientific flaw Sullins identified in a 2020 paper, Christopher Rosik, a psychologist at Fresno Pacific University, found in 2022 with a research review. All failed to control for suicidal thoughts and actions LGBT people expressed before they went to conversion therapy.

The studies claim conversion therapy caused the LGBT study participants to have more suicidal thoughts and attempts, but not one separated the suicidal thoughts and attempts that occurred before starting therapy. Its not only logically impossible but scientifically invalid to say something that came after a first thing caused the first thing. But thats what every single one of these studies did.

Chart from Rosiks review

Failing to control for preexisting suicidal distress among LGBT people before they went to therapy led to the false but widely publicized claim that conversion therapy causes suicide.

When he reran the numbers with proper controls, Sullins found two-thirds of the LGBT participants suicidal thoughts and attempts in the 2020 study happened before they went to therapy for help with their sexual orientation. That means therapy couldnt have caused the majority of LGBT peoples suicidal thoughts or attempts because most happened before therapy.

In fact, when Sullins controlled for pre-therapy suicidal behavior, he found conversion therapy actually reduced suicide attempts and intentions by up to 80 percent. That means he found the opposite of what the study authors claimed using their own data. If therapy does reduce suicidal thoughts and attempts, these talk therapy bans and the Supreme Courts refusal to end them enable higher levels of distress and self-harm for LGBT Americans.

The reaction to Sullins 2022 published findings, which continues, included respondents insisting on retraction because the findings could endanger queer legal privileges. Amid that debate, Rosik and Sullins note that the studies claiming to find that sexual orientation change efforts increase suicide risks also only include self-identified LGBT people, which excludes people with similar attractions who dont identify as LGBT.

The 2020 Blosnich, et al., study is an elaborate falsehood, Sullins said in the press conference. I dont want to say that their study was fraudulent, but it purposely ignored scientific standards of evidence to point to causation with regard to SOCE [sexual orientation change efforts] harm.

The social sciences are the hardest hit by the replication crisis affecting every domain of allegedly scientific research. Today, replicating a study more often than not does not yield the same results, at least partly because science has become a tool for advancing politics. Thats exactly what these studies appear to be: tools for advancing politics, rather than attempts to find the truth.

In his 2022 review and replication of the Blosnich study, Sullins writes, A disturbing feature of this research is that, at least for some, including Blosnich et al.s (2020) study, the choice to ignore time order in attributing causation was not inadvertent but intentional. He notes that several authors of these flawed studies publicly stated their awareness of the difference between pre-therapy distress and post-therapy distress yet still failed to distinguish between the two in their studies.

Next, Sullins looked at the four most recent studies the American Psychological Association and U.K. Government Equalities Office cited when publicly supporting bans on therapists helping people with unwanted same-sex attractions. All four of the studies made the same error as Blosnich: failing to control for suicidal thoughts and attempts that occurred before starting therapy.

Sullins noted major queer organizations use these scientifically incompetent studies to push for therapy bans. He quoted as an example Shannon Price Minter, an attorney for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which defended Washington states therapy ban the Supreme Court refused to review.

In a press release celebrating the Supreme Courts refusal to secure therapists and their willing clients free speech rights, Minter said, Every major medical and mental health association in the country has warned that conversion therapy is unnecessary, ineffective, and harmful. That is why nearly half the states in this country have enacted laws to protect youth and their families from these serious harms.

Now, thats a patently false claim, Sullins responded. Its true that this study reported that. But the report, the result is a false, misleading, egregious kind of science.

The national suicide hotline is 1-800-273-8255. Find more resourceshere.

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Data: Banning Therapy For LGBT People Increases Suicide Risks - The Federalist

Democrats Marxist takeover of Americas education system is rearing its ugly head on an almost daily basis, and the latest stories out of Illinois are further proof of it.

On Thursday, Parents Defending Education reported that students attending the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) orchestrated a protest and walkout on Dec. 8 demanding harsh punishments for individuals who have bias incident reports filed against them. According to the academys website, anyone from IMSA students to alumni and visitors can file on-the-record or anonymous reports alleging incidents of bias committed by other IMSA community members. The reports are then investigated by school staff such as the chief human resources/equity officer and/or the director of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

IMSA students who participated in the Dec. 8 demonstration, however, are demanding the high school take its leftist policies even further. Included in their list of demands are requests for the school to publicize a list of possible consequences for students following a bias incident report, including detentions, removal from leadership positions, suspensions, expulsions, and notification to parents.

But the students who chanted Silence is complacence! and Why are our pronouns not used? during the Dec. 8 demonstration didnt stop there. They also want the university to notify any potential future colleges that offending students may consider transferring to or attending in the future, after they are presumably expelled for their supposed transgressions. In essence, the demonstrators want to destroy possible offenders future educational and career prospects based on potentially-anonymous reporting of incidents like not using a persons preferred pronouns.

The list also includes a demand that possible consequences for offending faculty members be publicized, recommending punishments that include, but go beyond only educational conversations and required training.

Meanwhile, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a far-left Democrat, announced plans this week to cripple the citys high-achieving selective-enrollment schools in the name of so-called equity. During his mayoral campaign earlier this year, Johnson explicitly promised city residents his administration would not end selective enrollment at Chicago public schools.

According to The Daily Mail, the proposal put forward by Johnsons education board would effectively stop gifted children from lower income backgrounds from academically competing to get into high-performing schools. Some of these schools are among the nations highest ranking high schools and offer children who grow up in difficult circumstances opportunities to further their academic careers.

This article has been updated since publication.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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From Woke Walkouts To 'Equity,' Illinois Schools Are Melting Down - The Federalist

President Joe Bidens son, Hunter, is relying on Second Amendment arguments that his father once slammed as deeply troubling to escape conviction on gun crimes.

On Monday, attorneys for the presidents son filed a series of motions to dismiss federal charges handed down by Special Counsel David Weiss. Among the charges Bidens attorneys want thrown out are firearm charges that were filed on the basis of Hunter Biden purchasing a gun as a drug addict. Hunter Bidens initial sweetheart plea agreement which was derailed this summer after it fell apart in court would have forgiven the felony firearm conviction if Hunter maintained 24 months of sobriety.

Hunter Biden asserts that the gun charges fail as a matter of constitutional law because Congress could not criminalize the possession of a gun by an addict, explained Federalist Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland. And since Congress could not criminalize possession by an addict, it also could not make lying about being an addict a crime. Therefore, Hunter Biden argues the three gun charges fail.

Hunter Bidens attorneys cited United States v. Daniels, a 5th Circuit decision in August that reversed the firearm conviction of a non-violent drug user.

In short, our history and tradition may support some limits on an intoxicated persons right to carry a weapon, but it does not justify disarming a sober citizen based exclusively on his past drug usage, the court ruled. Nor do more generalized traditions of disarming dangerous persons support this restriction on nonviolent drug users.

The prosecution charges that Mr. Biden violated a rarely used statute that it claims prevented him from owning a firearm as an unlawful user of a controlled substance, Hunter Bidens lawyers wrote in their Monday motion. But that statutes status-based prohibition on gun ownership recently was struck down as unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.

The Daniels decision followed the Supreme Courts decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, a landmark ruling in 2022 that broadly upheld the right to carry a handgun in public.

In another gun rights case that followed Bruen, attorneys for an Oklahoma man who was pulled over with a gun and marijuana in his car argued the portion of federal firearms law focused on drug users or addicts was not consistent with the nations historical tradition of firearm regulation, echoing what the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled last year in Bruen.

Attorneys for Hunter Biden cited the Supreme Courts decision in Bruen 19 times in their motion filed on Monday. And yet, when the court handed down the landmark case in June 2022, President Biden said the ruling contradicts both common sense and the Constitution, and should deeply trouble us all.

Now, Hunters case may further strengthen the Second Amendment protections his father disparaged.

[RELATED: Please Let Hunter Biden Help Overturn Our Unjust And Unconstitutional Gun Laws]

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Hunter Biden Invokes Gun Rights Ruling That Joe Called Unconstitutional - The Federalist

2023 will go down in history as the year that Chinas state-sponsored hackers advanced their ability to wage cyber warfare against the U.S.

Chinese hackers used to focus on stealing Americas commercial secrets and personnel information (see exampleshere and here). But this year, Chinese hackers have expanded their reach by collecting intelligence on U.S. government agencies and breaching systems of infrastructures with strategic value.

In May 2023, The New York Times reported that a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group had installed malware in electric grids in Guam and other parts of the U.S. since February 2023, probably seeking to cut off power to the U.S. military in case China invades Taiwan.

Microsoftdisclosed in July that China-based hackers gained access to email accounts affecting approximately 25 organizations in the public cloud, including government agencies as well as related consumer accounts of individuals, since May 15, 2023. The affected government agencies included the U.S. State Department. U.S. national security officials identified the hackers as affiliated with Chinese intelligence. Google Clouds Mandiant senior vice president and chief technical officer, Charles Carmakal, called Chinese hackers techniques very advanced.

Then, last week,DailyMail.com reported that Chinese hackers affiliated with the Peoples Liberation Army have gained access to essential infrastructure sites in the U.S., including a water utility in Hawaii, a major port, and at least one oil and gas pipeline. The hackers access to the water utility in Hawaii is probably of the utmost concern since the U.S. Pacific fleet resides near the island of Oahu. Chinese hackers had been sitting on a stockpile of strategic vulnerabilities without being detected for almost a year.

Brandon Wales of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agencysaid, It is very clear that Chinese attempts to compromise critical infrastructure are in part to pre-position themselves to be able to disrupt or destroy that critical infrastructure in the event of a conflict.

For example, if the Chinese Communist Party invades Taiwan, Chinese military-affiliated hackers will likely disrupt critical infrastructure in the United States. Wales said the hackers will try either to prevent the United States from being able to project power into Asia or to cause societal chaos inside the United States to affect our decision-making around a crisis.

Chinas state-sponsored hackers are relentless, and they have received the states assistance to enhance their abilities. For example, Beijing passed aData Security Lawin 2021. It includes a provision that requires technology companies doing business in China to report their software vulnerabilities to Chinas Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) within 48 hours after the issue became known. The MIIT then adds such vulnerabilities to a National Vulnerability Database and generates vulnerability reports.

The Chinese government claims such a database and its reports are necessary for researchers to learn how to fix those software vulnerabilities and enhance cybersecurity. Beijing omitted to mention that MIIT shares its software vulnerability reports with other Chinese government agencies. These include Chinas Ministry of State Security (MSS), the nations leading spy agency.

MSSs activities include performing domestic counterintelligence, gathering foreign intelligence, conducting overseas influence campaigns, and organizing hacking. Last year, the U.S. Justice Departmentcharged13 individuals, including a few members of MSS, for alleged efforts to unlawfully exert influence in the United States for the benefit of the government of the PRC. The agency was also behind some of themost disruptive overseas hacking operationsin recent years.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the security firm Beijing Topsec, two entities known for working with the PLA to carry out hacking campaigns, also have access to MIITs vulnerability reports.

Another serious concern of this Chinese law is that it mandates companies to disclose any software vulnerabilities within two days of discovery, even though the average time it takes to patch its software flaws is between60 daysandmore than 200 days.

Brad Williams, writing forBreaking Defense,warnedthat Chinas new law essentially has given its state-sponsored hackers a head start. It provides them with nearly exclusive early access to a steady stream of zero-day vulnerabilities of software used by other countries, including the U.S. The law gives Chinese hackers plenty of time to exploit those vulnerabilities and advance their hacking abilities.

How many American companies have complied with Chinas software vulnerability reporting mandate is unclear. Williams named two U.S. companies, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, which have business operations in China and likely must comply with the software vulnerability disclosure requirement.

Unfortunately, both companies also have a significant presence in both the public and private sectors in the U.S. Their compliance with Chinese law could potentially include those discovered in technologies used by the Defense Department and Intelligence Community in the U.S. Even a mere description of a bug with the required level of specificity would provide a lead for Chinas offensive hackers as they search for new vulnerabilities to exploit, according toWIRED magazine.

It is not a coincidence that since Beijing enacted mandatory software vulnerability reporting, Chinas hackers have demonstrated an enhanced ability to breach into more strategically sensitive systems in the West, especially in the U.S. The Director of National Intelligences 2023 Annual Threat Assessment states,China probably currently represents the broadest, most active, and persistent cyber espionage threat to U.S. Government and private-sector networks.

The PLA has every intention to incorporate cyber warfare as part of its war planning against Taiwan and its allies. Foreign technology companies in China have a decision to make: Will they continue chasing short-term profits and market access in China, even if it means sharing software vulnerabilities? Or should they pack up and leave the hostile legal environment in China? Their decision will affect not only their own data security and that of their customers but also the national security of their homeland and allies.

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China's Cyber Warfare Surges With Hacking Of U.S. Infrastructure - The Federalist