Category Archives: Federalist

A judge in Texas granted full custody of a nine-year-old boy to his mother, who for the past several years has sought to force the child to be transgender despite protests by the boys father.

Anne Georgulas, a pediatrician in Coppell, Texas, was granted full custody on Tuesday to James Younger, her son, by Democrat Judge Mary Brown. Georgulas will assume full responsibility for the boys medications, extracurricular activities, education, primary residence, and counseling. The ruling also permits the mother to withhold information regarding Youngers extracurricular activities, school functions, school enrollment, counseling, and medical care from the father, Jeff Younger.

Georgulas and her ex-husband have sparred in the public eye over their sons sex. Georgulas refers to James as Luna, and believes the biological boy to be a female. Younger disagrees, saying James chooses to present himself as a boy at his house, even though he keeps feminine clothes in his sons closet as an option.

The Facebook page Save James, which has eclipsed a following of close to 39,000 people since launching years back, denounced the memorandum last Wednesday.

Judge Mary Brown ruled against the safety and protection of James and Jude, the page wrote. Supervised visitation with their own dad at Jeffs expense. As of today, no communication with their beloved daddy! Dr. Fletchers dishonest report has prompted Anne to file an Ex Parte Temporary Restraining order to prevent Jeff from seeing or even speaking with his sons. The child abusers say James and Jude are afraid of Jeff! PRAY!

While Georgulas was given custody, there are limitations in place. Although she is granted the ability to consent to medical procedures, hormone-suppression therapy, puberty blockers, and reassignment surgery, or gender mutilation, are not included in this umbrella. The mother argues that her son expressed a desire to be called Luna but Jeff claims to have footage disproving this claim.

The prior orders that Ms. Georgulas must notify Mr. Younger of doctors, counseling, or mental health appointments, or extracurricular activities for the children are lifted, the court document states. In an effort to ensure the emotional well-being and physical safety of the children, the court orders that all of Mr. Youngers possession periods shall be continuously supervised by Forensic Counseling Services. at Mr. Youngers sole cost and expense.

In a hearing a month ago, Georgulas claimed her sons sex was not the primary force behind the custody case. She accused Jeff of bad parenting abilities, which evidently succeeded given that the court found Jeff failed to timely make the payments of child support, medical support and interest as ordered and only paid his past due support after the motion for enforcement was filed.

Jeffs attorney, however, argued that Georgulas team seeks to downplay the significance of the trans-issue.

To downplay that this is but for the gender issue is absolutely misleading and wrong, attorney David Hanschen said. This is all about the gender issue in this case. And its about the parents ability to cope with and deal with this situation.

A jury in Dallas ruled 11 to 1 in October 2019 to not grant Jeff sole conservatorship of James and his brother. Georgulas then filed a petition in court to try and mandate her ex-husband refer to their son as a female. Republicans in Texas introduced a measure in May to prohibit child sex mutilation, but it failed and was not scheduled in the House.

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Judge Awards Full Custody Of James Younger To Mother Who Wants To Transition Him - The Federalist

Margot Clevelands recent article here in The Federalist asserted Texas Gov. Greg Abbotts recent executive order barring the transportation of foreign nationals by non-official actors to limit the spread of the Delta variant of COVID-19 was not authorized under constitutional principles or federal law.

Cleveland asserts Abbotts order is illegal because it interfered with federal immigration authority and that its foundation in state public health law was irrelevant. Cleveland also contends that there is nothing [Gov.] Abbott or state and local officials can do about the Biden administrations complete disregard for the security of our southern border.

Respectfully, Clevelands statements are constitutionally inaccurate, reflect common misunderstandings of the basic principles that anchor our republic, and are arguably negligent from a public safety perspective.

The foundational flaw in this argument is rejecting the dual and mutually supportive concepts of state sovereignty and federalism. Bluntly stated, the American states are sovereign entities, not provinces. Our system is structurally and fundamentally different than virtually almost every other national governmental structure in the world.

Because our states are sovereigns with their own constitutions, laws, and obligations to their citizens and not mere appendages of our federal government, they are authorized to wield substantial, non-symbolic power within their own territories. An assertion that states function in a realm of permission-based or symbolic authority is just flat wrong.

State sovereignty, and the voter-based power that grants that sovereignty, is in turn an essential component of federalism, which provides the checks and balances that guard our freedoms. Remember, there are two crucial types of federalism at work in our system: horizontal federalism and vertical federalism. When most Americans talk of federalism, they are likely talking about horizontal federalism, the three branches of the federal government, the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. These coequal branches ostensibly keep each other in check and prevent overreach.

But vertical federalism is just as important as horizontal federalism, if not more so. The same checks-and-balances philosophy behind the three-branch design of our federal government is no less a part of the interaction between state governments and the federal government.

The Founders, who created the federal government to benefit the states, did not think states would just behave like pieces of a centralized government. They fully banked on states jealously guarding their power and pushing back against federal overreach as needed. Indeed, the odds are pretty good that the U.S. Constitution would never have been ratified at all if the states had been told they were voluntarily ceding their states powers to a centralized government.

Applied to the situation at hand, state sovereignty and vertical federalism absolutely authorize Abbott and any other governor Republican, Democrat, or other to serve their citizens within the boundaries of their state constitutions, laws, and obligations. Here, we have what is state government leadership issuing an instruction to state-funded officials to protect the public health of state citizens in a situation where the federal government has opted out of its obligations to do so.

An assertion that the constitutional doctrine of preemption, which prohibits states from functioning in areas exclusively reserved for federal action, prohibits Abbotts order is not only inaccurate, but also raises important questions about what happens when the federal government asserts preemptive authority but then abdicates that authority. Call it dormant overreach.

In her article, Cleveland notes the Biden administrations Department of Justice argued in federal court that Abbotts order violates the Supremacy Clause because it disrupts federal immigration operations in Texas. Most Texans would find that argument somewhat comical in that, by most accounts, there is virtually no immigration enforcement taking place in Texas, or anywhere else along the United States-Mexico border, for that matter. The Biden administrations argument is the intellectual equivalent of a pilot steering a plane into the ground while preventing someone from trying to rescue the flight by claiming that only the pilot is authorized to fly the plane.

Cleveland also implies that Texass most meaningful or even only role here is to highlight the hypocrisy of the Biden administration and eventually win some sort of national conversation. She is correct to say that the Biden administration is engaging in rank hypocrisy by unleashing hundreds of thousands of potentially COVID-19-positive foreign nationals on American soil while pushing for new rights-inhibiting restrictions of American citizens.

Nevertheless, it is inaccurate to say that a states job in the face of federal abuse is to win a messaging fight but otherwise stand down and wait for federal rescue. This perspective approaches negligent disregard because it is essentially arguing state and local governments have no role in public safety when our federal government is failing to ensure the publics safety.

The Biden administrations damaging conduct is obvious to most Americans, but Texas and other states are not bystanders in this war for Americans safety, security, and primacy. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. The solutions that lay ahead will require more aggressive assertion of state sovereignty, more aggressive state action to protect their citizens, and a more thorough understanding and appreciation of what our Constitution not only allows, but requires.

John A. Zadrozny serves as the director of America First Policy Institute's Center for Homeland Security and Immigration. Prior to joining AFPI, Zadrozny served in several roles in the Trump administration, including most recently as deputy assistant to the president in the Office of the Senior Advisor for Policy.

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Texas Has An Obligation To Protect Its Citizens With Border Enforcement - The Federalist

Selena Gomez doesnt want to be mocked. Nobody really does. But Gomez and her fans are mobilizing to scold a show that made a one-second quip about her kidney transplant.

The line wasnt even really about Gomez. In a discussion on cancel culture, characters on The Good Fight were listing off topics that cant be joked about, like necrophilia, autism, and Selena Gomezs kidney transplant.

The writing was meta, and Gomez is proving it right. As Buzzfeed notes, The joke was likely a reference to a 2020episode of the Saved By The Bell reboot that included a joke about the singers 2017 transplant, which she received as part of her treatment for lupus, recalling that Gomezs fans called the show cruel and disgusting after the joke aired.

On Tuesday, the former Disney star tweeted, I am not sure how writing jokes about organ transplants for television shows has become a thing but sadly it has apparently. I hope in the next writers room when one of these tasteless jokes are presented its called out immediately and doesnt make it on air.

Ashley Tisdale added to the pile-on, instructing the writers togo back to school to come up with something clever and actually funny.

With their misdirected opprobrium, Gomez and her not-so-merry band of keyboard warriors are proving the joke right. It was about cancel culture, not Gomez. Whats hilarious is that one of the Good Fight characters actually asks in the same scene, Do you think we could get canceled for even joking about being canceled?

The answer, of course, is yes, and for two key reasons illustrated by this exceptionally silly controversy. Social media conditions us to publish and then amplify our emotional reflexes, which boosts hot takes over cooler ones tempered by, say, a 10-second pause. Worse, entertainment medias overcorrection from the frenzied tabloid days of the aughts means celebrities increasingly feel entitled to friendly treatment.

They weaponize mental health awareness and stan culture, a trend itself fueled by alienation and dystopian tech, to police the media into compliance. Its a repulsive display of elite entitlement, but the entertainment media rolls right along with it.

Next month, well have been without Joan Rivers for seven long years. While Rivers may have regretted an Elizabeth Taylor joke or two, she justified her constant mockery of celebrities by pointing out that their vast wealth and privilege made them fair game. Yoko Ono? The woman has $250 million, and right now shes screeching somewhere and making a record, Rivers said nearly 40 years ago when pressed by ABC over her cruel comments. Liz Taylor? I dont think its cruel when the woman is the most beautiful woman in the world, one of the wealthiest women, and is still a star of great magnitude, she said.

Im cruel to big guys, but Ill make sure Im nice to room service who cant answer me back, Rivers added. I dont care if Elizabeth Taylor is unhappy. I do care if a little lady thats driving an elevator is upset by something I said to her.

A climate in which comedy writers and tabloids are hesitant to mock and criticizecelebrities is a climate that allows celebrities to shield themselves from the unwashed masses, growing their fortunes and their power more easily thanks to disproportionately kind treatment. (Chrissy Teigen is Exhibit A.)

Of course its okay to mock Selena Gomezs kidney transplant. Im sure there are legitimately inappropriate ways to mock her kidney transplant, but mocking about whether or not its okay to mock certainly isnt one of them. Nor is the lukewarm exchange from Saved By The Bell where characters speculate about who Gomezs donor was. Not only is it okay to make those jokes, its healthy. The notion that mild jokes at the expense of a celebritys medical condition are off-limits does the bidding of elites who are manipulating the public into protecting them.

Elizabeth Taylor was reportedly hurt by Rivers many jokes at her expense. Gomez may, indeed, have been legitimately hurt by these gentle sitcom barbs. If thats the case, it wasnt the fault of The Good Fight writers.

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How Selena Gomez Is Manipulating People Into Protecting Her Privilege - The Federalist

Federalist Publisher Ben Domenech explained that children and the families who raise them are the bedrock of our communities and make our country great during Fox News Primetime on Wednesday.

Domenech began by pointing out that todays woke leftist hate many, many things: the Constitution, Donald Trump, Fox News, comedy, and, of course, you. Domenech continued, There was really one thing that woke socialist progressives seem to hate more than anything else, before answering: Thats babies.

Domenech decried the industrialized murder of 60 million unborn infants and said the left just doesnt take their problems out on Americas kids. Their problem seems to be that there are American kids at all.

Radical environmentalists regard children as enemies of the climate. Corporate elites see babies as expensive competitors for the time, attention, and creativity of professional women, which they apparently feel should belong exclusively to them. Critical race theory con men suggest that babies become racist as early as three months old, Domenech said. Radical feminists have built their entire brand around de-prioritizing family life and shaming happy moms as sellouts to the patriarchy.

Progressives hate babies because theyre crying, drooling, pooping refutations of everything woke leftists believe, Domenech continued. Boys and girls are the answer to the lefts every argument, and the antidote to their poisonous lie. For instance, he said, parents learn the hard way that sex is not a social construct. Social constructs dont pee on you while you are giving them a bath.

Children possess many virtues and are much more than the helpless timid victims the leftist people say they are, and so are we, Domenech said. Thats the lefts real problem with children.

Children make families. Boys turn into men. Couples turn into parents, and women become the archangels we call moms. Just as the founders envisioned, America is a place where every child, no matter where they started, has limitless potential and spark of divine.

Children are also crucial for building communities. The more attention we pay to our families, the more time we spend with other families at playdates, little league games, church picnics, school plays children dont just turn individuals into families, they also pull families into communities.

Leftism is an ideology of fear, grievance, and affected helplessness, Domenech continued, explaining why leftism is so hostile to families.Every year on Mothers Day the media is filled with one article after another by childless writers defending their childlessness. On Fathers Day, dads have long been similarly held up as objects of correction and ridicule. These sad people protest too much, and they are not convincing anyone.

Kids love America, and they inspire us to make her ever more worthy of their love. Parents teach their children how to be good. The children teach their parents how to be great. Together they make America both, Domenech concluded. This is not something you have to do. This is something you get to do.

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Domenech: Here's Why Babies Are Great And Why The Left Hates Them - The Federalist

This article contains disturbing information about medical experimentation on humans.

Another week, another discovery that the U.S. government attempted to cover up scientific experiments on viable babieswith by far the most condemning evidence yet and increasing calls for federal investigation. On Monday, Judicial Watch and David Daleidens Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released the details of a $3 million grant the National Institutes of Health (NIH) gave the University of Pittsburgh to create a fetal Tissue Hub to dismember and distribute the organs of full-term aborted babies, selected by race, for inhumane experiments.

As if that wasnt appalling enough, new evidence points to the University of Pittsburgh harvesting organs from born-alive babies as a real possibilitymeaning the babies would have died while researchers dissected their bodies for kidneys and other organs.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently handed over the documents thanks to a lawsuit Judicial Watch filed last year on behalf of CMP when the agency failed to deliver records CMP requested through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Last month, Daleidens group exposed the University of Pittsburghs work to graft the full-thickness scalps of unborn babies onto the backs of rodents in a study funded by Anthony Faucis NIAID office. The records released this week reveal this wasnt a one-off incident, unearthing an agreement between NIH and the university to fully operationalize a grotesque baby organ bank funded by federal taxpayers.

As just discovered this week, the specific terms of the grant were to develop a pipeline to the acquisition, quality control and distribution of human babies from all levels of development right up to the age of birth.The University of Pittsburghs grant application to the NIH requests funding to generate an ongoing resource to fetal tissue from babies 6 to 42 weeks old by establishing itself as the Tissue Hub and Collection Site for the GUDMAP project. The project supplies researchers across the country with aborted kidneys, bladders, and other organs for experimentation.

The series of grants, running from 2015 into May 2021, propose that fetal collections can be significantly ramped up from previous yearseffectively making the university a base for harvesting and distributing baby tissue.

Pittsburgh claims it has been collecting fetal tissue in enormous volumes for more than a decade, including liver, heart, gonads, legs, brain and kidneys, ureters and bladders. In 2015 alone, it distributed over 300 fresh samples collected from 77 cases and as many as 725 cases the year prior. Its reasonable to assume that this number exponentially increased, since their stated target goal is to have a minimum of five cases of tissue per week for ages 6 to 42 weeks. Thats at least one baby per day.

On Wednesday, the University of Pittsburghs spokesman dodged multiple accusations that the organs of born-alive babies were being harvested, possibly indicating that federally funded researchers at the university harvested babies kidneys from their bodies while their hearts were still beating.

The spokesman told Fox News the researchers aimed to minimize what scientists call the warm ischemia time, or in the words of the NIH, the time [an] organremains at body temperature after its blood supply has been reduced or cut off. The Pitt spokesman confirmed Wednesday this was in fact the time after tissue was collected and distributed: Ischemia time, he said refers to the time after the tissue collection procedure and before cooling for storage and transport.

The Center for Medical Progress explained this could mean the organs are still receiving blood supply from the fetal heartbeat during tissue collection. This means the spokesmans quotes affirm the possibility these babies are being delivered alive and killed by the process of organ harvesting.

The university divulged in the grant application that their method of organ-harvesting, evidenced by record[ing] the warm ischemic time, ensures high-quality specimens, but did not go into further detail and in fact redacted several portions of the document.

The NIH project admitted it used inducing labor as a procedure, almost surely meaning babies who could survive outside the womb were harvested by a barbaricand illegallate-term abortion method. Pittsburgh outlines what abortion procedures are used to obtain specimens, including dilation and curettage, dilation and evacuation, and labor induction.

Physicians attending to mothers who donate the tissue of their aborted child retain the responsibility for determining the procedure to be used for termination of the pregnancy. Given that Pitts emphasis is on high quality tissue samples, the likelihood labor induction and partial-birth abortion win out as the procedures of choice is high, as organs are usually mutilated through D&C or D&E abortions but more likely to be preserved intact if the baby is delivered whole.

Pittsburgh also specified they select aborted babies by race in order to fill diversity quotas to ensure researchers had plentiful African American and Hispanic specimens to experiment on. Pittsburgh informed the NIH their proposal sets a racial target for harvesting organs from African American, Hispanic, and Asian babies, setting a goal that 50 percent of their tissue supply come from minority fetuses; 25 percent of which would be harvested from African-American women.

The proposal reasons that harvesting tissue from an appropriate racial mix of babies is necessary because Pittsburgh is a racially mixed metropolis, but the numbers say otherwise. Allegheny County, Pittsburghs chief metropolitan zone, reflects this disparity with a population close to 80 percent white and a nationally representative 13 percent black.

The university defended itself on Wednesday by insisting it wanted to reflect the inclusion of women and minorities.

The known facts in this case should be enough to get the attention of the federal authorities and elected officials responsible for ending this nightmare. In a press statement this week, Daleiden called for the Senate Judiciary Committee to bring any involved, including NIH Director Francis Collins, Fauci, and representatives of the University of Pittsburgh and Planned Parenthood, to faceimperative scrutiny for the enabling of partial-birth abortions and infanticide in the government-sponsored human trafficking of aborted infants.

On Friday, Pennsylvania state Rep. Kathy Rapp heightened calls to investigate the University of Pittsburgh with a request that the states auditor general conduct a thorough investigation of all state and federal funds. U.S. Republican Senate candidate Sean Parnell joined in, noting that If these allegations are true that scientists at the University of Pittsburgh were harvesting kidneys of unborn babies while their hearts were still beating, they should not only have their taxpayer funding immediately suspended, everyone involved should face criminal charges.

Our government has not been simply complicit in this atrocity, it has helped instigate it. The University of Pittsburgh and NIH owe American taxpayers complete transparency, including the unredacted release of all related documents to account for these revelations. Its beyond time these atrocities are publicly answered for, and to the fullest extent possible.

Edie Heipel works at the Center for Renewing America. She previously worked at the White House Office of Management and Budget under President Trump.

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Federal Grants Sponsored Baby Harvesting At University Of Pittsburgh - The Federalist

The media like to pretend theyre anti-racist when in reality theyre just pro-mob. Especially if the mob is targeting random, nondescript whites.

Mark and Patricia McCloskey of St. Louis just received a pardon from the Missouri governor after they pleaded guilty to a couple of trivial charges related to the incident last summer wherein they displayed their guns as a rowdy group of demonstrators passed by their home.

This should be a story for the C section of a local paper but the McCloskeys are white and wouldnt back down to the intimidating Black Lives Matter crowd so of course it has the national press shaking in anger.

Wednesday on CNN, anchor John Berman opened a segment on the pardon by reminding viewers that the McCloskeys were the ones who pointed guns at protesters last summer.

Hmm, thats weird. A couple who just decided to take aim at some simple protesters? That would be shocking for anyone who doesnt remember what was actually happening at the time in June 2020.

For those who have understandably blocked out the trauma, Im sorry to remind you that at that time, every major city in America was under siege by Black Lives Matter rioters who were burning down buildings, bashing windows, vandalizing public property and looting small businesses.

The carnage and chaos resulted in dozens of deaths and the most expensive insurance claims tab for rioting ever. (at least $1 billion, perhaps as high as $2 billion).

And during this time known by liberals as the romantic period Democrat-controlled legislatures and city councils were voting to decriminalize the rioting. District attorneys were declining to prosecute thieves and vandals. Mayors were ordering police departments to stand down. And the media were gushing over the mostly peaceful protests.

It was the rise of the defund the police movement and with the understanding that cops werent supposed to interfere with the madness, they werent around when people needed help.

Oh, and one other minor detail: St. Louis has the second-highest violent crime rate in the country.

There are two ways to react when faced with a noisy and angry mob descending upon your private, gated community: Make yourself as small as possible and hope it passes you and property by unmolested, or make it known that youre prepared to defend yourself and your home.

The McCloskeys chose the latter. When they saw the protest breach the vicinity, they grabbed their guns and demanded that the crowd keep moving.

During that CNN segment hosted by Berman, his guest, Democratic State Rep. Rasheen Aldridge, said, That day could have really turned out to be deadly.

No shit. And perhaps it didnt because the McCloskeys warned what would happen if it did.

That they were ever charged with anything is a joke. Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner, a Democrat, tried charging them with felonies but then had to be removed from the case after she bragged about it in fundraising emails.

In the end, the McCloskeys had to pay a relatively small fine and give up the two guns they displayed on that day last year. Its unfair but no one can blame them for wanting to put it all behind them.

Now Mark McCloskey is running for Senate. It would be great if he won, if for no other reason than that it would actually give the media a legitimate reason to continue talking about him.

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Pardoning The McCloskeys Is What Real Racial Justice Looks Like - The Federalist

Rihanna began trending on Twitter yesterday afterForbes revealed that the 33-year-old singer,fashion designer, and beauty mogul is now worth 1.7 billion dollars and isthe richest female musician on earth.

The news has sparked a fiery debate on eat the rich Twitter, revealing that the white privilege and systemic racism narrative is a lie and that authentic leftists dont really care about black female success.

The debate over whether its okay for Rihanna to be a billionaire highlights the tension between the white privilege lie and the reality of the American Dream. Narratives of systemic, racial, and gender inequality are the lefts path to socialism. If inequity is based on immutable qualities, then our entire American system needs to go.

Now RIHdistribute it ? https://t.co/E0FoK1QXjA

— Lakyn Thee Stylist (@OgLakyn) August 4, 2021

The path from white privilege to socialism is summed up nicely by Federalist senior contributor Georgi Boorman:

White privilege theory seeks equality of outcome, not merely the equal dispensation of individual justice. That goal can only be reached by redistribution policies that violate the principle of local governance, treat people as ethnic units, limit individuals opportunities based on race, suppress freedom of speech, and restrict the freedom to keep and control ones own money.

To the ideological leaders of the left, the Bernie Sanderses and the AOCs, Rihannas success is one of the greatest threats to their movement because she is everything an accomplished American person cant be: a black woman with a rocky start to life.

Interestingly, some leftists are giving the popular R&B star a pass.

These socialists are struggling to join their comrades in hating Rihanna. Since so many people have bought into the systemic racism narrative, they see Rihanna as someone subverting the system, and naturally, they want to cheer her on. This inability to eat Rihanna, as they would like to eat the rest of the billionaire class, is a result of the white privilege lie: They want to celebrate her success because of her race and sex.

Rihanna’s billionaire announcement happening the day after Black Women’s Equal Pay Day is a different kind of satisfaction? (although i’m sure she would have hit billionionairism -with the amount of success she’s had- sooner if she wasn’t a Black woman.)

— freddie ransome (@Ransome_Note) August 4, 2021

The people who refuse to be happy for her know the systemic racism narrative is simply a means to their desired end. Everything about Rihanna, from her sex to her skin color, and especially her upbringing, troubles the left.

Rihanna has one of the most incredible modern rags-to-riches stories. She grew up poor in a three-bedroom bungalow in Bridgetown, Barbados, where she sold clothes with her father in a stall on the street. Her father was an alcoholic and crack cocaine addict, and he physically abused her mother.

Rihanna struggled with excruciatingly painful headaches for several years during her childhood. She even had multiple CT scans for her headaches, recalling, The doctors even thought it was a tumor because it was that intense. After her parents divorced when she was 14, her health improved.

Growing up, she listened to reggae, American hip-hop, and R&B. When she was as young as 7, Rihanna began idolizing American singers like Madonna and Janet Jackson and dreamed of becoming a star herself.

As a young teen, Rihanna formed a girl group with two of her friends and was discovered by Evan Rogers, an American record producer. Rogers helped Rihanna record a demo that led to an audition with Jay-Z, who was the head of Def Jam Recordings.

Jay-Z signed Rihanna in 2005, and her music career skyrocketed. She has won nine Grammys, 13 American Music Awards, and eight Billboard Music Awards. Rihannas music, however, only accounts for a small percent of her wealth. Her money was made via her business ventures in beauty and fashion.

In the early 2010s, Rihanna began collaborating on several cosmetics collections until she launched her own line, Fenty Beauty, in 2017. Fenty Beauty, known for offering 40 different shades of foundation at its launch (now grown to 50), was an instant success.

In 2018, Rihanna launched Savage X Fenty, a lingerie brand with designs that include a wide variety of sizes and shades to match all skin tones. In 2019, she partnered with LVMH Mot Hennessy Louis Vuitton to create the Fenty fashion line.

Shes also begun dipping her toes into acting, with major roles in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), Oceans 8 (2018), and Guava Island (2019).

From her humble beginning to her rise to fame and fortune, Rihanna is truly the embodiment of the American Dream, a bona fide self-made woman who capitalized on her remarkable talents. She deserves praise not because she is black and female, but because of her smarts, talent, and resiliency despite her rocky childhood.

No one should be anything but happy for Rihanna. If youre not, youre either jealous or a radical leftist watching your entire carefully constructed narrative of the gender pay gap, white guilt, and systemic racism fall apart at the seams.

Evita Duffy is an intern at The Federalist, co-founder of the Chicago Thinker, and a senior at the University of Chicago. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1

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Rihanna Is Now A Billionaire And Leftists Don't Know What To Do - The Federalist

Many conservatives arent on TikTok over valid privacy concerns that their data collected by its Beijing-headquartered parent company ByteDance can be shared with the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, the app was deemed such a threat to national security by intelligence officials in the Trump administration that the former president tried to ban the platform in U.S. app stores last summer.

According to the Pew Research Center in April, Democrats between the ages of 18-45 were 7 percent more likely to be on the app than Republicans of the same age. Considering the animosity toward the app for its close relationship with communist China, the lack of Republicans on the platform is to some extent a result of a right-wing pundit class that is especially wary of the companys behind-the-scene motives.

This absence has left many in the dark on what gets posted on the platform, albeit filtered through echo chambers as content gets self-curated through its profoundly addictive algorithms. A new account on Twitter, however, called Libs of Tik Tok has shed light on the progressive radicalism brewing on the popular video-sharing website.

The account, which merely highlights content from some of the most radical producers on the platform in an effort to mock them, opens a window not only into activity on the app, but into the minds of progressives, showing where they are now and where theyre headed.

Forget the gender binary. Progressives have deemed that oppressive as they create new genders and sexualities out of thin air.

While it might appear innocent at first, one can easily imagine how confusing it must be to a 12-year-old child in puberty to be subjected to a wide array of sexualities and genders that dont exist in reality but are explained as existential to ones identity. The app is most popular among children and teens, with 25 percent of its U.S. users between 10 and 19 years old.

The short clips below showcase the bizarre trend of progressives on TikTok explaining new sexualities and pronouns beyond the binary scale in a form of woke-speak advertised directly to kids.

This new phenomenon, playing out in plain sight on TikTok while concealed within K-12 classrooms, threatens to breed its own epidemic of rapid-onset gender dysphoria, a socially contagious condition creating a new generation of sexually confused adolescents taking cues from their peers.

Meanwhile, the push to move blind acceptance into the mainstream brings with it severe consequences for public health, such as medical professionals missing proper diagnoses because they deny a clear understanding of gender. Yet children on the most popular app among teens and pre-teens are inundated with terms redefining puberty itself, such as greysexuality or aceflux, the latter of which apparently means that someones capacity for sexual romance changes overtime. In other words, kids are being led to believe theyre queer if theyre horny sometimes more than others, which is actually a natural cycle.

Or theyre told theyre queer if they may only feel sexually attracted to individuals with whom they feel emotionally bonded, noted by the label demisexual, a testament to how far the culture has already shifted from a few short decades ago.

Meanwhile, denying someones gender is portrayed as a grave offense.

And if one isnt attracted to any of the above, thats transphobic.

The Libs of Tik Tok account on Twitter has also offered insight into where progressives genuinely stand on race, now embracing open racism.

And that white supremacist society starts with white women.

Teachers, meanwhile, have exposed themselves as being obsessed with critical race theory while teachers unions dubiously claim that the unpopular curriculum is not taught in schools.

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Libs Of Tik Tok Twitter Account Pulls Back The Curtain On Radical Leftism - The Federalist

Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney is the most unpopular Republican in the country among GOP voters, according to a new poll out this monthreported by Axios.

While Donald Trump Jr. and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis led in a survey of prominent Republicans, with a 55 and 54 percent net approval rating respectively, Cheneys ratings tanked at negative 43 percent.

The survey conducted by the firm Fabrizio, Lee & Associates, the pollster for each of Donald Trumps presidential campaigns interviewed 800 Republican voters between July 6-8 with a +/-3.46 percent margin of error. The results are mapped out in the chart below by Axios.

Cheneys unfavorable ratings in the nationwide poll reflect similar results from surveys conducted in her own state as the congresswoman continues to antagonize the base and engineer a GOP civil war that is nonexistent outside her home in Washington, D.C.

Another poll conducted in April by the conservative political action committee Club for Growth found Cheney deep underwater as she faces a series of primary challengers who threaten to oust the three-term incumbent. More than half of likely GOP primary voters said they would vote against Cheney no matter her opponent, while only a slim 14 percent said the representative could count on their continued support.

House Republicans overwhelmingly voted to kick Cheney from her No. 3 role in House leadership in May as the now-former House GOP conference chair escalated her feud with Trump and undermined other members in the process. The emboldened Wyoming lawmaker had survived an initial referendum in February following her last-minute effort to get Republican support for Trumps second impeachment.

Now Republicans on Capitol Hill have begun talks of removing Cheney from her committee assignments while she joins Democrats in Speaker Nancy Pelosis crusade to weaponize the lower chamber and go after political dissidents with the establishment of a Jan. 6 commission.

Im honored to have been named to serve on the January 6th select committee, Cheney said, going on to regurgitate the Democrat talking point that the Capitol riot was the most serious attack on our Capitol since 1814.

In 1983, however, the Senate was bombed by left-wing militants, decades before Al-Qaeda terrorists flew a plane into the Pentagon on 9/11, and decades before the summer of rage last year presented routine outbursts of political violence in the nations capital.

Pelosi kicked Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthys picks, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan and Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, from the Jan. 6 committee last week. On Sunday, the speaker placed Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Cheney ally and fellow Never Trumper in the lower chamber, on the committee.

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Liz Cheney Is The Most Unpopular Republican In The Country - The Federalist

You dont have to know the entire modern history of the traditional Latin Mass to understand whats behind Pope Franciss recent apostolic letter, Traditionis custodes, claiming the ancient rite threatens the unity of the Catholic Church and imposing strict new limits on its use.

All you must do to understand whats happening now is attend a Latin Mass. There, you will see full church pews teeming with young families and couples, mewling infants and unruly toddlers, single twenty-somethings and teens. The air will be full of incense and, in some parishes, the haunting beauty of Gregorian chant.

Most of the women and girls will be in veils, most parishioners will be following along with a 1962 Roman missal and responding to the priest in Latin, kneeling or genuflecting as required. You will see, in short, a religious ritual that looks odd and shockingly out of place in modern society.

You will also see, unmistakably, the future of the Catholic Church.

How can that be? After all, only a small number of Catholics, perhaps only about 150,000 in the United States, regularly attend a Latin (Tridentine) Mass. Fewer than 700 Catholic parishes in the U.S., out of more than 17,000, even offer Latin Mass. If the Latin Mass is the future of the Catholic Church, it portends a church much diminished in size and prestige.

But it also portends a more faithful church, one more committed to the doctrines and teachings of Catholicism, and the obligations they impose. Indeed, the vast majority of Catholics in America today reject central tenets of the faith. A 2019 Pew survey found that nearly 70 percent of American Catholics reject the doctrine of transubstantiation, which says the bread and wine used in Holy Communion become, during Holy Mass, the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

By contrast, polls in recent years have shown that those who regularly attend Latin Mass adhere much more closely to Catholic teaching, including on matters like abortion, gay marriage, and contraception, compared to Catholics who attend the Novus ordo rite that was established in vernacular languages in 1970, after the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

One national survey of Latin Mass attendees, conducted by Fr. Donald Kloster in 2018, found that only 2 percent approve of contraception, compared to 89 percent of Novus ordo attendees. On approval of abortion, the split was 1 percent compared to 51 percent. On gay marriage, 2 percent to 67 percent. The same survey found parishioners at Latin Mass have on average nearly 60 percent larger family sizes, donate on average five times more, and attend weekly Mass at 4.5 times the rate of Catholics who attend the Novus ordo rite.

Another survey by Kloster and others, conducted online last year, found that among adults aged 18 to 39 who attend Latin Mass, 98 percent report going every Sunday. This stands in stark contrast to the findings of a 2018 Gallup poll, which showed dramatic declines in weekly Mass attendance among all Catholics, with the sharpest decline in the 21 to 29-year-old demographic, from 73 percent in 1955 to 25 percent in 2017, the lowest of all age groups.

Even more striking, the survey by Kloster found that 90 percent of these young Catholics were not raised in the Latin rite and that the vast majority were drawn to it by forces from within their own generation, rather than by their parents. A plurality, 35 percent, cited reverence as what prompted them to seek out the Latin rite.

The seriousness of Catholics who attend Latin Mass confirms something then-Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, said in an interview in 1969, the year before the Latin Mass was effectively replaced by the Novus ordo:

From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members.

Benedict understood that the church was going to shrink, but that as it shrank, the remnant would be more zealous, more closely tied to Catholic teaching and doctrine than it had been before. He must have also understood that beauty and reverence in worship had an important role to play in this smaller but more faithful church.

When in 2007 Benedict gave broad permission to conduct Mass according to the old Latin rite, affirming that it had never been forbidden and that it never could be, and encouraged bishops to allow their priests to offer it wherever it was desired, he launched a movement within the church not a schism but a revival, which now points the way forward for a church thats still in crisis, and still shrinking. In the 14 years since, adoption of Latin Mass has grown among the Catholic faithful worldwide, attracting converts and cradle Catholics alike.

Why, then, would Francis punish those who worship according to the Latin rite? Why would he misrepresent, in brutal and authoritarian language, the motives of these Catholics? In the letter to the bishops that accompanies his motu proprio, Francis writes:

I am nonetheless saddened that the instrumental use of Missale Romanum of 1962 is often characterized by a rejection not only of the liturgical reform, but of the Vatican Council II itself, claiming, with unfounded and unsustainable assertions, that it betrayed the Tradition and the true Church.

Now we come to the heart of the matter. Francis fears that Catholics who are drawn to the ancient rite are somehow rejecting the reforms the of Second Vatican Council. In another passage, he writes that the effort to expand the Latin rite by both Saint John Paul II and Benedict, intended to recover the unity of an ecclesial body with diverse liturgical sensibilities, was exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Catholics who attend Latin Mass are by all accounts the least likely to encourage disagreements, widen gaps, or reinforce divergences in the church. They are far more likely to adhere to Catholic teaching and accept the obligations the church places on the faithful than Catholics who dont attend Latin Mass. Indeed, they stand in stark contrast to the nearly 70 percent of American Catholics who deny transubstantiation, and the large majorities who support abortion and gay marriage, and feel no compunction to fulfill their religious obligations.

That doesnt mean there arent some very online Traditionalist Catholics who boast about the Latin Mass, make inflammatory claims about its superiority, and criticize Francis. But they arent representative of Latin Mass-goers as a whole, and the divisions they might foment are nothing compared to the divisions and indeed outright schism that bishops in Germany, for example, have been pushing throughout Franciss pontificate, seeking to bless same-sex unions and ordain women to the priesthood. The supposed divisions caused by Traditionalists are also nothing compared to the vey real divisions that millions of ordinary Catholics incite routinely when they deny Catholic teaching, bear false witness against the church, and shirk their religious obligations.

Given all this, we have to conclude theres some other motive, unexpressed in the popes motu proprio, for targeting a relatively small group of faithful Catholics who are drawn to the Latin Mass. Its hard to get at this motive, but its perhaps best understood as a generational conflict.

Clerics of Franciss generation, who came up in the reforms of Vatican II, envisioned a very different future for the church than the one thats now emerging. They imagined a church that would give no offense, in its worship or its doctrine, to Protestants. They imagined a church that would be pliable, able to change with the times and accommodate new and different mores. The so-called spirit of Vatican II was to guide the church into the modern era, make her relevant and attractive to modern people, more welcoming and less severe.

What happened instead, they didnt see coming. Modern people, it seems, do not want the kind of church that Francis and the German bishops want to give them. Many lapsed Catholics want nothing to do with the church, even a more progressive one, and have simply left it for good. Others would prefer to remain Catholic, nominally at least, but free to ignore or even disparage anything with which they might disagree or that might offend their modern sensibilities.

But a strong and stalwart remnant fervently want a church that espouses and upholds timeless and unchangeable doctrines, given physical form in ancient rituals and worship. They want a church that takes the sacraments seriously, that demands something of them, and in return gives them beauty and truth.

Among these Catholics, a growing number desire to worship according to the Latin rite. Regardless of whatever inchoate and vindictive policy emanates from Rome, their numbers, it seems, will continue to grow.

One gets the sense that this, above all, is what the pope wishes were not so. When Francis looks back over his shoulder to pass the baton to the next generation, perhaps he sees what Benedict saw in 1969: a smaller but more faithful church, young and vibrant, but much diminished in power and prestige.

Perhaps, unlike Benedict, he thought it wouldnt turn out this way. But it has.

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The Latin Mass Is The Future Of The Catholic Church - The Federalist