Monthly Archives: February 2022

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry weighed in on the Spotify controversy this week, expressing concerns about Covid misinformation as the censorship police endeavor to deplatform Joe Rogan. Prince Harry, who declared the First Amendment bonkers last year, also serves on the Aspen Institutes Commission on Information Disorder, avehicle for corporate donors to generate items justifying censorship.

On Sunday, the couple released a statement from the Archewell Foundation, which the pair founded in 2020, raising alarm over hundreds of millions of people who are affected by the serious harms of rampant mis- and disinformation every day. The couple signed their own exclusive multi-year podcast partnership with the streaming service when they launched their latest venture, with only one episode published to date.

Last April, our co-founders began expressing concerns to our partners at Spotify about the all-too-real consequences of COVID-19 misinformation on its platform, they said. We have continued to express our concerns to Spotify to ensure changes to its platform are made to help address this public health crisis. We look to Spotify to meet this moment and are committed to continuing our work together as it does.

While not mentioning Rogan by name, the statement came on the heels of Spotify announcing it will add a content advisory to podcasts discussing Covid-19, including Rogans, after other artists pledged to strip their content from the service absent outright censorship of Rogan. Longtime music star Neil Young was the first major name to offer Spotify an ultimatum last week over fake information about vaccines.

They can have Rogan, or Young. Not both, Young wrote in an open letter. Spotify chose Rogan.

Youngs call for censorship, however, ignited a movement among left-wing content producers, who offered their own ultimatums to drop the Rogan podcast, which the Swedish company bought the rights to for $100 million in the summer of 2020.

The Aspen Institute did not respond to The Federalists repeated inquiries about whether the Institute would stand by its members perceived attacks on Rogan in an environment where narratives contrary to the media-manufactured consensus are labeled misinformation.

Other members of the commission include Katie Couric, who co-chairs the group and admitted in October to selectively editing a 2016 interview with now-deceased Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Couric toned down Ginsburgs criticism of the NFL kneeling protests led by 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in an episode of routine manipulation by the legacy journalist.

In January last year, Couric also called for efforts to deprogram Republicans.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

Read more here:

Harry And Meghan's 'Concerns' About Joe Rogan Could Drive Anti-Speech Aspen Institute Project - The Federalist

Foreigners are voting in our elections. It isnt just in the sanctuary city of New York, where 800,000 foreigners just got the power to vote in municipal elections.

Foreigners voting occurs all over the country. Over the past few years, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which I am president, has uncovered government records showing foreigners voting in Pennsylvania, Texas, New Jersey, and California.

Voter fraud deniers do not want to talk about the fact that foreigners are registering and voting in U.S. elections. They forget that the foreigners voting in American elections are sometimes victims of third-party voter registration drives that jeopardize their immigration status. These voter registration drives sign anyone up without regard to eligibility.

States are also victimizing these foreigners. Pennsylvania let aliens register to vote for more than two decades on a broken department of motor vehicles registration process.

Unwitting aliens often dont know they arent allowed to register and vote. Meanwhile, committing an election crime such as illegal voting subjects them to deportation. The only winner is the political party that reliably gets their votes.

Just this week, we uncovered more evidence of foreigners voting in our elections, this time in the swing state of North Carolina.

In 2019, the North Carolina State Board of Elections denied the foundation access to documents relating to foreigners registering and voting, so the foundation sued the board. Following a ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirming that the National Voter Registration Act requires disclosure of these documents, the board agreed to settle the case.

In the settlement, the board agreed to disclose the records relating to foreigners registering and voting. There have already been 38 indictments of foreigners registering to vote and some casting ballots. These records will conclusively show how many foreigners have been voting in North Carolina elections.

Inspecting these list maintenance documents serves an important purpose by allowing one to identify how foreigners are getting registered to vote. That is a key first step to improve the system and ensure that these errors do not continue to happen.

Often, it is the fault of the government. For example, a voter registration form will have a question at the top asking if the potential registrant is an American. One may check no and, due to errors by local elections officials, still get registered to vote.

The same mistakes can happen when the potential registrant leaves the checkbox blank. The mistake may also be on the part of the potential registrant, incorrectly checking the box attesting that he or she is a U.S. citizen. The bottom line is, foreigners are registering and voting in states across the country.

Nobody should want this. Only Americans should be electing American leaders. States need to examine their voter list maintenance procedures and ensure they are keeping non-citizens off the voter rolls.

We will continue the effort to catalog and expose government mistakes and election malfeasance. Americans have a right to know about the vulnerabilities in our election system.

J. Christian Adams is the President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney, and current commissioner on the United States Commission for Civil Rights.

Link:

The Real Foreign Election Interference Is Happening At Your Local DMV - The Federalist

I wrote yesterday about the Joe Rogan problem our elite faces today, where even such leading intellectual lights as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle must take up the solemn duty of condemning their Spotify colleague who actually does the work his contract demands. Of course, the companys decision to essentially add a dangerous, do not ingest warning to Rogans interviews is just a prelude to more crackdowns, as Zaid Jilani recognizes:

As Jilani notes, there has been a demonstrable increase in the number of leftists who favor censorship by any entity necessary including private corporations all in the cause of shutting down speech that they find irritating or inconvenient to the narrative they favor:

Youngs transformation from countercultural champion of freedom of speech to corporate censorship advocate and defender of the public-health bureaucracy didnt occur in a vacuum. Progressives have become increasingly censorious over the past few years. A majority of Democrats now believe that both private tech companies and the U.S. government should take steps to restrict false info online.

This is the reality based community coming home to roost: where once the counterculture spoke of dying to defend the right to disagree, now they will bring down the entire house of individual liberty to shut you up. But what is a leftist to do when someone like Rogan cant be shut up? When his work bizarrely coming in the form of interviews so long they outpace Doctor Zhivago is so defiantly popular that it attracts the eyes and ears of a nation hungry for more information?

In this case, they are turning into a mob appealing to the elites in this case, The Cathedral to shut down this troublesome talk. The network of power from the corporate media to the academy to big tech to the Aspen Institutes Commission on Information Disorder must act to save us all, before its too late!

This problem brings to mind a piece from two years ago, published at the onset of the pandemic in Commentary, by James B. Meigs, former editor of Popular Mechanics:

Disaster researchers call this phenomenon elite panic. When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself. They clamp down on information, restrict freedom of movement, and devote unnecessary energy to enforcing laws they assume are about to be broken. These strategies dont just waste resources, one study notes; they also undermine the publics capacity for resilient behaviors. In other words, nervous officials can actively impede the ordinary people trying to help themselves and their neighbors.

As in war, the first casualty in disasters is often the truth. One symptom of elite panic is the belief that too much information, or the wrong kind of information, will send citizens reeling. After the 2011 tsunami knocked out Japans Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, officials gave a series of confusing briefings. To many, they seemed to be downplaying the amount of radiation released in the accident. In the end, the radiation risks turned out to be much lower than feared, resulting in no civilian deaths. But, by then, the traumatized public had lost faith in any official statements. As one team of researchers notes, any perceived lack of information provision increases public anxiety and distrust.

The oddity of all this is that Rogan himself is not actually the source of the troublesome information the Covid authoritarians seek to quash. Instead, his show is merely the vehicle for them to express their opinions. He asks open-ended and often meandering questions before driving down to a point, seeking an answer from the person sitting across from him in ways that are, given the marathon length and intellectual breadth of the show, impossible to filibuster.

It is the rumbling host of intelligent guests with whom Rogan has these discussions often with impressive credentials in multiple spheres, but with well-earned reputations for contrarian perspectives that run afoul of the dominant narratives in their field of choice who are the real problem. And because CNN and Anthony Fauci and Prince Harry and his Hogwarts Ministry on Information Disorder cant shut them all down, they are instead seeking to shut down the popularizer.

Joe Rogan isnt the messenger. Hes just the interlocutor inviting the wrong people on an enormous stage. And how interesting it is that when he invites the right people, like Sanjay Gupta, they end up looking very foolish.

There is a tale told about Galileo Galilei that comes to mind here one that is almost certainly apocryphal, given that there is little indication it was printed until a century after his death. Galileos heliocentric heresy, published in 1632 in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, resulted in a firestorm of reaction from the church. Intentionally or not there is evidence Galileo never intended to offend his friend and ally Pope Urban VIII the episode obviously resulted in his being brought before inquisitors, threatened with torture, and subjected to condemnation and imprisonment under house arrest for the duration of his life.

The legend is that, in the process of being transferred from one home to another, Galileo engaged in an act of defiance:

The moment he was set at liberty, he looked up to the sky and down to the ground, and, stamping with his foot, in a contemplative mood, said, Eppur si muove, that is, still it moves, meaning the Earth.

The inquisitions suffered by those who have defied the Covid narrative at very great risk to their careers are for the most part not comparable to anything suffered by Galileo, but they share certain commonalities. Pope Urban VIII was in some sense afraid of the machinations of court insiders and his foes who saw advantage in the moment, and cowed into going along with the persecution of an intellectual he admired.

There are similarly minded individuals today, largely silent, scattered around the heights of industry and politics. Their book recommendations and listening tendencies act as secret handshakes. They hold these views against the tide. They just dont have Elon Musks F-you money.

The motivation of the Cathedral now to protect their power against what they view as an unruly, prideful, and disobedient rabble is not without basis. The people are indeed fed up with the elite panic. They have, as the Monmouth poll indicated this week, moved on they believe its time we accept that Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives.

But the Cathedral does not accept that theyve lost control. They still think they can crush the revolt and re-establish the narrative. And they are too short-sighted to see the long-lasting and institution-destroying ramifications they are creating by engaging in such an obvious crackdown on people brave enough to tell the truth.

Read more:

Elite Panic In The Cathedral! - The Federalist

When Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday that Facebook lost daily users for the first time in its 18-year history last quarter, he blamed TikTok. And why shouldnt he? The young platform is both the most downloaded app and most visited website in the world. Its addicting and profitable, which also makes TikTok a tool of cultural control.

Beijing understands this, which is why the apps Chinese counterpart Douyin is run much differently by ByteDance. Indeed, the Chinese government recently acquired a 1 percent stake and a seat on the board of one of the Beijing-based companys domestic subsidiaries.

Andrew Schulz explained this perfectly in a clip he posted to Instagram this week.

You dont have to crush an opposing nation to convince them to crush themselves, Schulz wrote in the caption. If China seeks to undermine the power of the United States, controlling the algorithms that captivate its children isnt a bad place to start.

If you browse this BuzzFeed roundup of the top trends on TikTok in 2021, youll find explicit dances, songs, and gender-bending alongside adorable dogs and easy recipes. In 2020, Seventeen included the WAP dance on its roundup of the apps most popular trends, meaning millions of American kids were watching and making video after video of a song about wet ass p-ssy.

Its of course true that American culture is decaying on its own. But it doesnt help that a company based in and legally under the control of China is in charge of a place our kids spend hours a day, talking about politics, family life, and culture. It would be like Moscow owning our film studios during the Cold War, except worse because TikTok is omnipresent in every teens pocket.

TikTok is known for its sophisticated algorithm, which one expert told the New York Times tries to get people addicted rather than giving them what they really want. Theres mounting evidence that TikTok is having negative effects on users health, which you can read more about here. Beijing seems to understand this because the government is taking steps to prevent the app from addicting its own users.

In China, Douyin is subject to government control intended to make the app a force for cultural good and a vehicle for propaganda. Users under 14 can only access the app at certain times of day for a capped period of time, and are delivered interesting popular science experiments, exhibitions in museums and galleries, beautiful scenery across the country, explanations of historical knowledge, and so on.

All users are subject to mandatory five-second pauses after spending a certain amount of time on the app, during which theyre delivered videos that tell them to put down the phone, go to bed, and work tomorrow. The app censors political content that transgresses Beijings boundaries. It was fined last year for spreading obscene, pornographic, and vulgar content.

None of this is to say the U.S. government should start curbing free expression on TikTok. I think theres a good argument to be made that social media is a public health emergency and demands more transparency. The point is that ByteDance owns an app thats controlled by a government seeking to undermine us, and that app is designed to be less harmful than the one peddled in America.

We can talk about what kind of government action that might warrant, but it should immediately change the way we approach TikTok. Beijing knows the app can stoke discord and worsen the health of our teenagers. Why would we willingly give that tool to an opposition government? (Thats not even to get into the potential national security concerns.)

The simple answer is because were addicted.

Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at The Federalist. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young Americas Foundation. Shes interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including Fox News Sunday, Media Buzz, and The McLaughlin Group. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center and a visiting fellow at Independent Women's Forum. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.

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Beijing-Based ByteDance Knows TikTok Is A Cultural Weapon - The Federalist

University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, a man, has smashed records and shocked sensibilities. Thomass performance illustrates the effects and absurdity of denying differences between the sexes, especially mens obvious bodily advantages in sports.

Thomas presumably fulfilled the NCAAs policy requiring trans athletes to suppress testosterone levels for a designated time before competing on the womans team. In January, the NCAA tweaked the rules to place sport-specific limits on testosterone levels. The policy still falls short by ignoring the unchanging enhanced muscle strength and endurance amassed during male puberty.

Caitlyn Jenner (formerly Bruce), an elite Olympian athlete, weighed in on the Thomas controversy, saying him competing as a woman isnt fair to women athletes. Jenner says his physical advantages are still apparent many years after transition.

In Lia Thomass case, I dont care about her testosterone levels now for the last year or two, Jenner said. Honestly, I care about her testosterone levels for the first 16, 17 years of her life. Thats what we are fighting against here.

As a man who formerly identified as a woman, I now clearly see with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight and reflection a similar flaw in my thinking that led me astray. Like the people setting NCAA policies, I neglected to consider that it was categorically impossible to biologically change my internal male morphology: my skeletal structure, body mass, muscle strength, and myriad other sexually determined attributes.

This flawed and foolish thinking results in real-life consequences. Changing sexes is a myth and trans folklorists who promote it are harming people, especially children vulnerable to believing fairy tales can come true. Here are some of these trans myths at play in the Thomas story.

The entire folklore of transgenderism rests on the artificial construct that gender is separate from biological sex, and that sex doesnt matter, gender identity does. Its a house of cards built on the flimsiest of foundations, a feeling. Feelings can, and do, change.

Who we are cannot be separated from our bodily reality. We live our lives in our bodies. Our identities are rooted in our bodies. The whole body is organized around either being male or female, a sexual binary. Who we are is not based on a feeling but rooted in physical reality.

Sex does not come from an ideological vending machine filled with multiple choices. Starting at conception, sex is absolute, innate, and immutable: male or female.

During intercourse, approximately 250 million sperm cells start the journey from the testes of the man to the fallopian tube of the woman, where one lucky sperm cell joins the egg in the hours or days following sexual intercourse. The sperm and the egg each contain mitochondria and DNA. When the sperm fertilizes the egg, the nuclei from each fuse together, and a baby is conceived. The babys sex revealed in the DNA is fixed for life.

Now were told sex is assigned at birth. This phrase popped up out of nowhere and now has infiltrated everywhere. No one has ever had his or her sex assigned at birth. Its fixed nine months before birth, at conception.

The truth since the dawn of time is that a look at the babys genitalia reveals his or her sex. With todays ultrasound technology, parents can know the sex of the baby during pregnancy. Sex is innate and unchangeable, not assigned by a doctor after the baby exits the womb.

The deceitful language creates the foundation for an even bigger lie: Because sex is assigned at birth, it can be reassigned later.

Transitioning is a myth. Its not possible. Sex is unchangeable. That is not a transphobic smear; its biological fact.

No amount of female hormones forced into a mans bloodstream can transition him biologically into a woman, or vice versa. Sure, each can identify as the other if they want, but they do not magically become the other sex. Thomas did not magically change bodies, replacing male with female, by suppressing testosterone and ingesting estrogen.

The same goes for surgery. Surgeons may use their operating prowess to fashion a convincing replica of a man or a woman, but their efforts are feckless to change anyones biological sex. I have thought for years that lawyers should be having a field day jumping all over the medical fraud that has been perpetrated by surgeons who claim they have changed a persons sex. Thats an outlandish lie of biblical proportions.

Trans folklore requires us to ignore the ample, obvious evidence of physiological and structural differences between males and females, suppress any intellectual rational discussion, and swallow whole the lie that cross-sex hormones and surgery can flip sex. Reality goes out the window and we enter a world of Orwellian dystopia, where language gets distorted and free speech is dumped in the trash. Skeptics are bullied. Good people are canceled, and careers are ended by the slightest infraction in speech or thought.

Lawmakers, medical societies, and school boards disregard these biological facts and therefore make nonsense policies. Opportunistic males cloaked in cross-sex identities are permitted to invade womens spaces and sports, threatening womens safety and undoing the level playing field women have fought so hard to attain.

The truth is: God makes male and female; surgeons and hormone dispensaries dont.

The media paint a rosy picture of a transgender persons life after the so-called change of gender. Life will be rainbows and lollipops, they convey; everyone lives happily ever after. The trope they disseminate implies no one has ever regretted it. This myth leads gender-distressed individuals to think, Why not go for it? What do I have to lose?

The truth is, they have a lot to lose. Ive heard countless heartbreaking stories from people who lost years of their lives trying to erase who they are in a futile attempt to become someone they can never be. People need to hear the truth. Regret is not rare. My book, Trans Life Survivors, features the experiences of 30 such survivors, told in their own words. I could have included hundreds, perhaps thousands.

Regret can hit months, years, or decades after surgery. The survivors come to realize that a surgically fabricated and hormonally induced persona didnt cure what ailed them, and they want help to go back to living in authentic biological reality.

Gender discomfort exists, but like any pain, its purpose is to alert you of something wrong.It used to be that a counselors job was to methodically pinpoint the probable cause and work through it. Thats no longer the case. People who want to reclaim their lives tell me therapists diagnosed them with gender dysphoria after one or two visits, then encouraged them to transition socially, take cross-sex hormones, and undergo surgery. Parents report similar sessions with their childrens therapists. The therapist considers nothing else.

Yet gender distress is a symptom of other difficulties: adverse childhood experiences, or psychiatric or psychological issues such as panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, dissociative disorders, and substance abuse. None of these benefit from cross-sex hormones and surgery.

For me, the desire to escape my male existence was the result of years of cross-dressing at the hands of my grandmother starting at age four, after which I was molested by my uncle. Deep psychological pain caused me to want to be female.

My transgenderism was a hiding place until I received proper psychotherapy, then set my sights on God. Slowly but steadily, Gods love healed the pain of childhood experiences and redeemed my life, and the desire went away. I no longer needed a hiding place.

Today, due to the successful efforts of transgender folklorists, successful talk therapy like I received is against the law in 20 states and the District of Columbia. Affirmation is the only treatment allowed for patients who utter the magic phrase gender distress.

It especially crushes my heart to see children and teens ensnared in this ideology. The American College of Pediatricians, one of the few medical associations not given over to woke indoctrination, has spoken to the experimental nature of transgender intervention for children and the many ways it impairs their mental and physical health.

Panicked parents contact me. One mother succeeded through loving intervention to divert her 10-year-old daughter from going down the transgender path. Other parents want to reach their older teenagers who are blind to the difficulties awaiting them with hormones and surgery. I hear from those teens after transition, in their later teens or early 20s when reality has dashed their dreams of living happily ever after.

Women bemoan their permanently lowered voices and scarred chests. Men mourn the loss of potency and prospects for future romance. From my experience and the testimonies of the thousands who have written me, I know these myths harm innocent people and that the path to freedom starts with acknowledging the truth.

No therapist, no doctor, and no surgeon has been effective in biologically changing anyones sex, full stop. Sex is not assigned at birth and cannot be reassigned later. Regret is real. Harm is done, no matter what trans folklorists claim.

Therein lies the hope for people who want to go back: you never really changed.

Walt Heyer is an accomplished author and public speaker with a passion for mentoring individuals whose lives have been torn apart by unnecessary gender-change surgery.

Excerpt from:

3 Myths Trans Folklorists Want You To Believe That Lia Thomas Smashes - The Federalist