For months, Yahya Sinwar has resisted pressure to cut a ceasefire-and-hostages deal with Israel. Behind his decision, messages the Hamas military leader in Gaza has sent to mediators show, is a calculation that more fighting—and more Palestinian civilian deaths—work to his advantage.

“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Sinwar said in a recent message to Hamas officials seeking to broker an agreement with Qatari and Egyptian officials.

Fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas units in the Gaza Strip’s south has disrupted humanitarian-aid shipments, caused mounting civilian casualties and intensified international criticism of Israel’s efforts to eradicate the Islamist extremist group.

For much of Sinwar’s political life, shaped by bloody conflict with an Israeli state that he says has no right to exist, he has stuck to a simple playbook. Backed into a corner, he looks to violence for a way out. The current fight in Gaza is no exception.

In dozens of messages—reviewed by The Wall Street Journal—that Sinwar has transmitted to cease-fire negotiators, Hamas compatriots outside Gaza and others, he’s shown a cold disregard for human life and made clear he believes Israel has more to lose from the war than Hamas. The messages were shared by multiple people with differing views of Sinwar.

More than 37,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, most of them civilians, Palestinian officials say. The figure doesn’t specify how many were combatants. Health authorities said almost 300 Palestinians were killed Saturday in an Israeli raid that rescued four hostages kept in captivity in homes surrounded by civilians—driving home for some Palestinians their role as pawns for Hamas.

In one message to Hamas leaders in Doha, Sinwar cited civilian losses in national-liberation conflicts in places such as Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of people died fighting for independence from France, saying, “these are necessary sacrifices.”

In an April 11 letter to Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh after three of Haniyeh’s adult sons were killed by an Israeli airstrike, Sinwar wrote that their deaths and those of other Palestinians would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.”

Sinwar isn’t the first Palestinian leader to embrace bloodshed as a means to pressure Israel. But the scale of the collateral damage in this war—civilians killed and destruction wrought—is unprecedented between Israelis and Palestinians.

Despite Israel’s ferocious effort to kill him, Sinwar has survived and micromanaged Hamas’s war effort, drafting letters, sending messages to cease-fire negotiators and deciding when the U.S.-designated terrorist group ramps up or dials back its attacks.

His ultimate goal appears to be to win a permanent cease-fire that allows Hamas to declare a historic victory by outlasting Israel and claim leadership of the Palestinian national cause.

President Biden is trying to force Israel and Hamas to halt the war. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is opposed to permanently ending the fight before what he calls “total victory” over Hamas.

Even without a lasting truce, Sinwar believes Netanyahu has few options other than occupying Gaza and getting bogged down fighting a Hamas-led insurgency for months or years.

It is an outcome that Sinwar foreshadowed six years ago when he first became leader in the Gaza Strip. Hamas might lose a war with Israel, but it would cause an Israeli occupation of more than two million Palestinians.

“For Netanyahu, a victory would be even worse than a defeat,” Sinwar told an Italian journalist writing in 2018 in an Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth.

Sinwar, now in his early 60s, was roughly 5 years old when the 1967 war brought him his first experience of significant violence between Israelis and Arabs. That brief fight reordered the Middle East. Israel took control of the Golan Heights from Syria and the West Bank from Jordan. It also captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, as well as the Gaza Strip, where Sinwar grew up in a United Nations-run refugee camp.

The conflict was a constant presence. Sinwar published a novel in 2004 while in Israeli prison and wrote in the preface that it was based on his own experiences. In the book, a father digs a deep hole in the yard of the refugee camp during the 1967 war, covering it with wood and metal to make a shelter.

A young son waits in the hole with his family, crying and hearing the sounds of explosions grow louder as the Israeli army approaches. The boy tries to climb out, only for his mother to yell: “It’s war out there! Don’t you know what war means?”

Sinwar joined the movement that eventually became Hamas in the 1980s, becoming close to founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and setting up an internal-security police that hunted and killed suspected informants, according to the transcript of his confession to Israeli interrogators in 1988.

He received multiple life sentences for murder and spent 22 years in prison before being freed in a swap along with a thousand other Palestinians in 2011 for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

During the negotiations between Israel and Hamas over the Shalit swap, Sinwar was influential in pushing for the freedom of Palestinians who were jailed for murdering Israelis.

He wanted to release even those who were involved in bombings that had killed large numbers of Israelis and was so maximalist in his demands that Israel put him in solitary confinement so he wouldn’t disrupt progress.

When he became leader of Hamas in Gaza in 2017, violence was a constant in his repertoire. Hamas had wrested control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in a bloody conflict a decade earlier, and while Sinwar moved early in his tenure to reconcile Hamas with other Palestinian factions, he warned that he would “break the neck” of anyone who stood in the way.

In 2018, Sinwar supported weekly protests at the fence between Gaza and Israeli territory. Fearful of a breach in the barrier, the Israeli military fired on Palestinians and agitators who came too close. It was all part of the plan.

“We make the headlines only with blood,” Sinwar said in the interview at the time with an Italian journalist. “No blood, no news.”

In 2021, reconciliation talks between Hamas and Palestinian factions appeared to be progressing toward legislative and presidential elections for the Palestinian Authority, the first in 15 years. But at the last moment, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas canceled polls. With the political track closed, Sinwar days later turned to bloodshed to change the status quo, firing rockets on Jerusalem amid tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the city. The ensuing 11-day conflict killed 242 Palestinians and 12 people in Israel.

Israeli airstrikes caused such damage that Israeli officials believed Sinwar would be deterred from again attacking Israelis.

But the opposite happened: Israeli officials now believe Sinwar then began planning the Oct. 7 attacks. One aim was to end the paralysis in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and revive its global diplomatic importance, said Arab and Hamas officials familiar with Sinwar’s thinking.

Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories had lasted more than half a century, and Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners were talking about annexing land in the West Bank that Palestinians wanted for a future state. Saudi Arabia, once a champion of the Palestinian cause, was in talks to normalize relations with Israel.

Though Sinwar planned and greenlighted the Oct. 7 attacks, early messages to cease-fire negotiators show he seemed surprised by the brutality of Hamas’s armed wing and other Palestinians, and how easily they committed civilian atrocities.

“Things went out of control,” Sinwar said in one of his messages, referring to gangs taking civilian women and children as hostages. “People got caught up in this, and that should not have happened.”

This became a talking point for Hamas to explain away the Oct. 7 civilian toll.

Early in the war, Sinwar focused on using the hostages as a bargaining chip to delay an Israeli ground operation in Gaza. A day after Israeli soldiers entered the strip, Sinwar said Hamas was ready for an immediate deal to exchange its hostages for the release of all Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.

But Sinwar had misread how Israel would react to Oct. 7. Netanyahu declared Israel was going to destroy Hamas and said the only way to force the group to release hostages was through military pressure.

Sinwar appears to have also misinterpreted the support that Iran and Lebanese militia Hezbollah were willing to offer.

When Hamas political chief Haniyeh and deputy Saleh al-Arouri traveled to Tehran in November for a meeting with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, they were told that Tehran backed Hamas but wouldn’t be entering the conflict.

“He was partly misled by them and partly misled himself,” said Ehud Yaari, an Israeli commentator who has known Sinwar since his days in prison. “He was extremely disappointed.”

By November, Hamas’s political leadership privately began distancing themselves from Sinwar, saying he launched the Oct. 7 attacks without telling them, Arab officials who spoke to Hamas said.

At the end of November, Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire and the release of some hostages held by the militants. But the deal collapsed after a week.

As Israel’s army quickly dismantled Hamas’s military structures, the group’s political leadership began meeting other Palestinian factions in early December to discuss reconciliation and a postwar plan. Sinwar wasn’t consulted.

Sinwar in a message sent to the political leaders blasted the end-around as “shameful and outrageous.”

“As long as fighters are still standing and we have not lost the war, such contacts should be immediately terminated,” he said. “We have the capabilities to continue fighting for months.”

On Jan. 2, Arouri was killed in a suspected Israeli strike in Beirut, and Sinwar began to change the way he communicated, said Arab officials. He used aliases and relayed notes only through a handful of trusted aides and via codes, switching between audio, messages spoken to intermediaries and written messages, they said.

Still, his communications indicate he began to feel things were turning Hamas’s way.

By the end of that month, Israel’s military advance had slowed to a grueling battle in the city of Khan Younis, Sinwar’s hometown. Israel began to lose more troops. On Jan. 23, about two dozen Israeli troops were killed in central and southern Gaza, the invasion’s deadliest day for the military.

Arab mediators hastened to speed up talks about a cease-fire, and on Feb. 19, Israel set a deadline of Ramadan—a month later—for Hamas to return the hostages or face a ground offensive in Rafah, what Israeli officials described as the militant group’s last stronghold.

Sinwar in a message urged his comrades in Hamas’s political leadership outside Gaza not to make concessions and instead to push for a permanent end to the war. High civilian casualties would create worldwide pressure on Israel, Sinwar said. The group’s armed wing was ready for the onslaught, Sinwar’s messages said.

“Israel’s journey in Rafah won’t be a walk in the park,” Sinwar told Hamas leaders in Doha in a message.

At the end of February, an aid delivery in Gaza turned deadly as Israeli forces fired on Palestinian civilians crowding trucks, adding U.S. pressure on Israel to limit casualties.

Disagreements among Israel’s wartime leaders erupted into public view, as Netanyahu failed to articulate a postwar governance plan for Gaza and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, privately warned against reoccupying the strip. Israelis grew concerned the country was losing the war.

In May, Israel again threatened to attack Rafah if cease-fire talks remained deadlocked, a move Hamas viewed as purely a negotiating tactic.

Netanyahu said Israel needed to expand into Rafah to destroy Hamas’s military structure there and disrupt smuggling from Egypt.

Sinwar’s response: Hamas fired on Kerem Shalom crossing May 5, killing four soldiers. Hamas officials outside Gaza began to echo Sinwar’s confident posture.

Israel has since launched its Rafah operation. But as Sinwar predicted, it has come at a humanitarian and diplomatic cost.

Sinwar’s messages, meanwhile, indicate he’s willing to die in the fighting.

In a recent message to allies, the Hamas leader likened the war to a 7th-century battle in Karbala, Iraq, where the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad was controversially slain.

“We have to move forward on the same path we started,” Sinwar wrote. “Or let it be a new Karbala.”

For 25 years or so, I've been thinking about the taunt that the jihadists - whether they are from Al-Qaeda, from Hamas, from ISIS - the taunt that they make to freedom loving people to citizens of liberal democracies. They always have the same taunt. They say, "we love death more than you love life."

And I've heard this for such a long time. And I've heard it from people who've killed friends of mine from Afghanistan to France, and I've always founded it an incredibly disturbing taunt. It seems almost something you couldn't-- it's almost insuperable, almost unsolvable. What would you do with an enemy that genuinely, genuinely loves death more than we love life.

But recent months in this country have enormously inspired me. Because I've realized, of course, there is a very obvious answer to it. Which is that there is no crime in loving life this much. We will not apologize for loving life. We will not apologize if you bring up your children to hate that we bring up our children to love. We will not apologize if you indoctrinate your children into totally inconsequent and unproductive hatred, if we bring them up to live productive and meaning-filled lives.

And, in the end, it seems to me, actually now between these two world visions, the people who love death that much have no chance of winning against the people of life.

Colin Wright: I'm coming from this classical liberal side where, and I thought we were achieving a lot of success in this idea that we were correctly identifying that there was a lot of variation in the degree to which people conform to sex stereotypes - there's masculine and feminine girls, masculine and feminine boys.

And we were at least going in the direction as a society of saying, that's completely normal, if you don't like that, deal with it. Like, these people exist and we should accept them.

And now we've kind of just gone the complete opposite. We're saying, well the boy who's very feminine, you're no longer a boy, you're actually a girl, you're stuck on the wrong body and we need to change you.

I'm just for the hands-off principle. Like, these are just normal people, these are just-- this is just natural variation and we need to let them be who they are. But then they would interpret "be who you are" as like, well they're born in the wrong body, so being who they are is modifying.

Andrew Gold: It's sort of-- I feel like there's authoritarianism coming from a benevolent dictator...

Wright: It was on the right path and then it just somehow, just totally got derailed and that's when I jumped off the train before it went off over the cliff.

Gold: Humans in big groups, they're just always going to do that, they're always going to start telling people they're in the wrong body, they're in the wrong thing, there's something wrong with who they are.

Both the right and the left have a really big problem with gender non-conforming individuals. You had the people on the far Christian right who don't like their feminine sons potentially being homosexual, and so they tried to change their brains to match your body, you know try to change your behaviors.

And then on the far left we have just the opposite, where they're, you know, they claimed to be accepting of it but now they're saying, well we need to change your body to match your brain.

It's just two ways to achieve the same end result basically.

DOJ Indicts Doctor Who Exposed the Barbarism of “Gender-Affirming Care”

Eithan Haim blew the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital’s illegal child sex-change program. Now he’s being prosecuted.

City Journal

A few years ago, Texas Children’s Hospital made no secret of its support for transgender medicine. Its doctors proudly administered puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and other medical interventions to children who self-identified as “trans.”

Then the tone shifted. In the face of public pressure, CEO Mark Wallace announced that he was shutting down the child gender clinic. But doctors at the hospital, including Richard Ogden Roberts, David Paul, and Kristy Rialon, never stopped.

The public would not have known if not for a courageous surgeon, Eithan Haim, who felt morally obligated to expose the subterfuge. He contacted me about how the hospital had lied about terminating the transgender medicine program, and that doctors were, in fact, continuing to perform sex-change procedures on children as young as 11.

The story rocketed across the world. The hospital immediately went on the defensive. Within a week, Texas legislators passed a bill confirming that transgender medical procedures for minors were illegal.

But the story also attracted attention from another powerful source: federal prosecutors. The Department of Justice has not shied from targeting political opponents of the Biden administration: former President Trump; conservative school board protesters; persons praying outside of abortion clinics; and now, doctors who dissent from transgender ideology.

On the morning in June 2023 that Haim was to graduate from Texas Children Hospital’s residency program, federal agents knocked on his door. They had identified him as a potential “leaker,” presumably through forensic examination of the hospital’s computer systems. Shortly thereafter, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari began threatening Haim with prosecution.

Now, Ansari has made good on those threats. Earlier this week, U.S. marshals appeared at Haim’s home and summoned him to court to face an indictment on four felony counts of violating HIPAA. His initial appearance is next Monday, where he will learn more about the charges against him.

According to one of Haim’s attorneys, Marcella Burke, he is anxious to get to trial to get his side of the story told; she is confident that this will result in the correct decision being made. (For my own part, I can confirm that nothing in the information provided to me identified any individual; all the documents were, in fact, carefully redacted.) Nonetheless, the prosecutor has pressed forward, hoping, at the least, to intimidate other medical professionals who would consider blowing the whistle on the barbarism of “transgender medicine.”

Despite the threat to his livelihood and freedom, Haim is undeterred. He plans to mount a vigorous defense in court and is soliciting public support.

The Haim case marks an inflection point in the debate on “gender-affirming care.” If Haim prevails, other courageous doctors and medical professionals will follow his lead and speak out. We will need all their voices if we are to succeed in shutting down the child sex-change business in the United States.

A whistleblower is a person who exposes any kind of information or activity that is deemed illegal, unethical, or not correct within an organization that is either private or public. The Whistleblower Protection Act was made into federal law in the United States in 1989.

Whistleblower protection laws and regulations guarantee freedom of speech for workers and contractors in certain situations. Whistleblowers are protected from retaliation for disclosing information that the employee or applicant reasonably believes provides evidence of a violation of any law, rule, regulation, gross mismanagement, gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety.

Astrology Debunked - Again

Star signs predict well-being about as well as random numbers

stevestewartwilliams.com

In a fine example of such a test, two statisticians examined the reenlistment records of the United States Marine Corps. We suspect you will agree that it takes a certain kind of personality not only to enlist, but also to reenlist in the Marines. If sun signs can predict strong personality traits - as astrologers claim - then those who reenlisted (with similar personalities) should have been distributed preferentially in those one or few signs that matched the personality of someone who loves being a Marine. However, the reenlisted were distributed randomly among all the signs. More sophisticated studies have also been done, involving full horoscopes calculated for thousands of individuals. The results of all these studies are also negative: none of the systems of astrology has been shown to be at all effective in connecting astrological aspects to personality, success, or finding the right person to love. Other tests show that it hardly seems to matter what a horoscope interpretation says, as long as it is vague enough, and as long as each subject feels it was prepared personally just for him or her. The French statistician Michel Gauquelin, for example, sent the horoscope interpretation for one of the worst mass murderers in history to 150 people, but told each recipient that it was a “reading” prepared exclusively for him or her. Ninety-four percent of the readers said they recognized themselves in the interpretation of the mass murderer’s horoscope. Geoffrey Dean, an Australian researcher, reversed the astrological readings of 22 subjects, substituting phrases that were the opposite of what the horoscope actually said. Yet, his subjects said that the resulting readings applied to them just as often (95%) as the people to whom the original phrases were given.

• You can access a free copy of the star-signs-and-wellbeing paper here.
• Follow Steve on Twitter/X.

Trans activism is holding proper health care to ransom after Cass Rev…

archive.ph

The Cass Review of gender medicine in England, released this week, captures a medical establishment waking up to a major scandal.

Thousands of transgender and gender-questioning English children have been exposed to harmful interventions under the medical treatment model called “gender-affirming care”.

This failure was caused by medical authorities who abandoned traditional safeguards in the face of pressure from international trans activist groups. Many other countries are now starting to acknowledge similar failures, led by Sweden and Finland.

Gender confusion is a normal part of adolescence that is likely to resolve without treatment in the overwhelming majority of cases. The gender-affirming care described in the review trapped gender-confused kids on a treadmill from which few escaped, leading from social transition, through puberty blockers, to hormone treatment and surgery in many cases.

As widely publicised when puberty blockers were banned in England a few weeks ago, these treatments have significant side-effects, including fractured bones, infertility and severe sexual dysfunction, which can be lifelong.

Cass makes it impossible for Australian authorities to continue to ignore warnings that Aussie kids and their families face the same systemic problems and clinical risks the English, Swedes and Finns are now scrambling to correct.

The explosive growth in gender-questioning patients and gender-affirming services in Australia closely retraces the English trajectory. But we started a few years later, so there is time to learn from England’s mistakes.

English medical authorities were forced to awaken by years of testimony from clinical whistleblowers, traumatised patients, and their families. The Cass Review followed books, media attention and legal cases, describing a health service heavily influenced by trans activist groups who infiltrated clinical units as patient advocates and supports.

Health staff reported they felt pressured to ignore signs of medical and mental illness in order to focus exclusively on gender, a process called diagnostic overshadowing. Even more damning, Cass reveals that gender-affirming providers ignored their own research, rapidly expanding access to dangerous medications such as puberty blockers even after finding there were no benefits.

The usual health system safeguards failed to detect this violation of the first principle of medicine: do no harm. Instead, problems were only identified because individual patients and staff had the courage to speak out over strong social and bureaucratic pressure to remain silent.

As well as ignoring their own research, English gender services actively refused to co-operate with official efforts to analyse existing data. This prevented investigators from getting a better picture of who was being treated, what was being done to them, and what the outcomes were.

While speculative, it seems unlikely that services would have refused to participate in research if they were confident it would show patients were significantly more helped than harmed by gender-affirming treatment.

Although these advance warnings should be good news for the health and safety of gender-questioning Australian kids and their families, our gender services do not seem to be listening. Instead, in many cases, they are making up for lost time by implementing more aggressive versions of the practices being shut down in England because of risks to patients.

For example, the Cass Review explicitly identifies “informed consent” models, similar to one being rolled out in Victoria, as incompatible with responsible medical practice. This type of model is grounded in political activist theory more than medicine. It views assessment of the gender identity of gender-confused teens as an illegitimate form of “gatekeeping” designed to control patient behaviour, instead of a medical safeguard protecting their health.

Under this model the doctor’s only role is to confirm that patients understand proposed treatments. Once confirmed, doctors must deliver any treatment the patient requests, without further assessment.

This contradicts the traditional medical approach, in which a comprehensive assessment, including the assessment of gender identity, is a non-negotiable feature of competent and ethical treatment of gender dysphoria. Even more concerning is that the “informed consent” model in Victoria is reportedly being extended to allow GPs to medicate transgender kids without specialists, going well beyond the safe limits recommended by Cass.

It may seem strange that Australia’s gender services are so keen to implement and go beyond risky treatments being shut down all over the world, but it is consistent with what is known about the gender-affirming care movement. This is a well-organised, well-funded international network of clinicians and activists committed to advancing a specific agenda.

Those interested in the details should seek out the report compiled by publisher Thomson-Reuters for gay rights organisation iglyo in 2019 called Only Adults?

In brief, the report compares international efforts to overcome strong public dislike of trans activist goals such as legislation enshrining the right to unconstrained gender self-identification in law, replacing biological sex with gender as the basis of legal rights, and the elimination of barriers such as lower age limits for non-traditional gender identities and treatments.

Based on case studies across Europe, the report recommends trans activists take a strategic approach to achieve their goals. Reflecting on evidence that increased public awareness of trans ideology tends to increase public resistance to it, the report recommends avoiding scrutiny by limiting contact with media and focusing efforts on influencing key decision-makers rather than attempting to change public opinion.

A core part of the strategy relies on establishing gender self-identification legislation as a legal foot in the door that can be leveraged to achieve many other trans activist goals.

The stakes are high, and not just for trans people. A case in Federal Court this week provides a perfect example, where a woman, Sally Grover, is defending her right to define for herself what a woman-only space means. The other party is a transgender woman, Roxanne Tickle, who is effectively claiming transgender women should have all the same rights as biological women, and be able to enforce those rights in court.

The rapid expansion of gender-affirming care, despite the limited evidence of benefits and the certain knowledge of harms, is consistent with this type of strategy. High-quality healthcare relies upon the integrity of the medical authorities who write the blueprints used by hospitals and health services to build their clinical services. This can work very well when the blueprints are written by independent experts who exercise methodological rigour focused purely on patient health outcomes. It can be deeply problematic when the small committees that write the blueprints are co-opted by people with ulterior motives.

Unfortunately, as confirmed by the Cass Review, the blueprints used to create gender services in Australia (endorsed by the WPATH and AusPATH organisations) scored very low on both methodological rigour (26 per cent and 19 per cent respectively) and editorial independence (17 per cent and 14 per cent).

Close examination of these blueprints suggests the primary goal of gender-affirming care in Australia is not to improve the health of gender-confused kids but to ensure they have the right to gender self-identification, and that public health services affirm that identity with support, resources, and medical and surgical interventions.

The rapid expansion of gender-affirming care to increasing numbers of gender-confused kids in Australia, despite the gaps in knowledge, represents a significant failure of leadership. While the reflex is often to blame politicians for systemic failures, medicine’s claim to expert authority in matters of health suggests political solutions will not be possible until the medical profession in Australia follows England’s lead and initiates a comprehensive review of gender medicine.

Fireworks and dancing as Iranians defiantly celebrate Raisi’s death

Jubilant scenes posted online while regime broadcasts footage of mourning after president killed in helicopter crash

The Telegraph

Defiant acts of celebration broke out in Iran as state television broadcasted footage of mourning following the death of president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash.

Fireworks were set off in several cities on Monday night and some people posted videos of themselves dancing in the streets early on Tuesday.

However, the open displays of celebration were limited as dissent is often met with a strict crackdown by the hardline regime.

In one video showing fireworks, a woman’s voice can be heard saying: “People are rejoicing at the downfall of Raisi.”

“People are celebrating and I congratulate the president’s death,” said another man over another clip. “I hope the rest of them die too.”

People in the capital Tehran told The Telegraph there was a heavy presence of armed security forces in several neighbourhoods.

“I went up to the roof last night, and there were fireworks in several parts of the city,” a resident of Karaj, near the capital Tehran, said.

“I also heard people chanting ‘death to the dictator’ somewhere close by,” he added.

Many Iranians celebrated in secret and some people told the Telegraph they stayed awake waiting for “good news to come out of the mountains”.

“I was on my phone all night and when I finally saw the news, I jumped from bed and started dancing,” a man in Tehran said.

“I went to a nearby shop, and it was incredible. The shopkeeper, whom I know, gave me a free cigarette and said, ‘Let’s hope for more crashes like this’,” he said.

The mother of a Kurdish prisoner executed earlier this year posted a video of herself dancing upon hearing the news of Raisi’s death.

A shopkeeper in central Isfahan said he experienced a surge in selling sweets on Monday as people “keep coming to celebrate”.

“It’s very strange and good, people come and congratulate me for the death of Raisi,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I saw something like this.”

“Many are hiding their happiness because they are afraid of government spies and worried about the subsequent consequences,” he added.

On Monday afternoon, state TV continued to broadcast scenes of mourning and tearful individuals.

“I don’t know what to say,” said a crying man. “I’m shocked, and I hope God helps people in these grieving times,” said another.

“He lost his life while serving the nation, which made me very sad,” said a man in a mosque where people had gathered to mourn. “He held a special place in people’s hearts.”

Mourning songs and live footage of memorials played continuously on several state channels.

Many changed their logos to black and aired tributes about how “beloved and close to the people the martyred president” was, highlighting that he lost his life on the “flight of service”.

“The president set new benchmarks for good governance, and we hope his legacy continues,” a presenter said. “He accomplished significant feats and would have achieved even more if given more time.”

“He was a soldier of the Supreme Leader, and anyone who respected the Supreme Leader respected him as well. He was dedicated to the development of Iran,” an analyst said on state TV.

Iran’s president and his foreign minister were confirmed dead after the helicopter they were travelling in crashed in a mountainous region during bad weather on Sunday evening.

Rescuers reached the wreckage early Monday morning after a desperate search mission hampered by rain, fog and snow.

Mr Raisi won Iran’s closely stage-managed 2021 presidential election, a vote marked by the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history.

His victory brought all branches of power under the control of hardliners, after eight years in which the presidency had been held by Hassan Rouhani, a pragmatist who entered into a nuclear deal with Washington.

“These three years of Raisi were like a nightmare,” said a woman in her late 20s in northwestern Mashhad, Raisi’s hometown.

“I do not expect any big change to happen now, at least we can hope,” she added.

Under the code name “Noor” or “light” in Farsi, the Islamic Republic has intensified a clampdown on anyone violating its draconian female dress codes.

Two-Spirits against a Great Divider

The Queer lobby keeps adding letters to their banner to signal their holier-than-thou “inclusivity” and “diversity”. One of the more recent

GD Alliance

The Queer lobby keeps adding letters to their banner to signal their holier-than-thou “inclusivity” and “diversity”. One of the more recent inclusions has been the 2S, which stands for Two-Spirit”, but what does this mean and where did it originate?

The english term “Two-Spirit” was coined in 1990 during the third annual intertribal Native American/First Nations gay and lesbian conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The congregants wanted to distance themselves from European concepts of “gay” and the word “berdache”, a label given to the gender non-conforming natives by white settlers. “Two-Spirit” is a translation of the Ojibwe niizh manitoag.

I grew up in Manitoba. One Scottish branch of my family travelled here on Lord Selkirk’s ship to build and work for the Hudson’s Bay Settlement, which is now Winnipeg. Despite living in close proximity to many Cree, Ojibwe and Dakota communities, I know embarrassingly little about their cultures. I have (also embarrassingly) heard countless Queer activists over the past 20 years cite Two-Spirit as a local example of “transgender” history, but I’ve rarely heard this mentioned by First Nations people themselves. So, I’m curious: what were the historical and cultural meanings of the term? Ask, and the Universe/Creator/God provides.

I was introduced to a Dakota woman who resides in Winnipeg, not far from where I was born. She has several friends who attended the 1990 conference. I’ll call her “Teara” to protect her privacy. (She chose the pseudonym "cause I'm gonna tear this crap down...for my community's well being"). Teara reminded me a lot of my own grandmother, a powerhouse of a woman with a big heart, a loud voice and a sharp mind that can detect bullshit up wind. She’ll call it like it is.

Here's what she told me:

Dakota culture is organized around the Creator. What is given by the Creator is to be respected and appreciated. Teara comes from a long line of “seers” – a visionary gift. The Dakota people have long believed that everyone is born with two spirits – one masculine and one feminine. She gave examples of times when she draws from her male spirit when she needs to be strong, and from her female spirit when she needs to be gentle. Sometimes, one of those spirits is innately stronger in a person and so, some women tend to be more masculine, and some men tend to be more feminine. Since all natural traits are seen as the gifts from the Creator, they are honoured. Women with strong masculine spirits were permitted to go hunting with the men. Likewise, men with strong feminine spirits were permitted to participate in some activities with the women.

She explained that this understanding is very different from the contemporary “transgender” movement. Two-Spirit people were not seen as a third sex, nor the opposite sex. They understood that female and male are biological/reproductive categories. To “change sex” would be at act of rebellion against the Creator who gave us the gift of our bodies.

Queer politics have made their way into Teara’s own Manitoba community. She sees this as a threat to her culture, an attack on native women, and an effort to divide and conquer. She has raised her concerns in her community and met with hostility. She’s been asked to leave council meetings and has been physically attacked and intimidated.

I saw no hate or deceit in Teara. She was generous and gracious with me, freely offering her wisdom to a stranger. She has insights into the disruptive and divisive nature of critical gender theory which echo academics like James Lindsay.

Teara is a Knowledge Keeper.

Dr. Myra Laramee, B.Ed., M.Ed., Ph. D (Education) of Fisher River First Nation discusses what it means to be Two-Spirit, as well as the term’s history and origin.

Speed offence

British paediatrician Hilary Cass puts the spotlight on Australian gender clinics racing ahead of the safety data

genderclinicnews.com

A 2020 journal article, with RCH gender clinicians and University of Melbourne bioethicists among the authors, considers the case of 15-year-old male child “EF”, a hypothetical “non-binary” patient combining features of real cases.

After three years of hormone suppression EF’s bone mineral density has fallen to the lowest 2.5 percentile, “although there have been no fractures,” the authors say.

“EF, whose desire for biological children in the future remains unclear, wishes to continue puberty suppression until they are at least 18 years old [thereby keeping a seemingly androgynous body]. Their clinicians contact the clinical ethics consultation team to ask, ‘Is that appropriate?’”

The paper assumes, contrary to systematic reviews of the evidence, that blockers can be counted on to ease the distress of gender dysphoria and confer mental health benefits. In other words, the paper does not accept that the use of blockers with dysphoria is experimental.

Three of the Melbourne authors suggest the “attractive” option of maintaining EF on blockers while making experimental use of another medication. They say that “selective estrogen receptor modulators” (SERMs) might “theoretically promote improved bone density” without growing undesired breast tissue. It is “attractive”, they suggest, despite this new medication’s side effects including hot flashes, blood clots and possibly cognitive impairment.

Another 2020 paper involving authors from the RCH clinic and the University of Melbourne contemplates the composite case of “Phoenix”, a non-binary adult requesting ongoing puberty suppression (OPS) to permanently prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics, as a way of affirming their gender identity.”

The hypothetical Phoenix is an 18-year-old girl who has mostly identified as non-binary and began hormone suppression at age 11 after she became “extremely distressed” by the appearance of breast buds and the thought of approaching menarche.

The authors declare perpetual puberty blockers “ethically justifiable”, because the possible harms would be outweighed by benefits such as “a physical appearance that better matches gender identity.”

“We have also contended that Phoenix’s request can be regarded as substantially autonomous. Arguably, medicine is moving beyond its traditional, narrow goal of promoting health, biostatistically conceived.”

Under the rubric of more ethical work to be done with non-binary adults, the authors ask, “Should a diagnosis of gender dysphoria be required for an individual to be eligible for puberty suppression?”

'Woke' is Dead. The Spin Doctoring has Begun.

The Guardian once again spits in the face of the woke witch hunters' victims, minimizing us as collateral damage in the ultimate service of

artymorty.substack.com

• “the broader push for social, racial and environmental justice”
• “the idea of being more open to sometimes uncomfortable challenge from minority perspectives that were previously suppressed”
• “saving the planet”
• “uncovering forgotten histories”
• “inclusivity at work”
• “ ‘be kind’ ”
• “getting more used to acknowledging conflicting views based on different life experiences”

Social justice is not the same thing as “environmental justice” and climate change isn’t fundamentally political. What to do about it is politicized (but shouldn’t be), but the change itself is not responsive to whether we shout “fascist!” or “wokerati!” at it. Those are two radically different things, so there’s no point in calling the pairing of them anything.

Woke is no longer wildly anti-establishment; increasingly it’s becoming the boring old establishment, to the point where teenagers will doubtless soon be ripping it apart on TikTok, since turning into baby conservatives is the only thing really guaranteed now to confound their parents. It is radicalism that initially breaks down doors. But what usually ends up walking through them is a version with the sharp edges smoothed off that most people find they can live with, and that’s where woke is heading now. It’s not dead. But it is evolving, and that’s how living things ultimately survive.

The really crucial point that we're not grappling with at all is, even the diagnosis of gender dysphoria itself, whatever you want to call it - we've got the World Health Organization calling it "gender incongruence," we've got the DSM calling it "gender dysphoria," in the past it was gender identity disorder - you've really got to look at, is this even real?

Is this-- as far as I'm concerned it is a culture-bound syndrome that appeared at this time and in this place, and because it's in the symptom pool-- I love Edward Shorter's concept of the "symptom pool," which is the pool of legitimate mental health diagnoses that exist in any culture, in any time.

And so, what you have is a bunch of unhappy people, people who are in a state of distress and mental fragility, and what they do, they select a diagnosis from the symptom pool of their time. Right now, they can select gender dysphoria and then they apply that to their lives, and it feels very real, and it feels very-- it feels totally legitimate to them.

But then they go, and they show up at gender clinics and they've given themselves this diagnosis. And the madness is the fact that in gender clinics, nobody questions the diagnosis. Even though it is as culture-bound in my opinion as like if we had the epidemic of multiple personality disorder in the 1980s and 1990s. That was, it spread like wildfire. It just, it was an epidemic. And then it disappeared, because it was based entirely on something completely nonsensical that had no science and no evidence to it.

The same thing is happening now. Gender identity ideology, this whole trans rights movement, has created a culture-bound syndrome of gender dysphoria and people, unhappy people are just applying that label to their lives. But it's not necessarily-- it's not real in the sense that, you know, cancer is real, or diabetes is real. And yet, we're treating it with this harsh, brutal medical pathway that is as extreme as cancer treatment, and that-- Really, I think a focus on what exactly the diagnosis is, is absolutely essential to avoid misdiagnosis. To avoid all of these kids, maybe they're autistic and they're interpreting the difficulties with autism as a sign that they're transgender.

And finally, New Rule. As one of the few people in the public eye who's gone through life and never had kids, someone has to tell me why am I always having to defend them? I don't even like kids. But I also think it's every adult's job to protect them.

Have you all been watching the Max documentary called "Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV"? OMG. Nickelodeon? It wasn't a studio; it was Neverland Ranch with craft services. It is just scene after scene, clip after clip of the child stars of their day being subjected to obviously inappropriate, highly sexualized degradation. And quite a few pickles going through glory holes. I was grossed out and I've gone camping with John Waters. I kid you John, I love you.

So, I don't know if this documentary is the talk of your town, but it is out here, because it didn't just expose a dangerous workplace. It also exposed hypocrisy. Because it must be pointed out that when the evil governor of Florida was saying the exact same thing about kids and creepy stuff at Disney that liberals now find intolerable at Nickelodeon, he was dismissed as a hick and a bigot. But why would a kids' content factory like Disney be all that different than the one at Nickelodeon?

A 2014 CNN report discovered that at least 35 Disney employees had been arrested for sex crimes against children, and in 2021, Disney child star Alyson Stoner confessed she only "narrowly survived the toddler-to-trainwreck pipeline." The next year, child star Cole Sprouse told the New York Times that young actresses at the Disney Channel were heavily sexualized from an early age.

You know, Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because that's where the money is. And the reason we find pedophiles in the Boy Scouts and the rectory and kids' TV is that's where the kids are. De Santis wasn't wrong. But we're so tribal now, the left will overlook child fucking if the guy from the wrong party calls it out.

Sure, Nickelodeon messed up Amanda Bynes, but the Mickey Mouse Club was where Britney Spears got her start and she's perfectly fine!

And get this. After Brian Peck, who was one of the lead creeps at Nickelodeon, served 16 months in prison for the molesting he did there, Disney hired him. Naturally to work on a children's series. Oh, for pedophiles in Hollywood, It's a Small World After All.

And not just Hollywood. There are Instagram moms these days who are practically Only Fans-ing their itty, bitty beauty queen daughters by having them wear skimpy bikinis and eat bananas to build social media stardom. They're called "Sharenters," a hybrid of "sharing" and "parent." I call them pimps, a hybrid of "pimp" and "s."

And people who believe in social justice have agreed this is wrong and this is bad and exposing kids to an adult world of lurid costumes and garish makeup borders on abuse. Now hurry up and get in the car, we're late for Drag Queen Story Hour.

Not that there's anything wrong with being a drag queen, but maybe it's time to admit that sometimes Drag Queen Story Hour is more for the queen than the kids. Sure, kids love a clown, but does the clown have to have tits? And when I see a 5-year-old tipping-- tipping at a bar under a sign that says, "it's not going to lick itself," do I have to pretend that's cool in order to keep my liberal ID card? Sorry, I can't do that.

If you want kids to be more tolerant, why not have handicapped people read them stories? Kids are more likely to encounter disabled people than drag queens in life. Geez, can't we just go back to the good old days when kids were read simple stories with simple morals like, if you're a lonely single man just make a boy out of wood.

I've said it before, wokeness is not an extension of liberalism anymore. It's more often taking something so far that it becomes the opposite. Teaching kids not to hate or judge those who are different? Great. Proud we got there. All for that.

But at a certain point, inclusion becomes promotion. And contrary to current progressive dogma, children aren't miniature adults wise beyond their years. They're morons. They're gullible morons who'll believe anything and just want to please grown-ups.

And they don't have any frame of reference, so they normalize whatever is happening. That's why endlessly talking about gender to six-year-olds isn't just inappropriate, it's what the law would call "entrapment." Which means enticing people into doing something they wouldn't ordinarily do.

For example, after 9/11 there were several cases of overzealous federal agents leading sad losers into terrorist plots. Like the undercover FBI agent who got seven out-of-work dudes in Liberty City Florida to sign onto a plot to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago. Oh please, these guys didn't even have a gun. But when someone said, wouldn't it be cool if we taught the man a lesson and blew something up? They said, yeah that would be kind of cool.

Entrapment. Suggesting someone into something they wouldn't otherwise do. And if you think that some of that isn't going on with gender in schools, you're not watching enough Tik Tok videos.

There's a certain kind of activist these days who wants to take heterosexuality -- old-school, old-fashioned, boring, minding its own business heterosexuality -- and lump it in with patriarchy and sexism and racism and tell kids, wouldn't it be cool if you were anything but that?

It also seems to be the theme of kind of a lot of kids' books these days. I never used the phrase gay agenda because I thought it was mostly nonsense. And it is. Mostly. But a director for Disney television animation did say, after she was hired -- "the showrunners were super welcoming to like, my like, not at all secret gay agenda, like I was just wherever I could, just basically adding queerness. No one would stop me, and no one was trying to stop me."

Look, I'm all for adding queerness wherever. I put some in my drink before I came out here tonight. But maybe we should think about giving kids a break from our culture wars for a minute. Or at least until the election is over.

Finally, it is often assumed that the primary pedagogical goal of queer education should be to increase empathy towards LGBT people. While this premise has some merit – and underlies many sincere projects in educational and cultural work, including DQSH – the notion of empathy has also been critiqued by feminist scholars of colour and others for the ways in which empathy can enable an affective appropriation of an individual’s unique experiences and reinforce hierarchies of power. … Whether through literature or virtual reality, these tropes tend to reflect an overstated ability to understand difference, as well as empathy’s potential to preclude meaningful relationships of solidarity.

It is undeniable that DQSH participates in many of these tropes of empathy, from the marketing language the programme uses to its selection of books. Much of this is strategically done in order to justify its educational value. However, we suggest that drag supports scholars’ critiques of empathy, rather than reifying the concept…This approach can support students in finding the unique or queer aspects of themselves – rather than attempting to understand what it’s like to be LGBT.

Queer worldmaking, including political organizing, has long been a project driven by desire. It is, in part, enacted through art forms like fashion, theatre, and drag. We believe that DQSH offers an invitation towards deeper public engagement with queer cultural production, particularly for young children and their families. It may be that DQSH is “family friendly,” in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is “family friendly” in the sense of “family” as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street.

In a mandatory course on "structural racism" for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles, a guest speaker who has praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel led students in chants of "Free, Free Palestine" and demanded that they bow down to "mama earth," according to students in the class and audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Lisa "Tiny" Gray-Garcia, who has referred to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks as "justice," began the March 27 class by leading students in what she described as a "non-secular prayer" to "the ancestors," instructing everyone to get on their knees and touch the floor—"mama earth," as she described it—with their fists.

At least half of the assembled students complied, two students said. Gray-Garcia, a local activist who had been invited to speak about "Housing (In)Justice," proceeded to thank native tribes for preserving "what the settlers call L.A.," according to audio obtained by the Free Beacon, and to remind students of the city’s "herstory."

The prayer also included a benediction for "black," "brown," and "houseless people" who die because of the "crapatalist lie" of "private property."

"Mama earth," Gray-Garcia told the kneeling students, "was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped, or played."

So began a long and looney lecture that shocked some students at the elite medical school and has led to calls for an investigation. Wearing a keffiyeh that covered her entire face, Gray-Garcia, a self-described "poverty scholar," led the class in chants of "Free, Free Palestine" as faculty and staff looked on in silence, according to people in the course and contemporaneous text messages reviewed by the Free Beacon.

One of the onlookers was Lindsay Wells, a pediatrician at UCLA and the director of the mandatory first-year course, "Structural Racism and Health Equity," who did not respond to a request for comment.

Gray-Garcia later referred to modern medicine as "white science" and inveighed against the "occupation" of "Turtle Island"—that is, the United States—before asking students to stand for a second prayer. This time, nearly everyone rose.

When one student remained seated, according to students in the class, a UCLA administrator, whom the Free Beacon could not identify, inquired about the student’s identity, implying that discipline could be on the table.

"The net effect was that UCLA staff intimidated first-year medical students into participating in a religious service in derogation of their own personal beliefs," UCLA’s Jewish Faculty Resilience Group wrote to university chancellor Gene Block on Sunday.  "There needs to be an urgent and thorough external review and investigation of the [medical school’s] curriculum and systemic antisemitism."

UCLA and Gray-Garcia did not respond to requests for comment.

The surreal spectacle is the latest controversy to envelop the "Structural Racism and Health Equity" class, launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death as a part of the medical school’s "anti-racism roadmap."

The course became the subject of a civil rights complaint in January after it separated students into race-based discussion groups—one for white students, another for African Americans, and a third for "Non-Black People of Color." UCLA cancelled the exercise after a Wall Street Journal editorial highlighted the complaint.

More unwanted attention came in March when the Daily Wire published portions of the course’s syllabus, which includes units on "settler colonialism" and recommends a podcast about "Indigenous womxn’s health." Students are also urged to read an essay, "Decolonization is not a metaphor," that describes the "epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence" of "the settler."

Gray-Garcia’s talk offers a window into the way these concepts are shaping the classroom experience at one of the top medical schools in the country—and raises serious questions about how that school vetted a speaker with a long history of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic posts.

"When u resist after decades of relentless poLicing [sic], killing & terrorizing," Gray-Garcia tweeted on Nov. 1, "that’s not ‘terrorism’ that’s justice."

Israel, she declared in 2018, is "amerikkklan."

News of Gray-Garcia’s lecture comes as the Department of Education is investigating UCLA over a string of anti-Semitic episodes on campus, including an incident in which students bludgeoned a piñata with a picture of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face. "Beat that f—ing Jew," one student allegedly shouted. In a separate incident, UCLA moved an event with former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni online due to threats of protests.

Beyond her anti-Israel posts, Gray-Garcia’s writings include a book called How to Not Call the Po’Lice Ever and a poem, "Dear KKKolumbus," dedicated to black people killed by law enforcement.

"Pop - Pop/Our babies have been shot," the first stanza reads. "By these occupying armies called KKKops."

Who Agrees with Hitler?

Michael Bernstein & April Bleske-Rechek

unsafescience.substack.com

This is a guest post by Michael Bernstein (Brown University) & April Bleske-Rechek (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire). Michael Bernstein is an experimental psychologist and an Assistant Professor at Brown University. His research focuses on: cognitive biases, the placebo effect, pain, and substance use. He is an editor of the forthcoming book, The nocebo effect: When words make you sick.

April Bleske-Rechek is a differential and evolutionary psychologist. She is a full professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where she invests in mentoring undergraduate scholars and engaging students with viewpoints and data they are unlikely to be exposed to elsewhere. Her recent publications and presentations can be found on her personal website: bleske-rechek.com.

Let’s play a game. It’s called “Who said it: Robin DiAngelo or Adolf Hitler?” DiAngelo, in case you don’t know, is author of the NYT best-seller book, White Fragility.  We’ll give you a couple quotes and you think about whether it’s from DiAngelo or Hitler. Ready, go.

1)    Did Hitler say: “Not having a group consciousness, Jews often respond defensively when grouped with other Jews.” Or did DiAngelo say: “Not having a group consciousness, Whites often respond defensively when grouped with other Whites.”

2)    Did Hitler say: “Jews… creep up on the workers in order to win their confidence, pretending to have compassion.” Or did DiAngelo say: “Whites… creep up on the workers in order to win their confidence, pretending to have compassion.”

For the record, the first quote is from DiAngelo and the second quote is from Hitler. Though whether you were right isn’t exactly the point, as an astute reader would probably know Hitler is likely to use the language of “workers” and DiAngelo is likely to use the language of “group consciousness”. The point is that DiAngelo and Hitler are both advocating an approach that reduces behavior to group membership. They describe the behavior of all Whites or all Jews in highly critical terms and conclude that this is the nature of Whiteness or Jewishness. 

We know from decades of psychological research that people hold prejudices. But which groups in today’s society are more likely to be the target of expressions of prejudicial attitudes? And who is more likely to express them?

We decided to examine this empirically. Would agreement with the same statement, whether it be anti-White, anti-Black, or anti-Jew, vary depending on which group it referenced? And would political affiliation moderate attitudes?

We took 3 real anti-Jew quotes from Adolf Hitler, 3 real anti-White quotes from Robin DiAngelo, and 3 real anti-Black quotes from Stephen Douglas. (Douglas was a 19th century American politician who debated Abraham Lincoln). Then, we created anti-Jew, anti-White, and anti-Black variations of each quote, and showed it to 428 college graduates or college students (72% White). This means that 1/3 of participants saw the real quote verbatim, whereas the other 2/3 saw a version of the quote that was manipulated by changing the original (e.g., replace “Jew” with “White” or “Black”, or any other combination thereof). This is shown in the Table below. For each quote, participants were asked to imagine that an intellectual or political leader uttered the statement. They then indicated whether they agreed with the statement by selecting: “definitely no,” “probably no,” “probably yes,” or “definitely yes.” Participants answered this question for all nine quotes, and all were in the same frame (anti-Jew, anti-White, or anti-Black).

The results were surprising. For 7 of the 9 quotes, agreement differed according to target group. On each of these, agreement was highest in the anti-White condition versus the anti-Jew and anti-Black condition. The figures below show the percentage of college graduates (left) and college students (right) who either “probably” or “definitely” agreed with at least one statement, broken down by target group and the original author of the quote (Hitler vs. DiAngelo vs. Douglas). You can see that agreement with both Hitler and DiAngelo is much higher in the anti-White condition versus the other two conditions. Hardly anyone agreed with the Douglas quotes regardless of target group.

For the Hitler and DiAngelo quotes we analyzed the interaction between target group and political ideology.1 This was significant for all quotes, and we once again looked at the percentage of people who agreed with at least one of the statements, shown below. Anti-White sentiment was highest across the board – for liberals, moderates, and conservatives alike. Anti-White sentiment was the highest for liberals compared to other political groups; anti-Jew and anti-Black sentiment was highest for conservatives compared to other political groups.

In a sense, our results are nothing new. We simply observed what has existed for millennia: People treat some groups preferentially to others. In the Bible, the Egyptian Pharoah enslaved the people of Israel. And interestingly, even God responded to this tribally by establishing Passover which “The whole community of Israel is to be included on the meal,” but “no foreigners are to eat it.”2  

Sweeping claims about all members of certain demographic groups seem to be on the rise in some circles. But unless you’re tuned into a relatively small number of heterodox writers like Bari Weiss or Coleman Hughes, you will rarely hear someone speculate about the counter-factual (e.g. Bob said all Whites do X vs. Imagine if he instead said all Blacks do X).

Coleman Hughes: “It [cops killing unarmed people] only gets pumped into the media when its a Black person, which gives the false impression that it only happens to Black people.” See also this survey finding that people in general, but especially liberals, massively overestimate the number of unarmed Black people killed by police.

In the language of Richard Dawkins, tribalism and prejudice may be memes. Memes, in this context, are ideas that “propagate themselves… by leaping from brain to brain” (Dawkins, 2016; p. 249). It is easy to see how tribal loyalties evolved evolutionarily (see Clark & Winegard, 2020), though finding that a mostly White sample had anti-White sentiment cannot be attributed to in-group preferences. Indeed, 55% of college students agreed with at least one Hitler quote applied to White people. Still, there is a historical precedent for people acting negatively towards their own group. In Nazi Germany, Kapos, who were prisoners but also functioned as SS guards, were often crueler towards their fellow prisoners (and frequently fellow Jews) than the Nazis themselves. 

This type of tribalism never seems to go well. Why would we expect it to benefit us now?

An incomplete list of disclaimers that should go without saying:

1)      Nothing in our essay is meant as an argument that DiAngelo is as evil a person as Hitler, or for that matter, evil at all. Hitler is responsible for the murder of 11 million people and the death toll from just the European theater of World War II was at least 40 million. DiAngelo is not responsible for the death of anyone. But we can recognize this fact while still pointing to similarities in their thinking.

2)      Just because a person agrees with a quote from Hitler does not mean that person agrees with Hitler’s genocide.

I often wonder how it would look because, you know, the left was majorly against things like gay conversion therapy and rightfully so. You know, just leave the kids alone. They can express themselves however they want. Let them marry whoever they want, all that type of stuff.

And what really struck me with this whole gender stuff was that, to me, it seemed like just that similar, even more extreme conservative impulse to make people conform to gender roles.

You know, previously with the gay conversion therapy, it was just like, oh you're a man, you're attracted to other men, you should be attracted to women. We're going to, you know, try to change your mind so it matches your bodies and make you actually attracted to women. And with the whole, like gender surgery stuff, like most of these kids they're quite sex non-conforming most of them end up uh being just gay adults.

And so but now we're taking these kids and we're saying, oh there's a mismatch between your brain and body just like as the conservatives would say, but instead of changing your brain to match your body, we're going to change your body to match your brain now. And that's just like conversion therapy on steroids, literally.

And it's, it's really just like that. It just seems like if this was the right wing doing it, if Republicans were doing something like this where they were clearly taking, you know, sex non-conforming kids who were going to turn out to be most likely gay when they grow up and they were trying to give them surgeries to make them straight, like, that would just be the biggest scandal in the world.

But because it's coming from the left-hand side and coming from the people who are, you know, waving the the rainbow flag or whatever the flag looks like now, it's somehow just, you know, it's it's love and life saving and everything like that.

And it's, I'm just sitting back, just shocked at everything that's going on there because I I was never like a tribal political person. I was not like, I vote Democrat because I'm, you know, vote blue, no matter who type of thing. It's, that's never been me. It's always been, as you said, you have your principles. Those are stable. You know, you can change your principles, you know, based on life experience or whatever. But I ultimately look at the political playing field, try to identify where those principles are being expressed mostly. And in the past they had been most well expressed, I think, on the sort of center-left. And now I think they're more better expressed in my opinion, on sort of the center-right and that liberal right position.

Under pressure

A new push for scrutiny of the gender medicine that the Dutch exported to the world

genderclinicnews.com

Before her recent election to parliament Dr Hertzberger was a microbiologist studying the little understood bacterial makeup of the human vagina, a field with implications for the reproductive and sexual health of women.

“For instance, it is unclear why humans are the only apes with this high acidity and dominance of Lactobacillus whereas these characteristics are absent in other primates. Why is the human vagina such a good host for these specific bacteria?” she says on her website.

She carried out her research thanks to the hospitality of a lab at the VU University Amsterdam, which is also home to the gender centre whose Dutch protocol for “juvenile transsexuals” culminates for males in castration and the surgical creation of a pseudo vagina.

Dr Hertzberger has practised “citizen science” with the rationale of engaging ordinary women in research to develop a probiotic to modify the vaginal microbiome. She is also an advocate for “open science” whereby all findings, even negative results, are made public.

“The general aim is to increase scientific efficiency by sharing as much information as possible with other scientists and the general public,” she says.

She has also reflected on the role of science in society, publishing an essay with the title The great nothing: Why we have too much faith in science. Her thesis is that science is muscling into the moral vacuum left by organised religion.

“I see a new generation of Western secular policymakers, politicians, administrators, thinkers, writers, entrepreneurs and leaders who no longer see science as a tool for generating knowledge, but as a new infallible authority; an all-knowing judge who decides what is good and what is evil,” she writes.

“The Endocrine Society (ES) is updating its clinical practice guidelines on ‘gender-affirming care.’ ES, however, appears to be putting its thumb on the scale in favor of medical interventions by appointing experts with serious conflicts of interest to its guideline-development group, ignoring its own standards for how to write trustworthy medical recommendations, and trying to keep the process hidden from the public.”—Leor Sapir, news article, City Journal, 27 February 2024

“It’s noteworthy that most of the authors of ES’s 2017 clinical practice guidelines were also big names at WPATH [the World Professional Association for Transgender Health]. Two—Peggy Cohen-Kettenis and Louis Gooren—were Dutch pioneers of pediatric gender medicine. Despite the perception that ES and WPATH are separate entities, and that recommendations on behalf of ‘gender-affirming care’ are not just made by trans advocacy groups but also by run-of-the-mill U.S. medical groups, the truth is that WPATH members used ES as a guise for embedding hormonal interventions as an accepted standard of care in the United States.”

“Despite claims that blocking puberty gives time for decision-making, no one can answer the obvious: How is it possible for a child to discover ‘This isn’t as bad as I feared,’ when they are blocked from experiencing it? Fears are resolved by confronting them, not avoiding them.”—Sexual behaviour scientist Dr James M Cantor, tweet, 3 March 2024

Interracial Crime and “Perspective”

Why you sometimes need to tell uncomfortable truths

richardhanania.com

The topic of black crime has taken over Twitter. It all started when Elon Musk responded sympathetically to a Tweet that presented data showing black-on-white crime is the most common form of interracial violence. The original tweet was completely correct, and you can see Noah Carl for some of the sophistry that has been used to try to deny or obfuscate on the underlying facts.

I personally don’t have the patience for taking part in these kinds of arguments, at least in the way that Noah is engaging here. It’s like the people who spend all their time arguing with trans and feminists by pointing to *scientific studies* showing that boys have penises and girls have vaginas. Men have more grip strength. Scientists just proved it! I guess someone has to do it, and I’ve run into some actual human beings (on the internet anyway) who tell me that they accepted the blank slate view of sex until they looked at the data. This makes me sad. But since the data does convince some people, I guess I’m glad someone is providing it.

Race and crime is similar. The numbers are there if you need them. I suppose foreigners might. But I grew up just outside of Chicago, and data on black criminality is to me just as unnecessary as sex comparisons of grip strength. Chicago is about a third black. Like many midwestern cities, it is extremely violent, with nearly all of the crime concentrated in black neighborhoods. When crime does spill over into the nicer areas, it’s committed by the people from those neighborhoods.

I knew many family friends who were Middle Eastern immigrants and store owners in the city. Every now and then, some distant relation or acquaintance would get their store looted or, in at least one instance I remember, shot and killed. Michael Jordan’s greatness was much appreciated and respected but its consequences used to fill the community with fear, because another championship tended to create another possibility that stores would go up in flames. The Arabs would speak in shorthand. “What happened to Walid’s store?” “You know, the blacks…” “Ah.” Actually, they would say “the slaves,” if you want to really know how Arabs talk.

Here’s the thing: while only immigrants and white proles explicitly discuss this aspect of their reality, every single person within the orbit of the city behaves as if they know the truth. No matter who you are, unless you’re one of the residents of those communities, your life is organized around avoiding the pathologies of the inner city. If you’re a desperate immigrant, you might open up a store, put up a “We Take EBT” sign, and take the risk of being shot. White Americans are less inclined to do this, so they instead just flee black neighborhoods and do what they can to get their kids out of black schools. They’ll make any commute or pay whatever tuition is necessary. No one is confused about this — liberals are correct that entire swaths of a major city don’t end up with zero white people by accident. They just attribute this to “racism” rather than the desire not to be sexually assaulted or physically harmed.

I’ve been talking about Chicago, but the same things are true for Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Baltimore, and countless other major cities. It’s also true for the cities where American elites and policymakers live like Washington, DC, which is why I’m always amused by theories that say they are actually acting in their own interests by coddling criminals. Other than blacks themselves, no group would benefit more from solving our crime problem than wealthy urban whites.

We can therefore ignore those who deny the reality of black crime. They’re either too stupid or dishonest to engage with. Among others on the left, there has been an acceptance of reality combined with pleas to simply frame the issue differently.

When liberals talk about perspective here, what they usually mean is that the likelihood of a white person being victimized by a black person is small in an absolute sense, so why worry about it? It would be a fine argument, except that we are constantly told to obsess over the harms done by police shootings, white supremacist violence, and vigilantes falsely accusing innocent black men of crimes.

I thought about showing you NYT and CNN headlines implying that blacks have to live in constant fear due to racism. But you’ve probably seen them, and instead I’ll share this clip showing how the topic was addressed a few years ago on a major network TV show.

As a digression, I would recommend checking out a few episodes of A Million Little Things if you want to see the horror that is the PC therapeutic slop that normies are being fed these days, but that’s a discussion for a different time.

So the crime debate has been going something like this.

Conservatives: Look at all the black-on-white crime.

Liberals: Get some perspective man. It’s nothing compared to the chances of being murdered by your own race. Not to mention heart attacks or covid. These are very small numbers.

Conservatives: You guys are the ones telling us blacks are living in constant fear. Stop doing that.

Now, when having these debates, what’s frustrating is that people are usually talking past one another. There’s not like one guy named “conservatives” and one guy named “liberals.” The liberals who are telling you to have some perspective on black crime often aren’t the same ones pushing the narrative that blacks should live in fear of whites. It’s easy to “own” the other side by putting together views of different people and finding contradictions.

That being said, the myth of substantial white-on-black violence is so deeply embedded in the culture that it’s a storyline in network TV shows. I think it’s fair to ask people to take a position on it. If you dislike racists on Twitter focusing too much on black-on-white crime, know that they are closer to the truth than the race obsessives on the other side, and have a lot less power.

One odd thing about these calls for perspective is that when liberals say that intra-racial crime is more common than crime that crosses group boundaries, what they are essentially saying is don’t worry about black crime, because the victims are overwhelmingly black people. But wait! Since when are liberals uninterested in problems that disproportionately affect blacks? These are the people who write serious NYT think pieces about how national parks are too white. They now turn around and say, let’s not talk too much about murder, because blacks are the victims? It’s a very odd thing, and it’s hard for me to even steelman their lack of interest in solving this issue as they obsess over every other black grievance, real or imagined.

Some years ago I noticed that fact checkers started providing “perspective” on claims rather than simply saying whether they were true or false. Of course, what perspective to take on facts is a huge part of what political discourse is about. Do blacks commit a lot of violence against whites? Compared to the number of cancer deaths, no. But in the context of a comparison to white-on-black violence, absolutely. One can conduct a similar analysis of issues like covid, terrorism, and school shootings.

For me, I like cost-benefit analysis as the way to understand what problems are worth worrying about and what we should be doing about them.

Black-on-white violence is not the biggest issue in the world, but it is useful to talk about in order to challenge narratives that pose much more serious problems. Arguments about supposed racism committed by whites against blacks are why we can’t effectively fight crime in this country and why we can’t have freedom of association or meritocratic criteria in hiring. The belief in white racism as a major factor in American life is the force that distorts all of policymaking and culture. Any arguments that are effective at discrediting that narrative are worth making.

And no, I don’t consider acting on statistical realities to be a kind of racism society should solve. Once you remove reactions that are based on group behavior, and private preferences that are none of the government’s business in a free society, the remaining “racism” in the United States against blacks is negligible, and more than balanced out by the ways in which they are advantaged.

The truth of the matter is we have a disgraceful amount of crime in the US, and the costs are not simply a matter of the number of people robbed, raped, and killed. It’s also a tragedy that what could be some of the most valuable urban real estate in the country is basically uninhabitable. In fact, part of the reason that black-on-white violence is rare in this country is because whites have overwhelmingly fled places where blacks live due to the threat of violence.

Other pathologies of American life, like NIMBYism, which drives up the cost of housing, are also downstream of the crime issue. If you’re a resident of Tokyo, you don’t need to worry about greater density leading to a decline in public safety, the way that Americans have to.

There’s no “perspective” one can take from which a reasonable observer won’t find that inner city crime is a major problem, and something we should do our best to solve. The chart below shows the ten American cities of at least 100,000 people that have the highest murder rates, and how they compare to the most violent countries in the world. The murder rates for cities come from CBS, while the country data comes from the World Bank.

You might be saying that it’s unfair to compare cities to entire countries, since urban areas might have concentrated violence. Yet the most violent countries in the world tend to be small. For example, St Louis, which is number one in murder in the chart above, has 293,000 people. That’s a larger population than St Lucia (180,000) and St Vincent (104,000), which are shown on the graph. Detroit has 632,000 people, making it more than 50% larger than either the Bahamas (407,000) or Belize (400,000). New Orleans (384,000) and Cleveland (373,000) are close behind. So this isn’t a matter of cherry-picking areas with minuscule populations and making them look bad. These cities are the size of small countries, which means we are pretty much comparing apples-to-apples in many of these cases. And if you want to make a real apples-to-apples comparisons, try contrasting American cities to those in other first world countries, like London.

As I argue in my articles on El Salvador, any polity that has a high enough murder rate needs to make solving crime its number one priority. This was true for that nation before Bukele came along, as it is for major American cities today. It’s not a big mystery how to do this, it’s just politically difficult, because literally everything that works is considered racist. You need more cops, more prisons, and more use of DNA databases and facial recognition technology. You can’t have concerns about disparate impact in a world where crime is so overwhelmingly committed by one group. And yes, liberals are right about one thing, which is that gun laws matter too.

But the left is so out of its mind on everything touching on race that even though they’re right that gun laws matter, when it comes to actually enforcing them, they tend to shy away from doing so for the obvious reason.

While I support policies that can make incremental improvements, actually solving our crime problem to any serious extent would take a revolution in our culture or system of government. Whether you want to focus on guns or the criminals themselves, it would involve heavily policing, surveilling, and incarcerating more black people. If any part of you is uncomfortable with policies that have an extreme disparate impact, you don’t have the stomach for what it would take. And, unlike some, I’m not naive enough to think that non-criminal blacks would end up grateful towards those who took the steps necessary to make their communities safer.

Dealing with the crime issue is complicated for reasons that go deep to the heart of the American psyche, which means there’s little hope that things will change any time soon. Until they do, we should continue to at the very least push back on the most malicious lies being told about race in America.