Culture - Honest News - KpNews https://kpnews.eu/ en Culture - Honest News - KpNews DataLife Engine The Schools Didn’t Fail Us. We Did. https://kpnews.eu/55669-the-schools-didnt-fail-us-we-did.html https://kpnews.eu/55669-the-schools-didnt-fail-us-we-did.html Andrew Cloud Fri, 16 Oct 2026 07:53:33 +0300

American Thinker

 

by Micheal S. Parkhurst

    Every few weeks, a reporter takes a microphone onto the street and asks ordinary people simple questions. Name the three branches of government. Who is your senator  What was the Civil War about  The answers are alarming, and the surveys back them up. This year, 35 percent of Americans could not name all three branches of government. In 2018, a majority could not name a single Supreme Court justice. Then a legislator or a pundit delivers the familiar verdict: The schools have failed us, and reform is needed.

    I am always struck by the hidden assumption: that the people saying it know what the schools are supposed to do.

    I have seen American education from a few angles. I started in parochial school, switched to public school around fifth grade, and stayed in California’s public system through my bachelor’s degree. My Master’s came from Biola and my doctorate from Pepperdine, both private. Then, not by choice, I became a different kind of teacher: My wife and I homeschooled all three of our children.

    They have led me to an unpopular conclusion. The schools have not failed us. American families have failed their children.

    For most of history, education happened at home. Children learned to read at the kitchen table, learned a trade in their father’s workshop, and learned right from wrong in Sunday school. America began the same way. Massachusetts’s first education law, in 1642, made parents responsible for teaching their children to read. Towns were ordered to provide schools only later.

    The public school system as we know it took shape in the 19th century, as immigration swelled, and its goal was clear and worthy: to make citizens. In the great wave of 1880 to 1920, millions of newcomers could not read or write English and knew little of American customs. The Americanization movement leaned on the schools to teach them the language, American history, and how our government works. It did a real public service, raising the general level of knowledge of nearly everyone who passed through it.

    The schools did teach morals, in a sense. Horace Mann’s common schools taught a generic, nondenominational Christian morality, the lowest common denominator. But they were never built to pass on a family’s own faith, values, or history. A classroom of thirty children from thirty families cannot carry thirty family traditions. And after the Supreme Court ended official school prayer in 1962 and devotional Bible reading in 1963, even that thin common layer was stripped out.

    The first five years of parochial school gave me a foundation that let me coast from sixth grade well into my freshman year of high school. In all my public schooling after that, I cannot recall a single conversation about right and wrong. Nearly all of it was memorization and regurgitation. Knowing the capital of Turkey has not come up much in my adult life.

    Real critical thinking, being asked why something is true rather than what was said, did not come until my Master’s program. That is a long time to wait to be asked “why.”

    Our homeschooling began with our son. Real doctors and learning psychologists diagnosed him with hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder, back before those labels were handed out so freely. He could not be taught in a group. He would not sit still, and a class moving at the pace of thirty children was far too slow for his mind. So we taught him at home, and when our two daughters came along, they joined in.

    At the time, many people considered homeschooling a form of child abuse, and parents feared that California would come down on them like a ton of bricks. The fear was not imaginary. As late as 2008, a California appeals court ruled that parents without teaching credentials could not homeschool, before reversing itself months later. For legal cover and support, we enrolled through a private school that mainly kept records, while each family ran its own instruction.

    The objection we heard most was that homeschooled children would be isolated. We knew that it was false within our first few years, and the research has since agreed. Our homeschool group made time for the children to socialize. Because instruction was one on one, the school day was far shorter than mine had ever been. On field trips, docents loved the homeschooled kids, because they wanted to be there, asked intelligent questions, and behaved. I taught my son from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and he went on to earn a college degree.

    Having taken all three through high school, I can say this: Almost any parent who graduated from a university is perfectly capable of tutoring a child through the eighth grade.

    Some things a public institution simply cannot do, no matter how earnest its teachers are.

    It cannot teach your family’s history. There is a reason oral histories are so much richer than the anthology textbooks of history class. Families keep diaries. Grandparents tell their grandchildren what they saw firsthand. My grandfather was a Navy Seabee in World War II, and the stories he told me taught me more about that war than any textbook did. My wife’s grandmother served in the French Resistance and was beaten more than once by the Gestapo, leaving her with a damaged eye. What she told my wife, no curriculum could reproduce. That is how a child learns why there are medals in a frame on Grandpa’s wall and a statue in the town square.

    And no teacher can make a student learn. A teacher with thirty students can assign the homework. A parent standing over the kitchen table is the one who sees that it gets done.

    The moral drift shows up even in our language. We have become so afraid of offending anyone that we no longer say a person lied. We say he spread “disinformation.” Look the word up, and the dictionary will tell you it means false information spread deliberately. In plain English, a lie. We have softened truths into ambiguities so nobody has to feel uncomfortable. Children do not learn that lying and stealing are wrong from a state curriculum. They learn it from the people who raise them.

    So when the man on the street cannot name his congressman, cannot say where his electricity or his food comes from, and has no idea why World War II was fought, the honest question is not what the schools failed to do. It is who was supposed to be teaching him all along.

    Somewhere along the way, Americans decided it was easier to send the children off to school so both parents could work and afford the house, the neighborhood, the television, and the vacations. None of those things is bad in itself. But we have decided that pursuing them matters more than making sure our children are ready to face the world after we are gone.

    The schools did the job they were built for. The job we handed them on top of it was never theirs. It was ours, and it still is.

    Image via PickPik.

]]>

American Thinker

 

by Micheal S. Parkhurst

    Every few weeks, a reporter takes a microphone onto the street and asks ordinary people simple questions. Name the three branches of government. Who is your senator  What was the Civil War about  The answers are alarming, and the surveys back them up. This year, 35 percent of Americans could not name all three branches of government. In 2018, a majority could not name a single Supreme Court justice. Then a legislator or a pundit delivers the familiar verdict: The schools have failed us, and reform is needed.

    I am always struck by the hidden assumption: that the people saying it know what the schools are supposed to do.

    I have seen American education from a few angles. I started in parochial school, switched to public school around fifth grade, and stayed in California’s public system through my bachelor’s degree. My Master’s came from Biola and my doctorate from Pepperdine, both private. Then, not by choice, I became a different kind of teacher: My wife and I homeschooled all three of our children.

    They have led me to an unpopular conclusion. The schools have not failed us. American families have failed their children.

    For most of history, education happened at home. Children learned to read at the kitchen table, learned a trade in their father’s workshop, and learned right from wrong in Sunday school. America began the same way. Massachusetts’s first education law, in 1642, made parents responsible for teaching their children to read. Towns were ordered to provide schools only later.

    The public school system as we know it took shape in the 19th century, as immigration swelled, and its goal was clear and worthy: to make citizens. In the great wave of 1880 to 1920, millions of newcomers could not read or write English and knew little of American customs. The Americanization movement leaned on the schools to teach them the language, American history, and how our government works. It did a real public service, raising the general level of knowledge of nearly everyone who passed through it.

    The schools did teach morals, in a sense. Horace Mann’s common schools taught a generic, nondenominational Christian morality, the lowest common denominator. But they were never built to pass on a family’s own faith, values, or history. A classroom of thirty children from thirty families cannot carry thirty family traditions. And after the Supreme Court ended official school prayer in 1962 and devotional Bible reading in 1963, even that thin common layer was stripped out.

    The first five years of parochial school gave me a foundation that let me coast from sixth grade well into my freshman year of high school. In all my public schooling after that, I cannot recall a single conversation about right and wrong. Nearly all of it was memorization and regurgitation. Knowing the capital of Turkey has not come up much in my adult life.

    Real critical thinking, being asked why something is true rather than what was said, did not come until my Master’s program. That is a long time to wait to be asked “why.”

    Our homeschooling began with our son. Real doctors and learning psychologists diagnosed him with hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder, back before those labels were handed out so freely. He could not be taught in a group. He would not sit still, and a class moving at the pace of thirty children was far too slow for his mind. So we taught him at home, and when our two daughters came along, they joined in.

    At the time, many people considered homeschooling a form of child abuse, and parents feared that California would come down on them like a ton of bricks. The fear was not imaginary. As late as 2008, a California appeals court ruled that parents without teaching credentials could not homeschool, before reversing itself months later. For legal cover and support, we enrolled through a private school that mainly kept records, while each family ran its own instruction.

    The objection we heard most was that homeschooled children would be isolated. We knew that it was false within our first few years, and the research has since agreed. Our homeschool group made time for the children to socialize. Because instruction was one on one, the school day was far shorter than mine had ever been. On field trips, docents loved the homeschooled kids, because they wanted to be there, asked intelligent questions, and behaved. I taught my son from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and he went on to earn a college degree.

    Having taken all three through high school, I can say this: Almost any parent who graduated from a university is perfectly capable of tutoring a child through the eighth grade.

    Some things a public institution simply cannot do, no matter how earnest its teachers are.

    It cannot teach your family’s history. There is a reason oral histories are so much richer than the anthology textbooks of history class. Families keep diaries. Grandparents tell their grandchildren what they saw firsthand. My grandfather was a Navy Seabee in World War II, and the stories he told me taught me more about that war than any textbook did. My wife’s grandmother served in the French Resistance and was beaten more than once by the Gestapo, leaving her with a damaged eye. What she told my wife, no curriculum could reproduce. That is how a child learns why there are medals in a frame on Grandpa’s wall and a statue in the town square.

    And no teacher can make a student learn. A teacher with thirty students can assign the homework. A parent standing over the kitchen table is the one who sees that it gets done.

    The moral drift shows up even in our language. We have become so afraid of offending anyone that we no longer say a person lied. We say he spread “disinformation.” Look the word up, and the dictionary will tell you it means false information spread deliberately. In plain English, a lie. We have softened truths into ambiguities so nobody has to feel uncomfortable. Children do not learn that lying and stealing are wrong from a state curriculum. They learn it from the people who raise them.

    So when the man on the street cannot name his congressman, cannot say where his electricity or his food comes from, and has no idea why World War II was fought, the honest question is not what the schools failed to do. It is who was supposed to be teaching him all along.

    Somewhere along the way, Americans decided it was easier to send the children off to school so both parents could work and afford the house, the neighborhood, the television, and the vacations. None of those things is bad in itself. But we have decided that pursuing them matters more than making sure our children are ready to face the world after we are gone.

    The schools did the job they were built for. The job we handed them on top of it was never theirs. It was ours, and it still is.

    Image via PickPik.

]]>

American Thinker

 

by Micheal S. Parkhurst

    Every few weeks, a reporter takes a microphone onto the street and asks ordinary people simple questions. Name the three branches of government. Who is your senator  What was the Civil War about  The answers are alarming, and the surveys back them up. This year, 35 percent of Americans could not name all three branches of government. In 2018, a majority could not name a single Supreme Court justice. Then a legislator or a pundit delivers the familiar verdict: The schools have failed us, and reform is needed.

    I am always struck by the hidden assumption: that the people saying it know what the schools are supposed to do.

    I have seen American education from a few angles. I started in parochial school, switched to public school around fifth grade, and stayed in California’s public system through my bachelor’s degree. My Master’s came from Biola and my doctorate from Pepperdine, both private. Then, not by choice, I became a different kind of teacher: My wife and I homeschooled all three of our children.

    They have led me to an unpopular conclusion. The schools have not failed us. American families have failed their children.

    For most of history, education happened at home. Children learned to read at the kitchen table, learned a trade in their father’s workshop, and learned right from wrong in Sunday school. America began the same way. Massachusetts’s first education law, in 1642, made parents responsible for teaching their children to read. Towns were ordered to provide schools only later.

    The public school system as we know it took shape in the 19th century, as immigration swelled, and its goal was clear and worthy: to make citizens. In the great wave of 1880 to 1920, millions of newcomers could not read or write English and knew little of American customs. The Americanization movement leaned on the schools to teach them the language, American history, and how our government works. It did a real public service, raising the general level of knowledge of nearly everyone who passed through it.

    The schools did teach morals, in a sense. Horace Mann’s common schools taught a generic, nondenominational Christian morality, the lowest common denominator. But they were never built to pass on a family’s own faith, values, or history. A classroom of thirty children from thirty families cannot carry thirty family traditions. And after the Supreme Court ended official school prayer in 1962 and devotional Bible reading in 1963, even that thin common layer was stripped out.

    The first five years of parochial school gave me a foundation that let me coast from sixth grade well into my freshman year of high school. In all my public schooling after that, I cannot recall a single conversation about right and wrong. Nearly all of it was memorization and regurgitation. Knowing the capital of Turkey has not come up much in my adult life.

    Real critical thinking, being asked why something is true rather than what was said, did not come until my Master’s program. That is a long time to wait to be asked “why.”

    Our homeschooling began with our son. Real doctors and learning psychologists diagnosed him with hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder, back before those labels were handed out so freely. He could not be taught in a group. He would not sit still, and a class moving at the pace of thirty children was far too slow for his mind. So we taught him at home, and when our two daughters came along, they joined in.

    At the time, many people considered homeschooling a form of child abuse, and parents feared that California would come down on them like a ton of bricks. The fear was not imaginary. As late as 2008, a California appeals court ruled that parents without teaching credentials could not homeschool, before reversing itself months later. For legal cover and support, we enrolled through a private school that mainly kept records, while each family ran its own instruction.

    The objection we heard most was that homeschooled children would be isolated. We knew that it was false within our first few years, and the research has since agreed. Our homeschool group made time for the children to socialize. Because instruction was one on one, the school day was far shorter than mine had ever been. On field trips, docents loved the homeschooled kids, because they wanted to be there, asked intelligent questions, and behaved. I taught my son from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and he went on to earn a college degree.

    Having taken all three through high school, I can say this: Almost any parent who graduated from a university is perfectly capable of tutoring a child through the eighth grade.

    Some things a public institution simply cannot do, no matter how earnest its teachers are.

    It cannot teach your family’s history. There is a reason oral histories are so much richer than the anthology textbooks of history class. Families keep diaries. Grandparents tell their grandchildren what they saw firsthand. My grandfather was a Navy Seabee in World War II, and the stories he told me taught me more about that war than any textbook did. My wife’s grandmother served in the French Resistance and was beaten more than once by the Gestapo, leaving her with a damaged eye. What she told my wife, no curriculum could reproduce. That is how a child learns why there are medals in a frame on Grandpa’s wall and a statue in the town square.

    And no teacher can make a student learn. A teacher with thirty students can assign the homework. A parent standing over the kitchen table is the one who sees that it gets done.

    The moral drift shows up even in our language. We have become so afraid of offending anyone that we no longer say a person lied. We say he spread “disinformation.” Look the word up, and the dictionary will tell you it means false information spread deliberately. In plain English, a lie. We have softened truths into ambiguities so nobody has to feel uncomfortable. Children do not learn that lying and stealing are wrong from a state curriculum. They learn it from the people who raise them.

    So when the man on the street cannot name his congressman, cannot say where his electricity or his food comes from, and has no idea why World War II was fought, the honest question is not what the schools failed to do. It is who was supposed to be teaching him all along.

    Somewhere along the way, Americans decided it was easier to send the children off to school so both parents could work and afford the house, the neighborhood, the television, and the vacations. None of those things is bad in itself. But we have decided that pursuing them matters more than making sure our children are ready to face the world after we are gone.

    The schools did the job they were built for. The job we handed them on top of it was never theirs. It was ours, and it still is.

    Image via PickPik.

]]> We Are In A Cold Civil War — And We Refuse To See It https://kpnews.eu/55660-we-are-in-a-cold-civil-war-and-we-refuse-to-see-it.html https://kpnews.eu/55660-we-are-in-a-cold-civil-war-and-we-refuse-to-see-it.html Andrew Cloud Thu, 15 Oct 2026 08:20:29 +0300

American Thinker

 

by W. Galt

    There are many ways to wage war. Today, these non-traditional forms of warfare are commonly referred to as hybrid warfare, which includes non-military means such as civilian operations. Spain has just been subjected to an attack of this nature in the city of Ceuta: a civilian invasion sponsored, encouraged, ordered, and directed by Moroccan intelligence services.

    But it does not take such obvious attacks to prove that a state of war exists. A cold civil war is already underway throughout the Western democracies. It is not being fought with trenches and rifles, but through institutions, culture, demographics, courts, the media, and the ballot box. The Left — in Europe and the United States — has abandoned the boundaries of the moderate social democracy of three decades ago and now operates according to a logic of total power. It does not seek to persuade within liberal rules; it seeks to transform society until the inherited order becomes unrecognizable. Those who fail to see this will continue losing, election after election, reform after reform, border after border.

    Thirty years ago, European socialist parties and the American Democrat party accepted, with certain qualifications, the liberal framework: markets, individual rights, peaceful alternation in power, and a degree of cultural restraint. Today, that restraint has evaporated. Driven by parties further to their left and by an ideologized base — every right-wing government has, for decades, left education in the hands of the Left, which knew exactly what it was doing, because controlling education means controlling the future — European socialist parties have become aggressively interventionist, woke, and hostile to any firm defense of cultural or demographic sovereignty. The Democrat party has followed a parallel path.

    Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are not marginal figures. They represent a current that has shifted the party’s center of gravity toward the most extreme forms of radicalism. Today, their political programs are virtually communist.

    Under the Biden administration, agencies such as USAID illustrated the extent to which this agenda was translated into actual policy: funding directed toward gender ideology, diversity, and progressive projects that had little to do with the national interest or neutral humanitarian assistance. This included funding left-wing activist groups throughout the world, including in the United States itself, movements close to terrorist groups, and all manner of enemies of the United States. USAID’s funding of these movements is not merely an anecdote about the misuse of public money; it reveals the real policy of a government beneath its official rhetoric and its more visible policy programs.

    If one looks at what USAID did with citizens’ money, only one conclusion can be drawn: the United States government acted against its own country and its own population, in an evident act of betrayal. Those who made it possible should not merely be judged for the mismanagement of public funds, but for treason.

    The more than possible electoral fraud of 2020, the repeated attempts on Trump’s life before the elections, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk — none of which could have been carried out without the complicity of elements of the deep state — provide yet more unmistakable evidence of the cold civil war that so many people refuse to see. The aggression always comes from the same side, and so do the victims.

    When a political force regards liberal democracy as merely a temporary instrument and believes that its adversaries do not deserve symmetrical rules, it has ceased to be a normal opposition.

    It has become a force for civil conflict.

    The ultimate betrayal is not merely economic or cultural. It is civilizational. The Left has established a convergence of interests with Islam. They share enemies: the liberal West, national sovereignty, the historical identity of European and North American societies, the Christian religion, and individual freedom. Hatred unites more powerfully than doctrinal differences divide. Today we can see France burning, set ablaze by young left-wing activists and young Muslims who will never integrate and who will ultimately turn against the former as soon as they have sufficient power to do so.

    This alliance is not a conspiracy theory. It can be seen on university campuses, in electoral coalitions, in the reluctance to confront the incompatibility of Islamic values with equality before the law, and in the prioritization of “diversity” over cohesion. It represents the surrender of the democratic principle to a bloc mentality: us against them. The American people and the peoples of Europe did not vote to become the subjects of an experiment in cultural and demographic replacement. Yet open or lax border policies, combined with the denial of their social costs, point in precisely that direction.

    In Sweden, the left-wing bloc may be able to take power with the help of Muslim votes. In Berlin, communists govern the city with Muslim votes. In the United Kingdom, France, and Spain, left-wing governments or coalitions have maintained or expanded policies that prioritize mass immigration and the most extreme forms of multiculturalism while criminalizing or stigmatizing the concerns of the native population about its identity, security, and demographic future.

    Calling someone “racist” for defending the cultural continuity of his own country is the exact reversal of democratic logic. It turns the political opponent into a permanent suspect. When a government treats its majority population as an obstacle and uncontrolled migration flows as an ethical imperative, it is not governing: it is waging a cultural and institutional battle against its own society, which it intends to destroy. The foreseeable result, if this is not corrected, resembles Lebanon or Iran’s post-1979 trajectory more than a stable democracy: fragmentation, loss of trust, erosion of a common legal order, and the eventual subordination of individual freedoms to new majorities or organized minorities.

    The moderate Right insists on treating all this as an ordinary ideological disagreement. It believes that dialogue, concessions, and the “center” will be enough. It is mistaken. The difference is no longer merely one of policy. It is existential. Part of the political spectrum operates according to different rules: narrative above facts, identity above citizenship, the enemy above agreement. As long as the Right pretends that this remains a conventional parliamentary debate, it will continue to surrender ground.

    We are in a cold civil war because one side has ceased to accept the limits of democracy. The other side has not yet recognized the true scale of the conflict. That is why it loses: in the streets, in institutions, in demographic trends and, often, at the ballot box.

    We already know how this ends if it is not corrected. At best, we will have divided, insecure, and culturally unrecognizable societies. At worst, the practical extinction of the European nations and of the civilization that sustained them. The year 2050 is not an abstract date. It is the horizon by which today’s demographic, migratory, and ideological trends will have consolidated irreversibly unless there is a change in awareness and political will.

    The Left and its tactical alliance with Islam are not a misunderstanding. They constitute a project of war against all of us and against our civilization. As long as the Right and libertarians deny or downplay it, they will continue to suffer the consequences of a war whose very existence they refuse to acknowledge.

    And wars that are not recognized are lost.

    Image generated by ChatGPT.

]]>

American Thinker

 

by W. Galt

    There are many ways to wage war. Today, these non-traditional forms of warfare are commonly referred to as hybrid warfare, which includes non-military means such as civilian operations. Spain has just been subjected to an attack of this nature in the city of Ceuta: a civilian invasion sponsored, encouraged, ordered, and directed by Moroccan intelligence services.

    But it does not take such obvious attacks to prove that a state of war exists. A cold civil war is already underway throughout the Western democracies. It is not being fought with trenches and rifles, but through institutions, culture, demographics, courts, the media, and the ballot box. The Left — in Europe and the United States — has abandoned the boundaries of the moderate social democracy of three decades ago and now operates according to a logic of total power. It does not seek to persuade within liberal rules; it seeks to transform society until the inherited order becomes unrecognizable. Those who fail to see this will continue losing, election after election, reform after reform, border after border.

    Thirty years ago, European socialist parties and the American Democrat party accepted, with certain qualifications, the liberal framework: markets, individual rights, peaceful alternation in power, and a degree of cultural restraint. Today, that restraint has evaporated. Driven by parties further to their left and by an ideologized base — every right-wing government has, for decades, left education in the hands of the Left, which knew exactly what it was doing, because controlling education means controlling the future — European socialist parties have become aggressively interventionist, woke, and hostile to any firm defense of cultural or demographic sovereignty. The Democrat party has followed a parallel path.

    Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are not marginal figures. They represent a current that has shifted the party’s center of gravity toward the most extreme forms of radicalism. Today, their political programs are virtually communist.

    Under the Biden administration, agencies such as USAID illustrated the extent to which this agenda was translated into actual policy: funding directed toward gender ideology, diversity, and progressive projects that had little to do with the national interest or neutral humanitarian assistance. This included funding left-wing activist groups throughout the world, including in the United States itself, movements close to terrorist groups, and all manner of enemies of the United States. USAID’s funding of these movements is not merely an anecdote about the misuse of public money; it reveals the real policy of a government beneath its official rhetoric and its more visible policy programs.

    If one looks at what USAID did with citizens’ money, only one conclusion can be drawn: the United States government acted against its own country and its own population, in an evident act of betrayal. Those who made it possible should not merely be judged for the mismanagement of public funds, but for treason.

    The more than possible electoral fraud of 2020, the repeated attempts on Trump’s life before the elections, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk — none of which could have been carried out without the complicity of elements of the deep state — provide yet more unmistakable evidence of the cold civil war that so many people refuse to see. The aggression always comes from the same side, and so do the victims.

    When a political force regards liberal democracy as merely a temporary instrument and believes that its adversaries do not deserve symmetrical rules, it has ceased to be a normal opposition.

    It has become a force for civil conflict.

    The ultimate betrayal is not merely economic or cultural. It is civilizational. The Left has established a convergence of interests with Islam. They share enemies: the liberal West, national sovereignty, the historical identity of European and North American societies, the Christian religion, and individual freedom. Hatred unites more powerfully than doctrinal differences divide. Today we can see France burning, set ablaze by young left-wing activists and young Muslims who will never integrate and who will ultimately turn against the former as soon as they have sufficient power to do so.

    This alliance is not a conspiracy theory. It can be seen on university campuses, in electoral coalitions, in the reluctance to confront the incompatibility of Islamic values with equality before the law, and in the prioritization of “diversity” over cohesion. It represents the surrender of the democratic principle to a bloc mentality: us against them. The American people and the peoples of Europe did not vote to become the subjects of an experiment in cultural and demographic replacement. Yet open or lax border policies, combined with the denial of their social costs, point in precisely that direction.

    In Sweden, the left-wing bloc may be able to take power with the help of Muslim votes. In Berlin, communists govern the city with Muslim votes. In the United Kingdom, France, and Spain, left-wing governments or coalitions have maintained or expanded policies that prioritize mass immigration and the most extreme forms of multiculturalism while criminalizing or stigmatizing the concerns of the native population about its identity, security, and demographic future.

    Calling someone “racist” for defending the cultural continuity of his own country is the exact reversal of democratic logic. It turns the political opponent into a permanent suspect. When a government treats its majority population as an obstacle and uncontrolled migration flows as an ethical imperative, it is not governing: it is waging a cultural and institutional battle against its own society, which it intends to destroy. The foreseeable result, if this is not corrected, resembles Lebanon or Iran’s post-1979 trajectory more than a stable democracy: fragmentation, loss of trust, erosion of a common legal order, and the eventual subordination of individual freedoms to new majorities or organized minorities.

    The moderate Right insists on treating all this as an ordinary ideological disagreement. It believes that dialogue, concessions, and the “center” will be enough. It is mistaken. The difference is no longer merely one of policy. It is existential. Part of the political spectrum operates according to different rules: narrative above facts, identity above citizenship, the enemy above agreement. As long as the Right pretends that this remains a conventional parliamentary debate, it will continue to surrender ground.

    We are in a cold civil war because one side has ceased to accept the limits of democracy. The other side has not yet recognized the true scale of the conflict. That is why it loses: in the streets, in institutions, in demographic trends and, often, at the ballot box.

    We already know how this ends if it is not corrected. At best, we will have divided, insecure, and culturally unrecognizable societies. At worst, the practical extinction of the European nations and of the civilization that sustained them. The year 2050 is not an abstract date. It is the horizon by which today’s demographic, migratory, and ideological trends will have consolidated irreversibly unless there is a change in awareness and political will.

    The Left and its tactical alliance with Islam are not a misunderstanding. They constitute a project of war against all of us and against our civilization. As long as the Right and libertarians deny or downplay it, they will continue to suffer the consequences of a war whose very existence they refuse to acknowledge.

    And wars that are not recognized are lost.

    Image generated by ChatGPT.

]]>

American Thinker

 

by W. Galt

    There are many ways to wage war. Today, these non-traditional forms of warfare are commonly referred to as hybrid warfare, which includes non-military means such as civilian operations. Spain has just been subjected to an attack of this nature in the city of Ceuta: a civilian invasion sponsored, encouraged, ordered, and directed by Moroccan intelligence services.

    But it does not take such obvious attacks to prove that a state of war exists. A cold civil war is already underway throughout the Western democracies. It is not being fought with trenches and rifles, but through institutions, culture, demographics, courts, the media, and the ballot box. The Left — in Europe and the United States — has abandoned the boundaries of the moderate social democracy of three decades ago and now operates according to a logic of total power. It does not seek to persuade within liberal rules; it seeks to transform society until the inherited order becomes unrecognizable. Those who fail to see this will continue losing, election after election, reform after reform, border after border.

    Thirty years ago, European socialist parties and the American Democrat party accepted, with certain qualifications, the liberal framework: markets, individual rights, peaceful alternation in power, and a degree of cultural restraint. Today, that restraint has evaporated. Driven by parties further to their left and by an ideologized base — every right-wing government has, for decades, left education in the hands of the Left, which knew exactly what it was doing, because controlling education means controlling the future — European socialist parties have become aggressively interventionist, woke, and hostile to any firm defense of cultural or demographic sovereignty. The Democrat party has followed a parallel path.

    Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are not marginal figures. They represent a current that has shifted the party’s center of gravity toward the most extreme forms of radicalism. Today, their political programs are virtually communist.

    Under the Biden administration, agencies such as USAID illustrated the extent to which this agenda was translated into actual policy: funding directed toward gender ideology, diversity, and progressive projects that had little to do with the national interest or neutral humanitarian assistance. This included funding left-wing activist groups throughout the world, including in the United States itself, movements close to terrorist groups, and all manner of enemies of the United States. USAID’s funding of these movements is not merely an anecdote about the misuse of public money; it reveals the real policy of a government beneath its official rhetoric and its more visible policy programs.

    If one looks at what USAID did with citizens’ money, only one conclusion can be drawn: the United States government acted against its own country and its own population, in an evident act of betrayal. Those who made it possible should not merely be judged for the mismanagement of public funds, but for treason.

    The more than possible electoral fraud of 2020, the repeated attempts on Trump’s life before the elections, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk — none of which could have been carried out without the complicity of elements of the deep state — provide yet more unmistakable evidence of the cold civil war that so many people refuse to see. The aggression always comes from the same side, and so do the victims.

    When a political force regards liberal democracy as merely a temporary instrument and believes that its adversaries do not deserve symmetrical rules, it has ceased to be a normal opposition.

    It has become a force for civil conflict.

    The ultimate betrayal is not merely economic or cultural. It is civilizational. The Left has established a convergence of interests with Islam. They share enemies: the liberal West, national sovereignty, the historical identity of European and North American societies, the Christian religion, and individual freedom. Hatred unites more powerfully than doctrinal differences divide. Today we can see France burning, set ablaze by young left-wing activists and young Muslims who will never integrate and who will ultimately turn against the former as soon as they have sufficient power to do so.

    This alliance is not a conspiracy theory. It can be seen on university campuses, in electoral coalitions, in the reluctance to confront the incompatibility of Islamic values with equality before the law, and in the prioritization of “diversity” over cohesion. It represents the surrender of the democratic principle to a bloc mentality: us against them. The American people and the peoples of Europe did not vote to become the subjects of an experiment in cultural and demographic replacement. Yet open or lax border policies, combined with the denial of their social costs, point in precisely that direction.

    In Sweden, the left-wing bloc may be able to take power with the help of Muslim votes. In Berlin, communists govern the city with Muslim votes. In the United Kingdom, France, and Spain, left-wing governments or coalitions have maintained or expanded policies that prioritize mass immigration and the most extreme forms of multiculturalism while criminalizing or stigmatizing the concerns of the native population about its identity, security, and demographic future.

    Calling someone “racist” for defending the cultural continuity of his own country is the exact reversal of democratic logic. It turns the political opponent into a permanent suspect. When a government treats its majority population as an obstacle and uncontrolled migration flows as an ethical imperative, it is not governing: it is waging a cultural and institutional battle against its own society, which it intends to destroy. The foreseeable result, if this is not corrected, resembles Lebanon or Iran’s post-1979 trajectory more than a stable democracy: fragmentation, loss of trust, erosion of a common legal order, and the eventual subordination of individual freedoms to new majorities or organized minorities.

    The moderate Right insists on treating all this as an ordinary ideological disagreement. It believes that dialogue, concessions, and the “center” will be enough. It is mistaken. The difference is no longer merely one of policy. It is existential. Part of the political spectrum operates according to different rules: narrative above facts, identity above citizenship, the enemy above agreement. As long as the Right pretends that this remains a conventional parliamentary debate, it will continue to surrender ground.

    We are in a cold civil war because one side has ceased to accept the limits of democracy. The other side has not yet recognized the true scale of the conflict. That is why it loses: in the streets, in institutions, in demographic trends and, often, at the ballot box.

    We already know how this ends if it is not corrected. At best, we will have divided, insecure, and culturally unrecognizable societies. At worst, the practical extinction of the European nations and of the civilization that sustained them. The year 2050 is not an abstract date. It is the horizon by which today’s demographic, migratory, and ideological trends will have consolidated irreversibly unless there is a change in awareness and political will.

    The Left and its tactical alliance with Islam are not a misunderstanding. They constitute a project of war against all of us and against our civilization. As long as the Right and libertarians deny or downplay it, they will continue to suffer the consequences of a war whose very existence they refuse to acknowledge.

    And wars that are not recognized are lost.

    Image generated by ChatGPT.

]]> The Talking Head Barometers https://kpnews.eu/55579-the-talking-head-barometers.html https://kpnews.eu/55579-the-talking-head-barometers.html Andrew Cloud Fri, 02 Oct 2026 07:08:10 +0300

American Thinker

 

by Dan Bell

    I’ve learned to watch the talking heads as barometers for changes in “the news” or in “culture.” When they start parroting each other, using the same aphorisms, short-circuiting their reporting, and referencing each other instead of the facts, I know there’s an incoming change in pressure—not weather-wise, but in attempts at opinion-making.

    My contrarian nature surfaces, and I start to doubt their versions and conclusions and steer toward the opposite opinion, kind of like Odysseus commanding his crew to wax their ears while he steered toward the Sirens, just so he could brag about surviving them.

    Recently, a research employee of one of the major frontier-model innovators—a junior, short-tenured figure with only a score of social-media followers—resigned and wrote an op-ed column about the dangers of AI that went viral. He wasn’t an AI founder, dreamer, or even a wannabe influencer. But the greatest creative and industrial minds in generations, along with the President of the United States, took note and commented on it.

    The resignation and the op-ed weren’t the story—they were the tell…the setup.

    The setup was followed immediately by the proof: The WSJ opined before the op-ed was actually published, and lawmakers reacted on social media within seconds, evidence that the narrative was prepared before the public ever saw the memo. Reactions were instantaneous because the posters expected the column and intended to boost the already-pressurized post.

    The direction of doom was outclassed only by its hyperbole: “Existential threat!” “Humanity wiped out in a decade.”

    The import of the op-ed wasn’t really about him or his opinion. Its real worth was to the people who used him—a corporate cipher—as a spark to light the fire of activism. They weren’t reacting; they were ready.

    In reality, they were chumming for hegemony, their intent more about increasing regulation, restricting innovation, and centralizing control than about developing reasoned approaches to the risks of humans’ attempts at playing God. Their commentary wasn’t analysis—it was combustion.

    The reverse synchrony took a few days, but the matching metronomes soon started keeping time for the opposition. “Psy-op” was the phrase that appeared, then multiplied, then metastasized, just like “hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation” before it.

    Different wolf; same sheepskin.

    Neither the doom nor the “psy-op” response is the disease—they’re only symptoms of the opinion system shifting again. The disease is more virulent than the symptoms.

    The disease is an oblivious populace, one that doesn’t know what to believe or how to determine the truth. People depend on the talking heads to tell them when to pack an umbrella.

    Neither the op-ed volley nor the “psy-op” response represents the truth—the meteorological North Star. They’re each a kind of magnetic north: directionally right but off by a few degrees, no matter which end of the compass points where.

    And inverting the claim doesn’t reorient the compass. Certainty does not equal accuracy, no matter which side espouses it, and thoughtless inversion is just as short-sighted.

    The Hugging Face attacks that preceded the op-ed tempest were real. They do represent real risks. But they’re not true north either. They’re another front in the same opinion system—another high- or low-pressure system pushing the barometer.

    When the AI labs warn of humanity’s decimation, that’s not revelation. It’s directional pressure from a cluster of industrial power-seekers. Regulation is just another route to power, and power is the simplest explanation for their synchrony. Occam’s Razor would suggest that desisting from risky behavior is more rational than asking for legal protections to continue it.

    And when the risk-downplayers respond—minimizing the threat while quietly acquiring companies that complement their own Industrial Revolution—that’s weather too. A counter-front. A reflex pressure. A synchronized pattern of reassurance blowing in from a different ownership group.

    Their commentary isn’t the compass. It’s just another vane spinning in the wind.

    The point isn’t who’s right. The point is that everybody with an opinion—everyone taking a side—is part of the same storm system. Business is just as much an opinion-maker as the pundits. All are synchronized. All are creating the weather through pressure.

    Their statements aren’t truth; they’re magnetic north—directionally suggestive, but pulled off course by incentives, momentum, and the prevailing gusts of the moment.

    The reactions to Hugging Face and the op-ed were real. But the uniformity of the commentary—in both directions—was the real phenomenon.

    I don’t know whom to trust any more than the rest of the populace does. And I do not know whom not to trust. But I do have a few talking heads on whom I can reliably count to be unidirectional, regardless of the topic. They’re lodestones of opinion, throwing the compass off-kilter.

    I know I need to watch the weather, understanding that when every vane points in the same direction, the storm isn’t the story. The storm is the system and what it wants me to believe.

    The disease is an oblivious and malleable populace, and the system knows it. The trick, then, is to step outside the storm entirely. The cure is independence.

    Recognize that talking-head barometers and weathervanes are tools. Learn to use the tools for yourself. Seek opinions from both sides of the argument, then pepper them with the healthiest dose of common sense in your kitchen.

    Human existence is shaped by applied pressure, and human nature creates that pressure for both good and ill. Knowing and understanding human nature is the best barometer you can find.

    Learn to use the tools, or the talking-head system will use you and make you its cipher.

I write about my observations and curiosity on Substack: Observations, Collected | Daniel F. Bell | Substack

]]>

American Thinker

 

by Dan Bell

    I’ve learned to watch the talking heads as barometers for changes in “the news” or in “culture.” When they start parroting each other, using the same aphorisms, short-circuiting their reporting, and referencing each other instead of the facts, I know there’s an incoming change in pressure—not weather-wise, but in attempts at opinion-making.

    My contrarian nature surfaces, and I start to doubt their versions and conclusions and steer toward the opposite opinion, kind of like Odysseus commanding his crew to wax their ears while he steered toward the Sirens, just so he could brag about surviving them.

    Recently, a research employee of one of the major frontier-model innovators—a junior, short-tenured figure with only a score of social-media followers—resigned and wrote an op-ed column about the dangers of AI that went viral. He wasn’t an AI founder, dreamer, or even a wannabe influencer. But the greatest creative and industrial minds in generations, along with the President of the United States, took note and commented on it.

    The resignation and the op-ed weren’t the story—they were the tell…the setup.

    The setup was followed immediately by the proof: The WSJ opined before the op-ed was actually published, and lawmakers reacted on social media within seconds, evidence that the narrative was prepared before the public ever saw the memo. Reactions were instantaneous because the posters expected the column and intended to boost the already-pressurized post.

    The direction of doom was outclassed only by its hyperbole: “Existential threat!” “Humanity wiped out in a decade.”

    The import of the op-ed wasn’t really about him or his opinion. Its real worth was to the people who used him—a corporate cipher—as a spark to light the fire of activism. They weren’t reacting; they were ready.

    In reality, they were chumming for hegemony, their intent more about increasing regulation, restricting innovation, and centralizing control than about developing reasoned approaches to the risks of humans’ attempts at playing God. Their commentary wasn’t analysis—it was combustion.

    The reverse synchrony took a few days, but the matching metronomes soon started keeping time for the opposition. “Psy-op” was the phrase that appeared, then multiplied, then metastasized, just like “hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation” before it.

    Different wolf; same sheepskin.

    Neither the doom nor the “psy-op” response is the disease—they’re only symptoms of the opinion system shifting again. The disease is more virulent than the symptoms.

    The disease is an oblivious populace, one that doesn’t know what to believe or how to determine the truth. People depend on the talking heads to tell them when to pack an umbrella.

    Neither the op-ed volley nor the “psy-op” response represents the truth—the meteorological North Star. They’re each a kind of magnetic north: directionally right but off by a few degrees, no matter which end of the compass points where.

    And inverting the claim doesn’t reorient the compass. Certainty does not equal accuracy, no matter which side espouses it, and thoughtless inversion is just as short-sighted.

    The Hugging Face attacks that preceded the op-ed tempest were real. They do represent real risks. But they’re not true north either. They’re another front in the same opinion system—another high- or low-pressure system pushing the barometer.

    When the AI labs warn of humanity’s decimation, that’s not revelation. It’s directional pressure from a cluster of industrial power-seekers. Regulation is just another route to power, and power is the simplest explanation for their synchrony. Occam’s Razor would suggest that desisting from risky behavior is more rational than asking for legal protections to continue it.

    And when the risk-downplayers respond—minimizing the threat while quietly acquiring companies that complement their own Industrial Revolution—that’s weather too. A counter-front. A reflex pressure. A synchronized pattern of reassurance blowing in from a different ownership group.

    Their commentary isn’t the compass. It’s just another vane spinning in the wind.

    The point isn’t who’s right. The point is that everybody with an opinion—everyone taking a side—is part of the same storm system. Business is just as much an opinion-maker as the pundits. All are synchronized. All are creating the weather through pressure.

    Their statements aren’t truth; they’re magnetic north—directionally suggestive, but pulled off course by incentives, momentum, and the prevailing gusts of the moment.

    The reactions to Hugging Face and the op-ed were real. But the uniformity of the commentary—in both directions—was the real phenomenon.

    I don’t know whom to trust any more than the rest of the populace does. And I do not know whom not to trust. But I do have a few talking heads on whom I can reliably count to be unidirectional, regardless of the topic. They’re lodestones of opinion, throwing the compass off-kilter.

    I know I need to watch the weather, understanding that when every vane points in the same direction, the storm isn’t the story. The storm is the system and what it wants me to believe.

    The disease is an oblivious and malleable populace, and the system knows it. The trick, then, is to step outside the storm entirely. The cure is independence.

    Recognize that talking-head barometers and weathervanes are tools. Learn to use the tools for yourself. Seek opinions from both sides of the argument, then pepper them with the healthiest dose of common sense in your kitchen.

    Human existence is shaped by applied pressure, and human nature creates that pressure for both good and ill. Knowing and understanding human nature is the best barometer you can find.

    Learn to use the tools, or the talking-head system will use you and make you its cipher.

I write about my observations and curiosity on Substack: Observations, Collected | Daniel F. Bell | Substack

]]>

American Thinker

 

by Dan Bell

    I’ve learned to watch the talking heads as barometers for changes in “the news” or in “culture.” When they start parroting each other, using the same aphorisms, short-circuiting their reporting, and referencing each other instead of the facts, I know there’s an incoming change in pressure—not weather-wise, but in attempts at opinion-making.

    My contrarian nature surfaces, and I start to doubt their versions and conclusions and steer toward the opposite opinion, kind of like Odysseus commanding his crew to wax their ears while he steered toward the Sirens, just so he could brag about surviving them.

    Recently, a research employee of one of the major frontier-model innovators—a junior, short-tenured figure with only a score of social-media followers—resigned and wrote an op-ed column about the dangers of AI that went viral. He wasn’t an AI founder, dreamer, or even a wannabe influencer. But the greatest creative and industrial minds in generations, along with the President of the United States, took note and commented on it.

    The resignation and the op-ed weren’t the story—they were the tell…the setup.

    The setup was followed immediately by the proof: The WSJ opined before the op-ed was actually published, and lawmakers reacted on social media within seconds, evidence that the narrative was prepared before the public ever saw the memo. Reactions were instantaneous because the posters expected the column and intended to boost the already-pressurized post.

    The direction of doom was outclassed only by its hyperbole: “Existential threat!” “Humanity wiped out in a decade.”

    The import of the op-ed wasn’t really about him or his opinion. Its real worth was to the people who used him—a corporate cipher—as a spark to light the fire of activism. They weren’t reacting; they were ready.

    In reality, they were chumming for hegemony, their intent more about increasing regulation, restricting innovation, and centralizing control than about developing reasoned approaches to the risks of humans’ attempts at playing God. Their commentary wasn’t analysis—it was combustion.

    The reverse synchrony took a few days, but the matching metronomes soon started keeping time for the opposition. “Psy-op” was the phrase that appeared, then multiplied, then metastasized, just like “hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation” before it.

    Different wolf; same sheepskin.

    Neither the doom nor the “psy-op” response is the disease—they’re only symptoms of the opinion system shifting again. The disease is more virulent than the symptoms.

    The disease is an oblivious populace, one that doesn’t know what to believe or how to determine the truth. People depend on the talking heads to tell them when to pack an umbrella.

    Neither the op-ed volley nor the “psy-op” response represents the truth—the meteorological North Star. They’re each a kind of magnetic north: directionally right but off by a few degrees, no matter which end of the compass points where.

    And inverting the claim doesn’t reorient the compass. Certainty does not equal accuracy, no matter which side espouses it, and thoughtless inversion is just as short-sighted.

    The Hugging Face attacks that preceded the op-ed tempest were real. They do represent real risks. But they’re not true north either. They’re another front in the same opinion system—another high- or low-pressure system pushing the barometer.

    When the AI labs warn of humanity’s decimation, that’s not revelation. It’s directional pressure from a cluster of industrial power-seekers. Regulation is just another route to power, and power is the simplest explanation for their synchrony. Occam’s Razor would suggest that desisting from risky behavior is more rational than asking for legal protections to continue it.

    And when the risk-downplayers respond—minimizing the threat while quietly acquiring companies that complement their own Industrial Revolution—that’s weather too. A counter-front. A reflex pressure. A synchronized pattern of reassurance blowing in from a different ownership group.

    Their commentary isn’t the compass. It’s just another vane spinning in the wind.

    The point isn’t who’s right. The point is that everybody with an opinion—everyone taking a side—is part of the same storm system. Business is just as much an opinion-maker as the pundits. All are synchronized. All are creating the weather through pressure.

    Their statements aren’t truth; they’re magnetic north—directionally suggestive, but pulled off course by incentives, momentum, and the prevailing gusts of the moment.

    The reactions to Hugging Face and the op-ed were real. But the uniformity of the commentary—in both directions—was the real phenomenon.

    I don’t know whom to trust any more than the rest of the populace does. And I do not know whom not to trust. But I do have a few talking heads on whom I can reliably count to be unidirectional, regardless of the topic. They’re lodestones of opinion, throwing the compass off-kilter.

    I know I need to watch the weather, understanding that when every vane points in the same direction, the storm isn’t the story. The storm is the system and what it wants me to believe.

    The disease is an oblivious and malleable populace, and the system knows it. The trick, then, is to step outside the storm entirely. The cure is independence.

    Recognize that talking-head barometers and weathervanes are tools. Learn to use the tools for yourself. Seek opinions from both sides of the argument, then pepper them with the healthiest dose of common sense in your kitchen.

    Human existence is shaped by applied pressure, and human nature creates that pressure for both good and ill. Knowing and understanding human nature is the best barometer you can find.

    Learn to use the tools, or the talking-head system will use you and make you its cipher.

I write about my observations and curiosity on Substack: Observations, Collected | Daniel F. Bell | Substack

]]> Propriety Is the Basis of Freedom https://kpnews.eu/55537-propriety-is-the-basis-of-freedom.html https://kpnews.eu/55537-propriety-is-the-basis-of-freedom.html Andrew Cloud Sun, 27 Sep 2026 12:38:12 +0300 ​american conservative​​​

by Theodore Dalrymple

    It is by no means uncommon to hear someone reply to criticism of his conduct by saying that there was no law against it. This is a sinister reply, at least implicitly, for it suggests that what the law does not forbid is permitted in all other senses: in other words, that the law provides the sole criteria by which we are to judge our conduct. No doubt there are some legislators who would be delighted by this extension of their responsibilities, but for anyone who cares both for freedom and civilization, the idea of such philosopher kings (who always turn out to be ambitious mediocrities) sends shivers up the spine.

    It was Lord Moulton, an English judge, who coined the felicitous phrase “obedience to the unenforceable” more than a century ago. These are the standards of behaviour that the law does not enforce, either by prescription or by proscription, but which the individual feels called upon to obey and enforce in himself. Without such standards, which intellectuals love to deride as inimical to the expression of their beautiful personalities, society becomes a free-for-all in which the most psychopathic dominate and the exercise of freedom by one person becomes a cause of anxiety in others.

    The realm of obedience to the unenforceable seems to be in retreat, both among the social and economic elite, and in the general population. Perhaps people have been making similar complaints for decades, if not for centuries, but we seem to be living in an age of mass narcissistic egoism, in which, in the absence of positive law, everyone decides for himself on every occasion how he should behave, consulting only his own immediate interests.

    Let us take as an example the wedding gift to Donald Trump Jr. by the Russian oligarch, Umar Kremlev, a man of dubious reputation, to put it mildly, and an ally of Vladimir Putin. Trump is a private citizen and can therefore legally accept gifts from whomever he chooses; the argument that no one gives such gifts without expecting something in return is no proof that any such demands have been made, let alone complied with. But the whole proceeding is unseemly on the part of the recipient, even if it is nothing worse. But unseemliness has gone the way of obedience to the unenforceable: Fewer and fewer people take any notice of it as a guide to conduct.

    Some years ago, pharmaceutical companies used to transport doctors, who were in a position to prescribe the latest expensive drugs and were supposedly “opinion leaders” in the profession, to places that they might like to go. There, in luxury hotels, they were plied not only with good food and drink, but subjected to propaganda, supposedly scientific, in favour of whatever product the pharmaceutical companies were trying to sell.

    I agreed only once to go on one of these trips. They were not prohibited at the time, and were regarded, at least by some, almost as a perk of the job. I was soon disgusted. There was one participant whose medical specialty, insofar as he had one, appeared to be attending such conferences around the world, from Florence to Rio, from Stockholm to Bangkok. He marked off the cities he had visited at the companies’ expense rather as a successful fighter pilot would mark off the enemy planes that he had downed. Another boasted of the way that he never spent a penny of his own from the moment he left his house to go on such trips to the moment he returned, including for the limousines that took him to and from the airport.

    The principal speaker at the “conference” I attended was widely known as the Universal Prostitute, a professor who would argue passionately in favour of a certain new drug one week, only to argue equally passionately for its direct competitor the next, depending on who was paying him. I must say that he was very convincing, a kind of brilliant pharmaceutical sophist, who eventually lost his medical license for his corrupt (but not illegal) practices, though not before he had made a great deal of money by them.

    The last straw for me came when my wife, for whose air ticket I am glad to say that I insisted on paying though the company offered to pay it, ordered breakfast in bed in the luxury hotel in which we had been put up. It was the kind of hotel for which I would never have paid myself, and the breakfast arrived in clouds of starched linen and quantities of silverware the like of which I have not seen since. When we left the hotel, I offered to pay for the breakfast, which seemed to me an unjustifiable extra even in those circumstances of general unjustifiability. A company representative, who was just behind me, said, “No, we will take care of that.”

    I resolved at once never to agree again to attend such an event irrespective of the blandishments. At the time, as I have mentioned, such trips were regarded as perfectly legitimate because not actually prohibited, though it seemed to me clear that they were both corrupt and corrupting. If I examine my conscience honestly, I knew this in advance, for it was obvious on the most minimal reflection, but my desire for something for nothing overcame my scruples. Of course, it would have been easy to rationalize continued acceptance of invitations to such events, for example by telling myself that I was not influenced in my prescribing habits by them—just as Donald Trump Jr. can no doubt believe that Umar Kremlev’s gift to him was merely an act of generosity or kindness of heart. But a still, small voice would have told me that I was rationalizing rather than being rational.

    Where the rules are the sole determinant of propriety, we do, or tend to do, what we can get away with. Where people do what they can get away with, there is an ever-greater need for rules, and a dialectic is set up between social disorder and bureaucratic control. Freedom simply interpreted as lack of prohibition leads almost inevitably to ever more prohibition. Moral anarchy thus comes to coexist with moral dictatorship.

    This is an old lesson. Edmund Burke wrote more than two centuries ago that “men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites”; if they fail to do so, “Their passions forge their fetters.”

]]> ​american conservative​​​

by Theodore Dalrymple

    It is by no means uncommon to hear someone reply to criticism of his conduct by saying that there was no law against it. This is a sinister reply, at least implicitly, for it suggests that what the law does not forbid is permitted in all other senses: in other words, that the law provides the sole criteria by which we are to judge our conduct. No doubt there are some legislators who would be delighted by this extension of their responsibilities, but for anyone who cares both for freedom and civilization, the idea of such philosopher kings (who always turn out to be ambitious mediocrities) sends shivers up the spine.

    It was Lord Moulton, an English judge, who coined the felicitous phrase “obedience to the unenforceable” more than a century ago. These are the standards of behaviour that the law does not enforce, either by prescription or by proscription, but which the individual feels called upon to obey and enforce in himself. Without such standards, which intellectuals love to deride as inimical to the expression of their beautiful personalities, society becomes a free-for-all in which the most psychopathic dominate and the exercise of freedom by one person becomes a cause of anxiety in others.

    The realm of obedience to the unenforceable seems to be in retreat, both among the social and economic elite, and in the general population. Perhaps people have been making similar complaints for decades, if not for centuries, but we seem to be living in an age of mass narcissistic egoism, in which, in the absence of positive law, everyone decides for himself on every occasion how he should behave, consulting only his own immediate interests.

    Let us take as an example the wedding gift to Donald Trump Jr. by the Russian oligarch, Umar Kremlev, a man of dubious reputation, to put it mildly, and an ally of Vladimir Putin. Trump is a private citizen and can therefore legally accept gifts from whomever he chooses; the argument that no one gives such gifts without expecting something in return is no proof that any such demands have been made, let alone complied with. But the whole proceeding is unseemly on the part of the recipient, even if it is nothing worse. But unseemliness has gone the way of obedience to the unenforceable: Fewer and fewer people take any notice of it as a guide to conduct.

    Some years ago, pharmaceutical companies used to transport doctors, who were in a position to prescribe the latest expensive drugs and were supposedly “opinion leaders” in the profession, to places that they might like to go. There, in luxury hotels, they were plied not only with good food and drink, but subjected to propaganda, supposedly scientific, in favour of whatever product the pharmaceutical companies were trying to sell.

    I agreed only once to go on one of these trips. They were not prohibited at the time, and were regarded, at least by some, almost as a perk of the job. I was soon disgusted. There was one participant whose medical specialty, insofar as he had one, appeared to be attending such conferences around the world, from Florence to Rio, from Stockholm to Bangkok. He marked off the cities he had visited at the companies’ expense rather as a successful fighter pilot would mark off the enemy planes that he had downed. Another boasted of the way that he never spent a penny of his own from the moment he left his house to go on such trips to the moment he returned, including for the limousines that took him to and from the airport.

    The principal speaker at the “conference” I attended was widely known as the Universal Prostitute, a professor who would argue passionately in favour of a certain new drug one week, only to argue equally passionately for its direct competitor the next, depending on who was paying him. I must say that he was very convincing, a kind of brilliant pharmaceutical sophist, who eventually lost his medical license for his corrupt (but not illegal) practices, though not before he had made a great deal of money by them.

    The last straw for me came when my wife, for whose air ticket I am glad to say that I insisted on paying though the company offered to pay it, ordered breakfast in bed in the luxury hotel in which we had been put up. It was the kind of hotel for which I would never have paid myself, and the breakfast arrived in clouds of starched linen and quantities of silverware the like of which I have not seen since. When we left the hotel, I offered to pay for the breakfast, which seemed to me an unjustifiable extra even in those circumstances of general unjustifiability. A company representative, who was just behind me, said, “No, we will take care of that.”

    I resolved at once never to agree again to attend such an event irrespective of the blandishments. At the time, as I have mentioned, such trips were regarded as perfectly legitimate because not actually prohibited, though it seemed to me clear that they were both corrupt and corrupting. If I examine my conscience honestly, I knew this in advance, for it was obvious on the most minimal reflection, but my desire for something for nothing overcame my scruples. Of course, it would have been easy to rationalize continued acceptance of invitations to such events, for example by telling myself that I was not influenced in my prescribing habits by them—just as Donald Trump Jr. can no doubt believe that Umar Kremlev’s gift to him was merely an act of generosity or kindness of heart. But a still, small voice would have told me that I was rationalizing rather than being rational.

    Where the rules are the sole determinant of propriety, we do, or tend to do, what we can get away with. Where people do what they can get away with, there is an ever-greater need for rules, and a dialectic is set up between social disorder and bureaucratic control. Freedom simply interpreted as lack of prohibition leads almost inevitably to ever more prohibition. Moral anarchy thus comes to coexist with moral dictatorship.

    This is an old lesson. Edmund Burke wrote more than two centuries ago that “men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites”; if they fail to do so, “Their passions forge their fetters.”

]]> ​american conservative​​​

by Theodore Dalrymple

    It is by no means uncommon to hear someone reply to criticism of his conduct by saying that there was no law against it. This is a sinister reply, at least implicitly, for it suggests that what the law does not forbid is permitted in all other senses: in other words, that the law provides the sole criteria by which we are to judge our conduct. No doubt there are some legislators who would be delighted by this extension of their responsibilities, but for anyone who cares both for freedom and civilization, the idea of such philosopher kings (who always turn out to be ambitious mediocrities) sends shivers up the spine.

    It was Lord Moulton, an English judge, who coined the felicitous phrase “obedience to the unenforceable” more than a century ago. These are the standards of behaviour that the law does not enforce, either by prescription or by proscription, but which the individual feels called upon to obey and enforce in himself. Without such standards, which intellectuals love to deride as inimical to the expression of their beautiful personalities, society becomes a free-for-all in which the most psychopathic dominate and the exercise of freedom by one person becomes a cause of anxiety in others.

    The realm of obedience to the unenforceable seems to be in retreat, both among the social and economic elite, and in the general population. Perhaps people have been making similar complaints for decades, if not for centuries, but we seem to be living in an age of mass narcissistic egoism, in which, in the absence of positive law, everyone decides for himself on every occasion how he should behave, consulting only his own immediate interests.

    Let us take as an example the wedding gift to Donald Trump Jr. by the Russian oligarch, Umar Kremlev, a man of dubious reputation, to put it mildly, and an ally of Vladimir Putin. Trump is a private citizen and can therefore legally accept gifts from whomever he chooses; the argument that no one gives such gifts without expecting something in return is no proof that any such demands have been made, let alone complied with. But the whole proceeding is unseemly on the part of the recipient, even if it is nothing worse. But unseemliness has gone the way of obedience to the unenforceable: Fewer and fewer people take any notice of it as a guide to conduct.

    Some years ago, pharmaceutical companies used to transport doctors, who were in a position to prescribe the latest expensive drugs and were supposedly “opinion leaders” in the profession, to places that they might like to go. There, in luxury hotels, they were plied not only with good food and drink, but subjected to propaganda, supposedly scientific, in favour of whatever product the pharmaceutical companies were trying to sell.

    I agreed only once to go on one of these trips. They were not prohibited at the time, and were regarded, at least by some, almost as a perk of the job. I was soon disgusted. There was one participant whose medical specialty, insofar as he had one, appeared to be attending such conferences around the world, from Florence to Rio, from Stockholm to Bangkok. He marked off the cities he had visited at the companies’ expense rather as a successful fighter pilot would mark off the enemy planes that he had downed. Another boasted of the way that he never spent a penny of his own from the moment he left his house to go on such trips to the moment he returned, including for the limousines that took him to and from the airport.

    The principal speaker at the “conference” I attended was widely known as the Universal Prostitute, a professor who would argue passionately in favour of a certain new drug one week, only to argue equally passionately for its direct competitor the next, depending on who was paying him. I must say that he was very convincing, a kind of brilliant pharmaceutical sophist, who eventually lost his medical license for his corrupt (but not illegal) practices, though not before he had made a great deal of money by them.

    The last straw for me came when my wife, for whose air ticket I am glad to say that I insisted on paying though the company offered to pay it, ordered breakfast in bed in the luxury hotel in which we had been put up. It was the kind of hotel for which I would never have paid myself, and the breakfast arrived in clouds of starched linen and quantities of silverware the like of which I have not seen since. When we left the hotel, I offered to pay for the breakfast, which seemed to me an unjustifiable extra even in those circumstances of general unjustifiability. A company representative, who was just behind me, said, “No, we will take care of that.”

    I resolved at once never to agree again to attend such an event irrespective of the blandishments. At the time, as I have mentioned, such trips were regarded as perfectly legitimate because not actually prohibited, though it seemed to me clear that they were both corrupt and corrupting. If I examine my conscience honestly, I knew this in advance, for it was obvious on the most minimal reflection, but my desire for something for nothing overcame my scruples. Of course, it would have been easy to rationalize continued acceptance of invitations to such events, for example by telling myself that I was not influenced in my prescribing habits by them—just as Donald Trump Jr. can no doubt believe that Umar Kremlev’s gift to him was merely an act of generosity or kindness of heart. But a still, small voice would have told me that I was rationalizing rather than being rational.

    Where the rules are the sole determinant of propriety, we do, or tend to do, what we can get away with. Where people do what they can get away with, there is an ever-greater need for rules, and a dialectic is set up between social disorder and bureaucratic control. Freedom simply interpreted as lack of prohibition leads almost inevitably to ever more prohibition. Moral anarchy thus comes to coexist with moral dictatorship.

    This is an old lesson. Edmund Burke wrote more than two centuries ago that “men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites”; if they fail to do so, “Their passions forge their fetters.”

]]> Evil Flourishes When There is No Respect for Life https://kpnews.eu/55526-evil-flourishes-when-there-is-no-respect-for-life.html https://kpnews.eu/55526-evil-flourishes-when-there-is-no-respect-for-life.html Andrew Cloud Fri, 25 Sep 2026 06:56:50 +0300

American Thinker

 

by Steve McCann

    Over the past two months, the United States has been mesmerized by a trial to decide whether or not a mother who was claiming postpartum psychosis, who was abusing prescription drugs, and whose psychiatrist refused to affirm her self-declared mental state can premeditatedly murder her 8-month-old infant and her three- and five-year-old children without consequence.

    A recent poll indicated that 54% of those polled either thought Lindsay Clancy was innocent or were not sure whether she was guilty of murder.

    Further adding to the hitherto unfathomable atmosphere of indifference to the brutal murder of three children, legions of Lindsay Clancy supporters have raised over 1.2 million dollars on her behalf. They chose to characterize her as the victim while effectively portraying the brutally murdered children as simply collateral damage, thereby callously dehumanizing three innocent children.

    It is not a coincidence that, in the past month, Massachusetts, where the murders and trial took place, passed a bill allowing abortions up to the moment of birth, thereby unequivocally affirming that a baby in the birth canal is nothing more than a clump of cells and, as such, can be disposed of at the whim of the mother.

    This mindset requires believing that human life originates at random, is sustained solely at the impulse of other human beings, and is therefore not unique or deserving of respect. Thus, the premeditated killing of three children by their mother can be easily justified, as this same outlook has justified 64 million abortions that have taken place in the United States since 1973.

    Further underscoring the extent to which this dehumanization mindset has captured American culture, the promotion of unconstrained abortion up to the point of birth and post-birth infanticide has become a foundational policy position of America’s oldest and largest political party—the Democrats.

    Thus, the door is opened for the government to one day ultimately determine at what age and under what circumstances someone fully achieves the status of a human being within society. Those who do not meet the criteria could then be considered subhuman and, thus, disposable.

    Over the past three decades, this inexorable abandonment of respect for life has precipitated previously unthinkable changes that are metastasizing within American culture and society.

    Unrestrained euthanasia is now being openly discussed and supported by an ever-growing segment (73%) of the population.

    A significant plurality of Americans, obsessed with their version of political correctness, view their political rivals as effectively subhuman and are demanding not only their censorship, imprisonment, and persecution but also their assassination.

    Supremacism in the guise of tribalism has been mainstreamed, and with it the belief that certain races, ethnicities, religions, or groups (e.g., the Jews and White Christian heterosexual males) are responsible for all of society’s ills; therefore, they are deserving of disrespect, abuse, discrimination, and, if necessary, execution.

    The path the United States is presently on is the same road every civilization has traveled since mankind first set foot on this planet, as virtually every human conflict has been triggered by the inculcated belief that certain human beings were inferior and subhuman. Therefore, within their societies, they were exploited, abused, and discarded, while other nations or tribes were similarly defined, thereby justifying their subjugation or enslavement.

    Because of this dehumanization mindset, these same societies did not recognize any human rights, concentrated all power in the state, and wallowed in what the Catholic Church defines as the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.

    Respect for life is a foundational value of all societies in which reasonable people would want to live. Those who see mankind as having dignity because they are human believe that respect for life requires that they not intentionally kill, abuse, exploit, or enslave another human being.

    The world’s major religions, which represent 78% of the global population, believe and teach that respect for life is fundamental to all religious sensibilities and societies. Judaism and Christianity believe God created mankind; thus, human life deserves respect and dignity. Islam also pays lip service to that same ideology. Hinduism views human life as a manifestation or expression of the Divine. And Buddhism sees human beings as entities that can ultimately attain enlightenment (Buddhahood) and are entitled to respect. All major religions agree that life is sacred.

    Therefore, taking or exploiting human life is regarded as among the gravest transgressions, except when necessary to protect oneself or others from greater harm.

    The commonality of language underscoring the sanctity of life appears first in the Ten Commandments (1446 B.C.), the New Testament (50 A.D.), the Jewish Talmud (200 A.D.), and, surprisingly, the Islamic Qur’an (600 A.D.). In the Talmud, Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:9, we read, “Whoever destroys a life, it is considered as if he destroyed the entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved the entire world.”

    The fifth chapter of the Qur’an, Surah Al-Maidah, verse 32, states, “that whosoever kills a human being for other than murder or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he has killed all mankind, and whoever saves the life of one, it shall be as if he saved the life of all mankind.”

    Unfortunately, the vast majority of Islamists over the centuries have seized upon numerous other verses amid the 114 chapters of the Qur’an as justification for the mandatory conquest of other societies, centered around the belief that all non-believers are inferior and subhuman. Thus, they created cultures that, to this day, are overwhelmingly regressive, misogynistic, tyrannical, callous, and sadistic.

    Unlike Islam, Judaism and Christianity left behind no vague language about the dignity of mankind and what constitutes evil. Those teachings became the foundational building blocks of Western Civilization, a civilization that has catalyzed massive advances in the human condition over the past 1,500 years.

    Today, throughout the West and in the United States, far too many have selfishly and mindlessly opted to abandon a fundamental Judeo-Christian tenet: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This ongoing abandonment has led to morally and ethically confused, aimless societies on a collision course with self-destruction.

    The absence of respect for human life inevitably leads to the dark side of human nature, or evil, becoming ascendant, and once evil controls a society, it cannot be bargained with or appeased. Ultimately, as history has repeatedly revealed, these societies either destroy themselves from within or are, by necessity, conquered by others.

]]>

American Thinker

 

by Steve McCann

    Over the past two months, the United States has been mesmerized by a trial to decide whether or not a mother who was claiming postpartum psychosis, who was abusing prescription drugs, and whose psychiatrist refused to affirm her self-declared mental state can premeditatedly murder her 8-month-old infant and her three- and five-year-old children without consequence.

    A recent poll indicated that 54% of those polled either thought Lindsay Clancy was innocent or were not sure whether she was guilty of murder.

    Further adding to the hitherto unfathomable atmosphere of indifference to the brutal murder of three children, legions of Lindsay Clancy supporters have raised over 1.2 million dollars on her behalf. They chose to characterize her as the victim while effectively portraying the brutally murdered children as simply collateral damage, thereby callously dehumanizing three innocent children.

    It is not a coincidence that, in the past month, Massachusetts, where the murders and trial took place, passed a bill allowing abortions up to the moment of birth, thereby unequivocally affirming that a baby in the birth canal is nothing more than a clump of cells and, as such, can be disposed of at the whim of the mother.

    This mindset requires believing that human life originates at random, is sustained solely at the impulse of other human beings, and is therefore not unique or deserving of respect. Thus, the premeditated killing of three children by their mother can be easily justified, as this same outlook has justified 64 million abortions that have taken place in the United States since 1973.

    Further underscoring the extent to which this dehumanization mindset has captured American culture, the promotion of unconstrained abortion up to the point of birth and post-birth infanticide has become a foundational policy position of America’s oldest and largest political party—the Democrats.

    Thus, the door is opened for the government to one day ultimately determine at what age and under what circumstances someone fully achieves the status of a human being within society. Those who do not meet the criteria could then be considered subhuman and, thus, disposable.

    Over the past three decades, this inexorable abandonment of respect for life has precipitated previously unthinkable changes that are metastasizing within American culture and society.

    Unrestrained euthanasia is now being openly discussed and supported by an ever-growing segment (73%) of the population.

    A significant plurality of Americans, obsessed with their version of political correctness, view their political rivals as effectively subhuman and are demanding not only their censorship, imprisonment, and persecution but also their assassination.

    Supremacism in the guise of tribalism has been mainstreamed, and with it the belief that certain races, ethnicities, religions, or groups (e.g., the Jews and White Christian heterosexual males) are responsible for all of society’s ills; therefore, they are deserving of disrespect, abuse, discrimination, and, if necessary, execution.

    The path the United States is presently on is the same road every civilization has traveled since mankind first set foot on this planet, as virtually every human conflict has been triggered by the inculcated belief that certain human beings were inferior and subhuman. Therefore, within their societies, they were exploited, abused, and discarded, while other nations or tribes were similarly defined, thereby justifying their subjugation or enslavement.

    Because of this dehumanization mindset, these same societies did not recognize any human rights, concentrated all power in the state, and wallowed in what the Catholic Church defines as the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.

    Respect for life is a foundational value of all societies in which reasonable people would want to live. Those who see mankind as having dignity because they are human believe that respect for life requires that they not intentionally kill, abuse, exploit, or enslave another human being.

    The world’s major religions, which represent 78% of the global population, believe and teach that respect for life is fundamental to all religious sensibilities and societies. Judaism and Christianity believe God created mankind; thus, human life deserves respect and dignity. Islam also pays lip service to that same ideology. Hinduism views human life as a manifestation or expression of the Divine. And Buddhism sees human beings as entities that can ultimately attain enlightenment (Buddhahood) and are entitled to respect. All major religions agree that life is sacred.

    Therefore, taking or exploiting human life is regarded as among the gravest transgressions, except when necessary to protect oneself or others from greater harm.

    The commonality of language underscoring the sanctity of life appears first in the Ten Commandments (1446 B.C.), the New Testament (50 A.D.), the Jewish Talmud (200 A.D.), and, surprisingly, the Islamic Qur’an (600 A.D.). In the Talmud, Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:9, we read, “Whoever destroys a life, it is considered as if he destroyed the entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved the entire world.”

    The fifth chapter of the Qur’an, Surah Al-Maidah, verse 32, states, “that whosoever kills a human being for other than murder or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he has killed all mankind, and whoever saves the life of one, it shall be as if he saved the life of all mankind.”

    Unfortunately, the vast majority of Islamists over the centuries have seized upon numerous other verses amid the 114 chapters of the Qur’an as justification for the mandatory conquest of other societies, centered around the belief that all non-believers are inferior and subhuman. Thus, they created cultures that, to this day, are overwhelmingly regressive, misogynistic, tyrannical, callous, and sadistic.

    Unlike Islam, Judaism and Christianity left behind no vague language about the dignity of mankind and what constitutes evil. Those teachings became the foundational building blocks of Western Civilization, a civilization that has catalyzed massive advances in the human condition over the past 1,500 years.

    Today, throughout the West and in the United States, far too many have selfishly and mindlessly opted to abandon a fundamental Judeo-Christian tenet: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This ongoing abandonment has led to morally and ethically confused, aimless societies on a collision course with self-destruction.

    The absence of respect for human life inevitably leads to the dark side of human nature, or evil, becoming ascendant, and once evil controls a society, it cannot be bargained with or appeased. Ultimately, as history has repeatedly revealed, these societies either destroy themselves from within or are, by necessity, conquered by others.

]]>

American Thinker

 

by Steve McCann

    Over the past two months, the United States has been mesmerized by a trial to decide whether or not a mother who was claiming postpartum psychosis, who was abusing prescription drugs, and whose psychiatrist refused to affirm her self-declared mental state can premeditatedly murder her 8-month-old infant and her three- and five-year-old children without consequence.

    A recent poll indicated that 54% of those polled either thought Lindsay Clancy was innocent or were not sure whether she was guilty of murder.

    Further adding to the hitherto unfathomable atmosphere of indifference to the brutal murder of three children, legions of Lindsay Clancy supporters have raised over 1.2 million dollars on her behalf. They chose to characterize her as the victim while effectively portraying the brutally murdered children as simply collateral damage, thereby callously dehumanizing three innocent children.

    It is not a coincidence that, in the past month, Massachusetts, where the murders and trial took place, passed a bill allowing abortions up to the moment of birth, thereby unequivocally affirming that a baby in the birth canal is nothing more than a clump of cells and, as such, can be disposed of at the whim of the mother.

    This mindset requires believing that human life originates at random, is sustained solely at the impulse of other human beings, and is therefore not unique or deserving of respect. Thus, the premeditated killing of three children by their mother can be easily justified, as this same outlook has justified 64 million abortions that have taken place in the United States since 1973.

    Further underscoring the extent to which this dehumanization mindset has captured American culture, the promotion of unconstrained abortion up to the point of birth and post-birth infanticide has become a foundational policy position of America’s oldest and largest political party—the Democrats.

    Thus, the door is opened for the government to one day ultimately determine at what age and under what circumstances someone fully achieves the status of a human being within society. Those who do not meet the criteria could then be considered subhuman and, thus, disposable.

    Over the past three decades, this inexorable abandonment of respect for life has precipitated previously unthinkable changes that are metastasizing within American culture and society.

    Unrestrained euthanasia is now being openly discussed and supported by an ever-growing segment (73%) of the population.

    A significant plurality of Americans, obsessed with their version of political correctness, view their political rivals as effectively subhuman and are demanding not only their censorship, imprisonment, and persecution but also their assassination.

    Supremacism in the guise of tribalism has been mainstreamed, and with it the belief that certain races, ethnicities, religions, or groups (e.g., the Jews and White Christian heterosexual males) are responsible for all of society’s ills; therefore, they are deserving of disrespect, abuse, discrimination, and, if necessary, execution.

    The path the United States is presently on is the same road every civilization has traveled since mankind first set foot on this planet, as virtually every human conflict has been triggered by the inculcated belief that certain human beings were inferior and subhuman. Therefore, within their societies, they were exploited, abused, and discarded, while other nations or tribes were similarly defined, thereby justifying their subjugation or enslavement.

    Because of this dehumanization mindset, these same societies did not recognize any human rights, concentrated all power in the state, and wallowed in what the Catholic Church defines as the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.

    Respect for life is a foundational value of all societies in which reasonable people would want to live. Those who see mankind as having dignity because they are human believe that respect for life requires that they not intentionally kill, abuse, exploit, or enslave another human being.

    The world’s major religions, which represent 78% of the global population, believe and teach that respect for life is fundamental to all religious sensibilities and societies. Judaism and Christianity believe God created mankind; thus, human life deserves respect and dignity. Islam also pays lip service to that same ideology. Hinduism views human life as a manifestation or expression of the Divine. And Buddhism sees human beings as entities that can ultimately attain enlightenment (Buddhahood) and are entitled to respect. All major religions agree that life is sacred.

    Therefore, taking or exploiting human life is regarded as among the gravest transgressions, except when necessary to protect oneself or others from greater harm.

    The commonality of language underscoring the sanctity of life appears first in the Ten Commandments (1446 B.C.), the New Testament (50 A.D.), the Jewish Talmud (200 A.D.), and, surprisingly, the Islamic Qur’an (600 A.D.). In the Talmud, Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:9, we read, “Whoever destroys a life, it is considered as if he destroyed the entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved the entire world.”

    The fifth chapter of the Qur’an, Surah Al-Maidah, verse 32, states, “that whosoever kills a human being for other than murder or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he has killed all mankind, and whoever saves the life of one, it shall be as if he saved the life of all mankind.”

    Unfortunately, the vast majority of Islamists over the centuries have seized upon numerous other verses amid the 114 chapters of the Qur’an as justification for the mandatory conquest of other societies, centered around the belief that all non-believers are inferior and subhuman. Thus, they created cultures that, to this day, are overwhelmingly regressive, misogynistic, tyrannical, callous, and sadistic.

    Unlike Islam, Judaism and Christianity left behind no vague language about the dignity of mankind and what constitutes evil. Those teachings became the foundational building blocks of Western Civilization, a civilization that has catalyzed massive advances in the human condition over the past 1,500 years.

    Today, throughout the West and in the United States, far too many have selfishly and mindlessly opted to abandon a fundamental Judeo-Christian tenet: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This ongoing abandonment has led to morally and ethically confused, aimless societies on a collision course with self-destruction.

    The absence of respect for human life inevitably leads to the dark side of human nature, or evil, becoming ascendant, and once evil controls a society, it cannot be bargained with or appeased. Ultimately, as history has repeatedly revealed, these societies either destroy themselves from within or are, by necessity, conquered by others.

]]> Blinded By Science https://kpnews.eu/55507-blinded-by-science.html https://kpnews.eu/55507-blinded-by-science.html Andrew Cloud Wed, 23 Sep 2026 07:00:45 +0300

American Thinker

 

by John Dietrich

“Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” -- Anthony Fauci

    Most modern conveniences we enjoy today are the result of scientific discoveries. Television, computers, the internet, automobile travel were derived by the use of the scientific method.

    The great legitimizer of our age is not religion but science.

    To describe something as “scientifically proven” gives it tremendous status similar to describing something as being the “gospel truth” in previous centuries.

    Attacks on “science” are a modern form of blasphemy. Economist Robert Reich claimed, "The conflict of the 21st century ... will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists ... between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma.”

    Comedian Bill Maher asserted, “I mean, this is scary stuff. Because it's completely irrational. It's like half this country wants to guide our ship of state by a compass. A compass, something that works by science and rationality, and empirical wisdom. And half this country wants to kill a chicken and read the entrails like they used to do in the old Roman Empire. And I'm with the compass people.”

    What is science  It is a process were reliable predictive rules are derived at through experimentation. These rules can be validated through replication. The process has been so successful that it has attracted pretenders who claim their product is scientifically derived. These products can be described as pseudoscience, deviant or fraudulent science, junk science, cargo-cult science, voodoo science and pathological science, a term coined by Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir. They are not science.

    One of the earliest pretenders to scientific authority was Karl Marx.

    Marx is frequently described as the father of “scientific socialism.”

    There is little that is scientifically derived at in economics. Economist H.S. Katz asserted: “Modern economics claims to be a science. This is a sham and a fraud. When it fails to predict future events it does not act like the scientist, disregarding false theories in search of the truth; it acts like the Indian Medicine Man who has failed to make rain.”

    The next great pretender was Sigmund Freud. Freud claimed that the intention of his project, “is to furnish a psychology which shall be a natural science: its aim, that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material particles.” None of Freud's theories are scientific. This cocaine user who believed the nasal reflex neurosis and the Oedipus Complex projected his own psychological problems on the rest of humanity.

    Other branches of study making claims to science are numerous. Anthropology’s founder Franz Boas wrote, “I often ask myself what advantages our ‘good society’ possesses over the ‘savages.’ The more I see of their customs, the more I realize that we have no right to look down upon them.”

    His skepticism about Western culture was passed on to his disciple, Margaret Mead. The 24-year-old Mead traveled to American Samoa in 1925 and spent nine months there living with an American family, which rather limited her fieldwork. Her book, Coming of Age in Samoa, portrayed Samoa as a sexual paradise free of the neuroses that plagued the West. It had an enormous impact of the field of anthropology. Mead’s conclusions were questioned by Derek Freeman who spent several years in Samoa and spoke fluent Samoan. He claimed that Samoa was far from the sexual paradise Mead portrayed.

    If you promote the orthodox theories you receive generous government funding. If you question orthodoxy you are punished. People who oppose the accepted orthodoxy face serious consequences. Opponents of Soviet “biologist” Trofim Lysenko paid for their opposition with their lives. In the West providers of scientific “misinformation” can be banned from the internet fired from their jobs. French philosopher Albert Camus declared that times came in history when those who dared to say that 2 + 2 = 4 rather than 2 + 2 = 5 were put to death.

    While some of the most absurd conclusions are accepted as scientific, genuine science is under attack. University of California professor Sara Giordano argues that "traditional science" relies on "a colonial and racialized form of power," and must be replaced with an "anti-science, antiracist, feminist approach to knowledge production.” Science is being charged as a tool of patriarchy. Brittany Marshall, a teacher and “social justice change agent” claims “the idea of 2 + 2 equaling 4 is cultural and because of Western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing.” Kareem Carr’s dialogue about the abstract nature of mathematics was profiled by Popular Mechanics in an article entitled “Why Some People Think 2+2=5 ... and why they’re right.” The very foundations of science are under attack.

    Sociologist Lewis Feuer claimed: "The Intellectual Elite in both the United States and Europe has a record of recurrent misjudgement and misperception of social reality. Its members have yielded to wish fulfillment, emotional indulgence and even insincerity while claiming to the public at large that they were inspired by scientific reasoning.”

    Due to the exposure of many cases of faulty “science” public faith in science has declined. Pew research has concluded, “Americans’ trust in scientists, positive views of science continue to decline.” Genuine science can be replaced with political pseudo-science, and people can be convinced or compelled to pay allegiance to its false claims, but we cannot escape the consequences of these actions.

    John Dietrich is a freelance writer and the author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (Algora Publishing). He has a Master of Arts Degree in International Relations from St. Mary’s University. He is retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. He is featured on the BBC's program "Things We Forgot to Remember:" Morgenthau Plan and Post-War Germany.

]]>

American Thinker

 

by John Dietrich

“Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” -- Anthony Fauci

    Most modern conveniences we enjoy today are the result of scientific discoveries. Television, computers, the internet, automobile travel were derived by the use of the scientific method.

    The great legitimizer of our age is not religion but science.

    To describe something as “scientifically proven” gives it tremendous status similar to describing something as being the “gospel truth” in previous centuries.

    Attacks on “science” are a modern form of blasphemy. Economist Robert Reich claimed, "The conflict of the 21st century ... will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists ... between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma.”

    Comedian Bill Maher asserted, “I mean, this is scary stuff. Because it's completely irrational. It's like half this country wants to guide our ship of state by a compass. A compass, something that works by science and rationality, and empirical wisdom. And half this country wants to kill a chicken and read the entrails like they used to do in the old Roman Empire. And I'm with the compass people.”

    What is science  It is a process were reliable predictive rules are derived at through experimentation. These rules can be validated through replication. The process has been so successful that it has attracted pretenders who claim their product is scientifically derived. These products can be described as pseudoscience, deviant or fraudulent science, junk science, cargo-cult science, voodoo science and pathological science, a term coined by Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir. They are not science.

    One of the earliest pretenders to scientific authority was Karl Marx.

    Marx is frequently described as the father of “scientific socialism.”

    There is little that is scientifically derived at in economics. Economist H.S. Katz asserted: “Modern economics claims to be a science. This is a sham and a fraud. When it fails to predict future events it does not act like the scientist, disregarding false theories in search of the truth; it acts like the Indian Medicine Man who has failed to make rain.”

    The next great pretender was Sigmund Freud. Freud claimed that the intention of his project, “is to furnish a psychology which shall be a natural science: its aim, that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material particles.” None of Freud's theories are scientific. This cocaine user who believed the nasal reflex neurosis and the Oedipus Complex projected his own psychological problems on the rest of humanity.

    Other branches of study making claims to science are numerous. Anthropology’s founder Franz Boas wrote, “I often ask myself what advantages our ‘good society’ possesses over the ‘savages.’ The more I see of their customs, the more I realize that we have no right to look down upon them.”

    His skepticism about Western culture was passed on to his disciple, Margaret Mead. The 24-year-old Mead traveled to American Samoa in 1925 and spent nine months there living with an American family, which rather limited her fieldwork. Her book, Coming of Age in Samoa, portrayed Samoa as a sexual paradise free of the neuroses that plagued the West. It had an enormous impact of the field of anthropology. Mead’s conclusions were questioned by Derek Freeman who spent several years in Samoa and spoke fluent Samoan. He claimed that Samoa was far from the sexual paradise Mead portrayed.

    If you promote the orthodox theories you receive generous government funding. If you question orthodoxy you are punished. People who oppose the accepted orthodoxy face serious consequences. Opponents of Soviet “biologist” Trofim Lysenko paid for their opposition with their lives. In the West providers of scientific “misinformation” can be banned from the internet fired from their jobs. French philosopher Albert Camus declared that times came in history when those who dared to say that 2 + 2 = 4 rather than 2 + 2 = 5 were put to death.

    While some of the most absurd conclusions are accepted as scientific, genuine science is under attack. University of California professor Sara Giordano argues that "traditional science" relies on "a colonial and racialized form of power," and must be replaced with an "anti-science, antiracist, feminist approach to knowledge production.” Science is being charged as a tool of patriarchy. Brittany Marshall, a teacher and “social justice change agent” claims “the idea of 2 + 2 equaling 4 is cultural and because of Western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing.” Kareem Carr’s dialogue about the abstract nature of mathematics was profiled by Popular Mechanics in an article entitled “Why Some People Think 2+2=5 ... and why they’re right.” The very foundations of science are under attack.

    Sociologist Lewis Feuer claimed: "The Intellectual Elite in both the United States and Europe has a record of recurrent misjudgement and misperception of social reality. Its members have yielded to wish fulfillment, emotional indulgence and even insincerity while claiming to the public at large that they were inspired by scientific reasoning.”

    Due to the exposure of many cases of faulty “science” public faith in science has declined. Pew research has concluded, “Americans’ trust in scientists, positive views of science continue to decline.” Genuine science can be replaced with political pseudo-science, and people can be convinced or compelled to pay allegiance to its false claims, but we cannot escape the consequences of these actions.

    John Dietrich is a freelance writer and the author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (Algora Publishing). He has a Master of Arts Degree in International Relations from St. Mary’s University. He is retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. He is featured on the BBC's program "Things We Forgot to Remember:" Morgenthau Plan and Post-War Germany.

]]>

American Thinker

 

by John Dietrich

“Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” -- Anthony Fauci

    Most modern conveniences we enjoy today are the result of scientific discoveries. Television, computers, the internet, automobile travel were derived by the use of the scientific method.

    The great legitimizer of our age is not religion but science.

    To describe something as “scientifically proven” gives it tremendous status similar to describing something as being the “gospel truth” in previous centuries.

    Attacks on “science” are a modern form of blasphemy. Economist Robert Reich claimed, "The conflict of the 21st century ... will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists ... between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma.”

    Comedian Bill Maher asserted, “I mean, this is scary stuff. Because it's completely irrational. It's like half this country wants to guide our ship of state by a compass. A compass, something that works by science and rationality, and empirical wisdom. And half this country wants to kill a chicken and read the entrails like they used to do in the old Roman Empire. And I'm with the compass people.”

    What is science  It is a process were reliable predictive rules are derived at through experimentation. These rules can be validated through replication. The process has been so successful that it has attracted pretenders who claim their product is scientifically derived. These products can be described as pseudoscience, deviant or fraudulent science, junk science, cargo-cult science, voodoo science and pathological science, a term coined by Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir. They are not science.

    One of the earliest pretenders to scientific authority was Karl Marx.

    Marx is frequently described as the father of “scientific socialism.”

    There is little that is scientifically derived at in economics. Economist H.S. Katz asserted: “Modern economics claims to be a science. This is a sham and a fraud. When it fails to predict future events it does not act like the scientist, disregarding false theories in search of the truth; it acts like the Indian Medicine Man who has failed to make rain.”

    The next great pretender was Sigmund Freud. Freud claimed that the intention of his project, “is to furnish a psychology which shall be a natural science: its aim, that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material particles.” None of Freud's theories are scientific. This cocaine user who believed the nasal reflex neurosis and the Oedipus Complex projected his own psychological problems on the rest of humanity.

    Other branches of study making claims to science are numerous. Anthropology’s founder Franz Boas wrote, “I often ask myself what advantages our ‘good society’ possesses over the ‘savages.’ The more I see of their customs, the more I realize that we have no right to look down upon them.”

    His skepticism about Western culture was passed on to his disciple, Margaret Mead. The 24-year-old Mead traveled to American Samoa in 1925 and spent nine months there living with an American family, which rather limited her fieldwork. Her book, Coming of Age in Samoa, portrayed Samoa as a sexual paradise free of the neuroses that plagued the West. It had an enormous impact of the field of anthropology. Mead’s conclusions were questioned by Derek Freeman who spent several years in Samoa and spoke fluent Samoan. He claimed that Samoa was far from the sexual paradise Mead portrayed.

    If you promote the orthodox theories you receive generous government funding. If you question orthodoxy you are punished. People who oppose the accepted orthodoxy face serious consequences. Opponents of Soviet “biologist” Trofim Lysenko paid for their opposition with their lives. In the West providers of scientific “misinformation” can be banned from the internet fired from their jobs. French philosopher Albert Camus declared that times came in history when those who dared to say that 2 + 2 = 4 rather than 2 + 2 = 5 were put to death.

    While some of the most absurd conclusions are accepted as scientific, genuine science is under attack. University of California professor Sara Giordano argues that "traditional science" relies on "a colonial and racialized form of power," and must be replaced with an "anti-science, antiracist, feminist approach to knowledge production.” Science is being charged as a tool of patriarchy. Brittany Marshall, a teacher and “social justice change agent” claims “the idea of 2 + 2 equaling 4 is cultural and because of Western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing.” Kareem Carr’s dialogue about the abstract nature of mathematics was profiled by Popular Mechanics in an article entitled “Why Some People Think 2+2=5 ... and why they’re right.” The very foundations of science are under attack.

    Sociologist Lewis Feuer claimed: "The Intellectual Elite in both the United States and Europe has a record of recurrent misjudgement and misperception of social reality. Its members have yielded to wish fulfillment, emotional indulgence and even insincerity while claiming to the public at large that they were inspired by scientific reasoning.”

    Due to the exposure of many cases of faulty “science” public faith in science has declined. Pew research has concluded, “Americans’ trust in scientists, positive views of science continue to decline.” Genuine science can be replaced with political pseudo-science, and people can be convinced or compelled to pay allegiance to its false claims, but we cannot escape the consequences of these actions.

    John Dietrich is a freelance writer and the author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (Algora Publishing). He has a Master of Arts Degree in International Relations from St. Mary’s University. He is retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. He is featured on the BBC's program "Things We Forgot to Remember:" Morgenthau Plan and Post-War Germany.

]]> Feminist Icon Billie Jean King Needs A Man — Far More Than A Fish Needs A Bicycle https://kpnews.eu/55483-feminist-icon-billie-jean-king-needs-a-man-far-more-than-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle.html https://kpnews.eu/55483-feminist-icon-billie-jean-king-needs-a-man-far-more-than-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle.html Andrew Cloud Sun, 20 Sep 2026 10:08:38 +0300

American Thinker

 

by Selwyn Duke

    Feminist sports icon Billie Jean King is at it again, oblivious to economics and banging on about “equal pay” for female tennis players. It apparently never occurs to her that there’s one way to get the men’s money.

    The same way the men do: Compete on the men’s tour and succeed.

Oh, that’s too much to ask  The women couldn’t cut it there

    Well, look at that: You just learned, Billie, why they’re not making the men’s money.

    I know how the gals feel, too. A long-retired tennis pro, I also couldn’t cut it on the men’s tour (and in my day there was no such thing as donning a dress and identifying as Billie Jean Duke to cash in). So I didn’t get their money, either.

See how that works

    The story here is that ex-tennis champion King, 82, who is “married” (ahem) to another woman, needs a man — badly. In fact, she just recently criticized former men’s number one Roger Federer, 45, for not helping the women get prize money the market says they don’t deserve. Apparently, her cause is his obligation.

    “‘I wish he would fight harder for equality, because I keep telling him: ‘You have two sons and two daughters. There is equality in your home,’” Tennis World quoted King as saying. “Do you think he would ever do something to create a stir  He doesn’t want to. I would like to earn more, too.”

    Well, nothing proves you’re an “independent woman” like needing a man to help you make bank.

    Really, though, how does King know there’s equality in Federer’s home  I mean, there isn't equality hardly anywhere else, as it’s not this world’s norm. If he’s like most parents, too, chores may be sex specific (even if servants perform them), with daughters more likely to load the dishwasher and sons to mow the lawn.

But King really, really cares about equality. That’s why she has highlighted how female fashion models are paid substantially more than their male counterparts, right

    Actually, no — she hasn’t made a peep about that.

    It is, however, why she has complained about only men being subject to draft registration, no  I mean, that’s the big inequality tamale, requiring just one sex, when the situation demands it, to fight, bleed and possibly die for the country.

    Actually, though, no — King does a great impression of crickets on that one, too.

    Oddly, she only complains about “inequality” when perceiving a disparity that redounds negatively upon the group she feels allegiance to.

    My, how rare, how self-sacrificing — how noble!

    A cynic, however, could get the crazy idea that this isn’t about equality at all. He could suspect that an equality argument, rather, is used as a ruse to gain leverage and achieve feminist goals. These aims are, at bottom, about winning special dispensations and preferential treatment for women — even if this means advocating unfairness and injustice.

    It’s good I’m not a cynic.

    The Federer overture isn’t the first time King has called on a prince in shining armor to rescue her from the dragon of economic reality, either. Decades ago she was upset that tennis legend Arthur Ashe wouldn’t do the same. He explained himself, responding with economic facts on The Dick Cavett Show in 1980 (video below; relevant portion begins at 2:23).

    Yet 46 years later, in her ninth decade of life, King still doesn’t get it — because she doesn’t want to. But female tennis players earn less than opposite-sex colleagues for the same reason male fashion models do. It’s for the same reason lightweight boxers command less than heavyweights: Their market isn't as large and lucrative. This isn't esoteric knowledge, either — it's Economics 101.

    And what if a lightweight complained he should get the heavyweights’ purses  The answer should be: Then fight in the heavyweight ranks. If you can take those anvil-like blows and prevail, you’ll be rich beyond imagination. If you can’t, then please, do shut up.

    In the tennis world, the men are the heavyweights. King, most famous for beating quasi-decrepit, 55-year-old hustler Bobby Riggs in 1973’s Battle of the Sexes, ought to know this better than anyone. Long before she played Riggs, she locked horns with Eugene Scott, a top amateur male player. He spotted her 10 points in a 21-point game, gave her a service advantage, and still won 21-17.

    Lightweight status is why the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA — their tour) has been losing money in recent years and may not have liquidity in 2027. The kicker:

    Equal-pay subsidies — the WTA’s own cash used to raise women’s prize money closer to the men’s at certain events — are part of the reason for these financial woes. In other words, King’s own equal-pay agitation, in the face of market realities, is helping to bankrupt the tour she purports to care about.

    I’m sure, of course, that King would like the ATP (men’s tour) to subsidize the WTA just as the NBA does the WNBA (which wouldn’t exist without male ballers’ largesse). But here’s a different, radical idea:

    Accept reality.

    And as mentioned earlier, reality is that “equality” is not a thing of this world. Rather, disparities are the norm. Men are four times as likely as women to be struck by lightning. Men die younger. Men are more likely to be affected by hemophilia A and B, gout, abdominal aortic aneurysm and autism spectrum disorder; women are more likely to suffer with systemic lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis after midlife and autoimmune thyroid disease. That’s just a short list, too.

    So why do we identify just certain disparities as “unjust” and target only them for elimination  Why focus on, let’s say, equalizing the sexes’ workplace wages and not their workplace deaths (92 percent of which involve men)

    Well, now we’ve discovered the real unjust discrimination. Privilege is having only the disparities that affect you negatively noticed and cherry-picked for a DEI-style nixing.

Speaking of discrimination brings us to the “equal pay for equal work” fancy. Most fundamentally, how do you even determine equal work  It’s not easy. From experience, I know that the men tennis players train notably harder than the women, for example. Equal work

    Moreover, I was considered in my playing days a workhorse; few labored longer in the gym and elsewhere. I should’ve been compensated more handsomely than the big names if “work” were the determinant; instead, I was a “starving artist.”

And what of high-level junior boys  Not only can they beat the women (as ex-number one Garbine Muguruza admitted last year), but they’re paid nothing. Should the kids who work harder than the pros get the latter’s money

    What of cops and emergency-services workers  Their work is far more important than King’s was. (The world would survive just fine without tennis players.) Yet they make a relative pittance.

    The point: Work seriousness or scale doesn’t determine pay scale. The market does.

    That is, except when activists can browbeat society into trumping market forces in deference to a favored group. But this is a dangerous road. Upon accepting that market determinations should be subordinated to some notion of “fairness,” where does it end  It’s a communistic idea.

    Lastly, feminists might blame the predominantly male sports-viewers market for women’s athletics’ relative unpopularity. But women outnumber men population-wise; they could tune in and make females’ sports bigger than men’s. They choose not to — which is, apparently, why men are supposed to go and fight that war for them, too.

    And, I guess, this is why the world needs activists such as Billie Jean King, champions of a most selective “equality.”

]]>

American Thinker

 

by Selwyn Duke

    Feminist sports icon Billie Jean King is at it again, oblivious to economics and banging on about “equal pay” for female tennis players. It apparently never occurs to her that there’s one way to get the men’s money.

    The same way the men do: Compete on the men’s tour and succeed.

Oh, that’s too much to ask  The women couldn’t cut it there

    Well, look at that: You just learned, Billie, why they’re not making the men’s money.

    I know how the gals feel, too. A long-retired tennis pro, I also couldn’t cut it on the men’s tour (and in my day there was no such thing as donning a dress and identifying as Billie Jean Duke to cash in). So I didn’t get their money, either.

See how that works

    The story here is that ex-tennis champion King, 82, who is “married” (ahem) to another woman, needs a man — badly. In fact, she just recently criticized former men’s number one Roger Federer, 45, for not helping the women get prize money the market says they don’t deserve. Apparently, her cause is his obligation.

    “‘I wish he would fight harder for equality, because I keep telling him: ‘You have two sons and two daughters. There is equality in your home,’” Tennis World quoted King as saying. “Do you think he would ever do something to create a stir  He doesn’t want to. I would like to earn more, too.”

    Well, nothing proves you’re an “independent woman” like needing a man to help you make bank.

    Really, though, how does King know there’s equality in Federer’s home  I mean, there isn't equality hardly anywhere else, as it’s not this world’s norm. If he’s like most parents, too, chores may be sex specific (even if servants perform them), with daughters more likely to load the dishwasher and sons to mow the lawn.

But King really, really cares about equality. That’s why she has highlighted how female fashion models are paid substantially more than their male counterparts, right

    Actually, no — she hasn’t made a peep about that.

    It is, however, why she has complained about only men being subject to draft registration, no  I mean, that’s the big inequality tamale, requiring just one sex, when the situation demands it, to fight, bleed and possibly die for the country.

    Actually, though, no — King does a great impression of crickets on that one, too.

    Oddly, she only complains about “inequality” when perceiving a disparity that redounds negatively upon the group she feels allegiance to.

    My, how rare, how self-sacrificing — how noble!

    A cynic, however, could get the crazy idea that this isn’t about equality at all. He could suspect that an equality argument, rather, is used as a ruse to gain leverage and achieve feminist goals. These aims are, at bottom, about winning special dispensations and preferential treatment for women — even if this means advocating unfairness and injustice.

    It’s good I’m not a cynic.

    The Federer overture isn’t the first time King has called on a prince in shining armor to rescue her from the dragon of economic reality, either. Decades ago she was upset that tennis legend Arthur Ashe wouldn’t do the same. He explained himself, responding with economic facts on The Dick Cavett Show in 1980 (video below; relevant portion begins at 2:23).

    Yet 46 years later, in her ninth decade of life, King still doesn’t get it — because she doesn’t want to. But female tennis players earn less than opposite-sex colleagues for the same reason male fashion models do. It’s for the same reason lightweight boxers command less than heavyweights: Their market isn't as large and lucrative. This isn't esoteric knowledge, either — it's Economics 101.

    And what if a lightweight complained he should get the heavyweights’ purses  The answer should be: Then fight in the heavyweight ranks. If you can take those anvil-like blows and prevail, you’ll be rich beyond imagination. If you can’t, then please, do shut up.

    In the tennis world, the men are the heavyweights. King, most famous for beating quasi-decrepit, 55-year-old hustler Bobby Riggs in 1973’s Battle of the Sexes, ought to know this better than anyone. Long before she played Riggs, she locked horns with Eugene Scott, a top amateur male player. He spotted her 10 points in a 21-point game, gave her a service advantage, and still won 21-17.

    Lightweight status is why the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA — their tour) has been losing money in recent years and may not have liquidity in 2027. The kicker:

    Equal-pay subsidies — the WTA’s own cash used to raise women’s prize money closer to the men’s at certain events — are part of the reason for these financial woes. In other words, King’s own equal-pay agitation, in the face of market realities, is helping to bankrupt the tour she purports to care about.

    I’m sure, of course, that King would like the ATP (men’s tour) to subsidize the WTA just as the NBA does the WNBA (which wouldn’t exist without male ballers’ largesse). But here’s a different, radical idea:

    Accept reality.

    And as mentioned earlier, reality is that “equality” is not a thing of this world. Rather, disparities are the norm. Men are four times as likely as women to be struck by lightning. Men die younger. Men are more likely to be affected by hemophilia A and B, gout, abdominal aortic aneurysm and autism spectrum disorder; women are more likely to suffer with systemic lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis after midlife and autoimmune thyroid disease. That’s just a short list, too.

    So why do we identify just certain disparities as “unjust” and target only them for elimination  Why focus on, let’s say, equalizing the sexes’ workplace wages and not their workplace deaths (92 percent of which involve men)

    Well, now we’ve discovered the real unjust discrimination. Privilege is having only the disparities that affect you negatively noticed and cherry-picked for a DEI-style nixing.

Speaking of discrimination brings us to the “equal pay for equal work” fancy. Most fundamentally, how do you even determine equal work  It’s not easy. From experience, I know that the men tennis players train notably harder than the women, for example. Equal work

    Moreover, I was considered in my playing days a workhorse; few labored longer in the gym and elsewhere. I should’ve been compensated more handsomely than the big names if “work” were the determinant; instead, I was a “starving artist.”

And what of high-level junior boys  Not only can they beat the women (as ex-number one Garbine Muguruza admitted last year), but they’re paid nothing. Should the kids who work harder than the pros get the latter’s money

    What of cops and emergency-services workers  Their work is far more important than King’s was. (The world would survive just fine without tennis players.) Yet they make a relative pittance.

    The point: Work seriousness or scale doesn’t determine pay scale. The market does.

    That is, except when activists can browbeat society into trumping market forces in deference to a favored group. But this is a dangerous road. Upon accepting that market determinations should be subordinated to some notion of “fairness,” where does it end  It’s a communistic idea.

    Lastly, feminists might blame the predominantly male sports-viewers market for women’s athletics’ relative unpopularity. But women outnumber men population-wise; they could tune in and make females’ sports bigger than men’s. They choose not to — which is, apparently, why men are supposed to go and fight that war for them, too.

    And, I guess, this is why the world needs activists such as Billie Jean King, champions of a most selective “equality.”

]]>

American Thinker

 

by Selwyn Duke

    Feminist sports icon Billie Jean King is at it again, oblivious to economics and banging on about “equal pay” for female tennis players. It apparently never occurs to her that there’s one way to get the men’s money.

    The same way the men do: Compete on the men’s tour and succeed.

Oh, that’s too much to ask  The women couldn’t cut it there

    Well, look at that: You just learned, Billie, why they’re not making the men’s money.

    I know how the gals feel, too. A long-retired tennis pro, I also couldn’t cut it on the men’s tour (and in my day there was no such thing as donning a dress and identifying as Billie Jean Duke to cash in). So I didn’t get their money, either.

See how that works

    The story here is that ex-tennis champion King, 82, who is “married” (ahem) to another woman, needs a man — badly. In fact, she just recently criticized former men’s number one Roger Federer, 45, for not helping the women get prize money the market says they don’t deserve. Apparently, her cause is his obligation.

    “‘I wish he would fight harder for equality, because I keep telling him: ‘You have two sons and two daughters. There is equality in your home,’” Tennis World quoted King as saying. “Do you think he would ever do something to create a stir  He doesn’t want to. I would like to earn more, too.”

    Well, nothing proves you’re an “independent woman” like needing a man to help you make bank.

    Really, though, how does King know there’s equality in Federer’s home  I mean, there isn't equality hardly anywhere else, as it’s not this world’s norm. If he’s like most parents, too, chores may be sex specific (even if servants perform them), with daughters more likely to load the dishwasher and sons to mow the lawn.

But King really, really cares about equality. That’s why she has highlighted how female fashion models are paid substantially more than their male counterparts, right

    Actually, no — she hasn’t made a peep about that.

    It is, however, why she has complained about only men being subject to draft registration, no  I mean, that’s the big inequality tamale, requiring just one sex, when the situation demands it, to fight, bleed and possibly die for the country.

    Actually, though, no — King does a great impression of crickets on that one, too.

    Oddly, she only complains about “inequality” when perceiving a disparity that redounds negatively upon the group she feels allegiance to.

    My, how rare, how self-sacrificing — how noble!

    A cynic, however, could get the crazy idea that this isn’t about equality at all. He could suspect that an equality argument, rather, is used as a ruse to gain leverage and achieve feminist goals. These aims are, at bottom, about winning special dispensations and preferential treatment for women — even if this means advocating unfairness and injustice.

    It’s good I’m not a cynic.

    The Federer overture isn’t the first time King has called on a prince in shining armor to rescue her from the dragon of economic reality, either. Decades ago she was upset that tennis legend Arthur Ashe wouldn’t do the same. He explained himself, responding with economic facts on The Dick Cavett Show in 1980 (video below; relevant portion begins at 2:23).

    Yet 46 years later, in her ninth decade of life, King still doesn’t get it — because she doesn’t want to. But female tennis players earn less than opposite-sex colleagues for the same reason male fashion models do. It’s for the same reason lightweight boxers command less than heavyweights: Their market isn't as large and lucrative. This isn't esoteric knowledge, either — it's Economics 101.

    And what if a lightweight complained he should get the heavyweights’ purses  The answer should be: Then fight in the heavyweight ranks. If you can take those anvil-like blows and prevail, you’ll be rich beyond imagination. If you can’t, then please, do shut up.

    In the tennis world, the men are the heavyweights. King, most famous for beating quasi-decrepit, 55-year-old hustler Bobby Riggs in 1973’s Battle of the Sexes, ought to know this better than anyone. Long before she played Riggs, she locked horns with Eugene Scott, a top amateur male player. He spotted her 10 points in a 21-point game, gave her a service advantage, and still won 21-17.

    Lightweight status is why the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA — their tour) has been losing money in recent years and may not have liquidity in 2027. The kicker:

    Equal-pay subsidies — the WTA’s own cash used to raise women’s prize money closer to the men’s at certain events — are part of the reason for these financial woes. In other words, King’s own equal-pay agitation, in the face of market realities, is helping to bankrupt the tour she purports to care about.

    I’m sure, of course, that King would like the ATP (men’s tour) to subsidize the WTA just as the NBA does the WNBA (which wouldn’t exist without male ballers’ largesse). But here’s a different, radical idea:

    Accept reality.

    And as mentioned earlier, reality is that “equality” is not a thing of this world. Rather, disparities are the norm. Men are four times as likely as women to be struck by lightning. Men die younger. Men are more likely to be affected by hemophilia A and B, gout, abdominal aortic aneurysm and autism spectrum disorder; women are more likely to suffer with systemic lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis after midlife and autoimmune thyroid disease. That’s just a short list, too.

    So why do we identify just certain disparities as “unjust” and target only them for elimination  Why focus on, let’s say, equalizing the sexes’ workplace wages and not their workplace deaths (92 percent of which involve men)

    Well, now we’ve discovered the real unjust discrimination. Privilege is having only the disparities that affect you negatively noticed and cherry-picked for a DEI-style nixing.

Speaking of discrimination brings us to the “equal pay for equal work” fancy. Most fundamentally, how do you even determine equal work  It’s not easy. From experience, I know that the men tennis players train notably harder than the women, for example. Equal work

    Moreover, I was considered in my playing days a workhorse; few labored longer in the gym and elsewhere. I should’ve been compensated more handsomely than the big names if “work” were the determinant; instead, I was a “starving artist.”

And what of high-level junior boys  Not only can they beat the women (as ex-number one Garbine Muguruza admitted last year), but they’re paid nothing. Should the kids who work harder than the pros get the latter’s money

    What of cops and emergency-services workers  Their work is far more important than King’s was. (The world would survive just fine without tennis players.) Yet they make a relative pittance.

    The point: Work seriousness or scale doesn’t determine pay scale. The market does.

    That is, except when activists can browbeat society into trumping market forces in deference to a favored group. But this is a dangerous road. Upon accepting that market determinations should be subordinated to some notion of “fairness,” where does it end  It’s a communistic idea.

    Lastly, feminists might blame the predominantly male sports-viewers market for women’s athletics’ relative unpopularity. But women outnumber men population-wise; they could tune in and make females’ sports bigger than men’s. They choose not to — which is, apparently, why men are supposed to go and fight that war for them, too.

    And, I guess, this is why the world needs activists such as Billie Jean King, champions of a most selective “equality.”

]]> The Transgender Mirage Is Cracking https://kpnews.eu/55444-the-transgender-mirage-is-cracking.html https://kpnews.eu/55444-the-transgender-mirage-is-cracking.html Andrew Cloud Tue, 15 Sep 2026 09:42:05 +0300

American Thinker

 

by Brian C. Joondeph

    For nearly a decade, Americans were told to deny what biology, common sense, and their own eyes made plain.

    Men could become women.

    Women could become men.

    Children were fully capable of choosing sterilizing hormones.

    Puberty blockers were “reversible.”

    And anyone who questioned any of it was a bigot.

    It was one of the most aggressive campaigns of magical thinking in modern public life.

    We were told sex was “assigned at birth,” as if doctors in delivery rooms were rolling dice rather than observing biological reality. Chromosomes, anatomy, and reproductive function were suddenly deemed less important than feelings. Centuries of scientific understanding were brushed aside in favor of slogans and hashtags.

    No civilization in history believed this.

    Then, almost overnight, we were expected not only to accept it but also to celebrate it.

    The issue was never about adults making personal choices. Free people can live as they wish.

    The scandal was always about the children.

    Adolescence is messy. Teenagers often feel anxious, awkward, alienated, and uncomfortable in their own skin. That used to be called growing up — a phase most eventually outgrow.

    Then activists rebranded ordinary distress as evidence of being “born in the wrong body.” This is magical thinking.

    A tomboy girl  Maybe she’s a boy.

    A sensitive boy  Maybe she’s a girl.

    A teen who dreads puberty  Time for blockers.

    What previous generations handled with patience was reclassified as a medical diagnosis.

    And what followed was sold as “care.”

    Puberty blockers interrupt normal development. Cross-sex hormones carry permanent negative consequences. Healthy breasts removed from teenage girls don’t grow back. Fertility is eliminated before adulthood. Sexual function and pleasure are impaired before they ever fully develop.

    All under the banner of “affirmation” or “compassion.”

    If this sounds extreme, it is.

    Even within medicine, dissenting voices warned of this long before speaking became professionally dangerous. Paul McHugh, M.D., former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, described transgenderism as a psychological condition rather than a biological reality and cautioned against reinforcing it with irreversible interventions.

    Those warnings were not debated.

    They were dismissed.

    Or worse, they were silenced.

    Imagine a child insisting he is a bird. No sane adult would encourage him to jump off a roof. Yet when a child says he is the opposite sex, many adults now rush to validate that belief, prescribe drugs, and call it progress.

    That is not compassion.

    That is malpractice masquerading as virtue.

    Even the promised benefits have proven less certain than advertised. The claim was that affirmation and transition would reduce suicide risk and psychological distress. However, as highlighted in a recent Spiked analysis, the evidence supporting these interventions is far weaker than activists suggested—often based on low-quality studies, short follow-ups, and selective reporting.

    That helps explain why several European countries have shifted course.

    Britain has reevaluated pediatric gender medicine. Sweden and Finland have restricted its use. Other nations are shifting toward psychotherapy rather than toward immediate medicalization.

    When Scandinavia urges caution, it might be time to reconsider the bumper stickers.

    Yet many American institutions continue forward as if nothing has changed — like cartoon characters who have already run off a cliff but haven’t looked down.

Why

    Because this was never just medicine.

    It became ideology.

    A belief system with its own rules:

    Say “trans women are women.”

    Or agree that “men can become pregnant.”

    Repeat that sex is assigned.

    Declare dissent to be harm or hate.

    Announce your pronouns.

    Castigate the heretics.

    Doctors who objected were smeared. Parents who hesitated were threatened. Teachers were encouraged to hide transitions from families. Women who raised concerns about privacy or fairness were labeled extremists. Athletes were told to accept losing as a sign of inclusion and tolerance.

    The movement that once claimed to champion women and science now asks both to step back.

    Quite the evolution — from Helen Reddy’s “I am woman, hear me roar” to The Tremeloes’ “Silence is golden.”

    Then there are the parents.

    Some deserve sympathy. They were pressured by schools, counselors, and a culture that insists that immediate affirmation is the only loving response. Yet parents are constantly pressured by their kids to let them do this or buy that, and most usually say 'no.'

    Others seem unusually enthusiastic. In some circles, having a transgender child has become less of a difficult reality and more of a marker of social virtue.

    It raises uncomfortable questions.

Are some adults projecting their struggles onto their children  Are they seeking validation from their children

Is this a case of Munchausen by proxy

Is it a status symbol

    The contradictions continue to mount.

    We were told this was about tolerance, yet dissent was punished.

    We were told it was about privacy, yet women lost their privacy.

    We were told it was about fairness, yet girls lost out on opportunities.

    We were told it was evidence-based, yet evidence was optional.

    We were told regret was rare, until detransitioners spoke.

    And those voices matter.

    Young people who transitioned as minors are now describing what happened to them: rushed decisions, inadequate evaluation, social pressure, and irreversible consequences.

    Some lost fertility.

    Some lost sexual function.

    Some lost healthy body parts.

    Many lost trust in the adults who were supposed to guide and protect them.

    That is not health care.

    That is a scandal unfolding in real time.

    And then there is the geopolitical irony.

    Western activists often align with movements or regimes where transgender identity would not be celebrated—but criminalized or worse. “Queers for Palestine” may be the most unintentionally revealing slogan of the moment.

    Reality has a sense of humor. Even if it may be fatal.

    None of this means that people experiencing gender distress should be mocked. They deserve compassion, honesty, and serious psychological care.

    But compassion does not require pretending.

    A man cannot become a woman.

    A woman cannot become a man.

    Puberty is not a disease.

    And children should not be sterilized because adults are afraid to say 'no.'

    Those statements once required no courage.

    Today, they do.

    Because ideology demands silence.

    Reality does not.

    The transgender mirage is cracking — not because critics were loud, but because reality is louder.

    Reality, unlike ideology, does not need to be enforced.

    It simply waits and ultimately wins.

    Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Colorado-based ophthalmologist who writes frequently about medicine, science, and public policy.

    Follow Brian:

Twitter @retinaldoctor

Substack Dr. Brian’s Substack

Truth Social @BrianJoondeph

LinkedIn @Brian Joondeph

Email brianjoondeph@gmail.com

]]>

American Thinker

 

by Brian C. Joondeph

    For nearly a decade, Americans were told to deny what biology, common sense, and their own eyes made plain.

    Men could become women.

    Women could become men.

    Children were fully capable of choosing sterilizing hormones.

    Puberty blockers were “reversible.”

    And anyone who questioned any of it was a bigot.

    It was one of the most aggressive campaigns of magical thinking in modern public life.

    We were told sex was “assigned at birth,” as if doctors in delivery rooms were rolling dice rather than observing biological reality. Chromosomes, anatomy, and reproductive function were suddenly deemed less important than feelings. Centuries of scientific understanding were brushed aside in favor of slogans and hashtags.

    No civilization in history believed this.

    Then, almost overnight, we were expected not only to accept it but also to celebrate it.

    The issue was never about adults making personal choices. Free people can live as they wish.

    The scandal was always about the children.

    Adolescence is messy. Teenagers often feel anxious, awkward, alienated, and uncomfortable in their own skin. That used to be called growing up — a phase most eventually outgrow.

    Then activists rebranded ordinary distress as evidence of being “born in the wrong body.” This is magical thinking.

    A tomboy girl  Maybe she’s a boy.

    A sensitive boy  Maybe she’s a girl.

    A teen who dreads puberty  Time for blockers.

    What previous generations handled with patience was reclassified as a medical diagnosis.

    And what followed was sold as “care.”

    Puberty blockers interrupt normal development. Cross-sex hormones carry permanent negative consequences. Healthy breasts removed from teenage girls don’t grow back. Fertility is eliminated before adulthood. Sexual function and pleasure are impaired before they ever fully develop.

    All under the banner of “affirmation” or “compassion.”

    If this sounds extreme, it is.

    Even within medicine, dissenting voices warned of this long before speaking became professionally dangerous. Paul McHugh, M.D., former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, described transgenderism as a psychological condition rather than a biological reality and cautioned against reinforcing it with irreversible interventions.

    Those warnings were not debated.

    They were dismissed.

    Or worse, they were silenced.

    Imagine a child insisting he is a bird. No sane adult would encourage him to jump off a roof. Yet when a child says he is the opposite sex, many adults now rush to validate that belief, prescribe drugs, and call it progress.

    That is not compassion.

    That is malpractice masquerading as virtue.

    Even the promised benefits have proven less certain than advertised. The claim was that affirmation and transition would reduce suicide risk and psychological distress. However, as highlighted in a recent Spiked analysis, the evidence supporting these interventions is far weaker than activists suggested—often based on low-quality studies, short follow-ups, and selective reporting.

    That helps explain why several European countries have shifted course.

    Britain has reevaluated pediatric gender medicine. Sweden and Finland have restricted its use. Other nations are shifting toward psychotherapy rather than toward immediate medicalization.

    When Scandinavia urges caution, it might be time to reconsider the bumper stickers.

    Yet many American institutions continue forward as if nothing has changed — like cartoon characters who have already run off a cliff but haven’t looked down.

Why

    Because this was never just medicine.

    It became ideology.

    A belief system with its own rules:

    Say “trans women are women.”

    Or agree that “men can become pregnant.”

    Repeat that sex is assigned.

    Declare dissent to be harm or hate.

    Announce your pronouns.

    Castigate the heretics.

    Doctors who objected were smeared. Parents who hesitated were threatened. Teachers were encouraged to hide transitions from families. Women who raised concerns about privacy or fairness were labeled extremists. Athletes were told to accept losing as a sign of inclusion and tolerance.

    The movement that once claimed to champion women and science now asks both to step back.

    Quite the evolution — from Helen Reddy’s “I am woman, hear me roar” to The Tremeloes’ “Silence is golden.”

    Then there are the parents.

    Some deserve sympathy. They were pressured by schools, counselors, and a culture that insists that immediate affirmation is the only loving response. Yet parents are constantly pressured by their kids to let them do this or buy that, and most usually say 'no.'

    Others seem unusually enthusiastic. In some circles, having a transgender child has become less of a difficult reality and more of a marker of social virtue.

    It raises uncomfortable questions.

Are some adults projecting their struggles onto their children  Are they seeking validation from their children

Is this a case of Munchausen by proxy

Is it a status symbol

    The contradictions continue to mount.

    We were told this was about tolerance, yet dissent was punished.

    We were told it was about privacy, yet women lost their privacy.

    We were told it was about fairness, yet girls lost out on opportunities.

    We were told it was evidence-based, yet evidence was optional.

    We were told regret was rare, until detransitioners spoke.

    And those voices matter.

    Young people who transitioned as minors are now describing what happened to them: rushed decisions, inadequate evaluation, social pressure, and irreversible consequences.

    Some lost fertility.

    Some lost sexual function.

    Some lost healthy body parts.

    Many lost trust in the adults who were supposed to guide and protect them.

    That is not health care.

    That is a scandal unfolding in real time.

    And then there is the geopolitical irony.

    Western activists often align with movements or regimes where transgender identity would not be celebrated—but criminalized or worse. “Queers for Palestine” may be the most unintentionally revealing slogan of the moment.

    Reality has a sense of humor. Even if it may be fatal.

    None of this means that people experiencing gender distress should be mocked. They deserve compassion, honesty, and serious psychological care.

    But compassion does not require pretending.

    A man cannot become a woman.

    A woman cannot become a man.

    Puberty is not a disease.

    And children should not be sterilized because adults are afraid to say 'no.'

    Those statements once required no courage.

    Today, they do.

    Because ideology demands silence.

    Reality does not.

    The transgender mirage is cracking — not because critics were loud, but because reality is louder.

    Reality, unlike ideology, does not need to be enforced.

    It simply waits and ultimately wins.

    Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Colorado-based ophthalmologist who writes frequently about medicine, science, and public policy.

    Follow Brian:

Twitter @retinaldoctor

Substack Dr. Brian’s Substack

Truth Social @BrianJoondeph

LinkedIn @Brian Joondeph

Email brianjoondeph@gmail.com

]]>

American Thinker

 

by Brian C. Joondeph

    For nearly a decade, Americans were told to deny what biology, common sense, and their own eyes made plain.

    Men could become women.

    Women could become men.

    Children were fully capable of choosing sterilizing hormones.

    Puberty blockers were “reversible.”

    And anyone who questioned any of it was a bigot.

    It was one of the most aggressive campaigns of magical thinking in modern public life.

    We were told sex was “assigned at birth,” as if doctors in delivery rooms were rolling dice rather than observing biological reality. Chromosomes, anatomy, and reproductive function were suddenly deemed less important than feelings. Centuries of scientific understanding were brushed aside in favor of slogans and hashtags.

    No civilization in history believed this.

    Then, almost overnight, we were expected not only to accept it but also to celebrate it.

    The issue was never about adults making personal choices. Free people can live as they wish.

    The scandal was always about the children.

    Adolescence is messy. Teenagers often feel anxious, awkward, alienated, and uncomfortable in their own skin. That used to be called growing up — a phase most eventually outgrow.

    Then activists rebranded ordinary distress as evidence of being “born in the wrong body.” This is magical thinking.

    A tomboy girl  Maybe she’s a boy.

    A sensitive boy  Maybe she’s a girl.

    A teen who dreads puberty  Time for blockers.

    What previous generations handled with patience was reclassified as a medical diagnosis.

    And what followed was sold as “care.”

    Puberty blockers interrupt normal development. Cross-sex hormones carry permanent negative consequences. Healthy breasts removed from teenage girls don’t grow back. Fertility is eliminated before adulthood. Sexual function and pleasure are impaired before they ever fully develop.

    All under the banner of “affirmation” or “compassion.”

    If this sounds extreme, it is.

    Even within medicine, dissenting voices warned of this long before speaking became professionally dangerous. Paul McHugh, M.D., former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, described transgenderism as a psychological condition rather than a biological reality and cautioned against reinforcing it with irreversible interventions.

    Those warnings were not debated.

    They were dismissed.

    Or worse, they were silenced.

    Imagine a child insisting he is a bird. No sane adult would encourage him to jump off a roof. Yet when a child says he is the opposite sex, many adults now rush to validate that belief, prescribe drugs, and call it progress.

    That is not compassion.

    That is malpractice masquerading as virtue.

    Even the promised benefits have proven less certain than advertised. The claim was that affirmation and transition would reduce suicide risk and psychological distress. However, as highlighted in a recent Spiked analysis, the evidence supporting these interventions is far weaker than activists suggested—often based on low-quality studies, short follow-ups, and selective reporting.

    That helps explain why several European countries have shifted course.

    Britain has reevaluated pediatric gender medicine. Sweden and Finland have restricted its use. Other nations are shifting toward psychotherapy rather than toward immediate medicalization.

    When Scandinavia urges caution, it might be time to reconsider the bumper stickers.

    Yet many American institutions continue forward as if nothing has changed — like cartoon characters who have already run off a cliff but haven’t looked down.

Why

    Because this was never just medicine.

    It became ideology.

    A belief system with its own rules:

    Say “trans women are women.”

    Or agree that “men can become pregnant.”

    Repeat that sex is assigned.

    Declare dissent to be harm or hate.

    Announce your pronouns.

    Castigate the heretics.

    Doctors who objected were smeared. Parents who hesitated were threatened. Teachers were encouraged to hide transitions from families. Women who raised concerns about privacy or fairness were labeled extremists. Athletes were told to accept losing as a sign of inclusion and tolerance.

    The movement that once claimed to champion women and science now asks both to step back.

    Quite the evolution — from Helen Reddy’s “I am woman, hear me roar” to The Tremeloes’ “Silence is golden.”

    Then there are the parents.

    Some deserve sympathy. They were pressured by schools, counselors, and a culture that insists that immediate affirmation is the only loving response. Yet parents are constantly pressured by their kids to let them do this or buy that, and most usually say 'no.'

    Others seem unusually enthusiastic. In some circles, having a transgender child has become less of a difficult reality and more of a marker of social virtue.

    It raises uncomfortable questions.

Are some adults projecting their struggles onto their children  Are they seeking validation from their children

Is this a case of Munchausen by proxy

Is it a status symbol

    The contradictions continue to mount.

    We were told this was about tolerance, yet dissent was punished.

    We were told it was about privacy, yet women lost their privacy.

    We were told it was about fairness, yet girls lost out on opportunities.

    We were told it was evidence-based, yet evidence was optional.

    We were told regret was rare, until detransitioners spoke.

    And those voices matter.

    Young people who transitioned as minors are now describing what happened to them: rushed decisions, inadequate evaluation, social pressure, and irreversible consequences.

    Some lost fertility.

    Some lost sexual function.

    Some lost healthy body parts.

    Many lost trust in the adults who were supposed to guide and protect them.

    That is not health care.

    That is a scandal unfolding in real time.

    And then there is the geopolitical irony.

    Western activists often align with movements or regimes where transgender identity would not be celebrated—but criminalized or worse. “Queers for Palestine” may be the most unintentionally revealing slogan of the moment.

    Reality has a sense of humor. Even if it may be fatal.

    None of this means that people experiencing gender distress should be mocked. They deserve compassion, honesty, and serious psychological care.

    But compassion does not require pretending.

    A man cannot become a woman.

    A woman cannot become a man.

    Puberty is not a disease.

    And children should not be sterilized because adults are afraid to say 'no.'

    Those statements once required no courage.

    Today, they do.

    Because ideology demands silence.

    Reality does not.

    The transgender mirage is cracking — not because critics were loud, but because reality is louder.

    Reality, unlike ideology, does not need to be enforced.

    It simply waits and ultimately wins.

    Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Colorado-based ophthalmologist who writes frequently about medicine, science, and public policy.

    Follow Brian:

Twitter @retinaldoctor

Substack Dr. Brian’s Substack

Truth Social @BrianJoondeph

LinkedIn @Brian Joondeph

Email brianjoondeph@gmail.com

]]> Democrats In Disarray: The Cost Of Success https://kpnews.eu/55422-democrats-in-disarray-the-cost-of-success.html https://kpnews.eu/55422-democrats-in-disarray-the-cost-of-success.html Andrew Cloud Sat, 12 Sep 2026 10:07:12 +0300

American Thinker

 

by Robert Weissberg

    Successful American political parties cannot offer narrowly crafted, closely argued programs. Moreover, unlike ideology-based European parties, American parties with their heterogeneous electoral supporters must win majorities to gain office, and this requires coalition building.

    That reality acknowledged, the current Democrat party’s offerings far exceed the usual hodgepodge of appeals. What, for example, links facilitating sex change operations for minors and increasing taxes on billionaires  Or “free” government-funded medical care (“Medicare for All”) and defunding the police  How is “affordability” related to enacting the “Green New Deal,” a policy that invariably increases energy costs  Can government lower prices while simultaneously boosting everyone’s wages  Why defend open borders and sanctuary cities when the resulting cheap labor will drive down wages for American workers  Will millions vote Democrat to allow men to play on women’s sports teams, legalize deadly addictive drugs, condemn Israeli “genocide” in Gaza  This “platform” is an incoherent collection of bumper stickers-like slogans.

    Many of these appeals are also unpopular and have zero chance of implementation. Do Americans really want to pack the Supreme Court to advance some vague agenda or replace it altogether  What about supporting a political party that displays a lukewarm enthusiasm for patriotic symbols like the flag and the glories of American history  American political parties typically resemble budget-breaking Santa Clauses, but the Democrat party’s current version of Old Saint Nick promises toys few want, will not work as advertised, and are dangerous.

    Nor is altering the English language a winning election strategy though it is alluringly cheap to accomplish. Using “sex workers” versus the supposedly offensive “hooker” is hardly a winning election strategy. Or “birthing person,” to replace “mother.” Such often comic wordplay only conflates terminology with reality and fools nobody.

    Particularly desperate is chasing electoral advantage by invoking “socialism.” No doubt, few Americans correctly understand “socialism” other than lots of “free stuff.” More importantly, implementing genuine socialism necessarily requires deeply unpopular measures such as public ownership of key industries, government-controlled media, eliminating private banks and similar draconian government controls over people’s private lives.

    Even further afield from the party’s historic identity is playing footsie with Muslim extremism, especially Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, despite his anti-American and Anti-Israeli baggage. This is in Michigan, the home of the United Auto Workers, a traditional core Democrat constituency, and one hardly disposed towards Islam. Apparently, the Democrat “Big Tent” here excludes the old faithful in favor of a religion deeply antithetical to American values.

Why not escape the floundering and return to an earlier era when Democrats of all stripes easily rallied around a package of doable, sensible inter-related policies, for example, the Great Society

    Today’s incoherence results from the party’s past successes, and with mission accomplished, a new mission statement is necessary. This “what comes next” predicament is commonplace in all once successful organizations.

    A perfect illustration of this “mission accomplished” quandary occurred to a famous American charity—the March of Dimes. Created in 1938 to fight the dreaded polio, a disease that paralyzed millions of children, the organization raised millions for research and healthcare facilities.

    In 1955 thanks to the Salk and Sabin vaccine, polio was conquered so, in effect, the March of Dimes had put itself out of business. However, rather than disband their substantial fund-raising apparatus, it soldiered on, and after some initial dead ends, the organization reinvented itself to combat birth defects, arthritis, and virus diseases (premature birth was added in 2005). The mission shift was formalized in 1976 with a new name: the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation.

    Today’s Democrat party is in a comparable position of achieving successes in its mission. Consider, for example, the Democrat party’s role in advancing black civil rights. Thanks largely to Democrats, we have enacted dozens of anti-discrimination laws, made huge investments in black-run neighborhoods and cities, elected countless blacks (including one president), created economic set-asides, among multiple other civil rights advances. A stunning record of accomplishment.

    What’s left on the Democrat’s traditional agenda  Answer: not much, at least as far as what the government can provide and what works. Absent a new agenda, it is no wonder today’s civil rights movement focuses on ephemeral issues like toxic white racism or reparation. At most, lacking a clear alternative, Democrats can denounce Republican efforts to roll back racial preferences (DEI), but this rhetoric will hardly mobilize millions of voters.

    A similar quandary exists in rallying liberal women, given their far-ranging progress. Hard to demand yet one more anti-discrimination law when women college graduates outnumber men, occupy many top corporate positions, enjoy ample political success and even fly fighter jets. In fact, women accounted for 98% of all jobs added to the economy in August 2026. Given this observable progress, it is not easy being a Democrat strategist crafting today’s party’s message promoting greater sexual equality.

    Ditto for those motivated to achieve broad economic equality. For over half a century, Democrats have waged “wars on poverty” with massive expenditures on education, subsidized housing, job training, food and medical subsidies, and the like. Alas, hundreds of billions have barely moved the needle, and no magic bullet currently exists. Given this lack of progress and viable options, Democrats have turned to vacuous slogans, for example demanding that billionaires pay “their fair share” or enacting business-killing, unrealistic minimum wage increases, as if these nostrums could uplift millions of poor people into the middle class.

    Then there’s the once politically popular Green New Deal to eliminate fossil fuels to save the planet while creating millions of good-paying jobs. This Democrat-led scheme once mobilized voters and had initial successes, but the magic is long gone. Doomsday scenarios are no longer credible, and few voters want yet more huge wind farms or want to ban gas stoves.

    The same pattern holds for others who once voted Democrat—their decades-old wish lists are now law or, the promised outcomes have proven elusive. Gays now enjoy same sex marriage and adoption rights while the disabled benefit from ample legal protection. There is hardly any disadvantaged group that lacks government assistance, so Democrats almost desperately search for new “victims” like the transgendered.

    Today’s Democrat party plight is not unique. Recall the once popular Prohibition Party that banned alcohol nationally, and look what happened when Americans changed their minds. Or the powerful Whig Party that failed to survive divisive quarrels over slavery  On the other hand, the Republican Party was initially built on its anti-slavery appeal, but it successfully re-invented itself as the pro-business party when slavery was abolished.

    As in nature, political survival demands constant adaptation, and the Democrat party must adapt to a shifting political landscape. The list of defunct American political parties is a long one, and it is hard to predict this adaptation, but endless facile sloganeering hardly seems the solution. The party built on helping ordinary wage earners requires a more substantive message than “Orange Man Bad” or “prices are too high.” Yes, thanks to millions of loyal followers, Democrats will still win elections, but at some point, today’s party stalwarts will grow apathetic or die off, and new voters will look elsewhere for champions. In the long run, a party that stumbles from one vacuous trendy issue to another for its core identity is doomed to collapse.

    Image generated by ChatGPT.

]]>

American Thinker

 

by Robert Weissberg

    Successful American political parties cannot offer narrowly crafted, closely argued programs. Moreover, unlike ideology-based European parties, American parties with their heterogeneous electoral supporters must win majorities to gain office, and this requires coalition building.

    That reality acknowledged, the current Democrat party’s offerings far exceed the usual hodgepodge of appeals. What, for example, links facilitating sex change operations for minors and increasing taxes on billionaires  Or “free” government-funded medical care (“Medicare for All”) and defunding the police  How is “affordability” related to enacting the “Green New Deal,” a policy that invariably increases energy costs  Can government lower prices while simultaneously boosting everyone’s wages  Why defend open borders and sanctuary cities when the resulting cheap labor will drive down wages for American workers  Will millions vote Democrat to allow men to play on women’s sports teams, legalize deadly addictive drugs, condemn Israeli “genocide” in Gaza  This “platform” is an incoherent collection of bumper stickers-like slogans.

    Many of these appeals are also unpopular and have zero chance of implementation. Do Americans really want to pack the Supreme Court to advance some vague agenda or replace it altogether  What about supporting a political party that displays a lukewarm enthusiasm for patriotic symbols like the flag and the glories of American history  American political parties typically resemble budget-breaking Santa Clauses, but the Democrat party’s current version of Old Saint Nick promises toys few want, will not work as advertised, and are dangerous.

    Nor is altering the English language a winning election strategy though it is alluringly cheap to accomplish. Using “sex workers” versus the supposedly offensive “hooker” is hardly a winning election strategy. Or “birthing person,” to replace “mother.” Such often comic wordplay only conflates terminology with reality and fools nobody.

    Particularly desperate is chasing electoral advantage by invoking “socialism.” No doubt, few Americans correctly understand “socialism” other than lots of “free stuff.” More importantly, implementing genuine socialism necessarily requires deeply unpopular measures such as public ownership of key industries, government-controlled media, eliminating private banks and similar draconian government controls over people’s private lives.

    Even further afield from the party’s historic identity is playing footsie with Muslim extremism, especially Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, despite his anti-American and Anti-Israeli baggage. This is in Michigan, the home of the United Auto Workers, a traditional core Democrat constituency, and one hardly disposed towards Islam. Apparently, the Democrat “Big Tent” here excludes the old faithful in favor of a religion deeply antithetical to American values.

Why not escape the floundering and return to an earlier era when Democrats of all stripes easily rallied around a package of doable, sensible inter-related policies, for example, the Great Society

    Today’s incoherence results from the party’s past successes, and with mission accomplished, a new mission statement is necessary. This “what comes next” predicament is commonplace in all once successful organizations.

    A perfect illustration of this “mission accomplished” quandary occurred to a famous American charity—the March of Dimes. Created in 1938 to fight the dreaded polio, a disease that paralyzed millions of children, the organization raised millions for research and healthcare facilities.

    In 1955 thanks to the Salk and Sabin vaccine, polio was conquered so, in effect, the March of Dimes had put itself out of business. However, rather than disband their substantial fund-raising apparatus, it soldiered on, and after some initial dead ends, the organization reinvented itself to combat birth defects, arthritis, and virus diseases (premature birth was added in 2005). The mission shift was formalized in 1976 with a new name: the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation.

    Today’s Democrat party is in a comparable position of achieving successes in its mission. Consider, for example, the Democrat party’s role in advancing black civil rights. Thanks largely to Democrats, we have enacted dozens of anti-discrimination laws, made huge investments in black-run neighborhoods and cities, elected countless blacks (including one president), created economic set-asides, among multiple other civil rights advances. A stunning record of accomplishment.

    What’s left on the Democrat’s traditional agenda  Answer: not much, at least as far as what the government can provide and what works. Absent a new agenda, it is no wonder today’s civil rights movement focuses on ephemeral issues like toxic white racism or reparation. At most, lacking a clear alternative, Democrats can denounce Republican efforts to roll back racial preferences (DEI), but this rhetoric will hardly mobilize millions of voters.

    A similar quandary exists in rallying liberal women, given their far-ranging progress. Hard to demand yet one more anti-discrimination law when women college graduates outnumber men, occupy many top corporate positions, enjoy ample political success and even fly fighter jets. In fact, women accounted for 98% of all jobs added to the economy in August 2026. Given this observable progress, it is not easy being a Democrat strategist crafting today’s party’s message promoting greater sexual equality.

    Ditto for those motivated to achieve broad economic equality. For over half a century, Democrats have waged “wars on poverty” with massive expenditures on education, subsidized housing, job training, food and medical subsidies, and the like. Alas, hundreds of billions have barely moved the needle, and no magic bullet currently exists. Given this lack of progress and viable options, Democrats have turned to vacuous slogans, for example demanding that billionaires pay “their fair share” or enacting business-killing, unrealistic minimum wage increases, as if these nostrums could uplift millions of poor people into the middle class.

    Then there’s the once politically popular Green New Deal to eliminate fossil fuels to save the planet while creating millions of good-paying jobs. This Democrat-led scheme once mobilized voters and had initial successes, but the magic is long gone. Doomsday scenarios are no longer credible, and few voters want yet more huge wind farms or want to ban gas stoves.

    The same pattern holds for others who once voted Democrat—their decades-old wish lists are now law or, the promised outcomes have proven elusive. Gays now enjoy same sex marriage and adoption rights while the disabled benefit from ample legal protection. There is hardly any disadvantaged group that lacks government assistance, so Democrats almost desperately search for new “victims” like the transgendered.

    Today’s Democrat party plight is not unique. Recall the once popular Prohibition Party that banned alcohol nationally, and look what happened when Americans changed their minds. Or the powerful Whig Party that failed to survive divisive quarrels over slavery  On the other hand, the Republican Party was initially built on its anti-slavery appeal, but it successfully re-invented itself as the pro-business party when slavery was abolished.

    As in nature, political survival demands constant adaptation, and the Democrat party must adapt to a shifting political landscape. The list of defunct American political parties is a long one, and it is hard to predict this adaptation, but endless facile sloganeering hardly seems the solution. The party built on helping ordinary wage earners requires a more substantive message than “Orange Man Bad” or “prices are too high.” Yes, thanks to millions of loyal followers, Democrats will still win elections, but at some point, today’s party stalwarts will grow apathetic or die off, and new voters will look elsewhere for champions. In the long run, a party that stumbles from one vacuous trendy issue to another for its core identity is doomed to collapse.

    Image generated by ChatGPT.

]]>

American Thinker

 

by Robert Weissberg

    Successful American political parties cannot offer narrowly crafted, closely argued programs. Moreover, unlike ideology-based European parties, American parties with their heterogeneous electoral supporters must win majorities to gain office, and this requires coalition building.

    That reality acknowledged, the current Democrat party’s offerings far exceed the usual hodgepodge of appeals. What, for example, links facilitating sex change operations for minors and increasing taxes on billionaires  Or “free” government-funded medical care (“Medicare for All”) and defunding the police  How is “affordability” related to enacting the “Green New Deal,” a policy that invariably increases energy costs  Can government lower prices while simultaneously boosting everyone’s wages  Why defend open borders and sanctuary cities when the resulting cheap labor will drive down wages for American workers  Will millions vote Democrat to allow men to play on women’s sports teams, legalize deadly addictive drugs, condemn Israeli “genocide” in Gaza  This “platform” is an incoherent collection of bumper stickers-like slogans.

    Many of these appeals are also unpopular and have zero chance of implementation. Do Americans really want to pack the Supreme Court to advance some vague agenda or replace it altogether  What about supporting a political party that displays a lukewarm enthusiasm for patriotic symbols like the flag and the glories of American history  American political parties typically resemble budget-breaking Santa Clauses, but the Democrat party’s current version of Old Saint Nick promises toys few want, will not work as advertised, and are dangerous.

    Nor is altering the English language a winning election strategy though it is alluringly cheap to accomplish. Using “sex workers” versus the supposedly offensive “hooker” is hardly a winning election strategy. Or “birthing person,” to replace “mother.” Such often comic wordplay only conflates terminology with reality and fools nobody.

    Particularly desperate is chasing electoral advantage by invoking “socialism.” No doubt, few Americans correctly understand “socialism” other than lots of “free stuff.” More importantly, implementing genuine socialism necessarily requires deeply unpopular measures such as public ownership of key industries, government-controlled media, eliminating private banks and similar draconian government controls over people’s private lives.

    Even further afield from the party’s historic identity is playing footsie with Muslim extremism, especially Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, despite his anti-American and Anti-Israeli baggage. This is in Michigan, the home of the United Auto Workers, a traditional core Democrat constituency, and one hardly disposed towards Islam. Apparently, the Democrat “Big Tent” here excludes the old faithful in favor of a religion deeply antithetical to American values.

Why not escape the floundering and return to an earlier era when Democrats of all stripes easily rallied around a package of doable, sensible inter-related policies, for example, the Great Society

    Today’s incoherence results from the party’s past successes, and with mission accomplished, a new mission statement is necessary. This “what comes next” predicament is commonplace in all once successful organizations.

    A perfect illustration of this “mission accomplished” quandary occurred to a famous American charity—the March of Dimes. Created in 1938 to fight the dreaded polio, a disease that paralyzed millions of children, the organization raised millions for research and healthcare facilities.

    In 1955 thanks to the Salk and Sabin vaccine, polio was conquered so, in effect, the March of Dimes had put itself out of business. However, rather than disband their substantial fund-raising apparatus, it soldiered on, and after some initial dead ends, the organization reinvented itself to combat birth defects, arthritis, and virus diseases (premature birth was added in 2005). The mission shift was formalized in 1976 with a new name: the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation.

    Today’s Democrat party is in a comparable position of achieving successes in its mission. Consider, for example, the Democrat party’s role in advancing black civil rights. Thanks largely to Democrats, we have enacted dozens of anti-discrimination laws, made huge investments in black-run neighborhoods and cities, elected countless blacks (including one president), created economic set-asides, among multiple other civil rights advances. A stunning record of accomplishment.

    What’s left on the Democrat’s traditional agenda  Answer: not much, at least as far as what the government can provide and what works. Absent a new agenda, it is no wonder today’s civil rights movement focuses on ephemeral issues like toxic white racism or reparation. At most, lacking a clear alternative, Democrats can denounce Republican efforts to roll back racial preferences (DEI), but this rhetoric will hardly mobilize millions of voters.

    A similar quandary exists in rallying liberal women, given their far-ranging progress. Hard to demand yet one more anti-discrimination law when women college graduates outnumber men, occupy many top corporate positions, enjoy ample political success and even fly fighter jets. In fact, women accounted for 98% of all jobs added to the economy in August 2026. Given this observable progress, it is not easy being a Democrat strategist crafting today’s party’s message promoting greater sexual equality.

    Ditto for those motivated to achieve broad economic equality. For over half a century, Democrats have waged “wars on poverty” with massive expenditures on education, subsidized housing, job training, food and medical subsidies, and the like. Alas, hundreds of billions have barely moved the needle, and no magic bullet currently exists. Given this lack of progress and viable options, Democrats have turned to vacuous slogans, for example demanding that billionaires pay “their fair share” or enacting business-killing, unrealistic minimum wage increases, as if these nostrums could uplift millions of poor people into the middle class.

    Then there’s the once politically popular Green New Deal to eliminate fossil fuels to save the planet while creating millions of good-paying jobs. This Democrat-led scheme once mobilized voters and had initial successes, but the magic is long gone. Doomsday scenarios are no longer credible, and few voters want yet more huge wind farms or want to ban gas stoves.

    The same pattern holds for others who once voted Democrat—their decades-old wish lists are now law or, the promised outcomes have proven elusive. Gays now enjoy same sex marriage and adoption rights while the disabled benefit from ample legal protection. There is hardly any disadvantaged group that lacks government assistance, so Democrats almost desperately search for new “victims” like the transgendered.

    Today’s Democrat party plight is not unique. Recall the once popular Prohibition Party that banned alcohol nationally, and look what happened when Americans changed their minds. Or the powerful Whig Party that failed to survive divisive quarrels over slavery  On the other hand, the Republican Party was initially built on its anti-slavery appeal, but it successfully re-invented itself as the pro-business party when slavery was abolished.

    As in nature, political survival demands constant adaptation, and the Democrat party must adapt to a shifting political landscape. The list of defunct American political parties is a long one, and it is hard to predict this adaptation, but endless facile sloganeering hardly seems the solution. The party built on helping ordinary wage earners requires a more substantive message than “Orange Man Bad” or “prices are too high.” Yes, thanks to millions of loyal followers, Democrats will still win elections, but at some point, today’s party stalwarts will grow apathetic or die off, and new voters will look elsewhere for champions. In the long run, a party that stumbles from one vacuous trendy issue to another for its core identity is doomed to collapse.

    Image generated by ChatGPT.

]]> The Red and the Green https://kpnews.eu/55396-the-red-and-the-green.html https://kpnews.eu/55396-the-red-and-the-green.html Andrew Cloud Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:45:08 +0300

American Thinker

 

by Luis Gonzalez

    Sun Tzu made an observation, some 2,500 years ago, that modern coalition politics seems to have taken to heart, though no one credits him for it. Paraphrased loosely: an army does not need every soldier to want the same outcome. It needs them moving in the same direction until the battle is won.

    The Red and the Green appear to have absorbed the lesson without ever reading the book. Almost nobody asks what happens once the battle ends and there's no shared enemy left to hold the army together.

    The Red is the socialist left. The Green is political Islam. Different histories, different ambitions, different visions of the society each ultimately wants to build; on paper, that gap should make an alliance implausible. In practice, it hasn't stopped one from forming. Coalitions never require their members to agree about the final destination, only about what stands in the way of reaching one, and for now, the Democratic Party's own establishment: its incumbents, its machine, its money, its voters, serves that purpose well enough.

    History has already run this experiment. Revolutionary Cuba built its coalition against Batista out of men who agreed on almost nothing beyond wanting him gone. Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Ernesto "Che" Guevara fought side by side, but Che was already a committed Marxist, Raul stood further left than Fidel, and Camilo's own movement had promised a return to constitutional government once Batista fell. That promise did not survive him. Once the enemy was gone, the question became who got to decide what came next, and the coalition answered by leaving almost no one standing who might contest it. Camilo died in what the official record calls an accident, a plane that was never recovered. Che was "reassigned" to Bolivia and executed there. Raul remained, entrenched in a state bearing little resemblance to what the men who fought Batista had separately imagined building.

    Start with the Red. The Democratic Socialists of America have published a program advocating democratic socialism, public ownership of major industries, and structural changes to American government, including abolishing the Electoral College and the Senate and replacing capitalism with a socialist economy. A citizen can support that program or oppose it, but pretending it isn't on the table is not an argument. It's avoidance.

    Now the Green. The subject is not Muslims generally, but political Islam: movements in which religious identity becomes the organizing principle of a political project. Not every Muslim politician or voter is an Islamist, and political Islam spans multiple currents and attitudes toward violence.

    That overlap doesn't make these figures interchangeable or mean supporting them endorses political Islam's long-term aims. It means only that coalitions don't require ideological uniformity while there's an opponent left to beat. A movement that wins repeatedly reshapes the environment around it, and a coalition that reproduces itself becomes an institution. Institutions outlast elections, but they also have to govern, and governing is where shared adversaries stop mattering and shared commitments start to.

    That is where the Cuban pattern stops being optional and becomes relevant. The American progressive left has spent two generations building its identity around expanding individual autonomy: reproductive rights, gender identity, secularism, and same-sex marriage treated as settled law rather than an open question. That identity has no version that survives being negotiated away.

    Political Islam does not share that center of gravity, and in key respects is built against it. Mainstream Islamic jurisprudence, across the major schools of fiqh treats homosexuality as haram, forbidden rather than merely disfavored. Islamist movements aren't organized around a live-and-let-live pluralism where competing moral frameworks coexist under a neutral state. Their project restores a fixed religious order, where questions the American left considers settled were resolved centuries ago by scripture, not open for renegotiation. That project has nothing to give away without ceasing to be itself. Two absolutes do not compromise. They wait.

    Picture the coalition after it wins, not before. Jeffries and Schumer are gone, the establishment is captured, and what remains are two movements that each require the other's core commitment to be false for its own to be true. The Red cannot concede on sexuality and gender without abandoning the autonomy politics that define it. The Green cannot concede the same ground without abandoning the order that defines it. There is no wiggle room in that arrangement, because both sides already spent it building the identities that made cooperation possible in opposition and impossible in government.

    Havana found itself in exactly that position come 1959. The men who won did not negotiate a shared vision for the country. One faction consolidated, and the others were removed from the board, by exile, by the jungle, by a plane that never landed. Nobody is predicting firing squads for Sacramento or Dearborn. But the mechanism doesn't require violence. It requires only a coalition reaching power without resolving what it actually agrees on, at which point the resolving happens anyway, later, on someone else's terms.

    None of this is cause for panic so much as attention, nor a claim that these movements lack the right to pursue their objectives. Read the platforms. Watch who campaigns with whom, which organizations supply the volunteers, and where the money moves. If the Red wants to replace capitalism, let it make the case openly; if the Green wants political influence, let it make its case too. What voters do with that, armed with full information, is what democracy is for.

    But democracy also depends on voters understanding what they're voting for, including the parts of the coalition's future that haven't been worked out yet. The Constitution doesn't protect citizens from political ignorance; it hands them the machinery of self-government and leaves them responsible for who operates it. The fight everyone can see, against the common enemy, is not the fight that decides what the country becomes. That fight comes after, between the allies, and history suggests it doesn't end in a treaty.

    Red and green do not blend into some glorious new political color. They make brown, and brown is the color of mud, decay, and shit.

    A fitting color for coalitions that confuse a common enemy with a common cause.

    Luis Gonzalez is the owner and publisher of The Last Wire, an independent blog covering news, politics, opinion, and the rabbit holes beneath the headlines. He has been writing online since 2000 and is the founder of Boiling Frogs, a personal blog launched in 2008. He hangs his hat at The Briefing Room, where he excels at the role of resident curmudgeon.

]]>

American Thinker

 

by Luis Gonzalez

    Sun Tzu made an observation, some 2,500 years ago, that modern coalition politics seems to have taken to heart, though no one credits him for it. Paraphrased loosely: an army does not need every soldier to want the same outcome. It needs them moving in the same direction until the battle is won.

    The Red and the Green appear to have absorbed the lesson without ever reading the book. Almost nobody asks what happens once the battle ends and there's no shared enemy left to hold the army together.

    The Red is the socialist left. The Green is political Islam. Different histories, different ambitions, different visions of the society each ultimately wants to build; on paper, that gap should make an alliance implausible. In practice, it hasn't stopped one from forming. Coalitions never require their members to agree about the final destination, only about what stands in the way of reaching one, and for now, the Democratic Party's own establishment: its incumbents, its machine, its money, its voters, serves that purpose well enough.

    History has already run this experiment. Revolutionary Cuba built its coalition against Batista out of men who agreed on almost nothing beyond wanting him gone. Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Ernesto "Che" Guevara fought side by side, but Che was already a committed Marxist, Raul stood further left than Fidel, and Camilo's own movement had promised a return to constitutional government once Batista fell. That promise did not survive him. Once the enemy was gone, the question became who got to decide what came next, and the coalition answered by leaving almost no one standing who might contest it. Camilo died in what the official record calls an accident, a plane that was never recovered. Che was "reassigned" to Bolivia and executed there. Raul remained, entrenched in a state bearing little resemblance to what the men who fought Batista had separately imagined building.

    Start with the Red. The Democratic Socialists of America have published a program advocating democratic socialism, public ownership of major industries, and structural changes to American government, including abolishing the Electoral College and the Senate and replacing capitalism with a socialist economy. A citizen can support that program or oppose it, but pretending it isn't on the table is not an argument. It's avoidance.

    Now the Green. The subject is not Muslims generally, but political Islam: movements in which religious identity becomes the organizing principle of a political project. Not every Muslim politician or voter is an Islamist, and political Islam spans multiple currents and attitudes toward violence.

    That overlap doesn't make these figures interchangeable or mean supporting them endorses political Islam's long-term aims. It means only that coalitions don't require ideological uniformity while there's an opponent left to beat. A movement that wins repeatedly reshapes the environment around it, and a coalition that reproduces itself becomes an institution. Institutions outlast elections, but they also have to govern, and governing is where shared adversaries stop mattering and shared commitments start to.

    That is where the Cuban pattern stops being optional and becomes relevant. The American progressive left has spent two generations building its identity around expanding individual autonomy: reproductive rights, gender identity, secularism, and same-sex marriage treated as settled law rather than an open question. That identity has no version that survives being negotiated away.

    Political Islam does not share that center of gravity, and in key respects is built against it. Mainstream Islamic jurisprudence, across the major schools of fiqh treats homosexuality as haram, forbidden rather than merely disfavored. Islamist movements aren't organized around a live-and-let-live pluralism where competing moral frameworks coexist under a neutral state. Their project restores a fixed religious order, where questions the American left considers settled were resolved centuries ago by scripture, not open for renegotiation. That project has nothing to give away without ceasing to be itself. Two absolutes do not compromise. They wait.

    Picture the coalition after it wins, not before. Jeffries and Schumer are gone, the establishment is captured, and what remains are two movements that each require the other's core commitment to be false for its own to be true. The Red cannot concede on sexuality and gender without abandoning the autonomy politics that define it. The Green cannot concede the same ground without abandoning the order that defines it. There is no wiggle room in that arrangement, because both sides already spent it building the identities that made cooperation possible in opposition and impossible in government.

    Havana found itself in exactly that position come 1959. The men who won did not negotiate a shared vision for the country. One faction consolidated, and the others were removed from the board, by exile, by the jungle, by a plane that never landed. Nobody is predicting firing squads for Sacramento or Dearborn. But the mechanism doesn't require violence. It requires only a coalition reaching power without resolving what it actually agrees on, at which point the resolving happens anyway, later, on someone else's terms.

    None of this is cause for panic so much as attention, nor a claim that these movements lack the right to pursue their objectives. Read the platforms. Watch who campaigns with whom, which organizations supply the volunteers, and where the money moves. If the Red wants to replace capitalism, let it make the case openly; if the Green wants political influence, let it make its case too. What voters do with that, armed with full information, is what democracy is for.

    But democracy also depends on voters understanding what they're voting for, including the parts of the coalition's future that haven't been worked out yet. The Constitution doesn't protect citizens from political ignorance; it hands them the machinery of self-government and leaves them responsible for who operates it. The fight everyone can see, against the common enemy, is not the fight that decides what the country becomes. That fight comes after, between the allies, and history suggests it doesn't end in a treaty.

    Red and green do not blend into some glorious new political color. They make brown, and brown is the color of mud, decay, and shit.

    A fitting color for coalitions that confuse a common enemy with a common cause.

    Luis Gonzalez is the owner and publisher of The Last Wire, an independent blog covering news, politics, opinion, and the rabbit holes beneath the headlines. He has been writing online since 2000 and is the founder of Boiling Frogs, a personal blog launched in 2008. He hangs his hat at The Briefing Room, where he excels at the role of resident curmudgeon.

]]>

American Thinker

 

by Luis Gonzalez

    Sun Tzu made an observation, some 2,500 years ago, that modern coalition politics seems to have taken to heart, though no one credits him for it. Paraphrased loosely: an army does not need every soldier to want the same outcome. It needs them moving in the same direction until the battle is won.

    The Red and the Green appear to have absorbed the lesson without ever reading the book. Almost nobody asks what happens once the battle ends and there's no shared enemy left to hold the army together.

    The Red is the socialist left. The Green is political Islam. Different histories, different ambitions, different visions of the society each ultimately wants to build; on paper, that gap should make an alliance implausible. In practice, it hasn't stopped one from forming. Coalitions never require their members to agree about the final destination, only about what stands in the way of reaching one, and for now, the Democratic Party's own establishment: its incumbents, its machine, its money, its voters, serves that purpose well enough.

    History has already run this experiment. Revolutionary Cuba built its coalition against Batista out of men who agreed on almost nothing beyond wanting him gone. Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Ernesto "Che" Guevara fought side by side, but Che was already a committed Marxist, Raul stood further left than Fidel, and Camilo's own movement had promised a return to constitutional government once Batista fell. That promise did not survive him. Once the enemy was gone, the question became who got to decide what came next, and the coalition answered by leaving almost no one standing who might contest it. Camilo died in what the official record calls an accident, a plane that was never recovered. Che was "reassigned" to Bolivia and executed there. Raul remained, entrenched in a state bearing little resemblance to what the men who fought Batista had separately imagined building.

    Start with the Red. The Democratic Socialists of America have published a program advocating democratic socialism, public ownership of major industries, and structural changes to American government, including abolishing the Electoral College and the Senate and replacing capitalism with a socialist economy. A citizen can support that program or oppose it, but pretending it isn't on the table is not an argument. It's avoidance.

    Now the Green. The subject is not Muslims generally, but political Islam: movements in which religious identity becomes the organizing principle of a political project. Not every Muslim politician or voter is an Islamist, and political Islam spans multiple currents and attitudes toward violence.

    That overlap doesn't make these figures interchangeable or mean supporting them endorses political Islam's long-term aims. It means only that coalitions don't require ideological uniformity while there's an opponent left to beat. A movement that wins repeatedly reshapes the environment around it, and a coalition that reproduces itself becomes an institution. Institutions outlast elections, but they also have to govern, and governing is where shared adversaries stop mattering and shared commitments start to.

    That is where the Cuban pattern stops being optional and becomes relevant. The American progressive left has spent two generations building its identity around expanding individual autonomy: reproductive rights, gender identity, secularism, and same-sex marriage treated as settled law rather than an open question. That identity has no version that survives being negotiated away.

    Political Islam does not share that center of gravity, and in key respects is built against it. Mainstream Islamic jurisprudence, across the major schools of fiqh treats homosexuality as haram, forbidden rather than merely disfavored. Islamist movements aren't organized around a live-and-let-live pluralism where competing moral frameworks coexist under a neutral state. Their project restores a fixed religious order, where questions the American left considers settled were resolved centuries ago by scripture, not open for renegotiation. That project has nothing to give away without ceasing to be itself. Two absolutes do not compromise. They wait.

    Picture the coalition after it wins, not before. Jeffries and Schumer are gone, the establishment is captured, and what remains are two movements that each require the other's core commitment to be false for its own to be true. The Red cannot concede on sexuality and gender without abandoning the autonomy politics that define it. The Green cannot concede the same ground without abandoning the order that defines it. There is no wiggle room in that arrangement, because both sides already spent it building the identities that made cooperation possible in opposition and impossible in government.

    Havana found itself in exactly that position come 1959. The men who won did not negotiate a shared vision for the country. One faction consolidated, and the others were removed from the board, by exile, by the jungle, by a plane that never landed. Nobody is predicting firing squads for Sacramento or Dearborn. But the mechanism doesn't require violence. It requires only a coalition reaching power without resolving what it actually agrees on, at which point the resolving happens anyway, later, on someone else's terms.

    None of this is cause for panic so much as attention, nor a claim that these movements lack the right to pursue their objectives. Read the platforms. Watch who campaigns with whom, which organizations supply the volunteers, and where the money moves. If the Red wants to replace capitalism, let it make the case openly; if the Green wants political influence, let it make its case too. What voters do with that, armed with full information, is what democracy is for.

    But democracy also depends on voters understanding what they're voting for, including the parts of the coalition's future that haven't been worked out yet. The Constitution doesn't protect citizens from political ignorance; it hands them the machinery of self-government and leaves them responsible for who operates it. The fight everyone can see, against the common enemy, is not the fight that decides what the country becomes. That fight comes after, between the allies, and history suggests it doesn't end in a treaty.

    Red and green do not blend into some glorious new political color. They make brown, and brown is the color of mud, decay, and shit.

    A fitting color for coalitions that confuse a common enemy with a common cause.

    Luis Gonzalez is the owner and publisher of The Last Wire, an independent blog covering news, politics, opinion, and the rabbit holes beneath the headlines. He has been writing online since 2000 and is the founder of Boiling Frogs, a personal blog launched in 2008. He hangs his hat at The Briefing Room, where he excels at the role of resident curmudgeon.

]]>