During my military career, I have led people in combat and made choices with real consequences. From this experience, I can say with confidence that George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River in December 1776 was not desperate. It was a clear act of leadership.
By that point, Washington had suffered several defeats. Losing New York was a huge blow, and his army had been pushed back again and again. The British had the upper hand in almost every way—better ground, supplies, more troops, and momentum. Washington had lost the initiative and the trust of Congress and many leaders in Philadelphia, who started to expect a British win.
But Washington understood something that sets true leaders apart: an army’s will to fight depends not just on resources, but on the leader’s refusal to give up. His soldiers were hungry and sick, and they had every reason to walk away. In those conditions, giving up would have made sense.
Washington didn’t let his men think about surrender. Instead, he gave them a mission: cross a frozen river on Christmas night and attack the enemy at Trenton. He did this not because the odds were good, but because he truly believed the cause was still worth fighting for.
The win at Trenton mattered less for its size and more for how it lifted spirits. It changed the story and showed that winning was still possible. Washington’s refusal to give up inspired the whole nation to keep going. Washington won at Trenton because he chose to fight, even when things looked bad and success seemed unlikely. He took action when most would have given up.
This lesson isn’t easy or often taught today. Society usually tells people to wait for perfect conditions, more resources, or approval before acting. That kind of thinking leads to giving up. I’ve seen that key moments in military history frequently come from leaders who ignore common advice and keep going, even when things are tough.
Think of Washington at Trenton, Grant at Vicksburg, and Chamberlain at Gettysburg. In each case, the turning point occurred because a leader refused to give up and chose to act. People often forget that Washington didn’t win by waiting for help, approval, or a mistake from the enemy. He won because he made a clear choice and followed through with steadfastness and strong leadership.
I’ve seen this pattern in my own service. The best units under pressure aren’t always the ones with the best gear; they’re the ones led by people who won’t accept failure. When leaders are certain and assured, their teams follow. When leaders are unsure, people struggle. Washington had a clear goal: cross the Delaware and attack the Hessians. His troops followed him because they saw how determined he was, and that helped them refuse to give up too.
Today, some leaders tell Americans to give up, saying the system can’t be fixed, our opponents are too strong, and the cause is lost. They encourage people to just accept things as they are.
I’ve heard these views many times, including in 2020 when some said the election was lost for good and defending the Constitution was pointless. Others have argued that the government is too set in its ways for one person to make a difference. Usually, these ideas come from people who would rather settle than face tough challenges.
Every one of those people was wrong. You do not need permission to be the change. You don’t need Congress, a political party, or the media to approve you in order to show integrity, patriotism, or allegiance to the Constitution.
I didn’t become a general by waiting for someone else to lead. At every step, I took responsibility, acted when needed, and refused to give up for the people who counted on me. Now, you’re in charge of your own battlefield. That could be your neighborhood, your school, your family. Even your vote is an act of leadership.
People who focus on comfort often miss an important truth.
Historical change is not driven by those who seek comfort. At every turning point, people face a choice: to accept defeat and settle for comfort, or to take action for something greater. The first path is to surrender to the belief that the system is irreparably flawed, that resistance is pointless, and that no single effort will matter. This approach demands no sacrifice or courage and always results in the same outcome: surrender and stagnation.
The second path is harder. It requires pushing past the urge for safety and choosing to act, as Washington did when he crossed the Delaware. He was not motivated by ease or self-preservation, but by a sense of duty to his men, his country, and his faith. In making this choice, he showed that the Republic is worth the fight, that future generations deserve our effort, and that defending the Constitution calls for action, not just words. One individual’s certainty and commitment can change the direction of an entire community.
This way doesn’t promise quick results. Washington’s final victory took seven more years of fighting, including tough times at Valley Forge and many setbacks. But his choice to cross the Delaware and keep going at Trenton inspired Congress and gave hope to the states. In the end, America won its independence because one person thought the cause was worth it.
I’m asking you to make that same choice, not on a big stage, but right where you live. It could be as simple as helping a neighbor who is struggling or standing up for what’s right at a school board meeting. Leadership doesn’t always look grand. It happens every day when someone speaks up, lends a hand, or takes responsibility for the good of others.
It only takes one person. One person who decides not to give up. One person who won’t believe the story that the cause is lost.
We honor perseverance, and history remembers those who keep going when giving up would have been easier. The cause is still alive as long as even one American is willing to act.
Since the 2020 election, the most common response to claims of election fraud—from virtually all leftists and an unfortunate number of conservatives—has been that it either doesn’t exist or that it does but it’s time to move on. However, the earth-shattering declassifications President Trump revealed to the nation on July 16, along with the left-leaning networks’ decision to refuse to air them, prove that it is not merely necessary, but obligatory to once and for all uncover and end the practice of election fraud in America and prosecute those responsible.
During his 25-minute primetime address, President Trump revealed newly declassified information regarding five major areas of concern involving American elections and what he directly described as the Deep State: China’s acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files (including names, addresses, phone numbers, party affiliations of U.S. citizens and more), which he described as “the largest compromise of election data in history”; a subsequent cover-up of this and other key information by U.S. agencies such as the CIA and NSA; vulnerabilities in electronic voting and ballot-counting systems as well as other key election infrastructure; evidence of a massive voter fraud scheme in Michigan that was identified yet buried by government officials; and a DHS investigation that revealed hundreds of thousands of non-citizens on voter rolls throughout America.
This irrefutable information was unsurprising to those who have remained entrenched in the election integrity fight for the better part of a decade. But to the average citizen—who has been inundated with rehearsed lines about the 2020 election being “the most secure election in American history” (which Trump himself mocked during the address) or that election fraud is impossible and nothing more than a right-wing conspiracy theory—it was quite damning. Regardless of where one stood before the address, the question most are asking now is whether it still matters and, if so, why?
Firstly, though the Biden administration has come and gone, accurately documenting our nation’s history remains a matter of historical significance. To date, no official records note the various ways the 2020 election was illegally conducted—through governors and secretaries of state changing election laws and procedures that are reserved to state legislatures—or illegitimately certified, as was admitted this past January in Georgia. The only way to rectify this, no matter how long after the fact, is to follow the path toward total clarity that President Trump is leading. Additionally, while Trump did not go as far as announcing Georgia’s two Democrat senators as illegitimate —as some rumors (or perhaps leaks) alleged he would—the revelations he presented (along with other documented instances of fraud outside of the scope of these findings) strongly suggest that is the case. We are therefore still suffering injury as a nation from past election fraud, including from 2020. And due to the disproportionate resistance election fraud investigations face, we do not know how many other officials acquired their offices through illegitimate means. Such a travesty should be addressed regardless of how close the balance of power is. But this dilemma carries even greater weight considering Republican’s razor-thin Senate majority has proven insufficient to pass the Save America Act—the most powerful presently available mechanism to prevent election fraud from recurring.
Secondly, the declassified emails that were unearthed confirmed a tangible Deep State at work, not just vague speculation or allusions to one. The China breach, identified by the FBI months before the 2020 election, involved manufacturing illegal ballots for Joe Biden. Yet internal emails show intelligence analysts admitting they “deliberately massaged the presidential daily briefing to withhold information regarding Chinese activities related to the election,” while an FBI official described “running a shadow government”—both efforts aimed at preventing President Trump and the public from learning the truth and stopping the threat before the election. A separate scheme in 2020 that was reported to the FBI in Michigan saw state police raid a Democrat Get Out The Vote operation that revealed widespread fraud, including canvassers who admitted to signing voter registration forms in others’ names, submitting fraudulent registrations for people who did not exist, and receiving gift cards tied to the number of applications that they produced. Despite these key admissions, the investigation was slow-walked until the Biden administration took power and was subsequently squashed. The term “Deep State” has been overused to such a degree that many have become numb to its reality. But its existence—including an open admission of a shadow government—is now undeniable, even to those previously fearful of being labeled as crazy for believing so.
Lastly, one key element not detailed in the documents, but central to this grand conspiracy, is the mainstream media. China accessed sensitive information on 220 million Americans—a number that reaches nearly all voting-age American citizens (240 million) and far more than the roughly 175 million registered to vote. This alone signals a national emergency, yet numerous mainstream networks partook in a frantic weeklong scramble to “debunk” all of Trump’s forthcoming revelations before knowing what they would be—an inherently impossible task until the claims have been heard, analyzed, and investigated, which in and of itself is an extensive and time-consuming process. This, combined with their decision to not air Trump’s election fraud address while simultaneously trying to convince viewers there isn’t any, confirmed to every American—regardless of political affiliation—the exact opposite. Almost unbelievably, they dug their grave even deeper in the days that followed by citing the CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY’S denial as evidence that the revelations unearthed by the AMERICAN PRESIDENT, were untrue.
To this day, the media-Democrat party duo has condescendingly framed election fraud as nothing more than a coping mechanism concocted by the world’s biggest sore loser. While their framing was effective in keeping the focus away from the fraud itself and those carrying it out for a time—as was its intended purpose—most now know this to be untrue. Public perception has shifted, and actively present election fraud—which was the only thing preventing Americans from discovering that most strong Democrat showings in elections are lies birthed from fraud and propaganda, and is also the mechanism that results in our elections seemingly always resulting in a near-50-50 result—has become undeniable.
This explains why the Democrat party vehemently opposes election-securing measures, despite the vast majority of Americans—and even a majority of Democrat voters—supporting them. It also explains why the media refuses to even cover it as a possibility, let alone a present reality, and why the “get over 2020” crowd is so mistaken. Election integrity is by far the most important issue of our time. Immigration, the economy, and foreign affairs are ever-present top issues of concern for Americans, rightfully so. But without free, fair, and trustworthy elections, as we saw in 2020, a candidate overwhelmingly preferred by the majority can still be denied his rightful office. And as long as those who enabled this system remain unaccountable, fraud will continue to disenfranchise the will of the people.
If last week’s revelations do not convince those straddling the fence that election integrity is a cause worth fighting for, nothing will.
Matt Kane served in President Trump’s second administration as Assistant Press Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security. Follow on X:@MattKaneUSA, Truth Social: @MattKane.
The group of radical female congresswomen who call themselves “the Squad” was supposed to be a triumph for feminism, but behind the scenes they serve as meal tickets for very shady men.
The latest scandal involving the “Squad Husbands” was the dead body of a teenage girl turning up in a house owned by Conan Harris: the husband of Squad member Rep. Ayanna Pressley.
Yoseliani “Liani” Marte, 18, was found shot and killed in a Boston home owned by Harris, who was already in the middle of a scandal over his company scoring a $2 billion contract to build a courthouse. Harris, who became a “public safety adviser” after leaving prison, co-owns the company whose other partner heads the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority. Their company received the high profile government contract despite Harris having spent 10 years in prison on felony drug trafficking charges and having been accused of assaulting a reporter.
Even while that scandal was breaking, former Rep. Cori Bush, who had been ousted in a previous election, was in the news for trying to mount a comeback while putting her husband Cortney Merritts on the payroll to provide her with security. Bush had argued for defunding the police only to be caught paying her husband with campaign funds to be her private police.
Bush’s loss was attributed in part to the scandal surrounding her diversion of over $150,000 to her “secret” husband for serving as her bodyguard. Merritts was indicted on two counts of wire fraud for allegedly fraudulent PPP loans after the feds accused him of lying on his application, but a hung jury in his court case resulted in an acquittal. Former Rep. Bush had also faced an ethics investigation for the six figure campaign funds payments to her husband.
None of the Squad members can seem to escape money problems with their Squad Husbands because Rep. Ilhan Omar is also in the news after initially filing a disclosure that claimed she and her Squad Husband had assets of between $6 million and $30 million only to ‘correct’ that down to a claim that her husband, who owns a venture capital firm, only made $200 last year.
Rep. Omar’s aides claimed that the disclosure form revealing millions to tens of millions of dollars in assets was an “accounting error” and “that Omar looked at the form before it was filed in 2025, but that the error didn’t jump off the page for her because she isn’t involved with her husband’s businesses.”
If we are to believe Rep. Ilhan Omar, she was so uninvolved with “her husband’s businesses” that she had no idea whatsoever whether he had $30 million or $200. Omar’s lawyer issued a statement contending that “as the busiest of people, it is very common for members and their spouses to rely on learned professionals like accountants to make calculations and determinations that appear on public filings.” And too busy to notice the minor difference between $30 million and $200.
But that’s just the latest chapter in Rep. Omar’s “Squad Husband” soap opera.
After previously being accused of marrying her own brother, leading to calls for a congressional investigation over possible immigration fraud, Omar was also accused of cheating on her second Somali husband, fellow Somali Ahmed Hirsi, with Tim Mynett, a white political consultant whose consulting firm, E Street Group, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from the Omar congressional campaign and would eventually take in $3 million.
Omar and Mynett divorced their spouses and married. The scandal reportedly led to Omar’s father, Somali war criminal Col. Nur Omar Mohamed (whom Somalilanders have accused of genocide), refusing to see his daughter for disgracing the family as he died of COVID.
However, Omar and Mynett were apparently just getting started. Shortly after their marriage, Mynett created Rose Lake Capital, described on his bio as “former members of Congress and Ambassadors, thought leaders and financial experts – skilled operators bringing the right people together to drive results. A multinational holding company committed to doing good in the world.” One of the ambassadors was a former Qatari lobbyist. Qatar is an Islamic terror state.
Between 2023 and 2024, Mynett’s organizations, Rose Lake Capital and eStCru, a California winery, went from being worth $51,000 with only $700 in cash to that aforementioned $30 million while Rose Lake Capital was supposedly being backed with a massive $60 billion in assets.
These business ventures led to multiple lawsuits, including one alleging fraud and involving a drug business, suggesting that the Omar family has benefited from marijuana sales. Another lawsuit by a Muslim D.C. restaurant owner claimed that he had been promised that the winery would triple his money or that he would be paid 10% interest. (Wine and taking interest are both in violation of Islamic Sharia law. As is adultery.) The winery has since shut down.
And since no “Squad Husband” could be without ethical and legal drama, even when he isn’t a husband, the decision by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to list her boyfriend as her husband led to a formal rebuke from the House Ethics Committee over AOC’s boyfriend, Riley Roberts, getting a complimentary $35,000 ticket to attend the Met Gala. That was the same event where AOC was also found to have violated ethics regulations with her infamous lavish “Tax the Rich” dress for taking “impermissible gifts” worth over $3,000.
Rep. Ocasio Cortez had tried to have it both ways, arguing that Roberts should have spouse privileges like a ‘spouse pin’ granting him access to Congress, and allowing him to come on sponsored trips abroad, while also arguing that Roberts should not be subject to financial disclosures because the two aren’t officially married.
Roberts has been listed as a “fiance” since 2022. That’s two whole congressional terms.
This is convenient because, while Roberts tends to be described as an “Arizona web designer,” he had financial ties to AOC’s campaign, with thousands of dollars coming to him from a PAC working for AOC and an official listing as a staffer. One of the trips where AOC wrongly listed her boyfriend as a spouse for travel purposes was to an event funded by a Soros-linked organization. Funding from Soros groups has led to concerns about the radical billionaire family buying control of the political process.
The Squad was praised as an example of strong female leadership, but 4 out of 5 of its female members used public office and campaigns to move money to their husbands and boyfriends.
Half of those husbands have been charged with serious crimes.
The Squad uses its Squad-Husbands to get rich while being accused of crime, fraud, corruption, and ethical violations. Feminism now means putting your deadbeat husbands and boyfriends on the payroll, making TikTok videos ranting about capitalism, while they make off with the money.
AOC, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush and Ayanna Pressley all paid their men with public money. They claimed to be reformers, but who’s going to reform them?
Midwest Poultry Services is recalling 1.6 million eggs over concerns that they could be contaminated with salmonella, the Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday.
The recall covers white-shell and cage-free shell eggs produced at the company’s Texas farms and distributed to retailers in six states.
Salmonella Enteritidis can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in vulnerable populations such as young children or older adults. Symptoms in otherwise healthy people can include fever, diarrhea, nausea and vomiting.
The recalled eggs from Texas farms were produced and distributed to customers across six states between June 6 and July 3, according to the FDA’s recall notice. Their sell-by or best-by dates are between July 20 and Aug. 17, and they were sold under multiple brand names, including Kroger, Simple Truth, Brookshire’s, Country Morning and Sunups.
Here’s where the recalled eggs were sold:
Arkansas: Brookshire Grocery stores
Louisiana: Kroger, Brookshire Grocery stores
Mississippi: Brookshire Grocery stores
New Mexico: Brookshire Grocery stores
Oklahoma: Brookshire Grocery stores
Texas: Kroger, Brookshire Grocery stores
The eggs were also sold at other smaller retail outlets, according to the FDA, which said that no other products for the poultry firm are part of the latest recall.
No illnesses have been reported related to the eggs, according to Midwest Poultry Services.
How did it uncover the issue?
The firm identified the issue through what it described as “proactive environmental monitoring practices and root cause analysis” on its two Texas farms. It has since paused the distribution of any fresh eggs produced at the farms.
Consumers should not eat the recalled eggs and should return them to the place of purchase for a full refund. A complete list of affected products is available in the FDA’s recall notice.
It is worth recalling how we got here, because the road, while sadly well-worn, is instructive. In April 2004, Google launched Gmail, and Americans in some quarters had a minor conniption. Google scanned the text of your email to place ads beside it; no human read anything, the company insisted, but 31 privacy organizations demanded the launch be suspended. A California state senator introduced a bill to stop it. Editorial pages lectured. The idea that a corporation would read your correspondence to sell you shoes struck ordinary Americans as self-evidently creepy.
That was the high-water mark of our resistance.
Google’s Eric Schmidt later described the company’s policy as getting “right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” But the creepy line, it turns out, is not a line at all. It is a treadmill. Each incursion recalibrates what counts as normal, and the next one starts from the new baseline. We accepted the scanned inbox, then the tracked search history, then the phone that logs our location every few seconds, then the doorbell that streams to a server, then the speaker that listens in the kitchen. Every step was convenient. Every step was voluntary, more or less. And each step made the next one unremarkable.
So, when a private company wired up 6,000 municipalities with AI-powered cameras and made every American’s driving history searchable by tens of thousands of police officers – plus, as audits kept revealing, federal agencies that were never supposed to have access – there was no 2004-style temper tantrum. There couldn’t be. The capacity for that outrage was slowly spent over 20 years.
This is what a slow decline looks like. Not a boot, not a coup, but a subscription.
The surveillance is only half the issue. Read what Silicon Valley’s most powerful men say they are building, and a familiar image emerges.
Some predict AI will deliver universal high income and a world of such abundance that saving for retirement won’t matter. Bill Gates, when not rationalizing his time with Jeffrey Epstein, muses that humans won’t be needed “for most things,” and floats the two-day work week. Sam Altman writes of a coming age in which intelligence is too cheap to meter and the machines handle the tedium while we flourish. Work becomes optional. Leisure becomes universal. The algorithms will manage things.
Set aside whether any of it is true. Notice what kind of promise it is: You will be freed from the burdens of running your own life, because a smarter class of managers – made of silicon, this time – will run it for you. Your commute will be optimized. Your neighborhood watched. Your needs anticipated. Your income guaranteed. All you must do is surrender the management of it all. And in so doing, your civil rights – and your humanity itself.
We have heard this promise before, almost word for word … a hundred years ago.
The progressives of the early 20th century were not villains in the classic sense of the word. They were, by their own lights, humanitarians armed with the newest science. Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson, and the so-called reformers around them looked at the messy, inefficient business of American self-government and offered a deal: Hand the complicated questions to trained experts. They’d be nonpartisans, they said, scientific, disinterested. Government would finally run like the modern machine it ought to be. Wilson said the Constitution’s clunky separation of powers belonged to the age of Newton; government, he argued, was a living thing that must evolve past such complicating checks. The citizen’s job would shrink, pleasantly. The expert’s job would grow, efficiently. Everyone would have more time for the higher things, the greater good.
It was the same trade-off the so-called “tech bros” now pitch, with slide rules instead of servers: liberation through management.
The only problem is that 20th century progressives only delivered half of their promise. They built the managerial apparatus, layer upon layer upon layer: the alphabet agencies, the administrative rulemaking that now outproduces Congress by orders of magnitude, the delegation of lawmaking to bodies no voter can touch. What never arrived was the expanded freedom.
The expert class did not hand citizens more self-government once the trains ran on time; it discovered, decade after decade, new domains that required its supervision. The promise was leisure from politics. The product was a permanent, unelected government and a citizenry gradually reclassified from self-governing agents into objects of administration: clients, cases, data points. The federal government the progressives inherited could be laid out and summarized in a pamphlet. The one they built, ironically, probably requires AI-powered data centers to understand and navigate.
The tech founders’ promise is the progressive promise with cooler hardware: not expert commissions but algorithms, not the Bureau of Efficiency but the Nova platform, not the case file but the vehicle fingerprint. The vocabulary has changed; “optimization” for “scientific management,” “abundance” for “progress,” but the trade-off is identical. You are offered comfort and asked to surrender control. And as before, the comfort is speculative while the control is given away up front. Universal high income has not arrived. The 20 billion monthly scans are already here.
In my documentary, “The Thread of Liberty: Saving Our Republic,” I note that in 1840, in the second volume of “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville tried to imagine what despotism would look like in a democratic age and concluded it would look like nothing history had ever produced. Not cruel, but soft. He described “an immense and tutelary power” that “covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform.” A power that “does not tyrannize, it hinders,” that keeps its citizens “in perpetual childhood” precisely by providing for them, that “every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent.” He wondered what would remain of a people who were spared “all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living.”
Tocqueville could not have foreseen the license plate reader. But “citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording” is soft despotism wrapped in a marketing pitch. Best behavior is not the behavior of free citizens; it is the behavior of the supervised. A republic does not require subjects who behave because they are watched. Those people belong in Russia or Iran or China. A republic requires citizens who govern themselves because they are free. The habit of self-government, like any habit, atrophies when someone else does the governing.
Is there any hope? Perhaps. A Flock backlash has emerged, and it is working through the channels the Founders left us.
This pushback is not being initiated by a federal privacy czar, not a blue-ribbon commission of experts, but town councils, local judges, aggrieved, neighbors organizing. It turns out that remedy for the managerial promise is the very thing it proposes to replace. Imagine that.
The cameras are not the disease. They are a symptom of a century-old habit of trading self-government for the promise of being well-managed. A promise that has never once been kept, and whose down payment is always the same: watch me, regulate me, decide for me, and in exchange I will finally be comfortable. The progressives called it “administration.” The tech bros call it “abundance.” Tocqueville called it, more honestly, a kind of servitude that “does not break wills, but softens them, bends them, and directs them.”
The camera on the pole at the entrance to your neighborhood is asking you a question to challenge you. It is the same question the republic has always asked. Not, “Are you behaving?” Larry Ellison is free to own that one.
The question is whether you are still willing to govern yourself.
Ned Ryun is the founder and CEO of American Majority.
President Donald Trump is marching full steam ahead in support of “absolutely incredible” data centers being built across the United States, and told Americans: “You’re becoming a utility.”
The remarks came during Trump’s roughly 20 minute remarks during a Thursday visit to Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters in Washington D.C., during which he called data centers a “really important subject.”
“It is something that you’re very familiar with. The people in the room are real doers. It’s an amazing group,” Trump continued.
“We are here today to continue the incredible progress we are making in communities nationwide, to ensure that as new data centers go up, and they’re going up all over, electricity bills for American families will actually come down.”
“You’re going to be building your own data centers, and you’re going to build your own electric plants. You are essentially becoming a utility, like Con Edison in New York,” he added.
“But maybe at a level that nobody’s ever seen before, because we’ve seen some of the plants they’re building are absolutely incredible. They’re absolutely incredible,” the president said.
“Electric plants, electric manufacturing plants. It’s hard to believe, but you need double the electricity that we have right now, maybe even more than that to really fulfill what you want to do.”
“We’re leading China by a lot, and using our old grid would not have worked. I came up with the idea: build your own plant. Nobody can complain. You won’t call me and say what a terrible job I’m doing because we have a 200-year-old grid that’s not the best in the world,” Trump also said.
“You look at some places. Take a look at California; they have brownouts and blackouts every weekend. The last thing they are going to be able to do is supply electric at numbers. Nobody has ever explained to me why it’s so much electricity, why you need so much. Nor did I care that much, to be honest with you.”
The president’s data center push comes as Americans are increasingly against construction of the facilities.
A poll by Emerson College published this week found 63% of voters in the U.S. oppose the centers being built in their communities; opponents often cite environmental concerns as a major reason why. The poll was conducted July 19 and 20.
What’s wrong with President Trump? He has endorsed Lindsey Graham’s sister to replace him in the U.S. Senate. The woman stands for “affordability and health care.” She could just as easily be a Democrat. We have no clue what she’d stand for in office, but he promises she’ll never let us down. And then there’s Iran. We all know we have to finish the job with massively superior firepower. Why postpone the inevitable?
And not one successful indictment of an American traitor despite all the evidence against Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and many high profile others. I hesitate to criticize a man — the only man — who has displayed the courage to expose what’s wrong with America.
But the truth is the truth: we are not winning. The clock is ticking, and the nastiest totalitarians in history are coming for America in the form of the Democratic Party if it returns to power.
How the government drove out the science of risk from the entire business of consumer pricing of health care insurance.
In the movie Paddington, a bear moves in with a London family. The father of the house is an insurance actuary. As the bear is bathing, he places a panicked call to his home insurer to add a provision in his policy for the presence of a bear.
The movie has fun with the trope that actuaries are boring, nerdy, and maniacally focused on discerning and pricing risk in multivariate settings. We laugh but they are essential to our lives.
Let’s explore this as it pertains to health.
For years now, there has been a huge question on the part of many. Should you get the mRNA shots and boosters? How many? Or do their risks outweigh their potential benefits?
The answer, if there is any chance that they accomplish the good that the CDC promises, obviously depends on demographics. But where is the cutoff and what are the relative risks?
To answer the question, we go to experts, presumably not those who have failed us so miserably for years now. We find others, but even here we discover debate, studies, uncertainties of data, and various interpretations of that data. Everyone is shouting at each other.
What precisely are the costs of being wrong in the decision? For the individual, they are high. For everyone else, the answer doesn’t matter much. The pharmaceutical companies don’t pay a price. They are indemnified against liability, an egregious privilege that has ruined all incentives to produce working products. Nor do the insurers. They are going to get their beloved premiums regardless of the risks that individuals take.
That means, essentially, people are flying blind on this crucially important topic. And it is hardly the only one.
What is the best diet for health? Some people push the Mediterranean diet and others the Blue Zone. Some people say we should eat vastly more meat and others say vastly less or none. Some people say down with seed oils and others say the risks are exaggerated.
Then there are the fad diets: carrots, blueberries, pumpernickel bread, or whatever. And treatments: some people swear by allopathic regulars and others insist that traditional Chinese, chiropractic, or homeopathic medicine has a lot to offer. Who’s to say?
Or what about the costs of obesity? Some people say it is devastating and is the underlying issue in the huge increase in heart disease while others say this is just aesthetic discrimination. What are the risks vs benefits of the new weight-loss drugs originally developed for diabetes? Everyone argues about this problem but we lack actionable data that could make itself known in insurance premiums.
Even issues like vaping and drinking wine are affected here, with some people saying these are harmless and others swearing that they are far more dangerous than is usually admitted.
These debates affect truly everything from birthing strategies to vaccines themselves. Multitudes have lost trust in experts from on high but hardly anyone knows where to turn to otherwise. And this becomes massively important with crucial decisions like cancer. If you get the diagnosis, you find yourself in an epistemic void.
Or take a simple example: masks. Fauci said we should not wear masks. Then he said we should wear them. Then he said we should wear two masks. He said that this reduces risk. Other people said that this was ridiculous. There is simply no science behind the claim.
Well, who was right? It was some experts over other experts and the rest of us were left to do Internet searches.
This is ridiculous. There is an active industry wholly dedicated to risk assessment. It has professional credentialing, a dedication to facts, a broadness of mind to include as many relevant factors as possible. They could have told us the answer had they been assigned to the case. Tragically, they were not assigned to the case so we ended up having millions and billions of people easily manipulated by a quack doctor in the pay of the panic industry.
In truth, we know far less than we ought to know about any of these issues. Why? Here is the fundamental reason. The actuaries have been disempowered in the health care industry as it directly affects consumers.They were silenced in 1996 with HIPAA legislation that said actuarial tables could no longer impact premiums in group insurance plans. Then in 2010, Obamacare got rid of them completely from individual plans.
No longer was the science of risk part of premium assessment so far as individual premiums are concerned. Actuaries are still active within the industry; the premiums come from somewhere. But their data is not permitted to affect the pricing of plans based on particular risks of individuals and their health decisions.
This whole disaster was promoted in the name of getting rid of discrimination against pre-existing conditions. But this was just the rhetoric. What this did in fact was drive out the science of risk from the entire business of consumer pricing of health care insurance. That’s why we are at such a loss even to discover known facts.
Actuaries specialize in assessing the probabilities of outcomes given an existing set of facts. The risk of those outcomes are priced and weighed against premiums. There are many beautiful features of the profession but one of them is the role of causation, the most difficult problem in all sciences: they are far less concerned about that conundrum than the raw facts. As a consequence, the resulting formulas are constantly changing in light of new data and then the new reality is conveyed to consumers in terms of risk.
Let’s say there is a high incidence of cancer near a lithium mine and that starts to impact on health care costs. In an actuarially informed market, this reality might be reflected in risk premiums.
But let’s say another provider doubts there is any real causal connection and declines to price that risk. Consumers are in a position to decide, and the course of events reveals who made the better guess. They don’t have to wait for randomized controlled trials or otherwise infer causality based on data. They compete to see who has the best theory based on a given set of facts.
There is no longer an industry publicly active in health care that examines such questions and prices plans based on what they know. They are still active in auto, home, fire, and life. There are at least 50,000 certified actuaries who examine facts and adjust premiums based on behavior or demographics. That’s why we have smoke alarms in our houses and why white cars are more popular than black cars. The insurers tell us, through the price system, and not through force, that which increases and reduces risk.
We know for sure, for example, that driving safely lowers accident risk. That’s why a bad driving record will increase your premiums. And therefore you also have a strong financial incentive for driving safely and getting fewer tickets. It’s right there in the pricing structure. You don’t need anyone hectoring you constantly to drive safely. The incentive to do so is built into the price system.
The actuaries also know for sure that young men are at greater risk for accidents than older women. This is not invidious “discrimination.” It’s just what the facts say and everyone recognizes it. It is merely the exercise of economic rationality. It’s what the risk premiums adjusted for markets make clear.
Here’s one: premiums for electric vehicle insurance are typically 25 percent higher than for internal combustion cars. The reason is the higher price for the car, higher repair bills, the extreme risk of battery replacements, and the low resale value. This discourages buyers and rightly so.
If someone says that EVs are safer and more affordable than gas cars, we have the facts on the ground to prove otherwise. If that were true, the insurance would be lower. You might buy an EV if only to save on insurance costs.
Imagine if car insurance were governed by HIPAA or Obamacare. There is simply no way we would know this. People would argue back and forth about it, with some experts shouting down others. With a real market for car insurance, no one needs to shout. We only need to read the price tags.
This is not true in personal health management. There is so much we as consumers do not know. What are the risks of vaccines vs. actually acquiring natural immunity for, for example, chicken pox? There are debates and arguments but no clear way to discern the answer in concrete terms.
Or consider another controversy: breastfeeding vs. bottle feeding and the risk of breast cancer? Or what about birth control and depression? Is there a link?
People tear each other apart over such debates but we have no agreement on facts on the ground to make a clear assessment. If the actuaries were part of the mix, and their data could affect what we pay and therefore what we do, we would have greater clarity.
What about weight-reduction surgeries? Or let’s get really dicey: what about gender-based reconstruction surgery and the risks thereof? Some people say that not granting “gender-affirming care” leads to suicide while others say that cutting a person up when he or she is young leads to a lifetime of regret.
These are the kinds of questions that scientific risk assessment could answer as the data unfolds in real time. If gender surgery leads to vastly higher insurance premiums – and do you really doubt it? – you would have your answer. That way the costs would obtain a rational assessment. Otherwise we are just guessing.
People say we should be taking more vitamin D and eating less surgery desserts and that’s probably right. But how much? There is surely real-time data we could obtain outside randomized controlled trials. We are in fact surrounded by cases that could be closely examined based on experience with premiums adjusted as facts come in. But because of huge interventions, such an industry that informs market pricing based on individual choice doesn’t exist.
I was speaking to some professional actuaries about this whole issue and raised the problem of lying. For example, people are notorious for lying about how much they drink. What does the industry do about this? His answer came quickly: if accurate reporting impacts the profitability of the risk, the policyholder would have every incentive to submit to regular proof tests of various sorts. If he or she didn’t want to do that, he or she would pay for the difference.
See how this works? With a developed enough industry, we would come to know the price of everything. We would know how much a trip to the gym saves us, how much that extra cocktail costs us, how much we are really paying for that double chocolate cake, and how much that bong hit will affect our premiums.
We’ll know how many miles we should be walking, how much tennis to play, and how much weight we need to lose. We’ll even know arcane things like: is boxing or fencing good for health enough to lower our premiums or so dangerous that they raise our premiums? Right now, we do not know. With an actual functioning market, we would know, or at least we would have a window into what real-world experience suggests.
The power is absolutely not to sanction another group of experts. The point is to gather information so that we can make more rational judgments with the best-possible understanding of risks.
Guess who doesn’t want such a market? The pharmaceutical industry. They want us to take a maximum amount of drugs and then more drugs to counteract the ill effects of those drugs and so on. The last thing this industry wants is a signaling system that says: stop taking these products because they are increasing the risk of ill health! They would fight tooth and nail against such a truth-telling system.
Without any pricing information for any of these questions, we are all merely groping around in the dark for answers, like Soviet central planners trying to maximize production but having no rational understanding for how best to do so. We are trying to gain health but still failing and this is for a very obvious reason.
After all, obesity in America went from 23 percent to 45 percent after we lost the ability to rationally price risk. This should not be a surprise! This is exactly what you would expect.
It’s not just that “non-discrimination” reduces the will to health, which it certainly does. It also denies us reliable information for figuring out how best to obtain health. This is why every single subject listed above leads to wild arguments and unhinged speculations and gives rise to ridiculous gurus telling us this theory or myth or that theory or lie. Because of legislation, we have actively denied ourselves access to valuable information on how to get healthy and obtain any reward for doing so.
This is especially true in a pandemic. What is the real risk of Disease X? To whom does it pertain? How best to reduce the damage? What kinds of mitigation strategies get the results to minimize the costs to insurers? We knew NONE of this for certain during the last go-round because we have no industry dedicated to discovering this information in any reliable way. We had “the science” but vast amounts of that turned out to be fake. Actuaries have a strong stake in cranking out and pricing true information, even if that involves doing lab tests themselves.
What about “pre-existing” conditions? These should be handled initially through regular welfare programs or, better, through philanthropic interests. The American Cancer Society can provide for patients and so too with other special-interest philanthropies. In addition, catastrophic risk can be priced into insurance too, same as any other risk, and policies offered for that as well. The premium would be adjusted based on behavior and demographics.
There will never be serious healthcare reform in this country until legislators take on this crucially important topic. And until they do, we will continue to have a completely irrational system that lies to us, disincentivizes healthy living, and fails to reward people for health or even explains the fact on how best to obtain it.
Emancipating the actuarial scientists and letting them speak to the issue of health care insurance premiums might sound like a technical fix to what is a system-wide problem. It’s certainly not a panacea. In healthcare today, corruption is rampant. The journals, the universities, the regulators, the distributors, and the media are all captured and part of a racket that is deeply embedded in all operations. Even this suggestion is highly contingent on other reforms, at the minimum disconnecting individual plans from employer control. And that’s just the start.
Still, it is undeniable that the real catastrophe has been the leveling out of premiums and the elimination of risk assessment associated with them. That system is a proven failure and it has led to disaster. It needs to be ended immediately and replaced by a system that gathers and deploys factual information toward a rational and more truth-telling system in the interest of everyone.
There is an additional benefit of putting the actuaries to work on pricing individual plans. No longer could the FDA/CDC machine lie to the public. Or if they chose to, we could explose those lies immediately.
The point is not to disable one machine only to put another machine in its place. The purpose here is to make operational the information we have so that we can obtain and act on more of it – verifiable information supplied by industrial players in a competitive environment so that health care can begin to operate like a normal market player.
This simply cannot happen without viable actuarial data that can inform pricing systems that account for real-world risk.
The observations above are hardly novel. They are rooted in three core insights about the signaling function of market institutions and pricing in particular.
The economic calculation problem was identified by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 with his famed article on the issue. In it, he presciently predicted that any attempt by a state to abolish or otherwise collectivize capital would render accounting meaningless and thus lead to a tremendous overutilization of resources. That is precisely what has happened to American healthcare, in which trillions and trillions are thrown at a problem that keeps getting worse.
The knowledge problem was singled out by F.A. Hayek in his famed article from 1945. The collectivization of resources, he argued, would blind all producers and consumers to information they need to navigate a constantly changing economic terrain, knowledge that can only be revealed through a process of ongoing discovery. The use of knowledge in health care is of extreme importance, given that the best plan of action is “not given to anyone in its totality.” It can only be revealed in the course of real-world choice.
The third problem is the incentive problem, explained by countless observers for centuries. If there is no financial penalty at all for ill health – indeed if the reward runs entirely in the opposite direction especially for suppliers – we can expect more of it and less of what it is we are seeking to obtain. Subsidize something and get more of it: this is a fact of the way the world works. And the opposite is true: all else equal, a higher price reduces the quantity demanded.
Ill health has not only been subsidized. The truth about its cause and its solution has been suppressed because of legislation that mandates that everyone be treated the same regardless of risk. This is not a real market but a fake one, even if most of the main players are nominally working in the private sector. Otherwise there is no real functioning market at all. This is a sector dominated by corporatists and not market structures.
There are myriad issues in healthcare that are crying out for reform. The large and mandated benefits packages serve no purpose for most people. The whole system of employer-provided plans increases the costs of switching jobs and embroils enterprises in a system that should not involve them. The regulations of the industry are extreme with the regulatory agencies captured by the biggest industrial players. The indemnification of pharma against liability for harm is contrary to all justice.
All of this is true. But it is also true that health insurance needs a new pricing structure that is not based on a one-size-fits-all model that it is now. Health and therefore healthcare expenses are highly tuned to individual choice. We need more information about the best choices, and that information can only come to us once the specialists who know the data are allowed to impact pricing structures in ways they currently cannot.
Is it too much to ask that health insurance take a cue from automotive insurance, rewarding people for better behavior and charging more for great risk? It would not seem so. Such a reform would at least be a step in the right direction.
To return to our opening example of Paddington bear, having that guy in your house surely does increase the risk of accidents. We might love that bear so much that we are happy to pay the differential but it is good to know how much the decision is going to cost us. Otherwise we are just flying blind
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, including Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. Follow him at @jeffreyatucker .
The Los Angeles Times recently published a “News Analysis” headlined: “Trump, long a critic of ‘forever wars,’ may be stumbling into one with Iran.”
The analysis offers legitimate grounds for criticizing President Donald Trump. He has described the objectives of the war against Iran in different ways. He has made changing predictions about its duration. He has repeatedly suggested that an agreement was near, only for negotiations to collapse. He promised no more endless Middle East wars, yet the conflict has continued for months, American servicemembers have died, and the administration has not clearly defined what victory looks like.
All fair questions. But the article omits the most important question of all: Why did the war begin?
Similarly, recent analyses in Time, The Washington Post and Politico raise many of the same objections. Yet, here, too, none address the threshold question: Was Iran close to obtaining a nuclear weapon—and if so, how close?
Trump, from the beginning of the war, said the primary purpose was to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte publicly agreed with Trump and said Iran was close to acquiring a nuclear and ballistic-missile capability “which is posing a threat not only to the region, the Middle East, including posing an existential threat to Israel, it is also posing a huge threat to us here in Europe.”
Was that assessment correct?
The Times quotes three experts who explain why Trump may be “stumbling” into a “forever war.” Yet the article does not ask any of them whether Iran was close to producing a nuclear weapon. It does not ask what Iran might have done with one. And it does not ask what they would have proposed to prevent it.
Suppose Iran was nowhere near a bomb. Suppose its nuclear program posed no imminent danger and could have been contained indefinitely through inspections, sanctions and negotiations. In that case, Trump’s decision to use military force becomes far harder, if not impossible, to defend.
But suppose Trump and Rutte were right. Suppose Iran was approaching the point at which it could produce a nuclear weapon along with increasingly capable missiles. It could intimidate its neighbors, protect its terrorist proxies and trigger a regional nuclear-arms race.
That would not automatically prove that every Trump decision was wise. It would not excuse shifting explanations, unrealistic timelines, failed ceasefires or poor planning, if that was the case. But it would establish that the president did not simply awaken one morning and decide he felt like bombing a country. It would establish that he took action when previous presidents chose not to—an action no other country on earth was willing or able to undertake.
Americans cannot intelligently judge this war when major news organizations discuss its costs while barely mentioning the danger it was intended to prevent.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed recently denounced “a war we should have never started.” Yet the interviewer never asked: Was Iran close to a nuclear weapon? If not, what evidence disproves that claim? If so, what would you have done about it, if anything?
Sanctions? Iran endured them for years.
Negotiations? Iranian negotiators broke the memorandum of understanding before the ink was dry.
Inspections? Those work only when inspectors receive genuine access without notice and only if Iran allows the inspectors to inspect.
Containment? That means accepting the risk that the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism remains determined to acquire a nuclear weapon while hoping deterrence works forever.
That is what serious analysis looks like.
Critics may conclude that military action was unnecessary, disproportionate or counterproductive. But they must confront the alternative. What was the likelihood that Iran would obtain a bomb? How soon? What would the consequences have been if and when Iran achieved this objective? And what nonmilitary policy had a realistic chance of stopping it?
An analysis that calls the conflict a potential forever war, while refusing to analyze the threat that caused the war, is not analysis. It is a prosecution brief.
The public deserves scrutiny of Trump’s inconsistencies, predictions and strategy. But it also deserves scrutiny of Iran’s nuclear progress, intentions and capabilities. This is not too much to ask from a “news analysis.”
Sometimes you just have to write what you know and document what you’ve seen, heard, and metabolized to remind yourself that, no, you haven’t gone crazy.
Perhaps by spelling it all out and publishing it, the masses might begin to grasp the breadth and scope of a problem they’ve been led to believe is an overblown, remote issue. Tenacious journalist that I am, I’ll provide ample receipts proving that the exact opposite is true.
Allow me to show you what life in the trans trench has been like for the past decade, with a combination of personal story and indisputable, brute facts. This is the tip of the iceberg, a mere fraction of the filth.
Probably eight years ago, I remember seeing for the first time a series of images that are burned into my memory. They say a picture says a thousand words, but in the trans trench, they are the beginning of a kind of trauma — the jarring introduction to a bestial type of Hell you never knew existed. Writing in Corinth with a front-row seat to all kinds of debauchery, the Apostle Paul noted in Romans 1 how wicked people “invent new ways of doing evil” (Romans 1:30). The trans scourge is that. On steroids, literally.
The first image I saw was a blue-haired, bare-chested girl who looked like she might be all of 14 years old. Scars were where her breasts used to be. She had the most tormented, vacant eyes.
It took me aback, and I gasped repeatedly. I stood up from my desk and walked away, feeling as though I’d been violated at a deep level, like a sledgehammer to the gut. I told a friend that it felt like I had involuntarily looked at sexually violent fetish porn featuring a minor child. That friend replied, “Brandon, that is exactly what you saw.”
The second image I saw was when I heard from someone who’d undergone a radial forearm phalloplasty and regretted it. She sent me a picture of her gutted forearm, the harvested tissue from which was used to make a fake penis. Another gut-punch.
Some weeks later, I stumbled upon Miami-based Irish gender surgeon Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher’s Instagram account — some of us refer to her as the “butcher of Louth.” This surgeon was posing next to young people she’d operated on, including a girl who had previous self-harm scars. Around that same time, I remember seeing Canadian gender surgeon Giancarlo McEvenue posing with a Santa hat, holding up two medical waste buckets labeled “breast tissue.” I subsequently saw footage of him speaking at a Johnson & Johnson–sponsored discussion, boasting of his sordid profession. Calling this unmitigated depravity is the understatement of the century.
I also remember interviewing a regretful de-trans man who was castrated, and he told me how he ended up ejaculating blood. I was glad this interview was on the phone and not on a Zoom call because he would have seen me fall out of my chair.
Everyone has their own journey of falling down the gender rabbit hole, and when you find yourself in this particular trench, you soon start meeting all sorts of shocked and disoriented people, astonished that this is real life. It’s a freight train of unimaginable nightmares hurtling down the tracks at a high velocity, bulldozing people right and left.
Those of us who’ve been doing the hard work exposing the madness against an impenetrable mainstream media blockade can all tell you what it’s like to learn about all the horrors, only to be gaslit with flat denials like “that’s not happening.” Then you show concrete proof, and it becomes “well, it’s only a few people,” and then maybe “why are you so obsessed with this small, strange issue?” The whole world is under a reality-denying spell, shrouded in pink and blue flags, and people are programmed with dismissive talking points if anyone suggests that something’s wrong.
We, the trans (and queer) trench dwellers, have seen pedophilic elements of this movement in silicone pediatric penis packers — vile products aimed at girls as young as 4 so that they can “pack” their underwear to give the appearance of a male bulge.
If that wasn’t ghastly enough, we found out how academics and others in internet chat forums were behind the strategic rebranding of “gender identity disorder” to “gender dysphoria” at meetings of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Thanks to the intrepid reporting of Reduxx, which spent several months investigating the Eunuch Archive, we learned that men on that site swap castration-themed written pornography involving the sexual torture of children whose puberty has been stunted. One user on that foul site described watching a trans surgery on a male as “arousing” to watch. These men say “eunuch” is a kind of “gender-diverse” person, by the way, and it’s actually listed in WPATH’s official guidelines.
The trench dwellers also know about the 2016 Dutch medical report that was part of the linchpin study underlying gender surgeries on youth. An 18-year-old in that study had been on puberty blockers, so his genitals hadn’t matured, and surgeons used part of his bowel tissue to fashion a simulacrum of a female sex organ — a laparoscopic intestinal vaginoplasty. Complications followed: E. coli bacteria from his intestine spread through his body, and he died of sepsis. When this came to light, more people started paying attention, especially since Elon Musk had purchased Twitter by then, and photos of the man’s maimed genital area were able to circulate freely online.
We’ve seen pink-haired queer surgeon Blair Peters speak in a podcast interview about using the peritoneum in similarly grotesque surgeries he does on minor boys. We’ve watched Democrat politicians walk out of the room when U.S. Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Florida) tried to show footage of that Peters interview during a House hearing.
We’ve seen all the boundary-breaking madness of garish drag queens reading to children in libraries. We can’t seem to forget this particular pervert that some of us call “rainbow monkey dildo man.”
We’ve seen the 11-year-old “drag kid” performer “Desmond Is Amazing” dance in a gay nightclub while patrons threw dollar bills at him. Elle Magazine platformed another young drag performer, an 8-year-old boy from Canada whose stage name is “Lactatia.”
Speaking of lactation, we’ve watched the disturbing capture of groups like La Leche League and the Centers for Disease Control endorse the feculent phenomenon of “chestfeeding” — trans-identifying males pretending to breastfeed babies. The NHS Trust in the UK even claimed that the drug-induced, hormone-addled discharge that such men secrete was as good as mother’s milk. In 2017, one such man who “chestfed” his daughter wrote in the Seattle alt newspaper The Stranger that the experience was sexually charged and that he “got off” on it, insisting readers not judge him. Yes, it’s as revolting as it sounds; they are using infants like prostitutes to satisfy their sick, twisted fetish.
We’ve seen the FOIA’d progress report document showing how Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy altered a research protocol, lowering the age from 13 to 8 for the cross-sex hormone cohort inclusion criteria in an NIH-funded grant.
We’ve seen the data, from insurance record analyses and medical journal documentation, showing girls as young as 12 and 13 undergoing mastectomies, and boys as young as 15 undergoing genital surgery. We’ve seen the Do No Harm database showing that between 2019 and 2023, nearly 14,000 minors received puberty blockers or hormones, and over 5,700 minors underwent gender surgeries. These are lowball figures, I should note, since some insurance systems are closed to researchers.
Some of us now carry secondary trauma from years of sifting through this diabolical wretchedness. We find ourselves sporadically and inexplicably on the verge of vomiting, our bodies seizing up in panic. Our nervous systems are fried, and our sleep is disturbed. Some of us have family members mired in the gender jungle, and it makes the torment all the more personal.
We are not in the mood to be told that we are right-wing “culture warriors” stoking a moral panic. We are done being told “Just let them pee in peace,” and “Trans kids know who they are,” as we have heard ad nauseam.
No — those of us in the trans trench have been exposed to things at a granular level that we hope you never have to see. We’ll take some of it to our graves. We’ve been harassed, threatened, sent disturbing material by email, and censored on social media for stating basic biology. We can relate to the kind of hostile bilge that Irreversible Damage author Abigail Shrier received from a trans activist. I print it in full so as not to sugarcoat what it has been like: “I’ll slit your f*cking throat and f*ck your newly made neck p*ssy.”
How any of us in the trans trench have remained sane is nothing short of a miracle. Some of us need counseling to process everything we’ve had to absorb, so we can inform the public about the atrocities happening right under our noses.
But instead of accountability, we feel mostly ignored. In a sane world, we would be convening Nuremberg 2.0 tribunals, but we’re watching politicians and major media start to treat this chapter as something to forget and be memory-holed.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 