“Do Not Touch Me…
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Jonathan
I am a Faculty Member”: Cornell Professor Disrupts Coulter Speech. Monica Cornejo, an assistant professor of interpersonal communication, was forcibly removed from a Cornell University event this week after disrupting a speech by conservative commentator Ann Coulter. She is only the latest faculty member to seek to prevent others from hearing opposing views. The question now is what Cornell will do about her conduct.

Biden's New Student Debt Relief Will Add Up To $750 Billion To The Budget Deficit
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
In total, our $250 billion to $750 billion estimate for the total cost of the plan would be in line with the cost of the Administration’s $400 billion blanket debt cancellation. The Biden Administration recently announced a new plan to cancel student debt for up to 30 million borrowers and released a preliminary rule this morning detailing parts of this plan. The proposal, which is being introduced through the rule making process, would replace the Administration’s initial proposal to cancel between $10,000 and $20,000 per person of debt, which was struck down by the Supreme Court. Elements of the plan in today’s proposed rule would cost nearly $150 billion, according to the Department of Education. However, this excludes a proposal to allow the Secretary of Education to cancel debt for those facing hardship or likely to default. Including this provision, we estimate the plan could cost $250 billion to $750 billion, depending on how the additional cancellation is designed.

DeSantis signs law limiting Florida book challenges
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Politico
Florida residents who don’t have children attending school will have significantly fewer chances to challenge books in local K-12 libraries under a new law signed Tuesday by Gov. Ron DeSantis. Meant to curb what lawmakers described as a “logistical nightmare” facing school districts flooded with requests to remove books, the policy marks an admission from Republican leaders that last year’s expansions to book challenge laws may have gone too far after national backlash from free speech groups and even some conservatives.

Trans ‘vampire’ woman sexually assaulted teen, charged in death of disabled man
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The New York Post
[Ed: not from the Onion. the insanity that is now us.] A transgender woman who identifies as a vampire has been convicted of sexually assaulting a developmentally disabled girl — while already under investigation for allegedly strangling a man “possessed by a demon.” Adam Hetke, 35, who goes by the name “Sabrina,” was convicted in Wisconsin last week of first-degree sexual assault by threatening the use of a dangerous weapon and second-degree assault of a mentally ill victim, GMToday reported. Hetke was already a convicted sex offender — and under investigation for a homicide, with charges only filed since the disturbed attacker was busted for the sex assault.

Majority Of Colleges Tie Diversity, Equity And Inclusion To Graduation Requirements
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Daily Caller
A majority of colleges and universities require students to take courses related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in order to graduate, according to a new report. Speech First, a pro-free expression organization, examined the policies of 248 colleges across the country and found that 67% of them required DEI coursework to “satisfy general education requirements.” Students enrolled in these courses are “subjected to courses advocating far-left ideological perspectives and pushing far-left political advocacy,” the report notes.

West Virginia's Transgender Sports Ban Gets Bad News
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Associated Press
4th US Circuit Court of Appeals says it's a Title IX violation. A federal appeals court has overturned a West Virginia transgender sports ban, finding that the law violates Title IX, the federal civil-rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools. The ruling Tuesday from the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals blocks a West Virginia law banning transgender girls from playing on girls sports teams, reports the AP. The court said the law can't lawfully be applied to a 13-year-old girl who has been taking puberty-blocking medication and publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade. West Virginia is one of at least 24 states with a law on the books barring transgender women and girls from competing in certain women's or girls sports competitions.

Guardian Ludicrously Reports That Orthodox Bishop Was "Allegedly Stabbed"
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Zero Hedge
The left-wing Guardian newspaper reported on the brutal stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Sydney that was caught on camera by saying the victim was “allegedly stabbed.” Yes, really. Watch the video. There’s really no “allegedly” about it... Bishop Emmanuel was stabbed multiple times by a 15-year-old boy during a live broadcast.

'Transgender Archeology' PhDs And Degrees In 'Magic'
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Zero Hedge
... Being Funded With UK Taxpayer Money. Prompts call for review of government education funding... A Conservative MP in the UK has called for a thorough review of government higher education funding after it was revealed that taxpayer money is being spent on ridiculous university courses, including a PhD researcher who has chose to explore “Transphobic Invocations of Archaeology.” The Telegraph reports that the student at the University of York is being given more than £18,000 a year by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to do detailed research and present papers, including one titled Bones Don’t Care About Your Feelings: Challenging Transphobic Invocations of Archaeology in (Social) Media.

Tenn. Senate passes bill allowing teachers to carry concealed firearms in classrooms
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Constitutional Rights Pac
The Tennessee state Senate has passed a bill that would give teachers and staff in public schools across the state the ability to carry concealed firearms in their classrooms, provided they pass a rigorous background check and complete a training regimen. SB 1325 has now moved to the House, where a similar bill, HB 1202, has been held up since last year. Under the terms of the legislation, educators and other school staff hoping to carry a concealed firearm to work would have to acquire "the joint written authorization of the [Local Education Agency]'s director of schools in conjunction with the principal of the school at which the person is assigned."

Schools Were Just Supposed To Block Porn.
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Mark Up
Some of the censorship inhibits the ability to do basic research on sites like Wikipedia and Quora. Students have been blocked from going to websites that web-filtering software categorizes as “education,” “news,” or “informational.” But even more concerning, especially for some students who spoke with The Markup, are blocks against sex education, abortion information, and resources for LGBTQ+ teens—including suicide prevention. Virtually all school districts buy web filters from companies that sort the internet into categories. Districts decide which categories to block, often making those selections without a complete understanding of the universe of websites under each label—information that the filtering companies consider proprietary. This necessarily leads to overblocking, and The Markup found that districts routinely have to create new, custom categories to allow certain websites on a case-by-case basis. Students and teachers, meanwhile, suffer the consequences of overzealous filtering.

Dawn French is right. Cancel culture turns us into cowards
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Spiked Online
The Vicar of Dibley star has made a welcome plea for tolerance. Everyone’s fed up with cancel culture. Even the vicar of Dibley has had enough. Yesterday, it was the turn of actress and comedian Dawn French to stick up for free speech and tolerance. Speaking on the latest episode of the Happy Place podcast, she said cancel culture has ‘forced people into corners’ and turned many more of us into cowards. French, the star of beloved TV shows like The Vicar of Dibley and French & Saunders, said that many people today talk about ‘inclusivity and favouring difference and all the rest of it’, but ‘that’s not how we’re living’. Instead, we have become ‘massively intolerant [and] quick to blame’ others, she said.

NPR Editor Resigns After Suspension for Exposing Bias and Intolerance
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Jonathan Turley
It appears that National Public Radio has solved the problem of the intolerance for opposing views, detailed in an article by award-winning editor Uri Berliner: he is now out of NPR. Berliner resigned after NPR suspended him and various other journalists and the CEO lashed out at his discussing their political bias. For those of us in higher education, it is a chillingly familiar pattern. Editors, journalists, and listeners at the public-supported outlet will now be able to return to the echo-chambered coverage without the distracting voice of a dissenter.

Why are Dutch doctors euthanising a healthy young woman?
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Spiked Online
People suffering from mental ill-health, autism or learning difficulties are being encouraged to take their own lives. Jolanda Fun is scheduled to die next week on her 34th birthday. As such, she has been able to prepare the funeral invites in advance. ‘Born from love, let go in love’, reads the card. ‘After a hard-fought life, she chose the peace she so longed for.’ Fun, who lives in North Brabant in the Netherlands, explained why she wants to die in an interview with The Sunday Times last week. Though she is physically healthy, she feels constantly ‘sad, down, gloomy’. At age 22, she was diagnosed with a litany of mental-health problems and has since run the gamut of therapies. Consequently, she has never been able to hold down a job. When a counsellor told her two years ago that she could be euthanised, she decided this was the only option left for her. ‘I want to step out of life’, she explains.

Humza Yousaf’s race obsession is an affront to democracy
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Spiked Online
Scotland’s clownish first minister thinks his identity should place him beyond criticism. It is tempting to think of Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf as merely a clownish character. Remember when, last year, he asked a group of female Ukrainian refugees, ‘Where are all the men?’, seemingly forgetting about the war they would have been fighting in. And who can forget when, in 2021, he fell off a scooter while speeding down the halls of Holyrood? He was health minister at the time. Comical though he is, these gaffes tend to obscure a more sinister side to the first minister – namely, his obsession with a racial identity politics. Recently, this was brought back to the fore because of his own Hate Crime Act.

Lord of the Lies
Topic: Children and Family
Source: The Epoch Times
A Pediatrician’s Take on the Latest Child Gender Transition Research. Last week’s release of the Cass Review brought to memory the old jingle: “Liar, liar, pants on fire; your nose is longer than a telephone wire.” Commissioned four years ago to probe the practices of the Tavistock gender clinic in Britain, the report methodically assembles a damning indictment of the flimsy evidence used to “transition” children. Its author, retired pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, is polite and professional, but she pulls no punches in exposing the false foundation upon which the entire edifice of “gender-affirming care” is built.

Should NPR Rely on Listeners Rather Than Taxpayers Like You?
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Jonathan Turley
It has been a rough week for the National Public Radio (NPR) after a respected editor, Uri Berliner, wrote a scathing account of the political bias at the media outlet. Although NPR responded by denying the allegations, the controversy has rekindled the debate over the danger of the government selectively funding media outlets. That is a debate that does not simply turn on the question of bias, but more fundamentally on why the public should support this particular media company to the exclusion of others. The Biden administration and Congress continue to struggle with a massive budget deficit and growing national debt, which stands at $34 trillion and is approximately 99 percent of Gross Domestic Product.

Homeschool Moms, It’s Time to Kick Your Inferiority Complex
Topic: Children and Family
Source: The Epoch Times
I had lunch with a friend the other day, and it wasn’t long before our conversation drifted to her role as a homeschool mom. In essence, she was frustrated and overwhelmed, convinced that she was doing a terrible job teaching her children, and desperately wondering if she should put them in a traditional classroom. “Well, I wouldn’t put them in a public school—on an academics basis alone,” I said, working my way through lunch. Being an education researcher has its perks, because when she asked what I meant, I started citing the proficiency statistics for a public school district near her own. “Did you know that only 23 percent of kids in that district can read proficiently?” I asked. “Think your kids can do better than that?” “Oh,” came her response, and as a hint of a smile played at her lips, I knew she’d suddenly realized that maybe her kids were doing way better than she thought.

How woke leftists became cheerleaders for Iran
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Spiked Online
We can now see the anti-Israel bigotry behind their phoney pacifism. How quickly the ‘Ceasefire Now!’ lobby turned into frothing warmongers. No sooner had Iran began its criminal bombardment of Israel than these phoney peaceniks were leaping up and down with delight. This is ‘true solidarity’, said one ‘pro-Palestine’ group in response to Iran’s raining down of missiles on the Jewish State. We can now glimpse the truth behind their fake pacifism. We can see their yearning for war on Israel that they cynically dress up as a campaign for peace in Palestine. It’s not a ceasefire woke Westerners want – it’s the humiliation and taming of the Jewish nation. [Ed: At this point, I think there are empirical grounds to dislike Israel. There are no grounds on which to be anti-Jewish or pro-war.]

What Leaving Abortion Up to the States Really Means
Topic: Abortion
Source: Reason
Reproductive freedom initiatives are advancing toward November ballots, putting the matter of abortion access in voters' hands. A funny thing happens when you leave abortion access up to each state: Voters start to show politicians how they actually feel. The loudest and most persistent voices are no longer the ones most able to influence policy. And—perhaps surprisingly to some—this has resulted in a wave of successful pro-choice ballot initiatives. Since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, the abortion rights side has come out on top every time the matter has been up for a vote on state ballots (even in states such as Kansas, Ohio, and Kentucky).

The Observer view on the Cass review
Topic: Children and Family
Source: The Guardian (UK)
...children were catastrophically failed by the medical profession. Clinicians and managers must be held to account for the travesty in which adult beliefs were allowed to drive healthcare for children. ‘They deserve very much better,” the distinguished paediatrician Hilary Cass concludes in the final report of her independent review of NHS gender identity services for children and young people. The report details how a vulnerable group has been “exceptionalised” by the NHS and denied the evidence-based healthcare all patients have the right to expect. Just how badly wrong things went at the gender identity development service (Gids) is evidenced in the fact that Cass felt she had to explicitly state that, while some people argue that clinical care for children should be based on a “social justice” model, “the NHS works in an evidence-based way”.