Conrad Verner N7

A last-minute California budget hearing this Monday aims to push $26 million for sex-rejecting interventions on minors. ✔️Announced before a major holiday weekend. ✔️Stacked panels - Johanna Olsen- Kennedy, anyone? ✔️One-sided public testimony. Members of California’s LGBTQ legislative caucus and allied activist groups are taking over a California state budget hearing on Monday afternoon to demand $26 million of taxpayer funds for sex-rejection procedures for minors. They have dredged up no longer valid US HHS online pages from 2023 to claim puberty blockers are reversible. To push the dangerous suicide trope they use a 2024 Trevor Project assessment of self reported suicide ideation to falsely imply sex-rejecting procedures or social transition prevent suicide. This surprise hearing is this Monday afternoon, complete with stacked with trans activists public comment and one-sided panels of "experts" including disgraced LA Children's Hospital pediatrician Johanna Olsen- Kennedy - who took millions from the Federal Government for puberty blockade research and then hid the results. This event was not made public until the day before Easter weekend in order to suppress dissent. California’s leadership is tying itself to one the greatest medical scandals of all time. The question is whether the public is willing to let them do it without scrutiny.

She knows humans can’t change sex & isn’t afraid to say it. Seriously, that is the reason.

"Her penis" went from being Ricky Gervais punchline to compulsory across all newsroom style guides in just a few years. There is no reductio ad absurdum that isn't endorsed as doxa within a few years.

Trans activism has corrupted the media. Every week, a new man is described as a woman or bestowed with ‘she / her’ pronouns. That ubiquitous phrase ‘her penis’ is an affront to journalistic objectivity, says Janet Murray buff.ly/OeHrJXJ

They are just two ordinary HS girls whom the legal, medical, political, cultural, and educational establishments of the Western world are desperate to vilify and silence because forbidding any woman or girl from drawing a boundary between herself and many who claims to be a woman has been declared to be the civil rights movement of the 21st century.

I was banned from Twitter in 2019 for almost two weeks because I told Chelsea Clinton on her “trans genocide” post that most of the killers are black men m—rdering trans prostitutes.

Kindness is antithetical to normalizing harmful delusions that lead to medicalized self-harm under the influence of cult ideologues making impossible promises that can never be true

Almost always

Regular Virginians, like this HERO are standing up to this ludicrous Democratic gerrymander! Our campaign against this insanity doesn't need millions of California dollars, just the "NO" votes of Virginians. If this is one of you, I will buy you a beer.

Let me show you how this works: It’s Friday morning. You’re in America. Coffee in hand. Half-awake. Scrolling. A headline hits you: “America/Israel bombs residential building, 20 civilians killed, including 5 children.” (These numbers are imaginary) Your stomach drops. You glance at your kid. Or think about your nieces and nephews. Now you’re not just reading anymore, you’re feeling anger, rage, disgust. By the time you get to work, the story has already settled in your mind as truth. At lunch, you bring it up. Your coworkers nod. Of course they do. Why wouldn’t they? It sounds real. Now five more people carry that same anger. They go home. They repeat it. To friends. To family. Online. Just like that, one headline becomes thousands of convictions. But here is what never made it into that headline what you did not see, what no one bothered to check: It wasn’t America. It wasn’t Israel. It was a failed missile fired by the IRGC that fell on its own people. And by the time the truth shows up, if it ever does, the damage is already done. This is what an information war looks like in real time.

The Washington State Superintendent said this high school girl used "derogatory language" for saying "you're a man."

It’s always fine to call a man a man. It’s not dehumanizing because a man is a type of human. It’s not derogatory because being a man is not a lesser form of person than a woman. It simply denies a person’s wish to be recognized as something they are not, a desire that imposes no duty on any other person to aid in furthering. There is no legal or social norm that can condemn such a denial as in any way a violation of anyone’s obligation and the attempt to render it so is inherently an illegitimate act of aggression against rights that each of us holds and which any liberal, pluralistic society has a positive duty to protect.

European military brass waiting on the Strait of Hormuz to magically open

We didn't ask anyone to join. We just asked for permission to transit across what was presumed to be friendly territory and that was rejected by a country that we literally saved from annihilation in living memory.

This is deliberate misinformation. It's a tell that you can't argue these points honestly. 1) Enrichment is the most important step for developing nuclear weapons. Always has been. The focus on enrichment has/had nothing to do with Israel. Even the Obama nuclear deal was centered on enrichment levels. No one actually believes that the fatwa, which no one has seen, was anything but a public misinformation tool from a regime that lies about almost everything. While they moved the program underground in 2004, there has been overwhelming evidence since 2004, including published documents, that the regime has an active nuclear weapons program, so you would have to pretend like all of these regime officials and scientists were actively ignoring the fatwa to seriously cite it. Specifically on the enrichment point: It was an IAEA report, hardly a pro-Israel entity, last February, that determined the regime had increased its stockpile of 60% enriched uranium by 50% in a period of 4-6 months. Enough highly enriched uranium to make 7 nuclear bombs. There is no civilian purpose for enriching uranium at that level, and they are the only non-nuclear state in the world to be doing so. It doesn't take a genius to connect the dots. That's what led to the strikes last year. Neither the regime nor you can explain why they were developing highly enriched uranium clearly meant for a bomb if they weren't planning to or allowed to build a bomb. 2) Nuclear weapons, while the biggest issue, were never the only concern for Trump or his administration. Trump didn't take out Soleimani because of nuclear weapons, but because he had organized a massive terror proxy network that was consistently destabilizing the region, and encouraging terror attacks in the Gulf, the United States, and Europe. It's a tell that you guys continually leave out how the Gulf states also view the Islamic Republic as the key threat and actively are supporting efforts to degrade the regime because it's inconvenient to the "this is all about Israel" narrative. It's the UAE, more than anyone, that wants the war to continue until there is regime change. Yet no one claims that Trump is being controlled by them or the Saudis (because he is not). Trump has also seen the evidence that the Islamic Republic has actively planned to assassinate him since Soleimani. And while you can push conspiracies about that, it doesn't change the facts that they have an active assassination program that has repeatedly targeted Americans. Or that they are responsible for thousands of American troop deaths, which many Americans have never forgotten. Their ballistic missile and terror proxy programs are also major threats. The big knock on JCPOA, which is why Trump left it, was that it didn't address those issues, so it let the Islamic Republic terrorize everyone without consequences. They refused to put those on the table in the recent negotiation. The "Death to America" Islamic Republic has been fighting a proxy war targeting Americans since 1979. We have been focused on responding to the proxies and simply playing defense the whole time. They built up terror proxies and an extensive ballistic missile program as protection to allow them to continue the covert and one-sided war, but those protections have been severely degraded since 10/7, thanks to Israel. Trump made the call that now was the time to stop playing defense and take on the head of the snake to permanently put an end to that war. You might disagree with the timing or his decision, but that doesn't change the context or that he himself made it.

May I offer a different perspective on the whole transatlantic family feud brewing over NATO. Europeans are furious at what they call American unilateralism and "wars of choice," while Americans are done subsidizing allies who won't lift a finger when Washington actually needs them. Given all the sentimentality and historical baggage, there’s been a lot of bad blood and high grade insults thrown both ways. A lot of pride here is at stake. But given that I am not American or European, what I can provide is an Asian perspective. The whole thing looks very different as there are no blood ties or cultural nostalgia to pull me either way. Because of distance, the default Asian lens on America has always been colder, clearer, and far more pragmatic than the European one. Asians have never lived under the illusion that their relationship to the US is one based on shared values. If they ever did, the illusion was shattered during the Cold War. Instead, Asian nations saw the relationship to America as a cold, interest-driven bargain in a dangerous neighborhood full of communists, insurgents, and bigger powers. Fast forward to today, and this lesson still holds. Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore and Indonesia all partner with America because their interests (not values) align - especially when it comes to countering China. These nations have reasons to be alarmed about Beijing's ambitions in the South China Sea, around Taiwan, and across the Indo-Pacific. They don't need lectures about democracy or liberal international order to see the value in US forward presence, intelligence sharing, tech transfers, and security guarantees. It's a straight-up transactional deal: the US keeps the sea lanes open and the PLA at bay. Meanwhile, Asian nations host your bases, buy your weapons, and join your alliances (Quad, AUKUS, etc.). When interests diverge, they adjust pragmatically, without the drama and meltdown. Probably not many in the West know this, but one of the forces that shaped this attitude was the US pullout of Vietnam and the rest of America’s Cold War shenanigans. Lee Kuan Yew was one of America’s loudest cheerleaders in Southeast Asia. In 1967 he flew to Washington, testified to Congress, and begged Lyndon Johnson (and later Nixon) not to cut and run in Vietnam. He warned that a hasty US exit would trigger the dominoes - Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and then pressure on the rest of Southeast Asia. Singapore became a logistical hub, providing a haven for US troops on R&R, oil refineries supplying the American war machine, and Lockheed servicing aircraft. At one point, US military-related spending made up 15% of Singapore’s entire GDP. Singapore didn’t support the war because it loved American democracy but because it kept the communists tied up and bought Southeast Asia time to build up its own economy and military. Then came the pullout - the Paris Accords in 1973 and then Saigon falls in 1975. Despite all the lobbying, despite the blood and resources America had spent, domestic politics in the US (the anti-war movement, Congress, Vietnam syndrome etc.) ended it. LKY watched in disbelief as the superpower that had promised to hold the line simply walked away. The lesson was that American commitments are real only as long as they serve American interests and American voters don’t get tired. It’s a brutal one to internalize. LKY was disappointed and noted American “unreliability” but Singapore didn’t collapse into panic or anti-Americanism. They just recalibrated and kept pursuing pragmatism by building its own deterrent, diversifying partners, and later offered the US naval logistics access (Sembawang port) when the Philippines kicked them out of Subic Bay in the early 1990s. Malaysia drew the same conclusion. The Tunku was pro-Western and anti-communist early on, but Malaysia never joined SEATO and pushed ZOPFAN (Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality) instead. When the British announced their East-of-Suez withdrawal in 1968 and Nixon’s Doctrine (1969) told Asians “you defend yourselves first, we’ll just help,” Kuala Lumpur accelerated its neutralist tilt. The message was clear - don’t count on Washington to bleed indefinitely for distant allies. South Korea is similarly pragmatic but it operates under far higher stakes due to baggage from the Korean War and the ongoing North Korean threat. American intervention literally saved the South from conquest, resulting in a bond that is forged in blood. While South Korea had to learn the same lessons - that the American umbrella isn’t permanent, sharing a border with a nuclear-armed adversary forces tighter coupling with Washington. The reverberations of Nixon’s 1973 opening to Beijing cannot be understated. It shocked the entire region that America, the great anti-communist crusader, suddenly would cozy up to Mao to counter the Soviets. If Washington could flip on core principles when interests demanded it, why should smaller states pretend the relationship was about anything deeper? The core Asian critique of the European approach to dealing with America is that it is entirely bound up in moral values and civilizational kinship. This means that every disagreement feels like a betrayal and breeds resentment on both sides. Because Europe is so hyped up on abstract values, it makes NATO feel like a sacred club that America is disrespecting. Asia's interest-based lens sees alliances as tools - useful until they're not. Maybe Europe thinks the Asian approach is cynical but the irony is that this is actually what keeps Indo-Pacific partners far more reliable counterweights to China than many NATO members ever were against Russia.

@JonahDispatch The NYT has an uncanny ability to illustrate a "hardship" story with people who are so unsympathetic that I end up actively rooting against them.

Well there were some pretty big protests in Iran a couple of months ago. He seems to have missed them.

Better times at the White House

"Man won't fly for a million years" – NYT 1903