It’s hard to imagine a self-titled “Catholic” organization advocating for a political regime that has illegally targeted Catholics, imprisoned Americans who dare to champion Catholic principles, and done everything in its power — legal or not — to slaughter unborn babies. But that’s exactly what the group “Catholics for Harris” is doing. At the latest virtual meeting of the inane organization, emcee Alex Nason hailed pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris as a leader “with a moral purpose, and as president she will lead with that same moral purpose,” according to CatholicVote. Nason also claimed that Harris, throughout her tenure in various political offices, “advocated for, protected, and saw justice for the oppressed, and least among us, lending a voice to the voiceless.” Former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Joe Donnelly, another pro-abortion fanatic, touted Harris as someone who “speaks for those who cannot speak for themselves.” Except, of course, for the voiceless unborn children, who cannot speak for themselves, who have been disemboweled, eviscerated, chopped up, boiled alive in saline, and left to die on operating tables and in plastic bags — all on Harris’s watch. Since becoming involved in law and politics in 1990, when she was hired as a deputy district attorney in California’s Alameda County, Harris has proven that she is openly and violently hostile to the pro-life principles championed by the Catholic Church since the first century. The Vice President’s record on abortion is an atrocity: she has relentlessly persecuted pro-life Americans, pushed the most extreme pro-abortion legislation and agenda ever seen outside of Communist China, and worked hard to reverse and repeal pro-life laws duly put into place by various states. (READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: Immigration Control Is Smart, Not Un-Christian) How could anyone with even the most elementary understanding of Catholic moral teaching — which incontrovertibly declares abortion to be a “grave moral evil” and imposes the severe penalty of excommunication upon those who commit, procure, or openly advocate for abortions — claim that such a candidate as Harris can be called a friend of Catholic principles? If you’re dissident Sister Simone Campbell of the Sisters of Social Service, another speaker at the “Catholics for Harris” farce, the answer is simple: don’t think about abortion. “The fact is, our faith does not require the outlawing of abortions,” Campbell said. “Our faith teaches us that protecting life is what we’re about, and we also trust each individual to have a well-formed conscience for making decisions. In this case, for her wellbeing.” Again, this is absolutely and unequivocally false. The Catholic Church has consistently clarified that abortion is murder — and, exacerbating the evil of simple murder, it is both the murder of an innocent and the murder of a child. Even Pope Francis, whom Campbell proudly quoted from, compared the inhuman practice of abortion to hiring a hitman, reiterating that abortion is never acceptable or to be approved or condoned in any way. Furthermore, the Church does not “trust each individual to have a well-formed conscience for making decisions.” Instead, the Church provides centuries upon centuries of moral teachings, in order to form consciences aright. It has been acknowledged by countless Saints and mystics, from John Bosco and Faustina Kowalska to Our Lady of Fatima and the three children blessed with visions of her, that Hell is far from empty. Responsibilities of Catholics One of the chief purposes of the Catholic Church here on earth is to prepare souls for Heaven and equip them with the knowledge and grace to escape the clutches of Hell. If Catholics really do believe that abortion is the murder of an innocent, unborn child — and it’s clear from her statements that Campbell does not — then we have a solemn obligation to work diligently to outlaw abortion. Rest assured, we will be judged on our failure or unwillingness to do so. In his Dante-inspired novel My Visit to Hell, Catholic apologist Dr. Paul Thigpen imagined that those who unrepentantly abort their children will be accused by those very children before being damned to Hell. It is difficult to imagine that those same slaughtered unborn will not point their fingers at us for failing or refusing to save their lives, no matter the reason. One cannot help but wonder the number of unborn souls awaiting Harris’s arrival at the gates of Perdition, or the arrival of those who call themselves “Catholic” but look on with glazed-over eyes — or, worse still, gleefully cheer for — the barbaric butchering of unborn babies. (READ MORE: What Attacks on Catholic Churches Reveal About Society) Despite the dizzying display of mental gymnastics and moral contortionism evinced by the “Catholics for Harris” debacle, American Catholics have a solemn moral responsibility to protect the lives of the unborn, protect their national sovereignty and identity, protect their families, and protect truth. If God cares about a sparrow falling from the sky, how much more must He care about how we shape our society and tend to the souls He entrusted to our care? The post Can A Catholic Support Kamala Harris? No. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

ABC/Disney gave us all a startling vision of their contempt for truth.  Or perhaps not so startling. Certainly, it shouldn’t barie. They provided only the latest, though most egregious, example of the legacy media’s pimping of truth, the coin of payment being power. Their goal is establishing themselves as a new ruling aristocracy. Truth stands in their way, so it must be ravished, demoralized and shamed to clear their way. Aristocrats are afraid of the power of the people. What better public place for the shaming than the presidential debate? When I thought of researching this article, I went first to refresh my memory of the crossing-the-Rubicon moment when Candy Crowley changed the momentum of the 2012 race. Obama had disappointed as president, deliberately enacting policies that he knew had never received a mandate from the American people, increasingly showing himself as a divider rather than a unifier, as racial tensions began their recent rise under him. Obama Gets Media Help Obama had disappointed in his first debate with Republican nominee Mitt Romney as well, and the polls showed it. Unless Obama could regain the Big Mo, odds were he would lose. In that second debate, Romney had Obama dead to rights. He had focused on the avoidable and disastrous loss of America’s ambassador, left inadequately secure in Benghazi, Libya. Despite the brave members of the military who defended them to the death, the well-organized terrorists of Ansar al-Sharia celebrated another humiliation of America on the anniversary of 9/11.  In reporting the incident to the country, Obama deliberately obscured the intelligence that he already had — that the attack was planned and executed by terrorists. His team would soon try to pass the lie that the terror was really a spontaneous and understandable popular reaction to an American insult to Islam (as would be maintained, a reaction to an utterly unknown film by an utterly unknown filmmaker whom the feds then hustled off to prison, First Amendment and the intelligence reports be damned). The truth would hurt the administration, so it had to be suppressed. Obama had in mind, as we know now and has been admitted by his chief confederate in the process, the complete upending of our long-held Middle East policy. He aimed to distance Israel and other American allies in the region and in their stead, rehabilitate and empower the savage mullahs of Iran. Step by careful step, he minimized the role of Islamist terror and magnified everything and anything that could be portrayed as American (and Israeli) hubristic imperialism.   Now, his community-organizer narrative was being threatened by objective reality. But he had a tight grip on his administration and he effectively controlled what information got out — at least at first. In his characteristic manner, he used words that were meant to communicate one thing but, when needed, provided a sort of plausible deniability of his actual intent. In his speech, he condemned the attack — America would expect that. But he made no statement clearly calling the attack an act of terrorism, and so set the ground for what became the administration’s line in the coming days: it was a spontaneous attack, an understandable reaction to American insensitivity towards Muslim sensibilities.  Obama used the word “terror” just once in his remarks. Here’s how it reads in the official transcript: “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”  This is a perfect example of Obama’s brilliant duplicity. He does not call the act terror nor its instigators terrorists. Here, he speaks only about our principled stand as Americans, not of the specific act, which was and should have been labeled as exactly that, for planned terror is exactly what it was.  So, when at the second debate, Obama spoke of how he had called Benghazi an act of terror, Romney knew he had the chance to put this debate away and probably the whole election. He asked Obama to deny that he had not identified the attack as terror, believing that he had him dead to rights. But Obama seemed entirely unconcerned. There was no deer-in-the-headlight look on his face, but rather that of a skilled poker player about to show someone who has put all his money on the table that he was holding four aces. He wasn’t going to have to lie. Candy did it for him, intervening decisively to uphold the lie that Obama had in fact called Benghazi an act of terror. She knew how to deploy the trust most Americans still put in legacy media for being honest brokers that would never put its thumb on the scales of a presidential election. Romney never regained momentum. He lost that debate, and the next one, and the election. This is what I recalled as I set out to review that ancient history before writing about the latest lying intervention by legacy media abusing the trust still invested in them by a major segment of the American people. The facts, I thought, had been settled out by the evidence, and since the election for which Crowley lied was won in some part due to her intervention, there was no necessity to spend all the energy it takes to keep a lie alive. Still Gaslighting the People Was I ever wrong. My Google search was filled almost to exclusion by the links given pride of place by Big Tech, and those links are still pumping air into Crowley’s lie and pretending that what a fair reading and internal emails show conclusively as true — is not. It takes little reflection to understand why. The legacy media still wish to perform the same role in empowering those who do not trust the people, the self-appointed aristocracy that believe it knows all things better than we the people. ABC showed that to perfection, lying not once, but many times. Just as important, they supported Kamala’s serial deceits by silence and other means. The legacy media cannot admit that they have ever done what they did and what they are doing again, whether it was the feeding of debate questions to Hillary in 2016 or Chris Wallace’s utterly erroneous “correction” of Trump’s accurate assertions about Hunter’s laptop. They admit no wrong and intend no change. It’s an old attitude. The fault towards which aristocracies tend, as known even by Aristotle and in our own history by Madison, Hamilton, and the other framers, is ever-increasing contempt for those under their rule which inevitably leads to ever greater resentment. Aristocrats are afraid of the power of the people.  This is true over time. Piers Brendon wrote of the British aristocracy of the 1930s: The people were only allowed a glimpse of the proceedings. Live television coverage, which could not be censored, was prohibited…. The masses were consumers, powerful but manipulable. We, the People, can see better. Legacy media no longer have the only voice. We need to seek out the voices of those who are unafraid of the truth and unafraid of the people. Our trust must be earned, by the media and by the candidates alike. That is the core of our power and the power of our constitutional republic. It is in our hands. READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Kamala’s Words Mean Nothing Against Hamas Tucker Carlson Gives Credibility to a Hatemonger The post We the People Can Break the Culture of Lies appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The park next to JD Vance’s house in Alexandria, Virginia, is closed. After two assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump, security is tight near the Vance home in Del Ray, the upscale, family-friendly neighborhood that leans very much to the left. There are security barriers and men and women in uniforms. Neighbors who have talked to the press understand. The Secret Service “is doing what they need to do,” Del Ray resident Erica Toler told ALXnow. “We look forward to getting our park back in a few months.” Del Ray has not been particularly friendly to the author of Hillbilly Elegy. A number of Vance’s neighbors want the family out because they disagree with his politics. Another neighbor told ALXnow, “If he lived up in Seminary, where he belongs, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen.” This kind of thing being: Shortly after the newly minted Ohio senator, his wife, Usha, and three young children moved to Del Ray in March 2023, a local artist “yarn-bombed” a tree outside the home with a knitted sign that read “Respect Our Rights.” Yes, this brand of intolerance predated Trump’s decision to pick Vance as his running mate. On Wednesday, when I went to see the “temporarily closed” Judy Lowe Neighborhood Park, which is right next to the Vance home, I saw numerous “Harris Walz” signs on lawns and fences strategically placed in view of the Vance home. Also in the mix were a “Forward” poster featuring the Democratic nominee and a “Cats for Kamala” poster, a play on Vance’s 2021 remark likening Democrats to “childless cat ladies.” Putting up political signs of any stripe is a First Amendment right, which I wholeheartedly defend. This is America, where people have every right to criticize political candidates. Just as I have every right to criticize their poor treatment of a fellow American. Sadly, in a country evenly divided between left and right, some folks in Del Ray think they’re too precious to have to be exposed to dissenting views. Vance Not the Only Target Vance’s experience is not a one-time thing. In 2022, activists protested outside the homes of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. In 2021, the wife of Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, came outside of the family’s home in Vienna, Virginia, with a seven-week-old baby to ask protesters to cut it out. Democrats are not immune. In 2017, protesters swarmed outside then-Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s San Francisco home. In 2018, Code Pink gathered outside Feinstein’s home to protest the U.S. bombing of Syria. As an Alexandria resident, I live near Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat. I’ve seen activists picket outside his home, and I have yelled at them for picketing there instead of his office. There is one bright light in the Del Ray neighbors’ message to the Vances that they are trespassing and should leave: The bad neighbors may get their wish. If the Trump-Vance ticket wins in November, the Vances will have to move — to the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington. Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE from Debra J. Saunders: Kamala Harris Talks to NABJ — Five Takeaways Springfield, Ohio Is About More Than Cats and Dogs The post Liberal Neighbors to JD Vance — Hillbilly, Go Home appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Is there a Satan Club in your child’s public school? There very well could be. Here’s a little background and advice on how to be an active parent in protecting both the souls and constitutional rights of your children.  Child Evangelism Fellowship at the Supreme Court Back in 2001, the United States Supreme Court heard a case by the name of Good News Club v. Milford Central School District. This case was brought because a school district refused to allow the Child Evangelism Fellowship to hold their Good News Club® in schools in its district. The school district mistakenly thought that having religious clubs on school property was some sort of violation of the separation of church and state or an endorsement of that religion by the school.  The Ruling The Supreme Court ruled that the school district must give the same accommodations to a Good News Club as to any other club. For example, if a chess club gets to use a classroom and meet immediately after the last bell, the school couldn’t restrict a Good News Club from having that same access just because the Good News Club has a religious perspective. That would amount to discrimination based on a religious viewpoint and would be a violation of First Amendment rights to free speech and free practice of religion. The First Amendment says the government may not prohibit the exercise of these freedoms. Now, the First Amendment also says the government may not establish a particular religion and force people to practice it. So, the school district’s attorneys argued that having a religious club on public school property could lead children to believe that the school or government was somehow endorsing a particular religion. SCOTUS considered that argument and concluded that there is a greater danger that children will get the idea that they may not speak about God on public property than there is a danger that kids will think the school is endorsing a particular religion. With parents’ permission, children are allowed to attend a variety of clubs that are held at the school, including religious clubs. Child Evangelism Fellowship was pleased with the victory and has been able to help many school districts around the United States understand that they must allow the Good News Club to have the same access as other clubs. This SCOTUS ruling also helped to win another District Court ruling which clarified that teachers may also volunteer in Good News Club (Wigg v. Sioux City School District).  The Satanic Temple’s Pushback Now, here’s where it gets sticky. The Satanic Temple was upset to see the Good News Club having less resistance, so to make a point, they decided to start their own “Satan Clubs” in public schools. Choosing a school with a Good News Club, the Satanic Temple would insist that permission slips for a Satan Club be made available to the children under that same freedom of religion umbrella. Of course, when an active parent sees that a Satan Club is being hosted at the school, they get upset and go to the school board. The board can’t allow one and not the other, so the Satanic Temple hopes that this will force the school to shut down all clubs and thus get rid of the Good News Club. Or even, to put pressure on the Good News Club to leave in exchange for the Satan Club to leave also, thus solving the school’s problem of angry parents. How to Be an Active Parent Against This Ploy So, here’s the advice. What can you do as an active parent to combat strategies like this when it comes to protecting your freedom of religion in school?  1. Call Their Bluff The best strategy as an active parent is to call the bluff of those who would oppose you. Sure, start a Satan Club. It’s a free country. See how many other active parents give permission for kids to attend or see how well it’s run and how long it lasts. It won’t take long for people to realize that their track record is dismal and what the club really stands for. They will say that they don’t teach kids about Satan; that it’s more about humanism and so-called “tolerance,” but their actions and underhanded tactics only expose them to be deeply intolerant of the beliefs of others when it aligns with Biblical truth. 2. Don’t Let Your Guard Down While a Satan Club in your child’s school likely won’t do well, it’s still no reason to dismiss concern as an active parent. Besides this overt attempt to win the hearts of kids over to the dark side, there are many more insidious attempts of corruption that can happen beneath the surface. Kids may feel that going to a Satan Club has a cool, naughty, rebellious novelty about it. And even if the content taught, itself, seems innocuous, attending as a child will wear down inhibition towards attending a truly Satanic event or organization when older. The Satanic Temple may claim to be a “religion” of irony — one created solely to mock hyper-vigilant Christians, while preaching a message of humanism. But the Satanic Temple also had an 8,000-pound statue made of Satan with two elementary-aged children looking up adoringly. So, judge for yourself whether their clear attempt to appeal to children is one born from truly good intentions, or to weaponize and manipulate children against Christian values.  3. Get Involved Deceit is the calling card of Satan, and the best defense is a good offense — one that’s steeped in positive support for the values you do want to uphold as an active parent! Even if you don’t have children of your own in public school, I encourage you to help out in a Good News Club®. The best way you can help support a Good News Club is to encourage your church to adopt one. By banding together as active parents and teachers in our communities, we can help protect the right for kids to learn about Jesus in public schools — regardless of the ploys others might throw at us. Fred Pry is the acting vice president of administration at Child Evangelism Fellowship. READ MORE: There Is Nothing Worth Saving in America’s Public Schools Supreme Court Rules Against Religious Discrimination in School Funding The post Defending Faith in Schools: Oppose Satan Clubs appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Institutional Neutrality and the Truth I have noted in recent days that several American colleges have declared themselves “institutionally neutral,” meaning that they will no longer, as institutions, take positions on contested social and political questions. They rightly note that such declarations put the chill on freedom of thought, inquiry, and speech. They also, though from what I have seen they do it rather timidly, reaffirm that the university is supposed to be a place where people seek knowledge. That quest implies that there is such a thing as knowledge to be sought. Truth exists. We do not want to produce sophists. Our students are alive with the desire to see what is actually there to see. There are a few madmen and madwomen who will go so far as to deny that the results of scientific investigation and experiment help us to discover truths about the world. But there are far more such mad people outside of the “hard” sciences. In our colleges and graduate programs, in our law schools and medical schools, they are in the majority. These not only deny the existence of truths about God and man, about moral good and evil, about beauty and decency; they actively teach that there are no such, and brand as benighted and bigoted those who believe otherwise. Power is all: the power to “control the narrative.”  This power has been, they assume, merely the power of the rich against the poor, men against women, the privileged against the underprivileged, and so on through all the easy categorizations of oppressors and victims. It is, in an odd way, a sign of some stubborn health among the people, that departments in the humanities dominated by such professors are withering. Consider what moves someone to want to study history or literature. The soul in love with truth or beauty is not the same kind of soul as one in love with power, or one motivated by resentment or revenge against the powerful. Shift the discussion to any other moral arena and the distinction is clear. The young man who loves your daughter for her goodness and beauty is not the same kind of person as one who wants her because of her social rank. A man who prays to God in adoration is not the same kind of person as one who uses the idea of God as a weapon against his enemies. If you go on a tour of the Louvre, you expect the guide to describe the paintings for you, the techniques the artists used, their strokes of genius, the stories they tell in visual form, and so on; if all he talks about is what the artists earned from the sale of paintings, or what political positions they held, you will ask for your money back. And millions of graduates from our programs across the humanities and the social sciences should be doing just that: asking for their money back. It is one thing to put your parents’ house in hock over the gables to attain the truth, precious as pearls of great price. It is another thing to do so for political posters whose messages will not outlast the cardboard they are pasted on. The university, then, must affirm its commitment to truth, in all departments and in all matters that bear upon human life. You would not want to trust your money to someone who tells you at the outset that promises are made to be broken, whenever the promiser can gain by it politically or financially or personally. You would not trust your care to a doctor who tells you at the outset that “health” is a mere social construct, and what is called “disease” is often preferable. Why then would you trust your mind to someone who tells you he does not believe in truth, or your imagination to someone who tells you that there is no such thing as beauty? Here universities are convicted by what they still say about their methods of instruction. Everywhere you go, you will hear praise for the Socratic method, and for the discussion-based seminar. But you will not hear a peep about the Socratic aim: for Socrates sought the truth, and that was why he used the method we name for him, a method of definition, testing the definition, and rejecting it or refining it or developing it.  If you do not believe in the truth, you are not Socrates but one of the sophists with which his enemies confused him, one of those hucksters of rhetorical persuasion. Many a sophist did believe, as the boorish Thrasymachus insists in the Republic, that there is no such thing as justice, but only what the powerful demand. Or, as the evil Richard III puts it to his dubious followers before the battle of Bosworth Field, Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devised at first to keep the strong in awe. Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law! At Thales College, where I teach, we believe in the Socratic method because we believe in the Socratic aim: the method is an effective and humanly powerful way to achieve the aim, and to do so in a fashion that helps students experience what it is like to discover the truth. We do not want to produce sophists. Our students are alive with the desire to see what is actually there to see, and not to get themselves up in political fancy-dress, or to shout at one another to see whose lungs are the loudest, whose face is the reddest, and whose soul is the most shameless. Our care extends to works of art. No one, I suppose, would be so foolish as to say that Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star is as great a work as The Magic Flute, or that a child’s crayon drawing of a tree is as beautiful as the Tree of Life mosaic in Saint Clement’s, in Rome. No one who has ever heard me sing will confuse me with Luciano Pavarotti. Such admissions are points of leverage with which to heave up and clear away any lumpish skepticism regarding the objective existence of beauty. We may well argue about the details.  I would rather hear Jerry Orbach singing “Try to Remember,” from The Fantasticks, than anything at all by Taylor Swift. That sad and sweet love song is beautiful and memorable; I don’t think that Ms. Swift even thinks about beauty; rather about narcissistic self-presentation and aggression. She certainly dresses that way, without grace, without taste. But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps, in this general area, I am missing something essential from voices that sound as if they were forced out in groans. Perhaps I am expecting melodies in music where melodies do not belong. Reverence for the Truth In any case, even beauty can be approached with reverence, as Socrates approaches it. The statements I have read upholding freedom of inquiry still seem strangely limiting, as if their authors believe that a certain irreverence were necessary to the life of the mind. The reverse is true. Sloganeers are not reverent; they are simpletons or bullies or both. Silence is reverence’s gentle companion: a silence that enables the heart to wait upon the object of its gaze, as when through my small telescope I saw Saturn and her rings for the first time. Irreverence is flippant, slovenly, perfunctory. In our time, the humble, careful, and constant courtship of the beautiful is made nearly impossible by bad habits instilled in us by our high technology, and it is scorned or vitiated, whether consciously or not, by almost every teacher and professor of arts and letters in the land. Let those in charge of our schools look to it. We will have once more the Socrates of the Republic, when we have also the Socrates of the Phaedrus, sitting under a plane tree beside the brook Ilissus, to talk with a young fellow about what love is and what it is not. Then we may have, once more, faces of young people not contorted in political wrath, but calm and confident, irradiated by a vision of beauty and truth. READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: Get Lost, Kid Noise in the Classroom The post We Seek the Truth appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

With ongoing reports of supposed “book bans” and legislation being passed to “combat” them, it’s important to understand what’s really going on. Both the side arguing that these books somehow “save lives” as well as the side saying, “You’re an adult writing for kids. You’re an adult editing, publishing, selling, and recommending to kids. Stop grooming,” need clarification.   To be exact, books aren’t being banned or censored, as they can still be bought anywhere. Books are, however, being deemed inappropriate for reading lists, classrooms, and kid sections in libraries. Much of the mainstream conversation around this topic is usually focused on books easily recognized for their content, such as Gender Queer and Breathe, but there are cartloads of books going unnoticed unless someone bothers to read them. (Examples here and here if you can stomach it.) Granted, some titles wrongly land on the do-not-recommend list. Deliberate Publishing Shift The shift in publishing for younger audiences, like most issues of the day, began decades ago, and it has only accelerated. In the mid-1900s, an influential children’s editor named Ursula Nordstrom impacted children’s publishing in ways, good and otherwise, that are still present today. One of the most notable changes she enacted was publishing books that, rather than promote morals and good behaviors, were instead “good books for bad children.” A genre that’s always been dominated by female writers is increasingly expanding exclusive access to so-called queer and BIPOC writers.   Interestingly, some titles, like Where the Wild Things Are, don’t always garner second thoughts because they encourage “imagination” or something. Recall, however, that, in these books, there are no parents, morals, or good behavior in sight. And that is deliberate.  Fast forward to the past decade. Anyone who’s been following teen and young reader books for the last while will have picked up on shifts and trends that are par for the course of the industry. After Twilight proved that the young adult genre could be a moneymaker, the genre boomed and a slew of paranormal fiction hit YA shelves. Other trends include romantic triangles (one girl decides between two male romantic interests), dystopian fiction (often with climate-change-flooding themes), non-Western history, myths, and fantasy (a specific request of agents, hence the influx of Asian-themed books and authors as of late), enemies-to-lovers, and, most currently, the new romantasy genre.   Connection to YA and “Book Banning”  I’ve asked the question of book-world peers, but haven’t received a straight answer. Veterans and avid readers frustrated with the industry will confirm what not-lying eyes see as fact: that there have been major shifts in content, and almost no book is published from the major publishers without paying homage to certain checkboxes. Some don’t always see it right away, as quality of writing may override the ideas the writers are touting. The focus here is on content.  These latest shifts are not organic but have been foisted upon writers for years. While many gladly included them all along, most were not compelled to until recently. This includes writers who celebrate their religious beliefs in the acknowledgements, conciliatorily tossing in “her wife,” “his husband,” and the like.   Beyond the Cover of Teen Fiction Supporters, and enforcers, of these types of stories claim there has to be romance in teen fiction because it’s a time of firsts, first tastes of freedom and responsibility, first jobs, first cars, first decisions without parents, and first love. And so, for a long while, this first love was sealed with a kiss most of the way or all of the way at the end of the story. It was short, infrequent, and much easier to overlook.  Now, take a multi-book series that first came out about a decade ago. The first book probably has a girl-guy romance, and there’s a good chance it builds to a big romantic kiss, kind of like the movies. Follow the series as the years progress and see what happens by the time the last book comes out. They’re probably sleeping with each other, and if the book is more recent, they probably have been for a while. They may have even broken up, slept with others, then gotten back together at the end. Or, a guy-girl romance suddenly becomes f/f or m/m, for the protagonist or secondary characters.  Alongside the political and social currents, the slowly moving wave of change morphed into a tsunami of deliberate attempts of normalization. Kisses are more descriptive. Touches linger and travel all over. Depictions previously only found in steamy Harlequin Romances became regular features of novels for adults, and then YA (largely read by adults, so it’s become a genre). Spice, steam, and heat levels have been turned way, way up.  Many parents don’t realize how far this has gone because they trust in the industry, which should have many reasons to be celebrated. Upon spotting a tween holding a thick fantasy I knew to be above her age level, I had to ask her mom about it. The mother was not as avid a reader as her daughter, and had her own responsibilities that kept her from staying ahead of her daughter’s reading list. She thought it prudent enough to tell her tween to stick to books marked 14+. She had no idea what’s in books these days. (The author of the child’s book has been described as the “queen of faerie smut,” if you’re wondering.) Proponents of romance for teens will insist that inferno-heat levels of graphic, explicit detail saves lives because teens have to see themselves represented. What one thing has to do with the other is obviously not up for discussion from those of us without multiple letters after our names. As if morality needs a degree. How the details of clothing removal, and beyond, saves lives, and why this is representation, when many behaviors described are cause for alarming concern and immediate intervention are not explained. Why representation can’t be found in universal values and deep awareness of the timeless human condition, instead of a demeaning oversimplification of someone into desired love interests, has yet to be addressed.  Instead, they insist sexual encounters must be explicitly, graphically depicted because (a) teens are doing this anyway, (b) “representation,” and (c) teens have to see what healthy relationships look like, the obvious reason to include step-by-step instruction with accompanying consent at each point. It’s not about “stage of consent,” but “age of consent,” even if most characters written by adults are underage. And don’t think this isn’t trickling into Middle Grade (ages 8-12) too. And so, in books for teens, the new normal is that kisses are descriptive, touch is everywhere, clothes come off, and scenes in bed (and elsewhere) deliberately don’t fade to black. Just like the movies. The discussion among proponents is “what’s the best way to show a ‘healthy’ version of sleeping together” instead of “who said it’s healthy to be ramming any of this into a teen’s brain, anyway?”  Romances are no longer girl-guy, and if there is a love triangle, there’s a good chance it’s a girl choosing between one guy and one girl or both guys, an intentional promotion of polyamory. Other topics shoehorned into books include a child born of a man and woman who now lives with another woman, abortion, bi/demi/trans/queer/et al, “systemic racism” (including against Asians, still considered minorities in publishing-land for now), girls being physically stronger than guys, non-magical female soldiers/warriors in combat, females being explicit about not wanting kids, girls making the first move with guys (as per girlboss/”consent”), pedantic feminism, female gender-bent retellings, leftist activism, and on and on. Many of these aspects cannot be noticed by the title or cover, which is why so many don’t fully understand how pervasive it is. A genre that’s always been dominated by female writers is increasingly expanding exclusive access to so-called queer and BIPOC writers. Egregiously, books by “historically marginalized authors” are often penned by individuals who lean heavily into the above noted themes. The claim becomes that they’re banning books by minorities, without specifying what the author is writing about. Moreover, no one has conducted a thorough inquiry of all types among these minorities to know if this is how they want to be “represented.”  Pull up a list of recent/upcoming releases. Scan the shelves at your local bookstore. What do your “lying eyes” tell you? More importantly, notice what they’re not seeing? The move to adjust the window of inclusion hasn’t led to a widened frame, but merely a shifted, narrowed one. This is a large, but only partial, portion of the books supposedly “banned” from reading lists, classrooms and kid sections at the library. It’d be great to join the chorus urging teens to put down their phones and pick up a book instead, but that would really depend on what they’re reading. READ MORE from E.L. Tenenbaum: “American Teen” Young Informers The post Teen Fiction Is Going off the Rails appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The Trump-Harris debate — with 67 million viewers, the most watched in 16 years — was a 3-on-1 travesty. Megyn Kelly’s take (4:34) on the moderators shows extreme moderator anti-Republican bias, so ingrained that drastic measures must be taken. There are preliminary indications that Trump may have picked up undecided voter support, but even if so, reform is urgently needed. There are fixes at hand, but getting the Democrats to agree requires that Trump wins the election, as they benefit from today’s bias. Moderators as Neutral Time-Keepers (1) candidates and their campaign staffs prepare questions for the opposing candidate(s); (2) each side decides which topics to raise; (3) questions are limited to 30 seconds, to prevent candidates from making speeches disguised as questions; (4) candidates fact-check each other; (5) moderators are time-keepers only, cutting off mics when each time segment expires; (6) keep the new practice of no in-studio audiences. [T]he performance of the ABC moderators was the worst he’d seen in the 33 debates he’d run as CPD co-chair. My views come primarily from my years of watching debates — until after the first presidential debate in 2016, when I soured on watching live contests. At age 13, I watched the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates. One lesson learned was that appearances do matter: JFK was movie-star handsome, well-dressed — he was told that light blue shirt and makeup would work well with he black-and-white TVs of the time — and exuded charisma and charm.  Alas for Nixon, he was on the wrong side of all three; his post-shaving five-o’clock shadow showed up by lunchtime. Viewers gave JFK the edge, while radio listeners thought Nixon won. (READ MORE from John Wohlstetter: Will 2024 Bring Doom for the Filibuster and the Court?) There were no debates in 1964, 1968, and 1972. In 1968, a very close election, the outcome might have been different had the charismatic RFK, tragically assassinated and not saddled with Vietnam, been the Democratic candidate; RFK could well have swayed enough voters. Debates might have had to include George Wallace, whose 10 million voters delivered five states and 46 electoral votes in the still solidly Democratic South. Epic landslides made debates irrelevant in 1964 and 1972. Came 1976, and debates were revived. The GOP tickets introduced a new feature that factored in some debates: the catastrophic gaffe. In the vice-presidential debate, Senator Dole, a genuine war hero, crippled while trying to help a comrade, called the two world wars, plus the Korean and Vietnam conflicts “Democrat wars” (0:46) — adding that the total killed and wounded came to 1.6 million, equal to the population of Detroit. President Ford, in one of his debates with Jimmy Carter, said in response to stellar NY Times foreign correspondent Max Frankel, asking about Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe, that their populations did not see themselves dominated by the Soviets; given a change to retract, Ford repeated his view. He was belatedly vindicated on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. In 1980 the race was roughly dead even going into the final week. President Carter and Reagan met alone that night (Independent John Anderson had participated in the first debate, a month earlier). Reagan closed by asking voters: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” He cited Carter’s stagflation economy, and serial retreat abroad, The race margin held through the workweek, but over Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, the numbers tipped decisively to Reagan, who won the election on the issues foremost in voters’ minds. In 1984, Reagan won in a monster landslide. His debate with Carter’s former vice president, Walter Mondale, decided little. Reagan had faded at the end of the first debate. This led a journalist to ask Reagan, who was to turn 73 shortly after Inauguration Day 1985, if his age should be an issue. Reagan answered (0:45), looking at Mondale, then 56, that he promised not to use his opponent’s “youth and inexperience” against him. The audience roared, and Mondale, always a good sport, laughed. In 1988, Bush handily defeated a weak Democrat, former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. The year’s noteworthy debate moment came when vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen, who had served in the Congress Senate with JFK, pounced (0:49) on Dan Quayle’s citing having had as much experience in Congress as did JFK when he ran for president. To which Bentsen delivered a zinger: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. And senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy!” The audience, packed with Democrats, erupted. In the next five quadrennial debates, only one produced a truly noteworthy moment. The 1992 debates produced no fireworks, and were a veritable three-ring circus. In 1996, 2004, and 2008, ditto. But 2000 produced one extraordinary episode, that may well have cost then-vice president Al Gore the White House, given the razor-thin final margin. (Officially, Bush 43 won Florida, and the Electoral College majority, by only 537 votes in a protracted recount.) In one of the debates, Gore wandered over to Bush, physically invading his personal space (0:17) on stage, a major breach of debate etiquette. In 2012 there was a new element introduced: moderator fact-checking. CNN moderator Candy Crowley fact-checked Mitt Romney on what Obama said about the murder by Arab terrorists of three special ops defenders guarding our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where then-U.S. ambassador, J. Christopher Stephens, also perished. Crowley’s fact-check was, alas, not fully factual. In the event, Obama was handily re-elected. In 2016, I watched the first debate only, and was disgusted as the moderator, NBC’s Lester Holt, interceded on Hillary’s behalf after her dismal showing in the first 30 minutes. That did it for me and suffering through debates, praying that my preferred candidate wouldn’t make a fatal gaffe. (READ MORE: 25th Amendment: Acting President Is Not President) In 2020, it is generally conceded that Trump’s constant interrupting of Joe Biden cost him the win. Lest Trump do better a second time, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) used Trump’s recent recovery from Covid as an excuse to deny him a second debate. As if the candidates could not have been in separate booths, socially distant. The GOP co-chair of the CPD called (4:01) the performance of the ABC moderators the worst he’d ever seen in the 33 debates he’d run as CPD co-chair, from 1988 through 2020. (In 2024, Biden rejected CPD debate sponsorship.) True, no amount of reform can nullify advantages of looks, charm, charisma. And sheer luck can play a role. But lots can — and should — be done to minimize bias and caprice. The voters — for whose benefit political debates are presumably aired — deserve maximum transparency. Bottom Line An earlier generation of moderators tried to be fair: Their biases — impossible for anyone to completely eliminate — never decided a debate. Today’s generation of pseudo-journalists that moderate political debates are overwhelmingly — about 90 percent — ardently pro-Democrat. Reforming debate rules would enable voters to better appraise candidates. John C. Wohlstetter is the author of Presidential Succession: Constitution, Congress and National Security (Gold Institute Press, 2024) The post Fixing Presidential Debates: Lose the Moderators appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

MAHA Pushback Now that RFK, Jr. has teamed up with Trump to make Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) the new, if slightly less significant national slogan, the left will try to undermine the one thing that seems to unite both sides of the aisle — health. This alliance is more of a threat to the Democratic ticket than either candidate was alone and as sure as the sun rises, the Democrat party and the media will do everything it can to discredit the Trump—Kennedy stance against chronic disease. But demonizing meat and animal products is not the answer. Take, for example, Time’s August 27 story with the headline, “What If Ultra-Processed Foods Aren’t as Bad as You Think?” The article goes through the same type of mental gyrations I wrote about in a previous piece, splitting hairs over the definition of processed food arguing, for example, that a gummy bear and a can of beans are technically both processed. So how could a consumer possibly discern which would be the more nutritious choice? The backlash on social media channels was so fierce that the title of the article was updated the next day to read “Why One Dietitian is Speaking Up for ‘Ultra-Processed’ Foods.” The processed food industry is comprised not only of products common sense tells us are not healthy, such as Doritos, sugary soft drinks, and Snickers bars, but also a slew of vegan products that are marketed as healthy, such as non-dairy alternatives to milk, cheese and yogurt, beefless burgers, and dairy free ice cream. Vegan food options are often filled with artificial ingredients and highly processed seed oils, things Kennedy and his allies, such as Dr. Casey Means, have marked as contributors to chronic disease. A strictly animal free diet also supports the lie that cow farts will destroy the planet, promoting a rationale for Democrats to further their Green New Deal initiatives. This includes increased regulation that makes survival for independent farmers, in particular, even more tenuous. MAHA Requires Meat Alternately, Kennedy’s vision of saving the environment and simultaneously cleaning up people’s palates involves renewing the soil, which, through regenerative agriculture, must involve cows. Farm waste is recycled into the land and carbon sequestered for soil health. Several studies find that with appropriate regenerative crop and grazing management, ruminants not only reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions but also facilitate the provision of essential ecosystem services, increase soil carbon sequestration, and reduce environmental damage. Still, the left will continue to insist that all virtuous, caring people must stop eating meat. Mainstream media will continue to prime the pump to thwart any food policies that prevent the Green New Deal from achieving its end goal — complete and total government control over the means of production, or as many like to call it, socialism. Beans, Beans Are Good For … Not Much An opinion essay in the New York Times last month entitled “How to Make a Nation of Meat Eaters Crave the Humble Bean” offers another example of the type of pushback we can expect against Kennedy and Trump’s efforts to stop yet another avenue of anti-democratic control. The essay’s author, Bee Wilson, doesn’t exactly offer a compelling case for beans nutritional superiority or its environmental benefits. She only says that beans, “along with peas, lentils, and other legumes, are everything meat is not in sustainability terms.” Never mind that many studies conclude that one of the best food categories to decrease incidents of malnutrition is animal-based products. Or that the protein from all beans and legumes are considered “incomplete proteins” because they lack one or more of the nine essential amino acids found in animal-based protein that can only be taken in through food. That’s not to say they are nutritionally useless. But without mixing beans or legumes with another grain that contains one of its missing amino acids, you’ll not get the full benefit of the building blocks of muscle, skin, organs, and other tissues. Furthermore, a 2016 study found that diets that focus on reducing carbon are often less healthy than their carbon emitting counterparts. The key to human and planetary health is improving the sustainability of food while ensuring adequate nutritional needs for all. Bottom line: beans do not cut it. Bean Eaters Are Not Born – They’re Created What’s more illuminating is Ms. Wilson’s progressive view of human nature. She states that “no one is born loving hot dogs or disliking broccoli and Brazil nuts; our food preferences are learned.” Tell that to a mother trying to feed broccoli to her two-year-old. Like most loyal lefties, Wilson’s hypothesis assumes that humans are only a byproduct of learned behavior. There is no nature, only nurture. Everything — including one’s gender — is determined through socialization. It reminds me of Simone de Beauvoir’s declaration: “one is not born a woman, but becomes one.” We learn arithmetic, but 2+2 still equals 4. Unless, I suppose, you ask a progressive. They might try to tell you it equals seven and even do a pretty good job of convincing you it’s true. Just like a person with XY chromosomes can be a woman. As someone who doesn’t eat that much red meat, but is far from a vegetarian or vegan, I enjoy bean dishes as much as the next tree hugging hippie. I’ll happily plow through some homemade hummus. There’s nothing quite like a side of sauteed spinach and white beans with loads of garlic and, as the author comments, “crispy sage.” But I refuse to equate, as the author does, mashed potatoes to this plate of gaseous turmoil. Plus, she invalidates her own argument by suggesting that beans should replace potatoes, a vegetable, and not a bloody, juicy honking piece of red meat. Vegetables, beans, and legumes can be a wonderful supplement to any health diet. But for most, they should not be the sole source of sustenance. Talk about carbon emissions. You’ll Eat The Food We Prefer! Ms. Wilson also states, “To start seeing beans as something to crave, you need to imagine them as desirable.” In other words, we will shame and guilt you into eating beans. Just like Covid vaccinations. She also claims that “once little-known foods, from pesto to tofu and gochujang, have been welcomed gratefully onto American tables in recent decades.” I would contest the fact that tofu has been “welcomed gratefully” onto American tables. Maybe in neighborhoods like Brooklyn and in select microcosms of states west of Nevada, but for the most part, people still equate eating tofu with ingesting cardboard. Progressives make for very poor historians. They conveniently ignore the lessons of Stalin, Hitler, and Zedong. Forced change — including Kamala’s federal ban on so-called “price gouging” on food — cause nothing but misery and suffering and is almost always based on false logic and a desire for power. Food and the environment can be used as a tools of control, something Trump and now Kennedy are trying to prevent. Could Americans do with less McDonald’s and more homemade meals around the family dinner table? Of course. But demonizing meat and animal products is not the answer. Educating people on proper nutrition and weaning them off of addictive carbohydrate heavy diets would go a long way in ensuring the health of both humans and the planet to achieve MAHA’s goals. You can’t do that without meat and the farmers who provide it. READ MORE from Jennifer Galardi: Can America Afford To Be Healthy Again? The Democrat Party is a Cult   The post Food Fight: Competing Visions for America’s Health appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.