Column Science Fiction Film Club Village of the Damned: Killer Kiddos From Outer Space Parents grapple with raising brood parasitic aliens in this quiet, unsettling invasion story. By Kali Wallace | Published on December 4, 2024 Credit: MGM Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: MGM Village of the Damned (1960) Directed by Wolf Rilla. Written by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, and Ronald Kinnoch, based on the novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham. Starring George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, and Martin Stephens. One of the things I love about researching these articles is that I never know what historical twists and turns I will stumble across. Let’s go back to 1934, a few decades before Village of the Damned (1960) was put into production. John Wyndham was writing for American sci fi pulp magazines under the name John Beynon; his breakout literary success with Days of the Triffids wouldn’t arrive until 1951. Hollywood was becoming both a major political force (the studios meddled enthusiastically in the 1934 California gubernatorial election) and, relatedly, a major source of moral concern for people inclined toward pearl-clutching and handwringing about what they saw on movie screens. In 1934, MGM released W.S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man, which managed to slip in just under the wire as one of the last major films before studios accepted and began enforcing the self-censorship of the Hays Code. At the same time, across the country in Ohio, the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, a man by the name of John T. McNicholas, founded a group called the Catholic Legion of Decency. The goal of the Legion was to push the film industry into avoiding any subject matter that would “offend decency and Christian morality.” The Legion did not advocate for governmental censorship; instead it operated by asking its members to pledge to avoid films deemed inappropriate by various bishops and priests, and to apply commercial pressure by letting studios know exactly why they refused to see certain films. To address the obvious question: No, I don’t know if the men making these lists of forbidden movies went to watch those movies first. This 1934 Time article contains some quotations that suggest somebody was sitting in the theater furiously taking notes on every seductive and unwholesome detail, as well as scouring the tabloids to keep tabs on Hollywood gossip about the lives of the people involved. I hope they did watch the films; that would at the very least put them ahead of today’s book banners, most of whom have probably not read a book since high school, much less the books they so vehemently denounce as pornographic. By the late 1950s, both the influence of the Hays Code (which was drafted by a Jesuit priest) and the religion-driven pressure on motion picture studios was lessening, but it was still very much present. The Catholic Legion of Decency (which was at some point renamed “the National Legion of Decency”) was keeping an eye on movies as they went into production. One of the movies that caught their eye was Village of the Damned. (Note: It’s not entirely clear when the title was chosen or who chose it. The initial development used the book’s title, The Midwich Cuckoos, but it seems to have been changed fairly early on. I think Wyndham’s title is much better for the story, and Village of the Damned doesn’t fit at all, but that’s just movie business nonsense.) In a 1978 interview with Starburst magazine, screenwriter Stirling Silliphant spoke about how after he finished the initial script, MGM grew wary of producing the film because their Catholic advisors found the premise “anti-Catholic.” The problem, of course, is that the entire story hinges on a rash of sudden and mysterious pregnancies that mimic the Immaculate Conception. The Catholic Legion of Decency and others felt that it was blasphemous and “insulting” to make a movie about an alien force impregnating a bunch of women who were not, presumably, free of original sin. This surprised me a little bit—not because I would have expected 1950s Catholics to not be extremely weird about pregnancy, that’s totally predictable—but because in my mind various types of invasive impregnation, brood parasitism, and evil children are familiar horror and sci fi staples. But I started digging into those tropes and realized it’s maybe not quite that simple. There have of course been changeling myths for as long as people have been telling stories, but those are notably about perfectly normal human children being replaced by inhuman children. There have also long been spooky kids in horror literature; Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) is of course one of the creepy children classics. But there weren’t actually many films with the evil children premise when Wyndham wrote The Midwich Cuckoos. There was 1956’s The Bad Seed, based on William March’s 1954 novel, which is about a sociopathic little girl who kills a schoolmate. The Production Code Administration strongly urged all the major studios not to adapt the novel, but Warner Brothers made the movie, and it was a big hit. I’m not sure if The Bad Seed is the first major Hollywood film to focus on a homicidal little child, but it certainly one of the earliest. Village of the Damned followed not long after, and quite a few more terrifying children from studios large and small would fill out the horror genre over the next few decades: The Omen (1976), Alice, Sweet Alice (1976), Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), The Brood (1979), Children of the Corn (1984), and so on. In any case, back in the late ’50s, killer kids weren’t the horror movie staple they are today, and MGM did not see Village of the Damned as a sure thing. Around the same time as the studio was balking under pressure from the Catholic Legion of Decency, the film’s original lead actor, Ronald Colman, died of natural causes. Rather than scrapping the film entirely, MGM shelved it for a while before moving it to the United Kingdom. This annoyed Silliphant so much that he broke his contract with MGM and spent a few years writing for television—he came back to the movies eventually, and is now most well-known for writing the Academy Award-winning screenplay for In the Heat of the Night (1978), as well as the iconic Irwin Allen disaster films The Towering Inferno (1974) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the latter of which gave me terrible nightmares as a child, even though I lived a thousand miles from the nearest ocean. Upon its move to the U.K., Village of the Damned was handed to director Wolf Rilla and producer Ronald Kinnoch. Production was slated to start just a few weeks later, so Rilla and Kinnoch had a very short time to revise the script to make it more believably British. They filmed the movie in the Hertfordshire village of Letchmore Heath, featuring the village’s buildings and exteriors—such as the wall that unfortunate driver smashes into. Rilla was a writer and producer for the BBC before he decided to try his hand at making films, although Village of the Damned would prove to be his only real success. It’s interesting how much his journalistic background influenced the movie’s style. Contemporary reviews highlight how Village of the Damned is “quietly civilized” and “acted and directed with deadly seriousness.” The film has no real action, no jump-scares, very little on-screen violence, and the only special effects are the use of freeze frames and minor animation to give the children their glowing eyes. This approach is very understated, almost muted, which isn’t unusual for how horror movies normally begin, but it is unusual that it maintains that tone all the way through. This is a film about people desperately trying to believe they aren’t in a horror story. It works better in some places than in others. The film’s weakest element is in how the awful violation of inexplicable pregnancy is explored largely through the perspective of the men reacting to it, not the women. Sure, it’s a result of the film being very much of its time, as well as written by men, but I can’t help but think how much more unsettling the situation would feel if we got a glimpse into a conversation between the mothers of the children. For all of the worries about blasphemy, the movie barely touches on religion. What it’s more concerned about is the role parents and other people play in shaping a child’s moral compass. Gordon and Anthea Zellaby (George Sanders and Barbara Shelley) are concerned about guiding David (Martin Stephens) to maybe try not to kill people with his brain, although their efforts are ultimately futile and always undermined by their own suspicions and fears. Obviously, they know from conception that there is something strange about David and the other children. The kids grow at an unnaturally rapid rate and never bother to hide their psychic powers, so the film skips right over the “Little kids can’t be that bad!” stage and right into the “Those children are mind-controlling people!” stage. The few scenes we see of Anthea caring for David—mothering him—are notably uncomfortable. He is merely tolerating her, and she is afraid of him, and they both know the other one wants their relationship to be different. Gordon’s attitude toward the children is slightly different. It reminds me a bit of Dr. Yamane’s reaction in Godzilla (1954): acknowledgement that this is a terrifying situation beyond their understanding, but still wanting to learn from it rather than recklessly eliminating it. Atomic-era sci fi was often reminding us that with great power comes great responsibility, and Village of the Damned touches on this with the information about the strange children being born into other communities around the world. The purpose is to show that people have dealt with these children differently, although the details, taken directly from The Midwich Cuckoos, are rife with cultural stereotypes: Inuit and Mongolian communities killing their children outright, the Soviet community seizing upon the children’s skills to control and utilize them, and the Australian children (part of the Commonwealth, after all!) dying of natural causes. But let’s not forget what’s important here: Village of the Damned works because those kids are really, truly creepy. They are delightfully creepy. Zilla was very straightforward about how he achieved that creepiness from his young cast: he made them be still. It’s such a small thing, but all the more effective because of it. Children are not still. Children are chaotic perpetual motion machines. So by having the Midwich children be perfectly still, whether they’re in their cribs or in their mother’s arms, sitting attentively at their school desks or psychically forcing a man to shoot himself, there is a powerful sense of wrongness every time they are on screen. They are always calmly unmoving, emotionlessly blank, and outwardly unreactive. Heavy-handed late ’50s xenophobia and wonderfully creepy blond moppets aside, the film provides an interesting look into a whole swath of sci fi questions: How are we different? How are we the same? What do we do when we encounter somebody truly different? Not just on our planet, but in our bodies, in our families, in our homes? What do we do in the face of something so unfamiliar that it’s frightening? What do we do when we want the aliens to be like us, to adopt our ways and fit into our lives, but the aliens refuse? What do we do when neither humans nor aliens can ignore the mutual threat they present to each other? Much like the interplanetary spores in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Midwich children have come to Earth to survive, but we don’t learn much about their purpose beyond that. We don’t even know if there is a purpose beyond that. Unlike the pod people, they don’t state any intent toward taking over the world or assimilating humanity under their control. (The film, unlike the book, even hedges a little bit on whether they are extraterrestrial in origin, but it’s a very little bit. It’s clear that everybody, including the children themselves, believes they are aliens.) Would things go differently if the children blended in better? If they weren’t so emotionless, or if the villagers weren’t so afraid? Was there ever a possibility in which Gordon and Anthea’s nurturing could have been more influential than David’s nature? We don’t know, but the endless possibilities are why writers so enjoy sticking odd children among ordinary people, for better or worse. I mentioned a bunch of creepy children stories above, but let’s also remember an alien-raised-by-humans story that predates The Midwich Cuckoos by a couple of decades, and which takes a similar premise in pretty much the exact opposite direction: the first Superman comic was published in 1938. Sci fi has long been fascinated with the presence or absence of emotion, whether it’s innate or learned, and to what extent it is a fundamental human trait. It’s a way to examine questions that tumble around the fields of psychology, sociology, and criminology—questions that don’t have easy answers, because humans are complicated creatures. How we treat children is a powerful lens for exploring how we view ourselves. When the children are a bit wrong, or quite creepy, or extremely dangerous, it becomes a way to challenge our ideas about our capacity for empathy, our willingness to engage the strange and unknown, and where we might reach the limits of our protective instincts. Who are your favorite creepy children in sci fi and horror? What do you think about Village of the Damned? I know there is a sequel, Children of the Damned (1964), that portrays the children in a much more sympathetic light, but I haven’t seen it and am curious to hear from anybody who has. Next week: Use your internet skills to hunt down Save the Green Planet!, or watch it on Kanopy if you can. I suggest checking JustWatch or a similar site to see about availability in your location.[end-mark] The post <i>Village of the Damned</i>: Killer Kiddos From Outer Space appeared first on Reactor.

With thousands of songs released a year, only an incredibly small percentage of them ever make it on the radio. And of the small percentage, even fewer leave their lasting mark on the medium. "Yesterday" by The Beatles can still be heard on the radio today while other tracks from the legendary band's catalog have fallen out of the rotation. What other songs have stood the test of time to become... Source

An animal shelter in Virginia shares the good news that one of their shelter dogs who has spent 472 days at the shelter has finally found her forever home. The Angels of Assisi shared the news on Wednesday, November 27. They wrote on a Facebook post, “Finally, during our Pet Expo Adopt-A-Thon last Saturday, RoRo met her human.” Angels of Assisi shares that Roro was brought into their shelter after her family suffered a loss which caused them to move and they could no longer take care of the pooch. Life was tough for Roro, because on top of being surrendered by her family, she also had some medical issues. “On top of that, RoRo needed to have surgery to remove a cancerous mass and has severe allergies, which caused her to have some hearing loss, and need to be managed daily.” “All 472 of those shelter days, RoRo has been a happy, playful and loving dog, with our kennel staff often going into her space on their breaks to spend extra time with her,” Angels of Assisi shares. And while there weren’t many potential adopters lining up for Roro, she had an “Angel Ambassador”, someone who takes her for weekly outings to help keep her spirits up despite the shelter life and give her some extra loving. And on Saturday, November 23, Roro finally met her forever home. “Kathy fell in love immediately and we know RoRo’s feelings were mutual,” the animal shelter shared. Angels of Assisi also reveals that Roro has quickly settled into her new mom’s home and giant yard! The animal shelter said they are very excited for this next chapter in Roro’s life and said, “Kathy says RoRo is in fact the one who rescued her, and she’s looking forward to growing together in the years to come.” “Animals like RoRo are why we do what we do,” Angels of Assisi wrote. Currently, the Angels of Assisi is offering special holiday weekend discounts on their adoption fees from November 30 to December 29, every Saturday & Sunday. The adoption fees for adult cats and dogs will be $25, $75 for kittens, and $200 for puppies. So, if you’re looking for a sign to adopt, this is it! The discounts are the animal shelter’s way of ensuring they can get as many of their shelter animals into a warm, loving home just in time for the holidays.

It's True! Trump Lost Childless Cat Ladies!

Not all asteroid impacts lead to devastating mass extinction, as it turns out.

On October 19, 2017, astronomers spotted the anomalous interstellar object `Oumuamua, as it arrived near Earth within a fifth of the Earth-Sun separation. At closest approach, it was moving at a speed of 54 miles per second relative to the Sun, traversing in one second the distance that a typical car crosses on the highway in one hour. At that speed, `Oumuamua was not bound by the Sun’s gravity and was heading out of the Solar system. It was the first large visitor to have been identified by astronomers from outside the Solar system. `Oumuamua had a diameter of order a hundred meters, the size of a football field. The brightness of sunlight reflected from its surface changed by a factor of ten as it was tumbling every 8 hours, suggesting a shape that is disk-like at the 91% confidence. Moreover, `Oumuamua exhibited non-gravitational acceleration away from the Sun without any visible signs of a cometary tail. The level of that acceleration, 0.1% of the gravitational acceleration induced by the Sun, required that the object lose about a tenth of its mass through standard cometary evaporation in order for it to obtain the observed push from the rocket effect. Such a high level of evaporation would have been easily observed in the form of a familiar cometary tail that reflects sunlight. However, no carbon-based molecules or dust particles were spotted around `Oumuamua following deep observations by the Spitzer space telescope. By now, `Oumuamua is 44 times farther than the Earth is from the Sun and 100 million times fainter than it was close to Earth. Its nature and origin remain mysterious. An artist’s impression of ‘Oumuamua, which means ‘messenger’ in Hawaiian. Last night, I gave a public lecture to an inspiring women’s organization near the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge Massachusetts. While discussing `Oumuamua, I pointed out the analogy with a memorable dating experience. Just as in an intriguing encounter with someone who left the bar to the dark street before we could get enough information from them, we can search for past encounters with their family members in order to gain more information about their origins. One of the attendees asked: “Could we find elongated crater impacts from `Oumuamua’s family on the Moon?” This was late last night. As soon as I woke up this morning, I did the related calculation before my morning jog at sunrise. Given that one `Oumuamua-like object was detected within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun in seven years, the number of its family members per unit volume is about 0.1 per Earth-Sun-separation cubed. Adopting this abundance and the local speed of `Oumuamua, I calculated that there should have been a few impacts by `Oumuamua’s family members on the Moon during its 4.5 billion years history. Can we identify the craters they left behind? Given the high speed and large size of `Oumuamua, a related lunar crater could be up to 20 kilometers in diameter and possibly show evidence for the elongated shape of the impactor. Unfortunately, finding the few craters from `Oumuamua’s family on the Moon is like finding a needle in a haystack. Based on a recent census, there are at least a million lunar craters larger than a kilometer in diameter, 83 thousand above 5 kilometers and 7 thousand larger than 20 kilometers. This large number of scars on the face of the Moon is not surprising since the abundance of `Oumuamua-size rocks from the Solar system that are flying around the Earth is about of order a thousand times larger than those originating from interstellar space. Finding the graves of `Oumuamua’s family members on the Moon is therefore as challenging as finding the corpses of a few specific people among a few thousand unmarked graves in a mass grave. Should we instead search for relics of `Oumuamua’s family members on Earth? Since the surface area of the Earth is 13.4 times larger than that of the Moon, there were probably tens of related impacts on Earth but their craters were compromised by pre-impact ablation in the Earth’s atmosphere and post-impact geological activity over hundreds of millions of years. Given a thousand times more impactors from the Solar system, it is extremely difficult to trace `Oumuamua’s family members on Earth. A better way to proceed is to search for `Oumuamua’s family members as they pass near Earth without colliding, just as `Oumuamua did. Starting in 2025, the Rubin observatory in Chile will survey the southern sky every four days with a 3.2 giga-pixel camera. This survey will enable the discovery of many new family members of `Oumuamua without requiring them to crash on Earth or a Moon. After all, there are many more fish in the interstellar ocean than those captured by our fishing nets. The post The Graveyard of `Oumuamua’s Family on the Moon appeared first on Anomalien.com.

On Monday's Morning Joe, MSNBC co-host Joe Scarborough proclaimed that "the only reason" that Republicans will have a majority in the House of Representatives is because North Carolina Republicans "rigged" the state's congressional districts to take three seats from Democrats. The MSNBC host did not mention that there are plenty of states (California, for example) where Republicans are substantially short-changed in the number of districts they can win compared to the party's overall performance in the state. As Scarborough was making an argument that, because the overall popular vote in the elections was close, pundits should not go overboard in predicting how much trouble Democrats are in, the MSNBC host brought up Republicans picking up three House seats in North Carolina after the districts were redrawn by the Republican legislature this year, twice claiming that they had "rigged" the districts: And the only reason Democrats are not in charge of the United States House of Representatives and Hakeem Jeffries is not Speaker of the House is because North Carolina legislators rigged the process so badly that they took away three Democratic seats there in a rigged redistricting attempt that actually held up. After court-drawn plans were used in the 2022 elections, the North Carolina State Supreme Court allowed the legislature to change the districts again to be used beginning in 2024. MSNBC regular Willie Geist then elaborated that, although Republicans won 220 seats, three of the Republican seats are likely to be vacant for several months, with two accepting appointments by President-elect Donald Trump, making the margin very close.  Geist eventually read a Tweet by The Cook Political Report's Dave Wasserman who observed that North Carolina redistricting probably put Republicans over the top for a House majority: That small majority may also be due in part because of the North Carolina Supreme Court. As Dave Wasserman of The Cook Political Report notes, "When Republicans won a majority on the court in 2022, they had the power to redraw three Democratic seats into the GOP's hands, which may have effectively killed Democrats' chances at winning the House this cycle." In spite of Scarborough's suggestion that Republicans did something underhanded by drawing districts to gain three seats in North Carolina, it was not mentioned that there are plenty of examples of Republicans being short-changed in other states such that it all balances out. In California, for example, even though the state's 52 districts were drawn by a nonpartisan commission to prevent gerrymandering, Republicans are being short-changed by a whopping 11 seats. Even though Trump won 38.3 percent of the vote in the state this year, which would work out proportionately to 20 out of 52 districts, there will likely only be nine districts that Republicans will hold. (And only seven California districts were Republican-leaning enough to vote for Trump in 2020.) There's also New York, where Republicans will hold seven out of 26 seats when 11 would be proportionate; Illinois where the GOP will hold three out of 17 when seven would be proportionate; New Jersey where there will be three Republican seats out of 12 when five or six would be more appropriate; and Massachusetts, where Democrats have held all the state's congressional districts (currently nine) since the 1990s. Transcript follows: MSNBC's Morning Joe December 3, 2024 6:16 a.m. Eastern JOE SCARBOROUGH: Like we said repeatedly going up to the election, this race is tight. Now, I can see, if this was like an LBJ-style blowout in '64 or a Nixon blowout in '72 or a Reagan blowout in '84, but this was one of the closest elections ever, especially if you look at the outcome in the House and the outcome of the Senate. And the only reason Democrats are not in charge of the United States House of Representatives and Hakeem Jeffries is not Speaker of the House is because North Carolina legislators rigged the process so badly that they took away three Democratic seats there in a rigged redistricting attempt that actually held up. So, again, here we are one month since the 2024 election, Willie, and only one House seat that remains uncalled this morning but is Democratic -- makes it look like they're in a dead tie. You know what they call this in Europe? A unity government because they're basically tied. So all these people saying that this is the end of the world for the Democratic party? I think they may be over-analyzing this just a bit. WILLIE GEIST: Yeah, a three-vote majority in the Senate for Republicans and an even narrower majority at this moment in the House. And, as you said, Joe, those swing state -- all seven of which went to Donald Trump, and there are some very troubling signs inside the vote for Democrats that they're already looking at and need to adjust to to change, but let's remember he won by a point and a half within the margin of error of all of the polling, as we said all along. He won by a couple million votes. He's under a majority -- he's at 49.9 percent this morning -- doesn't even have 50 percent. So you can throw out terms like "landslide" -- which his campaign and transition team likes to use. He does have a mandate in the sense of Republicans are fully behind him. But the idea that he's going to steamroll through anything he wants -- he is pushing those boundaries right now. Let's be clear to see how far Republicans will go. But he just doesn't have the votes to do it all on his own terms. So let's explain what Joe was saying. One House seat remains uncalled still this morning four weeks after election day. In California's 13th congressional district, Republican Congressman John Duarte is trailing his Democratic challenger by more than 200 votes with 99 percent of the vote in. Should his Democratic challenger oust him, House Speaker Mike Johnson will likely be dealing with a one-seat majority for those first 100 days of Congress. That's because two House members are likely to serve in the incoming Trump administration, and former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz resigned from office last month, which will leave those seats empty until special elections are held. That small majority may also be due in part because of the North Carolina Supreme Court. As Dave Wasserman of the The Cook Political Report notes, "When Republicans won a majority on the court in 2022, they had the power to redraw three Democratic seats into the GOP's hands, which may have effectively killed Democrats' chances at winning the House this cycle."

Introducing an interview with left-wing author Joshua Green, PBS News Hour co-anchor Geoff Bennett made a rare media admission: “Much has been made of the far right’s strong sway over the GOP and its agenda. But what doesn’t get nearly as much attention is the far left’s influence in the Democratic Party.”  Bennett could be describing his very own News Hour, PBS’s flagship weeknight news program. The “far left” certainly doesn't gain attention on taxpayer-funded PBS, at least not under that label. PBS was “far” more likely to use hostile ideological terminology to describe right-leaning groups, personalities, or policies. MRC analysts studied the labels used by anchors, reporters and contributors on the PBS NewsHour regarding American politics from June 1, 2023 to November 30, 2024. We did not include PBS News Weekend programs.The difference in labeling was stark.  Key Findings: ■ PBS staff used 162 variations of “far right” labels and only six “far left” labels, an astounding ratio of 27 to 1. ■ PBS staff also used mere "right-wing" and "left-wing" labels at a disparity of 33 to 6. So overall, the labeling disparity was 195 to 12. ■ Fascist Trump, Communist Harris: Independent of the labeling counts above, PBS staff and guests employed 17 total “fascist” labels of Donald Trump, compared to three for Kamala Harris as “communist,”  with two of those three denying she was one. Even that stark 27:1 ratio understates the full extent of the slant. “Right” labels were often targeted at specific people or groups and conveyed a sense of menace. The rare “left” labels were often merely quotes from the Republican campaign trail or amorphous descriptions that lacked the specificity or warning connotation of the right labels, or were loaded with caveats.  PBS also failed to apply “left” labels to the guests invited on to lament, unopposed, about Trump using extremist rhetoric of having extremist immigration proposals, or Republican legislation limiting abortion or transgender "health care." In fact, those guests turned around and contributed their own labeling bias, though the slant was not as stark as from PBS reporters.   PBS Reporters: “far-right” labels vs “far-left” labels: 64-2 Far-right examples: News Hour co-anchor Amna Nawaz lamented on June 2, 2023, during the drawn-out House GOP leadership fight: “….there were a lot of questions about how Speaker McCarthy would be able to handle the far-right members of his conference in particular.” PBS reporter Laura Barron-Lopez on September 12, 2023: “And far-right Republicans have threatened a shutdown and McCarthy's gavel if their list of demands, including an impeachment inquiry, go unmet….The White House is again saying that there is no evidence, that this is -- quote -- 'extreme politics.' And to Heather's point about the list of demands that these far-right conservatives are issuing in exchange for funding the government, the White House is very eager to latch on to that and say that this is extreme Republicans trying to potentially cause a government shutdown in exchange for an impeachment inquiry, in exchange for these — a host of all these other demands.” Nawaz’s fellow co-anchor Geoff Bennett said in a September 26, 2023 interview with Vice President Kamala Harris: “… as House Republicans fight among themselves over whether or how to extend government funding, it appears likely that the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who's already slammed his far-right flank, as trying to burn down the House, that he might need help from Democrats.” On October 25, 2023, Bennett said to guest Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa): “Mike Johnson is more genial than Jim Jordan, but he's no less a hard-liner. He is on the far right of the spectrum when it comes to issues like reproductive rights, same-sex marriage.” Bennett waded into the supposed Supreme Court flag controversy on May 29, 2024: “U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito told lawmakers today he won't recuse himself from cases involving the 2020 presidential election or the January 6 Capitol riot. That's despite concerns about two flags associated with far-right causes that have flown over his properties.” Barron-Lopez questioned hard-left Yale professor Jason Stanley on November 27, 2024: “What could a second Trump term mean in terms of emboldening extremists or those who hold far-right views about the future of the country?” Far-left: Occasionally centrist commentator David Brooks came up with one of his almost reluctant uses of a “left” label on August 30, 2024. Reflecting on the 2019 Democratic primary debates, he noted that “the Democratic Party moved pretty far left on a whole bunch of issues in ways that I thought were politically suicidal, decriminalizing the border, obviously the defunding the police, the ban on fracking.”    “Hard-right" vs “hard-left” labels: 16-1 Hard-right: Nawaz on October 2, 2023 documented one of the last acts of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who kept the government open, having “sidestepped the hard-right flank of his party and pushed through a temporary spending bill with the help of Democrats.” Covering the race to replace McCarthy, here’s congressional reporter Lisa Desjardins on October 17, 2023: “In Congress, Jordan was a founding member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, where he gained a reputation for forgoing suit jackets and for his combative in-your-face style of politics.” They did not describe the Congressional Black Caucus or the Congressional Progressive Caucus as "hard-left."  After Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) cited the “hard right….in the Freedom Caucus,” on the January 8, 2024 edition, Desjardins repeated the partisan Democrat’s hostile formulation: “Yes, but again, that hard right, however you want to describe them, Freedom Caucus really will be an issue in terms of getting the votes….” Hard-left:  This barely counts as a negative label, as David Brooks managed to sound sympathetic talking of the pro-Hamas mobs on college campuses on April 26, 2024: “So I think most of the protesters are appalled by the horrors the Palestinians are suffering and they're well-motivated by compassion. There are some people who are probably hard-left people, and they get to have their views.”    "Extreme right" vs "extreme left": 57-3 Extreme Right: Two groups that could actually be called “extreme,” The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, were granted that label by both anchors, Bennett and Nawaz, on the June 1, 2023 program. Yet PBS reporters have also used the label to smear  conservative groups like Moms for Liberty. On Independence Day 2023, co-anchor Amna Nawaz unwittingly revealed PBS’s gross labeling standards when she called the anti-Israel elimination terror group Hamas “extremist” (obviously before the October 7 attacks), then applied that same word, on the same program, to non-racist “militias” that celebrated 1776 and the Founding Fathers! Nawaz used two separate labels while introducing a report by congressional reporter Lisa Desjardins: “The American Revolution and the Founding Fathers, two parts of U.S. history celebrated on July Fourth. In recent years, they have also become political and ideological tools, including at times of some extremist groups on the right.” While interviewing Hillary Clinton on October 3, 2023, Bennett pivoted off Clinton’s reference to “extreme members” of the Republican caucus with this repetitive softball: “On this matter of extremists within the GOP, President Biden has said that the Trump Republicans, the MAGA Republicans, as he puts it, are semi-fascists, and that there's this growing authoritarian strain in the Republican Party. Do you see it that way? And what's the best way to remedy that, if you do see it that way?” On November 8, 2023, Bennett forwarded a charge by the discredited radical leftists at Southern Poverty Law Center: “In yesterday’s election, voters across the country pushed back on the group called Moms for Liberty. They say they’re a parental rights organization. The Southern Poverty Law Center says that they’re an extremist group.”  Anchor Nawaz talked to Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on February 5, 2024 about Democrats supposedly caving on immigration legislation: “You have faced some criticism from your fellow Democrats as well, progressives in particular. The caucus chair, Pramila Jayapal, said Democrats are giving into extremist views."  Extreme Left: As previously noted, even the few lefty labels tabulated were often just anchors repeating Donald Trump or J.D. Vance’s campaign rhetoric, often with a note of disapproval. PBS wouldn’t have dared call Kamala Harris “extreme” directly, the way the News Hour was comfortable doing with Republicans. NPR’s White House correspondent and PBS commentator Tamara Keith announced on July 22, 2024: “There is a well of energy that exists for Harris and who she is and the history she could make. Republicans also want to tap into that and paint her as extreme.”    “Hard-line” right vs “hard-line” left: 25-0 Most stark was the use of “hard-line,” employed by PBS staff 25 times against conservative policies or personalities during the study period, compared to zero occasions for liberal ones. (Two guests also referred to conservatives as “hard-line.”) Lisa Desjardins packed an impressive amount of labels into her March 21, 2024 story: "Hard-liners say the disorder is within GOP leadership, that they skirt rules and bend or break pledges. But the majority of Republicans I speak with say, no, the issue is the hard-liners, that they demand untenable positions, like allowing a government shutdown. Some hard-liners see shutdowns as leverage, even right at this moment, Amna, and others see them as a disaster.” Here’s Bennett on November 11, 2024, after Trump’s victory: “And the president-elect is also expected to formally name Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff for policy in the coming days. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance confirmed the selection on the social media site X. Miller worked as an adviser during Mr. Trump's first term and is known as an immigration hard-liner.”   PBS Reporters: “right-wing” vs. “left-wing: 33-6 Right-wing: PBS host John Yang talked with NPR media reporter David Folkenflik about Rupert Murdoch’s right-leaning media empire on September 21, 2023. Folkenflik ranted: “The legacy that endures is sort of the success and the fun at times of his right-wing populism, but also the punitive and pugilistic nature of it that has been ultimately quite corrosive, not only to our sense of what fair play is in journalism in this country and in some of the others, like the U.K. and Australia, in which he was so dominant.”  Bennett chatted with then-Washington Post reporter Devlin Barrett on the November 7, 2023 edition on an emerging liberal bogeyman, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025: “And you report that much of the planning for a second Trump term has been outsourced to this group of right-wing think tanks dubbed Project 2025.” Bennett on May 17, 2024: “Texas Governor Greg Abbott has pardoned a man convicted of fatally shooting a Black Lives Matter protester in the summer of 2020. Abbott had faced pressure to issue the pardon from white right-wing conservatives, including then Fox News host Tucker Carlson.” The same evening, reporter Stephanie Sy questioned Austin-American Statesman investigative reporter Tony Plohetski about Abbott’s pardon: “….critics say this is politics, and you had right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson calling for this for a year.” Left-wing: Even the few left-wing references came with caveats. On February 15, 2024, substitute anchor John Yang hemmed and hawed to Shaun Harper, Executive Director of the USC Race and Equity Center: “Shaun, I don't want to put words into Greg's mouth [Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression], but I have heard others argue against DEI, saying that colleges and universities are essentially indoctrinating students in sort of left-wing views. What do you say to that?” On August 6, 2024, Bennett used one of the liberal media’s favorite words to neutralize Trump’s criticism of the “left-wing” Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket: “The Trump campaign is already pouncing, calling [Tim Walz] dangerously liberal and saying that the Harris/Walz ticket is the most left-wing ticket in American history.” One of the very few genuine “left” labels aired -- not a quote, not one made sarcastically or dismissively -- was Bennett on the June 24, 2024 show talking to USA Today reporter Francesca Chambers about an upcoming Democratic primary race, in which more moderate Democrat George Latimer would defeat radical Democrat incumbent Jamaal Bowman: “Francesca, without reading too much into any one race, I mean, how much will this tell us about the strength of the Democrats’ left-wing faction."   Labeling Disparity by Guests: 52 right to 19 left Guests interviewed on the PBS News Hour also unloaded ideological labels upon conservatives and Republicans, though not at quite the same sharp tilt as the PBS crew. The right-left label disparity from PBS guests (often political journalists) was 52-19. For example, Dr. Peter Hotez complained that the government's COVID response faced "an entire ecosystem of elected officials on the far right, together with Fox News and other outlets."   SIDEBAR: “Fascist” Trump vs.” Communist” Kamala PBS’s labeling disparity wasn’t limited to the terms above. A “fascist” smear campaign against Donald Trump came to a head after October 22, 2024 comments made by John Kelly, the retired Marine general who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff, claiming the former president fit “into the general definition of fascist.” PBS relished using Kelly’s quotes to smear Trump as a “fascist,” without caveats or hesitation.  Desjardins on October 23, 2024: “In scathing comments in audio interviews with The New York Times, Kelly said Trump, behind the scenes, displayed the tendencies of a fascist.” Bennett repeated it that same night: “As we just heard, retired Four-Star General John Kelly, who was one of Donald Trump’s White House chiefs of staff, told The New York Times, Donald Trump would rule like a fascist if reelected.” PBS didn’t let up. Here’s Bennett on October 25: "John Kelly, Donald Trump's longest-serving White House chief of staff, told The New York Times that he believed Donald Trump met the definition of a fascist, that he would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of the rule of law.” Barron-Lopez got in some last licks against Trump on November 4, the day before Election Day, that Kamala Harris "was repeatedly quoting former Trump officials like his longest-serving Chief of Staff John Kelly, as well as the former Joints Chief of Staff. And their words, as they described him as -- they described Donald Trump as fascist and as dangerous.” In all, 10 NewsHour reporters and seven guests labeled Trump or his policies as “fascist,” often in the course of repeating Kelly’s accusation, with no criticism that the label was a smear or an extreme exaggeration, save a typically mild comment from David Brooks. Only during PBS’s special Election Night coverage, with Trump cruising toward victory, did PBS’s resident poll-watcher Amy Walter mildly suggest that calling Trump a fascist perhaps hadn’t been an effective tactic for the Democrats.  In contrast, PBS fiercely resisted when the Trump camp referred to Kamala Harris as “Comrade Kamala” or her or Democrats in general as “Communist.” The description aired a total of three times, each time by a PBS staffer -- and two of those three happened in the course of denying Harris was a communist! On June 6, 2024, Barron-Lopez said that referring to Democrats as Marxist or communists were “common slurs” by Republicans.  Desjardins assured viewers on July 22, 2024 that Republicans were wrong about Harris: “Obviously, [Harris] is someone who is a part of a democratic republic. She is not a communist. But that is something that they’re going to try and tag her with.” The labeling disparity documented in this study goes beyond the standard media tilt of “liberal” and “conservative” labeling, and is a grossly inappropriate stance for a tax-funded network with a congressional mandate to maintain "strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.”     Methodology: MRC analysts tabulated every use of the phrases “far right, “hard right,” “right wing, “far left,” “hard left,” “left wing,” “extreme,” “hard-line,” fascist,” and “communist” (and all variations of those phrases, i.e. with or without hyphens or spaces) pertaining to political figures, policies, and movements in American politics, that were said on air by PBS News Hour staffers (anchors, reporters, commentators, and occasional substitute commentators) during the 18 months up to and after the 2024 election (June 1, 2023 – November 30, 2024). Labels spoken by guests were also counted. Clips of politicians or other talking heads using the labels were not included.

One of the first serious academics to push back against the onslaught of novel, non-pharmaceutical interventions during COVID-19, like lockdowns, masks, and school closures, was Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Now, he’s Trump’s pick to lead the National Institutes of Health. In his statement, Trump said, "Dr. Bhattacharya will work in cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to direct the Nation's Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health and save lives." “This kind of stuff is biblical to me, man,” Steve Deace of “The Steve Deace Show” comments. “It’s not just that Francis Collins was replaced by a man who followed actual science and did so bravely, but Jay Bhattacharya is also a man of faith.” “This has been a spiritual battle for so long, guys,” he continues. “If all you get out of your vote for Donald Trump, and you’re like me and you supported Ron DeSantis in the primary because of what happened during COVID, and all you get out of this and that vote is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the head of HHS and Jay Bhattacharya as the head of NIH — the two most powerful health care policy making positions on this continent, on this entire continent, maybe in the world, frankly — if that’s what you got out of this, then your vote has more than paid off.” However, not everyone is as thrilled as Deace. “At the gym this morning, I watched MSNBC do a 10-minute segment on Jay Bhattacharya, losing their mind,” Deace says, noting that they didn’t mention his credentials. Bhattacharya is a tenured professor at Stanford University, one of the top five medical schools in the United States of America. “They kept forgetting to mention his credentials and expertise, but they were literally opening a spleen over this,” he says. Want more from Steve Deace?To enjoy more of Steve's take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

To the chagrin of LGBT extremists, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) ratified Republican legislation in March 2023 protecting children in the state from sex-change mutilations and puberty blockers. Three teen transvestites and their parents, later joined by the Biden Department of Justice, sued the state, seeking to put sterilizing puberty blockers and deformative hormone therapy back on the kids' menu. The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments for and against the Republican mutilation ban Wednesday. The court's decision could ultimately reinforce or spike similar bans in dozens of other states. Ahead of the hearing before the high court, a bearded woman with the American Civil Liberties Union — the radical outfit representing the plaintiffs — explained to CNN Tuesday why she felt the law should fall, claiming at one point that toddlers can know they are transvestites. Chase Strangio, the transvestic ACLU attorney formerly known as Kate who is set to argue against the Tennessee law before the Supreme Court, told talking head Jake Tapper that this case "is a critical inflection point for transgender people across the country. We're coming off of an election season where transgender people played an outsized role in people's consciousness in terms of the way in which we were situated as — as a threat to others." The election helped highlight a trend: Americans are increasingly rejecting gender ideology and radical LGBT policies. The New York Times noted that an analysis conducted by Future Forward, failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris' top super PAC, found that the campaign ad with the tagline, "Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you," shifted the race nearly three percentage points in President-elect Donald Trump's favor. Ahead of announcing that he was stepping down, Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa effectively admitted on the basis of fellow travelers' electoral failures that the "a big bulk of our population does not support" extreme "transgender" policies. While some Democrats may be shocked, the turning tide is no secret. A Washington Post-KFF poll found last year that 57% of Americans say gender is biologically determined; 68% oppose the use of puberty blockers by children; 58% oppose hormonal treatments for teens; and 62% say male transvestites should not be able to compete in girls' sports. "When we look at the map of states that ban this type of evidence-based health care, we went from zero states that had these bans in 2020 to now more than half the country," continued Strangio. The ACLU attorney indicated that she will argue before the high court that the Tennessee law, Senate Bill 1, is a form of sex discrimination. When Tapper raised the question of whether there is sufficient data to prove that sex-change treatments for kids is beneficial, Strangio replied, "We have decades of both clinical experience and research data showing that this is medical treatment that provides critical benefits to adolescents who need it." Strangio apparently missed the memo about the Cass Review, which revealed earlier this year that where so-called gender science is concerned, "There is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices." The massive multiyear investigation commissioned by NHS England found that most of the "research" underpinning so-called gender science is of "poor quality," demonstrating "poor study design, inadequate follow-up periods, and a lack of objectivity in reporting of results." In the case of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones foisted on children, the review made clear that the uses "are unproven and benefits/harms are unknown." "In addition to this making it difficult for clinicians to know whether these are appropriate treatments to offer, it is also challenging to provide children, young people, and families with sufficient information on which to make an informed choice," said the review. "The duty of information disclosure is complicated by many 'unknown unknowns' about the long-term impacts of puberty blocker and/or masculinizing/feminizing hormone during a dynamic developmental period when gender identity may not be settled." Strangio suggested to Tapper that toddlers' confusion is actionable and that in some cases, the "best" remedy is life-altering drugs. "These are doctors who are wanting to treat their patients in the best way that they know how, based on the best available evidence to us," said Strangio. "And these are young people who may have known since they were two years old exactly who they are, who suffered for 6 or 7 years before they had any relief. And what's happening here? It's not the kids who are consenting to this treatment; it's the parents who are consenting to the treatment." Journalist Mia Hughes highlighted in her 242-page report, published in March by Michael Shellenberger's think tank, Environmental Progress, that Dianne Berg, a member of World Professional Association for Transgender Health and co-author of the child chapter of the organization's Standards of Care 8, indicated that while adolescents are not mature enough to understand "the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them," some parents also lack the requisite health literacy to understand the treatments. "What really disturbs me is when the parents can't tell me what they need to know about a medical intervention that apparently they signed off for," said Berg. "As a parent, I would say we — when our children are suffering, we are suffering," said Strangio. "And these are parents who love their children, who are listening to the advice of their doctors, of the mainstream medical community, and doing what's right for them, for their kids in the state. ... Tennessee has displaced their judgment." Those keen to prevent or remedy suffering might take into account the Cass Review's indications that: the "systematic review showed no clear evidence that social transition in childhood has any positive or negative mental health outcomes, and relatively weak evidence for any effect in adolescence"; puberty blockers compromise bone density and have no apparent impact on "gender dysphoria or body satisfaction"; there is "insufficient and/or inconsistent evidence about the effects of puberty suppression on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health, cognitive development, cardio-metabolic risk, and fertility"; there is "a lack of high-quality research assessing the outcomes of hormones for masculinisation or feminisation in adolescents with gender dysphoria or incongruence and few studies that undertake long-term follow-up"; and so-called gender-affirming care is "an area of remarkably weak evidence." Other studies have similarly demonstrated the fallout of the drugs Strangio wants kids to access. For instance, a 2022 study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy confirmed that puberty blockers adversely impact bone density and noted that there "is increasing evidence for negative effects on cognitive and emotional development and on sexual functioning." Tennessee noted in February that the state "acted rationally, reasonably, and compassionately to protect its children, and the Act survives any level of review. Nothing in the Constitution deputizes Petitioners to override the legislature's judgment and demand a policy they believe to be more favorable. Concluding otherwise would violate 'the most deeply rooted tradition in this country ... that we look to democracy to answer pioneering public-policy questions.'" The Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Skrmetti is not expected for several months. Like Blaze News? 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