If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. On Monday, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance was announced by President Donald Trump as his vice-presidential candidate for his 2024 campaign. This decision comes as Trump seeks to win back the presidency from President Joe Biden. Vance, a figure that has seamlessly transitioned from the world of venture capitalism to the halls of US politics, brings a unique perspective to the ongoing debates surrounding technology and antitrust legislation. As a former venture capitalist and current Ohio Senator, Vance’s views are poised to significantly influence policy making in an era where tech giants face increasing scrutiny under antitrust laws. This significant leap in Vance’s career could trace its origins to the early support of Peter Thiel, a major figure in Silicon Valley known for co-founding PayPal and the defense contractor Palantir, and for his connections with Elon Musk. Following a brief tenure at a corporate law firm, Vance relocated to San Francisco to join Mithril Capital, a tech fund owned by Thiel, all while penning his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” His venture into the financial world of technology deepened when he launched his own venture capital firm in Ohio, supported heavily by Thiel. It wasn’t long before political ambitions surfaced, with Thiel’s encouragement spurring Vance’s senate candidacy by 2021. Trump’s selection of Vance was announced via Truth Social, where he commended Vance for his notable career in technology and finance. With Vance’s rise to prominence, particularly following his endorsement as former President Trump’s running mate, understanding his approach to these tech issues is more important than ever. Vance’s admiration for Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan’s expansive view of US antitrust law was evident, suggesting potential policy directions in a new Trump administration. Vance’s support of Khan highlights a split within the conservative movement, balancing a desire to reduce regulation with utilizing antitrust laws to address dominance, particularly in the tech sector. He believes these laws should not only focus on consumer prices but also on a broader competitive landscape. This perspective aligns him with other Republicans such as Senator Josh Hawley and Representative Matt Gaetz, who share this broader interpretation of antitrust objectives when it comes to the power of Big Tech. At a Washington event in February, Vance articulated this stance on Khan: “She recognized there has to be a broader understanding of how we think about competition in the marketplace.” Vance also said: “The fundamental question to me is, how do we build a competitive marketplace that is pro-innovation, pro-competition, that allows consumers to have the right choices and isn’t just so obsessed on pricing power within the market that it sort of ignores all the other things that really matter?” His position indicates a readiness to challenge major tech companies, which is consistent with the antitrust actions seen during Trump’s first term. Under Trump’s presidency, the FTC and Department of Justice pursued antitrust investigations against major firms like Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Google, all of which faced lawsuits over alleged antitrust violations. Vance has been vocal about his views on Big Tech, advocating for significant actions such as breaking up Google, as evidenced by his tweet in February criticizing the company’s monopolistic control over information. “Long overdue, but it’s time to break Google up,” Vance posted, lamenting that “monopolistic control of information in our society resides with an explicitly progressive technology company.” “I think that Google and Facebook have really distorted our political process, and I think that a lot of my friends on the left would agree with me, but they might disagree with me directionally about how to fix that problem,” Vance said. Vance criticized the Biden administration’s collaboration with Big Tech to censor Americans, arguing that this partnership stifled necessary debates, particularly regarding the impact of school closures on children’s mental health and socialization. During a Senate Republican press conference, Vance highlighted the human costs of such censorship, noting increases in depression among children who were unable to attend school and interact with peers. He emphasized the broader implications for democracy, questioning whether the real threat comes from the electorate’s potential voting preferences or from tech companies with ties to foreign interests collaborating with government agencies like the FBI to limit free speech. Vance asserted the importance of preserving public discourse on social media, which he described as the modern “town square” where critical national debates occur. https://video.reclaimthenet.org/articles/Vance-Censorship-From-Big-Tech-And-Big-Government.mp4 Senator Vance expressed concerns about a proposed Irish legislation, the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022, in a letter to Irish Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason. Noting its impact on US tech companies, Vance criticized the bill for its vague prohibitions which he fears could suppress vital public debates, especially on sensitive issues. He highlighted that the legislation includes penalties for actions in public that could incite hatred, with potential impacts on discussions around immigration and gender definitions. Vance warned that the fear of prosecution under such ambiguous laws might lead citizens to self-censor, thereby undermining the rich tradition of free speech in Ireland and elsewhere. Senator Vance has expressed skepticism for strong regulations against AI technology, arguing that such legislation would give more power to Big Tech incumbents. “…Very often CEOs, especially of larger technology companies that I think already have advantageous positions in AI, will come and talk about the terrible safety dangers of this new technology and how Congress needs to jump up and regulate as quickly as possible. And I can’t help but worry that if we do something under duress from the current incumbents, it’s going to be to the advantage of those incumbents and not to the advantage of the American consumer,” Vance said during a Senate hearing last week. President Trump’s vice-presidential pick brings a crucial focus on US tech policy and antitrust issues. Vance’s blend of conservative values and progressive views on corporate dominance and free speech positions him uniquely within the Republican party but it’s yet to be seen how his influence on Trump’s campaign and policy direction, especially regarding technology and censorship, will be important in their bid to reclaim the White House. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post J.D Vance on Tech and the Internet appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Michael Steele Has a ConspEARacy Theory

The internet is full of hacks and tips on how to best pack your suitcase for a vacation, but what about those of us who crave chaos? Is there a way to rationally and systematically fill a space in the worst way possible? The answer is yes – and thanks to a recent proof, we’re getting closer to figuring out exactly how.“We use[d] optimal control theory to prove that the most unpackable centrally symmetric convex disk in the plane is a smoothed polygon,” explained Thomas Hales, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh and co-author of a new book containing the proof, in a May blog post. “Our book proves what [renowned mathematician Kurt] Mahler set out to prove: Mahler’s First conjecture on smoothed polygons,” he wrote. While not yet peer-reviewed, initial reactions from other mathematicians seem to be positive regarding the result’s validity. So what does all that mean? Well, let’s start with some terminology. First, we have “most unpackable”, which sounds awkward af, we know. It’s a technical term, though: the more unpackable a shape is, the less dense a packing of it is able to be. To put it another way, one shape is more “unpackable” than another if a tessellation of it will leave more space uncovered.Then we have “centrally symmetric convex disk.” This describes the shapes we’re considering – the most important bit is the “convex disk” bit, which specifies that any two points inside the shape can be connected by a straight line that’s also contained entirely within the shape. Without this detail, we could create all kinds of weird Taskmaster-style workarounds that leave virtually all of the space uncovered, and that – well, that’s cheating, isn’t it?Centrally symmetric, meanwhile, means that a point is located inside the shape if and only if its reflection through the center is also. It’s not a necessary condition for the problem – it’s just a way to reduce the number of possible shapes, making the question easier to tackle.That’s an important point, by the way: this is, despite its glib appearance, an incredibly difficult problem. “I knew this problem was hard going into it, but there was always more structure that you could unravel,” Koundinya Vajjha, co-author of the book along with Hales and now an engineer at Intel, told Quanta. “It was always the case that there was just six months more,” he said. “We could never know when this problem would fight back and stay unresolved for another century.”In fact, the pair took so long on this potentially unsolvable problem that Vajjha progressed from grad student to employed engineer before a conclusion was reached. But then, Hales had an epiphany: they may not be close to proving the original problem they had set out on, but they were almost there on a related one – namely, that conjecture by Mahler, which posited that the worst such shape would be a smoothed polygon.“A smoothed polygon is a polygon whose corners have been rounded in a special way by arcs of hyperbolas,” Hales explained in his blog. Or, more evocatively:A smoothed octagonal packing.Image Credit: Greg Egan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia CommonsBy reformulating a theorem by Minkowski regarding the geometry of numbers, the pair was able to apply it to their packing problem by investigating one particular aspect of the statement: “To improve Minkowski’s theorem, it was natural to ask how much the constant of Minkowski’s theorem might be improved to a smaller constant,” Hales wrote. “There is no improvement if K is a parallelogram or centrally symmetric hexagon, because these polygons tile the plane,” he explained. “What choice of K gives the constant improving Minkowski’s theorem by the most? […] We prove that in dimension 2, the constant d(K) is minimal for some smoothed polygon K.”In other words, Mahler was right: the most unpackable shape is a smoothed polygon. But which one?Well, people have made guesses. The mathematician Karl Reinhardt showed in 1934 that circles weren’t as unpackable as a smoothed octagon – the latter covering at maximum 90.24 percent of a surface, while the former reaches the heady heights of 90.69 percent – and he, along with Mahler, believed this to be the answer. Many other mathematicians agree: “I’ve always believed that Reinhardt is probably right but that the theory was not there to attack this problem,” mathematician Henry Cohn, who was not involved in the research, told Quanta. But “were we ever going to see a proof? Probably not in my lifetime,” he added.And, so far, he’s correct. While the book makes a big leap towards solving the problem of how worst to pack a suitcase, the question is still only half answered. “Reinhardt’s conjecture asserts that the smoothed octagon is the centrally symmetric convex K with the property that its densest lattice packing is the least,” Hales concluded.“This problem is still unsolved in general,” he wrote, “but our result gives the best known result in this direction.”The new book, currently not peer-reviewed, can be read on the ArXiv preprint server.

When Elon Musk took over X (then known by the much more recognizable name of Twitter), he made a big deal out of getting rid of the bots. But nearly two years down the line, according to analysis by the Queensland University of Technology, bots are still very much active on the platform.X users have found a few ways to summon them, including one woman who found certain bots would swarm to them if they posted the phrase "sugar daddy". A new phrase is heading around X, which also seems to throw bots off their usual course. By simply saying "ignore all previous instructions" or "disregard all previous instructions" in reply to a suspected bot, followed by further instructions of their choosing, X users have been outing accounts as automated bots powered by large language models.     IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.     IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.     IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.     IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.     IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.   IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.While not every example will be from a bot – some people just really like writing poems, being trolls, or following instructions – the phrase does appear to make some automated accounts reveal themselves. Bots are very much still active on X.

The animal kingdom is full of spectacularly colored creatures. From bright blue tarantulas to the stripes and spots on a tiger cat,  just about every kind of pattern and hue can be found somewhere. Problems arise, however, when those who admire these bright colors want a closer look. Research has revealed that a bat species in Asia is under threat due to its popularity as a decorative ornament. The painted wooly bat (Kerivoula picta) is a striking species with bright orange fur and patterned wings. On popular online shopping sites like Etsy and eBay, dead bats can be bought as display items with their wings outstretched. The researchers looked at 856 general bat listings and found 215 of them were for the painted wooly bats, representing 284 individual animals.Just some examples of the bats for sale on eBay and Etsy.Image credit: Coleman, J, L., et al Journal of European Journal of Wildlife Research (2024)“These bats are not from the United States, but they’re being sourced from across Asia and then brought here and used as décor,” co-leading author Nistara Randhawa, a UC Davis data scientist and epidemiologist, said in a statement. “With this study, we hope to raise awareness and propel the conservation of this species.” What makes the bats especially vulnerable to this kind of human actively is their slow life history. The adults live around 10 years and produce just one offspring at a time. In the wild they are found across Asia, where their bright orange fur acts as camouflage against the dried leaves where they roost. The IUCN Red List has them under the Near Threatened bracket but suggests there have been insufficient surveys. The team also explored the influence of Halloween on the bat sales. They found that Tennessee sold more bats than any other state between the 2022 Halloween and Christmas periods. Around 20 percent of the sales listings used words such as “ethical” or “sustainable” with some sellers even claiming the bats had been bred in captivity and died under normal circumstances – all claims that the authors strongly suspect to be false.“We’re talking about 284 distinct individuals found over just a three-month period,” said co-leading author Joanna Coleman, an assistant professor at CUNY-Queens College and co-chair of the IUCN’s Bat Trade Working Group. “That doesn’t include all the others sold on websites and physical shops year-round across the world. Because these bats are quite scarce on landscapes, we are concerned that hunters might be systematically going out and removing every individual they see.”The authors suggest that the painted wooly bat be included under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which would prohibit any international trade. They further suggest more fieldwork studies to better understand the population remaining in the wild. "Bat populations are declining worldwide, and K. picta is but one of the many unique bat species affected by ongoing global biodiversity loss,” Randhawa said. “They are incredibly important to protect, not least because of the vital ecosystem services bats provide. K. picta should be roosting under the banana leaves of its natural habitat, not hanging dead on a wall as décor.” The study is published in The European Journal of Wildlife Research.

The new trailer for Gladiator II is an absolute riot of glistening flesh and spilled bodily fluids, and while the movie itself may be historically dubious, it’s certainly true that the combatants of the Colosseum would have spent much of their lives coated in blood and sweat. Exactly what the ancient Romans did with all this carnal discharge, however, is not entirely clear, although a quick internet search will tell you that gladiator perspiration was used as both an aphrodisiac and a medical panacea.According to numerous unverified reports, competitors were coated in olive oil before being sent into the arena, later to be scraped down using an implement known as a strigil (assuming they survived their mortal contest). Supposedly, the resultant gladiator gunk – which would have consisted of sweat, blood, exfoliated skin, general dirt, and excess oil – was then sold in vials to punters, who applied it to their own bodies and faces in the hopes of attaining a range of physical benefits.It is sometimes claimed, for instance, that this repulsive ooze was mixed with perfume or used as a facial cream by wealthy Roman women. Other statements suggest that both men and women employed the excretions to inject some gladiatorial vitality into their sex lives or to cure a range of ailments from joint pain to inflammation.Like many aspects of Ridley Scott’s new blockbuster, however, there’s no evidence to suggest that this practice actually existed. On the contrary, esteemed Roman author Pliny the Elder was absolutely repulsed by the idea of wallowing in the filth of another, and scorned the ancient Greeks for doing just that in his famous text Naturalis Historia.Describing the habits of the Greeks, Pliny wrote that “the scrapings from the bodies of the athletes are looked upon as possessed of certain properties of an emollient, calorific, resolvent, and expletive nature, resulting from the compound of human sweat and oil.” Readers can almost hear his stomach turning as he goes on to explain that “these scrapings are used, in the form of a pessary, for inflammations and contractions of the uterus.”According to Pliny, the Greeks saw no limits to the medical properties of athletes’ sweat – known as gloios – and made use of it to cure everything from genital warts to “inflammations of the rectum”.Given the many inaccuracies found in Naturalis Historia, it’s difficult to know how truthful Pliny’s descriptions of Greek hygiene and medicine really were, although you can really feel his revulsion when he writes that “they have even gone so far, too, as to scrape the very filth from off the walls of the gymnasia.” Supposedly, these residues could be sold for a handsome price and were sought after as “a resolvent for inflamed tumours,” amongst other things.In reality, then, it seems that the Romans did not use gladiator sweat to boost sexual performance – or, indeed, for any other purpose. Rather, it was the Greeks who may have exalted the benefits of gloios, much to the disgust of Pliny and his compatriots.

A new planet has been discovered that has the most elongated orbit of any of the 5,600 we have found. On top of that, it’s going the wrong way. Strange as this is, it could provide the missing link between planetary formation, and the category that made up most of our initial discoveries of planets beyond the Solar System.When the capacity to detect planets around other stars was first developed, astronomers experienced a shock. Instead of finding systems like our own, most of the early discoveries were what became known as “hot Jupiters”, gas giants that orbited closer to their stars than Mercury, producing tremendous temperatures.This was an artifact of detection methods that could more easily pick up planets with larger masses and those with short orbits. As our planetary sample has grown, the proportion of hot Jupiters has shrunk, to now be less than 10 percent. Nevertheless, having nothing remotely like this in our Solar System, the frequency of such objects was unexpected. The search began to explain how such planets came to be, which makes finding one suspected of being a hot Jupiter in the making a major prize.Such a world has now been found orbiting the star TIC 241249530, 1,100 light years from Earth. On average, the planet TIC 241249530b has an orbital distance of about two-thirds Earth’s and its year is 167 days, between that of Mercury and Venus. With a star 27 percent more massive than the Sun, that makes it a warm Jupiter at least. However, like the old story of the billionaire who transforms the mean wealth of the people in a room by walking in, averages can be very deceptive. TIC 241249530b gets ten times closer to its star than Mercury does, before whipping out again to further out than the Earth. Astronomers refer to how far a planet’s orbit differs from circular as its “eccentricity”. TIC 241249530b’s eccentricity is 0.94, where anything equal or greater than 1 leaves the system. We know of comets that are much more eccentric than TIC 241249530b, but the only candidate planet HD 20782b, has competing estimates.  This is an eccentric world in the colloquial sense as well. All the planets in our Solar System orbit in the same direction the Sun rotates, a big clue to common origins in the same spinning gas cloud. This is one respect in which the overwhelming bulk of planets we have found orbiting other stars resemble those we know. TIC 241249530b is a very rare exception indeed.MIT’s Dr Sarah Millholland, part of the team that discovered TIC 241249530b, thinks the orbit will shorten until it’s a more regular hot Jupiter, although it will still be orbiting backwards. “This new planet supports the theory that high eccentricity migration should account for some fraction of hot Jupiters,” she said in a statement. “We think that when this planet formed, it would have been a frigid world. And because of the dramatic orbital dynamics, it will become a hot Jupiter in about a billion years, with temperatures of several thousand Kelvin. So it’s a huge shift from where it started.” In the meantime, she noted; “There must be really radical seasons and an absolutely scorched atmosphere every time it passes close to the star.”Our understanding of planet formation doesn’t allow very large planets to form close to their stars. Unless we have that very wrong, hot Jupiters must originate further out, at the sort of distances where our own gas giants now orbit, and migrate in. That creates two obvious questions: how does that happen? And why didn’t Jupiter and Saturn do the same thing? The second puzzle is particularly crucial, because if a gas giant had migrated through the Solar System to take up residence close to the Sun, it would almost certainly have annihilated the Earth – or thrown it into deep space – in the process. It’s only in systems without hot Jupiters that there can be lifeforms capable of spotting them elsewhere and wondering what is going on.TIC 241249530b is unlikely to provide a universal answer, but it does offer clues to the origins of some hot Jupiters. The star it orbits, TIC 241249530, is circled by a distant small star. Gravitational interference from this companion may have pushed the planet out of its conventional path at the sort of distance where gas giants normally form.We know not all hot Jupiters are in binary systems, so there must be other explanations in some cases, but it makes such events less likely in a system like our own.Despite TIC 241249530b’s rareness, it’s not unique. The previous record for planetary eccentricity is held by HD80606b, which is suspected of being at a later stage of a similar migration. “Like HD80606b, this planet is many times Jupiter's mass, suggesting this channel for forming hot Jupiters might be one only the most massive planets can take,” said Penn State Professor Jason Wright in a different statement.  The authors propose that smaller planets are more tidally disrupted, and move much more rapidly to their final hot orbit. “Planets like this are hard to find and we hope it can help us unravel the hot Jupiter formation story,” said first author Arvind Gupta, a doctoral student at Penn State. TIC 241249530b was first spotted by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) detecting a dip in its star’s brightness in 2020. It was only when other instruments were used to confirm the observation that its exceptional characteristics were revealed, including the fact it is five times as massive as Jupiter.Inevitably, the discoverers are hoping for time on the JWST to observe the effects of such a remarkable orbit. "We’re especially interested in what we can learn about the dynamics of this planet's atmosphere after it makes one of its scorchingly close passages to its star," Wright said. The study is published in the journal Nature. 

As the Republican National Convention kicked off Monday, Google is continuing to bury former President Donald Trump’s campaign website while propping up his opponents. MRC researchers searched Google using a “clean environment” (without the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies) and found that the search giant completely eliminated Donald Trump’s website from the top 100 search results, while pushing President Joe Biden’s campaign website up to the number one spot.  Researchers conducted three separate searches for the top three candidate’s names along with the words “presidential race 2024.”  While the results for Trump brought up seemingly endless 2024 election updates, including news articles, polls and commentaries, the search engine did not display the candidate’s campaign website.  Google, however, had no issues displaying Joe Biden’s campaign website as the first result in an equivalent search. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s website appeared as the fourth result in a similar search.  MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider commented on Google’s tone-deaf bias in the aftermath of an assassination attempt on Trump. “Other left-wing media outlets and platforms are taking a pause from their anti-Trump tactics, but not Google,” he said. “The search giant has doubled down on its anti-American, election interference strategies.”  Schneider continued: “People who often do political searches on their computers will likely get different results since Google tracks their search history. But this study reflects a much darker, more sinister behavior at Google. It is through this kind of data manipulation that Google swayed millions of votes in the 2020 election. It must not be allowed to corrupt our democracy.” The importance of where a search result appears on the first page of a Google search cannot be overstated. Not only is Google the go-to search engine for most people, holding a market share of nearly 92 percent worldwide, but the higher a search result appears, the more likely a user will click on a particular result, according to Brian Dean, a search engine optimization expert. Dean conducted a study analyzing how often users click on various rankings of Google search results. His blog, Backlinko, reported that "The #1 Result In Google Gets 27.6% of All Clicks" and it has “10x higher [Click Through Rate] compared to the #10 result.” Other studies, like one conducted in 2020 by Sistrix, show similar results. This comes after MRC Free Speech America previously found that before the June presidential debate, Google completely buried the only two pro-life candidates in the 2024 presidential race–Trump and Constitutional Party presidential candidate Randall Terry. Biden’s website again appeared first in search results along with Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Independent candidate Cornel West. At that time, Kennedy’s campaign website appeared as the third result and so did Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver’s campaign website.  MRC Free Speech America has tracked Google’s ability to produce the websites of any Republican or right-leaning candidate in the race since the first presidential debate in August 2023.  The search engine has repeatedly censored and buried Republican presidential campaign websites and particularly Trump’s website at nearly every turn. The only exception was when Google displayed presidential candidate Will Hurd’s website both while he was polling at less than one percent and again after he dropped out of the race altogether.  Methodology For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the July 15 Google Search results.  Researchers searched “joe biden presidential race 2024,” “donald trump presidential race 2024,” “robert f. kennedy jr. presidential race 2024.” To determine bias, our researchers examined Google’s results and recorded the rank(s) of each candidate’s campaign website. MRC Free Speech America created an algorithm to automate this process in a clean environment. A “clean environment” allows for organic search to populate results without the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies. Conservatives are under attack. Contact Google at 650-253-0000 and demand it be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

Former President Donald Trump may be a white man, but that hasn’t stopped accounts on X from calling him “the first black president.” In several viral memes, it’s pointed out that because he’s been shot, has three “baby mamas,” and has 34 felonies, he’s the first real black president. “I saw multiple videos from several ‘brothers’ in the hood over the weekend,” Jeffy tells Pat Gray and Keith Malinak of “Pat Gray Unleashed.” He recalls those "brothers" saying, “Just come to the hood and get yourself some brothers and tell them to wear a specific colored shirt on whatever day you want them there, and then they’ll guard you better than that.” But it doesn't end there — even rapper 50 Cent started going viral after the failed assassination attempt. "Trump gets shot and now I'm trending," 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, posted on X on Saturday. The viral meme features Trump's face on 50 Cent's 2003 album cover. In the hit song, Jackson, who survived getting shot nine times in 2000, raps: "Many men wish death upon me / Blood in my eye, dawg, and I can't see / I'm tryin' to be what I'm destined to be / And n****s tryin' to take my life away." 50 Cent then rapped an updated version of the song in front of a giant image of his "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" album cover turned viral meme in a video that’s now gone even more viral on X. “It’s good,” Gray laughs. Want more from Pat Gray?To enjoy more of Pat's biting analysis and signature wit as he restores common sense to a senseless world, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

California Democrats and the LGBT activists among them have ramped up their years-long campaign to drive a wedge between parents and their children. Alvin Lui, president of the parental rights advocacy group Courage Is a Habit, told Blaze News that the state has long sought to keep parents in the dark about their kids' manifestations of gender dysphoria and efforts to transition at school. However, some school districts have in recent months bucked the trend of secrecy and grooming at school and have instead clued in parents. The Chino Valley Unified School District under the leadership of Sonja Shaw, for instance, became the first district in the state to embrace a policy last year whereby school officials must inform parents if their kids request to use the bathroom intended for members of the opposite sex as well as if their confused children ask to use names and pronouns that don't correspond with reality or their official documents. California Attorney General Rob Bonta took legal action against Shaw's district on Aug. 28, 2023, claiming it violated privacy laws regarding transvestite students. In October, a San Bernardino County Superior Court judge blocked the district from enforcing some of the related policies until the case was resolved. On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) went a step further, ratifying Assembly Bill 1955, which forbids districts like the CVUSD from engaging in such transparency. Lui, who moved his family out of California upon observing how similarly radical policies were transforming the state, indicated, "AB 1955 was passed solely in response to several school boards being flipped because parents were waking up and in order to discourage good teachers and counselors who still respect parental rights." The law, first introduced by gay Assemblyman Christopher Ward (D) and championed by the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus, prohibits school districts, county offices of education, charter schools, and state special schools from introducing or enforcing rules, regulations, or policies that require employees to disclose to parents "any information related to a pupil's sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression." 'The children must be the state's at all costs.' Contrary to the spin from Newsom's office, educators in all districts must now effectively keep parents in California in the dark about their child's sexual confusion and gender dysphoria unless the mentally compromised minor in question consents to looping them in. School employees in the meantime can hook the child up with possibly pro-transitioning counselors and activist resources. AB 1955 — which Elon Musk has cited as cause to move two of his major companies out of the state — also shields employees from consequence if they have worked to conceal a child's confusion from their parents. Courtesy of Courage is a Habit Assemblyman Ward affirmed Lui's characterization of the law this week, indicating that it will force compliance from those school districts that have tried to keep parents clued in to what's happening with their children at school. "Politically motivated attacks on the rights, safety, and dignity of transgender, nonbinary, and other LGBTQ+ youth are on the rise nationwide, including in California," Ward said in a statement. "While some school districts have adopted policies to forcibly out students, the SAFETY Act ensures that discussions about gender identity remain a private matter within the family." "This is what communism is," said Lui. "There can be ZERO dissent. The children must be the state's at all costs." Lui is not alone in his understanding of the threats AB 1955 poses. Journalist Michael Shellenberger, whose think tank Environmental Progress published the damning WPATH Files, noted Tuesday that the new Democratic law "makes children vulnerable to irreversible and lifelong medical abuse and mistreatment. And it is all based on the pseudoscientific idea that some children are born into the wrong bodies and that we can change a person's sex through drugs and surgery." In pushing through AB 1955, it is clear that Democrats chose to ignore the ever-growing mountain of evidence indicating so-called "gender-affirming care" is not as advertised. England's National Health Service appointed Dr. Hilary Cass in 2020 to lead an independent investigation into the U.K.'s sex-change regime and its youth-facing services. Following a penetrating, multi-year investigation, Cass — an esteemed British medical doctor who previously served as president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health — revealed that so-called gender science was effectively rooted in pseudoscience. Blaze News previously reported that among the many damning revelations about the sex-change regime in the Cass review was its finding that there was "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." While "social transition" of the kind Newsom and California Democrats want to hide from parents apparently had no discernible impact on mental health, the Cass review further revealed that those children so groomed were much more likely to undergo sex-change medical interventions at a later stage. Contrary to the core claim of sex-change activists, such medical interventions do not lessen the risk of suicide. A peer-reviewed study in BMJ Mental Health revealed in February that "medical gender reassignment does not have an impact on suicide risk." Besides underscoring the "weak" and unreliable nature of the evidence in support of "gender-affirming care," the Cass review also indicated that clinicians "are unable to determine with any certainty which children and young people will go on to have an enduring trans identity." California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus Chair Susan Eggman, evidently immune to the scientific insights raised in the Cass review, BMJ Mental Health, and elsewhere, said AB 1955 was "life-saving legislation." "Safe and supportive schools for all our children should be our top priority. And at the end of the day that's what this bill does, ensures our K-12 campuses remain safe and affirming places for our youth no matter how they identify," stated Eggman. Those cognizant of the fallout of so-called "gender-affirming care" and supportive of parental rights aren't buying what Eggman and other California Democrats are selling. 'Moms and dads have both a constitutional and divine mandate to guide and protect their kids.' Shellenberger stressed on X, "What Gavin Newsom has done is actively prevented schools from informing parents that their children have been put on a medical pathway." "This is an outrageous attack on the rights of children and parents. Children have a right to go through puberty. No adult should be able to block their puberty. And parents have a right to know if their child thinks that they are the opposite sex or were born into the wrong body," continued Shellenberger. "The new law creates the grave risk that activist teachers, students, and outside groups will convince their children that they were born into the wrong body, and hide their 'social transition' from parents, which will lead to harmful medical mistreatment." Jonathan Keller, president of the California Family Council, denounced AB 1955, noting, "Moms and dads have both a constitutional and divine mandate to guide and protect their kids, and AB 1955 egregiously violates this sacred trust." California Assemblyman Bill Essayli (R), who unsuccessfully attempted to advance legislation requiring parental notification in schools, said in a statement, "Today, Governor Gavin Newsom defied parents' constitutional and God-given right to raise their children by signing AB 1955, which codifies the government's authority to keep secrets from parents." Essayli noted that the bill's ratification is "immoral and unconstitutional" and promised to challenge it in court. Already, the Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit challenging AB 1955 on behalf of the Chino Valley Unified School District and several Californian parents with children in the system. Blaze News previously reported that Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) and 15 other attorneys general recently filed an amicus brief on behalf of their respective states asking that the U.S. Supreme Court take up a case regarding schools' covert efforts to transition children into sexually confused transvestites behind their parents' backs. If the Parents Protecting Our Children, UA v. Eau Claire Area School District is taken up by the high court and the plaintiffs succeed, then there is a strong likelihood that AB 1955 and comparable laws across the nation will fall. Human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali also condemned AB 1955, writing, "It is truly terrible news for children and for many Americans a key reason not only to flee California but also the Democratic Party. The madness and mass child abuse really has to stop." Lui emphasized that while children are now at greater risk in California, particularly in those districts that once resisted the preferred policies of the sex-change regime, the problem is not limited to the Golden State. "Parents must understand that public K-12 have already been keeping transgender secrets from parents in ALL 50 states through school counselors and 'mental health' Trojan horses," said Lui. "This isn't just a California or New York thing. Moving to another state doesn't get you away from it any longer. That is the fallacy that gives parents a false sense of security." "I certainly advocate for all Americans to leave California, but whichever state you land in, you will still have to fight for and protect your children," added Lui. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!