In today’s snake eats its own tail story, NPR reports on Pompeo’s abuse and lies aimed at NPR’s reporter.

Notice I simply assume Pompeo’s claims are lies. I do, yes. He has form in this area. He works for the colossal shameless brazen liar Donald Trump. He backs Trump’s lies. Kelly works for a reputable news organization, one that has its flaws (way too much fake “balance” in my view) but doesn’t just peddle lies the way Fox does. Between the two of them, it’s not Pompeo I’m going to believe.

One day after a contentious interview that was followed by an expletive-filled verbal lashing of NPR host Mary Louise Kelly, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is publicly accusing her of lying to him — “twice.”

In a statement released by the State Department on Saturday, Pompeo says Kelly first lied “in setting up our interview.”

Let’s not lose sight of how wack that is. An official State Department statement, by the Secretary of State, calls a public radio reporter a liar. That would be wack even if it were true, and since it’s not…

He does not explain how and offers no evidence. In their recorded interview from Friday, the nation’s top diplomat declined to respond when Kelly asked whether he owed an apology to Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. She was ousted from that post last year afterallies of President Trump accused her of disloyalty.

“I agreed to come on your show today,” Pompeo replied, “to talk about Iran.”

Kelly pushed back, telling Pompeo, “I confirmed with your staff last night that I would talk about Iran and Ukraine.” She later said she specifically flagged her intention to do so in writing, noting, “I never agree to take any topics off the table.”

And why should she? Why does Pompeo think he gets to stonewall us on an issue very much of public concern? He’s not hiding sensitive intel, he’s refusing to discuss Trump’s grotesque crimes against Ukraine and all of us. It’s not national security or diplomatic secrets, it’s omertà.

Pompeo asserts Kelly again lied “in agreeing to have our post-interview conversation off the record.”

Now why the hell would she do that? Why would she want to hear from Pompeo off the record? She’s not there to gossip with him, she’s there to report on him. She doesn’t want to swap secrets, she wants to know wtf he thinks he’s doing, for a news story, because we all want to know and we have a right to know.

In his statement on Saturday, Pompeo further berates Kelly. “It is shameful that this reporter chose to violate the basic rules of journalism and decency,” he writes. “This is another example of how unhinged the media has become in its quest to hurt President Trump and this Administration. It is no wonder that the American people distrust many in the media when they so consistently demonstrate their agenda and their absence of integrity.”

In other words “wa wa wa wa wa wa wa.”

He ends the statement with an assertion that appears to falsely imply Kelly was unable to locate Ukraine on a map.

“It is worth noting,” he concludes with no further explanation, “that Bangladesh is NOT Ukraine.”

The childish stupidity and cheapness of that simply astound me.

I’m not the only one.

Five Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — ranking member Bob Menendez of New Jersey; Cory Booker, also of New Jersey; Ed Markey of Massachusetts; Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Tim Kaine of Virginia — responded caustically on Saturday to Pompeo’s statement.

“We write to express our profound disappointment and concern regarding your irresponsible statement this morning about NPR Reporter Mary Louise Kelly and the corrosive effects of your behavior on American values and standing in the world,” the senators wrote in a letter to Pompeo. “At a time when journalists around the world are being jailed for their reporting — and as in the case of Jamal Khashoggi, killed — your insulting and contemptuous comments are beneath the office of the Secretary of State.”

Exactly. This is not what Secretaries of State are supposed to do.

Way beneath.

Originally a comment by G Felis on The caucus has become a mob.

An interesting fact about cognitive dissonance development theory: From the start (Leon Festinger in the late 50s), it was more or less just an article of faith that the unpleasantness of cognitive dissonance is a spur for people to resolve it, and so a direct cause of cognitive developments such as attitude or belief change. Eventually, someone came along and asked the obvious question: whether cognitive dissonance is actually unpleasant for everyone, or if it’s variable like most psychological phenomena. It turns out, it’s the latter. Discomfort at cognitive dissonance is not universal, it’s distributed across the population in slightly skewed bell curve, just like nearly every feature of psychology, with some people feeling very high levels of discomfort with dissonance, others feeling none at all, and most falling somewhere in the middle (with what appears to be a slight skew towards more rather than less discomfort). Many people simply experience no discomfort at all from believing A and not-A simultaneously, or even from contradicting themselves from one breath to the next. Claire’s comment recognizes the variability by noting that cognitive dissonance is agonizing “for most people,” but I want to add that Senators simply aren’t “most people.”

The connection between a lack of discomfort with cognitive dissonance and the Cluster B personality disorders is pretty obvious if you’ve ever had experience with Cluster Bs: Narcissists especially not only feel no discomfort at all with cognitive dissonance, they will deliberately inspire cognitive dissonance in others through gaslighting. And narcissism, sadly, is an all-too-common pathology among career politicians. So I don’t think Republican Senators are unable to back down due to cognitive dissonance or any sort of moral “sunk cost” of the dark road they’ve come down; they’ve all deliberately courted and encouraged the darkest impulses of their electorate for decades for their own benefit. The “southern strategy” of aligning the Republican Party with white supremacy dates back to Goldwater and Nixon campaigns in the 60s, after all. Even Republican politicians who haven’t actually drunk that Kool-Aid have been serving it up for their entire career at this point, and they clearly have no compunction whatsoever about it. Thus, their fear is almost certainly a matter of prosaic calculating self-interest, not any sort of cognitive dissonance. They know that a majority of the Republican base is highly invested in their racist authoritarian hero, and they fear the electoral consequences of not toeing the Trumpist line. With regard to everyone who ISN’T a part of the Republican voter base, they also fear the electoral consequences of covering up for a transparently corrupt and incompetent president, which is why they’re trying to make the whole impeachment trial go away as quickly and with as little fuss and attention as possible. Happily, that strategy doesn’t seem to be working very well.

Behold the disgusting blob of flesh who pretends to be a real boy.

For completeness, here is Pompeo’s nasty stupid childish “statement” in full, on official State Department letterhead.

NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly lied to me, twice. First, last month, in setting up our interview and, then again yesterday, in agreeing to have our post-interview conversation off the record. It is shameful that this reporter chose to violate the basic rules of journalism and decency. This is another example of how unhinged the media has become in its quest to hurt President Trump and this Administration. It is no wonder that the American people distrust many in the media when they so consistently demonstrate their agenda and their absence of integrity. 

It is worth noting that Bangladesh is NOT Ukraine. 

He actually said that. He told her she doesn’t even know where Ukraine is, she disputed his claim, he had his stooges bring them an unmarked map and she pointed to Ukraine on the map. Nobody said anything about Bangladesh.

What.a.tool.

The other day in Quebec:

A man charged with killing a Quebec City sex worker was allowed to have what the Parole Board of Canada deemed “inappropriate” sexual relations with women — despite the “serious and worrisome risk.” 

Eustachio Gallese had been allowed to meet women “only for the purpose of responding to [his] sexual needs,” since he was granted day parole in March 2019, according to parole board documents.  

What was he in prison for? Murdering a woman.

He was in prison for murdering a woman, so they gave him day parole so that he could get his “sexual needs” met…by another woman. Whom he murdered.

Heads up: there is no such thing as “sexual needs.” Wants, yes, urgent intense importunate wants yes, but needs, no. Nobody dies of wanting sex. If you frame male sexual wants as “needs” you make it seem as if women owe men sex, and that’s just to institutionalize rape.

Gallese, 51, was charged Thursday with second-degree murder in the death of 22-year-old Marylène Levesque, whose body was found by police in a hotel room in Quebec City’s Sainte-Foy neighbourhood on Wednesday evening.

Gallese’s desire for sex was not more important than Marylène Levesque’s life. That’s not even a close call.

Gallese was sentenced in 2006 to life in prison with no chance of parole for 15 years for the 2004 second-degree murder of Chantale Deschênes who, according to parole documents, he struck on the head with a hammer and stabbed several times, enraged by her decision to leave him. 

So, maybe possibly not the kind of guy who should be on day parole to get his sexual “needs” met? Granted, many violent criminals mature out of their violent tendencies, and long prison sentences are not a self-evident social good, and retribution is even less so, but all the same…if they’ve decided he’s not safe to release yet, they have no business deciding he’s safe to release for the few hours it takes to fuck and then kill a woman.

Véronique Hivon, the justice critic for the Parti Québécois, said the case shows a certain “nonchalance” in the way violent crimes against women are treated. 

Coupled with a deadly seriousness about the idea that men have sexual “needs” that require giving them access to women’s bodies.

Sandra Wesley, the director of Stella, a Montreal-based sex workers’ organization, said the case is “very concerning” because the parole board appears to have given Gallese tacit permission to hire prostitutes, knowingly putting them at risk.

“They identified that this man was a potential danger to women and wasn’t ready to have proper relationships with women but figured that he could then go see sex workers.”

Oh no, I’m sure they were thinking he could find a genuine girlfriend in the course of an afternoon.

Pompeo thinks we don’t yet understand what a pig he is, and he wants to make sure we grasp the true depth of his piggishness.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Saturday attacked an NPR correspondent who reported that he berated and cursed at her following questioning over Ukraine, claiming “she lied to me” and describing her actions as “shameful.”

“NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly lied to me, twice. First, last month, in setting up our interview and, then again yesterday, in agreeing to have our post-interview conversation off the record,” Pompeo said in a statement. “It is shameful that this reporter chose to violate the basic rules of journalism and decency.”

Kelly says she told them what she was going to ask about, and that she never said their post-interview “conversation” was off the record. Now which of them are ya gonna believe? Does Pompeo have a history of integrity we can turn to for help in believing his claims?

listens

I’ll take that as a “no.”

Pompeo did not challenge the details of Kelly’s claims about his statements or demeanor during their conversation.

He said what he said and did what he did, but he’s outraged, outraged, that she reported both.

“This is another example of how unhinged the media has become in its quest to hurt President Trump and this Administration. It is no wonder that the American people distrust many in the media when they so consistently demonstrate their agenda and their absence of integrity,” Pompeo said Saturday.

Says the guy who did nothing while Trump ruined Marie Yovanovitch’s life.

Oh puhleeeeze.

NBC reports:

Senate Republicans said lead impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff insulted them during the trial on Friday night by repeating an anonymously sourced report that the White House had threatened to punish Republicans who voted against President Donald Trump.

Bull. shit. Republicans can’t be insulted any further than they already have been by their own slavish surrender to the evil lying shit befouling the Oval Office.

Schiff, who delivered closing arguments for the prosecution, was holding Republican senators rapt as he called for removing Trump from office for abusing his power and obstructing Congress. Doing anything else, he argued, would be to let the president bully Senate Republicans into ignoring his pressure on Ukraine for political help.

“CBS News reported last night that a Trump confidant said that key senators were warned, ‘Vote against the president and your head will be on a pike.’ I don’t know if that’s true,” Schiff said.

After that remark, the generally respectful mood in the Senate immediately changed.

Republicans across their side of the chamber groaned, gasped and said, “That’s not true.” One of those key moderate Republicans, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, looked directly at Schiff, shook her head and said, “Not true.”

Rachel Maddow pointed out last night that speaking is forbidden on pain of imprisonment.

But more to the point – what the hell were they groaning and gasping about? It’s not as if that doesn’t fit a pattern after all. Trump threatens people all the time, in public, while we watch in fury and shame.

“Not only have I never heard the ‘head on the pike’ line,” Collins said in a statement, “but also I know of no Republican senator who has been threatened in any way by anyone in the administration.”

And if you believe that, I have a castle on the Florida coast not at all infested with rats that I would love to sell you.

“That’s when he lost me,” Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican moderate, said about Schiff’s remark, according to her spokeswoman. She denied having been told what the network reported about the White House. Schiff’s invocation of it, she added, “was unnecessary.”

Riiiiiight. The so-called “moderates” are not at all using this as their excuse for voting with the Jim Jordans and Devin Nuneses.

Originally a comment by Claire on Fairly judging the facts.

There comes a point where those in power no longer seek to maintain or increase that power for a reason but simply for the sake of power itself. It’s a black hole, the power sucks you in and once you’ve passed that event horizon, it’s pretty much impossible to get back out. Backing out means coming to terms with what you did to get there in the first place. For most people that is unbelievably painful because cognitive dissonance is agonizing.

Related to my comments on another post, I’m fascinated by cognitive dissonance, how it works and the way it is capable of drawing ordinary people into doing extraordinarily horrifying things. Interviews with people in Germany and countries occupied by the Nazis in WWII are illuminating. The Gestapo was effective, despite being relatively small in numbers, because people believed they were everywhere. In fact, most of the arrests of people targeted by the Gestapo were instigated by denunciations by their neighbors, their friends, even their families. Much of the information was incredibly flimsy, but nobody cared because the point wasn’t really to find undesirables, although that was a useful side effect. The point was terror. The Salem Witch Trials industrialized and formalized to intimidate people into conformity.

The same thing is happening here. Whips in the US Congress don’t have the power or the ability to instigate fear that the Whips in the House of Commons in the UK have. British whips can threaten MPs with all kinds of terrifiying things, including deselection. US whips can’t do that. This gives senators and congressmen more power to act on their own conscience. In theory. In practice, a new kind of intimidation power has arisen and it has the same effect. Not a single GOP representative or senator wants the rest of the caucus to stand and point at them screaming “Witch!”. The caucus has become a mob and once you have a mob, you can no longer appeal to the reason of the individual. And if you dare defy the mob, you are out on your ass.

We all knew Pompeo is awful, but…yikes. CNBC reports:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cursed out an NPR reporter after she pressed him to answer questions about the removal of former U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch from her post in Ukraine, the outlet reported Friday.

The reporter, “All Things Considered” co-host Mary Louise Kelly, interviewed Pompeo on Friday amid President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, which centers around the president’s dealings with Ukraine.

He refused to answer all her questions about Ukraine, saying he’d agreed only to talk about Iran.

You can hear her not letting him shout her down.

NPR reported that “immediately after the questions on Ukraine, the interview concluded. Pompeo stood, leaned in and silently glared at Kelly for a period of several seconds before leaving the room.”

He’s big. He’s a big, scowly, angry-looking man. It’s interesting to learn that he feels entitled to use that fact to try to intimidate a female reporter.

An aide to the Cabinet official asked Kelly to follow Pompeo to his living quarters at the State Department without a recording device, but did not specify that the ensuing exchange would be off the record, according to NPR.

“Inside the room, Pompeo shouted his displeasure at being questioned about Ukraine,” NPR reported. “He used repeated expletives, according to Kelly, and asked, ‘Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?’”

On a radio program for NPR that aired Friday, Kelly provided more details about her unrecorded exchange with Pompeo. 

“I was taken to the Secretary’s private living room, where he was waiting, and where he shouted at me for about the same amount of time as the interview itself had lasted,” Kelly said. 

“He used the F word in that sentence, and many others. He asked if I could find Ukraine on a map I said yes. He called out for his aides to bring him a map of the world with no writing, no countries marked,” Kelly said.

“I pointed to Ukraine,” she said. “He put the map away. He said, ‘People will hear about this,’ and then he turned and said he had things to do, and I thanked him again for his time and left.”

The Secretary of State, ladies and gentlemen.

But however good Schiff is at making the case, this is what we’re dealing with:

Malicious contemptuous lying, is what we’re dealing with. Schiff didn’t say “we can’t trust American voters to decide who should be their next president.” He said “we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won,” meaning, we can’t be assured of that because Trump and his gangsters and Putin will cheat. It’s not about the voters being stupid, it’s about Trump being a criminal. Schiff didn’t express any “disdain for opinion of the American people,” he expressed conviction that Trump will do again what he did before, which is to solicit help from Russia and various crooks to steal the election.

I watched this as it happened last night. It’s extraordinary. Dude’s got rhetorical chops.

Also, he kept saying Truth Matters.

In ordinary criminal trials, the jurors have to stay where they are and listen. They’re not allowed to just get up and wander off when they get bored.

Republican Senators not so much.

Despite making public assurances that he would fulfill their Constitutional obligations as impartial jurors in President Trump’s impeachment trial, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy joined a large number of GOP Senators in leaving the Senate Chambers for prolonged periods of time, while crucial evidence was introduced against the President.

I guess the thinking is that he doesn’t need to listen to the evidence because nothing is going to make him vote to remove Trump from office.

But you wouldn’t think he would want to advertise that in advance…except I guess you would, because the targeted consumer is Trump.

Last week, all one hundred United States Senators were sworn in as jurors by the Chief Justice for the United States Supreme Court. Senator Cassidy, taking this oath, swore that “in all matters appertaining to the trial of the impeachment” of the President, he would be impartial.

Which is to say he swore an oath to do something he had every intention of not doing.

Senator Cassidy made a statement in a press release in December, affirming that “the Senate will offer President Trump a fair process” and that he looked forward to “fairly judging the facts.” Yesterday he tweeted: “I intend to be a fair and impartial juror and consider the facts, not let partisan distractions get in the way.”

But also get up and leave while important evidence is being presented.

Newsweek noted that while the oaths of impartiality are not legally binding, the Senate could elect to impeach one of its own for violating the rules. The rules do not explicitly require the Senators to be seated during the trial, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) both told their camps they needed to be in attendance at all times – which Senator Cassidy failed to do.

Why? Performance, is my guess – performance of contempt for the process, contempt for the rules, contempt for the laws, contempt for everyone and everything that doesn’t help Donald Trump enrich himself and smash everything he doesn’t like.

Why that? I don’t know. I don’t understand the depth of cynicism here.

T he fact that Senator Cassidy and other lawmakers were absent during a crucial part of the trial was not ignored by legal blogs. Law & Crime remarked that one-third of all GOP Senators missed the same crucial evidence in the President’s trial. They also contrasted Senator Cassidy’s absence with his promises to “listen to both sides with an open mind.” Bradley Moss, a national security attorney, observed that, of all jurors in all trials, only in the Senate can “‘jurors’ get to stand up and walk out during the prosecution’s presentation of the case.”

Conservative pundit Bill Kristol likened the behavior of Senators like Cassidy to endorsing a mockery of a trial. “I grew up reading about show trials in authoritarian nations abroad,” Kristol said on Twitter.” “I didn’t expect to see one of our two major parties endorse a show trial here in the U.S. Capitol.”

But her emails.

Remember Selina Todd? She was told by students last year that there was going to be a campaign to have her sacked from her job being a professor of modern history at Oxford. More here and here and here.

Now she has to have a security detail.

Prof Selina Todd, a historian who specialises in the lives of women and the working class, said that she has now been provided with “routine security” to ensure she is not attacked.

The academic – who has been accused of being a “transphobe” for her involvement in women’s rights advocacy – was told by her students that she was potentially in danger.

“Two students came to see me and said they were very worried that threats had been made to me on email networks they were part of,” Prof Todd told The Telegraph.

Isn’t it funny how feminism has never been known for issuing threats against people who oppose feminism?

“The university investigated the threats and came back to me to say their intelligence on them is such that they are providing me security for all of my lecturers for the rest of this year. They said ‘you’re having two men in the rest of your lectures’.”

At her most recent undergraduate lecture, a handful of students arrived in trans activists T-shirts, who she believed had come to cause trouble.

She figures the burly guys standing in the back may have persuaded them to skip the trouble-causing.

Prof Todd said that transgender activists started making complaints about her on the basis that her teaching of feminist history was “transphobic”.

“My research suggests that women who posed as men  in the past were often lesbians seeking to protect themselves, or because they want to do jobs that were only available to men,” she said.

How dare women focus on women instead of on men who say they are women. Men matter, women do not.

Prof Todd said that the history faculty now receives “daily” complaints from activists calling for her to be sacked, which has left her feeling unnerved.

…

Prof Todd urged the university to take a stronger stance in disciplining students who are making threats and malicious complaints against her. 

Oh they couldn’t do that; that might look transphobic.

Earlier this week an Oxford college rowed back on its code of conduct for a transgender discussion following criticism that it was closing down free speech.

Merton College was accused of adopting a “draconian” stance over its plans to host a discussion about transgender issues which bans “language which denies the validity of trans identity”.

Do colleges ban language which denies the validity of pretend-astronaut identity? Do they ban language which denies the validity of pretend-movie star identity? Do they ban language which denies the validity of pretend-Nobel prize winner identity?

No. In other contexts people are expected to act like adults and not try to force their fantasies on other people. Sex is the one exception; that fantasy has to be humored, and permitted to threaten non-believers.

The Guardian Live is reporting on the impeachment.

Jerry Nadler talked about the history of impeachment:

[Andrew] Johnson, who took office after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, was the first president to be impeached but was narrowly acquitted by the Senate.

Johnson’s impeachment ostensibly centered on his violation of the Tenure of Office Act, a law that was later ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

But Johnson’s impeachment was actually the culmination of the president’s bitter feud with Republican lawmakers, who accused Johnson of trying to nullify the Union’s victory in the Civil War by being lenient toward former Confederate leaders and opposing the expansion of political rights for former slaves.

Reconstruction failed, and former slaves continued to be lynched, arbitrarily imprisoned and thus re-enslaved, denied rights, confined to bad jobs, bad housing, and bad schools, for another damn century. This stuff matters.

Nadler quoted Dershowitz.

As Bill Clinton faced removal from office in 1998, Dershowitz said of the constitutional standard for impeachment, “It certainly doesn’t have to be a crime. If you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of president and who abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty, you don’t need a technical crime.”

Oops.

He also had a gotcha moment for Lindsey Graham.

Nadler just played this 1999 clip of then-congressman Lindsey Graham, who served as an impeachment manager during Bill Clinton’s trial.

“What’s a high crime?” Graham said at the time. “How about if an important person hurts somebody of low means? It’s not very scholarly. But I think it’s the truth. I think that’s what they meant by high crimes. Doesn’t even have to be a crime.”

Oops.

Still not a good plan, guys.

Turkey’s ruling party has begun a second attempt at introducing a law to grant rapists amnesty as long as they marry their victim, four years after a similar bill sparked outrage at home and internationally.

Similarly, do they plan to introduce a law granting murderers amnesty as long as they dig up their victim and prop her/him up in a corner of the living room?

Also, is this “marriage” of which you speak at all consensual at all? Or is it just a matter of the man “marrying” his victim exactly the way he abused her in the first place? The second is much the more likely, don’t you think? How many people actually want to be married to the very person who abused them?

The legislation, which was first debated by parliament on 16 January, would give men suspended sentences for child sex offences if the two parties get married and the age difference between them is less than 10 years.

Opposition parties and women’s rights groups have been quick to point out that the bill in effect legitimises child marriage and statutory rape in a country where the legal age of consent is 18.

Almost as if that’s the point, isn’t it.

Fidan Ataselim, the general secretary of the activist group We Will Stop Femicide, said the new bill was an attempt by the government to erase evidence of Turkey’s growing epidemic of violence against girls and women.

The group, which has tracked gender-related violence and deaths since Turkish authorities stopped doing so in 2009, estimates that more than 2,600 women have been murdered in the last decade, and the number of killings has increased steadily each year.

Anything to do with the fact that Turkey has been steadily desecularizing during that time?

Writing in the Cumhuriyet newspaper, Dr Adem Sözüer, the head of Istanbul University’s criminal and criminal procedure law department, said the new bill was likely to increase rates of violence against women and children because it “legitimises the mentality that women are objects to possess or exist for sexual satisfaction”.

Just say no, women of Turkey.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on The ACLU is telling whoppers.

How can the ACLU of all organizations declare that athletes should be segregated according to their stated “gender identity”? The ACLU aren’t declaring that all males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports — they are declaring that only males who state that they feel in possession of a feminine “gender identity” should be allowed to compete with females in sports. How can a legal civil rights organization take the stance that any kind of self-assessed, self-declared identity characteristic should be the sole basis by which we sort and segregate athletes in competitive sports? Why not some other self-declared identity characterisitic? Why not favourite colour? Introverts vs. Extroverts? Taylor Swift fans vs. Kanye fans? Even if you truly believe that people’s stated gender identities are sacrosanct and important and “valid” or whateverthefuck, how does that get you to the part where it’s a necessary civil right for athletes to be sorted and separated based on them? How is it a crucial component of the world’s civil rights that members of an Olympic volleyball team can be of mixed biological sex but absolutely must all share the same preferred pronouns? Because in order for women’s and men’s sports to continue to exist as separate categories, that is exactly what we’re demanding — uniform pronouns; mixed sexes and mixed everything else.

It’s stupid and backwards even from a trans rights perspective. If gender is nothing but a feeling inside one’s own head and is completely separate from someone’s biological body — which is all that trans activists scream about all day and all night: the body I was born into doesn’t define my gender, they say — shouldn’t the ACLU be arguing that an athlete’s gender identity is completely irrelevant to their sports career? Shouldn’t the ACLU be fighting to let male-bodied people with feminine-gender-identity-feelz compete proudly and without prejudice against any other male-bodied people, regardless of gender, on the basis that their gender identity has nothing whatsoever to do with the sexed body they happen to have been born in and happen to be using in the physical competition we call sports? After all, “the body I was born into doesn’t define my gender identity” is just another way of saying, “my gender identity isn’t defined by the body I was born into.” You don’t serve a volleyball or sprint 100 metres or throw a discus with your pronouns; you do it with your body.

Of course, the answer to that is obvious: trans activists are in active denial about the bodies they were born in. They claim that their genders are completely separate from their bodies, but all the physical surgeries and hormones give the lie to that: it’s not about freeing everyone’s gender expression from their sexed bodies (that’s feminism, thank you) and it never was: “trans rights” is about men pretending their male bodies are literally female when they plainly, factually aren’t, and guilt-tripping and bullying everyone else into playing along.

This is such a ludicrous, feeble exercise with such obviously negative ramifications — most evidently, to common folk outside of academic feminist circles, in the domain of sports — that I genuinely think it will rapidly collapse once the general public gets a clear, sober look at what trans activists are demanding. The fact that the ACLU has doubled down on it is certain to be a disaster for them very, very soon.

It’s incredible how short-sighted and self-destructive they’re being. I don’t know what’s worse: the foolishness of the eager young virtue signallers the ACLU has brought in at the bottom, or the cowardice of the older people at the top.

Busted.

Jessica Yaniv was arrested for the assault of a Canadian journalist on over the weekend. According to Keean Bexte, the journalist who was assaulted by Yaniv on camera outside of the B.C. courts on January 14, 2020, Yaniv spent time behind bars on the charge of assault. She may face up to five years for the assault.

That same day, Yaniv falsely accused TPM‘s own Amy Eileen Hamm of sexual assault while at the courtroom. Hamm is suing Yaniv for defamation.

I hope Hamm wins.

When reached for comment, Bexte said, “Yaniv has been ordered to cease all contact with me, both directly and indirectly. I can’t wait for the day when Yaniv is put away for the long haul. He is dangerous and unpredictable.”

I’m not a big fan of imprisonment but Yaniv needs to be prevented from doing more people harm.

You know who the bravest athlete in history is? I bet you don’t. Here, have a headline:

Fallon Fox is still the bravest athlete in history

Why? Because of the hatred.

In 2013, when Fallon Fox came out publicly as trans in professional mixed martial arts, she was the target of a torrent of hatred I have literally never seen targeting an LGBTQ athlete. While certainly some writers took thoughtful approaches to understanding this emerging dynamic of trans athletes in women’s sports, still many more, like Joe Rogan, were vicious for the sake of being vicious.

Wait a second though. Isn’t Fallon Fox a man? Doesn’t “Fallon Fox came out as trans” mean that Fallon Fox is a man who decided to “identify as” a woman so that he could compete against women instead of men? Does that really make him brave? Let alone the bravest ever?

Cyd Zeigler thinks so, or pretends to think so in this article:

Yet Fox stood strong and continued to push for, and earn, her right to compete. Except for one fateful match, she also won every time she stepped into the professional ring.

Well no shit, he’s a man, who stepped into the professional ring to beat up women. When he stepped into the professional ring to beat up Tamikka Brents, he broke her orbital bone and gave her a concussion. I’m not seeing the bravery.

When I wrote my book, Fair Play: How LGBT Athletes Are Claiming Their Rightful Place In Sports, the final chapter was titled, “Fallon Fox Is The Bravest Athlete In History.”

That remains true for me now, four years later.

Nothing for the bravery of Tamikka Brents?

Don’t be silly, there’s no such thing as bravery in women.