It turns out the key thing about Trump is his pragmatism. Who knew?

But both sides consistently misread Mr. Trump’s success. He isn’t edging ahead of Mr. Biden in swing states because Americans are eager to submit to authoritarianism, and he isn’t attracting the backing of significant numbers of Black and Hispanic voters because they support white supremacy. His success is not a sign that America is prepared to embrace the ideas of the extreme right. Mr. Trump enjoys enduring support because he is perceived by many voters — often with good reason — as a pragmatic if unpredictable kind of moderate.

Well. Even if it’s true that many voters see Trump as a pragmatic moderate – and that’s a big if – it’s not at all clear how that perception would make everything else about him tolerable. It’s not at all clear, in particular, how that would cancel out or soften the glaring reality of what kind of human being he is – the sadism, the bullying, the domineering, the conceit, the nonstop aggression, the greed, the lying, the cheating, the theft, the exploitation, the hatred, the contempt, the narcissism, the selfishness, the vulgarity, the relentless shoving punching kicking brutality.

I guess I’m some kind of dreamy clueless optimist underneath, because I still have a hard time believing that most people like that kind of thing.

To be sure, Mr. Trump’s wild rhetoric, indifference to protocol and willingness to challenge expertise have been profoundly unsettling to people of both political parties. 

His “indifference to protocol” is it. Is that what you call it. Euphemism much? January 6 was indifference to protocol was it?

His term in office was frequently chaotic, and the chaos seemed to culminate in the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021.

Seemed? What would convince you it more than “seemed”?

But it is worth remembering that during his presidency, Mr. Trump’s often intemperate rhetoric and erratic behavior ended up accompanying a host of moderate policies. 

And then he tried to take power by force. No biggy.

I have to wonder why the Times published this glurge.

It’s odd how this is framed. The Guardian tells us:

Teachers in England will not be made to automatically “out” pupils who come to them with questions over gender identity, despite a push from Conservative rightwingers for a blanket approach, government guidance due to be published this week will say.

Schools will be expected to inform parents if children tell staff that they want to take any steps towards transitioning, but they will not have to flag conversations if children are just asking general questions, or in the event of safeguarding issues.

The decision to keep some protections in place so that children are not automatically outed is likely to frustrate some on the Tory right who have been pushing for parents to be told in all circumstances.

“The decision to keep some protections in place” – that is, “protections” meaning protections for secrecy, not protections for children. The Guardian is assuming that gender ideology needs and deserves protection from adults who understand that people can’t change sex. The Guardian is assuming that we should all be anxiously shielding gender ideology from questions, as opposed to shielding children from destructive gender ideology.

Remember when feminism got the same kind of anxious protective care? No, neither do I.

What is the point?

Prison officers are being asked to consider the needs of “pregnant people” and “breastfeeding people” in official guidance from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). 

The MoJ equality analysis policy framework, a publicly available document, gives guidance to prison officers to ensure facilities are compliant with equality legislation.

You can’t make pregnancy and breastfeeding “equal” in the sense of both sexes being equipped to carry them out. Men can’t get pregnant or breastfeed. I hope that clears that up.

Published on April 20 2023, the guidance asks officers to consider: “How are pregnant or breastfeeding people catered for when working/visiting a prison?” 

How is it “equality” to erase women?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The bindweed.

AJ Eckert, DO, is Connecticut’s first out nonbinary trans doctor….

Please, make up your fucking mind: choose one or the other and stick with it. You can’t be both.

No, Helen. That’s not why you’re transphobic. Asserting two sexes is just incorrect. You’re transphobic because you claim that individuals cannot ever change biological sex

It’s one thing to have activists believing the impossible, but here we have a doctor. But in order to fool others convincingly, you need to fool yourself first. Looks like it took.

This is a doctor who, from this quote alone, quite literally does not know what she’s doing. If she can prove that humans have more than one sex, or that they can change sexes*, there’s a Nobel with her name on it. Proving either (without resorting to word games, or equivocating about gender “presentation”) would be revolutionary. Until she’s made the trip to Stockholm to pick up her medal, she needs to be kept away from patients, particularly children.

It’s like she’s high on her own supply, smoking the product she’s selling. Such ignorant confidence is rather scary to witness, even at the distance of reading a quote online. There’s no way that her counsel is going to be honest or complete if she insists that the impossible is possible. It’s like a mechanic telling you with a straight face that by removing a couple of parts, filling the tank with aviation fuel, and painting some wings on the side, your car can be turned into fully functioning Cesna, ready to fly anywhere. I wouldn’t let someone like that clean my windshield, let alone tinker with the engine. And yet here’s Dr. Nonbinary-Trans working under the hood on humans, telling her victims clients that she can change their sex by lopping off a few organs, pumping them full of wrong-sex hormones, and grafting pretend organs onto them, sculpting their own flesh in a futile effort to give it a vague, aspirational resemblance to the target genitals it can never be.

*Two separate claims often joined in the same breath, neither of which is true. Even if one of them was true, it would not render the other any more true, possible, or likely.

Hey kids, welcome to another episode of Naming by Idiots.

Yass yass yass! “Lesbian” does not at all mean “woman attracted to women”; that is a complete misunderstanding. I don’t know where people come up with these ideas.

Originally a comment by VanitysFiend on The bindweed.

I hope one day when the bottom has fallen out of the trans movement we can have a proper belly laugh at all the people who should’ve known better but still somehow fell for it and subsequently pissed away their reputations as a result, but right now this just feels sad. Sad that the website where I first learned about Lupron and its use in crank medicine as a treatment for autism is now promoting an ideology that uses that exact same drug to stall the natural development path for adolescent humans because it thinks it’ll help children change sex.

There’s a dark beauty to this level of stupidity that just can’t really be appreciated in the present. To me stunting the process that turns a child into an adult seems so obviously like the prologue to a dystopian Sci-fi classic like Brave New World that it should be easy to dismiss out of hand, and yet here we are, doing it to thousands of kids every year.

Now we’re onto the “poisoning the blood” phase.

Donald Trump is facing a backlash for repeating a remark at a political rally on Saturday where he said undocumented immigrants to the United States are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

Of course he said that. It’s how he thinks. He says it because His People love it, but also because he loves it himself. He loves talking filth of that kind. If Hitler were still around Trump would be his best friend.

In November he was widely condemned for calling his opponents “vermin”, language that echoed that used historically by dictators and authoritarians.

Well duh. He is an authoritarian, and he would be a dictator if he could. It’s all too possible that he’ll make himself one if he wins the election.

“He’s disgusting,” former New Jersey governor and Republican presidential contender Chris Christie told CNN Sunday. “He’s dog-whistling to Americans who feel under stress and strain from the economy and conflicts around the world,” Christie said. “He’s dog-whistling to blame it on people from areas that don’t look like us.”

Here’s that dog-whistling issue again. I wouldn’t call it dog-whistling, because I think he’s just plain saying it. I mean granted he leaves off the “so kill them all” part, but I think “poisoning the blood of our country” is pretty clear.

What it is to be a Maga person:

The purpose of [Ruby] Freeman’s courtroom testimony was simple: to describe in detail how Giuliani’s lies had profoundly damaged her life. And make no mistake, Giuliani lied. He admitted that his statements were false back in July, and in August the court entered a default judgment against him, holding him liable for those falsehoods.

The only question left for the jury was the amount of the damages. And Friday, the jury gave its answer: Giuliani now owes Freeman and Moss $148 million to compensate them for his cruel and obvious lies.

The verdict is against Giuliani alone. But make no mistake, MAGA was on trial in the courtroom — its methods, its morality and the means it uses to escape the consequences of its dreadful acts. That’s because Rudy Giuliani isn’t truly Rudy Giuliani any longer. In his long descent from a post-9/11 American hero to a mocked, derided and embattled criminal defendant (he has also been indicted in Fani Willis’s sprawling Georgia case), he became something else entirely. He became a MAGA Man.

Or to put it less metaphorically, he let greed and power-hunger crowd out everything else, so he became a clone of the filthy crook Donald Trump.

The first thing you need to know about a MAGA Man like Giuliani is that he’s dishonest. Truthfulness is incompatible with Trumpism. Trump is a liar, and he demands fealty to his lies. So Giuliani’s task, as Trump’s lawyer, was to lie on his behalf, and lie he did. He even repeated his lies about Freeman and Moss — the same lies to which he’d already confessed — outside the courthouse during his trial.

A MAGA Man such as Giuliani supplements his lies with rage. To watch him pushing Trump’s election lies was to watch a man become unglued with anger. The rage merged with the lie. The rage helped make the lie stick.

That too is very filthy-trumpy. Rage is always right there, ready to show up at the smallest hint to help Master win another skirmish. Lie, rage, win.

His trial and verdict write another page in the volume of truth that tells the real story of MAGA America. Every voter should know exactly who Trump is and what his movement is like. They should know what happened to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. We should remember their names. But if a MAGA Man remembers, he does not care. Whoever he once was is gone. He serves a new master now.

Dr Faustus without the intellect.

Science-Based Medicine has a venomous book-length post by AJ Eckert attacking Helen Joyce.

Who is AJ Eckert besides a contributor at SBM?

AJ Eckert, DO, is Connecticut’s first out nonbinary trans doctor and serves as the Medical Director of our Gender & Life-Affirming Medicine (GLAM) Program. Dr. Eckert has over 17 years’ experience in LGBTQ health care, with 9 years as a provider of primary care and gender-affirming services.

After Dr. Eckert completed their education at Touro University College of Osteopathic Medicine and residency at NEOMEN/Maine Dartmouth Family Medicine Program, they specialized in LGBTQ health. Dr. Eckert is board certified in family medicine.

Outside of their clinical work with patients, Dr. Eckert is active in education and advocacy. He is an assistant clinical professor of family medicine at Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University and has piloted a 4th-year medical student rotation at Anchor Health. Since 2021, Dr. Eckert has published nine articles in Science-Based Medicine, was a reviewer for the Journal of Medical Ethics, and had a quote in the 2nd edition of “The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals.” They were on the 2021 Abstract Review Committee for the United States Professional Association for Transgender Health, or USPATH.

Dr. Eckert is active in advocacy all right.

Joyce doesn’t understand why she’s seen as transphobic; in one interview, she claims,

“So according to them, I’m transphobic for just saying human beings come in two types, male and female…that’s transphobic.”

No, Helen. That’s not why you’re transphobic. Asserting two sexes is just incorrect. You’re transphobic because you claim that individuals cannot ever change biological sex, and anyone who disagrees with that statement is just frightened of activists.

Cool; that’s fine then.

Finally we get the accusation of seeking genocide:

Helen Joyce’s goal is to reduce the number of trans people and keep down the number of those who transition. She opines,

           “That’s for two reasons – one of them is that every one of those people is a person who’s been damaged. But the second one is every one of those people is basically, you know, a huge problem to a sane world.”

Joyce is following the pattern of pundits in 2023 who have taken the anti-trans campaign from “just asking questions” to “protecting children” to “trans eradication.” People are scared, and with good reason.

Subtle enough? The good doctor is saying Helen wants trans people “eradicated” i.e. killed.

It’s almost funny, because the doc goes on to quote Helen saying she hopes to see kids who think they’re trans getting over it and being happy lesbians and gay men as if that were evidence of her hoping to see them “eradicated.” Like so:

Joyce is following the pattern of pundits in 2023 who have taken the anti-trans campaign from “just asking questions” to “protecting children” to “trans eradication.” People are scared, and with good reason. And for those who still don’t believe this is Joyce’s goal, here she says in an interview:

“There are two versions of the future, and one of them is just clearly better than the other, which is to let these kids just be themselves and grow up to be gay.”

That’s not eradication. Changing your mind is not eradication. Just being yourself is not eradication. (If it is, what about people who were gay but later decide they’re trans? Wouldn’t that be eradication too?)

Joyce does not want us to exist…is it clear now?

No. No, it isn’t. She wants you not to be deluded and confused, which is not the same thing as not existing.

She compares trans rights to bindweed. We are a weed that needs to be eradicated.

“I often analogize it with bindweed or Japanese knotweed, depending on which analogy, how pessimistic I’m feeling on that day, because bindweed is hard, but Japanese knotweed is really hard. So this has spread while nobody was doing the weeding, but you could conceivably pull it all back out. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Note the lurch from “trans rights” to “we” – but note also that Helen is talking about the bizarro beliefs of trans ideology, not trans people as people. Comparing an ideology to a weed is not all that unusual, let alone shocking, let alone genocidal.

There’s a whole lot more. It’s a staggeringly long article. The bindweed goes on for miles.

H/t Harald Hanche-Olsen

Yesssssss

Eddie Izzard fails to be chosen as Brighton Labour candidate

The comedian and activist had hoped to represent the constituency as Labour’s parliamentary candidate but was defeated by music industry activist Tom Gray. The result is Eddie Izzard’s second defeated attempt to stand as an MP, after not being selected to become Labour’s candidate in Sheffield Central last year.

Tom Gray aims to become the first Labour MP for Brighton Pavilion in more than a decade after Green MP Caroline Lucas was elected in 2010.

…

Mr Gray attracted the majority of support from party members and also received the backing of several trade unions, including Unite, Unison and USDAW.

And Eddie Izzard lost.

He what?

He LOST.

Another man eager to cheat a woman out of a scholarship:

Reduxx has learned that a volleyball player from California is reportedly set to become the first known male recipient of a women’s Division 1 (D1) athletic scholarship. Tate Drageset, 17, has verbally committed to the University of Washington, and, if the offer is signed next fall, he would be seizing one of only twelve D1 volleyball scholarships available for females at the University.

The announcement of Drageset’s verbal commitment to the University of Washington was made in June to much fanfare within the volleyball community, with multiple sporting magazines and social media accounts covering the verbal commitment.

Drageset has long been considered a rising star within women’s volleyball, and he was the dominant force on two USA Volleyball teams in two separate age groups that both claimed national titles last summer. He was also named an MVP at the Girls Junior National Championships earlier this year. In addition to his club volleyball accolades, he was awarded the title of the California Interscholastic Federation’s Division 5 Player of the 2022-23 Year.

I suppose being male helped him?

But this time it was a secret.

But Drageset’s transgender status has reportedly been concealed from public knowledge, with coaches, parents, and opposing players being left uninformed of his biological sex ahead of games.

Now, for the first time, a source close to the situation has anonymously come forward to reveal concerns about the steady escalation of Drageset’s participation in women’s volleyball, something which has now resulted in him preparing to take a rare, all-expenses-paid athletic scholarship opportunity.

Oh well, it’s only girls.

From the pen of Pliny:

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on So many? Like five?

Back in my Movement Skeptic days, before the “deep rifts”, for a while my thinking was heavily influenced by Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. While I still think Pinker made some valid points*, in the light of everything that’s happened since, I have grown much more sympathetic towards (or at least understanding of) the reluctance among certain feminists to talk about innate cognitive or psychological differences between men and women. As I remember there was a certain “gotcha” that was very popular among “anti-blank-slatists” at the time:

So what you’re saying is that if there were differences in the distribution of interests and talents between men and women that were not entirely attributable to culture, discrimination wouldn’t be wrong after all?

Indeed, I was almost certainly guilty of occasionally using this “gotcha” myself. I now think this is a strawman. It’s not that the supposed innate differences justify discrimination, it’s that they’re too often used to explain away discrimination (Michael Shermer’s infamous “more of a guy thing” comment being a prime example).

There is a tendency among movement skeptics to talk as if claims are either “supported by evidence and sound logic” or not, when, in fact, things are almost never that clear cut. As they say, there is no algorithm for truth. The data is usually at least somewhat ambiguous and open to interpretation, no method is ever infallible, and no study is ever without flaws, so if we’re motivated to reach certain conclusions and avoid others, we can always find reasons why studies that lead to an inconvenient conclusion are “fatally flawed”. For studies that lead to a desirable conclusion we don’t look so hard for flaws and don’t ascribe such fatal consequences to the ones we do notice. We can be biased and guilty of intellectual double standards even without contradicting any established facts and without making any obvious logical fallacies or methodological errors.

So while I don’t deny that there are real differences in the distribution of interests and talents between men and women, my general impression is that right-leaning people tend to be very quick to embrace biological explanations for things like the under-representation of women in positions of power and status without exposing them to the same level of hypercritical scrutiny as the alternatives. They also seem very quick to conclude that if different innate preferences enters into the explanation at all, there is no need to look any further: That’s all there is to it, and sexism has nothing to do with it. And to be fair, at the risk of engaging in false equivalence and bothsiderism, leftleaning people are almost certainly guilty of the opposite double standard.

While I have some issues with Jonathan Haidt, I think he is right to say that the merit of science is not that it makes individual scientists immune to bias, motivated reasoning, intellectual double standards etc. It’s that, at its best, it allows the competing biases of different scientists to “cancel out”, at least to some degree, which is why viewpoint diversity is so vitally important in science. I also think this is a major part of the reason it’s so important to determine in advance (i.e. before the data are in) what is going to count as a positive result. You should always be prepared to bet your pet hypothesis on predictions that haven’t yet been confirmed or disconfirmed. Because once the facts are in, it is always possible to retrofit the data to a desired conclusion.

* Indeed several critics of gender ideology, including Helen Joyce, have made the point that the tendency among many feminists to downplay and minimize the importance of biology has put them in an awkward position when it comes to defending the need for female only spaces.

Eva Kurilova reports that Canadian schools are asking students impertinent questions about personal matters.

It was recently brought to my attention that a school district in Ontario was asking students to fill out a survey that asked them to indicate what their “gender” is. The options included male and female but did not end there. This was followed by “transgender,” “non-binary,” “questioning,” and “two-spirit,” among other ridiculous prompts. If your “gender” was not listed, you could specify further.

Are school districts 14 years old all of a sudden? Are they sharing selfies on Twitter? Have they lost their minds?

These are the questions of a cult, and schools are just taking them for granted. The idea that it’s possible to be something other than male or female or that “gender” takes precedence over “sex” (they never specify which view they are taking, because confusion is the whole point) is a cult idea. It is more than just a metaphysical belief—it is a marker of complete and total indoctrination, and activist educators have the country’s children believing it.

It’s as if school districts have been taken over by Moonies or UFO finders or Freudians. Schools are supposed to educate, not induct into lunacy.

It’s been going on for some time, Eva says.

A great example is the 2021-22 York Region District School Board Student Survey. This survey asked a similar set of questions, prompting students to accept the idea that they must have a “deeply felt” sense of their “identity” on the “gender spectrum” and then asking them what it was.

What people have is the experience of being told they are girls or boys from long before their brains could form memories. That’s what these fools claim is a “deeply felt sense.” The only reason the felt sense seems “deeply felt” is because they don’t remember the beginning because they were too young to remember anything. Confusing the forgotten with the deep is a rooky error.

Why not just start asking kids if they’re elves, refugees from Remulac, giant tortoises, sharks in people suits?

Islamizing Turkish schools:

 Turkey’s steps to promote traditional moral values in students, increase Islamic lessons and open prayer rooms in schools are fuelling secularist concerns in the Muslim country and laying bare divisions over the role religion should have in education.

The measures, introduced recently, have fired up tensions over what is already a highly charged subject as Turkey marks 100 years since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the staunchly secular republic.

Reuters stumbles over its own feet there – if Turkey is a staunchly secular republic then why does Reuters call it “the Muslim country”?

The number of Imam Hatip schools, founded to educate Islamic preachers, has risen to around 1,700 from 450 in 2002 when the AKP first came to power. Their student body has risen six-fold to more than half a million.

But secularist criticism is now directed at the regular school system, where students take two compulsory religion lessons a week and now must take additional religion and morality classes.

Separately, under a regulation that came into force in October, all schools must make spaces available for what is known as a mescit, a small place for Islamic worship.

“State schools are being transformed into (religious) madrasas by making other schools’ curriculums similar to Imam Hatips,” Kadem Ozbay, head of the education sector union Egitim-Is, told Reuters.

The same thing happens in the US of course. Daddy God is always being smuggled in one way or another.

A Lively Exchange of Views.

At 9 minutes in Tatchell tells us “it’s not compatible with a kind compassionate generous society”…to say that men are not women.

Yesterday trans ideologue Finn MacKay tweeted this photo:

as evidence for this assertion:

If nobody has a gender (apart from trans people) & there is only biological sex & the rest is personality – it’s a bit weird so many men’s personalities are expressed so similarly, same for women. Is this just biological sex?

Women’s personalities are expressed so similarly, MacKay says, pointing to a grotesque photo of seven women dressed up as expensive prostitutes [aka “sex workers”]. We’re supposed to nod in agreement that that’s how women dress, and isn’t it weird that we have such similar personality expressions.

Many people pointed out the utter stupidity of that claim, and were ignored, but Colin Montgomerie gave it a thumbs up and was chucked under the chin.

What planet does MacKay live on? Where feminist women say there are ergonomic reasons for catch me-fuck me shoes? lol! ha, ha, ha?

Oops.

A word of advice: don’t do this.

Publisher drops author for using fake accounts to ‘review-bomb’ peers

You mean, like overwhelm peers with rave reviews? No.

Cait Corrain, whose book Crown of Starlight was due to be published in May next year, posted on X to apologise for her behaviour. “I boosted the rating of my book, bombed the ratings of several fellow debut authors, and left reviews that ranged from kind of mean to downright abusive,” she tweeted.

Corrain’s US publisher Del Rey, an imprint of Penguin Random House, stated on Monday that it was “aware of the ongoing discussion” about the author. Crown of Starlight “is no longer on our 2024 publishing schedule”, it said. Though it was initially unclear whether this meant that the book’s publication was being postponed or cancelled, both Del Rey and Corrain’s UK publisher Daphne Press later said that neither Crown of Starlight nor the second book in Corrain’s contract will be published by them.

Corrain’s former agent, Rebecca Podos, announced on Monday that she will no longer be working with Corrain. “Cait and I will not be continuing our partnership moving forward. I deeply appreciate the patience of those directly impacted by last week’s events as I worked through a difficult situation,” she wrote in a post on X.

So it all worked out pretty badly for this Corrain person.

“I can’t believe Del Rey spent half a million dollars on this when they could have spent half a million dollars on anything else. Sorry not sorry,” read one of the review screenshots of Chang’s book, posted by a user called Brett Spinner. The review was liked by Chantal B.

Sounds very “I agree with Polly-O!” if anyone remembers that extended prank.

A review of Corrain’s book, posted under the username Oh Se-Young, called Corrain a “f*cking genius”.

“I love this book so much that I regret reading it because now nothing on my TBR sounds interesting by comparison,” it stated.

Corrain claimed a friend was responsible for fake reviews, and shared several screenshots of a conversation in which the author berates “Lilly” for posting the ratings. Corrain later admitted that the screenshots were fabricated, and that the “friend” was “nonexistent”.

Hahahahahahaha it was all I agree with Polly-O all the way down. It’s hilarious.

In an X post, Corrain said that they had been “fighting a losing battle against depression, alcoholism and substance abuse” and changed medication in late November. They explained that on 2 December they “suffered a complete psychological breakdown” and created “roughly six profiles on Goodreads”. Along with two profiles created “during a similar but shorter breakdown in 2022”, they used the accounts to post the negative reviews of other books and to boost their own.

Uh huh uh huh uh huh. I especially like the part where she has a complete pyschological breakdown but still remains calculating enough to use those profiles created “during a similar but shorter breakdown in 2022”…in fact I think that’s one of the funniest things I’ve read in some time.

Also hilarious? Brave scourge of terfs Joanne Harris was in there supporting the psychologically broken down mad review bomber. I can’t share the tweets because of too many locked accounts, but I can tell you she was defending the poor misunderstood trickster. Good stuff.

The Times:

A jury on Friday ordered Rudolph W. Giuliani to pay $148 million to two former Georgia election workers who said he had destroyed their reputations with lies that they tried to steal the 2020 election from Donald J. Trump.

Judge Beryl A. Howell of the Federal District Court in Washington had already ruled that Mr. Giuliani had defamed the two workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. The jury had been asked to decide only on the amount of the damages.

The jury awarded Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss a combined $75 million in punitive damages. It also ordered Mr. Giuliani to pay compensatory damages of $16.2 million to Ms. Freeman and $16.9 million to Ms. Moss, as well as $20 million to each of them for emotional suffering.

Good. I have no idea how much of that they’ll actually get, but I like the underlying principle. Powerful rich people should not bully and defame and lie about powerless non-rich people, especially for such corrupt reasons as stealing an election to install an evil toad as dictator.

Mr. Giuliani, who helped lead Mr. Trump’s effort to remain in office after his defeat in the 2020 election but has endured a string of legal and financial setbacks since then, was defiant after the proceeding.

“I don’t regret a damn thing,” he said outside the courthouse, suggesting that he would appeal and that he stood by his assertions about the two women.

What a disgusting rotten human being.

Mr. Giuliani’s net worth is unknown because he refused to comply with the court’s requirement to provide that information. A lawyer familiar with his legal situation said after the verdict that Mr. Giuliani was likely to file for bankruptcy protection. But because the damages he owes Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss are considered an “intentional tort,” bankruptcy would not erase his liability, lawyers said.

Now do Trump.

It’s not just religious liberty though, in fact it’s not even primarily religious liberty. It’s also, of course, not just conservatives.

In a ruling hailed as a major victory by conservatives, Virginia’s Supreme Court on Thursday revived a lawsuit by a teacher who claims his religious liberties and free-speech rights were violated when school officials fired him for refusing to use the pronouns of a transgender student.

It should never be a job requirement to have to remember anyone’s specialty pronouns.

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the conservative Christian group that is representing Vlaming, called the ruling a “sweeping victory” for free speech and religious rights, and Virginia Attorney General Jason S. Miyares (R) said “it dramatically expands the protection of religious liberty.”

But legal counsel for the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), which has followed the case, called it “dangerous and misguided” and said it gives teachers a right to discriminate. 

Well teachers do have a right to discriminate. They have to do quite a lot of discriminating as part of their job – discriminating between good work and bad work, brilliant work and terrible work. They have to discriminate between wrong answers and right ones.

Shannon Minter, legal director for NCLR, said in a statement that the ruling ignores teachers’ obligations under the law.

“Requiring teachers to treat transgender students equally when they address them in class is about prohibiting discriminatory conduct, not speech,” Minter said. “Such a rule no more restricts protected speech than requiring teachers to treat any other group of students equally.”

But it’s not “equally.” What does remembering to use the wrong pronouns have to do with equality? Nothing.

Vlaming, who taught French, claims in his lawsuit he couldn’t refer to a transitioning student assigned female at birth by masculine pronouns because it violated the tenets of his Christian faith.

Well it doesn’t really. Jesus never said anything about pronouns. It’s not a faith issue at all, it’s a language issue, a reality issue, a truth issue, a nuisance issue. It’s a nuisance to have to remember to use opposite pronouns; it’s not something that comes naturally.

Vlaming, a six-year teacher, told the student he would use the student’s male name in class and try not to use pronouns in an effort to balance the student’s wishes and his own religious beliefs, according to the lawsuit.

But school administrators told him it would violate a nondiscrimination policy to not use the student’s masculine pronouns and issued Vlaming warnings, according to the suit. When Vlaming still refused to use the masculine pronouns, the lawsuit says, the school board fired him in December 2018.

That’s so ridiculous. What does a nondiscrimination policy have to do with using the wrong pronouns for some but not all students?

The ACLU of Virginia said in a statement that “public school officials are still bound by federal law to not discriminate against their students.”

But it’s not “discriminating against students” to fail to memorize specialty pronouns. Ordering teachers to use specialty pronouns is more like discrimination than failure to use them is.