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My latest WSJ OpEd went live this evening online and will be in the print edition tomorrow. Here it is in full for Just the Facts subscribers (note: The VoiceOver for this article is an AI automated voice)
Protecting women’s sports should be at the top of the Trump administration’s to-do list. The issue gained national attention in 2022, when male swimmer Lia Thomas, who had been ranked 65th among men in the nation for the 500-yard freestyle, won an NCAA swimming championship while competing as a woman. A United Nations report last month revealed that men identifying as women have won 890 medals in 29 female-only sports worldwide.
The Education Department in April proposed a regulation adding “gender identity” as a protected category to Title IX rules. Title IX, enacted in 1972, bans sex discrimination by federally funded educational institutions. The new rule, which went into effect Aug. 1, allows males unfettered access to female locker rooms and bathrooms. It also signals approval of men participating in and dominating women’s athletics.
Republicans tried unsuccessfully to pre-empt the Title IX changes. In 2023 the House passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which defined sex as “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” When it got to the Senate, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville—who began his career as a high-school girls’ basketball coach—asked for unanimous consent. Hawaii’s Sen. Mazie Hirono objected, saying it would bar people from playing sports “consistent with their gender.” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stymied the bill. In July Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R., Miss.) and Rep. Mary Miller (R., Ill.), introduced a resolution under the Congressional Review Act to reverse the Biden regulation. It passed the House along party lines, 210-205. Mr. Schumer again made certain it died in the Senate.
Federal courts blocked the Biden administration rule in 26 states. The Supreme Court upheld these injunctions and may eventually take up the new rule itself. The new Republican-controlled Congress could settle the matter quickly by passing a bill to reverse the Biden Title IX modifications. It would sail through the House, maybe even winning some support from Democratic representatives who saw the potency of the issue in the November election. Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton has said that his party is “out of touch” and that he doesn’t want his daughters playing in sports against males.
New Senate Majority Leader John Thune could force Democrats to vote on the issue. It takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Republicans will have 53, and the new Senate will have 10 members from states Donald Trump carried. Should the effort to restore Title IX stall in the Senate, Mr. Trump can issue an executive order barring institutions that receive federal funding from allowing male athletes to participate in athletic programs designed for girls and women. It will get tied up in litigation, but at least the federal government will be on the right side of the issue. The Trump administration should be at the forefront to restore fairness and demonstrate quickly that elections have real consequences for protecting women’s rights.
Mr. Posner is author of “Pharma: Greed, Lies and the Poisoning of America.”
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The brutal murder of UnitedHealth Group CEO, Brian Thompson, in the streets of Manhattan, has elicited widespread condemnation but also unleashed an online tsunami of celebratory memes and praise for the killer. The polarizing reaction has put a spotlight on the deep-seated animosity that many Americans harbor toward health insurance companies that often deny critical medical claims to protect profits. As they reject essential medical treatments, a corporate whistleblower recently provided me an internal health insurance policy that revealed they are also green-lighting expansive “gender affirming care” benefits for employees and their dependent children.
Under Thompson's leadership, UnitedHealth had one of the industry’s highest rates of claim denials. A Senate subcommittee report from October found that the company denied requests for costly post-acute care at triple the rate of less expensive treatments. Worse, the insurer used an artificial intelligence-driven claims process with a 90% error rate in determining medical necessity. The industry-leading denial rate was good for shareholders but created a legion of angry patients who felt subordinated to the company’s bottom line profits.
The backlash has prompted some insurers to reconsider controversial policies. Last week, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, one of the country’s biggest insurers, announced it would halt a policy change that limited reimbursement for anesthesia during surgeries.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Anthem BCBS had quietly rolled out a policy in three states in which it set an “appropriate number of minutes” for surgical procedures and refused to pay for anesthesia that exceeded the limits. Complications that extended surgery times made patients responsible for the costs.
The Anthem policy had survived nearly a year despite vociferous industry opposition from the American Society of Anesthesiologists. However, Anthem only backtracked following Thompson’s murder.
I was acutely aware of the extent of the hypocrisy of Anthem’s ‘let’s limit reimbursement for surgical anesthesia’ since I had recently received from a whistleblower a copy of a corporate “LGBT+ Benefits Guide” from the same insurer. In the Anthem healthcare policy offered by Edward Jones, a Fortune 500 firm that is the largest U.S. financial services company in the number of financial advisors, it has a section titled “Transgender-inclusive health benefits.”
“Our medical plan provides gender-affirming health benefits to associates and dependents who have a diagnosis of and meet Anthem’s clinical requirements for gender dysphoria.”
The plan then lists what “gender-affirming care includes”
* Hormone-replacement therapy including puberty blockers for youths (where allowed by law)
* Reconstructive chest, breast and genital surgery.
* Other services, such as facial feminization surgery, voice modification surgery, tracheal shave/thyroid reduction surgery, etc.”
Edward Jones employees can qualify for “family-oriented and surgical recovery leave” for themselves, or “a loved one [who] receives gender-affirming surgery.”
If an Edward Jones employee, or dependent, “must travel more than 50-miles from your home to receive in-network gender-affirming surgery because it’s not available in your area, our medical plan covers up to $50 per day for one person and $100 per day for up to two companions in travel and lodging expenses.”
Who does Anthem list as “eligible dependents?
* Legal spouse.
* Edward Jones-recognized domestic partner
* Children born to you, adopted by you or waiting to be adopted by you; stepchildren; children for whom you are the legal guardian; foster children; and children and stepchildren of your domestic partner.”
Requests for comments from Anthem or Edward Jones went unanswered.
As someone who has extensively covered corporate abuses in the healthcare industry, including in my 2020 book PHARMA: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America, I’ve documented countless ways in which profits are prioritized over patients. But the murder of UnitedHealth’s CEO has brought fresh attention to the role of private insurers in perpetuating public mistrust. With healthcare decisions, as in the case of Anthem, to prioritize gender-affirming care while dialing back on such basic needs as anesthesia for the full length of a surgery, it is little wonder that so many Americans feel abandoned by a system that seems increasingly designed to work against them.
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Meta has kept secret a disturbing flaw in its systems by which cybercriminals exploit Instagram accounts for illegal activities, including running up charges on stolen credit cards and selling nonexistent products. The criminals exploit a weakness in Meta security by creating and linking fraudulent Instagram accounts to randomly selected legitimate Facebook profiles. This enables the hackers to mostly bypass Meta’s commerce eligibility criteria, the supposed safeguard before verifying an account for sales activities. The hackers then abuse their new accounts until Meta detects the fraud and shuts them down. However, by that time, the legitimate Facebook profiles linked to these hacked Instagram accounts are suspended or deleted in error.
The result is that tens of thousands of Facebook users have unjustly had their accounts permanently deleted.
What has been Meta’s response to this security issue?
It has refused to address it.
How do I know all this? I came to this story by a bit of personal serendipity. My wife, Trisha Posner, had thousands of friends and colleagues on her Facebook profile that she created in July 2007. This past June 13, Trisha got the notice (in the image at the top of this article) that her Facebook account was suspended “because your Instagram account lijaaketer533 doesn’t follow our rules. You have 180 days left to appeal. Log into your linked Instagram account to appeal our decision. Log into your Instagram account.”
That was the first time Trisha had ever heard of an Instagram account with the username lijaakter533. She has her own Instagram accounts, a personal one under her own name, and another for our nonprofit, Antisemitism Watch. Both of those accounts were still operating.
It was only when Trisha tried correcting her Facebook suspension that she immediately discovered that Meta had created a classic “Catch 22” that made it impossible to fix. Meta’s online help sends users in an endless circle of dead ends. And in this case, it only allowed an appeal to be made by the Instagram account that had violated its rules. However, since that Instagram account was created by some unknown cybercriminal, it was impossible for Trisha to access it to appeal her account suspension. Only the hacker knew that account's username and password.
No matter what Trisha tried, Meta showed no interest in even acknowledging the problem, much less correcting it. Meta ignored every entreaty for a workaround. After signing up for Meta Verified on her personal Instagram account, chat representatives promised to investigate, but Trisha never heard back. She paid for Meta Pro Team support which also proved to be useless. Frustrated at Meta’s total stonewalling and unresponsiveness, Trisha filed a formal consumer complaint to the California Attorney General’s office.
By this point, I got involved to determine whether Trisha’s experience was an isolated incident or part of a larger Meta problem. What I discovered was startling.
I first came across FBDisabledMe, a subreddit with nearly 20,000 members many of whom had experienced the same problem: their Facebook accounts were first suspended and then ultimately deleted after hackers linked fraudulent Instagram accounts to their profiles. As with Trisha, those users had no way to appeal because only the hacker knew how to access the compromised Instagram account.
After discovering FBDisabledMe, I reached out to others who would have more information. It included litigators who had fought Meta on other matters and had masses of discovery from the company, as well whistleblowers who had testified publicly about problems inside the company. Eventually, I was put in touch with a veteran software engineer who had personal knowledge of the problem that Trisha had stumbled into.
According to that engineer, the 20,000 users on FBDisabledMe represented just a fraction of those affected. The real number of Facebook users who had fallen victim to the scam could be as high as 250,000. Meta’s security logs indicated that many of the affected Instagram accounts were linked to IP addresses from countries like Romania, Latvia, Belarus, and Moldova.
Has Meta shared this information with Interpol or other law enforcement agencies? It is unclear since Meta refuses any public comment.
Over the past week, I reached out several times to Meta’s press office for an official statement but received no response.
Meta faces daily cybersecurity challenges. While it spends a lot of money on security, digital crooks are constantly probing to find weaknesses. It is troubling that Facebook will not acknowledge that this easily exploited vulnerability is leaving a trail of innocent victims who lose forever their accounts.
In 2019, the FTC imposed a historic $5 billion penalty on Facebook (now Meta) and ordered the company to implement sweeping privacy requirements designed to boost transparency and accountability.
What makes this issue even more egregious is Mark Zuckerberg’s apparent indifference. With over three billion users, he likely views the loss of 250,000 accounts as a minor inconvenience. Users who lose their accounts might simply create new ones, while others vent their frustrations on a subreddit that gets little attention from the tech or business press.
There’s also the matter of Meta’s dismal approach to customer service. Last month, a woman named Tova Ridgway in Northern California, was so desperate to regain access to her hacked Facebook account that she drove to Meta’s headquarters.
"They're like, 'I'm sorry, I can't do anything about this,” she told a local ABC affiliate.
“Are you telling me you don't have anyone working for hacked pages?”
“This happens every day,” a Facebook representative told her. “No, I'm sorry, there isn't.’”
Ridgway found a solution through Meta Verified, a $15 a month subscription, something that did not work for Trisha. While that might work for some, it is an unjustified cost for users whose accounts were compromised due to Meta’s security flaws. Zuckerberg himself said in a blog post it would be too expensive for the company to recover and restore all hacked accounts. For a company that reported $39 billion in net profit last year, that justification rings hollow.
Meta could and should be doing more to protect its users. The simplest solution for Trisha is restoring her Facebook account before it’s permanently deleted. But this goes far beyond her case. Tens of thousands of users like her—some of whom have lost years of business contacts, personal photos, and memories—are suffering because of Meta’s failure to address a critical security flaw.
The most important step is for Meta to patch the security vulnerability that allows cybercriminals to manipulate Instagram accounts and cause collateral damage to Facebook users. Until that happens, it’s clear that Meta’s dismissive response to the growing problem of hacked accounts is not only inadequate but arrogant. That is never good for business in the long run.
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The World Bank somehow lost track of upwards of $41 billion to fight climate change, about 40% of all its climate funding over the past seven years. The stunning disclosure was made public last week following an audit by Oxfam, the left-leaning British NGO focused on fighting worldwide poverty.
The amount of missing money “could be twice or 10 times more,” according to a World Bank insider who asked for anonymity.
Oxfam’s bombshell report outlined what might ultimately be an enormous public sector financial scandal.
For those of you not familiar with the World Bank, it describes itself as “international development organization owned by 187 countries…that help developing nations advance their economies.” Five countries — the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Japan - are the bank’s major shareholders. Because the U.S. gives so much money to the World Bank, it is the only country that has a veto power on how it is run. The World Bank, with about $320 billion in capital, is supposed to distribute money to developing countries through low cost or zero-interest loans, grants, equity investments, and guarantees.
The World Bank introduced a Climate Change Action Plan in 2016 at the direction of the U.S. and European countries that urged it to make fighting climate change an equal goal with eradicating poverty. The Bank revised its mission statement to “end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity on a livable planet.” By 2023, 41% of all the Bank’s financing to developing nations was directed to climate projects.
Oxfam raised red flags — what it called “serious concerns” — that something was wrong when they began their audit of the Bank’s climate spending. It reviewed 181 climate projects the Bank had funded since 2017.
“We had to sift through layers of complex and incomplete reports, and even then, the data was full of gaps and inconsistencies,” reported Kate Donald, the chief of Oxfam’s Washington D.C. office. “The fact that this information is so hard to access and understand is alarming —it shouldn’t take a team of professional researchers to figure out how billions of dollars meant for climate action are being spent.”
The Bank could not account for somewhere between $24 billion and $41 billion in climate funds from the time they approved a project and the work was supposed to be completed. The World Bank did not know how the money it provided was used, not even if it was spent on the climate-initiatives for which it was earmarked. The Bank has “no single reliable source of data and information on [its] expenditures.” The lack of transparency, according to Oxfam, means “that it is impossible to verify the numbers that the Bank has reported as climate finance…”
“All the figures are routinely made up,” a World Bank insider told the New York Post. “Nobody has a clue about who spends what.”
Is the money missing because it was simply not accounted for by the countries that received it or did some of those tens of billions disappear into graft and corruption?
That is impossible to determine because the World Bank is self-policing and not very forthcoming. Its Financial Integrity Unit is supposed to help developing nations build cases to pursue the illegal diversion of funds. And the Bank’s Office of Suspension and Disbarment (OSD) handles reports of fraud and corruption. The OSD refused my request to confirm or deny whether any of the unaccounted climate funds were the subject of an ongoing investigation.
A private attorney in practice in Washington D.C., and who has helped NGO’s submit proposals for funding to the Bank, told me that, “It is a private fiefdom. They are not accustomed to much oversight.”
If you have not heard about this story before this Just the Facts, that is not surprising. Although the Oxfam report was covered in the financial press by Bloomberg and Barrons, the leading MSM outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR, did not report on it. Nothing.
Maybe that was because it was a money scandal involving climate change and the editors there thought that somehow sullied the underlying cause? I can’t figure out what today’s MSM editors consider newsworthy, but it is hard to imagine why they would not at least give some coverage to such a big story. Billions in missing taxpayer funds at a storied international institution should be front page news. Without widespread press coverage, the World Bank may never feel enough pressure to come clean with what really happened to all that money.
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A whistleblower leaked to The Free Press an audio tape of a CBS news editorial meeting on Monday, October 7, in which senior executive Adrienne Roark admonished the CBS Mornings cohost, Tony Dokoupil, for his interview the previous week with author Ta-Nehisi Coates about his just published book, The Message.
This episode should send shivers down the spine of every serious journalist. As Bari Weiss called it in comments on The Free Press Live, “The actual complaint is that Tony Dokoupil committed the sin of doing real journalism on morning TV.”
The background is simple enough.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a greatly celebrated author. He spent a decade at The Atlantic, where he wrote extensively about African Americans and white supremacy. A MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” Fellow, Coates has won more than dozen of journalism’s top prizes, including National Magazine and George Polk awards, and a National Book Award for his second book, the 2015 Between the World and Me. It was a NY Times bestseller for two years. Over the past few years, Coates had focused on Hollywood, writing the sixth volume of Marvel Comics’ Black Panther series, landed an Oprah Winfrey-HBO series about Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement, and was hired to write the next Superman script for Warner Brothers/DC Films.
Coleman Hughes, an American writer and former Manhattan Institute Fellow, wrote in a Free Press review of The Message that “Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of those journalists treated by the left-of-center establishment more like a prophet than a writer. . . .And when Coates publishes a book, it’s an event.”
Little wonder that Penguin Random House has set a massive media rollout for Coates’s The Message. It is four interweaving essays about Coates’s observations and conclusions from his visits to Dakar, Senegal; Columbia, South Carolina, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem. New York magazine in a profile last month said The Message “lays forth the case that the Israeli occupation is a moral crime, one that has been all but covered up by the West.” Coates told the magazine that, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stronger and more intense than in Israel.” It was “horseshit” he told the magazine that the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors was “complicated.” For Coates, the situation in the Middle East is analogous to slavery and segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”
In fact, Coates new book has been described by critics as “a one-sided polemic against Israel,” “flawed and ill-informed,” and “the crudest version of identity politics in which everything [is]… reduced to a childlike story in which the ‘victims’ can do no wrong (and have no agency) and the ‘villains’ can do no right (and are all-powerful).”
The Message omits in its 260-pages that Israel is surrounded by countries that have launched four wars to annihilate it. He does not discuss that Israel must contend with Iran-backed terror groups dedicated to wiping out the Jewish state.
As Coleman Hughes notes in his eviscerating review of The Message, Coates “doesn’t even mention the word Hamas—or Fatah, or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or Hezbollah, or Iran—once. In his telling, the threats don’t exist, only the barriers that Israel erects to contain them.”
“That’s like writing a book about the Civil War without mentioning slavery,” notes Free Press founder, Bari Weiss. “I mean, there's so much missing information, it's more like a lie.”
This was the backdrop to a September 29 interview on CBS Mornings. Tony Dokoupil, a veteran news reporter who is one of the show’s anchors, did exactly what any decent journalist would do: politely but firmly push back against Coates’s one-sided narrative.
“Why does Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I've known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very talented, smart guy, leave out so much,” asked Dekoupil.
“Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the First and the Second Intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits? And is it because you just don't believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?”
At another point in the seven-minute interview, Dokoupil said, “Imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off the book the publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.”
Coates later told Democracy Now, “I don't really have a problem with a tough interview. You know, I knew what I wrote. You know, I knew I'd be confronted. I know. Was he rude? Was he aggressive? You know, I like, I can't really get into that. Like, it's not really something that I think too much about. The question I would ask, though, is, how often on CBS, on NBC, on ABC or any major news organization, do you see someone who is a defender of the Israeli state project get confronted in that kind of way?”
Social media blew up. Self-appointed woke influencers complained that Dokoupil was “too tough” and “biased.” Racism was the only narrative by which some could see a white interviewer grilling an African American writer about Israel and Palestine. Others complained that Dokoupil was biased since he has two children from his first marriage living in Israel.
No one seemed to take notice that what Dokoupil did with his questioning is what is supposed to happen during any decent news interview. When I have published some of my books with controversial findings — Oswald alone killed JFK or that some Saudi royals had advance notice of 9/11 or that the Vatican profited from the Nazi death camps during World War II — interviewers often vigorously pressed me to see how I defended my findings. I never objected. It is what good reporters are obligated to do.
This would have been a nothing-story if the complainers remained confined to social media. But the much more problematic response was that inside CBS News the madness played out. Some CBS news staffers claimed they were “traumatized” and complained to senior news executives continuously for a week.
On October 7, by chance the anniversary of the Hamas terror attack that killed 1,200 Israelis, CBS held an editorial meeting in which the news division’s senior executives disavowed the interview and Dokoupil was eviscerated in front of his colleagues.
It was an audio of that internal CBS meeting that a whistleblower sent later that morning to The Free Press.
“I want to be clear,” said Adrienne Roark, in charge of all the network’s news gathering, “we will still ask tough questions. We will still hold people accountable. That's part of our job, too, but we will do so objective, and that means very plainly, we have to check our bias and opinions at the door, and that applies to every single point. After a review of our coverage, including the interview, it's clear there are times we have not met our editorial standards.”
Roark went on: “There are times we fail our audiences and each other. We’re in one of those times right now, and it’s been growing. And we’re at a tipping point. Many of you have reached out to express concerns about recent reporting. Specifically, about the CBS Mornings Coates interview last week as well as comments made coming out of some of our correspondents’ reporting. I want to acknowledge and apologize that it’s taken this long to have this conversation.”
Only one journalist at the editorial meeting refused to swallow the woke Kool-Aid. Jan Crawford, the network’s veteran chief legal correspondent, pushed back. “It sounds like we are calling out one of our anchors in a somewhat public setting on this call for failing to meet editorial standards for, I’m not even sure what. I thought our commitment was to truth. And when someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of a very complex situation, as Coates himself acknowledges that he has, it’s my understanding that as journalists we are obligated to challenge that worldview so that our viewers can have that access to the truth or a fuller account, a more balanced account. And, to me, that is what Tony did.
“Tony prevented a one-sided account from being broadcast on our network that was completely devoid of history or facts. As someone who does a lot of interviews, I’m not sure now how to proceed in challenging viewpoints that are obviously one-sided and devoid of facts and history.”
The audio of the editorial meeting makes it clear that Crawford was alone in her defense of Dokoupil. The consensus from the CBS News brass was that Dokoupil’s interview had crossed some ambiguous editorial standard.
Once The Free Press broke the story about CBS scolding one of its anchors for the respectful but probing questioning of Coates, it went viral in the mainstream news. Was the Dokoupil interview too tough?” asked the Associated Press. The Washington Post judged the interview “unusually tense and substantive.”
“I don’t think you understand the shockwave that interview created,” said talk show host, Trevor Noah, “not because of what you said but because of the way people felt like you were treated.”
What happened next is what is to be expected. The next day, at “an emotional meeting” led by CBS Mornings executive producer, Shawna Thomas, Tony Dokoupil expressed his “regret” at having upset his colleagues. Some at the meeting were in tears, they were so distressed at what they considered his harsh questioning of Coates.
The pushback from CBS staffers was so great that the network hired Dr. Donald Grant, a self-described “mental health expert, DEI strategist and trauma trainer” to counsel those who felt traumatized by what had happened. After word of that leaked, CBS cancelled Grant’s appearance at the Tuesday meeting but has not said when he will mediate the tension inside the network’s news division.
“How does a DEI consultant actually add to this particular conversation?,” John Ziegler, a conservative commentator, asked the News Nation’s Dan Abrams. “Well, I actually think that the DEI aspect of this may tell the real story of what's going on here, because we live in a media world now where DEI is everything, even when it shouldn't matter to the actual subject. You showed a clip, there were four people on that set. One was a straight white male, the other three happened to be people of color. If Gayle King had asked the exact same questions that Tony did, we would not be having this conversation. This would not be a controversy, because Gayle King is a black female and also happens to be friends with Oprah. She has all sorts of PC protection. No one's going to go after her on DEI grounds. And so, I think Tony's race is an important element of this.”
Bari Weiss thinks it is less about race and more about the subject matter.
“And the thing is, at CBS,” said Weiss yesterday, “when they have, I don't know, a Republican, on when they have someone who you know is a vociferous advocate for the Second Amendment, on when they have any number of people on you would expect CBS to do its job. Would challenge that person, yes. So why in this case was it unacceptable? . . . . the reason that this is a sin in this case, is because of the subject, which is Israel.”
“Can you imagine, on the first anniversary of 9/11 if something like this had occurred,” asks Ziegler, “where there was an author who was pro-Taliban and was gently chided on national television, and somehow the anchor, the person who asked them legitimate questions got basically destroyed in front of their own coworkers in a ridiculous meeting. That would be unfathomable, but that's how much journalism has degraded over the last 20 years or so.”
Whether it is DEI or the subject of Israel that has caused CBS News to admonish one of its anchors for doing his job, there is no doubt about the message it sends to young journalists at CBS and other mainstream news outlets:
“Think about a 26-year-old that works there that wants to become one of the anchors, says Weiss. “What message does it send to them? What kind of chilling atmosphere does it create?”
CBS is punishing Dokoupil for the unwritten crime of journalism that violates the sanctioned coverage permitted by the network’s woke overlords. It is simply the latest in a long line of infuriating and depressing examples of how the mainstream press has become hostage to political correctness and in the process, has gutted its ability to fairly and fully report the news.
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It did not take very long for conspiracy theories to start about why Trump had a bad debate night. One pro-Trump Twitter account with half a million followers posted last night, “It appears Kamala Harris was being coached by using earphones embedded in her earrings during the ABC presidential debate against President Trump.” Another pro-Trump X account posted that claim while the debate was underway and got over 5 million views.
I know crazy debate conspiracy theories when I see one.
In 1996 I wrote a biography of independent presidential candidate Ross Perot. He told me that he thought when he debated Vice-President Al Gore about the North American Free Trade Agreement, that Gore was fed good answers through a secret earpiece. That showed me that Perot was someone who would never admit that he had lost a one-on-one debate. He had to spin a wild story to explain why his opponent was better. Sound familiar?
I am nonpartisan as a journalist. As a registered Independent I try to call balls and strikes as I see them. That means I make people angry on both sides of the political aisle at different times. I’m also a high school and university national debating champion, winner of the Meiklejohn medal while at U.C. Berkeley. What makes a good debater? In school, we had a single topic for the entire year. We did not know until immediately before each debate about which side of the issue we would argue. Being a great debater required the ability to argue both sides of controversial topics with passion, knowledge and conviction. As a society, we have mostly lost the ability to even understand why someone holds a belief contrary to our own, much less have the capability to argue their case.
Can you imagine anti-Israel college demonstrators taking the stage to be advocates for Zionism? Or someone arguing as effectively both for and against abortion rights?
That is, however, what debate is about.
Sure, the ABC moderators could have asked tougher questions of Harris, had more follow-up to her generalities or misstatements, and pressed her more on why she and others in the administration kept telling the public that Biden was sharp as a tack in private when they knew he was not fit to run for another four years. But it is not up to the moderators to do that. Blaming the moderators for a poor performance is like a sports team losing the game and blaming the refs while refusing to admit they got beat by a better team that day. No one likes a sore loser.
I have had debates in which I thought the moderator was tipping the scales in favor of my opponent. It just meant I had the responsibility for highlighting inequities in the questioning and then going on the offensive to make my points.
Last night’s debate was a classic showcase of what to do and most of all what not to do.
While presidential debates are not real debates, there are still basic strategies that are good no matter what the topic. Staying on message is key. I always tried to get the other debater to talk about my issues, put them on the defensive, and get under their skin. A good debater has not only studied up on all the details and nuances of a topic but is quick on their feet to adapt to unexpected questions while staying disciplined and on message.
What I saw last night with Trump was someone who ignores his advisers. They must have repeatedly told him during preparation not to go off topic to talk about whether he thinks the last election was stolen or defend the size and enthusiasm of the crowds at his rallies. But there he was, doing exactly that. How did Trump get into talking about the Central Park Five, a 1989 rape of a woman in Central Park in which five Black and Latino teens were wrongfully convicted? Because Harris mentioned it and Trump, being Trump, started talking about it. He was reactive time and again, a sure way to lose control of the debate and allow an opponent to drive their issues.
Last night, Harris did just about everything she needed to, without any major hiccup. She talked about the issues she wanted, put Trump on the defensive, rattled him at times, and balanced her performance by focusing on the future while mixing in an occasional dose of outrage and indignation.
Trump, on the other hand, missed opportunity after opportunity to engage in a real debate instead of simply repeating canned campaign lines. It made him look like the candidate from yesterday while it allowed Harris to portray herself as the one with fresh ideas for the future.
It is not easy for an incumbent to become the change candidate, but Trump allowed her to do that repeatedly. He could have pressed her for details on the many plans she said she had. But he not only failed to do that, but he backed off when discussing health care from having his own plan to talking only about “concepts of a plan.”
Want evidence that the Harris team was elated at her performance? They put out the word immediately afterwards that she was open to another debate. My simple advice for Trump if there is another round?
Discipline and focus.
It is the only way he will leave a debate stage without later looking to put blame on the moderators for not doing what he should have done.
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The Washington Post published an article today by Kyle Melnick about Trump’s promise to release all the JFK assassination files and what those documents might disclose. It is thorough old-fashioned journalism, one of most balanced and informative pieces about the JFK files from a mainstream outlet this year.
Melnick sets out the facts and includes interviews with me and Jefferson Morley, the editor of JFK Facts.
The article shows where Morley and I agree: the full release of the files is long overdue. It also highlights were we disagree: I think the remaining files might show the CIA failed to share all its information on Oswald’s trip to Mexico City with the FBI, while Morley believes the files might show that some Kennedy opponents in the CIA worked with Oswald.
Morley says freeing the files is “not about a smoking gun” while I content that even if the documents do not any provide “any evidence of a conspiracy in the case, people believing in a conspiracy will say, ‘Well, see, there you go. They destroyed the real documents.”
A CIA spokesman at the close of the article says the “CIA believes all substantive information known to be directly related to Oswald has been released.” (I will have a separate comment this coming week about the significant shortcomings in that statement).
The Washington Post article is responsible journalism. That, of course, means it is unlikely to go viral or bring in lots of clicks. No problem.
The Daily Mail tabloid knows how to juice a story.
They recast Melnick’s sober reporting into a front-page banner headline: “JFK BOMBSHELL.”
The Mail focuses on Morley’s statements that CIA employees did not believe Oswald acted alone and that a counterintelligence official may have tried to “wait out” the Warren Commission by denying it information.
None of that is surprising.
There were plenty of government officials who thought Oswald was the assassin but suspected he might have done it as part of a conspiracy. LBJ shared the same belief as some in the CIA that Castro and Cuba had a hand in it. The problem was that there was no solid evidence to back up their hunches.
And there is also no surprise that a CIA official denied information to the Warren Commission. I write in Case Closed about how the CIA hid from the Warren Commission, among other matters, that it was working with top mafia bosses to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Melnick quoted me in the Washington Post saying, “Some of the biggest headlines that have been pulled from the JFK files the last four or five years are what I call tabloid stories about stories that were actually old.”
The Daily Mail again proves my point.
Tabloids measure success in clicks. A clickbait headline might be a hit by their metrics. The only casualty is the truth. Little wonder so many people - who check the headlines and do not read the articles - believe there is something explosive still in the JFK files.
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Many of our subscribers are familiar with yesterday’s disastrous landmark court ruling in Australia that women’s only spaces must admit men who identify as women. “[I]n its contemporary ordinary meaning, sex is changeable” concluded the trial judge, and “sex is not confined to being a biological concept.”
This was a test case for whether women would remain a protected sex class. The answer is no. Sex no longer defines the class. Anyone can join by declaring themselves to be a woman. The judge’s Orwellian conclusion is that men who self-identify as women, must be protected from discrimination under a law designed to protect women.
At the center of this high-profile case was an online app available only to women and girls, but the verdict’s broad language could apply equally to physical spaces such as women’s changing rooms, athletics, even women’s only domestic violence and abuse shelters or prisons.
The judge’s findings that gender is a personal preference rather than a product of nature and biology could have implications far beyond Australia and is why it is being celebrated widely by trans activists. The ruling, for instance, would have made mute the recent controversy about the biological sex of the Taiwanese and Algerian boxers who won gold medals at the Paris Olympics.
The facts of the case seemingly are straightforward.
Sall Grover, a screenwriter, launched an online app in 2020.
The then 35-year-old Grover had “a conversation between me and my Mum. I had recently returned from almost ten years in Hollywood, where I had experienced everything the Me-Too Movement represents. It was my Mum who said, ‘There needs to be a way for girls to help girls!’ We decided that we would create an app despite having no idea how to do that.”
Grover called her app Giggle, a collective noun for a group of girls and its mission was to create an international online community for girls and women where they could safely meet other women for freelance work, finding roommates, holiday companions, sharing car rides, maybe even partners.
By serendipity, Covid had started the lock downs in Australia and many other countries in the summer of 2020. Online connection apps like Zoom boomed. In seven months, Grover had raised $500,000 and Giggle was launched. By August 2020, it was in 84 countries and had twenty thousand women and girls as members.
Grover and her team enforced what they thought was a simple rule. They rejected the online applications of men who applied to join Giggle.
One of the men who applied in 2021 was a transgender woman who had three years earlier gotten a revised birth certificate that listed him as a woman named Roxanne Tickle.
So many women were joining the app that Grover and her team used AI to scan the selfies sent along with new applications. Artificial intelligence ‘approved’ Roxanne Tickle’s selfie as a woman. It was not until Grover later personally reviewed the application that she rejected it.
Tickle filed a legal challenge claiming unlawful discrimination and cited international human rights conventions to which Australia is a party. The suit also relied heavily on Australia’s 1984 Sex Discrimination Act, a law that protected women who faced inequality or discrimination based on their sex. In 2013, Australia’s Labour government amended the Sex Discrimination Act and removed the biological definitions of men and women and replaced them with gender identity (the Prime Minister at the time was a woman, Julia Gillard).
The discrimination lawsuit filed by Tickle was the first case in which the courts faced the question of whether biological sex was still protected in Australia.
Grover contested the constitutionality of the 2013 gender amendments and argued that Tickle was not a woman, sex is unchangeable, and it was appropriate to block Tickle from joining Giggle to preserve a women’s-only space.
The case attracted international attention. Trans activists rallied to Tickle’s support and Sall Grover was outspoken about the case’s larger implications: “It is ‘what is a woman’ case,” she told one interviewer, “it’s the most important woman’s rights case in Australian modern history, we are fighting to ensure that female is a sex class in law that men cannot identify into.”
Grover’s activism drew support from some prominent women, including J.K. Rowling and Martina Navratilova, but also made her a target of merciless social media trolling and dismissive coverage from progressive news outlets such as The Guardian, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and the BBC.
Grover had to suspend her Giggle app in 2022. There were financial pressures as well as increasing malware attacks on the site. She promised to get it back up but so far that has not happened. Still, she continued to fight the discrimination lawsuit from Roxy Tickle.
This past April, Grover told an interviewer that, “If you’ve got a man in a female only space, you’re dealing with someone who has no respect for boundaries. You’re already dealing with a predator. Good men don’t go into female spaces. Female spaces exist to protect us from the men who want to go in.”
In April of last year, Robert Bromwich — the same judge who issued the latest verdict — granted permission for Tickle to bring the case personally against Sall Grover. In June 2023, Bromwich gave a preliminary ruling that allowed the case to move forward and rejected motions for dismissal (few knew that Bromwich’s father was a noted surgeon, someone who might have contested his son’s view that gender identification trumped biology).
As the case continued, the legal costs were threatening to put Grover into bankruptcy. Grover decided to crowdfund the litigation and raised nearly $600,000AU of an estimated $850,000AU in legal costs. Grover also promised that if any money was left over at the end of the final appeal, she would “donate those funds to other gender critical crowdfunders and causes. I will not keep any of the funds raised.”
On the crowdfunding page, it notes that “The decision by the Federal Court will have far-reaching implications, likely influencing not only the Australian legal system but also international law and policy regarding the intersection of gender identity and sex-based rights. It will serve as a crucial reference for future legal frameworks and discussions on sex discrimination and sex-based rights, and their direct conflict with gender-identity ideology worldwide.”
Yesterday’s ruling was a total disaster for biological women. The judge ruled Grover and her women’s only app “had engaged in indirect gender identity discrimination against the applicant.” As for the question on everyone’s mind – what is a woman? – the judge ruled that all that was required was that a man “identifies and is legally recognized as a woman.” The legal recognition in this case was the revised birth certificate issued by the Queensland Register with a female sex marker.
Roxy Tickle had undergone in 2019 extensive gender surgery. That, however, was not an important issue for the judge. In the ruling, surgery or hormones are not necessary for a man to be protected from discrimination as a self-identified woman.
Adding insult to injury, the judge awarded Tickle A$10,000 in damages plus legal costs.
Tickle was jubilant after the verdict, telling reporters outside the courthouse “I hope it is healing for trans and gender diverse people. The ruling shows that all women are protected from discrimination. I brought my case to show trans people that you can be brave, and you can stand up for yourself.”
Grover said little after the ruling, tweeting only “Unfortunately, we got the judgment we anticipated. The fight for women’s rights continues.”
Grover has previously said she would appeal any adverse decision, all the way if necessary to Australia’s High Court. She must.
The opinion of a single male judge, with such wide-ranging repercussions for women everywhere, cannot be allowed to stand.
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[This post will be familiar to those on Twitter, where I have posted much of the below in a couple of long tweets that kicked off a lot of debate. At least it is getting people thinking about the consequences of what many at first think is a virtuous policy]
My ‘shame of the week’ award goes to Wes Streeting, the UK Health Secretary. He said this past Wednesday that people who are racist to NHS staff in health settings “can and should” be turned away from care.
That prompted a remarkably fast same-day endorsement from the Royal College of Nursing. For the first time, the country’s largest nursing association changed its 'withdrawing care' guidelines to include “racism" to instances in which "there is discriminatory behavior."
The Health Secretary and the RCN said that NHS staff should never have to be subjected to abusive and violent behavior. That is undoubtedly true. But it is not what the Health Secretary and the Royal College of Nursing embraced. The new standard, as evidenced on the RCN's own site, is about controlling behavior.
Doctors in civilian settings treat convicted serial killers and terrorists among many other unsavory patients, and during war, tend to enemy combatants. Israeli surgeons, for instance, saved the life of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, when he had a brain tumor while in prison in 2004. There is a duty of care that is the ethical foundation for medical practitioners.
One UK health care provider posted, "I nurse all of my patients in the same way, be they sex offenders, racists, petty criminals, or Mary Poppins. My job isn't to judge or press my opinion, it's to provide health care to anyone who needs it. No matter how I privately feel about them." Another said, "When I was nursing, we treated prisoners shackled to prison officers, paedophiles, rapists etc. Everyone did, and should, get equal care by the NHS."
A lot of people seem to have forgotten the outrage in 2010 when a German surgeon refused to operate on a man who was already anesthetized when he noticed a swastika tattooed on the patient’s upper arm. Are Muslim doctors going to decide not to treat patients who served in the IDF? Can Jewish doctors turn away patients with a Hamas or ISIS symbol? Are there health care providers in the UK, who are guided by the Health Secretary’s declaration, who would refuse to treat Tommy Robinson, one of the UK’s most prominent right-wing activists?
Introducing racism as a supposedly objective factor is particularly challenging given that it is a constantly shifting, and often overused, concept. Is the standard for refusing to treat a patient now subject to the interpretation of racism by the treating medical staff?
The University of Chicago offers a course that teaches that "Speech is a medium within which violence is performed." Does that empower someone who is triggered by what a patient says to turn them away for medical treatment? Many young people contend that anything they dislike or disagree with constitutes "literal violence."
How would that work in an A&E/emergency room setting when the patient exhibiting the "discriminatory behavior, including racism" might be suffering from mental illness, dementia or Alzheimer's disease, be on the spectrum, or in great pain, or even strung out on drugs?
Many patients arriving at a busy A&E are in both a physical and mental distress that brings out their worst sides. That is not an excuse for abusive behavior. It is instead a challenge to the medical staff to quickly and accurately determine whether the patient has their full mental capacity before refusing to treat them. Abuse and violence toward medical staff can and should be criminally pursued. Patients, however, even the difficult ones, are also entitled to medical care.
It is a slippery slope to turn healthcare providers into subjective arbiters of whether patients should be refused medical care for "discriminatory behavior, including racism." What's next, turning away patients for misgendering? That might seem farfetched. However, Kellie-Jay Keen, a prominent British gender critical activist, has been banned recently from her general practitioner’s office for objecting to pronoun badges worn by the medical staff.
Once this creeps into medical treatment, you never know where it ends. But it never ends well.
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This 10 minute attached video covers the issues I raised the other day in my article “A Dereliction of Duty? Problems in the Trump Shooting Deadline.” Smerconish lays out in the first half the latest information about the security lapses that preceded the shooting. Then we talk about what I conclude is “the greatest breach and dropping of the ball in terms of Secret Service security that I’ve ever seen.” Be sure to listen to the last minute, when Smerconish speaks about the failure of federal agencies, particularly the Secret Service and Homeland Security, to provide any public updates. “If any of those investigative agencies take issue with our timeline presentation, it’s your fault, because you haven’t come out and told the public what the public needs to know. It’s been a week, we have a right to know. In the end, we are going to find out.”
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[Updates to this article are in double brackets, dated and in bold]. The VoiceOver for this article is only the original July 16 post]
I wrote on X a couple of days ago decrying the rush to conspiracy theories about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. “How about waiting for the facts to emerge?” I asked. “There is a story behind the Trump assassination. I just don't know what it is yet.”
It is still too early to answer most questions, especially given the sparse information available on Thomas Crooks, the wannabe assassin. It is not too early, however, to draw some conclusions about what appears to be a startling security failure as information emerges about missed opportunities to intercept the shooter before he pulled the trigger.
I studied security protocols around political assassinations for books I did on the murders of John F. Kennedy (Case Closed) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Killing the Dream). Presidential security was lax before the Kennedy assassination changed everything. Publishing in local newspapers the president’s motorcade route was common practice. JFK was in an open convertible when Lee Harvey Oswald gunned him down with a long-distance rifle shot in Dallas. When it came to Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights preacher, King himself eschewed much of the local police protection offered in different cities. He did not want to be surrounded by a contingent of cops wherever he went. And federal protective services were not helping to protect him but rather used to spy on him.
We have become accustomed to much better protection around presidents and presidential candidates in the decades since Kennedy’s murder. All the multiple layers of redundant security again got tightened considerably after the failed 1980 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.
Protecting the president and candidates for the office is not fail safe. Secret Service agents with whom I have spoken over the decades acknowledge they always fear any professional assassin willing to die for the mission.
That was not what the security team confronted this past Saturday in the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. A 20-year-old came within an inch of pulling off the assassination and did so notwithstanding there having been considerable time to have stopped him after eyewitnesses warned law enforcement about a potential shooter and his location.
The timeline of the assassination is a damning indictment of a dereliction of duty.
An NBC Pittsburgh affiliate reports this morning that one of eight members of a local Beaver County Emergency Services Unit assigned to security outside the Secret Service perimeter, spotted a suspicious man on the roof from which Crooks fired his shots. The Secret Service will almost certainly have to reevaluate its rules for setting a security perimeter for such large public events. There is always enhanced security inside the perimeter, usually weapon checks on entering the area, as well as increased surveillance by the Secret Service. Outside the perimeter local and state law enforcement are responsible. There will be plenty of questions as to how a gunman with an AR-style 223 rifle was able to shoot in an unobstructed view about 150 yards from his target. That distance, for proficient shooters, is considered an almost certain kill zone. [[July 17: It is also the same distance that Army recruits must repeatedly hit a human-sized target in order to qualify for basic proficiency with an M-16 rifle. According to an unidentified law enforcement source cited by CNN, the day before the attempted assassination, Crooks practiced with his rifle at a shooting range of which he was a member.]]
The Beaver County ESU unit was composed of spotters and snipers.
That first encounter with Crooks was at “prior to 5:45 p.m.”
[[July 17: The New York Post reported what was meant by “prior to 5:45 p.m.” A “local police counter-sniper officer” took a long range photo of Crooks apparently crawling or leaning low to the ground around 5:30 p.m. In the photo, Crooks is wearing a gray t-s**t with a logo for Demolition Ranch, a popular YouTube channel. The police sniper who took it searched the area for him but Crooks had moved away by then.
At 5:45 p.m., eighteen minutes before Trump began speaking, the same Beaver County counter-sniper officer saw Crooks again, this time on the roof of the building from which he soon tried to kill Trump. He called that into the command center. What the command center did with that information is not yet public.
About 10 minutes before Trump took the stage, Secret Service went from looking at Thomas Crooks as “suspicious” to considering him a “threat.” Still, the Secret Service did not inform Trump or cancel his rally appearance.
Moreover, around 3 p.m., more than three hours before Trump took the stage, CNN reports that Crooks was spotted at the rally’s screening area with a rangefinder, a binocular-like device used mostly by golfers and hunters to measure distance. The rangefinder would not have stopped him from entering the inside perimeter. Secret Service agents evidently monitored him near the screening area but did not keep surveillance on him when he walked away. The CNN reports is based on “a senior law enforcement official briefed on the investigation.” A report in the Daily Mail cites unidentified eyewitnesses who report that Crooks “was also acting strangely around the metal detectors” and that he “was furiously checking his phone and operating a hunting range finder.”]]
Let that sink in.
Trump did not take the stage for until 6:03 p.m.[[July 17: That was about an hour later than scheduled.]]
No one is certain yet how Crooks gained access to the roof of the commercial building from which he planned to shoot Trump. [[July 17: According to an unidentified law enforcement source cited by CNN, on the morning of the shooting, Crooks bought a five-foot ladder at Home Depot. However, an ABC News report on an unclassified congressional briefing reported that Crooks did not appear use the ladder to climb on the roof and the ladder was not found at the scene. Investigators believe Crooks scaled an air conditioning unit of an adjacent building and pulled himself up onto the roof. He managed from there to gain access to the top of the building he had chosen to set up a sniper’s nest. Eyewitnesses told ABC News that Crooks shimmied up the slope of the roof to the area where he ultimately shot at Trump.]].
A stunning development today was that Secret Service Director, Kimberly Cheatle, told ABC News that a local police sniper team was stationed inside the one story structure while Crooks was on the roof. Cheatle emphasized that local police - not the Secret Service - were “responsible” for securing the outer perimeter.
The New York Post quoted unidentified sources that the police were still inside the building when the shooting started.
By 6:09, people at the rally began voicing concerns about the man they saw in a prone position on top of a building roof. An amateur video captures the anxious couple of minutes of chaos that preceded the shots.
“Look, they're all pointing,” someone says as at least one police officer walks around the side of the building.
“Someone's on top of the roof.”
“There he is, right there. Right there, see him? He's laying down.”
Someone else gestures to the cop, “He's on the roof … right here, right on the roof!”
Other witnesses told CBS News, they had seen “the guy move from roof to roof. [I] told an officer [he] was on the roof.”
Michael Slupe, the Butler County Sheriff, confirmed to CBS’s Pittsburgh affiliate, KDKA, that shortly before the shooting began, one of his armed officers reached the ledge of the roof that Crooks had picked as his sniper’s nest. The cop evidently backed off when the gunman pointed the rifle toward him.
“All I know is the officer had both hands up on the roof to get up onto the roof,” Slupe recounted “because the shooter had turned towards the officer. And rightfully and smartfully [sic], the officer let go.”
Slupe admitted that after that officer retreated from confronting Crooks, the shooter pointed his rifle back toward the rally stage.
It is not yet known if the police who learned of a man on a roof with a rifle immediately warned Secret Service agents. Although four police officials told NBC news that when rallygoers told local cops about a man behaving strangely near the security checkpoint, the Secret Service was told and the local police began looking for him.
Twelve seconds before the first shot, a police officer on amateur video is seen walking around the building that has Crooks on the roof. Yet in another video which starts exactly five seconds before the first shot, a group of people are screaming that the man on the roof has a gun. Some start running away from where Crooks is readying to shoot Trump.
A third video –- only four seconds before Crooks pulls the trigger — shows more people yelling that the shooter is “right here” and pointing to the rooftop sniper’s nest.
A multi-feed video montage put together by MilkBarTV uses video clips from different angles to show the chaos in the agonizing 120 seconds preceding the failed assassination. People spot Crooks on the roof and try to alert the police. The rally attendee shooting the video hears a nearby commotion. “Look, they’re all pointing,” he says. He pans the camera seconds later and captures a police officer walking around the front of the building that Crooks was on top of.
More people start gathering around to see what is happening. A few can be heard in the background.
“Yeah, someone’s on top of the roof, look! There he is right there, see him? He’s laying down, see him?”
“Yeah, he’s lying down,” replies a female voice.
Crooks comes into view for the first time, lying on his right side, at the video’s 17-second mark.
Five seconds later the crowd moves closer to the building to check on the growing ruckus. Another ten seconds passes before the man filming points out Crooks to another bystander. At the 34-second mark, Crooks is in the frame and rolls from his right side to rest on his stomach.
While Crooks is changing his shooting position, a male voice yells “Officer!”
A woman begins providing a play-by-play of what she sees and calls out to nearby police. “Come over here, he’s on the roof! He’s flat! Right here, he’s flat on the roof! He’s standing up now, he went flat on the roof again.”
Others in the crowd can be heard calling out but it is not possible to make out what they were saying.
At the 52-second mark, about a minute before the first shot is fired, the video montage shifts to a full frame of Trump speaking on stage. It returns to a split-screen when the timer gets to 1minute and 15 seconds and later changes to four simultaneous views, two of Trump, one from the original videographer, and one view from behind Trump.
At a minute, 50 seconds, a man in what seems to be a military uniform, with a green helmet, steps into the frame and seems to motion to the crowd before disappearing as he walks in the opposite direction of the building with the shooter.
At the 1 minute, 55 second mark, a male voice screams, “He’s got a gun!”
It is then that the film gets increasingly shaky, yet still manages to capture what looks like a uniformed police officer walking toward the building where Crooks is prone on the roof.
The first shot is only five to six seconds away. As the clock ticks down we all know now what comes next. There is no hero’s intervention, just the crack of the first rifle shot and everything erupts into chaos.
The sequence of shots can be timed from news coverage of Trump’s speech. Crooks gets off the first shot at 6:11:33, as Trump was talking about immigration. The next two come on top of one another only a second later, at 6:11:34. Three seconds go by before a volley of at least three shots. And a final shot that sounds different, described by ballistics experts as an “outgoing shot.” That is likely the shot that two law enforcement officials told CBS News was the single round fired by a Secret Service sniper, assisted by a spotter, that killed Crooks. [[July 17: The Secret Service agent in charge of security for the rally was on the phone wit local and state police when the shooting began]]
Did the Secret Service have all the assets it needed for the event? That is still to be determined and might not be known until after Congressional investigations obtain access to electronic and phone communications between the local Secret Service field office and Washington D.C. headquarters. Law enforcement sources who were on previous presidential protection details told the New York Post that field offices often had to fight with Washington to get the protection budget for an event, and often got only “a fraction” of what they needed.
The Trump shooting timeline begs many more questions. If government officials and law enforcement should have learned anything from the JFK assassination, it is that transparency is critical to not only getting to the truth, but also to eliminating the many legitimate questions ordinary citizens will have about what took place. Does that mean the Secret Service and local and state law enforcement, and any military assets, are likely to open their files for public inspection any time soon? Do not count it. But one thing that is certain is that I, and lots of other investigative journalists, will not stop looking for the answers behind such a staggering security failure.
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[Sorry for a second Just the Facts on the same day. Long time subscribers know my regular pace is a new piece every couple of weeks or so. Below is a reprint of my Wall Street Journal OpEd. It is online now for those who have a WSJ account and want to comment there. It will be in the paper tomorrow]
Incendiary political language has consequences. Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen agitated his supporters and culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. The assassination attempt against Mr. Trump follows years of relentless attacks from left-wing media and many in the Democratic Party, who likened the former president to Hitler and claimed his re-election would end democracy.
The Trump-Hitler comparisons started during the 2016 campaign, accelerated after the 2017 rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., and reached a fever pitch in recent months.
In December, the Washington Post ran an article by Mike Godwin titled “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you.” MSNBC’s Joy Reid said in a TikTok video a week ago: “Let me know who I got to vote for to keep Hitler out of the White House.” The New Republic’s June cover was a 1932 Hitler campaign poster altered to look like Mr. Trump. In its lead story, “American Fascism: What Would It Look Like,” the magazine editors wrote, “We can spend it”—the election year—“debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, ‘He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.’ We unreservedly choose the latter course.”
This theme wasn’t limited to left-wing commentators. In December, Politico noted: “Comparing a political opponent to Adolf Hitler might seem like an extraordinary step. For Joe Biden’s campaign, it has become part of the routine of running against Donald Trump.” Biden campaign officials and surrogates have compared Mr. Trump to Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. Even the president himself fell back on the Nazi comparison. At a December fundraiser he warned that Mr. Trump’s language “echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.” In a poor choice of words last week, the president told donors that “it’s time to put Trump in a bull’s eye.”
It is a shame that those who repeatedly talked about Mr. Trump as an existential threat hadn’t studied how the volatile atmosphere in 1963 Dallas and 1968 Memphis, Tenn., emboldened Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray to assassinate John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Dallas, where 24-year-old Oswald lived, was a hotbed of anti-Kennedy propaganda and right-wing extremism. Anticommunists had portrayed the president as a traitorous appeaser of the Soviet Union. Ted Dealey, owner and publisher of the Dallas Morning News, had presented JFK a nine-page broadside during a personal meeting at the White House. Dealey said: “It is better to die than to submit to communism and slavery.”
Kennedy was repeatedly portrayed as a socialist threat to the republic. Edwin Walker, a retired Army general and failed candidate for governor, led the John Birch Society’s campaign warning that JFK was secretly planning to cede U.S. sovereignty to the United Nations. Integration and civil rights added to the anti-JFK fervor. The head of the country’s largest Baptist congregation condemned Kennedy and his allies as “a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up!”
In the months before Kennedy got to Dallas, King had visited and there had been a bomb threat. When U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson visited a month before JFK, an angry mob attacked him. On JFK’s arrival in November, a full-page, black-bordered advertisement in the Morning News accused the president of being a Communist tool. Walker posted thousands of handbills along the streets with an image of Kennedy and the message “WANTED FOR TREASON.”
After JFK’s murder, Dallas was widely referred to as a “city of hate.” Oswald was no right-winger, but the local atmosphere made him feel like less of a fringe outsider.
The same was true in Memphis in April 1968. King was no stranger to threats against his life. He had visited Miami not long before, and there were so many threats that the police begged him not to leave the hotel. A lot of white Americans were frightened of King’s message that “America is still a racist country.” A Harris poll not long before his death gave him a nearly 75% disapproval rating. Many Americans thought he hated the country, hated white people, or was a communist.
In Memphis, after riot police had used indiscriminate force to stop some 1,000 sanitation workers and supporters during a march, the strike became a nasty battleground for racists. Commentary from elected officials and local media fed a lurid narrative that King was a race-baiting troublemaker whose far-left supporters made him a danger not only to Memphis but to the country itself. King’s Poor People’s Campaign march, planned for June in Washington, had become a target for right-wing critics. Newspaper editorials warned about “suspicions of communist influence.” King was painted as a narcissistic radical who threatened to cause a race war.
Ray, who died in 1998, took his reason for killing King to the grave. There is no doubt, though, that he was heartened by the anti-King hysterics. He wanted to get to apartheid South Africa after the assassination, expecting to find a sanctuary.
As with Oswald, who was murdered two days after he killed Kennedy, we may never know Thomas Matthew Crooks’s motive for shooting Mr. Trump. But politicians, media figures and all citizens must ask whether the constant drumbeat of Trump as Hitler might have created an atmosphere in which an unstable 20-year-old was encouraged to take a shot.
There is a price to reckless speech that portrays public figures as threats to the American way of life. It can be the spark that helps push an assassin to act. It is impossible to separate the violence of political assassinations in modern American history from the temperature of the times. It takes only a little fuel to push someone into the history books as an assassin.
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Take your pick of suspects. The Deep State, Jews, the Democratic Party, Islamists, Israel, maybe Putin?
How about it was staged?
Since I wrote Case Closed 31 years ago about the JFK assassination, I have been asked hundreds of times in interviews about whether the Kennedy conspiracies would have started quicker and been more florid had there been an internet and social media. I always said yes.
The aftermath of speculation, misinformation, fake reports, hearsay, guesswork, and efforts to pin blame in this hyper-polarized political environment is even worse than I might have imagined.
How about waiting for the facts to emerge?
I realize that is impossible on social media in which everyone is an instant expert on bullet angles, presidential security, eyewitness and earwitness credibility, and there are self-appointed digital detectives looking for suspicious "evidence."
I used to say that Americans love conspiracies. It seems it is a worldwide infection. Conspiracies happen, no doubt. But the knee jerk response to immediately see every major event as the product of a nefarious plot is a sad commentary on how most people process information. It should not be a surprise in a world in which half of Tik Tok users get their news from the app.
I will wait for the slow release of information. And then I will do some reporting, question it, probe to see what was right and wrong, and criticize any shortcomings. If some government agency covers up what they should have done beforehand, I'll go after that.
There is a story behind the Trump assassination. I just don't know what it is yet. But I do know enough to realize that the feverish conspiracy speculation is off the charts.
By the way, I have an opinion piece running tomorrow in the Wall Street Journal. It is about the assassination, but a very different angle than this commentary. I will send it out tomorrow on Just the Facts as well.
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Everybody gives lip service to free speech. Until it runs counter to what they believe. It is not easy nowadays to have a reasonable discussion about topics such as gender ideology or the effect of the T on LGB without some zealots making life miserable for those with whom they disagree. Debate often quickly devolves into a verbal food fight. No wonder so many of the smartest people I know stay away from these topics as if they are social third rails. That is especially true of my progressive friends. They have discovered that it is not just high-profile public figures, such as J. K. Rowling, who become targets of a woke mob. Ordinary people suffer the consequences of free speech by running the real risks of getting cancelled at work or in social settings.
Next Monday at 7PM EST, Trisha Posner and I will be guests on a Twitter/X Space hosted by Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender (DIAG). It will be a wide-ranging discussion on how our institutions, the Democratic party, and many progressives, have been captured by gender ideology.
DIAG is an all-volunteer 501c3 formed by Democrats, or politically homeless former Democrats, who still embrace liberal values but think the party has “veered way off track” when it comes to gender. DIAG’s members include parents, public health professionals, lawyers, teachers, and policy experts, all focused on the issue of gender and minors.
DIAG is trying to have a voice on the gender issue inside the Democratic Party. On the Team Bios page of its website, thirteen of the sixteen people are identified by pseudonyms (one of the three listed under a real name is Jenny Poyer Akerman, some of you will remember that I was a guest on her TransMuted podcast a few weeks ago).
Why are 80% of DIAG team members hiding their real names?
"Many of us are balancing family situations and jobs that require us to remain anonymous."
They know that merely expressing public opinions about gender ideology could cause problems with friends or families and might even put them in jeopardy professionally. It is a shame but that is where we are in 2024 when it comes to progressive censorship on issues such as gender.
DIAG members are not the only ones concerned about getting into a public fray on hot button issues.
A Bard professor, Omar Encarnación, wrote a New York Times opinion piece last week, “America Got Gay Marriage, but It Came at a Cost.” He argued that American gay activists who successfully pressed the campaign for same-sex marriage framed their efforts too narrowly as about “tax advantages, inheritance rights and hospital visitation privileges.” Instead, Encarnación contended, such a narrow focus “limited the transformative power of gay marriage and helped enable today’s backlash against L.G.B.T.Q. rights.”
I am passing along below the smart and well-reasoned email from a friend and colleague who had drafted a response to that New York Times OpEd. My friend, a respected community activist in Florida, is himself gay, and has a unique perspective on why there has been some pushback on LGBT rights in America. However, as with the DIAG volunteers, he prefers anonymity, avoiding those activists who would prefer to make his life miserable for progressive heresy.
“I do not agree that the lack of emphasis on moral equivalency of gay and straight marriage is the cause of backlash.
When same-sex couples won the right to marriage, I viewed that as the culmination of gay rights activism, the normalization of gay households as additional building blocks of a traditional society with flexibility.
I believe many heterosexuals felt the same way, and grew used to gay marriage, and their children gave not a thought to it.
Then, gay rights organizations, having fulfilled a mission, needed to justify their existence with a new cause. This is called the March-of-Dimes effect.
The March of Dimes aimed to fund the creation and distribution of a polio vaccine.
They succeeded. Rather than disband, they moved on to another cause: birth defects. That, at least, was quite worthy.
The gay organizations latched on to ever more initials, LBGQTIA, with ever more arcane and bizarre aims far removed and often in direct opposition to their original cause.
In 1973, I believe, the psychiatric organizations removed homosexuality from their lists of mental illnesses.
We were not insane, sick, and did not need treatment or therapy. Society as a whole needed therapy to let us live normal lives.
Now, the trans agenda says the exact opposite. They cry that trans children suffer from an illness, gender dysphoria, and demand medical and psychiatric treatment.
They are trying to normalize the therapy but not the people. The idea is to transform the trans people into the correct sex. It is as though their birth sex was a birth defect.
It turns out that many young people thinking they have dysphoria are gay and will outgrow the confusion. But these organizations would rather trans away the gay, and sometimes without even asking the parents. I wonder how gay parents would feel if schools started using different pronouns from the birth sex of their children and secretly encouraged transitioning.
Like any straight parent, they would go ballistic.
This is the real attempt to destroy marriage and the nuclear family and have the state control everything. By latching on to this transexual revolutionary Marxist agenda so corrosive to a family-based society, gay organizations have greatly alarmed society. Their methods remind me of the Soviet Union, which would encourage students to spy on their parents for counter-revolutionary activity and betray them to state authorities.
No wonder there is a backlash. Heterosexuals, after believing gay marriage was the goal, see the same organizations that fought for marriage equality, now fighting for goals that would destroy the family's ability to defend their children. They are beginning to think that we are insane, and I don't blame them.”
Personally, I look forward to a time when it is possible to discuss gender with a group of Democrat party mothers and professionals, or print a critical email from a gay man about LGBT rights, and they will use their real names without fear that modern day McCarthyites will punish them for expressing independent opinions that do not fit into a progressive orthodoxy,.
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I joined the International Criminal Court in 2012. It was only ten years old and had been tarred by controversy over its credibility and independence. Still, I believed in its stated mission of providing a legal forum for bringing to justice those guilty of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression.
Being an ICC member did not mean I agreed with everything it did. In 2018, for instance, it undermined its own principles when its appeal chamber unexpectedly overturned the conviction of Jean-Pierre Bemba, a Central African Republic politician found guilty of allowing war crimes under his command. And there were many instances in which I was concerned about apparent bias, had questions about fairness over the cases it pursued, and was frustrated by its glacial pace. Still, I stuck with the ICC.
Today, I submit my resignation and cancel my membership.
The May 21 decision to pursue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on war crimes charges, was a bridge too far. Those warrants, the first ever against any Western leaders, were an assault on the state of Israel and its right to defend itself against a terrorist enemy who violates the Geneva Convention by using its civilian population as human shields. The very suggestion of a moral or legal equivalence between a democratic country fighting an enemy that threatens its elimination and Hamas’s mass murderers is itself preposterous.
The ICC prosecutor, British lawyer Karim Kahn, relied on experts versed in human rights law, not the laws of conflict. This was all about feeding a feverish anti-Israel sentiment, particularly an anti-Netanyahu virus. There is no other way to explain why the ICC so blatantly violated its key rule about its own jurisdiction. The ICC only has jurisdiction when local courts are unwilling or unable to act. When the ICC issued arrest warrants last year for Vladimir Putin, and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian Commissioner for Children's Rights, it was confident that if it did not act, there was no independent Russian legal tribunal that would pursue those charges. The same is true with the arrest warrant request this week for three Hamas officials -- Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif — for war crimes including extermination and murder, the taking of civilian hostages, torture, rape and sanctioned acts of sexual violence. Even the ICC understands that Hamas has no intention of investigating its own atrocities.
“Israel, on the other hand,” noted the Israeli ambassador to the EU, Haim Regev, “has a rigorous legal system that has proven itself willing and able to investigate and prosecute violations of international law.”
President Biden, who has tried straddling an impossible middle in the conflict by arming Israel while criticizing the humanitarian response in Gaza, had no doubt the ICC move was beyond the pale. “Let me be clear,” he said, “we reject the ICC’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. Whatever these warrants may imply, there’s no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”
Not all U.S. allies agree. France and Germany, most notably, have said they would arrest Netanyahu and extradite him to The Hague for trial. Germany, of course, has had some practice in arresting Jews, although I personally was surprised by their quick embrace of such an outlier warrant.
I understand that the cancellation of my ICC membership is symbolic only. I hope, however, that I am not the only one to throw in the towel on a troubled tribunal whose ingrained biases have destroyed any last vestiges of authority and impartiality.
This ICC — the one that wants to draw parallels between the IDF and Hamas terrorists — is destroying itself in real time.
By the way, for any subscriber who also does Wiki editing, I would appreciate if someone could remove the ICC reference in my Wikipedia page, or at least update it with this Substack. I will correct my own Linkedin profile.
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There has been a lot of news recently about the deleterious effects on the developing brains of children and adolescents who spend too much time online. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (@afterbabel) and many others who have studied it pin most of the blame for spiraling rates of poor adolescent and teen mental health — including depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation — on social media. “The costs of using social media, in particular, are high for adolescents, compared with adults, while the benefits are minimal,” Haidt writes in his latest bestseller, The Anxious Generation.
Social media is unquestionably an irresistible magnet for kids, but Dr. James Winston, a Miami Beach-based psychologist with 30 years of experience in the field of addiction, says putting the blame on social media is too simplistic. Winston believes that the culprit is the device itself — the smartphone — and that extensive use during the crucial years of childhood brain development creates a neurological nutritional deficiency for users fourteen and younger.
“Smartphones are starving the brain,” he says.
While Winston’s smartphone-induced nutritional deficiency seems initially a revolutionary idea, it provides a straightforward, organic answer as to how digital technology has created and fed a mental health crisis among kids.
The theory certainly drew a lot of attention and excitement after a presentation Winston made at a program last week in Miami Beach, “The Effects of Screen Time on Adolescent Brain Development.” After the event, when I spoke to academics, researchers, local politicians, and parents, all thought it might be the next big step in figuring out how to protect children when it comes to the harms of digital addiction.
Margarita Louis-Dreyfus, the Swiss billionaire businesswoman and philanthropist, had flown in from Switzerland to co-host the event. She had created Human Change last year, “a coalition of parents, advocates, educators, psychologists, pediatricians, clinicians, and researchers who are raising the alarm about the dangers of digital devices and social media to children’s health and development.” This past January, Winston had joined Louis-Dreyfus and Human Change at the World Economic Forum, trying to raise awareness of the issue among the global leaders that gathered in Davos.
Winston has no social media accounts and uses an AOL email address. But, as the single father of teen sons, he is no newcomer to the subject of technology and kids. I wrote about Winston two years ago in Forbes - '“This Family Foundation Is Quietly Going To War With Facebook Over How It Affects Kids’ Brains” - regarding how he and four relatives of a family foundation left by his father were spearheading scientific research at the University of North Carolina into how social media platforms affected young brains. The family’s $10 million gift in 2022 created an eponymously named National Center on Technology Use, Brain, and Psychological Development. That UNC research center is the only one in the country that does not accept money from tech companies.
Last year the center published the results of a groundbreaking 3-year study in JAMA Pediatrics. It utilized functional MRIs to monitor the brains of middle school students. The results showed that the brains of teens who frequently checked their social media developed differently than those who did not check social media very much. The heavy social media users were far more hypersensitive to feedback than their less connected peers.
For Winston, a UNC and Oxford alum, who worked with drug addicts at a federal prison and later as clinical supervisor at an adolescent sex offender treatment program before going into private practice, his initial interest in the field came about unexpectedly.
“I used to be one of those nerd dads who walked their kids into school every day,” he recounts. “And we would get bumped into by students coming the other way. Every day that happened. Very few of them even looked up from their phones. Professionally, I knew that was one of the critical variables in addictive dynamics, interference with basic self-care, thinking about survival. We've all supposed to be aware of our surroundings, simple things like avoiding potholes or hurting ourselves or others. These kids were bumping into each other because the magnetic pull of their devices was so powerful that they were oblivious to everyone around them.”
Winston talks animatedly about attachment theory, introduced by British psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s and 1960s to understand the emotional bond between infants and their parents.
“We require sustained attachment to caretakers in order to develop into thriving human beings,” he says. “Where our sustained attention goes, so goes our attachment to that person, so in terms of human bonding, attention is the currency of value.”
“Smartphones are strategically designed to capture this exact attention. The tech companies know exactly what they're doing. They're developing a device that is architecturally constructed to be overstimulating. That gives it a huge addictive potential. And if you think about it, it's really a parallel universe, a digital parallel universe, and it's unlimited.”
The crux of the problem, says Winston, is that “adolescents are incapable of regulating hyper-arousing dynamics. That’s why we don’t let kids watch violence or allow them into a casino, because we know intuitively that they cannot integrate that in a healthy way.”
A parallel problem is that smartphones significantly impact neurobiological adolescent brain development.
“Our brains developed over tens of thousands of years to absorb visceral input,” says Winston, “eye contact, voice quality, touch, it is how we unfold in a healthy way.”
“Our brains learned to process if someone was sarcastic, affectionate, snarky, or what it's like when you say something, and they're hurt. If they're mad, you can discern all that. The richness and dimensionality of face-to-face contact is visceral nutrition for the brain.”
That is where the smartphone comes to play, and thousands of years of brain wiring starts to go haywire for kids.
Winston sees all the classic signs of addiction when it comes to adolescents and smartphones. There is increased self-centeredness, cravings and dependency for the device, externalization of responsibility, and withdrawal symptoms if the smartphone is taken away. “Ever try to take an iPad away from a six-year-old? We call that reaction a tantrum, and in addiction terminology that's called withdrawal.”
Some researchers have contended that tech is not a classical addiction since it does not cross the blood brain barrier. “Gambling doesn't either,” counters Winston. “But we all know gambling is an addictive disease. Cell phones don't cross your blood brain barrier but still ticks all the addiction boxes.”
“Access to a drug is a critical variable in the development of an addictive dynamic,” he adds. “Smartphones are not just another tech advancement; they are qualitatively different in that they can be carried around with us all the time. While that makes it easier for people, including adults, to get addicted, it is especially dangerous for adolescents, ages 9 -14. This is the second most critical time of brain development and is when the neural highway system that we carry into adulthood is established.”
The adolescent brain undergoes a massive restructuring process as kids near and enter puberty. The young brain is designed to prune itself of circuitry no longer needed from childhood.
“And it is during this time,” notes Winston, “when the need for adolescent social connection is as powerful an instinct as hunger. They are transitioning from family centric mother and father to a peer system. It is wired into our DNA as a transitional period when adolescents make friends, develop empathy, and learn their social skills needed for early adulthood. Tech companies know this and exploit it. If they can get a pathway system laid down, where kids are attached to their phones, and in particular social media, they've got a lifetime customer. It's no different, except in the quality of the substance, than cigarettes. They used to target kids so they would have them for life.”
Research shows adolescents spend on average eight hours a day behind a screen.
“That is four months a year,” Winston says, “half of their waking hours.”
He returns to attachment theory.
“Attention is going through a screen instead of a dimensional dynamic with face-to -face contact. It has profound implications both emotionally, psychologically, and neurobiologically.”
Why is he focused on the device as opposed to what it contains?
“As an addiction guy, a critical factor that facilitates an addictive dynamic is access to a drug,” he notes. “You can't really be an alcoholic if you can't get alcohol, for instance. The constant and easy access to smartphones amplifies the addictive process.”
He cites a recent study that shows kids pick up their phones roughly 100 times a day. “That is pretty extraordinary,” he says. “So, there's some magnetic pull that keeps them going.”
What is good news for tech companies — that kids want to stay on their devices more than ever — is, for Winston, “horrifying in terms of adolescence. I've witnessed kids interacting with one another. Then, one kid gets kind of anxious. Instead of staying connected with the other kids, they pick up their phone. So, phones have become a medicator, which is a powerful ingredient in any addictive process. And it allows kids to avoid the hard work of really having to learn how to manage their feelings, the uncomfortable ones in particular, to work it out face to face. They go to the phone and the anxiety goes away.”
That is no different in Winston’s view than an alcoholic who takes a drink to offset anxiety.
Where Winston’s theory goes beyond the work of Haidt and others is in his belief that the tech addiction for kids creates a measurable nutritional deficiency.
“Both fruits and candy contain sugar,” says Winston, “but they are otherwise nothing alike. There is a big difference between having a banana for a snack or a snickers bar. The simple sugars in candy spike blood sugar, are void of nutrients, and since they are calorie dense, people need to eat a lot to feel full. It is no coincidence that the brains of cocaine addicts and sugar addicts looks basically the same. You can never get enough of what you don’t need. That is smartphones.”
What are the results of Winston’s nutritional deficiency? “If it was one hour a day, it might not have such bad effects on things like depression and anxiety. But the mental and psychological problems spike as it becomes a nutritional deficiency at scale with more and more hours stuck on a phone.”
There are huge ramifications if Winston is right about smartphones creating a nutritional brain deficiency at a particularly critical development period for adolescent brains. It would open the door for the Surgeon General and other government health officials and institutions to get involved. Winston’s dream scenario is a ban on smartphones for kids younger than 14, the age he set for his own sons to get their phones. “It would protects adolescents’ neurobiological vulnerabilities, allowing kids a longer runway to feed on vital social ‘visceral nutrition’ which facilitates healthy brain and psychological development.”
“I know everybody laughs But I think that was probably true in the 1940s if someone said that about cigarettes.” He believes that society is in the middle of the same historical process as played out with cigarettes. “Cigarettes used to be cool. Then science proved they were not only addictive but caused cancer. Legislation banned sales to minors.”
At the very least, Winston hopes to get state by state or national legislation to ban smartphones at schools. Research shows a 6% increase in academic performance when phones are removed. “It is a no cost enhancement of one of schools’ primary functions.”
Another ambitious goal is warning labels outlining the addictive potential of smartphones, “the equivalent of ‘cigarettes will kill you’”.
“I think this still sounds radical to some people and they will think it will never happen. Interestingly, in Chile, a few months ago, they put little warning labels on processed food, and it really had a huge impact on the amount of processed food that was bought. So much so that it began to shift Chile’s obesity rate.”
There is significant correlational research documenting the dangers of too much social media and smartphone use. What is missing is the hard science data. It is needed to force government action that could bolster his provocative theory with incontrovertible facts. That is why he and his family, and other activists like Margarita Louis-Dreyfus, are funding research studies.
“It is why I jumped at the opportunity to get some funding to the UNC center,” says Winston. “The science must stand on its own. Whether you're Republican or Democrat or what, it doesn't matter, this is the science. In every historical social change movement, the tipping point at a national level has come after the accumulation of apolitical science.”
The sooner the hard science comes, the better. The mental health of our children is what is at stake.
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Gender activists are hailing an 8-6 decision by the U.S. Fourth Circuit as a Transgender Roe v. Wade. Their celebration is, however, premature. While Kadel v. Folwell is undoubtedly a landmark ruling that the Equal Rights Amendment bars state health plans from excluding medical coverage for transgender surgical procedures, one of the dissenting circuit court justices called it “imperial judging at its least defensible.” It will almost certainly be reviewed by the Supreme Court.
In the spotlight in the Fourth Circuit case were two states that had excluded covering costs “in connection with sex changes.” West Virginia’s Medicaid plan did not pay for transgender surgical procedures. North Carolina’s insurance plan for teachers and government staff did the same.
The die was cast in the appellate court when the majority concluded that the state plans “cover mastectomies to treat cancer, but not to treat gender dysphoria…and chest-reconstruction surgery for cisgender women post-mastectomy, but not for gender dysphoria in transgender women.” The majority considered “treatments for a diagnosis unique to transgender patients” as “medically necessary treatments” and that the Constitution prohibited any coverage exclusions for transgender patients. The court’s bottom line: “The North Carolina State Health Plan and the West Virginia Medicaid Program discriminate on the basis of gender identity and sex in violation of the Equal Protection.”
Just the Facts has subscribers in over 100 countries. Many may not be familiar with the much talked about 14th Amendment. It was ratified in 1868 in the wake of the Civil War and designed to stop states from discriminating against freed Black slaves. The Amendment gave all Blacks born in the United States citizenship as a matter of birthright. Courts have, in the 156 years since its ratification, expansively interpreted its broadly-worded second sentence: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That language was the basis for the Supreme Court’s 1973 milestone 7-2 Roe v. Wade decision. The Roe court ruled there was a personal right to privacy implied in the 14th Amendment and that abortion was constitutionally protected.
In 2019, the same Fourth Circuit appeals court that made the Kadel ruling, had demonstrated its willingness to grant constitutional protection to gender identity. In deciding in Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board that a Virginia school district could not bar a transgender boy from using whatever bathroom he chose, the court concluded that “gender identity is a protected characteristic under the Equal Protection Clause.” The following year, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in its Bostock ruling that gay and transgender status was covered by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The Kadel ruling relies on Grimm and Bostock and expands their reach. A dissenting judge, J. Harvie Wilkinson III, summed up the potential impact of the new decision: “What plaintiffs propose is nothing less than to use the Constitution to establish a nationwide mandate that States pay for emerging gender dysphoria treatments.”
In reaching its sweeping ruling, the majority provided examples of what it concluded constitute sex discrimination in the state plans. It cited, for instance, that “women can receive coverage for a vaginoplasty to treat the congenital absence of a vagina, but transgender women cannot receive a vaginoplasty to treat gender dysphoria.”
The court did not further describe the birth condition that would require such surgery for women. It is Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, a rare congenital reproductive disorder defined by an underdeveloped or nonexistent uterus and vagina. When the condition affects the uterus, it means women are infertile.
The two state plans covered surgeries for genitals or breasts only if the patient had a congenital condition or there was injury or a disease. Women who were diagnosed with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, would qualify for full coverage of a vaginoplasty. Men, however, who identified as the opposite gender, would not qualify for state coverage. For men, it involves the surgical removal of the penis, testicles and scrotum and uses a skin graft from the buttocks or bowel to create a nonfunctioning pseudo-vagina.
Patients did not qualify for coverage under the state plans, as one dissenting judge wrote, “to affirm a patient’s biological sex.”
The same is true in another example cited by the majority, when the state plan “covers chest surgery for men who experience gynecomastia, but not for transgender men who experience gender dysphoria.”
Men in either state only qualify for surgical correction of gynecomastia, a hormonal imbalance that results in a swelling of breast tissue, if “they have physical symptoms, like breast pain.” They are not covered to treat “gender dysphoria.”
The six dissenting justices understood it is not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause for state health plans to exclude coverage based on medical diagnoses.
“The Equal Protection Clause does not license judges to strike down any policy we disagree with,” said Judge Richardson, writing for the dissent. “North Carolina and West Virginia do not target members of either sex or transgender individuals by excluding coverage for certain services from their policies. They instead condition coverage on whether a patient has a qualifying diagnosis. Anyone—regardless of their sex, gender identity, or combination thereof—can obtain coverage for these services if they have a qualifying diagnosis. And no one—regardless of their sex, gender identity, or combination thereof—can obtain coverage if they lack one. There is therefore nothing about these policies that discriminate on the basis of sex or transgender status.”
The Kadel decision is dangerous for the breath of the constitutional protection it applies to gender medical procedures. It is also reckless in its embrace of the scientific certainty and safety about such procedures.
“The science behind gender dysphoria care is far from settled,” wrote Judge Wilkerson in his dissent. “Many European nations have questioned the wisdom of hormonal and surgical interventions, particularly when used to treat children…. Providing the best possible care to adults and youth struggling with gender dysphoria is a challenging task for our States. But it is one that they are entitled to perform without premature judicial interference.”
Still, the majority blew past amicus briefs that set out the extent to which the science about gender was in a state of rapidly changing flux and provided a list of recent studies that raised significant questions about the safety and long-term effects of the very surgeries the majority wants to constitutionally protect.
The Kadel ruling exposes the dangers of leaving to the courts matters that should be decided by biology and medicine. It is the latest example of the politicization of gender medicine. The Supreme Court will be the last resort for permitting state legislatures to have the power to set policies on gender dysphoria treatments. Putting it under the protection of the Constitution, as Kadel does, guarantees only that evolving evidence about gender medicine will be ignored at the peril of patients and the costs borne by taxpayers.
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Most readers are familiar with Sirius radio and CNN host Michael Smerconish. In an era of increasingly polarized politics, where the loudest voices on the far right and far left often garner the biggest ratings, Smerconish is an old-fashioned centrist, a lawyer by training who tries striking a reasoned balance on even the most contentious issues. Listeners to Smerconish filter him through their own world views. His effort to stay in the middle means he is not someone who would seem likely to get cancelled as a university commencement speaker.
But that is precisely what has happened at Dickinson College, a premier Pennsylvania-based liberal arts school, that has rescinded its invitation for Smerconish as the school’s 2024 commencement speaker. It also cancelled an honorary degree it had planned to give him.
What did he do wrong?
A Muslim-Arab first year student wrote an opinion piece in the student newspaper that Smerconish supported racial profiling of Muslims and Arab Americans. The evidence? In a book Smerconish authored 20 years ago, Flying Blind: How Political Correctness Continues to Compromise Airline Security Safety Post 9/11, he wrote: “The TSA should at least be paying extra attention to those who share characteristics – either racial or circumstantial – with those who have been known to commit terror acts in the past. Makes sense to me.”
That was, claimed the student, “as blatant as it could possibly be. In no uncertain terms, Smerconish advocates for racial profiling.”
The class of 2024, he wrote, “deserves better than Smerconish.”
That article sparked pro-Palestine student protestors to set up an encampment on campus with a key demand that Smerconish be cancelled from the commencement.
Smerconish, as is his style, offered an olive branch, saying on his radio show that he would reread Flying Blind. “Chances are, that given the acquired wisdom of the last 20 years and all the knowledge that I have gleaned, and you know, reflecting on my life’s experiences, my hunch is I will probably stand behind every single word in the book.”
How did that go over at Dickinson?
“His statements were not a sign of the times,” proclaimed the student newspaper editorial, “but remain his own enduring prejudices.”
“This should be a cautionary tale for anyone in America who believes in fairness, common sense, the free exchange of ideas, rational decision-making, and the importance of leadership in the face of hysteria,” Smerconish wrote in a public letter he shared today.
Nothing in Flying Blind was considered controversial when it was published in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It still is not. However, activist students combed it looking for some sentence, anything at all that they might use to cancel him. It was not really about something they thought was objectionable from two decades ago, it is because they have disdain for someone who is not an advocate for their current anti-Israel/pro-Palestine passion.
This past Saturday, the same College President, John Jones, who had invited Smerconish this past January — “On a personal note, and as a long-time acquaintance and admirer of your career, I am excited to welcome you to campus” — wrote and withdrew the invitation.
Schools cancelling a speaker is nothing new. But those speakers are usually themselves firebrands whose hard-edged views run counter to the progressive ideologies that are the permitted “one think” at many schools.
That even a moderate like Smerconish can run afoul of the censorial mob is evidence of both the closed mindedness of the protestors and the cowardice of school administrations to stand up to them. Those in power at many universities have abdicated their decision making to a tiny minority with the loudest megaphone.
Dickinson was founded in 1783 by Dr. Benjamin Rush, a slavery abolitionist who was also one of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence. “Rush believed in freedom — freedom of thought and freedom of action,” the school proclaims on its website.
It appears the school has modified the concept of “freedom of thought.” Unless someone objects, of course, and especially if that objection is couched in the modern language of racial or gender victimhood. Such a complaint does not need to be true. It just needs to be voiced and then craven school administrators race to placate the aggrieved students. Throw in a few radicalized professors, and you have the perfect storm in which a moderate like Smerconish becomes someone the student newspaper concludes is “undeserving of the honor of commencement speaker.”
Smerconish, in his public letter, summed up the danger of judging a 20-year book through the prism of today’s political filters: “Times change, people change, circumstances change. Statements in books written decades ago, if penned by the well-intentioned with a history of tolerance and advocacy of unity, cannot in a just and rational society be the basis for judging someone’s soul or determining their fitness to be part of the national conversation. And it certainly shouldn’t obliterate someone’s lifetime of reputation and performance. Those students who demanded I not speak had better hope that twenty years from now, when they are looking for a job, no one will look at everything they said and did two decades earlier, yanking it out of context and using it as a weapon of personal destruction.”
An oft-quoted thought from a German Lutheran pastor during World War II is,
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
When cancel culture comes for middle-of-the-road commentators like Smerconish, it is strong evidence that no one is safe. At least no journalist who reaches conclusions based on facts and evidence that somehow is on the prohibited list at today’s college campuses.
I am not holding my breath for any commencement address invitation coming my way any time soon.
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The United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, are among several dozen countries that have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization.
The New York Times, Washington Post, PBS, and all three major television news outlets, ABC, CBS, and NBC, and other legacy media outlets, will not use the word terrorist to describe Hamas.
The Black Panthers were militant. Hamas is a terror group.
That is not rocket science. It is straightforward, especially for news outlets reporting on the Middle East. The legacy media, however, avoids putting terror and Hamas in the same sentence.
The Associated Press style guide on the Israel-Hamas war, for example, says that the terms terrorism and terrorist have become too politicized and often are applied inconsistently. The AP made an exception after 9/11 and referred often to al Qaeda as terrorists. But not Hamas.
The world affairs editor for the BBC, John Simpson, said last October that terrorism "is a loaded word," and that "it's simply not the BBC's job to tell people who to support and who to condemn — who are the good guys and who are the bad guys."
Media bias is insidious on the big issues that dominate the news cycle. They can influence public opinion in something as simple as the words selected to report events. In this case, avoiding the word terror is meant to soft-pedal Hamas’s actions. The New York Times even managed to avoid the word terrorists in their initial report on the pillaging of rape, murder and abduction carried out by Hamas on October 7.
Shunning the words terror or terrorists normalizes Hamas and its atrocities. Lots of groups covering everything from climate change to social justice are correctly dubbed militant. Extinction Rebellion, for instance, the militant eco-warriors, chain themselves to one another to block traffic, and engage in high profile incidents of “environmentally themed graffiti” on some of the world’s great art works. Extinction Rebellion is undoubtedly a militant group. And the mainstream press refers to them as such, sometimes even as extremist. But Extremist Rebellion does not fire rockets and send suicide bombers into civilian gatherings, nor has it unleashed an attack in which rape, kidnapping and murder were its tools of ‘resistance.’ If they did, they would correctly be classified as a terror group. Same as Hamas, but likely without the political cover of the legacy press.
There should be no debate over October 7. It was a terror attack and those who carried it out were terrorists. By using militant when it comes to Hamas, the press is normalizing its horrific acts of terrorism.
Six months on from October 7 and I no longer know what it would take to get the legacy press to correctly call Hamas a terror organization. I know, unfortunately, that simple good journalism is not enough.
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There has been a recent wave of comparisons between the massive late sixties and early seventies antiwar protests and today’s campus Israel-Palestinian demonstrations. While these parallels are largely imperfect, they share a common element: activist professors and radicalized teaching assistants can significantly intensify campus unrest.
I experienced this first-hand growing up in San Francisco during the 1960s and attending UC Berkeley from 1972 to 1975—a period marked by significant protests against the war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the rise of the Black Power movement, and an anti-capitalism fever. As a political science major, I was surrounded by professors who were not just educators but also fervent advocates, with some quoting Mao’s Little Red Book and fostering a spirit of revolution over academic inquiry.
Those professors, whom we dubbed "Mercedes Maoists," seemed to lead comfortable lives in the affluent Berkeley Hills, driving vintage Mercedes, while preaching revolutionary ideals. This wasn't mere posturing; they genuinely believed America was fundamentally flawed, a sentiment echoed by a sizable contingent of radical university teachers who distort Middle East history into a victim narrative in which Israel and western colonialism are the root of all evil.
Students now arrive at college already steeped in an extreme mix of ideology and misinformation—many boasting a "history degree from TikTok." Unlike fifty years ago, we couldn't blame social media for our skewed world views.
By the time I entered the Berkeley freshman class, I had embraced Dr. Benjamin Spock’s views on Vietnam. Yes, that Dr. Spock. The pediatrician whose 1950s book about raising children was a bible for my parents and many millions of others. Spock had created a revolution of sorts by suggesting our parents use less discipline and instead encourage our instincts and reinforce our independent thinking.
Spock’s perspective was a precursor to the cultural revolution of the Free Speech/Haight Ashbury/Woodstock era in where cultural gurus such as psychologist Timothy Leary urged a “Human Be-In” crowd of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park in 1967 to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
As adolescents, we quoted Leary as if it was some deep philosophical revelation, the 50-year-old version of ‘going viral.’
The tumultuous political climate in northern California made it seem to us as kids that the structured world of our parents was crumbling, and that society was on a precipice of some great but unknown change. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale had founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (later mercifully shortened to the Black Panthers) across the Bay in Oakland. It was a Marxist revolutionary group that called for arming all Blacks, exempting them from the military draft, and releasing all incarcerated Black prisoners. The Panthers were ahead of their time by also demanding reparations for “centuries of white exploitation.” Martin Luther King’s activism was my parents’ style. That meant I wanted to be cutting-edge and oppositional by embracing the Panthers.
When the Ohio national guard shot at hundreds of student protestors at Kent State University and killed four and wounded eight, it shocked the country. For those of us who grew up in the Bay Area, however, the police shooting at demonstrators was not new.
A year before Kent State, Berkeley police had killed one and wounded dozens when they opened fire with buck and bird shot at demonstrators at a community garden called People’s Park. The city declared martial law and imposed a curfew. Ronald Reagan, who had run on a law-and-order platform when he was elected California’s governor in 1967, wasted no time sending in the national guard. Then troops arrived en masse with unsheathed bayonets and live ammunition. Military helicopters sprayed tear gas across the campus. Alameda county sheriffs, many of whom were Vietnam veterans, were let loose with truncheons on the crowds.
As I started my first semester at Berkeley, hundreds of thousands protested Nixon’s mining of North Vietnamese ports by taking to the streets nationwide for massive marches, silent vigils, traffic‐blocking sit‐ins, and often violent clashes with police. A few months earlier an all-white northern California jury had acquitted Angela Davis for her role in providing the guns used in a takeover of a Marin County courthouse in which four were killed.
All the political chaos meant that by the time I got to Berkeley I was primed to be receptive to the leftwing propaganda that my teachers passed for scholarship.
One professor hung his favorite Mao quote in a placard over his classroom doorway: “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
An oversized Che Guevara poster greeted us at a “comparative economic systems” class. A different professor who taught about American imperialism in Central and South America encouraged us to write congratulatory letters to Chilean president Salvador Allende getting the 1973 Lenin Peace Prize. None of us were particularly bothered that the Soviet government appointed and controlled the panel who chose the winner. Allende shared the award that year with the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev.
At Berkeley, professors often joined us in protests, providing solidarity with a revolutionary zeal. They also played on student fears that we would be drafted to fight an “unjust war.” Teachers helped feed a contagion that infected many students, one whose underlying philosophy was that resistance and revolution was far more important than worrying about good grades and some future job.
The culmination of insanity came in 1974, just before my 20th birthday, when heiress Patty Hearst, was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a self-described Marxist guerrilla group.
On an audiotape released to the media two months after her abduction, Hearst announced she had joined the SLA and adopted the name Tania as a tribute to one of Che Guevara's comrades. Two weeks later, she carried an M1 carbine into a San Francisco bank branch and announced to the stunned customers and employees, “I'm Tania. Up, up, up against the wall, motherfuckers!”
How did that play at Berkeley? Many students and faculty cheered her on. “We Love You Tania” posters sprouted up around campus. One teaching assistant on “political discourse” held a nightly vigil to show “solidarity” with the SLA.
When a campus environment reaches the extreme edges, what passes for the middle is still pretty far out. The middle at my Berkeley poly sci classes was represented by the small faction of pacifists who contended Hearst should not have been armed during the robbery.
Leaving Berkeley and going on to Law School at UC San Francisco was the time for detoxing from the political fervor. I came to realize how the writings of Spock and the lectures by many poly sci professors were riddled with errors and steeped in an ideology of anti-imperialism. Contract and criminal law discussions replaced lectures about the Bolshevik revolution and Mao’s Great Leap Forward. My law school years - 1975- 1978 - coincided with the end of the Vietnam war and the disintegration of the violent Weather Underground. The “revolution” preached by the tenured Mercedes Maoists had turned into a quickly fading memory of a period when the earth seemed slightly off its axis.
Today’s campus protestors might not be able forget their past so easily. Omnipresent technology allows outdated and sometimes vile ideas to retain some cachet on Tik Tok. I am forever grateful that social media did not exist during my time at Berkeley. Today’s students will learn the hard way that ignorance and hate live forever on the internet. There will always be online evidence of who called for the destruction of Israel, denied October 7 terrorism, proudly claimed their support for Hamas, and attacked Jews for nothing more than being Jews.
The university professors who have celebrated October 7 and urged “resistance at any cost” might eventually pay a price with their careers as schools investigate how tenured teachers can be dismissed for hate speech. If there is anything I learned from my Berkeley student days, it is that the influence of a radicalized faculty sets the framework by which students feel not only empowered but sanctioned by those in authority. Students should bear the ultimate responsibility for what they do. However, without taking effective action against the teachers who sanction and foment the extremist hate, I know from experience the craziness will never end.
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