Category Archives: damned lies

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In the wake of the Graham Platner scandals, we mustn’t forget the danger posed by James Talarico The fact that he's such a nice guy can't be used to cover his horrendous political beliefs

At the moment, 2026 Democratic senatorial nominee Graham Platner of Maine — my mother’s home state — has been sucking up all of the news coverage, following the accusations by a fellow Democratic woman that he broke into her house and raped her. The Democrats were OK with his Totenkopf death head tattoo, with his cheating on his wife, with toxic social media posts, and his blatant anti-Semitism, but finally, finally! the Democrats are abandoning him. Subsequent to that, The Washington Post published complaints by a former girlfriend that Mr Platner covertly removed his condom, which she had required for consent to sex with him, and continued to f(ornicate) with her, something which is a crime, albeit only a civil offense, in Maine.

They shouldn’t be surprised. They loved the charismatic bad boy who promotes socialism and hates Jews, because many of today’s Democrats promote socialism and hate Jews, but the trouble with the bad boys is that you never really know when the next bad story will drop.

But I’ll let other people write about Mr Platner and his troubles. I am more concerned about 2026 Democratic senatorial nominee James Talarico of Texas. We have previously noted Mr Talarico, a seminarian with the Presbyterian Church USA. Mr Talarico pretends to be tells us that he is a devout Christian, but he supports prenatal infanticide, using the story of the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38) as a supposedly Christian argument for it, supports “trans children”, and The Advocate, a ‘magazine’ which supports homosexuality and transgenderism, has said the candidate “has positioned himself as a fierce queer ally, even using the Bible to advocate in favor of LGBTQ+ rights.” Continue reading →

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John Walker Flynt wants to have surgery after surgery, to hide the evidence normal people can plainly see A simulacrum of a woman will never be a real woman

John Walker Flynt is a male who has decided that he’s really a woman and goes by the name of Brianna Wu. He has some fame due to ‘gamergate,’ something about which Robert Stacy McCain is far more knowledgeable than I am, and about which I confess to having no interest at all. Mr Flynt — as per our published Stylebook, The First Street Journal always refers to the ‘transgendered’ by their real names — has been legally ‘married’ to Frank Wu, a successful science fiction and fantasy artist since 2008.

On Sunday, July 5th, Mr Flynt told us about the problems faced by men males trying to pass themselves off as women, perhaps in terms he didn’t really appreciate.

A lot of trans women, myself included, have gotten a lot more serious about our looks in the last few years.

It think it’s a direct outcome of the anti-trans movement. You’re going to try to hunt us down and take away our access to civil society? Well, we’re going to camouflage ourselves in that society even better.

What the writer is admitting is that men males who really, really, really want to be women still don’t look like women. He’s telling us that fake boobs and a faux vagina and a (usually hideous) dress still only rarely make ‘transwomen’ look like real women, and that they are going to try to “camouflage”, his word, not mine, themselves even better. Continue reading →

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The ‘transgendered’ would find their lives far simpler if they’d stop trying to make their beliefs other people’s business

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” ― George Orwell, 1984

Living on a rural farm, in a small, mostly rural county, in a very politically conservative state, I only rarely see the ‘transgendered.’ I saw one such gentleman pretending to be a lady, as a customer, in the Corto Lima restaurant in downtown Lexington several years ago, and another such gentleman working as a waiter in the now-several-years-closed Applebee’s on Bypass Road in Richmond. I thought such was humorous, because neither one came anywhere close to ‘passing’ as a real woman, but I had no interactions with either of them. They were doing what they wanted to do, in a manner which had no impact on me at all. Unlike the “Party’s” most essential command, I accepted the evidence of my eyes. Continue reading →

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No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough! After covering up stories on Joe Biden's health, the left are speculating about every bump and bruise on President Trump

The first rule of holes is that when you find yourself in one, stop digging. In the case of former First Lady, Dr Jill Biden, it works out to: when you keep saying stupid stuff, and can’t get out of your own way on it, just stop talking.

But, alas! when she’s on the hook to sell her book, View from the East Wing: A Memoir, she’s got to keep on keeping on, she’s got to keep making those appearances, got to keep talking, and got to keep deep throating her doubtlessly well-pedicured feet.

Why, I have to ask, would anyone pay the cover price of $32.00, $28.42 for Amazon Prime members, for a book of nothing but lies. At every stop she makes, with every word she says, we get the message: she’s just not telling the truth. But Simon & Schuster is paying her several million bucks, the exact amount undisclosed, so she has a contract to keep running her mouth.

The book hasn’t been well-received. CNN’s Jake Tapper, the well-connected Washington journalist who knew everybody who was anybody in Washington, wrote with Alex ThompsonOriginal Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, told us all how they were shocked, shocked! that Mr Biden’s aides helped to cover up the 46th President’s decline, now has an article showing on CNN’s subscribers’ only page entitled “Jill Biden’s rosy if not blindfolded ‘View from the East Wing’.” I guess that he’s trying to seem like a real journalist again, rather than the shill for the Democratic Party he was during the four-year interregnum between President Trump’s two terms. The Wall Street Journal‘s review by Kara Voght was just simping, and reading the review makes me wonder if she actually read the book itself, rather than some Cliff’s Notes version of it. Alexandra Jacobs review in The New York Times might have had the most damning with faint praise line of all, “The general vibe is more popovers in Woman’s Day than popping off in Politico.”

It’s almost as though the talking point had been sent out. Once everybody saw, on June 27, 2024, what we evil, reich-wing conservatives had been saying all along, that President Biden was becoming more and more out of it mentally, our good friends on the left decided that they had to attack President Trump’s health. The very lovely Amanda Marcotte has gone all-out conspiracy theorist on the subject:

Why MAGA buys Trump’s perfect health lie

Cultish devotion leads Republicans to see Trump as more god-like than human

by Amanda Marcotte | Monday, June 1, 2026 | 6:45 AM EDT

“When it happens” — the phrase became a meme almost overnight, as Troy Farah recently observed, in no small part because, even in our attention-addled age, people understand what it means. Donald Trump, who turns 80 this month, is not well, which has led to waves of speculation about his health and, at times, even rumors that he has died.

What great journalism in that first paragraph! Miss Marcotte gave us three citations via hyperlink, all of which lead back to Salon, the hard-left ezine for which she writes. The article is illustrated with a photo of the President’s left hand, with a visible bruise, and the caption, “Speculation continues to rise about the state of Donald Trump’s physical and mental health.” I’m not certain how a bruise on his hand leads to “speculation” about his “mental health.”

The president regularly nods off on camera during public meetings. He appeared to nap during the May 27 Cabinet meeting, even though his appointees were competing with each other to offer empty flattery, which is usually his favorite activity. His hands are not only covered in bruises, but they have also started to swell alarmingly. While he struggles to stay awake during the day, the president is often up at odd hours of the night, raving incoherently on Truth Social while obsessively reposting artificial intelligence-generated memes that frame him as heroic. He’s had at least two surprise trips to the “dentist” this year — even though the White House has its own fully equipped dental suite. On May 26, Trump had his third “annual” exam in 13 months at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, after which he posted, “Everything checked out PERFECTLY.”

This is almost certainly a lie, though how big of one remains to be seen. People in perfect health don’t have swollen and bruised hands or the water balloon-sized ankles Trump sometimes sports. Even the White House communications staff has tacitly admitted that something is going on, though all they will say is Trump has chronic venous insufficiency, a conveniently benign condition. There is zero reason to trust Trump or his staff; they lie constantly about nearly everything. This includes false explanations about the president’s health, because the White House keeps insisting he’s merely blinking in photos with his eyes closed, when anyone who watches the videos can see his eyes are shut for long stints of time, and not just milliseconds.

While I certainly cannot speak for the President, I do sometimes close my eyes when I am concentrating, including concentrating on what I am hearing, something not uncommon among those of us who are partially deaf.

But Miss Marcotte is ramping up for the conclusion she wants readers to draw: that the physical ailments of a man who will turn 80 twelve days from now indicate a mental ailment as well. After all, Mr Biden was losing his marbles when he was in his 80s, so why shouldn’t the same be true of President Trump?

Dr. Jonathan Reiner of The George Washington University, who was former vice president Dick Cheney’s cardiologist, told CNN that Trump is showing symptoms of chronic insomnia, which “is a severe illness that can result in an increase in risk of dementia” and a “decrease in cognitive effects” that “increases your cardiac risk of having a heart attack or developing congestive heart failure.” It appears that the president has undergone multiple cognitive tests, because Trump, who seems to confuse them with IQ tests, keeps bragging about how he was told him he had “aced” them. Such exams are typically given when doctors suspect cognitive decline, as journalist Jim Acosta underscored recently by taking the test himself, which involves drawing a cube or identifying common animals.

As a part of my annual Medicare examination — I’m 73 years old — I got the simple cognitive test, mine being to draw a circle and then add the hours of a clock on the face. Being the snarky guy that I am, I made it a 24-hour clock face, just to amuse the nurse, and I’m wondering how today’s generation, familiar almost entirely with digital clocks, will do. 🙂

But it’s amusing: the left want to do something, do anything to get rid of President Trump. The only evidence they have of cognitive problems for the President is that they are outraged by the decisions he takes. Yet if President Trump does fail to complete his term, for whatever reason, Vice President J D Vance then becomes President — something I currently hope he does on January 20, 2029 — and they’ll hate Mr Vance, who is only 41 years old, just as much as they do Mr Trump.

Godwin’s law, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one,” amuses here. The younger President Bush was “literally Hitler,” which was conveniently ignored when President Trump also became Hitler during his first term, and during the four years in the wilderness, before his triumphal return to Washington. If Mr Vance becomes President, will we see yet another reductio ad Hitlerum applied to him.

Miss Marcotte has already expressed her wish for the Vances to divorce.

There actually is a mental problem rampant among our friends on the left, called Trump Derangement Syndrome. There were a lot of things conservatives disliked about President Biden and his four years in office, but if there were any stories about wild-eyed conservatives saying things about the President on social media that got them fired, I missed them. Chaya Raichik and her Libs of TikTok became hugely successful for quoting what the left were saying about themselves, and even today (supposedly) educated professionals have lost jobs and professional accreditations for posting really stupid stuff about wanting to kill the President and members of the Administration. Conservatives haven’t proven themselves to be that deranged!

That mental problem was never on greater display than the four years of the Biden Administration. Our friends on the left kept assuring us that everything was just fine with Mr Biden, he was sharp as a tack, always on top of his game, pretty much exactly what his loving wife was saying about him. Contrast that with today, and every little bruise on the President’s hand leads the media to speculate that he’s at death’s door, with exactly zero evidence of such.

About his health? The fact is that we do not really know, but we do know that he’s twelve days shy of his 80th birthday, he’s visibly overweight, and despite his many years of wealth, he prefers to eat pure junk. It’s been long reported that he wants his steaks well done, and with ketchup, which is, to my mind, his only impeachable offense. If the man did suddenly die, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. What I’m not going to do, however, is speculate blindly and aimlessly, and I’m not going to stop telling the truth.

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James Talarico: a representative of failing ‘progressive’ Christianity, and a hypocrite to boot Former 'vegan' campaigner now chows down on barbeque to appeal to Texas voters

In a move reminiscent of Democratic congressional candidate Amy McGrath Hnderson being caught on tape, fund raising in Massachusetts for a congressional seat in the Bluegrass State, saying “I am further left, I am more progressive, than anyone in the state of Kentucky,” Texas Democratic Senate nominee was caught on tape saying, in a 2022 state House of Representatives campaign, “I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign. We are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses.”

Now Mr Talarico is telling us, it ain’t true, ’cause see, I is eating spare ribs and turkey drumsticks.

Battling rumors that he is a sexual neuter or homosexual, the 36-year-old Mr Talarico announced that yes, he has a girlfriend, saying “She is my rock. She is my best friend. I don’t know if I could have gotten through the last six months of this crazy race if she hadn’t been by my side.” She’s been “by (his) side” so much that no one knows who she is or has a photo of her with him.

Oh, we’ll eventually see a name and photo of her, a version of the fake dating books now popular for some reason, but she’s just as likely to be a beard to get him past election day. Continue reading →

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Propaganda from the credentialed media will not change reality Girls can't be boys and boys can't be girls!

The First Street Journal maintains a Stylebook of its own devise. It includes:

Those who claim to be transgender will be referred to with the names, honorifics, and pronouns appropriate to the sex of their birth; the site owner does not agree with the cockamamie notion that anyone can simply ‘identify’ with a sex which is not his own, nor that any medical ‘treatment’ or surgery can change a person’s natural sex; all that it can do is physically mutilate a person.

Sadly, most credentialed media publications do not do the same, but use the Associated Press Stylebook, something I would like to have, but it isn’t free, and I’m not about to waste my money on it.

You may think that I have issued my Stylebook to reflect my political views, and you would be correct. However, screen capturing Google’s return of associated press stylebook on transgender persons, pictured to the right, you’ll see that they have done so as well. The AP Stylebook is structured entirely on the concept that girls can be boys and boys can be girls, and cautions the users against using terms which might dispute that. I am particularly amused by the part which states:

Sex Assigned at Birth: Use phrases like “assigned female at birth” or “assigned male at birth” rather than “born a girl/boy” or “biological sex”.

Such a point has the underlying assumption that sex is something actually assigned at birth, rather than a simple recognition of the biological determination of sex made at conception. I suppose that King Henry VIII could have avoided a whole lot of trouble had he ‘assigned’ Mary as a boy rather than a girl, if such things could actually be assigned.

And so we come to a fawning article in the Los Angeles Times on Abraham Delgado[1]DailyMail.com can also reveal that AB’s name at birth was Abraham Delgado, born in Riverside, California, on August 4, 2008, according to court records filed by Nereyda (Hernandez) in June … Continue reading, the 17½-year-old boy competing as a girl calling himself A B Hernandez in California high school athletics.

Mother of transgender athlete AB Hernandez determined to push through protests

  • As protests target transgender track star AB Hernandez, her mother feels better prepared for protests and national scrutiny.
  • State policies allowing transgender girls to compete against cis-gender athletes puts California at odds with federal directives.
  • Hernandez, a two-time state champion, dominated Southern Section prelims and eyes a final state title run in Clovis.

By Marisa Ingemi | Thursday, May 14, 2026 | 4 AM PDT

A flyer featuring a pink background was the top Instagram post on California state superintendent candidate Sonja Shaw’s page on Saturday morning. It read, in blue, “a male athlete” held the top spot for an upcoming high school girls’ track and field meet, listing the event start times for protesters.

It was a tactic Nereyda Hernandez previously faced when her daughter, Jurupa Valley High track and field athlete AB Hernandez, first hit the national spotlight last year.

It has been about a year since President Trump targeted AB, who is transgender. As a result, the athlete and her mother knew what to expect when the track postseason began in May. There would be cameras, protesters and vitriol directed at a high school athlete.

You can see it, right away: reporter Marisa Ingemi referred to young Mr Delgado with the feminine pronoun “her”. While our Stylebook notes that we will always refer to the “transgendered” with the names, honorifics and pronouns appropriate to their actual sex, we do not change direct quotations from others.

CIF policies allow transgender athletes to compete alongside other cisgender girls. If the transgender athlete places high enough to advance in qualifying or to medal at a CIF event, the athlete advances or receives the medal. But so does the next athlete in line. As a result, AB shared the first-place podium alongside another athlete twice at the state track and field meet last year.

Perhaps Miss Ingemi simply missed it, and it was just poor prose on her part, but in saying that “CIF policies allow transgender athletes to compete alongside other cisgender girls,” the reporter leaves the implication that there is no difference between “transgender” athletes and “cisgender girls.” That even the Pyrite State recognizes the biological differences is made obvious by the sharing on the podium with real girls.

The Daily Mail reported:

Ahead of the State Championships, DailyMail.com went through the ‘meet program’.

AB Hernandez, as a girl in the Varsity Long Jump category, had a seed mark of 19′ 3.5′ and in the triple jump category 40′ 4.75′. If she, as a biological male, competed against the boys in this year’s championship, AB would not have even qualified in this weekend’s championships.

Naturally, Miss Ingemi failed to include that in her article. Males and females have significantly different hip structures. Because babies have to be able to pass through the birth canal, the hips of females are wider in ways to allow that, while the hip structure of males are optimized for speed and strength, exactly the kind of differences which make a difference in athletic events.

Young Mr Delgado may really see himself as a girl, may really, really, really believe it. He may see himself as a real girl strongly enough that he’d never dream of competing in sports against other boys. But wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’, plannin’ and dreamin‘ each night that he’s a girl won’t make him a girl. Sorry, but it just won’t. And propaganda from the credentialed media will not change reality.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

References

References
↑1 DailyMail.com can also reveal that AB’s name at birth was Abraham Delgado, born in Riverside, California, on August 4, 2008, according to court records filed by Nereyda (Hernandez) in June 2012.

The records stated she petitioned the Riverside County courts to change Abraham’s last name from Delgado to Hernandez.

She lists Abraham’s father as JayDee Delgado from Riverside, California. DailyMail.com attempted to reach out to Abraham’s father, but he did not respond to requests for comment.
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Citius, Altius, Fortius Girls can't be boys and boys can't be girls, no matter how much a few of them don't like it

The Nation is one of our oldest political commentary journals, dating from 1865, and these days it is charitably described as “progressive,” though far-left and #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading would be more accurate. They’re just another bunch who’ve fallen for the idiocy that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

The Olympics Is Repeating One of Its Worst Mistakes

The IOC’s new anti-trans testing regime revives some of the most discredited and discriminatory policies in the history of the games.

Michael Waters | Holy Thursday, April 2, 2026

In 1967, a Polish sprinter named Ewa Kłobukowska sat for a mandatory DNA test. Kłobukowska, a rising track star, had won a gold and a bronze medal at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. Now, a new policy required all women track-and-field athletes to be screened for the presence of X chromosomes. Kłobukowska was probably shocked to learn that the test had placed her on the wrong side of the gender binary. Exactly what happened is hazy—news reports claimed that Kłobukowska was discovered to have “one chromosome too many,” without further explanation—but the consequences were immediate. Kłobukowska was banned from the Olympics. Her sporting career was over.

Now why would the Olympics be running DNA tests back in the mid 1960s, before there was any such thing as “transgenderism”? It’s simple! Female athletes in international competition from the Soviet bloc nations, the USSR and the satellite countries in the old Warsaw Pact, sure looked as though there were some men in drag competing in women’s sports. They were cheating, no surprise during the Cold War and the Soviets’ attempts to persuade the civilized world that Communism was somehow superior.

Track-and-field officials framed this as an unmitigated triumph, proof that DNA testing had weeded out an athlete who was “not truly female.” But even at the time, some onlookers could see that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was going down a dark road of gender policing, weeding out women who had always understood themselves as female based on some arbitrary biological marker. The head of the Polish Olympic Committee, perhaps radicalized by the dismissal of one of his top athletes, called DNA testing a “form of discrimination” as well as something of a gender delusion: How could the IOC hope to split up athletes into biological binaries when “there are no generally accepted criteria of sex for woman athletes”? Sex, after all, is a spectrum.

These critiques did not stop the IOC from expanding its testing requirements. From 1968 on, all women athletes had to sit for chromosome exams ahead of the Olympics. Only at the end of the 1990s, when the chorus of critical voices became unavoidable, did the IOC ditch this sex testing regime.

Translation: when Communism in the USSR fell and their attempts at cheating ended, genetic testing to see if women were actually women was no longer needed. But author Michael Waters revealed his point of argument when he wrote, “Sex, after all, is a spectrum.”

No, it isn’t. Sex falls into two major categories, males and females, and one minor one, those unfortunate individuals who suffer from genetic or developmental defects which make them “intersex.” Our #woke friends on the far-left sometimes claim that gender is a spectrum, but this is the first time I’ve seen someone claim that sex is. Even the World Health Organization, which buys into the gender spectrum idea, differentiates it from sex:

Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs. Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity. Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.

It would seem that Mr Waters is attempting to move the goalposts to make his argument!

Sadly, the article falls behind the paywall just a bit after the parts I’ve already quoted, but, not to worry, I had first found it in my morning feeds from another source, which has the entire article here.

After a couple of paragraphs whining about the tests, Mr Waters continued:

Just as it did in 1968, the IOC is insisting that the new regime is about preventing men from breaching the barriers of women’s sports, saying that “it is absolutely clear that it would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category.” And, just as was true all those decades ago, this excuse doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Instead, the IOC is playing a linguistic jiu-jitsu with us, lumping intersex and trans women into the categories of “biological males,” even though they are not men and do not have the same athletic advantages as men.

We have previously noted how Will Thomas, a very much middle-of-the-pack male swimmer, vaulted to the top of the ranking after he decided he was really a woman and started calling himself “Lia.” We pointed out how, in the Zippy Invitational he was not only utterly destroying the real women in the pool, but his times were in the middle of the pack for the male swimmers. We noted how the last place male swimmer in the 500-yard freestyle had a time 7.21 seconds faster than the first real female finisher in that race.

But, don’t take my word for it: Swimming World magazine ran the numbers in an article entitled “A Look At the Numbers and Times: No Denying the Advantages of Lia Thomas.”

Clearly, this new policy has little to do with science or fairness—and everything to do with the metastasizing right-wing panic against trans women. Instead of dealing with the occasionally messy work of including gender-diverse athletes in a binary sports infrastructure, the IOC seems to have decided that it’s more convenient simply not to try. That the global right has made trans women athletes into a fixation, a proxy for their much wider-ranging campaign to disenfranchise trans people, has proven to be a convenient cover for a return to the 20th century. It’s also only the latest example of the regressive gender politics that have defined the Olympics for their entire history.

Ahhh, it’s not really science but Mr Waters’ view of fairness, fairness for “trans women” rather than fairness to real women, which is his bugaboo, and what he calls “right-wing panic.”

Michael Waters, from his website.

Sports does not really care about sensible conservative or whacko leftist politics; sports simply measures, by various means, strength, speed, quickness, and other physical metrics. The Olympics motto is “Citius, Altius, Fortius – Communiter”, which is Latin for “Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together”, and there is absolutely no denying that, overall, males are faster, can jump higher, and are stronger than females. Through rigorous training, some women will be able to run faster, jump higher, and be stronger than most men, but when it comes to athletic competition the subject is not the males in the middle, but the top women’s performances versus the top men’s performances. As Mr Thomas so well proved, a mid-level male collegiate swimmer is going to outperform a top-level female swimmer. A simple look at the men’s records versus women’s records in track and field demonstrates the physical advantages men have.

The real panic is among our good friends on the left, who are adamant that men and women are equal. That can certainly be true under the law, and in some areas, we are seeing women’s achievements in things such as medical school admissions and collegiate admissions in general outpacing those of men. The top surgeons are heavily men, but as the surge of women in medical schools persists, the time and experience of women in medicine might change just who are at the top surgeons.

But physically? Sorry, Mr Waters, but biology will not be mocked. Not only are males, in general, taller, larger, and stronger than females, the structural differences between the hips of males, optimized for strength and speed in running, versus the hips of women, which have to have larger internal openings to permit babies to pass through, lead to real differences, differences which make a difference when it comes to sports and many other physical activities. The last player on the Washington Wizards team would absolutely dominate in the WNBA. 5’7″ “Spud” Webb once won the NBA dunk contest; very few WNBA players can dunk the ball.

Sexual dimorphism is a real thing, and it’s not subject to politics. Mr Waters actually knows this, but chooses to ignore it over politics. Girls really can’t be boys, and boys really can’t be girls, no matter how much a few mentally ill people think they can.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues. By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Now you know why I call it Journolism! ** Updated! 9:05 PM EST ** #FreedomOfThePress includes the right not to publish what you don't want to publish, but concealing uncomfortable facts hurts the media's reputation

In the wake of the roughly 300 layoffs at The Washington Post, there has been a lot of blame spread, both among the subscribers who quit for owner Jeff Bezos refusing to endorse Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024, and the paper itself for it’s very liberal leanings. The Post managed to piss off both the conservatives who might have been willing to subscribe, and the liberals who cancelled their subscriptions. Mr Bezos, in trying to fix a long-ongoing problem, fouled up.

But let me be clear here: the Freedom of the Press includes the freedom not to publish something. That should be obvious: there are only so many pages a newspaper can print, though with digital publishing these days, those limits have expanded.

And now we see just what isn’t being published, when it doesn’t fit Teh Narrative. When the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in a small town in northeast British Columbia occurred, the Associated Press told us, at 8:59 AM EST, that the (alleged) killer was a “woman” and a “female suspect.” At 9:32 AM EST, CNN simply identified the killer as “they,” being careful to not use a pronoun to specify the killer’s sex. At 9:32 AM EST, The New York Times told us nothing about the shooter.

But, as early as 6:48 AM EST, Matt Van Swol was telling us on Twitter the news which was not politically correct, that the killer was a mentally ill boy who thought he was a girl. I checked the credentialed media, and found several instances of the media concealing the knowledge that the (alleged) killer was transgender.

The killer’s name is Jesse Van Rootselaar, though initially identified as Jesse Strang, 18 years old, and yes, he’s transgender.

I don’t get it. The credentialed media want to build trust in their accuracy, so why conceal information that they know will come out soon enough?

My spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. And now you know why I spell it that way.

Well, eventually even The New York Times had to admit what had previously been revealed, that young Mr Van Rootselaar was the killer, and that the “suspect” was born as biologically male and chose to identify as a female about six years ago. That acknowledgement was time-stamped at 2:45 PM EST, just three minutes short of eight hours after Mr Van Swol’s tweet. The Times also revealed that the “suspect” had quit school four years earlier, which would have meant he wasn’t in school since age 14.

From the Times at 3:19 PM EST:

“Police had attended that residence on a number of occasions over the last several years dealing with concerns of mental health with our suspect,” Dwayne McDonald, the deputy commissioner, said, referring to the home where the suspect’s mother and stepbrother were found dead. On one of those occasions, “firearms were seized.” The most recent police call to the residence was in the spring of last year.

So, the local police already knew that young Mr Van Rootselaar was just plain nuts. Isn’t being biologically one sex but believing you are the other one definition of just plain nuts?

Of course, the newspaper continued to use the feminine pronouns to refer to the killer, as did local officials, because for some stupid reason they think a guy calling himself a girl really is a girl; are the editors and writers at the Times just as nuts as Mr Van Rootselaar?

Yeah, I think that they are!

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Will Bunch and due process of law

This site’s favorite whipping boy, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far, far, far left columnist Will Bunch, who’s even crazier than Amanda Marcotte if such a thing is possible, has told us how important it is to enforce the law. We have previously noted how The Philadelphia Inquirer’s radical left columnist Will Bunch was adamant in his support for legality, railing against President Trump’s pardon of the January 6th Capitol kerfufflers, even though the vast majority of them had already been punished, already served their sentences, his indignation over the United States sinking drug trafficking boats rather than arresting the drug traffickers, and, as we reported last June, his support for illegal immigrant and accused wife beater Kilmar Abrego Garcia, insisting that this illegal immigrant be given the full protection of the laws. He was all about the law when President Trump was eliminating drug trafficking boats coming from Venezuela, an action that Philadelphians should at least somewhat understand given the Hellhole that the Kensington neighborhood has become with strung out junkies sleeping on the sidewalks, in alleys and the Allegheny Avenue SEPTA station.

Mr Bunch even said that he did not “like” President Biden’s final flurry of pardons “at all,” though he claimed that “they were understandable” to protect critics of then-incoming President Trump. Clearly, Mr Bunch believed the Democrats mantra of “no one is above the law,” used when they were trying to throw Mr Trump in prison.

But, when it comes to our immigration laws, all of a sudden he doesn’t want those enforced. Apprehending and deporting illegals he told us is indistinguishable from the Geheime Staatspolizei rounding up Jews to send them to the concentration camps and their deaths.

Now we have this:

Europe is holding its Epstein creeps accountable. Why can’t we?

Europeans are pushing to hold Jeffrey Epstein’s creepy pals, including billionaires like Elon Musk, accountable. The U.S.? Not so much.

by Will Bunch | Sunday, February 8, 2026 |12:56 PM EST

The slow drip of the U.S. government’s still grossly incomplete release of its files on late financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has nonetheless become a who’s who of Planet Earth’s rich and famous — from billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk to cultural icons like filmmaker Woody Allen and, of course, two presidents.

You can see what the distinguished Mr Bunch did. He wants us to associate Messrs Gates, Allen, Musk, Bill Clinton, and, of course Donald Trump with Mr Epstein’s sex trafficking, because that’s for which the late financier is spectacularly infamous.

The average American paying any attention to this global bonfire of the vanities probably barely noticed this name: longtime British politico Peter Mandelson, who most recently served as the U.K.’s ambassador to the United States.

Across the pond, it was another story. The Fleet Street tabloid press went wild over revelations that Mandelson — a key insider in the ruling Labor Party, long known to have been one of Epstein’s globetrotting pals — maintained his close ties even after the American’s 2008 child-prostitution conviction, writing Epstein in 2009 to hail his release from jail as “liberation day.”

But unlike the fallout in the United States, Mandelson’s Epstein problem didn’t end with some embarrassing headlines. Back in September, when an initial batch of Epstein’s emails went public, Prime Minister Keir Starmer — Mandelson’s longtime ally — immediately fired his friend from his ambassador’s post in D.C., and the scandal has only intensified.

Mr Bunch wants Americans named in the Epstein files ‘held .  .  . accountable,’ as he sees Mr Mandelson so being. But how was the now former Ambassador held accountable? He was fired from his appointed post by the man who appointed him, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, after the British tabloids had a field day going “wild” over the revelations.

Yet, through several subsequent paragraphs, Mr Bunch mentions only resignations by prominent people mentioned in the Epstein files. Oddly enough, the columnist who so vociferously wanted due process of law and a presumption of evidence for Mr Abrego Garcia seems totally uninterested in such for the Americans he hates, which means, of course, President Trump and Mr Musk.

The time-lapsed released of the Epstein files hasn’t yet produced a smoking gun concerning his close friendship with Trump, but the fact that lurid tips to federal authorities about the two-time president don’t seem to have been really investigated speaks volumes about the utter lack of elite accountability on this side of the Atlantic.

“(D)on’t seem to have been really investigated”, huh? The Epstein files have been under the control of President Trump and his subordinates for one year and 19 days so far, but they were under the control of then-President Joe Biden and his Attorney General, Merrick Garland, who absolutely hates Republicans for denying him a seat on the Supreme Court for four full years. It could reasonably be argued that the Biden Administration could not do much with them until the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell was concluded, but she was convicted on December 29, 2021, leaving the previous administration, an administration determined to do all it could to put Mr Trump in prison and prevent him from ever becoming President again, all of 2022, 2023, and 2024 to pore through those files. The Democrats would like us to believe that yes, there really is incriminating evidence against Mr Trump in those files, but somehow, some way, they never went through the files.

How stupid would you have to believe something like that?

Even Mr Bunch described Mr Epstein as a “late financier and sex trafficker,” which means that at least some of his contacts were about finance rather than young girls; contact with Mr Epstein simply proves contact with him, not sexual offenses. Mr Bunch, like the rest of the #TrumpDerangementSyndrome-afflicted, want to assume that contact must mean knowledge of and cooperation with Mr Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, but that’s not the case. More, for Mr Bunch, who was so very concerned that Mr Abrego Garcia receive due process of law, wants to see punished anyone who spoke with Mr Epstein, even if such contact had nothing to do with trafficking young girls.