Category Archives: damned lies

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The Associated Press will happily tell you what their biases are . . . if you pay them!

We have frequently mocked The Philadelphia Inquirer’s very much unpublished stylebook, a manual and guide concerning how things should be expressed, in its use of “Black and brown” to refer to minority communities. While I cannot document this, it appears that the Inquirer use the Associated Press Stylebook, which was modified , in June of 2020,to capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not capitalize “white.”

After changing its usage rules last month to capitalize the word “Black” when used in the context of race and culture, The Associated Press on Monday said it would not do the same for “white.” The AP said white people in general have much less shared history and culture, and don’t have the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color. Protests following the death of George Floyd, which led to discussions of policing and Confederate symbols, also prompted many news organizations to examine their own practices and staffing. The Associated Press, whose Stylebook is widely influential in the industry, announced June 19 it would make Black uppercase. In some ways, the decision over “white” has been more ticklish. The National Association of Black Journalists and some Black scholars have said white should be capitalized, too. “We agree that white people’s skin color plays into systemic inequalities and injustices, and we want our journalism to robustly explore these problems,” Daniszewski said. “But capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.”

Translation: this was all political. Capitalizing ‘Black’ but not ‘white,’ or, in the Inquirer’s amusing permutation, ‘brown,’ is really kind of silly, and has caused some people to notice it, but it really shouldn’t lead to much overt bias.

But some of what is in the AP Stylebook is overtly biased. From National Review:

AP Stylebook Issues Guide for Transgender Coverage

by Abigail Anthony | July 22, 2022 | 7:23 PM EDT

The Associated Press Stylebook, which for decades has served as the default style manual for most news organizations, has issued a “Topical Guide” for transgender coverage that encourages writers to use “unbiased language” and to “avoid false balance [by] giving a platform to unqualified claims or sources in the guise of balancing a story by including all views.”

Yet the guidance appears to explicitly embrace the language and claims of transgender activists, a move likely to steer newsrooms away from objectively framing the issue.

The AP Stylebook has issued prior guidance related to gender and sexuality, and some of that is repackaged in the Topical Guide. But it does include some updates, together providing an extensive reference for journalists.

The Transgender Coverage Topical Guide explains: “A person’s sex and gender are usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting of only men and women, that can vary among societies and can change over time.” The guide encourages writers to refer to subjects according to their preferred gender identity. The guide condemns “deadnaming,” or referring to a transgender person’s previous name, because that “can be akin to using a slur and can cause feelings of gender dysphoria to resurface.”

The guide explains that the word “identify” can be useful, but alternative phrasing “like ‘is a woman’ is more to the point than ‘identifies as a woman.’”

Translation: the Associated Press Stylebook carries the implicit assumption that a ‘transgender’ person is the sex he[1]In English grammar, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine, and thus, in cases in which the sex of the person to which a pronoun refers is not known, the masculine pronouns are … Continue reading claims to be, not his actual sex.

Deadline noted, on June 3, 2023:

The Associated Press style guide – which sets the agenda for how most major media uses its words and phrases in reporting, thus shaping society views – has come out with new guidelines on gender.

The AP now instructs journalists to respect LGBTQ subjects’ preferred pronouns and to avoid terms like “biological sex.”

The new guide also suggested avoiding phrases like “both sexes,” indicating there are more than two that people use. Journalists should also avoid referring to a trans person as being born a boy or girl, with “sex assigned at birth” the new preferred usage.

Think about that. Not only does Deadline note that the AP Stylebook is “shaping society views,” but has gone all in on attempting to push the cockamamie notions that there are more than two sexes, and that sex is somehow “assigned at birth.” We have known for a century that the sex of every mammal is determined by whether the male’s sperm cell which fertilizes the female’s egg is carrying either the X or the Y chromosome, and that the male has exactly zero biological role in procreation after sexual intercourse and fertilization of the egg. The sex of the offspring is determined at conception, and simply recognized at birth, but the AP Stylebook stresses something factually false.

Dawn Stacy Ennis of Forbes has more on this silliness, and she is writing from the perspective of someone who supports transgenderism.

UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.

What does all of this do? By controlling the language, the AP is attempting to control the discussion; by the broad acceptance of the AP Stylebook, most major media in the country are going along with it. The AP do not like, and advises against, “deadnaming,” which is referring to a transgender person by the name given at birth, which almost always corresponds to the person’s sex. Thus, virtually every credentialed media source referred to Lia Thomas rather than Will Thomas, because they were going along with the attempt to persuade people that Mr Thomas is actually Miss Thomas.

The Associated Press also do not want you to refer to a person being ‘transgender’ unless transgenderism is specifically the topic. Thus, according to the Stylebook, Dr Richard Levine, the United States Assistant Secretary for Health, is not only to be referred to as Rachel Levine, as he now claims to be a woman, but not to inform readers that Dr Levine is transgender; readers who do not actually know are expected to assume that Dr Levine really is a woman.

This has real consequences. How many people would simply trust Dr Levine’s medical judgement, because he is a physician, who would otherwise not if they knew that he really is a man male claiming to be a woman? This is a question the AP do not want asked!

So, why do I bring this up? Today, @APStylebook tweeted:

We don’t have a new print Stylebook this year, but there’s plenty that’s new on AP Stylebook Online.
Subscribe for our latest guidance. You can opt in to notifications when we update entries.

Translation: they will give you a guidebook of our journolistic[2]The 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 … Continue reading biases, if you will pay them for it!

The First Street Journal does not claim to be an unbiased news source, but what we have done is to create and publish our own Stylebook, which can easily be found on the menu bar below the site title. You may not agree with our point of view, but we do not hide anything.

Who knows, some of our readers may actually believe that girls can be boys and boys can be girls, but we very explicitly tell you if a person claims to be the opposite sex from what he was born, and if you disagree with our editorial position, you are at least able to take an informed decision. That’s something the Associated Press do not want you to be able to do.

References

References
↑1 In English grammar, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine, and thus, in cases in which the sex of the person to which a pronoun refers is not known, the masculine pronouns are properly used, while formulations such as “he or she” are evidence that the writer does not understand proper grammar.
↑2 The 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. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Remember you haters! Calling them ‘groomers’ and saying that ‘they’re coming after our kids’ is sexist, homophobic, transphobic and just plain false!

There are times I think that I’ve written on the subject of ‘transgenderism’ too frequently, but it keeps coming up in the news. I wouldn’t care if Jack wanted to call himself Jill, if the ‘transgendered’ weren’t trying to use the power of the state to force other people to go along with their delusions.

You will not find this story many places, and certainly not in the leftist part of the credentialed media. From the New York Post:

California school suspends 2 children for misgendering classmate

By Hannah Grossman , Fox News | Friday, July 7, 2023 | 3:31 PM EDT | Updated

A California school district suspended two children for five days after a misgendering incident took place, and then subjected them to a training called “restorative justice,” according to an email reviewed by Fox News Digital.

The email was sent by a recently departed principal of Herbert Hoover High School located in the Glendale Unified School District. It was first reported by GUSD Parents Voices.

The former principal, Jennifer Earl, described two students who misgendered a transgender student, and then ran away as the teacher attempted to correct them.

There’s some disagreement here. The Post story states that the students correctly referenced a student’s sex “misgendered a transgender student,” but the local Fox 11 report has the suspended student “misgendering” a teacher.

So, what is “restorative justice” in the Glendale United School District? The district has a handy graph of its system, as shown in a photo in the Post. It has “Control” on one axis, defined as “Pressure Limits (and?) Expectations”, which can only mean that the district believes that, in the case of “restorative justice”, high pressure is acceptable, as long as it is accompanied with high levels of “Support – Encouragement – Nurturing”.

Further down:

GUSD explained to Fox News Digital that they make determinations if a misgendering – generally defined as using the wrong pronouns – is considered bullying based on whether a student’s perceived intent.

“A student has never been punished, much less suspended, for accidentally using the wrong pronoun to refer to a peer or staff member. However, a student could be suspended if the action escalated to harassment or bullying,” a spokesperson said.

Translation: if we assume that the school district’s spokescritter is telling the truth, the district decided that the “action escalated to harassment or bullying”.

Now we get to the district’s definition of a re-education camp “restorative justice”

The district’s website explains restorative justice on its website.

Restorative justice is a re-education of students and gaining control over a situation based on the perceived wrongs they committed.

So, even the district uses the term “re-education”. Got it!

First the person making the restorative justice circle will ask “barrier breaking” questions, such as:

“What is the greatest value that guides your life?”

“What gives you the most security?”

“If you could smash one thing… what would you smash?”

If I could smash one thing, it would be the cockamamie idea that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

“Describe the ideal family.”

Simple: a mother and father, married to each other, living with and rearing their minor children. Anything else, anything else, is less than ideal. This is the system which successful human societies have had for as far back into the past as we have any real knowledge of human sociological structures.

The district’s website continues, “When there is harm or conflict within the established community, restorative responses help to repair the damage. This is done through processes that bring harmed and harmers together to address root causes of the conflict, support accountability for those responsible, and promote healing for impacted individuals. As a result, community is once again restored bringing back a sense of belonging to all.”

So, “restorative justice” exists when the “harmed and harmers” are brought together, but note the rest: “to address root causes of the conflict, support accountability for those responsible, and promote healing for impacted individuals.” Simply put, “restorative justice” cannot be achieved unless the two students who correctly recognized the ‘transgender’ person’s sex who “misgendered” someone agree that the Special Snowflake™ person they correctly referenced “misgendered” is actually the sex the transgender individual claims to be rather than the sex they actually are, and say that they are oh-so-sorry.

Simply put, the Glendale Unified School District is teaching that transgenderism is real, that a person actually can change his ‘gender,’ and if you decline to go along with that notion, you will be punished.

Remember how we have been told that the government may not establish a religion? Well, the Catholic Church, the majority of Protestant Christian denominations, Judaism, and Islam all agree that transgenderism is not something with which their faiths agree, yet the Glendale Unified School District, apparently as required by law in California, are teaching something major which is against the religious faiths of most Americans.

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‘Progressives’ against common sense and reality

The Nation is a far-left, “progressive” opinion journal with a long history, and when you see an article from The Nation, you already know: it’s going to be almost Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez crazy:

How Women’s Swimming Got So Transphobic

Almost no other sport is as hostile to trans athletes—and that’s because its culture created the perfect conditions for transphobia to take root.

By Frankie de la Cretaz | Friday, May 12, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

When Lia Thomas first entered the women’s NCAA swimming scene in 2021, her presence was immediately felt. National media outlets became obsessed with her. She got the kind of attention rarely given to swimming athletes outside of the Olympics.

Non-subscribers get just three articles per month before the paywall descends. To read this article without paywall issues, you can also find it here.

Thomas was good, but she wasn’t the next Simone Biles of her field. So what explained such a frenzy? Simple: Thomas was a transgender woman having success in the women’s division.

Will Thomas, who competed all through high school and his first three years at the University of Pennsylvania, as the 6’3″ tall male he was, did not have much success in the men’s division. He won a couple of events, but was ranked 554th in the nation, 200 meter freestyle, all divisions, 65th in the 500 freestyle and 32nd in the 1650 freestyle.

Yet, when he decided that he was really a woman, which coincided with the shutdowns due to the COVID-19 panicdemic, he had a full season off before joining Penn’s women’s swim team and calling himself “Lia.” Mr Thomas did more than just “hav(e) success in the women’s division”; he dominated.

From December 7, 2021, to February 22, 2022, CNN spent nearly 15 minutes criticizing Thomas’s participation in the women’s division but less than two minutes discussing the dozens of anti-trans sports bills being introduced across the country. Meanwhile, from December 3, 2021, through January 12, 2022, Fox News aired 32 segments that attacked Thomas, according to Media Matters for America. That pace didn’t slow down for months. “That level of coverage of women’s swimming, specifically, has not come close to being matched in the year after the end of [Thomas’s] swimming career,” says Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director at Media Matters. “They like to say that this is coming from a place of caring about women’s sports, but it’s hard not to notice that they don’t really cover women’s sports unless trans women are competing in them.”

Well, one thing is certainly true: Mr Thomas did generate far more coverage competing on the women’s team as a woman than was common. But let’s tell the truth here: men’s swimming races don’t generate that much coverage, either.

Women’s sports? Yeah, there’s coverage on ESPN and its related networks . . . of figure skating, volleyball (especially beach volleyball), and gymnastics, sports where we get to see mostly white women in top shape in skimpy outfits. There is some coverage of women’s basketball, which features mostly black women in top shape, though the uniforms are not as skimpy or tight-fitting.

But it’s also true that Mr Thomas’ participation drove the coverage of women’s swimming, because he was a fully-developed man male beating up on girls beating women in sports.

Frankie de la Cretaz, from her Tweet saying that she is “Summer ready.”

So, who is Frankie de la Cretaz, the author of The Nation article? Her biography page on the Hatchette Book Group lists her as Frankie, but the underlying url shows that, at some point, she was calling herself Britni. I found nothing which indicates that she is a transgender woman, but her biographies, through several sources, including Twitter and The Nation,, all use “they/their/them” pronouns. Her only two articles listed in her The Nation biography are on transgender issues. She is, to put it plainly, a special pleader. As The First Street Journal does not go along with the pronoun silliness, I shall refer to her using the feminine forms, though I am not certain that such are correct.

The intensity of the critical media coverage helped fuel an equally intense backlash against Thomas. Sixteen of her University of Pennsylvania teammates signed a letter midway through the season saying that she had an unfair advantage. That letter was organized by former Olympic swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who, along with fellow Olympic swimmer Donna de Varona, is a founding member of the Women’s Sport Policy Working Group, which has been leading the movement to ban trans women and girls from competing in the women’s division in sports across the board. (The Human Rights Campaign has called the WSPWG “a hate group.”) And World Aquatics, the international federation that governs the sport of swimming, released a new transgender participation policy in July 2022 that essentially bans trans women from competing by creating incredibly restrictive requirements for their inclusion. (As I have written previously, there is no real evidence that trans athletes have an inherent advantage over their cisgender counterparts.)

This is utter rubbish. Mr Thomas certainly had an inherent advantage over the real women against whom he competed. He was bigger, taller, stronger, and had more endurance than the women against whom he was racing. We have previously noted his times in the Zippy Invitational.

I have noted Mr Thomas and his swimming records, competing against biological women, proving that “trans women” are very different from real women. On Sunday, December 5, 2021, Mr Thomas, won the 1,650 yard freestyle with a time of 15:59:71; the second-place finisher was his teammate Anna Sofia Kalandaze, who touched at 16:37:44 in the Zippy Invitational Event in Akron, Ohio. The difference between Mr Thomas’ and Miss Kalandaze’s times is 37.73 seconds, nearly the length of the pool.

Competitive swimming at the collegiate level involves races which are often won by fractions of a second. A victory of 37.73 seconds is extraordinary.

In the 500-yard freestyle final, Mr Thomas again defeated his teammate, Miss Kalandaze, who finished second, 4:34.06 to 4:48.99, a 14.93 second margin; Miss Kalandaze defeated the seventh-place finisher by 7.42 seconds, just half of the time she was behind Mr Thomas.

Mr Thomas time would have finished 15th in the men’s final, ahead of ten other male swimmers. The last place male swimmer in the 500 yard freestyle, Luke Scoboria of Bloomsburg University, finished at 4:42.78, 7.21 seconds ahead of Miss Kalandaze’s second-place time. His year of taking testosterone suppressants — Mr Thomas had not undergone ‘sex reassignment surgery’ by the time of the NCAA championships — have obviously not done what the NCAA believe it would. Mr Thomas ranking in the 500 freestyle, 65th, went to number one in the women’s category.

When it came to the NCAA championships, Mr Thomas went ahead and won one title, and then, apparently, backed off in his other races, so as not to increase the political backlash. No, I can’t prove that’s what he did, but it seems pretty blatantly obvious. Riley Gaines Barker, who tied for fifth with Mr Thomas in the 200-yard NCAA women’s championships, and was one of the few who had the ovaries to speak out, reported that Mr Thomas was an intact male in the women’s locker room at those championships.

Human beings have known about sex, and the differences between males and females for as long as we have any evidence of human social structure and thinking. Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal can tell the difference between males and females of their own species, and, from my anecdotal observations, it appears that dogs and cats can tell human males and females apart.

The ‘transgender’ advocates have been mounting a full-court press on this stuff. In just Friday’s Philadelphia Inquirer’s website home page are the stories Trans and queer-led groups are protesting the Marriott for hosting Moms for Liberty conference this summer, The Pennridge board has passed a bathroom policy that advocates say discriminates against transgender students, and Central Bucks orders removal of ‘Gender Queer,’ ‘This Book is Gay’ from school library shelves. As a cycling fan, my feed has Cycling race director agonizes over UCI’s transgender participation policy: ‘This could kill the sport’, and Cycling team parts ways with Olympian Inga Thompson after call to protest UCI’s transgender athlete policy.

Miss de la Cretaz’s article went a lot longer than I have quoted, but most of the remainder of it isn’t some sort of pseudo-scientific claim that there are no real advantages in sports to males claiming to be female over real women, but political arguments, that swimming has been an almost exclusively white sport, and that opposition to Mr Thomas’ claim that he’s a real woman is actually white supremacy.

Mr Thomas is white. And several of the women on Penn’s women’s swim team are Asian rather than white. But no, I don’t expect much in the way of rationality from someone like Miss de la Cretaz.

In the end, it boils down to one simple question: can people actually change their sex? The notion that sex is somehow “assigned” at birth is silly; sex is recognized at birth, but the actual determination of sex occurs at conception, by whether the sperm cell fertilizing the egg carries the X or the Y chromosome. This has been known scientifically for a hundred years now.

We know of no process by which a person whose body was developed with XY chromosomes can be transitioned into someone having XX chromosomes, or vice versa. Some with ‘gender dysphoria’ want to allow children to take puberty blockers, to prevent them from developing into adult males when they believe they are girls, or adult females if they think that they are really boys. But that doesn’t transform them into the opposite sex; it simply leaves them as underdeveloped as children.

Someone as focused on ‘transgender’ issues as Miss de la Cretaz cannot possibly have missed the horror stories of Jaron Bloshinsky, more commonly known by the fake name Jazz Jennings, and his attempts to surgically transition in adulthood after being on puberty blockers since he was young. The dedicated author cannot possibly be unaware that medical and surgical treatments do not really turn male bodies into female ones, or female bodies into male ones, but, at best, a simulacrum of what the victims want to be.

I can understand that the ‘transgendered,’ the delusional people who really, really, really believe that they were born into the wrong body — and hey, I think that I should have been born into Bo Jackson’s body! — believe that there is some way, perhaps just over the horizon, but close and eventually attainable in which they can really become the members of the sex that they want to be, but the percentage of people really suffering from gender dysphoria is very, very low. What I don’t understand is the number of normal people who support this silliness.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer gives us another fluff article about “Lia” Thomas

Leave it to the #woke editors and writers of The Philadelphia Inquirer when, in the wake of the boycott of Bud Light beer and the “leaves of absence” of two of Budweiser’s and Bud Light’s marketing supervisors, they decided to spend 867 words, exclusive of the headlines and byline, telling us how strong and brave and noble former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Will Thomas, a male who claims to be a woman and goes by the name “Lia”, is for beating out real women on the swim team:

Lia Thomas speaks on podcast about trans issues and her (sic) experience at Penn

Thomas spoke candidly to a fellow trans athlete about her (sic) experience swimming for Penn in the 2022 NCAA championships.

by Andrea Canales | Monday, April 24, 2023 | 6:44 PM EDT

Former Penn swimmer Lia Thomas spoke about her (sic) experience as a lightning rod in the topic of trans athletes on a podcast hosted by another trans athlete, Schuyler Bailar, a former swimmer at Harvard.

Regarding when 16 Penn teammates sent a letter to the school written by Nancy Hogshead-Makar that opposed her (sic) participation in championship meets, a former Olympian now campaigning for legislation to limit trans athletes, Thomas said it was hard to feel opposition coming from some teammates who she (sic) thought had her back. She (sic) pointed out the contradiction in the support they were expressing. “They’re like, ‘Oh, we respect Lia as a woman, as a trans woman, or whatever, we respect her (sic) identity; we just don’t think it’s fair.’ I think you can’t really have that sort of half support,” Thomas said on the Dear Schuyler podcast released Monday.

The adverb ‘sic’ indicates accuracy in transcription, despite errors in the original. With five such references using the incorrect pronouns in the first two paragraphs, plus two more in the headline and sub-heading, I’m tired of adding the notification. But readers may simply assume that they belong after each example of using the feminine references to Mr Thomas.

Thomas said that if she were being supported as a trans woman, then her right to compete in sport would count as much as those of any woman athlete. “You can’t sort of break me down as a person into little pieces and you’re like, ‘OK, this is OK, this is OK, that’s not.’ It’s pretending to be supportive on some level but in reality it just sort of falls flat.”

But that’s just it: that he claims to be a “trans woman” does not mean that people will accept him as a real woman. There really are differences between males and females, physical differences which make a difference in physical activities and sports.

As I predicted, by 8:48 PM EDT the Inquirer had closed all comments and deleted the existing ones. Click to enlarge.

Thomas also expressed concern over a trend of legislation around controlling bodily autonomy.“[There are] broader systems of trying to control people and control people’s bodies and exclude anybody who doesn’t fit a certain mold,” Thomas said. “A true feminist is everybody trying to come together to sort of break down these patriarchal ideals of what a woman is and who can be a woman.”

At a certain point in the discourse, it weighed on Thomas that she had become a flashpoint in the debate.

“I definitely struggled with at first, sort of like a year ago following the season, following NCAAs, of feeling almost a responsibility or maybe even a blame for some of the new rulings or rules or legislation,” Thomas said. She realized, however, “It wasn’t me personally that sparked it; it was just [trans-exclusionists] were waiting for a trans woman to be successful to go on a whole tirade against trans people and pass all sorts of legislation. So that’s helped me move past that a little bit.”

Translation: when a male, a mature, adult male, started beating real women. I’ve asked the question before: if someone was setting out to destroy acceptance of transgenderism, what would he be doing differently from what Mr Thomas has done?

Note the pullquote to the left, screen captured from the Inky original, complete with its embedded link; it references Penn swimmer Anna Kalandadze, and how she’s heading for records. We noted Miss Kalandadze previously, and how she finished second to Mr Thomas in the 1650 meter freestyle in the Zippy Invitational Event in Akron, Ohio in December of 2021. On Sunday, December 5, 2021, Mr Thomas, won the 1,650 meter freestyle with a time of 15:59:71; the second-place finisher was Miss Kalandadze, who touched at 16:37:44 in the Zippy Invitational Event in Akron, Ohio. The difference between Mr Thomas’ and Miss Kalandadze’s times is 37.73 seconds.

Now?

Kalandadze, a senior distance swimmer for Penn, won Ivy League titles in the 500-yard freestyle and the 1650 free this past February. Kalandadze’s time of 4 minutes, 38.86 seconds in the 500 free was 13th-best in the nation this year, while her 15:53.88 in the 1650 free was the sixth-fastest. Kalandadze will represent the Quakers in both events at the NCAA championships from March 15-18 in Knoxville, Tenn.

She has significantly improved her time, but she’s still almost six seconds slower than Mr Thomas time, when he was so far ahead of the field that he didn’t really need to push at the end. No one will say it, but it’s obvious that once Mr Thomas won his first NCAA championship, he deliberately backed off, so as to not totally demolish the field, and create even more anger at his unfair presence in the women’s competition. No, I can’t prove that, because he’ll never admit it, but he was so much faster than all of the real women in the Zippy Invitational that it’s extremely difficult to believe that he lost that much of his advantage in the couple of months before the Ivy League and NCAA championships.

No one would care if Will Thomas wanted to identify as “Lia,” and tell everybody that he’s a woman now, if he were not using his male athletic advantages unfairly. If he wants to be seen as a real woman, why is he doing things which so obviously set himself apart from real women?

Naturally, the Inky’s article was, supposedly, a straight sports article, but it was an obvious fluff piece, to support Mr Thomas’ claim that he’s a she now. Sports articles in the Inquirer do allow reader comments, unlike other stories in the newspaper, but once the editors saw what they were getting, they quickly deleted all comments and closed the comments section.  🙂

I knew that would happen, which is why I got the quick screen capture.

The newspaper very much supports transgenderism, using the faked names and imagined pronouns the transgendered want, and, as closing the comments section proves, the editors will brook no dissent. But the Bud Light/Dylan Mulvaney controversy pointed out the obvious: there are a whole lot of people who don’t accept that stupidity.

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Harvard grad enters the unemployment line

We have previously noted the idiocy of Bud Light’s Vice President for Marketing Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid’s choice to use Dylan Mulvaney, the homosexual male who claims he’s a girl, and has been using a “365 Days of Girlhood” presentation — which I refuse to link — which completely mocks stereotypes of how real girls act, as the brand’s spokesthing. Well, now the digested food appears to have hit the air circulation device:

Bud Light’s Marketing Leadership Undergoes Shakeup After Dylan Mulvaney Controversy

Alissa Heinerscheid, who has led the brand since June, takes leave of absence and is replaced by Budweiser global marketing VP Todd Allen

by Jon Springer | Friday, April 21, 2023

Anheuser-Busch InBev has changed marketing leadership for Bud Light in the wake of controversy over the brand sending a can to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney with her (sic) face on it.

Alissa Heinerscheid, marketing VP for the brand since June 2022, has taken a leave of absence, the brewer confirmed, and will be replaced by Todd Allen, who was most recently global marketing VP for Budweiser.

I did suggest, in the previous article, that Mrs Heinerscheid had made a “Career Limiting Mistake.” 🙂 Continue reading →

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There’s no statute of limitations on stupidity

My old Bible, using an Israeli 20 shekel note as a bookmark.

Those who know me know that I am not just Catholic in name only, but a Mass every Sunday Catholic, and occasionally attend weekday Mass as well. I have article tags for the Catholic Church and Catholic Priesthood. And the last thing I want to see are more sexual abuse cases among the priesthood revealed.

Philly archdiocese accused of covering up sex abuse complaints against priest who allegedly found a new victim in Nashville

“If there was ever a case of reckless disregard for the safety of the public and parishioners,” said lawyers representing a woman now suing church officials over an alleged cover-up, “it’s this one.”

by Jeremy Roebuck | Thursday, April 20, 2023

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia is facing new accusations that it covered up sexual misconduct, this time involving a former priest who allegedly forced himself on multiple women and told them the unwanted encounters were “special trials” ordained by God.

In court filings this week, a 27-year-old woman said church officials’ failure to disclose previous complaints against the Rev. Kevin Barry McGoldrick enabled abuse she endured after he was transferred from Philadelphia to Nashville in 2013.

Even after the Philadelphia archdiocese had substantiated her claims that McGoldrick had plied her with bourbon and then sexually assaulted her while he was serving as a college chaplain in Tennessee, she said, church officials here still refused to acknowledge they’d received reports years earlier of his involvement in similar misconduct.

The woman, now living in Virginia and identified in court filings only as Jane Doe, made those accusations in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that seeks hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages from church officials and McGoldrick himself in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas.

There’s more at the original, but the important date is that Fr McGoldrick was transferred from Philadelphia to the Diocese of Nashville in 2013. Msgr. William J. Lynn, once a secretary for Cardinal Anthony Bevilaqua, the Archbishop of Philadelphia, was convicted in June of 2012 for his role in transferring priests accused of sexual misconduct to other parishes, and though that conviction was twice overturned, the Monsignor was behind bars in 2013.

Cardinal Justin Rigali, the Archbishop of Philadelphia from 2003 to 2011, had his resignation upon reaching 75 accepted by Pope Benedict XVI, but, as The New York Times noted, his resignation was tainted by the priestly abuse scandal. The Times had also noted that the District Attorney’s office had “been investigating the archdiocese aggressively since 2002“.

So, how is it that, in 2013, with the previous Archbishop having his resignation accepted under an ethical cloud, Msgr Lynn behind bars for his role in identifying ‘problem’ priests, priests Edward Avery and Charles Engelhardt in prison for the sexual abuse of minors, as was Catholic school teacher Bernard Shero, that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, then under Archbishop Charles Chaput, allegedly knew of Fr McGoldrick’s reported sexual abuses transferred him to Nashville?

Lawyers for the accuser say former Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput failed to disclose earlier investigations into McGoldrick and signed off on his transfer to Nashville in 2013. That move came two years after Pope Benedict XVI had tapped Chaput to take over the Philadelphia archdiocese and oversee reform efforts after a series of damning grand jury investigations highlighted its failures in handling clergy sex abuse complaints.

Let me be clear here: there have been no criminal charges or convictions in this case: “Jane Doe” has filed a lawsuit, something which is subject to a much lower standard of proof, the “preponderance of the evidence,” and that lawsuit has not gone to trial. At the moment, Archbishop Chaput and Fr McGoldrick are neither legally guilty nor adjudicated as responsible for any wrongdoing. I’d like to believe that Miss “Doe” is making a fraudulent claim, which is certainly a possibility. Archbishop Chaput, having been appointed to the Archdiocese of Philadelphia in large part for his previous strong handling of such cases while Archbishop of Denver. It would seem improbable that he would have approved that transfer of a known sexual abuser.

However, if Miss “Doe’s” claims are valid, it might be a slightly different case. The article states that she is 27 years old now, which means she would have been 17 or 18 at the time Fr McGoldrick was transferred, and she might have been legally an adult at the time she claims she was abused by the priest.

But my wanting the claim to be false does not preclude the possibility that it could be true. And while I want it to be false, there are a lot of people out there who will be convinced that the accusations are true, because it has happened so often in the past.

If the accusation is true, it means that Archbishop Chaput and his subordinates in the Archdiocese learned absolutely nothing from not only what had happened in the past, but happened in the recent past. And our bishops have to know, and understand, this: there is exactly zero tolerance for this stuff among the public, and cover-ups just don’t work. With so many people hostile to the Church, and looking for wrongdoing, and with possible victims out there, this stuff will eventually be exposed.

There has to be zero tolerance in the Church for this, and everybody needs to know it. Actually, every priest and bishop in the Church does know it; they are all highly educated men, and they just aren’t stupid. But not being stupid overall does not mean that they can’t do stupid things, and trying to cover up for this stuff, regardless of how much they may like and respect their friends and colleagues in the priesthood, is just plain stupid.

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When you don’t tell the truth at first, don’t be surprised if fewer people believe you later When it comes to COVID-19, if we had been told the truth all along, people wouldn’t be doubting the government’s word!

My good friend William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove noted that the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, sitting in full on an appeal of a ruling by a three-judge panel, blocked President Biden’s mandate that all federal employees must be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Mr Teach’s money line:

And, even with the mandate, people who got vaxxed were still getting COVID and still dying.

And this was the entire problem. If the ‘vaccines’ had actually been vaccines, had actually prevented the vaccinated from contracting COVID-19, vaccine resistance would have vanished. But it wasn’t long after the ‘vaccines’ became available to everyone that we started to hear reports of ‘breakthrough’ cases, of people who had been fully vaccinated — defined at the time as 14 days past their second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines — contracting the Peking pox. Continue reading →

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When supposedly responsible people make irresponsible promises

Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff, image from her campaign website. Click to enlarge.

That The Philadelphia Inquirer would not like a law-and-order Democrat like Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff[1]Even though married to a man named David McDuff, Mrs McDuff has not shown him the respect of taking his name. As stated in our Stylebook, at The First Street Journal we do not show similar disrespect … Continue reading is not much of a surprise. In an article published on February 15th on the four women running for the Democratic nomination for Mayor, she was listed last — which does happen when listed in alphabetical order — though the Inky did give her more words, 244, than Helen Gym Flaherty, 233, the #woke progressive who will probably be favored by the newspaper’s Editorial Board.

What Mrs McDuff posts as her campaign promises actually sounds reasonable, right up until it hits up against political reality:

Most shootings in Philadelphia are perpetrated with illegal firearms. Though the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania prevents Philadelphia from passing its own gun laws, it is within our legal authority to prosecute individuals possessing guns illegally. The Rhynhart Administration will aggressively pursue those trafficking illegal guns into our city, working in conjunction with law enforcement partners.

Recently, Philadelphia Police have been arresting more people for carrying illegal guns, but prosecutions have not kept pace. As Mayor, Rhynhart will convene a task force with the District Attorney’s Office, the Philadelphia Police, and the courts to review illegal firearm cases and ensure all three arms of the criminal justice system work cooperatively to eliminate illegal firearms from our streets.

The District Attorney is not a subordinate official to the Mayor, but is independently elected on his own, and the current DA, Larry Krasner, does not want to prosecute people for carrying “illegal guns,” and has said so openly:

“With so many guns available,” Krasner says, “a law enforcement strategy prioritizing seizing guns locally does little to reduce the supply of guns, and, if it entails increasing numbers of car and pedestrian stops, has the potential to be counterproductive by alienating the very communities that it is designed to help.” He notes that “people of color are disproportionately stopped in Philadelphia and arrested for illegal gun possession in Philadelphia and statewide.” African Americans, who represent 44 percent of Philadelphia’s population, account for about 80 percent of people arrested for illegal gun possession in the city.

The city’s George Soros-sponsored defense attorney now serving as chief prosecutor apparently cannot conceive of the notion that a higher percentage of blacks than whites are arrested for illegal firearms possession because perhaps, just perhaps, a higher percentage of black Philadelphians than whites are carrying guns illegally. Given that the vast majority of shooting and homicide victims in the city are black, you’d think he could figure that out on his own.

“Focusing so many resources on removing guns from the street while a constant supply of new guns is available is unlikely to stop gun violence, but it does erode trust and the perceived legitimacy of the system,” Krasner writes. “This in turn decreases the likelihood that people will cooperate and participate in the criminal legal system and associated processes, reducing clearance, conviction, and witness appearance rates.”

Krasner highlights an oddity of Pennsylvania law that compounds the racially disproportionate impact of arrests for illegal gun possession. For Pennsylvanians generally, carrying a concealed weapon without a license is a first-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to five years in jail and/or a maximum fine of $10,000. For Philadelphia residents, the same offense justifies an additional misdemeanor charge. As a local law firm explains, the combination of those two charges is “almost always graded as a felony,” which means “it may carry significant jail time even for defendants who do not have a prior criminal record.”

That Mr Krasner and his office could, if they so chose, not pursue the additional misdemeanor charge went unspoken, but given that city officials have long sought to be able to pass stricter gun control measures for Philadelphia, the whole thing becomes laughable: the District Attorney wouldn’t prosecute them anyway.

Yet Mrs McDuff just airily brushes that concern aside.

Sadly, it gets worse, which was my inspiration for this article. In this tweet, Mrs McDuff says, directly, “As your Mayor, I will reduce this homicide rate, I will cut it in half within my first term, from over 500 to under 250, where it was seven years ago.”[2]Direct quote from her spoken words, rather than the reduced version in the heading of the tweet.

At this point, I would note that even under Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, the number of homicides was not cut from the 391 in the year before he took office to “under 250,” 246 to be precise, in his first term, but his sixth year in office, and that Administration had far less of a reduction to get under 250.

Mrs McDuff has promised to do something unprecedented. If she wins, will she decline to run for a second term if she fails to meet that first term promise?

References

References
↑1 Even though married to a man named David McDuff, Mrs McDuff has not shown him the respect of taking his name. As stated in our Stylebook, at The First Street Journal we do not show similar disrespect to husbands, and always refer to married women by their married names.
↑2 Direct quote from her spoken words, rather than the reduced version in the heading of the tweet.
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Someone needs to check the water supply in Loudoun County Something is making public officials lie through their scummy teeth

It seems that Loudoun County, Virginia, isn’t the greatest place to work or go to school.

Remember the sexual assault by a ‘transgender’ student against a girl in the girls’ bathroom, which came to light when the victim’s father was demanding answers from the school board, and then dragged to the floor and arrested. It was all a big right-wing myth, the credentialed media told us:

The media’s defense of transgenderism fell apart quickly when the rapist was found guilty. Continue reading →