Nothing exposes the ignorance and evil of “progressivism” quite like discussions of the rights of the most vulnerable among us.

Nothing exposes the hollowness of leftist claims to care about social justice, the poor, and the weak like their bloodthirsty eagerness to keep the slaughter of humans in the womb legal.

Nothing exposes the loathing of leftists for those deemed “other” by the powerful than their seething rage at the possibility they may lose the right to kill those they “other.” Leftists view humans with defects and humans created by the criminal acts of their fathers as undeserving of existence. Leftist “othering” of imperfect humans and humans conceived through evil acts is so extreme that they shriek apoplectically at the claim that even these tiny, innocent humans are part of the human family.

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The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system—rife with systemic bias against conservative views of sex and sexuality—has announced its newest effort to cultivate “inclusivity” and “equity” in all of its K-12 schools. The “social justice” activists, puddenheads, and lemmings who lead the CPS have banned all sex-based bathrooms for children and staff. Instead, children and staff are free to use any bathroom they are “comfortable” using.

Subjective feelings now trump objective scientific reality in determining bathroom usage policy. All bathrooms are now co-ed. No word yet on how the CPS plans to include and respect children and adults who are uncomfortable sharing bathrooms with opposite-sex persons.

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Have you recently heard the scornful claims of “progressives” who assert that critical race theory (CRT) is absolutely, unequivocally not taught in public schools? Never, no way, no how. Have you heard the suspiciously uniform proclamations that CRT is an academic theory originating and taught exclusively in law schools? Well, take a gander at this upcoming course offered at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy—a public high school:

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A gang of college students at Arizona State University committed to “social justice” as redefined by leftists are trying to get Kyle Rittenhouse kicked out of online nursing school, calling him a “bloodthirsty murderer” who makes the campus “unsafe.” They want to “abate” the “danger” posed by Rittenhouse’s online presence in a nursing class. In the real world, where many of us still live and move and have our being, this is called industrial strength bullying.

In addition to demanding the administration “withdraw” Rittenhouse from the school, the four oppressive, tyrannical, exclusionary, leftwing organizations—MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán), Students for Socialism, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Multicultural Solidarity Coalition—are demanding that the school issue a public statement against the “racist murderer Kyle Rittenhouse.”

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Chicago Sun-Times education reporter Nader Issa offers a classic example of biased opinion writing masquerading as objective reporting in his “news” narratives about a recent controversy in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove over an obscene “graphic memoir.” The memoir titled Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe may sound familiar to IFI readers. I wrote this about her memoir in early August 2021:

Maia Kobabe, author of Gender Queer: A Memoir, which is carried in high school libraries, tells the peculiar tale of her journey to her “identity” as a genderqueer, asexual woman with a lesbian aunt and a sister who dates a woman who pretends to be a man.

The far-left American Library Association awarded Kobabe an Alex Award for her “graphic” memoir. Her memoir is graphic in both senses of the word. It’s a sexually explicit, 240-page comic book about her journey into sexual confusion and perversion. Kobabe, who uses the “Spivak” pronouns ey/eir/em, also teaches art workshops to middle school children, mostly, she says, “AFAB” girls, which means “assigned female at birth.” Kobabe evidently doesn’t know that children aren’t assigned either a sex or “gender identity” at birth. That’s not a thing obstetricians do. Obstetricians identify the objective sex of babies at birth, a characteristic that never changes.

Public school kerfuffles over Kobabe’s obscene memoir have been justifiably emerging as parents learn that their children’s school carries it, and one of those kerfuffles took place at a Downers Grove School Board meeting on November 15.

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Exeter High School in New Hampshire is being sued by a Catholic student (identified in the lawsuit as M.P.) who was suspended from playing in a football game because in a private conversation, off school grounds, initiated by a “progressive” student, M.P. expressed his view that there are only two genders: male and female. To be clear, by “genders,” he meant sexes. Until recently when the “trans”-cult redefined “gender,” the term was synonymous with “biological sex.”

The conversation was precipitated by an incident in Spanish class when a student declared that he or she is “nonbinary” and wished to be addressed by the third-person plural pronoun “they.” On the bus ride home after school, M.P. and his friends were discussing the “difficulty of addressing a non-binary person in Spanish,” which has two gendered words for “they,”: “ellas” and “ellos.”

A girl identified as A.G. interrupted their conversation to assert the silly idea that there are more than two “genders.” After M.P. got off the bus, A.G. texted him to resume the debate during which she demanded M.P. “Give me one valid reason why there’s only two genders.”

That’s like demanding someone give her a valid reason why there are tigers. Tigers—like boys and girls—just are.

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At the most recent School District 200 Board Meeting in Wheaton, Illinois, new school board member and cunning rhetorician, Mary Yeboah, Director of Graduate Student Life at Wheaton College, posed six questions to the board beginning with a prefatory statement that let the woke cat out of the bag:

I would like to ask six rhetorical questions regarding the proposed October 10th, 2022 and October 9th, 2023 no-school all-grades Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day in relation to district purposes outlined in the mission of School District 200, Vision 2022, and the portrait of a graduate work. To be very clear, these are not questions that I expect you to answer right now. I am asking them for the benefit of reflective thinking for the district, especially in the month leading up to the approval of these calendars.

One, does the District 200 administration recognize the impact of holidays, statues, and other memorials on shaping school culture, which in turn shapes student experiences and outcomes?

Two, does the District 200 administration consider celebrating extreme violence, theft, genocide, and dehumanization to be in line with the study of social science to help students develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the benefit of the global society in which they live?

Three, does the District 200 administration affirm the accurate telling of history and recognize the impossibility of “discovering” land already inhabited?

Four, does the District 200 administration take into consideration the perspectives of Indigenous people regarding this particular calendar event?

Five, could maintaining this District 200 calendar event unintentionally support a myth of U.S. exceptionalism that could undermine district efforts to create diverse, inclusive schools for all children?

Lastly, does this calendar event advance the vision and mission of District 200 goals? And if it does not, must it remain despite state-level support?

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The euphemistically titled “Youth Health and Safety Act” (HB 370) has passed both the Illinois House and Senate. Leftists who believe it takes a village to strip parents of their natural rights and strip preborn humans of their right to live are close to fulfilling their promise to make Illinois America’s bloodiest killing field.  HB 370 will repeal the Parental Notice of Abortion Act passed in 1995 that requires parents of minor pregnant girls to be notified at least 48 hours before girls can have their babies killed.

In another repugnant floor debate in Springfield, State Representative Anna Moeller (D-Elgin) asserted without proving that there is a “fundamental principle that everyone has the right to make their own reproductive healthcare decisions without interference.”

Translated, she means there exists a right for underage pregnant girls to have their babies slaughtered without their parents being notified. Let’s remember, girls as young as eight can become pregnant.

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Over the weekend, the Republican National Committee (RNC) announced its newest endeavor called the “RNC Pride Coalition.” The RNC is colluding with Log Cabin Republicans, the country’s largest “LGBTQ+,” allegedly Republican group, to get Republicans elected. Make no mistake, the RNC Pride Coalition will seek to get elected their ideological kind of Republican—the kind that believe marriage has no connection to sexual differentiation or reproduction, the kind that believe children have no right to a mother and a father, and the kind that believe celebration of homosexual acts and relationships is necessary for a healthy social order. Log Cabin Republicans and the RNC Pride Coalition believe that homosexual acts and relationships are worthy of pride. Such beliefs are neither conservative nor good for America.

The RNC has decided that sacrificing principle for power will build a better America. The RNC, under chairwoman Ronna McDaniel’s leadership, has calculated that the homosexual and cross-dressing communities are more politically valuable to the RNC than are stalwart conservatives who have been fighting for decades to make America a safe place where America’s families, children, and liberty can flourish.

While conservatives are awakening from their slumber, working tenaciously to get critical race theory, the “trans” ideology, and homosexual porn out of their schools, Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel is working tenaciously to curry favor with homosexual “Republicans.”

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If we learned anything from the recent midterm elections—and we should have learned a lot—it should be that the “social issues” are not the third rail of politics. The claim that it is the third rail is a manipulative and self-fulfilling lie told ad nauseum by RINOs who are so foolish they don’t understand that the social issues are essential for the health of any society.

The recent midterm elections and the bellicose responses of “progressives” should teach that conservatives won elections from coast to coast in part because they have been “leaning in” to the “social issues” rather than fleeing from them. And we should have learned from the responses of Leftists that their only defenses are calling names and lying.

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In his important new book Live Not by Lies, Rod Dreher explores the reasons so few Americans are willing to resist the pervasive and growing “soft totalitarianism” for which the left is responsible. Citing political philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt, Dreher establishes that all forms of totalitarianism share in common the goal of imposing an ideology, which entails supplanting or eradicating the influence of competing beliefs:

‘A totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers say it is.’

Dreher provides evidence that this totalitarian effort to impose an ideology that redefines reality is well underway here in America:

In our time, we do not have an all-powerful state forcing this [ideology] on us. This dictatorship is far more subtle. Under soft totalitarianism, the media, academia, corporate America, and other institutions are practicing Newspeak and compelling the rest of us to engage in doublethink every day. Men have periods. The woman standing in front of you is to be called “he.” Diversity and inclusion mean excluding those who object to ideological uniformity. Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result.

According to Dreher, soft totalitarianism differs from the form of totalitarianism that impelled and informed…

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“Peter” Fray-Witzer, a privileged white female student at uber-woke Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio claims to have been recently triggered big time by the presence of workmen in her dorm room who came to install a spanking new radiator so Fray-Witzer (birth name “Ava”) would be cozy in her segregated dorm throughout the cold Ohio winter.

The regressive Oberlin is deeply committed to “identity-based” segregation. Oberlin is so committed to segregation that it provides student housing segregated by race, ethnicity, and “gender identity.”

In an editorial published in the student newspaper, Fray-Witzer waxed aggrieved that she “had less than 24 hours to prepare for the arrival of the installation crew.”

She “was further perturbed by the ambiguous” period of time the installers would be in her room. Evidently, she expected to know precisely how long it would take for workers to install a new radiator. Good luck when she moves into the real world.

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Leftists used their favorite tactics for silencing those who won’t kowtow to their perverse, deceitful, and destructive sexuality ideology. When conservatives warned that allowing males in female private spaces puts girls and women at risk, leftists called them ugly names and mocked them. And now it’s been revealed that on May 28, 2021, a 14-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by a skirt-wearing boy who was allowed to use girls’ restrooms at Stone Bridge High School in Loudon County, Virginia. The administration then transferred the boy to another district school where he sexually assaulted another girl. He has now been charged with “two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio.”

The first victim’s father, Scott Smith, attended his first school board meeting ever on June 22, 2021, just 3.5 weeks after his daughter’s sexual assault. Many community members attended the meeting to discuss the board’s proposed policy of sexually integrating the private spaces of minor students and of compelling teachers to lie by using incorrect pronouns when referring to cross-sex impersonators. A woman who through her rainbow t-shirt identified herself as an “LGBTQ+” activist, quarreled with Smith including telling him she did not believe his daughter was raped by a skirt-wearing boy in the girls’ restroom. The police-intervened and Smith—like the Covington Catholic High School boys—was turned into a national villain by leftist activists who identify as “journalists” and no longer have the patience or integrity to investigate stories before mischaracterizing people.

I wonder how leftist fathers would react if their 15-year-old daughters had been sodomized in a girls’ bathroom at their “safe” schools and then had an activist tell them she doesn’t believe it happened.

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The great evil in America for over two centuries was slavery and its ugly aftermath. Too few Christians for too long stood passive as Satan attacked the humanity of African Americans. Too few had the courage to do what Wheaton College founder, pastor, and tenacious abolitionist Jonathan Blanchard did. Here is but one example:

During their trip from Cincinnati to Galesburg, in order to observe the Sabbath as a day of rest, the Blanchard family took lodgings in a hotel in slave territory. On that Sabbath morning, just before breakfast, out in the back yard of the hotel, a slave girl was unmercifully flogged, so severely that blood from wounds in her back fell to the ground around her. At the breakfast table some of the guests of the hotel were laughing and joking about the incident. Finally, Jonathan Blanchard could stand it no longer. He arose, and was about to leave the room. Then, realizing the meaning of retreat on his part, he turned and apologized for being too cowardly to testify against their actions. Directly facing those who made light of such barbarity, he said, “For every drop of slave blood that was shed, God will require white blood!”

Then came the Civil War.

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I was hoping not to wade into the gutter with the critics of Douglas Wilson, who in IFI’s view is one of the most important truth-tellers on the corrupt American scene. But the calumny hurled at Wilson is so manifestly unjust that we cannot remain on the curb any longer.

For those who don’t know Douglas Wilson, he is a faithful, wise Christian, a theologian, and pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho with the increasingly rare gift for foreseeing where intellectual trends are leading both the church and the culture and for fearlessly warning against these trends. He is a brilliant writer with a gift for incisive metaphor and biting satire, which he has employed to critique, among other things, toxic feminism, toxic un-masculinity, unbiblical egalitarianism, the failure of churches to apply biblical church discipline, and “pomosexuality” (i.e., post-modern sexuality, including “trans”-cultism).

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