Nothing opens your mind to new worlds and new possibilities better than a book. Stories can communicate ideas, themes, and lessons considerably better than a lecture does. Children love to act out the stories of their favorite characters, adopting their mannerisms and wishing to be them. You probably can think of a book that has impacted you deeply and maybe even encouraged you to change your behavior in some manner.

Stories are incredibly powerful, sometimes bringing about great change in a culture.

Throughout history, various groups and organizations have banned books for a myriad of reasons: they were deemed inappropriate or immoral, the ideas proliferated were considered dangerous or heretical, or a tyrant thought they would stir up unrest and opposition to his rule.

Book banning is not a good thing. Because of the innate sinfulness of humanity, banning one book opens the door for unjust people or groups to ban anything they choose.

Lately, so-called book banning has been forefront in the news; a story complicated by the narrative the media is spinning. In 2020, when everything shut down due to Covid, public schooling moved to Zoom, and parents could see what their children were being taught and the material they were assigned, including the books their kids were reading.

At some point during all of this, it was discovered that there are books in elementary through high school libraries that are highly pornographic. This is not an exaggeration. If you don’t believe me, watch this video posted by a concerned mother  (WARNING: graphic content).

Understandably, parents began forming groups to advocate for having more of a say in what their children are learning in public schools and began rightly contesting books such as Gender Queer, All Boys aren’t Blue, and Lawn Boy, reading them out loud at school board meetings, requesting that schools remove them from their libraries, and asking that they provide age-appropriate reading material only.

Now the media is attacking parents and parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty. The story is being framed to make it look like these parents are trying to ban books because they are bigots who don’t want their children exposed to “diverse” ideas. They’re comparing concerned parents to Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984 (which is ironic, since in 1984 it was Big Brother that was providing people with porn).

Without coming right out and saying it, they’re purporting that schools should have these books in their libraries precisely because parents don’t want their kids to read them. The idea seems to be, “What if those poor kids feel uncomfortable with who they are and need a place to express themselves and learn about every aspect of the LGBTQIA agenda without the involvement of their mean, strict parents?”

Not only is this a twisted spin on the facts, but it is a downright lie. Banning a book means that the book is banned. It’s illegal to buy, sell, read, or own, and anyone caught with it would face punishment. That isn’t what these parents are requesting. Asking that a book be removed from a school library because of inappropriate content doesn’t vilify the parent.

Similarly, we wouldn’t blame a parent for taking a phone away from their child who is doing things he or she isn’t supposed to with it. Children aren’t allowed to go to tattoo parlors or tanning salons, and we rate movies based on the content because there are things children (and people in general) should not see.

Requesting only age-appropriate content in public schools doesn’t constitute a ban.

Much of the reasoning behind the media’s spin of the story is because most, if not all, of the contested books are LGBTQIA+ related. Our culture is obsessed with self– personal autonomy, total unrestricted freedom, and the pursuit of making oneself happy. It’s a worldview that says, “Anything goes, but if you get in the way of my anything, you need to go.”

But freedom in this world isn’t unlimited. Free societies still have laws and legal consequences for breaking them because people do bad things. If those things were allowed to continue without repercussions, society would collapse. Insisting on having the freedom to gratify the desires of the flesh ends up in slavery to death and eternal destruction.

The backbone of true freedom is Biblical morality.

Some things absolutely should be illegal. In reality, the LGBTQIA+ movement has to do with a grotesque focus on sex. It’s openly targeting children, who, be they seven or seventeen, ought to be guarded against, not exposed to pornography. Adults shouldn’t be filling their minds with it either.

Stories have the power to change minds, for good or for evil. Requesting that a school provide only age-appropriate material is a good thing, and very different from book banning.

Using data primarily gathered through the public-education system, Big Brother and the collectivists running the government schools now know more about American children than their own parents do. The awesome powers offered by “Big Data” will blow your mind.

In fact, authorities have vacuumed up so much private information on America’s youth that, according to a U.S. Department of Education report, it’s now possible to predict the “future behavior and interests” of children. It also allows the government to manipulate their thoughts and attitudes like never before.

The data-gathering has become so intrusive and extreme that some critics have even referred to it as the “data-rape” of American children. And this is just the start.

From biometric data and private health care information to academic records, online browsing habits, and mental-health data, government schools and technocratic policymakers across the United States want it all—from “cradle to career” and beyond, as authorities often put it. Thanks to federal grants, they’re getting it, and sharing it.

Hundreds of data points on each child are now being collected and stored in databases accessible by state and federal authorities. Privacy laws and regulations prohibiting the creation of national databases with student information were ignored and pushed aside beginning during the Obama administration, and even earlier.

Through a byzantine combination of public schools, government agencies, social-media companies, crony contractors, testing companies, non-profit organizations, and more, there’s now more data collected on children than anyone could have imagined even just a few short years ago. Many times, the children do not even realize they’re giving their private data to Big Brother—forever.

The tip of the iceberg occasionally becomes visible. Right now, for example, there’s an ongoing lawsuit against the non-profit College Board, currently headed by Common Core architect David Coleman, for allegedly collecting and selling private student data to third parties without the consent of the children or their parents. According to the plaintiffs, numerous laws have been broken.

That is all a big deal, of course. And it’s wrong. But it pales in comparison to the dangers of what Big Government and Big Business are doing right now—and what they have planned for the future.

The Common Core national standards imposed on the United States by the Obama administration, covered in the most recent piece in this series, super-charged the government’s data-harvesting and data-mining operations. After that, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which Obama referred to as a “Christmas miracle,” took it even further.

But it has been going on for quite some time. Consider a 2012 “Issue Brief” titled “Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics.” In the report, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology dropped a bombshell regarding what all this data was going to be used for: Basically, the feds want to make predictions about your children.

In the report, authorities said that “online learning systems” allow the government to “capture streams of fine-grained learner behaviors.” These systems send to a database the “time-stamped student input and behaviors captured as students work within the system,” the document explained.

Authorities then combine that behavioral data with other external information sources, including sensitive personal data held by the school, the district, or the state, according to the report. Then, the information is put to use making predictions and shaping “interventions.”

“A predictive model combines demographic data (from an external student information system) and learning/behavior data from the student learning database to track a student’s progress and make predictions about his or her future behaviors or performance,” the report explains (emphasis added).

The data being collected can also allow the government to peer into the minds of students. “Big data captured from users’ online behaviors enables algorithms to infer the users’ knowledge, intentions, and interests and to create models for predicting future behavior and interest,” the report adds.

Using controversial federally funded “surveys” under the guise of “health,” public schools across the United States have been collecting some of the most intimate data imaginable: political views, religious beliefs, sexual behaviors, sensitive information on parents or the home, private medical information, and much more.

Among the creepiest elements of the data-gathering and data-mining machine is the ability it gives to peer into the innermost thoughts and feelings of students. With access to this data, and the computing power to process it all, government and those connected to it can become nightmarishly powerful—and they will, if nothing is done to stop it, as the people of China are discovering under the “social credit” system.

Consider a 2010 speech to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), also the subject of part 9 in this series, by then-U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. In it, the Chicago radical celebrated the rapidly expanding data-gathering colossus and the new powers it would unleash.

“More robust data systems and a new generation of assessments can assist teachers and principals to improve their practices and tailor their instruction in ways that were largely unthinkable in the past,” said Duncan, who regularly boasted about using schools to brainwash children with “sustainability” propaganda. “We have advanced data systems that we are constantly improving.”

In the decade since then, those “advanced data systems” have become ever more sophisticated, enabling governments to build unfathomable personal profiles on every public-school student in the United States. Even students in private schools and home schools are now in the cross-hairs of the data-mining machine.

Some of the technological tools that have already been used by the federal government in these areas have sparked grave privacy concerns. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Education released a report titled “Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century” that became a lightning rod for criticism.

Among other developments, the report included revelations about the sorts of technology being used in some federal programs to gather data on children. One of the tools, for example, was described as a “facial expression camera.” The report said this was used to “detect emotion” and “capture facial expressions,” with the data then processed through software and fed into databases.

Other tools described in the report, which has since been taken off the Education Department’s website, included a “posture analysis seat,” a “pressure mouse,” and a “wireless skin conductance sensor.” All of these existing technologies are used to monitor and collect “physiological response data” that can “examine student frustration.”

“Researchers are exploring how to gather complex affective data and generate meaningful and usable information to feed back to learners, teachers, researchers, and the technology itself,” the report explains, with “affective” data referring to students’ attitudes and feelings, rather than academic or educational abilities. “Connections to neuroscience are also beginning to emerge.”

More recently, a U.S. company called BrainCo developed a headband that measures and collects data on students’ “brainwaves.” BrainCo, which is part funded by Chinese state-owned companies, has already trialed the devices on 10,000 students in China. Back in 2017, the CEO talked of building the “world’s largest database,” which could be analyzed by artificial intelligence to better detect emotions. Some U.S. schools have reportedly tried the devices, too.

In 2017, the federal government funded a project to build a “friendly social robot” to collect highly sensitive psychological data on children. Known as “EMAR,” or Ecological Momentary Assessment Robot, the robot “gathers teen mental health data in a public high school setting,” the National Science Foundation said.

One of the major concerns surrounding all this intrusive data-gathering technology is that it’s being used by government schools and the education establishment to manipulate the thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of children. As the technology advances, it will allow bureaucrats and technocrats to do much more of this in the future, too.

Under new “Social and Emotional Learning” (SEL) programs, which are currently all the rage in educational circles, authorities set goals for various attitudes and values they want children to hold. By testing for these “affective” characteristics, the technology can help determine whether children hold the government-mandated attitudes. If not, the programs then help to develop “interventions” to get the desired attitude inculcated in the child.

As far back as 2016, Education Week revealed that, under the guise of providing “personalized learning experiences,” new technology was aiming at students’ “individual emotions, cognitive processes, ‘mindsets,’ and character and personality traits.” So-called “non-cognitive competencies” were also targets.

That same year, the U.S. Department of Education released a “National Education Technology Plan” peddling “assessments” that measure “non-cognitive competencies” including “attitudes that facilitate functioning well in school, work, and life.” How the feds would determine the correct “attitudes” for children to have was not specified.

The potential for abuse is self-evidently enormous. What if these tools get into the hands of evil-doers? What if they already are in the hands of evil-doers? Do Americans really want unelected bureaucrats at the far-left U.S. Department of Education—where 99.7 percent of 2016 donations to presidential campaigns went to Hillary Clinton—determining what attitudes and values children will hold on controversial issues such as homosexual marriage, immigration, and abortion?

When one realizes that the public education system was literally created by Utopian collectivists to fundamentally transform society, as this series has documented extensively since the first segment, the dangers are obvious and extraordinary.

Indeed, the architects and current leaders of the government-school machine have long been open about their desire to shift the United States away from a liberty-minded Christian society, and toward collectivism and humanism. With these powerful tools, resistance will become increasingly difficult, if not futile, for children held captive by the system.

Another major concern is that all of this data being gathered by schools is being fused with labor and career data. For years, authorities have been openly working on connecting the various “education” databases packed with information gathered on Americans by schools with that collected by other government organs.

Officials are hoping that this enormous amount of data, all brought together in one place, will help them do what previous attempts at central planning have always failed to do: accurately understand the needs of the economy, and then adjust production, employment, consumption, training, and education accordingly.

Then, imagine combining all of that with emerging developments such as artificial intelligence and super computers with unprecedented capabilities, plus all of the data being gathered on Americans by agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, the National Security Agency, and more. Big Brother will know everything about everyone, literally from “the cradle,” as the Utopians themselves often say.

It’s a recipe for disaster—or even a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions.

Around the world, the U.N. is also leaning heavily on governments to start collecting, sharing, analyzing, using, and weaponizing all sorts of data on children via schools. And more than a few foreign governments—communist China and certain Western European governments, among others—have been more than happy to jump on the bandwagon.

Humanity must resist. Americans, in particular, have the means to effectively resist, if only they can find the will.

Privacy is extremely important to a free society. That’s why America’s Founding Fathers enshrined it in the U.S. Constitution. Without privacy, liberty cannot exist. And without liberty, prosperity and other blessings enjoyed by the people of the United States will end as well.

Americans must demand an end to the Orwellian data-gathering apparatus, and protect their children from it, before it’s too late.

This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

As I have long argued, the greatest threat posed to our First Amendment assembly, speech, and religious free exercise protections comes from the homosexual community and the “trans” cult. Already state laws and judicial decisions have been eroding those protections, and last Thursday, the most dangerous threat yet emerged in Congress when U.S. Representative David Cicilline (D-RI) re-introduced the deceitfully titled “Equality Act,” which explicitly neuters religious protections when religious beliefs conflict with disordered sexual desires.

The Equality Act (H.R. 5) would add “sexual orientation” (i.e., homosexuality) and “gender identity” (i.e., cross-sex impersonation) to the current list of bases on which discrimination is prohibited in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Doing so is a means of abrogating 1. the right of free people to express moral judgments about volitional acts, 2. the right of people of faith to exercise their religion freely with regard to beliefs on sexuality, and 3. the right to recognize the scientific reality of sex differences in those places where sex differences matter most.

When leftists say that the Equality Act will protect “LGBTQ” persons from discrimination, they mean the Equality Act will prohibit conservative people from making decisions in accordance with their beliefs—including religious beliefs—about marriage, volitional sexual acts, and cross-sex impersonation. In other words, if the Equality Act passes, a new protected class based on or constituted by disordered subjective sexual feelings will be created and our first freedom will be abrogated.

The Equality Act, which has 223 co-sponsors—all Democrats—is supposed to be voted on this week after which it will move to the U.S. Senate. President Biden is urging Congress to pass it with all due haste, so he—the self-identifying Catholic—can sign into law the bill that will undermine religious protections for Catholics and Protestants.

The Equality Act makes clear the sweeping nature of the cultural changes leftists seek to impose via federal legislation.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer … people commonly experience discrimination in securing access to public accommodations—including … senior centers … health care facilities, shelters …  youth service providers including adoption and foster care providers. … Forms of discrimination include the exclusion and denial of entry, unequal or unfair treatment. … (with respect to gender identity) an individual shall not be denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room, and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual’s gender identity.

If this legislation passes, no senior center, health care facility, shelter, or adoption agency that partners with the federal government or receives federal money will be permitted to treat biological men who pretend to be women as men.

Shelters, senior centers, and hospitals with sex-segregated restrooms, showers, or sleeping quarters will be forced to sexually integrate those private spaces.

Catholic hospitals will be forced to perform surgical mutilations on men and women who seek to pass as the sex they are not.

Christian adoption and foster care providers will be forced to place infants, children, and teens in the homes of homosexuals and cross-sex impersonators.

Teachers in government schools will be forced to facilitate delusional “trans”-cultic beliefs and practices. Administrators, faculty, and staff will be required by law to use incorrect pronouns, which constitutes bearing false witness. And locker room supervisors will be forced to oversee students of the opposite sex undressing.

The Equality Act poses some as of yet unacknowledged ideological and pragmatic problems for Democrats. For example, on the same day Cicilline reintroduced the Equality Act, U.S. Representative Grace Meng (D-NY) reintroduced her bill that seeks to protect girls and women in refugee camp bathrooms. Meng explained,

Refugee camps should be safe havens for those who have been forced to flee their countries and that includes secure facilities for restrooms. … But unfortunately, many bathrooms in refugee camps do not provide appropriate safety protections. Many refugee camps lack adequate access to such facilities and often times the restrooms are mixed-sex, public, and without locks. … These conditions create a lack of privacy and dignity and make women and girls afraid to use the restrooms, fearing that they may be assaulted and subjected to violence while using the bathroom. These types of conditions are unacceptable. Nobody should have their safety jeopardized in order care for their most basic hygiene needs. My bill would finally combat this problem. (emphasis added)

David Cicilline is a co-sponsor of Meng’s bill, which means that Cicilline is the co-sponsor of a bill that prohibits mixed-sex bathrooms in federal refugee camps and the sponsor of a bill that mandates mixed-sex bathrooms in all federally funded facilities.

Oh, what tangled webs …

The Equality Act also includes the following:

A single instance of discrimination may have more than one basis. For example, discrimination against a married same-sex couple could be based on the sex stereotype that marriage should only be between heterosexual couples, the sexual orientation of the two individuals in the couple, or both.

Leftists define the belief that marriage is the union of two people of opposite sexes as a discriminatory “sex stereotype,” and they want to legally prohibit every American from acting in accordance with that belief. Of course, the leftist opinion that the cross-cultural and historical understanding of marriage is a discriminatory sex stereotype is neither an objective fact nor true. It is an ideological assumption.

As an end run around the First Amendment’s religious protection, the anti-constitutional, anti-liberty, anti-Christian, perversity-supremacy law—misnamed the Equality Act—states,

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 … shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under, a covered title, or provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement of a covered title.

Anticipating appeals to equality for people of faith, who are currently protected by both the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, the tyrants behind the Religious Bigotry Act Equality Act made sure that people of faith lose.

As I wrote two years ago,

The Equality Act would require that federal law recognize disordered subjective feelings and deviant behaviors as protected characteristics. Federal law would absurdly recognize homoeroticism and cross-sex masquerading as conditions that must be treated like race and biological sex, which are objective, 100 percent heritable conditions that are in all cases immutable, and carry no behavioral implications.

Once the law is enjoined to protect two groups based on their subjective sexual feelings and volitional sexual behaviors, we open a Pandora’s Box of evils that will inevitably result in conflicts between the new legal rights of those who embrace sexual deviance as “identity” and 1. the First Amendment rights of those who reject sexual deviance, 2. the moral right of businesses to require restrooms, locker rooms, and showers to correspond to biological sex, 3. the right of businesses to fire or refuse to hire a person who chooses to masquerade as the opposite sex, and 4. the right of public schools to fire or to refuse to hire a person who chooses to impersonate the opposite sex.

If the Equality Act passes, all it will take for other groups to have their sexual peccadillos deemed “sexual orientations,” is to organize and wait for the culture to do its dirty work.

Academia will jump aboard first, squawking in newly invented jargon and intellectual-ese about identity, authenticity, equity, tolerance, diversity, bigotry, hatred, and phobias.

Then the “arts,” will join in writing plays, novels, Hollywood scripts, and heartstring-pulling songs affirming all sorts of perverse sexual fetishes as authentic “identities.”

Next our polluted and politicized professional mental health and medical communities will manufacture “social science” studies to show how much happier polyamorists are when they are free to live in poly-pods without shaming judgments; and that brothers in love should be permitted to marry (after all, love is love); and that adults who identify as babies should be free to wear onesies to work in order to be their authentic selves, after which all of society will be  forced to ask our friends, neighbors, co-workers, and students what their preferred age is.

Christians will be legally prohibited from acting on their moral judgments about sexual perversion, and dissenters will be “othered,” cancelled, and shamed. Soon Christian-shaming will be the only shaming permitted in this brave new world where shame is unmoored from morality.

Americans are a tolerant and patient people, but their capacity for tolerating unjust oppression and suppression of their most fundamental rights is not unlimited. I suspect Pelosi, Schumer et al. realize that. I suspect they know that the radical anti-American, anti-liberty, anti-Constitution, anti-Christianity, Big Brother-esque agenda they have planned for Americans in the next four years may spark a rebellion. Hence the razor-topped wall surrounding the “people’s” house.

But, razor-topped barbed wire cannot keep standing a house divided against itself.

Take ACTION: (UPDATED) Click HERE to send a message to your U.S. Representative our U.S. Senators to urge him/her them to oppose the federal Equality Act (H.R. 5) which seeks to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include protections for an individual’s perceived sex, “sexual orientation,” or “gender identity.” If you know the name of your local official, you can also call the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask the operator to connect you with his/her office to leave a message.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/audioThe-Equality-Act-Will-Lay-Waste-to-This-Already-Divided-House_01.mp3

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois!

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.

Illinois Democrats are hell-bent on passing a new law—the REACH Act (HB 1736 and SB 647)—that will require every school-age child in Illinois public schools to be introduced to homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation through mandatory “comprehensive sex ed.” To be clear, that’s every child from kindergarten on up and the indoctrination will take place every school year, increasing in detail each year. This will be in addition to all the other pro-“LGBTQ” material in which leftists are drowning children via the proposed “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards”; the existing “LGBT” school indoctrination law; the homosexuality- affirming “anti-bullying” law passed in 2010; and the novels, plays, movies, essays, and articles teachers are already choosing to teach.

Every year the amount of time and number of contexts in which positive images of and ideas about homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation—topics that no adult other than parents should introduce to children or teens—grows. Leftists have been planting a dark, impenetrable forest while self-neutering conservatives fret about the trash tree they just bumped into and left standing. Can conservatives not yet see the forest?

Leftists have their gimlet eyes always focused on the big picture as they play the long game to rule the country. And they know the big picture depends on shaping the hearts and minds of children. While conservatives dismiss the “little” offenses and fume briefly about the big offenses against decency, morality, and truth, leftists continue their march through every institution that shapes culture, including our schools which create our future culture-makers—or as we learned in 2020, our culture-destroyers.

Illinois made the national press recently for the youth mind-grab called the “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” that require teacher-training/professional licensure programs, all in-house professional development, and all classrooms to be infused with leftist beliefs about race, homosexuality, and cross-sex impersonation. That amendment will be decided in just a few days by a rules committee in Springfield composed of twelve lawmakers and controlled by leftists.

Meanwhile, here comes the REACH Act, which will enable leftists to reach deeper into the hearts and minds of impressionable children to shape their feelings and beliefs about sexuality under the viperish guise of protecting children.

IFI warned parents about this bill when it was first introduced last year. If passed, this legislation will require leftist-created “comprehensive” sexuality indoctrination to start in kindergarten. Currently, sex education is not required in Illinois, but if it is offered, the only type of curriculum that can be used is leftist “comprehensive” sex ed. That’s thanks to a 2013 law. More on that shortly.

Here are some morsels from the REACH Act (highlighted in yellow):

• “It is the intent of the General Assembly that comprehensive sex ed shall [must]… promote awareness and healthy attitudes about gender identity, gender expression” and “sexual orientation … and must be available to students in kindergarten through 12th grade.”

Since when did it become the job of public school teachers to promote “awareness” of homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation? When did it become their job to promote “healthy attitudes” about homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation? Who decides what constitutes a “healthy attitude” toward these phenomena, and on what criteria are such judgments made?

• “Comprehensive sex ed in kindergarten through second grade shall [must] include … instruction on the following topics: human anatomy … gender roles … [and] varying family structures.”

Discussing human sexual anatomy in co-ed K-12 classes is yet one more way for our leftists to dissolve feelings of modesty in young children just as those feelings are beginning to develop. Leftists view that as a good thing. Discussions of “gender roles” and of “varying family structures” are ways of introducing little ones to “trans”-cultic beliefs and homosexuality.

• “Comprehensive sex ed in the third through 5th grades shall [must] include information about diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions. … and an examination of the harm caused by gender-role stereotypes.”

No requirement that all competing views of “sexual orientation” be included or that criticism of “gender theory” be included.

No requirement that materials be presented that challenge the idea that all “gender-role stereotypes” are socially constructed and imposed.

No requirement that materials be presented that espouse the idea that “gender-role stereotypes” emerge organically from a recognition of sexual differentiation.

No requirement that materials be presented that discuss the possible ways “gender-role stereotypes” may serve a healthy cultural function.

No requirement that materials be included that argue that leftist gender theory is socially constructed and is being imposed on children with little to no public debate.

No requirement that materials be included that explain the serious health risks of chemical and surgical “treatments” to facilitate cross-sex impersonation.

No requirement that materials be presented on the social contagion that afflicts mostly adolescent girls called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.

No requirement that materials on desistance and detransitioning be presented.

• “[C]omprehensive sex ed must include … Discussion about … sexting” with 8-10-year-olds.

Leftists may be unaware of the many 8-10-year-olds who have never heard of sexting, never heard of porn, and don’t have cell phones. In those many cases, the passage of this law would mean the government would be introducing these young children to sexting. The innocence of their children that, at great effort and vigilance, parents have been able to preserve in the midst of this sex-saturated and defiling culture, the government would steal.

• Comprehensive sex ed “may not use stigmatizing or shame-based instructional tools or stigmatize parenting or sexually active youth,” “may not employ gender stereotypes” [you know, like saying only girls menstruate or only boys have penises], and “may not teach or promote any religious doctrine.”

In other words, schools must express only one judgment on homosexual behavior, cross-sex identification, and same-sex parenting: approval. So, what happens when the next sexual lobby gets their sexual identity added to the lawbooks? What happens when polyamorists are successful in having “polyamory” included in law as a “sexual orientation” as they already seek to do?

Enquiring minds wonder why this bill does not include these words: “Comprehensive sex ed shall not use stigmatizing or shame-based instructional tools to stigmatize religiously based parenting and shall not implicitly or explicitly teach or promote views critical of religiously based beliefs on the nature and morality of homosexuality or cross-sex identification.”

This bill follows the aforementioned comprehensive sex ed law passed in 2013. That bill required that any school that has a sex ed curricula in any grade must use only comprehensive sex ed—no abstinence-based sex ed. The bill’s sponsors argued at the time that the law was needed to reduce the number of STIs and unintended pregnancies among minors but then provided zero research proving that comprehensive sex ed achieves those goals better than abstinence-based curricula. And no Republican demanded such research.

The one good thing in the 2013 comprehensive sex ed law was that schools were left free not to offer any sex ed at all. That was then. This is now. The wolves waited for seven years, and then they pounced. Those little ones are so tender and tasty.

Last week, a video went viral of a justifiably enraged father taking a school board to task for the way his district was mishandling the education of children during the pandemic. Why haven’t there been an army of enraged fathers and mothers in Illinois taking school boards, administrations, and lawmakers to task for promoting evil ideas to their children? Why haven’t pastors and priests told parents that training their children up in the way they should go must never include even one positive teaching about homosexuality or cross-sex impersonation? Why haven’t churches made it possible for their members to remove their children from the ideological cesspools that self-identify as schools? Why are Christian teachers calling boys by female pronouns or saying nothing to oppose the sexual integration of children’s private spaces?

This is how leftists work:

Slowly they come, step by step, prepared for the wailing of conservatives, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Leftists bide their time, knowing the annoying sound and fury will shortly abate. Exhausted, conservatives will go home, abandoning all that messy, unpleasant opposition to the culture-unmaking of leftists. Conservatives won’t organize, won’t persevere, and won’t sacrifice. And the ones who do fight the evil-doers are alone and isolated because the masses of conservatives don’t want to do the hard work of culture-making.

They don’t want to say or do anything too public–anything that may affect their reputation in the neighborhood, their careers, or their children’s GPA. Even if they have the time and money to educate their children outside of government schools, they don’t want the hassle or expense. They don’t want to sacrifice those fantastic athletic and arts opportunities public schools offer. And they certainly don’t want to turn down a Big Ten or Ivy education for their children even if they—the parents—are feeding the very beasts who are destroying their children and freedom for people of faith in America.

There is no tiny sliver of the hearts, souls, and minds of Illinois school children that presumptuous Illinois lawmakers will allow to remain untouched by corrosive leftist beliefs on sexuality. And there is no child that presumptuous Illinois lawmakers view as too young to be exposed to those corrosive beliefs. Wail all you want, my conservative friends. Big Brother’s minions are patient. They’ll wait for the wailing to cease. They see in the distance a glorious time when wailing will be illegal.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your state lawmakers to ask them to vote against the REACH Act (HB 1736 and SB 647). This radical sex education bill is heartily endorsed by Planned Parenthood of Illinois and by Illinois’ premiere “LBGT” activist organization, Equality Illinois, which should tell you everything you need to know about it.

Impressionable students in public schools should not be exposed to body- and soul-destroying messages that promote leftist beliefs about sexuality.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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Good job, David French, Ed Stetzer, Christianity Today, Lincoln Project, and other assorted Never-Trumpers. The senile, morally corrupt President-Elect of the once great United States of America just nominated a delusional man with a cross-dressing fetish to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Now decent people won’t be able to teach their young children about our president’s cabinet. With Dr. Richard “Rachel” Devine‘s appointment will come Big Brother’s prohibition of “misgendering” Devine. In other words, Big Brother and his minions will command all Americans to mis-sex the burly Dr. Devine. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.

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Chinese Translation – 中文翻译

No matter what you think of Trump’s character or rhetoric (I’ve never been a fan of either), his presidency accomplished many great things for America, perhaps chief among them getting the left—especially Big Tech—to expose its purulent underbelly. The real power today rests in the delicate fingers of the tech Oligarchs sitting behind their screens moving walls to trap Americans in their prison-like mazes equipped with virtual solitary confinement cells and freedom-crushing language rules euphemistically called “community standards” and “policies.” Trump was the immovable force that stood for a brief moment in their way.

The tyrannical nature of leftists has emerged more fully following the indefensible and shocking 90-minute assault on the Capitol. The fury of those robbed of faith and family by leftist ideologies turned from the theft and arson of businesses and police precincts—targets Dems couldn’t have cared less about—to the Capitol. The monsters who were created and abandoned have turned on some of their Frankensteinian creators, that is Congressmen and women.

Yes, leftist ideologies create lawless anarchists on both the left and right. Violence is the business of fatherless, faithless, anchorless young men. Always has been, always will be.

After five months of lawless leftist anarchy during which CNN, AOC, and scores of other leftists defended and egged on alienated leftist anarchists who attacked symbols of government, law, and order, alienated far-right anarchists decided to attack a symbol of government, law, and order too.

Of course, Congress hasn’t worked alone on the pernicious project to destroy humans from conception to unnatural death. Leftists and RINOs in Congress colluded with among others, leftist academics, Hollywood, Christian apostates and heretics within the church, propagandists who self-identify as “journalists,” and, of course, Big Tech.

Big Techies have been colluding during a long game of 3D chess while Republicans have been in a corner playing tiddlywinks and occasionally wondering where their winkies disappeared to. (They disappeared long ago during the Great Gelding of Republicans in year … oh, I can’t remember. It was so long ago.)

And now we’re on the verge of the Great Purge of conservatives from society.

Those who had eyes to see discerned the oppression goose-stepping toward the center in stocking feet. Those with 20/5 vision tried to warn the flocks. They’re still trying to warn them. But the tyrants are now in our midst, and they’re replacing noise-cancelling socks with speech-cancelling jackboots. The center is not holding.

First Twitter suspended the accounts of President Trump, General Michael Flynn, and Sidney Powell. The collaborators at Google, Apple, and Facebook joined in the Purge.

Next came Amazon banning Parler—the up and coming Twitter competitor—from its web-hosting service. Apparently Jack Dorsey held his breath and stomped his feet at the mere thought of competition. Once servers refuse to host social media platforms like Parler, those platforms are toast. This is Big Brother on steroids.

And then there’s CNN business “reporter” Oliver Darcy who wrote this on Friday:

[I]t is time TV carriers face questions for lending their platforms to dishonest companies that profit off of disinformation and conspiracy theories. After all, it was the very lies that Fox, Newsmax, and OAN spread that helped prime President Trump’s supporters into not believing the truth.

This from the “news” organization that refused to ask Biden any hard questions before the election and that censored news stories in order to shovel Biden, the malleable and dim marionette, into the seat of power.

Even a Democrat lawmaker got into the rollicking censorship fun. New Jersey assemblyman Paul Moriarty (distant relative perhaps of Professor James Moriarty, arch-nemesis of Sherlock Holmes?) texted a Comcast executive with this subtle message:

Fox and Newsmax, both delivered to my home by your company, are complicit. What are you going to do??? You feed this garbage, lies and all.

Some conservatives have drawn a line in the virtual sand, saying they refuse to be forced off Facebook. They don’t see that the Tech Oligarchs—now including Bezos-the-Bezillionaire—are not trying to force them off. Quite the contrary. The Oligarchs and Overlords are trying to keep conservatives trapped in their virtual prisons. They’re trying to prevent conservatives from leaving by cutting off all other means of communicating ideas in the public square or to friends.

If you want to communicate far and wide with friends old and new, you will be able to do it only on platforms created by the Oligarchs and Overlords and only within the speech parameters they create and impose—on their “neutral platforms.” The Tech Oligarchs don’t want us to leave their fiefdoms. They want us to stay and remain under their sclerotic poisoned thumbs.

It’s not just conservatives who are concerned about tech tyranny. Kate Ruane, attorney for the ACLU, issued a statement via Twitter last Friday saying,

[I]t should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions.

And Kevin Roose, technology columnist for the New York Times echoes the worries of many on both sides of the political aisle—but mainly on the right—about the power of social media wielded with no accountability and no transparency:

Above all, Mr. Trump’s muzzling provides a clarifying lesson in where power resides in our digital society — not just in the precedent of law or the checks and balances of government, but in the ability to deny access to the platforms that shape our public discourse. Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Zuckerberg’s names have never appeared on a ballot. But they have a kind of authority that no elected official on earth can claim.

While leftists have spent four years calling Trump a Nazi, tyrant and dictator, did he ever try to do what leftists are doing now? Has Trump or any other Republican ever attempted to compel or censor speech?

And this is what Never-Trumpers and their small-minded obsession with Trump’s pugilistic rhetoric have brought to our doorsteps. Never-Trumpers with their beady little myopic eyes still can’t see that without Trump’s pugilism, leftists would not yet have revealed their game plan, because unlike Trump, leftists, like the unctuous Obama and arrogant Oligarchs in charge of Big Tech—which is to say, our lives—are more practiced at the art of political deception.

Leftists and RINOs scorn the idea that drove thousands of law-abiding non-insurrectionists to Washington D.C., which is that the election was stolen. Curiously, those same scorners keep their gimlet eyes and forked tongues focused on the Kraken, never acknowledging other concerns of non-insurrectionists like, for example, what liberal Democrat and Biden-voter  senior research psychologist at the  American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology Robert Epstein—a Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden—said in Senate Judiciary Sub-Committee hearing on the Constitution in July 2019:

Google presents a serious threat to democracy and human autonomy. … Data I’ve collected since 2016 show that Google displays content to the American public that is biased in favor of one political party—a party I happen to like, but that’s irrelevant. No private company should have either the right or the power to manipulate large populations without their knowledge. … [D]emocracy as originally conceived cannot survive Big Tech as currently empowered.

Epstein’s earlier research showed that millions of votes were shifted to Hillary in 2016, and post 2020-election research showed that millions were shifted to Biden by Google’s tricksy algorithms.

They’re also ignoring what liberal Democrat Senator Ron Wyden said in Feb. 2020 and which sounds a lot like what conservative non-insurrectionists are being pilloried by leftists for saying:

I fear the 2020 election will make 2016 look like small potatoes. The list of threats and vulnerabilities is enough to give you a migraine.

There were the ES&S voting machines that for years came with preinstalled remote access software.

There’s the fact that Russia hacked an election vendor called VR Systems in the summer of 2016.

VR systems machines in North Carolina malfunctioned on Election Day that year, and one polling place had to shut down for hours. It took two and a half years before the Department of Homeland Security investigated what happened.

Right now, many election officials across the country are buying election systems they believe are high-tech, but they’re vulnerable to hacking and out-of-date the moment they come out of the box.

There is the spread of mobile voting apps like Voatz that have never been vetted by top security experts.

There’s a reason cybersecurity experts have been sounding the alarm for years, warning that putting computers between a voter and their ballot is a recipe for disaster.

What happens when the “glitch” changes a candidate’s vote totals by just 2 or 5 percent, instead of 50 percent? What happens when a glitch shuts down machines in some precincts and not others, disenfranchising voters and skewing election results?

Five states still exclusively use hackable, paperless voting machines, and nine other states still use paperless machines in some counties.

The problems are daunting … but the solutions are clear.

My bill, the PAVE Act, mandates the three key priorities that experts most universally recommended—paper ballots, routine, post-election risk-limiting audits, and federal cybersecurity standards for election systems.

… Senator Klobuchar introduced the Senate version of the SAFE Act, which I’m proud to co-sponsor. The SAFE Act has all three key elements recommended by our nation’s top cybersecurity experts: paper ballots, security standards and post-election audits, as well as the funding necessary to make sure states can live up to the new standards.

There is another obstacle to the Oligarchs’ domination of infinity and beyond. It is Senator Josh Hawley, virtually the only Congressman to take on Big Tech by calling for social media platforms to lose Section 230 protections from liability. Section 230 protections apply to “neutral platforms” which Twitter and Facebook with all their censoring, de-platforming, and slammer-tossing clearly are not.

So, the whipsmart and courageous Josh Hawley had to be taken out by the delicate-fingered. His effort to demonstrate that Pennsylvania’s illegal and unconstitutional extension of the voting deadline matters provided just the opportunity the slimy Tech Oligarchs, Dems, and RINOs needed to do just that.

The problem for the delicate-fingered and their congressional collaborators was Hawley’s objections alone would not have been sufficient. The Oligarchs, conscience-free Dems, and RINOs needed something more.

And then the anarchists gave them the crisis they needed. Flying to their virtual barns, the Oligarchs and their collaborators hauled out their waiting pitchforks, tar, and feathers. Sparks flying from their fingertips, they demanded Hawley resign, accusing him of contributing to an insurrection. Then more gelded Republicans came creeping out of their dark corners squeaking in their high castrated voices that they would no longer support Hawley’s effort.

Somehow the well-respected and reasonable journalist Byron York didn’t notice how crazy the idea that Pennsylvania violated the Constitution was. In a piece titled “The Election Lawsuit Trump Should Win,” York wrote:

The court fight over Pennsylvania’s election rules … involves a fundamental issue that is important to all 50 states. … putting aside the specifics of the Pennsylvania situation, the matter concerns a hugely important principle, which is the constitutional authority of state legislatures to make election law for their states.

York’s essay is an important read for anyone who may not know the details of the Pennsylvania mess.

Not even Trump is guilty of “incitement to insurrection,” let alone Hawley. In an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, attorney Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, known during his years as a D.C. prosecutor as “protestor prosecutor,” writes that “The president didn’t mention violence on Wednesday, much less provoke or incite it.”

All tyrants use crises to expand powers that are never relinquished. They inflame public fears about threats to their safety from disease, from foreign enemies, or from dangers lurking in their midst. They are skilled at fomenting social division, imposing censorship, and disseminating propaganda to acquire more control. What’s next? Facial recognition cameras everywhere? Then a social credit system like China has?

There’s something rotten in the Upside Down ruled by the Oligarchs and administered by their algorithmically determined minions who control the speech by which ideas are disseminated. Somewhere along the life journeys of the Oligarchs, they lost sight of the meaning of the First Amendment, which was intended to protect unpopular speech—not just the speech leftists like. Who knows, maybe one day the only way conservatives will be able to communicate is via underground newspapers. So, hold on to those archaic printing presses, my friends. I think we’re gonna need ‘em.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

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On August 20, 2018, in an article on foolish public school administrators and board members who are permitting co-ed restrooms, I referred to a recently published study by Dr. Lisa Littman, physician and associate professor of the practice of behavioral sciences at radical Ivy League Brown University. Her study is on “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD) among mostly female “adolescent and young adult” (AYA) children, a relatively new phenomenon discussed by concerned parents in online forums. Dr. Littman describes this phenomenon and urges further study:

In recent years, a number of parents have been reporting in online discussion groups… that their adolescent and young adult (AYA) children, who have had no histories of childhood gender identity issues, experienced a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. Parents have described clusters of gender dysphoria outbreaks occurring in pre-existing friend groups with multiple or even all members of a friend group becoming gender dysphoric and transgender-identified in a pattern that seems statistically unlikely based on previous research. Parents describe a process of immersion in social media, such as “binge-watching” Youtube transition videos and excessive use of Tumblr, immediately preceding their child becoming gender dysphoric. These descriptions… raise the question of whether social influences may be contributing to or even driving these occurrences of gender dysphoria in some populations of adolescents and young adults. 

On August 22, 2018, Brown University crossed the Leftist line and published a news story about Dr. Littman’s study and hoo boy did Brown feel the wrath of men in dresses with flowing tresses and bearded women in dungarees. Five days later, Brown took down the offending article and invented a rationalization to mask their censorship. First, they claimed concern about Littman’s study design:

In light of questions raised about research design and data collection related to the study on “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” the University determined that removing the article from news distribution is the most responsible course of action.

As anyone who pays attention to studies related to homosexuality and gender dysphoria knows, “progressives” are much fussier about research design in studies whose conclusions they don’t like than they are about studies whose conclusions they do like. The criteria they use to evaluate the soundness of studies whose conclusions they favor—like the infamous study by Simon LeVay of a tiny part of the hypothalamus of 35 men, or the infamous “lesbian study,” or the newest poorly designed study on homosexual parents out of Italy—barely exist. But when it comes to better-designed studies whose conclusions they don’t like, like University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus’ study, the criteria are impossibly stringent.

Even as “LGBTQQAP” activists have touted these deeply flawed studies everywhere for years, how often have Leftist academicians criticized them for convenience sampling, confirmation bias, small sample size, non-replicated conclusions, and self-reported responses?

Brown’s statement also included a risible and embarrassing attempt to feign commitment to free inquiry:

The University and School have always affirmed the importance of academic freedom and the value of rigorous debate informed by research. The merits of all research should be debated vigorously, because that is the process by which knowledge ultimately advances, often through tentative findings that are often overridden or corrected in subsequent higher quality research. The spirit of free inquiry and scholarly debate is central to academic excellence. 

But their de facto apology to Big Brother (who now identifies as Big Sister and uses the pronoun “ze”) exposed what’s really going on and contravenes their claim to be committed to “academic freedom” and “rigorous debate”:

At the same time, we believe firmly that it is also incumbent on public health researchers to listen to multiple perspectives…. This process includes acknowledging and considering the perspectives of those who criticize our research methods and conclusions…. There is an added obligation for vigilance in research design and analysis any time there are implications for the health of the communities at the center of research and study.

The School’s commitment to studying and supporting the health and well-being of sexual and gender minority populations is unwavering. Our faculty and students are on the cutting edge of research on transgender populations domestically and globally. The commitment of the School to diversity and inclusion is central to our mission, and we pride ourselves on building a community that fully recognizes and affirms the full diversity of gender and sexual identity in its members. These commitments are an unshakable part of our core values as a community. (emphasis added)

If I may be so presumptuous as to translate sophistry into plain English, Brown is saying that the feelings of “trans”-activists trump all other considerations. No matter how well a study is designed and executed, if trannies don’t like the findings, “progressive” universities will not draw attention to it even if the study is conducted by their own faculty.

How could the health of “trans”-identifying persons be put at risk by studying whether there may be environmental causes for feelings of bodily alienation, the examination of which may result in the dissipation of gender dysphoria without social “transitioning,” surgery, or lifelong cross-sex hormone-doping?

To fully grasp how troubling this censorship effort is, it’s important to know a bit about what Littman’s study found:

The description of cluster outbreaks of gender dysphoria occurring in pre-existing groups of friends and increased exposure to social media/internet preceding a child’s announcement of a transgender identity raises the possibility of social and peer contagion. Social contagion is the spread of affect or behaviors through a population. Peer contagion, in particular, is the process where an individual and peer mutually influence each other in a way that promotes emotions and behaviors that can potentially undermine their own development or harm others. Peer contagion has been associated with depressive symptoms, disordered eating, aggression, bullying, and drug use.

…

It is plausible that online content may encourage vulnerable individuals to believe that nonspecific symptoms and vague feelings should be interpreted as gender dysphoria stemming from a transgender condition. Recently, leading international academic and clinical commentators have raised the question about the role of social media and online content in the development of gender dysphoria. Concern has been raised that adolescents may come to believe that transition is the only solution to their individual situations, that exposure to internet content that is uncritically positive about transition may intensify these beliefs, and that those teens may pressure doctors for immediate medical treatment.

According to Littman, parents report that their children “had many comorbidities and vulnerabilities predating the onset of their gender dysphoria, including psychiatric disorders, neurodevelopmental disabilities, trauma, non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), and difficulties coping with strong or negative emotions.” Here are three of the case studies Littman summarizes to illustrate some possible causes of ROGD, including social contagion and trauma:

• A 12-year-old natal female was bullied specifically for going through early puberty and the responding parent wrote “as a result she said she felt fat and hated her breasts.” She learned online that hating your breasts is a sign of being transgender. She edited her diary (by crossing out existing text and writing in new text) to make it appear that she has always felt that she is transgender.

• A 14-year-old natal female and three of her natal female friends were taking group lessons together with a very popular coach. The coach came out as transgender, and, within one year, all four students announced they were also transgender.

• A natal female was traumatized by a rape when she was 16 years of age. Before the rape, she was described as a happy girl; after the rape, she became withdrawn and fearful. Several months after the rape, she announced that she was transgender and told her parents that she needed to transition.

This effort to quash dissemination of the study exposes again the hypocrisy of “progressives.” Remember the oft-recited argument for all sorts of policies, practices, and laws, “If we could save one life…” Well, don’t expect sexual anarchists to apply it consistently. If one or one hundred teens could be spared chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation by examining reasons other than body misplacement for feelings of bodily dissatisfaction, don’t expect the “trans” community to support it. No sireee, their doctrinaire dogma must be defended at all costs, even the cost of children’s bodily integrity and psychological health, and academic freedom.

All of America’s essential and historically most treasured principles, like speech rights, association rights, religious liberty, and sound pedagogy, are being devoured and vomited out by sexual deviants with inordinate amounts of cultural power, and most conservatives do exactly what Brown University did: We hold their barf bag.

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A National Review article warns of a troubling new collaboration between the European Union (EU)and social media sites including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Microsoft to police and censor the Internet.

In a document with Orwellian overtones titled “Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online,” the EU announces this unholy alliance. While offering a token commitment to free speech,  assuring protection of even ideas “that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population,” the dominant commitment is to suppressing “hate speech.”

This document makes clear that part of the motivation for global censorship is combatting the use of the Internet to advance terrorism, which is certainly a worthy goal. Unfortunately, the presumptuous “progressive” project to impose leftist moral and political views on the entire world corrupts even worthy goals.

For clarification of what constitutes “illegal hate speech,” this new alliance (henceforth referred to as Big Brother) directs readers to a document titled “Acts Adopted Under Title VI of the EU Treaty” which states that “‘Hatred’ should be understood as referring to hatred based on race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin.’” “Hatred should be understood as hatred”? Say what?

The initial structure of the sentence suggests a definition of “hatred” is forthcoming, but instead what follows is a list of conditions (i.e., “race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin”) toward which rhetorical hatred may not be expressed.

But what constitutes hatred? Does criticism of the tenets of Islam—moderate or radical—constitute hatred? Does criticism of Judaism constitute hatred? Do the vulgar rantings of homosexual bigot Dan Savage who referred to orthodox Christians as “bat sh**, a**h*le, dou**ebags” constitute ban-worthy hatred? (Read more about Savage HERE.)

The list of conditions that these Internet language police seek to protect from public expressions of “hatred” is neither exhaustive nor fixed. Big Brother’s anti-First Amendment Code of Conduct concludes with this portentous statement:

To this end, regular meetings will take place and a preliminary assessment will be reported to the High Level Group on Combating Racism, Xenophobia and all forms of intolerance by the end of 2016.

It’s not just undefined “hatred” that is being banned from the Internet. It’s undefined “intolerance” as well. And it’s not just the aforementioned six privileged conditions toward which no Internet-user may express hatred or intolerance, but all other conditions or identity groups toward which “intolerance” could conceivably be directed.

This sentence is poorly constructed in that a grammatically correct reading suggests that it is condemning the forms intolerance could assume. The forms of intolerance could be, for example, hurling epithets at or urging assaults on members of the six groups. But since the phrase “all forms of intolerance” is included in a list that alludes to conditions for which persons may be hated (i.e., racism alludes to race and xenophobia alludes to national origin), it is clear that Big Brother is expanding the groups toward which “intolerance” may not be expressed.

So what might those unnamed groups be? What other groups identifiable by some shared trait might the Internet censors believe must be free from “intolerance”? Perhaps a speech given by the EU Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality can help us discern the gerrymandered boundaries of Internet safe spaces.

Here is an extended excerpt from a speech delivered last October by EU commissioner Věra Jourová to the European Region of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA-Europe):

I am pleased to lend my support to this vibrant space for discussion on LGBTI rights in Europe and beyond.

We have recently seen homophobic statements made by a number of political leaders. At the United Nations General Assembly in September, First Vice-President Timmermans made it clear that human rights are for everyone and LGBTI people must not be an exception. I fully endorse his views and will not hesitate to speak out against homophobia and transphobia.

We are also seeing that a narrative undermining LGBTI rights is quietly spreading, often disguised as so-called religious principles. This is unacceptable.

First Vice-President Timmermans and I recently held a conference in Brussels on antisemitism and islamophobia, where we also discussed online hate speech and how to combat it. It is clear that we must fight all hate speech, online and offline, whatever group of society it targets. We will work with internet providers to ensure hate speech is taken off the web as soon as it’s reported.

…

[W]hen it comes to social acceptance of LGBT people in daily life situations, respondents are less accepting. Less than half of respondents (44 percent) say they would be comfortable if their son or daughter had a relationship with a person of the same sex, and only 49 percent are comfortable with gay couples showing affection in public. For transgender people, the levels of acceptance are also low….

What we need is to raise awareness of the benefits of diversity. To this end I will launch an EU-wide campaign to promote LGBTI-equality in 2016….The campaign will be part of Commission’s wider effort and actions I plan to implement in coming years to ensure the rights of LGBTI people and their acceptance are enforced.

…

If we want to move the equality agenda forward, we need a united effort from civil society, businesses, straight allies and national governments.

Lest the naïve among us mistakenly believe that Jourová is solely concerned with existential threats against particular groups, take note of one of her concerns: In this speech in which Jourova condemns hate speech and commits the EU to wiping it off the Internet, she offers parental “discomfort” with a son’s or daughter’s homoerotic relationship as something that society, the world of commerce, and national governments should unite to change.

Another clue as to what constitutes “intolerance” can be found in an EU document titled “Homophobia and Discrimination on Grounds of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in the EU Member States”:

The term ‘hate speech’, as used in this section, includes a broader spectrum of verbal acts drawing upon or expressing homophobia and/or transphobia in degrading or disrespectful public discourse. Based on available data, it is possible to identify at least three types of hate speech as having particular importance in a homophobic context: hate speech by public figures, hate speech by public religious figures and hate speech published, often anonymously, on the Internet.

…

[A]nti-LGBT statements are mainly articulated by conservative politicians and religious (Catholic, Lutheran or Evangelical Christian) public figures. These statements draw mainly upon the theme that LGBT persons and ways of living constitute a threat to society….it became clear that certain types of arguments were being used over and over again to speak out against lesbians and gays’. Among these are arguments:

• aiming to preserve the ethnic homogeneity and integrity of the nation and the state by excluding or subordinating gays and lesbians;

• drawing upon Christian belief to support the exclusion of gays and lesbians from the ‘moral community’ which is understood as encompassing the entire nation;

• referring to an unspecified morality, often invoking family values to argue for the exclusion or subordination of gays and lesbians. [emphasis added]

To the EU, any expression of the belief–including religious belief–that homoerotic activity is immoral or contrary to the health and integrity of the family and the larger community constitutes hate speech. Chew on that subversive idea for a while.

What do “progressive” leaders of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Microsoft view as evidence of hatred? What do they view as evidence of intolerance? Do they view expressions of disapproval of homoerotic activity or relationships as evidence of hatred or intolerance that should be banned? Do they view condemnation of the legal recognition of homoerotic unions as “marriages” as evidence of hatred or intolerance of those who believe differently and act in accordance with those beliefs? Do they view criticism of leftist assumptions about gender-dysphoria as hateful and intolerant?

To tolerate means to put up with or endure something objectionable. It does not mean approving of all actions or ideas or refraining from criticism of actions or ideas. And hatred of pernicious ideas does not constitute hatred of persons who espouse those ideas. Will this newly formed alliance of speech vigilantes make these distinctions? Doubtful.

Rather, it appears that in the service of expunging from the global public square ideas leftists don’t like, this alliance will, with Comstockian fervor, whitewash the Internet.