Yesterday, U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) put to shame every Congressman and Congresswoman who refuses to state publicly and definitively that no medical professional should support cross-sex hormone-doping for minors or the elective removal of healthy parts of their sexual anatomy as “treatments” for disordered feelings about their maleness or femaleness.

The inspiring and courageous statements by Senator Paul occurred in a must-see exchange between Senator Paul and the pitiable Dr. “Rachel” Levine, a cross-dressing male physician whom the pandering Joe Biden has nominated to be his assistant health secretary. Of all the physicians in all of America, Biden chose a psychologically unwell man, and the reason for choosing Levine? Obviously, he was chosen because he masquerades as a woman and calls his masquerade “authentic identity.”

Senator Paul began by reminding Levine that female genital mutilation has been widely condemned:

Genital mutilation has been condemned by the WHO, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and the United Nations Population Fund. According to the WHO, genital mutilation is recognized internationally as a violation of human rights. Genital mutilation is considered particularly egregious because as the WHO notes, it is nearly always carried out on minors and is a violation of the rights of children.

Senator Paul further noted that as with genital mutilation, social forces today play a critical role in forming “trans”-cultic beliefs and practices that harm the bodies of minors:

Genital mutilation is not typically performed by force, but, as WHO notes, by social convention, social norm, the social pressure to conform, to do what others do and have been doing, as well as the need to be accepted socially, and the fear of being rejected by the community.

Evidence increasingly shows that social influences, including both the influence of social media and peers, have profound effects on adolescents, particularly on girls who tend to be more vulnerable to what are called “social contagions” (e.g., repressed memory syndrome, bulimia, and cutting) than are boys.

A study released in the United Kingdom showed that between 2009-2018, there was a 4,515 percent increase in the number of minor girls seeking to “transition,”—a shocking increase that many experts believe is the result of social media providing a distorted lens through which girls are misinterpreting their often normal feelings.

Rather than recommending waiting and counseling to get at the root causes for the confused and disordered feelings of minors, “trans”-cultists and their profiteering allies are recommending experimental medications and surgeries while banning counseling.

Senator Paul asked Levine,

Dr. Levine, you have supported both allowing minors to be given hormone blockers to prevent them from going through puberty, as well as surgical destruction of a minor’s genitalia. Like surgical mutilation, hormonal interruption of puberty can permanently alter and prevent secondary sexual characteristics. The American College of Pediatricians reports that 80 to 95% of pre-pubertal children with gender dysphoria will experience resolution by late adolescence, if not exposed to medical intervention and social affirmation. Dr. Levine, do you believe that minors are capable of making such a life changing decision as changing one’s sex?

Note U.S. Senator Paul’s inclusion of “social affirmation,” as a factor that contributes to minors persisting in their rejection of their biological sex. Affirming their delusional thinking through incorrect pronouns and restroom/locker room usage policies harm children.

Instead of answering Senator Paul’s direct and clear question, Levine dodged with a pre-memorized evasion, so Senator Paul tried again:

Let’s be a little more specific since you evaded the question. Do you support the government intervening to override the parent’s consent to give a child puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones, and/or amputation surgery of breasts and genitalia? You have said that you’re willing to accelerate the protocols for street kids. I’m alarmed that poor kids with no parents who are homeless and distraught, that you would just go through with this and allow that to happen to a minor.

Again, Levine robotically recited the same memorized, evasive non-answer, which revealed that Levine does, indeed, support the chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation of minors who experience sexual confusion, often because of abuse and/or the toxic influence of social media.

Barely containing his justifiable and righteous anger over the destructive ignorance and dissembling of Levine, Senator Paul said what every decent American should be saying publicly and often:

Let it go into the record that the witness refused to answer the question. The question is a very specific one: Should minors be making these momentous decisions? For most of the history of medicine, we wouldn’t let you have a cut sewn up in the ER, but you’re willing to let a minor take things that prevent their puberty, and you think they get that back? You give a woman testosterone enough that she grows a beard, and you think she’s going to go back looking like a woman when you stop the testosterone? You have permanently changed them. Infertility is another problem. None of these drugs have been approved for this. They’re all being used off-label. I find it ironic that the left that went nuts over hydroxychloroquine being used possibly for COVID are not alarmed that these hormones are being used off-label.

There’s no long-term studies. We don’t know what happens to them. We do know that there are dozens and dozens of people who’ve been through this, who regret that this happened. And a permanent change happened to them and if you’ve ever been around children, 14-year-olds can’t make this decision. In the gender dysphoria clinic in England, 10% of the kids are between the ages of three and 10. We should be outraged that someone is talking to a three-year-old about changing their sex. I can’t vote for you if you can’t make a decision.

U.S. Senator Paul’s concluding statement exposed the hypocrisy and dishonesty of leftists. To leftists, the off-label use of hydroxychloroquine for the emergency treatment of a viral pandemic that was killing thousands of people worldwide was unconscionable. Why? Because successfully treating COVID-19 would have helped President Trump.

But the off-label use of puberty-blockers like Lupron, and the prescription of estrogen for physically healthy boys and progesterone for physically healthy girls are not only medically sound but also altruistic acts of love. At least the “trans” cult and its legion of allies think so.

And who are these allies? Who are the groups that gain from exploiting confused children?

Well, there are the cosmetic surgeons, endocrinologists, pharmaceutical companies, mental health “professionals,” academics, and YouTube “influencers” whose greedy hands are grasping for the filthy lucre the “trans” cult generates for them.

And then there are the pandering politicians like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and every member of Congress who are content to say nothing as the bodies of children are destroyed. Children are expendable commodities because, unlike “trans”-cultists,” children have no power.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Rand-Paul-Confronts-Bidens-Cross-Dressing-Pick-for-Assistant-Health-Secretary_audio.mp3

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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:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/audio_Another-K-12-School-Indoctrination-Bill-Coming-Through-the-Illinois-Sewage-Pipeline.mp3

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This is how it’s going down, my friends—the eradication of speech rights for conservatives, that is. The stage was set years ago when “hate speech” laws were passed.

The Left argues that any rhetoric that is or may be in any distant way at any time related to acts of violence should be banned. So, if I say that volitional homosexual acts and relationships are abhorrent to God as Scripture teaches, and a lone, crazed, alienated, Godless sociopath or a few hundred alienated fatherless, Godless anarchists—people who may or may not have read my words—commit acts of heinous violence against homosexuals—my words should be banned. Of course, the banning of my words necessarily requires the banning of God’s Word as well as the words of any theologically orthodox Christian since the inception of the church.

If I say that humans born with healthy, normally functioning penises are male and can never be female, and some man deceived into having sex with a man who pretends to be a woman kills the deceiver, my expression of a moral proposition must be banned.

When Lila Rose, founder of the pro-life organization Live Action, tweeted, “Abortion is violence,” abortionist Dr. Leah Torres tweeted back this:

This is violent rhetoric. It is objectively false and meant to incite others to commit crimes against clinics, patients, and health care providers. This is what domestic terrorism looks like.

Note the three arguable claims Torres makes: 1. She says Rose’s claim is false, 2. She says Rose’s claim is meant to incite others to commit violent crimes, 3. She says Rose’s tweet constitutes domestic terrorism. How convenient that those claims are precisely the type of claims leftists now say are not protected by the First Amendment. See how that works?

Torres is also the author of this since-deleted tweet:

You know fetuses can’t scream, right? I transect the cord [first] so there’s really no opportunity, if they’re even far enough along to have a larynx.

She later claimed the “cord” was not referring to babies’ vocal cords but, rather, to their umbilical cords. So much better. So much less violent.

Those with eyes to see recognize that leftists are using their special skill in manipulating language—also known as sophistry—to turn good into evil and protected speech into violence requiring censorship.

Leftists argue that saying the election was “stolen” should be banned because some far-right anarchists who hold similar views engaged in violence. Therefore, a few words about the phrase “stolen election”—the newest bugbear used by dishonest leftists to crush the civil rights of conservatives—are in order.

The claim that “an election was stolen”—you know, like Hillary Clinton has claimed for four years—means that an election lacked integrity. Some may claim it was stolen via, for example, Russian interference, or algorithmic manipulation, or ballot-harvesting, or voting irregularities regarding signatures, or unconstitutional changes in election requirements, or the counting of late ballots, or Big Tech’s censorship of the Biden crime family’s corruption that likely affected votes, or dead people voting, or a combination of shady acts by shady actors. Someone needs to tell the liars and paranoiacs in the Democrat Party that the term “stolen election” is not a code word for “attack the Capitol.”

If, however, “stolen election” is a secret code word used to initiate violent lawlessness, then surely Hillary Clinton should be thrown in the slammer—a lot. Here are two of her many seditionist/insurrectionist statements:

You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you.

and,

[T]here was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level. We still don’t know what really happened. … you don’t win by 3 million votes and have all this other shenanigans and stuff going on and not come away with an idea like, “Whoa, something’s not right here.

The fact that her alleged attempts to incite insurrection and/or sedition failed shouldn’t matter. The law prohibits even attempts to incite insurrection or sedition.

Trump and many other Americans said the election was “stolen” in the sense that myriad dubious acts took place that cast doubt on the fairness and integrity of the election. Some anarchists—angry about a boatload of corrosive leftist words and deeds, including election malfeasance—breached the Capitol. Therefore, leftists argue, anyone who attended the pro-Trump protest or voted for Trump must be banned from all social media, kicked out of elected office, lose their private sector jobs, or never be hired. Social media newbie Parler must lose all access to the Internet. Americans must lose their medical insurance and recording contracts.

Via a Royal Proclamation, Randall Lane, Forbes Magazine editor, has threatened to harm any company that hires Kayleigh McEnany, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway, Stephanie Grisham, or Sean Spicer—Trump’s former press secretaries:

Let it be known to the business world: Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. We’re going to scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet. Want to ensure the world’s biggest business media brand approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation? Then hire away.

He actually wrote, “Let it be known.” Can the left get any more arrogant and oppressive? Rhetorical question.

Trump (again, like Hillary before him) and many decent, law-abiding citizens claimed the election was “stolen.” Some far-right anarchists also believe the election was stolen. Those far-right anarchists stormed the Capitol. Ergo, in the mad, mad, mad, mad world of cynical leftists, Trump is responsible for the storming of the Capitol. Anyone who attended the protest is responsible for the violence—including even those grandmas who abhor violence and didn’t know the violence was happening. Anyone who has prepared food for Trump is responsible because they helped sustain the life of a man who caused a 90-minute seditious violent protest. Anyone who sold food to anyone who prepared food is responsible for the violence. And any of Trump’s kids’ college friends who may have met Trump and thought he was not Hitler is responsible for the violence—obviously.

So, why aren’t YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter being tossed off the Internet, since all were used to organize both the Capitol riots and the BLM riots of 2020?

Why isn’t Kamala Harris who didn’t condemn BLM violence until late August, three months after it began, being accused of fomenting violence?

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi waited until three months after the BLM riots began to condemn them, did she facilitate violence and property destruction through her silence?

What about Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the inaccurate, leftist 1619 Project, who said in the middle of the BLM riots that “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” Was she guilty of inciting more property-destruction?

The goal of leftists isn’t really to prevent violence. Appeals to thwarting violence are merely stratagems for preventing the dissemination of ideas leftists hate. They must link ideas they hate to violence in order to undermine foundational American principles. How do I know? Because the linguistic ground is shifting. We are now hearing calls for banning or “reining in” “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and discourse that “harms,” because—the argument goes—such information may lead to violence.

AOC recently said,

We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation.

So, who determines what constitutes “disinformation and misinformation”? Remember Dr. Leah Torres calling Lila Rose’s statement “false”—in other words, disinformation or misinformation? And remember when just before the election CNN asserted—without conducting any investigation—that the New York Post story about Hunter and Joe Biden was “disinformation,” and then conveniently, after the election, declared it a legitimate news story?

If leftist rhetoric about violence, disinformation, misinformation, harm, and hate leads eventually to imprisonment of dissidents—i.e., conservatives—no problem. All conservatives need to do to avoid the inconvenience of imprisonment or “enlightenment camps” is agree with Big Brother, take some Soma, burn some books, and shut up.

At least leftist rhetoric won’t lead to violence—will it?

The arc of the shady leftist universe is long, convoluted, and bends toward injustice, tyranny, and a senile old man who’s shuffling around looking for his moral compass and a milkshake.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/audio_Leftists-Exploit-Violence-to-Cancel-Conservatives-.mp3

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One of the many remarkable aspects of this time in America is that all the forces of oppression about which George Orwell warned in his novel 1984 are present and growing, and many of the oppressors can’t see it. Ironically, many of the oppressors view themselves as paragons of virtue when, in reality, they’re paragons of virtue-signaling, which constitutes a performative cloak of invisibility that conceals their totalitarianism.

In Orwell’s portentous novel, he describes four government ministries, one of which—the Ministry of Truth—“concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts.” Orwell wrote,

‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ … All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.

While our news, entertainment, education, and fine arts are not institutionally linked to the government, they are ideologically bound together in an unholy alliance that seeks to indoctrinate society just as Big Brother does in 1984.

Today “progressives” are tearing down statues and renaming government schools to erase recognition of our Founding Fathers. Government schools are teaching the revisionist history of the 1619 Project and Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States.

Through falsified birth certificates and drivers’ licenses, the state colludes with mainstream news outlets, entertainment, and educational institutions to scrub history by identifying men and women as the sex they aren’t. Try looking for information on the actress Ellen Page. Within hours of Page’s recent announcement that she was no longer a woman, the disparate minions in the Ministry of Truth began scrubbing history, changing “Ellen” to “Elliot” and replacing all pronouns that refer to her with deceitful male pronouns.

Acts of hatred and deceit against the human person are now called “love” and “authenticity” by those practiced at the art of Newspeak.

Orwell wrote, “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”

It’s happening now, and it is terrifying, indeed. Now we have intrusive Big Government—including government schools—in cahoots with Big Tech to control the past, the present, and the future. Social media has created algorithms and inconsistently applied “community standards” to suppress the dissemination of not only ideas but also news.

Orwell explains that in the government-mandated language of Newspeak, “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” When I worked at Deerfield High School, two English teachers, Michael Wolf and Jeff Berger-White, sent a letter to the local press which was signed by half the department in which they argued,

It is difficult for … people … to simultaneously hold conflicting opinions. But this difficulty should not prevent us from attempting to do so. The best work we do in our classrooms is to highlight how multiple understandings are true, and that the validity of one idea does not necessarily negate the validity of another.

I’m pretty sure they read 1984 but seemed to have missed the point.

In their letter, they acknowledged that “certain doctrine” that “may not allow diverse and conflicting views to coexist” still have a “cherished place” in their classrooms—unless those doctrine are “malicious.” Guess which views on sexuality the gods of government schools have declared malicious.

The vehicle for our rocketing trip deep down into our subterranean Orwellian dystopia is “trans”-cultism. The world we’ve entered is the anti-science Transtopia where, in Orwell’s words, “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” The propellant that reality-denying “trans”-cultists and their fearful and/or foolish collaborators use is Newspeak.

Newspeak, like the speech rules leftists impose today, is intended to control thought:

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all… a heretical thought… should be literally unthinkable. … This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings. … [T]he special function of certain Newspeak words. … was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.

In two now-famous quotes, Orwell illuminates the troubling views of tyrants about language:

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

On December 8, 2020, the University of Michigan’s Information and Technology Services’ “Words Matter Task Force”—Ministry of Truth for short—issued its spanking new Newspeak lexicon. Acknowledging that “language is powerful,” the Ministers of Truthiness have published a document with banned words and “recommended” replacements along with a bewildering array of action steps to ensure widespread compliance. The banned list—which is “not exhaustive and will continue to grow”—are those words deemed by the Ministers of Truthiness (aka Thought Police) to “harm morale, and deliberately or inadvertently exclude people from feeling accepted” or “cause people to feel alienated.”

Here are a few of the alienating terms (left column) and their “recommended” Newspeakian replacements (right column):

I don’t know how fans of Masters of the Universe are going to feel about Primaries of the Universe.

This list reveals that the left is teaching people to be offended in order to maintain their cultural power through intersectional-identity grievance politics. My anecdotal experience with even leftists suggests virtually no one has been offended by most of these expressions as they are commonly used until the last five minutes of history. And the faux-offense now being asserted didn’t arise naturally. It had to be beaten into them by the hammer of tolerance wielded by far-left social justice warriors.

It also raises a question for leftists: If a word’s history is largely unknown and its current meaning is inoffensive, why eliminate it? Why not be thankful that the old ugly association has been supplanted by a new innocuous one?

If, on the other hand, we must commit to linguistic stasis, then shouldn’t we retain the historical meaning of, for example, pronouns?

And what if I’m offended by being commanded to use pronouns based on “gender identity” rather than on biological sex?  What if, because I’m deeply committed to science, reality, truth, and the First Amendment, I’m offended by attempts to socially coerce language compliance in the service of a political agenda?

Orwell wrote that “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” Yep, that pretty much describes what 16+ years of secular education does to children.

Under an article about the University of Michigan’s Ministry of Truth on the College Fix website, one waggish fellow left this perfect response to the banned words list:

Every member of the Words Matter Task Force has sold his or her ideals down the river. This black-and-white thinking only ever leads to blacklists, and shunning people off the reservation while the crazies enjoy a crippled picnic. To be thrown under the bus for being the low man on the social-justice totem pole is to be grandfathered into the ever-growing community of gypped guys and gals, excluded when the masters change the rules of polite society into one of a dummy society where every utterance is weighed for a privileged account. Even asking for a sanity check of these lunatic brown-baggers puts you at risk of being professionally, if not personally, disabled. They may start by cracking the whip rhetorically, but their rhetoric inevitably leads to insane physical realities sooner or later.

In short, kiss my grits, sweetie.

Remember this list next time you see the leftist American Library Association’s annual umbrage-fest called Banned Books Week. Leftists ban not only books, but also words.

Orwell said something else “progressives” will hate:

Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

On July 23, 2020, conservative University of North Carolina professor, Townhall writer, and Christian, Mike Adams, was driven to suicide by the vile and relentless bullying of devotees of diversity and teachers of tolerance who fancy themselves “progressive.” They were aided and abetted by spineless Christians who failed to come alongside a brother in Christ because of his “sins” of violating leftist language rules.

Leftists and some Christians were especially peeved by a metaphor Adams employed to criticize oppressive pandemic commandments issued by North Carolina’s Democrat governor Roy Cooper.

On May 29th, Adams tweeted, “This evening I ate pizza and drank beer with six guys at a six seat table top. I almost felt like a free man who was not living in the slave state of North Carolina. Massa Cooper, let my people go.”

Which of the following metaphors is more offensive: Comparing a political leader who oppresses citizens with unjust orders to a slave master or comparing those with wealth who ignore the starvation of the poor to cannibals?

Is one acceptable speech and the other unacceptable? Are both acceptable? Neither?

Of course, the cannibal metaphor was employed by Jonathan Swift in his satirical essay “A Modest Proposal,” which we teach in public schools.

When Reverend Jesse Jackson referred to President Trump as a slave master and knee-takers as slaves, I can’t recall anyone on the left or right batting their exquisitely sensitive eyes. Are only blacks allowed to use slave metaphors, or does it depend wholly on whose ox is being gored with condemnation that determines whether metaphors should send adults to the fainting couch?

While their sanctimonious and empty proclamations of fealty to inclusivity, love, equality, tolerance, subjectivism, autonomy, freedom, and diversity echo systemically throughout American institutions, Leftists reveal their inky underbellies rotted with hypocrisy and depravity when they screech hater and hurl death wishes at those who dare to disagree with Big Brother, Critical Race Theory, or their anarchical sexuality ideology.

But it’s not just leftists, secularists, and atheists who faux-tie their own panties in a twist about bold language from conservatives. Even conservatives get the heebie-jeebies if Christians use bold language.

In a mostly moving tribute to his “close friend” Mike Adams, political pundit David French made sure to include that, although protected by the First Amendment, some of Adams’ writing was “acerbic,” “intemperate,” “insensitive,” “excessively provocative,” and “outright infuriating.” French further said, he “cringed at some,” of Adams’ comments and that “my friend could frustrate me. He could say things I disagreed with. He could say things that outraged me. He could be wrong.”

With “close friends” like French to write a tribute, who needs enemies.

New Testament professor and friend of Mike Adams, Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon, wrote about Adams’ sadness at the socially distancing of David French:

[W]hen [Mike] reached out to David by phone for help in his hour of greatest crisis in June 2020, he viewed David’s brush-off as due to the negative change in David in the Trump era. While he couldn’t be entirely surprised by David’s failure to help, there’s no question that it was a body blow to his gut. He twice initiated mention of David to me in mid-June and on July 1. I didn’t bring David French up as a topic of conversation. Mike did, unsolicited from me. …

Mike felt that David had abandoned him precisely because he didn’t share David’s NeverTrump stance and because of David’s heightened desire to distance himself from Mike’s tweets in order to preserve his (David’s) reputation with people on the Left. …

I would never say that David French single-handedly killed Mike Adams. … David was simply the most painful among many acts of silence and detachment toward Mike by Christian “elites” and “friends” at his end. The primary blame belongs with the vicious Left.

Every Christian on the frontlines of the culture war has experienced the voluntary social distancing of brothers and sisters in Christ who don’t want to be tainted by friendship with cultural lepers. We all know the experience of having friends or colleagues either secretly whisper their thanks for our work, or avoid us entirely, or turn against us. There’s no skin in the game for many Christians when the game gets rough. Instead of marching into battle accoutered with the armor of God, they scuttle into their safe havens accoutered with protective platitudes acceptable to God’s enemies.

Oddly, I’ve seen very little criticism of Andrew Klavan—another Christian who uses satire brilliantly and effectively to mock stupid and evil ideas that deserve mockery. For example, assuming the voice of a presumptuous Hollywood celebrity, Klavan recently wrote,

I take responsibility for being a fatuous, virtue-signaling, useless, celebrity knucklehead. Which is a much better life than yours by the way. For which I take complete responsibility… and then run away before you realize I haven’t done a damn thing for you and your life still sucks.

Before reading Klavan’s satires, all those legions of PC Christians holed up in their bunkers hoping no unbelieving colleague learns they disapprove of homosexuality better stock up on smelling salts.

Not quite a year ago, I wrote an article about the superintendent of a large Illinois high school district who sexually integrated all locker rooms in the five-school district—a decision so wicked that all Christians should have felt enraged.

He was aided and abetted by wealthy Hollywood Matrix director “Lana” Wachowski—a man who pretends to be a woman—homosexuals from outside the district, and a school board member with a vile sexuality podcast for children. In strong language, I wrote about this evil action and the vipers who promoted it.

In response, I received an email from a conservative Christian who identified herself as the “dean of rhetoric” in a “Christian co-school.” She chastised my “language and tone,” saying that she found them “disturbing.” She criticized the “vitriol and loaded language … name calling and hyperbole” and “uncharitable language,” saying it “would never be tolerated” in her rhetoric classes, that she was “disappointed to read” such language, and that she found my “writing style offensive.”

So, a Christian is teaching children that the use of biblical language and tone are sinful even when describing egregious sin.

I asked if she had ever sent an email with as much passion and strong language as the one she sent to me to any of the many political leaders, public school teachers, administrators, or heretical “Christian” leaders who promote sexual deviance to children. No response.

“Progressives” use the phrase “my truth” a lot—a phrase that Boston College philosophy professor Dr. Peter Kreeft describes as both oxymoronic and moronic. Much of what “progressives” affirm as “their truth,” seems to be sexual desires that originate in their dark bellies—or what in The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis calls the seat of mere animal appetites.

Lewis argues that to protect against domination by our imperious appetites, human emotions must be properly trained:

Without the aid of trained emotions, the intellect is powerless against the animal organism…. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful.

Do tell, Christian brothers and sisters who favor warm milquetoasty language at all times, how do we train human animals of all sizes to feel disgust and hatred of those things which really are disgusting and hateful while using only warm milquetoasty language?

Lewis continues, describing what education should do:

Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt. … Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.

Yes, there are things—desires, ideas, images, words, and acts—for which we should properly feel hatred. The prophet Amos said, “Hate evil, and love good.” In Romans, Paul teaches us “Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” For love to be genuine or true, we must abhor what is evil.

Children must be taught to feel love for the good and feel hatred for that which is evil, which is wholly different from hating people. True love requires first knowing what is true and good. Affirming in and to people that which God detests is not love; affirming in and to people that which God detests is detestable.

“Progressives” understand that the emotions must be trained, which is why they use the arts—especially our myth-making machine, Hollywood, and government schools to shape the hearts of America’s children. Tragically, since “progressives” don’t know truth, they’re training America’s children to love evil and hate good.

In our public schools, interactions with friends, and Facebook posts, we have at our disposal many tools for training emotions, among which are rhetorical tools. The Bible warns that the tongue “is a restless evil, full of deadly poison,” and that “Kind words are like honey—sweet to the soul and healthy for the body.” But such verses do not and cannot possibly mean Christians must never use strong language or sarcasm. We know that because the Bible includes numerous examples of the use of strong language and mockery.

Amos called women fat “cows” and warned that God would take them away by harpoons or fishhooks. Imagine how today’s evanjellyfishes would feel if a Christian were to use that biblical language.

Paul wrote this to Titus: “As one of their own prophets has said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.’ This testimony is true.” In other words, Paul called Cretans liars, evil beasts, and lazy gluttons.

Jesus said,

“You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.”

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! … You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.”

“You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?”

Paul said this about sinners,

There is none who does good, no, not one.”
“Their throat is an open tomb;
With their tongues they have practiced deceit”;
“The poison of asps is under their lips”

In Revelation, those who are not saved are called “dogs.”

Peter describes false teachers—of which we have many in the church today—as “irrational animals … born to be caught and destroyed, blaspheming about matters of which they are ignorant. … They are blots and blemishes. … Accursed children!”

Paul calls the Galatians, “foolish Galatians.”

John the Baptist called the multitudes a “brood of vipers.”

If the dean of rhetoric of the Christian co-school thinks calling a top school leader who sexually integrates the locker rooms of 12,000 minor children “depraved” undermines our witness—as she claimed I did—then logically she must think John the Baptist undermined his witness by calling the multitudes a brood of vipers.

Theologian and pastor Doug Wilson makes clear that the Bible does not mandate the kind of saccharine language that corrupts evangelicalism or prohibit bold, bracing, condemnatory language from which many evangelicals flee:

Evangelical Christians are very sweet people and there’s an upside to that. … But they’re so sweet they can’t be friends with diabetics. And what happens is, if you respond to the prevailing ungodliness with a response that’s tart, or serrated, or pungent, or satiric, you will have more than a few Christians taking you aside saying, “Hey brother, you probably don’t want to talk to them that way. … Would Jesus have responded that way?” And when you reply, “Well, yes, he would have. And here’s how he did it in Matthew 23 where he disassembles the Pharisees.”

[Evangelical Christians] don’t have a category for that. They’re so used to having Christlikeness defined by their ecclesiastical culture instead of having Christlikeness defined by the Bible, it is astonishing for many Christians to discover that this kind of verbal polemical engagement is preeminently biblical. It’s a very common biblical way of expressing righteousness. … If you take the smarmy, sweetie, nice discourse that many Christians think is supposed to be the norm and drive it into the Bible, you can’t find examples of that anywhere.

American philosopher and Catholic, Dr. Edward Feser, shares Wilson’s disdain for the unbiblical and unhelpful contemporary perversion of the Christian obligation to love our neighbors:

Niceness. Well, it has its place. But the Christ who angrily overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, who taught a moral code more austere than that of the Pharisees, and who threatened unrepentant sinners with the fiery furnace, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, was not exactly “nice.”

Feser finds fault with the unbiblical notion that “even a great many churchmen seem to have bought into,” which is that “inoffensive ‘niceness’ is somehow the essence of the true Christian, or at least of any Christian worthy of the liberal’s respect.” He argues that in,

innumerable vapid sermons one hears about God’s love and acceptance and forgiveness, but never about divine judgment or the moral teachings to which modern people are most resistant—and which, precisely for that reason, they most need to hear expounded and defended.

Feser argues against church “teachings on sexual morality” that are delivered “half-apologetically, in vague and soft language, and in a manner hedged with endless qualifications”:

Such “niceness” is in no way a part of Christian morality. It is a distortion of the virtues of meekness (which is simply moderation in anger—as opposed to too much or too little anger), and friendliness (which is a matter of exhibiting the right degree of affability necessary for decent social order—as opposed to too little affability or too much).

Maybe, just maybe, if every theologically orthodox Christian spoke in biblical tones and language about the perversity and corruption that confront our children every day in their TV shows, picture books, and government schools, and defile our society there would be less of it, and maybe, just maybe Mike Adams would still be alive.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/How-May-Christians-Speak.mp3

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On July 10 at Walled Lake Western High School in Michigan, popular teacher Justin Kucera who taught AP World History and coached varsity baseball and basketball and who by all accounts never brought his politics into his teaching or coaching was fired for tweeting, “I’m done being silent. Donald Trump is our president.” Meanwhile,

Paulette Loe, a now-retired Walled Lake Western teacher, encouraged students to read an article from the Atlantic about “how to beat Trump” while still employed. Nicole Estes, a kindergarten teacher in the district, called Trump a “sociopath” and a “narcissist” on Facebook in 2016 and is still employed at Keith Elementary School [also in Walled Lake Consolidated school district].

It should be unbelievable that a teacher could be fired from a government school for expressing his support for a sitting president while indoctrinators are free to bring their politics into the classroom regularly with no fear of retribution. Sadly, this is now the new normal.

Twelve years ago when I was a member of the English Department at Deerfield High School on Chicago’s North Shore working full-time in the writing center, teachers Elliott Hurtig and Jeff Berger-White were teaching the repugnant play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and Hurtig was also teaching the historically inaccurate Laramie Project, both plays of which espoused politically “progressive,” morally regressive views of homosexuality.

Setting aside the egregious obscenity in Angels in America, I discussed with a purportedly Catholic writing center colleague the ethical problem of teachers presenting resources from only one side of the debate on this most controversial cultural issue. I made the case that in an educational environment, teachers have an obligation to present resources from opposing voices as well. She responded that because she was absolutely sure opposing voices—that is, conservative voices—were wrong, they shouldn’t be allowed to be presented to students.

This is the kind of presumptuousness that has long poisoned education in America from elementary schools through colleges and universities, and has created a dissolute and destructive culture. Leftists demand absolute autonomy and arrogate to themselves the right to indoctrinate other people’s children because they have unilaterally concluded that their political and moral beliefs are objectively true, and opposing views are false. From kindergarten on up, leftists are indoctrinating other people’s children with their arguable leftist beliefs on homosexuality, opposite-sex impersonation, race, sex, American history, and presidential politics with no negative repercussions.

In his essay “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mills presciently warns about the very arrogance infecting today’s “educators” hell-bent on imposing their beliefs on vulnerable, ideologically malleable students:

The rules which obtain among themselves appear to them self-evident and self-justifying. … People are accustomed to believe, and have been encouraged in the belief …  that their feelings … are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary. The practical principle which guides them to their opinions on the regulation of human conduct, is the feeling in each person’s mind that everybody should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathises, would like them to act. No one, indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment is his own liking; but an opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person’s preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many people’s liking instead of one. … his own preference … is not only a perfectly satisfactory reason, but the only one he generally has for any of his notions of morality, taste, or propriety.

In a recent appearance on Mark Levin’s program Life, Liberty & Levin, Dr. John Ellis, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, chairman of the California Association of Scholars, and author of Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities and The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done discussed the root cause of the cultural “shout downs” and riots:

The real problem is way behind the scenes in the classrooms, which the public never sees. … you’ve had a very long campaign of converting the universities into one party campuses. If you go back 50 years … there were 3 left-of-center professors to 2 right-of-center professors. … that’s consistent with a very healthy debate between the left and the right on campus. But by … 1999, a study shows 5 to 1. … By another five to six years later, it’s gone to 8 to 1, and the current studies … coming out now, it’s something like 13 to 1. There’s every reason to believe that that’s getting more extreme all the time because one of these studies looks to the junior ranks—assistant professors, associate professors—and found that the ratio there, left to right, is 48 to 1.  … The hiring being done now is at the rate of about 50 to 1. … So, you’re going to wind up with a complete monoculture within a short period of time. And a one-party campus is a campus that’s dysfunctional. …

The campus is so far left and so irrational now, and it’s leftism that is poisoning the culture. One profession after another is being essentially corrupted. … It’s totally poisoned journalism. It’s poisoned the teaching in the high schools because the high school teachers are all trained on college campuses

Ellis also suggests that parents who continue to send their children to colleges and universities that are in the business of poisoning culture are part of the problem:

Parents have a very fixed attitude, derived from the past, that sending their kids to college is a first rate way to launch them into a life and a career, and then there’s the fact that those great names of the institutions of higher learning of Harvard, Yale, Columbia … are very, very impressive. It casts a kind of spell over the public. They really cannot believe … that what was so glorious is now in fact no longer there.

Conservatives often ask what they can do to help restore health to our ailing culture. Here’s one thing they can do: Don’t send their children to colleges and universities that have “monocultures,” and through those monocultures, poison culture.

Stop being impressed by the worldly accolades poured on the polluted Ivies that now oppose their original mission statements, mottos, logos, and seals. Harvard long ago rejected its original mission statement:

Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.

The Princeton University shield once depicted an open Bible inscribed with “VET NOV TESTAMENTUM,” that signified the Old and New Testaments; a ribbon above the Bible that said, “VITAM MORTUIS REDDO,” which means, “I restore life to the dead”; and a ribbon below the shield with the words “DEI SUB NUMINE VIGET,” which mean, “Under God’s power she flourishes.” Such expressions today would be an embarrassment to the faculty and a trigger to most students.

Dartmouth College’s original motto was “VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO,” which is translated as “A voice crying out in the wilderness,” an allusion to Scripture about preparing the world for Christ. Ironically, Dartmouth is now a cacophonous voice creating wilderness out of the semi-tamed culture Christianity created.

When teachers and college professors preach their leftist sermons in schools, not only do they indoctrinate, but they also leave dissenters at the mercy of social tyrants. In other words, government school preachers and college professors fuel bullying. In “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mills writes,

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first … chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”

You know there’s a problem when a left-leaning site like the satirical website the Onion skewers the close-minded propaganda that leftists identify as “education” as it did in a post titled “College Encourages Lively Exchange of Idea”:

As an institution of higher learning, we recognize that it’s inevitable that certain contentious topics will come up from time to time, and when they do, we want to create an atmosphere where both students and faculty feel comfortable voicing a single homogeneous opinion. … Whether it’s a discussion of a national political issue or a concern here on campus, an open forum in which one argument is uniformly reinforced is crucial for maintaining the exceptional learning environment we have cultivated here.(emphasis added for fun).

Leftists are fond of saying that free speech does not guarantee freedom from consequences. They fail to acknowledge that if those consequences are loss of employment, First Amendment speech protections are, in effect, nullified. And we all know, leftists couldn’t care less.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Education-in-a-Pro-Propaganda-Culture_podcast_01.mp3

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As always, your gift to IFI is tax-deductible and greatly appreciated!

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