When Crazy Must Account For Crazy
I want to note at the beginning here that the Economist has polled Venezuelans and found only 18% oppose American governance of the nation. We hear all the time about how other nations hate America, but in Iran, Donald Trump is the most popular politician, and in Venezuela, it is the same. Funny how so many Americans think we live in a dictatorship, and all the people living in actual dictatorships prefer America.
Also, please note the Trump Administration quietly started funding Planned Parenthood again in December, causing the ACLU to dismiss its lawsuit against the Administration. This funding, approved by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, will now continue even as Congress eliminated other Planned Parenthood funding in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. This was an under-the-radar prelude to Trump suggesting the GOP find a way to be “flexible” about the Hyde Amendment last week. It’s also going to cause problems for JD Vance, given his public statements about fighting abortion and his support of RFK.
I’d again note that personnel is policy, and putting the man who has paid for more abortions than all other Cabinet Secretaries in American history combined in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services was a bad idea and among conservative groups, Mike Pence’s group was one of the very few to vocally oppose the man who just started funding Planned Parenthood again.
Speaking of the ACLU, we have to get to an amazing day in the United States Supreme Court yesterday. One could easily be forgiven for thinking the ACLU is a sleeper cell of Christians out to undermine the trans-movement in the United States. In both the Skrmetti case last year and the present case on sports, the ACLU sabotaged the arguments of the trans-movement.
Last time, Chase Strangio (actual name) got tripped up by Justice Clarence Thomas, who pointed out that if the ACLU got its way, trans-boys could get testosterone treatment that boys could not get, opening the door to sex-based discrimination that favored transgender people. Strangio completely sabotaged her own argument.
This time, a different ACLU lawyer, Kathleen Hartnett, engaged with Justice Sam Alito on the difference between boys and girls and then dared to claim the ACLU had no definition for what a boy or girl is.
If that was not bad enough, Hartnett had no good answer for Alito’s hypothetical of a man who self-identifies as a woman and wants to play on a women’s team. She just undermined her own argument.
Notice, by the way, that the ACLU’s own lawyer uses “birth sex” as opposed to “sex assigned at birth,” which is the most common phrase used by the American press corps because a trans-advocacy group encourages it.
The bottom line here is that the trans-movement’s argument remains inherently detached from the reality of biology and are generally incoherent and riddled with logical fallacies that do not stand up to close scrutiny. Likewise, the majority of the Court seems very concerned that it should not bind the whole nation to something where there is real division in both opinion and science. The trans-movement demands we ignore the science and censor the opinion.
Relatedly, we need to talk about Amy Coney Barrett.
Some are raising questions about her use of “cisgender” and “trans-girl” in the case, suggesting that it may mean she is sympathetic to the trans community. Barrett is from the Scalia school, which believes you use the word choices at play in the case. In the case at hand, the briefs and lower court decision used “trans-girl” and “cisgender.” Barrett is most likely using that language because that is the language used in the case.
