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This post was inspired by Brian Watt’s post, A Helpful Guide to Cancelling “Mother”. Reading of Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’ proposal to replace “mother” with “inseminated person” made me wonder if there shouldn’t be some award akin to the popular Darwin Awards to be presented for torturing language for political ends. Something, say, called “Orwell Awards” — in honor of George Orwell’s NewSpeak Dictionary from his dystopian novel, 1984. But, it turns out that there is in fact an existing Orwell Award that, sadly, stands for exactly the opposite:

It is awarded annually to “writers who have made outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse.

The closest thing that comes to my conception is a Doublespeak Award presented by the same organization as the Orwell Award:

An ironic tribute to public speakers who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-centered.

But this doesn’t get quite to my meaning. The award I have in mind would be presented to persons who really embrace the spirit that George Orwell described.s

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A racist, former Survivor contestant and tobacco progressive sued the president claiming that unless we castrate the kids, they’ll die. And a judge ruled in front of a courtroom full of transgender activists cheering for child mutilation that banning castration wasn’t constitutional.

Where is child castration mentioned in the Constitution?

The closest that the matter came to the attention of the Founding Fathers was when Thomas Jefferson authored a Virginia state bill punishing rape with castration. What Jefferson thought fitting for rapists, modern day members of his party believe is fitting for young children.

The progressive child castration complex may be on the wrong side of history, sanity and decency, but so long as it has enough lawyers and judges, it will go on wielding the scalpel.

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“Oh, no! You mean I’ll have to pay back all that money I borrowed and spent on that shit degree in Grievance Studies? The taxpayers aren’t going to cover it? Oh, no!”

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While public-sector unions file lawsuits to block President Donald Trump’s reforms to the bureaucracy, federal government workers are getting paid by the taxpayer for time they spend doing work for those very same unions.

The little-known practice of “official time” allows bureaucrats to bill the taxpayer for hours they spend doing work for the union. Members of Congress have filed bills to ban the practice, but a budget expert suggests that taxing the practice instead might pose a smaller hurdle for getting it through Congress.

While most bills face a 60-vote threshold to avoid a filibuster and get through the Senate, senators could pass such a tax through a process known as budget reconciliation—a process by which bills only require a majority of senators’ votes to pass.

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The PBS News Hour, along with the rest of the liberal press, have certainly warmed up in recent years to the FBI, America’s chief domestic surveillance organization. Since Donald Trump came on the scene, a press eager to find criminal behavior within a loathed administration has behaved more like a present-day “Friends of the FBI” than the bulwark against government spying and surveillance it once fancied itself as being.

PBS has even run pro-FBI stories with a McCarthyite tinge, like one applauding the online liberal “sedition hunters” of January 6 scofflaws.

But the release from prison of an American Indian activist convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1975 put the PBS News Hour in liberal reset mode on Tuesday evening. Co-anchor Amna Nawaz marked the occasion with a tone similar to hard-left groups like Amnesty International in celebrating the release of the infamous convicted killer Leonard Peltier. The now-80-year-old Peltier’s life sentence was commuted to home confinement by President Biden just hours before leaving office January 20.

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The transformer crisis is a direct result of the previous administration’s decision to prioritize ideological policies over practical energy infrastructure needs. While certain technologies were favored politically, they did not address the essential requirements of grid stability. Without immediate action to rectify the transformer shortage, the U.S. risks hindering economic growth and compromising energy security.

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The field of climate science has long been presented as an objective, data-driven discipline, immune to the biases and financial conflicts that plague other scientific domains. However, a recent preprint study by Jessica Weinkle et al, Conflicts of Interest, Funding Support, and Author Affiliation in Peer-Reviewed Research on the Relationship between Climate Change and Geophysical Characteristics of Hurricanes, challenges this assumption, shedding light on an alarming lack of conflict of interest (COI) disclosures in climate research, particularly in studies linking hurricanes to climate change?. She also has an excellent write up of the study on her Substack, Conflicted.

The study’s findings reveal a disturbing trend: not a single one of the 331 authors analyzed disclosed any financial or non-financial conflicts of interest?. Moreover, the research found that funding from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) was a significant predictor of studies reporting a positive association between climate change and hurricane behavior?.

The American Mind.

The Fighting Irish may soon be fighting in court rather than on the gridiron. Few universities have practiced affirmative action in hiring longer than Notre Dame, as I document in a new report. Notre Dame’s provost even recently announced that increasing “the number of women and underrepresented minorities” on the faculty is a goal “equally important” to hiring Catholic faculty.

Fifty years of efforts to increase diversity, however, are now clearly in conflict with President Trump’s Executive Order 14173, a bold plan for “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” Section 4 of that order directs relevant government agencies, in a process overseen by the attorney general in coordination with the Office of Management and Budget, to identify the most egregious examples of “illegal DEI discrimination” happening at, among other places, “institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars.” The Department of Education could conduct up to nine investigations of around 80 institutions, a target rich environment. Notre Dame, whose endowment exceeds $20 billion, is one such institution that needs to be investigated.

Notre Dame has been practicing affirmative action since the late 1970s, when it established its Academic Affirmative Action Committee (AAAC). The school had long favored hiring faithful Catholics, relying on informal networks in earlier days, when more than 80% of the faculty were Catholic. But according to the AAAC, using informal networks made it more difficult to hire women and underrepresented minorities. Thus Notre Dame revolutionized its hiring process, shifting away from its historic religious affiliation to a new focus on diversity.

I was born in South Bend, and inherited my love of Notre Dame from my parents. My mother’s mother’s father was allegedly a bricklayer brought over from Ireland during the Famine, and family legend has it that his name is inscribed on the Golden Dome along with those of all the other workmen who helped build the campus. Fortunately I left the area before the rot set in.

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A Northwestern Law School clinic is providing free legal defense to a group of anti-Israel radicals who organized a blockade of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport that shut down travel last spring. One of the organizers is benefiting from that defense after repeatedly accusing Northwestern of “anti-Palestinian discrimination.”

Sheila Bedi, a Northwestern law professor who leads the school’s Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic, is representing four of the blockade organizers, according to legal filings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Her clinic and others like it at Northwestern use funding from the law school and its donors to offer legal services pro bono, according to attorneys familiar with the school.

The Washington, D.C.-based Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute filed a class action suit against the “anti-American” organizers in September, arguing that they should pay civil damages to travelers who missed their flights and were forced to walk miles with their luggage to access the airport.

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The Biden administration put in a lot hard at work inflating the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), using exaggerated agricultural damage estimates to justify sweeping climate policies. But in a new study, economist Ross McKitrick—one of the sharpest minds in climate policy skepticism—has taken apart the foundations of these inflated numbers, revealing what happens when climate alarmism meets real data.

The American Mind.

American life today is characterized in no small part by nearly ceaseless exposure to LGBTQ propaganda. Everywhere you turn, you’re confronted with “the message,” be it in grade schools, on college campuses, while watching television or movies, or at work. There are no “safe spaces” sheltered from the deluge—not even FEMA’s hurricane recovery efforts have been spared.

How did such a small “community” capture America’s institutions? The answer is complex, but a new database by The Project to Expose Corporate Activism (PECA) shines a light on a significant part of the story.

PECA’s database shows that corporations have become the vanguard of the LGBTQ movement, donating vast sums of money to prop up an equally vast network of activists. The database does not merely rehash well-known examples like Anheuser-Busch’s support for transgender TikTok influencers but rather furnishes evidence of 1,588 companies’ support for more than 2,300 LGBTQ causes. These causes on the whole are quite radical. They range from Camp Brave Trails—a queer summer camp that has children’s drag shows and a “clothing closet for exploring gender expression”—to NGOs like Immigration Equality that facilitate the illegal migration of transgender and HIV+ “asylum seekers.”