Malaysia’s biggest bank has one unhappy client to deal with. 

One client of the bank, Maybank, Hafidzah Abdullah checked her account in November to find that she had an astonishing 404 million ringgit ($86.3 million) in it. The only issue, according to a Bloomberg writeup, is that she couldn’t access it at the time. 

Instead, she took to LinkedIn to share the news. “Dear Maybank. I appreciate your making my banking experience memorable,” she wrote online, complaining that glitches were commonplace on the bank’s site.

She called the recurring issues “a comedy of errors that nobody finds funny” – and that always required visits to an in-person branch to resolve. 

She added: “They say money can’t buy happiness, but Maybank knows how to buy frustration.”

Bloomberg wrote that others chimed in to support her online. “They treat you like a ball, kick you here and there. Am wondering what’s wrong with banks in Malaysia,” one person wrote in response. 

Finally Maybank’s head of group customer experience management, Shaikh Munir Ahmad, reached out. He said in a comment online that he had spoken to Abdullah and that she could now access her account. Of course, without the extra $86 million. 

“It was not a system-wide issue and the customer account was not compromised,” a Maybank person said, according to the report. 

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The number of children placed on puberty blockers for ‘gender affirming care’ has doubled in the UK in a year despite the government run National Health Service saying it would stop the practice outside of clinical trials.

The Telegraph reports that at least 100 children, some as young as 12, have been given the drugs since July 2022 regardless of the NHS’ decision that month to stop doing so based on a damning review by Dr Hilary Cass, former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.

Dr Cass warned that puberty blockers could permanently disrupt the brain development of adolescents, and irreversibly rewire neural circuits.

🔴 Use of puberty blockers doubled since NHS clampdown.

Increase in number of children as young as 12 being treated with controversial drugs https://t.co/2ssR9G4Gr4

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) November 27, 2023

Cass also charged that Tavistock clinic, where the ‘treatment’ is carried out, operates an “affirmative, non-exploratory approach”, diagnosing children with gender dysphoria without proper oversight. 

NHS England agreed with Cass’ findings and announced that “due to the significant uncertainties surrounding the use of hormone treatments” puberty blockers for children would be halted.

The report notes that Freedom of Information requests for referrals from the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service have revealed that hasn’t happened.

The figures also do not include those given the drugs by GPs or privately, and are likely to be much higher.

Commenting on the findings, Psychotherapist Stella O’Malley charged that “This demonstrates that the culture war is more important than the medical war.”

The number of kids prescribed puberty blockers has doubled since July 2022, when the NHS England agreed that hormone blockers should only be prescribed as part of clinical trials, “due to the significant uncertainties surrounding the use of hormone treatments”.

This demonstrates…

— Stella O’Malley (@stellaomalley3) November 27, 2023

Meanwhile the 16-17 year olds are just referred straight to the adult clinic:

“As many as 2,000 teens aged 16 and 17 have been told they will be sent straight to an adult clinic as delays and backlogs mean they won’t be seen by a children’s service before they turn 18.”

— Stella O’Malley (@stellaomalley3) November 27, 2023

Consultant psychiatrist Dr David Bell commented that the drugs cause “considerable damage,” adding “There are serious concerns about bone mineralisation and long-term cognitive effects.”

“We know 98 per cent of children starting puberty blockers go on to take opposite-sex hormones, and a very significant proportion of those go on to have surgery,” he continued, adding “They are being started on a pathway which is highly likely to be irreversible. Once you start them on that path, it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Bell also noted that “autism, depression, family trauma or sexuality” are not considered as factors which goes “completely against the Cass recommendations”.

Stephanie Davies-Arai, director of Transgender Trend, which campaigns for evidence-based healthcare, said “How many more children will be given blockers before they stop?” adding “I don’t understand how the NHS can sit back and let this continue when they know the harms that were described in Dr Cass’ interim report.”

The number of children put on puberty blockers by the Tavistock has doubled over the last year to 100, some aged just 12.
Why this reckless rush to put them on harmful drugs which will lead to 98% of them going onto to irreversible cross sex hormones?https://t.co/Gnuuof8g2w

— TransgenderTrend (@Transgendertrd) November 27, 2023

Stephanie Davies-Arai, director of Transgender Trend, said: “How many more children will be given blockers before they stop?
I don’t understand how the NHS can sit back and let this continue when they know the harms that were described in Dr Cass’ interim report.”

— TransgenderTrend (@Transgendertrd) November 27, 2023

As we highlighted earlier this week, NHS midwives have revealed that they are being forced to assign gender identities to new born babies on a new computer system, rather than register their biological sex.

*  *  *

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Authored by Techno Fog via The Reactionary,

Henry Kissinger is dead at 100.

He rose to power from humble beginnings. His middle-class Jewish family escaped Germany for the United States in 1938. After graduating high school and attending one year of college (studying accounting, of all things), Kissinger would enlist in the Army and serve in Germany until 1947.

Upon his return to the States, and through the advice of a mentor, he would gain admission to Harvard, where he excelled as an undergraduate and graduate student. His academic career at Harvard, starting in 1951, was also the beginning of his professional trajectory. Kissinger would establish himself as an important foreign policy theorist and a “recognized expert on the role of nuclear weapons in American foreign policy.” At the same time, by way of his position at Harvard, he would forge relationships with prominent American and foreign political figures. Kissinger’s network, and really his scope of influence, would further grow after his 1955 appointment to the Council of Foreign Relations, where he was brought in contact with “many of the most powerful men in the nation” including the Rockefellers.

Through the later 1950s and into the 1960s, Kissinger would cement himself as a best-selling author (Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957) and prolific writer. For all the talk of Kissinger’s genius (then and now), many of his ideas at that time were unoriginal, illogical, and near-delusional. For example, in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Kissinger argued in favor of limited nuclear war (as opposed to all-out nuclear war). To avoid the escalation from limited nuclear war to all-out nuclear war – a very real and obvious danger – Kissinger proposed conditions by which such a war could take place, such as using “diplomacy to convey to our opponent what we understand by limited nuclear war, or at least what limitations we are willing to observe.” He argued that “a war which began as a limited nuclear war would have the advantage that its limitations could have been established” in advance of hostilities. These ideas were as ludicrous then as they are now, and were criticized as such after publication. As one writer more recently observed, “Kissinger’s limited nuclear war had to be conceived and waged as an Ivy League fencing match.”

Kissinger would eventually obtain a tenured professorship at Harvard in 1962. Yet he was not destined for academia; his appetite was for high-stakes policymaking. He was the foreign policy advisor for Nelson Rockefeller’s failed presidential campaigns and in 1968, when Nixon won the Republican nomination, Kissinger made it clear that he wanted to be part of the potential Nixon Administration. (Kissinger was adept enough to leave open the possibility of a position in the Humphrey administration, had he defeated Nixon.)

The lengths Kissinger might go to assist then-candidate Nixon – and thus ensure Kissinger’s ascent – were revealed in 1968, as President Lyndon B. Johnson sought to begin peace negotiations and bring about an end to the Vietnam War. This would undoubtedly benefit Democrat candidate Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Nixon learned of that peace effort via leaks from Kissinger, who was serving as an advisor to President Johnson and attended the Paris Peace talks with the North Vietnamese. Nixon then instructed his closest advisor, H.R. Haldeman, to “monkey wrench” the negotiations. The South Vietnamese were pressured to “hold firm” by Nixon’s allies. With the understanding that Nixon could deliver better terms, the South Vietnamese boycotted the talks. Nixon would win the election. Over 25,000 more Americans would die in Vietnam before the war eventually concluded.

Kissinger’s duplicity was rewarded with his appointment of National Security Advisor after Nixon took office in 1969. Seizing on Nixon’s distrust of the State Department, Kissinger executed a “quiet coup” to exclude other agencies and officials from the foreign policy decision-making process (an idea Nixon liked), effectively guaranteeing his “position as the foreign policy czar.”

This structure allowed for streamlined decisions, Executive control, a reduction in bureaucratic meddling, and secrecy. Beginning in the Spring of 1969 through 1973, the Nixon and Kissinger conducted a secret and illegal and extensive bombing operation (codenamed MENU) of purported North Vietnamese routes and alleged headquarters in Cambodia. The architect and overseer of this plan was Kissinger. In fact, Kissinger maneuvered to ensure Nixon’s approval of the plan after the Secretary of State objected.

In the first 14 months of the operation (codenamed MENU), there would be a total of 3,630 flights dropping 110,000 tons of bombs. In total, U.S. planes “dropped 500,000 or more tons of munitions.” Gunships would rake children. The Nixon Administration and Kissinger conspired to keep the carpet bombings secret while Kissinger oversaw its execution and “approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids” with “full knowledge of it effect on civilians.” Kissinger’s instructions for strikes (following Nixon’s demands) weren’t to hit military targets, but “anything that moves.” Many times, innocent Cambodian villages would be “hit with dozens of payloads over the course of several hours. The result was near-total destruction.”

Interviews of Cambodian victims by The Intercept reveal the first-person horror. One woman described what she experienced as a young girl, stating “At around 10 a.m., an airplane dropped a bomb on my home. My parents and four siblings were all killed.” Thousands of others had similar stories: “I lost my mother, father, sisters, brothers, everyone.” It is estimated that as many as 150,000 civilians were killed – all at the direction of Henry Kissinger.  

Subscribers to The Reactionary can read the rest here…

As the US government hurtles toward insolvency while political and cultural divisions intensify across the country, Texans are poised to take their long-simmering flirtation with secession to the next level, as a non-binding proposition is expected to appear on the statewide GOP primary ballot in March 2024.  

On Friday, the Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) announced that it had obtained the number of signatures required to compel the Republican Party of Texas to include this question on the primary ballot: “Should the State of Texas reassert its status as an independent nation?”

The party’s State Republican Executive Committee (SREC) is meeting this weekend to finalize the list of ballot propositions. According to TNM, the SREC’s wishes are not relevent, as the Texas Election Code empowers voters to place a proposition on a ballot by collecting the signatures of 97,709 Texans who want the question to appear. TNM says it has more than 102,000. 

BREAKING: TNM has secured more than the required amount petition signatures to get TEXIT on the ballot this March!

RT NOW to spread the word! pic.twitter.com/ndqd8S8cDi

— Texas Nationalist Movement (TEXIT) (@TexasNatMov) December 1, 2023

“We could actually bypass the SREC’s ballot proposition process and compel the party to place the question on the ballot,” said TNM President Daniel Miller in a Friday letter submitted to the SREC in support of the proposition. He emphasized that including the proposition doesn’t equate to a Texas GOP endorsement of secession. Rather, he wrote, ballot propositions serve as a means of pursuing clarity as to the “greatest concerns of Republican voters.”

The drive for statewide votes on secession has spanned several years. While the SREC’s resolutions committee added it to a preliminary list in 2015, the SREC struck it. At the party’s 2016 convention, a plank calling for a statewide referendum of all voters was forwarded for inclusion in the Texas GOP platform, only for it to be struck down by the Permanent Platform Committee.

ICYMI: I spent some time last month with the TEXIT folks at their first-ever conference — which featured a sitting state senator. They told me they feel more emboldened than ever about the potential for a secession vote. #txlege https://t.co/yL2PPQAJEe

— Robert Downen (@RobertDownen_) December 1, 2023

Later Republican plank attempts were successful. The SREC will be under greater pressure to green-light the primary ballot proposition on Saturday, given presence of two planks in the current Texas GOP platform: 

• Plank 33, addressing “state sovereignty,” asserts that “Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto.”
• Plank 225, “Texas Independence,” urges the legislature to require a general election referendum “for the people of Texas to determine whether or not the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.”

“Whether you are for, against, or undecided TEXIT, we should all be able to agree that the platform matters, the Texas Bill of Rights matters, and the Republican voters matter,” said TNM’s Miller in his letter to the SREC.

The GOP primary proposition won’t have any power of law, but is sure to intensify discussion of the idea inside Texas and out. Secessionists in other states are keeping a close eye on the Texas secession movement, seeing it as a flagship that, if successful, will accelerate the trend elsewhere.

Covering the latest development in Texas, the anonymous, non-Texan author of the Red-State Secession Substack newsletter argues…

If Texas eventually withdraws from the Union, other red states will suddenly realize they need to follow. If Texas announces a future independence date, red states will have a choice to make: stay in a Union dominated by blue states, or follow Texas’ lead.

Since a Republican can’t win a presidential election without Texas’ electoral votes, the red states will have to follow Texas to avoid the tyranny, perversion, and bankruptcy that incompetent Democrat rule will bring to the remainder of the US… even if these states hadn’t favored secession until presented with this dilemma.

After seceding from Mexico, Texas was an independent country from 1836 to 1845 and, economically, is extraordinarily well-suited for independence today. It’s by far the largest oil producer of any US state, accounting for a whopping 42% of American production, with no other state exceeding even 10%. It has deep-water ports, abundant agriculture, and is a major high-tech hub. 

Authored by Andre Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours)

The United States must expand and modernize its nuclear arsenal beyond planned improvements to deter combined aggression from communist China and Russia, according to a new congressional report.

Planned nuclear capacity “limits” the United States’ ability to effectively prevent a war with China and Russia, says the report (pdf) by the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States.

“Given current threat trajectories, our nation will soon encounter a fundamentally different global setting than it has ever experienced: we will face a world where two nations possess nuclear arsenals on par with our own,” the report says.

“The size and composition of the nuclear force must account for the possibility of combined aggression from Russia and China.”

The report emphasizes that a new conflict with either or both of the powers could realistically result in nuclear catastrophe and would need to be deterred.

“There is a growing risk of confrontation with China, Russia, or both. This includes the risk of military conflict,” the report says.

“Deployed strategic nuclear force requirements will increase for the United States in such a threat environment,” the report says.

Hudson Institute senior fellow Marshall Billingslea, who co-authored the report, said a key factor in the commission’s decision-making was the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal.

“They’re on pace to either rival or perhaps surpass the number of fielded nuclear weapons that we ourselves possess,” Mr. Billingslea said during a Nov. 30 talk at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

“Let’s be clear, when you have a China that has gone from, let’s say, around 250 nuclear weapons to … around 700 by 2027 … that’s a fundamental game changer.”

Mr. Billingslea’s comments referred to the Pentagon’s most recent China Military Power Report, which found that the regime likely already has 500 deployed nuclear warheads and will have more than 1,000 by 2030.

Moreover, because of China’s size and economic power, he said the nation cannot rely on coercive economic methods to bring China to the nonproliferation table.

“When you’re talking about China, which has an economy nearly as large as ours … some of the tools that we traditionally have relied upon to deal with the Russias and the Irans and the Venezuelas and the North Koreas, are simply not available in a Chinese context.”

As such, he said the commission recommended the United States increase the number of its “shorter and medium-range” missiles and invest in “hypersonics” to deploy both nuclear and conventional weapons.

“The sheer increase in the number of targets implied by this Chinese buildup … [suggests] that the program of record that was foreseen back in 2010 is not sufficient,” he said.

Similarly, Hudson Institute senior fellow Rebeccah Heinrichs, also a co-author of the report, said the new posture was necessary to counter a united China and Russia, which have entered an unprecedented comprehensive strategic partnership.

“What the report finds is that the United States must be able to deter both Russia and China simultaneously,” Ms. Heinrichs said.

“That’s obviously going to change the United States’ strategic posture.”

Selling the idea of supplemental spending for nuclear weapons may not be an easy task. Concerns about war profiteering are growing amid unprecedented defense spending by the Biden administration.

Additionally, the Hudson Institute’s close financial relationship with key defense corporations may diminish its credibility with some in Congress. According to the organization’s financials (pdf), defense contractors gave the think tank more than half a million dollars last year.

Anticipation of an eventual US spot Bitcoin ETF – which Bloomberg’s analysts assign a 90% probability of being approved by the SEC in January…

Okay, we’re nearing in on deadline dates for 3 spot #Bitcoin ETF applications. I want to get ahead of it because there’s a pretty good chance we’ll see delay orders from the SEC. Delays WOULD NOT change anything about our views & 90% odds for 19b-4 approval by Jan 10, 2024 pic.twitter.com/LE7sOlHAHM

— James Seyffart (@JSeyff) November 14, 2023

… as well as surging prices, have helped to spur inflows into digital-asset investment products for a ninth consecutive week, the largest run since the crypto bull market in late 2021.

According to a recent report from CoinShares, these products which include trusts and exchange-traded products, saw inflows of $346 million last week, with Canada and Germany contributing to 87% of the total. Only $30 million came from the US, a sign of continued low participation from the country, the asset-management firm said. Of course, that will change as soon as investors start seeing double digit percentage weekly gains, and reallocating their money into crypto in droves, just like they did in 2020 and 2021.

Since early October, the crypto market has surged as traditional asset managers like BlackRock prepared for spot Bitcoin ETFs, potentially bringing in many more investors into the asset and resulting in inflows of tens of billions in fresh capital.

“The combination of price rises and inflows have now pushed up total assets under management to $45.3 billion, the highest in over one and half years,” the report said.

Bitcoin products raked in $312 million last week, pushing inflows to over $1.5 billion since the start of the year. Ether products saw $34 million in inflows last week, almost negating outflows all of 2023.

Amid the surging inflows, and amid expectations for imminent ETF approval by the SEC and a surge in March rate cuts odds, bitcoin and ethereum have continued their furious ascent, with the former now trading just shy of $40,

Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClear Wire,

Megyn Kelly was worried. And more recently, indignant. Righteously, of course.

She craved another chance and felt confident, while watching from home, that she could deliver in a way that was a hell of a lot better than the competition, harboring the sort of personal ambition and professional jealousy that develop as a matter of course in all who have fought for survival in prime time.

Talent and earned experience and the trust of a large audience. She has had all of it. The only thing she needed now was a television network. And so, she will borrow one.

She is set to return as a debate moderator next week to referee the fourth Republican presidential debate, this one in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and this time on NewsNation as part of a partnership with that network, Sirius XM, and the Free Beacon. It is a noteworthy milestone; she had a front-row seat eight years ago to the rise of populism. It is also a test of the new media; she bridled a similar kind of populism to continue her career.

And that’s why, for just a while, she worried. Independent journalists don’t often get to call marquee prize fights. But Megyn Kelly does.

“Malpractice, absolute journalistic malpractice!” That’s how Kelly describes the most explosive exchange from the Miami debate moderated by NBC News anchors Lester Holt and Kristen Welker. Nikki Haley had called Vivek Ramaswamy “scum” after the businessman took a shot at her adult daughter. Reliving the moment in an interview with RealClearPolitics, Kelly was incredulous: “And the moderator did not stop to say, ‘Wait, did you just call him scum? Mr. Ramaswamy. Do you care to respond?’”

“How did that not happen?” she asks before immediately offering an answer. “Because these moderators are too tied to their written questions. They’re not nimble. They are afraid to deviate from what their producers put in front of them. That isn’t good television!”

“There’s a reason why they call it broadcast journalism. It’s not just about journalism. It’s also about seizing the moment,” she explains. “You feel the moment, go with the moment.”

Kelly could have just as easily been describing her own career. A trial lawyer before entering journalism, Kelly jumped from the courtroom to cable news to network television over the last two decades.

And then the wilderness. Veteran journalists who go it alone hardly ever regain prominence. Some decamp to college campuses. Others write books. Most generally fade. Kelly, instead, seized the digital moment.

Three years ago, after an unsuccessful stint at NBC News, she launched “The Megyn Kelly Show,” a daily podcast that was later picked up on Sirius XM and that posts on YouTube, where her interviews regularly attract millions of viewers. Professional indifference, as much as independence, was an advertised feature of the new venture. The name of her production company: “Devil May Care Media.”

“Fourth or fifth acts in broadcast media are rare,” explains Brian Stelter, “and she is pulling it off.” Hardly a conservative fanboy, the veteran media reporter and former host of CNN’s Reliable Sources occasionally tunes in to the show during his commute, programming he described as “a hard-right, anti-woke rage fest.” But Stelter admits the Kelly renaissance “is a pretty rare success story.”  

A seat at the desk of a presidential debate, though, the crown jewel of any career in political journalism? Even Kelly felt that would be out of reach “this time around.” Those gigs traditionally go to legacy media, and for good reason. Deep pockets, not to mention a wealth of experience, are needed to pull off a prize fight in prime time. All the same, Kelly says she “wound up with three different offers to co-moderate a debate.” But even with NewsNation handling all the technical logistics, would the ordeal be worth the fuss?

Former President Donald Trump has walked away from the stage, leaving his primary challengers to cannibalize each other as they trail by more than 45 points. “Does it matter at all?” she asked herself when deciding whether to moderate an undercard debate without the biggest name in politics. Sequels often fall flat, and her first debate had catapulted her to the journalism equivalent of superstardom.

It has now been eight years since Trump and Kelly, then of Fox News, clashed at the first Republican presidential debate. A stampede of magazine writers followed.

“Blowhards, Beware,” declared Vanity Fair in 2016, “Megyn Kelly Will Slay You Now.” And later Vogue dubbed her “Megyn Unbound” as she prepared to decamp Fox for NBC the next year, speculating that, once split from the conservative news juggernaut, she could finally be “a force for good.” Eventually, the names of the magazines that profiled her said as much about her career as the interviews: Variety, then Success, and finally More.

The quotes changed. The formula for each glossy cover story stayed the same. An elegant photo shoot, a couple thousand words complete with anecdotes about unscripted off-air moments, deviations on one common theme. One gushing headline summed up the shared sentiment: “Megyn Kelly Always Wins.”

She chuckles at that past coverage, and then the new queen of independent journalism returns to a no-brainer for anyone else with a byline. “In the end, I concluded, yes,” Kelly says of her reason for reprising her role as debate moderator, noting that “Trump is vulnerable in some unique ways” – from the frontrunner’s legal jeopardy to, “with all due respect,” the septuagenarian’s health. Between the Thanksgiving holiday and debate prep sessions, she insists “there are all sorts of reasons” for the GOP to consider “at least the next best option.” One of the candidates not named Trump “could pull an inside straight,” she muses. “It’s not likely,” Kelly concludes, “but who am I to rule it out?”

Haley, Ramaswamy, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have qualified for that contest. None would likely appreciate her analysis of their chances. All of them know her already, however, and there is a level of comfort with Kelly inside party headquarters and among the grassroots. She may not be a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. She can at least speak their language.

“This does get to an interesting tension point about the debates,” Stelter mused. “Who should be asking the questions: Should it be Hugh Hewitt and Megyn Kelly, or Lester Holt and Bret Baier?” In his estimation, since going independent, the woman once crowned “the First Lady of Fox,” someone who cultivated a brand as “unpredictable,” has become reliably “more Rush Limbaugh than Brit Hume.”

It was Hume who first spotted Kelly and passed her demo tape along to Fox News brass, who eagerly recruited her to be a reporter. The rest is history, including a cautionary tale about cultivating talent. According to talk show host Erick Erickson, NBC drafted Kelly without an adequate plan to leverage her conservative celebrity. “They could have built a credible brand around Megyn,” he says, “but chose not to because she did not have enough of a left-wing orthodoxy.”

Erickson, like many others on the right, was quick to celebrate her return to the moderator role. “She can speak the language of the people from whom she came,” he explains, “even though she’s been elevated into this New York world of the media.”

Conservatives have long loved to hate the media, and moderators are no exception. Ramaswamy delighted the right with his modest proposal at the last debate that Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, and Tucker Carlson should be calling the contest. Kelly arguably has more mainstream appeal, less baggage, and better hair than all of them. And according to Erickson, a unique kind of credibility. “You don’t have to be a card-carrying member of the vast right-wing conspiracy to be taken seriously by conservatives,” he insisted. “You just have to be willing to treat them as humans with valid opinions.”

Kelly won’t sign any party membership card. “I’m a registered independent,” she says to almost preempt her admission in the next breath that “my sensibilities are center-right.” And so, when she takes her seat behind the desk in Alabama and looks out over the field of candidates, she won’t bother with a view from nowhere. On the eve of that contest, Kelly advertises “complete fluency” in the ideological concerns of conservatives. And then she offers up a professional disclaimer directed at the politicians she will square up with: “I’m never going to share a jersey with these people.”

“Am I willing to vote for a Democrat over a Republican at the presidential level these days? I’ll be honest, probably not. I have voted for plenty of Democrats in the past, but the world is so insane right now, and I’ve become almost a single-issue voter on what we’re doing to children in the trans lane,” she admits.

“But my point is even though I’m probably rooting for these guys over a Democrat, you won’t be able to tell that on debate night, and that’s all you can ask of a good moderator. They don’t have to have no politics. They don’t have to have no ideology. They have to be able to check it. They go out there such that both sides are satisfied that this person was tough but fair,” she continues.

Each of the candidates who will walk on stage next week has sat for in-depth interviews with her already, and even Trump made peace with her. Of course, it was only temporary. That segment included a lengthy cross-examination about his handling of classified documents, and days after it aired, hostilities resumed. “She was pretty nasty,” the former president complained to an Iowa crowd, “didn’t you think?” Kelly could care less.

She already got the interview. Now she’s about to get her debate, a contest she playfully likens to “a dinner party” where her role is that of the “bad host” who chooses chaos. “Instead of introducing fun topics on which guests might agree, you’re introducing the thorny ones,” Kelly says, laying out in broad strokes her plans for the evening. Should any of the candidates arrive low energy, she warns, well, “Maybe you take out the cattle prod.”

She plans to invite arguments and doesn’t expect “a hug” from anyone on stage afterward. “As soon as you declare yourself a presidential candidate, we’re not friends,” Kelly explains. The biggest bully in politics helped solidify that fact in her mind: “The nature of the relationship becomes adversarial. And as much as Trump came after me and made my life unpleasant after the 2015 debate, he wasn’t wrong.”

“I threw a punch at him that was considerable, and he threw many, many punches back. You could argue it was excessive. I certainly think it was. But my point is simply that part of it is accepting your role as someone who these guys are not going to like that much. If you’re doing it right, they shouldn’t,” she says, recalling her first big brush with the populist who went on to the presidency.

She talks in calculated, almost cold-blooded, terms but her inviting tone never loses its warmth. Such is the duality of Megyn Kelly: She is as disarming and kind as any suburban mom anywhere, and yet she has a plan to end the career of any unprepared politician she meets.

Scott Walker has tangled with Kelly before, and the former Wisconsin governor, who now serves as president of the Young America’s Foundation, has blunt advice for any 2024 candidates who might be tempted to underestimate the blonde brawler: Don’t.

“Just because she articulates conservative views doesn’t mean any of the candidates will get a pass from her,” Walker cautions. “They’d better be bringing their A-game to the debate stage.”

While her confrontation of Trump eight years ago dominates the memory of that contest, her questions to the rest of the field were no less aggressive. For instance, she didn’t lob a softball and invite Walker to explain why he opposed abortion. She threw high and inside. “Would you really let a mother die rather than have an abortion?” Kelly asked. The governor kept his balance, defended his position, and answered that his pro-life position was “in line with everyday America.”

Others weren’t so lucky that night, as Kelly weaved right as quickly as she bobbed left. One moment, she asked former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who had leaned on Scripture to justify his expansion of Medicaid, why conservative voters, “who generally want to shrink government” should “believe you won’t use your Saint Peter analogy to expand all government?” The next, she hit him with this question: “If you had a son or daughter who was gay or lesbian, how would you explain to them your opposition to same-sex marriage?”

The left-right routine was enough to win Kelly praise from all corners. Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, declared Kelly “the toughest person on the debate stage,” while Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of the eventual Democratic nominee the next year, said the moderators had raised “the quality of the debate.”

Campaigns are rewatching that debate and pulling clips from her show to prepare. “They should review my show,” she laughs. “It’s full of interesting content. They won’t find clues in there, though.” Kelly stubbornly refuses to talk outside of school. She says only that she and her co-moderators, Elizabeth Vargas of NewsNation and Eliana Johnson of the Washington Free Beacon, will be “unsparing.” The trio has binders full of “A+ level questions” designed to shove candidates off their talking points and into real moments of conflict.

“If the three of us could shrink into obscurity that night, it would be a total win. If it’s just all about the three of them, or four of them, and not at all about the three of us, that would be great,” Kelly says.

The four of them? “I know Trump loves Alabama. I do know this,” she says of a perhaps hoped-for surprise appearance. “He loves Alabama. So, there’s some possibility he’d decide to show up.” Should that happen, Kelly says the trio of moderators will be prepared. They’ve studied the candidates and the current moment.

“This Republican Party is a far more dynamic, interesting, and complex one than what we had even six to eight years ago,” she reports, before suggesting “that’s probably actually good for the country” and then declaring, “that’s definitely good for a debate.”

Take foreign policy, for instance, the foundation of the previous debate. Kelly cuts the party roughly into thirds for the sake of example. There is “the populist, Trump MAGA wing,” she says, and “then you still have the neoconservatives.” The remainder, in her quick estimation, are “the war-weary” who are skeptical of foreign intervention, “but who aren’t MAGA and certainly aren’t pro-Trump.”

Pick a different issue. Slice, dice, and repeat. “There are a bunch of factions right now in the Republican Party,” she says, in between debate prep sessions, “which for me, as somebody who has a show, a journalist, and as a debate moderator, spells opportunity.”

Familiarity will not lead to fondness, though. The only class Kelly seems to dislike more than politicians are members of the media. So much of her current rise is a reaction to their coverage, or perhaps an antidote. She complains that “the liberals who dominate the news” fail to account for their own biases, let alone check them in any meaningful way. “They’re cheerleaders,” Kelly says, “and that’s why independent media has exploded.”

“The populist rising that we’ve seen in our politics has tilted over to media,” she replies when asked how she fits into that phenomenon. “My own coverage, I wouldn’t describe it as populist, but it is definitely anti-elite and anti-institution because they’ve earned that disdain. And people have had it. They’ve come to understand that these institutions are not rooting for them.”

Next week may be the biggest opportunity yet for independent media when Megyn Kelly returns to live television. She predicts that some of her questions will be objectionable to one wing of the party and acceptable to another. “You have the chance to both please and displease a large constituency,” she says, “which is a win.” 

“No one should be feeling super warm and fuzzy when the debate is over, like they just want to give the debate moderator a hug,” she adds. “They should be feeling like, ‘I loved this stuff. I hated that stuff. Overall, I found it very informative.’”

More than anything, though, Kelly stresses that she and her co-moderators will go with the moment. “We are going to make this entertaining,” she promises. “Trust me when I tell you, we know how. It’ll be fun to watch.”

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Former President Donald Trump is not immune to lawsuits over the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol, a federal appeals court ruled on Dec. 1.

President Trump has not proven that he has presidential immunity from suits regarding his actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, the court said.

The ruling was largely based on the determination that President Trump’s campaign for another term was not an official presidential act, so did not fall under presidential immunity.

“In arguing that he is entitled to official-act immunity in the cases before us, President Trump does not dispute that he engaged in his alleged actions up to and on January 6 in his capacity as a candidate. But he thinks that does not matter. Rather, in his view, a president’s speech on matters of public concern is invariably an official function, and he was engaged in that function when he spoke at the January 6 rally and in the leadup to that day. We cannot accept that rationale,” U.S. Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan, appointed under former President Barack Obama, wrote in the ruling.

“While presidents are often exercising official responsibilities when they speak on matters of public concern, that is not always the case. When a sitting president running for re-election speaks in a campaign ad or in accepting his political party’s nomination at the party convention, he typically speaks on matters of public concern. Yet he does so in an unofficial, private capacity as office-seeker, not an official capacity as office-holder. And actions taken in an unofficial capacity cannot qualify for official-act immunity,” Judge Srinivasan added.

Judge Gregory Katsas, appointed by President Trump, concurred, while Judge Judith Rogers, appointed under President Bill Clinton, concurred in part.

The panel ruled on an appeal lodged by President Trump after U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta, appointed under President Obama, ruled in 2022 that President Trump was not protected by presidential immunity for his speech on Jan. 6.

“To deny a president immunity from civil damages is no small step,” Judge Mehta wrote at the time. “The court well understands the gravity of its decision. But the alleged facts of this case are without precedent, and the court believes that its decision is consistent with the purposes behind such immunity.”

The ruling is not final, Judge Srinivasan emphasized.

The rejection of President Trump’s appeal “is necessarily tied to the need to assume the truth of the plaintiffs’ factual allegations at this point in the proceedings,” he wrote. “President Trump has not had a chance to counter those allegations with facts of his own. When these cases move forward in the district court, he must be afforded the opportunity to develop his own facts on the immunity question if he desires to show that he took the actions alleged in the complaints in his official capacity as President rather than in his unofficial capacity as a candidate. At the appropriate time, he can move for summary judgment on his claim of official-act immunity.”

The Dec. 1 decision “is not necessarily even the final word on the issue of presidential immunity,” he added, so “we of course express no view on the ultimate merits of the claims against President Trump.”

Lawyers for President Trump and the other parties did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Positions

The decision came nearly a year after the parties argued in front of the appeals court panel. The appeals court normally issues decisions in about a third of the time.

The ruling came after President Trump was sued by Democrats and law enforcement officers over his actions on Jan. 6.

Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, for instance, accused President Trump of conspiring to prevent them from their duty in approving the 2020 electoral results because of his speech, in which the president called on supporters to march to the Capitol.

President Trump, who is the Republican frontrunner for 2024, has argued that the speech consisted of “political statements and discourse by a sitting president during his term of office” and should thus be covered by presidential immunity.

The immunity protects presidents from civil lawsuits over official acts, or acts taken with the “outer perimeter” of his official responsibilities, under a 1982 Supreme Court ruling.

“In the run-up to January 6th and on the day itself, President Trump was acting well within the scope of ordinary presidential action when he engaged in open discussion and debate about the integrity of the 2020 election,” lawyers for the former president wrote in one filing.

Lawyers for the other parties had told the appeals court that Judge Mehta ruled correctly.

President Trump “was acting far beyond the “outer perimeter” of his office when he conspired to use violence and intimidation to prevent members of Congress from carrying out their constitutional duty to count Electoral College votes and certify the results of the 2020 presidential election,” they said.

Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A new “cutting-edge” textbook on transgenderism written with the help of activists will be used to train psychiatrists and could harm millions of children in the future, some experts have warned.

“Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care,” just released on Amazon at $58, is a textbook printed by American Psychiatric Association (APA) Publishing.

The textbook signals early on that it’s more subjective than objective, quoting a feminist studies professor saying, “Scientific neutrality is a fallacy.”

The content has prompted some critics to question the textbook’s reliance on a mix of transgender-identifying professionals writing about their experiences, limited scientific studies, and neo-Marxist critical theories.

“This is a huge issue; millions more kids will be harmed,” said Dr. Lauren Schwartz, a psychiatrist in Oklahoma speaking out against the rush to “transition” children.

The textbook’s introduction says the book is based on an “evidence-informed approach” instead of an evidence-based approach, which is more scientific, she told The Epoch Times.

The 26 chapters are written by 56 authors, 50 of whom are in the transgender community, according to the textbook’s foreword.

Chapters include affirming “two-spirit people,” a term used to refer to someone who believes he or she is both sexes, and one about “double queer” people—or people who identify as transgender and have a mental disability.

The book’s editors are listed as an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and investigator at the National LGBT Health Education Center; and a transgender-identifying psychiatry resident at the University of Pennsylvania, whose work is influenced by her background as a “non-binary/trans, queer, neurodivergent, chronically ill, Jewish person.”

Dr. Schwartz noted that the authors were chosen by “prioritizing lived experience, diversity of perspectives, and community impact of prior work over academic titles.”

‘Disturbing Gibberish’

The problem is the textbook will be perceived as authoritative because it was printed by the APA’s publishing arm, she said.

“Anyone wanting to practice gender-affirming care, any attorney wanting to defend it, and any legislator who wants to protect it, now they have a new peer-reviewed textbook, not just ‘evidence’ in a journal or a study,” she said.

Alan Hopewell, a prescribing neuropsychologist in Texas who saw transgender-identifying patients decades ago, called the textbook “disturbing.”

“This is nonsensical gibberish which has no foundation whatsoever in science,” he told The Epoch Times.

Hospitals could demand doctors go by the textbook because the APA put it out, or it could even be used to remove the license of doctors who don’t go along with it, he said.

“This reminds me of brain-damaged hippies free-associating at a commune,” Mr. Hopewell said.

The book foreword says that most of the contributing authors recognize they are “obscenely privileged” as English-speaking doctors with access to elite schools.

It asserts that the psychiatric field was built on “the work [and assumptions] of European, white, cisgender men, including their colonial, Anglo-centric, cis-heteropatriarchal worldview and pathologization of experiences that did not fit their own ‘norm.'”

“For millennia, outside of European colonial influences, gender diversity has flourished to varying degrees among hundreds of indigenous communities around the world,” the foreword reads.

The idea that Western countries were colonizing land stolen from indigenous people is part of critical race theory (CRT), which critics say is rooted in neo-Marxism.

Straight White Bias

CRT and gender theories see white people and heterosexuals in Western civilization as “oppressors” of minority identity groups, who are viewed as victims.

Activists are encouraged to dismantle oppressive societies in order to right discrimination of the past, according to ideology architects such as Ibram X. Kendi, who wrote “How to Be an Antiracist.”

Proponents of CRT and gender theories contend that discrimination against identity groups such as white people and heterosexuals is needed to right the wrongs against racial and sexual minorities.

“The entire document is predicated on an uncritical acceptance of queer theory, which is more accurately queer Marxism,” conservative author James Lindsay told The Epoch Times.

Queer theory is a gender ideology advocating the destruction of traditional sexual norms; some queer theorists support sexual acts such as pedophilia and bestiality that aren’t accepted by society.

The textbook describes heterosexuals as cisgender people who are part of a “cultural and systemic marginalization” of LGBT people who don’t align with societal norms.

To prove the point, the authors object to the idea that only women can have babies.

“For example, naming an obstetrics and gynecology practice a women’s health center is cis-normative because it assumes the practice will only serve patients with one gender,” the foreword reads.

Mr. Lindsay, author of “The Marxification of Education,” said the idea of “treating” gender dysphoria with hormones or surgery is akin to performing lobotomies on the mentally ill decades ago.

History teaches that communist theories applied to the real world have deadly results, he said.

Mr. Lindsay pointed to the forced application of Trofim Lysenko’s Soviet agriculture program based on pseudo-science as an example of a communist idea gone bad.

The program caused millions of innocent people in the former Soviet Union to starve by forcing them to plant seeds close together in the belief that plants from the same class never compete with each other. The theory contributed to widespread famine.

Read the rest here…