Kevin Williamson, Thought Criminal

This is really good. So good, I've gained a new appreciation for Jonah Goldberg's writing. He's very thoughtful, articulate, fair, and measured.

At National Review:

The G-File is out. It is lengthy, among other things. https://t.co/nYM74LQvyc

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) April 6, 2018

Erick Erickson on the Cultural Revolution

At RCP, "The American Cultural Revolution":

Kevin Williamson has been fired by The Atlantic. Williamson is one of the great conservative intellectuals of our times. He has a keen wit and frequently engages in heterodox opinions that make his writing and thinking intriguing. For a decade he wrote at William F. Buckley's National Review until hired away last week by Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor of The Atlantic.

The Atlantic fancies itself a place of intellectual diversity where the best writers across ideologies can share their views. But Williamson's hire drew burning rage from the left. Williamson's birth came from an unplanned pregnancy. Instead of aborting him, his birth mother gave him up for adoption. As you might imagine, Williamson has strongly held views on the matter of abortion. A week after hiring him, Jeffrey Goldberg bowed to the leftwing mob and fired Williamson for, in part, how he might make the pro-abortion women in the office feel.

Never mind Williamson's feelings on abortion and that he could have been aborted himself, the editor took the brave stand of worrying about the hypothetical feelings of pro-abortion women in the office. The left told us that the purges happening on college campuses were contained to the campus. Yet here we are today with one of the best voices of conservatism fired from a job for his conservative views.

It will only get worse...

Keep reading.

And on Twitter:

More from Goldberg’s memo: pic.twitter.com/gnTi9qpDZG

— Michael Calderone (@mlcalderone) April 5, 2018

I've publicly argued with Kevin Williamson (who's a friend) over harsh things he's written, but he is one of the bravest and most talented writers I know. The Atlantic's cutting him loose under left-wing fire is deplorable. But clarifying. Definitely clarifying.

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) April 5, 2018

If they didn’t know Kevin Williamson could be callous in pursuing his arguments, they didn’t do the most basic due diligence. And I doubt that. They were mau-maued into firing an intellectually honest writer for too much honesty.

— Virginia Postrel (@vpostrel) April 5, 2018

The left & @TheAtlantic are cowards.

They don’t believe in their liberal philosophy enough to think it can withstand opposing views.

Instead, they publicly execute Kevin Williamson as an example of what happens if you DARE challenge progressive ideology.

First Kevin. Then, you

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) April 5, 2018

The Left is a disaster. SHAME. https://t.co/HVtue8houo

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) April 5, 2018

Newt Gingrich on the Cultural Civil War (VIDEO)

At Fox News:

We All Live on Campus Now

From Andrew Sullivan, a.k.a, "RawMuscleGlutes," at New York Magazine:

"The goal of our culture now is not the emancipation of the individual from the group, but the permanent definition of the individual by the group. We used to call this bigotry. Now we call it being woke."https://t.co/iHY9xqjNps via @intelligencer

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) February 9, 2018

Ben Shapiro on Hollywood's Propaganda Program (VIDEO)

Ben Shapiro's got a new book, at Amazon, Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV.

As you know, I quit watching cable news, and I wasn't much for television sit-coms and talk show as it is. I like movies, but then, I can sort through the leftist clap-trap.

Sadly, most Americans don't really appreciate how powerfully they're being programmed toward leftist issues. And the ones that do, a lot of them Trump voters, are demonized as racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, or what have you.

The culture war is real.

At Prager University:

Satanic LGBT Drag Queen Reads to Small Children at Michelle Obama Public Library in Long Beach

Seriously, this Michelle Obama Public Library in Long Beach is not even two miles from my college. So saying this "hits a little close to home" is putting it mildly. This is mind-boggling.

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles, "Photo of Horned Drag Queen Reading to Kids at Long Beach Library Goes Viral."

And see Gateway Pundit, "Satanic Looking Drag Queen with Horns Reads to Little Kids at Michelle Obama Public Library." (The Long Beach Public Library removed photos of the drag queen from its social media accounts, but of course, the Internet's forever. I'm shaking my head at this, man.)

What are we teaching kids in school? Demonic teachings alive in Long Beach. I’m outraged they would allow this. pic.twitter.com/Q72nhnWbBo

— Omar Navarro (@RealOmarNavarro) October 16, 2017

This is PURE EVIL. Shame on the parents for allowing their children to sit there! Who does that???

— Cristina Laila (@cristinalaila1) October 16, 2017

Men and Women Are Different

Of course, but our culture is so fucked up, thanks to progressives, that you cant' say something like that nowadays without being attack as Nazi transphobe bigot.

Here's Ashley McGuire, for Prager University:

Democrats Alienate Catholics in the Rustbelt

What else is new?

From Salena Zito, at the Washington Examiner, "Dems Give Away Rust Belt by Alienating Catholics":

OHIO VALLEY — A clip of Martha Plimpton's exuberance over the "best" abortion she ever had played out on the television overhead of a gas-station counter somewhere along U.S. Route 422 between Ohio and Pennsylvania.

A woman with a name tag noting her as the manager rolled her eyes and said to no one in particular as she went about stacking the shelves behind the counter, "And they wonder why people don't vote for Democrats around here anymore."

Plimpton, 46, is best known for her role in the 1980's Steven Spielberg classic kid adventure movie "The Goonies." She made her remark in an interview with Dr. Willie Parker at a #ShoutYourAbortion event in Seattle in June.

After saying Seattle was the home of some of her family, she went on to cheer what she did in her teens: "I also had my first abortion at the Seattle Planned Parenthood. Yay!"

With equal exuberance, she also revealed her Seattle abortion wasn't her last.

Actions like Plimpton's do not help the Democratic cause in achieving power and influence back in Washington, D.C. At least not with Main Street voters. Nor does it help Democrats win local races.

"Democrats used to debate the legal right to have one, and that was a point of view that was shared by most voters," said Michael Wear, a theologically conservative evangelical Christian and Democrat who served in Barack Obama's faith outreach office in the White House.

"I don't understand why, 14 months before a midterm election, why would you push 20 percent of voters who would love to support Democrats out the door? Better yet, why would you speak of pro-life Democrats as though they were some extraterrestrial who just landed on earth?" he said.

It is rare that anyone who has had an abortion celebrates it — Plimpton seems to fail to understand few in this country do. Maybe the privileged class celebrates abortions? Even if they did, that won't help the Democratic Party win back voters. Or is it the intellectual class that celebrates them? Even if they did, that doesn't win back majorities either. Or maybe it's the celebrity class that does? If so, there's not enough of them to win back the House or Senate.

In short, this is not the message you want to win every down-ballot seat the party has let waste away under the thrust of identity politics...

I hate to hate, but I do hate Democrats, and on this issue particularly.

More.

Safe Spaces and 'Ze' Badges at College (What a Total Nightmare)

From Maddy Kearns, at the Spectator U.K., "Safe spaces and ‘ze’ badges: My bewildering year at a U.S. university: Fear of causing offence on campus is stifling free thought – as I’ve found to my cost" (cached):

This week's cover: Campus tyranny pic.twitter.com/K9nsg8Ofbb

— The Spectator (@spectator) August 23, 2017

As a child in Glasgow, I learned that sticks and stones might break my bones but words didn’t really hurt. I’m now at New York University studying journalism, where a different mantra seems to apply. Words, it turns out, might cause life-ruining emotional trauma.

During my ‘Welcome Week’, for example, I was presented with a choice of badges indicating my preferred gender pronouns: ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ or ‘ze’?

The student in front of me, an Australian, found this hilarious: ‘Last time I checked, I was a girl.’ Her joke was met with stony silence. Later I realised why: expressing bewilderment at the obsession with pronouns might count as a ‘micro-aggression’. Next stop, ‘transphobia’.

It was soon obvious to my fellow students that I was not quite with the programme. In a class discussion early in my first semester, I made the mistake of mentioning that I believed in objective standards in art. Some art is great, some isn’t, I said; not all artists are equally talented. This was deemed an undemocratic opinion and I was given a nickname: the cultural fascist. I’ve tried to take it affectionately.

After a year on campus, on a course entitled ‘Cultural Reporting and Criticism’, I still feel unable to speak freely, let alone critically. Although it doesn’t apply to my own course, friends have told me about ‘trigger warnings’ that caution they are about to be exposed to certain ideas; the threat of micro-aggressions (i.e. unintended insults) makes frank discourse impossible. Then there is the infamous ‘safe space’ — a massage-circle, Play-Doh-making haven — where students are protected from offence (and, therefore, intellectual challenge).

During class discussions, I’ve learned to discreetly scan my classmates’ faces for signs that they might be fellow free-thinkers. A slight head tilt at the mention of Islamophobia, a gentle questioning of what exactly is meant by ‘toxic masculinity’. I was thrilled to see a scribbled note — ‘This is utter shit’ — on someone’s copy of one of the reading requirements, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (an introduction to queer theory). In this way, I found the members of my secret non-conformist book club.

We met in a disused convent in Hell’s Kitchen and discussed campus-censored ideas. We read Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe, Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus and Walter Benn Michaels’s The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. We were a diverse group: a Catholic woman, a black conservative man, an anti-theist neoconservative, a Protestant libertarian, and a quick-witted Spanish contrarian. We were united in agreeing that we should be free to disagree. We made our own unsafe space, and at the end of each meeting, we were invigorated and parted on good terms.

It seemed to the members of my book club that academia is losing its way. It is riddled with paradox: safe spaces which are dangerously insular; the idea of ‘no absolutes’ (as an absolute); aggressive intolerance for anything perceived as intolerant; and censorship of ideas deemed too offensive for expression. It’s a form of totalitarianism and it’s beginning to infect British universities, too.

The morning after the US election, New York was bluer than ever. My classmates were in tears, including one professor. Protesters chanting ‘Not my President’ took to the streets as cries of ‘How did this happen?’ ‘What will we tell our children?’ and ‘What a terrible day for [insert identity group]!’ echoed down NYU’s hallways.

Two weeks later, I spent a slightly surreal Thanksgiving with my friend’s family in the DC area. My friend’s father is the former Republican senator and twice presidential candidate Rick Santorum. As I stuffed my face with turkey, I couldn’t believe my luck. Santorum’s insights into the new administration were as close to an insider’s scoop as any student journalist could hope for.

I was sure that, despite their differences in outlook, my classmates would be fascinated to hear about what he had to say. But before I had mustered the courage to share my experience, I received the following email from a professor: ‘Dear all, hope you are all recovering well from any encounters with Trump-supporting relatives over Thanksgiving. I should be all right myself in a day or so.’ Naturally, when this professor asked me, ‘How was your first Thanksgiving?’ I chose to speak exclusively about marshmallow yams.

This is daft, certainly. Even funny, in a macabre way. But it also raises a serious point: the university experience in America is now not one that will adequately prepare students for real life. In real-life democracy, people disagree — and normally they don’t die or suffer emotional injury because of it. In normal life, there’s no reason not to like someone with whom you disagree politically. On campus, opinions are often ontology: you are what you think. But this is dangerous logic: if I hate what you think, I must hate what you are...

Still more.

And welcome to my world, Ms. Maddy, my leftist campus nightmare. (I'm going back to my campus nightmare tomorrow, with our school's "College Days" return orientation and department meetings, oh joy.)

Lauren Southern on Removal of Confederate Statues (VIDEO)

Here's Ms. Lauren on the hysteria over the "racist" Confederate statues.

Democrat 'Nazi Hunters' Gone Wild

You gotta read this.

R.S. McCain has the post, "Robert Tracinski Kills It," linking to an article entitled "Nazi-Hunting Fantasies Have Unhinged the Left."

This Nazi-hunting hysteria's going to turn out badly for the hard-left Democrats, as it shows them to be bankrupt --- morally, politically, philosophically bankrupt. When you have to attack everyone as a Nazi no one's a Nazi, and that doesn't reflect well on the historical memory of those who perished in the Holocaust. See, for example, Matt Vespa, at Town Hall, via Memeorandum, "Howard Dean: If You Vote Republican in 2018, You're a Racist."

Mizzou Enrollment Plunges

I wonder why?

At Instapundit, "HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Mizzou suffering brutal long-term impacts of 2015 protests."

And from Jillian Kay Melchior, at WSJ, "Mizzou Pays a Price for Appeasing the Left":

Timothy Vaughn dutifully cheered the University of Missouri for a decade, sitting in the stands with his swag, two hot dogs and a Diet Coke. He estimates he attended between 60 and 85 athletic events every year—football and basketball games and even tennis matches and gymnastics meets. But after the infamous protests of fall 2015, Missouri lost this die-hard fan.

“I pledge from this day forward NOT TO contribute to the [Tiger Scholarship Fund], buy any tickets to any University of Missouri athletic event, to attend any athletic event (even if free), to give away all my MU clothes (nearly my entire wardrobe) after I have removed any logos associated with the University of Missouri, and any cards/helmets/ice buckets/flags with the University of Missouri logo on it,” Mr. Vaughn told administrators in an email four semesters ago.

He was not alone. Thousands of pages of emails I obtained through the Missouri Freedom of Information Act show that many alumni and other supporters were disgusted with administrators’ feeble response to the disruptions. Like Mr. Vaughn, many promised they’d stop attending athletic events. Others vowed they’d never send their children or grandchildren to the university. It now appears many of them have made good on those promises.

The commotion began in October 2015, when student activists claiming that “racism lives here” sent administrators a lengthy list of demands. Among them: The president of the University of Missouri system should resign after delivering a handwritten apology acknowledging his “white male privilege”; the curriculum should include “comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion” training; and 10% of the faculty and staff should be black.

Two weeks later, a student announced he was going on a hunger strike, and the football team refused to practice or play until the university met the demands. As protesters occupied the quad, administrators bent over backward to accommodate them, even providing a power strip so they could charge phones and a generator so they could camp in comfort. A communications instructor, Melissa Click, appeared on viral video calling for “muscle” to remove a student reporter from the quad. By Nov. 9, both the president and the chancellor of Mizzou, as the flagship Columbia campus is known, had resigned.

Donors, parents, alumni, sports fans and prospective students raged against the administration’s caving in. “At breakfast this morning, my wife and I agreed that MU is NOT a school we would even consider for our three children,” wrote Victor Wirtz, a 1978 alum, adding that the university “has devolved into the Berkeley of the Midwest.”

"Berkeley of the Midwest." Ouch.

Still more.

Radical Leftists Are Never Considered 'Fringe'

Here's this, at the far-left NYT (safe link), "The Showdown Over How We Define Fringe Views in America":

Today in the United States, sweeping majorities of the public say they support fair housing laws and the ideal of integrated schools. Nine in 10 say they would back a black candidate for president from their own party, and the same say they approve of marriage between blacks and whites. That last issue has undergone one of the greatest transformations in polling over the last 50 years. In 1960, just 4 percent of Americans approved.

More than a triumph over private prejudice, these numbers reflect changing social norms. The country hasn’t extinguished racism. But society — universities, employers, cultural institutions, the military — has made clearer over time that people who hold racist views had better nurse them off in the corner.

But these norms may be fraying. Since the last presidential election, and particularly since white supremacists rallied this month, unmasked, in Charlottesville, Va., the line between acceptable and ostracized views has started to become less stark. When President Trump declined to condemn white supremacists more forcefully, he ignited a fight that at its core is about how we define norms in America: Who gets to be part of civil society, and whose views belong on the fringe?

That fight is being waged by opposing protesters across the country and by pundits daily on TV. The president’s critics fear that he is inviting white supremacists out of the corner, helping ideas that have become widely reviled in America to be redefined as reasonable opinions — just part of the discussion.

“They are explicitly trying to do that,” Tina Fetner, a sociologist at McMaster University in Ontario, said of members of white supremacist groups. Until recently, they were ignored. But now the president is repeating their memes and the distorted versions of history that prop up their views, she said. As a result, the news media is broadly covering them, too.

“This is exactly the process of how social change happens,” Ms. Fetner said. “It’s not because all of a sudden there is more racism now than there was a few weeks ago. It’s that the absolute condemnation of those most abhorrent views is crumbling away because the president isn’t fulfilling that role.”

Ms. Fetner has studied the transformation in views on gay rights and same-sex marriage. The shifts around race and gender similarly reflect not just widening acceptance of equality, but also the rising condemnation of anyone who vocally opposes it.

Polls don’t necessarily capture how people truly feel; they capture what people are willing to say to a pollster. But the idea that some people might lie in surveys illustrates how social norms work. And political scientists suspect that part of what Mr. Trump has done, through his anti-immigrant and nativist appeals, is encourage people who might have kept silent in the past about their racist views to express them in public.

“For all these years, this is a group of people that’s been very bitter about the fact that they feel like they can’t speak,” said Sarah Sobieraj, a sociologist at Tufts. “It’s not just that their policies haven’t been popular.” And then Mr. Trump says similar things, with a powerful platform, without apology.

When norms of acceptable behavior and speech start to shift, it can disturb the shared beliefs, values and symbols that make up our culture. “It’s really all of those things that we’re watching right now — they’re all up for discussion,” Ms. Sobieraj said...

This, of course, is all B.S., because it's only the alleged "alt-right" whose views are considered "fringe" and unacceptable. You never get wall-to-wall coverage of major stories like just last week when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's son stated that radical leftists are the far bigger threat today. (See the Times of Israel, "Yair Netanyahu says leftists more dangerous than neo-Nazis.")

As I've said for years, the Democrats' motto is "no enemies on the left," and that motto is now the default position of all the major actors of the institutional left. See John Fund, at NRO (via Memeorandum), "‘No Enemies on the Left’ Is Still the Mantra of Too Many Liberals."

I haven't been following politics, or blogging politics, all that much this last couple of weeks. And you can see why. We're in the middle of an all-out war on the Trump administration and his supporters, and there's no depth the leftist mass media won't sink in its campaign against truth and decency.

Radical leftists are the real threat to American freedom, prosperity, and security. And to defeat the radical left, you have to defeat all the institutions of cultural, economic, and political domination now working against traditional America. It's a cold civil war at this point, but that's just temporary. Regular folks will only take so much before they put up a fight. And as the radical left is never satisfied (as evidenced by the current leftist campaign to remove Confederate statues from the public sphere across the country), there comes a time when you have to stand up and be held to account for your values.

That's where we are today in America. There will be blood.

Female Trump Voters Defend President Trump's #Charlottesville Response (VIDEO)

NYT had this last week, "Deal Breaker for Trump’s Supporters? Nope."

Interesting.

And watch, at CBS News This Morning:

University of Texas Removes Confederate Statues

The Austin campus is the flagship of the UT system. Authorities swept down in the cover of night to seize the statues from history.

At the Texas Tribune, via Memeorandum, "UT-Austin removes Confederate statues in the middle of the night."

And at USA Today, "University of Texas removes Confederate statues from campus."

The Rich Higgins 'Deep State' Memo

In case you've missed the alt-right backlash over H.R. McMaster, here's some background.

At the Atlantic, "An NSC Staffer Is Forced Out Over a Controversial Memo," and "The War Against H.R. McMaster."

And at Foreign Policy, "Here’s the Memo That Blew Up the NSC":

Fired White House staffer argued "deep state" attacked Trump administration because the president represents a threat to cultural Marxist memes, globalists, and bankers.

Women Surviving in Trump's White House

A good piece, at Politico, "In Trump's WhiteHouse, the women are the survivors."

President Trump's War Against the Elites

I still don't think MSM types are getting it. It's not just President Trump. We're in a new age. A totally new era. Regular folks don't even care if you slam them for rejecting "the experts." Not a whit. The so-called experts are mostly leftists and almost always wrong.

Be that as it may, see Cathleen Decker, at LAT, "Analysis: Trump's war against elites and expertise":

When President Trump campaigned this spring at the Hermitage, the home of Andrew Jackson, one part of his predecessor’s approach got a special endorsement.

“It was during the Revolution that Jackson first confronted and defied an arrogant elite. Does that sound familiar?" Trump asked to laughs from his audience.

When Trump ally and National Rifle Assn. President Wayne LaPierre teed off six weeks later on America’s greatest domestic threats, he cited not homegrown terrorists but what he termed “the three most dangerous voices in America: academic elites, political elites, and media elites.”

The rhetoric against elites came from two men who would seem to be card-carrying members of the club: LaPierre made more than $5 million in 2015, the most recent year for which his compensation was publicly released. Trump lived before his inauguration in a gold-plated home in the sky above New York’s Fifth Avenue, a billionaire’s luxurious domain.

Yet for Trump and his allies, a war on elites has been central to the campaign which put him in the presidency and has maintained the loyalty of his core voters. Trump has taken particular aim at entities that could counter his power, which has helped stoke the ardor of his political backers.

Among his targets so far: the government’s intelligence agencies, the media, foreign allies, the Department of Justice, establishment politicians, scientists and the Congressional Budget Office. The last has played a large role in raising questions about Republican proposals to repeal and replace Obamacare, leading to a furious White House assault on its competence.

Trump has refused to accept the judgment of intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. He has alleged, without proof and contrary to both Democratic and Republican officials in key states, that millions of illegal voters cast ballots last year. He has blamed vaccines for autism, despite the scientific debunking of that notion.

Excoriating elites “is classic populist language,” said Yale historian Beverly Gage. “Trump has taken it to a whole new level by not only attacking clueless elites but the entire idea of expertise.”

To voters listening for them, Trump’s anti-elitism signals have blared. As telling as his political and policy postures is his language — who else but Trump would angrily call his predecessor’s signature program “a big fat ugly lie” — and a perpetual sense of victimization.

“He’s a billionaire, and therefore a member of a certain type of elites,” Gage said. “But he’s also the guy from Queens rebelling against the know-it-all smarty pantses from Manhattan.”

Trump has used both specific insults and the specter of powerful and mysterious external forces — he often describes them as an undefined “they” — arrayed against common Americans, with him as chief defender...

See what I mean? This piece makes some good points, but it's otherwise dripping with disdain.

I don't know if Trump can be reelected again. The left will mount an all-out war on him and everything he stands for in 2020. But whatever happens, we're at the point of no return. Too much has changed. I'd say it's like a cultural cold war, and it's not neatly divided into "left and right." The people vs. the establishment is more like it, and perhaps only Bernie Sanders has the proper sense of it among folks on the Democrat side. The culture war, things like transgenders in the military, also plays large. I mean who else but leftist establishment elites would think this a good idea? And rejection of science? Only leftists reject science to push a degenerate socio-political agenda. It's disgusting.

So, if anyone is ready and willing to stand up to the left's warmongering political onslaught come 2020, it's The Donald.

More at the link, FWIW.

Transgender Accommodations and Military Realities

Following-up from yesterday, "Read J.R. Salzman's Twitter Stream."

Here's Ryan Anderson, at the Daily Signal, "5 Good Reasons Why Transgender Accommodations Aren’t Compatible With Military Realities":

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced that he was reversing an Obama-era policy that opened the military to people who identify as transgender.

That policy, announced during the last year of President Barack Obama’s second term, was scheduled to go into effect earlier this month, but Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced a six-month delay in its implementation to review whether it was in fact prudent given the nature of the military and its mission.

The mission of our armed forces is winning wars and protecting the nation. So any personnel policy must prioritize military readiness and mission-critical purposes first.

Trump’s announcement that it would not be feasible to open the military to personnel who identify as transgender returns the military to the policy it had always observed, before the Obama administration’s 12th-hour, politically driven imposition of a transgender agenda.

Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. But this can't be done alone. Find out more >>

As I explain in my forthcoming book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment,” the best biology, psychology, and philosophy conclude that sex is a biological reality and that gender is the social expression of that reality.

The most helpful therapies for gender dysphoria focus not on achieving the impossible—changing bodies to conform to thoughts and feelings—but on helping people accept and even embrace the truth about their bodies and reality.

Unfortunately, 41 percent of people who identify as transgender will attempt suicide at some point in their lives, compared to 4.6 percent of the general population. And people who have had transition surgery are 19 times more likely than average to die by suicide.

People who identify as transgender suffer a host of mental health and social problems—including anxiety, depression, and substance abuse—at higher rates than the general population. Biology isn’t bigotry, and we need a sober and honest assessment of the human costs of getting human nature wrong.

So there were well-justified concerns that Obama was using the military to advance the latest social justice culture warrior agenda item—seeking to mainstream transgender identities and promote controversial therapies for gender dysphoria.

Obama’s policy change ignored the reality that placing individuals who might be at increased risk for suicide or other psychological injury in the most stressful situation imaginable—the battlefield—is reckless.

But even people who disagree about the underlying transgender issues should acknowledge that there are practical concerns for the military when it comes to people who identify as transgender.

Wednesday’s announcement reflects good reasons why transgender accommodations are incompatible with military realities. Here are just a few of the considerations...

Keep reading.

BONUS: Pre-order Anderson's book at Amazon, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.

Read J.R. Salzman's Twitter Stream

Following-up from earlier, "President Trump Reverses Obama Administration's Transgender Military Policy."

Read this thread from J.R. Salzman, on Twitter, "I served in Iraq in 2006. For the first five months I was on a 12 man firebase out in the middle of nowhere in the desert."