Author: Ophelia Benson

NPR reports:

The New York Times says several of its journalists have been subpoenaed by the Department of Justice over their reporting on Air Force One, describing it as a “brazen act.”

On Wednesday, the newspaper published an anonymously sourced story that the Secret Service urged President Trump to leave the recent NATO summit in Turkey on an older version of Air Force One instead of the Boeing 747 donated by Qatar last year because of security concerns. The following day, the Times reported, again citing anonymous sources, that the gifted plane lacked “defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced antimissile capabilities.”

The four reporters bylined on Wednesday’s article — Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt — all received subpoenas, according to the Times. The paper said federal agents delivered the subpoenas Friday evening to some reporters at their homes.

The subpoenas “seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday,” the Times reported. Their testimony, according to the subpoenas, was requested “in regard to an alleged violation of federal criminal law.”

“The appearance of Federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for the Times, said in a statement. “Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public’s right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used. This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”

We’re zooming down the highway to full-on fascism.

The usual adamant refusal to be clear.

Amnesty claims it regrets.

Amnesty International UK has said it regrets a report which labelled JK Rowling’s sexual assault support centre for women ‘anti-rights’.

…

Amnesty International UK has said it regrets a report which labelled JK Rowling’s sexual assault support centre for women ‘anti-rights’.

Has it said why it regrets the report? Does it regret the report because the report is shit, or because people noticed that it’s shit?

Amnesty summons up a lot of words:

“Amnesty International conducts independent research and campaigns on human rights issues worldwide, and works alongside victims and communities on the frontlines of the struggle for dignity and justice. This work includes a long‑standing and explicit commitment to gender justice, including the rights of women, LGBTQI and trans people.”

Trans people get counted twice. But more to the point: as usual, women must not have their rights supported without instant follow-up mention of LGBTQIZFRDNM people. If you say women have rights you have to mention someone else who has rights; no exceptions. Women must not be allowed to take center stage, ever.

In a published list of 117 UK organisations, Amnesty International mentions Beira’s Place under “gender critical” in the anti-rights category.

Amnesty International also condemns For Women Scotland – the group of women who took the  Scottish Government to court over policies which allowed transgender women, born male, to take up female-only spaces on public boards.

The organisation’s three co-founders – Trina Budge, Marion Calder and Susan Smith – have written to Amnesty to warn the report contributes to “reputational harm” against For Women Scotland.

The letter states: “We note that your primary charitable object is to promote human rights. Women also have human rights. We recently won a case in Scotland to protect the human rights of incarcerated women in Scotland. The old Amnesty would have taken that case rather than attack the women who brought it.

“We now ask that you apologise to FWS for the malicious characterisation of our organisation in your report.”

Women also have human rights. Women are half of humanity, and they are the half that reproduces humanity. Without women, no humanity. You’d think that would count.

Jo Bartosch on how Amnesty got so horrible:

Its new report, ‘A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK’, was recently published and then, like a disfavoured comrade, quietly disappeared from the organisation’s website less than 24 hours later. Before its abrupt vanishing act, Amnesty warned that an ‘anti-rights ecosystem’ was threatening ‘the safety of women and LGBT+ people in the UK’. It identified 117 organisations allegedly working to roll back human rights, lumping together American Christian groups with a patchwork of British feminist, lesbian and gay organisations.

It’s very progressive to tell destructive lies about feminist, lesbian and gay rights organizations.

That ordinary people might simply have had enough of trans tyranny – or concluded for themselves that sex-based rights are worth defending – doesn’t seem to have occurred to Amnesty’s overeducated, underthinking professional whingers. Nor, apparently, has the unfortunate optics of compiling lists of ideological enemies and then silently deleting it.

It’s not just the having enough of trans tyranny…it’s the being expected to repeat an obvious lie as if it were true. It’s the being expected to repeat that particular obvious lie – it’s the expecting women to repeat that obvious lie. It’s the expecting the underdog sex to pretend that some members of the overdog sex are not members of the overdog sex. It’s a very bizarre, warped thing to expect, and it reveals an indifference to women that feels all too New Left circa 1970.

This is the organisation that once presented itself as the conscience of the free world: a champion of dissidents and those who stood up to authoritarian power. Today, Amnesty International resembles the very forces it was created to oppose. It spreads the misinformation it claims to be combating, smears grassroots campaigners as extremists, and casts ordinary people who refuse to deny biological reality as enemies of human rights. The organisation that once defended prisoners of conscience now seems determined to identify a new generation of thoughtcriminals.

No amnesty for women.

The fury at Amnesty is mounting.

Euan is very cross.

Euan calls someone else’s writing “a hack job at writing”. Euan claims to be a writer – a journalist – himself, yet his writing is hair-raisingly terrible. He’s not the right fella to judge someone else’s writing chops.

Originally a comment by The Whimster Gap on Christian Nationalist wish list.

“Though not a religion, secularism, like theocracy, is incompatible with our First Amendment freedoms because it excludes religious voices from the process of self-government.”

Well, that’s got things arse-about-face, hasn’t it? Secularism – properly understood – does not exclude religious voices. Secularism actually guarantees a space for their participation in public life, precisely because it’s public life and so takes all comers. Secularism says, “Oh, that’s what you believe, is it? Fine. Feel free to make the case. Feel free to argue what you like. No strongarming, mind; but that’s about the limit of the limits.” (This is why I’d classify the repressively atheist regimes of people like Enver Hoxa as not secular; they didn’t have the commitment to the state stepping back and letting people figure stuff out.)

There’s a tendency among reactionary religionists to complain that secularism is a threat to them. That’s why in the UK you sometimes see strange confluences of the more evangelical bits of the Church singing the same song as conservative Muslims. It’s dressed up as a common concern for the rights of the religious, and – more dubiously – of religion.

But the real motivation is that secularism threatens their ability not to make the case for their position, but their ability to enforce it. And so they’ll join together to moan about how awful secularism is. Of course, they despise each other really, and in the non-secular world they claim to want their pretence of a unified protection of religion would crumble; they’d be at each other’s throats for heresy faster than you could say “Arminian Heresy”.

They should love secularism, because it protects them against the beastliness of others. But it also stops them being beastly in return if they happen to have the whip hand; and that’s a big price to pay. Too big, it seems.

Now here’s a fascinating thread.

It turns out that organizations such as Women’s Rights Network don’t much like being called “anti-rights” and seek to know the reasons for being so labeled.

Let’s all of us consider our options. It’s about time.

“Heather” Herbert may end up regretting his verbal sadism.

Aberdeen University is conducting an urgent review of comments made by an employee who said she hoped former MP Ann Widdecombe suffered “an extremely painful death”.

Heather Herbert, a web developer at the university, faced backlash after making the comments on Friday, July 10 following news of Widdecombe’s death.

Herbert responded to a news report of her passing on her Bluesky account, writing: “Some good news for once.

“I hope it was an extremely painful death.”

She added: “I hope she was handcuffed to the bed as she screamed in agony.”

It’s a news article, not a TwitX burble. He’s not a she. He’s a man who hates women and isn’t embarrassed to make his hatred public.

Aberdeen University has confirmed that they are reviewing the comments as a “matter of priority”.

What’s to review? He said what he said. It’s only a few words. They kind of review themselves.

Principal and Vice Chancellor, Professor Peter Edwards, added: “Ann Widdecombe was a highly respected figure in both the Westminster and European parliaments.

“The University of Aberdeen does not tolerate violence or hateful behaviour in any form.

“We are aware of the incident and the concerns that have been raised and are looking into the matter as a priority.”

It doesn’t really matter whether she was a highly respected figure or not. Rejoicing that she was beaten to death is not ok.

I’ll admit that there is one person I would like to see facing some major karma, but then he has had many people murdered and many more injured, tortured, immiserated, displaced, bereaved – the list is endless. He has literally hundreds if not thousands of lives to account for. One former MP, however right-wing, not so much.

A Facebook group called The Sports Bra tells us:

This weekend, July 11–12, The Sports Bra is joining the boycott of Women’s Elite Rugby (WER) matches.

That means that we will not stream matches, host watch parties, or otherwise promote WER competition during the boycott window.

We’re doing this in solidarity with the players, fans, and organizers calling for rugby to live up to its own values of respect, integrity, and inclusion.

The Sports Bra exists to celebrate and elevate women and girls in sports. That includes trans women and girls. Always.

Well, no it doesn’t. Ever. Trans women and girls are men and boys. Always.

We love women’s sports. We love seeing new leagues grow. We want more athletes on bigger stages with more fans in the stands. But growth cannot come at the cost of belonging.

But males don’t belong in female sports. There is no “cost of belonging” in having things for girls and women. Girls and women are allowed to have their own belonging, and men shouldn’t try to force their way into it.

They added in a comment:

Part of our commitment to belonging means we protect our marginalized community members. We will delete comments that are hostile, threatening, or use profanity. We will block repeat offenders.

They will delete comments that disagree with their determination to trash female sports. How progressivey.

Nick Fish of American Atheists writes in a mailing:

“The biggest lie that’s ever been told in America”

Those are the words Dan Patrick, Lieutenant Governor of Texas and Chairperson of President Trump’s so-called “Religious Liberty Commission”, used to describe church-state separation.

And if the draft report just released by the Religious Liberty Commission — along with its Christian Nationalist wish list of recommendations for policy changes — is any indication, Patrick’s (mis)belief that church-state separation is a lie was the unanimous position of the commission.

Of course, that should come as no surprise. A panel made up of ultra-conservative, reactionary Christians and just a single (conservative) Jewish member does not represent the religious diversity of our nation. Their views on, well, everything are dramatically out of step with everyday Americans — and in some cases, the majority of their coreligionists.

The recommendations from the panel include both the boring (a “Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty” award, “Know Your Rights” posters, and a reporting hotline) and the five-alarm fire for equality (repealing the Johnson Amendment, completely turning the understanding of the Establishment Clause on its head, and a massive giveaway of your tax dollars to religious schools).

And all this at the behest of Trump, who is notoriously not a believer. I’m not going to call him an atheist, because that would require at least a moment or two of thought at some point. He’s just a de facto non-believer, in the same way he’s a non-believer in quantum physics or Etruscan tennis.

Despite the report’s executive summary claiming that religious liberty “protects believers and nonbelievers alike,” the report spends 224 pages proving they don’t actually believe that. Atheists and the nonreligious appear nowhere else in the document except as an ideology to be defeated.

Why? Because the Commission made no effort to hear from members of the atheist community.

Can we not call it that? Can we not keep bunching things into “communities”? Can we not just say “atheists” and leave it at that?

It’s not just that they deny that we might have a shared commitment to freedom of conscience. Rather, it’s that they believe we don’t exist at all except as enemies of their freedom.

Possibly the most chilling line of the entire report makes that belief crystal clear: “Though not a religion, secularism, like theocracy, is incompatible with our First Amendment freedoms because it excludes religious voices from the process of self-government.”

Wut? Theocracy excludes religious voices from the process of government? Theocracy puts religious voices at the core of government; that’s why it’s called theocracy. The line is chilling but also incoherent.

Anyway, thanks for the update Nick; keep up the good work.

Freedom of the press much?

The Department of Justice has subpoenaed New York Times journalists after they reported on security concerns involving the new, Qatari-gifted Air Force One, marking a dramatic escalation of President Donald Trump’s campaign against the media that has drawn condemnation for eroding a fundamental freedom of American democracy.

…

The subpoenas seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan next week, the Times said, adding that federal agents delivered some subpoenas to the reporters at their homes. The subpoenas were issued after FBI Director Kash Patel and other Justice Department officials met at the White House on Friday to talk about the matter.

…

“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, a lawyer for the Times, said in a statement.

Hey it’s not our consciences on the line. The appearance of the feds should shock us; it’s Patel and his thugs who need their consciences shocked.

Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said Trump’s “war on the press is looking for another victim.”

He said in a statement that the subpoenas “break from longstanding Justice Department practice to protect the public interest and press independence by requiring prosecutors to only seek information from reporters as a last resort when all other avenues have been exhausted.”

The department said that “to be clear, reporters are not the targets, those leaking classified information are.”

Cool. Question: who classified the information, and why? Is it classified for reasons of public safety and the like, or is it classified because it’s dirty and they want to keep it secret?

Issuing subpoenas represents further ramping up of Trump’s effort to threaten independent new organizations by leveraging the power of the federal government against them. It is also part of a systematic pattern by the Republican president to attempt to undermine press freedom in order to shield him[self] from negative coverage.

And by “negative coverage” we mean truthful reporting on his many violations of longstanding norms and outright crimes.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department issued subpoenas seeking to compel testimony from reporters at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. In both cases, the department later withdrew the subpoenas.

They were just kidding both times, right? Funny stuff.

During his first term, Trump suggested that the press constituted an “enemy” of the American people. Since returning to the White House last year, he has waged an aggressive campaign against the media unlike any in modern U.S. history.

Trump’s pattern of attacks against news outlets and media figures he believes are overly critical of him has included filing lawsuits against outlets whose coverage he dislikes, threatening to revoke TV broadcast licenses, and seeking to bend news organizations and social media companies to his will.

He’s just doing what any self-respecting dictator does.

Amnesty better lawyer up.

Round of applause.

The Herald (Scotland):

JK Rowling’s support centre for female sexual assault victims – Beira’s Place – has been labelled an “anti-rights” group by Amnesty International UK.

Beira’s Place was founded in 2022 by the Harry Potter author to provide trauma-informed support service to women survivors of sexual abuse. The organisation labels itself as “women-only” and does not include transgender people.

It doesn’t include giraffes, either; what’s your point?

Amnesty updated its report this month to include 51 gender critical groups, including For Women Scotland and Beira’s Place.

It warns the UK had experienced a “significant decline” in protections for LGBT+ rights, with the nation falling from first to 22nd place in the ILGA-Europe (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association).

Wait. ILGA has to mean International Lesbian, Gay Association. ILGA is not ILGABTI. Somebody here is hiding something.

In a published list of 117 UK organisations, Amnesty International mentions Beira’s Place under “gender critical” in the anti-rights categories.

Amnesty International also condemns For Women Scotland – the group of women who took the Scottish Government to court over policies which allowed transgender women – born male – to take up female-only spaces on public boards.

The group has also recently had a successful legal victory over the Scottish Government and the Scottish Prison Service’s placement of trans people in the female prison estate.

The Scottish Government confirmed it would not appeal the decision and has removed all trans women from staying in the female estate, however further clarity is sought on whether transwomen are restricted from accessing women’s-only services in prisons.

If they’re not they should be. Enough already. Stop pretending it’s progressive to force women to share everything with men.

Amnesty may have made a mistake.

Maybe that’s why Amnesty has hidden the report. Worried about the libel perhaps maybe possibly? Hmmm?

Ah yes the oh so progressive trans activismists share their thoughts on the murder of a woman they dislike.

He hopes she was chained to a bed, screaming in agony.

Peter Tatchell outdid himself today. This morning:

But it turned out she’d been battered to death.

So Tatchell had to try to undo his initial glee.

It hasn’t gone all that well.

It’s not really something you can claw back once it’s out there.

As we’ve all noted a million times, they can’t make their case without lying constantly. The Nation:

The Supreme Court upheld anti-trans athlete laws in the recent Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ decisions, declaring that Title IX, the bedrock of gender-based protections in public schools, does not extend to transgender student athletes.

The laws are not “anti-trans”. The laws are pro-equal rights for women and girls. The issue isn’t trans, the issue is that male people are male and thus can’t be in women’s sports because being male entails many physical advantages. It doesn’t matter what flavor of ideology tries to get around that fact; it’s only the fact that matters. Women have their own sports because otherwise they would have no sports. It is unfair, unsporting, unreasonable for men to try to infiltrate women’s sports on the grounds of being “trans”.

The court’s decisions are part of a global campaign to legislate and litigate trans people out of public life. This was made clear during oral arguments back in January; attorneys and justices alike scrutinized the bodies of trans girls, debating the size and shape of their organs, muscles, and bones. Yet the banality of the scene—procedural buzzwords, shuffling papers, cordial back-and-forths couched with honorifics—almost obfuscated the violence of it all.

Violence my ass. The violence is men slamming into women in the football game.

Alan Hurst, then Idaho’s solicitor general, said transgender girls pose “a real threat” to safety and fairness in women’s athletics. “We cite Your Honors to the U.N. Special Rapporteur’s report that says 600 women have lost 890 medals in 29 different sports,” he said, arguing that ( presumed) cisgender women are losing en masse to transgender ones and that trans women and girls don’t belong in women’s spaces.

The United Nations official in question is Reem Alsalem—the special rapporteur on violence against women and girls. She filed an amicus brief with the court supporting trans-exclusionary laws. This comes after years of pushing reports at the United Nations that painted trans women as a danger to their peers. The court’s final opinion echoed the language in her brief.

Of course “trans women” i.e. men are a danger to women in contact sports. What is the Nation doing publishing this lying manipulative garbage? Why doesn’t the Nation give a damn about women?

Hurst’s comment about Alsalem’s work has a few problems. Among them: The numbers are not particularly meaningful or accurate. But facts have never stopped Alsalem. Through her writings to the United Nations, she has become a leading mouthpiece for far-right propaganda and misinformation about trans people, propelling untruths into policy and law and declaring war, in her words, on the concept of “gender equality” itself.

Bordering on libelous if you ask me. Also rude, tendentious, inaccurate, manipulative. The Nation should be embarrassed.

Hegseth has his pants in a bunch again.

As they juggle ongoing U.S. military operations against Iran and a host of other national security challenges, senior Pentagon officials have also been pressing ahead on a far different priority: tightening the grooming, fitness and appearance standards of the American service members. 

Military officials have recently taken steps to address troops who fail to meet hair, weight and physical fitness standards, nine months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a blunt message to a room full of admirals and generals at Marine Corps Base Quantico, declaring there would be “no more beardos” and “fat troops.” 

Because appearance is everything, troops. After all, would Hegseth be in charge of the military if he looked like, say, Trump? No he would not.

The renewed emphasis comes as Hegseth, an Army National Guard veteran and former Fox News host, has privately complained in recent days about seeing service members with facial hair and has expressed frustration over lapses in physical training and violations of military height and weight standards, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. 

And he is the expert. He’s a tv guy, and he knows tv stuff. Appearance is everything.

One official told CBS News that Hegseth believes his message has not been fully embraced by the military’s senior leadership despite his repeated public and private calls for stricter enforcement. The military official, who is not authorized to speak publicly and talked with CBS News under condition of anonymity, said the defense secretary was frustrated that his speech to the top brass gathered from around the world at Quantico last year did not produce the rapid change he expected. 

Is he sobbing himself to sleep every night? I hope?

The military is overhauling how they measure body composition following Pentagon guidance to all the services issued in December in an effort to restore the “warrior ethos” demanded by Hegseth and has rolled out guidance that frames shaving as a matter of military readiness rather than appearance. 

Erm, what? How is a requirement to shave a matter of military readiness as opposed to its opposite? “I’ll be with you in just a few minutes, sir, I have to shave first, I hope the invaders don’t overrun our position beforeoopsaarghboom…”

Over roughly 18 months as defense secretary, Hegseth has repeatedly argued in speeches, policy directives and public remarks that relaxed appearance standards are symptomatic of a military culture that has drifted away from discipline and combat readiness. 

Of course he has. He’s a tv guy, and he’s not bright.

The Telegraph on the Waitrose “feminine products” absurdity:

Waitrose has rebranded its “feminine care” section after receiving a complaint claiming it was not inclusive of transgender people.

Sanitary products will no longer be referred to as female following a complaint which said “not all people who have periods are women”.

Except, of course, they are. That’s kind of the whole point. It’s kind of the whole point with cows and ewes and hens and mares and it’s kind of the whole point with women. Without that whole point there are no women or men. We’re animals first of all, and we’re divided into the egg-havers and the fertilizers. Without that we don’t exist at all.

The section rebrand came after an internal complaint said it was “disappointing” that sanitary products were referred to as “feminine care”.

Well, frankly, it’s also disappointing that the Telegraph is silly enough to use the vague meaningless “sanitary products” instead of, say, menstrual products. “Sanitary products” could just mean bottles of floor-cleaning liquids and similar. The issue here is menstruation, not some vague nameless detergent.

Amnesty International and Amnesty UK are drunk.

A movement to defend women’s rights is not an anti-rights movement.

Amnesty is pretending that men have a right to be seen and treated as women if they claim to be women, and that women have no right to tell such men to stay out of women’s organizations and spaces. Amnesty has lost its tiny mind.