Zack Polanski, the new leader of the Greens.

And then there’s the second part.

In a statement, Rowley said: “On Monday, officers arrested a man in his 50s at Heathrow in relation to allegations of inciting violence, linked to posts on X. The officers involved in the arrest had reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed under the Public Order Act.

“While the decision to investigate and ultimately arrest the man was made within existing legislation – which dictates that a threat to punch someone from a protected group could be an offence – I understand the concern caused by such incidents given differing perspectives on the balance between free speech and the risks of inciting violence in the real world.”

See it?

“a threat to punch someone from a protected group could be an offence”

He’s making men who pretend to be women the protected group and women the threat. He’s framing women as the powerful violent overlords and men as their helpless victims.

That’s what this fucking ideology is all about.

Met police chief calls for review of law after Graham Linehan arrest

The Metropolitan police have declined to drop their investigation into the comedy writer Graham Linehan for tweets about trans issues, and said that the law used by officers to detain him needs reviewing.

The Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, said on Wednesday officers should not be “policing toxic culture wars debates”, and while any review took place, officers would investigate only more serious cases concerning online messages.

I gather the Met isn’t thrilled about all the headlines.

In a statement, Rowley said: “On Monday, officers arrested a man in his 50s at Heathrow in relation to allegations of inciting violence, linked to posts on X. The officers involved in the arrest had reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed under the Public Order Act.”

Inciting violence is it?

The tweet in question:

If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.

Is that inciting violence or instructing in self-defense?

People used to know that women are at a physical disadvantage compared to men, and that therefore it’s useful for them to know some self-defense techniques. I’m wondering what makes the Met so confident that Graham was inciting violence as opposed to suggesting a means of self-defense.

I don’t think he meant it exactly literally – I think it’s more exasperated hyperbole than advice. But either way, surely it’s about self-defense as opposed to inciting violence. He’s suggesting self-defense techniques for the underdog, which is the obverse of inciting violence. It seems highly perverse for the cops to pretend women are a threat to men.

Originally a comment by What a Maroon at Miscellany Room.

It’s fairly common when you’re in a group of three or more to refer to one of the group in the third person. As an example, imagine a classroom discussion, where Johnson (a man who insists that others use female pronouns when referring to him in the third person) has just expressed an opinion. The teacher, in an attempt to stimulate some conversation, may then turn to Smith and say, “Do you agree with what [3rd person sg. pronoun] says?” Of course the teacher could just say “Johnson”, but it gets awkward if the question becomes more complex: “Do you agree with Johnson when Johnson says X?”

From a linguistics perspective, this is one of my main objections to the whole pronoun business. Pronouns (like most grammatical morphemes) are meant to be semantically and cognitively light, and generally are not very salient phonetically or semantically (which is why they often get reduced or in some languages elided completely). Linguistic communication is cognitively demanding; using pronouns when everyone understands who or what the referent is and, in the case of humans when speaking English, what sex the referent is, lightens the load for both the speaker and the listeners; insisting on pronouns that don’t match the referent’s sex, either in gender or in number (i.e., “they”), forces both sides of the conversation to put effort into producing and understanding what’s normally an effortless part of the discourse, and can impede communication. It’s like sleeping on a lumpy mattress–suddenly you’re noticing and being bothered by things that are supposed to fly under the radar, and you’re not getting a good night’s sleep.

Sometimes people will say it doesn’t really matter; after all, most English speakers use the same pronoun for second person singular and plural without any problems. Except of course that causes all kinds of problems, which are aggravated by the fact that we often use “you” as a generic pronoun as well. We’ve developed ways to get around the ambiguity (youse, y’all, yinz, etc.; or “Not you personally but you generically”), but the ambiguity is there, and it can defeat the purpose of the pronoun by forcing us to put our communicative and cognitive resources into clearing it up.

The pronoun business is a trap, one that we’re all bound to fall into at some point, and when we do, we’ll be forced to either grovel in apology or sew the proverbial “T” onto our garments.

Steven Pinker writes:

Evidence that woke isn’t dead, peer review is problematic, and science needs to address deep problems in its culture: A grad student at Harvard conducted the first systematic, data-based study to document & explain the rise in gender dysphoria. His paper was rejected from a leading journal because, among other things, “Throughout the manuscript, the authors use language that is considered prejudicial and outdated (e.g., “natal sex” as opposed to “sex assigned at birth”). It is critical to follow best practice and guidelines surrounding gender inclusive language, particularly for research specifically on the topic of gender incongruence, expression, and identity.”

Lordy lordy lordy. What sane person considers “natal sex” outdated compared to “sex assigned at birth”? That’s not a matter of scientific language being updated, it’s a matter of politics, and idenniny politics at that. There’s nothing “updated” about pretending that sex is assigned as opposed to observed. Cult language is not an update.

There are a few replies that insist yes cult language is too so an update. Such as:

So let me get this straight. Someone’s “smoking gun” that science is collapsing under “woke tyranny” is… that a grad student’s paper got rejected because it ignored established terminology guidelines in the very field it was trying to publish in? That’s not censorship, that’s just bad scholarship.

Imagine a med student submitting a cardiology paper and insisting on using “dropsy” instead of “congestive heart failure.” A journal would laugh it out the door, not because of politics but because science has agreed-upon, precise language for a reason.

Uh huh, and “assigned male at birth” is some of that agreed-upon, precise language.

“Natal sex” isn’t neutral…. it carries baggage and misrepresents the consensus terminology. If you’re studying gender identity, you follow the standards of the field just like youd follow APA style in psychology or IUPAC naming in chemistry.

Peer review rejecting a sloppy manuscript isn’t proof science is broken….. it’s proof science is working. The whole point of peer review is to keep outdated, imprecise, or biased framing from muddying the literature. If you can’t meet the bar, you don’t get in. That’s not “woke,” that’s quality control.

It’s science science SCIENCE I tell you!

Oh how interesting. I wonder if I will ever see any former colleagues say the same.

As for the mad props, how about some mad props for those of us who rejected the bullshit from the outset?

boswelltoday on Peggie V NHS Fife & Dr Upton:

Jane Russell’s Closing: A Masterclass in Wishful Thinking

Jane Russell KC’s closing argument for NHS Fife and Dr. Upton was a performance in the art of inversion – turning reality inside out and expecting the tribunal to applaud. She spoke with elegance, but what she asked the panel to believe was preposterous: that a nurse of thirty years’ service was a bully, that a man in a women’s changing room was harmless, and that the law demands women silence their instincts to preserve a colleague’s feelings. She began with her little parable about hoofbeats – “think horses, not zebras.” According to Russell, Peggie had conjured up a fantasy of danger. Yet the “horse” standing there was obvious: a male body in a female space. Only a lawyer desperate to deflect would try to convince a roomful of adults that it was the zebra.

Also, danger isn’t the only issue. Privacy matters. Sex matters. Who is which sex matters. Shame matters. Embarrassment matters.

Her biblical comparison was worse. The tribunal, she claimed, need not decide whether sex is immutable, any more than it must decide if Noah built an Ark in seven days. This was sophistry dressed as wit. Everyone knows that sex matters in law – in medicine, crime, safeguarding, and equality. It is written into the very statutes she pretended to interpret. To wave it away as mere belief was not clever – it was insulting.

What a comparison. The fairy tale of Noah’s ark, and whether or not people can change sex. A very old biblical story, and a very current ideology that says men are women if they say they are. NOT COMPARABLE.

Russell then invoked Goodwin and Article 8 as though they were magic words. She insisted that Dr. Upton’s “right to live as a woman” was inviolable.

It may be inviolable in private. Why in private? Because there it doesn’t affect anyone else. But the minute you take it outside, it very much does affect anyone else. There’s a pretty much infinite list of things we can’t do because they impinge on other people. In a whole lot of circumstances and contexts, pretending to be a woman is one of them.

The evidential gymnastics were almost comic. No “smoking gun” was found, so Peggie must be imagining things. No other women complained, so there must be no problem. In reality, every woman watching this case unfold knows exactly why others stayed silent. Peggie was dragged through suspension, investigation, and character assassination for daring to say what many quietly think. Silence in that climate is not proof of contentment – it is proof of fear.

And the Jane Russells of the world are fine with that.

Helen Webberley threatening death for people who know sex can’t be swapped.

Coffin emoji. Haw haw haw.

Judge tells Trump No you can’t.

A federal judge on Tuesday barred President Donald Trump from deploying National Guard and other military troops in California to execute law-enforcement actions there, including making arrests, searching locations, and crowd control.

The ruling came in connection with a lawsuit filed in early June by the state of California challenging Trump’s and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s deployment of the Guard to deal with protests in Los Angeles over the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies.

Judge Charles Breyer said that Trump’s deployment of thousands of National Guard troops and 700 Marines to L.A. violated the federal Posse Comitatus Act, which bars U.S. Military forces from enforcing the law domestically.

Breyer’s ruling in U.S. District Court in San Francisco is limited to California, and the judge stayed the decision until Sept. 12 to give the Trump administration time to appeal it.

But it comes as Trump has considered deploying National Guard troops to other U.S. cities to deal with crime, including Oakland and San Francisco.

Trump doesn’t know from jurisdiction. Trump thinks he has infinite powers. If court rulings can’t stop him then he effectively does.

Meanwhile Trump

The arrest of a US army veteran who protested against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has raised alarms among legal experts and fellow veterans familiar with his service in Afghanistan.

Bajun Mavalwalla II – a former army sergeant who survived a roadside bomb blast on a special operations mission in Afghanistan – was charged in July with “conspiracy to impede or injure officers” after joining a demonstration against federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Spokane, Washington.

We are allowed to demonstrate. Presidents are not allowed to punish us for demonstrating. We are not the criminals here.

Legal experts say the case marks an escalation in the administration’s attacks on first amendment rights. Afghanistan war veterans who know him say the case against Mavalwalla appears unjust.

“Here’s a guy who held a top secret clearance and was privy to some of the most sensitive information we have, who served in a combat zone,” said Kenneth Koop, a retired colonel who trained the Afghan military and police during Mavalwalla’s deployment. “To see him treated like this really sticks in my craw.”

The 11 June protest against Ice that led to Mavalwalla’s arrest was confrontational, leaving a government van’s windshield smashed and tires slashed, but Mavalwalla was not among the more than two dozen people arrested at the scene. More than a month passed before the FBI arrived at his door on 15 July.

It took them all that time to find a pretext.

While the indictment alleges other protesters struck federal officers and let the air out of the tires of an Ice transport, Mavalwalla was not charged with obstruction or assault. Instead, he was charged with “conspiracy to impede or injure officers”.

According to the indictment, Mavalwalla and his co-defendants “physically blocked the drive-way of the federal facility and/or physically pushed against officers despite orders to disburse and efforts to remove them from the property”.

He helped block a driveway. Wow, what a hardened criminal.

The indictment was handed down two days after career prosecutor Richard Barker, the acting US attorney for eastern Washington state, resigned. In a social post, Barker called his exit “a very difficult decision”.

“I am grateful that I never had to sign an indictment or file a brief that I didn’t believe in,” he wrote.

The current acting US attorney, nominated for the permanent post by Donald Trump, is Pete Serrano, a former litigator for the Silent Majority Foundation, a conservative advocacy group. In February, Serrano filed an amicus brief in support of Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, a position at odds with the 14th amendment. He has no prosecutorial experience and has described the 6 January 2021, US Capitol rioters as “political prisoners”.

We’re all at the mercy of these shits.

Well there is an easy solution…

Algerian boxer Imane Khelif appeals World Boxing ban over mandatory sex testing

Algeria‘s Olympic gold medallist Imane Khelif has appealed to sport‘s highest court against a World Boxing decision barring her from upcoming events unless she undergoes genetic sex testing, Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) said on Monday.

Why? Why is he doing that? Why doesn’t he just take the test?

The appeal seeks to overturn the ruling and allow Algeria’s Khelif to compete at the 2025 World Boxing Championships without having the test, the Court of Arbitration for Sport said in a statement, adding that it had dismissed her request to suspend the decision while the case is heard.

But why? Why go to all that trouble? Why not just take the test?

Because he would fail it.

Do he and his handlers not realize that we can all figure that out?

Also journalism needs to stop calling him “her”.

Well this is horrific. Glinner writes:

The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two—five. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets.

He shares the tweets. One concludes with “if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” Another captions a demo with “A photo you can smell.” The last one says “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em.”

At Heathrow police station, my belt, bag, and devices were confiscated. Then I was shown into a small green-tiled cell with a bunk, a silver toilet in the corner and a message from Crimestoppers on the ceiling next to a concave mirror that was presumably there to make you reflect on your life choices.

Ffs!

Five cops! Arresting him at Heathrow! Putting him in a cell! Because tweets!

I have to wonder if a single UK cop – let alone five – has ever arrested a man for tweeting violent threats against women.

Surely a more normal response would be something like a parking ticket, or a request to stop by for a chat, in a country where rape goes uninvestigated and unpunished.

Eventually, a nurse came to check on me and found my blood pressure was over 200—stroke territory. The stress of being arrested for jokes was literally threatening my life! So I was escorted to A&E, where I write this now after spending about eight hours under observation.

The doctors suggested the high blood pressure was stress-related, combined with long-haul travel and lack of movement. I feel it may also have been a contributing factor that I have now spent eight years being targeted by trans activists working in tandem with police in a dedicated, perseistent harassment campaign because I refuse to believe that lesbians have cocks.

It’s insane.

Trump administration offers military funeral honors to Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt

The U.S. government is offering military funeral honors for Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who was killed at 35 by an officer in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Babbitt was a U.S. Air Force veteran from California who was shot dead wearing a Trump campaign flag wrapped around her shoulders while attempting to climb through the broken window of a barricaded door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby inside the Capitol.

Offering military honors to one of the Capitol rioters is part of President Donald Trump’s attempts to rewrite that chapter after the 2020 election as a patriotic stand, given he still denies he lost that election. Babbitt has gained martyr status among Republicans, and the Trump administration agreed to pay just under $5 million to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit that her family filed over her shooting.

Because violent insurrection is fine if you’re doing it for Trump.

Originally a comment by Enzyme on Crucial.

I wouldn’t want to speculate on what the GMC’s rationale its decision about HRT prescriptions might have been; but let’s allow for the sake of the argument that it was buffoonery. Still: there might be an upside to that – or, at least, there might have been a bullet dodged.

Had the GMC said that it was a specialist area, requiring special training, then who would have undertaken such training? Since doctors are not assigned to specialisms by lottery, the answer to that would have to be that the training would only or overwhelmingly be sought by True Believers in the gender cause. And, in turn, that would have given heft to the idea that there is a whole specialism devoted to this thing, therefore this thing must be 100% legit. (Recall a few years ago a minor kerfuffle over chiropractors setting up a professional organisation and publishing professional standards; the concern was then that this gave a fig-leaf to chiropraxis because it made it look like something real.*)

On the other hand, by not saying that it’s a speciality area – by saying that it’s just a normal part of medicine – the door is left open for normal medics to make normal evidence-based decisions about whether HRT is warranted. And while that means that there’d me more doctors with the liberty to prescribe HRT, there’d also be more who’d be inclined not to.

(*Yes, I’m calling it chiropraxis, because “chiropractic” is an adjective. Lord: if there’s one single thing that makes me, as a layman, suspicious of those charlatans, it’s that they do such obvious violence to the rules of grammar. And if they’re mangling grammar, what’re they going to do with my vertebrae?)

But do not call him Ted.

Dr Beth Upton’s birth name will be redacted in official Sandie Peggie documents, the tribunal judge has ruled. The case has restarted for a third time with final submissions being put forward by each legal team before a decision will be made towards the end of the year.

…

Born Theodore Upton, the name was used on the General Medical Council register before he was re-registered under his new name, Dr Beth Upton. His legal team claimed that publishing his birth name would be against his human rights and would out him as a trans woman.

Judge Sandy Kemp ruled in his favour, confirming that the submissions can be published but Theodore Upton will be redacted from all of the documents. His full name will now not be included when Ms Peggie’s evidence is made public, as well as submissions from those on her side.

Fabulous; that way no one will ever know or suspect or guess that he’s not a woman.

Ms Peggie’s lawyer Naomi Cunningham asked for the documents to be published in full to promote “open justice” and “freedom of self expression.” But Ms Russell argued that using the Theodore Upton name was “gratuitous and unnecessary” and claimed that it triggered “gender dysphoria.”

Of course it’s not gratuitous and unnecessary, it’s the whole point. The man is not a god damn woman and he has no right to persecute women who don’t want him in their changing rooms. That’s it, that’s the case!

She pointed out that he is not being sued under that name and cited legislation such as the gender recognition law and the Equal Treatment Bench Book to prove her point. She quoted this: “Name or pronouns can be very important to the transperson. It can be a sign of disrespect if transperson is not referred to by them.

Nobody cares.

“No one should be outed, everyone should be treated with courtesy and dignity.” She went on to claim that the “gratuitous dropping of the deadname in the submissions is harmful” to Dr Upton, and using the deadname is “not relevant in this case.”

It’s not gratuitous. Again: the fact that he’s not a woman is central to the hearing. All this cringing and bowing and scraping is how we got here. It is not reasonable or fair for men to order everyone to call them “her”.

But he got his way all the same.

The NY Times on grinding the proletariat:

Trump is the most ruthlessly antilabor president since before the Great Depression.

If the labor movement does not fight harder than it has since Mr. Trump regained the presidency, its future will be dire.

Mr. Trump and his administration have unilaterally stripped collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers. At the Department of Veterans Affairs alone, 400,000 workers, or 2.8 percent of America’s unionized workers, have lost their collective bargaining rights because of an executive order that will eventually affect more than one million federal workers. Mr. Trump ushered in Labor Day weekend on Thursday by continuing his assault of federal unions, adding the Patent Office, NASA and the National Weather Service to his list of targeted agencies.

He’s a festive guy.

Despite this assault on their very existence, we have barely heard a peep from unions. Where is organized labor in the public fight to maintain union jobs, stop the stripping of the safety net and lead the fight for democracy? Other than some statements and angry speeches, the movement has been muted.

If the labor movement wants to fight for its survival, it must return to mass mobilization tactics, reminding Americans that their rights come through working together — not through supporting a president who talks about helping American workers while slashing worker safety regulations, supporting tariffs that raise the cost of consumer goods and stripping workers of their legal rights to contracts.

…

One cannot overstate the significance of Mr. Trump’s attacks on government workers. Public sector work has become organized labor’s power base, allowing the total workforce’s union membership rate to remain at around 10 percent, despite less than 6 percent of private sector workers having unions.

Jeezus. I didn’t know it was that bad.

Mr. Trump has attacked workers in other ways. He has gutted the Department of Labor through cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency. He is also rolling back Labor Department rules from the Obama and Biden administrations that allowed home care workers to earn overtime and farmworkers to campaign for better working conditions. And he has severely undermined the National Labor Relations Board, which handles thousands of union matters every year, by firing its head and nominating corporate-friendly figures to steer its operations away from supporting workers.

Happy Boss Day.

Um…happy Labor Day.

Federal employees have had the right to join unions and collectively bargain over working conditions since the 1960s. Unlike private sector workers, government employees cannot negotiate wages or strike. But through collective bargaining, they do help shape disciplinary procedures, parental leave policies, how overtime is managed and much more.

Giving workers a say in workplace policies, the thinking goes, leads to less friction in the workplace and more effective government.

But President Trump has abandoned that idea. Instead, he’s argued that federal employee unions pose a danger to the country. In March, he issued an executive order ending collective bargaining rights for more than one million federal workers at about 20 federal agencies. Almost immediately, many agencies halted automatic deductions of union dues from employee paychecks, cutting off a critical source of cash flow to the unions. Just ahead of Labor Day, Trump issued a new executive order, adding about a half dozen agencies to the list.

Of course he did.

In his March and August executive orders, Trump leans on a provision in federal law that gives him authority to end collective bargaining rights at agencies that have national security as a primary function. Past presidents have used that authority sparingly. Trump is applying it to a broad swath of agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department, the National Weather Service and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees the embattled Voice of America.

The president’s rationale is that it hurts national security when unions are able to obstruct management. In a “fact sheet” issued alongside the March executive order, the White House cited the many legal challenges unions have brought. “Certain Federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda,” the document said.

And the workers must not be allowed to challenge the bosses. End of.

Across the federal government, some workers aren’t waiting around to see what happens. They’re quitting now, having decided a government job just isn’t worth it anymore. Many workers fear with unions gone, they won’t have a say in matters such as telework or family leave policies that make a difference to their quality of life.

…

Lee says the government is losing chemists, toxicologists, engineers and others who ensure drugs and medical devices are safe and effective and food ingredients aren’t poisonous.

“It is already, in my view, harming the public because we’re losing that institutional knowledge. We’re losing that subject matter expertise,” Lee says. “As much as the current administration thinks that everyone is just quickly replaceable, they’re not.”

Pfffff. One worker is like any other worker. It’s like replacing a light bulb.

Oh really?

That first bullet point is just so much blather, unless what they are sneakily doing is pretending that the rules and expectations around gender are the same thing as the categories female and male. I think that probably is what they’re doing, and it’s both pompous and deceptive. Of course “understandings of sex” have always been binary, which is not to deny that views on how women and men have to behave are contingent and various.

Yes of course the rules around gender are “open to political manipulation”; we know that; it does not follow that men can be women.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on A quiet senior.

Ms. Gaines’s approach to activism involves a weaponization of names, pronouns, physical descriptions and other language to undermine the legitimacy of transgender people’s mere existence in the world.

JFC. It was Thomas who was weaponizing all of that in order to undermine women and rob them of their safety, dignity, and awards.

In other words, she often seems to go out of her way to provoke those who are not already fully on board with her mission.

JFC. Anyone mentioning reality provokes these people. Gaines is not any different in this regard. Thomas is male; always has been, always will be. Maybe Gaines was just tired of living with and having to regurgitate the lie that he was not.

But if Ms. Gaines’s rhetoric is alienating, her specific position on transgender women and sports has increasingly widespread support.

As if Thomas’s delusional, perverted, fetish-fueled intrusion into the women’s swim team was not “alienating.” And why shouldn’t reality have “widespread support”? (Way to normalize abnormal, and, despite claims of being a “woman” criminal behaviour.) Without the protection of his bullshit “gender identity” he would have been arrested, just like any other male who did what he did. His cheating (which is bad enough) is the least of it. His presence in the women’s changing rooms was a sex crime. Thomas is not a hero. Thomas is a sex criminal. Having voluntarily outed himself as a proud, unrepentant sex offender, Thomas should be on watch lists and under restraining orders for the rest of his life. Who the fuck in their right mind wouldn’t have rooted against him?

Now Trump is kneecapping Voice of America.

VOA was established in 1942, during World War II. Building on American use of shortwave radio during the war, it initially served as an anti-propaganda tool against Axis misinformation but expanded to include other forms of content like American music programs for cultural diplomacy. During the Cold War, its operations expanded in an effort to fight communism and played a role in the decline of communism in several countries. Throughout its operations, it has aimed to broadcast uncensored information to residents under restrictive regimes, even airing behind the Iron Curtain.

Ah; that will be the problem then. Trump doesn’t want anybody messing with his restrictive regime.

The Trump administration has moved to lay off more than 500 employees who work for the federally funded network Voice of America, which provides global reporting in places with restricted press freedom.

In March, Trump officials first attempted to close down some of the organization’s newsrooms. But Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia called for the network’s restoration last April, citing a law that requires the Voice of America broadcast to be continued.

Despite the ruling, Kari Lake, the acting chief executive of Voice of America’s oversight agency, posted on social media on Friday evening that 532 government positions were eliminated.

Nobody cares what some judge says; this is Trump’s dictatorship.

Before the downsizing, Voice of America was responsible for broadcasting news in 49 languages to 360 million people every week, including in Russia and China. Now, the network airs programming in four languages: Persian, Mandarin, Dari and Pashto.

The layoffs “will likely improve [the agency’s] ability to function and provide the truth to people across the world who live under murderous Communist governments and other tyrannical regimes,” wrote Lake on X.

Most of the 1,300 Voice of America journalists had already been fired or remained on paid leave prior to these layoffs. Only 100 journalists and other staff members remain employed by the organization.

How exactly will that improve the agency’s ability to function and provide the truth to people across the world?