Heather Cox Richardson yesterday:

There seems to be a change in the air.

Three days ago, on April 14, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote that the vibe is shifting against the right. Yesterday, former neocon and now fervent Trump critic and editor of The Bulwark Bill Kristol posted a photo of plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers kidnapping Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, and commented: “Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology.”

Today, in the New York Times, conservative David Brooks called for all those resisting what he called “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men” to work together. He called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” that would first stop Trump and then create “a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism—one that offers a positive vision.”

Brooks is hardly the first to suggest that “this is what America needs right now.” But a conservative like Brooks not only arguing that “Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life,” but then quoting Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to call for resistance to those shackles—“We have nothing to lose but our chains”—signals that a shift is underway.

That shift has apparently swept in New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who is generally a good barometer of the way today’s non-MAGA Republicans are thinking. In an interview today, he said: “[M]y feelings about not only Trump, but the administration, are falling like a boulder going into the Mariana Trench. So the memory of things that this administration has done, of which I approve, is drowning in the number of things that are, in my view, reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful and bad—not just for the country, but also for the conservative movement.”

Stephens identified Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s bullying of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office as the event that turned him away from Trump. “America should never treat an ally that way, certainly not one who is bravely fighting a common enemy,” he said. Stephens also noted the meeting had “delighted” Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who is now “emboldened…to press the war harder.”

We have been in a similar moment of shifting coalitions before.

In the 1850s, elite southern enslavers organized to take over the government and create an oligarchy that would make enslavement national. Northerners hadn’t been paying a great deal of attention to southern leaders’ slow accumulation of power and were shocked when Congress bowed to them and in 1854 passed a law that overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept slavery out of the West. The establishment of slavery in the West would mean new slave states there would work with the southern slave states to outvote the North in Congress, and it would only be a question of time until they made slavery national. Soon, the Slave Power would own the country.

The law was the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Northerners of all parties who disagreed with each other over issues of immigration, finance, and internal improvements—and even over the institution of slavery—came together to stand against the end of American democracy.

Four years later, in 1858, Democrat Stephen Douglas complained that those coming together to oppose the Democrats were a ragtag coalition whose members didn’t agree on much at all. Abraham Lincoln, who by then was speaking for the new party coalescing around that coalition, replied that Douglas “should remember that he took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose, by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

I think I’ll go for the cleaver.

Trump’s war on the law continues.

After attacking judges and repeatedly sidestepping their orders, the Trump administration has accused a federal judge in Washington of escalating tensions between the judicial and executive branches by seeking to hold the White House accountable for its courtroom behavior.

Because he thinks he’s a monarch and the law is subservient to him. He’s the prez but he doesn’t understand the separation of powers.

The accusation against the judge, James E. Boasberg, came in a court filing early Friday morning by the Justice Department. In it, department lawyers asked the federal appeals court that sits over Judge Boasberg to prevent him from opening an expansive contempt inquiry into whether the White House violated an order he issued in March to stop flights of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador under the authority of a powerful wartime statute.

Wawawa let us do whatever we want, you’re just judges and we have the golden throne.

Much of the filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia read like a normal legal brief, laying out the government’s challenge to a judicial order it did not like. But in its opening line, department lawyers made clear that they believed Judge Boasberg’s recent threat to open criminal contempt proceedings in the deportation case represented another salvo in an increasingly bitter battle between the White House and the courts.

“‘Occasions for constitutional confrontation between the two branches should be avoided whenever possible,’” the department lawyers wrote, failing to mention their own role in fostering such confrontations. “The district court’s criminal contempt order instead escalates the constitutional stakes by infringing core executive prerogatives.”

Or, to put it another way, the administration’s refusal to comply with the judicial order escalates the constitutional stakes by infringing core judicial prerogatives.

All of this and more prompted a conservative Republican jurist, writing for a federal appeals court that reviews Judge Xinis, to scold the Trump administration on Thursday for repeatedly taking an aggressive and recalcitrant approach to the courts and to court orders.

“The respect that courts must accord the executive must be reciprocated by the executive’s respect for the courts,” the appellate judge, J. Harvie Wilkinson III, wrote. “Too often today this has not been the case, as calls for impeachment of judges for decisions the executive disfavors and exhortations to disregard court orders sadly illustrate.”

That’s Trumpism for you. Just ignore any orders you don’t like and accuse everyone else of disrespect and disobedience. He considers himself a dictator and that’s all there is to it – the rules might as well not exist.

This guy is such a gift. He will force himself on women and if cops show up to stop him he will scream “rape” at them.

And of course Willoughby says “Yeah!”

Brendan O’Neill is frankly gloating.

No sooner had the Supreme Court said what even the Neanderthals knew – that men are men and women are women – than these blokes were fuming. First out of the traps was thin-lipped loon India Willoughby. He branded the court’s decision ‘evil’. Yes, it is apparently wicked and immoral to say that if you have a todger you’re a fella. Willoughby spent the day furiously doubling down on his delusions of womanhood. ‘I have always been a woman’, he said. Tell that to the jizz you sired your kid with.

It’s a ‘grim day’, they cry. The ruling threatens trans people’s ‘safety’, they say. That’s big talk from a movement that expects female prisoners to live cheek by jowl with rapists and girls to share changing rooms with hulking blokes in ill-fitting bikinis. There are dark mutterings about ‘fascism’. Munroe Bergdorf shared a post saying: ‘There is no trans debate. There are trans people and there are fascists who wish to dominate and eliminate trans people.’ Dude, it’s not fascism to say women should be free to seek rape counselling without fearing there’ll be a weirdo in a boob tube listening in.

Listening in or just plain doing the counselling (see Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre for details).

Some of the angry fellas say they intend to carry on going into women-only areas. ‘You will never stop me accessing female spaces. It is my right to use them’, says one. Not anymore it isn’t, you prick. Trans activist Charlie Craggs says it’s terrible that he’ll now be expected to ‘use men’s spaces’ alongside ‘predatory men’. How can TERFs sleep at night, he says, knowing ‘they’re sending transwomen into bathrooms with predatory men’. What depthless gall. The men who demanded that women throw open their changing rooms, refuges, swimming pools and sports to any bloke who fancied waltzing in are now blubbing that they’ll have to share spaces with those very same blokes. Honestly, what these people lack in XX chromosomes they more than make up for with brass neck.

Sauce for the goose sauce for the gander eh wot?

Then, best of all, came ‘the allies’. Is there anything funnier than a fiftysomething public-school arse trying to stay relevant by saying ‘transwomen are women’? Barrister Jolyon Maugham – famous for killing foxes and losing cases – declared in his haughty headmaster’s drawl that the court’s ruling is ‘profoundly unfair’. LBC knob jockey James O’Brien asked TERFs how they feel being on the same side as Donald Trump on the trans issue. I don’t know, James, I think I’m happier being on the side of Trump than on the side of a movement that mutilates young lesbians, calls women cunts and puts rapists in women’s jails so they can rape more women.

I certainly don’t like the Team Donald Trump aspect of this, but when so much of the left is so determined to be so stupid, what choice do we have?

It begins.

Rapists will no longer be able to identify as women following a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court.

Forces are now expected to begin recording criminals’ birth sex rather than preferred gender in official crime statistics following the ruling, which stated that trans women are not the same as biological women under equality laws.

It will end a situation where some police forces record rapists as being women, even though the legal definition of the crime requires a penis.

Finally the police will have to stop forcing rape victims to call their rapists “she/her.”

How ugly. University and College Union spits on women.

Medscape explains how clueless and reckless Bad Kennedy is.

In an interview earlier this year, RFK appeared on Fox Nation to talk about a range of issues, but he spent much of the time discussing infectious diseases and the measles outbreak in particular. We took a closer look at the secretary’s comments quoted in his own words and fact-checked them with some leading infectious disease specialists.

RFK: “The safest application of vitamin A is through cod liver oil because you’re getting it through food and the toxicity issue is no longer an issue. You can test people at the hospital for vitamin A.…There’s a lot of good studies out there to show that even as a prophylaxis it’s effective in early treatment.”

Vitamin A is a micronutrient that enhances immune function and cod liver oil is high in vitamin A. Research conducted over several decades has shown that while vitamin A may be helpful in some cases for the treatment of measles, it is not a substitute for vaccination. And cod liver oil should not be used as a source of vitamin A because it would be highly impractical due to the high volume that would need to be ingested to obtain a therapeutic dose of the nutrient, which is 200,000 international units given over two consecutive days.

Also – just a reminder – Kennedy is neither an MD nor a scientist. He has no actual expertise here, just opinions, of the kind any random person on the bus might have.

RFK: “There is malnutrition in West Texas, in Gaines County, and in the Mennonite community. The doctors that I’m talking to on the ground, the leaders in the community are reporting that the people who are getting sick are people who are umm and the little girl who died, where malnutrition may have been an issue in her death. There’s a lot of poverty in that area and the food is kind of a food desert. The best thing that Americans can do is to keep themselves healthy. It’s very very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person.”

One, yes, it’s a good idea for people to keep themselves healthy. Seeking to be unhealthy is a mistake. Those are true statements. However, they are not statements that create a barrier to measles infection. Two, surviving measles is not as good as never having measles at all.

The 6-year-old girl who died from the measles in Gaines County was healthy before she contracted the measles, so recommending a healthy diet in lieu of vaccination is both misleading and dangerous, Offit said. 

“[RFK Jr] is of the false belief that if your nutrition is good, you cannot die from the measles. I have no idea where he gets this,” Offit said. “Measles killed 500 children a year before there was vaccination and most of those children were previously healthy.”

We all know where he gets this. He pulls it out of his ass. He’s a conceited fool who thinks his folk wisdom is better than substantive knowledge.

RFK: If you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease in modern times because we have nutrition, because we have access to medicines. It’s very, very difficult for any infectious disease to kill a healthy human being.”

And God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.

It never seems to occur to Kennedy that he doesn’t know as much about it as the professionals do. Why is that? The rest of us don’t prance around thinking we know all about electrical engineering and dark matter and how to fly planes, we understand that there are professionals and experts who have taken the time to learn a subject or skill and we can’t be professionals and experts without doing the same thing.

He thinks he knows better why rates of autism have risen. Why does he think that?

In remarks laced with scientific inaccuracies, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said on Wednesday that autism was preventable while directly contradicting researchers within his own agency on a primary driver behind rising rates of the condition in young children.

Mr. Kennedy made his comments at a news conference, responding to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that rates of autism had increased to one in 31 among 8-year-olds, continuing a long-running trend.

Blaming environmental risk factors for the uptick, he accused the media and the public of succumbing to a “myth of epidemic denial” when it came to autism. He also called research into the genetic factors that scientists say play a vital role in whether a child will develop autism “a dead end.”

How would he know? He’s not a scientist. How would he know better than scientists who work in the field? How does he manage to think he knows better?

Dr. Eric Fombonne, who is a longtime autism researcher and professor emeritus at Oregon Health & Science University, called Mr. Kennedy’s claim “ridiculous.”

“Autism is not an infectious disease. So there aren’t preventive measures that we can take,” said Dr. Joshua Anbar, an assistant teaching professor at Arizona State University who helped collect data for the C.D.C. report.

…

Researchers said there is no one reason autism rates have risen, but that increased screening was likely a large factor.

“The more you look for it, the more you find,” said Dr. Maureen Durkin, a professor of population health sciences and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has long studied autism. Dr. Durkin is one of the authors of the C.D.C. report.

Mr. Kennedy repeatedly dismissed the idea that screenings had driven the uptick as a “canard” and chastised “epidemic deniers” for focusing on genetics instead of environmental factors.

Why did he do that? How does he think he knows better?

Narcissism is a dangerous drug.

Honest to christ do these people pay any attention at all??

I am really saddened by the level of vitriol and hatred being directed toward the trans community.

We are losing our common humanity. How hard is it to treat people with kindness and respect?

Trans people are human beings — and they deserve to live in dignity.

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) April 17, 2025

DUDE. Pay fucking attention. Look at how “the trans community” has been treating us – women – for the past ten or more years. We’re not the bullies here. Furthermore, trans people aren’t the poor unfortunate neglected bedraggled starved tortured victims here, either. Trans people have been sanctified while women have been kicked to the curb and had our rights given away to people who don’t need them. What about us you soppy callous clueless git?

Ah yes, that’s the way to get around environmental laws and restrictions: define harm very narrowly.

The Trump administration is proposing to significantly limit the Endangered Species Act’s power to preserve crucial habitats by changing the definition of one word: harm.

On Wednesday, the administration proposed a rule change that would essentially prohibit only actions that directly hurt or kill actual animals, not the habitats they rely on. If finalized, the change could make it easier to log, mine and build on lands that endangered species need to thrive.

And the species would disappear. They would all be gone, you see, so nobody would be harmed.

Under the Endangered Species Act, it’s illegal to “take” an endangered species. By law, “take” is defined to mean actions that harass, harm, or kill species. For decades, federal agencies have interpreted “harm” broadly, to include actions that modify or degrade habitats in ways that impair endangered species’ ability to feed, breed or find shelter.

That interpretation has been a crucial part of how the Endangered Species Act has protected over 1,700 species since its passage in 1973, said Hartl. It’s helped preserve spawning grounds for Atlantic sturgeon, allowing them to mate and sustain the population. It has protected old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest that house northern spotted owls, saving them from extinction.

In the 1990s, timber companies that wanted to harvest those old-growth forests challenged the government’s broad interpretation of harm. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld that interpretation in a 6-3 decision.

But this is not the 1990s and this Supreme Court is not that Supreme Court. Bye bye endangered species – we’ll keep plenty of photos of you.

Willoughby is busy demonstrating what a healthy, fair-minded, generous ideology Trans Dogma really is.

Remember when he objected with the same energy to trans women in the police body-searching women? No, neither do I.

Oh dear, trans ideology chalks up another loss, how sad, never mind.

A trans woman who complained to police about social media posts made by a “gender critical” man has lost a High Court challenge of the force’s decision to take no further action against him.

Lynsay Watson complained to Greater Manchester Police (GMP) in February 2023, about more than 15 posts made on X by Stuart Campbell related to the murder of teenager Brianna Ghey, who was also transgender, that month.

Mr Campbell, who was described by his lawyers as “gender critical” or a “biological realist”, said Brianna was a “trans-identifying boy”, adding: “Human beings can’t change sex. Being murdered doesn’t alter that.”

Imagine complaining to the police about that.

The judge said: “(GMP) was entitled, and correct, to conclude that posts did not cross the threshold to be considered objectively ‘grossly offensive’.” She continued: “The defendant’s conclusion properly reflected society’s fundamental values of free speech, including the need for tolerance of statements and opinions that some might find offensive or upsetting.” She added: “(GMP) was justified, and right, in concluding that to proceed further with the investigation was not appropriate.”

Especially when the statements and opinions at issue were not being shouted into Lynsay Watson’s face in a threatening bullying manner – they were just sentences on social media.

Kathleen Stock credits For Women Scotland:

Thanks to the tenacity of grassroots organisation For Women Scotland in fighting several cases through the courts, judges at the highest level have now clarified that a man — with or without a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) — does not belong in any woman-only prison, hospital ward, dormitory, rape crisis service, or changing room. If trans-identified, he is rightly shielded from discrimination and harassment under the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” but not those of “female” or “lesbian”. This classification also means that, if he’s a medical professional, he is not allowed to provide intimate care to unwilling women on the spurious grounds that he, too, is female. As a police or prison officer, he may not carry out strip searches of his “fellow women” either. His presence in the upper echelons of a workplace does not count towards feminist empowerment there. His athletic personal bests can no longer break female records, nor his football and rugby tackles break female bones.

And he doesn’t get to crash lesbian groups either.

…another big problem for transactivist campaigners was the restricted arsenal of argumentative weapons at their disposal. They couldn’t rely on reason or evidence as these concepts are commonly understood, because no good arguments for transubstantiation by means of lip gloss existed. This left only three options: intellectual misdirection, emotional blackmail, and aggressively shaming opponents into silence.

Ah yes. The ideology and the “activism” are so aggressive and obnoxious because aggression and rudeness are the only tools they have.

Equally, as time passed, it became increasingly difficult to maintain heartrending fictions about the unique vulnerability of the trans-identified cohort as a whole. Over and over again, men claiming womanhood kept featuring as perpetrators in court reports. So that left only the tactic of terrifying critics into silence. We on the gender-critical and sex-realist side were called harpies, transphobes, bigots, Christian nationalists, National Socialists, and white supremacists; and that was just by Guardian writers.

When you don’t have the arguments, bullying and abuse are all that’s left.

So, while the other side most definitely had all the gender identities, our side had more tangible assets in the shape of brains, guts, and heart. Given the damage done by Sturgeon to the cause of women and girls north of the border, it is fitting that the biggest victory in the gender wars should belong to members of that esteemed company, the women who wouldn’t wheesht. In the former First Minister, we are given a perfect encapsulation of the tongue-clucking, eye-rolling, mostly performative feminist attitude favoured by women in the progressive establishment. But thanks to For Women Scotland and their many grassroots allies, we have been given the real thing.

Indeed – THANKS TO FOR WOMEN SCOTLAND. MASSIVE EXUBERANT THANKS.

Jolyon Maugham pretends trans ideology is like Freedom Summer. And what? India Willoughby is another James Chaney?

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Return of pearls and handbags.

I’m a man myself, and if I were a woman, I wouldn’t feel safe around men either. If the election of the pussygrabber, the rise of the manosphere, the sheer magnitude of the inherently misogynistic porn industry etc. should have taught us any lessons, it’s that male predatory attitudes, as well as general hate and contempt towards women, are not ”fringe”.

One of the mixed “blessings” of growing up male is that – unless you’re going to spend your life in a sealed box – you can hardly avoid being exposed to vast amounts of misogynistic “locker-room” talk from other “boy-men” who seem to take for granted that you’re going to find their “banter” totally awesome. Why do they think that? Probably because their behavior has resulted in far more social reward than pushback from their male peers.

The heroes of the action movies that were popular when I grew up were almost without exception misogynists, and many of them were predators. And remember, these were the guys we were supposed to find totally cool And, as I have previously mentioned, the lyrics of much of the rock music I grew up listening to might as well have been written by a serial rapist, and as a matter of fact many of them probably were. It didn’t stop fans by the hundreds of thousands from cheering as if it were the coolest thing ever. From what I have gathered things are not much better in the hiphop and rap scenes.

I can only conclude that women have to have nerves of steel to ever risk the company of any man, knowing that such a large proportion of them are fully on board with all this crap. Feminists (the real kind, not the “for men” kind) are often accused of misandry, so let me set this straight right away. They’re not misandrists. And I should know: I’m a misandrist, and the feminists all disagree with me.

Aaaaand the retrofitting begins.

Just one bit of added context…

CNN nervously reports:

The United Kingdom’s highest court ruled that the legal definition of “woman” excludes trans women, in a case with sweeping consequences for how equality laws are applied.

Britain’s Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the definition of a woman in equality legislation refers to “a biological woman and biological sex,” sparking celebrations outside court among gender-critical campaigners but warnings it was a “worrying” development for transgender people.

The case centered on whether trans women with a gender recognition certificate (GRC) – which offers legal recognition of someone’s female sex – are protected from discrimination as a woman under the nation’s Equality Act 2010.

It still, after all this time, seems absurd that we have to argue over the idea that a certificate should have the ability to override physical sex. There are some things that certificates can’t change. Quite a lot of things, actually.

“Interpreting ‘sex’ as certificated sex would cut across the definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and thus the protected characteristic of sex in an incoherent way,” a summary of the ruling said, which added that transgender women could be excluded from same-sex facilities such as changing rooms if “proportionate.”

Would and does and has for years been cutting across the definitions of woman and man. Cutting across them and making an incoherent mess of them.

The justice insisted that the court’s interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 “does not remove protection from trans people,” with or without a GRC document. A trans woman could claim discrimination on the grounds of gender reassignment, and because “she is perceived to be a woman,” added Hodge.

So a trans woman gets to count twice, eh? So trans women still get extras. How ridiculous.

Britain’s government “has always supported the protection of single-sex spaces based on biological sex,” a spokesperson said, following the ruling.

Has it? Really? Then what’s the Sandie Peggie-“Beth” Upton case all about? Why is Sandie Peggie being brutally persecuted for wanting “Beth” Upton to get out of the women’s changing room? Why hasn’t the government protected single spaces there?

Trans activists across the globe warn that the fierce public debate over their private lives has chipped away at protection for the marginalized and regularly vilified community in recent years.

But it’s not over their private lives. That’s exactly what it’s not. We don’t give a good god damn about their private lives; we object to their intrusions on our lives.

Helen Webberley is astounding.

And if that’s not enough –

Official.

Colin Montgomerie is confused.

Same with “equality”. Being labeled or recognized or endorsed as something you’re not has nothing to do with equality.

Also there’s his dimwitted question about an appeal. Onlookers are wondering if he grasps the meaning of “Supreme” in “Supreme Court”.