Chris Rufo Assembles Profile of NPR CEO Katherine Maher Based on her thousands of Tweets

What can we tell about NPR CEO Katherine Maher based on a review of her tweets?  Chris Rufo notes that she has tweeted more than 29,000 times. He has found a few themes:

What you notice first about Maher’s public speech are the buzzwords and phrases: “structural privilege,” “epistemic emergency,” “transit justice,” “non-binary people,” “late-stage capitalism,” “cis white mobility privilege,” “the politics of representation,” “folx.” She supported Black Lives Matter from its earliest days. She compares driving cars with smoking cigarettes. She is very concerned about “toxic masculinity.”

On every topic, Maher adopts the fashionable language of left-wing academic theory and uses it as social currency, even when her efforts veer into self-parody. She never explains, never provides new interpretation—she just repeats the phrases, in search of affirmation and, when the time is right, a promotion.

Maher understands the game: America’s elite institutions reward loyalty to the narrative. Those who repeat the words move up; those who don’t move out.

This is the person in charge of NPR. As you can see from Rufo's article, she has also taken a hard stand in favor of censorship.

As CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher made censorship a critical part of her policy, under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.

In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.”

Rufo's article is titled, "Quotations from Chairman MaherNPR’s new CEO exemplifies the ideological capture of America’s institutions."

Continue ReadingChris Rufo Assembles Profile of NPR CEO Katherine Maher Based on her thousands of Tweets

What is a Woman? Here is J.K. Rowling’s Answer . . .

What is a woman? J.K. Rowling offers this answer:

You’ve asked me several questions on this thread and accused me of avoiding answering, so here goes.

I believe a woman is a human being who belongs to the sex class that produces large gametes. It’s irrelevant whether or not her gametes have ever been fertilised, whether or not she’s carried a baby to term, irrelevant if she was born with a rare difference of sexual development that makes neither of the above possible, or if she’s aged beyond being able to produce viable eggs. She is a woman and just as much a woman as the others.

I don’t believe a woman is more or less of a woman for having sex with men, women, both or not wanting sex at all. I don’t think a woman is more or less of a woman for having a buzz cut and liking suits and ties, or wearing stilettos and mini dresses, for being black, white or brown, for being six feet tall or a little person, for being kind or cruel, angry or sad, loud or retiring. She isn't more of a woman for featuring in Playboy or being a surrendered wife, nor less of a woman for designing space rockets or taking up boxing. What makes her a woman is the fact of being born in a body that, assuming nothing has gone wrong in her physical development (which, as stated above, still doesn't stop her being a woman), is geared towards producing eggs as opposed to sperm, towards bearing as opposed to begetting children, and irrespective of whether she's done either of those things, or ever wants to.

Womanhood isn't a mystical state of being, nor is it measured by how well one apes sex stereotypes. We are not the creatures either porn or the Bible tell you we are. Femaleness is not, as trans woman Andrea Chu Long wrote, ‘an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes,’ nor are we God’s afterthought, sprung from Adam’s rib.

Women are provably subject to certain experiences because of our female bodies, including different forms of oppression, depending on the cultures in which we live. When trans activists say 'I thought you didn't want to be defined by your biology,' it’s a feeble and transparent attempt at linguistic sleight of hand. Women don't want to be limited, exploited, punished, or subject to other unjust treatment because of their biology, but our being female is indeed defined by our biology. It's one material fact about us, like having freckles or disliking beetroot, neither of which are representative of our entire beings, either. Women have billions of different personalities and life stories, which have nothing to do with our bodies, although we are likely to have had experiences men don't and can't, because we belong to our sex class.

Some people feel strongly that they should have been, or wish to be seen as, the sex class into which they weren't born. Gender dysphoria is a real and very painful condition and I feel nothing but sympathy for anyone who suffers from it. I want them to be free to dress and present themselves however they like and I want them to have exactly the same rights as every other citizen regarding housing, employment and personal safety. I do not, however, believe that surgeries and cross-sex hormones literally turn a person into the opposite sex, nor do I believe in the idea that each of us has a nebulous ‘gender identity’ that may or might not match our sexed bodies. I believe the ideology that preaches those tenets has caused, and continues to cause, very real harm to vulnerable people.

I am strongly against women's and girls' rights and protections being dismantled to accommodate trans-identified men, for the very simple reason that no study has ever demonstrated that trans-identified men don't have exactly the same pattern of criminality as other men, and because, however they identify, men retain their advantages of speed and strength. In other words, I think the safety and rights of girls and women are more important than those men's desire for validation.

I sincerely hope that answers your questions. You may still disagree, but as I hope this shows, I’m more than happy to have this debate.

Continue ReadingWhat is a Woman? Here is J.K. Rowling’s Answer . . .

FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff: Stanford’s Approach to Speech is Like Being in “An Upper Class Finishing School.”

Greg Lukianoff, reflecting on the time he attended Stanford University: Don't confuse "upper class white liberal ways of seeing the world with truth itself.” Excerpt:

And one thing that was so clear when I got to a place like Stanford, was that people had a real tendency to confuse sort of upper class white liberal ways of seeing the world with truth itself and therefore wanted everybody to talk exactly like rich white, over educated people. And there was like this lack of curiosity about whether or not those assumptions were even correct.

And you think about people who are on the spectrum, you think about people from other countries, you think about people who come from different economic classes or different regions or who are a little bit older or a little bit younger than everybody else, and it's just a series of landmines that you're supposed to either know they're there and if you know they're there, you're supposed to pretend you believe the following five things. It's a really messed up way for a place that is supposed to be a marketplace of ideas, to teach people to interact with each other.

Continue ReadingFIRE’s Greg Lukianoff: Stanford’s Approach to Speech is Like Being in “An Upper Class Finishing School.”

Andrew Sullivan Pulls Aside the Curtain to Expose the “Transqueer” Movement

Andrew Sullivan, a gay man who was a courageous leader of the movement to legalize gay marriage, has written a thoughtful article about the "transqueer" movement. Here's an excerpt:

"The truth is: we have come a long way in understanding and respecting the unique human experience of being transgender. In the US, trans people are protected by the gold standard of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They are everywhere in our popular culture. An entire generation has even been told that being trans is the most glamorous thing you could possibly be. But none of this is sufficient for the transqueers. What they want is an abolition of biological sex for everyone; the end of men and of women as separate categories; the sex reassignment of children on demand; the destruction of the nuclear family; an end to the Hippocratic Oath; the abolition of homosexuality; the presence of male bodies in women’s showers, prisons and shelter; the creation of fantastical post-everything genders and pronouns; and the criminalization of anyone who would ever question this cultural revolution.

They are not winning, but it is not for lack of trying. The pseudoscience behind child transition is beginning to be exposed and puberty blockers are now banned in the UK outside clinical trials. A new lawsuit is being filed against the NCAA for destroying women’s sports. Public opinion has responded to the transqueer ideology by moving in the opposite direction, and now gay people are being caught in the queer crossfire."

Continue ReadingAndrew Sullivan Pulls Aside the Curtain to Expose the “Transqueer” Movement

JK. Rowling’s Recent Statement on the Contested Meaning of “Transphobic”

J.K. Rowling is often accused of being "transphobic." She is repeatedly threatened with physical harm and death in response to her views on transgender ideology. And see here. Why? What are her views? In this March 7, 2024 Tweet, she succinctly states her views, which are also my own:

The word ‘transphobic’, as used here, does not mean an irrational fear or dislike of trans people. It means refusing to use gender identity ideology’s jargon, refusing to parrot its slogans, refusing to accept that sex doesn't matter when it comes to sport and single-sex spaces, refusing to believe a bearded heterosexual man becomes a lesbian when he declares himself one, and refusing to believe an abusive, misogynistic male is a woman because he likes to wear mini-dresses and pout in selfies.

Like every other gender critical person I know, I believe everyone should be free to express themselves however they wish, dress however they please, call themselves whatever they want, sleep with any consenting adult who wishes to sleep with them, and that trans-identified people should have the same protections regarding employment, housing, freedom of speech and personal safety every other citizen is entitled to.

But this isn’t nearly enough for the dominant strain of trans activism, which asserts that unless freedom of speech is removed from dissenters, unless trans-identified men are permitted to strip away women’s rights, with particular reference to single sex spaces like rape crisis centres, prison cells, hospital wards, changing rooms and public bathrooms, until we all bow down to their neo-religion, accept their pseudo-scientific claims and embrace their circular reasoning, trans people are more oppressed, and more at risk, than any other group in society.

This is nonsense. 99.9% of the world knows it's nonsense. The emperor is naked. He might be wearing lipstick, but his balls are swinging in plain sight.

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Related topic: I recently had my eyes opened on the psychology of autogynephilia. . And see here.

Continue ReadingJK. Rowling’s Recent Statement on the Contested Meaning of “Transphobic”