Concerns raised over universities signing over students’ private FERPA data
Topic: Children and Family
Source: The College Fix
...to voter data companies . A relatively new report outlines how universities nationwide have signed over students’ private FERPA data to a third-party vendor that reviews their personal information to help study college students’ voting trends. The nine-page report describes how a national voting study run out of Tufts’ Institute for Democracy in Higher Education gets university administrators from across the country to agree to release students’ Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, where its kept, to a voter data company.

Planet Fitness takes huge hit in membership and stock value
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Law Enforcement Today
......amid transgenders in locker room controversies. In terms of policies, Planet Fitness has a rule allowing members to use the locker room corresponding to their self-identified gender. While this policy is meant to be "inclusive," it has sparked controversy and discomfort among some members. A notable incident involved a woman whose membership was revoked after she took a photograph of a person who identified as a different gender in the women's locker room. This event gained widespread attention and led to calls for boycotts. Grondahl shared his disapproval of the policies and responses in recent weeks, emphasizing his concern for the company's direction. Financially, Planet Fitness has experienced a significant decline in its stock value amid these controversies. According to reports, the company lost $400 million in value within a week.

Poles March Against Abortion Law Changes
Topic: Abortion
Source: The Associated Press
New government has moved toward ending the near-total ban. Thousands of Polish opponents of abortion marched in Warsaw on Sunday to protest recent steps by the new government to liberalize the predominantly Catholic nation's restrictive laws and allow termination of pregnancy until the 12th week. Many participants in the downtown march were pushing prams with children, while others were carrying white-and-red national flags or posters representing a fetus in the womb, the AP reports. Poland's Catholic Church has called for Sunday to be a day of prayer "in defense of conceived life" and has supported the march, organized by an anti-abortion movement. [Ed: many Poles are also demanding the loosening of abortion law.]

Rayner stands by trans charter that attacked feminist ‘hate groups’
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: MSN
Angela Rayner has declined to apologise for endorsing a charter describing feminist organisations that raised fears about the treatment of trans children as “hate groups”. When Ms Rayner stood to be the deputy Labour leader in 2020, she backed a trans rights charter that described bodies including Women’s Place UK, which campaigns for single-sex rape refuges for women, as “trans-exclusionist hate groups”. In the wake of the Cass review into the treatment of children with gender issues, which concluded that much of the evidence for gender medicine was “shaky” and that drugs such as puberty blockers should be used with extreme caution, Ms Rayner faced calls to renounce the comments. However, her spokesman declined to apologise.

Former Stanford instructor who allegedly put Jews in a corner during class sues univ
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Campus Reform
A former Stanford University instructor who allegedly put Jewish students in a corner during a class exercise filed a lawsuit against the institution, saying his termination was wrongful. During an October 10, 2023 class session, an instructor allegedly asked Jewish students to stand in a corner of the classroom and used them as an example, according to The Forward. Reports at the time identified the instructor in question as Ameer Loggins. This identification is corroborated by recent coverage from the Stanford Daily. As Campus Reform reported, Loggins’ contract was not renewed in January. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Loggins alleged in the lawsuit filed Wednesday that Stanford administrators initially suspended him and publicly shared his work status because he’s Black and Muslim.

Tech Exec Predicts Billion-Dollar AI Girlfriend Industry
Topic: Men's Movement
Source: The Byte
When witnessing the sorry state of men addicted to AI girlfriends, one Miami tech exec saw dollar signs instead of red flags.
In a blog-length post on X-formerly-Twitter, former WeWork exec Greg Isenberg said that after meeting a young guy who claims to spend $10,000 a month on so-called "AI girlfriends," or relationship-simulating chatbots, he realized that eventually, someone is going to capitalize upon that market the way Match Group has with dating apps. "I thought he was kidding," Isenberg wrote. "But, he's a 24-year-old single guy who loves it." To date, Match Group — which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, OKCupid, Plenty of Fish, and several others — has a market cap of more than $9 billion. As the now-CEO of the Late Checkout holding company startup noted, someone is going to build the AI version and make a billion or more.

Kansas Gov. Kelly vetoes ban on gender treatments for minors
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Just the News
Twenty-three states have banned gender-related surgeries and treatments for minors, while Arizona has only banned surgeries. Kansas Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly on Friday vetoed legislation that would have banned certain gender-related treatments for minors. The "Substitute Bill for Senate Bill 233" would have banned gender surgeries and hormone treatments for minors and establish a civil means of action against healthcare providers who perform them. Kelly vetoed the legislation, stating it "targets a small group of Kansans by placing government mandates on them and dictating to parents how to best raise and care for their children. I do not believe that is a conservative value, and it’s certainly not a Kansas value."

A Victory for School Choice and Big Cheers to Texas Voters
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Mish Talk
Let’s kick off the weekend on a positive note. School choice scored a major victory in Texas including criminal incitements for illegal use of public funds. Chicago is another matter. Texas school-district officials are charged with unlawfully using public funds for electioneering reports the WSJ in A Campaign Against School Choice Prompts Criminal Charges.

Latine is the new Latinx
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Axios
"Latine," a gender-neutral way to describe or refer to people with Latino origins, is surging in popularity on university campuses, in museums, and among researchers and media. The big picture: Catch-all terms like Hispanic or Latino have come under scrutiny for blurring important nuances and presenting a large part of the U.S. population as a monolith. Latino/a and Hispanic are still the preferred terms for respondents, with over 80% acceptance, followed by a descriptor tied to a country of origin (such as Cuban American or Mexican American), the poll shows.

Planned Parenthood defies Missouri court order
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: The Post Millennial
... to turn over records on child sex change practices at clinic. Planned Parenthood has defied a St. Louis court order to disclose patient records in Missouri in a sex change interventions for minors probe from the state attorney general. "My team will get to the bottom of how this clandestine network of clinics has subjected children to puberty blockers and irreversible surgery, often without parental consent,” AG Bailey said of the court order.

School District Takes Next Step In DitchingSeattle Gifted Program
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: My Northwest
"Progressives would rather drag achievers down than elevate everyone..." Privileged progressives, donning their white knight armor, are in the next phase of a plan to end Seattle Public Schools’ gifted students program — known locally as its Highly Capable Cohort (HCC). They complained the HCC was too white. HCC separates academically gifted students from others via different classrooms or entirely different schools. But in 2020, white Seattle school board directors voted to terminate the HCC over the objections of parents. HCC will be completely phased out by the 2027-28 school year.

Anti-Chinese Xenophobia Fueled America's First Drug War
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Reason
Opium dens in San Francisco were patronized "by the vicious and the depraved," politicians of the 1800s claimed. Around 2 a.m. on Monday, December 6, 1875, a "posse of police" led by Captain William Douglass descended on 609 Dupont Street in San Francisco. The cops arrested Fannie Whitmore, Cora Martinez, James Dennison, and Charles Anderson, along with "two Chinamen who kept the place." That place, The San Francisco Examiner explained, was an "opium den," and this was the first raid conducted under an ordinance that the city's Board of Supervisors had enacted on November 15. The new law decreed that "no person shall, in the city and county of San Francisco, keep or maintain, or become an inmate of, or visit, or shall in any way contribute to the support of any place, house, or room, where opium is smoked, or where persons assemble for the purpose of smoking opium."

How the Cass Review exposed the trans cult
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Spiked Online
[Ed: I don't usually post videos because Brad doesn't like them but it is important to understand how incredibly influential the Cass Review is.] Ella Whelan joins Tom Slater and Lauren Smith for the latest episode of the spiked podcast. They discuss the landmark Cass Review into gender medicine, the Afghan flasher who was granted asylum and the idiocy of MPs.

The Vibe Shift
Topic: Individualist Feminism
Source: Pliego Substack
It’s hard to say exactly how long it’s taken for the eponymous vibe to shift, but everyone knows it’s happening. For at least the last six months, not a day has gone by when I haven’t seen something, heard a statement, read a post, or had a conversation with someone that doesn’t leave me completely shocked—in a good way. “This would not have happened a year ago. Vibe shift. The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. ..."

JK Rowling and the row over trans rights
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Independent
Timeline of author’s fall out with Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson. Rowling’s relationship with the actors who brought her beloved Harry Potter books to life appears irreparably broken. JK Rowling has become an increasingly divisive figure in recent years because of her views on transgender people. In an apparent bid to protect women’s rights, the author, 58, has repeatedly misgendered trans women in recent weeks and months – and recently implied the community was full of sexual predators. Now, her relationship with the actors who brought her beloved Harry Potter books to life appears to be irreparably broken. On Wednesday (10 April), the author suggested on X/Twitter that she will never “forgive” Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson for speaking out in favour of trans rights.

The history of Arizona’s Civil War-era abortion ban
Topic: Abortion
Source: Vox
How conspiring doctors, questionable tonics, and twisted patriotism led to the 1864 Arizona abortion ban that was just upheld in court. It’s one of several abortion laws enacted before the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that have been revived since the justices overturned Roe in 2022. Resuscitating these laws has created legal headaches, in part because they were written in a very different time for reasons that have little in common with the concerns of anti-abortion advocates today.

Students Don't Have a Right to Use Public University Social Events
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Volokh Conspiracy
....for Their Own Political Orations, whether at administrators' homes or in law school classrooms. A couple of people, both of whom I respect a great deal, asked me for a First Amendment analysis of the students' trying to orate about the Israel-Palestine conflict at the class party at Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky's home. Happy to oblige! [1.] Some people have argued that the party was a public law school function, and thus not just a private event. I'm not sure that's right—but I don't think it matters.

DEI Cronyism And Woke Grifters
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Daily Caller
Author: by Victor Davis Hanson
When ideology replaces meritocracy or provides immunity from the consequences of illegal behavior, systemic mediocrity follows. Under toxic National Socialism, Stalinism and Maoism, millions of cronies and grifters mouthed party lines in hopes that their approved ideology would allow them to advance their careers and excuse their lawbreaking. The same thing has happened with the woke movement and the now-huge Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) conglomerate. Grifters and opportunists mask their selfish agendas under the cloak of neo-Marxist care for the underprivileged or victimized minorities. Meanwhile, they seek to profit illegally as if they were old-fashioned crony capitalists.

Why the trans lobby is so allergic to debate
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Spiked Online
Author: by Brendan O’Neill
The meltdown over the Cass Review confirms how brittle and tyrannical the trans movement has become. Has there ever been a movement as allergic to scrutiny as the trans lobby? Analysis is to the trans activist as sunlight is to the vampire. Even the mildest questioning of their claims is likely to induce a fit of the vapours. Wonder out loud if it’s wise to pump confused kids with drugs that might render them infertile, or to allow a bloke to parade around a women’s changing room with his tumescent knob hanging out, and you’ll instantly be added to their blacklist of transphobes. These are epic levels of touchiness, irascibility turned up to 11. Why are they like this?

Sall Grover’s fight for womankind
Topic: Individualist Feminism
Source: Spiked Online
Tickle v Giggle is the world’s first test case for the definition of ‘woman’.The experience inspired Grover to establish Giggle for Girls (often shortened to Giggle), an online refuge for women, a chat site where girls could be girls and find support in communities tailored to their needs. Giggle was launched in 2020, after Grover moved back to Australia, as a social-media app. Those who wished to join were required to upload a selfie to validate their biological identity. The initial screening is conducted by AI, which examines facial bone structure to determine if users are male or female. Differences between male and female skulls and other bones, like the pelvis, are used by archaeologists to determine the sex of a skeleton. The artificial gatekeeper failed an early intelligence test by certifying that an applicant named Roxanne Tickle was a bona fide female. Tickle is a 54-year-old biological male from Lismore, New South Wales, who underwent gender-affirming surgery in 2019 and self-identifies as trans. He considers himself a trailblazer for transgender rights as a proud skirt-wearing member of the East Lismore Women’s Hockey team.