Could it be?

The next generation of rockers.

"It really gave me chills."

Beauty in fluidity.

“We were like art students learning from the professor..."

“We worked it all out carefully in advance”.

He revealed all during a guest DJ slot.

Despite a few highly publicized climb-downs of prominent liberal politicians and in the wake of an election where exit polling has shown it to be a clear electoral loser, the Left has obstinately held to its belief that men who aren’t women but think they are should be allowed to compete against real women in sports. (RELATED: Nebraska’s Stand with Women Act Opposed by Faith Leaders) The few pols who have woken up and smelled the polling have proved to be lonely — and abandoned — figures. Maybe it takes an 80–20 split on an issue — 80 percent for banning; 20 percent against — to get Gavin Newsom’s attention, but the California governor called trans participation in women’s sports “deeply unfair.” Congressman Seth Moulton (D-MA) told the New York Times he didn’t want his two little girls “run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” and his fellow representative Tim Suozzi (D-NY) said he doesn’t “think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.” (RELATED: Gavin Goes ‘Soul-Searching’) Anyone hoping this ripple would grow into a tsunami of common sense is disappointed, however. A tsunami of a different sort — of blowback — mussed Newsom’s hairdo. And Moulton collapsed like the ‘78 Red Sox, voting against a House bill that banned exactly what he didn’t want to see — male athletes running over little girls on a playing field. Elsewhere, Dems have doubled down on their contrarian position. Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who got into it with President Trump at the White House over males playing women’s sports in her state, defied a Trump executive order and got her state denied federal school funding (the issue is now in the courts). Minnesota says it won’t comply with Trump’s EO, and the California Assembly recently voted down bills banning transgender participation in women’s sports in the Golden State. (RELATED: Trump’s Executive Order Ends ‘Trans’ Tyranny and Protects Females) The question is why. Why cannot Dems bring themselves to abandon such a transparently destructive political position? Well, there is the backlash. We mentioned the hurricane-force winds of disdain Newsom’s coiffure had to endure, but Moulton also faced tirades from fellow Democrats for simply saying the party should be broad-minded enough to at least discuss the issue. State party chair Steve Kerrigan said Moulton’s comments “do not represent the broad view of our party.” That seems to be true. Bills banning guys in girls’ sports were voted against in the House and the Senate by every single Democrat. But avoiding backlash is a political calculation. Others blame another political creation — the primary system, which mandates that candidates for office cater to a base more extreme than common sentiment. If you want to get the Dem nomination, you have to mollify the screamers. The Left’s stubbornness on this issue, however, seems more ideological than pragmatic. Said Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA), “There is no poll result that could make me turn on marginalized people.” She added, “[T]hrowing anybody in our coalition under the bus just simply cannot be the answer.” Michael Baharaeen, writing at the Liberal Patriot, says transgenders’ vulnerable status ingratiates them with the liberal cause, the more so because “many Democrats have become convinced that conservatives — at least a lot of them — always seem to be in need of a group to pick on.” Liberals see transgenders as the latest in a string of embattled minorities and are determined to offer balls-to-the-wall support of “women” who have them. And once you go full throttle on civil rights, you can’t easily lay off the gas. Leor Sapir in City Journal contended, “Rights claims are by their nature absolutist and uncompromising.” He elaborated, [T]he reality is that embracing rights claims, in lieu of sober policy analysis, has become a deeply embedded feature of contemporary liberalism. That shift has been institutionalized across American society, from universities to corporate board rooms, from public schools to the military, from the interlocking layers of state and federal bureaucracies to the information superhighways of Google and AI. It is precisely why Democrats will struggle to walk back their support for radical transgender policies. Democrats spent years lecturing the public that boys’ participation in girls’ sports and mastectomies for teen girls who identify as boys are non-negotiable “civil rights.” If they change course now, they will either have to admit they were wrong before or become rights-violators by their own definition. Transgenderism has seen considerable “success” in the past 15 years. It has been instituted in the policies of the Department of Human Services; it has been enshrined in public schools; bathroom and locker-room rules permitting transgenders to use the facilities corresponding to their “gender identity” have been passed all over the country; Title IX was altered by the Biden administration to include gender identity among those rights protected from discrimination in education; and the public debate has been controlled by a left-wing press that has adopted the lingo and the views of the transgender world. This victorious march through the institutions has made leftists think they will eventually turn public opinion. After all, that’s what happened with gay marriage. Following decades of censure and obloquy — from homosexuals’ days as putative perverts in the 1960s to their portrayal as tragic figures during the AIDS crisis of the ‘80s and ‘90s — gay causes started gaining public approval toward the end of the last century. A Gallup poll from 1996 revealed 27 percent of Americans thought same-sex marriage should be valid, versus 68 percent that didn’t. In 2010, those numbers were 44 percent for and 53 percent against. Around the Obergefell decision (2015), it was 60–37, and in 2024, 69–29. The current numbers are even higher in younger cohorts. The numbers on the trans issue are going the other way, however. Whereas sentiment against homosexuality softened as people became more comfortable with it — through contact with gay people, for example — opinions about transgenderism have hardened with increased contact and education. While 54 percent of Americans thought sex was defined at birth in 2017, 60 percent believe it now. And the now-well-known 80 percent of Americans against biological men competing in women’s sports is up from 67 percent just two years ago. The more Americans learn about the transgender issue — of transgender motives, of surgeries for minors, of youthful indoctrination, of schoolkids coming home with new names and pronouns, of health officials playing politics on trans issues — the less they like it. The wonder of it is that Democrats don’t respond to this new reality. Allowing men to play women’s sports, like supporting MS-13 gang members, to the point of rescuing them from El Salvadoran prisons to bring them “home,” is a Democrat ‘own goal.’ (RELATED: Five Quick Things: The Hill They’ve Died On) We can only hope they continue to kick the political ball into their own net. READ MORE from Tom Raabe: Religious Liberty Cases Return to Supreme Court Hackman and Hoosiers — A Winning Team Baseball: The Funny Sport The post Democrats’ ‘Trans’ Intransigence appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Dear American Spectator Readers (or as it says on a coffee mug that I received for attending one of TAS’s annual dinners, other “proud members of the vast right-wing conspiracy”): I apologize for having been AWOL for a while, but I have been busy doing good work in other venues such as filing a draft amicus brief in the D.C. Circuit pro bono publico (i.e. without compensation) on behalf to two eminent scientific societies trying to explain why the Biden EPA’s regulation setting a ridiculously low level for PFAS is bonkers (these are some of the so-called “forever chemicals;” brilliant nickname because very scary but untrue; they do break down just very slowly). That over-conservative and very expensive EPA rule is a subject I previously criticized in these pages in February 2024. I guess the powers that were in the Biden administration were not reading TAS. Oh well, their loss. (READ MORE: Biden’s Latest Political Payoff … With Your Money) Also, I am just back from China, where I gave three lectures at Peking University at the invitation of a distinguished environmental professor there who is a former student of mine at Yale. (Yes, they really do send their best and brightest to study with us; that follows from one of the tenets of their prophet Sun Tzu in The Art of War: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”) The Chinese students at Peking University Law School were very bright and asked me and my Yale colleagues lots of probing questions about what is going on in the U.S., but the official purpose of our trip was to comment at a workshop on China’s new environmental trading system for greenhouse gases. They have had a voluntary trading system similar to our Acid Rain Trading system or RGGI since 2021, and this upcoming expansion makes it mandatory for several industries. When up and running, it will be the largest in the world, larger than California’s and the EU’s. Who knew? You’d never hear about it from the “regime media,” to borrow a term from Laura Ingraham. But I digress. The subject for today’s optional elective in constitutional law is “Are we really in a ‘constitutional crisis’ caused by Donald Trump’s ‘defying’ the courts?” That is certainly what the regime media is trying to get everyone to believe, which makes it inherently suspect. I was even asked by my church in Milford, Connecticut, which goes back to 1637 and the Puritans, to give a presentation on that subject, which is available here. I surprised a lot of those who chose to attend by showing them that most of the powers that Donald Trump is trying to take back were once presidential powers that were lost in the 1940s and 1970s in counterreactions by Congress and the courts to perceived abuses by FDR and Richard Nixon. (RELATED: Law Schools, Court Supremacy, and the Real Constitution) A good example is “impoundment,” the presidential power not to spend monies appropriated by Congress. Almost every president from Thomas Jefferson to Richard Nixon exercised the power to impound appropriated funds. Joe Biden did too, withholding the $10 billion that Congress had duly appropriated for a border wall and then-President Trump had signed into law. No one screamed “constitutional crisis” at that point. (Yes, I know that Biden’s running dogs in the media, an old commie term that is insulting to our canine friends, claim that Biden’s action was different because he was just going through required environmental and other reviews that were required by law, but Trump had omitted. If you believe that I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.) Let me remind those who are not paying attention to DOGE that out-of-control spending by Congress to buy votes threatens to destroy our country, a problem that I first wrote and spoke about in a sparsely attended lecture at Duke Law School in 1985, which is published in the Duke Law Journal here. (Yes, I do indeed feel like a lonely voice crying in the wilderness sometimes; thanks for asking.) The root of the problem is that the Supreme Court keeps approving expansions of federal government power, but strikes down as not specifically provided in the Constitution the checks and balances on the exercise of those expanded powers. (See here for example.) That’s because they have forgotten Chief Justice John Marshall’s famous line from McCollough v. Maryland that new institutions not created by the Constitution itself are necessary and proper if, but only if, they are consistent with both the text “and the spirit” of the Constitution. The “spirit” of the Constitution means its overall design, which certainly includes checks and balances against overly expansive exercises of power, a point made in his book America’s Unwritten Constitution (2012) by an even better constitutional lawyer than I, Yale Law School’s Akil Amar. The other thing that surprised some of my fellow parishioners in Milford was that fights among the three branches of government over power are one of the basic design principles of our Constitution. That strategy is consistent with the “balance of power” theories in vogue in international relations at the time the framers wrote the Constitution. One of the principal ways that the framers of the Constitution sought to control power was by building in a continuing power struggle between competing power centers into the structure of our government. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” wrote James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers, in Federalist 51. (RELATED: Elephant in the Courtroom) Similarly, the big bruhaha over Trump’s dismissal of federal workers only impresses those who don’t know their history. In 1871, the attorney general of the United States wrote a formal legal opinion maintaining that the president, as head of the executive branch, had the right to fire anyone in the executive branch. And the 1991 Clinton-Gore “national partnership for re-inventing government,” which was remarkably similar to DOGE, resulted in the “elimination of over 100 programs, the elimination of over 250,000 federal jobs, the consolidation of over 800 agencies.” And it was only one of 16 such commissions dating back to Theodore Roosevelt. (RELATED: DOGE Exposes Waste and Constitutional Drift) Interesting question: why were all the prior ones not controversial and DOGE is? Maybe it was because Clinton and Gore were canny enough to call theirs a “partnership” and give it the initials NPR, or maybe because it wasn’t headed by the richest man on the planet who chose to get his picture on television wielding a chainsaw. A picture really is worth a thousand words. Maybe the downsizing of the federal government could have been done more tactfully. All of us who have ever been fired or laid off know how painful an unexpected dismissal can be. My nominee for America’s greatest jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., was once asked what he would say to a person condemned to die on the gallows for murder. He replied with words to the effect of “You are dying for your country like a soldier in battle to deter others from committing similar crimes in the future,” a quote I remember from reading him but have not been able to find on the internet. Maybe DOGE would be less controversial if Trump and Musk had done more early on to explain to the country why this was necessary and to reassure those government employees who must suffer for the good of the rest of us that we honor their sacrifice as well as their service. Of course, the reductions could have been done better, as most things in life could be, but pardon me for being cynical aka realistic enough to note that it is called “progress” or a “constitutional moment” when a Democrat like FDR tests the outer bounds of presidential power but a “constitutional crisis” when a Republican such as Trump or Ronald Reagan does something similar. “This has all happened before and it will happen again,” is a quote attributed to Mark Twain. That truism is equally valid here, whether or not he really said or wrote that line. Finally, what about the contretemps de jour about Trump repeatedly “defying” court orders, a key feature of the current talking points on CNN and other mouthpieces for the Democrat party. Most of that noise overlooks how the federal courts work. If Trump were to comply with the numerous lower court orders in the 150 or so pending court cases filed against his administration, the case would become “moot,” and the right to appeal to a higher court would vanish. That’s because the federal courts refuse to issue what they call “advisory opinions”; instead, they require that there must be a live “case or controversy.” (True, a narrow discretionary exception exists for circumstances “capable of repetition but evading review.” However, no sensible lawyer would advise a client to rely on it in the present circumstances, and query whether a situation “evades review” if one had a live case raising the issue but dropped it through voluntary compliance.) President Trump’s administration is winning at least half of the cases on appeal, and even when he “loses” on some issues, he usually wins a large part of what he was seeking. That’s one of the key points in The Art of the Deal: ask for the moon and settle for Antarctica instead. (RELATED: Shooting Blanks From the Bench) Case in point: even in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the illegal alien and suspected MS-13 gang member admittedly sent to the supermax prison in El Salvador through an administrative error, the original court order to turn the planes around immediately got watered down to a polite request to make a good faith effort to “facilitate” his return if possible and to “clarify” the judge’s order to “effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. That is not to say that Trump is — or should — win all the cases. For example, I would tend to agree with the Supreme Court that even illegal aliens suspected of being dangerous gang members should get a basic due process hearing before they are shipped off to prison in a foreign country. But even that isn’t as open and shut a case as the media might lead one to believe: a famous 1936 Supreme court precedent, United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., 299 U.S. 304 (1936), held that the president is the country’s “sole organ” for dealings with foreign countries, i.e. that courts have no business ordering the president how to conduct negotiations with foreign countries. The current Supreme Court dialed that back a little, creating an exception to the seeming absolute language in Curtiss-Wright. The point for the moment is not whether scaling back Curtiss-Wright was right or wrong; time will tell. The point is that what has gone on so far is well within the normal range for our constitutional system in which the president asserts expansive power and the courts dial some of them back a little by distinguishing/changing their prior precedents. Even where the courts maintain that Trump’s positions are wrong, Trump’s legal positions are not frivolous, but instead everything I have seen so far has a reasonable basis in existing law, even if the courts do not ultimately rule in his favor. That kind of jockeying back and forth is the normal functioning of our system, as TV legal pundit Jonathan Turley has pointed out in a fine series of interviews. I don’t always agree with Jonathan, whom I know reasonably well, but he is dead-on correct in this instance. The problem is that the damage is already done in the minds of the people who hear over and over that Trump is defying the courts, as my favorite and best co-author, Gail Charnley Elliott, and I explain in this article in TAS, “What’s Worse Than Fake News?” Trial lawyers and propagandists throughout history have known that repeating something over and over makes it ring true. Plus, how did the Dems manage to get the exclusive focus on this one guy and not the thousands of dangerous bad actors that Biden let into our country in violation of our laws, and Trump has now deported? Why wasn’t Biden’s defiance of our law a “constitutional crisis” but somehow Trump’s actions are? Class dismissed for the day. Content yourself with the fact that a subscription to TAS is a lot less expensive than the tuition at either Yale or Scalia Law School. Plus, you get to read all the other great authors here. READ MORE from E. Donald Elliott: How DOGE Can Suspend Unneeded Regulations US Supreme Court Should Reverse Colorado Supreme Court 9–0 The post Is America Really in a Constitutional Crisis? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Canadians may be hell bent against becoming America’s 51st state, but if the April 28 elections confirm globalist central banker Mark Carney as prime minister it could go China’s way. In the divisive election campaign following Carney’s appointment to lead the ruling Liberal Party, the high-flying ex-governor of the Bank of Canada with strong Chinese business connections is whipping up anti-American sentiment supported by European socialists, which has hallmarks of a CCP strategy. (RELATED: Canada’s Manchurian Candidate) “Canada provides a backdoor by which the CCP can attempt to subvert the U.S. American progressives feel a kinship with Canada’s Liberal Party, which has embraced the CCP. It started with Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s and has come in full force at present with the full penetration of the Liberal Party by the CCP,” Government Accountability Institute director Peter Schweitzer told The American Spectator. Carney shares China’s goal of displacing U.S. dominance in world trade. “The system of global trade anchored on the United States … is over. The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership … is over,” he said in his acceptance speech. (RELATED: Canada Has a New Globalist Prime Minister (For Now)) In October of last year, Carney went to Beijing to obtain a $300 million loan from the Bank of China through Brookfield Management, the hedge fund he headed while acting as economic advisor to the preceding prime minister, Justin Trudeau, son of Pierre (or maybe Fidel Castro, according to gossips). (RELATED: Hasta la Vista, Fidelito!) Upon taking over the government, Carney flew to Brussels to meet with EU counterparts equally threatened by Trump’s tariff war and with whom he forged close connections when he tried sabotaging Brexit as governor of the Bank of England. Spain’s socialist president, Pedro Sanchez, subsequently flew to Beijing to “open new alliances and markets,” in a move which U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent compared with “cutting his own throat.” French leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon has been campaigning for the Liberals in Canada’s French speaking province of Quebec, declaring that “France and the Europeans would support Canada if it’s invaded” by the U.S. Directing his words at Trump, he said, “European leaders won’t tell you the truth, they are scared of you.” Mélenchon is traveling to the U.S. for a series of speaking engagements. Canada’s Liberal party has been in power for the better part of 70 years, during which the Trudeau family pushed the country consistently leftward. Fidel Castro was allowed to manage sensitive financial operations through Canadian banks by Pierre, whose son, Justin, could be the product of a close and highly publicized friendship with the mother. He has introduced measures to curb free speech, promote transgenderism, and pursue Green climate goals that are possibly the most extreme in the western world. (RELATED: Use Timber Tariffs to Leverage Policy Changes) Trudeau, who does bear a striking facial resemblance to his rumored father, has praised communist dictatorships in Cuba and China, stating that “there is a level of admiration I have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime.” He actively censored information on the Wuhan bioweapon lab’s development of COVID, threatening to jail those diverging from the wet market theory, and mandated lockdown policies rivaling China’s. Carney pushed for intrusive methods to debank truck drivers protesting vaccine mandates which even reached into U.S. accounts of the protests’ American backers. Evidence of Chinese “election interference” to boost Liberal candidates emerged in a leaked report from Canada’s CSIS intelligence service, identifying “Chinese consular officers” channeling money and advice to CCP-linked United Front groups forming among Chinese migrant communities which expanded under Justin Trudeau. He opened Canada to millions of mainland Chinese who could now “weigh” certain key races in favor of Liberals. Proceeds from China’s Fentanyl traffic to the U.S., whose “entire production and distribution chain is controlled by the CCP,” according to Schweitzer, are laundered through casinos in Vancouver by Chinese officials, according to Canadian investigative journalist Sam Cooper. In a shocking sign of the corrupt repression that may lie ahead, Liberal parliamentary candidate and former policeman Paul Chiang openly called for “kidnapping” a Conservative ethnic Chinese member of parliament. He told followers to turn him over to the nearest Chinese consulate and “collect a bounty” offered by the CCP. Carney was pictured meeting with United Front-linked Chinese community leaders backing Chiang. While criticizing Chiang’s violent remarks as “offensive,” Carney refused to call for his resignation and even praised his past record as a Toronto police officer. Chiang withdrew his candidacy only after the RCMP initiated an investigation. Of nine Canadian members of parliament who have resigned their seats over CCP links, seven are Liberals. Carney had little choice but to concede that “China is the biggest security threat to Canada” in a televised debate with conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. It was difficult to say otherwise as he touted his top secret clearance to diminish Poilievre’s status. Canada forms part of the U.S.-led “Five eyes” intelligence alliance with the U.K. and Australia. (RELATED: Meet Canada’s ‘MAGA’ Prime Minister Candidate: Pierre Poilievre) In an earlier statement, Carney indicated that he might change that. “The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over,” he said shortly after being named prime minister. He soon canceled a planned purchase of U.S. F-35 jet fighters. Carney has been under investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee for his role as co-chairman and founder of the GFANZ “climate cartel.” The committee report documenting how the group coerced companies to adopt Net Zero and ESG guidelines probed deeply into the racketeering tactics employed to force ExxonMobil to reduce energy production. According to the Judiciary Committee, “When ExxonMobil refused to comply, the cartel plotted to fire its board members. In early 2020, after years of failed campaigns demanding that ExxonMobil reduce its production of fossil fuels, the climate cartel received millions of dollars from funders of Climate Action 100+ to launch a campaign to remove and replace the company’s board members.” One of the main funders of Climate Action 100+ is Ping An, China’s 6th largest corporate conglomerate. Its main shareholder is former Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, revered among Beijing’s ruling elite for transforming the economy without political opening. “We will never copy the Western system,” Jibao told the 18th Congress of the CCP. “The climate cartel remains resolved to pressuring U.S. companies to stop producing the affordable energy Americans need… the climate cartel seeks to use the trillions of dollars it manages to impose its agenda on the U.S. economy and drain it of affordable energy,” the committee report concludes. American voters threw a spanner in the works by electing Donald Trump, who immediately set about dismantling globalist regulations stifling fossil fuel production and EV mandates imposed by the Biden administration that would have destroyed the U.S. car industry, flooding the market with Chinese EVs produced in Mexico. Four hundred companies, including BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase, have abandoned GFANZ. (RELATED: BlackRock’s Failures Are a Warning for All Institutions) But Carney could still disrupt Trump’s plans to bring down gas prices essential for winning next year’s midterm elections. Canada currently provides 60 percent of U.S. energy imports and instead of cutting production, Carney may redirect it to China according to various press reports. Carney is slightly ahead of Poilievre in the latest polls, and Canada’s elections could be easily fixed. The Liberal party controls Canada’s state-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Elections Canada, the government agency that runs the election system. A worker of Elections Canada was recently filmed tearing down conservative campaign posters. “Your party is f–king evil,” he shouted at the local conservative candidate who caught him in the act and had him arrested. The Trump administration has overwhelming economic clout to curtail potential harm from a hostile regime in Ottawa. Carney already had to roll back tariffs he tried imposing on American auto imports as added costs for parts produced in the U.S. threatened to tank Canada’s car industry. The U.S. should also explore possibilities of leveraging Canada’s strongly conservative western oil-producing states, Alberta and Saskatchewan, where 40 percent of respondents in a recent poll favor seceding if Carney wins these elections. The “disintegrational warfare” being waged on America can go both ways. READ MORE from Martin Arostegui: Why Trump Is Pissed Off at Putin Mend Don’t End the VOA Running Out of Cards in Kursk The post Canada’s Mark Carney Shares the Same Goal as China — Ending American Dominance appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.