10 ways to crush the trans scourge in red states
Slavery denied the humanity of people created in God’s image. Transgenderism — and its stepmother, gay marriage — does the same. Transgenderism mutilates bodies, erases truth, and mocks the created order. A society that tolerates it cannot remain free. Just as America once purged slavery, red states must now abolish this destructive creed.
The violence can no longer be dismissed as coincidence. Before investigators even finished documenting the carnage from a transgender shooter at a Minneapolis Catholic school, Charlie Kirk was murdered by a young man entangled in a relationship with a transgender partner and radicalized by that subculture online. These killers do not spring from nowhere. They emerge from a movement that celebrates mutilation, spreads delusion, and channels self-harm outward into violence.
This is the new abolition. Just as our ancestors eradicated slavery, our generation must eradicate transgenderism.
The medical data confirms the pattern. A 2023 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association led by NIH researcher Sarah Jackson found that transgender-identified people are three times more likely than men and five times more likely than women to die from suicide or homicide. In plain English: This ideology is deadly. It breeds broken bodies, broken minds, and broken communities. The “transition” industry is built on violence — against the self first, and then against others.
That makes transgenderism not a lifestyle but an inherently violent ideology. Like slavery, it is not a private eccentricity we can politely ignore. It is a social contagion that destabilizes families, radicalizes young men and women into killers, and leaves a trail of corpses in its wake.
Conservatives often ask: Can we shield our families from this? Not completely. The culture is too saturated. But we can, and must, turn red states into political no-go zones for transgenderism. If a state will not protect children from mutilation, schools from indoctrination, or families from assault, then it has surrendered to the lie. Legislatures must act now.
Here are 10 steps every red state must take — and soon:
- Ban adult castration and hormone “transitions.” We don’t allow elective removal of healthy organs for any other mental disorder. States must extend bans from minors to adults.
- End Medicaid coverage. Ten states — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, andTexas — already bar taxpayer funding for transgender procedures. The rest must follow.
- Restore biological truth on birth certificates and licenses. Only a handful of states refuse to indulge gender fantasies. All must.
- Purge government agencies of transgender dogma. Eight states — Florida, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Idaho, Utah, Kansas, and Iowa — restrict pronouns and gender ideology across schools and bureaucracies; that number needs to multiply.
- Keep bathrooms separate. Most red states ban men from girls’ sports, but fewer ban them from girls’ bathrooms. Florida, Texas, Idaho, and Arkansas lead; others lag.
- Criminalize drag shows for minors, including “story hours.” Public indecency is not a “right.” Only four states have laws on the books, and most are tied up in courts. Legislatures must strengthen them.
- Ban gender ideology in schools. Thirteen states restrict it, but half the red map still allows children to be indoctrinated daily. Aside from Florida, only Indiana, Kentucky, Montana, and Ohio police such instruction in all grades.
- Forbid rainbow flags and sexual propaganda on government property. Public streets, buildings, and bridges should not be billboards for sexual ideology. Six states have acted; more must.
- Ban transgender adoptions. We would never place children in homes where parents suffer from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Gender delusion must be treated the same.
- Mandate coverage for detransition care. Those who pushed mutilation must pay to undo the damage. Texas has already led with SB 1257.
Taken together, these reforms would begin dismantling the edifice of lies. Yet outside of banning child surgeries and men in women’s sports, most red states remain shockingly passive. They nibble at the edges while leaving the structure intact.
RELATED: How gay ‘marriage’ made today’s gender madness possible
This is not a matter of “live and let live.” Transgenderism spreads not through DNA but through culture, propaganda, and peer contagion. It advances because we permit it. And as long as we permit it, children will be mutilated, killers will be radicalized, and families will bury loved ones.
Scripture is clear on the task before us: “And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place” (Deuteronomy 12:3).
This is the new abolition. Just as our ancestors eradicated slavery, our generation must eradicate transgenderism. To compromise is to invite more funerals. To delay is to betray the next generation.
The time has come. Tear it out, root and branch.
American History’s Stark Warning Against Tolerating Political Violence
In the runup to the Civil War, the beating of a U.S. senator nearly to death was celebrated across the South.Debunking The Top 5 Lies The Left Is Spreading About Charlie Kirk After His Death
The left and their media allies have taken to assassinate Kirk's character, twisting his words, distorting his record, and in many cases, just making things up out of thin air.The vindication of Booker T. Washington
Christopher Wolfe’s thoughtful essay at the American Mind on Booker T. Washington, leisure, and work stirred some fond memories from years ago of making a friend by reading a book.
He was an old black man, and I was an old white man. We were both native Angelenos and had been just about old enough to drive when the Watts riots broke out in 1965. But that was half a century and a lifetime ago, and we hadn’t known each another.
If you read ‘Up from Slavery,’ you will be reading an American classic and will be getting to know a man who ranks among the greatest Americans of all time.
Los Angeles is a big place, a home to many worlds. Now we were white-haired professors, reading a book together, and we became friends. His name was Kimasi, and he has since gone to a better world.
We were spending a week with a dozen other academics reading Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, “Up from Slavery.” Washington was born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia, just a few years before the Civil War began. He gained his freedom through Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory in the war. With heroic determination, he got himself an education and went on to found the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, where he remained principal for the rest of his life.
After Frederick Douglass died in 1895, Washington became, without comparison, the most well-known and influential black American living. By the beginning of the 20th century, as John Hope Franklin would write, he was “one of the most powerful men in the United States.” “Up from Slavery,” published in 1901, sold 100,000 copies before Washington died in 1915.
It is a great American book. Modern Library ranks it third on its list of the best nonfiction books in the English language of the 20th century. But there was a reason why Kimasi and I were reading this great book when we were old men rather than when we were young men back in the riotous 1960s.
Even before Washington died, and while he was still the most famous and influential black man in America, other black leaders began to discredit him and question his way of dealing with the plight and aspirations of black Americans. These critics, whom Washington sometimes called “the intellectuals,” were led by W.E.B. Du Bois, the first black American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
So successful was this criticism that by the time Kimasi and I were in high school or heading off to college, the most fashionable opinion among intellectuals — black or white — was that Booker T. Washington was the worst of things for a black man. He was an “Uncle Tom.” (How “Uncle Tom” became a term of derision rather than the name of a heroic character is a story for another time.) And so, if Washington’s great book was mentioned at all to young Kimasi or me, it was mentioned in this negative light.
But fashions change, and, as Washington himself taught, merit is hard to resist. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural Address were dismissed and scoffed at by some “intellectuals” in his day; they are now generally recognized by informed and intelligent people around the world as the great speeches they are.
“Huckleberry Finn” scandalized polite opinion when it came out, because it was about an illiterate vagrant and other lowlifes and contained a lot of ungrammatical talk and bad spelling. A couple of generations later, Ernest Hemingway himself declared that “all modern American literature comes from one book” — Huckleberry Finn.
A couple of generations later still, in our own times, skittish librarians started removing the book from their shelves because it used language too dangerous for children.
The study of the past should shed light on what deserves praise, what deserves blame, and the grounds on which such judgments should be made. Americans being as fallible as the rest of mankind, as long as we are free to air opinions, there will be different opinions among us. Some of them may actually be true. And they will change from time to time, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for no reason at all.
RELATED: Why can't Americans talk honestly about race? Blame the 'Civil Rights Baby Boomers'
In recent years, several scholars have helped bring back to light the greatness and goodness of Booker T. Washington. Even fashionable opinion is capable of justice, and no one wants to be deceived about what is truly good and great, so I hazard to predict that it will sometime become fashionable again to recognize Booker T. Washington as one of the greatest Americans ever.
Washington never held political office. But his life and work demonstrated that you don’t have to hold political office to be a statesman and that the noblest work of the statesman is to teach. The soul of what Washington sought to teach was that we, too, can rise up from slavery. It is an eternal possibility.
This was the central purpose of Booker T. Washington’s life and work: to liberate souls from enslavement to ignorance, prejudice, and degrading passions, the kind of slavery that makes us tyrants to those around us in the world we live in.
Washington saw that this freedom of the soul cannot be given to us by others. Good teachers and good parents and friends, through precept and example, can help us see this freedom and understand it, but we have to achieve it for ourselves. When we do, our souls are liberated to rule themselves by reflection and choice, with malice toward none, with charity for all.
If you read “Up from Slavery,” you will be reading an American classic. You will be getting to know a man who, in the quality of his mind and character, and in the significance of what he did in and with his life, ranks among the greatest Americans of all time — even with the man whose name he chose for himself. When we read this great book together in the ripeness of our years, Kimasi, who always winningly wore his heart on his sleeve, wept frequently and repeated, shaking his head, “I lived a life not knowing this man.”
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.
What’s REALLY behind MSM’s false reporting on Trump’s Smithsonian initiative? Glenn Beck has a theory.
“It's one thing to get a story wrong; it's one thing to misunderstand … but it's an entirely other thing to intentionally take things out of context, intentionally leave things off the table, intentionally paint a picture that you know is not true,” says Glenn Beck.
If you didn’t already guess, Glenn is talking about the mainstream media — specifically its reporting on President Trump’s recent initiatives targeting the Smithsonian Institution, which has long insisted on portraying slavery as America’s defining story.
On August 12, the White House, in accordance with President Trump's vision of American exceptionalism, initiated a comprehensive review of eight Smithsonian museums, focusing on exhibition content, curation, and operations. A few days later, President Trump followed up the directive with a Truth Social post, explaining the need for reform in Smithsonian museums.
Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media cherry-picked from Trump’s words and published stories implying that he thinks slavery wasn’t so bad. The New York Times ran a piece titled, “Trump Says Smithsonian Focuses Too Much on ‘How Bad Slavery Was.’”
The Washington Post, NPR, and Reuters, among many other outlets, published similar pieces.
Despite the fact that President Trump has repeatedly and publicly condemned slavery, the media is pushing the narrative that Trump’s desire to highlight the whole picture — America’s failures and her accomplishments — equates to whitewashing slavery.
Glenn, a history lover and the founder of the American Journey Experience, a state-of-the-art museum and research library, knows the importance of studying the darkest parts of human history. “If we don't teach our kids that these dark things happened in this country, two things happen,” he says. “One, they don't believe us on the good things. … The second reason it is really important is if you don't teach [the bad stuff], you will repeat it.”
But the problem with the Smithsonian and other historical institutions, he says, is that they’re only telling the dark parts of American history. They’re trying to “make history about now,” examining it through the lens of modern ideas, cultural trends, and political agendas.
“Well, history is about the past,” says Glenn, adding that if we are to view history rightly, we need to ask questions, such as, “How did people think back then? Why did they think that way back then? Who fought against that at that time? What was the real argument?”
When we fail to ask these honest questions and instead view history as a means to accomplish an agenda, we get academics and scholars pushing information that is “absolutely dishonest” — like the idea that “Frederick Douglass never, never said a good word about the Constitution,” when in fact he called it “the greatest freedom document of all time.”
Why do they push false narratives like this?
Because “their goal is to get rid of the Constitution,” says Glenn. From academics and liberal politicians to progressive activist groups and, of course, the mainstream media, the overarching agenda is to convince Americans that the United States is “a bad nation and communism is neat.”
President Trump’s insistence that the Smithsonian put more focus on America’s long list of incredible accomplishments is a bold and necessary effort to reverse this insidious anti-American agenda.
“You want to [talk about] slavery? Tell both sides of slavery — not just the horrors of slavery, but the miracle of those who were white who stood up and tried to stop it,” Glenn pleads.
“I absolutely want the story of slavery told, but I want it to be told in context. And it's not the story of America. It is one of the stories of America that, thank God, we fought.”
To hear more of Glenn’s analysis and commentary, watch the clip above.
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Joy Reid gives ‘history’ lesson claiming white people stole all of black people’s ideas
Joy Reid is convinced that white people have stolen all of black people’s inventions, and she’s not being shy about it.
During a recent interview titled “How Mediocre White Men and Their Fragility Are Destroying America” with Wajahat Ali for his Left Hook substack, Reid criticized Trump’s review of the Smithsonian and took aim at all white people.
Even Elvis wasn’t spared.
“They can’t fix the history they did. Their ancestors made this country into a slave hell, but they can clean it up now because they got the Smithsonian. They can get rid of all the slavery stuff. They got PragerU that can lie about the history to the children,” Reid said.
“They can’t originally invent anything more than they ever were able to invent good music. We black folk gave y’all country music, hip-hop, R&B, jazz, rock and roll. They couldn’t even invent that. But they have to call a white man ‘the King’ because they couldn’t make rock and roll,” she continued.
“So, they have to stamp ‘the King’ on a man whose main song was stolen from an overweight black woman,” she added.
“Wow, really going after Elvis Presley on that. What is all that?” BlazeTV host Alex Stein comments on “Prime Time with Alex Stein.”
Stein has noticed that Reid’s grievances are already being addressed at the highest levels of government.
“I went on a tour of the Capitol, and it was actually very, you know, they kind of use trauma-based mind control like what she wants the Smithsonian to be. They make you go into this big room before you get your official tour, and they play a video,” Stein explains.
“It’s like, ‘These hallowed halls were built by slaves.’ ... And they show, like, black men, like, building stuff and, like, a cartoon of it, and you know, it’s just like everything you see was built on the backs of slaves, which is true,” he continues.
“Wall Street New York was built by black people,” Stein jokes. “The pyramids, built by black people, right? I mean, probably Egyptians or whatever.”
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In the shadow of legends, ordinary lives tell a bigger truth
I take a weekly walk in Sleepy Hollow, New York, through its historic cemetery, where many captains of industry rest. William Rockefeller lies in a grand mausoleum. So do Walter Chrysler, Leona Helmsley, and Elizabeth Arden. Andrew Carnegie’s grave is marked only by a simple Celtic cross.
Washington Irving is buried there, too, in a sprawling family plot on a hill just behind the Old Dutch Church he made famous in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
In the present, our responsibility is to live with honor, blessing and serving those we know and influence today.
But among the monuments to those who built billion-dollar corporations or wrote legendary tales, you’ll also find the graves of “ordinary folks” — men and women of humble means and obscure backgrounds. Walking among these modest headstones, you begin to see the nobility in even a simple life well lived.
One headstone I saw recently brought that home — and made me think about the left’s ongoing push for “reparations.”
Repayment for injustice
On the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I came across the grave of a man who died in 1912. That August morning in 1945, an estimated 70,000 people perished when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city — a calculated gamble to end World War II quickly.
In the years before the bombing, Japanese Americans — U.S. citizens — were herded into internment camps. Many likely had close relatives and friends who died in Hiroshima that day. In 1988, the federal government agreed to pay monetary reparations to surviving internees.
The Conversation, a website that claims to blend “academic rigor” with “journalistic flair,” offers a comparison between reparations for Japanese Americans and those sought for African Americans. One logistical distinction, the site notes, is that the injustice against the Japanese occurred over a defined period — from 1942, when internment began, to 1945, when the war ended.
The tombstone that started the gears turning in my head along that cemetery walk had an interesting dedication carved into it. A man named John C.L. Hamilton shared the gravesite with his wife, who died a few years after he did, but for his part, the inscription read:
JOHN C.L. HAMILTON
1842–1912
Soldier and Patriot
He Served His Country with Valor
and Distinction During the
Tragic Years of Our Civil War
Many other Civil War veterans reside in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and, standing prominently among them, is a fitting monument:
PATRIA CARIOR QUAM VITA.
[Country Dearer Than Life]
OUR
UNION SOLDIERS.
While Freedom's name
is understood,
They shall delight the
wise and good;
They dared to set their
country free,
And gave her laws
equality.
Another notable person who has found her final resting place in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is Amanda Foster, who passed away at the age of 97. She used her freedom helping others through the Underground Railroad:
(By the way, if you would like to watch a short but fun 2-1/2-minute “video tour” of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, I made one about eight years ago.)
Moving on and moving up
Many men and women — black and white — pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” to rid the young nation of slavery. If the United States ever pursued true reparations based on an honest review of historical records, the line of claimants who lost family and treasure — black and white — would stretch long.
Punishment for those who engaged in the slave trade or owned slaves ended long ago. The best way to close that dark chapter is not to blame or “correct” the past, but to leave those people and events where they belong — in history.
In the present, our responsibility is to live with honor, blessing and serving those we know and influence today.
Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at American Thinker.
Stop trying to segregate the American founding
Race relations in the United States have unraveled in recent years, not only because of genuine disagreement, but because many Americans now grow up believing the nation is fundamentally unjust — racist to the core, perhaps even irredeemable.
This idea, once fringe, now enjoys institutional backing. Critical race theory and DEI ideology assert that the U.S. was founded on slavery and white supremacy. And they dominate schools, corporations, and government agencies alike.
Don’t displace the Fourth of July. Don’t divide what should unite us.
As a result, America has seen a quiet comeback of sanctioned segregation. Colleges increasingly host race-based graduation ceremonies. Society encourages people to define themselves first by racial identity, not shared citizenship. That should alarm anyone who once marched for equal rights in the 1950s and ’60s.
When Americans stop thinking of each other as fellow citizens, the glue that holds the republic together dissolves.
Juneteenth and the new segregation
Consider one example of this trend: the push for a separate “independence day” for black Americans.
On June 17, 2021, Joe Biden signed Senate Bill 475 into law, establishing a new federal holiday: “Juneteenth National Independence Day.” The bill commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Texas and issued General Order No. 3, announcing that slaves in the state had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation — two years after it was signed.
Former slaves in Texas celebrated, and in the years that followed, Juneteenth spread across the South. But it never held central importance in the broader civil rights movement.
Juneteenth did not abolish slavery. It merely marked the day slaves in one state learned they had been legally freed. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1863, applied only to states in rebellion — excluding Union-supporting border states like Kentucky and Delaware, where slavery remained legal until the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865.
A false independence narrative
Some activists now argue that Juneteenth should serve as “Black Independence Day.” That’s a mistake.
This view implies that African Americans have no rightful claim to the Fourth of July or to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. But those ideas belong to all Americans — not just the descendants of the signers.
It’s true that many historical figures sought to exclude black Americans from the promise of the Declaration. Chief Justice Roger Taney made that argument explicit in the Dred Scott decision. Confederates like Alexander Stephens and John C. Calhoun claimed that “all men are created equal” never applied to African Americans.
They were wrong.
What Frederick Douglass really believed
Some cite Frederick Douglass’ famous 1852 speech — “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” — to support the idea that black Americans should reject the founding. But they ignore the full context.
Douglass, speaking two years after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, condemned the hypocrisy of a country that declared liberty while tolerating bondage. “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” he asked. “A day that reveals to him ... the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
But unlike Taney, Stephens, and Calhoun, Douglass didn’t reject the Declaration. He upheld it.
RELATED: Frederick Douglass: American patriot
Douglass took hope from the principles it proclaimed and called on America to live up to them. He dismissed the Garrisonian claim that the Constitution was pro-slavery. “Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” he said, “the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.”
He believed America’s founding held the moral resources to defeat slavery — and it did.
The universal promise of 1776
America’s founders didn’t invent slavery; they merely inherited it. At the time of the Revolution, slavery was a global institution, practiced on every continent and defended by every empire. Slavery, including African slavery, was a manifestation of the argument of the Athenians at Melos as recounted by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War: “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Even Africans sold fellow Africans into slavery.
The Declaration of Independence marked a sharp break from that past. It asserted that all human beings possess natural rights — and that no one may rule another without consent.
Thomas Jefferson famously observed that humanity had long been divided into those born "booted and spurred” and those “born with saddles on their backs.” The founders rejected that model. They established a republic based on equality before the law, not the interests of the stronger over the weaker.
They also knew slavery contradicted those ideals. Many believed the institution would die out — an Enlightenment relic destined for extinction. Still, the political compromises they made to preserve the Union allowed slavery to persist, and it took a war to end it.
Why the founding still matters
The Civil War was not a rejection of the founding. It was a fulfillment of it.
As Harry Jaffa wrote, “It is not wonderful that a nation of slaveholders, upon achieving independence, failed to abolish slavery. What is wonderful ... is that a nation of slaveholders founded a new nation on the proposition that ‘all men are created equal,’ making the abolition of slavery a moral and political necessity.”
The Declaration of Independence lit the fuse that ultimately destroyed slavery.
So let Americans celebrate Juneteenth — gratefully, joyfully, and historically. Let the holiday recall the biblical jubilee it was meant to evoke.
But don’t displace the Fourth of July. Don’t segment America’s founding. Don’t divide what should unite us.
As Douglass said: “I would not even in words do violence to the grand events, and thrilling associations, that gloriously cluster around the birth of our national independence.”
He went on: “No people ever entered upon the pathway of nations, with higher and grander ideas of justice, liberty and humanity than ourselves.”
Douglass understood something too many have forgotten: The genius of the American founding lies not in who it excluded but in the promise that, one day, it would include everyone.
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