The Truth About Gender-Affirming Care

"A recent article published in the Associated Press debunks a map circulating online claiming to show where it’s possible for toddlers to receive gender-affirming surgeries. It was clearly found to be completely false. Surgery under the age of 18 is very rare and is decided on a case by case basis. No toddler is receiving surgeries, nor any form of gender-affirming medical care for that matter.

"The map in question actually belongs to transgender rights advocate, Erin Reed, and depicts the states that have the 'worst active anti-trans laws' in red and the 'safest states' with protections for transgender people in blue. Right-wing extremists took the map to start a disinformation campaign about safer states for transgender young people.

"The fact check makes clear that gender-affirming surgeries are NOT performed on children, and that, 'In all cases, gender-affirming surgeries are only performed after multiple discussions with both mental health providers and physicians (including endocrinologists and/or surgeons), to determine if surgery is the appropriate course of action.'”

Click on the link below for the full article:

AP Debunks Extremist Claims About Gender-Affirming Care

Are You Blaming The Democrats? NO, Blame The Attack By Disinformation, And - - -

"Mehdi Hasan torched MAGA talking points and defended the Biden administration's economic record before offering a chilling warning of the future."

Click on this link for a defense of the Harris election efforts and a refutation of those who are not looking at the big picture: MAGA used disinformation from US and foreign sources to snow the majority of voters. Just how sad is that? The cure is critical/science-based thinking, beginning at an early age:

The REAL Leaders Of MAGA: Be Aware

"In this bonus, documentary-style episode of Outrage Overload, we explore the unsettling world of 'techno-libertarianism' and the powerful tech figures who are championing it. We sit down with David Troy, a tech entrepreneur and researcher, to discuss the visions of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others who advocate for dismantling traditional institutions in favor of a decentralized, digital future.What are the potential consequences of replacing governments with self-sovereign digital systems? How do these ideas mirror historical movements that sought to overthrow the state? Are these tech moguls’ intentions truly utopian, or do they have more self-serving goals?

"Join us as we examine the complex intersection of technology, politics, and power, and the potential risks these ideologies pose to our democracy and society as a whole."

Click on the link below for a podcast exposing the real power behind Trump and MAGA in general:

Tech Bro Apocalypse Dreams

To Fight Health Disinformation, Focus On Low Expertise

"Disinformation is false information spread intentionally, and it is particularly harmful for public health. We conducted three preregistered experiments (N = 1,568) investigating how to discredit dubious health sources and disinformation attributed to them. Experiments 1 and 2 used cancer information and recruited representative U.S. samples. Participants read a vignette about a seemingly reputable source and rated their credibility. Participants were randomly assigned to a control condition or interventions that (a) corrected the source’s disinformation, (b) highlighted the source’s low expertise, or (c) corrected disinformation and highlighted low expertise (Experiment 2). Next, participants rated their belief in the source’s disinformation claims and rerated their credibility. We found that highlighting low expertise was equivalent to (or more effective than) other interventions for reducing belief in disinformation. Highlighting low expertise was also more effective than correcting disinformation for reducing source credibility, although combining it with correcting disinformation outperformed low expertise alone (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 extended this paradigm to vaccine information in vaccinated and unvaccinated subgroups. A conflict-of-interest intervention and 1-week retention interval were also added. Highlighting low expertise was the most effective intervention in both vaccinated and unvaccinated participants for reducing belief in disinformation and source credibility. It was also the only condition where belief change was sustained over 1 week, but only in the vaccinated subgroup. In sum, *highlighting a source’s lack of expertise is a promising option for fact-checkers and health practitioners to reduce belief in disinformation and perceived credibility."

https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2025-19881-005.html

*The US Republican Party is a major source of disinformation on MANY topics. (https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/11/trump-disinformation-immigrants-storm-00183378)

Project 2025: A Comic Book Summary

Click here for a good consolidation of every major policy statement in Project 2025, the Republican/MAGA/Trump plan to destroy the US Constitution.

Fascism 101

"Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed 'to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.'

"On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was 'FASCISM!'”

Click on this link, from my favorite historian specializing in the USA, to learn how the military educated the troops in Europe about what they were fighting during World War II. This is EXACTLY what is needed now to inform the entire electorate that the USA is in imminent danger of fascism again, this time WITHIN THE USA in the form of Donald Trump and the Republican Party!

Leading Economists Strongly Prefer Harris' Economic Plan

"Twenty-three Nobel Prize-winning economists endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris over former President Donald Trump in a joint letter released Wednesday. Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Rattner joins Morning Joe to discuss the economic plans of both Trump and Harris."

Click on the link below for the details:

Trump’s mass deportation and trade war plans will tank the economy

Conservatives Hate Education

"Last week, West Virginia University (WVU) announced a plan to raze some of its core programs. The public land-grant university intends to eliminate 9 percent of its majors (32 programs total), all of its foreign language programs, and 16 percent of its full-time faculty members (169 in total). The departments targeted for these massive cuts count Truman, Marshall, Fulbright, and Rhodes scholars among their alumni. These cuts were recommended by the consulting firm rpk GROUP, and there’s every reason to believe they’re a trial balloon for doing this elsewhere. Anyone who cares about higher education should be alarmed about what this portends for public universities."

 

Click on the link below for more information reflecting on another target by the anti-education/anti-critical thinking conservative/Republicans/MAGAs:

The Evisceration of a Public University

Memo To The Media: Stop The False Equivalency!

"As Americans gear up for the election, Bill Adair warns of an 'epidemic of lying' in U.S. politics -- particularly within the Republican Party. Adair joins the show to discuss his new book "Beyond the Lie." As founder of the fact-checking website PolitiFact, Adair is well placed to account for where disinformation comes from, how it spreads, and the danger it poses to democracy."

Click on the link below for the effects of accepting the lies of the Republicans/MAGA/Trump:

PolitiFact Founder Explains the “Epidemic of Lying” in American Politics

The Republican Party: From Greatness To A Traitor Dictator

"Something seriously troubling has happened to the Republican Party. It’s become filled with wacko candidates for office who are being supported by large percentages of Republican voters.

"The trend started in the 1980s with Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, which attracted a wide audience with a toxic mixture of lies, conspiracy theories, fear-mongering, and thinly veiled racism.

"It accelerated in 1996 when Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to emulate Limbaugh with a new TV channel, Fox News. Additional media imitators followed.

"The growing supply of this poison offered the (predominantly) white working-class an easy explanation for why the wages and status of many blue-collar men had hit the skids: They could blame immigrants, Black people, Latinos, “coastal elites,” government bureaucrats, pedophiles, women, secularists, Muslims, liberals, Democrats, and Satan."

Click on the link below for a brief history of the failure of one of the two major US political parties:

How did the GOP become the party of cranks and crackpots?

Tariffs: What You Rely On If You Are Economically Ignorant

"Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is elevating McKinley, representative from Ohio from 1877 to 1891 and president from 1897 to 1901, to justify his plan to impose new high tariffs.

"Trump’s call for tariffs is not an economic plan; it is a worldview. Trump claims that foreign countries pay tariff duties and thus putting new tariffs of 20% on all imports, and as much as 60% on Chinese imports, will bring enough foreign money into the country to fund things like childcare, end federal budget deficits, and pay for the tax cuts he wants to give to the wealthy and corporations.

"This is a deliberate lie. Tariffs are essentially taxes on imported products, and they are paid not by foreign countries but by American consumers. Economists warn that Trump’s tariff plan would cost a typical family an average of more than $2,600 a year, with poorer families hardest hit; spike inflation as high as 20%; result in 50,000 to 70,000 fewer jobs created each month; slow economic growth; and add about $5.8 trillion in deficits over ten years. It would tank an economy that under the Biden administration, which has used tariffs selectively to protect new industries and stop unfair trade practices, has boomed."

Click on this link for more.

Do Not Doubt It: Trump Wins, The USA Will Be A Dictatorship

 Following is a good sample of information clearly supporting the title of this post:

10 Ways Trump Is Becoming a Dictator (from the 2020 election period)

Could a Trump dictatorship be resisted?

Trump’s grand plans for the federal bureaucracy

Trump to have unprecedented power if he wins the White House

What a Trump Dictatorship might look like

This Is How Trump Becomes a Dictator

15 times Donald Trump praised authoritarian rulers

Trump is Plotting to Make Himself Dictator

Trump's Recipe for a Shockingly Raw Power Grab

Focus On The States To Stop MAGA

"Today, we take a look at how GOP-controlled states are subverting democracy with a form of 'competitive autocracy' and some of the horrifying legislation these states then pass after they are no longer subject to the opinions of the general public."

Click on the link below to better understand how the far-right has achieved its success:

Red States, Where Democracy Goes to Die and Terrible Legislation Is Born

Immigration Plans Under MAGA

 "The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is the policy playbook for a second Trump administration, and its impacts on immigration would be far more complex and destructive than previously reported. It isn’t simply a refresh of first-term ideas, dusted off and ready to be re-implemented. Rather, it reflects a meticulously orchestrated, comprehensive plan to drive immigration levels to unprecedented lows and increase the federal government’s power to the states’ detriment. These proposals circumvent Congress and the courts and are specifically engineered to dismantle the foundations of our immigration system."

Click on the link below for another reason why the Republicans need to be avoided like the Plague:

The Far Right's plan to demolish immigration

MAGA And The Confederacy

"The framers of the new constitution hoped it would fix the problems of the first attempt to create a new nation. During the Revolutionary War, the Second Continental Congress had hammered out a plan for a confederation of states, but with fears of government tyranny still uppermost in lawmakers’ minds, they centered power in the states rather than in a national government.

"The result—the Articles of Confederation—was a 'firm league of friendship' among the 13 new states, overseen by a congress of men chosen by the state legislatures and in which each state had one vote. The new pact gave the federal government few duties and even fewer ways to meet them. Indicating their inclinations, in the first substantive paragraph the authors of the agreement said: 'Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.'

"Within a decade, the states were refusing to contribute money to the new government and were starting to contemplate their own trade agreements with other countries. An economic recession in 1786 threatened farmers in western Massachusetts with the loss of their farms when the state government in the eastern part of the state refused relief; in turn, when farmers led by Revolutionary War captain Daniel Shays marched on Boston, propertied men were so terrified their own property would be seized that they raised their own army for protection."

Click on the link below for more. As you do so, keep in mind that MAGA wants to return to the Confederacy through the conservative mantra of "States Rights."

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-17-2024

Attacks On Education: The Base Of Dictatorships

"With democracy under threat around the world, author Jason Stanley warns that the fundamental danger lies closer to home: in the schools. In his latest book, the American philosopher argues that attacks on education empower authoritarian regimes by reshaping our understanding of the past. Stanley joins the show to discuss."

Click on the link below for the history of dictatorships in recent decades:

Russia, Nazi Germany, MAGA: The Dangers of Weaponizing History and Education

Herd Mentality: Humanity's Achilles Heel

Herd Mentality: a psychological phenomenon that describes the tendency of people to conform to the beliefs or behaviors of a group they are part of. It can be seen in many aspects of life. (AI Overview)

It Is Difficult To Determine Causation Regarding The Economy

Click on the links below for several articles about whether Trump or Biden was better for the economy. It is important to consider all influences. One cannot just look at their effects presently:

The Trump and Biden Economies by the Numbers

Biden versus Trump's Economies

Biden versus Trump's Economy, in Eight Charts

How The Economy Really Fared Under Biden/Harris And Trump

Believe Trump, He is NOT Joking!!

"Brian interviews historian and star Substack writer Heather Cox Richardson to discuss the dangers of Trump’s agenda and how history shows us how that agenda will lead us into autocracy."

Click on the link below for a shocking expose of Trump and what he WILL do if elected:

Star Historian Issues Stunning Warning about Trump

Trump Only Helped The Elite In His First Term

 Click on the links below for a clear understanding of what you will get under another Trump administration. If you are not in the 1% and vote for MAGA, you are gaslighted and gullible:

100 Ways, in 100 Days, that Trump Has Hurt Americans

The 2017 Trump Tax Law Was Skewed to the Rich, Expensive, and Failed to Deliver on Its Promises

The middle class needs a tax cut: Trump didn’t give it to them 

Trump’s Economy: 7 Broken Promises to Working Americans

A look at Trump's economic legacy

How Trump and Congress further rigged the economy in favor of the wealthy

How Trump Took the Middle Class to the Cleaners