POLICY COUNSEL
MARCH 2024 POLICY COUNSEL SPEECHES
Steve Milloy
Founder and Publisher
JunkScience.com
Good afternoon, everyone. It’s great to be here. I understand that I am standing between you and lunch, so I will either be really interesting or really brief.
My mission today is to be a climate alarmist. By that, I mean to alarm you enough about climate and energy policy that you come to our Action Session at 1:30.
As Brent mentioned, I’ve been working on these issues for more than 30 years from the bowels of the science all the way up. I’ve done this in many different forms. I have worked for industry against the EPA. I have worked for the government against the EPA. Maybe many of you have probably heard of ESG investing. I organized a publicly traded mutual fund 20 years ago to work on this, so I’ve had lots of experience on all these issues. The one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that it’s very difficult to get conservatives interested in climate energy policy. I don’t know why that is, it just is. I remember when I was raising money for a mutual fund, I’d go to conservatives, libertarians and they’d say, well, if I don’t like what Bank of America is doing, I’ll just move my money to another bank or I’ll start my own bank. That’s not a very practical answer. Now, when we have all banks doing ESG, you can’t take your money anywhere else. So, it’s an issue that I think is very important, and I encourage you to come to the Action Session.
Although conservatives are often not very interested in climate, I can assure you that the other side is. In fact, it is the most important thing they are doing. Right now, they have an all-of-government approach to climate and energy. It is so important that in September of last year, Joe Biden was at the G20 conference in Japan, and in his closing remarks he said that global warming was more important than nuclear war. Okay, now you laugh. It sounds stupid, and it is. But then about a month later, I was watching Fox News one afternoon and Martha McCallum is on with John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman. Martha asks him about that quote from Biden, and John Kirby goes, “Yeah, that’s science.” So, there’s a real problem we have in the administration.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, someone interviewed John Kerry. I think it might have been Reuters. And John Kerry said, “Well, you know, we hope that Vladimir Putin keeps his eye on his emissions.” These are not comments from normal people. Just last week, John Kerry said, “Well, the invasion of Ukraine would not be so bad if Putin cared more about emissions.” I mean, that’s almost a verbatim quote. You can look that up. I’ve got it on my X feed. These people are crazy.
Speaking about Ukraine, for those of you that are interested in it, it’s got its roots in climate. Twenty-five years ago, Europe signed the Kyoto Accords to reduce emissions. Since 1997, they’ve been reducing their emissions. They’ve been closing their coal mines. They never started fracking. They’ve been drilling for less oil and gas except for Norway. Just generally reducing their emissions, exporting them to where? Russia.
At the beginning of the Ukraine War, Europe was heavily dependent on Russia for oil, gas, and coal. Being dependent was one problem, but they also enriched Putin along the way. In contrast, when President Trump was in office and we had an energy policy where we had energy dominance, we were in charge of the price of oil. We were so powerful that right before COVID, you might remember this, there was an oil production war between Russia and Saudi Arabia where the price of oil actually went negative for a while. That’s how dominant we were. As soon as Biden became president, that dominance ended. He handed the keys to the price of oil back over to OPEC.
But getting back to Putin, so Europe spent decades enriching Putin, making themselves dependent on Putin, so as soon as Putin felt the time was right, he just walked into Ukraine. Of course, that launched a round of inflation, and then that coincided with Joe Biden, his climate policy. As soon as he became president, one of the first things he did was to issue a series of executive orders on climate. We re-entered the Paris Climate Accords, and he started discouraging the production of energy in the U.S. That fueled inflation. We became dependent on OPEC once again. Biden even begged OPEC for more oil production. This has had a whole chain reaction of bad things happen.
In 2022, in a superficial attempt to lower the price of oil, Biden released our reserves from our strategic oil reserve, and he basically drained them. That had no effect on oil except that now we don’t have that oil and he hasn’t replaced it yet. It’s quite ironic because we’re actually producing more oil now than we did under Trump, yet OPEC is still in charge. What Joe Biden is doing—and most people don’t really realize this—is he is not allowing our oil and gas industry to explore for more oil in the US. He’s also shut down coal leasing so we can’t produce fossil fuels at all. What he’s making our oil industry do is drain their existing reserves, and it can’t find new reserves. So, we have no strategic petroleum reserves. Oil companies are draining their reserves.
Our society does not work without fossil fuels. We need all the fossil fuels we can get. There’s nothing that happens without fossil fuels: no wind, no solar, no nuclear, nothing. Without fossil fuels, billions are dead within a year. You can’t grow the food, you can’t transport the food around the world, it’ll just be a disaster. This is a very important issue. It is the most important thing for the Biden administration. What we need to do is get more interested in this. In addition to you all getting interested, we need to convince our politicians to get interested. I worked in the coal industry for a while. The Obama administration destroyed half the coal industry – 50,000 high paying jobs, the communities, just wrecked. Nobody cared. Even Joe Manchin from West Virginia. I have no idea how that guy got reelected. He stood by as Obama destroyed half of West Virginia’s coal industry, did nothing, absolutely nothing, and he got reelected.
If you’re interested in life, well, climate is a huge life issue. Environmentalists, the climate activists, they want to get rid of 75 % of us. They don’t talk about this, but it’s what they want to do. You might remember Paul Ehrlich from the 1960s wrote The Population Bomb. In that book, Paul Ehrlich wrote that the carrying capacity of the earth is two billion people, and one of the ways we can keep the population low is by putting chemicals in the water and sterilizing everyone. Well, of course, none of that came through, and none of Erlich’s Malthusian predictions came through. He predicted a huge mass starvation. It wasn’t true. As a matter of fact, we had more than doubled human population since the 1960s. We have unending food. Food production is at an all-time high. There’s really no end in sight. If people are hungry in this world, it’s because governments, environmentalists, war, and corruption are blocking them from getting food. It’s got nothing to do with our technological capability to produce food. But the environmentalists, of course, they are coming after food. They are coming after our energy. They are coming after fertilizer, which helps us grow food. They imagine that fertilizer is also changing the climate. It’s not true. And so, they want to get rid of most of us.
Paul Ehrlich, who is now 60 years in the public limelight, is still saying that the Earth’s carrying capacity is less than two billion people. We have eight billion today. You can’t get any more wrong than he is, but people don’t care. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford. He was a full professor for a very long time, even though he’s never been correct about anything. He is a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. The guy’s never been correct about anything. And so, you really have to understand the enemy. The enemy takes climate very seriously and insanely so. It’s almost like it’s a mental illness with these people. It really is. When you can say that global warming is worse than nuclear war or the invasion of Ukraine would be okay if emissions were reduced, these are signs of serious illness.
About 15 years ago, I wrote a book titled Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do About It. The whole environmental program is about controlling our lives. They want to tell us what to eat, what kind of energy we can use, what we can drive.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention China. I mentioned earlier about how climate policy facilitated the Russian invasion in Ukraine. For those who are interested in defending Taiwan, in case China invades, that’s not going to happen. The Biden policy, in addition to other industrial policies we’ve had, have made us completely dependent on China. You cannot have an EV without communist China. You cannot build a solar panel, a wind turbine, anything, and many other things. Biden’s climate policy is to make us entirely dependent on China. How are we going to defend Taiwan? How are we going to defend ourselves? You know, we can’t say boo to China, because China will just turn off whatever they’re sending us. They did this to Australia during COVID. Australia had mildly criticized China over COVID, and China left 260 coal barges from Australia marooned offshore for months until Australia caved. I’m out of time, but I have solutions for this. That’s what the CNP Action, Inc. Action Session is all about. It’s about solutions, what we need to do to solve these problems. So I invite you to come to the session. Thank you.
John Solomon
Founder, Chief Executive and Editor in Chief
Just the News
I’m in a business of truth—or at least I used to be in a business of truth. Most of my colleagues left it, but I’ve tried to stay in it. Over the course of the last 25 years, Tom has relentlessly pursued truth in an era when truth has been the primary target of the Left. If we can destroy the idea that there’s only two genders in America, if we can tell people that a border that’s open is closed, we’re destroying truth. Every day, Tom, your work as an arbiter of truth has been so important to our country. You fought for so many things we would never have known about were it not for you and Judicial Watch. Thank you for what you do. And for all of you, all of you are really truth watchers.
When I think of my first time at CNP long ago, when I was a young editor at the Washington Times, I realized that members of CNP, at the end of the day, were just fighting for the fundamental truths that this country is based on. Today, the opposition, which you saw in full force last night at what was supposed to be the State of the Union, they’re in the business of division. They have no vision, so they’ve turned to division. Their effort at educating the American public is designed to erode our truths. You, every day here at CNP, are in the business of restoring those truths. Yes, we are, by our Creator, given freedom, and it can’t be taken away by a government or a World Economic Forum or any of the other places that are trying to eradicate those freedoms today.
Every so often, I have these conversations with God. It’s a funny thing, many people may not know this. I almost became a Catholic priest earlier in life. God does intervene in many different ways. I was in this pre-seminary program at Marquette University, and then God sent me, or actually the priest sent me, but I think it was really God, to this wonderful Irish family in downtown Milwaukee to tutor a young man, and he had the most beautiful sister. Somehow, I left the priesthood and got married. That’s when I knew God had a great plan for me. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
But every so often, I still have these conversations with God, like when I was a young seminarian. Last night was one of them. I was in Florida, supposed to come here, and the JetBlue plane just kept getting later and later. We were supposed to leave at 6:00 pm and we left at about 11:00 pm East Coast time. I get to LA at 2:00 pm, and I’m like, okay God, this is funny, but I’m gonna sleep in the car. I’ll get an extra hour sleep and crash here. I get in the car with the taxi driver, and I say, “I might nod off, okay?” And he says, “Oh, I’ve just got to ask you a couple of questions.” And I’m like, “God, you have the funniest sense of humor!” I’m gonna talk for the next hour, and God knew exactly what he wanted for me in that conversation. It was such an amazing moment.
Within five minutes, I learned that this gentleman, Henry, had left El Salvador during the height of the Sandinista-Contra War under Ronald Reagan. He fled to this country legally. He built a life for himself here. He was telling me a little bit of his story, and then he asked this provocative question which I really think is the question that our country faces. But at the time, I didn’t fully understand what he meant. He said, “How do I save my country?” And I’m like, “Well, El Salvador has had a lot of problems, but it’s got this really nice….” “No, no, no, no, no,” he says. “El Salvador is great. In fact, I go there, and I feel safer in El Salvador now than I feel here in California.” What a profound statement. Of course, El Salvador does have, it seems, a conservative president doing some free market things. El Salvador is a little bit better. You saw him at CPAC. We’ll see if his record and his rhetoric ultimately match when we’re done.
But for a man to have fled one of the most war-torn countries in the world and be worried that this country is in jeopardy, that it needs to be saved, is the awakening that we all must have. I know everybody in this room understands that. I’m not sure the country understands the precipice that we stand upon and how close we are from eradicating the extraordinary American dream that we’ve lived for the last 248 years. I want to spend five or ten minutes on this, and we’ll get right to the Q&A, and you can turn the tables on me.
There is a war that the Left has waged, and back in 2019 and 2020 I took some time out of my normal reporting to go and understand what George Soros and the leftist oligarchs in America built. How did they get this one? What was their mission? By the way, it is brilliant. It may be diabolical, but it is brilliant. Anyone who underestimates George Soros does so at their own peril. He is one of the greatest political tacticians of all time. He had, after losing the Bush v. Gore race in 2000, a 20-year plan, which really manifested itself in 2018 and 2020. His plan was to never rely on the Democratic National Committee again and to build an infrastructure outside the institutions of Washington that would impose his worldview and those of like-minded donors in this country. He wanted to change this country. He had a very simple recipe. It’s so simple, it’s brilliant. Own the narrative in America, and you’ll own the action. If you own the action, you’ll own the election. It’s very simple, three steps. He set out over 20 years to impose that vision on America. We know what his vision is—open borders and globalism. He’s honest about it, he doesn’t hide it, he’s not subtle at all. But I don’t think we understand what those three calls to action on the Left have really meant over the last 20 years. We’ve lived it, and I think today, for just a few seconds, I want to identify what it is.
To own the narrative in America, you have to own the language, right? You have to get the media to use your terms. So, it’s anti-abortion, not pro-life. You know how that works, we’ve had that for a long time. But he set out early in 2003 to change the language of immigration. You can’t have open borders if you call the people crossing the borders illegal aliens. It just sounds so harsh. It’s a bad marketing term. I was at the AP when this started, and I saw this effort coming in right over Soros. We saw all these people coming in saying, you really shouldn’t use the term illegal alien. Let’s call them an illegal immigrant. We’ll just move it that much. I got to see in 2019 a document that Soros’s people put together, and they had a five-year plan. Let’s move it from illegal alien to illegal immigrant, illegal immigrant to undocumented worker, undocumented worker to dreamer, because a dreamer sounds a hell of a lot better than an illegal alien. They impose their will on the mainstream media.
Today, you are hard pressed to call someone who illegally crosses the border and kills someone like Laken Riley an illegal. Last night, President Biden slipped and said illegal, and he’s been blown up all day by his party. They’re like, “Oh, how insensitive!” But that is how you own the narrative. Over 20 years on issue by issue, the Left has changed the narrative in the mainstream media so that we debate on their terms, in their language. And you’re at a strategic disadvantage.
Once you get to that point and you start to roll the narrative in your direction, you’re able to then begin to own action. You can start to say, it’s discriminatory to stop those dreamers from coming over and having the American dream. We have a good way of doing it. We could go up through Ellis Island, it’s not that hard. In fact, it’s a lot safer. As you all know, the first thing that most young men and women who illegally cross our borders today see is a rape tree. They don’t see the Statue of Liberty. The first thing they see is a rape tree, the rewards of the horrible things that the cartels who brought them here have done, posted on a tree to send a message. That’s not the humane way we do it, but that’s the system we set up and we call that dreaming now. It’s the most inhumane way. But once you can do that, you begin to change the actions. Once you begin to change the actions, you can begin to change the outcome of the elections.
A lot of what happened in 2017, ’18, ’19, and ’20 took a lot of us a long time to absorb what the Left really did. They changed the rules of the election, and we didn’t stop it. We didn’t see it coming. You know, there’s people who did very valiant fights in ’18 and ’20, but they changed the rules of the election. We executed in 2020 and 2022 mostly the election strategy of 2016, and the Left had changed the rules of the game. They’re going to be changed forever now. Maybe we’ll get some power back. Maybe we can save some states from going to No-Excuse Absentee Ballots. But it’s the rule in all the battleground states, almost. That is what Soros intended. Let’s own the language, let’s own the action, then we’ll own the election.
How did he get from owning the action to owning the election? He invested in people like Secretaries of State. He created a program called SOS, which actually is quite appropriate when you think of what he’s actually done, but it was for Secretaries of State. He funded Secretaries of States. He funded all those District Attorneys. We were thinking about the presidential race. He was installing District Attorneys that would open the gate on every jailhouse door in America and put every one of our sons and daughters and each one of us in jeopardy.
The man last night told me this incredible anecdote. Henry went to San Francisco for a weekend to meet some friends. He hadn’t been to San Francisco in 20 years. He said he couldn’t believe it. He said in his worst day as a child, remembering the Civil War era of El Salvador, it didn’t look as bad as San Francisco. It smelled worse, it seemed worse, and he was on the ground 35 minutes. He went into a convenience store, came out, and got held up. He said, “I’ve been to El Salvador 14 times in the last two years. I’m trying to help do some things for my family who are left behind there. I haven’t been held up once there. Twenty minutes in San Francisco, and I was mugged.”
His story is why we are asking the question that he asked last night. How do we save this country? I’m very optimistic about it. I’m not as pessimistic as some of us who’ve been through the wars. I do see a light at the end of the tunnel. But we must take what Soros did, and we must turn it around in our way. We must own the narrative in America. We must own the action in America, and then we’ll own the elections. That is the key to doing it.
As that great man Henry said to me, “This is the election. We are either going to lose this country or we’re going to win this country.” He said to me, “Rome is burning. I can smell the smoke, and I can see the fire, like it was on the hillside in the canyon over there.” We are that close to not being America. We will either be a European socialist experiment on this North American continent soon—we already have it in Canada, but it’s coming to ours—or we’ll revers it and buy us some time to get some common sense back in America. Those are the stakes. We can’t disarm on any one of these issues, but we are making a difference. Thank you.
Jay Richards, Ph.D.
Director, Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family
The Heritage Foundation
Well, that was such a wonderful introduction. Thank you so much. You’re probably thinking that I’m here to talk about something very depressing, so I just want to promise you up front this ends in hope.
It is an absolutely depressing subject—gender ideology—and I’ve been talking about it long enough that I know that there is an age gradient in terms of people’s ability to kind of receive this insanity. Here is what I mean. Most of you learned from the time you were five or six years old that there are males and females. You just sort of take this for granted. You didn’t think this was something that would be contested. In fact, no one thought this would be contested.
When the Title IX law was written in 1972, the law was designed to guarantee women equal rights in publicly funded entities like colleges. It has words like male, female, woman, sex. No one thought to define those words because they were uncontested. Yet, we now live at a moment in history—a unique moment—in which the commanding heights of culture from the United Nations and UNESCO and the European Union to the Department of Health and Human Services, at least implicitly, teaches and pushes the idea that children can be born in the wrong body. If they realize that they’re born in the wrong body—for instance, they think that their sex assigned at birth, this social construct that doctors had imposed upon them, conflicts with their internal sense of gender—called gender identity—the way to fix that, therapeutically or medically, is not to adjust the person’s mind to their bodily reality, but to change their social surroundings, their names, their pronouns, and their bodies to conform to their gender identity. That is gender ideology. You might wonder, okay, that sounds crazy, like that can’t possibly be what they’re really saying. This is exactly what they’re saying. This is what gender ideology is.
Gender ideology essentially claims that sex, as a real observed given reality out there in nature that is built into the natural order, doesn’t really explain human existence. What explains human existence, rather, is this internal sense of gender called a gender identity. You call it the sort of the psychological self. Carl Truman calls it that. It’s this purely psychological sense of your gender, but not your sex, right? It’s your gender identity. Then you say, “Ok, but what’s sex?” I mean, we all learned about this. People think of themselves as boys and girls. Well, sex is the stereotypes that doctors adopted. It’s a kind of Western colonial idea, all right? They started to associate maleness with one set of body parts and femaleness with another set of body parts. So they assign people male or female at birth, assign, alright? You can tell a deeply committed orthodox gender ideologue because they will never use the word sex. They will never use the word sex alone to refer to the differences between males and females. They will always pivot and talk about “natal sex” or “sex assigned at birth.” That’s gender ideology.
In other words, biology doesn’t apply to human beings. We are just sort of these disembodied gender souls independent of our bodies. That sounds so crazy. Remember I mentioned a minute ago that there’s this age gradient with the capacity to mentally metabolize this idea. If you’re, let’s say, a Gen X-er like me, or you’re a boomer. That just sounds so crazy, nobody could possibly believe that. Is that a caricature he’s describing? If you’re a millennial or a Gen Z-er, you’re thinking, yeah, I learned that. I learned the gender unicorn. I know this stuff is also sort of taken for granted. So, this is part of the difficulty of this issue. Even conservatives, even Republicans who could really succeed by taking on this issue are sort of afraid of it. Initially, I could tell you, even two years ago, many Republican politicians did not want to talk about so-called gender -affirming care, because it seemed awkward and difficult to have to talk about drugs and double mastectomies on underage girls. This is something you just didn’t want to talk about. This is half of the job that we have to do is just help, first of all, fellow conservatives, and then basically everyone else with a scintilla of common sense that this is absolute madness, and that we’re just at this moment, and it’s a different moment from what we had in 2012. Even in 2012, there was a kind of idea that kind of the secular progressive worldview was based on reason and public evidence and compromise and these kinds of things. And you could think back to the way Barack Obama spoke in 2008. Those days are long gone. The public square, at least the sort of commanding heights that the elites that Kevin Roberts talked about, they’ve abandoned all pretense of reason as they would have to, because they have abandoned a truth that is available and apparent to natural reason at every time and place. That means we’re in a different moment.
Let me tell you what I mean. For instance, think about the abortion issue. Many of you in the room have been involved in the pro-life fight these many decades. It’s based on a very specific claim, a scientific claim straight from embryology, that a new human individual comes into existence at the moment of fertilization. Now you can learn this, you can cite embryology textbooks. Who has direct experience of fertilization, though? No one. So, in a sense, it’s a kind of intellectual abstraction that while I can understand this, it’s off-site. It’s something you actually have to learn, and then you have to run the moral calculation. This is a human being, even though this human being is very small. I was once a zygote and an embryo and so forth, and it’s wrong always to intentionally kill an innocent human being, so therefore it’s wrong. You notice that there’s several kinds of steps in the chain there, and none is based on something that is directly apparent, that is the humanity of the unborn from the moment of fertilization.
We’re way past that. Every culture and every time and place, whatever their religion, whatever their educational attainment or technological capacity, understood the basic reality that there is male and female and that this had something to do with reproduction. This is a kind of basic truth.
If you want to convince people that that’s not true, are you going to start telling them this when they’re 40? No, the neural pathways are built, right? I mean, Xers and Boomers, you’re not going to persuade them that male and female don’t exist. But what if you get them when they’re five or six years old? What if you say, don’t think of your peers as males and females, think of them as having these different gendered aspects of themselves. There’s a gender expression, there’s a gender identity, there is an orientation, and then there’s this thing called sex assigned at birth. Think of everyone as sort of a spectrum, as one kindergarten book puts it, “Some people are boys. Some people are girls. Some people are both, neither, or somewhere in between.” That’s how you get people. That’s how you persuade people of what is otherwise an obviously deranged idea.
We should not be surprised that the gender ideologues have spent so long working on children, spending their time not on advertising campaigns to us, but writing books, setting up award ceremonies for books, getting the books adopted into public schools, starting campaigns with the ACLU to talk about book banning when people try to object to what are explicitly pornographic books. That’s why they want to do that.
Now, why do they want to do this? Part of it is there’s some true believers that get this. But gender ideology is a species of a larger genus. The larger genus we’ll just call critical theory or conflict theory. These are just a series of explanations for social relations that explain everything in terms of conflict between some oppressor group and an oppressed group. You all are familiar with this kind of Marxist way of doing this. You’ve got the bourgeoisie, the owners, and the proletariat, the workers. That’s the conflict. But you can do this differently. You can do black-white, you can do male-female, right? You can do global-north, global-south, whatever. It’s always the same thing though, you just explain everything in terms of these conflicts. The job for anyone that ascribes to one of these views is not to develop a really sophisticated and persuasive philosophical system. It’s to create confusion and a cultural wrecking ball.
So, if you spend any time with gender ideology, it very quickly falls apart. I’ll give you one example. What is a gender identity? You can Google this. Trust me, but if you don’t, you can Google it later. It will be something like this, an internal sense of gender. Many of you grammarians know what’s wrong with that definition. You’ve got the same word in both the definition and the thing being defined. It’s perfectly circular. Now, there are about ten other obvious sorts of incoherencies to this ideology and, as a philosopher, I like to kind of fixate on that stuff, but it’s actually beside the point. Because these aren’t designed to be coherent worldviews. They’re designed to queer, which means to destabilize, our categories of reality. That’s what the word means in queer theory. It’s not a pejorative, it’s a verb, meaning to destabilize. That’s the purpose of this ideology, and it’s precise function. And for that function, the enemy has never invented a greater weapon. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that the folks on the other side moved a little too quickly. So, when they were just sort of teaching kids this and picking off young kids that were maybe the awkward ones in the class, no one was really paying attention. But then COVID happened, and parents suddenly noticed this, because their kids would come home or get off the Zoom class, and they’d discover, in some cases like January Littlejohn in Florida, that the school was secretly transitioning her daughter behind her back. Or suddenly, the son that you sent to the Dalton School comes home, and he’s spouting weird doctrines from gender ideology. And it’s generally a bad idea to come between people and their children. It’s a really bad idea to come between mothers and their children. That’s going to be the fatal mistake, I think, looking back ten years from now, that the folks on the other side are going to realize, yeah, maybe we moved a little too quickly. So, the plebes, that’s us, have now awakened. What felt like an unstoppable juggernaut of gender ideology is now encountering resistance. At The Heritage Foundation, and other organizations like Family Policy Alliance, ADF, FRC, many of the organizations that you know, many are in the room, have been working for the last few years to fight back. And because of what’s happening in the White House and Washington, D.C., we focused on the states. In the last three years, mostly just last year, and by the end of probably this month, half of U.S. states will have restricted or prohibited so called gender-affirming care for minors.
I can tell you, even the optimists among us, a year and a half ago thought maybe we’ll get two or three. We got, effectively, 20 or 21 of these bills last year. Why? Well, in some ways if you think about it, the kind of presenting insanity of this ideology, the kind of flash points, have been gender medicine for kids—puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, sterilizing surgery—that is upsetting to people once they realize that it’s happening, sports—maybe not as metaphysically important, but people care a lot about sports and it’s really visually obvious what’s happening, and culture and education. These have been the flash points.
I’d say our primary successes initially in the states have been with gender medicine, because it’s the kind of most grotesque manifestation of this ideology, a direct assault on children’s minds and bodies that leads to sterilization. This year, actually, there have been a number of bills passed in states dealing specifically with private spaces and sports. Then I can tell you what many of us have been working on this legislative session, which is bills to define male and female in precise biological terms and state laws. Now, why do we need that? We need that because the Biden administration is about to finalize a new interpretation of Title IX, which is going to define sex to include gender identity and sexual orientation. What does that mean? What that means is that after the rule change, if you are a state, basically any red state and probably most purple states, that wants to keep male and female sports separate, or keep males out of female prisons or males out of girls’ bathrooms, and there’s another male that identifies as female, and you prohibit him from entering those spaces, you can be charged by the Department of Justice for violating his civil rights under Title IX, designed to protect women.
The ultimate irony in this war on women is that even the legal tools used to defend women are being turned on them. That’s the bad news. The good news, as I mentioned, is that a lot of people have awakened to this problem and this outrage, and I don’t think what the other side anticipated is that they were going to build the army that will lead to their destruction. Who is that army? Okay, there’ll be some policy people, of course there will always be some lawyers around, they’re involved. But I’m talking about the detransitioners, the kids like Chloe Cole, who have suffered and have been victimized by the medicine. They’re still walking around, unlike the victims of abortion. Two athletes who suffered the injustice of people like Lea Thomas taking their positions on award ceremonies after NCAA tournaments, suddenly become very compelling and vocal defenders of sexual reality. I’ll now leave the stage so you can hear from one of them. Thank you very much.