E-Pluribus | August 7, 2024

Florida’s war on the 1st Amendment; Planned Parenthood's gender scandal; 'COVID tyrant' Tim Walz

A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

FIRE: Florida public universities get directive to word-search faculty syllabi to purge ‘anti-Israel bias’

Florida’s state university system has enacted an Orwellian policy of word-searching textbooks and syllabi for disfavored terms officials have deemed antisemitic. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports in a lengthy X post:

Last Monday, to be exact, when State University System of Florida Chancellor Ray Rodrigues reportedly directed the system’s 12 public university leaders to conduct an urgent and sweeping review of faculty syllabi, textbooks, and test banks for evidence of “antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias.” According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Rodrigues subsequently heard from some presidents about ‘the feasibility’ of getting such a review done by the start of the fall semester.”

So in follow-up communications Friday, Rodrigues and Emily Sikes, the system’s interim vice chancellor for academic and student affairs, clarified that universities should first conduct keyword searches of all course descriptions and syllabi for the words: Israel, Israeli, Palestine, Palestinian, Middle East, Zionism, Zionist, Judaism, Jewish, and Jews. Then, any fall courses using one or more of those terms are to be reported to the System Board of Governors, alongside a list of “related instructional materials,” by August 16.

The Orwellian directive, and the censorship that will follow, leaves students and faculty unsure about whether their discussions or course materials addressing current events — from terrorism, to the war in Gaza, to international relations more broadly — will land them in trouble with elected officials or campus administrators.

Read the rest.

Jennifer Block: How Did Planned Parenthood Become One of the Country’s Largest Suppliers of Testosterone?

Image by Sarah Mirk via Wikipedia

The scandal around youth transgender medicine continues to grow with The Free Press highlighting Planned Parenthood’s role as America’s leading provider of gender transition hormones for young adults. Several women are suing the abortion provider for failing to obtain informed consent before writing the prescriptions:

For Cristina Hineman, the situation felt urgent: the 17-year-old needed treatment at Planned Parenthood, where she knew she wouldn’t be subjected to humiliating questions, or an unnecessary waiting period, or lectures, or prying about her certainty. But it wasn’t an abortion she sought. It was testosterone.

Planned Parenthood was founded a century ago to promote birth control. Today, its nearly 600 clinics nationwide make it the largest single provider of abortion, contraception, reproductive care, and sex education in the U.S. 

It has also, in less than a decade, become the country’s leading provider of gender transition hormones for young adults, according to insurance claim data. In 2015, around two dozen of their clinics began offering this service. Now it’s available at nearly 450 locations. Insurance claim information provided to The Free Press by the Manhattan Institute shows that at least 40,000 patients went to Planned Parenthood for this purpose last year alone, a number that has risen tenfold since 2017. The largest proportion, about 40 percent, were 18- to 22-year-olds.

…

Like many others in the rising wave of female teens seeking to masculinize, [Hineman] had been battling a cluster of mental health problems: self-harm, depression, and anxiety. Also like many of these teens, Hineman has autism. The Covid lockdown exacerbated her troubles. She told me, “I couldn’t see my friends, I couldn’t see my girlfriend. I was depressed and scared, in my room ruminating all the time.” 

The viral YouTubers she was watching convinced her that gender was the problem. “I was like, oh my god, trans includes all the things I’ve been feeling—my discomfort with my chest, my discomfort with being called ‘young woman,’ not being sure of who I was or what I wanted to be,” she said. 

Just over a year into treatment, Hineman realized she had made a terrible mistake, and that gender was not the source of her problems. “I was brainwashed,” she says now. “A lot of people say that adults should be able to do whatever they want. But if you have mental illness that’s clouding your view, or you’re so misinformed about what gender dysphoria even means, then you cannot consent to such invasive treatments.”

Hineman, who went from identifying as “nonbinary” to “agender” to “trans” over the course of a year, now considers herself a “detransitioner”—someone who, if possible, has returned to living as their birth sex, often with medical side effects. 

Today, reported exclusively in The Free Press, she is a plaintiff in the first detransitioner lawsuit against Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In the medical malpractice suit, filed in April, she’s seeking unspecified damages for negligence and failure to obtain informed consent from all the health providers—including those at Planned Parenthood—who facilitated her medical transition: from therapists who “encouraged” her desire to change genders, to the plastic surgeon who removed her breasts after a superficial consult when she turned 19, to the nurse practitioner at Planned Parenthood who wrote Hineman the prescription for testosterone.

Read the whole thing.

Robby Soave: Tim Walz Was a COVID-19 Tyrant

At Reason, Robby Soave argues that vice presidential contender Tim Walz behaved like a tyrant during the pandemic, going as far as enabling neighbors to snitch on one another for violating social distancing rules:

When the coronavirus was first spreading, Walz was an enthusiastic promoter of social distancing rules. He described the crowds in public, outdoor spaces as "a little too big." He even defended Minnesota's ridiculous hotline for COVID-19 snitches. That's right: Walz's government maintained a method for people to report their neighbors for failing to abide by social distancing rules. Walz insisted in a recent interview that "one person's socialism is another person's neighborliness"; denouncing one's neighbors as insufficiently loyal to government policies is a fundamental aspect of socialism, however.

When asked by Republicans to take down the hotline, Walz responded: "We're not going to take down a phone number that people can call to keep their families safe."

And though Walz instructed police to merely issue citations to people caught violating stay-at-home orders—which is still bad enough—he also maintained the right, via executive order, to issue $1,000 fines and send violators to jail for 90 days. His government maintained that private, indoor gatherings should be limited to 10 people. Outdoor gatherings were arbitrarily capped at 25 people. On July 23, 2020, Walz declared a statewide mask mandate for most indoor spaces and even some outdoor spaces.

Read it all.

Around Twitter (X)

Speaking of neighborliness, Liz Wolfe takes exception to Walz proclaiming his support for “personal choices”:

Jeremy Wayne Tate outlines C.S. Lewis’s case for a liberal arts education. Some excerpts below:

Finally, Jonah Goldberg explains why we can’t have nice things: