TYLER O’NEIL: Rachel Levine Targets Transgender Heresy for Big Tech Suppression.

“There is substantial misinformation about gender-affirming care for transgender and gender-diverse individuals,” he said. “We are in this nation facing an onslaught of anti-LGBTQI+ actions at the state levels across the United States, and they are dangerous to the public health. They target and politicize evidence-based treatments that should be considered the standard of care and actually aim to criminalize, criminalize medical providers, including physicians providing care to their patients.”

“The positive value of gender-affirming care for youth and adults is not in scientific or medical dispute,” Levine claimed. “So, we all need to work together to get our voices out in the front line, we need to get our voices in the public eye, and we know how effective our medical community can be talking to communities, whether it’s at town halls, schools, conversations with others, and we need to use our clinicians’ voice to collectively advocate for our tech companies to create a healthier, cleaner information environment.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to The Daily Signal‘s request for comment on how Levine responds to criticism and whether he stands by his call for censorship.

Rather than explaining the kind of medical interventions Levine supports, he used the euphemism “gender-affirming care.” This term refers to various attempts to make a biologically male body resemble the body of a female or vice versa, in the pursuit of a nebulous “gender identity” that often—although not always—corresponds to the gender opposite that of a person’s biological sex.

Related: Rachel Levine must explain ‘misinformation’ over ‘gender-affirming care.’ “Levine is using semantics and hyperbole to effectively control and shutdown the debate around quite graphic and irreversible treatments for minors, just as the progressive left has done with abortion. We as the taxpaying public must support these procedures. We must even pay for them; however, we must never speak of what is actually involved (surgery and irreversible hormone treatments) with them because people will die, or something. Levine must be held accountable — in front of Congress, on the record — and answer how exactly and specifically the American public is being ‘misinformed’ about physical and mental medical treatments of minors who believe they are non-binary. What does transition involve, exactly? Levine needs to be specific. How are irreversible hormone and puberty treatments being mischaracterized? Does Levine believe in top or bottom surgery for minors, and are medical centers that perform such procedures misinforming the public writ large about what those surgeries involve (such as the removal of premature breasts or genitals) and how the human body functions afterwards?”

THERE’S A LOT TO UNPACK IN THIS HEADLINE: ‘Toxic’ influencer Andrew Tate is arrested in human trafficking raid at his luxury villa in Romania after PIZZA BOX in his smug video clap-back at Greta Thunberg gave away his location.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Airlines Insist Flights Aren’t Being Canceled, They’re Being Held Accountable.

MARK JUDGE: America needs a rock ‘n’ roll rebellion against woke censors.

In Transformer, Doonan, a gay man, celebrates how, in the glory days of rock ‘n’ roll, anyone could sing about anything. As Doonan writes: “The astonishing thing about glam rock — the style and the music — was its aggressive heterosexuality.” As critic Dave Hickey pointed out at the time, “The world of Hollywood is filled with gay people trying to act straight while the world of rock’n’roll is filled with straight people trying to act gay.”

Now, of course, you can’t have any “appropriation” that allows an artist to explore a new style. In an absurd and sad 2018 article, Washington Post pop critic Chris Richards argued that musicians should self-censor themselves in deference to prevailing political orthodoxies. Richards describes a band that so loved a record by an R&B artist that they wanted to cover it. They finally decided not to: “A band of white indie rockers performing the songs of a black R & B singer? No way. It would be seen as cultural appropriation.”

Fortunately, these white rockers never got the memo:

I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER WORD ABOUT GLENN REYNOLDS’ CARBON FOOTPRINT: Biden Has Multi-Trillion Dollar Spending Bill Flown to Caribbean Vacation So He Can Sign It.

Related: Biden Heads On Vacation Amid Multiple Crises At Home. Media Gives Him Different Coverage Than It Did Ted Cruz.

As John Nolte likes to say, Democrats sure got it good.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Why Did You Stop Going to the Movies? “Hollywood, Inc. rallied to defeat President Donald Trump in 2020. Now, they’re stuck with an 80-year-old leader with no clue how to steer the economy out of the ditch. That’s dramatically impacting Hollywood as a whole, and even streaming services are crunching some serious numbers of late. It’s also forcing potential movie goers to make some tough choices. Food … or film tickets?”

HOW PETER JACKSON BROKE UP THE BEATLES AND USED AI TO MAKE REVOLVER BETTER THAN EVER:

Beginning with Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles recorded most of their instruments and vocals to separate tracks. So for [Giles] Martin, boosting the volume of a guitar or organ from Abbey Road or “The White Album” was probably as simple as moving a fader. But on earlier albums, the band often combined a few sounds to the same track. The effect was to lock multiple voices or instruments in place together, leaving no easy way for future remixers to tweak just one by itself.

Non-audiophiles may ask: Who cares? The original Revolver sounded good enough to top lists of the greatest albums ever made. Did it really need the overhaul?

Arguably, yes. For all the Beatles’ genius, they never imagined a day when their music would mainly be played through earbuds. The stereo versions of their early albums were mixed for novelty, with extreme separation between sounds in the right and left speakers, sometimes to the point of lopsidedness. (The Beatles themselves preferred the mono mixes, which are harder to find these days.) “Taxman” was a notorious offender, with bass, drums, and rhythm guitar on one side, and for much of the song, just tambourine and cowbell on the other. It’s been reported to cause dizziness in headphone listeners. For 56 years, there was no way to separate those instruments and rearrange them across the stereo field.

But then Peter Jackson took up the case. A few years ago, the Lord of the Rings director was hired to sift through 60 hours of unused footage from the 1970 Beatles documentary Let It Be and cut it into his own movie — 2021’s Get Back. Large sections of that footage had been marked as unusable because the band’s conversations were drowned out on the mono audio tapes by the sound of their instruments: John, Paul, and George had deliberately hidden their sensitive discussions from the original doc crew by noodling on their guitars. Jackson asked the engineers at his production company, WingNut Films, to see what they could salvage, and so they developed their own machine-learning “de-mixing” software capable of splitting up interlocked sounds. It worked so well decoupling music from speech on the Let It Be audio tapes that Get Back, which had been planned as a two-hour film, grew into an eight-hour TV miniseries (a hit for Disney+ last fall and, by some estimations, the best rock documentary ever).

Martin wondered if Jackson’s software could also be used to isolate the sounds on the Beatles’ early studio albums. Could it ever! And so now we have a remixed Revolver, a “Taxman” that won’t make anybody sick, and, presumably, boxed-set remixes of the band’s other six albums on the way for the 2023-2028 holiday seasons. At last, the most valuable music catalogue in history will be AirPod compliant.

Hopefully Jackson’s technology will eventually filter down to the prosumer level, as the currently available demix technology is still filled with plenty of noticeable audio artifacts: How to Rebuild a Recorded Song When You’ve Lost the Multitracks.

WAS BUTTIGIEG ASLEEP AT THE SWITCH FOR SOUTHWEST AIRLINES’ HOLIDAY IMPLOSION?

Now, the question that will be most interesting to those who follow politics is: How much of this is Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg’s fault? And it’s not just Republicans asking this question. David Sirota, a former speechwriter for Bernie Sanders, argues that Buttigieg was asleep at the switch . . . not all that unlike the time the ports on the West Coast got snarled and the nation’s freight-rail system came to the brink of halting:

Southwest Airlines stranding thousands of Americans during the holiday season is not some unexpected crisis nor the normal consequence of inclement weather — and federal officials are not powerless bystanders. Before the debacle, attorneys general from both parties were sounding alarms about regulators’ lax oversight of the airline industry, imploring them and congressional lawmakers to crack down.

The warnings came just before Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appeared on national television insisting travel would improve by the holidays, and before Southwest executives — flush with cash from a government bailout — announced new dividend payouts to shareholders, while paying themselves millions of dollars.

Four months before Southwest’s mass cancellation of flights, 38 state attorneys general wrote to congressional leaders declaring that Buttigieg’s agency “failed to respond and to provide appropriate recourse” to thousands of consumer complaints about airlines customer service.

Back in September, I noted that Buttigieg played a surprisingly minor role in the Biden administration’s efforts to avert the threat of a freight-rail strike, taking a back seat to Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh. Looking over Buttigieg’s schedule and public events, it seemed like Buttigieg was treating his job like a de facto presidential campaign. (In mid September, the Hill wrote, “Some Democrats are speculating about what a second Buttigieg run could look like.”)

One of Buttigieg’s campaign-esque stops last fall was on James Corden’s Late Late Show, where he pledged to the host, “I think it’s going to get better by the holidays. We’re really pressing the airlines to deliver better service. So many people have been delayed, been canceled – it’s happened to me! Several times, this summer! And the fact is, they need to be ready to service the tickets they’re selling.”

As Bush said to “Brownie,” “Heck of a job!”

Pete’s got his private jets to fly. Why should he care about how you’re going to get home?

RIP: Soccer legend Pelé has died at 82, AP reports.

SAM BANKMAN-FRIED MET WITH BIG SHORT AUTHOR MICHAEL LEWIS DURING HOUSE ARREST: REPORT.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is working with a popular journalist to turn the story of his crypto exchange’s rise and fall into a bestseller.

Bankman-Fried was visited by Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and The Big Short, last Friday, according to the New York Post. Lewis spent several hours at SBF’s parents’ home, where he had been forced to live after paying a $250 million bail last week. Lewis has been in talks with Bankman-Fried for over six months, including discussions before the crypto mogul’s business collapse. These meetings are occurring as SBF is held on bail and faces trial over charges of fraud.

Bankman-Fried’s discussions were revealed in a letter from Lewis’s publishing agency, which had pitched a book on Bankman-Fried in the last year and his success as an investor. SBF’s rise to fame was “more than sufficient for a signature Michael Lewis book,” Lewis’s publicists argued.

Soon to be a major motion picture! Hollywood FTX Frenzy As Michael Lewis Reveals He Spent Six Months With Founder.

Related: In between visits with Lewis, “Martin Shkreli Offers Sam Bankman-Fried Blunt Prison Advice.” “If convicted, SBF could spend several decades behind bars. Now, Martin Shkreli, who also did time behind bars, wants to help him out. ‘Sam isn’t exactly going to be somebody that fits into prison. My advice for him includes shaving his head. My advice for him includes deepening his voice,’ the man known as ‘Pharma Bro’ said during a conversation with Laura Shin. Shkreli also believes the fact SBF is ‘effeminate’ and lacks knowledge of ‘criminal culture’ is going to be a problem for the former crypto mogul. One suggestion from Shkreli? Listen to a lot of rap music ASAP.”

RECORD TIME: Woke guy goes from “trans surgeries on minors aren’t happening” to “they are happening and it’s good” in record time. Watch the transformation right before your eyes!

HE’S TOO BUSY TRYING TO SOLVE AMERICA’S RACIST HIGHWAYS: Impotent Buttigieg Huffs and Puffs at Flailing Southwest Airlines.

‘WHOOPI, THAT’S WHAT THE YELLOW STARS WERE FOR:’ Fox News Guest Rips Goldberg’s ‘Ignorance’ After Holocaust Comments.

“Or they’re just gonna think you’re dumb,” Campos-Duffy replied.

“Exactly,” [Newsweek editor Batya Ungar-Sargon] said, before referencing the yellow stars of David the Nazis forced Jews to wear. “There’s just a deep ignorance there. The mistake she keeps making over and over is saying, if a Nazi showed up here and I was standing next to… Jews who have white skin, they would know I’m Black. They wouldn’t know they’re Jewish. And it’s like, Whoopi that’s what the yellow stars were for. Of course they see them as a separate race.”

Jeff Dunetz adds: Whoopi Apologizes (Again)—Whoopi Leave The Holocaust Alone! “I hope ABC doesn’t fire her from The View. That will make her a martyr, and she doesn’t deserve to have people feel bad for her. And who knows? Maybe this time, she really is contrite. As she continues her career, we will find out. My Friends at Clash Daily also covered the Whoopi idiocy but from the perspective of the Auschwitz Memorial. It’s worth your time to give it a read by clicking here.”

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Scientific American looks at the racist stigmatization of black women’s bodies and obesity.

So we already know which graphic we’re going to use with this post … the shot from Cosmopolitan declaring “This is healthy!” as an obese black woman holds a yoga pose. We specify black women because the fight against obesity has racist roots, according to Scientific American, which is one of those magazines that used to have some credibility. Who’s stigmatizing black women’s bodies, anyway? It hasn’t cost Lizzo her share of fame and fortune.

It turns out this was published in 2020, but Scientific American thought they’d tweet it out again. Sabrina Strings and Lindo Bacon explain that “prescribing weight loss to black women ignores barriers to their health.”

Black women have also been identified as the subgroup with the highest body mass index (BMI) in the U.S., with four out of five classified as either “overweight” or “obese.” Many doctors have claimed that Black women’s “excess” weight is the main cause of their poor health outcomes, often without fully testing or diagnosing them. While there has been a massive public health campaign urging fat people to eat right, eat less and lose weight, Black women have been specifically targeted.

This heightened concern about their weight is not new; it reflects the racist stigmatization of Black women’s bodies. Nearly three centuries ago scientists studying race argued that African women were especially likely to reach dimensions that the typical European might scorn. The men of Africa were said to like their women robust, and the European press featured tales of cultural events loosely described as festivals intended to fatten African women to the desired, “unwieldy” size.

Strings has also published a book entitled, “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia,” if you want to know more.

It’s a curious choice for a topic in 2020 or 2022, considering that last year, Scientific American explored: Why Are People with Obesity More Vulnerable to COVID?

Related: Obesity may reduce effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.

More: We Need to Stop Overlooking One Politically Incorrect COVID-19 Death Factor:

The United States has the 13th highest COVID-19 death rate relative to population. Many different factors shaped death rates in the pandemic. But there’s one uncomfortable reason that the U.S. likely experienced more COVID-19 deaths that has largely been ignored because it’s politically incorrect.

Out-of-control obesity rates and the “body positivity” movement predating the pandemic have left the U.S. population disproportionately vulnerable to COVID-19 compared to other countries. The U.S. ranks No. 12 in obesity worldwide, one of the highest rates among developed countries. One study found that 90% of worldwide COVID-19 deaths occurred in countries with high obesity rates.

Bill Maher concurs:

AREA SPINSTER DIVES FOR FAINTING COUCH: WaPo’s Taylor Lorenz Is Bent Out Of Shape Again, You Guys.

The comparisons were happening so frequently that Lorenz felt the need to comment on it, making the entire situation exponentially worse for her and so much more fun for spectators of Twitter wars (a modern bloodsport). Lorenz had to “spend all day dealing [with]” what she felt was an “ongoing misogynistic hate campaign” fostered by fans of Fox News anchor and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson and “Libs Of TikTok.” She shared an update to her Twitter — which I thought had been cancelled — on her big feels.

Apparently all the attention Lorenz was getting was “overwhelming” and she’s having a tough time dealing with the “level or hate [and] threats” she’s been getting. It’s unclear if the hate and threats were as a result of her finding her doppleganger in Raichik, or over the fact she doxxed Raichik back in April 2022, almost destroying her life and career.

The Washington Post published personal information on Raichik that helped people online find her address. While Twitter users were quick to point out the aesthetic similarities between Lorenz and the founder of “Libs of TikTok,” most of the hatred aimed at the social media celebrity and sometimes-journalist stemmed from her treatment of Raichik.

Flashback: Are There Any Adults at the Washington Post?

YOU AND I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH SCARCITY: Global economy is heading into a decade of low growth, economist says.

“The reopening of the Chinese economy is certainly going to give a significant boost to growth all over the world, but also — and I think it is a very important factor — German exporters, French exporters have felt the pinch of the lockdown and the weakening of the profit environment in China, and this is certainly going to help a lot.”

However, he suggested that this boost will not come close to bringing growth levels close to where they were in the years before the pandemic for a good while to come.

“I think that we are probably going to move into a decade of very, very poor growth in which developed economies are going to find themselves lucky with 1% growth per annum, if they are able to achieve it, and what is more unfortunate than everything else is with elevated levels of inflation,” Lacalle said.

“I think that we are living the backlash of massive stimulus packages that were implemented in 2020 and 2021. That has not delivered the kind of potential growth that many economists expected.”

Unexpectedly! Why, it’s as if “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” as a befuddled senior citizen once said.

FORMER POPE BENEDICT IS ‘VERY SICK,’ POPE FRANCIS SAYS.

OF COURSE: All the great women in history were actually men.

One of the great, pesky questions of human history has finally been answered. For thousands of years , as we all know, most great accomplishments were the works of men. But now and then there was an outlier, a woman doing great things. Esther in the Bible, Joan of Arc or Elizabeth I of England. It made no sense — but today, thanks to the tireless work of gender studies departments we know the truth: those weren’t women at all. They were actually men.

This weekend we had further confirmation of this revelation from the New York Times which ran a piece revealing that Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, was a trans man.

We know this because sometimes Alcott went by “Lou” and mentioned having a “boys’ spirit.”

I’m sold. I mean Alcott’s work shows an intimate and profound understanding of girlhood and womanhood. Who understands those things better than men?

But why stop with Alcott?

Indeed! The Washington Free Beacon’s 2022 Man of the Year: J.K. Rowling.

BIG ‘BROTHER’ IS WATCHING! Rachel Levine wants tech companies to censor gender-related ‘misinfo:’ Dr. Rachel Levine slammed after calling for Big Tech to clean up ‘misinformation’ on sex change.

I’LL HAVE WHATEVER THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE IS SMOKING: No, soft-on-crime liberalism isn’t fueling San Francisco’s drug crisis. Libertarianism is.

Many conservative commentators attribute the city’s drug problems to its political liberalism, but this is incorrect. San Franciscans’ liberalism is why the government offers generous health and social care services, without which overdose deaths would be higher, not lower.

What bedevils the city instead is its libertarian, individualistic culture. Since at least the 19th century, Americans have come to San Francisco to be free of traditional constraints back East, to reinvent themselves, to escape the small-mindedness of small towns and to find themselves. This culture underlies the city’s entrepreneurialism, artistic energy and tolerance for diversity in all forms.

But this has a downside when it comes to addiction, which thrives in such a cultural milieu. San Francisco has long been one of the booziest cities in the country as measured by metrics such as bars per capita or percentage of income spent on alcohol. The psychedelic drug revolution and much of the cannabis culture were born in the Bay Area. The “new” crisis around fentanyl is thus not as novel as portrayed: Heavy use of substances has always been part of how San Francisco defines freedom and the good life.

But while addictive substance use brings short-term pleasures, it brings long-term misery and a reduction in freedom. The libertarian assumption that given freedom and tolerance, everyone will rationally and productively pursue their self-interest cannot explain why a starving person would, for example, forgo food in exchange for fentanyl or cocaine.

I hope the guys at Reason magazine are properly ashamed of themselves now for single-handedly ruining San Francisco.

BETHLEHEM’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Mary Holding Out Hope For 4th Wise Man Bearing An Air Fryer.

WHAT ARE 2022’S BEST MOVIES? You’ll be shocked if you look at the New York Times’ and legacy media lists.

The most glaring omission is the old-fashioned, feel-good blockbuster – “Top Gun: Maverick.” Why would snooty cinéastes laud a film that not only got Americans back into theaters after a devastating pandemic but also grossed over $1.4 billion globally?

Why would they want to include a film that got two Golden Globe nominations, as well as the selection of “best film” by the National Board of Review, the non-profit group of New York City area film buffs whose awards are often a harbinger of films that will take home Oscars?

Why would they mention a movie whose box-office superstar, Tom Cruise, insisted that it open in theaters, saying that a streaming-only premiere was “never going to happen”? Cruise prevailed, though the film’s debut was postponed four times before finally arriving in theaters last May.

The Times was not the only major newspaper to diss the year’s top-grossing film. TG:M did not make the top ten lists of critics at The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and New Yorker. (Atlantic magazine gave it “honorable mention.”) But among the nation’s leading newspapers, only the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday chose it as the year’s best film. Calling it “a blockbuster in the best sense of the word,” Hornaday wrote that it is a “big, old-fashioned movie-movie that outclassed the first movie in its smart writing, canny casting, authentic emotion (still crying, Iceman) and bold, beautiful production values.”

As Sonny Bunch writes: ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Should Win Best Picture. “Some will argue that Top Gun: Maverick doesn’t ‘deserve’ the Oscar, that it wasn’t the ‘best’ movie of the year. I’d, frankly, agree with that. It’s not even at the top of my own list, and it’s likely to be up against the movie I do think is the best of the year (“Tár) in the best picture category. But to quote another Oscar favorite: Deserve’s got nothing to do with it. This is a moment for self-preservation, pure and simple, not just for a Hollywood struggling to retain relevance in an increasingly niche-ified entertainment universe but also for The Academy Awards themselves, which have seen ratings decline year after year and can’t expect the rousing triumph of Coda to remind people that, hey, the Oscars are a thing.”

QUESTION ASKED: What’s behind Southwest Airlines’s nightmare meltdown?

USDOT says it’ll review Southwest’s “unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays.” People in the front of this SW cancellation line Monday in Milwaukee said they were waiting 5 hours. A woman on hold with the airline showed a 6-hour call in progress.

Fortunately, Biden’s secretary of transportation is on the case: Buttigieg speaks with Southwest Airlines CEO amid mass cancellations.

“This afternoon, Secretary Buttigieg spoke with the CEO of Southwest Airlines and conveyed that he expects the airline to live up to the commitments it has made to passengers, including providing meal vouchers, refunds and hotel accommodations for those experiencing significant delays or cancellations that came about as a result of Southwest’s decisions and actions,” the department said. “Southwest, as all airlines, is also obligated to provide a cash refund for passengers whose flights were cancelled and decided not to travel.”

Buttigieg also spoke to union leaders who represent Southwest pilots and flight attendants, some of whom were also stranded and forced to book hotel rooms after cancellations.

“He also conveyed to Southwest CEO that he expects Southwest to do right by their pilots and flight attendants — and all their workers — in these situations,” the department said in a statement.

Do right by their pilots? A Buttigieg divided against itself cannot stand!

REPORT: THE STRUGGLE IS REAL FOR CNN’S NEW YEAR’S EVE HOSTS. “CNN Plans to Sober Up Boozy New Year’s Eve Coverage.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Californians Brace For Deadly 50-Degree Cold Front.