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Exposed: Extreme Right Wing Physicians’ Group Behind Anti-Trans Laws

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The American College of Pediatricians, a small, right-wing extremist group of physicians who for two decades has struggled to gain traction finds itself for the first time with more power than it has ever had as the far-right takes greater hold on America.

But along with their new-found power comes a deep dive into at least 15 years worth of their internal documents, the result of the group reportedly publishing a link to its own unsecured Google drive in April, which WIRED uncovered and reported on back in May.

The Washington Post combed through 10,000 of the group’s documents, and on Thursday publishing its exposé on the American College of Pediatricians, which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an anti-LGBTQ hate group.

“The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) is a fringe anti-LGBTQ hate group that masquerades as the premier U.S. association of pediatricians to push anti-LGBTQ junk science, primarily via far-right conservative media and filing amicus briefs in cases related to gay adoption and marriage equality,” SPLC writes in its extensive report.

READ MORE: ‘Lying Through Their Teeth’: White House Slams Fox News Over ‘Grooming and Pedophilia’ LGBTQ Pride Flag Article

According to The Washington Post, the American College of Pediatricians is a “small group of conservative doctors” that “has sought to shape the nation’s most contentious policies on abortion and transgender rights by promoting views rejected by the medical establishment as scientific fact.”

The American College of Pediatricians promotes the discredited practice of “conversion therapy,” which has been called “torture” by some who have been subjected to it. Conversion therapy, which purports to change a human being’s sexual orientation or gender identity, is outlawed in several states, while most credible medical organizations have denounced it.

The group’s success comes at the expense of transgender youth.

“The organization’s quest to ban the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors has culminated in a string of recent legislative wins following lobbying in at least eight states, internal documents show,” The Post reports. “Arkansas first enacted such a law in 2021, after Michelle Cretella, then executive director of the American College of Pediatricians, described such care as ‘experimental and dangerous‘ to legislators. A federal appeals court temporarily blocked it.”

READ MORE: School’s LGBTQ Pride Celebration Destroyed by Students Tearing Down Posters, Chanting Their Pronouns Are ‘USA’

“Versions of the law have since passed at least 20 other state legislatures, including Florida, Idaho, Indiana, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Missouri, Montana, Texas, North Dakota and Louisiana this spring alone; some face court challenges and one was vetoed by a governor. Similar bills are making their way through legislatures in North Carolina and Ohio.”

In other words, lawmakers in about half the country are working to harm transgender children, with the help of the American College of Pediatricians.

Also among the American College of Pediatricians’ more dangerous efforts over the years have been its attacks on homosexuality.

“Internal records from 2010 show how the group tied homosexuality to health risks — even death — in a letter campaign to educators, citing a 1991 study to demonstrate that for each year adolescents delay ‘self-labeling as ‘gay’,’ the risk of suicide decreases by 20 percent.”

That claim we know today is false.

“According to more recent research, suicide risk rises with therapy directed at changing sexual orientation. Lesbian, gay and bisexual people who experienced conversion therapy were almost twice as likely to think about suicide and to attempt suicide compared with peers who had not experienced conversion therapy, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law,” The Post adds.

2010 may seem like light years ago, but LGBTQ rights were very much a large part of the national conversation back then.

In 2010, President Barack Obama directed the federal government to extend spousal benefits to same-sex couples. A critical portion of the anti-LGBTQ federal law, the Defense of Marriage Act, was ruled unconstitutional by a federal court. President Obama also signed into law the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that year. And a federal judge ruled California’s infamous Prop 8 was unconstitutional.

But also in 2010, just as LGBTQ people were starting to be able to access the rights and recognition they had always been denied, the American College of Pediatricians sent a letter, The Post reports, “to 14,800 public school superintendents [that] urged school officials not to affirm any student expressing homosexuality. It directed them to a website operated by the group that pushed ‘sexual reorientation therapy’ for those with ‘unwanted homosexual attractions.'”

READ MORE: Marco Meltdown: Rubio Furious America Focused on Trump Indictment Instead of ‘Destruction of the Family’

The Heritage Foundation, a once-vaunted right-wing think tank that has succumbed to pro-Trump MAGA far-right extremism, is a big fan of the American College of Pediatricians.

“They have had the courage to take stands in court and to speak as medical professionals in relating their experience when it comes to questions of human dignity in unborn life, freedom of conscience, and the protection of children,” Roger Severino, Heritage’s vice president of domestic policy, told The Post.

Severino, a far-right religious extremist, served in the Trump administration as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights.

In 2020 Severino, as The New York Times reported, “finalized a regulation that will erase protections for transgender patients against discrimination by doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies, a move announced on the four-year anniversary of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando and in the middle of Pride Month.”

In its report on Thursday, The Washington Post adds that Severino “said [he] relies on the American College of Pediatricians for scientific expertise.”

Amplifying far-right wing anger that the LGBTQ Pride flag was hanging from the White House during President Joe Biden’s historic Pride celebration over the weekend, the Heritage Foundation lashed out, attacking the entire LGBTQ community and the Biden administration.

On Wednesday the Heritage Foundation declared that the LGBTQ Pride flag “does not represent anything good and it certainly does not represent America.”

 

Image by David Prasad via Flickr and a CC license

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The List of Who Donald Trump Has ‘Pledged to Punish,’ According to One of His Targets

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Vice President Kamala Harris, now the former Democratic presidential nominee, frequently said on the campaign trail: “On day one if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemy’s list. When elected, I will walk in with a to do list.”

Donald Trump is now President-elect and, according to Politico, he has “a lengthy inventory of people he’s pledged to punish.”

“For years, Trump has peppered his speeches and social media posts with vengeful calls for his political opponents, his critics and members of the media to be prosecuted, locked up, deported and even executed. In the waning weeks of the 2024 campaign, he escalated those promises of retaliation to a fever pitch,” Politico reports Wednesday. “Now that he’s won, he has both a popular mandate — and the power — to begin implementing his platform of punishment.”

Trump “will be emboldened by a Supreme Court ruling that grants presidents broad immunity from criminal accountability after they leave office. And he is expected to be surrounded by aides more willing to dispense with norms to carry out his wishes.”

READ MORE: ‘Be the Guardrails of Democracy’: Liz Cheney and Other Never-Trumpers Suggest Path Forward

Back in March of 2023, Trump declared, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

Who’s on his list? According to Politico, nearly two dozen individuals, largely in the legal and political spectrum, along with dozens of intelligence specialists, and unnamed journalists:

President Joe Biden
Vice President Kamala Harris
Former President Barack Obama
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi
New York Attorney General Letitia James
Manhattan Justice Arthur Engoron
Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney
Special Counsel Jack Smith
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg
Former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley
Former FBI Director James Comey
Hunter Biden and the rest of the Biden family
Former FBI special agent Peter Strzok
Former FBI attorney Lisa Page
Rep. Adam Schiff (Now Senator-elect Schiff)
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
Former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Mark Pomerantz
Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen
U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd
Rep. Jamaal Bowman
51 intelligence professionals who signed letter about Hunter Biden laptop
Members of the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack
Unspecified people engaged in election fraud
POLITICO reporters, editors and publisher

It’s not just Politico.

Trump has often called the mainstream media, the “enemy of the people.”

In his victory speech early Wednesday morning, Trump referred to the press as, “the enemy camp,” according to The Guardian.

“Introducing his running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, Trump said: “I told JD to go into the enemy camp. He just goes: OK. Which one? CNN? MSNBC? He’s like the only guy who looks forward to going on, and then just absolutely obliterates them.”

READ MORE: Trump Closes Campaign With Misogynistic Slur, Violent Rhetoric Against Women

 

 

 

 

 

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‘Be the Guardrails of Democracy’: Liz Cheney and Other Never-Trumpers Suggest Path Forward

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Never-Trumpers, the conservatives and Republicans who refused to support Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, who chose country over party and, in some cases, have put themselves in possible danger to support Vice President Kamala Harris’s run for the presidency, have some thoughts about the Election Day results—and what, they say, is required of Americans who oppose now President-elect Donald Trump.

At the top of the Never-Trump list is Liz Cheney, the former U.S. Congresswoman who lost her seat after taking one as vice chair of the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. The daughter of a former U.S. Vice President and Secretary of Defense, Cheney chose to cross the aisle and put aside her political beliefs to help protect democracy.

She says that battle must continue, and it will take all of us.

READ MORE: Trump Closes Campaign With Misogynistic Slur, Violent Rhetoric Against Women

“Our nation’s democratic system functioned last night and we have a new President-elect,” Cheney wrote on social media. “All Americans are bound, whether we like the outcome or not, to accept the results of our elections. We now have a special responsibility, as citizens of the greatest nation on earth, to do everything we can to support and defend our Constitution, preserve the rule of law, and ensure that our institutions hold over these coming four years. Citizens across this country, our courts, members of the press and those serving in our federal, state and local governments must now be the guardrails of democracy.”

George Conway, an attorney who started the anti-Trump Super PAC named Anti-Psychopath PAC, offered several thoughts.

“We are engulfed by depravity. But it’s more important than ever not to succumb to it,” he wrote.

And he issued this warning: “I’ve always found ‘kakistocracy’ to be an interesting word. I think more and more people will come to appreciate the word in the near future.”

Kakistocracy can be defined as, “government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state.”

Bill Kristol pointed to his piece today at The Bulwark, “What Will Trump’s Win Mean.”

He wrote: “As Churchill put it: ‘In Defeat: Defiance.’ We’ll have to keep our nerve and our principles…We’ll have to fight politically and to resist lawfully. We’ll have to do our best to limit the damage. And we’ll have to lay the groundwork for future recovery.”

And added: “‘Hope under adverse circumstances.’ That’s what we need. Hope followed by thought and action, all to help bring about a new day for a great nation which has, for now, made a terrible mistake.”

READ MORE: ‘Dire Implications’: Trump’s Possible Vaccine Ban Could Spark US, Global Health Crisis

The Atlantic’s David Frum offered this story, invoking the 1942 classic film, “Casablanca“:

“Eight years ago this night, my son asked me: ‘What do we do now?’ I answered, ‘We walk to the bar, strike up the band, and sing The Marseillaise.’ These past few months, my plan for 2025 was to retire from political journalism. Seems I’ll have to make new plans.”

Joe Walsh, the Tea Party Republican turned independent podcaster who regularly criticizes Republicans and Democrats, offered this: “I was wrong. The people spoke. Donald Trump has won. I’m devastated. I’m sad. But I accept the will of the people. I accept the results of the election. Because I love our democracy. Because I’m an American. That’s what we do.”

“We’re living in a populist moment,” he added. “Trump is a bad populist, a divisive populist, a demagogue, a lying populist. But Democrats have never recognized or understood this populist moment.”

“I’m not surprised because I’ve spoken often on how out of touch Democrats have grown with working class America,” Walsh continued. “But I am surprised because I didn’t think a majority of Americans would put such an utterly horrible human being back in the White House.”

RELATED: ‘She Kills People’: Trump Amps Up Attack on Cheney After Violent ‘Nine Barrels’ Rhetoric

 

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‘They Tried to Kill’: Fox Host Explodes When Pushed on Unity With Left If Harris Wins

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Co-hosts on Fox News’ “The Five” discussed the possibility of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris winning the election, and were asked if they would work with the left for the good of the country. Jeanine Pirro, a former judge and district attorney refused, appeared to suggest Democrats tried to assassinate the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

“And you know,” Pirro said, “wouldn’t it have been better for them to at least spend some time saying, ‘we’re going to do this to better all of us, as opposed to just going after [him or them]?”

“But no, they’re, they’re medically, they’re medically insane,” co-host Greg Gutfeld responded, appearing to talk about Democrats.

“But if Democrats do win tonight, a House or the Senate or even the presidency, can we say we’re all gonna try to work together?” co-host and Democratic former U.S. Congressman Harold Ford Jr. asked.

“If it’ll make you feel better,” one co-host replied, as Gutfeld snarked, “You’re sleeping on the couch.”

Then Pirro interjected:  “You know what? There’s only one guy that they tried to kill,” she said, apparently referring to the two assassination attempts on Donald Trump.

READ MORE: ‘I’m Waving at You’: Kamala Harris Phone Banks, Gets Voter Watching Her Live on TV

Republicans, including Donald Trump, have baselessly tried to blame the attempted assassinations on Democrats’ “rhetoric.” In September Trump said, “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things they say about me,” referring to Democratic President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

One of the attempted assassins, Thomas Matthew Crooks, who bloodied Trump’s ear and shot one audience member to death at a Butler, Pennsylvania rally in July, was a registered Republican who once donated $15 to ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform.

Ryan Wesley Routh, an alleged attempted assassin, had been a Trump supporter in 2016 but by 2020 had turned against the Republican president. USA Today reported Routh is an unaffiliated voter who supported Democrats at times but “may have once voted for Trump.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

READ MORE: Trump Closes Campaign With Misogynistic Slur, Violent Rhetoric Against Women

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