#christopher f. rufo

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Christopher Wiggins at The Advocate:

A Houston-based surgeon stands accused of betraying the privacy of transgender kids who weren’t under his care by stealing their medical information and handing it over to a far-right extremist who vehemently opposes transgender rights. The federal indictment, unsealed on Monday, details Dr. Eithan Haim’s alleged unauthorized access and disclosure of sensitive patient information at Texas Children’s Hospital. Haim, 34, completed his residency at Baylor College of Medicine and reportedly reactivated his access to the hospital’s electronic records system in April 2023. He is accused of illicitly obtaining patient names, treatment codes, and attending physician details, which he then shared with conservative activist Christopher Rufo. Rufo, known for his hardline stance against transgender rights, used the information to publish an exposé claiming the hospital continued to provide gender-affirming care for minors despite a public announcement to halt such services.

The indictment alleges Haim accessed this sensitive information under false pretenses and with malicious intent, aiming to harm Texas Children’s Hospital. Haim’s actions followed a 2022 opinion from Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, labeling gender-affirming care for minors as a form of child abuse. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, subsequently directed the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents seeking such care for their children. In response, Texas Children’s Hospital announced it would pause all gender-affirming services for minors to comply with these directives and protect its staff and patients from potential legal consequences.

Dr. Eithan Haim, who leaked the health records of trans kids to far-right anti-LGBTQ+ extremist Christopher Rufo, is facing charges of violation patient privacy.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Madeleine Rowley

Published: Jun 25, 2024

The fragile facade of transgender ideology has cracked over the past year. Whistleblowers from within the medical profession have emerged to provide damning evidence that doctors are performing procedures based on shoddy scientific evidence under the label of “gender-affirming care,” as outlined in the WPATH Files and the Cass Review. Former patients who received “gender-affirming” care as adolescents have now detransitioned and are suing the doctors who cut off their breasts and put them on hormones that permanently damaged their bodies. Businesses ranging from Target to NFL teams are scaling back or eliminating Pride-themed merchandise and promotions. The public, too, is increasingly turning against transgender ideology. The tide is shifting.

The Left has adopted a new approach in response: political persecution of those speaking out against trans dogma. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice indicted Eithan Haim, a surgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) who exposed the hospital’s secret continued use of irreversible sex-change procedures on minors after having publicly stated that it had stopped. By indicting Haim, the DOJ is seeking to silence future whistleblowers and to signal its disregard for the mounting evidence that gender-affirming care is harmful, and often irreversible.

Haim had anonymously sent City Journal’s Christopher Rufo documents proving that doctors at TCH were still prescribing hormone replacement therapy drugs and implanting puberty blockers in minor-age patients more than a year after the hospital announced it had stopped its pediatric gender-affirming care program. A month after Rufo published his article in May 2023, federal agents from the Department of Health and Human Services knocked on Haim’s door to let him know that he was a “potential target” in an investigation of alleged violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This week, an unsealed indictment revealed that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas is charging Haim with four felony counts of violating HIPAA. A press release on the indictment alleges that Haim accessed patient information “under false pretenses and with intent to cause malicious harm to TCH.”

According to a letter written by Haim’s lawyers, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari admitted that she hadn’t reviewed the purported evidence against Haim and was instead relying on what FBI agents told her. In the same discussion, Ansari insisted that the documents Haim sent to Rufo included children’s names, but nothing in the documents Rufo saw identified any individuals. All were redacted. The prosecutor then asked Haim to admit wrongdoing, telling him that he should apologize to the families of the children who received transgender medical interventions at TCH if he wanted her to help him avoid a felony prosecution. When this tactic failed, Ansari intimated that the families would sue if she didn’t bring criminal charges.

Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy for the Heritage Foundation and a former HIPAA regulator at the Department of Health and Human Services, called Haim’s prosecution “outrageous.” As Severino notes, Haim blew the whistle in good faith in a state “where it’s illegal to do these experimental surgeries on minors.” (In September 2023, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton announced that SB 14, a new law banning gender-transition procedures for minors in Texas, had gone into effect.)

Ansari’s zeal to prosecute Haim is especially strange, given her lack of knowledge of HIPAA law, as noted in a letter from Haim’s lawyers. In the past, Ansari has prosecuted cases involving doctors who falsified patient-care documents to receive higher insurance payouts, a health-center owner who scammed Medicare out of millions based on fraudulent claims, and a pharmacist who submitted false claims to Tricare and other federal insurance programs while pocketing $22 million. Yet she moved to indict Haim in this case, despite his having no profit motive, and despite the Texas Attorney General’s Office declining to act on the case for six months.

Dan Epstein, vice president of America First Legal, a conservative public-interest law group, calls the Haim indictment an overreach of epic proportions. “The fact that Texas state attorneys decided not to bring action on this case says that there wasn’t much public concern over it,” Epstein said. “This is a policy matter, and as a prosecutor if you’re enforcing legal policy and statute, you have to exercise some level of discretion.”

Paragraph 19 of the indictment alleges that Haim’s disclosures to Rufo resulted in “financial loss” to TCH, and that Haim blew the whistle out of “malicious intent.” Haim, for his part, observes that he swore an oath to “do no harm” and believed he had a duty to disclose alleged TCH’s secret gender clinic to prevent further harm to children undergoing procedures for which there is a lack of long-term evidence of efficacy (or safety).

This week, Vanessa Sivadge, a former registered nurse at TCH, came forward as a second whistleblower, alleging not only that the hospital was running its gender clinic in secret but also that doctors were illegally billing Texas’s Medicaid program to pay for the transgender medical interventions. Sivadge had spoken with Rufo for an article last year as an anonymous whistleblower, denouncing TCH’s gender-affirming care treatments for minors. Shortly after she did that, two FBI agents knocked on her door and, according to Sivadge, told her that she was a “person of interest” in the investigation involving Haim. They threatened to “make her life difficult” if she tried to protect him.

Unfortunately, these examples of politically motivated prosecutions aren’t new and will likely continue. Case in point: the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has chosen to prosecute cases like that of 75-year-old Paulette Harlow, recently sentenced to two years in prison for a demonstration at an abortion clinic. Meantime, pro-Hamas demonstrators who violated D.C. law by covering their faces with masks and keffiyehs and defaced statues near the White House run free, and anti-Israel protesters who barricaded themselves in Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall have seen criminal charges against them dropped.

Texas Children’s Hospital is a flashpoint. Haim faces up to a decade in prison and a $250,000 fine. What happens next could discourage future whistleblowers in the health-care industry.

“When it comes to health care fraud, you prosecute those that are going to have a strong deterrent effect and where prosecutorial resources justified spending taxpayer dollars on the matter,” says Epstein. “And here, I think, this is a clear case of prosecutorial overreach.”

[exprimis]

Christopher Rufo is a known transphobe, but I read this essay in Hillsdale's Imprimis, adapted from a speech that Rufo gave, and burst into laughter.

The essay contains many serious issues, including:

Uses trans people's post-transition names, but misgenders them in the most amazing ways: "[so-and-so] now identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. [...] She works as...."

Talks about "the transgender movement" as if it was something that only started in the late 1980s

Says that the transgender activists are trying to use transgenderism to support a Marxist revolution, and then does not try to split this gender-political coalition, thereby ceding ground to his ideological opponents

Discusses percentage-based demographic statistics without talking about population sizes

Hypothalamus-produced hormones are effectively the divine spark which grants life and humanity

Describes the evils of minimally-invasive robot surgery

There are also some things which I applaud this essay for:

Discusses MTF, FTM, and non-binary perspectives

Liberally quotes trans and non-binary writers

Provides the first mainstream citation for "nullification" surgery that I've yet seen

But that's not the funny part.

The funny part is Rufo's analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

In [Susan] Stryker’s best-known essay, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” he contends that the “transsexual body” is a “technological construction” that represents a war against Western society. “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” Stryker writes. And this monster, he continues, is destined to channel its “rage and revenge” against the “naturalized heterosexual order”; against “‘traditional family values’”; and against the “hegemonic oppression” of nature itself. [...]

In 1818, Mary Shelley wrote the famous novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The premise of the book is that modern science, stripped from the constraints of ethics and nature, will end up creating monsters. “Trans-affirming” doctors are the post-modern version of the book’s protagonist, Doctor Frankenstein. [...] Jennifer Pritzker, Maureen Connolly, Blair Peters, and their ilk occupy the heights of power and prestige, but like Doctor Frankenstein they will not be able to escape the consequences of what they have created. They are condemning legions of children to a lifetime of sorrows and medical necessities, all based on dubious postmodern theories that do not meet the standard of Hippocrates’ injunction in his work Of the Epidemics: “First, do no harm.” Although individuals can be nullified, nature cannot. No matter how advanced trans pharmaceuticals and surgeries become, the biological reality of man and woman cannot be abolished; the natural limitations of God’s Creation cannot be transcended. The attempt to do so will elicit the same heartbreak and alienation captured in the final scene of Mary Shelley’s novel: the hulking monster, shunned by society and betrayed by his father, filled with despair and drifting off into the ice floes—a symbol of the consequence of Promethean hubris.

Did Rufo even read Frankenstein? The tragedy did not come from the creation of The Creature, who Dr. Frankenstein and society shunned because of his looks. The tragedy was engendered by social rejection, and by physical attacks upon The Creature. It was this violence that led The Creature to swear revenge on Frankenstein and humanity, not some quirk of monstrous morality.

If Rufo wants to avoid the tragedies brought by shunning and rejection, instead of demonizing trans people and their sculptors, he should advocate for acceptance of ugliness, and for improvements in surgical technique to avoid that rejection.

[z0mbiechylde]

How the Trans Movement Conquered American Life | The Transgender Empire This cancerous tumor must be cut out of human society. It is sickening what’s being done to vulnerable people.

[1americanconservative]

Christopher F. Rufo 

@realchrisrufo

EXCLUSIVE: Kamala Harris plagiarized at least a dozen sections of her criminal-justice book, Smart on Crime, according to a new investigation. The current vice president even lifted material from Wikipedia.

We have the receipts.

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

"There is a creeping sense that our society has turned upside-down. Healthy debate is replaced by activist hysterics. Speech is declared violence; violence is excused as speech. Masculinity is condemned as “toxic,” while men in dresses are celebrated in the public square. It feels as if we are in the midst of a society-wide mental breakdown.

One might be tempted to laugh at these manifestations as the outbursts of small but vocal minority, but the compromised health of our body politic is no trivial concern. A strange new pattern of psychological dysfunction has infiltrated all our institutions, from humdrum bureaucracies to the highest offices. Wherever we turn, that creeping feeling sets in: our society is sick; our institutions are out of balance; our public life has been consumed by a cluster of disorders that appeal to our worst instincts and derange our most vital social functions." Christopher F. Rufo

[bllsbailey]

Report: Harris Accused Of Plagiarizing Co-Authored 2009 Book 'Smart On Crime'

Several paragraphs from Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s 2009 book “Smart on Crime” were found to closely resemble—or exactly match—wording from other sources, leading to accusations of plagiarism against the vice president.

Together with ghostwriter Joan O’C. Hamilton, who told the New York Post outlet when contacted on Monday that she was shocked to hear about the alleged copying, Harris, who was the district attorney of San Francisco at the time, penned the book advocating for a reform-minded approach to criminal prosecution.

Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, released the claims on Monday and attributed them to research conducted by Austrian “plagiarism hunter” Stefan Weber. Rufo shared screenshots of five instances on X where the book’s wording closely mirrors other sources.

In all instances, the purported source material predated the vice president’s book publication date.

The five side-by-side excerpts suggest that Harris may have copied text from a 2008 Associated Press article, a 2008 draft of a Wikipedia article, a 2000 Bureau of Justice Assistance report, a 2004 Urban Institute report, and a 2007 award press release from John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

The original verbiage’s source is mentioned in footnotes in at least two of the cases; however, quote marks are not used around the words that seem to have been copied, and in other cases, like the Urban Institute study, passages seem to be completely uncredited.

In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the… pic.twitter.com/9FpsxQE8Sz— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024

“Kamala Harris fabricated a source reference, inventing a nonexistent page number. The self-promotional content from Goodwill Industries was copied verbatim without citing the source (Goodwill Industries was her ‘primary partner’ on in [sic] the ‘Back on Track’ program),” Weber claimed. “In many other instances, even when a source was cited with a footnote, the text was directly copied and pasted without using quotation marks. Quotation marks would have been the most transparent and honest approach, also in non-academic books. Further signs of dishonesty may be evident when sources were copied but specific details were altered, such as replacing a Subway store owner with a sandwich shop clerk (p. 124) or highlighting Southeast Asia in the context of the US gang problem (p. 184).”

Nevertheless, politicians have survived similar scandals in the past. For example, former President Joe Biden misappropriated the family background and public statements of British politician Neil Kinnock during his 1987 presidential campaign and plagiarized a paper in his first year of law school.

Stay informed! Receive breaking news blasts directly to your inbox for free. Subscribe here. https://www.oann.com/alerts

[sutrala]

(NaturalNews) Writer and filmmaker Christopher F. Rufo and fellow writer Benjamin Roberts penned a piece for Rufo's Substack page verifying, they say, that some...

[prensabolivariana]

“Con 5.000 dólares podría comprar comida de verdad”, ironizó un comentarista. El periodista e investigador Christopher F. Rufo ofreció esta semana una recompensa de 5.000 dólares por pruebas que confirmen las afirmaciones de que inmigrantes haitianos están comiendo mascotas en el estado de Ohio (EE.UU.), pero tuvo que precisar sus condiciones para evitar abusos. Continue reading “¡No coman gatos!”: Periodista aclara polémica recompensa sobre migrantes en EE.UU.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alyssa Tirrell at MMFA:

Dr. Eithan Haim, a former medical resident at Texas Children's Hospital, was indicted in May for allegedly illegally accessing trans patients’ records, which he subsequently shared with Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo.  Right-wing media figures have since defended Haim and brought him in for interviews, often equating the care allegedly provided at Texas Children's Hospital — such as the prescription of "puberty blockers" — with harm or mutilation and alleging that Haim is the target of political persecution.  The campaign has successfully raised both Haim's profile and at least $888,865, which he claims will be used for both his legal defense and “offensive legal action against those who have abused their professional responsibility in service of radical transgender ideology.” 

Haim allegedly illegally accessed trans patients’ records

On February 18, 2022, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an opinion that qualified youth gender-affirming care as "child abuse", prompting Texas Children's Hospital to announce that it would stop proving such care. Although the opinion was not legally binding, the hospital released a statement announcing that it would stop prescribing gender-affirming hormone therapies. The statement, which also alluded to recent measures that Gov. Greg Abbott had taken against families of children receiving gender-affirming care, added that “this step was taken to safeguard our healthcare professionals and impacted families from potential legal ramifications.” [Office of the Attorney General of Texas, 2/18/22; American Civil Liberties Union, 2/23/22; The Washington Post, 3/8/22]

In late spring 2023, Dr. Eithan Haim allegedly accessed the records of trans patients at Texas Children's Hospital and shared them with Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo. Haim, a resident at Baylor College of Medicine who had previously conducted rotations at Texas Children's Hospital, shared redacted files with Rufo that allegedly demonstrated that the hospital was continuing to provide gender-affirming services to minors. [Houston Public Media, 6/10/24; U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of Texas, 6/17/24; United States District Court of the Southern District of Texas, 5/29/24]

On June 2, 2023, a Texas bill restricting gender-affirming care for children was signed into law. S.B. 14 prohibited “the provision to certain children of procedures and treatments for gender transitioning, gender reassignment, or gender dysphoria” as well as “the use of public money or public assistance to provide those procedures and treatments.” The law went into effect on September 1 of that year. [Texas legislature, 6/2/23]

[...]

Right-wing media figures platformed Haim in solo interviews, where he defended himself 

Since January 2024, with the revelation of his identity, Eithan Haim has appeared as a guest alongside many prominent right-wing media figures. In these interviews Haim neither claimed to have worked directly with trans patients nor disputed sharing the documents with Chris Rufo. Instead, Haim often alleged that he was being unfairly targeted and defended his case on the grounds that the care allegedly provided at Texas Children's Hospital was harmful to pediatric patients. 

Right-wing media defend Dr. Eithan Haim’s HIPAA-violating ways of illegally accessing trans patients’ records while at Texas Children’s Hospital in which he shared those records with far-right anti-LGBTQ+ agitator Christopher Rufo.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Christopher F. Rufo and Luke Rosiak

Published: Apr 22, 2024

Recent headlines about UCLA School of Medicine suggest that the institution has lost its focus. Instead of brushing up on organic chemistry, its students were subjected to lessons on “Indigenous womxn” and “two-spirits.” Future doctors had to take a class on “structural racism” and were led in a “Free Palestine” chant by a Hamas-praising guest speaker. The school made plans to segregate students by race for courses on left-wing ideology, and two of its psychiatry residents championed “revolutionary suicide.” 

Why has the school charted this course? One reason is its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology. UCLA has a DEI program called “Cultural North Star,” and at the medical school, it is led by Natalie J. Perry, whose official title is Cultural North Star Lead. Her UCLA biography says that her job is to “embed our aspirational Cultural North Stars [sic] value [sic] in our organizational DNA.” UCLA honored Perry last month for teaching students to “do what’s right,” saying her “empathy and radical listening” are to thank for her “success as an educator and a leader.”

According to a Daily Wire and City Journal investigation, however, Perry’s academic career is based on fraud. Perry published her Ph.D. dissertation in 2014 at the University of Virginia about college diversity programs. An analysis of the paper found it ridden with the worst sort of plagiarism, reproducing large swaths of text directly from several other authors, without proper citations. The scale of the plagiarism suggests that Perry lacks both ethics and competence and raises questions about academic programs that push DEI.

Perry’s dissertation lifted passages from ten other papers. In key portions of her text, she copied almost every paragraph from other sources without attribution. She fails even to mention at least four of the ten plagiarized papers anywhere in her dissertation.

Let’s review some examples.

The first three pages of Perry’s paper, “Faculty Perceptions of Diversity at a Highly Selective Research-Intensive University,” suggest that she did not even bother to read beyond the first page of papers from which she stole. Her dissertation’s second sentence reproduces verbatim part of a sentence on the first page of a paper by Adrianna Kezar, Peter Eckel, Melissa Contreras-McGavin, and Stephen John Quaye. Her third paragraph, without citation, lifts more than 100 words from the first page of a paper by Angela Locks, Sylvia Hurtado, Nicholas Bowman, and Leticia Oseguera.

Each colored portion of the below text was taken from a different author:

In some cases when Perry did include parenthetical citations, she wasn’t citing the papers whose text she had lifted. Instead, she simply reproduced the citations included in those stolen excerpts.

Take the above paragraph, which ends with “(Bernard, 2005; Bollag, 2005; Munoz, Jasis, Young, and McLaren, 2004; Williams, Nakashima, Kich, and Reginald, 1996).” Perry was not synthesizing those authors. Instead, the citation was part of Adalberto Aguirre and Ruben Martinez’s paper, from which she apparently copied and pasted, without attribution.

A core part of Perry’s dissertation involved summarizing work done by professors Robert Quinn and John Rohrbaugh. Instead of citing them directly, however, Perry cribbed summaries from other academics. Perry copied and pasted almost all of a nearly thousand-word passage from a paper by Chad Hartnell, Amy Yi Ou, and Angelo Kinicki, without quoting the authors.

Consider, for example, the following excerpt from Perry’s dissertation. The italicized portions were taken verbatim from Hartnell, Yi Ou, and Kinicki’s paper:

The CVF is widely used in organizational literature (Ostroff et al., 2003). Measures of organizational culture that directly or indirectly assess the CVF have been administered in over 10,000 organizations globally (Cameron et al., 2006) within the following academic disciplines: management, marketing, supply-chain management, accounting, social services, hospitality, and health care. Further, the reliability and content validity of Cameron and Ettington's (1988) measure of the CVF has been empirically supported in studies utilizing multitrait-multimethod analysis (Quinn & Spreitzer, 1991), multidimensional scaling (Howard, 1998), and structural equation modeling (Kalliath, Bluedorn, & Gillespie, 1999). Surprisingly, prior to 2011, there had been limited assessment of the theoretical foundation of the CVF despite its reported content validity and widespread use in research and practice.

The rest of Perry’s analysis of Quinn and Rohrbaugh’s work is largely copied, unquoted and unattributed, from a 2003 paper by John Smart. Below are pages 13 and 14 of Perry’s paper, outlining its “Theoretical Framework,” with the italicized text coming directly from Smart:

To develop this theory Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983) asked a panel of distinguished organizational theorists to evaluate the similarity between every possible pair of 39 indexes of organizational effectiveness derived from Campbell’s (1977) exhaustive synthesis of criteria used to assess the performance of organizations. The results of this analysis revealed three basic dimensions underlying the judgments of respondents. The first dimension is organizational focus, which distinguishes organizations that have an internal emphasis on the development of people from those that have an external focus on the development of the organization. The second dimension is organizational structure, which distinguishes between organizations that have an emphasis on stability and control from those that have an emphasis on flexibility and innovation. The third dimension is organizational means and ends, which distinguish between organizations that emphasize processes such as planning and establishing goals from those that emphasize resulting outcomes such as productivity and efficiency.

In a section titled “Positioning Diversity Leadership in Higher Education,” Perry copies almost every sentence from one of several other papers. In no case does she credit the actual source:

Finally, in a section on organizational culture, Perry duplicates language from a variety of other authors:

Perry presented her paper as “qualitative” research because she chatted with what appear to be ten members of her colleagues at the University of Virginia who sat on the faculty-retention taskforce and counted their musings as “data.” But when the paper gets to this section, where plagiarism wasn’t possible, Perry includes the following jumbled passage that includes a glaring spelling error:

The positionality of the participants informed the perspective on the origins of the commission. /in response to the needs of the varios [sic] stakeholders within the university, the commission addressed issues of diversity on the faculty, undergraduate, graduate, and university level.

The section of original text suggests that her plagiarism could be used to mask glaring academic deficiencies. Moreover, Perry in her references section fails to list some of the papers that she cites parenthetically in the body of the dissertation—a telltale sign that she had simply copied those citations from somewhere else. Legitimate academic inquiry would not excuse such shoddy work.

Perry and UCLA did not return requests for comment.

Entrepreneur Mark Cuban recently argued that DEI policies don’t necessarily lower an organization’s expectations. But for Harvard, UVA, and UCLA Medical School—where Perry earned her master’s, Ph.D., and DEI position, respectively—this is evidently not the case. These institutions have dramatically lowered expectations for favored groups and pushed a cohort of “scholars” through the system without enforcing basic standards of academic integrity.

Ultimately, Natalie Perry is to blame for her misconduct. But these institutions of higher learning share some fault for permitting such shoddiness to stand unchallenged.

==

These are the same people who want to lecture us how much more morally enlightened they are than we are.

[wimpydave]

The Business of Transgenderism | Christopher F. Rufo

[peachyteabuck]

Peachy!! im so sorry i completley forgot i wanted to ask about your reward aka the book trolley :D First off what was the best and worst book of last year? What was the easiest to listen to and the hardest, and with the trolley itself are you going to leave it as it is or are you gonna maybe add stickers or something to it? I had a random thought you could do some quilting inserts for the books to sit on, or something to put around the edge. I'm happy you reached your goal. what about this year?

hello!! I'm currently going to leave the Book Cart as is. I already have a drop off spot for stickers I get for free from random places, and I like the clean look of the cart currently. I do like the idea of quilting something for it, but I think that's just because I like the idea of a bookshelf quilt (but I uhhhhh have too many UFOs to start something big and new like that right now). Inspired by a coworker, my goal for 2024 is to read 105 books, and I've read 5 so far! I found another library that does free non-resident cards so Libby is my lifeblood right now for audiobooks.

best book(s) of 2023:

how the word is passed by clint smith

kill anything that moves by nick turse

this is how you lose the time war by Max Gladstone & Amal El-Mohtar

yellowface by r.f. kuang

salvation day by kari wallace

worst books of 2023:

Animal by Lisa Taddeo

a court of thorns and roses by sarah j. maas

hardest to listen to:

Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman (it was good, just so fucking long. and maggie haberman narrates the book, and she's very much a journalist rather than a voice actor, so it's so monotone)

America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything by Christopher F. Rufo (conservatives are just...so dumb and wrong about things, to a degree that is legitimately painful)

best to listen to:

killers of a certain age by deanna raybourn (it's about assassins, so there are tons of accents, and the voice actors did an excellent job with all of them)

[foxonly]

The Rise of Ethical Cannibalism

We should have seen this coming! The flagship publication of Hillsdale College, Imprimis, which the College claims has a readership of more than six million, has recently published an article by the current enfant terrible of conservatism, Christopher F. Rufo, entitled “Inside the Transgender Empire.” The article explores the question of how transgenderism became so successful, and especially…

[fuojbe-beowgi]

"D.E.I. Programs Are Getting in the Way of Liberal Education" by Christopher F. Rufo via NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/opinion/christopher-rufo-diversity-desantis-florida-university.html?partner=IFTTT

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

by Christopher F. Rufo | In 2015, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors led a delegation to the Palestinian territories, so that the group’s activists could learn from the “Palestinian struggle.” She condemned Israel as an “apartheid state,” and the running theme of the trip was revolution, “from Ferguson to Palestine.” The same year, Cullors signed a statement drawing parallels between the…