Viewpoints with Kerby Anderson

Kerby Anderson
This country received a financial downgrade earlier this month. In one sense it was justified. In another, it was absurd. Fitch Ratings reduced America’s financial status because of the increasing amount of national debt piled up by Congress and the president.
This is no small issue. The other day, I read that nearly all (98%) nations that have surpassed a 130 percent debt-to-GDP ratio in the last 225 years eventually defaulted. We exceeded that percentage for a short time a few years ago. The Congressional Budget Office expects federal government debt held by the public to reach 115 percent of GDP this decade.
Although the downgrade was justified, it is also absurd because it supposedly is based upon the ability or inability of a nation to meet its debt obligations. The likelihood of the federal government going into default is non-existent, at least for now. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve can create money to pay back sovereign debt.
The $2 trillion from the CARES Act helped to rescue the economy. But this administration didn’t want to go back to normal. Instead, the American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the so-called Inflation Reduction Act pumped trillions more into the economy, setting off nine percent inflation. There is no evidence that this administration is willing to cut back spending.
Perhaps the most puzzling part of the Fitch downgrade was the concern over the “debt-limit political standoffs.” Yet, those are often the only times when some members of Congress use the threat of default to restrain spending.
The financial downgrade should be a wake-up call but unfortunately, the president and many in Congress merely hit the snooze button.

Penna Dexter
They said the movie, Barbie, is ‘subversive.’ Woke. Promotes feminism. But I couldn’t hate it. It was too clever and beautiful. And genuinely funny. A parody of feminism, Barbie, and Mattel itself.
The opening scene takes place on a rocky beach where little girls are playing tea party with baby dolls. Barbie appears — larger than life — in her black and white striped bathing suit. Awestruck, the girls smash their baby dolls on the rocks. A jarring reminder of society’s denigration of women’s motherly role.’
Then we’re introduced to the feminist utopia that is Barbieland. The family simply doesn’t exist there. There is a pregnant Midge. “Didn’t we discontinue her?” wonders the Mattel CEO — played by Will Ferrell.
Each Barbie lives in her own house. The houses have no outer walls. The Barbies can see each other. They greet one another in the morning and affirm, love, and support one another throughout the day. Who needs a family? Who needs men? All Barbies have meaningful jobs: doctors, airline pilots, or astronauts. A Barbie is President, and the Supreme Court is all Barbies. The Kens do something called “Beach.”
Daily Mail columnist, Sarah Vine calls Barbie “a deeply anti-man movie.”
“Every male character is either an idiot, a bigot, or a sad, rather pathetic loser.”
Barbie’s purpose, as she understands it, is to help little girls grow up to run the real world.
Margot Robbie — the perfect Barbie — winks at the little girls surrounded by their broken baby dolls as if to reassure them. ‘Ladies, we’ve got this.’
When Barbie travels to the real world, she realizes she and the other Barbies have failed. “You represent everything wrong with our culture,” a teenager tells her.
Co-writer and producer Greta Gerwig’s previous movies portray men as oppressive authority figures. Her good men are disrespected or demeaned by female characters. Here, the Mattel executives are buffoonishly authoritarian. The Kens — and real-world fathers — are weak and compliant.
Behold:  feminism’s rotten fruit.

Kerby Anderson
Tim Busch begins his commentary with this quote: “We don’t want to convert the young people to Christ or to the Catholic Church or anything like that.” He then asks, who said this? Not an atheist. Not a defender of the separation of church and state. Not even a member of another religion.
It was spoken by a leader in the Catholic church. No matter what your denominational background (Catholic, Protestant, etc.), you can probably see the issue. We have a loss of courage and conviction. He observes that “many religious believers are losing the courage to defend their beliefs. Yet modern society desperately needs vibrant faith communities that stand strong for timeless principles and deeper truths.”
We are facing threats to the sanctity of human life and threats to the institutions of marriage and family. We are facing threats to our ability to practice our religious beliefs, though we have recently enjoyed many victories for religious liberty in the courts. And he concluded that one of the biggest threats facing modern society is the rise of transgenderism.
His question is appropriate: “Will religious believers take the heat without melting? Many are, but others are not.” He points to religious hospitals facing pressure to accept transgenderism and concludes that we “make clear that changing genders is impossible and wrong.”
His observations and conclusions are what we have been discussing on radio for the last few years. It has become even more important for Christians to develop biblical discernment when so many issues and principles are up for debate. And it is equally important for Christians to develop biblical courage to act on those biblical convictions.
I agree with his assessment that religious believers need to address these social issues that will determine the direction America takes. It is time for Christians to show courage.

Kerby Anderson
Is the idea of “The Great Reset” merely a conspiracy theory? That seems unlikely given the fact that if you type in those three words in a search engine, you will find more than 900 million hits.
Last year the founder of the World Economic Forum co-authored and published a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset. The authors see the current situation in the world as a means of dealing with the “weaknesses of capitalism” supposedly exposed during the pandemic.
But to understand the history of “The Great Reset,” you need to go back to 2010 when urban studies scholar Richard Florida wrote a book with that title. He argued that the 2008 economic crash was the latest in a series of great resets that included the Great Depression of the 1930s. A few years later, the book and its ideas became the basis for wanting to “push the reset button” on the world economies.
Today, it is probably fair to say that the phrase “The Great Reset” means different things to different people. Environmental groups want to reset how we use resources and focus on sustainability. Business leaders want banks and corporations to use an ESG index (environmental, social, and governance index). Globalists want to reset the economy and move us toward what has been called “stakeholder capitalism,” or what others have called “communist capitalism.”
Critics talk about some of the other factors associated with “The Great Reset.” That would include such things as the promotion of uncontrolled immigration along with significant money printing. That results in problems like open borders and uncontrolled inflation.
The phrase “The Great Reset” may mean different things to different people. And as you can see, some of the ideas associated with it are bad for our country and us.

Kerby Anderson
Let me introduce you to a word that is probably new to you but will probably be used much more in the future. Decades ago, when I talked about concepts like “secular humanism” or the “New Age Movement” on radio, I think most listeners wondered why I was talking about such philosophical concepts. But they soon learned how important they were.
The word is “panopticon.” It is used in two YouTube videos I’ve seen and is used many times in one of the books I am reading. The idea was formulated by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who wanted to construct a way in which a watchman could keep an eye on lots of prisoners in a prison. A central tower was surrounded by cells with a bright light shining from it, so the prisoners were unable to see the watchman. Therefore, they had to assume they were always under observation.
The word panopticon is now being used to describe our world of digital surveillance. You might think that this is merely another way to describe “Big Brother” in the book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, but there is a significant difference. The primary tools in that totalitarian state were posters and huge “telescreens,” which were a constant reminder you were being watched.
The Big Brother metaphor fails to capture what is happening in our current age of surveillance. We never know who is listening or when they are listening. People in China know the government is watching and listening and even giving them a social credit score. In this country, we know government and corporations are watching and listening to us through our phones, computers, smart watches, and even through security cameras. But we are never sure who is watching and when because we live in a digital panopticon.

Kerby Anderson
Belief in God is back. That is the claim that Justin Brierley makes in his book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. He was on my radio program recently to talk about his book that will be out next month.
He has welcomed atheists and agnostics on his Unbelievable program and heard the arguments against the Christian faith. He has also noticed that these arguments, often voiced by the New Atheists, have not made the impact these skeptics assumed they would make. They expected that their arguments would end Christianity permanently.
The standard view has been that a “long withdrawing roar” of the “Sea of Faith” would be swept away by a rising secularism in society. While that has been true in a general way, Justin has noticed that the tide may be coming back again. He points to such notables as Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland, and Dave Rubin. They have found themselves surprised by the continuing resonance and relevance of Christianity.
I also find it interesting, and discussed this with him on the program, that we see many people leaving the faith and “deconstructing” their faith at a time when we have the best evidence for our faith. Evidence for the reliability of the Bible comes from archaeology and biblical manuscripts. Evidence for the existence of God comes from scientific discoveries of the fine-tuning of the universe and the intricate design in biological systems.
His book documents the decline of the New Atheism and the revival of faith coming from science, history, and culture. Much of this new wave of faith is coming from the search for meaning in this 21st century world. The tide is coming, and the church needs to be ready.

Kerby Anderson
Greg Koukl was on my radio program recently and has a book coming out next month that will help you better engage non-believers in conversations on several different topics. The title of the book is Street Smarts and is a follow-up to his best-selling book, Tactics.
His Tactics book has been so helpful to Christians. It equips them to be diplomatic by asking questions that not only gather important information but also help point out logical flaws with the ideas expressed by non-Christians. Engaging others in controversial conversations is difficult and challenging. His previous book provides a conversational roadmap for those conversations.
In Street Smarts, Greg Koukl begins by explaining the difference between the harvesting approach (reaping) and a gardening approach (sowing). J. Warner Wallace, in his endorsement of the book, uses a baseball metaphor and contrasts trying to hit a home run with hitting singles and doubles. This strategy enables you to engage in conversations that you never thought you would have by asking others to defend their positions and consider a viewpoint they may never have considered.
The following chapters provide specific examples from discussions you might have “on the street” with friends, family, neighbors, or coworkers. I found the sample mini-dialogs helpful because they showed how you might ask questions to gain more information or how you might use questions to identify flaws in other’s logic or parry their attacks on Christianity.
Whether you are an experienced evangelist and apologist or merely an inexperienced new Christian, you will benefit from both books. I would encourage you to pre-order Street Smarts. I have already done so and know you will benefit from the years of experience that resulted in this book.

Penna Dexter
The United States Senate is considering legislation that would require the Supreme Court to set up a code of conduct, tighten financial disclosure rules, and bolster recusal requirements for justices. The bill would allow individual complaints against justices. Each complaint would be adjudicated by a “judicial investigation panel” of 5 chief judges from the circuit courts.
The proposed bill violates the US Constitution’s separation of powers. Supreme Court  justices police their own financial disclosures and make their own recusal decisions. But since the Court as currently composed is not giving the Left the rulings it wants, progressives are attacking certain justices’ ethics.
Last month, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act passed the Senate Judiciary Committee along party lines.
After the vote, six committee Republicans told reporters that, if enacted, the legislation would destroy the independence of the Supreme Court. Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) said the bill “should make every American afraid.”
A Wall Street Journal editorial argues, “The nine justices are appointees with lifetime tenure under the Constitution in order to insulate them from political pressure.”  Enacting this bill would do the opposite. The Journal points out that “Legislators are political actors accountable to voters for their relationships with campaign contributors and interest groups.” The Founders created the judiciary, under Article III of the Constitution, as a separate and co-equal branch of government.
The Journal emphasizes, “While Congress established the lower federal courts, the Constitution created the Supreme Court which sets its own rules.”  Congress has no power to set rules for the Court or dictate how it is run.
Justice Samuel Alito told the Journal he and the other justices voluntarily follow the disclosure statutes that lower court judges and executive branch officials adhere to. But, he says, “No provision in the US Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”
The Senate must block this attempt to intimidate justices and control the Court. 

Kerby Anderson
The “world is on fire.” That is the repeated claim of environmental activists who claim that fires are increasing worldwide due to climate change. But is that statement true? Satellites have (for more than two decades) been recording fires on the surface of this planet. We know more about the global phenomenon than ever before.
Bjorn Lomborg reminds us that the “data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3 percent of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward.” In the last year (2022) for which we have complete data, the world hit a new record low in terms of burned area. Of course, you wouldn’t know this by reading news accounts or watching television news programs.
Three years ago, I devoted a commentary debunking the claim that the terrible brush fires in Australia were made worse by climate change. At the time, I suggested a simple test. If the pattern in Australia was due to climate change, then you might expect to see the same pattern worldwide. A global survey of wildfire activity back then found less fire activity, not more.
The Canadian wildfires this year certainly got our attention since the smoke covered large parts of the northeastern US. The Canadian prime minister and the US president blamed climate change. But you find the same phenomenon I mentioned years ago. Yes, more land was burned this year in North America, but the rest of the world has seen lower burning.
The latest headlines about fires are reminiscent of the previous headlines about the future extinction of polar bears due to climate change. We don’t hear much about the polar bears these days perhaps because they are more populous than at any time in the last half-century.
The “world is on fire” makes for a scary headline, but it isn’t accurate science.

Kerby Anderson
An increasing number of Americans believe that “force [is] justified to restore abortion rights.” A survey from the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats found that the percentage of Democrats willing to use violence to promote abortion rose from 8 percent to 16 percent since January. Put another way, that means that 31 million Americans support the use of violence to reinstate pro-abortion laws.
Ben Johnson, writing about this in the Washington Stand, reminds us that these numbers are more than just theoretical support for abortion-based violence. “There have been at least 67 attacks against pro-life pregnancy resource centers since the still-unsolved leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last May.” On my radio program, I documented many of these attacks and interviewed pro-life leaders at these centers.
Churches have also been attacked. Family Research Council has documented a total of 543 attacks against churches between January 2018 and March 2023. It also has estimated that at least 57 of those attacks have been abortion-related assaults.
Even more disturbing was the statement from the Department of Homeland Security. It “warned that churches face an elevated threat of violence until at least the 2024 election, 15 months from now, due to their stance on sociopolitical issues.”
The survey also discovered that a majority (52%) of Americans believe “elections will not solve our most fundamental political and social problems” and that constitutes a dangerous “deep distrust of democracy.” If you see abortion as your right and aren’t convinced that the next election will change anything, it is easy to see why leftists promote violence.

Kerby Anderson
Can you be fired for teaching basic biology? That seems to be the case with Professor Johnson Varkey who was fired for “teaching standard principles about human biology and reproduction.” First Liberty Institute is defending him and has filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) naming St. Philip’s College in San Antonio, Texas.
On my radio program, we talked with several of the lawyers from First Liberty about the case. The professor has taught Human Anatomy and Physiology to more than 1,500 students since 2003. He has always received positive student feedback.
But the student world is changing. You can be considered bigoted for teaching that sex is determined by X and Y chromosomes. Students walked out of his class, complained, and he received a letter of termination in January. Teaching basic biology was labeled as “discriminatory about homosexuals and transgender individuals.”
Although Professor Varkey is a Christian, it is worth noting that many non-Christians are frustrated with attempts by faculty and students to misrepresent basic biology. Back in February, I did a commentary about a secular, evolutionary biology professor at Williams College frustrated that some of her fellow science professors were teaching that sex (not gender) is on a continuum. She pointed to an obvious fact of biology: “sexes are defined by the size of their gametes—that is, their reproductive cells. Large gametes occur in females, small gametes in males.”
The complaint to the EEOC argues that what was done to him by the college is wrong and that he should be able to get his job back. Colleges should not be firing professors for teaching actual science, even if that teaching also aligns with the professor’s religious beliefs.

Kerby Anderson
The latest survey done by Pew Research documents that most Americans don’t care about free speech. The share of US adults who say the federal government should restrict false information rose from one-third (38%) in 2018 to more than a majority (55%) this year.
If you dig into the demographics of the survey, you also find that Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (70%) are much more likely than Republicans and Republican-leaners (38%) to support the US government restricting information online. It is also worth mentioning that there was virtually no difference between the two parties in 2018.
Dennis Prager adds several conclusions based upon this survey. First, the most important human freedom is freedom of speech. He explains that “free speech is what makes the pursuit of truth possible and makes the advancement of science possible”.
Second, he observes that “America has been the freest country in the world for all of its history.” Unfortunately, this survey illustrates why many of us believe that is changing.
His third and fourth observations fit together. “Free speech is seriously threatened for the first time in American history” and “The threat to free speech comes entirely from the Left.” These observations might sound radical, but I have discussed the basis for them in previous commentaries.
Dennis Prager has documented these observations many times in his writings. He also adds that, “There is no example in history of the Left attaining power and allowing free speech,” and gives numerous historical examples to prove his point.
We should be concerned when a majority of our fellow citizens feel it is appropriate for politicians and bureaucrats to censor what they may deem as false information.

Kerby Anderson
In his new book, Decades of Decadence, Senator Marco Rubio exposes the attacks on four key elements of American strength: good local jobs, stable families, geographical communities, and a sovereign nation that serves as a beacon of freedom and prosperity.
He begins his book by talking about an article published in National Interest when he was getting ready for college. Francis Fukuyama wrote about “The End of History” and predicted a future global order where there were no viable alternatives to democracy. The US defeated fascism during World War II, and the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse.
This utopian vision of the future didn’t take place. In my radio interview with Senator Rubio, I mentioned sitting on a panel with Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, who wrote about The Clash of Civilizations. He predicted world history would be marked by conflicts between three principal groups: western universalism, Muslim militancy, and Chinese assertion.
Senator Rubio explained that the assumption was that nation states would be more focused on economic interests and therefore would not go to war with each other. Politicians started making decisions that benefited this system and stopped making decisions about what was good for America. This empowered China, and now we are heavily dependent upon them for all sorts of essential goods.
We assumed that nationhood was over, and people and countries would be doing what was good for the global economy and international order. Senator Rubio explained that “China didn’t get that memo, and Russia didn’t get that memo, and Iran didn’t get that memo, and North Korea didn’t get that memo.” Many countries have been operating in their national interest.
He believes it is not too late to reject those errors and rebuild this nation. His book provides a critique of the past and a roadmap for the future.

Penna Dexter
It’s hard to know the rate at which people who obtain gender transition surgeries ultimately seek to detransition. The detransition rate has hovered at around two percent. But two trans academics, Daniela Valdes and Kinnon MacKinnon, point out that “older studies may not adequately predict outcomes for today’s far larger, more diverse trans and gender-questioning population.”
In their article in The Atlantic entitled, “Take Detransitioners Seriously,” the two researchers argue that detransitioning is not “a negligible issue.”
We have been hearing from quite a few detransitioners lately.
Here’s one of their stories as told to FOX News and reported in Family Research Council’s news publication, The Washington Stand. For privacy, the detransitioner calls himself ‘Kobe.”  Kobe says he was a “feminine boy” and that he was experiencing “mental health” issues. Had it not been for the pervasive gender ideology online, he says he would not have  pursued a gender transition.
Kobe began taking puberty blockers at age 13 and estrogen at age 16. To get them, he heeded online advice to “play the suicide card.” He received “castration surgery” at age 19. “But then,” he says, “everything started to crack, and I couldn’t ignore the complications. I couldn’t ignore that I mutilated myself pretty much with the permission of a psychiatrist.” Because Kobe took puberty blockers and started estrogen so young, he mostly skipped male puberty. He has breasts, female hips, no gonads, a smaller body, and more of a feminine skull. As to the hoped-for improvement in his mental health, he says, “it didn’t do anything.” He has many complications including urination issues caused by his castration surgery and severe back pain which he fears is osteoporosis. “I just wasted so much time,” he says, “and all I really did was become a medical patient for life.”
Gender detransitioners like Kobe who were in no position to consent to such mutilation, are now to be commended for their courage in standing up against it. 

Kerby Anderson
Tim Busch begins his commentary with this quote: “We don’t want to convert the young people to Christ or to the Catholic Church or anything like that.” He then asks, who said this? Not an atheist. Not a defender of the separation of church and state. Not even a member of another religion.
It was spoken by a leader in the Catholic church. No matter what your denominational background (Catholic, Protestant, etc.), you can probably see the issue. We have a loss of courage and conviction. He observes that “many religious believers are losing the courage to defend their beliefs. Yet modern society desperately needs vibrant faith communities that stand strong for timeless principles and deeper truths.”
We are facing threats to the sanctity of human life and threats to the institutions of marriage and family. We are facing threats to our ability to practice our religious beliefs, though we have recently enjoyed many victories for religious liberty in the courts. And he concluded that one of the biggest threats facing modern society is the rise of transgenderism.
His question is appropriate: “Will religious believers take the heat without melting? Many are, but others are not.” He points to religious hospitals facing pressure to accept transgenderism and concludes that we “make clear that changing genders is impossible and wrong.”
His observations and conclusions are what we have been discussing on radio for the last few years. It has become even more important for Christians to develop biblical discernment when so many issues and principles are up for debate. And it is equally important for Christians to develop biblical courage to act on those biblical convictions.
I agree with his assessment that religious believers need to address these social issues that will determine the direction America takes. It is time for Christians to show courage.

Kerby Anderson
You could say that William Shatner is the most famous astronaut in the world. Until recently, he was not a real astronaut. But he is best known for playing Captain Kirk in the Star Trek TV series and movies. Last year he did go into space. And it had such an impact that he started crying and now has written about it in his memoir, Boldly Go.
At age 90, he had a life-changing experience by going into space. He thought it would be a fulfilling experience to see planet Earth from a different vantage point. Others told him they were struck by the “apparent fragility of this suspended blue marble.” He also experienced “the strongest feeling, dominating everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I have ever experienced.”
When he looked away from Earth towards the rest of the universe, he didn’t feel attraction. Instead, he realized that we are “a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death.”
There is a name for that experience. Space Philosopher Frank White called it the “overview effect,” which is the title of his book by the same name. It comes from an emotional shift in a person’s awareness when they see Earth from space. You gain a greater understanding of the preciousness of Earth.
I think we can draw two conclusions. First is environmental stewardship. Shatner’s conclusion was that he wanted to protect Earth for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We need to do all we can to prevent the destruction of this planet.
The second conclusion is intelligent design. Earth is not an insignificant speck in the galaxy. Earth is our home. It was created by God for us, and we can now measure all the fine-tuned parameters that show God’s fingerprints.

Kerby Anderson
The business world is seeing a reverse migration from Zoom to the conference room. Employees may love working from home, but there is growing evidence that productivity drops when people work from their dining table or home office.
We all know the benefits of remote working. You spend less time commuting. You can take a short nap or a mid-morning run. You can fit in several commitments from carpool to doctor’s appointments. During the pandemic and lockdowns, a few surveys found that workers reported higher levels of satisfaction and happiness.
Those may be the positive aspects of working from home, but more and more companies are calling their employees back to the office. Even the notoriously flexible Big Tech companies want employees to show up at least 2-3 days a week.
The reason for the call-back is productivity. A study reported in the Economist illustrates the change in perception. A study done by two Harvard University doctoral students originally found an 8 percent increase in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer that had shifted from offices to homes. But a revised version of the paper changed that estimate to a 4 percent decline. The researchers had not made a mistake. As they received more precise data, they found that the employees answered fewer calls and put customers on hold for longer.
Another study done by researchers at MIT and UCLA concluded workers at home were 18 percent less productive. And a research study from the University of Essex found a 19 percent drop in productivity.
What is also lost is face-to-face communication, human interaction, and team building. It is easy to see why more and more companies are summoning their workers back to the office.

Kerby Anderson
If you go to the State Department website, you will find the Bureau for Global Engagement Center. The section on “Disarming Disinformation: Our Shared Responsibility” has this quote from President Biden. “There is truth and there are lies. Lies told for power and for profit. And each of us has a duty and responsibility, as citizens, as Americans, and especially as leaders – leaders who have pledged to honor our Constitution and protect our nation — to defend the truth and to defeat the lies.”
In a recent commentary, Thaddeus McCotter observes that “there are times when irony isn’t enough.” We are being lectured by the president and the state department about the danger of lies.  McCotter reminds us of the 51 current and former members of the US intelligence community who claimed the Hunter Biden laptop was likely Russian disinformation. They knew that wasn’t true but spread that disinformation anyway.
Once that letter was made public, it gave the establishment media and Big Tech companies all they needed to censor the reporting by the New York Post and prevent millions of Americans from knowing about the laptop and its contents. Miranda Devine concluded: “The letter was a domestic disinformation operation by the CIA to deceive the American people and help Joe Biden win the 2020 election.”
Years later we now know that those who signed the letter understood it was not Russian disinformation. Instead, we know they were spreading disinformation. Special Counsel John Durham’s report concluded that the FBI probe of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia was “seriously flawed.” FBI officials “discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative.”
It now appears that while federal agencies were warning us of the danger of disinformation, they were often the ones dispensing disinformation.

Kerby Anderson
The last five decades have been marked by judicial overreach. But we are now seeing judicial activism replaced by judicial restraint. Before the Supreme Court adjourned for the summer, it delivered four opinions on religious liberty (Groff v. DeJoy), free speech (303 Creative v. Elenis), racial preferences in college applications (Fair Admissions v. Harvard), and student debt cancellation (Biden v. Nebraska).
You might now ask: what is next? Senator Ted Cruz has been building a coalition of lawmakers urging the Supreme Court to overturn the Chevron doctrine, often called Chevron deference. This is the idea that the court should always give deference to an administrative agency when it interprets an ambiguous statute.
The case involves the New England-based family-owned herring fishing company which is challenging a government rule. It requires every fishing vessel to have a government monitor on board to track compliance with federal regulations and requires that the fishing company pay the monitor’s salary (which amounts to 20 percent of their earnings).
The Chevron doctrine may sound harmless. It isn’t. A case in 1984 involving the Chevron corporation seemed reasonable at the time because conservatives in the Reagan administration wanted relief from rulings by liberal judges on the DC Circuit Court. Now it gives too much control to bureaucrats and the deep state.
Ted Cruz put it this way: “If the voters back home in Texas are ticked off at an idiotic rule that comes from the bowels of the Biden administration, there’s nothing they can do to fire that bureaucrat. And frankly, that bureaucrat does not give a flip what a small-business owner or hard-working family in Texas believes or how they are hurt by the rules they are decreeing from on high.”
I think the Chevron doctrine might be the next big battle before the Supreme Court when it reconvenes this fall.

Penna Dexter
The US Centers for Disease Control recently published guidance for new parents using a word I had never heard until a couple of weeks ago. The word is chestfeeding.
In an article in Today’s Parent magazine, lactation consultant Azura Goodman defines the word. She writes:
“Chestfeeding or bodyfeeding can refer to feeding your baby milk directly from your body. This term is used by people who don’t identify their anatomy with the term “breast.”
She explains that she uses the term chestfeeding in order to be inclusive “rather than narrow in on one population.”
When transwomen — let’s be clear: these are biological males — (when they) go to the CDC website looking for information on feeding newborns, they will find the affirming statement that “transgender and non-binary individuals may give birth and breastfeed or feed at the chest.”
Biological males cannot give birth. They can, however, be given hormones which mimic changes that take place in biological women’s bodies during the late stages of pregnancy. Apparently, this regimen results in some men producing a nipple discharge that a couple of transgender doctors claim can be pumped out and sustain a baby.
One of the hormones used in this protocol is domperidone, which, the FDA warns “can pass into breast milk in small amounts and can sometimes give babies an irregular heartbeat.” The CDC helpfully notes this.
The CDC’s advice on chestfeeding also applies to transgender males — biological females — who have breast-removal surgery and still want to coax a little milk out of what’s left. What a tragic sacrifice to have made. But what truly loving parent — biological or adoptive — would allow their child to be fed this toxic brew especially when it’s usually to allow a confused male to feel “seen” or satisfy a disordered desire to experience breastfeeding.
The CDC’s “guidance” on chestfeeding is not medical advice or a legitimate recommendation for the care and feeding of infants. The post-COVID CDC is embarrassing.