☕️ IMMUTABLE ☙ Friday, December 6, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Men winning women's awards; Supreme Court transitions transgender arguments; Daniel Penny trial update; nearly all federal workers have vanished; Tucker Carlson returns to Moscow; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Today’s roundup includes: man shatters glass toilet lid by winning top female fashion award; Supreme Court castrates transgender arguments in lit oral arguments; Daniel Penny trial races toward hung jury in fourth day of deliberations; bombshell Senate report finds only 1% of federal workers are coming in to their offices for work; and Tucker Carlson keeps on doing the basic reporting work that corporate media refuses to do.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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To set the breakfast table, let’s begin with this morning’s New York Times story headlined, “In a First, Transgender Woman Wins Model of the Year.” I bet the folks who, back in the 1970’s, applauded the “battle of the sexes” failed to realize how in 2024, men would win the battle and beat the gals by becoming better women. Don’t shoot the messenger.

I don’t know how seriously we should take the Annual British Fashion Awards, which three days ago awarded ‘Top Cultural Innovator’ to an American gentleman oddly named A$AP Rocky. (Probably not his real name.) I never heard of A$AP since I’m not traveling in those erudite circles, so maybe he deserves it.

Anyway, and more to the point, trans influencer Alex Consani, 21, of Petaluma, California, is a biological man who also affects a strong ‘ghetto’ dialect, thereby credibly establishing his/her intersectional credentials. He, I mean she, or they, broke the glass floor this week, by beating out all the other ladies competing this year and claiming the Award’s top female model championship.

Consani began ‘her’ modeling career at age 12, becoming one of the youngest transgender models in history (at that time), after her mother came across an ad for Slay Model Management, an LA-based trans modeling agency. Alex started wearing feminine clothing at age four, chose the name ‘Alex’ at eight, and started taking hormone replacement therapy to block his puberty. It was all Alex’s idea; her parents swear they had nothing to do with it.

I’m not saying the Annual Fashion Awards are a hot woke mess of political virtue-signaling, but last year’s top model was biological female Bella Hadid from Los Angeles, though she now identifies as Palestinian/Dutch and is controversial for her inflammatory Middle Eastern opinions and her mental health advocacy, drawn from her own cuckoo brain problems. At the 2023 Awards, Bella wore a spray-on dress. I don’t mean it was skin-tight, I mean literally. They sprayed it on:

Thus, this year’s Awards’ bizarre choice of a male trans influencer for female model of the year strikes me more as a desperate and boring attempt to stay relevant and to collect some virtue-signaling headlines. So courageous! So innovative! So dumb.

Who cares. But it lines up the next story well, right from the ladies’ tee.

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Yesterday, far-left Axios ran an unintentionally terrific and accidentally encouraging story headlined, “Supreme Court seems likely to uphold ban on gender-affirming care.” By “gender-affirming care,” Axios meant “sterilization and genital mutilation.”

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over a terrific Tennessee law banning “gender-affirming care” for children. Adults can still get chop-a-dictomies until they run out of spare forearm. The Tennessee law is similar to laws passed in nearly all the red states at this point.

The legal issue boiled down to whether Tennessee is simply regulating the practice of medicine, long approved as fully within state purview, or whether the law unconstitutionally discriminates against trans kids based on the immutable characteristic of their biological sex.

Fortunately, as I predicted, the Justices’ questions signaled deep skepticism, not just that Tennessee’s law was constitutionally sound, but also whether transgenderism could ever be considered a constitutionally protected category. Boiling it down, the conservative majority seemed inclined to leave difficult questions of developing medicine and evolving medical ethics to legislatures, suggesting more than once the complex issue was not appropriate for courts to decide.

But something else, something wonderful, miraculous, and unexpected happened during oral arguments. Maybe it was obvious in hindsight. But, for the first time, Biden’s weaponized trans activists (via their lawyers, one of whom was trans), were forced to rationally defend their irrational ideology. They had to answer the Justices’ questions. When they dodged, the Justices called them out on it.

The result was that trans “science” dissolved in the heat of judicial scrutiny. That is probably why corporate media predicted the Supreme Court will uphold the law. It was a rhetorical bloodbath.

For example, Justice Thomas asked a simple question that I first thought was a veiled criticism but turned out to be a wily judicial trap: “What remedy are you seeking?” he asked the government’s lawyers. Trans lawyer Chase Strangio (pictured above) was flustered, but eventually coughed up something about an injunction. (My goodness, what an ironic last name.)

The implied criticism was that if the Justice had to ask, the requested remedy must not have been completely clear from the briefs, which is a rookie mistake, and one that it is nearly unbelievable the overpaid government lawyers could have made. But that’s not where he was going. Then Justice Thomas sprang the trap with a followup question: “So practically, you would get different treatment based on sex?”

In other words, either way girls and boys are treated differently. Under the Tennessee law, boys “receive” testosterone (naturally) but girls “aren’t allowed to.” But if the law were enjoined, girls could receive testosterone supplements (from doctors) but boys can’t, since boys who are “transitioning” must get testosterone blockers.

That simple question left the government’s equal protection case in a shambles. But that wasn’t even close to all.

Justice Alito laid a similar trap that sliced the trans case in two. He asked them “whether transgender status is immutable.” This was key because only innate, unchangeable characteristics, like race or biological sex, are considered constitutionally protected. People’s characteristics that can change, such as their weight, hairstyle, national origin, virtuous yard sign ownership, face tattoos, or smoking status, cannot be protected by discrimination laws for a very straightforward reason.

If discrimination laws were available for mutable characteristics, then people could choose to voluntarily join a discriminated class and immediately acquire more legal rights over other citizens. Plus, as a practical matter, trying to protect characteristics that people can select between and change quickly becomes completely unworkable.

Consider the example of morbidly obese persons and airplane seats. If, to satisfy equal protection, fat folks get an extra airplane seat for free, how do you measure that? In other words, how fat is fat enough to get a free seat? If someone gains 50 pounds just to get a free seat, does that count? Should the law punish overweight people for losing weight by taking their free seat away? What happens if they weren’t fat enough for a free seat when they booked the ticket, but gained enough weight by the time they boarded the plane?

In other words, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause was only designed to address systemic inequalities tied to deeply ingrained societal prejudices over things people cannnot control, like their skin color, rather than protecting people’s individual preferences or lifestyle choices.

CLIP: Justice Alito questions Strangio about immutability of transgender status (1:29).

So, when Justice Alito asked attorney Strangio the simple question of whether transgender status is immutable, he pressed the bearded lady onto the razor-sharp horns of an impossible dilemma. If transgenderism isn’t immutable, then it isn’t biologically based, and thus isn’t protectable. Strangio had no choice. She stuttered out her only possible answer:

I -- I think that the record shows that the -- the discordance between a person's birth sex and gender identity has a strong biological basis and would satisfy an immutability test.

At that point, Justice Alito had Strangio right where he wanted her. Alito then asked, what about gender fluidity? Strangio had to admit that transgenders “include people who have different understandings of -- of their gender identity.” But a person’s understanding is not an immutable characteristic, however hard Strangio then tried to cling to a “biological basis.” The contradiction was a classic modern example of Orwell’s ‘doublethink,’ which he defined as ’a simultaneous belief in two contradictory ideas.’

Best of all, Justice Alito did not neglect the most important and most critical issue of all: the harms to kids. On this issue, the mild-mannered Justice judiciously called the government’s lawyers liars, in polite legal language, asking “I wonder if you think it would be appropriate to modify or withdraw your statement that the treatment benefits outweigh the risks?” Listen:

CLIP: Justice Alito calls Biden’s lawyers liars (1:52).

CLIP: Justice Alito presses Strangio on suicidality (0:53).

Elizabeth Prelogar is one of the federal government’s main appellate lawyers. She regularly argues for the Biden Administration at the Supreme Court. Justice Alito cited to Prelogar a number of studies, including the bombshell Cass Report, which found no evidence trans kids were less likely to attempt suicide than kids whose gender dysphoria was treated in other ways. Justice Alito noted that, after the publication in Britain of the Cass Report, the UK and other European countries banned puberty blockers.

As Axios (and others) noted, and as I predicted, it seems likely from the questions that the Supreme Court will uphold the Tennessee law and, by extension, the laws in 26 other sane states. But more importantly, this series of questions could — I’m not saying it will, I’m just saying it’s possible — it could have broken the back of the entire transgender movement, at least its pernicious status as presumptively valid.

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Yesterday, NewsNation ran a story headlined, “Daniel Penny trial trending toward possibility of hung jury.” Today, the jury begins its fourth day of deliberations in the high-profile case. As of noon yesterday, the jury had sent seven notes to the judge, requesting different pieces of evidence or parts of the transcript, including the dramatic cell phone video of Daniel Penny holding deranged lunatic Jordan Neely in a headlock on a New York Subway.

Ominously, the jury of seven women and five men has repeatedly asked the judge to define “recklessness” and “negligence.” They also asked for the part of the transcript featuring New York City medical examiner Dr. Cynthia Harris, who’d testified that “no toxicological result imaginable was going to change my opinion (that Neely was murdered), even if they showed enough fentanyl to put down an elephant.”

Okay, doc. Sure.

The jury’s multiple requests signal an intense debate in the deliberation room. Usually, a jury requests evidence from the judge or a clarification when the jurors disagree about what they remember happening during the trial. So they ask the judge for the evidence or for a clarification to settle their dispute.

It takes hours and hours for the jury to get an answer. Here’s how it works: The jury debates, argues, cannot agree, and finally just decide to ask the judge a question to clear up the problem. The question has to be in writing. Normally their question or request is handwritten on a post-it note. The bailiff brings it to the judge.

Then the judge calls the lawyers back for a hearing. Usually the lawyers are waiting at a nearby coffee shop or restaurant. The judge’s assistant calls everyone and they convene. Then the judge holds a formal hearing over the jury’s question, letting lawyers for both sides argue and suggest possible answers, while seeking a unanimous agreement.

The lawyers write up an answer for the jury that both sides agree to.

Once the judge and lawyers finish conferring and writing up a joint answer, the judge calls the jury back into the courtroom. Then the judge reads the prepared answer to the jury. They aren’t allowed to ask any follow up questions. Once that is done, the jury is sent back to resume deliberations.

This sounds incredibly ungainly, and it is, but there’s a good reason. The judge must maintain a complete record of the entire proceeding. The court reporter who transcribes everything is in the courtroom, where the lawyers and staff are. So everything must be filtered through the courtroom.

The result is that juries quickly realize they should only ask questions when they have real problems. The process takes too long for trivial or unimportant issues. Sometimes, by the time an answer comes back, the jury has either already figured it out themselves or have moved on and don’t care anymore.

So when a jury is on its third day, and has already sent the judge seven questions, it shows the jury is struggling to find agreement. That’s why Newsnation’s headline suggested a hung jury. My guess is that, since today is Friday, and jurors probably don’t want to work through the weekend, later today the jury will send the judge a note announcing it is deadlocked.

If so, the judge won’t accept their first deadlock notice. He’ll make them keep working until next week. The next most likely scenario is that the jurors will decide one way or the other by midafternoon, with the holdout jurors caving in to avoid weekend duty.

We’re about to find out whether New York City is bent on self-destruction or whether it still has sparks of life left.

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The New York Post ran a story this week headlined, “Top DOGE Elon Musk, House speaker balk at Senate report showing only 6% of federal workers show up in person on full-time basis: ‘Absurd’.” That six percent figure is not new. In April, the Hill ran a story about Biden trying to coax federal workers back to the office, and the article included this eye-popping paragraph:

A “significant majority?” That’s rich. They’re talking about 94%. I’d call that “pretty much all.”

This week, Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) announced the results of a year-and-a-half study conducted by her office. “The nation’s capital is a ghost town, with government buildings averaging an occupancy rate of 12%,” Ernst wrote in her blistering report. “If federal employees can’t be found at their desks, exactly where are they?” At the spa?

Last month, Ernst was appointed chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, which plans to collaborate with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to slash government bloat and inefficiency.

Elon Musk, who read a pre-publication version of Ernst’s report, tweeted, “If you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%!”

Only one percent of highly-paid and generously benefited federal employees showing up to work in person is an epic disaster that blossomed during the Biden Administration.

I have ideas. First, we should sell all those unused government buildings and use the money to pay down the national debt. Second, it should be simple to reduce headcount because, and this will be a controversial take, fewer focused employees at work are more productive than more multitasking employees working while driving their cars around.

Third, if anyone needed any more evidence that federal agencies don’t need to be located in Washington, DC, the argument is over.

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Tucker Carlson keeps doing the basic reporting work that arrogant corporate media refuses to do. Yesterday, he released his latest interview with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.

CLIP 1: Tucker Carlson interviews Russia Foreign Minister Lavrov (1:20:51).

CLIP 2: Tucker Carlson calls America’s Proxy War what it is (2:59).

CLIP 3: Lavrov explains why Russia considers ATACM missile strikes into its homeland as America’s fault (1:10).

Tucker has tried his best to interview Ukraine’s Martial Law Administrator V. Zelensky, but the garrulous, green-shirted Chatty Cathy, who seems to talk to anyone else who will listen, including rap podcasters, refused to return Tucker’s calls.

Like Putin’s interview with Tucker, this Lavrov interview is a must-watch. We citizens in the West are starved for information about the Russians’ point of view, since corporate media unanimously (and without debate) declared every single Russian thought to be unacceptable disinformation from which we must be protected at all costs.

Yet, we citizens must vote for leaders who will tackle the Proxy War Problem. How can we do this responsibly without at least hearing the alleged disinformation? Instead of working frantically to bury Russia’s side of the argument under a concrete bunker, corporate media could have busied itself with its rebuttals to the Russian “disinformation.” But no.

Why not? You know why. It’s because Russian “lies” are more believable than the obvious propaganda excreted by our feckless corporate media.

It’s not just Russia’s point of view that is conspicuously missing. Whatever happened to the “game-changing” F-16 fighter jets (retail $70 million each)? Crickets. And what about the “game-changing” Attack-Ems missiles (retail $1.5 million each), which have mysteriously not been used in the two weeks since Russia fired back with its revolutionary Orechnik missile?

An honest corporate media would be telling us all about how both fantastically expensive programs abominably failed. But sadly, our sold-out corporate media lies like napping golden retrievers. They lie like the Turkish rugs decorating Zelensky’s latest Italian villa. They are lilly-livered, lizard-lipped, shameless liars and I call them cowards.

Listen to the Russian side of the argument and decide for yourself.

Have a fabulous Friday! Then fly back here tomorrow morning for an in-depth and perfectly snarky C&C roundup of more essential news and commentary.

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