Half-Trans, Half-Free: Blue States Defy Trump
Democrat-majority states are defying President Trump on the transgender issue, and dividing our Nation into half-trans and half-free. The free half are the states that protect girls’ sports from males invading as transgenders, and which protect both boys and girls against mutilating transgender surgeries.
This country endured “half-slave, half-free” until it became impossible to co-exist that way, as the half-slave portion insisted on complicity by the half-free portion until it was no longer willing to go along. President Trump has already put an end to federal workers signing their emails with pronoun commands to recipients for how to address the senders.
On January 28, Trump signed an Executive Order that commanded every federal agency “that provides research or education grants to medical institutions, including medical schools and hospitals” to “immediately take appropriate steps to ensure that institutions receiving Federal research or education grants end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.”
President Trump further ordered the Attorney General to “prioritize enforcement of protections against female genital mutilation.” Trump has also ended the transgender policies of our Armed Services.
On Feb. 7 and as made public on Feb. 10, newly confirmed (by Vice President JD Vance’s tie-breaking vote) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suspended all future military promotions of soldiers who have “a history of gender dysphoria.” He canceled “all unscheduled, scheduled, or planned medical procedures associated with affirming or facilitating a gender transition for Service members.”
As to boys and young men invading girls’ school sports and locker rooms, Trump issued another Executive Order terminating that for all schools receiving federal funds. Only private high schools and a few private colleges do not receive federal funding.
“The war on women’s sports is over,” President Trump announced at his White House signing of this protection against unfair competition. He thereby rescinded a Biden policy encouraging boys to compete as transgender athletes in girls’ sports, as many have.
The NCAA, which governs college sports, immediately issued a new policy in partial compliance with President Trump’s orders. The NCAA immediately disallows men, as defined not by Trump’s definition based on reproductive potential at conception but by birth certificates (which could be inaccurate) from competing in women’s sporting events while still allowing men to practice with women and thus enter their locker rooms.
Blue states including New York and Minnesota are already flatly defying Trump’s directives. Democrat New York officials have advised the many hospitals in New York City and throughout the state to continue to perform transgender surgeries on children even if that means they will lose federal funding.
A total of 23 Attorneys General from blue states have obtained a temporary restraining order (TRO) from a federal court in the blue state of Rhode Island against Trump’s freezing of federal funding of hospitals and other institutions that are performing transgender operations on children. California and 14 other blue states have told hospitals not to cancel transgender procedures or else they would be in violation of state laws against discrimination.
A few hospitals had reportedly canceled a few transgender procedures, while the ACLU and others have sued to seek an injunction blocking Trump’s order against transgender surgeries and treatments from taking effect. Federal power is at its zenith on the issue of how it spends its money, and thus Trump should ultimately prevail at the Supreme Court, but that Court may not resolve this anytime soon.
Meanwhile, the Minnesota State High School League has told schools there to continue to allow boys to compete as transgender athletes in girls’ sports. In Virginia, which has a Republican governor, schools will comply with Trump’s order against boys invading girls’ sports.
Planned Parenthood is in the business of transgender treatments, so every Democrat-appointed judge sides with that agenda. Blue state judges rule entirely for transgender activists.
On Sunday, Feb. 9, the New York Times Editorial Board stated their opinion entitled “Trump’s Shameful Campaign Against Transgender Americans,” and asserted that Trump is siding with “the worst of” U.S. history. Yet grassroots politics are confirming the opposite.
In Pennsylvania, where the Democrat voter registration advantage over Republicans exceeded 800,000 voters in 2020, that margin has fallen to less than 200,000 and continues to plummet even after the recent election. Outspoken Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who will face reelection there in the presidential year of 2028, observed in November that Trump’s victory may have resulted from ads saying, “Kamala is for ‘they/them.’ President Trump is for you.”
More recently Fetterman described the overall political approach by Democrats today as “toxic,” particularly for the young men who shifted to vote Republican in the last election. Fetterman assessed Trump’s election victory as a “gut-check kind of vote” about which side would protect voters’ “personal view of the American way of life,” and that is President Trump.
Billions Lost in Super Bowl Gambling
The embrace and promotion of gambling by the NFL make Super Bowl week the worst of the year for those susceptible to being victimized. And next month features March Madness, when an estimated 68 million Americans bet on the annual college basketball tournament.
Many billions are wagered on the Super Bowl, basketball games, and nearly everything else. The easy availability of gambling on phone apps and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to promote individualized betting have vastly expanded this vice far beyond the limited horse racing of a generation ago.
Young adults, and particularly young men, are the biggest victims, according to a survey released a few months ago by Fairleigh Dickinson University. It found that 10% of men and 7% of women between ages 18 and 30 have a gambling addiction today.
Gambling causes suicides and cognitive disorders even more than other addictions, including substance abuse. A study in Sweden found that gamblers were 15 times more likely to commit suicide than the overall population.
College basketball is particularly vulnerable to corruption by gambling, as players desperate for income can alter their performance to enable gamblers to win big by betting on aspects of a game. ESPN reported on February 3rd that three college basketball programs are under a federal investigation into gambling rings.
Major League Baseball fired its top balls-and-strikes umpire after his gambling app account was being used by someone else to place substantial bets on baseball. Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani’s ex-interpreter faces federal sentencing for allegedly stealing $17 million to gamble and, while Ohtani himself was cleared, last year there was an NBA player who pled guilty to a scheme to depart games early with a phony injury and then an illness so that bets could win.
Delta Airlines recently announced its new partnership with DraftKings, a sports gambling company, to offer free gaming to passengers while in-flight. Apparently money will not be wagered through this program, but hooking idle travelers on this addiction can result.
Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court opened the floodgates to sports gambling in 2018, the sums wagered have increased. Missouri, through a ballot initiative, will soon join the 38 states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, that allow sports betting.
More people seek help for their gambling addiction at this time of year, during NFL playoffs through the Super Bowl, according to the executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of Pennsylvania Josh Ercole. “A lot of this has to do with the ease of access and the continued increased availability,” he said, which has sharply increased through phone apps.
These bets are not merely on the outcome of a game, but throughout the game on predictions like what the next play will be or how well a particular player performs. “Prop wagers,” short for “proposition wagers,” are pervasive now in betting on sports.
A prop wager is a bet on something within a game, such as who scores the first touchdown or kicks the longest field goal. There are nearly endless varieties of prop bets promoted to someone using a gambling app during a game, and the potential for corruption with players, particularly unpaid ones at the college level, is severe.
The longtime NFL Commissioner who built the NFL into the world’s premier sports league was Pete Rozelle, a conservative and a big fan of Phyllis Schlafly. Rozelle banned NFL games on Christmas Day, and said in 1975 that “the NFL is firmly opposed to the concept of legalized gambling on professional football.”
That is not the NFL today, as it welcomes gambling to boost its television ratings among those who place bets. The NFL insists on playing on Christmas too, so this holy day has been transformed into a day of gambling for many.
The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit may even allow gambling on election outcomes, in a case that was argued on January 17 captioned KalshiEX v. CFTC. The plaintiff seeks to offer trading in political event futures contracts, which the Commodity Futures Trading Commission so far prohibits under its interpretation of a federal statute.
Texas, which recently opened its biennial legislative session, has admirably resisted pressure to allow sports gambling in the Lone Star State. Texas also properly prohibits ballot initiatives like the one that gambling companies just passed in Missouri.
The revered longtime Mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia, who built the Big Apple during the Great Depression, worked hard to keep gambling out and was even photographed destroying slot machines with a sledgehammer. He dumped them into the river rather than allow harm from gambling.
Congress could and should prohibit sports betting, and has the authority to do so under the Commerce Clause. States, too, should prohibit sports betting as nearly a dozen have done.
California Up in Smoke, Thanks to Liberals
The cost of the fires in Los Angeles County is estimated to range up to $250 billion, far more than the damage done by the Great Chicago Fire which destroyed that city in 1871. The losses from the Chicago Fire, considered one of the worst in history, were a smaller inflation-adjusted $5.7 billion.
The cost of rebuilding Chicago, which was done quickly, was contained because it was funded by its own residents, businesses, donations, and architects determined to build a great city. By 1893 it held a most spectacular World’s Fair with 27 million visitors from around the world over six months, and Chicago quickly became the railroad hub for America.
New lumber began arriving in Chicago for its rebuild while there were still hot embers in burnt buildings. There was not a smoldering feeling of entitlement as seen among liberals in Los Angeles today, or demands that the federal government serve as the gravy train of handouts.
President Trump made a remarkable trip to Los Angeles to implore its residents to reclaim their property and start their own construction as soon as possible. Time is money, and extensive delay in rebuilding the devastated areas of Los Angeles could be as costly as the immediate loss in value from the fires.
But California is a regulatory nightmare where radical environmentalists obstruct construction projects at every turn. More than a decade ago Californians enacted Proposition 1 (2014) by a landslide vote of 67% to create new reservoirs to supply more water to the arid Los Angeles basin, which could have doused the fires.
Billions were allocated for the promised new reservoirs, and Congress kicked in hundreds of millions of dollars more at American taxpayer expense. Yet no new reservoirs have been built in California since 1979.
Environmentalists file lawsuits to delay or stop construction, while liberal California judges too often rule in favor of the Left there. The California Environmental Quality Act allows lawsuits to contest findings by California agencies that are required to assess the potential environmental harm of infrastructure projects.
The Palisades and Eaton fires near Los Angeles destroyed 40,000 acres, which is 20 times larger than what burned in the Great Chicago Fire. Rainfall was pouring down on Southern California in late January but nearly all of it flows into the ocean because of the lack of reservoirs there.
Currently there are only three routes to bring water to southern California, which has very little of its own. The first route is the Los Angeles Aqueduct built by the great William Mulholland in the 1900s, which brings water from the Owens River valley on the east side of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Next is the Colorado River Aqueduct built in the 1930s, which brings water from the Colorado River at Lake Havasu, but that diminishing water supply is also needed by fast-growing Arizona. Finally, there is the California Aqueduct built in the 1960s, which is the only route to bring water from north of Sacramento where water is abundant, but that water must be shared with the enormously productive farms in California’s fertile Central Valley.
The coastal city of Rancho Palos Verdes embarked on a multi-million dollar project of “dewatering wells,” which has removed more than 112 million gallons of water to protect million-dollar homes against instability in the earth. Now that the vegetation is gone due to fires, the risk of mudslides from sudden downpours is getting worse.
While touring the carnage near Los Angeles, Trump, himself a builder of magnificent skyscraper apartments and hotels, and golf courses, rightly criticized the interference by liberals with the owners of burned-out property gaining access to their own land to clear the wreckage and start rebuilding now. Not next year, not next month, but immediately, Trump urged local officials to allow it.
California liberals want the rest of America to pay for their costly regulations that impede sensible construction and affordable living. The notorious California Coastal Commission asserts its own veto power over all human activity near the ocean, where much of popular California is.
Environmentalists obstruct the routine clearing of underbrush necessary to avert disastrous wildfires from spreading so quickly. When Tom Daschle was the Democrat Senate Majority Leader from South Dakota, he inserted into legislation a special provision to prohibit federal judges from interfering with the removal of underbrush in his state.
An illegal alien, already convicted of a felony, was arrested and is considered a person of interest in connection with the start of one of these conflagrations, the so-called Kenneth Fire. He was caught carrying a blowtorch near where that fire started.
California has plenty of money, and it is time for its many billionaires to pick up their oars and row their own boat to aquatic self-sufficiency within the next decade. Rural America elected Trump over fierce opposition by wealthy California Leftists, and rural Trump voters should not be burdened with the expense of restoring the liberal lifestyle that just went up in smoke.
Pardons Show the Need to Downsize DOJ
The unprecedented number of presidential pardons as Biden exited and Trump entered the White House demonstrates that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is out of control. DOJ has become an unaccountable, unelected branch of government that is undermining representative democracy.
Incoming President Trump, in his first few hours in office, properly pardoned more than a thousand victims of DOJ prosecutions in the one-sided D.C. venue where Trump supporters cannot get a fair trial. More pardons, such as of Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon for protecting executive privilege against the Democrats’ witch hunt against Trump, will surely be granted if desired.
Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, Pam Bondi, faced hostile questioning during her confirmation hearings but no senator seemed interested in scaling back DOJ such that so many pardons by presidents of both parties would become unnecessary. With an annual budget of nearly $40 billion without any real oversight by Congress, DOJ spends more than the entire annual budget of many states in prosecuting whomever it likes for headline purposes.
With over 10,000 attorneys on its payroll, DOJ is more than twice the size of the biggest private law firm. The vast amount of prosecutions and civil cases brought annually by DOJ could be viewed as a jobs program for attorneys.
DOJ is the most bloated of all federal agencies, and the most destructive. A mere investigation of a small company by the DOJ inevitably drives it out of business, even if it did nothing wrong.
Yet so far the House of Representatives has been unwilling to cut the DOJ’s budget. Elon Musk has not talked much about cutting DOJ in connection with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) downsizing project, despite how our country flourished the most before DOJ was founded in 1870.
Trump immediately suspended all of Biden’s burdensome regulations, and the Trump Administration could likewise withdraw all of DOJ’s unjustified prosecutions and appeals. DOJ has long-running litigation against Texas to remove a few buoys that protect a sliver of our southern border, for example, and DOJ should end its appeal on that issue immediately.
Many cases are pending in the Supreme Court about which DOJ should also promptly reverse its position to align them with Trump’s successful campaign pledges. One of the biggest is U.S. v. Skrmetti, in which the Biden Administration argued strenuously that Tennessee’s ban on transgender surgeries on minors somehow violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
The Trump Administration notified the Court that it does not support the ban on transgender treatments for children, as Trump was elected by opposing the “transgender lunacy.” In this and other cases throughout our country, DOJ should be promptly informing courts that the liberal stances previously taken by Biden are repudiated and withdrawn.
In another case pending before the Supreme Court, the Biden Administration is appealing a conservative ruling by the Fifth Circuit against the Food & Drug Administration for sending “manufacturers of flavored e-cigarette products on a wild goose chase” and blocking their sales. This regulatory overreach by the power-hungry FDA illustrates what Trump campaigned against, and the FDA’s appeal should be dropped in this Wages and White Lion Investments case.
In another appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court by the Biden Administration of a conservative decision by the Fifth Circuit, the Environmental Protection Agency insists that the venue for challenges by small refineries to the EPA’s burdensome clean air regulations must be limited to Washington, D.C. There the EPA enjoys the home court advantage and a big majority by Democrat-appointed judges.
The Trump Administration should withdraw this appeal and allow the decision against the EPA to remain in place, in Environmental Protection Agency v. Calumet Shreveport Refining. Trump won on his pro-energy platform against suffocating energy production with regulatory burdens, and withdrawing this appeal would fulfill his campaign pledges.
Another case pending before the Supreme Court this year is an appeal of a DOJ prosecution that reinterpreted a federal statute criminalizing false statements, by broadening it to include statements that are true but misleading as in omitting additional related information.
DOJ prosecuted the defendant under 18 U.S.C. § 1014, which prohibits making a “false statement” for the purpose of influencing certain financial institutions or agencies. The statements made by the defendant concerning a loan were true but incomplete, and would not be considered a violation of this criminal statute by many courts.
DOJ should not be using federal resources to prosecute small beer, such as factually true but potentially misleading statements on routine loans. The defendant appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court in Thompson v. U.S., and the Trump Administration should end this prosecution by agreeing that truth should be a valid defense under a federal false statements statute.
