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A new report has revealed that a prominent white nationalist author, activist and podcaster known as Paul Kersey has in fact worked for more than a decade at mainstream conservative institutions and media outlets under his real name.

According to an investigation by the not-for-profit media outlet Right Wing Watch (RWW), the man who has worked under the Kersey pseudonym is in fact Michael J Thompson.

The Guardian has uncovered additional material that supports reporting by RWW, and further indicates Thompsons role in moulding rightwing activists from a position near the heart of Americas most influential conservative institutions.

The RWW investigation, published on Monday, reveals the work of Paul Kersey, whom it calls a barely underground member of the white nationalist movement and a fixture on the roster of racist media outlets and campaign groups.

But it also shows that Thompson worked under his own name at institutions like the Leadership Institute, its media arm Campus Reform, and WND, formerly World Net Daily, a once-popular conspiracy-minded conservative outlet, as late as November 2018.

It also shows how his WND position allowed him to move in professional circles that included white nationalists, writers from Breitbart and the Daily Caller and prominent Donald Trump supporters including Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec.

RWW determined Thompsons identity partly through a forensic voice test on audio recordings and partly through emails and testimony provided by Katie McHugh, a former far-right insider and Breitbart writer.

Evidence from McHugh underpinned reporting by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that showed how Trumps close aide Stephen Miller attempted to insert white nationalist themes into Breitbarts coverage of the 2016 presidential election.

Using the Paul Kersey pseudonym in online columns for outlets like VDare and American Renaissance, Thompson has for years whipped up racist fears about black crime; promoted racial paranoia about a demographic Great Replacement of white Americans; and spread falsehoods about the genetic inferiority of non-whites.

According to RWW, he has run an influential far-right blog, Stuff Black People Dont Like, since 2009. The blog is focused on promoting false white nationalist ideas about race and crime.

He has also regularly appeared as a guest on white nationalist podcasts including Red Ice, The Political Cesspool and Richard Spencers AltRight Radio and is currently the co-host of a podcast produced by a prominent SPLC-designated hate group, American Renaissance.

But in 2010, RWW reports, he was named in a press release from the Leadership Institute as working in their campus services program. The Guardian was able to confirm this by accessing an archived staff page for Campus Reform, the Leadership Institutes online vehicle for the prosecution of on-campus culture wars.

The Leadership Institute is one of the longest-standing institutions in the US conservative movement, focused on training young activists. It claims to have trained 200,000 such young conservatives over 40 years, in skills including public speaking, campaigning and fundraising.

In a series of archived snapshots from the Campus Reform staff page from September 2009 to July 2010, Thompson was listed as campus services coordinator for the western region. This suggests he began his pseudonymous white nationalist blog while employed by the Leadership Institute and its media arm.

Campus Reforms website was established at the beginning of 2009, according to Domain Name System records. It has typically targeted so-called political correctness and professors it deems to be leftists.

Using internet archiving services, the Guardian was able to access the full text of previously unreported Campus Reform articles by Thompson. In the bylines for those articles, written in 2009 and 2010, he is described as a Campus Reform reporter.

In the articles that were archived and accessible, Thompson does not openly use the vocabulary of white nationalism but does explore themes such as race and immigration.

One May 2010 article criticizes Colorado State students for staging a walkout in protest against a hardline immigration law passed in Arizona in 2010 and highlights the involvement of some students with an immigrant rights group, La Raza.

Another bemoans the decision of a Washington state public college, Evergreen State, to fund a visit by the academic and civil rights activist Angela Davis, calling her a Marxist agitator.

Many more articles offer instructions, guidance and assistance to conservative student activists.

Thompson leads with complaints about political correctness; news of anti-abortion, pro-gun and media activism by conservative students; and exhortations to run for student government.

In each case, he appeals to students to reach out to Campus Reform for information, training and organizing assistance.

The Guardian has discovered evidence that Thompson was able to make connections between students and members of the conservative movement.

A February 2011 guest post on the Campus Reform website by a senior at Utah State University describes that students experiences as a sponsored attendee at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which remains the principal annual gathering of the conservative movement.

The author writes: Michael Thompson, my regional field coordinator worked diligently to put me in contact with individuals and organizations willing to help me with future activism efforts on my campus.

RWW reports that Thompson worked at WND from at least January 2012 to November 2018.

Thompson, American Renaissance leader Jared Taylor and Joseph Farah of WND did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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White nationalist has long worked at conservative outlets under real name - The Guardian

When Justice Singleton was growing up, her father, the late director, writer and producer John Singleton, didnt go out of his way to show her the movies hed made. For awhile she thought he was a football player because he used to talk about how he was drafted into the industry.

But when the now 27-year-old attended a summer program for incoming freshmen of color at Loyola Marymount University, the group was shown a movie of her fathers that shed never seen before Higher Learning, about the struggles of a group of freshmen at the fictional Columbus University in Los Angeles.

When you go on a campus as a black person, Justice Singleton says, it can be really fearful, eye-opening.

The slang, fashion and soundtrack may date Higher Learning as a distinctly 1995 product, but its striking how many of the topics that shape the film are still being grappled with on college campuses and in society at large. Higher Learning examines the rise of white nationalism among young men, the pervasiveness of rape culture, school shootings, racist policing policies, the high price of a university education, binge drinking, sexual fluidity and the treatment of minority athletes in college athletics.

Presaging the culture wars that followed NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernicks sideline protests just a few years ago, there is even a scene in which Fudge, a politically minded senior played by Ice Cube, asks track star Malik Williams, played by Omar Epps, whether he would stand for the national anthem at a football game if he was surrounded by an all-white crowd.

Omar Epps, left, and Laurence Fishburne as student and professor in John Singletons Higher Learning.

(Eli Reed / Columbia Pictures)

These issues are still so prevalent in our society, Epps says today, and [Singleton] was cognizant of all of it.

John Singleton celebrated his 27th birthday five days before the January 1995 release of Higher Learning. Despite his youth, it was already his third project for a major film studio.

Singleton, who died last year at 51 from a stroke, had established himself as a new and formidable talent in Hollywood when Columbia Pictures put out his debut feature Boyz N the Hood in July 1991. The movie received a rapturous response after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, made over $57 million domestically off an estimated $6.5-million budget and earned the young filmmaker Oscar nominations in the director and original screenplay categories. Before Boyz reached theaters, critic Roger Ebert famously included Singleton as part of the vanguard of what he declared the black new wave. Columbias president Frank Price repeatedly compared Singleton to Steven Spielberg.

John Singleton during the shoot for Boyz N the Hood, which was released in 1991 and earned him an Academy Award nomination for directing.

(Aaron Rapoport / Corbis via Getty Images)

Singletons follow-up, Poetic Justice, was a road film and love story that starred Tupac Shakur and Janet Jackson. Bringing in $27.5 million, it wasnt as successful as Boyz, but Singletons career was still on the rise.

He pretty much had carte blanche, says Stephanie Allain, who was senior vice president of production at Columbia at the time. He could do what he wanted.

Tupac Shakur, left, and Janet Jackson as Lucky and Justice in John Singletons 1993 street romance Poetic Justice.

(Columbia Pictures)

What he wanted was to make Higher Learning, which was partly based on what the South-Central native witnessed during his time as a student at USC.

The film focused on Epps character Malik, an arrogant member of the track team who becomes increasingly attuned to the forces that shape the black experience in America. Ice Cubes character, Fudge, served as the films Afrocentric conscience. Laurence Fishburne portrayed political science professor Maurice Phipps. And rapper Busta Rhymes played a student who got into clashes for playing his music too loud.

Omar Epps, left, and Ice Cube in Higher Learning.

(Eli Reed/New Deal/Columbia Pictures/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Kristy Swanson, who had just starred in the titular role of the original Bufffy the Vampire Slayer movie (five years before the Joss Whedon TV series), played Kristen Connor, a nave Orange County-born woman who begins to explore feminist activism and her sexuality in the aftermath of a rape. Regina King was Kristens roommate, Monet; Jennifer Connelly played lesbian activist Taryn and model Tyra Banks was a track star who became a love interest for Malik.

Pivotal to the films conflict was Michael Rapaports character Remy, an awkward and lonely transplant from Idaho who joins a group of neo-Nazis led by Cole Hauser as Scott Moss. As the school year progresses, racial tensions increase among the student body, eventually exploding in violence.

To watch Singletons Higher Learning 25 years after its release is to watch a messy and often complicated movie. After all, it was trying to cover many messy and complicated subjects in just over two hours. Supposedly Singletons first cut was twice as long, though even that might not have been adequate time for all the ideas that the film attempts to digest.

This issue of tribalism and everybody separating into their little groups, its something that we might want to tease ourselves that weve gotten past in this country, but I feel like now more than ever, its pretty obvious that we havent, says Jay R. Ferguson, the Mad Men and Briarpatch actor who made his film debut in Higher Learning playing the frat boy Billy. Thats just a good reminder that its been going on for way too long and way before Higher Learning came out.

Laurence Fishburne, left, and Omar Epps in Higher Learning.

(Eli Reed/New Deal/Columbia Pictures/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Allain, who is preparing to produce the 92nd Academy Awards show with Lynette Howell Taylor next month, wasnt just one of the few black executives who worked at Columbia Pictures in the early 1990s, she was one of the few black executives in the entire film industry. She was responsible for bringing the Boyz N the Hood script and Singleton to Columbia, and shepherded his two subsequent movies at the studio. She also had a hand in launching the careers of Robert Rodriguez, Justin Simien, Sanaa Hamri, Craig Brewer and Darnell Martin, among others.

John basically taught me how to produce, how to protect the auteurs vision through a lot of arguments, Allain says. I worked for the studio, but I really worked for him too. John was a very persuasive guy. His passion and his intellect pulled you in. You wanted to be a part of it.

Singleton typically wouldnt start writing a film until he was finished with the one he was directing, but his ideas for Higher Learning were already forming as he worked on Poetic Justice. In 1992, the Los Angeles Times visited Singleton on the set of that film. In the midst of shooting, he was also emotionally contending with the Rodney King verdict and the riots that followed. He hinted that the conflicts within his hometown of Los Angeles would inspire his next project.

Its gonna be hard. Cause Im pissed off, he told writer Patrick Goldstein. Its going to be the first movie I do that has white characters. Because Im going to have to deal with a lot of bigger issues, economic issues, issues of class as well as race.

John Singleton on the set of his 1995 film Higher Learning.

(New Deal/Columbia Pictures/Kobal/Shutterstock)

The acclaim and box office success of Boyz N the Hood helped inspire an influx of what were then called hood movies films like Menace II Society and South Central. Just like the increasing popular strain of gangster rap, they purported to show the realities and repercussions of gang life, police brutality and the crack epidemic in L.A.s African American neighborhoods.

Dr. Todd Boyd, then a young professor who had recently moved to Los Angeles to join USCs film department, remembers it as a particularly exciting cultural time in the city. Black filmmakers were hot at that moment, he says. John was in the center of it. Spike [Lee] is from New York and his movies were New York movies But John brought a West Coast sensibility to it. When you consider how N.W.A and Ice Cube and [Dr.] Dre and Ice-T brought the West Coast into the hip-hop equation, John was doing the same kind of thing in film.

Since Higher Learning would be Singletons first movie without a predominantly black cast, it was perceived that there would be broader marketing possibilities and audience growth, which meant Columbia didnt hesitate when he brought them the concept.

Oh my God, they were happy, says Allain. Are you kidding? Theyre like, OK, we have some white people in this one! He was growing as a filmmaker and he felt like he had the ability to give voice to other characters.

As casting for the film began, the only actors attached were Ice Cube and King, who had made their film debuts in Boyz N the Hood. King, who won an Oscar last year for her role in Barry Jenkins If Beale Street Could Talk and recently starred as the detective at the heart of HBOs Watchmen, also played a supporting role in Poetic Justice, while Cube says he turned down the part that eventually went to Shakur in that film.

The offer to play Fudge in Higher Learning coincided with Cubes increasing interest in black history and the Nation of Islam. He was reading books by Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, as well as learning about the history behind the Black Panthers and Los Angeles gangs. It was a highly political stage in my career, says Cube. I was ready to do a movie and put out a visual match to what I was rapping about.

Stephanie Allain, producer

At a time when shaved heads and close fades were the normal hairstyles for young African American men, the voluminous, throwback Afro that Cube sported in Higher Learning was a striking look. When [Singleton] told me about the character months before, I just knew I wanted to grow my hair out, he says. I wanted to make that statement that this guy is black on the inside and outside.

Fishburne had played Furious Styles in Boyz N the Hood, a role that was based on Singletons father. After Sidney Poitier and Dustin Hoffman turned down the role of the political science professor in Higher Learning, Singleton turned to Fishburne, who was only 34 at the time. Just seven years earlier he had played a student activist in School Daze, Spike Lees film set at another fictional college, the historically black Mission College in Atlanta. For Higher Learning, they aged Fishburnes appearance by whitening his hair and beard, but the actor developed his own distinctive approach to the character.

[Singleton] explained to me that it was kind of generational, the difference between the students point of view and this professors, Fishburne says. I thought about [how] Poitier was from the Caribbean and I thought that would be kind of the way in. I said, Lets make him West Indian, so at least theres a cultural difference.

Fishburne ended up basing his performance on his godfather Maurice Watson, an English and drama professor at Brooklyn College, who was responsible for getting him into acting as a child.

Epps part of Malik was originally going to be played by Shakur Singleton told Vibe magazine at the time that he wanted the two of them to have a creative partnership like Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese. But as the film went into production, Shakur faced charges of sexual assault that eventually sent him to prison. Epps, later known for his starring role in Love and Basketball and his long run on House, had broken through with the film Juice and had replaced Wesley Snipes in the sequel to Major League. Still, this film felt different. It was my first time working with a filmmaker who was just so entrenched into the story and the bigger voice of the film, says Epps, who most recently has been seen on NBCs This Is Us.

Even before the script for Higher Learning was done, Swanson, who was repped by the same agency as Singleton, reached out to meet with the director. Like the character she went on to play, Swanson is from Orange County.

Even though we were both from Southern California, we were able to talk about how we came from very different sorts of lives, Swanson says. There was a lot of humor in our conversation and getting a feel for each other. I could tell he was really studying me and how I spoke and what I had to say. She believes that their conversation ended up shaping the character, even down to her name, Kristen.

Swanson is now one of the entertainment businesss most vocal supporters of Donald Trump, waging daily campaigns on his behalf on social media and getting messages of gratitude from the presidents Twitter account.

As for the role of the skinhead Remy, there are conflicting accounts about whether Leonardo DiCaprio (post-Oscar nomination for Whats Eating Gilbert Grape but pre-global mega fame for Titanic) was at one point officially attached to the part. As shooting neared, Singleton and the casting agents considered Rapaport and Hauser for the role.

I had actually just done a role in a film called Skins where I played a skinhead, so I already looked the part, says Hauser, who is currently one of the stars of Kevin Costners Paramount Network series Yellowstone, and conducted the interview for this story while riding his horse, Duke. When I walked in and met John, he kinda looked at me and I think he really thought I was a skinhead.

Rapaport eventually got the part of Remy, while Hauser was cast as the head of the neo-Nazis, even though he was only 19 years old. The irony was not lost on either of the actors that they were both Jewish.

Before filming began, Singleton developed exercises for the actors to get more in touch with the roles they were playing. He had this thing he called character therapy, Swanson remembers. We sat in a circle almost like you would see at a group-therapy meeting, you know, Hi, my name is . That kind of a thing. Everybody spoke as their character in this therapy circle.

Though Hauser said he got along with cast members like Ice Cube and Busta Rhymes on the Higher Learning set, his physical appearance caused some uncomfortable moments.

John was one of those guys, especially early on, who was doing this more than anybody, where the crew is black down to the catering and the drivers. he says. He was doing a lot for the African American community, especially in Los Angeles at that time. So to be walking around with a shaved head, with tattoos of Invisible Empire on my neck, its not the most, I guess, inviting atmosphere.

Singleton also told Rapaport not to hang out with most of the cast when they werent filming in order to mirror the isolation his character feels. It was not an easy ask for unabashed hip-hop devotee. I was such a fan of Omar Epps and Busta Rhymes and Cube, says Rapaport, who over the years has been a near-constant film and TV presence, most recently as the dad in Netflixs Atypical. I remember Omar Epps had gotten an early copy of Nas first record, Illmatic. I remember walking by their trailer and they were listening to it and I was so jealous.

As the filming went on, the difficult subjects the story examined couldnt help but affect the tenor of the production. It always starts off very optimistic and fun, and then the acting starts to take over and gets you a little more serious says Cube. The more we did it, the more difficult it felt to shoot things. It felt like theres really lines in the sand and thats because you got good actors on all sides of the equation, and you got a director who understands that this tension can be used to bring out better performances.

Director John Singleton in July 2011.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

With his comedies Friday, Ride Along, Barbershop and their sequels still in the future, Cube, who at the time of Higher Learning was still actively making music in his post N.W.A career, says he learned everything about screenwriting and directing from Singleton. Hanging out together at Singletons home in Baldwin Hills, the filmmaker told Cube that if he could tell stories so well in his lyrics, he should be doing it in scripts. Singleton not only guided him toward buying his first computer and Final Draft screenwriting software, he coached him through several different scripts until he finished Friday.

Higher Learning was shot on the campus of UCLA during the first half of 1994. (USC denied Singletons request to film it at his alma mater.) Columbia Pictures released the film in January 1995. These days, January is known as a time studios dump the movies they dont have faith in, either critically or commercially, but the executives interviewed for this article say that wasnt the case for Higher Learning.

Nobody thought we better bury this, said Sid Ganis, Columbias then head of marketing who had also worked on Singletons previous films. Not at all.

The film opened on Martin Luther King Jr. weekend and made over $13 million, taking the second spot in the box office rankings, just behind Legends of the Fall. It eventually grossed $38 million in theaters more than Poetic Justice but less than Boyz N the Hood.

Response to Higher Learning was mixed. Critics admired Singletons desire to confront societal problems but felt he relied on too many clichs and shallow depictions to do so. As Kenneth Turan wrote in his review for the Los Angeles Times, Because he accomplished so much so early, it is easy to forget how young John Singleton is. Higher Learning reminds us.

Singleton spent this century specializing in action films like Shaft and 2 Fast 2 Furious. Baby Boy from 2001 marked the last of his so-called hood films. In 2017 he took a deeper look at the L.A. unrest that had initially inspired Higher Learning by producing the documentary L.A. Burning: The Riots 25 Years Later. And he returned to the Los Angeles of his youth as the co-creator of FXs series about the 1980s drug trade, Snowfall. His death came three months before the premiere of the shows second season.

Taraji P. Henson, left, and Tyrese Gibson in a scene from John Singletons Baby Boy.

(Eli Reed / Columbia Pictures)

Higher Learning ends with the word Unlearn appearing over the American flag before the screen fades to black. These days, similarly optimistic phrases of the era like Erase Racism and No Colorlines get little play in discussion of racial dynamics. The emphasis is on getting people to acknowledge the inherent prejudices and biases within themselves, then working to challenge them.

When Higher Learning was released, the Los Angeles Times held a screening of the film for 10 local college students. Afterward USCs Dr. Boyd moderated a conversation between them and Singleton. The director had only graduated a few years earlier, but already the students questioned why he didnt focus more on systematic racism and wondered why his film didnt include the experience of Latino and Asian students.

Recent incidents on college campuses, such as the May 2018 call to campus police by a white student about a black Yale graduate student sleeping in a residence halls common area, have forced the people of the United States to examine their own feelings and assumptions about race. In this political climate theres also been the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and white supremacist incidents, as well as a continued battle over U.S. immigration policies and affirmative action lawsuits, all forcing difficult but crucial conversations.

As Justice Singleton says, The way the world is, is kind of like a college campus now.

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The sex, gun and race issues presaged by a 1995 John Singleton film - Los Angeles Times

Ted Bundy's crimes were described by the judge presiding over his trial as "extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile," a phrase that was later adopted by a movie about the serial killer starring Zac Efron.

However, the same judge also delivered a lesser publicized set of words that many still find profoundly troubling today.

"Extremely wicked, shockingly vile, and evil" only goes a short way to capture Bundy's atrocities. He exploited the fact that he was handsome and charismatic to win the trust of his umpteen victims, all young, beautiful girls, before knocking them unconscious and taking them to secluded locations to rape and kill them.

He was so brazen that he would openly approach his victims, often in broad daylight, by feigning injury or disability, and even impersonating an authority figure. Once he had them in his control, he would promise to release them if they didn't kick up a fuss, only to later kill them in cold blood.

He would sometimes revisit his secondary crime scenes, grooming and performing sexual acts with the corpses until decomposition and destruction made any further interactions impossible. He also decapitated at least 12 of his victims and kept some of their severed heads as trophies.

So, as one can imagine, when he was finally caught a third time in February 1978 his first two incarcerations in Colorado saw him engineer dramatic escapes and then commit further assaults in Florida after the horrific Chi Omega murders and his last victim 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, women across the country breathed a sigh of relief.

His highly publicized trial was covered by 250 reporters from five continents and was the first-ever to be televised nationally in the United States, something Bundy took glee in and saw as an opportunity to further promote his cult of personality.

Despite having four court-appointed attorneys on his side, Bundy routinely ignored their advice and took the defense into his hands, promptly making the trial into a sort of spectacle where he could show off the lawyer he always thought he could be.

However, his case was always doomed. Eyewitness testimony and a plethora of physical evidence meant the jury took less than seven hours to convict him of two counts of first-degree murder, three counts of attempted first-degree murder, two counts of burglary and recommended the death penalty.

Imposing the death sentence, Trial judge Edward Cowart delivered the words that have now almost been immortalized in pop culture.

"The court finds that both of these killings were indeed heinous, atrocious and cruel," he told Bundy. "And that they were extremely wicked, shockingly evil, vile and the product of a design to inflict a high degree of pain and utter indifference to human life."

However, his comments following that, as Bundy prepared to leave the courtroom, left many flabbergasted because it felt as though Cowart was almost sympathizing with the serial killer.

"Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely," he said. "I say that to you sincerely; take care of yourself. It is an utter tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity, I think, as I've experienced in this courtroom."

"You're a bright young man. You'd have made a good lawyer and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner. I don't feel any animosity toward you. I want you to know that. Take care of yourself."

Amazon Studios' 'Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer,' which premiered on January 31, criticized Cowart's handling of the case, with many taking issue with his kind words to a man who was responsible for the deaths of at least 30 women.

Reporters who were at the trial swear that they distinctly and categorically remember Cowart's words to Bundy after he was sentenced to death because of how taken aback they were by it.

"That he would say that to him with no concern for what these women actually experienced, it's almost like a homage to him," said Jane Caputi, a feminist scholar. "And that's a scary, scary thing."

'Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer' has attempted to reframe Bundy's crimes from a female perspective, including those of his longtime girlfriend and her daughter, and highlighted how his psychological hatred of women seemingly collided with the feminist movement and culture wars of the 70s.

The docuseries can be streamed on Amazon Prime.

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Ted Bundy was so charming that even the judge who gave him death sentence complimented him - MEAWW

U.S. Attorney General William Barr clapped back at leftwing hysteria over his support of the First Amendment Tuesday in an interview with Cardinal Timothy Dolan on Sirius XM.

I feel today religion is being driven out of the marketplace of ideas and theres a organized militant secular effort to drive religion out of our lives, Barr told Dolan. To me the problem today is not that religious people are trying to impose their views on nonreligious people, its the opposite its that militant secularists are trying to impose their values on religious people and theyre not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith.

Since developing similar ideas in depth in several public talks, Barr has been the subject of a series of hit pieces in publications including The New York Times and The New Yorker. Its not just his full-throated defense of the natural right to obey ones conscience above ones government that gets their goat. Barrs concern for the rule of law, fair play, and due process especially about Russian collusion and impeachment have also brought out the knives.

A particularly unhinged and error-riddled 10,000-word New Yorker article by David Rohde may have made one accurate assessment: Barr is the most feared, criticized, and effective member of Trumps Cabinet. There is certainly some relationship between the lefts fear and the rights effectiveness, and thus the neutering attempts. As Sohrab Amari noted, Barr has been ridiculously labeled an extremist Catholic associated with a secretive, ultra-orthodox Catholic sect.

Of course, the point of flak like this is to polarize the target and thus make him ineffective through clouds of mistrust. A parallel effort has been underway much longer against the nations first freedom: the duty to obey God before men. Thus in her own attack article against Barr last month in The New York Times, Katherine Stewart put the words religious liberty and religious freedom in scare quotes, even though these are longstanding natural rights that enjoy U.S. legal protection for very good reasons that include staunching bigotry. The ignorant scare quotes are becoming common in even outlets that style themselves objective news sources.

[I]t is illuminating to review how Mr. Barr has directed his Justice Department on matters concerning the First Amendment clause forbidding the establishment of a state religion, Stewart writes:

In Maryland, the department rushed to defend taxpayer funding for a religious school that says same-sex marriage is wrong. In Maine, it is defending parents suing over a state law that bans religious schools from obtaining taxpayer funding to promote their own sectarian doctrines.

In these and other cases, Mr. Barr has embraced wholesale the religious liberty rhetoric of todays Christian nationalist movement. When religious nationalists invoke religious freedom, it is typically code for religious privilege. The freedom they have in mind is the freedom of people of certain conservative and authoritarian varieties of religion to discriminate against those of whom they disapprove or over whom they wish to exert power.

Stewart makes an error of omission in her description of the First Amendment. The clause concerning religion reads, in full: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. A full quotation undoes her conclusion that the Constitution prohibits religious people from equal access to public funds. That is not only historically and legally inaccurate, its obviously textually inaccurate from any unbiased persons plain reading.

In other words, shes doing exactly what Barr says shes doing, while pretending that she is not. Stewart is making a secular effort to drive religion out of our lives and trying to impose her values on religious people while not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith. Her values say that only pagans people with atheist, pantheist, syncretist, or agnostic religious beliefs may fully access public goods. People with theistic religious beliefs may not. This is not equality or tolerance it is prejudice.

Mr. Barrs constitutional interpretation is simply window dressing on his commitment to religious authoritarianism, writes Stewart, smugly. No, maam: Your constitutional interpretation is simply window dressing on your commitment to religious authoritarianism. Barr acknowledges himself not free to do whatever he wants i.s. be an authoritarian by binding himself to a religion that checks his worst impulses and dictates the right way to treat other people, which includes respecting their sometimes very differing consciences.

The secularists Stewart represents just refuse to acknowledge that their religious beliefs are in fact religious beliefs, and of a far creepier and deadlier kind than Christians. What is, for example, the belief that human beings can have the female mind embedded in a male body, if not a religious belief? In a materialistic religious view, how is it even possible to have a gendered mind? Is gender solely a product of chemicals? If not, what else could it be for people who do not admit to a nonmaterial realm?

Further, what is more cultish than forcing people to believe through social pressure, law, and other means that a man is a woman is a man is a woman? What is more totalitarian than to force people to pretend that males and females are interchangeable inside the relationship whose major function in society is to spend half a livetime cultivating happy, competent citizens starting at conception?

Or what is, for another example, the belief that it is possible to fix the world by applying government pressure? That is not a belief that can be wholly validated by research or experience. In fact, research and experience both indicate that central planning usually makes life even more nasty, brutish, and short.

So what is this unfounded, undocumented, unprovable faith in government power to correct human psyches and behavior if not a religious (metaphysical) belief? It is also an unprovable and metaphysical belief about what a human is a thing that can be corrected by politics and whose error is not intrinsic to itself. Again, these are all metaphysical, religious beliefs with no empirical basis or possibility of being fully empirically proven.

It is quite simply a lie to say that atheism is not a religious belief. It cannot be empirically documented that there is no God. For one thing, nobody has visited the outermost reaches of the universe in an attempt to find Him, assuming that is a way He could be found. It is simply an assumption, a religious assumption, that an atheist makes.

And thats fine. Christians arent the ones who have a problem with people making religious assumptions. The secular, pagan, atheist types are the ones who claim religious assumptions are evil. They do so because they erroneously believe they are free from such assumptions. But in truth, no one is.

It has been long convenient for secularists to insist that it is possible for government to be neutral about religion by imposing their religion on everyone. But this is a falsehood, and its falsity is ever more obvious in todays culture wars, which are increasingly divided according to whether one believes in a deity and, by extension, an objective standard outside oneself or not. The culture war is in fact a religious war between relativism and orthodoxy, between the belief that truth is subjective and the belief that truth is objective, knowable, independent of ones opinions about it, and merits reverence.

This is very clear when one reads the attacks on Barr or on any orthodox position or person. Barr is just a representative of the half of America that believes in natural rights, in a written Constitution that restrains the government, and a God whose universe is explicable, orderly, and undergirds the whole shebang. Those who embrace a living Constitution, on the contrary, despise external rules, order, and anything else that might work to limit their passions, which they sometimes style politics. These are the two polar opposite metaphysical positions that drive our culture clash.

Far worse than the rule of law is the rule of the powerful over the weak. Far worse than the law of God are the so-called laws of men. On one side is freedom. On the other is totalitarianism. It is no irony that the real totalitarians project the label their position deserves onto opponents as a smear.

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Barr: The People Trying To 'Impose Their Values' Are 'Militant Secularists' - The Federalist

A participant lies on a giant Transgender Pride Flag during the Equality March, organized by the LGBT community in Kiev, Ukraine June 23, 2019. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)

South Dakotas House State Affairs Committee voted 85 yesterday to consider a bill the Vulnerable Child Protection Act that would make it a misdemeanor for doctors to chemically or surgically interfere with a gender-confused childs sexual development. The bill which can be read here will drop on the House floor Monday.

The Washington Posts report on the decision would give the impression that this is nothing more than the usual culture wars nonsense, a Here-We-Go-Again of bigoted conservatives versus progressives and professionals. Representative Fred Deutsch (R.), the bills co-sponsor, has framed the bill as homegrown but said he consulted with conservative groups such as the Liberty Counsel and the Kelsey Coalition as he was drafting it, the Post reporters wrote, inaccurately. Indeed, the Kelsey Coalitions website clearly indicates that they are a non-partisan, unfunded, volunteer-run organization with a singular mission to promote policies and laws to protect young people who identify as transgender. The Post has since corrected this, though they have not as of this writing acknowledged the error.

Later on, the Post reporters home in on Deutschs seemingly suspicious emotional state:

During the debate, Deutschs voice became extremely shaky as he said, Come on, can you wait till youre 16? Think about what you knew when you were that age.

Its lawmakers role to interject. We need to be the adult in the room, he said.

While contrasting this with the dispassionate presence of the people in lab coats:

House Minority Leader Jamie Smith (D) retorted that doctors and parents were already involved in decisions about gender transitioning, saying, Is it possible there are other adults in the room?

At the hearing, about 24 people in white lab coats wore pins that read, Every child counts, and said they were opposed to the bill. Representatives from the South Dakota State Medical Association and Sanford Health testified that the bill goes against best practices.

Later, the Post reporters conclude that the debate mirrored the nations culture wars, with Republican and Democratic lawmakers disputing not just medical facts, but also morality, parenting and the role of doctors in American life, before giving the final word to a mother of a child who has transitioned her child, and who says the bill is just designed to create more divide.

However, Jane Wheeler, a lesbian lawyer, and president of Rethink Identity Medicine Ethics (ReIME), a diverse group of multi-specialist clinicians and interdisciplinary scholars in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, endocrinology, sociology and the law, told me by email that no one is interested in culture wars except for lobby organizations,

There are groups now with real medical and ethical concerns about puberty blockers. These groups like Rethink Identity Medicine Ethics, The Kelsey Coalition, 4thWaveNow, GCCAN, Gender Health Query and SEGM are not radical feminist groups, religious or right-wing. The public has a right to know they exist, what they are saying and why.

There is a genuine conversation about media strategy to be had among those who oppose the medicalization of gender-confused children. Obviously, the broader the coalition the better. This means involving transgender adults, gays and lesbians, political liberals, doctors, scientists, formerly transgender teenagers (also known as detransitioners) and communicating the left-liberal resistance movements victories in the United Kingdom, which will help to discredit the tediously glib and inaccurate Republicans pounce narrative.

The South Dakota bill may or may not pass. But in any case, those who gave evidence signaled the beginning of a commonsense and, crucially, victim-led movement. One can only hope that more and more hearings like this will occur across the United States, creating a public record which, one way or another, will force the media to seriously engage.

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No WaPo, the South Dakota Transgender Bill Is Not about the Culture Wars - National Review