Brits Buck ‘Gender Identity Ideology’ in Schools, Strange Bedfellows with Red States

by Greg Piper   The United Kingdom pioneered the legal practice of recognizing a person as the opposite sex without a surgical operation nearly 20 years ago. Its gender-identity clinic for children was created before the fall of the Soviet Union. But as 2023 draws to a close, the U.K.’s. educational policy for gender-confused children is leaning toward red America. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Department for Education published “non-statutory guidance” for schools in England this month that resembles legislation and school board policies in conservative U.S. states that have quickly provoked litigation. The alignment is all the more surprising because supporters of Britain’s governing Conservative Party, at least on social views, more closely resemble Democrats than Republicans in the U.S. Addressing schoolchildren by pronouns that correspond with their sex, and requiring them to use restrooms and locker rooms in line with their anatomy, may be the only subject of agreement among Brits and Idahoans other than an affinity for potatoes. Nearly half of U.S. states joined a brief last week backing The Gem State in a legal challenge to its sex-separation law for schools. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals halted a federal district judge’s order refusing to block SB 1000 in October. The Biden administration and American mainstream…

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Top Swedish Doctors Determine Transgender Puberty Blockers ‘Experimental’ While U.S. Gender Clinics Push Ahead

With the urging of the Biden administration, gender clinics in the United States appear to be pushing ahead with aggressive medical interventions for gender-confused young people even as top Swedish doctors who reviewed the use of puberty blockers for children now say the drugs should only be called “experimental.” 

Doctors at the Karolinska Institute, one of Europe’s top medical schools, released a systematic review of the literature regarding the provision of puberty blockers to children, the report for which was published April 17 at Acta Paediatrica.

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Senate Approves Sweden and Finland’s NATO Entry

The United States Senate voted to approve a treaty to allow Sweden and Finland to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on Wednesday.

The treaty received bipartisan support and was passed with 95-1 votes in favor of expanding NATO, The New York Times reported. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell voiced their support for the ratification of the treaty and the growth of the organization.

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Three Virginia Congressmen Among 18 Votes Against Supporting Addition of Sweden, Finland to NATO

Virginia had the most representatives voting ‘Nay’ on Monday against a resolution supporting adding Sweden and Finland to NATO. The resolution passed with 394 votes in favor, just 18 votes against, all Republican, and 19 members not voting. Three of Virginia’s four Republican congressmen voted against the measure: Congressmen Morgan Griffith (R-VA-09), Bob Good (R-VA-05), and Ben Cline (R-VA-06), while Congressman Rob Wittman (R-VA-01) voted in favor.

In a press release, Griffith said that the Senate has the constitutional power to ratify adding the two countries to NATO, but not the House. He said that the resolution also calls for other NATO countries to support adding the two countries.

“I think that goes well beyond the House’s jurisdiction,” Griffith said.

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Commentary: Non-Binary Pronouns Are Conquering the West

For a long time now, Sweden has had a history of being impressively ahead of the rest of the West in a number of areas: appeasing Nazis, remaining neutral during the Cold War, exporting porn, legalizing euthanasia, serving meatballs at furniture emporia, capitulating to Islam, putting legitimate Ukrainian refugees into asylum centers where they’re raped by bogus Muslim refugees, etc.

It should not come as a surprise, then, that Sweden was also ahead of the curve on the pronoun front. Way ahead.

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Moderna Recalls More than 750,000 COVID-19 Vaccine Doses After ‘Foreign Body’ Found in Lot

The pharmaceutical company Moderna on Friday recalled 764,900 doses of its Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine after a “foreign body” was found in a vial.

The contaminated lot was manufactured at a contract manufacturing site, ROVI, in Spain, and was distributed in mid-January 2022 in Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and Spain, according to a company press release.

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Commentary: Sweden—Once Mocked for Its COVID Strategy—Now Has One of the Lowest COVID Mortality Rates in Europe

Early in the coronavirus pandemic, I asked a simple question. Could Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus actually work?

Unlike its European neighbors and virtually all US states, the Swedes had opted to not shut down the economy. The country of 10 million people took what was at first described as “a lighter touch.”

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Commentary: Five Charts Showing Sweden’s Strategy Worked

Government officials in Sweden announced this week that the government expects to maintain its mild restrictions on gatherings “for at least another year” to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

Unlike most other European countries and nations around the world, Sweden declined to initiate a nationwide lockdown or mask mandates, opting instead for a policy that restricted large gatherings and relied on social responsibility to slow transmission of the virus.

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Positive COVID-19 Cases Drop in No-Lockdown Sweden, Marking the Lowest Rate Since the Pandemic Began

Sweden’s positive coronavirus cases dropped after the country carried out a record number of COVID-19 tests recently, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing Swedish health officials.
The country saw only 1,300 positive cases out of 120,000 tests last week, representing a 1.2% positive rate, Sweden’s health agency said Tuesday, according to the Reuters report. The low number of cases is the lowest Sweden has seen since the pandemic, which originated in China, first emerged in Europe, the report noted.

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Swedish Lawmakers Nominate Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg for a Nobel Peace Prize

by Chris White   Swedish lawmakers nominated activist Greta Thunberg for a Nobel Peace Prize Monday in the belief that the teenager will help save the Paris climate agreement. Thunberg “worked hard to make politicians open their eyes to the climate crisis,” Jens Holm and Hakan Svenneling, both members of Sweden’s Left Party, told the Associated Press. They believe the 17-year-old activist’s work prodding officials to take the deal seriously is worth the prize. “Action for reducing our emissions and complying with the Paris Agreement is therefore also an act of making peace,” Holm and Svenneling said.  Thunberg is receiving heaps of praise after she appeared at the United Nations’ climate summit in 2019. She won Time’s “Person of the Year” in December 2019, making her the young person to receive the honor since Time Magazine started naming people of the year in 1927. She traveled to the U.S. from her home in Sweden in August on a racing yacht to avoid taking jets, which activists argue are responsible for spewing tons of carbon emissions. Her visit was designed to galvanize support for action on global warming ahead of September’s United Nations climate summit. Thunberg’s emotional speech at the summit appeared to be the catalyst for much of the praise. “You…

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Commentary: Capitalism Saved Sweden

by Michael Munger   Josh Billings famously diagnosed a problem with beliefs: “I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.” I am astonished at how many students, and for that matter adults, in the U.S. honestly believe that the U.S. should model itself after Sweden because Sweden has shown that socialism works. I will leave aside the question of whether the U.S. should try to “be like” Sweden; they are very different countries, with different histories and different institutions. But it is important to refute, using simple and widely available empirical evidence, the claim that Sweden is “socialist.” It is not. In fact, Sweden is one of the most robustly capitalist nations on earth. By socialism, I mean a system that relies on state ownership and control of the means of production, state direction of production decisions, and direct state control of education and employment decisions of individuals. If one does not mean those things, then that would require a little more thinking about what “socialism” means. If by “socialism” you mean prosperity and rule of law, then you are confused. There are several important issues to discuss, to understand the differences between…

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Walter Williams Commentary: Our Ignorance Of Socialism is Dangerous

by Walter E. Williams   A recent Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation survey found that 51 percent of American millennials would rather live in a socialist or communist country than in a capitalist country. Only 42 percent prefer the latter. Twenty-five percent of millennials who know who Vladimir Lenin was view him favorably. Lenin was the first premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Half of millennials have never heard of communist Mao Zedong, who ruled China from 1949 to 1959 and was responsible for the deaths of 45 million Chinese people. The number of people who died at the hands of Josef Stalin may be as high as 62 million. However, almost one-third of millennials think former President George W. Bush is responsible for more killings than Stalin. By the way, Adolf Hitler, head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, was responsible for the deaths of about 20 million people. The Nazis come in as a poor third in terms of history’s most prolific mass murderers. According to professor Rudolph Rummel’s research, the 20th century, mankind’s most brutal century, saw 262 million people’s lives destroyed at the hands of their own governments. Young people who weren’t alive…

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Integration of Foreigners in Sweden Has ‘Failed,’ and It Could Sway the Country’s Political System

Riksdag

by Hanna Bogorowski    – Voters in Sweden will hit the polls Sunday to elect a new Parliament.   – The right-leaning Sweden Democrats, an unusual pick for the progressive nation, are rising in the polls, and experts say immigration is the driving force.  – Recently, even foreign-born Swedes are questioning the state’s immigration policies. Voters in Sweden will hit the polls Sunday to elect a new Parliament, and following a similar trend present in other European countries, immigration is driving the political agenda and is the force behind the rising popularity of the right-leaning Sweden Democrats (SD) party. While nationalistic governments have been making waves in the political sphere as anti-immigrant sentiment rises in governments such as Italy, Hungary and even Australia, it’s notable that these views are taking hold in such a progressive government as Sweden’s. SD’s popularity has been climbing over the years, but recent polls show the party is in first or second place ahead of Sunday’s elections, according to The Wall Street Journal. The SD party entered the country’s Parliament in 2010 and holds 42 of the 349 seats in Parliament, but its emphasis on immigration policy struck a chord with voters this time around. Sweden has taken in more…

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