Turning Point USA recognized that many Americans have had enough, so they’ve announced a rival All- American Half Time Show that will feature Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett.

Paul Kengor and Grace Reilly break it all down in the latest episode of The Weekend Spectator.

Watch the full episode:

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I maintain that hospitals are a small zoo of bacteria, viruses, and microbes, and that anything you look at, smell, lick, or touch could be the beginning of a terrible infection. The Emergency Room waiting area, in particular, is a jungle. In other parts of a hospital, illnesses are already classified, so you know roughly what to expect depending on where you step. In the ER, however, viruses are still undiagnosed and share space wildly, mingling happily and jumping from one patient to another with impunity.

I always greet my doctor friends with a slight nod, keeping my distance. I avoid their hands as if they were lava, and I don’t mind saying so publicly here. A doctor’s hand looks like a normal hand. But if you put it under a microscope, a doctor’s hand is the closest thing to what you’d find if you dug a 10-meter hole in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. All those bugs don’t affect the doctor, because nobody bites the hand that feeds them, but they’re more than happy to latch onto your skin and cause all sorts of illnesses.

In the Emergency Room waiting area, I’ve developed a lung capacity far superior to that of any Olympic diver. I’ve gone as long as three hours without breathing, sitting between a woman who looked like she had yellow fever and an elderly man with obvious mumps, surrounded by a coral reef of sneezing unsavory characters.

The doctor’s office is another place where I try not to touch anything. Every time I go in and sit down, I imagine the lady with yellow fever and the man with mumps have meticulously licked every corner of the armrest and coughed with all their might onto the table where my fingers are resting. I rest my fingers instead of my whole hand to minimize the surface area for infection, you see. Another hypochondriac explained it to me years ago. He was a good guy. The nicest in the whole psychiatric ward.

And then there are the doctor’s questions — the ones they fire off routinely, hastily, and without enunciating, while they palpate your tonsils, take your temperature, squeeze your testicles, measure your blood pressure, and explore your ears.

• Tell me, is your cough dry or productive? My cough is annoying.
• Could you describe the mucus?
• And that headache you’re talking about — did it start before or after you began carrying it loose and tucked under your arm? Huh?

Once the diagnosis is made, things always end the same way. The options are to take a series of medications that wreck your stomach and worsen all your symptoms, receive an intensive treatment that’s far worse than the illness itself, or let them poke you anywhere on your body with one of the sharp instruments they always keep in a display case. Doctors particularly enjoy displaying their weapons. It’s a good technique. The moment you walk into the office, you’re confronted with such a collection of scalpels and bladed tools that you imagine the worst, the most painful things. So when it’s all over, and they prescribe a suppository every half hour for a month, you leave feeling like you’ve won the lottery.

On another note — and since you asked — yes: I’m terrified of syringes. I’d be capable of drinking sulfur just to avoid enduring an injection. The ailment is rarely more serious than the ordeal of the needle itself. I know doctors have to justify their line of work, which consists of examining fevered backs with a freezing instrument and sticking needles into butts.

In another century, a guy who went around sticking needles into other people’s buttocks would have been imprisoned or burned at the stake. Here, on the other hand, we protect them, adore them, and pay them a fortune. I don’t understand it. I didn’t get a penny the day I stuck a compass into the leg of the class idiot. It’s true I didn’t have the pretext of curing him of any disease — unless we consider stupidity an illness. But it’s still an injustice.

And since you’re begging me, let’s return to the subject of contagion. There’s another terrible moment in the life of a hypochondriac, something I can’t overlook. It’s when, after sharing a meal with a friend, the friend confesses over dessert that he has a strange viral disease that’s kept him out of work for several months. You turn pale and, instinctively, begin to subtly back away in your chair. And you hear nothing else. From that point on, all your faculties are focused on trying to remember whether you accidentally swapped glasses of water at some point during the meal. As he describes the symptoms of his illness, you experience them all. And finally, you faint. But before you completely lose consciousness, you run out — just in case the supposed patient decides to revive you with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

I don’t hide my admiration for doctors who dedicate themselves to saving lives. I have nothing against them. From here, my homage and my respect. On the other hand, I confess my contempt and opposition to those who devote themselves to sticking scalpels into people of goodwill and needles into innocent buttocks without a justifiable cause. And frankly, I can’t think of anything that could justify sticking a needle into someone else’s buttocks.

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Over there in the Big Apple, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal is now demanding that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani ban Newsmax TV from the TV screens in New York City taxi cabs.

Full disclosure, I am a Newsmax TV contributor. But if I had never heard of Newsmax or the ban was on another TV network, the answer would be the same. When America gets to the point that a government official is trying to use his/her governmental authority to shut down a free press, the red flags should go up.

Bluntly put, Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal is standing up for fascism. Fascism is defined, per the Merriam-Webster dictionary, as a philosophy “associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”

And what the Manhattan Borough president (a Democrat, but of course) is demanding is exactly the “forcible suppression of opposition.” With Hoylman-Sigal demanding that Mayor Mamdani play the role of the dictator.

Note well, if there is a felt need for TV in NYC taxi cabs, Hoylman-Sigal is not proposing a multitude of channels out there to fill the screen. The fact is that in today’s world, home televisions can and do offer a variety of news channels that include not just Newsmax but CNN, Fox, News Nation, and MSNBC, the latter rebranding itself as MS Now. And that’s before you get to local newscasts in whatever area the cab operates. It’s up to the viewer as to which one they choose to watch.

Choice in television channels. What an amazing, revolutionary concept. Who knew?

The real problem here is that Hoylman-Sigal’s fascist push to ban free speech and intellectual diversity in New York City taxi cab televisions is, in reality, exactly the underlying philosophy of the modern Democrat Party and the American Left.

Everything — everything — is the Left’s way or the highway.

Scroll through the Internet and headlines reporting some Democrat somewhere trying to silence the GOP opposition litter the screen.

Samples:

• “House Republicans slam WA Democrats for ‘censoring’ debate on parental rights law.”
• “College Democrats cancel debate with College Republicans.”
• “Democrats in Colorado House take extraordinary step of limiting debate on gun measures to halt GOP filibuster,” with the subtitle, “It appears to be the first time debate in the House has been limited in at least a decade.”
• “Opinion: The goal of liberal America is to intimidate conservatives into silence.”

This last opinion piece, penned by CNN’s conservative contributor Scott Jennings, notes:

America’s left-wing has taken a dark and dangerous turn, now openly expressing a desire for its political opposition to be delegitimized, criminalized, intimidated and ultimately banished.

This attitude has been boiling since Donald Trump became president. He’s too dangerous to be allowed to speak, they said, as the likes of Sen. Kamala Harris called on Twitter to suspend his account.

On and on goes the Left’s instinctive move to silence views on whatever they don’t like and want silenced.

And now, as noted above: “Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal is now demanding that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani ban Newsmax TV from the TV screens in New York City taxi cabs.”

All of which is to say, as Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal’s push to demand Newsmax TV be removed from New York City cabs vividly illustrates, the Left is all about fascism. Outright fascism.

Which is, without doubt, decidedly un-American.

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Last week, ICE Out protests erupted in several liberal cities in response to the Trump administration’s intensified ICE operations and the recent deaths of Alex Pretti and Renée Good. Award winners at the Grammys then used their platform to amplify the message and intensify hostility toward ICE and its agents.

The awards ceremony featured a coordinated effort to criticize ICE, with several major artists using the ceremony to publicly denounce the border enforcement agency. Among the most prominent voices was Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican pop star, who declared “ICE Out” during his acceptance speech. He then insisted, “We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens — we are humans, and we are Americans.” Last September, Bad Bunny planned no U.S. tour dates due to concerns over his audience getting detained by ICE agents, and he encouraged fans to attend his shows outside of the U.S. instead.

The Puerto Rican artist also said, “I want to say to the people, I know it’s tough to know, not to hate on these days…. So please, we need to be different. If we fight, we have to do it with love.”  He previously referred to ICE agents as “those motherf*****s” and “sons of b*****s” when he witnessed ICE operations in Puerto Rico.

Billie Eilish, who won the Song of the Year award, spent her acceptance speech opposing ICE’s actions and preaching to the choir. “No one is illegal on stolen land,” she remarked. “I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting, and our voices really do matter, and the people matter.” As she concluded her speech, Eilish said, “F*** ICE.” Eilish previously took to social media to call ICE a “federally funded and supported terrorist group.”

Actor Mark Ruffalo was an influential voice in the wave of celebrity backlash against ICE weeks before the issue reached the Grammy stage. At the Golden Globe Awards in January, Ruffalo walked the red carpet wearing a black-and-white pin reading “BE GOOD,” a reference to Renée Good, who was fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis earlier that month. Speaking to reporters, Ruffalo called out President Donald Trump. “We’re in the middle of a war with Venezuela that we illegally invaded. He’s telling the world that international law doesn’t matter to him. The only thing that matters to him is his own morality, but the guy is a convicted felon, a convicted rapist,” Ruffalo stated. He went on to call the president a “pedophile” and “the worst human being.”  

This anti-ICE rhetoric has also invaded public schools. In Washington State, a middle school walkout tied to opposition against Immigration and Customs Enforcement sparked backlash after a mother confronted administrators and removed her daughter from class. Video circulating online shows the mother objecting to the decision to allow students to participate in the anti-ICE demonstration during the school day. “This is f*****g unbelievable,” she remarked.

She then entered the building and demanded that her daughter be pulled out of the school immediately. The mother repeatedly made clear that she was concerned about the environment her child was placed in, telling school officials, “This is disrupting traffic and my child’s education.” She continued, “As I walked up [to the school], I was getting booed by every single student … because I didn’t honk. I pulled up to make sure everyone was okay.”

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Image licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

He was referencing the fact that A&M courses are no longer allowed to “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” as a result of a policy passed last year by the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents. (RELATED: The Problem Isn’t That Plato Is Woke)

This, of course, posed a problem for A&M’s gender studies program because the entire field of study is premised on advocating gender ideology.

When gender studies programs first began in the 1970s, they were initially marketed as studying women in history and society. In actuality, however, the field immediately became obsessed with theorizing on the most minute insanities of gender ideology.

That bait and switch is present in the now-removed description of gender studies on Texas A&M’s website: “Women’s and gender studies is a flexible interdisciplinary program devoted to the critical analysis of gender and the pursuit of knowledge about women throughout history and around the world.” (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 270: Rep. Harrison Exposes A&M’s Woke Cover-Up)

You would be hard-pressed to find courses in any gender studies department that actually do what the second part of that description promises: examining the role women have played throughout history. You instead find courses devoted to the “critical analysis of gender.” Social constructs of gender, systems of privilege, embodiment, microaggressions, intersectionality, performativity, identity politics, colonialism, deconstruction, and a bunch of other crackpot theories, such as queer theory and critical race theory, are what gender studies courses are really focused on. The longer the field has existed, the more the boundaries have been pushed, and the more the field has devolved into discussions that are incomprehensible to laypeople.

To understand just how crazy gender studies has gotten in recent years, take a look at some of the gender studies courses on offer this semester at some of America’s most elite universities.

Princeton University is offering gender studies students a course on “queer rave culture” titled “Raving: Encounters & Collisions in Night/Life.” The course description promises that students will use “dancing explorations” and “collectively imagined and constructed raves” to explore “queer rave culture” as “aesthetic, political, and subjective complex societal networks.” This rave culture, explains the course description, is “situated at the confluence of Blackness, queerness, and transness.” Students are advised that “All dance backgrounds and levels of experience are welcome; a deep desire and curiosity for dancing is required.”

Meanwhile, at the University of Chicago, gender studies students are engaged this semester in a course titled “Sex, Drugs, and Mantras: Tantra and Subversive Religious Practices.” Evidently, the point of the course is to consider whether things such as the chanting of mantras on burial grounds “to gain supernatural powers,” the practice of “erotic yoga to achieve mystical union,” and the ingestion of illegal drugs to “channel cosmic deities” are “merely the irrational behaviors of a superstitious mind” or actually represent “expressions of profound systems of embodied spirituality with sensible motivations.”

At Bowdoin College, gender studies students are this semester studying LGBTQ children’s picture books, young adult novels, and children’s TV shows in a course titled “Queer Youth Cultures: Texts and Contexts.” The course asks students to consider how LGBTQ children’s picture books “reinforce or disrupt normative understandings of youth, sexuality, queerness, and growth.” The course promises: “Through critical, intersectional engagement with fictional works crafted for younger audiences and scholarship in queer youth studies, students will challenge ideas used to conceptualize Western understandings of childhood and adolescence, such as innocence, knowledge, growth, and experience.” (RELATED: Supreme Court Saves Religious Parents From Radical LGBTQ Indoctrination of Their Children)

This is simply not a serious academic field. There is no rigorous scholarship, and there is no truth to be pursued.

The content of gender studies academic journals leads to the same conclusion: This is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo nonsense on theories that have spun further and further from reality with each passing year.

For example, Gender and Society, one of the top-ranked journals in the field, has in recent months published articles titled “The Economic Penalty of Gender Nonconformity Among Sexual Minorities,” “How Mid-Range Trollish Behavior Legitimates Hegemonic Masculinity in Digital Spaces,” “Gender Privilege and Vasectomy Experiences of Childless Men in Chile,” and “How Siblings of Transgender Youth Divest from Family Gender Norms.”

Book publishing in the field is perhaps worse. Tomes released in the past two years in the field of gender studies include Forbidden Intimacies: Polygamies at the Limits of Western Tolerance, Outskirts: Queer Experiences on the Fringe, The Witch Studies Reader, In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire, and Everyday Coercion: Men’s Routine Use of Sexual Coercion Toward Women.

One gender studies professor at Texas A&M, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, bemoaned the university’s decision to shut down the gender studies department in an interview with the Texas Tribune, saying, “We have to keep fighting and standing up for our students’ right to have an education that is critical for the times they live in.” A look at her work, however, shows that the education she offers her students is one they could do without. Lakkimsetti supposedly “brings to light contemporary struggles for social justice … undertaken by sex workers … in India.” To do so, she “deploys Foucauldian lens of biopolitics and postcolonial understandings of the state to understand these contemporary transformations.”

Nothing in the field of gender studies provides anything of value to society, and everything taught in it has the effect of brainwashing students into idiocy.

Every college should be pressured to quickly follow the example of Texas A&M.

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In one exchange, Epstein told her he was in Paris, looking for somebody to marry, to which she replied that Paris was good for adultery, but Scandinavians made “better wife material.” At one point an Epstein flunky conveyed an offer from him to arrange a dental appointment so Mette-Marit could get her teeth bleached. (Note: There are perfectly good dentists in Norway.) In yet another email, Epstein asks if she’s found him a new assistant. Then there’s one in which Mette-Marit tells Epstein that she’s just had a “[s]hitty flight”: Air France had demanded $3,000 for an upgrade, but she’d refused to pay it out of “principle,” and as a result “my back is f[*]cked.” Once she asked Epstein: “Is it inappropriate for a mother to suggest two naked women carrying a surfboard for my 15 yr old sons wallpaper?” (It’s unclear whether she’s referring to his screensaver or his bedroom wall.)

It also emerges from this tranche of papers that in January 2013, while her husband, Crown Prince Haakon, stayed at home in the freezing Norwegian cold, Mette-Marit and her “Buddhist spiritual teacher” spent four nights at Epstein’s house in sunny Palm Beach. (In a related story, I just learned from Hans Rustad’s invaluable Sunday evening podcast that Mette-Marit has spent so much time in New York that the consulate staff got sick of having to follow her around.) Oh, and then there are her compliments and expressions of affection. “You always make me smile,” she told Epstein. “You tickle my brain.” “I miss my crazy friend.” “U are very charming.” “You are so sweet.” “You’re such a sweetheart.” All these communications took place after Epstein had been convicted, in 2008, of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute.

Parenthetically, some of the newly released documents expose other notable Norwegians. In 2014, for example, former Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland hit Epstein up for a loan so he could buy an apartment in Oslo. It also turns out that Jagland stayed at Epstein’s residences in New York and Paris, and that Epstein visited Jagland’s home in Strasbourg when the latter was Secretary General of the Council of Europe. But the news about Jagland (so far, anyway) isn’t anywhere near as intriguing or sexy — or potentially damaging to the Norwegian state — as the revelations about Mette-Marit.

Over the course of the Epstein saga, it’s been staggering to discover how broad his circle of so-called friends was. Unfazed by his notoriety, the world’s rich and famous courted this creep. But why? In some cases, the answer is obvious. Many, like Bill Clinton, enjoyed the sybaritic pleasures available on Epstein’s island. Others, like Jagland, thought Epstein could be a ready source of money. Børge Brenden, a Norwegian politician who is the current president and CEO of the World Economic Forum and who, it now emerges, met several times with Epstein, sought his support for a covert effort to replace the U.N. as a power center with the WEF and Davos.

But what was Mette-Marit up to? What did she want out of Epstein? Was it so terribly important for her to score a few free days in Palm Beach? For heaven’s sake, she already lived in one palace and had access to another one. Plus a fact, she and her husband receive over a million dollars a year from Norwegian taxpayers, and can thus afford to pay for their own holiday accommodations. Finally, as she well knew, there were plenty of men in her own country who could have made her smile and tickled her brain. Why didn’t she give me a call?

Seriously, to understand just how this Mette-Marit story hits in Norway, you need to know a bit about her history. Before marrying Crown Prince Haakon, the heir to the throne, in 2001, Mette-Marit, who was a smashingly gorgeous young blonde of the classic Scandinavian type, was known to have led a very active social life, which included relationships with several men who had rap sheets for narcotics as well as for acts of violence and other serious offenses. With one of these men, a convicted felon, she had a son out of wedlock — Marius Borg Høiby, who at the time of the royal wedding was an adorable little blond moppet and who, ever since, has been treated like a member of the royal family (in recent years, he’s even traveled on a diplomatic passport). Now 29 years old, Marius has been in serious legal trouble for years. On Tuesday, he’ll go on trial for raping four women and for violating numerous other drug and assault laws; he faces no fewer than 38 criminal counts, and a possibility of up to 16 years in prison. To what extent, one wonders, can his bad choices in life be blamed on a mother who, when he was 15, asked a convicted child molester whether she should recommend pictures of naked women for the boy’s wallpaper?

Be sure, by the way, not to confuse Mette-Marit with another Norwegian princess — namely, Märtha Louise, her daffy sister-in-law, about whom I’ve written a few times here. In June 2022, I reported on the engagement of Märtha Louise, who had founded an “angel school” at which she taught students how to communicate with the dead, to a fellow New Age fourflusher, a black, bisexual Los Angeles shaman named Durek Verrett, who claims to cure cancer. In August 2024, I wrote about the lucrative deals the couple had made for wedding coverage with Britain’s Hello Magazine and Netflix; last September, I reviewed Rebel Royals, the mortifying Netflix documentary about their wedding, in which Durek pretty much called the king, queen, and Crown Prince racists. When that thing came out, the whole country cringed at once. (RELATED: The Princess Weds Her Shaman)

But back to Mette-Marit. All those years ago, when her engagement to Prince Haakon was announced, she was prevailed upon to make a statement to the press in which she admitted to, and apologized for, having led a “wild” life. The understanding was that she was now turning over a new leaf, solemnly embracing her obligations as a member of the royal house. Well, that was a quarter century ago. She and Haakon now have two children together, and they go out in public together doing the kinds of things that royal families do — cutting ribbons, shaking innumerable hands, delivering banal speeches.

But some of us have suspected that Mette-Marit never entirely gave up her old party-girl ways — and that the Skaugum Estate, where Haakon and Mette-Marit live, is the only house on earth where the cuckold chair is a throne. Okay, cheap joke. Still, the release of her email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein (“you tickle my brain”?) suggests that the future queen of Norway is still pretty “wild.” I’ll add this: when Haakon appeared on the NRK evening news on Saturday, apparently having been buttonholed by a reporter on a street in Oslo, he looked like a broken man as he whimpered an apology on his wife’s behalf. I felt sorry for the poor fellow. I’ve always felt that he seemed like a decent chap, despite his Davos inclinations. Why, then, had his wife, the mother of their two children, cozied up to an internationally infamous slimebag? Why had Haakon let her? Is it possible she was actually attracted to Epstein? A 2011 email from Epstein to one of his advisors raises disturbing questions: “What happened with Mette now?? She wants to carry your kid?” Epstein’s reply: “Mette is a mess.”

Of course, these revelations about Mette-Marit raise a significant question: why should taxpayers be footing the bill for such people? The current Norwegian royal house dates back only to 1905; before that, the country spent decades being ruled by Denmark, then Sweden. When Norway broke with Sweden, it could have chosen to go the modern route and become a republic, as Iceland did when it broke from Denmark in 1918. Instead, Norway asked Denmark for a spare prince and made him king. Yes, King Haakon and Crown Prince Olav (later King Olav) performed admirably during World War II, when they and their government-in-exile operated out of London, but even then, there were heady rumors to the effect that Crown Princess Märtha, Olav’s wife, who waited out the war in the White House, was getting it on with FDR. Which, if true, suggests that the current Crown Prince comes from a long line of — well, let’s not go there.

No, the point here should be a broader one. Norway, after all, isn’t the only constitutional monarchy in Europe that has turned into a clown show. In Britain, Harry and Meghan’s hijinks, Andrew’s involvement with Epstein, and the ascent to the throne of a slavering fan of Islam, proponent of homeopathy, and absolute sucker for climate-change ideology — a vainglorious fool who seems either blind or indifferent to the catastrophic course his country is taking — have made it feel as if the House of Windsor, in the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s death, has jumped the shark (if it didn’t already do so long ago). And the more you look around the continent, at all those countries in which the sovereign is supposed to be a unifying figure and a symbol of nationhood, what you see is a bunch of societies increasingly compromising their own cultures and values and yielding to Islam — and a bunch of crowned heads who, if anything, are encouraging this treachery.

In any event, it was a busier than usual Sunday in the Norwegian media. An essay by Hanne Skartveit, editor of Norway’s largest newspaper, VG, was headlined: “Can the Monarchy Survive This?” An article by Aftenposten‘s political editor, Kjetil B. Alstadheim, bore the subhead: “Can Mette-Marit Become Queen after This?” In a break with protocol that a royal expert described as “sensational,” Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre publicly criticized Mette-Marit for her lack of judgment. On Sunday evening it was reported that on Tuesday — the same day Høiby goes on trial — the Parliament will vote on abolishing the monarchy. And on Monday evening, NRK-TV ran a special edition of its trademark public-issues series, Debatten, on which high-profile commentators, politicians, and diplomats offered many takes on the crisis, but agreed on one thing: that the royal house is in deep, deep trouble. I must admit that after a long, long period during which the Norwegian media entertained themselves by parroting rumors that Donald Trump had ugly Epstein-related secrets to hide — all the while taking it for granted that the good and great of Norway were untainted by such sordid business — it felt rather good to see the American president being totally cleared even as Norway’s queen-in-waiting was exposed as (to put it gently) a steadfast Epstein intimate.

Time, then, to end it all? Not off with their heads, but off, in any case, with their crowns?

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Image licensed under Attribution 2.0 Generic.

I’m talking about the Fox Varian case.

This is the first big payday to be had by a “detransitioner” — a kid duped into going through medical mutilation by a corrupt cabal of doctors, shrinks, and activists who have pushed wacko gender ideology on the young, who grew up and realized what damage was done to her. The case is enough to make a normal reader want to throw up in disgust…

On Friday, a jury in White Plains, NY, made history when it awarded $2 million to Fox Varian, 22, after she sued the psychologist and plastic surgeon who oversaw the gender-transition mastectomy she received at age 16 and then came to regret. I covered the case for The Free Press.

The judge sealed all the case files at the start of the trial. But I downloaded the full case file before it was sealed and have it on hand.

The judge also sealed all the transcripts from the trial. Given I was the only reporter to attend the entirety of the three-week trial, the furious notes I took might remain the only way for the public to learn about the finer details of this historic lawsuit. So my hope is to share much what I heard in the coming days and weeks.

That’s from Ben Ryan’s Substack, and he has a whole lot more there.

The first victory in court for a young woman who was harmed by gender doctors as a child!

Fox Varian had her breasts removed as a 16-year-old girl because she was indoctrinated to believe she was trans.

She has been awarded $2 million. https://t.co/ZjbBbonXKR

— Billboard Chris 🌎 (@BillboardChris) January 31, 2026

On his podcast, The Verdict with Ted Cruz, the Texas senator made a very good point, Ellie and Lyrah also noted…

“This verdict, is, I hope, a really significant step in turning around this madness,” Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said during an episode of his podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” that aired Monday.

“This is not going to be the last lawsuit and you pointed out one of the most evil aspects of this, which is there is a multi-million dollar, if not a multi-billion dollar, industry behind this, behind pushing these supposed treatments that are just abusing kids. And you’ve got woke adults that are pushing these treatments because they want to virtue signal just how virtuous they are. But you’ve also got hospitals,” Cruz said. “You’ve got doctors that are making massive amounts of money and this lawsuit, you want to talk about changing physician behavior and changing hospital behavior, this lawsuit is significant.”

But the thing to remember here is that a breakthrough on the gender transition surgery front comes along at exactly the right time for the plaintiff bar.

Asbestos is pretty much played out. Chinese drywall? That’s done. Car wrecks aren’t a growth industry for the personal-injury lawyers, not when the cars are starting to drive themselves. We’re getting to the point where there simply aren’t any gold rushes out there for the billboard lawyers to participate in.

And all of a sudden, we now have the greatest medical malpractice mass scandal of any of their lives, with obvious liability on the part of highly unsympathetic defendants with the deepest pockets imaginable… and kids as victims.

These cases have all the elements of an amazingly good lawsuit, and there are thousands of them out there.

That there’s a Jeffrey Epstein connection to the trans research stuff will be absolute catnip for juries.

The thing to remember is that we aren’t just going to see recoveries in extreme cases like Varian’s, where these quacks chopped off her breasts. Those hormones they’ve been giving these kids — “puberty blockers” they’re calling them — aren’t reversible. They sterilize the victim. Not only that, they rob the victim of sexual enjoyment for the rest of their lives.

And these supposed medical professionals, who presumably took the Hippocratic oath to do no harm, have pushed “puberty blockers” on every kid they could. For years.

When these floodgates fully open — and maybe this is the case that locks them in place — every ambulance chaser in America will be hunting for a plaintiff. The crazier, the more dysfunctional, the better.

This won’t just bankrupt the doctors — though that’s without question a good thing. It’s going to blow a big hole through the hospitals, which have engaged in profiteering on a piratical scale over the past couple of decades as health care has become a greatly outsized portion of our national economy without actually making the nation healthier. Engaging in the medical mutilation of emotionally disturbed kids, while flim-flamming their weak and desperate parents, wasn’t just leftist activism run amok. It was a long con — give a kid a sex change surgery and you will make them a medical customer for life. (RELATED: Prepare to Say Goodbye to the Transgender Moment)

With expensive treatments, to boot.

And these hospitals and clinics didn’t just know that, they advertised it. Conservative media has done an outstanding job putting all of this out in the open for more than a decade, all the while being called names nonstop by crazy people and the grifters preying on them. (RELATED: Is Healthcare ‘Burning’ Yet?)

Except now the lawyers are involved. And the lawyers are hungry as wolves.

There was a time when you’d root for the doctors against the lawyers. That was a time before doctors were actively harming children.

So yes, we’ll be rooting for the wolves. If that does massive damage to the medical establishment, so be it.

Maybe one day we’ll put up a statue of Fox Varian as the pioneer who beat back the mass mutilation of American youth — and to the plaintiff lawyers who profit handsomely from the blowback that’s just beginning.

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Two New York doctors pushed Fox Varian to get a double mastectomy when she was just 16 years old. Varian, who is now 22 years old and detransitioned, filed a lawsuit against the doctors for pushing the surgery on her and won. This is the first time a plaintiff in such a case has won a judgment. (RELATED: Gender Dysphoria in Kids: It’s Time for Some Serious Research) 

BREAKING: 1st Detransitioner to Take a Medical-Malpractice Lawsuit to Trial Wins $2 Million Judgement

Fox Varian sued her Westchester, NY, area psychologist and plastic surgeon for the gender-transition mastectomy she got at 16.

I was the only reporter to attend the entire… pic.twitter.com/4e89PSgGDg

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) January 31, 2026

On this episode of The Spectator P.M. Podcast, hosts Ellie Gardey Holmes and Lyrah Margo unpack the case and praise the ruling for bringing to light the harms caused by “gender-affirming care.” Ellie and Lyrah discuss how this decision serves as a warning to medical professionals who perform life-altering surgeries that claim to transition people to the opposite sex. (READ MORE: ‘Experts’ Warn US Is on Brink of ‘Trans Genocide’)

Tune in to hear their discussion!

Read Ellie and Lyrah’s writing here and here.

Listen to the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Spotify.

More importantly, Maduro’s rapid dispatch and America’s open pursuit of democracy’s resurgence have now forced a bevy of corrupt leaders and nations to scurry out and confront their sins in the light of the new American epoch.

Unfortunately, it is clear that even the U.S’s historic ally, Canada, has been badly disfigured by its past decade of Liberal government and transformed into a fortress of hyper left-wing politics that now echoes many aspects of Maduro’s Venezuela.

And therefore, Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, must now begin to abandon the Liberal government’s own corrupt, neo-socialist, politics, if Canada is to escape the ire of Trump’s America and survive the U.S.’s modern renaissance as democracy’s champion.

Firstly, throughout the modern era, Canada’s Liberal government has lapsed into fascism and forcibly imposed its own hyper left-wing ideology upon all of Canadian society.

For example, for over a decade, the Liberal government has consistently oppressed fundamental human rights, such as free speech and religious freedom. In fact, the Liberal government has transformed the CBC, as well as the RCMP, into enthusiastic orifices of left-wing propaganda. In 2022, the Liberal government openly violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms itself, in a vulgar effort to oppress every ideology outside its own left-wing dogma during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition, Canadian citizens have routinely been prevented from espousing right-wing political values at public forums,: “Nearly half of all Canadian university students are actively concealing their real opinions for fear of sanction or mistreatment,” due to the open climate of ideological oppression that his been cultivated within Canadian academia. Worse still, the Liberal government now seeks the power to punish any Canadian with a lifetime of imprisonment for a slew of vaguely defined hate-crimes that amount almost entirely to right-wing “wrongthink” and any values or ideology that are not utterly left-wing.

Moreover, the Liberal government’s neo-socialist politics and hyper left-wing ideology have collapsed the Canadian economy and severely eroded quality of life.

For instance, due to the fact that Canada has vainly sought to “[rely] on immigration to drive economic growth and plug labor gaps,” Canada’s GDP per capita has crumbled, and a slew of respected economic indicators have all concluded that the Canadian state is currently mired in “the longest decline in individual living standards of the last 40 years.” Even the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) itself has confirmed that Canada will actually boast “the single worst performing economy of all 38 OECD members” until 2060.

Sadly, Canada’s unemployment rate has now also “jump[ed] to  a nine-year high, outside the pandemic” and youth unemployment has hit levels typically “seen during a recession,” as a result of Liberal initiatives such as the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFW). In fact, since 2019, food bank usage in Canada has increased by nearly 100 percent and over 25 percent of all Canadians currently suffer from food insecurity with “one third of food bank clients [now being] children.”

Furthermore, the past decade of Liberal government has transformed Canada into an urgent national security threat to the United States of America.

For example, the Rule of Law is collapsing in countless major cities across Canada and the Canadian state has started to become openly unsecure and unsafe. Astonishingly, Canada now displays the quintessential hallmarks of any failing or failed state, and the Liberal government’s shameful inability to secure Canada’s borders has permitted the violent insecurity that now menaces the Canadian people to bleed over into America and openly threaten the security of the America.

In addition, the Canadian state has become an outpost of Chinese influence in North America and utterly beholden to the national interests of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In fact, the Liberal Party itself has long been corrupted by the PRC’s influence and rendered unto the Chinese state. Even Prime Minister Carney himself recently lauded the “new strategic partnership” between the PRC and Canada, and openly declared that “the progress [Canada and the PRC] have made in the partnership sets us up well for the New World Order.”

Finally, Canada is itself a vital geo-strategic asset and home to vast reserves of oil, as well as countless other valuable resources.

For instance, the Canadian nation is a major global energy supplier, and Canada actually possesses “the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserves,” ranking only behind Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela, whose oil is already, effectively, America’s property. In fact, oil, natural gas, and other refined products “are a critical component of Canada’s exports, making up about 20 percent of Canada’s balance of trade,” and Canada is currently one of the largest producers of crude oil on the world stage.

Canada is also an immense source of fresh water, as well as various Rare-Earth Elements (REE) and Critical Minerals, such as aluminum, that are all absolutely crucial to the American economy and industrial complex. In addition, any annexation of Canada and its northern territories will inevitably afford America with an immediate, invaluable, foothold in its current crusade to defend the international progress of Democracy and The West against the constant onslaught of communism and dictators, such as Putin and Xi.

In fact, President Trump himself has already articulated his own intent to annex Canada and transform the nation into America’s 51st state. The Liberal government in Canada has now openly antagonized President Trump for over a decade. Even Prime Minister Carney has glibly pilfered and mis-purposed the phrase “elbows up” in a bizarre effort to highlight his own attempts to undermine Canada’s historic relationship with the U.S. and leverage its collapse towards his own personal gain and profit.

In fact, Canada has been badly disfigured by its past decade of Liberal government and transformed into a grotesque fortress of hyper left-wing politics that now echoes many aspects of Maduro’s Venezuela.

And therefore, Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, must now begin to abandon the Liberal government’s own corrupt, neo-socialist politics if Canada is to escape the ire of Trump’s America and survive the U.S.’s modern renaissance as democracy’s champion.

More importantly, it is readily apparent that Carney and other corrupt politicians do not have the luxury of delay, nor the time to bluff and posture.

Maduro’s rapid dispatch has confirmed that President Trump is utterly committed to re-establishing democracy worldwide and that the Trump Administration will immediately endeavor to eliminate any threat to America’s own national interests.

Even Canada.

READ MORE from Will Barclay:

The Spectacle Ep. 319: Exploring Venezuela’s Crisis and Canada’s Chinese Influence

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William Barclay is an award-winning political theorist and policy expert, as well as one of Canada’s foremost young conservative voices. Follow him on Twitter/X @WillBarclayPCBG.

But the larger picture tells a different story. Whatever its legal status, DEI has already lost cultural legitimacy — on campus, among students, and even within the academic left itself.

Consider the academic climate at one elite institution, which was captured in an interview of a highly-regarded professor, Jill Lepore. She has taught at Harvard since 2003 and no one would identify her as a conservative.

She was asked by the New York Times if woke culture was a “real problem” and not just a “problem that the right has managed to … weaponize.” She replied that, “it just surprises me to no end when people are like: Well, there was really never a problem on campuses. I don’t know what college campus they’re talking about…. I just think the left has to admit that it has done a lot to make a lot of Americans feel like they do not belong.”

When even a Harvard professor complains about the left creating a hostile environment on campus, and alienating a lot of Americans, you know you’re on the wrong side of history.

Consider one such problem: the lack of ideological diversity among college professors. A self-reported survey of the political affiliation of more than 1,100 tenure track faculty in 2020 revealed a sharp preference for Democrats. Among sociologists, 86 percent identified as Democrats; less than 2 percent identified as Republicans. The numbers were similar among anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, and economists.

Another survey, also from 2020, looked at political contributions made by more than 12,000 university professors and broke them out by their discipline. The numbers were striking. For every contribution an English professor made to a Republican candidate, there were 244 contributions to a Democrat. The ratios were similar even in fields that would seem to have nothing to do with politics: chemistry (113-1), math (118-1), biology (149-1), and psychology (184-1).

In such a homogenous climate, it’s hardly a surprise that students would become radicalized and agitate against even the most basic protections for free speech, which has been persuasively documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

It was this environment in which the DEI mindset was allowed to run rampant across college campuses. The Trump administration has done yeoman’s work in cracking down on the DEI ecosystem, which was all about creating a culture of victimhood and rewarding people who trafficked in identity politics. How big was that ecosystem? The University of Michigan spent about $250 million on DEI initiatives from 2016-2024, according to a devastating article in the New York Times.

The author of the article pointed out that while the school is “largely left-leaning … the most common attitude I encountered about D.E.I. during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain.” Students “rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read.”

Why wouldn’t anyone do anything to roll back this failed system? Because a culture of fear was pervasive on campus. One former dean at the school — herself a woman of color — was quoted in the article saying, “no one can criticize the D.E.&I. program — not its scale, its dominance.”

Higher education has brought these problems on itself, and its public standing has declined. In 2015, 57 percent of those surveyed by Gallup said they had confidence in higher ed. By 2024, just 36 percent did — and only 15 percent of Republicans.

Higher education is just one part of the broader American culture that is out of step with the views of millions of people. Another is the entertainment sector, which routinely peddles storylines that are hostile to the 37 percent of Americans who identify as “conservative” or “very conservative.”

There’s a battle underway right now that will determine who will have the biggest platform for the distribution of movies in the United States. Netflix is the leading candidate to acquire Warner Brothers, though President Trump shared an article on Truth Social recently charging that the Netflix bid “is an attempt to consolidate unprecedented cultural power inside one of America’s most ideologically aggressive corporations.” The article’s author said Netflix “has repeatedly used its global platform to elevate progressive narratives while suppressing dissenting viewpoints,” and Congress — responding to constituent pressures — is aggressively challenging the merger.

Which brings us back to last week’s court ruling. While DEI’s defenders may celebrate a legal reprieve, judicial decisions and federal guidance cannot restore credibility to an ideology that has already alienated students, faculty, and the public. DEI’s unraveling did not begin in a courtroom, and it will not end in one.

It began when institutions abandoned intellectual diversity, punished dissent, and elevated ideology over education. Institutions that refuse to confront those failures should not be surprised when reform no longer comes from within, but from outside political forces willing to challenge the monoculture they allowed to take hold.

READ MORE:

Administering Colleges: 1960s and Today

The Spectacle Ep. 318: DEI Ruined Universities. Conservatives Need to Save Them.

A Different Midterm Milestone

Herzog is a freelance writer for the Heartland Institute.