A decades-long Christmas market tradition in Germany has reportedly been killed off under European Union law.
According to a report on December 2 by news outletKieler Nachrichten, the famous Christmas market in the rural town of Bordesholm has sported homemade cakes made by local residents for more than half a century, with the confectionary item now a mainstay of the attraction which pulls in around 8,000 tourists each year.
But the practice is being axed in 2024 over fears it goes against a Brussels-made edict, namely EU Regulation 852/2004.
Under that, the people who make the cakes in their home kitchens are actually considered “food businesses”, requiring them to adhere to food labelling, health and safety as well as certification standards.
As such, continuing to practice the tradition would put the bakers involved at risk of fines or other forms of legal penalty.
One anonymous State secretary tasked with looking into the matter confirmed that those involved in baking the cakes risked breaking EU rules.
“The law is the law,” the secretary said, while another official said that there was no room for them to grant the bakers any form of legal exemption.
“For us, this is a slap in the face,” the unnamed main organiser of the event reportedly said.
“The cakes are a traditional part of the event.”
In 2023, €10,500 was reportedly raised by sales of the cakes for various clubs and associations in the local community.
Well, what’s that supposed to be? An extremely unusual nativity scene is now causing a lot of amusement on social media. The reason: the Holy Family has been replaced by crooked fir trees. The sight is anything but Christmassy …
In the deeply Catholic Upper Palatinate (Bavaria), of all places, a nativity scene is now causing hilarity on social media. The reason: the Holy Family has been replaced by Christmas trees, which have sometimes been ‘creatively’ decorated with flower pots and red Christmas tree baubles as noses. ‘I can’t take it all anymore,’ moans one X user.
Her snapshot went viral within a few hours and caused a lot of amusement: ‘Who are they? The ghosts of Christmas? That looks pretty strange,’ marvelled one X user. ‘Looks more like green flu than a Christian nativity scene,’ commented another user with a smile. Another user has a sad suspicion: ‘Do they no longer dare to show Mary, Joseph and the newborn Jesus in the manger?’.
Wir sind ein Erzkatholischer Ort. Das ist unsere diesjährige Krippe. 🤦♀️ Ich kann das alles nicht mehr. pic.twitter.com/LYbRY77ASr
Angela Merkel speaking at the 51sth Munich Security Conference, 2015. Photo: Tobias Kleinschmidt, CC BY 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons
For almost 16 years, Angela Merkel served as Germany’s Chancellor. Her legacy is deeply troubling, with euro zone bailouts angering both net payers and net receivers, chaotic migration policies, and suicidal energy policies that made Germany too dependent on Russia. She also ignored UK concerns about the EU, helping to cause Brexit, and she pushed to ignore referendums in the Netherlands and France on the “European Constitution”—another EU Treaty change that amounted to greater transfers of powers to the EU, repackaging it as the Lisbon Treaty. Importantly, she also hardly introduced any domestic competitiveness reforms. This view of Merkel is more and more mainstream. Recently, The Economist also wrote that “Merkel’s legacy looks increasingly terrible.”
Merkel herself, who has just published her memoirs, is basically regretting nothing when asked about many of these failures in a recent interview with Der Spiegel. There, she also mentions, “I am now 70 years old, 35 years in the East, 35 years in politics, apparently two lives, but in reality one life, and the second half cannot be understood without the first.”
In particular, how Merkel entered politics has always received very little attention. That is despite the fact that a number of biographies have been written about her, with the most critical one perhaps being “the first life of Angela M.” The book focuses on how she was a member of the FDJ, the communist youth organization, later serving as its cultural secretary while working as a physicist at the Academy of Sciences.
The book describes how her father, Pastor Horst Kasner, had left Hamburg, in West Germany, shortly after the birth of his daughter Angela, to settle in East Germany, then known as the “German Democratic Republic” (GDR). At a time when there was a mass exodus of citizens fleeing the communist regime, Kasner justified his action by saying he wanted to support the souls of his fellow citizens who remained on the other side. However, according to the two authors of the book, Kasner belonged to a group of theologians who considered socialism a real alternative to capitalism. He is said to have cultivated contacts in the SED, the socialist unity party that was in charge of the regime in East Germany, which allowed him to obtain advancement.
When the democratic movement in the GDR began to bring down the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Merkel advocated a shift in the system towards “democratic socialism” rather than a genuine peaceful revolution, the book alleges.
According to former German Transport Minister Günther Krause—an East German politician who worked with Merkel in the final months of the GDR—Merkel openly propagated Marxism, as he claims she served as the secretary for “Agitation and Propaganda,” saying: “With Agitation and Propaganda you’re responsible for brainwashing in the sense of Marxism,” adding:
That was her task and that wasn’t cultural work. Agitation and Propaganda, that was the group that was meant to fill people’s brains with everything you were supposed to believe in the GDR, with all the ideological tricks. And what annoys me about this woman is simply the fact that she doesn’t admit to a closeness to the system in the GDR. From a scientific standpoint she wasn’t indispensable at the Academy of Sciences. But she was useful as a pastor’s daughter in terms of Marxism-Leninism. And she’s denying that. But it’s the truth.”
Merkel has responded to this by arguing that she has not covered up anything about her past, stating: “I can only rely on my memory. … If something turns out to be different, I can live with that.”
What is probably hard to deny in all of this is that an academic career as a physicist would have been forbidden to someone openly hostile to the regime. However, to be fair to Merkel, the rest remains open to speculation.
What is not open to speculation is what happened after the Wall had fallen, with the “Wende,” the period during which the Berlin Wall fell and East Germany was absorbed into the West. There, a number of hard facts should raise profound questions about how Angela Merkel made her career.
During that period, Merkel made a blitz career in politics, morphing from a stuffy East German researcher in November 1989 to entering the German Bundestag in 1990, in order to be appointed shortly after as Minister for Women and Youth in the government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl in January 1991.
What’s really intriguing here is how she achieved this.
Merkel’s first job in politics
Merkel’s first job in politics wasn’t a great success. In February 1990, she had become the spokeswoman of the “Democratic Awakening,” an East German political movement and political party founded in October 1989. The party didn’t do well in the first democratic East German elections in March 1990, only collecting 0.9% of votes. This was because its chairman, Wolfgang Schnur, had to admit to having been an informer for the feared and ruthless Ministry for State Security (Stasi) for more than two decades. A few days before the election, he was forced to resign. This wasn’t exactly a great sales pitch for the leader of the East German pro-democracy movement. The man was later criminally convicted as well.
How did Merkel end up as spokeswoman for the leading opposition party when she was never active in opposition circles at all? According to her predecessor as party spokeswoman for Democratic Awakening” Christiane Ziller, who stepped down along with some other more left-leaning people over the decision of the party convention to adopt a more conservative program, “there wasn’t any democratic legitimacy [as to how Merkel was appointed], as far as I know. Her appointment was one of these discretionary decisions by Schnur,” the later disgraced party chairman. Ziller, who otherwise speaks positively about Merkel in an interview with Die Welt and later joined the German Greens, mentions how Merkel “remained a stranger within the opposition network in the German Democratic Republic.”
Merkel had joined the opposition movement Democratic Awakening only after the Berlin Wall fell, on 9 November, 1989. She has never claimed to have been an active dissident before the Wall fell.
The Democratic Awakening was based on existing politically active church groups and that’s where Merkel’s father, Horst Kasner, comes in. East German official documents describe him in his early days as “an opponent” of the regime, but later, his nickname seems to have evolved into “red Kasner,” as he was then campaigning for the East German Church to be split off from the Western German Evangelical Church in a bid to reconcile Christianity and “socialism,” as the Communists called their ideology. This was very much something the East German regime desired, as cutting church ties with the West would strengthen their grip on the church, which was a vehicle to oppose the regime. “At synods, he vehemently defended positions that were in the power-political interests of the SED.” Gerd Langguth, a former European Commission representative in Germany, recalls in an article about Merkel’s father in Die Welt.
Langguth furthermore points out in a biography of Merkel that, unlike the children in other pastors’ families, the higher education of Kasner’s children, including Angela Merkel, was not impeded, a sign that he may have been quite friendly towards the regime. Unlike the son of a system-critical pastor from Kasner’s circle, who had to work as an assistant locksmith, Angela, born in 1954, was among the just 10% of the class who were allowed to attend the extended secondary school.
A key fact here is that Wolfgang Schnur, the leader of the first East German opposition party who was later revealed as a Stasi, has been pretty clear that he employed Angela Merkel because her father was a longtime church friend.
Schnur was active in the Synod of the Federation of the Protestant Churches in the GDR and as an attorney, he defended many East German political dissidents in the 1980s. This may have helped this Stasi man to infiltrate so deeply into the East German opposition movement that he emerged as one of its leaders when the Wall came down. For what it’s worth: he has claimed to be acting against Stasi advice in joining the opposition movement. But also, while he acted as leader of the Democratic Awakening, he maintained contacts with the Stasi.
In any case, perhaps unknowingly, Merkel got her first job in politics due to the regime connections of her father.
Merkel’s second job in politics
After that, Merkel’s second job in politics is one where she ends up working for a politician who didn’t only have to step down over suspected Stasi links but who also comes out of the world of East German church politics. That is Lothar de Maiziere, the first democratically elected prime minister of East Germany.
When Merkel had to find a new way in politics after the Democratic Awakening had been crushed in March 1990 due to the Stasi connections of its leader, she was appointed as deputy spokesman for de Maiziere in April 1990. He was the leader of the East German Christian Democratic Union. In East Germany, there were so-called “bloc parties” whose function was to suggest there was an alternative to the SED. Also during the first free election in March 1990, these bloc parties took part. Short of any decent alternative, 40 percent of voters in East Germany opted for the CDU, as the real opposition party had been revealed as being led by a Stasi operator.
After de Maiziere won the first democratic elections in East Germany, he became prime minister of the East German State, which would end up integrating into West Germany in October 1990.
Before that, the East German bloc parties were all integrated into their West German counterparts. In a later interview, Lothar de Maiziere recalls how German Chancellor Kohl was easily convinced to merge the East German CDU with the Western German one, despite some protest in his party, because, according to de Maiziere, “in all areas of the GDR we had an office (…) and we were able to conduct a comprehensive electoral campaign. The Chancellor was always open to such considerations.” Despite some resistance, the West German liberal party also decided to do this, given the high number of members in their East German counterpart.
Lothar’s cousin and Germany’s former interior minister Thomas de Mazière was appointed as an advisor to the new East German Cabinet cabinet in April 1990, closely working together there with Merkel. Thomas comes from the West German wing of the family that had been estranged from the East German wing. He and Merkel go back a long way. In 2005, Merkel appointed him as her chief of staff when she became chancellor.
According to Thomas, in 1990, he recommended that his uncle hire Merkel. Thomas had been impressed by her qualities at the press conference where Schnur’s resignation as the leader of “Democratic Awakening” was declared. That party was in an electoral association called “Alliance for Germany” with Lothar de Mazière’s CDU. In a joint interview with his cousin, Lothar de Mazière makes clear that even before his cousin’s recommendation, Merkel had already impressed him, as she “was very good at moderating” between the “squabbling” different parties of the association.
Oddly, in this particular interview, Lothar de Mazière doesn’t mention that his father, Clemens de Mazière, and Merkel’s father knew each other very well. Both had been prominent in East German church politics for years, as Merkel’s father’s regular interlocutors in terms of church politics were Wolfgang Schnur and Clemens de Maizière, the father of Lothar de Maizière.
Clemens was the East German church’s lawyer, who worked closely together with Merkel’s father to split the East German church off from its Western German counterpart. As mentioned, this was a policy desired by the East German regime.
Notably, Clemens de Maizière was a shrewd Stasi-operator who apparently even betrayed his own family and his own clients, including the Protestant church. After the war, Clemens had swiftly converted from Nazism to Communism. He had once belonged to Adolf Hitler’s “Sturmabteilung,” with membership number 3952867, investigative journalist Uwe Müller has revealed.
This is also telling about Communist East Germany, where many former Nazis comfortably morphed into loyal Communists after the Second World War. For example, in 1946, 8-10% of all SED members had previously been members of Hitler’s NSDAP party. Nazi doctors that had been involved in terrible crimes were able to continue practising medicine in the GDR’s health care system.
After Merkel’s first boss in politics had to step down over Stasi links, the new leader of East Germany, Lothar de Maizière, was also accused of having been a Stasi operator. This happened in December 1990, resulting in his resignation as a minister in the first German government after unification, to which he had been appointed by Chancellor Helmut Kohl following the Bundestag elections of December 1990.
Lothar de Maizière would have worked for the Stasi since 1981, the year after his father Clemens, a long-time Stasi asset, had passed away, as he also took over his father’s role of the East German church’s lawyer. Before he went into active politics, Lothar de Maizière was the vice president of the synod of the Association of Protestant Churches in the GDR. Merkel’s father must have known him very well.
Questions abound
In a nutshell: Merkel may well have gotten her second job because the Democratic Awakening had been in a pre-election alliance with the East German CDU and because she did such an impressive job dealing with journalists when the Democratic Awakening was in crisis. But apart from that, there is something very intriguing about the closeness between her father and her first two political bosses.
Did Merkel use her father’s East German church policy connections to get her first two jobs in politics, twice working for people who had to resign over Stasi allegations? Did her father know or suspect they were? Did Merkel herself know or suspect? Questions abound.
Shouldn’t this have been investigated more deeply? Lothar de Mazière is still alive. Despite all the indications, he maintains he wasn’t secret Stasi agent “Czernie.” Then, it was De Maiziere’s government that ordered the destruction of Stasi computer tapes. The West German government had been warned even before the elections in March 1990 about Lothar De Maiziere’s possible Stasi connections in East Germany but due to his membership of the CDU, this may not have been thoroughly researched, according to Stasi-expert and Die Welt-journalist Uwe Müller.
At the end of the day, here are the facts: Both Merkel’s first two bosses in politics, Wolfgang Schnur and Lothar de Mazière, emerged as leaders of the East German opposition movement before having to step down because of Stasi accusations. Both brought Angela Merkel to the fore, and both were close to Merkel’s father.
There are the Stasi archives, the many people who were involved in the Democratic Awakening and East Germany’s CDU, people within East Germany’s church community. Doesn’t this deserve more investigation?
Maybe the only thing that can be concluded here is that Merkel was lucky enough to be able to use her father’s dodgy political connections to launch her career.
Has there been a proper debate in Germany over the role of the Stasi and its network during and after the unification of Germany? Even if this network would have only played a very minimal, almost accidental role in kick-starting Angela Merkel’s career: shouldn’t this be out in the open?
It’s commonly accepted that in the “East Block” countries that abandoned Communism, there was a lot of continuity after 1990. Not only Vladimir Putin and his KGB buddies who are ruling Russia; also in Poland and Romania, there are many examples of regime continuity.
When the Berlin wall fell in 1989, nearly three hundred thousand East Germans were working for the Stasi. This organisation has been described as “worse than the Gestapo” by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. The Christian democratic, liberal, and social democratic “bloc parties” of East Germany—which must have been infested with Stasi influences—were absorbed into Western Germany’s political system. Is it really surprising that the old elites managed to help each other in the politically turbulent period when Germany was unified?
According to GDR regime opponent Vera Lengsfeld, Stasi abuses have gone largely unpunished because it was decided that East Germans could not be prosecuted under West German law. She argues that Germany was so eager to move on with unification that it brushed too much dark history under the carpet.
Clearly, with so many involved actors still alive, this all deserves a lot more attention. A closer look at one specific case—that of how Angela Merkel started her political career—may be a good place to start.
The English Football Association (FA) is issuing a warning to one of its players after he wrote “I Love Jesus” over his league-mandated rainbow flag Captain armband.
Crystal Palace team captain Marc Guehi, a devout Christian whose father is a minister, escaped a formal charge and is being issued a formal warning by the FA after he wore the rainbow armband overwritten with his personal expression of faith during a match on Saturday.
The armbands were issued by Premier League clubs to show support for LGBTQ+ inclusion in Stonewall’s “Rainbow Laces” campaign between November 29 and December 5.
While Guehi was under threat of discipline from the league, another league player, practicing Muslim Sam Morsy, who refused to wear a rainbow armband, escaped criticism from the association.
According to Rule A4 of the FA’s regulations, religious messaging on player equipment or uniforms is prohibited, adding “for any offence the player and/or the team will be sanctioned by the competition organizer, national football association or by FIFA (the International Federation of Association Football).”
“The issue was a potentially thorny one for the FA, however, as the rainbow armband itself was part of a campaign in support of the LGBTQ+ community,” The Times’ Martyn Ziegler noted. “Ipswich Town said their captain, Sam Morsy, declined to wear a rainbow armband last weekend because of his religious beliefs, but the FA said that is not a breach of its regulations.”
“So the FA were completely FINE with Sam Morsy, a Muslim, refusing to wear an LGBT armband,” political commentator Alex Armstrong fumed on X.
“But when Marc Guehi wrote ‘I love Jesus’ on his armband and STILL WORE IT, the FA gives him a warning,” he continued.
“Why are (there) two-tier rules? One for Muslims and another (for) Christians?” Armstrong asked.
So the FA were completely FINE with Sam Morsy, a Muslim, refusing to wear an LGBT armband.
But when Marc Guehi wrote 'I love Jesus' on his armband and STILL WORE IT, the FA gives him a warning.
“I’ve grown up loving God and when I have had the chance I still go to church with my family, and my faith is definitely a big part of my life,” Guehi told The Athletic in 2021. “Faith is everything that I’m involved with, really; even in football, where I’m trying to be a role model and show God’s graciousness and God’s glory through my life.”
While traveling on Amtrak to Pittsburgh two months before the November election, I encountered an Amish family from Lancaster in the train’s café car. But this was no ordinary Amish family. The father also happened to be the leader of a large Lancaster Amish community. He was a loquacious fellow, chatting with one of the Amtrak engineers and another passenger who sat at a separate table with coffee and an open Bible. A young Amish couple — a ginger-haired farmer in a bowl haircut and his demure wife in wire-rimmed glasses — joined the group not long after I sat down.
The man with the Bible was talking about the deterioration of the Church of England and the rewriting of Scripture by woke Christian denominations so they could blend in with secular society. The topic very quickly switched to politics. I joined in the moment the leader mentioned his community had just registered to vote.
“I hope you didn’t go for the party promoting gender ideology and abortion,” I said.
I knew there was no chance that would be the case but I wanted to show solidarity. The leader said the Republican Party offered the only hope for America. For him and for all the Amish — as he explicitly stated — it came down to Biblical values and family. As he talked I could see he was thoroughly up to date on the multitudes of woke aberrations in the once-great party of John F. Kennedy.
Fast forward to Election Day when photos of the Amish in buggies with Trump flags going to vote went viral. Talk about a unified religious community. No such political unity exists in the world of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or evangelical Protestantism, although it should if one were to look at the specific doctrines of these Churches and how these doctrines organically align with Republican rather than Democrat policies.
And yet millions of deluded, faux “new age” Christians somehow talked themselves into voting for Harris and Walz, the crusader-team for abortion and ten-year-old girls who identify as butch stevedores.
The Amish trace their roots to the period following the Martin Luther-led Protestant Reformation in 1517. The pace of the 1517 Reformation, however, proved to be too slow for a group of believers in Zurich, Switzerland. This group of mainly young people found fault with the traditional practice of baptizing infants.
The new movement became known as the Radical Reformation and its adherents given the name Anabaptists. They were persecuted by both Catholics and Protestants.
William Penn, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, assured the Amish they were free to live their religion in Pennsylvania, which he called “the holy experiment of religious tolerance.” Many Amish then migrated to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in the 1720s.
The Amish traditionally have been apolitical or at least it was said they never voted. Outside the system, their protected life in Pennsylvania meant they made their own rules. They built houses in a certain way; they farmed in a certain way. One can glimpse the Amish at work in places like Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market, where they work their food stands of fresh produce, meats and various bakery items.
Then the 2020 election brought a new president (Joe Biden) and a new PA governor (Josh Shapiro). Like a bolt out of the blue, the groundwork was laid for the shattering of the apolitical life of the Amish.
The catalyst was Amish farmer Amos Miller, a Lancaster County resident who was hauled into court for violating Food and Drug Administration safety laws by selling raw milk without a permit after two E. coli cases in New York and Michigan had been linked to his farm. Essentially, the state of Pennsylvania was trying to put Miller out of business because the raw milk he produces also plays a part in the farm’s production of yogurt, kefir, butter and cream.
The state’s action was nothing less than wholesale financial decapitation, affecting Miller’s ability to distribute food products to customers, many of whom who are non-Amish.
The raw milk crackdown on farmer Miller was the last straw in a variety of embarrassments the Lancaster County Amish have had to deal with since Democrat Shapiro became governor. For decades the state said little or nothing about how the Amish handle their dogs or other animals, how they do carpentry work, how they handle workers compensation as well as a number of insurance issues.
Elmundo America reported that:
After an E. coli outbreak and news that Miller didn’t have a permit to sell milk in Pennsylvania, agents from Pennsylvania’s Department of Agriculture raided his farm, seizing much of his food and dairy products. In the ensuing case, Miller was banned from selling milk in Pennsylvania, with the case ongoing.
The case was seen by the Amish community as government tyranny and helped mobilize them against the party of Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA).
The Amish saw these charges as a gross exaggeration. A case of Democrats being Democrats wanting to over-regulate and reneging on William Penn’s promise to the Amish that they may self-regulate to a large degree without government interference.
Elon Musk, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, said,
The Democrats did make a mistake because there was government overreach with some of the Amish farmers. There was some government overreach that shut down some Amish farmers, which really made them pretty upset. And you just need to be able to channel that, the fact that they’re upset, like, well, there’s a thing you can do about it, which is called voting…
In the lead-up to the election, Steven Nolt, director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County, told PBS that the Amish voting population isn’t very big and that even if they all registered to vote he doubted whether they would vote in significant numbers.
So here we have a University guy (woke) talking to (woke) PBS about the insignificance of an Amish voting block.
“They haven’t voted, they’re not voting, and I think it’s safe to say in the near future we wouldn’t expect them to,” Nolt said. “Even if we would imagine, for example, that here in Lancaster, there would be a tremendous percentage in percentage terms … we’re looking at several hundred to maybe a thousand additional votes.”
In other words, the Amish will always be apathetic and apolitical and because they are not politically active, the government pretty much has its way with them.
Until, of course, Pennsylvania activist Scott Presler got into the act and with his team registered thousands of Amish across the state with the message: They won’t stop harassing you until you are politically active.
The message seems to have worked, although on Election Day when those images of Amish carriages all over parts of Pennsylvania went viral, Facebook flagged them as misinformation, a corrupt nod to Nolt and PBS perhaps and a slap in the face to hard working Presler who helped President Trump win Pennsylvania.
Yet reality told a different story.
The carriages with the Trump flags were real, and the Amish votes were significant. So significant in fact that the people of America-especially Republicans-owe the Amish a long heartfelt thank you that stretches far into the future, because not only did they buck a centuries old apolitical tradition, they also put their families on the line when they decided to vote.
By voting for Donald J. Trump, the Amish-all declared religious pacifists, by the way-opened the window to the Selective Service system. In effect, by voting for Trump they entered their names into the System.
As an article in CrisisMagazine put it:
The Amish’s decision to cast their votes ultimately came down to their own aversion to the prospect of the global war that the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket showed every sign of bringing about.
The countless deaths of men, women, and children already happening in the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine and the likelihood of escalations on all sides was enough to move even the contemplative, quietistic, nose-to-the-plow Amish to intervene.
The Minnesota Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in a case involving a trans-identifying male competitive weightlifter who is suing U.S.A. Powerlifting (USAPL) for refusing to allow him to compete in the women’s division, citing discrimination under the Minnesota Human Rights Act. Jaycee Cooper has been in ongoing legal disputes since 2019, after USAPL emailed him to inform him that his application to participate in the Minnesota Women’s State Championship had been denied.
According to a complaint lodged on Cooper’s behalf by trans activist legal group Gender Justice, Cooper first began competing in women’s powerlifting in 2018. While training for the Women’s State Championships, which took place on January 19, 2019, Cooper was informed that he would not be granted permission to participate.
“On December 5, 2018, USAPL emailed Ms. Cooper, informing her that she could not compete because she is transgender,” reads the May 2024 complaint referring to Cooper with feminine pronouns. “USAPL then revoked her competition card, which means that she was not eligible to compete in future USAPL events. USAPL MN then went on to hold both championship events, at which all transgender women athletes were prohibited from competing.”
USAPL published a statement clarifying their policy regarding athletes who claim a transgender status in 2019. “Identifying as one sex does not defy the factual physical differences between sexes that exist regardless of sex reassignment or hormone suppression,” the statement reads. “The assertion of gender choice, although legal to change in parts of the world, does not erase the dimorphic differences of sex, formalized at birth and continually developing throughout the lifespan, that have direct implications to performance advantages.”
In 2021, I acted as an expert witness for USA Powerlifting (USAPL) in JayCee Cooper v USA Powerlifting (62-CV-21-211, State of Minnesota District Court). As part of my testimony, I performed an analysis of performance in male and female weightlifting competitions. https://t.co/Oy61YLvAYU
Additionally, USAPL’s website had released a transgender participation policy which states: “Men naturally have a larger bone structure, higher bone density, stronger connective tissue and higher muscle density than women. These traits, even with reduced levels of testosterone do not go away. While MTF may be weaker and less muscle than they once were, the biological benefits given them at birth still remain over than of a female.”
However, Gender Justice insists that Cooper, who was “assigned male at birth” is in fact a “woman” who has been the victim of “discrimination” for being barred from competing against women. In 2019, Cooper was recorded as weighing 280 pounds, and had already won two titles in the women’s category despite having only entered the sport the year before and set a new benchpress record with a 214.5-pound lift.
Cooper has also threatened women who oppose his participation in the female division. In 2022, women’s sports advocate Beth Stelzer, founder of the non-profit Save Women’s Sports, revealed that she had been issued a subpoena from Cooper threatening her with legal action. Stelzer, herself a powerlifter who has credited the sport with empowering her after surviving domestic abuse, began her advocacy in direct response to Cooper’s participation in women’s powerlifting.
“Last month, I received messages from a number of women in the powerlifting community who expressed concern about the fact a male had registered to compete at the Powerlifting America Women’s National Championships in Texas,” Stelzer wrote for Feminist Current. “This wasn’t just any male — this was the same man who protested women’s right to single-sex competition back in 2019, inspiring me to start Save Women’s Sports.”
Stelzer detailed how she had attended the competition to protest Cooper’s inclusion in the female category, adding: “Jaycee Cooper was set to compete on April 3 for one of the most elite spots in powerlifting — a place on the USA team for the International Powerlifting Federation (IPF).”
One month later, Stelzer was sent a letter from Gender Justice which “threatened a lawsuit” which stated that “it was absolutely unacceptable that after being subpoenaed” Stelzer would continue to publicly advocate for female athletes.
Archived versions of Stelzer’s blog post show that she was required to disclose “every communication [she had] ever had with anyone about ‘transgender athletes, policies or laws relating to transgender people.’”
Additionally, she was told to provide to Gender Justice “documents showing ‘the amount and source of any past, current, or expected donations, compensation, or financial assistance relating to [Stelzer’s or Save Women’s Sports] advocacy on issues affecting transgender people.’”
Stelzer’s statement on the litigation threat was soon after deleted from her website and the Save Women’s Sports social media profiles were pulled.
The U.S. now has our very own Hayden/Yaniv.
Trans-identified male Jaycee Cooper is using the legal system to file a frivolous subpoena (and threaten a frivolous lawsuit) against @BethStelzer . Check out the absurd demands of this subpoena, then please donate to help Beth. 🙏 https://t.co/Jr4L0VR724pic.twitter.com/UR4APxBdzv
In the beginning of 2023, Ramsey County Judge Patrick Diamond ruled that Cooper “was discriminated against because of her sexual orientation and because of her sex,” and ordered USAPL to allow men to compete against women.
“The harm is in making a person pretend to be something different, the implicit message being that who they are is less than. That is the very essence of separation and segregation and it is what the [Minnesota Human Rights Act] prohibits,” said Diamond.
“USA Powerlifting did not exclude Ms. Cooper because of her gender identity. She simply was excluded from a women’s division because she had gone through puberty as a male and has significant strength advantages,” said USAPL’s attorney Ansis Viksnins.
Cooper is being represented in court by trans activist law group Gender Justice, which has also fought to have violent male convicts transferred into women’s prisons.
Cooper’s legal representation, Gender Justice, has previously secured the transfer of a violent male criminal into the female prison estate. As previously reported by Reduxx, at least five male convicts were transferred to MCF-Shakopee, Minnesota’s women-only prison, following the adoption of a gender identity policy by the Department of Corrections in January of 2023.
The policy was the direct result of litigation filed by Gender Justice on behalf of Craig ‘Christina’ Lusk, who was serving a five-year sentence for the possession of methamphetamine at the Moose Lake correctional facility for men. Lusk’s ex-wife came forward last year to tell The Daily Mail that during their relationship, he was “a big fat liar” and “violent.”
Due to Gender Justice’s activism, four other violent men have been placed in MCF-Shakopee, including two men who have been convicted of sexually abusing children. Female inmates have told Reduxx that the male transfers are making them feel “unsafe” and “scared” for their lives.
Yet Jess Braverman, the Legal Director at Gender Justice, has been received multiple honors and awards. For three consecutive years, from 2021 to 2023, Braverman was named Minnesota’s Attorney of the Year.
Our Senior Fellow Dr. Philip Kiszely joined GB News to discuss the Greek Prime Minister’s visit to the UK and reports that talks between the British and Greeks on returning the Elgin Marbles are “well advanced”.
A 24-year-old Syrian man, Hamza A., has been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of 17-year-old Malak in Menden, Germany.
The Arnsberg regional court found that Hamza A. doused the victim with gasoline and set her ablaze at her family’s front door in a premeditated attack aimed at inflicting maximum suffering on his ex-fiancée and her family.
As reported by Nius, the heinous act took place on March 22, 2023, when Malak, the sister of Hamza A.’s fiancée, answered the door to her family home at 10:05 p.m. Hamza A. immediately poured gasoline on her and ignited it, engulfing her body in flames within moments.
Despite medical efforts, Malak succumbed to her injuries 17 days later, after enduring excruciating pain.
The court revealed that Hamza A. sought to exact revenge on his former fiancée, whom he had violently abused before their separation in October 2023. Following the breakup, he issued repeated threats, leaving her in a state of constant fear. His plan targeted her innocent sister as a means to cause her the “greatest possible psychological damage.”
On the day of the attack, Hamza A. arrived at the family’s home with a bag containing gasoline canisters. He rang the doorbell with the intent to kill whoever answered. In addition to the murder charge, the court convicted him of grievous bodily harm and aggravated arson, as the accelerant endangered other residents in the building.
The presiding judge, Petja Pagel, emphasized the “particular gravity of the guilt,” meaning Hamza A. will not be eligible for parole after 15 years, a typical provision in life sentences under German law.
The court deemed his actions to be premeditated and extraordinarily cruel, ensuring he faces the maximum legal consequences.
Hamza A.’s defense attorney announced plans to appeal the verdict, but the decision has been met with widespread condemnation of the crime and relief that justice has been served for Malak and her grieving family.
Thousands celebrate the victory of the jihadists in Syria in Düsseldorf, Germany – Screengrab
by Giulio Meotti
Forget the Formula One World Constructors’ Championship and the Qatar Grand Prix. The real race right now is the race to Damascus and, as Erdogan puts it, “there is no moderate Islam”.
It’s Black Friday in Syria and in the West we sit at home watching the race, wondering who will win, the bearded Salafists, the bearded “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood or the bearded Iranian Shiites.
Iran, the regent of the Assad clan, committed so many resources to its assault on Israel on October 7 that Erdogan’s Turkey and the Emir of Qatar have discerned an opportunity. And Hezbollah, Iran’s main asset for controlling Syria, is bleeding. So the Iranian militias are coming from Iraq.
Figuring out who is on whose side in Syria is almost like a college exam in logic (or maybe Chaos Theory?) .
Hamas is Sunni but is on the side of the Shiite axis of evil; Erdogan is Sunni and is with both the Shiite axis of evil and the West and with both Hamas and the anti-Assad Syrian jihadists who in Ukraine are against Putin’s Russia which is with the Assad clan and which uses the Chechens against the Ukrainians who have come to Syria to help the Muslim brothers against the dictator aligned with Putin.
In Syria there is not only a battle between the people and the dictator; it is also a religious war.
In his book “The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State”, William McCants quotes a fighter in Aleppo:
“If you think that all these mujahideen have come from all over the world to fight Assad, you are wrong. They are all here as promised by the Prophet. This is the war he promised, it is the Great Battle.”
In the race to Damascus, the cleanest has the itch, or in this case, the shortest beard. Or as the Dutch-based Iranian academic Afshin Ellian put it, “all the jihadist terrorist groups in Syria will return to fight against each other, against Assad, against the Kurds and the Americans, and it will be a bloody battle between Islamic barbarians.”
During the first two centuries of Islam, Muslim armies faced the most prolonged fighting on the Syrian front, since it was here that Islam faced its most formidable enemy, the Byzantine Empire. Syria, therefore, is the key area for Islamic apocalyptic speculation. And the videos that are coming in prove it.
Syrian rebels in pick-ups with machine guns, carrying weapons supplied by Turkey, after having conquered Aleppo in a few hours, are on the road to Homs and Damascus. Alongside them ride British jihadists who converted to Islam after a privileged childhood spent in the Anglican Church.
The jihadists began kidnapping Kurdish girls, like the little Yazidi sex slave in Gaza.
A war of all with and against all for the sole glory of Islam.
Never has a book been so direct about Islam as “The Clash of Civilizations” by Samuel Huntington: “Islam has bloody borders”.
In Gaza, the barbarity of Hamas. In Lebanon, the barbarity of Hezbollah. In Syria, barbarians against barbarians. And in the midst of all this there is a small blue enclave, a land of Western civilization and culture: Israel.
In Syria there are the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the Hezbollah militias in crisis who are shooting at the militias of Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Syrian rebels are Sunni. The Syrian regime is Alawite, a small and heretical syncretistic minority that makes them natural allies of Tehran, which cannot afford the collapse of Damascus. Assad has an ostrich neck and shifty eyes, but he is cunning and brutal. And he will do practically anything to survive.
Meanwhile the barbarians have already started cutting off heads again.
The Christians, as usual, will pay. My thoughts are with them, with the women and with the Christians.
And since Qatar and Turkey and Saudis arm Sunni Muslims and Russia arms Shiites in a new Great Game, European countries should have armed Christians, like the Christian militias that fought against ISIS in Iraq.
America is historically in the Sunni axis (the Turks who send the jihadists are actually the second largest army in NATO) and the Eurocrats just hope only to calm their internal Sunni populations who are on everyone’s side, with Iran but also with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Distinguishing the right Syrian rebels from the wrong ones is a bit complicated.
Considered the greatest living Arab poet and a major figure in world poetry, the Syrian Adonis is one of the favorites for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year. He will not win it because he is “Islamophobic”. Adonis told Libération: “In more than sixty years, we see whether the life of the Arabs has progressed or declined. Where was Iraq and where is it today? The same goes for Syria, Libya, Yemen, Egypt… All are in continuous decline. Why have all the peoples of the world made progress in knowledge and the Arabs nothing? They lack nothing and yet they continue to decline. Because we live in the past and fourteen centuries later, the references remain the caliphs.”
And it is a religious problem, says Adonis. “My position is that the Arabs will never advance as long as religion is their political reference point. The relationship between Islam and man must be based on law and freedoms, while Islam gives more rights to Muslims than to non-Muslims. Syria, for example, is full of non-Muslims. But the non-Muslim will always be second class, without the same rights as the Muslim.”
The violence in the Middle East is not caused by Israel, it is caused by Islam.
And it should concern us, as the Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal said in 2016:
“The only force deeply rooted in Arab-Muslim society is religion. The Islamist movement occupies space and prevents the emergence of any other ideology. There is, of course, a competition between Salafi Islam and traditional Islam, between Shiites and Sunnis. However, today we see that the differences are fading within the Sunni world, while the confrontation between Shiites and Sunnis is taking place. But here too, strategic alliances are being formed. Little by little, the Muslim world is rebuilding itself and regaining its original ambitions and its hegemonic will. The frontier with the West is beginning to be abolished because political Islam is opening up spaces in London, Paris and Brussels. We can imagine that in thirty years Islam will govern the entire Muslim world that it will have unified. In sixty years it will set out to conquer Western civilization.”
We have already lived it, barely ten years ago.
François Hollande, called to testify at the trial for the November 13, 2015 attacks in Paris, confessed that the government “knew that operations were being prepared.” The former president revealed in court that the socialist government of the time knew that “operations were being prepared and that individuals had put themselves in the river of refugees to deceive the surveillance.”
“All the members of the commandos, foreigners or French who remained in Syria, took the migratory route from Eastern Europe,” confirmed Jean-Charles Brisard, president of the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, to Le Figaro. “They took the Balkan route, after Kosovo opened the passage in 2015, to get to Hungary.”
Fake Syrian refugees come out in Düsseldorf, Germany tonight to show their support for the jihadists that have seized Aleppo.
In case you needed any further proof that Europe is under an active invasion by Islamists here it is. pic.twitter.com/cHMaddWuXX
The list of terrorists in Paris and Brussels and the borders through which they entered Europe a few weeks before the massacres: Ten members of the terrorist cell responsible for the attacks in Paris and Brussels stayed or transited in Hungary between July and November 2015, taking advantage of the flow of migrants. They will all pass through Budapest’s Keleti station, which in those days was full of journalists there to tell us how bad Viktor Orban’s government was in wanting to stop the flow of migrants. In those days Hollande was busy announcing that France would welcome migrants.
Here we go again. At this very moment, future massacres in Europe are being prepared.
image of the event via Instagram, official account asta Screen grab youtube
While many in Europe are preparing for Christmas, students from the German University of Göttingen have been setting up an event using festive decorations made from bloody tampons and “butterfly decorations from pads”.
The Allgemeiner Studierendenausschuss (AStA), the political representation of the students, will host a lecture under the title “Oh my bloody mess. Trans and non-binary people bleed too”.
Following that lecture, the AStA will offer to create themed Christmas decorations and ornaments.
In the talk, the group said: “The basics of transitions are explained”, with ‘bloody’ insights into the different lives of menstruating trans and non-binary people.”
“Have you always wanted to hang a bloody tampon on your mom’s Christmas tree or make a beautiful butterfly decoration out of sanitary pads?,” AStA asked on its Instagram account on November 26. “Then it’s your evening. Welcome. The event is open to everyone.”
Speaker at the event on December 5 will be Alexander Hahne, who identifies as a gay trans man, specialising in sexual health, sex education, sexological bodywork, systemic sex therapy, dance and pleasure activism.
Sexological bodywork is described as a client-centred approach to empower, educate and bring attention to felt experience through movement, breath-work, touch, sound, and placement of awareness. Systemic sex therapy addresses the cognitions, emotions and behaviours surrounding sexual behaviour.
Hahne said ahead of the event: “With my work, I make a practical contribution to adults experiencing their own bodies, coming to terms with their own sexuality and the possibility of uncovering and trying out access to their pleasurable potential. The focus is on physical sexual education with adults. It is a matter close to my heart to accompany sexual learning processes and to open up and maintain spaces for experience. Taking time to feel.”
It is part of the series of topics on being trans and living trans to be held in co-operation with the university’s Break the Bloody Taboo group.
On December 3, the same student representation organisation is set to hold introduction on “queer basics” and on December 10 an interactive workshop titled “Let’s Talk Queer“.
There have previously been lectures on misogyny and the dangers of male influencers, how to argue against the Right and how “capitalism caused the climate crisis”.
