Month: November 2025

OUTRAGE: Tyrannical Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes Orders Bolsonaro Taken Into Custody To ‘Prevent Attempted Escape’ as He Appeals His Sham Conviction for ‘Coup D’état’

Bolsonaro did not try to enact a coup – in fact, he was a victim of one.

Brazil drifts even deeper into tyranny.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, but the dismay of every freedom loving person in Brazil and abroad, news arises that former Brazilian President, conservative firebrand Jair Bolsonaro has been remanded to pre-sentencing detention.

Bolsonaro was taken into federal police custody today (22), after months of house arrest as he appealed the Supreme Court sham conviction for a supposed ‘coup d’état’.

US conservatives know the playbook – instead of January 6, 2021, we have January 8, 2023 – a riot sold as an insurrection or a coup.

Sources say the arrest was a preventative measure ‘related to the terms of his house arrest’.

The New Yok Post reported:

“A federal police representative confirmed Bolsonaro was

The former right-wing leader was sentenced in September to 27 years and three months in prison for to plotting a coup to remain in power after losing the 2022 election to leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.”

It’s one of those hoaxes: a fake coup with no one armed, filled with women and elderly people – even a guy selling cotton candy! Some coup!

In a Supreme Court sham trial led by Justices openly hostile to him, Bolsonaro was identified as ‘the leader and main beneficiary of a scheme to prevent Lula from taking office in 2023’.

A final arrest order has not been issues in that case, because Bolsonaro has not exhausted the appeals process.

“For more than 100 days, Bolsonaro has been under strict house arrest for violating precautionary measures in a separate case over allegedly courting US interference to halt the criminal case against him.

US President Donald Trump, who was friendly with Bolsonaro when they were both in office, has called the case a “witch hunt.” He imposed sanctions on Moraes, the justice overseeing it, and a 50% tariff on US imports of several Brazilian goods, which he began to roll back this month.”

“It is not a precautionary measure, a preventive arrest, or any other term the regime’s servants use to soften this abomination. We must have the courage to say exactly what is happening:

Supreme court justice Moraes is trying to finish the job that the former Socialist and Liberty Party (PSOL), Adélio Bispo, began when stabbed my father @jairbolsonaro  in the 2018 campaign. It is an attempted murder, nothing less. Moraes responsible for Clezão’s death in the prison, in the same manner and was never held accountable. We must understand that Alexandre de Moraes is a psychopath; the Clezao’s death served as a test for the methods of execution he now has at his disposal. Every regime of exception seeks to physically eliminate its dissidents; Alexandre de Moraes is simply following the handbook of every psychopathic tyrant who came before him.

No normal person can claim that an elderly man, seized in his own home, surrounded by dozens of henchmen from the Alexandrine “gestapo,” with severely weakened health and a constant need for hospital monitoring due to an attempted assassination carried out by a former member of PSOL could possibly escape. No normal person can call a prayer vigil, called by Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Sen. @FlavioBolsonaro, an illicit gathering that threatens public order. These are arguments that only a psychopath could use or accept.

Justice Alexandre de Moraes has a very simple goal: to kill my father. To finish the job the left has already attempted. Today Moraes acts merely as an enforcer doing the regime’s dirty work, a regime of exception that seeks to seize power and eliminate the political opposition in Brazil entirely. The only difference between justiceMoraes and Adélio Bispo lies in the means available to carry out the killing. They are two hired gunmen, serving criminals who have seized power in Brazil.

None of this will make us retreat or give up. My father’s martyrdom will only ignite the flame of justice in our hearts. All those involved in what I view as Alexandre de Moraes’s current attempt to kill my father will be held accountable. Let fear and cowardice not be your advisors. May the indifferent and the complacent awaken and rise against iniquity. Let us have the courage to stand upright and face these criminals.”

US Deputy Secretary of State, Ambassador Christopher Landau:

Tweet by Christopher Landau discussing Justice Moraes' actions, human rights concerns in Brazil, and implications for democracy and political stability.

thegatewaypundit

To Save Italy, Meloni Must Depoliticize Its Judiciary

Giorgia Meloni
© European Union, 1998 – 2025, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons

Mere survival is not often a praiseworthy virtue in the realm of politics. But it is in the case of Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni. Her masterful politicking has made us all forget about just how labyrinthine the halls of power are in Rome. Italy, after all, is a land of collapsing coalitions, of imploding governments, and of prime ministers whose tenure one could often measure in days. Just as de Gaulle’s 1958 French Constitution had the goal of assuring stability by building a powerful executive, the Italian political system was carefully designed to prevent governability: the Head of Government, the President of the Council of Ministers, has to navigate a constitution that makes her the hostage of a parliament-approved President of the Republic as well as of the legislature’s two equally important chambers, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic. This, together with Italy’s geographically pluricentric political order, has made the Italian Republic a chaotic, trembling mess that few politicians have survived. Italy has seen 30 prime ministers and 70 governments since 1947. The U.S. has had 15 presidents in the same period. France has had eleven.

And yet, Meloni, a woman once dismissed by the European press as a passing nationalist fever, has now become the third-longest-serving premier of the republic. Already in the probable beginning of her career, Meloni has surpassed the tenure of the great Christian Democrat Alcide de Gasperi. She enjoys steady popularity and would crushingly win any election that were to occur today. It is as if the usual gravitational laws of Italian politics do not apply to her.

She managed this longevity at least in part through a sort of strategic patience that her critics had assumed she lacked. To be honest, I was once one of them. During the first years, she governed with one eye fixed on the screeching coming out of Brussels, signaling calm, moderation, and predictability. This served to diffuse the dread felt by the liberal Brussels establishment due to Meloni’s nationalism. But while the spotlight was on her tone, she quietly racked up wins on cultural and social issues, stitching together the early threads of a pan-Western  nationalist, conservative, and populist movement that stretches well beyond Italy’s borders.

Now, with her position stable, a much ameliorated international situation following the return of Donald Trump to the White House, and a strengthened budget reducing Rome’s dependence on Brussels and the European Central Bank, Meloni has started growing bolder. And the most consequential of her plans—the one that’s provoked a kind of institutional panic across Italy’s upper echelons—is her attempt to rewire the heart of Italy’s deep state: the country’s judicial system.

The recently revealed plot involving Francesco Saverio Garofani, a senior adviser to President Sergio Mattarella, with the apparent aim of weakening and replacing Meloni, shows that a complex game is still being played in the shadows. Meloni’s proposed judicial reform has nothing to do with it; the policy predates the presidency’s shady moves. But what it does show is that, finding itself unable to recapture the trust and votes of the Italian people, the Europhile establishment is, indeed, working hard to subvert the political process to its advantage. The utterly partial judicial system is, with the presidency, its chief weapon.

Meloni’s reform is structural: a division between judges and prosecutors so that the same person cannot play both roles; a restructuring of the oversight council so that it is not an internal club of self-policing magistrates; and the shift from elections—long manipulated by activist blocs within the judiciary—to a system in which half the council is chosen by lot. Hardly a revolution—but transformative nevertheless.

Yet, Italy’s opposition reacted as if Meloni had proposed dissolving the constitution and installing herself as regent. “A threat to democracy,” lawmakers shouted, “an assault on the rule of law.” Indeed, parliamentarians almost erupted into a fistfight when the bill was approved. It would all be very dramatic if it weren’t so deeply predictable. 

To understand the ferocity of the backlash, looking beyond Italy’s borders is paramount. Across Europe and the broader West, judicial elites have persistently acted as the establishment’s weapon of choice against conservative populists. In Romania, a massively popular nationalist candidate, Calin Georgescu, was barred from standing for office because apparently, voters had to be ‘protected’ from the possibility of voting for him. Germany prosecuted a member of the AfD for stating an uncomfortable statistical truth, and when the case began to look unseemly, politicians changed the rules—not to correct the imbalance, but to “protect” the judiciary from future populist governments.

Poland is the cautionary tale in reverse: the judges appointed by the right-wing, conservative Law & Justice were labelled illegitimate by the opposition, and now Donald Tusk simply ignores their rulings when he doesn’t like them. He has even gone as far as purging them to replace judges with obedient cronies. Judges, it seems, are independent when they rule for the establishment, political when they do not.

Behind the anger over the Meloni reforms lie the fears of an endangered establishment: judicial systems across Europe increasingly view themselves not as neutral organs but rather as guardians of an ideological order that treats populists not as a constituency to be represented but as a pathology to be contained.

Italy is no exception. The leaked remark from an Italian judge calling Meloni “dangerous” revealed more than it intended. It showed that the judiciary, or at least substantial parts of it, views itself not as an arbiter but as an active political participant—one that feels entitled to intervene when democracy delivers the wrong result.

To succeed in returning Italy’s judiciary to the people, Meloni will have to go beyond mere administrative tidying. What Italy needs is not just a cleaner judiciary. She needs a less political one: a judiciary, that is, that cannot enforce its own ideological preferences through backchannels, one that enacts impartial justice rather than attempts to govern. Populists across the West have learned the hard way that if you do not address this imbalance early on, courts will fill the vacuum of authority with astonishing speed. One needs only mention Brazil’s Alexandre de Moraes, an unelected judge who has managed to accumulate a breathtaking degree of political power without ever facing a ballot, while using it to persecute the Right with little to no moral qualms.

If Italy is to be saved from its own institutional reflexes, the judiciary needs to be depoliticized. Anything less than that will be swallowed whole by the old order. Meloni understands it, thankfully—she must, therefore, press on until the job is done.

europeanconservative

UK: Labour’s freedom of speech rules in tatters as university professor suspended and deemed ‘potential risk to colleagues’ after using n-word on campus

Peter Pormann was suspended from the University of Manchester | X

A university professor has been suspended and deemed a “potential risk to colleagues” after using the n-word while on campus.

Peter Pormann, aged 54, was labelled a “potential risk to colleagues” after discussing dictionary definitions during an internal disciplinary hearing meeting where no students were present.

The University of Manchester is now examining whether his language constituted racist and inappropriate conduct.

The suspension represents an immediate challenge to the government’s campus free speech regulations implemented in August.

These measures require universities to “actively promote academic freedom, ensuring campuses are places where robust discussion can take place without fear of censorship of students, staff or external speakers expressing lawful opinions”.

The philologist maintains he referenced the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for the term whilst explaining how word meanings evolve over time.

The incident occurred during a meeting last month where academic and administrative staff had gathered to address allegations against another faculty member who had upset students by saying “b***h”.

Whilst defending his colleague, Mr Pormann reportedly stated: “Words have context, and the word ‘b***h’ can have a positive meaning if you look at the Oxford English Dictionary.”

He then referenced the racial slur, explaining that the same principle applied, before adding: “I am not saying that we should use these words, but I am a philologist: so words have contexts, situations have context.”

Thomas Schmidt, who heads the school of arts, languages and cultures, issued the suspension three weeks following the meeting whille an investigation proceeds.

The University of Manchester’s free speech policy explicitly states that “such freedom must apply not only to information or ideas that are favourably received or uncontroversial, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb”.

This institutional commitment appears to conflict with the professor’s suspension, creating uncertainty about how universities should balance offensive language policies with academic discourse.

The new governmental regulations instruct higher education institutions to safeguard lawful expression on campus.

These measures emerged from concerns about censorship in academic settings.

The timing proves significant, as Mr Pormann’s case emerges merely three months after the rules took effect.

The suspension has caused concern amongst department staff, particularly given that a survey conducted this year revealed 89 per cent of 280 participants reported experiencing workplace bullying or harassment.

A colleague commented: “There is a problematic culture in the department and I fear Pormann has fallen victim to it.

“He was making an intellectual point, perhaps clumsily, but he is not a racist.”

Faculty members highlight Mr Pormann’s past anti-racism activism, including establishing a Youth Against Racism organisation during his youth in Hamburg and his work alongside Holocaust survivors in Israel.

The department encountered comparable issues in 2023 when students abandoned French classes, alleging instructors had used the same racial slur whilst teaching colonial history.

Dennis Hayes, who leads Academics for Academic Freedom (AFAF), argued that free speech “should be at the heart of everything a university does”.

He stated: “An example like this shows that although the new free speech legislation has encouraged universities to have pages of codes and procedures, the spirit of free speech has gone.

“AFAF deals with many similar cases where internal, formal and informal, processes are used to harass and intimidate individuals because of their beliefs and opinions.

“We need to continue to fight on the ground to reinstate a culture of free speech.”

The Oxford English Dictionary contains extensive documentation of the term, noting it is “liable to be considered offensive or taboo in almost all contexts”.

The entry acknowledges varying connotations depending on speaker and context.

Just four months prior, Manchester celebrated Mr Pormann’s achievement in securing £2.1 million from a European research centre to translate ancient medical manuscripts by Egyptian scholar Gesius.

GB News has approached the University of Manchester for comment.

gbnews

“Non-Binary” Maryland Teacher Sparks Outrage After Posting TikToks Flaunting Pregnancy and Breast Implant “Kinks”

Concerns are mounting in Maryland after a male teacher was found posting TikTok videos flaunting what he describes as his pregnancy and breast-implant fetish. Although the teacher has since locked down his social media accounts, the child-safeguarding organization Gays Against Groomers saved one of the clips and reposted it on X, where it has already racked up more than 30,000 views at the time of writing.

Reduxx has identified the teacher in the controversial video as James Roman Stilipec, who instructs Grade 9 English at REACH! Partnership School 341 in Baltimore.

In the clip shared by Gays Against Groomers, Stilipec is seen wearing an exaggerated breast form and an oversized fake pregnant belly beneath a tight green shirt. The video appears to be a repost from a concerned viewer, who captioned it: “this man @allthatjaz22 is a 9th grade teacher and posts this publicly.”

Before locking down his account, Stilipec had already gained a reputation on TikTok, drawing a wave of local critics who frequently confronted him during his livestreams. In one stream — later re-uploaded to YouTube by user KajunWarrior — multiple parents pressed Stilipec on whether his fetishes compromised his ability to safely carry out his duties around children. Stilipec denied this despite admitting to some fetishistic behavior.

“I am walking around in public living my best life because I fulfilled how I want my body to look. I am not fetishizing myself 24/7, just as you are not fetishizing yourself 24/7,” Stilipec insisted in his defense.

“No one can see my homosexuality or heterosexuality,” one man shot back.

“And nobody can see my autogynephilia,” Stilipec responded, referencing a sexual fetish in which men are aroused by imagining themselves as women. The term, coined by Ray Blanchard, describes a broad range of self-directed, cross-gender fantasies and behaviors in men that go beyond cross-dressing.

In another livestream, viewers gathered around photos and TikToks Stilipec had taken inside his classroom, expressing outrage over how he was presenting himself in front of young students.

“You need to be fired and jailed,” one woman exclaimed. “I can’t believe you go to school like this.”

A screenshot from Stilipec’s now-private TikTok account.

While Stilipec frequently sports enormous S-cup breast forms in his TikToks, he also has large breast implants that he has openly boasted about online, describing them as “36DDD, but I can fluff them up to about a 36G.”

Strangely, Stilipec has said he does not identify as a woman or a “trans woman.” On his X account, Stilipec has clarified he does not have gender dysphoria, is not on hormone replacement therapy, and has no desire to transition. Instead, he says he simply has breast implant, pregnancy, and “forced feminization” fetishes, and occasionally identifies as “gender fluid” or “non-binary.”

“I was dysphoric about having boobs, so I got them. My added desire for bigger boobs, hips, lips & hair is just a kink. I may want to dress up and show off, but it’s just for my own self-gratification rather than a filling a hole in my soul (like the implants did),” Stilipec wrote on X in 2022, posting two selfies revealing that he initially had relatively small implants but had significantly increased their proportions.

On his REACH! Partnership School department profile, he is listed as “Mr. Stilipec.”

Stilipec’s official school photo, as seen on his school-connected G-suite account.

Despite not identifying as a woman, Stilipec reportedly does still utilize female spaces. It is unclear if he uses the women’s restrooms at his school.

Stilipec is a Navy Veteran and was extremely active in creating Navy media during his service as a Mass Communications Specialist. Many of his videos, photos, and broadcasts can still be found on official Government websites, including for the Department of War, the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, and the National Museum of the US Navy.

Stilipec during his tenure at the US Navy.

Stilipec was previously married to a female Navy service member, and the two had placed their children for adoption. In 2014, he became the subject of a Protection From Abuse order after a court was told he had allegedly targeted the adoptive family of one of his children with “ongoing threats, stalking, and harassment.” The order barred him from contacting the family for one year. Stilipec and his wife divorced in 2016.

Alongside his involvement in Baltimore’s Dungeons & Dragons and cosplay communities, Stilipec also writes erotic fiction under the pen name Jay Aress. Nearly all of his publicly available works feature themes of BDSM, sexual slavery, and forced prostitution. In one short book, Angel’s Continuing Enslavement, a young woman is injected with a drug that halts her aging on her 18th birthday before being auctioned off and sold as a “pleasure slave.”

Stilipec is not the first male teacher to face public scrutiny for controversial attire or behavior at school.

In 2022, photos and videos from a Canadian high school went viral after showing a male teacher wearing what appeared to be extremely large prosthetic breasts in front of students. Reduxx traced the images to Oakville Trafalgar High School in Oakville, Ontario, igniting an international media firestorm around a Manufacturing Technology instructor who reportedly began identifying as a woman and attending classes in an oversized breastplate with protruding nipples.

Both the school and the Ontario College of Teachers defended the instructor, who later appeared in public presenting in masculine clothing again.

reduxx

Critical Race Theory Deserves to be labeled as ‘hate speech’

GROK

By Helen Louise Herndon

According to the Critical Race Theory, one sole race is targeted as “oppressor,” while another is “oppressed.” It falsely and negligently paints good and evil as relating only to black and white races. It slanderously and racistly describes the entire white race as “oppressors” and the entire black race as “oppressed.” Such fabrications and mendacities deserve to be labeled “hate speech.” There has been pushback on this theory, but not enough nor as publicly as it deserves.

Critical Race Theory ignores human race history. Whether ancient or modern history, oppressors are found on every continent, in every race, and in every ethnicity. The same is true of the oppressed. More often than not, oppressors and those they oppress are of the same race.

I was recently reminded of a horrific incident relating to an oppressor and an oppressed young man that took place thirteen years ago. A Muslim convert to Christianity was beheaded in Somalia—not only beheaded but mutilated.

Farhan Haji Mose, a 25-year-old Somali convert from Islam to Christianity, was beheaded on November 16, 2012, by Al-Shabaab rebels, according to Morning Star News. “His body was split into two, then carried away, only to be dumped near the beach of Barawa city,” a local Christian said.

Does that not describe an oppressed man and others as oppressors? Both were of the same race, the black race.

That is not an isolated case. Across Africa, black Africans historically slaughtered, enslaved, or sold other black Africans, especially Christians, something that’s happening even today in Nigeria, the Sudan, Uganda, Congo, and Kenya.

In the Middle East, religious persecution remains endemic. Muslims rule in most nations, oppressing those of other religions. In Saudi Arabia, no one can possess a Bible or practice any religion but Islam. However, Muslims there’s also been a long and bloody war between different Islam sects, one that often ends with mass massacres.

Across Asia, Asians of one nationality oppressed those of the same race via mass murder, rape, and enslavement. History reports what the Japanese did to the Chinese and Koreans in World War II, and what the Chinese Communists under Mao did to the non-Communist Chinese, Christians, and the Uyghurs. In Cambodia, under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, more than a million Cambodians were mass murdered.

In South America, millions of Incas were sacrificed to idols. Same with the Aztecs of Mexico. Human sacrifices were regularly made to Huitzilopochtli at the peak of the great pyramid Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlán. Today, the drug cartels oppress the people in Colombia and Venezuela.

In Europe, more history is recorded due to literacy, and it again shows an endless array of oppressors and those whom they oppress—and all of it was against the same race, the white race. Remember the many religious wars, as well as the post-religious wars of Hitler’s Naziism and Lenin’s and Stalin’s communism.

Yes, North America had its oppressors and the oppressed, too, both interracially and intra-racially. Whites enslaved blacks and decimated Native American tribes. Within the white race, some were persecuted, such as Jews, the Irish, Eastern Europeans, etc. There were thousands of black slave owners who oppressed members of their own race. Even Native Americans enslaved other Native Americans, fought wars with each other. In one tribe, the Caddoans of Southern Texas and Louisiana, youth were treated as slaves and then cannibalized at a certain age. Native Americans also owned black slaves.

The above are just some illustrations of both “oppressors” and “oppressed” being found in all races. Judaism and Christianity recognize this fact and truth due to their holy books describing evil as human depravity and occurring universally, not specific to any one group of people.

Why raise this issue and support the universality of “oppression” and “oppressors” in proof of Critical Race Theory’s grave and great falsehood? The sooner it is dealt the death blow it deserves, the better for everyone and especially for our nation.

What can be done to resolve and put to rest such a racist theory? Recognize it as a racist and evil indoctrination that has done much damage to racial relationships. Recognize it as racist hate speech and seek to enact a law that addresses it as unlawful hate speech and bars it from being taught in taxpayer-paid public education. Critical race theory deserves a “Hate Speech” label and law.

americanthinker

German court supports anti-Semites with ruling

The Higher Administrative Court (OVG) in Münster, Wikimedia Commons, Florian Adler, CC-BY-SA-3.0

It is a slap in the face for Jews living in Germany: for the first time, a court has allowed anti-Semites to deny the state of Israel’s right to exist at demonstrations. The Higher Administrative Court (OVG) in Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia, has overturned a ban imposed by the Administrative Court in Düsseldorf in an urgent ruling. The case concerned a pro-Palestinian demonstration planned for Saturday in Düsseldorf and the restrictions imposed on participants. More than 5,000 people had registered to attend.

The police had forbidden the organiser from denying the right of the State of Israel to exist during the rally. In addition, the slogans mentioned in the rally’s motto, ‘From the river to the sea’, ‘There is only one state – Palestine 48’ and ‘Yalla, yalla, Intifada’, were only allowed to be read out once at the beginning of the event and could not be used again afterwards.

The Higher Administrative Court justified its decision by stating: ‘Denying the right of the State of Israel to exist does not in itself constitute a criminal offence.’

However, ‘critical examination of the founding of the State of Israel and the demand for peaceful change to existing conditions’ are protected by the right to freedom of expression.

The situation is different, however, with regard to the other slogans. ‘Yalla, yalla, Intifada’ remains banned at the demonstration in Düsseldorf, as it could be understood ‘as an expression of sympathy for the acts of violence committed by radical Palestinians’.
‘From the river to the sea’ also remains banned because it is a slogan of the terrorist Palestinian organisation Hamas.

The ban on ‘There is only one state – Palestine 48’, on the other hand, has been lifted. Although the slogan calls for the annihilation of Israel, which was founded in 1948 from the ruins of the Holocaust.

The decision of the Higher Administrative Court is not subject to appeal.

Gericht in Münster erlaubt Antisemiten-Slogan bei Demo | Regional | BILD.de

COP30: Double Standards and Hypocrisy in Brazil

Wikimedia Commons, lula Oficial, CC-BY-SA-4.0

Maybe US President Trump refused to attend, but the European Commission could not miss out on the COP30 climate summit in Brazil. Not only President Ursula von der Leyen but also the EU Commissioner for Climate Action, Dutchman Wopke Hoekstra, took part. He sang the praises of ‘carbon pricing,’ or levying taxes on CO2 emissions. According to him, this is “something we must strive for: putting a price on carbon is something we must pursue as quickly as possible with as many parties as possible.”

This is questionable, given the state of the European economy. The chemical industry in particular is in particularly troubled waters. At the beginning of 2024, an important summit was held in Antwerp on this subject, attended by leading figures from European politics and the European chemical sector. This summit ended with a call for lower energy costs and less bureaucracy. However, in June 2024, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, founder and owner of the large British chemical company INEOS, complained that EU policymakers “are listening, but I have not seen any changes yet.”

Meanwhile, virtually nothing has changed. In October, Stephen Dossett, head of Ineos Inovyn, a subsidiary of INEOS, stated, “Europe is committing industrial suicide” after yet another chemical plant in Germany had to close due to sky-high energy costs. Ratcliffe himself is now calling for “carbon taxes to be abolished. … We need action, not sympathetic words, otherwise there will not be much left of the European chemical industry to save.”

EU climate tax and regulations on export

Years of experimentation with the European energy supply, from not exploiting its own fossil fuels to closing nuclear power plants, are taking their toll, in addition to the loss of cheap Russian gas. It will take years to return to an energy supply that prioritises cheap energy, but what European policymakers can do today is to abolish the EU’s climate taxation scheme, ETS. The price of natural gas before this tax is currently about twice as high in Europe as in America. When the ETS tax is added to the European price, that price doubles. This makes the price, including tax, four times higher than the American price. One does not need to be an expert to see how difficult this makes things for European industry and what the effect of abolishing the ETS would be.

It is therefore disconcerting to note that Hoekstra wants to export this failing European model to the rest of the world. The American experience shows that there are also ways to reduce emissions by focusing on economic growth rather than taxes. CO2 emissions in the U.S., where such a climate tax or ‘cap and trade’ system is largely absent, have fallen more sharply in percentage terms per capita than in the EU since 2005, when the ETS system was introduced in Europe.

However, avoiding central planning is not particularly popular at the Brazilian COP climate summit. The order of the day is so-called ‘reparations’ that are being demanded from the West along with ever-increasing green regulations. China has criticised the EU for doing too little, even though China, like India, is continuing to build new coal-fired power stations.

Cutting down rainforest for climate change

The chosen location of the COP climate summit raises legitimate questions. COP30 is being held in Brazil, in Belém, in the middle of the Amazon region—a location that forced the Brazilians to cut down forests to build new roads and airports. Tens of thousands of hectares of protected Amazon rainforest were felled to build a new four-lane motorway.

Bizarrely, European Commission President von der Leyen thanked Brazilian President Lula for his deforestation policy at COP30, saying, “Brazil is showing great leadership. Whether it’s putting a price on CO2 or fighting for our forests.”

Even though the EU is fumbling with its own new bureaucratic deforestation directive, Brazil is not exactly a model when it comes to deforestation. Soy cultivation, for example, is responsible for major ecological damage.

In August, the Brazilian authorities decided to suspend the Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM)—an arrangement in which commodity traders agreed not to buy soybeans from areas that had been deforested after 2008. According to studies, this contributed to a reduction in the overall rate of deforestation in the Amazon region. It is noteworthy that the agreement was voluntary and brought together farmers, environmental activists, and international food companies. It allowed soy production to increase significantly without destroying the Amazon region and is estimated to have prevented 17,000 square kilometres of deforestation.

Suspending the moratorium, the World Wildlife Fund said, “could open up an area the size of Portugal to deforestation.” NGOs have indicated that soy production in Brazil contributes significantly to the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, both directly through the clearing of forests for new soy farms and through the displacement of small farmers who then move to forest areas to engage in subsistence farming.

Climate orthodoxy takes a back seat to comfort

Other double standards are easy to find at this UN climate summit. 

The Brazilian government had to charter two cruise ships due to a lack of hotels to accommodate all the participants. Those ships—used to house delegates from less affluent countries—are obviously powered by diesel, a fossil fuel particularly denounced by climate change activists. 

Participants in the conference have also complained about the lack of air conditioning—again, not something that lines up neatly with their own climate orthodoxy.

Danish economist Björn Lomborg—not a ‘climate denier’—concludes: 

Climate summits like COP30 should focus more on human welfare and recognize that boosting prosperity is one of the best responses to climate change because it makes people more resilient. 

Leaders should also end their obsession with costly and inefficient NetZero and double down on adaptation, as well as R&D investment to catalyze green energy innovation.”

europeanconservative

New Jersey Korean Spa Agrees To Allow Males Access To Women’s Nude Sections Following Blow In “Discrimination” Lawsuit

Allie Goebert

A Korean spa in New Jersey has been ordered to implement “gender identity-friendly” policies and educate staff on “non-discrimination” after being sued for refusing to allow a male into the women’s nude section. The man, Alexandra “Allie” Goebert, first launched the discrimination suit against King Spa in 2022.

King Spa is a wellness facility modeling itself after a jimjilbang, a traditional Korean health center which requires nudity in some areas. For that reason, the nude areas of the spa had been strictly sex-segregated.

As previously reported by Reduxx, the incident involving Goebert first occurred in August of 2022 when he visited the Palisades Park location with a female companion. Upon registration, Goebert was provided wristband granting him access to the men’s locker room instead of the women’s. Goebert immediately complained, telling staff he was a “transgender woman” and was legally recognized as “female” by the state of New Jersey.

After making a phone call, the staff member gave Goebert access to the restricted women’s area. But after entering, Goebert came to the attention of a locker room attendant who quickly called the manager. The manager then began to question whether Goebert had undergone genital surgeries, at one point asking if Goebert still had “boy parts.”

Alexandra “Allie” Goebert

Goebert responded that he did not have “boy parts” because he is a “woman,” implying that he had attempted to argue his penis was not an inherently male anatomy. But the manager continued to press on whether he had undergone any surgical interventions, to which Goebert eventually admitted he was fully intact. The manager then told Goebert he needed to leave the female area of the spa.

After being told to use the men’s side of the spa, Goebert protested and said he would be uncomfortable in the men’s area because he identified as a woman.

The General Manager, Youn Park, attempted to make a concession for Goebert in the form of allowing him to use the women’s area, but only if he wore a bathing suit. Goebert refused, stating he did not have a bathing suit to wear and accused the spa of being in violation of the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination. He was offered a refund on his admission and told to leave.

Less than two months later, Goebert, who is a US Army Veteran and law school graduate, filed a complaint against the spa with the state’s Department of Law and Public Safety.

Throughout the course of the proceedings, Goebert’s counsel complained that King Spa “misgendered” him in court filings.

From the suit filed by Goebert.

In their position statement, lawyers for King Spa explained that Goebert had previously attended the spa and presented ID with his sex listed as “male,” prompting confusion from staff. 

“When the agent, servant, and employee of [the spa] saw that the license indicating female and recognizing that this was the same individual who had utilized the male facilities, the question was posed as to has the front changed,” the position statement read. 

“This was an attempt at not being insulting, but deemed a necessity given that there are many other male and female customers who utilize the Spa and do so in the nude. Once this individual indicated that he had not change his front, to wit, that he had male genitalia, the agent, servant, and employee of [the Spa] made a reasonable accommodation. They indicated that the individual could certainly use the facilities, but not in the female nude area. To do otherwise would simply cause havoc and expose all the other nude females to a fundamental invasion of their privacy and certainly expose the [spa] to extensive liability for the same.”

The position statement also noted that there was an apparent exception in New Jersey’s statues denoting that public places are allowed to impose “reasonable restrictions” where facilities are reserved for “individuals of one sex,” such as summer camps, day camps, resort camps, bathhouses, dressing rooms, and more.

This exception was challenged by Goebert’s lawyers, who claimed the single-sex provision did not entitle facilities to discriminate on the basis of gender identity.

“Nowhere in the LAD is there an exclusion for the wholly-fabricated ‘invasion of privacy’ or ‘extreme emotional distress’ the Defendant is convinced would befall all of the other female guests of the spa were [Goebert’s] gender identity to be respected.”

While the case was originally scheduled for a jury trial on August 11, King Spa came to a settlement agreement with Goebert instead. An August 28 filing refers to a “separate, confidential settlement agreement between the parties resolving all claims” in the case, with no insight provided into how much King Spa agreed to pay Goebert for his “distress.”

In addition to the financial settlement, King Spa also signed a Consent Order and agreed to implement a number of “corrective” policy measures to satisfy Goebert.

Among the measures were that it was obligated to force every employee to undergo at least one hour of training conducted by an independent consultant specializing in “gender identity and gender expression.” The Consent Order notes that Goebert’s counsel would receive confirmation from the consultant once every employee had undergone the training, including a list of all of the employee’s names.

King Spa was also required to implement an employee handbook outlining their new policy on “non-discrimination … on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.” The handbook offers employees definitions on various “gender identity” concepts, and instructs employees to address clients on the basis of their preferred pronouns and name.

Distressingly, the handbook details that the spa’s sex-segregated facilities were effectively abolished, noting that anyone may access the sex-segregated spaces on the basis of self-declared “gender identity” alone, and emphasizing that areas requiring partial or full nudity will contain clients whose bodies may not align with “stereotypical expectations” for that gender.

From the new King Spa handbook distributed to employees.

Goebert’s lawsuit is not the first involving a trans-identified male lashing out at a Korean bathing establishment due to its sex-segregated policies.

In 2023, a court in Seattle, Washington, ruled that a female-only nude spa lacked the “constitutional right” to bar males from their facilities. The decision came after the spa sued the Washington State Human Rights Commission (WSHRC), which had forced them to change their sex-exclusive policy due to the complaint of a transgender patron.

The complaint was made by Haven Wilvich, who had sought a membership at the Olympus Spa in January of 2020, but had been denied on the basis that he had not undergone “gender reassignment” surgeries and his penis was fully intact. The WSHRC ruled in Wilvich’s favor, and demanded Olympus Spa revise its policies to ensure trans-identified males who claimed a female identity could access the female nude areas.

In March of 2022, Olympus Spa sued Andreta Armstrong, the executive director of the Washington State Human Rights Commission, asserting that the actions taken against them violated their First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of association.

But a Washington District Court dismissed their lawsuit in January of 2023, upholding the ruling by the WSHRC and affirming that the measures taken to prevent the spa from having a female-only policy were lawful.

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