Jan. 29: Trump EOs Target Campus Antisemitism, Trans Medicine

Dems block ICC sanctions; Civil servants prepare for war; Tulsi and Hezbollah

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The Big Story

In news that will be welcome to many of our readers, Trump is expected on Wednesday evening to sign an executive order “instructing all federal agencies to identify civil and criminal authorities available to combat antisemitism,” according to the New York Post, which has reviewed a draft copy of the order.

In particular, the order will call on the Department of Justice to investigate universities for their handling of campus antisemitism (presumably by threatening to withhold federal funds) and will urge the deportation of resident aliens, including those on student visas, who “broke laws” as part of the anti-Israel protests that erupted in the wake of Oct. 7. As Tablet has noted on several occasions since the outbreak of the current war, existing immigration law deems inadmissible any alien who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” The Biden administration simply chose to ignore that law while providing political cover for elite universities such as Harvard and Columbia to facilitate foreign students’ illegal conduct via university-funded “anti-doxing resources,” which helped schools scrub the web of any digital traces of students’ illegal behavior. Indeed, as the Post points out, the Biden State Department and Department of Homeland Security “stonewalled record requests” from House Republican investigators “about the number of visa holders” present during the student occupation of Columbia University in the spring.

Trump also issued an executive order on Tuesday evening—“Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation”—ending all federal support for gender-transition treatment, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, for children under the age of 19. The order withholds federal funding from all institutions performing such procedures (including universities and hospitals) and bars federally funded insurance programs, such as Medicaid and the Department of Defense’s Tricare program, from covering them. The order specifically directs federal agencies to “rescind or amend” all policies relying on the guidance of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which develops the “standards of care” (SOC) that guide insurers and influence “best practices” in the field of transgender medicine. As The Scroll reported on multiple occasions in 2024, WPATH’s guidance was both scientifically unreliable and politically compromised. Though WPATH doctors privately admitted that children could not begin to understand the consequences of life-altering medical treatments, the organization nonetheless publicly declared such treatments were “medically necessary” and, at the behest of the Biden administration, removed recommended age minimums for extreme procedures such as breast and genital removal in its latest SOC.

And you can mark this last item under “fun while it lasted”: Trump on Monday night issued a memo pausing all federal funding implicated by his previous executive orders—i.e., trillions of dollars—supposedly including, as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday, $50 million in funding for condoms in Gaza. That figure wasn’t quite accurate, as it turned out; a September report from the U.S. Agency for International Aid and Development found that the United States spent a little more than $60 million on contraceptives worldwide, but that only $7 million of that was for condoms, and none of it went to Gaza. It is true, however, that Palestinians have in the past used condoms to make balloons carrying improvised explosive devices, which could be floated into Israel in an attempt to start fires, and that there’s a whole NGO infrastructure dedicated to complaining about the lack of U.S.- and Israeli-supplied condoms in Gaza. The New York Post quotes an Oct. 9, 2023, statement from something called the Palestinian Family Planning and Protection Association complaining that “Palestinians are systematically denied sexual and reproductive healthcare and rights” by “the Israeli occupation.” Sure, why not.

At any rate, the funding pause didn’t last long. A federal judge blocked implementation of the freeze on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a new memo stating that the previous day’s memo had been rescinded. We suppose it was worth a shot.

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The Rest

→While Trump’s federal funding freeze is now on pause pending what we expect will be a lengthy court battle, Senate Democrats managed to use it as a pretext on Tuesday to sink a bill imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court, which has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The bill easily passed the House earlier in January but attracted only 54 votes in the Senate, short of the 60-vote minimum needed to move forward. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was the lone Democrat who voted in favor.

→Trump’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on Tuesday offered to buy out roughly 2 million federal employees, giving them the option to resign now and be paid through the end of September, The New York Times reports. In a government-wide email titled “Fork in the Road,” OPM outlined four pillars of Trump’s planned civil service reforms—a return to in-person work, the implementation of a “performance culture,” downsizing, and “enhanced standards of conduct”—and gave employees until Feb. 6 to accept the buyout package. We assume the plan will hit some sort of legal snag somewhere, but the civil servants over at the r/fednews Subreddit aren’t taking any chances:

→The New York Times has a strange report on Trump’s embattled nominee for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. We previously noted at The Scroll that Gabbard had accused the Biden administration of retaliating against her by enrolling her in the Transportation Security Administration’s “Quiet Skies” program, a watch list for people with suspected terror ties. Gabbard really was on the list, according to the Times, which alleges that she was placed there after attending a summer 2024 conference at the Vatican “organized by a European businessman” who is on an FBI watch list, which the story insinuates but does not directly state is due to his ties to Russia. To make matters more confusing, the Times declined to identify the businessman “because U.S. officials would not explain why the FBI put him on the watch list or why he was still on it,” and noted that Gabbard’s trip had been organized by former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney.

Separately, the Times mentions a U.S. intelligence intercept concerning Gabbard’s 2017 trip to Syria, in which, according to the paper, a Hezbollah member reported to a colleague that Gabbard had met with “the big guy,” identified by U.S. officials as either a “senior Hezbollah official” or a “Lebanese government official who had strong ties to Hezbollah.” That official, according to a contemporaneous report from MTV Lebanon, appears to have been then Lebanese spymaster Abbas Ibrahim, who was indeed a Hezbollah cutout, albeit one generously funded by the United States via its subsidies for the Lebanese security forces. So the intercept, assuming it’s accurate, shows at minimum that Gabbard was being monitored and chaperoned during her stay in Syria by the Axis, which clearly saw her as a propaganda asset. At the same time, it’s a bit rich for the U.S. intelligence services to treat a meeting with Ibrahim as disqualifying, given that Ibrahim was not only funded directly by the United States—via what Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) recently called our programs to “help fight against Hezbollah influence”—but also served as the principal interlocutor for Biden envoy Amos Hochstein during negotiations over the Israel-Lebanon maritime border deal and later met with Hochstein in the wake of Oct. 7.

For a fuller accounting of Team Obama-Biden’s contacts with Ibrahim, consult Tony Badran’s X thread here: https://x.com/AcrossTheBay/status/1720817563041427553

→X user @DataRepublican, who was excellent in the runup to the November election, has created a searchable U.S. government grant database, which has been going viral over the past several days. It’s a powerful tool, and fun to play around with, not least due to results such as this one, which reveals $31 million worth of grants including the anti-human neologism birthing people as a substitute for women:

One note of caution on some of the numbers being circulated on social media: The tool can be somewhat misleading in some of the totals it provides. A search for “male circumcision,” for instance, will return a spending total of $322 billion—which is not the amount the federal government spends on male circumcision, but the total amount of all grants in which male circumcision appears anywhere in the description, usually as part of a suite of anti-HIV or sexual hygiene measures. On the other hand, the tool reveals that the government was spending $12 million on promoting male circumcision in Malawi, which still seems like a lot.

→Words of wisdom from a friend of The Scroll on the “new media”:

Sorry to all you X Premium users, but you are not the media. The media is the media. Places like The New York Times are all broken and rancid, but the forms are real, perhaps eternal. Twitter is more ephemeral than Roman graffiti, because no one would have let people write the vile shit on the walls of Rome that Elon monetizes. Is Dan Bilzerian also the media? No, he is not; he’s garbage. Media mediates, is a medium, a bouquet of mediums, hence media, plural. There are rules and gatekeepers, and all those people have lost their minds, but don’t for a second believe that a medium that makes it possible for Candace Owens to shit on the Jews in her silk lingerie is the media.

→Quote of the Day:

He believes there are chemicals in the water that turn kids gay.

That was Sen. Chris Murphy speaking about Trump’s nominee for Department of Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., at a Wednesday press conference ahead of Kennedy’s Senate confirmation hearing. The hearing itself devolved into something of a circus, with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at one point confronting Kennedy with images of anti-vax onesies (for babies) sold on the website of Children’s Health Defense, a Kennedy nonprofit. But we’d like to focus on Murphy’s comment, since it nicely illustrates the fine line between health “conspiracy theories” and inconvenient truths. Kennedy hasn’t said that chemicals are “turning kids gay,” but he has speculated about the potential link between endocrine-disrupting chemicals, such as the herbicide atrazine, and the rapid, historically unprecedented rise of transgender and LGBTQ identification among American children over the past decade. Specifically, Kennedy has noted that exposure to atrazine can cause frogs to change their sex—which is straightforwardly true, according to Science. As the authors of the aptly named paper “Atrazine induces complete feminization and chemical castration in male African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis),” published in 2010 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, put it:

Atrazine-exposed male [African clawed frogs] were both demasculinized (chemically castrated) and completely feminized as adults. Ten percent of the exposed genetic males developed into functional females that copulated with unexposed males and produced viable eggs. Atrazine-exposed males suffered from depressed testosterone, decreased breeding gland size, demasculinized/feminized laryngeal development, suppressed mating behavior, reduced spermatogenesis, and decreased fertility. These data are consistent with effects of atrazine observed in other vertebrate classes.

We hope that Sen. Murphy will heed the warning of NPR: “Science denial has consequences.”