Category Archives: Speakers, Panels and Events

Abigail Shrier, author of “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” will be speaking tonight (Oct. 11) at 7:00 p.m. at the University of Virginia. Register here.

If you can’t make it to Charlottesville, you can livestream the event by clicking here.

Abigail Shrier

by James A. Bacon

Abigail Shrier deserves a Pulitzer Prize for her 2019 work of journalism, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.” She’ll never get the recognition she deserves from the literary establishment, though, because her conclusions transgress some of the holiest orthodoxies in the progressive canon. Despite the outcry that greeted her book, it became a best seller and transformed the way many people think about transgenderism. I am one of them.

Anyone reading the book, as opposed to imbibing the mischaracterizations of her critics, will readily see that Shrier is no “transphobe.” She is highly empathetic to the struggles that transgender people undergo, and she respectfully refers to them by their transgendered names and pronouns. She also acknowledges that gender dysphoria is a real (but exceedingly rare) phenomenon that occurs mainly among boys as young as three or four who believe that their minds and bodies are mismatched.

Shrier is reviled because she regards the unprecedented surge of transgender identity among adolescent girls as a cultural contagion, and she sees “affirmative” practices of hormonal treatment and breast removal as one step removed from medical malpractice. She criticizes teachers, psychiatrists and medical professionals who automatically “affirm” transgender identity rather than inquire about other potential explanations of emotional distress.

One critic described her work as “a fear-filled screed, full of misinformation, biological and medical inaccuracies, logical fallacies, and propaganda.” Perhaps. I’m no expert. But I found her credible.

Virginians can hear Shrier speak for herself when she appears at the University of Virginia October 11, Room 125 of Minor Hall, at 7:00 p.m. The event is sponsored by The Jefferson Council and the Common Sense Society as part of our ongoing effort to bring diverse voices to UVa. Register here Continue reading →

Imagine what the University of Virginia would be like if the Jefferson Council wasn’t getting speakers like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to speak on the grounds. Here follows a list of offerings found on the UVA Today calendar of events for the current week. It’s very woke, though not uniformly so. The East Asia Center, founded in 1975 and not recognizably afflicted by progressivism, is putting on two lectures this week. And Jonathan Rauch, a pioneering advocate of gay marriage, describes himself as an admirer of James Madison and Edmund Burke and as a skeptic of utopian ideologies. I dare not predict the tenor of his remarks about Christianity’s broken promise. — JAB

New Frontiers in Black Placemaking
Panel discussion followed by a reception.
September 25

The notion of the Western frontier prompts recognition of the genocide and forced removal policies informed by notions of Manifest Destiny that dismembered Indigenous and Native communities. Native and Black landscapes of the West have historically lost population, been destroyed by development, and industry has extracted water and oil. Post-Emancipation, Black Western place makers sought a promised land in places like Nicodemus, Kansas, Blackdom, New Mexico, and Allensworth, California. During this event, descendant activists, planners, preservationists, and scholars from these towns will share their experiences preserving and planning in these emancipatory landscapes or Western Afrotopias. Continue reading →

Photo credit: UVa Today

The Mike Pompeo speech Monday night to an audience of 400 at Alumni Hall was a great success. View the speech in the video above. And read an excellent account of it in UVA Today.

Many thanks to our collaborators in putting on this event: the Young America’s Foundation, the University of Virginia Center for Politics, and the College Republicans-UVa.

As previously announced, Mike Pompeo is coming to the University of Virginia Sept. 25 to speak on the topic, “Talk softly but carry America with you: Inside negotiations on the world stage.” Registration is now open!

Register here.

Save the date: Monday, September 25
Time: 7:00 p.m. to 8:15 p.m.
Location: Newcomb Hall Ballroom

Former Secretary of State and Director of the CIA Mike Pompeo will speak on the topic, “Talk softly but carry America with you: Inside negotiations on the world stage.”

Michael R. Pompeo served as the 70th Secretary of State of the United States, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and was elected to four terms in Congress representing the Fourth District of Kansas. Mike graduated first in his class from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1986. He served as a cavalry officer in the U.S. Army, leading troops patrolling the Iron Curtain. He left the military in 1991 and then graduated from Harvard Law School, having served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Up next was almost a decade leading two manufacturing businesses in South Central Kansas – first in the aerospace industry and then making energy drilling and production equipment.

Please join us for what promises to be an exciting evening listening to one of America’s premier statesmen of the last half century.

SPONSORS: The College Republicans, The University of Virginia Center for Politics, The Jefferson Council for the University of Virginia, Young America’s Foundation.

We will post a registration link shortly.

Stanley Goldfarb. Photo credit: Do No Harm

In no field of scientific endeavor has the woke revolution made greater inroads than medicine. Militant leftist ideology and its administrative handmaiden, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, are transforming the practice of clinical medicine and medical research into subsidiaries of the “social justice” movement.

From locking down society during COVID-19, to promoting transgender surgery for minors, to agitating against “systemic” racism, America’s healthcare system has become thoroughly politicized.

We know what many of you are thinking – “I agree it’s terrible, but what can I do about it?”

Here’s a place to start. Attend a July 12 speech by Stanley Goldfarb, founder of Do No Harm and author of “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns: Why Turning Doctors into Social Justice Warriors is Destroying American Medicine.” He will address the topic, “How to Save Medicine from Identity Politics.”

The event will begin 6:00 p.m. with a reception at the Boar’s Head Inn, followed by Goldfarb’s speech. Click here for details. Continue reading →