The Conservative Cave

Toward the end of last month, before the Seattle Storm hosted the Indiana Fever, I spoke to people attending a rally in support of Sophie Cunningham outside Climate Pledge Arena. The Fever guard had recently taken a stance against biological males competing in women’s/girls sports, and a few dozen folks showed up to express their gratitude for her position.

One of them was 16-year-old Ahnaleigh Wilson, who’d lost to a biological male in a track and field race in eighth grade and was holding a sign reading “Thank You Sophie for Speaking up for Girls!”

I didn’t know if I was going to write something at that point, but after she allegedly got cussed out by a Storm co-owner during the game, I felt like I had to weigh in.

One thing Wilson emphasized to me at the rally was that she wasn’t anti-trans. Another student-athlete named Frances Staudt — who said she’s endured daily verbal abuse after refusing to play against a biological boy in a basketball game — echoed Wilson’s sentiment.

So that was the thesis of my column (which you can read here) — that supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn’t automatically make you transphobic, so let’s stop throwing those labels around.

I sent a draft after talking to my editor the morning of Friday, July 31, telling him there was no rush to run it. ... Thursday afternoon, my editor informed me that it wasn’t going to run because I didn’t tell him I was doing this in advance. I didn’t buy this reasoning. If that were the case, the piece would have been killed on the spot, not passed through the hands of multiple editors over several days.

My response? To resign on the spot.

That may come off as an emotional decision, but it was exactly what I was prepared to do. This, after all, was one of several columns of mine that had been spiked at the Seattle Times.

One was a piece questioning whether players for the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team were really the victims of discrimination in their equal-pay lawsuit. Another was a more general column on cancel culture in sports. The last, written shortly after George Floyd’s death, implored people to listen to state-champion basketball coach Mike Bethea — a black man urging the public not to stereotype cops. The common theme? All of these challenged prevailing newsroom narratives and likely would have triggered the outrage mob.

A federal judge has sentenced a 27-year-old Tennessee man to 77 years in prison for his targeting of young girls online as part of the extremist network 764, which the FBI deems a form of "modern-day terrorism."

The sentence handed down to Kyle Spitze on Wednesday marks the longest federal sentence so far for any associate of 764, whose mostly young followers around the world use popular social media platforms to methodically target, groom and push vulnerable teens into harming themselves and others.

"[Y]ou made sport of placing young minors in your own special 'hell' simply for the crime of being an insecure teenaged girl," prosecutors told Spitze in a memo before sentencing.

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2. This "third world country" equipped the Norwegian military with a lot of its modern hardware. This "third world country" also has global reach with its military, protecting various countries, and allowing them to skimp on their defense bugets. One wonders what would happen to the wonderful welfare systems were that not the case.

A 35-year-old Albany, N.Y., woman is in federal custody for allegedly planting a bomb in the State Capitol building with lawmakers inside.

Details are still thin, but I'll give you what we know and some choice reactions.

A Fox News breaker reports that the FBI told the network that a suspect named Jessica Bowie plotted to kill New York lawmakers after she "pledged allegiance to ISIS," more accurately known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Bowie allegedly planned to hide a bomb inside a DoorDash bag, "hoping to strike while state senators were meeting."

Wednesday, Bowie allegedly bought from two FBI informants what she thought was an explosive device, but was actually inert, according to the bureau. She was also given a non-functioning handgun.