Cross-Examination

• UN renames monkeypox: Evidently, the World Health Organization has so little to do that the United Nations’ primary health agency can waste time wringing its hands over a decades-old name worrying that it might offend leftist wokescolds. On Monday, the WHO released a statement noting that it is officially changing the name of “monkeypox” to “mpox” out of concern that the original name might be perceived as being “discriminatory and racist.” Talk about a classic case of projection. Why do leftists associate monkeys with race? As monkeypox spread across the globe — primarily the western world, where it had been essentially nonexistent — an uncomfortable reality was effectively avoided by much of the mainstream media and the WHO. Monkeypox generally spreads among homosexuals, who are known to be highly sexually promiscuous. This proved an embarrassing fact for the WHO, which like the rest of the woke Left deemed the homosexual community as a special victim class that deserves preferential treatment. While dubiously claiming the renaming of monkeypox was to disassociate it from “racism” and “discrimination,” a more likely motive is to disassociate the name “monkey” from a disease that is primarily impacting homosexual men.

• The food supply is dry: California’s ongoing drought and water shortages have farmers in the Golden State warning of the negative impacts to America’s food supply chain. 2022 has been an especially bad year for crops in California’s agricultural sector. The primary culprit for the bad growing season has been lack of water. Farmers in much of California depend upon water from the Colorado River. J.B. Hamby of the Imperial Irrigation District Board of Directors observes: “We need to ensure that Americans are fed by food produced in America. And the more we continue to offshore and outsource our food supply puts us in an increasingly vulnerable and weak position if we want to maintain full reliability of food in our grocery stores.” If farmers are unable to meet production demands, then grocer companies will be forced to seek produce elsewhere from more reliable sources, such as Mexico or China. One possible solution is for California to build more water storage facilities, something the state has not done since the 1960s, before the state’s population and water demands ballooned — and also before it became a one-party failed state.

• Schools are giving better grades to girls: The Left’s embrace and promotion of the Marxist-derived ethic of “equity” has infected institutions across the board, but none more so than America’s schools. A recently released study found that when it comes to academic grades, females are doing better than their male counterparts. But baked into these superior grades is the woke equity dynamic at play, where boys and girls are not being judged simply by their academic merit but also by their gender. To put the results of the study in a nutshell, teachers are giving higher grades to girls than boys because of a growing climate of anti-male prejudice. The study was conducted on 40,000 students age 15 to 16 who took standardized tests that were then blindly scored; the gender of the student was not known by the grader. The scores show that while girls on average scored better in language than male students, the boys scored on average better in math. However, when teachers graded the tests knowing the gender of the students, in both cases the female students were awarded better scores than the males. As schools have become more feminized, elevating feminism while degrading masculinity as “toxic,” it’s not surprising that girls would find greater preferential treatment.

Headlines

• Senate advances radical Respect for Marriage Act (Daily Signal)

• Trump takes sharp GOP criticism over meeting with white nationalist (The Hill)

• Democrat Virginia Rep. Donald McEachin dies at 61 (UPI)

• WHO renames monkeypox as mpox, citing racist stigma (NPR)

• Disney film featuring gay main character bombs at box office (National Review)

• Buffalo supermarket killer pleads guilty to terrorism, murder (Reuters)

• Biden boosts U.S. effort to stem sexual violence in war zones (Associated Press)

• Maricopa County responds to AG’s letter on election problems (Daily Wire)

• Biden family Christmas stockings exclude Hunter’s out-of-wedlock daughter (Washington Times)

• Stranger than fiction: Woman sues after her microwavable macaroni takes more than three and a half minutes (Red State)

• Humor: Pentagon hires Sam Bankman-Fried after proving he can lose money as fast as anyone (Genesius Times)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.

(The story about California was edited for clarification.)