Just the Facts with Gerald Posner

I joined the International Criminal Court in 2012. It was only ten years old and had been tarred by controversy over its credibility and independence. Still, I believed in its stated mission of providing a legal forum for bringing to justice those guilty of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression. Being an ICC member did not mean I agreed with everything it did. I...

There has been a lot of news recently about the deleterious effects on the developing brains of children and adolescents who spend too much time online. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (@afterbabel) and many others who have studied it pin most of the blame for spiraling rates of poor adolescent and teen mental health — including depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation — on social media. “The...

Gender activists are hailing an 8-6 decision by the U.S. Fourth Circuit as a Transgender Roe v. Wade . Their celebration is, however, premature. While Kadel v. Folwell is undoubtedly a landmark ruling that the Equal Rights Amendment bars state health plans from excluding medical coverage for transgender surgical procedures, one of the dissenting circuit court justices called it “imperial judging a...

Most readers are familiar with Sirius radio and CNN host Michael Smerconish . In an era of increasingly polarized politics, where the loudest voices on the far right and far left often garner the biggest ratings, Smerconish is an old-fashioned centrist, a lawyer by training who tries striking a reasoned balance on even the most contentious issues. Listeners to Smerconish filter him through their o...

The United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, are among several dozen countries that have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization. The New York Times , Washington Post , PBS, and all three major television news outlets, ABC, CBS, and NBC, and other legacy media outlets, will not use the word terrorist to describe Hamas. The Black Panthers were milit...

There has been a recent wave of comparisons between the massive late sixties and early seventies antiwar protests and today’s campus Israel-Palestinian demonstrations. While these parallels are largely imperfect, they share a common element: activist professors and radicalized teaching assistants can significantly intensify campus unrest. I experienced this first-hand growing up in San Francisco d...

California has reaffirmed that convicted male sex predators who have declared themselves to be women can serve their sentences in all-female prisons. The state says it is following federal law by “expressly prohibit[ing] housing decisions based solely on an incarcerated person’s external genitalia.” Mishandling this fundamental common sense issue was a key factor in Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation l...

Many Just the Facts subscribers requested the full OpEd published in the NY Post , not simply a link to the paper. It is below in full. I have included a voice over for those who prefer audio. It will also be available as a Just the Facts podcast. Thanks to everyone for the overwhelmingly positive response. Secret files show how international group pushes shocking experimental gender surgery for m...

This is another in my occasional series on the trans industry. The United States has one of the world’s most progressive standards of gender affirming care for minors. It requires that professionals, including physicians, therapists, and teachers, must confirm the self-diagnosis of children and young teenagers who believe they are a different gender than their birth sex. The judgment of children c...

An alarming report released Wednesday by the Defense Department Inspector General reveals that the U.S. has lost track of nearly all of the 40,000 sophisticated weapons sent to Ukraine’s front lines since February 2022. The redacted report underscores that the advanced technology and compact size of these untracked weapons — including more than $1 billion in kamikaze and switchblade drones, Javeli...

Thank you to the 5000 loyal subscribers to Just the Facts . This Substack is somewhat unorthodox. It does not adhere to the typical model of focusing on a single subject. Some of you discovered my work from articles about OxyContin or Fentanyl, only to find the next piece discussing the dangers of puberty blockers for minors or the risks posed to free expression by increasing censorship. Just when...

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments tomorrow morning about whether it should invalidate Purdue Pharma’s approved bankruptcy plan, the largest and most consequential in legal history. The elaborate $10 billion bankruptcy was approved in 2021 but is on hold at the request of the U.S. Trustee, the Department of Justice division that oversees bankruptcy cases.  The question the Supreme Court mu...

There has been a lot of talk from the Biden administration and European allies since October 7 about the need for a two state solution. OK, let’s find out what the moderates in Gaza think about that. Ghazi Hamad is widely considered a Hamas moderate. He was a Deputy Foreign Minister in the Hamas government, and the chairman of the Border Crossing Authority in Gaza. He holds a veterinary medical de...

The discussions at Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee will largely be about the absent Donald Trump and subjects important to Republican primary voters. Opinion polls list one of the top issues as the lethal opioid crisis, especially that fentanyl is now the #1 killer of Americans and is pouring over the southern border. The fentanyl epidemic, however, might not have existed i...

Just the Facts reached 3,000 subscribers today. I am grateful to all of you. Some have been with me since the start and others subscribed only today. The growth has been slow and steady. One of the first bits of advice another writer offered when I set up my Substack was to stick to a single topic. “Carve out a niche on one subject and you will get a following fast,” he assured me. Those of you wh...

There was an outcry recently over hundreds of changes made to Roald Dahl’s books and Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, all intended to make them “inclusive and accessible” through today’s progressive lens on issues such as gender, race, misogyny, weight, mental health, and violence. Author Salmon Rushdie condemned the publishers then for their “ absurd censorship .” In a Substack I wrote last month...

The World Obesity Federation issued a grim 232-page report earlier this month that predicted more than half the world’s population will be obese by 2035. Childhood obesity will more than double. Scorecards on 187 countries ranked each by their ability to address the epidemic. An independent advisory committee estimated the economic impact to the global economy will be $4.32 trillion in lost produc...

Most of us have been deluged by prognosticators warning that the first widely available artificial-intelligence tool, ChatGPT, is either “ a major threat to society’s well-being ” or the start of an unchartered era in which machine intelligence will be “ used for everything from customer service and sales to education and entertainment…. [and] will be able to hold more complex and nuanced conversa...

Sweden passed a milestone this month, but the dubious achievement was mostly lost under a deluge of news and commentary about Chinese spy balloons and the war in Ukraine. Crime statistics from last year revealed that the nation that once had one of Europe’s lowest rates of gun violence was closing in fast on Croatia for the continent’s highest per capita rate of fatal shootings. Thanks for reading...

Note: This is the first in an occasional series of short essays about the perils of what I call one think , a pernicious type of censorship in which voices and opinions that veer outside the guard rails of what is deemed “acceptable speech” are themselves banned, canceled, humiliated in the public square, and often branded as some form of bigotry. I made my first trip to London in 1981 to visit th...

Last week’s headlines summed up the gist of a breaking story. The Netherland’s National Archives had put on public display a map that purported to show where German soldiers had in 1944 buried diamonds, gold, and jewelry stolen from a bank branch that had taken a direct bombing hit. The Germans hid their haul in four oversized munitions boxes they buried on the outskirts of the small town of Ommen...

Everyone will have their own favorite short list of the stories they think turned into nothing burgers. This is my subjective top five. They are stories I followed closely that fizzled away. Fellow journalists understand all too well that a piece that captures headlines might sometimes fade without any significant follow up. Sometimes there are no more developments and other times journalists are...