Volume 80, no. 1
Philosophy, culture, and forms of governance, like mathematics, are based on “self-evident truths” or axioms. If the axioms are changed, so is everything that follows. Consider a current example: performances of The Nutcracker.
Tchaikovsky’s 1892 ballet, still the source of 40% of professional dance companies’ revenue, has been performed annually for and by children for generations—and recently by 1,500 drones (tinyurl.com/m4nr9k84). It is full of joy, magic—and innocence. Snippets of its tuneful melodies are heard everywhere. This year, Jill Biden brought a transformed version to the White House.
In the 2010s, The Nutcracker was called “racist,” and its Chinese and Arabian sequences “cultural misappropriation” and even “demeaning” (tinyurl.com/2mpw32tz). Some say that “the whole ballet tradition is inherently racist” (tinyurl.com/y5eya4pz).
The White House jazz version was an avant-garde tap dance performance by the Dorrance Dancers, whose website says that tap is a “subversive” dance form that is “rooted in protest and transcendence” (tinyurl.com/2fw8rzp8). The site answers questions about “white privilege, systemic racism, white fragility, and anti-racism” (tinyurl.com/taacmsbm). A “tap dancer is to be an ambassador to the world for the unsung history of a Black art form” (https://tinyurl.com/4pdne473).
An observer raised in the 1950s might see a lewd, sexualized performance that invites speculation on the gender identification and orientation of the dancers. And she might view dance as art that can be created, performed, or enjoyed by humans of any race.
The settings of the two Nutcrackers are radically different. When the ballet debuted in 1892, Russia and the rest of Europe were experiencing unprecedented prosperity. The opening scenes are in a comfortable middle-class home, where several generations and many children are celebrating Christmas with abundant gifts. Passports had not been invented, and the world enjoyed cross-cultural exchanges. The audience could not have imagined the horrors of the Great War and the economic and societal wreckage that followed it, writes Jeffrey Tucker (tinyurl.com/ywh9jxne).
The institutional features of the world of the ballet were faith, property, family, security. But after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Party ruled under the pretext of ideological communism, which consisted of opposition to faith, property, family, and the very bourgeois life that is celebrated in The Nutcracker.
The Biden White House is in the vanguard of a movement that thinks American foundational principles are evil and need to be subverted—and forgotten. Including faith. Many deny that America was a Christian nation at any point. Although some of the Founders were deists or atheists, the culture was Christian, and the law was derived from Judeo-Christian principles and morality. Nativity scenes until recently were everywhere, representing the historic event that marked year 1 of the Common Era, until recently designated A.D. But no one was required to be a believer.
There is still a small creche in the East Room of the White House, but this remnant is well within the “endorsement” or “reindeer” rule formulated by the late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. A display on public property can include the Christmas story without violating the “Establishment Clause” as long as it has enough secular symbols such as Rudolph or Santa Claus or Frosty the Snowman to balance it (https://tinyurl.com/mw6csm9x).
Portraying a family or home typical in 1892 could be “exclusionary.” Two married parents may soon be in the minority. A spacious home is becoming the impossible dream in America—a rented apartment in the pod or a “tiny home” (300 sq ft) may become the norm. No room for a Christmas tree, a big family dinner, or dancing. No space for books, tools, or extra supplies.
What Are American Axioms?
The U.S. Constitution makes no mention of God or a universal lawgiver. While it is intended to protect religious freedom, it is more often being used today to suppress religious and other nonapproved speech. The problematic Declaration of Independence refers to the Creator and Nature’s God as the source of rights—and is a call for insurrection against tyranny.
But what is self-evident? That “all men are created equal” is manifestly untrue. All are unique individuals differing widely in strength, talent, and virtue. Jefferson evidently meant equal under the law. America was not to have an aristocracy or a caste system, and this principle required the abolition of slavery.
But what about the “unalienable” rights to life, liberty, and “pursuit of happiness”? What exactly does the last mean? Was it substituted for “property,” which is protected by the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, because some considered slaves to be property? What is the meaning of a right to life and liberty if people have no right to own and use property to sustain their life, but must be dependent on a lord or government for sustenance?
Today, equality is taken to mean Equity (see p 2)—defined and enforced by authorities, who eventually acquire totalitarian powers. Is this inherent in the Lockean philosophy that our Founders embraced? And is it a flaw that can be mended?
The Nutcracker was a gift that got broken, but was repaired and transformed into a prince. The ballet was written in a “time of clarity when…even statesmen saw what was right and true,” writes Tucker. That world is shattered today beyond recognition. But we need not repeat the errors and horrors of the past. Can we put America’s wonderful gift back together again?
Aberration or Consequence?
Today’s Marxist Wokeism might be an invasion of an alien philosophy. But why has America been so susceptible? And could our own assumptions lead to that result—and to fascist tyranny?
In The Apprentice’s Sorcerer, Ishay Landa makes a complex argument that fascism flows from contradictions built into the liberal tradition.
Statistician William Briggs calls the Enlightenment “the Great Corruption.” Its first axiom, secularism, is “the belief that man is the measure of, and ultimate end of, all things. From secularism, nihilism necessarily follows, and from nihilism comes anarchy, and from anarchy arises tyranny, both large and small, and who today would not say we suffer from multiple tyrannies, and that worse are to come?” From the second axiom, egalitarianism, follows community of property—communism. “Equality is the most insidious belief.” Since Equity is impossible, it must be coerced.
“The age of chivalry is gone,” he notes. “That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever” (https://tinyurl.com/39rc4e6r).
“Abstract speculative reason, mindlessly generating ‘natural rights,’…is arbitrary and ends inevitably in tyranny,” writes Winston McCuen. Political action needs to be rooted in custom and tradition, he states. Government is not established to secure abstract rights, but “ordained…by God…to protect society from internal and external enemies” (https://tinyurl.com/mr2zxehb).
The tradition of “democratism,” traced back to the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which influenced Thomas Jefferson, serves as a compulsory ersatz religion, which makes an idol out of temporal power (https://tinyurl.com/7r5bwazz).
‘Equity’ Updates
Mea culpas from NEJM. The journal confesses to having been a prominent forum for discussing the superiority of Whites, and called the doctrine of equality “an anatomical, physiological and scriptural impossibility.” It actually argued that slavery had protected Blacks from insanity, tuberculosis, and the moral hazards of freedom and responsibility. “The 2020 murder of George Floyd galvanized physicians to take the legacies of slavery more seriously”—and alleviate entrenched inequities in health, perhaps with reparations (tinyurl.com/23evwhbj).
‘Antiracist’ Documentation. How and where the patient’s race is recorded in the chart may shape clinical encounters and decision making (NEJM 9/28/23).
Gender Categories. In evaluating diversity and equity in Mohs surgery fellows and program directors, further improvements could include “additional gender categories and intersectional identities” (JAMA Dermatol, September 2023).
Race Quotas. Tennessee’s use of quotas for government boards, which deny equality and opportunity, are being challenged by Do No Harm (https://tinyurl.com/fv8xe9px).
“Millions of citizens have lined up, from the French Revolution to this day, to pursue universal happiness at the expense of individual freedom; the worship of supreme authority instead of the ethics of personal courage; class hatred instead of neighborly love; the myth of historical progress instead of the traditional wisdom grounded in what really works.”
Mihail Neamtu, https://tinyurl.com/y4vy8u3a
‘Witness’ Testimony, 70 Years Later
In his 1952 book Witness, Whitaker Chambers wrote that he knew with certainty that he “was no longer a Communist” when he came to believe that it was just as wrong to cold-bloodedly kill the Tsar and the royal family and to “throw their bodies down a mineshaft as it is to starve two million peasants or slave laborers to death.” It took longer to articulate the ground of his break— “rooted in a reaffirmation of the goodness of God against false claims made on behalf of mind or reason beholden to nothing beyond itself, and idolatrous appeals to history or progress as the only tribunal of human judgment.” He came to see the “the falsehood of reductive and materialist accounts of both the human being and the world,” and freedom as a profound “need of the soul.” He concluded that “external freedom”—political liberty—was unsustainable without a recognition of the soul’s “interior freedom” (https://tinyurl.com/3a2n988d).
COVID Vaccine Adverse Effects
Studies. Dr. Robert Malone has entered about 750 published peer-reviewed studies of adverse events in the congressional record (https://tinyurl.com/yck79j4h); there are more than 6,000 studies on overcoming vaccine hesitancy. The privately funded React-19 group has more than 36,000 vaccine-injured members. The Yale-funded LISTEN study demonstrates “an urgent need for expeditious investigation.”
EMS Calls. Data obtained through Freedom of Information Law by Dr. Pierre Kory reveal that the Department of Emergency Services in Westchester, NY, received a shocking number of vaccine emergency calls as well as requests for ambulances to be “on standby” during vaccination clinics. In 2021, for an area with 800,000 people, 165 EMS calls specifically mentioned the vaccine as a cause of distress (tinyurl.com/bddk3wcz).
Excess Deaths. In September, CDC stopped updating its tracking of excess deaths on its website, without explanation. FDA chief Robert Califf called the drop in U.S. life expectancy “catastrophic”—a headline in The Hill called it “bigger than COVID”—but has no clue about why. Maybe smoking, junk food, or driving gasoline-fueled cars (tinyurl.com/yf5k6hsc).
COVID-19 Community Corps
More than 17,000 organizations and individuals have signed up with the Corps and commit to encouraging COVID-19 vaccination. The list includes public health and medical organizations, leaders in ethnic communities, and business, labor, and faith leaders (https://tinyurl.com/4ttujkfr).
AAPS Calendar
Jan 20, 2024. Board of Directors meeting (virtual).
Sep 18-21, 2024. 81st Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX. – https://aapsonline.org/2024am
ACTION OF THE MONTH
Scholarships are available to help medical students and residents attend the AAPS 81st Annual Meeting, Sept 18-21, 2024, in San Antonio. Details at https://aapsonline.org/2024am.
Jacobin Justice
The left-wing Jacobins were the most powerful political faction to emerge during the French Revolution. Their power derived from their ability to manage the Parisian mobs. To satisfy the mob’s bloodlust, the Jacobins imposed a state of revolutionary justice untethered to any traditional sense of Judeo-Christian morality. In the resulting Reign of Terror, more than 10,000 people were tried and executed.
Jacobins in the U.S. media, in cases from Sacco and Vanzetti to the Central Park Five, mustered evidence that seemed to exonerate the accused and suppressed the evidence that convicted them. But by 2012, the Jacobins were finding common ground with Robespierre. Instead of resisting the mob, they sided with it, managed it, encouraged it. “Instead of defending the transparently guilty, they felt free to condemn the transparently innocent,” writes Jack Cashill. “Oddly, almost no one noticed what may have been the darkest turn in judicial history.”
Among other cases, Cashill considers the death of George Floyd. Under threat, the Hennepin County medical examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker, added “neck compression” to his assessment, and
“four innocent police officers went to prison.”
“In this last decade, Jacobin justice has been unleashed on everyone from school board protesters to local police to a former president of the U.S. Much of it flows directly from the DOJ, but state and local prosecutors have been keen to launch witch hunts of their own. In doing so, they have corrupted evidence, rigged juries, allowed fear to dictate outcomes, and abandoned all traditional notions of equality before the law” (tinyurl.com/2xnpt59k).
See TheFallofMinneapolis.com concerning the Floyd trial.
Government Demands Metadata
The warrant demand from Special Counsel Jack Smith to Twitter for information on Donald Trump’s account includes “all information from the ‘Connect’ or ‘Notifications’ tab for the account, including all lists of Twitter users who have favorited or retweeted tweets posted by the account, as well as all tweets that include the username associated with the account (i.e., ‘mentions’ or ‘replies’)” and “all associated logs and metadata.” This includes billions of data points on millions of Americans, their locations and IP addresses, turning Trump into the center of a surveillance virus. Enhanced artificial intelligence (AI) will be used to comb through the data to protect the internet from “disinformation” under the auspices of national security (tinyurl.com/4nt5rhsc).
Tip of the Month: On Dec 11, the U.S. Supreme Court dodged the issue of the free-speech right of psychiatrists and other licensed professionals to counsel teenagers in favor of affirming their biological sex. The Ninth Circuit, the vast federal appellate court presiding over the most western states, ruled against the rights of a faith-based counselor in the State of Washington. The Eleventh Circuit, presiding over the southeastern states, has ruled in favor of the free-speech rights of counselors and against cities’ attempts to ban therapies that affirm traditional gender or sexual orientation. Justices Thomas and Alito dissented from this denial of cert., as both deplored this infringement on free-speech rights by the Ninth Circuit in Tingley v. Ferguson. D.C. and 20 States have enacted laws prohibiting or restricting “conversion therapy.”
Winning the War
There’s a war on medical freedom, and on Western civilization, and much is centered on COVID-19 and the response.
There is a deep partisan divide, and polarization has progressively intensified. A tremendous power asymmetry strongly favors the Left (https://tinyurl.com/4h94dpbe).
Truth is the most important weapon and the greatest threat to any tyranny. However, the way to discovering the truth is typically long and difficult, filled with errors, false hopes, and disappointments (https://tinyurl.com/3af6xf3t). And the Medical Freedom Movement is itself fractured.
As Nietzsche pointed out, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
Left-wing tyranny is delusional, prevaricating, arrogant, insolent, illogical, demonizing, and cruel. Its opponents must not morph into a mirror image.
What about “Nuremberg 2.0”—on which many seem to be pinning their hope? This assumes that we have a fair and just authority that will set things right—we don’t. It also omits any details about Nuremberg 1.0. This was a tribunal of victors in a war, accusing enemies who had been utterly crushed and had surrendered unconditionally. Defendants argued that their actions had been legal under the regime they served. What was the higher authority? God’s law? Consensus? The Soviets were aggressive atheists, and guilty of at least as many atrocities—for which they have never been held accountable. Who will judge now, or carry out the desired sentence to “hang them high”?
What about rules of evidence? Lists are being widely circulated, including names of private citizens who were performing highly sophisticated academic research—inaccurately (deceitfully?) described. Their laboratories, homes, and families have been threatened and attacked—Leftist tactics.
Exciting news is a great fund-raising device—but discredited reports, and often the funds, disappear.
While complex political conspiracies are a reality, they are difficult to study in detail. Right-wing “detailed” conspiracies based on guesses, delusions, or lies are only detrimental.
A winning strategy, states AAPS executive director Jane Orient, M.D., must be based on meticulous attention to facts.
Can WHO Override Our Constitutional Rights?
Is the U.S. on the verge of ceding its sovereignty to the World Health Organization through the International Health Regulations (IHR)? Many have expressed that fear.
“These claims absolutely deserve close scrutiny,” writes AAPS business manager Jeremy Snavely. “However, a closer look reveals that the current threat from the WHO is not as severe as is being stated, and is certainly less that the attack on the rights of Americans being perpetrated by our own U.S. states and federal government.” The proposed WHO treaty will not “give the WHO authority over U.S. domestic pandemic policies.” Instead, it is focused on forcing countries’ “equitable” redistribution of knowledge, technology, and other resources—harmful DEI policies (“socialistic policies”) that AAPS warned about in 1955 (https://tinyurl.com/4ae9kte4). AAPS opposes the WHO agreement (https://tinyurl.com/yve27bak).
Correspondence
Challenge to Censorship. In the AAPS reply brief in the case against specialty boards and the Biden Administration for censorship (https://tinyurl.com/2s4fn4sh), I particularly liked the State Action argument. Government agencies and advisory committees have developed particular expertise in ways to hide the truth. The level of deviousness in this case, as in sham peer review, never ceases to amaze me. As the brief states, “It is well settled that a defendant’s voluntary cessation of a challenged practice does not deprive a federal court of its power to determine the legality of the practice…. A defendant, without court compulsion, could legally return to its former ways.”
Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Lake View, NY
Sex Offenses in Schools. In 2023, there were 57 arrests statewide with a sexual component involving a school employee, mostly public school system employees, and a student or minor. Those arrested will include significant numbers of women. Whereas women could once be relied upon to apply the brakes before such interactions could take place, they now pursue such activities. In both sexes, the restraint based on a Christian-informed worldview, well-formed conscience, and a defined understanding of right vs. wrong is lacking.
Joseph Guarino, M.D., Reidsville, NC
Enantiodromia. Carl Gustav Jung coined this word for “the transformation of the hitherto valued into the worthless, and of the formerly good into the bad,” a concept taken from Heraclitus. This is the grand unifying theory for the controlled demolition of the Western world. In the Oppositeland of 2023, the season of good will to all men required counterterrorism police to safeguard carols and Nativity scenes.
Mark Steyn, https://tinyurl.com/59rkrh57
Data on COVID Vaccine Outcomes. I have been trying to go through the AMA to make sure that they will not sue me for publishing or analyzing my data stored in my EMR since AMA owns the CPT codes and I was forced to sign a click contract almost one year ago forbidding me from sharing my data. I have yet to receive confirmation that I can legally share life-saving information, but I hope that waiver will be forthcoming soon.
I also asked whether NCHS might add a codes for “adverse reaction to COVID-19 vaccination,” or “fully vaccinated for COVID-19,” since incredibly, (two years out) no codes exist. This prevents accurate tracking of what we know is occurring.
Sheri Weinstein, M.D., Sarasota, FL
Life under Communism. Elena Ceausescu, the wife of the Romanian dictator Nicolae, allegedly told a high-ranking government employee who displeased her, “The house you enjoy with your precious wife is not yours. It belongs to the Party. So does your car, and everything else you have.” The Ceausescus were proud of installing a security agent for every 15 citizens.
The nonviolent neo-Marxist revolution is now being achieved step by step, decree by decree, law by law, with international treaties that do not benefit the involved countries, endless executive orders, and other means.
In 2009, then U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a red industrial button with the word “reset” on it. The translation into Russian was incorrect; instead of “reset,” it meant “overload.”
Ileana Johnson Paugh, Ed.D., https://tinyurl.com/bddc6fsr
‘Decolonization.’ An entire issue of the British Medical Journal was devoted to “decolonizing health and medicine” (http://tinyurl.com/5ecm9kuh). Which beliefs they want to purge (logic, rationality, and old-school science) have been obvious since the misnamed Enlightenment began. But which beliefs do they want to impose in their place? “The decolonisation movement demands that we examine class, race, gender, and geographical inequities in health and medical institutions and knowledge production, and calls for radical social change.” There’s that rotten fruit of egalitarianism in all its blackened splendor.
William Briggs, Ph.D., https://tinyurl.com/yme343zn
Snipe Hunts. This practical joke dating back to the 1840s sends young persons on a hunt for a mythical lizard as a form of hazing. Participation is necessary to fit into the group culture. As an adult I was terribly disappointed to learn that huge swaths of the social sciences and of the economy are multibillion dollar snipe hunts…that maim and kill people. Why a culture built around artificiality? Why pursue escapism through drugs and alcohol, temporary adrenaline hits, and fakes? I think it’s because most of us do not know why we are here. With the breakdown of the old social order (family, community, connection to the earth, and humility and reverence for the divine) we are left naked and alone on this rock hurtling through space. The fake, the simulated, and the ridiculous become welcome distractions from existential doubts. Participating in ridiculousness reveals that one is part of the club, bonded together through shared ritual. We feel safer in the group, even if that group is participating in fascism. The revolution we seek is about a turn away from the artificial and to building a culture that cherishes the good and the beautiful.
Toby Rogers, https://tinyurl.com/2r6vrbvt
