Volume 79, no. 3 March 2023
Divisiveness has reached such a point that some are actually contemplating a divorce between “red” states and “blue” states, and Kurt Schlichter writes novels about it. Given the power asymmetry between leftist and conservative factions, it seems remarkable that so far the Left has only achieved a stalemate.
While the Left is waging “5GW” (fifth generation warfare—not related to cell towers), along with deploying the vast resources of the administrative state to crush opponents, “Conservatism, Inc.” seems content to be a graceful loser. It sends out messages to motivate its base to send money, but without offending the really huge vested interests. Ditto for most elected officials.
Note how circumspect “conservatives” are about the irreconcilable issues: COVID vaccination and the LGBTQ++ agenda. As the serious adverse effects of the COVID shots are becoming undeniable, some admit that mistakes were made, but claim that millions of lives were saved—please forgive us. But have conservatives fought unconstitutional emergency powers? Prominent Republicans are courting LGBTQ++ activists—talking about freedom, privacy, and compassion. Where is the outrage about the industry that exploits disturbed patients, especially children, and the fraudulent “science”?
What Will Be the Partitioning Issue?
Will the incremental moves to the Left, the constant shift of the Overton Window, with endless compromise by the Right continue? Or will one issue eventually provoke a sharp split?
To great applause, Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles told a CPAC audience that there “can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It is all or nothing…. Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely—the whole preposterous ideology” (https://tinyurl.com/ye4sm5ya).
“Genocidal!” was the leftist response. (Ironically, fully “transitioned” people would genocide themselves.) Activists are worried about nearly 300 bills “designed to discriminate against transgender people” that have been introduced in state legislatures (ibid.). These are most commonly aimed at banning “gender-affirming care” for minors.
Another unapologetic Daily Wire commentator, Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog), tweeted: “The core difference between me and my critics on the Right is that I aim to utterly defeat, humiliate and demoralize those who castrate children, wage war on the foundations of human society, and attack truth itself, while my critics hope to find ‘common ground’ with these people.”
For decades, scholarly conservatives have respectfully studied the transgender issue, hoping to persuade with facts and logic. But extremists will not be converted, nor will those whose objective is to create chaos and destroy our culture. But what about the “swing voters”? Walsh writes: “One of the key ways of swaying the middle is by making gender ideology seem utterly repulsive and insane. Which it is” (https://tinyurl.com/4bz469ts).
Conservative consultants are appalled by such strong language. But what about parents who see their children turned against them and subjected to sterilizing and mutilating procedures? How will they feel about physicians such as Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who justified mastectomy in young girls: “If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them” (https://tinyurl.com/2bjhehj2).
“Transphobes” are portrayed as fascist aggressors, but as Walsh points out, trans activists started the fight. A couple decades ago, they could have had what they said they wanted: freedom to live their lives in peace. Then they started demanding that “the rest of us abandon everything we know about physical reality.” No others have ever had the right, he said, to do whatever they want and then be “affirmed” and celebrated for it, or to take possession of the English language. TG activists now cry victim because some have said “no” to their demands, e.g., the right to induct children into a “suicidal cult” (tinyurl.com/5effaa53).
Is this overstated? Some 6,000 schools nationwide have rules that prevent faculty and staff from disclosing to parents a student’s gender status without that student’s permission, according to Parents Defending Education (tinyurl.com/yp5ezk3t).
Lack of legal support does not deter some trans activists. M2F Eli Erlick, a Ph.D. candidate, writes on Twitter that he orders four times more estrogen and testosterone blockers than he takes, and distributes them illegally, for free, so that no minors need to go without medication because of a state ban. He claims this activity puts him at minimal risk, and that nothing has happened despite “tens of thousands” of people reporting him to the DEA and FBI (https://tinyurl.com/pn4rrej7).
How Could Partitioning Work?
The late Justice Antonin Scalia concluded, “If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede.” Nevertheless, the Texas Nationalist Movement, more than 400,000 strong, which wants “Texit,” has been growing since 2005 (tinyurl.com/msvzs4s8).
Instead, what about building parallel communities and institutions, with virtual walls, based on exclusion of irreconcilables. Exclude all who want to kill you, take away your freedom, separate you from your children, lie to you, destroy your history and your culture, eliminate excellence, and impose cultural Marxism. “Inclusion” as in “DEI” means exclusion of life and liberty.
AAPS Statement on ‘Gender-affirming Care’
The AAPS Board of Directors issued the following statement on “gender-affirming care” for minor children:
1. Physicians and medical professionals should refuse to be mandated or coerced to participate in procedures to which they have ethical or scientific objections or which they believe would harm a patient.
2. Reproduction requires a male gamete (sperm), which can only be produced by a person of XY genotype, and a female gamete (egg), which can only be produced by a person of XX genotype. Primordial germ cells are present at birth.
3. Biological sex is determined at conception by genotype and apart from rare anomalies, which result in ambiguous genitalia, sex is correctly identified at birth—and is indeed obvious.
4. The construct of gender fluidity in the current cultural discourse is controversial.
5. Through medical, surgical, and other interventions, it is possible to change the physical appearance of one’s body. Changing physical appearance does not change biological sex.
6. There has been an explosive increase in persons who identify with the construct of gender different from sex, at an age where identity is easily malleable and brain development is not fully concluded.
7. Conflicting motivations have led to a growing industry dedicated to providing “gender-affirming” procedures that are generally irreversible and have a high probability of causing sterilization. These include puberty “blockers,” sex hormones, and surgery, such as castration, penectomy, and mastectomy. They commit a patient to a lifelong need for medical, surgical, and psychological care.
8. “Gender-affirming care” in minors is medically and ethically contraindicated because of a lack of informed consent. There are inherently unknown and unknowable long-term risks, and the consequences of removing normal, healthy organs are irreversible.
5th Generation Warfare
An extension of asymmetric and insurgent warfare, the goal of 5GW is to disrupt and defeat opponents by creating new cognitive biases. The most effective strategies mix truth with fiction, and act to increase confusion and disorder so that the targets are not sure what or whom to believe. Social media and the 24-hour news cycle are exploited. Governments, corporations, organized or decentralized groups, even individuals, can lead 5GW (tinyurl.com/c573tyn3).
Deleting ‘Woman’
The pro-transgender Irish government is trying to have the word “woman” stripped from the constitution, according to the leader of a populist party. The provision that protects women’s special right to home life is said to support the idea that only women can bear children (https://tinyurl.com/ysbme5p6).
X X X
“Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be forbidden to think, so as not to insult idiots.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Is Exclusion OK?
Trans activist (F2M nonbinary they/them) Massa Gessen told interviewer David Remnick in the Mar 11, 2023, New Yorker (https://tinyurl.com/46crxbu3): “As journalists, we’re not under obligation to quote every single view on an issue. I think we have the right to exclude the view that somebody’s not who they say they are.” Gessen states, “Being trans is not a medical condition, but it marries you for life to the medical system.” Regarding Michael Knowles’s statement to CPAC, Gessen opined that there was no distinction between eradicating transgenderism ideology and eradicating trans people as such.” (Try substituting “whiteness” and “white people.”) Bills to restrict “gender-affirming care” are “are about signalling [sic], and what they’re signalling is the essence of past-oriented politics.”
Excluding the Unvaccinated
A study in 21 countries examined discriminatory attitudes that COVID-vaccinated persons held against the unvaccinated. Exclusionary attitudes toward the unvaccinated were 2.5 times higher than toward Middle Eastern immigrants. The level of antipathy was higher toward the unvaccinated than toward ex-convicts, atheists, or mentally ill persons, and about the same as toward drug addicts. In the U.S. study, respondents were also asked about restricting publicly recognized rights. There was significant support for restricting unvaccinated persons’ freedom of movement, place of residence, freedom of speech, and access to unemployment and welfare benefits (Nature 1/26/23).
Transgender Updates
· Parental Rights. A Florida law requiring parental notification about services for mental and physical health is a “gag rule,” states Rachel Levine. She said some “LGBTQI+” children need to replace their parents with “one supportive adult,” such as a teacher or counselor (https://tinyurl.com/29x683ae).
· “Woke” Language in Preschool. Mandatory training for early childhood educators in N.C. includes drills in pronoun usage. One teacher, who identifies as a gay man, says that he wears a skirt to school and tells the children that “I want to make sure that I feel safe wearing a skirt in the classroom.” He fears that someone might laugh or feel uncomfortable (tinyurl.com/5yv86ccx).
· Tide May Be Turning… against treating minors. A coalition is building, states Scott Newgent, who transitioned F2M at age 50. “They promise you Candyland, but instead you get Vietnam”—a constant fight to survive (https://tinyurl.com/2x5htx85).
AAPS Calendar
Mar 30. Webinar. Do No Harm. Dr. Stanley Goldfarb.
Oct 26-28. 80th Annual Meeting, Fort Worth, TX.
ACTION OF THE MONTH
The FTC has extended the comment period for a proposal to ban non-compete clauses in employment contracts. Take action before April 19 at: https://bit.ly/ftcnoncompete.
Feds Resist Another COVID Remedy
A large, double-blind, randomized controlled trial (RCT) concerning a xylitol-containing nasal spray as a possible COVID preventive or treatment was published in October 2022. There were 62% fewer infections in medical workers using the spray compared with placebo. A comparable product, Xlear, is available in the U.S. The FDA has failed to carry out requested clinical trials, and the FTC has filed a lawsuit against Xlear for allegedly claiming usefulness against COVID (tinyurl.com/55dnj55w).
Transparency Rules Disregarded
For 20 years, the U.S. government has urged researchers to post results of clinical trials. A 2007 law made reporting mandatory as a result of allegations that patients were being harmed because companies withheld evidence that their drugs were ineffective or harmful. A widely cited case involved paroxetine (Paxil™). A final rule was issued in 2018. Science examined more than 4,700 trials whose results should have been posted on ClinicalTrials.gov, and found that sponsors violated the reporting law 55% of the time (Science 1/17/20). Stiff penalties were prescribed, but as of April 2022, only four notices of noncompliance had been issued, and no civil monetary penalties assessed (tinyurl.com/26uycfk3).
The Gender Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle is the mythical area of the Atlantic Ocean within which ships and aircraft have been known to vanish without a trace. “With transgenderism, all reason and logic disappears within what we might call the Gender Triangle,” writes Daniel Moody. “The Gender Triangle is that area enclosed by the relationships between three distinct models of gender—the social, medical and legal.” He concludes that transgenderism is a legal fiction, a project of the state to airbrush the biological reality of sex from the law. “Our body is vanishing without a trace from the sea of law.” Whether an idea is valid or not, it becomes the concern of society when it has the law behind it (tinyurl.com/mz8898ek).
Tip of the Month: Avoid unnecessary or exaggerated admissions of wrongdoing. It can be a mistake to think that admitting fault will cause a problem to go away. The courts, medical boards, and sham peer review systems prefer to base discipline on what a target himself has admitted. While admitting fault can be helpful in interpersonal relations, it can boomerang if included in an email or other written form. Many criminal defendants end up regretting what they were forced to admit as part of a plea bargain. Settlement agreements with medical boards and anyone else should be carefully written to ensure that there are no admissions of fault, to the extent these are possible to avoid.
Trusted News Initiative Sued under Antitrust Law
TrialSite Inc. and others have filed suit against TNI, which includes legacy media and Big Tech companies that control 90% of social media and search-engine markets, for their collusive censorship of online health and political news publishers who question TNI’s reporting on COVID and U.S. political issues (https://tinyurl.com/hmbzxjhf).
Juries Should Not Make Law
In an amicus brief filed by the AAPS Educational Foundation in United States vs. Tou Thao, attorney Andrew Schlafly writes: “Just as courts do not properly legislate from the bench, neither do juries.” Officer Thao, assigned to do crowd control during the arrest of George Floyd, was criminally convicted and is imprisoned because of failure to intervene when his superior officer was restraining the suspect, who died.
There was no fair notice of federal criminality concerning Officer Thao’s conduct. If the draconian penalty of imprisonment is to be applied to a bystander police officer when there is a death of an allegedly drug-intoxicated suspect being taken into custody by another officer, Schlafly writes that “this new public policy should be considered and resolved based on legislative hearings and considerable debate, not by a mere jury after viewing a disturbing video as played at an emotional trial.”
The amicus states that the theory of “positional asphyxia,” asserted to have caused Floyd’s death, is “doubtful medical science,” and “not susceptible to a finding beyond reasonable doubt by a rational jury.” Also, it is not for a jury to decide whether a bystander should have suspected that a suspect might be fentanyl intoxicated and in immediate danger of death. A rational jury cannot find sufficient mens rea to convict a mere bystander of an unlawful killing when there is no way under the Daubert standard even to hear testimony about the predictability of that death.
“The verdict must accordingly be reversed in adherence to the Rule of Law that does not imprison people based on unscientific speculation by a jury” (https://tinyurl.com/45k468fd).
COVID ‘Misinformation’ Cases
· Attorney Rick Jaffee provides a Mar 9 update on COVID cases in western states (https://tinyurl.com/ysf4hw3d). He reads the legislative history of AB 2098 as an acknowledgment that the board can’t stop doctors from speaking out in public about any matter of public interest. So, that part of the Federation of State Medical Boards invitation to medical boards to pursue doctors for “soapbox speech” appears to be blocked in California, but not other states. The situation is complicated if treatment decisions are involved. Høeg v. Newsom, Hoang v. Bonta, McDonald v. Lawson, and Couris v. Lawson will be affected by the action of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, expected later this year.
· Missouri v. Biden, also called the “Show Me versus Shut Up” case, could be, according to some, the “most important civil liberties case ever tried in a U.S. court.” It has numerous plaintiffs and an expanding list of government agency and individual government defendants, a “devil’s scorecard of weaponized agencies and bad actors.” Plaintiffs claim that the government censored Americans both directly and indirectly “through bullying, bribing, hectoring, nagging, and setting up one-way ‘partnerships’ with big tech companies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.” The case has been to the U.S. Supreme Court more than once on discovery issues. Plaintiffs’ investigators have unearthed evidence of government-sponsored censorship starting well before the pandemic. One official described the unprecedented “integrated, holistic partnership with social media” as the “model of the future.” The case, filed May 5, 2022, has faced every government effort to obstruct it (https://tinyurl.com/3rjhbjs5).
Correspondence
Tracking Your Brain Waves. The last bastion of privacy is in one’s brain. However, technology has been developed which will allow employers (and government) to track brain wave signals, and algorithms exist to analyze what’s going on in your brain. China, for instance, requires train drivers to wear special caps with
electrodes inside to determine whether they are focused on driving the train or are fatigued. Some factories in China monitor the brain waves of employees to determine who might be disruptive on the factory floor. Just imagine what hospitals could do with that technology. At a peer review hearing, the “prosecutor” projects the accused physician’s EEG on the screen along with the analysis algorithm and says “here is the proof” that this physician harbors disruptive thoughts. According to an article in WSJ (tinyurl.com/mrx3p6zp), such devices help determine whether you are conservative or liberal. The abuse potential is very high, and there are no laws governing the use of such data.
The term “thought police” has gained a whole new meaning.
Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Lake View, NY
Losing the Plot. Shortly before he became Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger observed that in Europe “there is a strange lack of desire for a future….”
America has reached that moment in Blazing Saddles when Mel Brooks throws away the script, and the brawling cowboys crash through the wall into the next soundstage, where all parts are interchangeable: Men become women, women become men, and then pregnant men, and then threaten the hospital for the humiliation of having to give birth in a “maternity ward”…. In today’s America, everything’s ablaze….
COVID fits naturally into such a world. What matters is to strike the correct attitude and ignore your lyin’ eyes. As ex-Pope Benedict observed, “Children, who are the future, are seen as a threat for the present.” Elderly adults sacrifice their infants to ward off the evil spirits of Omicron. The medical establishment is largely silent on this and many things, and their administrative bosses have publicly gone along with the notion that a child is “assigned” a “gender” at birth. We have extended nihilism to our private parts, to human biology….
Woke America is for losers: it’s what fills the void when you have trashed your history….
So, at the dawn of another Year Zero, I renew my old credo: Unless you’re prepared to surrender everything, surrender nothing —and don’t waste your time with alleged rock-ribbed politicians who have surrendered far too much already.
Mark Steyn, excerpted from https://tinyurl.com/mjudxjjj
Future-oriented Politics. The World Economic Forum’s plan to save the world is to cram everyone into “smart” “15-minute cities,” where a permit is needed to cross into the next zone. The only way out of a meager existence will be the Metaverse, a virtual world that will fulfill every need and desire. Even the ideas behind having a physical partner and a family are becoming obsolete! Our youth are now being trained to accept cybersex as the new normal. Reality doesn’t have to enter into this new equation of life and sex. Sex will increasingly replace love making. The nobility of being part of a family, a culture, and something more important than one’s own narcissistic self is being swept away in the remaking of modern society’s dystopian future.
We need instead to create intentional communities, with commitment to traditional values and long-term human relations.
Robert W. Malone, M.D., https://tinyurl.com/mr3tnrbt
Only PIC Members Protected. The court has not yet ruled on our First Amendment arguments in the Høeg v. Newsom challenge to California’s AB 2098. The preliminary injunction against enforcement applies only to plaintiffs and PIC members (see https://physiciansforinformedconsent.org/doctor-join).
Shira Miller, M.D., Oceanside, CA
‘Experts’ Deny Science. NEJM’s article entitled “Protecting Transgender Health and Challenging Science Denialism in Policy” uses denialism to denigrate any opinion contrary to that of the latest set of experts to claim sovereignty over a controversial subject. Denialism is another weapon in the rhetorical armory of the Left to stifle debate and intimidate those opposing a narrative that the socialist/sex deviancy army pushes. The preferred method of challenging laws restricting transgender therapy is litigation, not repeal. Doctors with an inherent conflict of interest (those who are paid to provide “gender-affirming care”) may be accepted as the sole authoritative voice in court (https://tinyurl.com/2p9tsd4n).
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Brownwood, TX
The Extreme Danger of Ideology. Seeing drawings from the Gulag reminded me of Solzhenitsyn’s reflections in Chapter 4 of The Gulag Archipelago: “Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology…—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and…helps to make [the evildoer’s] acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes.”
John Leake, https://tinyurl.com/msbznb4n
