The AMA wants not only censorship but DOJ investigation of those who would publicize what’s going on with the treatment of children who believe themselves to be transgender
It seems that the AMA wants Garland to prosecute speech that they believe is thoughtcrime of a dangerous sort:
BREAKING: The American Medical Association is asking Big Tech and the Department of Justice to censor, deplatform, investigate, and prosecute journalists who question the orthodoxy of radical gender surgeries for minors, arguing that public criticism is "disinformation." pic.twitter.com/NHv32Zzdu5
— Christopher F. Rufo ?? (@realchrisrufo) October 3, 2022
Social media has been doing this already, but the AMA wants the DOJ involved.
This is just another step in the criminalization of dissenting speech, and it’s been going on for a long time.
Ace has a post about this latest AMA move, and points out that only 17% of doctors belong to it. The organization has been on the activist left for a long time, and so this request is unsurprising.
Rufo spells it out, as quoted by Ace:
The morality of this situation is blindingly clear:
* Threatening hospitals is wrong.
* Censoring journalists is wrong.
* Criminalizing political opposition is wrong.The four stages of radical gender surgeries for minors:
1. It’s not happening.
2. It’s good that it’s happening.
3. It’s empowering when we say it’s happening, but disinformation when you say it’s happening.
4. The F.B.I. should put you in prison for quoting us saying it’s happening.
The argument made by the AMA, as well as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association who joined them in the letter, is the same one made by so many people who ask for censorship and even the prosecution of speech (here’s a link to the AMA’s letter in more easily readable form). If you read it, you can see how it starts with something reasonable – the prosecution of actual attacks on health providers, and the investigation of actual threats to attack – and segues seamlessly into complaints that they are afraid and have had to increase security and that demonstrations and “harassment” (which are protected activities) have been the cause, and that the DOJ must get involved [emphasis added]:
The attacks are rooted in an intentional campaign of disinformation, where a few high-profile users on social media share false and misleading information targeting individual physicians and hospitals, resulting in a rapid escalation of threats, harassment, and disruption of care across multiple jurisdictions. Our organizations have called on technology companies to do more to prevent this practice on digital platforms, and we now urge your office to take swift action to investigate and prosecute allorganizations, individuals, and entities responsible.
“Responsible” for what? What “attacks”? The words “attack” or “attacks” are used five times in what is actually not that long a letter, but not a single actual attack of the non-verbal sort is cited. Have there been any? I really don’t know, but I will assume that if anyone has been physically attacked the letter would have cited such an incident. What is mentioned instead are threats, verbal attacks and demonstrations, as well as doxxing. These have been the favored tools of the left, and are approaches that they heartily defend when it involves the left against the right. Nor does the letter even cite an example of the “disinformation” they say is rampant, but if it resembles what the Twitter user “Libs of Tik Tok” was deplatformed for (you can follow some of that story at this link), it probably is mostly not disinformation at all.
Here’s the paragraph in the AMA letter that immediately precedes that paragraph I quoted that starts “The attacks are rooted in an intentional campaign of disinformation…”. This seems to be what the word “attacks” refers to:
From Boston to Akron to Nashville to Seattle, children’s hospitals, academic health systems, and physicians are being targeted and threatened for providing evidence-based health care. These attacks have not only made it difficult and dangerous for institutions and practices to provide this care, they have also disrupted many other services to families seeking care. In one hospital, a new mother was prevented from being with her preterm infant because the hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was on lockdown due to a bomb threat. Children’s hospitals across the nation have substantially increased security in addition to working with local and federal law enforcement, both on their main hospital campuses as well as across their ambulatory delivery sites, in order to ensure the safety of patients, families, and medical staff who work there. In addition, some providers have needed 24/7 security. Children’s hospitals and their medical staffs continue to face increased threats via social media – including to their personal accounts. Coupled with harassing emails, phone calls, and protestors at health care sites, there is elevated and justifiable fear among families, patients, and staff.
Criminal threats already come under laws governing death threats, but protests and angry emails should be fine. If protestors block the entrance of a hospital, some localities have laws against it (see this as well as this). Nor do I see any reference in the AMA letter to protestors actually blocking a hospital entrance, just to a case in which a bomb threat caused a temporary lockdown at one hospital.
There is an intentional blurring of the lines between physical attacks, protests that block entrances, death threats – all mostly illegal already – and milder threats, doxxing, nasty emails and phone calls, and the right to use speech to publicize the policies of hospitals regarding their treatment of transgender minors. The letter is a call to FBI harassment of anyone who does any of those latter things, including journalists such as Rufo. This is similar to the earlier letter from the NSBA (see these posts) asking the DOJ to prosecute protesting parents as dangerous threats. It’s just another step down a tyrannical path that the left has been on since it seized power.
[NOTE: At the height of the Floyd protests of 2020, Republicans introduced this bill to create a new federal crime:
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) joined Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) today in introducing the “Stop Blocking Hospitals Act,” a bill making it a federal crime to obstruct any ambulance, fire department vehicle, law enforcement vehicle, or other emergency vehicles or personnel from responding to an emergency. Penalties for such obstruction would include imprisonment of one to five years, a fine, or both.
I haven’t seen anything that indicates it passed.]
Organizations are made up of people. Under whose authority at the three organizations in question was this letter sent?
Since I’m a Creigton alum, I know lots of doctors. Doctors are smart about science and medicine, but in other areas they can be not so smart. It is completely shocking to me that any doctors are performing surgery and giving high powered hormones to kids. At Vandy, they admitted they were doing it for the money; just like Obama claimed.
Stay tuned. More on this to come.
I do not support physical attacks upon the doctors that mutilate confused children. I do support loss of their license to practice medicine and lifetime imprisonment. Life imprisonment is appropriate because it is the proportionate consequence for what they have repeatedly done to their victims. They have condemned their mutilated victims to a life of self-hate and horror.
Those who advocate surgery for minors are literally inciting violence against the mentally afflicted.
Art Deco:
I assume that they took a vote, but that’s just an assumption. I haven’t actually seen anything that tackles your question.
The chairman of the board of the Children’s Hospital Association is one Paul King. The organization appears to have two chief executives with different titles, one Mark Wietecha and one Amy Wimpey Knight.
The Chairman of the board of the American Academy of Pediatrics is Moira Szilagyi. If you recognize the name, it’s because her husband was chairman of a CDC committee which recommended unanimously that distribution of COVID vaccines give priority to ‘diversity’. The ‘chief executive officer is one Mark del Monte.
The chairman of the board of the American Medical Association is one Jack Resnick. The president is one James Madara.
As far as I can tell, Resnick and Szilagyi are the only ones among them who have a history of treating patients (in dermatology and pediatrics respectively). Madara is a pathologist who spent his career on faculties. del Monte is a lawyer. The rest are career functionaries.
I was a member of the AMA for years. Then I became a delegate and saw what they are about. There are two annual meetings. One in December is scientific and pretty good, or it was 30 years ago. Then there is a June meeting that is devoted to campaigning for office in the organization. An amazing amount of effort and money is devoted to this. Then I attended a Board meeting and found out why. Remember this was 30 years ago. The Board salaries are/were higher than I had imagined. They began around 700 thousand a year and it was down to the tenth senior member before it was down to $300,000.
I quit then but I still get monthly billing notices. I am sure they are intended to go in an “Accounts Payable” folder to be paid by an office manager by accident.
I can provide a long list of reasons why membership is so low on request,
The point is they are sanctioning evil and dangerous practices something out of the middle age savageries
The Board salaries are/were higher than I had imagined. They began around 700 thousand a year and it was down to the tenth senior member before it was down to $300,000.
That’s obscene. Even the Teamster’s Union under mob rule was not egregious to this degree. That shouldn’t be legal.
NB, I seem to recall that 40 years ago, about half the physicians in the country were said to be AMA members. One of the running jokes of the old Dr. Smock comic strip was that the AMA would not have him as a member. That they’re down to 17% of all physicians is amusing.
Cornhead says, “At Vandy, they admitted they were doing it for the money; just like Obama claimed.”
There’s a lot of money for the docs involved in treating trans kids; I’ve seen $6000 cited as the fee for so-called “top” surgery on girls. I don’t know how many such procedures a surgeon could perform in one day– maybe Mike K has an estimate.
Then there’s the profits for Big Pharma in puberty blockers and hormone therapy. The cost of Lupron (leuprolide acetate, the drug that started out as a treatment for prostate and breast cancer and is now used as a puberty blocker) “will greatly depend on the type of kit you purchase (dosage strength), where you purchase it from and your health insurance policy. From what we researched when contacting local pharmacies [in 2018; it’s probably more now], a two-week Lupron kit could retail anywhere from $450 to $750 without any health insurance coverage.”
https://www.howmuchisit.org/how-much-does-lupron-cost/
In addition to its cost, Lupron has nasty side effects:
https://www.medicinenet.com/side_effects_of_leuprolide/side-effects.htm
Scroll down for the medical professional’s detailed list of the drug’s side effects. Mike K can doubtless provide his own or his colleagues’ experience with patients taking Lupron.
With regard to topical testosterone gels and creams, used by girls transitioning to boys, “The lowest GoodRx price for the most common version of Androderm is around $606.10, 16% off the average retail price of $728.75 The price of testosterone gels is around $650 and one product is sufficient for 15-30 days depending on your recommended dose.”
https://www.healthyhormonesclub.com/how-much-does-testosterone-gel-cost/
Well, if Brandon can forgive student loans, he can forgive the medical and surgical costs of transitioning. As for the students’ ignorance of the physical and mental costs of transition, they complain about the difficulty of college-level organic chemistry as a subject. Can’t expect the kids to figure out the consequences of “evidence-based health care.”
It’s most likely that the executive leaders of these organizations issued these letters, as did the leaders of the NSBA. I hope more doctors bail out of the organizations. The NSBA destroyed itself with the letter to the AG. We can hope this will be the end of these leftist no-longer-medical associations.
As the bloggers and Twitter journalists point out, they re-publish things openly available on hospital websites, and at no time have they ever called for violence.
Art Deco said, “Organizations are made up of people. Under whose authority at the three organizations in question was this letter sent?”
I’m wondering whether the organizations in question have financial/political connections to the Governor of Illinois and his clan. Per Jennifer Bilek at Tablet magazine: One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions.
It’s a long article; can be read here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers
Perhaps Art Deco can do some sleuthing around the relationships between the various Pritzkers and the AMA, AAP, and Children’s Hospital Association. There’s geographical proximity: the AMA is headquartered in Chicago; the AAP in Itasca, Illinois; and the Children’s Hospital Association in Lenexa, Kansas, just two states west of Illinois.
Visual warning about the link to the article: Governor Pritzker’s cousin Jennifer started out as James Pritzker, “a retired lieutenant colonel in the Illinois Army National Guard and the father of three children” before deciding to transition in 2013. Photo of xer at the link; let’s just say that “Rachel” Levine is an icon of feminine loveliness next to “Jennifer” Pritzker.
“I do not support physical attacks upon the doctors that mutilate confused children.”
I’m thinking … I’m thinking!
Well, let’s start with the easy case: if I were on a jury I would not vote to convict.
Is that support for attacks?
Seems the Priztker family through board positions / contributions steers hospitals on a certain direction.
Mark Wauke lived near Chicago, and has done good info:
https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/p/update-coordination-between-childrens
The AMA is yet another organization that lives on the memory of it being respected.
Like Iowa Hawk says.
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
The eagerness of lefties to use violence (i.e. government force) against anyone who disagrees is disturbing. These people are morally defective.
Imagine the screaming if the situation were reversed and government force was being marshalled to stifle leftwing dissent. Even small children instinctively understand that the rules need to apply evenly.
So why do they so readily insist that they are entitled to special treatment and also entitled to punish others for thoughtcrime? Why do they think they are entitled to play God with other people’s lives? To be dictators in a “democracy”?
I say that the answer is that they are evil. But if one isn’t willing to endorse that conclusion, what is the explanation? These attitudes are ugly, nasty and vicious. The beliefs and the actions are malevolent. They can’t possibly believe that a better society will result. So how to account for the sickness?
“Imagine the screaming if the situation were reversed and government force was being marshalled to stifle leftwing dissent.” Who else remembers the word “chill”?
Back when there were more conservatives in positions of power, about weekly I would see a liberal talking head complain about some action that had a “chilling impact on dissent”. The action was typically legal and even sensible but there was this outside-the-box danger we all needed to ponder. And the word “chill” always figured into it.
Then came Hillary: “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Is that still operative?
Barbara Bush Children Hospital is pushing this too…
https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/barbara-bush-childrens-hospital-is-infected/
I saw a female to male trans person at an Omaha restaurant last night. The voice and the face were still female; maybe she was wearing a device to bind her breasts. A very pathetic beard was on her face. Funky haircut.
All very sad.
Cornhead:
You notice the person who is obvious. You don’t notice the person who is not obvious. I know some FtoM people who are not at all obvious. In fact, as a general rule with many exceptions, FtoM transitions are more successful than MtoF in that regard.
PA+Cat–preceding the Pritzkers were the Strykers. A short but very informative article. Master plan to how we got where we are so quickly. Lots of money and influence involved.
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/01/the-billionaires-behind-the-lgbt-movement
All being funded by your “BS Back Better” tax dollars.
(Just another “Biden” “joke”….)
– – – – – – – –
And in other (entertaining) news, “Biden”, not content with his allies in Teheran, Beijing and Moskva (and one may well assume, Havana)—not to mention Ottawa—has decided to cozy up to Caracas.
Well, why not? After all…
“Biden To Ease Sanctions On Socialist Venezuela, Releases Maduro’s Convicted Narco Trafficker Nephews”—
https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-to-ease-sanctions-on-socialist-venezuela-releases-maduros-convicted-narco-trafficker-nephews
Diversity? Perversity? Monstrosity? Necessity?
Takes yer pick….
Not everyone is jumping on the AMA’s burning band-wagon.
https://notthebee.com/article/oklahoma-governor-stitt-just-signed-a-law-preventing-oklahomas-children-hospital-from-conducting-any-sex-change-interventions-