Skip ahead and it becomes clear that colleges did not heed the disturbing news years earlier about college students being functionally illiterate at graduation. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2017 about the results of the Collegiate Learning Assessment test taken at two hundred colleges: “At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table, The Wall Street Journal found after reviewing the latest results from dozens of public colleges and universities that gave the exam between 2013 and 2016.”
Also in 2013, half of college graduates agreed with the assessment that they’re unprepared for the workplace, with a Time magazine assessment noting the reaction among employers about new crops of the college educated: “The problem with the unemployability of these young adults goes way beyond a lack of STEM skills. As it turns out, they can’t even show up on time in a button-down shirt and organize a team project.”24
Not surprisingly, a 2023 survey found employers particularly blunt about what they find problematic with new college graduates. “88% say college graduates from the last three years are less prepared for the workforce than in years prior. Seventy percent say recent college grads lack preparedness due to their work ethic, 70% think they lack communication skills, 71% say they are ‘entitled,’ and 43% think they lack technological skills.”25
Corrupting Our Medical Establishment
This development is concerning in all fields, but particularly so in health care. After all, having skilled doctors, nurses, and other health professionals can make a critical difference in patient care and in saving lives when dealing with health crises.
Responding to wokeism and calls for more diversity in the medical profession, more than two dozen US medical schools no longer require students to take the difficult Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), in use since 1947, to be admitted.26 The test, which takes 7.5 hours to administer, was created to measure the knowledge students need in order to master the curriculum in medical school and become skilled doctors.
However, as U.S. News & World Report reported in June 2022: “Some say the MCAT impedes low-income pre-meds of all ethnic backgrounds, especially those whose parents did not attend college or who were raised in rural areas, and that the test particularly deters pre-meds from underrepresented racial groups, including black and Hispanic students. The average MCAT score within these demographic categories is lower than the norm—a phenomenon MCAT skeptics attribute to systemic inequalities that hinder the educational opportunities of certain populations.”27 In other words, it’s all the fault of systemic racism.
Keep in mind, if someone is taking the MCAT, it means they’ve also just gone through four years of pre-med in college with a focus on preparing for that test. If someone is completely unprepared, wouldn’t that be obvious to the student’s professors, family, friends, and even themselves? And then, wouldn’t the goal be to recognize the problem and adjust to get back on track? That would be and is what those interested in medical school would normally do . . . unless they’ve been conditioned to believe that their woke indoctrination is more important, and that test scores don’t matter.
Journalist Heather Mac Donald explores this issue with her “Corruption of Medicine” essay in City Journal, where she relays this story about, among other things, the impact on student priorities of Yale’s pass-fail grading system combined with anti-racist advocacy, now a core element of medical training:
A fourth-year Yale medical student describes how the specter of Step One [of the United States Medical Licensing Examination focused on basic medical knowledge and leading to residencies] affected his priorities. In his first two years of medical school, the student had “immersed” himself, as he describes it, in a student-led committee focused on diversity, inclusion, and social justice. The student ran a podcast about health disparities. All that political work was made possible by Yale’s pass-fail grading system, which meant that he didn’t feel compelled to put studying ahead of diversity concerns. Then, as he tells it, Step One “reared its ugly head.” Getting an actual grade on an exam might prove to “whoever might have thought it before that I didn’t deserve a seat at Yale as a Black medical student,” the student worried.28
This corruption of priorities is not the fault of the students, but a result of the environment that the left has deliberately created to further its degrading cultural agenda. Students are being trained to care more about dogma than science. More about politics than medicine and patients. The students are being defrauded, and our society is being strangled and denied high-quality medical care.
Sick with Woke
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), which advises and represents medical schools and also advises the national accreditation agency for medical schools, issued a report in 2022 telling the schools that medical students should be taught “diversity, equity and inclusion competencies.” That means, the AAMC states, that future doctors must learn a slew of woke concepts, such as “intersectionality,” which it defines as “overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that communities face based on race, gender, ethnicity, ability, etc.”29
Medical students must also be able to discuss “the impact of various systems of oppression on health and health care (e.g., colonization, white supremacy, acculturation, assimilation).” The AAMC said these and other politically correct lessons should be something practicing physicians learn as well because doing this is as important as learning about “the latest scientific breakthrough.”30
What on Earth does any of this have to do with health care? It’s important to understand diseases that disproportionately affect people of African or Asian descent, as an example, or customs of some religions that may affect treatments, but that is learning about specific potential patient populations and transcends politics. We want and deserve, above all else, to know that our doctor was focused on learning about medical care in medical school, so he or she has the excellent education, training, skills, experience, and bedside manner needed to do a good job taking care of us. This is basic common sense.
But the corruption of our important institutions marches on as though every day is May Day. The American Medical Association,31 founded in 1847, recently established the AMA Center for Health Equity, from which in 2021 it conjured up an “equity plan,” declaring in a press release their woke bona fides with “AMA releases plan dedicated to embedding racial justice and advancing health equity.”32
With pronouncements worthy of the most rigorous Marxist struggle sessions, the association declares: “The American Medical Association (AMA) today released an ambitious strategic plan to dismantle structural racism starting from within the organization, acknowledging that equity work requires recognition of past harms and critical examination of institutional roles upholding these structures. The framework of the plan—which is central to the work of the AMA Center for Health Equity and the responsibility of AMA leadership, membership, and external stakeholders—is driven by the immense need for equity-centered solutions to confront harms produced by systemic racism and other forms of oppression.”33
And exactly how will this be implemented? Fox News reports: “Much of the 86-page document includes buzzwords typically found in other organization’s [sic] ‘equity’ plans but is unique in explicitly acknowledging its use of CRT. . . . The AMA commits to ‘[e]xpand medical school and physician education to include equity, anti-racism, structural competency, public health and social sciences, critical race theory and historical basis of disease.’ The document follows other programs, including a ‘land acknowledgment’ for indigenous people. It criticizes the concept of treating everyone equally and, like previously reported materials, it disparages the idea of meritocracy.”34
This document, still unbelievably from the American Medical Association of all places, reads as though it was written by Marxist apparatchiks determined to make sure the evil bourgeoisie understand they are the problem and will be treated as such. This demonizing and blaming is part and parcel of the politics of fear. It is old, typical, and destroys everything it infects.
Do No Harm
Writing in an op-ed published by the New York Post in September 2022, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, who is chairman of the nonprofit group Do No Harm, and registered nurse Laura L. Morgan, a program manager at the organization,35 warned: “Elite medical schools are deliberately recruiting woke activists, jeopardizing their mission of training physicians.”36 Goldfarb is a kidney specialist, retired professor, and associate dean at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Do No Harm is operated by health professionals and policymakers with the mission to “Protect healthcare from a radical, divisive and discriminatory ideology.”37
In their op-ed, the pair wrote that Do No Harm reviewed the application process for the top fifty medical schools in the US and found that nearly three-quarters “ask applicants about their views on diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism, and other politicized concepts. The clear goal is to find the students who will best advance divisive ideology, not provide the best care to patients. . . . Recruiting woke activists instead of the most qualified candidates will both undermine trust in health care and lead to worse health outcomes for patients. That’s the last thing medical schools should do.”38
When Goldfarb tweeted in 2022 that the underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics in medicine might be due to individual qualifications of students rather than racism, the chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Medicine, Dr. Michael Parmacek, emailed faculty and students to denounce Goldfarb’s “racist statements,” and offered mental health counseling to anyone traumatized by reading the tweet.39
Calls followed to fire Goldfarb from his position as an editor at UpToDate, a medical reference publication used by millions of doctors.40 Bowing to the woke mob, the publication fired Goldfarb. “I’m disappointed in UpToDate,” he told Fox News. “Rather than stay focused on great medicine, they bowed down to cancel culture bullies. The focus on identity politics in medicine promoted by political activists is harming care, and will drive away talented medical professionals.”41
Alarmingly, wokeism is not just diverting the attention of medical students and doctors from medical education to social justice propaganda. It is diverting funding away from potentially lifesaving medical research. As Heather Mac Donald wrote in City Journal in the summer of 2022: “The NIH [National Institutes of Health] and the National Science Foundation are diverting billions in taxpayer dollars from trying to cure Alzheimer’s disease and lymphoma to fighting white privilege and cisheteronormativity. Private research support is following the same trajectory.”42
For example, Mac Donald said that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute—one of the largest charitable funders of basic science in the world—has made promoting diversity in the ranks of medical researchers its top priority. The institute announced in May 2022 that it was awarding $1.5 billion to scientists to promote a “happy and diverse lab where minoritized scientists will thrive and persist.”43 Hmm . . . I have a sneaking suspicion that patients dying of incurable diseases—including black and Hispanic patients—just might appreciate it more if the funds were used to find ways to keep them alive.
CRT and other woke indoctrination being applied in medical schools and advocated for by leftists is performing exactly as Marxists had hoped. Race-based criteria are also being used to determine who gets medical care. For example, guidance issued by the Biden administration in late 2021 limited the use of then-scarce oral antiviral drugs and monoclonal antibodies for the treatment of COVID-19 to patients at “high risk” of severe illness or death from the disease. This sensibly included people who are elderly, obese, diabetic, pregnant, or have chronic kidney disease or cardiovascular disease. But the guidance also said “race or ethnicity”—meaning being black or Hispanic—should also be considered a risk factor, even if the black or Hispanic person was young and healthy.44
Several states—including New York, Utah, and Minnesota—quickly announced they would favor minorities in deciding who should get the drugs. “Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor, as long-standing systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19,” a memo from the New York State Health Department said.45
In a similar vein, Dr. Michelle Morse (the chief medical officer in the New York City Health and Mental Hygiene department) and Dr. Bram Wispelwey (an instructor at the Harvard Medical School) authored an opinion piece published by the Boston Review in March 2021 advocating preferential treatment of black and Hispanic patients in health care.46 “After more than five decades of colorblind law . . . the stubborn persistence of racial inequities—both in health care and across society at large—gives the lie to the effectiveness of colorblind policies,” the two wrote. They called for incorporating anti-racism and Critical Race Theory into health care.
Christopher Rufo, a researcher with the nonprofit Discovery Institute and a critic of Critical Race Theory, blasted the entire premise: “The ‘equity’ ideology has permeated all of our elite institutions,” Rufo said. “Now medical professionals are setting the conceptual framework to deny medical treatment to Whites in order to achieve ‘non-disparate’ outcomes. This is a moral crime, a violation of the 14th Amendment, and a direct contravention of their oath to ‘do no harm.’”47
Information Is Power
The left uses issues surrounding civil rights and personal freedom specifically to promulgate division and fear. They are obsessed with controlling speech and information because they know information is, in fact, power. Controlling education is the necessary step if they have any chance at successfully “fundamentally transforming” America, which at this point appears to be transformation into a dumpster fire. It’s undeniably time for a course correction, and we need to move quickly or it will be too late.
Chapter 6 The Bureaucratic Tyranny of Fear
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
—BERTRAND RUSSELL1
Two prescient dystopian novels—Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (published in 1932) and George Orwell’s 1945 masterpiece Animal Farm—warn us of the grave dangers humanity faces from the utopian totalitarianism that robs individuals of their freedom and destroys everything it claims to save. Both books indict tyranny brought on by ruling elites, and show how identity politics have been used to crush the human spirit.
This is exactly what callous authoritarians—socialists, communists, fascists, and the deceptively named “progressives”—have used against modern civilization for over one hundred years. Leftists have seized control of governments through lies and perpetuate their cancer through the bureaucratic system. It is what the left has always done, and what we must fight now to prevent the cancer from metastasizing.
Widely considered prophetic, Huxley’s Brave New World portrays a nightmarish society under authoritarian rule that conditions individuals into conformity and a passive enslavement through the use of technology and drugs. Sound familiar? In large part, Brave New World is a blistering critique of technology and the degree to which tyrants will crush humanity when they have the chance. Huxley anticipated the spread of modern technology with uncanny accuracy, and watched with increasing alarm as it developed throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
Set in the year 2540, Huxley describes the tyranny of the governing “World State,” where human reproduction is controlled in laboratories and people are genetically engineered to meet the prearranged goals of the government. Individuality is conditioned out of people, and meaningful relationships do not exist because “every one belongs to every one else.” Sounds a bit like “it takes a village,” yes? People are kept under control through a drug called “soma” that creates artificial feelings of happiness and suppresses any desire to resist or rebel.
When reading Brave New World as a teenager, I never dreamed the world Huxley conjured up in his imagination could be remotely possible. But now as I write this, I am stunned at our current situation culturally and politically, realizing we are in the horrible grip of what Huxley warned us was possible.
