Mac Donald: The Corruption of Medicine

 

Heather Mac Donald is a favorite of mine.  In her most recent column at City Journal, she comments on “The Corruption of Medicine”:

The post–George Floyd racial reckoning has hit the field of medicine like an earthquake. Medical education, medical research, and standards of competence have been upended by two related hypotheses: that systemic racism is responsible both for racial disparities in the demographics of the medical profession and for racial disparities in health outcomes. Questioning those hypotheses is professionally suicidal. Vast sums of public and private research funding are being redirected from basic science to political projects aimed at dismantling white supremacy. The result will be declining quality of medical care and a curtailment of scientific progress.

Virtually every major medical organization—from the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) to the American Association of Pediatrics—has embraced the idea that medicine is an inequity-producing enterprise. The AMA’s 2021 Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity is virtually indistinguishable from a black studies department’s mission statement. The plan’s anonymous authors seem aware of how radically its rhetoric differs from medicine’s traditional concerns. The preamble notes that “just as the general parlance of a business document varies from that of a physics document, so too is the case for an equity document.” (Such shaky command of usage and grammar characterizes the entire 86-page tome, making the preamble’s boast that “the field of equity has developed a parlance which conveys both [sic] authenticity, precision, and meaning” particularly ironic.)

. . .

And so medical schools and medical societies are discarding traditional standards of merit in order to alter the demographic characteristics of their profession.  . . .

Read Ms. Mac Donald’s full article here.  Her sad conclusion: “The guardians of science have turned on science itself.”

Exit question: What criteria would you use to decide on which doctor to choose for your open-heart surgery?

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Now it's classical music: Denounce Putin or Be Blacklisted

 

And now compelled speech is canceling classical music.  Heather Mac Donald is a favorite of mine, and even if classical music is not your thing, you’ll probably know that canceling a performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture is a stupid way to virtue-signal any solidarity you may have with the Ukraine or opposition to Putin.  Ms. Mac Donald published yesterday at City Journal, and here’s her opener:

Compelled speech is becoming routine in academia. On campuses, faculty candidates for hiring and tenure increasingly must attest to their dedication to diversity to be considered for a job or a promotion. At least one university requires professors to post a “land acknowledgement”—a statement declaring that the space being used was originally the habitation of indigenous people—on their syllabus page.

Now the classical music establishment is adopting that same norm. Russian musicians are being asked to condemn President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to retain jobs and performing engagements in the West. Staying above the fray is not an option, and denouncing the war will not ward off cancellation. Russian musicians must criticize Putin by name or be blacklisted.

Classical music’s recent self-abasement for its “whiteness” laid the groundwork for this presumptive group guilt. Since the George Floyd race riots in May and June 2020, directors of orchestras, opera companies, and conservatories have lambasted their own field for its historical demographics, said to be inextricably linked to racism. Music critics have sneered at Beethoven and other composers for having allegedly leveraged their whiteness to achieve undeserved acclaim. Mea culpas and promises of fealty to Black Lives Matter have become de rigeuer in mission statements and fundraising pitches. Now these coerced confessions are demanded of a subset of musicians whose Russianness makes them as suspect as whiteness does the entire Caucasian population. Even Russian music itself faces a political litmus test.

Ms. Mac Donald goes on to cite chapter-and-verse on the numerous cancellations worldwide of Russian-born musicians, including the cancellation of superstar Anna Netrebko’s upcoming appearances at The Metropolitan Opera -- and even dead composers such as Tchaikovsky.  Madness.  Full article is here.  

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President Biden’s Words of Division

 

Heather Mac Donald watched President Biden’s inaugural speech so you didn’t have to.  Her commentary at City Journal begins:

It’s an odd way to seek national unity: call a significant portion of the American public white supremacists, racists, and nativists. Welcome to the Biden presidency.

Joe Biden’s inaugural speech as 46th president is predictably being hailed for its “unifying” message. And just as predictably, his invocations of the divisive bromides of the identitarian Left are being swept under the rug.

According to Biden, we are a “great nation” and a “good people.” But we also oppress minorities with an ever-rising fervor. “Growing inequity” is among the greatest challenges facing the country, according to Biden, along with the “sting of systemic racism” and encroaching “white supremacy.” Only now are we confronting “a cry for racial justice, some four hundred years in the making.”

One might have thought that more than 50 years of civil rights legislation; the banishing of Jim Crow segregation; the ubiquity of racial preferences throughout corporate America, higher education, and government; trillions of dollars of tax dollars attempting to close the academic achievement gap; and the election of black politicians by white voting districts would have reduced inequity, not increased it. But to Biden’s speechwriters, steeped in academic victimology, racial inequity is always with us, requiring constant remediation from government.

Ms. Mac Donald’s full commentary is here. 

Note:  When this blog makes reference to President Biden’s speech, or decision, or agenda, or whatever, I assume he is delivering whatever his masters require.

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Voting Alone

 

Howard Husock explains why he will be voting on Election Day.  In a column at City Journal,  Mr. Husock's column starts off (h/t Stephen Green at Instapundit):

Voting Alone : Why I won’t be casting my ballot early—and why you shouldn’t, either.

Even as the presidential campaign continues, an estimated 6 million Americans in 27 states have already voted. Early voting is now a fact of electoral life. I will not be joining in the habit, however—and I urge you not to do so, either.

Voting early is akin to boxing referees declaring one fighter the winner on points halfway through the bout—not knowing that a knockout punch was on its way. It may be hard to imagine what revelation about the candidates, at this point, would make much of a difference. But history has demonstrated such possibilities. 

Even before the Hunter Biden laptop made its way into the headlines.  The rest of Mr. Husock’s column is here.

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Heather MacDonald: False Testimony

Heather MacDonald recently testified before the House Judiciary Committee on alleged racial bias in law enforcement. It is not a pretty report (“False Testimony: Sworn statements at a recent congressional hearing on policing veered sharply from the truth; here are the facts”). Here’s her opening and closing paragraphs:

The anti-police narrative depends on suppression of facts, and the duplicity of anti-cop forces reached a shameless new high at a congressional hearing last week. Committee members should sanction the false testimony, given under oath, and publicly correct the record.

The House Judiciary Committee, now controlled by Democrats, had called a hearing to address a “series of deaths of unarmed African-American men while in police custody” as well as the “mistrust between police and marginalized communities.” Throughout the four-hour session, a photo array of blacks killed by the police played continuously on video screens around the room, interspersed with statistics allegedly proving that the police harbor lethal racist bias. Committee chairman Jerry Nadler claimed in his opening remarks that the “frequency of these killings and the absence of full accountability for those responsible send a message to members of the African American community that Black Lives Do Not Matter.” Nadler invoked the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, as examples of “police misconduct against African-Americans,” though Barack Obama’s Justice Department found no misconduct in the first case, and criminal charges against the Freddie Gray officers were dismissed either before or after trial.

. . .

The Republicans on the committee failed to push back against this narrative of systemic police bias, choosing instead to tell feel-good stories about “our brave men and women in uniform.” Such tales do little to rebut Black Lives Matter ideology, since both statements could be true:  individual officers display heroism, and policing is infected by “structural racism,” in Davis’s words. The only way to dislodge the “endemic racism” argument is to challenge its factual basis directly. I was the only witness at the hearing with the ability to do so, but the Republicans asked me not one question. This is not a matter of personal ego but rather of the public battle of ideas.

The Democratic committee members and their witnesses clearly laid out their agenda should they retake the White House and Senate: mandatory implicit-bias training for cops, a huge waste of money that could be spent instead on tactical and de-escalation training; mandatory racial-profiling data collection, which will be measured, misleadingly, against a population benchmark; racial quotas for police hiring, which require lowered standards; and more federal consent decrees for police departments, which cripple the ability of cops to engage in proactive policing and divert millions of dollars into the pockets of federal monitors. As inimical as these policy items are to effective policing, the narrative that drives them—that the police are a threat to black communities—is more dangerous still. That narrative rests on duplicity, as amply demonstrated at last week’s hearings. Republicans, who invoke patriotism on a regular basis, are doing the country no favors by ceding the criminal-justice narrative to the activists and race-baiters.

Her full report is here. Sad to say, GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee include Jim Jordan and Steve Chabot of Ohio; Louie Gohmert of Texas; Matt Gaetz of Florida; and Andy Biggs of Arizona. (E-mail links for Jordan and Chabot are embedded in case you would like to email them with the link to MacDonald's report.)

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