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Three leading medical organizations recently sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking the Department of Justice to investigate online attacks against hospitals that provide care to transgender children. Collectively the organizations represent more than 270,000 physicians and 220 children’s hospitals across the country. Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten argues that the woke medical establishment is “deputizing the DOJ to police disinformation” and punish those against “gender-affirming care.”
If its effort to sic the state and Big Tech on its critics is any indication, it seems the increasingly woke medical establishment now is not only ok potentially mutilating children, but with it, our free speech rights, in service of its lucrative “gender-affirming care” enterprise.
The American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics and Children’s Hospital Association recently delivered a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland calling for him to unleash the DOJ on foes of efforts to transition children—a new chapter in the War on “Wrongthink” we’ve been chronicling.
The AMA and its co-signers took a page out of the National School Board Association’s playbook.
The play goes like this: When your radical positions are exposed, creating a backlash, claim it’s all disinformation, that the disinformation is dangerous, and that public and private authorities must go after the disinformers. The play is made even more effective when the authorities are already on your side, as was the case when it came to the NSBA and the Biden administration.
The AMA and its co-signers made their play by arguing that the doctors they represent, and the places they work, face coordinated attacks threaten[ing] federally protected rights to health care for patients and their families. 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.
Therefore, they added, “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 all organizations, individuals, and entities responsible.”
Wisely, unlike the NSBA, the medical organizations were vaguer about the purported threats their members are facing, and the powers they’re calling on the DOJ to use against their critics.
