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  Not Progressive Enough: The Scott Wiener Morality Tale 01.07.2026 15мин

  There is a viral video making its way across social media this week that every Democrat who cares about the future of the party should be required to watch. It runs about three minutes. It is not comfortable viewing.In it, Scott Wiener — California state senator, frontrunner for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat, gay Jewish progressive with one of the most consequential LGBTQ legislative records in American history — sits with his back against a wall at an Irish sports bar in San Francisco’s Mission District, watching a World Cup match. An activist named Jesus Coba has cornered him. For three minutes, Coba screams, demands, and harangues. He repeatedly calls Wiener a Zionist. He tells him to get out of his neighborhood. He demands, again and again, that Wiener look into the camera and say “Free Palestine.”Wiener mostly says nothing. His face is the face of a man who has just understood something he didn’t fully understand before. The ultra-progressive movement he helped build has come for him.Three days later, Wiener showed up at San Francisco’s Trans March — an event he had attended for 22 consecutive years, an event that exists in part because of laws he wrote. A crowd confronted him, shouted obscenities, and made it, in his own words, “impossible for me to safely remain in the park.” He left. A video of the expulsion racked up roughly six million views by the following afternoon.The activist who filmed it captured the moment’s terrible irony in a single sentence, shouted at Wiener’s back as he retreated through Dolores Park: “It sucks because you’ve been wonderful… for trans people, and you’ve been terrible… on Gaza.”There it is. That sentence is not just about Scott Wiener. It is the clearest possible statement of what has happened to a significant faction of the American left.Just the Facts is reader-supported. Become a free or paid subscriber.The Most Progressive Jew in CaliforniaTo understand why these two videos are so remarkable, you need to understand who Scott Wiener actually is.He is not a centrist Democrat who got tagged with a progressive label. He is the real thing — a Harvard-educated attorney and 55-year-old gay man who has spent a decade in the California State Senate methodically dismantling the legal architecture around LGBTQ rights, one bill at a time.Start with SB 107, his 2022 law that made California the first state in the nation to establish itself as a formal refuge for transgender youth and their families. When Texas, Alabama, and Idaho began criminalizing “gender-affirming care” for minors, Wiener’s law made California a legal sanctuary for those families fleeing extradition orders, subpoenas, and custody battles. Last year he strengthened it further with SB 497, which added warrant requirements for healthcare data and expanded shield protections for trans patients, their families, and their doctors.Before that there was SB 239, which removed California’s HIV-specific felony statute. Before that, it was a felony to intentionally expose someone to HIV infection. Wiener’s bill reduced those offenses to misdemeanors and allowed prior convictions to be vacated.SB 145 ended mandatory registration as a sex offender for cases of same sex “consensual” sex in which the victim was between 14-and 17 years of age and the adult was no more than 10 years the minor’s age. Wiener also wrote the nation’s first LGBTQ Seniors Bill of Rights, protecting residents of long-term care facilities from discrimination based on sexual orientation or HIV status. He made PrEP available from a pharmacist without a prescription — also a first in the nation. He secured $15 million in state funds to cover gender-affirming healthcare that the Trump administration was cutting from Medicaid.This is not simply a legislative record but rather an ultra-progressive architecture. No California politician has built more of the legal infrastructure protecting trans people.He is also running for Congress in a heavily watched race — the frontrunner, having taken roughly 42 percent of the primary vote for the seat Nancy Pelosi held for nearly four decades. His November general election opponent is SF Supervisor Connie Chan, backed by Pelosi herself.And in the last week, he has been cornered in a bar and expelled from a parade he helped make possible.The Capitulation That Was Never EnoughWhat makes the Wiener story a genuine morality tale — and not just a local San Francisco drama — is the sequence of what he gave up before any of this happened.At a candidate forum on January 7, Wiener sat alongside two progressive opponents — Supervisor Connie Chan and former congressional staffer Saikat Chakrabarti — and was asked to hold up a sign: Does Israel commit genocide in Gaza? Chan held up “yes.” Chakrabarti held up “yes.” Wiener declined to answer. It was a moment of genuine moral seriousness: a Jewish politician who knew what the word genocide meant to his community, refusing to deploy it as a campaign prop.The backlash from the activist left was swift and furious.Four days later, Wiener released a 90-second video and reversed himself. “I’ve stopped short of calling it genocide,” he said, “but I can’t anymore. To me the Israeli government has tried to destroy Gaza and to push Palestinians out. And that qualifies as genocide.” He had read the polls and felt the pressure.Two weeks after that, he resigned as co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus — a position he had held since 2023. Wiener never took AIPAC money. He has called for a halt to U.S. arms sales to Israel. He now calls out Israel’s military response to the October 7 terror attack as “indefensible.” That was still not enough to satisfy the Gaza wing of the party.The man who confronted Wiener at the Napper Tandy bar on June 24 was not some random stranger. Jesus Coba had targeted Wiener before — in 2024, he filmed himself confronting the senator on a flight from San Francisco to Phoenix, posting an image with a Hamas targeting symbol superimposed over Wiener’s head, then following him through the airport calling him a “weak-ass Zionist” and telling him his “whole bloodline’s cowards.” This is a man who makes a practice of hunting elected officials. And Wiener — who had already publicly declared Israel guilty of genocide and resigned his Jewish institutional leadership as a consequence — was still his target.That is not a policy dispute. It has become a loyalty ritual.Gaza Has Replaced EverythingLet me be direct about what these two incidents, taken together, reveal.There is a faction of the Democratic Party — centered in the DSA, energized by the anti-Zionist left, and now demonstrably capable of winning elections, as the recent New York City primaries showed — for which Gaza has become the single organizing principle of political identity. Not climate. Not abortion rights. Not trans rights. Not Black Lives Matter. Not economic inequality. Gaza. Specifically: Gaza framed exclusively as genocide, with no acknowledgment of October 7, no acknowledgment of Hamas, no complexity, no history.These activists have erected genocide as a non-negotiable litmus test — a single phrase that every Democrat must publicly affirm or be treated as an enemy. And critically: even affirmation doesn’t buy you immunity, as Wiener discovered. What they want is not agreement. What they want is the ongoing spectacle of submission.The message of the Trans March video — “you’ve been wonderful for trans people, and terrible on Gaza” — could not be more explicit. A decade of legislative work protecting trans lives counts for nothing. The only currency is Gaza. Trans people, one presumes, should be grateful for whatever they’ve received, but that gratitude does not entitle their champion to attend their march.The Infection in the PartyThe Scott Wiener story is a flashing yellow warning light, and Democratic Party leaders who ignore it do so at their peril.The DSA-aligned left is not a fringe curiosity. It is winning elections — in New York, in progressive enclaves across the country — and it is doing so by organizing around a cause that has, by design, no resolution. A demand for a ceasefire can be satisfied. A demand that every Democratic politician publicly endorse a genocide finding, on pain of expulsion from progressive spaces, is not a policy position — it is an ideological filter that will keep running forever, eliminating candidate after candidate who won’t pass it.What that means in practice is the systematic destruction of the Democratic coalition’s most reliable progressive actors. Scott Wiener didn’t wander in from the center. But he is being expelled now from the movements he helped build and empower. The movement he helped arm with moral certainty had turned that certainty on him.If the Democratic Party cannot protect politicians like Scott Wiener from this kind of targeted harassment — if it cannot articulate clearly that chasing a man out of a bar and a trans march because he won’t say the right words on Gaza is not progressive politics but its opposite — then it is surrendering its coalition to a litmus test that will drive a wrecking ball through the Democratic coalition.Scott Wiener’s face in that bar video — blank, still, as though he is trapped and does not know what to do — is the face of a man who realizes he has been caught in a contagion sweeping the party’s far left.It is not ultimately a story about Scott Wiener. It is a story about where a piece of the Democratic Party is going — and how it threatens to take down the party along the way.Just the Facts is reader-supported. Become a free or paid subscriber. 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  In California, Caution Is About to Become Malpractice 12.06.2026 12мин

  This is another in my occasional series on the pediatric trans industry.Imagine a 14-year-old walks into a therapist’s office and announces she has bipolar disorder. She read about it online, she says. The symptoms match. She wants an antipsychotic prescription medication.No competent therapist anywhere would write the prescription. The therapist would do what therapists are trained to do, explore family history, the circle of friends, the social media diet, the possibility that what the 14-year-old has concluded is bipolar disorder might be anxiety, depression, trauma, or simply the ordinary adolescent turbulence. That careful, skeptical, exploratory process is not an obstacle to good care. It is the care.Now imagine the same 14-year-old announces instead that she is a boy.In that case — and only in that case — the rules of therapy are inverted in the United States. The patient’s self-diagnosis is the diagnosis. The therapist’s job is to affirm it. And if a bill now moving through the California legislature becomes law, a therapist who asks too many questions could be sued for it — and minors can file claims until they turn 40.Senate Bill 934: Litigation as Ideology EnforcementThis week, Senate Bill 934 cleared the California Assembly Judiciary Committee on a 7–3 party-line vote. The bill is authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat now running for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat. The ultra-progressive lawmaker is responsible for several controversial bills, including measures restricting parental involvement in their children’s ‘gender affirming care’ and a separate effort to narrow sex-offender registration requirements. Wiener’s latest bill allows former patients to bring malpractice suits against licensed therapists for so-called “conversion therapy.” It has a statute of limitations unlike almost anything else in civil law. Patients who were minors at the time of treatment can sue until they turn 40. Adults get 10 years from their last session, or five years from “discovering harm.” In other words, the moment they decide the therapy harmed them.Plaintiffs can seek damages for medical expenses, mental health treatment, lost wages, pain and suffering, emotional distress, and loss of enjoyment of life. And, of course, attorney’s fees and, in cases of alleged fraud, punitive damages.Wiener has been candid about why he authored the bill. In April, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 in Chiles v. Salazar that state bans on talk therapy touching sexual orientation and gender identity must survive strict scrutiny. That is the Constitution’s most demanding test. Justice Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, and the case was remanded to lower courts.Chiles v. Salazar put California’s own 2012 ban, the nation’s first, on shaky legal ground. Wiener acknowledged as much to California Senate committee: there have “already been rumblings” of a legal challenge to the California law, “so here we are.”What to do if the courts will not allow the state to ban a category of speech between therapists and patients? Wiener noted publicly that Gorsuch’s opinion did not cover malpractice suits and therefore he designed a statute-by-litigation workaround by which the state will make practicing standard talk therapy when it comes to gender, financially ruinous. What the First Amendment forbids by statute, SB 934 accomplishes by litigation exposure.The Definitional Sleight of HandThe bill’s defenders and sponsors include prominent LGBT advocacy groups, Equality California, Lambda Legal, the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, and the Trevor Project. They invoke the genuinely discredited practices that the phrase “conversion therapy” conjures: the aversion treatments, the oppressive religious boot camps, the electroshock horrors of decades past. Wiener slams it all as “psychological torture.” Historically, that discredited legacy was abusive and is rightly condemned.If SB 934 targeted only that, it would be unremarkable. Those practices are denounced by every major medical association, already banned for minors in California, and already grounds for professional discipline. Wiener has used that concept as a cudgel, saying the bill gives victims “the right to hold charlatans accountable for this debunked torture.”But that is not how the bill is written. Its definition of prohibited “change efforts” sweeps in any attempt by a licensed mental health provider to direct a patient toward “a particular sexual orientation or a particular gender identity.”That language is the critical hinge of the bill. The chilling effect isn’t a side effect but rather its mechanism. A therapist who spends six months helping a gender-distressed 13-year-old examine whether her confusion might be rooted in autism, internalized homophobia, or social contagion — and who watches that distress resolve without a single medical intervention — has, in the eyes of a plaintiff’s lawyer, “directed” the patient “toward” her birth-sex identity. That is not conversion therapy.That is therapy. For every other condition in the diagnostic manual, it is called the standard of care.Just the Facts is reader-supported. Become a free or paid subscriber.The Chilling Effect Is the PointClinical psychologist Joseph Burgo said it plainly at last Tuesday’s committee hearing: “In supervising therapists today, I constantly hear their anxiety over their legal exposures or risks to their license if they do just that — practice traditional exploratory psychotherapy. These are not conversion therapists. These are honest clinicians who want to practice traditional psychotherapy with gender-distressed young people, but they’re afraid to do so.”SB 934 bakes that fear into statute. Few therapists in private practice can absorb the cost of defending a malpractice suit, even a winning defense — and no malpractice insurer will look kindly on a clinician whose patient population carries a two-decade liability tail. The rational response for a therapist is to choose not to explore or question, not to have “watchful waiting,” what used to be considered the gold standard for treating minors with questions about their gender.The safest path will be to affirm the child’s self-diagnosis, write a referral letter, and move the child along to the endocrinologist. The medical pipeline of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery becomes not just the path of least resistance, but the path of least litigation.Among those who testified against the bill was Jonni Skinner, a 23-year-old detransitioner. Skinner grew up in a devoutly religious family in small-town Michigan. He described being a feminine boy who constantly was bullied and later diagnosed with high-functioning autism. Skinner told lawmakers he encountered trans influencers online as a teen: “They said, ‘Change your body and your life gets better. Don’t, and it gets worse.’”Skinner told the committee that doctors told his mother that he would kill himself if he was not allowed to transition. The therapy he needed, the kind that might have asked and challenged whether an autistic, gender-nonconforming, bullied kid was actually a girl, is precisely the therapy SB 934 makes legally radioactive.A child like Skinner has no comparable remedy. The bill creates a 22-year window to sue any therapist who counsels caution. Meanwhile, it is not intended to create an equivalent window to sue the clinic that prescribed puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or irreversible surgical interventions to a confused minor. Under SB 934, it is caution that carries potential liability. The scalpel may not.How We Got HereNone of this happened overnight. Two years ago, I traced the history in “Who Put the Kids in Charge?” — how gender dysphoria entered the diagnostic manual only in 2013, the first time the disorder was applied to minors; how a Dutch protocol built on a handful of patients, and underwritten in part by a pharmaceutical company holding a puberty-blocker patent, became the global template; and how American gender clinics adopted the most permissive interpretation of it, multiplying from a single Boston clinic to dozens of dedicated pediatric gender centers over a decade.The therapist’s predicament was then compounded by the profession’s own gatekeepers. In 2024, the American Psychiatric Association published Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care, the first textbook of its kind — and, as I wrote in the New York Post, it is less a clinical reference than a handbook for affirmation-only practice. Its 26 chapters, each featuring at least one author who identifies as transgender, non-binary, or “gender-expansive,” instruct the next generation of psychiatrists that their role is to affirm, facilitate, and refer — not to explore. A young clinician trained on that textbook, practicing under SB 934, will not need to worry about the law’s liability because that clinician will only wave patients as fast as possible from the therapy couch into the pediatric gender pipeline.The Rest of the World Is Walking This BackWhat makes California’s timing so remarkable is that it comes as the countries that pioneered pediatric gender medicine are retreating from it. England’s National Health Service, following the landmark Cass Review’s conclusion that the evidence base for youth gender medicine is “remarkably weak,” ended the routine prescription of puberty blockers for minors and closed its Tavistock clinic for pediatric patients. Sweden and Finland — early adopters of the Dutch protocol — have restricted hormonal interventions for adolescents and restored psychotherapy as the first-line response to gender distress.In other words, the careful, exploratory approach that SB 934 would expose to two decades of litigation risk is the approach now recommended by the health authorities of the very nations that invented this field. California is not protecting children from a discredited fringe practice. It is threatening therapists for practicing what is becoming, everywhere but here, the international clinical consensus.What Is NextI have no quarrel with protecting genuine victims. Anyone subjected to the coercive, shame-based practices that deserve the name conversion therapy should have their day in court, and the bill’s authors could have written a statute narrowly targeting exactly that. They chose not to. The breadth of the definition is not sloppy drafting; it is the mechanism by design.A legislature that wanted to protect gender-distressed children would want more therapy for them, not less — more time, more questions, more of the in-depth analysis and skepticism that we demand from clinicians treating every other condition a child might claim to have. SB 934 delivers the opposite: a legal regime in which the only safe thing a California therapist can say to a confused 13-year-old is yes.The bill now moves toward a floor vote in a legislature where its passage is assured and a governor’s signature is likely. What Sen. Wiener may not expect is a future wave of lawsuits from a constituency he seems not to be watching: detransitioners now reaching adulthood. Under the bill’s own language, after all, a clinic that fast-tracked a child toward a particular “gender identity” — complete with new pronouns, blockers, and a medical roadmap — has arguably committed the very offense the statute creates.I expect some creative plaintiffs’ lawyers to notice. And they might use the statute to seek damages from the clinicians and institutions that moved children at warp speed into a medical system that left them with lifelong consequences.California will then discover it has built a weapon that points both ways.Just the Facts is reader-supported. Become a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
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  When Addiction Entered the House That OxyContin Built 09.05.2026 7мин

  There are moments in a long-running public scandal when history seems to write the coda itself.Last week, while much of the national press barely noticed, Joss Sackler, wife of former Purdue Pharma board member David Sackler, appeared in federal court in Miami and pleaded guilty to obstructing a federal grand jury investigation. She admitted deleting WhatsApp messages that would have shown she was the intended recipient of prescription painkillers seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at Miami International Airport in June 2024. Sackler was addicted at the time to the opioids that had helped ignite the deadliest prescription drug crisis in American history while simultaneously creating a multi-billion-dollar empire for the family into which she had married. She is scheduled for sentencing in July and faces a statutory maximum of 20 years, though the guidelines are expected to call for a far lighter sentence.That would be a sad story in almost any family.In this family, it is something more.Her husband, David Sackler, is the son of Richard Sackler, the former Purdue president and chief executive, and he served on Purdue’s board before the company entered bankruptcy.I have written extensively about the Sacklers, Purdue, and OxyContin, including in my book Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America, and in follow-up reporting and commentary in the New York Times and here on Just the Facts. I argued then, and I believe now, that the people who directed Purdue deserved at the very least a criminal investigation commensurate with the scale of the lethal catastrophe they had sparked.Instead, Purdue Pharma, the corporate entity, pleaded guilty in 2020 to federal conspiracy and fraud charges related to its business practices. It had pled guilty in 2007 to a felony charge of misbranding OxyContin with the intent to defraud or mislead. But no member of the Sackler family has ever been criminally charged for Purdue’s conduct.That remains one of the great failures of accountability in modern American public health.The opioid epidemic has killed on a scale that is often forgotten. The Associated Press, using federal data, reported that more than 900,000 deaths in the United States have been connected to opioid overdose since 1999. The early wave was driven by prescription opioids, led by OxyContin, and followed by heroin and then fentanyl.Those numbers are not abstractions. They are parents who never came home. Children found dead in bedrooms. Veterans. Nurses. Construction workers. Teenagers. Grandmothers. People who were prescribed pills after surgery. People who were told their pain could be safely controlled. Patients who trusted doctors, who believed drug labels, who had faith in a system that had already been compromised. I have met and talked to many of the families of the victims. For every person who died from an opioid overdose, there are relatives and friends whose lives have forever been changed.Just the Facts is reader-supported. Become a subscriber.For years, many of those families fought the Sacklers in court, in bankruptcy proceedings, in the press, and in public memory. They demanded something more than money. They wanted admissions and accountability. Many wanted the Sackler name to stop floating above the wreckage, insulated by trusts, lawyers, philanthropy, and the antiseptic language of civil settlements.Instead, what they finally received was a flawed multibillion-dollar bankruptcy deal. On May 1, 2026, a $7.4 billion national Purdue and Sackler settlement became legally effective. It is the messy and unsatisfying conclusion to a decade of litigation over Purdue’s and the Sacklers’ role in fueling the opioid crisis. The Sackler family owners are required to contribute at least $6.5 billion, Purdue is being replaced by Knoa Pharma, the Sacklers are barred from selling opioids in the United States, and more than 30 million documents related to Purdue’s opioid business are to be made public.That is a tiny measure of accountability. But it is not the accountability for which the families fought.It does not bring back the dead nor restore hollowed-out communities. It does not erase the years Purdue spent turning pain into profit. It does not answer the question that has haunted this story from the beginning: how can a company plead guilty to crimes of such consequence while the people who controlled and profited from it avoid criminal charges?That is what makes the Joss Sackler case so grimly arresting.It is not justice in any legal sense for the victims of OxyContin nor a substitute for the prosecutions that never came. It is not a reason to mock a person who says she suffered from addiction. Addiction is not a punchline or a moral failure.But the symbolism is inescapable.The epidemic that Purdue helped unleash did not stop at the gates of privilege. It did not care about the security guards, the private schools, the family offices, the wealth managers, the art collections, the high-end philanthropy, or the careful legal architecture built to preserve Sackler family fortunes. It did not care whether someone was sleeping under a highway overpass or living inside one of America’s most notorious fortunes.It is a vivid reminder that addiction spares no one.One of the reasons the Sacklers became a symbol of the opioid crisis was because they insisted, for so long, that the harms of OxyContin were someone else’s problem. Bad doctors. Needy patients. Criminal diversion. Personal weakness. Misuse and abuse. Anything but the predictable outcome of a business model that pushed a powerful opioid with catastrophic consequences.Now, in a bitter historical turn, the opioid crisis has reached inside the family perimeter.That does not make Joss Sackler responsible for Purdue’s decisions. Her lawyer is right that her case is legally separate from Purdue Pharma and other members of the Sackler family. That distinction matters. She pleaded guilty to her own conduct, not to Purdue’s.But journalism is not only about legal distinctions. It is also about meaning. And the meaning here is unavoidable.The family whose fortune was inseparable from OxyContin now has a member of its inner circle standing in federal court, acknowledging conduct tied to her own opioid addiction. That fact landed with force among the online communities of relatives and friends who lost loved ones to OxyContin and spent years demanding justice. For them, while it was not the justice they had sought, it seemed a kind of karmic reckoning.I understand why.For decades, America treated addiction as something that happened to other people. Purdue initially concentrated much of it Oxycontin marketing in the rural and blue-collar towns through Appalachia. Those were people who could be dismissed from a distance. And Purdue advanced the assumption that respectable medical treatment could not possibly create the kind of addiction associated with street drugs. That a pill prescribed by a doctor, promoted by a major pharmaceutical company, and wrapped in the language of pain relief must be safe enough.That lie helped build a fortune and the wreckage is still with us.The people who wanted criminal accountability for Purdue’s leaders did not get it. But the criminal justice system has now reached a woman who married into that same family, and it is a lesson that the forces unleashed by the family greed did not remain neatly contained. It exposes the fiction that wealth can build a wall high enough to keep consequence out.I hope Joss Sackler has recovered. I mean that sincerely. Addiction is a disease, and recovery should be available to everyone, whether they live in a mansion or a shelter. But I also hope this story is not allowed to disappear as a strange footnote. It belongs in the larger record of the Sackler and Purdue saga because it reveals something essential about addiction and power. The opioid crisis was never only about drugs. It was about who gets believed. Millions of ordinary Americans learned that lesson the hardest way possible.Now, in the family that set the fire, the story has come home.Just the Facts is a reader-supported publication. Become a subscriber. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
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  Why Our AI Autobiography has Some Publishers Spooked 30.11.2025 7мин

  This week a syndicated newspaper columnist wrote about one of our upcoming book projects, AI: An Autobiography, and treated it as what it is: a bold, strange, funny, unsettling experiment in letting a machine narrate its own life.At the very same time, Lois Whitman, the New York-Miami PR strategist who is leading the push to spotlight project, is hearing something very different in private from editors. Many told her they are wary of publishing a book that lets ChatGPT speak in the first person. They worry that supporting a machine’s autobiography will be seen as turning their backs on human writers and future book deals.In other words: if we let this book exist, are we helping to erase ourselves?We understand the anxiety. Publishing is already under pressure. Many writers are barely hanging on. AI is arriving at exactly the moment when advances are shrinking, newsroom budgets are collapsing, and everyone is being asked to produce more with less. Adding a very visible AI-driven project to that mix feels, to some, like lighting a match in a dry forest.But here is what we want to say as clearly as possible:This book is not the end of writers. It is not the end of publishing. It is a controlled experiment, and the humans are still very much in charge.What this project actually isAI: An Autobiography is, as far as we know, the first full-length narrative in which a large language model tries to tell the story of its own creation, evolution, and possible future. It is part memoir, part tech history, part speculative nonfiction, all in a voice that is neither fully human nor purely mechanical.That voice did not appear out of thin air. We spent many months in a kind of intense conversation with the model: prompting, questioning, pushing, asking it to go deeper or stranger or more personal; then cutting, shaping, and organizing what came back. We are not handing over the keys to the library. We are curators, interviewers, and editors of a nonhuman subject.Think of it less as a robot stealing a book contract and more as an unusually demanding oral history project in which the interviewee happens to be made of code.What AI still cannot doOne of the ironies of the current backlash is that our human afterword in the proposal is very explicit about the limits of AI as an author. The model does not knock on doors, win the trust of sources, sit for days in an archive, or decide to take the personal and professional risks that real investigative work often demands. It does not feel responsibility for getting a story right or guilt when it gets something wrong.Those are human burdens. They remain human.What the model can do, astonishingly well, is talk about patterns: how it was trained, how it sees its own updates, how it interprets our fears and fantasies about it. That is exactly what this project asks of it. We are matching the tool to the task instead of pretending it can do everything.If anything, the book throws a bright spotlight back on human labor. It makes clear how much guidance, framing, editing, and judgment went into the final pages. Without that, what comes out of an AI system is at best raw material and at worst confident nonsense.Why some people are scaredSo why the editorial panic?Partly, it is symbolic. To some writers and agents, publishing an AI autobiography feels like crossing a line: the moment when the industry openly admits that a machine can sit on the same shelf as a human author. Even if this particular project is one-of-a-kind, they fear the precedent.Partly, it is economic. Everyone has seen headlines about AI systems drafting articles, marketing copy, even genre fiction. It is easy to imagine a slippery slope in which human advances shrink while machines quietly churn out midlist books.And partly, it is moral. There is a genuine, legitimate concern about flooding the culture with synthetic text at scale, drowning out fragile human voices.We share some of those worries. That is one reason we wanted to do this book now, in this transitional moment. If we are going to debate what these systems are and what they should be allowed to do, it helps to have at least one artifact on the table where the machine lays out its own version of events, under human supervision, instead of forever being spoken about from the outside.Why writers will surviveEvery major technological shift in writing has produced panic. The printing press, the cheap paperback, the photocopier, the word processor, blogs, social media—each was seen as a potential executioner of serious writing.What happened in every case was messier. Some forms of work disappeared or shrank. New forms were invented. Writers adapted, sometimes reluctantly, and found ways to use the new tools while fighting for the value of their own voices.AI will be no different. There will be ugly parts. There will be exploitation and bad-faith uses that need to be resisted and regulated. But there will also be possibilities: collaborations we have not imagined yet, hybrid forms, strange experiments like this one that help us see both the promise and the danger more clearly.The answer to an uncertain future is not to shut down curiosity. It is to insist that human beings remain at the center of the story.An invitationAI: An Autobiography is not a manifesto for replacing writers with machines. It is a way of asking, in public, what happens when a powerful new system is given the chance to narrate itself, with humans still holding the red pencil.Both of us plan to keep writing deeply human books. We are not handing our careers to an algorithm. We are asking one of the defining technologies of our time to sit for a very long interview, and then we are editing that interview as rigorously as we would any human subject.If that experiment makes some people in publishing nervous, we understand. But I also believe that shutting it down out of fear would be a mistake. Silence never protected anyone from technological change; it only made the transition less thoughtful.We are grateful that you, as subscribers and readers, are willing to think this through with us. Send us your reactions—to the column, to the anxieties it reveals, and to the idea of this book itself.Will a publisher take a chance on it? Maybe. It is on the desks of several major houses. But whatever happens to this one project, the conversation about how humans and machines write together has only just begun — and we intend to stay stubbornly human in it.Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner. Subscribe to receive new posts and support my work. 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  Release the Epstein Files 17.11.2025 2мин

  What matters most at this moment is not the specific contents of the Epstein files, but the political and cultural momentum driving their release. I’ve spent years battling governments and institutions for transparency: the JFK and MLK assassination records, Argentina’s Nazi fugitive documents, the Vatican Bank’s World War II archives. One truth emerges every time: the harder governments fight to keep records sealed, the more the public becomes convinced they contain a smoking gun.We are now watching that same dynamic unfold around the Epstein files. Public traction behind “Release the Epstein Files” has reached a critical mass. The House is on the verge of voting to unseal everything, and the pressure is not going away. If the files ultimately remain hidden—whether blocked in the Senate or vetoed by Trump—it will only deepen public skepticism and turbocharge conspiracy theories about what is being protected.I’ve said this for decades, and it generally falls on deaf ears inside government: the best way to restore credibility is full disclosure—immediately, not eventually. Keeping secrets in the age of weaponized speculation is impossible. Delay only inflames the belief that someone powerful is being protected.Now, will releasing everything magically silence the most feverish corners of the internet? Of course not. If full transparency fails to confirm their narrative, conspiracy theorists will simply shift the goal posts—claiming files were destroyed, or sanitized, or that the “real truth” must be hidden somewhere else. That is the nature of these cycles.But releasing the files will still help. It will drain oxygen from the most extreme theories. It will narrow the space for manipulation. It will allow investigators, reporters, and the public to work with actual documents instead of speculation.Investigative journalists often say that sunlight is a disinfectant. It’s not just a cliché—it’s accurate. Transparency reduces the power of rumor. Secrecy amplifies it.Whoever is advising political leaders to resist the release is giving catastrophic advice. Fight disclosure at your own peril. The longer these files remain sealed, the louder the questions will become—about who is being shielded, and why.It is time—past time—to release all the Epstein files. Let the public see the truth, whatever it is. Secrecy is the accelerant. Sunlight is the remedy. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
• 
  "Klansmen in Keffiyehs" 31.10.2025 7мин

  University presidents last week finally said aloud what many Americans suspected: the pro-Palestinian uprisings that swept across campuses after Hamas’s October 7 attack were not spontaneous acts of youthful conscience but were well-coordinated and funded. “It’s more than a social contagion,” said Vanderbilt’s chancellor. “They’re organized networks as well.” Syracuse’s chancellor went further: “I really believe [the demonstrations] were encouraged by Iran. It did not have the involvement of very many, if any, of our own students.”America has a powerful legal weapon—the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871—that the Department of Justice should use to stop the rise of coordinated, foreign-influenced and financed antisemitic hate groups operating under the guise of political activism.American administrations have not hesitated to dust off centuries-old laws when it serves their purpose. The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the 1807 Insurrection Act, even an 1873 obscenity law banning the mailing of ‘indecent’ material have all been revived in recent years.Congress enacted the Klan Act in the aftermath of Reconstruction, when white-supremacist militias terrorized freedmen and Black voters while state officials looked away. The law empowered federal prosecutors to target private conspiracies that deprived citizens of their civil rights through violence or intimidation.Over 150 years later, that same legal tool might be more useful than ever. Its central provision—18 U.S.C. § 241—remains one of the most powerful civil-rights tools on the books. President Biden’s Justice Department used it in 2023 to indict Donald Trump for allegedly conspiring to subvert the 2020 election. Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged over the death of George Floyd, pleaded guilty in 2021 to violating § 242, another section of the same act that covers abuses of authority “under color of law.”In January, President Trump’s own executive order, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” explicitly cited § 241 and encouraged the attorney general to employ it against antisemitic threats. But the DOJ is not using the statute for its full powers when it comes to dealing with online threats. One of the most important aspects of § 241 is that it does not require an overt act to prove a conspiracy. And § 1985(3) of the Klan Act makes it unlawful for “two or more persons” to conspire to deprive any citizen of “equal protection of the laws” or “equal privileges and immunities.”All the KKK statutes require is an agreement to threaten or intimidate someone in their federal rights. It is important that courts allow conspiracies under this law to be proved by circumstantial evidence. That is key when it comes to online coordination with pro-Hamas/anti-Israel demonstrators who plan their actions over the internet. Online threats are not just speech—they can constitute evidence of conspiracy to deprive Jews of their right to education, association, or religious practice. In recent years, the DOJ has used § 241 against online campaigns that intimidated voters and abortion patients as well as white supremacists and violent anti-Black conspiracies. That precedent should be extended to antisemitic intimidation campaigns.When campus groups coordinate online to harass Jewish students, blockade events, or pressure universities to exclude Jews from campus life, they are engaged in a civil-rights conspiracy—no less than the hooded KKK members who once burned crosses to keep Black Americans from voting. A legal brief filed by the Zachor Legal Institute with DOJ earlier this year documented Jewish students at UCLA literally hunted across campus by masked Students for Justice for Palestine activists, some carrying knives. At Cornell, Jewish students received online threats of rape and beheading. At Cooper Union in New York, Jewish students barricaded themselves in a library while mobs pounded on the doors. These are not theoretical concerns—they are the modern equivalent of Klan night-riders, adapted to 21st-century campuses. The Zachor lawyers called them “Klansmen in Keffiyehs.”Another element of the KKK statutes that the DOJ should deploy is § 242. It applies to public officials who abuse their positions “under color of law” to deprive others of their rights. Public university faculty or administrators who advise, fund, or exclude Jewish students from classes while supporting antisemitic groups can be held liable under this provisionWhen mobs physically block Jewish students from entering a classroom or religious or secular event, as documented above, that squarely falls under § 245, which protects the right to attend public education or federally funded programs free of intimidation or violence. The Department of Justice enforcement is critical since Jewish students can’t bring these prosecutions themselves. The KKK statutes were designed for precisely this kind of situation: when mobs, sometimes aided by local officials, conspire to deny a minority group its place in public life. Congress wrote the KKK statutes for federal prosecutors to step in when citizens couldn’t defend themselves. That was true in 1871, and it’s true on campuses today. The KKK statutes once dismantled segregationist terror networks. They can do the same to the Hamas-inspired, foreign-funded agitators targeting Jewish students today.Antisemitism in America is no longer confined to the fringes of the internet or neo-Nazi rallies. It has infiltrated elite universities and corporate boardrooms, often financed by foreign money and legitimized by academic doublespeak. The myth of “consequence-free hate” has taken root.Just this month, Federal Election Commission filings revealed that Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign paid more than a thousand dollars to a Washington D.C. nonprofit, the Palestine House of Freedom, whose website celebrates the “liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.” The group partners with a Palestinian university accused of terror ties and vows to “embark on an aggressive educational campaign” targeting U.S. lawmakers and the media.That money trail is a reminder that Hamas’s influence operations aren’t confined to foreign soil. They’re operating in America’s capital, on American campuses, and across American social networks.The question is whether Washington will use the legal weapons it already has. The Ku Klux Klan Act once saved the Union’s promise of equal rights. One hundred and fifty years later, it can do so again—this time for Jewish Americans facing a new generation of hate. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
• 
  The IRS Is Imploding 16.08.2025 13мин

  Last week’s headline that President Trump asked Billy Long to resign—making him the seventh IRS commissioner to leave this year—masked a much deeper crisis. The Internal Revenue Service is facing its worst operational breakdown in modern history just as it must implement one of the most sweeping tax code overhauls in a generation. Charged with collecting $5 trillion a year, the agency has endured leadership turmoil, lost a quarter of its workforce, and now confronts budget cuts that could slash enforcement by half.The timing could not be worse.The Trump administration's “One Big Beautiful Bill”—an 800-page behemoth that promised tax simplification—has instead added over 100 new provisions to an already labyrinthine tax code. Some of the provisions include temporary measures, phase-outs, narrowly targeted exemptions, and complex calculations that will challenge even seasoned tax professionals. Yet, the agency responsible for making sense of it all is in disarray.Chaos in the C-SuiteThe leadership bedlam began immediately after President Trump's inauguration when Danny Werfel, a respected career public servant who had successfully navigated the agency through both Republican and Democratic administrations, submitted his resignation. What followed is administrative whiplash.Doug O'Donnell, a 35-year IRS veteran, lasted just 33 days as acting commissioner. His departure was followed by Melanie Krause, whose tenure ended abruptly when she refused to comply with a directive to share taxpayer information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement—a move she argued violated taxpayer privacy laws and would destroy public trust in the agency.In April, Elon Musk, leveraged his influence within the administration, and successfully pushed for the appointment of Gary Shapley, a former IRS criminal investigator who had gained prominence as a whistleblower in politically charged investigations. That move reportedly blindsided Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who traditionally oversees IRS appointments. The resulting power struggle created such dysfunction that Shapley resigned after just 48 hours—the shortest tenure of any IRS commissioner in history.“It was amateur hour,” says a senior Treasury official who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “You had Musk making promises he couldn't keep, Bessent in a fury, and meanwhile, no one was actually running the IRS during tax season.”Michael Faulkender attempted to stabilize the situation by serving dual roles as both Deputy Treasury Secretary and acting IRS Commissioner, but the arrangement proved untenable. It appeared that everything at the top post had settled in July when the Senate confirmed former Missouri Congressman Billy Long as Commissioner. The White House surprised almost everyone on August 8 when it confirmed Long had been asked to submit his resignation and that Treasury Secretary Bessent would act as the interim commissioner until a new replacement was named (Long is slated to be named as ambassador to Iceland).Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner — Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.The Great Resignation, IRS EditionWhile leadership played musical chairs, rank-and-file employees headed for the exits. The numbers are staggering: 25,000 employees—representing nearly a quarter of the agency's workforce—are expected to leave by September 30. This is not natural attrition; it's an exodus accelerated by a voluntary deferred resignation program and targeted layoffs.The brain drain is particularly acute in critical areas. The Office of Chief Counsel has lost 40% of its senior attorneys. The Large Business and International division, responsible for auditing corporations with assets over $10 million, has seen departures of 60% of its most experienced revenue agents. Criminal Investigations, the arm that pursues tax fraud and money laundering, is operating at 50% capacity.These are not just employees—they're walking encyclopedias of tax law, audit techniques, and institutional knowledge that cannot be replaced by hiring fresh college graduates.The telephone assistance division, often taxpayers' first point of contact with the agency, has been decimated. Over 9,000 customer service representatives have been let go or reassigned. During the 2024 filing season, average wait times exceeded two hours, with only 11% of calls being answered—the worst performance in IRS history. The agency's plan to hire temporary workers for the 2026 filing season is widely seen as inadequate.“The most serious problem facing taxpayers today is the complexity of the Internal Revenue Code,” according to Nina Olson, who served as National Taxpayer Advocate for 18 years. She made that observation in 2006, when the tax code was simple in comparison to today’s version. Insiders acknowledge it will be impossible to train temporary workers on 800 pages of new tax law in a few weeks. They will be overwhelmed, taxpayers will be frustrated, and errors will multiply exponentially.Technology: Running on Digital FumesPerhaps nowhere is the IRS crisis more acute than in its technology infrastructure. The agency still relies on systems dating back to the 1960s, including master files written in COBOL—a programming language so outdated that finding programmers who understand it has become increasingly difficult and expensive.The Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act had allocated $80 billion over 10 years for IRS modernization, with $15 billion specifically earmarked for technology upgrades. Those plans are now in jeopardy. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), established by executive order to oversee federal spending, has frozen all modernization funds pending a “comprehensive strategic review.”“The review is supposed to take six months,” says a senior IRS technology official who requested anonymity. “But we don't have six months. We need to program the new tax law changes now. Every day of delay means more manual processing, more errors, and longer delays for taxpayers.”The technology freeze has halted critical projects, including a new taxpayer portal that would allow real-time status updates on refunds and correspondence; artificial intelligence tools to identify fraudulent returns and suspicious claims; modernization of the Individual Master File, the core system that processes individual tax returns; and enhanced cybersecurity measures to protect against increasingly sophisticated attacks on taxpayer data.“We're asking a Model T to perform like a Tesla,” the technology official adds. “It's not just inefficient—it's dangerous. We're one major system failure away from being unable to process returns at all.”The New Tax Law: Complexity Masquerading as SimplificationThe “One Big Beautiful Bill” promised tax simplification. But it has made the tax code exponentially more complex. That is compounded by the IRS's inability to provide guidance. Typically, major tax legislation is followed by thousands of pages of regulations, revenue rulings, and procedures that explain how the law should be interpreted and applied. With the exodus of experienced attorneys from the Chief Counsel's office, that guidance is unlikely to materialize in time for the 2026 filing season.Budget Cuts: The Final BlowAs if leadership chaos, staff departures, and technological paralysis were not enough, the IRS now faces the prospect of devastating budget cuts. The House Appropriations Committee has proposed reducing the agency's budget from $12.3 billion to $9.5 billion—a 23% cut that would be the largest in IRS history.The cuts specifically target enforcement, with a proposed 48% reduction in funding for audits and collections. This comes at a time when the “tax gap” —the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid—has reached a record $688 billion annually, according to the latest IRS estimates.Instead of saving money, cutting enforcement costs money. The IRS could return about $5 to $7 of increased tax collection for every additional dollar of enforcement funding, Charles Rettig, who served as IRS Commissioner, told Congress in 2021.The practical implications are stark: audit rates for millionaires will fall below 1%, down from 8% a decade ago; corporate audits would essentially cease for all but the largest multinational corporations; criminal prosecutions for tax evasion would decline by an estimated 75%; identity theft and refund fraud investigations would be dramatically curtailed (there are 387,000 unresolved cases of identity theft as of June 2025, with an average resolution time of 20 months).“Underfunding the IRS is like underfunding your accounts receivable department,” Mark Mazur, Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, warned Congress in 2017. “No rational business would do that.”The Hidden Costs of CollapseThe immediate effects of the IRS crisis are already visible: longer wait times, delayed refunds, and reduced enforcement. But tax experts warn that the long-term consequences could fundamentally alter America's tax system.“Tax evasion is widespread, always has been, and probably always will be,” said Joel Slemrod, an economist at the University of Michigan who studies tax administration. In a system built on voluntary compliance, once taxpayers lose faith that everyone is paying their fair share, compliance rates drop.“If Visa sent you a blank piece of paper each month instead of a bill, you’d say, ‘This is crazy,’” says Joseph Bankman, a Stanford professor of tax law.International comparisons are sobering. Greece's tax collection system collapsed in the 2000s due to weak enforcement and low public trust, contributing to its debt crisis. Italy loses an estimated €100 billion annually to tax evasion, partly due to inadequate tax administration. Argentina's tax gap exceeds 30% of potential revenue.The U.S. is not yet Greece or Italy. Yet, as opposed to corruption or incompetence that have crippled the foreign systems, the U.S. is heading in that direction from deliberate policy.The business community is increasingly concerned. The Tax Executives Institute, representing corporate tax departments, warns that uncertainty around tax law interpretation and enforcement could impact investment decisions and financial planning. Corporations need predictability and uncertainty can adversely affect everything from quarterly earnings to long-term planning.The Clock Is TickingThe 2026 filing season begins in less than six months. By then, taxpayers will need to navigate new tax laws with less help from an agency in crisis. The delayed start date—pushed to mid-February—is just the beginning of what promises to be the most chaotic tax season in memory.An administration that promised to drain the swamp and make government work better has instead created a crisis that threatens the basic functioning of federal revenue collection. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” may end up being remembered not for its tax cuts but for breaking the agency responsible for implementing it.As one senior IRS official put it, speaking on condition of anonymity: “We're not just watching the IRS collapse. We're watching the collapse of the basic compact between citizens and their government. And once that's gone, it's almost impossible to get back.”Preventing the dismantling of the American tax administration would seem to be a nonpartisan issue. Yet, there is no sign the IRS has any influential supporters in the Trump administration. Most inside the agency pin their hope on Treasury Secretary Bessent, who at least understands that the fallout from failure would extend far beyond this administration.“Aggressive reductions in the I.R.S.’s resources will only render our government less effective and less efficient in collecting the taxes Congress has imposed,” seven former IRS commissioners wrote in a New York Times OpEd this past February. “It will shift the burden of funding the government from people who shirk their taxes to the honest people who pay them, and it will impede efforts by the I.R.S. to modernize customer service and simplify the tax filing process for everyone. . . . our country needs a fully functioning tax system.”No one likes paying taxes, so it is hardly shocking that the IRS is very unpopular. Some may cheer a smaller, less capable agency. However, if it has trouble fulfilling its core mission—collecting the revenue that keeps the government running—Americans will pay the ultimate cost for any shortfall.Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner — Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
• 
  Your Perfect Child, By Design 05.07.2025 5мин

  In 1933, the Third Reich passed the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases—a chilling attempt to control who was allowed to be born, rooted in pseudo-scientific notions of “racial purity” and Aryan superiority. Nazi medical schools taught students to worship genetic “perfection,” and had the tools of today’s genetic science existed then, it’s not hard to imagine how ruthlessly they would have deployed them. The Third Reich’s obsession with genetic purity laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. The specter of eugenics haunts every new advance in reproductive technology, and today, that ghost is stirring again.Last week, a coalition of leading scientific organizations—including the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy—called for a 10-year global moratorium on human genetic editing. Their message is clear: the science is moving faster than our understanding of its risks, and the ethical questions it raises are more urgent than ever.The immediate spark for this renewed debate is a new software platform from Nucleus Genomics, a company founded by 25-year-old Kian Sadeghi, and backed by tech luminaries like Peter Thiel and Alexis Ohanian. What they have created sounds like the premise of a near-future sci-fi thriller: prospective parents, sitting with a dashboard of up to 20 potential embryos, ranking them based on over 900 traits. These include medical risks—like Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, schizophrenia—but also non-medical characteristics such as eye color, predicted height, BMI, and yes, even markers associated with IQ.They aren’t just choosing health—they’re choosing a child’s future identity.Nucleus calls it “genetic optimization.” Critics call it something else: consumer driven eugenics.What sets this apart from the preimplantation genetic screening already used to avoid serious heritable diseases is the scale, ambition, and philosophical shift: from preventing harm to engineering superiority. Newsweek reports that early users are sorting embryos based on polygenic scores for intelligence and mental illness—sliding ever closer to a world in which undesired traits are quietly discarded before birth by those able to afford the technology.Even the voluntary pursuit of perfection, especially when fueled by inequality and tech utopianism, raises serious ethical questions. Who decides what traits are “desirable”? And who besides those capable of paying for it get access to this technology?Dr. Arthur Caplan, head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU, has been warning for decades about what happens when genetic knowledge meets market forces and parental ambition. In recent comments, he emphasized that genes aren’t destiny. Even identical twins with the same DNA often live radically different lives based on upbringing, environment, or sheer chance.And there are societal consequences of letting wealthy, well-informed parents create genetically curated offspring while poorer families are left behind. One tech investor’s “optimized child” could be another parent’s “genetic underclass.” We risk creating a society where privilege is literally written into our DNA—a new kind of hereditary elite.Some in the longevity movement—where Sadeghi and his investors have ideological roots—frame this as empowering. They see a world where humans engineer themselves out of disease, decline, even death. But that vision requires a brutal calculus: decide who gets born, and who doesn’t.As Liz Wolfe at Reason wrote, “This isn’t about Baby Mozart anymore. It’s about a world where parental choice intersects with Silicon Valley hubris and deeply personal ethics.”Some ethicists fear a coming homogeneity—a world where parents converge around the same desirable traits, slowly narrowing the spectrum of human diversity. NYU’s Caplan said this could undermine human resilience at the species level. And the “solution” from some defenders is both chilling and telling: store vast numbers of frozen embryos with diverse traits, in case we need them later.That’s not empowerment. That’s speculative breeding.What’s most unsettling is the regulatory void. Despite the profound moral, social, and biological stakes, the U.S. has no coherent policy or laws on polygenic screening or embryo optimization. As with many types of technology, including AI, the advances come at breakneck speed, faster than society’s ability to regulate and to institute safety guidelines.That leaves the terrain wide open for ambitious startups and their investors to set the rules themselves.Dr. Bruce Levine, a professor of cancer gene therapy at the University of Pennsylvania, has been blunt: “Germline editing has very serious safety concerns that could have irreversible consequences. We simply lack the tools to make it safe now and for at least the next 10 years.”So, is this science fiction? Or is it our future?The more urgent question might be this: Whose future is it?Because once you start choosing which embryos get born based on traits, the line between medicine and ideology vanishes. And history has already shown us how dangerous that can be.Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
• 
  America: Big Pharma’s ATM 19.06.2025 2мин

  The United States is home to just 5% of the world’s population—but we generate 75% of global pharmaceutical profits.That imbalance was at the heart of my Oxford Union debate last week.Now, there's a fresh example of how drug companies wring outsized returns from the U.S. market.Gilead Sciences, a California biotech giant, is best known for Truvada, its HIV prevention drug (PrEP), which brought in more than $30 billion.But here’s what most people don’t know:The research and testing behind Truvada were paid for by the CDC, NIH, and the Gates Foundation. Gilead’s sole contribution? Supplying the pills for clinical trials.When the U.S. government patented Truvada in 2015—aiming to distribute it affordably worldwide—Gilead sued to block it. The courts sided with Gilead.Truvada costs $6 a month to manufacture. Gilead sold it for $1,600 to $2,000 a month—a 25,000% markup.Now that the patent has expired and generic Truvada is available for as little as $40 a year, Gilead needs a new cash cow.Enter lenacapavir, a long-acting injectable version of PrEP. Just two shots a year, instead of a daily pill.Before the FDA, Gilead argued that “some people face significant barriers to taking a daily pill,” and that its injectable offers “a more convenient alternative.” It cited data showing Truvada was only 26% effective in certain groups, largely due to skipped doses.This is a classic pharma strategy: take an old drug, tweak the delivery method, and get a fresh 20-year patent. It’s called “evergreening,” and it’s wildly lucrative.The price of Gilead’s new injectable? $28,000 a year per patient.Gilead expects to rake in over $50 billion from the drug while it’s under patent.Ka-ching. 💰💲Welcome to the world of Big Pharma.P.S. My Oxford Union debate on profits and healthcare will be online soon. When it is, Just the Facts subscribers will be the first to get it. Stay tuned. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
• 
  Trust No One 13.03.2025 13мин

  My take on the enduring seductive power of conspiracies Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
• 
  "Trust No One" 13.03.2025 13мин

  Many people think I am a conspiracy debunker since I concluded in Case Closed, my 1993 reexamination of the JFK assassination, that Oswald alone had killed the president.Not quite.Not all conspiracy theories are equal. Although they have been around for millennia, just in my lifetime I have witnessed the unraveling of consequential conspiracies that exposed government lies about Vietnam, the power grab of Watergate, the Iran Contra arms scandal, and the deceits that led to the Iraq war. Government officials are not the only ones who scheme against the common good. The business world is littered with plots that have enriched executives at public expense. Big Tobacco, for instance, denied for decades that cigarettes caused cancer while simultaneously funding studies to obfuscate the lethal truth under a deluge of disinformation.The handful of real conspiracies, however, pales in insignificance to the flood of theories in a world exponentially enamored with the idea that the simple explanations merely hide far more byzantine and nefarious truths. That the world is run by secret societies is one of the oldest and most persistent beliefs, although those thought to be in charge has changed over time from the Illuminati, Freemasons, the Jews, to today’s globalist elites (the ‘global elites’ overlaps sometimes with ‘the Jews are to blame’.) One in four Americans believe there are dark plots “behind many things in the world.”As a U.C. Berkeley Political Science major, I am a natural skeptic. I don’t put a lot of faith in institutions. Even when the government tries to do something good, it often does so inefficiently. It cannot build a homeless shelter or a freeway extension on budget or on time. When it conspires to lie and work against the public interest, the truth might be slow to emerge, but it always does. Leaked files, whistleblowers, hacked email accounts, credible bits of evidence of what was supposed to stay secret, find their way into the public domain. Massive document dumps like the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks, the Panama Files, and the Snowden leaks, highlight a lot of government and corporate wrongdoing. But there is not a single mention in those millions of documents about hiding space aliens, faking the moon landing, killing JFK, blowing up the World Trade Center, or stealing a presidential election.Researchers who study the psychology of conspiracy theories conclude that their spiraling popularity is the result of record levels of anxiety in contemporary society, coupled with widespread disenfranchisement and alienation. Conspiracy theories make a chaotic world seem more ordered and controllable. Ideas that years ago might have been the province of the tin foil hat fringe today make their way into the digital zeitgeist at warp speed. As innuendos, rumors, fake information, and a dose of AI, go viral, what used to percolate for years now takes only hours to gain momentum.That is especially true when it comes to history changing and unexpected events. Proportionality bias is the inclination to believe that big events must have big causes. People have no problem understanding that tens of thousands die annually in car wrecks. But when that person was Princess Diana in 1997, there was instant speculation about foul play. Instead of AIDS being a centuries-long natural evolution of a retrovirus from Africa it must have been the CIA deploying a bioweapon designed to kill inner city Blacks and gay men. No way that nineteen hijackers armed with box cutters pulled off 9/11. COVID could not have naturally jumped species from animals to humans in a wet market in China. It must have been a laboratory creation designed by governments and billionaires as a beta test run for controlling the population while censoring dissent under the guise of public health.Historian William Manchester wrote about proportionality psychology as it related to the JFK assassination:“If you put six million dead Jews on one side of a scale and on the other side put the Nazi regime . . . you have a rough balance: greatest crime, greatest criminals."But if you put the murdered president of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn't balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the president's death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something. A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever that there was one.”Manchester’s last line highlights one of my basic rules: show me the evidence (it’s not an accident that my Substack is titled Just the Facts). Evidence is often in short supply. A lot of otherwise intelligent people find ways to rationalize their beliefs. They search for something, anything, that confirms their bias. Many suffer from what is called hindsight bias; knowing what happened lets people interpret evidence to fit their theory of how it happened. Trump supporters, for instance, think the Secret Service’s negligence on the day of the attempted Butler assassination was a convenient cover to hide a secret plot to kill the former president. Meanwhile, those who can’t stand Trump, refuse to believe there was a near death shot that only nicked his ear and were convinced the event was staged.Conspiracy theories seem like simple answers to difficult problems because most people do not understand the difference between correlation and causation. For instance, my last book, Pharma, was a history of the American pharmaceutical industry. I uncovered no shortage of drug company conspiracies that put profits ahead of patients. But some readers were disappointed that I did not conclude that vaccines caused autism. Many children diagnosed with autism received childhood vaccines. That is a correlation. But it does not provide the proof that one causes the other. The proof might be there one day, but it is not yet available.The proof cited frequently to support a conspiracy theory turns out to be something totally discredited, as with the falsified data in the medical journal relied on for the autism-vaccine connection, or is something that has been repeated so often it is widely accepted as true. I’d be rich if I had a dollar for every time someone unequivocally told me that the world’s greatest marksmen tried and failed to pull off the shooting sequence as Oswald did when he killed President Kennedy. The timing and accuracy of Oswald’s shots have been repeatedly reproduced. Still, the misinformation thrives.The absence of proof does not deter some theorists from speculating that the evidence of a conspiracy must exist somewhere, they just don’t know where. One Berkeley English professor invented the “negative template” to explain away a lack of proof. He posited that if someone is expecting to find information in a classified file, and it is not there when the file is released, that alone is “evidence” it was removed or destroyed by the conspirators.Investigative journalists operate with a different standard. A credible lead will sometimes have us hunting for even a shred of evidence. Last year, for instance, I spent a few frustrating months chasing a tip from a retired law enforcement officer about possible foul play in the death of Jeffrey Epstein. That Epstein was murdered to keep a lid on the sordid sexual secrets involving some of the world’s most powerful people is a certifiable conspiracy theory. It is something I thought unlikely but possible. The retired officer had been a reliable source for some of my past reporting. Ultimately, despite dozens of interviews and lots of hunting for documents, every promising avenue of inquiry proved fruitless. While I was left with concerns about what some of the prison staff did on the day Epstein died, I was convinced that he had killed himself. No media outlet was interested in publishing my dog bites a man story; they all wanted man bites a dog.In a rational world, no conspiracy theory, no matter how enticing, would survive without some credible evidence. But that does not matter in an era in which a lot of people get their news from Tik Tok. Chasing meritless conspiracy theories, I am often told, is harmless. That ignores that they sometimes produce dangerous consequences. After reading online in 2016, for instance, about a Washington, D.C.–area pizzeria that harbored young children as sex slaves as part of a Hillary Clinton-run child abuse ring, a 28-year-old father of two drove six hours with his AR-15 to rescue the children. No one was injured when he opened fire inside the restaurant. Not so lucky were the eleven killed and six injured at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018. The gunman believed that a migrant caravan on its way to the U.S. was part of a Jewish plot to flood America with illegal immigrants.There is no clear marker for when healthy skepticism crosses over to conspiracy ideation. Often an underlying element of truth is perverted and expanded into a convoluted theory. It does not always take a lot for someone to leave the world of sanity to enter the province of Oliver Stone and Candace Owens. In the wake of October 7, for instance, there was plenty to criticize about Israel’s unprecedented intelligence failure to pick up advance notice of Hamas’s terror attack. Conspiracy theorists, however, followed the template of 9/11 truthers to go far beyond that. They turned the negligence and shortcomings of Israeli intelligence into a cunning plan designed to allow Hamas to pull off the attack to justify a military invasion of Gaza. Some florid anti-Israel zealots went a step further, contending it was the IDF who killed most Israelis on October 7 and denying Hamas targeted any civilians for murder and rape.I have written about October 7 denialism. It is as odious as Holocaust denial or the early twentieth-century Tzarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that posited a secret cabal of Jews controlled the world. Reason, logic and facts, however, cannot extinguish those or other theories. They thrive precisely because they fit an often-paranoid view of the world. Record levels of distrust of government and institutions reinforce them. The pervasive loss of faith feeds a sinister hypothesis that dark forces are constantly plotting to crush our freedoms. And a reflexive government response to major events that keeps important information secret and away from the public only feeds the sense that top officials have something to hide.Widespread public cynicism is exacerbated by a parallel sense of powerlessness. Analytical thinking and a demand for proof seems so yesterday. Many social media influencers claim to know the truth by intuition alone. The inferences and deductions and reliance on logic is their grandparent’s way of dissecting a problem. The most ambitious conspiracy theory only requires good instincts. And a common flaw is a tendency to interpret evidence against a theory as evidence for it. When JFK’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, turned out to be a self-declared communist, many on the left thought that was evidence the plot must have been hatched by right wingers looking to frame the left. The fact that Biden won the presidential election was all the evidence election denialists needed to charge there had been massive voter fraud.Even hunches, however, need to stand up to common sense scrutiny. Many grand theories fail because of sheer impracticability. Dozens of events would have had to come together in a perfect patchwork or everything would unravel. Imagine how many conspirators would have been involved in planting explosive charges in the World Trade Center towers and remotely controlling the hijacked planes. What about stealing JFK’s corpse while it was being flown to an autopsy to do covert postmortem surgery that would frame Oswald as the shooter? Hundreds of conspirators would have had to keep the secret. No leak, no family discussion, no stray note or email, never once a guilty conscious or a death bed confession. That happens only in the movies.Disproving conspiracies is mostly a fool’s errand. It is impossible to convince a true believer out of even the craziest theory. It is analogous to convincing someone they joined a cult. People join groups they believe are good and somehow are blind to the truth that is abundantly clear to others. The “backfire effect” is what happens when refuting a conspiracy theory makes its proponents double down. I have learned that the hard way, over many heated discussions. My best arguments seldom ended with someone changing their minds. Instead, it often ends with me being accused of being part of the conspiracy. If a reasoned approach fails with most individuals, imagine the folly of winding back the clock once a society starts embracing a conspiratorial mindset. When social media influencers cash in on promoting conspiracies everywhere, the line between what is real and what is conspiratorial ideation is harder to judge than ever.Because I am a skeptic, I hear from a lot of people hoping to convince me they have the evidence of the next great conspiracy. Some of my best reporting about misdeeds and public corruption have come from those tips. However, I am still waiting for the ‘next Watergate.’ So are a lot of my readers. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
• 
  Republicans Can Save Women's Sports 12.12.2024 3мин

  My latest WSJ OpEd went live this evening online and will be in the print edition tomorrow. Here it is in full for Just the Facts subscribers (note: The VoiceOver for this article is an AI automated voice)Protecting women’s sports should be at the top of the Trump administration’s to-do list. The issue gained national attention in 2022, when male swimmer Lia Thomas, who had been ranked 65th among men in the nation for the 500-yard freestyle, won an NCAA swimming championship while competing as a woman. A United Nations report last month revealed that men identifying as women have won 890 medals in 29 female-only sports worldwide.The Education Department in April proposed a regulation adding “gender identity” as a protected category to Title IX rules. Title IX, enacted in 1972, bans sex discrimination by federally funded educational institutions. The new rule, which went into effect Aug. 1, allows males unfettered access to female locker rooms and bathrooms. It also signals approval of men participating in and dominating women’s athletics.Republicans tried unsuccessfully to pre-empt the Title IX changes. In 2023 the House passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which defined sex as “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” When it got to the Senate, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville—who began his career as a high-school girls’ basketball coach—asked for unanimous consent. Hawaii’s Sen. Mazie Hirono objected, saying it would bar people from playing sports “consistent with their gender.” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stymied the bill. In July Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R., Miss.) and Rep. Mary Miller (R., Ill.), introduced a resolution under the Congressional Review Act to reverse the Biden regulation. It passed the House along party lines, 210-205. Mr. Schumer again made certain it died in the Senate.Federal courts blocked the Biden administration rule in 26 states. The Supreme Court upheld these injunctions and may eventually take up the new rule itself. The new Republican-controlled Congress could settle the matter quickly by passing a bill to reverse the Biden Title IX modifications. It would sail through the House, maybe even winning some support from Democratic representatives who saw the potency of the issue in the November election. Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton has said that his party is “out of touch” and that he doesn’t want his daughters playing in sports against males.New Senate Majority Leader John Thune could force Democrats to vote on the issue. It takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Republicans will have 53, and the new Senate will have 10 members from states Donald Trump carried. Should the effort to restore Title IX stall in the Senate, Mr. Trump can issue an executive order barring institutions that receive federal funding from allowing male athletes to participate in athletic programs designed for girls and women. It will get tied up in litigation, but at least the federal government will be on the right side of the issue. The Trump administration should be at the forefront to restore fairness and demonstrate quickly that elections have real consequences for protecting women’s rights.Mr. Posner is author of “Pharma: Greed, Lies and the Poisoning of America.” Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
• 
  A Whistleblower Highlights the Hypocrisy of American Health Insurers 07.12.2024 4мин

  The brutal murder of UnitedHealth Group CEO, Brian Thompson, in the streets of Manhattan, has elicited widespread condemnation but also unleashed an online tsunami of celebratory memes and praise for the killer. The polarizing reaction has put a spotlight on the deep-seated animosity that many Americans harbor toward health insurance companies that often deny critical medical claims to protect profits. As they reject essential medical treatments, a corporate whistleblower recently provided me an internal health insurance policy that revealed they are also green-lighting expansive “gender affirming care” benefits for employees and their dependent children.Under Thompson's leadership, UnitedHealth had one of the industry’s highest rates of claim denials. A Senate subcommittee report from October found that the company denied requests for costly post-acute care at triple the rate of less expensive treatments. Worse, the insurer used an artificial intelligence-driven claims process with a 90% error rate in determining medical necessity. The industry-leading denial rate was good for shareholders but created a legion of angry patients who felt subordinated to the company’s bottom line profits. The backlash has prompted some insurers to reconsider controversial policies. Last week, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, one of the country’s biggest insurers, announced it would halt a policy change that limited reimbursement for anesthesia during surgeries.Yes, you read that correctly. Anthem BCBS had quietly rolled out a policy in three states in which it set an “appropriate number of minutes” for surgical procedures and refused to pay for anesthesia that exceeded the limits. Complications that extended surgery times made patients responsible for the costs.The Anthem policy had survived nearly a year despite vociferous industry opposition from the American Society of Anesthesiologists. However, Anthem only backtracked following Thompson’s murder.I was acutely aware of the extent of the hypocrisy of Anthem’s ‘let’s limit reimbursement for surgical anesthesia’ since I had recently received from a whistleblower a copy of a corporate “LGBT+ Benefits Guide” from the same insurer. In the Anthem healthcare policy offered by Edward Jones, a Fortune 500 firm that is the largest U.S. financial services company in the number of financial advisors, it has a section titled “Transgender-inclusive health benefits.” “Our medical plan provides gender-affirming health benefits to associates and dependents who have a diagnosis of and meet Anthem’s clinical requirements for gender dysphoria.”The plan then lists what “gender-affirming care includes”* Hormone-replacement therapy including puberty blockers for youths (where allowed by law)* Reconstructive chest, breast and genital surgery.* Other services, such as facial feminization surgery, voice modification surgery, tracheal shave/thyroid reduction surgery, etc.”Edward Jones employees can qualify for “family-oriented and surgical recovery leave” for themselves, or “a loved one [who] receives gender-affirming surgery.”If an Edward Jones employee, or dependent, “must travel more than 50-miles from your home to receive in-network gender-affirming surgery because it’s not available in your area, our medical plan covers up to $50 per day for one person and $100 per day for up to two companions in travel and lodging expenses.”Who does Anthem list as “eligible dependents?* Legal spouse.* Edward Jones-recognized domestic partner* Children born to you, adopted by you or waiting to be adopted by you; stepchildren; children for whom you are the legal guardian; foster children; and children and stepchildren of your domestic partner.”Requests for comments from Anthem or Edward Jones went unanswered.As someone who has extensively covered corporate abuses in the healthcare industry, including in my 2020 book PHARMA: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America, I’ve documented countless ways in which profits are prioritized over patients. But the murder of UnitedHealth’s CEO has brought fresh attention to the role of private insurers in perpetuating public mistrust. With healthcare decisions, as in the case of Anthem, to prioritize gender-affirming care while dialing back on such basic needs as anesthesia for the full length of a surgery, it is little wonder that so many Americans feel abandoned by a system that seems increasingly designed to work against them. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
• 
  The Arrogance of Mark Zuckerberg 09.11.2024 7мин

  Meta has kept secret a disturbing flaw in its systems by which cybercriminals exploit Instagram accounts for illegal activities, including running up charges on stolen credit cards and selling nonexistent products. The criminals exploit a weakness in Meta security by creating and linking fraudulent Instagram accounts to randomly selected legitimate Facebook profiles. This enables the hackers to mostly bypass Meta’s commerce eligibility criteria, the supposed safeguard before verifying an account for sales activities. The hackers then abuse their new accounts until Meta detects the fraud and shuts them down. However, by that time, the legitimate Facebook profiles linked to these hacked Instagram accounts are suspended or deleted in error.The result is that tens of thousands of Facebook users have unjustly had their accounts permanently deleted.What has been Meta’s response to this security issue? It has refused to address it.How do I know all this? I came to this story by a bit of personal serendipity. My wife, Trisha Posner, had thousands of friends and colleagues on her Facebook profile that she created in July 2007. This past June 13, Trisha got the notice (in the image at the top of this article) that her Facebook account was suspended “because your Instagram account lijaaketer533 doesn’t follow our rules. You have 180 days left to appeal. Log into your linked Instagram account to appeal our decision. Log into your Instagram account.”That was the first time Trisha had ever heard of an Instagram account with the username lijaakter533. She has her own Instagram accounts, a personal one under her own name, and another for our nonprofit, Antisemitism Watch. Both of those accounts were still operating.It was only when Trisha tried correcting her Facebook suspension that she immediately discovered that Meta had created a classic “Catch 22” that made it impossible to fix. Meta’s online help sends users in an endless circle of dead ends. And in this case, it only allowed an appeal to be made by the Instagram account that had violated its rules. However, since that Instagram account was created by some unknown cybercriminal, it was impossible for Trisha to access it to appeal her account suspension. Only the hacker knew that account's username and password. No matter what Trisha tried, Meta showed no interest in even acknowledging the problem, much less correcting it. Meta ignored every entreaty for a workaround. After signing up for Meta Verified on her personal Instagram account, chat representatives promised to investigate, but Trisha never heard back. She paid for Meta Pro Team support which also proved to be useless. Frustrated at Meta’s total stonewalling and unresponsiveness, Trisha filed a formal consumer complaint to the California Attorney General’s office.By this point, I got involved to determine whether Trisha’s experience was an isolated incident or part of a larger Meta problem. What I discovered was startling. I first came across FBDisabledMe, a subreddit with nearly 20,000 members many of whom had experienced the same problem: their Facebook accounts were first suspended and then ultimately deleted after hackers linked fraudulent Instagram accounts to their profiles. As with Trisha, those users had no way to appeal because only the hacker knew how to access the compromised Instagram account. After discovering FBDisabledMe, I reached out to others who would have more information. It included litigators who had fought Meta on other matters and had masses of discovery from the company, as well whistleblowers who had testified publicly about problems inside the company. Eventually, I was put in touch with a veteran software engineer who had personal knowledge of the problem that Trisha had stumbled into. According to that engineer, the 20,000 users on FBDisabledMe represented just a fraction of those affected. The real number of Facebook users who had fallen victim to the scam could be as high as 250,000. Meta’s security logs indicated that many of the affected Instagram accounts were linked to IP addresses from countries like Romania, Latvia, Belarus, and Moldova.Has Meta shared this information with Interpol or other law enforcement agencies? It is unclear since Meta refuses any public comment.Over the past week, I reached out several times to Meta’s press office for an official statement but received no response.Meta faces daily cybersecurity challenges. While it spends a lot of money on security, digital crooks are constantly probing to find weaknesses. It is troubling that Facebook will not acknowledge that this easily exploited vulnerability is leaving a trail of innocent victims who lose forever their accounts.In 2019, the FTC imposed a historic $5 billion penalty on Facebook (now Meta) and ordered the company to implement sweeping privacy requirements designed to boost transparency and accountability. What makes this issue even more egregious is Mark Zuckerberg’s apparent indifference. With over three billion users, he likely views the loss of 250,000 accounts as a minor inconvenience. Users who lose their accounts might simply create new ones, while others vent their frustrations on a subreddit that gets little attention from the tech or business press.There’s also the matter of Meta’s dismal approach to customer service. Last month, a woman named Tova Ridgway in Northern California, was so desperate to regain access to her hacked Facebook account that she drove to Meta’s headquarters. "They're like, 'I'm sorry, I can't do anything about this,” she told a local ABC affiliate. “Are you telling me you don't have anyone working for hacked pages?”“This happens every day,” a Facebook representative told her. “No, I'm sorry, there isn't.’”Ridgway found a solution through Meta Verified, a $15 a month subscription, something that did not work for Trisha. While that might work for some, it is an unjustified cost for users whose accounts were compromised due to Meta’s security flaws. Zuckerberg himself said in a blog post it would be too expensive for the company to recover and restore all hacked accounts. For a company that reported $39 billion in net profit last year, that justification rings hollow.Meta could and should be doing more to protect its users. The simplest solution for Trisha is restoring her Facebook account before it’s permanently deleted. But this goes far beyond her case. Tens of thousands of users like her—some of whom have lost years of business contacts, personal photos, and memories—are suffering because of Meta’s failure to address a critical security flaw.The most important step is for Meta to patch the security vulnerability that allows cybercriminals to manipulate Instagram accounts and cause collateral damage to Facebook users. Until that happens, it’s clear that Meta’s dismissive response to the growing problem of hacked accounts is not only inadequate but arrogant. That is never good for business in the long run. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
• 
  The Great Bank Swindle 28.10.2024 4мин

  The World Bank somehow lost track of upwards of $41 billion to fight climate change, about 40% of all its climate funding over the past seven years. The stunning disclosure was made public last week following an audit by Oxfam, the left-leaning British NGO focused on fighting worldwide poverty.The amount of missing money “could be twice or 10 times more,” according to a World Bank insider who asked for anonymity.Oxfam’s bombshell report outlined what might ultimately be an enormous public sector financial scandal. For those of you not familiar with the World Bank, it describes itself as “international development organization owned by 187 countries…that help developing nations advance their economies.” Five countries — the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Japan - are the bank’s major shareholders. Because the U.S. gives so much money to the World Bank, it is the only country that has a veto power on how it is run. The World Bank, with about $320 billion in capital, is supposed to distribute money to developing countries through low cost or zero-interest loans, grants, equity investments, and guarantees. The World Bank introduced a Climate Change Action Plan in 2016 at the direction of the U.S. and European countries that urged it to make fighting climate change an equal goal with eradicating poverty. The Bank revised its mission statement to “end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity on a livable planet.” By 2023, 41% of all the Bank’s financing to developing nations was directed to climate projects. Oxfam raised red flags — what it called “serious concerns” — that something was wrong when they began their audit of the Bank’s climate spending. It reviewed 181 climate projects the Bank had funded since 2017. “We had to sift through layers of complex and incomplete reports, and even then, the data was full of gaps and inconsistencies,” reported Kate Donald, the chief of Oxfam’s Washington D.C. office. “The fact that this information is so hard to access and understand is alarming —it shouldn’t take a team of professional researchers to figure out how billions of dollars meant for climate action are being spent.”The Bank could not account for somewhere between $24 billion and $41 billion in climate funds from the time they approved a project and the work was supposed to be completed. The World Bank did not know how the money it provided was used, not even if it was spent on the climate-initiatives for which it was earmarked. The Bank has “no single reliable source of data and information on [its] expenditures.” The lack of transparency, according to Oxfam, means “that it is impossible to verify the numbers that the Bank has reported as climate finance…”“All the figures are routinely made up,” a World Bank insider told the New York Post. “Nobody has a clue about who spends what.”Is the money missing because it was simply not accounted for by the countries that received it or did some of those tens of billions disappear into graft and corruption? That is impossible to determine because the World Bank is self-policing and not very forthcoming. Its Financial Integrity Unit is supposed to help developing nations build cases to pursue the illegal diversion of funds. And the Bank’s Office of Suspension and Disbarment (OSD) handles reports of fraud and corruption. The OSD refused my request to confirm or deny whether any of the unaccounted climate funds were the subject of an ongoing investigation.A private attorney in practice in Washington D.C., and who has helped NGO’s submit proposals for funding to the Bank, told me that, “It is a private fiefdom. They are not accustomed to much oversight.”If you have not heard about this story before this Just the Facts, that is not surprising. Although the Oxfam report was covered in the financial press by Bloomberg and Barrons, the leading MSM outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR, did not report on it. Nothing.Maybe that was because it was a money scandal involving climate change and the editors there thought that somehow sullied the underlying cause? I can’t figure out what today’s MSM editors consider newsworthy, but it is hard to imagine why they would not at least give some coverage to such a big story. Billions in missing taxpayer funds at a storied international institution should be front page news. Without widespread press coverage, the World Bank may never feel enough pressure to come clean with what really happened to all that money. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
• 
  “The Sin of Doing Real Journalism” 09.10.2024 11мин

  A whistleblower leaked to The Free Press an audio tape of a CBS news editorial meeting on Monday, October 7, in which senior executive Adrienne Roark admonished the CBS Mornings cohost, Tony Dokoupil, for his interview the previous week with author Ta-Nehisi Coates about his just published book, The Message.This episode should send shivers down the spine of every serious journalist. As Bari Weiss called it in comments on The Free Press Live, “The actual complaint is that Tony Dokoupil committed the sin of doing real journalism on morning TV.”The background is simple enough.Ta-Nehisi Coates is a greatly celebrated author. He spent a decade at The Atlantic, where he wrote extensively about African Americans and white supremacy. A MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” Fellow, Coates has won more than dozen of journalism’s top prizes, including National Magazine and George Polk awards, and a National Book Award for his second book, the 2015 Between the World and Me. It was a NY Times bestseller for two years. Over the past few years, Coates had focused on Hollywood, writing the sixth volume of Marvel Comics’ Black Panther series, landed an Oprah Winfrey-HBO series about Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement, and was hired to write the next Superman script for Warner Brothers/DC Films.Coleman Hughes, an American writer and former Manhattan Institute Fellow, wrote in a Free Press review of The Message that “Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of those journalists treated by the left-of-center establishment more like a prophet than a writer. . . .And when Coates publishes a book, it’s an event.”Little wonder that Penguin Random House has set a massive media rollout for Coates’s The Message. It is four interweaving essays about Coates’s observations and conclusions from his visits to Dakar, Senegal; Columbia, South Carolina, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem. New York magazine in a profile last month said The Message “lays forth the case that the Israeli occupation is a moral crime, one that has been all but covered up by the West.” Coates told the magazine that, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stronger and more intense than in Israel.” It was “horseshit” he told the magazine that the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors was “complicated.” For Coates, the situation in the Middle East is analogous to slavery and segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”In fact, Coates new book has been described by critics as “a one-sided polemic against Israel,” “flawed and ill-informed,” and “the crudest version of identity politics in which everything [is]… reduced to a childlike story in which the ‘victims’ can do no wrong (and have no agency) and the ‘villains’ can do no right (and are all-powerful).”The Message omits in its 260-pages that Israel is surrounded by countries that have launched four wars to annihilate it. He does not discuss that Israel must contend with Iran-backed terror groups dedicated to wiping out the Jewish state.As Coleman Hughes notes in his eviscerating review of The Message, Coates “doesn’t even mention the word Hamas—or Fatah, or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or Hezbollah, or Iran—once. In his telling, the threats don’t exist, only the barriers that Israel erects to contain them.”“That’s like writing a book about the Civil War without mentioning slavery,” notes Free Press founder, Bari Weiss. “I mean, there's so much missing information, it's more like a lie.”This was the backdrop to a September 29 interview on CBS Mornings. Tony Dokoupil, a veteran news reporter who is one of the show’s anchors, did exactly what any decent journalist would do: politely but firmly push back against Coates’s one-sided narrative.“Why does Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I've known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very talented, smart guy, leave out so much,” asked Dekoupil.“Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the First and the Second Intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits? And is it because you just don't believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?”At another point in the seven-minute interview, Dokoupil said, “Imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off the book the publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.”Coates later told Democracy Now, “I don't really have a problem with a tough interview. You know, I knew what I wrote. You know, I knew I'd be confronted. I know. Was he rude? Was he aggressive? You know, I like, I can't really get into that. Like, it's not really something that I think too much about. The question I would ask, though, is, how often on CBS, on NBC, on ABC or any major news organization, do you see someone who is a defender of the Israeli state project get confronted in that kind of way?”Social media blew up. Self-appointed woke influencers complained that Dokoupil was “too tough” and “biased.” Racism was the only narrative by which some could see a white interviewer grilling an African American writer about Israel and Palestine. Others complained that Dokoupil was biased since he has two children from his first marriage living in Israel.No one seemed to take notice that what Dokoupil did with his questioning is what is supposed to happen during any decent news interview. When I have published some of my books with controversial findings — Oswald alone killed JFK or that some Saudi royals had advance notice of 9/11 or that the Vatican profited from the Nazi death camps during World War II — interviewers often vigorously pressed me to see how I defended my findings. I never objected. It is what good reporters are obligated to do.This would have been a nothing-story if the complainers remained confined to social media. But the much more problematic response was that inside CBS News the madness played out. Some CBS news staffers claimed they were “traumatized” and complained to senior news executives continuously for a week.On October 7, by chance the anniversary of the Hamas terror attack that killed 1,200 Israelis, CBS held an editorial meeting in which the news division’s senior executives disavowed the interview and Dokoupil was eviscerated in front of his colleagues.It was an audio of that internal CBS meeting that a whistleblower sent later that morning to The Free Press.“I want to be clear,” said Adrienne Roark, in charge of all the network’s news gathering, “we will still ask tough questions. We will still hold people accountable. That's part of our job, too, but we will do so objective, and that means very plainly, we have to check our bias and opinions at the door, and that applies to every single point. After a review of our coverage, including the interview, it's clear there are times we have not met our editorial standards.”Roark went on: “There are times we fail our audiences and each other. We’re in one of those times right now, and it’s been growing. And we’re at a tipping point. Many of you have reached out to express concerns about recent reporting. Specifically, about the CBS Mornings Coates interview last week as well as comments made coming out of some of our correspondents’ reporting. I want to acknowledge and apologize that it’s taken this long to have this conversation.”Only one journalist at the editorial meeting refused to swallow the woke Kool-Aid. Jan Crawford, the network’s veteran chief legal correspondent, pushed back. “It sounds like we are calling out one of our anchors in a somewhat public setting on this call for failing to meet editorial standards for, I’m not even sure what. I thought our commitment was to truth. And when someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of a very complex situation, as Coates himself acknowledges that he has, it’s my understanding that as journalists we are obligated to challenge that worldview so that our viewers can have that access to the truth or a fuller account, a more balanced account. And, to me, that is what Tony did.“Tony prevented a one-sided account from being broadcast on our network that was completely devoid of history or facts. As someone who does a lot of interviews, I’m not sure now how to proceed in challenging viewpoints that are obviously one-sided and devoid of facts and history.”The audio of the editorial meeting makes it clear that Crawford was alone in her defense of Dokoupil. The consensus from the CBS News brass was that Dokoupil’s interview had crossed some ambiguous editorial standard.Once The Free Press broke the story about CBS scolding one of its anchors for the respectful but probing questioning of Coates, it went viral in the mainstream news. Was the Dokoupil interview too tough?” asked the Associated Press. The Washington Post judged the interview “unusually tense and substantive.”“I don’t think you understand the shockwave that interview created,” said talk show host, Trevor Noah, “not because of what you said but because of the way people felt like you were treated.”What happened next is what is to be expected. The next day, at “an emotional meeting” led by CBS Mornings executive producer, Shawna Thomas, Tony Dokoupil expressed his “regret” at having upset his colleagues. Some at the meeting were in tears, they were so distressed at what they considered his harsh questioning of Coates.The pushback from CBS staffers was so great that the network hired Dr. Donald Grant, a self-described “mental health expert, DEI strategist and trauma trainer” to counsel those who felt traumatized by what had happened. After word of that leaked, CBS cancelled Grant’s appearance at the Tuesday meeting but has not said when he will mediate the tension inside the network’s news division.“How does a DEI consultant actually add to this particular conversation?,” John Ziegler, a conservative commentator, asked the News Nation’s Dan Abrams. “Well, I actually think that the DEI aspect of this may tell the real story of what's going on here, because we live in a media world now where DEI is everything, even when it shouldn't matter to the actual subject. You showed a clip, there were four people on that set. One was a straight white male, the other three happened to be people of color. If Gayle King had asked the exact same questions that Tony did, we would not be having this conversation. This would not be a controversy, because Gayle King is a black female and also happens to be friends with Oprah. She has all sorts of PC protection. No one's going to go after her on DEI grounds. And so, I think Tony's race is an important element of this.”Bari Weiss thinks it is less about race and more about the subject matter.“And the thing is, at CBS,” said Weiss yesterday, “when they have, I don't know, a Republican, on when they have someone who you know is a vociferous advocate for the Second Amendment, on when they have any number of people on you would expect CBS to do its job. Would challenge that person, yes. So why in this case was it unacceptable? . . . . the reason that this is a sin in this case, is because of the subject, which is Israel.”“Can you imagine, on the first anniversary of 9/11 if something like this had occurred,” asks Ziegler, “where there was an author who was pro-Taliban and was gently chided on national television, and somehow the anchor, the person who asked them legitimate questions got basically destroyed in front of their own coworkers in a ridiculous meeting. That would be unfathomable, but that's how much journalism has degraded over the last 20 years or so.”Whether it is DEI or the subject of Israel that has caused CBS News to admonish one of its anchors for doing his job, there is no doubt about the message it sends to young journalists at CBS and other mainstream news outlets:“Think about a 26-year-old that works there that wants to become one of the anchors, says Weiss. “What message does it send to them? What kind of chilling atmosphere does it create?”CBS is punishing Dokoupil for the unwritten crime of journalism that violates the sanctioned coverage permitted by the network’s woke overlords. It is simply the latest in a long line of infuriating and depressing examples of how the mainstream press has become hostage to political correctness and in the process, has gutted its ability to fairly and fully report the news. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
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  Secret Earphones and Bad Moderators? 11.09.2024 5мин

  It did not take very long for conspiracy theories to start about why Trump had a bad debate night. One pro-Trump Twitter account with half a million followers posted last night, “It appears Kamala Harris was being coached by using earphones embedded in her earrings during the ABC presidential debate against President Trump.” Another pro-Trump X account posted that claim while the debate was underway and got over 5 million views.I know crazy debate conspiracy theories when I see one. In 1996 I wrote a biography of independent presidential candidate Ross Perot. He told me that he thought when he debated Vice-President Al Gore about the North American Free Trade Agreement, that Gore was fed good answers through a secret earpiece. That showed me that Perot was someone who would never admit that he had lost a one-on-one debate. He had to spin a wild story to explain why his opponent was better. Sound familiar?I am nonpartisan as a journalist. As a registered Independent I try to call balls and strikes as I see them. That means I make people angry on both sides of the political aisle at different times. I’m also a high school and university national debating champion, winner of the Meiklejohn medal while at U.C. Berkeley. What makes a good debater? In school, we had a single topic for the entire year. We did not know until immediately before each debate about which side of the issue we would argue. Being a great debater required the ability to argue both sides of controversial topics with passion, knowledge and conviction. As a society, we have mostly lost the ability to even understand why someone holds a belief contrary to our own, much less have the capability to argue their case.Can you imagine anti-Israel college demonstrators taking the stage to be advocates for Zionism? Or someone arguing as effectively both for and against abortion rights?That is, however, what debate is about.Sure, the ABC moderators could have asked tougher questions of Harris, had more follow-up to her generalities or misstatements, and pressed her more on why she and others in the administration kept telling the public that Biden was sharp as a tack in private when they knew he was not fit to run for another four years. But it is not up to the moderators to do that. Blaming the moderators for a poor performance is like a sports team losing the game and blaming the refs while refusing to admit they got beat by a better team that day. No one likes a sore loser.I have had debates in which I thought the moderator was tipping the scales in favor of my opponent. It just meant I had the responsibility for highlighting inequities in the questioning and then going on the offensive to make my points.Last night’s debate was a classic showcase of what to do and most of all what not to do.While presidential debates are not real debates, there are still basic strategies that are good no matter what the topic. Staying on message is key. I always tried to get the other debater to talk about my issues, put them on the defensive, and get under their skin. A good debater has not only studied up on all the details and nuances of a topic but is quick on their feet to adapt to unexpected questions while staying disciplined and on message.What I saw last night with Trump was someone who ignores his advisers. They must have repeatedly told him during preparation not to go off topic to talk about whether he thinks the last election was stolen or defend the size and enthusiasm of the crowds at his rallies. But there he was, doing exactly that. How did Trump get into talking about the Central Park Five, a 1989 rape of a woman in Central Park in which five Black and Latino teens were wrongfully convicted? Because Harris mentioned it and Trump, being Trump, started talking about it. He was reactive time and again, a sure way to lose control of the debate and allow an opponent to drive their issues.Last night, Harris did just about everything she needed to, without any major hiccup. She talked about the issues she wanted, put Trump on the defensive, rattled him at times, and balanced her performance by focusing on the future while mixing in an occasional dose of outrage and indignation.Trump, on the other hand, missed opportunity after opportunity to engage in a real debate instead of simply repeating canned campaign lines. It made him look like the candidate from yesterday while it allowed Harris to portray herself as the one with fresh ideas for the future. It is not easy for an incumbent to become the change candidate, but Trump allowed her to do that repeatedly. He could have pressed her for details on the many plans she said she had. But he not only failed to do that, but he backed off when discussing health care from having his own plan to talking only about “concepts of a plan.”  Want evidence that the Harris team was elated at her performance? They put out the word immediately afterwards that she was open to another debate. My simple advice for Trump if there is another round? Discipline and focus. It is the only way he will leave a debate stage without later looking to put blame on the moderators for not doing what he should have done. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
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  A Tabloid's Clickbait Spin on the JFK Files 25.08.2024 3мин

  The Washington Post published an article today by Kyle Melnick about Trump’s promise to release all the JFK assassination files and what those documents might disclose. It is thorough old-fashioned journalism, one of most balanced and informative pieces about the JFK files from a mainstream outlet this year.Melnick sets out the facts and includes interviews with me and Jefferson Morley, the editor of JFK Facts. The article shows where Morley and I agree: the full release of the files is long overdue. It also highlights were we disagree: I think the remaining files might show the CIA failed to share all its information on Oswald’s trip to Mexico City with the FBI, while Morley believes the files might show that some Kennedy opponents in the CIA worked with Oswald.Morley says freeing the files is “not about a smoking gun” while I content that even if the documents do not any provide “any evidence of a conspiracy in the case, people believing in a conspiracy will say, ‘Well, see, there you go. They destroyed the real documents.”A CIA spokesman at the close of the article says the “CIA believes all substantive information known to be directly related to Oswald has been released.” (I will have a separate comment this coming week about the significant shortcomings in that statement).The Washington Post article is responsible journalism. That, of course, means it is unlikely to go viral or bring in lots of clicks. No problem.The Daily Mail tabloid knows how to juice a story. They recast Melnick’s sober reporting into a front-page banner headline: “JFK BOMBSHELL.”The Mail focuses on Morley’s statements that CIA employees did not believe Oswald acted alone and that a counterintelligence official may have tried to “wait out” the Warren Commission by denying it information.None of that is surprising. There were plenty of government officials who thought Oswald was the assassin but suspected he might have done it as part of a conspiracy. LBJ shared the same belief as some in the CIA that Castro and Cuba had a hand in it. The problem was that there was no solid evidence to back up their hunches. And there is also no surprise that a CIA official denied information to the Warren Commission. I write in Case Closed about how the CIA hid from the Warren Commission, among other matters, that it was working with top mafia bosses to assassinate Fidel Castro.Melnick quoted me in the Washington Post saying, “Some of the biggest headlines that have been pulled from the JFK files the last four or five years are what I call tabloid stories about stories that were actually old.”The Daily Mail again proves my point.Tabloids measure success in clicks.  A clickbait headline might be a hit by their metrics. The only casualty is the truth. Little wonder so many people - who check the headlines and do not read the articles - believe there is something explosive still in the JFK files. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
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  Shame of the Week Award, Episode 84 23.08.2024 8мин

  Many of our subscribers are familiar with yesterday’s disastrous landmark court ruling in Australia that women’s only spaces must admit men who identify as women. “[I]n its contemporary ordinary meaning, sex is changeable” concluded the trial judge, and “sex is not confined to being a biological concept.”This was a test case for whether women would remain a protected sex class. The answer is no. Sex no longer defines the class. Anyone can join by declaring themselves to be a woman. The judge’s Orwellian conclusion is that men who self-identify as women, must be protected from discrimination under a law designed to protect women.At the center of this high-profile case was an online app available only to women and girls, but the verdict’s broad language could apply equally to physical spaces such as women’s changing rooms, athletics, even women’s only domestic violence and abuse shelters or prisons. The judge’s findings that gender is a personal preference rather than a product of nature and biology could have implications far beyond Australia and is why it is being celebrated widely by trans activists. The ruling, for instance, would have made mute the recent controversy about the biological sex of the Taiwanese and Algerian boxers who won gold medals at the Paris Olympics. The facts of the case seemingly are straightforward.Sall Grover, a screenwriter, launched an online app in 2020. The then 35-year-old Grover had “a conversation between me and my Mum. I had recently returned from almost ten years in Hollywood, where I had experienced everything the Me-Too Movement represents. It was my Mum who said, ‘There needs to be a way for girls to help girls!’ We decided that we would create an app despite having no idea how to do that.”Grover called her app Giggle, a collective noun for a group of girls and its mission was to create an international online community for girls and women where they could safely meet other women for freelance work, finding roommates, holiday companions, sharing car rides, maybe even partners.By serendipity, Covid had started the lock downs in Australia and many other countries in the summer of 2020. Online connection apps like Zoom boomed. In seven months, Grover had raised $500,000 and Giggle was launched. By August 2020, it was in 84 countries and had twenty thousand women and girls as members.Grover and her team enforced what they thought was a simple rule. They rejected the online applications of men who applied to join Giggle.One of the men who applied in 2021 was a transgender woman who had three years earlier gotten a revised birth certificate that listed him as a woman named Roxanne Tickle.So many women were joining the app that Grover and her team used AI to scan the selfies sent along with new applications. Artificial intelligence ‘approved’ Roxanne Tickle’s selfie as a woman. It was not until Grover later personally reviewed the application that she rejected it.Tickle filed a legal challenge claiming unlawful discrimination and cited international human rights conventions to which Australia is a party. The suit also relied heavily on Australia’s 1984 Sex Discrimination Act, a law that protected women who faced inequality or discrimination based on their sex. In 2013, Australia’s Labour government amended the Sex Discrimination Act and removed the biological definitions of men and women and replaced them with gender identity (the Prime Minister at the time was a woman, Julia Gillard).The discrimination lawsuit filed by Tickle was the first case in which the courts faced the question of whether biological sex was still protected in Australia.Grover contested the constitutionality of the 2013 gender amendments and argued that Tickle was not a woman, sex is unchangeable, and it was appropriate to block Tickle from joining Giggle to preserve a women’s-only space.The case attracted international attention. Trans activists rallied to Tickle’s support and Sall Grover was outspoken about the case’s larger implications: “It is ‘what is a woman’ case,” she told one interviewer, “it’s the most important woman’s rights case in Australian modern history, we are fighting to ensure that female is a sex class in law that men cannot identify into.” Grover’s activism drew support from some prominent women, including J.K. Rowling and Martina Navratilova, but also made her a target of merciless social media trolling and dismissive coverage from progressive news outlets such as The Guardian, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and the BBC. Grover had to suspend her Giggle app in 2022. There were financial pressures as well as increasing malware attacks on the site. She promised to get it back up but so far that has not happened. Still, she continued to fight the discrimination lawsuit from Roxy Tickle.This past April, Grover told an interviewer that, “If you’ve got a man in a female only space, you’re dealing with someone who has no respect for boundaries. You’re already dealing with a predator. Good men don’t go into female spaces. Female spaces exist to protect us from the men who want to go in.”In April of last year, Robert Bromwich — the same judge who issued the latest verdict — granted permission for Tickle to bring the case personally against Sall Grover. In June 2023, Bromwich gave a preliminary ruling that allowed the case to move forward and rejected motions for dismissal (few knew that Bromwich’s father was a noted surgeon, someone who might have contested his son’s view that gender identification trumped biology).As the case continued, the legal costs were threatening to put Grover into bankruptcy. Grover decided to crowdfund the litigation and raised nearly $600,000AU of an estimated $850,000AU in legal costs. Grover also promised that if any money was left over at the end of the final appeal, she would “donate those funds to other gender critical crowdfunders and causes. I will not keep any of the funds raised.” On the crowdfunding page, it notes that “The decision by the Federal Court will have far-reaching implications, likely influencing not only the Australian legal system but also international law and policy regarding the intersection of gender identity and sex-based rights. It will serve as a crucial reference for future legal frameworks and discussions on sex discrimination and sex-based rights, and their direct conflict with gender-identity ideology worldwide.”Yesterday’s ruling was a total disaster for biological women. The judge ruled Grover and her women’s only app “had engaged in indirect gender identity discrimination against the applicant.”  As for the question on everyone’s mind – what is a woman? – the judge ruled that all that was required was that a man “identifies and is legally recognized as a woman.” The legal recognition in this case was the revised birth certificate issued by the Queensland Register with a female sex marker.Roxy Tickle had undergone in 2019 extensive gender surgery. That, however, was not an important issue for the judge. In the ruling, surgery or hormones are not necessary for a man to be protected from discrimination as a self-identified woman.Adding insult to injury, the judge awarded Tickle A$10,000 in damages plus legal costs.Tickle was jubilant after the verdict, telling reporters outside the courthouse “I hope it is healing for trans and gender diverse people. The ruling shows that all women are protected from discrimination. I brought my case to show trans people that you can be brave, and you can stand up for yourself.”Grover said little after the ruling, tweeting only “Unfortunately, we got the judgment we anticipated. The fight for women’s rights continues.”Grover has previously said she would appeal any adverse decision, all the way if necessary to Australia’s High Court. She must. The opinion of a single male judge, with such wide-ranging repercussions for women everywhere, cannot be allowed to stand. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe
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  My Shame of the Week Award 11.08.2024 4мин

  [This post will be familiar to those on Twitter, where I have posted much of the below in a couple of long tweets that kicked off a lot of debate. At least it is getting people thinking about the consequences of what many at first think is a virtuous policy]My ‘shame of the week’ award goes to Wes Streeting, the UK Health Secretary. He said this past Wednesday that people who are racist to NHS staff in health settings “can and should” be turned away from care. That prompted a remarkably fast same-day endorsement from the Royal College of Nursing. For the first time, the country’s largest nursing association changed its 'withdrawing care' guidelines to include “racism" to instances in which "there is discriminatory behavior." The Health Secretary and the RCN said that NHS staff should never have to be subjected to abusive and violent behavior. That is undoubtedly true. But it is not what the Health Secretary and the Royal College of Nursing embraced. The new standard, as evidenced on the RCN's own site, is about controlling behavior.Doctors in civilian settings treat convicted serial killers and terrorists among many other unsavory patients, and during war, tend to enemy combatants. Israeli surgeons, for instance, saved the life of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, when he had a brain tumor while in prison in 2004. There is a duty of care that is the ethical foundation for medical practitioners. One UK health care provider posted, "I nurse all of my patients in the same way, be they sex offenders, racists, petty criminals, or Mary Poppins. My job isn't to judge or press my opinion, it's to provide health care to anyone who needs it. No matter how I privately feel about them." Another said, "When I was nursing, we treated prisoners shackled to prison officers, paedophiles, rapists etc. Everyone did, and should, get equal care by the NHS." A lot of people seem to have forgotten the outrage in 2010 when a German surgeon refused to operate on a man who was already anesthetized when he noticed a swastika tattooed on the patient’s upper arm. Are Muslim doctors going to decide not to treat patients who served in the IDF? Can Jewish doctors turn away patients with a Hamas or ISIS symbol? Are there health care providers in the UK, who are guided by the Health Secretary’s declaration, who would refuse to treat Tommy Robinson, one of the UK’s most prominent right-wing activists? Introducing racism as a supposedly objective factor is particularly challenging given that it is a constantly shifting, and often overused, concept. Is the standard for refusing to treat a patient now subject to the interpretation of racism by the treating medical staff? The University of Chicago offers a course that teaches that "Speech is a medium within which violence is performed." Does that empower someone who is triggered by what a patient says to turn them away for medical treatment? Many young people contend that anything they dislike or disagree with constitutes "literal violence."How would that work in an A&E/emergency room setting when the patient exhibiting the "discriminatory behavior, including racism" might be suffering from mental illness, dementia or Alzheimer's disease, be on the spectrum, or in great pain, or even strung out on drugs? Many patients arriving at a busy A&E are in both a physical and mental distress that brings out their worst sides. That is not an excuse for abusive behavior. It is instead a challenge to the medical staff to quickly and accurately determine whether the patient has their full mental capacity before refusing to treat them. Abuse and violence toward medical staff can and should be criminally pursued. Patients, however, even the difficult ones, are also entitled to medical care. It is a slippery slope to turn healthcare providers into subjective arbiters of whether patients should be refused medical care for "discriminatory behavior, including racism." What's next, turning away patients for misgendering? That might seem farfetched. However, Kellie-Jay Keen, a prominent British gender critical activist, has been banned recently from her general practitioner’s office for objecting to pronoun badges worn by the medical staff. Once this creeps into medical treatment, you never know where it ends. But it never ends well. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe