I was just asked by a journalist for comment on the saga with US academic journals that began after I made this letter public last spring. My brief comment, which I cannot imagine will be published in full, is pasted below:

https://twitter.com/_Eric_Reinhart/status/1912958244768690407

The fact that the Trump administration has not meaningfully followed up on its attempts to intimidate scientific journals into publishing practices that align with RFK Jr's personal agendas and the regime's pseudo-scientific fabrications reflects a very important reality: When...

The Trump regime is now using US Attorneys to intimidate academic journals by sending them letters demanding they explain how they ensure ‘viewpoint diversity.’ Journal editors should be public about this and coordinate to refuse to comply with these fascist tactics. The 'radical,' 'woke' science of aspergillus infections and bronchial biopsies.

The advice my faculty friends at elite universities are getting from senior colleagues, who are themselves following their own advice: "Just keep your head down and don't attract attention. It'll pass."

It may serve self-interest, but, at scale, it ushers fascism onto campus. I can't tell you, as a humanities prof with few options for income and no non-university work experience, for example, to sacrifice your job for fundamental ethical-political principles. But by refusing to do so, you're likely ultimately going to have it taken from you anyway.

A thread on my scandal this week with LA Times and their billionaire owner, who has repeatedly meddled in editorial processes to advance his own personal agendas. The whole situation is symptomatic of the oligarchic takeover of US media and politics.👇
newrepublic.com/article/191030… I've published ~60 OpEds and am familiar with the back-and-forth of the editing processes and editorial control over final copy, headline, and subhead. The problem in this case is not the cuts alone, which I expected might be requested. It's a combination of factors, including...

I am the author of this OpEd, which was given a misleading title and from which key lines were cut—lines that made very clear that RFK Jr is dangerously ignorant, has absolutely no business near HHS, and is effectively a mass murderer in waiting.

https://twitter.com/DrPatSoonShiong/status/1885196993552584896

My first time working with the Los Angeles Times, and I expect also my last.

Preoccupation with Trump as "the end of democracy" in the US keeps sending me to Winnicott's essay on "fear of breakdown," in which what one fears is a past event that has already transpired but not been "experienced" because the ego is too "immature" to incorporate it. 1/ The fact is that democracy in the US was dead on arrival. Born in slavery and misogyny, and matured through the development of the associated distinctive form of US capitalism, it ended before it ever began, but disavowal of this reality is the basis of national identity. 2/

As a culture, we have been trained to turn to therapists and psychiatrists to define and 'treat' an ever-expanding range of feelings and experiences, and therapists and psychiatrists have been trained to see and work on a depoliticizing, individualizing plane. While therapy and psychiatry have myriad essential roles that can be life-saving and mobilizing for many, it's hard to argue that their aggregate social, cultural, and political-economic effects are not ultimately reactionary and reproductive of suffering. This is why it seems so important to me

Why is ethical dissent so rare among medical doctors, who have historically––and still now––simply gone along with so many profoundly violent, unethical practices and professional norms? 1/ Despite its image of itself as a distinctly virtuous profession dedicated to protecting human life and dignity, organized medicine’s participation in state violence is far from a new phenomenon. Nazi medicine, for example, emerged from within mainstream German medicine, which 2/

A @PIH staffer sent me a recent internal email purporting to explain why the org has not made any public comment on the unfolding genocide in Gaza. It makes no mention at all of the fact that this isn't just a random atrocity among many; it's one sponsored and enabled by the 1/ US government with which PIH collaborates, from which they receive funds, and within which they have extensive ties with officials in positions of power. Also no mention of the fact of widespread US suppression of protest and pro-Palestinian speech that would make PIH's 2/

Why does it matter that many of the world's most influential peer-reviewed academic journals systematically censor submissions related to Israeli violence against Palestinians? The ICC relies in part on scientific evidence to bring charges for criminal acts. By refusing to 1/ publish research related to Palestine or, in other cases, imposing non-standard review processes and long delays in brining such research to press, journal editors are impeding the availability of evidence to stop and deter war crimes and genocide. 2/

Fanon's observations about the political tendencies of doctors are as relevant today as ever. They are rooted in what he saw as he worked as a psychiatrist in French-colonized Algeria during its struggle for liberation, in which as many as 1.5 million Algerians were killed. 1/13 Doctors, when economically and professionally incentivized, are an “integral part of colonization, of domination, of exploitation," he wrote," and “we must not be surprised to find that doctors and professors of medicine are leaders of colonialist movements.” 2/

🧵"The Palestinian challenge to US medical ethics"

For the past 7 months, the world has been witnessing the murder of health workers, as well as their abduction, torture, execution, and the dumping of their bodies in mass graves; killing of patients in their hospital beds; 1/14 deliberate bombing of hospitals and clinics; targeted destruction of health and sanitation infrastructure; blockades to humanitarian aid and essential medications during a historic famine manufactured to serve as a weapon of war; and the infliction of conditions designed to be 2/

Today in @TheLancet: The US health industry is the largest sector in the world's largest economy, and the medical profession leverages massive political power through it. Given this, our silence on US-enabled genocide in Gaza is utterly indefensible. 1/
thelancet.com/journals/lance… I'm grateful to @jabirached_ for working with me on this. She's been pushing for months––including via this essay that was rejected by medical journals––for the medical community to confront the fact of genocide and our responsibility to stop it. 2/
bostonreview.net/articles/the-w…

I was invited to give a lecture at a US medical school in January 2024 for International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a focus on the German medical students who were part of the resistance group, The White Rose. I accepted and said I would of course draw parallels to 1/ our responsibilities in the face of an ongoing US-Israeli genocide against Palestinians. I was asked not to, as "it would just distract from the point," which was ostensibly that doctors should see political organizing and dissent as part of their ethical responsibilities. 2/

I'm recalling today my friend, a professor in India, reporting to me with disgust how a well-known NYC-based anthropologist engaged in critical theory and postcolonial studies casually asked, after agreeing to come give a lecture, if the "usual arrangements" were... ...being made for their travel. He asked of what such "usual arrangements" consisted, and was provided with a list: first-class airfare, hotel standards, specific honorarium, etc. The honorarium alone amounted to more than the annual salary of tenured faculty in his department.

🧵The New England Journal of Medicine is the world's most influential medical journal. To date, it has made not a single mention of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It's in this context that today's new essay in the series, "Recognizing Historical Injustices in Medicine and the... Journal," is highly relevant. The series focuses "on biases and injustice that the Journal has historically helped to perpetuate." To this end, my teacher of the last 16 years, Allan Brandt, wrote with Joelle Abi-Rached about NEJM's silence on Nazism:

What would happen if antidepressants, stimulants, antipsychotics, and nearly every other currently prescription-only psychiatric med were available over the counter rather than gate-kept by psychiatrists? What good comes of psychiatrists operating as gate-keepers and narcs? One problem with this is that psychiatrists' prescribing power has already functioned for decades to culturally legitimate and promulgate neurobiological reductionism and associated illness and medication narratives, generating an enormous market for psychopharmaceuticals.

Many imagine the Global South’s sympathy for Palestinians is due to some abstract anti-US/Israel ideological kinship, overlooking just how many people globally feel subjectively interpolated into the violence against Palestinians. Hundreds of millions of people are finding their own trauma and intergenerational suffering due to US/European-spawned imperial violence triggered by these images. Pakistani, Iraqi, Afghan, Yemeni, Vietnamese, Somali, Black American, Colombian, etc people who feel the planes overhead now or cop sirens on the streets as if

The physician is the natural attorney of the poor” was a slogan Rudolf Virchow, a wealthy German pathologist, politician and social medicine activist, helped popularise in the mid-nineteenth century. More than 100 years later, Frantz Fanon––a Martinican-born psychiatrist who 1/ resigned from his position in the French medical system in protest against French colonial violence in Algeria––expressed a less-idealised impression of the profession. 2/

🧵 Antipsychotics are widely prescribed in US jails and prisons, often more as a means of behavioral control via sedation than for actual psychiatric indications. Incarcerated people often welcome them, as they dull painful feelings, induce sleep, and pass the time. But the side effects of these medications are significant, sometimes irreversible, and require continuous medical monitoring to protect people from them. Incarcerated people rarely get this. After release, many continue to be prescribed these meds and assigned misdiagnoses based on prison...

Many public policy needs for building public health/safety and eliminating poverty and homelessness have long been obvious, but they’ve not been implemented. Strategic use of academic research careerism to produce endless debate with which to defer action seems a big part of why. I’m genuinely uncertain whether the push for “evidence-based policy,” which has often entailed the valuation of myopic academic fiefdoms over democratic movements and demands, has on net been more constructive or destructive for the public good, but I lean toward the latter.