Opinion
By Jeff Childers
10/18/24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! I apologize for the timing and brevity of today’s post; I’m fighting off something that feels like an incipient head cold. It seems foggy-mindedness tends to slow the writing process. But it finally came together: Excellent Texas Attorney General sues University of Texas doctor under terrific new law forbidding the genderbending of kids; best example of corporate media “permissive structures” yet in classic NYT mind control piece invoking Generals Milley and Mussolini; and justice continues coming for Disney like a remorseless robot gunslinger after firing female conservative MMA actress.
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🔥🔥 Lawfare cuts both ways, just like gender surgery. The New York Times ran an encouraging story yesterday headlined, “Texas Attorney General Sues Doctor Over Treatment for Transgender Minors.”
A new 2023 Texas law recently upheld as constitutional by the state’s Supreme Court makes it illegal for healthcare providers to “affirm the child’s perception of the child’s sex if that perception is inconsistent with the child’s biological sex.”
In other words, Texas doctors aren’t allowed to make confused kids even more confused.
Under Texas’s new 2023 law, the state can revoke doctors’ medical licenses if they prescribe puberty blockers and hormone therapies to children as transsexual aids. On top of that, the law allows doctors to be sued personally for damages. I heard a rumor that the law almost included a provision requiring noncompliant doctors to receive all the banned treatments they prescribed.
This week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the first doctor under the 2023 law. The lawsuit alleged that Dr. May Lau, a pediatrics professor at UT’s Southwestern Medical Center, has treated 21 kids with hormone blockers since the law passed and even worse, she “falsified medical records, prescriptions and billing records to represent that her testosterone prescriptions were for something other than transitioning a child’s biological sex or affirming a child’s belief that their gender identity is inconsistent with their biological sex.”
So Dr. Lau is — allegedly — a forgerer, liar, fraudster, and a danger to children. I’m not exaggerating. The lawsuit described the so-called doctor as “a scofflaw who is putting the health and safety of minors at risk.” Neither Dr. Lau nor Southwestern Medical Center answered calls for comment. In other words, the Times gave her a chance to deny it, but she clammed up. Probably under the advice of counsel.
Perhaps AG Paxton should consider adding claims for criminal insurance fraud, since one suspects that bleeding-hearted Dr. Lau and the oh-so-charitable Southwest Medical Center were not working for free. In fact, one suspects their gender-bending operation was on the lucrative side.
Paxton’s complaint asks for an order compelling Dr. Lau to stop breaking the law under threat of jail, and a money judgment of $10,000 per violation ($210,000).
It’s worth reflecting on the irony that all the people currently howling in outrage, such as the ACLU, are the very same people who, about ten minutes ago, also howled in rage demanding cancellation of doctors prescribing harmless ivermectin for covid infections.
There’s an ocean of difference between the two cases. Mainly, that no democratically-elected legislature anywhere ever voted to outlaw ivermectin. Ivermectin was never banned by law, not even for covid treatment.
In fact, the only authority anti-ivermectin state medical boards could rely on was a single horsey tweet by the jackasses at the FDA — a tweet the Fifth Circuit later ruled was illegal medical advice the FDA wasn’t allowed to give in the first place.
In other words, so-called liberals are all-in for de-credentialing doctors who provide legal services to willing patients, but then decry lawsuits against doctors who willfully break the law and then cover up the evidence.
In even more good news, the Times reported that over half the states (26) now have total or partial bans on medical gender-bending for children. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to Tennessee’s ban this upcoming term.
I realize everyone has their favorites, and believe me, I am not counting any chickens, but … how about Ken Paxton for U.S. Attorney General?
🔥 The New York Times ran an unintentionally hilarious, page-one, top-of-fold story this morning headlined, “Harris and Democrats Lose Their Reluctance to Call Trump a Fascist.” In a very cowardly fashion, the Times disabled the article’s comments section, or they’d have felt the sting of my fiery remark.
Tom Wolfe, reacting to liberal hysteria over conservative ‘fascism’ in the 1960’s, famously quipped that The dark night of fascism is constantly descending on the United States, but it always lands on Europe. I’ll add a personal observation: to communists, who occupy the hind end of the political spectrum and peep backward over their shoulders, everybody else looks fascistic.
I don’t know about Europe, but the dark night of fascism has descended on the New York Times.
The Times’s article — which I do not recommend reading — was a classic “permissive structure,” the latest example of what we’ve recently discussed. It’s how the deep state communicates telepathically with democrats, signaling what they’re allowed to say and to think without getting canceled by the liberal mob.
Indeed, the Party’s Glorious Leader and Useful Numbskull has granted Democrats permission to call Trump a “fascist”:
If you doubt this type of modern journalism is anything other than mind control, ask yourself: What breaking story was reported by this front-page news section article? A politician called another politician a bad name? That’s not news.
The rest of the overlong article was a study in psychological manipulation. The Times (or the AI in the deep state’s skunkworks that really wrote the article) began by scrambling liberal readers’ grey matter, preparing it for a cognitive upgrade. In other words, the word ‘fascism’ doesn’t mean what you think it means. We’ll tell you what it means:
Control. Is that what fascism is? Control? No. The Times promptly taught its readers that fascism is not control. It’s not, for example, control of free speech, control by mandatory medical treatments, or control by Banana-republic style lawfare:
The cognitive confusion was purposeful. A confused brain is the type of brain most susceptible to suggestion.
By the time readers reach the hypnotic, mind-numbing conclusion of the logorrheic article, they still have no definition of the single word that formed the center of the entire enterprise. Indeed, defining “fascism” would work against the article’s purposes.
After all, a tangible definition could be argued and reasoned against. It’s better to set the term’s tangibility level at a consistency near warm jello. Which, ironically, is just what fascists do. Proper ones, that is.
In sum, the Times’ entire argument consisted not of defining a fascist and then showing that Trump meets the definition, but instead just approvingly repeating Hillary Clinton and General Milley calling Trump a fascist, and giving readers explicit permission to emulate them.
This article might be the best example of a Barack Obama-style permissive structure that we’ve yet examined.
🔥🔥 Yesterday, Deadline ran a delightful story headlined, “Disney Loses Latest Attempt To Stall Trial Over Gina Carano’s ‘Mandalorian’ Firing; Sex Discrimination Case Goes Before Jury Next Year.” This is the way.
Feisty actress Gina Carano, 41, got her start as a successful female mixed martial arts fighter — and she’s still fighting. Her big acting break arrived when Disney cast her as a regular on its then-hit Star Wars offshoot, “The Mandalorian.”
The Mandalorian, directed by Jon Favreau, was a refreshingly non-woke, fan-favorite Star Wars takeoff that successfully (and profitably) merged space opera with classic Wild West tropes like robot gunslingers and sheriffs, desert scenes, bar fights, and lots of shootouts.
It lasted two seasons before Disney blew it out the airlock.
In 2021, Disney was furiously engaged in a laser battle with Governor Ron DeSantis over a Florida law banning sexual materials in pre-K-3rd grade, which it lost, badly and in a very humiliating fashion. Around that time, Disney also rudely fired Carano over a single conservative tweet, throwing the records-breaking Mandalorian into a tailspin, like a disabled tie-fighter. It has never recovered.
In other words, whoever decided to pull Carano’s plug, cough Kathleen Kennedy, cost Disney a carton of credits.
At the time it fired Carano, Disney was in production of a Mandalorian spinoff, Rangers of the New Republic, in which Carano would have starred. All of that show’s investment was obliterated in a picosecond of woke pique. Crowds of Mandalorian fans became furious and boycotted the show. The very next season without Carano, Season 3, was harshly reviewed. And Season 4 remains marooned in the inky outer space region of indefinite ‘production hold’ — for two years now and counting.
Last year, with help from Elon Musk (since she was fired over a tweet), Carano sued Disney, for wrongful termination and discrimination. Disney claimed Carano was fired for referring to the Holocaust, in a tweet in which she complained about how conservatives in Hollywood were treated (i.e. being ‘yellow-starred’ for discrimination).
Carano’s lawyers pointed out a glaring double standard: at the same time, her male liberal co-star, Enrico Pascal, tweeted comparing Trump to Hitler. Despite the inflammatory, Holocaust-invoking nature of his own post, Pascal faced zero consequences—no firing, no reprimand. The contrast was stark and undeniable: Carano was shot out of the airlock for her conservative views, while Pascal’s controversial liberal tweet flew right under Disney’s woke radar.
In the penultimate development last month, Carano’s judge denied Disney’s motion to dismiss. As I’ve pointed out, usually parties have no avenue of appeal from the denial of a motion to dismiss until after trial. So the case normally moves directly to discovery. But in this case, Disney’s lawyers filed a motion seeking leave to appeal now anyway.
Yesterday, in a terse, one-sentence order, the Court denied Disney’s request for an immediate appeal. That means it’s now high noon, and Carano’s lawyers will start discovering all of Disney’s internal communications about her and about what happened. Don’t worry, this is only going to hurt for a very long time.
With the jury trial set for next September, Disney—if it hasn’t completely lost its woke corporate mind—should settle before the discovery process delivers more causes of action to Carano and more embarrassment for the entertainment giant.
This encouraging story includes a hopeful confluence of emerging factors: anti-wokeness, conservative lawfare, frontier justice, and Elon Musk once again moving the social needle.
Have a fabulous Friday! Get back here in the morning tomorrow for a Weekend Edition roundup of essential news and commentary. Till then.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
