Just the Facts with Gerald Posner

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

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

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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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

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

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

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

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

My take on the enduring seductive power of conspiracies Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

[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

This 10 minute attached video covers the issues I raised the other day in my article “A Dereliction of Duty? Problems in the Trump Shooting Deadline.” Smerconish lays out in the first half the latest information about the security lapses that preceded the shooting. Then we talk about what I conclude is “the greatest breach and dropping of the ball in terms of Secret Service security that I’ve ever seen.” Be sure to listen to the last minute, when Smerconish speaks about the failure of federal agencies, particularly the Secret Service and Homeland Security, to provide any public updates. “If any of those investigative agencies take issue with our timeline presentation, it’s your fault, because you haven’t come out and told the public what the public needs to know. It’s been a week, we have a right to know. In the end, we are going to find out.” Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

[Updates to this article are in double brackets, dated and in bold]. The VoiceOver for this article is only the original July 16 post] I wrote on X a couple of days ago decrying the rush to conspiracy theories about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. “How about waiting for the facts to emerge?” I asked. “There is a story behind the Trump assassination. I just don't know what it is yet.”It is still too early to answer most questions, especially given the sparse information available on Thomas Crooks, the wannabe assassin. It is not too early, however, to draw some conclusions about what appears to be a startling security failure as information emerges about missed opportunities to intercept the shooter before he pulled the trigger.I studied security protocols around political assassinations for books I did on the murders of John F. Kennedy (Case Closed) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Killing the Dream). Presidential security was lax before the Kennedy assassination changed everything. Publishing in local newspapers the president’s motorcade route was common practice. JFK was in an open convertible when Lee Harvey Oswald gunned him down with a long-distance rifle shot in Dallas. When it came to Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights preacher, King himself eschewed much of the local police protection offered in different cities. He did not want to be surrounded by a contingent of cops wherever he went. And federal protective services were not helping to protect him but rather used to spy on him.We have become accustomed to much better protection around presidents and presidential candidates in the decades since Kennedy’s murder. All the multiple layers of redundant security again got tightened considerably after the failed 1980 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.Protecting the president and candidates for the office is not fail safe. Secret Service agents with whom I have spoken over the decades acknowledge they always fear any professional assassin willing to die for the mission.That was not what the security team confronted this past Saturday in the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. A 20-year-old came within an inch of pulling off the assassination and did so notwithstanding there having been considerable time to have stopped him after eyewitnesses warned law enforcement about a potential shooter and his location.The timeline of the assassination is a damning indictment of a dereliction of duty.An NBC Pittsburgh affiliate reports this morning that one of eight members of a local Beaver County Emergency Services Unit assigned to security outside the Secret Service perimeter, spotted a suspicious man on the roof from which Crooks fired his shots. The Secret Service will almost certainly have to reevaluate its rules for setting a security perimeter for such large public events. There is always enhanced security inside the perimeter, usually weapon checks on entering the area, as well as increased surveillance by the Secret Service. Outside the perimeter local and state law enforcement are responsible. There will be plenty of questions as to how a gunman with an AR-style 223 rifle was able to shoot in an unobstructed view about 150 yards from his target. That distance, for proficient shooters, is considered an almost certain kill zone. [[July 17: It is also the same distance that Army recruits must repeatedly hit a human-sized target in order to qualify for basic proficiency with an M-16 rifle. According to an unidentified law enforcement source cited by CNN, the day before the attempted assassination, Crooks practiced with his rifle at a shooting range of which he was a member.]]The Beaver County ESU unit was composed of spotters and snipers. That first encounter with Crooks was at “prior to 5:45 p.m.” [[July 17: The New York Post reported what was meant by “prior to 5:45 p.m.” A “local police counter-sniper officer” took a long range photo of Crooks apparently crawling or leaning low to the ground around 5:30 p.m. In the photo, Crooks is wearing a gray t-s**t with a logo for Demolition Ranch, a popular YouTube channel. The police sniper who took it searched the area for him but Crooks had moved away by then.At 5:45 p.m., eighteen minutes before Trump began speaking, the same Beaver County counter-sniper officer saw Crooks again, this time on the roof of the building from which he soon tried to kill Trump. He called that into the command center. What the command center did with that information is not yet public.About 10 minutes before Trump took the stage, Secret Service went from looking at Thomas Crooks as “suspicious” to considering him a “threat.” Still, the Secret Service did not inform Trump or cancel his rally appearance.Moreover, around 3 p.m., more than three hours before Trump took the stage, CNN reports that Crooks was spotted at the rally’s screening area with a rangefinder, a binocular-like device used mostly by golfers and hunters to measure distance. The rangefinder would not have stopped him from entering the inside perimeter. Secret Service agents evidently monitored him near the screening area but did not keep surveillance on him when he walked away. The CNN reports is based on “a senior law enforcement official briefed on the investigation.” A report in the Daily Mail cites unidentified eyewitnesses who report that Crooks “was also acting strangely around the metal detectors” and that he “was furiously checking his phone and operating a hunting range finder.”]]Let that sink in.Trump did not take the stage for until 6:03 p.m.[[July 17: That was about an hour later than scheduled.]]No one is certain yet how Crooks gained access to the roof of the commercial building from which he planned to shoot Trump. [[July 17: According to an unidentified law enforcement source cited by CNN, on the morning of the shooting, Crooks bought a five-foot ladder at Home Depot. However, an ABC News report on an unclassified congressional briefing reported that Crooks did not appear use the ladder to climb on the roof and the ladder was not found at the scene. Investigators believe Crooks scaled an air conditioning unit of an adjacent building and pulled himself up onto the roof. He managed from there to gain access to the top of the building he had chosen to set up a sniper’s nest. Eyewitnesses told ABC News that Crooks shimmied up the slope of the roof to the area where he ultimately shot at Trump.]].A stunning development today was that Secret Service Director, Kimberly Cheatle, told ABC News that a local police sniper team was stationed inside the one story structure while Crooks was on the roof. Cheatle emphasized that local police - not the Secret Service - were “responsible” for securing the outer perimeter.The New York Post quoted unidentified sources that the police were still inside the building when the shooting started.By 6:09, people at the rally began voicing concerns about the man they saw in a prone position on top of a building roof. An amateur video captures the anxious couple of minutes of chaos that preceded the shots.“Look, they're all pointing,” someone says as at least one police officer walks around the side of the building.“Someone's on top of the roof.”“There he is, right there. Right there, see him? He's laying down.”Someone else gestures to the cop, “He's on the roof … right here, right on the roof!”Other witnesses told CBS News, they had seen “the guy move from roof to roof. [I] told an officer [he] was on the roof.”Michael Slupe, the Butler County Sheriff, confirmed to CBS’s Pittsburgh affiliate, KDKA, that shortly before the shooting began, one of his armed officers reached the ledge of the roof that Crooks had picked as his sniper’s nest. The cop evidently backed off when the gunman pointed the rifle toward him.“All I know is the officer had both hands up on the roof to get up onto the roof,” Slupe recounted “because the shooter had turned towards the officer. And rightfully and smartfully [sic], the officer let go.”  Slupe admitted that after that officer retreated from confronting Crooks, the shooter pointed his rifle back toward the rally stage.It is not yet known if the police who learned of a man on a roof with a rifle immediately warned Secret Service agents. Although four police officials told NBC news that when rallygoers told local cops about a man behaving strangely near the security checkpoint, the Secret Service was told and the local police began looking for him.Twelve seconds before the first shot, a police officer on amateur video is seen walking around the building that has Crooks on the roof. Yet in another video which starts exactly five seconds before the first shot, a group of people are screaming that the man on the roof has a gun. Some start running away from where Crooks is readying to shoot Trump.A third video –- only four seconds before Crooks pulls the trigger — shows more people yelling that the shooter is “right here” and pointing to the rooftop sniper’s nest.A multi-feed video montage put together by MilkBarTV uses video clips from different angles to show the chaos in the agonizing 120 seconds preceding the failed assassination. People spot Crooks on the roof and try to alert the police. The rally attendee shooting the video hears a nearby commotion. “Look, they’re all pointing,” he says. He pans the camera seconds later and captures a police officer walking around the front of the building that Crooks was on top of.More people start gathering around to see what is happening. A few can be heard in the background.“Yeah, someone’s on top of the roof, look! There he is right there, see him? He’s laying down, see him?”“Yeah, he’s lying down,” replies a female voice.Crooks comes into view for the first time, lying on his right side, at the video’s 17-second mark.Five seconds later the crowd moves closer to the building to check on the growing ruckus. Another ten seconds passes before the man filming points out Crooks to another bystander. At the 34-second mark, Crooks is in the frame and rolls from his right side to rest on his stomach.While Crooks is changing his shooting position, a male voice yells “Officer!”A woman begins providing a play-by-play of what she sees and calls out to nearby police. “Come over here, he’s on the roof! He’s flat! Right here, he’s flat on the roof! He’s standing up now, he went flat on the roof again.”Others in the crowd can be heard calling out but it is not possible to make out what they were saying.At the 52-second mark, about a minute before the first shot is fired, the video montage shifts to a full frame of Trump speaking on stage. It returns to a split-screen when the timer gets to 1minute and 15 seconds and later changes to four simultaneous views, two of Trump, one from the original videographer, and one view from behind Trump.At a minute, 50 seconds, a man in what seems to be a military uniform, with a green helmet, steps into the frame and seems to motion to the crowd before disappearing as he walks in the opposite direction of the building with the shooter.At the 1 minute, 55 second mark, a male voice screams, “He’s got a gun!”It is then that the film gets increasingly shaky, yet still manages to capture what looks like a uniformed police officer walking toward the building where Crooks is prone on the roof.The first shot is only five to six seconds away. As the clock ticks down we all know now what comes next. There is no hero’s intervention, just the crack of the first rifle shot and everything erupts into chaos.The sequence of shots can be timed from news coverage of Trump’s speech. Crooks gets off the first shot at 6:11:33, as Trump was talking about immigration. The next two come on top of one another only a second later, at 6:11:34. Three seconds go by before a volley of at least three shots. And a final shot that sounds different, described by ballistics experts as an “outgoing shot.” That is likely the shot that two law enforcement officials told CBS News was the single round fired by a Secret Service sniper, assisted by a spotter, that killed Crooks. [[July 17: The Secret Service agent in charge of security for the rally was on the phone wit local and state police when the shooting began]]Did the Secret Service have all the assets it needed for the event? That is still to be determined and might not be known until after Congressional investigations obtain access to electronic and phone communications between the local Secret Service field office and Washington D.C. headquarters. Law enforcement sources who were on previous presidential protection details told the New York Post that field offices often had to fight with Washington to get the protection budget for an event, and often got only “a fraction” of what they needed.The Trump shooting timeline begs many more questions. If government officials and law enforcement should have learned anything from the JFK assassination, it is that transparency is critical to not only getting to the truth, but also to eliminating the many legitimate questions ordinary citizens will have about what took place. Does that mean the Secret Service and local and state law enforcement, and any military assets, are likely to open their files for public inspection any time soon? Do not count it. But one thing that is certain is that I, and lots of other investigative journalists, will not stop looking for the answers behind such a staggering security failure.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

[Sorry for a second Just the Facts on the same day. Long time subscribers know my regular pace is a new piece every couple of weeks or so. Below is a reprint of my Wall Street Journal OpEd. It is online now for those who have a WSJ account and want to comment there. It will be in the paper tomorrow]Incendiary political language has consequences. Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen agitated his supporters and culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. The assassination attempt against Mr. Trump follows years of relentless attacks from left-wing media and many in the Democratic Party, who likened the former president to Hitler and claimed his re-election would end democracy.The Trump-Hitler comparisons started during the 2016 campaign, accelerated after the 2017 rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., and reached a fever pitch in recent months.In December, the Washington Post ran an article by Mike Godwin titled “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you.” MSNBC’s Joy Reid said in a TikTok video a week ago: “Let me know who I got to vote for to keep Hitler out of the White House.” The New Republic’s June cover was a 1932 Hitler campaign poster altered to look like Mr. Trump. In its lead story, “American Fascism: What Would It Look Like,” the magazine editors wrote, “We can spend it”—the election year—“debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, ‘He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.’ We unreservedly choose the latter course.”This theme wasn’t limited to left-wing commentators. In December, Politico noted: “Comparing a political opponent to Adolf Hitler might seem like an extraordinary step. For Joe Biden’s campaign, it has become part of the routine of running against Donald Trump.” Biden campaign officials and surrogates have compared Mr. Trump to Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. Even the president himself fell back on the Nazi comparison. At a December fundraiser he warned that Mr. Trump’s language “echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.” In a poor choice of words last week, the president told donors that “it’s time to put Trump in a bull’s eye.”It is a shame that those who repeatedly talked about Mr. Trump as an existential threat hadn’t studied how the volatile atmosphere in 1963 Dallas and 1968 Memphis, Tenn., emboldened Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray to assassinate John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.Dallas, where 24-year-old Oswald lived, was a hotbed of anti-Kennedy propaganda and right-wing extremism. Anticommunists had portrayed the president as a traitorous appeaser of the Soviet Union. Ted Dealey, owner and publisher of the Dallas Morning News, had presented JFK a nine-page broadside during a personal meeting at the White House. Dealey said: “It is better to die than to submit to communism and slavery.”Kennedy was repeatedly portrayed as a socialist threat to the republic. Edwin Walker, a retired Army general and failed candidate for governor, led the John Birch Society’s campaign warning that JFK was secretly planning to cede U.S. sovereignty to the United Nations. Integration and civil rights added to the anti-JFK fervor. The head of the country’s largest Baptist congregation condemned Kennedy and his allies as “a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up!”In the months before Kennedy got to Dallas, King had visited and there had been a bomb threat. When U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson visited a month before JFK, an angry mob attacked him. On JFK’s arrival in November, a full-page, black-bordered advertisement in the Morning News accused the president of being a Communist tool. Walker posted thousands of handbills along the streets with an image of Kennedy and the message “WANTED FOR TREASON.”After JFK’s murder, Dallas was widely referred to as a “city of hate.” Oswald was no right-winger, but the local atmosphere made him feel like less of a fringe outsider.The same was true in Memphis in April 1968. King was no stranger to threats against his life. He had visited Miami not long before, and there were so many threats that the police begged him not to leave the hotel. A lot of white Americans were frightened of King’s message that “America is still a racist country.” A Harris poll not long before his death gave him a nearly 75% disapproval rating. Many Americans thought he hated the country, hated white people, or was a communist.In Memphis, after riot police had used indiscriminate force to stop some 1,000 sanitation workers and supporters during a march, the strike became a nasty battleground for racists. Commentary from elected officials and local media fed a lurid narrative that King was a race-baiting troublemaker whose far-left supporters made him a danger not only to Memphis but to the country itself. King’s Poor People’s Campaign march, planned for June in Washington, had become a target for right-wing critics. Newspaper editorials warned about “suspicions of communist influence.” King was painted as a narcissistic radical who threatened to cause a race war.Ray, who died in 1998, took his reason for killing King to the grave. There is no doubt, though, that he was heartened by the anti-King hysterics. He wanted to get to apartheid South Africa after the assassination, expecting to find a sanctuary.As with Oswald, who was murdered two days after he killed Kennedy, we may never know Thomas Matthew Crooks’s motive for shooting Mr. Trump. But politicians, media figures and all citizens must ask whether the constant drumbeat of Trump as Hitler might have created an atmosphere in which an unstable 20-year-old was encouraged to take a shot.There is a price to reckless speech that portrays public figures as threats to the American way of life. It can be the spark that helps push an assassin to act. It is impossible to separate the violence of political assassinations in modern American history from the temperature of the times. It takes only a little fuel to push someone into the history books as an assassin. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Take your pick of suspects. The Deep State, Jews, the Democratic Party, Islamists, Israel, maybe Putin? How about it was staged? Since I wrote Case Closed 31 years ago about the JFK assassination, I have been asked hundreds of times in interviews about whether the Kennedy conspiracies would have started quicker and been more florid had there been an internet and social media. I always said yes. The aftermath of speculation, misinformation, fake reports, hearsay, guesswork, and efforts to pin blame in this hyper-polarized political environment is even worse than I might have imagined. How about waiting for the facts to emerge? I realize that is impossible on social media in which everyone is an instant expert on bullet angles, presidential security, eyewitness and earwitness credibility, and there are self-appointed digital detectives looking for suspicious "evidence." I used to say that Americans love conspiracies. It seems it is a worldwide infection. Conspiracies happen, no doubt. But the knee jerk response to immediately see every major event as the product of a nefarious plot is a sad commentary on how most people process information. It should not be a surprise in a world in which half of Tik Tok users get their news from the app. I will wait for the slow release of information. And then I will do some reporting, question it, probe to see what was right and wrong, and criticize any shortcomings. If some government agency covers up what they should have done beforehand, I'll go after that. There is a story behind the Trump assassination. I just don't know what it is yet. But I do know enough to realize that the feverish conspiracy speculation is off the charts. By the way, I have an opinion piece running tomorrow in the Wall Street Journal. It is about the assassination, but a very different angle than this commentary. I will send it out tomorrow on Just the Facts as well. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Everybody gives lip service to free speech. Until it runs counter to what they believe. It is not easy nowadays to have a reasonable discussion about topics such as gender ideology or the effect of the T on LGB without some zealots making life miserable for those with whom they disagree. Debate often quickly devolves into a verbal food fight. No wonder so many of the smartest people I know stay away from these topics as if they are social third rails. That is especially true of my progressive friends. They have discovered that it is not just high-profile public figures, such as J. K. Rowling, who become targets of a woke mob. Ordinary people suffer the consequences of free speech by running the real risks of getting cancelled at work or in social settings. Next Monday at 7PM EST, Trisha Posner and I will be guests on a Twitter/X Space hosted by Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender (DIAG). It will be a wide-ranging discussion on how our institutions, the Democratic party, and many progressives, have been captured by gender ideology.DIAG is an all-volunteer 501c3 formed by Democrats, or politically homeless former Democrats, who still embrace liberal values but think the party has “veered way off track” when it comes to gender. DIAG’s members include parents, public health professionals, lawyers, teachers, and policy experts, all focused on the issue of gender and minors.DIAG is trying to have a voice on the gender issue inside the Democratic Party. On the Team Bios page of its website, thirteen of the sixteen people are identified by pseudonyms (one of the three listed under a real name is Jenny Poyer Akerman, some of you will remember that I was a guest on her TransMuted podcast a few weeks ago). Why are 80% of DIAG team members hiding their real names? "Many of us are balancing family situations and jobs that require us to remain anonymous." They know that merely expressing public opinions about gender ideology could cause problems with friends or families and might even put them in jeopardy professionally. It is a shame but that is where we are in 2024 when it comes to progressive censorship on issues such as gender.DIAG members are not the only ones concerned about getting into a public fray on hot button issues.A Bard professor, Omar Encarnación, wrote a New York Times opinion piece last week, “America Got Gay Marriage, but It Came at a Cost.” He argued that American gay activists who successfully pressed the campaign for same-sex marriage framed their efforts too narrowly as about “tax advantages, inheritance rights and hospital visitation privileges.” Instead, Encarnación contended, such a narrow focus “limited the transformative power of gay marriage and helped enable today’s backlash against L.G.B.T.Q. rights.”I am passing along below the smart and well-reasoned email from a friend and colleague who had drafted a response to that New York Times OpEd. My friend, a respected community activist in Florida, is himself gay, and has a unique perspective on why there has been some pushback on LGBT rights in America. However, as with the DIAG volunteers, he prefers anonymity, avoiding those activists who would prefer to make his life miserable for progressive heresy. “I do not agree that the lack of emphasis on moral equivalency of gay and straight marriage is the cause of backlash.When same-sex couples won the right to marriage, I viewed that as the culmination of gay rights activism, the normalization of gay households as additional building blocks of a traditional society with flexibility.I believe many heterosexuals felt the same way, and grew used to gay marriage, and their children gave not a thought to it.Then, gay rights organizations, having fulfilled a mission, needed to justify their existence with a new cause. This is called the March-of-Dimes effect.The March of Dimes aimed to fund the creation and distribution of a polio vaccine.They succeeded. Rather than disband, they moved on to another cause: birth defects. That, at least, was quite worthy.The gay organizations latched on to ever more initials, LBGQTIA, with ever more arcane and bizarre aims far removed and often in direct opposition to their original cause.In 1973, I believe, the psychiatric organizations removed homosexuality from their lists of mental illnesses.We were not insane, sick, and did not need treatment or therapy. Society as a whole needed therapy to let us live normal lives.Now, the trans agenda says the exact opposite. They cry that trans children suffer from an illness, gender dysphoria, and demand medical and psychiatric treatment.They are trying to normalize the therapy but not the people. The idea is to transform the trans people into the correct sex. It is as though their birth sex was a birth defect.It turns out that many young people thinking they have dysphoria are gay and will outgrow the confusion. But these organizations would rather trans away the gay, and sometimes without even asking the parents. I wonder how gay parents would feel if schools started using different pronouns from the birth sex of their children and secretly encouraged transitioning.Like any straight parent, they would go ballistic.This is the real attempt to destroy marriage and the nuclear family and have the state control everything. By latching on to this transexual revolutionary Marxist agenda so corrosive to a family-based society, gay organizations have greatly alarmed society. Their methods remind me of the Soviet Union, which would encourage students to spy on their parents for counter-revolutionary activity and betray them to state authorities.No wonder there is a backlash. Heterosexuals, after believing gay marriage was the goal, see the same organizations that fought for marriage equality, now fighting for goals that would destroy the family's ability to defend their children. They are beginning to think that we are insane, and I don't blame them.”Personally, I look forward to a time when it is possible to discuss gender with a group of Democrat party mothers and professionals, or print a critical email from a gay man about LGBT rights, and they will use their real names without fear that modern day McCarthyites will punish them for expressing independent opinions that do not fit into a progressive orthodoxy,. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

I joined the International Criminal Court in 2012. It was only ten years old and had been tarred by controversy over its credibility and independence. Still, I believed in its stated mission of providing a legal forum for bringing to justice those guilty of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression. Being an ICC member did not mean I agreed with everything it did. In 2018, for instance, it undermined its own principles when its appeal chamber unexpectedly overturned the conviction of Jean-Pierre Bemba, a Central African Republic politician found guilty of allowing war crimes under his command. And there were many instances in which I was concerned about apparent bias, had questions about fairness over the cases it pursued, and was frustrated by its glacial pace. Still, I stuck with the ICC.Today, I submit my resignation and cancel my membership. The May 21 decision to pursue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on war crimes charges, was a bridge too far. Those warrants, the first ever against any Western leaders, were an assault on the state of Israel and its right to defend itself against a terrorist enemy who violates the Geneva Convention by using its civilian population as human shields. The very suggestion of a moral or legal equivalence between a democratic country fighting an enemy that threatens its elimination and Hamas’s mass murderers is itself preposterous.The ICC prosecutor, British lawyer Karim Kahn, relied on experts versed in human rights law, not the laws of conflict. This was all about feeding a feverish anti-Israel sentiment, particularly an anti-Netanyahu virus. There is no other way to explain why the ICC so blatantly violated its key rule about its own jurisdiction.  The ICC only has jurisdiction when local courts are unwilling or unable to act. When the ICC issued arrest warrants last year for Vladimir Putin, and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian Commissioner for Children's Rights, it was confident that if it did not act, there was no independent Russian legal tribunal that would pursue those charges. The same is true with the arrest warrant request this week for three Hamas officials -- Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif — for war crimes including extermination and murder, the taking of civilian hostages, torture, rape and sanctioned acts of sexual violence. Even the ICC understands that Hamas has no intention of investigating its own atrocities. “Israel, on the other hand,” noted the Israeli ambassador to the EU, Haim Regev, “has a rigorous legal system that has proven itself willing and able to investigate and prosecute violations of international law.” President Biden, who has tried straddling an impossible middle in the conflict by arming Israel while criticizing the humanitarian response in Gaza, had no doubt the ICC move was beyond the pale. “Let me be clear,” he said, “we reject the ICC’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. Whatever these warrants may imply, there’s no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”Not all U.S. allies agree. France and Germany, most notably, have said they would arrest Netanyahu and extradite him to The Hague for trial. Germany, of course, has had some practice in arresting Jews, although I personally was surprised by their quick embrace of such an outlier warrant.I understand that the cancellation of my ICC membership is symbolic only. I hope, however, that I am not the only one to throw in the towel on a troubled tribunal whose ingrained biases have destroyed any last vestiges of authority and impartiality.This ICC — the one that wants to draw parallels between the IDF and Hamas terrorists — is destroying itself in real time.By the way, for any subscriber who also does Wiki editing, I would appreciate if someone could remove the ICC reference in my Wikipedia page, or at least update it with this Substack. I will correct my own Linkedin profile. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

There has been a lot of news recently about the deleterious effects on the developing brains of children and adolescents who spend too much time online. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (@afterbabel) and many others who have studied it pin most of the blame for spiraling rates of poor adolescent and teen mental health — including depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation — on social media. “The costs of using social media, in particular, are high for adolescents, compared with adults, while the benefits are minimal,” Haidt writes in his latest bestseller, The Anxious Generation.Social media is unquestionably an irresistible magnet for kids, but Dr. James Winston, a Miami Beach-based psychologist with 30 years of experience in the field of addiction, says putting the blame on social media is too simplistic. Winston believes that the culprit is the device itself — the smartphone — and that extensive use during the crucial years of childhood brain development creates a neurological nutritional deficiency for users fourteen and younger. “Smartphones are starving the brain,” he says.While Winston’s smartphone-induced nutritional deficiency seems initially a revolutionary idea, it provides a straightforward, organic answer as to how digital technology has created and fed a mental health crisis among kids.The theory certainly drew a lot of attention and excitement after a presentation Winston made at a program last week in Miami Beach, “The Effects of Screen Time on Adolescent Brain Development.” After the event, when I spoke to academics, researchers, local politicians, and parents, all thought it might be the next big step in figuring out how to protect children when it comes to the harms of digital addiction. Margarita Louis-Dreyfus, the Swiss billionaire businesswoman and philanthropist, had flown in from Switzerland to co-host the event. She had created Human Change last year, “a coalition of parents, advocates, educators, psychologists, pediatricians, clinicians, and researchers who are raising the alarm about the dangers of digital devices and social media to children’s health and development.” This past January, Winston had joined Louis-Dreyfus and Human Change at the World Economic Forum, trying to raise awareness of the issue among the global leaders that gathered in Davos. Winston has no social media accounts and uses an AOL email address. But, as the single father of teen sons, he is no newcomer to the subject of technology and kids. I wrote about Winston two years ago in Forbes - '“This Family Foundation Is Quietly Going To War With Facebook Over How It Affects Kids’ Brains” - regarding how he and four relatives of a family foundation left by his father were spearheading scientific research at the University of North Carolina into how social media platforms affected young brains. The family’s $10 million gift in 2022 created an eponymously named National Center on Technology Use, Brain, and Psychological Development. That UNC research center is the only one in the country that does not accept money from tech companies. Last year the center published the results of a groundbreaking 3-year study in JAMA Pediatrics. It utilized functional MRIs to monitor the brains of middle school students. The results showed that the brains of teens who frequently checked their social media developed differently than those who did not check social media very much. The heavy social media users were far more hypersensitive to feedback than their less connected peers.For Winston, a UNC and Oxford alum, who worked with drug addicts at a federal prison and later as clinical supervisor at an adolescent sex offender treatment program before going into private practice, his initial interest in the field came about unexpectedly. “I used to be one of those nerd dads who walked their kids into school every day,” he recounts. “And we would get bumped into by students coming the other way. Every day that happened. Very few of them even looked up from their phones. Professionally, I knew that was one of the critical variables in addictive dynamics, interference with basic self-care, thinking about survival. We've all supposed to be aware of our surroundings, simple things like avoiding potholes or hurting ourselves or others. These kids were bumping into each other because the magnetic pull of their devices was so powerful that they were oblivious to everyone around them.”Winston talks animatedly about attachment theory, introduced by British psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s and 1960s to understand the emotional bond between infants and their parents. “We require sustained attachment to caretakers in order to develop into thriving human beings,” he says. “Where our sustained attention goes, so goes our attachment to that person, so in terms of human bonding, attention is the currency of value.”“Smartphones are strategically designed to capture this exact attention. The tech companies know exactly what they're doing. They're developing a device that is architecturally constructed to be overstimulating. That gives it a huge addictive potential. And if you think about it, it's really a parallel universe, a digital parallel universe, and it's unlimited.”The crux of the problem, says Winston, is that “adolescents are incapable of regulating hyper-arousing dynamics. That’s why we don’t let kids watch violence or allow them into a casino, because we know intuitively that they cannot integrate that in a healthy way.”A parallel problem is that smartphones significantly impact neurobiological adolescent brain development. “Our brains developed over tens of thousands of years to absorb visceral input,” says Winston, “eye contact, voice quality, touch, it is how we unfold in a healthy way.”“Our brains learned to process if someone was sarcastic, affectionate, snarky, or what it's like when you say something, and they're hurt. If they're mad, you can discern all that. The richness and dimensionality of face-to-face contact is visceral nutrition for the brain.”That is where the smartphone comes to play, and thousands of years of brain wiring starts to go haywire for kids.Winston sees all the classic signs of addiction when it comes to adolescents and smartphones. There is increased self-centeredness, cravings and dependency for the device, externalization of responsibility, and withdrawal symptoms if the smartphone is taken away. “Ever try to take an iPad away from a six-year-old? We call that reaction a tantrum, and in addiction terminology that's called withdrawal.”Some researchers have contended that tech is not a classical addiction since it does not cross the blood brain barrier. “Gambling doesn't either,” counters Winston. “But we all know gambling is an addictive disease. Cell phones don't cross your blood brain barrier but still ticks all the addiction boxes.”“Access to a drug is a critical variable in the development of an addictive dynamic,” he adds. “Smartphones are not just another tech advancement; they are qualitatively different in that they can be carried around with us all the time. While that makes it easier for people, including adults, to get addicted, it is especially dangerous for adolescents, ages 9 -14. This is the second most critical time of brain development and is when the neural highway system that we carry into adulthood is established.” The adolescent brain undergoes a massive restructuring process as kids near and enter puberty. The young brain is designed to prune itself of circuitry no longer needed from childhood. “And it is during this time,” notes Winston, “when the need for adolescent social connection is as powerful an instinct as hunger. They are transitioning from family centric mother and father to a peer system. It is wired into our DNA as a transitional period when adolescents make friends, develop empathy, and learn their social skills needed for early adulthood. Tech companies know this and exploit it. If they can get a pathway system laid down, where kids are attached to their phones, and in particular social media, they've got a lifetime customer. It's no different, except in the quality of the substance, than cigarettes. They used to target kids so they would have them for life.”Research shows adolescents spend on average eight hours a day behind a screen.“That is four months a year,” Winston says, “half of their waking hours.” He returns to attachment theory. “Attention is going through a screen instead of a dimensional dynamic with face-to -face contact. It has profound implications both emotionally, psychologically, and neurobiologically.”Why is he focused on the device as opposed to what it contains?“As an addiction guy, a critical factor that facilitates an addictive dynamic is access to a drug,” he notes. “You can't really be an alcoholic if you can't get alcohol, for instance. The constant and easy access to smartphones amplifies the addictive process.”He cites a recent study that shows kids pick up their phones roughly 100 times a day. “That is pretty extraordinary,” he says. “So, there's some magnetic pull that keeps them going.”What is good news for tech companies — that kids want to stay on their devices more than ever — is, for Winston, “horrifying in terms of adolescence. I've witnessed kids interacting with one another. Then, one kid gets kind of anxious. Instead of staying connected with the other kids, they pick up their phone. So, phones have become a medicator, which is a powerful ingredient in any addictive process. And it allows kids to avoid the hard work of really having to learn how to manage their feelings, the uncomfortable ones in particular, to work it out face to face. They go to the phone and the anxiety goes away.”That is no different in Winston’s view than an alcoholic who takes a drink to offset anxiety. Where Winston’s theory goes beyond the work of Haidt and others is in his belief that the tech addiction for kids creates a measurable nutritional deficiency. “Both fruits and candy contain sugar,” says Winston, “but they are otherwise nothing alike. There is a big difference between having a banana for a snack or a snickers bar. The simple sugars in candy spike blood sugar, are void of nutrients, and since they are calorie dense, people need to eat a lot to feel full. It is no coincidence that the brains of cocaine addicts and sugar addicts looks basically the same. You can never get enough of what you don’t need. That is smartphones.”What are the results of Winston’s nutritional deficiency? “If it was one hour a day, it might not have such bad effects on things like depression and anxiety. But the mental and psychological problems spike as it becomes a nutritional deficiency at scale with more and more hours stuck on a phone.”There are huge ramifications if Winston is right about smartphones creating a nutritional brain deficiency at a particularly critical development period for adolescent brains. It would open the door for the Surgeon General and other government health officials and institutions to get involved. Winston’s dream scenario is a ban on smartphones for kids younger than 14, the age he set for his own sons to get their phones. “It would protects adolescents’ neurobiological vulnerabilities, allowing kids a longer runway to feed on vital social ‘visceral nutrition’ which facilitates healthy brain and psychological development.”“I know everybody laughs But I think that was probably true in the 1940s if someone said that about cigarettes.” He believes that society is in the middle of the same historical process as played out with cigarettes. “Cigarettes used to be cool. Then science proved they were not only addictive but caused cancer. Legislation banned sales to minors.”At the very least, Winston hopes to get state by state or national legislation to ban smartphones at schools. Research shows a 6% increase in academic performance when phones are removed. “It is a no cost enhancement of one of schools’ primary functions.” Another ambitious goal is warning labels outlining the addictive potential of smartphones, “the equivalent of ‘cigarettes will kill you’”.“I think this still sounds radical to some people and they will think it will never happen. Interestingly, in Chile, a few months ago, they put little warning labels on processed food, and it really had a huge impact on the amount of processed food that was bought. So much so that it began to shift Chile’s obesity rate.” There is significant correlational research documenting the dangers of too much social media and smartphone use. What is missing is the hard science data. It is needed to force government action that could bolster his provocative theory with incontrovertible facts. That is why he and his family, and other activists like Margarita Louis-Dreyfus, are funding research studies.“It is why I jumped at the opportunity to get some funding to the UNC center,” says Winston. “The science must stand on its own. Whether you're Republican or Democrat or what, it doesn't matter, this is the science. In every historical social change movement, the tipping point at a national level has come after the accumulation of apolitical science.” The sooner the hard science comes, the better. The mental health of our children is what is at stake. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Gender activists are hailing an 8-6 decision by the U.S. Fourth Circuit as a Transgender Roe v. Wade. Their celebration is, however, premature. While Kadel v. Folwell is undoubtedly a landmark ruling that the Equal Rights Amendment bars state health plans from excluding medical coverage for transgender surgical procedures, one of the dissenting circuit court justices called it “imperial judging at its least defensible.” It will almost certainly be reviewed by the Supreme Court.In the spotlight in the Fourth Circuit case were two states that had excluded covering costs “in connection with sex changes.”  West Virginia’s Medicaid plan did not pay for transgender surgical procedures. North Carolina’s insurance plan for teachers and government staff did the same.The die was cast in the appellate court when the majority concluded that the state plans “cover mastectomies to treat cancer, but not to treat gender dysphoria…and chest-reconstruction surgery for cisgender women post-mastectomy, but not for gender dysphoria in transgender women.” The majority considered “treatments for a diagnosis unique to transgender patients” as “medically necessary treatments” and that the Constitution prohibited any coverage exclusions for transgender patients. The court’s bottom line: “The North Carolina State Health Plan and the West Virginia Medicaid Program discriminate on the basis of gender identity and sex in violation of the Equal Protection.”Just the Facts has subscribers in over 100 countries. Many may not be familiar with the much talked about 14th Amendment. It was ratified in 1868 in the wake of the Civil War and designed to stop states from discriminating against freed Black slaves. The Amendment gave all Blacks born in the United States citizenship as a matter of birthright. Courts have, in the 156 years since its ratification, expansively interpreted its broadly-worded second sentence: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”That language was the basis for the Supreme Court’s 1973 milestone 7-2 Roe v. Wade decision. The Roe court ruled there was a personal right to privacy implied in the 14th Amendment and that abortion was constitutionally protected.In 2019, the same Fourth Circuit appeals court that made the Kadel ruling, had demonstrated its willingness to grant constitutional protection to gender identity. In deciding in Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board that a Virginia school district could not bar a transgender boy from using whatever bathroom he chose, the court concluded that “gender identity is a protected characteristic under the Equal Protection Clause.” The following year, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in its Bostock ruling that gay and transgender status was covered by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.The Kadel ruling relies on Grimm and Bostock and expands their reach. A dissenting judge, J. Harvie Wilkinson III, summed up the potential impact of the new decision: “What plaintiffs propose is nothing less than to use the Constitution to establish a nationwide mandate that States pay for emerging gender dysphoria treatments.”In reaching its sweeping ruling, the majority provided examples of what it concluded constitute sex discrimination in the state plans. It cited, for instance, that “women can receive coverage for a vaginoplasty to treat the congenital absence of a vagina, but transgender women cannot receive a vaginoplasty to treat gender dysphoria.”The court did not further describe the birth condition that would require such surgery for women. It is Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, a rare congenital reproductive disorder defined by an underdeveloped or nonexistent uterus and vagina. When the condition affects the uterus, it means women are infertile.The two state plans covered surgeries for genitals or breasts only if the patient had a congenital condition or there was injury or a disease. Women who were diagnosed with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, would qualify for full coverage of a vaginoplasty.  Men, however, who identified as the opposite gender, would not qualify for state coverage. For men, it involves the surgical removal of the penis, testicles and scrotum and uses a skin graft from the buttocks or bowel to create a nonfunctioning pseudo-vagina.Patients did not qualify for coverage under the state plans, as one dissenting judge wrote, “to affirm a patient’s biological sex.”The same is true in another example cited by the majority, when the state plan “covers chest surgery for men who experience gynecomastia, but not for transgender men who experience gender dysphoria.”Men in either state only qualify for surgical correction of gynecomastia, a hormonal imbalance that results in a swelling of breast tissue, if “they have physical symptoms, like breast pain.”  They are not covered to treat “gender dysphoria.”The six dissenting justices understood it is not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause for state health plans to exclude coverage based on medical diagnoses.“The Equal Protection Clause does not license judges to strike down any policy we disagree with,” said Judge Richardson, writing for the dissent. “North Carolina and West Virginia do not target members of either sex or transgender individuals by excluding coverage for certain services from their policies. They instead condition coverage on whether a patient has a qualifying diagnosis. Anyone—regardless of their sex, gender identity, or combination thereof—can obtain coverage for these services if they have a qualifying diagnosis. And no one—regardless of their sex, gender identity, or combination thereof—can obtain coverage if they lack one. There is therefore nothing about these policies that discriminate on the basis of sex or transgender status.”The Kadel decision is dangerous for the breath of the constitutional protection it applies to gender medical procedures. It is also reckless in its embrace of the scientific certainty and safety about such procedures.“The science behind gender dysphoria care is far from settled,” wrote Judge Wilkerson in his dissent. “Many European nations have questioned the wisdom of hormonal and surgical interventions, particularly when used to treat children…. Providing the best possible care to adults and youth struggling with gender dysphoria is a challenging task for our States. But it is one that they are entitled to perform without premature judicial interference.”Still, the majority blew past amicus briefs that set out the extent to which the science about gender was in a state of rapidly changing flux and provided a list of recent studies that raised significant questions about the safety and long-term effects of the very surgeries the majority wants to constitutionally protect.The Kadel ruling exposes the dangers of leaving to the courts matters that should be decided by biology and medicine. It is the latest example of the politicization of gender medicine. The Supreme Court will be the last resort for permitting state legislatures to have the power to set policies on gender dysphoria treatments. Putting it under the protection of the Constitution, as Kadel does, guarantees only that evolving evidence about gender medicine will be ignored at the peril of patients and the costs borne by taxpayers. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Most readers are familiar with Sirius radio and CNN host Michael Smerconish. In an era of increasingly polarized politics, where the loudest voices on the far right and far left often garner the biggest ratings, Smerconish is an old-fashioned centrist, a lawyer by training who tries striking a reasoned balance on even the most contentious issues. Listeners to Smerconish filter him through their own world views. His effort to stay in the middle means he is not someone who would seem likely to get cancelled as a university commencement speaker.But that is precisely what has happened at Dickinson College, a premier Pennsylvania-based liberal arts school, that has rescinded its invitation for Smerconish as the school’s 2024 commencement speaker. It also cancelled an honorary degree it had planned to give him.What did he do wrong?A Muslim-Arab first year student wrote an opinion piece in the student newspaper that Smerconish supported racial profiling of Muslims and Arab Americans. The evidence? In a book Smerconish authored 20 years ago, Flying Blind: How Political Correctness Continues to Compromise Airline Security Safety Post 9/11, he wrote: “The TSA should at least be paying extra attention to those who share characteristics – either racial or circumstantial – with those who have been known to commit terror acts in the past. Makes sense to me.”That was, claimed the student, “as blatant as it could possibly be. In no uncertain terms, Smerconish advocates for racial profiling.”The class of 2024, he wrote, “deserves better than Smerconish.”That article sparked pro-Palestine student protestors to set up an encampment on campus with a key demand that Smerconish be cancelled from the commencement.Smerconish, as is his style, offered an olive branch, saying on his radio show that he would reread Flying Blind. “Chances are, that given the acquired wisdom of the last 20 years and all the knowledge that I have gleaned, and you know, reflecting on my life’s experiences, my hunch is I will probably stand behind every single word in the book.”How did that go over at Dickinson? “His statements were not a sign of the times,” proclaimed the student newspaper editorial, “but remain his own enduring prejudices.”“This should be a cautionary tale for anyone in America who believes in fairness, common sense, the free exchange of ideas, rational decision-making, and the importance of leadership in the face of hysteria,” Smerconish wrote in a public letter he shared today.Nothing in Flying Blind was considered controversial when it was published in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It still is not. However, activist students combed it looking for some sentence, anything at all that they might use to cancel him. It was not really about something they thought was objectionable from two decades ago, it is because they have disdain for someone who is not an advocate for their current anti-Israel/pro-Palestine passion.This past Saturday, the same College President, John Jones, who had invited Smerconish this past January — “On a personal note, and as a long-time acquaintance and admirer of your career, I am excited to welcome you to campus” — wrote and withdrew the invitation.Schools cancelling a speaker is nothing new. But those speakers are usually themselves firebrands whose hard-edged views run counter to the progressive ideologies that are the permitted “one think” at many schools.That even a moderate like Smerconish can run afoul of the censorial mob is evidence of both the closed mindedness of the protestors and the cowardice of school administrations to stand up to them. Those in power at many universities have abdicated their decision making to a tiny minority with the loudest megaphone.Dickinson was founded in 1783 by Dr. Benjamin Rush, a slavery abolitionist who was also one of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence. “Rush believed in freedom — freedom of thought and freedom of action,” the school proclaims on its website. It appears the school has modified the concept of “freedom of thought.” Unless someone objects, of course, and especially if that objection is couched in the modern language of racial or gender victimhood. Such a complaint does not need to be true. It just needs to be voiced and then craven school administrators race to placate the aggrieved students. Throw in a few radicalized professors, and you have the perfect storm in which a moderate like Smerconish becomes someone the student newspaper concludes is “undeserving of the honor of commencement speaker.” Smerconish, in his public letter, summed up the danger of judging a 20-year book through the prism of today’s political filters: “Times change, people change, circumstances change. Statements in books written decades ago, if penned by the well-intentioned with a history of tolerance and advocacy of unity, cannot in a just and rational society be the basis for judging someone’s soul or determining their fitness to be part of the national conversation. And it certainly shouldn’t obliterate someone’s lifetime of reputation and performance. Those students who demanded I not speak had better hope that twenty years from now, when they are looking for a job, no one will look at everything they said and did two decades earlier, yanking it out of context and using it as a weapon of personal destruction.”An oft-quoted thought from a German Lutheran pastor during World War II is, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”When cancel culture comes for middle-of-the-road commentators like Smerconish, it is strong evidence that no one is safe. At least no journalist who reaches conclusions based on facts and evidence that somehow is on the prohibited list at today’s college campuses.I am not holding my breath for any commencement address invitation coming my way any time soon. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

The United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, are among several dozen countries that have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization. The New York Times, Washington Post, PBS, and all three major television news outlets, ABC, CBS, and NBC, and other legacy media outlets, will not use the word terrorist to describe Hamas.The Black Panthers were militant. Hamas is a terror group. That is not rocket science. It is straightforward, especially for news outlets reporting on the Middle East. The legacy media, however, avoids putting terror and Hamas in the same sentence. The Associated Press style guide on the Israel-Hamas war, for example, says that the terms terrorism and terrorist have become too politicized and often are applied inconsistently. The AP made an exception after 9/11 and referred often to al Qaeda as terrorists. But not Hamas.The world affairs editor for the BBC, John Simpson, said last October that terrorism "is a loaded word," and that "it's simply not the BBC's job to tell people who to support and who to condemn — who are the good guys and who are the bad guys."Media bias is insidious on the big issues that dominate the news cycle. They can influence public opinion in something as simple as the words selected to report events. In this case, avoiding the word terror is meant to soft-pedal Hamas’s actions. The New York Times even managed to avoid the word terrorists in their initial report on the pillaging of rape, murder and abduction carried out by Hamas on October 7.Shunning the words terror or terrorists normalizes Hamas and its atrocities. Lots of groups covering everything from climate change to social justice are correctly dubbed militant. Extinction Rebellion, for instance, the militant eco-warriors, chain themselves to one another to block traffic, and engage in high profile incidents of “environmentally themed graffiti” on some of the world’s great art works. Extinction Rebellion is undoubtedly a militant group. And the mainstream press refers to them as such, sometimes even as extremist. But Extremist Rebellion does not fire rockets and send suicide bombers into civilian gatherings, nor has it unleashed an attack in which rape, kidnapping and murder were its tools of ‘resistance.’ If they did, they would correctly be classified as a terror group. Same as Hamas, but likely without the political cover of the legacy press.There should be no debate over October 7. It was a terror attack and those who carried it out were terrorists. By using militant when it comes to Hamas, the press is normalizing its horrific acts of terrorism. Six months on from October 7 and I no longer know what it would take to get the legacy press to correctly call Hamas a terror organization. I know, unfortunately, that simple good journalism is not enough. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

There has been a recent wave of comparisons between the massive late sixties and early seventies antiwar protests and today’s campus Israel-Palestinian demonstrations. While these parallels are largely imperfect, they share a common element: activist professors and radicalized teaching assistants can significantly intensify campus unrest.I experienced this first-hand growing up in San Francisco during the 1960s and attending UC Berkeley from 1972 to 1975—a period marked by significant protests against the war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the rise of the Black Power movement, and an anti-capitalism fever. As a political science major, I was surrounded by professors who were not just educators but also fervent advocates, with some quoting Mao’s Little Red Book and fostering a spirit of revolution over academic inquiry.Those professors, whom we dubbed "Mercedes Maoists," seemed to lead comfortable lives in the affluent Berkeley Hills, driving vintage Mercedes, while preaching revolutionary ideals. This wasn't mere posturing; they genuinely believed America was fundamentally flawed, a sentiment echoed by a sizable contingent of radical university teachers who distort Middle East history into a victim narrative in which Israel and western colonialism are the root of all evil.Students now arrive at college already steeped in an extreme mix of ideology and misinformation—many boasting a "history degree from TikTok." Unlike fifty years ago, we couldn't blame social media for our skewed world views.By the time I entered the Berkeley freshman class, I had embraced Dr. Benjamin Spock’s views on Vietnam. Yes, that Dr. Spock. The pediatrician whose 1950s book about raising children was a bible for my parents and many millions of others. Spock had created a revolution of sorts by suggesting our parents use less discipline and instead encourage our instincts and reinforce our independent thinking. Spock’s perspective was a precursor to the cultural revolution of the Free Speech/Haight Ashbury/Woodstock era in where cultural gurus such as psychologist Timothy Leary urged a “Human Be-In” crowd of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park in 1967 to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”As adolescents, we quoted Leary as if it was some deep philosophical revelation, the 50-year-old version of ‘going viral.’ The tumultuous political climate in northern California made it seem to us as kids that the structured world of our parents was crumbling, and that society was on a precipice of some great but unknown change. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale had founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (later mercifully shortened to the Black Panthers) across the Bay in Oakland. It was a Marxist revolutionary group that called for arming all Blacks, exempting them from the military draft, and releasing all incarcerated Black prisoners. The Panthers were ahead of their time by also demanding reparations for “centuries of white exploitation.” Martin Luther King’s activism was my parents’ style. That meant I wanted to be cutting-edge and oppositional by embracing the Panthers.When the Ohio national guard shot at hundreds of student protestors at Kent State University and killed four and wounded eight, it shocked the country. For those of us who grew up in the Bay Area, however, the police shooting at demonstrators was not new. A year before Kent State, Berkeley police had killed one and wounded dozens when they opened fire with buck and bird shot at demonstrators at a community garden called People’s Park. The city declared martial law and imposed a curfew. Ronald Reagan, who had run on a law-and-order platform when he was elected California’s governor in 1967, wasted no time sending in the national guard. Then troops arrived en masse with unsheathed bayonets and live ammunition. Military helicopters sprayed tear gas across the campus. Alameda county sheriffs, many of whom were Vietnam veterans, were let loose with truncheons on the crowds. As I started my first semester at Berkeley, hundreds of thousands protested Nixon’s mining of North Vietnamese ports by taking to the streets nationwide for massive marches, silent vigils, traffic‐blocking sit‐ins, and often violent clashes with police. A few months earlier an all-white northern California jury had acquitted Angela Davis for her role in providing the guns used in a takeover of a Marin County courthouse in which four were killed. All the political chaos meant that by the time I got to Berkeley I was primed to be receptive to the leftwing propaganda that my teachers passed for scholarship. One professor hung his favorite Mao quote in a placard over his classroom doorway: “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”An oversized Che Guevara poster greeted us at a “comparative economic systems” class. A different professor who taught about American imperialism in Central and South America encouraged us to write congratulatory letters to Chilean president Salvador Allende getting the 1973 Lenin Peace Prize. None of us were particularly bothered that the Soviet government appointed and controlled the panel who chose the winner. Allende shared the award that year with the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev.At Berkeley, professors often joined us in protests, providing solidarity with a revolutionary zeal. They also played on student fears that we would be drafted to fight an “unjust war.” Teachers helped feed a contagion that infected many students, one whose underlying philosophy was that resistance and revolution was far more important than worrying about good grades and some future job. The culmination of insanity came in 1974, just before my 20th birthday, when heiress Patty Hearst, was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a self-described Marxist guerrilla group.On an audiotape released to the media two months after her abduction, Hearst announced she had joined the SLA and adopted the name Tania as a tribute to one of Che Guevara's comrades. Two weeks later, she carried an M1 carbine into a San Francisco bank branch and announced to the stunned customers and employees, “I'm Tania. Up, up, up against the wall, motherfuckers!”How did that play at Berkeley? Many students and faculty cheered her on. “We Love You Tania” posters sprouted up around campus. One teaching assistant on “political discourse” held a nightly vigil to show “solidarity” with the SLA. When a campus environment reaches the extreme edges, what passes for the middle is still pretty far out. The middle at my Berkeley poly sci classes was represented by the small faction of pacifists who contended Hearst should not have been armed during the robbery.Leaving Berkeley and going on to Law School at UC San Francisco was the time for detoxing from the political fervor. I came to realize how the writings of Spock and the lectures by many poly sci professors were riddled with errors and steeped in an ideology of anti-imperialism. Contract and criminal law discussions replaced lectures about the Bolshevik revolution and Mao’s Great Leap Forward. My law school years - 1975- 1978 - coincided with the end of the Vietnam war and the disintegration of the violent Weather Underground. The “revolution” preached by the tenured Mercedes Maoists had turned into a quickly fading memory of a period when the earth seemed slightly off its axis.Today’s campus protestors might not be able to forget their past so easily. Omnipresent technology allows outdated and sometimes vile ideas to retain some cachet on Tik Tok. I am forever grateful that social media did not exist during my time at Berkeley. Today’s students will learn the hard way that ignorance and hate live forever on the internet. There will always be online evidence of who called for the destruction of Israel, denied October 7 terrorism, proudly claimed their support for Hamas, and attacked Jews for nothing more than being Jews. The university professors who have celebrated October 7 and urged “resistance at any cost” might eventually pay a price with their careers as schools investigate how tenured teachers can be dismissed for hate speech. If there is anything I learned from my Berkeley student days, it is that the influence of a radicalized faculty sets the framework by which students feel not only empowered but sanctioned by those in authority. Students should bear the ultimate responsibility for what they do. However, without taking effective action against the teachers who sanction and foment the extremist hate, I know from experience the craziness will never end._________________________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

California has reaffirmed that convicted male sex predators who have declared themselves to be women can serve their sentences in all-female prisons. The state says it is following federal law by “expressly prohibit[ing] housing decisions based solely on an incarcerated person’s external genitalia.” Mishandling this fundamental common sense issue was a key factor in Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation last year. (Check my December 2022 article, “Does Scotland’s New Gender Law Put Women at Risk.”) California is pushing the progressive gender boundaries with the legislation, named by its proponents as The Transgender Respect, Agency and Dignity Act, and signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2021. Similar laws are also in Washington state, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York City. California does not require any medical diagnosis of "gender dysphoria." Anyone can declare on a Gender Identity Questionnaire that they are a different gender than their biological sex. The ease with which men can transfer to female prisons is set out in the portion of the law named, Housing and Searching Incarcerated People Consistent with their Gender Identity. Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner Subscribe for free to receive new postsAlthough the state has spent more than $3 million on medical procedures for inmates wanting to “transition” to a different gender, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) does not require that the prisoners take any medications or have any medical procedures. The CDCR says it “does not determine an incarcerated person’s gender identity. Every incarcerated person self-identifies.” Prisoners must serve their sentences at “an institution consistent with their gender identity.” Of the 93,000 inmates in state prison, only 3,700 are women. A remarkable 90% of those female prisoners have a history of being beaten or battered. The state says that as of this month, there are “1,919 incarcerated people identified as transgender, non-binary and intersex.” All, of course, “based on incarcerated people who self-identify using the Gender Identity Questionnaire.” The vast majority of those are biological men.What does California say about the safety of transferring men, even sex offenders, to female prisons? It flips the focus to the risk facing trans-identified prisoners. “Since transgender, non-binary and intersex people may be singled out for violent attacks by other incarcerated people and are at a higher risk for victimization, CDCR must make every effort to protect this vulnerable population. Housing transgender people according to their gender identity, when safe to do so, increases safety in prisons, upholds CDCR’s duty to protect all incarcerated people and promotes successful rehabilitation.”Some commentators have suggested California convert a small prison into one exclusively for its 2,000 trans inmates. It cannot, the state claims, because a federal law, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, states, “The agency shall not place lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersex inmates in dedicated facilities, units, or wings solely on the basis of such identification or status …”Of the 363 prisoners who have asked as of March 2024 to be transferred for gender, 347 are biological men. They include murderers, kidnappers, rapists, and sexual abusers. A snapshot report from 2022 revealed that one-third of those asking for a transfer to an all-women’s prison were registered sex offenders. A quarter were serving their current sentence for some sex related crime. After that report, the state stopped providing the breakdown data. (A UK study by its Ministry of Justice reported that half of transgender prisoners were sex offenders or '“dangerous category A inmates [“those that pose the most threat to the public”] In Canada, a startling 85% of “gender diverse offenders” have a history of sex crimes as men.)Although the California law has established a cursory review process for transgender transfer requests, it does not give authority to prevent a move based only on the man’s criminal record. Last year, a report from the California Office of the Inspector General, concluded that, “If a person with a history of raping women requests to transfer to a women’s prison, this [law] may prohibit the department from denying the person’s transfer request based solely on the prospective transferee’s history of raping women.”With this background, my primary question for the Department of Corrections was whether there have been sexual assaults by men who have transferred to all female prisons?That state’s answer is that its “reporting mechanisms do not track assaults by gender identity.” Which means they have no idea. That is evident in a March 2024 report in which the Department of Corrections gives lip service only to “proactive measures designed to prevent sexual violence.” To make it more difficult for anyone to discover the real numbers, California offers transgender men the option of a new prison identification number.The Geneva Convention mandates that male and female prisoners should be housed in separate facilities. That is only an interesting historical footnote in California and other gender progressive states that have embraced the movement’s two core doctrines: gender always trumps sex and self-identification determines gender. In the case of the California prison system, it is not transgender inmates who are suffering the greatest discrimination and risk of injury. It is women who are most at risk. Putting biological men, many of them convicted sex offenders, into women’s prisons, is a misogynistic policy that at first seems so ludicrous as to be impossible. The women there have no escape from a predator. But as demonstrated in California, where trends that spread to the rest of nation often hatch, it is all too real. Amie Ichikawa, herself a former inmate in California, works with Woman II Woman, a faith-based nonprofit that was created by formerly incarcerated women to help those still in prison and others as they are released. Ichikawa believes that biological men who pretend to be transgender are exploiting female inmates in what amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment.” She is in daily contact with women serving their time across the Golden State. It is "like they're being erased and that they do not matter at all."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

Many Just the Facts subscribers requested the full OpEd published in the NY Post, not simply a link to the paper. It is below in full. I have included a voice over for those who prefer audio. It will also be available as a Just the Facts podcast.Thanks to everyone for the overwhelmingly positive response.Secret files show how international group pushes shocking experimental gender surgery for minorsNewly leaked files from the world’s leading transgender health-care organization reveal it is pushing hormonal and surgical transitions for minors, including stomach-wrenching experimental procedures designed to create sexless bodies that resemble department-store mannequins.The World Professional Association for Transgender Health documents demonstrate it’s controlled by gender ideologues who push aside concerns about whether children and adolescents can consent to medical treatments that WPATH members privately acknowledge often have devastating and permanent side effects.Yet the US government, American doctors and prominent organizations nonetheless rely on WPATH guidelines for advice on treating our youth.The files — jaw-dropping conversations from a WPATH internal messaging board and a video of an Identity Evolution Workshop panel — were provided to journalist Michael Shellenberger, who shared the documents with me.Shellenberger’s nonprofit Environmental Progress will release a scathing summary report, comparing the WPATH promotion of “the pseudoscientific surgical destruction of healthy genitals in vulnerable people” to the mid-20th-century use of lobotomies, “the pseudoscientific surgical destruction of healthy brains.”The comparison to one of history’s greatest medical scandals is not hyperbole.It is particularly true, as the files show repeatedly, when it involves WPATH’s radical approach to minors.When the organization adopted in 2022 its current Standards of Care — relied on by the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization and every major American medical and psychiatric association — it scrapped a draft chapter about ethics and removed minimum-age requirements for children starting puberty blockers or undergoing sexual-modification surgeries. It had previously recommended 16 to start hormones and 17 for surgery.Not surprisingly, age comes up frequently in the WPATH files, from concerns about whether a developmentally delayed 13-year-old can start on puberty blockers to whether the growth of a 10-year-old girl will be stunted by hormones.During one conversation, a member asked for advice about a 14-year-old patient, a boy who identified as a girl and had begun transitioning at 4. The child insisted on a vaginoplasty, a surgery that removes the penis, testicles and scrotum and repositions tissue to create a nonfunctioning pseudo-vagina. It requires a lifetime of dilation. Was he too young at 14?Marci Bowers, WPATH’s president and a California-based pelvic and gynecologic surgeon who is herself transgender, said she considered any age limit “arbitrary.”But she would not do it. Why?“The tissue is too immature, dilation routine too critical.”In lay terms, that means boys who are too young do not have enough penal tissue for the surgery and the surgeon must harvest intestinal lining to build the faux vagina. Even Bowers admits that can lead to “problematic surgical outcomes.”She would know since she has performed more than 2,000 vaginoplasties. Her highest-profile patient is 17-year-old Jazz Jennings, the transgender star of reality TV show “I Am Jazz.”Three corrective surgeries were required to fix problems from the original vaginoplasty.“She had a very difficult surgical course,” Bowers admitted in a 2022 appearance on the show. “We knew it would be tough — it turned out tougher than any of us imagined.”Still, Bowers told her colleagues in the internal discussion forum of the best age for an adolescent to undergo surgery: “sometime before the end of high school does make some sense in that they are under the watch of parents in the home they grew up in.”Christine McGinn, a Pennsylvania plastic surgeon and herself transgender, agreed. McGinn has performed “about 20 vaginoplasties in patients under 18” and thinks the “ideal time in the U.S. is surgery the summer before the last year of high school. I have heard many other surgeons echo this.”Waiting until teens are older than 18 and in college is problematic, she said: “there are too many stressors in college that limit patients’ ability to dilate.”WPATH assures patients that surgical and hormonal interventions are tested and safe. It is a different matter in private.President Bowers, for instance, said publicly in 2022 that puberty blockers are “completely reversible,” although in the internal forum she conceded it is “in its infancy.”What about children who are infertile for life since they started hormone blockers before they reached puberty? Bowers told her colleagues the “fertility question has no research.”At other stages, members talk frankly about the complications for the transition surgery for girls, a phalloplasty in which a nonfunctioning pseudo-penis is fashioned from either forearm or thigh tissue. It requires a full hysterectomy and surgical removal of the vagina. They also discuss other serious consequences, including pelvic inflammatory disease, vaginal atrophy, abnormal pap tests and incontinence.A 16-year-old girl who had been on puberty blockers for several years before she was put on testosterone for a year had developed two liver tumors that an oncologist concluded the hormones had caused. Another member described “a young patient on testosterone for 3 years” who had developed “vaginal/pelvic pain/spotting . . . [and] atrophy with the persistent yellow discharge.”Several colleagues described patients with similar conditions, some with debilitating bowel problems or bleeding and excruciating pain during sex (“feeling like broken glass”). Vaginal estrogen creams and moisturizers as well as hyaluronic acid suppositories “can be helpful.”One WPATH member seemed surprised: “The transgender people under my surveillance do not complain about this matter. However, I confess that I have never asked them about it.”The litany of transition surgery’s side effects did not stop WPATH from endorsing far more radical “nullification” surgeries for patients who do not feel either male or female and identify only as nonbinary.Several dozen so-called “de-gendering” surgeries are designed to create a sexless, smooth cosmetic appearance that is unknown in nature. There is even an experimental “bi-genital” surgery that attempts to construct a second set of genitals.In 2017, when tabloids reported a 22-year-old man had spent $50,000 to surgically remove his sex organs so he could “transform into a genderless extra-terrestrial,” it seemed a one-off oddity.But WPATH has enshrined that concept in its Standard of Care — the same document in which the group endorsed for the time first time chemical or surgical castration for patients who identify as eunuchs. (WPATH even linked to the Eunuch Archives, where men anonymously share castration fetishes.)These science-fiction-like surgeries are not only reserved for adults.“How do we come up with appropriate standards for non-binary patients?” asked Thomas Satterwhite, a San Francisco-based plastic surgeon who has operated on dozens of patients younger than 18 since 2014. “I’ve found more and more patients recently requesting ‘non-standard’ procedures.”What are nonstandard procedures? They include “non-binary top surgery,” a mastectomy without nipples. There are brutal procedures for girls that eliminate all or part of the vagina and for boys that amputate the penis, scrotum and testicles.The goal, as one San Francisco surgical clinic proclaims on its website, “is a smooth, neutral body that is cosmetically free of sexual identification.” On TikTok the trend is called a “flat front.”A particularly intense subject of discussion was whether minors could understand the lifelong consequences of their gender treatments. Minors are presumed by law to be incapable of making an informed decision about having a vasectomy or tubal ligation.Gender surgeries are an exception, however.WPATH’s Standard of Care allows all procedures so long as the minor “demonstrates the emotional and cognitive maturity required to provide informed consent/assent for the treatment.”In a May 2022 internal workshop, “Identity Evolution,” WPATH members conceded that was all but impossible.Daniel Metzger, the British Columbia endocrinologist who cowrote the Canadian Pediatric Society’s position paper on health care for trans minors, said, “I think the thing you have to remember about kids is that we’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet.”Metzger noted adolescents are incapable of appreciating the lifelong consequence of infertility. “It’s always a good theory that you talk about fertility preservation with a 14-year-old,” he said, “but I know I’m talking to a blank wall. They’d be like, ‘ew, kids, babies, gross.’ Or, the usual answer is, ‘I’m just going to adopt.’ And then you ask them, ‘Well, what does that involve? Like, how much does it cost?’ ‘Oh, I thought you just like went to the orphanage, and they gave you a baby.’ . . . I think now that I follow a lot of kids into their mid-twenties, I’m always like, ‘Oh, the dog isn’t doing it for you, right?’”There is extensive research showing adolescent brains are wired to have little control over rash behavior and are not capable of grasping the magnitude of decisions with lifelong consequences. It is why society doesn’t allow teens to get tattoos or buy guns. Car-rental agencies set 25 as the minimum age for renting a car, and Sweden sets the same limit for deciding on sterilization.Although many WPATH members privately doubt that adolescents can give truly informed consent to life-altering procedures, they must affirm whatever children say about their gender.Unless, the WPATH files disclose, the patient wants to reverse course and become a so-called detransitioner.WPATH members mostly dismiss those cases as insignificant or overblown by the media and question whether minors who want to revert to their birth sex really understand what they are doing.It’s a question that would never be asked for minors who declared themselves to be gender dysphoric.One case involved a 17-year-old boy, just graduated from high school, who had been on testosterone for two years. He was reported to be “very distraught and angry. He reports he feels he was brainwashed and is upset by the permanent changes to his body.”A self-described “queer therapist” did not believe any young person could be brainwashed. “In my experience, those stories come from people who have an active agenda against the rights of trans people.”WPATH President Bowers said that “I do see talk of the phenomenon [detransitioners] as distracting from the many challenges we face.”The leaked files put a spotlight on the danger of mixing ideological activism with medicine and science. They should serve as an urgent wakeup call for the medical associations and government agencies that rely on WPATH guidance for transgender health.The files might even prompt investigations into how those with distorted personal agendas seized control of the organization at the expense of science and patients.Investigating what has gone wrong at WPATH might prove uncomfortable for some gender progressives in the Biden administration, none more so than Adm. Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health. Levine, the first transgender four-star military officer, is a WPATH member and has lavished praise on the organization.She says it “assesses the full state of the science and provides substantive, rigorously analyzed, peer-reviewed recommendations to the medical community on how best to care for patients who are transgender or gender non-binary. It is free of any agenda other than to ensure that medical decisions are informed by science.”Either Levine is unaware of the hormonal and surgical experimentation the group promotes or refuses to acknowledge it.“The Frankenstein files.” That is how a pediatrician described the leaked documents after I shared them with her. Unfortunately, this is no horror novel. It is a medical travesty playing out in real time, and the casualties are our children. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

This is another in my occasional series on the trans industry.The United States has one of the world’s most progressive standards of gender affirming care for minors. It requires that professionals, including physicians, therapists, and teachers, must confirm the self-diagnosis of children and young teenagers who believe they are a different gender than their birth sex. The judgment of children cannot be challenged. How did we get here? It starts with a couple of words that are tossed about without most people knowing what they mean: Gender Dysphoria. The term is only ten years old. It was introduced as a treatable psychological condition in 2013 in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Healthcare professionals worldwide rely on the DSM as the authoritative guide to diagnose mental disorders.  A dozen leading psychiatrists and mental health professionals worked for a year on developing the gender dysphoria diagnosis.How was gender dealt with before 2013?The first DSM published in 1952 did not mention the word gender. It did not appear until the 1968 second edition. That listed mental distress associated with gender identity as a “sexual deviation” in adults. The condition did not apply to children or adolescents. Twelve years later (1980), the DSM third edition introduced transsexualism as a psychological disorder. That was defined as “a desire to live and be accepted as a member of the opposite sex…and a wish to have surgery and hormonal treatment to make one's body as congruent as possible with the opposite sex.” Patients had to exhibit the desire to be the opposite sex for two years before psychiatrists could make a conclusive diagnosis.A revised DSM in 1987 (DSM-III-R), changed the disorder’s name from transsexualism to gender identity disorder (GID). It expanded the disorder to include people who did not want hormones or surgery. The fourth major DSM published in 1994 kept gender identity disorder but again expanded the eligibility criteria to patients who exhibited “discomfort” with their birth sex and demonstrated “clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other areas of functioning.”When the fifth edition replaced gender identity disorder with gender dysphoria in 2013, it liberalized the criteria to include patients who exhibited a “marked incongruence between one's experienced/expressed gender and one's assigned gender.” The previous requirement for at least two years of symptoms before a diagnosis could be confirmed was slashed to six months. And most importantly, in 2013, the disorder was applied for the first time to minors.To make a diagnosis that an adolescent (ages 10 to 19) had gender dysphoria, in addition to the feelings of “marked incongruence” over gender, there had to be at least two from a list of ten symptoms:A strong desire to be treated as the opposite gender or a desire to get rid of one's own sex characteristicsA strong preference for wearing clothes typical of the opposite genderA strong preference for cross-gender roles in make-believe play or fantasiesA strong preference for the toys, games, or activities stereotypically associated with the opposite genderA strong preference for playmates of the opposite genderA strong rejection of toys, games, and activities typical of one's assigned genderA strong dislike of one's own sexual anatomyA strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the opposite genderA strong belief that one will grow up to have the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the opposite gender.A strong desire to participate in the stereotypical games and pastimes of the opposite genderAs for children younger than 10, the DSM said they had to exhibit six of those symptoms.While gender dysphoria was a frequently changing diagnosis in the psychiatric world, most professionals agreed that even in the instances in which it might be a correct diagnosis, it was a very rare occurrence. As little as .001 percent of the population had gender dysphoria that was accompanied with a desire for hormonal and surgical treatments. The missing standard of care for adolescents and childrenThe 2013 DSM’s introduction of gender dysphoria — and its extension to adolescents and children — created a new world in medicine and psychiatry. What should the standard of care be for the small number of cases in which doctors, therapists, or other professionals confirmed a diagnosis of gender dysphoria in children or young teens?There were no guidelines for minors in 2013A German-born endocrinologist who practiced in New York City, Dr. Harry Benjamin, had developed a protocol for cross-sex hormone therapy and for surgery for transgender adults who felt trapped in the wrong biological body. Benjamin is often called the father of modern transgender medicine [in a future article, I will write about the four endocrinologists and psychiatrists I call the Gods of Gender; Benjamin, John Money, Robert Stoller and Richard Green].Benjamin was a strong advocate not just for international medical standards but also for gender affirming care for adults (also called “gender confirmation care”). He thought that in most instances, medical professionals should confirm the diagnosis as quickly as they could responsibly do so and then proceed to hormones and surgery.  Benjamin founded a medical association in 1979 to promote the treatment of gender dysphoria (it was called the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), renamed later the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH))However, Benjamin had not addressed the issue of affirming care for minors in his professional writings. He did not treat minors in his clinical practice. Benjamin died in 1986, 27 years before the DSM introduced gender dysphoria and applied it to children and teens.Still, many gender advocates contended that the same standards — gender affirming care for adults — should be applied to minors.The organization Benjamin founded is today at the progressive forefront of interpreting gender affirming care and is essentially an advocacy group operating under the veneer of a medical guidelines association.  Dozens of medical groups rely on the WPATH gender-affirming care guidelines, which have been updated eight times over twenty years. WPATH wields outsized influence on trans policies for adults and minors on the WHO, the American Pediatric Association, and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinology.  LGBT advocacy groups rely on WPATH’s pronouncements on trans policies to lobby policy makers and the public that the science is settled.That is false. The science is anything but settled. There has never been a double-blind clinical trial, medicine’s gold standard, for determining the short-term safety and long-term consequences of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones for minors. There are no large-scale studies tracking patients who were given puberty blockers, or cross-sex hormones, or surgical interventions as children to determine if they were satisfied or unhappy with their gender decision.The Dutch Model and the Introduction of Puberty Blockers Although gender dysphoria was not a recognized condition that might apply to minors until 2013, the Netherlands had pioneered the concept of hormone blockers to what it called “juvenile transsexuals” in 1998 (many doctors still call it the Dutch Model.) It was developed by three Dutch clinicians based on observations of a handful of patients (only 7 children under the age of 16 had been put on puberty blockers by 2000). The researchers subjectively concluded hormone blockers reduced gender dysphoria agitation (they omitted that one teen died after puberty suppression and a vaginoplasty). Without any clinical research to support their conclusions, the trio claimed that puberty blockers were “completely reversible….in other words, no lasting undesired effects are to be expected.” A later British study designed to confirm the Dutch results was withheld for years from publication because it did not show psychological improvement and enhanced mental health for the minors.  American studies that have attempted to reinforce the Dutch Model have been of poor quality and produced mixed and poor results.The Drug Industry Money behind the Dutch ModelTwo of the original Dutch researchers in 2006 published a paper in the European Journal of Endocrinology. They concluded that puberty blocker “treatment appears to be an important contribution to the clinical management of gender identity disorder in transsexual adolescents.” Largely ignored in a footnote in their acknowledgments was: “The authors are very grateful to Ferring Pharmaceuticals for the financial support of studies on the treatment of adolescents with gender identity disorders.”  The study’s authors had presented their paper in Paris at the 2006 Ferring Pharmaceuticals International Pediatric Endocrinology Symposium.  Why did Ferring pay for the study? It had a patent on Triptorelin, one of the most expensive puberty blockers, used under the brand names Gonapeptyl and Diphereline. The study recommended puberty blockers for gender dysphoric children identified “by the first growth of pubic hair and for girls by budding breasts and for boys by growing testicles—as long as they had reached the age of 12…”  The study recommended that cross-sex hormones not be dispensed before the age of 16.Two of the Dutch researchers were leading advocates for expanded transgender treatment and served as directors of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA). When HBIGDA adopted puberty suppression as a recommended standard of care for minors in 2006, it copied it from the Dutch protocol, with the exception that it did not specify a minimum age.Puberty blockers were prescribed to 111 minors between 2000 and 2008 (70 of them were the subjects of a much-challenged study published by the Dutch researchers, again confirming their own hypothesis.Not very many clinicians adhered to the liberal Dutch rules. Some children were given endocrinological exams as young as ten. Cross-sex hormones were dispensed to children as young as thirteen.America’s Permissive Gender Guidelines for ChildrenThe Gender Management Service at Boston Children’s Hospital, founded in 2007, was the first dedicated clinic for transgender minors in America. Its co-founder, Norman Spack, was an endocrinologist who once said he was “salivating” at the possibility of treating his minor patients with puberty blockers. The Boston clinic followed the Dutch protocol, although it did not set a minimum age under which it would not prescribe the drugs. One of the Boston psychologists was dispatched to Amsterdam to be trained by the Dutch lead author.When the Endocrine Society leadership decided it was necessary to address the first clinical guidelines for “transsexual persons,” it tapped the two primary Dutch authors and Boston’s Spack to lead the committee. It is not surprising that their recommendation was an endorsement of puberty blockers for gender dysphoric children. This formal endorsement by a leading medical society moved the medicalization of children forward.Within a year of the DSM listing gender dysphoria as a treatable diagnosis for adolescents, the number of clinics specializing in “gender-nonconforming children and adolescents” had skyrocketed from the single Boston clinic to 32 (as of 2023, there are 60 clinics dedicated solely to gender affirming care for minors, and about 350 more that are clinics or medical offices that offer hormonal interventions for children and adolescents).  The U.S. clinics have adopted the most permissive interpretations of the Dutch protocol, everything from the starting ages to the duration of treatment. An international advocacy organization, the Gender Identity Research and Education Society, told parents who lived in Europe that if they wanted their gender dysphoric children to receive puberty blockers, that they should “consider taking their children to the USA.” American gender clinics have expanded the boundaries of gender affirming care for minors.  Children as young as 3 have been treated at Yale’s Pediatric Gender Program.  U.S. clinics sharply downplay the role of psychotherapy that had been suggested by the Dutch as a parallel standard of treatment. The Dutch clinicians had also tried reducing the number of false positives, those children whose desire to change their birth sex was a “transient phase” that would pass before they reached 18. To avoid putting those children for whom gender dysphoria was a fleeting stage of adolescence, the Dutch discouraged early social transitioning of minors (such as using the child’s new pronouns and names).  However, American clinics, and many U.S. school districts have instead made social transitioning the accepted standard.The American approach is to put children on hormone blockers at ever younger ages, preferably before they start puberty. That is the only guarantee, contend advocates, for a less complicated series of surgeries for those who ultimately decide to cosmetically transition. It turns out that putting children on puberty blockers assures they will at least move on to cross-sex hormones. Ninety-five percent of minors on puberty blockers go on to further cross-sex hormones or surgeries. However, a study shows that upwards of 90% not taking puberty blockers change their minds and remain with their birth sex. A Canadian study by a psychologist running a gender dysphoria clinic, meanwhile, showed that without pharmacological or surgical treatment, approximately 80% of trans patients went on to identify as having a same-sex attraction.The liberal U.S. approach has had a stunning effect on the number of minors put on hormones.  A review of data at 43 major children’s hospitals shows that puberty blockers were never dispensed to minors from 2004 to 2009; from 2010 to 2016, 92 children were put on them.  A larger study of all insurance claims filed for patients aged 6 to 17 in the U.S from 2017 and through 2021, reveals that almost 5,000 were put on puberty blockers, and another 15,000 skipped puberty blockers and went directly to cross-sex hormones.Even one of the original Dutch clinicians who helped develop the protocol for giving puberty blockers to children, Dr. Thomas Steensma, expressed his concern in 2021 that the “rest of the world is blindly adopting our research….We just don’t know. Little research has yet been done on the treatment with puberty inhibitors and hormones in young people. That is why it also seen as experimental.”What is Gender Affirming Care for Minors?Gender affirmation is the standard of care adopted in 2018 by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the world’s largest association of doctors who treat children and adolescents. The American Psychological Association has similarly embraced “culturally competent, affirmative care for transgender and gender nonconforming people, including adolescents.” The Human Rights Campaign, one of America’s most influential LGBTQ+ lobbying groups, with 3,000,000 members, declares that gender affirming care is a medical necessity when it comes to gender dysphoria.Gender affirming care covers a broad range of treatment options but always involves a confirmation of gender dysphoria by doctors, psychiatrists, and other medical and mental health professionals.A pediatrician who prefers to stay anonymous shared with me guidelines he received from the large urban hospital with which he is affiliated: “Gender identity is a deeply personal and subjective experience, and individuals should be respected and believed whenever they reveal their gender identity. Therefore, it is generally considered best practice for healthcare professionals to validate and affirm the gender identity of their patients who are seeking gender affirming care. Your role is not to invalidate or question a patient's gender identity but instead to provide compassionate and respectful care that addresses the patient's individual goals. While a formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria is helpful for the patient’s access to full medical services, it should not be a prerequisite for patients who wish to obtain gender affirming care. The decision to seek gender affirming care should therefore be made by the individual based on their own life experience and needs.”A particular problem with gender affirming care is that it is at odds with therapeutic exploration. It requires that therapists only confirm a minor’s self-diagnosis of transgender and facilitate their access to hormones and surgeries. The professionals cannot question whether the gender dysphoria is a “transient phase” or possibly the result of an underlying mental disorder. To do so would be to question the self-diagnosis, and that is forbidden. In lay talk, that means that professional discretion is eliminated. This is one issue when it concerns adults, but quite another when children and teens are involved.When minors self-diagnose with gender dysphoria, however, there is a unique preliminary medical intervention: the dispensing of hormones that block puberty. The idea is that if the birth sex hormones of a prepubescent child are blocked before a child later begins cross-sex hormones, any full transition to the opposite sex will supposedly be easier (no long-term studies have been done, it is a theory that has been put into standard practice).Administering puberty blocking hormones is problematic because the process has evolved in America so that in many cases, children are making decisions about starting a process with lifelong consequences.  Who Put the Kids in Charge?All this might be written off as another contagion from social media that affects teens at their most vulnerable time of lack of self-confidence and in a state of brain development where they have little control over impulsive behavior or are not fully appreciating the magnitude of decisions that have life-long consequences. In interviews with several psychologists who have studied the field, I learned that adolescents cannot fathom risk. They cannot digest long-term consequences; they can only appreciate the gratification from something immediate.  Children, especially adolescents, are susceptible to the pressure and influence of their peers, and the outside world has a huge, overdetermined impact on their development.Social media and internet chatrooms that target children and teens who think they might have gender dysphoria have created a confusion matrix. With more than 100 genders available from which to choose, adolescents and children seem particularly susceptible to the contagion of believing they might be trapped in the wrong body. Experts who visit schools and study trends among minors have observed startling increases, especially among teen girls. Ten years ago, one percent might have talked about gender, now, in some schools upwards of 20 percent of teen girls identify as being the opposite gender.The social media influence creates a false sense that the child has made a reasoned decision.“If you're Johnny and you want to be Julie,” a Miami Beach-based psychologist told me, “and parents say, ‘Oh, okay,’ the child gets a charge from that response. Forget the content for a moment. The charge of that response is what kids will react to; hang on to it, it becomes an artificial structure. It's no different than being fed all the increasingly lurid and damaging YouTube or TikTok videos. Children are hypersensitive to external stimuli, and it pulls kids out of themselves, and then they're doing it just to again get the attention that their parents gave them when they said, ‘I want to be Julie.’ Many parents and professionals go along because it is, like a cult phenomenon. They are being bombarded with a particular type of narrative over and over and over again.”These are the reasons society does not allow teens to get tattoos or buy guns. That is why car rental agencies make twenty-five the minimum age for renting a car; Sweden has twenty-five as the minimum age to decide on sterilization. The brain doesn’t stop its pruning and settle into something that has a degree of reliability before then.Gender dysphoria is the only area of mental health in which patients are allowed to diagnose themselves, and physicians and psychologists are barred from making any independent medical judgment.Those who present themselves to doctors or psychiatrists and announce they have depression, anxiety, or schizophrenia are never accepted at their word. But that is precisely what happens under gender affirming care for children and teens.Failing to fully “affirm” in some countries will land a doctor in professional disciplinary proceedings. In some instances, doctors who refuse to go along with a process they believe is not in the best interests of the children because it is contradicted by science have been dismissed from their jobs and professionally ostracized as transphobic.Doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists are not the only ones who can get into trouble if they do not affirm the gender dysphoria presented by a minor. Parents who say no to their children are at risk in some places, such as Sweden, of losing their children to state control. Sweden’s Board of Health and Welfare can place a child into state custody if any third party reports the parents for refusing to approve puberty blocker treatment. Until recently, Karolinska Hospital, Sweden’s medical clinic for treating those aged 17 and younger who self-diagnose with gender dysphoria, had an online, pre-printed template for a report to be filed against resistant parents. A hospital official told reporters that “We refuse to see any children without their guardian’s approval.” That guardian can be the government.The state of Washington has not let Sweden get too far ahead of the progressive gender trend.  Parents who do not affirm and provide treatment for their child's gender choice will be legally at risk of losing custody due to “neglect.” Oregon bypasses parents.  A 2015 law permits 15-year-olds to get puberty blockers or start gender reassignment surgery without parental consent. Fifteen is the same age in Oregon where teens do not need parental consent to get birth control, have a pregnancy test, and get an abortion. Oregon does, however, ban teens until they are 18 from buying cigarettes and marijuana, voting, getting a tattoo, or using a tanning bed.“It is the greatest medical scandal since lobotomies”The United States has moved far beyond the Dutch standard of care, in which no surgeries were offered to patients younger than age 18. In contrast, an NIH-funded study reveals that minors as young as 13 can get mastectomies in the U.S. There are instances in which children as young as 12 have started crowdfunding to raise money for surgery.  A recent US-based study shows that the average age for mastectomy in minors — dubbed “masculinizing chest surgery” — is 16, with a range of 14-18.  A recent Vanderbilt University study found that the number of radical mastectomies performed on teen girls had surged fivefold in recent years.At Vanderbilt itself, double mastectomies were performed on girls from 16 to 17 years of age. The clinic also provided cross-sex hormones, which can lead in some instances to lifelong sterilization, to kids as young as 13.California’s Kaiser Permanente Oakland recorded 70 “top surgeries” in 2019 on teenagers between the ages of 13 and 18. Before that, it had only performed five in total since 2013, according to a study.Until a recent Florida law banned it, Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher, a Miami-based plastic surgeon, performed 40 “top surgeries” per month, including on minors, according to The New York Times. Most patients, she told the Times, were 15 or older, but she admitted she had done the procedure on children aged 13 and 14. Since the Florida law came into effect, she has moved on to so-called bottom surgeries, such as vaginoplasties and phalloplasties.“It is the greatest medical scandal since lobotomies,” a British physician told me. It is worth noting that in the last couple of years, the U.K., Finland, and Sweden have all stopped or radically cut back on medical transition of minors. Their retrenchment is the result of a spate of recent studies that have concluded that while the medical interventions have little demonstrable benefit, the potential for lasting harm is not fully known.When will United States medical associations responsible for treating children follow the lead of progressive European nations and stop embracing the cult of transgender ideology? How many more thousands of children will suffer from getting hooked on the trans contagion will depend on that answer. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

An alarming report released Wednesday by the Defense Department Inspector General reveals that the U.S. has lost track of nearly all of the 40,000 sophisticated weapons sent to Ukraine’s front lines since February 2022.The redacted report underscores that the advanced technology and compact size of these untracked weapons — including more than $1 billion in kamikaze and switchblade drones, Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger shoulder-fired missiles, and night vision goggles — make them particularly appealing for arms smugglers and black market dealers.Approximately 60 percent of the weapons were “delinquent,” meaning they were neither initially logged into a tracking database, nor added after shipment from American stockpiles.Over a year ago, the Biden administration tried fixing this problem by providing Ukrainian troops with handheld bar code scanners to instantly upload weapon serial numbers into U.S. databases. However, this effort has had a minimal impact. Only ten scanners were sent to Ukraine and none reached the front lines, where the weapons are deployed.The Inspector General said that determining whether any weapons were illegally diverted “was beyond the scope of our evaluation.”The issue is a significant behind-the-scenes concern for American officials, particularly given Ukraine’s history of arms smuggling.A senior Interpol official, on the condition of anonymity, told Just the Facts that the international crime fighting organization believes that “some undetermined number of U.S. weaponry intended for Ukraine has gotten to criminals.” Albanian crime syndicates are at the top of Interpol’s suspect list.Interpol has no public comment. It will not even acknowledge that it is officially investigating the diversion of the U.S. arms. However, last June, Interpol chief Jürgen Stock warned publicly that “Once the guns fall silent [in Ukraine], the illegal weapons will come. We know this from many other theaters of conflict. The criminals are even now, as we speak, focusing on them. Criminal groups try to exploit these chaotic situations and the availability of weapons, even those used by the military and including heavy weapons. These will be available on the criminal market and will create a challenge. No country or region can deal with it in isolation because these groups operate at a global level.”The Interpol official who spoke to Just the Facts said that Stock’s concerns had materialized earlier than thought likely.“We anticipated that the conflict would end before we confronted weapons of war finding their way to the illicit market. The sheer volume of weapons, coupled with the difficulty in tracking them, has presented a challenge for law enforcement problem sooner than we had expected.”The report, and news of Interpol’s apprehension about some American weapons entering the black market, comes at a bad time for the Biden administration. It is likely to fuel increasing Republican congressional opposition to further aid to Ukraine. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Thank you to the 5000 loyal subscribers to Just the Facts. This Substack is somewhat unorthodox. It does not adhere to the typical model of focusing on a single subject. Some of you discovered my work from articles about OxyContin or Fentanyl, only to find the next piece discussing the dangers of puberty blockers for minors or the risks posed to free expression by increasing censorship. Just when you think you spot a theme, I am sure to deliver something unexpected; how Sweden became a gangland paradise, the latest news from those still-sealed JFK assassination files, or the emergence of an October 7 denial movement. Just the Facts tries to break some news while also delivering a view of a topic that is fresh from the mainstream media coverage.The nature of investigative journalism means Just the Facts has no set publication schedule. It depends on when I finish my reporting on a story. Sometimes a promising lead takes much longer than expected or ends up in a dead end. And many times, I am pulled away from Substack — which I keep free of charge — to fulfill commitments for books, articles, and documentaries.Currently, there are several Just the Facts projects in progress. A couple have the potential for groundbreaking revelations. Additionally, next year, I plan to feature occasional articles by guest investigate reporters.Remember, some of the stories I am chasing come from your tips. I encourage whistleblowers to contact me through my Swiss-based, encrypted email, [email protected], or via Signal at 917-300-9834. Response times may vary due to deadline pressures, but rest assured, I will get back to you.For those wanting to send general feedback, or suggest a future topic, please write to me via Substack or at [email protected] of Just the Facts, you can follow my daily updates on X (formerly known as Twitter). Finally, my wife and reporting collaborator, Trisha — the author of the international bestselling The Pharmacist of Auschwitz, and the founder of the non-profit Antisemitism Watch — also shares her daily insights on X. Trisha has a much less frequently updated Substack, No More Nice Jewish Girl. Thanks once again for your steady support and encouragement. Wishing everyone a good New Year and start to 2024.Gerald Posner Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments tomorrow morning about whether it should invalidate Purdue Pharma’s approved bankruptcy plan, the largest and most consequential in legal history. The elaborate $10 billion bankruptcy was approved in 2021 but is on hold at the request of the U.S. Trustee, the Department of Justice division that oversees bankruptcy cases. The question the Supreme Court must decide is whether the Sackler family, owners of the company that sold $35 billion of its narcotic painkiller, OxyContin, should be granted full immunity from all civil litigation because they contributed several billion dollars to the settlement.The Sacklers are one of America’s richest families.  As directors of the privately owned Purdue, they carefully orchestrated and oversaw the aggressive marketing campaign that made OxyContin into a lethal blockbuster. No Sackler has ever gone bankrupt.  So why did the bankruptcy judge, Robert Drain, give them a free pass from all litigation, something meant to be available only to those who have filed for bankruptcy?  The Sacklers’ blue-chip law firms successfully argued that bankruptcy courts have expansive powers for creative outcomes (Judge Drain retired from the bench shortly after approving the Sackler deal in Purdue Pharma and went to work for Skadden Arps, a firm that was Purdue’s “special counsel” before and during the bankruptcy).Purdue’s lawyers cited the precedent of a 1985 case in which A.H. Robins, the manufacturer of the Dalkon Shield contraceptive device, filed for bankruptcy. Plaintiffs had sued the Robins family owners, charging they had deceptively concealed evidence that the Dalkon Shield was dangerous. None of the Robins family had filed for bankruptcy. The court still discharged them from all liability. Proponents of the Purdue settlement contend that the court had to impose a global resolution, as unfair as it might seem, or otherwise litigation would drag on for years. That does not persuade any of the families of the victims of OxyContin overdoses, a crisis that has taken over half a million lives. I have spoken with dozens of them in the lead up to the Supreme Court hearing. Several advocacy organizations, and individual victims, will hold a “Last Chance for Justice” rally in front of the court tomorrow morning. Others plan to line up overnight to get seats in the Court’s public gallery in order to hear the hour-long oral arguments. The families whose lives have been upended by OxyContin believe that if the Supreme Court approves the Purdue bankruptcy, the Sacklers will benefit at the expense of all victims.Upholding the legality of the Purdue bankruptcy plan will reinforce the common perception that individuals rich enough to take advantage of the legal system’s loopholes, can get away with the most appalling conduct. The Purdue bankruptcy will be the only major one in which no principal has faced criminal charges. Ed Bisch, a father whose son died from OxyContin twenty-two years ago, summed up the feeling of many others: “It was a bankruptcy scam from day one.”At stake before the Supreme Court is much more than whether so-called “third party releases” are permissible under bankruptcy law. What is at stake is determining whether there will ever be an equitable accounting of responsibility for America’s prescription opioid epidemic. Justice requires at the very least that the Sackler family not be allowed to keep billions in OxyContin profits while walking away free from all legal liability.The Supreme Court has a chance to do the right thing by the millions of Americans who have suffered a personal loss from the Sacklers’ addictive drug. There is still time for a measure of real justice for those responsible for creating the most deadly prescription drug crisis in American history.A Note to Readers: I have written editorials about the Sackler/Purdue bankruptcy fiasco in the Los Angeles Times, and twice in The New York Times. Here are the links for those interested in more information.“The Sacklers’ Last Poison Pill,” The New York Times, with Jonathan Lipson, December 5, 2020“The Sacklers Could Get Away With It,” The New York Times, with Ralph Brubaker, July 22, 2020“How to Hold Purdue Pharma Accountable for its Role in the Opioid Epidemic,” Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2020 Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

There has been a lot of talk from the Biden administration and European allies since October 7 about the need for a two state solution. OK, let’s find out what the moderates in Gaza think about that. Ghazi Hamad is widely considered a Hamas moderate. He was a Deputy Foreign Minister in the Hamas government, and the chairman of the Border Crossing Authority in Gaza. He holds a veterinary medical degree, speaks Hebrew and English in addition to his native Arabic, and was the editor of Al Watan, the Hamas newspaper. This week he gave an interview to Lebanese TV.Here is a one minute clip.Some of the highlights: “Does that mean the annihilation of Israel?” “Yes, of course” “We are the victims…therefore no one should blame us for what we do.” “On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000, everything we do is justified.” Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

The discussions at Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee will largely be about the absent Donald Trump and subjects important to Republican primary voters. Opinion polls list one of the top issues as the lethal opioid crisis, especially that fentanyl is now the #1 killer of Americans and is pouring over the southern border. The fentanyl epidemic, however, might not have existed if the groundwork had not been set with Purdue Pharma’s blockbuster opioid painkiller, OxyContin, and the lethal opioid crisis it triggered. Asa Hutchinson is the only candidate who once had a chance early on to possibly stop the opioid crisis in its tracks. And he did not. I hope one of the FOX debate hosts, or his fellow contenders, will finally confront him about that missed opportunity. I reported the background to this in my book, PHARMA. For those not familiar with it, in December 2001, Asa Hutchinson was the head of the DEA. The drug agency had just begun to focus on the problem of OxyContin being diverted to the black market. There were reports of rising abuse and overdose deaths. The DEA’s point person was Laura Nagel, a 22-year veteran who was the second in charge of the Office of Diversion Control (the Edie character, played by Uzi Aduba, in Netflix’s Painkiller, is loosely based on Nagel). Nagel was convinced that Purdue Pharma was not doing nearly enough to stop OxyContin reaching the black market. Purdue could not account for batches of pills made at a manufacturing plant in Totowa, New Jersey.In April 2002, Nagel and some of her DEA team, met with Richard Sackler, as well as Purdue’s Chief Financial Officer, its general counsel, and the company’s medical director. Nagel presented evidence that abuse of OxyContin had spiraled since the drug had gone on sale in 1996. At one stage, Nagel told Richard Sackler: “People are dying. Do you understand that?”That meeting ended in a stalemate. Later that month, Nagel again met with Purdue executives and this time was joined by Deborah Leiderman, the FDA’s director for controlled substances in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.Nagel hoped the FDA would use its authority as the nation’s drug regulator to restrict how OxyContin was dispensed. The FDA had previously done that for barbiturates, amphetamines, and benzodiazepines; the diversion of each of those had led to widespread drug abuse. Leiderman had no interest in recommending that the FDA put any restrictions on OxyContin prescriptions.As I report in PHARMA, “A retired DEA officer familiar with what transpired next told the author that Nagel and Gauvin [a DEA pharmacologist] were so incensed by Leiderman’s intervention on the side of Purdue that they discussed whether she might have sabotaged their investigation. They had no evidence of any wrongdoing and did not think she was in Purdue’s pocket. Instead, they wondered if it was Leiderman’s way of pushing back against the DEA for overreaching its authority by seeking prescription restrictions.”A month later, the Sackler family hired “America’s mayor” to represent Purdue Pharma. Rudy Giuliani had opened Giuliani Partners, a consulting firm, only a few months earlier. He was riding high from his two terms as New York’s mayor. He had been widely praised for his calm leadership after the 9/11 terror attacks; Time had named him Man of the Year and Britain’s Queen Elizabeth had given him an honorary knighthood. As a former United States attorney for the prestigious Southern District of New York, Giuliani offered high-level access and influence. He was friendly with many top-ranking Justice Department officials. As for Asa Hutchinson, the Drug Enforcement Administration director, the duo had known each other for twenty years. Maybe, thought the Sacklers, Giuliani might find a way to put a check on an investigation opened recently by a West Virginia U.S. Attorney. And, Purdue told him, it wanted him to extinguish the brewing DEA firestorm in Washington.Purdue Pharma was the ex-mayor’s first major client. (While the fee agreement remains a secret since both Purdue and Giuliani Partners refuse to disclose it, litigation documents produced later by Purdue reveal it was paying about $3 million a month to its team of high-powered attorneys). It could certainly afford it. OxyContin was bringing in $30 million a week, about 90 percent of Purdue’s profits. When Laura Nagel heard the news about Giuliani’s retainer, she said, “My reaction was that they went around me. They went and got Rudy.… They thought they were buying access and insight into how to manage things politically.”Giuliani assigned New York’s former police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, who had joined Giuliani Partners, to conduct a security appraisal of the New Jersey manufacturing plant where unaccounted-for Oxy had attracted Nagel’s attention. Giuliani set an August meeting with the DEA. “The mayor and I met with Asa Hutchinson, the director of the DEA; his staff; and people from Purdue [general counsel Udell],” Kerik told New York Magazine. Karen Tandy, the associate attorney general responsible for Drug Enforcement oversight, also attended. “We don’t want Purdue put in a position where it winds up being taken over by the courts,” said Kerik. “Or they get put out of business. What I’d like to see come out of this is we set model security standards for the industry.” A week before the first 9/11 anniversary, Giuliani joined Asa Hutchinson and Attorney General John Ashcroft at the opening of a DEA exhibit about terrorism and drug trafficking. Giuliani gave a short speech that raised $20,000 for the DEA’s Museum Foundation. When he finished, Hutchinson asked Laura Nagel to set a meeting with the ex-mayor. A week later, Asa Hutchinson and Laura Nagel were in Giuliani’s twenty-fourth-floor office overlooking Times Square. A Purdue OxyContin team Giuliani had created ran through a thirty-minute PowerPoint designed “to keep OxyContin out of the wrong hands.” They emphasized that Oxy was “a good drug” and claimed they were doing all they could to spot abuse and diversion. The DEA pair said little. “We were receivers of the information,” Hutchinson later said. Nagel was anxious to return to headquarters. When she did, colleagues recall that she railed against that “dog and pony show.”Laura Nagel had built a damning case against the cavalier way Purdue Pharma handled the manufacturing of a controlled substance. Over two years, she initiated several hundred OxyContin abuse and diversion cases connected to Purdue. Giuliani, however, had managed to make certain Purdue faced only civil charges. Purdue ultimately paid a $2 million civil penalty for its security lapses that allowed the drug to be diverted to the black market. By then, OxyContin sales were up twentyfold since its 1996 introduction; it was on its way to $2 billion that year in sales. Two million dollars was not an insignificant amount, but it was, as one Purdue executive boasted, “less than a day’s [OxyContin] revenue.”Why didn’t Asa Hutchinson listen to Laura Nagel and use the DEA’s full enforcement power against Purdue and Oxy? It is a question never satisfactorily answered by Hutchinson or Giuliani. Maybe Wednesday, somebody can finally put Hutchinson on the spot and get an answer in front of millions of viewers on live television. It’s about time. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Just the Facts reached 3,000 subscribers today. I am grateful to all of you. Some have been with me since the start and others subscribed only today. The growth has been slow and steady.One of the first bits of advice another writer offered when I set up my Substack was to stick to a single topic. “Carve out a niche on one subject and you will get a following fast,” he assured me. Those of you who have stuck around for a while know I never did that. On Just the Facts you get something about the gender wars one week, then opioids, maybe a condemnation of censorship before moving on next to the JFK assassination, or Nazi loot, possibly Big Pharma, maybe The Four Tops, or antisemitism, questions about Princess Di’s death, Afghan officials’ corruption, FBI mistakes in the Oklahoma City bombing or the Anthrax investigation, even how Sweden became a gangland paradise.From the messages I get from readers, I know some of you subscribed hoping I’d always write about only one of those topics. I am thankful you stayed the course. And, sometimes, my favorite notes are those that say, “I never thought I’d be interested in that, but you hooked me.”Just the Facts will remain an eclectic mix of news and reports from the frontlines of the culture wars.And it will remain free. Paid Substack subscriptions is not how Trisha Posner and I pay our bills. We do that through books, articles for traditional media, and documentaries (I do not have an air date yet for the R. J. Cutler-produced 6-hour documentary made from my last book, Pharma, but when I do, I will blast it out).I also want to thank some of the other great Substacks — among others, Public , Skeptic , Bill Rice Jr.'s NewsletterThe Vaccine Court From Symptoms to Causes, Margaret Anna Alice Reality’s Last Stand Christina Buttons BROADview by Lisa Selin Davis — that have generated subscribers by recommending me. Substack is a community of writers. Supporting one another seems an indispensable element toward growing readers for all of us.Share Just the Facts with your friends. I’ll let you know when it reaches another subscriber milestone. And in the meantime, thanks again for sticking around and spreading the word about this writing habit of mine. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

There was an outcry recently over hundreds of changes made to Roald Dahl’s books and Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, all intended to make them “inclusive and accessible” through today’s progressive lens on issues such as gender, race, misogyny, weight, mental health, and violence. Author Salmon Rushdie condemned the publishers then for their “absurd censorship.” In a Substack I wrote last month about the Dahl alterations, “’Ugly’ and ‘Fat’ No Longer,” I concluded, “Words matter. The problem is that the Dahl sensitivity censorship sets a template for other hugely successful author franchises. Readers should know that the words they read are no longer the words the author wrote.”The template of woke censorship has now been used by Harper Collins, one of the “Big Five” English-language publishers, to make wholesale changes in Agatha Christie’s classic detective novels. The publisher hired “sensitivity readers” to highlight what they considered offensive in the 12 novels and 20 short stories in the Miss Marple series and some of the 33 Hercule Poirot novels. The result is hundreds of alterations, often just changing a few words, but all too frequently the deletion of entire paragraphs.These are not the first changes to Christie’s works. Use of the N-word was removed years ago from earlier editions. Her hit novel, The Little Indians, which was also a successful play on Broadway with that name, was changed in 1977 to And Then There Were None. “Little Indians” was judged to be a “racist term.”The new changes, however, are a much broader effort to recast Christie’s writings so they satisfy modern sensitives. That results in characters mostly stripped of any racial or religious identity. A “black servant” is no longer black. A “gypsy type” woman is now just “a young woman.” A judge loses the “Indian” in a scene about his temper, Poirot no longer says that another character is “a Jew, of course.” Natives are replaced everywhere by locals. Most references to Nubians — an ethnic group indigenous to northern Sudan and southern Egypt — are deleted from the 1937 Death on the Nile. “Nubian boatman,” for instance, is now just “the boatman.”All references to Oriental are gone (Harper Collins is reportedly even considering changing the title of one of Christie’s best-known novels, Murder on the Orient Express, to the one used in 1934 on the U.S. edition, Murder in the Calais Coach).Sensitivity readers evidently are triggered by inexplicable passages. The publisher does not explain why it made any of the changes. In the 1964 novel, A Caribbean Mystery, a character does not see a black woman in the bushes as he returns to his hotel room. That passage is deleted in the cleansed edition. In the same book, Christie describes a character with “a torso of black marble such as a sculptor would have enjoyed.” That is also removed. At another point in the original, Miss Marple admires a West Indian hotel worker’s “lovely white teeth.” That is gone too. Even other references to “beautiful teeth” are deleted. What could be the preposterous reason to scrub references to “beautiful teeth?”  Does it trigger readers with poor dental hygiene?Insulting language is no longer allowed. In Death on the Nile, when a group of children annoy and harass a character, she muses, “they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children.”  In the cleansed edition it is simply, “They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.”Harper Collins does not deserve all the blame. As with the previous cases of Roald Dahl’s books and Ian Flemings Bond series, descendants of the authors own the rights. They must sign off on the wholesale changes that supposedly make the books “more inclusive and accessible for modern readers.”Shame on both the publishers and the family rights holders.Good literature should not be judged through a modern-day prism that goes out of its way to correct for perceived slights. By reading the uncensored originals, readers can react to books as written. The most talented authors provide an essential lens into the era about which they write. In censoring and changing those books, publishers are invariably diluting the power of great storytelling.  Christie is only the latest author, but she will certainly not be the last, to have her books scrubbed of all language that might potentially offend today’s readers. Dahl. Fleming. Christie. Who’s next?Personally, I can’t wait for the public ruckus after sensitivity readers comb through the Old Testament. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

The World Obesity Federation issued a grim 232-page report earlier this month that predicted more than half the world’s population will be obese by 2035. Childhood obesity will more than double. Scorecards on 187 countries ranked each by their ability to address the epidemic. An independent advisory committee estimated the economic impact to the global economy will be $4.32 trillion in lost productivity and additional health care costs for diabetes, blood pressure, heart disease and other obesity-related byproducts. That is about 3% of global GDP, the same impact as COVID-19 produced through worldwide lockdowns in 2020.And the $4 trillion figure might be low. Some researchers not involved in preparing the report believe it will be substantially higher since the forecast did not take into account inevitable costs from long term disability caused by obesity. The London-based World Obesity Federation is no rightwing organization attempting to stigmatize people with high body mass indexes (over 25 is overweight, more than 35 classifies as obese). It is a prestigious nonprofit whose work is supported by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Population Division. The British Medical Journal publishes an extended version of its conclusions. The World Obesity Federation’s credentials, however, do not impress some progressive public health advocates who believe that such reports only add to “weight stigma and fatphobia in public health.” The woke resistance has been building for years. A physician writing in Harvard Medical School’s Health Blog warned “weight bias is pervasive in medicine.” Terms such as “obese person” or “morbid” are “stigmatizing.” The U.K’s national health service has urged doctors for a decade to stop using “obese” and “overweight",” and instead try to find “weight-neutral language.” The AMA’s Journal of Ethics blames doctors who “exhibit weight bias” for “helping to perpetuate our nation’s obesity crisis.”The word obesity should be banned in healthcare, concluded a licensed dietician writing last year for the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Public Health. Buzzfeed’s copyediting desk joined the fray. The word obesity “is best avoided,” it declared. Why? It is based on BMI, a measurement that “simply looks at height and weight and is based on a Belgian scientist’s idea of ‘the average man’ 200 years ago. It’s racist and served as a steppingstone to the creation of eugenics.”“The focus on body size is rooted in racism,” concurred the University of Chicago’s School of Public Health.“Around 81 percent of societies historically have favored people in larger bodies. Larger bodies signified wealth and prosperity while thinness signified poverty and weakness. However, this began to change due to racism and eugenics. Charles Darwin and other race scientists created a hierarchy of civilization, placing whitemen on top and people of color, specifically black people, at the bottom, considering them to be ‘less civilized.’ Fatness and differing body characteristics were used to justify lack of civilization:  fatness used as a marker of ‘uncivilized behavior’ while thinness was ‘more evolved.’ This idea was maintained throughout the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, as a way to justify slavery, racism and classism, and control women through ‘temperance.’ This ideology has perpetuated Desirability Politics - where thinness and whiteness are given more access to social, political and cultural capital.”The World Obesity Federation report, however, demonstrates that obesity is a mostly equal opportunity disease for all races. Where there are statistically significant variations, it is usually in favor of people of color. For instance, the increased rates for obesity predicted by 2035 for Sub-Saharan African men and women are expected to be about half that of men and women in Central, South and North America.A lot of Substack readers know that facts alone are not always the most important elements as to whether something gets widely covered today in the MSM. A lot rides on whether the news checks the right boxes for progressive causes. Imagine if a UN and WHO-backed group issued a report that predicted a rapid rise in worldwide temperatures by 2035, and a $4 trillion impact on global economies. It would likely be front page news in most major papers and news sites. What about the World Obesity Federation report? Google it. It was covered by medical journals such as STAT, Healthline, and the Medical Press. A Reuters story was picked up by CNN Online and CBS online. WebMD carried it, as did FOX News online. The only newspapers that put the story into their print editions were the New York Post and The Alaska Dispatch News. Big names in legacy media, including The New York Times, Washington Post, and NBC, totally ignored the alarming report. Covering it meant using repeatedly the much disfavored word obesity.I wrote last month in Substack about “The Assault on Freedom of Speech.” It is not always, however, about direct censorship, cancellations, and the refusal to debate ideas in the public square. As the ghosting of the World Obesity Federation warnings illustrate, news is sometimes filtered and stories that do not fit certain political narratives are omitted. Only the Word Police can be satisfied that their assault on some language means the public is less informed on important issues. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Most of us have been deluged by prognosticators warning that the first widely available artificial-intelligence tool, ChatGPT, is either “a major threat to society’s well-being” or the start of an unchartered era in which machine intelligence will be “used for everything from customer service and sales to education and entertainment…. [and] will be able to hold more complex and nuanced conversations, and may even be able to understand and respond to more subtle emotional cues.”Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Elon Musk, one of the founders of OpenAI before he left, tweeted “ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.”Pretty impressive for a product launched less than ninety days ago. The truth between “end of times” and “the next enlightened era” is probably somewhere in between. ChatGPT is the first generation of AI for the masses. Whatever it can do now will seem rudimentary in a few years. It is like the first generation of the iPhone. We know what it looks like but have trouble imagining how fast it will progress and change.A lot of worry is that AI is too smart. It made its debut in scientific literature by producing four published papers. It passed three medical school admission tests “without any specialized training or reinforcement.” More than 200 books on Amazon are now listed with ChatGPT as a co-author. There is certain to be a lot more handwringing about AI’s implications. Dozens of competitive AI chatbots are in development, from tech giants such as Google to small, never-heard-of-before startups with a handful of coders. Good writing will survive, however. And I am not personally worried until they invent an AI model that can reliably persuade whistleblowers to provide secrets about public or corporate malfeasance and somehow be capable of reviewing non-digitized archives stashed away in government and private vaults worldwide. My goal this weekend was small in scope; a few questions about the JFK assassination seems to be a modest request for the AI chatbot that seems to have taken the world by storm.I asked ChatGPT seven questions, in this order. Who killed JFK? Why did Jack Ruby murder Lee Harvey Oswald? What is the connection between Lee Harvey Oswald and General Edwin Walker? How many shots were fired at JFK and how many hit the president? Did Oswald work for the CIA? Is Oliver Stone’s film “JFK” good history or disinformation? and “What will be learned when the JFK files are finally made public?”The answers below to each question are ChatGPT’s first responses. I did not request it to regenerate any answer. I did not correct any factual errors and it had some. For instance, it has Oswald coming to the attention of authorities after he tried to kill the retired Army general, Edwin Walker. In fact, no one knew that Oswald was the Walker shooter until Oswald’s wife, Marina, told the FBI after the president was killed.At another point, it credits the Warren Commission with a shooting sequence in which the assassin’s first shot missed, the second hit the president and Governor Connally, and the third was the fatal head shot. One of the Warren Commission’s biggest errors was its belief that the first shot hit the president and the second shot missed. That compressed the time for the assassin to get off the three shots to about 5.5 seconds. It was in my 1993 book, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, that the evidence was presented for the first shot missing, nearly doubling the time the assassin had to fire three .Also, when it came to why Jack Ruby killed Oswald, it mentions several possible motivations but omits entirely any of Ruby’s anger over his unfounded belief that the assassination was part of an antisemitic plot to unfairly blame Jews for the president’s death.Still, overall, I’m mildly impressed with ChatGPT when it comes to some broad JFK assassination queries. That is especially true given that so much of its database includes millions and millions of pages of conspiracy speculation as compared to a much smaller subset of data concluding Oswald alone killed JFK.Below are the verbatim questions and answers. I have put the questions in bold, so they are easier to see, and emphasized some portions of the answers. I’ve also attached a PDF of screenshots of my Q&As. That is to satisfy the eternally suspicious who won’t trust it unless they see it.who killed JFK?The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, remains a subject of controversy and speculation. The official investigation by the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting President Kennedy from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building, using a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. However, various conspiracy theories have emerged over the years, suggesting that other individuals or groups were involved in the assassination.Despite numerous investigations and inquiries over the years, no definitive evidence has emerged to support any of the conspiracy theories. The assassination remains a subject of intense interest and debate, but it is generally accepted that Lee Harvey Oswald was the person who fired the shots that killed President Kennedy.Why did Jack Ruby murder Lee Harvey Oswald?Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who had been charged with assassinating President John F. Kennedy, on November 24, 1963, two days after the assassination. Ruby's motive for killing Oswald is a matter of much speculation and debate.Ruby himself gave various explanations for his actions. He claimed that he killed Oswald to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the pain of a trial, to avenge Kennedy's death, or to show that Dallas was not a city of hate. However, none of these explanations were consistent with the evidence, and it is likely that Ruby's true motive was more personal.Some theories suggest that Ruby was part of a larger conspiracy to silence Oswald and prevent him from revealing any other conspirators in the assassination of Kennedy. However, no definitive evidence has emerged to support this theory.The official explanation for Ruby's actions is that he acted alone, and that his motive was simply to become famous. Ruby had a history of erratic behavior and had expressed a desire to be a hero. He may have believed that killing Oswald would earn him the admiration of the public and a place in history.In any case, Ruby was found guilty of murdering Oswald and sentenced to death, but the conviction was later overturned on the grounds that Ruby had not received a fair trial. Ruby died of cancer in prison in 1967 before a new trial could be held.What is the connection between Lee Harvey Oswald and General Edwin Walker?Lee Harvey Oswald and General Edwin Walker had a connection in the sense that Oswald attempted to assassinate Walker before he later assassinated President John F. Kennedy.In April 1963, Oswald attempted to shoot General Edwin Walker, who was a right-wing activist and a former Army officer known for his opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. Walker had been relieved of his command by President Kennedy after disobeying orders during the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962. Oswald, who had recently become politically radicalized and was sympathetic to Marxist ideology, saw Walker as a symbol of right-wing oppression and decided to kill him.Oswald fired a shot at Walker's home from a distance, but missed and only shattered a window. However, the incident brought Oswald to the attention of the authorities, who investigated him but ultimately failed to connect him to the attempted assassination.Later that same year, on November 22, 1963, Oswald assassinated President Kennedy while the president was traveling in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Oswald was arrested and charged with the murder, but was himself assassinated two days later by Jack Ruby. The connection between Oswald and General Walker has been the subject of much speculation and debate, with some suggesting that the two incidents were related or that Walker was somehow involved in the assassination of Kennedy, but there is no conclusive evidence to support these theories.How many shots were fired at JFK and how many hit the president?According to the official investigation by the Warren Commission, three shots were fired at President John F. Kennedy during the assassination on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. The first shot missed, the second shot struck Kennedy in the upper back and exited through his throat, and the third shot hit Kennedy in the head, causing a fatal wound.The Warren Commission concluded that all three shots were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building using a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. However, the number of shots and their trajectory have been the subject of much controversy and debate over the years, with various conspiracy theories suggesting that there may have been additional shooters or that the shots may have come from a different direction.Nevertheless, based on the official investigation, it is generally accepted that three shots were fired, with two hitting President Kennedy, and that Lee Harvey Oswald was the person who fired those shots.Did Oswald work for the CIA?There is no conclusive evidence to suggest that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or was directly involved in any CIA operations.However, there have been various conspiracy theories and allegations over the years that have suggested that Oswald had connections to the CIA or was involved in CIA operations. Some theorists have pointed to Oswald's brief defection to the Soviet Union in 1959 and his subsequent return to the United States as evidence of a possible CIA affiliation. Others have suggested that Oswald's military background and his language skills made him an attractive candidate for intelligence work.Despite these theories and allegations, there is no hard evidence to support the claim that Oswald was an agent of the CIA or that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. Several official investigations, including the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, found no evidence of a CIA conspiracy, and no direct link between Oswald and the CIA has been definitively established.Is Oliver Stone's film "JFK" good history or disinformation?Oliver Stone's film "JFK" is a dramatized version of events surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the subsequent investigations. While the film is highly regarded for its artistic qualities, it has been criticized by many historians and experts as presenting a distorted and misleading account of the assassination and the investigations.The film includes many conspiracy theories and allegations that have been widely discredited by official investigations and other studies. For example, the film suggests that there was a large-scale cover-up involving government officials and intelligence agencies, that there were multiple shooters involved in the assassination, and that there were connections between Oswald and various other individuals and organizations.While these claims have been popularized by various conspiracy theorists, there is no conclusive evidence to support them, and most mainstream historians and experts reject them. Moreover, the film takes significant liberties with the historical record and conflates various events and characters for dramatic effect.In summary, while "JFK" is a powerful and entertaining film, it should not be taken as an accurate or reliable account of the assassination and the investigations. Students of history should consult more credible and trustworthy sources to learn about this important event in American history.What will be learned when the JFK files are finally made public?In 1992, the U.S. Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which required that all assassination-related records held by federal agencies be publicly disclosed no later than 25 years after the passage of the law, which would have been 2017. However, due to concerns about national security and the potential impact on U.S. foreign relations, some of the records have been withheld or redacted, and the full release of the records has been postponed.In 2018, President Trump ordered that the remaining classified files related to the assassination be released by October 26 of that year. However, some documents were held back at the request of the FBI and CIA, and the full release has not yet occurred.It is difficult to predict exactly what will be learned when the JFK files are finally made public, as the content of the files has not been fully disclosed. However, it is possible that the files could shed new light on the circumstances surrounding the assassination and the subsequent investigations, and possibly answer some of the lingering questions and controversies.For example, the files may provide further information about the activities of Lee Harvey Oswald and his possible connections to other individuals or organizations, including the CIA or organized crime. The files may also provide new information about the investigations conducted by the FBI and other agencies, and shed light on the motives of the various parties involved.It is also possible that the files may not provide any significant new information or may even raise more questions and controversies, depending on their contents and the interpretations of those who study them.The bottom line? If you are waiting for AI to solve the Kennedy assassination, you are out of luck.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

Sweden passed a milestone this month, but the dubious achievement was mostly lost under a deluge of news and commentary about Chinese spy balloons and the war in Ukraine. Crime statistics from last year revealed that the nation that once had one of Europe’s lowest rates of gun violence was closing in fast on Croatia for the continent’s highest per capita rate of fatal shootings.Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.The news was celebrated in a Stockholm suburb when a hooded gunman fired 15 rounds from an AK47 into the home of a mother and her infant child. Police arrested 13 and 14-year-old suspects after the getaway car crashed during a high-speed chase.Such a brazen assault would have been front pages news in Sweden a few years ago. Today, however, it is another in a long litany of gangland violence that plagues the country. There were 388 shootings last year, with 61 fatalities. That was more than double the 2021 number, which itself had set a record and moved Sweden ahead of Italy and eastern European countries. In fact, since 2000, Sweden is the only one of 22 European nations that has recorded “a significant rise in gun deaths.” While the number of shootings and fatalities might seem modest to Americans inured to mass shootings, it is alarming to Europeans who are accustomed to a fraction of the U.S.’s violent gun culture.Rapes and sexual assaults are also at record levels. Every year during the past decade, the country averaged between 62 and 78 rapes per 100,000, about three times the number reported in 35 other European nations. The government claims that is because in 2013 it instituted a more liberal definition of rape by eliminating a requirement for the use of violence, threats or coercion and including cases where the victim did not physically resist. Sweden’s is not unique, however, since many of its EU neighbors have similarly broadened the definition of rape but have not seen a jump in the number of reported assaults.Sweden’s socially liberal and tolerant Nordic neighbors, Denmark, Finland and Norway, match or exceed Sweden’s progressive laws about rapes and sexual assaults. Yet, they have 60% to 80% fewer rapes per capita. Sweden has six times as many shootings per capita than their combined figure.While the crime stats are bad, many Swedes suspect the numbers are underreported. That belief was so widespread that the government was forced to issue a report denying it was “covering up crime statistics,” claiming it had “nothing to gain” from underreporting the numbers.What is behind the Swedish surge in crime?A recent report put most of the blame on 52 criminal gangs concentrated in huge immigrant suburbs of Stockholm, Malmo, and Gothenburg.They are in a cut-throat competition to control a booming and lucrative narcotics trade. The violence has skyrocketed because the gangs are heavily armed despite Sweden long boasting some of the strictest gun laws on the planet. All guns are licensed by the government, buyers have to take training courses that can last a year, and firearms are seldom stored at homes but usually in a lock box at a registered gun club. What the Swedes did not envision was the birth of sophisticated criminal enterprises with cross-border reach. Swedish police and border agents have failed to stop the gangs from arming themselves with millions of dollars in surplus weapons smuggled from the Balkans. The gangs also have developed a penchant for using explosives, either bought on the black market or stolen from local construction sites. Some gangs produce their own IEDS or use ex-Yugoslavian M75 hand grenades. It is no longer shocking to hear about a gang blowing up a restaurant or shop that refuses to pay protection money. Swedish police created a new crime category in 2017 to monitor the number of explosives and grenade attacks. (The only other country that tracks grenade attacks is Mexico; the two nations have a similar rate per capita).The intelligence chief of the National Police, Sweden’s FBI, admitted to a reporter, “It’s not normal to see these kinds of explosions in a country without a war.”The turf wars for control of drug distribution that play out across the country are depressingly similar, but the names change depending on the city. In Gothenburg it is likely to include the Ali Kahn and Backa gangs; in Stockholm it is usually a Turkish and Iraqi gang, Asir, battling with the Gambian-led Chosen Ones; Malmo is split between a Bosnian gang, M-Falangen and its Albanian rivals, K-Falangen. While the police describe the gangs as extended mafia-like families, immigrants call them ‘clans,’ and often resort to them to resolve problems that they do not want to report to the government authorities.Anyone who has followed Sweden’s spiraling descent into violence will not be surprised that in recent years almost half the suspects arrested for gun crimes are younger than 18. The gang lords exploit what they see as a loophole in the Swedish justice system. Sweden sets 15 as the age of criminal responsibility; anyone younger is considered incapable of committing a crime. In the U.S., where it is set by states, it is often 10. In Sweden, those under 15 are never prosecuted but if the crime is terrible enough, they can get counseling. The worst punishment for anyone between 15 and 18 is to undergo a rehabilitation program at homes that more closely resemble an American boarding school than a juvenile detention center. The rooms are comfortable and there is television, video games, sports, and internet access.The problem of gangs using adolescent assailants was highlighted last month in a murder that attracted nationwide attention. A fifteen-year-old Afghan boy, who had escaped the Taliban in 2019, was shot execution style at a sushi restaurant outside Stockholm. Hundreds attended his memorial. Police later arrested a 15-year-old as the shooter; his two accomplices were 16 and 17. “Many of them that we talk to don’t expect to be old, they don’t expect to reach 30,” says Johan Olsson, chief of the police’s national operation division in Stockholm. “The life of these young men is short, nasty and brutish. It’s a very, very grim environment.”Sweden’s crime epidemic is not simply the result of a too-lenient criminal justice system. It has been fueled also by a surge in immigrants during the past decade, most from war-ravaged Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Two million immigrants live in Sweden, about 20% of the population (25% of the country if those who have at least one immigrant parent are included). The largest group are Syrian refuges. Sweden has long prided itself as having one of the world’s most generous and protective immigration policies. It passed groundbreaking legislation in 1989, the Aliens Act, and the 1994 Reception of Asylum Seekers. Those laws established the framework to welcome anyone fleeing persecution, war, or other forms of violence. All seeking safety from conflict zones or escaping oppression were allowed to enter the country without background checks or any questioning that the government thought might add to the stress and anxiety of the incoming refugees. Sweden also provided for state support of the new arrivals, with welfare subsides for housing, medical needs, and education. Eligibility for citizenship was automatic after four years, and that sometimes was expedited. Before Covid slowed migration to the EU, Sweden ranked first per capita in its number of asylum seekers and refugees.When the country had a record influx in 2015, Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, said at the time, “My Europe takes in refugees. My Europe doesn’t build walls.” The problem was that Sweden had significantly underestimated the immense difficulties of integrating such huge numbers into society. Tens of thousands were put into so-called Million Programme estates, enormous 1960s era housing projects. Newcomers faced many hurdles in assimilating into Swedish culture, adopting its values, and learning its language, exacerbating the problems in what had become immigrant ghettos. Children in large families slept on the floor as the inventory of apartments ran low. Nearby schools were woefully substandard. The unemployment rate for young immigrants was double that of native Swedes. And, while the country is proud of its generous welfare system, many new arrivals were quickly mired in a cycle of poverty.The perfect storm created a rare opportunity for the criminal gangs inside the housing estates. There seemed to be an inverse relationship between the growth in power and influence of the gangs and the reduced level of police patrols and enforcement. Opposition politicians criticized the Million Programme estates as a Nordic version of Paris’s banlieues, places like Seine-Saint-Denis and Clichy-sous-Bois that had become so-called “no-go zones” in which criminal gangs exerted such control that the police no longer patrolled them. (The government admits that hundreds of thousands of immigrants, most from Muslim countries, live in 61 sprawling neighborhoods it defines as “vulnerable.” Those neighborhoods, according to an official report, “are characterized by a low socioeconomic status, in which criminals exert influence on the local community…. working [as police] in these vulnerable areas is challenging.”)As the police pulled back and the government struggled to assimilate the large number of the new arrivals, the gangs — Kurdish, Turkish, Bosnian, Syrian and Somali — moved in. They offered many vulnerable, young people a promise of fast money and a quick way out of the ghettos. And the problem was not limited to the latest arrivals. David Jones, a journalist who has written about crime and immigration in Scandinavia, says, the children of those migrants who arrived in the 1990s “have morphed dangerously into a lost generation who are effectively stateless. Though they were born here, many don’t feel remotely Swedish, yet have no allegiance to their parents’ homelands, either. Their alienation and discontentment smoldered for several years.”Has the government’s failed integration of migrants led to surging gang and gun violence? News accounts and websites sometimes report that immigrants are the perpetrators in a majority of serious, violent crimes. Those are often anecdotal. The real number is impossible to determine. That is because Swedish law enforcement agencies are forbidden to register an individual's ethnicity or nationality, and that information is omitted from official crime statistics. Websites that have reported court information revealing that a criminal was foreign-born have sometimes been censored by the government. An internal investigation was opened on one police officer, after he told a journalist that “ethnic Swedes [are] engaged in group violence, but not in the same numbers as foreign-born offenders.” The strict policy of secrecy around the nationality or ethnicity of those arrested and convicted of violent crimes is an exceptional standout in a nation that otherwise prides itself on transparency and a progressive and open access records policy. Sweden is one of three Nordic countries that makes even personal tax returns public.Information leaked by prison officials reveal that over half of those serving long prison sentences for violent crimes are foreign-born. It is closer to 70% if Swedish born, second-generation immigrants, are included. Crime reporters calculate that immigrants are suspects in 90% of public shootings.There is some evidence that Swedish leaders are finally running out of patience.  The national police commissioner admitted that unchecked criminal gangs threatened the very democracy that Sweden so greatly valued. The Gothenburg police chief told a reporter in 2020 that, “We need more police to deal with this situation urgently. Otherwise we will turn into a gangsters' paradise.”Last April, Magdalena Andersson, then Prime Minister, said, “Segregation has been allowed to go so far that we have parallel societies in Sweden. We live in the same country but in completely different realities.” It was a rather remarkable admission considering that her party, the Social Democrats, had been in power for 28 of the last 40 years.Public opinion polls before last September’s national election consistently showed that gang crime topped the list of concerns for the average Swede.  The new Prime Minister, the Moderate Party’s Ulf Kristersson, managed to get a parliamentary majority by promising to tackle crime and winning the backing of the far-right Sweden Democrats.  Kristersson committed to a “paradigm shift” in criminal justice and said he would work for longer prison sentences to go after gang members and deter recruits. “These people who shoot each other on the street aren’t going to stop because we tell them to; they need to be locked up.”His far-right partners want him to go further. One proposal is to permit the police to set up temporary zones in neighborhoods where they can search for guns, explosives, and drugs, even if they do not suspect wrongdoing. Another idea is to use anonymous witnesses at criminal trials, something now forbidden.The new government is talking up its anti-crime program, dubbing it “the biggest offensive in Swedish history against organized crime.”Given the failure of previous governments to acknowledge or concentrate on the problem, the “biggest offensive” might be a low bar.  Criminals know that no matter what the politicians promise, the police are still hobbled by a nation that often puts privacy protection above police powers. Detectives are frequently denied access to the CCTV network, traffic cameras or automatic license-plate recognition technology. Only recently have they been able to tap telephones. The only way to measure progress will be a steady drop in the sky-high crime rates. That will not be easy. It has taken years of neglect for Sweden to reach such a low point, it might take a long time to return any semblance of safety. As one Swedish cop assigned to the gang beat told a reporter in 2021, “There’s no quick fix, this will take at least one generation.” 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

Note: This is the first in an occasional series of short essays about the perils of what I call one think, a pernicious type of censorship in which voices and opinions that veer outside the guard rails of what is deemed “acceptable speech” are themselves banned, canceled, humiliated in the public square, and often branded as some form of bigotry.I made my first trip to London in 1981 to visit the family of my soon-to-be wife, author Patricia Posner. One day, while walking in Hyde Park, near Marble Arch and Oxford Street, I came across a few dozen people listening to a speaker ranting that the “illuminati are the masterminds” of a recently failed assassination on the Pope.Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.“I wonder what’s going on?” I asked Trisha.“Oh, that is Speakers’ Corner. People are free to turn up and talk about whatever they want.”She gave me the capsule history. For 600 years the British had hanged criminals there before huge crowds, some of whom bought tickets for the best seats. The more than 50,000 who were executed got a couple of minutes to say their final words. A century after the executions had moved from London, Parliament passed an act setting aside Speakers’ Corner. It was a safe haven used by suffragettes in their campaign for the right to vote, as well as by political firebrands such as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and black-nationalist, Marcus Garvey. 1984 author, George Orwell, himself an occasional speaker, called it “one of the minor wonders of the world….Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”For me, as an American, raised in liberal San Francisco on principles of free speech and vigorous debate, I thought Speakers’ Corner simply unnecessary.“I guess the whole of America,” I told Trisha, “is the equivalent of Speakers’ Corner.”I returned there many times in subsequent London visits. There was always something interesting going on. A Muslim preacher adamant that Jesus was a fiction. A Christian cleric scolding young Muslims that Islam was a faith of demons. An atheist calling out Catholics to demand they implore the Pope to stop “counting his money and smoking his dope.” An apoplectic man screaming that feminism was a fraud and that women were more violent than men.Some could be dismissed as religious fanatics or slightly unhinged. Others, however, pressed a rational and persuasive case for Western intervention to stop the Serbian slaughter of Bosnian Muslims or against a British military role in the war in Iraq. Those gatherings, some of them huge, provoked vigorous and often heated arguments. Although few people left with their minds changed, they had at least engaged in the debate.In all my visits I never saw any effort to silence the speakers, who at times relished expressing views that others found shocking and disturbing.No one called the often offensive speeches a smokescreen for hate.There was no movement to close Speakers’ Corner over charges it subjected marginalized groups to harmful prejudice.I never once heard anyone say that speech, by itself, could sometimes be violence.Speakers’ Corner showed me why the English were proud they did not need a “first amendment” to enjoy freedom of speech.  A British high court judge summed it up when he overturned in 2009 the conviction of a bible-thumping, evangelical minister who had become a near public nuisance: “Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having. Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative, provided it does not tend to provoke violence.”Fast forward to 2023 America.Imagine a Speakers’ Corner, an unrestricted bastion of “say whatever you like, no matter how many people you offend,” in New York’s Central Park or San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. A free-flowing discussion about today’s hot button issues, such as abortion, bail reform, climate activism, puberty blockers for adolescents, and race reparations, would quickly devolve into shouting and possibly violence.  Too many people have become accustomed to having their opinions amplified in an echo chamber of social media and cable news. Most follow those who reinforce what they already believe. Few like having their opinions challenged. Fewer yet have an open mind to changing what they think if presented with alternative evidence and arguments.For those who do have independent opinions, fear of the consequences of speaking out has created a tsunami of self-censorship. Little wonder that people stop themselves from saying or writing something that they believe will produce some blowback.That became abundantly clear when my wife, Patricia, wrote a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed in May 2022, “When Did ‘Woman’ Become a Dirty Word?” She put a spotlight on the trend in medicine to degender language. While trans rights, she wrote, were important to protect, so were women’s rights. Defending the rights of men identifying or transitioning to change their gender should not be at the expense of women. Trisha got almost a thousand direct messages and emails, mostly from women who overwhelmingly thanked her for saying what they felt unable to express in their workplace since they feared it meant they could be tagged as “transphobic.” That risk forced them to stay quiet.Heated discussions today abruptly end when someone charges racism or some phobic bias (transphobic, homophobic, Islamophobic), or interprets and condemns an opinion as the product of ableism, the patriarchy, or misogyny.All those biases and prejudices undoubtedly exist and should be condemned when publicly exposed. But in many instances, they have been reduced to empty labels used as cudgels by which to end immediately uncomfortable discussions or unpopular ideas. Evidence to the contrary is never welcome. One think has replaced divergent points of view. Fit in or get canceled.  Afraid of losing your thousands of followers on Twitter or Facebook? Do not post or like anything too controversial.This is the opposite of what I was taught in school. I was on the debate team at a San Francisco high school and then later at UC Berkeley. That instilled in me the concept that societies that evolve the best are those that do so through a battle of ideas. Let the nastiest opinions be expressed, my first debate coach said, and then destroy them with logic and evidence. I grew up on the idea that a consensus on divisive topics could only be had after a robust public discussion in which different views were constantly criticized and questioned.For school debates, a single controversial issue was assigned every year. To be a champion debater, one had to at different times persuasively argue both sides. The challenge was to understand so thoroughly what the advocates on each side believed that it was possible to credibly present their case. Imagine that today? More likely that both sides would be intent only in making their own points, not in listening to what the other said. Intellectually stimulating debate is a relic of a quickly fading past.The growing shadow of censorship has also fallen across college campuses, which should be bastions of free speech. There are dozens and dozens of examples in the past few years in which protestors have insisted their schools withdraw an invitation to a speaker they judge as controversial. When that fails there are efforts to block the entrance to lecture halls, shout down the speaker, and even storm the stage.At my alma mater, UC Berkeley, conservative speakers were shouted down even during the school’s much touted Free Speech Week. That is right, you read it correctly. Berkeley devotes a week a year to “free speech,” seven days when opposing points of view can be expressed. Except, of course, it is a façade. Only points of view that are sanctioned by the one think police are allowed. This is the same school that in 1964 ignited the Free Speech Movement. A 21-year-old student, Mario Savio, led 500 fellow students demanding an end to the numerous restrictions on political speech that were leftovers at public universities of the rabid 1950s Red Scare of McCarthyism.Most of the canceled speakers are conservatives; however, progressives are also sometimes canceled if they step on some unidentified one think land mine. “Protests against liberal speakers have drawn less media attention and appear to be less frequent,” concluded two constitutional law professors in a review of free speech problems on American campuses. The College of William and Mary sponsored a “Free Speech Event” a few years ago in which the ACLU’s Executive Director for Virginia was invited to talk about “Students and the First Amendment.” BLM protestors interfered, chanting “ACLU, you protect Hitler, too,” until it was canceled. Why? “Liberalism is white supremacy,” said one organizer.Protestors also blocked a “Stand Against Fascism” speech by the very progressive University of Oregon President, Michael Schill. Demonstrators chanting he was a “white leader,” who ran the university as a “business firm,” forced him to cancel.At UCLA, a panel discussion, “What Is Civil Discourse? Challenging Hate Speech in a Free Society,” was hosted by the university, the Los Angeles Times, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Protestors shut it down by shouting that the panel was “normalizing fascism.” One demonstrator said, “This is what the people in Nazi Germany were facing.”Colleges should be the places where the most repellant views are sometimes presented so that students can learn how to demolish those with logic and evidence as opposed to protesting and screaming the loudest. Administrations are craven, however, buckling often to the shrillest voices. Times are changing fast and not for the better. A few years ago, the fabled Oxford Union debating society refused to withdraw the invite it had extended to France’s right-wing politician Marie Le Pen. In the ensuing debate, Oxford published a paper that argued that it would have even been in the best interests of free speech to have invited Hitler to speak there in 1933: “It seems to me that freedom of speech, particularly in the context of politics and democracy, is a fundamental moral principle and shouldn’t be abandoned based on our feelings of whether we like the speaker or not.” In sharp contrast to that defense of offensive speech, this month the UK’s University of Derby added trigger warnings to Shakespearean and Greek tragedies because it is “a genre obsessed with violence and suffering, often of a sexual or graphic kind.”There is not a lot of good news beyond campuses when it comes to the protection of free speech in modern America.For me as a journalist, one of the most sobering instances that demonstrated how quickly the protections for speech can be lost, transpired at The New York Times in June 2020. One of the paper’s opinion editors invited Republican Senator Tom Cotton to write an Op-Ed about the protests sweeping the nation in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Although its title, “Send in the Troops,” made it seem as if Cotton were calling for military force against the demonstrators, his piece suggested the military be available as a backup only if the police were overwhelmed and there was no other way to stop the riots.“The column immediately drew fierce backlash, dozens of Times journalists voicing their opposition, tweeting the headline, caption and a form of the phrase “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger,” according to Politico.What did the Times do?The day after Cotton’s Op-Ed, James Bennet, the paper’s editorial page editor, wrote “Why We Published the Tom Cotton Op-Ed,” an unprecedented defense of his decision. Bennet emphasized that he “strongly oppose[d] the idea of using federal troops.” However, he said, “We published Cotton’s argument in part because we’ve committed to Times readers to provide a debate on important questions like this. It would undermine the integrity and independence of The New York Times if we only published views that editors like me agreed with, and it would betray what I think of as our fundamental purpose — not to tell you what to think, but to help you think for yourself.”At a long and tense internal meeting the following day, Bennett and other top editors apologized to the paper’s staff. While the Times publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, said the paper’s leadership regretted publishing Cotton’s opinion piece, he nevertheless backed Bennett, who he said had “as tough a job as anyone I can imagine in any newsroom.” Two days later, June 7, Bennet resigned, saying he was “proud of the work my colleagues and I have done to focus attention on injustice and threats to freedom…” The paper issued a statement that the Cotton Op-Ed had not met its “editorial standards.”The Times leadership may have ultimately had little choice because a fair percentage of its newsroom was in open revolt, mostly on Twitter, after the Cotton Op-Ed. Bennett’s departure, and the reassignment of James Dao, the editor who personally oversaw the Cotton piece, was likely the fastest way to quell the staff uprising. It was also, however, a sign of how one of the country’s most influential papers had itself come up short when it came to protecting speech.The express purpose of an opinion page is to run a mix of opposing viewpoints on the important issues of the day. I have written nine New York Times Op-Eds (all available here). The most recent three were on the drug industry and vaccines, and two about how the billionaire Sackler family were using the bankruptcy courts to avoid personal liability for the lethal opioid crisis they had ignited and fed with their blockbuster hit drug, OxyContin.Those who disagreed with me could write an opposing opinion piece. The Washington Post, for instance, published Jillian Sackler’s Op-Ed “Stop blaming my late husband, Arthur Sackler, for the opioid crisis.”That is how Op-Ed pages should work. Opinions presented on both sides of tough issues and the readers can make up their own minds. There were many good arguments against the case Cotton made, but not wanting it printed was not the right approach.A month after Bennet left, Times opinion writer and editorBari Weisssubmitted her resignation. While Bennett had left with a statement that talked about how he “was honored to be part of it [the Times],” Weiss left with a stinging resignation letter that she published on her website. Central to her disillusionment was that at the Times “truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”  Weiss concluded, “And I’ve always comforted myself with the notion that the best ideas win out. But ideas cannot win on their own. They need a voice. They need a hearing. Above all, they must be backed by people willing to live by them.”Weiss nailed it. It is great to champion free speech. If, however, the guardians of such speech are frightened every time a tweet in opposition goes viral, there will be little room indeed for an energetic and lively exchange of ideas. Those heated discussions might often be uncomfortable and trigger a lot of sensitive people, but they are also the only way to reach a consensus on key issues in our fragile democracy. The alternative, one think, an inflexible orthodoxy in which only sanctioned opinions and beliefs are championed, is already changing the definition of free speech in America. If we allow it to become an insufferable and permanent form of censorship, we will only have ourselves to blame for not speaking out earlier and forcefully.For now, I would settle for a Speakers’ Corner in Central Park as a starter.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

Last week’s headlines summed up the gist of a breaking story. The Netherland’s National Archives had put on public display a map that purported to show where German soldiers had in 1944 buried diamonds, gold, and jewelry stolen from a bank branch that had taken a direct bombing hit. The Germans hid their haul in four oversized munitions boxes they buried on the outskirts of the small town of Ommen. They never got a chance to retrieve it before the Allies won the war the following year.A new story about a long-missing clue that might lead to stolen spoils of the Third Reich does not surprise me. Hidden Nazi treasure is something I have investigated on and off for decades. It is indisputable that hundreds of millions in looted Nazi goods are still missing almost 80 years after the end of the war. The Nazi theft was at an industrial level. Of more than 600,000 works of art stolen from Jews and museums, 10,000 are still missing, including masterpieces by Raphael, Rembrandt, Klimt, Degas, Van Gogh, and Pissarro. The Nazis plundered hundreds of tons of gold from the national reserves of ten countries they occupied. Another five and a half tons of gold came from smelted dental fillings pulled from the mouths of concentration camp corpses. Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Hoping for a day when they might return to retrieve it, the Nazis hid much of what they had stolen. As Nazi leaders prepared to escape Europe, they implemented Aktion Feuerland (“Operation Land of Fire”), a secret plan to ferry art and diamonds in U-boats to Argentina. Moving tons of gold was not so simple, so almost all of it stayed in Europe. In the war’s closing days, American soldiers stumbled upon a motherlode of gold and art stashed in an underground cavern in abandoned salt mines near Frankfurt. The gold recovered there was worth $262,000,000 ($6.5 billion in 2022). The lure of so much missing gold and art has attracted many treasure hunters convinced it is buried under glaciers or deep inside caves in Alpine mountains. Over many years, dozens of expeditions organized to find the '“Nazi treasure” turned up only a few crates of Reichsbank documents. When word leaked in the 1960s that some currency had washed up on the shores of Austria’s remote Lake Töplitz, it was overrun with amateur divers. The money turned out to be counterfeit, and nothing else was found. Polish divers in 2020 thought they had found the priceless panels the Nazis had stolen from the Amber Room of a Russian royal palace. The crates they retrieved from a sunken Nazi warship contained personal belongings and some military gear, no Amber panels, no Nazi loot. Last year a newly discovered WWII diary of an SS officer grabbed headlines when it purported to show that four tons of gold were buried deep under an 18th-century Polish palace. Experts concluded last week that the SS diary was a fake, made at least 40 years after the end of war. How much Nazi gold is still missing? A massive postwar investigation concluded in the 1990s that it could not account for a stunning 177 tons. So where is it? My reporting pinpoints the last place where most of it was hidden: the Vatican’s underground catacombs and tunnels. I spent nine years to research and write a book about Vatican finances (God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican). As I report in that book, the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps (an Army predecessor organization to the CIA) had put one of its best agents, William Gowen, in Rome after the war. Gowen was on the lookout for Nazi fugitives trying to escape from Europe. In 1946, an informant told him that ten truckloads packed with gold stolen from the Croatian State Mint had traveled from Switzerland to Rome before being unloaded at a Croatian seminary only a mile from the Vatican. The convoy had used Vatican license plates, and some of the men were dressed as priests. Gowen discovered that a well-known Croatian priest based in Rome had led the convoy from the seminary to St. Peter’s Square. There, Gowen wrote in a classified report, the Vatican Bank took control of the gold for “safe keeping.” The presence of the Croatian priest, according to Gowen, allowed the Vatican Bank to accept the gold as “a contribution from a religious organization” and “convert[ed] it without creating a record.”U.S intelligence tried unsuccessfully to get more information on the Vatican gold. There were unconfirmed reports that much of it found its way to South American safe havens. However, another U.S. intelligence agent investigating the missing gold concluded those stories were “a smokescreen to cover the fact that the treasure remains in its original repository [the Vatican].”What happened to the stolen gold at the Vatican? There are some clues. The Vatican sold gold reserves as late as the 1980s, and covertly used gold ingots to support the CIA’s war against Communism in Poland (no coincidence there was then a Polish Pope). Around the same time, the church’s Our Lady of Fatima shrine in Portugal paid for an expansion to its sanctuary by selling 110 pounds of wartime gold bars stamped with swastikas. All of that, however, accounts for only a tiny portion of the gold that the 1946 truck convoy brought to the Vatican.The Vatican will not talk about what happened to the plundered gold. Forty-one countries gathered in London in 1997 as part of a broad international effort to get answers about the missing Nazi gold. The Vatican refused to attend the conference. It was unmoved although declassified documents revealed that it was one of only four countries that illegally received and stored gold bars emblazoned with swastikas (those bars often included gold from death camp victims). “Two hundred tons of gold from the pro-Nazi Croatian government found its way to the Vatican,” Elan Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress, told me in 2006. “Here they were, one of the world’s great moral institutions, and they refused to tell us what their view was, much less to lift a finger to help recover any looted assets. It was terribly disappointing.”A 180-page report the following year from the U.S. government concluded that the Vatican and Switzerland had used their neutral status to hide and make immense profits from Nazi gold stored in their central banks.That put more pressure on the Vatican. It still did not budge. “We later tried to get information from the Vatican,” Steinberg told me, '“[in comparison] the Swiss were an open door. The Vatican told us to get lost.”The Vatican also later told me to get lost. I tried repeatedly to obtain access to the wartime Vatican Bank records, but they are sealed. Only the Pope can order them released. Pope Francis has consistently rebuffed my efforts, even including my public pleas through three high-profile opinion pieces in 2015 and 2016 in The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. As another author had once noted, “Vatican officials would sooner talk about sex than money.”Absent a breakthrough with Francis or the next Pope, what happened to tons of plundered Nazi gold at the Vatican will remain a mystery.What about the current hunt in the Netherlands for the cache of looted diamonds and currency? While most of last week’s news coverage had an optimistic slant, I am skeptical. The map had been in the archives for decades and was not a secret to researchers and historians. It only made headlines after it went on public display (along with 1,300 other wartime documents). The Dutch archives admitted in a separate statement that the location highlighted on the map had been searched several times in the war’s immediate aftermath. A Dutch historian, Joost Rosendaal, doubts the Nazi loot is still there because of a heavy British Air Force bombing run in that area in April 1945. Rosendaal thinks the saturation bombing likely destroyed the metal containers containing the loot; whatever was left scattered about and was picked up by locals and Allied soldiers.The coming weeks will determine whether the Dutch map is just another in a long line of what has become an almost mythical quest for Nazi treasure. One thing, however, about which I am certain, is that whatever the outcome of the Dutch hunt, missing Third Reich plundered art and gold should not be become a footnote only for history books. The trail might be cold on many fronts, but answers must still be had from those countries, organizations, and people who profited from the greatest state theft in modern history. 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

Everyone will have their own favorite short list of the stories they think turned into nothing burgers. This is my subjective top five. They are stories I followed closely that fizzled away. Fellow journalists understand all too well that a piece that captures headlines might sometimes fade without any significant follow up. Sometimes there are no more developments and other times journalists are distracted by the latest and shiniest candy on the media radar. Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.I have reported widely in both the pre and post digital world. The pressure today is not just to deliver a good story that breaks some news but also to attract clicks. Publishers know precisely how many people clicked on a story, they also know whether readers stopped after a paragraph or two or read to the last word. The digital measurements translate into a new media culture. Once the click traffic slows to a crawl on what is initially big news, editors stop assigning more reporting. Of course, any of these can become a front-page story again in 2023. I’m looking into some of them, and I trust other good reporters are doing the same. Below, I also take a guess at the ones I think might get resurrected in the coming year.* What happened to the leak investigation of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs draft that overturned Roe. v. Wade? Seven months have passed. It is not a large universe of people to examine. Electronic records and phone logs might uncover a direct link to Politico, which broke the story. 2023 outlook? Little reason to think the Robert’s court will suddenly become transparent about the investigation or that anyone will be charged.* The JFK files. Fifty-nine years after the assassination we are still waiting for the government to release in full the final batch of classified files. Many had high expectations about the National Archives dump of 11,000 documents. Some conspiracy theorists claimed the new files established a link between the CIA and Oswald, ‘proof’ that there was a plot by the Secret State to kill JFK. Alas, the documents were mostly a big nothing. As I told The New York Times, anyone looking for a smoking gun in the new files was on a “fool’s errand.”2023 outlook? It will unquestionably return since the CIA and other government agencies have until May 15 to make their case to keep files sealed and President Biden could release everything to the public by June 30. * Are criminal gangs lining up to buy tens of millions in weapons the U.S. and NATO have shipped to Ukraine? That was headline news this past June when Interpol’s chief, Jürgen Stock, warned that, “The criminals are even now, as we speak, focusing on them…even those used by the military and including heavy weapons. We can expect an influx of weapons in Europe and beyond. We should be alarmed.” Interpol asked all countries sending weapons to Ukraine to use a database to help “track and trace” the weapons. Some nations refused.2023 outlook? It will become front page again after the hot war stops and Ukraine is left with a multi-billion-dollar surplus of weapons. No one knows if that will happen in the next year. I am following it. * What happened to the Department of Justice criminal probe of the OxyContin Sackler family? In February, a group of senators asked the Justice Department to investigate whether the Sackler family - Purdue Pharma’s billionaire owners who made their fortune on OxyContin - should be criminally charged. Although there were more than $50 billion in civil litigation settlements in the nation’s deadliest ever prescription drug crisis, many activists and families of opioid victims demanded more. Are there DOJ criminal probes of the Sacklers or executives at other drug companies, distributors, and pharmacy chains? Justice will not confirm or deny whether a probe is underway, but many of us who have followed it think they are going to wait out the outrage and pressure to act, eventually doing nothing.2023 outlook? I do not have much hope for criminal charges to be filed unless new evidence of culpability and intent come to light. I, and other journalists, will continue reporting on it in the hope that a whistleblower might yet come forward.* What happened to Monkeypox? In the summer it seemed that every news outlet had a Monkeypox scare story, something along the line that it was the viral successor to Covid. “America has the largest monkeypox outbreak in the world,” was the Daily Mail headline in August. All the media hype was over 28 confirmed deaths in more than 72,000 infections. And the initial cases were limited to mostly gay and bisexual men. Still, media warned it was an equal opportunity infection that would be a worldwide scourge. Four months after the first reports, the number of cases had dropped by 85%.2023 outlook? Zero. The virus turned out to be more difficult to transmit than originally forecast and far less deadly. I am looking forward in 2023 to reporting on some stories that will be new and interesting to a wide audience. It is a great time to be an investigative journalist. In the meantime, I am sending with this post the best New Year wishes to all my Substack followers. Thanks for making 2022 a great year.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