After he was shot in 1981, “President Reagan said to me, ‘I hope you’re all Republicans,’ and I replied, ‘Today, we’re all Republicans,’” one Dr. Giordano related in 2010. “I’m not a Republican,” added the physician, who treated Reagan, “but I thought for this one day I could be one.”
Reagan was kidding, of course, maintaining his legendary sense of humor even under duress. And Giordano was exhibiting the honor and integrity that once epitomized more Americans. That is, you do your job, no matter who your client is, for a simple reason: It’s your duty. (The virtue of Love can be a strong motivator, too.)
This has changed to an extent, however — and healthcare has not been immune to this change. As commentator J.R. Dunn wrote Monday:
Over the past few months, there has been a rash of social media videos from nurses making absolutely atrocious comments about people with whom they disagree politically. Here’s an example, posted this past weekend.
Actually, these have been common since President Trump began his second term, but they’ve really ramped up since the beginning of combat in the Gulf…. [O]ne wants all MAGA supporters to jump off bridges so that she can take pleasure in watching. Others, cutting a lot closer to the bone, have stated that they’d refuse care to MAGA supporters or, in one case, take steps during treatment to ensure that they wouldn’t recover…. In other words, acting like those medical psychopaths who deliberately target patients.
The response to these vids has been one of surprise and shock: these young women have embarked on careers devoted to caring for the sick and helpless. Yet here they are wishing pain, misery, and even death to those who hold different opinions.
Examples of such individuals follow.
First there’s “Sara,” reportedly a Colorado emergency room nurse:
Then there was Florida nurse Erik Martindale:
There’s also Chicago-area nurse Chad Malinowski:
Martindale relinquished his Florida nursing license after coming under pressure, Malinowski was fired, and Sara’s status is indeterminate.
The good news is that such nurses are a very small minority. Most (as with most Americans) aren’t overly political, and those who are generally separate their passions from their responsibilities. One such individual (below) posted her thoughts under the Malinowski video.
(The “mental health” framing is questionable, though. We have a spiritual/philosophical/moral “health” crisis more than a mental-health one.)
The bad news is that just one bad apple can wreak havoc, as the numerous cases of serial-killer nurses attest. Why, a couple or more might have had body counts reaching the hundreds.
More Bad News
Returning to Dunn, he essentially warns that modern “medicine” is breeding serial-killer nurses. Mentioning euthanasia in Europe and partial-birth abortion here at home, he writes:
These young women are products of their milieu — a “healthcare system” that elevates profits and efficiency, that lacks empathy, decency, and humanity. They have locked unwanted infants in closets to die. They have assisted in partial-birth abortions. They have injected patients with heavy doses of morphine so that they’ll die more quickly. Compassion has been trained out them. They are programmed assassins….
It doesn’t take much effort to add “MAGA patients” to that [hit] list.
In fairness, again, there are many great nurses who take their duty as healers seriously. (I’ve experienced their goodness at hospitals.) Also note that the problem in Europe isn’t elevating “profits.” Rather, it’s socialism-like, price-control-induced priorities that cause medical administrators to elevate saving money over saving lives. But there is, to use a word popular among the left, a “systemic” problem in medicine today. (And, of course, the deepest problems are always systemic.)
Racial Hierarchies
That is, it isn’t just anti-MAGA discrimination — which is largely a lone-wolf phenomenon — bedeviling us today. There’s also something far worse: institutionalized teaching that could lead to discrimination. Just consider, for example, the following 2024 Wall Street Journal story:
If you’ve heard that the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda is going away, don’t believe it. An emerging practice at elite medical schools segregates students by race to teach them about alleged structural racism in healthcare.
The University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine requires that first year students take a class called “Structural Racism and Health Equity” as part of the standard curriculum. In one exercise for the course, students divide by racial group and retreat to different areas to discuss antiracist prompts.
This is known as racial caucusing, a teaching device that UCLA describes as an “anti-racist pedagogical tool” to “provide a reflective space for us to explore how our positionality — particularly our racial identities as perceived within clinical spaces — influence our interaction with patients, colleagues and other staff.”
And where could the mentality reflected above lead? We needn’t wonder; we just have to note where it has already led. Per Fox News in 2021:
The state of New York said it will prioritize non-White people in the distribution of COVID-19 treatments in short supply.
So there you have it: The ice on racial discrimination in medical care has already been broken.
Apropos to this, leftists once talked much about combating prejudice. Yet today they epitomize it. This isn’t surprising, either.
Prejudice means to “pre-judge” and form a negative opinion without adequate knowledge and rational analysis. And, of course, when operating emotionally — as leftists typically do — you will always pre-judge matters. This is sometimes called a knee-jerk reaction.
The problem today is that the prevailing pseudo-elite world view, currently called “wokeness,” is emotion-based. Until it is utterly destroyed and we return to belief in Truth (objective by nature) and reliance on reason, Americans will increasingly pre-judge good as evil and duty as optional.
