#ideological indoctrination

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Aaron Sibarium

Published: Apr 24, 2024

Top physicians, including former Harvard dean, say required course is riddled with dangerous falsehoods

Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that "fatphobia is medicine’s status quo" and that weight loss is a "hopeless endeavor."

Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described "fat liberationist," in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory "Structural Racism and Health Equity" class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.

The Washington Free Beacon has obtained the entire syllabus for the course, along with slide decks and lecture prep from some of its most explosive sessions. The materials offer the fullest picture to date of what students at the elite medical school are learning and have dismayed prominent physicians—including those sympathetic to the goals of the class—who say UCLA has traded medicine for Marxism.

Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s foremost experts on obesity, said the curriculum "promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation."

UCLA "has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate," said Flier, who reviewed the full syllabus and several of the assigned readings. "As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking."

One required reading lists "anti-capitalist politics" as a principle of "disability justice" and attacks the evils of "ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism." Others decry "racial capitalism," attack "growth-centered economic theories," and call for "moving beyond capitalism for our health."

The essay by Mercedes "describes how weight came to be pathologized and medicalized in racialized terms" and offers guidance on "resisting entrenched fat oppression," according to the course syllabus. Mercedes claims that "ob*sity" is a slur "used to exact violence on fat people"—particularly "Black, disabled, trans, poor fat people"—and offers a "fat ode to care" that students are instructed to analyze, taking note of which sections "most resonate with you."

"This is a profoundly misguided view of obesity, a complex medical disorder with major adverse health consequences for all racial and ethnic groups," Flier told the Free Beacon. "Promotion of these ignorant ideas to medical students without counterbalancing input from medical experts in the area is nothing less than pedagogical malpractice."

Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician at Yale University, who has spent decades providing medical care to underserved communities, including in the South Side of Chicago, called the curriculum "nonsensical."

The relationship between health and social forces "should indeed be taught at medical school," Christakis wrote in an email, "but to have a mandatory course like this—so tendentious, sloganeering, incurious, and nonsensical—strikes me as embarrassing to UCLA."

UCLA did not respond to requests for comment.

Snapshots of the course have been leaking for months and left the school doing damage control as members of UCLA’s own faculty have spoken out against the curriculum. The most recent embarrassment came when a guest lecturer, Lisa Gray-Garcia, led students in chants of "Free, Free Palestine" after instructing them to kneel on the floor and pray to "Mama Earth." Lessons on "decolonization" and climate activism, as well as a classroom exercise that separated students by race, have also stirred controversy.

"There are areas where medicine and public health intersect with politics, and these require discussion and debate of conflicting viewpoints," Flier said. "That is distinct from education designed to ideologically indoctrinate physician-activists."

The mandatory class is part of a nationwide push by medical schools to integrate DEI content into their curricula—for residents as well as students— both by adding required courses and by changing the way traditional subjects are taught.

Stanford Medical School sprinkles lessons on "microaggressions," "structural racism," and "privilege" throughout its curriculum. Residents at Yale Medical School must complete an "Advocacy and Equity" sequence focused on "becoming physician advocates for health justice," while those in the infectious disease program must complete additional lessons on "Diversity, Equity, and Antiracism."

Columbia Medical School promotes an "Anti-bias and Inclusive" curriculum by encouraging educators to use "precise, accurate language." Instead of "women," guidelines for the curriculum state, faculty should refer to "people with uteruses."

The changes have been driven partly by the Association of American Medical Colleges—one of two groups that oversees the accrediting body for all U.S. medical schools—which in 2022 released a set of DEI "competencies" to guide curricula. Schools should teach students how to identify "systems of power, privilege, and oppression," the competencies state, and how to incorporate "knowledge of intersectionality" into clinical decision-making. Students should also be able to describe "public policy that promotes social justice" and demonstrate "moral courage" when faced with "microaggression."

The course at UCLA, which predates those accreditation standards, offers a preview of how DEI mandates could reshape medical education. It is littered with the lingo of progressive activism—"intersectionality" is a core value of the class, according to slides from the first session—and states outright that it is training doctors to become activists.

Students will "build critical consciousness" and move toward a "liberatory practice of medicine" by "focusing on praxis," according to the slides.

A section called "Our Hxstories" adds that "[h]ealth and medical practice are deeply impacted by racism and other intersectional structures of power, hierarchy, and oppression—all of which require humility, space and patience to understand, deconstruct, and eventually rectify."

That jargon reflects a worldview with clinical implications. In a unit on "abolitionist" health, which explores "alternatives to carceral systems in LA," students are assigned a paper that argues police should be removed from emergency rooms, where 55 percent of doctors say they’ve been assaulted—mostly by patients—and threats of violence are common, according to a 2022 survey from American College of Emergency Physicians. Other units discuss the "sickness of policing" and link "Queer liberation to liberation from the carceral state."

Flier said the syllabus was so bad it called for an investigation—and that anyone who signed off on it was unfit to make curricular decisions.

"Assuming the school’s dean," Steven Dubinett, a pulmonologist, "does not himself support this course as presented, it is his responsibility to review the course and the curriculum committee that approved it," Flier said. "If that body judged the course as appropriate, he should change its leadership and membership."

Dubinett did not respond to a request for comment.

One of the leaders of the course is Shamsher Samra, a professor of emergency medicine who in December signed an open letter endorsing "Palestinians’ right to return" and linking "health equity" to divestment from Israel.

"To authentically engage in antiracism health scholarship and practice is to explicitly name injustices tied to white supremacy and maintain an unapologetic commitment to antiracism praxis that transcends US borders," the letter reads. "As such, we, the undersigned,* unequivocally support a free Palestine and Palestinians’ right to return."

Samra, who in 2021 published a paper on "infrastructural violence and the health of border abolition," did not respond to a request for comment.

To the extent the course addresses actual medical debates, it frames contested treatments as settled science, omitting evidence that cuts against its activist narrative. A unit on "Queerness/Gender," for example, assigns readings on "gender self-determination" and "DIY transition," but does not include any of the research from Europe—such as the newly released Cass Report—that has led England and other countries to restrict hormone therapies for children.

"UCLA School of Medicine has decided to shield its students from the ongoing scientific debates playing out in Europe and even in the U.S.," said Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who researches gender medicine. "This is fundamentally unserious, and a stain on the school’s reputation."

The omission of inconvenient facts extends to a unit on Los Angeles's King/Drew hospital—nicknamed "Killer King" for its high rates of medical error—which the course promotes as an example of "community health."

Founded in 1972 as a response to the Watts riots, the hospital was majority black, had a documented policy of racial preferences, and was hit with several civil rights complaints by non-black doctors alleging discrimination in hiring and promotion.

It closed in 2007 after a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by the Los Angeles Times found numerous cases in which patients had been killed or injured by clinical mistakes, such as overdosing a child with sedatives and giving cancer drugs to a meningitis patient. Efforts to reform the hospital stalled, according to the Times, because its board of supervisors feared coming across as racially insensitive.

The assigned readings on King/Drew do not include any of this history. Lecture slides instead praise the hospital for "suturing racial divides," but suggest that it may not have gone far enough. A focus on "producing highly talented and skilled physicians," one slide reads, "forced" King/Drew to hire doctors who were, "in some cases, not Black."

The curriculum is a "compilation of ideologic and anecdotal assertions that represent a warped view of medicine," said Stanley Goldfarb, the founder of the medical advocacy group Do No Harm and the father of Free Beacon chairman Michael Goldfarb. "American medical education needs to purge itself of this nonsense and treat every patient as an individual."

The slides suggest that "lived experiences," "historical memory," and "other knowledges" can constitute medical expertise.

Biomedical knowledge, after all, is "just one way of knowing, understanding, and experiencing health in the world."

==

The moral of the story is, if you see a UCLA medical school certificate on your doctor's wall, leave.

If you don't see this as the same thing as faith-healing, I don't know what to tell you.

#Aaron Sibarium #UCLA #medical school #ideological corruption #ideological capture #corruption of education #medical corruption #health equity #medical malpractice #DEI #diversity equity and inclusion #diversity #equity #inclusion #DEI bureaucracy #indoctrination #ideological indoctrination #lived experience #other knowledges #other ways of knowing #obesity #fatphobia #religion is a mental illness

[amygdalae]

My archeology prof has gone on multiple tangents about how stupid gender reveal parties are ("they aren't gender reveal parties, they're sex reveal parties, and that's stupid) and spent a good chunk of a lecture going into how gender is a cultural/social construct and gender does not equal sex and neither gender nor sex are anywhere near as binary as western norms have us believe. And also she's beautiful. Just bragging

#my mom took her class years ago and has always had a crush on her since and i see why #another college professor indoctrinating the youths with woke gender ideology. epic

[feminismnightmares]

Friendly reminder girls can like boyish things and be tomboys and boys can like girly things and be feminine without being transgender.

“Dismantling gender roles” doesn’t work if you insist that any child who shows interest in something that goes against their sex implies they’re the opposite.

In fact it just reenforces those gender roles the woke crowd seem to hate so much

Interests have no gender and anyone can like anything. It doesn’t mean they’re not who they were when they were born.

#anti trans agenda #anti indoctrination #protect children #child safety #child safeguarding #anti lgbt #anti feminism #anti feminist #anti woke #anti woke ideology

[exvangelicalrage]

You Will Be Free Indeed

5/22/23

There's thing thing christians sometimes do, called "testimonies." Most of my memories of testimonies involve dudes with tattoos getting up in front of the congregation and saying something like, "I spent the last ten years in prison, and while I was there, I found jesus!" And then all the people say, "praise be" or "amen" or some such nonsense. Then the dude expounds on his story about how he did all these terrible things, but when he was born again, he felt the chains of sin fall away from him and he became "free indeed." 

(Side note, "Free indeed" is evangelical rhetoric/gaslighting designed to counter the realization that religion actually binds you.)

These testimonies weren't always from dudes with tattoos. Technically, everybody had a testimony. The formula was this: 

All the bad stuff you did —> your encounter with jesus and/or being born again — > how it changed you — > freedom

For example, "I used to be selfish but then I became born again and gave all of my self to christ and now I am free!" 

Or, "I used to be bound by the shackles of lust! Then jesus cleansed me of my sins and I was born again. I no longer feel constrained by my sinful desires. It's like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders!" 

Literally anything that counts as a "sin" works. Even if you were young, like I was, and hadn't experienced much in the way of deliberate sinfulness, you could simply swap out a specific sin with "sinful nature" or "sinful desires." 

"I was born sinful but then learned about jesus, accepted him into my heart, and now I know I don't have to give in to sin and am free in christ."

BAM: Testimony!

The proclamation of freedom at the end of a testimony has stuck with me.

There were tons of ways people described it, always very visceral and visual. Shackles breaking. A weight lifted from their shoulders. As if everything had been in darkness and now they could see the light. As if they had been limited or bound or contained in some way, but now they were released. Imprisoned, trapped, captive. And then freed.

I had this vision in my head of atheists walking around with a ball and chain hooked to each leg. With metaphorical backpacks that weighed hundreds of pounds making it impossible to keep their spines up straight. With black, slimy tendrils of sin licking around their bodies, pulling them into a quicksand of sin.

I could hardly imagine how non-christians slept at night. How did they not see the black cloud that followed them everywhere they went? Did they not imagine life could be better? 

Honestly, this intense visual is one of the reasons I stayed christian as long as I did. I didn't want to become like that. I didn't want life to be heavy. I didn't want to bear the weight of my sins—not when jesus had offered to do it for me. 

But eventually, the weight of my doubt grew heavier than the weight of my sins. After all, I'd spent my entire life trying to be as perfect as possible. Not to mention, jesus had supposedly cleansed me. 

So why did everything feel so heavy?

When I finally had the courage to Exit christianity, officially and for real, something crazy happened. You'll never believe it. 

I felt free.

It was like a metaphorical weight had been lifted. Like I'd been walking around with a ball and chain hooked to each leg—but now they were gone! Like I shed that metaphorical backpack that made it impossible for me to keep my spine straight. Like the black, slimy tendrils of christianity licking around my body and dragging me into the quicksand of religion had been utterly, irrevocably banished. 

The black cloud—gone! Only a blue sky above. 

Never had I ever imagined that life, existence, self could feel so light.

christians imagine that that sense of freedom comes from jesus. That the lightness comes from having your sins "forgiven." From choosing to live your life for god and walk on that dusty road to heaven, instead of the glittery road to hell.

But the truth is, that sense of freedom and lightness comes only in making the choice.  And which choice doesn't really matter. It's just that you made the right one for you.

It's about looking your own darkness in the face and saying, "No. I reject you."

Sometimes that darkness takes the form of the "sins" we've committed or the harm we've caused. Sometimes it's our guilt. Sometimes it might be mental illness. Or the trauma of past experiences. 

And sometimes, it's christianity.

#exchristian #ex christian #free indeed #atheist #agnostic #exvangelica #exvangelical #ex evangelical #religious trauma #religion #indoctrination #cult ideologies #cults #the christian cult #ex protestant

[heresronnie21]

Nico di Angelo would not wear an Italian flag patch on his jacket

#he does not have a sense of national identity he doesnt belong to a country #maria di angelo didnt put her babies on a ship to another continent despite the dangers they specifically faced with sea travel as #children of hades to avoid them being indoctrinated into fascist ideology for this #he has conflicted feelings about being Italian at best #nico di angelo

[superdiscochino]

Helping 12-year-old study for her history test the other night, they're doing European explorers, I'm reading names off flashcards, "Hernan Cortes" "Amerigo Vespucci" "Vasco de Gama," and every time she starts with "he discovered..." I make giant air quotes and exaggeratedly say "DISCOVERED" and every time she's like I KNOW I KNOW I GET IT!!!

#browbeating your children into understanding how ideological indoctrination works #deprogramming as we go #this is the teacher who plays golf #“discovered” is what he wants she is correct in surmising this #but I'm going to make damn sure she knows that is a euphemism for invaded/colonized/initiated the genocide of #even if it means being the exasperating father who can't let a damn thing go #my promise to you #I WILL NOT LET A DAMN THING GO

[mummer]

re lrb a huge portion of the zionist propaganda i have personally seen posted like on facebook and insta and stuff is concentrated very specifically on denying the concept of the innocent palestinian civilian. mostly just trying to manufacturing consent for the death of children. videos will be like “look at these palestinian 6 year olds saying how much they hate jews the entire population has been sadly brainwashed irreparably nothing to be done.” or that Fucking golda meir quote thats like “maybe we’ll forgive The Arabs for killing our sons but it’ll be harder to forgive them for ~forcing us to kill their sons~”. or stuff about how they’re Forced to bomb hospitals and schools human shields etc. most entrenched zionists really are not hemming and hawwing about history most of the time… They dont care that they’re killing innocent people whatsoever like it doesnt convince them because they just dont care. They consider it utterly acceptable in their moral calculus. i dont even think most of the time it’s that they dont see palestinians as people, they might, they see them as people deserving of death

#islamophobia cw #fffffucking. awesomeee #i think this is probably more indicative of like zionist indoctrination and ccommunity thought policing than anything #like the way you genuinely have to be culty about it because the evil is so overwhelming. idk #In that sense it’s like i dont know how there could be a workable solution to destroying zionism as an ideology #like clearly judaism and zionism are not intrinsic to one another but many jews think they are #Basically everythings fucked

[dontlookforme00]

i feel like you should know that thanks to you i am now starting to develop a chonny jash obsession (i am here to thank you this music is very good and im liking it a lot)

I keep getting asks from my mutual about chonny jash I am SO fucking pleased with myself. YES. YES, STAR, JOIN US. YOU'RE WELCOME, NOW come scream about the music with me, I need to balance my lack of irl friends who know him (NONE of them)

The music is fucking great. Have this video essay, please

#answered asks #star2stop #KIDNAPPING U AND INDOCTRINATING U WITH MY JASH IDEOLOGIES. MY JASHOLOGIES IF YOU WILL

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

“There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five.”

-- Arthur Schopenhauer

#Arthur Schopenhauer #indoctrination #religious indoctrination #childhood indoctrination #child indoctrination #woke indoctrination #ideological indoctrination #religion is a mental illness

[to-thelakes]

regulus arcturus black is my roman empire

(jkr completely glossing over his importance is another reason i hate dislike her 🫶)

#ruby rambles #harry potter #regulus black #marauders #half-blood prince is playing on itv and it reminded me of him #he was a fundamentally flawed character who was indoctrinated by his family before proceeding to break through it #then he proceeded to look for horcruxes on his own and double cross voldemort because he realised how flawed the ideology was #snape could never

[immaculatasknight]

Servitors of empire

#Canada #Britain #America #imperialism #subjugation #looting #slavery #impoverishment #Round Table #ideology #education #indoctrination

[fireworkss-exe]

why are there so many terfs and femcels on pinterest.

#tw transphobia #especially concerning since there's a lot of young girls on pinterest #who could get indoctrinated into terf ideology super easily

[yuriboobz]

#Not only that the mold gained sentience and our troubles began! #tomo takino ideological indoctrination #mold

[lalo-w]

They're targeting children at every turn with their warped ideologies.

#Children #Ideologies #Doctors #Gender #GenderFluid #Nonbinary #trans #indoctrination

#Children Ideologies Doctors Gender GenderFluid Nonbinary trans indoctrination

[camcorderrevival]

Desperately trying to explain to my very uninterested friends that Fight Club is best summed up by the lines “Someday, you will die, and until you know that, you are useless to me” and “This isn’t really death, we’ll be legend, we’ll never grow old.”

#IT'S ALL IN THE CONTRADICTIONS BABY!!!!!!!!!! #because Tyler is not some beacon of liberating ideology #though the members of FC and PM view him as such #It's about the way people (middle class white men - specifically) are indoctrinated #into ideologies that appear to serve and liberate them #but they do not #because Tyler's still at the top - he gets free food and transport #everyone calls him sir and he gives them homework assignments #he sells them the idea of freedom and then places himself #at the top of the cult he's created #overall - the shift from Fight Club to Project Mayhem #is the most important bit of the book #in terms of analysing belief and ideology #Fight Club

[ay0nha]

I've been thinking about unfollowing you for a while now. Thank god you made the decision for me. I'm all for transgender people, but the day isn't about them.

#cry me a river #FUCK TERFS #shoo now and stop being indoctrinated by antiquated ideologies #That shit poisons the mind #literally wtf is wrong with you people #what makes you so compelled to do shit like this #go read some sandy stone #personal #ask #anon