https://www.city-journal.org/article/derald-wing-sue-social-work-nursing-counseling-race

Why Are So Many Nurses Left-Wing?

By Forest Romm - March 3, 2026

Psychologist Derald Wing Sue’s racialist ideas have deeply influenced the helping professions.

National Nurses United has a message for the White House: “ICE messed with the wrong profession.” After intensive-care nurse Alex Pretti was killed in Minneapolis last month, the union’s members called U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement a “fascist, terrorizing, and lawless paramilitary force violently enforcing a white supremacist agenda.” In another statement, the union called federal immigration enforcement agencies one of America’s “top public health threats,” adding to a string of similar declarations it made about racism, climate change, and Israeli “apartheid.”

The helping professions—occupations like therapy, social work, and nursing—have increasingly drifted from their traditional roles as carers and embraced social-justice advocacy. These fields have long leaned left and female, but the skew has recently intensified, following broader trends in academia. Progressives now vastly outnumber conservatives, creating an echo chamber that has radicalized a segment of the workforce.

One reason for the change is the work of Derald Wing Sue, a psychologist whose racialist theories upended his field. His ideology captured professional organizations and accreditation bodies and changed the character of the helping professions.

Sue’s influence began to take hold in the late twentieth century, as patient populations became more racially and ethnically diverse. Therapists faced new challenges that demanded new competencies, and Sue filled the vacuum. His seminal 1981 text, Counseling the Culturally Diverse, established him as a leading figure in the emerging field of “multicultural counseling.”

His book was less concerned with the practical difficulties of cross-cultural therapy than with its premises. Sue argued that conventional mental-health models, rooted in the values and beliefs of “White Western Eurocentric culture,” wrongly cast individuals as autonomous agents responsible for their condition. Such assumptions were allegedly “oppressive and discriminating toward clients of color,” whose psychological and behavioral problems Sue attributed to “systemic factors” such as “stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, and oppression.” The counselor’s role, he believed, was not merely to treat the individual but to eradicate structural oppression.

Sue later popularized the concept of “microaggressions”: “slights, snubs, or insults” that target “marginalized” people. Such covert bias, he insisted, is “many times over more problematic, damaging, and injurious to persons of color than overt racist acts.” This unfalsifiable construct made Sue an interpretive authority on “microaggressions”—and carved out a lucrative niche for such “experts” in education and consulting.

Research now suggests that microaggression trainings may heighten people’s perceptions of racism in ambiguous situations. After Scott Lilienfeld warned of these risks in 2017 and called for a moratorium on such trainings pending evidence of benefit, Sue blithely dismissed him: “those with power,” Sue quipped, “enjoy the luxury of waiting for proof.”

Meantime, Sue argued in Counseling the Culturally Diverse, minorities were being harmed by “White institutions.” He rejected “colorblindness,” denounced policies that “claim to ‘treat everyone the same,’” and classified the suggestion that unequal outcomes might reflect factors beyond prejudice as a category of microaggressions labeled the “Myth of Meritocracy.” Instead of individual change, he advocated “social therapy,” in which helping professionals pursue institutional reform.

Minorities, in Sue’s scheme, possess little agency, while whites enjoy the “power to define reality” as a result of their “privilege.” He compared whites with “fish in water,” oblivious to how their “Whiteness . . . intrudes and disadvantages people of color.”

These radical premises formed the basis of “multicultural counseling.” Sue argued that, to become “culturally competent,” white counselors needed to confront their complicity in perpetuating racism, acknowledge their “unearned privilege,” and develop an “antiracist White identity.”

In time, Sue’s theories infected professional counseling and psychological organizations. By 1994, the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) had begun integrating his “multicultural competencies” into its training requirements. The American Psychological Association followed suit in 2002, publishing multicultural guidelines coauthored by Sue. Twelve years later, the American Counseling Association Code of Ethics required educators to “infuse material related to multiculturalism/diversity into all courses and workshops,” and subsequently adopted the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies, built explicitly on Sue’s original 1992 standards. CACREP updated its standards again in 2024 to reaffirm that “diversity, equity, and inclusion . . . are integral to counselor preparation and should be infused throughout the curriculum,” and to require instruction in “theories and models of multicultural counseling, social justice, and advocacy.”

Social work embraced similar principles. The 1993 National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics introduced “social justice,” which was elevated to a core professional value in 1996. In 2008, immigration status, sexual orientation, and gender identity were added to its nondiscrimination commitments. NASW then published Standards and Indicators for Cultural Competence in Social Work Practice in 2015, invoking Sue’s language, and issued a 2021 revision clarifying expectations for “cultural competence.”

Today, accredited university social work programs must embed “anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion” across curricula. Students learn to recognize their “positionality, power, and privilege,” confront oppression, and “advocate at all system levels” to reduce “inequities,” aided by Sue’s widely assigned Multicultural Social Work Practice.

Nursing may seem a less obvious target for Sue’s influence. Yet the field enthusiastically embraced his brand of racialism. Accreditation is aligned with the American Nurses Association’s Code of Ethics for Nurses, a document that calls racism a “public health crisis”; tasks nurses with “dismantl structural barriers to a good and healthy society”; and calls on nurses to “condemn all forms of oppression” and oppose “voter suppression.”

Ethical codes are blends of enforceable rules and aspirational ideals. But for students, “multicultural competence” requirements are nonnegotiable. In counseling, psychology, social work, and nursing education, trainees are judged as much on ideological alignment as on clinical skill.

Professional psychology graduate programs, for example, consider “gatekeeping”—the “initial and ongoing academic, skill, and dispositional assessment of students’ competency for professional practice”—an ethical duty. Faculty are empowered to monitor students’ compliance with ethical standards and to pursue “remediation” or “termination as appropriate” when they resist dominant orthodoxies.

Roger Scruton observed that human beings are shaped through the giving and receiving of social recognition. The pursuit of recognition is among the most powerful human drives; threats of rejection and ostracism are existential. It’s little wonder, then, that so many students in helping fields align their beliefs with progressive norms.

In higher education, helping-professional programs often consider white students like Alex Pretti inherently “privileged.” Such students are told that their lives “must become a ‘have to’ in being constantly vigilant to manifestations of bias in both and the people around you ,” and that “dealing with racism means a personal commitment to action,” as Sue instructed in Counseling the Culturally Diverse. In response, some white students attempt to demonstrate their moral bona fides through “antiracist” activism.

A generation of counselors, social workers, and nurses have been influenced by Sue’s racialist theories. If accreditation bodies and professional organizations change course, some counselors, social workers, and nurses would, too. But as National Nurses United’s comments after Pretti’s death suggest, change may be a long way off.

Forest Romm is a collegiate associate at Manhattan Institute.

A brilliant tutorial on how to slice through the deliberate theft of our words.

https://pjmedia.com/jamie-wilson/2025/11/21/the-only-strategy-that-works-against-weaponized-language-n4946261

The Only Strategy That  Works Against Weaponized Language

Jamie K. Wilson   |  November 21, 2025

Yesterday, in my piece about why we can’t argue about fascism anymore, a commenter asked the natural follow-up: “Well, how do we take the word back?” Short answer: We can’t. The old meaning isn’t coming back.

What we can and must do is learn how to argue around a word that no longer means what we think it means, because clinging to the old definition blindsides us every time. These techniques will work not only for "fascist" and "Nazi" but for other words the left has corrupted as well, though perhaps not in the way you might expect.

Why We Can't Make the Word Mean What It Used To Mean

“Fascist” and “Nazi” no longer function as political descriptors. They’re moral labels now, emotional containers signaling “bad person,” “unsafe presence,” or “someone outside the (correct) moral community.” Once a word becomes a purity signal, emotional meaning crushes factual meaning every time.

Most people under forty have never learned the historical definition at all. They don’t know about corporatism, syndicalism, mass mobilization, mythic nationalism, or the revolutionary state. They learned “fascist” as a feeling, not a doctrine — a linguistic siren, not a political ideology. Digital culture has supercharged this drift. Algorithms reward emotional spikes and punish precision. The mutated definition spreads faster, bonds groups better, and hits harder. They have become part of tribal language, not American cultural language. The original meaning is now museum trivia.

We aren’t getting those words back. We can show that two incompatible meanings are colliding, and once people see that fracture, the slur loses most of its force.

A Meme That Makes the Fracture Obvious

This hit home when someone online insisted she “understood fascism” and sent me an authoritative-looking yellow-and-black meme claiming to diagnose fascism at a glance. The “definition” box on the left seemed to lay out criteria. The checklist on the right looked like analysis.

When you look closely, though, the logic evaporates.

The “definition” isn't historical at all. It lists vibes: authoritarian, nationalist, controlling — traits so elastic you could stretch them over anyone you dislike. It left out the economic structure, the mass-mobilization state, the mythic nationalism, the corporatist machinery, and everything else that actually defines fascism.

The checklist wasn’t evidence. It was ritual. Here’s the moral template — now let’s stamp the enemy with it. The confidence wasn’t dishonesty. It was fluency, but in the new meaning, not the old one. And this is exactly why arguments collapse: the two sides aren’t even using the same conceptual categories.

You aren’t disagreeing.

You’re miscommunicating across a linguistic chasm, and that chasm is widening.

Why Their Words Don’t Sound Like Language

If, like me, you care about precision, if you're the kind of word nerd who will hunt down the exact right word even if it means switching languages (which is why I'm learning German), this new rhetoric doesn’t sound like language at all. That's because it is not, not precisely. It’s not built to describe, clarify, or differentiate. It’s not intended to convey thought.

It’s symbolic signaling.

In progressive speech, words aren’t vessels for meaning. They’re vessels for emotion: disgust, fear, boundary-marking, tribal alert.

Once you realize this, the entire pattern snaps into place. Their conflict style isn’t adult debate. It’s the adolescent female model of social aggression:

• using labels as weapons
• policing group boundaries
• punishing outsiders through reputation
• escalating emotion to display loyalty
• enforcing purity tests
• exiling people as discipline

It’s not argument. It’s status warfare.

Meanwhile, you’re trying to build a conversation with tools meant for clarity, and they’re trying to control a social environment. Two different goals. Two different languages. Once you understand that, the insanity around you suddenly makes sense.

This is why getting angry never works. When you hear “fascist,” you hear the historical charge. When they say it, they mean “morally unsafe.” So when you respond with logic — “I’m not a fascist, I believe in limited government and individual rights” — you are answering an accusation they did not make. You are refuting Mussolini while they are signaling emotional danger.

Denial reads as guilt. Logic reads as defensiveness.

You can’t refute a definition the other person isn’t using.

This is not disagreement. It’s a category error.

The Moral Framework Behind the New Usage

In modern progressive moral logic, “fascist” functions as a moral alert, not an ideological label.

“Fascist” = someone whose beliefs disrupt the emotional or moral order of the group.
“Nazi” = someone cast outside the human circle entirely — a moral contaminant.
These aren’t political arguments. The words no longer have the meaning they originally carried. Instead, they’re purification tags. Their social purpose is to identify safety and non-safety, insiders and outsiders, protected and unclean. Once you see that, the speed of escalation makes perfect sense.

Inside this purity system, escalation is a form of loyalty.

The first person says “fascist.” The next must match or exceed it. Matching is safe. Exceeding earns status.

So the Defcon ladder of impurity rises like this:

• fascist
• white supremacist
• Nazi
• genocidal
• existential threat

Digital algorithms amplify the climb. Outrage gets reach; nuance disappears. And once someone is framed as a moral threat, ordinary moral restraints come off. Deplatforming feels protective. Ostracism feels virtuous. Harassment feels justified. And violence feels like self-defense.

This is the psychology behind Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Someone believed the rhetoric literally. Someone believed the label, not the person. When the emotional definition replaces the historical one, violence becomes thinkable.

The modern use of the term “Nazi” is moral dehumanization. It means: this person is outside the circle of moral duty.

This is the same psychological mechanism the early fascists used. They didn’t start with violence. They started with labels: “enemy,” “contaminant,” “dangerous element.” Strip away humanity, and anything becomes possible.

Young progressives believe they’re resisting fascism, but psychologically, they’re reenacting its first step. Whether the left wants to admit this parallel or not, the structure is identical.

No one wants to admit this parallel — but the structure is identical.

If this vocabulary drift continues, we already know where it leads:

• debates become impossible
• moderates retreat to avoid pain
• institutions enforce emotional language
• political violence becomes moralized
• shared reality collapses
• communication fails

Societies don’t fracture over ideology. They fracture when language stops connecting people. When words no longer carry meaning, violence becomes the only remaining form of communication. That’s the direction we’re heading. Fortunately, it is not inevitable.

Can Argumentation Slow or Reverse This? Yes — but Not by Converting Radicals

Radicals are unreachable. They’re performing, not thinking. They’re using language as a ritual, not a tool. But normal people — the folks in the middle, the witnesses — absolutely are reachable.

When you answer “fascist” with calm translation, when you name the emotion beneath the label, when you redirect to shared moral values, the entire emotional frame falls apart.

Bystanders see clarity. The radical looks theatrical. The spell breaks.

Extremists win only when the middle checks out. Your clarity gives the middle the confidence to stay.

And it's a fight we have to engage in. The extremists are picking off more and more people, those who are on the edges or who are weak of will, who see this insanity and think, well, yeah, that feels right. This is why the mainstream media's technique of flooding the airwaves works, as the ballot box shows. If we truly believe our causes are worth fighting for, we are morally impelled to engage. But we must engage in the correct way.

Remember this: By the time someone calls you a fascist, the one-on-one argument is over. You aren’t talking to the accuser anymore. You’re talking to everyone watching.

The audience decides whose frame holds: who looks grounded or unhinged, credible or ridiculous.

Your goal is no longer persuasion. Your goal is demonstration.

Three Strategies That Actually Work (With Normal People)

Radicals cannot be persuaded — but those watching absolutely can.

These three strategies work because they stabilize the audience, not the accuser.

1. Translate Their Meaning Out Loud

This is the single most effective move.

“You’re using ‘fascist’ to mean ‘someone who disagrees with your worldview.’ I hear that, but that’s not what the word actually means.”

This reframes the exchange instantly:

• The audience sees the category error.
• The emotional punch fizzles.
• You regain control of the frame.
• They now have to clarify, not escalate.

Translation turns confusion into clarity.

2. Address the Emotion Beneath the Word

“Fascist” is an emotional alarm, not a political descriptor. So answer the emotion:

“You’re calling me that because what I said feels threatening to you, not because it resembles historical fascism.”

You’re not defending yourself — you’re explaining the mechanism. And audiences hate being manipulated by someone else’s emotions. Naming the emotional process collapses the power of the slur.

3. Shift the Conversation to Shared Moral Ground

Progressives still claim to value:

• fairness
• autonomy
• freedom of conscience
• diversity of thought
• basic dignity

So stand inside their stated principles:

“We both believe people should speak without fear. That’s the principle I’m defending.”

Radicals can’t reject their own values without revealing themselves. Normal people respond instantly to shared moral ground.

The People You Cannot Reach

Accept this early to avoid wasting energy. You cannot reason with:

• people whose politics function as religion
• purity activists
• Antifa-style street ideologues
• online radicals addicted to emotional escalation
• anyone who treats emotions as truth and words as ritual

These people aren’t debating. They’re policing. And they are not your audience.

Your audience is everyone watching, the people who still believe language has meaning, that disagreement isn’t violence, and that labels should not replace arguments. Be true to them, not your "debate" opponent.

Practical Safety: How Not to Become a Target

When language becomes dehumanization, prudence matters. Not paranoia — prudence.

Here is what actually keeps you safe:

1. Don’t engage radicals alone. Purity-driven people escalate harder when they lack witnesses.

2. Avoid activist territory. Protests and counter-protests are escalation machines. Don’t physically wander in without purpose or backup.

3. Maintain situational awareness. Not fear — awareness: about exits, crowd mood, agitation level, whether the emotional tone shifts. Be ready to exit stage right when things take an ugly shift. It's not cowardly; it's smart, and it ensures you stick around to fight the good fight another day.

4. Cameras protect you. Radicals rarely escalate when recorded. Documentation restores moral constraints. It's better if you have a friend or ally doing the recording while you talk.

5. Leave at the first hint of real voltage. If someone shifts from theatrical to clipped, shaky, or hyper-focused — leave. You cannot de-escalate purity frenzy.

6. Remember Charlie Kirk. Someone took the nasty rhetoric about Charlie Kirk literally. Someone thought they were preventing harm, not causing it. That wasn’t an aberration. It was a logical endpoint. And it can happen to anyone. Never, ever take a chance with your safety or anyone else's.

Remember, the Audience Matters More Than the Accuser

• attacker
• target
• audience

And the audience decides which narrative survives. Radicals escalate to terrify the audience into silence. Your calm clarity shows the audience the truth: This is not a debate — it’s emotional theater. By refusing to mirror the hysteria, you expose it. Narrative dominance never comes from outshouting extremists. It comes from making their performance look absurd beside your composure.

In the end, there's only one path forward. We can’t reclaim the old definitions. We can’t force the language to behave.

But we can reclaim the space around the words.

We can expose the fracture. We can refuse to let dehumanization go unchallenged. We can show the middle how to stay grounded in reality. We can model the steadiness the moment lacks.

The danger isn’t in the semantic drift. Drift is going to happen, and that's not entirely a bad thing; a language that changes is a language that lives. The danger is a culture forgetting that disagreement is not danger, dissent is not violence, and political opponents are not monsters.

We may not be able to resurrect the old meaning of “fascist.” But we can stop the emotional meaning from dragging us into the abyss.

Clarity is resistance.

Precision is de-escalation.

And refusing dehumanization is the only way out of this spiral.

Part of me thinks: women lose at least one egg per cycle throughout their fertile years. If they are sexually active, some fertilized eggs are lost - no one knows exactly how many. Impossible to trace. If the fertilized egg implants and the embryo grows, it may still miscarry. Some estimate up to 1 in 3 pregnancies (pre-born children) are lost this way. Even with good health practices, some miscarriages seem to be unavoidable.

So here's my question on the ethics: is IVF, carried out with the full intent of live birth, materially different from normal reproduction in this regard?

(I would put deliberate destruction of embryos in a different category.)

https://answersingenesis.org/sanctity-of-life/ivf-embryo-deaths-now-surpass-abortion-deaths/

IVF Embryo Deaths Now Surpass Abortion Deaths

Ken Ham    |     December 18, 2025

For years now, the leading cause of death in the United States has been abortion. Of course, it’s not reported like that—if you look up “leading cause of death,” you’ll read that it’s heart disease (680,981 lives lost in 2023), followed by cancer (613,352) and then unintentional injuries (222,698). But that’s not actually true, considering that unborn persons are indeed persons and abortion takes around a million lives each year here in the US (1,037,000 in 2023).

But, according to an analysis of new data from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART), abortion is no longer the leading cause of death because the number of deaths of embryos as part of the typical IVF (in vitro fertilization) process now tops the staggering number of lives lost to abortion.

As more and more couples tragically struggle with infertility, the demand for IVF has increased. Reportedly, “in 2023, there were 432,641 IVF cycles at 371 reporting clinics, but only 95,860 babies were born.” When the numbers are broken down, this means in just one year, “an estimated 1,946,884 embryos did not survive to be implanted, and another 1,759,664 were either frozen, destroyed, donated to research, or released for embryo adoption.”

That’s a staggering number of babies, many of whom were intentionally destroyed. (Yes, embryos are persons. Everything that made you “you,” a person made in the image of God, was present right from fertilization—nothing new was added. And, of course, a human embryo can’t be anything but . . . a human! “Embryo” just refers to a specific developmental milestone in a person’s life.) But why are so many destroyed?

Well, as these breakdowns from the companies themselves show, IVF cycles create a large number of embryos, and these “embryos graded and labeled during testing, and those not deemed healthy enough automatically destroyed.” It’s eugenics—filtering out and destroying those deemed “not good enough” to be born.

IVF Attrition Example (Step-by-Step)
Scenario: 19 eggs retrieved

15 mature eggs → (after retrieval)
12 fertilized embryos → (after fertilization)
6 blastocysts → (after blastulation)
3 normal embryos → (after PGT-A testing)
With three normal embryos, chances of at least one successful pregnancy are about 95%!

Source: Reproductive Medicine Associates

Sample IVF “Funnel”
15 Follicles in both ovaries at time of retrieval
14 Eggs retrieved from follicles
13 Mature eggs
10 Mature eggs fertilized with sperm
8 Embryos that develop to day 3
7 Embryos that develop to blastocyst stage
3 Embryos chromosomally “normal” after PGT testing
2 Embryos implant in the uterus
1 Live birth
Source: Alife

Live Action breaks down what these charts mean:

Based on these charts, there is an average of 10-12 embryos created per IVF cycle, but fertility businesses often list anywhere from seven embryos up to as many as 17 per cycle. Using a conservative nine embryos as the average number created per cycle, at 432,641 cycles, that totals about 3,893,769 embryos created via IVF in 2023 alone. Yet only 95,860 babies were born.

Here’s how those numbers break down. Up to half of the original 3,893,769, likely did not survive beyond the next two stages: the blastocyst stage and the genetic testing stage. . . .

That’s about 1,946,884 embryos who died or were deliberately killed without being given a chance to be implanted.

Of the remaining estimate of 1,946,884, SART states that 91,360 were automatically “banked” for “future use,” as was the parents’ plan when they began the process. We also know that after being graded, labeled, selected, and transferred, only 95,860 survived to birth.

That leaves 1,759,664 human embryos unaccounted for. They survived to the blastocyst stage and passed genetic testing, but they were then either miscarried, destroyed, donated to researchers (and ultimately destroyed), released for embryo adoption (just 1-6%), or are frozen indefinitely. The data don’t tell us, but we can estimate that at least 1.9 million died before even making it to the implantation or freezing stage of the IVF process, and another 1.7 million are not statistically accounted for.

That’s horrifying. The sheer number of persons destroyed in the typical IVF process highlights the commodification of life, where babies are created only to be destroyed if they aren’t “good enough.” (But who defines “good enough”?)

And, according to another news report, some of those “unaccounted for” persons may end up . . . as jewelry! Yes, you read that right—jewelry! A UK-based company “crafts modern heirloom jewelry for parents who have undergone IVF but can no longer store their unused embryos or feel uncertain about donation.” Hailed as a “gentler way to what created,” parents are offered their choice of rings, pendants, bracelets, and charms encasing the embryos they decided to destroy! Human life becomes nothing more than a macabre decoration.

Each individual embryo is a person made in the image of God, fearfully and wonderfully knit together by him and deserving of life.
Christians must speak out against the intentional killing of babies, whether those babies are forming in the womb or in a petri dish. Each individual embryo is a person made in the image of God, fearfully and wonderfully knit together by him and deserving of life. They are not a commodity to be kept or discarded at the whim of the parents or a technician in a lab.

For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them. (Psalm 139:13–16)

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.

I'm enjoying the most recent podcast which explores the intrinsic goodness of medicine, and contains echoes of Hillsdale College.

By way of introduction, a clip from Stanley Kurtz in the National Review.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/introducing-the-hippocratic-society/

Like the Federalist Society, the Hippocratic Society will be a place where conservative views are hosted and put into debate with progressive perspectives. And undoubtedly, conservative-leaning medical students will find colleagues and mentors among its members.

The Hippocratic Society has another function as well, however, ... likely to appeal regardless of political perspective. HippSoc (the abbreviated name of the group) addresses the closely related problems of physician burnout and the bureaucratization of medicine, modeling a return to human-scale doctoring. In furtherance of this, HippSoc reconnects doctors to the philosophical and religious roots of medicine, cultivating an active appreciation of the profession’s higher purpose. HippSoc’s activities on this front will surely appeal to many physicians and medical students, politically conservative or not.

... Hippocrates is most famous, of course, for his oath, the code of medical ethics that many or most modern doctors once swore to uphold. The original Hippocratic oath forbade both abortion and physician-assisted suicide. Most medical schools therefore now either forgo the oath altogether or rewrite it to modify or eliminate those and other provisions.

Most Hippocratic Society members, by contrast, tend to remain loyal to the original oath and to the more encompassing “do no harm” morality that lies behind it. Also, as we’ve seen, HippSoc works to revive knowledge of the philosophical and religious (Jewish, Christian, and Muslim) foundations of medicine, going back as far as Aristotle. It’s a return to medicine in the great tradition.

<clip>

The Hippocratic Society is growing rapidly. When Kheriaty wrote his book, published in September of this year, HippSoc chapters for premedical and medical students had been established at nine universities. I now count 28. (If you’d like to join, or start a chapter of your own, go here.)

What Kheriaty recommends for medicine applies more broadly. We need to establish a set of alternative institutions across many fields of endeavor in order to break monolithic progressive control of our institutions under the guise of “professional” consensus. The Federalist Society established the model. The Hippocratic Society, with modifications, continues it. With luck, we’ll see yet more to come.

Life: it begins at conception. And it's precious.

Video available at the link.

https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2025/09/14/parents-choosing-babies-live-die-eye-color/

Parents Are Choosing Which Babies Live and Die Based on . . . Eye Color

Yes, this is real. Parents utilizing “boutique” genetic testing services are sorting their embryos—living human beings—based on IQ, gender, chance of future illness, and even. . . eye color! Those embryos that don’t match what the parents want are either discarded as medical waste or indefinitely frozen.

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/to-address-the-mental-health-crisis-tackle-the-decline-in-religion/

To Address the Mental Health Crisis, Tackle the Decline in Religion
By Naomi Schaefer Riley | Michelle Shain
June 24, 2025

Americans are searching for an answer to the youth mental health crisis. While many experts rightfully scrutinize smartphones and social media as culprits, another profound shift deserves our attention: the dramatic retreat from religion in American life. As religious participation plummets, particularly among young people, we’re losing the profound social and psychological benefits once provided by religious communities. And our rapidly secularizing society has failed to offer compelling alternatives to replace religion’s protective effects on mental health.

Thousands of studies have shown that religious people are happier, more confident, more optimistic, and more satisfied with their lives. They are also less likely to suffer from anxiety or depression, commit suicide, or abuse alcohol or other drugs. While correlation doesn’t prove causation, longitudinal studies show that many people who become more religious subsequently show improved mental health. Yet the percent of Americans reporting no religious affiliation skyrocketed from just 5% in 1972 to almost 30% today, according to the Pew Research Center. Among the youngest U.S. adults, those ages 18-29, fully 44% are religiously unaffiliated.

Research identifies four distinct pathways through which religious involvement protects mental health — protection that many young Americans are now missing.

First, religion supports healthy families. Religious communities typically promote family stability, encourage parental involvement, and endorse values that strengthen family bonds. Practices such as attending worship services together create shared experiences and traditions that unite family members across generations. Rituals like Shabbat dinners for Jewish families or Family Home Evening for Latter-day Saints create sacred time for connection and conversation. The family structures and practices encouraged by religious participation create environments where children and adolescents are more likely to thrive emotionally and psychologically. As religious participation declines, we lose this institutional support for healthy family functioning.

Second, religion offers community and social support. Religious congregations provide connections that combat isolation and loneliness. Do not underestimate the power of studying together, singing together, and snacking together. The relationships formed during these activities provide a sense of belonging, as well as a place to give and receive help and advice.

Third, religion facilitates volunteerism and civic engagement. Religious institutions create structured opportunities for young people to contribute to their communities, develop empathy, and experience the psychological benefits of helping others. Religious teachings that emphasize service to others motivate prosocial behavior that benefits both the recipients and the volunteers themselves.

Fourth, religion helps people find meaning and purpose. Religious teachings address existential questions and help believers find purpose, direction, and an understanding of their place in the universe. In a world where social media teaches us to measure ourselves through views and likes, religion offers alternative metrics of value and worth. This sense of meaning serves as a powerful buffer against depression and helps youth develop resilience in the face of life’s challenges.

As religious participation declines, many young people are losing access to these protective factors. Regardless of how we feel about God and faith, neither triumphalism nor handwringing will solve the problem. Religious communities should continue reaching out to families with children, extolling the benefits of organized religion to parents in particular.

But we must also recognize that as one system of support fades, we need to develop alternatives intentionally.

We need programs that strengthen family bonds and teach parenting skills to replace religion’s family support function. Community organizations must create the social connections that religious congregations once offered. Schools and civic groups should expand service-learning and volunteerism programs to replace the structured helping opportunities religious institutions traditionally provided. And we need new frameworks that help young people find meaning and purpose in an increasingly secular world.

Restricting social media use and limiting screen time might help the teenage mental health crisis, but we need to do much more. We must build new structures that provide family support, community connection, opportunities for service, and pathways to meaning. We must fill the protective gap left by religion’s retreat.

This essay is adapted from a chapter in the edited volume Mind the Children: How to Think About the Youth Mental Health Collapse.

https://answersingenesis.org/sanctity-of-life/abortion/inventor-abortion-pill-dies-age-98/

A Deadly Legacy: Inventor of the Abortion Pill Dies at Age 98

The Lord hates . . . hands that shed innocent blood. (Proverbs 6:16–17)

A French scientist, Étienne-Émile Baulieu, who recently died at the age of 98, is being hailed in headlines around the world as “a beacon of courage” and a world-changer, a hero for women’s rights. But his legacy isn’t one that uplifts women—it’s a legacy of bloodshed and brokenness. A legacy of death.

Ken Ham is the Founder CEO of Answers in Genesis and its two popular attractions: the acclaimed Creation Museum and the internationally known Ark Encounter, which features a life-size 510-foot-long Noah’s Ark—sometimes described as the “8th Wonder of the Modern World.” Each year, the two attractions host over 1.5 million guests.

A much-in-demand Christian speaker and interview guest, Ham became well known throughout America for his 2014 evolution/creation debate with Bill Nye, TV’s “The Science Guy.”

Ham hosts the daily radio program Answers, now on 1,000 stations. He’s also the founder of the award-winning Answers magazine. In 2020, Ham launched Answers TV, an ambitious streaming service. His website of AnswersInGenesis.org has twice won the top award from the National Religious Broadcasters for best website.

A prolific blogger and author of more than 30 books, Ham’s newest releases are Divine Dilemma (understanding death, disease, and suffering), Divided Nation (about today’s culture wars), and the devotional commentary Creation to Babel.

https://www.georgeweigel.com/catholics-hippocrates-and-reforming-american-medicine/

Catholics, Hippocrates, and Reforming American Medicine
By George Weigel - January 29, 2025

I am the odd man out in a family of medical folk. My maternal grandfather was a physician; his daughter, my mother, was a medical technologist; my mother-in-law, a nurse. My brother is a physician; so is one of my daughters, and so is her husband. An aunt was a registered nurse, and my niece is a hospital nutritionist. Beyond the family circle, I have many friends practicing the medical arts, including America’s most distinguished psychiatrist, Paul McHugh. I’ve also been blessed by the work of great physicians, whose skills and dedication have gotten me beyond the biblical allotment of “three score years and ten” (Ps. 90:10).

Decades of life with and around doctors, nurses, and other medical practitioners have thus given me a deep regard for American medicine, which I believe to be the best in the world. And it’s precisely that regard that now leads me to a deep concern about the condition of medicine in these United States—which, like the other professions, is beset by the plague of wokery, and by physicians’ cooperation with what Pope St. John Paul II aptly called the “culture of death” in the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae.

The willful participation of physicians and other medical professionals in the practice of abortion flatly contradicts the Hippocratic Oath—long the moral framework for sound medical practice—in its original form. Indeed, some medical schools have been changing the oath’s wording in order to accommodate the politically correct view of abortion. Why, one wonders, haven’t more doctors, nurses, and health care workers been at the forefront of the pro-life movement, not only in pressing for legislation protective of unborn life but in counseling frightened women, often abandoned by irresponsible and sexually predatory men, to seek alternatives to killing their children? Thank God for the medical professionals who staff America’s crisis pregnancy centers. But what about the majority of their colleagues, who acquiesce in the modern slaughter of the innocents or, worse, participate in it?

The same degradation of medicine occurs when doctors, nurses, and others involved in health care participate in euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide, a ghoulish practice that now marches under the Orwellian banner of “MAID”—Medical Assistance (or Aid) in Dying. Hippocrates weeps. Isn’t the entire point of the profession of healing to affirm life, sustain life, and resist death whenever possible? This past September, the London-based Spectator published an instructive article, “A Chillingly Seductive Glimpse of Assisted Dying,” which should be required reading in medical schools, in part because it illustrates how MAID numbs the natural human sensibilities of physicians and nurses.

“Follow the science” has become a mantra in certain quarters since Plague Time in 2020–2021. Evidently, however, some science isn’t welcome—like the science that demonstrates beyond reasonable dispute that “sex-reassignment” interventions do not lead to long-term improvements in mental health, and that mutilating the bodies of the young surgically or through puberty blockers should be called child abuse, not medicine. If England’s National Health Service can figure this out by following the science, why can’t the American Academy of Pediatrics?

And then there is medical education, once known for its rigor but now catering to snowflakes, as in this notice from a prominent medical school promoting a putatively admirable service for its students—“Wellness Wednesdays: A monthly event offering students a chance to unwind and recharge with such activities as arts and crafts, live student performances, and wellness services like seated massages . . .”

I don’t know about you, but if I’m bringing a convulsing child with a 105-degree fever into the local emergency room at 2 a.m., I’m not interested in the attending ER doctor sending out for Legos, singing rap ditties from Hamilton, or getting a “seated massage” in order to handle the stress of the situation.

American medicine and American medical education are in need of serious reform. Getting the federal government’s healthcare agencies out of the DEI swamps and the gender-fluidity wilderness is only a start, welcome as that is. American medicine needs to rediscover its soul and its conscience. Well-catechized Catholic medical professionals are uniquely equipped to aid in that rediscovery. The Catholic Medical Association has a considerable role to play here. So do Catholic chaplains at American medical schools.

Given the wokery at the root of so many of these dysfunctions in American medicine—a tyranny enforced by cancel culture—Catholic medical reformers will need a lot of courage, as well as patience, tactical savvy, and impeccable scientific credentials. But then, courage is one of the four cardinal virtues, isn’t it?

https://www.ncregister.com/cna/time-is-right-for-catholic-hospital-and-medical-school-project-in-michigan-bishop-says

‘Time is Right’ for Catholic Hospital and Medical School Project in Michigan, Bishop Says
The project’s episcopal advisers are Cardinal Raymond Burke and Bishop Boyea.

By Martin Barillas - October 16, 2024

A celebration of two beloved saints recently served to highlight an initiative to found an authentically Catholic hospital and medical school in the Midwest.

Bishop Earl Boyea of Lansing, Michigan, celebrated a Mass at Holy Spirit Parish in nearby Brighton, Michigan, on Oct. 5 in honor of St. Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio) and St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast days fell just days before.

Bishop Boyea told a capacity crowd at dinner after Mass that the time is right for an authentically Catholic hospital in his diocese, which encompasses the state capital and much of southern Michigan. He said it will reflect the legacy of Padre Pio, who founded his Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza (Home for the Relief of Suffering) in Italy in the 1950s, and which was intended to be the first of many hospitals.

Earlier this year, nonprofit Catholic Healthcare International (CHI) signed a purchase agreement with Trinity Health, a national Catholic medical system, to buy a 140,000-square-foot hospital in Howell, Michigan, a rural small town. CHI Founder Jere Palazzolo told CNA the development comes as the culture of death increasingly endangers human life. The project’s episcopal advisers are Cardinal Raymond Burke and Bishop Boyea. Financing and donors are still being sought to complete the purchase.

In 1956, beloved Padre Pio of Pietrelcina founded a respected major research medical center now administered by the Vatican. The saint described it as “a place of prayer and science” and “a healing place where patients, doctors, and priests will serve as reserves of love.” No other such Casas have been created.

Father Timothy Nelson, a CHI board member and cardiologist, told CNA: “I’m convinced that the project is of God. It is needed in a cultural climate where Catholics and Catholic medical care are being challenged.”

Palazzolo said CHI will complement services offered by Trinity, allowing CHI to “focus on our mission to provide a real continuum of care from conception to natural death.”

When completed, the project is slated to house a medical school, embryo orphanage, outpatient and rehabilitative services, birthing unit, family medicine practice, and the Terri Schiavo Home for the Brain Injured.

“The medical center will serve as a place of hope and healing for students, patients, their families, and the entire community,” Palazzolo said. It aims to become operational in 2026.

Back in 2009, CHI signed an agreement with the Casa in Italy to recreate the facility under Bishop Boyea. Cardinal Burke has also emphasized the need for a truly faithful Catholic medical school to train physicians who value life and the dignity of human life, created in the image and likeness of God. As part of the project, CHI is seeking accreditation for a school of osteopathic medicine.

Dr. George Mychaskiw, the president of the proposed medical school who has founded medical schools elsewhere in the U.S., explained to CNA that some Catholic hospitals have fallen short of the culture of life espoused by the Church.

Echoing Cardinal Burke, he said: “This medical school will provide the equivalent of a master’s in bioethics and armor physicians with the faith and truth to stand with their patients, protecting the lives and dignity of the most vulnerable.”

He observed that the current euphemisms of “‘reproductive health care,’ ‘ending suffering,’ and ‘no one would want to live like that’” so common in secular systems today are reminiscent of Nazi Germany.

A veteran medical administrator, Palazzolo said abortion, contraception, in-vitro fertilization, euthanasia, and so-called “gender-affirming care” involving cross-sex hormones and surgical mutilation of secondary sexual characteristics will not be tolerated.

“We will emphasize the care of the unborn consistent with the teachings of the Catholic faith,” he said.

To underscore its foundation in prayer and faith, CHI has also developed the Worldwide Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration Program. This unites adorers around the world in their intentions and in support of the mission of the Home for the Relief of Suffering in Italy and Michigan.

The forthcoming hospital in Michigan comes as Do No Harm, a secular advocacy group focused on combating transgenderism, released its stoptheharmdatabase.com website detailing transgender surgeries and interventions carried out on minors by ostensibly Catholic hospitals.

“In a lot of Catholic systems, there is very little difference between them and secular systems,” Palazzolo said, adding: “St. John Paul II was so strong in saying how Catholic systems should be operated and shouldn’t get into joint ventures and alliances with non-Catholic systems.”

With changes in reimbursement and government regulations, it became increasingly difficult for Catholic systems to stand firm, he said.

“Because it limited some of their business opportunities, many systems forfeited their Catholic identity or ignored the Church. This is across the country. There are few truly Catholic systems in our country,” he explained.

The need for truly Catholic health care systems, Palazzolo pointed out, has also become more acute following the sale of hospitals owned by Ascension Healthcare to secular systems in Michigan and Illinois.

At the event, CNA also interviewed Anglican priest Calvin Robinson, a CHI board member who was in attendance.

Robinson recently relocated from England to Michigan where he pastors an Anglican parish in Grand Rapids. He became especially well known after a 2023 Oxford Union debate in which he vigorously defended the institution of holy matrimony.

He told CNA that his role in the project is to promote medical education grounded in Catholic teaching: “We are founding the medical school so that Catholic health care professionals are trained, particularly when it comes to abortion, IVF, end-of-life care, and euthanasia.”

“What we find is that many medical professionals end up becoming worldly and so they are pressured or incentivized to participate in things that any Catholic should object to. We want to train professionals so that they can say, ‘I’m a Catholic. I can’t do this,’” Robinson said.

“I have been visiting the U.S. about once a month for the last two years and I am encouraged after being here. People are openly proclaiming the name of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. People still believe in Christ and in freedom. But that can’t be said for the United Kingdom and most of Europe at this point,” he said.

At the event, Robinson also deplored the erosion of civil rights in the U.K. “If you give in to the woke mob, you have no legs to stand on,” he said.

“Either you stand for something or you do not stand at all,” he said and related that he has relocated to the U.S. out of fear of persecution. He received a standing ovation from attendees at the event.

It should be noted that His Eminence Raymond L. Burke is viewed as an arch traditionalist within the Roman Catholic Church and has publicly clashed with Pope Francis.  This has led to a backlash from the Pope and some Catholics.