Archive for 2024

IT’S ALL LIES:

I HAD BEEN ASSURED THIS KIND OF THING NEVER HAPPENED: Whistleblowers Risk Everything To Expose Shocking Practices At Texas Children’s Hospital.

Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston is the largest children’s hospital in the world. They treat more than four million patients under the age of 21 every year, most of them minors. And because of the hospital’s size and prestige, what happens at TCH doesn’t just affect those patients. What happens at TCH also influences how other major children’s hospitals all around the country conduct their operations.

That’s what makes the reporting out of Texas Children’s Hospital this year — most of it done by Chris Rufo — impossible to ignore. In the span of a little over a year, two whistleblowers have come forward to allege that TCH is systemically deceiving the public and potentially violating the law.

The first whistleblower, a general surgeon named Eithan Haim, provided records to Rufo which demonstrated that TCH had not, in fact, shut down its child sex-change program as promised. This was significant because the attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, had just released a legal opinion stating that child sex-change surgeries — as well as cross-sex hormone treatments — constitutes child abuse under Texas law. So TCH claimed that they shut the program down in order to avoid prosecution.

Read the whole thing.

WOKE BILL COMES DUE: Columbia Agonistes.

Words scarcely express what relief it was to finally escape Columbia University to turn whistleblower early last year. For the previous eleven years, across a range of prestigious schools, I was a reporter and PR flack charged with making people look good whether they deserved it or not, and oftentimes they didn’t. No doubt I promoted a bunch of dazzlingly impressive minds, but I also helped cover up for a lot of sloppy and misleading scholarship and no small amount of outright prejudice.

Today I stand especially relieved to have jumped ship ahead of Columbia’s calamitous past academic year, by far the most tumultuous and consequential in the university’s history since the notorious riots of 1968. It’s been “an even bigger sh1t show than Mattress Girl,” as I quipped on Twitter. Blow by blow, humiliation by humiliation, my heart has gone out to all of my former colleagues in the impossible position of trying to preserve Columbia’s reputation when it so manifestly deserves most of the embarrassing headlines and withering criticism.

Get woke, go broke.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY:

Related: Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

#JOURNALISM:

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Corrupt Media Couldn’t Save ‘The Acolyte’ from Cancellation.

Reporters didn’t just share updates on the series, created by Leslye Headland. They defended the saga, showered it with glowing reviews and said anyone who disagreed was a racist, sexist troll.

We all know why.

The series doubled down on Disney’s progressive agenda, from the cast’s aggressive diversity to the creation of a lesbian witch coven. The media became Disney’s extended PR team, swatting away naysayers without giving fans credit for sussing out a shoddy series.

Funny how the same sexist, racist fans loved “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” a film with a very diverse cast led by an empowered heroine (Felicity Jones).

As Rachel Zegler might say, “Weird!”

“The Acolyte” stands as one of the worst “Star Wars” projects since Disney shelled out $4 billion in 2012 to acquire the property from George Lucas. None of the press’ accusations could save the series from itself.

Woke. Dull. Terribly written. Canon-breaking themes.

And as a result, the Critical Drinker notes, “No More Acolyte for You, Rebel Scum!”

 

DISPATCHES FROM SUMMER RERUN SEASON: Nielsen: DNC Television Ratings Crash 22% from 2016.

The television ratings of the first night of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) sunk 22 percent from 2016, according to Nielsen.

The ratings crash suggests that Vice President Kamala Harris is far less popular than the media purported.

About 20 million people watched the first night of the DNC, up from 2020’s virtual convention but severely down from 2016, Axios reported:

  • Around 19.1 million viewers watched the DNC live from 11:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. ET during the president’s speech.
  • MSNBC drew the most viewers across all networks with 4.6 million, followed by CNN (3.2 million), ABC (2.8 million), Fox News (2.4 million), CBS (2.0 million) and NBC (1.8 million), according to fast national data provided by MSNBC.
  • Monday marked the network’s largest DNC night 1 viewership ever, a spokesperson said.

The ratings crash came after the media spent countless hours hyping Harris’s “historic” candidacy.

Don’t get cocky.

FEARLESS COMPASSION:

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THE OBAMA WAY:

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