ROD DREHER: Trans Totalitarianism: Time For Moral Panic.

When I was reporting Live Not By Lies, I talked to a senior physician at a major US hospital in a conservative state. The man only talked to me if I agreed not to use his name. His family emigrated to the West from the USSR when he was a child. Now, he said, he is seeing things that didn’t even exist in the Soviet Union. He told me that at his hospital, the management instructed all the physicians to give to any patient, including children, any gender-transition assistance they asked for — even if it violated the physician’s best judgment about that particular patient. There was no other health care issue in which doctors were told by the hospital to suspend their medical judgment to give a patient what he or she wants. Why do you think that is, reader? When the lawsuits begin, I wonder if “just following orders” will protect doctors?

By the way, this particular physician told me that the HR department at his hospital monitored their social media accounts, looking for wrongthink. He said that if he didn’t have a social media account, that would cause HR to flag him as a potential problem. So he kept his account up, but only put happy-clappy “wellness” things on it. This man is a top doctor at one of the country’s biggest hospitals, and he has to live in that kind of fear. Why doesn’t he quit? Because he has a family, and tuition to pay, and all the usual reasons. The other day in Vienna, I talked to a young Muslim from Canada, a man who works in IT. We agreed that the Canadian government is insane, and that trans ideology is destroying children and families. “Why don’t people stand up?” he said. I asked him if he would stand up, knowing that it would probably cost him his job. He thought for a second, and said, no, he guesses that he wouldn’t.

I understood. This is the condition most people are in. You maybe start to see why there were so few dissidents in the Communist world. It really and truly cost you a lot. Everybody likes to think that they would stand up, but when it comes right down to it, almost everybody conforms.

Rod has written an incredibly important essay and I can’t urge you strongly enough to read the whole thing — and to share it, and to speak up.