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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25431 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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Some Kind of Brouhaha over Trans Kids in Texas

I'm not actually sure what the one sentence summary is here, so bear with me. https://thetexan.news/issues/social-issues-life-family/paxton-investigates-texas-childrens-hospital-following-second-child-gender-modification-whistleblower/article_d61a2ece-2e6b-11ef-aeaa-cf9abce1d2a4.html

Following reporting from Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, of another gender modification whistleblower at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH), the Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG) has launched an investigation into the issue.

According to Rufo, he received information from a second whistleblower that “doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital were willing to falsify medical records and break the law to keep practicing ‘gender-affirming care.’”

So two whistleblowers told Chris Rufo that a children's hospital in Texas was doing gender transitions in violation of the law, and he got Paxton to open an investigation. Ok, page five story. Their names are Ethan Haim and Vanessa Sivadge.

According to Sivadge, TCH was “unlawfully billing the state Medicaid program” for the purposes of child gender modification.

Again, kind of boring, but public funds were supposedly being illegally redirected to do illegal things(remember, gender modification is considered child abuse in Texas).

Here's where it gets interesting:

Following Sivadge talking with Rufo, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sent agents to her home to “intimidate and threaten her,” in Rufo’s words.

Rufo also previously reported on the first TCH whistleblower, Eithan Haim, who alleged that TCH has continued to provide “gender-affirming care” to minor children.

Since then, Haim has been visited by agents of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and has been indicted on four felony counts of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.

So the federal DOJ stands accused of, basically, witness intimidation to enable medicaid fraud. Meanwhile, the Texas government is investigating the hospital for medicaid fraud.

Now, fraudulent medical billing isn't the most interesting story in the world. But the accusations of FBI witness intimidation are https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/06/18/whistleblower-surgeon-trans-kids-gender-affirming-care-texas/74075234007/

Haim recorded evidence of the hospital's ongoing care and passed it on to Rufo. Haim says he redacted any patient information that would violate HIPAA. On May 16, 2023, City Journal published Rufo's story that included Haim's anonymous account of what he witnessed at the hospital. The Texas Legislature then officially banned transgender medical interventions on minors.

Our first whistleblower claims that his releases didn't violate HIPAA; no doubt he didn't air personally identifiable information in the media. But three felonies a day and all; there might well be a crime involved.

Our second whistleblower is more interesting https://nypost.com/2024/06/19/us-news/texas-nurse-alleges-fbi-threatened-her-for-blowing-whistle-on-transgender-care-of-kids/

Vanessa Sivadge, who is a nurse at Texas Children’s Hospital, said the alleged feds “promised they would make life difficult” for her and that she was “not safe at work” after she started speaking out about the facility’s gender affirming care practices.

That sounds... pretty bad.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating her allegations, a spokesperson for his office told The Post.

This could get interesting, if Texas is actually(which this may be bluster, taken out of context, whatever) investigating federal agents for witness intimidation in a medicaid fraud case.

It kind of feels like a race:

Will conservatives get fed up with the behavior of the federal government first and decide that the rules for the distribution of power as they stand aren't working anymore, or will all the conservatives die out first?

The thing is that as progressives go further to the left, they create more conservatives. It could even be an equilibrium, if the new conservatives don't get cynical until they've been conservative for a while.

Will conservatives get fed up with the behavior of the federal government first and decide that the rules for the distribution of power as they stand aren't working anymore

Real conservatives have already past this point for going on 60 years. Read Willmoore Kendall's thoughts on things like the 14th amendment to understand this. His prose is pretty dense. A contemporary alternative is Chris Caldwell's Age of Entitlement. Deneen is too populist to be a true small-c conservative, but there's enough overlap.

or will all the conservatives die out first?

We'll always be an minority even within the Republican party. Reganite 'conservatism' isn't really conservatism in the traditional sense. But where conservatives can have an outside impact is definitely SCOTUS. This is the enduring legacy of Mitch McConnell, who built his entire career around getting the court where it is today. Is it enough? Incredibly, maybe not.

In terms of real conservatives totally dying out, I doubt it. The more salient question to me is how long and how much will pop-culture "conservatives" (your average Boomer Reaganite, or your current J.D. Vance / Josh Hawley style Trumper) continue to fuck around with dead end populism while allowing for the slow erosion of fundamental rights from the left. Nihilism is counter-productive by definition, yet so much of the current right seems to gleefully indulge themselves in it. Probably because it's easier to "burn it all down" than do the hard work of slow rebuilding.

That's sad. It makes me want to try to point things in a good direction.

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