(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) Kevin Bass, a doctor who has been canceled for noticing patterns of wokeness in the medical field, offered research showing that the medical field has shifted far leftward at an increasingly rapid rate over the past 20 years.
In December, Bass tweeted the graphical results of a study using Stanford Prof. Adam Bonica’s ideological measurement techniques, which illustrated the political movement of doctors over time based on political contributions.
I generated these figures using Adam Bonica's DIME dataset at Stanford [1].
They were generated by plotting the donor scores of physicians who had made political contributions during the respective years. Such measures have been shown to strongly correlate with the ideology of…
— Kevin Bass PhD MS (@kevinnbass) December 31, 2023
Bass also published an article on Saturday in the New York Post revealing in more detail the findings of the study.
Measuring the political ideology of doctors, researchers tracked a massive shift from right to left. Formerly, the medical field leaned right by 60%. It now favors the far left by 80%, and shows no signs of slowing down.
Bass’s findings reflected a larger problem concerning the radicalization of America’s universities, which has been underway for decades.
Those in the natural sciences resisted for longer, but eventually capitulated under political and social pressures.
Several catalysts likely played a role in the astounding institutional shift:
- the pernicious influence of the weaponized Justice and Education departments during the Obama administration, which began threatening to investigate or sue universities that did not fall in line with the White House’s politically correct agenda (something with which many academics were all too happy to comply)
- the Affordable Care Act’s socialization of the health-care industry, which rewrote Democrats’ adversarial relationship with pharmaceutical companies and turned them into some of Big Pharma’s top lobbying targets
- the rise of the ESG and lawfare movements, putting activist political pressure on institutions by threatening negative boycotts and other negative exposure in the public sphere, which became a particularly powerful tool with leftist-friendly social-media platforms amplifying their outrage
- the polarizing impact of COVID-19, which led many conservatives to distrust medical institutions due to the systemic corruption and incompetence of the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and other government agencies; moreover, hospitals and medical schools mandating deadly COVID vaccines may further ward off those on the political Right.
The so-called racial reckoning in the aftermath of George Floyd’s May 2020 fentanyl overdose gave already woke institutions the cover they needed to openly implement their most controversial policies.
As the Wall Street Journal noted in July of that year, the influential Association of American Medical Colleges rewrote its policies to embrace “diversity, equity and inclusion,” forcing all medical schools seeking accreditation to fall in line.
“America faces a looming and severe doctor shortage as baby boomers retire,” warned the paper’s editorial board. “It won’t help attract prospective doctors to tell top students they must attend to their guilt as racial and political oppressors before they can diagnose your cancer.”
In a two-part series the following year for RealClearInvestigations, journalist John Murawski further shed light on the “dramatic transformation sweeping through the health care profession.”
During the Biden administration, the radicalization in the practice of medicine has only become more pronounced, with a growing number of hospitals nationwide undertaking controversial-yet-lucrative sex-change surgeries for minors.
In January Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed a bill that would have made the surgeries illegal in his state, arguing that the handful of transgender kids adversely impacted by the bill would have their lives destroyed by the denial of their so-called gender-affirmation.
But records revealed that DeWine had received major campaign funding from pro-trans-surgery medical institutions, including major Ohio hospitals.
And last week, Dante King, an adjunct assistant professor of medical education at the Mayo Clinic’s College of Medicine and Science, publicly argued in a lecture to psychiatry students at the University of California, San Francisco that white people are racist due to their genetic psychopathy.
“White people have economized [b]lack pain, suffering, and genocide throughout every American institution, from the inception of slavery, into the present,” King wrote in a follow-up article.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.