(Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Over the years, the United States has endowed Israel with more than $150 billion in assistance, making it possible for the Jewish state to maintain its occupation, its ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of the land, its unremitting seizure of territory, and its settlement project, the latter of which has intentionally and drastically diminished any possibility a fair peace could ever be negotiated between the parties.
Prominent Israelis have referred to Palestinians as donkeys, crocodiles, cockroaches, snakes, psychopaths and serial killers, animals, not human, not entitled to live, shrapnel in the buttocks, they deserve to have their heads chopped off, etc., etc.1 Convinced of the truth of these slurs, Jewish settlers, protected by Israeli soldiers, have made it a practice of entering Palestinian villages where they poison wells, cut down olive trees, physically assault villagers, teach their children to throw stones at Palestinian children coming home from school, and deface buildings, mosques, and churches with slogans such as “Death to the Arabs” and “Jesus is a monkey?”
With its United Nations security council veto, the United States shields Israel from accountability to international law, thereby giving it a green light to continue and even accelerate these crimes against humanity.
Hamas’s October 7 surprise breach of the Israel-Gaza border, followed by its killing, injuring, and hostage-taking of soldiers and civilians is horrifying. American media has been following the tragedy for hours daily and has been overwhelmingly sympathetic to Israel, rarely, if ever, mentioning the motivation behind Hamas’s assault, which are the generations of persecution, humiliation, and character assassination Israel has levied against its Palestinian subjects; never enunciating that it shouldn’t have come to this; not once admonishing Israel for prioritizing its lust for Palestinian land over the lives of its own citizens.
At the same time, the media has been interviewing Israeli citizens who, outraged at Hamas’s actions, likewise make no mention of the motivation behind the actions. Neither have they expressed a hint of empathy or a measure of self-reflection upon the role their attitudes may have played in the dehumanization of the Palestinian people who, for decades, have endured essentially the same horrors these Israelis are now having to endure.
On October 9, Hamas threatened to kill a Jewish hostage every time Israel bombs a civilian building without first giving its residents time to flee. Justifiably horrified and quick to excoriate Hamas, the Israelis I’ve watched have said nothing about Israel’s habit of bombing residential buildings. As prominent Israelis throughout its history have admitted, their nation always targets civilians. The implications behind the following admissions are as horrifying as Hamas’s pronouncement:
Ze’ev Schiff, Israel’s most respected military analyst (by all sides of the military spectrum): “the Israeli Army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously . . . the Army . . . has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets . . . [but] purposely attacked civilian targets.”
General Yigal Allon with the approval of Ben-Gurion: “There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction If we accuse a family – we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included. Otherwise, this is not an effective reaction. During the operation there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty.”
During Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), Deputy Prime Minister Eliyahu Yishai urged the IDF to “bomb thousands of houses, to destroy Gaza.”
During Operation Pillar of Defense (November 2012), Ariel Sharon’s son Gilad: “They will pay the price and will remember the same for a long time. We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.”
Israel’s past assaults on Gaza, which human rights organizations have documented in detail, are further testaments to Israel’s contempt for a defenseless civilian population.
The reaction from every American lawmaker I‘ve seen is that Hamas, not Israel, must pay for its crimes. How? By giving more weapons to Israel so it can kill even more families. That is exactly what the United States intends to do, despite its hollow assurances, past and present, that it seeks peace between the two parties; despite knowing that years of military assistance have sustained both Israel’s illegal occupation and the violence it perpetrates upon ordinary people.
In keeping with the past, and vowing to “crush and destroy” Hamas, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu warned that every Hamas member was “a dead man.” In keeping with his fellow lawmakers, President Biden condemned Hamas’s attack, again without acknowledging either its seeds or that Israel wrote the rules of the game and that Hamas is playing by those rules. Aware of the thousands of Gazan civilians, including a disproportionate number of children, whose lives Israel has snuffed out in previous operations, Biden said, “terrorists purposely target civilians, kill them.” Yes, they do Mr. President. As of the early morning of October 12, over 1,000 Gazans, mostly residents, have been killed, and 5,000 injured. Whole neighborhoods and refugee camps have been blown to smithereens, more than 120,000 displaced. And Israel has yet to commence its inevitable ground invasion. Fortunately, I’ve not seen any reports that Hamas has made good on its threat.
Israel has cut off the delivery of all fuel, food, water and medical supplies. If its assault doesn’t end soon, Gazans who survive the bombings could starve, freeze to death, or die from a lack of medicine and medical treatment. This is genocide, the Final Solution, all because “terrorists target civilians.”
The only way to stop this cycle is for the US to resist its habit of resorting to physical punishment, concede that arming Israel so it can do to Palestinians what it always does will only inflame hostilities, and demand that Israel break the cycle of violence and negotiate a fair peace. Or, at the very least, treat its subjects not as snakes and cockroaches but as human beings. Otherwise, America and Israel’s message to the world will continue to be that revenge is more satisfying than peace—the lives of Israelis and Palestinians be damned.
It’s too quiet. It’s too quiet!! The walls echo emptiness and absence, and it’s tearing my heart.
In April of 2010 I wanted a friend. I wanted one who would keep watch over my safety, driving off strangers and those who meant me harm. I wanted a friend who would stand tall and let none pass that meant me harm. And so, I went to a friend of a friend who found those who no one wanted with hope she could find me such a friend. As we spoke this maniacal blur of black and grey came ripping into the yard, eyes wide, teeth sharp and white, claws digging up tufts of grass as she made corners and then straight towards me with an unknown intention.
“Watch that one,” the lady said. “She came to me as one too wild to be homed.”
And then this wild child launched herself into my lap and laid her head on my chest, looking right through me with soft brown eyes full of mischief and hope. “Well, looks like you have been claimed,” the lady said.
“What’s her name,” I asked.
“Grace,” the lady said. “I found her just before she was to be put down at the pound. I told you she is said to be too wild.”
“Yeah, she looks vicious,” I laughed. Yet, claimed I was, a man no one wanted by a dog no one wanted, and both of us thought by some better off with a bullet. And so, Grace came home with me, this wild one that would protect my home and safety, just as I wanted. Just as I thought I needed.
As time went, she proved to me how wrong I was. Grace was not a guard dog. She didn’t stand boldly at the gate, the fear of strangers everywhere. In fact, one of the neighbors referred to her as a slut – taking love from anyone. I didn’t know if I was offended by that or not, but she was right.
As time passed Grace helped me deal with my anger, my desire for violence, my desires to just get in my car and drive away from it all. Grace taught me discipline and responsibility.
Most importantly, Grace taught me love and loyalty. I did not receive the guard dog I wanted that day, but was instead blessed with the best friend I deeply needed.
Last summer Grace began to limp. She was coming on 14 years old, so arthritis is expected. But, the arthritis medications didn’t help. Still, she lived a happy dog, and though she couldn’t do zoomies anymore, she loved to be with me outside or between my feet while I sat in my chair. There was nothing wrong with her tail, that’s for sure, and she was sure to tell anyone who could reach the box that she was ready for a bone no matter how bad her leg hurt. Two weeks ago I found out that she actually had cancer as her pain was getting worse and worse.
Still, my happy girl was glad to see me, quick to cuddle, quick to make me feel wanted, needed, loved.
On Thursday I overcame my selfishness and said goodbye to my sweet friend of 13.5 years. She laid her head in my hands one last time, a slight look of confusion on a face wet with my tears as the vet helped her move on. I held her to the end, my sweet friend, and experienced pain I just didn’t know a man could as I drove home. Alone.
Thank you, my sweet girl. You will forever be the better part of my heart.
I had to take Ron to get his eye appointment as he would be dilated. On the way back to our home, we stopped at the Publix store just a mile or two down the road from us, and where we are well known. While checking out we were chatting with the cashier and the young woman bagging the groceries. I really like the Publix stores and their employees. Very friendly and helpful, and the people doing the bagging always ask if they can help me out to the car with the groceries. As we were leaving, the cashier asked if Ron and I were brothers or something, noting how well we got along and were often together. I looked back and said no, we are spouses and married. She beamed and was congratulating us, the young woman doing the bagging started clapping while also beaming. I knew some of the people working there knew we were a couple, I had already been asked before. Only one person struggled to understand it as he was new to the country, but the other staff rushed to explain it to him. Once he understood, he seemed OK with the idea, if still confused. I could tell from his very deep accent, he simply had not thought of two men being married. But back to today, as we stood there, I looked around. In the check-out aisle next to us, another cashier and bagging person were both smiling and nodding and most of the people in line did not seem bothered … except the woman in the front being checked out. She stared at Ron and me with a horrified, shocked look on her face. She looked like she had just smelt the worst sewer smell she had ever smelled and felt the poop running down her leg. I almost laughed as it was so over the top. Ron thankfully missed it and was saying goodbye to everyone as we started walking out.
But it stuck in my mind. Publix is known for being a semi religious company, they make it a priority to treat staff well, they have a strong pro LGBTQIA policy, they hire disabled workers a lot, more than any company I have seen. One of the bagging persons is a young man with only one hand and good arm. His other arm is smaller, thinner, and yet he can bag groceries with the best of them. Another is a very mentally challenged young adult who lives in our park, who has worked there since he was a teenager. One of the cashiers is an 84-year-old woman with oxygen they treat like a queen who is loved by all and lives to come to work. Which brings up another point, not all religious groups are automatically anti-LGBTQIA. Publix is not. They are very supportive of the LGBTQIA.
This woman with the horrified face is an example of what is happening more and more in Florida. Five to ten years ago there was only acceptance of Ron and me. Sometimes it was stumbling but very supportive. Now it is about 70-30 to if the response will be positive or aggressively negative. In January 2015 Ron and I went to the clerk of the court to get married, we were the first same-sex couple in Lee County. There was a slight delay in our ceremony, not because of anti-same sex marriage feelings though. All the clerks wanted to be the ones to marry us. When they told us what was going on that the entire office wanted to be involved, we invited them, all who wanted to come. The office took an unofficial break while we got married with the entire office staff in attendance. The package we paid for was a five-minute ceremony with a dozen pictures. It took nearly an hour and I have hundreds of pictures. So the Florida of then was very progressive. Sadly, that has changed.
I have grown my hair very long. While I clearly am not trans and don’t pretend to be, I get a lot of animosity for that, a lot of hostile looks. And also some very leering scary ones where someone is making it clear they think I am available to … rent. I am an out of shape, fat, 60 year old man, with a very large belly and walk with a cane! What kind of freak do you have to be to think I am a sex worker because I have very long hair. Either that or they are the most desperate involuntary celibates I have ever seen. But back to the story, I have over the last year faced push back when affirming that my spouse is Ron, a male, when filling out medical forms and in doctor’s offices. When at a new provider the MA was taking my information, and it came to emergency contact and family, I stated Ron and our relationship. She paused, then got up and left. After a few minutes a different MA came in and continued with no explanation of the change. But I knew. It is again becoming the 1990s again, and I feel too old to take on that same fight.
The great news is how happy everyone seemed at the store when I answered the question with “He is my spouse, we are married”. The bad is at least one person was openly horrified like I would gay her right there, how would she explain that to her family and hate preacher. The bad news is DeathSantis and his people have made Florida a lot less accepting to those not white fundamentalist Christian nationalist cis straight people. When do the lynchings restart? Hugs
Hello Wonderful people. I just put another 48 open tabs in Chrome, so I can shut everything down and go to bed. By doing that in the morning when I open Chrome I can open the many saved windows of many open tabs. The reason, well today despite my best efforts Ron and I kept doing things keeping me from the computers and getting up in the morning at 3 am to work on some open tabs, I crashed in the late morning. I couldn’t stay awake. Then Ron really got on my case for damaging my somewhat fragile health trying to stay awake and deal with open tabs. I let him browbeat me into the bedroom, where I lay down and fell asleep for 4 hours. So I saved what I could, had a really great day over all. But this window joins the other five of many open tabs I have to find a way to get to. Some of them are getting to be about 6 weeks old. Hugs, loves and everyone have a grand night. Scottie
I know I am late to reading and posting stuff, but this is why I save so many open tabs. This is a simple but so very important message to repeat over and over. On the plus side, I live in southwest Florida. Yes in DeathSantis Florida where the state just had to admit they hid and lied about the massive number of covid deaths, and Ron and I have been talking to our pharmacy about getting the covid vaccine. I am happy to say the pharmacy has asked us to work with them (they know us and we are very friendly with them) and they are over run with demands for the vaccine as soon as they can provide it. So the idea that the entire right is enslaved to the DeathSantis anti-vaccine message is wrong. The people want it, and are swarming any place that advertises they have it. Thanks Ten Bears for this wonderful explanation of how vaccines work. Hugs
The “lung float” test claims to help determine if a baby was born alive or dead, but many medical examiners say it’s too unreliable. Yet the test is still being used to bring murder charges — and get convictions.
Credit:Illustration by Chantal Jahchan for ProPublica. Source images: Getty Images; “Knight’s Forensic Pathology”; “Forensic Pathology: Principles and Practice”; “The Pathology of Homicide”
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
Inside the medical examiner’s office, two pathologists removed a baby’s lungs from his chest, clamped them together and placed them in a container of water. Then they watched.
They were examining the suspicious death of the baby whose body was found in a Maryland home; his mother said he was stillborn.
If the lungs floated, the theory behind the test holds, the baby likely was born alive. If they sank, the baby likely was stillborn.
“A very simple premise,” the assistant medical examiner later testified.
The lungs floated — and the mother was charged with murder.
In investigations across the country, the lung float test has emerged as a barometer of sorts to help determine if a mother suffered the devastating loss of a stillbirth or if she murdered her baby who was born alive. The test has been used in at least 11 cases where women were charged criminally since 2013 and has helped put nine of them behind bars, a ProPublica review of court records and news reports found. Some of those women remain in prison. Some had their charges dropped and were released.
But the test is so deeply flawed that many medical examiners say it cannot be trusted. They put it in the same company as the discredited analysis of bite marks and bloodstain patterns, 911 calls and hair comparisons, all of which lack solid scientific foundations and have contributed to wrongful convictions.
It is pseudoscience masquerading as sound forensics, they say. Some even liken the test to witch trials, where courts decided if a woman was a witch based on whether she floated or sank.
“Basing something so enormous on a test that should not be used, that has been completely discredited, is absolutely wrong,” said Dr. Ranit Mishori, the senior medical adviser for the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights, which has been studying the test, and a professor of family medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine. “You can send a person who is innocent to prison for many years.”
Medical examiners who rely on the lung float test typically do so in cases where someone gives birth outside of a hospital, often at home and far from the watchful eyes of medical professionals. Absent those witnesses, doubt can overshadow the insistence that the baby was stillborn.
Since the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion, legal experts and reproductive justice advocates have voiced fears that an increased reliance on the lung float test will lead to more prosecutions in a landscape where any pregnancy that doesn’t end with a living, breathing baby can be viewed with suspicion. In several cases, the fact that a woman had considered abortion was used against her. Black, brown and poor women, research shows, already disproportionately face pregnancy-related prosecutions. Black women also are more than two times as likely to have a stillbirth as white women.
Even medical examiners who perform the test as part of an autopsy acknowledge its shortcomings. They concede that there are several ways to perform it, undermining the standardization that many forensic disciplines demand. Yet judges have allowed prosecutors to use it as evidence in court.
Basing something so enormous on a test that should not be used, that has been completely discredited, is absolutely wrong.”
—Dr. Ranit Mishori, senior medical adviser for Physicians for Human Rights
ProPublica contacted the nation’s largest medical examiners’ offices to ask if they use the lung float test and discovered a patchwork of practices. Many offices said they just don’t trust it. The County of Los Angeles Department of Medical Examiner called its results “inaccurate.” The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences in Houston said it found the test to be “very unreliable” and “not supported by empirical evidence.”
In Cook County, home to Chicago, pathologists use it, but give more weight to “more reliable methods” including X-rays, microscopic examinations and autopsy findings to determine whether a birth was live or still. Others, like the Virginia Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, said the test may be useful only if a baby was not born into a toilet, CPR was not performed and decomposition was not present. None of the 12 largest offices by jurisdiction expressed full-throated support for the test.
And while the national organization that represents medical examiners said that it doesn’t have an official stance on the lung float test, it said it “strongly advocates using scientifically validated and evidence-based practices in forensic pathology.” The National Association of Medical Examiners called the lung float test “a single, dated test” that has not been subjected to the organization’s rigorous evaluation process.
Dr. Gregory Davis, a forensic pathologist at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine and a consultant to the office of the medical examiner in Kentucky, called the test “an outrageous breach of science.” He said he has personally observed the lungs of stillborn babies float and those of live-born babies sink.
The fundamental problem with the test, he said, is that there are many ways that air can enter the lungs of a stillborn child.
“There’s no way,” Davis said, “you can determine live birth versus stillbirth with this test.”
Moira Akers, the Maryland woman whose baby died, didn’t intend to get pregnant. She and her husband, Ian, already had two young children and the couple worried they wouldn’t be able to handle another child.
They struggled financially — she was a stay-at-home mom and he worked only a few days a week as a first mate on a dinner cruise. Her previous pregnancies — both ending in cesarean sections — were difficult, and challenges with her youngest child demanded much of her attention.
Due to Akers’ age, 37, and weight, her pregnancy was considered high risk. The couple decided to terminate, but they didn’t tell her family, who are Catholic and who she worried may not have approved. When Akers was a little girl, her mother said, she dreamed of being a mother, and as an adult she doted on her children.
After her appointment with a gynecologist around 15 weeks into her pregnancy, court records show that Akers thought that it was too late for her to have an abortion in Maryland. She decided she would carry the baby to term without letting anyone know she was still pregnant and give it up at a firehouse.
“I wanted the baby to have a good life,” Akers later told police. “I just knew we weren’t going to be able to provide that.”
Moira AkersCredit:Courtesy of Debra Saltz
She didn’t gain much weight and she told her husband early on that the pregnancy had been terminated. She also didn’t divulge the fact that she was pregnant to other family members, who were going through their own hardships, court records and interviews show. Her sister was being treated for cancer and feared she’d never be able to have children of her own. Her brother was recovering from an accident that had left him temporarily using a wheelchair. And the family had recently buried her grandmother and aunt.
Akers declined comment through her attorney. But the description of the case is based on police and court records, including a trial transcript, as well as interviews with her family and her lawyer.
On Nov. 1, 2018, in the family’s three-bedroom duplex in suburban Baltimore, Akers had been having contractions when she felt a strong urge to use the bathroom. She delivered her son into the toilet. She said he was not breathing. She grabbed her older son’s Star Wars towel to wrap the baby in, then carried him into the bedroom to get scissors and cut the umbilical cord.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Akers later told a detective. The baby, she said, didn’t move.
She didn’t know what to do next. Akers scanned the room and spotted a large Ziploc bag meant to store her daughter’s clothes. She placed her baby in the blue bag, and she put the bag in the closet.
Akers was bleeding heavily from the delivery. Blood soaked the carpet and smeared the bathroom floor. It stained the bathtub, closet door and hallway.
Her husband came upstairs. Alarmed by all the blood, he called the paramedics. When they arrived, they asked Akers questions as she sat on the couch with her husband and two children. She denied being pregnant.
It wasn’t until later, after Akers arrived at the hospital, that she told a nurse that she had “delivered a stillborn child” at home, police records show.
The doctors, who came in next, saw a protruding umbilical cord still attached and asked if the baby was alive. Akers said she had delivered a stillborn baby and told them about the bag and the closet.
Police launched an investigation. Akers described being in denial about the pregnancy and sad about the baby’s death.
The two Maryland doctors conducted an autopsy. The baby, they wrote in their report, appeared to be “well-developed” and “well-nourished” and had been delivered after about 41-42 weeks of pregnancy. He had blue eyes and straight brown hair.
Neither the external exam of the baby nor his bloodwork nor an X-ray revealed signs of foul play. But the narrative from police described a woman who hid her pregnancy from her family and paramedics, considered an abortion and placed the baby’s body in a closet. A microscopic view of the lungs, which were soft and pink in some areas, also appeared to show that some parts had air in them and others did not.
They also had the results of the lung float test.
“A flotation test and microscopic examination of the lungs was consistent with a live birth,” the autopsy read. The baby, the medical examiners concluded, died of asphyxia and exposure from being left in the closet.
Prosecutors charged Akers with child abuse and murder.
The lung float test’s simplicity — essentially unchanged over centuries — is both a feature and a flaw.
Some medical examiners take out one lung at a time. Some cut the lungs up and test pieces, and may even go so far as to squeeze them. Others clamp them together or put the heart and lungs in a jar. Some drop in the liver as a control. Others submerge the lungs in liquid formaldehyde instead of water.
As the assistant medical examiner in Akers’ case testified, “there’s a million ways” to conduct the test.
In theory, the test is meant to determine whether air has reached the microscopic air sacs inside the lungs. If it has, the sacs open and spread out. If it hasn’t, the sacs remain collapsed.
It is not always possible to reach a definitive conclusion, but that may be preferable to [a case] that is based on a problematic test.”
—Capt. Kyle Kennedy, Oregon State Police
But the problem with using aeration as a proxy for proof of life, many medical experts argue, is that babies don’t have to take a breath for air to enter their lungs. Air can be introduced when the baby’s chest is compressed as it squeezes through the birth canal. If there is an attempt to resuscitate a stillborn baby, that pressure can inflate the lungs. And if a body has started to decompose, gases from that process can cause the lungs to float in water. Even the ordinary handling of a stillborn baby can allow air to enter the lungs.
Doctors have long struggled with the best way to determine whether a baby was born alive in unattended births. Many experts agree that it’s nearly impossible without incontrovertible evidence such as milk in the baby’s stomach or signs of the umbilical cord stump beginning to heal where it was cut.
The uncertainty can be difficult for juries to accept, especially when prosecutors present what appears to be a scientific test that proves a baby was born alive and, as a result, was murdered.
“It is not always possible to reach a definitive conclusion, but that may be preferable to one that is based on a problematic test,” said Capt. Kyle Kennedy of the Oregon State Police department, of which the Oregon State Medical Examiner is a part.
The Oregon State Medical Examiner, he said, does not use the lung float test.
The test can produce correct results, said Dr. Christopher Milroy, a forensic pathologist with the Eastern Ontario Regional Forensic Pathology Unit and a professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada. But given that it also produces inaccurate results, he said it should not be used in criminal cases.
“It’s not like some of the things we do,” he said, “where we are going, ‘Well, did they die of diabetes or did they die of something else natural?’”
Milroy has studied the test and its history and has found references to its use in the 17th century, when witch trials were still occurring. But by the late 1700s, its reliability was questioned by doctors and lawyers. More than 200 years later, in 2016, the authors of a forensic medicine textbook wrote that there were too many recorded instances of stillborn lungs floating and live-born lungs sinking for the test to be used in a criminal trial.
No agency currently tracks how often the lung float test is used in criminal cases. But the 11 cases ProPublica identified are likely an undercount because some cases weren’t covered in news reports, and plea deals and acquittals often create less of a public record.
Still, the test has been cited in medical textbooks and is often included in forensic pathology training. Its defenders say that there aren’t any better alternatives, and they may be criticized for not doing their job if they don’t use it. Some also say they don’t rely solely on the test; they acknowledge its weaknesses but say it complements other exams. In addition, some people do, in fact, kill their babies.
Prosecutors have often turned to a 2013 academic study from Germany to support admitting the lung float test as evidence. “The study proves that for contemporary medicine, the lung floating test is still a reliable indicator of a newborn’s breathing,” the authors wrote.
But some experts have questioned that study, saying its results have not been reproduced, its 98% accuracy rate is misleading and it didn’t actually answer whether a baby was born alive because the births in the study had been attended by medical professionals, so there was never any real question about what happened.
The hospital affiliated with the study’s authors declined to comment.
The dearth of research around the test raises critical questions about whether it should be allowed as evidence, said Marvin Schechter, a New York criminal defense lawyer who served on the committee that wrote a groundbreaking National Academy of Sciences report in 2009 on strengthening forensic science in the United States. Schechter said the lung float test wasn’t included because the commission reviewed only the most frequently cited forensic tests.
His concerns with the test mirror many of the ones flagged in the report. For example, he said, the lack of standardization is evident in the fact that some medical examiners squeeze the lungs as part of the test.
“What is that? Your squeeze is different than my squeeze,” he said. “That’s not science.”
Schechter called for a national conference to evaluate the test and its admissibility in court.
“If you apply the rules and regulations that follow science to the lung float test, how does it pass muster?” Schechter said. “The research doesn’t exist, and if the research doesn’t exist, then you shouldn’t be doing it.”
Every so often, after the lung float test has been used to help put a woman behind bars, the questions around it set her free.
In 2006, Bridget Lee had hid her pregnancy after having an affair. She didn’t want anyone in the small Alabama community where she played piano at her church to know.
Bridget Lee at her home in Carrollton, Alabama, in 2009Credit:Jay Reeves/AP
When she went into labor at home, she said her son was stillborn. She placed his body in a plastic container and put it in her SUV, where it sat for days.
The medical examiner used the lung float test and concluded that Lee’s son had been born alive. Lee was charged with murder, which in Alabama carried the possibility of the death penalty.
Lee’s lawyer called on Davis to review the autopsy report, which was the first time he saw the lung float test being used to support criminal charges against a mother. He concluded that the autopsy was filled with errors. It missed an infection in the umbilical cord and erroneously described decomposition as signs of injury.
Davis’ review led to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences to examine the case, and the agency ruled that not only had the medical examiner botched the autopsy, but the baby was stillborn. Neither the medical examiner nor the prosecutors responded to requests for comment.
Lee spent nine months in jail before prosecutors dropped the charges against her.
She later told reporters that she knows it’s hard for people to understand how she could put her baby’s body in a container and leave it in her car. But, she said, the best way to describe it was like having “an out-of-body experience.”
While individual reactions are hard to comprehend, mental health specialists say the shock and pain of delivering a stillborn baby at home can be so traumatic that people may detach or disassociate from reality, said Dr. Miriam Schultz, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry who specializes in reproductive psychiatry at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health.
“Sometimes a survival instinct will kick in to try to normalize what’s an absolutely incomprehensibly shocking and devastating reality,” Schultz said. “One could imagine possibly trying to make evidence of what just happened less visible and wanting to completely compartmentalize this traumatic event that just has occurred.”
Late one April night in 2017, Latice Fisher said she felt the urge to defecate. About three hours later, she delivered her son into the toilet at her home.
The medical examiner in Fisher’s case performed the lung float test, which revealed that parts of the lungs floated and parts didn’t. He ruled that the baby was born alive and died from asphyxiation. Police also found that Fisher had searched for abortion pills on her phone.
Yveka Pierre, senior litigation counsel with the reproductive justice nonprofit If/When/How, said the people who are prosecuted for their pregnancy outcomes are typically from marginalized communities. They’re Black, like Fisher; or they’re brown, like Purvi Patel, an Indiana woman who was sent to prison for feticide after self-inducing an abortion, a charge that was later vacated; or they face financial hurdles, like Akers.
“Some losses are tragedies, depending on your identity, and some losses are crimes, depending on your identity.” Pierre said. “That is not how we say the law should work.”
Pierre, who also worked on Akers’ case, said Fisher and her husband did what prosecutors say to do by calling 911, but Fisher was still arrested. Once the medical examiner’s investigation starts, she said, the office typically works in tandem with the police.
A grand jury indicted Fisher on second-degree murder charges in January 2018. But a few months later, a local group raised money to get her released on bond. The group also contacted a national nonprofit, now known as Pregnancy Justice, which helped connect Fisher with longtime criminal defense attorney Dan Arshack. He began researching the lung float test and came to an unmistakable conclusion.
“It should be permitted to the same extent that dunking a woman in water is permitted to determine if she’s a witch,” he said in an interview.
Some losses are tragedies, depending on your identity, and some losses are crimes, depending on your identity. That is not how we say the law should work.”
—Yveka Pierre, senior litigation counsel with If/When/How
Arshack asked Davis to review the autopsy, which he found troubling. Arshack also asked Aziza Ahmed, then a professor at Northeastern University School of Law, to focus specifically on the forensics of the lung float test.
By not requiring rigorous testing or proof of its accuracy, Ahmed wrote, the “courts themselves have played a key role in sustaining the inaccurate belief” that the test could reliably determine whether a child was born alive.
Arshack wrote letters to District Attorney Scott Colom explaining Davis and Ahmed’s findings, saying there was no “reasonable legal or scientific basis” to conclude that a crime occurred. He also explained that it wasn’t “good public policy to prosecute women for bad pregnancy outcomes, especially Black women in Mississippi,” who suffer higher rates of maternal mortality and stillbirth.
In May 2019, Colom announced that he had learned of concerns surrounding the reliability of the lung float test. Once the question of whether the child was born alive was scientifically in dispute, he said, he dismissed the charges against Fisher and sent the case to another grand jury armed with the details about the test.
“When you’re talking about a murder charge for a mother,” Colom said in an interview, “I felt that was crucial information because I certainly didn’t want to be prosecuting somebody for a stillborn death that could not be her fault.”
This time, the grand jury chose not to indict Fisher.
As Akers’ case made its way through court, Davis was asked to review the autopsy. He noted that Akers had classic risk factors for stillbirth: hypertension during pregnancy, obesity, advanced maternal age and previous pregnancies. She also was past her due date and reported not feeling the baby kick in the days leading up to the birth.
Dr. Gregory Davis at University of Kentucky College of MedicineCredit:Natosha Via for ProPublica
Davis agreed with the medical examiner, Dr. Nikki Mourtzinos, and the associate pathologist who conducted parts of the autopsy, that there were infections in the pancreas, placenta — the vital organ that provides the fetus with nutrients and oxygen — and the umbilical cord, which serves as the baby’s lifeline in the womb.
But what he found “perplexing,” he wrote, is that they did “not seem to take these critical findings into account regarding such findings being associated with stillbirth.” When it was his time to take the witness stand at trial, he said the infections in the placenta, umbilical cord and membranes were “a smoking gun association” with stillbirth.
An OB-GYN also testified that he believed Akers suffered from a placental abruption — a complication where the placenta separates from the wall of the uterus — which also can lead to a stillbirth and cause heavy bleeding.
Prosecutors said the case hinged on whether the baby was born alive. Among the evidence they pointed to were the results of the lung float test, the pinkish appearance of the lungs and lack of decomposition, malformation of the baby’s head or slippage of the skin.
“These lungs floated,” the prosecutor said during closing. “They floated because this child had breathed and was alive after he was delivered at home that day.”
The prosecution homed in on the fact that Akers had wanted an abortion, which was underscored by her cellphone search history. They said she never intended to have her baby live and breathe. When she didn’t get an abortion, they said, she chose to give birth at home and kill her son. They pointed out that she hadn’t received prenatal care and that she didn’t attempt to resuscitate the baby.
Akers told police she thought it was too late.
During closing arguments, prosecutors displayed an oversized photo of the baby on the screen and repeated that Akers put his body in a bag, using the word “bag” 26 times.
In April 2022, the jury found Akers guilty of second-degree murder and first-degree child abuse.
In response to questions from ProPublica, the state’s attorney declined to comment. Mourtzinos, the assistant medical examiner who testified in Akers’ case, did not respond to requests for comment. She’s no longer with the Maryland medical examiner’s office. The agency’s interim chief medical examiner said the office is accredited by the National Association of Medical Examiners and follows the organization’s autopsy performance standards. Any and all ancillary tests, she said, “are done on a case by case basis, at the discretion of the attending medical examiner” and interpreted in the context of the entire case.
When the verdict was read, Akers collapsed in her chair, dropped her head to the table and sobbed. Her family, who was seated behind her, filled the courtroom with their own cries.
Last summer, as much of the country awaited the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which eliminated a constitutional right to abortion, the New York-based nonprofit Pregnancy Justice released a guide for medical, legal and child welfare professionals on confronting pregnancy criminalization.
The organization advised defense attorneys and medical examiners to challenge the lung float test. In many cases, the authors wrote, criminal charges are based on “the erroneous assumption that a woman engaged in acts or omissions that harmed the fetus.”
The backdrop to the lung float test is the deeper issue of criminalizing pregnancy loss. That was already on the rise before the Dobbs decision, with data from Pregnancy Justice showing that nearly 1,400 pregnant women were arrested, prosecuted or sentenced between 2006 and the 2022 Dobbs decision, more than three times the total for the previous 33 years. Many of the charges were connected to drug use while pregnant.
Society often wants to hold someone responsible, said Dana Sussman, deputy executive director of Pregnancy Justice. Mothers are usually the easiest to blame.
One of the first things Pregnancy Justice lawyers now ask in a pregnancy loss case is whether the prosecutor is attempting to use the lung float test.
“It’s almost like an intake question,” Sussman said. “We will fight every attempt that we learn of to use that test because that is a life sentence based on unreliable information and unreliable science.”
The lack of understanding, research and education around stillbirth also contributes to the urge to assign blame. Every year in the U.S., more than 20,000 pregnancies end in stillbirth, defined as the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more. But the public is often shocked to hear that number or learn that only a fraction of stillbirths are attributed to congenital abnormalities. Some babies died just minutes before they were born and were placed in their parents’ arms while they were warm to the touch and their cheeks were still rosy.
Davis, an affable man with a snow-white beard, has started to spread the word about the lung float test. At a post-Dobbs legal seminar in Tennessee over the summer, he told a room of lawyers about the test, one that many of them had not heard of but may soon encounter.
A lawyer sitting in the back told the crowd that the lung float test seemed to have the same validity as bite mark analysis, which for decades was accepted as evidence and now is considered junk science.
“What do you do when they say this test has been accepted in the past?” she asked.
Davis pointed her to a letter where he gathered signatures from more than two dozen forensic pathologists and medical examiners from around the world who declared that the lung float test is not a scientifically reliable test or indicator of live birth and “is not generally accepted within the forensic pathology community.”
He had submitted the letter in Akers’ case.
In July of last year, three months after the Akers verdict, prosecutors asked the judge to sentence her to 40 years. They said it was the “the most heinous of crimes that can be committed” and it was carried out by a woman who hid her pregnancy and took her baby’s life in a “detached and calculated manner.”
Akers’ family came to her defense. Her husband said that in their nearly 20 years together, Akers’ “devotion to her family defies description.” One of his greatest joys in life, he said, was seeing the way their kids light up anytime she enters a room.
Her lawyer, Debra Saltz, said Akers made “lapses in judgment” by not telling anyone she was pregnant, having the baby alone and then putting his body in the closet. But, she said, “There is in this life no way anybody will get me to believe that Moira Akers killed her baby. I believe Moira, and I believe the science, that this baby was stillborn.”
Before the judge imposed his sentence, Akers addressed him.
“My children are my entire world,” she said, “and I fell in love with my son as soon as I saw him.”
The judge, who acknowledged what an “extraordinarily difficult case” it was, said the charges against Akers were “particularly egregious because they were perpetrated against an innocent, helpless, newborn child.”
He sentenced her to 30 years in prison.
Akers’ appeal, now pending, focuses on the shortcomings of the lung float test.
As she waits for a ruling, she stays connected to her family from prison. Her mom, Mary Linehan, said most of their conversations revolve around the ordinary details of her children’s lives, their first day of school and their favorite new toys.
Akers’ mom, who retired from her job as an accountant at a Catholic church and school, helps watch her grandchildren. When they ask about their mom, she said, their dad tells them that she “got blamed for something she didn’t do, and we’re fighting to get her out.”
I just filled up this window with the tabs from sites / comments that I want to answer. I have the video monitor going on a YouTube channel I like, and I want to start answering reading the many tabs, but Ron just had me take my blood sugar for supper. I am proud to say that even with the steroids my diet control kept my BS to 119. It is not easy, I am so hungry and want to eat, and yes during these periods I crave sweet stuff.
Dogs that love gravy, Ron just brought to me a huge roast beef sandwich covered deeply with brown gravy. He then returned with a plate of french fries and a bowl of more gravy. To say that I won’t be able to eat all this is an understatement. But the sad thing is this was one of my most favorite meals, that in the old days I would have devoured all of it and asked for more.
However my wonderful love who created that meal reminded me of our agreement for my mental health. After I eat supper at night or if I don’t eat, which is often, at 7 pm my blogging / computer time is over. At that time I either go to bed or turn to my X-boxes and play a game to get me ready for bed. That agreement was made because I was getting far too upset at night and being unable or unwilling to go to bed. It is a good compromise with the man I get to sleep with and who feeds me such great meals.
So while I just opened another 23 tabs so I won’t lose them, I will close the computers down. I doubt I will play Halo … oh who am I kidding, yes I will try as I love it, and then go to bed. Loves and hugs to all. Scottie
Son of a bitch! I am so drifting I wrote an entire fucking post and at the end lost it. I will try to resurrect it. I cannot believe after two hours of work, I lost it all. But that is how foggy and tired I am.
But I went to bed instead.
I am trying to finish writing this Thursday morning at 5 am. I have allergy shots at 10:10 am.
So Sunday night I couldn’t sleep. I woke about 1 and tried to sleep but about 2:30 I got up. Typical Monday morning, but I got a lot done. Then I had a 9 AM appointment with the pain clinic and I got some steroid shots. I think they were eight in total. At home I tried to do the dishes, but my back was wrecked so I took more medications. That gets important later. That night after needing extra medications all day I was tired and not fully functioning. But I stayed up later than normal for me. Sadly when I went to bed I was unable to sleep, so after four hours of tossing and turning I got up.
Now it is Tuesday morning and I have not slept since 1 AM Monday morning. Plus I am groggy from needing extra morphine and baclofen. Add to that I have very high blood sugar even trying very hard not to eat carbs because of the steroids, along with the steroids pushing me to be aggressive. So I was not my really sweet normal self and barely tracking. By Tuesday afternoon, I was so punchy I was not making sense on anything. I was trying to talk to Ron about politics and was so disjointed I sounded like I had been drinking or something. I was listening to a podcast earlier that mentioned an interview that Biden did with Jack Hardwick that only got 117,000 views, but was super informative of what Biden was doing for the country. Then I read on Jill’s blog about Jill and Annie talking about posting snippets of what I thought was the same interview. I was so out of it I couldn’t understand two different events. Ron convinced me they were and informed me I really needed to go lay down for a while. I did. No sense fighting with Ron when he is right and in that mindset.
But it was in vain. I slept from 7 PM to 9 PM and was awake all through the night. I again got up about 2:30 frustrated as possible. I started to watch videos and read news articles. I did some postings. We got some great news in the morning when the roofing company called saying they were ready to put the new very expensive metal over roof on. They will start on the 11th. It is a very well constructed roof that goes over the existing structure already there, molded to include gutters, with a lifetime warranty. We are getting some skylights added and moving some vents.
Ron decided to put up my dry erase whiteboard in the Playtime Pink Palace even with my not tracking correctly and being so groggy. We are mounting it on the wall, as I don’t have room in here for the stand. It was slated for the west wall over the computers but I realized it would be hard to write on there. Then I also realized that I have that big open spot where the door swings back to. It has no shelves as it would prevent the door opening all the way. But the whiteboard is thin, so it won’t bother that. But that is the only wall that Ron has not removed or rebuilt in the years we have been here so the studs are not right. Ron fixed that with a small cleat that is hardly noticeable. I love it. Below are some pictures. Hugs
Here is the wall that the white board was slated for.
Here is the whiteboard put up. I was too punchy from days with no sleep, I forgot to get a picture of the wall first. The door is off because Ron is going to use that between the new living room that used to be my office before the hurricane tore the roof off the room, and it was slated to be James new room when the inner roof was put on. James moved out, I got his old room, Ron gets a new living room, and the house gets a new dinning room where the living room is now. Since the door that was on this room had lots of window panes and I don’t need that, Ron is getting a cheaper solid core interior door for me, and using the other door for the new living room. Below are three pictures of the whiteboard on the wall.
When you read the article, you see the first person to object was a doctor and why did he object? Because the bible told him to! Yes he kept telling the mother of a trans child that god had a plan and made her child the gender they were and that was that. When the mother told him a lot of trans kids are suicidal without gender affirming care, he replied, “Some children are born into this world to suffer and die.” Would you want this man treating anyone in your family? Horrible junk studies, lies, and myths some people spread to stop and prevent a well documented best medical practice on the issue of gender care. The best medical practice agreed to by the majority of medical associations. It is long but if you want the truth read it. If you want to see the lies, distortions, and lack of qualification of the anti-trans experts, then read it. It took me a day and a half to color it and digest it. Read it, especially if you are a bigot, you will see your heroes are frauds. Hugs
For years, these experts have struggled to establish their credibility in court. Judges have found their testimony to be “biased,” “illogical,” “conspiratorial” or based on fabrication, or tossed their testimony in its entirety for having no basis in research. More than a dozen major U.S. medical associations have endorsed gender-affirming care as medically necessary, including for adolescents.
Their purpose is to convince judges that gender-affirming care is scientifically controversial, unnecessary and dangerous — and they’re increasingly having an impact.
Kim Hutton was leading a charge to bring gender-affirming care to the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis when she agreed to get lunch with a skeptic. She met Dr. Paul Hruz, a pediatric endocrinologist at the university, in October 2013 at a cafe near campus, hoping that if she shared her struggles to find suitable health care for her young trans son, he would change his mind.
But Hruz was not there to listen.
No sooner did she sit down than he launched into a breathless lecture on “God’s plan” for her son. “I can’t begin to count the number of times he said, ‘If only you will read the writings of Pope John Paul II on gender, you will understand,’” she recalled.
Hruz made it clear he would try everything in his power to stop the medical school’s new gender clinic. When Hutton pleaded that trans kids were more likely to have suicidal thoughts without affirming care, he replied, “Some children are born into this world to suffer and die.”
Washington University started the gender clinic despite Hruz’s efforts. But as the assault on trans rights intensifies nationwide, he has come to play a pivotal role, and a lucrative one.
ZOE VAN DIJK FOR HUFFPOST
Hruz is part of a small but prolific roster of expert witnesses who crisscross the country to testify in defense of anti-trans laws and policies facing a legal challenge. Pulling ideas from the fringes of medicine, their purpose is to convince judges that gender-affirming care is scientifically controversial, unnecessary and dangerous.
Most, like Hruz, practice medicine in a field related to gender-affirming care — such as psychiatry or endocrinology — but have treated only a handful of adolescent patients for gender dysphoria, if that, and haven’t published relevant research. Several belong to openly anti-trans groups and have urged state legislatures to pass the very laws they get paid to defend.
Some of the most prominent witnesses were recruited by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal powerhouse whose mission is to realize a country governed by far-right Christian values. And many share ADF’s extreme antipathy toward LGBTQ+ people.
“They’re hired guns,” said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, a lawyer for the LGBTQ+ rights group Lambda Legal who has faced Hruz and his cohorts in several cases. “These are not real experts. They’re manufactured as experts by the opponents of transgender rights.”
Still, for a rate of hundreds of dollars an hour, they can lend a sheen of scientific rigor to school bathroom restrictions and bans on gender-affirming care.
And they are increasingly having an impact. On Aug. 25, a Missouri judge temporarily upheld the state’s four-year ban on most gender-affirming treatments for minors, writing, “The science and medical evidence is conflicting and unclear.”
“These are not real experts. They’re manufactured as experts by the opponents of transgender rights.”
– Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, a lawyer for the LGBTQ+ rights group Lambda Legal
HuffPost scoured thousands of pages of court filings and dozens of state vendor databases and filed more than 40 public records requests to get a full picture of their growing cottage industry. The search revealed that these expert witnesses routinely pull down five figures in return for just a few weeks of work. Since 2016, state and local governments have spent more than $1.1 million on expert testimony, much of it going to just six go-to witnesses.
Some states also hired high-priced outside legal teams, at a cost of another $6.6 million. The University of North Carolina hired the conservative legal giant Jones Day for up to $1,075 an hour after becoming embroiled in the state’s 2016 bathroom ban.
All these figures likely undercount the true cost by at least half: Out of more than three dozen state and local agencies that defended anti-trans laws in court, fewer than 20 disclosed their spending.
For years, these experts have struggled to establish their credibility in court. Judges have found their testimony to be “biased,” “illogical,” “conspiratorial” or based on fabrication, or tossed their testimony in its entirety for having no basis in research. More than a dozen major U.S. medical associations have endorsed gender-affirming care as medically necessary, including for adolescents.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration enlisted nearly every expert witness of note to craft and defend a 2022 state ban on Medicaid coverage for transition care. Yet all the witnesses combined, in the words of U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle, could muster “no evidence that these treatments have caused substantial adverse clinical results in properly screened and treated patients.” Hinkle struck the ban down in June.
But for the first time, other courts have begun to buy their arguments. Fortified by a belief that attacking trans people is “a political winner,” in 2023, state lawmakers, mostly Republicans, have introduced more than 550 new bills assailing trans health care and legal recognition. Not only are the experts having their busiest year as a result, but they have notched several critical successes.
In July, a 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel allowed Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care to remain in place while a legal challenge proceeds. In August, an 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel reinstated Alabama’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans youth.
The courts, applying the same reasoning the Supreme Court used to overturn Roe v. Wade, ruled transgender care is not constitutionally protected and that states only need some rationale to regulate it. The expert witnesses were key to cultivating the impression that the medical community is divided. “The medical and regulatory authorities are not of one mind about using hormone therapy to treat gender dysphoria,” wrote the 6th Circuit panel.
The rulings increase the odds of a split among the circuit courts and the likelihood that the Supreme Court will eventually take up the issue of gender-affirming care.
And in the meantime, these experts have helped block medically necessary care for thousands of trans people around the country.
“They’re wasting their time and their energy and money trying to convince me and people like me we aren’t who we say we are, and we aren’t who we feel we are,” said Dylan Brandt, a high school senior and the lead plaintiff challenging Arkansas’ first-in-the-nation ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors.
“I’ve known for a long time exactly who I am, and I am so much happier now that I can express and show who I am. For people to be trying so hard and using so much time and effort to stop me — that’s hard.”
Dylan Brandt at Bell Park in Greenwood, Arkansas. Brandt, his mother and several other families challenged the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. “They’re wasting their time and their energy and money trying to convince me and people like me we aren’t who we say we are, and we aren’t who we feel we are,” he said.
SHANE BROWN FOR HUFFPOST
A Group Of Outliers
Besides Hruz, the core group of experts includes James Cantor, a Canadian psychologist; Stephen Levine, a clinical psychiatrist whom prisons often enlist when they are facing pressure to provide gender-affirming care; Patrick Lappert, a former plastic surgeon, who has said he considers gender-affirming surgery “diabolical in every sense of the word”; Michael Laidlaw, an endocrinologist who has urged lawmakers to criminalize gender-affirming care; and Quentin Van Meter, a pediatric endocrinologist and the former head of the anti-LGBTQ+ American College of Pediatricians.
This ragtag group of outliers did not find their way into the courtroom at random. Dismayed at the “poverty of people who are willing to testify” in defense of anti-trans laws, according to Lappert, the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the most formidable forces on the religious right, held a conference in Arizona in 2017 to identify potential recruits. Lappert, who later described the conference in a deposition, Hruz, Van Meter and a California family physician named Andre Van Mol all attended and became go-to witnesses soon afterward. A few years later, the ADF enlisted Cantor to his first case — a lawsuit brought by another expert witness who claimed his university fired him for his courtroom work.
ADF’s recruitment effort paid off right away. Around the same time as the conference, Ashton Whitaker, a 16-year-old transgender boy, became one of the first students to sue over his school’s bathroom ban. An administrator at his high school, part of Wisconsin’s Kenosha Unified School District, had gone so far as to suggest he wear a bright green wristband so teachers could monitor his restroom use, the lawsuit said.
“They’re wasting their time and their energy and money trying to convince me and people like me we aren’t who we say we are, and we aren’t who we feel we are.”
– Dylan Brandt, the lead plaintiff challenging Arkansas’ ban on gender-affirming care for adolescents
The legal team Kenosha hired spent months poring over past cases and medical journals for potential expert witnesses, according to records obtained by HuffPost — a search that produced little more than several thousands in legal bills and a list of people who seemed “likely favorable” toward the ban. Then a lawyer reached out to the Alliance Defending Freedom, and Kenosha finally retained an expert: Hruz.
ADF plays a central role in the mounting backlash to LGBTQ+ rights — the witness roster is just one piece. The group, envisioned by its founder as a “Christian legal army,” has a $104 million annual budget and drives impact litigation around the country. On gender issues, it has helped organize a diffuse group of reactionary and religious-right lawmakers, lawyers and activists into a sprawling working group that trades model legislation, coordinates PR campaigns and fine-tunes bills to withstand legal challenges, a recent Mother Jones investigation found.
Several of the expert witnesses are active members of the working group, such as Laidlaw. Emails leaked to Mother Jones show he told lawmakers that gender-affirming surgical procedures are “crimes waiting to be recognized and codified into law.”
ZOE VAN DIJK FOR HUFFPOST
Kenosha lost its trial and a subsequent appeal. After that, ADF began closely coordinating with Kenosha’s legal team to try to appeal the case before the U.S. Supreme Court. They spent weeks strategizing on the legal approach and amicus briefs before the district ultimately chose to settle.
Opponents of trans rights lost most of their early legal battles in the late 2010s and early 2020s — Kenosha was just one. But the new cadre of experts has no shortage of work. Although their No. 1 assignment today is to defend bans on gender-affirming care for minors — these target puberty blockers and hormone therapy — the core group of experts has defended every variety of anti-trans policy under the sun, from school sports and bathroom bans to orders to investigate parents for child abuse if they support their child’s transition, to bans on gender-affirming care for adults.
The most prolific is Cantor, the Canadian psychologist, who has been a witness in 24 cases total, 11 this year alone. Close behind are Levine, who has been a witness in at least a dozen challenges to anti-trans laws and is the only defense witness with substantial experience treating transgender people, and Hruz.
Most of them bill between $200 and $650 an hour — which is standard for an expert trial witness — for writing reports, giving depositions and trial testimony, and traveling. When Cantor testifies in person versus over video, he said in an interview, he usually earns an extra $10,000 for traveling and waiting his turn in the courtroom.
In Brandt v. Rutledge, the case in which Dylan Brandt is the plaintiff, Arkansas paid Hruz, Lappert and Levine more than $40,000 apiece, records show. (“Yes, I find it pays well, but not nearly as well as your information suggests,” Levine said in an email.)
Mark Regnerus, a sociologist who testified, pocketed $57,062. Regnerus is a veteran of the expert witness circuit, having previously testified that children of same-sex couples grow up at a disadvantage in defense of bans on same-sex marriage. Hruz, a few months after he submitted his expert report to Arkansas, sold a “nearly identical” version to North Carolina, court records show.
“It’s not a difficult job for $200, $300, $400 an hour,” said Carl Charles, a senior attorney at Lambda Legal. But few are willing to do it, he speculated, because “These bills do real harm to young people and to their families, and I think doctors take that pretty seriously.”
ZOE VAN DIJK FOR HUFFPOST
Cantor, the Canadian psychologist, does not share the religious mission of groups like ADF. He credits “his inner Vulcan” for his ability to testify in cases that involve banning a 10-year-old trans girl from playing on the girls’ softball team or stopping adults from correcting their gender on their government documents, to name two recent examples.
“When I first started getting contacted by these groups, it was a long, hard conversation I had to have with myself,” he said. “It’s not up to me, I ultimately decided, what society does. That’s up to society.”
Although he has defended more policies involving trans kids than any other expert, Cantor has never counseled a transgender child or teenager. He has never carried out original research involving trans people, either. His expertise is in paraphilia: abnormal sexual desires, such as pedophilia. And he has acknowledged in court that gender dysphoria — the distress a person feels when they don’t identify as their sex assigned at birth — is not a form of paraphilia.
In a 2022 deposition over West Virginia’s ban on trans girls playing in school sports, Cantor failed to recall the names of any puberty-blocking drugs: “Oh, I couldn’t tell them to you by name so much as by function,” he said. “I’ve always been bad with names,” Cantor told me. “These drugs have had different names in different countries at different times.”
Cantor believes his lack of direct experience allows him to evaluate the field dispassionately.
“The best analogy I have is that, if you want to know if fortunetelling is valid, you’re not going to find that out by just asking the fortunetellers,” he said.
A deposition he gave last summer defending Indiana’s ban on trans girls playing girls’ sports suggests he does not believe trans adolescents are really trans, but are primarily either gay, young and “mistak[ing] the emotions that they’re having” for gender dysphoria, or have autogynephilia, an outlier theory holding that some trans women are merely aroused by the thought of themselves as a woman.
“It’s just a different phenomenon that only looks similar superficially” in children, he said in our interview.
He also argues that studies “consistently, even unanimously” find that the majority of youth who identify as trans stop doing so after a few years. But many of the sources he has cited aren’t studies of trans kids: In multiple examples, the researchers didn’t differentiate between kids who consistently and persistently identified as trans and kids who just behaved in ways associated with the opposite gender. Several studies are decades old and have research topics like “the sissy boy syndrome.”
More recent research finds very low rates of detransitioning among children who socially transitioned, and for reasons that include social pressure and a lack of parental support.
Cantor earned $23,400, he said, defending Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s notorious directive to investigate the parents of children who receive gender-affirming care for child abuse. In the case over Alabama’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, he earned $52,400. Because of his lack of experience treating trans youth, the judge in that case, Liles C. Burke, a Trump appointee, ruled that Cantor’s testimony held “very little weight” and blocked the ban from taking effect. A dozen states have nevertheless asked him to be an expert witness since that May 2022 ruling. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Burke’s ruling a few days after we spoke.
“The question in the back of people’s heads is, is he only saying this for the money?” Cantor said in our interview. “If my assessment of the literature was the other way around, I’d be working from the other side. It wouldn’t make a difference. So it’s good that I’m getting paid, right?”
ZOE VAN DIJK FOR HUFFPOST
Levine declined to be interviewed because he is an expert witness in at least one ongoing case. (HuffPost contacted all the experts named in this story and was unable to reach Lappert despite multiple attempts.) In response to specific questions, Levine wrote, “Your questions illuminate how information can be dysinformation [sic] or simply wrong. Like delusions that often contain a kernel of truth, it is the distortions of reality that enable the label delusion.”
In 1997, he chaired a committee of the organization known today as WPATH, which develops the best practices for treating gender dysphoria. He cut his ties, however, after WPATH became too responsive, in his view, to trans advocacy.
Before he started defending anti-trans laws as an expert witness, Levine provided expert testimony for prisons seeking to block trans inmates from socially transitioning or receiving gender-affirming care, which prisons often oppose for cost reasons.
“The question in the back of people’s heads is, is he only saying this for the money?”
– James Cantor, the top expert witness for states defending anti-trans policies
In that role, Levine has also questioned whether trans people are genuinely trans or if their gender dysphoria is actually an expression of deviant desires or something unresolved from childhood, like “excessively symbiotic” mothering. Of one trans inmate, he wrote that her “transgenderism is tied very much up to her narcissistic character, her demanding character.”
ZOE VAN DIJK FOR HUFFPOST
Van Meter, the former president of the American College of Pediatricians, or ACPeds, has appeared in at least six cases. Like ACPeds’ original founders, he became disillusioned with the American Academy of Pediatrics and sought an alternative because the AAP would not endorse the superiority of the “intact, married family” over same-sex parents and single mothers, he said in an interview.
Van Meter has seen a very small number of adolescent patients with gender dysphoria but says he believes the root cause in “100%” of cases is their family environment. “Divorce is probably the most common thread in all of these cases,” he said. He refers these patients to counseling for depression and anxiety, believing it will resolve their gender dysphoria — an approach with roots in gay conversion therapy that research has linked to an increased risk of suicide attempts.
“You basically ruin their lives” by allowing adolescents to transition, Van Meter said, and so at every opportunity, he pressures them to abandon the idea. To one of his current patients, “I have said it a bazillion times … You will always be a biological female.”
“You have a group of people who say they exist, and what they are saying is, ‘No you don’t. You’re not real, you’re sick,’” said Michelle Forcier, a professor of pediatrics at Brown University and a clinician specializing in gender-affirming care. “Let’s be clear: These are adults who are bullying children.”
Dylan with his mother, Joanna Brandt, who sat through expert testimony that minimized the harms of eradicating medically necessary care. “Actual lives are being saved by affirming care, and nobody on the state side cared,” she said.
SHANE BROWN FOR HUFFPOST
Dylan Brandt decided not to be in the courtroom on the days that Arkansas presented its case, but his mother, Joanna Brandt, was. The hardest moment for her was when Regnerus, the sociologist opposed to same-sex parenting, minimized the risk of suicide among trans youth, saying researchers had “document[ed] fairly small numbers of actually completed suicides.”
“If we distinguish suicidality from actual suicides — completed suicides — we see a much more narrow story validated,” he said.
Joanna thought about Dylan and felt the sting of tears.
“I was afraid I would start loud, ugly crying, so I got up and left,” she recalled. “How could you come here and talk about these people that you’ve never spoken to, that you don’t know anything about, in such a way? Actual lives are being saved by affirming care, and nobody on the state side cared about that.”
“God Is With Us!”
Hutton never forgot her lunch with Hruz. And in the years that followed, as Hruz developed his side hustle as an expert, she began to testify at some of the same trials that he did.
In a 2017 case where Hruz was defending the St. Johns County School District’s bathroom ban, she recalled before a court in central Florida how Hruz had said her child might be “born to suffer and die.” This summer, she flew down to Tallahassee to face off against Hruz again, this time over the state’s Medicaid ban. (She was only reimbursed for travel.)
Her goal is for the courts to understand his true motives. “I know he’s wrapping his whole presentation up in court now as based on science, but that is not what is driving Paul Hruz,” Hutton said. “It is religion.”
Hruz is not the only expert who appears to have religious motivations.
ZOE VAN DIJK FOR HUFFPOST
Lappert, the former plastic surgeon, is a chaplain in Alabama for a Catholic organization called Courage, which, according to its website, counsels “men and women with same-sex attractions in living chaste lives.” In a 2018 presentation titled “Transgender Surgery & Christian Anthropology,” he said “the challenge” at hand was “evangelizing people who are being relentlessly [misled] concerning human sexuality.” They needed “catechesis” and “the sacraments.”
Van Meter, on learning that Gov. Brad Little of Idaho had signed two bills the group supported, boasted, “God is with us!”
“It’s not that I’m driven by a religious ideology,” Van Meter said in an interview. “I do use that as a battery pack, during the weary times, to say, don’t give up, there is a reason you are here.”
Courts place few restrictions on who can serve as an expert witness, as long as their testimony is relevant and soundly reasoned. The bar is low enough that groups suing to overturn anti-trans laws rarely challenge these experts’ ability to testify. But when they do, courts have discounted their testimony in about half of cases.
“Hruz fended and parried questions and generally testified as a deeply biased advocate, not as an expert sharing relevant evidence-based information and opinions,” Judge Hinkle wrote when he blocked Florida’s Medicaid ban. Another judge called his testimony “conspiratorial.”
Levine has had parts of his testimony struck several times, including for relying on a fabricated anecdote.
There are moments in the courtroom when the lack of qualification on the defense side is obvious. During a deposition defending Florida’s Medicaid ban, G. Kevin Donovan, who recently retired as the director of Georgetown University’s center for clinical bioethics, claimed that most transgender girls eventually “revert in their self-perception.” But when pressed for his sources, he flailed.
Q: “What is your evidence of that statement?” A: “Oh, that — that’s been widely published and repeatedly published.” Q: “Can you name the study that that information comes from?” A: “I’m sure I could. It’s more than one source, but, yeah.” Q: “Can you name those studies?” A: “Not right now, no.”
Records show the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration paid Donovan $34,650. He did not respond to questions about his testimony.
The other side has its experts, too. Typically, they are clinicians who have provided gender-affirming care to hundreds of trans people or published substantial research on gender-affirming care, or both.
The expert witnesses for the defense, lacking the same breadth of experience, typically try to poke holes in the research supporting gender-affirming care, largely by nitpicking and misrepresenting the evidence or ignoring newer studies in favor of dated ones. “Their way of operating is to look at each study, say it has limitations, and because it has limitations, to disregard it entirely,” said Gonzalez-Pagan, the Lambda Legal attorney. “And the pile of evidence never grows because they keep finding reasons to disregard studies.”
Many have seized on the fact that there were no long-term, randomized controlled trials to test the efficacy of puberty blockers and hormone therapy for treating gender dysphoria.
Framing randomized trials as the only valid form of evidence lets them ignore the large body of observational and clinical data that does support gender-affirming care. Nearly 20 studies with components of randomized trials — that follow trans adolescents receiving gender-affirming care over a long period of time, or compare outcomes for trans people who accessed gender-affirming care with those who didn’t — have associated gender-affirming care with better mental health outcomes, such as reductions in depression, anxiety or thoughts of suicide.
Those positive associations make it unethical to run a randomized trial over the long term, especially one involving adolescents. “You wouldn’t randomly assign people to smoke a pack a day,” said Briana Last, a research psychologist at Stony Brook University, adding that scores of common medical practices were established without randomized trials.
And, in the past few weeks, researchers have published a randomized trial of 64 transmasculine adults showing that suicidality declined by more than half for the participants who received treatment right away.
The research that expert witnesses for the defense don’t ignore, they often distort. Many, especially Levine, have argued that transition care is potentially harmful by pointing to a 2011 Swedish study that found that trans people who had gender-affirming surgery still had a 19.1% higher suicide rate than the general population.
But the lead author, Cecilia Dhejne, says that is a blatantmisrepresentation of the study, which actually showed that providing medical care is not enough without also fighting societal discrimination.
When he deposed Levine in 2022, Charles, the Lambda Legal attorney, read Dhejne’s critique of how Levine misused her research out loud. Undeterred, Levine cited Dhejne again this year in support of Florida’s Medicaid ban.
Several of these experts have argued that other countries, such as the U.K., Finland, Norway and Sweden, have severely restricted puberty blockers and hormone therapy for adolescents. “They’ve decided that in all, it’s experimental and does more harm than good, and they’re stopping,” Kristopher Kaliebe, who has testified in three cases, said in an interview.
Gender-affirming care providers acknowledge their field faces unanswered questions and that people’s understanding of their gender identity can deepen over time.
Before puberty, Forcier noted, gender-affirming care consists mostly of supporting children if they want to dress or cut their hair differently or go by a new name. “The vast, vast majority will say, this is what I need and where I want to be,” she said, but “it’s OK to change your mind if you’re more gender fluid, it’s OK to change your plan.”
Opponents of gender-affirming care, she argued, aren’t bent on studying and improving care but on eradicating it. Recently, a former employee, Jamie Reed, accused Washington University’s gender clinic of rushing adolescents on to puberty blockers and hormones. While her core claims appear to be proving false or alarmist — one parent said Reed “twisted” her child’s medical history; out of nearly 1,200 patients who sought care at the clinic, Reed claims 16 detransitioned — the main challenge the clinic appears to face is overwhelming demand. Missouri’s response has not been to increase funding for adolescent trans care, but to pass a ban.
“I’m not seeing these people say, ‘This is such an important problem, let’s shift money from white male cardiovascular research to gender care,’” Forcier said. “They are making these arguments in favor of a ban.”
Out of all the government offices asked to justify their hiring of these experts, only the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, which wrote the state’s Medicaid ban, responded.
“Our process has been transparent and based on factual evidence that we put out for the world to see,” said Bailey Smith, the agency’s spokesperson, hyperlinking to a webpage containing the expert reports from Hruz, Laidlaw, Levine, Van Meter, Lappert and others. “Maybe you just fear the evidence will challenge your biased view of the world.”
Netball Amateurs
The spike in anti-trans legislation means states need even more experts to defend it. And in order to deepen the bench, states have started enlisting academics who aren’t in health care or don’t even primarily research humans.
One is a Manchester University professor named Emma Hilton, who mainly studies a particular species of frog and how it offers an understanding of inherited human genetic disorders.
Hilton is a founder of a British group, Sex Matters, that advocates for legally segregating spaces by sex. She earned $300 an hour last year defending bans on trans girls playing on girls’ sports teams in Utah and Indiana. By way of explaining why she was qualified to weigh in on school sports, she told one court, “I participate keenly in sports at an amateur level, playing netball recreationally.”
“Our understanding of human biology is in part a result of the study of animal models,” Hilton said in an email. She declined to address the relevance of netball, which is like basketball without dribbling.
Another is Michael Biggs, an Oxford sociology professor who admitted in court to writing transphobic tweets under the pseudonymous handle @MrHenryWimbush and described himself as a “teenage shitlord [turned] Oxford professor.” “Transphobia is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons,” reads one representative post.
Florida paid Biggs $400 an hour to defend its Medicaid ban. But he plays another, more important role in the expert pantheon: churning out publications that question the efficacy of gender-affirming care. One of his oft-cited critiques of puberty-blocking hormones relied on a questionable reading of hormone trials in sheep, in which the sheep appeared to have anxiety. The other experts have cited Biggs scores of times.
“I’ve known for a long time exactly who I am, and I am so much happier now that I can express and show who I am,” Dylan said.
SHANE BROWN FOR HUFFPOST
Dylan, the teenager challenging Arkansas’ ban on gender-affirming care, avoids thinking about a future in which these people’s arguments carry the day. Instead, he thinks about going to college in a state that isn’t hostile and studying education. “I’ve dealt with a lot of bullying, but I’ve had some pretty amazing teachers [who’ve] given me a safe place,” he said. “I want to be that for somebody else.”
His lawsuit has already made a temporary shelter for other trans teenagers. In June, a judge struck down Arkansas’ ban. The state had assembled a who’s-who of experts — Lappert, Hruz, Levine and Regnerus — but “failed to prove that gender-affirming care for minors with gender dysphoria is ineffective or riskier than other medical care provided to minors,” in the words of U.S. District Judge James M. Moody.
“He knows better than any of these people, better than I do, who he is, and none of them have any right to tell him any differently,” Joanna said of her son.
“When I started testosterone, I felt like I could breathe normally for the first time,” said Dylan. “In the past three years, I have been able to look at myself in the mirror and smile. It’s changed my life — it’s saved my life — in so many ways.”
I got this like from a blog that Ali introduced me to. She left the comment with the link and I checked it out. I like the content so I decided to follow the blog. Yes it stretches my time a bit more but also broadens my knowledge level. The blog can be found here. Hugs.
The world has been flooded with misinformation. Falsehoods and conspiracy theories bubble up on everything from the weather to vaccines to the shape of the Earth. Purveyors of this garbage may be motivated by attention, money, or simply the appeal of sticking it to the educated elite. For people who try to keep both feet planted in the real world, it’s enough to make you want to scream. Even if you spend 24 hours a day pushing back against the wrongness on the Internet, it seems impossible to make a dent in it.
I’ve been pondering this, and I’ve decided that we need a way to target the worst sources of misinformation—a way to identify the people who are both the most wrong and the most dangerous. So, as a bit of a thought experiment, I started playing with a simplified scoring system for misinformation merchants.
I’m calling it the 10-point Ladapo scale in honor of the surgeon general of Florida, for reasons I hope are obvious. Any person can be given a score of zero or one (fractions are discouraged) for each of the following questions; scores are then totaled to provide a composite picture of just how bad any source is. To help you understand how to use it, we’ll go through the questions and provide a sense of how each should be scored. We’ll then apply the Ladapo scale to a couple of real-world examples.
Is the person spreading misinformation where anyone will see it? A zero score here, representing a completely harmless individual, might be the person who keeps ranting to bots in an IRC channel that the last human left in 2012. Anybody who gives a press conference that the national media attends earns a one, as do people who find their place as talking heads or on the op-ed pages of The New York Times.
Does anyone care about the topic of the misinformation? If your conspiracy du jour somehow links the color of orange used on traffic cones to the sale of balsa wood model aircraft, congratulations, you pose no threat and rate a zero. If it involves who won the presidential election, you’re looking at a one here.
Is the subject easy to understand? Misunderstanding quantum chromodynamics, a subject many physicists fear, is not at all surprising. Getting things wrong about evolution, which is simple enough that textbooks explain its basics to pre-teens, is far less excusable and would thus get a one.
Is accurate information easy to find? Self-correction is only a possibility if the correct information is available. One can kind of understand holding false beliefs about a top-secret military technology. But when any search engine will pull up a dozen accurate FAQs on the topic you’re misinforming people about, you have earned your one.
Just how badly wrong is the argument? It continues to astonish me that there are people who apparently believe the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist. That level of detachment from reality should set the high end of the scale for wrongness. To get a zero (which is good here!), I’d allow even being mostly right but wrong about some details.
Is the misinformer promoting fake experts? Nobody can be an expert in everything, so we all find ourselves deferring to the expertise of others on some complicated topics. That makes assessing a source’s credibility critical. Unless you can tell an expert from a crackpot, you’re likely to find yourself relying on a climate “expert” who can’t reason scientifically. Like one who thinks dowsing works or one who happens to be a creationist or a former coal lobbyist. If so, you’ll have earned a point for relying on unreliable expertise—and increasing the reach of other serial misinformers.
Will people be harmed by the confusion created? If it turns out we’re living in a false quantum vacuum, everyone will die when the Universe finds a new ground state, and there would be nothing anyone could do about it. Misinforming people about the topic would have no influence on their ultimate fate, so you could lie to your heart’s content here and still earn a zero. That is very much not the case when it comes to issues like climate change or the pandemic. Putting people in danger earns you a one.
Should the individual know better? Anyone who is actually in the field they’re misinforming about, like Ladapo himself, obviously earns a one. But high scores also go to people who could easily access better information. It’s safe to say that every op-ed columnist at a major newspaper could easily call up scientists or other experts and have complicated topics explained to them. If someone refused to talk to experts because their feelings were hurt by people telling them they’re wrong, well, their score of one is probably best presented by a middle finger. Only the person who would struggle to access quality information truly earns their zero.
Enlarge/ Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo speaks at a press conference in Rockledge, Florida, on August 3, 2022.
Is the person using their own authority to mislead? It’s one thing to rely on a fake expert like Nils-Axel Mörner to make bad arguments. It’s a different thing entirely to be Nils-Axel Mörner. Or Joseph Ladapo (who, if we allowed bonus points, would earn them for dragging down all the credentialed scientists at his agency with him). A point also goes to people who try to use their PhD in physics or similar subjects to intimidate anyone who disagrees with them. “I’ve done a lot of Googling” earns a score that is equal to the amount of respect it deserves: zero.
Is the misinformation effective? In Florida, COVID death rates were higher among Republicans after vaccines became available, which suggests that the anti-vaccine messaging from the state’s Republican leadership is doing exactly what it’s expected to do. Misinformation about the climate has been so pervasive that it took until the Biden administration for the US to have a climate policy that wasn’t predicated on making things worse. These are signs that the misinformation is working, and its purveyors deserve their ones.
Let’s look at how this works in practice. Ladapo earns a point for spewing misinformation in nationally televised press conferences, enabled by his credentials as a Surgeon General (+1 there). He gets another point for misinforming about vaccines, which people care about. Both vaccines and the protection offered by the COVID vaccines are easy to understand (“not dead” is a pretty clear concept) and easy to find, so two more points there. His argument is wrong enough that he may have violated his university’s research ethics guidelines, so another point there, plus one more for him being able to know better. Dead Floridians attest to the harm and effectiveness of his misinformation. About the only thing I haven’t seen him do is use fake experts.
A near-perfect 9 out of 10 tells us that Ladapo demonstrates an impressive combination of wrongness and risk. It raises so many questions about his judgment that he probably shouldn’t be trusted about any subject. (You may nitpick naming the scale after someone who doesn’t achieve a perfect score on it, but remember, the issue here is misinformation—it would be inappropriate for the name to be completely accurate.)
A test case
To get a better sense for the use of the scale, I’ll use it on a less obvious candidate: Washington Post opinion columnist George Will. Will is an interesting case because he has a reputation as an intellectual and deep thinker, and he remains generally popular within the establishment of what you might call traditional conservatives in the post-Trump environment. And he generally reserves his arguments for policy matters, which are more opinion-based than fact-based.
But Will has had a thing for climate change, revisiting it semi-regularly for over a decade and invariably spouting blatant misinformation when he has. Here he is back in 2009, belittling scientists for saying that an apparent pause in warming was something that’s both temporary and inevitable when you superimpose short-term randomness on a long-term trend. Despite Will claiming that “evidence of warming becomes more elusive,” it is now obvious that the scientists were right. And he was still going on in 2021, suggesting we can’t even manage to establish basic facts. “Science has limited ability to disentangle human and natural influences on climate changes,” he said at the time. He’s published a number of very stupid things in between.
But is that enough to qualify Will as laughably wrong and dangerous? Let’s find out.
First, a focus on climate change guarantees someone a substantial number of points. It’s a subject people care about, accurate information is just about everywhere, people will clearly be harmed as a result of the misinformation, and it’s painfully clear that the misinformation has helped delay any action to limit the damage. That’s four points right there.
But Will doesn’t stop grabbing points. He has published his errors in places like the Washington Post and Newsweek, ensuring that it will be widely read (another point). He’s relied on fake experts like Steve Koonin and Bjorn Lomborg, who have had their arguments widely criticized in places Will could easily find if he chose to. He could easily get scientists to explain where he’s making errors, but as noted above, he seems to be comfortable simply dismissing their statements—and apparently hasn’t learned anything from the fact that the scientists turned out to be right. So there’s another point for being in a position where he clearly should know better but can’t be bothered to learn. We’re up to seven.
How badly wrong is Will? He devoted an entire column to the idea that the climate has changed in the past without human influence, so we can’t be confident that it’s changing now because of human influence. That is mind-numbingly ignorant. It’s the equivalent of arguing that, since lakes have formed free from human intervention, we can’t be certain that dams are doing anything.
I wish I could award him more than one point for just how awful that argument is, but rules are rules. Still, it does lead to another point: it’s not difficult to understand that the argument is wrong. Nobody is likely to have any problem recognizing that some things can happen due to either natural or human causes and that we can generally tell the two apart. It should be easy to understand this, so Will earns the point for failing to do so.
That’s nine points. The only thing that keeps him from outscoring Ladapo himself is the fact that Will doesn’t seem to have any special credentials he’s using to give his misinformation added weight. He may have a reputation as an intellectual—although, given all this evidence, it astonishes me that he’s retained it—but there are no formal credentials for intellectualism.
Still, in the end, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that, like Ladapo, Will is spreading blatant misinformation about a topic that poses a great deal of danger to many people and that his arguments are so laughably bad that we should question whether he can provide quality information about anything. Yet people still give him a pass and treat his opinions as worthy of attention. It mystifies me.
There are limits
The fact that Ladapo and Will achieve the same score highlights the limits of this scale. It’s about misinformation alone, and there are factors beyond that that can be critical to understanding the threat someone poses. Ladapo is actually in a position where he can set policy, and for most people, the risks posed by COVID are more immediate than those from our changing climate. Will is just one voice in a large chorus of climate misinformers. So Ladapo is a much more dangerous figure at the moment.
Despite its limits, I think the scale is a helpful way to think about how context makes some sources of misinformation far more dangerous than others. And it reflects the finding that, in some cases, the most widely disseminated misinformation comes from a limited number of sources.
Still, I have little doubt this scoring system could be improved. Please feel free to suggest additional factors that should be considered in the comments.
Yet, claimed I was, a man no one wanted by a dog no one wanted, and both of us thought by some better off with a bullet. And so, Grace came home with me, this wild one that would protect my home and safety, just as I wanted. Just as I thought I needed.
There was nothing wrong with her tail, that’s for sure, and she was sure to tell anyone who could reach the box that she was ready for a bone no matter how bad her leg hurt. Two weeks ago I found out that she actually had cancer as her pain was getting worse and worse.
Scottie's Playtime 
