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Oct. 1, 2023 - Where There's Woke - Thomas Smith

01:12:26

WTW11: Artisanal Coffee Comment Causes Firestorm?

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	What's so scary about the woke mob?
	How often you just don't see them coming.
	Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
	Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
	The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything.
	Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green Eminem will now wear sneakers.
	Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
	This is episode 11.
	I'm Thomas Smith.
	And more importantly, that over there is Lydia Smith.
	Hello, hello.
	I'm the co-host.
	You're the main host.
	I'm the co-host.
	Today I'm the main host.
	I'm gonna really try to shut up as much as I can.
	Let's see.
	I'm so excited.
	We're on a little side quest.
	We gotta get some experience points.
	You know, we gotta level up our weapons.
	You've seen a few of my video games.
	I've seen a few.
	I can follow along with what you're saying.
	Yeah.
	I don't know if I could talk the talk though.
	Princess Zelda has actually been holding off Ganon single-handedly in the castle for like hundreds of years and we're like, We could do another quest.
	We can do another quest before we go to the main thing.
	She's fine.
	Here's where we are.
	This is part two, of course, of the Kilbourne law exam question fiasco.
	Kilbourne ultimatum.
	Oh, is that the second Bourne movie?
	It might be.
	I can't remember which one's the second one.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	There's so many.
	That's all I can think of.
	The Bourne identity, the Bourne supremacy.
	Especially because his first name is Jason.
	Oh yeah, you're right.
	Jason Kilbourne Supremacy.
	Jason Kilbourne.
	Yeah, totally.
	Oh, I like it.
	I'll re-up how we got here in case it's been a minute for you folks listening.
	We're pausing on the main quest of the Kilbourne debunk to examine an example he brought up in an interview.
	Let's just very quickly play what he said before we'll let Lydia take us on a journey.
	There's a professor at Yale who has something to do with medical something or like maybe it's psychology or something, but she was doing a field study.
	And I can't exactly recall what the subject of her study was, but she made a comment at some point in a paper about this study in which she expressed surprise that residents of rural Ohio might have a taste for artisanal coffee.
	She wouldn't have expected that.
	Before very long, there was an enormous firestorm from these crazy extreme leftist Yale students who characterized that comment of hers about rural Ohioans as being, quote, dehumanizing.
	It was dehumanizing for her to suggest that these rural Ohioans probably wouldn't have a taste for artisanal coffee.
	And you just have to read it two or three times to go, am I getting this right?
	I mean, you can't believe that this is how normal people, well-educated people at the absolute flagship of the higher education industry in the United States, Yale University, they're behaving in this way.
	All right.
	So.
	All right.
	Here we go.
	Sally Satel.
	Sally Satel.
	We're going to talk about Sally Satel.
	And let me guess, you were able to track it down by being like coffee, professor, whatever.
	And every single result came up and told you exactly what it was.
	And they were all on her side.
	Yeah.
	That's what happens.
	Pretty much.
	Pretty much, yeah.
	So Sally Satel is an American psychiatrist.
	He says that she was conducting a field study.
	That is not true.
	We'll talk about exactly what she was working on, where these comments came up.
	He also said that it was a The paper that she was writing, a comment in a paper that she wrote, that is also not true.
	It was not in the context of a paper.
	It was in a lecture that was given to Yale students.
	And then the last piece was that before very long, you know, there was this firestorm from extreme leftists that were Yale students.
	Oh wow.
	What kind of firestorm?
	How many dead?
	A letter.
	A letter?
	Oh.
	Was it radioactive?
	Pretty much a letter.
	There's anthrax in the letter and it killed how many?
	Yeah.
	I think zero because it was digitally delivered.
	They have digital anthrax?
	The woke have digital anthrax, everyone.
	Yeah.
	It was a group of anonymous psychiatric residents at Yale School of Medicine that sent this letter.
	But let's back up.
	Let's talk about Sally Sattel a little bit.
	I'm not going to like dive deep, deep, deep into her history, but I do think some of this is important.
	But the official position of the show is that we will be referring to her as Sally Sitwell.
	Yes.
	Because that was what you and I quickly said.
	You actually, I think, said it first.
	I did.
	Yeah, that was impressive.
	You're not the quotey thing person.
	I'm usually the quotey stuff person.
	So Sally Sitwell.
	Tell us about Sally Sitwell.
	So we know she's a psychiatrist.
	We know where she teaches lectures at Yale, visiting professor at Columbia.
	She is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
	Since 2000.
	She has been with this conservative think tank for a long, long, long time.
	Any listeners who listen to our piece on the Witherspoon Institute, Robert P. George, he's over at the American Enterprise Institute.
	Scott Gottlieb is an important figure that we'll get to eventually.
	He was the FDA commissioner under Trump.
	He was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute before, and then he has returned after that administration ended.
	Lots of folks that we would like to see, you know, we get to see in the American Enterprise Institute, and she's one of them.
	In 2001, so shortly after she joined AEI, she wrote a book called PCMD.
	How political correctness is corrupting medicine.
	No way.
	That's how it starts.
	That's how it starts.
	Yeah.
	So she had a big problem with this idea that medical practitioners were expected to be mindful of the structures, the societal structures that are impacting their patients.
	And she really, there was an article I read where she basically said, now listen, black people and white people, they're different.
	And I'm going to take that into consideration when I'm prescribing something because this thing works only 40% of the time in black people.
	So she'll start people at like lower doses.
	Okay.
	This is one of those like horseshoe theory type things where it's like actually there was the 90s period into the 2000s where it was like no treat everyone exactly the fucking same percent you can't see their skin but I think we hopefully a lot of people outgrew that and it is fair to recognize there are different concerns of different people with different races.
	Yeah.
	Absolutely.
	I don't know.
	Sickle cell anemia or something.
	So is that... That's one of her examples, right?
	Is that sickle cell anemia is something that has evolved over time to be more prevalent in certain racial groups, right?
	So that is something that a doctor should be mindful of.
	And that's understandable.
	However, she includes someone, an anesthesiologist, I think, saying that they intubate black people at different rates than white people because of their rate of salivation.
	And...
	Years later, she issues a correction to this article where she says, numerous physicians have reached out to me unclear about where the salivation comment came from.
	She's like, then I started looking into it and I don't really know where he got it either.
	But the rest of the article stands and is reasonable.
	OK, so it's not sickle cell anemia.
	It's some racist myth about black people salivate differently.
	Yeah.
	And she just is like, I don't know where I heard it.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's from one source.
	One source, you know, didn't really like look into it.
	You know, granted, it's not her area of study.
	But still, it's a pretty intense claim.
	Growing up in a small racist town, like, yeah, we were kind of told stuff about other races.
	Then, like, if you didn't, you know, go to college like I did and quickly realize, like, oh, nothing I learned is reliable.
	Like, I'm just going to forget all that.
	Everything I knew about anything, I need to relearn.
	If you don't do that, then you're just like, yeah, no, black people definitely salivate differently.
	And then you work for a Republican think tank and then no one calls you out on it, apparently, until what year was that?
	2004, 2005.
	Yikes!
	Yeah, perhaps they called her out before and she just got around to editing it, you know, years later.
	I mean, both versions are bad.
	But in the health disparities myth, in 2006, she co-wrote this with an author named Jonathan Click, who is an economist.
	And in this book, their position is that differences in treatment do vary by race, but it's not because of race.
	It's because of insurance status, income, geographic location, that they're not seeing the same doctors because they live in different areas.
	Yeah.
	And I wonder how all of those things came to be.
	Okay, so it's like black people aren't using a different drinking fountain because they're black.
	Right.
	They're using the different worst drinking fountain because they tend to be located in line where that drinking fountain is for some reason.
	Yeah.
	Oh, okay.
	You're right.
	There's no racism.
	Yeah.
	The publisher, AEI Press.
	So at least, you know, there wasn't like, you know, Random House picked this up or anything like that.
	But it did carry media attention.
	And backing up one year before with another AEI fellow that I know you know, Christina Hoff Summers.
	Fucking Jesus Christ.
	They co-wrote a book together.
	And so this was very concerning to me because I read this title and I was like, wait, what?
	"How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance." And so this was very concerning to me 'cause I read this title and I was like, wait, what?
	"How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance." - Ah, okay. - You have a psychiatrist co-writing this book.
	That feels so wrong to me.
	What does she want psychiatry to be?
	Just like berating your client?
	It's bootstraps, baby.
	Yeah, I don't really know.
	You're like, I have very severe PTSD.
	Grow up!
	They reveal how therapism and the burgeoning trauma industry.
	Therapism?
	Yeah, therapism.
	And she's a psychiatrist.
	And she's a psychiatrist.
	Wait, is that the thing where like psychiatrists frown on just regular therapists?
	Psychiatrists have like the medical component to it, right?
	Yeah, but do you still call that therapy?
	I can't remember.
	I think so.
	I think you still call it therapy.
	You know, it's just, there's a variety of models of therapy.
	But psychiatrists tend to, they can prescribe stuff.
	So maybe it's like more of that angle.
	They're saying like, don't just talk to someone, you either have drugs or not or something, I don't know.
	Yeah, yeah, I guess.
	Well, I don't know that every psychiatrist thinks this way.
	No, no, no, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I think this is like very particular to her.
	But yes, reveal how therapism and the burgeoning trauma industry have come to pervade our lives.
	Help is offered everywhere under the presumption that we need it.
	In children's classrooms, the workplace, churches, courtrooms, the media, the military.
	But with all the help comes a host of troubling consequences.
	Can you imagine?
	How could you think that?
	Yeah, how can you think that?
	How is this something that you could think so much about that you have an entire book pouring out of you?
	I don't understand this.
	How could you walk about the world, in our country at least, in this United States of America, and be like, fuck, there's too much help everywhere.
	Everything's too helpful.
	You see like an Amazon driver run into a wall because he hasn't gone to the bathroom in four years and like homeless people, all that.
	Damn, you know what's the problem?
	Too much help.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So they think PTSD, you know, it used to be applied only to war veterans.
	It's being applied to way too many people now.
	Oh, grief counselors.
	They have a big problem with grief counselors.
	Grief counselors!
	Yeah.
	Yep.
	Come on.
	Like, okay, if you want to do a thing, you can get me on board with just about anything.
	If your angle is the people on TikTok are doing this wrong and you very, just stick to that.
	Cause yeah.
	Okay.
	There are the people on TikTok, but what year was this book?
	2005.
	Oh, OK.
	This is not even close.
	OK, fuck you.
	This is not... I know.
	In 2005, you're telling me we're already helping people too much and there's... All right.
	Yeah.
	No, because it's this idea, right?
	The part of the... Grief counseling!
	She has a problem with grief counselors in 2005!
	Yeah, the way that it's phrased, too, it says, the unasked for grief counselors who descend on bereaved families, schools, and communities.
	Yep.
	What?
	Yep.
	I don't even know.
	Like, most of the stuff I at least know, the idiotic Upside-down world because I've spent too much time in their mindset.
	I don't know what I mean is 2005 So this is before my time in terms of awareness of this kind of stuff But I can't even guess as to what the fuck they are thinking with this Like is there some news story of a grief count?
	I don't like what?
	Yeah, I honestly don't know, but they did like a whole circuit of like sitting on panels together, talking about this.
	This is something that, yeah, that they really, really pushed for for quite some time.
	And, you know, to your point in the previous episode and some of the other episodes that we've done on this show, I want to be fair.
	And just because I strongly disagree with a lot of these things here.
	It doesn't necessarily mean that she has a wrong opinion about everything.
	I think that there are some elements in my research of her where I'm on board with what she's saying, right?
	She doesn't think the death penalty is appropriate for Individuals with mental illness.
	It's kind of a low bar to agree with.
	But I want to give her credit.
	Right.
	Let me guess.
	She's for legalizing weed or something.
	No.
	They always have those.
	No, I know.
	It's a joke.
	They always have those.
	Dave Rubin has two.
	Weed and gay marriage.
	And that makes him a Bernie Sanders.
	Right.
	No, it doesn't.
	There's more things than those two things.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So that kind of tells you a little bit about Sally Sattel, that I don't want to go, you know, too deep into her history, but I think that kind of helps set up, you know, what the Yale students might know about her.
	That she probably fucking sucks.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	So here we go.
	January 8th, 2021.
	Yale does these things called Grand Rounds.
	So in their psychiatry department on January 8th, 2021, it's a weekly thing that they do during the school year.
	The Grand Round presenter for that day was Sally Satel.
	Sally Sitwell.
	Please say her name correctly.
	You're right.
	Sally Sitwell.
	I don't want to confuse the listeners.
	And she did a presentation that was titled My Year Abroad in Ironton, Ohio.
	Yikes.
	Yeah.
	So already titling it in a way that she will characterize as, you know, cheeky and fun.
	Yeah.
	But kind of sets up these expectations, again, knowing a little bit about how she views race.
	So in 2018, she says she moved to Ironton, Ohio.
	She did an interview with Reason in a different place, obviously, online in an article.
	They asked what drew you to Ohio, and she didn't really answer that, but I dug around to find out more of that story.
	In Grand Rounds, the way that she characterizes it is that she wanted to go since 2015 to a location, you know, where she could help with addiction.
	That's where a lot of her background is, is working in clinics and helping individuals with severe substance abuse and addiction problems and, you know, kind of figuring out getting on the other side of that.
	Does this feel a little J.D.
	Vance-esque?
	Honey, you should say that.
	Oh, okay, yeah.
	Wow.
	These are things I have not told you, so.
	No, yeah, they're in the dark here.
	So she wanted to go since 2015.
	Eventually she contacted a friend who had a lot of Ohio connections and he set me up.
	He set her up with J.D.
	Vance and his charity.
	The charity that I'll just add ceased operations when he started campaigning for Congress.
	Shut it down.
	Probably because they finished doing all the good.
	Yeah, they fixed it, right?
	So, she went out there for about a year, and she's, you know, telling the students in the lecture itself, talking about, you know, the connections that she's made there, what the town was like, kind of setting that context for the geography.
	And they talk explicitly about OxyContin because that is such a deep, deep, deep problem in a lot of America, especially in Ohio.
	J.D. Vance, you know, it's how he became just a name in everybody's living room.
	Wrote the hillbilly elegy.
	Hillbilly elegy.
	Yes.
	About his hillbilly upbringing.
	Actually, not much of it was about OxyContin.
	But as you're talking, I Google this town in Ohio.
	And it is, I think it's important to say this is 92 percent white.
	So I was I was curious, like, OK, is this a rural like black area or I think that makes a difference in terms of some of the implications of what she's saying.
	But it is one of those.
	J.D.
	Vance-esque, hillbilly, super white places.
	Yeah.
	She also talks a lot about the history of the town and that it used to be a really strong coal mining area and the way that like coal camps worked and stuff.
	I learned a lot, honestly.
	about history, like reading through some of this stuff and the way that painkillers, pain relievers ended up becoming a necessity for a lot of these individuals because without them and they weren't able to go to work, they didn't just lose their jobs.
	If they had a house that was being paid for by the coal company, they lost their house.
	They were like kicked out of town essentially in some of those cases.
	So it becomes this reliance, right?
	So just kind of talking about the drug history there.
	So she speaks this entire time and brings up towards the end about how, you know, she's seeing the town starting to turn around.
	And that's where that artisanal coffee Sure.
	Someone has opened an artisanal coffee shop, and I just thought that was, you know, so interesting because I didn't know that that's something that these people would like, you know, kind of thing.
	And if you can play the link I sent you, we get the Q&A portion where we're jumping in.
	And I thought this was really remarkable, so I want to share it with everybody.
	My name is Sean.
	I appreciate you coming to talk about the opioid epidemic.
	I'm from Mississippi and have a lot of interface with rural communities.
	And I had more of a comment than a question.
	So, I wanted to make a comment about kind of how we talk about rural populations and how we use the ways that we describe them to make our point.
	Too often, when we come out of our ivory towers and poke our head out the window, it's easy to view these communities kind of like a zoo.
	And I think some of the initial part of the PowerPoint kind of utilized that perspective.
	And correct me if I'm wrong, but to me, in some ways, it seemed that That you might have been using the kind of dehumanizing or mocking the rural population of Ohio to emphasize your thesis that patients are more responsible for their illness than we previously thought.
	And I just wanted to get your perspective on the view that I took away from that.
	I do think that people, of course, have a role.
	It's what we do in drug treatment.
	We show them what that role was.
	So, I mean, not in any kind of a, you know, a blaming or discouraging way, but that's really the key to, I mean, after you've stabilized people on, we were talking about opioids, maybe after you've stabilized them,
	on methadone or buprenorphine or whatever, which is often the first move, people have to stand still if they're going to start to get better in treatment, then so much of the work is showing them, you know, that's not blaming the victim, it's showing them how they have, you know, that's what relapse prevention is all about, is understanding the vulnerabilities which can take the form of
	you know, cues in the most, you know, conditioned cues kind of way.
	What else is, you know, how they can fill what they perceive to be some of the deficits in their life that has led them to feel so distraught that they often turn to drugs.
	So, you know, if we treat it like it's a formal disease where, you know, if you had pneumonia, I could treat it if you were in a coma.
	It's not like that.
	It's much more interactive.
	So, So I think that talking about the extent to which people play a role in their circumstances is essential.
	Did you hear anywhere in her response?
	Where she spoke to his concerns about the language that she was using for her thesis.
	She didn't address that at all.
	Yeah, I mean, she seemed to focus on... Where did she grab that from his question exactly?
	She read into the question where he was saying, you know, do you think that you leaned on that language in order to support your thesis that people are personally responsible?
	And then she said, well, people are personally responsible for their illness.
	She just kind of skipped the rest of the first part of that.
	That I thought was like really lovely and honest and vulnerable and, you know, can be kind of a challenging situation to speak up in that kind of environment.
	But that resident actually has gone on to become the inpatient chief resident and an assistant professor at Yale.
	And he's a big advocate for LGBTQ causes.
	And yeah, he's really cool.
	Sean Patterson, if anyone wants to check him out.
	So that was January 6th.
	That's pretty much where her presentation ends.
	And that was the we're talking.
	That was the presentation.
	That was a question.
	Yes.
	OK.
	Yeah.
	I mean, obviously.
	So we played just that one clip from a Q&A, but this is an hour and 20 minutes.
	So that's what the Grand Rounds is.
	It's like a talk like that.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	OK.
	And because of covid, it's like because of covid at that time, it was virtual.
	Exactly.
	And this answer that she did is if you're talking oxycontin, it's a little bit weird to be like, yeah, these people turned to drugs.
	She literally said that, like, oh, what's going on in their life that they turned to drugs?
	Do you think that's what happened?
	Or were those drugs pushed by the fucking Sackler family and got a gazillion people addicted and blah, blah, blah?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, this personal responsibility angle on the fucking opioid crisis.
	Actually, I'm going to zigzag here.
	That's slightly refreshing because The other thing that's happened is that once something like this affected white people, then all of a sudden it was like, all right, well, okay, it's not their fault.
	When it was like, okay, drug epidemic in any other race, it's like, well, those fucking people need to get their act together.
	So actually it's kind of weirdly, now that I think about it, I guess it's sort of consistent for her to be like, yeah, also these white people need to get their act together.
	But I think she's using that as a way to tell black people to get their act, you know what I mean?
	It's even worse than that, but put a pin in it because we'll get there.
	But you're 100% right.
	Oh, no.
	Sorry.
	I will say one more thing.
	Yes.
	That is the whole bullshit about J.D. Vance.
	Let's tell this very brief story, and I hope your dad won't mind.
	But your dad recommended Hillbilly Elegy to me a lot or to us or I don't know.
	Like right after it came out.
	Right after it came out.
	And that was pre-Trump, I want to say.
	Yeah.
	So June 28th.
	Yeah.
	So June 28th, 2016, I don't remember when I actually read it, but he started recommending it to me, and I think it was because of some sort of, I don't know what, family connection to that area, and he just- Yeah, yeah.
	It was relatable.
	Yeah, like the family component of it and the hillbilly background of it, which I also found kind of interesting, you know, like that area and that thing.
	But when I finally read it, I remember I told him, Yeah, I read the book, did enjoy it, but didn't you feel like it was kind of like a closeted right-wing thing?
	Because at this time, by the way, mind you, this is just Hillbilly Elegy bestseller.
	J.D.
	Vance isn't running for anything.
	Everybody's talking about this book.
	I knew nothing about any of that.
	I just read the book and I was like, yeah, I remember specifically having a feeling of like, wait, you're kind of using these downtrodden white people and saying basically they need to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps.
	And there was a part toward the end of the book where he was like, see, I got my shit together and got out of there and went to Yale or whatever the fuck you went to.
	And like, I became a blah.
	And it was, You know, most of the book was fine.
	But like the end of the book, toward the end, I remember seeing that message.
	I was like, hey, I kind of feel like this, you know, like it might be kind of a right wing thing that in disguise because it's, you know, it's one step away.
	He didn't want to say, hey, black people, get your shit together.
	But if he writes about these white people and says, See, it's not about anything other than their personal choices.
	They need to get their shit together.
	But you're kind of like also implying, you know, like you're able to make that statement to bring that message in a way that doesn't feel as racist because you're talking about your own family and your super poor white people that you're related to.
	Yeah.
	So I like I noted that very thing.
	And that's what this feels like to me.
	It's like specifically talking about white people to avoid the charge of racism, but you're still saying the same thing.
	You're saying people in these shitty circumstances need to get their fucking shit together.
	Mm-hmm.
	Mm-hmm.
	Flash forward to, you know, a couple years back or whatever, and J.D.
	Vance is running for Senate as a Republican, Trump fucking Republican, and I felt pretty vindicated about that.
	I felt like I called that one.
	Literally didn't know anything about him.
	Read the book, was like, eh, right wing, and yeah, nailed it.
	Anyway.
	So FIRE picks this up.
	They pick up that the Yale psychiatry residents are not pleased.
	Some number of them.
	Yes.
	Some number of anonymous Yale psychiatry residents.
	And those residents have sent a letter to Dr. John Kristol.
	Dr. John Kristol is co-chair of the Anti-Racism Task Force with Dr. Cindy Krusto.
	And she actually made history as the first black woman professor in Yale psychiatry.
	Wow, in like 18, what?
	2021.
	Oh, 2021, wow, okay.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Which is, I'm not just, that's also like, importantly, the backdrop here.
	Right.
	We're at fucking Yale, white as could be.
	Right, and so she was involved with Yale before then, because the Anti-Racism Task Force started in September 2020, but you know, she didn't have a professorship at the time.
	Yeah, 2021, what a year.
	Well, September 2020, yeah, because of George Floyd.
	Exactly.
	So, you know, before we get into the letter, actually, why don't I finish setting up some of that context of what the world looked like, you know, at large, but then also at Yale in particular, leading up to this.
	All right.
	So if we back up from when they formed the Anti-Racism Task Force, which we said was in the wake of George Floyd, Dr. John Kristol later described it as the largest and most important initiative in our department.
	But if you back up a little bit further, they actually started incorporating anti-racism education and advocacy into their curriculum for their residents in their medical school in 2015.
	Yikes.
	Not all stars.
	Not 1968 or something like that.
	Sure, yeah.
	But they did have something.
	It was formalized and structured, mandatory piece of their residency program.
	They had a structural competency track, the human experience track, The advocacy track and the history of psychiatry track.
	So talking about, you know, some of those systemic problems within psychiatry as a field and how that has been pervasive in that field moving forward.
	Not to mention so much of medical science.
	We only know a lot of stuff because we just experimented on black people without their fucking consent.
	So yeah, like maybe teaching any sort of medical student about that history I think would be a little bit, you know, at least, yeah, mention it.
	Like, they should always kind of know about that.
	That would be good.
	And it is something, you know, they talk about racism, they talk about ableism, colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, that general inequality that is pervasive in our society and how it Yeah, and what are we talking about?
	I'm sure it's like, what, what is this, a course or like one thing?
	You know, like people overreact to this as though this is, that's actually all they teach.
	They don't even teach medicine anymore.
	They just teach wokeness.
	It's like, no, this is probably like a fucking one course that they do.
	Sure, great.
	Yeah, it's like.
	That's good.
	You know, that's that's it should be taught.
	But it's people overreact as though that's all they're teaching instead of medicine or something.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So they have this framework for their students.
	And then I was looking through the grand rounds historically and stuff and stumbled on one from February 5th, 2020, where Dr. Amanda Calhoun spoke.
	And she was a resident at the time and her This piece was about sharing her experience with racism in the medical field.
	And she's doing this to her peers, right, to her colleagues, to her professors and mentors.
	July 30th, 2020, a few months later, there were pieces about confronting racism in the curriculum itself, how it's important to the psychiatrists in this program that they're confronting racism.
	That's around the time of George Floyd, right, July 30th, 2020.
	And then the Anti-Racism Task Force is formed in September.
	2020.
	So from the student's perspective, perhaps.
	Yeah.
	It's like, all right, we're making some change around here.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	In the year of our Lord 2020.
	Instead of, you know.
	Finally got to it.
	In nineteen fucking hundred.
	Yeah.
	If you recall the date of Sally Sitwell's presentation, January 8th, 2021.
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Do you know what happened two days before that?
	Okay.
	Very big commonality.
	Yeah.
	With when the whole Kilborn thing happened.
	Not to go back to that.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, so commonality there, and then we had the riots at the Capitol that were obviously really intense.
	I know Sally Sitwell does not believe in trauma.
	Someone waved a confederate flag in the fucking house chambers.
	Yeah.
	That's a racism that happened.
	A big one.
	And Yale had held a town hall on January 7th.
	Let me read the reaction from the students.
	I confess, I've already read the letter because I thought I was just doing this myself, so I don't want to fool people.
	I've read this.
	to be there together.
	And then in comes Sally Sitwell, January 8th.
	So I think that that's important context to have when you understand the reaction from the students.
	Now, let me read the reaction from the students.
	I confess, I've already read the letter because I thought I was just doing this myself.
	So I don't want to fool people.
	I've read this.
	I can't wait.
	Yeah.
	Dear Dr. Crystal, Anti-Racism Task Force, and Yale Department of Psychiatry Leadership.
	We, a concerned group of Yale psychiatry residents, are writing this letter to express our disappointment with the Grand Rounds presentation given on January 8, 2021, by Dr. Sally Satel.
	This presentation was given two days after the white supremacist insurrection that occurred at the Capitol and was further traumatizing to us and many of our colleagues.
	The language Dr. Sattel used in her presentation was dehumanizing, demeaning, and classist toward individuals living in rural Ohio and for rural populations in general.
	Dr. Sattel is known for her highly problematic and racist canon that explicitly blames individuals facing structural inequities for their own health outcomes.
	In the book, The Health Disparities Myth, Dr. Sattel and co-author Jonathan Click claim that structural racism is a myth.
	Then they give a quote from there.
	In another work titled PCMD, Dr. Sattel even has the audacity to challenge Reverend Al Sharpton, an exemplary individual and activist.
	While no one disputes the fact that minorities, especially black Americans, tend to be less healthy than whites, it is rash to ascribe this difference mainly to bias in the healthcare system or to doctors' subtle prejudice against minority patients.
	There are ample reasons for differences in health status, some easier to address than others, but the evidence does not support the charge of bias.
	The accusation is nonetheless being made by influential groups ranging from the U.S.
	Commission on Civil Rights to the Association of American Medical Colleges and by Black leaders like the Reverend Al Sharpton.
	As if this rhetoric weren't divisive enough, some of the remedies being implemented are deeply worrisome.
	And it continues.
	In her Grand Rounds presentation, Dr. Sattel applied her problematic beliefs to psychiatric patients suffering from substance use disorders.
	We find her canon to be beyond a difference of opinion, in quotes, worth debate.
	Her racist and classist beliefs are particularly harmful to our psychiatric patients, who do indeed suffer from structural inequities, as well as our Black colleagues, who also suffer from racism and have had family members die in the medical system because of inequitable treatment by providers.
	Many residents who have roots in rural America also expressed hurt by her elitist portrayal of Ohio as both foreign and lesser.
	For example, at one point in her speech, she describes an artisanal coffee shop, one I would not expect to find here.
	The very title of her piece likens rural Ohio to traveling abroad, another theme we found offensive.
	While we do promote holding space for diverse opinions, dehumanization should never be given a platform in Yale Department of Psychiatry.
	What does it say about our department that we are inviting this speaker, especially considering her previous work, while simultaneously forming an anti-racism task force?
	How can the department support a woman who is minimizing the impact of racism and then claim to make it a priority?
	Dr. Crystal, you are the chair and leader of the Anti-Racist Task Force.
	We are especially shocked and disappointed in you.
	How can we, as residents, be inspired to join an anti-racism task force when that same task force headed by you did not take a public stand against Dr. Sattel?
	You have demonstrated that you wish to talk about anti-racism abstractly, but not concretely.
	You have modeled that you are unwilling to call out racism in our own colleagues.
	In fact, you have, with no evidence of forethought or of warning, given such a colleague a platform and a large audience to promote her viewpoints.
	We, a concerned group of residents, do not necessarily represent our entire residency, but rather form an anonymous subset.
	We request a response from Dr. Crystal regarding the following list of questions by February 1st, 2021.
	We also request the same advantage that was given to Dr. Sattel, a large audience.
	We ask that this letter be distributed to the entire Yale Department of Psychiatry.
	We also intend that this letter be discussed during the next Anti-Racism Task Force meetings.
	Finally, we are ashamed to learn that Dr. Sattel has an academic affiliation with Yale.
	After a review of her previous work, we ask that Dr. Sattel's lectureship with Yale be revoked.
	And then they followed with some questions.
	What was the process of choosing her as a speaker?
	Who made this decision?
	What were the learning objectives of this talk?
	Why were her problematic views not presented to us beforehand so that those who might be offended and upset could choose not to attend the presentation?
	Will her academic affiliation be reconsidered?
	Why should we join the anti-racism task force when this same department supports racist, classist, and problematic speakers who directly minimize the impact of systemic racism?
	Why should we trust that you are committed to anti-racism?
	Are you only interested in fighting anti-racism in an abstract space for which you can assume no responsibility?
	Or are you interested in also fighting anti-racism even if it means challenging your own racism and that of your colleagues?
	What will you do differently in the future?
	Will you continue to invite grand round speakers with racist and classist mindsets like Dr. Sattel?
	Thank you, concerned Yale psychiatry residents.
	Boy, that sounds pretty reasonable to me.
	I think so, too.
	Yeah, the way that this is characterized is like everything else.
	The way that Kilbourn characterizes it, these extreme leftist Yale students provoked because how dare she talk about artisanal coffee shops in Ohio and they're enraged.
	That's not...
	That's not what happened, and that's not how that letter reads, and it's talking points from fire is really what he's espousing right there, right?
	It's because they got involved in this case, and so they're helping him out, and so he's helping to spread the gospel, I guess.
	So, what actually happened?
	After this letter came out, what do you think happened?
	Oh, well, OK, so they, let's see, based on the reaction, I would say so.
	A group of them took over the school at gunpoint.
	They decided nothing will happen until we get an answer to our letter.
	They publicly hanged Sally Sitwell.
	OK.
	All right.
	She's now dead.
	All right.
	Literally nothing happened.
	Yeah, nothing.
	Here's a quote from an article where she responded to what happened.
	I was offered a chance by the chairman to discuss it with him.
	He was very professional.
	But I had no questions.
	And I was not asked to do anything different.
	That was it.
	Literally it.
	Yep.
	Cool.
	She continues to be affiliated with Yale.
	I didn't see any evidence that there certainly was no public response from the school to the residents.
	It had a large audience because somehow, you know, it was published and FIRE got a hold of it.
	But again, who knows how big that audience is?
	You have to click through FIRE's main article to get to it anyway.
	But I didn't see any response from the school, from Dr. Crystal.
	I was looking through, like, the anti-racism task force materials on their website.
	I wasn't seeing anything relating to agendas or minutes or any sort of subcommittee documentation that they had.
	I don't think any of that stuff is made available for the public.
	So I wasn't able to confirm if that was able to be discussed.
	One thing I did note, though, I checked out some of the grand rounds that happened later.
	And they had one that was like the State of the Department that they did several months after this.
	And one of the things that I thought was interesting was, you know, this is it was a tough year with coming on the tail of the worst of COVID anyway, and all the political unrest and the insurrection and racism, like horrible, horrible, horrible things.
	Right.
	And Dr. Crystal leads it off with like, it was a terrible year.
	And this is, you know, the same year that Sally Sitwell spoke.
	I thought that was kind of funny.
	And then he turns it over to like a video of students responding about what their experience was with the year.
	And several of them spoke about confronting racism, including confronting it within the school.
	And I thought that was really interesting.
	No one spoke about this particular lecture by name.
	No one called her out specifically in that, but certainly alluded to problems within the department that I think everyone has been eager to address.
	Wish I knew more, but that's kind of where that piece ends.
	That's it.
	That's the entire story of Sally Sitwell.
	I do have some other stuff that's fun, but let's talk about this.
	Yeah, I don't, I mean, it's absurd.
	So the thing I had seen, again, before I kind of hand it off to you that I want to talk about is the fire.org article, which is, I can't even, now that you know the facts, everybody, because Lydia has done such a great job of breaking it down, and you know what happened was she came, she's a racist, she writes this fucking bullshit, and some students wrote a letter That's what happened.
	They wrote a letter.
	The administration did nothing from what we can find.
	Absolutely nothing.
	Literally nothing.
	It's very important to keep this in mind.
	This event is, this person comes, she's a racist who works for a conservative think tank.
	She's got all these views and whatever, regardless if you are on the other side of those, she has those views.
	And some students were like, "Hey, this kind of sucks.
	Admitting that we don't represent everybody, you know, like they write an incredibly reasonable letter that says, like, we're not big fans of this.
	Especially again, this is the fucking anti-racism task force.
	Like, do you maybe want to, you know, address some of these questions we have?
	Someone's concerned.
	Could not be more reasonable.
	Was this a raving mob of leftists that burned down buildings?
	No, they wrote a letter.
	And I know, guys, folks, this article, I can't, I can't even stress how fucking hilarious this, like the victim mentality of these people is unbelievable.
	Let me give you some highlights.
	So apparently there's this trap house case.
	I don't know what that is, but it's some fucking, who cares?
	We'll look into that later.
	But it also is talking about the headline is Yale's treatment of a psych lecture.
	Yale's treatment.
	Listen, we've told you what happened.
	Yeah.
	Yale's treatment of a psych lecturer, another step in continuing retreat from academic freedom.
	That's the... That's the head... I'm not fucking making this up.
	That's the headline.
	Here's the second sentence, because I guess that's what we do now.
	We do a headline and then we do... I don't know.
	It makes sense.
	But trouble brewing after, quote, dehumanizing artisanal coffee remark prompts students to grind for filter.
	Grind for filter?
	They got really stuck in the coffee mode.
	That's like Eli trying to make a pun on Citation Needed.
	That didn't work.
	Go back to the drawing board.
	Grind for filter.
	I guess you're trying to say like they want a filter for free speech or something.
	And so they're grinding.
	That's nothing.
	I'm sorry.
	You didn't do it.
	That didn't.
	Sorry, fire.
	Nice try.
	Not even close.
	But for real, Yale's treatment, another, I can't even, it's, that's the headline.
	There's more.
	Sattel's experience alone is not the gravest violation of intellectual freedom we see in a given week.
	And yet both are symptoms of a worsening disease.
	Disease!
	Folks, they wrote a letter that was ignored.
	They wrote a letter that was ignored.
	There's more to this fucking hyperbole.
	Sattel's conclusions are of course fair game for examination and critique.
	The residents are flatly uninterested, however, in anything of the sort.
	They write, quote, we find her canon to be beyond a difference of opinion worth debate, unquote.
	More to the point, they view allowing opinions like Sattel's on campus as wholly incompatible with Yale School of Medicine's commitment to anti-racism and call on Yale to terminate Sattel's status as a lecturer.
	Yeah, that's what happened.
	They did call on that and then nothing happened.
	Fortunately, Sattel writes, Yale has not done so.
	You ready for this?
	But Yale has also not used this as a teachable moment for its residents either, at least not in any public-facing way.
	And the chilling effect, the chilling effect, Will no doubt disincentivize many potential lecturers from volunteering to be the next punching bag!
	Oh my god!
	But what does it say?
	I'm still going, this is quotes.
	But what does it say about the culture of free expression at Yale?
	These are the terms of the discussion.
	I'm sorry.
	They wrote a letter.
	You know what's another word for writing a letter?
	Freedom of expression.
	You're expressing an opinion and they wrote a letter and that's it.
	That's all that.
	I know I keep repeating it, but imagine what would need to be the case for this.
	Whoever wrote whatever fucking nut job wrote this article for the fire.org.
	What would it take for them to be happy?
	That's what's important.
	Ask that question.
	So, flip it around.
	For these people to think, oh yeah, Yale is doing a good job at free expression.
	Here's what would have to happen.
	These students would have to have this very legitimate opinion that this person's a racist and they whatever.
	Like you can disagree with it.
	That's their opinion, man.
	They can have it.
	And then they're like, we should write a letter.
	But somehow Yale's like, what would make these people happy?
	What would make this article writer happy?
	They write the letter and then Yale's like, how fucking, you're expelled.
	How dare you express an opinion on this racist lecture.
	You can go, well, get out of here.
	You're gone.
	I am not being hyperbolic.
	They literally wrote, They did not use it as a teachable moment.
	What would that mean?
	What would be the teachable moment?
	Hey, we saw that you wrote an incredibly respectful letter outlining your opinion about these issues.
	Never fucking look me in the eyes.
	Shut up.
	Never do that again, assholes.
	And I think also they sent it internally, too.
	It wasn't like they plastered it everywhere, they went to the media, they sent it to the folks that needed to see it and then wanted it distributed by them to other people.
	But they weren't trying to...
	Yeah, Kilporn said there was a Twitter, but I mean, we haven't found that.
	I would think that these assholes on the fire would have probably quoted a bunch of tweets because that's what they love to do.
	It'll be a tweet from a student with four followers that has one like, and they'll be like, look at this.
	Look, yeah, in order for thefire.org to think that Yale is good at freedom of expression, what they would have to do is completely fucking destroy the freedom of expression for these students.
	Right.
	There's no softer way to do this.
	They wrote a letter.
	They sent it.
	The school is like, fuck you.
	We don't care.
	Yeah.
	The fire.org is writing an article as though she was assassinated.
	Look, there's there's more.
	Look at this.
	It says Yale's historical commitment to free expression is best encapsulated by the 1975 Woodward Report, blah, blah, blah.
	I'm only setting this up because it's like saying, you know, oh, back in the day, you know, they used to be so into blah, blah, blah.
	Yale President Peter Salovey has described the university's speech policies as being based on the Woodward Report and has said that academic freedom is sacrosanct at Yale.
	Though, as we'll see later, its lawyers don't necessarily agree.
	That was not Sattel's experience.
	What?
	She got paid to go talk there and is a racist and face no consequences.
	That was not Sattel.
	I'm sorry, I feel like a fucking crazy person.
	In order for Yale to be committed to free expression according to thefire.org, They would have to not allow freedom of expression from their students.
	It would not be allowed.
	That's the only way that this is compatible.
	My mind is, I can't, the victim mindset.
	This could be a story from the other side.
	So what the fire.org is doing is using this as like, we're, look at this.
	We're about to be genocided actually for our view.
	It could be the other way.
	You'd be like, Hey, this is awesome.
	Students, you know, you know those whiny fucking students.
	They care about racism.
	They wrote this dumb letter and the school's like, fuck you, man.
	It could be a victory story from the right.
	And they're writing as though this is like the sky is falling, man.
	Because these students, you know what they did?
	They wrote a letter.
	And nothing happened after that.
	I can't believe it.
	I really, I'm in disbelief at the inverse victimhood.
	That's the Darvo bullshit, reverse victim and abuser.
	Like that's what this is.
	Okay.
	Sorry.
	I just, that was the one part I did read of this and I'm still mad.
	No, I, I get it.
	You ready to get more mad?
	Oh no.
	So what has Sally Sitwell been up to since this?
	We know that she didn't lose her position at Yale.
	Nothing happened there.
	She's still a visiting professor at Columbia.
	But what really struck me was looking up the appearances that she's done since this incident and how they have felt in contrast to what her appearances looked like before.
	Before, she was really big in the organ donation space.
	She had received a kidney transplant from somebody that saved her life.
	And so she was very, very invested in speaking about organ donation, trying to influence policy to incentivize organ donation so it's easier for people to receive what they need to continue to live.
	She was really involved with addiction and the opioid crisis from a different angle than I think we would necessarily expect.
	But she did help out in these clinics and stuff and spoke a lot about her experience with that.
	Every single thing that I have found has been just this digging in my heels.
	There's too much identity politics in therapy.
	Social justice is the enemy, right?
	She's gone full anti-woke, essentially.
	Pretty much, yeah.
	Not that she was woke, but like, instead of being a person who had, you know, hobbies, who was like, also kind of anti-woke, now it's inevitably, it's what happens to all of them.
	They're like, now this is my fucking life.
	Everything is this.
	And I'll say, like, I'm waiting for, like, the OAN sort of appearance, right?
	Like, the names that I'm seeing here, it feels like it's just, it just, it feels crazy, like, how deep and deep and deep this is going.
	Take us there.
	That's crazy.
	In September of 2021, she wrote an Atlantic piece called How Experts Somehow Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left.
	Oh, shut up.
	And it's a study.
	And so I started looking into the study.
	This is something I'd like to do in a follow-up episode sometime.
	I'm getting the data, actually, so I can kind of poke around in myself.
	Oh, what do you mean?
	Do tell.
	This study, in general, was saying there is an established measure to look at right-wing authoritarianism, but there's nothing for left-wing authoritarianism.
	So we created a measure.
	And we did a study.
	So I have the measure and I have the data.
	This is the meaningless letter writing index.
	That's one of the main metrics of authoritarianism.
	How many letters per person that get written that do nothing.
	One of the authors, man, hun, I went on this whole spiral.
	So the lead author is from Emory University, which was funny when you were talking about the other situations and other professors speaking about what happened to Kilbourn and we got into the N-word.
	And it was that one Emory University professor.
	So that was just kind of funny as like an inside thing for me.
	But anyway, the lead author is from Emory University, and under the mentorship of someone that Sally Satel actually had worked with in other contexts and instances, he recently passed away actually.
	Good!
	One of the other authors of the study is affiliated with FIRE.
	Yeah.
	So I can't wait to get the methodology, the everything.
	We'll do a deep dive on that.
	So that was September 2021.
	Yeah, that's a long way from OAN.
	I mean, well, is it?
	No, I don't know.
	It's been so bad lately.
	I don't know.
	October 2021, she made a panel happen.
	The president of AEI said, you know, if it weren't for Sally, this wouldn't have happened.
	This panel with Michael Schellenberger titled San Francisco.
	Why progressives ruin cities?
	As opposed to those conservative cities.
	Why people ruin cities?
	Might as well say.
	Yeah.
	December 2021, she goes on Jonah Goldberg's podcast.
	Jonah Goldberg was the editor for The National Review from 98 To 2019.
	Talks about woke medicine.
	Really important conversation there.
	In fairness, I would say that was kind of what she was already doing, though.
	That's talking to an old school conservative.
	That's true.
	OK.
	All right.
	Well, January 2022.
	OK.
	Michael Shermer.
	Oh, God.
	Yeah.
	Fucking Michael.
	Two hours.
	A two hour conversation.
	About fucking what?
	Like, five minutes about organs, and then... Well, organs.
	They did cover organs.
	They did cover organs.
	She does still care about it.
	Like, she wouldn't be alive if it weren't for that kidney donation.
	So, I think that still is important to her.
	She's actually a hero.
	She's just using the anti-wokeness to gain a platform to talk about organs.
	But she talks about critical race theory in medicine, of course, and social justice in medicine and everything like that.
	And then she talks an hour about Ohio and her year abroad, and it's titled that way there, too, because She doesn't care.
	You know, received some feedback from students at Yale, and it didn't matter.
	May 2022, she goes on a podcast, Allie Beth Stuckey, who is with The Blaze.
	Just random.
	The Blaze.
	The Blaze, yeah.
	That is getting toward OAN territory.
	Yes.
	I see what you mean.
	Yes.
	Isn't that fucking, what's his fucking thing?
	Glenn Beck's, wow, that's cool.
	I can't believe that guy's still going.
	Yeah.
	I wonder how relevant he is.
	Yeah.
	Not very.
	And then in December 2022, she did a pair of appearances with the Manhattan Institute.
	The first one in particular was a panel that she sat on called Current Challenges Around Woke Medicine.
	And Dr. Stanley Goldfarb was on that panel from Do No Harm.
	And Do No Harm, on their website, says that they fight for individual patients and against identity politics.
	So they are very, very focused on fighting the woke mob in your doctor's office.
	That's doing what?
	What is it doing?
	What are they talking about?
	Well, let's see.
	They want to protect minors from gender ideology.
	Of course.
	Yep.
	I don't know why.
	I don't know why I didn't think about she could also be a TERF, obviously.
	Okay.
	So she's a TERF?
	Potentially.
	She sat on a panel anyway and didn't call into question those positions.
	And, you know, they're against implicit bias training for physicians and everything like that.
	So that's sort of been her trajectory.
	We talked about Sally Satel's canon a bit, right?
	The group of Yale students had described it as racist and classist.
	We talked about some of the books and some of the work that she's done, and I tend to agree with them.
	And maybe those beliefs were driving her language choice and that position that she demonstrated in her presentation of people suffering from addiction, including those in Ironton, Ohio, of course.
	That they had a personal responsibility for their addiction, that the drug itself was not to blame, it's not appropriate to call addiction a disease, etc.
	But there's another angle here that may help shed more light on what could be informing her position.
	Don't want to get too ahead of myself, but bottom line, she has been directly involved with Purdue Pharma since 2001.
	Bombshell.
	How directly involved are we talking about?
	Well, ProPublica did a big investigation in 2019, and in their article, they titled it Inside Purdue Pharma's Media Playbook, How It Planted the Opioid Anti-Story.
	Question, were they specifically looking at her?
	Like, they're like, we gotta fucking investigate why this person is such a big fan.
	No.
	Okay, so she was a byproduct.
	She's a byproduct, yeah, but her name kept popping up.
	And they're like, oh, this is very interesting.
	So some background, you know, we won't get into the history of Purdue Pharma and OxyContin and everything, but they launched it in 1996.
	And it very quickly became widely prescribed, one of the biggest opioid painkillers used in the United States.
	By 2001, it had grown so much that their profits were huge.
	And with that came growing concern about potential overdoses and addiction.
	They were starting to see the beginnings of that.
	So in August, Of 2001, a column came out in the New York Post opinion section criticizing media reports that OxyContin was being abused.
	It was called heroic dopeheads, question mark.
	And it.
	basically mocked, in quotes, a new species of victim, the hillbilly heroin addict.
	And in the article, they basically said in this opinion piece that the real victims were the patients who may lose access to this prescription drug.
	Well, OK, I mean, there was some validity to that.
	I mean, like, but obviously that fucking headline already seems terrible.
	But yeah, like it is true that because of all this, there are people who really need pain meds and it's just such a fucking hassle to get them now.
	Right.
	At 5.17 in the morning, the day that article was published, the founder of a crisis management firm, Dozen Hall Resources, the founder Eric Dozen Hall, sent an email to Purdue executives.
	And this is in a lawsuit against the opioid makers.
	So there's, you know, there's receipts.
	And his email says, see today's New York Post on OxyContin.
	The anti-story begins.
	Mustache, twirl, engage.
	Feels planted, right?
	Yeah, geez.
	And so this was, I said, August 2001.
	He came on to serve in this crisis management role in the summer, and in July of 2001, one of the very first things he did when he was hired by Purdue was he had lunch with Sally Zatel.
	Interesting.
	They had a meeting.
	Was it just a date or?
	No.
	Well, you know, maybe.
	I don't know.
	I guess it could be.
	I don't know that.
	But in that meeting, she expressed that she was eager to get started.
	She had read a, in quotes, debunking package and again, in quotes, was interested in doing an opinion piece on the medical needs of patients being sacrificed to protect drug abusers, in quotes.
	Yeah, okay.
	So that's not great, right?
	She wrote an opinion piece that went up on the Boston Globe, not trying to say that the New York Post piece was hers.
	I don't think it was.
	But her piece went up on the Boston Globe a month later defending OxyContin.
	A couple months later, February 2002, AEI, that she's affiliated with, held a panel discussion, who is responsible for the abuse of OxyContin?
	And the panel included Sattel, of course, a Purdue executive, a Purdue lawyer, And then another AEI fellow and a reporter for Charleston Gazette.
	But if you were having a panel about who's responsible for this, would you invite Purdue?
	Maybe like one person.
	Also, there was like an actual animate talking poll that was like, it's not me guys, I swear.
	So crazy.
	And so it doesn't stop there, hun.
	In 2003, staffer with Desden Hall, the crisis management firm, recommended her specifically as a guest for an NPR show, and they helped prep her for that appearance to kind of speak on behalf of OxyContin, I guess.
	So you're saying that person who's prepping her is still the PR campaign?
	The crisis management company.
	Later in 2003, Rush Limbaugh said he was addicted to painkillers, and Purdue recommended that Sattel talk to CNN.
	They wanted to do a story about it.
	And they reached out to Purdue, and Purdue said, oh, how about you talk to Sally instead to discuss this?
	And the position in that conversation was that OxyContin is a very effective and actually safe drug if taken as prescribed.
	Yeah.
	Boy, I actually remember when that happened.
	Yeah.
	Kind of the liberal students.
	I remember I had an interaction with one of them.
	So I can kind of pinpoint that day.
	It's funny.
	Interesting.
	Interesting.
	Yeah.
	So that's a bad sign when you're like, hey, we need a spokesperson for your evil pharmaceutical company that's killing people.
	And they're like, well, we could do it.
	The company itself could do it.
	But you know who would be even better?
	Yeah.
	This other person.
	Yeah.
	So 2004, you know, things are already looking pretty bad for Purdue, right?
	2004, it's ramping up.
	It's getting worse and worse.
	There's significant prescription abuse happening in the United States.
	And in October of that year, The New York Times published an essay from Sally Sattel titled, Doctors Behind Bars, Treating Pain is Now Risky Business.
	And a quote from that I'd like to share.
	When you scratch the surface of someone who is addicted to painkillers, you usually find a seasoned drug abuser with a previous habit involving pills, alcohol, heroin, or cocaine.
	Contrary to media portrayals, the typical OxyContin addict does not start out as a pain patient who fell unwittingly into a drug habit.
	Is there, like, sources or anything?
	No.
	She's just like, because she's a doctor, she can be like, look, Studied addiction.
	She does have credentials in that respect, you know.
	So she can just say that and there's not a lot, you don't, I guess nobody was like, but did you, are there studies or anything?
	Yeah.
	So the New York Times was pretty hands off from what I can tell.
	ProPublica had reached out to them to find out, you know, like what were those conversations like with the editor?
	And they said they didn't know because the people who worked on that story, you know, back in 2004, no longer work there.
	So they didn't have any history of that.
	They couldn't speak to that.
	They didn't disclose that AEI was financially involved with Purdue.
	They received contributions from Purdue.
	They did from 2003 to about 2018, including contributions for special events.
	The amount that they were giving is, I guess, the middle tier of what AEI offers for corporate contributions.
	Yeah, it's the middle tier corporate bribery package.
	We have a higher, upper tier, lower tier.
	Oh, you're interested in mid-level corporate bribery.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	It is good.
	It's a good package.
	It's a good package.
	I feel like you can go for the high end, but yeah.
	No, there's plenty of value there.
	We'll get right on it.
	Satel cited a doctor in her article and their experience in treating patients with OxyContin.
	And in the final article, he wasn't named.
	Turns out he was actually an employee of Purdue.
	When ProPublica had reached out to him, he described her as an old friend.
	And then he clarified, you know, hey, I left Purdue in 2005, and I work for a consulting company now that has Purdue as a client.
	This article came out in 2004.
	So he was an employee at the time of the article.
	But now, No longer.
	You know, he just still continued to work with Purdue in a different way.
	This is just an unnamed doctor that she cited as, you know, so it's like the whole, don't take my word for it.
	You know, it wasn't citing studies.
	Oh, that's someone she cited and they worked for Purdue?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	She did cite a study within the article.
	Turns out it was funded by Purdue and it was written by their employees and consultants.
	When ProPublica asked her about this, she said, I cite peer-reviewed papers by title as they appear in the journal of publication.
	And that feels really lazy to me.
	Yeah, what does that mean?
	She's basically saying, like, I wouldn't look into the credentials of the people who wrote the article, who they're affiliated with.
	Okay.
	But like, there is a conflict of interest statement usually or whatever.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I'm not sure.
	And I guess I don't know when the study was from exactly.
	So who knows?
	Maybe they've tightened down on that.
	But that seems still like, for someone who is so incredibly smart, just really, just very disappointing.
	Yeah.
	Somehow this person is justifying what they're doing to themselves.
	And I wonder what that is.
	Yeah, and then before she published this piece in 2004, she sent a draft to Purdue's Washington lobbyists.
	Asking him for his opinion on how balanced it seemed.
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	ProPublica asked about that and she said, oh, I don't remember sending a draft to him.
	Not something I usually do.
	But then ProPublica said, well, but you did the same thing in 2016 also.
	And she was like, oh, but I was checking facts there.
	Yeah.
	I feel like that's something you'd remember.
	Oh, I know.
	Like, if you're doing a climate change thing, you're like, let me just check with, like, big oil if this is okay with them.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So, this kind of practice continued for Sally Sattel up until 2018.
	She did another piece, this was in Politico, called The Myth of What's Driving the Opioid Crisis.
	When that piece came out, Purdue had started engaging with If you've made gazillions of dollars killing the world, that one benefit is like, well, guess we have some money available for trying to do a total disinformation campaign rewriting history.
	Might as well hire every single PR firm there is.
	Yeah.
	And so this media strategy company that they were going to be working with, when that article came out, they sent it over to the execs at Purdue and they said, oh, you know, we're going to work with AEI to promote this and start getting it into social media feeds of people who've searched for opioid issues so we can start kind of changing, you know, the narrative a bit.
	The media strategy company said they didn't end up working with AEI to promote the story, but that intention was there.
	And two years later, do you remember what happened in 2020? - A lot of things happened in 2020 then.
	- Okay, fair.
	- Yeah, the one thing that happened.
	Well, with regard to Purdue, they pled guilty.
	Eight billion dollars pled guilty to a number of criminal charges.
	Right.
	I mean, there have been a lot of lawsuits that they've pled guilty.
	There's different state level ones.
	This was like the big federal one where they, you know, misled the FDA and everything.
	I'm sure they paid all of, you know, $20,000 in penalties by the time judges got done reducing it.
	Yeah, because they have the whole bankruptcy court and everything.
	But what I find really interesting is that nearly 20 years Sally Sattel is engaging She's one of the fucking doctors saying it's okay to smoke in the sixth or whatever that was.
	Exactly.
	Yep.
	Just doing that and then God forbid you write a fucking letter saying this person kind of sucks, then you're actually the death of Western civilization.
	God forbid Yale students write a letter.
	Saying, you know, we're not really happy that she came to speak here.
	What went into that decision?
	This is the kind of person, and this information was, this investigation came out before that grand round occurred.
	Wow.
	So I am really disappointed that I can't find anything regarding a response from Yale Psychiatry to that letter.
	I would think that, at the very least, I hope So, privately, they shared a response to that letter with those students.
	But truly, I think it deserves to be public, because everything else related to this case is on the Internet.
	You know, I've been able to find all these things, and then now I'm just left sitting here being upset that, you know, I had to sit and listen to that ground rounds too, knowing the kind of person this individual is.
	So, Kilbourne's person of high honor and esteem.
	So, yeah, what's the verdict on Kilbourne's story here?
	Would we say that someone just said they're surprised that rural Ohioans would be interested in artisanal coffee?
	Yeah, and the extreme leftist mob.
	No part of it is, like, I guess that part's true.
	She did say that or whatever.
	Yeah, that was a sentence from her.
	Sort of true.
	And then the rest, everything else is the dumbest fucking complete distortion of reality to come to any other conclusion other than, oh, students, it's good that they wrote a letter and also Yale should have done something.
	Yeah.
	But you know, misinformation is easy, right?
	You can just spout things off and people aren't going to put in the work to piece it together and find out what really happened.
	I think I'm going to tease story number two.
	So this is the bonus third debunk for the price of one that you haven't even heard yet, but I think I'll tease this and do it as a bonus because this has gone on long enough.
	So if you'd like to hear this bonus here, let's tease the story here.
	By the way, I should have played through the end of this.
	He's referencing Yale.
	Listen to what his go-to reference for like how important or prestigious Yale is.
	Yale University, they're behaving in this way.
	These are our future leaders, right?
	George Bush went to Yale.
	Lots of other very famous people whom we all could recognize have gone to these places.
	I can only name George Bush for some reason.
	And they are completely falling apart at the seams.
	If you can't have a conversation involving end space or mentioning rural Ohioans taste for artisanal coffee, I mean, where are we now.
	Another of my favorite examples is this, this professor I can't crawl where this was simply mixed up the names of two young black men who had been in that class inadvertently.
	This happens all the time with white people, with all kinds of other people.
	You just forget their names, right?
	We don't, you know, these people aren't our lifelong friends.
	And once again, you just have to grab your head and go, am I hearing this right?
	Because this poor student, this poor professor mixes up a couple of names, goes, hey, sorry, right?
	You know, don't let the Sally Sitwell situation color your predictions for how True, this story ends up being, but if you'd like to find my debunk of that story, if Professor mixes up two black students' names and then tries to apologize and is fired for that, pledge to patreon.com slash where there's woke at the second tier and above.
	That'll be this month's bonus, bonus debunk.
	Going to be a lot of fun.
	We'll see if that's, that stacks up.
	All right, hun, well, excellent job.
	We've completed our side quest.
	We've leveled up our stats a little bit.
	I got a better, you know, sword or something.
	Yeah, there you go.
	You got a crossbow.
	And we're leveled up a little bit.
	We're ready to take on our main baddie, our main villain.
	Come back for part three.
	Back to Professor Kilborn.
	Let's take a look at what really happened and see how it stacks up to the narrative that you've heard in part one.

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