Podcasts about Larry Kramer

Larry Kramer, Abraham -- Genesis 21-22 by Terrill Road Bible Chapel

Dr. Gary Null provides a commentary on "Universal  Healthcare"       Universal Healthcare is the Solution to a Broken Medical System Gary Null, PhD Progressive Radio Network, March 3, 2025 For over 50 years, there has been no concerted or successful effort to bring down medical costs in the American healthcare system. Nor are the federal health agencies making disease prevention a priority. Regardless whether the political left or right sponsors proposals for reform, such measures are repeatedly defeated by both parties in Congress. As a result, the nation's healthcare system remains one of the most expensive and least efficient in the developed world. For the past 30 years, medical bills contributing to personal debt regularly rank among the top three causes of personal bankruptcy. This is a reality that reflects not only the financial strain on ordinary Americans but the systemic failure of the healthcare system itself. The urgent question is: If President Trump and his administration are truly seeking to reduce the nation's $36 trillion deficit, why is there no serious effort to reform the most bloated and corrupt sector of the economy? A key obstacle is the widespread misinformation campaign that falsely claims universal health care would cost an additional $2 trillion annually and further balloon the national debt. However, a more honest assessment reveals the opposite. If the US adopted a universal single-payer system, the nation could actually save up to $20 trillion over the next 10 years rather than add to the deficit. Even with the most ambitious efforts by people like Elon Musk to rein in federal spending or optimize government efficiency, the estimated savings would only amount to $500 billion. This is only a fraction of what could be achieved through comprehensive healthcare reform alone. Healthcare is the largest single expenditure of the federal budget. A careful examination of where the $5 trillion spent annually on healthcare actually goes reveals massive systemic fraud and inefficiency. Aside from emergency medicine, which accounts for only 10-12 percent of total healthcare expenditures, the bulk of this spending does not deliver better health outcomes nor reduce trends in physical and mental illness. Applying Ockham's Razor, the principle that the simplest solution is often the best, the obvious conclusion is that America's astronomical healthcare costs are the direct result of price gouging on an unimaginable scale. For example, in most small businesses, profit margins range between 1.6 and 2.5 percent, such as in grocery retail. Yet the pharmaceutical industrial complex routinely operates on markup rates as high as 150,000 percent for many prescription drugs. The chart below highlights the astronomical gap between the retail price of some top-selling patented pharmaceutical medications and their generic equivalents. Drug Condition Patent Price (per unit) Generic Price Estimated Manufacture Cost Markup Source Insulin (Humalog) Diabetes $300 $30 $3 10,000% Rand (2021) EpiPen Allergic reactions $600 $30 $10 6,000% BMJ (2022) Daraprim Toxoplasmosis $750/pill $2 $0.50 150,000% JAMA (2019) Harvoni Hepatitis C $94,500 (12 weeks) $30,000 $200 47,000% WHO Report (2018) Lipitor Cholesterol $150 $10 $0.50 29,900% Health Affairs (2020) Xarelto Blood Thinner $450 $25 $1.50 30,000% NEJM (2020) Abilify Schizophrenia $800 (30 tablets) $15 $2 39,900% AJMC (2019) Revlimid Cancer $16,000/mo $450 $150 10,500% Kaiser Health News (2021) Humira Arthritis $2,984/dose $400 $50 5,868% Rand (2021) Sovaldi Hepatitis C $1,000/pill $10 $2 49,900% JAMA (2021) Xolair Asthma $2,400/dose $300 $50 4,800% NEJM (2020) Gleevec Leukemia $10,000/mo $350 $200 4,900% Harvard Public Health Review (2020) OxyContin Pain Relief $600 (30 tablets) $15 $0.50 119,900% BMJ (2022) Remdesivir Covid-19 $3,120 (5 doses) N/A $10 31,100% The Lancet (2020) The corruption extends far beyond price gouging. Many pharmaceutical companies convince federal health agencies to fund their basic research and drug development with taxpayer dollars. Yet when these companies bring successful products to market, the profits are kept entirely by the corporations or shared with the agencies or groups of government scientists. On the other hand, the public, who funded the research, receives no financial return. This amounts to a systemic betrayal of the public trust on a scale of hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Another significant contributor to rising healthcare costs is the widespread practice of defensive medicine that is driven by the constant threat of litigation. Over the past 40 years, defensive medicine has become a cottage industry. Physicians order excessive diagnostic tests and unnecessary treatments simply to protect themselves from lawsuits. Study after study has shown that these over-performed procedures not only inflate costs but lead to iatrogenesis or medical injury and death caused by the medical  system and practices itself. The solution is simple: adopting no-fault healthcare coverage for everyone where patients receive care without needing to sue and thereby freeing doctors from the burden of excessive malpractice insurance. A single-payer universal healthcare system could fundamentally transform the entire industry by capping profits at every level — from drug manufacturers to hospitals to medical equipment suppliers. The Department of Health and Human Services would have the authority to set profit margins for medical procedures. This would ensure that healthcare is determined by outcomes, not profits. Additionally, the growing influence of private equity firms and vulture capitalists buying up hospitals and medical clinics across America must be reined in. These equity firms prioritize profit extraction over improving the quality of care. They often slash staff, raise prices, and dictate medical procedures based on what will yield the highest returns. Another vital reform would be to provide free medical education for doctors and nurses in exchange for five years of service under the universal system. Medical professionals would earn a realistic salary cap to prevent them from being lured into equity partnerships or charging exorbitant rates. The biggest single expense in the current system, however, is the private health insurance industry, which consumes 33 percent of the $5 trillion healthcare budget. Health insurance CEOs consistently rank among the highest-paid executives in the country. Their companies, who are nothing more than bean counters, decide what procedures and drugs will be covered, partially covered, or denied altogether. This entire industry is designed to place profits above patients' lives. If the US dismantled its existing insurance-based system and replaced it with a fully reformed national healthcare model, the country could save $2.7 trillion annually while simultaneously improving health outcomes. Over the course of 10 years, those savings would amount to $27 trillion. This could wipe out nearly the entire national debt in a short time. This solution has been available for decades but has been systematically blocked by corporate lobbying and bipartisan corruption in Washington. The path forward is clear but only if American citizens demand a system where healthcare is valued as a public service and not a commodity. The national healthcare crisis is not just a fiscal issue. It is a crucial moral failure of the highest order. With the right reforms, the nation could simultaneously restore its financial health and deliver the kind of healthcare system its citizens have long deserved. American Healthcare: Corrupt, Broken and Lethal Richard Gale and Gary Null Progressive Radio Network, March 3, 2025 For a nation that prides itself on being the world's wealthiest, most innovative and technologically advanced, the US' healthcare system is nothing less than a disaster and disgrace. Not only are Americans the least healthy among the most developed nations, but the US' health system ranks dead last among high-income countries. Despite rising costs and our unshakeable faith in American medical exceptionalism, average life expectancy in the US has remained lower than other OECD nations for many years and continues to decline. The United Nations recognizes healthcare as a human right. In 2018, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon denounced the American healthcare system as "politically and morally wrong." During the pandemic it is estimated that two to three years was lost on average life expectancy. On the other hand, before the Covid-19 pandemic, countries with universal healthcare coverage found their average life expectancy stable or slowly increasing. The fundamental problem in the U.S. is that politics have been far too beholden to the pharmaceutical, HMO and private insurance industries. Neither party has made any concerted effort to reign in the corruption of corporate campaign funding and do what is sensible, financially feasible and morally correct to improve Americans' quality of health and well-being.   The fact that our healthcare system is horribly broken is proof that moneyed interests have become so powerful to keep single-payer debate out of the media spotlight and censored. Poll after poll shows that the American public favors the expansion of public health coverage. Other incremental proposals, including Medicare and Medicaid buy-in plans, are also widely preferred to the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare mess we are currently stuck with.   It is not difficult to understand how the dismal state of American medicine is the result of a system that has been sold out to the free-market and the bottom line interests of drug makers and an inflated private insurance industry. How advanced and ethically sound can a healthcare system be if tens of millions of people have no access to medical care because it is financially out of their reach?  The figures speak for themselves. The U.S. is burdened with a $41 trillion Medicare liability. The number of uninsured has declined during the past several years but still lingers around 25 million. An additional 30-35 million are underinsured. There are currently 65 million Medicare enrollees and 89 million Medicaid recipients. This is an extremely unhealthy snapshot of the country's ability to provide affordable healthcare and it is certainly unsustainable. The system is a public economic failure, benefiting no one except the large and increasingly consolidated insurance and pharmaceutical firms at the top that supervise the racket.   Our political parties have wrestled with single-payer or universal healthcare for decades. Obama ran his first 2008 presidential campaign on a single-payer platform. Since 1985, his campaign health adviser, the late Dr. Quentin Young from the University of Illinois Medical School, was one of the nation's leading voices calling for universal health coverage.  During a private conversation with Dr. Young shortly before his passing in 2016, he conveyed his sense of betrayal at the hands of the Obama administration. Dr. Young was in his 80s when he joined the Obama campaign team to help lead the young Senator to victory on a promise that America would finally catch up with other nations. The doctor sounded defeated. He shared how he was manipulated, and that Obama held no sincere intention to make universal healthcare a part of his administration's agenda. During the closed-door negotiations, which spawned the weak and compromised Affordable Care Act, Dr. Young was neither consulted nor invited to participate. In fact, he told us that he never heard from Obama again after his White House victory.   Past efforts to even raise the issue have been viciously attacked. A huge army of private interests is determined to keep the public enslaved to private insurers and high medical costs. The failure of our healthcare is in no small measure due to it being a fully for-profit operation. Last year, private health insurance accounted for 65 percent of coverage. Consider that there are over 900 private insurance companies in the US. National Health Expenditures (NHE) grew to $4.5 trillion in 2022, which was 17.3 percent of GDP. Older corporate rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans argue that a single-payer or socialized medical program is unaffordable. However, not only is single-payer affordable, it will end bankruptcies due to unpayable medical debt. In addition, universal healthcare, structured on a preventative model, will reduce disease rates at the outset.    Corporate Democrats argue that Obama's Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a positive step inching the country towards complete public coverage. However, aside from providing coverage to the poorest of Americans, Obamacare turned into another financial anchor around the necks of millions more. According to the health policy research group KFF, the average annual health insurance premium for single coverage is $8,400 and almost $24,000 for a family. In addition, patient out-of-pocket costs continue to increase, a 6.6% increase to $471 billion in 2022. Rather than healthcare spending falling, it has exploded, and the Trump and Biden administrations made matters worse.    Clearly, a universal healthcare program will require flipping the script on the entire private insurance industry, which employed over half a million people last year.  Obviously, the most volatile debate concerning a national universal healthcare system concerns cost. Although there is already a socialized healthcare system in place -- every federal legislator, bureaucrat, government employee and veteran benefits from it -- fiscal Republican conservatives and groups such as the Koch Brothers network are single-mindedly dedicated to preventing the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid. A Koch-funded Mercatus analysis made the outrageous claim that a single-payer system would increase federal health spending by $32 trillion in ten years. However, analyses and reviews by the Congressional Budget Office in the early 1990s concluded that such a system would only increase spending at the start; enormous savings would quickly offset it as the years pass. In one analysis, "the savings in administrative costs [10 percent of health spending] would be more than enough to offset the expense of universal coverage."    Defenders of those advocating for funding a National Health Program argue this can primarily be accomplished by raising taxes to levels comparable to other developed nations. This was a platform Senator Bernie Sanders and some of the younger progressive Democrats in the House campaigned on. The strategy was to tax the highest multimillion-dollar earners 60-70 percent. Despite the outrage of its critics, including old rank-and-file multi-millionaire Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, this is still far less than in the past. During the Korean War, the top tax rate was 91 percent; it declined to 70 percent in the late 1960s. Throughout most of the 1970s, those in the lowest income bracket were taxed at 14 percent. We are not advocating for this strategy because it ignores where the funding is going, and the corruption in the system that is contributing to exorbitant waste.    But Democratic supporters of the ACA who oppose a universal healthcare plan ignore the additional taxes Obama levied to pay for the program. These included surtaxes on investment income, Medicare taxes from those earning over $200,000, taxes on tanning services, an excise tax on medical equipment, and a 40 percent tax on health coverage for costs over the designated cap that applied to flexible savings and health savings accounts. The entire ACA was reckless, sloppy and unnecessarily complicated from the start.    The fact that Obamacare further strengthened the distinctions between two parallel systems -- federal and private -- with entirely different economic structures created a labyrinth of red tape, rules, and wasteful bureaucracy. Since the ACA went into effect, over 150 new boards, agencies and programs have had to be established to monitor its 2,700 pages of gibberish. A federal single-payer system would easily eliminate this bureaucracy and waste.    A medical New Deal to establish universal healthcare coverage is a decisive step in the correct direction. But we must look at the crisis holistically and in a systematic way. Simply shuffling private insurance into a federal Medicare-for-all or buy-in program, funded by taxing the wealthiest of citizens, would only temporarily reduce costs. It will neither curtail nor slash escalating disease rates e. Any effective healthcare reform must also tackle the underlying reasons for Americans' poor state of health. We cannot shy away from examining the social illnesses infecting our entire free-market capitalist culture and its addiction to deregulation. A viable healthcare model would have to structurally transform how the medical economy operates. Finally, a successful medical New Deal must honestly evaluate the best and most reliable scientific evidence in order to effectively redirect public health spending.    For example, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a former Obama healthcare adviser, observed that AIDS-HIV measures consume the most public health spending, even though the disease "ranked 75th on the list of diseases by personal health expenditures." On the other hand, according to the American Medical Association, a large percentage of the nation's $3.4 trillion healthcare spending goes towards treating preventable diseases, notably diabetes, common forms of heart disease, and back and neck pain conditions. In 2016, these three conditions were the most costly and accounted for approximately $277 billion in spending. Last year, the CDC announced the autism rate is now 1 in 36 children compared to 1 in 44 two years ago. A retracted study by Mark Blaxill, an autism activist at the Holland Center and a friend of the authors, estimates that ASD costs will reach $589 billion annually by 2030. There are no signs that this alarming trend will reverse and decline; and yet, our entire federal health system has failed to conscientiously investigate the underlying causes of this epidemic. All explanations that might interfere with the pharmaceutical industry's unchecked growth, such as over-vaccination, are ignored and viciously discredited without any sound scientific evidence. Therefore, a proper medical New Deal will require a systemic overhaul and reform of our federal health agencies, especially the HHS, CDC and FDA. Only the Robert Kennedy Jr presidential campaign is even addressing the crisis and has an inexpensive and comprehensive plan to deal with it. For any medical revolution to succeed in advancing universal healthcare, the plan must prioritize spending in a manner that serves public health and not private interests. It will also require reshuffling private corporate interests and their lobbyists to the sidelines, away from any strategic planning, in order to break up the private interests' control over federal agencies and its revolving door policies. Aside from those who benefit from this medical corruption, the overwhelming majority of Americans would agree with this criticism. However, there is a complete lack of national trust that our legislators, including the so-called progressives, would be willing to undertake such actions.    In addition, America's healthcare system ignores the single most critical initiative to reduce costs - that is, preventative efforts and programs instead of deregulation and closing loopholes designed to protect the drug and insurance industries' bottom line. Prevention can begin with banning toxic chemicals that are proven health hazards associated with current disease epidemics, and it can begin by removing a 1,000-plus toxins already banned in Europe. This should be a no-brainer for any legislator who cares for public health. For example, Stacy Malkan, co-founder of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, notes that "the policy approach in the US and Europe is dramatically different" when it comes to chemical allowances in cosmetic products. Whereas the EU has banned 1,328 toxic substances from the cosmetic industry alone, the US has banned only 11. The US continues to allow carcinogenic formaldehyde, petroleum, forever chemicals, many parabens (an estrogen mimicker and endocrine hormone destroyer), the highly allergenic p-phenylenediamine or PBD, triclosan, which has been associated with the rise in antibiotic resistant bacteria, avobenzone, and many others to be used in cosmetics, sunscreens, shampoo and hair dyes.   Next, the food Americans consume can be reevaluated for its health benefits. There should be no hesitation to tax the unhealthiest foods, such as commercial junk food, sodas and candy relying on high fructose corn syrup, products that contain ingredients proven to be toxic, and meat products laden with dangerous chemicals including growth hormones and antibiotics. The scientific evidence that the average American diet is contributing to rising disease trends is indisputable. We could also implement additional taxes on the public advertising of these demonstrably unhealthy products. All such tax revenue would accrue to a national universal health program to offset medical expenditures associated with the very illnesses linked to these products. Although such tax measures would help pay for a new medical New Deal, it may be combined with programs to educate the public about healthy nutrition if it is to produce a reduction in the most common preventable diseases. In fact, comprehensive nutrition courses in medical schools should be mandatory because the average physician receives no education in this crucial subject.  In addition, preventative health education should be mandatory throughout public school systems.   Private insurers force hospitals, clinics and private physicians into financial corners, and this is contributing to prodigious waste in money and resources. Annually, healthcare spending towards medical liability insurance costs tens of billions of dollars. In particular, this economic burden has taxed small clinics and physicians. It is well past the time that physician liability insurance is replaced with no-fault options. Today's doctors are spending an inordinate amount of money to protect themselves. Legions of liability and trial lawyers seek big paydays for themselves stemming from physician error. This has created a culture of fear among doctors and hospitals, resulting in the overly cautious practice of defensive medicine, driving up costs and insurance premiums just to avoid lawsuits. Doctors are forced to order unnecessary tests and prescribe more medications and medical procedures just to cover their backsides. No-fault insurance is a common-sense plan that enables physicians to pursue their profession in a manner that will reduce iatrogenic injuries and costs. Individual cases requiring additional medical intervention and loss of income would still be compensated. This would generate huge savings.    No other nation suffers from the scourge of excessive drug price gouging like the US. After many years of haggling to lower prices and increase access to generic drugs, only a minute amount of progress has been made in recent years. A 60 Minutes feature about the Affordable Care Act reported an "orgy of lobbying and backroom deals in which just about everyone with a stake in the $3-trillion-a-year health industry came out ahead—except the taxpayers.” For example, Life Extension magazine reported that an antiviral cream (acyclovir), which had lost its patent protection, "was being sold to pharmacies for 7,500% over the active ingredient cost. The active ingredient (acyclovir) costs only 8 pennies, yet pharmacies are paying a generic maker $600 for this drug and selling it to consumers for around $700." Other examples include the antibiotic Doxycycline. The price per pill averages 7 cents to $3.36 but has a 5,300 percent markup when it reaches the consumer. The antidepressant Clomipramine is marked up 3,780 percent, and the anti-hypertensive drug Captopril's mark-up is 2,850 percent. And these are generic drugs!    Medication costs need to be dramatically cut to allow drug manufacturers a reasonable but not obscene profit margin. By capping profits approximately 100 percent above all costs, we would save our system hundreds of billions of dollars. Such a measure would also extirpate the growing corporate misdemeanors of pricing fraud, which forces patients to pay out-of-pocket in order to make up for the costs insurers are unwilling to pay.    Finally, we can acknowledge that our healthcare is fundamentally a despotic rationing system based upon high insurance costs vis-a-vis a toss of the dice to determine where a person sits on the economic ladder. For the past three decades it has contributed to inequality. The present insurance-based economic metrics cast millions of Americans out of coverage because private insurance costs are beyond their means. Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton University political economist, has called our system "brutal" because it "rations [people] out of the system." He defined rationing as "withholding something from someone that is beneficial." Discriminatory healthcare rationing now affects upwards to 60 million people who have been either priced out of the system or under insured. They make too much to qualify for Medicare under Obamacare, yet earn far too little to afford private insurance costs and premiums. In the final analysis, the entire system is discriminatory and predatory.    However, we must be realistic. Almost every member of Congress has benefited from Big Pharma and private insurance lobbyists. The only way to begin to bring our healthcare program up to the level of a truly developed nation is to remove the drug industry's rampant and unnecessary profiteering from the equation.     How did Fauci memory-hole a cure for AIDS and get away with it?   By Helen Buyniski   Over 700,000 Americans have died of AIDS since 1981, with the disease claiming some 42.3 million victims worldwide. While an HIV diagnosis is no longer considered a certain death sentence, the disease looms large in the public imagination and in public health funding, with contemporary treatments running into thousands of dollars per patient annually.   But was there a cure for AIDS all this time - an affordable and safe treatment that was ruthlessly suppressed and attacked by the US public health bureaucracy and its agents? Could this have saved millions of lives and billions of dollars spent on AZT, ddI and failed HIV vaccine trials? What could possibly justify the decision to disappear a safe and effective approach down the memory hole?   The inventor of the cure, Gary Null, already had several decades of experience creating healing protocols for physicians to help patients not responding well to conventional treatments by the time AIDS was officially defined in 1981. Null, a registered dietitian and board-certified nutritionist with a PhD in human nutrition and public health science, was a senior research fellow and Director of Anti-Aging Medicine at the Institute of Applied Biology for 36 years and has published over 950 papers, conducting groundbreaking experiments in reversing biological aging as confirmed with DNA methylation testing. Additionally, Null is a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker, bestselling author, and investigative journalist whose work exposing crimes against humanity over the last 50 years has highlighted abuses by Big Pharma, the military-industrial complex, the financial industry, and the permanent government stay-behind networks that have come to be known as the Deep State.   Null was contacted in 1974 by Dr. Stephen Caiazza, a physician working with a subculture of gay men in New York living the so-called “fast track” lifestyle, an extreme manifestation of the gay liberation movement that began with the Stonewall riots. Defined by rampant sexual promiscuity and copious use of illegal and prescription drugs, including heavy antibiotic use for a cornucopia of sexually-transmitted diseases, the fast-track never included more than about two percent of gay men, though these dominated many of the bathhouses and clubs that defined gay nightlife in the era. These patients had become seriously ill as a result of their indulgence, generally arriving at the clinic with multiple STDs including cytomegalovirus and several types of herpes and hepatitis, along with candida overgrowth, nutritional deficiencies, gut issues, and recurring pneumonia. Every week for the next 10 years, Null would counsel two or three of these men - a total of 800 patients - on how to detoxify their bodies and de-stress their lives, tracking their progress with Caiazza and the other providers at weekly feedback meetings that he credits with allowing the team to quickly evaluate which treatments were most effective. He observed that it only took about two years on the “fast track” for a healthy young person to begin seeing muscle loss and the recurrent, lingering opportunistic infections that would later come to be associated with AIDS - while those willing to commit to a healthier lifestyle could regain their health in about a year.    It was with this background that Null established the Tri-State Healing Center in Manhattan in 1980, staffing the facility with what would eventually run to 22 certified health professionals to offer safe, natural, and effective low- and no-cost treatments to thousands of patients with HIV and AIDS-defining conditions. Null and his staff used variations of the protocols he had perfected with Caiazza's patients, a multifactorial patient-tailored approach that included high-dose vitamin C drips, intravenous ozone therapy, juicing and nutritional improvements and supplementation, aspects of homeopathy and naturopathy with some Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic practices. Additional services offered on-site included acupuncture and holistic dentistry, while peer support groups were also held at the facility so that patients could find community and a positive environment, healing their minds and spirits while they healed their bodies.   “Instead of trying to kill the virus with antiretroviral pharmaceuticals designed to stop viral replication before it kills patients, we focused on what benefits could be gained by building up the patients' natural immunity and restoring biochemical integrity so the body could fight for itself,” Null wrote in a 2014 article describing the philosophy behind the Center's approach, which was wholly at odds with the pharmaceutical model.1   Patients were comprehensively tested every week, with any “recovery” defined solely by the labs, which documented AIDS patient after patient - 1,200 of them - returning to good health and reversing their debilitating conditions. Null claims to have never lost an AIDS patient in the Center's care, even as the death toll for the disease - and its pharmaceutical standard of care AZT - reached an all-time high in the early 1990s. Eight patients who had opted for a more intensive course of treatment - visiting the Center six days a week rather than one - actually sero-deconverted, with repeated subsequent testing showing no trace of HIV in their bodies.   As an experienced clinical researcher himself, Null recognized that any claims made by the Center would be massively scrutinized, challenging as they did the prevailing scientific consensus that AIDS was an incurable, terminal illness. He freely gave his protocols to any medical practitioner who asked, understanding that his own work could be considered scientifically valid only if others could replicate it under the same conditions. After weeks of daily observational visits to the Center, Dr. Robert Cathcart took the protocols back to San Francisco, where he excitedly reported that patients were no longer dying in his care.    Null's own colleague at the Institute of Applied Biology, senior research fellow Elana Avram, set up IV drip rooms at the Institute and used his intensive protocols to sero-deconvert 10 patients over a two-year period. While the experiment had been conducted in secret, as the Institute had been funded by Big Pharma since its inception half a century earlier, Avram had hoped she would be able to publish a journal article to further publicize Null's protocols and potentially help AIDS patients, who were still dying at incredibly high rates thanks to Burroughs Wellcome's noxious but profitable AZT. But as she would later explain in a 2019 letter to Null, their groundbreaking research never made it into print - despite meticulous documentation of their successes - because the Institute's director and board feared their pharmaceutical benefactors would withdraw the funding on which they depended, given that Null's protocols did not involve any patentable or otherwise profitable drugs. When Avram approached them about publication, the board vetoed the idea, arguing that it would “draw negative attention because [the work] was contrary to standard drug treatments.” With no real point in continuing experiments along those lines without institutional support and no hope of obtaining funding from elsewhere, the department she had created specifically for these experiments shut down after a two-year followup with her test subjects - all of whom remained alive and healthy - was completed.2   While the Center was receiving regular visits by this time from medical professionals and, increasingly, black celebrities like Stokely Carmichael and Isaac Hayes, who would occasionally perform for the patients, the news was spreading by word of mouth alone - not a single media outlet had dared to document the clinic that was curing AIDS patients for free. Instead, they gave airtime to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, who had for years been spreading baseless, hysteria-fueling claims about HIV and AIDS to any news outlet that would put him on. His claim that children could contract the virus from “ordinary household conduct” with an infected relative proved so outrageous he had to walk it back,3 and he never really stopped insisting the deadly plague associated with gays and drug users was about to explode like a nuclear bomb among the law-abiding heterosexual population. Fauci by this time controlled all government science funding through NIAID, and his zero-tolerance approach to dissent on the HIV/AIDS front had already seen prominent scientists like virologist Peter Duesberg stripped of the resources they needed for their work because they had dared to question his commandment: There is no cause of AIDS but HIV, and AZT is its treatment. Even the AIDS activist groups, which by then had been coopted by Big Pharma and essentially reduced to astroturfing for the toxic failed chemotherapy drug AZT backed by the institutional might of Fauci's NIAID,4 didn't seem to want to hear that there was a cure. Unconcerned with the irrationality of denouncing the man touting his free AIDS cure as an  “AIDS denier,” they warned journalists that platforming Null or anyone else rejecting the mainstream medical line would be met with organized demands for their firing.    Determined to breach the institutional iron curtain and get his message to the masses, Null and his team staged a press conference in New York, inviting scientists and doctors from around the world to share their research on alternative approaches to HIV and AIDS in 1993. To emphasize the sound scientific basis of the Center's protocols and encourage guests to adopt them into their own practices, Null printed out thousands of abstracts in support of each nutrient and treatment being used. However, despite over 7,000 invitations sent three times to major media, government figures, scientists, and activists, almost none of the intended audience members showed up. Over 100 AIDS patients and their doctors, whose charts exhaustively documented their improvements using natural and nontoxic modalities over the preceding 12 months, gave filmed testimonials, declaring that the feared disease was no longer a death sentence, but the conference had effectively been silenced. Bill Tatum, publisher of the Amsterdam News, suggested Null and his patients would find a more welcoming audience in his home neighborhood of Harlem - specifically, its iconic Apollo Theatre. For three nights, the theater was packed to capacity. Hit especially hard by the epidemic and distrustful of a medical system that had only recently stopped being openly racist (the Tuskegee syphilis experiment only ended in 1972), black Americans, at least, did not seem to care what Anthony Fauci would do if he found out they were investigating alternatives to AZT and death.    PBS journalist Tony Brown, having obtained a copy of the video of patient testimonials from the failed press conference, was among a handful of black journalists who began visiting the Center to investigate the legitimacy of Null's claims. Satisfied they had something significant to offer his audience, Brown invited eight patients - along with Null himself - onto his program over the course of several episodes to discuss the work. It was the first time these protocols had received any attention in the media, despite Null having released nearly two dozen articles and multiple documentaries on the subject by that time. A typical patient on one program, Al, a recovered IV drug user who was diagnosed with AIDS at age 32, described how he “panicked,” saw a doctor and started taking AZT despite his misgivings - only to be forced to discontinue the drug after just a few weeks due to his condition deteriorating rapidly. Researching alternatives brought him to Null, and after six months of “detoxing [his] lifestyle,” he observed his initial symptoms - swollen lymph nodes and weight loss - begin to reverse, culminating with sero-deconversion. On Bill McCreary's Channel 5 program, a married couple diagnosed with HIV described how they watched their T-cell counts increase as they cut out sugar, caffeine, smoking, and drinking and began eating a healthy diet. They also saw the virus leave their bodies.   For HIV-positive viewers surrounded by fear and negativity, watching healthy-looking, cheerful “AIDS patients” detail their recovery while Null backed up their claims with charts must have been balm for the soul. But the TV programs were also a form of outreach to the medical community, with patients' charts always on hand to convince skeptics the cure was scientifically valid. Null brought patients' charts to every program, urging them to keep an open mind: “Other physicians and public health officials should know that there's good science in the alternative perspective. It may not be a therapy that they're familiar with, because they're just not trained in it, but if the results are positive, and you can document them…” He challenged doubters to send in charts from their own sero-deconverted patients on AZT, and volunteered to debate proponents of the orthodox treatment paradigm - though the NIH and WHO both refused to participate in such a debate on Tony Brown's Journal, following Fauci's directive prohibiting engagement with forbidden ideas.    Aside from those few TV programs and Null's own films, suppression of Null's AIDS cure beyond word of mouth was total. The 2021 documentary The Cost of Denial, produced by the Society for Independent Journalists, tells the story of the Tri-State Healing Center and the medical paradigm that sought to destroy it, lamenting the loss of the lives that might have been saved in a more enlightened society. Nurse practitioner Luanne Pennesi, who treated many of the AIDS patients at the Center, speculated in the film that the refusal by the scientific establishment and AIDS activists to accept their successes was financially motivated. “It was as if they didn't want this information to get out. Understand that our healthcare system as we know it is a corporation, it's a corporate model, and it's about generating revenue. My concern was that maybe they couldn't generate enough revenue from these natural approaches.”5   Funding was certainly the main disciplinary tool Fauci's NIAID used to keep the scientific community in line. Despite the massive community interest in the work being done at the Center, no foundation or institution would defy Fauci and risk getting itself blacklisted, leaving Null to continue funding the operation out of his pocket with the profits from book sales. After 15 years, he left the Center in 1995, convinced the mainstream model had so thoroughly been institutionalized that there was no chance of overthrowing it. He has continued to counsel patients and advocate for a reappraisal of the HIV=AIDS hypothesis and its pharmaceutical treatments, highlighting the deeply flawed science underpinning the model of the disease espoused by the scientific establishment in 39 articles, six documentaries and a 700-page textbook on AIDS, but the Center's achievements have been effectively memory-holed by Fauci's multi-billion-dollar propaganda apparatus.     FRUIT OF THE POISONOUS TREE   To understand just how much of a threat Null's work was to the HIV/AIDS establishment, it is instructive to revisit the 1984 paper, published by Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute, that established HIV as the sole cause of AIDS. The CDC's official recognition of AIDS in 1981 had done little to quell the mounting public panic over the mysterious illness afflicting gay men in the US, as the agency had effectively admitted it had no idea what was causing them to sicken and die. As years passed with no progress determining the causative agent of the plague, activist groups like Gay Men's Health Crisis disrupted public events and threatened further mass civil disobedience as they excoriated the NIH for its sluggish allocation of government science funding to uncovering the cause of the “gay cancer.”6 When Gallo published his paper declaring that the retrovirus we now know as HIV was the sole “probable” cause of AIDS, its simple, single-factor hypothesis was the answer to the scientific establishment's prayers. This was particularly true for Fauci, as the NIAID chief was able to claim the hot new disease as his agency's own domain in what has been described as a “dramatic confrontation” with his rival Sam Broder at the National Cancer Institute. After all, Fauci pointed out, Gallo's findings - presented by Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler as if they were gospel truth before any other scientists had had a chance to inspect them, never mind conduct a full peer review - clearly classified AIDS as an infectious disease, and not a cancer like the Kaposi's sarcoma which was at the time its most visible manifestation. Money and media attention began pouring in, even as funding for the investigation of other potential causes of AIDS dried up. Having already patented a diagnostic test for “his” retrovirus before introducing it to the world, Gallo was poised for a financial windfall, while Fauci was busily leveraging the discovery into full bureaucratic empire of the US scientific apparatus.   While it would serve as the sole basis for all US government-backed AIDS research to follow - quickly turning Gallo into the most-cited scientist in the world during the 1980s,7 Gallo's “discovery” of HIV was deeply problematic. The sample that yielded the momentous discovery actually belonged to Prof. Luc Montagnier of the French Institut Pasteur, a fact Gallo finally admitted in 1991, four years after a lawsuit from the French government challenged his patent on the HIV antibody test, forcing the US government to negotiate a hasty profit-sharing agreement between Gallo's and Montagnier's labs. That lawsuit triggered a cascade of official investigations into scientific misconduct by Gallo, and evidence submitted during one of these probes, unearthed in 2008 by journalist Janine Roberts, revealed a much deeper problem with the seminal “discovery.” While Gallo's co-author, Mikulas Popovic, had concluded after numerous experiments with the French samples that the virus they contained was not the cause of AIDS, Gallo had drastically altered the paper's conclusion, scribbling his notes in the margins, and submitted it for publication to the journal Science without informing his co-author.   After Roberts shared her discovery with contacts in the scientific community, 37 scientific experts wrote to the journal demanding that Gallo's career-defining HIV paper be retracted from Science for lacking scientific integrity.8 Their call, backed by an endorsement from the 2,600-member scientific organization Rethinking AIDS, was ignored by the publication and by the rest of mainstream science despite - or perhaps because of - its profound implications.   That 2008 letter, addressed to Science editor-in-chief Bruce Alberts and copied to American Association for the Advancement of Science CEO Alan Leshner, is worth reproducing here in its entirety, as it utterly dismantles Gallo's hypothesis - and with them the entire HIV is the sole cause of AIDS dogma upon which the contemporary medical model of the disease rests:   On May 4, 1984 your journal published four papers by a group led by Dr. Robert Gallo. We are writing to express our serious concerns with regard to the integrity and veracity of the lead paper among these four of which Dr. Mikulas Popovic is the lead author.[1] The other three are also of concern because they rely upon the conclusions of the lead paper .[2][3][4]  In the early 1990s, several highly critical reports on the research underlying these papers were produced as a result of governmental inquiries working under the supervision of scientists nominated by the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. The Office of Research Integrity of the US Department of Health and Human Services concluded that the lead paper was “fraught with false and erroneous statements,” and that the “ORI believes that the careless and unacceptable keeping of research records...reflects irresponsible laboratory management that has permanently impaired the ability to retrace the important steps taken.”[5] Further, a Congressional Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations led by US Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan produced a staff report on the papers which contains scathing criticisms of their integrity.[6]  Despite the publically available record of challenges to their veracity, these papers have remained uncorrected and continue to be part of the scientific record.  What prompts our communication today is the recent revelation of an astonishing number of previously unreported deletions and unjustified alterations made by Gallo to the lead paper. There are several documents originating from Gallo's laboratory that, while available for some time, have only recently been fully analyzed. These include a draft of the lead paper typewritten by Popovic which contains handwritten changes made to it by Gallo.[7] This draft was the key evidence used in the above described inquiries to establish that Gallo had concealed his laboratory's use of a cell culture sample (known as LAV) which it received from the Institut Pasteur.  These earlier inquiries verified that the typed manuscript draft was produced by Popovic who had carried out the recorded experiment while his laboratory chief, Gallo, was in Europe and that, upon his return, Gallo changed the document by hand a few days before it was submitted to Science on March 30, 1984. According to the ORI investigation, “Dr. Gallo systematically rewrote the manuscript for what would become a renowned LTCB [Gallo's laboratory at the National Cancer Institute] paper.”[5]  This document provided the important evidence that established the basis for awarding Dr. Luc Montagnier and Dr. Francoise Barré-Sinoussi the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the AIDS virus by proving it was their samples of LAV that Popovic used in his key experiment. The draft reveals that Popovic had forthrightly admitted using the French samples of LAV renamed as Gallo's virus, HTLV-III, and that Gallo had deleted this admission, concealing their use of LAV.  However, it has not been previously reported that on page three of this same document Gallo had also deleted Popovic's unambiguous statement that, "Despite intensive research efforts, the causative agent of AIDS has not yet been identified,” replacing it in the published paper with a statement that said practically the opposite, namely, “That a retrovirus of the HTLV family might be an etiologic agent of AIDS was suggested by the findings.”  It is clear that the rest of Popovic's typed paper is entirely consistent with his statement that the cause of AIDS had not been found, despite his use of the French LAV. Popovic's final conclusion was that the culture he produced “provides the possibility” for detailed studies. He claimed to have achieved nothing more. At no point in his paper did Popovic attempt to prove that any virus caused AIDS, and it is evident that Gallo concealed these key elements in Popovic's experimental findings.  It is astonishing now to discover these unreported changes to such a seminal document. We can only assume that Gallo's alterations of Popovic's conclusions were not highlighted by earlier inquiries because the focus at the time was on establishing that the sample used by Gallo's lab came from Montagnier and was not independently collected by Gallo. In fact, the only attention paid to the deletions made by Gallo pertains to his effort to hide the identity of the sample. The questions of whether Gallo and Popovic's research proved that LAV or any other virus was the cause of AIDS were clearly not considered.  Related to these questions are other long overlooked documents that merit your attention. One of these is a letter from Dr. Matthew A. Gonda, then Head of the Electron Microscopy Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute, which is addressed to Popovic, copied to Gallo and dated just four days prior to Gallo's submission to Science.[8] In this letter, Gonda remarks on samples he had been sent for imaging because “Dr Gallo wanted these micrographs for publication because they contain HTLV.” He states, “I do not believe any of the particles photographed are of HTLV-I, II or III.” According to Gonda, one sample contained cellular debris, while another had no particles near the size of a retrovirus. Despite Gonda's clearly worded statement, Science published on May 4, 1984 papers attributed to Gallo et al with micrographs attributed to Gonda and described unequivocally as HTLV-III.  In another letter by Gallo, dated one day before he submitted his papers to Science, Gallo states, “It's extremely rare to find fresh cells [from AIDS patients] expressing the virus... cell culture seems to be necessary to induce virus,” a statement which raises the possibility he was working with a laboratory artifact. [9]  Included here are copies of these documents and links to the same. The very serious flaws they reveal in the preparation of the lead paper published in your journal in 1984 prompts our request that this paper be withdrawn. It appears that key experimental findings have been concealed. We further request that the three associated papers published on the same date also be withdrawn as they depend on the accuracy of this paper.  For the scientific record to be reliable, it is vital that papers shown to be flawed, or falsified be retracted. Because a very public record now exists showing that the Gallo papers drew unjustified conclusions, their withdrawal from Science is all the more important to maintain integrity. Future researchers must also understand they cannot rely on the 1984 Gallo papers for statements about HIV and AIDS, and all authors of papers that previously relied on this set of four papers should have the opportunity to consider whether their own conclusions are weakened by these revelations.      Gallo's handwritten revision, submitted without his colleague's knowledge despite multiple experiments that failed to support the new conclusion, was the sole foundation for the HIV=AIDS hypothesis. Had Science published the manuscript the way Popovic had typed it, there would be no AIDS “pandemic” - merely small clusters of people with AIDS. Without a viral hypothesis backing the development of expensive and deadly pharmaceuticals, would Fauci have allowed these patients to learn about the cure that existed all along?   Faced with a potential rebellion, Fauci marshaled the full resources under his control to squelch the publication of the investigations into Gallo and restrict any discussion of competing hypotheses in the scientific and mainstream press, which had been running virus-scare stories full-time since 1984. The effect was total, according to biochemist Dr. Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) procedure. In a 2009 interview, Mullis recalled his own shock when he attempted to unearth the experimental basis for the HIV=AIDS hypothesis. Despite his extensive inquiry into the literature, “there wasn't a scientific reference…[that] said ‘here's how come we know that HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.' There was nothing out there like that.”9 This yawning void at the core of HIV/AIDS “science" turned him into a strident critic of AIDS dogma - and those views made him persona non grata where the scientific press was concerned, suddenly unable to publish a single paper despite having won the Nobel Prize for his invention of the PCR test just weeks before.  10   DISSENT BECOMES “DENIAL”   While many of those who dissent from the orthodox HIV=AIDS view believe HIV plays a role in the development of AIDS, they point to lifestyle and other co-factors as being equally if not more important. Individuals who test positive for HIV can live for decades in perfect health - so long as they don't take AZT or the other toxic antivirals fast-tracked by Fauci's NIAID - but those who developed full-blown AIDS generally engaged in highly risky behaviors like extreme promiscuity and prodigious drug abuse, contracting STDs they took large quantities of antibiotics to treat, further running down their immune systems. While AIDS was largely portrayed as a “gay disease,” it was only the “fast track” gays, hooking up with dozens of partners nightly in sex marathons fueled by “poppers” (nitrate inhalants notorious for their own devastating effects on the immune system), who became sick. Kaposi's sarcoma, one of the original AIDS-defining conditions, was widespread among poppers-using gay men, but never appeared among IV drug users or hemophiliacs, the other two main risk groups during the early years of the epidemic. Even Robert Gallo himself, at a 1994 conference on poppers held by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, would admit that the previously-rare form of skin cancer surging among gay men was not primarily caused by HIV - and that it was immune stimulation, rather than suppression, that was likely responsible.11 Similarly, IV drug users are often riddled with opportunistic infections as their habit depresses the immune system and their focus on maintaining their addiction means that healthier habits - like good nutrition and even basic hygiene - fall by the wayside.    Supporting the call for revising the HIV=AIDS hypothesis to include co-factors is the fact that the mass heterosexual outbreaks long predicted by Fauci and his ilk in seemingly every country on Earth have failed to materialize, except - supposedly - in Africa, where the diagnostic standard for AIDS differs dramatically from those of the West. Given the prohibitively high cost of HIV testing for poor African nations, the WHO in 1985 crafted a diagnostic loophole that became known as the “Bangui definition,” allowing medical professionals to diagnose AIDS in the absence of a test using just clinical symptoms: high fever, persistent cough, at least 30 days of diarrhea, and the loss of 10% of one's body weight within two months. Often suffering from malnutrition and without access to clean drinking water, many of the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa fit the bill, especially when the WHO added tuberculosis to the list of AIDS-defining illnesses in 1993 - a move which may be responsible for as many as one half of African “AIDS” cases, according to journalist Christine Johnson. The WHO's former Chief of Global HIV Surveillance, James Chin, acknowledged their manipulation of statistics, but stressed that it was the entire AIDS industry - not just his organization - perpetrating the fraud. “There's the saying that, if you knew what sausages are made of, most people would hesitate to sort of eat them, because they wouldn't like what's in it. And if you knew how HIV/AIDS numbers are cooked, or made up, you would use them with extreme caution,” Chin told an interviewer in 2009.12   With infected numbers stubbornly remaining constant in the US despite Fauci's fearmongering projections of the looming heterosexually-transmitted plague, the CDC in 1993 broadened its definition of AIDS to include asymptomatic (that is, healthy) HIV-positive people with low T-cell counts - an absurd criteria given that an individual's T-cell count can fluctuate by hundreds within a single day. As a result, the number of “AIDS cases” in the US immediately doubled. Supervised by Fauci, the NIAID had been quietly piling on diseases into the “AIDS-related” category for years, bloating the list from just two conditions - pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma - to 30 so fast it raised eyebrows among some of science's leading lights. Deeming the entire process “bizarre” and unprecedented, Kary Mullis wondered aloud why no one had called the AIDS establishment out: “There's something wrong here. And it's got to be financial.”13   Indeed, an early CDC public relations campaign was exposed by the Wall Street Journal in 1987 as having deliberately mischaracterized AIDS as a threat to the entire population so as to garner increased public and private funding for what was very much a niche issue, with the risk to average heterosexuals from a single act of sex “smaller than the risk of ever getting hit by lightning.” Ironically, the ads, which sought to humanize AIDS patients in an era when few Americans knew anyone with the disease and more than half the adult population thought infected people should be forced to carry cards warning of their status, could be seen as a reaction to the fear tactics deployed by Fauci early on.14   It's hard to tell where fraud ends and incompetence begins with Gallo's HIV antibody test. Much like Covid-19 would become a “pandemic of testing,” with murder victims and motorcycle crashes lumped into “Covid deaths” thanks to over-sensitized PCR tests that yielded as many as 90% false positives,15 HIV testing is fraught with false positives - and unlike with Covid-19, most people who hear they are HIV-positive still believe they are receiving a death sentence. Due to the difficulty of isolating HIV itself from human samples, the most common diagnostic tests, ELISA and the Western Blot, are designed to detect not the virus but antibodies to it, upending the traditional medical understanding that the presence of antibodies indicates only exposure - and often that the body has actually vanquished the pathogen. Patients are known to test positive for HIV antibodies in the absence of the virus due to at least 70 other conditions, including hepatitis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, syphilis, recent vaccination or even pregnancy. (https://www.chcfl.org/diseases-that-can-cause-a-false-positive-hiv-test/) Positive results are often followed up with a PCR “viral load” test, even though the inventor of the PCR technique Kary Mullis famously condemned its misuse as a tool for diagnosing infection. Packaging inserts for all three tests warn the user that they cannot be reliably used to diagnose HIV.16 The ELISA HIV antibody test explicitly states: “At present there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence and absence of HIV antibody in human blood.”17   That the public remains largely unaware of these and other massive holes in the supposedly airtight HIV=AIDS=DEATH paradigm is a testament to Fauci's multi-layered control of the press. Like the writers of the Great Barrington Declaration and other Covid-19 dissidents, scientists who question HIV/AIDS dogma have been brutally punished for their heresy, no matter how prestigious their prior standing in the field and no matter how much evidence they have for their own claims. In 1987, the year the FDA's approval of AZT made AIDS the most profitable epidemic yet (a dubious designation Covid-19 has since surpassed), Fauci made it clearer than ever that scientific inquiry and debate - the basis of the scientific method - would no longer be welcome in the American public health sector, eliminating retrovirologist Peter Duesberg, then one of the most prominent opponents of the HIV=AIDS hypothesis, from the scientific conversation with a professional disemboweling that would make a cartel hitman blush. Duesberg had just eviscerated Gallo's 1984 HIV paper with an article of his own in the journal Cancer Research, pointing out that retroviruses had never before been found to cause a single disease in humans - let alone 30 AIDS-defining diseases. Rather than allow Gallo or any of the other scientists in his camp to respond to the challenge, Fauci waged a scorched-earth campaign against Duesberg, who had until then been one of the most highly regarded researchers in his field. Every research grant he requested was denied; every media appearance was canceled or preempted. The University of California at Berkeley, unable to fully fire him due to tenure, took away his lab, his graduate students, and the rest of his funding. The few colleagues who dared speak up for him in public were also attacked, while enemies and opportunists were encouraged to slander Duesberg at the conferences he was barred from attending and in the journals that would no longer publish his replies. When Duesberg was summoned to the White House later that year by then-President Ronald Reagan to debate Fauci on the origins of AIDS, Fauci convinced the president to cancel, allegedly pulling rank on the Commander-in-Chief with an accusation that the “White House was interfering in scientific matters that belonged to the NIH and the Office of Science and Technology Assessment.” After seven years of this treatment, Duesberg was contacted by NIH official Stephen O'Brien and offered an escape from professional purgatory. He could have “everything back,” he was told, and shown a manuscript of a scientific paper - apparently commissioned by the editor of the journal Nature - “HIV Causes AIDS: Koch's Postulates Fulfilled” with his own name listed alongside O'Brien's as an author.18 His refusal to take the bribe effectively guaranteed the epithet “AIDS denier” will appear on his tombstone. The character assassination of Duesberg became a template that would be deployed to great effectiveness wherever Fauci encountered dissent - never debate, only demonize, deplatform and destroy.    Even Luc Montagnier, the real discoverer of HIV, soon found himself on the wrong side of the Fauci machine. With his 1990 declaration that “the HIV virus [by itself] is harmless and passive, a benign virus,” Montagnier began distancing himself from Gallo's fraud, effectively placing a target on his own back. In a 1995 interview, he elaborated: “four factors that have come together to account for the sudden epidemic [of AIDS]: HIV presence, immune hyper-activation, increased sexually transmitted disease incidence, sexual behavior changes and other behavioral changes” such as drug use, poor nutrition and stress - all of which he said had to occur “essentially simultaneously” for HIV to be transmitted, creating the modern epidemic. Like the professionals at the Tri-State Healing Center, Montagnier advocated for the use of antioxidants like vitamin C and N-acetyl cysteine, naming oxidative stress as a critical factor in the progression from HIV to AIDS.19 When Montagnier died in 2022, Fauci's media mouthpieces sneered that the scientist (who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2008 for his discovery of HIV, despite his flagging faith in that discovery's significance) “started espousing views devoid of a scientific basis” in the late 2000s, leading him to be “shunned by the scientific community.”20 In a particularly egregious jab, the Washington Post's obit sings the praises of Robert Gallo, implying it was the American scientist who really should have won the Nobel for HIV, while dismissing as “

The queens talk with gay literary icon Edmund White about his new book, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir. (Miguel Murphy joins in the fun, too!)Please Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.                            Miguel's SHORE DITCH is available from Barrow Street.You can purchase Edmund White's new book, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, at BookWoman here. Bookwoman was founded to increase access to queer and feminist literature in Texas nearly fifty years ago. Read Colm Tóibín's essay, "On the Casual Brilliance of Edmund White"Read a tribute to Gary Indiana  in The Guardian here. Need a quick definition refresher of auto fiction? Here you go! Miguel mentions that composer Arnold Schoenberg's archive destroyed in LA fires, and you can read more about that here. Here's a dishy roundup of Nabokov's insults of DostoevskyFor a bit more about Larry Kramer's objections to The Farewell Symphony, read on.Learn more about Richard Howard and his poetry here. Edmund White and Michael Carroll talk about their relationship, and their experiences writing gay fiction here.And here's the Interview Magazine article we mention in the episode, in which gay writers ask Edmund White a question: “Tall Blonde With a Big Dick”: 18 Men Ask Edmund White Some Sexy Questions" Finally, check out the fabulous Garth Greenwell's website: https://www.garthgreenwell.com  

Larry Kramer, Abraham -- Genesis 15-17 by Terrill Road Bible Chapel

“The Family in Question” (May 9, 1988) It might seem like a joke today, that a show called My Two Dads is about two very hetero bachelors. But don't let that stop you from appreciating My Two Dads for being a smarter, funnier version of Full House. They debuted the same week, and unlike Full House, My Two Dads actually acknowledges that gay people exist. In this episode, the judge who awarded them custody of their daughter is persecuted in the press as being an activist judicial who is changing the definition of a family. Read the New York Times piece from 2022 that finally outed Ed Koch. Listen to the Bad Gays episode about Larry Kramer, which also discusses Ed Koch.

Neville Hodgkinson is a British journalist who reported about AIDS conventionally in the mid-1980s as a medical correspondent for the London Sunday Times.  In a subsequent role as the Times' science correspondent, he wrote a series of articles questioning the HIV theory after hearing about the work of Prof. Peter Duesberg, Joan Shenton and others. In 1996, Neville published his book "AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science -- How a Virus that Never Has Deceived the World." The book has recently been republished under the title "How HIV/AIDS Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis." The book includes recent data from the Australian Perth group of scientists who have argued that HIV has never been proven to exist as a unique infectious entity. Rather this research group claims it is a misinterpretation of signals from a compromised immune system. Due to his journalism, Neville was an early victim of cancel culture from early AIDS activists such as Larry Kramer who was aligned with Anthony Fauci. A seven-part series by Neville be found on the Conservative Woman website at www.conservativewoman.co.uk/author/nevillehodgkinson/ Neville Hodgkinson, Author at The Conservative Woman Neville Hodgkinson is the former Sunday Times medical and science correspondent who created an international storm by reporting a scientific challenge to the ‘HIV' theory of Aids. www.conservativewoman.co.uk

Today, I'm thrilled to announce my interview with Tony nominated actress Kathleen Chalfant. Tune in to hear some of the stories of her legendary career, including how Tony Kushner invited her to be part of ANGELS IN AMERICA, a letter from Larry Kramer during JUST SAY NO, how a fight broke out during her Broadway debut in DANCE WITH ME, the enormous difficulties of working with John Dexter on M. BUTTERFLY, taking on the role of Ronald Reagan in Sarah Ruhl's PASSION PLAY, how she ended up on staff at Playwrights Horizons, the production of MILLENNIUM APPROACHES that was dubbed MR. TOAD'S WILD RIDE, performing in workshops of FINDING NEVERLAND and FIRST DAUGHTER SUITE, and her most memorable reviews from John Simon, Michael Feingold, and more. You won't want to miss this conversation with a true theater veteran. 

It's a first time watch of Larry Kramer and Ken Russell's erotically charged adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's 1920 novel for both Mick and Jen. Will they finally understand teenage Hannah's obsession with Alan Bates? How many times can Mick sing Liberty X? And what's (young) Olly Reed doing to Jen's bloomers? Also contains – and no one was expecting this – that time David Blunkett was attacked by a cow.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Helen Eisenbach is a novelist, satirist, playwright, theatre director, screenwriter, journalist and editor. Her books include the novel Loonglow and the how-to/cry for help Lesbianism Made Easy, both published shamelessly ahead of their time and now available as ebooks with Open Road Media. Her plays have been produced in NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, and Edinburgh Festival Fringe. As a book editor, she founded the Plume line of LGBTQ fiction and nonfiction, where she published the subject of today's podcast, Larry Kramer, among others (mostly now dead!); she was also Editorial Director at Arbor House, where she founded a line of trade paperbacks, and Editor in Chief of Alyson Publications on its transition to a mainstream publisher under the Advocate magazine's rule. She was Executive Editor of the late beloved queer weekly magazine QW (where she published Rosanne's first ever queer interview); literary editor of the L.A. magazine Dot 429; an editor at the copy desk of Entertainment Weekly and Time Magazine. In theatre, she assisted writer/director Dick Scanlan, director Michael Mayer and Sherie Rene Scott on the play Whorl Inside a Loop as script editorial supervisor, seeing it from workshop to Off Broadway production for 2ND Stage Theatre; she was also researcher for Scanlan and composer Carmel Dean on their Edna St. Vincent Millay musical Renascence. Helen's reviews, profiles and interviews have appeared in New York magazine, LitHub, the Village Voice, Time Out NY, Newsday, Writer's Digest, The New York Times, Interview, the Daily News, HuffPost, Salonand other tasteful publications. Larry Kramer was a playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and gay rights activist.

Across the world, the rise of various forms of authoritarianism and ethno-nationalism seems to be on an ever upward trend. This creates huge uncertainties across multiple dimensions – personal, cultural, political, and not least of which in challenges business leaders face as they attempt to navigate across this uncertainty. All of this turmoil is, according to Larry Kramer - the Vice Chancellor and President of the London School of Economics - to be expected. Neo-liberalism, the once dominant political/economic paradigm, is no longer able to explain or order our understandings of our world. This triggers a search for, and creation of, alternatives. If, or until a different liberal paradigm emerges, we are destined to contend with illiberal, authoritarian and often ethno-national alternatives. In this podcast Larry and I discuss the fall of neo-liberalism and the emerging contours of what may come to replace it. How and when this new paradigm emerges and whether it will successfully defeat the existing alternatives is perhaps the most important question we will face in the next decade(s). Larry provides a thoughtful and provocative framework in which to understand these macro trends. Prior to being appointed to lead the LSE, Larry was the President of the Willam and Flora Hewlett Foundation for 12 years. With assets of over $14 billion, the Foundation is one of the largest sources of grants in the USA. Prior to his work at the Foundation, Larry was the Dean of the Stanford Law School and is a world expert in US Constitutional law and the role of judicial review within that system.Not wanting to miss the opportunity to discuss recent shifts in the US Supreme Court with such an expert, at the end of our conversation we discuss these developments as an example of the power of a paradigm shift - the rise of ‘originalism' as a reaction to the state-led expansion of individual rights – to take on real world consequences. In this context, we discuss the Dobbs decision, the overturning of the Chevron defence and the emerging presidential immunity doctrine.My discussion with Larry reminded me of how fortunate we are at TRIUM to have the LSE as a partner. The depth of analysis and understanding of the macro trends affecting the environment in which business operates continues to be a unique selling point of our EMBA. Enjoy the show!CitationsOperation Mincemeat by Cummings, D. Hodgson N. and Roberts Z. at the New Diorama Theatre,London.A Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and adapted by Kip Williams, with Sarah Snook at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London.Labatut B. (2024) The Maniac. Pushkin Press. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Helen Eisenbach is a novelist, satirist, playwright, theatre director, screenwriter, journalist and editor. Her books include the novel Loonglow and the how-to/cry for help Lesbianism Made Easy, both published shamelessly ahead of their time and now available as ebooks with Open Road Media. Her plays have been produced in NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, and Edinburgh Festival Fringe. As a book editor, she founded the Plume line of LGBTQ fiction and nonfiction, where she published the subject of today's podcast, Larry Kramer, among others (mostly now dead!); she was also Editorial Director at Arbor House, where she founded a line of trade paperbacks, and Editor in Chief of Alyson Publications on its transition to a mainstream publisher under the Advocate magazine's rule. She was Executive Editor of the late beloved queer weekly magazine QW (where she published Rosanne's first ever queer interview); literary editor of the L.A. magazine Dot 429; an editor at the copy desk of Entertainment Weekly and Time Magazine. In theatre, she assisted writer/director Dick Scanlan, director Michael Mayer and Sherie Rene Scott on the play Whorl Inside a Loop as script editorial supervisor, seeing it from workshop to Off Broadway production for 2ND Stage Theatre; she was also researcher for Scanlan and composer Carmel Dean on their Edna St. Vincent Millay musical Renascence. Helen's reviews, profiles and interviews have appeared in New York magazine, LitHub, the Village Voice, Time Out NY, Newsday, Writer's Digest, The New York Times, Interview, the Daily News, HuffPost, Salon and other tasteful publications. Larry Kramer was a playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and gay rights activist. In 1978, Kramer introduced a controversial and confrontational style in his novel FAGGOTS, which earned mixed reviews and emphatic denunciations from elements within the gay community for Kramer's portrayal of what he characterized as shallow, promiscuous gay relationships in the 1970s. Kramer witnessed the spread of the disease known as  Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) among his friends in 1980. He co-founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis  (GMHC), which has become the world's largest private organization assisting people living with AIDS. His political activism continued with the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power   (ACT UP) in 1987, an influential direct action protest organization with the aim of gaining more public action to fight the AIDS crisis. ACT UP has been widely credited with changing public health policy and the perception of people living with AIDS , and with raising awareness of HIV and AIDS-related diseases.His play The Normal Heart was produced by Joseph Papp at The Public Theater in New York City in 1985. He died from pneumonia on May 27,2020  

Larry Kramer, John 11 by Terrill Road Bible Chapel

José Villarrubia acude a los Estudios Romanones para presentar la traducción de "Cuando Larry Kramer me besó", un texto dramático, editado recientemente por 2 Bigotes y escrito por David Drake en los 90 que se ha convertido en monólogo de culto desde el activismo histórico LGTB. Además hablamos de ilustración, cómic, la obra de Richard Corben y múltiples asuntos.

Larry Kramer, Hebrews 10:19-39 by Terrill Road Bible Chapel

Larry Kramer, Hebrews 9:15-10:18 by Terrill Road Bible Chapel

Larry Kramer, incoming President and Vice Chancellor of the London School of Economics (LSE), joins Alberto Lidji on the Do One Better Podcast to reflect on his 10+ years as President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, discuss key lessons in philanthropy, and shed light on his aspirations for the LSE. The Hewlett Foundation is one of the world's largest philanthropic foundations and was a leading force in creating the field of climate philanthropy. Within the context of climate, we discuss collaboration; the progress that's been achieved in the field during the past decade; adaptation vs mitigation; investing vs divesting; shifting strategies from 'raising ambitions' to 'implementation'. Spoiler alert: the direction of travel on climate is positive. We explore the state of affairs in philanthropy and the key lessons Larry learned during his time as President of the Hewlett Foundation. Much ground is covered: from philanthropists' increased appetite for learning, experimentation, and collaboration; to encouraging journalists who cover the field of philanthropy to gain first-hand experience working in foundations; to trust-based philanthropy, and quite a bit more. We also hear of Larry's aspirations for the London School of Economics, which he describes as pretty much 'the' global institution unlike any other university, perfectly placed to leverage its social sciences prowess to tackle the world's most pressing problems. We learn what must be done to ensure the LSE achieves greatest impact. This episode will inform you and provide much food for thought. Please leave us a rating and a review. Join us every Monday for new and insightful conversations. Thank you for downloading this episode of the Do One Better Podcast. Visit our Knowledge Hub at Lidji.org for information on 250+ case studies and interviews with remarkable leaders in philanthropy, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.   

Today, I'm so excited to announce my episode with veteran actor Richard Topol, who is starring in Our Class at BAM through February 4th. Tune in to hear fascinating stories, including: how he almost went on for Al Pacino, what it was like acting with Larry David, how he got Covid at a theater in March 2020, a mask mishap during PRAYER FOR THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, the power of Larry Kramer's JUST SAY NO, working on THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL with Tony Randall, the loyalty of Denzel Washington, the Rubik's Cube of INDECENT, and so much more.

In 2020, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation committed $150M to support racial justice alongside the development of an entirely new office – the Office of Culture, Race and Equity – to incorporate equity efforts across the foundation's culture, operations, and grantmaking. In this episode, President Larry Kramer and Chief Equity Officer Charmaine Mercer reflect on what it took to get there and how their unique decentralized approach – called “the Hewlett Way” – played a role. Along the way, Larry provides visibility into his role as a translator between the staff and board; Charmaine shares the foundation's approach to advancing racial justice across 18 unique teams and 130 staff members; and together they emphasize the importance of trusting and supporting those closest to the work. 

Dennis is joined via Zoom by Mark S. King for Part 2 of their conversation about Mark's new book My Fabulous Disease as well as his previous memoir A Place Like This. In Part 2, Mark talks about building massive box kites with his father, how his father encouraged risk-taking in life and how surviving the AIDS crisis prepared him to deal with his father's passing. Mark also talks about one of his most widely-read columns; about the popular 2004 bareback porn film Dawson's 20-Load Weekend and what it said about gay culture at that time. He also talks about the column where he imagined going shopping for socks with the legendarily confrontational writer and activist Larry Kramer and then hearing from Kramer himself. Other topics include: meeting and marrying his husband Michael, being settled, monogamous and 'right-sized,' the strangest place he's ever been recognized and the thrill of having Elton John and David Furnish sing him Happy Birthday...in harmony, no less. www.myfabulousdisease.com

When Larry Kramer announced recently that he was leaving the Hewlett Foundation to run the London School of Economics, it marked the end of an extraordinarily productive tenure as the head of one of the world's largest and most influential charitable foundations. In Larry's nearly twelve years at Hewlett, he helped lead a new era of climate philanthropy, and launched initiatives in transparency, cybersecurity, democracy, racial justice, and economy and society. The guy's been busy. He's also candid, funny, and ridiculously smart. Five years after he last interviewed Larry (for the very first episode of Let's Hear It) Eric made the pilgrimage to Menlo Park to speak with his former boss about what went right and what went wrong during his time at the foundation, as well as his thoughts on the state of philanthropy, foundation communications, democracy, and, of course, the Beatles. You *seriously* don't want to miss this episode with one of the field's most expansive thinkers.

When Larry Kramer announced recently that he was leaving the Hewlett Foundation to run the London School of Economics, it marked the end of an extraordinarily productive tenure as the head of one of the world's largest and most influential charitable foundations. In Larry's nearly twelve years at Hewlett, he helped lead a new era of climate philanthropy, and launched initiatives in transparency, cybersecurity, democracy, racial justice, and economy and society. The guy's been busy. He's also candid, funny, and ridiculously smart. Five years after he last interviewed Larry (for the very first episode of Let's Hear It) Eric made the pilgrimage to Menlo Park to speak with his former boss about what went right and what went wrong during his time at the foundation, as well as his thoughts on the state of philanthropy, foundation communications, democracy, and, of course, the Beatles. You *seriously* don't want to miss this episode with one of the field's most expansive thinkers.

This Summer, Dino Fetscher will appear in the second season of the Apple TV+ sci-fi series FOUNDATION. The Emmy and BAFTA-nominated series created by showrunner David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight Triology, The Sandman) chronicles a band of exiles on their monumental journey to save humanity and rebuild civilisation amid the fall of the Galactic Empire. The series stars Jared Harris, Lee Pace, Ben Daniels and Lou Llobell. He's currently filming FOOL ME ONCE for Netflix, an adaptation of the novel by Harlan Coben also starring Adeel Akhtar, Michelle Keegan, Richard Armitage and Joanna Lumley. Shaken by two murders. Maya Stern (Keegan) watches security camera footage of her house sees her murdered husband Joe (Armitage) back as an intruder. Meanwhile, Abby and Daniel, her nephew and niece, are trying to find the truth about the murder of their mother and seeing possible connections between both cases.In 2021, Dino made his National Theatre debut in the first major European revival of Larry Kramer's seminal play THE NORMAL HEART described as ‘poignant and powerful' by The Guardian, largely based on Larry's own experience of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s in New York. Dino played the role of 'Felix Turner', Ned Week's closeted lover, for which he received a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Olivier Awards and WhatsOnStage Awards in 2022. After graduating from The Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, Dino made his screen debut in Russell T. Davies' critically acclaimed BAFTA nominated  and RTS winning Channel 4 drama CUCUMBER and sister series BANANA, before starring as the lead in the ITV/Netflix thriller PARANOID alongside Indira Varma, Lesley Sharpe and Robert Glenister, followed by the cult BAFTA nominated sci-fi series HUMANS (Channel4/AMC) in the role of new synth ‘Stanley'. Dino is also known for his role in the globally praised BBC/HBO drama YEARS AND YEARS penned again by Russell T. Davies and starring alongside Emma Thompson, Rory Kinnear and T'Nia Miller, and in the BBC/HBO historical award-winning drama series GENTLEMAN JACK created by Sally Wainwright and starring Suranne Jones.    Further theatre credits include DIRTY, GIFTED & WELSH (National Theatre of Wales), AS IS (Trafalgar Studios) and GHOST STORIES (Arts Theatre).

Gail Merrifield Papp worked alongside Joseph Papp as he founded The Public Theater and was named the theater's Director of New Works Development. In that role, Gail was responsible for some of The Public Theater's best-remembered productions, including FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF by Ntozake Shange, THE NORMAL HEART by Larry Kramer, THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD by Rupert Holmes, and many others. Gail Merrifield and Joe Papp married in 1976 and were together until his death in 1991. Her memoir, PUBLIC/PRIVATE: MY LIFE WITH JOE PAPP AT THE PUBLIC THEATER, will be published by Applause Books on October 17th. For more information regarding the memoir, please visit: https://www.amazon.com/Public-Private-Life-Papp-Theater/dp/1493074865/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=gail+papp&qid=1693238691&sr=8-1 If you love this show, please leave us a review. Go to RateThisPodcast.com/karereviewspodcast and follow the simple instructions. Follow Kare Reviews at www.karereviews.net and on Twitter:@KareReviews Also please visit the newly launched Patreon page:https://www.patreon.com/jeffreykare?fan_landing=true Follow Jeffrey Kare on Twitter:@JeffreyKare If you like what you've heard here, please subscribe to any one of the following places where the Kare Reviews Podcast is available. AnchorAppleGoogleSpotifyBreakerOvercastPocket CastsRadioPublic --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jeffrey-kare/support

Larry Kramer, 2 Kings 5 by Terrill Road Bible Chapel

The “war on cancer” was launched during the Nixon Administration in 1971, but the term was part of the national dialog on cancer at least early as 1913. Pink ribbons have been ubiquitous symbols of breast cancer awareness and fund-raising promotions since the mid-1980s, but “cancer weeks” fostering awareness of the disease and gala fund-raisers staged by wealthy socialites were popular beginning at least 100 years earlier. Early detection was touted as a cure at the beginning of the 20th century, long before any treatments other than primitive surgery were available, not to mention tests like mammography to detect the disease. Elaine Schattner provides these and myriad other surprising insights from our long and tortuous relationship with cancer in From Whispers to Shouts: The Ways We Talk about Cancer (Columbia UP, 2023). It is a fascinating book that traces how public perception and portrayal of cancer in our conversations, media and culture has evolved over the past century and a half. Whispers reflect the fear and shame that have led many to hide a cancer diagnosis; shouts mark the advocacy and activism that is giving patients voice in both the doctor's office and the public stage. Dr. Schattner, a medical oncologist, breast cancer survivor, and journalist enlists an intriguing cast of characters to tell the story: U.S. presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland and Joe Biden; Babe Ruth; Nat King Cole; the writer Susan Sontag; AIDS activist Larry Kramer; Gilda Radner and Nora Ephron are just a few of those she features whose stories have helped shape our changing attitudes toward a disease that has long been viewed as a death sentence, but one that for increasing numbers of patients is now a manageable illness with prospects for meaningful survival. In the past 25 years, effective new, but costly drugs that target molecular drivers of tumors or unleash the immune system against the disease have transformed treatment for many patients. The rise of the internet and social media has vastly changed how we learn and talk about cancer. Dr. Schattner describes both good and bad ramifications of these disruptive events and says what is needed is greater understanding of the treatability of the disease. Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The “war on cancer” was launched during the Nixon Administration in 1971, but the term was part of the national dialog on cancer at least early as 1913. Pink ribbons have been ubiquitous symbols of breast cancer awareness and fund-raising promotions since the mid-1980s, but “cancer weeks” fostering awareness of the disease and gala fund-raisers staged by wealthy socialites were popular beginning at least 100 years earlier. Early detection was touted as a cure at the beginning of the 20th century, long before any treatments other than primitive surgery were available, not to mention tests like mammography to detect the disease. Elaine Schattner provides these and myriad other surprising insights from our long and tortuous relationship with cancer in From Whispers to Shouts: The Ways We Talk about Cancer (Columbia UP, 2023). It is a fascinating book that traces how public perception and portrayal of cancer in our conversations, media and culture has evolved over the past century and a half. Whispers reflect the fear and shame that have led many to hide a cancer diagnosis; shouts mark the advocacy and activism that is giving patients voice in both the doctor's office and the public stage. Dr. Schattner, a medical oncologist, breast cancer survivor, and journalist enlists an intriguing cast of characters to tell the story: U.S. presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland and Joe Biden; Babe Ruth; Nat King Cole; the writer Susan Sontag; AIDS activist Larry Kramer; Gilda Radner and Nora Ephron are just a few of those she features whose stories have helped shape our changing attitudes toward a disease that has long been viewed as a death sentence, but one that for increasing numbers of patients is now a manageable illness with prospects for meaningful survival. In the past 25 years, effective new, but costly drugs that target molecular drivers of tumors or unleash the immune system against the disease have transformed treatment for many patients. The rise of the internet and social media has vastly changed how we learn and talk about cancer. Dr. Schattner describes both good and bad ramifications of these disruptive events and says what is needed is greater understanding of the treatability of the disease. Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

The “war on cancer” was launched during the Nixon Administration in 1971, but the term was part of the national dialog on cancer at least early as 1913. Pink ribbons have been ubiquitous symbols of breast cancer awareness and fund-raising promotions since the mid-1980s, but “cancer weeks” fostering awareness of the disease and gala fund-raisers staged by wealthy socialites were popular beginning at least 100 years earlier. Early detection was touted as a cure at the beginning of the 20th century, long before any treatments other than primitive surgery were available, not to mention tests like mammography to detect the disease. Elaine Schattner provides these and myriad other surprising insights from our long and tortuous relationship with cancer in From Whispers to Shouts: The Ways We Talk about Cancer (Columbia UP, 2023). It is a fascinating book that traces how public perception and portrayal of cancer in our conversations, media and culture has evolved over the past century and a half. Whispers reflect the fear and shame that have led many to hide a cancer diagnosis; shouts mark the advocacy and activism that is giving patients voice in both the doctor's office and the public stage. Dr. Schattner, a medical oncologist, breast cancer survivor, and journalist enlists an intriguing cast of characters to tell the story: U.S. presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland and Joe Biden; Babe Ruth; Nat King Cole; the writer Susan Sontag; AIDS activist Larry Kramer; Gilda Radner and Nora Ephron are just a few of those she features whose stories have helped shape our changing attitudes toward a disease that has long been viewed as a death sentence, but one that for increasing numbers of patients is now a manageable illness with prospects for meaningful survival. In the past 25 years, effective new, but costly drugs that target molecular drivers of tumors or unleash the immune system against the disease have transformed treatment for many patients. The rise of the internet and social media has vastly changed how we learn and talk about cancer. Dr. Schattner describes both good and bad ramifications of these disruptive events and says what is needed is greater understanding of the treatability of the disease. Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The “war on cancer” was launched during the Nixon Administration in 1971, but the term was part of the national dialog on cancer at least early as 1913. Pink ribbons have been ubiquitous symbols of breast cancer awareness and fund-raising promotions since the mid-1980s, but “cancer weeks” fostering awareness of the disease and gala fund-raisers staged by wealthy socialites were popular beginning at least 100 years earlier. Early detection was touted as a cure at the beginning of the 20th century, long before any treatments other than primitive surgery were available, not to mention tests like mammography to detect the disease. Elaine Schattner provides these and myriad other surprising insights from our long and tortuous relationship with cancer in From Whispers to Shouts: The Ways We Talk about Cancer (Columbia UP, 2023). It is a fascinating book that traces how public perception and portrayal of cancer in our conversations, media and culture has evolved over the past century and a half. Whispers reflect the fear and shame that have led many to hide a cancer diagnosis; shouts mark the advocacy and activism that is giving patients voice in both the doctor's office and the public stage. Dr. Schattner, a medical oncologist, breast cancer survivor, and journalist enlists an intriguing cast of characters to tell the story: U.S. presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland and Joe Biden; Babe Ruth; Nat King Cole; the writer Susan Sontag; AIDS activist Larry Kramer; Gilda Radner and Nora Ephron are just a few of those she features whose stories have helped shape our changing attitudes toward a disease that has long been viewed as a death sentence, but one that for increasing numbers of patients is now a manageable illness with prospects for meaningful survival. In the past 25 years, effective new, but costly drugs that target molecular drivers of tumors or unleash the immune system against the disease have transformed treatment for many patients. The rise of the internet and social media has vastly changed how we learn and talk about cancer. Dr. Schattner describes both good and bad ramifications of these disruptive events and says what is needed is greater understanding of the treatability of the disease. Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The “war on cancer” was launched during the Nixon Administration in 1971, but the term was part of the national dialog on cancer at least early as 1913. Pink ribbons have been ubiquitous symbols of breast cancer awareness and fund-raising promotions since the mid-1980s, but “cancer weeks” fostering awareness of the disease and gala fund-raisers staged by wealthy socialites were popular beginning at least 100 years earlier. Early detection was touted as a cure at the beginning of the 20th century, long before any treatments other than primitive surgery were available, not to mention tests like mammography to detect the disease. Elaine Schattner provides these and myriad other surprising insights from our long and tortuous relationship with cancer in From Whispers to Shouts: The Ways We Talk about Cancer (Columbia UP, 2023). It is a fascinating book that traces how public perception and portrayal of cancer in our conversations, media and culture has evolved over the past century and a half. Whispers reflect the fear and shame that have led many to hide a cancer diagnosis; shouts mark the advocacy and activism that is giving patients voice in both the doctor's office and the public stage. Dr. Schattner, a medical oncologist, breast cancer survivor, and journalist enlists an intriguing cast of characters to tell the story: U.S. presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland and Joe Biden; Babe Ruth; Nat King Cole; the writer Susan Sontag; AIDS activist Larry Kramer; Gilda Radner and Nora Ephron are just a few of those she features whose stories have helped shape our changing attitudes toward a disease that has long been viewed as a death sentence, but one that for increasing numbers of patients is now a manageable illness with prospects for meaningful survival. In the past 25 years, effective new, but costly drugs that target molecular drivers of tumors or unleash the immune system against the disease have transformed treatment for many patients. The rise of the internet and social media has vastly changed how we learn and talk about cancer. Dr. Schattner describes both good and bad ramifications of these disruptive events and says what is needed is greater understanding of the treatability of the disease. Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The “war on cancer” was launched during the Nixon Administration in 1971, but the term was part of the national dialog on cancer at least early as 1913. Pink ribbons have been ubiquitous symbols of breast cancer awareness and fund-raising promotions since the mid-1980s, but “cancer weeks” fostering awareness of the disease and gala fund-raisers staged by wealthy socialites were popular beginning at least 100 years earlier. Early detection was touted as a cure at the beginning of the 20th century, long before any treatments other than primitive surgery were available, not to mention tests like mammography to detect the disease. Elaine Schattner provides these and myriad other surprising insights from our long and tortuous relationship with cancer in From Whispers to Shouts: The Ways We Talk about Cancer (Columbia UP, 2023). It is a fascinating book that traces how public perception and portrayal of cancer in our conversations, media and culture has evolved over the past century and a half. Whispers reflect the fear and shame that have led many to hide a cancer diagnosis; shouts mark the advocacy and activism that is giving patients voice in both the doctor's office and the public stage. Dr. Schattner, a medical oncologist, breast cancer survivor, and journalist enlists an intriguing cast of characters to tell the story: U.S. presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland and Joe Biden; Babe Ruth; Nat King Cole; the writer Susan Sontag; AIDS activist Larry Kramer; Gilda Radner and Nora Ephron are just a few of those she features whose stories have helped shape our changing attitudes toward a disease that has long been viewed as a death sentence, but one that for increasing numbers of patients is now a manageable illness with prospects for meaningful survival. In the past 25 years, effective new, but costly drugs that target molecular drivers of tumors or unleash the immune system against the disease have transformed treatment for many patients. The rise of the internet and social media has vastly changed how we learn and talk about cancer. Dr. Schattner describes both good and bad ramifications of these disruptive events and says what is needed is greater understanding of the treatability of the disease. Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist.

Subscribe to The Realignment to access our exclusive Q&A episodes and support the show: https://realignment.supercast.com/REALIGNMENT NEWSLETTER: https://therealignment.substack.com/PURCHASE BOOKS AT OUR BOOKSHOP: https://bookshop.org/shop/therealignmentEmail Us: realignmentpod@gmail.comFoundation for American Innovation: https://www.thefai.org/posts/lincoln-becomes-faiLarry Kramer, President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, joins The Realignment. Larry and Marshall discuss why the Neoliberal approach is unable to address the economic challenges of the 2020s, what a post-Neoliberal paradigm could look like, where the political right and left can and cannot find common ground, shifting definitions of capitalism, and how a society's interpretation of what constitutes "common sense" when it comes to the economy shifts over time. 

Julia and Kait finish off pride month by discussing Larry Kramer's semi autobiographical 1980's hit play, The Normal Heart. They talk about the issues within the LGBTQIA+ community that still persist, the impact of the AIDS epidemic and its effect 40 years later, and Larry Kramer's incredible life. Enjoy!

Rebels! Welcome to the Pride Rewind! Continuing our Pride Month film reviews, Chad, Stuart and I take a step back with our deep gratitude, to have a heavy and intimate conversation with Gary Woodroffe, an elder gay man with real lived experiences before, and during the AIDS Epidemic.  Gary recants the story of living in the Maritimes, finding a gay tribe, his first party experience, and his first eye-opening experience with AIDS.This is a very important story that needs to be told and we can't thank Gary enough for sharing it with us.  *Trigger Warning in Effect*The Normal Heart (2014)  Written by Larry Kramer rd and directed by Ryan Murphy, starring Mark Ruffalo, Matt Boomer, and Julia Roberts. A gay activist attempts to raise H.I.V. and A.I.D.S. awareness during the early 1980s.Support the showSubscribe to hear our entire library now!Follow the Rebels: Stefan: @sjmaroni Bear SailorMoon: @bearsailormooon Carlotta Carlisle: @carlottacarlisle Chad: @cski01 / @dressedasaChad (IG/Tiktok) Julia: @julialynched PJ: @xndra_design Stu: @janikon_ Facebook: /groups/rwacpod Instagram @RWACpodFind us at linktr.ee/RWAC

Episode Reading List:* From Queer to Gay to Queer, James Kirchick* How Hannah Arendt's Zionism Helped Create American Gay Identity, Blake Smith* When the Pope Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie, That's Ahmari, James Kirchick* Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Big Fat Nonbinary Mistake, Blake Smith* Are Conservatives the New Queers?, Blake Smith* Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, John PistelliI have a working hypothesis that no one has suffered a more dramatic decline in a certain kind of social status, as a result of changes in left-liberal elite culture and politics, than white gay men. Less than a decade ago they were at the vanguard of social progress, having led a gay rights movement that achieved an extraordinary series of legal, political, and cultural victories. Now they're perceived as basically indistinguishable, within certain left-liberal spaces, from straight white men. In some activist circles they may be even more suspect, since they're competing for leadership roles and narrative centrality where straight men wouldn't presume (or particularly desire) to tread. My hypothesis, if it's accurate, is interesting on its own terms, as part of a much longer history in America of ethnic and other minority groups rising and falling in relative cultural, intellectual, and literary status. It's also interesting, however, for what it tells us about the recent evolution of left and liberal politics, as they've shifted and reshaped themselves in reaction to both great victories, like the legalization of gay marriage, and to depressingly intractable problems like the persistent racial gaps in wealth, health, incarceration, and crime.I'm less interested in the justice or injustice of this shift in standing (though I'm somewhat interested) than I am in the facts of it and its implications. Why has it happened? What does it feel like for the people who have experienced it? What are its implications? Will there be a backlash? To assist me in thinking through what it all means, I invited to the podcast Blake Smith and Jamie Kirchick. Jamie is a columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail, and the author of last year's New York Times bestseller, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. He has long been an outspoken critic of some sectors of the gay left and what he perceives of as their desire to subordinate the project of achieving full civic and political equality for gay people to a more radical, revolutionary project to tear down conventional bourgeois ideas of gender, sexuality, marriage, family, monogamy, and identity. In a recent essay in Liberties, “From Queer to Gay to Queer,” Jamie compares the liberal tenets of the gay rights movement to the radical aspirations of what he calls “political queerness”: With its insistence that gay people adhere to a very narrow set of political and identitarian commitments, to a particular definition that delegitimates everything outside of itself, political queerness is deeply illiberal. This is in stark opposition to the spirit of the mainstream gay rights movement, which was liberal in every sense — philosophically, temperamentally, and procedurally. It achieved its liberal aspirations (securing equality) by striving for liberal aims (access to marriage and the military) via liberal means (at the ballot box, through the courts, and in the public square). Appealing to liberal values, it accomplished an incredible revolution in human consciousness, radically transforming how Americans viewed a once despised minority. And it did so animated by the liberal belief that inclusion does not require the erasure of one's own particular identity, or even the tempering of it. By design, the gay movement was capacious, and made room for queers in its vision of an America where sexual orientation was no longer a barrier to equal citizenship. Queerness, alas, has no room for gays. The victory of the gay movement and its usurpation by the queer one represents an ominous succession. The gay movement sought to reform laws and attitudes so that they would align with America's founding liberal principles; the queer movement posits that such principles are intrinsically oppressive and therefore deserving of denigration. The gay movement was grounded in objective fact; the queer movement is rooted in Gnostic postmodernism. For the gay movement, homosexuality was something to be treated as any other benign human trait, whereas the queer movement imbues same-sex desire and gender nonconformity with a revolutionary socio-political valence. (Not for the first time, revolution is deemed more important than rights.) And whereas the gay movement strived for mainstream acceptance of gay people, the queer movement finds the very concept of a mainstream malevolent, a form of “structural violence.” Illiberal in its tactics, antinomian in its ideology, scornful of ordinary people and how they choose to live, and glorifying marginalization, queerness is a betrayal of the gay movement, and of gay people themselves. In the podcast I refer to Jamie as “a man alone.” This isn't quite true. He has comrades out there, in particular older gay writers like Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch, who share many of his commitments and critiques. Generationally, however, Jamie seems more alone than they do, without a cohort of gay intellectuals of roughly his age who share his intellectual reference points, his liberalism, and his very specific experience of coming of age as a gay man and journalist in America when he did, at his specific point of entry to AIDS, the decline of print and rise of online journalism, and the political advance of gay (and more recently trans) rights. He's a man alone but also, if the premise of this podcast is accurate, a man alone who has been publicly articulating a set of feelings and arguments that is shared by many of his gay male peers, of various generations, but hasn't yet taken shape in the form of a political or intellectual reaction.Blake Smith is my first return guest to the podcast, having recently joined me to discuss Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and critic Andrea Long Chu (the “it girl of the trans world,” as I called her). He is a recent refugee from academia, now living and working as a freelance writer in Chicago, writing for Tablet magazine, American Affairs, and elsewhere. At 35 he is only a few years younger than Jamie, but is the product of a very different set of formative biographical and intellectual influences. Raised in a conservative Southern Baptist family in a suburb of Memphis, Blake's big coming out, as he tells the story, was less as a gay man than as the kind of academically credentialed, world-traveling, city-based sophisticate he has become. If Jamie's sense of loss is maybe something in the vicinity of what I proposed at the top of this post–that he went from being in the ultimately victorious mainstream of the gay rights struggle to being seen as a member of the privileged oppressor class, at best a second-class “ally” and at worst an apostate to the cause –than Blake's experience is less about any personal or political loss of status or standing than it is a variant of the venerable intellectual and literary tradition of pining for a scene or scenes from eras prior to your own. Think Owen Wilson's character in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, who was magically transported back to Paris in the 1920s, the scene he'd always romanticized, only to fall in love with a woman from that era who herself romanticizes and eventually chooses to abandon him for another, earlier cultural moment, the Belle Époque scene of the 1890s. For Blake, the key era, maybe, was the brief post-Stonewall period before AIDS superseded all other concerns––so the 1970s, more or less– when gay male life was sufficiently out of the closet for a gay male public to come into existence and begin to define itself and understand how it related, or didn't relate, not just to the straight world but also to feminism, women, Marxism, black civil rights, and other left-wing and liberal movements. In a recent piece in Tablet, Blake writes about the magazine Christopher Street, founded in 1976, and its project of helping to bring into existence a coherent intellectual and cultural community of gay men:In its cultural politics of building a gay male world, Christopher Street featured poetry and short stories, helping launch the careers of the major gay writers of the late 20th century, such as Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Larry Kramer. It also ran many essays that contributed to an emerging awareness that there was a gay male canon in American letters, running from Walt Whitman and Hart Crane to John Ashbery and James Merrill.Christopher Street was by no means the only venue for the construction of a gay world, but [editor Michael] Denneny and his colleagues were perhaps the sharpest-minded defenders of its specificity—their demand that it be a world for gay men. In a debate that has now been largely forgotten, but which dominated gay intellectual life in the 1970s, Denneny's Arendtian perspective, with its debts to Zionism, was ranged against a vision of politics in which gay men were to be a kind of shock force for a broader sexual-cum-socialist revolution.For Blake, what's been lost or trumped is less the liberal politics that Jamie champions and that Christopher Street more or less advocated than the existence of a gay male world of letters that had fairly distinct boundaries, a relatively private space in which gay men–who may always remain in some way politically suspect, even reviled, by the mainstream–can recognize and talk to each other.  As he writes in another recent essay in Tablet, maybe half-seriously, “One should, …know one's own type (Jew, homosexual, philosopher, etc.) and remain at a ‘playful distance' from those outside it, with ‘no expectation of essential progress' toward a world in which the sort of people we are can be publicly recognized and respected. No messiahs, and no end to paranoias and persecutions—but, in the shade of deft silences, the possibility of cleareyed fellowship with one's own kind.”Jamie, Blake, and I had what I found to be a really exciting conversation about all these issues and more. Give it a listen.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Donna Cryer joins Jörn Schattenberg, Louise Campbell and Roger Green for an impactful episode which weighs the complexities of competing needs across all Fatty Liver stakeholders. The session expands discourse on the recently discussed ICER draft report to consider a developing landscape around nomenclature consensus and other important and impending decisions. Critically, the group grapples with challenges associated with honoring the precedence of patient-centricity.Roger prefaces this conversation with a brief recap of Season 4 Episode 19 where a panel of patient advocates (Wayne Eskridge, Michael Betel and Anthony Villiotti) dissected glaring inaccuracies and shortcomings within the ICER draft report. Roger goes on to introduce the rollout of the nomenclature consensus work and candidly shares that it is appearing to be a compromised solution between academics. He reasons it's not clear that it takes into account what other stakeholders need and the practicality behind approving drugs, educating patients and moving the management of the disease forward. From here, Donna describes her frustrations with the weight and value allotted (or lack-thereof) to patient inputs on such important matters. Her statement is powerful and urgent, and describing it in words does not capture the gravity of the moment.Listen to the full feature to engage with many more insightful moments. If you enjoy the episode, have questions or interest around endocrinology and Fatty Liver disease, we kindly ask that you submit reviews wherever you download the discourse. Alternatively, you can write to us directly at questions@SurfingNASH.com.Stay Safe and Surf On!

This week, Donna Cryer (Global Liver Institute) joins Jörn Schattenberg, Louise Campbell and Roger Green for an impassioned and sobering episode which weighs the complexities of competing needs across all Fatty Liver stakeholders. This powerful and at times emotional session expands recent discourse on the ICER draft report to also consider a developing landscape around nomenclature consensus and other important and impending decisions. Critically, the group grapples with challenges associated with honoring the precedence of fighting Fatty Liver through patient-centricity. Among this rich and tremendously honest discussion are the following themes:00:00 Introduction07:40 Who is going to be the Larry Kramer of NASH?17:38 Allied Health for Patient Empowerment26:59 Generating Data to Demonstrate Patient Needs and Inform Public Health36:55 Donna's Call to Action42:37 Can we absorb enough different perspectives into a common discussion and give them each the weight they deserve?Listen to the full feature to engage with the many insightful moments. If you enjoy the episode, have questions or interest around patient advocacy, allied health and Fatty Liver disease, we kindly ask that you submit reviews wherever you download the discourse. Alternatively, you can write to us directly at questions@SurfingNASH.com.Stay Safe and Surf On!

A complete and total history of the United States of America from the end of World War II in 1945 and the onset of the HIV/AIDS to the present + the second volume of Larry Kramer's epic historical "novel" THE AMERICAN PEOPLE: VOLUME TWO: THE BRUTALITY OF FACT. Follow Jocko on Twitter: twitter.com/jockogay And exclusively on the Patreon, a deep exploration of Jocko and Chi Chi's sexuality, the hospitalization and naturally, RuPaul's Drag Race. (S3.E44 病気の波）

A complete history of the United States of America from its creation to 1945 + the birth of HIV/AIDS and the first volume of Larry Kramer's epic historical "novel" THE AMERICAN PEOPLE: VOLUME ONE SEARCH FOR MY HEART. Follow Jocko on Twitter: twitter.com/jockogay And exclusively on the Patreon, a horrifying piece of context about the hospitalization of Zach Langley Chi Chi that will change everything you hear today: patreon.com/imsopopular (S3.E43 米国の波）

Larry Kramer, Colossians 4:2-18 by Terrill Road Bible Chapel

It's Oscar season, so we're taking a look at two controversial Academy Award winning movies! In 1993, Philadelphia was the first movie to address the ongoing AIDS crisis, winning Academy Awards and angering gay rights activists like Larry Kramer. Twenty years later, in 2013, Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto each won acting's top honor in Dallas Buyers Club, while angering the entire community. Brian welcomes Chris back to discuss landmark AIDS representation, and major steps backward. 

Larry Kramer, Colossians 1:1-14 by Terrill Road Bible Chapel

Lawrence D. Mass, M.D., a specialist in addiction medicine, was the first to write about AIDS in the press and is a co-founder of Gay Men's Health Crisis. He is the author of Dialogues of The Sexual Revolution, Volumes 1 and 2, and We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer. On The Future of Wagnerism: Art, Intoxication, Addiction, Codependence and Recovery is the sequel to his memoir, Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite: Being Gay and Jewish in America. He resides in New York City where he was the life-partner of pioneering gay activist and writer Arnie Kantrowitz, who died 1/21/22.https://lawrencedmass.com/mediaSend Audience To:https://lawrencedmass.com/Book: Critical Perspectives of WagnerismIn the realm of Wagnerism, Larry Mass' introspection on being a homosexual jew living in New York City weaves itself into a unique perspective of art, intoxication, addiction, codependence and recovery. Visit https://lawrencedmass.com/ to learn more about his work.This is Dr. Lino Martinez the host for A Little Less Fear Podcast. For more information, please use the information below. Thanks so much for your support!Patreon: www.patreon.com/alittlelessfearIG: @alittlelessfearpodcastTwitter: @alittlelessfearTikTok @alittlelessfearLinkedin @drlinomartinez

Dennis is joined via Zoom by writer-performer Will Nolan to discuss his show Gay History for Straight People hosted by his drag alter ego Leona, a 72 year old Southern lesbian who works at the Piggly Wiggly and is obsessed with Kelly Clarkson. Dennis first met Will when Will was a producer on the syndicated LGBT radio show Twist, which Dennis co-hosted from 2006 to 2008. Will talks about how he got into performing after her turned 40, where the character of Leola comes from, the reactions he's gotten from straight audiences to the show, Leola's go-to casserole and buying Leola's wardrobe from Party City and 5 Below. Dennis and Will also reminisce about their days working on Twist and their interactions with such A listers as Beyonce, Rob Thomas, Larry Kramer and Jennifer Lopez. Other topics include: appearing in the show and book Mortified, getting gay married and adopting a child before it was cool, why Kelly Clarkson is so awesome, and prank calling a John Schneider's mother because it made him feel closer to Bo Duke from Dukes of Hazzard. https://www.leolasladyland.com/

For decades now, the conservative legal movement has been on a mission to remake this nation's laws from the bench. And it's working. On Friday we released an episode with the legal scholar Kate Shaw that walked through case after case showing how conservative Supreme Court majorities have lurched this country's laws to the right on guns, voting, gerrymandering, regulatory authority, unions, campaign finance and more in the past 20 years. And if the Dobbs majority is any indication, this rightward shift is just getting started.But this conservative legal revolution is only half of the story. The other half is just as important: the collapse of liberal constitutional thinking. Liberals have “lost anything that would animate a positive theory of what the Constitution should be,” says the legal scholar Larry Kramer. “And so they've been left with a kind of potpourri of leftover things from the periods when liberals were ascendant in the '60s and '70s.”Kramer is a former dean of Stanford Law School, the current president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the author of“The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review.” And according to him, it hasn't always been this way. For most of American history, politicians, from Jefferson to Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt, believed that constitutional interpretation was inextricable from politics. And they put forward distinct visions of what the Constitution meant and the kind of country it was written to build. But then, in response to the progressive victories of the Warren court, liberals began to embrace the doctrine of judicial supremacy: the view that the final authority on the Constitution rests with the courts. This has resulted in both the conservative legal victories of the past few decades and liberals' muddled, weak response.So this is a conversation about the collapse of liberal constitutional politics: why it happened, what we can learn from it and what a renewed, progressive vision of the Constitution could look like. We also discuss why the founders weren't actually originalists at all, whether liberal constitutional thinking has been captured by the legal profession, what a liberal alternative to originalism could consist of, why changing the size of the court (despite its controversies) has been an important tool for staving off constitutional crisis, the case for an “anti-oligarchy Constitution,” the merits of imposing supermajority requirements on court decisions and nominations, why Kramer views Roosevelt's infamous court-packing effort as a major success and more.Mentioned:Larry Kramer's testimony at the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States“Judicial Supremacy and the End of Judicial Restraint” by Larry D. Kramer“Marbury and the Retreat from Judicial Supremacy” by Larry D. Kramer“The Judicial Tug of War” by Adam Bonica and Maya SenBook recommendations:The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution by Joseph Fishkin and William E. ForbathThe Second Creation by Jonathan GienappWhen We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín LabatutWe're hiring a researcher! You can apply here or by visiting nytimes.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/NewsThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, Kate Sinclair and Irene Noguchi; original music and mixing by Isaac Jones; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

Season 3, Episode 8A Life of Advocacy with Larry D. MassLarry D. Mass has been an advocate for the gay community for his entire adult life. From working with Larry Kramer at Act Up to writing an article that's now recognized as the first report on what would eventually become the AIDS crises, Larry is a hero to the advocate community. He's also written about what it's like to be a gay Jew and interestingly his love of Richard Wagner. Learn more about Larry at https://lawrencedmass.com/. *** There were audio issues with this interview if you're wondering why it sounds so disjointed in moments. Birthday Fundraiser Time! Reach out to sponsor the Worth Saving 'Gala' for $1,000, $3,000, or $5,000! Email Jay at Jay@JayShifman.com for more info. The Metro Philly 75 Power Women List: https://metrophiladelphia.com/power-lists/metro-philadelphia-power-women/As always, you can find everything you need, including our social media links, at our Campsite page: https://jay.campsite.bioLeave us a message for a chance to be played on the show and win a CYS schwag pack: https://podinbox.com/CYSReach out and let us know who you are and that you're listening at JayShifman.com or ChooseYourStruggle.comOne Last Celtics Game With William (Jay's tribute to his late Stepfather-In Law)Jay's Podcast Reviews (for GreatPods!)Jay and our good friends Savage Sisters are both finalists for the Best of Philly awards! To vote for Jay (which you can once a day until September) go to metrophillysbest.com/voting and under Arts and Entertainment scroll down to Philly Blogger. To vote for Savage Sisters, go to the same link and under Services you'll find the Not For Profit category. Thanks!Choose Your Struggle Presents: Made It, Season 1, Stay Savage dropped April 29th! Subscribe to Made It's stream! https://kite.link/choose-your-struggle-presents-made-itJay recently wrote an article for YES! Magazine: https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/pleasure/2022/05/18/drugs-better-policy-help-reduce-overdosesLeave us a message for a chance to be played on the show and win a CYS schwag pack: https://podinbox.com/CYSToday's Good Egg: Support the birthday fundraiser and buy some merch!Looking for someone to wow your audience now that the world is reopening? My speaking calendar is open! If you're interested in bringing me to your campus, your community group, your organization or any other location to speak about Mental Health, Substance Misuse & Recovery, or Drug Use & Policy, reach out to me at Info@jayShifman.com. Tank Tops are in! You can see what they look like on the website (thanks to Jay's wife for modeling the women's cut). Reach out through the website to order. If you're looking for something a little less expensive, magnets are in too! Check them out on the website or Instagram. Patreon supporters get a discount so join Patreon!But that's not all! You can now buy even more merch! Check out our store on Teepublic at https://www.teepublic.com/stores/choose-your-struggle?ref_id=24308 for shirts, mugs, stickers, phone cases, baby onesies and much, much more!Support the Podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ChooseYourStruggle Leave us an audio message to share feedback and have a chance to be played on the show: https://podinbox.com/CYS Review the Podcast: https://ReviewThisPodcast.com/Choose-Your-Struggle.Support the Podcast, a different way: https://podhero.com/401017-ikv.Learn more about the Shameless Podcast Network: https://www.shamelessnetwork.com/ Our Partner Bookshop (Support Local Book Stores and the Podcast in the Process!): https://bookshop.org/shop/CYS Our Partner Road Runner (Use Code CYS for 10% off): www.roadrunnerc ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Hillary and Tina cover AIDS activist Larry Kramer and anti-gay activist George Rekers. Hillary's Story Larry Kramer started his career as a writer. BUT when the government failed to act, he sounded the alarm on the AIDS crisis. Tina's Story George Rekers made a name for himself through his controversial theories and studies on homosexuality. BUT when he returns from vacation in 2010 with a young man in tow, he's got some explaining to do. Hillary's Story ACT UP "Larry--The WORD" (https://actupny.com/post-your-remembrances-of-larry-kramer/)--by Timothy Lunceford-Stevens Biography Larry Kramer Captured His Seemingly Hopeless Fight for HIV/AIDS Victims in 'The Normal Heart' (https://www.biography.com/news/larry-kramer-the-normal-heart)--by Rachel Chang Britannica Larry Kramer (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Larry-Kramer) Brooklyn Museum In Conversation: Larry Kramer and Jonathan Katz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avITb-TZWOQ)--via YouTube History AIDS activists unfurl a giant condom over Senator Jesse Helms' home (https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/aids-activists-unfurl-giant-condom-senator-jesse-helms-home-act-up) Los Angeles Times Letters to the Editor: Larry Kramer, the gay community's ‘Old Testament figure wrapped in righteous fury' (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-02/larry-kramer-the-gay-communitys-old-testament-prophet)--by Steve Martin Making Gay History Larry Kramer (https://makinggayhistory.com/podcast/larry-kramer/) The New Yorker The Benevolent Rage of Larry Kramer--by Michael Specter (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/the-benevolent-rage-of-larry-kramer) The New York Times Larry Kramer, Playwright and Outspoken AIDS Activist, Dies at 84 (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/us/larry-kramer-dead.html)--by Daniel Lewis NPR Larry Kramer, Pioneering AIDS Activist And Writer, Dies At 84 (https://www.npr.org/2020/05/27/512714500/larry-kramer-pioneering-aids-activist-and-writer-dies-at-84) Vanity Fair In One of His Final Interviews Larry Kramer, 84 and Infirm, Still Roared (https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/05/in-one-of-his-final-interviews-larry-kramer-still-roared)--by Michael Shnayerson Wikimedia Larry Kramer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Kramer) Photos Larry Kramer (https://makinggayhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/KRAMER-1-1989-Ph-Robert-Giard-NYPL.jpg)--by Robert Giard, via Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs at NYPL Larry Kramer at podium (https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/7743f1a/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2048x1270+0+0/resize/840x521!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F32%2F04%2F135df13ef3b9e68582093eca5bdc%2Fla-ca-cm-larry-kramer-20150628-002)--by Ellen Shub/HBO via Los Angeles Times Condom on Jesse Helms Home (https://scontent-mia3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t31.18172-8/14231223_894749393990379_557753539184204595_o.jpg?_nc_cat=102&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=9267fe&_nc_ohc=fdqSHeAMDAsAX-L8DQq&_nc_ht=scontent-mia3-2.xx&oh=00_AT_gCrElBXPrfENXFBbwbycWCJWux-m4lq3YVhEVyK54vA&oe=62D32155)--via LGBT_History Facebook Page Tina's Story ACLU HOWARD V. ARKANSAS - GEORGE REKERS FACT SHEET (https://www.aclu.org/other/howard-v-arkansas-george-rekers-fact-sheet) The Advocate Escort Revealed in Rekers Scandal (https://www.advocate.com/news/daily-news/2010/05/05/escort-rekers-scandal-revealed) BuzzFeed News George Alan Rekers' Rent-Boy Scandal (https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/expresident/george-alan-rekers-rent-boy-scandal)--by Jack Shepherd CNN Reporters find tragic story amid embarrassing scandal (http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/08/rekers.sissy.boy.experiment/index.html)--By Penn Bullock and Brandon K. Thorp Therapy to change 'feminine' boy created a troubled man, family says (http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/07/sissy.boy.experiment/)--by Scott Bronstein and Jessi Joseph Constantine Report Second "Rent Boy" Emerges in Prof. George Rekers (Family Research Council) Gay Sex Scandal (https://constantinereport.com/second-rent-boy-emerges-in-prof-george-rekers-family-research-council-gay-sex-scandal/) Daily News Anti-gay activist, Christian minister George Rekers caught in gay escort scandal resigns from NARTH (https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/anti-gay-activist-christian-minister-george-rekers-caught-gay-escort-scandal-resigns-narth-article-1.449343)--By Michael Sheridan Dangerous Minds DR. GEORGE REKERS: AMERICAN MENGELE? (https://dangerousminds.net/comments/dr._george_rekers_american_mengele) Equality Florida Bill McCollum Still Paying for George Rekers (https://www.eqfl.org/how-rent-boy-scandal-brought-down-far-right-favorite) Falls Church News Press George Rekers Delusional Downfall Is A Familiar Tale (https://www.fcnp.com/2010/05/06/george-rekers-delusional-downfall-is-a-familiar-tale/)--by Wayne Besen GLADD "Ex-gay" group NARTH rebrands with dangerous mission (https://www.glaad.org/blog/ex-gay-group-narth-rebrands-dangerous-mission)--by By Joeli Katz Go Pride Chicago George Rekers steps down from ex-gay board (https://chicago.gopride.com/news/article.cfm/articleid/10574644) Miami New Times Christian right leader George Rekers takes vacation with "rent boy" (https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/christian-right-leader-george-rekers-takes-vacation-with-rent-boy-6377933)--by PENN BULLOCK AND BRANDON K. THORP The New York Times Scandal Stirs Legal Questions in Anti-Gay Cases (https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/us/19rekers.html)--by John Schwartz Newsweek Left Wing: When Gay Bashers Are Gay, Why Do People Just Mock and Turn Away? (https://www.newsweek.com/left-wing-when-gay-bashers-are-gay-why-do-people-just-mock-and-turn-away-214204)--BY EVE CONANT PFLAG Ex-Gay Leader's Male Escort: Actually, We Did Have Sex (https://pflag.com/focus-on-family-leader-scandal/)--by Rachel Slajda Queerty The Gay Rentboy Scandal That Should Sink Bigot Baptist Minister George Alan Rekers (https://www.queerty.com/the-gay-rentboy-scandal-that-should-sink-bigot-baptist-minister-george-alan-rekers-20100504) Sacramento Post (Gay Escort Scandal) George Rekers (a gay Tiger Woods?) Second Man has come forward (https://sacratomatovillepost.com/2010/05/11/gay-escort-scandal-george-rekers-a-gay-tiger-woods-second-man-has-come-forward/) Sun Sentinel Male escort says he gave 'sexual' massages to anti-gay leader (https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-2010-05-08-mi-rentboy-escort-i-gave-sexual-massa20100508-story.html)--By Steve Rothaus and The Miami Herald Think Progress How The Rekers ‘Rent Boy' Scandal Could Undermine Prop. 8 Supporters' Court Battle (https://archive.thinkprogress.org/how-the-rekers-rent-boy-scandal-could-undermine-prop-8-supporters-court-battle-3099987a55db/)--by AMANDA TERKEL Towleroad Florida AG Bill McCollum Paid George ‘Rentboy' Rekers $87,000 to Be Star Witness for State's Gay Adoption Ban (https://www.towleroad.com/2010/05/florida-ag-bill-mccollum-paid-george-rentboy-rekers-87000-to-be-star-witness-for-states-adoption-ban/)--by Andy Towle The Week Rekers rentboy scandal: The fallout continues (https://theweek.com/articles/494639/rekers-rentboy-scandal-fallout-continues) Wikipedia George Rekers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Rekers) Howard v. Arkansas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_v._Arkansas#:~:text=Howard%2C%20367%20Ark.,housemates%20from%20being%20foster%20parents.) Photos George Rekers (https://www.advocate.com/sites/default/files/2012/04/25/roman_rekersx390.jpg)--screenshot via The Advocate Jo-Vanni Roman (https://www.advocate.com/sites/default/files/2012/04/25/roman_rekersx390.jpg)--screenshot via The Advocate Rekers caught at airport (http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2011/images/06/08/t1larg.rekers.thorp.jpg)--via CNN

Hey film buds,Last week began Pride Month. It is a special time of year designed to promote a sense of community, celebrate love, and remember the hard work and loss that went into making a world more open and accepting of the LGBTQIA+ community. Introduction - 22:02Opening ChatMovies, TV, and HIV/AIDSPart of the struggle that has defined the activism and awareness of the Gay community is undoubtedly the HIV/AIDS crisis. So, as a part of our Pride celebration we'll be reviewing a film that puts the AIDS crisis at the center of the discussion. HIV/AIDS History - 46:45The Normal Heart is an adaption of the play by Larry Kramer, directed for television by Ryan Murphy. The HBO movie from 2014 stars Mark Ruffalo as Ned Weeks, a stand-in for Kramer, as the AIDS epidemic starts to claim the lives of his friends, partners, and even friendly rivals. We review and discuss the film, how it portrayed the history, and more.The Normal Heart - 24:37History and BackgroundReview and DiscussionTo end the episode we'll discuss What We're Watching. Our big new movie recently was Top Gun: Maverick, which we briefly discuss. For our final review and discussion we share our thoughts on the new Disney+ series, Obi-Wan. End of Show - 1:08:14What We're WatchingTop Gun: MaverickObi-WanIf you haven't already, be sure to check out last week's episode. Also, make sure to join us next week when we discuss Drag performance and the Australian outback. Thanks y'all,The BudsTotal Runtime - 1:17:12Be a Friend to the Film Buds:thefilmbuds.comThe Buds on PatreonThe Buds on bandcamp@filmbuds on Twitter@thefilmbudspodcast on InstagramPaul's Letterboxd

Hey film buds,Last week began Pride Month. It is a special time of year designed to promote a sense of community, celebrate love, and remember the hard work and loss that went into making a world more open and accepting of the LGBTQIA+ community. Introduction - 22:02Opening ChatMovies, TV, and HIV/AIDSPart of the struggle that has defined the activism and awareness of the Gay community is undoubtedly the HIV/AIDS crisis. So, as a part of our Pride celebration we'll be reviewing a film that puts the AIDS crisis at the center of the discussion. HIV/AIDS History - 46:45The Normal Heart is an adaption of the play by Larry Kramer, directed for television by Ryan Murphy. The HBO movie from 2014 stars Mark Ruffalo as Ned Weeks, a stand-in for Kramer, as the AIDS epidemic starts to claim the lives of his friends, partners, and even friendly rivals. We review and discuss the film, how it portrayed the history, and more.The Normal Heart - 24:37History and BackgroundReview and DiscussionTo end the episode we'll discuss What We're Watching. Our big new movie recently was Top Gun: Maverick, which we briefly discuss. For our final review and discussion we share our thoughts on the new Disney+ series, Obi-Wan. End of Show - 1:08:14What We're WatchingTop Gun: MaverickObi-WanIf you haven't already, be sure to check out last week's episode. Also, make sure to join us next week when we discuss Drag performance and the Australian outback. Thanks y'all,The BudsTotal Runtime - 1:17:12Be a Friend to the Film Buds:thefilmbuds.comThe Buds on PatreonThe Buds on bandcamp@filmbuds on Twitter@thefilmbudspodcast on InstagramPaul's Letterboxd

Hey film buds,Last week began Pride Month. It is a special time of year designed to promote a sense of community, celebrate love, and remember the hard work and loss that went into making a world more open and accepting of the LGBTQIA+ community. Introduction - 22:02Opening ChatMovies, TV, and HIV/AIDSPart of the struggle that has defined the activism and awareness of the Gay community is undoubtedly the HIV/AIDS crisis. So, as a part of our Pride celebration we'll be reviewing a film that puts the AIDS crisis at the center of the discussion. HIV/AIDS History - 46:45The Normal Heart is an adaption of the play by Larry Kramer, directed for television by Ryan Murphy. The HBO movie from 2014 stars Mark Ruffalo as Ned Weeks, a stand-in for Kramer, as the AIDS epidemic starts to claim the lives of his friends, partners, and even friendly rivals. We review and discuss the film, how it portrayed the history, and more.The Normal Heart - 24:37History and BackgroundReview and DiscussionTo end the episode we'll discuss What We're Watching. Our big new movie recently was Top Gun: Maverick, which we briefly discuss. For our final review and discussion we share our thoughts on the new Disney+ series, Obi-Wan. End of Show - 1:08:14What We're WatchingTop Gun: MaverickObi-WanIf you haven't already, be sure to check out last week's episode. Also, make sure to join us next week when we discuss Drag performance and the Australian outback. Thanks y'all,The BudsTotal Runtime - 1:17:12Be a Friend to the Film Buds:thefilmbuds.comThe Buds on PatreonThe Buds on bandcamp@filmbuds on Twitter@thefilmbudspodcast on InstagramPaul's Letterboxd

David is a political writer and former attorney who took on high-profile cases for religious liberty. He was also a major in the Army Reserve who served in Iraq, and before that he served as president of FIRE, the campus free-speech group. David now writes for The Dispatch and The Atlantic, and his latest book is Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. Last summer he wrote this wonderful review of my essay collection, Out On A Limb, but this is the first time we’ve spoken.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above. For two clips of my convo with David — on how many political Christians completely miss the point of Jesus, and on the “God gap” within the Democratic coalition — head over to our YouTube page.That convo is a good complement to our January episode with Christopher Rufo (the two have tussled before), so we just transcribed Rufo’s episode in full. Here’s a reminder of his stance on CRT in the schools:Starting around the 30-minute mark in the new episode, David and I discuss the tricky defense of liberalism in the face of both CRT curriculum and anti-CRT bills. We also grapple with the corrosive effects of Twitter and, in particular, the commentary surrounding the racist massacre in Buffalo this week. On that note, a reader writes:I am a member of a mainline Christian denomination and parent of young children. My personal and professional experience of social media is centered on connections with clergy colleagues and active church members attached to a wide variety of Christian denominations. When news of the racially motivated shooting in Buffalo broke, my social media relationships immediately shifted to a flurry of outrage, comments about the pox of racism built into the American way, and pithy memes noting that the root problem of all that ails us is white supremacy.For example, one friend wrote in response to the Buffalo shooting, “The root cause of gun violence is white supremacy. We will not be safe from gun violence until we end white supremacy. White fam, we are the ones who can end white supremacy. It is on us.” Presiding Bishop Michael Curry of the Episcopal Church released a statement decrying the racism behind the shooting. Members of my left-leaning church have asked and encouraged me to preach from the pulpit about the evils of white supremacy and white fragility, especially now in light of the Buffalo shooting. However, I did not hear a thing from these same people or religious bodies following the racially motivated shooting by Frank James on the NYC subway last month. Mr. James has been indicted on federal terror charges after shooting ten people. Were there no official prayers for victims and to end racial violence from religious bodies because no one ultimately died in the subway shooting? Why were there no tweets, memes, or impassioned calls to “do better” after such a horrific, calculated attack? The silence after that racially motivated shooting compared to the outcry after this month’s racially motivated shooting is noteworthy. And essential to the CRT worldview. Racism is unique to white people. Another sign of our racialized culture war comes from this listener:In your episode with Douglas Murray, you mentioned that you had to explain to someone how white people did not invent racism. I serve at the school board in Manhattan and we had the same discussion at our last meeting. The district is pushing a book called “Our Skin” to teach elementary kids how white people invented racism. Money quote:“A long time ago, way before you were born, a group of white people made up an idea called race. They sorted people by skin color and said that white people were better, smarter, prettier, and that they deserve more than everybody else,” the book declares.Here’s how Murray addresses the canard that white people invented racism:On a lighter note, here’s a fan of last week’s episode with Tina Brown:In your conversation about the Queen’s inscrutable nature and unceasing impartiality, you forget one spectacular lapse into utter bias: the 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty!Pierre Brassard, a Quebec disc jockey, called Buckingham Palace impersonating the (then) Canadian PM Jean Chretien begging her to support the NO side and, astonishingly, got through to Queen Elizabeth! In the conversation, broadcast live in Montreal, she actually said, “It sounds as though the referendum may go the wrong (!) way...”. She said many other things that were blatantly against Quebec separating and was willing to make a public statement. Here’s the audio (and pardon Elizabeth R’s surprisingly bad French!): While I voted Non and thought the hoax was screamingly hilarious, this referendum was about the self-determination of a nation and she was hardly a glowing example of non-interference and impartiality. Quebec separatists were apoplectic. She wouldn’t even make a clear declaration in favour of the “No” side in the Scottish referendum! Ah, well ... even Captain Kirk broke the prime directive 33 times. Self-determination must be overrated. Here’s Tina on why the best British monarchs tend to be women:Another fan of the episode writes:So I’m a stereotypical NPR-listening, NYT-reading, Anglophilic liberal, happy to watch whatever B-grade pablum PBS airs on Sunday nights, as long as it has a British accent. So of course I fell in love with Downton Abbey. Part of my stereotypical outlook is holding a certain condescension toward the lower-class examples of American culture — you’d never catch me watching a soap opera, for example. But somewhere in the last season of Downton Abbey, it hit me full-on that the show is just a soap opera for snobs. That realization was a nice, bright, uncomfortable look in the mirror. What a hypocrite I am! That said, I can’t wait for the new Downton Abbey movie that opens this week:On the subject of Americans and their relationship with the British monarchy that you and Tina Brown discussed, to me it isn’t very complicated. It’s the embodiment of our cultural heritage, so it represents roots and stability in our land that values change and progress. And the monarchy is sacramental — another quality our society lacks, and which we’ve projected onto the office of the president as compensation. Toggling from listeners to readers, one of the latter writes:I have been thinking a lot about your May 6 column on the SCOTUS leak (“How Dare They!”) and the following week’s large number of reader responses to it. First, I want to say that, although I’m fiercely pro-choice, your column was strongly persuasive and helped me to think about Roe v Wade in a very different way. I love this about the Dish — the way you introduce complexity and nuance to issues that are polarizing and thus typically presented in stark black-and-white terms. But there is one potential detail of your argument that I continue to struggle with. While I accept that, in a liberal society, such issues as abortion should be a matter of debate and resolution via the popular voice, in practice they rarely are — because of the reality of our political system. Because of our two-party system and the primary elections that determine candidacy, most moderate, centrist voters simply do not have a choice to exercise their opinion on a wide variety of issues. They cannot vote individually on issues of substance, in an a la carte fashion. They are forced to accept a homogenous party platform that, in toto, represents the least worst of two extremes. For example, if I am a pro-choice moderate conservative who supports free markets, minimal government regulation, and low taxation, and is concerned about wokeness and CRT, my only choice to cast a vote in support of access to abortion is to vote for a candidate who is antagonistic to these other issues of import to me. You cite statistics in your column indicating broad support among Republicans for a moderate stance on abortion. Yet, I would argue that relatively few of these voters are going to voice that support by voting for a Democratic candidate — especially a far-left candidate — even if this means voting for the far-right opponent. This, then, is interpreted by the GOP as proof that their constituency supports the extreme view held by the majority of the GOP candidates. If we had a center party, I may be more optimistic in sharing your view of things. But as it stands, I feel like our choice is no choice at all.I feel you. But this is unavoidable in a democracy with political parties and winner-takes-all systems. Another reader has a few more laments:I believe anti-abortion-rights activists have not fully considered the consequences of how eliminating legal abortion will impact families. It is almost certain that the rate of child poverty in America will increase if a ban on abortion takes place.  Most of the states which want to ban abortion also have small child-welfare programs. That will result in more children being born into poor economic circumstances.Another thing that will probably happen is an increase in crime. The crime rate in the US has been falling since the early ‘90s, when kids born after Roe first started reaching adulthood. There is a clear link between kids being neglected and unwanted and then turning to crime. This was documented in the book Freakonomics.I believe the pro-choice side will win this debate. But perhaps it will only win when the full, horrifying consequences of banning all abortions — such as in the Oklahoma bill just passed — comes into focus. This next reader goes meta:In your otherwise excellent compilation of reader thoughts about Roe, you had one response I want to quibble with. After quoting one reader, you wrote: “Oh please. This next reader gets specific:” — and then went on with the next quote.I don’t recall what the first reader said, and it doesn’t matter because your response was inappropriate no matter what was said. If you think the reader’s argument has no merit, omit the comment. If you have a rebuttal to the reader’s argument, offer it. Even if you disagree with the reader but lack the time or energy to formulate a proper response, that’s fine too: Just print the comment with no response.What’s not OK, ever, is to reply with just a snarky dismissal and no further comment. That’s rude to the reader, and it makes you look like a dick.That whole big collection of reader dissents was compiled and edited by my colleague, Chris, who does that every week to hold my feet to the fire. I don’t censor the reader criticism he offers — so forgive me the occasional harrumph. Another reader switches topics:I read these two excerpts in your weekly money quotes:“There were also homosexual women at the Pines, but they were, or seemed to be, far fewer in number. Nor, except for a marked tendency to hang out in the company of large and usually ferocious dogs, were they instantly recognizable as the men were,” - Midge Decter, who died the week, on Fire Island in the summer of 1980.“Well, if I were a dyke and a pair of Podhoretzes came waddling toward me on the beach, copies of Leviticus and Freud in hand, I’d get in touch with the nearest Alsatian dealer pronto,” - Gore Vidal, responding to Midge.I had known about Decter’s “The Boys on the Beach” essay for decades, maybe since the late ‘80s, but I had never read it — until a few months ago. I am 66 years old, was practically always out, loved to read all the gay literature, and I have to say, that essay got the pulse of ‘70s gay life and society better than Edmund White (his “States of Desire” was published in 1980 and I still have my copy) or any other commentator I know of, with the exception of Randy Shilts’s “And the Band Played On.”Decter had gay acquaintances, friends, and frenemies, and she saw aspects of gay life with a beady-eyed sharpness and skepticism I wish more of us had had back then. I remember when I officially came out in 1974 at 18, met a couple of good-looking guys in their late 20s/early 30s who, like the vast majority of gay men, talked about sex all the time, with a greater intensity than straight guys I knew. So I asked them how many guys they had been to bed with and they said maybe 500 or 600. Asked them if they were afraid of getting diseases, and they said “no” because they just went to the public health clinic to get a shot. And right there, I sensed that at some point, there would be a gay healthcare catastrophe. I was not the only who had that sense, but it was very censored in the community.I tend to agree about Decter’s accuracy and perception, however laced it was with disgust. It’s a riveting piece — proof that sometimes being alien to a subculture makes you a better observer of it. She and Larry Kramer were essentially on the same page when it came to gay male culture in the 1970s. And yes, the omens were there. And now there’s monkeypox, which seems as if it might have found the same transmission route as HIV. Gulp.Lastly, because we ran out of room this week in the main Dish for the new VFYW contest photo (otherwise the email version would get cut short), here ya go:Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing! Get full access to The Weekly Dish at andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe