Race and Social Justice in South Park

South Park, begun in 1997 by writer-directors Trey Parker and Matt Stone, is one of the most successful and highly acclaimed sitcom series today. In 1999 the creators released a popular South Park feature film, and there have been a variety of video games based on the series. It is worth examining the social and political messages of such a major cultural phenomenon, particularly around what are becoming the most prominent issues today – those of race and “social justice.”

The most recent South Park games are two similar computer RPGs, developed under the creative control of Parker and Stone and released in 2014 and 2017. Both were very well-received, and the most recent title, South Park: The Fractured But Whole, is worth analyzing as the latest major installment in the South Park franchise.

The Fractured But Whole, like its predecessor The Stick of Truth, takes place in the town of South Park and features characters from the television series. Lampooning narcissism is one one of the main themes of the show, and one of the main characters is Eric Cartman, an obese and manipulative bully with a grandiose view of himself. In the latest game, Cartman positions himself as a daring crimefighter called The Coon, who along with his young superhero allies aims to rescue a missing cat named Scrambles. The hero, known simply as New Kid, completes a wide variety of quests while fighting alternately alongside Cartman’s team and a rival group of superheroes.

Race becomes an issue at the very beginning of the game when the player chooses their difficulty level. This is indicated by skin color; choosing a darker color means you will acquire less money and some characters will speak to you differently. However, the most important aspect of game difficulty is combat, and the player can change this independently at any point in the game. The player can also change his skin tone at will after a certain point in the story. Race is thus not as much of a handicap as it initially appears; it is possible that this was a hint by the developers about the exaggerated outrage over “racism” in society.

One of the few major Black characters in the television series or the game goes by the name of Token Black. The name is a reference to “tokenism,” the practice of including a few non-Whites to superficially demonstrate an “inclusive” spirit. The term is generally used to criticize Whites for not making sufficient efforts at racial integration in the eyes of minority activists. Token is surely a token in this sense; he is the only Black student at South Park Elementary and shows no apparent cultural differences with the White students. He speaks flawless white English, has no criminal tendencies, and his family is wealthier than any of the families of his White peers. To their credit, the producers do not imply that such assimilation into polite society is the norm for Blacks; there are few other Black characters in the game, and they include a prostitute/stripper and a pimp.

Unfortunately, the game reflects the stereotype that police are racially biased against non-Whites, arresting or attacking them for little or no reason. The player takes an assignment from the police to break into Token’s house and assault his father, as they falsely allege he is a drug kingpin. In one room in the police station, the player can see a bar graph on the wall depicting categories of arrests. Most of them are for petty offenses, another reads “racial profiling,” and the largest bar is for “no reason.”

These “racists” attempt to deny at least twice that they are prejudiced, only to be proven wrong by immediate circumstances. At one point the lead detective Sergeant Yates attempts to explain to the children that although they may be hearing things in the news about police being “racist and bigoted,” they have nothing to worry about. He is interrupted by another officer yelling “spook” and firing his weapon, barely missing Token.

In another scene the children come upon a cult devoted to Shub-Niggurath, a horrible deity from H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories. The cult members are policemen, led by Sergeant Yates. Yates denies being “racist,” even trying to deny that H. P. Lovecraft was racist before another cultist corrects him, but admits that they have been feeding the Blacks they arrest to the hungry creature. They explain that she only likes dark meat. The only way to defeat the monster is to feed the White officers to her; this “anti-racist” act makes her ill to the point of death.

To its credit, the game does mock social justice activists in the character of PC Principal. The new principal of South Park Elementary was introduced in the television series as a macho bodybuilder who verbally and physically abuses students while reciting social justice dogma. He is part of a social justice fraternity whose members drink heavily and engage in casual sex; it is suggested that this is the true aim behind their “woke” rhetoric.

The player in The Fractured But Whole receives training from PC Principal on microaggressions – seemingly innocuous statements which are creatively misinterpreted as “bigoted” insults. The principal gives the example of “Mr. Yamashiro is actually a good driver;” it implies that other Asian Americans are not good drivers, and “the use of Mr. is offensive to persons of third gender.” PC Principal trains the hero to respond to microaggressions in combat with an extra attack, which he refers to as “[doing] PC work.” This reinforces the idea that “social justice” is only a rationalization for antisocial impulses.

Social justice fanaticism is also lampooned when it comes to transgenderism. In one scene, the hero goes to the guidance counselor’s office and is given the option to choose his gender. When he indicates that he identifies with the gender he was born with, Mr. Mackey feels the need to call his parents. The counselor is obviously concerned and informs them that “you don’t always need to go with the first hand you’re dealt.”

Matt Stone’s mother is Jewish, which gives South Park more leeway to mock Jews than gentiles would have. Jews were portrayed in the earlier 2014 game as a separate class of hero, alongside fighter, mage and thief. The Jew in this context parodies a common mentality among real-world Jews – when they are seriously injured or suffering from various temporary negative conditions in combat, their attacks become more powerful. The implication is that they gain strength from a sense of victimization, and even that they depend on victimhood to prevail in conflict.

Kyle Broflovski, one of the main characters, is Jewish and has a stereotypically hysterical mother named Sheila. In the present game, he is unhappy to learn that his even more Jewish cousin Kyle Schwartz is visiting. Schwartz has terrible eyesight along with numerous imagined health problems and is constantly complaining in a very unpleasant tone of voice. After being defeated in two battles, he promises to help the hero and his associates, and he repeatedly appears in combat, but always finds a reason to flee almost immediately.

Mexicans are used in combat in a manner which emphasizes that they are hapless servants exploited by unfeeling Whites. Butters takes on the persona of the evil Professor Chaos and the hero is required to defeat both him and his accomplice General Disarray in battle. He begins one such encounter in an enormous “machine” constructed out of Mexicans wrapped in tinfoil. Other battles involve two Mexicans in a cardboard box serving as an unconvincing “robot,” or simply unenthusiastic “minions” who comment that they are only doing this for the money. In either case they speak largely in Spanish to emphasize their alienation from their employer and the wider society. The minions are obviously expendable; Professor Chaos can summon an unlimited number of them until he himself is defeated.

Of course, this characterization does not necessarily mean sympathy for further immigration from Mexico; if the immigrants are in such an uncomfortable condition here, it is no great kindness to let more of them in. But both the show and the game mock critics of immigration as ignorant “rednecks” who cannot even properly pronounce the phrase “they took our jobs.” A gang of such people attack the hero when they find that Butters, at that point his ally, has been employing immigrant minions.

The game makes an interesting point about the paranoia and denial of personal responsibility which is so rampant today, both among social justice activists and in the wider society. Cartman directs a conspiracy to add cat urine, which in the South Park universe has mind-altering qualities, to the local supplies of drugs and alcohol. His intention is to increase crime in the city so that he can blame this on the current mayor and be elected mayor himself. The hero’s parents, who use marijuana and alcohol heavily, are constantly in conflict with each other throughout the game, for which they partly blame one another’s substance abuse. But at the end of the story, Cartman’s plot is revealed and the townspeople resolve to get “clean drugs and alcohol from the next town over,” after which the feuding parents reconcile. The sarcastic implication is that it is not drug and alcohol abuse which cause problems in people’s lives, nor the unhealthy mindset behind these behaviors, but simply a malicious conspiracy beyond their control.

Although it deserves credit for criticizing the contemporary extremes of social justice fanaticism, the latest South Park game does not entirely reject the mindset behind it. It supports the “woke” stereotype that Whites – both police and clownish “redneck” hooligans – have a mindless hatred for non-Whites and immigrants. Parker and Stone have described their views as “middle of the road,” and if this is indeed the midpoint in the political spectrum, we have a long way to go before a sane view on race becomes the norm.

Jewish Themes in The Graduate (1967)

The 1967 film The Graduate was a landmark in Jewish cultural subversion (see also Edmund Connelly’s treatment). By the time of the film’s release, Jewish film-makers in Hollywood were becoming more explicit in their antipathy for White Americans and their culture, and this was increasingly reflected in their output. In 1963, the Jewish producer Larry Turman came across the 24-year-old Californian Charles Webb’s novel The Graduate which, he claimed, “had an emotional coloration for me like [the Jewish playwright] Harold Pinter. The book was funny, but it made you nervous at the same time.”[1]

In his novel, Webb looks back in anger at his gilded California lifestyle as the son of a Pasadena cardiologist. His semi-autobiographical protagonist, Benjamin Braddock, a 20-year-old recent graduate from an East Coast college, returns to his Californian home for a long, hot summer over the course of which he stumbles into a passionless affair with the much older Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father’s business partner. Braddock becomes infatuated with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine who reciprocates his feelings but rebuffs him after learning of his relationship with her mother. Mrs. Robinson sends Elaine off to college at UC Berkeley, where she becomes engaged to her classmate Carl Smith. A desperate Benjamin crashes their wedding and elopes with Elaine to the great distress of her family.

Turman bought the rights to the book for $1,000 and sent it unsolicited to Jewish director Mike Nichols (born Mikhail Peschkowsky) who signed on to the project. Turman’s search for financing led him to Jewish film mogul Joseph E. Levine—“the schlockmeister of the world”—who put up $3 million. Turman’s impulse purchase of the rights led to one of the most consequential films ever. Released in December 1967, The Graduate grossed almost $105 million (equivalent to almost $1 billion today), the third-highest ever at the time, and was nominated for seven Academy Awards including best picture and acting nods for stars Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross, plus an Oscar victory for director Nichols. The Graduate has since become one of the most referenced films in the popular culture lexicon of the Western world.

Nichols assigned Jewish screenwriter Buck Henry (born Henry Zuckerman), then writing for the TV spy spoof Get Smart, as screenwriter. Henry ended up sharing writing credits with the non-Jewish Calder Willingham who had written a rejected first script. Songs by the Jewish duo Simon and Garfunkel were used for the soundtrack. Given the many Jews involved in the film’s production, it’s hardly surprising that Jewish sensibilities and ideological fixations pervade the final product.

The Graduate was not meant to read Jewish in the novel: the non-Jewish Charles Webb wrote the 1963 novel when he was just out of Williams College, which at the time is alleged to have been “notoriously anti-Semitic, even at the administrative level.”[2] In the hands of director Mike Nichols, however, the story became a scathing critique of bourgeois WASP American culture and the oppressive burden it purportedly imposed on young Americans. Nichols employs two recurrent visual metaphors to symbolize this oppressive culture: black-and-white stripes and water. The former representing prison bars confining Benjamin, while the latter (the numerous scenes referencing pools, aquariums, Scuba diving and rain) are said to symbolize the oppressive weight of societal expectation. The “troubled water” theme recurs throughout the film, with Benjamin floundering in a toxic social order where “he is submerged, underwater, trapped,” his world appearing “claustrophobically enclosed like a fish in a small water tank.”[3]

Nichols’ prison bar metaphor

The film resonated with a generation of young people concerned, as recent college graduate Benjamin Braddock is, about their place in the adult world they were reluctantly entering. Beverly Gray, author of the 2017 book Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How “The Graduate” Became the Touchstone of a Generation, claims the film “strikes me as having a Jewish soul.” Laurie Shapiro, writing for the Forward, agrees, observing that “Despite the All-American storyline of the novel, The Graduate, the film version has always signaled a very Jewish sensibility to me, starting with Dustin Hoffman oddly cast in the lead as super-Waspy Connecticut kid Benjamin Braddock.” Referring to its Jewish director Mike Nichols, Gray notes how:

The film seems to me Jewish in a social sense, in terms of the Jewish outsider, which is certainly the way Mike Nichols viewed himself. Nichols was feeling a bit askew among the comforts of bourgeois America. It’s important to remember Nichols as a very young refugee from Nazi Germany. He never really got over the experience of fleeing Berlin at age 7. I’d go on to add that Nichols has made the following comment: “Dustin has always said that Benjamin is a walking surfboard. And that’s what he was in the book, in the original conception. But I kept looking and looking for an actor until I found Dustin, who is the opposite, who’s a short, dark, Jewish, anomalous presence, which is how I experience myself.” It’s a provocative statement, because Nichols was neither short nor dark, though clearly he felt a strong inner discomfort about the way he presented himself to the world. He certainly identified with the angst felt by Benjamin Braddock.[4] 

The perennial theme of Jewish alienation from a WASP-dominated mainstream American society played an important role in how the character of Benjamin Braddock—and the entire film—were conceived by Nichols—though this only became fully apparent to him after the film had been made. “My unconscious was making this movie,” Nichols later recalled. “It took me years before I got what I had been doing all along—that I was turning Benjamin into a Jew. I didn’t get it until I saw this hilarious issue of MAD magazine after the movie came out, in which the character of Dustin says to the character of Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Mom, how come I’m Jewish and you and Dad aren’t?’ And I asked myself the same question, and the answer was fairly embarrassing and fairly obvious: Who was the Jew among the goyim? And who was forever a visitor in a strange land?”[5]

It was with his casting of Benjamin Braddock, described in the book as a tall, blonde, and athletic, that Nichols took his biggest risk. Unable to resist the urge to engage in Jewish ethnic networking, he passed over Robert Redford for an unheralded, diminutive 29-year-old Jew, Dustin Hoffman. Nichols cast Hoffman, “despite the fact that he was virtually unknown and looked nothing like the leading man described in the script, which called for a tall, blond track star, not a short, Jewish guy with a schnoz for the ages.”[6] Hoffman later recalled telling Nichols, “The character is five-eleven, a track star. … It feels like this is a dirty trick, sir.” The director replied, “You mean you’re Jewish, that’s why you don’t think you’re right. Maybe he’s Jewish inside.” Nichols claimed that casting Hoffman emphasized Benjamin’s alienation from the WASP middle class world around him and its oppressive expectations. For the Jewish director Steven Soderbergh, Nichol’s choice was “the seminal event in the defining of motion picture leading men in the last 50 years.”[7]

Director Mike Nichols on set with Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft

A number of early reviews of The Graduate described Hoffman as “ugly.” An article in Life magazine referred to him as “a swarthy Pinocchio,” and made humorous reference to his prominent nose. According to Gray, however, “What was important was the way young audiences embraced Hoffman, big nose and all. Suddenly it was okay not to look like Robert Redford and still play a romantic leading role.”[8] Hoffman’s anti-heroic character gave the green light for Hollywood to promote “the ethnic Jewish matinee idol and youth icon in the forms of George Segal, Elliot Gould, Richard Benjamin, Charles Grodin, and Gene Wilder.”[9] These Jewish romantic leads were invariably paired onscreen with beautiful non-Jewish actresses like Marsha Mason, Candice Bergen, and (in the case of Dustin Hoffman) blondes like Mia Farrow, Faye Dunaway, Susan George, and Meryl Streep. The new era was boon for Jewish actors, who, as Gray points out, suddenly

no longer had to fret about not resembling the WASP ideal, nor did they need to hide (as such stars as John Garfield and Kirk Douglas had done) behind anglicized names. The casting of Dustin Hoffman as The Graduate’s leading man was a shock to Hollywood, which had spent decades trying to sidestep the Judaic roots of its founders. But in the wake of The Graduate, young Jewish males were suddenly everywhere, and often they were playing characters with backgrounds similar to their own. This was the era that launched Richard Benjamin (Goodbye, Columbus, 1969), and Richard Dreyfuss (The Goodbye Girl, 1977), along with Grodin. It was all part of what film critic J. Hoberman, paying tribute to Elliott Gould in the Village Voice, wittily called the Jew Wave.[10]

While celebrating the “Jew Wave” inaugurated by Hoffman’s casting as Benjamin Braddock, Shapiro laments that Hollywood’s enthusiasm for casting Jews as romantic leads didn’t extend to Jewish women, who, she contends, “still struggle to be cast in a lead if they don’t look like Natalie Portman, Mina Kunis or (yes, she’s Jewish) Scarlett Johansson. Men can keep their original noses and surnames (Ben Stiller, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Adam Brody, Adam Levine) but Jewish women elect for plastic surgery to ‘correct’ what Hollywood execs like Harvey Weinstein deem ‘unfuckable’ looks, and then hide their names and heritage.” Shapiro also resents that some Jewish biopic female roles have been handed to non-Jews like Nicole Kidman (as Diane Arbus) and Felicity Jones (as Ruth Bader Ginsburg)—despite the existence of Jewish actresses that “meet or even surpass most people’s standard of beauty” like Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz, and Mila Kunis. This is largely, she insists, because “Hollywood seems to have never gotten over its infatuation with blondes, especially when paired with dark-haired men.”[11]

Hollywood did make efforts in the 1960s to promote Jewesses as romantic lead characters. The Jewish film historian Neal Gabler notes, for example, in his book Barbara Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity and Power, how, in the late sixties, Streisand was repeatedly cast by Hollywood studios who deliberately attempted to make her Jewish ethnicity part of her public appeal. Gray notes that “In the wake of her success, many young girls thought twice about requesting a nose job as a Sweet Sixteen gift. But I would argue that Streisand started no trend toward the acceptance of other leading ladies who defied the WASP standard of physical attractiveness.”[12]

Dustin Hoffman certainly defied the WASP standard of male physical attractiveness, and Nichols sympathized with the young actor’s view of himself as an alienated Jew in a gentile world, and Hoffman, in turn, was able to comprehend the role once “he caught Nichols and Henry’s vision of Benjamin as the ultimate outsider—not a part of the culture, but not a part of the counter-culture either.” Nichols and Henry envisioned the Braddock character as a “genetic throwback” among the “walking surfboards” of angular, blond vigor—the American WASP mainstream. Nichols wanted Hoffman to project an estrangement that began in the blood. Renata Adler, writing in The New York Times, was the first to openly state the reality of Benjamin’s Jewish identity—with the Jewish film critic J. Hoberman endorsing Adler’s observation, identifying Benjamin as an obvious “crypto-Jew” and “an example of an ascendant Jewishness” in Hollywood.[13]

Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock: “an example of ascendant Jewishness”

Hoffman won the role over Charles Grodin, another Jewish actor who was no model of conventional WASP good looks. On the morning of Hoffman’s screen test for the role, he was marched into the makeup chair, where experts worried over his thick eyebrows, muscular neck, and less-than-perfect features. Hoffman recalled Nichols fretting, “Can we do anything about his nose?” Two hours later, when he went before the camera alongside co-star Katharine Ross, matters got worse: “The idea that the director was connecting me with someone as beautiful as her, it became an even uglier joke. It was like a Jewish nightmare.” Trying to ease the tension between them, he pinched or patted Ross’s buttock (accounts differ), leaving her furious. Nor did his reading of the role of Benjamin run smoothly. Just before the film’s release, when Ross was asked about her first impression of Hoffman, she pulled no punches: “He looks about three feet tall, so dead serious, so humorless, so unkempt.” She remembered thinking “This is going to be a disaster.”[14]

While Benjamin Braddock might have been, according to Nichols, Jewish on the inside (and on the outside to the extent of his casting Hoffman), the Braddock and the Robinson families were supposed to be representative of WASP middle class America. Despite this, Jewish characterizations even crept into the portrayal of these characters, and Gray notes how

the film is basically Jewish in a Lenny Bruce sense: New York neurotics are all Jewish, whatever their ethnic and religious background. Interestingly, the two overtly New York characters in the movie, in terms of speech patterns, are Ben’s father and Mrs. Robinson. I can certainly see Mr. Braddock (played by William Daniel) as an upwardly mobile “Jewish” man, enjoying the fruits of his labors. And of course Mrs. Robinson is the very definition of neurotic. But her husband and daughter don’t seem in any way Jewish to me, despite their presence in a Beverly Hills mini-mansion of the type that Jews of that era favored and that I recognized all too well.[15]

As those who have seen the film know, Benjamin Braddock sleeps with Mrs. Robinson but loves her beautiful daughter, Elaine, who is disgusted when she learns what her mother and boyfriend have done. Elaine ends her relationship with Braddock and becomes engaged to Carl Smith, portrayed by the decidedly non-Jewish actor Brian Avery.

Carl Smith (Brian Avery) with Elaine (Katharine Ross)

Undaunted by Elaine’s rejection, Benjamin pursues Elaine and crashes her wedding. This scene, as conceived by Nichols, is laden with Jewish symbolism and socio-political fixations. Hoffman’s character invades the sanctity of the church (a metaphor for the Jewish infiltration of Western societies?) to take Elaine from Carl who is depicted as Braddock’s physical and ethnic opposite (a tall and blonde Nordic archetype). Benjamin uses Christianity’s most sacred symbol (a crucifix) as a weapon to fend off the wedding attendees’ attempts to stop this profane intrusion. He then thwarts their attempts to reclaim Elaine by jamming the crucifix into the door of the church, leaving them barricaded inside and allowing him to flee with Elaine (see lead photograph).

The wedding scene of The Graduate

Such overt anti-Christian imagery jarred with the film’s first audiences—but was only the start of Hollywood’s disparagement of Christianity, and seems tame by today’s standards. Such efforts culminated in depicting nuns in sexual roles. Notoriously, the opening scene of the pilot of Californication, a program starring and produced by the Jewish actor David Duchovny (whose father was a publicist for the American Jewish Committee), depicts a nun performing oral sex on Duchovny’s character Hank Moody in a church. This pornographic debasement of Christian symbols by Jews is a blatant way of defiling Christian culture.

The wedding scene in The Graduate is supposed to be a triumphant moment: two young people rebelling against and liberating themselves from the oppressive expectations of their parents and their pathogenic culture. The conclusion to The Graduate glorifies breaking away from familial, cultural (and implicitly ethnic) constraints in favor of individualism. The Graduate’s core theme can be broken down to a general societal and political defiance. In the first scene of the film, Benjamin rides to the left on an airport conveyor belt as everyone else accedes to the airport’s public announcement system’s request to “Please stay to the right.” The political symbolism is obvious.

The Graduate was made at a time when the New Left was ascendant in the United States, and when the ideas of Jewish intellectuals like Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse were displacing orthodox Marxism in leftist movements throughout the West. Indeed, Nichols’ film can be seen as a subversive exposition of ideas espoused by Marcuse in his seminal 1964 work One Dimensional Man. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Marcuse’s work was probably the most influential social theory of its day and enjoyed a wide readership. In One Dimensional Man, he argued that advanced industrial societies like the United States repress their populations by creating false needs via mass advertising, industrial management, and modes of thought which resulted in a “one dimensional” universe of thought and behavior which stifled people’s capacity for critical thought and oppositional behavior. Marcuse advocated what he called the “great refusal” as the only effective opposition to these all-encompassing methods of social control. He championed sexual and ethnic minorities and outsiders “to nourish oppositional thought and behavior.”[16]

A generation of young radicals took up Marcuse’s texts as “essential criticism of existing forms of thought and behavior,” and Marcuse himself identified with the New Left and defended their politics and activism. For Marcuse, the traditional European family structure served “to legitimate authoritarian institutions and practices” and predisposed individuals to “accept social authority.” Alongside fellow Frankfurt School intellectuals Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, he viewed the traditional Western family was an important institution “for the production of ‘authoritarian personalities’ who are inclined to submit to dominant authorities, however irrational.”[17]

Herbert Marcuse

There are also strong points of intersection between Marcuse’s ideas and those of Jewish post-Freudian intellectual Wilhelm Reich. In his 1933 book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich argued that the authoritarian family is of critical importance for the authoritarian state because the family “becomes the factory in which the state’s structure and ideology are molded.”[18] Crucial for Reich was the repression of childhood sexuality, which, in his view, created children who are docile, fearful of authority, and in general anxious and submissive. Reich claimed the role of traditional “repressive” Western sexual morality was “to produce acquiescent subjects who, despite distress and humiliation, are adjusted to the authoritarian order.” Marcuse agreed with Reich that the “liberation of sexuality and the creation of non-hierarchical democratic structures in the family, workplace and society at large would create personalities resistant to fascism.”[19]

Marcuse, like Nichols, a refugee from National Socialist Germany, is said to have been “extremely sensitive to the dangers of fascistic tendencies” and his work was an important part of the great cultural shift from the affirmation to the repudiation of inherited values.[20] The familial, religious and ethnic ties of White people were presented by Jewish intellectuals like Marcuse (and Hollywood writers and producers) as an oppressive burden imposed by the past—a way in which parents encumber their offspring with an inheritance of dysfunctional norms.

Frankfurt School intellectuals, including Marcuse, held that the psychologically healthy White person was someone who had broken free from these dysfunctional norms (i.e., the traditional Western moral code), and realized their human potential without relying on membership in collectivist groups. The embrace of radical individualism among non-Jews, promoted by the likes of Marcuse, was, of course, conducive to the continuation of Judaism as a cohesive group. Yet while Marcuse promoted individualism and condemned White racial feeling as deeply immoral, he was a committed Zionist who strongly supported “the establishment of a Jewish state, capable of preventing the repetition of a holocaust.” Marcuse justified supporting ethnic nationalism for his own tribe on the basis that “The United States didn’t do a goddamn thing under Roosevelt about the persecution of Jews before and during World War II,” and because “There is a continued effective anti-Semitism that could explode at any time in a neo-fascist regime. … Anti-Semitism is rampant in all states, and still exists in all states.”[21]

This line of thinking motivated the activism of Jewish New Left leaders like Mark Rudd who actively promoted Marcuse’s ideas. Rudd claimed that for him and his New Left colleagues, “World War II and the Holocaust were our fixed reference points. We often talked about the moral imperative not to be good Germans. We saw American racism as akin to German racism towards the Jews.”[22]

Alongside intellectual activists like Marcuse and political activists like Rudd, Hollywood has played an incredibly important role in this Jewish campaign to attack and destroy the fabric of White American society. Hollywood’s guiding principle, as articulated by Jewish Hollywood director Jill Soloway, resides in the perceived necessity of “recreating culture to defend ourselves post-Holocaust.”[23] This ethnic “defense” has entailed the promotion of radical individualism for White people, racial diversity and mixing, the denigration of Christianity, the hypersexualization of popular culture, the glamorizing of sexual non-conformity and the breakdown of traditional gender roles—all alongside constant reminders of “the Holocaust” with its concomitant themes of Jewish victimhood and unsurpassed German (White, European) evil. This is Jewish ethnic warfare waged through the construction of culture. The Graduate was an early shot fired in this ongoing war.


[1] Alec Scott, “When ‘The Graduate’ Opened Fifty Years Ago, It Changed Hollywood (and America) Forever,” Smithsonian Magazine, December 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/graduate-opened-50-years-ago-changed-hollywood-forever-180967222/

[2] Laurie Gwen Shapiro, “50 Years Later, Just How Jewish Was ‘The Graduate?’” Forward, November 15, 2017. https://forward.com/culture/387524/50-years-later-just-how-jewish-was-the-graduate/

[3] Gus Cileone, “What does the water imagery in ‘The Graduate’ express about the 1960s youth mindset and destiny,” The Take, October 7, 2015. https://screenprism.com/insights/article/what-does-the-water-imagery-in-the-graduate-express-about-the-1960s-youth-m

[4] Shapiro, “50 Years Later,” op cit.

[5] J.W. Whitehead, Appraising The Graduate: The Mike Nichols Classic and Its Impact in Hollywood (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011) 58.

[6] Steve Almond, “Remembering Mike Nichols And The Cinematic Landmark That Was ‘The Graduate,’” wbur, November 21, 2014. https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2014/11/21/mike-nichols-the-graduate-steve-almond

[7] Scott, “When The Graduate Opened Fifty Years Ago,” op cit.

[8] Shapiro, “50 Years Later,” op cit.

[9] Whitehead, Appraising The Graduate, 63.

[10] Shapiro, “50 Years Later,” op cit.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Whitehead, Appraising The Graduate, 63.

[14] Beverley Gray, Seduced By Mrs. Robinson: How “The Graduate” Became the Touchstone of a Generation (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2017), 42-3.

[15] Shapiro, 50 Years Later,” op cit.

[16] Douglas Kellner, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” Herbert Marcuse, One-dimensional Man: Studies in Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 1991), xi.

[17] Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 110.

[18] Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (London: Penguin, 1970) 64.

[19] Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism, 111.

[20] Ibid., 296.

[21] Herbert Marcuse & Douglas Kellner (Ed.), The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse (London: Routledge, 2004), 180.

[22] Philip Mendes, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance (Melbourne, Victoria; Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 254.

[23] http://estherkustanowitz.typepad.com/myurbankvetch2005/2009/04/jenji-kohan-jill-soloway-and-the-hebrew-mamita-inside-the-jewish-noggin.html

The White Plague, Part 3: Concluding Thoughts

Go to Part 1.
Go to Part 2.

Of course, the Sacklers and their Purdue executives were not the only demons who facilitated the White Plague. We must not lose sight of the fact that the Jewish-dominated American healthcare system itself, by far the most expensive on earth, is not only failing to halt the precipitous fall of White life expectancy, but is actively fueling the conflagration. The Sacklers are indeed singularly responsible for the White Plague; without their deception, greed, and anti-White animus, it could not have occurred. However, while the Sacklers were certainly the heart (or rather, the gaping black hole where a heart should be) of the Hydra, the Beast had many heads. As Gerald Posner cautions, “By putting the responsibility for the crisis so squarely on Purdue and the Sacklers, there is a risk [that] others who played material roles in creating and feeding the epidemic may not pay a price. That is the hope among thousands of others, sales representatives and executives of rival pharma companies with their own opioid products, overprescribing doctors, FDA bureaucrats who did not want to restrict OxyContin, pharmacists who diverted prescriptions to the black market, and pain management experts who preached that opioids were not addictive when prescribed for pain.” In this respect, the Sacklers appear to be another sacrificial scapegoat for the Jewish ruling class; in other words, the Elders of Zion occasionally sacrifice one of their own for the good of the whole. For example, Bernie Madoff was sacrificed as the avatar for the entire Great Recession. “#MeToo” was created and Harvey Weinstein was sacrificed, in order to further conceal the pervasive pedophilia in Jewish Hollywood. Jeffrey Epstein was suicided, and, though it remains to be seen what will become of Ghislaine Maxwell, she certainly intended to be arrested and thus poses no threat to the System.

From its birth in 1996, OxyContin made 35 billion dollars in revenue. In 2014, the Sacklers entered the Forbes list of “richest families,” with an estimated net worth of fourteen billion dollars, edging out families like the Busches, Mellons, and Rockefellers. What was the cost of those billions? From 1999 to 2019, over 770,000 Americans, almost all of whom were White, were killed by drug overdose. This is greater than the number of Americans killed in all of our wars, combined. The CDC reports that nearly seventy percent of those fatal overdoses were due to opioids, while nearly half of the total number were from fentanyl or other synthetic opioids besides methadone. Twenty-two percent of the total came from heroin. The annual number of overdose deaths jumped from 16,849 in 1999 to a high mark of 70,237 in 2017, well over the number of Americans killed in Vietnam. That year, opioids prescribed by physicians accounted for a third of all opioid deaths, and a quarter of the total. In 2016 alone, there were nearly 64,000 overdose deaths, 42,000 of which were from opioids. According to the DEA, between 2006 and 2014, over one hundred billion doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone were shipped to pharmacies, and then homes, across the country. It is thus no wonder that OxyContin, and the family who created it, was almost singlehandedly responsible for the first decline in White life expectancy in more than twenty years.

Beginning in the late 1990s, almost exactly concurrent with the release of OxyContin, while the White mortality rate continued to steadily decline in Europe, it steadily increased in America, diverging more and more with each passing year. 1999 was the critical year; from 1999 to 2017, comparing the predictive mortality rate to the actual, there is a discrepancy of six hundred thousand deaths of middle-aged Americans who would be alive had progress gone on as expected. As a reference, approximately 675,000 Americans have perished from HIV/AIDS since the early 1980s. We might also consider the crack “epidemic,” which almost exclusively affected Blacks. “Our” government responded to crack by kicking each and every lever of the State into overdrive, yet has essentially done nothing to stem the White Plague. It does not take a conspiratorial mind to realize why. For Whites, life expectancy at birth fell by one-tenth of a year between 2013 and 2014. In the next four years, from 2014 to 2017, life expectancy fell for the nation as a whole. As Anne Case and Angus Deaton emphasize, “any decline in life expectancy is extremely uncommon. With a three-year decline, we are in unfamiliar territory; American life expectancy has never fallen for three years in a row since states’ vital registration coverage was completed in 1933.” Between 1999 and 2017, this rise in the mortality rate for Whites aged 45 to 54 occurred in all but six States, with the largest increases in death rates occurring in West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Mississippi. The only states where White mortality perceptibly fell were California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.

“Deaths of despair,” as Case and Deaton term them, are wholly responsible for the decline in White life expectancy. These deaths are primarily driven by drug overdose, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease and cirrhosis. While there are more deaths from overdoses than from either alcohol-related diseases or suicides, up forty percent in seventeen years, suicides and alcohol combined to kill more Whites than drugs alone. Case and Deaton underscore the despair underlying the slow genocide of the White race. Whites, they note, “are drinking themselves to death, or poisoning themselves with drugs, or shooting or hanging themselves. … All the deaths show great unhappiness with life, either momentary or prolonged.” Case and Deaton take care to introduce the nuanced issue of supply and demand, acknowledging that the White Plague “would not have happened without the carelessness of doctors, without a flawed approval process at the FDA, or without the pursuit of profits by the industry at whatever human cost.” At the same time, though, they contend that “the misbehavior poured fuel on the fire, making the epidemic worse, rather than creating the conditions under which such an epidemic could take place in the first place. The people who used the opioids, the many millions who became opioid abusers or became addicted, who became zombies walking the streets of once-prosperous towns, were those whose lives had already come apart, whose economic and social lives were no longer supporting them.”

If we do pursue this line of inquiry and dig deeper into the sources of this despair, we still find the same Enemy: the ruthlessly extractive Judeocracy that has stolen and annihilated the last vestiges of White identity from our atomized society, that has made Whites the hated Other in our own nation, that has liquidated the deplorable American kulak, cannibalized our once-overflowing capital resources, and destabilized our culture through the importation of an army of unwashed, hostile heathen. Case and Deaton write that, “by its end, much of the optimism of the twentieth century had faded. Towns and cities in the heartland of America that used to produce steel, glass, furniture, or shoes, and that are fondly remembered by people in their seventies as having been great places to grow up, had been gutted, their factories closed and shops boarded up. In the wreckage, the temptations of alcohol and drugs lured many to their deaths.”

For Whites between the ages of 45 and 54, deaths of despair tripled from 1999 to 2017. While this age group had the highest mortality rate, Whites in younger age groups also saw their mortality rates accelerate even more quickly; furthermore, the midlife pattern began to extend into old age after 2005. The key takeaway here is that, as Case and Deaton note, “each age-group does progressively worse than the same age-group did in earlier years.” In 2017, thus far the worst year, more than 158,000 Americans died from deaths of despair, the equivalent of three full 737 MAXs falling out of the sky every day, with no survivors. 47,000 were suicides, as compared to 40,100 traffic fatalities and 19,510 homicides. The aforementioned rise in White suicide is unique to the United States. The damage does not end with death; for every one opioid death, there are over thirty emergency room visits, a third of which lead to hospital admission. Each death corresponds to more than one hundred addicts, a number that continues to increase in parallel with the number of deaths. Over a third of all adults, or 98 million Americans, were prescribed opioids in 2015. In 2016, nearly 29 million Americans aged twelve and over self-reported using illegal drugs in the past month, including prescription drugs, and almost one million of those reported using heroin in the last twelve months; given that these are self-reports, these numbers are definitely underestimated.

If we add together the accumulated costs of the White Plague, including healthcare, crime and imprisonment, social services, rehabilitation, lost productivity, and the evisceration of entire regions of the nation, we arrive at an incalculable, incomprehensible figure in the trillions of dollars. Case and Deaton also point out that, aside from totally overturning the natural order of life, “the death of a child, even an adult child, can tear families apart, and the loss of people in their prime, people who should not be dying, upends communities and workplaces too … there are millions of American mothers and fathers today who are living in dread that the phone call to their adult son or daughter will go unanswered, or that a phone call will come from the police or the emergency room.” It is imperative that we do not allow ourselves to become mired in the preceding numbers—these are not statistics, but, like my fallen friend, real people, real men, women, and children with hopes and dreams. The lion’s share of these lives goes untold; not forgotten, but untold. As Case and Deaton observe, “Stigma often removes the cause of death from obituaries when suicide, overdose, or alcoholism is involved. Addiction is seen as a moral weakness, … its effects best covered up.” Just as our Enemy and its Black footsoldiers have canonized the names of irrelevant thugs whose deaths at the hands of police were wholly justified, we must practice White identity politics and White grievance politics, incessantly memorializing and repeating the names of the victims of the White Plague. White Lives Matter.

Remember Jesse Bolstridge, the high school football player from Strasburg, Virginia, who died of a heroin overdose on the piss-stained floor of someone’s bathroom. His headstone reads, “Miss you more,” the last thing he and his mother would say before hanging up the phone. Remember Tess Henry, the straight-A student and basketball star from Roanoke, Virginia, who turned to prostitution to fund her heroin addiction, preyed on by a vast network of Black dealers and Black pimps. She was the daughter of a surgeon and a nurse, and, before her hundreds-of-dollars-a-day heroin habit, she loved reading, writing poetry, painting, and singing to her dog, Koda. A routine visit to an urgent-care clinic for bronchitis ended with two prescriptions for codeine and hydrocodone. Eventually, an emaciated Tess, in jail for theft, learned that she was pregnant. She had to be given codeine so that her baby would not be born with neonatal abstinence syndrome and go into fatal opioid withdrawal. While her mother raised her child, Tess continued to struggle in the throes of addiction, oscillating between jails, battered women’s shelters, psychiatric wards, and the street. Tess disappeared, and her mother found her on a prostitution website with the headline, “Sweet sultry sexy 26.” Half an hour for sixty dollars.

Her mother did all that she could for her, despite having her valuables stolen and pawned. She bought matching bracelets for her and Tess that were inscribed, “Your heart is my heart.” Shortly thereafter, Tess vanished again, leaving a note: “I love you so much Mom. You are my everything. I want to get better and I won’t stop trying.” After another stint in treatment, Tess texted her mother that she was going to find a way home, signing her street name, “Sweet T.” She disappeared again, sporadically making contact with her family until, finally, she dropped off the face of the earth, Las Vegas her last known location. The morning after Christmas 2017, a homeless man discovered Tess’ corpse in the dumpster of an apartment complex. She was naked, wrapped in plastic, with burns on her body. Blunt force trauma to the head. Strung out, she had called her mother weeks before and mentioned “gang stalkers”; indeed, Las Vegas gangs often rape and murder prostitutes who refuse to be “turned out” by the gang. She had written in her journal months earlier: “I was stealing, robbing, selling my body, and anything else I could do to make money for drugs. I was beaten, raped, robbed, and malnourished. … I am going to die if I keep living the way I am.”

Remember these hundreds of thousands of Whites, joining the other tens of thousands ritually slaughtered upon the altar of the Synagogue of Diversity. Remember that the Sacklers still walk free, with all of their wealth intact, along with the legion of anonymous bureaucrats, attorneys, business executives, pharmacists, physicians, and politicians who helped ensure that the OxyContin blizzard was indeed deep, dense, and White.

The White Plague is not over. While Mexican cartels continue to pump Chinese fentanyl into the misery-choked veins of atomized America, the System continues to decriminalize drugs and throw open the prisons. Aside from enacting a massive transfer of wealth from the American kulak to the Jewish ruling class, and aside from paving the way for the totalitarian Left by socializing us into subservience via face masks and whatever satanic broth Bill Gates is cooking up for his vaccines, the unprecedented “coronavirus” lockdowns will certainly make 2020 one of the worst years yet for opioid overdoses.

I conclude with Richard Sackler’s compassionate words for our innocent brethren, the addicts whom he and his family intentionally created: “Abusers aren’t victims; they are the victimizers.”

They hate us. What is our response?

The White Plague, Part II: Genocide by Prescription: Deep, Dense, and White

Richard Sackler

Go to Part 1

In 1991, Richard Sackler got his wish, a new company to “take on the risk of new products.” Purdue Pharma, Inc., was born. As with the other Sackler outfits, it was a family affair, led primarily by Mortimer, Raymond, and their respective families. The drug that would become OxyContin had undergone its first clinical trial in 1989, its patent not filed until 1992. The drug was developed under the aegis of Purdue Frederick, but when it went on sale that corporation was to become a holding company, with OxyContin’s marketing and sales divided between Purdue Pharma, Inc., and Purdue Pharma LP, another company the Sacklers established in 1991. PF Laboratories, another Sackler company, was the manufacturer; for the purposes of patent protection and tax mitigation, the Sacklers assigned their intellectual property to their Swiss-based Mundipharma AG.

If the reader is confused at this point, he should be, for this was by design; Richard himself found the indecipherable corporate structure “confusing.” In a 2015 deposition, he appeared to be genuinely unable to recall whether the directors of the various tentacles of the Sackler Leviathan were the same or different. He also did not appear to know, as a factual matter, whether Purdue sales representatives were employed by Purdue Frederick or Purdue Pharma. When asked how many Purdue entities existed, Sackler pled ignorance, and refused even to venture a guess. In fact, Mortimer and Raymond created at least seventy different “Purdue Pharma” entities, often, just as their dearly departed brother had done, using overlapping addresses, phone numbers, and directors.

Purdue spent a cumulative forty million dollars developing and testing its MS Contin successor, by now christened as OxyContin; Raymond had insisted on retaining “Contin” for brand recognition, while “Oxy” signified the active ingredient. In its November 1992 patent application, Purdue presented OxyContin as a breakthrough, primarily based upon its claim that a single dose lasted twelve hours “to control pain in approximately ninety percent of patients.” This twelve-hour claim was, aside from being central to the marketing strategy, the essential differentiating factor that set it apart from rival painkillers. Unbeknownst to the public was the fact that Purdue’s own clinical trials had revealed that OxyContin possessed no therapeutic advantage over other opioids and provided no better relief than generic immediate-release oxycodone. Furthermore, in half a dozen other trials, a third of the subjects had required additional doses after the first. This presented no problem, though, because the FDA required only half of the subjects to get twelve hours of relief. Since 55 percent did, all in all, Purdue was permitted to make the claim.

In 1995, Purdue geared up for what the DEA would almost a quarter of a century later describe as “the most aggressive campaign for an opioid in U.S. history.” The company created a speakers’ bureau, dispatching such “pain management” leaders like Russell Portenoy and J. David Haddox across the country to sing the hymns of the real opium of the masses—opioids. Purdue funneled millions of dollars in grants to patient- and pain-advocacy groups, sponsored over twenty thousand “educational programs,” and underwrote dozens of conferences at which thousands of physicians and pharmacists got all-expense-paid vacations for the privilege of listening to shills heap praise upon the new “revolutionary” “breakthrough” “miracle,” OxyContin. The company established “pain management” curricula at leading universities and medical schools, funding a master’s program at Tufts University and an annual “Sackler Lecture” at the Tufts School of Medicine, to whose board Richard was appointed. When Tufts bestowed Raymond with an honorary degree, its President reverently declared that “it would be impossible to calculate how many lives you have saved.” Queen Elizabeth evidently felt the same way, for she knighted both Raymond and Mortimer. At Massachusetts General Hospital, the largest teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School, the company launched the Purdue Pharma Pain Program, also rolled out at Northeastern University, Boston University, and the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy. Purdue also bankrolled the American Pain Foundation, American Pain Society, and American Academy of Pain Medicine, as well as the Pain and Policy Studies Group at the University of Wisconsin, all of which vehemently advocated for relaxing controls and liberalizing opioid prescription.

In advance of the OxyContin launch, Purdue doubled its sales team, knowing that individual pitches from sales representatives directly to doctors were indispensable to creating a best-selling drug. More importantly, because there was no record of what was said in the doctor’s office, it was impossible for competitors or government regulators to determine if the salesmen adhered to FDA efficacy limits or provided adequate warning about side effects. Sales representatives were extremely careful not to leave any written notes, having been directed from on high to “commit nothing to a permanent record.” Violators were subject to “immediate dismissal.” Purdue also instructed its sales representatives to raise “concerns about addiction” before the physician did, saying that while patients did develop “a normal physiologic response,” “tolerance and physical dependence are not the same as addiction.” Addiction, they claimed, only occurred when a “susceptible individual,” of whom there were only a “small minority” of patients, obtained the drug and ignored dosage instructions. If physicians were still skeptical, they were shown the FDA-approved OxyContin label, which stated that, if used as prescribed, opioid addiction was “very rare.” Very rare, indeed.

To further emphasize the purportedly low addiction potential, representatives employed charts to illustrate the twelve-hour controlled-release that the OxyContin coating supposedly ensured. Purdue held that its patented coating “made it impossible for addicts to get the rush they chased,” and its sales teams maintained that the chance of addiction was “much less than one percent” if said patients are treated by doctors. In that vein, the Purdue-funded American Academy of Pain Medicine and American Pain Society issued a consensus paper reiterating that it was “established” that there was “less than one percent” probability of addiction. One of Purdue’s marketing slogans proclaimed that OxyContin provided “relief—not a ‘high’…[when] taken as directed.”

Of course, there was more to those charts than met the eye—the data minimizing addiction potential had been manipulated quite significantly. Worse still, Purdue’s own clinical trials had demonstrated that, for some patients, up to forty percent of the oxycodone was released into the bloodstream in the first hour or two. This was fast enough to cause a high, and, for many, resulted in a crash that required another dose. To concretize its Big Lie that OxyContin carried with it a “low risk of addiction” and was “non-habit forming,” Purdue financed several studies that reported addiction rates from long-term opioid usage between only 0.2 and 3.27 percent; as late as 2019, David Sackler, Richard’s son, maintained that the OxyContin addiction rate was “somewhere between two and three percent.”

In at least one instance, a Purdue employee did broach the great taboo, suggesting that those studies were marred by flawed methodologies. A superior rejected the concern, stating that “defeatist” questions would not be tolerated. The employee was right; later studies which were not funded by the Sacklers did indeed reveal addiction rates that ranged from 32 to 80 percent. Of course, there were also major problems in the FDA’s randomized controlled OxyContin trials. Those in the control group had previously taken the drug in the earlier open-label phase of the trial, done to exclude from the trial those who cannot tolerate the drug. In this type of trial, there is a ‘washout’ period between the two phases, in which the drug is supposed to wash out of the patients’ systems. As Anne Case and Angus Deaton explain, “the danger in the case of OxyContin, or any addictive drug, is that if the washout period is not long enough, some of those in the control group, no longer receiving the drug, may suffer withdrawal symptoms, which would make them look bad relative to those who go into the treatment group and receive it again. Moreover, the exclusion of those who, in the earlier, open-label phase, could not tolerate the drug means that the trial understates the rate of problems in the wider population for which the drug will be prescribed.” Case and Deaton also raise the more general point that “a testing and approval process that looks only at what these drugs do for individuals ignores the broader effects of releasing a powerful and highly addictive drug into society,” and that “a system that does not consider the public health consequences of approving the drug is surely inexcusable.”

Taking a page from Arthur Sackler’s Hoffmann-La Roche playbook, Purdue developed its own simplified pain rating scale, a sheet of facial expressions that ranged from happy to sad, and distributed tens of thousands of them to physicians. Simultaneously, Purdue used Arthur and his pal Ludwig Fröhlich’s creation, International Marketing Service, or IMS, to obtain a massive quantity of national prescription data; incidentally, the American Medical Association had licensed its “Physician Masterfile” to IMS. With this service, Purdue purchased lists of “core dispensers” sorted by zip code, those doctors who were known to be heavy prescribers of existing painkillers like Vicodin and Percocet; in other words, the people who, Purdue believed, “could be influenced to increase opioid prescriptions the most.” Later, Purdue ramped up its sales campaign even further by purchasing IMS’ Cornerstone 3.0 software, which allowed Purdue to track prescriptions in real-time. On one of the drug firm’s websites, it placed a “find a local pain specialist” widget, utilizing IMS data to connect visitors directly to physicians known to be heavy opioid prescribers. Aside from identifying and then targeting the physicians most likely to dole out OxyContin like candy, who else did Purdue place under its gaze?

First, Purdue targeted the elderly, focusing initially on nursing homes and long-term care facilities, touting “quality of life” and fictitious off-label osteoarthritis applications. The corporation made no mention of the numerous studies demonstrating that opioid painkillers actually increased the risks of falls and bone fractures. Next, Purdue aimed its sights on military veterans, having accumulated evidence that chronic pain was one of the most common complaints at VA hospitals, with the Department of Veterans Affairs confirming that over sixty percent of returning veterans of the Jewish “War on Terror” in the Middle East were afflicted. The company distributed pamphlets and other publications specifically for veterans, and contracted with a decorated Iraq veteran, Derek McGinnis, for a book urging veterans to ask their physicians for opioids and lobby reluctant prescribers. McGinnis assured his readers, already victimized by their service to Zion in the Jewish mercenary force known as the American military, that opioids were not addictive unless one was “predisposed” to addiction, whatever that means. Within Purdue, there were discussions over the possibility that high rates of substance abuse among combat veterans might make them more vulnerable, but the Sacklers pressed onwards anyway. Such thinking smacked of defeatism. Ultimately, veterans did prove to have a higher addiction rate than other classes of OxyContin users. Veterans were also twice as likely as the national average to have their lives stolen by fatal overdose.

However, as aforementioned, Purdue’s greatest target was Everyman, the population that it referred to as the “opioid naïve,” or OVS, “opioid virgins,” those who had never used opioids. The company, which, we cannot overstate, was indivisible and inseparable from the Sackler family, prepared hundreds of thousands of brochures suggesting the efficacy of OxyContin in treating a litany of unapproved, off-label conditions, such as backaches, migraines, sore knees, and tooth extractions. Purdue created the OxyContin Physicians Television Network, an online video service on which paid consultants promoted the drug, and put hundreds of friendly physicians on the payroll to travel the country and spread the Gospel of Opioids through such means as half-day courses aimed at general practitioners, or “family doctors.” The Sacklers set up a website, “In the Face of Pain,” aimed at healthcare professionals. The site featured eleven advocates who disguised OxyContin advertising as unbiased expert testimonials, concealing the fact that Purdue had paid them a quarter of a million dollars for their “objective” opinions. Another website, “Partners in Pain,” performed much the same deception, passing off bald-faced product promotion as public service announcements. This site promulgated Purdue’s Pain Assessment Scale, along with the claim that pure opioid agonists such as oxycodone, morphine, heroin, and fentanyl had “no ceiling dose,” or, in other words, that a patient will always get additional pain relief from additional dosages. For its part, Purdue simply concealed the unfortunate truth that increased dosage meant increased risk of death by overdose, and internal files reveal that the company well understood that this would be misinterpreted to mean that opioids were safe at high doses.

Purdue Pharma also employed Arthur’s saturation tactics, churning out brochures, newsletters, magazine inserts, direct mailings to physicians, and medical journal advertisements on an industrial scale. The company also sponsored a plethora of medical school programs, and distributed millions of dollars of Purdue and OxyContin-branded “swag” to doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, and pain clinics, such as luggage tags, baseball caps, sweatshirts, notepads, pens, heat-activated coffee mugs, and stuffed animals for children. Gerald Posner found some of these items, including a pedometer stamped, “OxyContin—A Step in the Right Direction,” and a CD, “Swing in the Right Direction with OxyContin,” featuring a joyous couple dancing over the OxyContin logo.

These items may seem irrelevant, but, given what we have thus far established regarding the Sacklers, would they take a single breath without knowing, with certainty, that it would reap them some form of material gain? Of course not. One study in New York found that, for every dollar in gifts given to a doctor, at least ten dollars of additional opioids were prescribed. It should, then, come as no surprise to learn that the top one percent of OxyContin prescribers received around eighty percent of the promotional incentivization money spent by Purdue. One week before the official launch of OxyContin and the White Plague, the Purdue shills Russell Portenoy and Ronald Kanner published Pain Management: Theory and Practice, a book in which the authors and a dozen other physicians methodically dismissed concerns about opioid addiction as uneducated “stigma.” Following suit, the American Pain Society, another Sackler mouthpiece, released a pamphlet that declared that suicide rates would crater if opioids were dispensed much more freely. The more you know.

On the last day of May 1996, Purdue issued a press release announcing OxyContin to the world. Titled “New Hope for Millions of Americans Suffering from Persistent Pain,” the statement heralded OxyContin as a catchall “magic bullet,” applicable to a vast array of pains, with a virtually nonexistent probability of addiction. At the OxyContin launch party, Richard Sackler asked the audience to imagine a series of natural disasters: an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a hurricane, and a blizzard. Lingering on the blizzard, Sackler declared that “the launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white.” As we now know, this was no metaphor.

Satan got to work immediately. While most drug firms paid sales representatives based on the number of prescriptions written by the physicians they had visited, Purdue paid its salesmen based on the dollar amount of the prescriptions dispensed by those doctors, trackable in real-time with the IMS Cornerstone 3.0 software. In high-volume States, Purdue representatives visited each “core dispenser” at least two hundred times per year, sometimes calling on doctors every day. The cost of each individualized sales visit to Purdue was roughly two hundred dollars, translating into forty thousand dollars for each top-tier doctor, an amount that added up to millions. These sales visits functioned as direct bribes to entice doctors into putting greater and greater numbers of patients on opioids, at ever-increasing dosages, for longer and longer periods of time. As an added incentive to drive OxyContin sales, Purdue offered exorbitant bonuses that were capable of doubling a sales representative’s salary. In one internal memo of many, the company assured top performers that “a pot of gold awaits you ‘Over the Rainbow.’” Another memo was titled, “$$$$$$$$$$$$$ It’s Bonus Time in the Neighborhood!”

It wasn’t long before Purdue’s drug pushers realized that they could maximize their earnings potential by selling the highest doses of OxyContin; originally, the pill was available in 10, 20, and 40 milligrams, followed by 80 the next month, and, later on, 30, 60, and the since-discontinued 160. Though the price of each increasing dose was exponentially inflated, Purdue’s manufacturing costs remained unchanged at every dosage. To help its salesmen along, Purdue initiated the “Individualize the Dose” campaign, instructing its representatives to tell physicians that its studies had shown that instead of starting patients on low strengths, they should start at medium to high doses, so that “the drug would relieve pain faster and allow the patient to stop using it quicker.” In the event that a doctor reported that he was dispensing OxyContin three or four times per day because his patients were not getting the promised twelve hours of pain relief, Purdue’s dealers assured that higher doses would make the drug last longer. They guaranteed physicians that those higher doses could even be prescribed to people who had never used opioids, all without adverse effects, reiterating that the higher dosages carried no elevated risk of addiction. Company documents would later reveal that Purdue knew full well that stronger doses did increase addiction potential, as well as the likelihood of lethal respiratory suppression. And, while its press releases asserted that “dose was not a risk factor for opioid overdose,” internal Purdue communications are full of references to the dangers of “dose-related overdose.”

In tandem with its campaign to hook patients on ever-increasing dosages of OxyContin, Purdue persuaded doctors to keep their patients on the opioid for ever-longer periods, which in turn secured ever-higher profits. Internal correspondence would eventually reveal that the Sacklers knew that patients were 30 times more likely to die of overdose if on OxyContin for three months, 46 times more likely to die after six to eleven months, and 51 times more likely to die if they remained on OxyContin for more than a year. Purdue, having discovered that “more patients remain on OxyContin after ninety days,” introduced a “savings card” that encouraged patients to try the drug, offering a substantial discount on their first prescription. For each million dollars spent on these giveaways, the unwitting patients who tried the drug and stayed on it brought in well over four million dollars in additional sales. The FDA was nowhere to be found. The most charitable explanation that we can entertain is that the office charged with promotional oversight was understaffed and overwhelmed, though this seems extraordinarily generous under the circumstances.

In the year of OxyContin’s birth, Purdue hired J. David Haddox, the opiate zealot, as the drug’s public face. Haddox represented the painkiller, a misnomer if ever there was one, at medical conferences and training courses, assuring doctors that the “exquisitely rare” risk of addiction was only “one-half of one percent.” Most of the charlatan’s audiences were comprised of general practitioners who, unfamiliar with the opioid reevaluation movement, saw his presentations as novel and persuasive. Some Purdue sales representatives indicated their uncertainty as to how they should handle instances in which physicians raised the possibility that their patients were addicted, to which Haddox simply peddled his old “pseudoaddiction” snake oil. How could a doctor “treat” this odious malady? According to Haddox, what those doctors mistook for addiction was merely evidence of severe pain and failed treatments, an evil that could only be remedied by eliminating the underlying pain. In other words, when physicians noticed a patient displaying signs of opioid dependence, they had to not only keep their patient on OxyContin, but also increase their dose. If a physician was still hesitant to double the dose, he was told to maintain the original dosage, but increase its frequency.

One of the most verboten topics at Purdue was what might happen if someone scraped off the patented OxyContin coating or crushed the pill. The company knew the answer, its own tests having demonstrated that when the extended-release shell was bypassed, about seventy percent of the oxycodone, as opposed to the time-released ten percent, went straight to the brain and produced a euphoria that rivaled heroin. The FDA thought that the issue was successfully handled with the all-caps warning label that it had required Purdue to place on the OxyContin prescription insert: “TABLETS ARE TO BE SWALLOWED WHOLE, AND ARE NOT TO BE BROKEN, CHEWED, OR CRUSHED. TAKING BROKEN, CHEWED, OR CRUSHED TABLETS COULD LEAD TO THE RAPID RELEASE AND ABSORPTION OF A POTENTIALLY TOXIC DOSE OF OXYCODONE.” It took another twenty years for the Centers for Disease Control to determine that this was a fatal design flaw. With no supporting studies or empirical evidence to speak of, the FDA allowed Purdue to claim that its delayed-absorption coating “was believed to reduce the abuse liability,” taking on faith Purdue’s assertion that drug addicts would only seek immediate-release painkillers. In private communications, the Sacklers acknowledged that this particular claim was their “principal selling tool.”

OxyContin detonated even more successfully than the Sacklers could have hoped. In its first year alone, the painkiller was prescribed half a million times for non-cancer-related pain, out of a total of 920,000. By 2002, prescriptions had metastasized to 7.2 million, with only one million prescribed for cancer-related pain; half of the prescribing physicians were general practitioners, or “family doctors.” In its second full year, OxyContin was responsible for over eighty percent of Purdue’s profits—more than double what the top year for MS Contin had been. From 1996 to 2000, sales climbed from 48 million to 1.1 billion dollars, Purdue’s first entry into the elite billion-dollar club. By 2000, Purdue sales representatives were reaping over forty million dollars in bonuses. In 1997, the FDA gave the Sacklers another gift by lifting the ban on direct-to-consumer advertising; for perspective, we should note that only America and New Zealand permit that practice. This is the same year in which Curtis Wright, the FDA official who had overseen the approval of OxyContin, left his government post to join Purdue Pharma.

As Gerald Posner notes, Purdue very specifically “targeted poverty-scarred working-class Whites in rural America as a prime market.” The Appalachian and Southern regions most afflicted by the White Plague did and do indeed suffer from rampant poverty, up to twenty percent unemployment, and chronic pain from strenuous lives of hard labor. While the Sacklers and their Purdue executives knew about the earliest reports of OxyContin abuse in 1997, the first media reports of OxyContin-fueled drug arrests, pharmacy robberies, and overdose deaths did not appear until 1999. Even then, it was only the shoestring newspapers in a handful of rural towns who sounded the alarm; thus, the problem appeared to all disinterested observers to be confined to a dozen or so counties in a few states. In 1998, the Department of Health and Human Services “Drug Abuse Warning Network” reported a 93 percent rise in “oxycodone mentions,” but this was dismissed as a cyclical spike that occurred any time a new drug was introduced to the market. Nobody saw that spike for the awful portent, the harbinger of doom, that it was. Damningly, 75 percent of the four hundred million dollars spent promoting OxyContin came after Purdue executives first learned of its heavy abuse.

Perhaps the first federal official to publicly raise concerns over OxyContin was Jay McCloskey, then the U.S. Attorney for Maine. McCloskey harbored suspicions that Purdue and its distributors were illegally diverting their opioid drug to the black market, especially given the fact that there had been illegal diversion issues with MS Contin. Purdue, of course, denied the allegations at a conference of state and federal law enforcement officials that McCloskey organized. Despite these concerns, the FDA approved a new 160-milligram dose of OxyContin in 2000, produced ostensibly for a small percentage of patients who had developed tolerance to lower doses in long-term treatment. Purdue intensified its marketing campaign, saturating medical journals, trade shows, and online videos to promote OxyContin for a wide range of musculoskeletal and postsurgical pain, including knee replacements, tendon repairs, and lower back surgeries. Later studies would reveal that patients who used opioids after surgery were twice as likely as the general population to develop opioid addiction.

In 2001, a New York Times story raised concerns about OxyContin, as did Joseph Famularo, then the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky. J. David Haddox, Purdue’s resident propagandist, was quoted in the Times article warning that “inflammatory statements” might cause doctors to withhold the drug from suffering patients. Richard Sackler breathed a sigh of relief after the article ran, noting that it “could have been far worse.” Sackler, of course, still could not abide the negative press. In an internal memo circulated just after the first Times story, the Jewish scion wrote that “we have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.” Purdue sales representatives were instructed to aggressively emphasize that “patients were to blame for abuse and addiction, not the drug.” Later the same year, the Department of Justice National Drug Intelligence Center issued its first systemwide Information Bulletin stating that OxyContin diversion and abuse was a major issue, acknowledging that addicts were substituting it with heroin. Shortly thereafter, another New York Times article quoted a Drug Enforcement Agency official who said that “no other prescription drug in the last twenty years had been illegally abused by so many people so soon after it appeared.” Not helping matters was the fact that Medicare and Medicaid covered OxyContin, as did private insurance plans for the huge number of miners and construction workers in the States hit earliest. At a street price of a dollar per milligram, a price that still holds to this day, a Medicaid patient who paid three dollars for one prescription of a hundred 80 milligram pills could earn eight thousand dollars, a third of what the average person earned annually in West Virginia and Kentucky.

The DEA Office of Diversion Control opened an investigation into illegal diversion at Purdue’s plant, PF Laboratories in Totowa, New Jersey. Some of the plant’s employees were arrested, a number of whom went on to sue Purdue, charging that plant supervisors had ordered them both to bypass security protocols that required all batches to remain in sight on the production line, and to report fake numbers to cover up missing inventory. The first private lawsuits against Purdue were filed in Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia, correctly alleging that addictions and overdoses were the result of OxyContin overprescription, and that overprescription was the direct result of Purdue’s deceptive marketing. The DEA investigation did not proceed any further than the one plant, and the lawsuits were dead in the water. If either or both of these early actions against the Sacklers had turned out differently, perhaps it would not have been true that by 2009, 81 percent of the world’s oxycodone and 99 percent of the world’s hydrocodone were consumed in the United States.

In the summer of 2001, the FDA ordered the addition of a black box warning to the OxyContin label that merely reiterated what physicians already knew, that OxyContin was “a Schedule II controlled substance with an abuse liability similar to morphine.” The FDA also expunged the extraordinary sentence, “Delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.” While the original label declared that “iatrogenic addiction is rare,” the FDA altered it to read that addiction in “managed patients with pain has been reported to be rare,” a minor and essentially worthless change that ignored recent studies which concluded that addiction potential was “moderate to high.” Finally, the original label had proclaimed that OxyContin was for “constant, moderate-to-severe pain that is expected to last a long time,” which the FDA revised to state that it was “for the management of moderate to severe pain when a continuous, around the clock analgesic is needed for an extended period of time.” This last “revision” fit the Purdue strategy of profit maximization by persuading physicians to dispense OxyContin for longer periods at ever-higher doses, “around the clock” creating a self-fulfilling spiral of tolerance and addiction. The Sacklers were ecstatic, writing in one Purdue memo that the FDA action “has created enormous opportunities.” Sales tripled over the next three years.

The Sacklers sent Purdue executives Michael Friedman, Howard Udell, and Paul Goldenheim to testify before the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, utilizing their time as an infomercial and reminding the panel that, “while all of the voices in this debate are important, we must be especially careful to listen to the voices of patients who, without drugs like OxyContin, would be left suffering from their untreated or inadequately treated pain.” By winter 2001, negative press continued to mount. Asa Hutchinson, the DEA Administrator at the time, publicly blamed Purdue’s aggressive marketing blitzkrieg for making OxyContin a drug of “disproportionate abuse.” The same trio of Jews was dispatched to make Hutchinson’s remarks go away. Purdue, as always, was successful. By year’s end, OxyContin had become the top-selling brand-name controlled substance drug ever, a title it still holds today.

Purdue sales representatives well understood that their first priority was to push as many pills as possible. They focused their efforts on “high value target” prescribers, internally listed as “SP,” for “super prescribers.” In OxyContin’s top thirteen markets, a few hundred super prescribers wrote more prescriptions than there were people. Nationally, 55 percent of all opioids were prescribed by three percent of all physicians. Purdue maintained records on the sales territories where it suspected that illegal dispensing contributed to wildly disproportionate sales volumes, referring to the areas as “Region Zero.” The company never once tipped off law enforcement. For example, one West Virginia doctor wrote 335,000 prescriptions over eight years, a rate of 130 a day, seven days a week, while Purdue’s star prescriber in Massachusetts wrote 347,000 in just five years. Purdue awarded both of these doctors lucrative speaking contracts at sponsored pain symposiums, along with many other “super prescribers,” some of whom went on to lose their licenses or go to prison. Purdue employees who raised concerns were shut down immediately and told to get back to selling drugs. And sell drugs, they did. Indeed, they did so with some OxyContin sales teams pressing dubious doctors to continue writing prescriptions for addicts who had been turned away elsewhere.

Many of Purdue’s “super prescribers” were pill mills, cash-only only “clinics” where “doctors” prescribed opioids to anyone for any reason. One of the earliest pill mills operated in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. In a scenario repeated hundreds of times for the next twenty years, pharmacists had alerted Purdue to this pill mill in 1998, but Purdue took no action, despite knowing that its volume of sales was inexplicable given the local population size and that sales at this “clinic” surged over a million dollars in the first quarter of 2001 alone; at the time it was the largest OxyContin revenue increase anywhere. In December 2001, the “clinic” was raided and shuttered. Throughout its lifetime, the three Purdue salesmen responsible for the pill mill continued to collect bonuses based on the OxyContin they funneled into it; later, Purdue would assert that it was under no legal obligation to alert law enforcement to anything. In 2002, amidst growing attention from Congress and the DEA, the latter agency’s Office of Diversion Control organized a summit between itself, the FDA, and Purdue. At the summit, the DEA’s senior scientific officer presented damning evidence regarding mounting overdose deaths, many of which had been officially classified as suicides. Interestingly, 98 percent of the dead had taken the drug orally, as approved and intended. The DEA thus rightly concluded that its overdose statistics were nowhere near an accurate approximation of the scale of the issue; chronic abusers, it surmised, would have developed tolerances making death by oral ingestion far less likely, meaning that addicts were driving the illicit trade. The VA reported that at least a quarter of its patients treated with OxyContin became addicted, and primary care physicians across the nation reported that at least a third of their OxyContin-prescribed patients ended up dependent.

The result of this summit? The FDA sided with Purdue and against the DEA on every point. The DEA took its findings to the press and was essentially ignored, with the by now familiar New England Journal of Medicine rejecting the DEA report as “too alarmist,” continuing that it “was too early in post-marketing surveillance to make claims of risks and hazards.” One man did take notice, however: John Brownlee, then the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia. In 2002, Raymond Sackler retained the just-retired Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, to neutralize Brownlee’s investigation. Giuliani Partners, the former Mayor’s new firm, was put on the Sackler payroll to the tune of millions of dollars per month. Giuliani and his former Police Commissioner, Bernard Kerik, who would soon serve as the Interior Minister of Iraq under the Jewish Paul Bremer regime, got to work immediately. Giuliani set up a meeting with DEA Administrator Asa Hutchinson, and, a week before the first anniversary of 9/11, Giuliani joined Hutchinson and United States Attorney General John Ashcroft to give the opening address for a DEA exhibit on terrorism and drug trafficking, raising twenty thousand dollars for the Drug Enforcement Museum Foundation. Purdue did not stop at Giuliani; the Sacklers also retained Louis Sullivan, George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, along with Jay McCloskey, the former U.S. Attorney who had been one of the first federal law enforcement officials to publicly oppose Purdue.

In response to another investigation, this time by Florida’s Attorney General, the Sacklers hired Burt Rosen, an extremely well-connected pharmaceutical lobbyist, as Vice President of Federal Governmental Affairs. Giuliani managed to settle this investigation with an agreement for Purdue to pay two million dollars to develop a “prescription monitoring program” that never came to fruition. Moreover, the State of Florida eventually repaid that money to Purdue. Over the next decade, its proliferation of pill mills gave Florida’s Broward County the moniker of “the Oxy Express.” There, over one thousand “clinics” sold more OxyContin than any other county in America; at its peak, Broward County pharmacies dispensed 89 percent of all of the OxyContin in the country. In 2011, the New York Times concluded that this was made possible “because of the absence of a widely used prescription drug monitoring system”—the very monitoring system that Purdue had promised to establish.

In 2002 Senate hearings, Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd stepped in to shield Purdue when the questioning became too heated, much like fictional Nevada Senator Pat Geary flacked for Michael Corleone during his Senate hearings in The Godfather Part II. That year, Purdue contributed more money to Senator Dodd than any other politician. Despite the DEA Office of Diversion Control having proven that there was pervasive malfeasance at Purdue’s OxyContin plant, Rudy Giuliani managed to ensure that the company only faced a minor civil penalty of two million dollars, less than a day’s revenue at a time when OxyContin was well on its way to two billion dollars in annual sales, up twentyfold from its first year. The Sacklers were on Cloud Nine, for, in addition to Giuliani’s skullduggery, the vast majority of the more than one hundred private lawsuits against Purdue had by now been dismissed. Soon, though, the Sacklers would mess with the wrong mother.

In April 2002, 29-year-old single mother Jill Skolek overdosed on OxyContin and died. Her six-year-old son had come home from school, only to find that, for the first time, his mother was not waiting for him at the bus stop. When he got home, he discovered his mother in bed, in what he presumed to be a dead sleep. He made himself a snack, watched cartoons, and then crawled in bed beside her and fell asleep. The next morning, when he found that she was still sleeping, he shook her to no avail, crying, “Mommy.” Finally, he called the police. She had been dead for a full day. Jill’s mother, Marianne Skolek, was a nurse. Marianne was shocked, because she knew that her daughter’s only physical problem was a herniated disk from lifting furniture the prior year. One morning, a week after the funeral, Jill’s orphaned son told his grandmother that “Mommy changed … after taking that pill.” He clarified that the “oxy” had made her back feel better, and, sure enough, the toxicology report concluded that Jill had died of accidental OxyContin overdose. Marianne vowed to get to the bottom of what had happened, and started a grassroots campaign against Purdue and the Sackler family, penning reams of letters to the FDA. The next January, the FDA issued a “warning letter” to Purdue, having compiled enough evidence of misconduct to hold a false advertising hearing, which, if successful, would have allowed the FDA to punish Purdue with labeling and refill restrictions. Giuliani worked his magic again and made it go away, Purdue’s only penalty: a promise not to do it again.

At a conference at Columbia University’s National Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse, at which J. David Haddox and the Connecticut Jew and now-U.S. Senator Richard “Da Nang Dick” Blumenthal were panelists, Marianne body-blocked Haddox and sent him crashing into a row of folding chairs, saying, “Now you know how the victims of OxyContin feel when they hit the depths of addiction and are on their knees fighting the horrific effects of withdrawal.” Robin Hogen, Purdue’s Vice President of Public Affairs and de facto spokesperson, suggested that Marianne’s dead daughter had been an addict, saying that “we think she abused drugs.” Hogen thus planted the seed of doubt, just as Purdue had in dozens of lawsuits that it got dismissed by aggressively putting the victims on trial as addicts who had “latched on to the painkiller to satisfy their drug habits.” Talk about blaming the victim. When Marianne learned that Purdue had asked for FDA approval of OxyContin for breastfeeding mothers experiencing postpartum pain, she flooded Attorneys General and media outlets with emails and faxes, stating that “we have enough devastation in the country without addicting infants to OxyContin.” Purdue withdrew the request.

In 2004, OxyContin was officially designated the most abused drug in the United States. This is the same year in which Purdue co-sponsored, along with the WHO, the “Global Day Against Pain” to make “pain management” a “human right.” In 2006, John Brownlee finally forwarded his Purdue investigation to his superiors at the Department of Justice. Brownlee focused on felony misbranding and fraudulent marketing, but felt confident that he could obtain charges for money laundering, defrauding the government, and wire and mail fraud. DOJ bureaucrats, including then-Criminal Division chief Alice Fisher, decided not to file expanded charges, and instead to simply pursue the far less serious misbranding charge. Giuliani and the rest of Purdue’s defense team signed a plea agreement with Brownlee in which Purdue Frederick, not Purdue LP or Purdue Pharma, pled guilty to felony deceptive and fraudulent marketing, paid a proportionally insignificant fine, and essentially agreed to reforms that again amounted to a mea culpa of “I promise, I’ll change my wicked ways.” Federal prosecutors hailed the 2007 judgment as the end of Purdue’s criminal misconduct, and industry analysts forecast that OxyContin had been stopped just in time to prevent a more serious and deadly epidemic. Of course, that isn’t what happened.

In the first three months of 2007, over five thousand “adverse events” were reported to Purdue. The company investigated only 21 of these reports, concluding from that paltry sample size that there were no widespread issues; needless to say, executives did not deign to report any of these incidents to law enforcement. Marianne was livid at the manner in which Purdue had essentially been let off scot-free, and testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The grieving mother, now the sole caretaker for her orphaned grandson, excoriated Jay McCloskey, Rudy Giuliani, and the three Purdue Jews who had been individually fined, Friedman, Udell, and Goldenheim. She denounced the fact that none of the Sacklers had been held liable, nor even named. She concluded with a plea for action: “Her name was Jill Carol Skolek. She did not deserve to be prescribed OxyContin and die because of the criminal activities of individuals of Purdue Pharma. Please give my family justice and investigate the criminal activity of Purdue Pharma.” Marianne Skolek was right. The greatest devastation would be wrought after Purdue’s 2007 guilty plea and Consent Agreement.

Purdue broke most, if not all, of its promises. The company did not report pill mills or super prescribers, nor did it direct its sales representatives to stop selling to them. Instead, Purdue expanded its deceptive promotional blitzkrieg to sell ever-greater amounts of OxyContin at ever-higher dosages for ever-longer periods. It worked. Net sales in 2007 topped one billion dollars and produced a profit of over six hundred million dollars, ninety percent of which came from OxyContin. Internal communications named “sales effort” as the main driver for this growth, with a majority of the revenue derived from the 80-milligram dose, the highest produced at the time. Purdue doubled its sales team over the next ten years. Nearly simultaneously with the 2007 plea deal, the University of Kentucky Colleges of Pharmacy and Medicine and Remedica Medical Education and Publishing, a London-based outfit founded the year of OxyContin’s birth, jointly launched Advances in Pain Management. Purdue had flooded Kentucky medical and pharmacy schools with grants for pain-based curricula, and the Kentucky Pharmacists Association regularly lobbied on Purdue’s behalf; it seems no coincidence that Kentucky was a Ground Zero State for the White Plague.

Just who were the editors of Advances in Pain Management? Russell Portenoy, one of the earliest missionaries of the Church of Opium, now on the Purdue payroll, and Ricardo Cruciani, chair of neurology at Drexel University. One of the journal’s writers was Lynn Webster, an anesthesiologist and “pseudoaddiction” advocate who created the “Opioid Risk Tool,” a five-question assessment ostensibly intended to identify patients at risk of opioid abuse. That one-minute “screening” helped to breed in physicians a false belief that liberalized dispensing of opiates was safe, and was featured on Purdue’s website. Portenoy and Cruciani cumulatively received over two million dollars from Purdue, and Webster’s Lifetree Pain Clinic received millions of dollars in research, ranking in the top fifty for single largest payments received, ahead of the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and Duke and Harvard Universities. Cruciani is currently in prison for the rape of several patients, while Webster’s clinic was shuttered after a 2010 DEA raid which discovered over twenty patient deaths from OxyContin. Federal prosecutors chose not to pursue charges against Webster, and Purdue continued to pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for his incessant spread of the Gospel of Opioid. Webster went on to become the President of the American Academy of Pain Medicine, as well as a senior editor of Pain Medicine.

In order to neutralize any possible generic competitors, Purdue made minor modifications to OxyContin to obtain patent extensions; ultimately, the Sacklers would secure thirteen new patents for OxyContin, the exclusive sales rights for which do not expire until after 2030. In 2010, Purdue released a “new and improved” “tamper-resistant” OxyContin, marketed as being more difficult to crush, snort, or inject. After receiving FDA approval for the new variation, Purdue initiated a new campaign, “Opioids with Abuse Deterrent Properties,” touting the “new” OxyContin as “the first-ever narcotic pain reliever that reduced the chances for abuse and slashed the addiction rate.” However, this was all smoke and mirrors, because the company was well aware that over ninety percent of OxyContin abusers did so by swallowing the pills as intended. Nevertheless, the pseudoscience worked, with legions of credulous physicians picking up the pace of prescription. In 2011, as Purdue continued to ramp up its sales representatives’ quotas, OxyContin gained the title of America’s deadliest drug, surpassing the combined fatalities from heroin and cocaine overdoses. All the while, Purdue’s compliance department received record numbers of complaints related to addiction, diversion, and deaths, none of which were ever forwarded to law enforcement.

For just one example of thousands, in 2009, a Purdue sales manager had reported to her superiors her suspicions about a suspected pill mill in Los Angeles. Lake Medical, the “pain clinic,” had a weekly prescription average of fifteen hundred, exceeding that territory’s monthly average. The sales manager noted that she was “certain this is an organized drug ring,” to which Purdue, as ever, did nothing. By the time the DEA closed Lake Medical in 2010, over one million OxyContin pills had been sold directly to the Crips and Armenian traffickers. Purdue Pharma was not alone; the largest pharmaceutical distributors, Cardinal Health, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen, who control up to ninety percent of the drugs going to market, ignored red flags that were impossible to miss unless they did so intentionally. One pharmacy in Kermit, West Virginia, a town of about four hundred people, ordered over nine million OxyContin pills in two years. Between 2007 and 2012, drug distributors shipped more than 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to West Virginia. This was orders of magnitude worse than Merck’s Vioxx scandal.

When the DEA attempted to take action against this egregious abuse, the pill distributors, all three of them Fortune 500 companies, exercised their lobbying power to force the agency to cease freezing their drug shipments. In 2016, Congress passed the 2016 Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act, whose language effectively prevented the DEA from stopping the flood. President Donald Trump then nominated one of the moving forces for the bill, Representative Tom Marino of Pennsylvania, to be his drug czar. Amidst public outrage over his years of pharmaceutical lobbying, Marino withdrew. Marino’s district had been shattered by opioids, as had that of another co-sponsor, then-Representative and now-Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. Yet, as Anne Case and Angus Deaton note, “they fought against effective regulation, not for it; money and pro-business ideology subordinated the voices of those who had been addicted or were dying.” Senator Orrin Hatch, a lifelong Big Pharma shill, applied influence on the DEA, cruelly apathetic to the plight of his home state of Utah, whose drug-induced mortality rate increased sevenfold between 1999 and the enactment of the bill in 2016. D. Linden Barber, a former senior DEA attorney, switched sides to advise Big Pharma and helped to write the bill. The poison kept flowing, but it was never enough for the House of Sackler. Purdue hired McKinsey to help them blow what little was left of the levees, along with organizations like the American Enterprise Institute, who seeded OxyContin propaganda in the press.

In 2012, Senators Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley led the Senate Finance Committee to open an investigation into the American Pain Foundation’s funding, realizing that the organization was an industry shill masquerading as a patient advocacy organization. The very day that the probe was announced, the American Pain Foundation closed its doors and vanished. In March of the next year, Purdue circulated an internal report that drug overdose deaths had tripled over the course of one decade, and that those tens of thousands of deaths—that we now know to be hundreds of thousands—were merely the tip of the iceberg; for each death, there were hundreds more enslaved in crippling addiction. By 2015, opioid prescription rates had tripled from 1999, with enough OxyContin dispensed that year to medicate every American for a month. A CDC report confirmed that prescription opioid users were forty times likelier than the general population to become heroin addicts, making OxyContin the gateway drug to heroin. Johns Hopkins University released a national survey that concluded that Purdue’s variety of messages had sown confusion among primary care physicians, with nearly half of the doctors surveyed believing that the “tamper-resistant” pill was less likely to cause addiction. The Sacklers took this report as a glorious affirmation of what they had done, and Purdue executives held a party to celebrate the success of their marketing strategy.

As the graves continued to multiply, the screws began to tighten around the Sacklers. The family developed a plan to use its Swiss-based Mundipharma network to aggressively market OxyContin overseas, targeting China, Brazil, and India, and, in the past three years, OxyContin sales have indeed risen over seven hundred percent in half a dozen European and South Asian countries. In autumn 2017, President Trump declared the opioid epidemic a “public health emergency,” with, at this time, 115 opioid deaths per day, and he launched his Initiative to Stop Opioid Abuse the next year. This toothless action followed over sixty prior measures that Congress had taken; although throwing money at an issue has never worked and will never work, Gerald Posner notes that the new action “evidently allowed politicians to demonstrate that if they were not ending the crisis, they were at least studying and talking about it a lot.” In 2019, Purdue Pharma was sued by nearly every State Attorney General, the Department of Justice, and dozens of class action attorneys on behalf of legions of families. The Massachusetts Attorney General went a step further than the others, and targeted the Sacklers directly for having “created the epidemic and profited from it through a web of illegal deceit.” In the complaint: “Eight people in a single family made the choices that caused much of the opioid epidemic. The Sackler family … had the power to decide how addictive narcotics were sold. They hired hundreds of workers to carry out their wishes, and they fired those who didn’t sell enough drugs. They got more patients on opioids, at higher doses, for longer, than ever before. They paid themselves billions of dollars. They are responsible for addiction, overdose, and death that damaged millions of lives.”

As one anonymous plaintiff’s attorney told the Guardian, the Sacklers were nothing but “a crime family … drug dealers in nice suits and dresses.” Purdue paid 270 million dollars to settle with the Oklahoma Attorney General, and reached a tentative multi-billion-dollar settlement in September with 23 States and 4 territories, the others rejecting it. Leaked details reveal that, in exchange for ending all pending lawsuits, the Sacklers would pay three billion dollars and put Purdue into structured bankruptcy to eventually be run as a public-benefit corporation that would distribute overdose and addiction mitigation drugs free of charge. The previous year, Purdue had obtained a patent for a variant of medication-assisted addiction treatment. To this, Case and Deaton state that “it is as if the poisoner of the water supply, having killed and sickened tens of thousands, were to demand a huge ransom for the antidote to save the survivors.” The Sacklers insisted that their settlement be paid in installments over seven years, the largest portion of which would come after the fifth year. The Attorneys General of Massachusetts and New York insisted that the Sacklers also sell their Swiss holding company, Mundipharma, and pay a higher cash amount. They agreed to do so within the same seven years, assenting to pay any surplus amount over three billion from the Mundipharma sale.

Considering that Purdue had paid the Sacklers twelve to thirteen billion dollars in OxyContin profits, the Jews would walk away with the vast majority of their wealth. Furthermore, the Sacklers were masters at the shell game, so they almost certainly have hidden wealth spirited away in parts unknown. Also included in their settlementa: Purdue will continue to sell OxyContin. The Sacklers categorically refused to admit any personal liability. On September 15, 2019, Purdue filed for bankruptcy protection, placing on hold all current and pending litigation against Purdue and the Sacklers; thus, thanks to U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain, it is incredibly likely that Purdue Pharma will never face trial, and that the Sackler family will never be held to account—at least, not on this earth. Even if they do deign to pay their settlement in full, that money will simply be used as general revenue for the government, not for any of their millions of victims. For now, the only punishment facing the Sacklers is that they seem to have been excommunicated from the ranks of polite society, no longer invited to New York’s finest cocktail dinners, with a small handful of the recipients of Sackler largesse even disavowing any connection to them.

End of Part 2 of 3.

The White Plague, Part I: An Empire of Death: The Rise of the House of Sackler

Becky Manning: “He just carried this tremendous guilt for everything, for our son doing drugs. Then he started getting depressed, and then my husband took his own life.”

Paul Solman: “How did he do it?”

Becky Manning: “He blew his head off. I came home to that.”

Paul Solman: “Best friend Marcy Conner’s husband also killed himself.”

Marcy Conner: “He developed alcoholism very young in life.”

Paul Solman: “An addiction he shared with lifelong friends.”

Marcy Conner: “One died with a heart attack, but drug use and alcohol use played all the way through his life. Another one died of cancer, drank up to the very end. And my husband actually had a G-tube in, a feeding tube in, and poured alcohol down his feeding tube until he died.”

Excerpted from a PBS interview conducted in Kentucky. 

I was in high school the first time I used heroin. I had started with marijuana in the tenth grade, which, like it or not, is a gateway drug. Marijuana gave way to psilocybin mushrooms, and then to alcohol, and the deluge poured forth. Oxycodone, LSD, MDMA, DMT, Ketamine, and then opium and cocaine. It was as if I was ascending a ladder, and heroin was its apex. I snorted it, smoked it, and injected it into my veins. My friends were well on their way to full-blown addiction, along with me. I went to a top-three university, and fell in with a group of hardcore addicts, in a league of our own that was entirely separate from the ubiquitous casual substance abuse that pervades American colleges. My existence was a blur, a bottomless pit that I could never fill, no matter how hard I tried. And try I did, with Xanax and other benzodiazepines, GHB, methamphetamine, hydrocodone, codeine, oxymorphone, morphine, and a litany of synthetic hallucinogens and amphetamines so new that they only had chemical names. And, of course, more heroin. Fentanyl was certainly in the mix. I liked speedballs, and I loved heroin, but my favorite drug was always baby blue Roxicodone, or “Roxy,” pure 30-milligram oxycodone. I had dealers, but I rarely needed them; the United States Postal Service delivered my drugs straight to my door from dark web markets on Tor.

Near the start of my second year of college, one of my two closest friends died of an overdose, a mixture of opioids and benzodiazepines. He had suffered from worsening scoliosis, his back-pain part of the reason he had originally been attracted to opioids. We had purchased our needles and descended into addiction together. At least three other boys from our high school graduating class died of opioid overdoses that same year. Another friend blew his brains out. Two acquaintances in college hung themselves. Eventually, after suffering through heroin withdrawal, I stopped using drugs. I then ran into the open arms of what would become my longest-lived demon, alcohol, and slipped into full-blown alcoholism in no time. At its height, I was drinking more than a fifth of hard liquor every day. On one such day, I blacked out behind the wheel and ran off of the road, flipped two or three times into a ravine, and totaled my car, escaping — miraculously — unscathed. This went on for about three years. And then, concurrent with my racial awakening, I found God again, whose company I had fled in adolescence. With His grace, I overcame the yoke that had held me in bondage for so many years. I have been completely sober for almost two years now, and I will never look back. When I reflect upon what I did—and in what prodigious quantities, I realize how lucky I am to be alive, how lucky I am to have overcome what hundreds of thousands of other Whites have succumbed to, the abnegation, erasure, and stench of waking death perfumed in the cloak of warmth, euphoria, and belonging.

I came from a wealthy home, and had a wonderful childhood in a decently small White town in the South. My parents did everything that they could for me, yet none of that stopped me from straying into the darkness. Drug addiction and alcoholism are, consciously or not, slow-motion suicides. These slow suicides have wrought unfathomable devastation during the past twenty years, one of the most consequential attacks on the White race in our history. The twenty-first century opioid epidemic is an assault from which we may never recover. Its ramifications cannot be overstated, and will ripple for decades. There are many of us who, perhaps tainted by the cancer of libertarianism, see addiction as a moral failing, a weakness for which we have only ourselves to blame. For some people, myself included, this diagnosis is accurate. But that is not the story of the opioid epidemic, the White Plague, or, as some White Nationalists call it, the White Death. No, the birth of the White Plague was largely iatrogenic, meaning “brought forth from the healer,” as legally prescribed OxyContin gave way to an opioid sea, as waves of oxycodone, hydrocodone, heroin, and fentanyl crested and crashed ashore, consuming our nation in its wake.

The White Plague is the handiwork of an irredeemably evil pharmaceutical industry, aided by innumerable pharmacists and physicians who both wittingly and unwittingly served as its facilitators and footsoldiers. However, if we peek behind the curtains of the great monolith of Big Pharma, we find the true culprits, the names and faces of the demons who deliberately crafted, planned, and inseminated the White Plague — the New York Jews known as the Sackler family, the patriarch of which was the architect of Big Pharma itself. Just as the Great Recession of 2008 provided us with a glimpse of the Jewish corruption of the American financial system into a malevolent oligarchy of organized crime, the tale of the Sacklers’ rise to power, of the Jewish perversion of the pharmaceutical industry, provides us with an incredible glimpse into the Jewish coup of the twentieth century, into the Jewish corrosion of every single one of our institutions. The White Plague is emblematic of Jewish deception, greed, and hatred — not apathy, but hatred — for Whites. The White Plague is also, almost coequally with the Jewish promotion of sexual nihilism, a powerful, calculated instrument of White genocide and control. Yes, they want us high in artificial bliss, in a spray-painted heaven where we are ripe for the picking. How did this, the Jewish drugging of White America, happen? Thanks in large part to the work of Sam Quinones[i], Beth Macy[ii], Anne Case, Angus Deaton[iii], and, above all, Gerald Posner[iv], we now know.

The road to Hell was first laid in Germany in 1804, when Friedrich Sertürner first isolated the morphine alkaloid from the opium poppy, naming it Morpheus, named by Ovid as the god of dreams, son of Somnus, the god of sleep. In 1827, Heinrich Merck initiated commercial morphine production at his family’s Engel-Apotheke, or “Angel Pharmacy,” the pharmacy that would eventually become Merck. Morphine became a key product for Ernst Schering and Friedrich Bayer, as well as their eponymous companies. After the Mexican War, the German cousins Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart launched Pfizer. During and after the War for Southern Independence, morphine demand burgeoned, spawning the companies now known as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Wyeth, Parke-Davis, Eli Lilly and Company, and Burroughs Wellcome. During the War, over ten million opium pills and three million ounces of opium tinctures and powders were doled out to Union soldiers. After the War, the hypodermic needle, which had only recently been invented, was widely used to facilitate opium-based pain relief. Intravenous injection was thought to reduce addictive potential by bypassing the digestive system. At least one hundred thousand veterans became addicted.

In 1874, C.R. Wright synthesized diacetylmorphine for the first time, and in 1898 the opioid was independently rediscovered by Felix Hoffmann, a Bayer chemist. Bayer brought it to market under the name heroisch, or, “heroic.” By this time, opium and morphine were ubiquitous across America, used even by children. Postwar addiction was especially common among White Southerners, whose entire world had been put to the sword and then to the torch, whose tear-dimmed eyes struggled to see through a vortex of ash. With Bayer’s introduction of heroin, which it sold as a nonaddictive morphine substitute, opioid demand surged. Many a mother gave her children heroin for a good night’s rest. In 1914, in response to skyrocketing opiate demand due in part to morphine overproduction in the First World War, the United States Congress enacted its first effort at drug enforcement with the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. The Harrison Act prohibited most cocaine use and most opiate importation, with one gaping exception: major manufacturers, such as Bayer, were exempt. In 1916, Martin Freund and the Jew Edmund Speyer first synthesized oxycodone, and in 1920 another pair of German scientists synthesized hydrocodone. For the next few decades, drug addiction remained a minor subculture, and it appeared that crisis had been avoided.

Arthur Sackler and his widow

In the early 1950s, Pfizer President John McKeen sought to develop an unorthodox, unprecedented marketing campaign to aggressively sell its new antibiotic, Terramycin. McKeen hired a young advertising executive and physician, a pioneer who was acknowledged by colleagues to be at the vanguard of the medical advertising industry, then in its nascency. His name was Arthur Sackler. Sackler, a self-described “Jewish kid from Brooklyn,” was born there in 1913 to Eastern European Orthodox Jewish immigrants, part of the deluge of two million Jews who swarmed into our nation from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires from the 1880s to the 1920s. His parents named him Abraham, after his grandfather, but he preferred “the less Jewish-sounding” Arthur. Arthur had two brothers, Mortimer and Raymond, and, like his parents, he was a committed Marxist. Leftism predominated in his Jewish neighborhood, indeed in all Jewish neighborhoods, and the Sacklers resented “unrestrained capitalism” for the Great Depression which cost them their small grocery. New York Jews were the driving force behind the trade unions of the day, and the Sacklers subscribed to Forverts, or, “Forward,” a socialist daily that was also the world’s largest Yiddish newspaper. Jews accounted for at least forty percent of New York’s Socialist Party, and sixty percent of New York’s Jews had voted for socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs.

In his last year of medical school, Arthur met a young Danish girl, the first of his three wives. His mother, “crushed” that her firstborn son would marry a despised Gentile, forced the girl to convert to Judaism. Arthur fundraised for Norman Bethune, a Canadian physician and Communist who volunteered as a battlefield surgeon for the Rojos in the Spanish Civil War before joining the Chinese Communists’ Eighth Route Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War, where he was commissioned by Mao Zedong himself to lead a mobile operating unit at the front. Later in life, when Arthur attended medical conferences in China, he told his hosts that nothing would be a greater honor to him than to be “a present-day Bethune.” The young Sackler also engaged in activism against blood bank segregation; it was of enormous importance to him that White and Black blood mixed. During the Second World War, Sackler got his first advertising post, working at Schering. The FBI, concerned about possible ties between the German-led Schering and the Third Reich, had six confidential informants placed within the company. Over the course of one year, one informant reported the emergence of “a Jewish influence,” and that the CEO, Julius Weltzien (whose mother was in fact Jewish), along with the other German emigrant executives, were “international Jews who would pour oil on both fires if a profit was in sight.”

To avoid the possible seizure of Schering, Sackler arranged for Alfred Stern, the American heir to a banking fortune, to purchase the company. Stern had been married to one of the daughters of Julius Rosenwald, part owner of Sears and Roebuck, and managed the family’s charitable foundation. Stern was enraptured by Freudian psychoanalysis, and funded the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago. He remarried Martha Dodd, a Soviet asset who had been turned while in Berlin with her father, the then-American Ambassador to Germany, and Dodd recruited Stern in turn. Stern went on to become a director of the Leftist-controlled New York Citizens Housing and Planning Council. Stern and Dodd would later be outed and fled the nation, never again to return. In any case, Sackler was too late, and Schering was seized. Around this time, the philandering Arthur married his second wife, a Jewess named Beverly. They officially joined the Communist Party, the majority of whose membership was Jewish. The FBI file on Arthur and Beverly remained active from 1944 to at least 1968, and is thus far only partially declassified, with at least one file having been “routinely” destroyed.

The brothers Sackler worked at Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital in Queens for a time, psychiatry and psychology being a perfect fit for Leftist Jews. From Schering, Arthur became Vice President of William Douglas McAdams, overseeing the then-fledgling medical advertising division, and soon became a one-third shareholder in the agency. Sackler detested the WASPs of Madison Avenue, later recalling, “You would sit at meetings where they would tell Jewish jokes, anti-Jewish jokes, and you had to sit there and swallow it, and laugh along with the boys.” The Jew would get the last laugh two generations later, taking his bloody vengeance upon the children and grandchildren of those patrician Whites whom he so hated. Arthur became fast friends with Ludwig Fröhlich, a Jewish sodomite emigrant from Germany. Both men actively concealed their Jewish identity. Fröhlich’s sister, Ingrid, obtained an influential position in high society through her brother’s connections, as a couture model for Sophie Gimbel, the American designer who ran Saks Fifth Avenue’s Salon Moderne custom dress shop. Ingrid was the favorite model of Wallis Simpson, the American divorcée for whom King Edward VIII abdicated the throne and thereby cleared the way for the Second World War. Ingrid, who hid her Jewish identity as painstakingly as her brother, was often heard to say, “Those Jewish people, I can’t stand them.”

The brothers Sackler incorporated their first of many joint businesses, Pharmaceutical Research Associates, and, setting the template for their future ventures, kept their ownership secret. Arthur, already a success, created the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation to shelter his art collection and make bequests; his brothers soon took the same course, and eventually all three set up parallel foundations and trusts in the United Kingdom. There are at least twelve Sackler foundations in New York alone. Arthur singlehandedly made McAdams the dominant medical advertising firm, its only comparable “competitor” an agency led by his dear friend Fröhlich, with whom Sackler regularly colluded. Unbeknownst to anyone else at the time, Sackler owned a controlling interest in that agency as well. At McAdams, Sackler pioneered direct drug sales to physicians; at the time, the FDA banned direct-to-consumer drug advertising. Arthur believed that “a drug company had to win the doctor’s loyalty for its entire product line,” and innovated several tactics that have since become standard practice, including promotional drug conferences, advertisements in medical journals, exhibits at medical conventions, and the saturation of physicians with free pharmaceutical samples. To bypass the aforementioned FDA ban, Sackler disguised product promotion as “news” in the consumer press, to induce patients to ask their physicians for the new drugs by name.

In 1948, Arthur approached Alfred Stern with another business proposition — he had set his sights on Purdue Frederick, a small patent pharmaceutical firm, and asked Stern to help him purchase it. By this time, the two had become good friends, with Arthur a regular visitor to his summer home, the same summer home that hosted meetings between Stern’s Soviet handlers and their other intelligence assets in the area. Stern nevertheless declined, and Arthur moved on for the time being. The next year, Sackler created the Medical and Pharmaceutical Information Bureau, or MPIB, the first company to specialize in seeding promotional articles, ostensibly about “new developments in medicine,” in the nonmedical press, part of his strategy to hype new, as yet unapproved drugs. Sackler practiced rampant insider trading, and concealed his ownership of MPIB, along with his large ownership stake in Pfizer. All the while, Sackler’s résumé expanded, and success gave way to success. In 1950, Arthur was appointed to chair the First International Congress of Psychiatry, he and his brothers having established themselves in biological psychiatry. Arthur, ever the greedy status-seeking Jew, missed the birth of his first son to deliver a speech. Money always came first. He became obsessed with collecting art, with the crates piling up in warehouses, unexamined; as his second wife would attest, most of the pieces were “known only by a packing list.” She would later write that Arthur “envisioned himself as the sun in his own solar system,” held in thralldom by a compulsive “necessity for prestige and recognition,” a deep “need to achieve…that his name not be forgotten by the world.”

In 1951, as aforementioned, Sackler singlehandedly plotted Pfizer’s Terramycin blitzkrieg, an unprecedently aggressive marketing campaign that directly gave birth to the legions of drug sales representatives that inundate physicians today. Arthur pioneered several mass pharmaceutical marketing strategies, including taking the campaign directly to physicians and blanketing medical journals, which were exempt from governmental oversight thanks to an FTC loophole that overlooked all advertisements directed at physicians, who were presumed to be capable of (and willing to) see deception; in doing so, Sackler transformed Pfizer into the powerhouse that it is today. The next year, Sackler helped Pfizer lead the other major pharmaceutical companies to lobby for a modification to American patent law, obtaining a lower innovation threshold and thus opening the floodgates for increased drugs on ever-shorter pipelines from development to market. Incidentally, this is the same year in which Pfizer lit the spark for the infernal Hell of factory farming, as well as antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Pfizer tested antibiotics on pigs and in short order began marketing them to farmers across the nation to accelerate the growth of their cattle, chickens, and pigs.

1952 proved to be an even more momentous year for Arthur Sackler. He finally bought Purdue Frederick Company, giving his brothers Mortimer and Raymond coequal shares. As per usual, none of the Sacklers’ names appeared on Purdue’s incorporation papers. At around this time, Arthur became acquainted with Félix Martí-Ibáñez, a Spanish psychiatrist and Marxist who worked for the pre-Franco Second Republic and represented it at the 1938 Universal Peace Congress. The Spaniard had also served in the Rojos medical corps. Together, Sackler and Martí-Ibáñez secretly formed a shell company, MD Publications, Inc. The two conspirators learned that the Washington Institute of Medicine, the publisher of the Journal of Antibiotics, was near bankruptcy; that publication’s editor was none other than Henry Welch, the head of the FDA Antibiotics Division. Welch’s superiors had no problem with his moonlighting position because Welch only received a small honorarium for the work. Sackler stepped in, agreeing to pay all of its debts, while MD Publications assumed control. Welch would receive 7.5 percent of all advertising income and 50 percent of net income from reprints sold to pharmaceutical companies; Sackler also agreed to publish Welch’s forthcoming book. Welch, for his part, disclosed none of this to the FDA, and his superiors went on believing that he was only receiving a trivial honorarium; Martí-Ibáñez assured him that no one would ever know the truth. Through MD Publications and a handful of other ventures, Arthur Sackler now personally controlled multiple medical journals, all of which were promptly packed to the gills with pharmaceutical advertisements.

Sackler operated an indescribably labyrinthine corporate shell game, creating new companies left and right, by which he concealed the fact that he and his brothers had a controlling interest in an inexorably expanding empire. At Arthur’s direction, Martí-Ibáñez and Welch established annual antibiotics conference, which Welch actually convinced the FDA to co-sponsor. At the inaugural conference, lavish receptions featured a tribute from President Eisenhower, and Welch and Martí-Ibáñez skewed the presentations to feature papers that favorably reviewed drugs from the biggest pharmaceutical firms, resulting in increased reprint sales, promoted as direct mail advertisements to physicians. The proceedings were printed, bound, and sold as a standalone book, while simultaneously the MD Encyclopedia was launched, a promotional tool disguised as a medical reference book. Meanwhile, the indefatigable Sackler patriarch used his old friend Fröhlich as the front man to incorporate what became International Marketing Service, or IMS, a data collection firm that paid physicians for their prescribing data.

Through IMS, Fröhlich fed Sackler prescribing data, which Sackler used to target sales at doctors who were large prescribers and most likely to be early adopters of new drugs. Simultaneously, Martí-Ibáñez published “scholarly” articles in Medical Encyclopedia to promote the same drugs, while Welch endorsed said drugs at the annual antibiotics conference in his official role, carrying the great weight of authority. By 1955, Sackler controlled over a dozen medical journals and marketing firms to seed promotional advertisements that appeared to be objective, his role totally hidden. Many of these advertisements reproduced the endorsements of “doctors,” complete with addresses, phone numbers, and office hours, all of which turned out to be, along with the “doctors,” nonexistent. Sackler’s chicanery did not stop here; indeed, he likely doctored the trial results of a Sackler product, L-Glutavite, and sold the one-product company for millions of dollars to a subsidiary of another company that was itself partially owned by the Sacklers.

Arthur maintained his Leftist affiliations, using his companies to hire dozens of blacklisted Communists and provide them a living until they could rejoin their respective fields. This, together with the extremely opaque corporate structures and funding sources for the Sackler empire, attracted the gaze of the FBI. Though federal agents were disconcerted by the fact that the Sackler businesses shared overlapping addresses and phone numbers, they were overwhelmed with other Soviet infiltration cases that they felt to be more pressing, and an official investigation was never undertaken. The FBI thus remained ignorant to the fact that, no matter who was listed on the incorporation papers, Arthur Sackler was the ventriloquist at the helm of it all. In 1959, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver took up the torch, spearheading a damning series of Senate hearings on the pharmaceutical industry that few paid any attention to. Kefauver’s investigative team was led by FTC veterans John Blair and Paul Dixon. Blair and Dixon, who uncovered evidence that the Sacklers were inordinately large shareholders in Pfizer and a number of other large pharmaceutical firms, wrote a 1960 memo with the subject: “Sackler Brothers.”

The investigators wrote, “During the course of the drug investigation, I have from time to time heard the rumors of the ‘Sackler Brothers’ or ‘Sackler Empire.’ … Any outfit which has been able to establish such close ties with the most powerful man in government with respect to antibiotics is hardly a fringe operation. … The clandestine manner in which they carry on their multitudinous activities also suggests there may be more here than meets the eye. Finally, the very number of organizations in every facet of the drug industry which are under their ownership, control, or influence, is such that they must be regarded as constituting a … large-scale operation.” Blair and Dixon concluded that “the Sackler empire is a completely integrated operation,” including creating “new drugs in its drug development enterprise,” ensuring that “hospitals with which they have connections” do the clinical trials and produce “favorable reports,” preparing advertising copy for publication in “their own medical journals,” and seeding articles in popular newspapers and magazines through “their public relations organizations.” For some reason that might not be so unfathomable, the Sacklers escaped unscathed and avoided public mention entirely. Henry Welch had no such luck; the millions of dollars that he had ferreted away were discovered and publicized, in response to which he had a heart attack and resigned from the FDA. Meanwhile, the Sackler empire continued its march; Arthur established the Medical Tribune and invited pioneer venture capitalist Georges Doriot to invest, marketing it as “the first independent paper for doctors,” again with the Sackler name concealed.

In 1957, under the aegis of Hoffmann-La Roche, Leo Sternbach (also Jewish) first synthesized benzodiazepines. Roche tapped Arthur to handle the saturation marketing campaign for Sternbach’s first creation, Librium. Fortuitously for Roche, Librium was granted FDA approval in 1960, perfectly coinciding with the creation of the Hamilton Anxiety and Depression Rating Scales by Max Hamilton (changed from Himmelschein). His Anxiety Rating Scale consisted of a fourteen-question survey, which laid the groundwork for the medicalization of anxiety as a psychiatric disorder. Roche distributed the Hamilton tests to tens of thousands of physicians, calculating that doctors would prescribe more Librium “if they felt they had a scientific basis for doing so.” As we will see, the Sacklers’ launch of OxyContin 34 years later would uncannily mirror the synergistic kismet under which Librium had been rolled out, with a reevaluation of “pain management” that included a ten-point “pain scale” by which physicians could supposedly “measure” patient pain. In order to bypass the FDA ban on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, Arthur created a promotional press release disguised as “news” about “advances in health,” containing grandiose claims about “taming” psychopathic prison inmates and aggressive zoo animals, dutifully repeated by magazines like Time, Life, Newsweek, National Geographic, and Esquire. Sackler presumed, correctly, that these magazines would make their way into patient waiting rooms across the United States. In less than three months, Arthur Sackler made Librium the best-selling tranquilizer in America.

In 1962, Arthur was questioned by the FBI over his ties to the since-departed Alfred Stern and Martha Dodd. He escaped unscathed by brazenly lying about his relationship with the Soviet agents. Called before Senator Kefauver’s subcommittee on another matter, Sackler perjured himself; with vile condescension, he exercised his skills as a master of obfuscation. If he could not deflect a question, he stonewalled or became combative, yet remained unfazed. In response to the horrific birth defects caused by thalidomide, Congress enacted the Kefauver Harris Amendment, tightening (though not by much) FDA oversight regarding drug efficacy and advertising claims. No matter; in 1963, Roche obtained FDA approval for Valium, another of Sternbach’s benzodiazepines, synthesized in 1959 to be the successor for Roche’s own Librium. As with that predecessor, Roche hired Arthur to wage his most aggressive blitz yet. Sackler’s favorite slogan: “No serious side effects.” In classic Sackler fashion, Arthur led Roche to finance the Network for Continuing Medical Education; by then, he had already started his own CME courses. Using prescription data collected by himself and Fröhlich’s IMS, Sackler personalized his Valium promotion and made the drug a tremendous hit—the best-selling drug on earth, the first hundred-million-dollar drug, making Roche the most expensive publicly-traded stock of its time.

As Valium took root, President Kennedy’s Advisory Commission on Narcotic and Drug Abuse released its final report, classifying Librium, the third best-selling drug in America, as addictive and dangerous. Roche, however, had nothing to fear; when the President’s face was blown apart, it took news of the report with it. The brothers Sackler, who, it will be remembered, were psychiatrists of the Freudian persuasion, specifically targeted Valium at women. In this effort, Arthur very likely authored Aspects of Anxiety, an attractive hardcover book released by Roche in 1965 and sent to the top ten thousand prescribing physicians in the nation. He had convinced Charles Branch, the President of the American Psychiatric Association, to write the preface. As with so many other Sackler efforts, the “informational tool” was just a marketing scheme in disguise, a method by which to bypass the FDA and FTC. Arthur also began sheltering of pharmaceutical intellectual property in overseas tax havens, utilizing a Swiss company that the Sacklers had incorporated in 1957. This innovation would later allow the family to evade hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on their crown jewel, OxyContin.

In England, an early euthanasia advocate named Cicely Saunders took the first major incremental step toward the White Plague. Saunders almost singlehandedly introduced the “death with dignity” concept, experimenting with heavy opioid doses as a volunteer at St. Joseph’s. In 1967, she became the inaugural medical director at St. Christopher’s, the world’s first modern hospice, where she launched her quest to find a better painkiller than heroin, to revolutionize “pain management.” The Sacklers had purchased H.R. Napp Pharmaceuticals and Bard Pharmaceuticals the year before; when they became aware of Saunders’ quest, they promised her that they could deliver the magic bullet that she sought—thirty years later, the Sacklers would fulfill that dream and extinguish hundreds of thousands of others. Back in the United States, the Nixon Administration came to power on a promise of law and order, partially in response to the spiraling drug counterculture, including rampant heroin addiction among returning Vietnam veterans. Under the tenure of James Goddard, the FDA was more proactive than ever before, placing a ban on directly mailing free, unsolicited drug samples. Of course, there were still no limits to the quantity of pharmaceuticals that sales representatives could dole out, and drug firms responded in kind by adopting a vast array of perks for prescribing physicians, including all-expense-paid vacations, golf tournaments, and extravagant parties.

Arthur, ever the criminal mastermind, developed an ingenious marketing ploy for Purdue Frederick’s new disinfectant, Betadine. In 1968, Sackler had finagled himself a contract to supply the product in bulk to American soldiers in Vietnam. From there, he managed to sell it to NASA; when the Apollo 11 crew returned to earth, the very first action taken by the astronauts was to spray down their suits, module, and raft with Betadine. Arthur ran with it, placing full-page advertisements in all of the leading medical journals, with the headline: “Apollo 11 Splashdown! NASA Selects Betadine Antiseptic to Help Guard Against Possible Moon Germ Contamination.” Needless to say, Betadine boomed. So too did Arthur’s career; he was appointed to chair the International Task Force on World Health Manpower for the World Health Organization, delivered a report before the United Nations, and received lucrative grants from the Environmental Protection Agency. What did Sackler do with these taxpayer dollars? Primarily, he performed nihilistically cruel and utterly pointless experiments on defenseless animals, such as one in which he strapped rats into a tiny cage, attached them to a motorized shaker, and shook them violently from side to side 150 times per minute for half an hour while simultaneously bombarding them with recordings of New York subway trains. After four months of torture, the last of the rats died. And what grand conclusions did this indescribable suffering make possible? That stress can kill.

The Sackler empire continued to metastasize, unopposed. In 1969, the Sacklers placed their Swiss corporation on a project to develop a timed-release coating, filing an obscure patent in 1971. The next year, the Sackler-owned Napp Pharmaceuticals and Bard Laboratories developed the first working compounds that they believed might be adaptable as a controlled-release formulation for oral medications. In 1980, the project culminated with MST Continus, the first drug to feature a timed-release coating, releasing morphine steadily over twelve hours. This was an essential selling-point, for most doctors erroneously believed that timed-release narcotics would be “addiction-proof.” Here was the revolutionary painkiller that Cicely Saunders had dreamed of. Here was the technology that, sixteen years later, would unleash pestilence upon our people. By this time, Arthur’s network of medical publications reached over one million doctors internationally; one of his magazines was Sexual Medicine Today, targeted toward psychiatrists; articles included: “Nazi Sexual Practices”; “Do Sore Nipples Inhibit Sexual Foreplay?”; “Medical Story of the Castrati”; “Homosexual Prostitute: A Boy Prostitute”; “Aphrodisiacs and Drugs”; “Sex Change Surgery”; and, “Quest for the Ultimate Orgasm.”

As aforementioned, Sackler was pathologically obsessed with status and prestige. He bitterly resented the patrician WASP establishment of New York, the members of which saw him for the nouveau riche wannabe that he was. Arthur had developed a close friendship with another up-and-coming Jew, a young Department of Justice lawyer named Michael Sonnenreich. Sonnenreich went on to formulate the Controlled Substances Act, and eventually switched teams, joining Sackler’s legal army. His mother was an executive administrator at Manhattan’s Temple Israel, while his father was the membership director of B’nai B’rith; it was his connection with Sackler, though, that reaped him his fortune, and Sonnenreich is now an art collector and “philanthropist.” Sackler minimized his Jewish identity until he got a revealing “pep talk” from Sonnenreich: “Let me explain something to you, Arthur. If there is a pogrom, I don’t care what you tell them you are, you are going to be in the same cattle car as I am. Stop the games. … They are not going to work. You could marry all the Christian girls you want, it ain’t going to work. They are still going to put you on the train and that’s that.”

The ascendant Jew made his mark upon American high society, displacing the old WASP order just as the Jewish coup was enshrined within every single institution within our nation. Sackler, after creating a company expressly to bequeath 39 percent of its shares to Columbia University, was appointed to Columbia’s Advisory Council of the Department of Art, History, and Archaeology. The fabled Metropolitan Museum of Art, struggling with fundraising, allowed Arthur to step in and raise his profile further, donating inflated shares of Sackler-controlled companies and hundreds of thousands of dollars to gain a Sackler gallery and a highly irregular storeroom inside the museum to house his private collection. Later, Sackler bankrolled the Met’s new Egyptian Temple of Dendur, along with galleries for Assyrian and Egyptian art, an archaeological laboratory, and a newly-named Sackler Wing. The Met also agreed to add all Sackler donations to its permanent collection. Arthur Rosenblatt, the Jewish second-in-command at the Met, had no issue with taking Sackler’s money, stating that the Met needed “every rich Jewish real estate mogul” because they had “run out of WASPs with money.” When news of Sackler’s specially arranged personal storage room in the basement of the Met hit the press, a reporter called for comment, to which the Met’s General Counsel said that anything that happened at the Met was “none of the public’s damned business,” despite the fact that the Met was publicly funded. The New York Attorney General opened an investigation into why the museum had to date spent nearly one million dollars on storing Sackler’s personal collection.

After Arthur married his third wife, he purchased a 27-room triplex at 666 Park Avenue, his occupancy a sick mockery of a residence that had originally been commissioned by the Vanderbilt family in 1927. Amidst growing tensions between Sackler and the Met, Arthur agreed to donate four million dollars and one thousand pieces valued at fifty million dollars to the Freer Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In return, the Smithsonian established the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery directly on the National Mall, the first modern structure on the Mall to be named for a private individual. Arthur underwrote construction of the Sackler School of Medicine in Tel Aviv, which, as of 2018, is Israel’s largest medical research facility. Along with the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University, we have , among others, the Sackler Gallery for Chinese Art at Princeton, a research lab at Long Island University, the Arthur M. Sackler Sciences Center at Clark University, the Sackler Institute of Graduate Biomedical Science at New York University, the Arthur M. Sackler Institute at Tufts University, a Sackler Wing at the Louvre, the Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Guggenheim Museum, and the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History. Sackler also donated to the National Academy of Sciences. As Arthur’s second wife said, Sackler “found safety and comfort in objects. … The irony, of course, was they made him their slave.”

Sackler had made Valium ubiquitous, his greatest success yet, with an estimated twenty percent of American women using regularly. It became the first ever billion-dollar drug, despite increasing reports of addiction, which, of course, Roche denied was possible. The DOJ upgraded both Librium and Valium to Schedule IV, slowing the juggernaut, although Valium still remained the top drug in America. In 1964, Roche had patented Klonopin, another of Leo Sternbach’s benzodiazepines; in 1977, Sackler was chosen to handle its national rollout. A Roche competitor, Upjohn Laboratories, was about to blow them out of the water with its new benzodiazepine, patented in 1971 and approved in 1981. Xanax was an instant hit, thanks in no small part to the addition of “panic disorder” to the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. By using a DSM anxiety diagnosis and getting FDA approval for a biological solution on which it had a patent, Upjohn set a new template that would be seized upon by many a pharmaceutical firm since, as the DSM has inexorably enlarged the number of recognized “mental illnesses.” Gilbert Cant wrote a famous piece for the New York Times Magazine, “Valiumania,” which Arthur took care to clip and save. Sackler underlined its last two sentences: “A drug has no moral or immoral qualities. These are the monopoly of the user or abuser.”

As aforementioned, the 1980 release of MST Continus by the Sacklers’ Napp Pharmaceuticals was heralded as the first extended-relief oral narcotic painkiller. Physicians were unconcerned about the fine-print warning that the tablets must be swallowed and not chewed, blissfully ignorant or dismissive of the fact that if the tablets were chewed, the entire dose of morphine, up to one hundred milligrams per pill, would be released. By some strange coincidence, the true story of which will likely never be known, the Sacklers benefited from a concurrent reevaluation of opioid prescription, itself part of a revolutionary “pain management” movement. Chronic pain was a massive medical problem that had been found intractable by the major pharmaceutical companies; morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone, and other opiates were effective, but were all designated controlled substances because of their extremely high addiction potential. A small vanguard of physicians set out to change that, positing that opioids were unfairly maligned and that as such, they should be dispensed far more freely. Until this time, there was no “pain management” industry; American physicians generally considered pain to be a symptom of some underlying condition, not an independent issue. John Bonica, a former professional wrestler, carnival strongman, and light heavyweight world boxing champion turned anesthesiologist, became the “founding father of pain relief,” publishing a massive monograph in 1953 and cofounding in 1974 the International Association for the Study of Pain, whose Pain journal is the field’s leading publication. In 1977, a team of physicians and researchers used Bonica’s research to launch the American Pain Society.

1980 marked a watershed with the publication of a 99-word letter to the editor, only five sentences long, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and authored by Hershel Jick, a leading physician at a drug surveillance program partially funded by the National Institutes of Health and the FDA, along with his graduate student, Jane Porter. Jick and Porter summarized their examination of Boston University Hospital patient records, finding in over ten thousand patients only “four cases of reasonably well-documented addiction in patients who had no history of addiction.” From that cursory research, the duo extrapolated the bizarre, wild, and inexplicable conclusion that went on to upend the world: “Despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare.” Their letter cited two prior drug surveillance studies; both involved only hospitalized patients who were given small doses of opioids in that controlled setting, with only a handful taking opioids for more than five days. Furthermore, not one of them was given painkillers after his discharge from the hospital.

The letter drew such attention precisely because it had been published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. Very few people knew that the journal almost never hired outside experts to review letters to the editor. As Gerald Posner notes, if Jick and Porter’s letter had been subjected to peer review, its conclusion would have been reformulated to instead read that “‘the development of addiction is rare’” in the controlled setting of a hospital.” Of course, that did not happen, and, over the next twenty years, that letter was cited more than six hundred times in textbooks, medical journals, and other publications to draw far broader conclusions regarding the safety of opioids. Scientific American called the letter “an extensive study” and rewrote its conclusion to say that “when patients take morphine to combat pain, it is rare to see addiction.” Time called it “a landmark study,” proving that the “fear” of addiction “is basically unwarranted.” The WHO cited the letter as a “cornerstone.” In 1986, Russell Portenoy and Kathleen Foley, respectively a physician and palliative care specialist, took things a step further. Portenoy and Foley published the results of a clinical study in Pain, involving 38 patients, concluding that opioids were “a safe, salutary, and more humane alternative to the options of surgery or no treatment in those patients with intractable non-malignant pain and no history of drug abuse.”

Portenoy and Foley’s paper was merely the first of dozens of such articles published in medical journals over the next few years; always predicated upon anecdotal reports or statistically insignificant trials, these articles softened the public image of opioids and buttressed the claim that they were extremely “effective in treating long-term chronic pain.” Buried in the footnotes, one could find that “long-term” usually only meant twelve to sixteen weeks, while “effective in treating” simply meant “superior to placebo.” Portenoy sacralized opioids as a “gift from nature” and lambasted doctors whose “opiophobia” prevented them from heavily prescribing them. Along with the American Pain Society, physicians formed the American Academy of Pain Medicine and the American Society of Addiction Medicine, and urged chronic pain patients to form special interest groups and petition Congress and the FDA to loosen dispensing restrictions. In 1990, Mitchell Max of the American Pain Society wrote a popular editorial in the Annals of Internal Medicine arguing that pain must be prioritized as a vital sign in a prominent position on patient charts, echoed more impactfully by another Pain Society doctor, James Campbell, who suggested “pain as the fifth vital sign.” Just as the Hamilton Rating Scales had provided “standardized diagnostic tests” for numerically quantifying anxiety and depression, several “pain assessment” tools came into use in the mid-1980s.

In 1989, J. David Haddox, an anesthesiologist and dentist who went on both to become President of the American Academy of Pain Medicine and work for Purdue Pharma, wrote in Pain about his theory of “pseudoaddiction.” According to Haddox, “pseudoaddiction” was a syndrome that caused “behavioral changes” that only looked like addiction, whereas, in reality, Haddox argued, it was caused when doctors did not prescribe enough opioids. Indeed, Haddox contended that it was “only evidence that the patient was desperate to get enough medication for pain relief,” and that the only solution was to dispense more narcotic painkillers. Cynically, the three leading pain associations embraced “pseudoaddiction,” hook, line, and sinker, and released a joint statement stating that it “can be distinguished from true addiction in that the behaviors resolve when pain is effectively treated.” Twenty-five years later, a comprehensive study would reveal that, of the 224 “scientific” articles in which “pseudoaddiction” was cited, only eighteen provided even skimpy anecdotal evidence. This study concluded that the term had “proliferated in the literature as a justification for opioid therapy for non-terminal pain.”

The same month that Haddox’s article was released, a dozen prominent physicians published the “Physician’s Responsibility Toward Hopelessly Ill Patients” in the New England Journal of Medicine. Although that statement only concerned the terminally ill, its conclusion became a rallying cry for the opioid reevaluation movement: “The proper dose of pain medication is the dose that is sufficient to relieve pain and suffering.” Portenoy et al thus contended that opioids should be a first treatment option, with no maximum dosage, positing that opioids must be dispensed until a patient’s pain has been “relieved.” A few years earlier, New Jersey had become the first State to pass “intractable pain treatment” law, stating that patients had a right to pain treatment and shielding physicians from criminal or civil liability if the prescribed narcotics resulted in addiction. Over the next couple of years, eighteen other States followed suit. It should by now be evident that the Sacklers could not have designed a better prelude to their OxyContin release, only a decade away, if they had planned everything themselves. By the time pain was on its way to becoming “the fifth vital sign,” however, OxyContin was barely past its embryonic stage.

For the next ten years, Purdue spent tens of millions of dollars subsidizing the very physicians, advocacy groups, and “pain societies” that worked tirelessly to liberalize opioid drugs. “Pioneers” like Portenoy and Haddox received lucrative speaking contracts, while Purdue poured money into medical schools, professional conferences, and continuing education courses. Many a retired FDA and DOJ official made their way through the revolving door to the Sackler feeding trough. Later, as cascading reports of opioid addiction, overdoses, crime, and pill mills began to blanket the nation, these early opioid advocates stuck to their original stories. One may only guess as to why; aside from malevolence toward rural and suburban working-class Whites, and aside from Big Pharma money, it would appear that egoism played a role. In other words, the most charitable explanation that we can supply is that these men simply did not wish to admit how brutally wrong they were, thus avoiding the acceptance of any responsibility for the millions of White lives their work brought to absolute ruin. As late as 2010, Russell Portenoy held the party line in a Good Morning America appearance, assuring the American public—and, more specifically, the suburban White mothers who make up that program’s audience—that “addiction, when treating pain, is distinctly uncommon. If a person does not have a history…of substance abuse, and does not have a very major psychiatric disorder, most doctors can feel very assured that that person is not going to become addicted.” And yet that same year, Portenoy had no qualms about confiding privately in another doctor that “I gave innumerable lectures in the late 1980s and ‘90s about addiction that weren’t true.”

Due to the slow FDA approval process for controlled substances, MST Continus was not given the green light for the American market until 1987, seven years after its release in the United Kingdom. For the United States, Arthur renamed the drug MS Contin. With only five years before generic manufacturers would be allowed to undercut them, Richard Sackler, Raymond’s son and thus Arthur’s nephew, spearheaded a project that he believed would protect Purdue’s profits for the long haul — a new, improved, controlled-release narcotic painkiller targeted not just at the terminally ill, but everyone. Robert Kaiko, Purdue Frederick’s Vice President of clinical research, enthusiastically agreed with Richard. The two men believed that the active ingredient of MS Contin, morphine, was problematic, as its reputation had grown too notorious, with a stigma even among physicians that it should primarily be used for end-of-life palliative care, rather than a product for “every application.” Eventually, they settled on oxycodone.

Though there were two other pharmaceutical companies developing extended-release narcotic painkillers, neither were utilizing oxycodone. Additionally, while there were oxycodone-based painkillers on the market, like Percodan (oxycodone-aspirin) and Percocet (oxycodone-acetaminophen), they were immediate-release pills. So, in classic Sackler style, Purdue’s extended-release oxycodone-only pill would be the first of its kind. Shortly before the OxyContin launch, as the Sacklers entertained the idea of concealing its abuse potential and selling it as an uncontrolled drug outside of the United States, Kaiko emailed Richard to express his concerns over the possibility of selling OxyContin uncontrolled. Kaiko wrote that, “if OxyContin is uncontrolled … it is highly likely that it will eventually be abused.” Richard Sackler’s response: “How substantially would it improve your sales?” As with all of the other Sackler ventures, the family used their impenetrable corporate shell game to assign the patents for each different part of the development process to different subsidiaries. Richard lobbied Arthur to create a new company, Purdue Pharma, as an independent corporation spun out of Purdue Frederick. For the time being, this went nowhere, as Arthur, the progenitor of Big Pharma, was preoccupied. In 1985, Arthur had joined the board of directors of Scientific American, and, the next year, Linus Pauling, the American biochemist and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize, dedicated his book to Sackler. Pauling shared Sackler’s fervor for Leftism. In 1987, Arthur gave the world his greatest gift—he died from a heart attack, thereby igniting decades of internecine legal battles between his relatives. The Sacklers, undaunted by the death of their patriarch, were only just getting started on consummating Arthur’s depraved legacy. Soon, they would release their White Plague.

Go to Part 2.


[i] Quinones, Sam. Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury, 2015).

[ii] Macy, Beth. Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America (Little, Brown and Company, 2018).

[iii] Case, Anne, & Deaton, Angus. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2020).

[iv] Posner, Gerald. Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America (Avid Reader Press, 2020).

 

The Crisis of the American University: Defunding Is the Only Solution

“The film is about the freedom to believe what you believe and not be persecuted for it.”
– Director Jay Roach on Trumbo

Last night while watching the film Trumbo, a typical Hollywood treatment of “How the Left was Wronged,” I was continually struck by how the story mirrors events over the past 50 years in academia, with the roles reversed. The First Amendment is in greater jeopardy today, not because of a few leftists in Hollywood in the 50’s, but in large part because millions of students on American campuses have been indoctrinated with the new totalitarian leftism of 2020.  Today’s persecution is far more significant than it was in the 50’s because the process has grown much more pervasive and more chilling, but certainly no less devastating than it was for Trumbo. Until recently it has remained under the radar to some because many of the students and faculty who are directly impacted are afraid to give any voice to their true beliefs. Propaganda reigns, and the relentless imposition of multicultural, leftist ideas, and the ruthless persecution of anything that conflicts with them, has gradually spread from the university to all aspects of public life, especially mainstream media and government. Even silence has become suspicious to the Party, much like the fate of Sir Thomas More who believed the law would protect him against being forced to take the King’s oath because “silence confers consent” … until he was at last beheaded.

In another era the brilliant and prescient Orwell explains that the Party (Stalinist Russia) could not protect its total power without rewriting all history and degrading the people with constant propaganda.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
— George Orwell ,1984 (published in 1949)

Yet knowledge of this deception, even within the Inner Party itself, could lead to the implosion of the State. The solution to this paradox is “doublethink”, the method of directly controlling thought. Doublethink is critical in allowing the Party to know what its true goals are without recoiling from them, avoiding the conflation of a regime’s egalitarian propaganda with its true purpose of total control.

Thus, in the case of workers at the Records Department in the Ministry of Truth, doublethink means being able to falsify public records, and then believe in the new history that they themselves have just rewritten. The other ministries are similarly named: the Ministry of Peace is concerned with war, the Ministry of Love is concerned with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty is concerned with starvation. The paradox is also expressed quite succinctly in the Party slogans: War is Peace and Freedom is Slavery.

The Role of the University Today: Ignorance is Strength

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” 
George Orwell,1984

The university today is all about insuring control of thought and speech. They want to rewrite the past, and they control the present by indoctrinating students, rewarding those who incentives and disincentives, and idealizing people who embody their values, thus providing role models for students. This guarantees that their millions of student “products” entering critical professions like teaching and journalism will control the future.

A Recent Case in Point

This is not an exceptional case. I chose it because it is the most recent, as well as typical of thousands of other cases. In July 2020 Michigan State University Vice President for Research and Innovations, Stephen Hsu, was forced to resign. His “crime” was citing a study published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year. The study, conducted by researchers at Michigan State and the University of Maryland, concluded, “We did not find evidence for anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity in police use of force across all shootings, and, if anything, found anti-White disparities when controlling for race-specific crime.”  They analyzed 917 officer-involved fatal shootings and found that that “per capita racial disparity in fatal shootings is explained by non-White people’s greater exposure to the police through crime.”

These findings surprise nobody apart from the hopelessly woke and are highly relevant to any debate about so-called systemic institutionalized racism. And of course it is this relevance and clarity that undermine the rationale for BLM and gets a prominent Asian-American scientist fired simply for bringing it to the attention of the community. Rather than refute these facts, the Leftist mob of student and faculty protestors attack the individual as “racist” and the cowardly MSU administration collaborates in the injustice.  Police are bad because they enforce “systemic racism” and kill innocent people of color “every single day,” a gross lie entirely refuted by all evidence. The BLM solution to skyrocketing robberies, assaults, rapes, shootings, and murders in Democrat run cities such as NY, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit and elsewhere is to “defund the police.”

If you disagree with this ludicrous policy based upon blatant lies, you will be eliminated, your constitutional rights and due process trampled upon, particularly if you work for a university. Nobody ever protests against this kind of contemptuous political aggression. Thus it has become commonplace — one piece of a larger strategy universities use to silence scientists, very similar to the purging strategies employed by Russian and Chinese communists. Besides public punishment like this, they also systematically reward those who support their “progressive” narrative. Sound familiar? It is basically the same one-sided strategy Leftists use to control the news media, publishing houses, and entertainment industry – all of which have come under the near total control of the Left as a result.

Other strategies on campus include intimidation and harassment of conservative students and forcing them into “Diversity” indoctrination programs from identity grievance studies programs, such as feminist and gender studies, gay and queer studies, Black studies, Hispanic and Chicano studies, indigenous studies, and ethnic studies, which have adopted Marxist theories popular in sociology and political science. At the same time, they attempt to silence any voices that conservative students themselves want to hear.

Increasingly, universities have been restricting speakers with views that effectively counter their propaganda. Data from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) shows this disturbing trend. Protests and shutting down speeches have been going on for decades, but began to escalate in 2017. That year, according to the FIRE data, there were about 40 scheduled speaking events. Of those, nearly half (19) of the speakers were disinvited due to protests by the left. Here are just a few that were either rejected or had to end their presentations during 2017. None of them could possibly be considered to be White advocates.

Milo Yiannopoulos was disinvited from San Diego State University. “University canceled campus speech by right-wing activist Milo Yiannopoulos after student groups expressed opposition to his presence on campus,” according to FIRE. He was also prevented from visiting the University of California, Berkley: “Yiannopoulos’ invitation was opposed by students who felt that he is a ‘bigot’ and ‘misogynist.’”

Charles Murray, a political scientist, had to relocate his lecture from Middlebury College in Vermont because of pressure, and when protesters found out the new, private location, they attacked him and Professor Allison Stanger, surrounding their car, and injuring Stanger badly enough for her to require emergency room treatment.

Gavin McInnes: DePaul University in Chicago refused the Proud Boys speaker because administrators said his statements “encouraged a violent response to the physical attacks during protests, and his announcement of a ‘military division’ of his Proud Boys’ alt-right’ group.” At New York University, McInnes had to stop speaking and was asked to leave “after repeated disruptions and fights, leading to multiple arrests.”

Heather Mac Donald, an author, was forced to end her speech after Black Lives Matter protested because they did not like her pro-police policies.

Ben Shapiro: The Concordia College student government “rescinded funding for the event after it had been granted, citing Shapiro’s alleged ‘hate speech’ towards marginalized communities.”

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is what goes on everyday in the classroom. The overwhelming leftist bias built into the universities of today stems for the longstanding exclusion of conservatives from the faculty. As a result the political affiliation of full-time faculty in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democrat and this can be easily demonstrated. For example, Mitchell Langbert’s 2018 study, “Homogenous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty” found that Democrat professors outnumber Republican instructors by over ten to one. This sample consisted of 8,688 tenure track, Ph.D.–holding professors from fifty-one of the sixty-six top ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S.

Faculty at 39 percent of the colleges in this study had zero Republicans, even though labeling yourself a Republican may mean nothing more than thinking that Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush would have made a good president. The political registration in most of the remaining 61 percent, with a few important exceptions, is slightly more than zero percent but nevertheless absurdly skewed against Republican affiliation and in favor of Democratic affiliation. 78.2 percent of the academic departments in the sample have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference. Ideologically linked fields, especially the interdisciplinary studies fields are 100% leftist.

The author concludes that

political homogeneity is problematic because it biases research and teaching and reduces academic credibility. . . . Even though more Americans are conservative than liberal, academic psychologists’ biases cause them to believe that conservatism is deviant. In the study of gender, Charlotta Stern finds that the ideological presumptions in sociology prevent any but the no-differences-between-genders assumptions of left-leaning sociologists from making serious research inroads. So pervasive is the lack of balance in academia that more than 1,000 professors and graduate students have started Heterodox Academy, an organization committed to increasing “viewpoint diversity” in higher education. The end result is that objective science becomes problematic, and where research is problematic, teaching is more so.

If political homogeneity is embedded in college culture, attempting to reform colleges by changing their cultures seems a very tall order. The solution to viewpoint homogeneity may lie in establishing new colleges from the ground up, rather than in reforming existing ones.

How did we get here?

A general consensus is emerging that we are where we are today because of education. Former Oklahoma Wesleyan University Everett Piper:

The fault for the nightly news lies with our colleges, universities and our public schools. But the blame also lies with us. All parents and other citizens who support these broken schools, with their tuition and tax dollars, need to wake up and face reality. Until we stop sending our kids off to intellectually bankrupt schools, we can expect nothing other than an intellectually bankrupt culture.

I have spent the past 50 years on campus, as student, faculty and now Professor Emeritus. Over this period everyone in my generation has witnessed the complete transformation of the university from an institution of “higher learning” to one devoted to Marxist indoctrination.

It’s interesting that even a mainstream figure like Newt Gingrich would cite the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse as laying the foundation of in the 1960s as a professor at the University of California, San Diego. One wonders if he has connected the dots on people like Marcuse. Many of us believe that an even more extensive influence derived from Franz Boas, also a German-born Jew. As an anthropologist, Boas was one of the first to scorn any biological or evolutionary influence on human behavior in favor of pure cultural determinism. It’s remarkable how such ignorance persisted in an era of unprecedented scientific advance in genetics. He inspired a number of prominent students—Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and many others (including Obama’s mother)—who came to dominate anthropology in the US.  By the late 60’s all hiring in anthropology would be Boasian adherents and today’s anthropology departments are virtually 100% leftist, according to a 2018 study that I discuss later in this essay.

This clearly shows how the Left inevitably seeks to eliminate all other points of view. During the 70’s and 80’s the rest of the social sciences and humanities followed suit. Once a given field or a department turned to the Left, it could never turn away; it would not be “allowed” to do so. As a result the American university system became increasing leftist.

California Association of Scholars Chairman John Ellis explains that the ratio of progressive versus conservative faculty members has increased exponentially toward the progressive side of the equation, from three to two in 1969 to more than eight to one currently. Moreover, at the more recently appointed assistant and associate professor level, that ratio explodes to 48 to one. “Everyone can see that it’s wrong. It’s unhealthy,” Ellis states. “And no one does a thing to stop it.” Similarly, Stanley Rothman and colleagues provided evidence that while 39 percent of the professoriate on average described itself as Left in 1984, 72 percent did so in 1999.

President Reagan was aware of this rise of anti-Americanism in our universities during his tenure and provided this warning in his farewell address on Jan. 11, 1989:

An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions.

If you didn’t get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-60s.

 But now, we’re about to enter the ’90s, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs [protection].

Along with the rise of Leftist ideology came a scorn of biology, logic and science in general, the dismissal of a foreign language requirement and an across-the-board lowering of academic standards—most recently not requiring standardized tests for admission at the University of California because Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans have lower scores. Grade inflation has been rampant. Prof. Robert Weissberg, long associated with AmRen, notes that “formerly tough professors who demanded educational excellence were cowed into lowering those standards by anonymous student evaluations. No savvy instructor would now challenge a student who ‘explained’ that socialism could end homelessness by eliminating all rent. If he did, the humiliated student would anonymously write how she felt ashamed, cried herself to sleep and felt diminished self-esteem” (my emphasis).

Enrollment-based budgets and soaring tuition costs fed this effort. Filling seats became a priority that led to “grade inflation, shortened reading lists, painless exams and no-brainer writing assignments,” Weissberg adds, while the increasing popularity of political correctness narrowed the field of “acceptable” information.

Yet perhaps above all else, the doubling of non-academic administrative and professional employees — including so-called “diversity specialists” — has far outpaced the growth of students and faculty. Such expansion has given rise to quota-mongering epitomized by Harvard, where black, Native American, and Hispanic students are invited to attend with SAT scores of 1,100, while Asian males and females requires scores of 1,350-plus and 1,380-plus, respectively, to get the same invitation.

Bloated bureaucracies are paid for by staggering tuition increases that have precipitated more than $1.5 trillion in student debt nationwide. All loan defaults on that debt are underwritten by the taxpayer, giving colleges no incentive whatsoever to control costs.

But the good news is that this outrageous and contemptible status quo is now being threatened by the China Virus devastating our economy and precipitating extended shutdowns. “The coronavirus pandemic threatens to remake U.S. higher education, speeding the closure of small, financially weak colleges and forcing others to make tough decisions about what they can afford,” Bloomberg News reports. But there’s nothing unaffordable about reinstituting ideologically balanced faculties and tolerance for dissenting ideas, or paring bloated bureaucracies that cultivate intolerance while calling it diversity. This coming fall, even though most of its students will be forced to attend classes online, Harvard University will be charging them nearly $50,000 for the online-only studies, even though it receives more than $40 billion in endowments. With this situation replicated in many brick and mortar institutions of propaganda masquerading as “higher learning,” now is an opportune moment for re-structuring the status quo.

With universities like Harvard charging $50,000 tuition this year for on-line courses espousing leftist propaganda, it is the perfect time for a bold new initiative in higher education: A truly national on-line university for conservative and liberal students who want an excellent education, rather than a one-sided diatribe, from their professors.

This should become a national discussion and national goal; one that could be realized by the fall of 2021. To be successful, such a university should draw from the strongest faculty nation-wide, especially excellent, well-published professors who wish to escape from their current leftist overlords.  They should be paid competitive salaries and charged with developing a curriculum second to none. Another key to success would be a central organization of high-quality university faculty and administrators with experience in our failing universities who see the need to start fresh, without the liabilities of an administration bloated by non-academic administrative and professional employees — including so-called “diversity” specialists.

Administrators of a new national on-line university could be housed in an existing brick-and-mortar institution, but students and faculty could reside anywhere in the country, or world for that matter. Initial funding could be generated in part from all the donations no longer being sent to current leftist institutions, but also from investors and philanthropists who are willing to see and seize a bright future. If full-time tuition costs were 40% that of Harvard, this would amount to $20,000 per student per year, with virtually unlimited enrollment.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 3.1 million higher education students enrolled exclusively in online programs in fall 2017. Under the conditions imposed by the 2020 pandemic, this number could grow by 500% or more in the coming year.

What Can We Do?

Amidst the current climate of violence, looting, arson, and the destruction of historical artifacts, cries of “defund the police!” have reached fever pitch. The one good thing that can come from this situation is to finally realize that we have long been subsidizing our own problems. Why continue funding institutions that for three generations have had an anti-American, anti-White, anti-male agenda?  As one female columnist pointed out, “a large majority of the destructive Black Lives Matter crowd is made up of white, “university-educated” women.”

But If June saw a sudden rise of protests and city council votes to defund the police, July has seen calls to defund the universities spreading like wildfire on social media. Writing in Spectator USA, Peter Wood proposes that “Now is the moment to defund the colleges. We should defund them because they are the root of the virulent anti-Americanism that feeds the riots, the looting and the learned helplessness that afflict the country.”

Wood proposes several commonsense measures for reining in these America-hating entities. They include refusing to cut checks to alumni donation campaigns, enrolling students in educational programs beyond the reach of the indoctrinators, and “rolling back the massive subsidies that state and federal government put into higher education” that are nothing more than “a thick-shelled nut of special interests.”

A similar Call to Arms was issued by Jay Latimer in American Thinker:

It’s no secret that much of the radical ideology fueling the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots are the product of our dysfunctional higher educational system. Universities today are almost 100% hard left-wing bubbles, openly hostile to any conservative thought. They are intolerant of opposing opinions, the very opposite of the kind of dialogue intended for higher education, and so desperately needed today. These Molotov-cocktail wielding radicals are the end product of years of propaganda from left-wing professors.

Colleges may hate conservatives, but they will be forced to listen – and change – if you target their pocketbooks. And colleges and universities are vulnerable, especially with the current double-whammy of lower student enrollment and the coronavirus taking its toll.

Here’s a modest outline of how to begin.

Stop Donating:

Every alumnus should write to their college ASAP to state that not a single penny will be given until things change significantly. This is your chance to be heard, so let them have it with both barrels! (I’ve attached my letter to Duke below). In fact, go it one better and tell them that you will do your best to convince other alumni to stop donating as well. We are in an ideological war – you need to show them whose side you are on.

[If you are reading this, please do this now. And even if you had no intention of giving money, tell them that you were – a lot.]

Halt Student Loan Guarantees:

The higher education system is kept afloat by a sea of student loan debt, much of it guaranteed by the Federal Government. This amounts to a huge subsidy, estimated at $100 to $250 billion per year, funded by our tax dollars. It’s long past time to stop this madness– let the universities compete in the marketplace without these kinds of perverse incentives (and watch those Diversity Deans collect pink slips).

Tax the Endowments:

Again, hit them in the pocketbook. Why should Harvard not pay a penny of taxes on its $40+ billion endowment? It’s always irked me that someone like Elizabeth Warren can rant about businesses “paying their fair share of taxes” while taking a high six-figure salary from an uber-rich institution that doesn’t pay any taxes at all. Tax them now!

Two days later a similar statement was published:

Defunding universities substantially would reduce their freedom to carry out their anti-American and anti-justice practices. They would be in a weaker position to spend millions of dollars on ever-proliferating “diversity and inclusion” officers, departments, and programs. But reduction would best be targeted: malicious sexist and racist grievance studies programs should be defunded entirely, and the programs cancelled.

What can we do? Certainly stop donating to universities. Better, encourage others to stop donating.

Then on July 10, Trump tweeted:

Of course, Trump has “examined” a lot of things—with no consequences. Earlier on July 4th at Mount Rushmore, the president said, “our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that they were villains.”

Last year, the president signed an executive order that required colleges to defend free speech after Hayden Williams, an activist with the conservative group The Leadership Institute, was assaulted at University of California, Berkeley. “These universities,” he said, “have tried to restrict free thought, impose total conformity and shut down the voices of great young Americans.”

As I write this essay I see that another voice has joined the chorus. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk has initiated ‘Divest U’ campaign with the goal of siphoning funds from prominent universities.

Defunding certain colleges will not be easy, it will take years, and would only happen under a Republican administration. The Treasury Department would need time to prove that schools are indoctrinating instead of educating. In the meantime, concerned citizens should immediately stop all donations and other financial support. It is perfectly clear that no university has any intention of ever voluntarily reforming itself. They are overwhelmingly leftist because that’s the way they want it and that’s the way they want to keep it. Only significant financial pressure will produce any positive changes. Those of you who are college or university alumni might consider writing a letter like this one provided by Jay Latimer, pen name of a Duke University alumnus:

To: Office of Gift Planning, Duke University
CC: Duke President Vincent E. Price

Dear Sirs,

I am very sorry to have to write you this letter, but I feel I no longer have any choice.

As you know I was considering a major donation to Duke University. However, after learning of President Price’s “structural racism” initiatives, I will no longer be donating to Duke. In fact, I will make it my priority to convince other alumni not to donate as well.

I am shocked and appalled to see the direction that Duke University has chosen to take. I am ashamed to be a Duke alumnus, and am worried and indeed horrified at what this once great institution is becoming.

President Price’s recent announcement to go all-in on a “structural racism” ideology insures that Duke will become a place where racial grievances are magnified, and where people are judged and rewarded based on the color of their skin and actions of their ancestors. Ironically this kind of ideology is the very definition of racism, and the polar opposite of Martin Luther King’s vision for a color-blind society.

This radical “anti-bias” ideology is anathema to higher learning, and barely existed a decade ago. And yet President Price now wants to “ensure every student leaves Duke with an understanding of the nature of structural racism.”

This is indoctrination, pure and simple. It is no different than what was seen in China’s Cultural Revolution. Force feeding any kind of ideology – much less a newly created, radical one – does not belong in a free society, much less in a supposed bastion of higher learning.

I wonder, will an allowance be made for those students who do not wish to be “trained” in such a racially-charged ideology? I’m guessing not – like the victims of Communist dictatorships, they will be made to obey whether they like it or not.

The philosophical underpinnings of “structural racism” are also deeply ignorant. Students of history recognize that slavery and inequities have been a part of the human experience for millennia. Simplistic slogans attacking “white privilege” ignore this background (in fact the very word “slave” is derived from the Slavic peoples – who are now ironically lumped in with the oppressors).

The Duke University I knew and loved is long gone, destroyed by radicals seeking political power at the expense of free speech and learned discussion.

This is a travesty.

Sincerely yours,

For those of you who think these proposals are too extreme, I have just this to say: Are you living inside a bubble? What do you think is happening here? Get with the program. Live free or die.

 

 

The Way Forward: A New Christianity, Partition, and a General Operational Plan