[Salon] 'Centrism as despotism'




7/28/25

  " 'Centrism as despotism'."

‘An immense and tutelary power.’

The thing itself is new.’ De Tocqueville as he was. (Auguste Lireux, Assemblée nationale comique, Michel Lévy Frères, Paris, 1850/ Wikimedia Commons.) 

This is the second of two essays on the insidious creep of censorship, coerced conformity, and “centrist” intolerance among the Western powers. The first of these is here.

28 JULY—I do not follow the rapacious doings of the American health care industry with any regularity: I am merely another of its victims. So long as human health remains a profit center we must endure a profoundly inhumane system: This has been my position for many years, and I have left it at that, watching the industry’s exploits (and exploitations) with, let’s say, peripheral vision. So it was as I picked up a piece in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago, which ran under the headline, “UnitedHealth’s campaign to quiet critics.” I had a personal interest: I pay United Health an insurance premium of $206 a month.

The Times’s report concerns one Mary Strause, a 30–year-old filmmaker from Rio, Wisconsin. Ms. Strause recently finished a documentary series critical not only of United Health but of the health care industry altogether. She titled the series “Modern Medical Mafia,” and it went public on Amazon and other streaming services this past spring. Strause explored the unscrupulous practices of drug-pricing intermediaries known as pharmacy benefit managers, P.B.M.s. I had read of these shameless people earlier—in The New York Times, indeed.

Well, in late May, The Times reported, Strause logged onto Amazon’s streaming service to retrieve the URL link to her video series so she could disseminate it. It was then she discovered Amazon had taken down her work in response to a letter from United Health’s attorneys charging—key word, an implicit threat—Strause’s series was “defamatory.” Vimeo, where the documentary was also available, did the same, citing “a complaint Vimeo received concerning defamation.”

Shamelessly pimping the assassination last December of United Health’s chief executive, the letter called Strause’s videos “a thinly veiled call to violence for anyone who is dissatisfied with the American health care system.” Slathering it on with a trowel, the letter continued, “Recent history and Brian Thompson’s murder demonstrates the devastating and irreversible consequences of ginning up such hatred with false claims designed to inspire violence.”

I have not seen “Modern Medical Mafia,” but United Health’s broadside against it is o.t.t. by any reasonable reckoning. This is easily surmised with a brief resort to United Health’s history in these matters. United Health has been at this kind of coercion for a long time now. It is given to suing or threatening to sue or otherwise coercing anyone—doctors, newspapers, investigative reporters—looking into the company’s business. This is not—in my judgment, I had better say—a glowingly admirable record. United Health has been subject to numerous investigations—journalistic, official (civil and criminal at the federal level) for its billing practices, denials of coverage, potential Medicare fraud, and what have you.

Having read The Times’s piece, which I thought well done (this not always so by a long way), I soon realized the report was about a lot more than a company that immorally makes humanity’s well being a source of (maximal) profit. For one thing, this was a study in a very wide-ranging kind of collusion, so broad and common that at this point it often goes unnoticed. United Health, various law firms, Amazon Video, and Vimeo were effectively complicit in suppressing the work of an investigative filmmaker.

This past spring The Guardian began what was supposed to be a two-part series on United Health’s apparent efforts to increase profits at patients’ expense. This report, which appeared in the paper’s 21 May editions, is the full Monty, based on interviews, the records of patients, lawsuits, whistleblowers, lots of interviews. United Health sued after The Guardian published, for—what else?—defamation. The paper says it stands by its reporting, good, but has not run the second part of the series and may never do so—not good. The list of the complicit thus expands: For its retreat I put The Guardianon it.

There is something else to note about United Health and what it gets up to with newspapers, physicians, executives in rebellion, and investigative people. Read the quotation from United Health’s letter to Amazon in the Mary Strause case: “… a thinly veiled call to violence for anyone who is dissatisfied with the American health care system.” Taking cover behind the Thompson murder, this company is after more than the rights the First Amendment confers. Adding up all the cases in which United Health is or has been involved, it tilts in the direction of mandating what people are permitted to think of it and its industry. This is thought control. This is as grave as anything else one may take from United Health’s conduct and intentions.

Our name for United Health’s aggressive responses to critics is “lawfare,” the use of statutes to attack political opponents, ideological opponents, opponents of any kind. Lawfare is nothing new, but it is the coming thing, to put the point mildly, now that Donald Trump, a law warrior par excellence, is back in the White House. Lawfare is now waged on fields of battle far beyond the health care industry or Trump’s media critics. Lawfare is the Trump regime’s principal weapon against those it wishes to deport, to take a ready-to-hand example. The regime’s instrument of aggression against higher education altogether is the law. Ditto the press and broadcasters.

On 9 July Secretary of State Rubio imposed sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the U.N.’s special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Territories. This is in response to Albanese’s recommendation that the International Criminal Court investigate with a view to prosecuting American and Israelis officials for their complicity in the Zionist state’s crimes against humanity. As my colleague Karen Leukefeld notes in a piece shortly to be published in the Swiss journal Current Concerns, “According to the U.S. administration, this means that those who attempt to prevent war crimes from being committed can be prosecuted for doing so.”

Ross Douthat, the sometimes-interesting New York Times commentator, published a long, thoughtful essay last November under the headline, “Who abandoned liberalism first, the populists or the Establishment?” The interesting implication in the headline is that everybody has abandoned liberalism at this point, a thought to which I will return. In general, Douthat’s piece concerns “how the structure of liberal governance has changed, since the Cold War or Sept. 11 or the ascent of Barack Obama.”



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