Have you ever seen a medical professional, or do you anticipate seeing one in your life?
For most of us, the answer is yes. For all of us, the quality of education provided to medical professionals is of vital importance because we live in a world where public health professionals can rule over us in many respects.
So something like this should scare the hell out of you:
The editorial standards of the @NEJM must be questioned for deciding to publish this article as it is presented below. Such terrible judgement. Jason Arday and the Perils of Being Black in Academia | NEJM Voices https://t.co/QiEqk9hFGy
— Jeffrey Flier (@jflier) August 22, 2026
The New England Journal of Medicine is ranked the 2 most influential medical journal in the world, just after The Lancet. It rejects 95 percent of submissions, and that is only of the papers anyone even considers submitting, which is a small fraction of all medical research. Getting published there puts you at the top of your profession in the same way that a position at Harvard or Cambridge does.
And yet...This gets published.
Here's how this fine article begins:
They are trying to kill us.
When Black academics say this, I imagine folks outside of our community think we are being hyperbolic. We are not. I think my non-Black colleagues are starting to get a taste of this as they realize how diabolically opposed to our own well-being most of the movements of our federal health agencies seem to be these days. It’s appalling and scary and also — yes, welcome. This is how it feels to know that there are systemic pressures working against your success, your well-being, and in the case of Jason Arday — your life.
This week I published two articles featuring insane takes from the British Medical Journal, and now I get to write about how The New England Journal of Medicine thinks that Richard Dawkins (he was not named, but he and every sane academic has pointed out that fabulist plagiarists do not belong at Cambridge University to be labeled the "best in the world" at their profession) wants black academics dead.
The message to Black academics is clear. Come in, be great and indeed be excellent, but don’t dare dream too big. Don’t dare shine too bright. Walk the line of excellence and humility with perfect grace, and be ready to fight for your life.
What is there to say about this other than it is 1) absurd; 2) unlikely to be the actual belief of the author; and 3) intended to be used as a form of extortion to keep us from pointing out that DEI policies result in incompetent fabulists who don't belong on pedestals.
Critical Theory, I keep reminding you, does not seek to communicate anything we understand as "truth" or "reality." It is about asserting power. The goal here is to intimidate everybody with an accusation of racism. To call you a Nazi. To make you quail in terror at the thought that you will face social opprobrium.
Assertions like this should never be heard outside a Black Lives Matter riot, and certainly have no place in The New England Journal of Medicine or any institution that has aspirations to participate in rational discussions of any kind. And the fact that it showed up in the second-most prestigious journal in medicine is as disturbing as the fact that Cambridge University treated Jason Arday as the best researcher in sociology.
I have no particular issue with people using hyperbole under the right circumstances — as a rhetorical device — but if you read this piece in the NEJM, it's clear that this statement was not hyperbole, and also obvious that hyperbole doesn't belong in an academic journal intended to shape the thinking and education of medical professionals.
Our prestigious institutions are fundamentally corrupted, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the dominant ideology has become race Marxism in the guise of DEI. They no longer have any allegiance to the truth, facts, or rational discourse. They are fundamentally hostile to the values that gave rise to them.
The New England Journal of Medicine dates to 1812, at the height of the Enlightenment values that define our academic institutions. What we call "Modern" thought, as opposed to postmodern, defined the 18th and 19th centuries. Postmodernism took off after World War I, although its intellectual roots predate it. Critical theory grew out of that turn away from rationality.
Academia is now riddled with the cancer of postmodernism, and the STEM fields are now infected. And because medicine is a hybrid discipline, incorporating harder and softer sciences, the cancer now runs deep.
If the Jason Arday fiasco hasn't convinced you that we need to, metaphorically, nuke the site (academia) from orbit, I hope the fact that even the NEJM is as corrupt as the Education Department at Cambridge University does.
I see no alternative to the painful process of destroying the elite institutions that dominate today and creating parallel institutions to replace them. Perhaps you can imagine a way to reform these institutions. But I can't.
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