‘Wolves in White Coats’: HHS’s Damning Report on ‘Gender Affirming’ Care. Mangione’s Plea. WaPo: It’s Now or Never, AOC. Dem’s ‘Redshift’. Hormuz. Leavitt. More
It reads more like tragedy than a government report. “Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of “Gender Medicine,” a 64-page report, was released yesterday by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The report documents “disturbing stories of children who were allegedly preyed upon by greedy hospitals and doctors — and encouraged as minors to undergo gender-care treatment.” One was Clementine Breen:
Clementine was just 12 years old and anxious about her changing adolescent body, while simultaneously grappling with unprocessed trauma from sexual abuse years earlier.
Desperate for an escape, she discovered the idea of transitioning gender in an internet search, and thought it would be the perfect refuge for her puberty fears.
At her first medical appointment at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, which was about an hour long, doctors told Clementine’s parents their daughter was “100% trans” and at a high risk of suicide without medical intervention.
The report argues that the financial incentives for doctors, hospitals, and even insurance providers to provide “gender affirming” care huge factors in the tragedies on young people such a Clementine. US News notes:
HHS said the providers billed for the therapies to treat minors aged 9 to 17, documenting an unspecified endocrine or hormone-related disorder diagnosis rather than gender dysphoria. The report alleged inaccurate diagnoses resulted in payments from both private and government-sponsored health plans.
HHS said that as gender care for minors has grown, it has become a larger revenue source for hospitals, creating financial incentives for more frequent billing. Citing conservative medical advocacy organization Do No Harm, the agency said hospitals and clinics billed nearly $120 million for the services provided to minors since 2019.
National Review also has a story on the report: “Lifelong Patients and Six-Figure Procedures: How Gender Transitions for Minors Became a Lucrative Business.”
The HHS report should have a bombshell effect similar to that of the Cass review in the U.K., which “found extremely weak evidence for intervening medically in children suffering “gender distress.” IW contributed to the landmark HHS report. With the money and legal issues involved, we can expect strenuous pushback.
Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of health executive and father Brian Thompson, is expected to plead guilty in federal court today. He has pleaded not guilty until now. Credit legal maneuvers, not a change of heart. In “What to Know About Luigi Mangione’s Court Cases and Potential Plea Deal,” the New York Times explains:
Mangione faces federal charges of stalking that resulted in the death of a health insurance executive. A guilty plea could close the federal case — and complicate a separate state murder trial.
By “complicate” the story means potential dismissal of the New York case against Mangione:
A federal plea could complicate whether Mr. Mangione still faces the state trial; his lawyers would be expected to argue that the state case should be dismissed because of double jeopardy, which bars someone from being tried twice for the same offense, with some exceptions….
“One plus one is two,” Mr. Mangione declared in February as he was led out of a Manhattan courtroom in handcuffs. “Double jeopardy by any common-sense definition.”
Legal experts, though, say that double jeopardy protections are not always clear-cut.
Mangione’s apparent deal is a risky venture and could fall apart, according to a New York Post exclusive. So beloved is the accused Ivy League killer that, should a New York trial take place, jurors will be anonymous to protect them from intimidation by the misfits who make up his fan base.
Not Funny. “AOC Tries to Make a Joke of Woke” is the headline on Wall Street Journal ace Kimberley Strassel’s column:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just exposed an entire movement’s disingenuousness with a laugh. …
Woke 1 was never funny. Check in with the Americans who lost jobs or friends, or who were otherwise canceled for refusing to fall in line with Covid orthodoxy, for landing on the wrong side of the #MeToo rush, or for failing to renounce their “whiteness” abjectly enough. …
The question every voter needs to ask is this: In the absence of an explanation for the radical left’s scurry from its past, should anyone trust that once in power, with passions running high, we wouldn’t be right back to Woke 1? Maybe we should give AOC credit for knowing exactly what she’s doing.
Steven Klavan writes at The American Mind that “Woke 2.0 Will Be Worse.” Woke or not, AOC, according to the Washington Post, is now at her peak. argues that AOC “may never get a better shot at being president than this:” it’s now or never. Which do you prefer, Gentle Reader?
Do you ever balk at describing somebody as “a moderate,” when you know they will promote out and out progressive policies (See, “Biden, Joe”). Matthew Continetti addresses this in “Beware the Democrats’ ‘Redshift’”:
“Moderate,” “centrist,” “liberal,” “progressive,” “democratic socialist”—the labels applied to Democratic candidates in 2026 are as varied as they are slippery. And the longer you study Democratic infighting, the more you see Democrats adopting socialism under the banner of “progressivism.” …
Though Mr. El-Sayed has socialist views, attended socialist events for years, headlined a Democratic Socialists of America fundraiser, campaigned with socialists like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Mr. Sanders and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and pals around with commie livestreamer Hasan Piker, he denies the socialist label. “When it comes to the question of socialism, I’m not a socialist,” he said during the final primary debate with Rep. Haley Stevens. “I’m just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works.”
Isn’t it confusing, though, for the media to call a self-described “capitalist” with a platform indistinguishable from socialism a “progressive”? Who, exactly, is being fooled?
Meanwhile, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal argues that Washington is being fooled by Iran (“Washington’s Four Wrong Assumptions About the Iran War”). The author is Middle East expert Nazee Moinian. She writes:
Washington keeps making four false assumptions about Iran. First, U.S. officials assume that the regime is a rational actor weighing costs and benefits. Tehran has shown caution when facing existential threats, scaling back its ambitions and accepting soft compromises on its nuclear program. But it is also a revolutionary state, sustained since 1979 by ideological conviction as much as calculation.
Washington holds vastly superior firepower. It can’t outmuscle the regime’s self-image as leader of an “axis of resistance,” a role its own founding myths assign it, an identity that makes ordinary compromise feel like apostasy, not prudence.
Meanwhile, Fox Digital reports that tankers [are] attacked as Tehran, Trump battle over control of Strait of Hormuz.
White Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt resigned her prestigious post to spend more time with her family (a line that’s really true for Leavitt, who gave birth to her second child in May). USA TODAY columnist Nicole Russell writes about the double standard to left applies to conservative women:
By all accounts, Leavitt, 28, has had a run most people would envy…. And yet Leavitt has drawn intense smears, criticism and even open disdain from Democrats and legacy media outlets. The left claims to champion all women, then sneers at conservative ones. That double standard doesn’t just hurt Democrats’ credibility; it’s dehumanizing to women of every political stripe.
Two photos accompanied her farewell post. One, taken by Anna Moneymaker in 2025, shows her in a kelly green dress, roughly a year after giving birth to her first child.
The Daily Beast suggested the photo looked too good to be real and speculated Leavitt had altered it with artificial intelligence. The New Republic checked and found it real and untouched.
The left seems fixated on Leavitt’s appearance, which has been mocked before in subtle ways. In December, Vanity Fair ran a large photo spread alongside an interview with the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Nearly everyone in it looked unflattering, but Leavitt especially.
Amanda Marcotte, meanwhile, is up in arms that conservatives (and some non-conservatives) have not celebrated AOC’s freezing her eggs. Marotte says that this criticism exposes MAGA’s motherhood hypocrisy. Groan. Do I really need to explain, Amada, how you can be for motherhood and have reservations about the practice being pursued by AOC?
Ms. Must’s Consumer Guarantee: This is my last item on AOC’s eggs. I hope.
Here We Go Again: The Kennedy Center Board has voted to inscribe President Trump’s name on the building:
The decisions would place an inscription honoring Trump below the venue’s sign and would close it for renovations, setting up a challenge to a judge’s order.
With that a hearty TGIF is in order.
