Societal Deadweight: What the Prosecution of a Small-Town Texas Surgeon Tells Us About the High Costs of Woke Kulturkampf

Back before the election, I wrote about the ongoing struggle between productive, creative culture — maker culture — and “an overlapping network of entirely parasitic and obstructive commissars.” Here’s a magnificent example of what that means in practice, and what the costs are.

In 2022, under pressure from the state, Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) announced that it would stop performing “gender-affirming,” biology-denying medical procedures on children. But on May 16, 2023, Christopher Rufo published a story, with redacted hospital documents that didn’t include patient identities, showing that the hospital hadn’t stopped — and had, for example, surgically implanted devices to deliver puberty blockers in patients as young as eleven years old, doing so after the announcement that they wouldn’t. Federal prosecutors have subsequently charged a former surgical resident, Dr. Eithan Haim, with multiple felonies, alleging that he committed [tbd] by alerting Rufo to the fact that the hospital was still performing the procedures after announcing that they would stop.

The [tbd] in that last sentence will begin to make sense as the week goes on. I plan, over the next few days, to get into the details of a prosecution that has been conducted like a game of blindfolded darts by a rotating cast of assistant US attorneys who are trying to figure out — they’re currently on their third version of the indictment — what crimes they’re trying to allege, for an emerging set of reasons.

But before I get into the details about what’s being done to Eithan Haim, I want to take a moment to show what’s being done to the rest of us.

Haim has been outspoken about the absurdity of the prosecution, giving interviews and posting on I-still-call-it-Twitter. Here’s one about Assistant US Attorney Tina Ansari:

Federal prosecutors recently discovered that they’re very scared of mean Dr. Haim, who is supposedly tainting the jury pool and exposing them to danger by criticizing them. So they asked the federal judge handling the case, David Hittner, to impose a gag order on both Haim and his lawyers, forbidding them from speaking publicly about the case. News stories last week correctly noted that Hittner had declined to rule on the motion, not issuing a gag order but not ruling it out in the future. But there’s a little more to it than that. More about that question in a moment.

For now, let’s get into the transcript of the Alice in Wonderland gag order hearing. You can read the whole thing yourself, if you’d like:

Haim 12 3 2024 Transcript

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Start with this:

Seven lawyers attended: three prosecutors, four defense lawyers. Remember that number as we get into the substance of the hearing. And by the way:

Lawyers from D.C. flew in for the hearing.

And what very important matter were all of these very important lawyers gathered to discuss in front of a judge? Mean tweets. It was a mean tweets hearing.

Through 67 pages of transcript, a team of federal prosecutors and a team of highly credentialed defense lawyers — one a former US Attorney — dig deeply into the substance of things like what Eithan Haim has reposted on social media. Problematic, you see. Very problematic. Thanks be to the heavens for Elon Musk’s decision to hide your “likes,” or we might have had a second hour of discussion on the topic.

Why are they on their third version of the indictment? ‘Cause of just like some typos and stuff, which it’s very mean to be mean about:

We made a mistake, your honor, in the multiple prior indictments that we had to discard because of our error, but the prosecution submits that the defendant overtweeted the error, which demands the intervention of the court.

Then a long exchange digs into the moment on X in which someone else called the prosecutors “effeminate,” and Haim rEpOStED iT OhhhhHHHH yoUr hONoRRRRRR, WHY WAS HE SO MEAN TO US:

At the risk of panicking an entire panel of federal prosecutors, this exchange offers remarkably clear evidence that the government officials objecting to the fact that someone called them “effeminate clowns” are…effeminate clowns. Imagine going to court to air this out in front of a judge. Apparently there’s no crime in Houston, so federal prosecutors there have a lot of time on their hands to police mean tweets.

Also, FBI agents are very delicate, and get upset quite easily, and are terribly shy:

Now people have seen the IMAGE of Agent Nixon, oh no! I sincerely hope that no one has broken Special Agent Nixon’s glass menagerie.

I could go on and on and on — they certainly did — but you get the flavor of it. A long hearing in federal court, attended by a large group of highly trained professionals, was a mean girls hearing in the vice-principal’s office. And then she went, and then he goes, and then she’s all like…

Walter Kirn, talking about something else but hitting a target near mine:

Bastiat talked about the broken window and the fallacy that the use of resources on it must be good, since the glazier got paid to fix it, injecting money into the market. But the celebration of the money spent on the broken window doesn’t take into account “that which is not seen”: the other ways the same resources would have been used, the loss of exchange that happens when the broken window forces the shopkeeper to spend his money fixing it.

The enormous and endless consumption of resources on trans everything — the time spent by Texas Children’s Hospital, the time spent by Baylor College of Medicine, where Haim was a surgical resident, the time spent by federal investigators from multiple agencies, the time spent by federal prosecutors, the time spent by Haim’s defense lawyers, the time spent by the judge and the court reporter, and above all the time spent by Haim, who is trained as a surgeon — is a bonfire, or a sinkhole. Choose your own metaphor. Or go with Kirn’s use of dead weight:

We’re all carrying this weight around, pouring out time and energy on an unnecessary discussion driven by unnecessary medical interventions on the bodies of innocent children who are being drugged and cut over a social mania that will, in a few years, pass like tulipomania or the famous mass fainting spells. This is how a hospital, and medical college, and the United States government are using their resources. Imagine the losses. Imagine the ways these lost hours could have been spent.

The shocking idiocy of the Daniel Penny trial, which ended today with an acquittal: same. In recent years, prosecutors in Manhattan have declined or reduced the majority of the felony cases presented to them by police. But they had plenty of time to go after the guy who protected other people in the closed environment of a subway car when a lunatic with a long history of violence started screaming that he was ready to die. What a waste. What a waste of Daniel Penny’s time and energy, and a courtroom full of people who all, every single one of them, had better things to do. Note that the same DA’s office charged Donald Trump with felonies for his accountant’s ledger entries. All of this energy for all of this nothing.

If we could add up the costs of insane leftist cultural jihad, and the need to respond to it, what percentage of the economy would we get? What percentage of social and cultural energy?

Looking ahead, Haim and his lawyers weren’t gagged by the court, but they were gagged by the court that didn’t gag them:

There’s no gag order, but boundaries have been laid, and everyone has to adjust their behavior, and the court will be watching to make sure they do. The judge also warned Haim that he could have his bail revoked and be sent to jail pending trial, so for sure there’s no judicial gag order. There’s just a judge saying that everyone should stop discussing the case, or else there could be punishments. You see the distinction. And a large group of federal prosecutors will be watching Eithan Haim’s social media posts day and night, so.

“I think we underestimate the sheer dead weight of the load we’ve been carrying.”

More soon.