Tag: Culture

medicine

Medicine by captivity: the rise of the hostage physician

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When doctors spend more time serving systems than serving patients, medicine changes. When physicians are afraid to speak honestly, medicine changes. When documentation matters more than human presence, medicine changes.
by Joseph Varon, MD
[This article, reproduced here by permission, was originally published by the Brownstone Institute in
Austin, Texas.]

The ICU before sunrise

The intensive care unit (ICU) was crowded before sunrise, again. After 40 years in medicine, I am not sure what “full” even means anymore. Every ICU now feels just one patient away from disaster. Patients wait in emergency departments for beds that do not exist. Another transfer is already on the way because someone thinks our ICU still has space. Nurses are exhausted. Residents are exhausted. Families are scared. Doctors try to think clearly while phones ring, alarms sound, charts pile up, and somewhere, someone checks dashboards and occupancy numbers while real people struggle to breathe just a few feet away.

I remember one morning clearly because it still bothers me years later. An administrator came into the ICU and asked about the “game plan” for one of my patients since his insurance would run out at the end of the week. I remember feeling angry, not because I cared about getting paid, but because I realized how much institutional pressure had taken over medical decisions. The focus was no longer on whether the patient needed ICU care or if the family understood what was happening. Instead, the conversation was about the “insurance clock”. I stood there wondering when this became normal. When did hospitals stop feeling like hospitals and start feeling like big systems moving people through pathways, numbers, and coverage limits?

Nobody in the room seemed shocked because everybody already understood the environment we were functioning inside. That may actually be the part that bothers me the most and made me write this article. We adapted to it. We normalized it. Human beings can normalize almost anything if they live inside it long enough. Physicians are especially vulnerable to this because medicine trains doctors to absorb enormous pressure quietly. We keep going because patients still need us. We keep functioning because sick people keep arriving. We convince ourselves this is simply modern healthcare. But there are nights, usually very late at night after rounds are over and the ICU becomes quiet for a few minutes, where I sit there wondering when medicine started losing part of itself.

I remember another conversation from years ago that also made me feel sick. Someone explained, almost casually, that if we transferred a patient to a long-term acute care facility (LTAC) and they stayed the required 21 days, they could come back to the hospital, because “the insurance clock resets”. Hearing that phrase for the first time sounded less like medicine and more like someone describing a loophole in a business contract. Meanwhile, a real person was lying in that bed, connected to ventilators and feeding tubes. A family was somewhere, terrified about whether their loved one would survive. But the discussion was about clocks, timelines, insurance days, and logistics.

I still think about those conversations. Not because they shocked me completely. After enough years in modern healthcare, very little surprises doctors anymore. Maybe that is part of the problem. We get used to things that should still bother us.

When hospitals became factories

I have now spent four decades practicing medicine. Four decades inside ICUs, emergency departments, trauma bays, hospital corridors, family meetings, codes, and nights where sleep never happened because too many people were too sick. I entered medicine because I genuinely cared about patients. Most physicians did. That is the part many people outside medicine still do not fully understand. Doctors do not sacrifice years of their lives, miss holidays, destroy their sleep schedules, and carry this kind of emotional burden because they dream about maximizing throughput metrics or documentation compliance. We entered medicine because we wanted to help people. It sounds simple saying that now, maybe even naïve, but it is true.

Somewhere along the line medicine changed. Hospitals changed. The language changed first because that is always how these transformations begin. Patients slowly became “throughput issues”. Beds became “capacity management”. Discharges became “flow optimization”. The ICU became “utilization”. Doctors became “providers”. Everything slowly started sounding less human and more operational. And eventually, hospitals stopped feeling like places centered around caring for human beings and started feeling like giant processing centers where movement itself became the priority.

Basically “Get them in”, “Get them out”, “Open the bed”, “Reduce the stay to maximize profit”, “Move the patient to an LTAC”, “Clear the ICU”, and so on.

Every hospital now has dashboards, graphs, throughput committees, operational targets, discharge metrics, and endless meetings about movement. Everything is about movement. Sometimes it feels like modern healthcare is one big revolving door. Patients come in one side, and everyone starts figuring out how quickly they can safely, or sometimes not so safely, move out the other side.

The strange thing is that many younger doctors probably think this is normal because it is the only medicine they have known. They inherited the system after it changed. Endless clicking. Mandatory modules. Documentation requirements. Throughput meetings. Insurance battles. Constant electronic interruptions. For them, this already feels like medicine. But it was not always like this. Hospitals once felt slower in some ways, not inefficient, just more human. Doctors had time to think, to sit with families, and to focus on the patient without constant operational pressure.

Now everything feels rushed. Even death feels rushed sometimes. I hate to write that, but it is true. Families barely have time to process terrible news before talks begin about placement options, transfer plans, insurance limits, or discharge plans. Sometimes, the machinery around medicine completely overwhelms its humanity. And honestly, I think physicians feel this loss more deeply than many people realize.

The patient somewhere in the middle

Doctors complain about administrators because they frustrate everyone. Doctors complain about electronic medical records because they take up so much time. But beneath all these complaints, something deeper is happening in medicine. Many doctors quietly feel that the profession they gave their lives to is slowly disappearing, even as everyone calls it progress. Maybe I sound old saying that. Maybe I sound frustrated. The truth is that I am frustrated. Very frustrated. Because we did not enter medicine to become highly educated employees inside giant healthcare corporations. We entered medicine to care for human beings during the worst moments of their lives.

That was supposed to remain the center of everything: the patient, the suffering human being in the bed. Not the dashboard. Not the metric. Not the throughput target. Not the insurance clock.

Somewhere along the way that became too easy to forget. The part that bothers me most is not that hospitals need money to survive. Of course they do. Ventilators are expensive. ICU nurses are expensive. Keeping hospitals open costs enormous amounts of money. I understand all of that. What bothers me is watching the patient slowly become secondary inside conversations where everybody claims to be acting in the patient’s best interest. All of this happens while the administrator thinks about occupancy, the insurance company thinks about authorization, the hospital thinks about length of stay, the case manager thinks about placement, and the physician tries to think about the patient while absorbing pressure from every direction simultaneously.

That is not how medicine was supposed to feel. I have had families look at me and ask what I would do if the patient were my own father or mother. That question cuts through all the institutional language immediately. They are not asking about metrics or throughput or utilization review. They are asking for honesty. Judgment. Humanity. They are asking for a doctor. And at that moment all the dashboards in the world suddenly feel ridiculous.

Doctors became servants to the machine

The electronic medical record sped up much of this change more than people realize. Hospitals promoted the electronic medical record (EMR) as a big step forward. We were told it would improve communication, reduce mistakes, streamline work, and let doctors spend more time with patients. Now, that almost sounds like a joke. The EMR did not free doctors. It buried them.

Doctors now spend huge parts of their lives working with electronic systems, mostly designed by people who have probably never spent a night in an ICU. We click boxes, answer alerts, fill out required forms, meet compliance rules, and write notes that are more for billing, auditors, administrators, insurance companies, and lawyers than for patient care. You stop writing notes for physicians. You start writing notes for the machine. This changes people (clinicians) psychologically even if they do not recognize it immediately.

There are moments now during rounds that honestly feel absurd. A family member is crying while the physician tries to maintain eye contact and complete mandatory documentation before another alert appears on the screen. The patient is talking. The nurse is asking questions. Laboratory values are changing. The phone rings. Another admission waits downstairs. Somewhere, someone is reviewing occupancy numbers while physicians are trying to keep critically ill people alive.

And through all of this chaos, doctors are somehow still expected to think clearly, compassionately, and deeply about human suffering.

Late at night after ICU shifts, I sometimes realize I spent more time with software than with real people. Think about how strange that really is. Somewhere along the line doctors stopped using computers and became servants to them. Everybody inside medicine knows it. Almost nobody says it publicly.

Burnout is the wrong word

I have become more irritated with the word burnout because I think it does not capture what many doctors are really going through. Burnout sounds temporary, like something in your mind. It makes it seem like doctors just need more yoga, resilience workshops, mindfulness apps, or wellness seminars. Hospitals like to talk about physician wellness because it lets them treat the problem as psychological instead of structural. But many physicians are not burned out. They are morally exhausted.

There is a big difference between being tired and slowly realizing that the profession you gave your life to no longer looks like the one you started in. That feeling builds up quietly over thousands of moments. A patient is discharged earlier than feels right because beds are needed. A doctor spends more time on paperwork than thinking. A hard family conversation is cut short because charts are unfinished. An ICU transfer is rushed because someone is watching occupancy numbers. A treatment discussion is quietly shaped by pressure no one talks about.

None of these moments alone defines modern medicine. That is what makes the situation psychologically dangerous. Rarely does somebody walk into a room demanding something obviously unethical. The pressure is subtle. Administrative. Financial. Constant. Eventually physicians begin anticipating institutional pressure before anybody even speaks it aloud. That is how systems shape human behaviour most effectively. Not through force. Through environment.

Covid-19 and the breaking point

Covid-19 exposed many realities physicians will never fully forget. The pandemic did not create institutional control inside medicine because the machinery already existed long before Covid-19 arrived. But Covid-19 revealed how powerful that machinery had become and how quickly independent clinical judgment could become secondary to institutional management once systems entered crisis mode.

At the beginning uncertainty existed everywhere. Physicians were trying to understand a disease process in real time while caring for critically ill patients under extraordinary emotional strain. In theory this should have been a moment for open scientific debate, flexibility, disagreement, and aggressive clinical observation.

Instead, many physicians experienced the opposite. Protocols hardened rapidly. Institutional rigidity intensified. Independent thinking suddenly became dangerous in ways many doctors had never previously experienced.

I remember exhausted physicians privately admitting frustrations during late-night ICU conversations they would never publicly express. Doctors quietly questioned policies in hallways while repeating institutional messaging during official meetings. Physicians felt trapped between what they observed clinically and what institutions expected them to communicate publicly.

Many doctors realized during Covid-19 that they were far less independent than they once believed. That realization changed some physicians permanently.

And honestly, I do not think medicine has emotionally recovered from that period yet.

This is not burnout. It is captivity.

This article is not nostalgia for some mythical golden age because medicine has always been difficult and
healthcare systems absolutely require organization, technology, and structure. Standardization sometimes saves lives. Electronic access to information has obvious benefits. Nobody seriously wants to practice medicine without modern tools. But professions can gradually lose their soul without visibly collapsing. That is what worries me after 40 years in medicine.

When doctors spend more time serving systems than serving patients, medicine changes. When physicians are afraid to speak honestly, medicine changes. When throughput quietly shapes bedside decisions, medicine changes. When documentation matters more than human presence, medicine changes. And when physicians slowly begin feeling emotionally trapped inside giant institutional systems that they no longer control, we should probably stop calling that burnout because burnout does not adequately describe what many doctors now feel. It feels more like captivity.

About the author
Joseph Varon, MD, is an American critical care physician, professor and president of the Independent Medical Alliance. He has authored over 980 peer-reviewed publications and serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Independent Medicine. The above article, reproduced here by permission, was originally published by the Brownstone Institute (Austin, Texas) on May 18, 2026, here . All of Dr Varon’s Brownstone Institute posts may be found here.

Children

Rising costs aren’t stopping young couples from having children

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Despite our assumption, it is not financial concerns that are stopping young couples from having children; rather, it is a lifestyle choice.

By Sarah Wilder at Intellectual Takeout

It’s no secret that rising costs are devastating Americans right now, and that young people are feeling the brunt of it. For the generation currently starting families, these costs are particularly stressful. Undoubtedly, the prospect of pinching pennies to pay for astronomical labor and delivery bills, car seats, formula, and strollers on top of life’s basic necessities is too significant to bear, causing some to forego having children in the first place.

“It’s just crazy right now,” one would-be mother said in a recent New York Times interview. “I have always told my husband, like, if we were rich, I would definitely have kids.”

Why aren’t young couples actually having children?

But do such financial hardships truly account for our plummeting birth rates?

Former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse went viral this week, bemoaning the fact that Americans are foregoing children because they’ve “decided that being distracted by a dopamine hit around Candy Crush might be a good way to spend your time.” Folks were quite angry by this comment. Rising petrol costs, lack of paid parental leave, and expensive childcare are the real reasons adults aren’t having children, they argued.

Yet that’s not what statistics say.

In 2024, Pew Research surveyed childless adults. Infertility, wanting to focus on “other things,” or lack of the right partner were among the reasons for not having children. The cost of children was on the list, but hardly on the top.

Almost 40% of childless adults age 50 or older said the top reason they didn’t have kids was because “it just never happened.” Childless adults under 50 listed their top reason for not planning to have kids as “they just don’t want to.” Indeed, for adults over 50, that reason accounted for 31% of those surveyed, compared to 57% of respondents under 50.

Economic concerns admittedly ranked higher for those under 50 than those over, but didn’t even make it into the top three reasons. Only 12% of adults over 50 chose “couldn’t afford to raise a child” as their reason, and still only 36% of those under 50 chose that reason.

It seems that young people mostly don’t want kids because they don’t see why they should want them. In other words, young people believe the proponents of kids bear the burden of proof, while those over 50 found some tangible reason (however faulty) for their childlessness.

Alleviating the economic hardships of young Americans to encourage childbearing and to ease the burden of those with children is surely a worthwhile cause. But it won’t fix our birth rate.

It’s time to encourage young families

In order to encourage young people to have kids, we must address the real reason they aren’t having them. They’re simply not sure if they’re valuable – economically, socially, or relationally.

Regarding the economic front, young people should realize that more kids were born in worse conditions throughout history. That’s not to dismiss the economic woes of this generation, but they simply aren’t at the level yet that should keep anyone from having children.

Socially speaking, it is true that communities don’t welcome children and the chaos and joy they bring like they once did. Public spaces often shun children and their parents. Child-free spaces are considered the right of every childless adult. But the way to fix that isn’t to reinforce our willfully-barren society in their efforts to avoid having children. Instead, the more children there are in a community, the more that community will have to adapt to their presence.

On the relational aspect, consider that children will love you, and you will love them, in the most selfless and pure way one can be loved by another human. They will show you how fulfilling a life lived for others can be. With each child, your capacity for love will simply expand. In your old age, they will be the living legacy that carries you in your twilight years.

Yes, children are worth every cent.

By Sarah Wilder. The above article first appeared in Intellectual Takeout (Bloomington, Minnesota), and is reproduced by permission.

campus

Campus life by a young Christian woman

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A previous article featured an essay from a conservative male college student entitled Gen Z,
Social Media, and Envy. This month we present an essay on campus life from a female Christian
perspective.

I am a young, conservative, Christian woman attending a large state university. I chose to attend state university because I wanted a good education in Economics and I thought it would give me valuable opportunities and cost less than attending a solid liberal arts college. While my time spent at the university has been fruitful and I have learned a great deal, it has also opened my eyes to many cultural problems with Gen Z in particular, as well as with our public higher education system.

I desire to pursue knowledge, while simultaneously pursuing the good, the true and the beautiful. I find that at state university, school is often drudgery instead of enjoyment in the challenge of pursuing truth and knowledge. Many students dread showing up to class, skip when they can and eagerly anticipate the end of the semester. When I hear from other students at smaller liberal arts colleges, many of them have their ups and downs, but overall they enjoy their education and the challenges that come with learning and mastering difficult subjects and ways of thinking.

What is different about the state university world? First of all, I have noticed my generation’s chronic
reliance on technology on my campus. It’s practically revolutionary to have a class that’s “tech free”
(including tests)—I have one of those, and it’s refreshing. In between class periods, the majority of
students walk to their next class with eyes glued to their phones or impenetrable headphones covering their ears. Students rarely make eye contact when walking, and when they do, they quickly avert their eyes.

Starting a conversation with a stranger—even to ask for directions—is one of the most intimidating things you can do. Discussion does happen in class, but it usually takes a while to get going. When students refuse to engage verbally, our professors are noticeably disheartened, but there’s not much they can do.

More tech, less reading

As technology use increases, it seems that reading is decreasing. Just last week, when I walked into class with a three-volume set of Civil War history that I was taking home, my classmate looked shocked.

I showed him what I had, and he told me that he had a couple of boxes of Encyclopedia Britannica books from his grandmother, boxed up in his basement. He said he was going to put them up on shelves by his TV. “Not to read,” he explained—“just for show.”

“Are you not much of a reader?” I asked.

“Why would I read?” he replied.

“To learn?”

He shook his head. “I haven’t read a book since probably sophomore year.” He is a senior in college.

As someone who was raised to love knowledge and reading, I found his statements discouraging. On a broader note, this makes me more concerned for my generation. Covid-19, with its lockdowns and cancelled school, forced students my age online. Now, tech use is through the roof, and hobbies and necessities that used to be common, like reading, are in steep decline.

In terms of the university’s approach to reading, we do not read economic theory in my economics classes. We discuss policy ideas, and we briefly mention famous economists, but all we know about these economists is roughly when they lived, and what equation or concept they popularised. We do not read Friedrich Hayek, Adam Smith, Milton Friedman or even Karl Marx. The most economic theory reading I have done thus far in my time at college is in my technology-free class on the history of Western political thought.

Campus Professor: ‘Friedman was wrong’

As an example of the economic theory teaching we get, my professor in my (required) environmental economics class began the semester by telling us that “Friedman was wrong.” He proceeded with a less than adequate two-minute summary of who Friedman was and why he was wrong, and then moved on. He ended that inaugural lecture by stating that “binary thinking is born from simplification” and encouraging us to be openminded, always looking for things to change our minds about.

I was shocked by his obvious lack of belief in objective truth and saddened that a public university was promoting—and even requiring—a class that encouraged this. We reduce problems to policy and an equation. Instead of looking to history to formulate solutions for present problems, we blindly plow full speed ahead, ignoring the wisdom from those who came before us.

This is not a problem that is unique to the economics department. A couple of my friends have expressed their annoyance with classes and professors that are not challenging them. It seems to be a common pattern throughout the humanities to offer a relatively small number of in-person courses, require few if any tests, provide open-note quizzes and short-answer questions, mandate online discussion boards (as opposed to in-person dialogue) and require minimal reading of primary sources and the classics. As students, we often pay hefty sums of money for our education. If we are not learning useful, challenging material, what is the point?

In the realm of civil discourse, it’s even more difficult—particularly for me as a conservative. Not all of my professors are liberal, but I can usually tell which ones are, aren’t or don’t care. It’s hard to challenge a professor when he is an “expert” in a topic and in charge of a class, and you are neither. It’s even harder when your fellow classmates don’t say anything.

It’s also difficult to bring up questions about politics, policy or religion with my classmates. Growing up, my generation was taught never to discuss politics, religion or money—yet those are the very things we should be talking about, especially as young people! We are all in school, wrestling with what we’ll do with the rest of our lives. Universities used to be great forums for debate. Now we’re afraid we’ll offend someone by asking a genuine question.

Dating by phone apps, hookups

Another problem is the dating aspect. I didn’t attend college with the belief that I would find my husband here, but of course there’s always that hope. Yet my generation was raised with a dependence on phones, video games and dating apps. Don’t want to leave the comfort of your home to meet someone? No problem. There are countless apps you can get that enable you to “meet” someone in every way possible except for the one that truly matters—face to face.

Walking around my campus, I’ve been disheartened to see that many of my schoolmates find greater enjoyment in the party and hookup culture than they do in searching out a spouse with whom they can faithfully spend the remainder of their lives. No wonder it’s hard to find a good man here.


Radical feminism doesn’t help

Add to that the problem of radical feminism. The men in my generation have been taught since birth that women are entitled to exactly the same treatment as men. Women can work all the same jobs as men, women can and should provide for their families, women are just as strong as men, etc. Gone is the chivalrous protector role that men used to strive to fill.

I’ve been shocked recently at how rare it is for my fellow male students to hold doors for the female
students. Since there is no longer a difference between the sexes, there is no longer a need—or even a desire—for men to step into a provider role. In my experience, this has led to young men who are afraid
to ask young women out, unsure of their place in their girlfriend’s life, and afraid of committing to long term relationships.

They also struggle with their role as a natural-born leader. I only know a few openly conservative men on campus—most of my conservative friends are female. I have more male friends who are deeply religious, but they tend not to speak publicly about their political beliefs.

Conservative women exist on campus

And yet, there is hope. In a culture where we’re told that Gen Z women are the most liberal demographic, most of my conservative friends at the university are women. They are women who want to do something to save America and her people. My best friend wants to be a lawyer, another good friend wants to teach history to kids, another wants to work in state and local government, and another wants to work in international politics.

All of these women are strong, godly and driven to make changes. We are equipped to make these changes and find community through a few clubs on campus, internships, and fellowship and seminar opportunities.

I have had incredible opportunities to network and build relationships with likeminded conservative students through a political dialogue club on campus and through the campus College Republicans club. I have the privilege of serving both as an officer. I met my best friend through the political dialogue club, and I was able to join up with some of my conservative friends to restart our defunct College Republicans chapter.

Clubs and internships

In the College Republicans chapter, we are continuing to recruit new members and planning events where conservatives can meet one another and find friendly community in the face of opposition.

Our goal is to develop responsible, conservative citizens, change the minds of others through respectful debates and dialogues, and protect conservatism on our campus. Through working with fellow students to advance conservative values, we have built a community of intelligent and driven young people who I am confident will continue the fight for truth at our university long after I graduate.

My conservative professors have helped me with internship and networking opportunities as well, including an internship at the Heritage Foundation this past summer. At Heritage I was blessed to work in the DeVos Center for Human Flourishing (formerly the DeVos Center for Life, Family, and Religion), where I did focused research on issues such as abortion, transgender hormone “therapy” and vaccines.

Through our weekly lecture series, I learned about domestic and foreign policy issues, the natural law, and the definition and application of conservatism, among other things.’

All the interns were given copies of Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order and Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions. One of the policy directors, who had majored in economics, gave me Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and encouraged me to read it.

The goal of the internship directors, and I believe everyone at Heritage, was to equip us as young conservatives to go out on the offensive for conservative values—not just defending them but promoting them.

At Heritage, I made friendships that will last my whole life, learned what it means to be a “happy warrior” and emerged equipped to further the conservative movement wherever I find myself in the future.

In addition to my time spent at Heritage, I had the privilege of interning for the Acton Institute and twice for the Center for Arizona Policy. Through these wonderful experiences, I learned the process of lawmaking, took notes on numerous legislative floor sessions, committee and caucus meetings, performed topical research, catalogued books, learned hospitality and reception work, and so much more. My time spent at the Center for Arizona Policy is even more applicable now, after my summer at Heritage.

At Heritage, I was more focused on learning conservative policy and values and implementing those in a focused area. At the Center for Arizona Policy, those values connected directly with lawmaking of all shapes and sizes. These experiences have shaped my understanding of America and her political system, and I am excited to apply what I have learned wherever I may go.

While sometimes I regret not attending a conservative liberal arts school, when I reflect on the experiences and opportunities I have had at state university, I repeatedly conclude that I would not be where I am today if I had not chosen to attend state university. And, despite its shortcomings, I do believe there is hope for the state university world—but it is not found in more federal funding or in forcing students to write more papers.

How to improve classes on campus

Instead, it will be found in

  • teaching good, comprehensive, challenging history and humanities courses,
  • supporting students in pursuing knowledge with excellence,
  • fostering a more Socratic method of teaching and interacting with teachers and fellow students in the classroom, and
  • encouraging students to respectfully debate and challenge one another’s ideas of religion, policy and more.

The young conservatives I have met at my state university are intelligent, motivated and dedicated individuals who are committed to working together to defend and promote conservative values. There may not be many of us at our university now, but our hope is that our actions now will change the future.

This article is published by the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in St Louis, Missouri, USA. The original article is available from the foundation’s website:  www.mindszenty.org. The Mindszenty Report is not copyrighted, and readers are invited to forward copies to their local bishops, priests and pastors.


New pro-life film by Denise Mountenay

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Endeavour Forum’s Canadian associate, Denise Mountenay, is currently working on a new pro-life film, “Truth Matters: The Impact of Abortion”. This comes ten years after Denise co-produced the award-winning documentary, “Hush”, which exposed the links between abortion and breast cancer, premature birth and mental health issues.

A new pro-life film

Dear Friend in Christ:

This documentary exposes the falsehoods many pregnant women are told. It shines a light on the miracle of life before birth through ultrasound technology and features medical experts who reveal the truth about it. Specialists report on the increased breast cancer risk, preterm birth link, and the devastating mental health consequences.

You’ll hear from a medical researcher reporting on dozens of peer-reviewed studies proving legal abortion is not “safe” for women. And you’ll witness powerful testimonies from women who have been physically, emotionally, and spiritually harmed by legal abortion—women who now speak out to warn others and bring hope.

Please watch the trailer to gain an idea of what we have in mind for this film:

This film is more than information. It’s a mission. A warning. A lifeline.

It will speak to the body, soul, and spirit—and ultimately save countless precious lives created in the image of God.

A call to action

Become our partner for such a time as this!

We are coming against the spirits of death and murder. We urgently ask for your prayers and, if possible, your fasting.

But prayer alone is not enough—this professionally produced film needs your financial support to be completed. We are raising funds for:

  • Editing and soundtrack-$30,000.
  • Subtitles in multiple languages (abortion is a global epidemic)
  • Marketing and distribution to reach hearts worldwide $100,000.

Good news

Everyone who donates $1,000 or more will receive a complimentary copy of the documentary upon release. And yes—your gift is tax-deductible if you give online to

U.S. Partners: www.advancingtruthalliance.com (501c3)

Canadians: www.togetherforlife.net Thank you so much! We hate to ask, but must.

For information about Denise Mountenay’s work on behalf of Endeavour Forum, please click here:

Solzhenitsyn, Lysenkoism and the lies of the revolution

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Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was the most important Soviet dissident, but his message was accessible to all. On the day before he was sent into exile in 1974, he published a short essay entitled “Live Not By Lies”. It only takes him a few pages to lay out the most effective strategy for resisting totalitarianism.

As Solzhenitsyn well knew, ordinary people often feel that they are too weak to make any difference in a corrupt world. When all the powers of government are arrayed in the service of oppression, the lone citizen truly seems powerless. If they speak up, they might miss out on a job, an education or social acceptance. So they remain silent — after all, what difference does a single voice make?

More than you might think, said Solzhenitsyn. For though the regime is powerful, its power does not rest on military might. Instead, it comes from lies.

Solzhenitsyn saw that though a revolution might rely on physical force, violence is not enough to maintain its power. As he put it:

“Violence ages swiftly, a few years pass — and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally — Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence. And it is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down its heavy hand: It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit — and this suffices as our fealty.”

The Revolution can only be continued if everyone lies. In the Soviet Union, lies often came in the form of Marxist slogans: Workers of the World, Unite! Even though common people had no interest in uniting with the workers of Algeria, the United States or Brazil, they shouted the slogans in order to stay safe. And when everyone moved in lockstep, the system seemed impenetrable. So much so that the Soviet authorities were able to force compliance with truly bizarre doctrines like Lysenkoism.

Lysenkoism was the political/scientific project of Trofim Lysenko, who probably killed more people than any scientist in human history. He did so by rejecting any scientific theories that conflicted with Marxist doctrine.

Lysenko was a biologist who denied the existence Trofim Lysenko probably killed more people than any scientist in human history. of genes. He did so because genes encode stable characteristics that are passed down from one generation of living things to the next. In his view, this contradicted the Marxist ideal of Revolution.

Marx believed that when capitalism died, socialism would produce a “new man”, ushering in a new age. Lysenko translated this idea into the field of biology, arguing that organisms are only shaped by their environment. For example, he thought that by manipulating the environmental conditions that seeds are exposed to, you could even grow orange trees in Siberia.

His ideas were so popular that Stalin empowered him to lead the “modernisation” of agriculture in the Ukraine, where forced collectivisation had already murdered millions of people. On Lysenko’s decree, farmers were ordered to plant seeds very close together. As he saw it, seeds from the same species wouldn’t compete against one another. Much like the proletariat, they were destined for cooperation. He also prohibited fertiliser and pesticides.

The results were predictable: mass starvation. Even after the Soviets grew farm acreage 163 times, food production hadn’t reached pre-collectivisation levels.

Yet that wasn’t the end of Lysenko’s career. Because his ideas aligned with party orthodoxy, they weren’t criticised. In fact, hundreds of scientists were sent to prisons, asylums and firing squads for defending genetics. The country’s genetics researchers were once among the world’s finest, but no matter: The Revolution required a full commitment.

By the 1950s, communist China adopted Lysenkoism as its official agricultural doctrine. Thirty million people starved to death as a result. But that wasn’t enough to stop Soviet satellites like Poland, Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic from having to accept Lysenkoism as the “new biology”.

Soviet lies like Lysenkoism give Solzhenitsyn’s program of resistance its special edge. If the regime rules through falsehood, then there is no end to the damage it can do. Yet by the same token, totalitarian dictatorships cannot survive if people stop lying. As Solzhenitsyn said: “When people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person.”

Of course, it’s impossible to read about the Soviets’ sacrificing biology to political ideology without thinking of the experts who claim to follow the science but can’t tell us what a woman is. People who undergo gender transition surgery are 12 times as likely to attempt suicide as those who do not (see Cureus, Vol. 16, No. 4, April 2, 2024), but this fact is inconvenient for the Revolution.

Much as in Solzhenitsyn’s day, powerful institutions — both nominally public and nominally private — are arrayed against the truth. We face the challenge he posed in 1974: “Let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries?”

Adam De Gree is an American classical educator and freelance writer. The above article first appeared in Intellectual Takeout (Bloomington, Minnesota), November 5, 2024, and is reproduced by permission.