Why My Articles Get Censored-Out, Not Published

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

On March 14th, the Manhattan Institute published from Paul T. Williams, “Equity Over Accuracy in Kidney Care: A new formula moves blacks to the front of the line for treatment, regardless of need.”

It opened:

“Health equity” could be claiming new victims. More than 10 million nonblack Americans with chronic kidney disease may have seen their treatments or transplants delayed because of policy changes enacted after 2020’s “racial reckoning.” Some of those patients now face greater risk of death because national transplant organizations have embraced racial activism.

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a quasi-governmental nonprofit that runs American transplant centers, enacted a significant policy change. The network compiles the national waitlist for kidney transplants and consults a formula that helps determine which candidates it will prioritize. Before 2020, the network used a formula that measured serum creatinine concentrations to assess a patient’s estimated glomerular filtration rate [GFR] — the best-known measure of whether a patient has chronic kidney disease. Since black patients typically have higher serum creatinine concentrations than nonblacks with the same kidney function, the formula had applied an adjustment for black patients to ensure a more precise GFR estimate.

Activists in the wake of George Floyd’s death claimed that the formula’s adjustment was racist. This prompted the National Kidney Foundation and the American Society of Nephrology to create a task force to “reassess inclusion of race in the estimation of glomerular filtration rate.” The task force decided to nix the racial adjustment and set to work choosing a new formula that would not take race into account, which it released in 2021.

In December 2022, the board of UNOS’s transplant system issued a directive requiring all transplant centers to apply retroactively the new formula to determine black patients’ spots on the national waitlist. Last December, the network announced the results of its application of the new formula. Removing the racial adjustments had moved the waitlist’s more than 6,100 black patients up by an average of 1.7 years, with just over 500 receiving a transplant. Of course, this meant that some nonblack patients were correspondingly pushed back in line.

While the board heralded this move as “underscor[ing] our commitment to equity” and ending a system that “unfairly delayed care for many black patients,” its decision resulted in unfairly delaying needed transplants for nonblack patients. The old race-conscious formula, far from being a remnant of the Jim Crow era, was published in 1999 and updated in 2009, and was based on studies and tests involving over 10,000 patients across racial, ethnic, and gender lines. The formula’s authors, renowned nephrologists, concluded that without the racial adjustment, the formula would have introduced significant error into screening for chronic kidney disease. It would have resulted in some black patients with less advanced disease or even no disease receiving treatment and transplants more quickly than nonblack patients with more advanced disease.

The new formula, by contrast, is scientifically difficult to defend. Instead of adjusting for one race in the name of cross-racial accuracy, as the old formula did, the new formula removes the adjustment so that black patients can get faster treatment. Ironically, the formula without a racial adjustment is more racially biased. …

Here was the comment that I posted to it on the morning of March 15th:

Eric Zuesse 2 minutes ago

Hold on, this is waiting to be approved by City Journal.

This article, and Paul T. Williams, and City Journal, are here calling for a race-conscious formula, and for abolishing the existing non-racist formula; and their argument for this is that ONLY by a racist formula will Whites be advantaged and Blacks be disadvantaged, and that the formula SHOULD advantage Whites and disadvantage Blacks. In other words: by publishing this article, City Journal publicly exposes itself as being racist in favor of Whites against Blacks.

The comment was never published.

That is the outcome for practically every article and every comment that I have been submitting to thousands of media ever since at least the year 2000. So: I am now trying to go public with this by submitting the present article about that phenomenon, to the 300 individuals at the 200 news-media that I submit each one of my articles to for publication. I do this now because despite my negative experience in the past, this was only a comment, not an article, and because this comment exposes that article, and that person, and that magazine, City Journal — the journal of the libertarian Manhattan Institute, which is perhaps the main Big-Think forum for the Wall Streeters who think much about broader social and political issues — exposes them as their being blatantly racist against non-Whites. By their refusing to publish my comment, the editor of that publication prevented that comment from being responded-to and maybe debated by other commenters at that article. That public debate there, about their article, was thus prevented to occur there; and, so, maybe now it will occur outside of there.

My comment was against racism of any type, but — in this case — particularly against racism that intentionally advantages Whites (the vast majority of Americans) against Blacks; and most particularly is the type of racism that was embodied in the old, pre-George-Floyd institutionalized practice of discriminating against Blacks so as to prevent Blacks’ unfortunate genetic predisposition more than of non-Blacks, to die of kidney disease and so to need kidney-transplants at a statistically higher rate than Whites do, from being addressed by what their article attacks as being “racial activism.”

The City Journal article argues that if Blacks are more-vulnerable to kidney disease than non-Blacks are, then there ought to be — as was formerly the case (before George-Floyd) — a racist formula that will “adjust” their higher propensity of dying from kidney disease, in order that more Whites and fewer Blacks will be able to obtain kidney transplants, because ignoring that genetic predisposition which Blacks have will produce a natural result, of more Blacks and fewer Whites dying from kidney disease. In other words: the City Journal argument is that an individual’s need for a kidney transplant — a need that is naturally higher for Blacks than for Whites — should not be the only factor in apportioning kidney transplants, but, instead, race should also be considered, so as to increase the number of Whites who will receive kidney transplants. They call this pro-Whites formula “a more precise GFR estimate.” As Paul T. Williams, and City Journal, and the Manhattan Institute, are propagandizing, Whites “now face greater risk of death because national transplant organizations have embraced racial activism.” They want the previous, pre-George-Floyd, anti-Black racism to become replaced by a pro-White racism, INSTEAD OF (as now) to apportion kidney transpants ENTIRELY ON THE BASIS OF A GIVEN PERSON’S NEED for a transplant — a formula that includes zero “racial activism,” for or against ANY “race.”

The blatant racism of that article struck me so much so that I am considering City Journal’s racism as being yet another item of evidence in confirmation of my theory (which was put forth in my book AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL) that the richer a person is (such as the Manhattan Institute serves), the higher is that person’s propensity to be a racist. Here is a summary of that argument (without any of the evidence that I cite for it, much of which evidence can be seen at my 1 June 2015 article “What is ‘Conservatism’: Social Science Findings about Conservatism”):

People of extraordinary wealth — regardless whether first-generation or inherited old-aristocracy — naturally are curious to understand why others don’t, and what to think especially of the numerous poor; and the commonest answer for them is that “God” or “Providence” or some other assumed source and authority on right and wrong (which just happens to be slanted in their favor), has chosen the people who are rich to be rich, and that this gives the rich the right to pass on to their children or any other beneficiaries they choose, that wealth. Just as this thinking moralizes for the rich, it ALSO moralizes AGAINST the poor; and, so, the poor and the children of the poor are being punished that way by “God” or whatever. It’s simply the way things are: it is ‘natural’ — they think.

Similarly: racism against any sort of oppressed or unfortunate people can be ‘justified’ as “God’s will” or “Fate,” so that those unfortunates are to blame for their plight.

To accept the moral validity of extraordinary inherited wealth, and of the many ways in which it can be passed tax-free to the next generation (though wealth that has been earned by labor is being taxed), is similar to outright racism, by its assuming that unlucky individuals are less-deserving than lucky ones are.

The Manhattan Institute’s Chairman is the vulture-fund billionaire Paul Singer, and its President is Reihan Salam, and its Trustees and its staff are likewise strong if not extremist libertarians, which is to say, they viscerally attribute “good” to rich, and “bad” to poor, and basically believe that any person’s moral worth is his or her net worth, so that an individual whose debts exceed their assets is bad, and any billionaire is extremely good and ought to be able to distribute his or her wealth to whatever beneficiaries that person selects instead of for the Government to make such choices as to how excess personal wealth in the given society ought to be allocated and for what public purposes. The prejudice against Blacks is to a large extent a prejudice against poor people, who are much more commonly found amongst Blacks than amongst Whites — and therefore tend to be targets of racism by libertarians (since a libertarian looks up to billionaires and other lucky individuals).

According to the U.S. National Kidney Foundation, “Black or African Americans are more than 3 times as likely … to have kidney failure compared to White Americans.” (Perhaps some donor(s) to the Manhattan Institute had brought their article about on account of their being White(s) who became outraged that some Black(s) were now ahead of them on the kidney-transplant wait-list.)

I tried to find whom the main donors to the Manhattan Institute were, but wasn’t able to. As regards its founders, they were William Casey, who headed Ronald Reagan’s CIA, and Antony Fisher, the British libertarian whose hidden wealth ended up funding his career of assisting over a hundred other libertarian think tanks (including those of America’s Charles and David Koch) to increase their effectiveness.

Though the Manhattan Institute represents Wall Street and hedge fund billionaires, it is very predominantly NOT a reflection of the Democratic Party, but very partisanly a Republican Party billionaires’ think tank, So: maybe it reflects the views held by around half of all U.S. billionaires. Democratic Party billionaires, however, are just as bad, though not in exactly the same ways. They are liberal, instead of conservative; but there are no progressive billionaires. Progressivism doesn’t buy into the idea that billionaires are good; so, it has no support from billionaires.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.