Commentary Culture Investigations

The PBS News Hour may have backed off a little on pushing transgender surgery for children since the issue’s main advocate, former PBS White House reporter Laura Barron-Lopez, moved to left-wing MS NOW. But her successor Liz Landers took up the cause on Friday’s edition, hosting Chase Strangio, transgender activist, ACLU lawyer, and biological female, to discuss “Where trans advocates are focusing efforts after recent court defeats.”Co-anchor Geoff Bennett: The U.S. Supreme Court wrapped up a consequential term for LGBTQ rights last week. In one of its major end-of-term decisions, the justices upheld state bans on transgender athletes competing in girls and women’s sports. But the ruling left key legal questions unresolved, and new challenges are already taking shape…. Landers used the misleading euphemism of “gender-affirming care” to describe irreversible surgical procedures on minors.Liz Landers: For decades, LGBTQ rights groups have turned to the courts to fight back against laws they view as discriminatory. And while they have notched victories in the past, advocates are now facing challenges in that legal movement. In the past two years, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sided with Republican-led states on issues involving transgender people. Those rulings include bans on gender-affirming care for minors, and, just last week, upholding bans on transgender women and girls from playing on sports teams that match their gender identity. For more on where the legal movement goes next, I’m joined now by Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Project, and the first openly transgender attorney to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court….Liz Landers continues PBS tradition of trans propaganda: “…the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sided with Republican-led states on….bans on gender-affirming care for minors…transgender women and girls from playing on sports teams that match their gender identity.” pic.twitter.com/ReSaKDMF2e— Clay Waters 🇮🇱 (@claywaters44) July 13, 2026Nothing else was said about Strangio’s difficult appearance before the Supreme Court for the ACLU last December, having to admit to Justice Samuel Alito that, despite years of media and activist proclamations, no evidence existed that surgical procedures actually reduce suicides of people identifying as transgender.Landers invited Strangio to explain away public revulsion to his radical trans-stand as cynical “politics.”Landers: I want to ask you about the Bostock v. Clayton County decision. That was from 2020 from the Supreme Court that protects employees against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. It was a major win for you all just a few years ago. But public sentiment has shifted since then. How much of that change comes down to politics?Strangio chose the paranoid explanation, and let’s not be specific about Kamala Harris favoring taxpayer-funded surgeries for prisoners, and other hot trans takes:Strangio: ….it was part of the political changes that were happening, but it was also part of a very significant conservative investment in narratives targeting particularly transgender people and hundreds of millions of dollars that were paid in the four or five years between 2021 and 2025 to demonize trans people in particular….Again, PBS’s coverage was muted compared to the Barron-Lopez era, but clearly sympathetic to one side.Landers: You are dealing with a Supreme Court with a conservative majority of justices that clearly don’t share your vision. How big of an obstacle is that?Strangio: I think, right now, we are facing in all rights movements, all civil rights movements a serious set of obstacles, both from the federal executive and from the judiciary in terms of a desire to really narrow civil rights….It’s as if PBS couldn’t bear asking Strangio a challenging question. This softball was the closest they got:Landers: This has now been two years of setbacks for your advocacy when it comes to the Supreme Court, including last year’s ruling on gender-affirming care for minors and this year’s on conversion therapy. Where does the movement go from here?To which Strangio gave a speech: “So we take in the setbacks. We care for our community, but we don’t let it deter us in this multigenerational fight to ensure that we continue to push towards justice.”In 2023, we did a study that found 90 percent of the PBS transgender stories pushed the pro-trans message. That tilt continues. A transcript is available, click “Expand.”PBS News Hour7/10/267:19:02 p.m. (ET)Geoff Bennett: The U.S. Supreme Court wrapped up a consequential term for LGBTQ rights last week. In one of its major end-of-term decisions, the justices upheld state bans on transgender athletes competing in girls and women’s sports. But the ruling left key legal questions unresolved, and new challenges are already taking shape.Liz Landers is back and brings us a conversation she recorded earlier this week on the ongoing legal battles.Liz Landers: For decades, LGBTQ rights groups have turned to the courts to fight back against laws they view as discriminatory. And while they have notched victories in the past, advocates are now facing challenges in that legal movement.In the past two years, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sided with Republican-led states on issues involving transgender people. Those rulings include bans on gender-affirming care for minors, and, just last week, upholding bans on transgender women and girls from playing on sports teams that match their gender identity.For more on where the legal movement goes next, I’m joined now by Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Project, and the first openly transgender attorney to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court.Chase, thank you for joining “News Hour.”Chase Strangio, American Civil Liberties Union: Thanks so much for having me.Liz Landers: How are you and the ACLU responding to last week’s Supreme Court decision?Chase Strangio: You know, we’re going to do what we always do, which is assess the court’s decision and prepare to mobilize whatever strategic next steps we need to take both in and out of the courtroom.Whether we win or lose at the Supreme Court, there is always more work to be done, and that is how we are positioning ourselves for the coming months and years.Liz Landers: I want to ask you about the Bostock v. Clayton County decision. That was from 2020 from the Supreme Court that protects employees against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. It was a major win for you all just a few years ago. But public sentiment has shifted since then.How much of that change comes down to politics?Chase Strangio: I think that the reality is that the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock in 2020 coincided with a change in the federal administration and was in the middle of the pandemic. And in the aftermath of those three things all together, we saw a pretty significant backlash targeting LGBT people.And it was part of the political changes that were happening, but it was also part of a very significant conservative investment in narratives targeting particularly transgender people and hundreds of millions of dollars that were paid in the four or five years between 2021 and 2025 to demonize trans people in particular.And that, of course, changes public sentiment when they’re internalizing incessant narratives about our community that situate us as a threat, despite the fact that we represent less than 1 percent of the population.Liz Landers: You are dealing with a Supreme Court with a conservative majority of justices that clearly don’t share your vision. How big of an obstacle is that?Chase Strangio: I think, right now, we are facing in all rights movements, all civil rights movements a serious set of obstacles, both from the federal executive and from the judiciary in terms of a desire to really narrow civil rights.And now, as trans people are facing this uphill battle with attacks from the Trump administration and significant constraints on our rights from the Supreme Court, obviously, we need to think about ways to protect people without just relying on the federal government.And so we’re turning to state courts, we’re turning to state legislatures, but we can’t abandon advocacy in the federal courts. And we and we won’t, because that is a important part of fighting back against the type of attacks that we’re seeing from the Trump administration.And even though we are facing these obstacles from the Supreme Court, we are consistently still winning in the lower courts, delaying some of the most egregious harms that our communities are facing. So it’s about pursuing multifaceted approach and doing whatever we can to protect the rights and well-being of our community.Liz Landers: About those lower court battles, some critics say that it’s risky to bring these legal challenges to anti-trans laws when courts at the state level are turning wins into losses at the Supreme Court. Are these lower-level wins enough?Chase Strangio: It’s easy to critique minority for advocating for their rights, when the problem is this larger set of structures that are targeting some of the most vulnerable members of our communities and absolving those structures and those people and institutions in power.But if we sit back and don’t challenge some of the most aggressive actions targeting trans people, then we have essentially just accepted the idea that we can we can exist in this baseline where trans people are denied access to education, to health care, to safe housing, even to privacy in their medical records.And I don’t think that that would be a safe or effective state of play to just let exist without challenge.Liz Landers: This has now been two years of setbacks for your advocacy when it comes to the Supreme Court, including last year’s ruling on gender-affirming care for minors and this year’s on conversion therapy.Where does the movement go from here?Chase Strangio: These are losses that will have a negative impact on people’s lives, on young people’s well-being, and of course, we grieve those realities and we continue to fight on. Movements are long, and the fight for justice is a multigenerational fight.So we take in the setbacks. We care for our community, but we don’t let it deter us in this multigenerational fight to ensure that we continue to push towards justice.Liz Landers: Chase Strangio, thank you for your time.Chase Strangio: Thanks for having me. 

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This article was produced in partnership with South Side Weekly, with support from the Wayne Barrett Project. CHICAGO — When the Venezuelan woman arrived in the city in December 2023 with her three children, she was looking for stability and a path to legal status. A friend referred her to a man who claimed he […]
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WASHINGTON, DC; December 4, 2025 – The Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Alicia Patterson Foundation announced today that the two organizations are merging, bringing together two of the oldest and largest funders of independent journalism in the United States.  Effective immediately, the Alicia Patterson Foundation will close, and its flagship six- and 12-month reporting […]
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His candor and fairness is why he’s getting praise even from his ideological foes.

Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D.), in a CNN essay that called Muslims “another victim of 9/11,” claimed that anti-Muslim discrimination after September 11 led to premature babies and low birthweight among Muslim newborns in the United States. But El-Sayed didn’t mention in his essay that he himself had published research four years earlier that found no such effect.
In a piece marking the anniversary of the September 11 attacks—published on the CNN web page of Fareed Zakaria—El-Sayed argued that the “discrimination and marginalization” that American Muslims and Arabs faced after the attacks produced measurable health consequences.
“We regularly see the toll this climate of discrimination takes upon these communities,” wrote El-Sayed, an epidemiologist at Columbia University at the time.
As evidence, he pointed to a 2006 study published in Demography, which concluded that Arab American women in California were 34 percent more likely to have premature and low birth weight babies following the terrorist attacks. The study’s author argued that “ethnicity-related stress or discrimination” likely contributed to the change. El-Sayed also cited his own 2011 study in the CNN essay that found Arab Americans had lower life expectancy rates than whites.
But El-Sayed’s essay omitted another study—one he coauthored in 2008 while at Columbia—that contradicted the California findings.
Analyzing 129,384 births in Michigan between September 2000 and March 2002, El-Sayed and two coauthors found “no difference” in the rates of premature or low birth weight births among Arab and Muslim mothers before and after September 11.
“Our findings contrast with the only other published study that has assessed the relationship between mass trauma and birth outcomes of a specific group,” the authors wrote in the paper, which appeared in the journal Ethnicity & Disease.
El-Sayed’s study went even further, reporting that Arab and Muslim women were at a “significantly” lower risk of delivering premature or low-weight babies than women overall. Roughly 8 percent of Arab mothers gave birth prematurely during the period studied, compared with about 9 percent of white mothers and 15 percent of black mothers, the study found.
The omission demonstrates how El-Sayed evolved over the years from a scientific researcher publishing peer-reviewed studies in obscure medical journals to a fledgling politician making inflammatory claims in unserious publications like the CNN page of “Fareed Zakaria GPS.”
More specifically, the omission raises an obvious question: Why did El-Sayed, who touted himself as “a scientist” in a CNN interview this week, cite research supporting his argument about the effects of anti-Muslim bigotry while leaving out his own published work that provided contradictory evidence?
El-Sayed has already faced scrutiny for drawing an equivalence between 9/11, in which 2,977 were killed, and the U.S. response to the attacks. On the 20th anniversary of the attacks, he wrote that while he mourned those killed on September 11, he would, the following day, “mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.” He has also drawn criticism for appearances with left-wing influencer Hasan Piker, who previously remarked that “America deserved 9/11.”
There are no apparent flaws in El-Sayed’s Michigan study. Indeed, he cited the paper in at least eight subsequent academic articles he published over the years, including a 2021 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. And El-Sayed, who went on to get his Ph.D. and M.D., though he never completed a residency, frequently touts his scholarly work, boasting of “more than 100 peer-reviewed publications that have been cited thousands of times.”
According to his résumé, El-Sayed presented the research at the Michigan Epidemiology Conference in 2008 and won second prize at that year’s annual meeting of the Society for Epidemiologic Research.
Unlike the California paper, El-Sayed’s Michigan study received little public attention. The 2006 Demography study generated national headlines, including a Washington Post story titled “Babies, Bigotry and 9/11,” and continued to be cited years later. WHYY, the Philadelphia NPR affiliate, aired a segment on the study in 2021.
By contrast, El-Sayed’s research remained largely confined to academic literature, perhaps because its muted findings did not make for splashy news coverage.
El-Sayed, now running against Rep. Haley Stevens in the Aug. 4 Democratic primary, more recently sought to reconcile the two studies, writing in his 2020 memoir, Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic, in which he sought to establish himself as a serious political figure, that the California study was a catalyst for him to pursue a career in epidemiology. “In that paper, science, social science, and my own life experiences collided in a way I had never known was possible. It was exhilarating and devastating at the same time,” he wrote, indicating that the findings were “stunning” and “blood-curdling.”
“I had found social epidemiology, the discipline that would shape my work for years to come,” he wrote.
Rather than questioning the validity of the California study, El-Sayed argued that Michigan Muslims and Arabs fared better after 9/11 because they were more likely to live in tighter ethnic enclaves, “empowering and supporting them while also shielding them from prejudice.”
But in his research paper, El-Sayed acknowledged that the “difference in birth outcomes observed in California may have been due to chance alone.”
El-Sayed did not respond to requests for comment.
The post El-Sayed Blamed Post-9/11 ‘Discrimination and Marginalization’ for Muslim Moms Having Premature Babies: He Ignored His Own Scientific Study That Proved It False appeared first on .

We have lost our minds. Everything is not politics.

Journalist Nick Shirley, who went viral last year for exposing fraud in Minnesota, just released his next hit: Over $190 Million in Medicare and Medicaid fraud exposed in New York City’s Queens neighborhood. And, that’s not the only potential fraud exposed there.On Friday, Shirley posted a documentary on X in which he exposes several social adult daycare centers he alleges committed fraud with American tax dollars. In the post, he further criticizes the fraudsters and the politicians who have done little to stop it:“We all work way too hard and pay too much in taxes for fraudsters to steal from our pockets. These fraudsters have been able to defund American taxpayers for years without any pushback from the public and politicians. Time is up”In one example of alleged fraud, a social adult daycare center, Sunrise Senior Service, was alleged to have obtained $44 million fraudulently over the past few years. Shirley confronted the organization, and met a client outside who admitted that the Sunrise Senior Service had given her a kickback, despite the owner’s previous denial that his organization offered kickbacks. Shirley claimed, according to Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services (CMS) and Health and Human Services (HHS) data, that the organization claimed 7,899 patients in 2024, despite its limited real estate.Sunrise Senior Service officially operates as a provider of geropsychology, a form of psychology that applies psychological methods to the needs of the elderly, according to its National Provider Identifier information. In the documentary, however, Shirley and the owner discuss the organization with an understanding that it is an adult daycare center.New York Medicaid covers adult daycare, according to the New York Department of Health website.Nick Shirley teams up with CMS Director Dr. Oz toward the end of the documentary. Dr. Oz alleges in the video that pharmacies and medical equipment companies have scammed the American taxpayer tens of millions of dollars.Dr. Oz touted the documentary on his official X account:“Flushing, Queens, NYC—an epicenter for one of the biggest fraud rings you’ve never heard of: Social adult daycares. In Queens, NY alone, social adult daycares generate $2.1 Billion@nickshirleyy and I investigated, and the War on Fraud continues.”These were not the only fraud allegations leveled against businesses in that neighborhood this year.This past February, the Department of Justice charged two men in the same Queens neighborhood in connection to an alleged $120 million Medicare and Medicare Fraud scheme.In February, the DOJ charged Inwoo Kim, who owned Royal Adult Daycare and Happy Life Inc., and Daniel Lee, program director at Happy Life. Kim and Lee were charged for providing kickbacks to those who filled prescriptions at their pharmacy and for providing unnecessary services:“Between 2016 and 2026, Kim and Yang paid illegal bribes in the form of cash and supermarket gift certificates to Medicaid recipients and Medicare beneficiaries to induce them to fill prescriptions at Kim’s pharmacy”…….“In total, Medicare and Medicaid paid approximately $120 million for prescription drugs and social adult day care services that were medically unnecessary, not provided, or induced by kickbacks and bribes.”In all, the two investigations have uncovered approximately $310 million in potential fraud.

There are times where the dynamic between President Trump and CNN seems exactly the same as it was in 2017.Late Monday afternoon in the Oval Office, President Trump took questions from the media regarding his announcement that another U.S. military strike on Iran would take place later that night. CNN’s Kaitlin Collins managed to ask two questions from the time CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper picked up coverage, late into the first hour of his show, in time to catch Trump rip CNN as “fake news”, something Tapper would later dispute, calling that accusation and others made by Trump “lies”.Tapper threw it to Trump, claiming that we are “on the verge of another war with Iran”. Soon Collins would ask the first of two her two questions to Trump.

COLLINS: “Mr. President, you noted the United States is bombing Iran again. I mean, you’ve been bombing Iran for months now. Is this just the new normal for the American people?TRUMP: Well, you know, we’re in Vietnam for 19 years. We’re here for four months. So I think we’ve done a lot. We’ve knocked out their Navy in a period of one month…. Their air force is nonexistent…. We knocked out most of their missiles, most of their drones…..This is almost a military skirmish. Trump’s answer to Collins went on for 2 and a half minutes, before she asked him about his promise to be reimbursed by countries for protecting the Strait of Hormuz.

TRUMP: Yeah, I want to be reimbursed because we’re protecting a very rich portion of the world. We’re spending money. And so what we’ve done is we are going to be reimbursed for protection.Trump would eventually go back to listing our military successes against Iran.TRUMP: So four months ago, these people had military that was very strong, by far the strongest, probably in the Middle East. They were called the bully of the Middle East. Now they don’t have a Navy….They had 230 airplanes attack planes. They’re all gone. They had tremendous radar. It’s all gone. They had tremendous anti-aircraft. It’s all gone. Sadly, their leadership is all gone.Then Trump ripped the media and specifically CNN for skipping the good news, which ends up being “fake news,” because they only talk about the bad news, as they see it.TRUMP: And then you read fake news like your network, CNN, which is fake news. You read them, you have them say, well, actually, aren’t they doing quite well? He continued, noting how Iran’s inflation rate is over 300%, how they’ve killed over 50,000 protesters in their country, and again stated that they have no military, before turning back to the media.TRUMP: All they have is fake news because the fake news would rather see us lose the war than win the war, which is really treasonous in a certain way. So we’re doing another very major attack tonight.When the presser was over moments later, Tapper turned to White House correspondent Kristen Holmes, and addressed Trump’s “lying” criticism: 

 TAPPER: Kristen, before I come to you, I just want to say everything the President just said about CNN is completely false. Nobody at CNN is saying that Iran is doing well, and nobody at CNN is rooting for Iran to win this war. I don’t know why the President continues to say these things. I don’t know if he believes them, but they’re all lies.HOLMES: It was clear during that, that he’s frustrated and that he was trying to filibuster to not take any more questions about Iran.Frustrated? Filibustering? From what viewers saw in those 10 minutes of coverage, Trump did take questions. He did not have to, but he did, and took two from Collins. Another possibility is that he has been watching CNN since the war began. If Trump has been watching, he may have seen Jim Sciutto claim cease fire violations, “in both directions”, or Jake Tapper himself object when Trump called Iranian leaders “loco and crazy.” He may have seen New Jersey Democrat Senator Cory Booker claim ‘unconditional surrender’ by Trump to Iran, while calling Trump a “criminal”, with no pushback from Phil Mattingly, or CNN’s Mathew Chance reporting from Iran, quoting an Iranian who called the conflict, “Trump’s War”, or Erin Burnett editing a clip, setting up Rep. Seth Moulton to call for the death penalty for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. This is CNN!