RUTHFULLY YOURS

If America is a patient and wokeness is a disease, then the surface-level prognosis has been looking good for the first few months of 2025. The leading edge of leftist opinion, defined by nothing so much as its insistence on institutional omnipresence, is seemingly in retreat. After Donald Trump’s executive order purging DEI from the federal government, companies are dropping their own programs. So are some universities.

Examine the patient more closely, however, and the sickness is still evident. The medical field provides many examples. Medical school accreditors and hospitals are still pushing DEI. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which often advances left-wing causes disguised as medical advocacy, still receives federal funding. And three years later, Richard T. Bosshardt is still stuck in wokeness’s waiting room.

Bosshardt is a plastic surgeon who objected to the 2020 embrace of DEI orthodoxy by the American College of Surgeons, of which he was (and, allegedly, remains) an official member. Bosshardt sought clarity about the organization’s declaring itself afflicted by structural racism, among other things. His effort garnered considerable attention and support within the ACS. That is, until the organization’s leadership unilaterally banned him from the internal forum where he had been making his case. All this proceeded in defiance of ACS’s own disciplinary process.

That was in 2022. On April 17, Bosshardt marked three years in limbo. He has never been officially kicked out of the ACS. Though he cannot communicate through the organization with other members, and lacks access to the membership directory, he continues to receive emails and event invitations. “According to the ACS leadership, I remain a fellow in good standing,” Bosshardt tells me. Some standing.

Bosshardt’s continuing plight is a symptom of the lingering disease of wokeness. So is the ACS’s own recent activity. A few years ago, at the height of DEI mania, the organization unveiled a “DEI toolkit.” Its purpose was to promote the incorporation of a whole suite of leftist doctrines — “intersectionality, microaggressions, implicit bias, allyship, active bystander, white privilege, and more,” Bosshardt wrote in 2023 — into the practice of medicine. Add to this the notion of “racial concordance” — that patients fare better with physicians who match their own identities — to which some are clinging even as it is increasingly discredited.

In perhaps something of a recognition of the marketing difficulties such ideas now face, the ACS no longer promotes its DEI toolkit as such. But it has not gone away. Rather, it has mutated into an “inclusive excellence” toolkit. It serves essentially the same function — and in many instances lives in the same places on the organization’s website. “They superficially tried to make it sound better, by getting away from some of the terminology,” Bosshardt says. “But they haven’t changed the basic premises of the whole thing.”

So long as these ideas persist, in whatever form, the practice of medicine is at risk — at every stage. That includes the training of future surgeons. Despite the formal end of affirmative action in higher education, medical schools and other institutions are still finding ways to promote politically favored identity groups instead of prioritizing merit. That’s true both for faculty and students.

It’s also true for what the former teach the latter. Coursework related to such faddish notions as implicit bias and white privilege continues to crowd out essential education, theoretical and practical, about medicine itself. Once-rigorous standards about curricula and practice hours continue to deteriorate. And those who object to any of this are often punished. “We’re trying to produce social justice warriors as opposed to producing physicians,” Bosshardt says. “That hasn’t changed at all” since 2023, when I first spoke with him.

What also hasn’t changed at all, however, is Bosshardt’s willingness to continue his fight to normalize his ACS membership. Though he has pursued multiple avenues of redress and has thus far come up short, he is not giving up. The organization is holding a conference in October; he is planning to attend. Now retired, he sees no reason to relent. “I have nothing to lose. They can’t hurt me,” he says. “I don’t care if people call me names.”

Bosshardt has kept his own struggles in perspective, calling himself “a little fish in a big pond.” His fight, he believes, is worth focusing on but is not the entirety of the problem. Much damage has already been done, in his view; he cites a worrying recent decline in the quality of surgeons, who spend more time learning woke bromides and less time meaningfully training in hospitals.

He’ll need help from others just to arrest this trend, to say nothing of reversing it. Fortunately, there is at least growing awareness of the problem, and more organizations, such as Do No Harm and FAIR, are willing to do something about it. Defending himself is part of his contribution. “I want to make sure that the profession that I dedicated my 47 years of medicine to is going to hopefully someday be better than when I got in,” he says. “I don’t think it is right now.”

As long as the same people and institutions who have spent years degrading the practice of medicine in service of their ideological goals are still at it, Bosshardt’s bracing diagnosis will be correct. That they may now be hiding their efforts does not make them any less dangerous. Suffering from a hidden illness, a patient, even one who thinks he is well, can stay ignorant for a long time of what ails him — until it’s too late.