Jack Cashill sneered in a deadname-laden Nov. 6 WorldNetDaily column:
Little did 53-year-old pediatrician Dr. Richard Levine suspect in 2011 that by rebranding himself mid-life as “Dr. Rachel Levine” he would one day save Western civilization.
Few would give Levine credit for the save. In fact, the good doctor would be horrified to know that people associated the word “save” with the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. And yet the link, though indirect, is there. Levine deserves credit as much as anyone.
I say “rebrand” here with some respect. In 2011, Levine could not have made a better career move. As “Richard,” Levine was going nowhere. A homely, chubby unhappily married father of two, Levine was treading water as a prof in the pediatrics department at Penn State University.
A football fan, Levine had to be unhappy with the scandals roiling the Penn State campus. The same year he formally changed gender, 2011, Penn State changed head football coaches, dumping legendary coach Joe Paterno the day after Levine’s 54th birthday. Time for the doc to move on.
Bruce Jenner would famously change gender four years later, but the former Olympian did not exploit the change for personal gain or expect the world to conform to the demands of the growing transgender movement. Jenner, in fact, remains a Republican and became a crusader against boys playing girls’ sports.
Levine, by contrast, used the new identity to climb the political ladder and use his lofty perch to demand radical social change – or else. In 2015, the ambitious doctor was named physician general of Pennsylvania and soon after Pennsylvania’s secretary of health.
Cashilll offers no evidence that Levine became transgender solely as a career move or for “personal gain.” He then huffed:
Levine’s disastrous handling of COVID caught the attention of the incoming Biden administration. Recognizing incompetence when he saw it, Biden designated Dr. Levine to serve as the 17th assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Levine was the first transgender appointee to be confirmed by the Senate as well as the highest-ranking transgender official in U.S. history.
Again, Cashill offered no evidence of a “disastrous handling of COVID” or any other “incompetence” by Levine — he’s simply parroting right-wing attacks on Levine promoted by right-wingers upon her nomination, which we debunked at the time.
All this evidence-free name-calling was to set up the last part of Cashill’s column, in which he cheered the “impish editors” at the right-wing Babylon Bee for a mocking “Man of the Year” award, which got it suspended from Twitter for being the obvious and malicious hate that it was — which in turn inspired Elon Musk to buy Twitter. Cashill concluded by gushing:
With the purchase of the world’s leading source of information, Musk has all but leveled the media playing field. Increasingly over the past half century, the “mainstream” media – TV networks, newspapers, the entertainment industry, social media platforms – had drifted leftwards.
By 2020, they were all in for the Democrats and the progressive agenda. Musk’s purchase made it increasingly difficult for them to peddle disinformation.
Thanks in no small part to Twitter, the right was able to push back against the radical transgender movement and its most visible champions, including Levine and Kamala Harris.
In the 2024 campaign, the Trump camp used images of Levine and Harris to show just how hostile to common sense the Left had become. The strategy worked.
At least for the moment Western civilization was saved. Thanks, Doc!
Not sure how Cashill came to that conclusion, since all it shows is the irrational hostility of both Musk and the Bee who challenges their orthodoxy. And it’s weird that Cashill think that Levine’s mere existence is an offense to “common sense” — and he ignores that the peddling of disinformation has greatly increased at Twitter (now X) under Musk’s ownership. But that disinformation is designed to benefit right-wingers, so Cashill is cool with it.