It Is Wrong to Call For the Murder of Journalists
I can't believe I have to say this, but no one has a leg to stand who has called for violence toward reporters, including Jesse Singal and me, who cover pediatric gender medicine with circumspection.
I cannot believe I have to say this, but:
It is wrong to call for the murder of journalists.
Just as it is wrong to call for, celebrate or rationalize the murder of CEOs, it deplorable, reprehensible and a sign of woeful moral decay for anyone to employ similarly twisted, antisocial rhetoric with regards to people whose job it is to report on uncomfortable and inconvenient truths. (Note: All murder is bad; but this essay concerns targeted assassinations of or threats of violence toward public figures.)
As the nation has sat transfixed by the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the ultimate arrest of his alleged assailant, Baltimore-born valedictorian, Ivy League grad and real-estate scion Luigi Mangione, populist online mobs have celebrated the slaying as comeuppance for the insurance industry’s supposed evils. Prominent tech blogger Taylor Lorenz, never one to let common decency stand in the way of running her mouth off, has danced right up to the edge of rejoicing over Mr. Thompson’s assassination.
Meanwhile, a parallel and sadly comparable uprising has produced similarly violent rhetoric against one reporter in particular on the ascendant social media site Bluesky.
I have said the following many times. I have had people end their relationships with me over saying it. And I will continue to say it:
Jesse Singal is a fine journalist.
It boggles the mind to witness Mr. Singal’s bravery and fortitude in the face of nearly a decade of vile attacks on his character and his incisive and invaluable reporting about pediatric medicine. He was the one who inspired me to begin reporting on this subject myself. Although he is several years younger than I am, I look up to him. (Whereas I am tall, he is, after all, extremely tall.) I remain in his debt.
Since Mr. Singal joined Bluesky last week, transgender activists and their allies have responded with such brutal and deranged hostility that some of them have actually taken to calling for his death. This shameful discourse should alarm anyone who believes in a liberal society that still benefits from the free press that the MAGA movement has worked so hard to denigrate and squelch. That such violent rhetoric should come from the left is a prime example of the horseshoe theory of politics, in which extremists on opposite ends of the political spectrum come to resemble one another, such as in their endorsement of elements of totalitarianism or in excusing, championing or fomenting politically motivated violence.
I have myself been subjected to violent overtures on Bluesky, in particular from the British transgender activist Mallory Moore (see the screenshot below). In response to a thread of mine in which I condemned Ms. Lorenz’s apparent rationalizing of Mr. Thompson’s slaying, Ms. Moore responded with the statement: “Supplied for the consideration of the Midnight CEO Murder Society.”
I can certainly withstand criticism and trolling online as I report about pediatric gender medicine myself. But I will not tolerate threats or overtures of violence, no matter how wrapped they might be in a bouquet of cheeky and sardonic irreverence.
Here a couple of the responses to Ms. Moore’s post about me:
After discovering Ms. Moore’s post about me yesterday, I was unsettled and alarmed. I immediately filed a police report with the authorities in England.
Ms. Moore has since claimed that her post was a joke and not meant as a violent threat or as call for a society of people to plot my violent demise. Rather, she has said, I misinterpreted an internet meme and 90s pop culture reference. That is a convenient excuse. Any reasonable person who has not had their mind warped and deranged by a lifetime of extremely-online exploits would interpret Ms. Moore’s post, at the very least, as coded call for violence, even if the wording might appear to lend her plausible deniability.
You know that mantra at the airport security checkpoint, “no jokes, please”?
That applies to murder.
Words matter. Adults should have the maturity to choose them carefully. People who engage in rhetoric that foments violence or threatens people who are diligently doing their jobs as journalists need to take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves what kind of a society they want to live in.
The sad truth is, we have hit the point in our dystopian and fractious culture that mirrors the bleak last act of Paddy Chayefsky’s eerily prescient 1976 masterpiece Network. By the final scenes of this searing satire of the corrosive impact of tabloid culture on broadcast journalism, the network television bosses have become so warped and stripped of any remaining moral fiber by their quest for wealth, power and success that they blithely discuss how to assassinate their newly inconvenient messianic, mad-as-hell TV prophet, Howard Beale.
Spoiler alert: Mr. Beal is indeed rubbed out. In the final line of the film, the Cronkitesque narrator intones:
“This was the story of Howard Beale: The first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.”
In Mr. Singal’s recent defense on Substack of his work, in which he unsparingly refutes the tangled web of lies about his supposedly having violated the privacy of pediatric gender clinic patients in Missouri, he has rightly called out transgender activist Alejandra Caraballo in particular for summoning and encouraging the online mob against him. Just as Ms. Caraballo once notoriously tweeted about the conservative Supreme Court justices who were in the majority in the Dobbs decision, she recently said of Mr. Singal: “I hope he never knows a moment of peace.”
Calling for a public figure to never know peace is a deranged and dangerous thing of Ms. Caraballo to do. It could very well lead to violence and even murder, especially given her large and commanding platform on social media.
Ms. Caraballo betrays a tenuous grasp on the truth. She routinely posts falsehoods about me in particular. And she was, along with Ms. Moore, centrally responsible for the misinformation that spread about the Cass Review in April, as I reported at the time, much to their chagrin. And yet many people actually take her seriously. They take cues from her. And they behave accordingly.
It is a painful and shocking irony that Ms. Caraballo is herself an attorney who specializes in cyberlaw; she is a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School. And yet here she is this week, unapologetically cheering on a potentially violent mob on Bluesky.
Ms. Caraballo’s online behavior and rhetoric is untenable. I cannot comprehend why her supervisors do not reel her in.
Mr. Singal writes:
Caraballo…argued that my alleged violation of these children’s medical privacy was so severe [the children] had to move, that I should never know a moment of peace, that I should always have to fear someone confronting me in public over my heinous actions. These are unbelievably serious claims coming from a high-profile activist who, again, works at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (which once published a white paper titled “Interventions for Online Harassment of Journalists.”)
...
If a bunch of people come to believe that there is a maniac out there intentionally posting the private medical records of trans youth, and this belief is given rocket fuel by major, trusted figures like Alejandra Caraballo and so many others, of course this could have consequences — of course it could leak out into the real world. That’s the point of all of this: to make the act of reporting on youth gender medicine extremely “expensive” in terms of reputational damage, fear of real-life harassment or violence, and so on. The more this stuff goes on, with no guardrails whatsoever on the spread of misinformation — and the angry contingent on Bluesky is so walled-off from reality or disagreement that there is even less of a check on the dissemination of false claims than there has been in the past — the more likely it is that someone will take Caraballo’s words to heart and do what they can to ensure I “never know a moment of peace.”
Again, this isn’t just internet randos. These are major figures like Alejandra Caraballo simply lying about my actions, and then sending clear signals that those actions are so grotesque that something needs to be done about me. In real life.
My preference is for that not to happen. If it does happen, though, I want it to be absolutely clear who was responsible.
Ms. Caraballo’s online rhetoric has indeed spilled out into my own real, offline life.
Mr. Singal previously covered the time, in April 2023, when Ms. Caraballo posted a false claim that I was writing a “transphobic hit piece” for The New York Times. She doxxed me in that post by including a screenshot of my phone number. The tweet raked in 2 million views. I was subjected to a barrage of harassing phone calls and texts and had to take various steps to increase my personal security out of fear that someone might seek to cause me physical harm.
When I first began looking into reporting about pediatric gender medicine myself, an editor with whom I was discussing possibly publishing an article cautioned me about doing so. “They will make your life miserable,” this editor said, referring to trans activists. I said I was well aware, but that I had decided this was important to me. There is a void in the slice of journalism that concerns itself with covering pediatric medicine with circumspection, with only a handful of brave reporters working in this space. I told the editor wanted to join them. And I have.
The editor was not wrong to warn me. And Singal is right. The purpose of these activist mobs and their lies, their threats of violence, their incessant and vicious attacks on those of us who report the truth about this troubled and controversial field of medicine, is not just to punish us or to scare us off.
Most importantly, the purpose of their ceaseless campaign of intimidation and calumny is to scare away other reporters. They also seek to make editors too afraid to publish any work that challenges the GLAAD-approved party line on pediatric gender medicine. These activists are the same people who disparage me for publishing my work on this subject in a small conservative publication, The New York Sun. But they know very well that they themselves fostered the poisonous climate across liberal media that has made editors in left-leaning publications too afraid to publish my work.
Here is a borderline death threat I received via direct message on Instagram in April:
Ms. Caraballo has also repeatedly claimed that I am a “chaser,” which is a colloquial term that refers to a man who has a sexual fetish for transgender women. I have been an openly gay man since I was 17 years old and have no interest in women or trans women. The fact that I have been compelled to say this in public to defend myself, 29 years after coming out of the closet, dismays me to say the least.
Meanwhile, here is Ms. Caraballo. Only with the broader context, her words take on a different meaning than she clearly intended:
“Time after time, social media companies are being shown to be complicit in the incitement of pogroms and sectarian violence across the world, as disinformation and unchecked hate have incited violence.”
People such as Ms. Caraballo and Ms. Moore may have succeeded brilliantly at scaring away other journalists with these tactics. But they have not scared me away from covering pediatric gender medicine. And they will not. I will continue to report about this important and vital subject.
I invite you to join me in standing up for truth:
I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC Newsand The New York Sun. I have also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic and The Nation. Follow me on Twitter: @benryanwriter and Bluesky: @benryanwriter.bsky.social. Visit my website: benryan.net
It's wrong to call for the murder of ANYONE.
This is scary on so many levels, the first of which is, of course, a rightful fear of violence. I happen to agree with your stance on gender ideology (happen to is not exactly accurate because I believe your stance is reasonable, rational and compassionate and those ways of being are of tremendous value to me), but, even if I disagreed with your reporting (and I probably do disagree with some specific aspects of your writing), I would never think you should feel in danger for your life and safety as a result. I wouldn't dream of threatening someone like Joanna Olson-Kennedy with violence, even though I vehemently disagree with her entire stance on gender, and think her "care" of her young patients is appalling. Violence is never the correct response.
Secondly, this article is scary because you have alerted me to the fact that someone so violent and so ignorant is teaching at Harvard. What the heck are these students learning?
Thirdly, while I do think our healthcare system is a shambles, and programs that deny claims are pretty evil, I would never celebrate murder - but some people are doing just that. It's beyond even using threats of violence to shut people down. It's actually glorifying violence. How warped have we become?
Disgust, horror, dismay, I can't think of enough words to express how much all of this bothers me - almost as much as I am bothered by the mass gaslighting, poisoning, mutilation and sterilization of something like 2% of a generation, cheered on by every major institution of society. What's happening?