UCLA Med Students Forced to Pray to ‘Mother Earth’

Aaron Sibarium is one of the best reporters out there, and as far as I can tell, he is barely out of diapers (as seen through the lens of an aging Gen Xer). 

Time and again, he covers stories that need to be told. Like this one: UCLA medical students being subjected to ridiculous and potentially illegal indoctrination as part of their required curriculum. 

Tiny Gray-Garcia, who has referred to Oct. 7 as “justice,” began the March 27 class by leading students in what she described as a “non-secular prayer” to “the ancestors,” instructing everyone to get on their knees and touch the floor—”mama earth”—with their fists.

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 2, 2024

Medical training in America has gone woke, as I have covered numerous times. But what began as vaguely Leftish BS is transforming into dangerously anti-Western medicine and the politicization of one of the most important industries in the country. 

Our bodies are being put into the hands of people who are being trained to ignore reality and to seek a bizarre notion of social justice. And, of course, those people are being trained to euthanize people. That’s a dangerous combination, indeed. 

Read more about the mandatory lecture for first-year medical students—and about the woke prayer that probably violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment—here: https://t.co/pd5cF4Lawt

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 2, 2024

In a mandatory course on “structural racism” for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles, a guest speaker who has praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel led students in chants of “Free, Free Palestine” and demanded that they bow down to “mama earth,” according to students in the class and audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, who has referred to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks as “justice,” began the March 27 class by leading students in what she described as a “non-secular prayer” to “the ancestors,” instructing everyone to get on their knees and touch the floor—”mama earth,” as she described it—with their fists.

At least half of the assembled students complied, two students said. Gray-Garcia, a local activist who had been invited to speak about “Housing (In)Justice,” proceeded to thank native tribes for preserving “what the settlers call L.A.,” according to audio obtained by the Free Beacon, and to remind students of the city’s “herstory.”

The prayer also included a benediction for “black,” “brown,” and “houseless people” who die because of the “crapatalist lie” of “private property.”

I wish I could say that this is unbelievable, but it is the opposite. It is what academic institutions do every single day in every single discipline. 

Some are just further along the line to destruction than others, but even physics is now filled with woke nonsense. There is a movement to rename “black holes” because the term is racist. 

Gray-Garcia later referred to modern medicine as “white science” and inveighed against the “occupation” of “Turtle Island”—that is, the United States—before asking students to stand for a second prayer. This time, nearly everyone rose.

When one student remained seated, according to students in the class, a UCLA administrator, whom the Free Beacon could not identify, inquired about the student’s identity, implying that discipline could be on the table.

“The net effect was that UCLA staff intimidated first-year medical students into participating in a religious service in derogation of their own personal beliefs,” UCLA’s Jewish Faculty Resilience Group wrote to university chancellor Gene Block on Sunday.  “There needs to be an urgent and thorough external review and investigation of the [medical school’s] curriculum and systemic antisemitism.”

Western medicine is hardly “White science.” It is, at least at its best, science, period. And not in Anthony Fauci’s sense of “I am the science.”

Medicine is still in its infancy–having had too much experience with the ministrations of doctors I can say that much of what it does it accomplishes through crude and violent means, but even in its infancy, it accomplishes miracles. It can also do great harm when done poorly or is driven by ignorance. We need a MORE scientific medical establishment, not one being created by Leftist ideologues. 

Lysenkoism is the next step, and that step can be very ugly indeed. 

The course became the subject of a civil rights complaint in January after it separated students into race-based discussion groups—one for white students, another for African Americans, and a third for “Non-Black People of Color.” UCLA cancelled the exercise after a Wall Street Journal editorial highlighted the complaint.

More unwanted attention came in March when the Daily Wire published portions of the course’s syllabus, which includes units on “settler colonialism” and recommends a podcast about “Indigenous womxn’s health.” Students are also urged to read an essay, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” that describes the “epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence” of “the settler.”

Gray-Garcia’s talk offers a window into the way these concepts are shaping the classroom experience at one of the top medical schools in the country—and raises serious questions about how that school vetted a speaker with a long history of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic posts.

Serious questions? Aaron, you are being too kind. The biggest question is how we clean out the rot that has developed in our most prestigious institutions. 

I have seriously suggested to family members that if they are seeing a younger doctor, they seek out one from India, where real medicine is apparently still taught. It may seem a strange suggestion, but my anecdotal experience is that doctors from the subcontinent are relentlessly precise and scientific. I assume this is due to training. 

Perhaps my experience is anomalous, but there it is. I wouldn’t want a UCLA doctor who went through their training under these conditions to touch my body. 

It is bizarre to me that lawsuits have to be filed to get what amounts to a mixture of Marxism and Druidism out of medical training at a prestigious institution, but in fewer years than a decade all our institutions are undergoing total collapse. 

We are nearing the end of the “long march through the institutions,” and as happened at the end of the first “long march,” the results will be devastating.