Ahead of the holiday season, Amanda Calhoun appeared on MSNBC's The ReidOut to deliver a message to its liberal viewers: It's okay to cut off your conservative relatives.
"So, if you are going into a situation where you have family members, where you have close friends who you know have voted in ways that are against you," Calhoun told Joy Reid earlier this month, "it's completely fine to not be around those people and to tell them why. I think you should very much be entitled to do so, and I think it may be essential for your mental health."
While such sentiments may be common enough among the resistance left, Calhoun is no average liberal activist. She's a psychiatrist who serves as chief resident of Yale's prestigious Albert J. Solnit Integrated Adult/Child Psychiatry program—and she's not shy about her far-left activism and racial biases.
A Saint Louis University graduate, Calhoun began her Yale residency in June 2019, according to her LinkedIn page. One year later, she was the keynote speaker at Yale Medical School's "White Coats for Black Lives," a demonstration held in the wake of George Floyd's death in which "around 300 doctors took a knee in front of the Yale School of Medicine to demonstrate their solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement."
"Before I was a doctor, I was a black person in America, and this white coat does not protect me," Calhoun told attendees. Her website touts similar rhetoric, including Calhoun's belief that "all doctors should be activists."
On X, meanwhile, Calhoun routinely laments what she views as systemic racism in psychiatry, arguing that the field as a whole "is rooted in anti-Black racism." Black children, according to Calhoun, are less likely to go to therapy not because of "access" issues, but rather because of "racist therapists."
The "racial gap in breastfeeding," she argued in a June 2022 Washington Post op-ed, "reflects white supremacy." And black men "don't get to enjoy old age" because "racism affects our longevity, literally shortens our lives," Calhoun wrote last year.
Calhoun's most controversial statements, however, involve her white colleagues, friends, and acquaintances.
Though Calhoun is married to a white man, she is openly hesitant toward Caucasians and gatekeeps her husband's white acquaintances. In a 2022 X thread, she said she and her husband "left our hometown" because "white neighbors would meet my husband and I together, and then straight up ignore me when I greeted them if I was alone." As a result, Calhoun wrote, she requires her husband's white acquaintances to meet her first before befriending them.
"My husband dropped a lot of white friends and acquaintances. He doesn't befriend white folks now unless they meet me first and respect me."
Calhoun also says white therapists are inherently inferior to their black counterparts when it comes to treating black patients. "I also believe that white (and non-Black) therapists can never gain the unique and brilliant skill set that Black therapists can bring. You will never be us," she wrote. "BUT a lot of 'therapy experts' still think that white folks can get there. Get to a place where they can match the expertise of Black therapists with Black patients (and other groups). This is a white supremacist mindset. You can't. Accept it."
Calhoun's chief resident status at Yale—home to one of the highest-ranking psychiatry programs in the world—reflects the proliferation of left-wing activism within America's top medical schools.
At the University of California, San Francisco, for example, medical students are subject to a mandatory six-week unit on "Justice and Advocacy in Medicine." That unit, the Washington Free Beacon reported, covers "issues like racism, ableism, and patriarchy." In one lesson, the school cited an anti-Israel protest on the San Francisco Bay Bridge—which stopped traffic for hours, delaying three trucks associated with the school's health system from delivering organs set to be transplanted—as an example of "direct action" that disrupts "business as usual" and pressures "targeted decision-makers."
"I have worked with and taught UCSF medical students for many years and was shocked to see mandated course content that promotes ideological activism," one professor said of the unit. "It sends a shockingly harmful message to our students: 'Your role is to disrupt and dismantle the system you are about to enter.'"
Reached for comment, Calhoun said she would "LOVE" to speak to the Free Beacon but "unfortunately, because of how viral my MSNBC interview went, my department at Yale is barring me from speaking with the media or press in any way."
"I do NOT agree with their decision at all," Calhoun wrote in an email, "but as I am a child psychiatry fellow, as you know, completing my final year of training, I have to comply with their rules, no matter how much I disagree.
"The good news is … this will only mean a slight delay," Calhoun continued. "I graduate at the end of June, and I would love it if we could talk about a piece on my activism, what it means to have backlash, and how institutions can support us and not silence us.
"Working with the media and getting my voice out there is so imperative. I so appreciate your work. I think this would be a very interesting piece that many readers might resonate with."
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