Medical Freedom in the Balance: Schara v. Ascension Health
The New American magazine is providing daily livestreaming coverage of what we’re calling “The Trial of the Century.” It’s a well-deserved title. Schara v. Ascension Health centers on the death of 19-year-old Grace Schara, who had Down syndrome and died on October 13, 2021, at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Appleton, Wisconsin, part of the Ascension Healthcare system. She was admitted with Covid-19 symptoms, and her death certificate claims that is what killed her. Her family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the hospital, Dr. Gavin Shokar, and registered nurse Hollee McInnis, alleging medical negligence, violation of informed consent, and battery. The lawsuit claims Grace was given a combination of sedatives (Precedex, lorazepam, and morphine) without family consent, which led to respiratory distress and her death, compounded by an unauthorized “Do Not Resuscitate” (DNR) order placed on her chart.
“An overdosage of Precedex caused metabolic acidosis, which was then misinterpreted by the providers as a problem with breathing. Partially in response to that misinterpretation, other medicine was administered — specifically lorazepam. And the problem with the Precedex progressed, and in addition to the metabolic acidosis, Grace lost her blood pressure, so she went into shock. This aggravated the metabolic acidosis. Grace reached a point where her respiratory compensation was as much as she could do…. She reached a maximum compensation, but the metabolic acidosis was not stopped. So the acid — the lactic acid — kept accumulating in the blood. And then shortly before her death, she was administered morphine, which had a catastrophic effect in decreasing her respiratory compensation for the metabolic acidosis. This caused a precipitous decrease in her [blood] pH, and her heart stopped.”
That was only part of Dr. Gilbert Berdine’s explosive testimony during Day 3 of the landmark lawsuit. Berdine is an award-winning medical doctor with specialties in respiratory diseases and critical care, and he is an associate professor of medicine at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. He has been in practice since 1978. Attorneys for the plaintiffs called him as an expert witness.
Shokar and McInnis blamed Covid for Grace’s demise, but Berdine tutored the jury on metabolic acidosis (low blood pH due to excess acid or reduced bicarbonate).
Symptoms of metabolic acidosis include rapid breathing, confusion, irregular heartbeat, and agitation and, in severe cases, coma or death. According to McInnis and Shokar, Grace had evinced all of these symptoms prior to her death.
Berdine explained to them, using Grace’s medical records, that the doctor’s prescribed treatments caused metabolic acidosis in Grace, which triggered her respiratory distress. Berdine stated that she died because they administered Precedex (a surgical sedative), lorazepam (a sedative and hypnotic antianxiety med), and morphine (an opioid that can significantly retard breathing) consecutively to slow her breathing. Instead, he believes, they should have reversed the metabolic acidosis by administering bicarbonate.
He called Grace’s healthcare providers “reckless” and their behavior throughout her course of care as “unforgivable.”
He called Scott’s eviction from Grace’s hospital room “shameful,” as he was her only patient advocate at the time. He named multiple breaches of informed consent on the part of the hospital and said they were “indefensible.” He accused providers of administering dangerous medications to their patient that resulted in her death. After enduring what he called two life-threatening overdose events several days earlier, Grace was administered ever-higher doses of Precedex on October 13, 2021. “Insane” was the word he used to describe that situation.
“Administration of morphine on 10/13 to a patient who was unconscious, with no BP, no palpable pulse and a respiratory pattern screaming metabolic acidosis,” he noted, “was the worst clinical decision I have ever witnessed in over 40 years of medical practice.”
The defense attorneys spent several hours trying to save face in cross examination by attempting to discredit Dr. Berdine. However, when the jury was allowed to ask questions of the witness at the end of the day, it was clear his message had hit home.
The second week of Schara v. Ascension Health began on June 9 with a full day of testimony by expert witness Suzi Eichinger, a registered nurse from Florida with decades of experience in critical-care nursing. She explained a nurse’s role in helping the family understand, confirm, and prepare for a decision to impose a “Do Not Resuscitate” order, thereby launching into one of many illustrations of her belief that healthcare providers in the Schara case breached the standard of care in many ways. She delineated more than a dozen such breaches.
For example, Samuel Haines, RN, should have notified family of Grace’s initial adverse reaction to a sedation drug, Precedex, which she continued to receive throughout treatment, and which Berdine named as the true cause of Grace’s death. Without knowledge of her adverse reaction, the family was hampered from giving informed consent to her care.
Eichinger also testified about ICU alarm protocols, because hospital staff accused Scott of turning off crucial equipment alarms in Grace’s room. Specifically, Eichinger explained that patient movement could trigger false EKG rhythm alarms, prompting nurses to turn them off, thereby illustrating that many alarms can be false alarms.
The following day began with heartbreaking testimony from Grace’s sister, Jessica Vanderheiden, who was with Grace when she died. She described her memories of the callousness of nurses whom she said refused to help Grace as she was dying. They claimed Grace was “DNR,” despite repeated pleadings from herself and her parents — the latter via a FaceTime call Jessica had placed after realizing Grace was in serious condition.
After Jessica’s testimony, defense attorneys filed a motion to declare mistrial because she had addressed the jury directly during her testimony. The judge denied the motion.
Jessica was the prosecution’s final witness. After she departed the stand, the defense began calling witnesses. The first was Dr. Bruce Goldberg, a toxicologist who testified that there was nothing unusual about Grace’s medication administration record and nothing to indicate overdose. However, he did admit to prosecuting attorneys that he is not a medical doctor and that as a toxicologist he would not advise the combination of meds Grace received for a patient who was somnolent [very sleepy] and who lacked a palpable pulse.
The final witness of the day was Emily Fisher, a nurse who works at Saint Elizabeth Ascension Hospital. She testified that there was nothing unusual about Grace’s care and that the hospital did all it could to help Grace. Again, defense attorneys countered with questions that made her admit that her testimony did not counter any charges of the prosecution.
Wednesday’s testimony in Schara v. Ascension Health began with radiologist Aaron Binstock, MD, who gave a tutorial on the basic anatomy of respiration. He then went over Grace’s x-rays specifically, explaining what he described as an accelerating severity of Covid progression in her lungs.
In cross examination he admitted his assessment was subjective, as the field of radiology is known for being so. He was not able to confirm whether Grace was receiving appropriate medications or care, or what contributed to her deterioration. He could only confirm that her condition was deteriorating.
The bulk of the day was spent with infectious disease expert David Fisk, MD. He spent a lot of time talking about Covid — how dangerous it is, its variants, transmissibility, and mortality rates. He alleged that the prosecution’s expert witness, Dr. Berdine, had no basis for his hypothesis that Grace’s cause of death was metabolic acidosis brought on by oversedation with Precedex. Throughout testimony he insisted that the hospital records indicate that “this was a Covid death.”
In cross examination, prosecuting attorneys caught embarrassing inconsistencies between his previous deposition given during discovery and his current testimony. He reluctantly agreed that her father’s removal from her hospital room contributed to Grace’s deteriorating condition on October 10, 2021. He effectively admitted that Covid blinders on Grace’s care providers would have caused them to attribute her condition to Covid and “nothing else,” regardless of lab results. He also admitted that he does not use Precedex or know much about it. However, he insisted to the end that Grace’s chances of survival because of Covid were essentially zero, even if she had been intubated. Interestingly, his invoices to the defense for consultancy fees totaled $32,000 as of February 2025.
Watch the daily livestreams on our website at TheNewAmerican.com. — Rebecca Terrell
RIP Frederick Forsyth: Author, Patriot, Anti-EU Brexiteer
Famed British author and journalist Frederick Forsyth died June 9 at age 86. Known for his spy-thriller novels, he burst onto the literary scene in 1971 with his runaway bestseller The Day of the Jackal. His books, which include The Odessa File, The Kill List, The Fourth Protocol, The Dogs of War, and The Devil’s Alternative, have reportedly sold more than 75 million copies in 30 languages.
Politically conservative, the popular author became a strong voice for “Brexit” (British Exit), the movement for the U.K. to exit the European Union. Forsyth went beyond the usual arguments about the economic and political disadvantages of staying in the EU and pointed to the deception and conspiracy by the globalist cabal that had designed the EU and had run it from the start. He repeatedly warned that the Eurocrats in Brussels were moving to completely destroy the national sovereignty of the U.K. and every other EU nation, while denying with their mouths what they were doing with their hands.
As we reported in 2008, Forsyth revealed in a speech to the anti-EU Bruges Group an amazing example of Orwellian doublespeak/doublethink he had personally experienced at a meeting of the EU globocrats. The audacity of the traitors is mind-blowing. Here is Forsyth’s description of the event:
I sat once in a meeting in, well I don’t know what I was doing in the meeting but I was invited clearly by a renegade to a meeting at the Financial Times editorial offices in Blackfriars to listen to Mr Pohl. He was a former president of the Bundesbank and he had been eased out of that presidency by Helmut Kohl specifically to work with Jacques Delors in the creation of the new currency, the Euro. And he was, I thought, extremely forthcoming. He said, “It is my duty to tell you my English friends (they never say British, I don’t know why, they always say English) that you will have to abandon the British nation state because the future has no provision for the nation state within it.” There was a stunned silence. And then in the course of the remarks that followed almost immediately afterwards, Peter Hain stood up and told us quite bluntly that we had not heard what we thought we had heard. It hadn’t been said. And a rather bemused German former president of the Bundesbank sat there as if someone had accused him of being slightly deranged. He had of course said exactly what he had said. We had all heard it. It was beyond doubt his informed position. He was giving us the final destination of the European Union project.
How could the various peoples ever be persuaded to hand over their countries from democracy to oligarchy, the government of the elite? Let me quote from what he [Monnet] wrote: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards the Super-state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.”
In this YouTube clip from the British program The Andrew Marr Show, Forsyth explains to host Andrew Marr his reasons for opposing the EU and supporting Brexit.
We should take a moment to brag here that, thanks to the yeoman spadework on the Common Market/EU done by our colleague Hilaire du Berrier in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, The New American was exposing the entire EU/ Monnet cabal long before Forsyth, Nigel Farage, Christopher Booker, and other Brexiteers — and in far greater depth. Over the years, in his monthly HduB Reports intelligence newsletter, du Berrier exposed the machinations and deceptive schemes of Jean Monnet, Joseph Retinger, David Rockefeller, Paul Henri Spaak, John J. McCloy, Robert Schuman, John Foster Dulles, Averell Harriman, and the rest of the pack of Euro-American conspirators who were plotting the suicide of Europe. The EU is the most advanced regional superstate in the globalist-communist plans for a series of regional mergers on the way to the final merger of regional superstates into a One World Superstate. How successful have they been in this murderous endeavor? Well, during a visit to London in 2000, former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev accurately described the EU as “the new European Soviet.” The Sovietizing by Brussels has continued apace. The following articles represent a small fraction of the coverage The New American has devoted to exposing:
Also both of my books on the UN, Global Tyranny … Step by Step (1992) and The United Nations Exposed (2001) provide extensive treatment of the development of the European Union and the concentration and centralization of EU political and economic power.
Forsyth’s anti-EU stance earned him the “conspiracy theorist” label from critics in the controlled media, but that didn’t seem to affect either his popularity or his outspokenness. If you’re not being called a conspiracy theorist today, you’re either suffering from moral cowardice or are completely and utterly oblivious to everything happening around you. — William F. Jasper
Companies Dropping Support for “Pride” Perversion Celebrations
The Advocate, a flagship publication for the LGBTQ+ “community” and its supporters, is not alone in complaining that the bountiful spigots of corporate cash that once showered queer Pride events with oodles of financial and brand support have run dry. In a June 2, 2025 article titled “These 14 corporations have stopped or scaled back sponsorship of LGBTQ+ Pride events,” this mouthpiece of the depravity lobby notes that the following companies have curtailed their support for the annual bacchanals: Anheuser-Busch, Booz Allen Hamilton, Citi, Comcast, Diageo, Garnier, Lowes, Mastercard, Nissan, Pepsico, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Sky Vodka, Target, and Walmart.
We obviously still have a long way to go to rectify the sodomite assault on Christian civilization, but these hopeful signs of progress demonstrate the importance of voicing our concerns to corporate leaders. Email the companies mentioned above and urge them to cut allsupport for LGBTQ indecency. Moreover, let corporate sponsors that continue to support and promote degeneracy know that you will not patronize them and will expose their sponsorship of immoral and anti-social activities and “lifestyles.” — William F. Jasper
Trump Effect: Colleges, Universities, Institutions, Corporations Dumping DEI
A June 10, 2025 article titled “Tracking Higher Ed’s Dismantling of DEI” in The Chronicle of Higher Education says,“The Chronicle is tracking higher ed’s dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. As colleges make changes in response to anti-DEI legislation and mounting political pressure, an inconsistent and confusing landscape has emerged. The pace of change ramped up in 2025, as the Trump administration signaled a desire to eliminate DEI efforts across the government and private sectors, including in colleges.”
The Chronicle reports that it is tracking changes “at 338 college campuses in 42 states and the District of Columbia.” Meanwhile, corporate boardrooms are also reversing course on DEI. Forbesreported, “IBM Reportedly Walks Back Diversity Policies, Citing ‘Inherent Tensions’: Here Are All The Companies Rolling Back DEI Programs.” In addition to IBM, the article profiles Gannett, Constellation Brands, Inc., United Health Group, Victoria’s Secret, State Street, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, BlackRock, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Google, PBS, Target, and more. — William F. Jasper
Repeating History on Purpose: How the Public School System Was Designed to Destroy the American Mind
“The end [goal] of education is to direct the powers of the mind in unfolding themselves; and to assist them in gaining their just bent and force. And, in order to do this, its business should be to teach how to think, rather than what to think.
But hitherto education has been conducted on a contrary plan. It has been a contraction, not an enlargement of the intellectual faculties; an injection of false principles hardening them in error, not a discipline enlightening and improving them.
Instead of opening and strengthening them, and teaching to think freely; it hath cramped and enslaved them and qualified for thinking only in one track.”
— Richard Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, and the Means of Making it a Benefit to the World (1784)
It’s no accident that Americans are cursed to repeat history, over and over again, ad nauseam. It’s no accident that despite every fiery speech about “Never Again,” our children stumble over the same ideological cliffs as their fathers. And it’s certainly no accident that the American public, in all its earnestness, cannot see the patterns — the fingerprints of tyranny — left by the same collectivist conspirators who have always sought to shackle them.
No, my friends, the American people’s inability to recognize these patterns is not a failure of intelligence. It is a feature — a deliberate design — embedded into the very fabric of our so-called education system.
Let’s name names, shall we? Horace Mann, the so-called Father of American Education, imported the Prussian model of schooling, the very same system that turned free-thinking farmers into obedient cogs of the German war machine. Mann’s vision, lauded by progressives as the salvation of the American mind, was in fact its first nail in the coffin: a compulsory, government-run institution whose ultimate goal was to produce factory workers, not freemen.
Then came John Dewey, the high priest of Progressive Education, who insisted that children should be molded by the state into “socialized” beings. Dewey — whose radical collectivism is well-documented — believed that education should not transmit the accumulated wisdom of Western Civilization but should instead indoctrinate students into the groupthink of the so-called common good. And so it did.
Of course, the Rockefeller Foundation’s oily fingers are all over this rotting pie. Rockefeller money — endless rivers of it — funded Dewey’s projects, Mann’s visions, and the teacher-training mills that churned out these apostles of collectivism. Why? Because John D. Rockefeller, that monopolistic baron of the robber barons, infamously declared, “I don’t want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers.”
There you have it: a century of educational subversion. Is it any wonder we have generations of Americans who can’t spot tyranny even as it shackles their wrists — who will willingly and gleefully shackle their own wrists, so long as the chains are designer and don’t clash with their outfit?
Let’s talk about patterns — the lifeblood of wisdom, the roadmap of liberty. Without the ability to recognize patterns, history is just a random jumble of dates and dead men. But with pattern recognition, history becomes the blazing beacon that warns us of tyranny’s approach. It’s the link that connects Caesar’s manipulations to modern presidential decrees — that exposes the same blueprint of power in every century, every civilization, every empire.
The Greek historian Polybius — a man whose Histories the Founders could quote from memory by the time they were nine or ten — very eloquently yet simply explained that “anyone who is capable of understanding cause and effect should, by reading history, be able to predict the future of any country.”
Livy, a Roman, was another author the men of the Founding Generation could recite before today’s students know their ABCs, and he also testified about the power — and critical need — of recognizing patterns in the annals of history. He wrote, “The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.”
Are you starting to see it now? Are you starting to see how are we perpetually caught in the same old traps and sold the same old snake oil? Why are we so credulous and so easily (mis)led by slick-talking politicians? We do not recognize patterns in history because we aren’t taught how! Most college professors, much less elementary-school teachers, don’t make students read Polybius and Livy. We have willingly traded the “best medicine for a sick mind” for a bit more luxury, another streaming service, a smartphone for little Johnny, one more vacation, or a couple hundred more square feet.
The Founders recognized the power of patterns, however. That’s why Thomas Jefferson, in his inimitable brilliance, declared that “the most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large.” But the Rockefeller/Dewey/Mann cabal had no use for such illumination. They understood, as every despot does, that a nation taught not to see patterns is a nation ripe for plunder.
Look at our present day. The same poisonous ideas, cloaked in different terminology, creep from Washington like a noxious fog: endless wars of aggression, the monstrous machinery of the Federal Reserve, the steady corrosion of the Bill of Rights. And yet the American mind, dulled by decades of Deweyan doctrine, fails to see the repetition of the same old script.
Pattern recognition is the antidote to tyranny, and the public-school system was built to suppress it. Instead of encouraging students to compare and contrast, to seek cause and effect, to trace the threads that connect past to present, our schools shovel out a fragmented, disconnected sludge of “social studies,” “language arts,” and critical race theory demonizing our Founding Fathers, thus devaluing anything they might have done, said, or written — no matter how true or helpful.
You see, it’s not about history class anymore. It’s about pattern class — or rather, the lack of one. The public-school system ensures that young Americans never develop the intellectual tools to see the shape of tyranny as it emerges from the fog.
The greatest trick these educational architects ever pulled was to convince Americans that the failure to see history’s patterns is a personal failing — that we’re too distracted, too lazy, too self-absorbed. But the truth is far darker and more insidious: It’s by design. By the time a child emerges from the state’s indoctrination centers, he is not supposed to think historically — he is supposed to obey.
Is it any wonder that the same class of elites who funded Dewey’s destructive doctrines also bankroll the “reforms” today? Common Core, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top — all of them built on the same rotten foundation: the obliteration of the mind’s natural ability to connect dots.
Look around: Every headline screams the return of tyranny. Executive orders with no constitutional basis. Alphabet agencies regulating every aspect of your life. A central bank that counterfeits our currency and steals our wealth. And yet, the average American, stripped of historical context and pattern recognition, cannot see it for what it is: the same despotic game played out over and over.
So, what’s the solution? It begins with a personal rebellion against this intellectual tyranny. We must seize back our right to recognize patterns, to think historically, to connect the dots that our supposed “educators” have so carefully hidden from us.
We must teach our children, outside the state’s temples of indoctrination, to ask the questions that terrify the Rockefellers of the world: Where have I seen this before? Who benefits from my ignorance? Whose agenda is advanced when I cannot connect the dots?
Only then can we hope to tear down the chains that bind us and build a new generation of Americans who can see the pattern of tyranny, name it, and — by God’s grace — crush it.
The Rockefeller/Dewey/Mann system is a centuries-old con, designed to keep Americans docile and blind. Let us rip the mask from its face and proclaim the truth with the same defiance as Patrick Henry, when he bellowed with the voice of thunder: “Give me liberty, or give me death.”
Because a mind unable to see the patterns of the past is a mind condemned to repeat them — and that, my fellow patriots, is no accident at all. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s the Marxist public school system working exactly as designed. It’s time to tear it down and build anew. — Joe Wolverton
Illinois House Passes Pro-UN Resolution Sponsored by Republican
Mere hours before adjourning its regular session, the Illinois House of Representatives voted to pass a resolution recognizing United Nations Day and explicitly honoring the globalist UN. House Resolution 178 (HR 178), sponsored by Representative Jackie Haas (R-Bourbonnais) and co-sponsored by four Democratic representatives, formally declared “October 24, 2025 as United Nations Day in the State of Illinois to honor the United Nations (UN) for the positive impact it has had on the global community.”
The resolution further stated, in part:
WHEREAS, Since its inception, the UN has operated with the goal of preventing future world wars, consisting of a group of independent countries that have voluntarily joined together to work towards world peace and economic and social progress; and….
WHEREAS, Over the years, the UN has depended on the support and leadership of the United States to successfully achieve its goals and objectives; and
WHEREAS, Today, the UN is the foremost global organization striving for women’s rights and the advancement of women as well as the health and development of communities around the world; and….
WHEREAS, The UN General Assembly has celebrated United Nations Day since establishing the day in 1947, later recognizing it as an international holiday in 1971; the day is celebrated with meetings, discussions, exhibits, and cultural performances as people come together in cities around the world to promote global unity and international cooperation, raise awareness of the UN’s goals and aspirations, promote global support for the UN’s missions, celebrate the UN’s achievements, and recognize the UN’s work in achieving peace, human rights, and sustainable development….
On May 31, the House voted 96-19 in favor of HR 178. Every Democrat voted in favor, while Republicans were evenly divided for and against the resolution.
Contact your state legislators, and urge them to oppose any pro-UN legislation, and to instead enact strong legislation nullifying the UN and/or UN-inspired programs. — Peter Rykowski
California Officials Suggest Withholding Federal Taxes
California officials, including Governor Gavin Newsom, are suggesting withholding federal taxes from the federal government in response to recent Trump administration actions. As Politicoreports:
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday suggested California consider withholding tens of billions in annual federal tax dollars amid reports Donald Trump is preparing funding cuts targeting the state.
Newsom’s suggestion came after CNN reported the president was considering a “full termination” of federal grant funding for California’s universities.
“Californians pay the bills for the federal government. We pay over $80 BILLION more in taxes than we get back,” the Democratic governor said in an X post Friday afternoon, referencing a recent analysis from the Rockefeller Institute that California contributed about $83 billion more in federal taxes in 2022 than it received back from Washington.
“Maybe it’s time to cut that off,” he added.
Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas also floated withholding federal taxes Friday in a post on the social-media site Bluesky shortly before Newsom raised the issue. He dismissed the rumored grant cancellations as “unconstitutional and vindictive.”
“We’re the nation’s economic engine and the largest donor state, and deserve our fair share,” Rivas wrote. “I’ll use every legal and constitutional tool available to defend CA — we must look at every option, including withholding federal taxes.”
Of course, Newsom, Rivas, and other California Democrats are motivated by their opposition to Donald Trump and his administration’s policies rather than sincere adherence to fiscal responsibility or constitutional principles. However, their proposal resembles what supporters of constitutional enforcement, i.e., nullification, have advocated for years. States can enact a “State Sovereignty and Federal Tax Funds Act,” also known as an “escrow” law. Put simply, it would require federal taxes collected in a particular state to be sent to the state government, which would then control how much the federal government could obtain.
A major difference between such a law and California’s proposal is that the former’s withholding of federal tax revenues is based on the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution grants only limited, specifically enumerated powers to the federal government, and as the 10th Amendment affirms, all other powers are reserved to the states or the people. Thus, any federal spending outside its enumerated powers is unconstitutional and must be declared null and void — regardless of whether a federal court recognizes it as such.
Contact your state legislators, and urge them to nullify all unconstitutional federal acts — motivated not by partisan politics, but by a principled defense of the Constitution, regardless of the inevitable pushback from the federal government, judiciary, and others. —Peter Rykowski
