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A hospital group in Chicago has quietly advanced a DEI agenda emphasizing transgenderism despite continuing to receive federal funds.

A new Consumers’ Research campaign has uncovered active DEI policies in the Rush University Medical Center hospital system. Rush CEO Omar Lateef previously said the hospital’s “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is a critical part of our DNA.”

‘Physical health can also be greatly affected from long-standing internalized stigma.’

Rush University President Robert Higgins, Rush University System for Health Chair Emeritus Susan Crown, and the Rush University Medical Center did not respond to a request for comment.

“Rush is betraying what should be every hospital's core mission by using its time, energy, and taxpayer support to promote radical woke activism,” Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild said. “Not only does Rush have a history of prioritizing DEI, child sex-change procedures, and climate alarmism, the hospital also has a troubling history of questionable spending on nonmedical initiatives completely unrelated to patient care, like its partnership with the Chicago White Sox.”

The Rush University Children’s Hospital’s pediatrics department currently conducts “department-wide DEI retreats” as part of a broader anti-racism and LGBTQ curriculum, according to the department website.

Retreat topics included “Microaggression Workshops” and sessions on “Achieving Health Equity for LGBTQ People.”

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Four thousand staff and students completed Rush’s “LGBTQ-affirming care” training in 2025. Affirm: The Rush Center for Gender, Sexuality, and Reproductive Health teaches program participants that “physical health can also be greatly affected from long-standing internalized stigma.”

Rush intends to offer the training to all employees, according to its program recap.

Although Affirm paused hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers to new patients in 2025, the hospital still offers some gender-related "services" to minors.

“Rush continues to provide mental health, behavioral health, and social services to gender care patients, regardless of age,” spokesperson Tobin Klinger told Block Club Chicago. “Rush will work to refer any patients to other programs for services we do not provide.”

Rush also propped up Pride parades in both 2025 and 2026.

“As Pride Month comes to a close, we continue to march forward, leading with love every step of the way. At Rush, we celebrate the vibrant diversity and unwavering resilience of our LGBTQ+ community, not just in June, but all year long,” the medical center wrote in a June 2023 Instagram post.

President Donald Trump’s “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” executive order in January 2025 restricted federal funds for hospitals that offer sex-rejecting interventions to minors.

Rush spent $194 million in federal funds for fiscal year 2025 while continuing its LGBTQ training programs, according to a June report by Save Our States.

The hospital system increased CEO Omar Lateef’s compensation by nearly $800,000 to $3.7 million between 2023 and 2024 while laying off an unknown number of employees due to “financial headwinds.” Rush began sponsoring the Chicago White Sox games in 2022.

Lateef also benefited from a personal housing allowance and subsidized membership dues for elite Chicago social clubs during this period.

Under Lateef’s leadership, Rush committed to using 100% renewable energy by 2030 and held “that climate change is fundamentally a human health issue.” As part of its environmental agenda, Rush participates in the Good Food Partnership Program to prioritize “suppliers who have experienced negative systemic social and/or economic impacts such as ‘people of color, across all supply chains and to the greatest extent possible.”

“This latest campaign by Consumers’ Research demonstrates that we will continue fighting for everyday consumers by holding woke hospitals like Rush accountable,” Hild told Blaze News.

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Anthony Fauci's diary entries revealed his celebrity fixation during COVID-19, yet ABC News, NBC News, CBS News and CNN all ignored the story on the air.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tried repeatedly in recent years to get the Justice Department to nail former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci over apparent false testimony before Congress in 2021.

The statute of limitations on charging Fauci over the alleged perjury expired in May, and Fauci also has a "full and unconditional" autopen pardon from President Joe Biden that covers January 2014 until January 2025.

'I am the most famous and talked about person in the country.'

However, Paul has secured for the 85-year-old another opportunity to potentially trip over his words and record, requiring Fauci to testify on Wednesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Days prior to grilling Fauci in person, Paul released a treasure trove of damning documents — including a series of apparent diary entries from Fauci where the immunologist not only comes across as a megalomaniac but undermines the official narrative he publicly championed regarding COVID-19, its origin, and school closures.

The documents released by Paul show that in a diary entry dated May 21, 2020, Fauci apparently noted the number of COVID infections and deaths, both globally and in the United States, then proceeded to spend the remainder of the entry boasting about his newfound fame.

"Big front page article abut [sic] me appeared in the Washington Post," says the entry. "Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world."

The author of the entry bragged that he couldn't keep up with all the things written about him; that President Donald Trump "seems to be enamored of me even though I am taking the spotlight away from him"; and that U.S. Secret Service personnel "let me into the first gate without even checking ID."

Days later, the author excitedly wrote that the press was simultaneously "going wild" with him while "crucifying the POTUS for not listening to me and making crazy statements about 'game-changing' therapies and praising me fot [sic] stivking [sic] to my guns."

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HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP/Getty Images

Although he ultimately came around to admitting that there was a "steep cost" associated with school closures during the pandemic, Fauci told ABC News' "This Week" that he "had nothing to do" with closing schools.

The diaries published by Paul suggest otherwise.

An entry dated March 15, 2020, states, "I spoke with Bill de Blasio (Mayor – NYC) and convinced him based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight to close the NYC schools (he had already decided based on what I was saying on TV). I went on to tell him he should close the bars and restaurants in NYC. He said that he would base this on my recommendation."

The same entry notes further that Fauci had a call with the chief of staff of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who informed him that based on his televised commentary, "The Governor has decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants."

Sen. Paul also highlighted that in a Jan. 26, 2020, entry, Fauci appeared to admit that he knew COVID-19 did not originate in a Chinese wet market, which was the prevailing theory among some so-called experts.

"It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market," Fauci wrote, according to the documents published by Paul. "The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection and that gave the virus time to establish itself in multigenerational (sustained) spread."

"Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market," continued the Jan. 26 entry. "Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans."

While Fauci seems to have privately admitted that the Huanan wet market was where the pandemic started, he nevertheless publicly promoted the infamous paper published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2," which stated, "As many early cases of COVID-19 were linked to the Huanan market in Wuhan, it is possible that an animal source was present at this location."

Fauci used this paper on multiple occasions to suggest to the American public that COVID-19 was not a lab leak but rather an animal virus that jumped to a human.

Though Fauci apparently understood that the "market was not the source," two studies published in the journal Science in July 2022 — "The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic," and "The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2" — hyped the wet market as the potential epicenter of the pandemic.

Jonathan Pekar of the University of California, San Diego, and several Fauci associates, including evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, virologist Edward Holmes, and virologist Robert Garry, were among the authors behind these papers.

Several days after the wet market admission, Fauci appears to acknowledge the suspicion among his in-group that a zoonotic leap was unlikely, the documents released by Paul show.

After dismissing the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was a product of gain-of-function experimentation that was deliberately or accidentally released, Fauci had a conference call with Andersen and Jeremy Farrar, a biologist "who sounded very concerned," the documents show.

"The people on the phone felt that the mutations around the furine [sic] cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary 'jump that they found nowhere in bat isolates,[']" said the entry. "They bring up the possibility that this could have been deliberately inserted and either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab, the former being the most likely."

Correspondence obtained in 2022 through a Freedom of Information lawsuit by Guardian reporter Jimmy Tobias shows that on Jan. 31, 2020, Andersen wrote to Fauci, "You have to look very closely at the genome to see features that are potentially engineered. … I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie [Holmes], Bob [Garry], Mike [Farzan], and myself all find the genome to be inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory."

According to an entry dated Feb. 1, 2020, Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins had a conference call with 10 other scientists, and only two of all of the individuals on the call — not including Fauci — "felt that deliberate insertion was possible and given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in [gain of function] in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go."

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