Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like the distance between a crackpot conspiracy theory and a Senate hearing is getting shorter by the flu season.

Last week, Sen. Josh Hawley chaired a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counter-Terrorism with the delightfully dystopian title “Your Data, Their Profit: The Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing.” Apparently we have reached the stage of technological progress where your supermarket, rideshare, and food-delivery apps might know more about you than your therapist—and can use that information to calculate your desperation down to the dollar. (And how does that make you feel?)

This isn’t the millennia-old “dynamic pricing” model—the one that looks at market conditions and external factors like supply, demand, weather, or time of day and adjusts consumer costs accordingly across the board. Surveillance pricing looks at you and says, “Based on your heart rate, your phone’s current battery status, and the fact that you were up at 3:14 a.m. googling ‘can anxiety cause chest pain,’ we’ve determined you’ll pay $47.99 for this pulse oximeter.”

And if you think I made up the pulse and battery parts for comedic effect, do I have some bad news for you.

“Major retailers like Walmart and Kroger are rolling out digital electronic shelf labels that can change prices instantly,” Gemini cheerfully explained when I asked if this is currently happening. “While people fear that cameras and data tracking could enable individualized ‘surveillance pricing,’ retailers state their digital tags do not use cameras to change prices on the fly for specific shoppers [emphasis mine].”

Oh, well, retailers state! I guess we have nothing to worry about, since Walmart says Walmart isn’t doing anything sketchy.

A curious assurance, seeing as in the Senate hearing, Hawley brought up Walmart’s patent for a spiffy new shopping cart—one equipped with sensors capable of tracking the cart’s speed as well as the shopper’s heart rate and body temperature. This information, you’ll be overjoyed to learn, can then be used to assign the shopper an “agitation score.”

Yes, an agitation score. This cart, you see, was not designed merely to transport your avocados and almond butter to the checkout—how quaint—but is also compiling a handy biometric profile on you like a rogue Fitbit ratting you out to corporate. I mean, how could they possibly estimate how much money they can squeeze out of you if they don’t know exactly how annoyed you are?

DoorDash has similarly pursued agitation-tracking technology “so they’ll know how desperate [customers] are to get food,” Hawley explained. (An insider has also claimed the company uses a “desperation score” to underpay drivers—an accusation DoorDash categorically denies.) Uber actively monitors your phone’s battery life after determining that number is one of the strongest predictors of price sensitivity. Think about it: if they know your battery is at 2%, they also know you’re not shopping around for the best deal or waiting out a temporary surge. You need your butt in a vehicle before your screen goes dark and you become one of those people forced to make eye contact with strangers—and that urgency is gonna cost you.

Uber, for the record, fully admits that they’re tracking your phone’s remaining run time and that they’re aware of the correlation between that percentage and a customer’s personal financial breaking point. But the company insists they don’t actually use this information to jack up prices. Which is comforting in the way “Relax, Mom, my drug dealer swears this meth is perfectly safe” is.

“What if I told you that a store like Staples, for example, charges more online based on your IP address or on your proximity to a rival?” Hawley asked. “What if I told you that Target’s shopping app tracked your location in real time in order to charge you as much as $150 more for a vacuum the moment that you enter their store? What if I told you that Lyft has charged 55 separate riders in my home state of Missouri 29 different prices for the same exact route at the same exact time with a difference of $37 between the different fares? These are all documented cases of what we are now calling AI surveillance pricing.”

A handful of states have begun passing laws against a practice we’re simultaneously assured is mostly hypothetical. New Jersey just became the latest to ban businesses from using personal consumer data to set individualized prices (and imposed a temporary ban on new electronic shelf labels while the technology is being studied). New York, Maryland, and Connecticut have enacted restrictions on Focker-style pricing—or at least imposed transparency requirements—as well.

To recap: we’ve gone from corporations aren’t tracking you, you paranoid weirdo… to okay, they’re tracking you, but they’re not allowed to use the info… to fine, they *could* use it but they pinky-promise they won’t… to state legislatures are hurriedly passing laws to prohibit them from doing it. At this rate, by Christmas it’ll be Whole Foods’ new Emotional Vulnerability Surcharge™ rewards shoppers by giving them 10 points toward a free rotisserie chicken every time they cry in the produce aisle!

Hawley called the marriage between AI and mega-corporations the “unholy trinity of everything Americans hate: spying on people, ripping them off, and taking away jobs.” He’s not wrong.

Retailer “loyalty programs” don’t reward your patronage so much as exploit it. They record what you buy, when you buy it, where you live, whether you have cats or kids or koi, and presumably how often you stress-buy Oreos—and then package those insights and sell them to advertisers. Kroger, the third-largest grocery retailer in the U.S., raked in a third of its net income last year by auctioning off customer data. According to hearing testimony, Amazon now makes more money selling access to the exquisitely detailed profile it’s built on you than from selling actual products. Think about that.

The most perverse part is that we’re paying for the privilege of being fleeced. We carry the tracking device, download the app, scan the QR code to get 40 cents off oat milk, flash our frequent-shopper cards, and then act shocked when the store charges us 12% more than the guy behind us with the flip phone and a wad of cash.

More and more, I’m convinced that dude’s onto something. He doesn’t have an app, a personalized offer, or an agitation score. He’s out there living like it’s 1982 while the rest of us are financing our own digital prisons with a 2% cash-back card. SMH.

Until legislators make official sense of this nightmare, we can at least make it harder for Big Brother to compile our dossiers. Some thoughts: Have the person in your party whose phone has the most juice hail the Uber. Use websites instead of apps and deny every possible permission. Browse online in incognito mode. Lie your face off on loyalty-program applications like you’re in witness protection. (Me? Zero kids, allergic to cats, obsessed with sportsball, addicted to TV, birthday: February 31, 1899.) Connect to a VPN (virtual private network) in a ZIP code where people lock their trash cans at night. Clear your browser cookies and cache so stores don’t see your repeat searches. Pay cash whenever humanly possible… while that’s even still an option.

It’s probably too late for complete invisibility at this point, but being less profitable to track than someone else isn’t the worst idea in the world.

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YOU decide what to tip—not me!

Warning for newbies: this is not my typical snarky, humorous, poke-the-political-bear fare. If it’s not your thing, feel free to skip it. It’s a freebie, after all.
Regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow. ;)

Happy back-to-school week, wherever you are in the cycle.
All I can say is… it gets easier. Promise.

It’s that time of year when your social media feeds are filled with photos of smiling, gown-clad graduates tossing their tasseled caps high into the air and beaming brightly behind lettered sweatshirts. Proud parents boast of their seniors’ accomplishments, their readiness, their plans, and occasionally their own heartache. This is what happens; what they hoped would happen. Pass the champagne!

Only this time, it’s you. That’s your cap-tossing, sweatshirt-sporting daughter (your first born, your baby), and that picture is your wildest dream and your worst nightmare fused into one stolen, high-resolution moment in time.

You think of all the other moments — the trips, the tears, the cuddles; your fights, your TikTok videos, your visits to the ER; her first tooth, her first steps, the first time she drove away without you — and it’s impossible to fathom that your precious little hatchling, the one you rocked and held and protected from cars and clowns and countless other dangers for the last 6,570-plus days of your life, is not only capable of leaving the nest but is actually leaving the nest.

“You did it, Mama!” the comments read. “Can’t wait to see what’s next for your amazing girl!”

She’s ready, you’re sure of it. (You, on the other hand, might be another story.) She’s strong and street-smart and organized, and if you send her a gift, she’ll send you a thank-you card every time. She can bake salmon and balance a checkbook. She has AAA and a taser and pepper spray, and she knows which body parts to aim for if you want to take someone down fast. She reads self-help books for fun, even though she needs less help than any other self you know. She has a voice she’s not afraid to use and the self-respect to use it. She’s going to be fine. She has more support, confidence, and poise than you did when you were her age, and you turned out fine.

What if she gets sick? Or wrecks her car? Or some stupid boy breaks her heart? Did you teach her everything you were supposed to teach her? What if you left out something important? Your parents didn’t feel like this when you left, did they?

[Spoiler: they did not. But that’s why you’re funny.]

You have a life outside of her; you made sure not to forget to do that. You have friends, a career, pets, another kid you love just as much as you love her, hobbies, a husband you mostly still adore and who (miraculously) mostly still adores you back. It’s a full, rich life; one you built carefully and intentionally. You showed her that you can balance family and work and friendships and not lose yourself in the muddy in-between. You should be proud.

You find yourself thinking about that essay that went viral — back before “going viral” was even a thing — that some dad wrote about the heartache of sending his daughter off to kindergarten. (B*tch, please.) You can’t find it now because the internet is saturated or because you’re old or maybe both. “Please, world, treat her kindly,” the dad implored. At least that’s the part you recall.

“Honey, you’re ready,” you tell her now when she looks at you with a quivering lip, her giant eyes veiled by a wall of tears she’s fighting to hold back. You take her hands and squeeze; she squeezes back. “You’ve got this,” you promise. “We’ll be right here. And if you need us, we’ll be right there.” You keep your voice gentle but firm, and you nod your head as you say this. You fake a smile and force it all the way up into your eyes, because if you don’t, you’ll break her heart, the heart you were put on this earth to protect.

You’re not lying; these things are all true. She is and she does and you will. She smiles bravely because she believes you, because you’re the mom and she trusts you.

So you let her go. Because you have to, and because she’s ready.

Please, world. Treat her kindly.

tips always welcome

The secret remote-activated stun gun hidden inside the hot chick’s blouse.

No, really.

Meet Jayme Leagh Franklin. Or, as she’s been crowned in cyberspace, The Zapper.

Franklin, a former Trump administration aide and founder of the conservative women’s media and lifestyle company The Conservateur, was standing strategically behind Trump—you know, because nobody ever got fired for putting a hot chick in the shot—as he announced the new guidelines.

At some point during the event, Trump looked down. Or maybe he enjoyed an especially long blink. Either way, he appeared to close his eyes for more than the roughly 100 to 400 milliseconds it typically takes for the human eye to refresh itself. And because Trump haters are uniquely fixated on catching POTUS catching unscheduled Zs, they pounced.

Trump is 80 years old. Scrutiny of his health has eclipsed pickleball in the national leisure-activity category. Is he sleeping? Is he swollen? Is he limping? Is he lisping? What’s going on with his hands? Sweet Jesus, those cankles are about to explode! “A glimpse of Trump’s bare skin showed that his mysterious bruising has spread beyond his hands,” the Daily Beast wrote just this week.

Anyway, as Bobby spoke and Trump appeared to be resting his lids, eagle-eyed internet detectives noticed Franklin ever-so-subtly pat her stomach at nearly the exact moment that Trump seemed to perk up.

Move over, Zapruder.

Within hours, slowed-down clips and frame-by-frame analyses were circulating like divorce papers in a trailer park tornado. The prevailing theory is this: someone off-camera noticed Trump falling asleep and gave Franklin a signal. Franklin then located and pressed a concealed button beneath her blouse, which activated some sort of device—a zapper, if you will—that jolted the president awake.

In this scenario, the United States government possesses—and employs—technology capable of remotely shocking POTUS back into consciousness, and has assigned its operation to an attractive young woman standing three feet behind him on live television.

Nobody thought to put the button under the Resolute Desk. Nobody gave it to an aide outside of camera range. Nobody invented an app. No, the continuity of the executive branch depends on a lady dressed like a flight attendant manually rebooting the president through her clothing while America watches.

Just as the frenzy had reached peak fever pitch, The Zapper herself weighed in.

And with that five-word tweet, the ZAPGATE conspiracy collapsed beneath the crushing weight of a (teeny, tiny) baby bump.

The best part is that because the media was powerless to resist the combo nap-zap, they were forced to put the clips into context—the context being Trump’s vaccine-policy changes. “A woman standing behind President Donald Trump during a White House announcement has drawn widespread attention online,” is how Newsweek opened its piece, praying nobody would read all the way to the bottom to find out what that announcement was.

So once again, POTUS got the Fourth Estate to cover a subject they despise—not because they suddenly developed an interest in childhood health, informed consent, or the causes of autism, but because some Resistance-era internet leftover thought a pretty woman was smuggling a presidential cattle prod under her top and a bunch of yahoos have way too much time on their hands.

If he was dozing off? More power to him. Name another president who could get a hostile press to do his bidding… in his sleep.

help keep me caffeinated

P.S. Predictably, Franklin’s five minutes in the background has earned her the left’s ugly lineup of familiar nicknames: bobblehead, fembot, cyborg, MAGA mannequin. (I’m not linking these because trolls don’t deserve clicks.) I mean, God forbid an attractive Trump supporter appear on TV looking slightly stiff without half the internet accusing her of having a hidden charging port. Jealous much? Yeah, her make-up was flawless. Her hair? Salon-blowout perfection. She nodded. A lot. Maybe she was nervous. Maybe she was trying to keep herself awake. How’d you look that time you flanked the president during his prime-time address while millions of strangers zoomed in and analyzed your pores? SMH.

The robot comparisons naturally dredged up another cherished bit of internet weirdness—that time Meghan Markle’s clone malfunctioned during an appearance at Windsor Castle, something I’d completely forgotten about. I love how we all see stuff like that and just… move on. (Seriously… it’s weird, right? Or did I just put myself into my own pie chart?)

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If you want in, an annual subscription works out to about 30 cents a post and comes with a free signed book, which probably isn’t even the worst deal around.

If you can’t swing it or you aren’t sure if you like me that much, no worries. Free content will resume tomorrow. :)

For the last five years, I fully believed that Dr. Anthony Fauci spent his days sitting in a cushy government office plotting precisely how to murder as many Americans as humanly possible. I truly, literally did.

“I’ll have the patents on the spike protein filed through NIAID before the virus even has a name,” I imagined him musing, stroking an invisible, hairless cat. “I’ll fund a little gain-of-function research, have a vaccine suspiciously ready to go, make it as deadly as possible, and—this part is key—it’ll be mandatory. For everyone. Birth to 200. I’ll spread the hot lots around so nobody catches on, of course. Then I’ll silence anyone who asks any questions, bury the data, destroy the careers and lives of anyone who dares to disagree with me, and write a bestselling book about my career in public service.”

Apparently I was wrong. That’s not what he was doing at all. Newly released evidence reveals that America’s Doctor isn’t, in fact, a class 1 felony murderer (premeditated, deliberate, the whole evil-genius catalog). He’s technically just a callous second-degree murderer—the “didn’t plan it, didn’t care either” tier.

My bad.

I wonder if Hallmark has a “sorry I thought you were a tiny bit more morally grotesque than you actually are” section.

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Yesterday afternoon, President Trump—with Bobby standing proudly by—signed an executive order titled “Delivering Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations for Americans,” taking another stab at dramatically shrinking and restructuring the federal vaccine schedule. The a-word was spoken. Multiple times. Out loud.

The mainstream media, as you might imagine, is already on its fourth martini.

Between sips, the country’s copy editors were frantically Googling synonyms for unfounded—because there are only so many ways to tell readers that asking questions is what stupid people do. The Washington Post managed to get “largely debunked” in by paragraph two. UPI went with “false claims.” Rolling Stone chose the ever-popular “conspiracy theory.” The AP invoked uncertainty, fear, and confusion. You could literally hear the sigh in CNN’s “… despite little scientific evidence supporting such sweeping changes.”

The predictable outcry aside, Trump did not, in fact, ban a single jab or order America’s children to lick escalator railings to build natural immunity. Under the new “Gold Standard recommendations,” vaccines against 11 diseases—including measles, mumps, rubella, polio, pertussis, tetanus and chickenpox—remain universally recommended. Pfizer’s GoFundMe was quietly taken down.

Hep A, Hep B, RSV, dengue, and meningococcal vaccines would be moved into high-risk and/or “shared decision-making” categories, along with rotavirus, flu, and Covid shots. Translation: the family doctor may once again be permitted to participate in decisions occurring in the family doctor’s office. It’s a bold concept.

The order also calls for vaccines to be spread across separate office visits whenever feasible and for MMR to be split into three individual shots once those products are domestically available. Finally, it directs the Attorney General to pursue litigation against states that fail to provide religious and medical exemptions.

It’s basically common sense. It’s also not a magic wand that immediately rewrites every state schedule, school rule, or sweeping vaccine policy. The EO directs HHS, acting through its Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines, to submit a plan for rethinking the timing and sequencing of childhood shots and beefing up safety monitoring. I’m guessing Bobby will have his homework turned in early.

POTUS kicked off his presser by comparing the number of shots our kids get with European tykes—as many as double the number in some cases—a fact that literally every news outlet completely ignored. Because if they included it, they’d have to answer a tricky question: if America’s supersized, combo-packed childhood schedule is the single scientific way to keep kids healthy, why do other wealthy countries achieve superior health outcomes with far fewer pokes and widely spaced-out shots?

Obviously, “superior health outcomes” can’t be pinned exclusively to a slimmer childhood vaccination schedule. We live in a country that’s turned deep-fried Oreos into a food group and introduced a taco with a Dorito for a shell. Clearly Denmark isn’t doing better than America solely because little Lars has fewer “well visits.” But if Country A gets by on considerably less of something than Country B without an obvious health penalty, asking whether Country B needs the supersized serving isn’t “anti-science.” It’s a literal question, something that used to be where science started—not stopped.

Before you pop the champagne (fine, after; the fact that the conversation is even happening is still worth celebrating), recall that this administration has tried this before. Twice. Kennedy’s HHS revised the childhood schedule back in January, reducing the universally recommended jabs from 17 to 11. By March, a federal judge blocked that move. Not because he ruled the pared down schedule unsafe, but because HHS allegedly skipped some of the required procedural steps getting there.

In May, Trump tried again—this time telling the CDC and ACIP to do it the proper bureaucratic way: review the international evidence and update the schedule through official channels. A slew of lawsuits promptly threw sand in those gears, too. Yesterday’s EO is less “new regulatory route” and more “we’re not letting this go.”

The new order also urges states to reconsider their individual vaccine requirements, since they—not the federal government—generally decide which shots kids need to attend school. In other words, Trump can rewrite Washington’s recommendations, but he can’t cross Hep B off the entire state of California’s kindergarten checklist. That clipboard belongs to Gavin Newsom—and Governor McHairspray isn’t handing that thing over as long as he has a pen and a pulse.

The next step is the federal agency review. The problem? The revolving door between Pharma and the alphabet agencies has been spinning so long that half of D.C. could set their watch to it. These are, after all, groups being tasked with evaluating products made by companies that routinely employ their former officials—and vice versa. Add billions in FDA user fees and lobbying every year, and the coziness gets downright corrupt. You’d have to be a fool—or me—to hope that a trillion-dollar industry might respond to a government plan to plunder its profits with, “You know what? It’s probably for the best.”

And then there’s history. A fresh executive order on crisp letterhead doesn’t cure the procedural problems courts found with earlier changes. It won’t stop the medical organizations and public health groups who are already lining up to file lawsuits. It will certainly do nothing positive for Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s blood pressure. And unless Congress codifies it into law, a future administration can rescind an executive order the day the U-Haul pulls up at the White House. Basically, it fired the starting gun—again.

If HHS survives the challenges that killed the first two rounds, the CDC and ACIP have to turn the order into actual recommendations. Then states, insurers, doctors, hospitals, and school have to decide what they’re going to do with them. This isn’t merely about winning a scientific argument; it’s about dismantling an enormous regulatory, legal, and financial ecosystem that now has its own gravitational pull.

Losing odds? Maybe. That’s why they call it a Hail Mary.

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Apparently, the federal government’s breakup with gene-editing technology was more of a Ross-and-Rachel situation.

On Friday, the FDA approved Moderna’s mFLUSIVA, America’s first mRNA flu vaccine, for adults 50 and older. The whippersnappers in that group—ages 50-64—got full-throated approval. The 65-plus crowd can still get jabbed under the FDA’s accelerated approval pathway, which is bureaucrat-speak for “we haven’t actually tested whether there’s any benefit at all for the most vulnerable segment of the population—or looked at possible side effects, TBH—but please ignore our historical record of fraud, deceit, and recklessness and get it anyway.”

I’m not saying Moderna is intentionally trying to cull the herd here. But if you were part of (or working for) a cold-blooded cabal looking to quietly reduce Earth’s occupancy rate, it would make sense to target the most expensive, resource-hogging slice of the population. They’re most likely to have existing complications that could interact with a novel gene-therapy injection—and less likely to trend on TikTok when a mob of them keel over after their mFLUSIVA shot.

Fun, totally unrelated fact: Shiva is the Hindu god of destruction. So.

The most maddening part of this train wreck—and trust me, the competitive field is fierce—is that Moderna didn’t test mFLUSIVA against a saline placebo in its pivotal efficacy trial. Roughly 20,000 guinea pigs got the new mRNA shot. The other 20,000—the supposed “control” group—got another flu vaccine. It wouldn’t be entirely indefensible if that metric were one of several studied; after all, you’d expect regulators might want to know whether a new vaccine can beat one we already have. But it was the only comparator. There was no unvaccinated control group to show how either group fared against receiving no poison at all.

Nevertheless, that didn’t stop Moderna from breathlessly announcing that mFLUSIVA was 26.6% more effective than the OG version (Glaxo’s Fluarix) that’s been around since 2005.

Not twenty-six times more effective, mind you. Twenty-six percent.

Let’s do the math they want us never, ever to do: Two percent of mFLUSIVA recipients developed PCR-confirmed “influenza-like illness” (and don’t get me started on the PCR fraud; it’s what they use, I’m just the reporter here) compared to 2.8 percent of those who got the standard vaccine. That’s an absolute difference of 0.8 percent. Meaning that out of every 100 people, 97.2 avoided the endpoint with the old shot and 98 sidestepped it with the new. Hardly résumé material. (“Increased corporate efficiency by a fraction of a percent!” Congratulations, Susan. Here’s your rake. The stalls are out back.)

But Moderna took the tiny difference between the two groups and divided it by the (roughly) 2.8 percent in the standard-vaccine group, and voila! In relative terms, you get a far more impressive double-digit “efficacy” figure. Same data, much sexier math.

Déjà vu, anyone?

So, fine, the shiny new poison dart flu vaccine is only a tiny bit more effective than the clunky old one. Something is better than nothing. And it’s got to be way safer, right? With far fewer adverse effects and maybe it destroys cellulite or helps bald men regrow their hair or reduces global carbon emissions or something? Otherwise why would they even bother? Right?

To anyone who is actually that aggressively unjaded, I say God bless you and your obvious lack of trauma. Stay gold.

It turns out, the new shot fared worse across every single “side-effect” category. In the large efficacy trial, injection-site pain occurred in 65.8 percent of mFLUSIVA recipients versus 29.8 percent with the conventional shot; fatigue was 48.1 versus 20.6 percent; headache 41.9 versus 20.1 percent; and muscle pain 40.6 versus 13 percent. Serious adverse events were reported in 2.2 percent versus 1.9 percent.

This year’s flu shot: now with more than twice the skull pain!

In the separate senior immunology study, the numbers were even worse: more than three-quarters (75.3%) of participants experienced an unfavorable reaction to the new shot versus less than half (49.3%) of those who received the original. And grade-3-or-worse systemic reactions—meaning bad enough to prevent normal daily activity—occurred in 6.9 percent of mFLUSIVA recipients versus 1.7 percent with the high-dose conventional vaccine.

If mFLUSIVA were a movie, it would have a Rotten Tomatoes score down in the Batman & Robin range.

Moderna made a big deal out of the fact that deaths were identical in both groups—I mean… congrats?—sitting at 0.3% through the six-month follow-up period. What they didn’t broadcast (but a handful of journalists—none in the U.S. that I could find—highlighted) were the 23 “sudden and unexpected” deaths in the mFLUSIVA group compared to just 9 in the other. Shockingly, autopsies were not performed. You know, because correlation does not equal causation.

My first reaction to the whole fustercluck was where is RFK Jr. in all of this? Surely he’s made a statement. Offered an explanation. Coughed up a maddening quasi-endorsement at apparent gunpoint. But no. Nada. Zip. Just complete subject-level silence. My disappointment needs its own therapist at this point.

Cardiologist Peter McCullough blasted the utter ridiculousness of it all. “BREAKING—FDA Approves Moderna’s mRNA Influenza Vaccine Despite 75.3% Rate of Adverse Reactions,” he shouted in headline type. “According to the FDA briefing document, severe systemic reactions were 4× MORE COMMON than with the traditional flu shot. Data consistent with mRNA being a more dangerous vaccine platform. Will it sell in a crowded flu shot market?”

“I literally cannot believe a mRNA flu vaccine was approved with the same side effects as the mRNA Covid vaccine and after all the vaccine injuries and even deaths from the mandated Covid vaccines,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene remarked. Structurally, her sentence is about as smooth as a cobblestone street littered with Legos, but she’s got a solid point.

Others were less restrained. “They can’t poison our soldiers fast enough,” wrote Health Ranger Mike Adams on X, sharing a Navy order detailing which groups are mandated to get a flu shot this year (essentially recruits, healthcare workers, deployed personnel, and some reservists). Under the cited regulations, “medical or administrative exemptions may be granted.” Then again, they may not! Thank you for your service.

“Cancer business is going to be booming for many, many years,” physician and oncology researcher William Makis added. “If you thought COVID-19 Vaccine-induced Turbo Cancer was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet. Stay far away from anyone who takes this new FDA-approved Moderna mRNA flu vaccine, they will shed for at least a month!”

“The Moderna mRNA flu shot is the next pandemic,” insisted the Brownstone Institute’s Toby Rogers. “Others have pointed out that one does not even need a virus, the toxic response itself can be a pandemic. Seniors, medical staff, and police/fire/military will get these shots and shed for months. Voilà, the next pandemic is here.”

Children’s Health Defense zeroed in on the part I find hardest to get past: The FDA initially rejected Moderna’s application. They refused to even review it, in fact, because their big trial compared mFLUSIVA with a standard-dose flu vaccine even for participants over 65, despite high-dose flu vaccines being the standard of care for that age group. You see the plan there, right? Compare their sparkly new mRNA juice with a deliberately weaker comparator to artificially boost that “relative” efficacy number.

The FDA saw through that—miraculously—and refused to file the application.

But Moderna objected. After an alleged “public outcry.” Mkay. But instead of holding the line (how hard would “fix your trial design and get back to us” have been?), the FDA caved, agreeing to separate the “full approval” and “accelerated approval” [i.e. also approval] groups.

“People need to understand that when Marty Makary, MD, MPH, Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH, and were at the FDA, they would not review the Moderna mRNA flu shot, and rightfully so,” Houston doc Mary Talley Bowden said on X. “It wasn’t a consideration. They subsequently were fired or forced to resign, without cause/reason. I’m pretty sure I know why!”

All of which leads any reasonable person to ask the same question: what in the actual pharma-funded hell is going on over there?

I’ll remind readers that this isn’t Joe Biden’s HHS. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the OG vaccine skeptic, the guy who called the Covid jab “the deadliest vaccine ever made”—runs the department that oversees the FDA. I realize that even though he sits at the top of the regulatory food chain, he can’t simply storm into FDA headquarters, slap a REJECTED sticker on Moderna’s app, and go back to playing with falcons. Once a vaccine is approved, reversal requires a laborious bureaucratic process as well as a legally defensible basis. “I think mRNA is trash” won’t cut it.

But that’s not my question. What I want to know is, how did it get approved at all? Couldn’t Kennedy have intervened before approval? Couldn’t his department have demanded more evidence, pushed for additional safety studies, insisted on an improved trial design, or otherwise pumped the brakes on another mRNA clot shot nobody wanted or asked for? Is anybody, anywhere, working on a time machine? Because we could really use one of those right about now.

“We recognize the importance of protecting older Americans from influenza, but we are deeply concerned that the FDA has taken this risky step,” said Independent Medical Alliance (IMA) President and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Joseph Varon. “Frontline doctors are seeing a growing number of mRNA-induced health crises every day, including heart inflammation, autoimmune disorders, and aggressive resurgence of cancers.”

And yet—huge, exhausted sigh—here we are. Again. With a technology Kennedy’s own HHS publicly declared unfit for respiratory viruses just a year ago, now repackaged, reapproved, and hustled back onto the market. Only this time, with considerably worse side-effect numbers, microscopic alleged benefits, and all the bravado of a seven-year-old who just got his yellow belt in karate. And the public is getting the same spiel: roll up your sleeve, don’t ask questions, and for God’s sake, do not look at the data.

I have a God box. I make vision boards. I listen to manifestation tapes. I pray. So here’s what I’m putting out into the universe: this miserable thing dies a quiet death—unopened on a pharmacy shelf between the expired zinc gummies and the Sudafed locked up like your eighth-grade diary. RFK swoops in and blows it up before we’re subjected to a string of commercials starring a silver-haired couple frolicking through CGI wildflowers. And someone at HHS rediscovers the once-radical regulatory standard that “we have a product” is not, by itself, a compelling argument for injecting it into millions of people.

Who’s manifesting with me?

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When shoppers attempted to add copy to their overpriced cans of carbonated high-fructose corn syrup, it quickly became clear that certain words and phrases were forbidden. For example, while “Walz/Harris 2024,” “Satan is king,” and “Allah is God,” got an easy green light, the software put its digital foot down at “Jesus loves you” and “Trump 2024.”

“After complaints,” the Toronto Sun reported at the time, “Coca-Cola reportedly fixed the glitch, banning all words that are ‘trademarked, political in nature, names of countries, celebrities, religious figures, as well as anything that could be considered offensive for other reasons.’”

Phew! They fixed that pesky glitch! You may resume your doom-scrolling now. Justice has prevailed.

Fast-forward to 2026, and the story is trending on X and blowing up TikTok. Users are uploading videos and screenshots of disturbing messages the cans will—and won’t—allow. Right now. Today. After all of that glitch-fixing and everything.

Even after seeing dozens of identical posts, I still thought this cannot be real.

Gentle readers, it is real.

“The name or phrase you’ve submitted is not permitted,” the error message reads. “Names and phrases may not be permitted if they belong to a business, organization, celebrity, public figure, school, team, or other trademark, are religious or political in nature, or could be considered inappropriate or unsuitable for other reasons.”

Makes sense, I suppose. Except.

Every single pro-Christian phrase I tried got rejected. The only way I could get Jesus on that can was to add “… is bad.” Also, in case you still had a shred of faith in “fact-checkers” lingering in your heart somewhere, I present the final nail in that coffin:

The unintentionally funny part is that in the meager 2024 media coverage, this silly little snafu was “raising the ire of American conservatives.” Not American Americans—who, last time I checked, were one nation under God, not Allah. No, the offense-takers were just a bunch of uptight, Bible-thumping right-wingers looking for a reason to take up arms. Or something.

But riddle me this: shouldn’t Americans in general, like all of us, be furious that Coca-Cola—the iconic, homegrown soft drink company that gave us Santa Claus, Norman Rockwell, Mean Joe Greene, and nearly a century of Olympic sponsorships—will happily print God Bless Iran… but not God Bless America?

Sadly, it seems like Coke is woke across the board. You can be proud of your mutilated genitals, your misogynistic religion, your dark skin, and your kinky proclivities… but Coke draws the line at white. Not in America, pal. Don’t you know you’re supposed to be ashamed of your privileged, milky complexion? We will not be party to your filthy racism.

People are pissed—rightfully so, IMO—and calling for yet another boycott. Will it matter? Probably not much. Coke is a publicly traded company whose largest shareholders, you won’t be surprised to learn, are Berkshire Hathaway, Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street. A boycott is about as threatening to Coca-Cola as an “I’ve attempted to reach you several times” message from a mortgage broker you’ve never met. The company’s market cap is north of a quarter-trillion dollars, and they’ve survived actual communists seizing their factories in Cuba. They’re not losing sleep because a few folks switched to RC Cola for a week.

You know what? Boycott the bastards anyway. It’ll feel fantastic and your pancreas will definitely thank you. But before you do, maybe order yourself a custom Prosecute Fauci can. Miraculously, that one made it through the filter. Perhaps there’s some hope to be had after all.

Try it for yourself and let me know how it goes in the comments. :)

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Ooooh! ICYMI, A Midwestern Doctor, the brilliance behind The Forgotten Side of Medicine, did a deep—and I mean deep—dive into chlorine dioxide. “For over a century, remarkable therapies have been suppressed to maintain a medical monopoly at the expense of humanity,” AMD writes. If you’re curious about the establishment’s illustrious history of censoring “dangerous and unproven” (read: “inexpensive and widely available”) therapeutics, do check it out. :)

“When they go low, we don’t go high,” El-Sayed said at a rally in Kalamazoo. “We take ‘em to the mud and choke them out.”

No, really. He said that.

Michigan. Buddy. Blink if you’re okay.

What makes this genuinely funny—not haha funny, more like watching someone back a U-Haul into a baptismal font funny—is that El-Sayed doesn’t even pretend to be a unifier. He stood on stage at a CAIR banquet in Oklahoma (CAIR is the Council on American-Islamic Relations—a group the FBI cut ties with in 2009 after evidence emerged in federal court linking them to Hamas financing, no big deal) and compared voters who reject Islamic law to mass murderers.

“You cannot understand a ban on Sharia without understanding the Trail of Tears,” El-Sayed insisted. “You cannot understand efforts against Muslim Americans without understanding the Tulsa Massacre. You cannot understand the challenges Muslims face today without understanding ‘white supremacy.’”

That’s not making an argument; it’s—as one astute X user put it—linguistic jihad. It’s a fatwa dressed up in historical shame. It’s a demand for surrender: either you submit or you’re a racist. There’s no middle ground; no daylight left for Democrats who think Michigan courts should apply… Michigan law. It’s Sharia or the highway.

Of course, Michigan is home to Dearborn—the first Arab-majority city in the U.S. They have a Muslim mayor and police chief and a fully-operational two-tier justice system. It’s the homey sort of place where you can be beaten for talking peacefully about Jesus at a protest but where chanting “Death to America” is welcome in the streets. Sharia isn’t a gentle suggestion there; increasingly, it’s the default.

Here’s the problem: Sharia law and the United States Constitution aren’t just mildly incompatible; they are fundamentally at odds on questions of authority, legal equality, and civil liberties. One treats women’s testimony as half a man’s, the other sees everyone as equal before the law. One prescribes barbaric seventh-century penalties, the other actively prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. One comes with a compulsory, non-negotiable belief system baked right in, the other opens with “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” You can’t really reconcile “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” with “leaving Islam is a grave spiritual sin punishable by death” without one of them blinking.

El-Sayed uses all of the uber-woke buzzwords that virtue-signaling liberals love—like “peace” and “justice” and “freedom.” And they eat it up. Which leads one to conclude that most VSLs [virtue-signaling libs] probably aren’t particularly well-versed in Muslim Brotherhood vernacular.

See, Islamists don’t use “peace” the way we do—you know, to describe the absence of war or a nonviolent state of coexistence. No, to the Ummah, peace is a conditional outcome that can only be achieved once an Islamic social, moral, and political order is established. In other words, do what we say and nobody gets hurt. Peaceful!

Similarly, “justice” isn’t good old American fairness, equity, or adherence to a defined set of legal or ethical principles. In Islamist ideology, it means fully adhering to the divine law of Allah. Justice? You mean just… do it. Or else.

And if you think “freedom” refers to some xenophobic concept like individual autonomy or certain inalienable rights granted by law, you might want to dust off your Quran. The Islamic legal definition of freedom (or hurriyah, as in hurry-yah ass over here and convert before we behead-yah) is “the liberation of humanity from serving other people or desires to serve the Creator exclusively.” It’s liberation—of the soul—through complete submission to Sharia. The body is free to follow along. Or meet the Maker. Totally your call.

That’s the far-left brand now. Not “Medicare for all.” Not “affordable housing.” Not “tax the rich” or “cancel student debt” or “protect our democracy.” The brand is “the Quran is our constitution, jihad is our path, and death in the name of Allah is our ultimate goal.” And yes, that’s a quote.

Mike Rogers is Michigan’s Republican nominee. He’s a Trump-endorsed former congressman, FBI special agent, and U.S. Army veteran who managed to run unopposed—a solid sign of unified party backing. While Democrats were busy clawing each other’s eyes out, Rogers has been stockpiling cash. El-Sayed now starts with $2.7 million cash on hand against the $5.66 million Rogers has in cash reserves―“the largest war chest of the bunch,” according to The Detroit News. Still, as of today, Polymarket is giving El-Sayed a 61% chance of winning the Senate seat.

November is nearly three months away, though. That’s longer than Kim Kardashian’s second marriage. A lot can happen, is all I’m saying.

“When folks ask, ‘If and when we win this race, how are you going to beat Mike Rogers and their money?’ I want you to remind them that if we come through this—when we come through this—inshallah,” El-Sayed smirked [to thunderous applause] from the stage, “that we’ll have taken $70 million on the chin and kept fighting back.”

Inshallah. God willing. It’s all in Allah’s hands now.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but conquerors rarely arrive wearing name tags that say, “Hi! We’re here to destroy and replace your cultural, legal, and societal systems!” First it’s, “Don’t worry, we come in peace.” Then it’s, “Could you make this one small accommodation?” Next it’s, “Actually, we have some demands.” Finally it’s, “There are more of us than there are of you, so this is the way it’s going to be from now on.” That’s not hysteria or hyperbole; it’s history.

Indulge me in a little thought experiment: Imagine a new family moves into your neighborhood and you invite them to Thanksgiving dinner. You spend days preparing your traditional spread—herb-roasted turkey with all the trimmings—and curating the world’s most cinematic holiday playlist. After the neighbors barge in without knocking, they spit on your buffet table, dump a bag of Doritos on the floor, and proceed to blast mariachi music over Sly & The Family Stone. And when you express your displeasure, they call you bigots for not embracing their “contributions.” On what planet in which solar system would that be okay?

Former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal said it best: immigration without assimilation is an invasion.

Michigan did not get the memo.

So yes, the Democratic Party in a purple swing state just nominated a guy who keynotes fundraisers for an enterprise designated a terrorist organization by multiple states. A guy whose supporters show up to rallies with jihad flags in Arabic. A guy who enjoys all of the freedoms of being an American while openly rejecting anything that reflects the nation he lives in. A guy who refused to comment on Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today.” (Yes, the Khamenei who led a murderous regime committed to the destruction of the West for decades.) That’s… worrisome.

But here’s the thing about “historic firsts”—they tend to motivate both sides. Every Michigan voter who’s even vaguely uncomfortable with a senator who equates rejecting Sharia with committing genocide just got their get-out-the-vote invitation, hand-delivered by the Democratic primary electorate.

Inshallah, they do the right thing.

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The CBS News Instagram edit shows a brave Moroccan couple paddling through the surf, two small children in tow. They’ve left the only home they’ve ever known and fought a mighty, treacherous ocean just to reach the safety of Spanish soil. Now they must somehow rebuild with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a dream. It’s the sort of footage that makes a producer reach for the swelling strings.

The New York Times profiled a distraught 21-year-old construction worker who’d made it all the way to Ceuta—a tiny Spanish enclave in North Africa that functions as a gateway to Europe—only to be booted back to Morocco. “If I don’t leave this country,” The Times quoted the would-be immigrant as saying, “there is nothing that will save me.”

The Telegraph interviewed a 14-year-old boy, identified only as Omar, who’d successfully made the 5-mile crossing. “My parents divorced,” Omar explained. “My mother has to raise four children on her own. I want to study, work and build a future for myself and for my family. My mother can’t do everything alone.”

Where are the GoFundMes?

Oddly, the actual, raw footage—every wide-angle clip, every aerial shot, every uncurated phone video—doesn’t support those stories at all.

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My theory is this (and I promise it’s funnier than it sounds): a big chunk of the Americans lining up to support communism aren’t doing it because they’ve thought it through and decided it sounds like an especially swell plan. They’re doing it because nobody has told them that’s what they’re supporting. And I hate to admit it, but conservatives are at least partially to blame.

Because for years, Republicans have famously referred to every other face on the increasingly progressive left as the c-word. Occasionally accurately. Sometimes not. Often indiscriminately. The result is that the accusation has lost all meaning—and every time the term gets trotted out, the liberal eyeroll can be heard from deep space. “Oh, here we go again. McCarthyism 2.0. You people think everyone west of Ronald Reagan is a Marxist. Turn off Fox News and go touch grass.”

So-and-so’s-a-commie has become background noise. Hold music. The flight attendant’s safety briefing before takeoff. Nobody’s listening. It’s just more Republican rhetoric. The GOP equivalent of “existential threat” or “danger to democracy.”

Apparently, alarm bells hit differently when they’re coming from inside your cozy blue bubble.

MAHER: “Now the coalition within the DSA called the Marxist Unity Group is in ascendance, and I must take them at their word when their words include, ‘Our commitment is to the long-term struggle for a fully liberated, classless society. In a word, communism.’ What do they have to do? Tweet out, ‘Elect more communists?’ Oh yeah. Cea Weaver did that.”

AUDIENCE: [stunned silence]

MAHER: “Good. I’m glad you’re shocked. People have got to realize this is going on.”

Maher’s monologue wasn’t a rant so much as a dramatic reading of receipts. Not clips from Breitbart. Not quotes from Speaker Mike Johnson. Not screenshots from some dude who goes by PatriotEagle1776 on X. Actual words from actual Democrats that—in Maher’s words—“if they were any closer to Karl Marx, they’d be sued for plagiarism.”

Imagine being a Mamdani or AOC fan and learning from Bill Maher that you’d basically become a Bolshevik.

“One of the new soon-to-be Democratic members of Congress, Darializa Avila Chevalier, supports seizing all property from landlords and has said, ‘Seize the means of production,’” Maher remarked. “Mamdani has also said the end goal is seizing the means of production. I think they want to seize the means of production. Now maybe you missed that in school—or missed school altogether—but that’s communism.”

Maher pointed to an open pledge two Democrat congressmen released last month for their fellow party members to sign. “We are capitalist, not socialist,” it read. “We want safety, not lawlessness. We are proud, not ashamed, of America.” Two hundred twelve lawmakers were asked if they agreed with those simple statements. Eight of them said yes.

Eight.

That means 204 refused to sign it. (Go back and read it again.)

The comedian called out—by name—individual Democrats who don’t think we should have police or prisons at all. Who think the solution to America’s woes is to abolish the border. Completely. Literally. Who want to replace the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. Whose goal is to—wait for it—impoverish the middle class. That is not me spelling “uplift” incorrectly, I swear.

“And again, they’re not lying about who they are,” Maher added. “The media is. You know, if you call a woman a whore and everyone gasps, and then the woman says, ‘Oh no, he’s right. I’m literally a prostitute’… Believe her.”

What heartens me most is the partisan traffic pattern. Because if you’re paying attention, you’ll see that it only runs one way. Compared to lots of his colleagues, Maher’s a little late to the roundabout. Joe Rogan’s spent the last few years drifting rightward like a canoe with no paddle. Elon Musk went from Democratic donor to guy who owns a website specifically to argue with Democratic donors. President Trump has an actual Kennedy in his cabinet. But name a prominent conservative from any field or industry who’s come forward to say, “You know what? This whole collective labor and resource redistribution stuff actually makes a shocking amount of sense! I guess I’m a Democrat now.” I’ll wait.

Progressives love to call conservatives fascists. I realize fascism isn’t exactly a confession crime, but give me the far-right equivalent of the Maher lineup. Where are the shocking quotes? The damning tweets? One Republican senator caught saying, “All hail the Führer” on a hot mic? Where’s Roseanne Barr’s scathing party takedown?

Oh, right. None of these things exist. When someone can point to a single conservative heavyweight in a Mussolini t-shirt declaring, “Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hands, and an infinite scorn in our hearts,” I’ll admit I was duped.

I was reading recently about Republican-linked PACs funding Democratic primaries—a tactic apparently both parties use to boost the candidates they think will be easiest to beat. Watching Maher’s monologue, I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s what’s happening here. I mean, what better way to destroy an entire political party than to elevate their craziest, most radical voices? Then you just sit back while they alienate every sane voter in the block and your guy nabs the seat. It would be like setting your crush up with a parade of psychos. Sooner or later, you’ll look like a catch by comparison.

It’s genius, actually.

“Vice President JD Vance was on the show, and I told him that if the Democratic Party keeps going in the direction of the DSA, my vote was in play,” Maher said. “Yes, my vote is in play. I’m not voting for anyone who thinks the wrong side won the Cold War or cheers for the Intifada like it’s the World Cup. I would vote for Sarah Palin before this. She’s a bimbo, but if you asked her to come up with something she likes about America, she could do it.”

The left has spent most of forever arguing that communism warnings are nothing but paranoid right-wing theater. Now that one of their own is pulling back the curtain, maybe a few of them will start heading for the exits.

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I won’t lie. Until this week, I was only vaguely aware of Stephen A. Smith—mostly because he occupies the vast, mysterious corner of television (which I do not watch) devoted to grown men who seem to enjoy drinking beer while arguing with screens (which I do not understand). If you can relate, according to Wikipedia, “Stephen Anthony Smith is an American television personality, radio host, sports analyst, political commentator, and actor” who mostly spends his time blustering about basketball on ESPN.

But when someone escapes the sportsball ecosystem and starts dominating my social media feed, I take it as a sign that I’ve been assigned some homework. A quick study session revealed that Smith was trending on X this weekend for the unforgivable crime of [checks notes] admitting he got some stuff about Covid wrong.

To be fair, Smith wasn’t some quiet bystander who merely went along with the “I guess we should trust the science?” crowd. He climbed aboard the vaccine bandwagon, grabbed the loudest megaphone he could find, and spent the next few years trying to recruit the rest of humanity.

He supported harsh consequences for unvaccinated players. He championed performative obedience disguised as mask-wearing. He blasted high-profile pro-sports holdouts like Kyrie Irving and Aaron Rodgers not just for refusing to take part in history’s biggest and most macabre medical experiment, but because they weren’t using their celebrity status to evangelize their fans. And when Smith himself was hospitalized with Covid—along with double pneumonia, severe liver issues, and 103-degree fevers, despite being boosted out the proverbial wazoo—he credited the vaccine with saving his life.

Basically, he’s the reason shampoo comes with instructions.

“Kyrie Irving, not taking the vaccine makes you look what I know you are not—which is flat-out stupid,” Smith spit in an unhinged rant in 2022. He accused Irving of having “an alarming level of self-righteousness,” as well as being untrustworthy, hypocritical, and selfish.

In other words, Stephen A. Smith wasn’t just drinking the Kool-Aid. He was whipping up drums and handing out pitchers.

But four years later, something Ripley’s Believe It or Not-level happened: Smith realized he had been wrong. And rather than quietly reaching out to Irving to make amends, or trying to rewrite history or gaslight his audience or even defend his prior position, he used his own media platform to issue a sincere, contrite, public mea culpa.

The irony is what finally broke the spell. It wasn’t the mounting evidence of Covid vaccine side effects and shortcomings—the elevated cardiac risks in young men, the Cleveland Clinic research finding each additional dose increased infection risk, the skyrocketing turbo cancers, the Florida surgeon general’s damning analysis, the perverse failure to prevent infection and transmission. No, it was watching Dr. Anthony Fauci squirm through a congressional hearing and refuse to answer for any of it: the lockdowns, the school closures, the six-foot-distance theater, the masking of toddlers—the whole ghoulish edifice of “the science” that completely crumbled under silent cross-examination.

“There were others who had the courage to say ‘bunk that’,” Smith said. “One of those people at the forefront was Kyrie Irving. I bring his name up because I had my issues with him from a leadership standpoint. Never as a player, because he’s sensational, but with him in terms of leadership. I didn’t look at [refusing the vaccine] as being courageous. I looked at it as being selfish.

I watched Dr. Fauci on Capitol Hill yesterday, and the person I thought about most was Kyrie Irving. Kyrie Irving stood out in my mind because of the heat that he was taking. In my opinion, particularly hindsight-wise, it didn’t make him stubborn or selfish. It made him brave. For his willingness to stand up and say, ‘Nah, I’m not doing that.’

Kyrie Irving did nobody wrong. We did him wrong. I did him wrong. And for that, I’m sincerely sorry. I just thought it was important to say that… I need to do better. I’m not alone, but I’m responsible for me. I need to do better. And I will.”

I can hear the furious objections already: Smith only apologized because the façade finally cracked! To which I say, yes. He did. That’s sort of how apologies work. People rarely admit they’re wrong when they think they’re still winning. The Fauci hearing made it impossible to sustain the illusion, and Smith—to his credit—acknowledged that fact. He could have done what every other Covid hardliner has done: dig his heels in even deeper. But instead, he accepted responsibility for his actions and asked for forgiveness.

It turns out, the Internet is made up of far fewer biblical scholars than one might have hoped.

Conservatives have spent the past half-decade demanding, “When are these people ever going to admit they were wrong?” And then when someone actually does, an alarming mob of them respond, “Too little, too late, go French kiss a wood chipper.”

I get the instinct. Forgiveness isn’t my default either. I can carry a grudge like it’s got a car seat and a college fund. But if we aren’t going to even flirt with the idea of grace, if we’re going to gloat forever in our smug, relentless rightness, where’s the incentive for anyone to ever change their mind? If the punishment for willful ignorance is eternal ridicule, and the punishment for expressing regret is… also eternal ridicule, congratulations. You’ve just created the moral equivalent of “heads you lose, tails you also lose.”

Is one sorry “enough?” No. Is it progress? Also no? Because if that’s the baseline, the only acceptable apology is one delivered by a time traveler. If you’re just another guy who says nothing, you can coast forever on a sea of anonymity. But the minute you speak out against the narrative, you’re burned at the stake. It’s like asking someone if they’d prefer a first-class upgrade or a punch in the face.

Imagine you’re Rachel Maddow or Stephen Colbert right now, watching Smith get eviscerated for saying, “I was wrong.” Now imagine (*it won’t be easy) that you’d had a similar awakening and were in the midst of drafting a humble confession. Do you think you’d continue fine-tuning it? Of course you wouldn’t! You’d close your laptop, pour yourself a scotch, and take that little revelation to the grave.

What’s tragic about that scenario is that the person who almost changed their mind isn’t just a coward. They’re one fewer witness for the prosecution; one less person admitting, “Yeah, we got played.” The Overton window doesn’t blindly swing on its own; it moves—incrementally—with every high-profile change of heart. We shouldn’t just hope for those; we should be hanging up giant neon signs that say, “Welcome to the party! Better late than never.”

In 2022, The Atlantic published a bold and infuriating piece titled, Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty. My response at the time was essentially, “yeah, let’s not.”

My take hasn’t changed. It’s not forgiveness I can’t stomach—it’s the blanket pardon that doesn’t require anyone to actually say the thing. The word amnesty comes from the ancient Greek word amnēstia, meaning “forgetfulness” or “oblivion.” The Atlantic literally asked the world to collectively agree with “we all did our best, some of us got it right, some of us got it wrong, water under the bridge.” Sure, let’s all willfully engage in some amnesia—that’ll make everything better!

Except, it won’t. We want apologies. Acknowledgment. Admissions. Remorse. Promises of reform. And a hugely public figure just delivered the complete repentance kit—without a gun to his head or anything. I say we take it… graciously. Otherwise, all we’re doing is inviting every reluctant Stephen A. Smith out there to double down, dig in, and die on a hill of deceit and denial.

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Bangstad is a busy dude. When he’s not working the taps over at “Wisconsin’s most progressive brewery,” he spends his time whining about government heavy-handedness, posting anti-conservative rants to social media, being arrested, running for Governor, losing $750K defamation lawsuits, and begging folks to donate to his pet projects and legal fees. His Minocqua Brewing Company isn’t just a local pub you can pop into for a cold Fascist Tears IPA, either; it’s an entire ecosystem—complete with podcast, super PAC, and merch store—where craft beer meets performative outrage and also you can purchase twine-wrapped cork coasters lovingly inscribed with, “In this house, we say please, thank you, and f*ck Trump.”

The brewery owner—who also sells koozies and t-shirts online that insist EMPATHY IS EVERYTHING—recently took TDS to exotic new heights by promising patrons “free beer all day long the day Trump dies.”

And then he lost his liquor license.

Although the two events were reportedly unrelated—the revocation was a result of tax and permit violations—the beer maker is pulling a Fauci, insisting he’s the victim of, among other injustices, “false complaints made by MAGA trolls.”

“[My attorneys] believe that someone in Wisconsin’s government is trying to make an example out of me, and they’ve told me to fight this with everything I’ve got,” Bangstad wrote. “Everyone reading this, Democrat or Republican, should recoil at the thought of a small and thriving business being destroyed by their state government over such small violations.”

You want to know what I recoil at, sir? People who applauded when folks got fired for refusing to take part in a grotesque, forced medical experiment. People who call parents who show up at school board meetings to protest gender-inclusive bathrooms and sexually explicit curricula domestic terrorists. People who are objectively awful and then play the martyr card while soliciting donations. People who cheer when rioters slash ICE tires and smash storefronts and call it “resistance.” People who preach tolerance while wishing actual death on their political enemies. People who don’t even have the decency to be… decent.

This isn’t Bangstad’s first brush with the legal system—nor is it the first time his operating permit has been revoked. He’s faced criminal defamation charges and a string of failed lawsuits, all while running a super PAC that funnels beer profits into progressive causes. Bangstad has also been formally accused of defrauding donors by using funds to pay himself nearly a half million dollars.

“The lawsuit alleges that two entities that received payments from the super PAC of more than $300,000 in the last two years are fronts for Bangstad’s personal expenses,” Wisconsin Public Radio reported.

“Effervescent Blue and NCPS received payments of $333,890 in 2023 and 2024. The entities are not registered businesses in Wisconsin and they do not have any storefront nor online footprint. According to federal data, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC is the only political group to pay either during the two-year period.”

“The lawsuit also alleges other misuses of donors’ funds, including to pay for personal legal expenses and bankruptcy counseling. A 2024 payment disclosed to the FEC showed a $10,000 payment to a Madison-based bankruptcy attorney that ‘has never established an attorney-client relationship with the MBC Super PAC.’”

Let the record show that according to the guy who’s definitely not defrauding anyone, the super PAC scandal is another right-wing smear campaign. Your money’s safe with him. Really.

I’m not saying Bangstad couldn’t have been targeted this last time around. Maybe the state is being unusually aggressive as a result of his political proclivities. Maybe the alleged violations wouldn’t ordinarily justify this response. Maybe his activism has earned him a few powerful adversaries. But if that’s his big argument, welcome to the club.

Conservatives have spent the better part of the last decade listening to liberals explain that government investigations, regulatory scrutiny, lawsuits, de-banking, and de-platforming are necessary civic protections. That free speech stops at “dangerous rhetoric” and whatever they subjectively label “misinformation.” That if you vote a certain way, you deserve to be canceled. That this is all just about accountability. That nobody is above the law.

Now we’re supposed to be horrified that a business owner who built his entire brand around political provocation feels targeted after years of boasting about being one of the most controversial activists in his state.

The actual paperwork that’s been filed against Bangstad by Wisconsin’s Department of Revenue tells a different version of events: unauthorized retail sales, violations of shipping laws, and possession of untaxed beer in an unpermitted warehouse. Bangstad admits he owes the taxes. But in his telling, the whole thing is a politically motivated hit job—one he is not taking lying down [*also, he really needs your financial support and will happily provide convenient donation links].

I’m all for creative capitalism. If consumers can’t get enough of your tasteless tees and offensive accessories, you have my hearty congratulations. God bless you and the free market system [*tips DEFUND THE MEDIA hat*]. But there’s a point where “edgy marketing” becomes genuine degeneracy. Unfortunately, some folks couldn’t find that point if St. Anthony himself handed them a map.

Normal breweries offer mug clubs. Military discounts. Trivia nights. Happy hour. Live music. Loyalty cards. Ladies-drink-free. The Minocqua Brewing Company offered a White House wake with an open bar, flouted a few rules, and got busted.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, Mr. Bangstad, but karma’s a bitch. And apparently, she drinks IPA.

P.S. Some generous supporters who aren’t fans of online payment platforms have asked if I could include a mailing address for donations, so here you go:

Jenna McCarthy, POPME
POB 342111
Lakeway, TX 78734

(If you mail a contribution, kindly DM me so that I can add you to the paid subs list!)

P.P.S. If you’re newish here, POPME is a title I gave myself in fellowship with lunatics everywhere. From the original post (which is a favorite of mine BTW):

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Senator Rand Paul, the committee chair, opened the session like a man who’d been waiting years to light a fuse—and finally had a match. He laid out the timeline methodically. The gain-of-function research, the private emails routed around FOIA, the diary entries that directly contradicted public testimony, the cozy backchanneling with Big Tech to silence “disinformation” and dissent. He wasn’t grandstanding. He was the ghost of Mary Alice Young recapping last week’s cliffhanger—calm, unhurried, and absolutely certain about where the bodies were buried.

Then it was time for Fauci to be sworn in (you know, because placing your hand on a Bible automatically activates some kind of lie-suppressor gene, even in pathological perjurers). With the audacity of a man who is blanketed in lawyers and has nothing left to lose, the career public serpent took the mic and announced that he’d be pleading the Fifth—the handy amendment that gives you the right to refuse to say anything that could make you look guilty. (The idea being that the government has to build its own case and not rely on you to destroy yourself… which makes about as much sense in this setting as asking the burglar to lock up on his way out, but that’s a topic for another post.)

That’s right, America’s Weasel boldly announced that he would not be answering a single question. Not because he’d done anything rawng, mind you—but because Paul’s “unhinged obsession” with seeing him “behind bars” made it impossible for him to testify safely.

He actually played the victim card. The man who spent years as the nation’s unelected pandemic czar—the one who bragged about being synonymous with science while pulling social distance guidelines out of his filthy backhole and whose rules kept families from celebrating holidays and being with dying loved ones, destroyed countless lives and livelihoods, and sentenced millions of American kids to a social and academic abyss they’ll spend decades trying to claw their way out of—had the nerve to portray himself as the injured party in this scenario. The irony was thicker than the white, fibrous clots embalmers can’t stop finding in corpses since the Covid vaccine rollout.

The career criminal—whose entire testimony consisted of repeating that 21-word sentence more than nine dozen times—showed up with a legal entourage roughly the size of a basketball starting lineup. (As one does when one has done absolutely nothing wrong, ever. Ahem.) One of them, attorney David Schertler, apparently missed the memo that defense counsel doesn’t get speaking parts in congressional hearings and kept interrupting the proceedings. Chairman Rand Paul issued a warning. Schertler persisted. Paul got louder. Schertler continued to prattle. Paul finally ordered him to be physically removed by Capitol Police, noting dryly that Fauci still had “the other half dozen attorneys” for emotional support.

The room erupted in applause.

Lawmakers took turns alternately extoling and deriding the tenured hack of the administrative state. Democrats, predictably, fawned over Fauci like a visiting dignitary. Senator Richard “Revolving Door” Blumenthal read a prepared statement from Fauci’s exiled attorney (a never-event in a Senate hearing, BTW). Senator Andy Kim read actual poetry into the record. Because nothing says “serious oversight of a man who was more concerned with Julia Roberts calling him the coolest man on the planet than pandemic preparedness” like a few adoring lines of iambic pentameter.

The notable exception on the left: Senator John Fetterman—who ditched the hoodie in favor of an actual suit, so you know he was serious—expressed his own regret for being blinded by partisan politics. A decade ago, if you’d told me I’d have John Fetterman as the only adult in the Democratic room on my bingo card, I’d have politely suggested getting your meds checked.

Republicans, meanwhile, came with flamethrowers. Senator Josh Hawley unleashed a string of absurdly basic questions (“What day of the week is it today? What color tie are you wearing? What color is the carpet in front of you?”) before cutting to the legal chase: “Let’s get one thing straight: you don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment. The Supreme Court has been clear for a century and more. Brown v. Walker, 1896. ‘When he has been pardoned, he may not stand upon his privilege’.” If squirming were an Olympic sport, Fauci would have gone home with a gold.

Rand Paul echoed the privilege point, making it clear Fauci was likely in contempt of Congress by invoking 5A, which requires a “reasonable fear of prosecution.” That is not something Fauci can claim. Like, at all. On account of the pardon. But he risked the contempt charge anyway. And the only reason you’d do that is if you knew that you couldn’t possibly answer congressional questioning without perjuring yourself.

Imagine assembling a human shield made up of the sleaziest attorneys on the planet and their best advice is, “Perjury’s a felony. Contempt’s a timeout. Take the timeout.”

The hearing’s knockout blow came from Senator Bernie Moreno, who recalled the story of a woman who was arrested—thanks to Fauci’s mandates—for not wearing a mask at her son’s outdoor football game. He was so incensed by that spectacle that he walked away from the private sector and launched a bid for the U.S. Senate with a singular mission: to one day sit across from Fauci and ask, “Who the f*ck do you think you were for doing that?”

And that’s exactly what he did. On the record. In a Senate hearing.

“It is a total disgrace what you did to this country,” Moreno continued. “And if my Democrat colleagues are standing there defending you, I hope the voters of the United States of America watch the clips of every one of you doting on a guy who was more interested in being a celebrity than saving American people. I will make it my mission to make certain that every single one of those Democrats will see that clip over and over and over again. Because there is no defense of what you did.”

Colorful language aside, he wasn’t wrong. Nor was he done. He asked everyone in the room suffering from pandemic PTSD to stand. A majority rose. Moreno asked Fauci to turn around and acknowledge them. The cockroach refused.

MORENO: “Will you apologize—just apologize—to the people you harmed through your actions? Do you have the dignity to just say you’re sorry?”

FAUCI: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution.”

Fauci’s silence was more incriminating than any answer he could have possibly given. Yes, his sweeping pardon covers any and all “offenses against the United States”—meaning federal charges are dead and the ashes have been scattered. But states can still bring criminal charges, and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has already—within hours of the hearing—announced that his office is launching an investigation into Fauci. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna urged other states to follow suit.

“Dr. ‘Mengele’ Fauci may be protected by a federal pardon but that does not hold against state prosecution and civil lawsuits,” Luna wrote on X. “He is and will go down in history as one of the darkest souls who has ever been in federal government.”

Those suits may never end in a conviction, but they will bring discovery. Yes, we’ve seen the damning diaries. Those were the appetizer course. Discovery is the full-blown buffet—not just Fauci’s own recollections but emails, texts, NIH internal records, exchanges with pharma execs and tech bros, grant docs, the whole messy enchilada. The physical embodiment of The Science™ himself is about to have his professional dirty laundry hung out in the town square. And unlike Fraudci, documents don’t get to plead the Fifth.

I expect he’ll play the same game in a civil deposition—sitting there like Pete the Repeat Parrot reciting his 21-word mantra. The difference at the state level is that in a civil case, the court can instruct the jury that it may draw what’s known as an adverse inference from the silence. Translation: if he pleads the Fifth, the fact-finders get to logically assume his answers would have been damning. And when the only thing standing between you and a conviction is your refusal to say “I didn’t do it,” you’re not protecting yourself. You’re turning yourself in.

In all likelihood and as much as I hate to admit it, Anthony Fauci will die a free man. The calendar isn’t doing him any favors and the system protects its own. But I take comfort in the thought that he’ll be forced to spend whatever years he has left being repeatedly run through the subpoena shredder and watching his legacy be destroyed like a white sofa in a room full of chocolate-covered toddlers.

Spare change goes here. :)

If you want in, an annual subscription works out to about 30 cents a post and comes with a free signed book, which probably isn’t even the worst deal around.

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Over the past eighteen frustrating months, I’d slowly resigned myself to the fact that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had been neutered. I watched our beloved MAHA hero—the Patron Saint of Pure Blood and Beef Tallow—be stymied into submission. The man who became a political pariah by unapologetically insisting that vaccines cause autism, the one who campaigned against community water fluoridation, the one who believes 5G towers are both spying on us and frying our brains… reduced to boasting about removing one of 147 questionable chemicals from breakfast cereal. All while needles are still being plunged into millions of tiny arms every day and our crops are continuously doused with poison.

It wasn’t Bobby’s fault. He tried. But Pharma was too powerful, Big Food was too greedy, and POTUS was too proud of Operation Warp Speed to ever allow the lowly HHS secretary to make any meaningful change. That was the comforting bedtime story I told myself, anyway.

Then yesterday I read a shocking new Wall Street Journal report. It wasn’t a throwaway AP reprint or a quick scoop, either; it ran more than 2,500 words, which is a lot of editorial real estate to waste if you’re just swatting at a crank. I realize that “bombshell” is one of the most overused words in modern journalism—up there with “baseless” and “debunked” and “threat to democracy”—but this one actually qualifies.

According to The Journal, while countless White House political advisors have encouraged Bobby to pump the brakes on the vaccine-autism probe, one extremely prominent individual has been ordering him to step on the gas.

Repeatedly.

Impatiently.

To hear the paper tell it, relentlessly.

Yup.

Trump.

Read more

ALL OF THE PREVIOUSLY PRESENTED EVIDENCE: “Anthony Fauci manufactured the AIDS crisis, tortured beagles in NIH-funded labs for decades, created Covid, allowed it to be unleashed on the planet, ran a criminal conspiracy to destroy federal records and suppress the lab leak narrative, coordinated with Facebook to shape content moderation policies around ‘vaccine misinformation,’ and then lied about all of it under oath. Repeatedly.”

AMERICAN JUSTICE SYSTEM TO DATE: “Godspeed, kind sir. Enjoy your well-earned retirement and this 10-karat gold pen.”

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve allowed myself to hope that I might live long enough to see that weasel nailed to the nearest wall—or at least be publicly humiliated, stripped of his taxpayer-funded pension, relieved of every honorary title, and relegated to signing soiled, second-hand copies of On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service in the back of a smelly thrift store somewhere on Skid Row—I’d be typing this from the breezy rooftop deck of my Parisian pied-à-terre and not my cloffice [closet/office] in central Texas, where the current temperature is hovering just north of one-hundred-and-surface-of-the-sun degrees.

So you’ll forgive me if I didn’t pay much attention to the “Fauci Diaries” posts when they started dropping over the weekend. Especially since they were all dripping in Rand Paul. Don’t get me wrong; Paul’s one of the better senators out there, but he’s already called Fauci in for questioning six times and referred him to the DOJ for criminal prosecution twice. To date, his efforts have produced a grand total of [*checks notes*] zero consequences. Trip me seven times, shame on me.

But when Dr. Death’s face had hijacked my X feed like a certain white Ford Bronco in 1994, I felt obligated to see what all the fuss was about.

To my disappointment, Senator Paul did not discover a leather-bound journal with a brass lock and the words PERSONAL AND PRIVATE, DO NOT READ embossed on the cover in Fauci’s nightstand. But close. The “Fauci Diaries” are a cache of more than 1,000 pages of the unelected bureaucrat’s contemporaneous notes chronicling meetings, media interactions, public appearances, phone calls, White House tensions, and private observations obtained through a Senate investigation spanning the period from December 2019 to December 2022. In short, a meticulously documented paper trail from the same three years the man wielded more influence over American lives than any other public servant [*throws up in mouth*] in history.

You wouldn’t think the highest-paid employee in the federal government would be dumb enough to document his own professional misconduct. And yet there it is—along with facts, figures, and footnotes he’d later deny under oath plus a humiliating index of his raging self-absorption.

If this had been an actual, eighth-grade-style diary, it would have “Anthony + The Media 4EVER” doodled all over it. It turns out during the height of the pandemic, Fauci wasn’t just briefing reporters—he was practically making out with them. Having private dinners at Jake Tapper’s home. Gushing over friendly texts from Dana Bash praising him after congressional spats. Cozying up to Wolf Blitzer, George Stephanopoulos, Maureen Dowd, Anna Wintour, and other powerful media players whose job was to be impartial. It’s sort of like finding out the referee has been partying all season with the team that plays the dirtiest and has never been flagged for a single foul.

The real love story, however, wasn’t Fauci and CNN or Fauci and The New York Times; it was Fauci and Fauci. Even as case counts soared and the death toll climbed into the tens of thousands, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was more obsessed with his own celebrity than the catastrophe unfolding around him.

He marveled that his “national and international fame is explosive,” and insisted that it was “not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked-about person in the country and one of the most recognizable in the world.” He cataloged fawning profiles and TV invitations (including a Dancing with the Stars request) like a fitness influencer tracking likes. “Press still hot and heavy about me. Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me,” he boasted. After visiting America’s Top Model Tyra Banks’ Instagram page, he wrote, “One person said that Tyra was sexy, but that I was even more sexy than she was.” He did. He wrote that down. In the literal sense. Somewhere people could find it. If he wasn’t a murderous bastard, you’d almost feel sorry for the guy.

The diary also reveals several serious conflicts of interest, like Fauci asking so-called scientists to nominate him for awards—many of which came with massive cash prizes—and then turning around and awarding the very same scientists billions in NIAID grants. We’ve also got our honest and upstanding friend describing Covid early on as a “bad flu” with a fatality rate of “0.2 to 0.3%,” which is super awkward because just a month later, he testified before Congress that Covid was “ten times more lethal than the flu.” Then there’s Dr. Flip-Flop bragging about encouraging New York and California to shutter schools—something he routinely and categorically denied having anything to do with.

The most damning entries are among the earliest—before the narratives even hardened. In February of 2020, Fauci gathered top scientists to assess the “novel virus’s” origins. His own notes show genuine uncertainty and serious concern. “Deliberate insertion” in the spike protein was discussed. So was “accidental release.” In his own words, Fauci noted that combo was “the most likely.” Within weeks, however, the wet-market theory wasn’t just the leading explanation, it was the only explanation worthy of polite society. Lab leaks and gain-of-function research were the purview of science deniers and horse-paste aficionados.

All of which isn’t just material for an embarrassing biography; it’s set to be part of cross-examination. Dr. Faucistein will testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this Wednesday about his role in the government’s (read: his own) handling of the pandemic. I’m a tiny bit excited about it, too.

I know. Fauci got that prophylactic hall pass. The five-year federal statute of limitations to indict him for perjury expired in May without so much as a wrist slap. That ship has sailed. And even I can admit that Paul’s track record of prosecution here is less than stellar. But still, this time might actually be different.

(I can’t help it. It’s in my nature.)

Because here’s the thing. Fauci’s previous six grillings were largely voluntary appearances. This time Paul had to subpoena him—meaning the masked midget fought being there. He’s being dragged in against his will, not strolling in for a photo op. That all by its little lonesome is delightfully telling.

Critically, this time around, there’s also hard evidence in the house. Where earlier hearings relied on redacted emails and circumstantial evidence, Congress now has Fauci’s own handwriting contradicting his previous sworn testimony. Paul can hold up the key witness’s diary entry from February 1, 2020—the one where he recorded his concerns about a lab leak—and then play the clip of Fauci calling the lab leak a conspiracy theory. That’s not just awkward, it’s Exhibit A.

Readers will likely recall that back in April, Fauci’s senior advisor David Morens was indicted for concealing and destroying federal records. Prosecutors also allege he conducted business Hillary Clinton-style and solicited grant kickbacks. At the time, Fauci painted his professional relationship with Morens as one you might have with the guy who rotates your tires every 50,000 miles. (It’s a strange thing to admit about your senior advisor—but that’s what he said.) The new documents show Fauci actively arranging private calls with Morens to discuss the grant controversy and Morens telling Fauci that critics were trying to “bring [him] down” over it. In other words, they were coordinating. Strategizing. Privately. Routinely. (Is the punishment for perjury decided, like, by degree? Or is the act itself the crime no matter how many times you commit it, like contempt or conspiracy? Asking for a friend.)

Finally, there’s the autopen pardon. Trump declared it void—which looks bad for the weasel but doesn’t automatically erase the pardon, unfortunately. The DOJ would have to charge Fauci with a crime, at which point a federal judge—not politicians or pundits—would decide whether the pardon actually protects him. So, hardly an arraignment… but not a laminated get-out-of-jail-free card with no expiration date either.

I’m not expecting Fauci to be led out of this week’s hearing in handcuffs, as much as I’d treasure that image for the rest of my days. But I’ll be watching nevertheless. The diaries give lawmakers ammunition they’ve never had before, because they openly contradict countless earlier claims. Every time Fauci lies under oath again—and Paul openly says he expects him to—he hands future prosecutors another priceless gift.

Here’s what I predict: Paul will ask his questions. Fauci will hem and hedge and insist over and over, “Senaduh, I do not ruhcawel.” He’ll lie about how many lives he saved and brag about how many death threats he’s received, as if those two numbers somehow cancel each other out. He’ll claim his diary entries were taken out of context. He’ll argue that the phrase “most likely” does not in fact mean likelier than most. It’ll be frustrating and infuriating and I’m sure I’ll check my calendar—and my pulse—at least once to make sure I’m not in the grips of a stroke or trapped in some bizarre time machine malfunction.

And even if nothing happens on Wednesday—no perjury charge, no dramatic confession, no perp-walk to a paddy wagon idling on Constitution Avenue—one thing’s certain: there’s no going backward from here. The diaries exist. They’re in the public record. Every future hearing, FOIA request, forensic review, and federal investigation gets built on this foundation. The case doesn’t have to be closed this week. It just needs to stay open.

I literally live for your support.

If you missed the film or have forgotten the fable, here’s the gist:

A scorpion wants to cross a wide, swift river. The problem is, he can’t swim. He spots a frog doing frog-things nearby and asks him for a ride to the other side.

“Absolutely not!” the frog replies. “If I let you on my back and you sting me, I’ll never make it across.”

“If I did that,” the wily scorpion explains, “I’d drown, too, because I cannot swim. Therefore stinging you would not be in my best interest.”

The frog—a very nice amphibian who believes all Eumetazoa were created equally and should support one another—considers this reply and finds it sensible enough. He lets the scorpion climb onto his back and begins swimming. Midway across the river, wouldn’t you know it, the %^$&@?! scorpion stings the poor, trusting frog right in the side.

“Why would you do that?” the frog cries out in anguish as the two begin to sink. “Now we’re both going to die!”

“I can’t help it,” the scorpion shrugs. “It’s in my nature.”

For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, the U.S. is the frog in this scenario—the genial, gullible, useful idiot doomed to invite its own death. For a long time, I thought that communism was the scorpion, but it’s not. Communism is the river; the ideological current that’s been washing over the country for decades. The cultural Marxism taking over our schools, eroding our national pride, fostering identity-based division, encouraging rampant cancel culture, and championing the deconstruction of the American family. The environment we’ve been submerged in for so long that we can no longer recognize dangerous predators because “inclusion” and “equity” and “human rights” now trump freedom and safety and even survival. Communism—sorry, Democratic socialism—did that. (If you still think the two aren’t the same thing, I encourage you to do a little homework.)

The scorpion—the thing we’re inviting to climb on top of us so that it can destroy us—is Islam.

It’s not that the river isn’t inherently dangerous. It absolutely is. And the scorpion is venomous on dry land, too. But the frog was built to withstand the river. And if he were carrying the scorpion across the street when he was stung, he might have been in a world of hurt—but he wouldn’t have drowned. It’s the combination of the two that’s ultimately lethal.

Islam and communism are categorically unrelated. One’s a religion, the other’s an economic framework. One promises virgins in paradise and eternal salvation through submission to Allah; the other guarantees free food and material equity. One’s obsessed with the afterlife; the other is all about the class struggle here on earth. But both are totalitarian ideologies that demand complete loyalty. Both hide their sins behind a banner of “social justice.” Both treat dissent not as inconvenient but punishable. Both seek to destroy Western civilization, capitalism, Christianity, and individual freedoms. And both, inexplicably, have been embraced by Democrats.

Which is how we ended up with a communist Muslim as mayor of New York.

This was not an accident. Progressivism scolded us not to judge him by the color of his skin or his religious beliefs. Love him extra-hard, they said, because he’s a minority, and America is a melting pot. We’re all immigrants. Everyone is welcome. The more the merrier!

LADY LIBERTY: “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore...”

ME: “That’s poetic and all, but… wretched refuse? Really? You want the world’s miserable garbage? Its unfortunate trash? Its despicable rubbish? Are you sure about that?”

LADY LIBERTY: “Nobody is going to take that literally.”

VENEZUELA: [empties prisons and sends murderers and rapists to the U.S.]

Because here’s the bitter, you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up irony: the “minority” is quickly becoming the majority. And the ideology we’ve been asked to welcome with open arms is one that would have us beheaded for questioning it. You can spend all day every day dunking on Christianity—calling its followers brainwashed hillbillies, its teachings a tool of the patriarchy—and you’ll get reskeeted on Bluesky and maybe land a guest-host gig on The View. But wonder aloud why a religion that throws gays off buildings and beats women for showing a lock of hair gets a free pass, and you’re an instant Islamophobe. Which begs several questions: Of all the belief systems on earth, who decided that Islam was the one that was beyond criticism? The one that was untouchable, unquestionable, unimpeachable? And why are so many people just accepting it?

Muslims, you’ll notice, use religion to build moral arguments for their progressive agendas. Our faith demands we take care of the poor, you see, so we have no choice but to tax the wealthy to fund public services. We believe property rights are conditional, not absolute, therefore we’ll be seizing your land so we can build affordable housing. The Quran explicitly forbids charging or collecting interest, so we must forgive all student debt immediately. We believe in modesty in public, so we’ll be releasing new art, music, entertainment, and fashion guidelines promptly. Blame Allah—er, God—not us.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the peaceful Muslim family living quietly next door. I’m talking about the ones who see Islam as something they’re obligated to impose, not something they’d be delighted to share. The ones whose worldview is so fundamentally incompatible with our nation’s founding principles that it’s actually staggering. Our ancestors crossed an ocean to escape governments that dictated how, where, and even whether they could worship. They deliberately built a system founded on freedom of speech, of religion, of expression; on the idea that all men are created equal (and later fought to make sure “men” included women) and endowed with the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They didn’t leave England to recreate the same arrangement with a different holy book.

Sharia law, on the other hand, calls for the execution of nonbelievers, apostates, and homosexuals, the taking of concubines from among the conquered, the sanctioning of child marriage, and the complete and permanent subjugation of women. This is not me being hypothetical or hyperbolic. This is the divine, foundational moral code derived from the Prophet Muhammad that shapes every aspect of Muslims’ spiritual, personal, and legal lives. This is the dogma they want governing the entire planet.

Last week, Zohran Mamdani attended prayer services at Al-Kohei Islamic Center in Queens, during which the imam called for “the killing of infidels by your sword.” No, Mamdani did not say the words himself. He also did not condemn or criticize them when the clip went viral. By definition, an infidel is one who is without faith. In this context, it’s anyone who is non-Muslim. I’m no theological scholar, but I’m pretty sure that’s the exact opposite of freedom of religion.

Meanwhile, the people who voted for Mamdani are knitting vagina hats and flying rainbow flags and festooning their lawns with virtue-signing signs that boast, “In this house, no human is illegal. Love is love. Black lives matter. Kindness is everything.” Because they need to prove that they’re not fascist, xenophobic white supremacists like some people.

Well, guess what, sis? If you fail to pledge loyalty to Allah after Islam has officially taken over, here’s what your yard sign is going to say (if you’re allowed to have one at all): “In this house, women are covered. Homosexual love is death. The punishment for theft is amputation. Muslim lives (only) matter. Decapitation is real.”

FAFO will now be LIFO: Leave Islam, Find Out.

(Spoiler: It’s not pretty.)

You protest immigration enforcement. You condemn border walls. You sneer at “Western values.” You march for tolerance. You rally against “fascists.” You vote in Muslim mayors, council members, state representatives—the same people who would (and one day likely will) criminalize blasphemy, view women as property, and sentence you to death for having a same-sex partner.

“NO KINGS!” you cry. Really? How about NO PROPHETS? How about not extending every civic courtesy to a group with a history of conquer-and-convert? How about admitting that we’re the dumb, trusting frog—and that there’s an angry, venomous thing on our back that’s trying to poison everything this country stands for?

It can’t help it. It’s in its nature.

In his bestselling book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Gad Saad shows how prioritizing excessive, unrestrained compassion over logic, self-preservation, and long-term security ultimately leads to civilizational collapse. It’s not just a vague behavioral concept; it’s a reality. Look at Europe, where Muhammad has been the top name for baby boys for three consecutive years. Where rape gangs operated for decades while authorities looked away, because being called racist is apparently worse than letting your sister or your daughter be brutalized. Where immigrants don’t assimilate the way our Irish or Italian ancestors did when they came to America but instead install their own value systems, their own legal structures. Where they self-segregate into areas where local police won’t enter. Where native women become “fair game.” Where the goal is to conquer at all costs; to wipe out anything that isn’t Islam. Where even whispering the word replacement gets you fired, labeled a racist hooligan, or arrested.

Poland saw this coming. They looked at Sweden, France, the UK—the no-go zones, the Sharia courts operating in tandem with so-called civil law—and they said no. Not here. Their policy is zero tolerance. No mass migration from incompatible cultures. No pretending that a seventh-century totalitarian ideology is merely another faith that deserves equal footing. And they’ve avoided both the communist rot and the Islamic takeover that are destroying Western Europe.

The Poles understand something we’ve forgotten: you don’t negotiate with people who want to eliminate you. You don’t open your door to cultures whose holy books command them to wipe you off the map. You don’t let the scorpion crawl onto your back because someone might call you a jerk if you don’t.

Islam is now the fastest-growing religion in Europe. Woke “journalists” routinely try to gaslight the world into thinking this is by choice; that the teachings of Muhammad simply “resonate deeply with the modern European soul.” That’s a direct quote. The reality is that Europeans are not willingly, joyfully converting to Islam. Muslim families are outbreeding natives 2 to 1. (You don’t need a single convert when you’re reproducing at twice the speed; you just need time. Then there are the EU’s open-border policies, which mirror our own. The result isn’t gentle persuasion; it’s flat-out replacement—whether you like the term or not. One side is playing to win; the other was taught that winning is racist.

So here we are.

The answer to all of this is as simple as it is uncomfortable: We need to wake up and start paying attention. We need to speak up, even when it’s awkward. We need to protect what we have, even if we’re called fanatics or bigots or worse. We need to participate in all of the messy parts of politics, from the school boards to the state legislatures. We need to love America more than our enemies hate what it represents, more than Marxists hate our traditions, more than Islamists hate our freedom, and more than globalists hate our borders. They hate those for a reason.

Zohran Mamdani didn’t wake up one morning as mayor of America’s biggest and arguably most important city. He was elected one local race at a time by people who assumed those races didn’t really matter.

They matter. A lot.

If we forget or ignore that, the frog’s mistake won’t be trusting the scorpion—it’ll be insisting, all the way down, that it was the right thing to do.

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Funny how that happens.

The guy was good. Not Trevor Noah-good, but I’d give his performance a solid B for timing and the accordion-hands alone. (Since he was lip-syncing, I can’t judge his voice—but I’m guessing based on enthusiasm the full impression isn’t half bad.)

As a publicity stunt? A-plus, sir.

The poor media must have been in the world’s most agonizing pickle.

EVERY NEWS EDITOR IN AMERICA: “We have a guy viciously trolling Donald Trump at a Georgia rally! This is epic. It’s priceless! Clear the home page.”

NAIVE INTERN: “But… but… he’s talking about Trump Accounts. I thought we were going full blackout on that?”

EVERY NEWS EDITOR IN AMERICA: “Dammit.” [TORMENTED PAUSE] “Run it anyway.”

Here’s the part they accidentally advertised: under POTUS’s eponymous savings plan, every eligible child (read: legal citizen) under 18 in the U.S. can open a Trump Account, and every baby born (again, to legal citizens) during Trump’s second term will get a $1,000 “seed money” bonus to get it rolling. Parents, grandparents, employers, and random future fans of these kids’ TikTok accounts can contribute up to $5,000 a year—which could easily grow into a six-figure nest egg by the time today’s newborns turn eighteen. (If nobody ever added another penny to the seeded accounts, the recipients might triple or quadruple the initial gift—which still isn’t an awful deal, considering it’s free and all.)

According to The New York Times, only about a quarter of eligible newborns have been enrolled—a lapse the Gray Lady attributes to folks not even knowing the accounts exist at all and unhinged lefties intentionally refusing the complimentary cash because it has Trump’s name tied to it. (Liberals! Turning down free stuff! If we renamed unemployment “Trump Assistance,” we could probably wipe out the national debt by Labor Day.)

The irony deserves its own exhibit in the Smithsonian. These are the same people who’ve spent years lecturing everyone about how the poor can’t possibly lift themselves up without government handouts, how every child deserves a fair start, how only monsters would oppose universal programs for kids. And then when someone tries to hand their baby a thousand-dollar check, they rip it up because the name on the envelope gives them the ick.

USA Today addressed the latter in a hilariously earnest opinion piece titled Trump Accounts are free money. Don’t let politics stop you. “The question isn’t whether you support Trump,” writer Nicole Russell attempted to soothe queasy Democrats. “It’s whether you’re willing to let politics stand between your child and a financial head start.” (In other words, plug your nose and swallow that nasty orange pill, a parent’s sacrifice truly knows no bounds.)

The funniest bit is, I only know any of these details because of the random heckler—the one I assume was actually anything but random. After all, you don’t wind up sitting directly behind the commander-in-chief at a televised event on accident. You’re chosen. You’re wearing the FREEDOM shirt or the red tie or the flag hat. You agree to wave the sign. Maybe you joke about that time your MAGA boat parade video went viral. Either way, if you’re front and center when the cameras are rolling, you went through some sort of vetting process. I’d bet my beloved leopard-print bathrobe on it.

Nevertheless, the terminally triggered TDS crowd is convinced DJT just got trolled, bigly. They think a guy tilting his head back and forth and using exaggerated hand gestures is Trump being destroyed on the global stage. It’s embarrassing. Sad-in-all-caps. The beginning of the end.

The red team, on the other hand, thought the whole thing was comedy gold. They called the impressionist a legend. A patriot. A super MAGA fan nerding out. And the delicious part is that Trump himself has made it clear he considers being mimicked a compliment. He starred as his own narcissistic self on The Tonight Show and praised Jimmy Fallon’s portrayal of his mirror reflection. He told the Times during his first presidential campaign that the proliferation of people parodying him was a “great honor”—even when they depict him as cocky or arrogant. “I know the business,” Trump said at the time. “I know the game. I’m not offended.”

POTUS, the progressive press should realize by now, chases the spotlight the way a cat chases a moving red dot: tirelessly. Instinctively. Joyfully. And as much as they loathe him, they can’t stop letting him catch it. It’s almost poetic.

We’re now forty-eight hours out, and the mystery mime has yet to be identified. In an age of internet sleuths who can identify anyone in the world from a single fuzzy shoelace photo, that’s… curious. As of now, we’ve got a guy who got his fifteen minutes of viral fame, a media machine trying to spin it into yet another career-ending humiliation, millions of Americans discovering that Trump Accounts exist, and an attention-loving president trending on X. I think it’s pretty obvious who got the last laugh.

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I guess a lot’s changed over at “America’s Attic” in the last 40-plus years.

Congress figured that out before I did. This week, the House Oversight subcommittee held a hearing titled “Rewriting American History: Examining the Smithsonian’s Efforts to Reshape the Past,” which is a very official and unsubtle way of saying, “What the hell are you people doing over there, anyway?”

The subcommittee—part of the House Oversight’s Delivering on Government Efficiency panel, led by Rep. Tim Burchett—hauled in Smithsonian director Dr. Anthea Hartig to answer that question and more. And while congressional hearings have gotten increasingly circuslike in recent years, this week’s spectacle should have come with clown shoes and juggling pins—somehow managing to cram BDSM, Mickey Mouse, the Founding Fathers, white supremacy, “Latina Power merch,” abortion, body dysmorphia, radical race politics, and transgender activism into a single afternoon. Even the Ringling brothers might have called it a little over the top.

Republicans’ basic argument wasn’t exactly complicated: if taxpayers are footing roughly two-thirds of the Smithsonian’s bill, it’s not crazy to ask why the nation’s history museum feels less like a celebration of our past and more like a semester-long seminar on Why America Is Irredeemably Awful.

The timing wasn’t random. Earlier this month, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a 162-page report titled Saving America’s Story, arguing that the Smithsonian has drifted from reflecting America’s history to reimagining it through the trendy filter of oppression, identity politics, and social justice. Among other things, the report revealed that every single museum exhibit, no matter the topic, must be linked to at least one of seven “core issues of the day:”

• race and identity

• gender and sexuality

• environmental change

• immigration and migrations

• economic inequality

• technological change

• nationalism and globalism

If Rachel Maddow were a musician, that lineup would essentially be her Greatest Hits album. But sure, the Smithsonian is an entirely nonpartisan organization with zero political agenda. Okay.

“The museum does not take sides in America’s political debates,” Hartig testified, explaining that the goal is simply to broaden the story by including voices that have been overlooked. Which would have been comforting—if lawmakers hadn’t then spent the next several hours pulling up exhibits with all the political neutrality of a Pride parade float.

Rep. Nancy Mace displayed images from exhibits featuring sexually graphic material—including photos of nude young women and “a chrome and rubber crotch harness designed for sadomasochism”—and asked a fairly obvious question: is this really appropriate for kids visiting the National Museum of American History? Dancing around the question like Muhammad Ali in his prime, Hartig explained that some exhibits are temporary, some aren’t designed for children, and parents should ultimately decide what their kids see.

Yes, Ms. Hartig, they should. They also shouldn’t stumble across a fetish exhibit in a federally funded history museum and find themselves having to have the world’s most awkward conversation, in public, with their eight-year-olds.

Mace wasn’t done. She zeroed in on the “Girlhood (It’s Complicated)” exhibit, which ran from 2020 to 2023 and featured a diary from a 13-year-old wrestling with body dysmorphia and gender confusion. The exhibit also informed visitors—children included—that “gender isn’t always revealed at birth.” The congresswoman demanded to know whether that belonged in a family museum. When Hartig deflected, Mace cut through the fog with a question so direct it required a PhD to dodge: “When was your gender revealed?”

And that was just the warm-up. An extra-spicy Rep. Brandon Gill raised concerns about materials tied to the MASS Action Toolkit—a widely used framework that suggests traits like “objectivity,” “individualism,” and even “being polite” are features of “white supremacy culture.” You read that correctly: the Smithsonian’s apparatus apparently includes training materials that teach museum staff—and by extension, the public—that being polite and objective might mean you’re a closet Neo-Nazi bigot.

Hartig was quick to explain that the Smithsonian didn’t create the toolkit—which would be like a bank robber insisting he didn’t build the shotgun he’s waving in the teller’s face. If you’re using a weapon, its origin story is sort of irrelevant.

Things got especially awkward in the gift shop. Rep. Brandon Gill pointed to merchandise like “Latina Power” mugs and tote bags sold through Smithsonian channels, questioning whether a taxpayer-supported museum should be in the business of pushing identity-based slogans at all. What he didn’t ask—and I would have—was if identity pride is so important to the institution, where are the I ♥ THE CONSTITUTION hoodies? The ABE LINCOLN FAN CLUB tees? The MAGA hats? The DON’T TREAD ON ME stickers? Where’s the line for inclusivity anyway? And why is it always somewhere just above patriot?

In reality, this wasn’t about the merch. It was about the fact that an institution created to chronicle America’s past has quietly become another activist institution promoting left-wing messaging—including support for abortion and replacing the traditional Flag Day celebration with Pride Month programming—masquerading as cultural preservation.

But the deeper rot, the thing that should genuinely anger any American who walks through those doors expecting to see their country’s story, is what’s missing. The White House report found that the National Museum of American History—the United States of America’s official recordkeeper—had no exhibit on George Washington. Or Thomas Jefferson. Or Alexander Hamilton. Or the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, or the Second Continental Congress. The museum only scrambled to open a 250th anniversary exhibit this past May after the criticism started rolling in. That’s not expanding the narrative. That’s erasing the main characters and calling it “inclusion.”

The report also flagged educational programming designed to “indoctrinate” teachers and students, illegal-alien activism dressed up as historical inquiry, and a pervasive DEI framework that appears to govern everything from what goes on the walls to who gets hired to curate it. Adding new voices is one thing. Firing the original cast and replacing them with a blue-haired HR-mandated sensitivity band is something else entirely.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that America should pretend drag shows, identity politics, climate protests, or debates over gender never existed. They did. They do. They’re part of our heritage, just like slavery, segregation, Japanese internment, and Kamala Harris as an actual presidential contender are. But do we really have to pretend that every chapter of our existence deserves equal billing on the highlight reel?

Unsurprisingly, critics denounced the White House report and subsequent hearing as an attempt to force Trump’s politics onto a treasured national institution. But that objection only makes sense if you believe the Smithsonian has been politically neutral all along. Judging by the exhibits Congress presented this week, that’s a pretty hard case to make.

The Smithsonian can insist the shift is simply a broader, more inclusive telling of American history. But when lawmakers have to ask why a family gallery features BDSM imagery, why educational materials flirt with labeling politeness as oppression, why a 13-year-old’s private gender confusion journal is presented as educational content for children, and why identity politics gets more exhibition space in “America’s Museum” than the Founding Fathers themselves, it’s not unreasonable for taxpayers to wonder whether the Smithsonian is preserving history—or trying to rewrite it.

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If you want in, an annual subscription works out to about 30 cents a post and comes with a free signed book, which probably isn’t even the worst deal around.

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There are, roughly speaking, two kinds of people who would demand millions of dollars from the sitting president for emotional distress: those who have been illegally and catastrophically wronged by the highest office in the land, and convicted murderers who are upset because everyone keeps calling them convicted murderers. Brandon Ortiz-Vite is not the first kind.

Ortiz-Vite is a 27-year-old illegal immigrant currently living rent-free in a Michigan prison after pleading guilty to the second-degree murder of his girlfriend, 25-year-old Ruby Garcia. He’d been deported to Mexico in 2020 following a drunk-driving arrest but somehow—one can only guess, really—he made his way back into the United States. Four years later, in the midst of a heated argument with his significant other, Ortiz-Vite responded the way any man who would later claim to be the victim of reputational harm would: he shot Garcia in the head, dumped her body along a Grand Rapids highway, and drove off in her car.

Instead of using his time in the slammer to find God or work on his cross-stitch skills, Ortiz-Vite has been busily preparing a federal lawsuit. The inmate, who I will again remind gentle readers is a self-confessed killer, claims that Donald Trump caused him immeasurable pain and suffering, for which he would like a tidy $75.5 million in compensation. And it’s not just boatloads of money Ortiz-Vite is seeking. In fact, the details of his demands are so spectacularly ballsy I had to read the whole thing twice to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.

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So naturally, the World Cup final was blaring loudly as we cooked dinner on Sunday. When Spain clinched it, the broadcast went full cinematic melodrama: agonizing close-ups of crushed Argentine players staring into the middle distance like someone had just put down the team dog, cut with jubilant Spaniards screaming, sobbing, and launching themselves into a delirious dogpile. The stadium went wild. Strangers hugged each other like long-lost relatives. When Trump strode onto the field to hand out the hardware, several Spanish players broke into the Trump dance. It was sweet and wholesome and exactly what I imagine international sporting events were designed to do: bring people together.

Apparently, I did not see what I saw.

Within minutes of Spain lifting the World Cup trophy, the headlines were locked and loaded: “Trump booed by World Cup final crowd.” “Most universally hated president in history.” “Not a mixed reaction.”

The weirdest bit is that for the most part, the soundtrack to the “MASSIVE BOOS for Trump at World Cup” lineup doesn’t sound like an overwhelming chorus of disappointment. It sounds like… stadium noise. Clapping. Whistling. Stomping. Shouting. Music. The sort of sounds you’d expect in the immediate aftermath of a hard-won victory from a crowd that’s half euphoric, half heartbroken.

According to the internet, I also need to get my ears checked.

“I am sorry but seeing MAGA cope after Trump was mercilessly booed at FIFA is the funniest thing on the planet,” X user @CalltoActivism wrote (profile tagline: “Founded to expose MAGA corruption, defend democracy, and uplift those fighting for truth and justice.”). “They are denying he was booed when at the end of this clip it is abundantly obvious the entire world hates Donald Trump’s f***ing guts.”

Do I doubt there were people at that game expressing audible disdain for Donald Trump? Not for one skinny minute. There is one snippet making the media rounds where the displeasure is undeniable. But when the entire press corps latches onto the same cherry-picked phone clip featuring one random dude and his five friends yelling into the void, that’s not news; it’s the same tired narrative spin the Fourth Estate’s been putting on POTUS since 2016.

Meanwhile, dozens of broadcasts—ones with actual professional audio rigs covering the whole venue—didn’t seem to pick up some deafening, universal cascade of hatred. What they picked up was a mixed crowd at a sporting event reacting to a man who inspires devotion and disgust in roughly equal measure, followed by the winning team celebrating.

THE ENTIRE MEDIA INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: “80,000 people loathe Trump!”

Rodri, the captain of the Spanish national team, shook Trump’s hand warmly. Multiple players grinned and posed with POTUS. Maybe they were genuinely excited to meet him. Maybe they were all faking it. Maybe they were just world champions who would’ve grinned next to a parking meter at that particular moment. Maybe Argentine fans were booing Spain. Maybe half the stadium was booing Trump. Maybe it was just five guys with excellent lung capacity. Maybe the Spanish team was honoring the American president with their little dance moves (and later, their Make Spain Great Again hats). Maybe they were mocking him. Maybe they were just a bunch of ecstatic athletes being goofy after winning the biggest match of their lives. Maybe they don’t think about Donald Trump at all. Maybe all of these things contain an element of truth. Most likely, they do. I have no way of knowing how much—and neither do the people confidently informing us that every decibel and dance move emanating from that stadium was a referendum on Donald Trump.

Because here’s the thing about crowd noise at an 80,000-seat stadium: it’s never one thing. Never has been. And it’s never just about one clip. But when it comes to the reporting, it’s the same formula every time: find the most hostile angle, crop out the rest, declare consensus. Because “mixed reaction at sporting event” doesn’t give New York Times readers the affirmation—and the dopamine fix—that’s guaranteed with their subscription. So here we are.

The funniest part isn’t the booing or the cheering. It’s the desperation. The hysteria. The manufactured certainty. These outlets and commentators need viewers to believe that the world hates Trump as much as they do. That the verdict is in. That the planet has spoken. That this time—finally—the public rejection is total and undeniable. As if convincing Trump supporters that all of humankind is pointing and laughing might finally shame them into admitting they voted wrong—and make damn sure they don’t do it again.

And then there’s the team photo—the one that Spain cropped or edited or Photoshopped Trump out of (depending on who you listen to). Imagine getting so giddy over your own exaggerated “TRUMP IS A PLANETARY ABOMINATION” narrative that you have to pretend not wanting a guy with no connection to the team in your group victory picture is some grand statement of global revulsion.

The media, alas, will never stop mediaing. A stadium packed with 80,000 people produced cheers, jeers, whistles, whines, applause, arguments, celebrations, sore losers, triumphant winners, and scores of spectators behaving as if they had personally just won or lost the World Cup. The press took all of that messy, contradictory humanity, found the twelve seconds it liked best, and handed down a unanimous verdict on behalf of the planet.

My take? If you need one angry guy with an iPhone in the nosebleed seats to prove the entire world agrees with you, I’m pretty sure you’re the one coping.

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Want to know why a substance you’ve probably been told belongs somewhere between antifreeze and rat poison on the “things you absolutely should not ingest” list has become one of the most sought-after—and fiercely suppressed—medical treatments in the world? Tune in to hear my co-author Dr. Pierre Kory discussing our latest book, The War on Chlorine Dioxide, with the lovely Dr. Tara Perry.