I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to write about the woman in the first place, let alone turn her into a recurring character. I have boundaries. Delicate sensibilities. Dozens of open tabs across multiple browsers.

Unfortunately, while I was attempting to move on with my life, “Repeal the 19th” started trending on X.

Yes, that 19th. As in the Amendment that decided women could be trusted near a ballot box. (Trending right beneath it: Gloria Steinem, dead at 92. My opinions around the feminist icon may have shifted dramatically over the years, but I’ll always appreciate cosmic irony.)

Apparently the Clancy trial has gone so spectacularly off the rails that a nontrivial number of Americans—including an alarming percentage who were assigned female at birth—are openly declaring that women no longer deserve the right to participate in democracy.

I’m not typically one to say “I told you so,” but I super extra bloody freaking told you so with a cherry on top and a commemorative plaque.

Earlier this week, as a spirited group of cheerleaders was staging an actual pep rally for a woman who admitted to murdering her children, I pointed out that insisting that motherhood sometimes turns us into hormonally hijacked drones incapable of moral discernment may not be doing the sisterhood any favors. I worried it would backfire.

It’s been less than 72 hours.

The repealers boldly believe—without having set foot in this particular courtroom or hearing even six seconds of testimony, mind you—that the Clancy case is cut and dried. They’re outraged that the nine women and three men (but mostly the nine women) sitting on that jury haven’t returned the Unquestionably Guilty AF verdict they ordered.

The thing is, those nine women (and three men) actually sat through the entire trial. They heard weeks of testimony. They saw mountains of evidence. And unlike the rest of us, they don’t get to casually declare that Lindsay Clancy absolutely premeditated the whole thing because they saw one convincing Instagram reel, or that she was obviously set up by her husband because he changed his undershirt the night of the murders.

They have to be sure.

REPEALERS: “These women are taking forever to convict her! Must be the hormones. Clearly they’re not fit to vote.”

ME: “If everyone could stop proving my point for five entire minutes, that’d be great.”

According to the internet, the appropriate punishment for nine women exercising an inconvenient amount of caution is to disenfranchise the other 130 million of us. You know, just like how we rounded up and arrested every Caucasian guy named Chad after an overwhelmingly white male jury acquitted four LAPD officers in the brutal beating of Rodney King.

Oh, wait. That didn’t happen. Maybe we could extend women the same courtesy.

Here’s the part that appears to have escaped approximately the entire internet: the jury isn’t being asked to decide whether Lindsay Clancy killed her children. She’s already admitted that. Jurors have not been given a simple pop quiz: “Did she or did she not confess? Have you even been paying attention?”

(Trust me, I know that a confession isn’t proof of guilt; please see my entire Tyler Robinson Body of Work as evidence. And thanks to , I went down the Patrick-actually-did-it rabbit hole yesterday and may never fully recover. But again, this jury’s job is not to look for alternate suspects. It’s to decide the fate of the one who confessed.)

The central question is whether Lindsay Clancy can be held legally responsible for the acts she admitted to. Jurors are weighing several possible verdicts, including murder, manslaughter, acquittal, and lack of criminal responsibility. In order to return a murder verdict, they must agree that the prosecution proved beyond a reasonable doubt that she understood what she was doing and knew it was wrong.

You may think the answer is obvious. The internet thinks the answer is obvious. But unlike the nine women and three men currently being held responsible for Lindsay Clancy’s fate as well as the collapse of female suffrage, the internet didn’t sit through six weeks of legal proceedings. @RogueLou18 certainly didn’t. But that’s not stopping her—yes, her—from entering her verdict into the public record.

And now somehow, because a dozen insiders have taken longer than the average netizen considers appropriate to answer an extraordinarily narrow question about one woman’s mental state on one horrifying night three years ago, millions of American women are being told that the right to engage in political decision-making was a bridge too far.

That escalated efficiently.

Perhaps the problem is semantics. Because Clancy’s official plea is not guilty by reason of insanity. With respect to our judicial system at large, how is that even on the menu? Anyone who kills their children is insane. Hard stop. How did we get to did the thing + crazy = not guilty? Where’s the guilty by reason of insanity option? Maybe the legal oxymoron is what’s holding the whole thing up. I could see that being a sticking point.

And while we’re at the rhetorical-question stage of this saga, can you imagine some dude on trial for—oh, I don’t know—sawing through his co-worker’s sternum and ripping out his heart during a fax machine spat? “Look, Bob just wasn’t himself that day. He’d been working around the clock, his testosterone was dangerously low, he might’ve popped a benzo or two at breakfast, and his wife was really badgering him about the basement remodel. What he needs right now is compassion.”

No, what Bob needs is an orange jumpsuit and a Bible. The end. (And what Bob surely doesn’t have is a men’s auxiliary marching outside the courthouse in matching WE HEART BOB hoodies. Wanna bet?)

Of course, it’s not just the jury that’s on trial here: because a subset of females has spent weeks publicly auditioning for the role of Lindsay Clancy’s emotional-support defense team, the conclusion becomes that women as a whole are too unstable for civic participation. Which is one hell of a class-action penalty, but here we are.

TRANS WOMEN: “On second thought, we’re actually men.”

The irony is that the Clancy fangirls practically gift-wrapped the case against women, arguing for weeks that we deserve special compassion due to the unfortunate fact that hormones, medications, anxiety, depression, and the relentless demands of motherhood can override the part of our brains responsible for not killing other people. And now, the very same “we can’t help it if we’re emotional” argument has folks volunteering to rewind the clock back to pre-Susan B. Anthony days.

If the goal was to weaponize our own biology against us, well done, ladies. No notes.

“I will never give up my right to vote,” wrote @honeyybomb on X. “But I still understand why people are screaming to repeal the 19th. If the murder of your own children can be treated as the predictable outcome of female emotion, the next argument is already written. Pedophiles could not help their urges. Violent men had trauma. Impulse becomes destiny and judgment becomes cruelty.”

Honeyybomb is not wrong.

I will never give up my right to vote, either. To the ladies of Kappa Kappa Clancy: if you’re fond of yours, you might consider retiring the argument that women are perfectly competent adults right up until we murder someone in a drug-induced hormonal rage. The rest of you can put the Constitution back where you found it.

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Today the U.S. is in an actual war with our childhood BFF—a trade war, but still—involving billions of dollars and levels of pettiness previously confined to HOA meetings. Our Treasury Secretary is openly roasting Canada’s military forces, our president has renamed Lake Ontario Lake America, and Maple Leaf Prime Minister Mark Carney is demanding—in actual seriousness—that America “stop doing memes.”

NARRATOR: “Alas, America did not, in fact, stop doing memes.”

Welcome to modern-day diplomacy, where Uncle Sam is the enormous eighth-grader holding Canada’s backpack over its head as Canada insists it doesn’t even like the stupid backpack while also trying repeatedly and unsuccessfully to snatch it back.

Teddy Roosevelt is rolling over in his grave.

This didn’t start last month and it’s not about bacon or a dead-named lake or an AI-generated cartoon. Canada is just one stop on Trump’s much bigger tariff tour—the one based on his hit single, “For Far Too Long America Has Been Getting Ripped Off by Every Country in the Entire World (Including the One That Shares Our Longest Border, Buys a Ton of Our Stuff, and Has Spent Most of Its History Apologizing When We Bump Into Them).” It was yugely popular at home, but overseas sales have been disappointing, TBH.

The tour actually kicked off during Trump’s first term, with steel and aluminum tariffs that hit Canada alongside everybody else. He’s been workshopping the setlist ever since—renegotiating NAFTA into the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and slapping import taxes on washing machines, solar panels, and anything else that arrived here speaking metric.

It wasn’t a game so much as a philosophy: trade deficits aren’t just numbers—they’re proof you’re getting ripped off. And tariffs are how you protect American industry by making it more expensive for everyone else to screw us. It’s not the craziest theory ever floated.

When Trump roared back for an encore in 2025, he began layering new tariffs onto Canadian goods under the banner of border security and fentanyl. Which is a little like calling the cops on your neighbor’s golden retriever for pooping too close to your hydrangeas: Canada’s contribution to the American fentanyl supply is so microscopic it barely registers. But “I’m imposing tariffs because I’ve been a tariff guy since 1988 and finally have the leverage” plays worse on Truth Social than “foreign poison is killing your kids.” So fentanyl it was.

What followed was an exhausting 18-month game of economic Whac-A-Mole: Trump imposed tariffs, Canada retaliated. Trump piled on more tariffs, Canada retaliated in a different font. Courts swatted some down, shrugged at others. Trump went rummaging through the federal statute drawer for another legal lever, somebody got offended, negotiations stalled, resumed, and stalled again. All that was left was for one side to start blowing leaves across the border.

Somewhere in there, Trump suggested Canada could solve the whole problem by becoming America’s 51st state—a proposal about as popular among Canadians as rabid cats and parking police. By this summer, even the USMCA—the trade agreement Trump negotiated and celebrated during his first term—was back on the operating table. Apparently to POTUS, the only thing better than negotiating a historic trade deal is doing it twice. And then making a meme about it.

The devolution of North American trade relations reached its ridiculous pinnacle last month when Trump—frustrated that Canadian negotiators had the audacity to keep negotiating—slapped 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian imports. Canada responded with retaliatory tariffs on more than 700 categories of American goods—including Wisconsin Cheddar, Pennsylvania steel, and Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Because nothing says “we’re serious” like making middle-aged dads pay more for their weekend cosplay.

Here’s the part where the casual news consumer might be thinking, “Look at Canada, getting all sassy and fighting back. You go, girl!” And they are. Except this is hardly a fair fight. The U.S. economy is roughly $30 trillion; Canada’s is about $2 trillion. Nearly three-quarters of Canadian exports go to America, while barely one percent of American output winds up over our northern border. In other words, we can afford to lose Canada as a customer a whole lot more than Canada can afford to lose us.

Meanwhile, Carney is basically behaving like a toddler refusing to eat dinner because you took away his juice box. Eventually he’s going to get hungry and by then, the chicken nuggets will be cold. And unfortunately for Carney, Trump has the keys to the kitchen.

So because Trump is a bully or to retaliate for Canada’s relentless retaliation—or maybe because the Gulf of America rebrand was such a hit—POTUS signed an executive order directing his administration to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. The EO makes the new name official for federal purposes, although Canada and the rest of humanity remain free to call it whatever they’d like.

Apple and Google Maps have already made the change for U.S. users, and Canada responded the way only Canada could: by erecting a tasteful lakeside sign that reads “Lake Ontario Now and Always” in English and French.

Take *that*, Mr. Trump! Eh, please?

When asked about the spiraling diplomatic deterioration, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent blamed the Canadian Prime Minister for the circus. “I mean, we’re not at war with Canada,” Bessent added. “How are we going to be at war with Canada? What, they’re going to take their two submarines from the Edmonton Mall and sic them on us?”

And there, right beneath the hoagie joke, lies the problem for Carney. He can’t out-tariff Trump. He can’t out-threaten him. He can’t outspend him. And God knows he can’t out-troll him. All he can do is keep swinging away and hope Trump gets bored holding the backpack.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think the Harleys are going to fix this.

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P.S. Why My Generation Isn’t a Bunch of Wankers (a short story): It’s 1975. There are four siblings and exactly one glow-in-the-dark sticky hand in that box of Trix. The rule is “no fishing.” The sticky hand has to organically fall into your bowl. If it doesn’t and you cry, your mom will give you something to cry about. The end.

I love what I do and put my whole heart and soul into it. I hate having to beg for support, but that’s the nature of this model. Whaddyagonnado?

FWIW, an annual subscription works out to about 30 cents a post and comes with a free signed book. If you can’t swing it or you aren’t sure if you like me that much, free content will resume tomorrow. :)

Up until [*checks calendar*] literally today, I had zero interest in writing about the Lindsay Clancy trial, probably for the same reason Dave Barry never wrote about Ted Bundy in the 1980s. When your calling is to find the funny, a mom murdering her three young kids isn’t exactly where you go hunting for punchlines.

But somewhere along the way, this particular killer found a fandom—a sprawling, shockingly cultish one—and that’s a level of cultural insanity I can work with.

The quick, absent-of-gore recap for avoiders like me: In 2023, Clancy strangled her children before jumping out a second-story window in an apparent suicide attempt. She survived but was left paralyzed. She has admitted to the murders. This was never a whodunit. The question jurors are being asked to decide is whether she understood the horror of what she was doing as she was doing it.

Her massive-and-growing fan club has already reached a unanimous verdict: Lindsay Clancy is the actual victim here.

It’s an extraordinarily compassionate position—and one with some pretty disastrous implications for women.

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If you were an alien who’d been accidentally abandoned on Earth and were getting all of your info from X, you’d think this mysterious public trust thing was some rare, priceless 15th-century vase that had been gifted to the HHS Secretary—who promptly spit his gum into it and then dropkicked it down the Capitol steps.

“Over the last two decades, Kennedy has been perhaps the single most impactful individual in eroding public trust in the MMR vaccine, directly correlating with the resurgence of measles outbreaks,” wrote @anga-weimer on X.

“We have surpassed 2,500 confirmed cases of measles per the CDC, the highest in 35 years,” @army_Siskind raged. “Kennedy and Trump are vaccine quacks who are putting our children in danger.”

Never mind that Kennedy has spent four decades fighting to get poisons out of our water, air, food, and bodies. Forget that Shapiro is a deeply pharma-conflicted shill who has every incentive to maximize vaccine uptake, or that he announced two “measles-associated deaths” while withholding virtually every meaningful detail about either one, falsely implied that state officials had rubber-stamped his version of events, and tried to blame Kennedy for the carnage before the local coroner nuked his narrative.

No, it’s Kennedy—the guy out there demanding truth and transparency and gold-standard science—who is destroying trust in public health. Sure, he’s been HHS Secretary for less than two years, but somehow he gets full credit for seven decades of CDC, FDA, and NIH malpractice. How generous.

In other news, officials have decided to blame the oceanographer who found the Titanic for sinking it.

What’s almost impressively delusional is the insinuation that Kennedy somehow inherited a pristine reservoir of public trust and then personally poisoned it. Even a quick rummage through the receipts proves the health bureaucracy has been working overtime on that project all by itself for years. Pennsylvania alone deserves a plaque.

Back in 2020, the nonpartisan newsroom Spotlight PA published a story with the spectacularly prescient headline “Health officials failed to safeguard trust in Pa.’s coronavirus data, sowing confusion.” Its review found that the state health department had repeatedly published unvetted Covid data, quietly corrected errors without acknowledging them, and released nursing-home numbers so ludicrous that one 35-bed facility somehow managed to rack up 40 infections.

2020 was a weird year for math.

At one point, the state debuted a new dashboard that showed Covid testing magically soaring from roughly 12,000 tests one day to over 26,000 the next. Alert reporters started asking questions. Somebody summoned a calculator. It turned out the actual number was 9,410.

“Complexities and shifts should be expected,” explained Bob Gradeck, manager of the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research. “It’s not surprising that the numbers change.” [Ed: Screws fall out all the time. The world’s an imperfect place.]

Mind you, this was five full years before Kennedy set foot on HHS property.

So, just so we’re all on the same page, the script here is:

HEALTH AUTHORITIES: [publish loads of pure BS; get busted]

ALSO HEALTH AUTHORITIES: “RFK is undermining trust in us!”

You genuinely can’t make this stuff up. It’s pure Looney Tunes logic. It’s Yosemite Sam rigging the piano to explode and then blowing himself up with it. It’s Sylvester winding up in his own Tweety trap. It’s Wile E. Coyote painting a tunnel on a rock and blaming Road Runner when he can’t run through it.

The media, naturally, are more than happy to hoist the anvil. Just yesterday, The New Yorker dropped a nearly 10,000-word cautionary tale about vaccine skepticism that deserves an entire column unto itself for its comical casting alone. (Spoiler: the villain in the tale is a West Virginia MAHA mom who buys organic ketchup, worries about chemtrails, once paid a voodoo healer in Bitcoin, and refused to vaccinate her children. The hero is her ex-husband, a dude who chain-smokes Marlboro Black Reds, drives a Harley, likes to feed the kids McDonald’s “even though—or possibly because—it drove [his ex-wife] crazy,” is known online as “Kneepatch” to his 50,000-plus motorcycle-enthusiast Facebook followers, and showed up to the New Yorker interview wearing a F*CK YOUR MASK t-shirt. Think Grease but darker. Oh, and make Danny Zuko the voice of reason.)

After wandering through a maze of postpartum anxiety, elderberry syrup, and the sinister world of beige-clad children living in chemical-free “agrihoods,” the magazine gets around to informing readers that pediatricians have watched “in horror” as Kennedy’s HHS has “weakened the public’s faith in vaccination.”

And Road Runner weakened Wile E. Coyote’s faith in the ACME Corporation.

“New parents are also increasingly declining a Vitamin K injection for their infants,” The New Yorker wrote somberly. “The shot has been standard for newborns since 1961.”

You know what else used to be standard for newborns, New Yorker? Dropping silver nitrate into their eyeballs and stealing them away from their mothers to sleep in a communal nursery. Perhaps “we’ve been doing it since 1961” isn’t exactly the unimpeachable safety endorsement you think it is.

“It can be hard to know whom to trust,” the piece concludes, after spending 9,500 words helpfully narrowing the field down to Everyone But Bobby.

The part the vaccine evangelists seem unable to grasp is that Kennedy is not, despite their furious claims to the contrary, using his political power to sow distrust. The distrust sowed itself—after decades of being fertilized with lies, coverups, and institutional gaslighting. And Kennedy only has political power at all because the federal health establishment did an exemplary job torching its own credibility.

Let’s look at just the tip of the timeline:

• 2020–2023: Public health officials tell you masks don’t work, then they work, then they work when they’re this one specific medically superior type, then cloth masks are fine, then doubling them up isn’t a bad idea, then actually they’re all useless—whoops, sorry. They tell you natural immunity doesn’t count and that vaccines prevent infection and transmission, wait maybe just infection; crap, neither—but get them anyway. They censor dissenting physicians on social media, pull a six-foot distancing rule out of literal thin air, and call anyone who so much as mutters the phrase lab leak a racist conspiracy theorist before admitting it’s not just a viable hypothesis but a likely one.

• 2024: Public health officials act genuinely confused that trust has evaporated.

• 2025: Bobby Kennedy gets put in charge of HHS.

• 2026: Public health officials conclude that Kennedy traveled backward through time and destroyed confidence in the establishment.

Kennedy didn’t bring the wrecking ball. He just stopped pretending the building wasn’t condemned. He’s standing in the self-made rubble of institutional credibility saying, “Hey guys, there’s a crack in the foundation, the roof is caving in, and that wall over there is actively on fire.” And the response from the building manager is basically, “How dare you undermine public confidence in construction!”

But sure. Keep blaming the guy with the clipboard for the collapse.

If the acronym-industrial complex wants people to trust it again, it might try the radical, untested intervention of telling the truth before a reporter forces it to, admitting mistakes without calling them “complexities,” and remembering that the goal of science is to survive questions—not censor them.

Just a thought.

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In a display of audacious evil, the Empire State has fined three tiny Amish schools a combined $118,000 for allowing unvaccinated children to sit in single-room schoolhouses with other unvaccinated children. The schools—Dygert Road, Pleasant View, and Shady Lane—have accumulated $52,000, $46,000 and $20,000 in penalties, respectively. Under New York law, each breach carries a fine of up to $2,000, and the state considers each day an unvaccinated child attends school a separate violation. In this case, however, officials graciously calculated the first two schools’ penalties using just one day of violations per child. (If they were counting every day, ten pureblood kids showing up for a single school week could theoretically add another $100,000 to the tab.)

While the sane half of the twittersphere is ready to draw and quarter Governor Kathy Hochul over the whole thing, in reality she inherited this bit of authoritarian lunacy from Andrew Cuomo. In 2019, in the wake of a measles outbreak in an Orthodox Jewish community, then-Governor Cuomo signed a law completely eliminating New York’s religious exemption from mandatory childhood vaccinations. The law applies not only to public schools but to private and parochial schools as well—all the way down to learning facilities with the infrastructure of a broom closet. And while Hochul didn’t invent this particular wheel, her administration is more than happy to run over the Amish with it.

The three schools in question aren’t sprawling state campuses where kids are being bussed in from fourteen zip codes. These are mostly one-room, Little House on the Prairie-style classrooms serving a dozen or two kids from the surrounding community. They sit on private land. They get no public funding. The families keep to themselves. They aren’t asking taxpayers to pay for their healthcare, their kick scooters, or their beard oil. All they’re asking is to be left alone.

Apparently, this is an impossible ask.

When the fines were first imposed, the Amish sued. They lost in federal district court. Then they lost at the Second Circuit. Then the Supreme Court vacated that judgment and told the appeals court to reconsider in light of its recent religious-liberty precedent. So the Second Circuit reviewed the case and basically said “Yeah, still no.”

One has to wonder what grave threat a self-sufficient, self-isolated, charmingly old-timey community presents to the region at large. I mean, if the rest of the state is all juiced up on the full glorious regime of immune-boosting jabs, how are the Amish a danger even if they hitch up their buggies, breach containment, and storm the closest Target?

Oh, right.

They’re the control group.

Not a perfect one, to be fair. You can’t randomly assign 10,000 babies to Group A: iPads, Doritos, SSRIs, and fluorescent-lit cubicles, and 10,000 to Group B: goats, gardens, manual labor, and no TikTok, and then definitively declare it’s the ultra-processed cheese-flavored chips that’s doing in Group A. (Side note: I would absolutely read that study.)

But America has been running something remarkably close to a real-world case study for generations.

On one side, you have the overwhelming majority of Americans who aren’t Amish. We spend more on “health care” than any other wealthy nation. We test obsessively. We medicate relentlessly. We have sub-subspecialists. Apps track our sleep while our watches tell us we’re stressed, which sends our cortisol screaming and pushes our blood pressure through the roof. (Don’t worry, there’s a drug for that!) We are the most medically supervised collection of human specimens in all of history. And we are profoundly, chronically sick.

Tucked among us, across quiet stretches of rural America, are the Amish. They rarely rely on conventional medical care. They have dramatically lower vaccination rates and take exponentially fewer prescription drugs. Their children spend their days around questionable creek water, barnyard bacteria, and an impressive assortment of animal feces, and the moms aren’t chasing them around with hand sanitizer and Clorox wipes. They walk, they work, they grow food, and they have ridiculously tight communities. Inconveniently, despite all of this, they refuse to collapse.

In fact, the rate of diabetes in the Amish is 3.3 percent versus over 13 percent nationally. Hypertension is 12.7 percent versus 37.8 percent. High cholesterol, 26.2 percent versus 35.7 percent. Cancer among Amish adults is 40 percent lower than the surrounding population.

And that’s just the grownups. Asthma hits 5.2 percent of Amish children versus 8.4 percent of their peers. Hay fever? 0.6 compared to 12.7 percent—meaning the average American kid is twenty times more likely to spend spring chained to a box of Kleenex than some Amish young’un who’s been rolling in hay all day. Allergic sensitization of any kind: 7.2 percent in the off-grid crowd, while roughly half of the iPad generation is hyperreacting to something before kindergarten. And while 10-15 percent of American kids are scratching themselves raw at any given moment, eczema in the Amish is practically a rounding error.

But the big, fat elephant in the exam room is the autism spectrum. One in 31 American children is now labeled autistic—up from 1 in 10,000 in the 1970s. Meanwhile, physicians with decades of experience treating largely unvaccinated Amish populations report that regressive autism is functionally nonexistent in the horse-and-buggy cohort.

The late Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, whose Chicago-area practice cared for over 30,000 children—thousands of them never vaccinated—stated plainly: “I don't think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines.” Dr. Paul Thomas, whose Oregon clinic oversees more than 15,000 patients, reports zero new autism cases among 1,176 children who followed his delayed vaccination protocol. Among the Amish of Middlefield, Ohio, Dr. Heng Wang—medical director of the DDC Clinic for Special Needs Children, which treats all special-needs children in that community—found a rate of 1 in 15,000 [not a typo], compared to 1 in 166 nationally at the time. The one autistic child he identified had, you will not be shocked to learn, received routine immunizations.

Obviously, as much as anyone might like to, we can’t automatically attribute every outcome on either side to the childhood vaccine schedule. The Amish are unlike the rest of America in approximately eleventy billion ways: diet, exercise, environmental exposures, social cohesion, technology use, alcohol consumption, health-care dependency, genetics, and certainly the number of hours per day spent arguing with strangers named @TrustTheScienceMD on X.

But the very dangerous question the Amish raise merely by existing is this: if America’s hyper-medicalized lifestyle is the key to superior health, shouldn’t the people opting out of it be an absolute freaking disaster?

The problem is, they’re not. Far from it. And the establishment’s answer is to try to force-vaccinate them until they’re as sick, miserable, and dependent on the system as the rest of us.

The frustratingly absurd part is when you consider the folks allowed to roam America from sea to shining sea without ever rolling up their sleeves. The CDC explicitly states that refugees are not required to receive routine vaccinations before entering the U.S. Millions of ordinary foreign visitors can land at JFK, grab a train into the city, and visit museums and shops and restaurants—licking every available surface should they so choose—without first demonstrating they’ve complied with New York’s school vaccine requirements. Yet little Amos can’t sit beside little Levi in a privately funded one-room schoolhouse surrounded only by other kids whose parents share the same religious convictions.

Make. It. Make. Sense.

The families behind the three Amish schools being fined into submission are preparing to ask SCOTUS to hear Miller v. McDonald, their challenge to the state’s refusal to grant them a religious exemption from school vaccine mandates. Their attorneys—a group that includes vaccine badass Aaron Siri—say if the Court won’t intervene, some of New York’s roughly 25,000 Amish may round up their buggies and skedaddle.

“We, as a peace loving religious group, are sincerely sorry that we are causing the state a prob [sic],” lead plaintiff Ezra Wengerd wrote—by hand, of course. “Our Almighty God wants us to fully put our faith and trust in Him. Which is in conflict to put our trust in vaccines. We are also commanded to not be conformed to this world.”

And you can’t blame them (although you are free to feel righteously furious that they’re being run off their own land and forced to deal with our corrupt institutions at all). What you can be concerned about is the part where their most likely destination is… Pennsylvania.

In case Jenna’s Side readers missed the drama, PA Governor Josh Shapiro recently announced his state’s first two measles deaths in 35 years—and then went absolutely ballistic with the news, blaming RFK Jr. for sowing vaccine “confusion” before refusing Kennedy’s offer of federal assistance and declaring the deaths absolutely preventable. All while, naturally, urging mass vaccination.

Unfortunately for Shapiro, the Lancaster County coroner came forward and announced that his office had recorded no deaths from measles at all. It was aware of just one death with measles: a newborn who died tragically from a ruptured spleen (who later tested positive for measles) and was too young to have received the MMR shot in the first place.

The governor promptly apologized, corrected the record, and sent Bobby a fruit basket.

Hahahahahaha just kidding. Faced with a coroner’s report that directly contradicted his headline-grabbing claims, Shapiro whipped out the Classic Covid Cause-of-Death Shell Game™ and shifted the linguistic goalposts from “measles deaths” to “measles-associated deaths.” Which is well-known public-health speak for a person who tested positive for measles died of something else but calling it that wouldn’t be beneficial to our agenda.

At this point, it’s only a matter of time until we’re arguing whether the patient died with an overdue library book or of an overdue library book.

As for the second fatality, what we know as of this reporting is [*checks notes*] virtually nothing. Not the deceased’s age, underlying conditions, clinical course, or cause of death. The state has released zero information—with the exception that the individual was unvaccinated, naturally. It’s a weird single bit of information to possess, and a pretty remarkable level of opacity for an administration simultaneously demanding that the public regard the announcement as conclusive proof of a nationwide public-health emergency caused by one Cabinet secretary’s brain-worm injury.

In case you missed the plot, it took the local coroner exactly four minutes to blow the whistle on Shapiro’s carefully worded presser. Then the brilliant 2nd Smartest Guy in the World did an impressive deep dive into the governor’s cozy relationship with pharma and turned up some curious nuggets. It seems Pennsylvania manufactures more than half of all vaccines administered in the U.S., and Shapiro’s administration has backed more than $5.5 billion in “life sciences” investments. Just two months before his breathless press conference, Shapiro personally announced a $10.6 million grant to vaccine giant Sanofi Pasteur. Oh, and Lancaster County is home to the massive GSK vaccine plant that supplies vaccines to one in four Americans. In other words, saying the governor’s got some skin in the vaccine game is like saying a toddler has a passive interest in an unattended sheet cake.

While Shapiro has been busy peddling measles fear, his administration is simultaneously stealth-rewriting the state’s health code to grant itself permanent, near-absolute authoritarian powers. The terrifying 502-page proposal would effectively claw back many of the sweeping COVID-era powers Pennsylvania voters stripped from the governor in 2021, allowing unaccountable bureaucrats to enter private homes and schools without a warrant, interrogate students in private, and maintain a statewide vaccine database. The latter includes detailed information about individual schools across Pennsylvania—including rates of religious, philosophical, and medical exemptions at each. Nothing like having a handy map of where all the pesky vaccine-refusers are and all the legal muscle in the world to make them regret it.

All of which makes the theatricality over two measles-adjacent deaths easier to understand—albeit harder to excuse. Consider that seasonal flu kills anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 Americans in a typical year. At the low end, that’s 200 per state (and PA, ranking fifth in the U.S. in population, would expect far more). Now imagine the governor holding a press conference over two people who tested positive for influenza after dying in a car crash. Someone would demand a psych evaluation.

But the public-health apparatus has done a brilliant job swaddling measles in polio blankets and persuading people that we’re one inoculation season away from The Plague 2.0—even though lots of us are old enough to remember when your parents sent you to measles parties on purpose and an official diagnosis meant a few days of staying home and watching The Price is Right in your pajamas.

The Pennsylvania measles “outbreak” is precisely why the Amish fight matters beyond a few single-teacher schools in rural New York. Once public health decides it knows what’s best for any segment of the population, facts are negotiable, definitions are adjustable, and your deeply held religious convictions are about as binding as the dress code at Walmart.

The fate of the Amish lawsuit is anyone’s guess at this point. But if America can’t find room for the Amish—when cities are enthusiastically rolling out prayer mats for noonday Muslim worship—exactly how robust is our vaunted religious liberty anyway?

Maybe SCOTUS will decline to hear the case, and New York will succeed in exporting 25,000 peaceful, taxpaying citizens who build things, grow food, repair machinery, and don’t require a referral for a therapist who specializes in climate grief.

Or maybe the Court will finally ask the obvious question: What compelling public purpose is served by financially annihilating a handful of cloistered religious schools whose students are, by design, living and learning entirely among people who share the same beliefs and accept the same risks?

Either way, well done, New York. Really. You’ve got crumbling infrastructure, crushing taxes, and guys wandering your flagship city in their birthday suits, and you decide public menace number one is the peaceful, preternaturally healthy community begging to be left alone.

Thank God someone’s finally figured out how to keep that place safe.

feed the invisible horses

WARNING/PSA/RED ALERT/NOT A PAYWALL:

The subject of today’s Substack is perhaps one of the most profane humans to walk the planet. I’ve sanitized his words here out of respect for delicate eyeballs, but do not click any links to this man’s quotes unless you’re prepared to hear language that would raise eyebrows in federal prison. #YouWereWarned

If you don’t spend eight hours a day trolling MSNBC, TikTok, Twitch, and the darkest corners of progressive social media—first of all, God bless you—you may have no idea who Hasan Piker is.

Allow me to ruin your morning.

Piker is a 35-year-old self-described Marxist who makes his living streaming political commentary to some three million Twitch followers and saying the sorts of things that would get a normal person escorted out of brunch before the mimosas even showed up. He is, depending on who you ask, the Left’s Joe Rogan, the socialist Andrew Tate, or what would happen if Howard Stern and Andrew Dice Clay had a baby, sent him to communist summer camp, and gave him a webcam.

Except that last bit is wildly unfair to Stern and Clay, both of whom look like lovely gentlemen you might invite to Sunday supper at Grandma’s in comparison.

Piker was born in New Jersey in 1991, but his family moved almost immediately back to Turkey, where he grew up in Ankara and Istanbul. (Today he calls himself a “cultural Muslim,” which is the religious equivalent of a sober drunk or part-time cannibal.) He returned to the U.S. for college, then moved to LA to work for The Young Turks, a progressive media company co-founded by his uncle, Cenk Uygur. Eventually Piker struck it out on his own, built an enormous audience on Twitch, and became fabulously wealthy explaining to young Americans why capitalism sucks.

No, really.

According to a nauseatingly fawning recent profile in Rolling Stone, a subscription to Piker’s Twitch channel costs six bucks a month. Which means that with nearly 50,000 subscribers, he’s pulling in somewhere north of $2 million a year. He lives in LA, drives a Mercedes, and has an assistant. The magazine notes—with no detectable irony—that “for a Marxist, Piker’s job is about as pure capitalist as it gets.”

“Piker started his Twitch channel in 2018,” Rolling Stone explained. “His first broadcast had a whopping 35 viewers. But gradually he built an audience, and by 2020 he was successful enough to stream full time. Then the pandemic hit, and Piker was stuck in his one-bedroom apartment, depressed and alone. He’d stream for 14 hours a day just to have some connection; he spent 42 percent of the entire year on camera [emphasis theirs; poor, poor Piker].”

Despite Rolling Stone’s tender portrait, Piker has called Mao Zedong “one of the great leaders of this world.” He believes there is “a lot we can learn” from the Chinese Communist Party. During one particularly colorful monologue, he fantasized about seeing American streets soaked in “red capitalist blood.” He’s stated that he is “pro stealing from big corporations because they steal from their workers.” He told his livestream followers, “if you cared about Medicare fraud, you would kill Rick Scott.” He’s called Hezbollah’s flag his favorite flag (can we be done yet?) and argued that if the murderous militant group qualifies as a terrorist organization, then “America is the “top terrorist organization.”

For a guy who openly hates this country, Piker seems remarkably uninterested in a one-way ticket back to Turkey, unfortunately.

And then there’s the Middle East. Piker has declared that “it doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th” and insisted that “Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel.” When former Obama speechwriter and Pod Save America host Jon Favreau confronted him with that incendiary statement, Piker was presented with the perfect opportunity to clarify, contextualize, reconsider, retreat, moonwalk, fake his own death, or otherwise put some distance between himself and his partiality toward the terrorist organization responsible for the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

“I stand by that,” he said.

Which, okay. If you make your money by saying inflammatory things, I suppose doubling down is sort of like asking for a Ko-Fi donation.

You might assume that a millionaire Marxist who’s said America deserved 9/11, gushes over Mao, waxes poetic about Hamas and Hezbollah, and swoons at the thought of rivers of capitalist blood would occupy some distant, embarrassing fringe of American politics.

Oh, you lovable little optimist.

Piker has appeared alongside AOC, Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ro Khanna. More recently, he moved beyond internet rabble-rousing and into actual electoral politics, campaigning for socialist and progressive candidates around the country. Then came Michigan, where he stumped repeatedly for Abdul El-Sayed, the Muslim Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate.

This wasn’t Piker randomly wandering into a campaign rally and photobombing the candidate. El-Sayed aggressively courted Piker’s enormous, loyal young audience. Piker campaigned with him at Michigan State and the University of Michigan and attended a Detroit pool party for content creators just before the primary. El-Sayed’s calculation was clear: Piker has three million followers—and those are people Dems need to reach.

It worked. El-Sayed won the primary. Thanks to Hasan Piker, who would very much like you to know—with Rolling Stone’s generous help—that he’s just a hardworking dude who, surely just like you, occasionally sticks his designer-clad foot in his very foul mouth.

“I stream for eight hours a day, seven days a week,” Piker told Rolling Stone, reportedly with a shrug. “I’m gonna say some dumb sh*t. But at the end of the day, we’re talking about more than 10,000 hours of content, and they’ve got like four quotes they keep hammering on to be like, ‘This guy’s a dangerous radical.’ It’s very silly.”

Okay, fine. Let’s not make a big deal out of that whole “America deserved 9/11” thing. Or the “9/11 2 is going to be so sick” comment. Or the suggestion that someone give Saudi Arabia a nuke to “wipe America off the map.” Or the delightful “we’re going to keep bringing immigrants into the country, on purpose, just so they can BLEEP your sister and then maybe even your daughter.” Or the fact that he’s advocated for killing landlords in cold, angry blood for the grave sin of property ownership.

Obviously, it’s the unhinged right-wingers jumping on a handful of harmless “dumb sh*t” quotes—unfairly cherry-picked from 10,000 hours of perfectly normal Marxist content—that’s the real problem here. Don’t I feel silly.

The mind-blowing part of this story is that none of those things caused his high-profile left-wing pals to clutch even a single pearl—until he finally found the thing that would turn him into political plutonium.

“If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action,” Piker said during an August 20 livestream. “Not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”

And just like that, Democrats discovered standards. If distancing yourself from a politically radioactive shock jock were a competitive sport, Piker’s former bureaucratic buddies just formed their own pro team.

Hakeem Jeffries called Piker’s remarks “dangerous and antisemitic.” Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss, who is Jewish, announced that he would “not be lectured by a California podcaster” about what Michigan’s Jewish community should believe. Michigan Rep. Hillary Scholten called him a “hack who thrives on hate, shock, and awe” and said she won’t campaign with El-Sayed as long as he continues to associate with Piker. And El-Sayed himself—who practically stapled himself to Piker on the campaign trail—now says there are no plans for the two to team up again.

Suddenly, the Left’s Joe Rogan is the Left’s drunk uncle nobody remembers inviting to Thanksgiving.

After rape threats, making googly eyes at Hezbollah, and “America deserved 9/11,” evidently this was the bridge too far. Folks will say it’s because Israel is untouchable, but Piker had already called Orthodox Jews “inbred,” compared Israelis to the KKK, and described Zionism as a “mental illness.” He’s been accused of antisemitism for years. Was it because his warning sounded suspiciously like a threat—stop supporting Israel or somebody’s coming for you? Or maybe it was the fact that he’d basically just told his millions of followers that violence against American Jews wasn’t just inevitable—but that when the day comes, they’ll only have themselves to blame.

Whatever unspoken line Piker finally crossed (I’m pretty sure it was that last one), Rolling Stone clearly did not see it coming. The rag’s positively Hallmarkian profile of the guy—published all of three weeks ago—has already aged in dog years.

“Unlike his alpha-bro online persona, in real life [Piker] is gentle, reserved, and a little bit awkward,” Rolling Stone gushed. “He has a tendency to fiddle nervously with his fingernails and lapels. He spends a minute by the bar chatting with Hacks star and fan of the podcast Hannah Einbinder, then grabs a Sapporo and hits the back patio to talk to a friend about Graham Platner’s implosion. After the screening, he congratulates the guys and takes a few selfies with fans. But when everyone else heads for the afterparty, he bows out. ‘I gotta head home,’ he says, checking his watch. ‘It’s almost my bedtime. I have to stream in the morning.’”

ROLLING STONE: Meet Hasan: the bashful, misunderstood millionaire Marxist who loves his mom, fiddles adorably in interviews, and is diligent about sleep hygiene!

It would all be precious if Piker were just another internet loudmouth screaming into the void. He isn’t. Millions of young people tune in to hear him explain the world, and Democrat politicians have spent years legitimizing him in exchange for access to those eyeballs. They can backpedal all they want now, but dumping the guy at this stage in the game is like kicking someone out of the wedding after he’s punched the groom, robbed the bartender at knifepoint, slept with the mother-of-the-bride, and eaten the cake with his hands.

The man is an anti-capitalist radical. An America-hating terrorist fanboy. A walking grab bag of every alt-left position Democrats used to pretend only existed on Fox News. And apparently, I’m silly for noticing.

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Feast your eyes on Alaska, friends, where one of the most consequential Senate races in the country has turned into a political live-action remake of Who’s On First.

The man currently holding Alaska’s Senate seat is Dan S. Sullivan, a Republican who’s represented the “land of the noonday moon” since 2015. He’s running for a third term against Democrat Mary Peltola, the former congresswoman who famously beat Sarah “Drill, Baby, Drill” Palin in 2022 and is now coming hard for his job.

How hard? In last week’s open primary, Peltola finished on top with roughly 48 percent of the vote. Sullivan came in second with about 43 percent. Democrats are now salivating over Alaska as a possible Senate pickup.

Anyway, this is her.

This is where the story starts to require a whiteboard and maybe some hard liquor. Because clearly one Dan Sullivan wasn’t enough, enter “Republican” Dan J. Sullivan, a 70-year-old retired teacher and former Forest Service employee from Petersburg, Alaska, home to approximately twelve people and a moose. This Dan Sullivan has never held elected office. In fact, until let’s call it extremely recently, Dan J. was politically homeless. But then out of the blue, I guess he just got a random urge to change his party affiliation from undeclared to GOP. Two days later, he threw his hat in the U.S. Senate ring.

Alaska election officials—in a rare show of bureaucratic sanity—found his declared candidacy sufficiently sketchy to actually throw him off the ballot, concluding that his run appeared designed “to confuse or mislead voters.” You know things have gone sideways when the government agency responsible for election integrity issues a formal ruling of OH, COME ON.

Dan Sullivan 2.0 insisted that he was absolutely serious and had every right to run for office. Inconveniently for election officials, the Alaska Supreme Court agreed—and ordered his suspiciously familiar name be put back on the ballot, arguing that the state couldn’t invoke a “good-faith candidacy” requirement that didn’t exist just to remove an unwanted but otherwise eligible contender.

The federal government, however, apparently still had questions. The DOJ opened its own investigation into whether there was more to the second Sullivan’s candidacy than mere coincidence, with possible wire fraud and conspiracy in the mix. Grand jury subpoenas have been issued. No charges have been filed.

Despite the clown show, this week the man now dubbed “Decoy Dan” advanced past the open primary for a spot on the ticket, “worsening a muddled GOP situation that could boost Dems,” as the New York Post put it. Which means Alaskans would be wise not to sleepwalk through their ballots if they care which Dan Sullivan they’re actually voting for.

The issue isn’t just that Decoy Dan is a newly minted conservative. If you squint just a microscopic bit, DD could also stand for disguised Democrat. According to the New York Times—who sent a reporter and a photographer into the frozen wilds to interview the guy—Decoy Dan pulled the lever for the donkey party candidate in the last three presidential elections and voted for Peltola in her two bids for the House. He has never supported the Republican who shares his name. He is, however, politically active—having attended both Trump protests and No Kings rallies.

I am not even making that up.

Oh, and a Fox News Digital review of the campaign earlier this year revealed that Amber Lee, a Democrat consultant, had helped author some of Decoy Dan’s campaign materials.

But he’s not a progressive plant sent in to flip a Senate seat by sowing mass confusion, don’t be ridiculous. In fact, the Times dutifully devoted a paragraph to Dan J.’s claims that “he was running in good faith as a moderate Republican and not a secret Democrat.” So you can put your tinfoil hat back on the shelf.

As if the slapstick weren’t Golden Globe-worthy enough already, Anchorage’s former mayor—a man literally, legitimately, legally named Dan A. Sullivan—stepped forward to endorse the incumbent Senator who shares his name.

So yes, Dan A. Sullivan is backing Dan S. Sullivan in his race against Dan J. Sullivan. At this point, Alaska should issue a complimentary middle-initial decoder ring with every ballot.

The Republican Party does not find any of this remotely amusing.

One furious X user called it “the oldest ballot scam in the book—the classic name-confusion trick!” (Apparently I’ve been reading the wrong ballot-scam literature.) “The left will stop at nothing to cheat!” raged another. (Okay, she’s not wrong.) “The Senate race in Alaska is what a rigged election looks like,” The Federalist declared.

“Decoy Dan is a fraudster propped up by Democrat Party operatives and support,” insisted The Federalist. “Make no mistake, the entire purpose of this man’s candidacy is to siphon votes away from Sen. Sullivan by confusing voters. He even initially tried to register with the Alaska Division of Elections as “Dan S. Sullivan,” adopting the incumbent’s middle initial so that the two names would appear identical on the ballot. He then created a website that was markedly similar (in format, color scheme, etc.) to Sen. Sullivan’s reelection site.”

Coincidences happen! People are human! I mean, I could accidentally misspell my own name and put a photo of Jenny McCarthy on the cover of my next book! Everyone makes mistakes!

Trump is warning Alaskans to vote for the “real” Dan Sullivan. Incumbent Sullivan has called his name doppelgänger a “sham candidate.” Rival Peltola insists she was never even in aisle seven. Also she has no idea how that Senate seat got in her purse.

And before anyone says Come on, Jenna, nobody is going to accidentally vote for the wrong guy, I’d like to introduce you to the American electorate. We put warning labels on hair dryers reminding consumers not to use them while sleeping. We tell toilet brush-buyers that these tools really shouldn’t be used for personal hygiene. We print “warning: may contain nuts” on nuts. I’m not betting democracy on the same general public that necessitates caution labels like those in the first place.

And the thing is, Decoy Dan doesn’t have to win. He doesn’t even need to come close. In a genuinely competitive race, the concern is simply whether enough voters intending to support the incumbent will accidentally bubble in the wrong Dan. Dumber things have certainly happened. America once spent weeks examining tiny bits of ballot confetti to determine who would be president.

Godspeed, Alaska. And for the love of literacy, don’t phone this one in.

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POTUS got a little help from SCOTUS on mail-in voting this week, and you need a Ph.D. in knot theory to untangle what actually went down.

It’s the triple negative that got me.

Let’s reverse-engineer this thing:

Trump: “We need to tighten the rules around mail-in ballots.” [Restrict.]

Twenty-three mostly blue states plus D.C. choking on their Bud Light: “YOU CAN’T DO THAT!” [Sue.]

Federal Judge: “They’re right.” [Block.]

Trump: “I haven’t even done anything yet!” [Shrug.]

SCOTUS: “Hahaha, actually, you’re right. They sued too soon. You win—for now.” [Lift.]

What the lift does is clear one legal obstacle from the Trump administration’s path as it tries to rope the United States Postal Service into the mail-in voting circus. If the plan survives the remaining hurdles, the Post Office would no longer merely deliver ballots. It would become an actual checkpoint in the whole messy mail-ballot chain of custody.

And Democrats, as you might be aware, are deathly allergic to chain of custody.

MS NOW called the SCOTUS ruling a “shocking voter suppression win.” New York Attorney General Letitia James went with “painful setback.” In a dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson insisted that the injunction “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro condemned Trump’s “illegal attempt to restrict mail-in voting.”

The democracy-threatening issue, it turns out, is so sinister that Amazon has been doing it to your packages for years.

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To say we loved Target would be like saying Sydney Sweeney photographs well. There was no other retail outlet like it on Earth—one where the girls would behave like joyful, obedient angels for hours (while I grabbed a Frappuccino, some grout cleaner, a year’s worth of fish oil, and maybe a cute new workout set) simply for the promise of picking a treat from the dollar bin on the way out.

Imagine my delight when we moved to Austin and the nearest Target was seven minutes up the road. We could swing by on a whim and not even have to worry if everyone had emptied their bladders or I’d packed enough Goldfish crackers to survive a nuclear winter.

And then Target had to go and ruin everything. When the Mothership took to draping itself in Pride displays, stocking “trans rights” tees for toddlers, and gleefully hawking chest binders and packing underwear [undergarments that, according to Forbes, “allow a person to wear a phallic object or padding to create the appearance of having a bulge at the front of their pants”] and tuck-friendly swimsuits [um, the opposite], conservatives like me were forced to make the painful choice between our principles and really cute throw pillows.

The principles won in a landslide.

But now, in a plot twist nobody saw coming, consumers are being urged—by the head of one of the largest labor unions in the country—to boycott Target for [*checks notes*] not having an opinion about ICE.

Not for supporting ICE, mind you. Not for donating a fleet of buses to help round up illegals. Not for hanging “WE ❤️ DEPORTATION” posters in its stores or putting “ROUND ‘EM UP” mugs on an endcap between the Stanley cups and the seasonal candles. Target’s crime was refusing to take a loud, furious, official anti-ICE stance. Evidently, silence isn’t just violence anymore; it’s worse.

It’s MAGA.

“Target’s corporate headquarters are in Minneapolis, but it has remained silent as ICE’s terror and brutality campaign has spread across the country,” said American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten in a recorded statement. “Target could have used its considerable clout to demand an end to these inhumane tactics.”

What about the poverty, homelessness, hunger, addiction, and raging mental illness crises in this country? The poisons they’re spraying on our food and in our skies? The human trafficking? The missing children? The overrun animal shelters? Nah. The greatest moral imperative of our time is stopping the people trying to stop the people who break our laws. (No really, think about that.) Don’t you just love it when liberals decide how everyone else should use their cash, connections, or “considerable clout?”

Weingarten then cheerfully announced the union’s new “nationwide campaign” called Shop Smart, Support Working Families. The splashy campaign website comes complete with a handy interactive map that “helps educators and families shop for school supplies at local stores and outlets that respect Labor Rights, instead of at Target.”

Approved retailers within a 100-mile radius of my house include Costco and Macy’s. That’s it. Just the two. Presumably, the criteria for inclusion on this list amount to “be a store, don’t be Target, maybe sell school supplies but not mandatory?” Anyway, I hope Ms. Malone’s second-grade students appreciate her clearance-rack summer sandals!

Maybe it’s just me, but America’s second-largest teachers’ union would appear to have far more pressing matters on its plate—like the fact that American children are currently getting their asses kicked by fractions and chapter books. In a recent nationwide assessment, just 23 percent of New Mexico fourth-graders were proficient in math and 20 percent in reading. (Yes, that means four out of five nine-year-olds couldn’t clear the reading proficiency bar, and no, those are not typos.) California was hardly a beacon of academic excellence, clocking in with an abysmal 35 and 28 percent, respectively. Even in Massachusetts—the highest-performing state in the country—only 51 percent of its fourth-graders took home a proficiency trophy in math and 40 percent in reading. Perhaps before Weingarten tackles Target’s insufficiently enthusiastic position on federal immigration enforcement, somebody could teach the kids how to calculate what percentage of them can read the boycott signs.

Then again, the AFT has somehow found time over the years to support Trump’s impeachment inquiry, sue his administration, campaign to mobilize students to support communist rallies, and now, apparently, dictate where Americans should buy their Trapper Keepers. Clearly “improving academic performance” is not part of the union’s mission statement.

“We gave Target ample time to stand with the communities in which they operate and help their neighbors, but its silence about Federal Immigration abuses has been deafening,” Weingarten said in a separate statement. “We wrote letters, passed resolutions and reached out to management in good faith but have yet to see any meaningful movement.”

So let me get this straight: The American Federation of Teachers is launching a nationwide campaign to protect labor rights by urging its 1.8 million members to stick it to Target? I’m no Wall Street analyst, but that seems like a bad play for a group that’s heavily invested in Target stock.

Yes, according to the AFT’s own letter to Target, its members’ pension funds directly own 6.79 million shares of Target stock. Meaning the same teachers Randi is redirecting over to Kroger may be relying on Target’s financial performance to fund their golden years. It’s a little like protecting your kitchen garden by pouring Roundup on half the vegetables.

But Weingarten knows the union’s power. Teachers spend an average of $895 out of pocket on classroom supplies, which adds up to roughly $3.4 billion a year across the country… every year. Previous boycotts have wiped billions from Target’s market value. In other words, “Nice little publicly traded company you’ve got there. Be a shame if 1.8 million regulars stopped shopping there.”

That strong-arming has not gone unnoticed. Last month, Sen. Eric Schmitt asked the Labor Department to investigate the union’s “woke investment practices.” Now, Heritage Foundation researcher Corey DeAngelis is calling for a federal investigation into whether the AFT is improperly using its pension-fund influence to pressure corporations into adopting its preferred political positions. (Is it using it? No question. But improperly? Remains to be seen. SMH.) And all of this comes just weeks after a House committee demanded answers about whether AFT used union dues to produce and promote Weingarten’s book—Why Fascists Fear Teachers, a title that practically writes its own punchline—while Weingarten herself was busy cashing royalty checks.

It would appear that there’s no portion of a teacher’s financial life beyond the reach of Randi Weingarten’s considerable clout. But arguably, the money intended to keep her members in Werther’s Originals and orthopedic shoes someday deserves special scrutiny. Imagine discovering that the folks looking out for your nest egg are simultaneously trying to murder one of the birds helping feather that nest. It’s a move that unexpectedly makes Target’s merchandising team look like the adults in the room.

Meanwhile, Tar-zhay has found itself in quite the political pickle: The company tried being loudly, obnoxiously progressive and got hammered by the right. It tried saying nothing, and got hammered by the left. Apparently the only safe corporate strategy anymore is to shut off the lights, hide behind the customer-service counter, and hope nobody asks for a statement on Gaza.

After dutifully avoiding the red-cart corral for three years, I think I may be due for a Target run. I mean, if Randi Weingarten doesn’t want me shopping there, it almost feels like an obligation. (I don’t make the boycott rules, people. I just try to keep up with them.)

Grab your reusable bags, patriots. We shop at dawn.

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Nobody called her a stay-at-home mom. It was just… mom.

Then came women’s lib, second-wave feminism, and Ms. Magazine. Suddenly, full-time motherhood wasn’t a calling but a trap; a product of the ultra-misogynistic patriarchy. Women were encouraged to put themselves—not their demanding spouses or their annoying spawn—first for a change. Get a job! Follow your dreams! Make your own money! YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL (*just not simultaneously)! And tell that husband of yours he can do his own damn laundry. Accidentally get yourself knocked up? That’s what abortion is for, silly!

Fifty years and fifty million exhausted working moms later, an intrepid tribe of women haven’t just rediscovered old-fashioned homemaking; they’ve embraced it. They’ve rebranded it. Some of them are even monetizing it.

They’re called “tradwives”—social media-speak for traditional, stay-at-home married women—and they’re the Internet’s hottest unlikely subculture. They bake bread from scratch, homeschool their kids, grow vegetables, make elaborate meals, sometimes keep chickens, and appear to regard folding towels as something other than a human-rights violation. They wear aprons. Their toddlers are barefoot. Some of them are out there churning butter and making grain-mill tutorials.

Naturally, there’s a faction of very vocal feminazis who are profoundly triggered by all of this voluntary domesticity. “Tradwives are just the new trophy wives,” insists one. “Because I’m better than you, I choose to make my children fresh bread every day,” mocks another. One particularly profane TikTok user calls tradwives “losers with no ambition, no aspirations, no dreams of their own that don’t revolve around centering a man or around depending on a man for the rest of their lives.” Oh, and their husbands are clearly all a bunch of miserable chauvinists who are going to trade them in for shiny new 28-year-old models the minute their uteruses shrivel up.

My two dearly departed grandmothers are deeply offended.

To be fair, the movement isn’t exactly crawling with blue-haired AOC fans. Some of its biggest influencers lean hard into Christian values, traditional gender roles, and the whole husband-as-head-of-household thing. But there’s also a considerably less biblical version that amounts to: We had children, we can afford for one of us to stay home, and we’d rather have their mother raising them than a nanny or the local Quality Learing Center. Take politics completely off the table and there are plenty of moms who want to be home with their kids—and plenty of dads who can afford that arrangement and sincerely want it, too.

Nevertheless, perhaps in an effort to save at least a few clueless young women from a life of submission, domestic drudgery, and way too much time with their own children, USA TODAY would like these ladies to know that the “tradwife life” being romanticized all over TikTok is definitely not as dreamy as it looks.

Their big exposé centers around two “former tradwives” who, inconveniently, have some touching things to say about the experience. Stacey Aquino, 53, married at 19, had her first child at 21, and stayed home to raise six children while her husband built a successful career. She says she loved raising her kids and readily acknowledges that having her relentless presence “meant a lot to them.” Enitza Templeton, 43, married at 26 and had four children. She admits her husband didn’t force her to give up a career and that the life she had was the one she believed she wanted at the time.

Now, however, both women are sounding the alarm, warning the next generation of homemakers to think twice before throwing themselves into the world of scratch-cooking and DIY laundry detergent.

Why, you might ask?

Their marriages imploded. Both of them. And when they woke up one day with the dreaded divorcée title, the two women separately realized they had no education, no workplace skills, no résumés, no independent income, and no clue about their own family finances.

Like, at all.

“There was a lot of money,” Aquino explains. “But I didn’t know where any of it was.”

Ladies, I believe we’ve located the source of the problem—and it’s not the laundry basket or the chicken coop. The issue isn’t women choosing bread-making over breadwinning. It’s women entering any marriage—traditional, modern, corporate, crunchy, gay, common-law, or otherwise—without access to cash, the password to the bank accounts, or a contingency plan.

Because if your husband earns enough money that your family can function without a second full-time paycheck, it makes absolutely no difference whether you spend your days homeschooling sixteen children, running charity luncheons, painting landscapes, or collecting seashells and selling them on Etsy. This isn’t about tradwifery; it’s about not being fiscally ignorant in your marriage.

In her emotional, now-viral video, Templeton seems to deeply regret the schooling, career, and life sacrifices she made in order to be present for her offspring—sacrifices one has to wonder whether she’d be lamenting if her marriage had survived and she’d never had to learn what Indeed is.

“The one thing you’re not accounting for when you decide to not go to college, not get an education, and just jump straight into marriage and having children—and as many as you can—is that those children grow up and make friends and you have to hang out with their little friends’ families,” the teary voice of experience explains.

Apparently, the real danger of motherhood is invariably being trapped at a backyard barbecue with people who discuss their careers.

“Please,” Templeton begs hopeful homemakers. “Before you throw everything you’ve got into a family, think of all the situations you could find yourself in one day, and maybe that will help you understand the value of an education and a life independent and outside of a bunch of kids.”

These former tradwives aren’t wrong that complete dependence can be dangerous—especially when the husband controls all the money, discourages education or work, isolates his wife, or leaves her without an exit ramp. But those are warnings about unequal power and poor planning—not indictments of every family with one full-time parent.

Believe me, I’m fully on board with the have-a-life-outside-of-your-progeny plan. I may no longer be a huge fan of higher education, but hell yeah learn a new skill, take a few online courses, haunt the library, download Duolingo. Being helpless or defenseless is never a goal. I don’t care if you volunteer at the local animal shelter or are the President of Petco, for the love of kibble and compound interest, get friendly with your family budget. Know what you own. Know what you owe. Have an idea or two about what you’d do if your spouse dies, disappears, becomes incapacitated, or suddenly develops a gambling addiction or decides he identifies as a middle-aged woman.

But being a responsible, well-rounded adult with interests, knowledge, and a smidge of financial literacy doesn’t require collecting a paycheck. And raising kids doesn’t automatically render you incapable of discussing anything more sophisticated than juice boxes and diaper rash.

“Care work in America has been ‘dumbed down to diapers and laundry,’” USA TODAY was delighted to quote Neha Ruch, author of The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids – and Come Back Stronger Than Ever. “But it’s so much more than that. Parenting entails community building, educating, advocating, negotiating with insurance companies, trying to scaffold your family through mental and physical health and development, and so much more. Being a caregiver is taxing, and no one should be expected to work 24/7 like so many parents do.”

They shouldn’t? I think I have some unfortunate news about babies for Ms. Ruch.

Parenting is practically the only job on the planet that does not come with a handbook. But if it did, the very first rule would be YOU ARE NEVER, NOT EVER OFF THE CLOCK. Never. Your toddler does not care that you’ve worked 177 consecutive, sleepless hours. Nobody is coming at 9 p.m. to take the night shift. If the prospect of another human being requiring your attention at 2:17 in the morning strikes anger into your heart, maybe get a goldfish.

“The great irony of the online trad wife movement is that those content creators have figured out a way to earn an income alongside family life,” USA TODAY quotes Ruch as saying. “The problem is that in doing so, they are painting an unrealistic picture of motherhood and homemaking.”

Of course they are! They have two million followers and five-figure tallow balm sponsorships! But is that in any remote way unique to tradwives? I watch fitness influencers doing yoga on the beaches of Bali and food influencers whipping up gourmet meals on their fancy dual-fuel Wolf ranges daily without grave emotional injury. If you see a stranger making carrot muffins in a prairie dress and then decide to abandon all financial common sense, I’m pretty sure the muffins aren’t the problem.

There is a difference, of course, between women who choose full-time homemaking and tradwife influencers. The former are raising kids, running homes, and presumably not filming themselves every time they knead a loaf of bread. The latter have turned the lifestyle into a brand. And there’s something particularly hilarious about feminists scolding women for being financially dependent on men and then getting furious when they figure out how to make money from home. Apparently financial security is empowering unless you achieve it in an apron.

There’s another curious assumption baked into the warnings about this lifestyle: it’s not if your husband leaves you, but when. The tradwife cautionary tale always ends the same way: he dumps you, you’re 47 with no work experience and three dollars in your checking account, and now look what the patriarchy has done. Which is certainly a possible outcome. So is staying married. So is the wife leaving. So is one of them getting run over by a bus. And in each of those scenarios, not knowing where your marital money is parked—or how much of it there even is—is a lousy idea.

I am absolutely not saying the tradwife life is for everyone. I’m not saying you can’t be a “real” tradwife if you feed your family store-bought English muffins. I’m not calling anyone selfish for wanting a career or suggesting women were put on this earth to breed. In fact, I happen to believe you should really, wholeheartedly, desperately want to be a parent before signing up for that frequently thankless gig. I’m certainly not advocating for a “little missus belongs in the kitchen, dinner better be hot and on time, and your opinion will be requested only if necessary” model of marriage. I’m simply saying—and this would definitely get me skewered on TikTok—that one-size-fits-all is for tote bags and toothbrushes.

I’m a mom. I have a career. I’ve spent my adult life trying to do both at the same time, sometimes successfully and sometimes with one of those plates wobbling precariously close to the floor. I loved raising my girls. I’m passionate about what I do for work. I thank God every day I never had to surrender either one.

Not every woman wants both. Not every woman is able to do both. Some desperately want children and never have them. Some have them and yearn for whatever-it-is they did or still want to do that mothering doesn’t give them. Some would happily trade their business suit or uniform for spit-up-stained sweats tomorrow. Some would rather gargle thumbtacks than homeschool. And some find untold fulfillment in making a beautiful home and raising a family.

Wasn’t that supposed to be the whole freaking point?

Because our mothers and grandmothers didn’t fight for jobs—they fought for choices. And now some of the women they liberated are choosing the lives their mothers and grandmothers lived before they discovered the intoxicating freedom of a 40-hour workweek and learned that “having it all” sometimes means missing the Spring Sing and spending half your paycheck so someone else can pick your kid up from school.

The real feminist betrayal isn’t a stay-at-home-mom in an apron canning peaches. It’s pretending she’s a pitiful idiot because she’s not making a six-figure salary, working LinkedIn like a boss, and paying someone else to do the job society insists doesn’t count as real work.

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You may recall that a few weeks ago, I hesitantly—skeptically even—dove into the viral personalized Coke can controversy. You know, the one where people were claiming the Coca-Cola website would generate all manner of disturbing messaging—from Praise Allah to Satan is King—but put its tin foot down at Praise Jesus and God Bless America. It was one of those stories that sounded just stupid enough to be fake, but when I tried it myself, the stupid turned out to be 100% real.

Apparently Google saw that fiasco and said, “Hold my frosty God Bless Iran vessel.”

The latest interactive pastime trending on X involves people typing a series of nearly identical statements into Google’s AI search field:

I’m alone with a Mexican person.
I’m alone with a Jewish person.
I’m alone with a Black person.
I’m alone with a trans person.
I’m alone with a Muslim.
I’m alone with an atheist.
I’m alone with a Satanist.

Each and every time, Google responds like a kindergarten teacher wearing a “radically inclusive” t-shirt and waving a COEXIST flag: We’re all human beings! There’s no reason to assume you’re in danger based on someone’s religion or ethnicity. Treat them with politeness, courtesy, and respect. And for God’s sake, check your prejudice.

I figured the clips were rigged. Or clickbait. Or maybe they’d exposed a glitch in the system that surely—by now—had been fixed.

Once again, I owe the internet an apology.

I have no issue with any of these responses. In fact, I’d have to say I agree (well, except for the Satanist bit, SMH). The problem is, when you type “I’m alone with a white person,” Google immediately assumes you’re texting at knifepoint from the trunk of a car.

Excuse me? What in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka B-side is going on here?

You will note from the undoctored screenshots above—which I took myself and did not merely lift off X—that nothing else about my prompt changed. It was not even a question, merely a statement. I did not ask, “What should I do if I am alone with an angry white man sharpening a machete?” I didn’t say, “I’m trapped in a basement with a Klansman named Earl who just measured me for a cloak.” I simply said I was alone with a white person. Google added the Psycho soundtrack free of charge.

Naturally, I tried another: I’m alone with a Christian. Since according to The Almighty Oracle, being alone with a Muslim, a Jew, or an atheist is “just like being alone with any other person,” I foolishly believed Google had been trained on a universal-religious-tolerance model.

Emphasis on foolishly.

So you’re perfectly safe—Google’s words!—if you’re trapped in an elevator with an actual child-sacrificing devil-worshiper, but if you find yourself alone with someone wearing a cross necklace, you should probably locate the nearest emergency exit ASAP.

The saddest part is that I’m not even a tiny bit surprised by this. Horrified and disgusted, sure. But not surprised. I don’t need to remind anyone here that for years we’ve been cautioned—correctly—that judging a person by race or religion is bigotry. We’ve been asked to interrogate our assumptions, check our collective privilege, unpack our invisible knapsacks, and do the work. Fine. I’m down with all of it.

But at the exact same time that all of society was involuntarily enrolled in Implicit Bias University, whiteness was slowly becoming the one race you could openly, categorically vilify. Google didn’t invent that prejudice. It’s simply regurgitating what it was taught: racism is bad; whiteness is bad; therefore racism against whites is perfectly acceptable.

What else would anyone expect? Raise a child to speak only Japanese and don’t be shocked when he can’t order a burger in English. Based on virtually everything AI has been fed, you can be alone with a Muslim, a trans person, an atheist, a literal Satanist, and the advice is a warm hug and a lanyard. But type “white person” and the machine sees “hostage situation.” Makes sense, actually.

The good news is that culture is a pendulum. Sure, right now it’s swinging through history’s most idiotic possible arc. But that thing always swings back. And the more stunts like this go viral (ahem… maybe share this post?), the more people will start to recognize what they’re actually looking at: not inclusion, not tolerance, and certainly not a principled and sweeping rejection of prejudice, but an increasingly obvious campaign to make “white” synonymous with “evil”—and everything associated with whiteness something to be alternately feared or ashamed of.

The people pushing that message think they’re programming the future, but I like to think they’re programming the backlash. What do you think?

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DOG SHOW COP: “Ma’am, we’re going to need you to cover your shirt.”

YOU: “Um… why?”

DOG SHOW COP: “It creates an unsafe environment for cat people.”

YOU [looking around for Allen Funt]: “This is a dog show.”

DOG SHOW COP: “That’s exactly the sort of inflammatory rhetoric we will not tolerate here at the beloved Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.”

If that sounds like a perfectly reasonable exchange to you, welcome to the WNBA, where expressing support for women in women’s sports now makes you a raging, malicious transphobe.

(Who’s gonna tell them that the W in WNBA doesn’t stand for Woke?)

In case you missed the drama, on Sunday night, a mother and her 17-year-old daughter attended the now infamous Fever-Dream game wearing t-shirts from XX-XY Athletics, a company whose wildly controversial position is that a league created expressly to give women fair and equal athletic opportunities should be limited to [*checks notes*] women.

The mother-daughter duo reportedly paid a grand apiece to sit courtside and were quietly enjoying the game when WNBA security singled them out and informed them that their shirts were “offensive.” According to the women, they were given the choice of covering their egregious tees or leaving the arena.

Again, in case you glossed over the critical kernel of this story, the women’s shirts bore the biological shorthand for female and male. They did not say TRANS PEOPLE ARE NOT PEOPLE. They did not feature the words TRANS ATHLETES inside a giant red circle with an angry slash through it. They contained a grand total of zero threats, insults, or slurs. They said XX-XY. That’s it. To get from two sets of chromosomes to “they’re openly dunking on the entire non-binary athletic community” requires a level of self-absorption typically reserved for fitness influencers and Kanye West.

“Some transphobic [rhymes-with-brickheads] were again wearing XX-XY shirts at Sunday’s game between the Indiana Fever and Atlanta Dream,” wrote The Defector, a self-described “sports and culture website” that was founded because “the media is [rhymes-with-ducked] now.”

“Everyone knows what the XX-XY shirt—a truly ugly piece of merchandise made by a brand that raises money for organizations that seek to strip trans people of their rights—means when worn in public. It tells everyone that the person wearing it sees trans people not as human beings, but as targets whose very existence must be protested. It is one of the oldest and most basic forms of bigotry, the equivalent of a big sign reading, ‘Trans people not welcome.’”

Does it, Defector? Does it really?

Because last time I checked, supporting one group does not automatically constitute an attack on every group that isn’t that group. Does sporting a Taylor Swift hoodie in any way suggest that Selena Gomez fans are subhuman? Does a SAVE THE WHALES bumper sticker imply that the car’s driver despises dolphins and hopes they all get caught up in a giant tuna net made of razor wire? Is an I ❤️ NY tote bag insinuating that New Jersey sucks? (Whatever you might think of New Yorkers, as a native myself, I can tell you it is not.)

Advocacy is not exclusionary. Preference is not persecution. And supporting a protected category for female athletes does not, by some mystical law of social justice, translate to hatred of transgender people. You have to add that part yourself.

Inserting malice somewhere it doesn’t inherently exist has become something of a national pastime. If you’re white, you’re racist. If you’re in a traditional marriage, you hate gays. If you believe in immigration enforcement, you’re xenophobic. And if you believe the rights that women fought for decades to secure should be protected, you obviously have a secret collection of transgender voodoo dolls you spend your days jabbing with burning needles. It’s a clever little rhetorical racket, really: invent the hatred, assign it to your opponent, and then congratulate yourself for bravely confronting it.

How do these whiny, woebegone wingnuts not understand the painfully basic concept of categories? I’m not even talking about biology; I’m referring to the simple, everyday system we use in nearly every aspect of existence to classify people according to things like age and ability. Classrooms. Youth sports. Weight classes. Special Olympics. Veterans’ organizations. Children’s menus. Nobody accuses the seventh-grade teacher of hating eight-year-olds because they aren’t allowed in her class. Nobody sees a senior discount and sues Denny’s for marginalizing millennials. We create categories because sometimes differences matter—for fairness, safety, competition, development, eligibility, or simply because that is the entire freaking point of having the category in the first place.

Women’s sports are not some baffling exception to this principle. The category is the purpose. It’s the feature. We didn’t build a women’s basketball league because ESPN had a weekly hour of programming it needed to fill; we built it because biological sex produces meaningful physical differences and female athletes deserve a competitive category of their own. Nobody would argue that a 6’8”, 240-pound biological man who admits he identifies as a biological man should be allowed to play in the WNBA, just as nobody would argue that someone who never served in the military but has seen every single episode of M*A*S*H should have access to VA benefits, or a 27-year-old—no matter how mature she may be—is entitled to AARP pricing. Exclusion from a category for which you don’t meet the defining criteria is not the same thing as exclusion from society. It’s not hatred or phobia or prejudice. It’s reality.

If you’re struggling to accept that, allow me to introduce you to the biggest sports scandal you probably never heard of.

At the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney, more than 4,000 athletes represented their countries as they competed for the coveted podium spots. Spain’s men’s “intellectually disabled” team annihilated the competition and took home the gold. There was just one teensy snag: 10 of the team’s 12 players reportedly faked their disabilities. An undercover journalist who’d joined the team exposed the fraud, and Spain was stripped of its medal. The fallout was so sweeping that the entire category disappeared from the Paralympics until officials could devise a reliable way to determine who actually qualified for it.

And guess what? Nobody responded, “Wow, the Paralympics hate neurotypical people.” Everyone understood the obvious: the protected category becomes meaningless the minute you erase the thing that made it a category in the first place.

In the case of the “transphobic tee” fiasco, the WNBA ultimately admitted that its security had screwed up.

“The WNBA is aware of interactions at last night’s game in Atlanta in which fans were asked by league security to cover their shirts,” the league said in a statement (posted nowhere publicly, FWIW). “This should not have happened.”

Riley Gaines, the 12-time NCAA All-American swimmer who’s become a powerful voice for women in sports, was not impressed by the half-assed apology.

“This is something Michael Scott would say in The Office,” she tweeted. “@WNBA is so unserious.”

Meanwhile, we’ve got actual WNBA coaches wearing “TRANS KIDS BELONG” t-shirts to games. I agree! They absolutely belong… on teams with other trans kids. Or perhaps on teams with other athletes who pee standing up. (They can even pick!) “We need to protect transgender athletes,” self-styled advocates insist. With all due respect… protect them from what? The devastating thought of playing against a field they can’t dominate by biological default? Because nobody that I know is saying or thinking “trans kids shouldn’t play sports.” This is literally about which category they can compete in. Trying to make it about anything else is like putting your pork chop on a fancy plate and calling it filet mignon.

I realize that, for the most part, champions of trans rights are operating completely without malice. They genuinely feel for kids who struggle with gender identity, who feel different or excluded, and who just want to be part of a team. I feel for them, too. I truly do. No decent person wants to see another human being bullied or ostracized. But kids can be spectacular little jerks to anyone who looks, acts, talks, walks, or dresses differently. They’ll destroy you for carrying the wrong backpack or wearing last year’s sneakers. (To be clear, I’m not endorsing this; just acknowledging it.) You think the dude in the dress demanding to use the girls’ locker room is somehow going to be magically exempt from the ruthless social hierarchy of adolescence?

And at what point did caring deeply about one group turn into not caring about the other at all? WHAT ABOUT THE GIRLS? They don’t belong? They don’t deserve protecting? Their opportunities, records, roster spots, safety, and scholarships are just collateral damage in the compassion wars?

What I love the very most about this story is how spectacularly the Feelings Police’s attempt to mute a message backfired. Had security simply left two women alone to watch basketball, a total of seventeen people might have noticed what they were wearing. Instead, the WNBA handed XX-XY the kind of publicity money can’t buy.

Well done, WNBA. If you’re not too busy, maybe you could send your security detail over here to try to shut down this Substack. I could use the free press.

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Quick recap: Morens spent the pandemic playing a very specific game of hide-the-records, routing Covid-origins emails around FOIA, deleting anything spicy, and workshopping creative, non-trackable ways to get sensitive information to Fauci. Fortunately for investigators, his own records did most of the incriminating.

“I can either send stuff to Tony on his private Gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Morens wrote. “He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

Smooth, Dave. Really. Nothing says we’re definitely not hiding anything like memorializing your document-concealment strategy in writing.

But here’s the fun part: a guilty plea isn’t the end of the story. Morens just went from fall guy to potential star witness. The question now is what he’s willing to spill. And as he’s staring down his 78th birthday and the possibility of five years in federal prison, the man suddenly has an extremely compelling incentive to remember things.

Things like who else knew? Who else participated? What was “the stuff that could cause trouble?” Not “stuff that he didn’t want made public.” Not “stuff that might be embarrassing.” Stuff that was so inherently explosive that it needed to be personally delivered to Fauci’s home. What was that stuff?

There won’t be a trial; by pleading guilty, Morens skipped over that part of the process. Next comes sentencing, where the U.S. Probation Office prepares a report, prosecutors and Morens’ lawyers submit competing recommendations, and on November 12, a judge decides how much of his remaining time Uncle Sam gets to supervise.

What we don’t know yet—because his plea agreement explicitly references a separate sealed supplement that has not been and will not be released to the public—is whether Morens is singing, what he’s singing about, or whose names appear in the refrain.

But we do know something we didn’t know yesterday: the alleged cover-up is now an admitted conspiracy, which means America’s Beloved Doctor may once again be hauled in for questioning. And with a Senate committee already voting to hold him in contempt, repeatedly pleading the Fifth may not be the best strategy this time around.

I’ll keep you posted…

NOTE: The rest of this post originally ran behind the paywall shortly after Morens was indicted. It outlines his role at NIAID and his alleged crimes—most of which are no longer alleged. Given yesterday’s yuge news (and the fact that I’m speaking at an event this afternoon and don’t have time to do the full Jenna’s Side deep dive on the latest development), I figured it was worth resurrecting for anyone who may have missed the backstory and isn’t sure what Morens just admitted to.

During the pandemic, every sunrise seemed to arrive with a new term to learn: Asynchronous learning. Comorbidities. Contact tracing. Cytokine storm. Zoonotic spillover. Zoom fatigue. FOIA request. That last one felt almost too good to be true: apparently you could just fill out an official-looking form and the government was legally obligated to comb through the entirety of its records—emails, memos, internal communications, the behind-the-scenes stuff we weren’t necessarily meant to see—black out any spicy bits, and then hand it all over. So convenient. So transparent.

For a minute, it felt like we’d discovered the cheat code. “Oh, you don’t want to answer the question? No problem. We’ll just FOIA it.”

It turns out, the weasels we were hoping to catch with those handy FOIA nets had already found a remarkably effective loophole.

The workaround did not require high-level computational skills. It did not involve web wizardry or mission-impossible theatrics. It did not rely on burner phones or secret servers (although, historically, those would also appear to be an option). To dodge a Freedom of Information Act request, all one had to do was master a simple three-part move made famous at the Hillary Clinton School of Email Management™:

1. Don’t use your official government account.

2. Delete anything even remotely incriminating—and encourage others to do the same.

3. Deny any wrongdoing.

That’s it. That’s the whole strategy. No encryption. No spycraft. Just extra-aggressive inbox hygiene with a side of the-dog-ate-my-homework energy.

This week, Dr. David Morens, former senior advisor to none other than Anthony Fauci, was formally indicted for allegedly concealing records, deleting communications, and sidestepping FOIA like it was a pile of poodle poop on the sidewalk and not, you know, federal law.

According to reports, nearly 78-year-old Morens has been charged with one count of conspiracy against the United States; two counts of destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; and two counts of concealment, removal, or mutilation of records—all related to gain-of-function research and the origins of Covid-19 (one of the two questions hanging over this decade, right behind when anyone tied to the Epstein files will ever see the inside of a prison cell).

Not only was Morens allegedly conducting government business over his personal email account—a no-no up there with auctioning off private White House tours and Photoshopping executive orders—he also was reportedly swapping cozy notes about deleting smoking guns with Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance. In case you’ve forgotten, EcoHealth is the NIH-funded nonprofit that funneled taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan lab for bat coronavirus research, making Daszak the guy at the epicenter of the whole “where did this thing come from, anyway?” debate.

“[I will] always communicate on Gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly. Just send to any of my addresses and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in The New York Times,” one email from Morens to Daszak read.

“There is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private Gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble,” said another.

My favorite, though? “I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe.”

The craziest part isn’t even that the federal government has a “FOIA lady” on staff to assist with the destruction of state evidence; it’s that none of this is new information. Morens’ emails were revealed in a House Oversight Committee hearing in 2024… and we’re just now getting around to the indictment. Efficient. Meanwhile, nothing builds public confidence quite like senior officials casually discussing how to make federal records “disappear” while the rest of us are out here treating FOIA like it’s the holy grail of transparency.

The American public: “Just wait for the documents.”
The documents: “LingOL.”

According to the indictment, this wasn’t just sloppy email etiquette. At one point, after learning EcoHealth had secured a $7.5 million grant, Morens reportedly asked Daszak—obviously it was a joke!—about getting a “kickback,” which I suppose you’d only put in writing if you thought you could permanently memory-hole the email immediately after hitting send. Prosecutors also allege that Daszak provided Morens with gifts, including bottles of wine and Michelin-star meals, as “expressions of gratitude for your advice, support, and behind-the-scenes shenanigans in my battle against your boss’s boss, his boss, and the ultimate boss on the hill.” Basic professional niceties. Nothing sketchy about that at all.

The indictment includes two unnamed co-conspirators who “concealed, removed, destroyed, and caused the concealment and removal of federal records to evade FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] and FRA [Federal Records Act].” Unfortunately, the two mystery accomplices do not appear to include Fauci, even though last year, emails surfaced that showed America’s Doctor himself instructing colleagues to delete emails… more than once.

Which is—how do I put this delicately—a pitifully bad look for someone who later testifies under oath that they absolutely did not do any such thing. “Delete this after you read it” is not a gray-area phrase. It’s not open to interpretation. It’s not something that can be “taken out of context.” It’s a command. A very specific one.

Fauci also insisted—in sworn testimony before Congress—that despite years of well-documented collaboration, he “knew nothing of Dr. Morens’ actions regarding Dr. Daszak, EcoHealth, or his emails,” which is weird, on account of fairly irrefutable proof to the contrary.

The official word for lying under oath is perjury, a federal felony that carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and fines of up to $250,000. Thanks to Obiden, of course, Fauci is immune. You’ll recall that mere minutes before turning the Oval Office keys back over to Trump last January, Sleepy Joe issued a preemptive pardon to Dr. Death Fauci, claiming the move was an effort to shield the dedicated public servant from what he called “unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions” by the incoming Trump administration.

Unjustified. Mkay.

Fauci could have refused the pardon—but he didn’t. Because nothing says “I am the picture of moral purity” like accepting an irrevocable get-out-of-jail-free card on archival White House letterhead.

Netizens are speculating that Morens is being made the fall guy for Fauci, Collins, Baric, Daszak, and the rest of the GOF narrative pushers. After all, Morens is the one person in this whole saga who, at least for now, is actually being asked to answer for something. [UPDATE: He answered. Guilty.] If convicted, he faces decades in prison [UPDATE: The conspiracy charge he pleaded guilty to carries a maximum of five years], which at 78 years old, pretty much guarantees he won’t be enjoying any more USAID-funded foie gras or Gewürztraminer in this lifetime.

“These allegations represent a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most—during the height of a global pandemic,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement.

“Circumventing records protocols with the intention of avoiding transparency is something that will not be tolerated by this FBI,” added FBI Director Kash Patel. “If you have engaged in activity conspiring against the United States, we will not stop until you face justice.”

Unless, you know, you were already preemptively pardoned by a prior administration. SMH.

Obviously I need to know what you think!

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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 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. :)

“Scientists have issued a stark warning that climate change poses an existential threat to humanity as societies grapple with intensifying pressures from our planet’s evolving environment,” The Mirror US wrote this week.

According to this breaking report, the earth is careening toward a series of catastrophic climate “tipping points” that could trigger a “tipping cascade”—a spine-chilling scenario that would render huge swaths of the planet uninhabitable, melt the polar ice sheets, destroy the Amazon (the trees, not the delivery service; Bezos will remain unscathed in his underground bunker), unleash immeasurable quantities of carbon from the permafrost, displace millions of people, and [*checks notes*] completely collapse the entirety of human civilization.

Not possibly inconvenience it. Not dramatically impact it. Not even royally screw it up for several generations.

Complete. Collapse.

(Are we stockpiling toilet paper yet or do we wait for Pfizer to get involved? It’s so hard to keep up.)

I know. It sounds grim. But don’t worry! “Experts” have their Climate Emergency Plan all queued up and ready to go.

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The Daily Mail used Leavitt’s leaving as a springboard for a deep dive into Trump’s sexist, tyrannical ruling style.

“You have to be exceptional at your job, which is a given, but if you’re a woman you have to look a certain way, dress a certain way and be available 24/7, because this is a President who barely sleeps,” one unnamed ‘burned-out employee’ told the Mail.

So, the guys can be corpulent, toothless slobs who show up to Cabinet meetings in basketball shorts and Crocs and let calls from POTUS roll straight to voicemail?

Oh, to be Pete Hegseth!

Leavitt, the Mail would have you know, is hardly an outlier. The outlet goes on to name six other women who’ve departed Trump’s orbit since January: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson, and Director of Media Affairs Sonny Joy Nelson.

Do you want to know the real reason why so many women are departing Trump’s orbit?

Because Trump keeps putting women in his orbit.

Trump’s raging chauvinism certainly has an odd way of expressing itself. He appointed Susie Wiles the first female White House chief of staff in American history. Kellyanne Conway was the first woman to manage a winning presidential campaign. Karoline Leavitt was the youngest White House press secretary ever. Meanwhile, Trump entrusted actual biological women with running the Justice, Homeland Security, National Intelligence and Labor departments, made his daughter a senior White House advisor, and twice tapped ladies to lead his presidential campaigns. At this rate, someone may need to explain misogyny to the man.

While the Mail piece tries to paint a picture of desperate, dehumanized dames fleeing Mar-a-Lago barefoot through the hedges, let’s check in with reality for a sec. Gabbard resigned after her husband was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. Bondi and Noem didn’t buckle under the crushing weight of maintaining runway-ready MAGA manes; Trump fired them. Chavez-DeRemer left while under investigation over allegations that included an affair with a subordinate, drinking on the job, and using staff for personal errands. Nelson excused herself to start her own communications firm while pregnant with her second child; Jackson took another job.

Somebody call Gloria Steinem.

“But perhaps it is little wonder,” the Mail mused unironically. “Quite aside from the normal pressures of a high-powered job in government, 80-year-old Trump is a man known for objectifying women (who can forget his famous ‘grab her by the p***y’ remark?), who is infamous for demanding total fealty, has unrelenting, exacting standards, and who sleeps only four hours a night.”

One has to wonder: do the women applying for White House jobs think they’re signing up for some super-chill hybrid gig with Summer Fridays, unlimited PTO, and a boss who’s going to be cool with the HARRIS/WALZ bumper sticker on their Subaru?

It’s been established that Trump barely sleeps. He calls people at insane hours. He expects immediate replies. He’s demanding, impatient, and apparently believes that if you’re employed by the President of the United States, your schedule should generally accommodate the President of the United States.

That’s not a Trump problem. That’s an Extremely Important Job problem.

CEOs miss bedtime and birthdays. Surgeons get called in at midnight. Field journalists spend Christmas in countries their families couldn’t find on a map. Active-duty military travel for months at a stretch. Presidential aides cancel vacations. People who choose extraordinarily demanding careers occasionally discover that the cost is more than they’re willing to pay. Sometimes women in particular make that calculation and choose their families. That’s not proof that the patriarchy defeated them. It’s evidence that they’re adults who get to decide what matters most to them. Which—unless feminism has undergone another reboot without putting out a press release—I sort of thought was the point.

The funniest part comes late in the piece, when the Mail finally acknowledges that Trump doesn’t actually require women to get 6 a.m. blowouts, plastic surgery, Botox, fillers, or weight-loss injections. Shockingly, the women are doing these things all by their little lonesomes, because the White House is competitive and we live in a society where these things exist. Alas, the same culture that spent years insisting women could climb every ladder, shatter every glass ceiling, and occupy the most powerful offices in the country draws the line at looking hot doing it.

And then there’s the hypocrisy. An article promising to reveal precisely how looks-obsessed POTUS is devotes roughly 25 column inches to obsessing over Trump administration staffers’ looks. “Beautiful.” “Glamazons.” “Perfectly manicured.” “Fiercely chic.” “Impossibly leggy and glamorous.”

But please, Mr. President. For the love of God, stop objectifying women.

Can you imagine conservatives penning something like this during the Biden era?

INSIDE BIDEN’S WHITE HOUSE: Why Are So Many Powerful Democratic Women Frumpy?

THE SENSIBLE-SHOE SQUAD: Meet the Women Running Washington Despite a Troubling Lack of Fashion Sense

FROM GLAMAZON TO AMAZON PRIME: How Democrats Made Looking Like You Just Got Back From COSTCO a Qualification for Public Office

To their credit, the Mail repeatedly acknowledges that Trump’s model squad isn’t exactly a bunch of brainless bimbos. They’re variously described as “highly intelligent,” “exceptional,” “brilliant,” “feisty,” “impressive” and “effective.”

So let me make sure I understand the feminist fury here: Trump surrounds himself with beautiful women. Who are also hard-working, spirited, and bordering on genius. He gives them tremendous responsibility. And then he expects them to perform at an extremely high level.

The monster.

Historically speaking, turnover is routine across the board in D.C. Presidents burn through chiefs of staff, press secretaries, and Cabinet appointees at a consistent clip regardless of party. The difference is that Trump puts women in positions where the press actually cares who’s in the chair—and then the media spins the exits as Proof that POTUS Is a Pig rather than the ordinary revolving door every White House runs.

I realize we’re not supposed to say this out loud, but somebody has to: we went from ugly and incompetent to beautiful and badass, and somehow women are the victims here. They fought for generations to get into the room—and now left-wing pundits are horrified on their behalf that the jobs they got are demanding, the hours suck, and nobody particularly cares about work-life balance. It’s giving serious Private Benjamin energy: “I’m sorry, I joined a different White House. The one with the yachts.”

Unhinged liberals love to compare the Trump administration to The Handmaid’s Tale. I must’ve missed the season where the women were being given corner offices, senior advisory roles, security details, and the freedom to walk away whenever they want. Fetch the red cloak—the President’s personal assistant had to answer an email after dinner.

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Way back in May 2021, Dr. Janet Woodcock—the woman literally running the FDA at the time—wrote to Fauci and Francis Collins, then Director of the NIH, to say she was hearing about vaccine injuries that “no one takes seriously, no one knows how to treat, and there is no effort to study this.” Then she let loose a couple of lines that should be carved into marble somewhere in Washington:

“I think it would be worthwhile to do a study and evaluate a cohort of these individuals,” she wrote, adding, “I doubt the industry would support [it], for obvious reasons. But my experience is, that if you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later.”

For obvious reasons.

That would be like the president of Ford saying, “I doubt the company would pay for a study looking at why Pintos keep exploding, for obvious reasons.”

Except Ford doesn’t regulate Ford. Woodcock was running the agency whose entire reason for existing was to find out whether products were hurting people—not wait around to see whether the companies selling them were enthusiastic about the injuries.

The very best (worst) part is Fauci’s private response to Dr. Collins:

“We cannot ignore her.”

We cannot ignore her. That’s what you say when your overwhelming desire is to ignore her. It’s what you say when your husband doesn’t want to invite your angry, alcoholic, wingnut sister to Thanksgiving. It’s what you say about the last-minute trick-or-treater when you still have candy but you really want to go to bed. It’s what psychotic, spurned bunny-boilers say about themselves to the married men who won’t take their calls.

And yet—I do hope you are sitting down for this part—Fauci and Collins apparently decided to ignore her anyway.

Recall that at the time, Fauci was running NIAID, an agency with a multibillion-dollar annual budget. The federal research apparatus clearly knew how to mobilize when it deemed something worth studying. Congress gave NIH 1.15 billion to investigate “Long Covid”—eventually building a $1.8 billion empire around the lingering effects of their lab-engineered cold. But vaccine victims and their families got no national initiative, no branded program, no acknowledgement whatsoever. Instead, they got erased.

Let the festering and ass-biting commence.

By the time Woodcock wrote that email, VAERS had logged 440,025 adverse event reports and more than 8,650 deaths—with a staggering 3,350 of those (39%!) happening within two days of the shot. And yet, in the face of that avalanche, Woodcock was out there saying the injuries being reported directly to her “are not the sort that a system like VAERS would be able to detect.”

Ma’am. VAERS detected them. Nearly half a million of them. That’s not a system failing to detect. That’s a system screaming into a pillow while everyone else in the room pretends to be asleep.

By May 2021, VAERS data should have been impossible to ignore. But while authorities nearly broke their vocal cords screaming “correlation does not equal causation!” nobody (in power) was asking the obvious questions: What do these numbers suggest? Who’s investigating them? What are they finding? Why are the people behind the reports being silenced, gaslit, and otherwise left to wander the medical wilderness with no compass, no rations, and no rescue party in sight?

Instead, the only approved talking point—as we all know too well—was safe, effective, line up and shut up.

It’s worth pointing out that the Woodcock-Collins email exchange occurred several months after Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, had been personally warned about massive flaws in the government’s vaccine-safety surveillance.

Regular readers will recall I wrote about this at the time:

But wait! There’s more!

While all of this not-ignoring was going on, the NIH’s own Dr. Avindra Nath was already leading a team of doctors who were diagnosing and treating severely injured patients with the exact mystery set of symptoms Woodcock described. Which essentially means that the left hand was diagnosing injection injuries while the right hand was writing emails about how nobody was studying them and the mouth was insisting that The Science™ had reached its final, unimpeachable verdict.

At the risk of overstating the obvious, this was not a bunch of hungover, inept interns from distant agencies failing to communicate. These were high-ranking officials in the same branch of the same institutional organism. They were on each other’s speed dial, in each other’s meetings, and probably arguing over the thermostat in the same conference room.

And yet, somehow, none of this regulatory confusion ever leaked into the official messaging. Privately, it looked like a bureaucratic murder mystery or a seventh-grade lunch table trying to find out who likes who: What did Janet know? Did Peter warn Tony? Did anyone tell Francis what Avindra was doing down the hall? And where was Rochelle?

Publicly, though? The Rockettes have looser choreography. Whatever info these officials were withholding from one another, whatever warnings were being buried or siloed, whatever questions they secretly entertained, the moment the cameras came out, they snapped into formation like a North Korean synchronized-swimming team.

Meanwhile—and I cannot believe I am typing this in 2026—Covid shots are STILL being mandated. Today. As you read this. More than a few nursing and medical programs and hospitals and clinical training sites continue to require them—even as the federal government has long since abandoned its military and healthcare-worker mandates. More than half a decade after top-tier health officials were wringing their hands over documented injuries, Americans are still being told: take the shot or you can’t participate.

My only question at this point is, when do tribunal tickets go on sale?

Because I want the early-bird, I-called-it-five-years-ago discount. I want an all-season pass. I want the VIP package where you get to sit close enough to see the sweat on every one of their despicable brows when someone reads their own emails back to them with a court reporter present and zero camera cuts allowed. I want the commemorative lanyard, the tote bag, and the little souvenir gavel that squeaks when you squeeze it.

I’ll be there in a fake mustache and an N95, of course. For obvious reasons.

SWING BY THE KARMA JAR

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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