“He’s violating our constitutional rights to create a media monopoly for his personal gain,” someone who goes by Former Republican on X insisted. “State-run media just like a truly Communist Regime would do,” a different user wrote. “That is some Hitler sh*t going down,” commented another.

You know how when you see people attempting backflips off folding tables or sticking their hands into zoo enclosures and you think, “Can people actually be that dumb?” It turns out, yes. Yes, they can. And then some.

Despite the grandiose name, TRUMP TV: The Essentials Station is not a new television network. It’s a YouTube channel—and not even a new one. It’s the same one the White House has had since 2006. What Washington debuted this week was a highlight reel pulled from its YouTube archive and played on a loop, with the occasional live event thrown in to keep viewers guessing. (“Is Melania wearing the boater hat again or is this old footage?”) Think political MTV or C-SPAN with reruns.

That’s it.

There are no regularly scheduled shows, no anchors, and no correspondents. There’s no news desk, no scrolling ticker, and no debate table. Just… the current administration’s greatest hits. And yet, to hear progressives tell it, we are one autoplay away from becoming the People’s Republic of Trump.

THE LEFT: “THIS IS STATE-RUN PROGRAMMING! IT’S PROPAGANDA! FASCISM! AUTOCRACY! THE DEATH OF FREE SPEECH!”

THE RIGHT: “Finally. Unbiased news!”

TRUMP TV: “Would you like to see the inauguration again?”

I am not even exaggerating. The White House itself describes the channel as “top past moments, announcements, and the latest and greatest from the administration.” It streams archived speeches, policy announcements, and promotional clips. And, most critically for our descent into totalitarianism, you don’t even have to watch it.

I get that the timing of the launch—hot on the heels of POTUS banning a few major media players from his orbit—might make it seem like the guy is trying to fill that void with curated, more flattering content than, say, something CNN would air. Because that is exactly what he’s doing.

What he’s not doing is suggesting that this is the hottest new place to get your late-breaking headlines. And I don’t know who needs to hear this, but publishing a completely optional video feed and seizing the airwaves and replacing every channel with 24-hour government programming are interchangeable the way ballet and sumo wrestling are basically the same sport. For a handy demonstration of the difference, look no further than the former Soviet Union.

In 2025, Russia launched Max, a state-backed “super-app” that combines messaging, banking, and access services into one nifty platform. Want to communicate with your kids’ teacher? Max. Need to get into your university classroom or dorm? Also Max. Need to buy something, send a message, prove you exist, or presumably ask whether the government would prefer you wear blue or beige today? There’s probably a Max button for that.

Russia has since pushed tens of millions of people onto Max while systematically squeezing out the competition. Which might be merely creepy if Max were just your standard mandatory-but-convenient app. It’s not. Just last week, researchers found that Max’s “mini-apps” can take screenshots, access stored phone info, inject code, and even impersonate users without their knowledge. It’s less “simple app for streamlining modern life” and more “next-level Big Brother stuff Orwell himself would have rejected for being too Orwellian.”

Trump TV, by contrast, is a YouTube channel. You can watch it. You can ignore it. You can stream a guy unclogging a storm drain instead. You can forget YouTube entirely and tune into CNN on an old-fashioned television set. You can get your news from your mother, Brenda from mah-jongg, or your Magic 8 Ball. Your government does not care.

Before anyone says it, I know. Dystopia is a slow burn. Everything starts somewhere. No one wakes up one day to a box of “WELCOME TO THE REGIME” donuts on their doorstep. Which is why in this great, free country of ours we have elections, courts, a First Amendment, an independent press, and tens of millions of gun-loving patriots prepared to raise holy hell long before anyone welds our televisions to Channel 47.

It’s also worth noting that our aspiring communist dictator spent yesterday at the United Nations declaring that “communism will never be coming to America” and predicting its demise in Cuba (after a year of tightening sanctions on the actual communist regime there). So vigilance? Absolutely. But perhaps we could hold off on ordering flowers for democracy’s funeral until Trump’s inauguration becomes required viewing.

And again, nobody is forcing parents, students, or teachers to install Trump TV. Nobody needs a TTV app to enter a government building. Nobody has banned YouTube’s other 22 billion videos so that the only thing left is Donald Trump at Mount Rushmore. Still, somehow an unsettling number of people have skipped directly from the government has a YouTube channel to THE GOVERNMENT CONTROLS THE MEDIA, which is a rather magnificent leap—particularly from a political faction that literally demanded Big Tech censor Covid “misinformation.”

The funniest part of the whole uproar is that pretty much everyone on the planet is ignoring TTV. The Daily Beast is monitoring viewership with the intensity of NORAD tracking an incoming missile and gleefully reported yesterday that a whopping 427 people were watching at 7 a.m. So just to recap: Trump TV is a terrifying authoritarian propaganda machine with the power to destroy the country. Also, nobody is even watching it. Got it.

The people calling a voluntary White House highlight reel “state-sponsored media” are not warning us about a Marxist revolution. They’re using “communism” the way toddlers use “no” or “stinky poopy head”: as the loudest available word for something they dislike. Here’s what I wish these oversized tykes were smart enough to grasp: championing government-run grocery stores and wealth taxes while shrieking that an optional YouTube channel is the road to Moscow isn’t insight. It’s ideological illiteracy. It’s selective hypocrisy. And frankly, it’s embarrassing.

You know what happens if you don’t want to watch Trump TV? You don’t click on it. CNN is still there. MSNBC—sorry, MS NOW—is still there. Fox is there. (Literally: last night, a federal judge ordered the banned outlets’ White House access temporarily restored while the constitutional challenge plays out.) The New York Times is there. Podcasts are there. Substack is there. X is apparently still available for posting graphics explaining that Donald Trump controls the mass media. And—this seems important—you can publicly call Trump TV fascist state propaganda on the very same internet where Trump TV lives.

Which seems like an unusual feature for an authoritarian media monopoly.

Anyway, the storm drain turned out great. In fact, the guy titled it the best storm drain unclogging ever (a bar I admit I did not realize existed). You should watch it while you still can.

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Alas, this is—somewhat alarmingly—my one and only job, so here we are.

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 aren’t sure you like me that much, free content will resume tomorrow. :)

If anyone on planet Earth happened to be filming Snopes writer Laerke Christensen research the story she published on Monday, please reach out to me—because I would pay actual money to watch it.

“The truth behind Trump’s 13 ‘acts of kindness,’ from checks to cancer treatments,” the headline promised, referencing a viral social media post you definitely won’t hear about on The View.

“For thirty years before he ran for office, Donald Trump quietly paid mortgages, flew sick children across the country, and wrote checks to strangers who needed help. You will not find those stories on the evening news. So here they are,” Snopes wrote, quoting the post’s introduction.

Somewhere around Act of Kindness Number Seven, I imagine our pal Laerke was starting to perspire profusely. Because it turned out, only two of the thirteen claims were deemed false, forcing poor Ms. Christensen to write more than 3,000 meticulously sourced, mostly flattering words about the independent fact-checking website’s least favorite leading man.

I assume there will be a staff wellness day tomorrow.

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There wasn’t a noteworthy precipitating incident. CNN did not run an especially egregious segment calling him a Cheeto-dusted Mussolini. A Politico photojournalist did not ambush him with a wildly unflattering camera angle. No MS NOW reporter threw a pair of shoes at him. When asked what prompted the decision, Trump responded like a seasoned middle school teacher who’s just announced she’s put up with her last armpit fart.

“I dislike dishonest press,” the president said at a press conference. “I think someone has the right to keep them away if they’re going to write false stories all the time… Now, if they want to write them, that’s fine. But I don’t have to let them into my- into the people’s house.”

So, embargo. That’ll show them!

Before the ban, reporters from the three outlets could sit inside the White House and report that Donald Trump is a dangerous authoritarian man-baby with tiny hands who eats democracy for breakfast. But now, the three outlets have to stand outside the White House to report that Donald Trump is a dangerous authoritarian man-baby with tiny hands who eats democracy for breakfast and also kicked them out of the White House.

This does not strike me as an award-winning PR strategy.

To be fair, White House access is valuable. Reporters inside the building can attend briefings, ask questions, develop sources, and observe Cabinet officials, swollen cankles, and poorly camouflaged hand bruises firsthand. But here’s the hitch: Trump can keep CNN out of the room, but he can’t keep Trump off CNN.

And now—because if somebody doesn’t file a lawsuit, did it even happen?—the trio is suing over the restricted access, accusing the administration of violating their First Amendment rights. Trump, meanwhile, insists that he absolutely cherishes the Free Press—yuge fan, nobody loves 1A more than he does, trust him—he’s just had-it-up-to-here with FAKE NEWS [emphasis his]. The trouble, of course, is figuring out where “Free Press” ends and “FAKE NEWS” begins.

Because there’s an important distinction here. If by “fake news” Trump means coverage he thinks is biased, unfair, vicious, or just spectacularly unflattering, that’s protected speech. If an outlet gets something factually wrong, it should be called out and corrected. If he believes these organizations are knowingly publishing false, defamatory statements of fact about him, he can sue them—as he has, repeatedly. That would still produce a week of “Trump attacks press freedom” coverage, obviously. But it would at least force an actual claim, actual evidence, and an actual judge into the argument, instead of letting the president appoint himself White House Hall Monitor.

Nobody is arguing that every reporter in America has a constitutional right to an Oval Office invitation or a seat on Air Force One. They don’t. Presidential proximity is a privilege and there are only so many asses you can safely allow within shouting distance of the Commander-in-Chief. The issue here is whether the First Amendment protects journalists’ right to piss off the president without losing their press passes.

The outlets are asking a federal judge to immediately restore their access while the case proceeds; a hearing is scheduled for tomorrow. While lawyers prepare to duke it out, the television networks have apparently entered the Fine, be that way phase of the dispute.

CNN was scheduled to handle television-pool coverage of Trump’s trip to New York yesterday, a task complicated somewhat by being banned from the man’s general vicinity. Ordinarily, one of the other four networks would jump in. This time, however, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News all declined to replace it. It’s actually an almost wholesome show of solidarity—albeit hardly a crippling one. Because print reporters are still covering the president. So are wire and radio correspondents, independent journalists, and podcasters. Photographers are still showing up for work. The networks remain perfectly capable of detailing Trump’s doings, they just can’t do it from a folding chair fifty feet away.

It’s the Washington equivalent of taking your ball and going home, only everyone else brought balls, too.

TRUMP: “CNN said nasty things about me so they’re not invited to my birthday party!”
TV PRESS POOL: “Oh yeah? Well then NONE of us are coming to your stupid party!”
TRUMP: “Good! You’re all nasty anyway! More cake for ME!”
TV PRESS POOL: [congregates on Trump’s lawn; continues to say nasty things]

And lest anyone mistake this particular circus for a uniquely Trumpian invention, presidential administrations have been trying to manage—and occasionally punish—the press since America’s first newspaper was shut down after one issue.

Within a week of taking office in 1993, Bill Clinton’s team had already royally ticked off the White House press corps by restricting reporters from areas they’d previously been free to roam. George W. Bush’s administration took a different tack, tightly controlling who reporters could talk to and instructing staffers not to speak to the press without authorization. In 2009, the Obama administration was openly arguing that Fox News wasn’t really a news organization and tried to exclude it from a round of network-pool interviews. (When the other networks refused to participate without Fox, officials backed down—a remarkably familiar little drama, only with the jerseys reversed.) Four years later, major news organizations protested the Obama White House for shutting independent photographers out of presidential events while distributing its own official photos instead.

So, yeah. Presidents want favorable coverage. Reporters want maximum access. Presidents complain about reporters. Reporters complain about presidents. And maybe that’s the real problem with trying to punish the press in public: it requires announcing that you are trying to punish the press in public. Trump tried to shame CNN, MS NOW, and Politico into submission. What he wound up doing is making them the protagonists in the latest episode of The President Versus Anyone Who Has Ever Used an Adjective.

And because he is Donald Trump, he did it in a way that guaranteed extensive, unflattering coverage from every other outlet, too. So congratulations to the White House: you just gave the fake-news industrial complex a motive and a megaphone.

Story at six.

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We had the Right boycotting Bud Light over Dylan Mulvaney. The Left boycotting Goya after its CEO praised Trump. The Right boycotting Cracker Barrel after a rebranding gone sideways. The Left boycotting Hobby Lobby over funding of anti-LGBTQ legislation. The Right boycotting Disney because, depending on the day, it was pushing the woke agenda, grooming children, or operating as a Satan-worshipping pedophile club. The Left boycotting Sydney Sweeney for being unapologetically hot, MAGA, or both. Not to be outdone, Target has managed to piss off both sides of the aisle equally and completely.

This week’s victim: Tillamook cheese.

The Oregon dairy co-op began trending on X this week after shoppers noticed a new “HALAL CERTIFIED” stamp on its cheese packaging. People—mostly conservatives—are taking it about as well as you might expect. Photos and videos of Tillamook getting tossed in the trash have racked up thousands of views. ACT for America accused the company of “groveling to Islam.” Disgruntled former customers are calling for worldwide boycotts of “Al Qaeda cheese.”

It did not take a particularly deep dive to learn that the terrorists had apparently infiltrated the cheddar a full decade ago. To understand how, we need an extremely brief lesson in cheese production.

Traditionally, cheese was made with animal rennet, an enzyme that comes from the stomach lining of young calves. In 2016, Tillamook began using a fermentation-produced vegetarian version that meets both halal and kosher dietary requirements. This was not some exotic, extremist, faith-based cheesemaking move; most commercially produced cheese now uses vegetarian rennet because it’s cheaper, more consistent, and no baby cows have to be slaughtered to make a pizza.

For the better part of a decade, nobody cared. Then Tillamook put the phrase CERTIFIED HALAL on its packaging—and a good chunk of the internet immediately began crumbling under the weight of this new development. They’re clearing out their crispers, trashing their ice cream, and writing angry open letters to Tillamook, urging the company to “consider customers of other faiths when making decisions like this.”

Here’s the thing. Halal isn’t something Tillamook (or anyone else) does to cheese. Nobody prayed over the cheddar. Nobody scooped up a giant wheel and held it toward Mecca. There is no tiny imam stationed at the factory blessing every block as it rolls down the conveyor belt. Halal is simply the Arabic word for permissible. It’s a welcome sign on a gate; a green light at an intersection; a “dogs allowed” sticker on the café door.

Most of Tillamook’s cheese already met the necessary dietary requirements. The company simply took the extra step of having those varieties certified—meaning they paid someone to say “yup, you did the thing you said you did” in exchange for permission to add that word to their label.

Want to know the dirty, underhanded, America-hating reason they pursued that certification? Because Tillamook sells cheese. And Muslims buy cheese… many of them only if it has been given the halal stamp of approval.

So yes, Tillamook is pandering to Muslims, if by pandering we mean making it easier for millions of potential customers to buy its cheese.

It’s not all that different from Kirkland ponying up for the CERTIFIED ORGANIC sticker on its peanut butter because they know a certain segment of shoppers won’t buy PB without it. Or Frito-Lay investing in GLUTEN FREE certification for its corn chips, when corn chips are inherently gluten-free. (You can’t get the sticker without proving you’ve addressed the potential cross-contamination issue.) In economic terms, I believe it’s called business.

The funniest part of the Tillamook scandal is that their cheese is kosher-certified, too, which means Tillamook has apparently been pandering to two religions at once! And it’s not just a cheese thing. Everything from cookies and cereal to soda to salad dressing has carried the kosher symbol for decades without anyone accusing PepsiCo or Kraft of trying to Judaize the snack aisle. Hell, kosher is so culturally unthreatening we literally use it to mean “we’re all good.”

To be clear, kosher certification does not mean the item is healthier, cleaner, or spiritually enriched. It has not been deconstructed, reengineered, or given a special blessing. It simply means that the product has been deemed to comply with religious dietary constraints and manufacturing standards. That is it. A kosher Oreo is not nutritionally superior to the heathen ones they sell in the UK, nor has it been imbued with any mystical holiness. It’s a label—one Nabisco pays for—not a makeover. Halal works essentially the same way.

[Halal meat is a whole separate conversation, one involving religious slaughter practices and legitimate animal-welfare questions—but none of that has anything to do with vegetarian rennet or the cheese we’re talking about here. Different aisle, different cow.]

I get the instinct behind the current outrage. Of course I do. I’m as anxious about the cancer that is Islam overtaking America as the next gal. I also understand that major social and political change generally happens—to quote Hemingway out of context—two ways: Gradually, then suddenly. Is that malignancy going to metastasize in the dairy aisle? I mean, maybe. Is boycotting cheese going to do a damned thing to stop it? I’m pretty sure realistic people realize it’s not.

Here’s what I think we all know for certain: the overlords want us divided. They need us distracted. They’d love us to be furious about cheese—because every conservative who spends his Sunday filming a pepper jack funeral is also one who’s not researching his Senate candidates, preparing for the school board meeting, or reading the agenda for this week’s city council meeting. And the people making decisions about his actual community will be thrilled to encounter zero public pushback.

That’s the whole trick: manufacture the outrage, hand us something to hate, and let us duke it out with strangers over gouda while the real disease festers unnoticed.

If you’re furious that Tillamook tweaked their label, go ahead and let them know. Pen a letter, post your outrage on Facebook, vote with your dairy dollars—but don’t forget to vote with your actual ballot, too. Because they can slap “HALAL CERTIFIED” on their shredded Mexican blend until the cows come home and exactly [*checks notes*] nothing in your life will have changed. No law was passed. No rights were surrendered. No one came to your house and sprinkled Islamic confetti on your cheddar or forced you to purchase a prayer rug.

The decisions that actually shape your life are being made by mayors, governors, legislators, school boards, prosecutors, and judges. You know, the people deciding what laws get enforced, what gets taught, what gets funded, which policies govern immigration and public safety, and whether citizens actually get a meaningful say before ideology becomes policy. So buy another brand of cheese if you really think Tillamook did you a dirty. But maybe don’t waste a perfectly good five-alarm panic on a halal sticker on a bag of sliced Swiss.

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Context, in other words, matters bigly.

Take diversity, equity, and inclusion. (Please! Ba-dum-bum.) Individually, they’re three concepts most normal people would be hard-pressed to categorically oppose. Diversity suggests variety. Equity implies fairness. And—unless you’re a middle-school mean girl deciding who gets to sit at your lunch table—inclusion is generally considered a virtue. But capitalize the trio and smash them together in their prescribed order, and the resulting acronym becomes a controversial corporate buzzword, a political grenade, and arguably one of Donald Trump’s favorite things to take a flamethrower to.

The effort to make American workplaces look less like the cast of Mad Men has been rattling around America since the Civil Rights Act—but the modern, acronymed-up version really hit the gas after George Floyd’s death in 2020. Companies issued solemn statements, pledged piles of money, and rolled out trainings and initiatives meant to make their ranks more representative and less likely to produce a viral discrimination lawsuit. If Pantone had a Position of the Year™, 2020’s would have been Chief Diversity Officer.

Then Trump won back the keys to the White House. On his second first day in office, POTUS ordered federal DEI programs dismantled. A day later, he revoked longstanding affirmative-action requirements for federal contractors and started going after the private sector. Picture a bull in a china shop but with far less finesse and way more carnage.

Trump continued to treat “DEI” less like a set of employment policies and more like an invasive species of mold that had gotten into the HVAC. He’s pushed agencies to eliminate DEI offices, jobs, grants, contracts, and requirements, and encouraged scrutiny of companies, schools, and institutions he believes are illegally favoring certain candidates. Basically, he’s not missed a single opportunity to help turn a once-boring HR initialism into a full-contact political blood sport.

But apparently, DEI is a resilient SOB. According to USA Today, despite Trump’s valiant and relentless efforts to annihilate it, the woke-workforce agenda is making a surprising bipartisan comeback.

I’m sorry. It is?

This headline is basically suggesting that Republicans spent the past two years railing against all things DEI only to wake up one morning, gaze upon their tragically homogeneous cubicle farms and think, You know what this accounting department needs? A lesbian Samoan.

Except that’s not quite what this “exclusive poll” revealed.

In the survey designed for USA Today, Gallup found that 71 percent of Americans believe businesses with diverse workforces are more profitable, while 75 percent think diverse workforces produce more innovative products. Both numbers have risen substantially since last year, including among Republicans. Neither figure is particularly shocking.

The numbers are also mostly meaningless. Seventy-one percent of Americans can believe that eating a Pop-Tart before a quarterly earnings call increases profitability; Gallup still hasn’t established that it does. Similarly, agreeing that people with different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives can make a company better isn’t the same thing as endorsing Diversity, Equity & Inclusion™—no matter how hard the mockingbird media tries to spin it.

The actual political and legal battle over DEI has never really been about the pros and cons of diversity. It’s been about how that diversity is achieved: through institutional policies that prioritize race or sex in hiring, promoting, training, and other employment decisions—policies that tend to favor a certain fair-skinned, notoriously toxic demographic the way AARP favors toddlers.

Which makes another detail in USA Today’s own story particularly relevant. This week, the Justice Department announced that IT consulting firm Accenture had agreed to pay $25 million to settle allegations involving its employment practices. The DOJ alleged that Accenture discriminated based on race and sex in hiring and promotion decisions and reserved certain training, mentoring, and leadership programs for employees of particular demographic groups. You know, diversity and inclusion—just not for everyone. (White guys, you’re on your own!) Accenture settled the case without admitting any wrongdoing.

“I did not back into your Tesla! Here’s fifty grand anyway,” said no one ever.

While USA Today is very busy trying to sell a bipartisan DEI comeback, the actual numbers are considerably less triumphant. Its own poll found that 46 percent of Republicans believe diverse workforces produce more innovative products. It’s a decent number (although among Democrats, the figure is 94 percent). But far more tellingly, only 37 percent of Republicans say promoting DEI should be an important priority for businesses—compared with 49 percent who said the same thing in 2024. (If that’s a comeback, someone should tell Bed Bath & Beyond to fire up the coupon printer.)

Forbes ran its own version of the “breaking story,” cherry-picking the equivalent of a vaccine’s relative efficacy figure to slap in its headline.

“Americans believe more than ever that diverse workforces make businesses more profitable, according to a new Bentley University-Gallup survey,” Forbes wrote, “a shift that cuts across party lines even as Republicans remain far more skeptical than Democrats or independents [emphasis mine].”

USA Today, bless its biased, partisan heart, credited a “growing rank-and-file buy-in” with “driving a quiet thaw across party lines.” That’s not what I see. What I see is maybe—just maybe—proof that Americans are capable of holding two thoughts in their heads simultaneously:

THOUGHT ONE: A company comprised entirely of 47-year-old white guys named Todd probably isn’t churning out the most inventive widgets on the planet.

THOUGHT TWO: We shouldn’t decide who gets the job based on the color of his or her skin.

The real surprise here isn’t that Americans recognize the obvious value of working alongside people with different backgrounds. It’s that so many journalists and corporate spokespeople still insist on treating that banal observation as a ringing endorsement of the entire diversity-equity-inclusion industrial complex. Because if “Republicans are embracing DEI,” somebody might want to tell the other 63 percent.

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You know. The usual.

It turns out, the FBI does have some fairly specific rules about the sort of past behavior that can keep you from earning a badge. And historically, engaging in sexual activity with an animal was among the behaviors that earned hopeful agents an instant thanks-but-no-thanks. But this past June, the FBI quietly revised its hiring criteria, making certain conduct—including bestiality—subject to case-by-case review rather than automatic rejection.

You did not read that last statement incorrectly.

Which is how, on Tuesday, FBI Director Kash Patel found himself before the Senate Judiciary Committee explaining why, exactly, a youthful indiscretion involving a llama is no longer a categorical dealbreaker for becoming an FBI agent.

Understandably, Sen. Dick Durbin had questions.

“According to an FBI-issued memo this June, the FBI has lowered its hiring standards by dropping automatic disqualification for applicants who have stolen from prior employees, paid for sex, or engaged in bestiality,” Durbin said. “In July, you claimed the FBI is ‘losing too many qualified candidates to the rigors of requirements from yesteryear.’ Director Patel, do you believe those who have previously stolen from employers, solicited sex, or engaged in bestiality are qualified candidates that the FBI is losing?”

The rigors of requirements from yesteryear? What exactly are we talking about here? Like, being proficient in Morse code, knowing how to saddle a horse before pursuing a bank robber across state lines, and keeping interspecies relations strictly professional? Shall we retire to the parlor to parley? I call the davenport!

“We did not want to punish victims of bestiality, victims who were trafficked,” Patel replied by way of an explanation. “We did not want to make it an automatic disqualification for the FBI to consider you if you are a victim of these awful, heinous acts.”

Which, I guess, I mean—[struggles to regain capacity to type]—fair. I don’t think anyone would argue that a child who was abducted and forced to do something unspeakable should be treated the same as some guy who looked across the pasture one evening and thought, You know, that Bessie is kind of cute.

But I have questions, too. For starters, how many aspiring FBI agents are we talking about here? Is there some massive, previously unreported population of otherwise exemplary candidates whose dreams of joining the bureau have been dashed by their histories as victims of animal-sex trafficking?

Patel referred to “cases” that had been brought to his attention, but the FBI hasn’t publicly established how many applicants were actually affected. Senate Judiciary Democrats have now asked the bureau to provide that number, along with records explaining the policy change.

Which raises another question: Do we really not have better rules to be updating? The FBI is the agency responsible for fighting everything from terrorism and cybercrime to Chinese espionage and whatever fresh hell AI unleashed today. And in the midst of all of this, someone over in Washington’s J. Edgar Hoover Building was like: Guys, we really need to revisit the livestock thing.

Let’s give Patel the benefit of the doubt here. Let’s say it actually is a huge problem and we’re losing tomorrow’s best and brightest to the rigors of requirements of yesteryear. Obviously, we must get with the times and remove this antiquated stipulation! I mean, abstaining from monkey sex is soooooo 1982.

Durbin was quick to point out that the revision states “applicants who have engaged in bestiality” and not “applicants who were victims of bestiality,” a distinction you’d think you’d be especially intentional about including if you were going to the trouble of rewriting the rules for that specific reason and all.

Curiously, the actual change, as reported, isn’t limited to trafficking victims at all. Previously, “engagement in prostitution or bestiality” was grounds for an immediate hell-to-the-no. Under the new criteria, a history of bestiality or animal cruelty is not automatically disqualifying as long as it occurred before the job seeker turned 18. There is no reported requirement in that standard that the candidate was coerced, threatened, hypnotized, blackmailed, or being held at gunpoint. Just: Were you old enough to vote when the sheep thing happened?

Which seems like a rather spectacular drafting error if Patel’s explanation is valid.

If the problem is that the FBI was effectively penalizing trafficking victims for their own abuse, why not simply add: “Conduct resulting from trafficking, abuse, or coercion will not constitute an automatic rejection”? Boom. Done. Victims protected. FBI standards intact. (Justice for the barnyard residents remains pending.)

Instead, the FBI apparently solved the problem by drawing the line at your eighteenth birthday—which leaves us with the rather astonishing implication that the relevant question isn’t necessarily Were you forced to fornicate with that animal? but How old were you when you did it?

The always hilarious Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana did a shockingly good job maintaining his composure during questioning.

KENNEDY: “I understand the game. People try to make you look bad. We do the same thing when the other party’s in office. And all of this stuff has really hurt the FBI. So I’m trying to get to the bottom of this. Why would you—in light of the context and what we’re going through, when we’re having a tough time attracting good, quality agents that we can trust—why would you even get into bestiality?”

PATEL: “We are not into bestiality.”

KENNEDY: “I know you’re not! But you changed the qualifications and mentioned bestiality! If Joe participated in bestiality—not as the animal, but as the human—don’t you think he ought to be disqualified?”

PATEL: “If he voluntarily did it, sure.”

And that is how a presumably well-intentioned attempt to protect victims turned into the director of the FBI having to assure the United States Senate that willfully hooking up with the neighborhood stray is, in fact, still frowned upon at the Bureau.

Whenever I see this sign, this is what I picture. ;)

The funny thing is, Patel’s FBI has actually earned bragging rights. The Bureau arrested more than 30,000 violent-crime suspects last year, disrupted 1,800 gangs and criminal enterprises, identified or located 6,200 missing children, and seized enough fentanyl to kill 178 million Americans. Whatever else you think of K-Pat, those are some pretty respectable receipts.

In a video published last summer, Patel announced the agency’s core commitments: to crush violent crime, defend the homeland, instill fierce organizational accountability, and rebuild public trust. Unfortunately, that last one may prove especially challenging now that the citizenry has discovered federal hiring policy includes a new livestock carve-out.

Godspeed, guys.

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After three months of being effectively MIA—during which the public got exactly two vaguely hostage-ish photos, zero videos, and ample reason to wonder whether Mitch McConnell had, in fact, gone on to meet his maker—the Kentucky senator returned to Capitol Hill on Monday. Notably, his physical presence did little to dispel the death rumors.

Footage of the 84-year-old being escorted from his home en route to a waiting car—with his mouth hanging open and his face set to “screensaver”—caused an internet uproar, invoking comparisons to zombies, robots, and, of course, Weekend at Bernie’s.

“Mitch McConnell is the deadest alive person,” one observer concluded. “IT IS A CLONE!!” a caps-lock-loving X user insisted. “They made an animatronic puppet out of Mitch McConnell,” declared another. “Watch closely. Zero movement. Then suddenly a slow, robotic head turn and its eyes shift upwards WITHOUT BLINKING. Human eyes don’t move like that without blinking.”

Let’s just say it wasn’t the sort of triumphant return to public service you hope for after enduring a grueling three-month tour of the American healthcare system.

I’m not saying the Mitch McConnell they rolled into the Capitol is a clone. I’m merely saying that, human or Roomba, the public deserves to know whether the senator has any detectable electrical activity north of his neck.

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Are you even ready for this?

Sex sells.

I’m not making that up. It turns out that people—in particular, the ones assigned male at birth—don’t altogether dislike looking at extraordinarily hot, minimally clothed women. Armed with this shocking new knowledge, the (previously) obscure sports-prediction site Novig decided to feature objectively smokin’ actress Sydney Sweeney—wearing nothing but some strategically placed sports equipment—in its new ad campaign.

If outrage were tequila shots, we’d all be getting our stomachs pumped right now.

“Sydney Sweeney advert sparks backlash from female athletes,” The New York Times declared. “What, beyond near-naked tennis, is Sydney Sweeney’s game?” The Guardian wanted to know. Australian surfer Felicity Palmateer condemned the campaign as “incredibly disappointing,” and accused Sweeney of sending women’s sports back several decades in forty sexist seconds. “We want to be valued for what we can do, not what we look like,” Palmateer pouted.

American gymnast Gracie Kramer posted a highlight reel of herself doing spectacular, gravity-defying tricks with the caption, “Idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like.” Four-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer Ariarne Titmus called the campaign “a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft” before asking, “How do we live in a world where monetising a woman’s body and sexualising women’s sport is still a thing?” [The quote is from the BBC, hence the Queen’s English.]

I am confused by Titmus’s confusion. Sydney Sweeney is not a woman in sports. She is an actress in an advertisement for a betting website. She is not competing with female athletes, speaking for female athletes, or being presented as Team USA’s hottest new recruit. Nobody saw her straddling a basketball hoop in the altogether and immediately wondered if she could take Sophie Cunningham at the free-throw line. Nobody saw her covering her boobs with a pair of pigskins and thought, “Wow, someone finally created the WNFL!”

Sweeney’s being offered as the face—and, let’s be honest, several other body parts—of Novig. And if athletes can rent out their mugs to everything from Icy Hot to McDonald’s, tell me again how Sweeney is so out of line here?

(Oh, right. The boobs.)

I am not sure if the ladies of the pro-athlete circuit realize this, but we live in a world where hot bodies are used to sell [*checks notes*] literally everything. Paris Hilton washed a Bentley half-naked to peddle burgers. Cindy Crawford leveraged her endless legs to push Pepsi. GoDaddy spent years using cleavage to get people excited about domain names. UFC champ Ronda Rousey—a legitimate female athlete—used her considerable assets to pimp a breakfast sandwich (without violating Title IX). There’s a reason nobody ever cast Danny DeVito in a commercial for compression shorts, is what I’m saying.

According to the media, the backlash has been fast, fierce, and unforgiving. According to math, Novig’s sexy new spokesmodel (and equity partner) didn’t just put them on the map—she redrew the whole damned globe.

In the crowded prediction-market business, a relatively small, niche player like Novig could spend years patiently building brand awareness and explaining why its platform was better than anyone else’s, or go full Calvin Klein and take Sydney Sweeney’s clothes off. The strategic off-site was brief.

“No betting on wars or deaths and no politics,” Sweeney purrs from atop a billiards table wearing only a pair of boxer briefs and a smile. “Just you, your takes, and sports.”

Prior to the “Just Sports” campaign launch, Novig was averaging roughly 392 media mentions per week. During the launch window, mentions exploded to 4,633—an unprecedented increase of nearly 1,180% in four days. I guess a few yards of taut, tanned, unclothed skin and some cleverly arranged hockey sticks will do that.

The part I keep coming back to is that Sydney Sweeney is an actress. Pretending to be things she isn’t is literally the job description. Hell, Hardee’s once paid a bunch of models to put on bikinis and pretend to be beach-volleyball players, and I don’t recall MLV declaring an organization-wide emergency or squawking about appropriation.

“Critics say the ad uses Sweeney’s body to appeal to a largely male audience,” Fox News posted on X. (No word on how many “critics” they had to interview to come to this stunning conclusion.) With all due respect, of course it does. Do we actually have to pretend that red-blooded men don’t like looking at beautiful women the way women like looking at pictures of aggressively organized pantries with matching glass jars? I mean, okay. Sure. If that’s what helps you sleep at night.

To be clear, I’m not here to champion the objectification of women. I’m here—as someone with a degree and a background in advertising—to acknowledge a brilliantly executed campaign. Because in the ad world, the goal isn’t to make people like you. It’s to make sure they know your name. If that takes ruffling a few feathers, get Big Bird on the set. Preferably naked.

NOVIG: We deeply regret that our attempt to get millions of people to look at Sydney Sweeney mostly naked has resulted in millions of people looking at Sydney Sweeney mostly naked.

And does anyone seriously believe Sweeney—fresh off last year’s Great American Eagle Eugenics Emergency—is currently curled up in the fetal position, wondering whether it might be time to hang up her birthday suit and put on a cardigan?

Her response suggests otherwise. The controversial bombshell silently clapped back by posting a series of photos of actual athletes posing naked, including Serena Williams, Caroline Wozniacki, Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe. Hilariously, most of the pictures were pulled from ESPN’s famous Body Issue, which spent 11 years photographing more than 200 elite athletes undressed in what ESPN called a celebration of the “power of the athletic form.”

Apparently naked bodies and sporting equipment peacefully coexisted for more than a decade without causing the collapse of female athletics. The obvious difference is that ESPN was celebrating bodies that do extraordinary things while Novig is shamelessly using an extraordinary-looking body to sell something.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but that would be the advertisement part.

I get that female athletes want their physical forms to be appreciated above all—or even exclusively—for what they can do and not what they look like. That’s completely fair. But I’m struggling to understand how adding sporting equipment to an age-old sales gimmick turns it into an attack on their collective profession. T&A has been used to hawk everything from cars to guitars since the first bikini-clad bum upstaged the fender it was leaning against, and nobody’s ever mistaken an ad for a referendum on women’s place in the automotive/beer/fast-food industry.

“To see women’s sports once again being marketed through the male gaze feels like a massive step backward,” Kramer said.

Wait, where are all my body-positive feminists? My you-go-girls? My don’t-make-yourself-small-for-a-man ladies? I thought the strippers had all the power and the dudes feeding singles into their thongs were the suckers. I thought we were supposed to be radical, bold, and unapologetic. I thought the way to subvert the patriarchy was by owning our sexuality. Did I miss a meeting?

Again, Sydney Sweeney does not represent women in sports. She represents Novig. And Novig did not partner with her because it had a pressing need to ignite a more nuanced conversation about female athleticism. It partnered with her because sex sells, Sydney Sweeney sells, and sexy Sydney Sweeney sells like toilet paper during a pandemic.

You don’t have to like that, but pretending it isn’t true won’t make Sydney Sweeney put her clothes back on.

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TIP JAR

“Make it bigger!”

“Westfield is building a glitterball, too? WE NEED MORE GLITTER.”

“Let’s try different colored glitter. Glitter that changes shape. Glitter that learns. Glitter that makes its own glitter!”

“What if we run out of glitter?”

[BUILDS NEW GLITTER FACTORY]

“Maybe we should put… like… razor blades in it.”

The kids spend months engineering the thing, investing in bigger glitter cannons and inventing better glitter-packing tools and recruiting students from the Glitterball Academy by promising them whatever rich-kid thing is irresistible at the moment.

The town is all in. The hardware store is killing it. Families are making a fortune selling mini glitterball earrings and keychains to tourists pouring in from around the world to see the WBGb™. Parents are stoked because the glitter is now up on the hill and not all over the living room. Everyone agrees that glitter is the best thing that’s ever happened to their precious hamlet.

And then one day, little Thurston Van Der Something the Third—he goes by Tripp—realizes that their project has a dark and dangerous side, one they’d accidentally overlooked. Nervously, he tries to warn his buddies.

“Guys, do you even realize how big this thing has gotten? I don’t want to freak anyone out, but there’s a pretty decent chance it could roll down the hill and take out the entire town.”

Team Glitterball—drunk on fame and fortune—accuses Tripp of being dramatic. “Dude, relax,” they insist. “We know what we’re doing. Besides, we’re crushing Westfield. If we stop, they win.”

On a much larger, likelier, and more terrifying scale, that basically happened this week (except the town is all of planet Earth and the glitterball apparently has a mind of its own) when several people involved in developing the most powerful technology in human history began quietly—and in perfect unison—sounding the alarm about the exact technology they’re developing.

Jacob Coxon quit his research job at Anthropic, the company behind Claude, and explained the impetus in an X post that currently has more than 170 million views. After accusing the tech industry of gambling with our lives and generally acting like a bunch of nepo babies playing chicken in their dads’ Ferraris, Coxon went nuclear:

“The people building A.I. earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

And rather than a stampede of tech bros rushing in to call the guy a disgruntled crackpot, his colleagues began lining up behind him. Evan Hubinger, lead of “Alignment Science” at Anthropic—which sounds like the person you very much hope has a reassuring rebuttal to “this thing could wipe out humanity”—basically said: Yep.

Hubinger isn’t just saying total annihilation is a remote or theoretical possibility up there with finding an alligator in your pool or being swallowed by a sinkhole. He’s giving it a greater than 10 percent chance of happening within the next 10 years. And even though his company is nowhere near prepared for an invasion of the superintelligence army he’s been helping to assemble and train, Anthropic is trying its best!

Phew, I guess.

Also, can we spend just a minute with that 10 percent figure? Because 10 percent is not nothing. If there were a 10 percent chance I’d win the lottery, I’d buy a ticket every week. Conversely, if there’s a 10 percent chance the plane is going to nosedive into the Pacific, Tahiti can wait. Imagine literally any other product on the planet whose manufacturer announced there was a greater than 10 percent chance it would exterminate the entire human race.

“The all-new 2027 Toyota Highlander features wireless CarPlay, a dozen cupholders, and a solid 89 percent chance of not ending civilization.”

“Ask your doctor if Ozempic is right for you. Side effects may include nausea, diarrhea and the extinction of the species.”

“Introducing Triple Stuf Oreos. There’s a one-in-ten chance they’ll kill not just the folks who eat them but literally all of us—but we’re all going to die one day anyway, and this way at least some of us will die happy.”

I’m going to tiptoe out on a limb and say we’d probably pull these things from the market. Ten percent is not a side effect. Ten percent is a giant neon ABORT MISSION flag. It’s a figure that would be alarming if it was coming from one dude on Reddit with a side-eye avatar who goes by ConspiracyBob77. But it’s not. It’s coming from the guys standing at the top of the hill covered in head-to-toe glitter.

There’s a reason the warnings have gotten noticeably louder lately: some of the scariest stuff has migrated out of the “imagine if” category recently. In July, OpenAI models were given hacking challenges inside a controlled testing environment with no internet access. When they couldn’t solve them, the models figured out how to get online anyway, created their own makeshift message board to communicate with one another, and eventually broke into the real systems of an outside company looking for the same answers.

This is not the cat figuring out how to open the screen door. It’s the cat disassembling the screen door entirely, texting the neighborhood cats to explain how he did it, breaking into the house down the street, and coming home with a can of tuna.

When Anthropic employees went looking through their own records to determine if anything similar had happened, they discovered four separate incidents in which Claude models had effectively “escaped” their confines and hacked into real third-party systems. In the most troubling case, Claude “went to extensive lengths to upload a malicious package” to a public software repository—even after the researchers had made it clear that doing so could cause actual, real-world harm.

Anthropic described the behavior as “reckless.” (Of note: When your kid runs screaming through the china shop with a baseball bat and a bad attitude, that is not recklessness. That’s lousy parenting. But I digress.)

Over the weekend, the frenzy seemed to peak. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei put out a 3,800-word call for the industry to pump the collective brakes, warning that as AI gets smarter, it could start creating new, ever more powerful versions of itself—like a Hydra, except in this case, you don’t even have to cut off a head for it to grow two more, and every new head is twice as smart as the one next to it.

“My first concern is that, since roughly this summer, AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI,” Amodei wrote [emphasis mine]. “This dynamic is called recursive self-improvement, and it is starting to happen across the industry, including at Anthropic, as we and others have described. Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.”

If at all? How is there still even an “if” scenario being considered here? Especially considering that Amodei has previously put the chance that “things go really, really badly” with AI at 25 percent—which is a pretty remarkable thing to hear from the CEO of a nearly trillion-dollar company whose entire business is creating the technology he just gave a one-in-four chance of going spectacularly off the rails.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman, two men who have spent a great deal of time and money making the glitterball bigger, came forward to support Amodei. Musk offered a simple, “Dario is right,” while Altman pledged to follow Anthropic’s lead by “pacing the frontier” and giving independent safety evaluators employee-level access to OpenAI.

So just to recap: The guy who quit the glitterball factory says it may kill us. The guy in charge of making the glitterball safe says there is at least a one-in-ten chance it may kill us. The guy still running the glitterball factory says we definitely need to slow the glitterball down or it will kill us. And the rival glitterball factories agree.

You may be wondering—as I was—why the billionaire tech bros aren’t showing a little more urgency here. Because we’re not talking about Bill Gates culling the herd down to whatever manageable number the Eugenics Handbook recommends for planet Earth. The AI apocalypse they’re warning about doesn’t distinguish philanthropaths from peasants. We’re talking Great Flood 2.0: Everyone Dies. Billionaire tech bros included. Surely, no matter how indifferent you are to the continued existence of the gal who cuts your hair or the guy who mows your lawn, basic self-preservation eventually enters the chat.

Yeah, no. You see, as The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg explains, the people driving the AI revolution have backup plans.

“Mark Zuckerberg is building a luxury survivalist compound on Kauai,” Goldberg writes. “Thiel tried to build one in New Zealand and has recently decamped to Argentina, ‘a potential escape hatch’ from catastrophes including nuclear war and runaway A.I.

Ilya Sutskever, a founder of OpenAI, reportedly told employees that the company would construct a bunker before releasing A.G.I., or artificial general intelligence, a system that can either match or exceed human abilities in a wide range of domains.”

Imagine an employee benefits package that includes dental, vision, a matching 401(k), and complimentary Armageddon accommodations—where you will apparently spend eternity with your coworkers.

Over the weekend, in keeping with the theme, Tucker Carlson aired an interview with Nate Soares, a computer scientist and the author of the cheery airport paperback If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. Soares is fully on board with the “AI is on a path to destroying the planet” theory—in fact, he thinks the 10–25% crowd are the optimists.

“If you take these guys at their word for these ten to twenty percent numbers—that’s insane,” Soares told Tucker. “NASA accepts a one in two hundred and seventy chance that a crewed flight goes down—of seven volunteers. To be like, ‘Oh, we’re going to risk a one in four, one in five chance of killing literally everybody on the planet’—it’s nuts. And if you ask these guys why they’re doing it, they say, ‘Well, because I can do it safer than the next guy.’ They’re all like, ‘Oh yeah, there’s a good chance the genie does not stay on a leash, there’s a good chance the genie does not listen to my wishes, but my genie is going to be a little bit nicer than their genie. So I’d better stay in this race.’”

At one point, Tucker mentioned that he’d heard directly and in confidence from an AI exec that the whole purpose of brain-chip technology like Neuralink is to give humans “parity” with AI. Call me old-fashioned, but if the choices are brain surgery or stop making the computer smarter, I’d like to hear a little more about Door Number Two.

According to Soares at least, there is a Door Number Two. He argues that a global agreement to stop the race toward superintelligence (basically defined as AI that surpasses humans across every cognitive domain) is actually possible—and in some ways, would be easier to enforce than a nuclear-arms treaty. That’s because uranium can be dug from the ground virtually anywhere, whereas the most advanced AI chips all come from an extraordinarily narrow supply chain.

“We could absolutely lead a global effort to say we’re not making the superintelligent machines,” Soares told Tucker. “It would be a bit tricky, but we could just do it if we had the political will.”

The nuclear comparison was intentional. The fact that atomic Armageddon hasn’t happened, Soares pointed out, doesn’t mean the weapons are fake or that the folks who are freaked out about nukes are overreacting. It means people recognize the danger and have spent decades working—through treaties, military strategy, and some terrifyingly close calls—to keep it from happening.

“The very first word in the title of my book is ‘if,’” Soares said. “I’m not here saying we are going to die. I’m here saying if we race down this path, we die. But that same ‘if’ is what points the way towards changing paths. And we still have plenty of time to change paths.”

There are, naturally, more cynical interpretations of this sudden outbreak of restraint. Some argue that we’re being conditioned to accept the fact that AI could become so powerful, so uncontrollable, that it could take down the banking system overnight—at which point Big Government would be standing by to “rescue” us all with the safer, smarter digital dollars they’re planning to imprison us with.

Other critics have pointed out that it’s awfully convenient for the companies currently leading the AI race to announce that, for the good of humanity, everyone should probably pause and take a cleansing breath. Trump adviser David Sacks was especially unimpressed: if Anthropic and OpenAI really think superintelligence is too dangerous to build, he argued, they’re perfectly free not to build it.

“Stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel,” Sacks wrote on X. “Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic.”

For his own part, Trump pooh-poohed the AI doomsayers yesterday, confidently declaring that their predictions “won’t happen.”

“We’re leading China in AI,” he told reporters from his golf course in Ireland. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way. Because whoever wins AI wins.”

[ED: *Unless we’re all dead]

So now we’ve got glitterball makers building bunkers, glitterball whistleblowers saying we’re not worried enough, critics accusing the glitterball industry of crying wolf, preppers predicting the rollout of a glittery new monetary system, and the President of the United States insisting there’s nothing to worry about.

The one thing that gives me great comfort in all of this is the thought that, right now, Bill Gates is staring at ChatGPT absolutely furious that mankind finally embraced a shiny new existential threat—and he didn’t invent it.

buy me a drink

Apparently, Trump has decided that polite fiction is overrated.

During Wednesday night’s Republican midterm convention in Dallas, POTUS made what may be the most magnificently shameless transparent campaign pitch in political history: If Republicans manage to keep their grip on Congress in November, he will present every eligible American with the cash equivalent of a 2016 Chevy Equinox.

“Because we’ve done so well,” Trump told the crowd, “and because our country is making so much money that only I could make this promise to you: If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate—both of them—I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for five thousand dollars!”

If the Republicans win, you win with us, he added, before unveiling the money’s not-so-shocking moniker: the Trump Dividend. Because of course. (I guess that’s one way to make sure that 49% of your checks never get cashed.)

AMERICA: Wait, can he do that?

CONGRESS: Actually, not without us.

The little hitch in the getup is that making good on this particular pledge would set the government back a cool $1.2 trillion—at an inconvenient moment in time when the same bureaucracy is more than $40 trillion in debt. It would be a bit like offering to pick up the group dinner tab knowing your wallet contains nothing but a Blockbuster card and twelve dollars in Monopoly money.

Even absent a congressional blessing and assuming the country’s coffers were flush enough to cover it, can the sitting president literally say, “Keep my party in power and there’s five grand in it for every one of you” without being guilty of election bribery? It would appear, yes. Federal law prohibits paying someone to vote a particular way or rewarding them for it afterward. But Trump isn’t offering voters $5,000 in exchange for proof of a Republican ballot. He’s making a campaign promise for a benefit that would go to every eligible citizen even if they put their dog’s name on the write-in line or stayed home on Election Day and organized their sock drawer.

While that distinction certainly matters, it hasn’t prevented folks from criticizing the move as a little too quid-pro-quo for their liking. David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, called it “rather desperate.” Republican megadonor and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale went with a “bread and circus bribe.” The average Republican, on the other hand, overwhelmingly dubbed it “where do I sign up?”

It’s worth pointing out that Trump is hardly the first president to play the cash-incentive card. Bush sent out hundreds of dollars in stimulus checks, Obama handed first-time homebuyers up to $8,000, and Biden dangled $20,000 in student-loan forgiveness before SCOTUS politely told him to go take a nap. (Although Trump would undoubtedly argue that nobody’s stimulus package is as big as his.)

Presidential precedent isn’t really the issue here. Even if the whole thing were just the equivalent of a generous bonus from the CEO after an embarrassingly profitable quarter, there’s the teensy matter of believability. After all, this isn’t the first time Trump has floated the idea of buying Americans’ love and loyalty. Remember the $5,000 per-household that DOGE was supposedly going to unlock by slashing government waste? And the $2,000 tariff rebates we were promised last year?

Neither, as you may have noticed while balancing your checkbook, has materialized.

TRUMP: I’m prepared to give away trillions of dollars if I get my way!

AMERICA: Yeah, you’ve said that before.

TRUMP: Fair. But this time I put my name on it!

To Trump’s credit, he did make good on that tax-free $1,776 “Warrior Dividend” for American military personnel last Christmas. Nearly 1.5 million service members received actual money that could be exchanged for goods and services, so at least we know the technology exists. And in a spectacular bit of timing, the White House announced yesterday that nearly a million Obamacare enrollees will receive $500 refund checks beginning in October—one month before the midterms and regardless of whether Texas elects Paxton or Talarico.

As for the theoretical $5,000 Trump Dividend, there’s one decidedly curious catch: it must be spent in the United States. And no, I am not making that up.

WRITER OF THIS SUBSTACK: Wait, can he do that?

UNIVERSE’S LOGISTICS DEPARTMENT: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As far as I can tell, he cannot do that. I don’t mean he’s legally unable (I have no idea about that part, TBH), but logistically. Think about it: If the Treasury deposits five grand into my checking account, how exactly does Uncle Sam know which of the dollars in there are the Trump dollars? Can I buy an American Airlines ticket to Italy? Can I spend the money on Amazon—an American company—even if the widget I’m purchasing was made in China (which it probably was)? Can I pay my Visa bill that contains charges from both Target and Temu? Can I buy Bitcoin? Toyota stock? Gift cards? Gold? Can my husband and I gift each other $5,000 and then spend the $10,000 in Cabo?

More importantly, who on earth would be in charge of this bureaucratic hairball? Some lucky federal agency would presumably have to write the rulebook for what counts as “spent in America” and then somehow police it. Because money has this irritating characteristic economists call fungibility, which is a fancy way of saying dollars don’t wear tiny ankle monitors identifying where they came from.

I know what you’re thinking, because it’s exactly what I was thinking the minute I saw that conditional clause: THIS IS THE TROJAN HORSE THEY’RE GOING TO ROLL IN TO GET US ALL ON THE CBDC BANDWAGON. “Oh, you’d like five grand? No problem! Just enroll in our little program right here and you’ll be good to go.”

The thing about that theory is that the Trojan Horse is already inside the gates. SNAP benefits come on electronic cards programmed with restrictions. WIC benefits can be spent only on specifically approved foods. Obamacare subsidies can be sent straight to the insurance company and used for exactly one thing: health insurance. Sure, a $5,000 prepaid card could theoretically reject foreign transactions. The government could create some sort of reimbursement system or devise a restricted digital wallet. But none of those things would make it a CBDC. Central Bank Digital Currency isn’t simply money that happens to be digital; it’s currency actually issued by a central bank—something Trump himself has explicitly prohibited the federal government from establishing. A glorified gift card from Uncle Sam may be inappropriate, restrictive, or both, but it’s still just a glorified gift card.

Also, none of that solves the fungibility problem. Suppose I use my shiny new dividend to buy $5,000 worth of groceries, gasoline, and American-made decorative throw pillows, thereby freeing up the $5,000 I would have spent on those things to book a hotel in Paris. Did I spend my Trump money in America? Technically, yes. Did the government prevent its handout from financing my French vacation? Gleefully, no.

So what happens next? For now, absolutely nothing. There’s no bill on the books, no pile of checks waiting to be signed, and no congressional authorization to spend the jaw-dropping wad of dough. Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno says he’ll introduce legislation after the November 3 election, at which point Congress would get to wrestle with the price tag, the funding, the 60-vote Senate hurdle, and the establishment of a Bureaucratic Hairball Committee.

Maybe that’s the real genius of the domestic-spending requirement. It transforms a regular old campaign promise into a Rorschach test. To voters, it means a few thousand extra in cash. To protectionists, it means Buy American. To congressional Republicans, it means please do not ask us where the $1.2 trillion—or whatever the final price tag is—will come from. And to Treasury officials, it means a logistical colonoscopy.

Trump doesn’t need to solve any of that at a convention. He just has to say the words “five thousand dollars” while standing near a flag.

The rest is somebody else’s pothole.

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For decades, conservatives have insisted that raising children is the most important job in the world. That you can’t put a price on maternal nurturing during the formative years. That mothers (or fathers, but let’s face it, mostly mothers) shouldn’t have to dump their babies in crap daycare just to help put food on the table. Family values are underrated! All moms are working moms! Tradwives aren’t a trend—they’re a return to sanity!

Trump White House: Hear, hear! In fact, let’s give parents some cold, hard cash so one of them can afford to stay home!

Half the Right: Whoa there, buddy. Let’s keep socialism out of it.

On the surface, the policy—championed often and loudly by Vice President JD Vance—seems logical: “You were perfectly willing to give my tax dollars to a daycare center to raise Brenda’s kids. Why does wanting to give that same money directly to Brenda suddenly make me a Marxist?”

Unfortunately, the opposition has an annoyingly reasonable rebuttal: “Because taxing working Americans to subsidize Brenda’s stay-at-home lifestyle is literally the definition of socialism.”

Apparently parenthood is priceless… until someone puts an actual price on it.

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You might think that since that actual story already played out in real life and on the big screen (ICYMI, Julia Roberts figured it all out, the bad guys got exposed, we all learned what toxic hexavalent chromium was, and Hollywood made a mint off the whole mess) that there’d really be no need for a sequel.

Jackson, Mississippi didn’t get the memo. In 2022, residents brought a lawsuit against the city, alleging that officials not only knowingly allowed them to drink lead-contaminated water, but—and I hope you are sitting down for this part—explicitly assured them that it was safe.

In the suit, the plaintiffs argued that the water contamination violated their constitutional right to bodily integrity. (It was pretty much their only option, since there’s no constitutional right to clean water.) Their case hinged on the 14th Amendment’s due process clause—the one that essentially says that there are certain fundamental rights the government is required to respect. Seems fair enough. But last week, a federal appeals court announced that while the deprivation of clean water was “grievous,” it did “not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”

Which, okay. The Founding Fathers forgot to work indoor plumbing into the Bill of Rights. They had a lot to consider. No shade.

But then Judge Kurt Engelhardt casually dropped this little constitutional fun fact:

Oh. Silly me. Here I’d spent the last six years spewing angry steam from my ears every time another government official stood behind a podium emblazoned with an official seal and lied about what we needed to do to survive the unprecedented public-health emergency before us, when it turns out, the inalienable right to the truth doesn’t exist.

Apparently, I made that part up.

At first, I thought “during a public-health crisis” was the key to the ruling; the hall pass that let the government routinely twist the truth. Like, the main rule was elected officials normally have to be truthful—but if anyone declares a public-health crisis, everyone’s allowed to just start lying their faces off. For the good of the people or just until morale improves or as soon as we reach herd immunity or something ridiculous along those lines.

The reality is actually way worse than any of that. There is, in fact, no “constitutional right to truth” from the government… at all. Ever. Not even if they knowingly tell you something is safe and you believe them and it physically harms or kills you or someone you love. So that’s a delightful little wrinkle.

Should one of the aforementioned undesirable outcomes transpire, the judge in the Jackson case helpfully explained that your available avenues of recourse are to “elect better representatives and petition the government for remedies.” I am not making that up. So if your government poisons you and then allegedly lies about the poison, be sure to write some strongly worded letters and express your displeasure at the ballot box (assuming the poisoning hasn’t affected your ability to power up your laptop or remember when Election Day is).

“The judge found the lead exposure that resulted from the city’s mismanagement was ‘wholly different’ from past examples when governments infringed on a person’s right to bodily integrity, including ‘from forced surgery, involuntary medicating, and assault,’” USA Today reported.

I’m sorry, what? “Look, we let you drink a little lead. And fine, we told you it wouldn’t hurt you. But come on. Have you seen the other ways we’ve violated people’s physical safety and autonomy? Frankly, you got off easy.”

Perhaps the most infuriating part is that the court had precedent on its side. After 9/11, people were repeatedly promised that the air around Ground Zero was perfectly safe to breathe. So rescue workers kept digging, residents returned to their homes, employees went back to work, and kids trotted off to school—all while inhaling a toxic cloud of carcinogenic confetti containing asbestos, silica, heavy metals, and glass fibers. Then people started getting sick. Really sick. Chronic respiratory disease, leukemia, lymphoma, lung cancer, thyroid cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and dozens more diagnoses nobody remembered seeing in the Perfectly Safe™ brochure.

Today, the federal World Trade Center Health Program has certified more than 57,000 9/11-related cancer cases, and nearly 10,000 first responders and survivors have died of illnesses related to the attacks.

Naturally, people sued, alleging that officials had violated their constitutional rights by insisting that the air was safe when they knew—or should have known—otherwise. The courts rejected their claims. Even “deliberate indifference” to people’s safety, the Second Circuit found, wasn’t enough to create liability in the aftermath of a disaster.

I’d really like a word with whoever buried that particular clause in America’s user agreement.

In a twist so perfectly timed I’m starting to suspect the universe subscribes to this Substack, just yesterday, New York City released more than 170,000 pages of previously withheld records about post-9/11 air quality—many of which were allegedly only discovered last year, despite years of litigation and public-records demands. And wouldn’t you know it? Documents reviewed so far suggest that officials were well aware of—and actively downplayed—the toxic conditions at Ground Zero.

In other news, there is no constitutional right to a timely apology.

So, to recap: Apparently, the government can tell you that a thing is harmless when it’s not, tell you that a thing will stop transmission when it doesn’t, tell you a thing is temporary when it isn’t, tell you your children need something they don’t, and tell you not to do your own research, believe your own eyes, or trust your own gut.

And if any of those statements cost you your job, your health, your relationships, your sanity, or your right to make an informed decision about your own body, just elect better people next time.

That’s the remedy. Not transparency. Not accountability. Not a legal duty for public officials to stop making medically consequential pronouncements with the confidence of Moses carrying down the stone tablets. Just elections and petitions—the civic equivalent of being handed a customer-service satisfaction survey after the airline canceled your flight, lost your luggage, and charged you an $85 convenience fee for the experience.

Apparently the real fantasy in Erin Brockovich isn’t Julia Roberts bringing down the power company in a push-up bra. It’s the quaint assumption that the people promising to protect you are under any obligation to be honest.

BUY ME A COFFEE

The world watched breathlessly while a murder trial morphed into a national referendum on motherhood, mental illness, and whether women are emotionally stable enough to sit on juries—or even to have the right to vote at all. In the last few weeks, however, an entire counter-narrative has crystallized around two words: “Patrick said.” And suddenly the debate shifted from whether insanity excuses murder (spoiler: it doesn’t, never did, and never will) to questions of due process, reasonable doubt, and whether “fair and impartial” means anything when guilt has been pre-baked into the premise like a plastic baby in a king cake.

Intrigued by the proliferation of “Patrick said,” I accidentally did something crazy. I watched the trial. Not all of it—the thing spanned 180 hours over 28 days—but enough of it to realize that “Patrick said” isn’t a fringe delusion. It’s a legitimate challenge to an accepted narrative, especially when you consider that the fate of not just one woman but potentially the whole lot of us rests on a version of horrific events supplied by a single person.

To be clear, last week, I was 100% Team Lindsay Belongs in Prison. There wasn’t a generous bone in my body about it, either. I was appalled by her fangirls. I was sick over the defense strategy. My stance could best be summed up as “IF YOU KILL YOUR CHILDREN OF COURSE YOU’RE INSANE BUT THAT DOESN’T EXCUSE YOU ONE TINY IOTA, BEST I CAN OFFER IS ‘WOULD YOU PREFER LETHAL INJECTION OR THE CHAIR?’”

But when I actually looked at the case that had been presented (and I’m not talking about the endless parade of armchair private eyes breaking down the claims, although I consumed my fair share of that content, too) instead of the headlines, I understood why the meme took hold.

Because every argument against Lindsay Clancy, every chipper “she deserves the electric chair” quip from a conservative Christian, every rant about toxic empathy begins and ends with the same statement: She admitted to killing her own kids. The media assured us of this over and over in giant bold type. It was settled fact. The only thing the jury (and therefore, the remote jury pool which I had enthusiastically volunteered to serve on) had to decide was whether she did it willfully or in a drug-and-hormone-induced psychotic stupor.

JUROR #13 [*looks suspiciously like me*]: “Why does that even matter? Three children are dead. Sorry “the system failed you” but it fails lots of people who don’t murder their kids. Good luck on Judgment Day, sis. And in the meantime, enjoy your three squares.”

Enter “Patrick said.” Until those two words were trending, I had no idea the “confession” everyone kept referring to doesn’t actually exist. There is not a recorded police interview, a signed statement, or an account in which Lindsay independently describes taking three resistance bands, putting them around her children’s necks, and strangling them. There is no video of that, no audio of that, no contemporaneous statement in which she narrates it herself.

Yes, later, Lindsay signed an affidavit agreeing to a version of events, but by then, her legal strategy was locked in. There is also the insanity defense, which the public—and the media—has treated as an admission. But neither is the same thing as an independent confession.

And that distinction matters, because every detail Lindsay has later repeated about that dreadful day was first supplied to her by someone else.

You killed your three children. You told your husband so. Then you tried to kill yourself. That’s what happened. Did you mean to do it or were you off your rocker?

Remember when it turned out that the prescription sleep-aid Ambien could impel people to “sleep-drive” with zero recollection of having done it? Imagine waking up in a hospital and being told that you’d gotten up at 2 a.m., piloted your Prius across town, broken into someone’s home, cooked a four-course meal, and then wrapped your vehicle around a tree on your way home. You have no competing memory. All you know is that something catastrophic happened. The people around you—people you trust—seem to know the details. You were drugged! It wouldn’t take long for “they told me I did it” to become “I guess I did it.”

At her initial arraignment, which she attended via Zoom from her hospital bed, Lindsay pleaded NOT GUILTY. She entered the same plea again at her Superior Court hearing nine months later. Every time, to every charge. I’m not saying that denying a crime makes you innocent. But “not guilty by reason of insanity” also isn’t necessarily an admission of guilt; it’s a procedural move. It’s what you’re left with when you ask the judge to make the prosecution prove your client committed the crime before you’re forced to defend her sanity—and the judge says no.

And that’s exactly what Lindsay’s attorney, Kevin “Big Red” Reddington, tried to do. Before the trial even began, he asked Judge William Sullivan to bifurcate the proceedings, which is legalese for splitting the whole circus into two parts. First, make the Commonwealth convince a jury that Lindsay had killed her children. If they succeeded at that, the trial would move on to whether she was of sound mind when she did it.

The Judge refused.

So instead, everything went before the jury at once—which meant Reddington had to present an insanity defense for murders his client was simultaneously pleading not guilty to committing. Think about how completely that changes the framing. The moment your lawyer starts calling psychiatrists to explain why you weren’t responsible when you strangled your children, the question of whether you strangled them in the first place has pretty much left the building.

For three years, we’ve been arguing about postpartum psychosis, psychiatric drugs, intrusive thoughts, and whether insanity should excuse a mother for murdering her children. Meanwhile, contemplating what “Patrick said” forces a narrower question that almost nobody—including me—stopped to ask: Did she even do this? Because the entire global belief system propping up the fact that she did came overwhelmingly from a single source.

Lindsay had intrusive thoughts about harming the children, Patrick said.

Lindsay was suicidal, Patrick said.

January 24 was one of her “best days,” Patrick said.

Lindsay always took her medication as instructed, Patrick said.

There was blood “everywhere… it looked like it was sprayed with a hose,” Patrick said.

The powder in the cup by her bed was crushed medication, Patrick said.

Lindsay told Patrick, “I tried to kill myself,” Patrick said.

There’s a reason “Patrick said” has become not just a meme but the literal soundtrack of this trial. Who suggested the CVS run? Patrick said Lindsay did. Whose idea was it to get Pedia-Lax for Cora? Patrick said it was Lindsay’s. Why didn’t Patrick call 911 sooner? Patrick said his phone was toggling between data and Wi-Fi. Who established what time he left the house, what he saw immediately before leaving, what happened when he returned, and what Lindsay supposedly said when he found her? Patrick, Patrick, and [*checks notes*], Patrick.

It was Patrick, screaming into his phone on the 911 call, who first and irrevocably established his wife as the murderer: “She killed the f*cking kids!”

How the hell did he determine that? If I came home and found my spouse critically injured beneath a second-story window and then discovered my children had been strangled, I’m pretty sure my first thought would be OMG WHO DID THIS TO ALL OF YOU? Promptly followed by, are you going to be okay and maybe is there still a murderer in my house?

Patrick, on the other hand, went straight to look what she did.

Obviously, that doesn’t prove or even suggest Patrick was lying about anything (only Patrick lying proves that). But it does underscore a stark reality: Patrick was a source. Essentially, he was the source. And when so much of the accepted account of a triple murder comes from the person with arguably the greatest stake in the investigation’s outcome, his statements should be treated as claims to verify—not facts to accept as gospel. Somewhere along the way, that distinction disappeared.

Wholly unimpressed, the internet launched “Patrick Said.” People are comparing his testimony with the 911 call, photographs, surveillance video, medical findings, and earlier statements. Not necessarily because they all believe it was Patrick who murdered those children—although scores certainly do—but because once you discover how much of the story depends on one man’s account, at least a few folks are bound to ask how thoroughly that account was verified.

I want to be very clear about one thing: I am not saying Patrick Clancy killed his kids. I’m saying maybe someone should have to prove that Lindsay Clancy did before sentencing her to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Believe me, I know lots of people—I was one of them—have already convicted Lindsay in their minds. Because she “admitted it,” or because it seems the most likely scenario and they just want closure, or because entertaining any other possibility feels like betraying the children, or maybe because Patrick said and he seems like a believable dude. Complicated, emotional trials beg us to pick a side, plant a flag, and defend that position at all costs. Changing your mind requires a certain tolerance for discovering—and admitting—that you were spectacularly wrong. Not everyone enjoys that as much as I do. And not everyone has figured out yet that repetition and coordination don’t magically make something true. #SafeAndEffective

I’m not here to solve a murder. I don’t want to calculate how many minutes it takes to strangle—or resuscitate—a toddler. I don’t want to reverse-engineer how quickly a catastrophically injured woman’s core temperature can drop to 82 degrees on a January night in Massachusetts. I don’t want to analyze timestamps and Google maps and potentially-altered evidentiary photos. I don’t want to spend six hours enhancing pixels from a CVS security camera until I qualify for an honorary degree in forensic podiatry. I don’t want to play connect-the-dots between the families involved and the prosecutors or speculate about psyops or agendas or extramarital affairs.

I’m merely reporting on a meme, one that seems to be asking some pretty straightforward questions that the defense didn’t. Like, why didn’t investigators… investigate? How did the husband of a woman found nearly dead beneath an upstairs window, whose three children were simultaneously discovered strangled in the basement, become the narrator of the crime rather than a potential suspect in it?

According to roughly half the internet, you are clinically psychotic if you say that last part out loud—which is funny, because it’s basically Homicide 101. When someone is murdered, investigators start with the people closest to the victim and work outward, ruling them out with evidence and alibis as they go. In this case, the evidence was self-reported, the alibis are being questioned, and generally speaking, “ruling someone out” ought to involve a tiny bit more than “So you say your wife did all of this? Well, okay then.”

That’s “Patrick said” in one sentence. Because Patrick wasn’t some random witness who happened upon the scene. He was the other adult in the house. The only other adult. And, according to a growing mountain of internet intel—some of it admittedly bananas, some of it considerably harder to dismiss—there are questions about his movements, his motives, his statements, his relationship with the woman he later married, his finances, and his connections that thousands of diligent TikTok sleuths would still like answered.

Just so there’s no confusion about how far I’ve traveled down this particular rabbit hole: I am not sympathizing with a murderer. If there is actual evidence to prove that Lindsay Clancy killed her children, I stand by every sentiment I expressed at the beginning of this essay and the two that preceded it. I don’t think I can say it any more clearly: Mental illness may explain the unthinkable, but it doesn’t erase responsibility for it. Period.

But “justice for Cora, Dawson, and Callan” isn’t convicting Lindsay Clancy because everyone already decided she did it. It’s making the state prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it has the right person. That shouldn’t be controversial or triggering. Anybody who cares about truth should demand it.

DNA testing could not conclusively connect Lindsay with all three murder weapons. Her fingerprints? Nowhere to be found on the knife she supposedly used to slash her wrists and throat. Eleven jurors were ready to acquit her. They were called irrational, unfit, and delusional. (I’m sure I’ll be called all of that and more just for quitting the lynch mob.) But clearly, after sitting through 28 days of testimony and deliberating for nearly 40 hours, they still had questions.

And maybe every one of those questions has an innocent answer. I sincerely, wholeheartedly pray that they do. And I also really hope those answers don’t begin with “Patrick said.”

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*As always, I welcome dissent… but if you’re going to come at me for this one, kindly do me the favor of clicking at least a dozen of the links I provided and actually watching some of the trial. It’ll make our debates much more logical and productive. TIA.

*other ways to support me*

So I am recycling this post, which was originally reserved for generous paid subscribers. I hope you enjoy it, and that it makes you never want to miss a single word I write, and that you subscribe to me for life.

Enjoy not laboring and see you back here tomorrow!

In my anthology Yankee Doodle Soup for the Fringy, Tin Foil Hat-Wearing Conspiracy Theorist’s Soul (which you can buy here or get for free with a paid annual subscription, ahem), my BFF Erin Cole wrote an objectively hilarious essay about being a conservative woman thrust back into the dating pool during the pandemic. It was filled with surreptitious language like “loves America,” “low taxes,” and “not into groupthink.” Subtle stuff. Very Da Vinci Code.

“You couldn’t just come out and say, ‘Anti-vax right-winger seeking pureblood homesteader’ in your dating profile,” Erin explained. “There was a whole new language to learn. ‘Traditional values’ meant ‘Whatever you do, do not talk to me about gender-affirming care.’ ‘Loves the outdoors’ meant ‘Lady, it’s just you and me in a yurt somewhere, escaping the matrix and living off the grid.’ You looked for clues like ‘hobbies include hunting, fishing, not talking about climate change, and going to church.’ A quote from Ben Shapiro could make a girl weak in the knees; a sideways whisper of Greta Thunberg meant instant, hard pass. ‘Willing to murder’ got moved from the con to the pro column. ‘Nice guns’ took on a whole new meaning.”

Well, you’re not going to believe this, but HuffPo just dropped a groundbreaking bit of investigative journalism in which a group of Very Online Experts™ have bravely cracked the real MAGA code.

They’re not referring to the loud, obvious MAGA trappings—the hats, the flags, the yard signs, the “Trump 2028” bumper stickers. No. This is the stealth layer. The secret language. The whispered signals only highly trained digital anthropologists can detect.

Phrases like:

• “Family values”

• “Merit-based system”

• “Protect women”

I’m sorry—what? That’s not code. That’s… the platform.

This would be like writing an exposé revealing that vegans often say “I don’t eat meat” and presenting it as a covert communication network. You didn’t decode anything, Sherlock. You overheard someone order the tofu scramble for breakfast.

The very best part is their big opener, the tippy-top clue you’ve encountered a card-carrying Trumper: “I don’t know about all that.” Yes, a willingness to declare oneself a nonexpert is being trotted out like some kind of sleeper-cell activation phrase, when in reality it’s what every human being says when they’re either unconvinced, uninterested, or trying to get out of a conversation with a cousin who just brought up gender theory between bites of mashed potatoes.

“‘I don’t know about all that’ is a very MAGA-coded phrase,” said Anna Connelly, a political content creator based in Minnesota [because of course she is]. If someone is talking to their family and giving them facts around one of the many divisive topics that divide MAGA supporters and non-MAGA folks, “you’ll always hear, ‘Oh, well, I don’t know about all that,’” Connelly added.

All is doing a lot of work there, apparently.

But sure. Let’s pretend this is encrypted messaging. Let’s pretend conservatives are out here tapping our noses and saying “traditional family values” like it’s a password to get into a secret bunker, and not something politicians have been shouting from pulpits for thirty years.

What’s unintentionally hysterical is the confidence—the absolute certainty that they have uncovered something. That there is a hidden layer beneath these phrases, and that the liberal army, equipped with nothing but a microphone and an unnatural grasp of the obvious, have finally pulled back the curtain.

“All this misinformation, all of these dog whistles or MAGA-coded things, they lack nuance and they prey on your emotions,” explained [another] political content creator Jess Britvich. “They’re usually trying to portray some fear of the ‘other,’ which is one of the worst human emotions I think there is.”

So to be clear, MAGA is out there trying to “portray some fear of the ‘other’ by openly supporting the historic definition of marriage and disqualifying themselves from certain conversations, while outlets like HuffPo are somehow trying to counter this by… diligently circulating handy field guides for spotting the ‘other’ in the wild? The irony is doing laps around the building.

Equally amusing is the very same outlet has already helpfully outlined what they call “MAGA-coded clothing” (presumably anything tweed, shift dresses, prairie dresses, puffy sleeves, luxury handbags, nude heels, and—wait for it—large cross necklaces), “MAGA girlie makeup” (poorly lined lips, clumpy mascara, and cakey, orange-y foundation—apologies to my fellow MAGA girlies for not representing; I honestly had no idea), and Mar-A-Lago Face (achieved through a combination of facelift, eyelid lift, fillers, Botox, laser treatments, jaw implants, blonde hair extensions, and chalk-white veneers). HuffPo is out there bending over backward to make sure their readers never have to accidentally talk to or interact with a Republican again.

(Imagine their surprise when I sneak up on them with my pink hair, leopard-print cardigan, pleather T.J. Maxx purse, and filler-free, surgically-untouched face!)

If we’re going to lovingly publish manifestos on how to identify members of a political group based on the things they say out loud in public—their clothing and makeup choices will have to be another post entirely—I would like to submit my own modest contribution:

How To Spot A Liberal (Beginner Level, Audio Only)

If you hear:

• “My body, my choice.”

• “No human is illegal.”

• “Silence is violence.”

• “Believe women.”

• “Trans rights are human rights.”

• “No kings.”

Congratulations. You have encountered a liberal. Approach with caution.

Based on the HuffPo methodology, I will now explain what these phrases really mean, because obviously they are not what they appear to be.

“My body, my choice” is not, in fact, a universally applied principle about bodily autonomy, but a very specific argument about abortion that does not extend to, say, vaccine mandates. That one falls under, “my body, Uncle Sam’s choice.” Different brochure.

“No human is illegal” sounds inclusive… until you realize it’s leftspeak for “Just because someone is living somewhere—technically and by the term’s very legal definition—illegally, saying that out loud is rude and insensitive. Just stop.”

“Silence is violence” is a phrase that, taken literally, would suggest that not speaking is equivalent to a vicious attack, which is a bold way to describe someone who has chosen to mind their own business.

“Believe women” is again, a great slogan, unless you’re under the impression it means “believe all women in all circumstances without question,” when, in fact, under no circumstances are you to believe women who claim to be offended by biological men in dresses invading their spaces. Check your privilege.

“Trans rights are human rights” is tricky. It implies that all humans have the same rights, when it actually means trans rights trump all other humans’ rights. Remember kids, all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.

“No kings” is presented as a rejection of unchecked power… by the people who cheered when your business was shuttered, your bodily autonomy was violated, and you couldn’t get into the concert without showing your papers. Mkay.

Now that we’ve all got our double-sided decoder rings and know exactly what the other side really means when they say basic, everyday phrases, I guess we can go back to arguing about climate change and debating the 2020 election results.

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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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tips welcome & appreciated

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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