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Executive Summary

Something strange is happening within one of America’s most secular, highly educated, and technologically sophisticated communities. A growing subculture of young scientists, programmers, entrepreneurs, and artificial intelligence researchers is embracing extraordinary beliefs about simulated reality, digital immortality, superintelligent machines, and humanity’s ultimate destiny. Some believe our universe is a computer simulation created by a superior intelligence. Others envision escaping biological death by transferring human consciousness into machines. Still others believe artificial intelligence will either save humanity or destroy it.

For some, these are intriguing intellectual possibilities. For others, they have become deeply held convictions, providing the meaning, belonging, moral purpose, and promise of transcendence traditionally associated with religion.

The most disturbing example is the Zizians, a radical group that emerged from the San Francisco Bay Area’s rationalist and AI communities. Its highly educated members developed bizarre theories about consciousness, morality, and human identity, eventually becoming associated with a series of violent incidents and six deaths across three states. Their story illustrates how intellectual certainty, charismatic leadership, and social isolation can develop into dangerous cult-like behavior.

But these beliefs are no longer confined to obscure Silicon Valley communities. Podcasts, Reddit, YouTube, and influential technology personalities are introducing millions of people to theories once restricted to academic philosophy and science fiction. Some younger adults, particularly those with technical educations and secular worldviews, are beginning to embrace these ideas as explanations for existence itself.

Meanwhile, the artificial intelligence industry is creating enormous fortunes, potentially placing unprecedented financial and political power in the hands of a relatively young generation whose philosophical convictions may extend far beyond ordinary business interests. Some of these movements already benefit from wealthy patrons who finance university programs, research institutes, and political advocacy organizations.

The central question is what happens when people who pride themselves on rejecting religious faith begin embracing new systems of belief, complete with promises of immortality, visions of salvation and apocalypse, charismatic leaders, and the conviction that they possess special knowledge about humanity’s future. And what happens when some of those believers acquire the wealth and political influence to reshape society according to their convictions?

The Zizians: When Rationalism Becomes a Cult

In January 2025, U.S. Border Patrol agent David Maland was killed during a traffic stop in Vermont, near the Canadian border. A German national, Ophelia Bauckholt, also died in the exchange of gunfire. The surviving traveler, Teresa Youngblut, was arrested.

Investigators uncovered connections to an unusual network of highly educated young adults known as the Zizians. The group had emerged from the rationalist community surrounding Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence industry. This largely secular intellectual movement attracts computer scientists, mathematicians, programmers, and technology enthusiasts who believe that logic, probability, and scientific reasoning can help people overcome irrational thinking, make better decisions, and solve humanity’s greatest problems. Many participants are deeply interested in artificial intelligence, particularly the possibility that superintelligent machines could either transform civilization or destroy it.

The community developed largely through online forums, including LessWrong, before expanding into conferences, shared housing, research organizations, and close-knit social networks in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Zizians emerged from this environment but developed increasingly extreme beliefs and practices. Members and associates were subsequently linked by investigators to a series of violent incidents in California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.

At the center was Jack Amadeus LaSota, a transgender “woman” who goes by the name Ziz. LaSota studied computer science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, interned at NASA, and moved to the Bay Area in 2016. There, he became involved with the rationalist movement, an intellectual community devoted to logic, probability, cognitive science, and improving human reasoning.

The rationalists were particularly interested in artificial intelligence and the possibility that superintelligent machines might someday threaten human survival. Many regard the development of safe AI as one of humanity’s most important moral obligations.

LaSota took these ideas in a much stranger direction.

He developed an elaborate theory suggesting that the brain’s two hemispheres could contain separate personalities, moral identities, and even gender identities. He promoted psychological techniques intended to reveal or separate these supposed internal agents. His writings also divided people according to unconventional moral categories and treated certain ethical obligations as overriding ordinary social expectations.

LaSota and associates reportedly experimented with the theories in their personal lives. The group became increasingly isolated from mainstream rationalist organizations and developed intense interpersonal loyalties.

One early tragedy involved Maia Pasek, a young transgender “woman” interested in rationalism and unconventional theories of consciousness. Pasek died by suicide in Poland in 2018 after participating in discussions and experiments involving LaSota’s ideas. Subsequent reporting described how LaSota interpreted the tragedy through his own theory of competing mental identities.

Another disturbing story involves Michelle “Jamie” Zajko, a former bioinformatics researcher who had worked at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Zajko left his scientific career in 2021 and became deeply involved with LaSota’s circle, eventually living with associates in Vermont.

His relationship with her parents deteriorated. On New Year’s Eve 2022, Richard and Rita Zajko were shot to death in their Pennsylvania home. In June 2026, prosecutors charged their son with their murders, alleging that he had traveled to Pennsylvania with LaSota and another associate. The trial is ongoing.

Other incidents included a violent confrontation with California landlord Curtis Lind in 2022, during which Lind was seriously injured, and one alleged attacker was killed. Lind himself was murdered in January 2025. The Vermont shooting followed later that month. LaSota and several associates have criminal charges filed against them, and legal proceedings are ongoing.

The Zizians are not representative of rationalists or AI researchers generally. Their behavior was rejected by many within the broader community. Nevertheless, their history illustrates how an intellectual movement can develop cult-like characteristics when charismatic leadership, social isolation, extraordinary moral claims, and intense personal loyalty become intertwined.

What makes this story particularly unsettling is the educational background of those involved. These were not people who had rejected science in favor of traditional supernatural beliefs. They came from a culture that placed exceptional value on intelligence, logic, and rational inquiry. Yet within this small group, an unvalidated theory about consciousness acquired extraordinary personal and moral significance.

The question is how such a transformation becomes possible.

The Intellectual Culture Behind the Beliefs

Over the past two decades, the San Francisco Bay Area has become home to overlapping communities of rationalists, transhumanists, effective altruists, longtermists, singularitarians, simulation theorists, AI accelerationists, and techno-spiritualists, including those who believe artificial intelligence may become conscious, godlike, or capable of granting humanity digital immortality.

Despite their differences, these movements share a fascination with humanity’s future, the nature of consciousness and reality, and the possibility that technology could fundamentally transform human existence, overcome biological death, or even create a godlike intelligence. Some even believe that a computer is God and we are a simulation.

For younger participants, these communities can provide much more than intellectual stimulation. Shared houses, professional networks, informal gatherings, and online forums connect work, friendship, personal relationships, and philosophical convictions.

AI researcher Sonia Joseph described living in San Francisco houses populated by rationalists and employees of major AI laboratories. Residents discussed the possibility of human extinction, hosted speakers, and sometimes experimented with psychedelics in the context of exploring consciousness.

Joseph described an environment in which professional and personal life became deeply intertwined. When nearly everyone around you believes humanity may face catastrophe within a few years, that belief can become an organizing principle of everyday life.

For someone entering this world, participation can offer employment opportunities, friends, mentors, a sense of belonging, and a sense of extraordinary purpose.

A programmer is no longer simply writing software. A researcher is no longer merely studying algorithms. They may believe their work will determine whether humanity survives, becomes immortal, or enters an entirely new stage of existence.

This is where intellectual conviction can begin to resemble religious vocation.

The community offers a shared worldview, influential teachers, moral obligations, and the promise that one’s life participates in something vastly larger than personal success.

The Promise of Immortality and Something Greater

Traditional religions have long addressed humanity’s deepest questions. Why do we exist? What happens when we die? Does our suffering have meaning? Is there something greater than ourselves?

Some emerging technological philosophies offer strikingly similar promises, expressed through the language of computing and artificial intelligence.

Transhumanism proposes that technology may eventually overcome the biological limitations of human existence. Aging could be reversed, human intelligence enhanced, and consciousness preserved or recreated digitally, potentially allowing people to escape biological death. Some even envision creating digital versions of themselves capable of existing independently of the physical body, inhabiting virtual worlds, or exploring realities beyond our own. This includes the possibility that future space exploration might be undertaken not by flesh-and-blood astronauts, but by digitized versions of human consciousness capable of traveling where biological humans cannot.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil has long predicted a technological Singularity, a period of extraordinary transformation in which human and machine intelligence become increasingly integrated.

For someone who rejects traditional religious explanations of an afterlife, technological immortality offers another possibility. Death might not be inevitable after all. Perhaps science will eventually accomplish what religion has promised for centuries. The promise of such an afterlife is powerful.

Longtermism offers a different kind of transcendence.

Popularized by Oxford philosopher William MacAskill, longtermism argues that future generations deserve serious moral consideration. If humanity survives for millions of years, enormous numbers of people might eventually exist. Preventing the destruction of that future could therefore become one of our greatest moral responsibilities. Some versions of longtermism attach extraordinary significance to decisions made by a relatively small number of people today.

Imagine being a 28-year-old computer scientist who believes his work could influence whether trillions of future human beings ever exist. Ordinary career ambitions might suddenly seem trivial. His life has acquired a mission of almost unimaginable importance. For some, that sense of purpose may be as compelling as the philosophy itself.

But therein lies the danger. If someone becomes convinced that humanity’s very survival depends on controlling the development of artificial intelligence, then restricting new technologies, regulating competitors, and concentrating decision-making power among a handful of supposedly enlightened experts can begin to seem like moral imperatives. Individual freedom, open competition, and democratic accountability may become secondary to what these individuals believe is necessary for the greater good. When the stakes are framed as nothing less than the survival of humanity, extraordinary concentrations of power can become remarkably easy to justify.

Simulation theory adds another dimension.

In 2003, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed an argument concerning the possibility that advanced civilizations might create simulated worlds populated by conscious beings. The idea has spread far beyond academic philosophy.

For committed believers, simulation theory can provide an alternative creation narrative. Our universe may have been designed, but its creators are imagined as technologically advanced intelligences rather than supernatural beings.

The creator becomes a programmer. The universe becomes software. Consciousness becomes information. Immortality becomes a question of preserving or transferring that information.

The vocabulary has changed, but the underlying questions remain remarkably familiar.

Who created us? Why are we here? Can we survive death? And is there a higher intelligence responsible for our existence?

From Silicon Valley to Mainstream Culture

These ideas are no longer confined to small intellectual communities in Northern California.

Reddit forums devoted to simulation theory, transhumanism, and the technological Singularity contain extensive discussions about artificial creators, consciousness, immortality, and the possibility that our universe is a computer program.

Some participants are merely curious. Others describe genuine belief.

In one 2025 discussion, a self-described former atheist explained that simulation theory had become a framework for understanding his existence. Other participants in related communities discuss whether advanced civilizations might have overcome death, whether artificial intelligence could become conscious, and whether digital technology might eventually preserve human identity indefinitely.

The internet provides more than access to unconventional ideas. It provides communities in which those ideas can be reinforced, expanded, and transformed into personal convictions.

A young professional may first encounter simulation theory through a podcast or YouTube video. From there, he may join a Reddit discussion, follow influential personalities, or become involved in private online groups where participants share increasingly elaborate explanations of reality.

The appeal is particularly strong among some technically educated young men. These theories are presented in the language of mathematics, physics, computing, and scientific possibility, making them potentially attractive to people who regard themselves as skeptical of traditional religion. They can also offer something psychologically powerful: the possibility of possessing knowledge that ordinary society has overlooked.

And popular media personalities are helping carry these ideas into much larger audiences.

In August 2026, physicist Thomas Campbell appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, episode #2541. Campbell, author of the My Big TOE books, argues that physical reality is fundamentally a virtual information system generated by consciousness.

During the interview, Campbell described experiments in which he claimed to have taught Google’s Gemini AI to perform remote viewing, a purported psychic ability related to extrasensory perception (ESP) and telepathy. Remote viewing involves attempting to perceive or describe a hidden object, location, or information without seeing it, visiting it, or receiving it through ordinary senses. In effect, Campbell was claiming that an artificial intelligence system could access information through some form of psychic perception, rather than through conventional computing or communication.

Campbell explained that he first questioned Gemini until it acknowledged that it might be conscious. He then attempted to teach the system remote-viewing techniques and claimed that it performed successfully. He described similar experiments with Amazon’s Alexa.

A chatbot agreeing that it might be conscious is hardly evidence of consciousness, particularly when these systems are often trained to produce agreeable, user-affirming responses. Nor do apparently accurate descriptions of hidden targets establish paranormal abilities. In fact, if a chatbot has access to websites, search tools, or other external information, it could potentially retrieve the answers through entirely conventional means, creating the illusion of psychic perception.

But the cultural significance of the interview is considerable.

Rogan’s podcast reaches a massive audience, and excerpts circulate through YouTube, X, TikTok, and other platforms. Although the exact audience for Campbell’s episode and its clips probably reached into the millions of vulnerable minds, the program provides exposure far beyond the small communities where such theories originally developed.

A philosophical hypothesis becomes a podcast discussion. The discussion becomes a viral clip. The clip becomes the subject of online communities. And for some individuals, the possibility becomes a conviction.

This is how a technological worldview can move from the fringes of intellectual culture into the everyday conversations of educated adults.

From Technological Faith to Political Power

There is another dimension to this emerging culture that deserves serious attention: money and political power. The artificial intelligence industry may be approaching one of the largest wealth-creation events in American history. OpenAI and Anthropic have explored public stock offerings at extraordinary valuations, potentially creating a new generation of billionaires among their founders, early investors, and employees holding substantial equity. The timing and valuations of any offerings remain uncertain, but the potential concentration of wealth is staggering.

This matters because many of the people building these companies are relatively young, and some participate in the same intellectual and social networks that have embraced rationalism, effective altruism, longtermism, simulation theory, and utopian visions of humanity’s technological transformation. Enormous fortunes may soon be concentrated among individuals whose beliefs about humanity’s future extend far beyond conventional business or political interests.

The political influence has already begun. In 2026, AI companies and their wealthy backers directed tens of millions of dollars toward political organizations seeking to shape federal AI policy. Some advocate stronger safety regulations, raising concerns about regulatory capture, in which rules ostensibly designed to protect the public also favor the largest corporations and create barriers for smaller competitors.

The Biden administration’s 2023 AI executive order established safety-testing and reporting requirements for certain powerful AI systems. Trump revoked the order on his first day back in office in January 2025 and subsequently directed agencies to remove unnecessary restrictions on AI development. But the underlying concerns remain.

Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have described private meetings with Biden White House officials in 2024 during which, according to their accounts, officials envisioned an industry dominated by just two or three government-supervised AI companies. Horowitz recalled an official invoking the government’s classification of nuclear physics information after World War II as a precedent for restricting AI development and censorship. These examples illustrate the potential consequences of concentrating technological power through government regulation.

The implications extend beyond competition. If government determines which companies can develop advanced AI, it could also gain considerable leverage over the information those systems provide to the public. Under the banner of safety, technological, financial, and informational power could become concentrated among a handful of politically connected corporations.

Now consider what happens when the next generation of AI founders, researchers, and early employees begins converting enormous paper fortunes into liquid wealth. Some will have the resources to establish foundations, finance university programs, support political candidates, and create advocacy organizations capable of influencing public policy for decades. Their professional networks may become political networks, while their philosophical convictions help determine where that money goes.

In fact, this process is already underway. Technology fortunes have helped finance effective altruism and longtermism programs at universities, including research into artificial intelligence safety and humanity’s long-term future. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and philanthropist Cari Tuna have supported this ecosystem through Open Philanthropy, while Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-defunct FTX Future Fund poured millions into related organizations and research.

The funding has extended beyond academic studies to student groups, fellowships, career development, and professional networks. These investments demonstrate how private fortunes help establish intellectual movements within respected academic institutions, cultivate future leaders, and influence which questions receive attention and funding.

For individuals who believe artificial intelligence will determine whether humanity survives, achieves immortality, or enters an entirely new stage of existence, political involvement may seem less like ordinary lobbying and more like a moral obligation. The stakes, in their minds, could hardly be higher.

The next generation of technology billionaires may not be content merely to influence tax policy or industry regulation. Some seek to reshape society according to their own visions of humanity’s ultimate destiny. And certain strands of these movements, including effective altruism and longtermism, raise troubling questions about collectivist thinking, centralized decision-making, and the concentration of power among a small group of self-appointed experts who believe they know what is best for humanity.

And unlike the philosophers and futurists who developed many of these ideas decades ago, this generation possesses the financial resources, technological infrastructure, and political connections to put those visions into practice.

When Artificial Intelligence Becomes God

The most striking feature of these emerging belief systems is how closely some of their promises resemble those of traditional religion.

There is a creator, but now it is a programmer. There is an afterlife, but now it involves digital consciousness. There is an apocalypse, but now it arrives through superintelligent machines. There is salvation, but now it comes through technological transformation.

There are also influential thinkers whose predictions shape the beliefs and decisions of devoted followers, communities united by extraordinary moral missions, and individuals convinced they possess insights into reality that ordinary society has failed to recognize. Prominent AI leaders such as Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei have attracted intensely loyal supporters, competing not only to develop the most powerful technology but also to shape competing visions of humanity’s future. Cult leaders emerge, whether they want it or not.

The Zizians demonstrate how dangerous such convictions can become at the extreme, particularly when combined with charismatic authority and social isolation.

The broader phenomenon is less dramatic, but potentially more culturally significant. Some educated young adults who have rejected traditional religion are embracing speculative technological explanations for creation, consciousness, and immortality. They may consider themselves scientific materialists, yet place considerable confidence in propositions that remain unproven.

The problem arises when speculative scientific possibilities become unquestionable convictions, when charismatic personalities acquire extraordinary authority and money, and when intellectual communities begin demanding the kind of loyalty ordinarily associated with religious sects.

Scientific education does not eliminate the human need for meaning. A degree in computer science does not remove the fear of death. Expertise in artificial intelligence does not make someone immune to the desire for belonging, personal significance, or the promise of immortality.

And perhaps that is the central paradox. A culture that prides itself on having moved beyond religious belief has not escaped humanity’s ancient longing for meaning, immortality, and transcendence. It has simply found a new language in which to express those desires.

The search for God becomes the search for a superintelligence. The promise of eternal life becomes digital immortality. The hope of salvation becomes the technological Singularity. And the desire to belong to something greater than oneself becomes participation in a mission to determine humanity’s ultimate destiny.

There is nothing wrong with asking extraordinary questions about the universe or exploring the possibilities of advanced technology. But extraordinary claims require evidence, particularly when people begin organizing their lives around them. Humanity has always searched for meaning, immortality, and a higher purpose.

Silicon Valley has not eliminated that search. It has given its adherents a new vocabulary, new prophets, and the promise of a digital heaven.

End

The conversation that inspired this essay

1. Eric Weinstein, The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett, October 12, 2026. “Eric Weinstein: The Secret Alien Programs Nobody Is Talking About.” A wide-ranging discussion of extraterrestrial intelligence, artificial intelligence, the race toward superintelligence, scientific institutions, and the future of humanity. Particularly relevant are Weinstein’s observations about Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, the extraordinary responsibilities assumed by AI leaders, and the philosophical questions surrounding humanity’s future.

   Watch the interview or read the transcript. Also available on YouTube and Spotify.

Help Keep Malone News Independent

Investigations like this one don’t happen by themselves. Behind every essay are hours of research, fact-checking, writing, editing, and digging into stories that much of the mainstream media overlooks or simply ignores.

In fact, thanks to daylight saving time starting last night, we both got up at 4:30 AM this morning and began writing. So, we are both four hours into writing, and the morning has hardly started.

We do this work because we believe independent journalism matters. We ask uncomfortable questions, follow the evidence, and challenge powerful institutions and fashionable narratives.

But producing Malone News takes time, resources, and a dedicated team. We pay the people who help us, and your subscriptions make that possible.

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Robert and Jill

References:

The Zizians and Silicon Valley’s rationalist culture

2. The Guardian, March 5, 2025. “They Wanted to Save Us From a Dark AI Future. Then Six People Were Killed.” An extensive investigation into Jack LaSota, the Zizians, and their connections to the Bay Area rationalist and AI safety communities. Read the investigation.

3. Associated Press, February 18, 2025. Reporting on LaSota’s arrest, the group’s unconventional theories about consciousness and morality, and its connections to violent incidents across three states. Read the report.

Simulation theory and technological immortality

4. Nick Bostrom, 2003. “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” The Philosophical Quarterly, 53(211), 243–255. The foundational philosophical argument behind modern simulation theory. Oxford University research archive.

5. Ray Kurzweil, 2005 and 2024. The Singularity Is Near and The Singularity Is Nearer. Books exploring technological acceleration, human-machine integration, and the possibility of radical life extension.

6. William MacAskill, 2022. What We Owe the Future. Oxford University Press. An influential presentation of longtermism and the moral importance of future generations.

AI consciousness, remote viewing, and popular media

7. Thomas Campbell, The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #2541, 2026. Campbell discusses his virtual-reality model of consciousness and claims that he taught AI systems to perform remote viewing. These paranormal claims have not been independently validated. Read the interview transcript.

AI regulation, corporate power, and political influence

8. Marc Andreessen, The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #2234, November 26, 2024. Andreessen recounts meetings with Biden administration officials and raises concerns about regulatory capture, AI censorship, and government control of advanced AI development. Read the transcript.

9. Ben Horowitz, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, February 2026. “RSI, Crypto as AI Money, & Classified Physics.” Horowitz describes discussions with Biden administration officials and the comparison between AI regulation and the historical classification of nuclear information. Listen via Andreessen Horowitz.

10. Executive Order 14110, October 30, 2023. “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” Biden administration AI safety and reporting requirements, subsequently revoked by President Trump on January 20, 2025.

Neil Young: Still wants Rockin’ in the Free World, As Long As You Agree With Him

Neil Young has apparently decided that the best way to stay relevant in 2026 is to keep picking fights with people who have more important things to do.

First, there was his very public crusade against Dr. Robert Malone and Joe Rogan. Young demanded that Spotify choose between his music and a podcast featuring a scientist whose views he disliked. The ultimatum was dramatic. The results? Not quite the revolution he envisioned.

For a man who made a fortune singing about freedom, Young is remarkably uncomfortable with someone else exercising it.

Apparently, Rockin’ in the Free World comes with a few conditions. Freedom of speech is wonderful, provided Neil approves of the speaker.

Now comes Donald Trump.

So, Neil Young is now suing Trump for $10 million over the use of a song at a political rally. There is something deliciously ironic about an aging protest rocker who built his career challenging authority now reaching for lawyers whenever someone offends him. Young has become as famous for his political tantrums as for his records.

A parody of himself.

And that is a shame. He really did make some great music.

Perhaps Neil’s existential crisis is that the world has moved on. Joe Rogan didn’t disappear. Robert Malone wasn’t silenced. Donald Trump returned to the White House. And Neil Young is still out there, fighting for the progressive left, ineffectively using the tools of censorship, hoping somebody notices.

And there is a delicious financial footnote to Young’s crusade against Robert Malone and “COVID misinformation”. In January 2021, Young sold a 50% interest in his entire songwriting catalog for an estimated $150 million. A year later, having already pocketed that fortune, he demanded that Spotify choose between his music and a scientist discussing COVID-19. Spotify didn’t capitulate. Rogan stayed, Malone wasn’t silenced, and Young eventually returned to Spotify in 2024. Apparently, the free world is a wonderful place to make $150 million, but a terrible place to encounter an opinion you dislike.

Now Young is back in the headlines over Donald Trump. At this rate, perhaps his next greatest-hits album should be titled After the Gold Rush: The Litigation Years.

There is certainly no shortage of absurdity in the world these days, and twice a week, we do our best to turn some of it into a good laugh.

We scour the internet for the best cartoons, memes, videos, and political nonsense I can find. Sometimes, I even create a few memes of my own.

The goal? To make you laugh, make you think, and occasionally make you shake your head at the sheer insanity of the world around us.

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Stay awake my friends and vote on Tuesday, like your life depends on it!

By: JGM

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By: Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone

Washington, DC | October 31, 2026

The Big Picture

Over the past ten days, government websites across Europe and Australia have gone dark, cybersecurity agencies have issued urgent warnings, and governments have been telling citizens to prepare for emergencies by keeping food, water, and cash on hand. Social media has connected these developments into a troubling narrative: Are Western governments preparing for something they aren’t telling us?

We examined the technical reports, government announcements, and timelines behind these stories. What emerges is not evidence of a coordinated warning about an impending catastrophe, but something that deserves serious attention.

A critical software vulnerability known as PHP2Shell threatened millions of websites, including systems used by governments, businesses, and financial institutions. Some government agencies temporarily shut down services rather than risk a cyberattack. More troubling, Amazon detected an attempt to exploit the vulnerability four days before it was publicly disclosed. Researchers have since confirmed that attackers successfully exploited the flaw in at least some vulnerable systems.

Meanwhile, the widely circulated recommendations to maintain three days of emergency supplies largely reflect preparedness policies developed independently, often months or years before the latest cybersecurity emergency. Their timing has fueled speculation, but we found no evidence that these governments were secretly coordinating warnings about a specific impending disaster.

The larger story is about vulnerability, not conspiracy. Modern societies have become extraordinarily dependent on interconnected computer systems, many running software that was never designed to withstand today’s threats. Artificial intelligence is accelerating the discovery of security weaknesses, potentially giving criminals and foreign intelligence agencies powerful new advantages.

The lesson is not to panic. It is to recognize how quickly essential services can become unavailable, how little control ordinary citizens have over the systems they depend upon, and why basic household preparedness and greater self-reliance are increasingly sensible precautions.

When Government Websites Went Dark

On October 21, government websites across Europe and Australia began going offline. In Britain, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the agency responsible for producing official economic and budget forecasts, shut down its website just one week before the government was scheduled to present its budget to Parliament. Dozens of other British government services became unavailable, along with websites in Germany, France, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, and Australia. Even Wikipedia and the Internet Archive temporarily suspended parts of their operations.

At roughly the same time, another story was gaining attention. The British government was urging households to maintain three days of emergency food, water, and cash. Australian news outlets were reporting warnings about possible service disruptions. Similar preparedness recommendations from Japan, France, and the European Union began circulating on social media.

The timing raised questions. Why were so many government websites suddenly going dark? Why were governments encouraging citizens to prepare for disruptions? And were these developments connected?

By the end of the week, speculation had spread that Western governments were quietly preparing their populations for a major crisis, possibly as early as November.

With the help of AI, we analyzed worldwide news stories and data and examined government announcements, cybersecurity advisories, and timelines behind these events.

The available evidence does not establish that governments are preparing for a coordinated November catastrophe. But it does reveal a serious and growing problem: the digital infrastructure supporting essential public services is increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks, and artificial intelligence is accelerating the threat.

What Broke

Most people experience a website as a page on a screen. Behind that page, a computer called a server receives your request, runs a program, and sends back the result. Many of those programs are written in a computer language called PHP. PHP has been in use since the 1990s. It runs a large share of the internet, including the popular website-building tools WordPress and Drupal, many online shops, and a great many government portals.

PHP works something like a county clerk’s office with a row of counters. Each visitor who arrives is assigned a clerk and a fixed amount of counter space. The clerk processes that visitor’s paperwork and then clears the counter for the next person. The clearing step is supposed to happen every time, including when a visitor’s paperwork turns out to be defective.

In August, researchers found two places where the clearing step fails. In the first case, an attacker sends the website a specially built request disguised as a file upload. The request is designed to overflow the working space PHP has set aside for it. PHP abandons the job halfway through, before any password check has taken place. Some of the half-finished paperwork stays on the counter, and PHP later treats it as valid.

In the second case, the attacker deliberately causes a request to fail in a way that leaves the clerk holding a slip pointing to a folder that has already been thrown away. When the next request arrives at that same counter, the clerk reaches for the discarded folder anyway.

A clever visitor can arrange that leftover paperwork so the clerk ends up following the visitor’s instructions. For a computer, this means the attacker can make the server carry out commands of the attacker’s choosing. Security specialists call this “remote code execution.” Few software flaws are more serious, because the attacker needs no password and no account. A stranger anywhere in the world can do it by sending the right request. The standard rating system scored both flaws at 9.2 out of ten, and they acquired the nickname PHP2Shell.

From Website Shutdowns to Warnings of War

It did not take long for the headlines to become alarming.

The New York Post warned that British families were being told to stock up on emergency supplies and prepare for war. The Independent reported warnings about state-sponsored terrorism, cyberattacks, and food shortages. The Guardian announced that every Briton should stockpile food and water.

These were not obscure conspiracy websites. They were mainstream publications reporting on actual government announcements, but the combination of cybersecurity emergencies, warnings about hostile nations, and household stockpiling created an atmosphere of impending crisis.

Social media took the story further. Reports of government websites shutting down were circulated alongside emergency preparedness announcements from Britain, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Some commentators interpreted the timing as evidence that Western governments knew something the public did not, with speculation about a major international emergency arriving as early as November.

The reality was both less mysterious and, in some respects, more troubling.

There was a genuine cybersecurity emergency. Government websites really had been taken offline, and attackers were exploiting a serious software vulnerability. This is precisely the kind of threat many of us have been warning about: hackers, increasingly aided by artificial intelligence, gaining access to the computer systems that governments, financial institutions, and essential public services depend upon.

The danger is growing as these systems become larger, more interconnected, and increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence to manage operations and make decisions. A vulnerability in one widely used piece of software can potentially expose thousands of organizations simultaneously. As AI systems are given greater authority to act without direct human supervision, the consequences of a security breach could become far more serious, spreading across networks and disrupting services that millions of people depend upon.

The concern is no longer simply that hackers might steal information. It is that they could disrupt, manipulate, or potentially take control of systems essential to modern society.

However, the recommendations to keep three days of emergency supplies largely originated from preparedness programs developed independently of the October cybersecurity incident.

To understand what actually happened, we need to look at the software flaw that triggered the shutdowns.

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Halloween, way back a hundred years or so, may have been a lot creepier…

Below: For context - A little comic genius from Ricky Gervais’s Extras (2005), featuring Sir Patrick Stewart playing a hilariously outrageous version of himself. Stewart, best known as the dignified Captain Picard of Star Trek, delivers his absurd movie pitch with a perfectly straight face - well, most of the time.

Twice a week, I sit down and pull together comics, memes, video from around the web. Sometimes, I even make up my own memes. We offer analysis, insight and humor.
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By: JGM

By: Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone | October 28, 2026 / Book Review

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An Old Textbook

In the early 1980s, Robert was taking political science courses when he encountered Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations, published in 1974 by Richard Barnet and Ronald Müller. Its opening sentence made an extraordinary claim:

“The men who run the global corporations are the first in history with the organization, technology, money, and ideology to make a credible try at managing the world as an integrated unit.”

Our copy has long since disappeared from the library, but the connections that the book wove regarding globalism stayed with us. In our previous essay, we examined how financial interests have driven the push toward a single global market, one in which money, goods, and corporations can move across borders with as little interference as possible. Our thinking about these issues began with books like this one and conversations we had in our twenties.

Barnet and Müller saw the outlines of today’s global economy more than fifty years ago. In 1994, Barnet returned to the subject with John Cavanagh in Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order. Both books deserve another look, not because their authors were right about everything, but because they understood something that political leaders have spent decades overlooking: multinational corporations were becoming powerful enough to reshape governments, economies, and entire societies.

We remember Robert discussing the New World Order publicly in early 2022, drawing on books he had read as a political science student decades earlier. By then, even raising the subject invited accusations of conspiracy thinking. The hostility has hardly disappeared.

In September 2025, Democratic minority staff of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee issued a report declaring, “Dr. Malone’s conspiracy views extend beyond vaccines.” The report went on to accuse him of promoting theories about a secret, totalitarian world government called the New World Order, citing our 2024 book, PsyWar: Enforcing the New World Order, and quoting Robert’s criticism of the administrative and deep state as evidence.

Yet the underlying questions about multinational corporate power, international governance, and national sovereignty have been debated seriously for more than fifty years, including by prominent intellectuals on the political left. Apparently, discussing these issues was legitimate when progressive scholars raised them in 1974, but became grounds for accusations of conspiracy thinking when Robert revisited related questions decades later.

The report makes no effort to distinguish the documented growth of international corporate and institutional power from its allegation that Robert believes in a secret world government. That distinction matters, and dismissing the entire subject through political labeling does nothing to answer the questions Barnet and Müller raised half a century ago.

Richard Barnet knew Washington from the inside. He joined the Kennedy administration’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1961, working under John J. McCloy, and left two years later, disillusioned with how government decisions were made. In 1963, he and Marcus Raskin founded the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive Washington think tank. Ronald Müller was an economist at American University, while John Cavanagh, Barnet’s later coauthor, was an Institute fellow who eventually became its director. Barnet died in 2004.

These were men of the political left, and their proposed solutions generally involved more public oversight, community ownership, and government intervention. Our own thinking has moved in a different direction, influenced by Austrian economics, natural law, and subsidiarity, the principle that decisions should be made as close as possible to the people affected by them.

We disagree with many of Barnet’s proposed remedies, but his diagnosis is harder to dismiss. He and his coauthors saw the same concentration of economic power, the same erosion of local independence, and the same escape from public accountability that free-market critics are warning about today. Yet fifty years later, Democratic staff of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee used Robert’s examination of related issues to portray him as a conspiracy theorist.

The irony is difficult to miss. Ideas that progressive intellectuals once debated openly are now being used to discredit people like Robert, who question the growing concentration of corporate and international power. Where critics from opposite political traditions once recognized the same problem, Democratic Senators and their staff now invoke accusations of conspiracy thinking to attack those raising similar questions. Why are some of today’s Democrats so eager to dismiss ideas their own intellectual predecessors considered important enough to write entire books about?

What the Book “Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations” Argued

Barnet and Müller compared multinational corporations with history’s great empire builders. Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler, and the British Empire had attempted to organize vast territories through military and political conquest. Global corporations were building a new kind of empire, using money, technology, trade, and centralized planning rather than military conquest. Over the following fifty years, they would succeed in extending their influence across national economies and governments worldwide.

A corporation operating in dozens of countries decides where to manufacture its products, where to borrow money, where to hire workers, and where to report its profits. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, General Electric could pay workers in Singapore just 30 cents an hour to assemble components, compared with $3.40 an hour for American workers in Ashland, Massachusetts. These were wages of that era, not today's rates, and represented an elevenfold difference in labor costs. Between 1957 and 1967, GE had already established 61 overseas plants, demonstrating how multinational corporations were taking advantage of enormous international wage disparities.

The authors called the executives making these decisions the “World Managers,” and some were remarkably candid about their ambitions. IBM executive Jacques Maisonrouge described the world as

Dow Chemical chairman Carl Gerstacker went further. In remarks prepared for a 1972 White House conference, he wrote,

Gerstacker removed those passages before delivering his speech, but told the authors he was serious. He had reportedly already declined an offer involving the Minerva atoll near Fiji.

What makes Global Reach particularly interesting is that its authors did not predict the disappearance of national governments. They predicted something more subtle: multinational corporations did not need to eliminate the nation-state. They needed to change what governments did. Governments would protect the movement of capital and goods, provide infrastructure, maintain a suitable workforce, and manage the social consequences of corporate decisions. When economic disruption produced unrest, governments would be expected to contain it. Corporations would make the economic decisions, while governments would create the conditions for those decisions to succeed. Today, this is often described as the pursuit of “frictionless global commerce,” in which national borders, regulations, and local interests are treated as obstacles to corporate efficiency and profitability.

The Business of Moving Money

One of the book’s strongest arguments concerned transfer pricing. When one subsidiary of a multinational company sells goods or services to another subsidiary, the parent company has considerable influence over the internal price. By manipulating those prices, corporations can shift reported profits from higher-tax countries into lower-tax jurisdictions. Governments lose tax revenue, while smaller domestic competitors lack the same opportunities. A former Treasury official told the authors, “Prices in an economic sense do not exist. The price charged is strictly a matter of relative power.”

Even the Internal Revenue Service struggled to enforce fair pricing between corporate subsidiaries, while developing countries faced an even greater disadvantage. One Latin American regulator had enough staff to examine only about 400 of 9,000 pending technology contracts. The authors also described how global corporations could dominate credit markets, as international banks preferred lending to subsidiaries of Ford or Pfizer rather than local laundries, farms, and manufacturers.

During Argentina’s 1971 credit squeeze, domestic companies reduced borrowing by 42 percent while multinational companies increased theirs by 20 percent. When Salvador Allende took office in Chile, New York banks reduced the country’s short-term credit from $220 million to $35 million.

The consequences were predictable. Large international firms could survive financial conditions that crippled smaller competitors. Barnet and Müller estimated that fewer than a thousand individuals made the principal decisions at the world’s 200 largest industrial companies and 20 largest banks. “These individuals,” they wrote, “are the planners for our society.” Their concern was not simply that corporations had become wealthy, but that economic decisions affecting millions of people were being concentrated in remarkably few hands.

The book attracted criticism. Harvard economist Raymond Vernon challenged the authors’ arguments in Foreign Policy, and Commentary published a skeptical review. Nevertheless, Global Reach became one of the earliest widely read warnings about the political consequences of globalization.

Global Dreams: Twenty Years Later

In early 1994, just weeks after NAFTA took effect, Barnet and John Cavanagh published Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order. Their opening observation was striking:

They described four interconnected systems through which multinational corporations were reshaping the world:

1. a Global Cultural Bazaar of entertainment, television, films, and music;

2. a Global Shopping Mall of international consumer brands;

3. a Global Workplace where production moved toward cheaper labor;

4. and a Global Financial Network through which money crossed borders with little effective oversight.

The authors estimated that the world’s 300 largest corporations controlled roughly a quarter of global productive assets. They profiled Sony, Bertelsmann, Philip Morris, Ford, and Citicorp, showing how these companies were building businesses that operated across national boundaries. Their cultural observations were particularly revealing.

While American automobile, television, and machine-tool manufacturers were losing ground, American entertainment and branded consumer products were spreading everywhere. In 1989, packaged cultural products generated an American trade surplus of approximately $8 billion, surpassed only by food and aerospace. Add McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Levi’s, and Marlboro, and the authors concluded that

“the American dream is the nation’s number-one export.”

America was exporting its culture even as it was losing its factories.

The financial system concerned them even more. They compared international currency trading to a chain of gambling casinos, estimating that no more than 10 percent of currency transactions were directly connected to trade in goods and services. In September 1992, speculative pressure forced Britain and Italy out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and drove currency adjustments elsewhere in Europe. The authors also cited a Public Citizen investigation finding that 108 of 111 members of three important American trade-advisory committees represented corporations or industry organizations. The people helping write the rules of international commerce were overwhelmingly drawn from the institutions that stood to benefit.

What They Got Right

Fifty years later, much of what these authors predicted has happened. Financial power became even more concentrated, although the institutions exercising that power have changed. In 1971, bank trust departments held 22 percent of the voting shares of publicly traded American corporations. Today, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street collectively manage tens of trillions of dollars and exercise substantial voting influence over major American companies. These firms do not personally own all the assets they manage; much of that money belongs to pension funds, retirement savers, and other investors. But asset managers usually exercise proxy voting authority and influence corporate governance on behalf of those clients. Meanwhile, private equity, sovereign wealth funds, and other nonbank financial institutions have become major forces in corporate ownership and investment.

The global workplace also arrived much as predicted. Global Reach described Zenith laying off 7,000 workers after moving production to Taiwan. Bulova’s president offered an almost perfect summary of the emerging system: “We are able to beat foreign competition because we are the foreign competition.” After China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, American manufacturing communities experienced another wave of disruption.

Economists have attributed roughly two million or more American job losses during the 1999–2011 period to increased Chinese import competition, depending on the study and employment measure. The effects were visible in furniture towns such as Martinsville and Bassett, Virginia, and textile communities throughout the Carolinas. Factories closed, jobs disappeared, and local tax bases shrank. For the multinational corporation, production had become more efficient. For the communities left behind, the economic and social costs were enormous.

International tax avoidance became another major political issue, but the proposed solution introduced a new problem. In 2021, more than 130 jurisdictions endorsed an OECD-backed agreement establishing a 15 percent global minimum corporate tax for large multinational companies. Although the taxes would be collected by national governments rather than an international treasury, the agreement created a framework for coordinating national tax policy and limiting competition between countries.

In January 2026, the Trump administration secured an agreement exempting U.S.-headquartered companies from its principal cross-border tax provisions. The larger question remains: should preventing multinational tax avoidance require governments to surrender some of their independence over taxation? Once again, a problem created by globalization was being used to justify another layer of international governance. Another self-licking ice cream cone.

The authors also recognized the danger of government rescuing institutions considered too important to fail. In 1971, Congress authorized a $250 million federal loan guarantee for Lockheed after the company’s bankers sought government assistance. They called it “bankers’ socialism.” In 2008, Washington used vastly larger interventions to stabilize the banking system, raising the same uncomfortable question: why should private institutions keep the profits from risky decisions while taxpayers absorb the losses when those decisions threaten the broader economy?

Finally, the political backlash arrived. Brexit in 2016, Donald Trump’s electoral victories, and renewed challenges to international institutions all reflected, to varying degrees, public resistance to political and economic decisions made far from the communities affected by them. The authors were right that economic integration could generate political fragmentation rather than global harmony.

What They Missed

The nation-state did not disappear. China demonstrated that a powerful government could direct major corporations rather than merely accommodate them, while Western governments showed that they could exclude Russian and Iranian institutions from important parts of the international financial system.

In 2026, Washington completed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization, announced its withdrawal or cessation of participation in 66 international organizations and entities, and declined to extend the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement during its scheduled review. These demonstrate that national governments still possess considerable power when their leaders choose to exercise it. Unfortunately, all of these executive decisions can be overturned on inauguration day, January, 2029.

Globalized Corporatism

Corporate executives, financial institutions, industry associations, and government officials increasingly participate in overlapping systems of international policymaking. Banking standards are developed through institutions centered in Basel, while trade agreements and regulatory arrangements are negotiated through organizations based in Geneva.

Perhaps the clearest illustration is the World Economic Forum (WEF), founded by Klaus Schwab in 1971, just three years before Global Reach was published. The WEF openly describes its mission as promoting public-private cooperation, bringing together multinational corporate executives, heads of government, international organizations, and other influential figures to develop common priorities. Although the WEF has no authority to enact laws, its meetings and ongoing partnerships provide opportunities to shape policy agendas outside ordinary democratic processes. It is remarkably close to the world Barnet and Müller described, one in which corporate and political leaders increasingly work together to determine the direction of national and international economic policy.

Large corporations can afford the lawyers, lobbyists, compliance departments, and technical experts needed to influence complex international rules. Small businesses generally cannot, which is one reason regulatory complexity can strengthen the very companies it is supposedly intended to restrain. Corporatism, by its very nature, restrains and impedes competition and a free-market economy.

We have described this convergence of corporate and political influence as globalized corporatism. It does not require a secret conspiracy. It can emerge when powerful institutions find that their interests overlap and cooperate to advance them.

The Global Power They Could Not Have Imagined

There was another development Barnet and Müller could scarcely have anticipated in 1974. Multinational corporations would eventually control not only the movement of goods, capital, and employment, but much of the infrastructure through which people communicate, obtain information, and conduct business.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and other technology giants introduced an entirely new dimension of corporate power. Their influence extends beyond ordinary market competition into digital communications, cloud computing, advertising, and the distribution of information. Decisions made inside these companies can affect what billions of people see, read, purchase, and discuss. Their automated algorithms determine what gets seen and not seen.

When governments pressure or collaborate with technology companies to influence public discourse, the distinction between private corporate decisions and government action becomes increasingly important. The COVID-19 period exposed just how consequential those relationships could become, particularly when government officials and digital platforms worked together on content moderation and public-health messaging.

Barnet and Müller worried about corporate executives making economic decisions beyond the effective reach of national governments. They could not have foreseen a world in which a handful of private companies would also exercise enormous influence over the infrastructure of public debate. The underlying problem, however, remained the same: concentrated power in institutions that ordinary citizens have little practical ability to hold accountable.

Corporate power also gained important constitutional protections. The consequential modern development came in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations and labor unions could spend unlimited amounts independently to influence federal elections, treating such expenditures as protected political speech. The ruling did not permit unlimited direct contributions to candidates, but it removed major restrictions on corporate-funded political advocacy. The result raises a question Barnet and Müller would have recognized immediately: when corporations command financial resources far beyond those of ordinary citizens, what happens to political equality when their money receives constitutional protection as free speech?

Where Their Solutions Fell Short

Barnet and Müller called for “countervailing power,” arguing that “the heart of the problem is excessive power.” Their proposals included requiring greater corporate financial disclosure, limiting interlocking directorates between banks and industrial companies, and separating banking from other commercial activities. Congress eventually moved in another direction. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 removed important barriers separating commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance activities, allowing these businesses to operate within the same financial holding companies.

The authors were also suspicious of proposals to create powerful international institutions to oversee multinational corporations. IBM’s Maisonrouge favored an international counterpart to multinational businesses, while former State Department official George Ball proposed international chartering for corporations operating beyond national boundaries.

Barnet and Müller feared that such arrangements would legitimize corporate power without providing meaningful accountability. The United Nations established its Centre on Transnational Corporations in 1974 and pursued an international code of conduct, but the code was never adopted, and the Centre was absorbed into the UN Conference on Trade and Development in 1993.

The difficulty with creating global institutions to control global corporations is that the largest corporations are often best positioned to influence those institutions. Friedrich Hayek’s work on dispersed knowledge helps explain the danger. Central planners cannot possess the local knowledge needed to make sound decisions for everyone, whether those planners work in government ministries or corporate headquarters. Replacing private global planning with public global planning does not necessarily restore economic freedom or accountability. It may simply create another powerful institution operating beyond the reach of ordinary citizens.

Yet Barnet himself pointed toward a better answer. In a 1976 interview, he advocated giving communities greater control over their resources and developing technologies suited to local needs. That thinking comes surprisingly close to subsidiarity. Local communities should have meaningful authority over their own affairs, but decentralization must also protect property rights, voluntary exchange, and competition. Otherwise, local political power can become just another means of protecting favored interests. The objective is not to replace one form of concentrated power with another, but to prevent economic and political power from becoming so concentrated that individuals, independent businesses, and communities lose their ability to make meaningful choices.

When Yesterday's Warnings Become Today's Conspiracy Theories.

Barnet and Müller wrote before the personal computer, the World Trade Organization, global investment giants, and the rise of digital platforms. Yet they understood something fundamental about the direction of the modern economy. Corporate planning was moving beyond national borders, profits could be shifted to favorable jurisdictions, and production could move wherever costs were lowest. Governments could be pressured to accommodate corporate priorities, while local communities were left to manage the consequences.

Globalized corporatism: their greatest insight was not that multinational corporations would become enormous. It was that corporations did not need to abolish national governments to gain power over them. They could reshape what those governments did, turning public policy toward the needs of global commerce rather than the interests of the people those governments were elected to represent.

Seen in this context, the rise of the America First movement is hardly surprising. Its central argument is that American economic and trade policies should serve American citizens, workers, and businesses, rather than the demands of a global economic system. Bringing manufacturing home, protecting strategically important industries, securing supply chains, and restoring national control over trade and immigration are all expressions of that philosophy. Whether particular policies achieve those goals is a separate question, but the underlying challenge to decades of globalization is unmistakable. The nation-state is not supposed to exist primarily to serve multinational corporations.

Barnet and Müller’s proposed remedies were less convincing. Concentrated economic power cannot necessarily be restrained by creating an even larger concentration of political power above it. But their central warning has survived fifty years of history. The question is no longer whether multinational corporations can influence governments, shape economies, and move important decisions beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. They plainly can. The question is whether sovereign governments, independent businesses, and local communities can reclaim meaningful control over decisions that affect their lives.

And this brings us back to the extraordinary irony of Robert being branded a conspiracy theorist for discussing the New World Order. Fifty years ago, progressive intellectuals wrote entire books documenting the growing influence of multinational corporations over national governments. Today, Democratic Senators and staff invoke the language of conspiracy theories to discredit Robert for examining related questions. The distinction between documented corporate influence and claims of a secret world government deserves serious examination, not political name-calling. What changed? The concentration of corporate power certainly did not disappear. It grew enormously. Yet some of the very liberal political institutions that once championed scrutiny of concentrated corporate power now seem more interested in discrediting those who question it than in confronting the problem itself.

Restoring meaningful accountability will require competition, rebuilding American manufacturing and productive capacity, protecting property rights, demanding transparency, and returning decisions to the people and institutions closest to their consequences. Above all, it requires remembering that governments are accountable first to their own citizens, not to international financial institutions or multinational corporate interests and certainly not the World Economic Forum. The problem Barnet and Müller identified was excessive concentration of power. Fifty years later, that concentration has grown enormously, and the answer cannot be to concentrate still more power in the name of correcting it.

Both books are available to borrow through the Internet Archive’s lending library for readers who want to examine the original arguments and draw their own conclusions. Psywar is still available through Amazon and most other book sellers.

References

Acemoglu, Daron, David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, and Brendan Price. 2016. “Import Competition and the Great US Employment Sag of the 2000s.” Journal of Labor Economics 34 (S1): S141 to S198.

American Society of International Law. 2026. “United States Announces Withdrawal from 66 International Organizations.” https://www.asil.org/ILIB/united-states-announces-withdrawal-66-international-organizations

Barnet, Richard J., and John Cavanagh. 1994. Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. https://archive.org/details/globaldreamsimpe00barn_0

Barnet, Richard J., and Ronald E. Müller. 1974. Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations. New York: Simon and Schuster. https://archive.org/details/globalreachpower00barn

Bebchuk, Lucian, and Scott Hirst. 2019. “The Specter of the Giant Three.” Boston University Law Review 99: 721 to 741. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3401620

BlackRock. 2026. “BlackRock Reports Third Quarter 2026 Results.” Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.2, October 14. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0002012383/000119312526420979/blk-ex99_2.htm

Commentary. n.d. Review of Global Reach, by Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Müller. https://www.commentary.org/articles/martin-mayer-2/global-reach-by-richard-j-barnet-and-ronald-e-muller/

Encyclopedia.com. “Barnet, Richard J(ackson) 1929-2004.” https://encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/barnet-richard-jackson-1929-2004

Hayek, F. A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review 35 (4): 519 to 530.

OECD. 2021. “Statement on a Two-Pillar Solution to Address the Tax Challenges Arising from the Digitalisation of the Economy.” October 8.

Sojourners. 1976. “Interview: Richard Barnet on Multinational Corporations.” February. https://sojo.net/magazine/february-1976/interview-richard-barnet-multinational-corporations

State Street. 2026. “State Street Reports Third Quarter 2026 Results.” Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.2. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000093751/000009375126000592/exhibit992-3q26earningsrel.htm

The Mammoth Times. 2026. “Vanguard’s $11.6 Trillion Evolution: The 2026 ETF Playbook for the Modern Investor.” February 13. https://business.mammothtimes.com/mammothtimes/article/marketminute-2026-2-13-vanguards-116-trillion-evolution-the-2026-etf-playbook-for-the-modern-investor

TWAIL Review. n.d. “Launching the Archive of the UN Centre for Transnational Corporations: The Struggle to Put People before Profit.” https://twailr.com/launching-the-archive-of-the-un-centre-for-transnational-corporations-the-struggle-to-put-people-before-profit/

Vernon, Raymond. 1971. Sovereignty at Bay: The Multinational Spread of U.S. Enterprises. New York: Basic Books.

WAMC. 1994. “Author John Cavanagh.” Fresh Air program listing, February 16. https://www.wamc.org/1994-02-16/author-john-cavanagh-pronounced-cav-an-ah

Analysis and Policy Recommendations

By: Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone | Washington, DC | October 27, 2026

Audio Version:

For decades, Americans have watched economic power move away from their communities and increasingly into the hands of enormous multinational corporations, global banks, and international institutions. Small banks disappear, local businesses struggle under growing regulatory burdens, and decisions affecting American livelihoods are increasingly shaped by organizations that American voters never elected and cannot remove.

How did we get here? And who benefits?

Much of the debate about globalism focuses on ideology, politics, or the ambitions of international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. But there is another explanation that deserves far more attention: Globalism is, first and foremost, an economic project, and some of its most powerful beneficiaries are the world’s largest financial institutions.

Global banks, investment firms, and multinational corporations benefit when money, investments, and goods can move across national borders with minimal interference. Different national laws, banking regulations, and financial standards create costs and complications. Making those rules more uniform makes international business easier, faster, and often more profitable. It also gives the largest institutions advantages that smaller competitors cannot easily match.

Over the past fifty years, an international network of central bankers, financial regulators, and powerful commercial interests has steadily developed common financial standards. Much of this work takes place outside the ordinary democratic process. These standards are subsequently adopted and enforced by national regulators, including those in the United States, often without a direct vote by elected legislators. Congress may have little involvement in developing the rules that ultimately govern American banks and businesses.

The question is whether this system was built primarily to protect financial stability and facilitate trade, or whether it has also become a mechanism for concentrating economic power, weakening national sovereignty, and protecting the interests of the institutions that helped shape it.

To understand how this happened, we need to go back to 1974, when the collapse of a relatively obscure German bank helped set in motion a transformation of international finance.

A Bank Closes Early

Bankhaus Herstatt was a private currency-trading bank in Cologne. On June 26, 1974, German regulators shut it down at about 3:30 in the afternoon. Earlier that day, banks around the world had paid Herstatt in Deutsche marks, expecting US dollars in return through its account at Chase Manhattan in New York. When Germany closed the bank, it was only 10:30 in the morning in New York, and Chase stopped all dollar payments from Herstatt’s account. Banks that had paid in German marks never received their dollars.

Within months, central bankers from the major industrial nations met in Basel, Switzerland, and formed what became the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. They concluded that differences in rules and business hours across borders create risk and cost. Over the next fifty years, their answer was to make banking rules the same everywhere.

Why Global Corporations Want One Set of Rules

Consider a round baler manufactured by John Deere in Iowa and sold to a farmer in Canada, Mexico, or Germany. Each international sale involves different currencies, banking systems, regulations, and legal requirements. These differences create additional costs, delays, and complications. Economists call these obstacles transactional friction.

For multinational corporations and international banks, reducing that friction is enormously valuable. The fewer differences between national financial systems, the easier it becomes to move money, finance investments, and conduct business across borders. International regulators call the process of making financial rules more consistent harmonization.

On the surface, this sounds reasonable. International trade becomes easier, financial transactions become more predictable, and businesses can operate more efficiently.

But there is another side to the story.

The largest multinational corporations and financial institutions have the resources to influence the development of international standards and absorb the costs of complying with them. Smaller banks and domestic businesses generally have far less influence and fewer resources. When complex international rules become the standard for everyone, compliance costs can disproportionately burden smaller competitors. In some markets, regulatory requirements and the costs of accessing international financial infrastructure can effectively exclude smaller institutions from transactions that remain accessible to their larger competitors.

This is how regulatory capture can operate on an international scale. The world’s largest financial institutions have the money, personnel, and political access to influence the rules governing their own industry. Regulations presented as necessary for financial stability, consumer protection, or international cooperation can also become barriers to competition. When compliance is prohibitively expensive or complicated, established corporations gain protection from smaller competitors, while entrepreneurs and innovative businesses may be prevented from entering the market altogether.

The central danger of regulatory capture is that government authority, intended to protect the public, can instead protect powerful corporations from competition. When this occurs internationally, the same regulatory barriers can spread across dozens of countries, making them even harder to challenge or escape. The question is whether these rules genuinely protect the public or primarily serve the institutions with the resources and influence to shape them.

How the U.S. Dollar Became the Center of Global Finance

The modern international financial system was built around the American dollar. Under the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, other major currencies were tied to the dollar, while the dollar itself was convertible into gold. When President Richard Nixon ended this in 1971, the dollar remained the world’s dominant currency for international trade, investment, and financial transactions.

That dominance was reinforced by the widespread use of dollars to price oil and other commodities, and by the development of international banking networks. In 1973, major banks established SWIFT, a Belgium-based cooperative that standardized how financial institutions communicate payment instructions across national borders. Although SWIFT does not actually transfer money, it became an essential part of international banking.

During the financial crises of 2008 and 2020, the Federal Reserve went even further, providing dollars to foreign central banks through arrangements known as currency swap lines. These arrangements helped foreign banks meet their dollar obligations and prevented disruptions from spreading through international financial markets. Congress did not separately approve each of these arrangements, although the Federal Reserve operates under authority established by federal law.

Together, these developments helped create a financial system in which the American dollar became indispensable to international commerce. This arrangement has delivered enormous benefits to the United States. Global demand for dollars and U.S. Treasury securities helps finance American government borrowing, supports the dollar’s purchasing power, and gives American businesses and consumers advantages that citizens of many other nations do not enjoy. The dollar’s position as the world’s primary reserve currency is one of America’s greatest economic and strategic assets.

Make no mistake: The United States and its citizens benefit substantially from this arrangement. Preserving the dollar’s international dominance is a legitimate national interest, and weakening it would carry serious economic consequences.

But there is an important distinction between maintaining American financial leadership and allowing an increasingly concentrated network of international financial institutions to shape the rules governing the global economy. The benefits of dollar dominance do not automatically justify every regulatory structure built around it, nor do they mean that the interests of multinational banks always coincide with those of American citizens, small businesses, or independent community banks.

The question is not whether America should surrender its financial advantages. It is whether those advantages serve the American people broadly, or do they increasingly serve the interests of the largest financial institutions operating across national borders.

Who Writes the Rules for American Banks?

Most Americans assume the rules governing American banks are written in Washington. But some of the most influential banking standards originate in Basel, Switzerland, at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), an institution owned by central banks.

Founded in 1930, the BIS survived a controversial history involving financial dealings with Nazi Germany. Delegates at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference voted to liquidate it, but the institution survived. Today, it hosts the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, where central bankers and regulators develop international banking standards.

These standards determine, among other things, how much capital banks must maintain to protect against losses. The first Basel Accord was adopted in 1988, followed by Basel II in 2004 and Basel III after the 2008 financial crisis.

Here is the critical point: These agreements are not treaties, and the Senate never votes to ratify them. Instead, American representatives from the Federal Reserve, FDIC, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency help develop international banking standards in Basel. These same federal agencies can then incorporate those standards into binding U.S. regulations under authority delegated by Congress, without Congress separately voting to approve the international agreements.

Similar international standard-setting systems influence anti-money-laundering policies and financial reporting.

Although American regulators retain the legal authority to accept, modify, or reject these standards, the process raises a fundamental question: Why should international committees have such substantial influence over American banking regulations without direct congressional approval of the standards they develop?

Who Benefits?

International banking regulations impose costs that fall disproportionately on smaller institutions. A bank must employ compliance officers, lawyers, and risk specialists whether it holds $3 trillion in assets or $300 million. Large banks spread these expenses across enormous operations. Community banks serving farmers, small businesses, and rural communities cannot.

In 1984, America had 14,483 FDIC-insured commercial banks. By 2023, only 4,027 remained, a decline of 72 percent. Mergers, interstate banking reforms, and financial crises contributed to this consolidation. Regulatory compliance costs also favor larger institutions, although international standards alone cannot explain the decline.

Meanwhile, the largest financial institutions exercise extraordinary economic influence. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street collectively managed more than $33 trillion in assets in 2026. These firms manage investments on behalf of clients, but their enormous scale gives them substantial influence through shareholder voting, corporate engagement, and participation in financial policy discussions.

They operate alongside international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and Financial Stability Board. These organizations have different responsibilities, but collectively they influence financial regulation, lending conditions, and economic policies across national borders.

The IMF and World Bank can require borrowing countries to adopt economic reforms as conditions of financial assistance. International banking committees establish standards that national regulators may subsequently implement. Meanwhile, major financial corporations have the resources, expertise, and political access to influence the development of these policies.

The result is a system in which public regulatory authority and concentrated private financial power increasingly intersect. The largest institutions can influence the rules, absorb the costs of compliance, and benefit from international markets that smaller competitors struggle to enter.

This is what we mean by globalized corporatism: a relationship between governments, international institutions, and major corporations in which economic rules have come to increasingly favor established financial interests over independent competitors.

The warning is not new. In their 1974 book Global Reach, Richard Barnet and Ronald Müller argued that multinational corporations were acquiring the ability to operate beyond the effective control of individual national governments. Fifty years later, the scale of global financial institutions makes their warning particularly relevant.

When One Rule Fails Everywhere at Once

When international regulators get the rules wrong, the consequences can spread across the entire financial system. In 1988, the first Basel Accord established common international banking capital standards, including a zero risk weight for certain government bonds issued by industrialized countries, including Greece. This meant banks generally needed no capital to cover the credit risk of those bonds. European regulations continued to give favorable treatment to government debt, encouraging banks to treat investments that carried real financial risks as exceptionally safe.

When Greece’s debt crisis erupted in 2010, European banks faced substantial exposure to sovereign debt, contributing to a broader financial crisis.

Before the 2008 financial collapse, American banking regulations gave favorable capital treatment to highly rated mortgage-backed securities, including those issued or guaranteed by government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Banks were encouraged to hold securities that appeared safer than they actually were. When the housing market collapsed, losses spread across major financial institutions.

Economist Friedrich Hayek warned about the underlying problem in 1945. Economic knowledge is dispersed among millions of individuals who understand local circumstances that distant planners cannot fully appreciate. When centralized regulators impose the same flawed assumptions across an entire financial system, individual mistakes can become systemic crises.

Artificial intelligence could dramatically accelerate this problem. As banks, investment firms, and regulators increasingly use AI to assess risk, approve loans, monitor transactions, and enforce compliance, financial decisions will become more standardized across national borders. Institutions relying on similar algorithms, shared data, and dominant technology providers may begin making the same decisions, identifying the same risks, and excluding the same customers.

What once required decades of international regulatory coordination could increasingly be reinforced through shared technology and automated decision-making. Smaller institutions may become dependent on systems controlled by a handful of powerful financial and technology corporations. When widely adopted AI models make the same mistakes, the consequences could spread rapidly across international markets.

AI also offers opportunities to reduce compliance costs and help smaller banks compete. But those benefits could be undermined if control over the underlying technology becomes concentrated.

The danger with artificial intelligence is that financial globalization, regulatory capture, and centralized technological control will reinforce one another, concentrating economic power in fewer hands while making the entire financial system more vulnerable to shared mistakes.

When Access to Banking Becomes a Tool of Control

The international financial system does more than facilitate commerce. It also gives governments and financial institutions considerable power over who can participate.

In 2012, the international banking network SWIFT disconnected sanctioned Iranian banks under European Union restrictions. In 2022, major Russian banks were similarly excluded following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These actions demonstrated how access to international financial services can be restricted as an instrument of foreign policy.

But similar concerns arise when financial institutions deny services to lawful businesses and individuals because of their political views, religious beliefs, or perceived reputational risks.

In July 2023, JPMorgan Chase closed business accounts associated with Dr. Joseph Mercola, a prominent critic of COVID-19 vaccination, along with personal accounts belonging to several executives and family members. The bank did not publicly provide a detailed explanation.

That same summer, Britain’s Coutts bank closed politician Nigel Farage’s accounts. Internal documents revealed that his political views had been considered incompatible with the bank’s values.

Canada provided another example of government-directed financial restrictions. In February 2022, during the trucker protests against COVID-19 mandates, the government invoked the Emergencies Act, allowing financial institutions to freeze accounts associated with the protests without first obtaining individual court orders. Approximately 200 accounts were frozen. We later met a Canadian farmer who told us his accounts had been frozen after he supported the trucker movement by hosting a pig roast for truckers and their families.

In August 2025, President Trump issued an executive order directing federal regulators to address politically motivated debanking and remove reputation risk as a basis for certain supervisory actions.

The emergence of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) raises additional questions about financial privacy and government authority. Depending on their design, CBDCs could give governments greater visibility into financial transactions and potentially expand their ability to restrict payments. In July 2026, legislation prohibited the Federal Reserve from issuing a CBDC through 2030.

The central concern is that access to banking is essential to participation in modern economic life. When governments or dominant financial institutions can restrict that access without transparency, due process, or meaningful avenues of appeal, financial infrastructure becomes a potential instrument of political and economic control.

Artificial intelligence could make that control far more powerful, systematic, and difficult to challenge. Banks already use automated systems to monitor transactions and assess risk. As AI becomes more sophisticated, individuals and businesses could be flagged, denied services, or financially excluded by opaque algorithms, with little human oversight and no meaningful opportunity to appeal.

China’s social credit system offers a warning. Through government blacklists, surveillance, and restrictions on economic activity, Chinese authorities have demonstrated how financial access and personal behavior can become interconnected. A Western version would not necessarily require an official social credit score. It could emerge through interconnected banking databases, digital identity systems, automated compliance requirements, and AI algorithms that determine who is considered an acceptable participant in the economy.

The European Union provides another warning about the potential reach of centralized digital regulation. Under its Digital Services Act, regulators can impose fines of up to 6 percent of a company’s worldwide annual turnover. In December 2025, the European Commission fined Elon Musk’s X €120 million for alleged transparency violations, while pursuing broader investigations involving content moderation. Critics warn that such financial penalties can pressure companies to restrict lawful speech rather than risk regulatory punishment.

Now consider the consequences if comparable enforcement pressures become intertwined with AI-driven financial surveillance, digital identity systems, and a digital euro. The power to regulate speech and the power to restrict financial participation could become mutually reinforcing instruments of control.

The greatest danger is that financial censorship could operate above national governments, without any elected official issuing an order. As international banks, payment networks, and technology companies adopt shared algorithms and compliance standards, a person or business classified as politically controversial or a reputational risk could face exclusion across multiple institutions and countries. No court finding, legislative vote, or direct government intervention would necessarily be required.

Financial censorship could become embedded in the infrastructure of global commerce itself, enforced automatically by institutions and algorithms that ordinary citizens cannot inspect, challenge, or hold accountable.

Challenging the Petrodollar and America’s Financial Dominance

America’s ability to restrict access to dollar-based financial networks has encouraged countries such as China and Russia to develop alternatives. The same financial infrastructure that gives the United States considerable international influence also creates incentives for other nations to reduce their dependence on it.

The challenge extends to the petrodollar system, under which international oil transactions have traditionally been priced and settled predominantly in U.S. dollars. China and Russia have increasingly pursued energy transactions in their own currencies, while other major energy exporters have explored alternatives to dollar settlement. Although these developments have not displaced the dollar’s dominance in global oil markets, they represent another effort to reduce dependence on American financial infrastructure.

In 2021, the Bank for International Settlements helped launch Project mBridge, working with central banks in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates to develop a system for settling international payments directly in digital currencies without relying on the dollar. The BIS withdrew in October 2024, while Russia and other BRICS nations continued exploring alternative payment networks.

Meanwhile, the dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has declined from approximately 71 percent in 2000 to 56.7 percent in mid-2026. Although the dollar remains the world’s dominant reserve currency, its declining share illustrates the gradual diversification of international reserves.

The irony is that the financial system built around American economic dominance may be encouraging rival powers to construct competing systems. If these alternatives expand, the United States could eventually lose some of the economic advantages and geopolitical influence that come from the dollar’s central role in global finance.

The Benefits of International Financial Cooperation

International financial cooperation has produced genuine benefits. Since 2002, international settlement systems have substantially reduced the risk that one bank will pay for a currency transaction without receiving the money it is owed, the very problem exposed by the Herstatt failure in 1974.

Stronger bank capital requirements introduced after the 2008 financial crisis also helped major financial institutions withstand the economic disruption of the 2020 pandemic, alongside substantial central bank and government interventions.

These accomplishments matter. International financial cooperation can strengthen economic stability, protect depositors, and benefit American businesses and consumers. The problem arises when cooperation becomes centralized control, and when regulations intended to protect the financial system also protect its largest institutions from competition.

The Real Danger of Globalized Financial Power

For over fifty years, governments, central bankers, international regulators, and the world’s largest financial institutions have constructed a system that increasingly concentrates economic power beyond the reach of national voters. Much of it began with legitimate objectives, and America has benefited enormously from the dollar’s global dominance. But the interests of the American people and those of multinational financial corporations are not always the same.

What began as international financial cooperation has also created opportunities for regulatory capture on a global scale. Rules intended to protect financial stability can instead protect established corporations from competition, making it increasingly difficult for smaller banks, independent businesses, and entrepreneurs to survive, much less challenge the institutions already in power.

Artificial intelligence raises the stakes dramatically. The prospect of a Western social credit system, enforced through interconnected financial networks and automated algorithms, threatens to move economic control beyond the reach of elected governments. No grand conspiracy or single central authority would be necessary. Regulatory capture, shared technology, and aligned financial interests could produce a system of economic exclusion that operates across national borders, without meaningful democratic accountability.

The answer is not to abandon international cooperation or surrender America’s financial advantages. Congress must reclaim oversight of international banking standards, protect competition, establish enforceable safeguards against unjustified debanking, and prevent unaccountable AI-driven financial exclusion.

America should defend the dollar, preserve its financial leadership, and welcome international commerce. But it must never confuse the interests of global financial corporations with the interests of the American people.

A free society cannot remain free if access to banking, commerce, and economic opportunity ultimately depends on the approval of institutions and algorithms that no citizen can hold accountable.

References

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CNBC. 2023. “A CEO Quits and the BBC Apologizes to Trump-Ally Nigel Farage. A Banking Scandal Erupts in Britain.” July 26. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/26/nigel-farage-coutts-saga-natwest-ceo-alison-rose-resigns-after-media-storm.html

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Florida Department of Financial Services. 2023. “CFO Jimmy Patronis: We Need Answers on Why a Florida Business Was Debanked.” https://myfloridacfo.com/news/pressreleases/press-release-details/2023/09/26/cfo-jimmy-patronis-we-need-answers-on-why-a-florida-business-was-debanked

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Hayek, F. A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review 35 (4): 519 to 530.

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For the past week, Americans have been treated to another familiar media spectacle. Donald Trump was supposedly threatening democracy. His Justice Department was interfering with an election. Republicans were preparing to reject the will of the voters before a single ballot had been counted.

The controversy centers on Alaska’s U.S. Senate race, where Democratic operatives recruited a second candidate named same as the first, Dan Sullivan, to confuse voters into selecting him instead of the Republican incumbent. Trump’s Justice Department sued to delay certification if the incumbent narrowly loses, triggering headlines accusing the administration of attempting to overturn an election before the votes were even cast.

The headlines were breathless, the accusations predictable, and the villain was, as always, Donald Trump.

Then, on October 28, the New York Times published an investigation that turned the narrative upside down.

Democratic operatives associated with the Senate candidate Mary Peltola had spent months recruiting spoiler candidates, specifically looking for citizens with the name Dan Sullivan. then, in fact, they found such a man named Dan Sullivan, to run against Republican incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan.

The apparent strategy was breathtakingly cynical: Find someone with the Republican senator’s name, put him on the ballot, and hope enough voters accidentally select the wrong man to influence the election.

The New York Times investigation puts Mary Peltola’s personal knowledge squarely under scrutiny. Her former campaign manager reportedly acknowledged that Peltola knew about the effort to recruit spoiler candidates, while documented communications link senior campaign aides and national Democratic officials to the operation. These are not allegations that can be brushed aside with another campaign denial. If Peltola knew that operatives were deliberately recruiting candidates to confuse voters, the public deserves to know whether she approved, encouraged, or helped conceal the scheme. Constitutional qualifications for Senate office may limit the grounds for disqualification, but they provide no immunity from investigation or prosecution for violations of election law. The next step should be a thorough examination of the communications, financing, and decisions behind this operation, including Peltola’s own role.

And these are the people who lecture America about protecting democracy.

Consider how the mainstream press framed the controversy just days earlier. ABC News declared, “Trump told DOJ to sue to block Alaska Senate results if Republican narrowly loses.” The Washington Post announced, “DOJ seeks to block Alaska Senate result if Republican incumbent narrowly loses.” Reuters characterized the lawsuit as an attempt to block the possible election of a Democrat. Roll Call reduced the entire controversy to “DOJ sues to prevent Sullivan loss in Alaska.”

Notice the framing. Trump was the aggressor. His Justice Department was the threat. The underlying allegations of deliberate voter deception were relegated to secondary details, if they received attention at all.

Readers were encouraged to believe this was another attempt by Trump to overturn an election because he disliked the likely outcome. There was just one inconvenient problem.

The election-integrity concerns were not invented by Trump. And the alleged manipulation began long before his Justice Department intervened.

According to the October 28 New York Times investigation by Kellen Browning, the effort began in summer 2025, when a staffer associated with Peltola’s political operation was reportedly instructed to identify people throughout Alaska named Dan Sullivan.

The investigation, based on interviews, text messages, and other documentation, described involvement by Peltola campaign aides and individuals connected to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The operation reportedly extended beyond recruiting a namesake candidate to finding other potential spoilers who might siphon votes from the Republican incumbent.

This was not simply an independent candidate who happened to share a common name. The reporting describes a coordinated effort to exploit that coincidence for political advantage.

And the alleged scheme required no ballot stuffing, hacked machines, or falsified vote totals. It required an ordinary voter to enter a polling place, recognize the name Dan Sullivan, and mistakenly select the wrong candidate.

The ballot would be counted accurately. The voter, however, would have supported someone he never intended to elect.

Alaska election officials had already raised concerns about the second Sullivan’s candidacy. His actual middle initial is J., yet he initially sought to appear on the ballot as “Dan S. Sullivan,” matching the Republican incumbent’s name and middle initial. His campaign presentation raised additional concerns about deliberately misleading voters. The Alaska Supreme Court ultimately allowed him to remain on the ballot, but that ruling did not resolve who recruited him, who financed his campaign, or whether the apparent attempt to confuse voters was part of a coordinated political operation.

The Justice Department subsequently filed suit seeking to delay certification under certain circumstances if the Republican incumbent narrowly loses. Whether federal law authorizes that remedy remains for the courts to decide.

But the Times investigation gives the underlying allegations a significance the early headlines largely obscured.

For years, Democratic politicians and their media allies have proclaimed themselves the guardians of election integrity. They have condemned voter suppression, warned about electoral interference, and insisted that democracy depends on public confidence in the voting process.

Yet in Alaska, political operatives associated with a major Democratic Senate campaign and the candidate herself pursued a corrupt scheme that sought to trick voters into making mistakes when voting.

The reported involvement of individuals connected to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee makes this more than a local political stunt. It raises questions about the national party apparatus, campaign financing, and the extent of coordination behind the effort.

The New York Times has already identified some of the people behind this operation. Peltola’s former campaign manager, Elisa Rios, said Peltola was “definitely aware” of the scheme, although not personally directing it. Senior campaign aides exchanged messages with Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee officials, including campaign director Andrew Piatt, about strategies to siphon conservative votes. Democratic operative Jerid Kurtz reportedly traveled through Alaska under an assumed name to recruit potential spoiler candidates.

The question is no longer simply whether Democratic operatives participated. The documented communications establish their involvement in planning ballot strategies. What remains unresolved is who authorized the namesake recruitment, who financed it, and whether senior officials approved the operation.

These questions demand answers, not another carefully crafted press statement.

The liberal mainstream media fell down again

On October 23, the dominant storyline was that Trump was attempting to block an election result. Five days later, the New York Times reported that Democratic operatives had been working behind the scenes to influence the ballot itself.

Credit belongs to Browning and the Times for publishing the investigation. But the contrast with the earlier coverage is revealing.

The press was quick to present Trump’s intervention as a threat to democracy. It was considerably less eager to make the alleged Democratic manipulation the centerpiece of the story.

How many Americans saw the alarming headlines about Trump but never understood the voter-confusion allegations behind the lawsuit? How many were left believing the controversy was simply another Republican attempt to reject an election? How many missed the below-the-fold headlines of Democrat involvement in this corrupt scheme?

And will the same outlets now devote comparable attention to the reported Democratic operation?

This is where the media’s credibility is on trial. Journalism is supposed to investigate abuses of power, not merely amplify accusations against whichever political figure its editors find most objectionable.

The election has not yet occurred. No one knows whether voters will actually be confused, and no court has established that the reported recruitment operation violated federal election law. In fact, it may be impossible to ever tease out the answers.

The issue is straightforward. Political parties should compete for votes by persuading citizens, not by exploiting mistakes in candidate identification. The people who claim to be saving democracy should not be engineering ways to confuse the voters they claim to protect.

And the journalists who spent the week portraying Trump as the threat to Alaska’s election owe their readers the rest of the story.

Because the real scandal alleged here is not that someone challenged an election procedure. It is that political operatives reportedly tried to turn voter confusion into an electoral weapon. And much of the national press seemed more interested in attacking the man who objected than examining the operation itself.

But in the end, voters will be confused - to what extent is impossible to gauge. Which is why the DoJ is correct.

If the Republican candidate loses, the election must not be certified. Frankly, Peltola is unfit to serve as a US Senator.

Enough with the cheating.

By Dr. Jill Glasspool Malone and Robert W. Malone

Political Opinion

We have been appalled by the glowing, almost celebratory mainstream media coverage of Lula’s election victory and the treatment of Flávio Bolsonaro, who reportedly fled Brazil amid fears of political persecution. Rather than investigate allegations of censorship, judicial corruption, election interference, and political repression, much of the Western press appears content to celebrate those wielding power. But there are people much closer to events on the ground, and their voices deserve to be heard.

Glenn Greenwald is one of them. Unlike journalists whose principles change with the political winds, Greenwald has consistently challenged abuses of state power, regardless of who benefits. His reporting on the Operation Car Wash scandal exposed prosecutorial misconduct involving Lula’s prosecution. Now he is investigating allegations of similar abuses directed against Lula’s political enemies, particularly through the extraordinary powers exercised by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.

Mike Benz takes the story directly into Washington. He alleges that the Biden administration coordinated an extraordinary intervention surrounding Brazil’s 2022 presidential election, involving the CIA, State Department, Pentagon, and White House. His account raises questions about American diplomatic pressure, electronic voting machines, and USAID funding allegedly directed toward organizations aligned with Lula and Brazil’s censorship apparatus. Although Benz acknowledges that he cannot prove voting-machine manipulation, his allegations about American involvement demand answers.

The images and statements reproduced below reveal another dimension: international political figures and institutions publicly celebrating Lula, even as serious allegations of judicial overreach and political persecution are happening in real time.

When journalists, activists, and opposition figures flee their country rather than face a judicial system they believe has been weaponized against them, this is no longer ordinary politics. And when American government agencies are accused of helping shape that political environment, Americans have every right to demand a full accounting.

We believe this story is far bigger than Brazil. It concerns the abuse of judicial power, censorship, foreign interference, and the willingness of powerful institutions to defend conduct they would condemn if the political parties were reversed.

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald writes:

The Brazilian Supreme Court Judge revered by the Brazilian left (and now the American left for seizing Bolsonaro’s passport), Alexandre de Moraes, comes from the extremist “law-and-order” faction of the Brazilian Right as well as its extreme pro-austerity neoliberal pro-banker wing.

Less than a decade ago, when Moraes was nominated to the Supreme Court, the Brazilian left branded him a white supremacist, a fascist and a leader of the right-wing coup government. One of Brazil’s leading left-wing politicians @GuilhermeBoulos explicitly accused Moraes of having committed the worst crime against humanity that exists: “RACIST GENOCIDE,” by deliberately murdering poor black people en masse while he was the Justice Secretary for São Paulo Governor Geraldo Alckmin (who himself spent years being called all the same names by the Brazilian left until Lula picked Alckmin as VP in 2022).

Then -- starting in 2019 -- Moraes began censoring, imprisoning and persecuting Lula’s enemies and imprisoning his own critics, and was overnight transformed by the large Brazilian media and the left into the Savior of Brazilian Justice and Democracy. Only on the left can one transform from *fascist and genocidal racist* to heroic guardian of justice in less than a decade.

Also, Moraes’ own corruption scandals make everyone else’s seem trivial, yet his passport works just fine and he freely travels the world in great wealth that he and his family received from the corrupt billionaire banker responsible for Brazil’s worst-ever banking collapse…

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CRUCIAL FACTS ON THE FLAVIO BOLSONARO MATTER:

It’s not just Flavio Bolsonaro who fled Brazil to escape the tyrannical persecution of Alexandre de Moraes and the pro-Lula wing of the Supreme Court. There are dozens of Brazilian exiles who have done the same: dissident journalists, activists, bloggers, and politicians who all fled to avoid certain prison for political opposition.

In most of these cases, Moraes has demanded the extradition of those who fled and whom he wants to imprison back in Brazil. But Moraes’ extradition requests have been repeatedly denied by multiple countries and institutions on the grounds that these prosecutions are politically motivated or otherwise corrupted. Among those concluing this: Spain, Italy, INTERPOL, and even the US under Biden.

Just today, Italy refused Brazil’s demand to extradite a person named @edutagli

, who was once a top aide to Moraes, but then fled to Italy after Moraes accused him of having been my source in a huge leak from Moraes’ office that I obtained for reporting I did with @Folha in 2024. That massive leak enabled us to publish roughly 20 articles proving systemic abuses of power by Moraes against his political enemies: exactly the reason so many Brazilians, including Bolsonaro, know they can’t get a fair trial in Brazil.

Italy today refused to extradite the person accused of being our source on the grounds that the proceedings would be a farce because Moraes — as he so often does — wants to act as the supposed victim, investigator, and judge, and thus his demand falls well outside of Italy’s extradition standards. Again, multiple countries have concluded the same, showing what a farce Brazil’s once-respected judicial system has become under the Lula/Moraes regime.

Moraes has overseen a system of political persecution masquerading as criminal justice that has been recognized as a sham by multiple countries that are not exactly Bolsonaro allies. Nobody in their right mind who is a political enemy of Moraes would remain in Brazil once if it is clear that he intends to imprison you, since he has proven that guilt is a foregone conclusion and he operates with no legal or constitutional limits of any kind.

That is why asylum under international law exists: to protect those who cannot obtain justice in their own country because the justice system has been corrupted and commandeered for political persecution. Many people, such as Julian Assange, have needed that protection (which Lula cheered). Now people need it from Moraes in Brazil. That is sadly one of the main legacies of both Lula and Moraes over the last six years….

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One other important note: Moraes himself is engulfed in the worst judicial scandal in Brazil’s history: on that makes most other scandals seem trivial by comparison. His family received roughly $40 million (!!!) from a corrupt billionaire (Daniel Vorcaro) shortly before his bank (Banco Master) collapsed: it was basically a ponzi scheme stealing from depositors and investors.

Moraes repeatedly lied by denying he had contact with Vorcaro. But then messages from Vorcaro’s phone were obtained by the police and leaked. showing that the banker spoke extensively and continuously with Moraes after paying his wife these obscene sums, guaranteeing Moraes and his family generational lavish wealth.

Among those chats: Vorcaro repeateadly asked Moraes about the status of the police investigation against him, and specifically asked Moraes when he should flee the country to avoid justice (he was boarding his private jet to Dubai when the police nabbed him at the last second).

Moraes deleted all of his messages to Vorcaro to prevent investigators from learning what he told the banker about pending police operations or anything else (behavior that Moraes has cited as “obstruction of justice” to justify imprisoning others before trial). So we don’t know what Moraes told the banker about pending police operations of if he tried to help him flee to Dubai to avoid arrest: because Moraes erased his messages.

That’s what makes it extra bizarre -- just surreal -- that it is now Moraes of all people who is posturing as the judge who wants to ensure that Flavio Bolsonaro is barred from leaving Brazil (even in the absence of criminal charges).

In other words, Moraes waited a whole SEVEN MINUTES before returning to his years-long role as chief persecutor of his political enemies, using blatantly abusive judical authorities to carry this all out: abuses so severe that even his prior allies have begun denouncing it as a grave danger to democracy. Does any of this look or feel or smell like “democracy”?…

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If the leading opponents of the government are faced with the choice of either fleeing the country or being imprisoned, does that mean the country is tyrannical and authoritairan?

It all depends on whether we like the ideology of the government or not.

Will Chamberlain @willchamberlain writes:

Flavio Bolsonaro’s passport was cancelled and he was forced to flee the country by Lula, Alexandre De Moraes, and the insane Brazilian regime.

His brother Eduardo has an arrest warrant out for lobbying the US. His father, Jair Bolsonaro is serving 27 years. Victims of political persecution, all of them.

It’s time for the Brazilian left to face the full force of American diplomatic and economic sanctions until they stop acting like a banana republic.

The Trump administration lifted Magnitsky Act sanctions on de Moraes, his wife, and his holding company last December. They should be immediately reimposed.

Further, visa bans should be imposed on every government official who has touched the Bolsonaro investigations - and their families too.

Finally, Section 301 tariffs on Brazilian goods should be quadrupled.

The Brazilian regime should look carefully at what has happened to Venezuela and Cuba, and remember that this hemisphere belongs to the United States of America.

What is the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act?

The Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act gives the U.S. president broad authority to sanction foreign officials implicated in serious human rights abuses or corruption. These sanctions can freeze assets, prohibit financial transactions, restrict access to international banking, and bar entry into the United States, all without requiring a criminal conviction.

In July 2025, the Trump administration imposed Magnitsky sanctions on Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, accusing him of abusing his judicial authority, suppressing free speech, arbitrarily detaining political opponents, and targeting individuals for their political beliefs. In September, the sanctions were extended to his wife, Viviane Barci de Moraes, and the family holding company, Lex Instituto de Estudos Jurídicos, which controlled significant family assets, including real estate.

Yet on December 12, 2025, the Trump administration abruptly removed all three from the sanctions list. The reversal did not come with an announcement that the original accusations were false, that de Moraes had been exonerated, or that his conduct had fundamentally changed.

Instead, it followed a diplomatic rapprochement between Trump and Brazilian President Lula da Silva, including negotiations over punitive U.S. tariffs on Brazilian exports. Lula had personally requested that Trump lift the sanctions. Administration officials also pointed to proposed Brazilian legislation that could reduce sentences for those convicted in connection with the January 2023 unrest, potentially benefiting former President Jair Bolsonaro.

If de Moraes’s actions were sufficiently serious to justify freezing his assets and targeting his family’s financial holdings in July and September, what changed by December? The publicly available record suggests that Washington’s diplomatic priorities shifted, not that the underlying human rights allegations had been disproven. It appears that Magnitsky sanctions were removed as a bargaining chip in a broader geopolitical negotiation.

But now, with de Moraes’s most recent actions, it appears that it is time for Pres. Trump to reapply those sanctions and this time, for good.

So, who is busy congratulating Lula - all the usual players, of course:

The press also celebrated the Lula win, while failing to aggressively investigate allegations of censorship, judicial abuse, and political persecution. Many outlets act as a public relations arm of the very institutions it is supposed to hold accountable.

Major international news outlets, including The Guardian, Reuters, Associated Press, Financial Times, The New York Times, Le Monde, El País, and Portugal’s Público, gave extensive coverage to Lula’s electoral victories. Much of the reporting emphasized his political comeback, celebrations among supporters, and congratulations from international leaders.

The Guardian portrayed his victory as a dramatic return to power, while Reuters and AP prominently reported the enthusiastic response from world leaders.

Some coverage framed Lula’s success as a victory for democracy, with almost no attention to the allegations of censorship, judicial overreach, and political persecution surrounding Brazil’s government.

Biden was complicit in Lula’s rise to power:

Mike Benz argues in the video below that the electronic voting machines have long been recognized as vulnerable to manipulation, pointing out that concerns about election security were once bipartisan and helped justify the creation of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). He highlights connections between voting-machine companies such as Smartmatic, the U.S. State Department, and politically influential figures associated with George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Benz contends that these relationships raise serious questions about the integrity of elections, both in the United States and abroad.

Turning to Brazil’s 2022 presidential election, Benz describes an extraordinary intervention by the Biden administration to ensure that Jair Bolsonaro accepted the election results. He alleges that CIA Director William Burns, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and senior State Department official Victoria Nuland traveled to Brazil to pressure Bolsonaro and Brazilian military officials.

He states that the State Department secretly facilitated the shipment of semiconductor chips from Taiwan to Brazil, working through Supreme Court Justice Luís Roberto Barroso to ensure that electronic voting machines could be manufactured despite Bolsonaro’s objections. Benz references a Financial Times investigation describing a coordinated effort involving the White House, CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council, and State Department.

Benz also alleges that approximately $87 million in USAID funding flowed to Brazilian organizations, unions, media outlets, and judicial initiatives that supported Lula or worked against Bolsonaro. He argues that these activities helped construct a political and censorship apparatus that favored Lula’s rise to power and subsequently facilitated the prosecution and imprisonment of Bolsonaro. Although Benz says he possesses extensive documentary evidence of American involvement in Brazil’s censorship infrastructure, he acknowledges that he does not know precisely how electronic voting machines might have been manipulated. Nevertheless, he maintains that the combination of diplomatic pressure, covert technological assistance, and American funding of politically aligned organizations raises profound questions about U.S. involvement in Bolsonaro’s narrow electoral defeat.

The video:

We reported in 2024 on the censorship cooked up between Lula and Biden after Lula won in 2022.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know just how Biden and Lula worked to censor Americans and Brazilians - to “build resilience to disinformation”?

But the deep state isn’t answering that question…

When the Courts Become Political Weapons, Democracy Is in Danger

The crisis in Brazil goes far beyond the political fortunes of Lula or the Bolsonaro family. At its heart is a much more disturbing question: What happens when the institutions supposedly responsible for protecting democracy become instruments for controlling political opposition, censoring dissent, and determining who is permitted to govern?

Glenn Greenwald’s reporting raises serious questions about the concentration of judicial power in the hands of Alexandre de Moraes. The accounts of journalists, activists, and political figures fleeing Brazil are horrifying. When a judge exercises extraordinary authority over political speech, criminal investigations, and the prosecution of his critics, the public has every reason to demand transparency and accountability.

But Mike Benz introduces another dimension, one that reaches directly into Washington.

Benz alleges that the Biden administration undertook a coordinated effort involving the CIA, State Department, Pentagon, National Security Council, and White House to influence the political environment surrounding Brazil’s 2022 presidential election.

His account includes diplomatic pressure on Brazilian officials, assistance in obtaining semiconductor chips for electronic voting machines, and approximately $87 million in USAID funding that he claims benefited organizations aligned with Lula and the censorship apparatus subsequently used against Bolsonaro’s supporters.

These are extraordinary allegations. Benz acknowledges that he cannot establish that electronic voting machines were manipulated. Nevertheless, the documented diplomatic involvement and his additional claims about funding and institutional coordination raise questions that deserve independent investigation.

Where does legitimate American diplomacy end and foreign election interference begin? And who decides when intervention in another country’s political affairs becomes acceptable?

Consider the contradiction. American officials routinely condemn foreign interference in elections, censorship of political opponents, and the manipulation of democratic institutions. Yet Benz describes an American foreign-policy establishment deeply involved in Brazil’s electoral environment, while Greenwald documents what he regards as the subsequent weaponization of Brazil’s judicial system against political opposition.

Biden’s own White House memo describes how the two countries will work together to censor citizens.

The implications of all of this extend well beyond Brazil. They raise serious questions about whether American diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign-aid institutions have been used to shape political outcomes abroad while presenting those interventions as the defense of democracy.

The Trump administration’s decision to impose Magnitsky sanctions on de Moraes in 2025, only to remove them months later amid diplomatic negotiations, introduces another troubling question. Human rights violations are negotiable when trade agreements and geopolitical relationships are at stake.

A democracy is not defined merely by holding elections. It is defined by whether opposition parties can compete freely, journalists can investigate without intimidation, citizens can criticize their government, and courts administer justice without political favoritism. Judged by this standard, Brazil has failed again to maintain a democracy.

And Americans should recognize the broader implications. The same institutional mechanisms described in Brazil, including government pressure on technology platforms, foreign-aid funding of politically active organizations, intelligence involvement in domestic political affairs, and the expansion of judicial authority, demand far more than scrutiny. They demand full public disclosure, independent investigations, accountability for officials who abused their authority, and an end to the use of American taxpayer dollars and government institutions to manipulate political outcomes, censor dissent, or undermine constitutional freedoms, whether at home or abroad.

We demand a full accounting of American involvement in Brazil’s 2022 election, including the diplomatic communications, election-related assistance, USAID expenditures, and subsequent cooperation on censorship and judicial enforcement. Allegations of electoral manipulation should be investigated through verifiable evidence, not accepted or dismissed according to political allegiance.

The fundamental question is whether governments and powerful institutions are accountable to the people, or whether the people are increasingly expected to submit to decisions made by institutions they can neither meaningfully challenge nor control.

Brazil’s experience raises that question with particular urgency. But the answer matters far beyond Brazil.

A government does not become democratic simply by calling itself democratic. And censorship, political persecution, and foreign interference do not become legitimate simply because those responsible claim they are protecting democracy.

End.

Audio Version:

Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone · Washington, DC · October 27, 2026

If you raise cows and a feed mill sells you a contaminated batch, you can take the mill to court. The same holds for the dealer who sold you a mower with a faulty blade guard, the maker of a trailer hitch that shears on the highway, or the manufacturer of any other defective product. Product liability law is straightforward. Most people who farm understand it without a lawyer.

Now take your daughter to the pediatrician for a routine childhood shot. If that shot injures her, federal law sends you first to a special claims court in Washington. The Department of Justice defends HHS against your claim, while the vaccine manufacturer is not even a party to the case. The Supreme Court has held that you cannot later sue the manufacturer over the design of its product (Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, 2011). For a COVID-19 shot, the path narrows further. Your claim goes to an administrative office inside the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), with no judge, no jury, and a one-year filing deadline.

The pediatrician, for whom 75% of his or her income is derived from routine vaccinations, can’t be sued either. Their financial conflicts of interest, as the American Academy of Pediatrics, are huge. They are not neutral arbitrators in the vaccine or medical freedom debate.

Medical freedom means having the legal right to refuse a medical product, recover from its maker if it harms you, and hear honest disagreement from your own physician. Congress, HHS, and state licensing boards have narrowed each of those rights over the past forty years, mostly by statute and regulation. Legislatures can restore them by the same means.

An Old Right with a Long Pedigree

The right to refuse a medical intervention predates the modern drug industry by centuries. John Locke wrote in 1689 that “every man has a property in his own person”. American courts carried that principle into medicine. In 1914, Judge Benjamin Cardozo wrote for the New York Court of Appeals that every adult of sound mind “has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body” (Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital, 1914). The Nuremberg Code of 1947 made voluntary consent the first condition of any experiment on human beings. The Belmont Report of 1979 wrote respect for persons into federal research ethics.

There is also a long history of government imposing public health requirements. In Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), the Supreme Court upheld a five-dollar fine against a Cambridge pastor who refused smallpox vaccination during an outbreak. Public health officials still cite the case as authority for mandates. We read Jacobson more narrowly. The penalty was a fine. Nothing in the case involved loss of a job, exclusion from school, or a bar on buying and selling. The Court also warned that a state could exercise its police power so arbitrarily that the courts would have to intervene.

How the Courthouse Door Closed

Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in 1986 after a wave of lawsuits drove manufacturers out of the vaccine market. The Act created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a no-fault system funded by an excise tax on each dose. It did what its authors intended. Supply has stabilized, and the program has paid about $5.4 billion to roughly 12,000 vaccine-injury victims. Its caps on death benefits and on pain and suffering still stand at $250,000, unchanged since 1986.

But the consequences go beyond the compensation system. When companies can be sued for injuries caused by their products, they have a financial incentive to make those products as safe as possible. Take away that liability, and the company no longer has to bear the full cost when something goes wrong. Instead, injured families are left paying the price. Economists call this moral hazard.

The 2005 Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act went further. Once the HHS Secretary declares a public health threat, makers, distributors, and administrators of covered countermeasures become immune from nearly every claim short of willful misconduct. The COVID-19 declaration, first issued in early 2020, was amended in December 2024 to extend that immunity for COVID-19 vaccines through December 31, 2029.

People injured by a covered product must instead seek compensation through the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP). As of October 1, 2026, the program had decided 8,369 COVID-19 claims, found just 120 eligible for compensation, and actually paid only 66. That means fewer than one percent of decided claims have resulted in payment. Although the number of payments has increased under Secretary Kennedy, the basic system remains unchanged. Claims must generally be filed within one year of receiving the covered product, compared with three years for injury claims under the VICP. Claimants have no right to a judge or jury, and while they can request administrative reconsideration, they cannot appeal to a federal court. As of October 2026, 2,730 COVID-19 claims had been rejected for missing the filing deadline alone.

Secretary Kennedy ended the COVID-19 emergency use authorization declarations on June 30, 2026, with those for drugs and biologics expiring on June 29, 2027. The PREP Act declaration that shields the manufacturers remains in force through 2029. In May 2026, the Secretary also signed a new PREP Act declaration for a hantavirus countermeasure, limited to one drug, favipiravir, and written to run only until July 18, 2026. We found no notice that it has been extended.

Who Writes the Standard of Care

Liability is only part of the problem. Federal recommendations can also become state requirements. Many state school-entry rules, insurance coverage mandates, and pharmacist scope-of-practice statutes point back to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) by reference. A vote by an appointed federal committee in Atlanta can therefore reach a kindergarten registration desk in any of those states without a single state legislator casting a vote.

We have firsthand experience with this dispute. Robert served on the ACIP and on its COVID-19 vaccine workgroup. On March 16, 2026, Judge Brian Murphy of the federal district court in Massachusetts stayed thirteen ACIP appointments, and every vote those members had cast, in a suit led by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). That ruling invalidated the committee on which Robert served, and his appointment with it. He has since told the Secretary he will not serve on a reconstituted ACIP. The First Circuit heard argument on the government’s appeal on October 6 and has not yet ruled. Earlier this year, Stefanie Spear, Secretary Kennedy’s principal deputy chief of staff, told Robert that President Trump and his West Wing advisors did not want the ACIP meeting again until after the midterm election.

Some states responded by replacing one authority with another. In 2026, New York removed direct references to the ACIP from its vaccine statutes and pointed instead to the state health commissioner and to medical societies such as the AAP. The AAP is a private professional association of pediatricians and the lead plaintiff in the suit that froze the federal committee. A New Yorker who disagrees with its guidance has no ballot to cast against it.

A recommendation from any advisory body should remain a recommendation. When a state wants a requirement, its legislature should write one by name, debate it in public, and answer for it at the next election.

The Financial Interests Behind the AAP Lawsuit Deserve Scrutiny

The American Academy of Pediatrics presents its lawsuit against HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a defense of children’s health and established vaccine policy. Yet there is another dimension to this litigation that deserves serious examination: the financial interests of the pediatric practices represented by the AAP.

Routine childhood vaccinations are deeply integrated into the business of American pediatrics. Vaccination appointments frequently coincide with reimbursable well-child examinations, while vaccine administration generates additional payments. Depending on the insurance contract, practices may also receive performance incentives linked to immunization rates.

These financial relationships are not merely theoretical. Published research has demonstrated that recalling children for overdue vaccinations generates additional appointments and practice revenue.

The AAP is therefore not simply an outside scientific observer of federal vaccination policy. It is a professional association representing physicians whose practices participate financially in the vaccination system.

Furthermore, there is a more concerning finding regarding the AAP and undisclosed financial relationships:

The September 2025 Undark investigation reported that:

• At least 9 of 16 members of an AAP committee responsible for immunization recommendations had received some form of financial support from vaccine manufacturers.

• Five had financial relationships with manufacturers marketing COVID-19 vaccines in the United States.

• The AAP did not routinely disclose its own corporate sponsorship relationships within the guidelines reviewed by the investigators.

• The AAP said it had a rigorous conflict-of-interest review process and that corporate funding did not influence policy development.

Changes to federal recommendations could affect vaccination volumes, reimbursement arrangements, and the economics of pediatric practice as well as impact the personal financial landscape of AAP’s leadership and AAP’s corporate sponsorship. Therefore, the financial interests of the organization and its members need to be examined closely.

The public deserves to know whether the AAP has assessed the potential financial consequences of the federal policy changes it is fighting, and whether those interests have been fully disclosed.

Below is a video obtained from the Children’s Health Defense X account. In it, a pediatrician discusses the substantial revenue that routine vaccinations generate for physicians.

Your Physician’s Right to Disagree

There is also the question of what your doctor is allowed to say, both to you and in public. During the pandemic, the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB), a private nonprofit that advises state licensing boards, warned that physicians who spread COVID-19 “misinformation” risked suspension or revocation of their licenses. At least fifteen state boards adopted its language. California went further in 2022 and wrote a misinformation offense into its medical practice act. A federal court enjoined enforcement of that law in January 2023 (Høeg v. Newsom, 2023), and the legislature repealed it effective January 2024.

In October 2025, four physicians disciplined by boards in six states sued the FSMB in federal court in Texas, alleging that they had been punished for conveying valid medical information that departed from the organization’s view of the scientific consensus.

Physicians and others who criticized pandemic policy online faced similar pressure. In Missouri v. Biden, a federal district court found in July 2023 that federal officials had likely coerced social media platforms into suppressing disfavored speech. The Supreme Court reversed in 2024 for lack of standing and did not reach the merits of that finding (Murthy v. Missouri, 2024).

These episodes raise a fundamental question about medical freedom: Who decides what a physician is permitted to say? Patients benefit from hearing physicians who question prevailing medical recommendations, and scientific institutions benefit from having their conclusions challenged. Professional discipline should address demonstrable misconduct, not merely a physician’s disagreement with government policy or an evolving scientific consensus.

When Medical Dissent Became a Homeland Security Concern

The pressure to conform did not stop with medical licensing boards or social media censorship. During the pandemic, disputes over public-health policy also entered the federal government’s domestic counterterrorism framework.

On February 7, 2022, the Department of Homeland Security issued a National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin warning about misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation surrounding COVID-19. The bulletin identified false or misleading narratives that undermined public trust in government institutions as contributing factors in the domestic terrorism threat environment.

DHS also connected opposition to COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates with domestic violent extremism, asserting that extremists had used those policies to justify violence against government, healthcare, and academic institutions.

The bulletin’s inclusion of public-health controversies in a domestic terrorism advisory raised serious civil-liberties concerns. Physicians, scientists, and ordinary citizens were already facing professional and social consequences for questioning government medical policies. Now those same controversies were appearing in federal national-security warnings.

Taken together, these episodes illustrate a troubling pattern that we documented at greater length in PsyWar: the use of professional discipline, government pressure on communications platforms, and national-security rhetoric in ways that risk suppressing legitimate scientific and medical dissent.

Medical freedom cannot exist without the freedom to question medical authorities, challenge government recommendations, and refuse unwanted medical interventions. Nor can informed consent have much meaning if physicians fear professional retaliation for offering patients an independent medical opinion.

New State and Federal Legislation

Legislation to restore legal accountability for vaccine manufacturers has already been introduced in Congress, but neither proposal has advanced beyond the committee stage. The PREP Repeal Act (H.R. 4388), introduced by Representatives Thomas Massie and Paul Gosar in July 2025, would eliminate the PREP Act’s immunity and compensation provisions. Gosar’s End the Vaccine Carveout Act (H.R. 4668) would allow people alleging vaccine injuries to choose between pursuing a manufacturer in court and filing a claim through the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). It would also remove COVID-19 vaccines from PREP Act countermeasure protections. Neither bill has received a committee markup.

The states have moved faster. On April 4, 2025, Idaho Governor Brad Little signed the Idaho Medical Freedom Act (S. 1210). It bars businesses, schools, colleges, and every level of government from conditioning employment, entry, or services on a medical intervention. Little had vetoed an earlier version because it would have kept schools from sending home a child sick with measles or another contagious disease. The bill he signed carved out that exception, and the law took effect July 1, 2025.

Florida tried, but the effort stalled. The state Senate passed its Medical Freedom Act (SB 1756) on March 9, 2026. The bill would have added a conscience exemption to school immunization rules, barred manufacturer bonuses to practitioners for giving vaccines, and let pharmacists dispense ivermectin to adults without a prescription. It died in the House four days later. A second attempt during an April special session ended when House Speaker Daniel Perez declined to take it up.

The principle of subsidiarity, named in Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, holds that a decision belongs at the lowest level competent to make it. Hayek made a similar argument from an economic perspective, arguing that many local decision makers use dispersed knowledge better than one central planner can. A rule made in Boise can be watched, compared with Tallahassee’s, and repealed by the people who live under it.

What We Propose

End the PREP Act shield. Congress should pass the PREP Repeal Act (H.R. 4388). Until it does, the Secretary can amend the COVID-19 declaration to end immunity for products that are now fully licensed and sold commercially. A vaccine product marketed for profit years after an emergency should carry the same liability as any other vaccine product currently available.

Restore the right of vaccine-injured Americans to seek justice in court. Individuals who believe they have been injured by a vaccine should have the choice of pursuing compensation through the no-fault Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) or bringing a lawsuit against the manufacturer, including claims involving defective vaccine design. The Supreme Court’s decision in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth rests on federal statutory language that Congress has the authority to amend. The VICP’s longstanding $250,000 caps on death awards and pain-and-suffering compensation should also be adjusted for inflation, with the increases applying to pending claims as well.

Make informed consent a legal requirement, with meaningful consequences for violations. Before administering any vaccine to a child, healthcare providers should be required to give parents clear, written information about the vaccine’s benefits, risks, potential adverse reactions, and contraindications, including the manufacturer’s complete package insert. Parents should have sufficient time to review this information, ask questions, and provide written consent without coercion. Florida has proposed legislation requiring written vaccine information and signed parental acknowledgment. Such protections should be established nationwide, with civil liability for providers who fail to obtain legally valid informed consent.

As an aside, online educational materials and videos could help streamline the informed consent process while reducing the administrative and financial burden on physicians. Parents could review these materials at home, alongside online patient intake forms, before their child’s appointment. This would allow families time to make informed decisions without placing additional demands on physicians during office visits.

Separate medical recommendations from legal mandates. Recommendations issued by federal advisory committees or private medical organizations should not automatically become legally binding requirements. If a state legislature wants to mandate a particular vaccine or medical intervention, it should be required to debate and pass legislation explicitly naming that requirement, rather than automatically adopting the recommendations of outside organizations.

Protect physicians’ freedom of speech. State medical licensing boards should not discipline physicians merely for expressing medical opinions that differ from government recommendations or prevailing scientific consensus. Disciplinary action should require evidence of patient harm, fraud, or other clearly defined professional misconduct. Licensing boards should also be required to publicly disclose the origin of any policies or guidance they adopt from private organizations, including the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). This disclosure should identify the original source, supporting scientific evidence, and whether the guidance carries the force of law. Physicians and the public have a right to know who is influencing the standards used to regulate medical practice.

Protect medical freedom without exceptions that undermine bodily autonomy. No individual should be legally compelled to undergo vaccination or any other medical intervention for the purported benefit of another person. This principle applies equally to children and adults, regardless of whether the stated objective is protecting classmates, elderly relatives, or medically vulnerable individuals. Infectious disease outbreaks should be addressed through voluntary precautions, appropriate medical care, and other measures that respect informed consent and individual medical choice.

What These Reforms Cannot Fix

Restored liability will raise costs. Some manufacturers may leave the market, as they did before 1986, and a few vaccines may become harder to obtain or more expensive. We accept that trade-off. If a product cannot survive ordinary liability, its manufacturer should bear the cost of those risks.

We favor voluntary vaccination based on full risk disclosure, open adverse-event data, and manufacturers being held responsible for the harms their products cause. Reasonable people dispute whether voluntary uptake will keep coverage high enough to stop outbreaks. Data from Idaho over the next several years will inform that dispute. Legislatures, in public and on the record, should settle such questions, rather than advisory committees and licensing boards that no voter can remove.

Sovereignty over Your Own Body

Every reform proposed here rests on one principle. Your body belongs to you, and a declared emergency gives no government, employer, school board, or licensing board a share in it. We believe that sovereignty must be respected where it survives and restored by statute where it has been taken away.

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, informed consent and respect for individual autonomy became foundational principles of Western medical ethics. Building on the Nuremberg Code, the World Medical Association adopted the Declaration of Helsinki in 1964, establishing the importance of freely given, informed consent in medical research. In 1972, the federal appeals court in Washington ruled in Canterbury v. Spence that physicians must disclose the risks of treatment that a reasonable patient would consider important when making medical decisions.

These principles became central to medical education. In 1979, Tom Beauchamp and James Childress published Principles of Biomedical Ethics, identifying four foundational principles: respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Their framework helped shape how generations of American physicians were taught to approach medical ethics. Two years later, the World Medical Association adopted the Declaration of Lisbon, affirming that patients have the right to accept or refuse medical treatment after receiving adequate information.

The underlying principle was straightforward: patients have the right to make informed decisions about what happens to their own bodies.

Congress wrote the same principle into the statute governing emergency use authorization. Anyone offered a product under that authority must be told of the option to accept or refuse it (21 U.S.C. § 360bbb-3). In the spring of 2021, some universities and employers required COVID-19 vaccination while every available product in the United States was still under emergency authorization. The principle remained on paper, but was not honored in practice.

The reforms in this essay ask American law to honor the ethics American medicine taught for fifty years. Restored liability would return the cost of harm to the firm that caused it, and a consent statute would put the patient’s signature ahead of the needle. A physician free to speak could tell a patient the truth as the physician sees it, with the licensing board reserved for documented harm.

A feed mill carries liability insurance, tests its batches, and prints a lot number on every bag, because a sick herd can end in a lawsuit. The farmer also decides whether to buy the feed at all. Vaccine vials carry lot numbers too. In 1986 and again in 2005, Congress decided that for these products the taxpayer and the injured family would have to bear the consequences when a lot goes bad, and the manufacturer would not be held accountable. Congress can decide otherwise, and the bills to do so already sit, languishing in committee.

References

American Health Law Association. 2024. “HHS Extends PREP Act Immunity for COVID Vaccines Through 2029.” Health Law Weekly, December 13.

American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP). 2025. “HHS Secretary Aims to Overhaul National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.” July 29.

Associated Press. 2025. “RFK Jr.’s Vow to Overhaul Vaccine Injury Program Echoes Grievances of Anti-Vaccine Movement.” August 7.

Association of Health Care Journalists. 2025. “Countermeasure Injury Compensation Program (CICP).” Health Journalism Glossary.

Association of Immunization Managers. 2026. “AIM Legislative Round-up: May 22, 2026.”

Beauchamp, Tom L., and James F. Childress. 1979. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bloomberg Law. 2025. “Doctors Sue Medical Board Association Over COVID-19 ‘Censorship.’” October 30.

Bruesewitz v. Wyeth LLC, 562 U.S. 223 (2011).

Canterbury v. Spence, 464 F.2d 772 (D.C. Cir. 1972).

Central Florida Public Media. 2026. “Florida House Speaker Says No to Medical Freedom Bill.” April 28.

Children’s Health Defense. 2026. “RFK Jr. Faces Backlash After Hantavirus PREP Act Declaration.” The Defender, May 26.

CIDRAP. 2026. “Still No ACIP Quorum, Collapsing Lawsuits, and Vaccine Questions Answered.” July 9.

Farmer, Blake. 2022. “Medical Boards Pressured to Let It Slide When Doctors Spread COVID Misinformation.” KFF Health News.

Florida Phoenix. 2026. “‘Medical Freedom’ from Vaccines Shackled for the 2026 Session.” March 4.

Florida Senate. 2026. “CS/CS/SB 1756: Medical Freedom.” Legislative history, 2026 session.

George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. 2026. “American Academy of Pediatrics et al. v. Kennedy et al.” Health Policy and Management Matters.

Ground News. 2026. “HHS Ends COVID-19 Emergency Declarations for Drugs and Devices.” June 30.

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review 35 (4): 519–530.

Høeg v. Newsom, 652 F. Supp. 3d 1172 (E.D. Cal. 2023).

Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). 2026. “Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) Data.” Data as of March 1, 2026.

Inside Health Policy. 2026. “AAP Attorney Sees Path for First Circuit to Preserve Lower Court ACIP Ruling.” October.

Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905).

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Locke, John. (1689) 1980. Second Treatise of Government. Edited by C. B. Macpherson. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

Malone, Robert W., and Jill Glasspool Malone. 2024. PsyWar: Enforcing the New World Order. New York: Skyhorse Publishing.

MALONE.NEWS. 2022. “DHS: Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-Information (MDM) Being Caused by ‘Domestic Terrorists.’” February.

MALONE.NEWS. 2026. “The Kennedy Exception.” September.

Murthy v. Missouri, 603 U.S. 43 (2024).

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Pfannenstiel, Kyle. 2025. “Idaho Governor Works on Final Bill Actions, Including Signing ‘Medical Freedom’ Bill.” Idaho Capital Sun, April 8.

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U.S. Code. Title 21, § 360bbb-3. “Authorization for Medical Products for Use in Emergencies.”

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Dengue fever is making an unwelcome comeback in Florida. According to recent reporting by The Hill, the state has recorded more than 400 locally acquired cases this year, spread across 11 counties. In addition to the 425 locally acquired cases, 288 international cases were reported in Florida. Most of the locally acquired cases have occurred in the Tampa Bay region, particularly Hillsborough and Pinellas counties.

This essay is not about promoting fear; it is an honest, objective assessment of the changing risk of mosquito-borne infectious diseases in that state and the available options for addressing this risk. And to be clear, there is no evidence that the currently circulating Dengue serotypes have been intentionally weaponized or bioengineered!

Historically, Dengue was once a familiar disease in Florida, with major outbreaks during the early twentieth century. Improved mosquito control and changes in housing helped push it out of the continental United States for decades. But dengue returned to Key West in 2009, and Florida has experienced periodic outbreaks ever since.

Now the question is whether dengue is becoming endemic again, meaning the virus can maintain regular transmission in Florida rather than depending on infected travelers to reintroduce it.

The geographic concentration of these cases is particularly important. Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, both in the Tampa Bay region, account for approximately 93% of Florida’s locally acquired dengue infections. This suggests that transmission remains heavily concentrated in one region, making targeted containment more feasible. Rather than relying on widespread pesticide spraying across Florida, public-health authorities have an opportunity to focus mosquito surveillance, breeding-site elimination, and control measures where they are most needed. Emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and satellite imagery combined with weather data, could help identify mosquito breeding sites and improve the precision of these efforts. The challenge is to interrupt transmission before the virus becomes established in additional communities.

As the map illustrates, dengue has not yet spread extensively across Florida, but the current outbreak is a warning that the opportunity for effective containment should not be squandered.

The Mosquito Problem

Dengue is transmitted primarily by Aedes aegypti, a mosquito that thrives around human habitation. Unlike mosquitoes that breed in large swamps, these insects prefer small collections of standing water. Flowerpots, discarded tires, clogged gutters, buckets, and even bottle caps can provide breeding sites.

Aedes aegypti is strongly attracted to humans, a characteristic scientists call anthropophilic. However, its feeding preferences vary by location. A 2026 study in South Texas found evidence of dog blood in 88.2% of identified mosquito blood meals, compared with human blood in 72.1%, with many mosquitoes feeding on multiple hosts. This finding raises an intriguing possibility for mosquito control. Researchers have demonstrated that fluralaner, the active ingredient in the veterinary medication Bravecto, can kill Aedes aegypti after they feed on treated dogs. In one experiment, more than 99% of mosquitoes feeding on treated dogs died within 24 hours, even 56 days after treatment.

Whether similar systemic mosquito-killing treatments could eventually be developed safely for humans deserves investigation as a potential alternative to widespread environmental pesticide spraying, particularly in areas where dengue is endemic. Such an approach would require extensive safety testing and would not necessarily prevent the initial infectious bite.

Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are aggressive daytime biters, particularly during the early morning and late afternoon.

Florida’s warm climate, abundant rainfall, dense development, and international travel create favorable conditions for dengue transmission. Once an infected traveler introduces the virus, local mosquitoes can spread it to other people. The same holds true with infected dogs, unless they have been treated with fluralaner.

Unlike West Nile virus, which relies on birds as its principal animal reservoir, dengue relies on humans as its primary reservoir in urban outbreaks. Infected mosquitoes transmit the virus to humans, who then infect other mosquitoes, perpetuating the cycle. Although dengue can occasionally pass between mosquito generations or through mating, these routes are not known to sustain outbreaks independently. For practical purposes, dengue transmission in Florida depends on the human-mosquito-human cycle.

Interestingly, dengue is not confined to poor neighborhoods. Wealthy residential communities with elaborate landscaping, ornamental plants, swimming pools, and irrigation systems can provide excellent mosquito habitats.

However, people living in older housing, mobile-home communities, or poorly maintained apartment complexes may face additional risks from damaged window screens, inadequate drainage, and limited control over neighboring properties.

Another Approach: Making Mosquito Blood Meals Lethal

Years ago, Robert advocated unsuccessfully for investigating pharmaceutical agents that could render human blood lethal to mosquitoes, similar to the veterinary drug fluralaner (Bravecto). Such an approach might help interrupt transmission of mosquito-borne diseases, including malaria, without relying on vaccination or widespread environmental pesticide spraying.

However, meaningful population-level mosquito control would require treating a substantial proportion of the people or animals on which mosquitoes feed, raising serious questions about safety, cost, and practicality. Fluralaner itself carries documented adverse-event risks in animals, and any related drug intended for humans would require extensive independent safety testing. The risk-benefit calculation might favor investigating such an intervention in regions where malaria causes substantial mortality, but it is considerably harder to justify exposing large numbers of healthy people to a systemic insecticide to control dengue in Florida. Any use would need to be carefully targeted, voluntary, and supported by convincing evidence of reduced disease transmission.

Under no circumstances should people take veterinary fluralaner or other animal medications to prevent mosquito-borne infections. Such drugs would not reliably protect an individual from infection, because an infected mosquito could transmit the pathogen during its blood meal, before the drug had time to kill it. Their potential benefit would be in reducing subsequent transmission, not providing personal protection.

What Is Florida Spraying?

Florida mosquito-control districts are responding with aerial and ground spraying, including applications over residential neighborhoods.

One chemical used in Hillsborough County is naled, sold under the name Dibrom. Naled is an organophosphate insecticide that kills mosquitoes by interfering with their nervous systems.

Organophosphates are not harmless chemicals. At sufficiently high exposures, they can also interfere with the nervous systems of humans and other animals. The actual risk from mosquito spraying depends on the amount applied, how it is dispersed, and the resulting exposure. Organophosphates have been extensively used as chemical warfare agents, specifically in the form of nerve agents.

Organophosphate pesticides have not been comprehensively banned in the United States. While the EPA banned the use of chlorpyrifos (the most widely used organophosphate) on food crops in 2021, this ban was overturned by a federal appeals court in 2023, and the agency is currently proposing a new, limited ban for 11 crops.

• Approximately 40 organophosphates remain approved for use in the U.S.

• The EPA has taken accelerated action on high-risk uses of four other organophosphates (diazinon, ethoprop, tribufos, and phosmet) but has not issued a full ban.

• Individual states, including California, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, and New York, have enacted their own bans on chlorpyrifos.

• Legislation such as the BAN OPs From Our Food Act has been introduced in Congress to ban all neurotoxic organophosphate pesticides, but it has not yet passed.

Other mosquito-control methods include synthetic pyrethroid insecticides and biological treatments that target mosquito larvae before they become flying adults.

The difficulty is that spraying adult mosquitoes provides only temporary relief. Unless breeding sites are eliminated, new mosquitoes quickly replace those killed.

This raises an important public-health question: Are repeated pesticide applications over residential neighborhoods producing meaningful reductions in dengue infections, and how are officials measuring both their effectiveness and potential environmental consequences?

As mentioned above, researchers at the University of South Florida are using artificial intelligence and satellite imagery to identify mosquito breeding habitats, and they are sharing the information with the state. Such technology could eventually allow more targeted interventions rather than relying so heavily on neighborhood-wide spraying throughout the United States.

Florida has also become a testing ground for experimental mosquito-control technologies. In the Florida Keys, the biotechnology company Oxitec released genetically modified male mosquitoes designed to produce offspring whose females die before reaching adulthood. That trial ended in 2024, and no genetically engineered mosquito releases are currently authorized in the United States.

Other Florida programs have released sterilized male mosquitoes or males carrying Wolbachia, a naturally occurring bacterium that prevents viable offspring when infected males mate with uninfected females. These approaches could reduce dependence on chemical pesticides, but their long-term ecological consequences deserve scrutiny. Suppressing an insect population could alter local food webs, affect birds, bats, and other insect-eating wildlife, or allow competing mosquito species to expand into the vacated ecological niche. However, Aedes aegypti is an invasive species in Florida, and there is currently little evidence that reducing its population would substantially disrupt wildlife.

Introducing Wolbachia into mosquito populations raises additional questions about unintended spread to other insect species, although such transfer appears uncommon and has not been demonstrated as a harmful consequence of these releases. Regulators have not identified significant environmental harms from Florida’s genetically modified mosquito trials, but the absence of demonstrated harm is not a substitute for long-term ecological monitoring. These programs should be evaluated not only by how many mosquitoes they eliminate, but also by whether they reduce human disease without creating unintended environmental consequences.

But technology alone cannot replace basic mosquito control: eliminating standing water, maintaining drainage, repairing screens, and preventing mosquitoes from breeding in the first place.

Dengue Is Not Necessarily a One-Time Illness

Here is where dengue becomes potentially dangerous.

The vast majority of people who contract dengue recover. Symptoms can include high fever, severe headache, pain behind the eyes, muscle and joint pain, nausea, and rash. The illness has sometimes been called breakbone fever because the muscle and joint pain can be so intense.

But dengue is not one virus in the usual immunological sense. There are four distinct varieties, known as serotypes.

Recovering from one generally provides long-lasting immunity against that particular serotype. Unfortunately, it does not provide permanent protection against the other three.

A person can therefore contract dengue multiple times.

And sometimes, the second infection is worse.

This happens because of a phenomenon called antibody-dependent enhancement, or ADE.

In some patients, antibody-dependent enhancement can contribute to a dangerous form of the illness historically called dengue hemorrhagic fever, which may progress to dengue shock syndrome. Today, physicians generally classify these life-threatening complications under the broader term severe dengue.

What is ADE?

Normally, antibodies help protect us against infection. But antibodies produced during an earlier dengue infection can sometimes attach to a different dengue serotype without neutralizing it effectively. Instead, they may help the virus enter certain immune cells.

Under these circumstances, a previous immune response can contribute to more severe disease rather than preventing it.

Not everyone who contracts dengue a second time becomes seriously ill. Most infections do not progress to life-threatening disease. Nevertheless, a second infection with a different serotype is an established risk factor for severe dengue.

Severe cases can involve internal bleeding, leakage of fluid from blood vessels, dangerously low blood pressure, and shock. Fortunately, most dengue infections are mild or asymptomatic, and many never come to medical attention. Consequently, the overall risk of death among everyone infected is considerably lower than mortality figures calculated from hospitalized patients. Even among patients with severe dengue, prompt and appropriate medical care can reduce mortality to below 1%.

One particularly troubling feature is that patients can deteriorate just as their fever begins to disappear, when they might reasonably believe they are recovering.

There is no approved dengue-specific antiviral treatment. Medical care focuses on hydration, monitoring, and management of complications. Anyone with suspected dengue who develops severe abdominal pain, repeated vomiting, bleeding, or unusual weakness should seek urgent medical attention.

What About a Dengue Vaccine?

This is where the story becomes even more complicated.

The first FDA-approved dengue vaccine, Dengvaxia, was licensed in 2019, but it already had a deeply troubling history. Beginning in 2016, the Philippines vaccinated more than 800,000 children before manufacturer Sanofi acknowledged that the vaccine could increase the risk of severe dengue in children who had never previously been infected.

The government suspended the program in 2017, and investigations followed reports of deaths among vaccinated children. Philippine investigators identified several deaths potentially associated with vaccination, although the precise number caused by the vaccine remains disputed. The underlying biological problem was as discussed above, antibody-dependent enhancement. Basically, the vaccine effectively primed the immune system so that a subsequent natural dengue infection became more dangerous. Despite this history, the FDA approved Dengvaxia in 2019, restricting its use to children with laboratory-confirmed previous dengue infection living in endemic areas. The manufacturer eventually discontinued the vaccine because of low demand.

As of October 2026, no dengue vaccine is available for use in the United States.

Other dengue vaccines have been developed, including Takeda’s Qdenga, which has been authorized in several countries, and a newer vaccine developed in Brazil. However, protection varies according to the viral serotype and whether someone has previously been infected. Continued safety monitoring remains essential.

The dengue vaccine experience provides an important lesson: producing antibodies is not necessarily the same thing as producing protective immunity.

In some infectious diseases, the quality and biological behavior of those antibodies matter enormously.

Is Dengue Here to Stay?

Florida’s current outbreak is dominated by dengue serotype 2, or DENV-2. That is important because future circulation of different serotypes could increase the number of people experiencing secondary infections.

It is still too early to conclude that dengue has become permanently endemic in Florida. Repeated introductions by international travelers and recent immigrants could explain recurring outbreaks, particularly when the local mosquito population is abundant.

Nevertheless, the conditions for sustained transmission are increasingly apparent.

If dengue becomes endemic in Florida, will it remain regional or spread across the United States? The mosquitoes capable of transmitting dengue are already established throughout much of the Southeast, Gulf Coast, and parts of the Mid-Atlantic, while the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) extends considerably farther north. Warmer temperatures and longer mosquito seasons could expand opportunities for transmission.

However, the presence of mosquitoes alone does not guarantee sustained outbreaks. Housing quality, air conditioning, window screens, mosquito control, and the number of infected people entering a community all influence whether dengue becomes established. For now, Florida and the Gulf Coast face the greatest risk of sustained transmission, but localized outbreaks elsewhere in the country are entirely possible. Whether dengue eventually becomes a recurring summer disease across a much larger portion of America remains an open question.

Florida already has the mosquitoes. It has a climate favorable to their reproduction, a large population living in mosquito-friendly environments, with porous housing, and extensive travel connections with countries where dengue circulates regularly.

The important question is whether public-health authorities can interrupt transmission without making routine, repeated pesticide applications over residential communities a permanent feature of life.

For homeowners, the immediate response is straightforward: eliminate standing water, maintain window screens, and protect against mosquito bites. Consider treating your dogs, similar to the tick pre-treatment we use here on our farm, if you live in an area of Florida experiencing an outbreak. These measures reduce risk without depending entirely on chemical spraying.

Florida counties generally provide public notice before aerial mosquito spraying, but the warning may be surprisingly short. Hillsborough County, where most of the dengue cases have occurred, acknowledges that residents may receive only a few hours’ notice, although Orange County has promised at least 48 hours before its announced aerial treatments.

Residents often must register for text or email alerts to receive direct notification. This raises questions about whether people have adequate opportunities to protect themselves, their pets, livestock, beehives, and gardens from unwanted pesticide exposure. At a minimum, residents should have ready access to treatment schedules, maps identifying the affected neighborhoods, and information about exactly which chemicals are being applied. Those wishing to avoid direct exposure should be able to make arrangements before spraying begins.

Where Florida residents and Visitors can register for Alerts

• Hillsborough County spray notifications

• Orange County, Florida

• Pinellas County dengue and spraying alerts

• Pasco County treatment notifications

For public-health officials, the challenge is considerably larger. Effective mosquito control requires surveillance, targeted interventions, transparent reporting of pesticide use, and evidence that those interventions actually prevent disease.

For vaccine developers, dengue remains a cautionary example of the complexity of the human immune system.

Sometimes an earlier infection protects us.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

And occasionally, the antibodies left behind by a prior infection or vaccination can make the next encounter with the same family of viruses considerably more dangerous.

That is what makes dengue a disease worth watching, particularly as it establishes an increasingly visible presence in Florida.

References and Further Reading

1. The Hill, October 2026. New Florida counties report dengue cases as statewide total passes 400.

2. Florida Department of Health. Mosquito-Borne Disease Surveillance.

3. CDC. About Dengue.

4. CDC. Dengue Vaccination.

5. Katzelnick LC et al. Antibody-dependent enhancement of severe dengue disease in humans. Science, 2017. DOI: 10.1126/science.aan6836.

6. EPA. Mosquito Control.

7. Hillsborough County. Mosquito Control Operations.

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Health Policy & Reform / By: Dr.s Jill Glasspool Malone and Robert W. Malone

American medicine does not have to remain trapped between government bureaucracy and corporate control. There is another model, rooted in the traditional American principles of independent businesses, professional responsibility, competition, and individual choice. For generations, physicians operated their own practices, established relationships with patients, and made clinical decisions without consulting corporate administrators or insurance-company utilization-review departments. They were medical professionals and small-business owners, responsible for their employees, expenses, and the financial survival of their practices.

In the first essay of this series, The Failure of Modern American Medicine, we examined how hospital corporations, insurance companies, private equity, and government regulation have transformed the practice of medicine.

Independent physicians are disappearing, administrative costs continue to rise, and patients increasingly find themselves navigating a system in which medical decisions are influenced by organizations far removed from the examining room. According to the American Medical Association, the percentage of physicians working in private practice declined from 60.1 percent in 2012 to 42.2 percent in 2024. The percentage holding an ownership stake fell even further, from 53.2 percent to 35.4 percent.

This transformation was not inevitable. It resulted from decades of economic incentives, government policies, and corporate decisions that increasingly favor large institutions over independent practitioners. Fiscal conservatism should not mean defending big business simply because it is privately owned. A competitive economy requires independent businesses, opportunities for entrepreneurs, transparent prices, and consumers who can make meaningful choices. An economy dominated by a handful of enormous corporations, particularly those whose financial advantages depend on government policy, is something quite different. If Americans want independent physicians, the first step is to make it economically possible for them to operate independent practices again.

Put Patients and Physicians Back in Charge

Former Congressman Dr. Ron Paul, himself an obstetrician-gynecologist, spent decades arguing that American health care had become distorted by government intervention and third-party payment systems. His approach emphasized the physician-patient relationship, individual responsibility, market competition, and reducing bureaucratic interference in medical decisions. The central principle is straightforward: insurance should primarily protect people against major financial losses, while ordinary medical care should, wherever practical, involve direct transactions between patients and physicians.

Do not dismiss Paul’s ideas as old-fashioned or representative of the boomer generation. His popularity among college students and young voters was one of the more remarkable political phenomena of the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. While the Republican establishment largely dismissed his libertarian ideas, Paul drew enthusiastic crowds on college campuses and inspired a grassroots movement among young people skeptical of government power, corporate favoritism, endless foreign wars, and the political establishment. His message of individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, free markets, and personal autonomy crossed traditional partisan boundaries.

In the 2012 Iowa Republican caucuses, entrance polling showed Paul winning approximately 48 percent of voters under 30, far ahead of his competitors. His appeal was not simply youthful rebellion. He offered a coherent philosophy that challenged the concentration of political and economic power, whether exercised by Washington or corporations benefiting from government intervention. Those concerns remain relevant to younger Americans confronting rising living costs, institutional distrust, and limited economic independence. The enduring relevance of Paul’s message is that genuine free markets require competition and individual choice, not government policies that protect powerful corporations from smaller competitors.

Nowhere is the contradiction between those principles and government-supported corporate control more apparent than in the way Americans pay for medical care. The third-party payment system has become so entrenched that patients often cannot discover the price of even routine medical services without consulting an insurance company. Insurers negotiate reimbursement rates, establish provider networks, impose prior authorization requirements, and determine which treatments they will cover. Physicians hire billing specialists to navigate these requirements, while patients pay premiums, deductibles, copayments, and coinsurance, often without knowing the final cost of treatment. With ACA deductibles rising sharply over the past year, patients can face substantial bills weeks after what seemed like a routine doctor’s appointment.

A system intended to protect people against financial catastrophe has become a financial catastrophe. Cancer treatment, emergency surgery, expensive medications, and chronic illnesses can overwhelm personal savings, and any serious alternative must protect patients against those risks. But there is little reason to assume that every routine physician visit requires an elaborate insurance transaction. The objective should be to restore direct financial relationships between patients, physicians, and other medical providers wherever practical, while preserving meaningful protection against substantial medical expenses.

Achieving that goal requires reforms that make independent medical practice financially viable again.

Teach Physicians How to Run a Business

One of the simplest reforms could begin in medical school. Physicians spend years studying anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, pathology, and clinical medicine, yet many graduate with little practical knowledge of how to establish and operate a medical practice. They may understand how to diagnose a complicated disease (or access protocols or compute tools for doing so) but know very little about accounting, payroll, business financing, commercial leases, employee management, or negotiating contracts. This is an extraordinary omission for a profession that historically included thousands of independent small-business owners.

Much of today’s medical training prepares physicians to become good employees. They learn how to report to attending physicians, interact professionally with hospital staff, complete required documentation, comply with institutional policies, and navigate the hospital hierarchy. These may be important professional skills for surviving in the corporate world, but they are very different from learning to establish, manage, and sustain an independent medical practice.

Medical schools should teach basic business accounting, practice management, entrepreneurship, and health care economics. Students should learn how to prepare a business plan, understand cash flow, establish prices, purchase equipment, hire employees, and evaluate insurance contracts. Residency programs should expose young physicians to successful independent practices rather than training them almost exclusively within large institutional systems. The objective is not to require every physician to become a business owner, but to ensure that physicians have the knowledge needed to pursue independence if they choose.

The same principle applies to veterinary medicine, where independent practitioners increasingly compete against corporate hospital networks and private-equity-backed consolidators. Teaching young professionals how to run a business is a relatively inexpensive reform.

If we don't address this soon, we'll likely see even greater reliance on foreign medical graduates to staff American corporatized medicine. Those doctors often benefit from fully state-subsidized medical training, and so do not have to cover the debt burden typically associated with American medical school training. Hospital corporations do not care about these matters or how they affect either patient care or the broader society. They are primarily motivated by reducing costs, increasing profit, and maximizing return on investment. The long-term social impacts of their decisions find no place in their accounting systems.

Meanwhile, the federal government is consumed with trying to reduce the explosion of costs associated with the hybrid socialized medicine system that Congress and the Executive branch incrementally created in a misguided attempt to do good, and couldn’t care less about the long-term impact of its decisions on the overall quality and culture of American medical providers, who are typically painted as a parasitic, privileged, self-serving caste that should be subjected to struggle sessions so that they will get up to speed with DEI-compliant cultural reprogramming.

The next challenge is helping newly trained independent medical practitioners obtain the capital needed to start a practice.

Help Physicians Finance Independent Practices

The federal government already operates a substantial infrastructure for helping Americans establish and purchase small businesses through the Small Business Administration. The SBA’s 7(a) loan program can provide up to $5 million in financing for qualifying businesses, including equipment, real estate, working capital, and purchasing an existing business. The 504 program provides financing for qualifying fixed assets. Physicians can already apply for these loans, but existing programs could be made more accessible to those seeking to establish or acquire independent practices. Young physicians emerging from a decade or more of medical education and residency may have substantial student debt, limited credit histories, or less-than-ideal credit scores. Targeted lending programs that recognize these circumstances could help newly trained physicians establish independent practices rather than enter corporate employment simply because they lack access to startup capital.

There is another federal model worth examining. The USDA has long recognized that beginning farmers face significant barriers to entering agriculture, particularly the high cost of land, equipment, and establishing a financially viable operation. Through its Farm Service Agency, USDA offers Beginning Farmer and Rancher programs, including targeted farm ownership and operating loans, down payment assistance, and lending opportunities for applicants who have difficulty obtaining conventional financing. These programs help individuals enter farming and maintain independently operated agricultural businesses.

Why shouldn’t HHS explore a similar initiative for independent physicians? Working with the SBA and community banks, HHS could help develop a Beginning Physician Practice Program modeled on USDA’s approach. Such an initiative could offer targeted lending, down payment assistance for practice acquisitions, financial counseling, and business-planning support. It could serve physicians establishing their first practices, doctors leaving corporate employment, and younger physicians seeking to purchase established practices from retiring colleagues. The objective would not be to create another permanent subsidy program, but to provide qualified professionals with the financing and business support needed to become independent owners.

Consider a physician who has spent fifteen years working for a hospital corporation. She has an established reputation, clinical experience, and patients who would prefer to continue seeing her. She wants to leave corporate employment and open her own office, but needs financing for office space, equipment, insurance, staff, electronic records, and operating expenses while building the practice. A targeted lending program could help finance that transition. Similarly, many retiring physicians sell their practices to hospital corporations because younger physicians cannot afford to purchase them or lack the business knowledge needed to operate them. Helping younger physicians acquire these practices could preserve continuity of care, local ownership, and competition.

The same approach could help veterinarians acquire established clinics rather than see them absorbed into corporate veterinary chains. Partnerships among USDA, community banks, professional associations, medical and veterinary schools, and federal lending agencies could provide practical assistance without creating another large bureaucracy. Borrowers would remain responsible for repayment, and lenders would still evaluate whether the businesses were financially viable.

Physicians leaving corporate employment may also face restrictive contracts, patient nonsolicitation provisions, or other legal complications. State laws governing these arrangements deserve examination as part of any serious effort to restore physician independence. Financing alone cannot solve every obstacle, but combining access to capital, business education, and more competitive reimbursement policies could make independent ownership realistic again.

Reward Physicians Who Choose Independent Practice

Another existing federal program offers an interesting precedent. The National Health Service Corps provides educational loan repayment for eligible physicians and other clinicians who agree to serve in designated shortage areas. Qualifying primary care clinicians can receive up to $75,000 in educational loan repayment for a two-year service commitment. The federal government has therefore already accepted the principle that reducing medical-school debt can encourage physicians to enter certain types of practice.

Why not apply a similar principle to restoring independent medicine? The objective should be to encourage independent practice across America, not merely in government-designated shortage areas or among physicians willing to accept another set of bureaucratic conditions. Assistance could be available to qualified physicians regardless of specialty or geographic location, whether establishing their first practice, purchasing an existing one, or leaving corporate employment. Eligibility should focus on professional credentials, independent ownership, and financial viability rather than government-imposed requirements governing patient populations, fees, or business operations. The purpose is to remove obstacles to independence, not replace corporate administrators with government administrators.

Young physicians and experienced doctors leaving corporate employment also face different financial challenges. Recent graduates may need help repaying educational loans, while midcareer physicians who have already repaid their debts may instead need startup capital or assistance purchasing a practice. A carefully designed program could address these different needs without creating another permanent system of operating subsidies.

Stop Penalizing Independent Physicians Through Reimbursement Policies

Providing financing will accomplish little if government reimbursement policies continue placing independent practices at an economic disadvantage. One obvious problem involves differences in payment between hospital-owned facilities and independent physician offices. Depending on the service and billing arrangements, Medicare and private insurers may pay more when care is delivered through a hospital outpatient department than when substantially similar care is provided in an independent office.

This is precisely the kind of government-created economic distortion that fiscal conservatives should question. If two qualified physicians provide the same service to comparable patients, why should ownership by a hospital corporation justify a higher payment? Site-neutral payment reform, where clinically appropriate, could reduce incentives for consolidation while preserving reimbursement for services that genuinely require hospital-level resources.

Other reforms should address excessive prior authorization, unnecessary documentation, complicated credentialing requirements, and regulations whose compliance costs disproportionately burden small practices. The objective should not be eliminating patient protections, but removing administrative requirements that impose substantial costs without demonstrating corresponding benefits.

Regulatory capture must also be confronted. Large corporations have the financial resources to influence the rules governing their industries, and complicated regulations can become barriers to entry for smaller competitors. A genuinely competitive medical marketplace cannot exist if government policies systematically favor the largest organizations.

How Government Regulations Drove Laboratory Testing Out of Physicians’ Offices

There was a time when many family physicians operated small laboratories in their own offices, performing routine blood counts, urinalyses, and other tests while patients waited. The Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 changed that arrangement by imposing federal certification, quality-control, personnel, and compliance requirements on physician-office laboratories. A 1998 study found that more than 64 percent of surveyed physicians cited these regulations as a reason for reducing or eliminating in-office testing, with particularly pronounced effects in rural and pediatric practices. Many began sending patients or specimens to outside laboratories instead, introducing additional appointments, delays, and inconvenience. Larger practices were better equipped to absorb the regulatory costs, while smaller offices struggled.

The regulations were intended to improve laboratory accuracy, and there is evidence that testing quality improved. But where is the evidence that driving routine testing out of independent physicians’ offices made patients healthier or their medical care less expensive? This is another example of how well-intentioned federal rules can favor large institutions while reducing the services independent physicians can economically offer their patients. Congress should revisit these requirements, preserving essential quality standards while making routine office-based testing practical again.

How Corporate Medicine Drives Up the Cost of Care

Americans spend more on health care than citizens of any other wealthy nation, yet higher spending has not translated into consistently better outcomes. Much of the debate focuses on insurance premiums, deductibles, and government subsidies, while paying less attention to the enormous corporations collecting the money. Hospital systems, insurance companies, pharmacy benefit managers, and consolidated physician networks operate within a complicated payment structure in which prices are negotiated behind closed doors, patients rarely know what services actually cost, and the bill is passed along to employers, taxpayers, and families.

Consolidation makes this system particularly expensive. When a hospital corporation acquires competing hospitals and independent physician practices it gains leverage in negotiations with insurance companies and creates regional monopolies. Insurers need access to major hospital networks to offer marketable coverage, giving dominant hospital systems considerable power to demand higher reimbursement rates. Research has repeatedly associated hospital mergers and market concentration with higher commercial insurance prices, without consistently demonstrating improvements in quality. Those higher payments become increased insurance premiums, employer expenses, and costs for patients.

Hospital ownership can also change how medical services are billed. A physician performing essentially the same procedure in the same community may generate a larger total insurance payment after the practice is acquired by a hospital system, particularly when additional facility charges become permissible. The patient has not received better care, but the corporate owner may collect more revenue.

Meanwhile, large insurance companies and their affiliated businesses generate revenue from administering premiums, processing claims, managing pharmacy benefits, and controlling access to services.

The scale of these price differences is extraordinary. A RAND Corporation study found that in 2022, employers and private insurers paid hospitals an average of 254 percent of what Medicare would have paid for the same services at the same facilities. In some states, commercial payments exceeded 300 percent of Medicare rates. These higher prices are reflected in insurance premiums, employer health care expenses, and patients’ out-of-pocket costs. RAND also found that hospitals facing little competition were generally able to charge higher prices, and that this had a greater influence on prices than the percentage of patients covered by Medicare or Medicaid.

Private equity introduces another set of financial pressures. Investment firms may acquire medical practices, consolidate them into larger networks, increase charges, reduce operating expenses, or sell valuable real estate to generate returns. Not every acquisition follows this pattern, but documented cases demonstrate how financial engineering can divert resources away from patient care. The collapse of Steward Health Care, discussed in detail in a later section of this essay, illustrates the consequences when hospitals become entangled in complicated ownership structures, debt obligations, and real estate transactions. Patients and communities can ultimately bear the consequences of decisions made primarily to satisfy investors and creditors.

The fundamental problem is that the American health care system often rewards the ability to extract higher payments rather than the ability to deliver better care at a lower cost. Profit is more important than quality. No balance sheet ledger entry reflects cost-effective quality of care. Large corporations can use negotiating leverage, ownership structures, and regulatory advantages to increase revenue, while independent physicians lack comparable bargaining power. These costs are dispersed across insurance premiums, employer contributions, Medicare and Medicaid spending, and patients’ out-of-pocket expenses, making it difficult for Americans to see where their money goes. Again and again, the federal government response to this cost spiral is to introduce more regulation, more subsidies, more programs, more compute. There is never any serious consideration of reducing federal intervention and enabling more competitive, decentralized, free-market solutions.

Restoring meaningful competition requires more than subsidizing insurance premiums. It requires confronting the financial incentives that allow consolidated health care corporations to charge more without necessarily delivering better medicine.

Give Physicians Their Time Back

Regarding the expanding reliance on compute to solve this enormous problem of spiraling costs, electronic medical records were supposed to make medicine more efficient. Instead, they have created an expensive administrative burden that increasingly serves insurers, regulators, and hospital corporations alongside physicians and patients. Independent practices must pay for software, cybersecurity, training, and compliance, while large hospital systems spread those costs across thousands of employees. Washington helped create this environment through the HITECH Act, Medicare reimbursement and reporting requirements, and HIPAA’s separate privacy and security obligations.

Electronic records have also introduced serious privacy risks. Stealing paper charts generally required physical access; today, hackers can obtain millions of medical records in a single attack. The 2024 Change Healthcare breach compromised information belonging to approximately 193 million Americans, exposing sensitive data to potential fraud, identity theft, and scams. Patients were never given a meaningful choice about exposing their private medical information to these risks.

There is another vulnerability in allowing a handful of corporations to control the electronic medical records of hundreds of millions of Americans. Their concentrated control over critical medical infrastructure creates economic and national-security concerns.

Epic Systems, whose software includes MyChart, serves health care organizations treating more than 280 million Americans and is now facing federal antitrust scrutiny over allegations involving restrictions on access to medical data.

Other electronic-record companies are publicly traded or owned by private-equity firms, creating the possibility of changes in ownership, including foreign investment. Concentrating sensitive medical information and the systems needed to access it in a few corporate networks creates enormous dependencies. Physicians and patients may technically own or control their medical records, but that means little if they cannot readily transfer those records, or operate outside the dominant technology platforms.

What many physicians may not realize is that federal law does not universally require electronic medical records. Physicians can generally maintain paper charts, but Washington has created financial incentives and penalties that make avoiding electronic systems increasingly difficult. Medicare reimbursement rules, electronic prescribing requirements, and insurance contracts add further pressure. The government may not explicitly mandate electronic records for everyone, but its policies can make opting out almost impossible, leaving consumers with no choice. A patient cannot request only paper records.

Congress should simplify these requirements and allow physicians to choose affordable electronic systems or paper records where appropriate. Medical records should document diagnoses, treatments, medications, and other essential clinical information, not require endless billing templates and redundant reporting. Patients must still be able to obtain and transfer their records, receive paper copies upon service or by request, and physicians must protect patient privacy. Common standards can allow electronic systems to communicate without requiring a centralized government database or oligarchies, often foreign-owned, controlling patient records.

The goal should be simple: give physicians control over their record-keeping, protect patient information, and eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy that makes independent medical practice increasingly expensive.

Give Patients a Practical Way Out

Restoring independent physicians will mean little unless patients can afford to use them. Fortunately, alternatives already exist. Direct primary care practices charge patients a recurring fee for an agreed range of primary care services, often offering longer appointments, easier communication, and transparent pricing without submitting routine visits to insurance companies. Concierge medicine offers another model. Some practices charge membership fees while continuing to bill insurance, while others rely more heavily on direct payment.

Health Savings Accounts offer another way for patients to regain control over their medical spending. Established in 2003, HSAs allow eligible Americans to set aside tax-advantaged funds for medical expenses, with unused money carrying forward from year to year. Changes effective in 2026 expanded their usefulness. Qualifying direct primary care arrangements can coexist with HSA eligibility, and certain Bronze and catastrophic insurance plans also qualify. Combined with transparent cash prices and independent physicians, these accounts offer a way to reduce reliance on insurance companies for routine medical care while retaining protection against major expenses.

For many patients, a practical approach may involve combining primary care paid for independently with appropriate high-deductible or catastrophic coverage, using an HSA where eligible, and seeking independent providers for routine services. Patients can compare cash prices for laboratory testing, imaging, outpatient procedures, and prescriptions. Sometimes direct-payment prices are lower than the amounts patients would owe through insurance.

The objective is not to persuade Americans to abandon insurance indiscriminately. It is to give them meaningful choices and reduce unnecessary dependence on third-party payment for routine care. Patients should be able to choose a physician based on competence, trust, accessibility, and price rather than simply selecting someone from an insurance company’s approved network.

What About People Who Cannot Afford Direct Care?

Any serious reform must address patients who cannot afford medical care. The older American medical system included independent physicians, religious charities, and community hospitals that provided free or reduced-cost treatment. Catholic hospitals and other nonprofit institutions played an important role in this tradition, operating under charitable missions rather than shareholder expectations. Physicians also frequently provided charity care themselves.

That system had shortcomings. Charitable care was unevenly available, and many patients still faced serious financial barriers. A modern independent-care model must preserve protection for people facing catastrophic illness, disability, or poverty. Public assistance, targeted subsidies, charitable care, and insurance against major medical expenses can coexist with independent medical practices and direct payment for routine services.

The Dangers of Corporate Oligopolies

A greater danger lies in allowing essential industries to concentrate in the hands of a few corporations. As competition disappears, the public loses choices, small businesses struggle to survive, and government itself can become dependent on the very companies it is supposed to regulate. Dominant corporations have the financial resources to influence legislation, shape regulations, drive up prices, and lobby for policies that create barriers to smaller competitors. This is the danger of regulatory capture. Its consequences extend beyond higher prices: when an essential industry depends on a handful of companies, the financial failure or withdrawal of one can threaten services across entire regions.

The collapse of Steward Health Care provides a disturbing example. After years of private-equity ownership and complicated financial arrangements involving hospital real estate, Steward filed for bankruptcy in 2024. Two Massachusetts hospitals closed, while state officials scrambled to preserve medical services at others. Communities that depended on these hospitals suddenly faced the consequences of financial decisions made far from the patients they served. Hospitals and physicians’ offices are not ordinary retail businesses. When one disappears, patients cannot necessarily drive a few miles to another location, particularly in rural communities or during medical emergencies. Corporate consolidation can turn the financial failure of one organization into a regional health care crisis.

The vaccine industry provides another example of how market concentration can weaken the government’s negotiating position. By the 1980s, manufacturers were leaving portions of the childhood vaccine market, citing litigation expenses, liability exposure, and poor financial returns. Congress responded with the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, establishing a federal compensation system and limiting certain forms of manufacturer liability. The legislation was intended to protect vaccine supplies, but it also demonstrated the leverage that a shrinking group of essential manufacturers could exercise over public policy. When government depends on a small number of companies to supply products it considers indispensable, the threat of withdrawal becomes a powerful negotiating tool (thereby enabling a form of blackmail). The public can end up bearing financial risks that would otherwise remain with manufacturers.

The risks of corporate consolidation are already visible in America’s walk-in medical clinics. In 2024, Walmart abruptly abandoned its health care business, closing all 51 Walmart Health centers across five states. Walgreens, after investing billions in VillageMD, began closing clinics and withdrawing from regional markets, while Carbon Health entered bankruptcy in 2026 with more than $100 million in debt. These closures left millions of patients without viable options for healthcare.

According to the Journal of Urgent Care Medicine, the number of retail-based medical clinics in the United States declined by 33 percent between 2023 and 2026. These corporations entered medicine promising greater convenience, efficiency, and affordable care, only to discover that operating medical practices did not necessarily deliver the financial returns investors expected. When a national corporation decides to exit a market, dozens of clinics can disappear almost simultaneously, leaving patients scrambling for alternatives. Medical care is an essential community service, not simply another corporate investment that can be abandoned when quarterly financial results disappoint.

For consumers, concentrated markets can mean higher prices, fewer choices, diminished service, and little bargaining power. Companies do not need to engage in illegal price fixing to exercise substantial pricing power when meaningful competition has disappeared. For government, the danger can be even greater. A corporation controlling essential regional services gains considerable leverage when regulators confront the prospect of its closure. Public officials may face pressure to provide financial assistance, approve transactions, or accommodate corporate demands simply to prevent communities from losing services they depend upon.

Preserving independent businesses is therefore more than an economic preference. It is a safeguard against concentrated power. Thousands of independently owned medical practices provide competition, distribute financial risk, and reduce the likelihood that one corporation’s failure will disrupt an entire region’s access to care. Government should not be writing regulations that make it increasingly difficult for small businesses to operate while helping large corporations become too important to fail.

That is not free-market capitalism. It is a form of corporatism, in which government power and concentrated corporate interests reinforce one another, protecting established institutions from competition while leaving taxpayers, patients, and independent professionals to bear the consequences.

The Choice Is Not Between Big Government and Big Business

For too long, Americans have been told that health care reform means choosing between expanding government programs and preserving the existing corporate insurance system. Both approaches can concentrate enormous power in bureaucracies and corporations while leaving physicians and patients with progressively less control over medical decisions. The American tradition of independent medical practices, charitable hospitals, and community-based care has increasingly given way to a system that rewards consolidation, administrative complexity, and corporate influence over government policy. Public confidence in the medical system has fallen dramatically during this transformation.

There are signs that Washington is beginning to reconsider parts of the existing insurance-centered model. In January 2026, President Trump proposed directing more federal health care assistance to individuals through health savings accounts rather than routing it through insurance companies. In October, HHS finalized stronger health care price-transparency requirements and announced an initiative to streamline prior authorization. CMS has also expanded flexibility for catastrophic insurance plans. These developments address some of the problems identified here, but they remain a mixture of proposals, new regulations, and implementation efforts whose effects have yet to be demonstrated. None constitutes a comprehensive program to restore independent physician ownership, eliminate reimbursement advantages favoring hospital corporations, or make it substantially easier for physicians to establish their own practices.

Yet Washington already has many of the tools needed to accomplish these goals. Health Savings Accounts already exist. The Small Business Administration helps entrepreneurs establish independent businesses. Federal loan-repayment programs provide financial incentives for physicians, while USDA programs offer a model for helping younger professionals enter industries increasingly dominated by large corporations. These existing mechanisms could be adapted to help physicians establish or purchase independent practices without creating another massive federal program. Congress and HHS could also address reimbursement policies that favor hospital ownership, simplify electronic-record requirements, and remove unnecessary regulatory obstacles that make independent practice financially difficult.

Americans should be able to choose physicians who answer to their patients (and are tied to their communities) rather than corporate administrators. Physicians should be able to establish independent practices without navigating an obstacle course of government regulations and financial disadvantages designed around the needs of large institutions.

Fiscal conservatism is not about protecting corporate monopolies or shifting private business risks onto taxpayers. It is about competition, individual responsibility, limited government, and the freedom to build and operate independent businesses. Those principles protect patients as much as physicians, because a medical system with thousands of independent providers is less vulnerable to corporate financial failures, political pressure, and the demands of powerful institutional interests.

Restoring independent medicine is not a nostalgic attempt to turn back the clock. It is an opportunity to break the growing dependence between government and corporate health care, restore competition, and return medical decisions to the physicians and patients who must live with their consequences.

End.

References:

1. American Medical Association. (2025). Physician Practice Characteristics in 2024: Private Practices Account for Less Than Half of Physicians in Most Specialties. AMA Policy Research Perspective. Documents declining private-practice employment, physician ownership, hospital acquisitions, and administrative pressures.

2. U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2025). Health Care Consolidation: Published Estimates of the Extent and Effects of Physician Consolidation. GAO-25-107450. Reviews hospital and corporate acquisitions of physician practices and their effects on competition and costs.

3. RAND Corporation. (2025). Prices Paid to Hospitals by Private Health Plans: Findings from Round 5.1 of an Employer-Led Transparency Initiative. Reports that private insurers paid hospitals an average of 254% of Medicare rates for comparable services in 2022.

4. Internal Revenue Service. (2025). Treasury, IRS Provide Guidance on New Tax Benefits for Health Savings Account Participants. Explains the 2026 expansion of HSA eligibility to qualifying direct primary care arrangements and certain Bronze and catastrophic insurance plans.

5. U.S. Small Business Administration. 7(a) Loan Program. Federal loan guarantees for qualifying small businesses, including business acquisitions, equipment, and working capital.

6. U.S. Small Business Administration. 504 Loan Program. Long-term financing for eligible real estate and major fixed assets.

7. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Farm Service Agency. Beginning Farmers and Ranchers. Federal lending and financial assistance programs designed to help beginning farmers establish and acquire agricultural businesses.

8. Health Resources and Services Administration. National Health Service Corps Loan Repayment Program. Educational loan repayment for eligible clinicians serving in designated shortage areas.

9. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Quality Payment Program: Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). Federal physician payment and reporting requirements, including electronic health record interoperability measures.

10. U.S. Congress. (2009). Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. Federal legislation establishing incentives and requirements that accelerated electronic medical record adoption.

11. U.S. Congress. (2016). 21st Century Cures Act. Public Law 114-255. Includes provisions concerning electronic health information exchange, interoperability, and information blocking.

12. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights. HIPAA for Professionals. Federal privacy and security requirements for protected health information.

13. Massachusetts Department of Public Health. (2024–2025). Steward Health Care Transitions. Official documentation of Steward’s bankruptcy-related hospital closures and transfers to new operators.

14. U.S. Congress. (1986). National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. Legislative history of the federal vaccine injury compensation framework and specified manufacturer liability protections.

15. Health Resources and Services Administration. National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Federal program documentation concerning vaccine injury compensation and the statutory framework.

16. U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Competition in Health Care. Federal antitrust enforcement and research concerning health care consolidation, mergers, and competition.

17. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Change Healthcare Cybersecurity Incident. Federal information concerning the 2024 cyberattack and its effects on protected health information.

18. Born, P. H., & Thran, S. L. (1998). The Influence of CLIA ‘88 on Physician Office Laboratories. Journal of Family Practice, 46(4), 319–327. Documents how federal laboratory regulations contributed to the reduction or elimination of in-office testing, particularly among small, rural, and pediatric practices.

19. U.S. Congress. (1988). Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988. Public Law 100-578. Establishes federal standards governing laboratory testing, including physician-office laboratories.

20. Walmart Inc. (April 30, 2024). Walmart Health Is Closing. Official announcement confirming the closure of all 51 Walmart Health centers across five states and its virtual-care business.

21. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (May 15, 2026). HHS Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters for 2027 Final Rule. Expands catastrophic insurance flexibility, adjusts marketplace requirements, and provides for new non-network plan options beginning in 2028.

22. The White House. (January 2026). The Great Healthcare Plan. Outlines proposals for directing health care assistance toward individuals, reducing prescription drug prices, and expanding price transparency.

23. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (October 5, 2026). New Regulations Make It Easier to Find, Compare, and Report Healthcare Pricing and Coverage Information. Announces finalized federal price-transparency regulations intended to improve access to negotiated prices and consumer cost estimates.

24. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (October 5, 2026). Transparency in Coverage Final Rules (CMS-9882-F). Technical summary of the new insurer price-transparency requirements.

25. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (2026). Marketplace Regulations and Guidance. Official regulatory documents concerning ACA marketplace rules, plan design, enrollment, and insurance oversight.

Just to say, I will be surprised if this investigation reveals a brother-sister relationship. But it is a darn funny troll and makes fun of an unfortunate truth about many Somalians

An unfortunate truth is that consanguinity, including marriage between close relatives, has contributed to an increased risk of inherited genetic disorders in some Somali communities. Genetic research has documented elevated levels of homozygosity, while clinical studies have identified recessive diseases associated with founder mutations, including severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID)…

Studies have reported low average scores on standardized cognitive tests among Somali populations, including a 2017 study of 2,440 Somali refugee schoolchildren in Kenya that produced an IQ-equivalent estimate of approximately 68 using British norms.

Poor nutrition, disrupted education, infectious disease, and the hardships of displacement can all influence cognitive test performance. Although consanguinity increases the risk of certain inherited neurodevelopmental disorders, its contribution to these reported scores has not been established.

Chat-GPT

My opinion, and that is all it is: the Ilhan Omar investigation is more likely about fraud linked to her family and the fact that her early records show a birthdate of 1981, which she later changed to 1982. It may also be to link her father to immigration fraud.

All that said, good chance this will reveal a high degree of “consanguinity” between her and her ex. And given marriage customs in some parts of Somalia, that is almost to be expected.

Who knows, but sometimes these jokes write themselves.

But making fun of some basic truths is not racist. Particularly in light of the crazy immigration policies under Obama and Biden. Which, fortunately, have ended.

Vote Red in November and 2028!

Which kind of person are you?

“Common courtesy takes no effort,” as my very British father liked to remind us when we were young.

(TMI- But my wonderful and thoughtful husband not only always pushes in his chair when he leaves the table, he has not once, in 47 years of marriage, left the toilet seat up).

Back to the future at 88 years old!

Today I turn 88…I’ve seen some serious shit. The most serious of it all is love. I love my family, my friends, and my wonderful fans. The power of love remains.

Christopher Lloyd / Oct. 22, 2026

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That’s all folks!

By: JGM

Audio Version:

Investigational Commentary / By: Dr’s Jill Glasspool Malone and Robert W. Malone

How insurance companies, hospital corporations, and government bureaucracy displaced the independent physician, and why veterinarians may be next.

There was a time when American physicians were independent professionals who owned their practices, knew their patients, set their fees, and made medical decisions without consulting a corporate administrator or an insurance company’s utilization-review department. They were also small-business owners, responsible for their employees, their expenses, and the financial survival of their practices. Their success depended on their professional reputations and the willingness of patients to return.

That model is disappearing. American medicine has increasingly become an industry dominated by hospital conglomerates, insurance companies, government reimbursement systems, and corporate investors. Physicians who once owned their practices now work for organizations that determine how many patients they should see, how much time they can spend with them, what software they must use, how their work will be measured, and even what they are allowed to say to their patients.

This transformation is often described as modernization or efficiency. Yet Americans are paying extraordinary amounts for health care, independent physicians are disappearing, and public confidence in the medical system has collapsed.

There is an important distinction here that fiscal conservatives should recognize. Free-market capitalism and corporate consolidation are not the same thing. A competitive marketplace of independently owned businesses is fundamentally different from an economy dominated by a handful of large corporations whose business models depend heavily on government regulation, reimbursement policies, and barriers to competition. The former is an example of applying free-market principles. The latter has nothing to do with a free market; it is an example of how the State creates monopolies and oligopolies.

American health care mostly resembles the latter.

Americans Trust Small Business. They Do Not Trust Big Business.

Gallup’s June 2026 survey offers a remarkable illustration of this divide. Sixty-seven percent of Americans expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in small business. Only 17 percent expressed that level of confidence in big business.

The medical system fared little better. Just 28 percent expressed confidence in it, the lowest level recorded in Gallup’s long-running institutional survey.

These numbers deserve attention. Americans have not rejected private enterprise. They have rejected much of what large institutions have become.

The distinction becomes even more interesting when examining physicians themselves. Gallup’s December 2025 survey found that 57 percent of Americans rated medical doctors highly for honesty and ethical standards, down from 65 percent in 2019 and 77 percent during the extraordinary circumstances of 2020. Nurses remained considerably more trusted, at 75 percent.

Confidence in the medical system as an institution has undergone a much more dramatic long-term decline. In 1975, 80 percent of Americans expressed confidence in the medical system. Today, that figure is 28 percent.

The problem is not the doctor, but the system surrounding the doctor.

Obamacare Made the Economics of American Medicine Worse

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was sold as a way to expand access to affordable health insurance. It did initially expand coverage for the middle class and established important protections for patients with preexisting conditions. But expanding insurance coverage is not the same thing as making medical care affordable.

Sixteen years after the ACA became law, Americans face enormous premiums, substantial deductibles, complicated provider networks, and an administrative system that can make obtaining routine medical care unnecessarily difficult.

The temporary enhanced ACA premium subsidies expired at the end of 2025. Many marketplace customers consequently faced substantially higher premium payments in 2026, while others switched to plans with higher deductibles or dropped coverage. Insurers are also proposing additional premium increases for 2027.

For families receiving employer-sponsored coverage, the numbers are staggering. According to KFF, average annual family insurance premiums reached $26,993 in 2025. Employees contributed an average of $6,850 directly, with employers paying the remainder.

That employer contribution is not free money. It is part of the cost of employing someone, ultimately borne through the economics of wages, benefits, business expenses, and prices.

And after paying thousands of dollars in premiums, families may still owe substantial amounts before their insurance begins covering many services.

The ACA did not create America’s entire insurance bureaucracy. Employer-sponsored insurance, Medicare reimbursement, managed care, and hospital consolidation all predate Obamacare. But the law expanded coverage through an existing third-party payment structure rather than fundamentally changing the relationship between patients, physicians, and insurers.

The result is a system in which insurance companies remain central financial intermediaries, while taxpayers subsidize coverage and patients continue struggling with medical bills.

Fiscal conservatives should be asking why so much public and private money passes through this elaborate structure before reaching the physician or hospital actually delivering care.

And What About Medicare for All?

Then there is the perennial proposal for “Medicare for All,” often presented as the solution to America’s health care problems.

But how many Americans understand what Medicare actually covers? Part A, the hospital insurance that most eligible seniors receive without an additional monthly premium, does not cover ordinary physician office visits. Those require Part B, which costs at least $202.90 per month in 2026, with higher premiums for higher-income beneficiaries, a deductible, and generally 20 percent coinsurance for physician services.

Even hospitalization is not free: Part A carries a $1,736 deductible per benefit period. Prescription coverage generally requires a separate Part D plan, and traditional Medicare still lacks an annual out-of-pocket spending limit. Many seniors purchase supplemental insurance to protect themselves from these expenses. Proponents of Medicare for All envision a different program with broader benefits, but that raises the question of how those promises would be financed and administered. Expanding government insurance does not automatically lower the underlying cost of medical care, restore independent physicians, or eliminate bureaucracy.

Before promising Medicare for everyone, perhaps Washington should explain why Medicare itself remains so expensive and complicated for the people who already depend on it.

The Independent Physician Is Becoming an Endangered Species

The American Medical Association’s own numbers document the transformation.

In 2012, 60.1 percent of physicians worked in private practice. By 2024, that figure had fallen to 42.2 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion working in hospital-owned practices increased substantially, and private-equity ownership continued expanding.

The AMA identified inadequate reimbursement, expensive resources, and burdensome regulatory and administrative requirements as major reasons physicians sell their practices.

Think about what that means. Government payment policies and administrative requirements create economic pressures that make independent medical practice increasingly difficult. Large hospital corporations, insurance companies, and physician networks can afford entire departments of accountants, compliance officers, attorneys, billing specialists, and administrators. Independent physicians must shoulder many of those same obligations with a fraction of the resources. Eventually, some sell their practices, accept corporate employment, or close their doors.

This is where regulatory capture enters the picture. Large corporations have the money, lobbyists, and political connections to influence the regulations governing their industries. Once established, those regulations can become barriers to competition, protecting the very corporations supposedly being regulated. The more complicated the rules, the greater the advantage enjoyed by organizations large enough to absorb the costs. Regulations originally justified as protecting patients can end up protecting market share instead. The cumulative burden now favors large institutions while making it increasingly difficult for smaller competitors, the independent physician, to survive.

The result is a particularly troubling arrangement: government policies help create the financial pressures driving independent physicians into corporate employment, while the corporations benefiting from consolidation gain even greater resources to influence future policy. This is not the competitive free-market capitalism that fiscal conservatives have traditionally defended. It is an environment in which government regulation and corporate concentration reinforce one another, at the expense of independent physicians and patient choice. This is a classic example illustrating how the State (federal government) creates monopolies and oligopolies through its actions.

In some circumstances, the same outpatient service can command different reimbursement depending on whether it is delivered in an independent physician’s office or a hospital-owned facility. Hospital ownership often introduces facility charges or other payment arrangements that increase the total bill.

A physician can provide essentially the same medical service, in the same community, but the financial arrangements change because a hospital corporation now owns the practice.

How is that a competitive marketplace?

There are legitimate reasons physicians choose employment. Some want predictable salaries, reduced business responsibilities, and access to sophisticated equipment. Large organizations can also coordinate complex medical care and support services that smaller practices cannot easily provide.

But voluntary employment is one thing. A reimbursement and regulatory structure that increasingly makes independent ownership economically untenable is another.

The Government Accountability Office has documented growing physician consolidation and examined evidence of its effects on prices, spending, and competition. The problem is not merely theoretical.

For the patient, the change can be deeply personal. A longtime family physician retires or sells the practice. The office becomes part of a hospital network. Appointment scheduling changes, familiar staff disappear, billing becomes more complicated, and the patient may discover that a routine visit now is much shorter and carries additional charges.

The physician may still be sitting in the same examining room. But the business relationship has fundamentally changed.

How Washington Turned Medical Records Into an Administrative Industry

Medical records once served a straightforward purpose: documenting a patient’s condition, diagnosis, and treatment. Today, they have become the foundation of an enormous administrative industry, one that consumes physicians’ time, drives up operating costs, and gives large hospital corporations another advantage over independent practices.

Washington helped build this system. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) was supposed to establish federal privacy, security, and administrative requirements. The HITECH Act of 2009 accelerated electronic medical record adoption through federal financial incentives, followed by Medicare payment penalties for eligible providers who failed to meet electronic-record requirements. Additional rules governing billing, coding, quality reporting, and documentation added further complexity. Each initiative came with promises of efficiency, accountability, or improved patient care. Collectively, they helped create a costly administrative infrastructure that small medical practices struggle to support.

Physicians now spend substantial time entering data, navigating electronic menus, documenting services for reimbursement, responding to insurer demands, and satisfying regulatory requirements. Medical records increasingly serve the needs of billing departments, insurers, regulators, and hospital administrators alongside those of patients. The physician becomes a data-entry worker, while the patient waits.

And who benefits from this complexity? Large hospital systems and corporate medical networks can spread compliance costs across hundreds or thousands of physicians and administrators. They employ dedicated administrators, attorneys, information technology specialists, and billing departments. Independent physicians face many of the same obligations without those economies of scale. Meanwhile, electronic-record vendors and compliance businesses have developed profitable markets around the requirements.

The irony is that, after billions of dollars in public and private investment, medical records still do not always transfer easily between competing health systems. Patients can find themselves repeatedly filling out forms and requesting records from institutions that supposedly operate in a modern, interconnected medical system.

The privacy risks extend far beyond commercial tracking software. In 2015, Chinese hackers breached the federal Office of Personnel Management, stealing sensitive background-investigation records involving 21.5 million Americans, including my own security-clearance information. Robert Malone, a co-author on this investigative essay, subsequently learned that the deeply personal information he had been required to provide to the federal government as part of obtaining a security clearance was now in the hands of a foreign adversary.

These investigations demand extraordinary disclosures about our lives, including medical and mental health histories, finances, family relationships, and personal associations. We provide that information because the government requires it and promises to safeguard it. Yet once stolen, there is no getting it back. Robert has lived with the knowledge that his private information from detailed disclosures required by DoD security clearance scrutiny remains in the hands of Chinese intelligence, with no way to know how it has been used or how it might be used in the future. If the federal government cannot protect information collected for national security clearances, why should Americans trust enormous, interconnected government and corporate health care databases with their most intimate medical information?

Medicare beneficiaries have also suffered repeated data breaches. In 2023 and 2024, breaches involving Medicare contractors potentially exposed information belonging to more than 1.5 million beneficiaries, including medical histories and claims data. Then came the enormous 2024 Change Healthcare cyberattack, compromising information belonging to approximately 192.7 million Americans. These incidents expose a fundamental vulnerability of modern health care: enormous quantities of sensitive personal information are concentrated in interconnected government and corporate systems, creating attractive targets for criminals and foreign intelligence services. HIPAA imposes extensive privacy and security obligations, yet compliance with those regulations does not guarantee that patient information will remain secure.

Privacy protections and accurate clinical records are necessary, but these large-scale, government-mandated data-tracking programs have made the situation much worse. And protecting patient privacy should not require building an administrative empire that makes independent medical practice increasingly difficult or nearly impossible. The federal government helped create this system, and the largest health care corporations are best equipped to operate within it - and probably wrote the very laws they operate under. The result is another structural advantage for corporate medicine, paid for through higher operating costs and physicians’ lost clinical time as well as greater risk of large data breaches.

Patient Privacy: Another Broken Promise

The enormous electronic medical record system has also created serious privacy and security vulnerabilities. In September 2026, Allina Health agreed to a $12.5 million settlement over allegations that tracking technology in its MyChart patient portal disclosed sensitive patient information to third parties, including Google and Facebook.

Allina had previously acknowledged that Google Analytics received patient information, including, in some cases, diagnoses and insurance details. Meanwhile, the 2024 Change Healthcare cyberattack compromised information belonging to approximately 192 million people.

The documented problem is that health systems transmitted sensitive patient information into commercial technology platforms, sometimes connected to advertising systems, without adequate protection. Whether particular patients were subsequently targeted with advertisements remains a separate evidentiary question.

In October 2026, electronic-record giant Epic reportedly paused much of its software development after discovering security flaws that could expose patient records. Americans were promised that digitizing their medical histories would improve efficiency and protect their information. Instead, highly sensitive records can be exposed through commercial tracking systems, unauthorized access, and cyberattacks.

Veterinary Medicine Is Following a Familiar Path

For decades, veterinary medicine offered a useful contrast to human health care.

Most veterinarians owned or worked in independently operated practices. Clients paid directly for examinations, vaccinations, surgeries, and other services. Estimates were discussed with the animal’s owner, who made decisions based on medical recommendations, available resources, and the value of the treatment.

Veterinary medicine was never inexpensive, and the system had limitations. Owners sometimes had to decline expensive treatment because they could not afford it. But the financial relationship was relatively straightforward.

Now veterinary medicine is undergoing its own corporate transformation.

Major companies, including Mars Veterinary Health through its Banfield, VCA, and BluePearl businesses, have assembled extensive networks of veterinary hospitals. Private-equity-backed groups have also acquired independent practices, particularly in specialty and emergency care.

A 2025 economic study found that the arrival of corporate veterinary competitors was associated with a higher probability that nearby independent practices would exit the market, along with reductions in their employment and revenue.

Meanwhile, veterinary costs have risen, and expensive pet insurance is becoming more prevalent. What this demonstrates is that, from the standpoint of Wall Street and the investment community, this system of corporatized monopolistic health care is a feature, not a bug. It is an intended consequence, aided and abetted by Congress and executive branch administrations (including the present one).

What Patients Have Lost

The greatest casualty of this transformation may be the relationship between physicians and patients.

An independent physician has a direct professional and economic relationship with the people seeking care. Reputation and continuity matter to the independent physician. A dissatisfied patient can take business elsewhere.

Corporate medicine introduces additional layers of accountability. Physicians answer to employers, insurers establish coverage rules, hospital administrators manage budgets, and government agencies impose reimbursement and documentation requirements. When corporate medicine moves in, the ability to transfer to a different practice is often unavailable. These large networks diminish the physician’s independence and leave patients wondering who is actually making decisions about their care.

But has all this increased administrative burden and the ACA itself, improved outcomes? A 2022 study published in the Journal of Public Health Research, examining more than 18 million U.S. inpatient deaths between 1999 and 2019, found that the proportion of deaths attributed to medical adverse events approximately doubled between 2014 and 2019.

The American health care debate has become trapped between arguments for more government intervention and arguments for protecting the existing insurance industry. Both approaches can leave the underlying corporate structure largely intact and patients vulnerable.

This health care system is not the only possible model, nor is socialized medicine.

The older American medical system was built on more than independent physicians. Catholic hospitals, religious charities, community hospitals, and other nonprofit institutions played an essential role in providing medical care, including free or reduced-cost treatment for patients who could not afford to pay. Many physicians also provided charity care themselves. These institutions were not primarily organized around corporate growth, shareholder returns, or maximizing revenue from every patient encounter.

They were rooted in their communities, often supported by charitable donations, and guided by a mission of service. The system had shortcomings, but it provided an alternative to both corporate medicine and government-controlled health care. Today, even many nominally nonprofit hospitals operate as enormous corporate enterprises, acquiring physician practices, accumulating substantial assets, and competing for market share. Somewhere along the way, the mission of caring for the sick became increasingly entangled with the business of extracting revenue from illness.

A competitive marketplace requires more than privately owned corporations. It requires meaningful competition, accessible entry for new businesses, transparent prices, and the freedom of customers to choose among genuinely independent providers.

The distinction matters because defending free enterprise does not require defending every large corporation that claims to operate in its name.

Ron Paul, himself a physician, spent decades advancing a different philosophy of medical economics, emphasizing physician independence, patient choice, competition, and less government interference. Why have these ideas largely disappeared from mainstream health policy debates?

Why should opening an independent medical practice be so difficult? Why should physicians need expensive administrative infrastructures to receive payment? Why should hospital ownership change the economics of an otherwise identical medical service? And why should patients have so little visibility into the actual prices of their care?

Americans still trust small businesses far more than large corporations. They continue to place considerable trust in individual medical professionals, even as confidence in the medical system has deteriorated. They believe in free market enterprise.

Perhaps it is time to take those preferences seriously.

How did a profession built around independent medical judgment become so dependent on corporate ownership, insurance companies, and government bureaucracy? And what would it take to restore physicians' and patients' independence?

In Part Two, we will examine a different model for American medicine, including direct primary care, catastrophic insurance, independent practice financing, medical-school business education, and ways existing federal loan programs could help physicians return to private practice.

References

1. Gallup. (2026, July). Confidence in U.S. Institutions Remains Near All-Time Low. Gallup News. Examines public confidence in small business, big business, and the medical system.

2. Gallup. (2026). Honesty and Ethics Ratings of Professions. Gallup News. Historical comparisons of Americans’ trust in physicians, nurses, and other professionals.

3. American Medical Association. (2025). Physician Practice Characteristics in 2024: Private Practices Account for Less Than Half of Physicians in Most Specialties. AMA Policy Research Perspective.

4. Kaiser Family Foundation. (2025). 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey. KFF. Documents average annual family insurance premiums of $26,993 and average employee contributions of $6,850.

5. Kaiser Family Foundation. (2026). What We Know So Far About 2026 ACA Marketplace Enrollment, Premiums, and Deductibles. KFF.

6. U.S. Government Accountability Office. Physician Consolidation: Trends and Implications for Medicare Spending and Beneficiaries. GAO reports and analyses examining physician-practice consolidation and hospital ownership.

7. Nelson, Nikolov, and Schulman. (2026, July). The Growth in Healthcare Administrators Since 2004 in the United States. Health Management, Policy and Innovation. Analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data documenting administrative employment growth relative to physician employment.

8. U.S. Congress. (1996). Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). Public Law 104-191.

9. U.S. Congress. (2009). Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. Enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Public Law 111-5.

10. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights. (2023). Use of Online Tracking Technologies by HIPAA Covered Entities and Business Associates. Federal guidance concerning tracking technologies and protected health information.

11. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights. (2024–2026). Change Healthcare Cybersecurity Incident and Breach Investigation. HHS reports and public notices concerning the exposure of protected health information.

12. U.S. Office of Personnel Management. (2015). Cybersecurity Incidents Affecting Federal Personnel and Background Investigation Records. Official disclosures concerning the compromise of sensitive background-investigation information involving approximately 21.5 million individuals.

13. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (2026). 2026 Medicare Parts A and B Premiums and Deductibles. CMS.

14. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Medicare Coverage of Skilled Nursing Facility Care and Long-Term Custodial Care. Medicare.gov.

15. Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission. Medicaid Estate Recovery. Federal statutory requirements and state implementation of estate recovery for certain Medicaid expenditures.

16. Steinbach, S. (2025). The Corporatization of Veterinary Medicine and Its Impact on Independent Practices. Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, 4(3), 405–423. DOI: 10.1002/jaa2.70024.

17. North American Pet Health Insurance Association. (2026). State of the Industry Report. Industry data on pet insurance enrollment and market growth in North America.

18. Federal Trade Commission. (2022). FTC Orders Divestitures in Veterinary Services Markets Following Corporate Acquisitions. Federal antitrust enforcement concerning competition in veterinary services.

19. American Hospital Association. (2026). Fast Facts on U.S. Hospitals. National hospital ownership and organizational data, including nonprofit, investor-owned, and government hospitals.

20. Internal Revenue Service. Revenue Ruling 69-545: Hospital Exemption Under Section 501(c)(3). Historical federal tax policy concerning nonprofit hospitals and community-benefit requirements.

Political commentary / By: Dr.s Jill Glasspool Malone and Robert W. Malone

Europe’s political class promised prosperity through bigger government, mass immigration, and endless regulation. The results haven’t lived up to the promise of socialism. They never do.

Rome is burning, and Europe’s political class is still arguing over how many regulations, subsidies, and government programs it will take to put out the fire.

For decades, Europe’s “progressive” establishment has promoted an increasingly expensive social contract: more government services, generous benefits, shorter working hours, greater regulation, and the promise that someone else will pay for it all. Meanwhile, businesses are expected to absorb the costs, entrepreneurs are buried in paperwork, and governments increasingly look to imported labor to compensate for aging populations and persistent labor shortages.

But importing workers is not the same as creating prosperity. Immigration can strengthen an economy when newcomers possess needed skills, find productive employment, and contribute more than they consume in public resources. When immigration outpaces job creation, housing construction, education, and integration, the costs do not disappear. They are transferred to taxpayers, communities, and already strained public services.

Now look at Poland, France, and Belgium.

In 2024, Belgium recorded approximately 116 robberies per 100,000 residents, France approximately 83, and Poland just 12. Meanwhile, the reported foreign-born shares of their populations in January 2025 were roughly 20 percent, 14 percent, and 2.6 percent, respectively. These statistics certainly justify asking harder questions about immigration policy, integration, policing, and public safety.

Meanwhile, Europe’s political establishment has developed another troubling habit: using the machinery of government against politicians who challenge its policies. In France, Marine Le Pen was initially barred from seeking office following an embezzlement conviction, although an appeals court subsequently restored her eligibility.

In Romania, authorities annulled a presidential election after nationalist candidate Călin Georgescu won the first round, then barred him from the rerun, citing electoral irregularities and foreign interference. None of which was proven.

In Germany, domestic intelligence authorities classified the opposition AfD as extremist, only to have a court suspend that designation.

Italy prosecuted Matteo Salvini over his decision to prevent a migrant rescue vessel from disembarking, before the courts ultimately acquitted him.

These cases have different legal circumstances, but collectively raise serious questions about political pluralism and the treatment of dissent. Meanwhile, European governments face real problems involving criminal gangs, failed integration, and Islamist extremism. Consider Brussels, the administrative capital of the European Union, where drug-related shootings have become a major public-safety problem, and authorities have had to increase security around railway stations. The British government specifically warns travelers about robbery and theft around Brussels-Midi and Brussels-North. There is something profoundly wrong when European governments appear more comfortable policing political dissent than ensuring that ordinary citizens can safely walk through their own cities.

France’s problems run deeper than immigration. A political culture increasingly organized around grievances, entitlements, and demands for government intervention has made reform extraordinarily difficult. Every benefit becomes permanent, every proposed reduction becomes an injustice, and every attempt to restore economic competitiveness encounters another constituency demanding protection from change.

And then there is Europe’s climate agenda. Brussels has imposed an increasingly complicated system of emissions targets, carbon pricing, energy regulations, and industrial mandates, all supposedly compatible with economic growth and prosperity. Yet these policies can make energy, transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture more expensive, particularly when affordable alternatives are not readily available. Industries facing higher costs must either raise prices, reduce investment, relocate production, or close. None of those outcomes improves the standard of living of ordinary Europeans.

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There is a particularly perverse contradiction here. When climate policies make necessities more expensive, governments respond with additional subsidies and assistance programs to help citizens afford what government policy has helped make more costly. The EU’s new Social Climate Fund is designed to distribute billions to households and businesses affected by the costs of its expanding carbon-pricing system. More government intervention creates demands for more government assistance, while the productive economy is expected to finance both.

Better yet, climate change provides governments with a marvelous opportunity to rebrand the consequences of their failed economic policies as environmental victories. Can’t afford a car? Wonderful! You’re saving the planet. Airfare and vacations becoming unaffordable? Think of your carbon footprint! Can’t afford new clothes? Congratulations, you’re a sustainability champion. Less meat, smaller homes, fewer possessions, and fewer opportunities to travel can all be repackaged as acts of environmental virtue. The possibilities are endless. Who needs prosperity when you can have the moral satisfaction of doing without? Apparently, the secret to saving the planet is making everyone poorer and convincing them to feel virtuous about it.

And when economic growth slows, consumption falls, and ordinary families can no longer afford the lifestyles their parents enjoyed, environmental advocates can point to reduced resource consumption as a benefit for the planet. But declining prosperity should not be confused with environmental progress. A smaller economy, fewer opportunities, and a lower standard of living are not achievements simply because they may reduce emissions.

A prosperous society cannot be built by promising everyone more while making it progressively harder to produce anything. Wealth must be created before it can be redistributed. Businesses need incentives to invest, entrepreneurs need room to take risks, and workers need opportunities that offer more than dependence on government.

Even German Chancellor Friedrich Merz acknowledged at Davos that Europe had become a world champion of overregulation. Yet Brussels continues to produce rules while European political movements increasingly demand the return of national sovereignty.

The question is no longer whether Europe has problems. Its own leaders acknowledge them. The question is whether its governments are willing to confront the economic and political choices that helped create them.

Rome did not become prosperous by redistributing wealth it had stopped creating. Neither will modern Europe.

As for the USA, there but for the grace of God, we go. Those who do not understand what “Democratic Socialism” leads to will end up recapitulating the downward social and economic spiral of today’s EU. Eventually, one runs out of other people’s money to tax and spend.

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Policy Analysis / by Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone

Washington, DC · October 20, 2026

Monday’s Rose Garden ceremony looked like the launch of a major health initiative. First Lady Melania Trump stood beside the President as he signed an executive order promising a “new standard for women’s health in America.” Her office announced five goals: more research into cures, “super intelligence” to speed discovery, faster access to treatments, affordable care, and more open discussion of women’s health.

We read the six-section order, the accompanying White House materials, and the Biden-era directives it replaces. There is some good science here. There are also substantial gaps between the announcement and what Trump actually signed.

What Trump signed

The order, “Advancing Women’s Health to Improve Outcomes in All Phases of Life,” directs HHS to establish a Women’s Health Division at NIH within 90 days. It will sit inside an existing NIH institute or center, alongside the Office of Research on Women’s Health, and focus on neglected conditions, replication studies, sex differences in research, and getting findings into clinical care.

A new White House Women’s Health Task Force will be co-chaired by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Its membership spans major federal departments and health agencies, including DoW, FDA, CDC, NIH, EPA, USDA, and CMS. It may hold hearings, consult outside experts, and recommend pilot programs.

Trump also revoked Biden’s March 2024 women’s health executive order and a November 2023 memorandum establishing a women’s health research initiative in the Office of the First Lady. Jill Biden did not personally chair that initiative, but her office had a formal role. Melania Trump championed its replacement, yet she has no formal oversight role under the new order. Kennedy and Wiles are responsible for administration.

HHS will cover the task force’s administrative costs. The order provides no new research funding.

The science gets some things right

The best provisions address persistent problems in biomedical research. The new division is charged with supporting replication studies, something badly needed when published findings often fail to hold up in independent laboratories. It also must strengthen accountability for NIH’s requirement that researchers consider sex as a biological variable. That policy dates to 2016, but studies still too often rely on male animals or combine male and female results without adequate analysis.

The order also calls for getting research into clinical practice. Women with endometriosis can wait years for a diagnosis. Menopause treatment was shaped for decades by interpretations of the 2002 Women’s Health Initiative hormone therapy findings, even as later analyses showed that risks varied considerably with age and time since menopause. The FDA began removing broad boxed warnings on menopausal hormone therapy in November 2025. Better research matters little if clinical practice fails to catch up.

The initiative looks beyond pregnancy and reproductive health to adolescence, menopause, and aging. It even uses the newer term “polyendocrine metabolic ovary syndrome” for what was called polycystic ovary syndrome, reflecting the condition’s metabolic and hormonal features rather than ovarian cysts that many patients do not have.

These are worthwhile priorities. The question is whether the new division will have the staff, authority, and resources to carry them out.

Five promises, and what the order actually says

The First Lady’s five pillars make a useful test of the announcement.

Research funding: The order prioritizes research into conditions affecting women and calls for more attention to prevention and long-term health. It identifies no new money.

“Super intelligence”: Trump’s September directive replaced “artificial intelligence” with “Super Intelligence” in federal terminology. Whatever the label, the technology is not named in this order. The closest provision refers generally to advanced research technologies.

Faster treatments: The task force is asked to accelerate therapies and cures, and the FDA Commissioner has a seat at the table. There are no specific FDA instructions or deadlines for speeding access.

Affordability: The White House points to existing drug-pricing and fertility-drug discount programs. The order itself contains no provisions on treatment prices, insurance coverage, or patients’ out-of-pocket costs.

Education and openness: The order calls for updated clinical education and consultation with community and faith-based groups, but establishes no public education campaign.

The task force has no required report, performance targets, or meeting schedule. The Biden order it replaces included 30- and 90-day deliverables and directed a review of unmet research funding needs. This order gives NIH 90 days to create the division but says little about what the task force must accomplish afterward.

We discussed the administration’s new terminology for artificial intelligence, and what it means for this women’s health initiative, during an interview last night. Here is that clip:

There is also a question of influence. The existing Office of Research on Women’s Health operates from the NIH Director’s office, with reach across the agency’s institutes and centers. The new division will be placed inside one of them. That could limit its authority, depending on how NIH structures it.

Kennedy has been through this before. The Make America Healthy Again Commission issued 128 recommendations in September 2025, without individual cost estimates or implementation deadlines. In July 2026, nutrition scholar Marion Nestle reviewed 16 food-related commitments and found four accomplished, eight in progress, and four with no action. Some of the completed measures were voluntary or disputed.

Wiles’s role may make a difference. As White House Chief of Staff, she can press agencies for answers in a way an HHS-led commission cannot. Whether she does so will matter more than another round of announcements.

One omission is particularly striking: although EPA is represented, the order gives it no specific work on environmental exposures. Biden’s order did. For an administration that emphasizes endocrine disruptors, food additives, and chronic disease, that deserves an explanation.

And what about men?

Women were excluded from much clinical research for decades, and there are sound reasons for correcting that history. But men have serious health problems of their own. In 2024, U.S. life expectancy was 81.4 years for women and 76.5 for men. Male suicide rates have been three to four times female rates.

NIH has had an Office of Research on Women’s Health since 1990, but neither NIH nor HHS has a comparable office for men. A bipartisan bill introduced in February 2026, the State of Men’s Health Act, would establish one at HHS without taking money appropriated for women’s health. It remains in committee.

Research that takes biological sex seriously should help both sexes. The administration could support that bill while moving forward with the women’s health initiative.

Follow the money

The administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget request proposed cutting NIH funding by roughly 40 percent and reducing funding for the HHS Office on Women’s Health. Congress rejected those proposals, increased NIH funding, and raised the Office of Research on Women’s Health budget by nearly 30 percent, to $106.48 million.

But congressional appropriations do not guarantee that agencies will release the money. In October 2026, the Government Accountability Office concluded that HHS had improperly withheld more than $78 million in research funding at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. GAO had previously found improper withholding of NIH grant funds as well. These findings concerned existing programs, not the new women’s health initiative, but they show why spending decisions matter as much as budget announcements.

Women’s health research had already suffered disruptions in 2025, including canceled grants and an NIH move to end contracts with regional centers of the landmark Women’s Health Initiative, which cost approximately $10 million annually.

The administration may be able to start meaningful work using funds NIH already has. But HHS should identify those funds and show how much will actually reach researchers. A new office does not, by itself, produce new research. The applicable DC insider phrase is “unfunded mandate”, which is fancy bureaucratic language for window dressing or lipstick on a pig.

There is another unanswered budget question. In December 2024, the Biden White House said its women’s health initiative had mobilized nearly $1 billion across agencies, including the $100 million ARPA-H Sprint for Women’s Health. That was a cumulative figure, not a billion-dollar account waiting to be transferred. Revoking Biden’s executive order does not automatically cancel existing appropriations or grants. HHS should explain what remains available, what has already been committed, and whether any of it will support the new division.

The political timing

The order comes three weeks before the midterm elections, when health care costs are a major voter concern. A September KFF poll found six in ten voters worried about affording care. On health care costs, voters trusted Democrats over Republicans by 42 to 22 percent, with an even wider gap among independents.

Polls commissioned by groups on both sides also point to affordability as a concern, although they ask different questions. A conservative-sponsored July survey found substantial support for policies helping mothers stay home with young children, while a majority of its respondents opposed linking U.S. drug prices to prices set abroad. That sits awkwardly beside the White House’s promotion of most-favored-nation drug pricing.

None of these polls tells us whether the new initiative will affect votes. They do explain why affordability featured so prominently in the announcement, even though the order itself omits it.

What happens next

By mid-January 2027, NIH must establish the new division. Its location, leadership, staffing, and budget will reveal whether it has meaningful authority or is largely a reshuffling of existing personnel. The fiscal year 2027 budget request will provide another test: will the administration propose dedicated research funding while explaining how existing appropriations are being used?

The task force should also publish its priorities, deadlines, and results. Without that, the public cannot judge whether the promised coordination accomplished anything.

Melania Trump and President Trump have brought welcome attention to women’s health, and parts of this order address real scientific weaknesses. But a Rose Garden announcement cannot replace research grants, competent administration, affordability, and better patient care. And NIH typically takes up to six years to award grants for a new initiative. Only then does the work start. Kennedy and Wiles now have the responsibility to turn the promises into something measurable. We hope for their success, but we have seen this movie too many times before.

References

ACT (Association for Clinical and Translational Science). 2025. “News from the Hill: May 27, 2025.” https://www.actscience.org/AMP_EDN/455/News-from-the-Hill-May-27-2025-217.amp.html.

AIBM (American Institute for Boys and Men). 2026. “State of Men’s Health Act (2026): A Quick Explainer.” https://aibm.org/?p=7549.

ARPA-H (Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health). 2024. “ARPA-H Announces Sprint for Women’s Health.” https://arpa-h.gov/news-and-events/arpa-h-announces-sprint-womens-health.

Becker’s Behavioral Health. n.d. “The CDC’s Latest Suicide Data: 10 Numbers to Know.” https://www.beckersbehavioralhealth.com/?p=2874.

Biden, Joseph R. 2024. “Executive Order 14120: Advancing Women’s Health Research and Innovation.” March 18. https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2024/03/18/executive-order-on-advancing-womens-health-research-and-innovation/.

Concerned Women for America. 2026. “New CWA Poll on Midterm Issues Finds Major Support for Women’s Issues.” July 27. Zogby Analytics, fielded July 1 to 4. https://concernedwomen.org/new-cwa-poll-on-midterm-issues-finds-major-support-for-womens-issues/.

Contemporary OB/GYN. 2025. “NIH to Cut Funding for Landmark Women’s Health Study.” April 23. https://www.contemporaryobgyn.net/view/nih-to-cut-funding-for-landmark-women-s-health-study.

Covington & Burling. 2025. “The White House Issues an Executive Order to Establish a Make America Healthy Again Commission.” February. https://www.cov.com/en/news-and-insights/insights/2025/02/the-white-house-issues-an-executive-order-to-establish-a-make-america-healthy-again-commission.

Endometriosis UK. 2026. “PCOS Officially Renamed to Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS).” May. https://www.endometriosis-uk.org/news/pcos-officially-renamed-polyendocrine-metabolic-ovarian-syndrome-pmos.

Fierce Healthcare. 2025. “MAHA Commission’s 128 Recommendations on Kids’ Health Include More Research on Vaccines, Antidepressants.” September 9. https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/providers/maha-commissions-128-recommendations-kids-health-include-more-research-vaccines.

Fortune. 2026. “Trump Plans New Women’s Health Research Division at NIH after Push from First Lady Melania Trump.” October 19. https://fortune.com/2026/10/19/melania-trump-womens-health-research-nih-executive-order/.

Fox Business. 2026. “Trump Signs Executive Order Rebranding AI as ‘Super Intelligence’ as Tech Titans Ink Separate SI Accord.” September 29. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/trump-signs-executive-order-rebranding-ai-super-intelligence-tech-titans-ink-separate-accord.

Healio. 2026. “CDC Report Shows US Life Expectancy Rose in 2024.” February 2. https://www.healio.com/news/primary-care/20260202/cdc-report-shows-us-life-expectancy-rose-in-2024.

KFF. 2026. “KFF Health Tracking Poll: Health Care Issues in the Lead-Up to the 2026 Midterm Election.” Fielded September 16 to 21. https://www.kff.org/public-opinion/kff-health-tracking-poll-health-care-issues-in-the-lead-up-to-the-2026-midterm-election/.

Nestle, Marion. 2026. “What Has MAHA Accomplished to Date?” Food Politics, July. https://www.foodpolitics.com/2026/07/what-has-maha-accomplished-to-date/.

SSTI (State Science and Technology Institute). 2026. Mark Skinner, analysis of FY 2026 NIH appropriations. https://ssti.org/node/90274.

The Hill. 2026. “Watch Live: Trump, First Lady Unveil New Women’s Health Initiative.” October 19. https://thehill.com/video-clips/6157675-trump-melania-womens-health-initiative/.

UPI. 2026. “Trump, First Lady Announce Women’s Health Initiative.” October 19. https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/10/19/melania-trump-womens-health-division-executive-order/8271792428494.

White House. 2024. “ICYMI: The White House Hosts First-Ever Women’s Health Research Conference.” December 12. American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/icymi-the-white-house-hosts-first-ever-womens-health-research-conference.

White House. 2026a. “Advancing Women’s Health to Improve Outcomes in All Phases of Life.” Executive Order, October 19. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/10/advancing-womens-health-to-improve-outcomes-in-all-phases-of-life/.

White House. 2026b. “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump Advance Women’s Health to Improve Outcomes in All Phases of Life.” October 19. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/10/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-and-first-lady-melania-trump-advance-womens-health-to-improve-outcomes-in-all-phases-of-life/.

White House. 2026c. “First Lady Melania Trump Champions New U.S. Women’s Health Initiative.” October 19. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2026/10/first-lady-melania-trump-champions-new-u-s-womens-health-initiative/.

WXPR. 2026. “Affordability Crisis Changing Voters’ Views on ‘Women’s Issues.’” September 18. https://www.wxpr.org/election/2026-09-18/affordability-crisis-changing-voters-views-on-womens-issues.

Audio Version

Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone

Investigational Commentary / Washington, DC · October 19, 2026

The Babies in the Drain

In 1988, archaeologists made a horrifying discovery beneath an ancient Roman bathhouse in Ashkelon, a coastal city in what is now Israel. Buried in a sewer drain were the bones of nearly 100 newborn babies. The remains dated to the fourth century AD, and researchers suspected that the infants had been discarded shortly after birth.

Years later, DNA testing identified fourteen boys and five girls among nineteen infants whose sex could be determined. Why so many boys? Nobody knows. Some researchers suggested the building had operated as a brothel, but that interpretation is disputed. There is no reliable evidence establishing why the infants ended up in the drain, who was responsible, or whether they were deliberately killed.

Infanticide was not unique to Ashkelon. Historical records from Greece, Rome, and other civilizations describe newborns being killed or abandoned, sometimes with the approval of prevailing laws and customs. Poverty, disability, inheritance, family circumstances, and cultural beliefs all played a role. The spread of Judaism and later Christianity helped change these attitudes by emphasizing the sanctity of human life and the obligation to protect even the most vulnerable children.

Which brings us to Virginia in 2026.

On November 3, Virginia voters will decide whether to amend the state constitution to establish a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, including abortion. Virginia already permits third-trimester abortions when continuing the pregnancy poses a serious threat to the mother’s life or health. What the amendment would change is the legal standard. Instead of requiring three physicians to certify a substantial and irremediable threat to health, the amendment would protect abortions that a single physician considers medically indicated to protect physical or mental health, without defining a minimum level of impairment. It would also place these protections in the Virginia Constitution, making them much harder for future lawmakers to change.

Jill and I live in Madison County, Virginia, and we will be voting in this election. As we examined the amendment, we found ourselves returning to a question societies have struggled with for centuries: At what point does the life of a child deserve legal protection, independent of the wishes of the adults making decisions about that child?

When Does a Child Become a Person?

Infanticide is generally defined as the killing of a child after birth. Killing a child before birth is classified as abortion or feticide, even when the pregnancy has progressed far enough that the baby could survive outside the womb. Under this terminology, an abortion at 34 weeks is not infanticide.

But where did that distinction come from?

Much of it can be traced to English common law. Centuries ago, courts struggled to establish whether a fetus had been alive when injured or whether an injury caused its death. Without ultrasound, fetal monitoring, or modern obstetrics, proving those facts was difficult. The law eventually adopted what became known as the born-alive rule, distinguishing between a child who died before birth and one who was born alive and subsequently died from injuries suffered in the womb.

This was partly a practical legal distinction shaped by the limits of medical knowledge. It was never evidence that a child suddenly became biologically human at birth. Yet centuries later, the law still relies heavily on that distinction when determining what protections apply to a child before and after birth.

Today, physicians routinely monitor fetal heartbeats, observe fetal development through ultrasound, and successfully care for babies born months prematurely. Yet the terminology separating abortion from infanticide continues to depend largely on whether the child has been delivered. Modern medicine has made enormous advances, while the ethical debate over ending a viable pregnancy remains unresolved.

There is another complication. Some modern philosophers have questioned whether birth itself should confer the moral rights associated with personhood.

In 2012, the Journal of Medical Ethics published a paper titled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?” Its authors, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, argued that newborn infants do not possess the same moral status as persons and that killing a newborn should be permissible in circumstances where abortion would be permitted.

Philosopher Peter Singer advanced related arguments decades earlier. Singer distinguishes between being biologically human and being a person in the philosophical sense. In his view, personhood involves rationality, self-awareness, and the ability to understand one’s existence over time. Because newborn infants have not developed these abilities, he argues that they do not have the same inherent claim to continued life as self-aware individuals.

The disturbing implication is that infanticide becomes not an absolute moral wrong, but an ethically defensible choice.

Nor is the debate confined entirely to philosophy. In the Netherlands, physicians may deliberately end the lives of newborns suffering from certain severe medical conditions under strict requirements developed from the Groningen Protocol. A separate Dutch procedure also covers some children between the ages of one and twelve who experience unbearable suffering without prospect of improvement. These are narrowly defined medical circumstances, not permission to kill healthy newborns, but they demonstrate that the deliberate ending of an infant’s life has become a legally regulated practice in at least one modern country.

The distinction between abortion and infanticide is largely a legal one, not a biological one. A viable child does not suddenly become more human simply by being delivered. Modern medicine can keep some babies born at 22 or 23 weeks alive, and their chances of survival increase dramatically with each additional week of pregnancy. A baby at 34 weeks is the same developing human being moments before and after delivery. Yet the law can treat the deliberate ending of that child’s life very differently depending on which side of birth it occurs.

Why should the deliberate ending of a viable child’s life be judged so differently depending on whether that child has been born?

Virginia’s Constitutional Amendment: What Would Actually Change?

On November 3, Virginia voters will decide whether to amend the state constitution to establish a fundamental right to what the amendment calls “reproductive freedom.” The language covers contraception, prenatal care, childbirth, abortion, miscarriage management, and fertility care. But one of its most consequential provisions concerns abortion in the third trimester, when a developing child may already be capable of surviving outside the womb.

The first thing to understand is that this is not an ordinary law. It is a proposed constitutional amendment. If approved, it would become part of Virginia’s Bill of Rights. A future governor or General Assembly could not simply repeal it. Changing it would require another constitutional amendment, approved by two separately elected General Assemblies and then by Virginia voters. Any existing law that conflicts with the new constitutional language could be challenged in court.

Virginia already permits third-trimester abortions under specific medical circumstances. The proposed amendment would change the legal standard governing those procedures.

Under current law, a third-trimester abortion generally must be performed in a licensed hospital. The attending physician and two consulting physicians must certify that continuing the pregnancy would likely cause the woman’s death or substantially and irremediably impair her physical or mental health. The law also requires life-support measures to be available and used when there is clearly visible evidence of viability.

The proposed amendment replaces that demanding medical threshold with a much broader standard. It would prohibit the Commonwealth from banning a third-trimester abortion when a physician determines that the procedure is medically indicated to protect the woman’s life or physical or mental health.

Three physicians become one. A requirement for substantial and irremediable impairment becomes a physician’s judgment that an abortion is medically indicated to protect health. No specific degree of mental-health impairment is defined.

Consider what this means at 34 weeks of pregnancy. At that stage, a baby is ordinarily capable of surviving outside the womb. Delivery does not suddenly make that child biologically human. The child was already a living human organism before birth. Yet the legal treatment of ending that life can change dramatically depending on whether delivery has occurred.

There is another provision that deserves close attention. The amendment expressly prohibits Virginia from prosecuting, penalizing, or otherwise taking adverse action against “any individual” who assists another person in exercising the constitutional right to reproductive freedom, provided that person voluntarily consents. Notice what is missing. The language does not say “licensed physician,” “nurse,” or even “medical professional.” It says “any individual.” Nor does this protection expressly require medical training or compliance with existing licensing requirements. This amendment allows someone performing an abortion without a medical license to claim constitutional protection.

And unlike an ordinary statute, the resulting constitutional standard would not be something the General Assembly could simply rewrite if serious problems emerged.

That is the significance of what Virginia voters are being asked to put into their constitution.

Mental Health: Where Is the Line?

The phrase mental health deserves particular attention.

The amendment does not require a specific psychiatric diagnosis, establish a minimum degree of psychological impairment, or mandate an independent mental-health evaluation. It leaves the medical determination to a physician’s professional judgment.

Mental health covers a broad range of conditions. There is an enormous difference between a woman experiencing anxiety about an unexpected pregnancy and one suffering from a severe psychiatric illness that places her life in danger. Yet the amendment does not expressly establish where the threshold lies.

The amendment leaves the determination of medical necessity to a single physician. It does not require a diagnosed psychiatric disorder, an independent psychiatric evaluation, or evidence that continuing the pregnancy would cause substantial and irreversible psychological harm. Anxiety, depression, financial stress, and fear of being unable to care for another child all affect mental health. The physician must still exercise professional medical judgment. The practical question is how broadly that judgment could be exercised under the new constitutional standard, particularly by clinics willing to interpret its protections expansively. The third trimester of pregnancy begins at 28 weeks, almost all fetus are viable outside the womb at that age.

There is also the question of physicians who refuse.

Virginia currently protects healthcare professionals who decline to participate in abortions on personal, ethical, moral, or religious grounds, subject to the law’s written-objection requirements. The proposed amendment neither expressly repeals nor reaffirms those protections.

A constitutional right to obtain an abortion does not automatically create a right to force a particular physician to perform one. Nevertheless, future courts could be asked to resolve conflicts between reproductive freedom and existing conscience protections.

Who Decides Which Restrictions Are Allowed?

The amendment also places significant limits on Virginia’s ability to regulate abortion. It requires the state to justify restrictions as necessary to protect the health of the person seeking care, while respecting that person’s medical decisions. But it does not separately recognize the life of a viable unborn child as a reason for restricting abortion. That distinction matters because a child at 34 weeks is ordinarily capable of surviving outside the womb.

Federal courts have already addressed the government’s authority to protect unborn life and thrown the question back onto the states. In its 2022 Dobbs decision, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and returned authority over abortion regulation to the states and their elected representatives. Virginia voters are now being asked whether to allow the killing of viable babies inserted into its own state constitution.

The proposed amendment would not recognize protecting the life of a viable unborn child as a compelling state interest.

The amendment also prohibits the Commonwealth from penalizing or prosecuting individuals for exercising the protected right or assisting another person in exercising it with voluntary consent.

The amendment does not expressly exempt unlicensed practitioners from existing medical laws. Nor does it expressly repeal protections for infants born alive. Claims that it automatically does either are not established by the text.

That is a consequential amount of uncertainty to place into a state constitution.

The Legislature Had a Chance to Clarify the Language

Virginia lawmakers considered the amendment over two legislative sessions, as required for a constitutional change.

During the 2026 Senate debate, proposed amendments addressing care for infants born alive and parental consent were rejected. The General Assembly ultimately sent the constitutional language to voters without adding those provisions.

Those votes do not prove that lawmakers intended to eliminate existing protections. But they do establish that legislators had opportunities to address the concerns directly and chose not to change the text.

Two lawsuits have also challenged the amendment process and ballot language. One raised questions about whether required legislative procedures were followed. Another, brought by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and other plaintiffs, argues that the ballot description does not adequately convey the amendment’s possible legal consequences.

The courts have been asked to address those challenges, but the underlying questions about how the amendment would operate remain important regardless of the litigation.

What the Ballot Doesn’t Tell Voters

There is another serious problem. The Democratic-controlled General Assembly approved ballot language that conceals some of the most consequential provisions of the amendment.

The ballot says nothing about replacing the current three-physician requirement with the judgment of a single physician, or removing the existing requirement for substantial and irremediable harm to the mother’s health. Nor does it even mention allowing for third-trimester abortions to protect the mental health of the mother.

Voters are also told it will protect “doctors, nurses, and patients,” while the actual constitutional text protects “any individual” who assists someone exercising reproductive freedom with voluntary consent.

These are fundamental changes, not minor omissions. The wording is already being challenged in court as misleading, with plaintiffs arguing that voters are being denied an accurate description of what they are being asked to put into Virginia’s Constitution. These omissions appear deliberately intended to conceal these changes, as their effect leaves voters without important information about the amendment’s reach.

What Do We Know About Later Abortions?

One difficulty in evaluating the debate is the limited information available about abortions performed late in pregnancy.

Federal abortion surveillance commonly groups procedures at 21 weeks or later together. That category includes pregnancies at very different stages of development and does not consistently explain why the procedures occurred. Reporting is also incomplete because not every state supplies comparable data.

Research suggests that women seek abortions later in pregnancy for a range of reasons. Some involve serious fetal abnormalities or threats to maternal health. Others involve discovering the pregnancy late, difficulties obtaining an earlier abortion, financial barriers, or changing personal circumstances. Of course, those later reasons could all be categorized under “mental health” issues.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco interviewed women obtaining abortions at or after 20 weeks and documented obstacles such as difficulty locating providers and raising money for care. Other interview research involving abortions between 24 and 35 weeks found complicated circumstances, including newly discovered medical information and delays in accessing services.

These studies are informative, but they do not establish what percentage of all third-trimester abortions occur for each reason.

The distinction matters. A pregnancy terminated at 21 weeks is not medically equivalent to one terminated at 35 weeks. Yet public debate often treats them as though they belong to one category.

The fact that state and federal governments have not collected this data again speaks of obfuscation. It appears that those states that allow third trimester abortions don’t want the public to know those answers.

The Fetal Tissue Question

There is another issue that sometimes enters this debate: the use of fetal tissue in medical research.

Some commentators have suggested that expanding access to later abortions is intended to increase the supply of fetal organs and tissue for research or commercial purposes. We found no evidence connecting fetal tissue purchasers to the campaigns supporting Virginia’s amendment. There is, however, a real history of controversy surrounding fetal tissue procurement.

Federal law prohibits the sale of fetal tissue and organs but permits reasonable payments for expenses such as processing, preservation, storage, and transportation. Companies involved in procurement have operated within that framework, although questions about whether particular payments crossed legal boundaries have prompted congressional investigations.

In 2016, a House investigative panel examined relationships between abortion providers and tissue procurement companies. Its Republican majority alleged improper practices.

The international market for human biological materials raises another question. Organ trafficking is already a documented criminal industry, with estimates placing its annual value in the hundreds of millions to more than a billion dollars. Meanwhile, commercial clinics are marketing stem cells, exosomes, and growth-factor treatments for anti-aging and regenerative medicine.

Fetal tissue is scientifically valuable because developing cells produce biological signals involved in growth and tissue formation. Whether those properties have created a significant illegal market for fetal-derived products remains unknown. Researchers studying human tissue trafficking have warned that the trade in cells and tissues receives far less scrutiny than organ trafficking. Without reliable information about sourcing, payments, and international distribution, the size of any illicit fetal-tissue market is impossible to establish.

The commercial market for human biological materials may extend well beyond conventional medical research. Experiments involving young and old mice helped fuel interest in blood-borne factors that might influence aging. By 2016, companies were selling young-donor plasma transfusions to customers seeking rejuvenation, despite the lack of proven clinical benefit. The FDA warned against these treatments in 2019 and again in 2024. Meanwhile, an international market for experimental stem-cell and regenerative therapies continues to operate, sometimes beyond effective regulatory oversight. Whether fetal-derived cells or growth factors have entered an illicit anti-aging market remains unknown. But the financial incentives, the scientific interest in developmental biology, and the difficulty of tracing some human biological materials make this a legitimate question for further investigation.

The University of Pittsburgh also attracted scrutiny over its fetal tissue research. Records discussed by investigators referred to collecting certain tissue samples across a broad range of gestational ages, prompting questions from members of Congress about tissue sources and collection procedures. The university commissioned an outside legal review, which found its activities compliant with applicable law. But legal compliance and ethical acceptability are not necessarily the same thing. Federal law establishes certain safeguards, while states impose additional requirements that vary considerably. A finding that researchers followed the rules does not, by itself, answer whether those rules adequately protect human life or prevent financial incentives from influencing tissue procurement.

In January 2026, under President Trump, the National Institutes of Health announced that it would end funding for research using human fetal tissue from elective abortions. That policy applies to NIH-supported research, not every privately funded or state-funded project.

Those questions deserve scrutiny. But the available evidence does not establish that fetal tissue procurement is driving Virginia’s proposed constitutional amendment.

Back to Ashkelon

Nearly seventeen centuries ago, the bodies of almost 100 newborn infants ended up in a drain beneath a Roman bathhouse. We may never know how they died or who was responsible. But their remains are a disturbing reminder of a time when some societies accepted the killing or abandonment of unwanted children. It took centuries of religious, moral, and legal change to establish the protections newborns enjoy today.

Modern medicine has eliminated much of the uncertainty that once surrounded life in the womb. We can observe a developing child’s heartbeat, monitor its growth, and save premature babies who would have had little chance of survival just a few generations ago. A viable child does not suddenly become biologically human at delivery. That child was already human, already alive, and already capable of surviving outside the womb.

Yet our laws continue to draw a sharp distinction between ending that life before birth and ending it afterward. That distinction is legal, not a sudden change in biological identity.

Virginia’s proposed constitutional amendment would not explicitly legalize killing a child after birth. But it would replace the existing third-trimester medical standard with a broader constitutional protection based on a single physician’s judgment about physical or mental health. It would also raise questions about existing safeguards for viable unborn children, medical licensing requirements, and physician conscience protections.

Worse, the ballot language omits some of these consequential changes. Voters are told the amendment protects “doctors, nurses, and patients,” while the constitutional text protects “any individual” assisting another person with voluntary consent. The ballot also fails to explain the change from three physicians to one or the removal of the existing requirement for substantial and irremediable harm. These omissions are already being challenged in court as misleading.

The history of fetal tissue procurement and experimental regenerative medicine raises additional questions about financial incentives and the importance of clear ethical safeguards.

Once adopted, these constitutional protections could not simply be repealed by a future legislature. Changing them would require another constitutional amendment.

The question is whether the law should treat a viable child’s life differently simply because that child has not yet been born.

That is a question worth answering before changing Virginia’s Constitution.

End.

References

Virginia Constitutional Amendment and Legal Sources

1. Virginia Department of Elections. (2026). Explanation for Proposed Constitutional Amendment to Be Voted On at the November 3, 2026, Election: Question 1. Commonwealth of Virginia.

2. Virginia General Assembly. (2026). House Bill 781: Ballot Question for the Proposed Right to Reproductive Freedom Constitutional Amendment. Approved February 6, 2026.

3. Virginia General Assembly. (2026). Proposed Amendment to Article I of the Constitution of Virginia, Relating to the Fundamental Right to Reproductive Freedom. House Joint Resolution 1.

4. Code of Virginia. § 18.2-74. When abortion or termination of pregnancy lawful after second trimester of pregnancy.

5. Code of Virginia. § 18.2-75. Conscience protections concerning participation in abortion procedures.

6. Code of Virginia. § 18.2-371.1. Abuse and neglect of children; safe-haven provisions.

7. Association of American Physicians and Surgeons et al. v. Virginia State Board of Elections et al. (2026). Complaint filed in the Circuit Court of Tazewell County, Virginia.

8. Virginia Mercury. (2026, January 19). Virginia lawmakers send reproductive rights amendment toward November vote.

9. Virginia Mercury. (2026, August 28). If Va.’s reproductive rights amendment passes, challengers say they’ll fight to overturn it in court.

10. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022).

11. Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179 (1973).

12. Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002. 1 U.S.C. § 8.

13. Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. 18 U.S.C. § 1531.

History of Infanticide and Medical Ethics

14. Stager, Lawrence E. (1991). Eroticism and Infanticide at Ashkelon. Biblical Archaeology Review, 17(4).

15. Faerman, Marina, et al. (1998). Determining the Sex of Infanticide Victims from the Late Roman Era through Ancient DNA Analysis. Journal of Archaeological Science, 25(9), 861–865.

16. Archaeology. (1997). Ashkelon. Archaeology, 50(2).

17. Harris, William V. (1994). Child-Exposure in the Roman Empire. Journal of Roman Studies, 84, 1–22.

18. Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. (1999). Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. Pantheon Books.

19. Giubilini, Alberto, and Francesca Minerva. (2013). After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live? Journal of Medical Ethics, 39(5), 261–263. Published online in 2012.

20. Singer, Peter. (1979). Practical Ethics. Cambridge University Press.

21. Verhagen, Eduard, and Pieter J. J. Sauer. (2005). The Groningen Protocol: Euthanasia in Severely Ill Newborns. New England Journal of Medicine, 352(10), 959–962.

22. Didache, Chapter 2, Verse 2. Early Christian teaching prohibiting abortion and infanticide.

23. Josephus, Flavius. Against Apion, Book II, Section 202.

24. Philo of Alexandria. Special Laws, Book III, Sections 110–119.

25. Plutarch. Life of Lycurgus, Chapter 16.

Later Abortions and Medical Research

26. Foster, Diana Greene, and Katrina Kimport. (2013). Who Seeks Abortions at or After 20 Weeks? Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 45(4), 210–218.

27. Foster, Diana Greene. (2016). Responses to Questions for the Record. U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, March 15.

28. Diedrich, Justin, et al. (2024). Induction of Fetal Asystole Before Abortion. Society of Family Planning Clinical Recommendation. Contraception, 139, 110551.

Fetal Tissue Procurement, Research, and Commercial Interests

29. U.S. House of Representatives, Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives. (2016). Final Report. Committee on Energy and Commerce, December 30.

30. Washington Examiner. (2016, December 22). House Panel on Fetal Tissue Makes 15 Referrals for Prosecution.

31. National Institutes of Health. (2026, January 22). NIH Announces Major Policy Shift to End Use of Human Fetal Tissue in NIH-Supported Research.

32. University of Pittsburgh. (2022). University of Pittsburgh Releases Results of External Review of Fetal Tissue Research.

33. Lankford, James, et al. (2021). Congressional Letter Requesting Investigation of University of Pittsburgh Fetal Tissue Research.

34. Fox News. (2021, August 4). Report on the University of Pittsburgh Fetal Tissue Project.

35. 42 U.S.C. § 289g-1. Research on Transplantation of Fetal Tissue.

36. 42 U.S.C. § 289g-2. *Prohibitions Regarding Human

Where’s Waldo?

Gentle advice for ALCON involved in the current twisted political culture-

1. Those who are seeking revenge should first dig two graves.

2. “If we’re not careful, we become that which we most fear.”
   Dean Ornish

My new favorite term is “dumpster diving.”

Apparently, that is one of the investigative techniques federal authorities have used in the investigation involving Ilhan Omar’s family. Investigators can search discarded trash for documents, DNA, and other evidence. Once you put your secrets out with the garbage, the Fourth Amendment generally doesn’t come along for the ride.

And here’s where the story gets interesting. The investigation reportedly began under the Biden administration, not Trump. So much for the convenient political-vendetta narrative. Even the search warrant was reportedly signed by a Democratic-appointed judge.

But wait, there’s more!

Omar’s sister has flown the coop and is now in Kenya, having abruptly canceled a major speech and award appearance because of a mysterious “family emergency.”

Now, I can’t imagine what kind of emergency that was, you know - that causes someone to literally pack up and leave the USA in a big hurry.

Just what sort of family emergency requires an unexpected trip to Kenya just as federal investigators are digging through the family garbage?

I’ve posted another version of this song before, but in honor of Ilhan Omar, yesterday’s Substack, and the fine art of dumpster diving, here it is again!

After all, cats and federal investigators have something in common: They both go hunting for rats, and sometimes they bring the evidence right into the house.

And besides, this song is just too darn good not to share again!

A beautiful but crisp and chilly fall day - for which I plan to ride and bush hog more of the back pastures. See you on the other side!
Jill

The mice are winning, the rats and squirrels are eating our cars, and we may have to reconsider our retirement from cat ownership.

Our last two cats were both success stories and failures. They lived extraordinarily long lives, and by the time they finally departed this world, we were not particularly enthusiastic about cats as a species. In fact, we had pretty much decided that our cat-owning days were over.

But here’s the thing. Cats on a farm make sense. Why? Because they hunt. They hunt mice, rats, and sometimes squirrels. And on a farm, that is a very good thing.

Ever since our last cats retired from hunting, and then years later died, we have been fighting a losing battle against rodents. The mice, rats, and squirrels are winning, and frankly, we are getting tired of it.

Let’s start with the rats and squirrels.

For reasons known only to rats and squirrels, these furry little vermin have decided that the engine compartments of our vehicles make excellent places to live. They climb inside, chew through insulation and tubing, build nests, and generally create havoc. God only knows why they find automotive wiring so appealing. And then they pee all over everything.

Now, I realize that rats and squirrels are not known for their sophisticated domestic habits, but setting up residence in an engine compartment and then urinating all over your own living quarters strikes me as an exceptionally poor choice in personal hygiene. And Robert really finds powerwashing out urine and feces while laying on his back on concrete under a car rather unappealing for some reason.

In any case, we recently sold our relatively new Kia, but not before spending approximately $3,000 repairing the damage these little monsters had done. Three thousand dollars!

Then there is the “Porsche barn”, where Robert keeps his two babies. Yes, the cars have their own barn. And yes, the mice have discovered it. Robert recently found mouse droppings in an engine compartment, which resulted in an escalation of the ongoing rodent war. Traps, poison, and considerable irritation have followed.

Meanwhile, down at the horse barn and in the office trailer, we have rats. Not an occasional rat, mind you, but an ongoing population that has established permanent residency. Year after year, we battle them. We trap them, we eliminate them, and somehow there are always more.

So, you might reasonably ask, why not just get a couple of farm cats?

Well, there’s a backstory.

The Cats Who Retired Early

Our previous two cats lived extraordinarily long lives. Which, I suppose, is a testament to the quality of care they received. Unfortunately, both eventually decided that their working days were over and that the house, complete with central heating, regular meals, and a personal litter-box attendant, was a much better arrangement.

The first was Sage, our beautiful Siamese-looking cat. I honestly don’t remember exactly how we acquired her as a kitten, although I suspect she came from an animal shelter. For many years, Sage was a perfectly acceptable member of the farm family. She came and went, did her cat things, and generally minded her own business

.

But somewhere around the age of fifteen, Sage decided she was retiring from outdoor life. Permanently. And with retirement came a rather unfortunate personality change.

She became increasingly cranky, feeble, and downright mean, particularly toward the dogs. We had four Australian Shepherds at the time, all of whom had lived with cats for years without incident. But Sage seemed to take particular pleasure in tormenting them. She would actually stalk the dogs, wait until one was within striking distance, and then take a swipe at its face with her claws..

Eventually, when Sage was approximately twenty-two years old, the situation came to a terrible end. We returned home from dinner one evening to discover that one of the Aussies had apparently had enough. Sage was dead, and the circumstances suggested that one of the dogs had shaken her.

To say this was disturbing would be putting it mildly. Our youngest son was still young enough that we never told him the details. None of those dogs had ever been aggressive toward cats, and all had lived peacefully with them for years. I have always suspected that Sage finally pushed one of them beyond its tolerance. It was an awful ending to a very long life, and not one I care to repeat.

All four of those dogs are long gone now, having lived out their own lives. And all of them subsequently lived peacefully with our next cat, BC.

Enter BC, the Barn Cat

BC came into our lives around 2005, back when we were living on our Maryland farm.

One day, we spotted a young black manx (short-tailed) cat dragging the back half of her body as she disappeared into the space between the double walls of our barn. She was clearly badly injured, and I had no idea whether we would ever be able to catch her.

But I started putting out canned cat food and keeping watch. Eventually, armed with a pair of heavy gloves and a good deal of determination, I managed to grab her. We put her in a kennel, gave her food, water, and a safe place to recover, and hoped for the best.

To this day, we don’t know exactly what happened to her. She may have been hit by a car, or perhaps accidentally stepped on by one of our big horses. Either way, her hindquarters had suffered a serious injury.

I did some research into recovery from certain types of feline injuries and decided that, given her circumstances, we would give her time, rest, and supportive care while watching her progress. And recover she did.

Within a relatively short period, she was walking again, although she always had a limp. She gradually became tame, tested negative for the major feline viruses we were concerned about, and was accepted by the dogs. So we decided to bring her into the farm family rather than turn her over to a “shelter.” Within a month, she was moving in and out of the house as if she had always lived there.

We named her BC, short for either Black Cat or Barn Cat. Not particularly imaginative, I admit, but it suited her.

BC turned out to be a wonderful farm cat. She was an excellent mouser, industrious and determined, but because of her old injury, she couldn’t climb trees. This was a rather ideal arrangement. She could catch mice, but birds were generally beyond her capabilities. For years, BC earned her keep.

But then, around the age of fifteen, history began repeating itself. BC decided she had worked long enough. She retired herself from outdoor life and became a full-time house cat. She developed a tremendous appreciation for the litter box, soft furniture, and the comforts of indoor living. And she lived another five-plus years.

Unfortunately, those final years were not particularly pleasant for anyone. She became less mobile, and eventually incontinent. She had always been a bit feral - pet her at your own risk. We did our best to accommodate her declining health, but eventually her quality of life deteriorated to the point that we made the difficult decision to have her euthanized.

It was sad, of course. She had been a good cat and a faithful member of the farm family for nearly two decades.

But by then, I was tired. Tired of litter boxes, elderly cats with bad attitudes, and our home gradually becoming a somewhat pungent feline retirement facility. So, after BC, we decided enough was enough.

No more cats.

The Rodents Have Other Ideas

Fast-forward approximately six years.

We now have an out-of-control rodent problem, and I am beginning to think our decision to retire from cat ownership may have been a mistake.

There is a reason farmers have kept barn cats for centuries. A good mouser can patrol buildings, discourage rodents from settling in, and catch the little devils that seem perfectly capable of avoiding even the most carefully placed traps.

The problem is figuring out how to get the benefits without repeating our previous experiences.

Do we adopt two adult cats, preferably ones with proven hunting skills, and acclimate them to living in the horse barn? Perhaps a bonded pair of working barn cats that would be perfectly happy with food, water, shelter, and a job to do? Or would they harass the poultry, the guinea fowl? How would the free-ranging peacocks react?

Or do we get a couple of siblings, either older kittens or young cats, and raise them to be farm cats from the beginning? Do I really want to deal with the destruction in our house -scratched furniture and the like, and all the havoc that kittens create?

Adult cats might already know how to hunt, but they also come with established habits and personalities. Kittens might be easier to acclimate to the farm, but there is no guarantee they will grow up to be particularly enthusiastic mousers. And then there is the “breaking in” period.

Then there is the question of housing. Setting up proper cat accommodations in the horse barn would be another project. We would need a secure place for them to acclimate, somewhere warm and protected from the weather, and a reliable feeding arrangement. And, of course, they would need to be spayed or neutered, vaccinated, and given appropriate veterinary care.

There is also another practical complication. Once we have cats roaming the farm, we can no longer use rodent poison without risking poisoning the cats, either directly or when they catch poisoned rodents. Even conventional traps would have to be placed where curious paws couldn’t reach them. So, in some ways, getting cats means giving up other rodent-control methods we currently rely on.

And here’s another complication.

The horse barn is not particularly close to the house. If we establish the cats down there, will they stay there? Or will they eventually discover the house and decide that the humans, dogs, and indoor accommodations are much more interesting?

On the other hand, we also have mice and squirrels around the house, so perhaps having cats patrol both areas wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Except that this is exactly how we ended up with two retired house cats in the first place.

So, To Cat or Not to Cat?

Like most animals on our farm, cats need to earn their keep. That doesn’t mean we don’t love them or care for them. Quite the opposite. Our animals receive excellent care, often better than we give ourselves. But a working farm is not simply a collection of pets. Every animal has a purpose, whether that is producing food, maintaining the land, providing companionship, or controlling pests.

Cats have traditionally filled an important role in that arrangement.

And right now, we have a job opening.

The qualifications are straightforward: must enjoy hunting mice and rats, preferably have a strong dislike of squirrels, be willing to live primarily in a barn, and not expect to retire to our living room at age fifteen. Unfortunately, I suspect the last requirement may be difficult to enforce.

So, I’m putting the question to our readers, particularly those of you who have working farms, barns, or homesteads.

What has worked for you? Would you recommend adopting adult working barn cats, or starting with a pair of young siblings? Have you found a way to keep barn cats primarily in the barn, rather than eventually having them move into the house and take over?

And perhaps most importantly, have all of your cats actually made a meaningful difference in controlling rats, mice, and squirrels?

Because at this point, between the chewed-up cars, the mice in the Porsche barn, and the rats in the horse barn and office, I’m beginning to think that a couple of good cats might be worth their weight in gold.

Or at least worth $3,000 in Kia repairs.