“Today, on my final day as Director of National Intelligence, I’m releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Dr. Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, worked with politicized elements within the Intelligence Community to suppress the truth about his actions and hide the virus’ lab-leak origins, and lied to Congress while under oath in 2024. It’s time you know the truth.”

Here is her video, release on her last day as Director of DNI. This is followed by the DNI press release and then links to the documents.

ODNI PRESS RELEASE:

Fauci Funded Wuhan Lab Research That Sparked COVID
New Evidence Fauci Manipulated Intelligence and Lied to Congress

WASHINGTON D.C. — Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Anthony Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—work which is now widely viewed as the source of the unintentional lab leak that sparked the pandemic.

Today, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Fauci worked with politicized career leadership in the Intelligence Community (IC) to suppress the truth about his actions, the virus’ lab-leak origins, and his role in directing U.S. funding for this dangerous research that caused immeasurable harm and countless lost lives. These documents expose Fauci’s direct role in influencing and manipulating IC assessments on COVID-19, and how Fauci lied to Congress in 2024, when under oath he denied knowledge of or participation in discussions with intelligence officials about viral research.

You can view the communications and documents HERE.

“The COVID-19 pandemic caused tremendous hardship and pain for millions of our fellow Americans and for countless people around the world. After years of lies, censorship, and cover ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability,” DNI Gabbard said. “The tactics used to hide the truth are straight from the deep state playbook: politicized self-serving leaders like Dr. Fauci covered up their own wrongdoing and abuses of power, manipulated intelligence, lied to Congress, and undermined a duly elected President by restricting his access to vital facts needed to keep the country safe. It’s time the American people learn the real story.”

The materials released today are a result of DNI Gabbard’s yearlong declassification review in support of President Trump’s maximum transparency mandate. During this process, ODNI officials gathered testimony from multiple IC whistleblowers who reported retaliation for challenging the IC’s manipulation of intelligence on the virus’ origins. This unveiled a clear pattern of suppressing dissent, silencing critics, and burying evidence that undermined IC integrity and disserved the American people.

Fauci’s close IC relationships enabled him to assume three key roles during the pandemic that shielded him from scrutiny as he wielded outsized influence.

• Fauci funded risky coronavirus research linked to big pharma and the pursuit of “universal vaccines” worth trillions of dollars.

• Fauci was the behind-the-scenes advisor who, with his hand-picked experts, pushed the IC to endorse a natural, animal origin to hide his dangerous research.

• Fauci became the nation’s pandemic “pundit” and publicly pushed lies, disinformation, and censorship.

Fauci’s Relationship With The Intelligence Community Drove Intelligence & Public Narratives

Throughout the pandemic, Fauci and politicized leaders within the IC created a self-serving circular reporting loop. He provided hand-picked NIAID-funded scientists to advise the IC. This input shaped official intelligence assessments, which were then publicly cited as scientific consensus to refute the lab-leak theory.

According to hundreds of reviewed emails, the IC almost always incorporated his recommendations. Fauci promoted a fraudulent paper, whose publication he helped prompt, as legitimate information for Intelligence Community consideration. Senior analysts praised Fauci not as a “policymaker,” but as an unbiased guide to “the real coronavirus experts”—while ignoring experts who might dissent from Fauci’s narratives.

Fauci Lied to Congress

The correspondence released today directly contradicts Fauci’s 2024 testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. In that hearing, while under oath, Fauci was repeatedly asked whether he spoke to “FBI, CIA, DIA or any U.S. intelligence agency concerning viral research” before, during, or after the pandemic. Fauci repeatedly dodged the questions, before falsely stating, “not to my knowledge about COVID.”

Retaliation Against Truth-Seekers

Testimony from multiple whistleblowers reveals intelligence analysts who challenged Fauci’s COVID-origin conclusions faced threat of retaliation, were marginalized, and often suffered career setbacks. This silenced dissent and fostered a culture where truth was sacrificed to conformity and credible evidence was buried.

The following are examples from whistleblower accounts that Director Gabbard has referred to the Intelligence Community’s Inspector General.

• A contractor was terminated just days after coming forward to ODNI as a whistleblower.

• Managers reminded analysts who advocated for the lab-leak hypothesis that leadership would determine which analysts would be promoted. The message was clear: disagreement with the manipulated finding would derail careers.

• Senior leaders allegedly set up roadblocks for whistleblowers, removing anonymity from the complaint process by insisting managers or attorneys be present at ODNI meetings, creating an atmosphere of intimidation.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Fauci worked with politicized career leadership in the Intelligence Community (IC) to suppress the truth about his actions, the virus’ lab-leak origins, and his role in directing U.S. funding for this dangerous research that caused immeasurable harm and countless lost lives. These documents expose Fauci’s direct role in influencing and manipulating IC assessments on COVID-19, and how Fauci lied to Congress in 2024, when under oath he denied knowledge of or participation in discussions with intelligence officials about viral research.

The materials released today are a result of DNI Gabbard’s yearlong declassification review in support of President Trump’s maximum transparency mandate.

COVID-19 Release Index
COVID-19 Release Part 1
COVID-19 Release Part 2
COVID-19 Release Part 3
COVID-19 Release Part 4

<JGM>: A more comprehensive analysis of these documents will follow.

In the meantime, Friday Funnies will be published shortly!

Victimhood is the highest-paying content on the internet. The system rewards it, the reward selects for it, and most of the people participating in the process have no idea it is happening. Including, on plenty of days, me.

Somewhere in the last fifteen years, being wronged became a business model. Not simply a feeling or a misfortune, but a reliable way to generate attention, loyalty, and revenue. If you want reach on any platform that matters, one of the most reliable ways to get it is to show an audience that someone has done you harm and that you are bearing it with dignity. That post will travel farther than your best argument, raise more money than your best work, and bind followers to you more tightly than almost anything you could accomplish by simply being right. The wound outperforms the insight.

This is not a moral failing in the people it happens to. It is the result of incentives built into the system.

I want to take this apart carefully, because the easy version gets it wrong.

The easy version says that people who play the victim are frauds working a grift. A few are. Most are not. Most believe every word, and that is the most interesting part of the story.

Most people are not sitting around plotting how to become professional victims. They are doing what all of us do. They post something, watch what happens, and learn from the response. The posts that get attention get repeated. The posts that disappear do not. After enough repetitions, the process starts selecting for itself.

Nobody has to decide to run the play. The incentives do most of the work.

Breaking Through the Floor

To understand why grievance is so powerful, you have to start with a simple reality. The internet does not distribute attention evenly, or anything close to it. A tiny number of accounts receive most of it while everyone else receives almost none. Much of what gets posted, including thoughtful and accurate work, is seen by very few people and disappears without a trace.

For anyone trying to be heard online, that is the central fact. The hard problem is not producing good content. The internet is already full of good content. The hard problem is getting noticed at all. Most people who try never manage it.

So ask what actually breaks an unknown account through.

It is usually not careful analysis. Careful analysis fills the internet already. What breaks through is emotional and moral charge, and one of the most potent forms of that charge is grievance.

The people who study how messages spread online have a technical term for this. They call it moral-emotional contagion. Words carrying both moral and emotional weight are shared far more often than ordinary language, with each additional moral-emotional word measurably increasing a post’s reach (Brady et al. 2017). Grievance is built almost entirely from those ingredients. Outrage. Betrayal. Courage. Harm.

The important point is not that grievance performs slightly better than a calm post. The important point is that grievance is one of the few things that reliably gives an unknown person a chance to be noticed at all.

This explains something that otherwise looks like an indictment of human nature: nearly every successful influencer appears to run on the same fuel.

But we only see the people who made it through.

Most thoughtful and fair-minded people never break through at all. Their work receives little attention, they eventually stop posting, and they disappear from view. The mistake of studying only the winners while ignoring the much larger number who vanished has a name: survivorship bias.

When you look at successful influencers and notice that many rely on grievance, you are not necessarily learning something dark about the people who become influencers. You are observing a selection process. The people who broke through often did so because grievance worked.

There is a specific mechanism behind it.

To break through, a small account often has to borrow a larger account’s audience. Grievance is one of the most effective tools for doing that. You identify someone bigger than you and argue that they have harmed you, or harmed the people watching. The accused, or the people who rush to defend them, respond. That response carries your name into an audience you could never have reached on your own.

In my own social media universe, I have watched this dynamic play out again and again.

Over the years, I have been called everything from a mass murderer for my role in early mRNA technology development to a government operative, a pharmaceutical shill, and now, apparently, a DARPA and CIA propagandist (despite the fact that I have worked for neither organization).

Just yesterday, Dr. Jack Kruse launched another attack, built on demonstrably false claims. But the specifics are almost beside the point.

If Jill and I sat down and made a list, we could probably name dozens of individuals who have built substantial audiences around the claims that I personally wronged them or their audience, deceived them, betrayed them, or somehow stand at the center of whatever problem they are trying to explain. Some individuals have written hundreds, even thousands, of posts about me across Substack and X. Some are still at it today.

The interesting question is not whether they are right. They aren’t.

The interesting question is why this pattern keeps repeating.

The answer is that grievance works.

A public feud is audience acquisition. A villain is a growth strategy. The larger and more visible the target, the greater the opportunity. The truth is that responding is counterproductive because every response expands the reach of the attack.

In fact, by mentioning Dr. Kruse here, I am probably helping him gain followers. That is simply how the system operates.

He is not unique. He is merely the latest example to cross my path. One in a long line of attackers.

Conflict becomes the distribution mechanism.

This is why challenging powerful people is often such an effective way to grow an audience. It may or may not be morally justified, but it also works as a form of distribution. The larger the target, the larger the audience available through the resulting conflict.

The same research I cite below found that signals of victimhood also make audiences more willing to view the accused as fair game. In market terms, that is an additional advantage for the person making the claim.

I know this territory because I have stood on both sides of it.

At the end of 2021, within days of each other, Twitter and LinkedIn both acted against me. Twitter removed more than half a million followers in an afternoon. LinkedIn made its ban permanent, and LinkedIn was not a vanity platform. It was a primary channel through which I found consulting clients and maintained a professional reputation built on credentials, scientific work, and experience rather than grievance. That door closed for good.

Days later, I sat down with Joe Rogan for what became the most-watched conversation of my life.

I am not going to claim with certainty that the platforms coordinated their actions, although Congressional evidence suggests that the Biden administration had a hand in what happened. I cannot prove that, and I do not need to. What matters is the result.

One professional channel was effectively destroyed. The grievance channel that emerged in its place reached a much larger audience.

I had started this Substack a few weeks earlier, so the new path was already there. The bans simply slammed one door shut and threw the other one wide open.

At the time, I said publicly that the bans meant I was over the target. I believed that, and there was truth in it. There is another truth as well.

The censorship was real. The injury was real.

It was also the largest single breakthrough in reach and audience growth I have ever experienced on Substack.

The suppression was a real injury and a real act of censorship. It was also the largest breakthrough of my life. The wound became the launch, not the setback.

When the Old Controls Backfire

There is a larger point hidden in my own experience, and it took me a while to see it.

For most of the last century, the people who could injure you and the people who controlled access to an audience were often the same people, or closely aligned. Suppression worked because once they silenced you, there was nowhere else for the audience to go.

That is no longer true.

The thing that can injure you and the thing that distributes you are now different systems. In many cases, the distribution system rewards the conflict created by the first.

As a result, the old tools of narrative control have not merely weakened. In many cases, they have reversed.

A categorical official denial, the flat declaration that “this is false,” was designed for a world in which the institution controlled distribution. Today it often accomplishes the opposite. It signals that the topic is worth discussing, gives the target a fresh grievance to distribute, and exposes the target to the institution’s own audience through the ensuing conflict.

The denial no longer closes the question. It often amplifies it.

An institution still relying on the historic approach to narrative suppression in 2026 (posting statements like “Total BS”, for example) is not demonstrating control. It is demonstrating that it no longer understands the environment in which it operates.

Before anyone on my side of these debates celebrates, however, the same dynamic applies to manufactured grievances. The medium does not distinguish between truth and falsehood. It rewards whatever travels.

A real injury and a manufactured one spread through the system in much the same way. Both are amplified by the same mechanisms.

How Grievance Becomes Power

Once you break through, the wound continues to pay in ways that go beyond reach.

The first was identified by a team of researchers led by Ekin Ok, who described what they called the virtuous victim signal (Ok et al. 2021). It occurs when a claim of injury is paired with a claim of moral goodness.

That combination attracts sympathy, money, trust, and deference.

The second payoff receives less attention. The wound becomes armor.

Criticizing a self-declared victim is costly because it looks like attacking someone who is already down. Most people avoid doing it. Those who do often create a fresh grievance for the next news cycle.

The signal becomes self-reinforcing.

It attracts attention, generates resources, and shields the sender from many of the normal costs of being wrong.

Now follow the money, because all of these benefits eventually become revenue.

Reach becomes subscriptions, donations, advertising revenue, speaking fees, and book sales. The audience built around a victim narrative is one of the most durable revenue streams available, more durable than shared beliefs and often more durable than entertainment, because followers no longer see themselves as customers. They see themselves as participants in a struggle.

People who think they are helping defend a persecuted truth-teller are remarkably loyal.

A subscriber who believes he is helping sustain a persecuted truth-teller is likely to remain subscribed.

Grievance is not adjacent to the business model. It is the business model.

You can watch it operate in plain sight, where a paragraph about censorship or defamation may sit directly above a button asking readers to become paid subscribers.

That juxtaposition is not hypocrisy.

It is the design.

Nobody has to Plan It

This is where the ugly version of the story falls apart.

When a behavior pays this well, nobody has to plan it. This is operant conditioning, the basic principle that governs the behavior of any animal with a nervous system. You do more of what gets rewarded and less of what does not, and you do not need a theory to explain why.

A creator posts twenty things in a month. Five succeed, and fifteen disappear. He has no explanation. He simply notices the response to the five and the silence surrounding the fifteen. Over time, his output drifts toward whatever gets rewarded.

He never consciously decided to become a grievance entrepreneur. He simply learned what worked.

That is why people can tell you, with complete sincerity, that they would never stoop to playing the victim and still be telling the truth as they understand it.

I have said it myself more than once. Be a lion, not a victim.

I meant it when I wrote it, and I mean it now.

Yet the pattern still appears sometimes in my own feed because the part of us that consciously decides what we believe is not always the same part that responds to rewards. My disavowal is not evidence against the system. It is evidence of how the system works.

Victimhood as a Mindset

Psychologists have measured a more durable version of this as a personality trait (Gabay et al. 2020). Some people consistently experience the world as a place where they are being wronged. The pattern has recognizable features: a strong desire for their suffering to be acknowledged, a belief that they occupy the moral high ground, a tendency to revisit old injuries long after the fact, and an asymmetry in which their own pain remains vivid, while the pain of others fades into the background.

The most revealing finding is that the filter tends to operate in only one direction. Present an ambiguous situation, and these individuals reliably assume the worst interpretation rather than the best.

Most influencers are nowhere near the extreme end of that spectrum, and they do not need to be. Modern platforms make it easy to adopt the mindset without fully inhabiting it. The incentives encourage people to interpret events through the lens of grievance because grievance performs.

There is also a status component. Researchers who study public moral conflict describe what they call moral grandstanding (Grubbs et al. 2019), the use of moral language primarily to elevate one’s own status rather than to resolve a disagreement.

It generally takes two forms.

• One seeks admiration: the courageous truth-teller who paid a personal price.

• The other seeks dominance: shaming opponents until they retreat.

Much grievance content contains elements of both.

Since everyone assumes this is the vice of the other side, it is worth noting that the research found little relationship between political affiliation and the tendency to engage in this behavior. The incentives operate across the political spectrum.

When Grievance Becomes Power

For most influencers, grievance converts into attention and money.

For politicians, it converts into attention, money, and power.

A loyal grievance-based audience is simultaneously a donor list, a voter base, and protection against potential challengers. The same dynamic is operating. The stakes are simply higher.

Look across the political landscape and the ideological differences largely disappear.

• Marjorie Taylor Greene built a powerful small-dollar fundraising operation and left Congress with a public narrative centered on betrayal and mistreatment.

• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez built an almost entirely people-funded operation and produced some of the most prominent personal-victim narratives of the January 6 era.

• Kari Lake carried a stolen-election narrative through repeated defeats and never abandoned it.

These politicians do not share an ideology or a constituency. What they share is a common set of incentives.

The most useful example, however, is the politician who had one of the strongest claims to victimhood and largely refused to use it.

Thomas Massie endured the most expensive House primary challenge in history while being personally targeted by the President of the United States. Yet his public message remained focused on constitutional questions and fiscal realities rather than on his own grievances.

He lost. Because grievances convert into votes. Issues and logical debate often do not.

But he demonstrated something important.

Genuine victimization does not require victim-signaling.

The signal is a choice the system rewards. It is not something the situation forces upon you.

Our own side is not exempt from any of this, and pretending otherwise would make this essay worthless.

Bobby Kennedy was, in demonstrable fact, deplatformed and savaged in print for years, and his grievances have real foundations under them, the same as mine do. That is exactly why the machine works on (and for) him, and on the movement around him. A real wound is the honest raw material the signal is built from - but an entire ecosystem has been built around those grievances. The question is never whether the injury happened. Mostly it did. The question is what gets built on top of it, and how much of what gets built is the system quietly paying us to keep the wound open.

That is precisely why the dynamic works.

A real injury is often the raw material from which the signal is built.

The question is not whether the injury happened. Much of the time it did.

The question is what gets built on top of it, and how much of that construction is being quietly rewarded by the system.

The Cost of Success

This brings me to the part that should make all of us uncomfortable.

The problem does not disappear once you build an audience. It gets worse.

Moving from ten thousand followers to one hundred thousand, and from one hundred thousand to a million, is often the same challenge repeated at a larger scale. The audience that initial grievance assembled around must continue to receive grievance if it is going to remain engaged.

The incentive does not weaken. It strengthens.

And underneath it sits the ugliest fact in the entire arrangement.

An audience that pays to support a persecuted truth-teller has a vested interest in the persecution continuing.

Not because anyone planned it. Not because anyone wants it. But because that is how the relationship was formed.

The audience gathered around the wound.

The result is a subtle but powerful incentive structure. It rewards the person who discovers a new outrage every week more than the person who solves a problem and reports that it has been solved.

You can see this dynamic across the political spectrum. Once an influencer reaches a certain scale, the challenge is no longer attracting an audience. It is maintaining one.

Consider what happened after Candace Owens left The Daily Wire. Whether her claims about Charlie Kirk, his wife Erika, Brigitte Macron, or anyone else were true is not the point. The point is that the audience's incentive increasingly favored conflict itself. Every new feud generated attention, engagement, discussion, reaction videos, rebuttals, and fresh content for supporters and critics alike. The conflicts became self-sustaining.

That is not unique to Candace Owens. It is simply a highly visible example of a broader phenomenon. Once a large audience has been assembled around controversy and opposition, the pressure to find the next controversy never entirely goes away.

The audience gathered around the conflict. The conflict becomes part of the product.

That incentive quietly rewards the person who finds a new outrage every week over the person who solves a problem and reports that it is solved.

• Solutions end stories.

• Grievances extend them.

Once you see that dynamic in your own feed, it becomes difficult to ignore.

One of the most striking examples emerged during COVID. Entire audiences formed around resistance to lockdowns, mandates, censorship, and official public health messaging. Many of those grievances were legitimate. That is not the point.

The point is that once those audiences existed, they became economic assets.

Media outlets, publishers, advocacy organizations, conferences, subscription platforms, supplement companies, telemedicine services, and alternative healthcare businesses all emerged to serve them. A large audience of people who believed institutions had failed them became a market. Some organizations sold information. Some sold memberships. Some sold products. Some sold treatments intended to protect against the very threats that had helped build the audience in the first place.

None of this required a conspiracy. It is simply what markets do. Audiences attract entrepreneurs. Demand attracts supply.

The uncomfortable part is that the incentives do not disappear once the crisis passes. An audience assembled around institutional failure, censorship, corruption, persecution, or the corruption of big pharma must continue to hear about the same issues if it is to remain engaged. So now, the company formed to sell ivermectin against COVID-19 has become the company selling ivermectin as an antiparasitic to restore gut balance and vitality. Hint: As a pathologist, I have examined thousands of human biological samples from Americans under the microscope. Generally speaking, parasites are not a significant problem in the United States, despite the attention they often receive on social media. And yes, when I read such claims from our side, it makes my skin crawl.

The institutional side operates according to the same logic. Pharmaceutical advertising influences legacy media. Government agencies defend their budgets and authorities. Public health organizations protect their reputations. The fear product I describe in the book we are currently writing called “The Grift” was monetized by institutions in much the same way grievance is monetized by their critics.

• Different products.

• Different customers.

• Similar incentives.

An analysis that recognizes only one side of that equation is not an analysis. It is advocacy.

The Way Out

There is an easy way out of this argument, and it is also the wrong one.

“The system made me do it.”

That is the easy escape, and it is really just another version of the victim’s argument wearing a lab coat: the system made me do it, so go look somewhere else.

The system selects for behavior. It does not force it. People can recognize the incentives and choose differently. In fact, one of the simplest ways to tell who is sincere and who is merely working the incentives is to explain the mechanism and watch the reaction.

Sincere people usually become uncomfortable. They look at their own feed, their own behavior, and the incentives acting on them. The operators become defensive. For them, the grievance is no longer just a belief or a habit. Grievance has become an asset, and you have just questioned its value and moral integrity.

This is also why the burden now falls on the audience.

The old information order had external checks. Editors, producers, publishers, and gatekeepers could suppress a claim, whether true or false. They often abused that power, but it existed. Today, most of those checks are gone. There are no guardrails to prevent a grievance from spreading, whether it is legitimate or fabricated.

That leaves only one remaining check: your own judgment.

So how do you tell when a legitimate grievance has crossed over into something else?

First, ask whether the injury was real. Most of the injuries discussed in this essay were real. Mine were. Bobby Kennedy’s were. Many others were as well. But some aren’t. That is the first test.

Next, the question to ask is whether the grievance remains tethered to reality, or whether it has become a self-sealing narrative.

One of the warning signs is that nothing is allowed to count as evidence against it.

• If people attack you, that proves you are over the target.

• If they ignore you, that proves they cannot answer you.

• If the prediction fails, then they must have changed their plans because you exposed them.

• Every outcome becomes evidence for the same conclusion.

At that point, the grievance is no longer being tested against reality. It is being protected from reality.

That is the moment to be careful.

A real injury does not require a permanent story built around it. A true claim should remain vulnerable to contradictory evidence. It should be possible to imagine what would change your mind.

When you can no longer answer that question, something important has changed. The injury may still be real, but the narrative built on top of it has taken on a life of its own.

That is when the incentives begin doing some of the thinking for you.

I have caught myself doing exactly that more than once while publicly insisting that I would not. I am not offering that observation as a gesture of humility. I am offering it because it may be the most useful fact in this entire essay.

If this pattern can operate in someone who is aware of it, has publicly rejected it and sincerely meant the rejection, it can operate in anyone.

Most of us have been wronged in real ways. That is not the question.

The question is whether what we build on top of those injuries is true, and whether we would still say it, if saying it cost us the audience.

Marshall McLuhan once famously observed that the medium is the message.

In the decentralized media environment of 2026, one can observe a similar dynamic.

The wound is the product.

References

Brady, William J., Julian A. Wills, John T. Jost, Joshua A. Tucker, and Jay J. Van Bavel. 2017. “Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114 (28): 7313–7318.

Gabay, Rahav, Boaz Hameiri, Tammy Rubel-Lifschitz, and Arie Nadler. 2020. “The Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood: The Personality Construct and Its Consequences.” Personality and Individual Differences 165: 110134.

Grubbs, Joshua B., Brandon Warmke, Justin Tosi, A. Shanti James, and W. Keith Campbell. 2019. “Moral Grandstanding in Public Discourse: Status-Seeking Motives as a Potential Explanatory Mechanism in Predicting Conflict.” PLoS ONE 14 (10): e0223749.

Ok, Ekin, Yi Qian, Brendan Strejcek, and Karl Aquino. 2021. “Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 120 (6): 1634–1661.

The accepted story of alpha-gal syndrome (AGS) is simple.

A tick bites a person. During feeding, the tick introduces alpha-gal, a carbohydrate found in most mammals but not humans, along with a complex mixture of salivary proteins that alter the immune response. The immune system becomes sensitized. Months or years later, the patient develops allergic reactions to beef, pork, lamb, dairy products, gelatin, medications, or other mammalian-derived substances.

The story is elegant. It is also incomplete and best treated as one of many alternative hypotheses for the cause of the clinical syndrome known as alpha-gal syndrome.

The first question is obvious.

If ticks cause alpha-gal syndrome, why did the disease only appear or be recognized in the late 2000s?

The lone star tick did not suddenly appear in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, or the southeastern United States. It has occupied those regions for centuries. Millions of Americans were bitten by lone star ticks long before anyone had heard the term “alpha-gal syndrome.”

• If the disease truly emerged only recently, then people assume that something changed - that this is a new disease.

• But what if the disease did not emerge recently at all?

• What if medicine simply learned how to recognize it?

Science and medicine have a long history of sampling and detection bias. When new testing capabilities are developed and used to detect something new, this often leads to a pattern of drawing cause-and-effect conclusions based on correlation.

Before alpha-gal testing became available, patients presenting with delayed allergic reactions were frequently diagnosed with chronic hives, idiopathic anaphylaxis, food allergies of unknown origin, irritable bowel syndrome, mast cell disorders, or anxiety. Unlike classic food allergies, alpha-gal reactions often occur three to eight hours after exposure. A patient who eats a steak at dinner and awakens covered in hives at two in the morning is unlikely to connect the two events. Neither is their physician.

How many of those patients would meet today’s diagnostic criteria?

No one knows.

That uncertainty alone should make us cautious about interpreting every increase in reported cases as evidence of a rapidly growing epidemic. Increased testing and increased awareness have a remarkable ability to create the appearance of one.

The Lack of Quality Research

Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of the entire alpha-gal story is how little effort has been devoted to answering that question.

The NIH and CDC have invested considerable effort into documenting current cases, mapping tick distributions, and characterizing the syndrome. Yet there has been remarkably little focus on retrospective investigation. Where are the large studies examining archived blood samples collected in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s? Where are the efforts to determine whether alpha-gal antibodies were already common decades before the syndrome was formally recognized?

Those studies are technically feasible. Blood repositories exist. Military serum banks exist. Academic biobanks exist. A systematic retrospective analysis could help answer one of the most important questions in the field: Are we witnessing the emergence of a new disease, or the recognition of an old one?

Another possibility rarely discussed is whether changing patterns of childhood exposure have altered immune tolerance. Previous generations growing up in tick-endemic regions spent far more time outdoors, accumulated far more environmental exposures, and likely experienced repeated encounters with ticks and tick-associated antigens from an early age. Modern allergy research increasingly recognizes that the timing and context of exposure can influence whether the immune system develops tolerance or sensitization. Whether a similar process contributes to alpha-gal syndrome remains largely unexplored, but it raises an intriguing question: has something changed not only in ticks but also in us?

The distinction matters. If alpha-gal sensitization was already widespread forty years ago, then much of the apparent epidemic may reflect improved recognition and testing. If historical samples reveal substantially lower rates, then researchers must explain what changed. Either outcome would significantly advance our understanding. The fact that this question remains largely unanswered is itself noteworthy.

Yet despite its importance, the question remains surprisingly unexplored.

Why?

A positive alpha-gal blood test is not the same thing as alpha-gal syndrome.

Studies from parts of the southeastern United States have found surprisingly high rates of alpha-gal antibodies in the general population. Yet only a fraction of those individuals develop clinically significant disease (1).

This raises an uncomfortable question.

If tick bites are the entire explanation, why do so many individuals carry antibodies without symptoms?

The answer may be that the tick is only the beginning of the story.

Even the question of where alpha-gal in the tick originates remains less settled than many assume. The prevailing theory is that ticks acquire alpha-gal during previous blood meals from mammals such as deer and then transfer it to humans during subsequent feeding. The hypothesis that a tick must first feed on another mammal, detach, and then bite a human in order to transfer mammalian α-gal has become increasingly difficult to support.

Current evidence suggests that this sequence is not required, and there is little peer-reviewed behavioral literature demonstrating that interrupted host-switching is common enough to explain AGS. More recently, researchers have identified alpha-gal-containing structures in tick saliva under circumstances that are not fully explained by prior mammalian feeding alone. Some investigators have proposed that ticks may modify, concentrate, or even synthesize alpha-gal-containing molecules themselves. Others have suggested a role for the tick microbiome. The science is far from settled. But what is settled is that ticks, including the notorious Lone Star tick, have been biting humans for as long as both have cohabitated the same environments.

That uncertainty matters because it shifts the discussion from a simple chain of events to a much larger biological question. We know current evidence indicates that ticks appear to be involved. We know alpha-gal is involved. There may be other sources of human alpha-gal exposure, including injected pharmaceuticals. What remains surprisingly unclear is exactly how the tick may acquire, process, and deliver the molecule that initiates the immune response.

Modern medicine has a habit of first discovering a signal, then hypothesizing a mechanism, and then treating that mechanism as the complete explanation. Alpha-gal syndrome may be another example.

Another factor that receives surprisingly little attention is deer ecology.

The lone star tick did not expand its range in a vacuum. Over the last century, white-tailed deer populations have exploded across much of the United States. Reforestation of former farmland, suburban development, reduced predator pressure, and changing hunting patterns have created ideal conditions for both deer and ticks.

Adult lone star ticks depend heavily on deer as hosts. More deer means more ticks. More ticks mean more opportunities for human exposure.

One does not need a bioweapon, a laboratory accident, or a novel environmental toxin to explain much of the observed increase in alpha-gal syndrome. Basic ecology may explain a substantial portion of the phenomenon.

Yet even here, the story is more complicated than commonly presented. While the lone star tick remains the primary tick associated with alpha-gal syndrome in the United States, alpha-gal sensitization has also been linked to other tick species in Europe, Australia, Asia, and elsewhere, including Ixodes ricinus and Ixodes holocyclus (2). The emerging picture suggests that alpha-gal syndrome may not be a disease of a single tick species, but rather a broader biological phenomenon involving multiple tick species that can induce similar immune responses.

One alternative explanation that has received surprisingly little attention is the role of mammalian-derived pharmaceuticals and injectable products. The lack of investigation and analysis of this alternative hypothesis may reflect cognitive or incentive/funding biases.

Within the National Institutes of Health, responsibility for research on alpha-gal syndrome spans multiple programs at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Transplantation (DAIT) supports studies of IgE-mediated allergy, immune tolerance, mast cell biology, and the mechanisms underlying allergic sensitization, making it the principal home for research on the immunopathogenesis of alpha-gal syndrome.

Complementing this effort, the Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (DMID) and its Vector Biology Program support investigations into tick physiology, salivary gland biology, host-seeking and feeding behavior, vector-host interactions, and tick-borne diseases, including research that could elucidate the origin and transmission of alpha-gal-containing molecules.

NIAID's intramural Rocky Mountain Laboratories further contribute internationally recognized expertise in tick biology and vector-host interactions. Collectively, these programs encompass the full scientific spectrum required to investigate alpha-gal syndrome, from the molecular and immunologic mechanisms of IgE sensitization to the behavioral ecology, glycobiology, and salivary biology of ticks that may initiate the disease.

If there is a sincere desire to get to the true cause and effect (and hopefully, effective treatment) of this syndrome, these federal agencies and programs (intramural and extramural) are in the strongest position to promote more rigorous scientific and medical research.

Biologics

Alpha-gal is not encountered only through food. It appears in biologic drugs, gelatin-containing products, certain vaccines, surgical implants, porcine-derived medications, heart valves, plasma products, and numerous medical materials (3).

Ironically, alpha-gal syndrome was not discovered because people reacted to steak.

It was discovered because cancer patients in the southeastern United States experienced severe reactions to cetuximab, a monoclonal antibody. Investigation of those reactions ultimately led researchers to alpha-gal and then to the lone star tick (4).

An injectable product helped reveal the syndrome in the first place, because such products also contain Alpha-gal.

Yet the possibility that such drugs or repeated pharmaceutical exposures may influence disease severity, persistence, or progression receives relatively little discussion.

The route of exposure matters.

An antigen introduced through the bloodstream may not be processed by the immune system in the same way as an antigen encountered through the digestive tract.

The same question applies to intestinal permeability.

Alpha-gal is repeatedly encountered through food. For symptoms to occur, alpha-gal-containing molecules must cross the intestinal barrier and enter circulation. Yet remarkably little attention has been paid to whether gut barrier integrity influences disease expression.

Could increased intestinal permeability contribute to symptom severity?

Could dysbiosis, chronic gastrointestinal inflammation, metabolic disease, alcohol consumption, medications, or ultra-processed diets alter the threshold at which sensitization becomes clinical disease?

The possibility is biologically plausible.

The gut may prove to be as or more important as the tick.

And there is another issue that receives little discussion.

The attribution problem: diagnostic false positives.

A positive alpha-gal test can create a powerful explanatory framework. Once a diagnosis exists, every episode of fatigue, bloating, abdominal discomfort, headache, rash, or gastrointestinal upset risks being attributed to alpha-gal.

Some of those symptoms undoubtedly are.

Others may not be.

Histamine intolerance, mast cell disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, medication reactions, foodborne illness, metabolic dysfunction, and countless other conditions can produce overlapping symptoms.

The distinction matters because attribution is not diagnosis.

There is also the problem of expectation.

Media coverage of alpha-gal syndrome has expanded dramatically. Patients learn that a tick bite may leave them allergic to red meat for life. They discover that severe reactions are possible. They test positive for antibodies.

At that point, every hamburger becomes a potential threat.

The nocebo effect is well established throughout medicine. Expectations can amplify symptoms, alter symptom perception, and influence behavior. This does not mean symptoms are imaginary, although sometimes they are. It means that biology and psychology are often more intertwined than simplistic narratives allow.

The existence of alpha-gal syndrome is not in question.

The interpretation of every symptom attributed to alpha-gal remains open to debate.

One final claim deserves mention because it occasionally surfaces in alternative media.

Some have suggested that alpha-gal syndrome was deliberately released or engineered as a bioweapon.

The evidence supporting that claim is exceedingly weak.

More importantly, it is unnecessary.

The historical presence of ticks, expanding deer populations, increased human exposure, improved diagnostic testing, and greater physician awareness provide entirely adequate explanations for the observed increase in diagnosed cases.

• The more plausible mystery is not why alpha-gal suddenly appeared.

• The more plausible mystery is whether it was present all along.

• The strongest evidence supports a role for ticks in alpha-gal syndrome.

• But acknowledging that fact should not end the scientific discussion.

• Why do some sensitized individuals remain asymptomatic?

• Why do others become severely ill?

• What role do pharmaceuticals, biologics, gut permeability, microbiome composition, repeated tick bites, genetics, and environmental exposures play?

• How much of the apparent increase reflects a true rise in disease, and how much reflects increased recognition?

The tick may be necessary.

Whether it is sufficient remains very much an open question.

Science advances by asking better questions, not by declaring difficult questions settled.

In Part II, I will move from causes to solutions. We will examine what is currently known about treatment, whether desensitization strategies may be possible, emerging therapeutic approaches under development, and practical methods for reducing tick exposure. That discussion will include both personal protective measures and land-management strategies that can dramatically reduce tick populations around homes, farms, and rural properties.

Understanding the disease is only half the challenge. The other half is learning how to live with it, prevent it, and eventually overcome it.

JGM/RWM

References

(1) Wilson JM, Schuyler AJ, Workman L, et al. Population studies of alpha-gal sensitization and clinical disease.

(2) Commins SP. Alpha-gal syndrome across continents: tick species and sensitization patterns.

(3) Platts-Mills TAE, Commins SP. Emerging antigens involved in allergic responses. Current Opinion in Immunology. 2021.

(4) Chung CH, Mirakhur B, Chan E, et al. Cetuximab-induced anaphylaxis and IgE specific for galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose. New England Journal of Medicine. 2008;358:1109-1117.

Kennedy JL, Stallings AP, Platts-Mills TAE, et al. Galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose and delayed allergic reactions to mammalian meat. Current Allergy and Asthma Reports. 2013.

Wilson JM, Schuyler AJ, Workman L, et al. Investigation into the alpha-gal syndrome and associated cofactors. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. 2019.

The 2026 Oslo Freedom Forum was held in Oslo from June 1–3, 2026. It was organized by the Human Rights Foundation and carried the theme “Dismantling Dictatorship.”

There, on June 2, 2026, Telegram Founder Pavel Durov spoke about how the loss of personal freedom is destroying Western Civilization.

Please listen or watch:

The title of Pavel Durov’s 2026 Oslo Freedom Forum talk was:

“Communication Technology and the Struggle for Freedom”.

It was delivered at the Oslo Freedom Forum on June 1–3, 2026, and focused on digital freedom, censorship, surveillance, and the increasing pressure that governments in both authoritarian and democratic countries are placing on online communications platforms. The Titanic analogy and his warnings about Europe’s gradual loss of civil liberties came from this address.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov drew a striking comparison between the passengers aboard the Titanic and modern Europeans watching their freedoms disappear in slow motion

“The Titanic did not sink all at once, ” Durov observed. “Most passengers remained calm because they did not yet understand what was happening. Today, we find ourselves in a similar situation. Our ship has already hit the iceberg. We have already begun to sink, and many people have not even realized it. I am talking about the ship of our personal freedoms.”

Durov went on to recount his own experiences dealing with government pressure, fraud, and political corruption across Russia, the European Union, and France. His broader point was that censorship and state control rarely arrive as a dramatic event. They advance incrementally, justified as necessary, reasonable, or temporary, until citizens wake up to discover that rights once taken for granted have quietly disappeared.

He pointed in particular to the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, where authorities have dramatically expanded enforcement actions tied to online speech.

Thousands of people are now investigated or arrested each year in Britain over social media posts. Across parts of Europe, expressing an unpopular political opinion online can result in fines, police visits, prosecution, or even imprisonment. In Germany, for example, citizens have faced legal penalties for speech that government officials deem politically unacceptable.

The warning Durov is offering is not really about social media. It is about the tendency of free societies to assume that freedom is permanent. History suggests otherwise. Rights are rarely abolished in a single act. More often, they are eroded one exception, one emergency, and one “reasonable restriction” at a time, until the iceberg is visible to everyone, and by then it is too late to change course.

Executive Summary

America’s chronic disease crisis did not emerge by accident. It was, in part, the predictable consequence of a food system shaped by government policy.

Beginning in the 1970s, federal agricultural programs encouraged the large-scale production of a small number of subsidized commodity crops, particularly corn and soybeans. Those subsidies helped make refined carbohydrates, corn sweeteners, industrial seed oils, and highly processed foods some of the cheapest calories in human history. For fifty years, Americans have been told this was a triumph of efficiency.

This essay argues that the apparent cheapness of modern food is, to a significant extent, an accounting illusion.

Some of the low cost reflect genuine advances in productivity. But much of it reflects costs that have been shifted elsewhere: onto taxpayers through subsidies, onto future generations through the depletion of soil and water resources, and onto society as a whole through the rising burden of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic illnesses.

The result is a system that often appears efficient only because it excludes some of its highest costs from the price tag.

Drawing on Austrian-school economics, this essay argues that the problem is not simply industrial agriculture itself, nor is the solution a new form of centralized planning. The problem is a food economy built on distorted price signals. When prices are manipulated, producers respond rationally, consumers respond rationally, and the resulting outcomes can still be profoundly unhealthy.

The alternative is not a government mandate for local food, regenerative farming, or any other preferred model. The alternative is to restore honest price signals by removing subsidies, enforcing liability for environmental damage, reducing regulatory barriers that favor scale, and expanding transparency so consumers can make informed choices.

The central question is straightforward: if food prices reflected their true costs, including the costs now shifted onto public health, the environment, and taxpayers, would Americans eat the way they do today?

The essay below suggests the answer is no.

Get Big or Get Out

In 1971, Earl Butz left the board of Ralston Purina to become Secretary of Agriculture, and within a few years, he had rewritten the operating logic of American farming. His advice to farmers was to plant “fencerow to fencerow,” and his counsel to those who could not expand was blunter still: “get big or get out” (1).

The phrase was folksy. The policy behind it was not.

The New Deal programs that had once paid farmers to restrain production were redirected toward maximizing it, and the federal government committed itself to backstopping the price of a short list of storable commodities, corn and soybeans foremost among them. Every operator in the country received the same signal: grow as much of these crops as the land will bear, expand or be absorbed, and the Treasury will cover the difference. Butz, in the end, did not so much replace the New Deal as redirect it toward a different objective.

This was central planning, though it never used the word. It did not nationalize a single acre or impose a Soviet-style output quota. It did something quieter and, judged by the standards of the Austrian school of economic analysis, more corrosive. It reached into the price system and bent it.

The consequences of that distortion reach far beyond the farm gate, and they are the real subject of this essay. The policy did not merely favor large producers over small ones. It helped determine what Americans would eat. By artificially cheapening a narrow band of storable commodities above all else, it cheapened refined carbohydrates, corn-derived sweeteners, and the industrial seed oils and feedlot protein made from the surplus. In doing so, it made the engineered, calorie-dense, nutrient-poor product the rational commercial default for everyone who processes and sells food.

Half a century later, we treat the result as the natural condition of food, a baseline against which any alternative appears expensive and quaint. It is nothing of the kind. It is the downstream effect of specific decisions made by specific people in the 1970s, and the bill for those decisions is now arriving in a form few could predict or bothered to tally at the time: an epidemic of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and the cardiovascular disease that follows. The resulting burden is helping to bankrupt public accounts while sustaining a pharmaceutical and medical complex whose business model is the lifelong management, rather than the cure, of conditions the food system helps create.

To question the food is therefore to question the policy. To question the policy is to reopen assumptions that two generations have been taught to accept without examination. That is the purpose of what follows.

A Central Plan That Did Not Call Itself One

The coalition that produced the Butz settlement was not a free-market coalition, whatever its later defenders have claimed. It joined a mid-century progressive conviction, inherited from the New Deal and amplified by Cold War ambition, that an imperial American state bore a duty to feed the world, with a set of financial and industrial interests that stood to profit from consolidation. Grain traders preferred volume. The implement manufacturers preferred the large operator, who would finance a new combine every few seasons, over the smallholder, who would not.

The banks preferred the collateral of a thousand contiguous acres to the diffuse credit of a hundred mixed farms. The moral language of abundance and the material language of margin pointed in the same direction, toward scale, and the policy followed.

An Austrian-school economist has no quarrel with bigness as such. Scale that emerges from voluntary exchange and survives the test of profit and loss is simply efficiency made visible, and there is nothing to object to in it. The objection is narrower and more serious: not bigness, but bigness manufactured by subsidy and sustained by distorted prices. In that environment, neither managers, investors, nor policymakers can reliably distinguish genuine productivity from political favoritism, because the market's measuring stick has been bent.

What Austrian-School Economics Claims

Ludwig von Mises established the point a century ago, in his demonstration that, by definition and structure, a socialist commonwealth (including European or Bernie-style “democratic socialism”) cannot calculate true costs (2). Without market prices for the means of production, for the land, labor and machinery that go into making things, the planner has no way to know whether any given use of resources creates wealth or destroys it. Prices are not arbitrary tags. They are the distilled, dispersed knowledge of everyone who has ever bid for or offered a thing, and they are the only instrument by which a society discovers what its scarce resources are actually worth in their competing uses.

The Butz system did not abolish prices. It corrupted a subset of them, which was and is enough to do real damage. When the state alters the effective price of corn through deficiency payments, target prices, and subsidized crop insurance, it does not merely transfer income to corn growers. It falsifies the signal on which every downstream decision depends: the decision of what to plant, where, by what method, for whom. A nation that pours fertilizer onto sixty million acres of one grain does so because the price says to, and the price says to because the state has disconnected that price from the underlying realities of supply, demand, and scarcity.

Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on markets and knowledge, deepened the argument by locating the relevant knowledge where it actually lives (3). The knowledge that matters in agriculture is overwhelmingly local and tacit: the drainage of a particular field, the frost pocket at the bottom of a particular slope, the rotation that suits a particular soil.

No central authority (or government bureaucracy) can possess this knowledge, and the great virtue of a functioning price system is that it does not need to. It lets those on the ground act on what only they know. Industrial monocropping inverts this. It applies a uniform recipe of purchased inputs across radically heterogeneous land, precisely because the subsidized commodity price has overwhelmed the local signal that would have counseled otherwise.

And beneath both arguments sits the deepest Austrian-school commitment of all, the one most relevant to the healthy-food agenda: consumer sovereignty (4). In an unhampered market, the consumer is the final authority. Production is not an end in itself; it is the servant of consumption, and the entrepreneur who misjudges what consumers want is corrected by loss.

The Butz model severed this link. It set production as the goal and the consumer as an afterthought, to be supplied with whatever abundance the subsidy produced, and then to be sold, through a second industry of marketing (and its cousin, government propaganda), the appetite to consume it.

Where Bigness Genuinely Won

The industrial model achieved real and substantial gains. The division of labor, mechanization, plant breeding, and specialization raised yields to levels that would have astonished a farmer of 1940. The real price of calories fell. The fraction of the American household budget spent on food dropped to one of the lowest levels in human history, and the lowest on earth. Famine, the recurring companion of every prior agricultural civilization, vanished from the developed world. These are not small things, and the romantic localist who waves them away forfeits all credibility.

Productivity and policy are not the same thing, and they should not be confused. Some of the low prices consumers see at the grocery store are the result of genuine improvements in efficiency driven by specialization, technology, and capital investment. Some are the result of government subsidies that reduce market prices without reducing the underlying costs of production. Still others reflect costs that have been shifted elsewhere, onto taxpayers, future generations, rural communities, public health, or the environment.

The key question is how much of the system’s apparent success comes from real wealth creation and how much comes from transfers and deferred liabilities. Genuine efficiency creates wealth. Subsidies redistribute wealth. Unpaid costs represent the consumption of capital that does not appear on a balance sheet. Distinguishing between these categories is essential to understanding the true economics of modern agriculture.

The Unaccounted Ledger

The standard term for this third category is “externality,” but the concept deserves careful treatment. The conventional approach, rooted in the Pigovian tradition, assumes that experts can measure the social cost of an activity, calculate the appropriate corrective tax, and impose it from above.

The Austrian school has long challenged this assumption. As Hayek argued, no individual or institution possesses the knowledge necessary to calculate and manage the countless interactions that make up a modern economy. No one can accurately determine the total cost of the industrial food system to society and then engineer the perfect correction through regulation or taxation. The belief that this can be done is itself a form of central planning (5).

The Austrian perspective, particularly as developed by Rothbard, approaches the problem differently (6). These are not market failures that require an all-knowing regulator. They are often failures to define and enforce property rights. When a producer contaminates an aquifer with nitrates, pumps groundwater faster than it can be replenished, or allows agricultural chemicals to enter a neighbor’s well without bearing responsibility for the damage, the cost has not disappeared. It has simply been shifted to someone else who did not consent to bear it.

Under those circumstances, food appears cheaper than it really is. The market price reflects only part of the cost of production, while the remaining costs are imposed on nearby landowners, local communities, taxpayers, or future generations.

From this perspective, the solution is not to empower planners to calculate and impose the “correct” price. The solution is to restore clear property rights and meaningful liability, so that those who cause harm bear the cost of that harm. When costs remain with the party that generates them, prices become more accurate signals of economic reality.

This distinction is important for any serious discussion of food, agriculture, and health. The objective is not to determine what prices should be. It is to remove the distortions, both subsidies and uncompensated harms, so that prices can emerge from voluntary exchange and reflect the true costs of production.

Austrian capital theory helps explain a cost that is often overlooked in discussions of modern agriculture. The industrial farming model frequently treats soil fertility and groundwater reserves as current income when they are actually forms of capital.

Continuous monocropping can reduce organic matter, disrupt soil biology, and deplete mineral reserves over time, replacing natural fertility with purchased fertilizers and other inputs. Likewise, large-scale irrigation in many regions draws groundwater from aquifers faster than natural recharge can replace it. These practices can support high yields and strong financial returns in the short term, but they do so by drawing down productive assets that took decades, centuries, or even millennia to accumulate.

Ludwig von Mises, one of the founders of the Austrian school of economics, described this process as capital consumption and argued that it is one of the most dangerous economic illusions because it creates the appearance of prosperity while the underlying productive assets are being depleted (7). A business can appear profitable while consuming the assets that enable future production. The same principle applies to agriculture. A food system may appear highly productive and efficient while steadily reducing the soil fertility and water resources on which that productivity depends.

The resulting food may be inexpensive at the checkout counter, but the price does not reflect the full cost of replacing depleted groundwater, rebuilding degraded soils, or adapting to the loss of these resources. Those costs remain largely absent from market transactions today, even though they will eventually have to be borne by someone.

Any serious accounting of the economics of food must therefore consider not only annual production and profits, but also whether the underlying stock of natural capital is being maintained, enhanced, or consumed.

The Cost Paid in Bodies

The largest item on the ledger, however, is written neither in soil nor in water. It is written in the health of the people the system feeds. The commodity programs did not make all food cheaper. They made a particular kind of food cheaper: refined carbohydrates, corn-derived sweeteners, industrial seed oils pressed largely from soybeans, and the inexpensive feedlot protein that commodity surpluses helped support. These ingredients became the foundation of the modern processed-food industry.

They also became some of the least expensive calories available. Food manufacturers responded accordingly, building products around the cheapest and most abundant inputs. Over the same half-century, rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and other chronic diseases rose dramatically (8). While many factors contributed to these trends, no serious analysis can ignore the role of a food system that consistently made highly processed, calorie-dense foods abundant and inexpensive. The structure of that food system did not emerge by accident. It was shaped by policy.

This is where the Austrian distinction between internal and external costs becomes important. Part of the cost is borne by the individual consumer, and a free society must preserve individuals' right to make their own choices, including poor ones. But several factors complicate that simple picture.

First, the price signals consumers receive have been influenced by decades of subsidies that favored certain commodities and the products made from them. Second, many of the long-term health consequences of diet are difficult for consumers to evaluate in real time. The effects often emerge only after years or decades. Third, and most important economically, the costs of chronic disease are not borne solely by the individual. Through Medicare, Medicaid, public programs, employer-sponsored insurance, and pooled risk, a substantial portion of those costs is distributed across society.

As a result, the apparent affordability of many foods reflects only the price paid at the checkout counter. The downstream costs appear elsewhere in the economy, particularly in the healthcare system.

The distortion extends beyond agriculture. Price signals influence where capital, research, and entrepreneurial effort are directed. Over the past several decades, a vast medical and pharmaceutical infrastructure has emerged to manage chronic diseases associated with obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and related metabolic disorders. The incentives of that system naturally favor the ongoing treatment of disease, because treatment generates continuing demand for products and services.

This is not a conspiracy. It is how markets respond to the incentives they face. Public policy helped make calorie-dense, highly processed foods inexpensive and abundant. Public health programs then assumed much of the cost of treating the resulting disease burden. Taxpayers support both ends of the system: first through agricultural programs and again through healthcare spending. The result is a large-scale misallocation of resources that becomes visible only when the entire chain of costs is considered together.

The Myth of Cheap Food

So much for the indictment. The harder question, and the one the healthy-food movement must answer if it hopes to be more than a critique, is whether a more decentralized, local, and diversified food system can actually work at scale, and at what cost. The case is stronger in some areas than others, but it is strongest where the hidden costs of the current system are greatest.

The advantages are several. First, for perishable, high-value foods such as produce, dairy, meat, and eggs, shorter supply chains reduce spoilage, handling, refrigeration, and transportation costs. A tomato grown forty miles away generally requires fewer resources than one shipped across the continent.

Second, diversified farms can often substitute management and biological processes for purchased inputs. Crop rotation, cover crops, integrated livestock, and other regenerative practices can rebuild soil fertility while reducing dependence on fertilizers, pesticides, and other petrochemical inputs.

Third, local producers can apply local knowledge. As Hayek observed, knowledge is dispersed. Farmers who understand their own soils, climate, water resources, and markets can often make decisions that no centralized system can replicate efficiently.

Finally, diversified local agriculture tends to produce the nutrient-dense foods that support health rather than the commodity surpluses that become sweeteners, industrial seed oils, and highly processed foods. The distinction matters because the health costs associated with those products are among the largest hidden costs in the current system.

One common argument for local food should be rejected because it rests on the same error this essay has criticized throughout. The claim that local food is inherently superior because it travels fewer miles elevates a single measurable variable into a proxy for total cost. Transportation is only a small portion of the resources embodied in most foods, roughly a tenth by conventional accounting.9 That fact is often used to dismiss local food, but it points to a broader lesson. Transportation miles, carbon footprints, and energy audits each measure only a fraction of the picture. None captures the full cost of production.

The larger costs are often the hardest to measure: depleted soil, contaminated water, lost biodiversity, and the long-term health consequences of poor nutrition. No single metric can accurately account for all of them. The true cost of food is not something planners calculate in advance. It emerges only when prices are allowed to reflect the real costs of production rather than subsidies and cost-shifting.

The strongest objection to decentralization is that it often costs more, particularly for storable commodity crops. Large operations benefit from real economies of scale in equipment, processing, transportation, and regulatory compliance. A combine, grain elevator, slaughterhouse, or pasteurization facility becomes more efficient as output increases.

Those efficiencies are real. The question is whether the prices they produce reflect the full cost of production. Throughout this essay, the argument has been that they often do not. Some costs are shifted to the land through soil depletion and groundwater extraction. Others are shifted to watersheds through runoff and contamination. Still others are shifted to the healthcare system through diet-related chronic disease.

When those costs are excluded, industrial food appears inexpensive. When they are included, the calculation changes substantially. The apparent advantage of many commodity-derived foods depends in part on costs that are paid elsewhere and later.

This leads to a more realistic view of the alternative. The goal is not to replace every large farm with a farmers’ market or to produce every calorie locally. Staple grains will continue to be grown, processed, and stored at scale. The question is whether the current corn-and-soy commodity system deserves the privileged position it occupies today.

That system’s apparent advantage rests heavily on subsidies, cost shifting, and a pricing structure that does not fully reflect its environmental and health consequences. By contrast, decentralized and diversified agriculture is particularly well suited to producing the nutrient-dense foods that form the foundation of a healthy diet. Its potential market is therefore as large as the share of the national diet that consumers choose to move away from highly processed, commodity-derived foods.

The central question is whether that alternative can compete when the comparison is made honestly and the policy distortions are removed. There is good reason to believe it can. The next question is how such a transition might occur.

Demand, Not Decree

The healthy-food movement could make a serious mistake by responding to one centralized system with another. Replacing the Butz model with a new set of mandates, subsidies, and politically favored industries would not solve the underlying problem. It would simply substitute one distortion for another.

The flaw in the current system is not that the wrong people are making the decisions. The flaw is that decisions are being driven by political incentives rather than consumer demand and market signals. Subsidies for favored forms of agriculture distort prices just as surely as subsidies for commodity crops. They invite lobbying, regulatory capture, and the diversion of resources toward whatever qualifies for government support rather than what consumers actually want.

The alternative is to restore the forces that the current system suppresses: consumer choice and entrepreneurial competition.

The economist Israel Kirzner described markets as discovery processes. Entrepreneurs identify opportunities that planners cannot anticipate, test them in the marketplace, and succeed or fail according to whether consumers value what they provide. That process is already visible in regenerative agriculture, direct-to-consumer food sales, community-supported agriculture, and the growth of regional processing. None of these developments emerged from a national plan. They emerged because consumers increasingly want food that is healthier, more transparent, and more trustworthy.

The role of policy should therefore be limited and structural. The objective is not to direct outcomes but to remove distortions that prevent consumers and producers from responding to one another.

Four reforms stand out.

• First, stop subsidizing the products policymakers claim they want less of. Commodity programs that favor monocropped corn and soy sit at the center of the current system. Removing those subsidies does not require new mandates or new bureaucracies. It simply allows relative prices to reflect actual demand rather than government preference.

• Second, restore regulatory parity. Much of the apparent inefficiency of small-scale agriculture is the product of regulatory structures that impose high fixed compliance costs regardless of scale. Requirements that are manageable for a multinational processor can be prohibitive for a local producer. The result is an artificial advantage for large firms. Reforms such as the PRIME Act, which would allow states greater authority over local meat processing for local markets, are not subsidies or special favors. They remove barriers that disproportionately burden smaller operations.11

• Third, restore liability. Producers who contaminate groundwater, degrade neighboring property, or impose measurable environmental harm should bear the cost of those actions. This is not a new principle. It is one of the oldest functions of property law. While legislative reform is often slow and politically constrained, courts already possess the tools to adjudicate claims involving nuisance, trespass, and demonstrable harm. When damages are assigned to those responsible, costs that are currently shifted onto others begin to reappear where they belong: in the price of production.

• Fourth, improve transparency through private certification, labeling, and reputation. Food is a classic example of a product whose most important qualities are difficult for consumers to verify directly. Consumers cannot easily determine how food was produced or what its long-term health consequences may be. The answer is not a government definition of what constitutes “healthy” food. The answer is a competitive marketplace of certification systems, trusted brands, independent testing, and transparent labeling that allows consumers to make informed choices.

Taken together, these reforms share a common characteristic. None requires Washington to design the food system it prefers. None requires new national mandates. None depends on government planners determining the correct diet, the correct farming method, or the correct price.

They simply remove distortions and allow consumers, producers, and entrepreneurs to discover the answers for themselves.

Conclusion

What is at stake is not a preference for farmers’ markets or a nostalgic vision of rural life. It is the burden of chronic disease and the enormous public expense that follows from it. Obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and related metabolic disorders have become defining features of modern American health. No healthcare system can solve those problems if the foods most associated with them remain among the cheapest and most heavily promoted options available. The question of whether a different food economy can sustain itself is therefore also the question of whether the nation can stop paying for the consequences of the current one.

A more decentralized food system is economically viable, but its ultimate scope should be determined by honest prices rather than government policy. Commodity agriculture may continue to play an important role, particularly for certain grains and storage crops. What is far less clear is how much of the current system would survive in its present form if subsidies were removed, environmental costs were borne by those who create them, and the health consequences of commodity-derived foods were fully accounted for. Under those conditions, decentralized and diversified agriculture would compete on a far more level field than it does today.

Whether that opportunity can be fully realized depends on correcting distortions that result from policy rather than from market competition. Remove commodity subsidies, and industrial products lose an artificial advantage. Restore liability for damage to soil and water, and costs that are currently shifted to others return to the producer responsible for them. Achieve regulatory parity, and smaller producers can compete on their merits rather than on their ability to absorb compliance costs. Expand transparency and consumers gain the information needed to make informed choices.

Under those conditions, decentralized agriculture requires no special protection, no new subsidy, and no central plan. It will expand only to the extent that consumers value what it produces and are willing to pay for it. That is exactly how a market is supposed to work.

This is where Austrian-school economics and the healthy-food movement either align or diverge. The goal cannot be to achieve a government-defined percentage of local food production or to replace one agricultural plan with another. The goal is simpler and more durable: prices should reflect actual costs, and consumers should be free to choose among competing alternatives.

If food prices reflected the full costs of production, including the costs now shifted to taxpayers, ecosystems, and future healthcare spending, the American food economy would look very different. The resulting system would not be healthier because policymakers designed it to be. It would be healthier because consumers, responding to honest prices and accurate information, chose it for themselves.

References

1. Earl L. Butz served as Secretary of Agriculture from 1971 to 1976. His exhortations to plant “fencerow to fencerow” and to “get big or get out” are widely associated with his tenure and with the production-maximizing policy turn it represented.

2. Ludwig von Mises, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920); the argument is developed at length in Human Action (1949).

3. Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945).

4. On consumer sovereignty as the organizing principle of the market, see Mises, Human Action, on the market as a process directed by consumers through profit and loss.

5. Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Pretence of Knowledge,” Nobel Memorial Prize lecture (1974); see also The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988).

6. Murray N. Rothbard, “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution,” Cato Journal 2, no. 1 (1982).

7. Mises, Human Action, on capital consumption: the liquidation of capital mistaken for income, which resembles prosperity for as long as the stock lasts.

8. The sustained rise in American adult and childhood obesity and in type 2 diabetes prevalence dates from the late 1970s onward, the period following the commodity-policy shift and the rapid substitution of corn-derived sweeteners and refined, ultra-processed foods into the American diet. The relative causal weight of diet remains debated in particulars, but the association between the cheapened commodity diet and metabolic disease is extensively documented. Confirm specific prevalence and cost figures against current CDC and USDA sources before publication.

9. Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews, “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States,” Environmental Science & Technology 42, no. 10 (2008). The study attributes roughly 11 percent of household food greenhouse-gas emissions to transportation and about 4 percent to final delivery, with the method of production dominating the remainder. Verify the exact figures against the source before publication.

10. Israel M. Kirzner, Competition and Entrepreneurship (University of Chicago Press, 1973).

11. The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (2011); on local meat processing, the proposed PRIME Act (Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption Act).

“Homesteading for Health” is available for pre-order, and this includes the audio version!

The latest chapter in the ongoing Southern Poverty Law Center saga reads less like a civil rights success story and more like a screenplay rejected by Hollywood for being too implausible.

According to a New York Post report based on a federal superseding indictment, Heidi Beirich, who served as director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, allegedly directed approximately $1.2 million in donor funds to a confidential source deeply embedded within the neo-Nazi National Alliance organization.

The twist? Prosecutors allege that the neo-Nazi informant was also her lover, with the two sharing a home and joint bank accounts. Roughly $140,000 of SPLC money allegedly flowed into those accounts and was used for their personal expenses. Ergo: this woman paid a neo-Nazi informant, who was also her boyfriend, and then pocketed the money for her own expenses. That would be called theft or money laundering. The question remains: Was SPLC aware of the fraud?

Did you read that right? Yes, you did. A senior official at SPLC had (has) a “neo-Nazi” boyfriend- who was/is a neo-Nazi and was embedded in a neo-Nazi hate group. She paid him money, which was deposited into a joint bank account, and then helped spend it…

The indictment alleges that the neo-Nazi source remained active within the organization while receiving payments and that the arrangement continued for years.

The broader federal case is even more remarkable. The Department of Justice has accused the SPLC of paying millions of dollars to informants inside various extremist organizations while simultaneously using those same organizations as fundraising targets. Prosecutors allege that more than $4 million ultimately flowed to members and leaders of white supremacist and Klan-affiliated groups.

The irony is almost too perfect. Imagine donating money to fight neo-Nazis only to discover your contribution may have helped pay the mortgage of one.

And according to the indictment, it wasn't always some low-level skinhead handing out flyers at a county fair. One of the alleged recipients, identified as F-3, was reportedly an Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America. That is roughly equivalent to discovering that your anti-smoking charity had secretly put the Marlboro Man on retainer.

Donors likely assumed their checks were funding investigations, research, and exposés. They probably did not envision helping a Klan leader make his truck payment. If these allegations prove true, the SPLC may have stumbled upon the most innovative diversity and inclusion program in nonprofit history: bringing extremists and anti-extremists together through the healing power of shared financial interests. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Could the SPLC lose its nonprofit status? Yes. Will it happen automatically because of an indictment? No. The real question is whether prosecutors can prove that what the SPLC calls "intelligence gathering" was actually donor fraud, private benefit, or something inconsistent with a charitable mission. If the government's indictment holds up, the IRS may eventually have to answer a rather awkward question: how much money can a nonprofit funnel to Klan leaders, neo-Nazis, and extremist insiders before it stops looking like a charity and starts looking like a very confusing venture capital fund for extremist organizations?

For decades, the SPLC has built its reputation as America’s premier watchdog of hate groups. The government’s case now raises an uncomfortable question: At what point does infiltrating an organization become subsidizing it? Cause it sure seems like SPLC crossed that line a long time ago.

The story also highlights a problem that extends beyond the SPLC. Entire industries can emerge around identifying threats, monitoring threats, fundraising against threats, and publicizing threats. The temptation is obvious. If your business model depends on finding monsters under the bed, there is always an incentive to make sure the monsters never completely disappear or to even create monsters that you can then expose. Another self-licking ice cream cone.

One thing is already clear: if this were a conservative organization accused of funneling donor money through a romantic relationship to a neo-Nazi operative, the media would be running twenty-four-hour special coverage.

We may have witnessed the emergence of a curious new institution: a privately funded domestic intelligence operation with no badge, no warrant authority, no public oversight, and a marketing department.

At a minimum, Americans should be asking why a nonprofit organization was conducting activities that seem increasingly difficult to distinguish from those of a government informant network. If the SPLC wishes to function as an intelligence service, then perhaps it should be prepared to accept the scrutiny that comes with that role.

The upcoming federal trial is not simply about informants, donor funds, or accounting practices. It is about accountability. According to prosecutors, donor money from a tax-exempt nonprofit may have flowed to Klan leaders, neo-Nazi organizers, and other extremists through a network of paid sources.

Regardless of the outcome, the discovery process is likely to be full of twists, turns, and revelations that even Netflix might reject as unrealistic. And Americans may finally get answers to questions that have gone unasked for decades: How does the SPLC operate? Who does it work with? Who does it answer to? And how much power should any private organization have to monitor, label, and influence the political lives of others?

The bigger question remains: if SPLC-funded individuals were involved in criminal activity, does the organization's responsibility end when the check clears? Informants are one thing. Financially supporting people who commit crimes is another. Somewhere between intelligence gathering and underwriting bad behavior lies a line, and this case may force a jury to decide where that line is.

For years, the SPLC acted as investigator, prosecutor, judge, and jury.

Because somewhere along the way, “monitoring extremism” appears to have evolved into running a small spy agency.

Then there is the case of Heidi Beirich, who did not just creep under a rock after SPLC

After leaving the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2020, Heidi Beirich co-founded the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), an organization that has effectively continued much of the same anti-extremism work under a new banner. A left-wing extremist group that is collecting large donations to expose “right-wing” extremism.

According to the organization’s most recent IRS filings, annual revenue for fiscal year 2025 was approximately $965,000, almost entirely derived from grants and charitable contributions. The organization reported roughly $1.07 million in net assets.

What is notable is not the size of the organization, but who funds it. Public records indicate support from a collection of well-known philanthropic foundations, including Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Democracy Fund, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and others. The usual round-up of well-funded, liberal foundations, nonprofits, advocacy groups, and grant-makers that often support similar causes, attend the same conferences, and cite one another's work, and move money through many of the same institutional channels.

In other words, GPAHE is not primarily supported by thousands of small-dollar donors. It appears to operate largely on foundation money.

That may become relevant as the federal case involving the SPLC unfolds.

One of the more interesting questions is whether any of the facts developed during discovery will spill over into public scrutiny of organizations that grew out of the SPLC ecosystem. Discovery has a funny way of doing that. Lawyers start asking questions. Documents get produced. Emails surface. Depositions are taken. People who have spent years asking questions of others suddenly find themselves answering questions instead.

To be clear, GPAHE has not been charged with any crime, nor has Heidi Beirich been charged in connection with the federal case. But given her prominent role in both organizations, it is difficult to imagine that journalists, donors, and investigators will not be paying close attention. And that the DoJ isn’t investigating her as well.

The discovery process alone may prove fascinating. After all, when the people who built careers investigating everyone else suddenly become the subject of investigation themselves, surprises are almost guaranteed.

And as taxpayers have learned repeatedly over the years, intelligence operations have a tendency to grow, expand, and justify their own existence. Apparently, that principle may apply to nonprofits as well.

Yet, much of the liberal press seems oddly uninterested.

Apparently, some hate groups are more special than others.

Back in 2023, I wrote about berberine after hearing my friend and colleague Dr. Paul Marik discuss repurposed therapies. At the time, berberine was still relatively unknown outside of integrative medicine circles. Today, it has become one of the most talked-about supplements in the world.

In typical fashion, the conversation has become polarized. Some social media influencers now market berberine as “Nature’s Ozempic.” Others dismiss it as little more than internet hype. As is often the case, the truth lies somewhere between those extremes.

The comparison to Ozempic is understandable. We are living through a period in which GLP-1 agonists such as semaglutide and tirzepatide have become some of the most profitable pharmaceutical products ever developed. Weight loss has become a national obsession. Every new compound that appears to influence body weight is immediately compared to these drugs.

Of course, the real culprits are a sedentary lifestyle and a culture that disdains physical labor, along with an abundance of highly addictive, ultraprocessed foods - full of carbs and sugar. But there it is. GLP-1 agonists are here to stay and are one way to combat the epidemic of metabolic disease that has overtaken America.

But I digress. Back to berberine as a “natural” Ozempic. The comparison is misleading.

Berberine is not Ozempic. It does not produce the dramatic appetite suppression or rapid weight loss associated with modern GLP-1 therapies. It is not a pharmaceutical agent designed to target a specific receptor. Rather, it is a naturally occurring plant alkaloid with a remarkably broad range of biological effects that influence metabolism through multiple pathways.

Berberine is found in several plants, including barberry, goldenseal, and Oregon grape. Traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine have used it for centuries, primarily for gastrointestinal infections and digestive disorders. Modern research, however, has revealed a much broader range of biological activity for this natural product.

One reason berberine has attracted so much attention is that it appears to activate one of the body’s central metabolic control systems: AMP-activated protein kinase, or AMPK.

AMPK functions as a cellular energy sensor. When activated, it promotes glucose uptake, improves insulin sensitivity, enhances fat metabolism, reduces hepatic glucose production, and helps regulate energy balance throughout the body. These effects have obvious implications for many of the chronic diseases that now dominate modern medicine.

Since my original article, multiple reviews and meta-analyses have continued to support berberine’s role in improving metabolic health. The evidence suggests that berberine can modestly reduce fasting blood glucose, improve insulin sensitivity, lower LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, and support modest weight loss in some individuals.

• The effects are not dramatic.

• They are also remarkably consistent.

• This distinction matters.

Medicine often falls into the trap of assuming that bigger effects are always better effects. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they are not. Metabolic health is not simply a matter of losing weight. It involves a complex interplay between insulin sensitivity, inflammation, mitochondrial function, lipid metabolism, gut health, physical activity, and nutrition.

Berberine appears to touch many of these systems simultaneously.

In many respects, it behaves more like a naturally derived cousin of metformin than a GLP-1 agonist.

Metformin is a prescription drug, best known as a first-line treatment for type 2 diabetes. It lowers blood sugar by reducing glucose production in the liver, decreasing absorption of sugar from food, and improving the body's response to insulin.

This is one reason researchers continue to investigate berberine’s potential role in prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), and polycystic ovarian syndrome.

But let me digress (again):

As someone who has spent much of a career evaluating therapeutics, I find compounds such as berberine particularly interesting because they remind us that biology rarely operates through a single pathway. This is also true of ivermectin, which is the primary reason the FDA has had such a hard time approving it for various infectious disease indications.

It is the reason given by the FDA to stop my team and me from conducting clinical trials on the use of ivermectin for COVID. We were told that, first, we would have to prove the mechanism of action of ivermectin against COVID in tissue culture. A truly impossible task and a completely absurd FDA edict. Ivermectin was already an approved drug. Furthermore, we have extensively documented that ivermectin acts through multiple pathways to reduce disease symptoms.

Below was the FDA’s response to us and highlights why it takes so long to get anything through the FDA. BTW- we actually did not need the FDA’s approval for this clinical trial, but the US military, which was funding this work, had it as a requirement for continued funding.

The FDA official in charge of writing this response in April of 2021 was Dr. Sumathi Nambiar. Guess where she went once she left the FDA, somewhere around 2024?

And so it goes. If you don’t upset the apple cart and piss off big pharma while at the FDA, you will be blessed with a high-paying second career soon after departure.

We were also told that to conduct clinical trials using already-licensed drugs (repurposed drugs), we would have to include remdesivir as the standard of care. And that means we would have to conduct toxicology studies on the combination of remdesivir and ivermectin. This demand, despite the fact that remdesivir was already known by the FDA’s own reporting not to have any mortality benefit. In fact, in late 2020, the WHO's large multinational Solidarity Trial determined that remdesivir had little or no effect on overall mortality, initiation of ventilation, or duration of hospital stay.

Again, the FDA imposed an impossible standard during a fast-moving pandemic for drugs that are already licensed, safe, and effective.

In retrospect, it was clear that the FDA’s decision to block, in a timely manner, the main clinical trials for the use of ivermectin and other repurposed drugs in the USA was about stopping any treatment that would conflict with the economic drivers behind the vaccines that came at us like a freight train.

However, this example shows just how impossibly complex these issues are.

The reductionist mindset that dominates modern drug development seeks highly specific targets. Block one receptor. Activate one enzyme. Modify one signaling pathway. If you can’t prove that, the FDA will not allow a clinical trial to proceed.

Human physiology is rarely that simple.

Berberine appears to influence metabolic regulation, inflammatory signaling, oxidative stress, mitochondrial function, and the gut microbiome. Those systems interact continuously. The result may be a series of individually modest effects that collectively become clinically meaningful.

The Microbiome Connection

One of the most fascinating developments since I first wrote about berberine involves its interaction with the gut microbiome.

Over the last several years, evidence has continued to accumulate suggesting that berberine alters microbial populations within the gastrointestinal tract. Some investigators now believe that a substantial portion of its metabolic effects may be mediated through changes in gut ecology rather than through direct systemic absorption.

This hypothesis makes sense. Berberine has notoriously poor oral bioavailability. Yet despite limited absorption, it consistently produces metabolic effects in both animal and human studies.

The gut microbiome may help explain that apparent paradox.

Increasingly, researchers are recognizing that metabolism, immunity, inflammation, and the microbiome operate as an interconnected system rather than as isolated biological compartments. Berberine appears to function within that interconnected network.

The more we learn about the microbiome, the more we appreciate how many chronic diseases may be linked to disturbances in this ecosystem. Obesity, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, autoimmune disorders, neurodegenerative disease, and even some cancers have all been associated with alterations in gut microbial communities.

Whether berberine’s primary mechanism ultimately proves to be direct metabolic regulation, microbiome modulation, a combination of both, or another mechanism of action remains uncertain.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that the microbiome cannot be ignored.

Berberine and Cancer

One of the more intriguing developments since my original article involves the growing body of research examining berberine and cancer biology.

Whenever discussing cancer research, it is important to separate laboratory findings, animal studies, cancer prevention, and treatment of established disease. These categories are often blurred together in popular reporting, creating unrealistic expectations and unnecessary confusion.

The strongest human evidence involving berberine and cancer does not concern treatment.

It concerns prevention.

In 2020, investigators published a multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study involving more than 1,100 patients who had recently undergone removal of colorectal adenomas. These adenomas are precancerous lesions that can progress to colorectal cancer over time.

Patients receiving berberine experienced significantly fewer recurrent adenomas than those receiving a placebo.

The recurrence rate was approximately 36 percent in the berberine group versus 47 percent in the placebo group. In the world of cancer research, this is a very big deal.

That does not prove berberine prevents colorectal cancer. It does, however, represent one of the stronger human studies demonstrating that a relatively inexpensive natural compound can favorably influence a clinically relevant cancer-related endpoint.

Beyond colorectal adenomas, the cancer literature remains largely preclinical.

Researchers have reported that berberine influences numerous biological pathways associated with tumor growth and progression, including apoptosis, cell-cycle regulation, angiogenesis, inflammatory signaling, oxidative stress, cellular metabolism, and mitochondrial function.

Laboratory studies have demonstrated activity in models of breast cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, gastric cancer, and colorectal cancer.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of animal studies published in 2019 concluded that berberine consistently reduced tumor volume and tumor weight across multiple experimental models.

That finding is encouraging.

Cell cultures are not people. Mice are not people. Something the FDA still fails to understand. Many compounds that appear promising in preclinical cancer research ultimately fail in human trials.

The purpose of preclinical research is to identify signals worth pursuing. Berberine continues to generate those signals.

There is also growing interest in its potential role as an adjunctive therapy. Experimental studies suggest that berberine may increase sensitivity to certain chemotherapeutic agents and may help overcome mechanisms of drug resistance that frequently emerge during cancer treatment.

Whether those observations ultimately translate into meaningful clinical benefits remains to be determined.

For now, the most scientifically defensible conclusion is that berberine demonstrates credible anticancer activity deserving further investigation, while remaining far from a proven cancer therapy.

That said, taking berberine as an adjunctive therapy to other cancer treatments seems like a no-brainer. This is not medical advice, just an observation.

The Economics of Medical Research

The story of berberine also illustrates a larger problem within modern medicine.

At the same time that governments, insurers, and healthcare systems are spending tens of billions of dollars annually on GLP-1 agonists, relatively little funding is available to rigorously study inexpensive natural compounds such as berberine.

This is not because berberine lacks biological activity.

It is because berberine lacks patent protection.

Modern biomedical research is largely financed through a system built around intellectual property. Pharmaceutical companies can justify investing hundreds of millions of dollars in clinical trials when exclusive rights offer the potential for billions in future revenue.

The scientific consequences are significant.

A naturally occurring compound may demonstrate therapeutic promise across multiple disease categories and yet struggle to attract the funding necessary for definitive Phase III trials. The result is a peculiar form of scientific limbo. Evidence accumulates slowly. Small studies show benefit. Mechanistic studies identify plausible biological pathways. Researchers continue reporting encouraging findings. Yet the large-scale clinical trials required to change guidelines never materialize. Of course, the National Cancer Institute at NIH, as usual, appears to be asleep at the wheel. They have little interest in funding products without economic sponsors.

Then critics point to the absence of those trials as evidence that the therapy lacks merit.

This creates a self-reinforcing cycle.

Compounds with commercial potential attract funding, generate evidence, receive regulatory support, gain physician acceptance, and become standard of care. Compounds without commercial potential often remain trapped in a perpetual state of scientific uncertainty regardless of their biological promise.

To be clear, this is not an argument against GLP-1 drugs.

Semaglutide and tirzepatide represent important therapeutic advances. For many patients, these medications are genuinely life-changing. The clinical data supporting their effectiveness are impressive. Yes, there can be severe side-effects for some, but for others, these drugs are life-saving. Living with severe metabolic disease is eventually a death sentence and greatly affects quality of life. These drugs are giving many a new lease on life.

The question is whether our research priorities have become too narrowly focused on what can be monetized.

Obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver disease, neurodegenerative disorders, and even many forms of cancer share common metabolic roots. If an inexpensive natural compound demonstrates evidence of improving insulin sensitivity, reducing inflammation, altering the microbiome, improving lipid metabolism, and potentially reducing recurrence of precancerous lesions, should society not invest serious resources into determining its true clinical value?

One cannot help but wonder what the evidence base for berberine would look like if it carried a patent and a multibillion-dollar marketing budget?

• Would there now be dozens of large multicenter trials?

• Would physicians routinely prescribe it?

• Would treatment guidelines mention it?

• Would insurers reimburse it?

We cannot know the answers.

What we do know is that the amount of evidence available for a therapy often reflects the economic incentives behind studying it as much as the biological potential of the therapy itself.

That reality should make all of us a bit more cautious when equating “lack of evidence” with “lack of efficacy.”

Sometimes the missing evidence reflects not scientific failure, but market failure.

Berberine may ultimately prove to be modestly useful, highly useful, or only useful in select circumstances. The honest answer is that we still do not know. But we do know that it has already proven itself to be useful.

What we can say with confidence is that the question deserves far more investigation than it has received.

Safety and Quality Matter

Of course, berberine is not risk-free.

The most common adverse effects remain gastrointestinal. Constipation, diarrhea, bloating, and abdominal discomfort are all reported.

Berberine can also interact with prescription medications used to treat diabetes, hypertension, anticoagulation disorders, and other chronic conditions. Individuals taking prescription drugs should discuss supplementation with their healthcare provider before beginning use.

Quality control is another concern.

Unlike pharmaceuticals, dietary supplements are not subject to the same manufacturing standards. Independent testing has repeatedly demonstrated variability among commercial products. Choosing reputable manufacturers remains important.

Final Thoughts

Berberine is not a miracle drug.

It is not a substitute for proper nutrition, physical activity, restorative sleep, sunlight, social connection, and maintaining a healthy body composition.

It is not a replacement for good medical care.

However, the accumulated evidence suggests that it remains one of the more promising natural compounds available for supporting metabolic health. Its effects are biologically plausible, clinically relevant, and increasingly supported by a growing body of research.

The emerging data involving the microbiome, metabolic disease, and even cancer prevention only strengthen the case for continued investigation and use.

In an era when obesity, diabetes, fatty liver disease, and metabolic dysfunction have become defining public health challenges, therapies that safely improve metabolic resilience deserve serious attention.

Sometimes the most interesting therapies are not the newest, the most expensive, or the most heavily marketed.

Sometimes they have been sitting quietly in nature all along.

RWM/JGM

References

Cicero, Arrigo F. G., and Alessandro Colletti. “Berberine for the Treatment of Metabolic Disorders: A Comprehensive Review.” Nutrients 16, no. 2 (2024): 201–216.

Feng, Rui, Yao Shou, Jian Li, et al. “Efficacy and Safety of Berberine Alone for Several Metabolic Disorders: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Clinical Trials.” Frontiers in Pharmacology 14 (2023): 1198476.

Li, Yong, Jie Wang, Xin Zhang, et al. “Effect of Berberine on the Recurrence of Colorectal Adenomas: A Multicentre, Double-Blind, Randomised, Placebo-Controlled Study.” The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology 5, no. 3 (2020): 267–275.

Liu, Chao, Xiaoqing Zheng, and Yanfang Wang. “Berberine as a Potential Anticancer Agent: A Review of Molecular Mechanisms and Clinical Prospects.” Cancer Cell International 24, no. 1 (2024): 112.

Sun, Yan, Jing Li, et al. “The Antitumor Effect of Berberine in Animal Models: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” BMC Cancer 19 (2019): 589.

Wang, Yujie, Lin Zhao, and Rui Chen. “Berberine Modulates the Gut Microbiota and Improves Metabolic Homeostasis: Current Evidence and Future Perspectives.” Frontiers in Microbiology 15 (2024): 1364582.

Yu, Yan, and Xiaohua Zhang. “Berberine and Metabolic Syndrome: Molecular Mechanisms and Clinical Evidence.” Pharmacological Research 203 (2025): 107143.

Bernie Sanders just can’t help himself (true story):

Homesteading for Health by Drs. Malone

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Anthropic is a U.S.-based artificial intelligence company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives and researchers, including Dario Amodei, that develops the Claude family of AI models and focuses heavily on AI safety, alignment, and national security applications.

Anthropic's recent restrictions on public access to its most advanced AI systems for biological research reveal something far more significant than a debate about artificial intelligence.

• They reveal the emergence of a new doctrine.

• Powerful capabilities for the public will be restricted.

• Powerful capabilities for governments and approved institutions will continue.

• The justification is biosecurity.

According to Anthropic, its most advanced models demonstrate capabilities for sophisticated biological research. The company has cited concerns that these systems may assist with advanced experimental design, biological reasoning, and other activities that could be misused.

Powerful technologies create risks.

The argument being made is simple. These capabilities are supposedly far too dangerous for independent scientists, small laboratories, entrepreneurs, citizen researchers, and the general public. Yet they are somehow safe in the hands of governments and the institutions governments choose to trust.

What evidence supports that conclusion?

Before we hand control of these technologies to governments and their preferred partners, perhaps we should examine the track record of the institutions demanding that trust.

The same federal apparatus now positioning itself as the guardian of biological AI spent years funding, overseeing, defending, and, in many cases, obscuring controversial gain-of-function research programs.

For years, Senator Rand Paul pursued questions regarding NIH funding streams, EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the bureaucratic shell game that often allows agencies to distance themselves from responsibility while retaining control over funding and policy. It is now difficult to deny that federal funds flowed through a complex network of grants, subcontracts, foreign laboratories, and research partners engaged in increasingly risky virology research. Strong evidence has emerged that U.S.-supported research contributed to work relevant to the development of SARS-CoV-2, and some of that work occurred in laboratories here in the United States.

A revealing aspect of this history is not the research itself, but the effort required to uncover basic facts about it.

Obtaining answers required years of congressional inquiries, subpoenas, hearings, document requests, whistleblowers, litigation, and relentless public pressure. Emails were withheld. Records were slow-walked. Definitions shifted. Agencies repeatedly appeared more interested in protecting programs and reputations than in providing transparency.

That is not evidence of a system characterized by openness and accountability.

It is evidence of a system resistant to oversight.

Which brings us to Congress.

What has Congress actually done with the information it has uncovered?

There have been hearings. There have been reports. There have been sharply worded letters, subpoenas, referrals, and public confrontations. Yet the fundamental architecture remains largely intact. The same agencies continue to fund research (with the notable exception of USAID, some of whose “dual function” research activities have been moved to other agencies). The same biodefense bureaucracy continues to operate. The same grant-making mechanisms continue to function. The same oversight failures that generated concern in the first place remain virtually unchanged. Anyone who challenges the system isn’t just shut down; they are ostracized by the government. Their services no longer needed. Their opinions should not be considered.

Congress has demonstrated its ability to investigate. It has not demonstrated its ability to govern.

That failure matters because the debate over biological AI assumes the existence of competent and accountable oversight. Yet the recent history of gain-of-function research suggests precisely the opposite. If Congress has struggled to exercise meaningful oversight over traditional biological research programs, why should anyone assume it will be more successful overseeing AI systems capable of dramatically accelerating biological research?

The question looms large.

Why is Anthropic, or any frontier AI company, for that matter, being permitted to move forward with technologies that their own executives describe as presenting unprecedented biological risks?

And if these capabilities truly are as dangerous as claimed, who exactly is providing oversight?

At the moment, the answer appears to be a small circle of corporations, federal agencies, contractors, and selected partners making decisions on behalf of everyone else.

That is not a biosecurity strategy.

It is a concentration of power.

Then there is the matter of operational competence.

Just this year, federal prosecutors charged NIH researcher Claude Kwe and NIH scientist Vincent Munster in connection with the alleged smuggling of biological materials, including mpox samples, into the United States.

The same institutions that assure us that advanced biological AI capabilities must be tightly controlled cannot reliably control the illegal and illicit global movement of biological materials by government researchers, and cannot control the movement and monitoring of dangerous pathogens within their own research ecosystems.

The public is asked to believe that future AI systems capable of accelerating biotechnology research and bioweapons will somehow be managed with greater competence than the pathogens and biological materials already under government supervision.

Why should anyone believe that?

The deeper problem is that the biosecurity argument assumes the government is a unitary actor.

It is not.

Government is a sprawling collection of agencies, contractors, universities, military laboratories, intelligence organizations, grantees, subcontractors, and international partners. Many experts involved in senior US Government operations describe the structure as more akin to an aggregate of separate governments - each cabinet-level agency is semi-autonomous.

The people advocating centralized control often speak as though assigning responsibility to “the government” solves the problem.

In reality, it merely changes the location of the problem.

• The same incentives remain.

• The same human weaknesses remain.

• The same bureaucratic failures remain.

• The same conflicts of interest remain.

• The same secrecy remains.

And now there is another development.

According to statements recently attributed to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the U.S. government has acknowledged overseas biological research conducted through a network of international partnerships and laboratories. The appearance is that there has been an active, sustained “offshoring” of dual-function biological research. Dual-function is a polite and politically correct euphamism for biological research that can be used for either biodefense or biowarfare purposes.

Whether these programs are described as biodefense, public health preparedness, threat reduction, pathogen surveillance, or something else is almost beside the point.

The central fact is that biological research is already conducted through a complex international ecosystem that few citizens understand and even fewer policymakers can fully map. For whatever reason, these biolabs are often located in hot zones, such as the Ukrainian/Russian border, which gives the impression that they are being used for ulterior purposes. That the “dual-function” label appears to be a cover what is functionally prohibited biowarfare research and development activities. A case can be made that the real reason the US Government is so reluctant to modify the UN Biowarfare Treaty (“The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction”) to provide some enforceable teeth to the thing is that it might be used to hold the US Government accountable for activities relating to this topic.

Yet we are now told that these same institutions should be trusted with exclusive access to AI systems capable of dramatically accelerating biological research and development including “dual-function” activities.

All the while, by limiting public knowledge and access to advanced AI systems, the government and transnational corporations effectively eliminate public oversight.

That proposition deserves skepticism.

Advanced AI will help build dangerous biological engineered systems. That is a given.

Here is another uncomfortable reality. Advanced biological AI presents genuine biosecurity risks, so restricting access within the United States does not prevent hostile nations from developing or acquiring similar capabilities. In fact, as sure as the sun rises in the east, we can be assured that they will and are.

The emergence of DeepSeek should have ended any illusion that advanced AI capabilities can be permanently contained within a handful of American companies. In a matter of months, a Chinese firm demonstrated that many of the capabilities previously thought to require enormous resources and privileged access could be replicated at far lower cost than experts had predicted. Whether one views DeepSeek as an innovation story, a national security concern, or a market disruption, the lesson is the same: knowledge spreads. Information and technology know no borders.

China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and other adversarial states are unlikely to voluntarily limit research into technologies that could provide strategic advantages in biotechnology, biodefense, pharmaceutical development, pathogen characterization, or potentially biological weapons programs. If frontier AI systems can meaningfully accelerate biological research, those capabilities will inevitably proliferate.

The result may be a world in which American citizens, independent scientists, and smaller research organizations face increasing restrictions, while foreign governments continue to advance their own programs with few comparable constraints.

In that scenario, the policy does not eliminate risk. It merely concentrates capability among states and large institutions while hoping America's geopolitical competitors choose not to pursue the same technological path. DeepSeek suggests that hope is unlikely to be rewarded.

At this point, there is no international framework capable of controlling AI-assisted biological research. There is no enforceable treaty, no inspection system worthy of the name, and no reason to believe geopolitical rivals will voluntarily restrain themselves. The Biological Weapons Convention is an artifact of another age. It has no meaningful verification provisions, no meaningful enforcement powers, and no ability to prevent nations from pursuing capabilities they deem strategically important. It offers the appearance of control without much of the substance.

There also appears to be no way to put the genie back into the bottle.

The question is who gets the capability.

Anthropic and others appear to be moving toward a model in which governments, large corporations, intelligence agencies, military organizations, and approved partners retain access while the public receives increasingly restricted versions.

The public rationale is safety.

The practical effect is the concentration of power.

But before surrendering these capabilities to the institutions that brought us years of gain-of-function controversy, opaque biodefense programs, international research networks, contractor oversight failures, and repeated transparency battles, citizens should ask a simple question.

What exactly has this governing class done to earn that trust?

Lots of talk, Potemkin oversight, and no legislation.

Recent history suggests the simple, transparent and straightforward answer: not much of anything. It appears that “incentives to act are not aligned”.

RWM/JGM

BREAKING- There is a very active rumor mill currently with specifics from senior USG (government) employees that RFKjr will be leaving as Secretary of HHS in July, after the 4th. Apparently, there was a meeting last Monday.

Oz to head transition team.

This is reported to have been widely and openly discussed during Wednesday's annual Congressional baseball game.

End.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
ODNI News Release No. 10-26
June 12, 2026

DNI Gabbard Reveals Evidence of U.S. Taxpayer-Funded Global Biolab Program

PRESS RELEASE FROM ODNI

WASHINGTON D.C. — After months of searching through Intelligence Community holdings and files, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard is revealing new evidence of longstanding United States government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries. These biolabs include labs in Ukraine, which may be at risk of compromise due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. For example, the Intelligence Community previously warned that a US-funded biolab in Ukraine likely housed dangerous pathogens and remained vulnerable to longstanding threats of Russian attack, seizure, or damage.

The newly declassified evidence can be found HERE (the four images are also copied at the end of this press release).

Until now, evidence regarding the full existence and funding of these laboratories had been knowingly withheld from the American people. The information surrounding the existence, history, locations and funding of these US funded biolabs has been intentionally covered up by powerful people falsely, claiming that they do not exist and accusing anyone who says otherwise to be foreign assets and traitors to America.

Many of these U.S. government-funded biolabs are currently or have previously engaged in research using hazardous and highly contagious pathogens, in some cases to include dangerous Gain-of-Function research, with very little visibility or oversight.

President Trump understands the serious threat dangerous Gain-of-Function research poses to the American people, which is why he took decisive action on May 25, 2025, signing EO 14292 to end federal funding of Gain-of-Function research around the world.

“Despite the obvious potential for catastrophic global impact research on dangerous pathogens in biolabs can have, politicians, so-called health professionals like Dr. Fauci, and entities within the Biden administration’s national security team lied to the American people about the existence of U.S.-funded and supported biolabs, and threatened those who attempted to expose the truth. ODNI will continue to work closely with partners across the government to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain to end dangerous Gain-of-Function research that threatens the health and wellbeing of the American people and people around the world,” said DNI Gabbard.

DNI Gabbard issued new guidance to the Intelligence Community directing increased collection on these laboratories and facilities overseas. This directive is already providing new details on clinical trials that are underway at these facilities, raising significant ethical, financial, and security concerns regarding these supposed public health initiatives and U.S. national security.

End

The four images released by DNI Gabbard:

These were the March, 2022 Malone.News coverage of the Ukraine Biolab story, for which I was censored and vilified, but once again have been vindicated with this new press release. At the time, our coverage was much more detailed than much of what is covered in this new release. The story of censorship, vilification, targeted delegitimization, followed by eventual vindication is getting a bit old. By the way, it was disclosed to us by a US Army officer that the labs were intentionally destroyed using US fighter/bombers to destroy the evidence due to the risk of being overrun by Russian forces. You may recall that the existance of these biolabs was specificially cited by Russia as justification for the initial invasion.

and then from May 2025

This year, the headlines warning of the “worst tick season ever” are everywhere. These alarms are particularly loud, arriving just as Pfizer and Valneva prepare to seek approval for the first Lyme vaccine in a generation.

Current projections from industry reports suggest a possible launch around late 2027, assuming regulators accept the application and approve it

To be clear, ticks are real. Lyme disease is real. Nobody who has spent time in the woods, on a farm, or hunting needs a journalist paid by big pharma to explain that.

But it is fair to ask whether we are witnessing an objective assessment of risk or the early stages of market development. After all, pharmaceutical companies do not spend billions developing products and then hope people forget the disease exists.

Perhaps this really is the worst tick season ever. Again.

Or perhaps Americans are being reminded, hourly, that ticks are lurking behind every blade of grass just as a new vaccine approaches the finish line.

Funny how that works. The ticks always seem to get their best publicist right before product launch.

Remember that word?

And for those who somehow think that because we advise people not to fall for fear porn, we don’t believe Lyme is an issue -(it is) - please read,or re-read the following that Robert wrote in early March of this year:

True story:

We don’t throw away perfectly good food in this house.

We put it in Tupperware, ignore it until it reaches peak chicken cuisine, then serve it to the flock. The chickens, unlike the rest of us, appreciate properly aged leftovers.

Since publishing ‘The Decline and Fall of Elon Musk,’ Musk has only managed to become the first trillionaire, dominate global satellite communications, launch a successful SpaceX IPO, and remain the most influential entrepreneur on Earth.

Other than that, The Atlantic pretty much nailed it.

Whenever The Atlantic announces someone's decline and fall, it is usually a good time to buy stock.

A fan on X rejiggered a photo of Robert…

Just for the record, my great-great-grandfather was a Captain in the CSA Alabama Second, served under Stonewall Jackson and Lee, and lost his leg in the battle of Richmond. Campaigned right through the area we now live in. Presumably, he also fought in the second battle of the Wilderness, which took place near our farm under notoriously horrid conditions. So, probably the uniform would have been gray, not blue.

In all seriousness, we had a lovely black filly born yesterday. She is out of Quieta (inspection score 71.25), who is a Jade daughter, so we had to go outside for the stallion. Lider Seven is the sire (inspection score 70.50), which horse was named USDF Horse of the Year 2024 and Grand Prix reserve champion before passing suddenly. Not surprisingly, this one looks to be a good mover. Maybe a keeper!

“Homesteading for Health” is available for pre-order, and this includes the audio version!

I am off to ride a couple of stallions before it gets too hot.
Have a great day, Folks!

JGM

Every season brings a new health scare, a new public health grift. This spring it is ticks.

Open a newspaper, turn on the television, or scroll through social media, and you will be told that America is facing a terrible tick season. Lyme disease is spreading. Alpha-gal syndrome is lurking in the woods. Emergency rooms are seeing record numbers of tick bite patients. Public health officials are warning the public to take precautions.

The evidence most often cited comes from the CDC’s Tick Bite Tracker. Earlier this year, the agency announced that emergency department visits related to tick bites were running at the highest level for this point in the season since 2017, when the program began.

That sounds alarming until you look at what is actually being measured.

The CDC is not measuring ticks. The CDC is tracking people who seek medical care in emergency rooms after a tick bite.

Furthermore, the CDC database lists only three years in total, as shown below. The data for 2018-2024 are unavailable. Three data points, that’s all we have:

Also note that this is an expression of tick-bite chief complaints per emergency department visit, not all tick bites, or even tick bites at doctors’ offices. Only people who were so scared of a tick bite that they went to the emergency room, as opposed to a doctor’s office. That just reeks of fear porn driving this epidemic of tick bite-related ER visits.

Those are not the same thing.

A rise in emergency room visits could, theoretically, reflect an increase in tick activity.

It could also reflect increased media coverage, greater public awareness, more physician referrals, more urgent care advertising, more telemedicine consultations, and greater anxiety.

The surveillance system does not distinguish between these possibilities. It simply counts visits. It could also reflect that during the COVID years - which for some, included 2025, many people stayed mostly indoors, particularly in the winter/spring - during “flu, RSV, and COVID season.”

Yet the headlines routinely leap from “more people sought medical care” to “there are more ticks” and then from “there are more ticks” to “the danger is increasing.” And finally, to conclude that tick populations are increasing. Without any evidence whatsoever. This is the usual corporate (pharma-sponsored) and social media (often also pharma-sponsored) fear porn marketing cycle. In other words, the Grift of Fear.

That is not what the data show.

The distinction matters because the public conversation around tick bites has changed dramatically over the last decade.

People who grew up farming, hunting, logging, surveying land, hiking, or working outdoors will remember a very different message. A tick bite was considered an exposure. You removed the tick. You monitored for symptoms. You paid attention to your health. Most people did not rush to an emergency room after finding a tick attached to their leg. Real farmers and sportsmen recognize that this would be a waste of time and money.

Today, the message is different. Tick bites themselves are increasingly treated as medical events. Public health agencies, healthcare systems, media outlets, and advocacy organizations routinely encourage people to seek professional evaluation following tick exposure. The bite is no longer merely an exposure requiring observation. It is increasingly presented as a reason to enter the healthcare system.

That shift alone has the potential to change surveillance numbers.

The CDC can tell us that more people are showing up at emergency departments because of tick bites. What it cannot tell us is why.

• How much of the increase reflects more ticks?

• How much reflects more disease?

• How much reflects heightened awareness?

• How much reflects changes in medical guidance?

• How much reflects media coverage?

• How much reflects public anxiety?

The current crude surveillance system cannot answer those questions. But it can be weaponized very nicely to promote fear. A self-licking ice cream cone.

From the perspective of agnotology, the study of how ignorance and misunderstanding are created, maintained, and then utilized for ulterior purposes (propaganda) in science, this is an important distinction. An increase in medical encounters can be presented as evidence of a worsening threat even when part of that increase is driven by awareness campaigns, media attention, advocacy efforts, or changes in public guidance rather than a proportional increase in actual disease.

The data alone cannot disentangle those factors.

That does not mean Lyme disease is not real. It is.

That does not mean alpha-gal syndrome is not real. It is.

Nor does it mean that tick populations have not expanded in some regions.

What it means is that healthcare utilization is not the same thing as biological risk. Yet much of the reporting (and social media “outrage farming” hype) treats the two as interchangeable.

The timing of this year’s coverage makes the problem even more obvious.

Over the past year, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has elevated Lyme disease and related tick-borne illnesses to a national priority. Federal initiatives have been announced. Roundtables have been convened. Diagnostic programs have received attention. HHS communications have repeatedly highlighted Lyme disease and alpha-gal syndrome.

Awareness campaigns work.

When government officials spend months drawing attention to a condition, more people think about it. More people look for it. More people seek care. More people report exposures that previously would have gone unreported.

That is not a criticism of Kennedy. It is simply a fact of public health surveillance.

The same thing happens with influenza awareness campaigns. It happened during COVID. It happens with skin cancer screening campaigns. Public attention campaigns change public behavior, and often in unintended ways.

What is remarkable is that almost no one discussing the CDC’s numbers seems interested in acknowledging this possibility.

Instead, every increase in healthcare encounters is quietly interpreted as evidence that the underlying threat must be worsening.

Perhaps it is.

But that conclusion has not been demonstrated.

If public health officials want to prove that 2026 is an unusually dangerous tick year, there are far better ways to do it.

• Show us field surveys demonstrating higher tick densities.

• Show us standardized tick-drag studies.

• Show us infection rates in collected ticks.

• Show us evidence that Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis, babesiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, or alpha-gal syndrome are actually increasing beyond historical trends.

• Show us measures that are independent of media coverage and healthcare-seeking behavior.

Instead, the public is being asked to infer a biological conclusion from a behavioral metric.

That is a surprisingly weak foundation for such confident headlines.

Even worse, alternative media is chock full of wild stories of swarms of ticks being dropped from helicopters, Bill Gates having millions of GMO ticks being released in the USA, boxes of GMO ticks being found on farms and forests, and humans being enslaved by GMO ticks that cause alpha gal. An X search on ticks pulled up absolutely crazy stuff. Don’t fall for the hype - this is about clicks, likes, follows, and X monetization. Once again, for emphasis and comprehension, outrage farming. Fear porn.

Perhaps this really is an unusually active tick season. Time may prove that to be true. But the evidence most commonly cited today does not establish that conclusion. It establishes something much narrower. It tells us that more people are showing up to emergency departments after tick bites than were showing up last year, but about the same number as in 2017, and for all other years, we have no data available. All the while, the fear porn over tick bites grows larger and larger.

The question that matters is the one nobody seems interested in asking.

• Are we measuring ticks or tickbite frequency/risk?

• Or are we merely measuring fear of ticks?

Until public health officials can answer that question, a great many of the headlines should be read with considerably more skepticism than they currently receive.

Summer is almost upon us, although here it still feels more like spring. Some big jobs have been accomplished, while others continue to languish. Such is life on a farm.

The biggest news is that yesterday we welcomed a healthy filly out of our homebred mare, Tantra. She is a lovely buckskin, or perhaps a bay. At this point, only color testing will settle the question. If she moves as well as she looks, I suspect she will be a keeper.

Our mare Caranja, whom we have owned since she was a filly, is now nineteen years old. Although we have scaled back our breeding program, we are not quite finished. Caranja is due as well, though I am not sure how many more foals she has left in her. One or two, perhaps, if we are lucky. In total, we are expecting two more foals this month.

I have been riding at least one horse, and often two, every day. That is a considerable investment of both time and energy, which means some of the less essential chores around the farm have been pushed aside. There are only so many hours in a day.

The garden, however, is thriving. Garlic harvest is just around the corner. The kale has gone absolutely crazy, although I have not frozen any yet, which is entirely my fault. The squash is already producing. Carrots are up and looking good. The basil has finally sprouted. I plant it later in the spring because otherwise it simply refuses to cooperate. We have been eating a lot of beet tops, which I sauté with garlic and squash - very tasty with a b-b-que! The tomatoes are growing well, and there are already tiny green fruits hanging on the vines. We have enjoyed plenty of lettuce, cilantro, and spinach, although the spinach has now surrendered to summer.

I am most proud of my Apios americana plant, which already has lots of ground tubers growing. This is also called the American ground nut and a favorite of native Americans in this region in times past.

The Apios also has a wonderful flower and is quite the specimen plant.

Unfortunately, Virginia was hit by an almost unheard-of late freeze near the end of May. It wiped out nearly all of the young fruit across much of the state. So, although all our trees and we have about 60 fruit trees, look great - there is very little fruit this year.

Our blueberries and blackberries escaped and should produce exceptional crops, but peaches, apples, plums, and cherries are another story altogether. The damage has been severe enough that the Governor has petitioned the federal government for disaster assistance. It will be a lean fruit year for many growers.

I have been on a sourdough bread-making kick in recent months. Robert has decided that sourdough agrees with his digestive system better than other breads, so I set out to learn how to make it efficiently. It has taken the better part of six months to develop a system, but I think I finally have it figured out and can now reproduce the results again and again.

I expand the starter and make enough dough for fifteen to twenty loaves at a time. I know crazy, right? Then, I go through the process of kneading, proofing, etc., which is labor- and time-intensive. It also uses just about every mixing bowl in the house. Then I divide it all into loaf-sized portions and freeze them. When we need bread, I simply pull out a dough loaf, let it thaw overnight, shape it, allow it to rise a bit more, and bake it.

I also dehydrated a large quantity of starter for long-term storage. Once the frozen bread supply is gone, I can simply rehydrate the starter and begin again. The result is that I can do one concentrated burst of bread-making and then largely forget about it. Aside from occasionally baking a loaf, there is very little maintenance required. So far, it has worked remarkably well.

For the next batch, in a couple of months, I will write up a photo journal on my adventures in making sourdough (trust me, there have been mishaps) as a homesteading article.

As I write daily, ride daily, entertain guests, travel, and help maintain a busy farm, anything that reduces routine maintenance is a welcome development. I think others might appreciate the idea of making a lot of dough at once, then freezing. Plus, I have found a number of little shortcuts in making sourdough, so stay tuned for that.

This week we had visitors staying in the guest house. Our friends, Taylor Ferber and Rob Nelson have been visiting for the week. Robert and I both have a tendency to work, work, and then work some more, so having friends in town gave us a good excuse to step away from our routines and enjoy ourselves a bit.

We had several excellent meals at local restaurants, including Patty O’s, which holds a Michelin Selection in the tiny town of Washington, Virginia. The same owners also operate the Inn at Little Washington, located next door, which is a three-Michelin-starred restaurant. While there, we unexpectedly met up with our friends Nina and Colby May, which is always a pleasure.

We also spent plenty of time cooking together here on the farm and fired up the grill more than once.

One day we went ziplining. Another day Taylor and I did what women occasionally must do and went shopping for clothes.

Now, I do not always drive fast cars. In fact, I am quite fond of my Ram 3500 dually. But when I do drive a sports car, I prefer a Porsche. For those who do not know, my husband maintains a long-running and entirely unapologetic love affair with fast and vintage automobiles.

On the poultry front, we now have three peababies hatched, with more on the way.

A funny thing is that the peacocks (below is a young male) are fascinated by the little chirps that the babies make. Soon after the above birds hatched, this yearling bird below wandered into the office to come gander at the babies in the incubator.

The video below: Robert and I gently herding the boy outside…

The older little one that imprinted on me remains thoroughly convinced that I am its proper parent. It has no interest whatsoever in spending time with the younger birds and still prefers riding around on my shoulder whenever possible.

We also ended up with two turkeys, which have now been moved to an outdoor pen and have become surprisingly calm. In another ten to twelve weeks, they should be ready for processing. I never look forward to that day, although it is part of raising your own food.

The chickens continue to lay and lay and lay. I am constantly making dog food with the extra eggs, finding ways to use them ourselves, and giving cartons away to friends. We feed the hens plenty of scraps, and I must say that laying hens are truly God’s gift to the farm. They turn leftovers into breakfast with remarkable efficiency.

Mowing season is now in full force. Our friends have even been lending a hand, with Rob Nelson, who grew up on a farm, helping bush-hog some of the back pastures. Until the summer heat finally shuts down the rains, usually sometime in August, mowing and weed-whipping are never-ending chores, particularly since we do not use herbicides. As a result, Robert and our farmhand are already putting in long hours on both the tractor and the zero-turn mower.

As for the division of labor, I occasionally bush hog, but I rarely mow. Robert, on the other hand, spends far more time on the tractor than in the vegetable garden. The garden requires watering several times a week when the rain does not cooperate, plenty of weeding, and a steady stream of planting and maintenance.

The cows have not been bred yet, although I have had a veterinarian out to begin the process of artificial insemination. With the horses, we do this ourselves, but breeding cattle this way is new territory for us. We will be using sexed semen, which is somewhat less viable, but the increased likelihood of producing a heifer makes the extra effort worthwhile. In the dairy world, bull calves simply do not command the same value.

As foals are born, mares must be bred also. As always, there tends to be more than one “yahoo” moment when dealing with 1200-pound hormonally motivated animals, with 100-pound babies running around underfoot. All must be carefully controlled, so no one gets hurt.

As I write this, a gentle rain is falling outside, which means I am temporarily excused from watering duties. But there is always another task waiting. The peababies have outgrown their box, so today I need to move a stock tank into the house and set up larger accommodations for them.

It is going to be a busy day. Robert will be taking our friends to the airport, and I will be hauling Jade to another farm where a trainer from Portugal is working with several students.

The partners in crime:

When I ride daily, I always have company - the three amigos don’t actually want to be in the arena with me (too boring). Yet, spend the entire time peeking under the gate - making sure I don’t go anywhere?

So with that, I bid you all farewell for the day. The farm is calling, the horses are waiting, and the peababy is undoubtedly planning her next attempt to turn my shoulder into permanent real estate.

Dr. Robert W. Malone

The effort to dismantle the administrative state is often described as a single project. It is not. It rests on three distinct legal doctrines, each operating in a different way. Together, they are reshaping the relationship between federal agencies, Congress, the courts, and the presidency.

In the span of a year, three major federal actions illustrated the shift.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced that it never possessed the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks, despite exercising that power since 2009.¹

The Supreme Court blocked a federal vaccine mandate that would have applied to much of the American workforce.¹¹

A presidential order directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to reduce the childhood vaccine schedule.¹⁴

Supporters of all three actions used similar language. Restore accountability. Rein in the administrative state. End government by unelected experts.

The concern is legitimate. Over the last century, the federal government developed a vast administrative apparatus that the Constitution never explicitly describes and voters never directly approved. Agencies increasingly write rules, enforce those rules, and adjudicate disputes arising from them. In practice, many exercise powers that look legislative, executive, and judicial at the same time.

For those influenced by the tradition of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, the criticism is straightforward. Bureaucracies cannot possess the knowledge they claim to command, and they operate without the feedback mechanisms that discipline markets, businesses, and elected officials.²³ ²⁵

But the legal revolution now underway is more complicated than many of its supporters realize.

The same doctrines being used to limit agency power can also strengthen presidential power. The same legal theories that constrain federal regulators can expand executive control over the bureaucracy. And one of the most important of these doctrines does not limit presidents at all. It empowers them.

To understand what is happening, it is necessary to separate three very different ideas that are often treated as one.

The Major Questions Doctrine

The major questions doctrine is the most frequently discussed of the three doctrines and, in many ways, the most consequential.

Its core principle is simple. When a federal agency claims the authority to decide an issue of major economic or political significance, courts will not assume Congress intended to grant that power. The agency must point to clear statutory language showing that Congress actually authorized it. Broad mandates, vague language, and decades-old statutes are not enough. If the power is significant, the authorization must be explicit.⁶

The Supreme Court’s formulation is memorable because it reflects common sense. Congress does not hide elephants in mouseholes. Lawmakers do not bury the authority to reshape entire industries, rewrite national policy, or regulate major sectors of the economy inside a few ambiguous words. If Congress intended to grant that authority, it should have said so clearly.

The doctrine did not emerge overnight. Its foundation can be traced to FDA v. Brown & Williamson in 2000, when the Court held that the Food and Drug Administration could not suddenly claim authority to regulate cigarettes as drugs or medical devices. For decades, the FDA itself had denied possessing that power, while Congress repeatedly enacted tobacco legislation without granting it. The Court concluded that an agency cannot discover sweeping authority in a statute that neither Congress nor the agency had previously understood to confer it.³

The doctrine became a central feature of administrative law in 2022 with West Virginia v. EPA. There, the Court struck down an Environmental Protection Agency plan that would have used an obscure provision of the Clean Air Act to reshape electricity generation across the United States.⁴

Its reach expanded further in 2024 when the Court decided Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and overturned Chevron deference, the forty-year rule requiring judges to defer to an agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute.⁵ After Loper Bright, ambiguity no longer works in the agency’s favor. Agencies must persuade courts that Congress actually granted the authority they claim.

The Court has never provided a precise definition of what qualifies as a “major question.” There is no formula, no dollar threshold, and no checklist.⁶ That uncertainty is not an oversight. It is the doctrine’s defining feature. The broader the claimed power and the greater its economic or political significance, the more likely a court is to demand clear authorization from Congress before allowing an agency to act.

Three Doctrines, Not One

The campaign against the administrative state draws on three separate legal ideas. They feel like allies because all three distrust unaccountable expert power. They are not the same, and they do not point the same way.

The first is executive accountability, grounded in the unitary executive theory and reinforced by the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), the 1972 law governing federal advisory panels. The concern here is advisory bodies that have evolved into policymakers. The remedy is hierarchy. Committees advise. Agencies execute. Elected officials set policy. The President directs the executive branch and is accountable to voters for its actions. This is the framework behind the recent executive order on the childhood vaccine schedule and much of the current effort to reassert presidential control over federal agencies.²¹

The second is the major questions doctrine. Its target is an agency claiming authority to make decisions of enormous economic or political significance without a clear grant of power from Congress. The remedy is not greater presidential control. It is congressional responsibility. If a policy decision is important enough to affect the entire country, Congress must authorize it in plain language. In practice, the doctrine often operates as a deregulatory tool because it is easier to invalidate an agency action than to create a new one.⁸ More importantly, it limits presidents as much as bureaucrats. The authority it demands must come from Congress. Neither agencies nor presidents can supply it themselves.

The third is structural accountability, built on the Appointments Clause and the nondelegation doctrine. The Appointments Clause governs who may exercise federal power and how they must be appointed. The nondelegation doctrine asks whether Congress transferred too much of its legislative authority in the first place. The concern is not merely what a government body is doing, but whether it possesses constitutional authority to do it at all. This is the favored tool of the libertarian legal movement, the litigators at Cato, Pacific Legal Foundation, the Goldwater Institute, and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.²⁰

All three doctrines challenge the growth of the administrative state. All three seek greater accountability. But they are not interchangeable.

One strengthens presidential control over the executive branch.

One strengthens Congress at the expense of both agencies and presidents.

One asks whether the constitutional structure was violated from the beginning.

Three doctrines. Three targets. Three different answers to the same question: who gets to govern?

The differences become clear when we examine the three federal actions that opened this article. Each was driven by a different theory of accountability and emerged from a different understanding of where federal power should reside.

The Sword: EPA Discovers It Never Had the Power

In February 2026, the EPA rescinded the Obama administration's 2009 endangerment finding, the determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. That finding was personally championed by Obama, and had served as the legal foundation for federal greenhouse gas regulations on cars and trucks for nearly two decades. Once the finding was withdrawn, the agency repealed the vehicle emissions standards that were based on it.¹

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin described the action as the largest deregulatory measure in American history, claiming that it would deliver more than $1.3 trillion in economic benefits.² Those figures come from the agency itself and should be understood as EPA’s estimate rather than an established fact.

The more important story is actually the legal theory.

EPA did not simply argue that the regulations were misguided or ineffective. Under EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s leadership, it argued that the agency never possessed the authority to impose them in the first place. The foundation for that argument was the major questions doctrine.

This is the doctrine operating as a sword rather than a shield.

Traditionally, the major questions doctrine is invoked by challengers seeking to stop an agency from exercising power that Congress never clearly granted. Here, the agency itself invoked the doctrine to dismantle a regulatory regime that had existed for years by declaring that the underlying authority never existed.

That is a remarkable reversal.

In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the agency possessed authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles.⁷ The EPA lost that case because it argued the opposite position. Nearly twenty years later, the same agency returned with the same statute and the same subject matter, but reached the opposite conclusion.

The tension is not merely political. It is doctrinal.

The major questions doctrine asks a straightforward question: did Congress clearly grant this power? If the answer is no, the agency cannot act. What the doctrine was never designed to answer is the reverse question: whether an agency is required to dismantle an existing regulatory framework after concluding that the original grant of authority was unclear.

What EPA has done is turn the major questions doctrine around and point it in the opposite direction. The doctrine was created to stop agencies from discovering powers Congress never clearly granted. EPA is using it to justify dismantling a regulatory system that already exists.

That may prove to be legally correct. But it is not the doctrine acting as a brake on administrative power. It is an administrative agency invoking the doctrine as authority for a major policy choice of its own. The outcome is less regulation. The mechanism is still executive action.

Whatever one thinks of the outcome, this is not the “major questions doctrine” functioning as a shield against administrative power. It is the doctrine being wielded as a sword.

The Shield: When the Doctrine Works as Designed

The OSHA vaccine mandate shows the major questions doctrine operating in its traditional form.

In January 2022, the Supreme Court blocked the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s rule requiring vaccination or testing for employees at large businesses, a mandate that would have applied to roughly eighty million workers. The Court’s reasoning was straightforward. The policy carried enormous economic and political consequences, yet OSHA could point only to a broad and general statutory grant. Congress had never clearly authorized the agency to impose a public health mandate of that scale.¹¹

This is the doctrine functioning as intended.

An agency claimed authority to make a major national policy decision. The Court asked where Congress had clearly granted that authority. The agency could not provide an answer. The mandate fell.

The same week revealed the limits of the doctrine as well.

The Court allowed a different vaccine mandate to remain in effect, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services requirement that workers at facilities receiving Medicare and Medicaid funds be vaccinated. The distinction was not the subject matter. Both cases involved vaccines. The distinction was the statute. CMS possessed longstanding authority to establish conditions for participation in federal healthcare programs. OSHA relied on a general workplace safety statute that was being stretched to cover something new.¹²

The doctrine treated the two cases differently because the statutes were different.

That same pattern appeared in the CDC eviction moratorium case a year earlier. The agency relied on broad public health language to justify a sweeping intervention into the national housing market. The Court concluded that Congress had never clearly authorized such a measure.¹³ The policy may (or may not) have been desirable. The agency may have believed it necessary. Neither was enough.

The major questions doctrine does not ask whether a policy is wise. It asks who has the authority to make it.

Where the statutory grant is specific, agency action can survive.

Where the statutory grant is broad, vague, or inferred, agency action is vulnerable.

That is the doctrine operating as a shield. It does not transfer power to the President. It does not create new authority for agencies. It simply blocks major exercises of power that Congress did not clearly authorize.

For that reason, a nationwide vaccine mandate imposed through agency action alone is now on exceptionally weak legal ground.

The Wrong Key: Why the Major Questions Doctrine Does Not Fit

The third action does not fit the pattern of the first two.

In May 2026, President Trump signed an executive order titled Realigning United States Core Childhood Vaccine Recommendations With Best Practices from Peer, Developed Countries. The order directs CDC and ACIP to review a January HHS assessment and revise the childhood schedule “to the extent permitted by law.”¹⁴ That assessment recommended reducing the routine childhood schedule from seventeen vaccines to eleven.¹⁵ At the same time, the order sought to preserve the existing coverage framework so that vaccines remaining on the schedule would continue to be covered without cost-sharing.¹⁶

Many observers immediately reached for the major questions doctrine.

It is the wrong doctrine.

Part of the confusion is understandable. The major questions doctrine has become the best-known legal weapon against the administrative state, so many commentators instinctively reach for it whenever a major federal policy is challenged.

But that is not where the real fight is. The central legal battles over this order involve FACA, the Administrative Procedure Act, the Appointments Clause, and the nondelegation doctrine.

The dispute is not whether CDC and ACIP possess authority to make vaccine recommendations. It is whether those institutions are structured and operating in a manner consistent with federal law and the Constitution.

The major questions doctrine is designed to stop agencies from claiming powers Congress never clearly granted. It is a doctrine of restraint. It asks whether an agency has discovered (or appropriated) authority that was never actually given to it.

That is not what is happening here.

The CDC and ACIP have long possessed authority to make vaccine recommendations. The childhood schedule itself was assembled through that process over many years. No statute requires seventeen vaccines rather than eleven. If these bodies possess authority to recommend a vaccine, they necessarily possess authority to stop recommending it. The power is the same.

Nor is an executive order itself the agency action a court reviews. The order simply directs executive branch officials. What a court ultimately reviews is whatever action CDC and ACIP take in response. And that action would involve those bodies exercising authority they have long exercised, not claiming some new and transformative power.

The real legal vulnerabilities lie elsewhere.

They lie in FACA, the Administrative Procedure Act, the Appointments Clause, and the nondelegation doctrine. In fact, the litigation has already begun. In March 2026, a federal judge halted an earlier schedule reduction and blocked the reconstituted ACIP, not because of the major questions doctrine, but because of alleged defects under FACA and the APA.¹⁷ The executive order’s careful phrase, “to the extent permitted by law,” reflects an awareness of exactly those challenges.²²

The irony is that the same statute appears on both sides of the fight. Supporters of reform invoke FACA to argue that ACIP should function as an advisory body rather than an independent policymaker. Opponents invoke FACA to challenge how the committee was restructured. The same law supplies arguments for both camps.

The deeper problem lies in the coverage system the order deliberately preserved.

For decades, Congress and the executive branch built a recommendation-to-mandate pipeline around ACIP. An ACIP recommendation triggers no-cost insurance coverage, obligations under Medicaid and CHIP, eligibility under the Vaccines for Children program, and protections under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.¹⁸

The administration’s policy depends on that machinery continuing to exist.

But that machinery is also under constitutional attack. In Kennedy v. Braidwood, the Supreme Court upheld one advisory-body structure while leaving unresolved challenges to ACIP itself.¹⁹ Those challenges remain alive in the lower courts. If they ultimately succeed, they do not merely weaken mandates. They undermine the mechanism the administration needs to make its preferred vaccine schedule durable, funded, and enforceable.

That is the collision point between the three doctrines.

The executive order is defended in the language of executive accountability. Elected officials direct. Advisory committees advise. Agencies execute.

The major questions doctrine points somewhere else. It asks whether major national policies should rest on agency discretion at all.

And the structural-accountability doctrines go further still. They ask whether the institutions making these decisions were constitutionally constructed in the first place.

The result is a paradox. The same legal movement that seeks to reduce the power of administrative agencies is now relying on executive authority to reshape one of the most important administrative programs in the country.

An executive order can be reversed by the next president. It can be delayed by litigation. It can be narrowed by the courts.

The major questions doctrine can stop a policy. It cannot make one permanent.

For that, Congress still matters.

The Austrian Question

The Austrian school of economics has spent more than a century examining exactly this kind of problem.

In his essay The Use of Knowledge in Society, Friedrich Hayek argued that the information needed to manage a complex society is never concentrated in one place. It exists in countless fragments dispersed among millions of individuals. No central planner can fully assemble it, much less act on it effectively. The error is not merely technical. It is the belief that experts possess a level of knowledge they cannot actually obtain. Hayek later gave the mistake its enduring name: the pretense of knowledge.²³ ²⁴

Ludwig von Mises identified a related problem. Bureaucracies do not operate under the discipline of profit and loss. They receive no market signal telling them when they have failed. A business that makes bad decisions eventually pays a price. An agency often does not. It expands, accumulates authority, and corrects course only when external forces compel it to do so.²⁵

Regulatory capture completes the picture. Over time, agencies, professional societies, regulated industries, and advocacy groups can form a closed policy ecosystem. The public remains formally represented but increasingly loses influence over decisions made in its name. Whether the subject is vaccines, emissions, energy, finance, or healthcare, the pattern is familiar.

By that measure, the impulse behind all three actions discussed in this article is understandable. Pulling decisions away from insulated expert networks and returning them to politically accountable institutions is a legitimate objective.

But the Austrian tradition is not fundamentally a deregulatory project.

It is a rule-of-law project.

Those are not the same thing.

Hayek did not argue for the absence of rules. He argued for the right kind of rules: general, predictable, stable, knowable in advance, and applied equally to citizens and governments alike. Such rules allow people to plan their lives because they can reasonably predict the legal environment in which they operate. The enemy is not regulation itself. The enemy is arbitrary power.²⁶

Viewed through that lens, the major questions doctrine produces a mixed verdict.

At its best, the doctrine strengthens the rule of law. It pushes major policy decisions back toward Congress and demands that lawmakers speak clearly when they authorize significant exercises of government power. Citizens can read the law. Legislators can be held accountable for it. That is a genuine improvement.

At its worst, the doctrine risks replacing one form of discretion with another.

A doctrine built around a term as undefined as “major” inevitably leaves substantial room for judicial judgment. If neither agencies nor citizens can predict when a court will deem a question sufficiently major to trigger heightened scrutiny, certainty is reduced rather than increased. Discretion has not disappeared. It has merely changed hands.

The same concern applies to executive action.

A regulatory regime created through one administration’s interpretation of an old statute and dismantled through the next administration’s reinterpretation of that same statute is not a system of stable law. Neither is a national vaccine policy established by executive order and destined to be reversed when political control changes. Such policies may be legal. They may even be wise. But they remain exercises of discretionary power rather than durable law.

The Austrian question is therefore different from the partisan question.

It is not: Which side benefits from this doctrine today?

It is: Does this produce a system governed by stable, predictable rules, or by the changing preferences of whoever currently holds power?

By that standard, the ultimate solution is neither regulation by agency nor deregulation by executive order.

It is Congress writing clear law.

That is the one outcome most consistent with the rule of law, the one outcome these doctrines increasingly demand, and the one outcome a deeply divided Congress appears least capable of delivering.

The Paradox of an Empowered Congress

The three doctrines examined here all promise the same thing: less power for agencies and greater accountability.

But power never disappears. It only moves.

When authority leaves the administrative state, it goes somewhere else. Some of it goes to the courts, which now decide what counts as a major question, what an old statute means, and whether an agency has crossed a constitutional line. Some of it is supposed to return to Congress, which is expected to write the clear laws the courts increasingly demand.

The courts will take their share.

Congress is the real question.

If there is one responsibility the Constitution assigns exclusively to Congress, it is the power of the purse. Article I gives spending authority to the legislature and to no one else. Before Congress regulates, investigates, or declares war, it must first decide what government will spend and what government will do.

Even that basic responsibility now strains the institution.

Since the modern budget process was adopted in the 1970s, Congress has completed all twelve annual appropriations bills on time only four times. The last was for fiscal year 1997.²⁷ In most years, Congress does not finish even one by the statutory deadline. Instead, it relies on continuing resolutions, temporary extensions that simply carry forward the previous year’s spending while lawmakers postpone difficult decisions. There have been more than two hundred continuing resolutions since 1977, and the federal government now spends much of its life operating under temporary funding measures rather than actual budgets.²⁸

The current fiscal year is not an exception. It is the pattern.

Fiscal year 2026 began with no completed appropriations bills and a government shutdown. Funding arrived through a series of temporary measures, partial appropriations, further delays, and additional stopgap extensions.²⁹ ³⁰ The year before was funded almost entirely through continuing resolutions.³¹

This is the institution that the major questions doctrine increasingly relies upon.

The doctrine assumes a Congress willing and able to write clear laws for major national questions. Yet Congress routinely struggles to perform the most fundamental legislative task it possesses. It cannot consistently decide what government will spend, much less provide detailed statutory guidance across the entire regulatory state.

The administrative state did not grow by conquest.

It grew by abdication.

Congress delegated authority because legislating is difficult. It requires compromise. It requires accepting responsibility for outcomes. It requires casting votes that can be used in the next election. Agencies offered a way around those costs. Difficult decisions could be transferred to experts. Political accountability could be diluted. Members could take positions without bearing full responsibility for results.

The continuing resolution is simply the same instinct turned inward. Rather than make a decision, Congress extends the last one. Rather than accept responsibility, it postpones it. Rather than legislate, it waits for deadlines, crises, shutdown threats, or last-minute omnibus bills to force action.

The major questions doctrine closes one escape route. It tells agencies they may no longer decide issues that Congress itself refused to decide.

What it cannot do is change the incentives that caused Congress to delegate those decisions in the first place.

No court can force a legislature to want its authority back.

The optimistic view is that removing power from agencies will force Congress to reclaim its constitutional role. Perhaps it will.

The evidence points the other way.

When authority is stripped from agencies, it does not automatically return to Congress. Instead, it accumulates in the institutions that remain capable of acting: the courts and the presidency. Judges decide what statutes mean. Presidents issue executive orders. One administration acts. The next reverses course. Litigation fills the gaps Congress leaves behind.

The great paradox is that the legal movement seeking to restore legislative authority depends on a legislature that has spent half a century proving how little interest it has in exercising it.

The doctrine is built on the idea that Congress should decide the nation’s most important questions. The difficulty is that Congress increasingly refuses to decide them.

The Activism of Restraint

Power does not disappear when it leaves the agencies.

It lands in the courts.

The legal movement that developed these doctrines did so in the name of judicial restraint. Originalism and textualism were designed to limit judicial discretion by tying judges to the words of a statute and the meaning those words carried when enacted. For decades, the movement’s central complaint was judicial activism: unelected judges imposing policy preferences under the guise of interpretation.

The major questions doctrine creates a complication.

Unlike a traditional rule of interpretation, it does not supply a clear boundary. Its central term, “major,” has no fixed definition. Courts decide case by case which questions are sufficiently significant to require an exceptionally clear statement from Congress. But significance is not a textual category. It is a judgment.

With Chevron deference gone, judges no longer defer to an agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute. They supply their own. Combine that development with the major questions doctrine, and the courts become the final arbiters of vast areas of public policy, from environmental regulation to healthcare to energy and beyond.

Not because Congress expressly assigned them that role.

Because the doctrine increasingly sends every difficult question there.

This is judicial power assembled in the language of restraint.

The tension has not gone unnoticed. Even some textualist and originalist scholars have argued that the doctrine sits uneasily with the principles it claims to advance. If a statute means what its text says, they argue, then the importance of the policy at issue should not change the method of interpretation. A doctrine that alters its approach when the stakes become sufficiently large begins to look less like a neutral rule of construction and more like a substantive preference.³²

The problem returns us to the same question raised by the Austrian critique.

The rule of law requires rules that are general, predictable, and knowable in advance. Citizens should not have to guess which statutes will be treated as ordinary and which will be deemed major. Agencies should not have to predict how a future court will measure significance. Congress should not have to legislate in the shadow of standards that no one can clearly define.

Otherwise, discretion has not been eliminated.

It has merely been relocated.

First from Congress to the agencies.

Then from the agencies back to the courts.

The label changes. The underlying problem does not.

The conservative legal project set out to reduce government by unaccountable experts. In a political system where Congress increasingly refuses to legislate, the practical effect may be to increase government by unaccountable judges.

That is not necessarily a contradiction. It may simply be what happens when the institutions that are supposed to make the law stop doing so.

What This Means

For Congress, the message is straightforward.

The courts are increasingly demanding clear legislative authorization for major national policies. Yet Congress has shown remarkably little ability to provide it. Durable policy now requires legislation, and recent decades suggest that legislation is precisely what Congress struggles to produce. The hard decisions are being returned to the branch that has spent half a century finding ways to avoid making them.

For agencies and presidents, the lesson is equally clear.

The soft instruments of government are becoming less durable. Guidance documents, advisory recommendations, agency interpretations, executive orders, and informal exercises of administrative power all stand on shakier ground than they did a decade ago. Policies created through those mechanisms can still be implemented. They are simply less likely to survive a challenge and less likely to outlast the administration that created them.

The March 2026 ruling against the vaccine schedule change illustrates the point as clearly as any reversal of a prior administration’s policy. Increasingly, if Congress wants a policy to endure, Congress must enact it. Broad delegations of authority and administrative workarounds are becoming less reliable substitutes for legislation.

For the courts, the difficult questions are only beginning.

What qualifies as a major question? Can the doctrine continue to be used offensively to dismantle existing regulatory structures? How far will courts push structural-accountability theories involving FACA, the Appointments Clause, and nondelegation? What happens if challenges to ACIP’s legal architecture ultimately succeed?

Those questions will shape the next phase of the administrative-state debate.

Beneath all of them lies a deeper problem.

If major policies can be created by one administration’s interpretation of an old statute and dismantled by the next administration’s reinterpretation of the same statute, stability becomes impossible. Every election becomes a struggle not merely over policy but over the meaning of the laws already on the books. One administration builds. The next tears down. The one after that builds again.

That is not a system governed by settled law.

It is government by oscillation.

A free society depends on rules that are durable enough for citizens, businesses, institutions, and states to plan around them. A legal regime that changes direction every four or eight years may expand liberty in one moment and restrict it in the next, but it cannot provide the predictability that liberty ultimately requires.

The greatest risk is not that one side wins.

It is that nothing ever stays settled long enough for self-government to work.

The Branch That Cannot Act

Three doctrines. One target. Three different destinations.

A doctrine worth having is one you would accept in the hands of your opponents.

A rule worth keeping is one that binds the people who created it.

A limit on power is only a limit if it still applies when your own side holds power.

The major questions doctrine revives a legitimate principle. It insists that major national decisions should rest on clear legislative authority rather than administrative improvisation. But it comes with costs: discretion shifted to judges, a persistent deregulatory bias, and a legal landscape in which major policies become increasingly provisional.

Its greatest virtue may be that it does not care who holds office.

The doctrine that restrains a Biden administration restrains a Trump administration. The doctrine that blocks one executive action can be used to block the next. That neutrality is the source of its legitimacy, even if it is often the feature its supporters are least eager to discuss.

In theory, the doctrine returns major questions to Congress, the branch closest to the voter and the institution the Constitution expects to make law.

In practice, Congress increasingly refuses the assignment.

The result is a transfer of power that looks different from the one many expected. Questions that agencies can no longer answer do not automatically return to the legislature. They flow instead to the courts, which must decide what statutes mean, what powers were delegated, and what questions are sufficiently major to require something more. And of course, it is the courts that have decided the structures resulting in the functional transfer of power to the courts.

The branch that will not act hands its work to the branch that cannot avoid acting.

A movement that set out to reduce the influence of unelected officials has, at least for now, increased the influence of the least elected officials in the American system.

That may be a flaw in the doctrine. Or it may be a hidden intention.

Or it may simply be what happens when a constitutional system built on legislation encounters a legislature that no longer legislates.

The next decade will tell us which.

References

1. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Rescission of the Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and Motor Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emission Standards Under the Clean Air Act,” final rule, Federal Register doc. 2026-03157 (Feb. 18, 2026), https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/02/18/2026-03157/rescission-of-the-greenhouse-gas-endangerment-finding-and-motor-vehicle-greenhouse-gas-emission ; EPA fact sheet 420F26003 (Feb. 12, 2026), https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2026-02/420f26003.pdf.

2. EPA statement attributing “the single largest act of deregulation” and the $1.3 trillion figure to the agency; see also World Resources Institute, “EPA’s Endangerment Finding Repeal, Explained” (Feb. 19, 2026), https://www.wri.org/insights/endangerment-finding-repeal-explained.

3. FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 529 U.S. 120 (2000).

4. West Virginia v. EPA, 597 U.S. 697 (2022).

5. Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369 (2024).

6. Congressional Research Service, “The Major Questions Doctrine,” In Focus IF12077, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12077.

7. Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007).

8. Lisa Heinzerling and others on the deregulatory asymmetry of the doctrine; “The National Security Consequences of the Major Questions Doctrine,” Michigan Law Review (2025), https://michiganlawreview.org/journal/the-national-security-consequences-of-the-major-questions-doctrine/ ; Institute for Policy Integrity, “Statutory Interpretation and Deregulation,” https://policyintegrity.org/files/publications/Statutory_Interpretation_and_Deregulation_Issue_Brief_vF.pdf.

9. Executive Order, “Directing the Repeal of Unlawful Regulations” (Apr. 9, 2025); analysis in Arnold & Porter, “Deregulatory Executive Orders: Issues Under the Administrative Procedure Act” (Apr. 16, 2025), https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/perspectives/advisories/2025/04/deregulatory-eos-issues-under-the-apa.

10. HHS and FDA, “HHS, FDA Issue RFI on Deregulatory Plan to Lower Costs and Empower Providers” (May 13, 2025), https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/hhs-fda-issue-rfi-deregulatory-plan-lower-costs-and-empower-providers ; Holland & Knight, “HHS, FDA Issue Request for Information to Support Administration’s Deregulatory Agenda” (May 14, 2025), https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2025/05/hhs-fda-issue-request-for-information-to-support-administrations.

11. National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor, OSHA, 595 U.S. 109 (2022) (per curiam).

12. Biden v. Missouri, 595 U.S. 87 (2022) (per curiam).

13. Alabama Association of Realtors v. Department of Health and Human Services, 594 U.S. 758 (2021) (per curiam).

14. The White House, Executive Order, “Realigning United States Core Childhood Vaccine Recommendations With Best Practices from Peer, Developed Countries” (May 29, 2026), https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/05/realigning-united-states-core-childhood-vaccine-recommendations-with-best-practices-from-peer-developed-countries/ ; CBS News, “Trump signs order directing CDC to align with assessment calling for fewer childhood vaccines” (May 29, 2026), https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-executive-order-cdc-childhood-vaccines/.

15. CDC, “CDC Acts on Presidential Memorandum to Update Childhood Immunization Schedule” (Jan. 5, 2026), https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2026/2026-cdc-acts-on-presidential-memorandum-to-update-childhood-immunization-schedule.html ; Fierce Healthcare, “Trump signs off on HHS overhaul of childhood vaccine schedule with new executive order” (Jun. 1, 2026), https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/regulatory/trump-signs-hhs-overhaul-childhood-vaccine-schedule-new-executive-order.

16. American Hospital Association, “President signs EO on childhood immunization schedule” (Jun. 1, 2026), https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2026-06-01-president-signs-eo-childhood-immunization-schedule.

17. American Academy of Pediatrics v. Kennedy, U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts (Mar. 16, 2026); NPR, “Federal judge halts RFK Jr.’s changes to children’s vaccine policies” (Mar. 16, 2026), https://www.npr.org/2026/03/16/nx-s1-5749530/judge-blocks-rfk-jr-vaccine-changes ; NBC News, “RFK Jr. rewrites rules on CDC panel after judge blocks vaccine changes” (Apr. 7, 2026), https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/rfk-jr-rewrites-rules-cdc-panel-lawsuit-vaccine-changes-rcna267069.

18. Congressional Research Service, “Changes to CDC Vaccine Recommendations in 2025 and 2026,” Insight IN12684, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12684 ; KFF, “ACA Preventive Services Are Back at the Supreme Court: Kennedy v. Braidwood,” https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/issue-brief/aca-preventive-services-supreme-court-kennedy-braidwood/.

19. Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, Inc. (U.S. Jun. 27, 2025); KFF, “Kennedy v. Braidwood: The Supreme Court Upheld ACA Preventive Services but That’s Not the End of the Story,” https://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/kennedy-v-braidwood-the-supreme-court-upheld-aca-preventive-services-but-thats-not-the-end-of-the-story/.

20. Georgetown Law, Health Care Litigation Tracker, “Braidwood Management, Inc. et al. v. Kennedy et al.” (amici including Cato Institute, Pacific Legal Foundation, Goldwater Institute, and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons), https://litigationtracker.law.georgetown.edu/litigation/braidwood-management-inc-et-al-v-xavier-becerra-et-al-3/.

21. Robert W. Malone, “The Executive Order That May Change the Vaccine Debate Forever,” Malone News (May 30, 2026), https://www.malone.news/p/the-executive-order-that-may-change.

22. Medscape, “Executive Order on Vaccine Schedule ‘Flies in the Face’ of Federal Ruling” (Jun. 3, 2026), https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/executive-order-vaccine-schedule-flies-face-federal-ruling-2026a1000iik.

23. F. A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519-530.

24. F. A. Hayek, “The Pretence of Knowledge,” Nobel Memorial Lecture (Dec. 11, 1974).

25. Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944).

26. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); and The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).

27. Pew Research Center, “Congress has long struggled to pass spending bills on time” (Oct. 1, 2025), https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/01/congress-has-long-struggled-to-pass-spending-bills-on-time/.

28. Congressional Research Service, “Continuing Resolutions: Overview of Components and Practices,” R46595, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R46595 (all twelve regular appropriations bills enacted on time only four times since FY1977, and 207 continuing resolutions enacted from FY1977 through FY2025).

29. Congressional Research Service, “Overview of Continuing Appropriations for FY2026 (Division A of P.L. 119-37),” R48765, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48765 ; H.R. 5371, 119th Congress, https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5371 (the funding lapse beginning October 1, 2025, and the continuing resolution through January 30, 2026).

30. Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “Appropriations Watch: FY 2026,” https://www.crfb.org/blogs/appropriations-watch-fy-2026 ; International Economic Development Council, “Federal Funding Update: FY 2026 Appropriations and January 30 Deadline” (Jan. 28, 2026), https://www.iedconline.org/news/2026/01/28/federal-policy-updates/federal-funding-update-fy-2026-appropriations-and-january-30-deadline/.

31. Bloomberg Government, “What a Continuing Resolution Means for Appropriations Strategy” (Aug. 7, 2025), https://about.bgov.com/insights/budget-appropriations/what-a-continuing-resolution-means-for-federal-contractors-agencies-and-appropriations-strategy/ (fiscal year 2025 funded entirely through continuing resolutions, including a full-year measure signed March 15, 2025).

32. On the doctrine’s tension with textualism and its lack of defined limits, see Cato Institute, “Responding to the New Major Questions Doctrine” (Summer 2023), https://www.cato.org/regulation/summer-2023/responding-new-major-questions-doctrine ; and Ballotpedia, “Major questions doctrine,” https://ballotpedia.org/Major_questions_doctrine.

Raw Milk: The Wrong Lesson

A scandal of corruption and filth became a permanent case against fresh milk. It was the wrong lesson.

New York distillers poisoned thousands of infants with filthy milk, and the politicians paid to stop them took bribes instead. Then the government drew exactly the wrong lesson. Rather than remove the conditions that caused the disaster, it treated the symptom, protected the system, and taught generations of Americans that the cow was the problem.

She was not.

In the spring of 1858, a New York publisher named Frank Leslie received milk at his door that was blue, watery, and contaminated with pus. He ordered an analysis, disliked what he found, and sent reporters and illustrators to trace the milk to its source. What they uncovered was not a quality control failure. It was an industrial scandal that had become a business model.

The distilleries of Manhattan and Brooklyn produced enormous quantities of spent grain mash. Disposing of it cost money. Feeding it to cattle produced profit. Distillers built cow sheds against their whiskey operations and packed them with animals standing in filth, tethered over troughs and fed steaming waste from the stills. The diet destroyed the animals. Teeth loosened. Sores opened. Udders became diseased. Cows too weak to stand were suspended in slings and milked until they died.

That milk was sold to the public.

Because it was thin and blue, it was adulterated first. Chalk and plaster for color. Flour and starch for body. Molasses for appearance. Water for volume. Wagons labeled “Pure Country Milk” carried it through the city while families believed they were buying fresh milk from the country. Contemporary estimates attributed thousands of infant deaths a year to it.

The corruption that protected the trade should sound familiar.

When public outrage forced an investigation, inspectors warned the operators before arriving. The barns were cleaned. The conditions were staged. The committee toured the sanitized sheds, declared the danger exaggerated, and recommended better ventilation. One member, Charles Haswell, filed a dissent describing the fraud and warning that children were dying. He was ignored. Years of pressure passed before the state acted.

The story is usually told backward.

Nothing about the swill milk scandal shows that milk was inherently dangerous. The deaths came from confinement, diseased animals, contaminated feed, adulteration, and political corruption. The milk was dangerous because the system producing it was dangerous.

There were two ways to respond.

One was to fix the source. Take the cattle out of the distillery sheds. Clean up the conditions. Test the animals. Keep the herds healthy. Produce milk under conditions that do not cause disease.

The other was to leave the industrial system in place and try to neutralize the result after the fact.

The second path won.

Pasteurization was not the choice made in 1858. It did not yet exist as a practical milk intervention. Pasteur’s early work was on wine; milk pasteurization did not take hold in the United States until decades later. The officials who inspected the swill dairies were not choosing heat over reform. They were choosing corruption over reform.

That distinction matters.

Decades later, when the federal government did push pasteurization, it conceded that the method was not ideal, only practical under existing conditions. In plain terms, restructuring the production system was harder than heating the final product. The industry was already large, centralized, and politically connected. Heating the milk was easier than fixing the barn.

There is another part of this history that deserves the same scrutiny, and it cuts against the regulators as much as against anyone else.

There was a genuine disease that traveled in milk. It was tuberculosis. But the historical record blurred two organisms. Mycobacterium tuberculosis is primarily a human pathogen, spread person-to-person. Mycobacterium bovis is primarily a cattle pathogen that can infect people, most often through raw milk.

The two diseases can look identical, and for most of this history, physicians could not tell them apart. Species-level identification was usually impossible. Cases were classified by symptoms, by age, and by the site of disease rather than by direct proof. Extrapulmonary tuberculosis in a child was often assumed to be milk-borne and therefore bovine. That assumption is not the same as demonstrating M. bovis, and the reasoning frequently ran in a circle.

This is why the old body counts should be read with caution. The round figures still quoted today, such as fifteen thousand American deaths in 1917, are contemporaneous official estimates, copied forward for a century with little hard counting beneath them. The confidence with which they are repeated now exceeds the evidence that produced them.

None of that makes bovine tuberculosis imaginary. Where investigators actually typed the organism, by culture and animal inoculation, they found it. Park and Krumwiede did this work in New York in 1910. Fraser showed in 1912 that much of the bone and joint tuberculosis in Edinburgh children was bovine. Three British Royal Commissions, working between 1890 and 1911, settled that the cattle organism does infect people. In those studies, the bovine type accounted for roughly a quarter of childhood tuberculosis cases and about half of tuberculous neck gland cases before milk was made safe. The honest reading is that the disease was real and laboratory confirmed in children and in the non-pulmonary forms, while the sweeping national totals were not.

Modern data argues for the same restraint. Across much of the world, raw milk and informal dairy remain common, yet zoonotic tuberculosis is generally estimated to be a small share of human tuberculosis, often one to two percent, and likely undercounted in some regions. WHO-linked figures put it at near 140,000 human cases per year, out of millions of total cases. That is real. It is not nothing. It is also not the blanket case against fresh milk that regulators imply.

So the honest statement is narrow. M. bovis was a real risk where infected cattle were present, and milk was drunk untreated, and it was most dangerous to children. The remedy was not to heat all milk and restrict the alternative. The remedy was to clean up the herds, and where that was done thoroughly, the disease collapsed. The United States tested and removed infected cattle and largely eliminated it. Countries that relied on pasteurization alone and left their herds infected kept the problem for decades.

The lesson is not that raw milk causes tuberculosis. The lesson is that diseased herds are dangerous.

Test the animals. Remove infected cattle. Document herd health. Maintain clean production.

Raw milk from a tested, healthy herd is a different product from milk drawn from animals of unknown disease status. The deciding factor is not temperature. It is the health of the animal. Tuberculosis testing. Brucellosis testing. Clean conditions. Real surveillance, proven rather than assumed.

The real lesson of the swill milk scandal is not that milk is dangerous. It is that any system, industrial or otherwise, becomes dangerous when corruption, convenience, and profit replace accountability.

The cow was never the central problem.

The conditions were.

The fraud was.

The corruption was.

Citations

1. “Exposure of the Milk Trade,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 8 and May 15, 1858. The Henry Ford Digital Collections. https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/artifact/87141

2. “The 19th-century milk scandal that killed thousands of babies.” Big Think, 2023. Source for the contemporary New York Times estimate of thousands of infant deaths a year and historian Catherine McNeur on the committee’s better-ventilation recommendation. https://bigthink.com/the-past/swill-milk-scandal/

3. “The Swill Milk Scandal That Poisoned Thousands of Babies in 19th-Century New York City.” Atlas Obscura, 2025. Source for the milk-and-pus origin, the tipped-off inspectors, and the staged inspection. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/swill-milk-scandal-new-york-city

4. “Swill Milk: When Distilleries Defiled Dairy.” The Saturday Evening Post, 2025. Source for the cow suspended in a sling and milked until death and the shed conditions. https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2025/07/swill-milk-when-distilleries-defiled-dairy/

5. “The Surprisingly Intolerant History of Milk.” Smithsonian Magazine, 2018. Source for the 1908 federal report stating pasteurization was “forced upon us by present conditions.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/surprisingly-intolerant-history-milk-180969056/

6. Bradish Johnson, Wikipedia. Corroborating source for the chalk and flour adulteration, the slings, and the “Orange County” pushcart branding, citing contemporary New York Times reporting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradish_Johnson

7. “The Swill Milk Scandal of 1858.” Stuff You Missed in History Class (transcript). Source for Councilman Charles Haswell’s dissenting minority report and the staged inspection. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-missed-in-histor-21124503/episode/the-swill-milk-scandal-of-1858-85039095/

8. “The Fight for Safe Milk: Pasteurization.” Neatorama, 2011. Source for Pasteur’s early work on wine and the late arrival of milk pasteurization in the United States. https://www.neatorama.com/2011/01/24/the-fight-for-safe-milk-pasteurization/

9. “The Crusade for ’Pure’ Milk.” Postcard History, 2021. Source for the slow adoption of pasteurization in New York. https://postcardhistory.net/2021/12/the-crusade-for-pure-milk/

10. “A 100-Year Review: A century of dairy processing advancements.” Journal of Dairy Science, 2017. Source for the timeline of US compulsory pasteurization laws and Koch’s linkage of cow health to milk-borne disease. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022030217310573

11. “Pasteurize or Certify: Two Solutions to ’The Milk Problem.’” A Campaign for Real Milk. Source for the period debate over pasteurization versus certified clean milk. https://www.realmilk.com/pasteurize-or-certify/

12. Park, W. H. and Krumwiede, C. (1910). “The Relative Importance of the Bovine and Human Types of Tubercle Bacilli in Different Forms of Human Tuberculosis.” Journal of Medical Research 23: 205-268. The foundational US study typing the organism in human cases by culture and animal inoculation; indexed in PubMed.

13. Fraser, J. (1912). “The Relative Prevalence of Human and Bovine Types of Tubercle Bacilli in Bone and Joint Tuberculosis Occurring in Children.” Journal of Experimental Medicine 16(4): 432-442. Found a large proportion of childhood bone and joint TB in Edinburgh to be bovine in origin, introduced through cow’s milk. https://rupress.org/jem/article/16/4/432/6823/

14. Royal Commission on Tuberculosis, Final Report (Griffith, A. S., 1911), with contemporaneous coverage of the Commission’s experimental program of 1890 to 1911. The Commission’s own animal experiments established that the bovine bacillus infects humans, overturning Koch’s 1901 claim that it did not. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5205861/

15. “The History of In Vivo Tuberculin Testing in Bovines: Tuberculosis, a One Health Issue.” Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 2018 (via PMC). Source for the New York neck-gland data, about half bovine before pasteurization and only a handful after, nearly all in raw-milk drinkers, and for the observation that cattle economics rather than the human toll primarily drove British eradication. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5900347/

16. “Milk and Tuberculosis.” PMC. Source for the high tuberculous-lesion rates among cows slaughtered in London in 1901 and continued high cattle infection into the 1940s. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5068040/

17. Olmstead, A. L. and Rhode, P. W. “An Impossible Undertaking: The Eradication of Bovine Tuberculosis in the United States.” Journal of Economic History, 2004; and the 2012 comparative chapter. Source for the estimate that probably 10 percent or more of US TB sufferers had the bovine form, concentrated in non-pulmonary cases and in children, and for the United States leading Europe in controlling the disease through test and slaughter. https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/alolmstead/Recent_Publications/Impossible_Undertaking.pdf

18. “Bovine tuberculosis in India: The need for One Health approach.” PMC. Corroborating source for the 1917 US test-and-slaughter policy and the scale of cattle testing and culling. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9932178/

19. de la Rua-Domenech, R. “Human Mycobacterium bovis infection in the United Kingdom.” Tuberculosis, 2006. Source for M. bovis as a distinct organism transmitted chiefly through raw milk and for its small share of modern TB cases in industrialized countries. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1472979205000478

20. The older aggregate death tolls. The estimate of roughly 15,000 US bovine TB deaths in 1917 is an official estimate of the era, repeated in later reviews such as Waters et al., “Bovine tuberculosis vaccine research,” Vaccine, 2012, and is best read as a contemporaneous estimate rather than a measured count. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264410X12001831

21. “About Bovine Tuberculosis in Humans.” US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2025. Source for pasteurization eliminating M. bovis from milk and for the national eradication program. https://www.cdc.gov/tb/about/m-bovis.html

22. “Bovine Tuberculosis in Cattle.” US Department of Agriculture, APHIS. Source for the National Tuberculosis Eradication Program (begun 1917) and the fact that infected cattle are typically asymptomatic. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/cattle/bovine-tuberculosis-cattle

23. “Zoonotic tuberculosis in human beings caused by Mycobacterium bovis: a call for action.” Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2017. Source for the modern position that the human burden of M. bovis is uncertain and likely underestimated, because routine laboratories cannot distinguish it from M. tuberculosis and surveillance is largely absent in endemic regions. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1473309916301396

24. “Mycobacterium bovis and its impact on human and animal tuberculosis.” Journal of Medical Microbiology. Source for the modern estimate of roughly 140,000 human zoonotic TB cases a year, about 1 to 2 percent of human TB, with a reported range across studies of 1 to 28 percent. https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/jmm/10.1099/jmm.0.001769

Note on the evidence. Before the 1930s, clinical diagnosis could not distinguish M. bovis from M. tuberculosis, so the pre-typing death tolls are contemporaneous estimates rather than measured counts, and the swill-era infant deaths of the 1850s were generally acute deaths from contaminated milk, not tuberculosis. The firm historical evidence comes from the laboratory-typing studies, Park and Krumwiede in 1910, Fraser in 1912, and the Royal Commissions of 1890 to 1911, and it is specific to childhood and non-pulmonary disease rather than to total tuberculosis.

JGM

For a generation, Americans have been taught to approach their own country’s birthday as a dark day in history. The founding, we are told, was irredeemably compromised. The men who created the nation were hypocrites who spoke of liberty while tolerating slavery, and the proper response to 1776 is not gratitude or admiration, but discomfort.

Eric Metaxas rejects that view, and thank God for that.

Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World arrives at exactly the right moment, as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary. It does something that much of our educational, cultural, and political establishment has spent decades discouraging. It celebrates the American founding.

Metaxas argues that what emerged in 1776 was not merely a successful rebellion against British rule. It was a genuinely revolutionary event that changed the course of human history. Unlike the French, Russian, Chinese, and countless other revolutions that promised liberty and delivered tyranny, the American Revolution produced a constitutional republic built on individual rights, self-government, and the radical idea that legitimate power comes from the consent of the governed.

Very little in our culture today encourages Americans to understand what was achieved in 1776, much less take pride in it. Metaxas reminds readers that the American story is not one of perfection. It is the story of an imperfect people who created something extraordinary. A nation that forgets how it was founded will eventually lose what made it worth preserving in the first place.

At its heart, this book is a reminder that our inheritance is real, that it is worth defending, and that Americans should not be ashamed of it.

The New York Times moved the date on purpose

A few years ago, The New York Times advanced the argument that America’s true founding was not 1776, but 1619, the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia. This was not simply a dispute over dates. It was an attempt to redefine the nation’s origin story.

If the country begins with slavery rather than liberty, then the Declaration, the Constitution, the Founders, and the principles of self-government become secondary at best and fraudulent at worst. The founding ideals are transformed from aspirations into excuses.

The problem was that many of the project’s central historical claims did not withstand scrutiny. Criticism came not only from conservatives but from prominent historians on the political left, several of whom publicly challenged key assertions. In response, The New York Times quietly revised portions of its presentation. Yet by then, the objective had largely been achieved. The debate was no longer about whether the founding principles were true. It was about whether they deserved to remain at the center of America’s inception. They put the idea in the minds of everyday Americans that the founding was based on maintaining slavery and not on freedom, democracy, and a constitutional republic.

That is the challenge Metaxas takes on directly.

The title alone makes the case. Revolution requires no qualifier because, in Metaxas’s telling, the American Revolution stands apart from every other event that has claimed the name. The French Revolution descended into terror. The Russian Revolution produced totalitarianism. Again and again, revolutions have promised freedom and delivered concentrated power.

The American Revolution was different because it began with a radically different premise: that rights do not originate with governments, kings, legislatures, or political movements. They are inherent to the individual, endowed by God, and therefore beyond the legitimate reach of any ruler to grant, redefine, or revoke. Everything else follows from that proposition. It is the foundation of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the American experiment itself.

This is also why the debate over 1619 matters. At its core, the argument was never about chronology. It was about whether America’s defining principle should be liberty or oppression, whether the nation’s story should be understood through its highest ideals or its greatest failures.

The two visions cannot occupy the same place in the national narrative.

Metaxas unapologetically places the American founding and the principles that animated it back at the center of the story. More importantly, he spends more than six hundred fascinating pages demonstrating why they belong there.

A storyteller, not a lecturer

What saves this from being a sermon is that Metaxas can actually tell a story. The author understands something many historians do not. People learn through stories. Ideas matter, but ideas become real when they are attached to events and the men and women who lived them.

Rather than treating the American Revolution as a collection of dates and documents, Metaxas tells it as a story.

He begins before the shooting starts, with what John Adams called the “revolution before the Revolution.” The story unfolds through the legal and political battles that preceded open conflict: the challenge to British authority, the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, the growing military presence in Boston, the Boston Massacre, and the Boston Tea Party. By the time Lexington and Concord arrive, the reader understands that war did not emerge from a single incident. It was the culmination of years of escalating conflict between a people who increasingly saw themselves as free and a government determined to treat them as subjects.

From there come the moments every American recognizes, even if many no longer know them well. Henry Knox hauling artillery from Fort Ticonderoga through winter conditions that few thought navigable. Washington crossing the Delaware and launching the Trenton campaign when the cause appeared close to collapse. Saratoga. Valley Forge. Benedict Arnold’s betrayal. Yorktown.

Metaxas tells these stories with energy and detail, but the storytelling serves a larger purpose. He is not asking the reader to admire a set of abstract principles. He is showing how those principles survived because ordinary and extraordinary individuals chose sacrifice, risk, and perseverance when failure would have been easier and surrender more comfortable.

That is ultimately why the book works. The American founding emerges not as mythology, but as the product of real people making difficult choices under extraordinary circumstances. The ideas matter because the people who carried them forward were willing to pay the price required to make them real.

The warning: A republic, if you can keep it

The most important part of the book may be the epilogue.

There, Metaxas turns to a question that modern Americans often avoid: What made the American experiment possible in the first place? His answer, drawn from the words of the founders themselves, is that the Revolution and the republic it produced rested on a moral and religious foundation.

He points to John Adams’s warning that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people and was wholly inadequate for any other. He recalls George Washington’s caution in his Farewell Address that religion and morality were indispensable supports of political prosperity and national character.

This is not an argument for theocracy. It is an argument about the limits of government.

Metaxas, drawing in part on the work of Os Guinness, argues that freedom requires virtue, virtue requires moral formation, and moral formation depends on institutions and beliefs that exist outside the state. A free society can sustain limited government only if enough citizens possess the character and self-restraint necessary to govern themselves. The government cannot create those qualities by decree.

That insight lies at the heart of the American constitutional system. The founders did not believe that liberty would survive automatically. They understood that self-government ultimately depends on a culture capable of sustaining it.

Which brings the reader back to Benjamin Franklin’s famous response after the Constitutional Convention. Asked what form of government had been created, he answered: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

That is the question hanging over America’s 250th anniversary.

The celebration of America's founding is deserved. The achievements are real. But anniversaries are not merely occasions for remembrance. They are opportunities for self-examination. The generation that inherited this republic is now responsible for preserving it.

Metaxas’s concern is that many Americans no longer understand the principles that created the country, the sacrifices that sustained it, or the civic character required to keep it free. Whether one agrees with that conclusion or not, it is the question that runs beneath the entire book, and it is the question the nation will carry into its third century.

Be clear about what Metaxas has written.

This is not a conventional academic history. It is not detached, ironic, or hesitant. It is written by an author who believes the American founding was one of the most consequential events in human history and who is willing to defend that proposition without apology.

That alone will make many liberal readers uncomfortable.

For decades, much of America’s historical and cultural establishment has approached the founding primarily through the lens of its failures and contradictions. Of course, the United States is not perfect, and the past deserves honest examination. But a nation cannot endure if it remembers only its sins and forgets its achievements. A people taught to be ashamed of their inheritance will not preserve it for long.

Metaxas takes a different approach. He does not ask readers to ignore the imperfections of the founders. He asks them to understand what those founders accomplished, why it mattered, and why the principles they articulated changed the course of history.

Whether one agrees with every argument in the book is almost beside the point. The larger contribution is that Metaxas is willing to state plainly what many modern writers seem reluctant to acknowledge: the American experiment was extraordinary, its success was far from inevitable, and its continuation is not guaranteed.

That is why this book arrives at exactly the right moment.

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, Americans face a choice. We can teach the next generation that our history is little more than a catalog of grievances, or we can teach them that free people built something remarkable, flawed but worthy, and that its preservation now rests in their hands.

Read this book before Independence Day.

Then give it to your children, your grandchildren, or someone young enough to inherit the country we leave behind. The American Revolution created a republic. Every generation since has been responsible for keeping it.

Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World is published by Odysseus Books.

Available from Amazon at this link, and from all good booksellers.

TURN: Washington’s Spies and the America We Have Forgotten

If you have not watched TURN: Washington’s Spies, you should.

Based on the story of the Culper Ring, George Washington’s intelligence network during the Revolutionary War, TURN follows farmers, merchants, sailors, and families caught between loyalty to the Crown and loyalty to a revolutionary cause. It portrays the American founding not as an inevitable march of progress, but as a dangerous gamble undertaken by imperfect people who believed liberty was worth fighting for.

That alone makes it unusual television. The show is also edge of the seat suspenseful and it is hard not to binge watch all the the way through. It is that good.

Much of today’s historical programming approaches America through a different lens. The dominant theme is failure. Every story becomes an indictment. Slavery. Racism. Imperialism. Economic inequality. The nation is presented less as an extraordinary political experiment and more as a catalog of its sins. The audience is taught to view American history primarily through oppression rather than aspiration. The message is familiar to anyone who followed the debates surrounding the 1619 Project: America is not a remarkable achievement with flaws, but a flawed enterprise whose achievements are largely incidental.

TURN offers a needed corrective.

The series treats the struggle for independence as something noble. It assumes that creating a constitutional republic was a remarkable achievement rather than an embarrassment to be explained away. The men and women in the story are flawed, frightened, and often conflicted, but they are also brave. They risk their lives, their families, and their livelihoods for an idea. That perspective has become surprisingly rare.

Now, historians will undoubtedly object. They will point out that the series compresses timelines, combines characters, invents conversations, and occasionally takes liberties with the historical record. Fair enough. But those criticisms miss the larger point. TURN succeeds where most modern historical programming fails. It captures the spirit of the Revolution. It helps viewers understand why ordinary people would risk everything to create a new nation.

That said, TURN contains a great deal of violence. It does not shy away from battle scenes, executions, injury, torture, or the brutal realities of eighteenth-century warfare. This is most definitely not a show for children.

A healthy nation should be capable of acknowledging its failures without becoming obsessed with them. History should tell us what was wrong, but it should also remind us what was right. Americans do not need more documentaries explaining why they should be ashamed of their inheritance. Americans need stories that help them understand why previous generations believed the country was worth building in the first place and why they should to.

For that reason alone, TURN is worth your time. It reminds viewers that the American Revolution was not merely a collection of grievances and contradictions. It was also an act of courage, sacrifice, and conviction. A country that forgets that part of its story risks forgetting why it exists at all.

For those who don’t understand or remember the image above, it is seared into my memory because Robert and I lived near Charlottesville when the far-right protests there occurred in 2017. And yes, there were some pretty nasty neo-Nazis; truly white supremacist, KKK members at those rallies. Then, near the end of that tension-filled weekend, where the police were told to stand down and not arrest anyone, some far-right psychopath took his car and rammed it into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing a woman. It was horrific.

Then we learn from the DoJ, almost a decade later, that the Southern Poverty Law Center was PAYING those KKK and neo-Nazi types a monthly stipend to recruit new members. People who were probably at that Charlottesville protest/riot - to be there, to rile up hate and act out - to the point where an innocent young woman’s life was cut short - murdered.

The SPLC paid over four million dollars to people to join the KKK, in hopes of stirring enough hate to get liberals to donate to their cause. The idea that a non-profit, non-governmental agency was hiring people to do this is abhorrent. They have no legal authority to hire people to recruit others to do illegal acts, so that the SPLC can report on it. Just think about it.

If I went out and paid someone who was a drug dealer to buy drugs so I could track and record for the media, would that be legal? Of course not. Yet that is the argument the liberal news is making. That the SPLC's behavior was justified because they were tracking racists, paying informants. Sorry, but that interpretation is just wrong. Paying people to be involved in illegal activities is illegal - that is called being an accessory to a crime.

Under U.S. law, private citizens and private organizations do not have the same legal protections that law enforcement has when using confidential informants. If a private person knowingly funds, encourages, or materially assists criminal activity, that creates criminal liability.

The SPLC crossed the line from observation into financial support of ongoing activities by paying individuals to remain active and allegedly reimbursing them for activities that helped sustain the organization.

Now we know all about it… that these SPLC-paid KKK protestors stirred up so much hate, that some crazy person rammed their car into a crowd. Does that make the SPLC an accessory to murder?

For me, the fact that the SPLC was complicit in enabling these protests/riots completely changes the lens through which I view this sordid bit of history.

Postscript on this story, that I found shocking:

There was not a single story written by progressive mainstream media on the KKK being paid 4 million bucks by the SPLC.

For instance, Ground News, an aggregator of both left and right news, found only numerous articles from media outlets on the "right" to source. No left-wing mainstream media news site could be bothered to write a story on this development - except about how the SPLC is being persecuted for hiring “paid informants.”
I wonder why (insert sarcasm)?

Finally, the New York Times did a recent story on the SPLC - and this is what they went with:

The NYT maintains that the DoJ is engaged in vindictive prosecution of the SPLC. The NYTs doesn’t write a peep about Klan members being paid.

Honestly, this stuff writes itself…

Yes, the below image is a sick joke and probably untrue - but still… funny

Ron Paul is still right…

The Frog Whisperer Was Right: What Atrazine Tells Us About Who Really Protects Your Family

Why a weed killer banned across Europe still flows from American taps, why the scientist who exposed it was hunted by the company that made it, and why the chemical you should worry about is not the one you eat but the one you drink.

Few stories illustrate the collision between science, corporate power, and public health more clearly than the controversy surrounding atrazine.

Atrazine is the second most widely used herbicide in the United States. It is routinely detected in rivers, reservoirs, groundwater, and drinking water supplies across much of the country. It has been banned throughout much of Europe, remains the subject of ongoing scientific and legal disputes, and has generated decades of controversy over its potential effects on hormones, reproduction, development, and human health.

At the center of this story is Dr. Tyrone Hayes, a University of California, Berkeley biologist who was initially hired to study atrazine on behalf of its manufacturer. His findings raised questions the company did not want asked. What followed has become one of the most widely cited examples of conflict between independent scientific inquiry and the commercial interests surrounding a major agricultural product.

The debate over atrazine is not merely about a herbicide. It is about who decides what constitutes acceptable risk, how regulatory agencies evaluate evidence, and whether economic interests are given greater weight than public health when the two come into conflict.

When the Research Became Inconvenient

In 1997, Dr. Tyrone Hayes was hired by a predecessor company to Syngenta to study the effects of atrazine on amphibians. His research raised concerns that the herbicide could disrupt normal sexual development in frogs. In one of his most widely cited studies, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, genetically male frogs exposed to atrazine developed significant reproductive abnormalities. Some exhibited feminized characteristics, and some were capable of producing viable eggs after mating with male frogs [1].

The scientific findings were controversial. What made the controversy even more significant was what later emerged from internal corporate records.

Documents obtained during litigation and subsequently released through Freedom of Information Act requests revealed extensive efforts by Syngenta and its contractors to monitor, challenge, and discredit Hayes and his work [2][3].

Internal communications described strategies intended to undermine his credibility, track his public appearances, and respond to his scientific claims. Company records also referenced efforts to assemble networks of outside experts who could be called upon to defend atrazine and challenge adverse findings in the scientific and public policy arenas [3][4].

The existence of these documents became public through investigative reporting by The New Yorker, Mother Jones, and the nonprofit newsroom the Center for Media and Democracy, all of which reviewed court records and internal company communications released during litigation [2][3][4].

The use of corporate resources to investigate, profile, monitor, and attempt to discredit a scientist whose research produced findings unfavorable to a commercial product is unacceptable. The atrazine controversy became about more than frogs, endocrine disruption, or environmental toxicology. It became a case study in how large organizations respond when scientific findings threaten a product worth billions of dollars in annual sales.

As someone who was personally targeted for questioning the safety profile of mRNA vaccines during the COVID response, a vicious attack campaign that has since been documented in congressional reports, court filings, and government disclosures, the Hayes story is not merely historical. The tactics are instantly recognizable. When the science becomes inconvenient, the discussion often shifts from the data to the scientist.

What has changed since the atrazine controversy is not the strategy but the sophistication. The tools are more advanced, the coordination is more effective, and the ability to shape public perception is far greater. The objective, however, remains unchanged: isolate the dissenter, damage credibility, and ensure that the debate centers on the individual rather than the evidence.

What the science actually says

Hayes’s headline claim, complete sex reversal in frogs, has been the hardest to replicate, and industry-funded studies reported no such effect [5]. But step back from that single dramatic image, and the broader picture is much stronger. Independent reviews, including meta-analyses by amphibian biologist Jason Rohr, who is not in anyone’s pocket, found that atrazine reliably disrupts amphibian biology: it alters gonadal development and sex hormones, suppresses immune function, raises infection rates, and changes behavior at concentrations you actually find in the environment [6]. The specific “turns males into females” headline is debated. The conclusion that atrazine is a real endocrine disruptor is not.

Then came November 2025. A working group convened by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the same body considered the gold standard for cancer hazard assessment, reviewed the evidence, and classified atrazine as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” Group 2A [7][8]. They cited limited evidence in humans for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, sufficient evidence of cancer in animals, and strong mechanistic evidence that atrazine behaves like a carcinogen, causing oxidative stress, DNA damage, immune suppression, inflammation, and hormone disruption [7]. This is the same category, by the same agency, that glyphosate landed in a decade earlier.

The counterpoint is that the largest American study of farm applicators, the Agricultural Health Study, did not find an overall link between atrazine and non-Hodgkin lymphoma in its 2024 update, though it did flag elevated cancer rates among those who apply the product diagnosed before age 50 [9].

IARC weighs hazard, the question of whether something can cause cancer. EPA tends to argue about risk at typical exposures. Both can be partly right. But notice the asymmetry: the WHO’s cancer agency says probably carcinogenic, and the EPA continues to defend the chemical’s use [8].

Pregnancy and fetal development

Potential effects on fetal development warrant particular attention. A peer-reviewed study conducted in Indiana reported that higher atrazine concentrations in drinking water during pregnancy were associated with an increased risk of infants being born small for gestational age [10].

The increase in risk observed in the study was modest at the level of an individual pregnancy. However, small shifts in birth weight distributions can have significant public health implications when exposure occurs across large populations. A risk increase that appears minor for a single family may translate into thousands of additional affected births when millions of pregnant women are exposed.

Low birth weight and small-for-gestational-age status are not merely statistical outcomes. Both have been associated with increased risks of neonatal complications, developmental challenges, metabolic disorders, and adverse health outcomes later in life. For that reason, even relatively small changes in population-level risk deserve careful consideration when evaluating environmental exposures during pregnancy.

The desiccant debate

If you read this substack and other alternative media, you have read about the alarming and accurate reporting about pre-harvest desiccation: the practice of spraying a herbicide on a mature crop days before harvest to dry it down, which drives chemical residues straight into oats, wheat, bread, and legumes. That reporting is real. But the chemical at its center is glyphosate as well as some other bad actors, but it is not atrazine [11][12].

Atrazine is not a desiccant. Atrazine is a Group 5 photosynthesis inhibitor used early in the season on corn, sorghum, and sugarcane, usually before or shortly after the weeds and crop emerge [13]. Its label requires a long gap between application and harvest, a 45-day pre-harvest interval for sweet corn forage, for example, and prohibits late-season spraying [14]. So there is no equivalent of the glyphosate-on-oats story for atrazine, and no dataset of “atrazine desiccant residues,” because that is simply not how the chemical is used.

Here is the twist, though. Atrazine’s exposure route is in some ways sneakier than food residues.

You do not mainly eat atrazine. You drink it.

On the plate, atrazine is a minor actor. EPA’s dietary assessment concluded that the risk from atrazine residues in food did not exceed the agency’s level of concern. Trace amounts turn up in grain, milk, and meat because the chemical is fed to livestock, and year after year, USDA monitoring reports most sampled foods sitting below tolerance [15][16][17]. EPA even tightened several atrazine food tolerances in December 2025 [14]. Fine. If atrazine were only a residue on your cornflakes, it would barely be worth an essay.

The primary route of exposure is through water, and that is what makes atrazine different from many other agricultural chemicals. Atrazine is highly mobile in the environment. It persists in soil long enough to be carried by rainfall and irrigation runoff, and it readily moves through the soil profile into groundwater. After spring application, significant quantities can wash into streams, rivers, reservoirs, and aquifers that supply drinking water for both rural and urban communities. According to EPA monitoring data, atrazine is one of the most frequently detected pesticide contaminants in both surface water and groundwater in the United States [13].

Once atrazine enters groundwater and surface water systems, it can persist for extended periods. Atrazine is relatively resistant to hydrolysis across the normal environmental pH range and is not readily degraded by sunlight. In surface waters exposed to sunlight, degradation may occur over periods ranging from days to months. In groundwater aquifers, where sunlight is absent and temperatures are lower, environmental persistence can extend for years [26]. Germany banned atrazine in 1991, yet more than eighteen years later it remained one of the most frequently detected pesticide contaminants in German groundwater [27].

Atrazine also degrades into several metabolites, including desethylatrazine and desisopropylatrazine. These degradation products remain mobile in the environment, persist in groundwater, and are commonly detected alongside the parent compound in environmental monitoring programs [28].

The extent of contamination is well documented. A 2021 U.S. Geological Survey analysis of 442 streams detected atrazine in 55 percent of surface water samples and in 70 percent of groundwater samples tested [25]. In major agricultural regions, particularly the Corn Belt, concentrations rise predictably following seasonal application, with peak levels occurring during late spring and early summer runoff events [13]. An Environmental Working Group analysis estimated that approximately 30 million Americans in 28 states receive drinking water containing detectable atrazine residues [20].

These findings raise an important regulatory question: what level of atrazine exposure is considered acceptable in drinking water? The United States Environmental Protection Agency has established a maximum contaminant level of 3 micrograms per liter. By comparison, the European Union limits any individual pesticide in drinking water to 0.1 micrograms per liter, a standard thirty times lower than the U.S. limit [20]. The substantial difference between these regulatory thresholds reflects differing interpretations of the available scientific evidence and differing approaches to precautionary regulation.

The economic consequences of atrazine contamination have also been significant. In 2012, Syngenta agreed to a $105 million settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by more than one thousand community water systems serving millions of Americans. The settlement was intended to help offset costs associated with monitoring and removing atrazine from drinking water supplies [18][19]. Although the company admitted no wrongdoing, the case highlighted the financial burden that pesticide contamination can impose on public water systems.

The potential public health implications extend beyond contamination alone. The Indiana birth-weight study discussed earlier evaluated atrazine concentrations in drinking water and reported an association between higher maternal exposure during pregnancy and an increased likelihood of low birth weight among newborns [10]. As a result, drinking water remains one of the most important pathways for human exposure to atrazine, particularly for pregnant women, infants, and young children.Malone News is a reader-supported publication.

Why it ends up in the milk

The exposure pathway does not end with drinking water. Atrazine contamination can also enter the food supply through livestock. Dairy cattle consume water and feed produced in agricultural environments where atrazine is widely used. Because atrazine and its metabolites can accumulate in animal tissues, residues may subsequently be detected in milk and other animal products [29][30]. As one review noted, human exposure occurs primarily through contaminated water and through foods, particularly animal-derived products with higher fat content [30].

Evidence for this pathway has been documented in multiple studies. A 2022 investigation of dairy farms in Argentina detected atrazine residues in 89 percent of raw milk samples tested, with some samples exceeding internationally established limits for human consumption [30]. The authors concluded that the estimated risk associated with consumption of individual milk samples was low. However, the study confirmed that atrazine contamination can be transferred from agricultural production systems into the human food chain.

Data from the United States suggest that farming practices can substantially influence residue levels. In a study comparing retail conventional and organic milk products, researchers reported no detectable residues of the current-use pesticides examined in organic milk samples. In contrast, pesticide residues, including atrazine, were detected in a portion of conventionally produced milk samples. The same study also reported differences in the presence of other agricultural contaminants, including growth-promoting hormones and antibiotic residues [29].

At first glance, these findings appear inconsistent with federal monitoring data. The FDA’s pesticide residue surveillance program reported no pesticide violations in domestically produced milk and found no residues exceeding established regulatory tolerances [31]. However, the two datasets were designed to answer different questions. FDA monitoring programs are intended to identify violations of regulatory limits. Research studies often employ more sensitive analytical techniques capable of detecting trace concentrations well below those limits. Consequently, a finding of no regulatory violations does not necessarily mean that no residues are present; it means that any residues detected fall below established enforcement thresholds.

The distinction is important. Regulatory compliance addresses whether a product meets legal standards. Exposure assessment addresses whether a chemical is present at all and, if so, at what concentration. These are related but separate questions.

The absence of detectable atrazine residues in the organic milk samples is consistent with the requirements of organic production. Organic certification prohibits the use of atrazine and other synthetic herbicides on feed crops and pastureland, thereby reducing the likelihood that residues will enter the production system. While no agricultural product can be guaranteed completely free of environmental contaminants, production methods can significantly influence the probability and magnitude of exposure.

For consumers seeking to reduce atrazine exposure, drinking water and dairy products represent two pathways over which individual purchasing decisions may have a measurable effect. Selecting water treatment systems capable of removing atrazine and choosing dairy products produced without atrazine-based agricultural inputs can reduce overall exposure from these sources.

Below is a table of what water purification systems eliminat or reduce atrazine from water sources:

Recently, we purchased a countertop reverse osmosis unit to reduce microplastics in our drinking water. With a well depth of roughly 450 feet, atrazine contamination was not something we had given much thought. However, after digging into the literature, it became clear that atrazine and its metabolites can persist in groundwater for years and may, in some cases, be present even in relatively deep aquifers.

Reverse osmosis systems are expensive, but carbon filter-based units are not. So, if budget is a concern, that may be your solution - even if they don’t remove all of the residue.

The regulatory approaches taken by Europe and the United States are very different.

The European Union effectively banned atrazine in 2004 after concluding that groundwater contamination was widespread, difficult to control, and that available data were insufficient to demonstrate the chemical could be used safely under European environmental standards [20]. The decision reflected the precautionary principle: manufacturers bear the burden of demonstrating safety before a product remains on the market.

The United States has historically taken the opposite approach. Atrazine has remained in use unless and until regulators determine that the evidence justifies additional restrictions. As a result, regulatory standards have shifted repeatedly over time as scientific assessments, political priorities, litigation, and administrative reviews have changed.

The history of the EPA’s ecological level of concern for atrazine illustrates this process. In 2016, EPA scientists established an aquatic ecosystem level of concern of 3.4 micrograms per liter [21]. In 2020, the agency adopted a substantially less restrictive threshold of 15 micrograms per liter, a change that EPA later acknowledged reflected a policy decision rather than a purely scientific determination [21]. Following legal challenges and further review, including consideration by a scientific advisory panel, the EPA finalized a revised concentration-equivalent level of concern of 9.7 micrograms per liter in 2024 [22]. The result was neither the more protective 2016 threshold nor the more permissive 2020 standard.

Regulatory debate surrounding atrazine remains unresolved. In 2026, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finalized a biological opinion concluding that atrazine was not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of endangered or threatened species, a position that differed substantially from earlier federal analyses that had identified potential risks to a large number of listed species [23][24].

In response, environmental and public health organizations initiated additional legal challenges and renewed efforts to compel stronger federal regulation. As of mid-2026, petitions seeking more restrictive controls, including a complete ban, remained under active consideration [24].

Atrazine, MAHA, and the Limits of Political Will

Atrazine has become part of the broader Make America Healthy Again grass roots agenda. In May 2025, the MAHA Commission, chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., released its first report on childhood chronic disease and specifically identified atrazine as a chemical of concern. The report cited evidence from animal and wildlife studies indicating endocrine-disrupting effects and developmental abnormalities associated with exposure [32]. For a chemical that remains registered and approved for use by EPA, its inclusion in a cabinet-level report was noteworthy.

Kennedy’s interest in pesticide regulation predates his government service. As an environmental attorney, he spent decades litigating environmental contamination cases and publicly criticized a number of agricultural chemicals, including glyphosate. During his presidential campaign, he repeatedly argued that pesticide exposures may contribute to the rise in chronic disease and called for substantially greater scrutiny of these products [34].

However, identifying a potential public health concern and implementing regulatory action are two different matters. The MAHA report documented concerns regarding atrazine and other agricultural chemicals but stopped short of recommending specific restrictions or regulatory changes [32]. During the report’s release, administration officials emphasized that the goal was to evaluate scientific evidence rather than immediately alter agricultural practices.

The political realities surrounding pesticide regulation are difficult to ignore. Agricultural interests were not merely observers in the MAHA process; they had representation at the highest levels of the Commission itself.

As Secretary of Agriculture and a member of the MAHA Commission, Brooke Rollins has consistently positioned herself as an advocate for conventional agricultural practices and the chemical companies that support them. Industry sources and reporting indicate that agricultural interests successfully influenced portions of the Commission's deliberations and final language, including discussion of glyphosate and atrazine [33]. While the Commission was tasked with examining potential contributors to chronic disease, Rollins repeatedly emphasized the need to protect existing agricultural production systems and to reassure producers that major changes were not imminent. The result was a report that acknowledged concerns regarding these chemicals while stopping well short of recommending regulatory action.

The result has been a predictable conflict between public health concerns and entrenched agricultural interests. On one side are parents, physicians, scientists, and public health advocates raising questions about endocrine disruption, reproductive toxicity, developmental effects, and widespread contamination of drinking water. On the other are agricultural producers, chemical manufacturers, and the government agencies responsible for protecting an agricultural system that has become heavily dependent on products such as atrazine.

EPA continues to maintain that atrazine can be used safely under approved conditions, despite decades of scientific controversy, repeated regulatory disputes, documented groundwater contamination, and growing evidence of biological effects at exposure levels well below those traditionally considered toxic. The debate is no longer about whether atrazine reaches people and the environment. It is about how much evidence must accumulate before regulators act, and whether regulatory capture and economic considerations will continue to outweigh legitimate public health concerns.

As a practical matter, the regulatory status of atrazine remains unchanged. The herbicide continues to be registered for use in the United States, and EPA’s current aquatic concentration equivalent level of concern remains 9.7 micrograms per liter rather than the 3.4 micrograms per liter proposed by agency scientists in 2016 [21][22].

The broader lesson extends beyond atrazine itself. Scientific concerns, regulatory findings, public advocacy, and political commitments do not automatically translate into policy change. Regulatory outcomes ultimately depend on whether elected officials and agency leadership are willing to expend the political capital necessary to alter existing policy. To date, despite years of scientific debate and public controversy, atrazine remains widely used throughout American agriculture.

What This Is Really About

At its core, this debate is not about atrazine alone. It is about how regulatory systems respond when scientific uncertainty intersects with powerful economic interests.

Atrazine remains one of the most widely used herbicides in the United States despite being banned or effectively prohibited in much of the developed world. The chemical has been associated with endocrine-disrupting effects in laboratory and wildlife studies, has been linked to adverse developmental outcomes in some epidemiological investigations, and has generated decades of scientific and regulatory controversy. At the same time, it remains strongly defended by both its manufacturers and by agricultural interests that rely on it as a production tool.

It is hard to dispute that atrazine contaminates groundwater, surface water, and drinking water supplies throughout large portions of the United States. That fact has been documented repeatedly by federal agencies, academic researchers, and water utilities.

The larger question is how much evidence is required before taking precautionary action. Europe answered that question more than two decades ago by concluding that widespread groundwater contamination alone justified removing atrazine from the market. The United States regulatory agencies reached a different conclusion and continue to rely on faulty regulatory thresholds, risk assessments, and mitigation measures to justify its continued use.

Citizens do not have direct control over federal pesticide policy, but they do have control over their own decisions. Understanding where exposure occurs, reviewing the underlying evidence, supporting independent scientific inquiry, and reducing avoidable exposures where practical are all reasonable responses to an issue that remains scientifically and politically contested. That means using water filters and buying organic milk or milk from local farmers that you know are not using atrazine in their fields.

History repeatedly demonstrates that public confidence in regulatory decisions depends on transparency, independent science, and the absence of conflicts of interest. Those principles should apply whether the subject is a pharmaceutical product, an industrial chemical, or an agricultural herbicide.

For now, the contamination remains. And the burden of deciding what level of risk is acceptable still falls largely on the public.

Because the government is not here to help…

References

1. Hayes, T. B., et al. “Atrazine induces complete feminization and chemical castration in male African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis).” PNAS, 2010. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0909519107

2. Aviv, R. “A Valuable Reputation.” The New Yorker, February 10, 2014. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/10/a-valuable-reputation

3. Howard, C. “Pest Control: Syngenta’s Secret Campaign to Discredit Atrazine’s Critics.” 100Reporters, 2013. https://100r.org/2013/06/pest-control-syngentas-secret-campaign-to-discredit-atrazines-critics/

4. “Special Report: Syngenta’s campaign to protect atrazine, discredit critics.” Environmental Health News. https://www.ehn.org/special-report-syngentas-campaign-to-protect-atrazine-discredit-critics-2646375953.html

5. “Frogs feminized, but atrazine’s effects on people uncertain.” Environmental Health News. https://www.ehn.org/frogs-feminized-but-atrazines-effects-on-people-uncertain

6. Rohr, J. R., and McCoy, K. A. “A Qualitative Meta-Analysis Reveals Consistent Effects of Atrazine on Freshwater Fish and Amphibians.” Environmental Health Perspectives, 2010. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831963/ ; see also Rohr, J. R. “The Atrazine Saga and its Importance to the Future of Toxicology, Science, and Environmental and Human Health.” Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, 2021. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/etc.5037

7. International Agency for Research on Cancer evaluation, summarized in The Lancet Oncology, November 2025. Reporting: “Atrazine probably causes cancer in humans, WHO cancer agency says.” U.S. Right to Know. https://usrtk.org/pesticides/atrazine-probably-carcinogenic-iarc/

8. “WHO’s Cancer Research Arm Finds Atrazine Is Probable Human Carcinogen.” Center for Biological Diversity, November 21, 2025. https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/whos-cancer-research-arm-finds-atrazine-is-probable-human-carcinogen-2025-11-21/

9. “An Updated Evaluation of Atrazine-Cancer Incidence Associations among Pesticide Applicators in the Agricultural Health Study Cohort.” Environmental Health Perspectives, 2024. https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP13684

10. Winchester, P., et al. “Drinking-Water Herbicide Exposure in Indiana and Prevalence of Small-for-Gestational-Age and Preterm Delivery.” Environmental Health Perspectives. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2790519/

11. “Crop desiccation.” Wikipedia (overview of glyphosate as the principal pre-harvest desiccant). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation

12. “New report alleges ’mass contamination’ of foods from use of glyphosate to dry crops.” FoodNavigator-USA, February 22, 2022. https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2022/02/22/New-report-alleges-mass-contamination-of-foods-from-use-of-glyphosate-to-dry-crops/

13. “Atrazine.” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/atrazine

14. “Pesticide Tolerances; Implementing Registration Review Decisions for Certain Pesticides; Atrazine, et al.” Federal Register, December 11, 2025. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/11/2025-22519/pesticide-tolerances-implementing-registration-review-decisions-for-certain-pesticides-atrazine-et

15. “Interim Reregistration Eligibility Decision for Atrazine.” U.S. EPA (dietary exposure assessment). https://www.thecre.com/pdf/20030224-epa.pdf

16. Hong, J., et al. “Degradation of Residual Herbicide Atrazine in Agri-Food and Washing Water.” Foods, 2022. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9407628/

17. “Pesticide Data Program: 30 years of food residue data and trends.” 2023. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10541321/ ; USDA Pesticide Data Program Annual Summary, Calendar Year 2022. https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/2022PDPSummary.pdf

18. “$105 Million Settlement for Water Providers Harmed by Atrazine Contamination.” Baron & Budd / Storm Water Solutions. https://www.estormwater.com/standards-water-regulations/news/10988714/105-million-settlement-for-water-providers-harmed-by-atrazine-contamination

19. “Water Law: $105 Million Settlement in Water Pollution Lawsuit.” Circle of Blue, 2012. https://www.circleofblue.org/2012/world/water-law-105-million-settlement-in-water-pollution-lawsuit-between-swiss-company-and-u-s-communities/

20. “Atrazine, an herbicide banned in Europe, is the second-most used weed killer in the US.” FoodFight USA (on the 2004 EU ban and the 0.1 vs 3 microgram per liter contrast). https://foodfightusa.com/blog/2024/10/atrazine-an-herbicide-banned-in-europe-is-the-second-most-used-weed-killer-in-the-us/

21. “EPA Announces Update on Atrazine.” U.S. EPA, 2024 (3.4, 15, and 9.7 microgram per liter history). https://www.epa.gov/pesticides/epa-announces-update-atrazine

22. “Atrazine; Updated Proposed Mitigation for the Interim Registration Review Decision.” Federal Register, December 5, 2024. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/12/05/2024-28459/atrazine-updated-proposed-mitigation-for-the-interim-registration-review-decision-notice-of

23. “Atrazine: the pesticide banned in 60 countries still in U.S. food and water” (on the May 2026 Fish and Wildlife Service finding and the 2021 biological evaluation). https://culturacolectiva.com/en/history/atrazine-health-risks-trump-epa-approved-banned-pesticide/

24. “Suit Launched to Reduce Cancer-Linked Atrazine Pollution in Thousands of U.S. Waterways, Drinking-Water Supplies.” Center for Biological Diversity, May 28, 2026. https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/suit-launched-to-reduce-cancer-linked-atrazine-pollution-in-thousands-of-us-waterways-drinking-water-supplies-2026-05-28/

25. “Atrazine.” U.S. Right to Know (citing the 2021 U.S. Geological Survey analysis in Environmental Science & Technology: 55 percent of surface water and 70 percent of groundwater sampled). https://usrtk.org/pesticides/atrazine/

26. Comber, S. D. W. “Abiotic persistence of atrazine and simazine in water.” 1999 (half-lives of about six days in sunlit acidic water, months in lowland rivers, and years in groundwater due to slow hydrolysis). https://agris.fao.org/search/en/records/65de3ac40f3e94b9e5cc230f

27. “Still present after all these years: persistence plus potential toxicity raise questions about the use of atrazine.” Environmental Science and Pollution Research (atrazine still the most abundant pesticide in German groundwater more than 18 years after the 1991 ban). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11356-010-0431-y

28. “Ultimate fate and possible ecological risks associated with atrazine and its principal metabolites (DIA and DEA) in soil and water environment.” Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, 2022 (metabolites found in soil, surface, and groundwater years after application due to persistence and mobility). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147651322011393

29. Welsh, J. A., et al. “Production-related contaminants (pesticides, antibiotics and hormones) in organic and conventionally produced milk samples sold in the USA.” Public Health Nutrition (current-use pesticides including atrazine detected in 26 to 60 percent of conventional samples and in none of the organic samples). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6792142/

30. “Atrazine pollution in groundwater and raw bovine milk: Water quality, bioaccumulation and human risk assessment.” Science of the Total Environment, 2022 (atrazine in 89 percent of raw milk samples; transfer to milk via contaminated water and forage; lipophilic bioaccumulation mobilized during lactation). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969722055978

31. “FDA Releases FY 2023 Pesticide Residue Monitoring Report.” U.S. Food and Drug Administration (no violative residues in animal-derived foods; no residues detected in the milk samples analyzed); see also the FY 2017 report finding no residues in any domestic milk samples. https://www.fda.gov/food/hfp-constituent-updates/fda-releases-fy-2023-pesticide-residue-monitoring-report

32. “MAHA Acknowledges Pesticide Concerns While Recognizing Farmers’ Role in Health.” DTN/Progressive Farmer, May 2025 (the MAHA Commission report named atrazine and cited animal and wildlife studies of endocrine disruption and birth defects); see also “RFK Jr. releases MAHA report on childhood chronic disease,” CBS News, May 2025. https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/columns/washington-insider/article/2025/05/22/maha-acknowledges-pesticide-concerns

33. “MAHA Report’s Surprising Stance on Glyphosate, Atrazine Explained.” AgWeb, May 2025 (farm media crediting Secretary Rollins with softening the report’s pesticide language); and “MAHA Report Points Fingers at Pesticides, Farm Industry Responds.” No-Till Farmer, May 2025 (Rollins statement on farmers and the food supply). https://www.agweb.com/news/policy/politics/maha-reports-surprising-stance-glyphosate-atrazine-explained

34. “Trump Betrayed the MAHA Movement This Week. RFK Jr.’s Reaction Was Telling.” Slate, February 2026 (Kennedy’s prior pledge to ban glyphosate and his praise for the 2026 executive order promoting it). https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/02/trump-kennedy-maha-roundup.html

35. “The MAHA movement feels like it’s making headway on vaccines but pesticides threaten a MAGA political divorce.” CNN Politics, September 2025 (Kennedy on the political stakes of losing farmers; the internal MAHA rift over pesticides). https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/12/politics/maha-commission-pesticides-rfk-maga

This essay leans on primary and neutral sources for its factual spine: peer-reviewed journals, the EPA’s own statements and the Federal Register, IARC and The Lancet Oncology, and court reporting from the New Yorker and a nonprofit investigative newsroom.