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Israel’s Wall Fell to Water Cannons

The wolf at the door, part two: notes from the Israeli frontier

Jill and I spent the last week of July 2026 in Israel with a delegation organized to push back against Jew hatred, specifically the version now circulating on the American right. That was the purpose, and I expected to spend the week looking outward.

Instead, the country kept handing me a mirror.

The detail that did it was small and administrative. Young women assigned to watch the Gaza fence had spent months reporting rehearsals against mock Israeli compounds and drills on breaching the barrier. Their reports went up the chain and stopped, and some of them were told to quit filing. God lives in the details.

I know the shape of that. I lived something similar during COVID. So has anyone who has ever been the person whose report was never forwarded, at any scale, in any setting. The recognition comes with a jolt of vindication, and that is the thing to be careful about.

Seeing your own experience reflected in someone else’s catastrophe is not evidence of anything. It is the same mechanism that failed the Israelis, now running in me rather than in an intelligence directorate. A story that flatters the man telling it deserves to be held at arm’s length, and that includes this one.

The Israeli failure was not villainy. Nobody in Tel Aviv wanted that fence to fall. The officers who read the observers’ reports and moved on were competent people working inside a structure that made their judgment seem almost inevitable. Fifty years earlier, different people made the same call about the same kind of evidence in the same building.

If that charity is owed to them, it is owed elsewhere. I have spent five years criticizing American public health institutions, and I retract none of it. But I also have to take seriously that most of the people inside those institutions were not conspirators. They were doing what the observers’ superiors did: receiving information that contradicted a settled model and dismissing it as noise.

That is a less satisfying story than the villain version, and the villain version is the one that sells. I am not immune to its appeal. But I think the duller story is closer to the truth, and I think it is more useful, because a structure can be redesigned, while a villain can only be replaced.

The thought does not stay in Israel, and it does not stay in 2023.

Defeating a Fortress with Water Cannons

In 1973, many military planners regarded Israel’s Bar-Lev Line along the Suez Canal as one of the strongest defensive positions in the world. Built after the 1967 Six-Day War, it was intended to make any Egyptian assault across the canal prohibitively costly.

At two in the afternoon on October 6, 1973, Egyptian engineers pointed high-pressure hoses at the Israeli sand rampart along the Suez Canal and turned on the water.

The rampart formed the outer face of the Bar-Lev Line. Israel had spent several years and much of its defense budget building it. Thirty-odd fortified strongpoints, a wall of sand and rock rising sixty feet above the waterline, and buried pipes intended to set the canal itself on fire.

The water cut through it in a matter of hours. Egyptian assault troops crossed on rafts and walked through the gaps.

By the next morning, most of the strongpoints were surrounded. A single reserve infantry brigade of older men held them, roughly 450 soldiers spread across a hundred miles of canal. Only sixteen positions were manned.

The Bar-Lev Line had effectively ceased to exist as a defensive barrier. The problem was not that the fortifications were weak. It was that the assumptions behind them were wrong.

The Maginot Myth: The Defenses Held, The Strategy Failed.

The Maginot Line has become shorthand for a spectacular military failure, a monument to misplaced confidence in fixed defenses. That is not what happened.

Built along France’s border with Germany after the First World War, it was a vast system of underground fortresses, artillery positions, bunkers, tunnels, and obstacles designed to make a direct German invasion prohibitively expensive. It was never intended to defend every inch of France. It was meant to anchor the frontier so France’s field armies could fight elsewhere.

The Maginot Line was not breached in May 1940. German forces did not overwhelm it, did not outfight it, and, for the most part, did not attack it.

The fortifications performed the mission their designers assigned them, which was economy of force. Hold the German border cheaply so the mobile armies can concentrate somewhere else. The line did exactly that.

France then squandered what the line had bought. Maurice Gamelin, the French supreme commander, sent his best formations north into Belgium under the Dyle-Breda Plan, committing the strongest Allied divisions to a forward line inside Belgium and the Netherlands. His most capable mobile reserve went furthest of all.

That left the hinge of the whole position at Sedan, on the Meuse River. Two Series B reserve divisions held it, formations of older men with obsolete equipment and little training (Horne 1969).

The Germans came through the Ardennes instead and hit the hinge. The Maginot Line had done its job. The French command had failed to do theirs.

The Caveat That Got Lost

The hinge was weak because the Ardennes had been judged impassable to armor. But that judgment came with a condition, and the condition stopped being repeated.

Philippe Pétain, then France’s most decorated living soldier, told a Senate commission in 1934 that the Ardennes forest was impenetrable, provided special dispositions were made. The conclusion survived in French planning for six years. The condition did not.

By late 1944, the Allies had reached much the same conclusion about the same forest. In December 1944, they judged that Germany no longer had the capacity for a major offensive and treated the Ardennes as a quiet sector where tired divisions could rest. Three German armies came through it (MacDonald 1985). Same terrain, same assessment, different army.

A qualified judgment hardens into an unqualified premise. Nobody formally decides to discard the condition. It simply stops being repeated. After enough repetitions, the premise begins to look like fact rather than opinion.

Israeli intelligence did this twice. In 1973, the governing assumption held that Egypt would not attack without the ability to strike Israeli airfields in depth, and that Syria would not attack without Egypt. In 2023, it held that Hamas had been deterred and had become a government with something to lose. Israelis call the pattern HaConceptzia, the Conception.

Zvi Lanir distinguished between two kinds of surprise. Situational surprise concerns timing and place. Fundamental surprise occurs when the model itself collapses (Lanir 1983). Sedan, the Suez Canal, and the Gaza envelope were all fundamental surprises. In each case, the enemy did not merely arrive unexpectedly. It arrived through a possibility the prevailing model had ruled out.

Wingtip to Wingtip in Hawaii

On November 27, 1941, Washington sent a war warning to the Hawaiian commands. Lieutenant General Walter Short read the threat as sabotage by local agents rather than attack from the sea, and ordered the lowest of three readiness states, one designed to guard against exactly that.

Aircraft came out of dispersed revetments and were parked in tight rows on open ground, wingtip to wingtip, where a small guard force could watch them all. Ammunition went into locked storage. The precaution was rational for the threat Short believed he was facing. It also arranged the Hawaiian Air Force into an ideal strafing target, and most of it burned on the ground within the first minutes of the attack (Prange 1981).

The Navy’s assumptions failed in much the same way. Pearl Harbor is about forty feet deep, and American planners believed aerial torpedoes could not operate in water that shallow. In November 1940, British aircraft had crippled three Italian battleships at Taranto in comparable depth using torpedoes modified for the purpose. The Japanese studied Taranto and adapted their torpedoes with wooden fins that allowed them to run in shallow water. American planners read the same reporting. The information was accepted. The implication was not.

Data collection was not the failure. American cryptanalysts had broken the Japanese diplomatic cipher, and in September 1941 they decrypted an instruction from Tokyo directing its Honolulu consulate to divide Pearl Harbor into five sub-areas and report warship berthings by grid. Analysts interpreted it as Japanese thoroughness rather than targeting data.

At 7:02 on the morning of December 7, two privates at the Opana Point radar station detected a large formation about 130 miles north. The duty officer they telephoned told them not to worry because a flight of American bombers was expected from California. A flight of American bombers was, in fact, expected. The first Japanese bombs fell fifty-three minutes later.

Roberta Wohlstetter’s classic study of the attack settled the broader question. The problem was not a lack of information. The signals were present, buried in far more noise, and they appear obvious only after you know which ones mattered (Wohlstetter 1962).

What Sharon Lost

The Bar-Lev Line was built after an argument, and the people who lost the argument were right.

Ariel Sharon and Israel Tal favored a mobile defense. Hold the canal thinly, keep the armor back, let the Egyptians cross, and destroy them on open ground where Israeli tanks held the advantage. Chaim Bar-Lev and Avraham Adan favored the fortified line. Bar-Lev was Chief of the General Staff, and the line carries his name because he won the argument (Rabinovich 2004).

Nobody disputed the engineering. Both camps agreed the fortifications would be formidable. They disagreed about whether strength in a fixed position was the relevant variable. That was a judgment, not a technical question.

Institutions are good at answering technical questions. They are much less comfortable with questions of judgment. So they resolve what they can measure, and seniority of staff settles the rest.

Why Walls Cannot be Questioned

A large fortification is a political object before it is a military one. It is expensive, and it has a name attached. Budgets were defended for it, and the public was told it would keep them safe.

After that, doubting the wall means doubting the people who approved it. In any hierarchy, that is costly for a junior person to say and uncomfortable for a senior person to hear. Neither of those facts has anything to do with evidence.

Israel spent roughly a billion dollars on the Gaza barrier and completed it in 2021. Confidence in the sensors rose, manpower behind the fence thinned, and units shifted to the West Bank. Hamas studied the system, disabled the remote weapon stations first, and opened roughly thirty breaches in the first hour.

None of this requires concrete. Any expensive countermeasure that prominent officials have publicly defended acquires the same protection. Questioning it stops being an empirical act and becomes a political one. Once that happens, evidence no longer competes with reality. It competes with reputation.

Vincennes Had No Radio

In 1940, French commander Maurice Gamelin directed the defense of France from the Château de Vincennes outside Paris. His headquarters had no radio. Orders and reports moved by telephone and motorcycle courier. André Beaufre, who served on Gamelin’s staff, later described the headquarters as “a submarine without a periscope” (Horne 1969).

French aerial reconnaissance did spot the German columns moving through the Ardennes. The concentration was among the largest traffic jams in military history, stretching for more than a hundred miles toward the Rhine. But the reports reached a headquarters that could neither process nor respond at the speed events demanded. Worse, they contradicted an assumption that no one was prepared to question.

On October 7, 2023, something similar happened in southern Israel. The Gaza Division headquarters at Re’im was itself overrun. Divisional command stopped functioning for most of the day, and the opening fight fell to local ready squads, off-duty soldiers, police officers, and civilians.

Centralized command has a characteristic failure mode. It works when information flows reliably, and events unfold slowly. It struggles when communications break down, and decisions must be made immediately, which is precisely when it is needed most.

Groupthink: When the Explanation Becomes the Problem

Irving Janis offered the framework most people reach for.

Janis studied the Bay of Pigs, Pearl Harbor, and the escalation in Vietnam. He argued that cohesive groups under stress converge early on a course of action while suppressing the doubts of their own members (Janis 1972). The symptoms that matter here are collective rationalization, the illusion of unanimity, direct pressure on dissenters, and what Janis called mindguards, people who shield the group from disconfirming information.

His remedies were structural. The leader withholds his own preference until others have spoken. Someone is assigned to argue the opposing case. Independent subgroups work the same problem separately.

The Agranat Commission, Israel’s state inquiry into the 1973 surprise, reached nearly identical prescriptions in 1974 from an entirely different direction. It broke the military intelligence’s monopoly on national assessment, added an intelligence adviser to the Prime Minister, and created a standing office inside the intelligence directorate whose only job was to write the contrary assessment. Israelis call that office ipcha mistabra, an Aramaic phrase from the Talmud meaning the opposite seems likely.

Groupthink is also contested, and has been for thirty years. Ramon Aldag and Sally Riggs Fuller showed that the model was built from case studies selected because they ended badly, which guarantees the symptoms will be found (Aldag and Fuller 1993). Roderick Kramer reexamined the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam records and concluded that political self-interest explained the decisions better than the group cohesion that the theories behind groupthink did (Kramer 1998).

A seductive framework is exactly what trapped the Israelis. Used carelessly, groupthink becomes the very kind of unquestioned assumption it was meant to expose. Anyone who diagnoses it only in organizations he dislikes and never in those he belongs to is participating in the phenomenon rather than analyzing it.

What survives is narrower and better established. Groups under time pressure converge early. Dissent is expensive to voice. Senior people hear less than they think.

The Cost of Deference

One of history’s clearest examples of the cost of deference came before Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Barton Whaley later counted eighty-four separate warnings that reached Soviet leadership before the attack (Whaley 1973). Stalin believed Hitler would not open a second front while Britain remained undefeated, so every report of an impending invasion was dismissed as British provocation. He returned one report from the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, with a note that its source inside the German Air Ministry was a disinformer rather than a source (Murphy 2005). Officers who pressed the point risked execution.

That is the authority gradient with the safety catch removed, and the gradient is a spectrum rather than a category.

Psychologist Solomon Asch explored the power of social conformity with a deceptively simple experiment. Volunteers were shown a set of lines and asked to identify which two were the same length. The correct answer was obvious. Unknown to the volunteer, however, everyone else in the room had been instructed to give the wrong answer.

The experiment’s most famous result is not its most important one. Roughly a third of the volunteers denied the evidence of their own eyes and agreed with the unanimous group. The more important finding came when Asch planted a single confederate who broke with the majority. Conformity fell by about three-quarters (Asch 1955). Unanimity generates the pressure. Breaking unanimity releases it

One industry took that lesson seriously. In December 1978, United Airlines Flight 173 circled Portland while the captain focused on a landing gear problem. The first officer and flight engineer both knew the aircraft was running out of fuel. They mentioned the fuel repeatedly, but neither directly challenged the captain or declared that they needed to land immediately. The aircraft crashed into a suburb with its tanks dry.

In response, the industry built Crew Resource Management, a training discipline aimed at the authority gradient between a captain and his crew (Helmreich, Merritt, and Wilhelm 1999). Junior officers learn escalating assertion. Captains learn to solicit challenge and to state their reasoning aloud so it can be attacked.

Aviation solved a problem that intelligence services and health agencies have not. Airline crashes produce bodies, a mandatory investigation, and a public report with named recommendations. Intelligence failures produce arguments.

Lieutenant Siman-Tov

By now, the pattern should look familiar. The warning exists. It reaches the institution. Then it stops moving.

Benjamin Siman-Tov was a lieutenant serving as an intelligence officer at Israel’s Southern Command. On October 1 and again on October 3, 1973, he wrote assessments arguing that Egyptian activity along the canal was not another exercise but a deployment for war. He was junior, he was right, and his superior did not forward the reports.

Israel had no shortage of information. Ashraf Marwan, the best-placed human source Israel ever ran inside Egypt, gave warning. Soviet advisers quietly evacuated their families. The Egyptian buildup was visible from the far bank.

Eli Zeira, who headed military intelligence, told the political leadership that certain special collection systems had been activated when they had not (Bar-Joseph 2005). Uri Bar-Joseph and Arie Kruglanski later analyzed the failure through the psychology of cognitive closure, arguing that those involved became committed to an answer they already had and stopped searching for evidence that might overturn it (Bar-Joseph and Kruglanski 2003).

Richard Betts drew the conclusion that should trouble anyone who designs institutions. Intelligence failures persist because the binding constraint is rarely collecting information. It is whether decision makers are willing to hear unwelcome conclusions, and no procedural reform can guarantee that (Betts 1978).

Fifty Years Later

The examples are separated by half a century. The pattern is almost unchanged.

In 1973, the Egyptians massed divisions along the Suez Canal in plain view, and Israeli intelligence classified the activity as an exercise. In 2023, Israeli intelligence possessed a Hamas planning document, reported afterward as Jericho Wall, describing a cross-border assault at roughly the scale of the one that came. Senior officers classified it as aspirational.

Exercise and aspirational are, in effect, the same word. Both mean the enemy is doing the thing, but the thing does not count because our model says he will not follow through.

Siman-Tov wrote his assessments, and his superior filed them away. Fifty years later, the tatzpitaniyot, young women conscripted to watch the Gaza fence, spent months reporting rehearsals against mock Israeli compounds, drone reconnaissance along the barrier, and other preparations. Their reports moved up the chain and stopped. Some of them were told to quit filing.

A junior person with a view of the ground writes it down. A senior person with a model decides it does not matter.

On the night of October 5, mass activation of Israeli SIM cards inside Gaza was detected. A consultation took place around three in the morning. The alert status was not raised.

The ipcha mistabra office was staffed and operating throughout. Israel had built the precise institutional answer to the precise institutional failure, maintained it for half a century, and it still did not fire.

The lesson is uncomfortable. Institutions can preserve reforms for decades without preserving the habits of mind those reforms were meant to encourage.

The cost was not theoretical. On October 7, more than 1,200 people were murdered, hundreds were taken hostage, and entire communities were overrun before the system understood that the model had failed.

Agranat was convened within weeks of the 1973 war and reported in April 1974. Nearly three years after October 7, Israel still has no equivalent state commission. The debate over how to constitute one has moved through the Supreme Court and the Knesset without resolution.

The Knowledge Problem

An economist described this problem in 1945 without mentioning armies, intelligence agencies, or war.

Friedrich Hayek argued that the knowledge most important to a decision rarely exists in one place. Much of it consists of what he called “the particular circumstances of time and place,” held by people on the spot. Much of it cannot be fully articulated, even by the people who possess it. A central authority cannot simply collect that knowledge because, in compressing it for transmission, it loses the very details that matter (Hayek 1945).

The young women at the observation posts did not hold a threat assessment. They knew what the far side of the fence looked like on an ordinary Tuesday, well enough to notice when it stopped looking ordinary. That kind of knowledge does not survive translation into a summary paragraph, and a summary paragraph is the only form in which it can travel upward.

The pattern repeated itself again and again. Lieutenant Benjamin Siman-Tov, a junior Israeli intelligence officer in 1973, was close enough to events to recognize that Egyptian forces were preparing for war, but his warnings never reached the people making the final decisions.

Fifty years later, the local defense squads in communities such as Be'eri and Nir Oz were the only people with an accurate picture of what was happening on their own streets during the opening hours of the October 7 attack. Every one of these systems was designed to move local knowledge upward to a central authority that would decide. Every one of these systems was designed on the assumption that local knowledge could be transmitted upward without losing its meaning.

The loss is not random. Whoever writes the summary already has a model of the situation. Summarizing requires judging what is relevant. Relevance is judged against the model. The details most likely to challenge the model are therefore the first to be discarded as noise. At every level, the filter preferentially strips away disconfirming evidence. But God lives in the details.

Markets avoid this problem because they do not require all knowledge to travel to the center. Prices carry the signal, and local actors make local decisions. Armies and public health agencies cannot go that far because someone still has to decide where reserves, personnel, and resources should go.

What they can do is move authority closer to the knowledge instead of pulling the knowledge toward the authority.

The Germans had a word for that in 1940: Auftragstaktik, usually translated as mission command. A subordinate commander was given the objective and left to determine the method, on the assumption that the commander looking at the ground sees what the map cannot. Heinz Guderian, commanding the German armored spearhead, crossed the Meuse at Sedan on his own initiative and kept going, in places beyond his orders (van Creveld 1985).

Israel built much of its military doctrine on the same principle and has been unusually successful with it. Eitan Shamir’s comparative study identifies the IDF as the strongest modern practitioner of mission command among Western militaries (Shamir 2011). The fighting in the first hours of October 7 was carried by people exercising exactly that discretion.

The people closest to the fight performed as intended. The failure occurred higher in the chain of command.

The Phoenix Memo

The pattern repeated itself in the United States before 9/11.

Kenneth Williams was an FBI agent in Phoenix. On July 10, 2001, he warned headquarters that Osama bin Laden might be sending followers to American flight schools and recommended a nationwide canvass of aviation schools. His memo never reached senior FBI leadership before September 11 (National Commission 2004).

In August 2001, agents in Minneapolis arrested Zacarias Moussaoui after a flight school reported that a student with almost no flying experience wanted time on a Boeing 747 simulator. The field office asked headquarters for authority to search his laptop. Headquarters refused. Coleen Rowley, the division counsel in Minneapolis, later documented the sequence in a memorandum to Director Robert Mueller (Rowley 2002).

Two field offices. Two people close to the problem. Both warnings stopped at the same level. God lives in the details.

There was also "the wall," the informal name for the legal and procedural barriers separating intelligence and criminal terrorism investigations. Procedures dating from 1995 sharply restricted the flow of information between intelligence and criminal terrorism investigations. The barrier is legal rather than physical, and it exists for a defensible reason: protecting criminal prosecutions. Its unintended effect is to prevent exactly the fusion of scattered warnings that the intelligence system was supposed to provide.

The 9/11 Commission concluded that the central failure was one of imagination (National Commission 2004).

That conclusion is only partly convincing. The scenario had been imagined repeatedly.

• The Bojinka plot uncovered in Manila in 1995 envisioned airliners used as weapons.

• Algerian hijackers seized an Air France flight in 1994 with the reported intention of crashing it into Paris.

• A report prepared for the National Intelligence Council in 1999 described al-Qaeda operatives flying an aircraft into a building in Washington (Hudson 1999).

The problem was not imagination. It was that institutions failed to act on what they had already imagined. Israeli intelligence filed the Hamas invasion plan later known as Jericho Wall as aspirational for much the same reason.

Political scientist Amy Zegart reached the same conclusion in organizational terms. The agencies had been built for a Cold War adversary, their structures resisted adaptation, and competent people operated inside systems that all but guaranteed the outcome (Zegart 2007).

Congress responded to this issue during the 9/11 attacks in 2004 by creating the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center so that scattered warnings could be fused and delivered to the President. Institutional reforms followed. As elsewhere in this essay, the harder question is whether structures alone can overcome the habits of mind that produced the failure in the first place.

Five Microns

The same failure mode appeared during COVID.

For most of 2020, the World Health Organization and American public health agencies treated SARS-CoV-2 as spreading primarily by large droplets that fell quickly to the ground. That model produced the countermeasures Americans lived under, including surface disinfection, plexiglass barriers, and distancing rules. It de-emphasized ventilation and shared indoor air.

The model rested on a boundary between droplets and aerosols set at five microns.

Katherine Randall and her co-authors traced the origin of that number. It did not come from the physics of airborne particles. Instead, it appears to have migrated from a different literature concerned with how deeply inhaled particles deposit in the lungs, an entirely different question. The two became conflated in the mid-twentieth century, and the figure was repeated as settled science for decades (Randall et al. 2021). Megan Molteni’s account for WIRED is the most accessible summary (Molteni 2021).

In July 2020, Lidia Morawska and Donald Milton published an appeal in Clinical Infectious Diseases, co-signed by 239 scientists from 32 countries, asking health authorities to recognize airborne transmission (Morawska and Milton 2020). The signatories were aerosol physicists and engineers. They were the observation post. They held dispersed technical knowledge that central public health authorities could not absorb without abandoning guidance they had already publicly defended.

The institutional response was gradual and slow. Morawska and her co-authors published a retrospective in the same journal three years later titled Science Rejected, Lives Lost (Morawska et al. 2023).

The suppression of dissent in this case left a paper trail. On October 8, 2020, four days after three epidemiologists published the Great Barrington Declaration, Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, emailed Anthony Fauci and Clifford Lane. He called the authors “three fringe epidemiologists,” noted that the declaration was receiving attention, and wrote that there needed to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. He asked whether one was underway. The email surfaced through Freedom of Information Act requests and was entered into the congressional record (Bhattacharya 2023).

The email documents a process rather than resolving a scientific debate. Two senior officials responded to scientific disagreement by organizing its public rebuttal rather than commissioning its evaluation. Janis, with his Groupthink theory, called that behavior a mindguard: protecting a prevailing view from disconfirming evidence rather than exposing it to challenge.

Institutionalized dissent is not valuable because dissenters are usually right. They may be right or wrong, but if correct, they represent a threat to established authority and consensus. That is precisely why it is easy to dismiss them and difficult to hear the dissenting opinion that matters.

Institutionalized dissent is not valuable because dissenters are usually right. It is valuable because, at the moment a disagreement matters most, no institution can confidently tell the difference between a flawed objection and the one warning it, and which decision makers ignore at the peril of all concerned.

What Actually Works

The encouraging news is that we already know a great deal about how organizations become more reliable. None of it requires perfect people.

Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe studied organizations that operate dangerous systems with remarkably few catastrophes, including aircraft carriers and nuclear power plants. They found a common set of habits: constant attention to small failures, reluctance to accept simple explanations, and deference to expertise rather than rank during a crisis (Weick and Sutcliffe 2007). That last habit directly counters the authority gradient.

Sociologist Diane Vaughan, studying the Challenger disaster, coined the phrase normalization of deviance to describe how repeated anomalies gradually become accepted as normal simply because nothing bad has happened yet (Vaughan 1996). Physicist Richard Feynman reached much the same conclusion in his appendix to the Rogers Commission report: “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled” (Feynman 1986). God lives in the details.

Psychologist Gary Klein proposed perhaps the simplest intervention of all: the premortem. Before adopting a plan, the group assumes it is a year later, and the plan has failed catastrophically. Everyone then writes the history of that failure. Treating failure as an established fact rather than a mere possibility removes much of the social cost of raising uncomfortable objections (Klein 2007).

Political scientist Philip Tetlock addressed a different weakness. Instead of rewarding confidence or seniority, he argued that institutions should track predictions, measure their accuracy, and learn who is actually well calibrated over time (Tetlock 2005).

None of these ideas is exotic. None is especially expensive. All cost far less than building a wall, and all are more likely to prevent the next surprise.

The Office Existed

The Agranat Commission created the Devil's Advocate Office in 1974. Israeli military intelligence still had it on October 6, 2023. A named unit with a written mandate and fifty years of institutional memory. It did not prevent October 7 from happening.

The United States built the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947 so that scattered warnings would be fused and carried to the President. Fifty-seven years later, after concluding that scattered warnings still were not being fused and carried to the President, Congress created a second office and assigned it much the same mission.

Political scientist Richard Betts, whose landmark 1978 study examined why intelligence failures persist, predicted this outcome. Procedural reform does not solve the deeper problem. It cannot compel people to hear what they do not wish to hear.

That is the narrower, more durable lesson. Every institution that suffers a major surprise writes down what it learned. Writing it down is the easy part. The difficult part comes years later, when a junior officer, an analyst, an engineer, or a scientist brings forward an unwelcome report that challenges an accepted model. In that moment, no reform, commission, or organizational chart makes the decision. A person does.

The Bar-Lev Line was made of sand. It fell to water in an afternoon.

Fifty years later, the Gaza barrier was among the most sophisticated border defenses ever built. It, too, failed when the assumptions behind it proved false, and on a failure to attend to the details of local intelligence. And God lives in the details.

Every institution builds its own walls.

Most of them are made of assumptions.

RWM/JGM

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Weick, Karl E., and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe. 2007. Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Whaley, Barton. 1973. Codeword Barbarossa. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wohlstetter, Roberta. 1962. Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Zegart, Amy B. 2007. Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Given the events over the past week, I think reposting Brad’s infamous song is in order, 'cause it is still so gud…

JGM

Audio Version:

The Wolf at the Door, The Safe Room, and the Building Code

Notes from the Israeli frontier, part one

Israeli building code has required a reinforced concrete room in every new residence since 1992. It is called a mamad. Steel door, blast shutter, filtered air, poured walls. Americans pay extra for this and call it a storm shelter. Israelis get it standard, the way we get a smoke detector in the hallway.

The mamad was designed for rockets. Rockets give you fifteen seconds, and then the danger passes. Nothing in that threat model calls for a lock or a barricade on the inside, so most units have neither. The handle is held by hand, or it is not held at all.

On the morning of October 7, 2023, families in the kibbutzim of Be’eri, Kfar Aza, and Nir Oz held those handles while heavily armed terrorists on the other side pulled. Some held for six hours. Some held while the house burned around them. When pulling failed, the murderers fired through the door at the handle, working to destroy the hands holding it. After the parents died, so did the twin five-year-old girls of smoke inhalation - as they had been tucked away in the safe room. Only the family dog survived. Once painted white, the black walls tell the tale of death and destruction.

Jill and I went to Nir Oz in Israel and stood in one of those doorways and that safe room this week. The steel around the handle is riddled with bullet holes. They were shooting at hands.

When the door held, they burned the house. Fire is what defeated the mamad. A room built to keep you alive for fifteen seconds becomes an oven once the building around it is alight, and its air filter was designed for a chemical agent rather than for smoke. The attackers carried accelerant and threw Molotov cocktails through windows, using fire to drive families out of shelters they could not otherwise breach. More than seventy percent of the homes at Nir Oz burned. Six houses in the entire kibbutz were left untouched. Elderly residents who could not walk died in their beds.

A wealthy and technically superb country wrote one threat into its building code. A different threat arrived.

What a raiding economy is

For roughly a century and a half, the southwestern plains of North America ran on a raiding and captive economy. Hämäläinen (2008) makes the case that Comanchería, that is, the vast region of the Southwestern United States occupied by the Comanche people before the 1860s, functioned as an imperial system rather than a collection of war parties, and that raiding was its productive sector. Brooks (2002) documents the captive exchange in the Southwest borderlands as a working market with prices, brokers, and repeat participants.

The arithmetic comes first. A raider chooses the time and place. A defender must guard them all. No amount of virtue, vigilance, or wealth changes that equation.No amount of virtue or vigilance changes that ratio, and wealth does not improve it. A frontier settlement in 1840 and a kibbutz in 2023 faced the same problem, except that the kibbutz faced it on a shorter clock, because the raid arrived by paraglider.

The strategy, tactics, and economics of captives were also remarkably similar. Comanche raiders killed adult men and took women and children. The selection was deliberate, and both sides knew it. Ransom followed, funded on the Spanish and Mexican side through the rescate system and by the Church.

A reliable buyer creates a standing bid, and a standing bid raises the expected return on acquisition. Every individual redemption was a mercy. The aggregate of those mercies was a price signal that manufactured more captives. Any reader who understands why price controls produce shortages already understands why organized ransom produces abductions.

Terror belonged to the same system. Deliberate atrocity and the display of bodies by native populations in the southwest made pursuit unattractive and resistance more expensive than accommodation. It also emptied territory.

Through the 1830s and 1840s, Comanche and Kiowa raiding hollowed out the northern Mexican states, and whole districts were abandoned. Raiding by the light of the full moon became a calendar of dread that Texans later called the Comanche Moon. DeLay (2008) argues that this depopulation created the conditions for the American conquest of northern Mexico in 1846. The thousand deserts of his title are those abandoned settlements. The haunting images of deserted Southwestern churches and settlements so often portrayed in popular films have their basis in this history. I was struck by how much the burned-out, bullet-riddled kibbutzim along the Gaza border resembled those cinematic archetypes.

Terror was the production technology for Comanche and Kiowa raiders. A defender who will not pursue is cheaper to raid next season.

Carl Menger founded the Austrian School of Economics in 1871 by explaining where prices come from. Value is not a property inherent in a good. It is imputed by the people who desire it, and the resulting price tells producers what to make more of. Pay above the market rate for something, and you have effectively placed an order for more of it.

The rabbis arrived at the same insight seventeen centuries earlier, without the formal economics. Redemption of captives, pidyon shvuyim, ranks in Maimonides as the highest form of charity a Jew can perform. Yet Mishnah Gittin 4:6 immediately places a limit on it: captives are not to be redeemed for more than their worth, mipnei tikkun ha’olam, “for the good order of the world.” A tradition that elevated redeeming captives to a supreme obligation also imposed a ceiling on the price, because the sages understood what an unlimited bid does to supply.

The ceiling has not held. In 1985, Israel exchanged roughly 1,150 prisoners for three Israeli soldiers. In 2011, it traded 1,027 prisoners for a single soldier, Gilad Shalit. Among those released was Yahya Sinwar, who would later mastermind the October 7 attack. The market cleared. The price was published. The buyer came back.

On October 7, Hamas took 251 hostages. Securing their return consumed Israeli politics for the next two years, as the country wrestled with the same dilemma its sages had recognized nearly two millennia ago: how to save the captives without ensuring there would be more captives to save.

Americans had their own version in 1676. Raiders struck the frontier town of Lancaster, Massachusetts, at dawn on February 10 during King Philip’s War. They killed more than a dozen settlers and carried off twenty-four, among them Mary Rowlandson, the wife of the town’s minister, and her three children. Joseph Rowlandson was in Boston that morning, petitioning the colonial government for troops to defend Lancaster. He did not get them.

Her six-year-old daughter, Sarah, was wounded during the attack and died in her mother’s arms nine days later. Rowlandson walked more than 150 miles over eleven weeks and five days, moving between camps in what she called “removes.” When her captors opened negotiations, they asked her to name her own price, and she set it at twenty pounds in goods. They released her on May 2, 1676. Lancaster had been burned, and there was nothing to return to.

She published her account six years later under the title The Soveraignty and Goodness of God. It is generally regarded as the first American bestseller and established the captivity narrative as a genre that endured for the next two centuries. Colonists who would never have read a casualty report read Rowlandson, because readers identify with a captive in a way that a body count never can.

Israel built the modern version of that in a city plaza. Within days of the attack, the open space outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art became Kikar HaHatufim: Hostages Square. Families of the captives moved in, and some slept in tents there for weeks at a time. Survivors from the attacked kibbutzim staffed booths and told visitors about their missing neighbors. A digital clock counted every second since the morning of October 7. On Friday evenings, crowds gathered for Kabbalat Shabbat, many dressed in yellow.

The last twenty living hostages came home in October 2025, a year after the attack. The body of Ran Gvili, a police officer killed that morning, was returned on January 26, 2026, and the clock went dark the following evening after 843 days, 12 hours, and 6 minutes. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum held its final Shabbat service that Friday, marking the first Sabbath since July 2014 with no Israeli held in Gaza. Most of the installations have since been removed, and the municipality is now deciding what the plaza should become.

Rowlandson’s readers and the people who stood in that square were doing the same work, separated by three and a half centuries. A society can absorb casualties. It cannot absorb its people being held captive.

Who came through the fence

The attack came in three waves.

It began with a massive barrage of rockets across Israel, announcing the assault.

The Nukhba came first, Hamas’s elite assault force. Roughly 1,500 fighters crossed in the opening hours against assigned objectives, including the Gaza Division headquarters, the surrounding communities, and the Nova music festival near Re’im. They carried mission orders, and those orders included taking captives alive.

Behind them came Hamas’s broader military wing and other armed factions, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, moving through breaches the Nukhba had already opened.

Then the fence stood open, and civilians walked through it. These people had no formal orders and no assigned objectives. Looting was widespread. Some killed. Some took captives.

Although the massacre is remembered as a border attack, it was not confined to the immediate frontier. Hamas and allied forces fought across more than forty locations and penetrated as far as roughly thirty kilometers into Israel before the attack was finally contained.

Hamas and its allies killed roughly 1,200 people in this attack, including more than 800 civilians and over 300 members of Israel's security forces, while taking 251 hostages into Gaza.

I heard two seemingly contradictory explanations for the hostage-taking. One described abduction for profit. The other insisted it was an act of terror with no commercial motive. Both were correct. They were describing different layers of the same morning.

Hamas’s leadership had political objectives. They wanted a large pool of captives to force another exchange like the one in 2011, which had secured Sinwar’s own release. They also wanted to shatter Israel’s deterrence, derail the Saudi normalization process, and ignite a wider regional conflict. Money appears nowhere on that list of objectives.

Ransom in the Israeli case is not monetary. Israel does not pay cash for hostages. The currency has long been prisoner releases, negotiated between a state and an armed organization. A Gazan civilian holding a captive therefore had no direct counterparty in Israel and no practical way to sell that captive to the party seeking their return. What he held was an asset with exactly one buyer. Only Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad could convert a captive into prisoner releases. The primary market created a derived demand, and that derived demand created a spot market inside Gaza among people who had never been part of the original plan.

Brooks (2002) describes the same structure on the Rio Grande. The rescate system did not merely fund the redemption of captives already taken. It established what a captive was worth, and people with no connection to the original raiding economy began taking captives because a buyer existed.

Released hostages have described being held in family homes rather than by organized units, which supports the civilian-captor account. The mechanism by which captives were transferred to Hamas is less well documented.

The parallel breaks at the audience. Comanche terror spoke to the local defender about his own conduct: abandon the district and stop pursuing us. October 7 spoke to people thousands of miles away. The attackers filmed the atrocities and broadcast them, in some cases through the victims’ own phones and social media accounts, so that families watched in real time. No nineteenth-century raider could do that, and it changed the purpose of terror itself. The target was not only the communities of the Negev, but Israeli domestic politics and Western public opinion. On the second count, it worked.

The economics are ancient. The distribution is new. That is what makes this version more dangerous than the one that emptied northern Mexico.

How a superb intelligence service went blind

Israel spent roughly a billion dollars on the Gaza barrier, completing it in 2021. It combined sophisticated sensors, remote weapon stations, and an underground wall designed to block tunnels. As confidence in the barrier grew, however, the manpower behind it thinned, and military units were redeployed to the West Bank.

Hamas studied the system and struck the cameras first. The barrier was breached in roughly thirty places within the first hour.

The failure began long before the concrete. Israeli intelligence possessed a Hamas planning document, later reported as Jericho Wall, describing an operation remarkably similar in scale and method to the one that unfolded. Senior officers judged it to be aspirational. Young women serving as border observers, the tatzpitaniyot, repeatedly reported rehearsals at mock Israeli compounds and drone reconnaissance along the fence. They were told to stop filing the reports.

Hayek (1945) named the problem. Knowledge relevant to a decision exists in dispersed, local, and particular form, held by people on the spot who cannot fully articulate what they know. A central authority cannot simply aggregate that knowledge, because compressing it for transmission destroys the part that mattered. The women at the observation posts possessed that kind of knowledge. The officers reading their reports possessed a model instead, and they trusted the model.

Israelis call it HaConceptzia, the Conception. Hamas had been deterred. Hamas had become a governing authority with something to lose. Both propositions were defensible when they were first formulated. Over time, they hardened into filters that dismissed contradictory evidence as noise.

Israel had done this before. In 1973, the Conception held that Egypt would not attack without the ability to strike Israeli airfields deep inside the country, and that Syria would not attack without Egypt. Egyptian divisions massed along the Suez Canal, and the model absorbed the warning. The Agranat Commission diagnosed the failure in 1974 and prescribed institutional dissent, including a permanent devil’s advocate office within military intelligence whose job was to produce the opposing assessment.

That office still existed on October 7, 2023. I would put that fact before anyone who believes a well-designed process can substitute for judgment. The reform survived on paper for half a century, yet it did not prevent the same failure when it mattered most. Wohlstetter (1962) reached a similar conclusion in her study of Pearl Harbor. Betts (1978) went further, arguing that intelligence failures persist because the real constraint is not information but the decision maker’s willingness to hear unwelcome conclusions, something no procedural reform can guarantee.

There is a colder lesson here for anyone who keeps a bag packed.

A threat that is present every night eventually stops seeming exceptional; it becomes normalized. Constant hostility erodes the ability to recognize the one night the wolf actually comes. Any human system living under permanent low-grade alarm does this. Readiness decays fastest in the places that need it most.

Eight hours

Sderot lies eight miles from Gaza. Before October 7, its residents were generally not eligible for a private firearms license. Eligibility in Israel is determined by locality, and the licensing map reflected the same threat assessment that guided Israeli intelligence.

Where communities had armed civilians, those civilians became the first line of defense. The kitat konenut, the local ready squad, is a chartered volunteer unit that maintains weapons for precisely this contingency. The squads at Be’eri and Kfar Aza fought through the opening hours. Off-duty soldiers drove south on their own initiative, and police units improvised as they could. The Gaza Division headquarters at Re’im was itself overrun, leaving divisional command largely nonfunctional for most of the day.

Nir Oz sits under two miles from the Gaza border, with no military outpost between it and Gaza. Between 400 and 500 attackers entered a community of 385 people that morning. The IDF’s own investigation found that the first security forces reached the kibbutz forty minutes after the last of the attackers had already walked back into Gaza. About a quarter of its people were murdered or taken.

Israeli law at the time permitted civilians to hold handguns but not rifles. The ready squads met men with assault rifles and RPGs while carrying pistols. Afterward, the state purchased rifles and issued them to rural squads, then expanded the squads into municipal areas. Ben Gvir’s ministry claimed roughly 700 new civilian security teams within weeks.

Storage decided more of that morning than firepower did. Squad weapons belonged to the state, and the state kept them in a communal armory rather than in the members’ homes. Northern squads had generally moved their rifles home. Most southern squads had not. A man in Be’eri or Nir Oz woke to gunfire and had to cross open ground to reach a locked room before he could fight at all. In several communities, he never reached it.

Nir Oz fielded nine ready squad members that morning, according to an IDF report aired by Kan. Four were killed. Irit Pauker, who walked us through the devastation of Nir Oz, knew every one of them and told us their stories. It was almost impossible not to be moved by their courage. They faced an estimated 450 attackers. The kibbutz lost 69 people and had another 76 taken into Gaza.

Israel had licensed those men, trained them, and issued them rifles. It had not trusted them with the keys to the room where the rifles were kept. That is the difference between an armed population and a ready one, and it likely cost more lives on October 7 than any limit on ammunition ever could. In December 2025, the IDF began allowing thousands of reservists to keep their rifles at home, explicitly citing the delays that morning and the ready squads that could not reach their weapons.

People often repeat the saying that when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. On October 7, the answer was closer to eight hours. This happened in a country the size of New Jersey, with universal conscription and one of the finest militaries on earth. The gap between a raid and the arrival of the state is a matter of geometry before it is a matter of competence.

Sixty-nine is a number. Gideon Pauker was one of them.

Pauker was seventy-nine, a week short of his eightieth birthday, and one of the founders of Nir Oz. Late in life, he planted a vineyard on the kibbutz and brought in its first harvest in 2008.

We stood among those vines this week. You can see the Gaza border from them. He made the wine with three lifelong friends who had helped found the kibbutz: Gadi Mozes, Chaim Peri, and Yoram Metzger. Together they produced about a thousand bottles each year, giving nearly all of them to family and neighbors. The 2022 vintage was aging in the kibbutz’s underground shelter, built during the Yom Kippur War.

The seventeenth harvest came in just days before the attack.

On the morning of October 7, Pauker and his wife, Orna, were inside their safe room when the gunmen reached their home. They fired through the door and killed him. His daughter told us he bled to death. Mozes, Peri, and Metzger were all taken alive into Gaza. Only Mozes came home, after 480 days, at the age of eighty. When he returned, he learned that Gideon was dead. The other two were murdered in captivity.

At the funeral three weeks later, someone placed a bottle of his wine on the coffin.

His daughter, Irit Pauker, told us about him and his dream of making wine, as she calmly poured glasses from the vines he had planted and tended. She had grown up on that kibbutz among the people whose names now appear on its casualty list. She walked us through Nir Oz house by house, remembering the children she had played with, then telling us how many died defending their families and neighbors, and how many were taken. She did not need to embellish the story. The empty homes did that for her.

Most Israelis are not armed

I was told repeatedly on this trip that most Israelis now carry a sidearm. That is not true, and anyone repeating it will be dismantled by the first hostile fact-checker who looks.

The Small Arms Survey estimated Israel at 6.7 civilian firearms per 100 people in 2017, compared with 120.5 in the United States. Israel had 147,248 active firearms licenses in early 2023, below its 2009 peak. Since October 7, Israelis have submitted more than 403,000 new applications, and the National Security Ministry says it had issued more than 240,000 additional licenses by March 2026. Add those to the existing base, and you arrive at roughly 400,000 licensed carriers in a country of ten million. About four percent, in a nation at war, after three years of the most aggressive firearms licensing liberalization in its history.

What looks like general armament to a visitor is mostly conscription. The rifles you see on buses are issued service weapons carried by soldiers who are required to keep them. The guards at every mall entrance are a separately licensed occupational category. Eligibility also varies by residence, so Jerusalem, the border communities, and the settlements have far higher rates of licensed carry than the national average. A delegation itinerary samples the top of that distribution and mistakes it for the middle.

Israeli law draws no distinction between open and concealed carry because there is no distinction for it to attach to. There is no ownership license with a separate carry permit layered on top. The private firearms license is a carry license. It covers one handgun, requires periodic range qualification, and says nothing about how it must be carried.

Then there is the ammunition. A private firearms license originally allowed possession of just fifty rounds. Fifty in total, and most American readers will assume that number is a misprint. New licensees were allowed one hundred rounds after the war began, while those already licensed remained capped at fifty until January 2025, when the ministry finally doubled the allowance across the board. An official in the Firearms Division explained the change as a direct lesson from October 7, citing civilians who fought with a single magazine and exhausted their ammunition.

Nor is firearm ownership treated as a right. An applicant must satisfy a residence criterion, pass background checks, and submit a physician’s declaration of physical and mental fitness. The state grants permission for security reasons and may deny it. No natural-rights doctrine underlies the system, and no constitutional guarantee of self-defense stands between the citizen and the government.

Israelis embraced much of the practice we say we want but never adopted the principle. Americans enshrined the principle and, across much of the country, increasingly neglect the practice. Neither side has much reason for self-congratulation.

The deeper reason Israel resists anything resembling an American Second Amendment tradition lies in 1948, and it has little to do with squeamishness. The Yishuv (the organized Jewish community residing in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948) included competing armed factions under independent commands. Ben-Gurion ordered the shelling of the Altalena off Tel Aviv in June 1948 rather than allow the Irgun (National Military Organization in the Land of Israel) to land arms it alone would control, and five months later he dissolved the Palmach (the main paramilitary organization of the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine). Israel’s commitment to a single chain of command was forged at the cost of Jews shooting Jews within weeks of independence. A country founded that way hears the word militia and thinks of Beirut, not Lexington. That history deserves more from us than a lecture.

The man at the gate

My wife, Jill, and I sat with two men at the Nova music festival massacre site on Thursday. One of them ran five miles across open ground on October 7. The other lied to save his life, and the lives of everyone hiding beneath his house.

Shalev Biton, a musician and recent member of the IDF who had completed his tour of duty, was twenty-five and at the Nova music festival near Re’im, trying to sleep in his tent when the rockets began. Three hundred sixty-four people were murdered there, and forty were carried into Gaza. Biton escaped with a friend and ran east into the fields. Others joined them as they fled. One young woman had lost her shoes and arrived with her feet bleeding.

Five miles away, they found a farm worked by twenty-four Thai laborers and managed by a Bedouin Israeli named Yunis Alkarnawi. They hesitated at first. Men in head coverings standing in a field that morning could have been anything. Alkarnawi waved them in, gave them food and water, let them charge their phones, and told them to rest.

The Thai workers saw the motorcycles first. Alkarnawi quietly told everyone to hide as best they could, then walked alone towards the gate, taking refuge behind a John Deere tractor. While he spoke to the gunmen in Arabic, everyone slipped out of the dining room and crawled beneath the house, which stood just high enough off the ground to conceal them.

He told the gunmen there were no Jews on his farm. The man at the gate argued with him, consulted three others positioned behind the house, and eventually rode away. Eight festivalgoers and twenty-four Thai workers lay beneath the floorboards for hours, listening to a conversation in a language none of them understood, knowing their lives depended on its outcome.

Other Arab citizens of Israel tried talking to Hamas that day and were murdered anyway. When asked why he survived, Alkarnawi simply points to the sky.

Like most Bedouin Israelis, Yunis Alkarnawi is an Israeli citizen and part of the fabric of the country. Many Arabic-speaking Bedouin Israelis serve in the Israel Defense Forces.

Hold that against the claim that Israel is a colonial project and all its citizens are settlers. A Muslim Bedouin farmer hid Jewish young people and Thai migrant workers beneath his kitchen floor, then lied to armed Hamas gunmen in his own language to keep them alive. That story has no place in the framework. It cannot process the sentence.

It complicates my argument too. I have written about ready squads, firearms licensing, and where the rifles were kept, and all of those things mattered on October 7. But the man who saved thirty-two lives near Re’im that morning was unarmed. All he had was Arabic, extraordinary courage, and the determination to save his fellow human beings.

What this has to do with the argument you are having online

The people who hate Jews have upgraded their vocabulary. The old themes about international finance and dual loyalty still circulate. Today they often arrive dressed as anticolonial analysis, or as a “knowing” snide anonymous remark about who really wanted the last war. They circulate on parts of the American right as well as the left, and pretending otherwise helps no one.

Every version of that narrative, built on foundations laid by decades of Soviet propaganda and, before that, Nazi propaganda, requires the Israeli to remain an abstraction: a settler, a colonizer, an outpost of somebody else’s empire. It works by reducing individuals to a category. The abstraction collapses the moment the Israeli becomes a specific person doing a specific thing, because the specific thing is almost always holding a safe-room door shut to protect a family while terrorists try to shoot their way through it.

You cannot stand in Be’eri, count the bullet holes around a safe-room handle, and still retain the abstraction. That is why Jill and I went. It is why I am writing this down.

Americans who think seriously about self-reliance keep discovering that Israelis have been living the subject we merely study. Local knowledge lost to centralized assumptions. Ransom markets created incentives for more captives. Sophisticated intelligence and one of the world’s finest militaries failed to recognize the threat and respond in time. In community after community, a handful of lightly armed civilians with limited ammunition faced hundreds of attackers carrying automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, and ample ammunition.

For Israelis, the wolf is always at the door. Their enemies have been explicit. Hamas’s charter and repeated public statements have left little doubt about its objective: the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews.

And yet.

This week, we sat with Lieutenant Colonel Eyal Dror, who founded and commanded Operation Good Neighbor, the IDF program that carried wounded Syrians across the Golan border from 2016 until Assad’s forces reestablished control in 2018. Over those years, Israel treated roughly 4,900 Syrians in its hospitals, about 1,300 of them children. It helped establish a maternity ward inside Syria where more than a thousand babies were delivered. It also sent some 1,500 tons of food, fuel, medicine, and infant formula to people in a country that remained formally at war with it.

We also met the leadership of Save a Child’s Heart, which has operated from Wolfson Medical Center in Holon since 1995. My friends Drs. Kirk and Kimberly Milhoan have both volunteered there. Kirk later served as chair of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Save a Child’s Heart has brought more than 8,000 children from seventy-five countries to Israel for life-saving cardiac surgery, including many from countries that do not recognize the State of Israel. More than 3,000 of those patients have been Palestinian children from Gaza and the West Bank, seen through a weekly clinic. The organization is now training a Palestinian surgeon who intends to return home as the first fully qualified Palestinian pediatric cardiac surgeon and establish a department in Ramallah.

Israel is a nation with every reason to harden its heart. Yet it has repeatedly found ways to value the lives of its neighbors alongside its own. As I look into my own heart, I do not know if I would retain my humanity under the same conditions.

They have already run the experiment. We should pay attention to the results before conducting our own.

Radical Islamist movements will either be contained or neutralized, or they will expand and threaten all of western civilization including the United States. The key questions are where, when, by whom, and at what cost. The terrible alternative is that of Scipio Aemilianus, who commanded the final destruction of Carthage in 146 BC. Those are the options.

RWM/JGM

References

Betts, Richard K. 1978. “Analysis, War, and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable.” World Politics 31 (1): 61 to 89.

Brooks, James F. 2002. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

DeLay, Brian. 2008. War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hämäläinen, Pekka. 2008. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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

The Jerusalem Post. 2026. “Nir Oz volunteers train to defend Israel’s frontlines after Oct. 7.” May 30.

Jewish Insider. 2025. “Parents of Nova survivor meet their son’s savior, a Bedouin Israeli, for first time.” January 27.

The Jewish Press. 2025. “Ben Gvir Doubles Ammunition Allowance for Licensed Gun Owners.” January 12.

Maimonides. Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Matnot Aniyim 8:10.

Menger, Carl. 1871. Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre. Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller.

Mishnah Gittin 4:6.

Rowlandson, Mary. 1682. The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Cambridge, MA: Samuel Green.

Save a Child’s Heart. 2026. “Our Impact.” Holon, Israel.

Small Arms Survey. 2018. Estimating Global Civilian-Held Firearms Numbers. Geneva: Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.

State of Israel. 1974. Agranat Commission of Inquiry, Interim Report. Jerusalem.

The Times of Israel. 2018. “As war nears end, IDF shutters ‘Good Neighbor’ Syrian aid program.” September 13.

The Times of Israel. 2025. “To life: Grandson revives wines of vintner killed October 7 in Kibbutz Nir Oz.” July 2.

The Times of Israel. 2025. “Residents of 5 more localities to be eligible for gun permits, Ben Gvir announces.” September 1.

The Times of Israel. 2026. “After 843 days, 12 hours, 6 minutes, Hostages Square clock goes dark with Ran Gvili’s return.” January 27.

The Times of Israel. 2026. “Ben Gvir significantly widens gun license eligibility for Jewish Jerusalemites.” March 9.

Wohlstetter, Roberta. 1962. Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Ynet. 2025. “’40 minutes too late’: IDF report details Hamas’ attack on Nir Oz and systematic failures.” March 14.

Ynet. 2025. “IDF to allow thousands of reservists to keep rifles at home after October 7 failures.” December 21.

True story… from 2021

The video below was made at least 30 years ago. When SNL was both funny and relevant.

It is so cringe-worthy, I couldn’t watch the whole thing. Because after about a minute in, you kind of get the idea. And it hits way too close to home.

At the time, this all seemed absurd and yet… here we are (or hopefully were…).

New Jersey’s “Software Glitch” Was No Glitch

The biggest problem with New Jersey’s so-called “software glitch” is that it wasn’t a glitch. It was a problem; no, it was a deliberately designed system - that some state officials knew about for roughly two years. Yet not once during that period did they acknowledge it publicly.

For weeks, the public had been told that approximately 6,600 non-citizens were mistakenly registered to vote because of a computer error in New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission. That explanation was a lie.

Here’s what we know. The registrations occurred between June 2023 and June 2024. According to the state, the registration process was changed in June 2024 to prevent it from happening again. Yet the public wasn’t informed until July 2026.

Even more troubling, the registrations that had already occurred apparently were left in place after the state says it fixed the problem. Read that again. After the registration process stopped allowing non-citizens to be added to the voter rolls, the state did not remove these registrations already added to the system. These people were allowed to vote.

Think about what that means.

Someone knew enough to change the system.

Someone knew enough to stop the registrations.

But no one thought it important enough to tell the public, county election officials, or the Legislature that thousands of self-identified non-citizens who expressed that they desired to vote had already been added to the voter rolls.

AND no one in the NJ government thought it important enough to remove the non-citizens already added to the voter registration system???

It also turns out that New Jersey’s own contractor disputes the state’s explanation.

Governor Mikie Sherrill has blamed IDEMIA, the company that operates the MVC registration system. That turns out to be a “fabrication” by the governor.

IDEMIA says its software correctly recorded applicants who answered “No” when asked whether they were U.S. citizens. The company says the state still allowed those same applicants to continue through the voter registration workflow if they answered “Yes” when asked whether they wished to register. According to IDEMIA, New Jersey did not request a software change to stop that process until June 2024.

If IDEMIA is correct, computers didn’t suddenly malfunction. The system did exactly what it had been designed to do.

That raises an uncomfortable fact.

Why was the system designed to allow someone who had already declared they were not a U.S. citizen to continue into voter registration?

Even more troubling, why were the registrations that had already occurred apparently left in place after the state says it fixed the problem?

Officials now acknowledge that hundreds of those registrants later cast ballots before the issue became public. That alone should have triggered immediate disclosure.

And there is another reason to be skeptical of the official narrative.

The figure of 6,600 non-citizens who want to vote and then were registered in New Jersey to vote is not the final number. Several Republican officials involved in reviewing the matter have publicly stated they believe additional registrations could be identified as investigations continue. The public deserves to know the full scope of the problem, not simply the first number released.

Calling this a “software glitch” suggests an unforeseeable technical accident. This was no accident.

The questions investigators and the public should be asking are no longer about software. They are about who knew, when they knew it, why the public wasn’t told, and whether the number released so far is the whole story.

Of course, the question remains - what other design flaws are buried deep into the voter computer software in other blue states?

Two years later… the same actor.

Cause its all about him (clicks, likes, follows, and … monetization)

and here we go again…

But things are different now <insert sarcasm>

JGM

Pumpkin-Squash

Last summer we grew a lot of pumpkins. And by “a lot,” I mean somewhere around 300 pounds of pumpkins.

I gave plenty away, cooked some down and froze it for later, and we ate our fair share. Even so, I still had roughly 150 pounds left over. Some became horse treats. Some went to the chickens. The rest eventually succumbed to gravity, mold, and neglect - making a rather large mess in the storage room before making the final trip to the compost pile.

Fortunately, we had much better luck with the yellow squash. We managed to keep up with most of it, although a couple escaped our notice and grew into yellow clubs that looked capable of defending the garden from intruders. For some reason, our dogs have no interest in eating raw squash. Kind of weird, given that they seem to eat everything else.

You would think that was the end of the story. Harvest over. Crops finished. Everything either eaten or composted or molded into oblivion.

Not quite.

Those discarded pumpkins were full of viable seeds, and many survived buried deep in the compost pile. This spring, we spread some of that finished compost over the front garden.

Almost immediately, enormous vines appeared.

“Wonderful,” I thought. “Free pumpkins.”

Well... maybe.

Here’s where things get interesting.

Pumpkins are squash, and squash are notorious for cross-pollinating with other compatible squash varieties. Bees don’t care what they’re carrying from flower to flower. They simply visit blossoms all day, happily mixing pollen between plants.

The vines certainly looked like pumpkins, but when the fruit began to develop, something was clearly different. They weren’t quite pumpkins, and they weren’t quite yellow squash either. The shape landed somewhere in between. The color leaned orange rather than bright yellow. The skin was noticeably thinner and bruised easily. The flesh was perfectly edible, but the texture and flavor were closer to a winter squash than the pie pumpkins we had planted the year before.

This is one of the quirks of open pollination.

For many vegetables, saving seed works beautifully. Tomatoes, beans, peas, and lettuce are often reliable if they’re isolated or naturally self-pollinating. Squash, on the other hand, are genetic gamblers. Unless you deliberately control pollination, you never quite know what the next generation is going to produce.

Sometimes you stumble onto something wonderful.

Sometimes you end up with some sort of watery, bitter-tasting squash that neither tastes good nor stores well. Which is why some seeds are best bought at the store, unless you have a heck of a lot of room to separate plants or grow only one squash type per year.

Carrots

One interesting surprise came from the carrots.

A few escaped harvest and remained buried in the garden over winter. Come spring, they sent up fresh green tops, bolted, flowered, and eventually produced thousands of tiny seeds. We collected them, and now they’re drying nicely, soon to be tucked away in an envelope for next year’s planting. Honestly, carrots as an ornamental never crossed my mind until I actually had last year’s carrots bloom. They have been a beautiful addition to the garden.

We now have volunteer carrot plants popping up all over the farm. The wind, birds, and probably a few overly helpful guinea fowl seem to have taken it upon themselves to distribute last year’s seed crop far more efficiently than we ever could.

I am curious whether carrots will naturalize in Virginia, given half the chance. I guess next year, we will find out!

Pasture work

Mowing has become the primary focus of farm chores this past month.

Lots and lots of pasture to mow!

Last week, Robert tackled the enormous job of reclaiming a large stretch of land along the river that had become completely unusable. Ever since a micro-tornado took out a few trees a couple of years ago, the area had been littered with old tree stumps, piles of debris, forgotten farm “treasures,” and enough brambles to discourage anyone from walking through it.

Getting it to the point you see below took heavy equipment, countless hours on the tractor, and a lot of determination.

The payoff? We’ve reclaimed about an acre of usable land and a better walking/riding path to the river. Robert has already seeded it with a mix of clover and fescue, and if all goes according to plan, this will eventually become our farm’s shooting range.

It never ceases to amaze me how much work goes into creating what, at first glance, looks like an empty field.

Bread Making

I get into details here - so some may wish to skip this section)

So, for years I have made about 50% of the bread we eat. I used to use a bread maker to mix the dough and for the rise, then bake it in our own oven. When I do this, I use a big cast iron bread pan or a round enameled cast iron Dutch oven. Such as this:

.

My baking method gives the loaf a beautiful crust. The basic process is straightforward:

• Preheat both the oven and the Dutch oven to 450°F.

• Score the loaf with one or more slashes to allow steam to escape during baking.

• Place the shaped loaf on a sheet of parchment paper.

• Carefully lower the parchment and dough into the preheated Dutch oven.

• Slip 4 to 6 ice cubes between the parchment paper and the side of the pan.

• Cover with the lid and bake for 20 minutes. The steam created inside the Dutch oven gives the loaf an excellent “oven spring,” producing a dramatic rise in the hot, humid environment.

• Reduce the oven temperature to 400°F.

• Remove the lid and continue baking for another 30 minutes or so, depending on the size and shape of the loaf, until the crust reaches the color I want. Removing the lid too early can limit oven spring, while taking the bread out before it is fully baked leaves the interior underdone.

All that said, Robert still found that even my organic flour bread sometimes caused digestive upset. So, somewhat reluctantly, I turned to sourdough:

Why reluctantly? Because maintaining a sourdough culture and baking with it is a bit of a pain in the arse. It required learning an entirely new set of bread-baking skills.

The thing about baking bread is that no two loaves are ever exactly alike. Sourdough is even more finicky than commercial yeast breads. We all go through various contortions trying to make every loaf as consistent as the last, but countless variables get in the way. Humidity, room temperature, water temperature, the activity of the starter, flour characteristics, fermentation time, and proofing time all affect the final loaf. Those of us who bake regularly become almost superstitious about repeating exactly the same routine every time.

Taking on sourdough meant learning a whole new set of variables.

Unlike commercial baker’s yeast, a sourdough “mother” is a living culture containing both wild yeast and beneficial bacteria. During fermentation, those bacteria break down some of the gluten and other wheat proteins while producing organic acids that many people find make the bread easier to digest. It is important to note that sourdough is not gluten-free. Gluten is reduced, not eliminated.

Having kept a sourdough mother alive for months at a time before, I knew the routine was rather tedious. Traditionally, you discard about half of the starter, then replace it with equal parts flour and lukewarm water, mixing it into a paste about the consistency of smooth peanut butter. You let it sit in a warm place until it doubles or triples in size, then repeat the process. Depending on how often you bake, that can mean feeding it anywhere from three to five times each week. It consumes quite a bit of flour and can become a real time sink.

Once a healthy mother has been established, it can be stored in the refrigerator. At that point, many bakers feed it about once a week, allowing it to become fully active before returning a portion to the refrigerator until the next feeding. Even then, it requires regular attention and enough time at home to keep the culture healthy.

So I came up with another approach.

Instead of discarding starter, I kept building it until I had enough active starter to make roughly ten to fifteen loaves of bread. I then go through the rather tedious process of mixing, fermenting, shaping, and baking that entire batch at once before freezing the finished loaves. As one can’t do the entire batch all at once, without a commercial kitchen, so I have to sequentially weigh, mix, knead, rise, knead again, proof, refrigerate, etc. For basic directions or to learn more about sourdough baking or feeding a mother, I recommend this site and then scale up…

Now I no longer have to bake bread every week, or even every month. Instead, I simply pull a loaf from the freezer, let it thaw, and we have fresh sourdough whenever we want it. Rather than interrupting my schedule every week, I spend a couple of busy days baking every two or three months.

Whew. More work on those baking days, but far more manageable with my schedule. And I can schedule when I want to take on this homesteading project. So, I can control the sourdough - rather than it controlling me.

Even with this system, though, the mother still needed to be fed every week, which is essentially a 24-hour process.

A Few Tips for Baking Bread

• Weigh your ingredients. A digital food scale costs well under $15 and will last for years. It is one of the best investments you can make if you want consistently good bread.

• If you’re making yeast breads, consider using a bread machine for mixing and the first rise. Personally, I’m not fond of the crust a bread machine produces, so I use it only for kneading and proofing before baking in a Dutch oven using the method described above. If you’re just beginning your bread-making journey, though, a bread machine can be a great confidence builder. New ones aren’t inexpensive, but thrift stores often have them for a fraction of the retail price.

• Don’t rush the process. Good bread rewards patience. Most disappointing loaves come from trying to hurry the rise or shorten the fermentation time.

• Don’t expect 100% whole wheat bread to behave like white bread. Whole wheat contains the bran and germ, which interfere with gluten development and produce a denser loaf. For yeast breads, I recommend starting with a 50:50 blend of whole wheat and white bread flour. For sourdough, I generally use about one part whole wheat to five parts white flour, although you can gradually increase the whole wheat as you gain experience.

• Experiment with different crust finishes. Dust the loaf with flour for a rustic look, brush it with egg or egg white for a glossy crust, or use milk or water for a softer finish. Sprinkle on sesame, poppy, or other seeds before baking for both flavor and appearance.

• Consider grinding your own wheat berries for the whole wheat portion of the flour. Hard white wheat berries are my favorite because they produce a lighter, sweeter whole wheat loaf than hard red wheat. I typically buy 50-pound bags of organic hard white wheat berries along with organic white bread flour. Stored in a cool, dark, dry place, such as a closet or pantry, both will keep for at least a year. The biggest risk is pantry pests like grain moths or weevils. I haven’t had an infestation in years, but it’s always something to watch for.

• Grinding your own flour is surprisingly easy. A Vitamix or another high-powered blender will grind wheat berries into flour in about a minute on high speed. Most can handle about 1½ to 2 cups at a time. I usually grind enough flour to last about two months, which gives me the flavor and nutrition of freshly milled grain without having to grind flour every time I bake.

Then I stumbled onto another trick that completely changed how I think about maintaining a sourdough mother.

You can simply dehydrate it.

That means no more weekly feedings if you don’t feel like baking for a while. No worrying about the starter dying in the back of the refrigerator while you’re traveling. No guilt over neglecting it. Enquiring minds want to know: is it weird to have guilt over sourdough mother neglect? Just dry it, store it, and bring it back to life when you’re ready.

The method below is adapted from King Arthur Baking, with a few tweaks that have worked well for me

How to Dehydrate a Sourdough Mother

1. Start with a healthy, active mother.

Feed your starter just as though you were getting ready to bake. If it has been living in the refrigerator, let it come to room temperature and feed it equal parts unbleached all-purpose flour and lukewarm water. Leave it covered until it is bubbly, active, and at its peak.

2. Spread it out as thinly as possible.

Spread the entire starter onto parchment paper. I usually divide it between two sheets simply because it is easier to handle. Use an offset spatula, silicone spatula, or bowl scraper to spread it into a very thin layer. The thinner the layer, the faster and more evenly it dries.

3. Let it dry completely.

This is the part where patience comes in.

Leave the starter to dry at room temperature until it is completely brittle. Depending on the humidity where you live, this can take anywhere from a day to nearly a week. Virginia summers take considerably longer than an Arizona desert.

If you live somewhere humid, you can speed things up by placing the trays in your oven with only the oven light turned on. The tiny amount of heat from the light is usually enough to help the drying process. Do not turn on the oven itself. Too much heat will kill the wild yeast and beneficial bacteria that make sourdough work.

When the starter is fully dry, it should peel easily from the parchment and snap cleanly between your fingers.

Tip: If you don’t have parchment, just spread it on a clean cookie sheet - and use a spatula to scrape the dried starter off when ready.

Storing the Dried Starter

Break the dried starter into small flakes.

You can certainly store the flakes as they are, but I prefer running them through a food processor for a few seconds. That reduces them to coarse flakes or powder, which cuts the storage space to about one-quarter of the original volume.

Store the dried starter in an airtight glass jar. Label it with the date so that months later no one mistakes it for something that belongs in the compost.

Keep the jar in a cool, dark, dry place. It doesn’t need refrigeration, just reasonable storage conditions. A pantry or closet shelf is perfect.

Properly dried, the starter will keep for a very long time. Some bakers have successfully revived starter that was stored for years.

Bringing It Back to Life

When you’re ready to bake again, simply measure out about one ounce of the dried starter, roughly one-eighth of the amount you originally dried. If you don’t own a scale, this is approximately one-quarter to one-third of a cup, depending on how finely you crushed it.

Place the dried starter in a bowl with lukewarm water and let it soak until it has completely softened. Then begin feeding it just as you would any other sourdough starter, using equal weights of flour and water. It usually takes two or three feedings before it becomes vigorous enough for baking.

For me, this has become the ideal solution. I no longer feel obligated to babysit a sourdough mother every week simply because I own one. Instead, I keep a dried backup in the pantry. If my refrigerated starter dies, gets contaminated, or I simply haven’t baked in months, I can revive it in a couple of days and be right back where I started.

An added benefit: I now keep a dehydrated colony of different starters, so I can add a little variety to my baking

.

Sometimes the simplest solutions really are the best ones.

The Camel

For those of you who aren’t nearly as fascinated by bread baking or volunteer pumpkin plants as I am, here’s a little reward: a short video from our trip to Israel.

No surprise to anyone that I found a camel to ride…

One thing that surprised me was learning that many Bedouin families in Israel still work hard to preserve their traditional way of life. Another discovery? Their obvious appreciation for camels.

Really, who could resist climbing aboard a camel in the parking lot of a gas station, somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, not too far from the Dead Sea?

Apparently, not me.

This has now become a running joke in our family. OK… Well... mostly in my head. The question is whether a camel would make a good addition to the farm?

Having now ridden one, I have to admit I’m leaning toward “yes.”

There are obvious advantages. They eat brush, they’re undeniably entertaining, and camel milk is reputed to have a number of health benefits.

So perhaps not just a camel.

Perhaps... camels?

Since Robert is with the delegation touring Israel and attending events on combating antisemitism - which is shockingly running rampant in the Western world, he won’t be editing this Substack or talking me out of any questionable livestock decisions.

So I’m taking advantage of his absence.

Time for a poll.

Finally, our Homesteading for Health book will be available on August 4th!

My simple request for those who have or will order copies: please, please, please leave a book review on Amazon! This can’t be done until after the book has shipped, but please remember to do so. It would be much appreciated by both Robert and me.

Homesteading for Health

Now off to catch up with the delegation and the activities for the afternoon

JGM

Fauci and “Good Faith”

MALONE.NEWS

He put the correct mortality estimate in his own notebook, published it under his own name, and gave Congress a figure three to five times higher. Eighteen months later, he was hiring litigators to claim a share of the product he was telling Americans to take.

On 8 February 2020, Anthony Fauci took a morning telephone call from Tom Frieden, formerly the director of the CDC. He wrote down what they discussed. Both men agreed the new coronavirus was behaving like a bad influenza in transmissibility. Fauci recorded 34,867 known cases against 724 deaths, then observed that the real denominator was far larger than the confirmed count. That put the case fatality rate at 0.2 to 0.3 percent rather than 2.0 percent (Paul 2026).

He was right, and the estimate has held up better than most of what was said in public over the two years that followed.

Twenty days later, he published the same reasoning under his own name. Writing with H. Clifford Lane and Robert Redfield in the New England Journal of Medicine, he noted that a reported case fatality rate near two percent rested on a case definition requiring pneumonia. If asymptomatic and minimally symptomatic infections ran several times the reported count, the true rate might fall considerably below one percent. The clinical consequences, the three authors wrote, could prove closer to those of a severe seasonal influenza, which they put at roughly 0.1 percent, than to SARS or MERS (Fauci, Lane, and Redfield 2020, 1268). The article went online on 28 February 2020.

On 11 March 2020, he appeared before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Chairwoman Maloney administered the oath, and the record reflects an affirmative response (U.S. House 2020, 4). Representative Michael Cloud of Texas asked how the virus compared to what had come before. Fauci answered that seasonal influenza carries a mortality of 0.1 percent, that the stated mortality for this virus was about three percent, and that counting minimally symptomatic and asymptomatic infection brought it to around one percent. Ten times more lethal than seasonal flu, he told the committee, adding that this was something people could get their arms around and understand (U.S. House 2020, 29).

Thirty-two days separate the diary entry from the sworn testimony. In the middle of that window, he put the low figure into the most widely read medical journal in the English language.

The arithmetic

The obvious defense is that the science was evolving and that hindsight is cheap. It fails on the arithmetic.

Both figures are denominator-adjusted. Neither is a raw count. On 8 February, he began with a raw rate of 2.0 percent and corrected downward roughly eightfold. On 11 March, under oath, he began with a raw rate of three percent and corrected downward roughly threefold. The operation is identical in both cases, reasoning about uncounted mild infections and enlarging the denominator to match. Privately he applied that correction with confidence. To Congress he applied less than half as much of it.

New data moves an estimate. It does not explain why a man would apply a weaker version of his own published correction to a congressional committee than he had applied to his own notebook five weeks earlier. The intervening document runs against the defense rather than for it, because on 28 February, three weeks into the supposed evolution, he was still publishing the low number.

A practice he has admitted

He has also described calibrating public figures deliberately. In December 2020 he told Donald McNeil of the New York Times that he had been slowly and deliberately moving the goalposts on herd immunity, raising his public estimate from seventy to seventy-five percent toward eighty or eighty-five. He attributed the shift partly to new science and partly to polling. When surveys showed roughly half the country willing to take a vaccine, he cited the lower figure. When the polling improved, he judged that he could nudge the number up, because the country was finally ready to hear what he really thought (McNeil 2020).

Masks are the second instance, and the structure differs. On 5 February 2020 Fauci wrote to Sylvia Burwell, formerly Secretary of Health and Human Services, that masks were meant for infected people rather than for protecting the uninfected. The email surfaced later under the Freedom of Information Act (Fauci 2020b). He told the country much the same thing on 60 Minutes in March, saying there was no reason to walk around in a mask, and warning that general use could exhaust the supply needed by healthcare workers (CBS News 2020).

The private and the public statements agreed. The explanation changed afterward. In a June 2020 interview, he accounted for the early guidance by pointing to shortages of N95 and surgical masks, and to the need to protect access for healthcare workers treating infected patients (TheStreet 2020). On that account, a supply management objective, rather than his reading of the evidence, had shaped what the country was told. Harvard’s Kennedy School now teaches the episode as a case study under the heading of a noble lie (Harvard Kennedy School, n.d.).

Twice, by his own account, his public statements were shaped by something other than his best reading of the evidence. The mortality gap is larger than either admitted instance, and he has never given any account of it at all.

Why the number mattered

Nearly every projection made in 2020 was calculated from an assumed mortality rate. The estimate was an input, and the outputs moved with it.

Five days after Fauci testified, Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College published Report 9. The model assumed an infection fatality ratio of 0.9 percent, within a stated range of 0.4 to 1.4 percent. Run without intervention, it projected roughly 510,000 deaths in Great Britain and 2.2 million in the United States (Ferguson et al. 2020). A copy reached the Trump administration that weekend and the CDC the following Monday. Patrick Vallance, the British chief scientific adviser, confirmed that his government was working from it.

In models of this kind, deaths scale with the fatality ratio in something close to a straight line. Hold the assumed attack rate constant, substitute the figure from Fauci’s own notebook, and the projection falls by roughly two thirds. The gap between 2.2 million dead Americans and something nearer 700,000 is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a catastrophe that suspends ordinary life and a severe epidemic that a country manages.

Ferguson did not take his assumption from Fauci. He derived it from Chinese case data. But the sworn figure and the modeling input converged on the same number in the same week, and that number, rather than the one in the notebook, became the premise of American policy. Among the few people in the country positioned to tell the White House that the input might run three to five times high, one had written the lower figure down and published it. He did not offer it.

The second problem was worse and lasted longer. A single national number carries the implication that risk is spread evenly across a population. COVID mortality was never spread evenly. It concentrated in the old and the already ill to a degree with few parallels in modern infectious disease.

British government advisers noticed the consequence within days. On 22 March 2020 the behavioral science subgroup SPI-B submitted a paper to SAGE observing that many people did not feel personally threatened, and suggesting they had been reassured by the low death rate in their own demographic group. Its recommendation was that “the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased” among the complacent, by means of emotionally forceful messaging (SPI-B 2020). SAGE discussed the paper the following day.

A government advisory body had observed that the public correctly perceived its own low risk, identified that accuracy as an obstacle to compliance, and recommended raising the perception. The paper is British and I know of no published American equivalent. The mechanism it describes operated on both sides of the Atlantic.

The result showed up in survey data by that summer. In July 2020 Franklin Templeton and Gallup surveyed just over ten thousand American adults about who was dying. Respondents believed that people aged 55 and over accounted for a little more than half of COVID deaths, when the actual share was 92 percent. They put deaths among those aged 44 and under at about 30 percent, against an actual figure of 2.7 percent. Risk to Americans aged 24 and under was overestimated by a factor of roughly fifty (Franklin Templeton and Gallup 2020). Among respondents aged 18 to 24, a group accounting for about a tenth of one percent of deaths, 58 percent expected serious health consequences from infection.

A peer-reviewed survey study found the same misperception and traced it further. Deaths among Americans under 55 amounted to 7 percent of the national total, while respondents estimated 43 percent. Overestimating the risk was associated with greater household isolation, and greater household isolation was associated with more loneliness (JMIR 2021).

An inflated national figure produced an inflated sense of personal danger, and the fear produced consent.

Fauci’s own diary records him convincing the mayor of New York to close the city’s schools, a step he would later tell the public he had nothing to do with. Children were among the least endangered people in the country by a wide margin, a fact visible in the data by early 2020 and never seriously disputed since. National assessment scores afterward showed the largest mathematics declines ever recorded in that program, concentrated among the lowest-performing students.

All of it followed from a single national mortality figure standing in place of an age-stratified one, and from the silence of the people who knew better.

Fear and consent

Emergency powers rest on public consent, and public consent tracks perceived danger. The British behavioral advisers put that relationship in writing, named accurate risk perception among the young and healthy as the obstacle to compliance, and recommended raising it.

The measures Americans accepted had few peacetime precedents. Movement was restricted by executive decree, and businesses were closed by order, with the line between essential and inessential drawn by officials nobody had elected to draw it. Churches shut while liquor stores stayed open. Schools closed for a year, and considerably longer in some districts. Employment, education, and military service came to be conditioned on a medical procedure.

Each of those measures required a public convinced that the danger justified it. The conviction was there, and it rested on a picture of the danger that was wrong. Americans under 55 accounted for 7 percent of deaths and were thought to account for 43. The young overestimated their own risk by a factor of fifty.

Whether Anthony Fauci intended that misperception is not established by any document I have seen, and I will not assert it. No diary entry, email, or interview yet shows him linking a mortality figure to public compliance. The SPI-B paper is British and he had no part in it, which is why it belongs in this argument as evidence about pandemic governance rather than evidence about him.

He has twice conceded that his public statements were shaped by objectives other than his best reading of the evidence. He privately held a mortality estimate three to five times below the figure he gave Congress under oath. He never corrected the record, and the higher figure underwrote the most sweeping peacetime restrictions in the history of the republic. Having twice explained that he sets public numbers by what he judges the public should hear, he has forfeited any presumption that the third occasion was innocent. He has been asked, and he has never answered.

The question underneath is a political one. A government that secures compliance by managing what its citizens believe about their own risk has arranged for them to consent to what they would have refused had they been told the truth. That is the difference between governing a free people and administering one.

The entry about the patent

One passage in the released diary has drawn almost no attention.

The dispute it describes is a matter of public record. In a July 2021 filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Moderna made a disclosure under 37 C.F.R. § 1.56. The company stated that its collaborators at NIH had submitted John Mascola, Barney Graham, and Kizzmekia Corbett as additional co-inventors. Moderna then stated that it had reached a good-faith determination that these individuals did not co-invent the mRNAs and mRNA compositions claimed (Public Citizen 2021, quoting application M1378.70145US07).

Francis Collins went public that November, after private negotiations collapsed. Moderna had made a serious mistake, he said, in withholding co-inventorship credit from people who played a major role in a product the company was making a fair amount of money from (Reuters 2021). Moderna projected fifteen to eighteen billion dollars in COVID vaccine revenue for 2021 and ultimately booked roughly thirty-six billion across 2021 and 2022.

Moderna told the Patent Office that its determination was made in good faith. Fauci wrote in his notebook that Moderna had not acted in good faith. Both invocations concerned who owned the patent, not what either party owed the people being asked to take the product.

Two disputes, not one

There were two separate fights with Moderna, and merging them is how this story keeps getting handed back to Fauci’s defenders.

1. The first concerned the prefusion stabilization technique for coronavirus spike proteins, the 2P modification, invented by Barney Graham at NIAID with Jason McLellan, then at Dartmouth, and Andrew Ward at Scripps. It settled. Moderna executed a royalty-bearing license in December 2022 and disclosed a catch-up payment of four hundred million dollars to NIAID in its February 2023 earnings release, along with low single-digit royalties on future sales. NIAID shares that money with Dartmouth and Scripps (Moderna 2023).

2. The second concerned inventorship of the mRNA-1273 sequence itself, the larger prize and the subject of the diary entry. It was still open when the first resolved.

The diary entry belongs to the second fight. The four hundred million dollars belongs to the first. Both flowed to the institute Fauci directed.

Moderna’s own filings show how entangled the two organizations were from the start. In a disclosure to the Securities and Exchange Commission the company stated that NIH and Moderna’s infectious disease research team finalized the vaccine sequence on 13 January 2020 (Moderna 2020). NIH’s technology transfer office lists Spikevax with a NIAID contribution described as research and development of prefusion-stabilized spike protein antigen mRNA technology, naming Graham among the inventors (NIH Office of Technology Transfer, n.d.).

What the statute does

The financial architecture is written into federal law rather than inferred from it.

Under 15 U.S.C. § 3710c(a)(1)(A)(i), when a federal laboratory licenses an invention, the agency must pay the inventor or co-inventors the first two thousand dollars of royalties each year and at least fifteen percent of everything after that. Payments to any one person are capped at one hundred fifty thousand dollars annually unless the President approves more, and they continue after the inventor leaves government service (15 U.S.C. § 3710c(a)(3)). Whatever remains is retained by the laboratory that produced the invention.

Inventorship on mRNA-1273 therefore carried two consequences. Graham, Mascola, and Corbett would each collect personally, at the statutory maximum for as long as the license generated revenue. NIAID would retain the remainder of a royalty stream drawn from a product with tens of billions of dollars in sales.

What I am not claiming

Anthony Fauci was not a named inventor on mRNA-1273, and he was not a named inventor on the stabilization patent either. He stood to receive no royalty from the four hundred million dollar payment. Anyone writing that he did is wrong, fact-checkers have correctly said so, and the claim should stay buried.

Nor am I claiming that he inflated the mortality figure in order to enrich his institute. The patent entry postdates the March 2020 testimony by roughly eighteen months. A document written later cannot establish motive for a statement made earlier.

The conflict of interest is structural

A structural conflict does more damage than a personal one, because nobody has to be bought and there is nothing to step away from.

NIAID paid for the research. Its scientists helped design the stabilized spike protein used in the shot. It settled the final sequence with Moderna in January 2020, ran the trials, and held a royalty stake in the technology inside the product. Fauci ran NIAID. He also went on television night after night telling Americans to take the vaccine. In the middle of that, he called in NIH leadership to hire lawyers who could grow the institute’s share.

No money has to reach him for this to be wrong. His institute had a financial stake in how well a product sold, and he was telling three hundred million people to take it. He was also running the legal fight to make that stake bigger. A journal author would have to declare an interest like that. So would a trial investigator, or anyone sitting on an FDA advisory panel. The public he spoke to every night was never told.

Consent that is not informed is not consent. The principle is older than the Nuremberg Code and does not rest on it. A doctor who backs a product while holding a hidden stake in its sales has not always lied about the product. He has kept back the one fact you needed to judge what he said. The silence is the injury.

None of this requires anyone to be corrupt on purpose. Nobody has to be bribed to end up biased. It is enough to sit inside a structure that pays better for one answer than the other, and people are very good at finding the answer that pays. A high death rate makes a vaccine essential and puts its emergency approval beyond argument. The lower figure, the one in his notebook and his journal article, makes it a judgment call. Careful doctors could differ. His institute had billions of reasons to prefer the first version, and nothing in the system was built to notice.

The question of remorse

Fauci will not be prosecuted. The pardon issued in January 2025 is broad and covers federal conduct through its stated cutoff. It does not reach state offenses, does not bar civil action, does not touch congressional process, and protects nothing said afterward. If he gives false testimony to the Senate today, he does so without a net. For what he did between 2020 and 2024, the criminal courts are closed.

What remains is whether he understands what he did, which is the question every legal system reaches after guilt is settled and before punishment is fixed.

The diaries have produced a wave of commentary reaching for clinical vocabulary. One widely read column concluded that they paint him as a psychopath (Vespa 2026). The people writing this are political commentators borrowing a diagnostic term for emphasis, and the reach is a mistake.

I have never examined Anthony Fauci and will not assign him a psychiatric label from across a hearing room. The stronger objection is that a diagnosis would be the most generous thing anyone has offered him. Disorders mitigate. A man who cannot help what he does is owed treatment and some measure of pity, and any court in the country would weigh it in his favor at sentencing.

The record will not support that reading. It shows a competent physician who recorded an accurate estimate in private, published it under his own name, and gave a different number under oath five weeks later. The competence is what makes it culpable.

The conduct itself is documented. He has never publicly revised the mortality figure he gave under oath, though his own contemporaneous notes and his own journal article contradict it. He told the country he had nothing to do with school closures, and the diary records him convincing the mayor of New York to close them. The six-foot distancing rule, he eventually conceded, sort of just appeared. He has never withdrawn his claim that criticism directed at him constituted an attack on science itself.

Twice in the 11 March hearing, roughly fourteen pages before the mortality answer, he addressed his own candor directly. He told Representative Lynch that he had never held back telling exactly what was going on from a public health standpoint (U.S. House 2020, 15). He told Representative Green that he had never done anything other than state the exact scientific evidence (U.S. House 2020, 24). Both are categorical claims, made under oath, in the same appearance that produced a mortality figure his own notebook contradicts.

Five years of documented error, and not one correction has ever issued from him unprompted. Every concession has been extracted under questioning. That is a pattern rather than a diagnosis, it sits in the public record, and readers are competent to weigh it themselves.

Burdick

One act of his own speaks to the question more clearly than any interview he has given. He accepted the pardon.

In Burdick v. United States the Supreme Court considered a newspaper editor who refused a presidential pardon so that he could continue asserting his privilege against self-incrimination. Justice McKenna wrote for a unanimous Court that a pardon carries an imputation of guilt, and that acceptance of it is a confession of that guilt (Burdick v. United States, 236 U.S. 79, 94 (1915)). Honesty requires the qualification. Later courts have generally treated that language as dicta rather than binding rule, and Biddle v. Perovich held that acceptance is not required for a pardon to take effect (274 U.S. 480 (1927)).

The doctrinal question can be set aside. The moral observation survives it. Burdick understood that taking a pardon says something about the man who takes it, and he refused one rather than say it.

A man who had spent five years insisting he told the country the exact scientific evidence had an obvious course available to him. He could have declined, gone before a grand jury, and let the documents speak. By his own account he had nothing to fear from them.

He took the pardon instead. Nobody forced it on him. He chose it knowing what his own notebook said, and knowing what a jury would have made of those thirty-two days in the winter of 2020. That judgment now falls to the rest of us.

References

“Association of COVID-19 Risk Misperceptions with Household Isolation in the United States: Survey Study.” 2021. Journal of Medical Internet Research. PMC8407438.

Biddle v. Perovich, 274 U.S. 480 (1927).

Burdick v. United States, 236 U.S. 79 (1915).

CBS News. 2020. Interview with Anthony S. Fauci. 60 Minutes, March.

Fauci, Anthony S. 2020b. Email to Sylvia Burwell, 5 February. Released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Fauci, Anthony S., H. Clifford Lane, and Robert R. Redfield. 2020. “Covid-19: Navigating the Uncharted.” New England Journal of Medicine 382 (13): 1268-1269. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMe2002387. Published online 28 February 2020.

Federal Technology Transfer Act provisions on royalty distribution. 15 U.S.C. § 3710c.

Ferguson, Neil M., et al. 2020. Report 9: Impact of Non-pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) to Reduce COVID-19 Mortality and Healthcare Demand. Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, 16 March.

Franklin Templeton and Gallup. 2020. Economics of Recovery Study. Survey of 10,014 U.S. adults, fielded 2 to 14 July.

Harvard Kennedy School. n.d. “A Noble Lie? Dr. Anthony Fauci and Masking in the United States.” Case Program.

McNeil, Donald G., Jr. 2020. “How Much Herd Immunity Is Enough?” New York Times, 24 December.

Moderna, Inc. 2020. Current Report, Exhibit 99.1. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR, CIK 0001682852.

Moderna, Inc. 2023. Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2022 Financial Results. 23 February.

NIH Office of Technology Transfer. n.d. “Spikevax.” Technology Transfer Showcase. https://www.techtransfer.nih.gov/showcase/spikevax-r.

Paul, Rand. 2026. “Tony’s Diary.” The Reading Room, U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 24 July.

Public Citizen. 2021. “Letter Urging NIH to Reclaim Foundational Role in NIH-Moderna Vaccine.” 9 November. Quoting Moderna patent application M1378.70145US07, disclosure under 37 C.F.R. § 1.56.

Reuters. 2021. “Moderna Covid-19 Vaccine Patent Dispute Headed to Court, NIH Head Says.” 10 November.

Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B). 2020. Options for Increasing Adherence to Social Distancing Measures. Paper prepared for the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, 22 March. Discussed at SAGE meeting 18, 23 March.

TheStreet. 2020. Interview with Anthony S. Fauci, 12 June.

U.S. House. 2020. Coronavirus Preparedness and Response. Hearing before the Committee on Oversight and Reform, 116th Cong., 2nd sess., 11 and 12 March. Serial No. 116-96. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office.

Vespa, Matt. 2026. “This Fauci Diary Entry Will Cause Your Blood to Boil.” Townhall, 28 July.

By: Wendy McElroy

When and why did the word “gender” displace the word “sex?” “Gender” refers to a person’s socially constructed identity of being male, female, or some other category, while “sex” refers to physical characteristics of male or female, such as chromosomes. Gender is a matter of a person’s self-perception; sex is a circumstance of birth.

When did sex get pushed to the curb by gender? In his book The Man Who Invented Gender, Terry Goldie claims that the sexologist John Money of Johns Hopkins Medical Center (Baltimore) first used the word “gender” in its modern meaning in 1955. Money pioneered the word to describe his famous John/Joan experiment that was conducted on a young boy named Bruce who’d lost his penis in an accident. To ‘prove’ Money’s theory that sexual identity was learned and not biological, Bruce’s parents raised him as a girl, complete with a surgically constructed vagina. The experiment failed. Bruce ultimately insisted on living as male, but he did not recover from the ordeal Money imposed on him, which he called torture. Bruce committed suicide in his 30s.

By then, however, Money had declared for decades that John/Joan was a complete success; discussions of “gender identity” abounded in ‘60s medical journals and academia. By the ‘70s and ‘80s, feminists brought the term to the streets, with “gender” describing a person’s self-defined sociocultural identity and “sex” meaning biology. Then, the word wedged its way into government. In 1993, for instance, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) replaced “sex” with “gender” in its literature. In 2011, “sex” returned to the FDA to mean biology while “gender” meant “a person’s self-representation.” The term went global. Also in 1993, the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (DEVAW) vaguely defined this aggression as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women.”

Genderspeak became the language of elites, social justice activists, and the government, while average people still spoke of “sex”. But more than elitism lies behind the difference in words. By swapping in their own terms, elitists—especially professional feminists—grabbed the narrative on sexuality and politicized it to dismiss anyone who disagrees. Since the average male generally still uses biology to define his sexuality, he is an opponent; the average male is a living, breathing disagreement.

The ideology of gender faces an obstacle, however. If people can argue effectively against gender, then the narrative is difficult to manage. Those who dissent must be intimidated into silence or otherwise marginalized. The main strategy is to condemn dissenters as hate-filled. If some people cannot be silenced, then their words or opinions can become hate crimes punishable by law. George Orwell’s novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four is about a dystopian society of social control, which is maintained largely through restricting language. Since words are the foundation of thought, this means people cannot form thoughts, let alone articulate them. The villain of Nineteen-Eighty-Four proclaims, “The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.” He concludes, “The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”

Men’s health researcher James L. Nuzzo highlights an attempt to perfect the language. “In recent years, use of the phrase “gender-based violence” (or “gendered violence”) in the titles and abstracts of papers indexed in PubMed has increased noticeably. Between 2019 and 2025, the phrase “gender-based violence” (or “gendered violence”) appeared in the titles or abstracts of 2,784 articles indexed in PubMed.” [Chart available here.]

A typical definition of gender-related violence or gendered violence is “any form of physical or non-physical violence or abuse against a person or group of people because of biased or harmful beliefs about gender. It can include things that happen online and that use digital technology.” This definition is typical because it includes non-physical violence (discrimination) and abuse (words) that are motivated by non-specific ”biased or harmful beliefs about gender.” Nineteen-Eighty-Four would refer to such non-physical violence as “crimethink,” with thought itself being an assault.

Just as “sex” is displaced by “gender,” well-researched and comparatively clear terms such as “domestic violence” are displaced by less-defined ones such as “gender-related violence.” This achieves several goals. For one thing, the confusing definition becomes elastic. Almost any word or act can be stretched to qualify as “gender-related violence,” especially since virtually everything in the politicized feminist universe is gender-related.

But the most important purpose of swapping in the word “gender” is to introduce a subtle but powerful bias that controls the narrative; it creates Genderspeak.

The concept of gender comes directly from the twin ideologies of Social Constructionism and Gender Feminism. Social Constructionism tells us that male and female are learned forms of behavior (gender) rather than biology (sex).

To this, Gender Feminism adds an ideological layer. Male and female are patriarchal learned behaviors; they are social concepts derived from white male capitalistic culture. Thus, approaching violence in a correctly gendered way means rejecting white male capitalism—the economic system that is said to vest power and wealth in the hands of white men at the expense of everyone else. To embrace gender is to reject white male culture and capitalism, with ‘the free market’ usually viewed as a synonym.

Genderspeak is similar to Orwell’s Newspeak. Both are ambiguous speech that embeds ideology into the language so that every word perpetuates correcthink—officially approved thought. In Orwell’s dystopian world, Newspeak serves the ideological goals of Ingsoc – an abbreviation for English Socialism. It gradually replaces Oldspeak and becomes pivotal in defining politics and culture. Genderspeak has the same ideological goal. If you embed gender ideology into words, then you control how people think and how culture develops.

The process goes something like this:

• Embed new ideologically-driven language when possible. For example, substitute the term “gendered violence” for the more research-driven term “domestic violence.”

• Eliminate “wrong” words. In Nineteen-Eighty-Four, salvageable literature was rewritten in Newspeak so that authors either disappeared or were reinterpreted to serve Ingsoc. Today, school texts are commonly reviewed to eliminate wrong words. ‘Improper’ ones like “Founding Fathers” are changed to proper ones like “Framers.”

• Change the meaning of words. In Nineteen-Eighty-Four, the word “free” is used only in the simple form of ‘my sweater is free of lint.’ The concept of freedom does not exist. The current usage of “diversity” in Genderspeak is similar. It is a diversity that tolerates no deviation. Its conclusions are or can be mandated by law.

• Introduce doublethink. Doublethink is when someone accepts two contradictory ideas as being true. A modern example is students who attend “sensitivity training,” which includes publicly ridiculing and humiliating whites and males because of their race and sex. This is sensitivity?

• Last of all, decry anyone who objects as a hater and oppressor; punish them.

Precise wording provides the incredible benefit of letting people know what they are talking about. It is time to reclaim the richness of precise English…verb by verb, adjective by adjective. Words should not be propaganda that blocks thought; disagreement is no crime. And sex is reality, while gender is not. The concept and the word “gender” should be abandoned by people who respect either accuracy or truth.

End.

This article was originally published at Brownstone Institute.

Executive Summary: Anthony Fauci’s Private Journal

Senator Rand Paul has now released more than 1,100 pages of what amounts to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s private working journal, daily notes, emails, schedules, and supporting documents from the COVID era. Far from being a conventional diary, the collection provides a rare window into how one of the world’s most influential public health officials viewed events as they unfolded.

This document provides something arguably more valuable: contemporaneous records that allow readers to compare what was being discussed privately with what was later communicated publicly.

Among the most significant themes are:

• The laboratory-origin hypothesis was taken seriously by senior scientific advisers during the earliest weeks of the pandemic. The journal documents Fauci’s efforts to organize scientific discussions as concerns emerged, demonstrating that a laboratory accident was viewed as a plausible possibility before the public narrative rapidly shifted toward natural emergence.

• The records reveal substantial scientific uncertainty during January and February 2020. Contrary to later claims that “the science was settled,” the documents show ongoing debate, disagreement, and evaluation of competing hypotheses before a consensus was publicly presented.

• Fauci’s daily entries illustrate the extraordinary degree to which he became involved in media strategy, public messaging, and political communications. The journal chronicles an almost relentless schedule of television appearances, interviews, briefings, and messaging decisions throughout the pandemic.

• The journal also captures Fauci’s awareness that he had become a celebrity and a political symbol rather than simply a scientific adviser. He comments repeatedly on media coverage, public criticism, praise, celebrity status, threats against himself and his family, and the increasingly polarized political environment surrounding COVID-19.

• Throughout the pandemic, Fauci consistently advocated for aggressive mitigation measures and expressed concern that political leaders were moving too quickly toward reopening. The entries document repeated frustration that public health recommendations were being diluted or ignored. He did this without an awareness that the science around lockdowns and masking was not settled.

• The collection also sheds light on internal discussions surrounding boosters, updated vaccines, pandemic preparedness, and relationships among NIH, FDA, industry, and outside stakeholders as the response evolved into 2022.

The documents do not, by themselves, prove that Dr. Fauci knew SARS-CoV-2 was engineered, that he knowingly participated in a cover-up, or that he possessed definitive evidence of a laboratory origin. Readers looking for a single incriminating document will not find one.

For that evidence, the February 2020 emails, the Proximal Origin drafting history, the FOIA releases, NIH funding records, congressional testimony, and Baric's more recent admissions support the conclusion that senior officials and scientists regarded a laboratory origin as a credible possibility very early in the pandemic are bigger smoking guns. They also show coordinated efforts to evaluate and communicate about that possibility.

Instead, the value of this release lies in its historical record. It demonstrates that many issues later portrayed as settled were, in fact, actively debated behind closed doors. It shows the evolution of scientific thinking in real time, the interaction between science, politics, and public messaging, and the immense pressures under which pandemic policy was developed.

For historians of COVID-19, this collection is likely to become one of the most important primary source documents yet released. Anyone seeking to understand how the official narrative evolved should read the original materials rather than relying on selective excerpts or commentary from either supporters or critics.

The Air Quality Scam: How Statistical Sleight-of-Hand Convinced the World That Breathing Is Killing You

By Stan Young, PhD and Warren Kindzierski, PhD

Guest post on Dr. Robert Malone’s Substack

We’ve spent decades watching epidemiology turn into something between a cargo cult and a magic show. Worse still, university epidemiologists and government public health policymakers have been trying to convince us for decades that the air we breathe is killing us — and that only trillion-dollar regulatory regimes stand between us and the grave.

We just published a paper in the Journal of the Academy of Public Health that pulls back the curtain on this scam. The response has been... well, the usual deafening silence from the regulatory priesthood. Let’s walk you through the scam.

Real Air Pollution Disasters (And Why They Don’t Prove What You Think)

First, let’s be honest about where the air quality panic comes from. There were three genuine events where a combination of temperature inversions, acid in the air, and particulate matter resulted in deaths:

· London Fog, 1952 (and again in 1956 and 1962) — Temperature inversions trapped coal smoke, soot, and industrial gases causing 4,000 excess deaths in 1952 (and 1,000 in 1956 and another 700 in 1962).

· Meuse River Valley, Belgium, December1930 — Same story. Inversion, trapped industrial emissions, 60 deaths.

· Donora, Pennsylvania, October 1948 — Ditto, 20 deaths.

These events were real, and here’s the part nobody mentions: these conditions literally cannot occur today. Modern emissions controls and clean air regulations eliminated the conditions that created those killing fogs. Using these events to justify an air quality panic is like citing the 1918 flu to justify locking down for a common cold.

Yet the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) still claims particulates in air can cause premature deaths. In 2011, the agency estimated Clean Air Act compliance costs at $65 billion annually and claimed the regulations would prevent 230,000 premature deaths in 2020.

Let’s look at the evidence.

The Air Quality‒Premature Death Argument

This argument can be traced back to two 1990 studies, both partially funded by the EPA. One became famous, the other ignored.

The 1993 Harvard Six Cities study followed 8,111 adults across six American cities for 16 years. Over that period, 1,430 people died. The researchers claimed that fine particles in air (PM2.5) increased deaths by 26%.

Let that sink in. Eight thousand people. Six cities. The “sample size” for statistical purposes? Six. Because the comparisons were across cities, not individuals. You can’t get much statistical power from six data points unless you’re using very creative math. Nevertheless, it has been cited over 11,000 times in literature.

A 1995 National Institute of Statistical Sciences study looked at over 785,000 deaths among elderly people across two counties over six years. Their finding? No association between PM10 — which is highly correlated with PM2.5 — and deaths. When you breathe, you breathe both.

The EPA even secured Harvard’s dataset and, along with industry, partially funded another group of epidemiologists to reanalyze it. The result, published in 2000? If you followed Harvard’s exact analysis, you got roughly the same answer. But if you varied the analysis method — changed a covariate, adjusted for a different confounder — the effect fell apart completely.

The EPA did not secure the NISS dataset for reanalysis. Why would you scrutinize a study that found nothing?

The Big Studies That Found Nothing

After Harvard, two major air quality‒premature death studies dwarfed it in scale:

One study in 2011 used individual-level data from a population of 18.2 million (with 3.2 million deaths) across 814 US locations over the period 2000 to 2006. They found effects across locations but noted these were “likely due to unmeasured confounders.” Their within-location analysis? Direct quote: “We are not able to demonstrate any change in life expectancy for a reduction in PM2.5.”

The other study in 2017 used individual-level data from a population of roughly 20 million people (with over 2 million deaths) in eight California air basins over the period 2000 to 2012. They found no association between PM2.5 and daily deaths.

Just to recap… Harvard’s study: 8,111 people and a positive association between PM2.5 and deaths. Later studies: millions of people, no association.

The Dirty Secret of Big Observational Datasets

Here’s the problem nobody in public health wants to discuss… give a complex dataset to different analysts, pose the same research question to them, and watch what happens. You can literally get any result you want.

Researchers at Yale recognized this problem back in 1988 (see here and here). They initially identified 56 medical and pharmaceutical research claims from observational studies in literature, then they tracked down other studies on the same topics from the same period. The result — they found 136 studies supporting the claims and 127 contradicting them. This is coin-flip territory.

The president of the Biometrics Society gave his 2002 Presidential Address noting that when his regression class students were given the same dataset and question as homework, they produced dramatically different results.

Today, we know from “multiverse analysis” (many-analyst studies, examples here and here) — where independent teams get the same data and same research question — that there are thousands of seemingly reasonable ways to run an analysis, with wildly different results depending on analysis choices.

A concrete example… Smith (2021) analyzed PM2.5‒premature death associations in Medicaid data. He showed that simply removing one covariate — previous day’s temperature — flipped PM2.5 from non-significant to statistically significant. One variable. That’s the difference between “air quality kills” and “nothing to see here.” And researchers have thousands of choices like this to make in their analysis.

The Data Harvard Won’t Release

Here’s what should keep you up at night… the 2011 (Greven) study demonstrated that when you use individual-level data with proper spatio-temporal modeling, the PM2.5‒premature death association evaporates. It’s a gold-standard approach — individual deaths, precise timing, geographic granularity, and the statistical power of millions of observations.

So why hasn’t Harvard released their Six Cities study dataset in a form that would allow someone to run a Greven-style analysis on it? The original dataset, as far as anyone outside the inner circle can tell, remains locked away.

The 2000 reanalysis commissioned by the EPA and industry was conducted under controlled conditions with the original Harvard team hovering nearby — and even then, the effect crumbled when the analysis method was varied.

Thirty-plus years later, the Six Cities study — that anchors billions of dollars in EPA regulatory costs — has never been independently reproduced from its raw data with modern methods. In any other field, this would be called what it is… science by press release, sustained by data hoarding.

The Research‒Publishing Problem

Here’s what the world doesn’t see happening in the university research‒journal publishing game:

· Most studies that do not find positive associations — the negative studies — go unpublished. Researchers put them in file drawers and move on.

· Researchers in other studies can use flexible designs and selectively report their results to nudge what should be non-significant results to significant.

· Journals prefer publishing positive studies. No editor wants to headline “nothing to see here” in a study.

· False positive studies that are published can get canonized — endlessly cited until everyone assumes they’re settled fact.

Academics make up most of the journal peer review and editorial positions. The academic publishing and tenure process functions as natural selection of bad science. Career incentives reward splashy positive findings, not careful null results. The Harvard Six Cities study was a small positive study that became famous. The larger negative studies that followed? Ignored.

Follow the Money

The EPA justifies its existence and its $65 billion annual regulatory burden by claiming lives are being saved. University researchers who produce studies showing air quality harms public health get grants, publications, tenure, and prestigious appointments. Journals who publish these studies get citations and impact factors. The environmental consulting industry gets contracts.

Who benefits from a null result? Nobody. Who loses? Everyone with a stake in the university‒government‒journal publishing industrial complex.

The National Association of Scholars published a detailed report that we co-authored on how selective research methods gives rise to irreproducible claims for PM2.5 and premature deaths, heart attacks, and asthma attacks. It’s called Shifting Sands — apt, because the scientific foundation for these claims keeps moving if you look closely at the methods.

The Bottom Line

Air quality‒premature death epidemiology, as currently practiced, looks like a statistical fluke — an artifact of analytical flexibility, publication bias, and unaccounted confounding dressed up as public health consensus.

The genuine air disasters of the mid-20th century were real. But they bear no resemblance to current conditions. The Harvard Six Cities study methods crumble under scrutiny. Larger, better-designed studies that followed found nothing. Using the 1952 London fog and Harvard Six Cities study to justify regulatory overreach today is intellectually dishonest.

Multiverse analyses show that different reasonable analytical choices produce contradictory results in research. And the entire journal publication ecosystem is structurally biased toward publishing false positive research.

Are there real environmental health threats worth addressing? Absolutely. Smoking, asbestos fiber inhalation, foodborne illness outbreaks (e.g., from E. coli) — these are genuine concerns with plausible mechanisms of harm. But the PM2.5‒premature death panic is a house of cards built on statistical sleight-of-hand and institutional self-preservation.

The next time someone tells you that air quality is shaving years off your life, ask them one question: Which covariate did you leave out?

Stan Young, PhD, is a statistician and can be reached at genetree@bellsouth.net. Warren Kindzierski, PhD, is a retired college professor (public health) and can be reached at warrenk@ualberta.ca. Young and Kindzierski authored the paper “Are air quality–health effect claims a statistical analysis fluke?” published in the Journal of the Academy of Public Health.

Robert wearing his dinner again, is a common joke in our house…

Of note, after a grueling two days of travel, we are now in Israel for the next week with a delegation of medical freedom professionals.

We finally arrived here at 5:00 AM this morning after leaving on Friday. When we arrived in Rome, all of the non-Israeli airlines had canceled their flights due to the once again escalating conflict. So we had to rebook for a second red-eye in a row with an Israeli airline - which are the ones flying into this country right now.

Today, we are at the Agricultural University to learn about innovations in agriculture in Israel. As this topic and the use of such innovations in regenerative agriculture are closely related, this day was a not-to-be-missed event for us.

You will hear more about this endeavor in the days to come.

JGM

True story:

JGM

Audio Version:

Executive Summary

Over the past day, we have worked our way through the thousands of pages of documents Senator Rand Paul recently released in his COVID-19 Reading Room, including the transcribed interview with Dr. Ralph Baric released today. Using AI to analyze this enormous collection of congressional testimony, emails, and Slack messages, we uncovered a series of remarkable revelations that fundamentally change our understanding of how the origins of COVID-19 were discussed behind closed doors.

For more than five years, the American public was told that the science was settled. The laboratory-origin hypothesis was dismissed as implausible, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 became the definitive scientific narrative, and those who questioned it were censored, ridiculed, and marginalized.

The newly released documents in Senator Rand Paul’s COVID-19 Reading Room tell a very different story.

Congressional testimony from Dr. Ralph Baric and thousands of pages of private Slack messages reveal that the scientists closest to the evidence privately debated laboratory scenarios, acknowledged uncertainty, discussed gain-of-function research, and questioned many of the very assumptions that were presented to the public as settled science.

Baric himself confirms that DARPA’s proposed coronavirus experiments were gain-of-function research, acknowledges conducting gain-of-function unpublished experiments that undermined a central argument of Proximal Origin, and describes years of coronavirus work involving many of the same investigators and institutions that later became central to the origins debate.

Meanwhile, the Slack discussions show that the paper’s authors continued privately exploring laboratory-related mechanisms both before and long after their paper had become the foundation for government messaging and censorship.

These documents prove that the public was never given the full scientific debate. They expose serious questions about scientific transparency, government involvement, funding disclosures, oversight of gain-of-function research, and the extraordinary effort to present uncertainty as certainty during one of the most consequential public health crises in modern history.

What makes this all so important is that this information is now in the congressional record. It can be acted upon.

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1. DARPA explicitly solicited gain-of-function research

• Baric testified that the DARPA PREEMPT program required gain-of-function experiments to answer the scientific question it posed.

• His exact words:

“That’s a gain-of-function experiment. There’s no other way to think about it.”

• This undercuts years of semantic arguments that the proposed work somehow wasn’t GOF.

2. DEFUSE proposed inserting a furin cleavage site

• Baric confirmed that under the DEFUSE proposal, his laboratory would have performed the furin cleavage site insertion.

• The furin cleavage site became one of the central scientific features that fueled lab-origin scrutiny.

• During his congressional testimony, Baric acknowledged that the DARPA DEFUSE proposal called for inserting a furin cleavage site into SARS-like bat coronaviruses and confirmed that his laboratory at UNC would have been responsible for engineering those viruses. He further acknowledged that inserting a furin cleavage site to determine whether it changes viral phenotype constitutes gain-of-function research, and he described DARPA's PREEMPT solicitation as asking for "a gain-of-function experiment" with "no other way to think about it."

• At the same time, Baric testified that DARPA rejected the DEFUSE proposal and that the specific experiments outlined in that proposal were therefore never performed.

• But then, Baric also acknowledged conducting other furin cleavage site insertion experiments in coronaviruses as part of his broader research program, demonstrating both the technical capability and the scientific interest in precisely the type of work described in DEFUSE.

• The unresolved question is whether substantially similar experiments ultimately proceeded under other federally funded projects.

• We know that NIH later funded coronavirus research involving many of the same investigators and institutions associated with DEFUSE - in fact there is evidence that NIH funded almost that exact same grant, but the documents released to date do not, by themselves, establish that the specific furin cleavage site insertion experiments proposed to DARPA were subsequently carried out under an NIH grant. Although that scenario is highly likely.

• That question remains one of the central issues for investigators examining the documentary record.

• Below is a chart comparing the DEFUSE proposal and the NIH-funded research.

Were the furin cleavage site and related gain-of-function experiments proposed in DEFUSE later carried out under the NIH-funded grants or contracts, either in whole or in part? If so, where are the protocols, progress reports, sequence data, laboratory notebooks, and oversight reviews?

To be sure, Senator Paul’s research team is all over that question.

3. Baric had unpublished data that weakened a major argument in Proximal Origin

Published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" became the most influential scientific paper arguing that SARS-CoV-2 was not a laboratory construct and that "any type of laboratory-based scenario" was not considered plausible. Since publication, prominent scientists and scientific organizations have submitted formal petitions and open letters calling for the paper to be corrected, withdrawn, or retracted in light of subsequently released evidence and congressional investigations. Nature Medicine has acknowledged receiving these requests but has refused to retract the paper, issue an Editorial Expression of Concern, or otherwise alter the scientific record.

• Baric testified he had previously demonstrated that maximizing ACE2 binding is not necessarily advantageous.

• Stronger receptor binding can actually reduce viral spread.

• He says he informed NIH and destroyed the experimental materials.

• That directly weakens one of the principal arguments used in Proximal Origin against deliberate engineering.

4. The “Proximal Origin” authors did not believe their own story about a natural origin for the virus.

• Slack messages show Kristian Andersen did not have confidence in the natural origin theory by the time the paper was published.

• He writes that he is moving “much more toward the middle.”

• Elsewhere he indicates that, given what he knows, both origin scenarios are plausible (From the Slack archive in Rand’s reading room).

5. The scientists spent months privately debating tissue-culture scenarios

• The Slack discussions repeatedly focus on:

  • tissue culture,

  • furin cleavage sites,

  • cell adaptation,

  • host-range experiments,

  • Wuhan Institute work.

• Those are precisely the mechanisms central to laboratory-accident hypotheses, showing the issue remained an active scientific discussion rather than a settled question.

6. Baric confirms he attended the secret February 1, 2020 origins call

On February 1, 2020, Sir Jeremy Farrar, then Director of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world's most influential biomedical research foundations, organized a confidential teleconference bringing together Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Andrew Rambaut, Edward (Eddie) Holmes, Michael Farzan, Ron Fouchier, Christian Drosten, Marion Koopmans, and several other leading virologists to discuss whether SARS-CoV-2 had emerged naturally or from a laboratory accident.

Farrar later revealed in his memoir Spike that the discussions were considered so sensitive he used a disposable ("burner") phone for the communications surrounding the call.

Five participants in that call: Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Andrew Rambaut, and Edward Holmes would go on to author the highly influential The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 paper, while Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins were actively involved in discussions surrounding its development. Farrar now serves as Assistant Director-General at the World Health Organization.

• Baric acknowledges being on the call with Fauci, Collins, Farrar, Andersen, Garry, Holmes, and others.

• He cannot explain how he was invited.

• He says he cannot find any record showing why he was included.

• Some participants reportedly did not know he was present.

• He gives somewhat inconsistent accounts about whether he spoke during the meeting.

Whether Baric was intentionally withholding information cannot be determined from the testimony. What the testimony clearly shows is that his explanations regarding his invitation and participation are incomplete and, at points, internally inconsistent. Those inconsistencies warrant further scrutiny by Senator Paul’s committee.

7. NIH apparently requested records it supposedly had already reviewed

• During the February 2020 discussions, NIH officials reportedly asked Baric for research records that NIH had allegedly reviewed years earlier under its oversight process.

• This raises questions about NIH’s recordkeeping and oversight of research involving enhanced pathogens.

8. Baric sent his taxpayer-funded ACE2 mouse model to Wuhan

• He confirmed sending the mouse model to Shi Zhengli’s laboratory.

• Later, when a Chinese company attempted to commercialize that model, Baric described the situation as unethical:

“What kind of crap is this?”

• He also stated that sharing the model was effectively required under research-sharing norms and suggested Congress should change the rules if policymakers objected.

Baric also confirmed that he provided his NIH-funded human ACE2 transgenic mouse model to Shi Zhengli's laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Although the transfer of the mice was not itself gain-of-function research, the human ACE2 mouse was specifically designed as an experimental platform for studies involving SARS-like coronaviruses that cannot efficiently infect conventional laboratory mice.

The model enabled researchers to evaluate viruses produced through reverse genetics, measure the effects of engineered mutations such as insertion of a furin cleavage site, serially passage viruses to select for increased adaptation or pathogenicity, and determine whether genetically modified viruses exhibited enhanced infectivity, tissue tropism, virulence, or transmissibility.

Many of these experimental approaches constitute gain-of-function research and involve the same experimental techniques that are plausible laboratory pathways for the creation of SARS-CoV-2.

9. The USAID-Funded Pipeline Behind the Wuhan Coronavirus Research

Although PREDICT was presented as a surveillance program, it created the scientific pipeline for coronavirus gain-of-function research. The full extent of USAID's role in building that pipeline only became apparent years later through congressional investigations and the release of internal communications.

USAID’s PREDICT program, led by the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis, operated from 2009 through 2020 to identify potentially dangerous viruses before they spilled over into humans. In practice, it funded the discovery, collection, sequencing, cataloging, and international sharing of thousands of SARS-like bat coronaviruses through collaborators that included EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Those viruses and their genetic sequences became the foundation for subsequent laboratory research involving reverse genetics, chimeric viruses, human ACE2 mouse models, and other experimental approaches that overlap with, or constitute, gain-of-function research. While PREDICT itself was not established to engineer viruses, it built the scientific infrastructure and international collaborations that made those experiments possible.

Internal emails also revealed that Peter Daszak requested that USAID’s PREDICT program be acknowledged as a funding source for the landmark 2015 Baric-Shi paper. That acknowledgment reportedly did not appear until 2020, five years after publication, raising additional questions about the transparency of funding disclosures for coronavirus research involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

• Emails showed Peter Daszak asking that USAID’s PREDICT program be acknowledged.

• The acknowledgment was reportedly added only in 2020.

• The delay raises questions about transparency surrounding funding sources for work involving Wuhan collaborators.

10. The Slack archive shows genuine scientific disagreement: not a unified front

Kristian Andersen, PhD, is a professor at Scripps Research and Director of Infectious Disease Genomics at the Scripps Research Translational Institute. An internationally recognized evolutionary biologist, he was the lead author of the influential March 2020 Nature Medicine paper, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2, which argued that SARS-CoV-2 was not the product of laboratory engineering and dismissed a laboratory-based origin as implausible. In the years that followed, Andersen became one of the most aggressive public defenders of the natural-origin hypothesis. For years, he used his scientific authority and large social media platform to portray the laboratory-origin hypothesis as unsupported, repeatedly mocking critics and dismissing questions about a possible man-made origin, even as internal emails released later showed that he initially considered aspects of the virus concerning enough to merit serious discussion.

Edward “Eddie” Holmes is one of the world's foremost evolutionary virologists, whose decades of research on bat coronaviruses made him uniquely qualified to assess the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. A professor at the University of Sydney and a principal author of the influential March 2020 Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 paper, Holmes also participated in the pivotal February 1, 2020 teleconference with Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Jeremy Farrar, Kristian Andersen, Ralph Baric, and others that shaped the early scientific response to the origins question.

• Rather than revealing a scientific consensus, the private discussions show Holmes continually pressing for rigorous evidence while other participants privately acknowledged growing uncertainty, offering a far more nuanced picture than the certainty projected in public and written up in their proximal origins paper.

• Eddie Holmes repeatedly challenges stronger lab-origin claims and asks for additional evidence.

• The discussions reveal ongoing internal debate rather than unanimous agreement.

• That makes the later shifts in Andersen’s position that the virus was of natural origin duplicitious, because they occurred despite his active scientific skepticism privately.

11. The scientists privately continued exploring laboratory-related mechanisms well after the Proximal Origin paper

• The Slack archive includes detailed discussions of:

  • template switching,

  • recombination,

  • furin cleavage site generation,

  • co-infection scenarios,

  • alternative evolutionary pathways.

• These conversations indicate the scientific inquiry continued after publication rather than ending with the paper.

The biggest takeaway

After reviewing thousands of pages of congressional testimony, private Slack messages, emails, and internal documents, one conclusion is unavoidable: the public was never given the full story.

These documents show that gain-of-function coronavirus experiments were not imaginary. They were openly discussed, proposed, and, in Dr. Ralph Baric’s own words, explicitly solicited under DARPA’s PREEMPT program. Baric himself acknowledged performing and proposing experiments that he scientifically characterizes as gain-of-function. His defense is not that such work never occurred. His defense is that it was lawful under the regulatory framework that existed at the time because it had been reviewed, exempted, or fell outside the government’s evolving oversight policies.

The documents also expose something equally troubling. The scientific assumptions that underpinned The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 paper were far less certain than the public was led to believe. During and after publication, the paper’s own authors privately debated tissue culture, furin cleavage sites, laboratory adaptation, host-range experiments, and other mechanisms central to a potential laboratory origin. The scientific discussion never ended. Only the public discussion did.

That raises profound questions about transparency, scientific integrity, federal oversight, funding disclosures, recordkeeping at NIH, and the role government officials played in shaping what became the accepted public narrative.

For more than five years, Americans were told that questioning the origins of SARS-CoV-2 was the province of conspiracy theorists. We were assured the science was settled. We were told Proximal Origin had closed the case and that a laboratory origin was implausible.

The newly released testimony from Dr. Ralph Baric and the private communications among the authors are important because they reveal that many of the scientists closest to the evidence privately entertained doubts, debated laboratory scenarios, and questioned key assumptions while presenting a far more confident story to the public.

They purposefully tried to change the history of COVID-19 itself. The question remains, to what end?

It begins with Ralph Baric.

There may be no scientist on Earth better positioned to discuss coronavirus gain-of-function research than Ralph Baric.

For more than three decades, Baric has been one of the world’s foremost coronavirus researchers. He pioneered reverse genetics systems for coronaviruses, developed the human ACE2 mouse model, collaborated extensively with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and helped develop many of the experimental techniques that later became central to the debate over the origins of COVID-19.

His congressional testimony is remarkable because it dismantles, piece by piece, many of the simplistic arguments that were used for years to dismiss the possibility of a laboratory origin.

One of the most important moments came when Baric was asked about DARPA’s PREEMPT proposal. His answer was unequivocal.

For years, the public was subjected to endless semantic gymnastics over whether gain-of-function research was even being proposed or conducted. Baric swept aside that debate in a single sentence. In his scientific judgment, the proposed experiments were gain-of-function.

Why does this matter? Because COVID-19 changed the world.

The virus claimed millions of lives. Governments responded with lockdowns that devastated economies, disrupted education, deepened poverty, fueled food insecurity, and inflicted lasting social and psychological harm. Children lost years of normal development. Businesses disappeared. Families were separated. Public trust in science and public health institutions was profoundly damaged. The pandemic accelerated one of the greatest transfers of wealth and economic power in modern American history, from small businesses to multinational corporations, from wage earners to owners of financial assets, and from Main Street to Wall Street. The vaccines also became the subject of unprecedented controversy over safety, mandates, and adverse events that are still being investigated.

Baric’s testimony establishes one important fact: gain-of-function coronavirus research was real and probably caused one of the biggest pandemics that the world has ever known. We now need to know: which experiments were actually performed, who funded them, where were they conducted, what oversight existed, and which of that research contributed, directly or indirectly, to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2?

Those are no longer fringe questions. They are the central scientific and public policy questions of our time.

Senator Rand Paul’s team has had roadblock after road block thrown at them; they have been stymied by government officials and agencies. But they are managing to break through the floor and find missing documents. We know, because Robert has played a small part by using advanced systems to track down missing data that have now been shared with Senator Paul.

Then comes perhaps the biggest surprise.

Then comes perhaps the most remarkable revelation in Baric's testimony. One of the central arguments of the Proximal Origin paper was that if SARS-CoV-2 had been engineered, scientists would have optimized its binding to the human ACE2 receptor. Baric told Congress he had already performed unpublished experiments demonstrating that this assumption was flawed. According to his testimony, stronger ACE2 binding does not necessarily produce a more successful virus. In fact, excessive receptor affinity can reduce viral fitness and transmission.

He testified that he informed NIH of these findings, destroyed the experimental viruses, and chose not to publish the work because of “biosecurity concerns.” Although Baric did not characterize these experiments as gain-of-function research during this exchange, the testimony raises obvious questions about the nature of the experiments, whether they were supported by NIH funding, and why results that undercut one of the central scientific arguments in Proximal Origin were never published.

The Slack messages reveal the lies.

For years, the American public was told that The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 represented settled science. Government officials repeatedly pointed to the paper as proof that COVID-19 could not have come from a laboratory. Social media companies, under duress by the Biden administration, used it to justify censorship. Journalists cited it as the definitive scientific consensus. Scientists, physicians, and ordinary citizens who questioned that narrative found themselves labeled conspiracy theorists, censored, deplatformed, and, in some cases, professionally ostracized.

The private discussions tell a very different story. Kristian Andersen, the paper’s lead author, did not become more certain over time. He became less certain. In fact, by the time of publication, he was privately arguing that the virus was man-made.

After months of discussions about tissue culture, furin cleavage sites, coronavirus experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and newly emerging evidence, Andersen acknowledged that although he had initially leaned strongly toward a natural origin, he was no longer convinced. By the summer of 2020, he wrote that he was “moving much more toward the middle.”

Later, he went further still, stating that, based on what he had learned, he regarded both a natural spillover and a laboratory origin as plausible explanations.

That is extraordinary.

This was not a scientist reconsidering his conclusions years later after new discoveries. This was the lead author of the paper that shaped global opinion, questioning its central conclusion while the paper was still only just being published, and yet already being treated as the definitive account of COVID-19’s origins. At a time when the authors could have easily corrected the paper's original conclusions.

The Slack archive makes clear that the authors were privately debating precisely the issues the public was assured had already been settled: tissue culture adaptation, furin cleavage sites, laboratory selection, BSL-2 coronavirus research, host-range experiments, EcoHealth Alliance grants, and work conducted at Shi Zhengli’s laboratory in Wuhan. The discussions were technical, candid, and often vigorous. They do not reflect a group of scientists who had unanimously ruled out a laboratory origin.

Which raises the obvious question: Why was Proximal Origin written with such certainty?

Congressional records show that Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins were actively engaged with the authors during the paper’s development.

Those same records also show that shortly after publication, Andersen received a substantial NIH grant. This raises legitimate questions about Fauci's role in shaping the scientific narrative that would dominate public discourse for years.

Legitimate questions remain about Fauci's role in asserting that the “science was settled” in favor of a natural origin story by the publication of this paper, which shaped public discourse for years. Examining emails, internal memos, and phone call records from Fauci during this period may uncover whether a quid pro quo was involved.

Perhaps most striking of all, even as Andersen’s private confidence in a purely natural origin appeared to erode, his public rhetoric became increasingly absolute. On social media and in interviews, he repeatedly dismissed, ridiculed, and attacked scientists, journalists, and members of the public who questioned the natural-origin narrative, often portraying the laboratory-origin hypothesis as scientifically indefensible despite privately acknowledging that both scenarios remained plausible.

The Wuhan Institute itself also comes under much closer scrutiny.

One Slack discussion draws an important distinction between Ralph Baric’s reverse genetics experiments and the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s tissue-culture work.

According to Kristian Andersen, researchers in Wuhan had spent years growing SARS-like bat coronaviruses in different animal cell lines to determine what mutations allowed those viruses to infect human cells more efficiently. That type of research is precisely the sort of laboratory adaptation work that has become central to the debate over COVID-19’s origins. These experiments constitute gain-of-function research.

At the time, and still today, no international treaty specifically prohibited gain-of-function research conducted for peaceful scientific purposes, and similar work was and is being performed in laboratories around the world.

If research of this type were to produce a pathogen capable of causing a global pandemic, the consequences could rival those of a weapon of mass destruction, raising the obvious point that international oversight has not kept pace with modern biotechnology.

Baric acknowledged that the Wuhan experiments closely paralleled research proposed in EcoHealth Alliance grant applications but distinguished them from his own reverse genetics studies, noting they were being conducted under different biosafety conditions. Whether Baric’s experiments ultimately contributed to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 remains unknown. What is no longer in dispute is that scientists were actively exploring how bat coronaviruses adapt to human hosts through laboratory experimentation and that this virus was almost certainly man-made.

If Baric’s experiments produced a virus capable of causing a global pandemic, the consequences would extend far beyond an academic debate over gain-of-function research. If the Wuhan Lab and the CCP were ultimately responsible, that raises another set of questions about culpability and liability. Questions that the world leaders clearly do not want to address.

The truth is that such research with the potential to create pathogens of catastrophic consequence should never have been conducted in the first place.

Where does that leave us?

The question is no longer whether a laboratory origin was “implausible.” After reading these documents, a more fundamental question emerges: was the natural-origin narrative ever as convincing as the public was led to believe?

The scientists who authored Proximal Origin privately wrestled with laboratory scenarios, debated furin cleavage sites, tissue culture, reverse genetics, and Wuhan’s coronavirus research. Yet publicly, they projected certainty. As their private confidence in a purely natural origin eroded, their public certainty only grew. Scientists who questioned the narrative were ridiculed. Journalists were dismissed. Citizens were censored. That is not how science is supposed to work. It is how narratives are protected.

These newly released documents do not prove 100% that SARS-CoV-2 came from a laboratory. But they do prove something equally important: the public was never given the full scientific debate. Instead, it was presented with a manufactured consensus that collapsed the moment private emails, Slack messages, and sworn congressional testimony saw the light of day.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that this reckoning is not being led by the institutions that spent years insisting they had already settled the matter. It is not being driven by the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Justice, or the vast machinery of the administrative state. Instead, much of the documentary record now reshaping this debate has emerged because Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky refused to stop asking questions.

COVID-19 killed millions of people. It upended the global economy, transformed governments, accelerated one of the largest transfers of wealth in modern history, deprived children of years of normal development, and fractured public trust in medicine, science, and government. If research contributed in any way to that catastrophe, then the world deserves a complete accounting—not to assign political blame, but to ensure it never happens again.

Science advances by questioning assumptions, following evidence wherever it leads, and correcting mistakes. These documents suggest that, for far too long, protecting the narrative became more important than pursuing the truth. History will ultimately judge which mattered more.

JGM/RWM

Audio Version:

I was listening to the Joe Rogan podcast while mowing the mare pasture the other day. Joe had Rupert Lowe on, a British politician and businessman who has served as a Member of Parliament since July 2024. Lowe is currently the leader of Restore Britain. In that conversation, they briefly touched on the Fabian Society and its infamous wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing emblem shown above.

Most people have not heard the name. Few remember what the Fabian Society actually was, or why it still matters. Yet it is the most important organization that you have hardly heard of. The Fabian Society is directly responsible for the new world order foisted upon us by the globalists in the 20th century. But let’s start at the beginning.

The Fabian Society was founded in London on January 4, 1884, as an offshoot of an earlier organization called the Fellowship of the New Life. That movement promoted ethical living, social reform, and the belief that society could be remade through gradual cultural change rather than revolution. Some members concluded that personal example was not enough. If they wanted to reshape society, they would have to reshape government as well. The Fabian Society became their political vehicle.

Unlike Marxists, the Fabians rejected violent revolution. Their strategy was far more patient. Rather than tearing down existing institutions, they intended to slowly capture them from within. Schools, universities, civil service, journalism, law, and eventually political parties all became vehicles through which socialist ideas could be normalized one small step at a time.

Their symbols reflected that strategy. The tortoise represented gradual, almost imperceptible progress toward socialism. Their original coat of arms, however, was far more revealing: a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The symbolism was difficult to miss. The Society openly embraced the idea that its goals would be achieved through persuasion, incrementalism, and careful political camouflage rather than open confrontation. Unsurprisingly, the wolf emblem eventually disappeared as its public relations value became impossible to defend.

During the early twentieth century, Fabian writers developed an intellectual framework for industrial Britain that emphasized cooperative economics and steadily reducing the role of private ownership of capital and land. Their influence extended well beyond pamphlets and lectures. Fabian ideas became deeply embedded within the British Labour movement, helping shape generations of politicians, civil servants, academics, and policy advisers.

That influence has hardly disappeared. Throughout the twentieth century, the Fabian Society remained one of Labour’s most influential intellectual institutions and that has continued into the 21st century. They publish policy papers, host conferences, train young political leaders, and cultivate future Labour officials through organizations such as the Young Fabians and the Fabian Women’s Network. While the rhetoric has evolved with the times, the underlying strategy has remained remarkably consistent: achieve profound political and social change not through dramatic revolution, but through the steady, often unnoticed, transformation of institutions.

The Fabians Conquered Great Britain a Long Time Ago

The Fabian Society is no longer important because of the number of its members. It is important because its strategy succeeded. The organization no longer needs to command the political battlefield because the battlefield itself has been reshaped.

The original Fabians rejected revolution. They believed that socialism would never gain lasting acceptance if it arrived through barricades and bloodshed. Instead, their brilliant strategy advocated a slow march through society’s institutions, replacing old assumptions with new ones over decades rather than months. Their goal was not simply to elect politicians. It was to educate teachers, influence journalists, train civil servants, shape judges, advise bureaucrats, and eventually redefine what the public considered normal.

Measured against that objective, the Fabians won. One remarkable fact is how completely the Fabian Society achieved its long game. It has spent nearly a century and a half shaping the intellectual direction of the Labour Party.

Every Labour prime minister, from Clement Attlee to Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Keir Starmer, and now Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, has been associated with the Fabian Society. This is not a hidden conspiracy. The Society proudly advertises the fact. The Fabian Society is the principal policy incubator for Britain's left-wing governing class. Its success was never measured by fiery speeches or barricades in the streets, but by something far more enduring: the steady occupation of the institutions that write policy, train civil servants, influence universities, and ultimately produce the people who govern the nation.

Britain today bears little resemblance to the nation that existed when Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and Graham Wallas founded the Society in 1884. The modern British state reaches into nearly every aspect of economic and social life. Healthcare, education, welfare, housing, taxation, energy policy, industrial policy, environmental regulation, and increasingly even speech are influenced by an administrative state that would have been almost unimaginable in Victorian England.

This transformation did not happen through revolution. It happened one committee, one regulation, one university department, one government agency, and one generation at a time.

That same philosophy can now be seen well beyond Britain.

The language has changed, but the method remains remarkably familiar. Today’s political battles are increasingly fought through ESG standards, DEI mandates, sustainability metrics, corporate governance rules, accreditation bodies, professional licensing boards, international organizations, and regulatory agencies. These mechanisms rarely require voters to approve sweeping ideological change. Instead, they alter the incentives that govern institutions, which in turn reshape the behavior of individuals.

Whether one supports these initiatives or opposes them is almost beside the point. They reflect a distinctly Fabian approach to political change. Rather than persuading citizens to embrace an entirely new social contract, institutions gradually redefine the rules under which citizens live and work. Over time, what once would have provoked fierce political debate simply becomes accepted practice.

Perhaps the Society’s greatest achievement was making itself appear unnecessary. Today, relatively few people identify as Fabians, yet countless politicians, academics, journalists, corporate executives, and bureaucrats employ methods that would have been immediately recognizable to Sidney Webb, one of the original founders. The tortoise reached the finish line so quietly that most people never realized it was a race.

The Fabians understood that whoever controls the institutions eventually controls the politics. Elections come and go. Governments rise and fall. Institutions endure.

Their vision unfolded over more than a century, and it followed a remarkably consistent path.

• First came the argument that government should become more rational and less political.

• Next: If society was becoming more complex, then experts should increasingly replace politicians in making important decisions.

• As government expanded, so did the administrative state.

• Independent commissions and regulatory agencies accumulated authority that once belonged to elected legislatures.

• National bureaucracies increasingly coordinated with international organizations.

• Public policy became harmonized across borders.

• Corporate governance evolved alongside government regulation, producing concepts such as ESG and DEI that increasingly shaped behavior without requiring legislation.

• Financial governance moved toward central bank digital currencies.

• Artificial intelligence is now being positioned as the next generation of expert-assisted governance.

This is the story of the administrative state gradually replacing democratic accountability as the preferred mechanism of governance. The economy may remain capitalist. Elections may continue to be held. But increasingly, the decisions that shape daily life are made by regulators, standards boards, international organizations, corporate governance committees, central banks, and technical experts rather than by representatives directly accountable to voters.

That was the Fabian insight from the very beginning. Change the institutions, and eventually the politics will follow.

From Westminster to the United Nations

The Fabian Society did not simply change British politics. Its influence spread first through the British colonies and then throughout the English-speaking world. Eventually, it extended into many of the international institutions created after the Second World War.

This should not be surprising. The Fabians never viewed the nation-state as the final destination. Their objective was rational administration by trained experts globally. Political questions, in their view, should increasingly become technical questions to be managed by professionals rather than decided by ordinary citizens. The larger the institution, the greater the opportunity to implement “uniform standards” across society.

Many of the architects of Britain’s postwar welfare state also participated in building the international order that emerged after 1945. Fabian ideas helped shape economic planning, social welfare, labor policy, public health, education, and international development.

Organizations such as the United Nations and its specialized agencies became natural homes for this style of governance. Decisions once made by elected legislatures increasingly became recommendations, standards, frameworks, or best practices issued by international bureaucracies and then adopted by national governments.

The intellectual overlap is not accidental. Both Fabianism and the postwar international system placed extraordinary faith in expertise, centralized planning, and the belief that complex societies could be managed more effectively by specialists than by the rough and often unpredictable process of democratic politics.

The first Director-General of UNESCO, Sir Julian Huxley, provides an excellent example. Huxley openly advocated what he called “evolutionary humanism” and envisioned UNESCO as an institution capable of gradually fostering a common world culture. His writings described education not merely as the transmission of knowledge but as an instrument for reshaping civilization itself. Anyone who has read UNESCO’s founding philosophy will recognize themes that would have been entirely familiar to the Fabian founders: gradualism, expert administration, social engineering, centralized planning, and confidence that enlightened institutions should guide public opinion rather than merely reflect it.

From Britain to America: Exporting an Idea

The Fabian Society never expected to transform the world through elections alone. Ideas travel farther than political parties, and institutions often outlive governments. From the beginning, the Fabians understood that if they could shape the education of future leaders, civil servants, economists, and policymakers, their philosophy would spread far beyond Britain itself.

One of their greatest achievements was the founding of the London School of Economics in 1895. Established by the leading Fabians of the time, the school was intended to be far more than another university. It was designed to educate the administrators of a modern state. Rather than training philosophers or political theorists, it emphasized economics, public administration, statistics, and the practical management of government. Over the next century, the London School of Economics became one of the world’s premier institutions for educating economists, diplomats, senior civil servants, and political leaders from every continent.

Its influence extended well beyond Britain. During the Progressive Era, many American scholars and reformers looked to British municipal government as a model for managing rapidly growing industrial cities. They admired Britain’s increasingly professional civil service, its expanding public health system, and its reliance on trained experts to solve social problems. The question was no longer simply who should govern. Increasingly, it became who possessed the expertise to govern well.

Few Americans expressed this philosophy more clearly than Woodrow Wilson. Long before entering the White House, Wilson argued that public administration should become a professional discipline, insulated as much as possible from ordinary politics. Although he was never a Fabian, as that was a British organization, his writings reflected many of the same assumptions: that modern government required trained administrators, specialized knowledge, and institutions capable of operating beyond the turbulence of electoral politics.

These ideas continued to evolve throughout the twentieth century. Universities established schools of public administration and public policy. Independent research organizations and policy institutes emerged to advise governments on increasingly complex economic, military, and social problems. Institutions such as the Brookings Institution, the RAND Corporation, and countless university-affiliated policy centers reflected a growing confidence that expertise, data, and professional analysis could produce better governance than partisan politics alone.

The result was a profound change in the mission of higher education. Universities no longer existed simply to educate citizens or cultivate statesmen. Increasingly, they trained administrators, regulators, economists, planners, policy analysts, and technical experts who would move between government, academia, foundations, corporations, and international organizations. Whether consciously influenced by Fabian writings or not, many of these institutions embraced the same underlying premise: that the management of society should increasingly rest in the hands of credentialed professionals rather than elected representatives.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Fabianism had become something larger than a British political society. Its most enduring legacy was not a political party, but a way of thinking about governance that has spread throughout much of the Western world.

Fabianism Comes to America

The United States never developed a mass Fabian Party. It did not need one.

American political culture has always been skeptical of socialism when presented openly, that is, until recently. But Americans have historically been far more receptive to progressive reforms framed as efficiency, expertise, modernization, scientific management, or good government.

Rather than advancing through an explicitly socialist movement, Fabian-style thinking entered the United States through elite universities, philanthropic foundations, professional associations, civil service reform, and the expanding federal bureaucracy during the Progressive Era and the New Deal. The emphasis was not on class struggle. It was on replacing local decision-making with “credentialed expertise,” trained in institutions, whose approach reflected many of the same assumptions about expert administration, credentialed authority, and centralized governance that the Fabians had been advocating for decades.

If you educate the teachers, train the civil servants, influence the economists, and shape the universities, you don’t need to seize power. Over time, the people graduating from those institutions become the administrators, judges, journalists, policy analysts, and politicians who govern society. The result is not revolution, but a gradual shift in how government thinks about itself. The arena of political change moves from the ballot box to the bureaucracy, from legislatures to regulatory agencies, and from public debate to expert administration.

The modern administrative state reflects precisely these assumptions. Congress increasingly delegates its legislative authority to agencies that issue thousands of regulations carrying the force of law. Courts often defer to specialized expertise rather than elected representatives. Universities train successive generations of policymakers who rotate between government, multinational corporations, NGOs, foundations, and international organizations. Increasingly, those same institutions establish the standards governing finance, environmental policy, public health, education, employment, and corporate behavior. Elections still matter, but much of modern governance now occurs beyond the ballot box.

The Fabian method has always favored incremental institutional change over direct political confrontation. In that sense, its greatest American success may not be any single law or political party. It is the widespread acceptance that experts, regulators, and large institutions should increasingly shape public life while elected representatives ratify decisions that have largely already been made.

From Economic Socialism to Social Justice

By the end of the twentieth century, something remarkable had happened. The old economic debate had largely been settled. Central planning had repeatedly failed wherever it had been fully implemented. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic stagnation of Eastern Europe, and the market reforms adopted even by communist China made it increasingly difficult to argue that government ownership of the means of production represented the future of prosperous societies.

Author James Lindsay has argued that much of the modern “Social Justice” movement represents precisely this adaptation. Rather than organizing politics primarily around economic class, contemporary activists increasingly organize society around identity groups defined by race, sex, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other characteristics. Economic redistribution is replaced by the redistribution of power, status, opportunity, representation, and cultural influence. Lindsay argues that the language of communism changed, but the underlying revolutionary framework remained remarkably familiar. The Fabians now use social justice as the primary justification for socialism or communism, having failed on the economic front.

The focus of political conflict has steadily shifted from ownership of factories to governance of institutions. Universities, accreditation bodies, professional associations, corporations, media organizations, public health agencies, financial institutions, and international organizations increasingly became the arena in which political objectives were pursued. Rather than nationalizing industries, modern movements often seek to redefine the rules under which those industries operate.

Viewed through the Fabian lens, this evolution is not especially surprising. The Fabians never insisted that socialism required the immediate abolition of markets. Their strategy was always incremental. Change the assumptions taught in universities. Change the standards governing professions. Change the regulations that shape corporations. Change the bureaucracies that administer public life. Over time, political outcomes would follow naturally.

This is why the modern debate increasingly revolves around ESG, DEI, sustainability, stakeholder capitalism, public-private partnerships, pandemic preparedness, and global governance rather than nationalization of steel mills or collective farms. The battlefield shifted from ownership to administration. The question is no longer simply who owns the economy. It is who writes the rules under which the economy operates.

Winning the Universities

The Fabians understood something that revolutionaries often overlooked. Political victories are temporary. Educational victories can last for generations.

Governments come and go. Professors remain. Politicians write today’s laws. Professors educate the people who will write tomorrow’s.

The early Fabians understood that they did not need to win every election. They needed to influence the people who educated the next generation of economists, teachers, journalists, lawyers, judges, and civil servants. Institutions are self-replicating. Professors train professors. Teachers train teachers. Civil servants recruit civil servants. Once the assumptions become embedded in the institutions, the institutions perpetuate themselves.

That was one reason the Fabians founded the London School of Economics in 1895. It was not intended to be simply another university. It was designed to educate the administrators of the modern state. Economics, statistics, public administration, labor policy, and social planning became disciplines through which government itself could increasingly be viewed as a scientific enterprise rather than merely a political one.

Oxford and Cambridge were already educating Britain’s governing class. The Fabians did not need to capture either institution. They needed enough respected scholars, economists, historians, and political theorists who shared their assumptions to gradually become accepted scholarship. Universities rarely change overnight. One generation simply teaches the next. Intellectual fashions become intellectual orthodoxy.

The London School of Economics complemented those older universities by producing economists, planners, civil servants, and policy specialists. Fabian Summer Schools, the Workers’ Educational Association, and adult education programs carried many of the same ideas far beyond the campus into local government, labor organizations, and public life. At the same time, Britain’s expanding civil service increasingly rewarded technical expertise. Government ceased to be viewed primarily as a political responsibility and increasingly became a technical profession.

For those interested in the distorted and weaponized disease modeling that underpinned the global COVID response, the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the academic home of the modeling group in question, are both constituent colleges of the University of London and maintain a formal academic partnership. Specifically, the two institutions offer a joint master’s program in Health Policy, Planning and Financing.

The same philosophy crossed the Atlantic during the Progressive Era of 1890 to 1920. American reformers admired Britain’s professional civil service and increasingly organized universities around schools of public administration, public policy, education, and social work. Their graduates moved easily between government, universities, foundations, corporations, and international organizations, carrying with them a common belief that complex societies were best managed by credentialed experts.

Education itself became an object of scientific management. John Dewey argued that schools should shape citizens, not merely transmit knowledge. Columbia Teachers College became one of the most influential teacher-training institutions in America, exporting mostly educational socialist philosophy through thousands of graduates who would educate millions of children. After the Second World War, UNESCO extended similar ideas globally. Its first Director-General, Sir Julian Huxley, viewed education not simply as preserving civilization but as an instrument for guiding social change and fostering a common world culture.

None of this required a conspiracy, nor did it require every university to become Fabian. Ideas spread because universities educate the people who eventually govern. Once enough institutions embraced the same assumptions, those assumptions became self-reinforcing. Graduates staffed government agencies, wrote regulations, trained future teachers, advised corporations, and educated the next generation.

The Fabians did not need to control every university. They simply needed enough universities to educate enough teachers, economists, lawyers, journalists, and civil servants that their assumptions became the default assumptions of public life. Once those assumptions became orthodoxy, the Society itself became almost irrelevant. The graduates carried the philosophy forward whether they had ever heard the name Sidney Webb or not.

Fabianism and the New World Order

The Fabians do not envision a dramatic seizure of power. They envision something far more durable: a world increasingly governed by experts, administrators, commissions, international organizations, and bureaucracies that would operate above the turbulence of electoral politics. Their objective was not merely to elect socialists. It was to change how societies are governed.

Viewed through that lens, many of the defining institutions of the postwar era begin to look less like isolated developments and more like pieces of a broader intellectual trend. International organizations, transnational regulatory bodies, global public-private partnerships, multinational financial institutions, and increasingly harmonized regulatory frameworks all rest upon a common assumption: that many of humanity’s greatest challenges are best managed by centralized expertise operating across national boundaries.

This philosophy has become known by many names. Internationalism. Stakeholder capitalism. Sustainable development. Global governance. More recently, ESG, DEI, and the language of “whole-of-society” solutions. The vocabulary changes every decade. The underlying premise changes very little. This was the great post-Cold War consensus, which has been rebranded again and is now known as “democratic socialism.”

National sovereignty, local autonomy, and democratic accountability inevitably become secondary when decisions are increasingly made by institutions that are insulated from direct electoral control. Rules become standards. Standards become regulations. Regulations become expectations. Eventually, expectations become accepted reality, often without a single national referendum or meaningful public debate.

Advocates contend that global issues demand global institutions. They argue that financial instability, cybercrime, terrorism, and international trade cannot be effectively handled by individual nations alone. Yet global programs have also been exploited for financial gain and dominance. Examples like climate change and the pandemic show how these institutions are often manipulated for power as well as commercial interests and control. The question is not whether cooperation is necessary. The question is where cooperation ends, and governance begins.

When international organizations coordinate sovereign governments, they serve democracy. When they begin to shape national policy without direct democratic accountability, the balance shifts. Citizens increasingly find themselves governed by frameworks they never voted for, implemented by officials they cannot remove, and justified by experts they cannot question. If you want to see a leading example of how this works (or doesn’t), look no further than the European Union, and specifically the European Council.

Whether one calls this globalism, stakeholder governance, or simply modern administration, the method is unmistakably familiar. The governance becomes institutional rather than electoral. Incremental rather than dramatic. It does not seek to overthrow existing systems overnight. It seeks to redefine them until the old assumptions quietly disappear.

The wolf no longer wears the sheep’s clothing emblazoned on the Fabian Society’s original crest. In truth, it no longer needs the disguise. After more than a century of gradual institutional change, many of the assumptions that animated the early Fabians have become so deeply embedded in political, academic, corporate, and international institutions that we are no longer even aware of them.

Perhaps that is the Fabians' greatest achievement. The victory was not simply that the Fabians conquered Britain or influenced the West. Their real triumph was changing how modern bureaucracies think about governance itself. More than a century after the Society was founded in London, much of the Western world now accepts as perfectly normal the idea that experts, regulators, international institutions, and administrative bodies should increasingly shape public policy while elected governments ratify decisions already made elsewhere. Rewiring institutions changes civilizations. That was the Fabian strategy from the beginning, and history suggests it has been remarkably successful.

End.

By: JGM

MALONE.NEWS · BOOK REVIEW

The Official Record Is Moving. This Book Is Where It Points.

The White House has declassified intelligence on voting-system vulnerabilities. A captured Venezuelan spy chief is writing letters to the President. Ralph Pezzullo’s Stolen Elections is the fullest account yet of the story those developments only begin to tell. Read it, and decide for yourself.

Review by Robert W. Malone, MD

On the night of July 16, 2026, President Trump stood in the East Room and declassified a body of intelligence on the security of American elections, then laid it before the country in a primetime address. Alongside the speech, the White House released four sets of documents. They covered vulnerabilities in electronic voting and ballot-counting systems, China’s acquisition of American voter data, a Michigan voter-registration investigation, and noncitizens on state rolls (Fox News 2026).

The centerpiece was a declassified CIA memo dated June 29, 2026. It records that the intelligence community rated Smartmatic’s purchase of the American firm Sequoia Voting Systems a moderate threat to national security in 2006, and that the concern was serious enough to force a divestiture through a federal review in 2007 (Military.com 2026). It summarizes reporting that Venezuela built the capacity to alter its own elections. It also draws one clear line. Neither Smartmatic nor the Venezuelan government, the memo concludes, held the access required to change an election result outside Venezuela (CNN 2026).

That conclusion is the seam between the official record and this book. The record stops at the exact point the book keeps going.

The declassification is one piece of a wider push. The recently resigned Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had taken an unusual and expanding role in election security prior to her departure. Her office obtained voting machines from Puerto Rico and tested them for vulnerabilities, and she was present as FBI agents executed a 2020-related search warrant in Fulton County, Georgia (CNN 2026). The administration has moved on the policy front as well. A March 2026 executive order on citizenship verification and mail ballots was partly blocked in the courts, then partly revived when a federal appeals court let the Postal Service continue its ballot-mail rulemaking on July 17 (NPR 2026; New York Post 2026). The President has said he intends to end mail-in ballots and the machines themselves before the midterms (The Hill 2025).

And in a jail in Brooklyn sits Nicolás Maduro, captured and brought to New York to face narcoterrorism charges. His former military intelligence chief, Hugo Carvajal, pleaded guilty in 2025, wrote a letter to President Trump in December, and had his sentencing postponed with no new date, which legal observers read as a possible sign of cooperation (CNN 2026). Carvajal’s letter names Smartmatic.

Whatever you conclude about any single item, the larger fact is settled. Three years ago, raising these questions got people banned from platforms. Today the same questions drive presidential declassification, federal prosecution, and executive orders. The topic that was forbidden is now the top of the front page.

Into this moment, a book

Ralph Pezzullo did not write Stolen Elections to catch a news cycle. He is a New York Times bestselling author who has spent a career co-writing with intelligence and special-operations figures, including the former CIA officer Gary Berntsen, with whom he wrote Jawbreaker. That matters, because Berntsen is one of the two men at the center of this book. The other is Martin Rodil, a Venezuelan-American financial investigator who worked cases for the DEA. Together, the book tells us, they spent four years running a private criminal investigation into election fraud, at real risk to themselves, with no help from the agencies whose job this was, and in some instances against their active resistance. The book’s path to print carried the same friction. Pezzullo says a major trade publisher signed the book and paid an advance, then declined to release it, and he brought it out himself.

I am not going to walk you through what they found. Spoiling it would rob the book of its reason to exist. But the method is worth describing, because the method is what holds you.

Pezzullo writes like the professional storyteller he is. The investigation reads like the field reporting it was, source by recruited source, and the men doing the recruiting are the genuine article rather than podcast personalities. The book does not ask you to take its word. Its appendices carry the documents: the federal indictment of Smartmatic co-founder Roger Piñate, the record of USAID grants that pushed this software abroad, Treasury sanctions, the account of a Serbian engineer at the center of the system, and Carvajal’s letter to the President reproduced in full. When Pezzullo makes a claim you can check, he shows you where to check it. That discipline is rare in this genre, and it is why the book earns a serious reading.

The scope is enormous. Pezzullo argues that the manipulation reaches across seventy-two countries and back through more than a decade of American elections. He traces Smartmatic from a 2004 Venezuelan referendum to the largest county in the United States. He names the people he believes built the system and the people he believes protected it. If even a fraction survives scrutiny, the story is a large one. He believes all of it survives, and he argues it with more specificity than anyone before him.

Where the book goes past the record, and why that is the reason to read it

The memo’s conclusion is where the disagreement starts. The government’s own declassified assessment says the access needed to alter an American election from Venezuela did not exist. Pezzullo argues that it did exist and was used. That is not a small gap. It is the central question, and the administration’s own document lands on the opposite side of it from the book.

I am not going to paper over that, and you should be suspicious of any reviewer who does. Parts of this book rest on anonymous sources whose claims cannot be independently verified. The most sweeping assertions, that specific past presidential outcomes were determined from abroad, go well beyond what any court, any audit, or any declassified memo has established. The Carvajal material is a live development, and reading a former spy chief describe the system from the inside is arresting. It is also a set of allegations from a man who pleaded guilty to narcoterrorism and has every reason to tell this administration what it wants to hear, and no court has tested a word of it. A related document circulating online, a list purporting to name dozens of bribed American senators, appears to be fabricated even by the account of sympathetic writers (Houk 2026). The information environment around this story is treacherous, and a careful reader has to keep his footing.

None of that is a reason to skip the book. It is the reason to read it.

You are going to form a view on this. The President is declassifying documents about it. Federal prosecutors have indicted a voting-machine company and its parent, though on financial crimes rather than vote-rigging, and have traced money from the Los Angeles contract into the same structure used to bribe an election official abroad (Willkie Compliance Concourse 2025; The Guardian 2025). A cooperating witness may be about to talk. You can form your view from headlines and hostile summaries, or from the fullest primary argument anyone has assembled. Stolen Elections is that argument. Reading it does not commit you to believing it. It commits you to understanding, in detail and from the source, what the official record is now circling. A serious citizen reads a serious claim and weighs it for himself.

This is the ground Malone.News intends to hold, and it is nearly empty. Most of the press will not touch the book except to sneer. Much of the alternative media will cheer it without reading past the jacket. Almost no one stands in between, crediting what is documented and marking plainly what is not. An honest center-right reader deserves that middle ground, and few are offering it.

Read it before you decide

The declassified memo, the captured regime, the cooperating spy chief, the indicted vendor, the executive orders working through the courts. None of it is a forecast. It is this month’s news. Ralph Pezzullo wrote the backstory to all of it before most of it broke, and he wrote it as a narrative you will not put down and a dossier you can argue with.

You will not agree with every page. I did not. That is not the standard for whether a book is worth your time. The standard is whether it sharpens how you see the question and equips you to judge it for yourself, and by that standard Stolen Elections earns its place on the shelf beside the declassified documents it anticipates.

Buy it. Read it. Then hand it to the person in your life who still believes this question was settled, and ask them to do the same.

The record is moving. Get ahead of it.

About the author

Ralph Pezzullo is a New York Times and international bestselling author whose books have sold more than six million copies. He has written more than thirty of them, most by the same method: working with CIA officers, Special Forces soldiers, and federal agents to turn their firsthand accounts into print. The best known is Jawbreaker, his inside history of the CIA’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden, written with the former CIA officer Gary Berntsen, who is one of the two investigators at the center of Stolen Elections. Paramount Pictures bought the film rights to Jawbreaker, with Oliver Stone attached to direct. His other books include Zero Footprint, Left of Boom, Ghost, and the SEAL Team Six series. He covered Latin America as an Associated Press correspondent, and he grew up inside American diplomacy as the son of Ambassador Lawrence Pezzullo, who helped negotiate the 1979 departure of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. He hosts the documentary podcast Heroes Behind Headlines. He has reported this world for decades, and that record is why the book deserves a hearing.

Ralph Pezzullo, Stolen Elections: The Takedown of Democracies Worldwide. HBH Books, hardback September 2025, paperback January 2026. Hardback ISBN 979-8-9997530-0-7; paperback ISBN 979-8-9997530-1-4. Available on Amazon. More at stolenelections.us .

Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, is a physician-scientist, an inventor of the foundational mRNA vaccine technology, and a co-author, with Jill Glasspool Malone, PhD, of Lies My Gov’t Told Me and the forthcoming Homesteading for Health. He writes at malone.news.

REFERENCES

Central Intelligence Agency. 2026. “Summary of Select Intelligence Reporting From 2004 to 2020 on Venezuela’s Electronic Voting Manipulation Capabilities.” Declassified memo dated June 29, 2026.

CNN Politics. 2026. “Key moments from Trump’s speech claiming declassified documents show US election vulnerabilities.” July 17, 2026.

CNN. 2026. “Could Hugo Carvajal Barrios be a witness in Maduro trial?” April 26, 2026.

CNN Politics. 2026. “Intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard’s office obtained and tested voting machines in Puerto Rico.” February 4, 2026.

Fox News. 2026. “Trump White House releases election integrity files after primetime address.” July 2026.

The Guardian (Zetter, Kim). 2025. “New Allegations Against Smartmatic Executive in Company’s Voting Machine Contract with LA County.”

Houk, John R. 2026. “Looking at the ‘Venezuela List’ Attributed to Hugo Carvajal.” January 6, 2026.

The Hill. 2025. “Trump takes aim at mail-in ballots, ‘controversial’ voting machines.” August 2025.

Military.com. 2026. “Trump Declassifies CIA Intelligence on Alleged Maduro Election-Rigging Efforts.” July 2026.

NPR. 2026. “Trump signs a new executive order on voting. Experts say he lacks the authority.” March 31, 2026.

Pezzullo, Ralph. 2025. Stolen Elections: The Takedown of Democracies Worldwide. HBH Books.

New York Post. 2026. “USPS to move forward with major mail-in voting change: ‘A win for election integrity.’” July 18, 2026.

Willkie Compliance Concourse. 2025. “Smartmatic Charged in the Southern District of Florida for Allegedly Bribing a Philippine Official.” October 27, 2025.

MAHA Inc.: The Machine, the Figurehead, and the Base

The view from inside Washington. Who actually runs the health department, and whether the movement’s founder can win back the people he has lost.

Eighteen months in, Make America Healthy Again has changed shape twice. The movement hardened into a corporation. The department slipped from Kennedy’s own people toward the White House. A third problem now shadows both. The base that carried Kennedy feels betrayed on the issues it cares about most. That matters for a 2028 run he keeps denying, because a figurehead cannot lead an insurgency.

This account comes from inside the Beltway. It rests on the Washington press and on the operatives who run these groups. That vantage reads org charts, donor filings, and personnel moves well, and grassroots faith badly. In the capital’s telling, Kennedy is a diminished official inside a machine. In much of the base’s telling, he is a fighter under siege. The documents favor the first reading. The base lives the second. Hold both in your mind as you read through this essay.

The apparatus

Tony Lyons built the machine. He founded Skyhorse Publishing, Kennedy’s book publisher for two decades. He and Mark Gorton seeded American Values 2024, the super PAC behind Kennedy’s presidential run, then rebranded it as MAHA PAC (Isenstadt 2025).

Gorton co-founded Tower Research Capital in 1998, one of the oldest high-frequency trading firms, now spread across offices on four continents (Tower Research Capital 2025). In 2000 he created LimeWire, the peer-to-peer file-sharing program that at its 2007 peak sat on roughly a third of the world’s computers (Institutional Investor 2014). A federal court shut it down in 2010 and found Gorton personally liable for copyright infringement. He settled with the record labels for about one hundred five million dollars (SlashGear 2023). Wall Street trading and a shuttered file-sharing empire built the money now underwriting the movement.

Four more entities grew around the PAC (Children’s Health Defense 2025). MAHA Action runs advocacy and now holds the trademark. Policy work sits with the MAHA Institute. Donations to the MAHA Center are tax deductible. The commercial arm is MAHA Holdings.

MAHA Holdings sits closest to the family, and it is the least transparent of the five. Kennedy’s twenty-eight-year-old son, Finn Kennedy, holds a board seat and helped organize the movement’s marquee industry summit (E&E News 2025). He also invests at the venture firm 8VC, which backs health, manufacturing, and defense companies (E&E News 2025). He put the entity’s purpose in plain commercial terms. It exists to accelerate private industry adoption of the MAHA agenda (MAHA Action 2025). That agenda is the one his father sets as secretary. The entity keeps no public website and discloses neither its ownership nor its revenue model (Children’s Health Defense 2025; Consumer Federation of America 2025).

The brand carries a paid history. Kennedy earned one hundred thousand dollars in licensing fees from the MAHA marks, then transferred the trademark to a Wyoming LLC managed by Del Bigtree for no compensation (Associated Press 2025; Washington Post 2025). The incentives run the way public-choice economics predicts. Concentrated benefits reach those who hold the brand and sell the products. The costs disperse across a movement that supplies the moral energy for free.

The Musk claim

Sasha Latypova put the funding question on the table in July (Latypova 2026). She read the MAHA Alliance filings and concluded that six million dollars of the roughly eight million raised came from one donor, Elon Musk. From there she argued that Musk underwrote the movement and owns Kennedy. Part of this checks out. The headline number does not.

Musk did fund MAHA Alliance. The documented figure is three million dollars, given on October 22, 2024, through the Elon Musk Revocable Trust. CNN, NBC, CBS, and The Hill report the same three million, each citing the same FEC filings (CNN 2024; NBC News 2024; CBS News 2024; The Hill 2024). Against the committee’s cycle total near eight million, that was the largest single donation (OpenSecrets 2024). It was about a third of the money, not three quarters.

Six million runs to roughly double the record. No outlet and no FEC summary supports it, and the period filings fit one three-million contribution rather than two (FEC 2024). The likely source of the larger figure is a separate sum she cites, the two point one million that American Values 2024 sent to MAHA Alliance. That money came from Timothy Mellon and Nicole Shanahan, not from Musk. Adding it to Musk’s total does not make it his. One detail also fails to line up. She places the Musk trust in Dallas. The trust named in the reporting sits in Austin (NBC News 2024).

The larger error is what the money was for. MAHA Alliance was not the seed capital of Kennedy’s movement. It was a single-candidate super PAC supporting Trump, registered on September 5, 2024, after Kennedy left the race and endorsed him (OpenSecrets 2024). It ran ads urging Kennedy’s voters to choose Trump in the final stretch (CNN 2024). Musk’s three million was one line in his pro-Trump spending that year, which approached three hundred million dollars (CBS News 2024). This was turnout money wearing a MAHA label. It did not build MAHA Action, the MAHA Institute, or MAHA Holdings, and it did not fund the health agenda.

So the jump from a campaign check to ownership does not hold. A single three-million donation, a third of a small committee that spent on Trump ads and conferences, does not buy a man or a movement. The filings show a contribution and nothing larger.

Latypova’s underlying work is not worthless. Bigtree signed the filings as principal officer. His media firm, Big Truth Inc., collected about three hundred ten thousand dollars, which matches earlier reporting (Associated Press 2025). Mellon’s twenty-five million to American Values 2024 is real (Washington Post 2024). The itemized spending she flags is on the record. Her strongest point survives the correction. A small and cash-hungry movement is cheap to influence, which is a public-choice truth. The three-million check makes that case on its own. Follow the money to the filing, not to the story you already believe.

The old guard

Before February, two people ran the health department in Kennedy’s name. Stefanie Spear controlled the door. She had served Kennedy for twenty years and run communications on his campaign, and she functioned as the gatekeeper to the secretary (World Tribune 2025). Nothing reached him without passing her. Matt Buckham ran the machinery. As chief of staff he controlled personnel and the flow of appointees into the building.

Critics inside the movement called this a cage. Gray Delany, the former director of MAHA implementation, says Spear and Buckham sealed Kennedy off from his own allies and staffed the department with compliant hands (World Tribune 2025). Their defenders called it discipline. Either way, the pair held the immediate office. For a year the chain of command ran through them, not through the career bureaucracy and not through the White House.

The Oz axis

That arrangement ended when the White House found a better instrument. Mehmet Oz runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the largest agency inside HHS, with a budget above two trillion dollars (CMS 2025). Chris Klomp served as his deputy, directing the Center for Medicare and drawing up the drug-pricing deals that Trump prizes. Oz called him a generational talent (Deseret News 2026). Trump called him a potential star.

In February the White House lifted Klomp out of CMS and set him over the whole department as chief counselor (Politico 2026). In June it nominated him deputy secretary, the formal second in command. Trump, Kennedy, and Oz announced the choice together (Fox News 2026). The cost-control wing that Oz built at CMS now occupies the top of Kennedy’s department. The reshuffle pushed the movement wing down. Buckham became a senior counselor. Spear kept her title, lost her reach, and remains at the building in a smaller role (HHS 2026; Traylor 2026).

Who governs now

The arrangement raises a hard question about Kennedy himself. On the public record, operational authority has moved to Klomp. Trump says Klomp oversees day-to-day operations (CNN 2026). Klomp ran the searches that produced the nominees for the CDC, the surgeon general, and the FDA (CNN 2026). The White House installed him to keep closer tabs on Kennedy and to align the department with its own aims (Politico 2026).

Kennedy has not been emptied out. He keeps the bully pulpit and the brand, and he still drives his signature moves. He cancelled the BARDA mRNA contracts and remade the vaccine advisory committee. The campaign against synthetic food dyes was his. These are real exercises of a secretary’s power, and they belong to him.

The division is now visible from the capital. Kennedy owns the symbolism and the culture-war health fights. Klomp owns operations, personnel, and the agenda the White House can sell in November. By the capital’s reckoning, a secretary who owns the message but not the machinery is most of the way to a figurehead. Kennedy is not all the way there. He is close.

The revolt

The base sees the drift and resents it. The break came over glyphosate. Kennedy spent years calling the weedkiller a driver of chronic disease, and he won a large verdict against its maker (Slate 2026). In February Trump signed an order shielding glyphosate producers from lawsuits and framing the chemical as a matter of national defense. Kennedy stayed quiet, then defended the order (The Hill 2026). MAHA moms revolted. One Turning Point host said women were leaving the party over it (Slate 2026).

The losses stacked from there. The White House sided with farm lobbyists against pesticide limits in the second MAHA Commission report (New York Times 2026). Lobbyists spent millions to keep the food-safety loophole that Kennedy pledged to close (Daily Beast 2026). The Supreme Court threw out the old Roundup verdict. Each defeat landed on the people who trusted Kennedy to win these exact fights.

The sharpest break is over vaccines. In June a group of medical-freedom activists led by Mary Talley Bowden, with Naomi Wolf and others, sent Kennedy an open letter accusing him of a bait and switch on the mRNA platform (Bowden 2026). They want the shots pulled from the market and the PREP Act repealed. They warned that MAHA voters can walk away. Mike Adams and Sayer Ji, longtime allies, turned on Kennedy over a single pro-MMR statement. To its hardest core, the movement’s founder now looks like a man who compromised on the founding cause.

The recovery problem

Set the denials aside and assume a run (Kennedy 2025; KFF Health News 2026). Kennedy would face a base he alienated while governing. The disaffection is structural, not a matter of messaging. Governing inside the MAGA coalition forced the compromises that enraged the movement. Big Ag won the pesticide fight and Big Food kept its loophole. The White House took the department. A candidate cannot campaign against the outcomes his own administration produced without indicting himself.

Deliver a trophy

One path runs through a signature win before 2028. The mRNA contract cancellations were a down payment. A reversal on childhood mRNA guidance, or a closed food loophole, would give Kennedy a concrete victory to point at. The obstacle sits above him. Klomp and the White House control the timing, and neither wants a vaccine fight before the midterms.

Blame the captors

A second path casts Kennedy as the thwarted reformer. This is his native register. Kennedy and Spear have long framed him as a lone man of courage besieged by a corrupt machine, and they will keep doing so. When the White House pressed him last summer, he called it a swamp panic and a smear campaign, and vowed that nothing would stop him (Kennedy 2025). So he tells the base that Big Pharma, Big Ag, and the swamp blocked him from the inside. The story has the advantage of being partly true. It carries one complication. The people who blocked him, in the base’s own telling, were Spear and Buckham and the White House he chose to serve. He cannot indict his captivity without admitting he accepted it.

The anti-war lane

That complication has an exit, and current events supply it. In 2026 the United States and Israel went to war with Iran, a conflict that split the coalition and reopened the oldest fault line on the right (Britannica 2026). Thomas Massie, the last consistent anti-war Republican in the House, lost his primary in May to a Trump-backed challenger. It was the most expensive House primary on record, and pro-Israel groups spent more than fifteen million dollars to beat him (Al Jazeera 2026). Tucker Carlson turned the defeat into a thesis. A foreign lobby, he argued, hijacked America First and now runs the party (Carlson 2026).

The thesis hands Kennedy a captor who is not his own staff. If outsiders captured the administration, then Kennedy is a fellow prisoner and not the warden. He can stay loyal to Trump, blame the hijackers, and reach for the anti-war base that the Iran war and the Massie purge left leaderless. That story scales to a larger stage.

The lane is more dangerous than it looks. His own record is the plainest obstacle. In 2024 he called Israel a moral nation, defended its war in Gaza, and pledged it firm support, and the anti-war left attacked him for it (Times of Israel 2024). His campaign, with Spear running communications, declined public debates on the subject (Blumenthal 2023). A pivot to the anti-war banner would reverse his most consistent foreign-policy stance, and the purists remember.

The framing carries its own danger. That pro-Israel groups spent heavily to beat Massie is documented fact (Al Jazeera 2026). That a foreign government controls the president is not. The leap from lobbying to secret control is unproven, and in its strong form it revives an old antisemitic libel. A man already labeled a conspiracy theorist cannot carry that cargo. His enemies would brand him at once, and the brand would hold.

He also cannot run from where he sits. No one campaigns as the anti-war candidate while serving in the cabinet that runs the war. The money that ended Massie, more than thirty million dollars in a single House race, would turn on a sitting secretary with far more to lose. This lane runs through the exit, not the office. It is less a way to blame the captors than a reason to walk out.

Walk out

A third path is exit. Kennedy leaves HHS, sheds the compromises, and runs as the outsider again. This restores the insurgent posture the base rewards. It also forfeits the incumbency, the platform, and the drug-pricing wins that a general electorate likes. Lyons has said the plan is the opposite, to keep Kennedy at HHS into the next administration (Telegraph 2025). Exit burns that plan down.

Buy the turnout

A fourth path leans on the machine. MAHA Inc. has money and a candidate pipeline, and it can paper over disaffection with organization. Money turns out soft supporters. It does not turn out the betrayed. The Bowden letter and the glyphosate revolt come from the true believers, the people a mailer cannot buy back.

None of these paths is clean. The strongest combination pairs a trophy with a villain, a real win plus a machine to blame, told in the victim’s voice he already owns. That still requires the White House to let him win something before November, which it has no reason to do. The base problem and the figurehead problem are one problem. Kennedy lost the power to give the base what it wants at the moment he needs the base most.

The campaign is the product

The recovery problem assumes the goal is winning. Super PAC law makes that goal optional (Malone and Glasspool Malone 2026). American campaign finance runs on an asymmetry. Outside money arrives without limit, and it leaves through consultants, media firms, vendors, and the candidate’s own entities. The vote at the end does not govern the flow. A campaign is a machine for turning donations into contracts.

Defeat still leaves a durable asset. A run builds a donor list, a media brand, and a standing organization, and all three outlast the ballots. The return does not depend on the result. Hopeless campaigns in both parties have worked this way for years, the candidate’s name still raising money long after the race was lost. Losing is not failure when the campaign was the product.

MAHA Inc. is that machine already assembled. The PAC, the nonprofits, the trademark, and the holding company are campaign infrastructure held in escrow. A sitting secretary cannot run, so the allies hold the pieces and wait. A 2028 bid would not build an apparatus. It would switch one on. The engine is finished, staffed, and idling.

So the base problem changes shape. Recovering the base is the task if the aim is to win. If the aim is the campaign itself, a hollow base matters less. A tilting-at-windmills run still pays the consultants and licenses the brand, and it still enriches the circle around the candidate. That is the incentive the law builds. It rewards the attempt regardless of the odds. Whether Kennedy can win in 2028 is one question. Whether a run is worth launching is another, and the second does not wait on the first.

A movement earns its authority from the consent of the people who animate it. MAHA rose on a promise to break captured institutions. Its founder now sits inside one, outranked by the men the White House chose, defending an order he once would have sued. The machine that bears his name keeps raising money and licensing the brand, and his own son sits on the board of its commercial arm. The people who supplied the moral force are drifting off. Kennedy built an apparatus to protect the mission and a coalition to carry it. He is losing command of both at once. He will narrate that loss as a siege, the lone reformer against the machine, because that story has always worked for him. The capital measures power in org charts and reads him as fading. The movement measures power in belief, and by that measure the story is not settled. Whether he can run on a movement he no longer controls is the question the denials are meant to postpone. The Beltway thinks it knows the answer. It has misjudged Kennedy (and the MAHA populist coalition) before.

References

Al Jazeera. 2026. “Massie Race Breaks Spending Record as Pro-Israel Groups Target Trump Critic.” May 18.

Associated Press. 2025. “How Leaders of the MAHA Movement Benefit From Anti-Science Advocacy and Promise Profits to Industry.” October 21.

Blumenthal, Max. 2023. “RFK Jr. Staff Block Israel-Palestine Dialogue.” The Grayzone.

Bowden, Mary Talley. 2026. “Open Letter to Secretary Kennedy on mRNA Vaccine Policy.” June 4.

Britannica. 2026. “2026 Iran War.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Carlson, Tucker. 2026. “The Israel Lobby Takes Out Thomas Massie and Kills MAGA.” The Tucker Carlson Show, May 20.

CBS News. 2024. “Elon Musk Spends $277 Million to Back Trump and Republican Candidates.” December 8.

Children’s Health Defense. 2025. “MAHA: A Who’s Who of Groups That Bear the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Slogan in Their Names.” The Defender, November 24.

CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services). 2025. “Dr. Mehmet Oz Shares Vision for CMS.” April 10.

CNN. 2024. “Musk Spent at Least a Quarter-Billion Dollars to Help Elect Donald Trump, New Filings Show.” December 5.

CNN. 2026. “Trump Nominates Chris Klomp as HHS Second in Command.” June 25.

Consumer Federation of America. 2025. “What to Make of ‘MAHA-Con’?” November 19.

Daily Beast, The. 2026. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA Agenda Starts to Unravel at FDA Over GRAS.” June 17.

Deseret News. 2026. “Who Is Trump’s ‘Favorite Mormon’ Chris Klomp, Overseeing HHS?” March 24.

E&E News. 2025. “JD Vance, RFK Jr. to Attend MAHA Summit.” Politico, November 12.

FEC (Federal Election Commission). 2024. “MAHA Alliance, Committee C00888172: Filings and Financial Summary.”

Fox News. 2026. “Trump Nominates Chris Klomp for HHS Deputy Secretary, Calls Him ‘a Potential Star.’” June 25.

HHS (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). 2026. “Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Harms of Screen Use.” May 20.

Institutional Investor. 2014. “The 2014 Trading Technology 40: Mark Gorton.”

Isenstadt, Alex. 2025. “RFK Jr., Allies Rush to Rally the MAHA Movement for 2026.” Axios, August 24.

KFF Health News. 2026. “Kennedy, Balancing MAHA and White House, Says He Won’t Run for President in 2028.” May 16.

Kennedy, Robert F., Jr. 2025. Statement posted to X, August 15.

Latypova, Sasha. 2026. “Who Owns Bobby? Review of MAHA Alliance Financials for 2024-2025.” Due Diligence and Art (Substack), July 17.

MAHA Action. 2025. “The MAHA Summit.” mahaaction.com, November 12.

Malone, Robert W., and Jill Glasspool Malone. 2026. “The Campaign Is the Product.” MALONE.NEWS (Substack).

NBC News. 2024. “Elon Musk Spent a Quarter-Billion Dollars Electing Trump, Including Financing Mysterious ‘RBG PAC.’” December 5.

New York Times, The. 2026. “Leaked Draft of Second MAHA Commission Report Declines to Restrict Pesticides.” Reported via secondary coverage, March.

OpenSecrets. 2024. “PAC Profile: MAHA Alliance (C00888172).”

Politico. 2026. “RFK Jr. Shakes Up Leadership Team.” February 12.

SlashGear. 2023. “The History of LimeWire: How It Worked and What Happened to It.” July 25.

Slate. 2026. “Trump Betrayed the MAHA Movement This Week. RFK Jr.’s Reaction Was Telling.” February 21.

Telegraph, The. 2025. “RFK Jr. Should Have Second Term as Health Secretary, Say Allies.”

The Hill. 2024. “Musk Spent at Least $250M to Help Elect Trump, Filings Show.” December 6.

The Hill. 2026. “Kennedy Doubles Down on Defense of Trump Glyphosate Order Amid MAHA Backlash.” February 23.

Times of Israel, The. 2024. “2024 Dark Horse RFK Jr. Questions Need for Gaza Truce, Defends Israeli Offensive.” March 21.

Tower Research Capital. 2025. “Firm Overview.” tower-research.com.

Traylor, Jake. 2026. “White House Moves to Sideline Key RFK Jr. Aide as Part of HHS Shake-Up.” MS NOW, February 17.

Washington Post. 2024. “The Biggest Campaign Donors of the 2024 Election.”

Washington Post. 2025. “RFK Jr. Sought to Trademark MAHA, Transferred It to an Ally’s LLC.” January.

World Tribune. 2025. “Who Is Stefanie Spear: RFK Jr.’s Gatekeeper Accused of ‘Ruthlessly Sidelining’ His MAHA Allies.” October 31.

(But according to my Aunt Renee, the bingo hall was a lot more fun.)

The video below is disturbing -

The man was the unfortunate object onto which an already highly aroused rutting bull directed its aggression. Had another person, cyclist, vehicle, or even another bison occupied that same place at that moment, they might well have become the target instead.

That is one reason wildlife biologists often say that rutting bison are among the most unpredictable large mammals in North America. During the breeding season, their behavior can shift from apparently placid to explosively aggressive with remarkably little obvious provocation.

Freedom - Getting serious now.

The meme coin above may offend some people because it jokes about someone being seriously injured. But to me, that image perfectly captures what freedom means.

Freedom means accepting responsibility for taking chances. It means choosing to be in places where the unexpected can happen. It means accepting that, yes, you might get seriously hurt. Sometimes by animals that have no concept of what it means not to be free.

Robert and I live on a farm with heavy equipment, large animals, and countless opportunities to get hurt. And we have. More than once, we’ve found ourselves in situations where the stakes were very real.

Just on Friday, we bred a 1,200-pound mare to Jade. The mare threw an absolute anxiety tantrum after being separated from her filly for all of five minutes. She repeatedly lashed out at the gate where Jade was standing. Had I not stepped aside after seeing her ears pin back, I could have been seriously injured. Robert was just as exposed while trying to steady the mare as I opened the gate. This mare is one of our nicest, kindest mares. But in that moment, all hell broke loose.

Was it fun? No. Was it scary? Absolutely. But it was also seemed the safest way to make sure the filly wasn’t hurt. Everything worked out, but those are the kinds of decisions we make year after year because that’s what comes with running a breeding farm. When you choose to work with large animals, you also choose to accept the risks that come with them.

By the way, the humble cow is closely related to the bison.

And dairy bulls are widely considered among the most dangerous domestic animals in the world.

So, people choose to do all sorts of things that may not be in their best interests, but that is what freedom brings - the risk and the responsibility to make our own choices.

On the flip side of the coin, the homestead and the horses keep us fit. We look and feel years younger than we are.

Life is a balancing act - and a trade-off.

Homesteading for Health.

There are those who talk the talk, and those who walk the walk. Over 50 years together, still in love, and still frisky. And, back in the day, they all said we were too young. They were wrong. The above photos were from a photo shoot yesterday for an article in Homesteaders of America (due out in September), promoting our book.

JGM

Audio Version

Every summer, it seems to happen again. Another foodborne outbreak. Another investigation. Another recall. And, inevitably, another round of fearporn.

This year it is Cyclospora, a microscopic parasite that has sickened thousands of Americans. We now know the source of at least one major cluster. Federal investigators traced a five-state outbreak to shredded iceberg lettuce grown in central Mexico, supplied by Taylor Farms de Mexico, and served at Taco Bell restaurants in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. Taco Bell was the point of sale, but the contamination entered the system farther upstream, somewhere along a supply chain that stretched from a Mexican farm through a major distributor and into hundreds of American restaurants. Other Cyclospora illnesses reported across the country may have different sources and remain under investigation.

The problem is no longer a single contaminated restaurant or grocery store. Taylor Farms supplies hundreds or thousands of food-service locations through national distributors like Sysco. When contamination enters that system, it can travel farther than the produce itself, reaching hospitals, schools, restaurants, and grocery stores across multiple states before anyone realizes there is a problem.

Cyclospora cayetanensis is not a bacterium like E. coli or Salmonella. It is a single-celled protozoan parasite spread through human fecal contamination. Freshly shed oocysts are not immediately infectious. They must mature in the environment for days or weeks before they can infect another person. That makes direct person-to-person transmission uncommon and generally occurs before the produce reaches the consumer.

Cyclospora is also difficult to remove from delicate produce. Ordinary washing may reduce surface contamination, but it cannot reliably eliminate the parasite. Standard chlorination is also less effective against Cyclospora than it is against many bacteria. Once the parasite is lodged in the folds and crevices of lettuce or other leafy greens, there is only so much a consumer can do.

But there is a larger story here, and it is one that few people seem interested in asking.

In the 1970s, Americans traveling in Mexico were routinely warned not to eat raw salads or leafy vegetables. The advice was simple: drink bottled water, peel your fruit, and avoid uncooked produce that might have been irrigated, washed, or handled with contaminated water. No one considered this particularly controversial. It was ordinary travel advice based on the known risk of fecal contamination and gastrointestinal illness.

Today, Americans increasingly eat Mexican-grown vegetables without leaving home or even thinking about it. That is especially true during the winter, when supermarkets remain stocked with cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, herbs, lettuce, and other fresh produce grown far to the south. The United States now imports roughly half of its fresh fruit and about one-fifth of its fresh vegetables, with Mexico serving as the dominant foreign supplier for many categories.

NAFTA accelerated the integration of imported foods from South America, particularly Mexico, into the North American food supply. Seasonal boundaries became less visible. We all now expect strawberries in January, tomatoes in February, and salad greens every day of the year. American growers faced competition from regions with lower labor costs, different regulatory systems, different water infrastructure, and growing conditions that allowed production when much of the United States was frozen.

After NAFTA, the number of reported produce-associated outbreaks increased dramatically. CDC researchers identified 606 outbreaks associated with fresh leafy vegetables or leafy-based salads between 1973 and 2012. From 1973 through 1997, the average was about four reported outbreaks per year. From 1998 through 2012, it rose to more than thirty-three per year. That is an 8-fold difference from pre-NAFTA to after-NAFTA.

Since 2012, the pattern has become even more striking. Instead of a steady increase in the number of outbreaks, the United States has experienced a series of large, multistate outbreaks involving the same commodity over and over again: leafy greens.

Although only a few thousand illnesses each year are recognized as part of documented produce outbreaks, epidemiologists estimate the true burden is vastly larger. One recent analysis concluded that leafy greens alone are responsible for as many as 2,307,558 illnesses annually in the United States. The economic cost of these illnesses is estimated to be up to $5.278 billion.” Thus, making them one of the single largest sources of foodborne disease.

The recurrence has been serious enough that FDA developed a dedicated Leafy Greens STEC Action Plan, and the CDC, FDA, and USDA now estimate that vegetable row crops, primarily leafy greens, account for nearly 68 percent of all foodborne E. coli O157 illnesses, far exceeding beef.

How did this happen? Produce imports increased. Centralized processing expanded. Bagged salads became common. National distribution systems allowed one contaminated field, packing house, or processing line to expose consumers across many states. Yet remarkably little work has been done to determine whether increasing dependence on imported produce has itself changed the epidemiology of foodborne illness.

Produces accounts for the largest share of imported-food outbreaks, with foods such as cilantro, basil, peppers, cucumbers, papayas, berries, and leafy vegetables appearing repeatedly. Mexico and other Latin American countries were prominent sources in a number of these investigations.

It is important to note that several of the most serious romaine outbreaks in recent years were traced to American growing regions in California and Arizona, often near large cattle operations or other potential sources of environmental contamination. American agriculture has its own sanitation problems, and a domestic label is also no guarantee of safety.

There is another important complication. Most of the historical leafy-green outbreaks were not necessarily traced to contaminated fields. Nearly three-quarters were associated with salads in which investigators could not identify the precise ingredient responsible. Many occurred in restaurants or catering facilities, and norovirus was frequently involved. In those cases, a sick food worker may have contaminated the salad during preparation.

The more serious multi-state outbreaks tended to look different. They were more likely to involve E. coli or Salmonella and more likely to originate earlier in the production chain. Those were the events that produced a disproportionate share of hospitalizations and deaths.

So, when public-health officials speak of a “leafy-green outbreak,” they may be combining two very different problems. One is a restaurant worker contaminating a bowl of salad. The other is fecally contaminated irrigation water reaching a nationally distributed crop. Those events belong in the same surveillance database, but they do not have the same cause, the same scale, or the same solution.

The honest conclusion is that globalization is a huge part of this story, but no one has adequately measured how large that part is. We have dramatically increased the distance between the field and the fork. We mix crops from multiple farms, wash them in centralized facilities, package them in plastic, ship them across national borders, and expect them to remain crisp for a week or more before they reach the dinner table.

Isn’t it time for an honest analysis of the downstream consequences of trade agreements, such as NAFTA?

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A plea for all of us to do better

Robert and I rarely buy bagged salad anymore. Not because we are terrified of Cyclospora. The odds that any individual package will make us sick remain small. We stopped buying it because once you learn to grow greens, packaged salad simply stops making much sense.

Homegrown greens taste better. They last longer because the food stays on the plant until harvest, and then it is harvested minutes before dinner rather than days or even weeks after processing. They cost pennies instead of dollars. There is no plastic container headed for the landfill, and we know exactly where they came from. We also know what was used to grow them, which, in our case, means no pesticides or herbicides, and the nitrogen comes from living soil instead of being made from natural gas. Our fertility comes from compost, cover crops, mulch, animal manures, and living soil rather than primarily from nitrogen manufactured from natural gas. Our practices feed the soil first, and the plants second.

People tend to think gardening means waiting until July for the first tomato. In reality, greens are among the fastest and easiest foods to grow. With a little planning, they can be harvested during nearly every month of the year.

The secret is to stop thinking about “the garden” as a single annual event and begin thinking in terms of succession planting. Instead of planting one large crop, sow a smaller amount every few weeks. Use raised beds, containers near the kitchen, or any sunny patch of ground. When cold weather arrives, move production into a simple hoop house, cold frame, unheated greenhouse, or sunny indoor space.

Spring belongs to spinach, lettuce, arugula, mustard greens, Asian greens, and peas. These crops prefer cool weather and often grow more vigorously before summer heat arrives.

Summer requires a different strategy. Traditional lettuce and spinach often bolt in the heat, but Swiss chard, New Zealand spinach, Malabar spinach, amaranth leaves, sweet potato leaves, and beet greens will continue producing. Many people harvest beets for their roots and throw away the tops, even though beet greens are tender, nutritious, and delicious. We harvest both.

Autumn brings a second season for cool-weather crops. Spinach returns, kale becomes sweeter after cold nights, lettuce thrives again, and Asian greens flourish as temperatures fall. With a light cover, many of these crops will continue producing well past the first frost.

Winter is where a little creativity pays off. Microgreens can be harvested on a kitchen counter in ten to fourteen days. Pea shoots grow quickly indoors. Sunflower shoots are packed with flavor. Broccoli sprouts are easy to grow and are among the most nutrient-dense greens available. Mung beans and alfalfa remain old standbys, although sprouts require careful sanitation because the same warm, humid conditions that promote germination can also promote bacterial growth.

In our greenhouse, we continue harvesting herbs long after the outdoor garden has gone dormant. A greenhouse is wonderful, but it is not essential. A simple hoop system over a raised bed can protect greens from frost, wind, and heavy rain while extending the growing season by weeks or even months. The hoop system is what we use for our main greens - lettuce, spinach, and kale during the early winter months and early spring.

Raised beds make the process easier. They warm more quickly in spring, drain well during heavy rains, and allow the gardener to build living soil over time. We add compost regularly, mulch generously, and plant cover crops whenever a bed will sit empty for more than a few weeks. We are still experimenting with cover crops; this year, daikon radishes and turnips will do dual duty as cover crops and also for their clay-busting potential. Healthy soil produces resilient plants, and resilient plants are not chemical inputs.

One of the biggest surprises for new gardeners is how little space greens require. A single four-by-eight-foot raised bed can produce salads for weeks. Add another bed, a few containers, and some trays of microgreens indoors, and many families can stop buying packaged greens for much of the year.

Our industrial food system has become more centralized, more dependent on imports, and less visible. Every additional field, truck, border crossing, washing facility, processing line, warehouse, and grocery shelf introduces another point where something can go wrong. Most of the time, the system works. Occasionally, it fails on a scale that would have been nearly impossible when food was grown and eaten locally.

There is another reason we enjoy growing our own greens. Freshly harvested vegetables are living tissue. The moment they are cut, they begin consuming their own sugars and vitamins through respiration. Vitamin C begins to decline almost immediately, while flavor compounds and delicate antioxidants slowly disappear during washing, packaging, transportation, refrigeration, and storage. Commercial agriculture has done an extraordinary job of producing vegetables that survive a thousand-mile trip and then can sit in the vegetable aisle for another week or two. It has been less successful at producing vegetables that taste like they were picked ten minutes ago.

Plant breeding has also changed our food. Over the past half-century, breeders have selected varieties that yield more, ship farther, bruise less, and remain attractive on grocery shelves. Those improvements have helped feed millions of people cheaply, but they have also been accompanied by measurable declines in several minerals and vitamins in many vegetables, a phenomenon known as “yield dilution.” Bigger plants do not necessarily contain more nutrition. They often contain more water. So, be careful with the cultivar when selecting your seeds or seedlings. Heirloom varieties are often best.

Commercial agriculture often manages dirt. We try to grow soil. There is a difference. Healthy soil is alive. It is full of roots, bacteria, fungi, earthworms, insects, nematodes, protozoa, and countless other organisms that recycle nutrients, build organic matter, and feed plants in ways a bag of fertilizer never can. Much of modern agriculture replaces that biological complexity with applications of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Crops still grow, often spectacularly well, but over time, the soil itself becomes less biologically resilient.

That is one of the hidden pleasures of growing food at home. We are not trying to maximize truckloads per acre. We harvest for flavor, freshness, and nutrition. Our lettuce never has to survive a week in a refrigerated trailer. It only has to make it from the garden to the dinner table.

Every head of lettuce you grow yourself is one less that depends on a supply chain you cannot see and cannot control. Growing greens is one of the easiest places to begin. The investment is small, the learning curve is gentle, and the reward begins in a matter of weeks.

There is something deeply satisfying about walking outside with a bowl, cutting enough greens for dinner, and knowing that your salad never crossed a border, entered a processing plant, or was exposed to someone defecating in a field.

That is food security on a very human scale.

JGM/RWM

For those not paying attention, CBS has now“fact checked” several of Trump's claims from last night’s speech - as false. They have announced this before the newly declassified documents he cited have been fully released and independently evaluated.

Funny how that works…

I'm old enough to remember the collective meltdown when Congress renamed Washington National Airport after Ronald Reagan. The mainstream media acted as if civilization itself were ending.

To this day, plenty of people in DC refuse to call it Reagan National. It’s still just “National” or “DCA.” Because, well... we all know how “evil” Reagan was <insert eye roll here>.

So now United has decided to join the culture wars?

Ironically, we fly United almost exclusively because our home airport, Dulles (yes, named after those Dulles brothers), is basically a United hub.

My response?

F/U, United.

Maybe it’s time to go out of my way to fly someone else for a while.

So, China cracks down on AI companions, banning features that foster emotional dependence, not allowing children to have AI companions, and forcing major tech firms to disable many virtual companion services.

So, unless we do what China just did and regulate AI companions - this will be the future of our youth…

JGM

Audio Version:

The New World Order Nobody Expected

For nearly three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world’s political and economic elites believed they knew where history was headed. The nation-state would gradually give way to international institutions. Markets would become global. Borders would matter less. International courts would become more influential. Decisions once made in national capitals would increasingly be made by multinational organizations, trade bodies, international courts, and public-private partnerships. Ironically, the new world order that is emerging bears little resemblance to the one so confidently predicted after the Cold War.

This was the great post-Cold War consensus, a post-war internationalist vision that holds that many of humanity's greatest challenges transcend national borders and therefore require international cooperation, shared institutions, and expert-informed policymaking.

Whether one called it globalization, global governance, the rules-based international order, stakeholder capitalism, or even the New World Order, the philosophy was remarkably consistent.

The underlying assumption was that nations would prosper by surrendering a measure of sovereignty to a growing network of international institutions designed to manage an increasingly interconnected world. They even gave this future a name. Heck, their leaders even wrote books about how the COVID-19 pandemic would rewrite world politics to reflect a one world government based on socialist principles. A new, more woke ethos would become the norm.

Stakeholder capitalism envisioned governments, multinational corporations, financial institutions, and international organizations working in increasingly close partnership to achieve common economic, environmental, and social objectives. This blurred the distinction between public authority and corporate power while diminishing democratic accountability. Stakeholder capitalism incorporated DEI positions favoring mass immigration of people from poorer countries into wealthier ones - to stop population decline, open borders, centralized vaccination campaigns, world trade agreements, etc.

What many people forget is that this represented a dramatic departure from the international system that had governed relations between nations for nearly four centuries. Beginning with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, nation-states became the organizing principle of international affairs. The assumption was straightforward: governments exist first to govern their own people. Cooperation between nations was encouraged, but sovereignty remained paramount.

The post-Cold War consensus challenged that premise by arguing that many decisions could be better made above the level of the nation-state.

• The European Union became its most ambitious political experiment.

• The World Trade Organization would regulate international commerce.

• The International Criminal Court would expand universal jurisdiction.

• The World Health Organization would coordinate global public health.

The World Economic Forum became the annual gathering place where political leaders, multinational corporations, financial institutions, and international organizations discussed the future of global governance. In 2016, the WEF said the quiet part out loud, even declared in a video that soon people would “own nothing and be happy.” Yep, the Great Reset was a thing.

Many of us questioned this direction long before it became fashionable to do so. Not because international cooperation is undesirable. Nations will always cooperate where their interests align.

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But cooperation is fundamentally different from governance.

The assumption underlying the post-Cold War consensus was that what benefits “the world” necessarily benefits individual nations. Experience has demonstrated that this is often not the case. The promise was that transnational governance would make everyone wealthier, in fact - the opposite is true.

Starting under President Clinton in the 1990s, U.S. trade policy increasingly prioritized global economic efficiency over the resilience of domestic manufacturing. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed into law in 1993, accelerated the relocation of manufacturing to Mexico, where companies could take advantage of lower labor costs and a less burdensome regulatory environment. Estimates of the resulting job losses vary widely, from roughly 40,000 to more than 700,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs. But few dispute that entire manufacturing communities were hollowed out as factories closed or moved overseas.

The creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995, followed by China’s admission in 2001, accelerated those trends. International trade expanded, and consumers enjoyed lower prices on many imported goods. But those savings came at a cost. Millions of American manufacturing jobs left the United States over the following decades, supply chains migrated overseas, and many once-thriving industrial towns experienced long-term economic decline.

Prosperity depends on far more than what consumers pay at the checkout counter. It also depends on good-paying jobs, stable employment, affordable housing, accessible healthcare, educational opportunity, and the resilience of local communities. The post-1990 trade agreements improved the first while undermining the others.

The promise was that global supply chains would create unprecedented efficiency. Instead, Americans discovered during the COVID-19 pandemic that we no longer manufactured many of the medicines, medical supplies, semiconductors, and other strategic products upon which our lives depended. Efficiency had come at the expense of resilience.

The same philosophy reshaped our food system. We were told that feeding the world represented both humanitarian leadership and sound economic policy. In practice, those policies favored multinational agribusinesses capable of producing vast quantities of globally traded commodity crops while undermining traditional agriculture in developing nations, as well as domestically. Here at home, American farming became increasingly optimized for export markets, processed foods, and industrial efficiency rather than the nutritional quality, food security, and resilience of our own food supply. Shelf-stable, ultra-processed foods formulated with roughly 10,000 food additives and chemicals, many introduced through the GRAS process based largely on manufacturer-submitted evidence, became the norm because they could be produced cheaply, and shipped anywhere. Convenience and global commerce prevailed, at the expense of America’s health.

These developments unquestionably created winners.

• Large multinational corporations benefited.

• Global financial institutions benefited.

• International consulting firms benefited.

• Nations that the United States traded with benefited.

But the question every sovereign government should ask is not whether globalization created aggregate wealth. The question is whether it fulfilled its first responsibility to its own citizens.

That is the central idea behind America First, which the globalists frequently mock as isolationism. It is nothing of the sort.

Every nation has not only the right but the obligation to place the welfare of its own citizens at the center of public policy. In fact, many thriving nations do place their own citizens first. Japan, India, China, Israel, and increasingly many European nations all pursue policies they believe advance their own national interests. The United States should be no different. Virtually every successful nation pursues policies designed to advance its own strategic interests.

Trump Changed the Conversation

What is fascinating is that the institutions built upon the post-Cold War consensus now appear to recognize that the world has changed.

The World Trade Organization increasingly finds itself unable to enforce the rules that once governed international commerce. By blocking appointments to the WTO’s Appellate Body, the United States effectively disabled the organization’s final dispute-settlement mechanism, restoring greater freedom for sovereign nations to pursue their own trade policies rather than submit to supranational adjudication. President Trump’s embrace of tariffs, bilateral negotiations, and economic statecraft reflects a broader shift away from rules-based globalization and toward the primacy of national interests.

The International Criminal Court now faces an even more direct challenge. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced a diplomatic campaign to isolate and ultimately dismantle the Court, arguing that no international tribunal should claim authority over American citizens or officials. Together, these developments signal more than a change in policy. They represent a deliberate reassertion of national sovereignty over institutions that once appeared destined to govern an increasingly globalized world.

The World Economic Forum itself has begun speaking less about transnational governance as an inevitable destination and more about resilience, strategic competition, industrial policy, critical minerals, and supply-chain security. Davos now acknowledges that the world is entering what it calls an "Age of Competition."

The institution that once symbolized globalization now openly discusses fragmentation, economic security, and geopolitical rivalry as defining features of the emerging international order. At the same time, the Forum's ongoing leadership transition and governance reforms appear to reflect a growing emphasis on business leadership and organizational restructuring over the climate-centric agenda that dominated much of the previous decade.

These institutional changes represent an intellectual surrender of the assumptions that dominated international politics from roughly 1990 through 2024. The organizing principle is no longer transnational governance. It is sovereignty.

International cooperation, trade, and scientific collaboration remain valuable. None, however, should supersede the primary obligation of elected governments to serve and protect their own citizens.

The irony is unmistakable. For years, critics warned that a “new world order” would emerge in which international institutions gradually displaced national sovereignty. Instead, a very different new world order appears to be taking shape.

Not one governed from Brussels or coordinated from Davos or even adjudicated in The Hague. Instead, we are returning to something far older and, arguably, far more stable.

A world of independent nations cooperating where their interests align, competing where they do not, and accepting that no international institution can permanently substitute for the judgment and accountability of self-governing peoples.

The post-Cold War consensus may have reached its end. What appears to be returning is something much older: the Westphalian principle that sovereign governments exist first to serve their own people. In the case of the United States, establishing a constitutional republic and representative democracy has proven to be an extraordinary success. This is something to be cherished and it is time to return to those principles.

Ultimately, good governments derive their legitimacy not from international organizations, multinational corporations, or global summits. They derive it from the consent of the governed. That was the genius of the Westphalian tradition, and later of the American constitutional republic. Governments exist to serve their own citizens. International cooperation can be beneficial, but it must always remain subordinate to that first obligation, to serve and protect their own citizens.

The New World Order envisioned by its proponents never lived up to the hype that it was better for the world to harmonize as one, frictionless business venue. Instead, the world leaders and its citizens appear to be returning to a much older idea: each nation is accountable to their own people, cooperating where their interests align and competing where they do not.

President Trump’s presidency has accelerated this paradigm and given political voice to millions of Americans who believe their government had forgotten its first responsibility: serving its own people.

JGM/RWM

Audio Version:

Has Automation Stolen What It Means to Be Human?

By Jessica Rose

I want to begin this article by reminding everyone reading it of the old parable of the man fishing alone on a beach. It goes something like this, more or less.

There’s a man fishing alone on a beach with a single, simple fishing pole. Another man walks up to him and asks him why he doesn’t buy a boat to fish because then, he could catch more fish. The fisherman responds by saying: “Then what?” The passer-by then says in a matter-of-fact way: “Well then, you could buy an even bigger boat and catch even more fish with the money from selling all of that fish!”. The fisherman responds by saying: “Then what?” The passer-by confounded that the fisherman does not seem to understand what he is telling him balks: “Then you could retire and hire others to do the fishing for you!” The fisherman responds by saying: “Then what?” Even more confounded, the passer-by says: “Then you could have more time to spend doing what you love!”

The fisherman looks at him. And waits. For understanding. The passer-by then comprehends perhaps for the first time in his life that the long and often exploitative path to simplicity is pointless. The fisherman, even with all of the money in the world would be doing precisely what he already was doing.

Here’s a more “well-known” version if you like.

One day, a wealthy businessman (or investment banker, in some tellings) was vacationing in a small coastal village in Mexico. He watched as a lone fisherman rowed his little boat back to shore with just a few large fish. The businessman complimented the fisherman on the quality of the catch and asked,

“How long did it take you to catch those?”

“Only a little while,” the fisherman replied.

“Why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more?” the businessman asked.

“I caught enough for my family’s needs today,” the fisherman said.

The businessman pressed on:

“But what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The fisherman smiled and answered, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.

”The businessman scoffed. “I’m a Harvard MBA – I can help you. You should spend more time fishing. With the extra money, buy a bigger boat. With the bigger boat, catch even more fish, then buy several boats and build a fleet. Cut out the middleman, sell directly to processors, open your own cannery. Control production, processing, and distribution. You’d eventually move to the city, expand to other locations, run a growing enterprise.”

The fisherman listened patiently, then asked, “And how long would all that take?”

“Fifteen, maybe twenty years,” the businessman replied.

“And then what?” the fisherman asked.

The businessman laughed. “That’s the best part! When the time is right, you announce an IPO, sell your company stock to the public, make millions – become very rich!”

“Millions… and then what?” the fisherman repeated.

“Then,” the businessman said triumphantly, “you could retire! Move to a small coastal village where you could sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings to sip wine and play guitar with your friends.”

The fisherman looked at him quietly for a moment, then smiled and said, “But that’s exactly what I’m already doing.”

The businessman stood there, speechless, as the simple truth sank in: the fisherman was already living the very life the ambitious man dreamed of achieving – after decades of grinding pursuit…

I was walking today and knew that I had to write up some of the thoughts I had about automation being the key to the demise of what it means to be human.

To be connected. To work hard. To truly earn. To truly learn.

It got me thinking about one of the first examples of automation that was actually a really neat idea: the water wheel. Water wheels and similar devices appeared as early as the 1st century BC (or possibly earlier in rudimentary forms) among the Greeks and Romans, used for grinding grain. These harnessed flowing water to drive machinery continuously without constant human input, representing early power automation in industry. Similar water-powered trip-hammers existed in ancient China over 2,000 years ago.

The most commonly cited earliest true example of automated control – a self-regulating feedback mechanism – is the improved water clock (clepsydra – comes from Ancient Greek meaning to pipette…) invented by the Greek engineer Ctesibius around 270–250 BC in Ptolemaic Egypt (Alexandria)…

Automatic devices can be divided into subdivisions based on function. Some devices help and are “non-invasive” in terms of imposing on the human part of humanity. Some devices are quite “invasive” in this same way.

Many – if not all – devices made in the last century fall into the latter subdivision. I think of these as inflictions upon humanity masquerading as “convenience”, as opposed to devices that make our human lives better. Many examples exist and play a daily role in our human lives today.

(Some examples)

1. Single-serve pod coffee makers: Ah yes! The promise of instant coffee without that brewing hassle! Only problem is what you actually get is mediocre taste, generation massive plastic waste, ingestion of microplastics and likely forever chemicals, high cost per cup relative to traditional methods, and most importantly, the removal of the simple ritual of making coffee that many find relaxing or social.

2. Smartphones: How many times a day does someone on one of these dumb devices almost bump into you? How many people do you see on a daily basis who are literally in phone-land – more akin to zombies – than engaged with nature or others? With constant notifications and app ecosystems, they automate communication, information access, navigation, and entertainment into one device for seamless convenience! The only catch is that they contribute to addiction, reduced attention spans, social isolation, anxiety, poorer sleep, and less presence in real-life and social interactions.

3. Robotic vacuum cleaners: Why vacuum or sweep when you can off-shore that duty to a robot! They handle floor cleaning autonomously so you “don’t have to”. But guess what? They require more setup/maintenance than promised, miss spots, create noise/annoyance, and don’t replace the satisfaction or light exercise of manual vacuuming, perhaps even as a family activity, eliminating yet another social interaction. But hey, you get yet another gadget to charge and repair.

4. Microwave ovens: Ah yes. Where would we all be without being able to speed up heating of forever plastic/endocrine disrupting nightmares that are TV dinners? But hey, isn’t that the ultimate convenience? Guess again! This encouragement of ingesting ultra-processed ready meals to save you time also reduces home cooking skills/pleasure, alter social family meal rituals, and shift food prep away from shared or mindful preparation toward solitary, rushed eating. Not very social or human-like behavior.

And now we get to the real winners in our list.

5. Smart home devices and always-on assistants: Oh man, where do I start with these? Automation of climate control, lighting, music, shopping lists, etc., for effortless living! Why wouldn’t you want to not take the time to get up off your ass and turn the thermostat yourself when a computer can do it for you! I am being sarcastic, of course, because all of these so-called smart devices foster dependency, privacy erosion (constant listening), increased screen time fragmentation, and a subtle loss of basic self-reliance or analog comforts. Loss of self-reliance. Isolation. Loss of social structure.

6. Automatic/self-checkout kiosks and app-based ordering: Welcome to the new world where all you have to be able to do is use your index finger to have all of your shopping needs fulfilled! No more actually having to walk to the grocery store or market! No more talking to other people at the market! No need to go slow! Ingest! Ingest! Ingest! Consume! Consume! Consume! They’re so awesome, aren’t they? Speeding up transactions by removing cashiers and human interaction. Stupid humans: so error-prone and slow! But hey, guess what? These apps and self-checkouts also increase frustration (computers never make mistakes – wait, is the printer not printing again?), reduce jobs/social contact, and turn routine errands into impersonal, glitch-prone experiences that feel more alienating, than efficient.

I could go on… but these examples are sufficient for now.

Notice how in every single example, there is an inherent de-socialization component baked in. Hmm. Is this to ensure that our lives are made more convenient, or is this something more insidious? Having said that, I want to stress how deeply disturbed I am every single day that these things are being demanded by humans.

No demand; no supply.

Why are we demanding these things? Do people really and truly believe that these idiotic things make their lives easier/better? Where does the line get drawn between convenience and relinquishing self-sovereignty? Does this line get drawn? Have we not opted into slavery?

Why are supply chains even a thing? The only supply chain that any human used to need is the line from their own goat to fresh cheese.

This automation of human work, to me, poses a real existential crisis that is the root reason why we are “where we are” today as a society.

Giving up these wonderful ritualistic habits that translate to being able to eat that day, or being with our loved ones, or sleeping well after a day of hard work, has led us nowhere but isolated and dependent.

I want to end this short pokey piece on a positive and inspiring note. I would love it if everyone would watch Maynard J. Keenan’s 4-part mini-movie series called: The Art of Work. It speaks deeply to what I am writing about here…

I simply hope that this article is shared profusely and that perhaps, even one person will wake up from their digital slumber as a result of reading it.

Notice that I didn’t even touch on AI or human-replacing robots: the ultimate automation enforcing a permanent vacation from human-ation.

Be like the man alone fishing on the shore and never succumb to the lie that the act of DOING is something that needs to be sped up or removed from the human equation.

DOING is not far from BEING.

Love and light.

The essay above was lightly abbreviated. The full essay was was first published on Jessica’s Substack and then republished at the Brownstone Institute. Republished here via a creative commons license.

Fauci Under Oath: Where the Risk Actually Lives

Rand Paul has set the date. Anthony Fauci testifies on July 29 before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (The Hill 2026). Most coverage frames this as a reckoning for what he did during the pandemic. That framing misses the mechanics. The pardon and the expired statute of limitations have already closed the door on his past conduct. The only conduct still exposed is what he says in the chair.

Biden pardoned Fauci for any federal offense from 2014 through January 2025 (CNN 2026). Paul concedes the statute of limitations on the gain-of-function testimony has run (Everett 2026). Past perjury, if it happened, cannot be charged. A new false statement can. Pardons do not reach future crimes. That single fact defines the entire hearing.

The Fifth Amendment cuts against him

The instinct is to assume Fauci can take the Fifth and end the problem. The pardon makes that harder, not easier. The privilege against self-incrimination protects a witness from answers usable in a prosecution. Remove the prosecution and the privilege dissolves for that subject. The Supreme Court settled this in Brown v. Walker. A witness who cannot be charged cannot refuse to answer on self-incrimination grounds.

For conduct inside the pardon window, Fauci is likely compellable. He cannot decline on the ground that a truthful answer would incriminate him. He also cannot lie. A false statement on July 29 is a fresh offense, unpardoned and prosecutable. The shield built to protect him now pushes him toward the one place he remains exposed.

The residual room is narrow. He keeps the privilege where a truthful answer would expose him to something outside the pardon. Post-2025 conduct qualifies. State offenses qualify. A skilled lawyer will hunt for that hook. Absent it, the pardon operates as a compulsion to speak.

What the pardon does not reach

The pardon closes federal criminal exposure. It closes nothing else. It reaches offenses against the United States and stops there. State crime and civil liability sit outside it. Both are already moving.

Seventeen state attorneys general, led by South Carolina’s Alan Wilson, asserted in February 2025 that the pardon does not preclude state-level investigations or proceedings (South Carolina Attorney General 2025). They asked Congress for evidence usable at the state level. Idaho’s legislature resolved that the pardon confers no immunity from state crimes. The threshold claim is correct. A federal pardon cannot bar a state prosecution.

The obstacle is Supremacy Clause immunity. The Constitution makes federal law supreme over state law. A state cannot punish a federal officer for doing his federal job. The Supreme Court settled this in In re Neagle in 1890. A federal marshal, assigned to guard a Justice, killed a man who lunged at him. California charged the marshal with murder. The Court threw the charge out. An officer acting within his federal duty answers to federal law, not to a state prosecutor.

That doctrine shields Fauci’s official conduct. His grant decisions and his statements as a federal official are the core of the job he held. A state that charged him over them would not keep the case. Federal law lets a federal officer move such a prosecution into federal court, where the immunity is decided (28 U.S.C. 1442). Finding a state crime that survives is harder still. Testimony to Congress is federal. Grant administration is federal. The conduct has no natural home in a state penal code. The state track is leverage and an evidence operation. It is not a likely conviction path for official acts.

Civil liability is different. The pardon never touched it. Clemency erases criminal liability alone. A civil suit seeks money, not prison, and it proves its case by a lower standard. It also opens discovery, which can pry loose documents a closed criminal file never would. Plaintiffs find that route attractive for exactly those reasons.

Federal officials still carry heavy civil armor for official acts. Three layers do the work. The Westfall Act, passed in 1988, is the first. When a federal employee is sued for a wrong committed on the job, the United States steps in and takes his place as defendant. The employee drops out of the case. The claim then proceeds, if at all, against the government under its own restrictive rules. The second layer is the Bivens doctrine. A 1971 Supreme Court case once let citizens sue federal officers in person for violating their constitutional rights. The Court has since narrowed that route almost to nothing (Egbert v. Boule 2022). The third layer is qualified immunity. It protects an official from personal liability unless he broke a clearly established legal rule. Together these make personal damages against Fauci for official pandemic conduct hard to win.

Every layer turns on one hinge. Scope of employment. The armor covers acts done within the job and only those. Show that Fauci acted outside his official role and the Westfall substitution falls away. He then stands in court as a private man. This is the seam plaintiffs aim at. The April 2026 indictment of David Morens, Fauci’s senior adviser, for concealing records is the wedge. So is the alleged instruction to delete an email that Paul surfaced. Both are offered to argue that Fauci stepped outside his lawful duties into a private scheme. That link is unproven.

The largest numbers rest on a further theory. Civil conspiracy with joint and several liability. Under it, every member of a proven conspiracy can be charged with the entire harm, not merely his own share. Stack the claimed pandemic damages across fifty states and the figure reaches into the trillions. No court has come near that number against a single person. It is a ceiling lawyers prepare against, not a verdict anyone has won.

State exposure reopens the Fifth Amendment. The privilege protects against any prosecution, state included. It applies wherever a truthful answer could be a link in the chain. Seventeen attorneys general are openly seeking state-law theories. That gives Fauci a genuine basis to invoke the Fifth on July 29. The campaign meant to increase his jeopardy hands him his strongest reason to say nothing.

The civil risk runs through the record, not through a new claim. His 2022 Murthy v. Missouri deposition is already permanent, cross-usable evidence. Every answer on July 29 joins it. It becomes impeachment material and admission evidence in any case where he is a party or witness. It is usable against co-actors and institutions even where he is not liable. The hearing’s largest civil consequence is the sworn record it locks in. That record survives every immunity he holds.

Gain of function and the regulatory line

Paul’s loudest charge is his weakest legal ground. The federal definition of gain-of-function research runs through the P3CO Framework, adopted by HHS in December 2017 (HHS 2017). It regulates a narrow category. The pathogen must be a potential pandemic pathogen, meaning plausibly transmissible and virulent in humans. Enhancement of such a pathogen triggers review. Nothing else does.

The EcoHealth grant funded chimeric work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Researchers placed bat coronavirus spike proteins on a WIV1 backbone and tested binding to human ACE2 in engineered mice. The chimeras replicated at 1,000 to 10,000 times the level of WIV1 (PolitiFact 2021). NIH ruled the work outside P3CO. Its stated reason was that the bat viruses had not been shown to infect humans, so they were never potential pandemic pathogens (FactCheck.org 2021). The Tabak letter never uses the phrase gain of function.

That reading holds on the text. It is also the definition of playing semantics. The grant carried a clause requiring EcoHealth to report enhanced growth beyond a set threshold. The chimeras cleared it by orders of magnitude. The clause existed because someone anticipated this result. Independent scholars reject NIH’s narrow application. David Relman of Stanford and Marc Lipsitch of Harvard, neither a Paul ally, have said an enhanced-replication result is exactly what oversight should capture.

The legal consequence inverts the political heat. House investigators concluded Fauci’s testimony was, at a minimum, misleading (Moffit 2026). Misleading is not perjury. A no defended under the regulatory definition survives cross-examination. On gain of function, the exposure is reputational, not criminal.

The 2024 testimony is softer than advertised

The claim that Fauci already perjured himself in 2024 rests on six words. Asked whether he spoke to intelligence agencies about COVID, he said, Not to my knowledge about Covid (CNN 2026). Gabbard’s team isolated that line. The rest of the same hearing complicates it. Under questioning from Chairman Comer minutes later, Fauci corrected the record and affirmed he was briefed by the intelligence community multiple times (U.S. House 2024).

He did not deny contact. He conceded it. A perjury theory cannot rest on a denial he never made. CNN, no friend of the lab-leak thesis, found the isolated answer did not clearly amount to a lie. The pardon covers it regardless. There is no clean past offense here for Paul to ratify on July 29.

Erdman closes the ambiguity

The dangerous strand is the one with dates. James Erdman III, a CIA operations officer, testified on May 13, 2026 under subpoena and against his agency’s wishes (Fox News 2026). He served on Gabbard’s Director’s Initiatives Group reviewing COVID origins. His claim is specific. Fauci inserted himself into intelligence deliberations twice, on February 3, 2020 and June 4, 2021, to push a natural-origins narrative (New York Post 2026). Fauci supplied a curated list of experts mirroring the Proximal Origin authors. Six of seven technical experts favored a lab leak. Management changed the analytic line.

Erdman is a contested witness. He carries advocacy ties from the vaccine-mandate fights. The CIA rejected his framing and called the hearing political theater (New York Post 2026). That same CIA assessed in 2025 that a lab leak is the most likely origin. Erdman’s charge concerns the corruption of the historical process, not the agency’s current position. The leap from recommending experts to orchestrating a cover-up is what remains disputed.

None of that rescues Fauci on the narrow question. Dated meetings are not fundamentally ambiguous. A yes-or-no about a June 4, 2021 discussion cannot hide behind the definitional fog that shelters him on gain of function. This is where the vise closes.

Fauci’s choice

Fauci’s two risks pull in opposite directions. Concede and reframe, and he is legally safe. I offered scientific input when the intelligence community asked is defensible and probably true. It also abandons the passive-recipient posture his public account has leaned on. Protect the narrative, insist he was only briefed and never steered, and he stays consistent with his reputation. If the documents and Erdman contradict that, the minimization becomes a new false statement. The trap is not any single question. It is that the safe answer and the consistent answer are not the same answer. Erdman forces the choice.

Objective reporting or propaganda?

Press framing is part of this story. The Hill’s report on the subpoena inserted two judgments in the reporter’s own voice. It called Paul’s claims unsupported by hard evidence, applied to the whole bundle rather than the unresolved origins question alone (The Hill 2026). It stated Fauci is blamed for tens of millions of deaths, a figure reachable only under the broadest excess-mortality modeling and far above the confirmed count. Both cut one direction. Both sit in the outlet’s voice, not in a quote.

That is bias, and it is demonstrable from the text. Intent is not. The same output follows from house habit, from a newsroom that codes lab-leak claims as fringe and never updated as the CIA, FBI, and Department of Energy shifted. Why the spin was designed this way cannot be read off a page. The honest charge stays with what is printed. The Hill slanted its own reporting in Fauci’s favor. The background, purpose, and intent of that bias is unprovable and beside the point.

Accountability

The hearing will not resolve the origin of SARS-CoV-2. The pardon still stands. The record of what Fauci did is largely fixed. One variable is open. Whether Fauci, under oath, repeats a denial that the record can now falsify. His federal criminal exposure is closed. State prosecutors and civil plaintiffs are still building, and every sworn answer feeds them. His words are the last variable he controls. Accountability, if it comes, will come from his own mouth.

References

Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents. 1971. 403 U.S. 388.

CNN. 2026. “Why the Covid-19 Documents Gabbard Released Don’t Prove Her Claims About Fauci.” June 23. https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/23/politics/covid-19-gabbard-fauci-claims.

Egbert v. Boule. 2022. 596 U.S. 482.

Everett, Burgess. 2026. “Why Rand Paul Subpoenaed Fauci.” Semafor, June 23. https://www.semafor.com/article/06/23/2026/why-rand-paul-subpoenaed-fauci.

FactCheck.org. 2021. “Republicans Spin NIH Letter About Coronavirus Gain-of-Function Research.” October. https://www.factcheck.org/2021/10/scicheck-republicans-spin-nih-letter-about-coronavirus-gain-of-function-research/.

Federal Employees Liability Reform and Tort Compensation Act of 1988 (Westfall Act). Pub. L. No. 100-694, 102 Stat. 4563.

Fox News. 2026. “Who Is James Erdman III? CIA Whistleblower Who Went from COVID Mandate Fights to Senate Spotlight.” May 13. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/who-james-erdman-iii-cia-whistleblower-who-went-from-covid-mandate-fights-senate-spotlight.

HHS (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). 2017. Framework for Guiding Funding Decisions About Proposed Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens. December. https://aspr.hhs.gov/S3/Pages/Enhanced-Potential-Pandemic-Pathogen-Oversight-Framework.aspx.

In re Neagle. 1890. 135 U.S. 1.

Moffit, Robert. 2026. “Fauci Will Testify, but the CIA Needs More Scrutiny.” Daily Signal, June 25. https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/06/25/fauci-testify-senate-cia/.

New York Post. 2026. “CIA Whistleblower James Erdman Reveals Anthony Fauci ‘Influenced’ COVID Origins Intel Probe as Part of Lab Leak ‘Cover-Up.’” May 13. https://www.aol.com/news/cia-whistleblower-james-erdman-reveals-160502741.html.

PolitiFact. 2021. “Ask PolitiFact: What Does an NIH Letter Say About Gain-of-Function Research, What Fauci Knew?” October 28. https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/oct/28/ask-politifact-what-does-nih-letter-say-about-gain/.

South Carolina Attorney General. 2025. “Attorney General Alan Wilson Leads Coalition of AGs Investigating Dr. Anthony Fauci’s COVID-19 Response.” February 5. https://www.scag.gov/about-the-office/news/attorney-general-alan-wilson-leads-coalition-of-ags-investigating-dr-anthony-fauci-s-covid-19-response/.

The Hill. 2026. “Rand Paul Issues Subpoena for Anthony Fauci.” June 23. https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5936032-rand-paul-subpoena-anthony-fauci-covid-19/.

U.S. House. 2024. “A Hearing with Dr. Anthony Fauci.” Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, June 3. https://www.congress.gov/event/118th-congress/house-event/LC72977/text.

U.S. Senate. 2026. “Written Testimony of James E. Erdman III Before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.” May 13. https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/letter-and-testimomy.pdf.