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Investigative Health Policy, MAHA Accountability

Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone

Washington, DC: November 9, 2026

On Thursday, November 6, 2026, three days after Republicans lost control of the House, Susie Wiles resigned as White House Chief of Staff. Richard Walters, her deputy, resigned on Friday. President Trump elevated Stephen Miller to Chief of Staff. Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted on X:

Calley Means had resigned his own White House and HHS roles on October 22, 2026, twelve days before the midterms. The specific trigger, as he told it on Rogan, was Chief of Staff Wiles pulling the ultra-processed-food definition after lobbyist calls, including from Coca-Cola and Mondelez. His resignation statement named “a corrupt DC bureaucracy that is doing everything possible to protect the status quo.” On the day Means left, stock prices for General Mills, Kraft Heinz, and other packaged-food companies rose roughly 8 percent. Means framed the exit as his own choice. Wiles sent him a text afterward praising him and asking that he not speak negatively of her. He has not honored that request.

Means went on the podcast circuit in the two weeks that followed. He appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience on November 6 for a little over two hours. He appeared on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan on Sunday, November 8.

Both interviews are now in the public record. Together they give the fullest account yet of how the first two years of the Kennedy HHS tenure ran. They also give the fullest account yet of how Calley Means wants that history remembered. The two accounts diverge in ways the public record can test.

What Did Calley Means Allege on Rogan and Face the Nation?

Means directs his allegations at four groups.

Against Chief of Staff Wiles and her deputies. Wiles kept the president in the dark about the midterm headwinds. She pulled the ultra-processed-food definition after lobbyist calls to her office. She told Means directly that she needed sugar-industry money for the midterms. Her daughter Katie Wiles joined Continental Strategy, a lobbying firm whose revenue rose from $1.8 million in 2024 to $27.3 million in 2025, per filings under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. Wiles’s former firm, Ballard Partners, generated $82 million in 2025 lobbying revenue, the highest single-year total in LegiStorm’s data.

Against pollster Tony Fabrizio. Fabrizio took Pepsi and pharmaceutical-industry money while serving as the political check on cabinet policy decisions. Means recited Fabrizio’s Corporate Public Affairs client list on Rogan, reading from the firm’s own website. The list visible during the broadcast included Pfizer, PhRMA, RJ Reynolds, Philip Morris, Dow Chemical, Pepsi, Procter and Gamble, Penn National Gaming, and the Vaping Heritage Foundation. Fabrizio has denied the allegations.

Against White House staff members Walker Barrett, James Blair, Chris LaCivita, and Richard Walters. Policy decisions on glyphosate, kratom, fruit-flavored vapes, and the sugar-industry threat to the ultra-processed-food definition were driven through the interagency process by these staff members. The driving party, in each case, was a named industry interest. Blair and LaCivita allegedly traveled to Republika Srpska and collected money from parties there while running the midterm strategy. Blair denies telling Wiles about the trip.

Against FDA-commissioner nominee Heidi Overton. Overton blocked psychedelic policy. She blocked MAHA food policy. She drove the reversal of the FDA decision on Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine after former Commissioner Marty Makary was pushed out. She wrote the rule relaxing the 7-OH kratom concentration tolerance by twenty times. She worked with the Solicitor General’s office through attorney Sarah Harris on the brief urging Supreme Court certiorari in the glyphosate liability case. Harris came from Bayer’s main law firm, Means says.

What Can the Public Record Confirm?

Several of these specific claims are confirmed outside the interview transcripts. Continental Strategy’s revenue growth is in the public filings. Ballard Partners’ 2025 revenue total is in LegiStorm’s data. Reynolds American contributed $5 million to MAGA, Inc. on April 30, 2026, according to the Federal Election Commission. The contribution preceded the administration’s rollback of Makary’s kratom and vape posture. Fabrizio’s client roster is published on his firm’s website and confirms the associations with clients whose interests were directly related to the polling data he was providing to the White House.

Marty Makary’s on-record statement to CBS News reads: “Big tobacco exploited their connections to administration and HHS officials to put repeated pressure on me to approve fruit-flavored vapes that appeal to children. I wouldn’t do it.” Makary names “tobacco” rather than a single named staff member. The pressure channel he describes runs through the same staff offices Means names.

Means’s account of the glyphosate executive order is also partly supported by the document itself. The signed order carries the title “Promoting the National Defense by Ensuring an Adequate Supply of Elemental Phosphorus and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides.” That is a national-security framing for a chemical with no national-security application other than munitions precursors. The order attempts to link phosphorus and glyphosate under the banner of national security, but the logical disconnect between the two is so glaring that even a high school student could recognize it.

Is Calley Means a Neutral Witness?

Means is not a neutral witness. He co-founded TrueMed, which enables pre-tax health-savings dollars to flow to wellness-industry products through letter-of-medical-necessity certifications. Representative Jake Auchincloss and other congressional Democrats have raised the question of whether Means’s holdings in TrueMed, valued between $25 million and $50 million through November 2025, constituted a conflict of interest during his tenure as a Special Government Employee. Means states that he divested when he moved to full-time government status. Mary Talley Bowden, an ear, nose, and throat physician in Houston, published an essay in April 2025 titled “The Truth About TrueMed” that raised the same question. Bowden has been raising concerns about TrueMed and Means for two years, long before congressional Democrats began questioning whether Means’s substantial financial interests conflicted with his government responsibilities.

Means also helped build the apparatus he now criticizes. He is the person who introduced Secretary Kennedy to the Trump 2024 campaign. He led MAHA implementation within the White House for the first 21 months of the administration. The lobbying-firm dynamic he describes on Rogan was already running on inauguration day. He worked within it for twenty-one months before leaving.

The allegations still deserve to be judged on their merits. But Means’s interview tour is doing far more than exposing alleged wrongdoing. It allows him to defend his own record while deflecting questions about his financial interests in TrueMed. It positions him as a champion of the MAHA grassroots movement, fighting the very Washington establishment he recently served.

And perhaps most importantly, it constructs a convenient political narrative in which unelected staff members bear responsibility for the administration’s failures, while the two men ultimately in charge, President Trump and Secretary Kennedy, escape meaningful scrutiny. The question is whether Means is exposing the machinery of government or helping protect the people who control it.

Why Does Toby Rogers Call the Rogan Interview a Psyop?

Toby Rogers, a political-economy scholar who publishes the Substack newsletter uTobian, watched the full 138-minute Rogan interview and published his own reading on X on November 8, 2026. The post drew more than 622,000 views at this writing. Rogers has published on autism causation, regulatory capture, and the political economy of the pharmaceutical industry for over a decade. Rogers represents the more skeptical wing of MAHA, one increasingly unwilling to accept political loyalty, promises of reform, or carefully managed narratives as substitutes for measurable results and accountability.

Rogers argues that Means is selling the MAHA movement a politically convenient fiction: that President Trump and Secretary Kennedy are well-intentioned reformers whose agenda is being systematically sabotaged by unelected bureaucrats. He distills the story into five increasingly implausible propositions. Trump and Kennedy are the heroes. Their own staff members repeatedly deceive and undermine them. Somehow, neither man knows what is happening, despite extensive news coverage and repeated warnings from activists. When they finally discover the betrayals, they express outrage but fail to fire anyone or reverse the decisions. And rather than exercise the authority they already possess, Means suggests that the real solution requires a constitutional amendment whose actual language he never provides. Rogers’s central objection is devastatingly simple: If Trump and Kennedy are genuinely being betrayed by their own appointees, why do they continue to employ, protect, and even promote them? But, for some reason, Joe Rogan never asks that question.

The most damaging contradiction in Rogers’s analysis centers on Heidi Overton. According to Means, Overton worked with the Department of Justice to push the glyphosate liability case toward Supreme Court review, helped draft the executive order benefiting Bayer, and orchestrated the reversal of the FDA’s decision on Moderna’s mRNA influenza vaccine after Makary was pushed aside. These are serious allegations involving major regulatory decisions, not minor bureaucratic disagreements. Yet the same administration that Means portrays as repeatedly betrayed by Overton subsequently nominated her to lead the FDA.

If Means’s allegations are accurate, how could Trump and Kennedy remain unaware of her actions? And if they were aware, why would they reward her with one of the most powerful regulatory positions in government? Either the administration’s leadership is astonishingly uninformed about its own appointees, or the narrative of helpless leaders being sabotaged by rogue staffers begins to collapse. “That’s how you know the interview is a psyop,” Rogers writes.

Rogers makes the stronger version of the skeptical case directly. He writes that “Trump or RFK Jr. could have stopped the approval of the Moderna mRNA flu shot or flavored vapes but refused to use their legal authority to do so. Both men know EXACTLY what is happening, but they do nothing because THEY are captured by industry.” He cites a June 30, 2026 letter from the Informed Consent Action Network to Secretary Kennedy listing twenty vaccine-program reforms the Secretary could implement by signature alone. None of those reforms have happened. The authority question has been on the public record longer than Rogers’s post. Our September 14, 2026 MALONE.NEWS essay, “Kennedy Can End Big Pharma’s COVID Immunity With a Signature,” notes that 42 U.S.C. § 247d-6d(b) authorizes the Secretary to amend the COVID-19 PREP Act declaration through Federal Register publication, without Congress. The declaration remains in force through December 31, 2029. The Secretary has not amended it.

Rogers also offers a specific theory on former FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. Rogers writes that Makary “knew he was finished at the FDA and he was thinking about his next career move. He quit over flavored vapes so that he could go out like Scott Gottlieb.” If Makary had instead resigned a week later over the Moderna mRNA flu vaccine approval, which Rogers calls “the worst example of regulatory capture in history,” he would have been labeled an anti-vaxxer. His post-government career would have narrowed.

Our own analysis stops short of Rogers’s conclusion that the interview was a deliberate psychological operation. But the contradictions he identifies cannot simply be dismissed. The public record shows that Secretary Kennedy endorsed the glyphosate executive order, publicly thanked his departing Chief of Staff, and nominated Heidi Overton to lead the FDA. Whether those decisions reflect industry influence, political calculation, or genuine agreement remains an open question. What is much harder to reconcile is Means’s portrayal of Trump and Kennedy as helpless victims of their own staff. These are not powerless figureheads. They possess the authority to remove appointees, reverse policies, and demand accountability. Yet the very people Means identifies as responsible for undermining MAHA appear to have retained the confidence of the administration’s leadership. Rogers exposes the central weakness in Means’s narrative: At what point does repeated betrayal, followed by continued protection and promotion of those allegedly responsible, cease to be sabotage and become a matter of leadership accountability?

Was RFK Jr. Really Blocked by His Own Staff?

Means tells Rogan directly: “Bobby Kennedy is a hero.” He says he left with more respect for the Secretary than ever. He says he has never seen Secretary Kennedy do anything that wasn’t in the best interest of the American people. On Face the Nation he tells Brennan: “America is very, very lucky he is sitting at HHS.” The accompanying claim is that the Secretary has been surrounded, blocked, and overridden by a captured apparatus running policy around him. But that narrative becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile with Kennedy’s own public statements and decisions. Three episodes deserve particular scrutiny: his repeated defense of the glyphosate executive order, his public praise for Susie Wiles, and his enthusiastic nomination of Heidi Overton to lead the FDA.

The glyphosate executive order was signed on February 18, 2026. Means describes being handed the signed order by Walker Barrett and being told to inform Kennedy that it was not up for discussion. Within four days, Secretary Kennedy publicly defended the order. He told CNBC on February 19: “Donald Trump’s Executive Order puts America first where it matters most, our defense readiness and our food supply. We must safeguard America’s national security first, because all of our priorities depend on it.”

On February 22, he posted at length on social media. He wrote that “our agricultural system depends heavily on these chemicals.” He warned that without them “crop yields would fall, food prices would surge, and America would experience a massive loss of farms.” He added that “reform at this scale will test entrenched interests, and it will not move in a straight line.” He told The Epoch Times: “When hostile actors control critical inputs, they weaken our security. By expanding domestic production, we close that gap and protect American families.”

A Secretary blindsided and overridden four days earlier does not publish three separate defenses of the order in the ensuing week. Those statements describe a cabinet officer embracing the policy under his signature. If the order was driven by Ballard Partners and Bayer through Wiles and Barrett, as Means now describes, Secretary Kennedy’s February 2026 statements provided the political cover that let the order stand.

On Wiles, Secretary Kennedy’s public statement at the moment of her departure, as reported by CBS News on November 8, credits her with brokering his partnership with President Trump. He thanked her for helping bring disruptive leaders into HHS. Brennan put that statement to Means on air. He did not challenge the quote. He said he was comfortable with his own account and declined to speak for the Secretary.

On Heidi Overton, Secretary Kennedy’s X post nominating her reads: “A pantheon of superstar candidates made choosing our next FDA Commissioner one of the toughest decisions of my tenure at HHS. I’m confident President Trump and I chose the best person for the job: Dr. Heidi Overton. Heidi brings exceptional judgment, professionalism, discipline, and strategic leadership to every policy she touches.” Means on Face the Nation now says Overton “does not have the character or integrity to be FDA commissioner.” Both statements cannot be true. Kennedy’s nomination letter went to the Senate under his signature in August. Means’s character attack on Overton came on November 8, seventy-two hours after the White House staff shake-up.

Why did Kennedy repeatedly endorse the very people and policies Means now accuses of sabotaging MAHA? Means claims he spoke with Kennedy every day. Are we really supposed to believe he never warned the Secretary about the people allegedly undermining his agenda? Having watched Kennedy’s leadership at HHS, we find it increasingly difficult to accept that he was unaware of what was happening inside his own department and in the White House.

Who Benefits from the Means Interview Tour?

The Means interview tour serves three purposes. It externalizes blame for the first two years. Policy failures on the ultra-processed-food definition, glyphosate liability, kratom tolerance, fruit-flavored vapes, and the Moderna mRNA flu vaccine are assigned to named staff members. The cabinet officer who defended them, the president who signed them, and the senior adviser who worked inside the process throughout are left outside the blame game.

The tour also positions Secretary Kennedy and President Trump for a reset. By attributing the failures of the first two years to compromised staff members, Means creates an explanation for why the promised reforms have not materialized. Removing those individuals then becomes the justification for renewed confidence that the administration can deliver on its 2024 campaign promises during its remaining two years. The underlying assumption is that Trump and Kennedy were prevented from implementing their agenda rather than being responsible for the decisions made under their leadership.

Third, the interviews serve Means’s own interests. Rather than being held accountable for his participation in the administration and the unresolved questions surrounding his financial interests in TrueMed, he presents himself as the insider who fought against regulatory capture. In this telling, his departure becomes evidence of his independence, while his accusations against former colleagues reinforce his standing with MAHA supporters.

The allegations of lobbying influence deserve serious investigation. Public lobbying disclosures provide a basis for examining the relationships and financial interests involving Ballard Partners and Continental Strategy, although lobbying revenue alone does not establish improper conduct. But the effort to separate Trump and Kennedy from responsibility for their administration’s decisions is much harder to defend.

Kennedy publicly endorsed the glyphosate executive order, praised Wiles upon her departure, and nominated Overton to lead the FDA. These were not merely decisions made by anonymous staff members operating beyond his control. They were actions Kennedy publicly supported. Means has offered an explanation for why the administration failed to deliver on its promises, but he has not adequately explained why its leadership repeatedly endorsed the very decisions and individuals he now condemns.

What Can Congress Do With What Calley Means Just Said?

The November 3 midterms handed Democrats control of Congress, and Democratic leaders have already made clear that Secretary Kennedy is a target. Some are demanding his resignation. Others are preparing congressional investigations, subpoenas, and possible impeachment proceedings. The House Oversight Committee, Senate Finance Committee, and Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee have the authority to investigate the allegations Means has now made publicly.

But Means has given Democrats a very particular version of events. In his telling, Kennedy and Trump are reformers betrayed by corrupt staff members, while lobbying firms and corporate interests operate behind the scenes. The responsibility rests with Susie Wiles, Heidi Overton, and other officials. Kennedy and Trump are portrayed as victims rather than participants in the decisions made under their authority.

This is precisely why Toby Rogers calls the interview a psyop. Whether deliberate or not, Means has provided a narrative that could redirect congressional scrutiny away from Kennedy and Trump and toward the staff members he identifies as responsible. The people with ultimate authority are effectively excused before the investigation even begins.

Congress has the power to test that account. Committees can subpoena communications involving Wiles, Overton, Ballard Partners, Continental Strategy, and other named parties. They can examine the development of the glyphosate executive order, the Moderna mRNA influenza vaccine decision, lobbying relationships, campaign contributions, and financial conflicts. They can compel Means to testify under oath about what he knew, when he knew it, and what he told Kennedy.

But Democrats face a credibility test of their own. They have spent years defending federal health agencies while frequently dismissing concerns about pharmaceutical industry influence. Now they have an opportunity to investigate regulatory capture across the federal government. Will they follow the evidence wherever it leads, including into the relationships between pharmaceutical companies, political donors, regulators, and officials of both parties? Or will they use congressional oversight primarily to attack their political opponents?

The critical question is whether Means’s account will become the framework for the investigation or one of the claims being investigated. Kennedy publicly defended the glyphosate order, praised Wiles, and nominated Overton. Those decisions cannot simply be attributed to rogue staff members without examining the Secretary’s own knowledge and responsibility.

The danger is that Democrats will pursue a partisan investigation while Means succeeds in shifting attention away from the people who actually held the authority to make these decisions. That would leave Congress investigating the alleged sabotage without fully examining the leadership that permitted, endorsed, or failed to prevent it.

If Congress is serious about accountability, it must investigate Means, Kennedy, Trump, the named staff members, and the corporate interests involved. Anything less risks turning a potentially important investigation into another exercise in partisan theater.

The Lobbying Connections Means Left Out

Calley Means has made Washington’s lobbying industry a central target of his public criticism, singling out the influence of well-connected firms and the family relationships that can provide access to senior government officials. His criticism of Susie Wiles and her daughter, Katie Wiles, is particularly pointed. Katie works at Continental Strategy, a lobbying firm whose political connections have attracted scrutiny. Means suggests that such relationships create opportunities for corporate interests to influence administration policy through channels unavailable to ordinary Americans.

But there is another politically connected family member whom Means does not appear to have mentioned. And this one is much closer to Secretary Kennedy himself.

In July 2026, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s daughter-in-law and the former manager of his presidential campaign, joined Ballard Partners to co-lead its artificial intelligence and emerging technology practice. This is the same powerful lobbying firm Means criticizes as an example of Washington’s influence industry. It is also the firm where White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles previously worked.

That connection deserves attention. Means criticizes the lobbying industry for leveraging personal relationships with powerful government officials, yet his public account does not appear to apply the same scrutiny to Kennedy’s own family. The distinction is especially relevant because Fox Kennedy did not join some obscure consulting operation. She joined an established Washington lobbying firm with substantial political connections, working in the increasingly consequential fields of artificial intelligence and emerging technology.

There is no public evidence presented here that Fox Kennedy improperly influenced HHS decisions or that her employment involved wrongdoing. Nor does Katie Wiles’s employment, by itself, establish misconduct. But the standard of scrutiny should be consistent. If a family relationship warrants investigation when the relative works for a lobbying firm connected to the White House Chief of Staff, why would the same principle not apply when the relative is the daughter-in-law of the Secretary of Health and Human Services?

The central question is why Means considers one family connection important enough to publicize while leaving the other out of his criticism of Washington’s lobbying culture.

What makes this omission particularly revealing is that Means is not merely criticizing lobbying in general. He is asking Americans to believe that political access, family relationships, and corporate money have compromised the White House while maintaining that Secretary Kennedy is a heroic reformer being thwarted by the same system. Yet Kennedy’s own daughter-in-law now works inside one of the very firms Means identifies as central to that system.

What Three Reforms Would End the Lobbying Capture?

Means identifies a serious problem: lobbying firms, political consultants, and corporate interests can exercise enormous influence over federal policy while the public has limited visibility into those relationships. But replacing a chief of staff or removing a handful of political appointees will not solve that problem. As Toby Rogers points out, cabinet secretaries already possess substantial authority over their departments. The failure to exercise that authority cannot always be blamed on subordinate staff. Reform must address both corporate influence and accountability at the highest levels of government.

First, require full disclosure of corporate influence over federal policy. Lobbying firms, political consultants, polling contractors, and senior White House advisers involved in shaping federal health policy should be required to disclose relevant clients, financial relationships, and contacts with government decision-makers. Disclosures should be timely, searchable, and machine-readable. Existing lobbying laws leave significant gaps involving consultants and political advisers who influence policy without registering as lobbyists. Those gaps should be closed, with meaningful penalties for false reporting and concealment.

Second, impose meaningful revolving-door restrictions. Senior political appointees should face a five-year prohibition on lobbying the agencies in which they exercised substantial authority, rather than relying on shorter and narrower existing restrictions. The movement of government officials into industries affected by their decisions creates obvious opportunities for conflicts of interest. Disclosure alone is insufficient when public service can become a pathway to lucrative private-sector influence.

Third, require transparency and accountability for major regulatory decisions. The government should publish a reviewable record identifying the officials, outside interests, and substantive recommendations involved in major health-related executive orders and regulatory actions, subject to legitimate legal protections. The glyphosate executive order and kratom proposal illustrate why this matters. The public should be able to determine who proposed a policy, who objected, who influenced the final decision, and who approved it.

But these reforms will accomplish little if political leaders can continue to claim ignorance whenever their administrations make controversial decisions. The president and cabinet secretaries must remain accountable for the policies they authorize, defend, and implement. Regulatory capture cannot be addressed by exposing the lobbyists while excusing the officials who possess the power to say no.

Conclusion: Will RFK Jr. Just Talk the Talk, or Will He Walk the Walk?

None of the three proposed reforms requires a constitutional amendment. Congress can enact them through ordinary legislation. But legislative reform is not an excuse for inaction today. As Toby Rogers points out, Secretary Kennedy and President Trump already possess substantial authority to change federal health policy, replace political appointees, and reconsider regulatory decisions. They do not need permission from lobbyists, political consultants, or White House staff to exercise their lawful powers.

The public record lends weight to Means’s allegations of corporate influence within the administration, but it also raises a far more uncomfortable question: Why did Kennedy and Trump repeatedly endorse the very policies and officials Means now accuses of undermining MAHA? Continental Strategy’s reported revenue growth, Reynolds American’s $5 million political contribution, Ballard Partners’ record lobbying revenue, Fabrizio’s corporate relationships, and Makary’s allegations of tobacco-industry pressure provide reasons to investigate corporate influence over administration policy. But Kennedy’s own actions cannot be ignored. He defended the glyphosate executive order, publicly thanked Susie Wiles, and nominated Heidi Overton to lead the FDA. These were decisions and endorsements made by the Secretary himself.

Means asks the MAHA movement to believe that Kennedy was repeatedly betrayed by people operating around him. Rogers asks a more fundamental question: Why didn’t Kennedy stop them?

This essay opened with Kennedy’s November 6 declaration that Stephen Miller was the administration’s strongest MAHA supporter and that it was time to “unleash the Kraken.” If Kennedy intends to deliver on that promise, there are concrete actions he can take.

He can amend the COVID-19 PREP Act declaration under 42 U.S.C. § 247d-6d(b), reconsider the Moderna mRNA influenza vaccine decision through the appropriate FDA process, seek withdrawal of Overton’s nomination, reopen the ultra-processed-food definition process, and address the vaccine-program reforms identified by ICAN. Some actions fall within his delegated authority; others require presidential involvement or established regulatory procedures. None requires a constitutional amendment.

And Congress, regardless of which party holds the gavels, has a responsibility to investigate the allegations Means has made, including the conduct of Kennedy, Trump, and Means himself. Accountability cannot stop at the doors of the White House or the Secretary’s office.

MAHA supporters were promised fundamental reform of America’s public-health institutions, not another explanation for why reform remains impossible. Nearly two years into the administration, blaming departed staff members is no substitute for demonstrating results.

Kennedy has publicly defended his decisions and the people involved in those decisions. Means has now challenged the integrity of the people involved in making them. The contradictions demand answers.

The next ninety days should be measured not by interviews, promises, or declarations of war against the bureaucracy, but by actual policy decisions, published regulatory actions, and the willingness to hold responsible officials accountable.

The question is no longer who prevented Kennedy from acting.

It is what Kennedy intends to do with the authority he already has.

References

Brennan, Margaret. “Transcript: Calley Means on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan, Nov. 8, 2026.” CBS News. cbsnews.com/news/calley-means-health-and-human-services-face-the-nation-transcript-11-08-2026.

CNBC. “Kennedy defends Trump glyphosate order; MAHA erupts as midterms approach.” February 19, 2026.

Executive Order, “Promoting the National Defense by Ensuring an Adequate Supply of Elemental Phosphorus and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides.” The White House, February 18, 2026.

Federal Election Commission. Contribution record, RAI Services Company to MAGA, Inc., April 30, 2026.

Informed Consent Action Network. Letter to Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Immediate Vaccine Reforms, June 30, 2026. icandecide.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/2026-06-30_Letter_Kennedy_Immediate_Vaccine_Reforms.pdf.

Kennedy, Robert F. Jr. (@SecKennedy). X post nominating Dr. Heidi Overton for FDA Commissioner. x.com/SecKennedy/status/2090116085978632385.

LegiStorm. Ballard Partners lobbying revenue data, 2025.

Lobbying Disclosure Act filings. Continental Strategy revenue, 2024 and 2025.

Makary, Marty. Statement to CBS News, November 8, 2026.

Malone, Robert W. and Jill Glasspool Malone. “Kennedy Can End Big Pharma’s COVID Immunity With a Signature.” MALONE.NEWS, September 14, 2026. malone.news/p/kennedy-can-end-big-pharmas-covid.

Rogan, Joe. “The Joe Rogan Experience #2578 with Calley Means,” November 6, 2026.

Rogers, Toby (@uTobian). X post reading the Rogan interview as a psyop and citing the ICAN letter, November 8, 2026. x.com/uTobian/status/2119361157781942420.

Rogers, Toby (@uTobian). X post on Marty Makary’s resignation timing and the Scott Gottlieb exit model, November 8, 2026. x.com/uTobian/status/2119513667389767838.

The Epoch Times. Statement by Secretary Kennedy on the glyphosate executive order, February 2026.

Truthout. “RFK Jr. Supports Trump Push to Ramp Up Glyphosate Output, Angering MAHA Backers.” February 2026.

Release the Kraken!

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By: JGM

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Dr. Robert Malone

TWO QUOTES TO SET THE FRAME

The two quotes:

The first, from Robert Hunter, the bard of the Grateful Dead. And this quote may reflect something of my misspent youth: What a long, strange trip it’s been.

The second, widely attributed and of uncertain origin. We certainly live in interesting times.

THE AUDIENCE, AND WHAT I BRING TO IT

Brownstone is not an accident. It is an intentional community. Jeffrey built it in May 2021 with a specific charter: to be the gathering point for the people who had refused the promoted narrative during COVID, and who needed to make sense of what had been done, and of what had been lost.

What holds this community together is not a single political position. It is two things. The first is outrage. The second is the ongoing work of sense-making. Many of you came in through the first door. Most of you are still here because of the second.

Jeffrey opened yesterday with a candid admission: his own unreasonable resentment and judgmentalism of people in airports. Walter Kirn, the novelist whose book Up in the Air became the film, picked that thread up. He talked about the particular resentment we feel toward the people ahead of us in a boarding line. He extended

it. We should no longer be trying to save liberals from themselves, he said. We should treat them as an enemy to be defeated.

I looked into my own soul after those remarks. I did not find those feelings there.

What I was reminded of, standing in that space, is Mattias Desmet’s teaching. Human beings need two things to live well. Meaning in their lives. And genuine connection with other human beings. When a population is denied those two things long enough, the mass-formation dynamic that Desmet documented is what fills the vacuum. Intentional communities like this one exist, in part, because they answer that need. They give people the bonds without which happiness and fulfillment are not available to us. Brownstone, in that sense, is a medicine for a specific wound.

What I want to do with the time I have left, and what I hope the book I am going to describe can help others do, is make sense of the world as it actually is, help where help is possible, and offer a path forward. Not obsess over the harms that were done, as real and as deep as those harms were. Not treat myself or anyone else as a victim with a long account to settle.

My soul tells me I do not want to harm our political and philosophical opponents. I want to understand them. I want to help them better understand what we have seen and lived through. I understand the urge to strike back.I felt it most acutely this year during my travel to the Gaza border and through Judea and Samaria, where the urge is carried in the bodies of people on every side of every line. But striking back propagates a cycle of hate. It does not move the culture forward. It does not heal the country we live in.

Having said that, I want to be plain about something else. There will be no justice for what was done during COVID. No federal agency is pursuing accountability. No state attorney general is pursuing restitution on any serious scale. Both political parties enabled what went down, and both are now running the cool-out phase rather than the reckoning. The institutions that would have to insist on accountability are the institutions that would have to indict themselves.

Murray Rothbard set out the structural reason in Anatomy of the State. The judiciary is a branch of the state. Judges are appointed by the state, paid by the state, housed in state courts, enforced by state police. To expect such a body to deliver justice against the state is to expect a monopoly to rule against itself. In Rothbard’sframing, the court is a branch of the government interpreting the rules of the government in a game against the government. That is a feature, not a flaw. It is what the institution is for.

Yesterday, Calley Means went on Joe Rogan. Until last month, he was Senior Adviser to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. He named five White House staffers he says killed the MAHA agenda from inside: SusieWiles, Richard Walters, Walker Barrett, James Blair, Tony Fabrizio. He said industry pressure on Wiles stripped glyphosate out of a second MAHA report. He said the White House sided with Bayer in a Supreme Court brief over Roundup cancer lawsuits without telling Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. His conclusion from inside: Americans who get excited about policy promises through the existing structure are, in his words, being duped. The datapoint stands even if you discount everything Means says. MAHA had its own Secretary, its own Senior Adviser, its own public reports, its own moment of political alignment. And still, industry won. If MAHA could not deliver inside the administration it ran, COVID accountability from the same administration will not either.

So the task of sense-making does not sit alongside the task of accountability. It sits in place of it. That is why communities like this one exist, outside the apparatus of the state. That is why the work of sense-making is the work I am here to describe.

A THREAD ELON REPOSTED THIS WEEK

Before I come to the books, a brief detour through a post Elon Musk reposted and endorsed earlier this week. It touches on a set of questions this community has been working through in and around the sessions here: Artificial Intelligence, the Surveillance State, and the hyperscale data centers being built to run it. These are complex topics, and I do not have a tidy answer on them. I want to put one framing in front of the room, because the structural argument at the top of it is the same argument this book makes, applied to a different domain.

The thread’s argument runs this way. DOGE was an attempt to reform the state from the inside. It failed. The claim, which Elon’s endorsement foregrounds, is that it failed for a structural reason rather than a personal one. The machine protects itself. Nobody in power actually wants to cut, because the incentives of everyone in the chain run the other way. The deficit is not a policy choice. It is an output of the incentive structure.

From that premise, the thread argues there are only two exits. One is bankruptcy. The debt compounds until the system collapses under its own weight. The other is a productivity shock big enough to outrun the debt. The author’s candidate for that productivity shock is AI and robotics at hyperscale, delivered fast enough that abundance becomes visible in real time rather than invisibly over thirty years.

The thread’s secondary claim is the one with the most structural weight. Capitalism has had a two-centurymarketing problem. Its gains are real but slow and invisible. Two percent a year is not experienced as anything.Meanwhile, the left’s promises, a check, a subsidy, a benefit, feel immediate and concrete. That is why the left wins on promises even when it cannot deliver them. Capitalism produces the wealth. Socialism takes the credit. Robots, the thread argues, break that asymmetry, because they make the causal chain between enterprise and prosperity visible to the person living through it.

I am not endorsing every claim in the thread. The civilizational-collapse scenarios at the end are the author’s, not mine. What I do endorse is the structural premise at the top, because it maps directly onto the subject oftoday’s book. What Elon concluded about federal spending and debt- that the machine will not reform itself and that the incentive structure produces the deficit- is what Jill, Rob, and I concluded about pandemic governance. The machine will not reform itself. The incentive structure produces the next pandemic grift. And the question for us is the same one Elon is now asking in a different domain: what, exactly, breaks the mechanism from the outside?

THE THREE BOOKS SO FAR

The book I am going to describe is the fourth installment of Jill’s and my own sense-making work since 2020. The first three are already in print.

The first was Lies My Government Told Me. That book was about what was experienced by the people on the front lines who opposed the promoted narratives during COVID. Physicians who were threatened with loss of license for prescribing early-treatment protocols. Scientists who were de-platformed for publishing data that did not fit. Patients who were told that what their own bodies were doing was not happening. Families who buried people the official record will not count.

The second was PsyWar. That book was about the development of modern propaganda and censorship technology. How the techniques were built, who built them, and how they were used during COVID and in the broader globalist project to promote and reinforce specific narratives. The architecture of consent manufacturing is older than COVID. COVID is where that architecture was stress-tested at population scale.

The third was Homesteading for Health. That book offered a vision for how to live afterward. How to maintain autonomy, personal sovereignty, and household-level resilience in the world that COVID revealed. It is practical and specific. It is about the piece of ground you stand on and the food you put on your family’s table.

Each of the three answers a different question raised by what we lived through. What really happened on the ground. How were we told what we were told. And how do we live now?

THE FOURTH BOOK

The fourth book, the one I want to walk you through today, is called The Grift: How Pandemic Fear Became a Business, and Who Profits from Running It. Jill and I wrote it with Rob Nelson. Morgan James will publish it before the end of this year. It asks the question the first three set up but did not fully answer. What, exactly, was this that happened to us?

GRIFTING AS THE STRUCTURE THAT MAKES SENSE OF IT

The answer the book arrives at, and that we think holds, is that what we lived through was grifting. Not conspiracy. Not accident. Not incompetence. Grifting, in the formal sense, is a word that has been carried in American English for more than a century.

The term and the theory have a direct lineage. David Maurer, in The Big Con, published in 1940, documented the long con as a technical operation. The taxonomy has five stages. The setup, in which the mark is identified and groomed. The convincer, in which the mark is given a small early win so that trust is established. The sting, in which the mark hands over the money. The blow-off, in which the grifter exits before the mark realizes what has happened. And the cool-out, in which the mark is persuaded afterward that nothing really went wrong, that the loss was his own fault or his own imagination, and that the people now telling him he was played are themselves the problem.

Every stage of that taxonomy maps directly onto the pandemic response.

The setup was the manufactured sense of unprecedented danger, built on a decades-old infrastructure that I will come back to. The convincer was the early fatality projections and the two-weeks-to-flatten-the-curve promise, both revised downward only after compliance was secured. The sting was the trillions of dollars in transferred wealth and the compulsory medical product. The blow-off was the quiet end of the emergency declarations without acknowledgment, apology, or accounting. And the cool-out is what we are living through right now. The engineered persuasion that nothing much went wrong, that the people who said something was wrong at the time are the problem, and that the proper response is to move on.

That is the structural claim the book makes. It is not a metaphor. It is a technical description of what happened to you and what is being done to you now.

THE SYSTEM BUILT OVER FOUR DECADES

The second half of the argument is that this did not come together in 2020. It came together over four decades. Part II of the book walks the precedents, and each chapter is organized around what the next generation of grifters learned from the one before.

What AIDS taught the grifters was that fear of a novel pathogen could be converted into a permanent funding stream and an unfireable priesthood of experts whose credibility was insulated from outcomes. The institutional AIDS response built the template. Anthony Fauci’s career is the arc of that chapter.

What anthrax built, in the five years after 2001, was the biodefense apparatus. Mark Kortepeter, who ran USAMRIID’s response from inside, gives that chapter its primary witness. Billions of dollars moved. Companies were created to receive the money. The pandemic-preparedness industry was built in that period, and its clients are the same agencies that were about to spend COVID.

Swine flu taught them that definitions are a lever. In 2009, the WHO quietly revised the word “pandemic” to remove the severity-of-disease criterion. Lowering that definitional threshold was worth billions in automatic vaccine purchases and gave every future outbreak a smoother path to emergency declaration.

And the chronic-illness buildout that followed each wave turned acute scares into permanent product lines. Statins. Antidepressants. Long-acting injectables. Each engineered episode left behind a new maintenance-doseeconomy.

By March 2020 the system was in place. The institutions, the regulators who had become executives, the broadcast relationships, the automatic funding mechanisms, the pre-stocked emergency authorities, the model legislation sitting in drawers in fifty state capitals. COVID did not improvise. COVID executed.

WHO TOOK THE MONEY

Who profited. Pfizer booked the largest single-year revenue in pharmaceutical history. Moderna went from pre-revenue to the Fortune 500 in twenty-four months. BlackRock and the pension funds captured the upward wealth transfer that Ed Dowd documents in detail, chapter and figure. The regulatory class moved into the regulated class, with named individuals leaving FDA and CDC to board seats at the companies whose products they had just approved. The broadcast networks sold the advertising next to the fear. The censorship industry found its first mass commercial market and institutionalized itself accordingly.

And the public, on the mark side, paid twice. Once in taxes, in debased currency, in excess deaths, in lost education, in deferred care, in suicides that should not have happened and children who did not speak when they should have been speaking. And then again, on the contrarian side, where a parallel grift rose to serve the people who had seen through the first one. Part IV of the book documents this half with the same discipline we used for the institutional half. The grifter is as happy to sell you a supplement at ninety dollars as the hospital was to put you on a ventilator at nine thousand. Both operations run on your fear. Both need you to stay afraid for the business to work.

Naming both is uncomfortable. It is also necessary.

WHAT CAN BE DONE

The last chapter is called “How to Not Be the Mark.” It returns to Gavin de Becker’s first distinction, from his book The Gift of Fear. Warranted fear is a signal in the presence of actual danger. Unwarranted fear is a signal that has been produced in you by someone who stands to profit from your response.

The practical operation is to ask one question. Am I in the presence of real danger, or am I being sold something by someone who needs me to stay afraid?

That question, asked honestly and asked often, defuses the grift. Not because it answers what the next danger really is. Because it makes you unsellable to the industry that produces false danger for a living. It is a cognitive discipline, practiced one person at a time, and reinforced by communities that take the discipline seriously. Many of you here have, in the last five years, become people who ask that question as a matter of reflex. That is some part of what Brownstone is, and some part of why Jeffrey built it.

THE LIGHTHOUSE

There is an old saying that those who seek revenge should first dig two graves. Looking back on my own life, I now see the deep wisdom in that line.

I understand the urge to gird one’s loins and wield the flaming sword of righteous indignation. After Jill and I returned from Israel this year, after walking the carnage at the kibbutzim along the Gaza border and the killing fields of the NOVA festival site where the atrocity of October 7 was carried out, we gunned up. We bought large numbers of rounds. But that is for defense, not for offense. I prefer to live by New Testament ethics, even while living in what is still substantially an Old Testament world.

In Jerusalem I stood at the Temple ruins and walked through the archaeological excavations that document what the Roman Empire did to an independent minority community that confronted it. I have seen firsthand what happens to a community that treats empire as something to be defeated rather than something to be outlasted. The siege. The dispersion. The silence of two millennia.

So I want to offer a different metaphor for what this community is, and for what it can be.

A lighthouse. Not a fortress. Not an army. Not a political faction waiting for its turn to run the machine. A lighthouse. We burrow in. We keep the knowledge of a better way, a more decentralized way. We preserve it.We communicate it. We make ourselves findable by the people in the present and in the future who are open to learning our view of the world, and our sense of how things actually work. A view grounded in decentralized subsidiarity and free-market enterprise. Not in socialism. Not in central planning. Not in another empire.

That is the work. That is the book I came here to describe. And it is why I am grateful to be in this room this morning.

Thank you.

Hint: Their economic plan has two pillars: Affordability and Accountability.

Affordability means more government programs: Medicare for All (a mandatory government-run insurance system financed through mandatory taxes), housing subsidies, expanded SNAP benefits, student debt forgiveness, and the list goes on. Remember the ACA’s individual mandate? Medicare for All would go considerably further, replacing most private health insurance with a taxpayer-financed national system - with mandatory co-pays and deductibles.

Accountability means investigations, congressional hearings, and impeachment proceedings designed to dominate the headlines and distract Americans from the exploding national debt and the country’s deteriorating economic condition.

Keep voters focused on political theater while promising them more government benefits, and hope they don’t notice the country is going broke. Brilliant!

“Medicare for All” means a mandatory government-run insurance system financed through mandatory taxes.

Will this lower healthcare costs? No.

Will people have a monthly fee? Yes.

Will people have a deductible? Yes.

Will it make healthcare better? No.

Will it make heathcare cheaper? No.

And who benefits from “Medicare for All”? Insurance companies.

Who do you think is pushing for this? Lobbyists.

The above video is representative of what I like to call a

“self-licking ice cream cone”

We are at the Brownstone Annual Event today, after a long drive down to Chattanooga, TN. So today there is a lot to listen to, and I will be speaking on a panel about public health. Tomorrow Robert will be speaking. Looking forward to two days of learning, connecting with old friends, and making some new ones!

We are both still adjusting to the new daylight savings time and winter coming on. The problem being that our dogs are pretty set on when they wake up and when breakfast is served.

But between the election and the drive down, with the skies darkening so early, made me realize that winter is coming.

By: Jill

Audio Version:

• Investigative analysis / By: Dr’s Jill Glasspool Malone and Robert W. Malone

  ---

The Birds in Our Barn Are Not Disposable

We currently have eleven peafowl, two turkey hens, two emus, four guinea fowl, and eight laying hens living on our farm. That is 27 birds in all. They are a colorful, noisy, occasionally obnoxious collection of birds that have become part of our everyday lives.

The peafowl and guinea fowl spend much of their time roaming the property, sleeping in the barn or up in the trees at night. They come begging for treats at the door, wander around as though they own the place, and occasionally express their appreciation by depositing large bird droppings on top of our cars.

Beautiful pests, every one of them. And they make me smile.

Our four guinea fowl are all males, probably seven or eight years old by now. We call them the geriatric bachelor herd. They still patrol the property, squabble with each other over who knows what, and make an extraordinary amount of noise about very little. Those four guineas also keep the tick population down. We consider them an essential pest extermination service.

And here’s something interesting. None of these birds has ever suffered from a respiratory disease. Not one. They live outdoors, encounter wild birds, forage through the pastures, and generally lead the sort of lives that would make a USDA inspection service officer shudder. They remain extraordinarily healthy - probably because they do live outdoors, encounter pathogens, which build a robust immune system, and eat a varied diet of their choosing. We supplement their foraging with plenty of greens, kitchen scraps, treats, and generous quantities of organic poultry feed.

That doesn’t prove they are resistant to avian influenza, but given the large numbers of wild birds on our farm, it is hard to see how they could have avoided contact with the virus somewhere. This does make me wonder whether we have spent too much time trying to engineer disease resistance in laboratories and too little time studying birds that are already thriving under ordinary farm conditions.

All of these birds matter to us. Earlier this summer, we lost our beloved goose, Gonzo, due to a predator. I still miss her little daily rituals: waiting for us at the glass door each morning, following us around the farm as we did chores, and begging for affection. Her death was heartbreaking. Frankly, I don’t think I could ever eat goose. One thing about working with birds, they are not all the same: intelligence, emotional IQ, tractability, and flightiness differ greatly.

Anyone who has raised geese, peafowl, or other long-lived birds understands that these animals are not simply livestock. They have distinct personalities, routines, friendships, and peculiar habits. Over time, they become part of the family.

Now imagine a government official arriving at your farm, discovering a bird that tests positive for H5N1, and informing you that your entire flock must be destroyed. Not because every bird is sick. Not because every bird is dying. But because that is the established disease-control protocol for infected poultry flocks.

Could this actually happen? Yes.

Maryland provides a troubling example of how government oversight of backyard poultry has expanded. Anyone keeping chickens, even a handful of backyard hens, must register their premises with the state. Poultry retailers, including stores such as Tractor Supply, are required to maintain records identifying purchasers, their addresses, and the birds purchased. These records must be made available to state inspectors. By 2022, Maryland already had more than 8,000 registered backyard flocks, supported by an established network of poultry inspectors and testing agents.

During the 2023–2024 H5N1 outbreaks, Maryland officials conducted poultry surveillance and testing, including investigations involving backyard poultry and flocks near infected commercial operations. Maryland doesn’t publish their inspection results, or if officials are conducting unannounced testing of healthy backyard birds, so we just don’t know. But what we do know is that the infrastructure exists and was used at some level fairly recently.

Combined with disease-control laws and regulations that can result in quarantine and compulsory flock destruction, this raises legitimate concerns about government overreach. For small farmers, the implications are obvious: a system designed to monitor animal disease can also become a powerful instrument of government surveillance, potentially discouraging poultry owners from reporting suspected illness for fear of losing their entire flock. It is also a backdoor for government officials to come onto your property for no good reason. Once there, your entire operation is open to government surveillance. So much for the right to privacy.

For a commercial poultry operation, the destruction of an entire flock represents an enormous financial loss. For a small farm like ours, where many of these birds are beloved companions, it would also be a devastating personal loss.

And that brings me to something federal regulators seem to have difficulty understanding.

Farmers and homesteaders talk to one another.

We share experiences, discuss disease prevention, compare treatments, and learn from what happens on neighboring farms. In backyard poultry groups, conversations about avian influenza include fear of what will happen if government authorities become involved.

I know people who say they would rather isolate sick birds, tighten biosecurity, and attempt to care for their animals themselves than risk losing every healthy bird on their property. In fact, many advise this course of action on various chat groups. Because yes, we have all read the stories of what inspectors in states like Maryland have done. Which includes both culling of birds and lockdowns of entire homestead farms - usually over a few backyard hens.

And after years of destroying domestic poultry while H5N1 continues circulating in wild birds, it is reasonable to ask whether federal policy has adequately considered the people and animals it is supposed to protect.

We first raised these questions in Malone News three years ago.

In February 2025, the Trump administration announced a $100 million research initiative to combat avian influenza, funding new approaches involving vaccines, therapeutics, genetic engineering, and disease surveillance. By 2026, USDA had selected dozens of research projects.

But there is one remarkably simple question that seems to be receiving comparatively little attention.

Why aren’t they starting their research programs/influenza resistance program with chickens that already demonstrate natural resistance to disease and breeding more of them?

Breeding for Natural Resistance: The Solution They Keep Overlooking

For generations, farmers have improved the health and resilience of their livestock through selective breeding. They observed which animals remained healthy when others became sick, which survived disease outbreaks, and which passed those desirable traits to their offspring. Long before genetic engineering, this was how farmers developed hardier, more productive animals.

Chickens are no exception. Research has demonstrated that genetic differences among chicken breeds and individual birds can influence susceptibility to avian influenza. Some birds are better equipped to withstand infection than others. That natural variation provides an opportunity to breed poultry with greater resistance to disease.

Yet modern commercial poultry production has concentrated heavily on a relatively narrow range of genetic lines - generally heavily inbred, selected primarily for rapid growth, feed efficiency, egg production, and uniformity. These traits have made poultry production remarkably efficient, but they have also raised questions about whether sufficient attention has been paid to genetic diversity and disease resilience.

Instead of relying almost exclusively on surveillance, biosecurity, vaccination, and the destruction of infected flocks, why not make breeding for natural resistance a central part of the national avian influenza strategy?

Remember, the term “highly pathogenic avian influenza” refers to the virus’s effects on poultry, not humans. Despite years of widespread H5N1 circulation in wild birds, human infections remain extraordinarily rare. Since 2022, the United States has recorded just 73 confirmed human H5 bird flu cases and two deaths in a population of roughly 350 million people. That works out to approximately one reported infection for every 4.8 million Americans and one death for every 175 million. Sustained human-to-human transmission has not been documented.

Recent antibody studies offer further perspective. In a CDC study of dairy workers exposed to infected cattle, approximately 7% had evidence of previous H5 infection, and half of those testing positive reported no symptoms.

Other research has detected antibodies capable of neutralizing H5N1 in approximately 2.2% of adults tested. If representative of the U.S. population, that would translate to roughly 7.7 million Americans with some preexisting antibody activity against the virus. Whether those antibodies arose from previous seasonal influenza infections, environmental exposure to avian influenza, or other immune cross-reactivity remains an important question.

The population-level numbers are striking. After years of widespread circulation in wild birds, confirmed human infections remain exceedingly uncommon. The question is whether our disease-control policies, particularly those involving the compulsory destruction of entire domestic flocks - billions of birds at this point- are proportionate to the actual risks and adequately account for animal welfare, agricultural livelihoods, and the possibility of breeding naturally resistant poultry. Not to mention the issue of costs to both taxpayers and consumers of poultry. You would think the citizens of the United States were made of money, the way our government spends it.

But back to a program of creating a hardy chicken. Such a breeding program would not eliminate H5N1 overnight, but we would hardly be starting from scratch. Researchers have already identified naturally occurring differences in avian influenza resistance among chicken breeds, including indigenous Asian breeds such as Thailand’s Chee and Dang chickens. These birds have demonstrated greater resilience and reduced viral shedding compared with commercial White Leghorns in experimental studies. Other heritage breeds, including the Egyptian Fayoumi, are being investigated for their natural disease resistance. And these are just the breeds we know about.

• Chee (Thailand): Demonstrated longer survival under H5N1 challenge.

• Dang (Thailand): Also demonstrated longer survival.

• Fayoumi (Egypt): Known for general disease hardiness and currently being investigated for natural H5N1 resistance.

The goal of selective breeding should be to develop chickens that not only survive infection but also limit viral replication and transmission. But we already have living chicken populations that offer a starting point. Rather than beginning in a laboratory attempting to engineer resistance gene by gene, why not begin with these existing birds, determine which protective traits are inherited, and selectively breed those characteristics into productive commercial poultry?

We don’t have to invent a disease-resistant chicken from scratch. Farmers and homesteaders throughout the world have already created promising candidates.

These are precisely the kinds of solutions that agricultural research institutions should be investigating. The goal should not simply be to develop another pharmaceutical or technological intervention. It should also be to produce healthier, more resilient poultry populations that are less vulnerable to devastating outbreaks in the first place.

And unlike a vaccine that may require repeated administration or updating as viruses evolve, inherited resistance could potentially provide benefits across successive generations.

We have spent decades breeding chickens to produce more meat, more eggs, and greater profits. Perhaps it is time to place equal emphasis on breeding chickens that can survive disease.

This isn’t some radical new scientific concept. It is the foundation of animal husbandry, practiced by farmers for generations.

Yet when we examine where USDA is directing its avian influenza research dollars, a very different set of priorities begins to emerge.

Because what the USDA is actually funding on the research and development side is more vaccines and genetic engineering, which of course, at this stage means gene identification.

Millions for Genetic Engineering.
Pennies for Natural Resistance.

In February 2025, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced a $1 billion initiative to combat bird flu, including $500 million for biosecurity, $400 million in financial assistance to poultry producers, and $100 million for research.

USDA subsequently selected 58 research projects, funding everything from vaccines and antiviral treatments to sophisticated surveillance systems and genetic engineering. Ohio State University is working on gene-edited chickens, while other researchers are investigating how to manipulate multiple genes to create resistance to H5N1.

Of note, the USDA is spending millions developing experimental antiviral treatments for poultry, despite the disappointing record of influenza antivirals in human medicine. A 2025 systematic review of 73 clinical trials involving more than 34,000 participants found that oseltamivir (Tamiflu) had little or no effect on hospitalization or mortality, shortened symptoms by less than a day, and increased adverse reactions. Yes, that means that Tamiflu made people sicker. Yet USDA is pursuing experimental antiviral treatments for chickens, a species in which H5N1 can progress rapidly and kill birds before treatment could realistically begin. What evidence suggests these expensive new therapies will succeed where established influenza drugs have delivered such limited benefits? And even if researchers develop an effective treatment, will USDA permit farmers to use it instead of ordering compulsory flock destruction?

But that is not the point here; there is a glaring omission in their 100 million dollar research program: Where is the major federal breeding program focused on chickens that already demonstrate natural resistance to avian influenza?

We already have chicken breeds that demonstrate greater resistance to avian influenza. We have generations of experience selectively breeding livestock for desirable traits. And we have modern genetic tools that could make conventional breeding more precise. And male chickens reach sexual maturity at 15 weeks, females at 20 weeks, meaning we can breed almost three generations of birds in a single year! By overlapping generations, much can be accomplished in a short period of time.

Why not start with the hardier chicken breeds that farmers have developed through generations of selective breeding, rather than spending years and millions of dollars trying to engineer resistance from scratch?

The goal should be straightforward: develop healthy, productive chickens that can withstand H5N1 and are less likely to spread it.

Farmers don’t need another decade of research papers identifying resistance genes. They need chickens that survive.

Farmers have spent generations breeding healthier, hardier livestock. We already have chicken breeds that demonstrate greater resistance to avian influenza. What we need now is a serious federal commitment to building on that knowledge, rather than relying on endless surveillance, experimental technologies, gene identification, and the destruction of entire flocks.

After billions spent fighting bird flu and millions of chickens destroyed, isn’t it time we started breeding chickens to survive it?

A Personal Request to Our Free Readers

Robert and I spend countless hours researching, writing, and investigating the issues that affect our lives, our farms, our freedoms, and our country. This article is particularly personal to us. We have spent years raising animals, watching government policies unfold, and asking questions that too often go unanswered.

Malone News is independently published. We don’t have corporate sponsors, government grants, or a large newsroom supporting this work. We rely on our readers

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If you’ve been reading Malone News for free, now would be a wonderful time to become a paid subscriber.

Thank you for reading, sharing our articles, and helping us keep independent journalism alive.

Jill and Robert

Postscript:

At UC Davis, researchers are studying naturally occurring avian influenza resistance in Fayoumi chickens. The project has a total budget of just $299,938, half provided by the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research and half matched by UC Davis. This project is entirely separate from USDA’s $100 million H5N1 research initiative.

Clearly, the idea of breeding chickens for natural disease resistance is already being explored within the scientific community. The researchers, the knowledge, and the promising chicken breeds already exist. Yet USDA’s published list of 58 funded projects does not identify a single conventional breeding program.

Why did USDA prioritize genetic engineering, experimental vaccines, and antiviral drugs without making conventional breeding a major research priority? Is this simply institutional preference for high-tech solutions, or do commercial interests, patent opportunities, and the financial incentives surrounding pharmaceutical and biotechnology research influence which projects receive funding?

We cannot establish those motives from the published grant awards alone. But when taxpayers are investing $100 million in bird flu research, they deserve to know why an established agricultural approach appears to have received so little attention. Who determined these research priorities, and whose interests do they ultimately serve?

References:

USDA policy, surveillance, and research funding

1. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (USDA-APHIS). Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza: HPAI Poultry Innovation Grand Challenge. 2025–2026. USDA’s $100 million research initiative, including vaccines, therapeutics, and disease-control technologies.

2. USDA-APHIS. HPAI Response Plan: The Red Book. Federal response framework for surveillance, quarantine, depopulation, disposal, and disease containment.

3. USDA-APHIS. Avian Influenza Incidents and Depopulation Methods, February 2022–June 2024. Federal records documenting affected premises, poultry depopulation, and destruction methods.

4. USDA-APHIS. Epidemiologic and Other Analyses of HPAI-Affected Poultry Flocks. 2025. Federal analyses of outbreak patterns, wild-bird introductions, and transmission between poultry premises.

Natural resistance and poultry genetics

5. Matsuu, A., et al. (2016). “Pathogenicity of Genetically Similar H5N1 Viruses and Differences in Sensitivity Among Chicken Breeds.” PLOS ONE, 11(4), e0153649. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0153649.

6. Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR). (2026). Research into Natural Avian Influenza Resistance in Fayoumi Chickens. UC Davis project examining naturally occurring resistance in heritage and commercial poultry.

7. Idoko-Akoh, A., et al. (2023). “Creating Resistance to Avian Influenza Infection through Genome Editing of the ANP32 Gene Family.” Nature Communications, 14, 6136. Research demonstrating experimental influenza resistance in gene-edited chickens.

Influenza antiviral effectiveness

8. Gao, Y., et al. (2025). “Antiviral Medications for Treatment of Nonsevere Influenza: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-Analysis.” JAMA Internal Medicine, 185(3), 293–301. Analysis of 73 randomized trials involving 34,332 participants. Found that oseltamivir had little or no effect on mortality or hospitalization and increased treatment-related adverse events.

PMC

9. Hanula, R., et al. (2024). “Evaluation of Oseltamivir Used to Prevent Hospitalization in Outpatients With Influenza: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” JAMA Internal Medicine, 184(1), 18–27. DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.0699. Analysis of 15 randomized trials involving 6,166 influenza-positive patients, finding no statistically significant reduction in hospitalization and increased gastrointestinal adverse events.

JAMA Network

10. USDA-APHIS. (2025). HPAI Poultry Innovation Grand Challenge: Award Selections. November 2025. Lists 14 projects categorized as novel therapeutics, including poultry-specific antivirals, CRISPR-based treatments, niclosamide, tannins, and nutritional interventions.

APHIS+1

Previous Malone News reporting

11. Malone News. (2023). “Why Are the Chickens So Sick?” March 15, 2023.

12. Malone News. (2025). “Fox in the Henhouse: mRNA Bird Flu Vax.” February 20, 2025.

13. Malone News. (2025). “Ostriches Executed for No Good Reason.” November 8, 2025.

Audio Version:

Drs. Jill Glasspool Malone and Robert Malone

• Analysis and Policy Recommendations / Washington, DC, November 4, 2026

Madison County voted overwhelmingly against Virginia’s Amendment 1, with 58 percent voting no. Statewide, however, more than 61 percent voted yes. Come January 1, the same constitutional protections for abortion will apply throughout Virginia, regardless of how individual counties voted.

The amendment establishes a constitutional right to abortion through the second trimester, with exceptions extending into the third trimester for the mother’s life, physical or mental health, or fetal nonviability. We believe this is a grave moral error. The right to life should not be determined by a majority vote, whether at the county or state level.

But the voters have spoken. And now we must decide what that means for us.

We spent this morning exchanging increasingly emotional messages with friends. For nearly a decade, we have poured our hearts, souls, time, physical labor, and financial resources into building this farm. This is our home, our life’s work, and the place we intended to spend the rest of our years.

And yet, this morning, we also found ourselves asking a question we never expected to confront.

What do we do now?

The national results were worse. Democrats took the House and the Senate, flipping Senate seats in Texas, Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Early this morning, Democrats held 54 Senate seats to 44 for Republicans, with Alaska and Mississippi uncalled. Dozens of House races were also still open. Florida stood out as the exception, electing Byron Donalds governor and returning Ashley Moody to the Senate.

Ron DeSantis, the outgoing governor of Florida, posted his forecast at 1:42 this morning. He projected 55 Democratic Senate seats and more than 250 in the House. He judged it very unlikely that Republicans will recapture Congress in 2028, and said they might not have a shot at the Senate until 2032. We will both be in our seventies by then. We may spend much of what remains of our working lives under a government moving steadily toward what we consider creeping socialism, and away from the constitutional conservatism we had hoped to see.

It’s the Economy, Stupid!

Trump promised to fix the economy. In our view, he failed. CBS News exit polls put his approval at just 38 percent, lower than exit polls recorded for him or any of the three previous presidents at their midterms. Three-quarters of voters told CNN that economic conditions were bad, and most blamed Trump’s policies for higher prices. Despite the propaganda CNN routinely puts out, its analysis may be spot on this time.

Tariffs are one example. When the government taxes imported goods, American importers pay the tax and pass much of the cost along to consumers. Free-market conservatives have understood this for generations. Had Trump first rebuilt America’s manufacturing base, creating jobs and expanding domestic production, he might have made the case for higher tariffs. Instead, he put the cart before the horse. In Maine, 69 percent of voters said tariffs had hurt their local economy. Susan Collins, a thirty-year Senate veteran, lost her seat.

Then came the wars. Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine. It continues. Does anything more need to be said here?

On February 28, he launched a new war with Iran, predicting it would last four to five weeks. More than eight months later, Iran’s navy and much of its missile force have been badly damaged, but the fate of approximately 970 pounds of enriched uranium remains unresolved. Preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon was the original objective. Reopening the Strait of Hormuz became another only after Iran closed it.

And the fighting continued right up to Election Day. On Monday, Trump told voters, “I don’t know if you even call it a war.” That same day, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard claimed to have captured two American drones and destroyed a third. Iranian forces reportedly fired on a U.S. aircraft in the Strait of Hormuz, prompting American retaliatory strikes. Washington reportedly sought to keep the exchange quiet to avoid signaling a return to major combat. This raises troubling questions about government efforts to manage what Americans are allowed to know. Once again, we are left with the unsettling sense that we are living in a manufactured reality, carefully constructed to serve Washington’s political interests rather than inform the American public.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported that October saw the most attacks on commercial shipping in the strait since March. The war has already cost taxpayers at least $47 billion, another aircraft carrier is being deployed, and Iran continues to condition reopening the strait on American concessions.

Washington has yet to acknowledge the failure of its apparent decapitation strategy: eliminate Iran’s leadership, encourage a popular uprising, and arm the opposition, which never materialized. Iran is not simply a religious state dependent on a handful of powerful clerics. It is also an Islamic republic with established institutions and mechanisms for replacing its leadership. Removing individual leaders does not automatically dismantle the government or produce regime change. The Trump White House appears to have underestimated that institutional resilience before launching its initial strikes, a potentially disastrous miscalculation whose consequences Americans are still paying for.

Vice President Vance remains optimistic about negotiations, but a resolution remains elusive. For Vance, widely discussed as a potential 2028 presidential candidate, the political dilemma is considerable. Having once opposed another costly American war in the Middle East, he must now reconcile that position with his defense of Trump’s policies, even as voters register their dissatisfaction with the administration.

Earlier this morning, Vance wrote on X: “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.” As he is actually on record telling President Trump that he opposed going into Iran, this is a very safe spot for him to land, going into the 2028 elections.

American families paid for this at the pump. On Election Day, gasoline averaged $4.15 per gallon, compared with $3.10 in 2024. Diesel prices have climbed even more dramatically, hitting farmers and truckers particularly hard. Those of us who farm are also paying more for fertilizer and other essential supplies. But the consequences extend far beyond agriculture. Nearly everything Americans purchase, from groceries to household goods, depends on transportation. Higher diesel costs are passed along through the supply chain, driving up consumer prices long after the initial increase at the pump. And those costs rarely come back down as quickly as they went up, and most likely they never do. When was the last time prices of goods decreased?

Meanwhile, ordinary Americans watch Trump appear to be more interested in enriching himself and his family than fulfilling his most important campaign promise. Nearly six in ten voters told the Associated Press that Trump puts his personal interests ahead of the country’s.

But Trump’s economic failures should not be confused with a failure of conservative economic principles. Free markets, limited government, lower taxes, and less regulatory interference were not what Americans experienced these past two years. Instead, they got tariffs, more forever war in Ukraine, an expensive and, in our view, poorly planned war, and industries increasingly dominated by politically connected corporations. Crony capitalism, in which private firms use government power to protect their market positions, continues to flourish.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, approximately 70 percent of voters told the AP they wanted Congress to impose greater checks on presidential power. James Madison, who grew up at Montpelier in the next county over from ours, would have recognized that instinct. Constitutional conservatives should, too.

The political damage extended well beyond suburban America. Rural Iowa shifted toward Democrats, and the head of the Iowa Farmers Union told CBS News that his members voted as though Trump himself were on the ballot. In Kansas, Adam Hamilton won a U.S. Senate seat with Republican crossover support, becoming the first Democrat to win that seat since 1932.

Hispanic voters also shifted sharply toward Democrats, supporting them by approximately 60 to 35 percent. Nearly seven in ten said Trump’s policies had worsened the economy. Immigration enforcement compounded the problem. A pre-election Cook Political Report/Univision poll found that nearly two-thirds of Hispanic voters in Texas were less likely to support candidates backing Trump’s deportation policies. Yet economic concerns still outweighed immigration and ICE enforcement combined by roughly two to one.

Some Republicans will blame the Texas results on Hispanic voters. Their shift mattered, but it cannot fully explain how both Ken Paxton and Governor Greg Abbott lost statewide in a state Trump carried by 14 points just two years earlier.

And this is where the Republican Party’s failure becomes especially dangerous.

When government fails to deliver prosperity, promises of greater economic security through expanded government programs become more appealing to some. Voters are increasingly judging conservatism by the record of an administration that, in critical respects, abandoned its principles.

The danger is that Americans will reject free-market conservatism for the failures of crony capitalism, and embrace more government as the solution to problems government helped create.

The Crumbling Republican Southern Stronghold

For decades, Republicans have counted on the South as their political fortress. Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Florida, and Texas have been reliable sources of Republican votes, congressional seats, and political power. North Carolina has been more competitive, but it too voted for Trump in 2024.

The 2026 midterms should alarm Republican leadership.

Just two years ago, Trump carried Alabama and Tennessee by approximately 30 percentage points, South Carolina by 18, Florida by 13, and Texas by 14. Yet on Tuesday, Republican gubernatorial candidates barely held on in Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Florida. In North Carolina, Democrat Roy Cooper won the Senate race decisively. South Carolina elected a Democratic senator for the first time since 1998.

Texas delivered an even more consequential result. Democrats captured both the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat, ending decades of Republican dominance in statewide elections.

These results cannot simply be dismissed as a handful of bad candidates. The Republican decline extended across multiple states and offices. Nor does it necessarily mean Southern voters have embraced socialism or abandoned conservative principles. Candidate quality, turnout, economic dissatisfaction, and disillusionment with Washington all deserve consideration.

But the warning is unmistakable: The Republican Party can no longer assume that the voters who delivered Trump’s 2024 victory will continue supporting Republican candidates simply because they have an R beside their names.

The Southern Republican stronghold has not disappeared. But its foundations have been shaken.

Trust Is Hard to Rebuild

Voters under 30 split about evenly between Trump and Kamala Harris in 2024. On Tuesday, the NBC News exit poll had them backing Democrats 72 percent to 25 percent. They were only about one in ten voters, which limits their effect on any single election. But they will be voting for many more years to come.

Zoomers abandoned Trump and the Republican Party because they felt betrayed. Prices did not come down. Regulatory capture of entire industries only worsened. The job market did not improve. Healthcare and America’s health were not fixed. A major new war began with Iran, the war in Ukraine did not end, and major questions surrounding Epstein remain unanswered.

To understand why they may not come back soon or ever, think about a personal betrayal in your own life. How easy was it to forgive that person and rebuild the relationship? Of course, a group that moved this far in two years can move again. We doubt it will move back toward anyone in the current Republican tent.

So when the Democratic Party fails them, perhaps within the next two years, where do they turn? CNN found that about one voter in five trusts neither party on the economy, and those voters largely chose Democrats anyway. That looks to us like next time around, they could switch candidates and parties again if things don’t greatly improve. We suspect a new independent voice will emerge, a maverick from either the progressive left or the conservative and libertarian right, perhaps from a new party. It will not be easy. Dan Osborn, a former union leader running as an independent, lost in Nebraska for the second time.

One such effort is already underway. Bret Weinstein, the former Evergreen State College professor and podcaster, announced this week that he is working with the Libertarian Party’s Mises Caucus on what he calls a “friendly takeover” of the party. The goal is to rebrand it as the American Liberty Party and recruit former Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky to run for president in 2028. Weinstein says Massie is aware of the effort and supportive, although Massie has not committed to running.

But there is a significant obstacle. The Mises Caucus is a faction within the Libertarian Party, not its governing authority. The party has its own elected leadership, bylaws, state affiliates, and national convention delegates who select its presidential nominee. Weinstein and his allies cannot simply rename the party or claim its established ballot access without winning the necessary internal support. In fact, the Mises Caucus failed to secure its preferred presidential nominee at the 2024 convention.

Whether this becomes a genuine new political movement or another internal Libertarian Party power struggle remains to be seen. The larger question is whether it can attract younger voters disillusioned with both major parties, or primarily draw Republicans dissatisfied with Trump and the direction of their own party.

Two Years of Hearings, Then the Real Test

We expect Democrats to pursue two strategies. The first is investigation. Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, gave his preview in two words on election night: “Lawyer up.” Expect subpoenas, public hearings, allegations of corruption, criminal referrals, and perhaps renewed impeachment efforts aimed at Trump, his family, and his allies.

The second is benefits. Improving the underlying economy is difficult, and any real recovery would let Trump claim credit. Chuck Schumer’s election night message was that relief is on the way. Expect proposals to restore and expand ACA subsidies, reverse Medicaid cuts, increase SNAP, expand child tax credits, subsidize housing and childcare, relieve student loans, and raise the minimum wage. Hamilton, the new Kansas senator, put ending the Iran war and addressing tariffs at the top of his list, along with health costs and SNAP.

Much of the Democrats’ expanded benefits agenda will likely stop at the Resolute Desk through January 2029. Budget reconciliation allows the Senate to pass qualifying tax and spending legislation with a simple majority, but the Byrd Rule limits what can be included. In 2021, for example, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that a minimum wage increase could not be passed through reconciliation. Trump can still veto legislation that reaches his desk, and he told CBS News he welcomes the nickname “Mr. Veto.” Overriding a presidential veto requires a two-thirds majority in both chambers, which Democrats do not have.

But these legislative battles will also provide campaign ammunition for 2028, forcing Republicans to defend their opposition to expanded government benefits. Some Republicans, particularly those facing competitive reelection campaigns, may break ranks and vote with Democrats rather than risk alienating voters.

The real test comes in 2029 if Democrats win the White House and retain control of Congress. That is where DeSantis’s arithmetic matters, because it could leave Republicans with little power to stop an ambitious legislative agenda.

And that is how a nation can move toward socialism without ever voting for a socialist revolution. The transformation happens incrementally, one popular government program, one new entitlement, and one expansion of state authority at a time. Each step becomes politically difficult to reverse, and over time, the cumulative changes fundamentally alter the relationship between citizens and their government.

This gradual approach has a name: Fabian socialism. Rather than pursuing revolution, Fabian socialists seek to advance their goals through legislation, influence over academic and cultural institutions, and incremental social change. Such policies can appear sustainable for a generation, particularly in a prosperous, high-trust society with a strong work ethic. But as successive generations become increasingly dependent on government benefits, incentives to work, save, and remain self-reliant weaken. Taxes rise to finance expanding commitments, while governments increasingly turn to imported labor to fill jobs their own citizens are reluctant to take. In our view, Great Britain and Canada offer particularly revealing examples of this trajectory.

Benefits are also very hard to take back once granted. Republicans held Congress and the White House in 2017 and still could not repeal the Affordable Care Act. Republicans did curtail SNAP in the last Congress, and Democrats are already promising to restore it. Republican Congresses have also run large deficits of their own, so neither party can claim clean hands on the growth of government. Congress failed to make DOGE's spending cuts permanent, undermining Republican promises to rein in federal spending. Another broken promise.

Even blue states have limits. California voters appeared headed on Tuesday to reject Proposition 40, a one-time 5 percent tax on the wealth of the state’s billionaires, which was trailing with about 57 percent voting no in early returns. Gov. Gavin Newsom, widely believed to be preparing a 2028 run, opposed it, and opponents warned that billionaires would leave the state and take their income tax with them. Of course, billionaires and business interests also spent more than $316 million to defeat it. Newsom’s alternative is a national wealth tax, which no one can escape by moving to Texas.

The economic hardship driving these votes is real. People are struggling to afford housing, groceries, and energy. Government benefits may provide temporary relief, but we worry about the long-term costs: greater dependence on government, a growing national debt, and an economy that becomes increasingly difficult to repair. Even more concerning are political changes that could prove difficult to reverse, such as eliminating the Senate filibuster, admitting new states, or expanding the Supreme Court. These changes could reshape the balance of political power for generations.

What Happens to MAHA?

We are not neutral observers here. Robert was a compensated Medical Advisor to MAHA Action until June 2026, and we have both publicly criticized how the movement has been led.

Tuesday was a very bad night for the politicians most closely tied to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, who founded the MAHA Caucus, lost his seat. In Iowa, Kennedy-backed candidates Zach Lahn, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn, and Joe Mitchell all lost.

Kennedy had called Lahn’s race the most important election in the country. In March, Tony Lyons, president of the MAHA PAC, called the midterms “existential” for the movement while launching a $100 million fundraising campaign. In South Carolina, Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who made impeaching Kennedy a campaign pledge, defeated Sen. Darline Graham.

Those losses do not prove that voters rejected MAHA. These candidates lost in a wave that took down many other Republicans, and we have seen no post-election data on how MAHA voters actually voted. A March poll found that only 19 percent of Americans ranked healthcare access as their top issue.

MAHA voters had reasons for disappointment well before Tuesday. Trump created the MAHA Commission, with Kennedy as chair, and many supporters read its first report in May 2025 as a promise. That report mentioned ultra-processed foods more than 40 times and said pesticides were found at alarming levels in American children. The strategy that followed in September 2025 offered 128 ideas, but it mentioned ultra-processed foods only once, in a pledge to define them. On pesticides and food, it mainly advised more research and voluntary action by industry.

Then, in February 2026, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to secure the domestic supply of glyphosate, calling it crucial to national security. Kennedy, who had previously identified glyphosate as a likely contributor to the chronic disease epidemic, defended the order.

Worse, the Trump Justice Department and EPA voluntarily intervened on Bayer/Monsanto’s side in a Supreme Court case concerning cancer warnings on Roundup. The administration argued that federal pesticide labeling law overrode state failure-to-warn claims. In June, the Supreme Court agreed, ruling in Monsanto’s favor and limiting consumers’ ability to sue over missing cancer warnings. The DOJ was not required to take Bayer’s side. It chose to do so.

Kennedy also promised to rein in mRNA vaccines, raising concerns about their safety, effectiveness, and inadequate investigation of adverse events. In August 2025, HHS canceled 22 mRNA vaccine development projects worth nearly $500 million, a significant step. Yet mRNA vaccines remain on the market, and in June 2026, the CDC awarded Pfizer two contracts for adult and pediatric COVID-19 vaccines with a combined maximum value of $1.24 billion. Kennedy defended the contracts, arguing that they established purchasing arrangements rather than actual expenditures. However, the CDC also awarded Moderna a separate vaccine contract, with more than $6 million obligated by late October. While the administration has restricted some vaccine recommendations and research funding, its continued federal contracting for mRNA vaccines raises serious questions about how much of Kennedy’s promised overhaul of vaccine policy has actually been delivered.

The administration did deliver new dietary guidelines and encouraged state SNAP restrictions on items such as soda and candy. As of July, however, nutrition professor Marion Nestle’s review found no action on limiting the marketing of ultra-processed foods to children. She also found that the promises most likely to improve children’s health were held up, ignored, or awaiting rulemaking.

For now, Kennedy appears likely to remain at HHS. Trump said on election night that he has no plans to change his Cabinet, and Axios reported before the election that Kennedy had no intention of stepping down. But with Democrats gaining power in Congress, Kennedy faces a different political environment. His department can still pursue changes to vaccine and food policy without new legislation, but congressional oversight, subpoenas, hearings, and battles over funding could make those efforts increasingly difficult. Impeachment is theoretically possible, but removal would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate, making it a remote prospect. The more immediate challenge is whether Kennedy can deliver meaningful reforms while defending his record before a more hostile Congress.

Durability is the larger problem. Whatever one secretary does by executive action, a later secretary can undo. Some MAHA activists already complain that Kennedy has not done enough to make the food dye restrictions last beyond this administration. Calley Means, a leading MAHA advocate, resigned from HHS on October 22, and the Wall Street Journal reported that he was frustrated by the lack of progress on food. With Democrats holding Congress, a statute codifying the MAHA agenda on Republican terms is now out of reach until at least 2029.

We expect the coalition to split along an existing line. Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan’s new senator-elect, Abdul El-Sayed, are courting voters worried about corporate influence over food and pesticides. Center for American Progress polling found that 37 percent of Trump voters are open to a Democrat running on core MAHA issues. Questioning the safety of certain vaccines remains a nonstarter for many Democrats, and Annenberg polling found those priorities far less popular than the food agenda. So the food voters may have two parties bidding for their votes, while the medical freedom voters may have none.

That should worry anyone who cares about informed consent. It also shows the cost of tying a movement’s future to one party and one cabinet secretary. As Jill argued in “The Kennedy Exception,” loyalty replaced scrutiny once Kennedy ran HHS. A former HHS official told Semafor that MAHA voters are becoming independent again and will vote for whoever advocates for them. We hope so.

We also expect MAHA’s leaders, Kennedy and his closest adviser Stefanie Spear, to return to their roots in environmentalism and liberal politics. Kennedy built his career as an environmental lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council and Hudson Riverkeeper, founded Waterkeeper Alliance, and began his presidential campaign as a Democrat. Spear, who became a senior Kennedy aide at HHS, founded the environmental publication EcoWatch, where Kennedy served on the advisory board. Both have longstanding ties to environmental activism that predate their alliance with Trump. With Republicans losing control of Congress and Democrats increasingly focused on pesticides, food safety, and corporate influence, Kennedy and Spear may find more common ground with their former political allies. But much of the MAHA coalition comes from a different background, including conservatives, homesteaders, and medical freedom advocates whose political priorities may not align with those of the movement’s leadership.

In our opinion, the deeper issue was never a particular appointee. MAHA has always been about autonomy: who decides what goes into your child’s arm, your food, and your medical record. Those questions extend naturally to data centers, Flock cameras, and the surveillance state, and they cross party lines. A movement built on those questions can outlast Kennedy. It can also do much of its work in state legislatures and county meetings, and on farms, where the next HHS secretary has less reach.

What Now?

We have spent much of our political lives believing that America could return to its constitutional foundations: limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, and an economy that rewards hard work over political connections. We built our farm around those same principles, investing years of hard work and much of our resources into creating a life grounded in independence and self-reliance. Tuesday’s election results do not change those principles, nor do they diminish our commitment to living by them.

The principle we keep coming back to is subsidiarity: decisions should be made at the most local level capable of addressing them effectively. Local communities understand their own needs, priorities, and circumstances far better than distant government bureaucracies, and they should retain the authority to govern themselves whenever possible. It is to this model we return in our own lives.

Opposition to the rapid expansion of data centers became a significant issue in Tuesday’s elections, with voters demanding greater local control over decisions affecting their communities. The Washington Post reported that voters in at least 29 jurisdictions approved bans or restrictions on data centers. In Ohio, where 125 local moratoriums were already in place, Fortune counted at least 14 municipalities adopting additional limits. An NBC exit poll found that 56 percent of voters considered data centers a crucial or major factor in their vote.

Democrats were the main political beneficiaries of this opposition. In Texas, Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa campaigned on maintaining a moratorium on new data center construction until the state addresses concerns about water supplies, electricity, air quality, and property rights. Texas accounts for 41 percent of the new data center capacity projected nationwide for 2028, according to research firm SemiAnalysis. Even outgoing Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who had previously promoted Texas as a national center for AI data centers, ordered a temporary pause in August amid growing public opposition.

Trump, meanwhile, openly criticized Americans opposing data center expansion. In August, he suggested that communities rejecting these developments wanted to remain “backwards and poor,” and warned that China was benefiting from the opposition. In September, he went further, suggesting that the growing resistance might be a Chinese public-relations campaign. Rather than acknowledging legitimate local concerns about electricity, water, and property rights, the president portrayed opposition as economically foolish and potentially serving a foreign adversary.

The issue illustrates the principle of subsidiarity in practice. Communities are demanding greater control over development decisions that directly affect their land, resources, and quality of life. Yet the Republican president, whose party has traditionally championed local control, has repeatedly dismissed their objections.

Axios reported that Democratic challengers ousted Republicans in Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Pennsylvania after making AI policy a campaign weapon. Democratic groups ran ads in those districts attacking Republican incumbents for a 2025 vote that would have gutted state AI laws. Conservatives who believe in federalism might have raised that objection first. In the Ohio Senate race, Sherrod Brown called Jon Husted “the face of data centers.” Axios also reported that nearly two-thirds of the data center capacity planned for 2028 could face delays in a buildout it put at $10 trillion, although most political analysts do not expect Democrats to block construction permanently. These candidates also ran in a year of high prices and an unpopular war, so we would not credit AI alone for their wins.

Property rights, water, the electric bill, and local control are conservative concerns, and a Democrat just campaigned on them and won the Texas governorship. Abbott had welcomed these companies with tax breaks, although his campaign noted that Hinojosa had voted for such incentives herself. There is a real tension here for those of us who defend private property, since a local ban can also stop a landowner from selling to a willing buyer. We would rather see that argument settled in county meetings than in corporate deals protected by nondisclosure agreements.

Subsidiarity has limits, and Tuesday showed one. Our 58 percent in Madison County did not stop Amendment 1, and we do not believe the right to life should turn on a county vote any more than a state vote. That argument rests on natural law, and we will keep making it. It also means that roughly four in ten of our neighbors disagree with us, and they remain our neighbors.

Many important decisions remain within our control, particularly at the local level: land use, education, local food production and processing, what we grow and preserve, and where we spend our money. For younger Americans dissatisfied with both political parties, greater involvement in their communities offers a practical alternative to waiting for another presidential candidate to deliver change. We intend to spend the next two years working toward greater local independence and self-reliance, while continuing to ask whether enough Americans still share those priorities.

Our Recommendations: Returning to Conservative Principles

The election results are a reminder that Republicans cannot simply campaign on conservative principles. They must actually govern by them. Restoring public trust requires more than new candidates, political movements, or another round of executive orders. It requires returning to the constitutional and economic principles that once defined American conservatism.

1. Restore constitutional limits on federal power.

Congress must reclaim its constitutional responsibilities, particularly over taxation, spending, and war. These powers should not be surrendered to the executive branch simply because a Republican occupies the White House. The same constitutional limits must apply regardless of which party controls Washington.

2. Defend the Senate filibuster and a nine-seat Supreme Court.

The Senate filibuster and the current nine-justice Supreme Court are important institutional safeguards against rapid changes in federal policy and judicial power. Democrats could seek to eliminate the legislative filibuster and expand the Supreme Court if they regain unified control of Washington. Conservatives should defend these institutional arrangements consistently, rather than supporting changes whenever their own party might benefit.

3. Restore fiscal discipline and free-market economics.

Stop expanding federal spending without identifying how it will be paid for. Demand honest accounting of entitlement obligations, meaningful reductions in wasteful spending, and a serious plan to address the national debt. End corporate subsidies, preferential treatment, and regulatory advantages that protect politically connected businesses at the expense of smaller competitors. Economic prosperity comes from productive work, investment, competition, and entrepreneurship, not government favoritism.

4. Restore competition and patient choice in healthcare.

America’s healthcare system has become increasingly expensive, bureaucratic, and dominated by large hospital systems, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and government programs. Reform should focus on restoring independent medical practices, reducing unnecessary regulatory burdens, increasing price transparency, and allowing patients greater control over their healthcare spending and decisions. Expand opportunities for direct primary care, health savings accounts, and competition among providers. Protect informed consent and medical freedom while demanding independent, transparent evaluation of pharmaceutical products and medical interventions. The goal should be better, more affordable healthcare, not another expansion of government bureaucracy or corporate control.

5. Defend individual liberty and personal responsibility.

Medical freedom, informed consent, property rights, freedom of speech, and parental authority should not depend on which political party controls Washington. These principles must be defended consistently, even when doing so means opposing politicians or policies we otherwise support. Government should protect individual rights, not substitute its judgment for the decisions of competent adults and families.

6. Return power to states, counties, and communities.

The principle of subsidiarity should guide conservative governance. Decisions about land use, schools, agriculture, and local development should be made as close to the affected communities as practical. Reduce unnecessary barriers to small farms, local meat processing, home-based businesses, and affordable housing. Support legislation such as the PRIME Act that would expand opportunities for local food producers while maintaining appropriate food safety protections.

7. Demand accountability rather than political loyalty.

Judge candidates and elected officials by their actions, not their party affiliation, endorsements, or promises. Demand measurable results from government reform efforts, including MAHA, and insist that public officials explain what they have accomplished. Political movements lose their independence when loyalty to individual leaders becomes more important than the principles they were created to advance.

8. Rebuild civic participation from the local level.

Attend county meetings, participate in local elections, support independent businesses, and become involved in decisions affecting your community.

Encourage younger Americans to see self-reliance, entrepreneurship, homeownership, and local involvement as practical alternatives to increasing dependence on government. These are not substitutes for national reform, but they are areas where individuals can still exercise meaningful influence.

The Long Road Back

The Senate presents a particularly difficult challenge. Only about one-third of its seats come up for election every two years, and many Democratic seats are in states where Republicans have little recent history of winning statewide. As DeSantis’s analysis illustrates, the election calendar itself could leave Republicans facing many years without the congressional power needed to reverse Democratic legislation. Regaining that power may require multiple election cycles, potentially extending into 2032.

That makes the possibility of eliminating the filibuster or expanding the Supreme Court especially consequential. Unlike ordinary legislation, changes to these institutions could reshape the balance of power long after the next election. The Supreme Court has had nine justices since 1869, and expanding it for partisan advantage would establish a precedent that either party could exploit.

Healthcare illustrates the larger problem: Americans are increasingly dependent on institutions they cannot afford, cannot easily leave, and have little power to hold accountable.

Conservatism cannot survive as a collection of campaign slogans while government continues to expand, federal debt grows, and political connections determine economic opportunity. Its principles must be practiced consistently, whether Republicans hold power or not.

The next election will not solve these problems. Rebuilding the institutions, economic independence, and civic responsibility that make limited government possible will require a much longer commitment.

Robert and I have been up since 4 AM researching, writing, editing, and fact-checking this article. And this is just one of the many pieces we publish each week.

Independent journalism takes time, effort, and resources. We don’t have a corporate newsroom, wealthy investors, or government funding behind us. We do this because we believe honest analysis, independent thinking, and holding those in power accountable matter.

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References

2026 Midterm Elections and Voter Sentiment

1. Associated Press. “Democrats Win the U.S. House and Senate as Voters Deliver a Strong Rebuke to Trump and Republicans.” November 3, 2026.

2. Associated Press. “The Political Map Is Anyone’s Guess After a Democratic Wave in the Midterm Elections.” November 4, 2026.

3. CBS News. “2026 Senate Midterm Election Results.” November 4, 2026.

4. Fox News. “Democrats’ Historic Wins in Texas Highlight Taking Control of Congress in Midterm Blue Wave.” November 4, 2026.

5. South Carolina State Election Commission. “2026 General Election Results.” November 2026.

6. National Conference of State Legislatures. “2026 State Legislative Elections: The Results and What They Mean.” November 4, 2026.

Economy, Energy and the Iran War

7. U.S. Energy Information Administration. Weekly Retail Gasoline and Diesel Prices. November 2024 and November 2026.

8. Associated Press. November 2026 reporting on the Iran war, commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and U.S. military expenditures.

9. CBS News. 2026 election exit polling on economic conditions, presidential approval, and voter priorities.

10. CNN. 2026 national election exit polling on inflation, economic conditions, and presidential policies.

Constitutional Government and Political Reform

11. U.S. Constitution. Article I, Section 8; Article II; Article III.

12. U.S. Senate. The Byrd Rule and Budget Reconciliation. Senate institutional reference materials.

13. U.S. Senate. Classes of United States Senators. Senate historical and procedural reference materials.

14. U.S. Supreme Court. The Court as an Institution. Historical information on the number of justices.

15. Libertarian Party. National Bylaws and Convention Rules.

16. U.S. Congress. Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption (PRIME) Act. Legislative text and sponsorship records.

MAHA, Healthcare and Vaccine Policy

17. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. August 2025 announcement concerning termination of mRNA vaccine-development projects.

18. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. January 2025 announcement of additional Moderna pandemic influenza vaccine funding.

19. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. FY2026–2027 Adult COVID-19 Vaccines. Federal procurement solicitation 75D30126R73405.

20. SAM.gov. Pfizer Adult COVID-19 Vaccine Contract. Award 75D30126D21004, June 1, 2026. Maximum contract value: $505,272,000.

21. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Pfizer Pediatric COVID-19 Vaccine Contract. June 2026. Reported maximum contract value: approximately $735.7 million.

22. USAspending.gov. Moderna US, Inc., Adult COVID-19 Vaccine Contract. Award 75D30126D21003, 2026.

23. U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services. Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Current administration guidelines and implementation materials.

24. Marion Nestle. Food Politics. July 2026 analysis of MAHA policy implementation and outstanding commitments.

Agriculture, Glyphosate and Local Control

25. The White House. February 2026 executive action invoking the Defense Production Act concerning domestic glyphosate production.

26. U.S. Supreme Court. Monsanto Co. v. Durnell. June 25, 2026.

27. U.S. Department of Justice. Brief concerning federal pesticide labeling requirements and state-law failure-to-warn claims in Monsanto Co. v. Durnell.

28. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act pesticide registration and labeling requirements.

29. National Conference of State Legislatures. State legislation concerning food additives, agricultural regulation, and local land-use authority.

Data Centers and Local Government

30. The Washington Post. November 2026 reporting on local data-center restrictions and election results.

31. Fortune. November 2026 reporting on Ohio municipal data-center moratoriums.

32. SemiAnalysis. 2026 projections of U.S. data-center capacity and Texas development.

By Dr. Jill Glasspool Malone and Robert W. Malone

Last September 30, Robert and I published an exposé titled Operation Stork Stall, revealing something rather astonishing about American infant formula.

The FDA does not require manufacturers to disclose how many grams of Total Sugars or Added Sugars are in infant formula. Some products even list corn syrup as their first ingredient. Yet parents cannot look at the nutritional panel and determine how much sugar their babies are consuming.

Think about that. A jar of baby food must disclose its sugar content, but infant formula, which may provide virtually every calorie a newborn consumes for months, is exempt.

We also documented how Operation Stork Speed, announced by Secretary Kennedy in March 2025 with promises of “radical transparency,” had accomplished relatively little in changing the actual formula being sold to American families.

Now, here is where the story gets interesting.

At the time, Calley Means was still communicating with Robert. Since leaving his HHS position, however, Means has essentially cut off communication, as have others associated with the MAHA political organizations.

We have been told that Secretary Kennedy is, as one person described it, “big mad” at Robert.

My impression is that certain elements of the MAHA establishment have become increasingly interested in controlling the narrative and ostracizing those who independently investigate and report on what is happening. Activists who promote the movement are welcome. Independent journalists asking uncomfortable questions? Apparently, not so much.

But before that breakdown in communication, we made certain that our infant formula investigation reached Calley Means.

He told us that he, Secretary Kennedy, and senior HHS leadership had been unaware of the specific sugar-labeling exemption we documented. He promised to circulate our article to FDA Commissioner Heidi Overton and other FDA officials.

We hoped he would follow through.

Fast-forward to October 29.

Secretary Kennedy announced that the FDA is moving forward with its first comprehensive review of infant formula nutrient requirements in nearly 30 years.

As Kennedy explained, the science has evolved, and the agency is now comparing American infant formula standards with more recent research and European standards.

Those words, “European values,” are particularly significant. As we had documented, European infant formula regulations impose tighter restrictions on certain carbohydrate sources, including glucose syrup, sucrose, and other sugars. The European Union also maintains detailed standards governing ingredients, additives, and nutritional composition. These differences go directly to the heart of our September investigation, which exposed the use of corn syrup-derived ingredients in American infant formula and the FDA’s extraordinary exemption allowing manufacturers to omit Total Sugars and Added Sugars from nutrition labels.

Kennedy’s reference to European standards suggests that the administration may finally be examining the very regulatory differences we brought to HHS leadership’s attention.

The FDA has now proposed changes affecting eight nutrients, including iodine, manganese, and vitamins A and D. Additional reviews are planned, including an examination of carbohydrate sources.

That is welcome progress, and credit should be given where it is due.

However, the FDA initiated its comprehensive nutrient review before our September investigation. What we specifically brought to MAHA leadership’s attention was the longstanding regulatory exemption that allows infant formula manufacturers to withhold basic sugar-content information from parents.

And that problem remains unresolved.

The current proposal does not eliminate the sugar-labeling exemption. Carbohydrate sources are scheduled for examination in a later phase, but there is no guarantee that the FDA will ultimately require manufacturers to disclose Total Sugars and Added Sugars.

We cannot know whether our investigation helped bring additional attention to this issue within HHS or FDA. What we do know is that we documented the problem, delivered our findings to someone with direct access to senior leadership, and received assurances that the information would be circulated.

Perhaps our reporting helped move the conversation forward. We certainly hope so.

But the fundamental question remains: Why should American parents have to wait years for the FDA to require infant formula manufacturers to disclose information they already possess?

And there is a larger issue here, one that goes well beyond infant formula.

Independent journalism is not supposed to function as the public relations department for politicians, government agencies, or political movements. We support reforms that improve American health, regardless of who implements them, and we will give credit when meaningful progress is made.

But supporting the goals of MAHA does not mean surrendering our independence to its political leadership, remaining silent when promises go unfulfilled, or overlooking failures simply because the people responsible happen to be on our side.

Accountability cannot be reserved exclusively for political opponents.

Our job is to investigate, document, and ask difficult questions, including those that make people in positions of power uncomfortable.

And that is exactly what we intend to keep doing.

What Happens to MAHA if Democrats Take Congress?

The future of the MAGA-MAHA alliance, the emergence of an independent MAHA political movement, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s uncertain political future.

By: Dr Robert Malone

The following analysis is for paid subscribers only.

Read more

Policy Analysis

Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone · Washington, DC · Nov 3, 2026

Audio Version:

The Curious Case of 1,600 Chinese Cars

Jamberoo Action Park sits in the hills south of Sydney, Australia. During the winter months, its parking lots are normally empty. But in August 2025, hundreds of brand-new Chinese vehicles began appearing in neat rows. By October, more than 1,600 vehicles manufactured by BYD, China’s leading electric-vehicle manufacturer, were parked there. Local officials objected because the water park was not licensed to operate as a commercial vehicle storage facility.

The more interesting question was why so many vehicles were being stored there. Australia’s New Vehicle Efficiency Standard, introduced in January 2025, created a financial incentive that most consumers probably never considered. Under the program, manufacturers can earn emissions credits when qualifying vehicles are imported, rather than when they are sold. According to reporting by the Australian Financial Review, a single electric BYD Sealion 7 could generate approximately A$7,050 in credits. Those credits have value because manufacturers selling higher-emission vehicles must either meet government targets, purchase credits from competitors, or face financial penalties.

The stockpile does not prove that BYD imported these particular vehicles to collect credits. But it illustrates a much larger economic phenomenon unfolding across the Western world. Governments have created emissions regulations that reward certain technologies, penalize others, and transfer money between competing manufacturers. China has spent decades developing the industrial capacity to benefit from these policies, while Western companies increasingly struggle with the costs of compliance.

To understand how this happened, we need to examine the relationship between environmental modeling, government intervention, corporate financial interests, and China’s industrial strategy.

How Government Created a Market for Emissions

The intellectual foundations of emissions trading originated with economists Ronald Coase and John Dales. Coase argued that clearly defined property rights could allow parties to negotiate solutions to environmental problems. Dales subsequently proposed that governments establish limits on pollution and allow companies to trade permits representing the right to emit.

The idea was that companies capable of reducing pollution inexpensively could sell their unused permits to companies facing higher compliance costs. The total emissions limit would remain in place, but the market would determine how reductions were distributed.

Early American programs applied variations of this approach to lead in gasoline and sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants. These pollutants caused measurable health and environmental damage, and trading mechanisms helped reduce emissions at lower costs than some traditional regulatory approaches.

Carbon dioxide presented a different challenge. At ordinary atmospheric concentrations, it is not directly toxic, and it is essential for plant growth. Its environmental significance comes from its greenhouse effect and contribution to global warming. Consequently, the justification for restricting carbon dioxide depended heavily on projections of future temperature changes and their consequences.

Those projections relied on computer models containing substantial uncertainties. The 1979 Charney report estimated that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change retained essentially that same likely range through 2013, narrowing it to 2.5 to 4 degrees in 2021.

Other modeling problems emerged. The high-emissions scenario known as RCP8.5 was frequently described as business as usual, implying that its projected outcomes represented the likely future without additional government intervention. In 2020, climate researchers Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters warned in Nature that this characterization was misleading. In 2022, another group of climate scientists, including NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, reported that approximately one-quarter of the newest generation of climate models produced unusually high warming estimates.

These findings do not invalidate climate science. They demonstrate why uncertainty matters when governments use projections extending decades into the future to justify major economic interventions.

When Computer Models Become Government Policy

We have seen this pattern before, most dramatically during COVID-19.

On March 16, 2020, Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College London published projections suggesting that an uncontrolled epidemic could cause approximately 510,000 deaths in Britain and 2.2 million deaths in the United States. These figures represented a hypothetical epidemic without control measures or spontaneous behavioral changes, not inevitable outcomes. Nevertheless, the alarming numbers received enormous publicity and helped drive decisions to impose unprecedented restrictions on businesses, schools, travel, and ordinary social life.

The political response demonstrated how quickly frightening model projections could become the justification for extraordinary government powers. Policymakers faced genuine uncertainty, but the public was rarely given a satisfactory explanation of the assumptions underlying the most alarming scenarios, the limitations of the models, or the long-term economic and social consequences of the proposed interventions.

The economic consequences were staggering. In April 2020, the International Monetary Fund described the resulting crisis as the Great Lockdown. By October, the IMF projected that cumulative global economic output losses relative to pre-pandemic expectations could reach $28 trillion through 2025. Those losses reflected the combined effects of the pandemic and the response, and cannot be attributed exclusively to lockdown policies. Nevertheless, the scale of the disruption was extraordinary.

Climate policy presents a comparable problem, although the scientific questions and timescales are different. Models project future risks, those projections influence public perceptions of urgency, and governments establish regulations intended to prevent the predicted outcomes. Those regulations then reshape economic activity, creating financial winners and losers whose interests may have little to do with the original environmental objective.

The concern is not that governments should never use models. It is that uncertain projections can become the basis for expensive mandates without sufficient scrutiny of their assumptions, costs, or unintended consequences. Once those mandates are established, powerful economic interests develop around preserving them.

The Environmental Movement and Its Corporate Beneficiaries

Economist Bruce Yandle described this political phenomenon in 1983 with his theory of “bootleggers and Baptists.” Baptist preachers supported restrictions on Sunday alcohol sales for moral reasons, while bootleggers supported the same restrictions because they eliminated legitimate competition. Groups with different motivations could therefore promote identical government policies.

International carbon trading provides a revealing example.

Maurice Strong, a Canadian businessman with extensive experience in energy and finance, became a central figure in international environmental governance. He organized the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, became the first head of the UN Environment Programme, and later organized the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. These efforts helped establish the institutional foundations for international climate agreements.

Meanwhile, powerful corporations recognized that emissions restrictions could create profitable new markets. Enron was among the most enthusiastic early supporters of carbon trading. The Houston-based energy company had experience trading sulfur dioxide allowances and recognized that restrictions on carbon dioxide could favor natural gas, one of its principal businesses, over coal.

Enron chairman Ken Lay actively promoted climate regulation, and company representatives participated in discussions surrounding the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Following those negotiations, Enron lobbyist John Palmisano celebrated the agreement in an internal memorandum, writing: “This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!”

Enron collapsed in 2001, but the international emissions-trading architecture it supported survived. The Kyoto Protocol established mechanisms for international carbon-credit transactions, while subsequent national and regional regulations expanded the role of emissions credits across multiple industries.

Environmental organizations supplied the public justification, governments established the regulatory framework, and corporations positioned to benefit helped promote the system. Their motivations were not necessarily identical, but their economic and political objectives frequently aligned.

How Western Automobile Regulations Created New Winners

The automobile industry developed its own emissions-credit systems, beginning with California’s zero-emission vehicle program in 1990. Federal fuel-economy regulations subsequently incorporated credit trading, while the European Union established fleet emissions targets that allowed manufacturers to combine their vehicles into compliance pools.

The mechanism is straightforward. Manufacturers producing vehicles with emissions below regulatory targets accumulate credits or other compliance advantages. Manufacturers whose fleets exceed those targets may need to purchase credits, enter pooling arrangements, or face penalties. These transactions exist because governments have assigned financial value to meeting particular regulatory formulas.

Tesla became one of the largest beneficiaries. The company reported approximately $1.79 billion in regulatory credit revenue in 2023, $2.76 billion in 2024, and nearly $2 billion in 2025. Because these credits do not require Tesla to manufacture additional vehicles, the revenue can be extraordinarily profitable.

Europe provides an especially important example of how the system affects international competition. European Union emissions targets impose substantial financial pressure on manufacturers whose fleets exceed regulatory limits. Companies including Ford, Toyota, Stellantis, Mazda, and Subaru entered pooling arrangements involving Tesla. Nissan joined a similar arrangement with China’s BYD.

The result is a remarkable competitive situation. Established Western and Japanese automakers can find themselves paying electric-vehicle competitors for the regulatory privilege of continuing to sell gasoline-powered vehicles. Those costs affect profitability, investment, employment, and ultimately consumer prices.

Meanwhile, European governments have encouraged electric-vehicle adoption through emissions requirements and various national incentives, creating demand for technologies that Chinese manufacturers have spent years developing. European policymakers subsequently imposed additional tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles after investigating Chinese government subsidies, illustrating the contradiction between encouraging electrification and protecting domestic manufacturers from subsidized foreign competition.

The United States developed similar credit mechanisms, although tariffs and other trade restrictions have largely prevented Chinese electric-vehicle manufacturers from entering the American market directly. China therefore benefits from Western climate policies through different channels, depending on the country and its regulatory system.

California’s Partnership with China

California’s influence over American automobile manufacturing extended well beyond its borders. Under the Clean Air Act, California could obtain EPA approval to establish vehicle-emissions standards stricter than federal requirements, and other states could adopt those standards. President George W. Bush’s EPA rejected California’s greenhouse-gas waiver in 2008, but President Obama’s EPA reversed that decision in 2009 and approved additional requirements in 2013. The Obama administration also coordinated federal vehicle standards with California’s regulations, extending their influence nationwide. By 2025, California and other states adopting its vehicle standards represented approximately 40 percent of the American new-vehicle market.

What is less widely understood is that California was simultaneously developing formal partnerships with China on electric vehicles and climate regulation. In 2014, during Governor Jerry Brown’s administration, UC Davis established the China-U.S. Zero-Emission Vehicle Policy Lab with China’s Automotive Technology and Research Center, an institution involved in the regulation of China’s automobile industry.

The California Air Resources Board and China’s National Development and Reform Commission supported the partnership and were designated to co-chair its advisory board. In June 2017, Brown traveled to Beijing, met with President Xi Jinping, and signed an agreement to expand cooperation on electric vehicles, batteries, renewable energy, and emissions trading systems. California officials also met directly with Chinese manufacturers.

The cooperation continued in 2019 with the establishment of the California-China Climate Institute at UC Berkeley, working with China’s Tsinghua University. Its activities included joint research and policy development on climate and clean-energy regulation. In May 2026, the National Association of Scholars published an investigation alleging that these institutional relationships helped advance policies benefiting Chinese green-technology manufacturers. The agreements establish substantial cooperation, although they do not establish that Beijing directed California’s regulatory decisions.

Meanwhile, California continued pursuing increasingly restrictive vehicle-emissions requirements. Its Advanced Clean Cars II program sought to require that all new passenger vehicles sold in the state qualify as zero-emission by 2035, with limited allowances for plug-in hybrids.

Under Governor Gavin Newsom, California went further in 2023, adopting its Advanced Clean Fleets regulation to phase out diesel-powered semi-trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles, despite serious concerns about battery weight, reduced cargo capacity, charging infrastructure, and operating costs.

In January 2025, just seven days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, California withdrew its request for federal approval of the truck mandate, acknowledging that the incoming Trump administration was unlikely to approve it. Trump had previously withdrawn California’s greenhouse-gas and zero-emission vehicle waiver in 2019, Biden restored the earlier waiver in 2022 and approved the new passenger-vehicle requirements in December 2024, and Trump signed legislation disapproving the latter waiver in June 2025.

The national implications were significant. California was pursuing vehicle mandates that could influence manufacturing decisions throughout the United States while cooperating directly with CCP regulatory institutions and manufacturers. The documented partnerships do not prove improper Chinese influence, but they raise an important question:

Why were federal and California officials working directly with CCP government institutions and manufacturers to advance electric-vehicle policies that threatened American industrial competitiveness?

While California pushed mandates that would have reshaped the entire U.S. automobile market, it was simultaneously sharing regulatory expertise with institutions tied to the Chinese Communist Party and setting up manufacturing partnerships - impacting the entire US market.

Who evaluated the national-security risks, who stood to profit, and why were American policymakers helping a strategic rival develop the tools to compete against American industry?

China Read the Rulebook

China did not formally write the West’s climate regulations, but it was hardly a passive observer. California’s partnerships with Chinese government institutions demonstrate that Beijing had direct access to discussions about regulatory policies from which its manufacturers would later benefit. The Chinese Communist Party then leveraged these opportunities through an aggressive industrial strategy. California was not an isolated example, but part of a broader pattern of Chinese engagement with international climate policymaking, raising serious questions about how much influence Beijing has exercised over the rules governing Western industries.

International climate agreements have historically treated China as a developing country, granting it different obligations than those imposed on industrialized Western nations. Under the Kyoto Protocol, China had no binding national emissions-reduction target, but Chinese projects could generate credits that developed countries purchased to meet their own commitments.

One particularly revealing example involved HFC-23, an industrial waste gas with an extremely powerful greenhouse effect. Under Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism, destroying HFC-23 generated valuable carbon credits. The incentives became so distorted that destroying the waste gas could be substantially more profitable than producing the refrigerant associated with it.

Investigators raised concerns that some facilities were effectively being rewarded for generating additional waste gas that could subsequently be destroyed for credits. China hosted 11 of the 19 approved HFC-23 projects and collected substantial tax revenue from the proceeds. When the European Union moved to prohibit these credits, Chinese officials warned that facilities might release the gas rather than destroy it without compensation.

A program intended to reduce pollution had created financial incentives that could encourage the production of additional pollutants. This was a consequence of government-created rewards that were poorly aligned with the intended environmental outcome.

China subsequently developed its own vehicle-credit system, influenced in part by California’s regulations. Under the dual-credit policy adopted in 2017, automakers that failed to meet government targets needed credits from manufacturers producing qualifying vehicles. By 2019, nine of the ten automakers with the largest credit deficits were joint ventures involving foreign manufacturers, including General Motors, Ford, and Toyota. None of the ten largest credit earners were foreign manufacturers.

Foreign automakers operating in China were therefore helping finance the growth of their Chinese competitors through a regulatory system established by Beijing.

At the same time, China invested heavily in its domestic electric-vehicle industry. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Chinese government support for electric vehicles totaled at least $230.9 billion between 2009 and 2023. This support helped build enormous manufacturing capacity, battery production, supply chains, and internationally competitive companies.

Chinese manufacturers also developed genuine technological and manufacturing strengths, including battery innovation, vertical integration, and economies of scale. These advantages cannot be explained entirely by subsidies, but government industrial policy played a substantial role in creating the conditions for their growth.

Western governments were establishing policies that encouraged electric-vehicle adoption. China was building the industrial capacity to supply those vehicles.

Globalism and the Unequal Rulebook

For decades, multinational corporations and international institutions have promoted regulatory harmonization, arguing that common standards make international commerce more efficient. There are legitimate advantages to predictable international rules, particularly for companies operating in dozens of countries.

But harmonization also creates opportunities for businesses with the financial resources, political connections, and global manufacturing capacity to navigate complex regulatory systems.

The world’s vehicle-credit programs are not a single unified market. California, Europe, China, and Australia maintain different rules. Nevertheless, they share a common feature: government policy assigns financial value to particular technologies and imposes costs on competitors that do not satisfy preferred standards.

China recognized the commercial implications of this regulatory convergence and pursued an industrial strategy designed to benefit from it.

Western governments committed themselves to increasingly restrictive emissions targets, often without adequately considering whether domestic manufacturers could compete against heavily subsidized Chinese producers. Beijing invested in manufacturing capacity, secured critical supply chains, and established domestic policies that favored Chinese companies.

The resulting competitive pressures extend beyond automobiles. Batteries, critical minerals, renewable-energy equipment, and other strategically important industries are increasingly shaped by government mandates and subsidies. Losing domestic manufacturing capacity in these sectors creates economic vulnerabilities that extend far beyond the price of a new vehicle.

Economist Friedrich Hayek argued that central planners cannot gather the dispersed information reflected in market prices. Government-created emissions-credit systems illustrate part of that problem. Although credits may be traded between private companies, their value ultimately depends on regulatory limits, compliance requirements, and penalties established by government.

These are not prices emerging solely from consumer preferences and voluntary exchanges. They are financial signals created and shaped by political decisions.

China, which continues to organize much of its industrial policy through centralized planning, recognized the opportunity to compete in markets increasingly shaped by government mandates. It used its own industrial strategy to develop manufacturers capable of benefiting from regulatory decisions made in Western capitals.

What Happens When Government Changes the Rules?

The United States has recently begun reversing portions of its vehicle emissions-credit system.

In July 2025, federal legislation eliminated monetary penalties for violations of corporate average fuel-economy standards. In February 2026, the Environmental Protection Agency rescinded its 2009 greenhouse-gas endangerment finding for motor vehicles and repealed federal vehicle greenhouse-gas standards, including associated credit-trading provisions.

Tesla’s regulatory credit revenue fell to $146 million in the second quarter of 2026, compared with $439 million during the same period in 2025. Although other factors also influence these revenues, the decline illustrates how dependent the market is on government policy.

A regulatory credit has financial value because the government creates an obligation that makes someone need it. Reduce or eliminate that obligation, and the market for the credit can contract dramatically.

Australia continues to operate its emissions-credit program, although officials have considered changing the rules so credits are earned when vehicles are sold rather than imported. Such a reform could address the particular incentive illustrated by the BYD vehicles stored at Jamberoo, but it would not eliminate the broader financial transfers created by the emissions-credit system.

The Consequences of Government-Directed Markets

There is an important distinction between protecting the environment and creating elaborate regulatory markets that redistribute wealth, reshape entire industries, and alter the balance of economic power between nations based on nothing more than some modeling data and longtermerism. What began as a mechanism for reducing identifiable pollutants has evolved into a carbon credit system and a system of government mandates, financial penalties, and tradable credits that increasingly determines which manufacturers prosper and which struggle to survive.

The underlying problem is that governments are making enormous economic decisions based on computer models that necessarily contain uncertainty. The experience of COVID-19 should have taught policymakers the dangers of treating projections as certainties. Climate policy operates on a much longer timescale, but it raises the same fundamental questions about uncertainty, accountability, and the unintended consequences of government intervention.

There is also a national-security dimension that cannot be ignored. The Chinese Communist Party governs America’s principal strategic and economic competitor. Beijing has made industrial leadership, technological development, and control over critical supply chains central objectives of its national strategy. Its electric-vehicle industry is not simply the product of independent entrepreneurs responding to consumer demand. It has benefited from extensive state subsidies, coordinated industrial planning, and government policies designed to strengthen domestic manufacturers.

Meanwhile, Western governments have imposed emissions requirements that create additional costs for their own automobile industries while providing financial opportunities for CCP-aligned manufacturers positioned to satisfy those mandates. California’s documented cooperation with Chinese regulatory institutions and manufacturers makes this history particularly troubling.

American officials were sharing expertise and pursuing joint policy development and partnerships with the CCP and its affiliates, even as California sought to establish vehicle requirements to influence manufacturing decisions nationwide. Whether those partnerships and financial conflicts of interest materially shaped specific regulations remains an important unanswered question.

The consequences extend far beyond electric vehicles. Automobile manufacturing supports domestic employment, technological innovation, steel production, advanced electronics, battery development, and national industrial capacity. Policies that weaken domestic manufacturers while increasing dependence on Chinese and other foreign supply chains can have implications for economic resilience and national security. These concerns are especially significant when the foreign competitor is a government-directed economy pursuing its own strategic interests.

The irony is that Western governments, supposedly committed to free markets, have increasingly relied on centrally determined economic incentives. Basically, installing the beginnings of a command economy. China, openly committed to industrial planning, has developed the manufacturing capacity to benefit from those incentives. The result is a competitive environment shaped as much by government decisions as by technological innovation, manufacturing efficiency, or consumer preferences.

The Chinese vehicles parked at an Australian water park are therefore more than an unusual example of regulatory incentives. They illustrate how emissions policies can create financial opportunities that extend across national borders, sometimes benefiting companies supported by governments whose strategic interests conflict with those of the countries imposing the regulations.

The issue is not whether environmental risks deserve serious consideration. They do. The issue is whether governments have adequately evaluated the economic, industrial, and national-security consequences of the policies adopted in response.

The central question for American policymakers is whether regulations strengthened a strategic competitor at the expense of American industry, and whether the officials who promoted them understood, examined, and disclosed those consequences.

That question deserves a public accounting, particularly where American regulatory agencies and universities worked directly with Chinese government institutions during the development of these policies.

Independent Journalism Isn’t Free

Uncovering the connections between government policies, powerful corporations, international institutions, and the Chinese Communist Party takes time, research, and a willingness to ask questions that much of the mainstream media would rather ignore.

At Malone News, we dig into the history, follow the money, examine the evidence, and connect the dots. We do this because we believe readers deserve more than government talking points and carefully packaged narratives.

But this work isn’t free. Research, writing, editing, and publishing require substantial time and resources. We have a small team, and we pay the people who help us produce this work.

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References

Selected sources supporting the historical, economic, regulatory, and national-security analysis.

1. Coase, Ronald H. (1960). “The Problem of Social Cost.” Journal of Law and Economics, Vol. 3, pp. 1–44.

2. Dales, J. H. (1968). Pollution, Property and Prices. University of Toronto Press.

3. Hausfather, Zeke, and Glen Peters (2020). “Emissions: The ‘Business as Usual’ Story Is Misleading.” Nature, Vol. 577, pp. 618–620. Original article.

4. Ferguson, Neil M., et al. (March 16, 2020). “Impact of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) to Reduce COVID-19 Mortality and Healthcare Demand.” Imperial College London, Report 9.

5. International Monetary Fund (October 13, 2020). “A Long, Uneven and Uncertain Ascent.” IMF World Economic Outlook analysis. Source of the projected $28 trillion cumulative global output loss through 2025. IMF analysis.

6. Yandle, Bruce (1983). “Bootleggers and Baptists: The Education of a Regulatory Economist.” Regulation, Vol. 7, No. 3.

7. Business History Conference. “Enron and the Kyoto Protocol: U.S. Climate Change Policymaking in the 1990s.” Historical research.

8. CarExpert (2025). “Australian Emissions Loophole Sees BYD Import Excess Stock to Get Credits: Report,” and “Stockpiled BYD Cars Declared Illegal as Council Rejects Application.” Emissions-credit reporting.

9. Tesla, Inc. (2025–2026). Annual and quarterly reports, regulatory-credit revenue. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Q2 2026 filing.

10. Center for Strategic and International Studies (2024). “The Chinese EV Dilemma: Subsidized Yet Striking.” Analysis of Chinese government support for electric-vehicle manufacturing. CSIS analysis.

11. University of California, Davis (September 8, 2014). “China and UC Davis Partner to Put Zero Emission Vehicles on a Faster Track.” Establishment of the China-U.S. Zero-Emission Vehicle Policy Lab with Chinese regulatory participation. UC Davis announcement. UC Davis

12. Office of Governor Jerry Brown (June 6, 2017). “Governor Brown Meets with President Xi of the People’s Republic of China, Signs Agreement with National Government to Boost Green Technology.” Official California government record, including the cooperation agreement. Governor’s announcement and agreement. Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.

13. University of California, Berkeley (September 23, 2019). “UC Berkeley, Former Gov. Jerry Brown Partner with China to Spur Climate Action.” Establishment of the California-China Climate Institute and partnership with Tsinghua University. UC Berkeley announcement. Berkeley News

14. National Association of Scholars (May 18, 2026). Behind the Climate Curtain: China’s Hidden Role in California’s Energy Mandates and University Partnerships. Investigation of California-China institutional relationships and alleged policy influence. Full report. National Association of Scholars

15. Congressional Research Service. California’s Vehicle Emissions Standards and Federal Waivers. Legislative and regulatory history of EPA approvals, withdrawals, and congressional actions. CRS report

Audio Version:

Executive Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Zizians: When Rationalism Becomes a Cult

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

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

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

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

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

LaSota took these ideas in a much stranger direction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The question is how such a transformation becomes possible.

The Intellectual Culture Behind the Beliefs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Promise of Immortality and Something Greater

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

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

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

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

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

Longtermism offers a different kind of transcendence.

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

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

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

Simulation theory adds another dimension.

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

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

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

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

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

From Silicon Valley to Mainstream Culture

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

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

Some participants are merely curious. Others describe genuine belief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the cultural significance of the interview is considerable.

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

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

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

From Technological Faith to Political Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Artificial Intelligence Becomes God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End

The conversation that inspired this essay

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

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

Help Keep Malone News Independent

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

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

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

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

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Robert and Jill

References:

The Zizians and Silicon Valley’s rationalist culture

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

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

Simulation theory and technological immortality

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

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

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

AI consciousness, remote viewing, and popular media

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

AI regulation, corporate power, and political influence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now comes Donald Trump.

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

A parody of himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: JGM

For the text version, go to

Audio Version:

By: Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone

Washington, DC | October 31, 2026

The Big Picture

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Government Websites Went Dark

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Broke

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

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

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

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

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

From Website Shutdowns to Warnings of War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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An Old Textbook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Business of Moving Money

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

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

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

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

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

Global Dreams: Twenty Years Later

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

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

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

2. a Global Shopping Mall of international consumer brands;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What They Got Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What They Missed

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

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

Globalized Corporatism

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

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

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

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

The Global Power They Could Not Have Imagined

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

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

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

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

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

Where Their Solutions Fell Short

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis and Policy Recommendations

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

Audio Version:

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

How did we get here? And who benefits?

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

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

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

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

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

A Bank Closes Early

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

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

Why Global Corporations Want One Set of Rules

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

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

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

But there is another side to the story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Writes the Rules for American Banks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Benefits?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When One Rule Fails Everywhere at Once

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Access to Banking Becomes a Tool of Control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Challenging the Petrodollar and America’s Financial Dominance

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

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

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

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

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

The Benefits of International Financial Cooperation

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

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

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

The Real Danger of Globalized Financial Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The liberal mainstream media fell down again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enough with the cheating.

By Dr. Jill Glasspool Malone and Robert W. Malone

Political Opinion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald writes:

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

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

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

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

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CRUCIAL FACTS ON THE FLAVIO BOLSONARO MATTER:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will Chamberlain @willchamberlain writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biden was complicit in Lula’s rise to power:

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

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

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

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

The video:

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

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

But the deep state isn’t answering that question…

When the Courts Become Political Weapons, Democracy Is in Danger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End.

Audio Version:

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

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

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

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

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

An Old Right with a Long Pedigree

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

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

How the Courthouse Door Closed

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

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

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

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

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

Who Writes the Standard of Care

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

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

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

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

The Financial Interests Behind the AAP Lawsuit Deserve Scrutiny

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

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

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

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

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

The September 2025 Undark investigation reported that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Physician’s Right to Disagree

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

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

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

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

When Medical Dissent Became a Homeland Security Concern

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

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

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

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

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

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

New State and Federal Legislation

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

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

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

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

What We Propose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What These Reforms Cannot Fix

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

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

Sovereignty over Your Own Body

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KFF Health News. 2026. “First Edition: Thursday, January 29, 2026.”

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

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

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

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

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

National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. 1979. The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

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

Pius XI. 1931. Quadragesimo Anno. Vatican City.

Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital, 211 N.Y. 125, 105 N.E. 92 (1914).

Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10. 1949. Vol. 2. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

The Capitolist. 2026. “Florida Senate Passes ‘Medical Freedom Act.’” March 9.

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

U.S. Congress. 2025a. PREP Repeal Act. H.R. 4388, 119th Congress.

U.S. Congress. 2025b. End the Vaccine Carveout Act. H.R. 4668, 119th Congress.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security. 2022. National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin. February 7.

World Medical Association. 1964. Declaration of Helsinki: Recommendations Guiding Doctors in Clinical Research. Adopted by the 18th World Medical Assembly, Helsinki, Finland.

World Medical Association. 1981. Declaration of Lisbon on the Rights of the Patient. Adopted by the 34th World Medical Assembly, Lisbon, Portugal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mosquito Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Approach: Making Mosquito Blood Meals Lethal

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

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

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

What Is Florida Spraying?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dengue Is Not Necessarily a One-Time Illness

Here is where dengue becomes potentially dangerous.

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

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

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

A person can therefore contract dengue multiple times.

And sometimes, the second infection is worse.

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

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

What is ADE?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What About a Dengue Vaccine?

This is where the story becomes even more complicated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Dengue Here to Stay?

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

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

Nevertheless, the conditions for sustained transmission are increasingly apparent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Florida residents and Visitors can register for Alerts

• Hillsborough County spray notifications

• Orange County, Florida

• Pinellas County dengue and spraying alerts

• Pasco County treatment notifications

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

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

Sometimes an earlier infection protects us.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

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

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

References and Further Reading

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

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

3. CDC. About Dengue.

4. CDC. Dengue Vaccination.

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

6. EPA. Mosquito Control.

7. Hillsborough County. Mosquito Control Operations.

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