M A L O N E . N E W S

Forty-Four Billion Dollars, No Data

Moderna and Merck say their personalized mRNA cancer therapy worked in a large melanoma trial. They have not yet shown anyone the data. The distance between those two facts is the story.

By Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, and Jill Glasspool Malone, PhD

On the morning of August 19, Merck and Moderna issued a press release. It said that a large clinical trial of a personalized mRNA product, given alongside Merck’s cancer drug Keytruda, had succeeded in patients whose melanoma had been surgically removed (Merck and Moderna 2026a).

By the closing bell, Moderna’s stock had risen 177 percent. The company’s market value went from about $25 billion to about $69 billion in one trading session. Trading volume ran roughly nineteen times its three-month average (Motley Fool 2026). Merck gained more than 12 percent (CNBC 2026). Headlines around the world announced that an mRNA cancer vaccine had finally worked.

We should be plain about our interest before going further. One of us designed and implemented the core messenger RNA construct that remains in use today. He also developed the benchtop version of the manufacturing process the industry later scaled, and wrote the initial patent disclosures in the late 1980s covering the use of RNA as a drug and its application to vaccination. That is the documented basis for the claim to original inventorship of this platform. It rests on the patent record and its filing dates.

It has never included a claim to have invented the COVID vaccines, or to have worked alone. Read what follows as the assessment of people who would like this technology to succeed, and who also read the fine print.

The press release contains no numbers.

What the product is

Some vocabulary first, because the coverage has been sloppy with it.

Every tumor carries mutations. Those mutations produce slightly altered proteins that the patient’s own healthy cells do not make. Immunologists call these altered proteins neoantigens, meaning new antigens. In principle, they are flags the immune system could learn to recognize.

The Merck and Moderna product, now named intismeran autogene, works from that idea. A surgeon removes the tumor. A laboratory sequences it and identifies mutations unique to that patient. Software picks up to 34 of them. A custom mRNA molecule is then synthesized that instructs the patient’s cells to manufacture those specific flagged proteins, wrapped in the same fatty particles used in the COVID shots (Merck and Moderna 2026a).

The patient receives nine injections over about six months. That is the Moderna component alone. Counted alongside the Keytruda infusions, the earlier trial asked patients for twenty-seven administrations across a year, and the current one asks for eighteen (Weber et al. 2024; Merck and Moderna 2026a). Claims circulating online that Moderna's product is itself an eighteen- or twenty-seven-injection course are wrong. Those totals include Merck's antibody drug, which has been in use since 2014 and is given intravenously.

Keytruda does something different. It releases a brake that tumors use to switch off immune cells that would otherwise attack them. The theory of the combination is that one drug supplies the target and the other removes the restraint.

Moderna no longer calls this a vaccine. The company calls it an individualized neoantigen therapy, and that is the honest description (Boston Globe 2026). Nobody is preventing melanoma with this. It is given to people who already had the disease cut out, to reduce the chance that it returns. Physicians call that adjuvant treatment. Most of the press has gone on using the word vaccine anyway, and that word is doing work in this debate that the underlying science does not support.

What the announcement actually said

The trial is called INTerpath-001. It enrolled 1,137 patients whose melanoma had been completely removed. Two-thirds received the personalized injections plus Keytruda. One third received Keytruda alone. Treatment ran about a year (Merck and Moderna 2026a).

The companies report that the combination beat Keytruda alone on two measures. The first is recurrence-free survival, meaning how long patients go before the cancer comes back or they die. The second is distant metastasis-free survival, meaning how long before the cancer appears somewhere far from the original site.

Now consider what the release does not contain. There is no hazard ratio, which is the standard measure of how much a treatment reduces risk. There is no confidence interval, which tells a reader how precise that estimate is. There is no p-value. There is no count of how many patients in each group actually relapsed. There are no survival curves. There is no breakdown by disease stage. The phrase used is “statistically significant and clinically meaningful,” which is a claim about numbers rather than the numbers themselves.

The release is not short on language, only on data. Professor Georgina Long of Melanoma Institute Australia, the trial’s principal investigator, called the result “a landmark moment for adjuvant melanoma treatment” (AJMC 2026). Stephane Bancel, Moderna’s chief executive, described the findings as “a pivotal moment for the field of cancer research” (Merck and Moderna 2026a).

Both statements may prove correct. Neither can be checked by anyone outside the sponsor, because the release supplies no figure against which to test them.

Two further details in the release deserve attention. The result comes from a planned interim look, taken before the trial finished. Trials reported at the first moment they cross a statistical threshold tend to overstate the size of the benefit compared with the final tally. That is a known property of the method, not an accusation.

Interim looks are legitimate, and they exist for a sound reason. If a treatment is plainly working, it becomes hard to justify keeping the comparison group from it. But they are not free. Each look spends part of a fixed error budget, so whatever remains for the final analysis must clear a stricter bar, and trials are enlarged in advance to absorb the cost. The companies have not said how many looks were planned, how much of the budget this one consumed, or which threshold it crossed. Without those three figures, a reader outside the sponsor cannot judge how strong the result was. Only that it was strong enough to announce.

Note also what did not happen. The trial did not stop. It continues to measure whether anyone lives longer. What ended early was the wait for a headline.

Overall survival, the measure of whether patients live longer, is not yet available. The release states plainly that the study continues in order to assess it (Merck and Moderna 2026a).

Read more

The British Home Office has apparently concluded that asylum seekers arriving in the United Kingdom require a tutorial on what should be universal morality.

This week, the government released “Understanding behaviours and expectations in the UK: A guide for asylum seekers,” accompanied by a series of illustrated posters explaining some of the finer points of British life.

Women are equal to men. Women may work, study and travel without a man’s permission. You may not hit or control your wife. Sex requires consent, including within marriage. Children under 16 cannot consent to sex. Do not follow strangers. Do not block their path. Do not make sexual comments. Do not whistle or make kissing noises at women. Do not photograph people in private situations without permission.

There are even separate government posters devoted to “Age of consent,” “Consent,” “Child abuse,” “Domestic abuse,” “Gender equality,” “Harassment,” and “Photography and filming.”

These are not memes created by some foreign bot account on X. They are official Home Office materials, published by His Majesty’s Government on August 19, 2026.

Which raises the rather obvious question that polite society will presumably regard as impolite:

Why did the British government believe these particular instructions needed to be written down?

Governments generally do not spend taxpayer money designing illustrated educational campaigns reminding newcomers not to rape women, abuse children, beat their wives or sexually harass strangers unless someone, somewhere, has concluded that there is a reason to do so.

Over the last decades, Britons have experienced very large migration flows from profoundly different cultures, which might produce “problems” of assimilation. These were routinely dismissed as xenophobic, racist or simply “far right.”

For years, organized groups of men, disproportionately British Pakistani in several of the towns at the center of the scandal, groomed, trafficked and raped vulnerable girls in places such as Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and Telford. Authorities had repeated warnings, yet victims were ignored, blamed or treated as troublesome teenagers. Subsequent (conservative) official inquiries documented catastrophic failures by police, councils and social services, including reluctance in some institutions to confront the ethnicity of perpetrators for fear of being called racist or inflaming community tensions.

In Rotherham alone, the official inquiry estimated that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013. Britain learned, at an appalling cost to thousands of girls, that refusing to discuss cultural differences does not make those differences disappear.

Yet after decades of scandals across numerous English towns, the government’s own 2025 national audit concluded that the data were still so inadequate that Britain could not reliably say how many children had been victimized by grooming gangs nationwide.

So, guess what mainstream media and the liberal parliament had to say about that?

Apparently the Home Office, while not actually addressing the issue of rape gangs head on, has now decided that spelling out a few expectations might be prudent.

Progress, I suppose? Not!

How about actually arresting and deporting immigrants who break the law?

Real progress, as Britain’s Conservative Party and Reform UK have both campaigned on, would mean dramatically reducing the enormous influx of migrants into a country roughly the size of Alabama, but with about 11 times as many people packed into essentially the same land area.

One might imagine that population density, housing, infrastructure and assimilation would eventually enter the conversation. But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards for jolly old England.

JGM

Two decay curves

Peter Panum sailed to the Faroe Islands in 1846 to investigate an epidemic that infected some six thousand of the islands’ seven thousand eight hundred residents. The exceptions were the elderly who had survived the epidemic of 1781. Not one of them was reinfected sixty-five years later (Panum 1847).

Influenza changes its surface proteins continuously, which is why last year’s antibodies stop fitting this year’s virus. Measles does not do this. It carries a single serotype and does not drift, so an antibody response raised against the wild virus of 1781 still fitted the virus of 1846 exactly. The durability question for measles is a question about the human immune system alone, uncomplicated by any change in the target.

Vaccine-induced immunity behaves differently from what Panum found among the Faroese. Bianchi and colleagues tested 611 Italian students and hospital residents. Twenty percent of the twice vaccinated had no detectable protective IgG, against six percent of those reporting natural infection, with geometric mean antibody levels of 92.2 and 213.3, respectively (Bianchi et al. 2021). A 2022 systematic review in the Journal of Infectious Diseases put the general finding in its title: in elimination settings, measles antibodies wane after vaccination but not after infection. Kennedy and colleagues at Mayo reached a parallel conclusion on the differential durability of the measles and mumps components of MMR (Kennedy et al. 2019).

How the body decides how long to remember

A B cell is a white blood cell carrying a single antibody design on its surface, generated by a random shuffling of gene segments before the cell ever meets anything. Each of us carries billions of them, and collectively they hold an enormous library of possible shapes. When a virus arrives, the small subset whose antibodies happen to fit some piece of that virus structure (a viral antigen) gets activated.

Those cells do not begin producing antibody straight away. They migrate into a temporary structure called a germinal center, which forms inside lymph nodes, tonsils, and the spleen during an infection and dissolves afterward. Inside it, B cells introduce mutations into the genes encoding their own antibodies at a rate a million times higher than ordinary genetic mutation. They then compete for limited access to the virus antigen and for survival signals from helper T cells. A cell whose mutation improved the fit captures more antigen, receives more help, survives, and divides. A cell whose mutation worsened the fit dies. The cycle repeats for weeks, and immunity gradually improves over the course of an infection rather than appearing fully formed at the start. The antibody a patient carries in week four grips its target far more tightly than the one they carried in week one. Immunologists call that grip strength avidity, and it matters as much or more than the quantity of antibody present. Antibody quantity is measured as titer and is easy to measure, which is why titer is what gets reported. Antibody avidity is much harder to measure, and so is rarely reported except in academic studies and a few clinical trials.

The germinal center produces two surviving antibody-associated B cell types, and the difference between them determines everything that follows.

Memory B cells leave the germinal center and go quiet. They circulate for decades doing nothing measurable, carrying their refined antibody design on the surface, waiting. On re-exposure to the antigen they are primed to recognize, they activate, divide rapidly, and begin manufacturing antibody in quantity, a process taking three to seven days. In vaccine terms, this is called a recall response.

Long-lived plasma cells do something else. They abandon surface antibody production, migrate to the bone marrow, and settle into specialized niches where supporting cells keep them alive. There they secrete antibody continuously into the bloodstream for decades, neither dividing nor requiring further contact with the virus. A plasma cell seeded in a Faroese child in 1781 was still pumping measles antibody into that person’s blood in 1846.

When a laboratory reports a “resting” measles antibody level (titer), it is measuring the output of that bone marrow population. Memory B cells contribute nothing to a resting titer because they are secreting nothing. Every seroprevalence study on this subject inherits the resulting ambiguity. A low number establishes that the plasma cell pool has thinned, and says nothing directly about whether the memory cells remain.

How large a plasma cell pool a person ends up with depends on how much antigen the germinal centers processed and for how long during the period when this germinal center B cell “education” process occurs, which is the key characteristic that separates disease from vaccination. This helps explain why “natural immunity” from an infection usually works better than vaccination for producing durable, long-lasting immunity. Basically, like a lot of things, good B cell education takes time and experience.

Why the vaccine cannot match the disease

Wild measles is a systemic infection. The virus replicates for days to enormous titers, spreads through every lymph node in the body, and feeds antigen to germinal centers across the whole lymphoid system for two weeks or more. The plasma cell pool that processes produces is very large, and because those cells persist without further stimulation, so does the antibody they produce.

Attenuated vaccine strains are crippled on purpose. They were passaged repeatedly in cell culture until they lost the ability to replicate efficiently in humans, which is also what makes them safe. An attenuated vaccine strain (like what is used in the measles vaccines) produces a brief, limited, largely local infection. The germinal centers it drives are smaller and shorter lived, and the plasma cell population they seed into marrow is smaller in proportion. Antibody from a smaller pool falls below detection sooner as individual plasma cells die off.

The vaccine's safety and its shorter durability are basically the same property viewed from two angles. That fact is uncomfortable for those who take the simplistic view of all vaccines being “safe and effective”. It argues for a better product rather than against vaccination, but it does mean that vaccine-induced and “natural” immunity achieved through actual infection should not be described as equivalent. They are not equivalent. Naturally acquired immunity from measles is clearly superior, but it comes with a cost: the risks associated with a primary live measles infection.

Two further consequences follow that typical oversimplified “public health” messaging tends to skip past. Until elimination, vaccinated people were regularly re-exposed to circulating wild virus. Those exposures were usually silent, producing no illness, but they restimulated memory cells and topped up antibody levels. Eliminating measles removed that free, silent booster, and universal vaccination program success unmasked the gradually waning memory-cell immunity that endemic circulation had been correcting for decades. Separately, infants of vaccinated mothers receive lower antibody levels across the placenta than infants of naturally immune mothers, widening the window of infant vulnerability before the first dose. Both effects are permanent features of the transition away from a naturally immune population. Vaccination also has a “public health” cost, one that is never tallied in the approved pro-vaccination messaging narratives.

Where the susceptibility accumulates

Measles mortality does not track age in a straight line. It traces a U. Infants under one year carry the highest risk (particularly infants born of vaccinated mothers relative to mothers with naturally acquired immunity). The curve falls through early childhood, bottoms out between ages five and nine, then climbs again through adult life. The World Health Organization places the bottom of this U-shaped curve (adult inflection point) near age thirty (WHO 2026).

Set that curve against the serology. Seropositivity is defined by measuring total circulating anti-measles antibodies. Recent Czech survey data put seropositivity at 61.5 percent in the 30 to 39 cohort, the lowest of any age stratum, while those fifty and older who were infected in the pre-vaccine era sat at 96 percent and above. The population accumulating antibody gaps is the same population moving onto the steeper arm of the severity curve. In other words, the consequences of waning vaccine-induced immunity in the elderly are currently masked because they have natural immunity from being infected as children. But over time, as the global elderly population will become dominated by those who were vaccinated rather than infected, the problems and risks associated with the relative lack of durable protection from measles vaccines will become more prevalent.

Adult measles is a different disease from the pediatric version. Hospitalization runs several fold higher, and pneumonia dominates the mortality. Hepatic involvement has been reported in the large majority of adult cases. Encephalitis holds roughly flat by age at about one per thousand, but a patient with reduced physiologic reserve tolerates it far worse.

Older adults are almost absent from current case counts, and that absence is immunity rather than resistance. Americans born before 1957 nearly all contracted measles as children. Whatever we know about measles in a seventy-year-old comes from scattered case reports, because no susceptible elderly cohort exists to study. That naturally immune generation is dying off, and what replaces it is a population whose protection decays on a schedule.

The obvious remedy

The intuitive policy response to all of this is another dose. Serological modelers in Thailand proposed a third measles-containing dose at age eighteen to twenty, calculated to close the young adult gap. Korea is weighing a third MMR dose for young healthcare workers. Occupational health programs in most countries already do a version of this, screening staff and revaccinating the seronegative regardless of documented history.

Extend that logic, and you arrive at the proposal worth examining. Give a third dose in late adolescence. Give a fourth somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five, when the serological data say a vaccinated cohort has spent decades decaying without natural boosting. The reasoning is coherent, the target population is real, and the delivery infrastructure already exists. Inconveniently, it also does not work.

Why the boost fails

Anichini and colleagues followed twenty-four individuals who remained seronegative for measles years after completing the two-dose schedule. Eleven seroconverted after a single booster, and thirteen required a second. Antibody levels were then tracked at one and three years. Booster doses in subjects with waning antibodies produced low IgG levels that declined significantly over three years, and neutralizing antibody stayed low in single- and double-booster recipients alike (Anichini et al. 2024). The paper’s title states the conclusion without hedging: seronegative vaccinees may not benefit from multiple booster doses in restoring immunity.

Fiebelkorn and colleagues had reported the same shape in young adults given a third MMR dose, measuring neutralizing antibody, cell-mediated immunity, and antibody avidity before and after (Fiebelkorn et al. 2016). Levels rise and then return toward where they started. Korean investigators following seronegative healthcare workers two years after one or two booster doses found fewer than half retaining a medium or high neutralizing titer.

The explanation lies in what a live attenuated vaccine has to do in order to work. It must replicate. A dose of MMR contains a small quantity of weakened virus, and the response it provokes depends on that virus multiplying enough to generate a meaningful quantity of antigen over a sustained period. Only sustained presentation drives germinal centers hard enough to seed new plasma cells.

In a partially immune person, whatever antibody remains, even at levels a laboratory calls negative, binds the incoming vaccine virus and neutralizes it. The particles are cleared before they can establish an infection, and the germinal center machinery never fully engages. What happens instead is a recall response. Existing memory B cells recognize the antigen, wake, divide, and secrete antibody, which raises the measured level for a period of months to a couple of years. Immunologists call this an anamnestic response, and it is real protection while it lasts. But memory cells doing a temporary job is a different thing from construction of a new bone marrow plasma cell population, and when the recall response subsides the person returns to where they began.

The result runs backward from what the policy intends. Boosting works best in people carrying no residual antibody, meaning those who never responded properly in the first place, and works worst in people with partial immunity, who are the population the exercise means to protect. A dose at fifty buys a few years of elevated antibody in some fraction of recipients. It cannot restore the durability that natural infection confers, because the mechanism generating that durability is structurally unavailable to an attenuated virus meeting pre-existing antibody.

Clearly a better vaccine is needed. One that immunologically acts more like an attenuated measles virus, but does not require viral replication. That is precisely the rationale that I developed in the late 1980s for using nucleic acid-based gene therapy (DNA or mRNA) for vaccination purposes. The challenge both then and now is how to do this safely.

The seroprevalence numbers also overstate the gap

The twenty percent figure predicts something we ought to be able to see. If a fifth of two-dose adults were genuinely susceptible, outbreaks would generate adult attack rates that nobody observes. Measles is among the most transmissible pathogens known, and a susceptible fifth of the adult population would show up in outbreak data immediately.

The gap between plasma cells and memory cells explains the discrepancy. As previously discussed, serum antibody levels measure the first population and are blind to the second. Someone whose measured antibody has fallen below the laboratory threshold may still carry an intact memory compartment holding the high-avidity antibody designs refined during their original germinal center response.

Timing decides whether that matters. Measles has an incubation period of ten to fourteen days between exposure and illness, and a memory recall response begins producing antibody within three to seven days. Someone with no circulating antibody but functional memory can therefore mount a defense before the virus completes its expansion, and will often experience either nothing at all or a mild, modified illness. This is why the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices declines to recommend routine antibody screening of documented two-dose recipients, a position defensible on the biology rather than merely being conservative or cost-driven.

The threshold itself is also thin. The currently accepted working correlate of protection near 120 mIU/mL descends largely from a single college outbreak investigation, where investigators compared pre-exposure antibody levels against those who subsequently fell ill, and used that correlation to derive a number (Chen et al. 1990). An entire architecture of screening, revaccination, and occupational policy rests on that one study. Nobody has re-derived it in an elimination-era population (ergo, the current situation rather than a population with many who had natural immunity), and every argument about waning, this one included, inherits its uncertainty.

What re-dosing can reasonably accomplish

Some of the case survives. Targeted revaccination has defensible indications, though not the ones a fixed-age schedule would capture.

As if all of this were not complicated enough, birth cohort is more important than chronological age in this case. The American two-dose schedule did not become universal until 1989, so people born between 1957 and 1985 may have received a single dose, and single-dose recipients carry documented secondary failure risk that twice-vaccinated recipients largely do not.

Occupational, travel, and outbreak-response revaccination all remain sensible for this birth cohort based on the same reasoning that supports post-exposure prophylaxis. A transient antibody elevation is worth having when you can predict the exposure window, and worth much less when you cannot.

One population no dosing schedule reaches. Adults on rituximab (a monoclonal antibody indicated for the treatment of B-cell malignancies and autoimmune disorders) or other B-cell depleting therapy, on methotrexate, on chronic corticosteroids, or with active malignancy face the highest measles risk among adults, and they cannot receive a live attenuated vaccine at all. Rituximab destroys the B cell compartment outright, erasing both memory cells and the capacity to respond to a new dose. Their protection depends on the immunity of the people around them and on post-exposure immune globulin. Any honest discussion of adult measles policy has to account for the group the policy structurally cannot help.

The one cohort worth actually finding

An argument about waning immunity in the general population is a diagnosis. A narrower group in this country has a concrete policy ask that already exists, sits on the books, and goes almost entirely ignored and unexecuted by “public health” guidance and practice.

Two measles vaccines were licensed in the United States in 1963. One was a live attenuated Edmonston B product. The other was a formalin-inactivated killed vaccine, marketed as Pfizer-Vax Measles-K. The killed Pfizer product did not protect, and it was withdrawn in 1967. Fewer than one million American children received it (CDC 2026c).

Failure to protect was the smaller problem. Fulginiti and colleagues described what happened when those children met wild measles years later. They developed atypical measles syndrome: high fever, a rash beginning peripherally on the palms and soles and spreading inward, nodular pulmonary infiltrates, pleural effusions, and very high antibody levels (Fulginiti et al. 1967).

The immunology behind that syndrome is worth spelling out. Killing a virus with formalin cross-links its surface proteins and distorts their shape, so the immune system builds antibodies against a deformed template. Those antibodies bind the real virus, but they bind it in the wrong places and with poor grip, failing to block it from entering cells. Antibody that attaches without neutralizing causes harm. Virus and antibody form clumps called immune complexes, which lodge in small blood vessels and in lung tissue and recruit inflammatory cells to attack them. Much of the lung damage in atypical measles is the patient’s own immune system reacting to those deposits. The helper T cell response was also skewed toward supporting antibody production rather than destroying infected cells, leaving the patient with the wrong tool for the job. This is an example of vaccine-induced disease enhancement, one of many.

Clinically the syndrome runs backward from ordinary measles, which produces a rash starting on the face and moving down and out. Atypical measles starts at the extremities and moves inward, so a physician pattern-matching on the classic description will not recognize it.

ACIP has recommended revaccinating this group for decades. Anyone who received killed measles vaccine, or measles vaccine of unknown type, between 1963 and 1967 should be considered unvaccinated and given at least one dose of live attenuated vaccine (CDC 2026c). Documented receipt of live vaccine in that window remains valid and needs nothing further. But finding documentation of which vaccine was given to whom decades ago is essentially impossible.

Children vaccinated between 1963 and 1967 were born between 1953 and 1966. Those born before 1957 are presumed immune from natural infection anyway, which leaves a birth cohort of 1957 to 1966. In 2026, they are approximately sixty to seventy years old.

They now sit on the climbing arm of the severity curve. Reduced pulmonary reserve and comorbid disease are common at that age, and so is immunosuppressive therapy for rheumatologic or oncologic indications. They are young enough that the pre-vaccine natural immunity of their older siblings does not cover them, and they would present, if infected, with a syndrome almost no practicing American physician has seen.

Practically nobody holds a 1963 vaccination card. That is not an obstacle to the recommendation. It is the reason for it. Without documentation that the dose was live, the guidance directs revaccination, and one dose of MMR in an immunocompetent sixty-five-year-old is a cheap, well-characterized intervention. The screening question fits in a sentence, belongs in every adult primary care visit for that birth cohort, and is not being asked. A rational public health response would be to make monovalent measles vaccine available for these people, so that they were not forced to receive unnecessary mumps and rubella vaccine products.

This is the version of a re-dosing recommendation I would defend before a policy committee. It targets a defined cohort rather than a chronological band, and rests on a documented product failure rather than a modeled seroprevalence curve. No new guidance is required, because the guidance was written decades ago and has simply stopped being executed.

What happens when the virus meets a susceptible host

Clemens von Pirquet reported in 1908 that children with measles lost their reactivity to the tuberculin skin test (von Pirquet 1908). That test works by injecting a tuberculosis protein under the skin and looking for a raised area two days later, which appears only if the person carries T cells already primed against tuberculosis. Children who had that reaction before measles stopped having it afterward, for weeks. Their T cell memory had been damaged, and physicians of that era also watched tuberculosis itself re-appear after measles.

Michael Mina and colleagues put numbers on the consequence a century later. They compared measles incidence against subsequent deaths from other infectious diseases in England and Wales, the United States, and Denmark, testing how long a delay best explained the relationship. The best fit corresponded to twenty-seven months, implicating measles in a large share of the pre-vaccine childhood mortality that had been attributed to other organisms (Mina et al. 2015). In other words, live measles infection produces a short-term (approximately 27-month) acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Just so that Wikipedia editors and corporate media shills are clear, I am not saying that measles causes the AIDS disease classically associated with HIV infection. I am saying that primary live measles infection in children causes a different form of an acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.

The same group (Mina et al.) later measured the damage directly. Their assay, VirScan, uses a library of engineered viruses displaying short fragments of thousands of human pathogens on their surfaces. Serum is washed over the library and whatever antibodies the patient carries stick to their matching fragments. Sequencing the captured fragments produces an inventory of everything a person’s antibodies recognize. Applied to seventy-seven unvaccinated Dutch children before and after natural measles, it showed elimination of between eleven and seventy-three percent of that inventory (Mina et al. 2019). Petrova and colleagues sequenced the antibody genes of B cells in a subset of the same children. They documented loss of previously expanded memory clones alongside incomplete rebuilding of the naive pool, which returned in an immature state (Petrova et al. 2019). Read that last part again. What that means is that recovery from this type of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome did not result in recovery of the lost “educated” memory B cells. “Recovery” in this case means getting back to a population of B cells that are in a pre-educated, pre-immune state

Repertoire loss unfolds across two to three years. A separate and much faster failure accounts for the deaths.

How does this happen? Measles virus enters cells by latching onto a specific surface protein, in the way a key fits a lock. Its principal lock on immune cells is a molecule called CD150, also known as SLAM. Distribution of that molecule determines what the virus can infect, and CD150 is displayed on activated and memory T and B cells, on dendritic cells, and on macrophages. These are the cells that get killed by measles virus. Resting naive cells carry little of it. By the accident of receptor choice, the virus targets the cells that hold a person’s accumulated immunological memory.

Acute measles produces a profound drop in circulating lymphocytes that resolves within one to two weeks, and the speed of that recovery is why the damage went underestimated for a century. Macaque work from de Vries and colleagues showed why the recovery misleads (de Vries et al. 2012). Lymphocytes repopulating the blood are overwhelmingly new cells generated during the response to measles itself, specific for measles and little else. A complete blood count reports how many lymphocytes a patient has, and cannot report what those lymphocytes recognize. The count normalizes while the range of things the immune system can answer does not.

Simultaneously, the virus destroys the ciliated cells lining the airway. Those cells beat in coordinated waves to sweep mucus, debris, and inhaled bacteria upward and out. With them gone, bacteria that would ordinarily be cleared settle into the lower airway instead.

So the patient with measles pneumonitis has an injured airway with no clearance mechanism, a hollowed-out immune memory compartment, and a complete blood count that reads reassuringly normal- which is what physicians are trained to focus on. Secondary bacterial pneumonia is the modal mechanism by which measles causes death, rather than an alternative diagnosis to it. Which is why physicians must be hyper-alert to the onset and treatment of bacterial pneumonia after measles infection, instead of relying on the old clinical saw of not treating a viral infection with antibiotics.

West Texas as the demonstration

CDC reviewed medical records for 54 of the 60 patients hospitalized during the first two months of the Gaines County outbreak. Forty-nine were under eighteen, and forty-eight had no underlying condition. All were unvaccinated or of unknown status. Seventy-two percent developed pneumonia, and seventy percent required supplemental oxygen (CDC 2026b).

Thirty-one and a half percent carried a documented co-infecting pathogen. Mycoplasma pneumoniae accounted for five, influenza four, respiratory syncytial virus three, and group A Streptococcus three, with further organisms recovered from sputum and blood cultures. Just over half received antibiotics (CDC 2026b). Infection and disease from those organisms are what an emptied memory B-cell compartment and a stripped airway produce.

Two previously healthy unvaccinated children died in Lubbock hospitals, in February and April of 2025. A third death occurred in an unvaccinated New Mexico adult. Pierre Kory reviewed records released by the families and argued that both children died of bacterial pneumonia that was mismanaged (Kory 2025). He faults the antibiotic selection and the discontinuation of antibiotics on a readmission days after ICU discharge. He also faults a late sputum culture and the failure to consider hospital-acquired organisms until day six of eight. Those records have not been published in full, and no independent panel has adjudicated the reading, so the criticisms stand as hypothesis rather than finding.

If the hypothesis is correct, what it claims is that the treating teams anchored on the viral diagnosis and were slow to pursue the bacterial one. That would confirm rather than contradict measles as the cause of death. Post-measles bacterial superinfection is the specific pathway measles uses, and a clinician misses it because measles occupies the diagnostic frame physicians are typically focused on. Most American pediatricians practicing in 2025 had worked their entire careers without seeing a measles case.

The United States has now confirmed 2,566 measles cases in 2026, exceeding the 2,289 recorded in all of 2025 and standing as the highest annual count since 1991 (CDC 2026a). No one has died. Three deaths across 2,289 cases in 2025 works out near 1.3 per thousand, which predicts roughly three deaths this year, and observing zero carries a probability near four percent under a simple Poisson assumption. The hospitalization rate moved further and more convincingly, from eleven percent to seven percent (CDC 2026a). Ascertainment differences and community differences deserve a hearing, and the year is not over. My own reading is that clinicians changed, because the Lubbock deaths generated more argument about post-measles bacterial pneumonia than any American measles case in thirty years. Unfortunately, three died; those deaths probably could have been avoided if the clinicians involved had promptly recognized the threat of secondary bacterial pneumonia, but the resulting widespread coverage in media (although predominantly misinformed) alerted virtually every US physician of the threat posed by post-measles bacterial pneumonia.

The product, not the schedule

The current vaccine cannot generate the bone marrow plasma cell population that wild infection generates, and repetition cannot make it do so, because pre-existing antibody neutralizes each subsequent dose before it can replicate.

A better product would have to clear a specific bar. It must seed durable plasma cell memory without inflicting the lymphocyte depletion and memory loss that produce that durability in natural infection. It must remain immunogenic in the presence of residual antibody, which a replication-dependent platform cannot do by definition.

A non-replicating platform sidesteps that problem. Because it does not need to multiply, neutralization of the inoculum does not defeat it. Deliver enough antigen in the dose itself, with an adjuvant to drive germinal center activity, and you can immunize someone who already carries antibody. Candidate approaches include adjuvanted subunit protein directed at the two measles surface glycoproteins, viral vectors, and nucleic acid platforms.

Every one of those carries the shadow of Pfizer-Vax Measles-K. Atypical measles arose from exactly this design category: a non-replicating measles antigen generating binding antibody without neutralizing capacity, which skewed the helper T cell response the wrong way. Modern adjuvants and modern antigen design address that failure mode directly, and the immunology is far better understood than it was in 1963. The burden of proof still sits with the challenger. Any non-replicating measles immunogen must demonstrate high-avidity neutralizing antibody and appropriate helper polarization before it approaches a pediatric population, and must be followed for years afterward. It will take many years to responsibly demonstrate “safety and effectiveness”.

Live attenuated vaccine carries a warning from the opposite direction. WHO recommended high-titer Edmonston-Zagreb vaccine for infants in 1989 and withdrew the recommendation in 1992, after prospective African cohorts showed increased mortality among vaccinated girls (Garenne et al. 1991). In the case of measles, increasing the antigen dose is not a safe default with live-attenuated virus technology.

None of it can be evaluated without a defensible correlate of protection. Developing against a threshold derived from one 1985 outbreak means developing against a number nobody has interrogated in forty years, while ignoring the memory compartment that appears to do much of the actual protecting. Re-deriving that correlate in an elimination-era population, with cell-mediated and avidity endpoints alongside neutralization, is the prerequisite work, and it will be expensive, but still cheap relative to what it would inform and the consequences of just continuing to ignore the problem.

Why it will not get built

The scientific case for a better measles vaccine is straightforward. The economic case against building one is stronger.

MMR is off patent, manufactured at very low unit cost, and carries a headline effectiveness figure of ninety-seven percent after two doses. A challenger would need to demonstrate superiority against that incumbent, in an elimination setting where clinical endpoints are nearly unobtainable, across a trial population large enough to detect durability differences that take twenty years to manifest. No sponsor will fund that. No regulator has a pathway for it. The people who would benefit are forty years downstream and cannot express a preference today.

This is a market that cannot price a benefit deferred past the planning horizon of every participant. Public health agencies respond to the incentive structure the same way manufacturers do. Acknowledging that vaccine-induced immunity wanes invites an argument they would rather not have, so the durability question stays unfunded and largely unasked. The result is a population trading a permanent, durable immunity for a decaying one, with no serious program underway to close the difference.

The two-dose schedule remains the right recommendation for a child today, and the ninety-three percent of current American cases occurring in unvaccinated people is where the marginal dose does the most good. Both statements hold at once, alongside the observation that we have built an entire elimination strategy on a product whose central limitation we decline to study.

While that argument waits, work is available that requires no new science, no new authorization, and no new money. The cohort is identifiable. Americans born between 1957 and 1966 are now sixty to seventy years old, and any of them vaccinated against measles before 1968 may have received the inactivated product. ACIP has directed for decades that such a person be treated as unvaccinated.

I am in this cohort. I turn sixty-seven this year; my wife and partner Jill Glasspool Malone turns sixty-six, and neither of us can produce a vaccination record from the 1960s. Almost no one our age can. Under the guidance as written, both of us count as unvaccinated against measles. Were either of us to meet the wild virus, we would be candidates for a syndrome that no physician now in practice has seen outside a textbook.

The question at the physician’s visit takes one sentence. Were you vaccinated against measles before 1968, and is there any record of which vaccine you got? Almost no one will have the record. That absence settles the question rather than complicating it. The existing recommendation turns on documentation of a live dose, and revaccination is the default when none exists. One dose of MMR suffices for most, two for anyone with elevated exposure risk through occupation or travel. Ideally, the physician would offer a monovalent measles vaccine, but those have been taken off the market for convenience in the childhood vaccination schedule.

Ordering serology first is tempting, but it answers the wrong question. An antibody level in a sixty-five-year-old cannot distinguish childhood infection from a live vaccine dose from an inactivated one. The problem in this cohort is a response that was defective from the beginning, not one that decayed. Presumptive revaccination costs a single dose of an off-patent product with sixty years of safety data behind it. Screening costs a blood draw, a return visit, and a result that will not tell the clinician what to do.

One exception carries over from the discussion of immunosuppression. Live attenuated vaccine cannot be given to a patient on B cell depleting therapy, on chronic corticosteroids, or with active malignancy, and those patients sit inside this same age band. Their protection runs through exposure avoidance, post-exposure immune globulin, and the immunity of the people around them, which argues for vaccinating their household rather than leaving the cohort alone.

Every year this group ages further onto the climbing arm of the severity curve, and every year more of them acquire the comorbidities and the immunosuppressive prescriptions that would close the option. Adult primary care already sees them. Medicare annual wellness visits already provide the encounter. Nothing stands between the recommendation and its execution except the fact that nobody is doing it. The last time this country distributed a measles vaccine that did not work, it wrote a correction and then stopped looking for the people who needed it.

Nothing here constitutes medical advice for any individual patient. Clinical and vaccination decisions belong to patients and the physicians who examine them.

RWM

References

Anichini, Gabriele, et al. 2024. “Seronegative Vaccinees May Not Benefit From Multiple Booster Doses of MMR Vaccine in Restoring Immunity.” Journal of Medical Virology 96 (12): e70135.

Bianchi, Francesco Paolo, Simona Mascipinto, Pasquale Stefanizzi, Sara De Nitto, Cinzia Germinario, and Silvio Tafuri. 2021. “Long-Term Immunogenicity After Measles Vaccine vs. Wild Infection: An Italian Retrospective Cohort Study.” Human Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics 17 (7): 2078-2084.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2026a. “Measles Cases and Outbreaks.” Data as of August 13, 2026. https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2026b. “Characteristics of Patients Hospitalized with Measles During an Outbreak: West Texas, January to March 2025.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 75 (20).

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2026c. “Chapter 13: Measles.” In Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases (Pink Book). Also “Measles Vaccination for Specific Groups,” https://www.cdc.gov/measles/hcp/vaccine-considerations/specific-groups.html.

Chen, Robert T., Lauri E. Markowitz, Paul Albrecht, et al. 1990. “Measles Antibody: Reevaluation of Protective Titers.” Journal of Infectious Diseases 162 (5): 1036-1042.

de Vries, Rory D., Rik L. de Swart, et al. 2012. “Measles Immune Suppression: Lessons from the Macaque Model.” PLoS Pathogens 8 (8): e1002885.

Fiebelkorn, Amy Parker, Laura A. Coleman, Edward A. Belongia, et al. 2016. “Measles Virus Neutralizing Antibody Response, Cell-Mediated Immunity, and Immunoglobulin G Antibody Avidity Before and After Receipt of a Third Dose of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccine in Young Adults.” Journal of Infectious Diseases 213 (7): 1115-1123.

Fulginiti, Vincent A., Joseph J. Eller, Allan W. Downie, and C. Henry Kempe. 1967. “Altered Reactivity to Measles Virus: Atypical Measles in Children Previously Immunized with Inactivated Measles Virus Vaccines.” JAMA 202 (12): 1075-1080.

Garenne, Michel, Odile Leroy, Jean-Pierre Beau, and Ibrahima Sene. 1991. “Child Mortality After High-Titre Measles Vaccines: Prospective Study in Senegal.” Lancet 338 (8772): 903-907.

“In Elimination Settings, Measles Antibodies Wane After Vaccination but Not After Infection: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” 2022. Journal of Infectious Diseases 226 (7): 1127-1139.

Kennedy, Richard B., Inna G. Ovsyannikova, Amber Thomas, Beth R. Larrabee, Steven Rubin, and Gregory A. Poland. 2019. “Differential Durability of Immune Responses to Measles and Mumps Following MMR Vaccination.” Vaccine 37 (13): 1775-1784.

Kory, Pierre. 2025. “My Expert Review of the Medical Records of the Two Girls in Texas Who Purportedly Died of Measles.” Pierre Kory’s Medical Musings, April 11.

Mina, Michael J., C. Jessica E. Metcalf, Rik L. de Swart, Albert D. M. E. Osterhaus, and Bryan T. Grenfell. 2015. “Long-Term Measles-Induced Immunomodulation Increases Overall Childhood Infectious Disease Mortality.” Science 348 (6235): 694-699.

Mina, Michael J., Tomasz Kula, Yumei Leng, Mamie Li, Rory D. de Vries, Mikael Knip, et al. 2019. “Measles Virus Infection Diminishes Preexisting Antibodies That Offer Protection from Other Pathogens.” Science 366 (6465): 599-606.

Panum, Peter Ludvig. 1847. Observations Made During the Epidemic of Measles on the Faroe Islands in the Year 1846. Copenhagen.

Petrova, Velislava N., Rory D. de Vries, Colin A. Russell, et al. 2019. “Incomplete Genetic Reconstitution of B Cell Pools Contributes to Prolonged Immunosuppression After Measles.” Science Immunology 4 (41): eaay6125.

von Pirquet, Clemens. 1908. “Das Verhalten der kutanen Tuberkulinreaktion wahrend der Masern.” Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 34: 1297-1300.

World Health Organization. 2026. “Measles.” Fact sheet, July 15.

From Homesteading for Health

The following is an excerpt from our book, Homesteading for Health. It comes from a section in which we move from diagnosing what has gone wrong with the modern food system to the much more practical question: What can we actually do about it?

The short answer is surprisingly simple. Eat real food. Prioritize protein. Reduce processed carbohydrates and ultra-processed foods. Pay attention to how your food was grown and raised. And, where possible, shorten the distance between yourself and the people, animals, and soil that produce what you eat.

For us, this was not an abstract exercise in nutrition. In 2022, both Robert and I were in poor metabolic health despite believing, as many people do, that we ate reasonably well. Changing what we ate, and eventually producing much more of that food ourselves, changed our health dramatically. We each lost fifty pounds and kept it off. Other chronic problems improved or disappeared.

That experience became one of the central ideas behind Homesteading for Health: you do not have to become a homesteader to take back some control over your food, your health, and your environment. You do not need forty acres, a dairy cow, or a flock of chickens. You can begin with a garden bed, a farmers market, a local farmer, better choices at the grocery store, or simply learning to cook again.

The book goes much further into the science, the food system, regenerative agriculture, environmental exposures, and what we have learned from building our own farm. But this section is where much of it becomes practical.

It begins with the first intervention: eat differently.

The First Intervention: Eat Differently

We have described, at length, what the modern food system has done to dietary patterns. Now we want to describe, from our own experience, what changing those patterns actually looks like and what it produces.

In 2022, after a decade of chronic stress, significant injuries, and the disruptions of the pandemic years, both of us were in poor metabolic health. We were technically obese. Robert was dealing with cardiac arrhythmia, chronic digestive problems, and the lingering effects of post-COVID illness and vaccine injury. Jill was managing neuropathic damage from a trimalleolar fracture and recovering from facial reconstruction after a horse injury. We had been vegetarians for over thirty years and believed we were eating reasonably well. The blood work told a different story.

When Dr. Brooke Miller, Robert’s physician, reviewed those numbers, his recommendation was blunt: Eat meat, prioritize protein, and eliminate the processed carbohydrates that had quietly colonized our diet over three decades. We spent a month researching before acting. Then we acted.

What followed was not a temporary diet. It was a structural change. We committed to whole foods: our own eggs, grass-fed meat, raw milk from cow shares and then our growing mini Jersey herd, garden vegetables, and organic grains we milled ourselves. We eliminated seed oils, added sugars, refined flour, and processed foods. We adopted intermittent fasting and reduced total caloric intake by 30 to 40 percent. Over the following year, we each lost fifty pounds. Years later, we have not regained them. More significantly, the arthritic symptoms that had plagued both of us largely resolved. Robert’s chronic digestive distress, which had followed him for years, is gone. These were not minor adjustments to a marginal condition. They were meaningful reversals of what had seemed like the inevitable trajectory of aging.

We tell this story not because our experience proves anything at a population level (it does not) but because we want to be concrete about what a dietary transformation looks and feels like when it is grounded in real food you have grown and raised yourself. The farm did not just provide the ingredients; it provided the framework. When you are eating eggs you collected this morning, milk from an animal you milked yesterday, and vegetables you harvested from your own soil, the relationship to food changes. You stop eating passively. You start eating with intention.

That is available to everyone in some form, whether you have forty acres or a balcony.

What to eat: the non-prescription

The science of nutrition is genuinely contested in many of its particulars, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What is not contested, however, is the broad direction. Dietary patterns centered on minimally processed whole foods such as animal protein, vegetables, fruits, intact grains, and healthy fats, consistently outperform dietary patterns built around refined carbohydrates, added sugars, and ultra-processed products. This finding holds across observational studies, feeding trials, and the lived experience of millions of people who have changed how they eat and watched their health improve as a result.

Our own approach, shaped by both the research and by what our farm actually produces, centers on several consistent principles.

Prioritize protein from quality sources. Eggs from pastured hens, meat from animals raised on grass or hay, fish, dairy from animals on pasture . . . these are among the most nutrient-dense foods available and were central to human diets long before industrial agriculture created the alternatives. If you raise your own livestock, you know exactly what went into them. If you do not, buy as close to the source as you can and ask questions.

Eliminate or sharply reduce ultra-processed foods. This category covers most of what fills the interior aisles of a modern grocery store: packaged snacks, breakfast cereals, commercial bread, processed meats, most fast food, sweetened beverages, and any product whose ingredient list reads like a chemistry text. These foods are engineered for palatability and shelf life, not for nutrition. They deliver calories efficiently and nutrients poorly. They are also, as we have discussed, the primary vehicle by which glyphosate and other agricultural chemical residues reach the human body.

Reduce refined grains and added sugars. White flour, white rice, corn syrup, and the dozens of sweetener variants that appear on ingredient labels under different names all share the same metabolic effect: rapid glucose delivery, insulin response, and, over time, the progressive impairment of insulin sensitivity. This is not about eliminating all carbohydrates. It is about recognizing that the structure of a food, whether whole grain or refined, intact starch or extruded powder, matters as much as its macronutrient composition.

Use fats that humans have actually eaten for most of their history. Butter, lard, tallow, olive oil. These are the fats that appeared on traditional tables before industrial seed oil extraction became economically viable. The evidence that saturated fat causes cardiovascular disease, which drove the low-fat era and the substitution of seed oils for animal fats, has not held up.

The evidence is accumulating that excess seed oil consumption, particularly the omega-6-rich linoleic acid found in canola, soybean, corn, and sunflower oils, promotes inflammation. We are not claiming certainty here. We are suggesting that when in doubt, the food your great-grandmother would recognize as food is a reasonable heuristic.

Source food grown in living soil. The regenerative farming evidence reviewed earlier in this section makes clear that how food is grown matters to its nutritional content. Organic certification does not guarantee regenerative management, but it does prohibit synthetic herbicide and pesticide use and is therefore a reasonable proxy for lower chemical exposure. Local food, when you can know something about its production, is often preferable to certified organic from a distant source. Grown yourself is best of all.

Reduce glyphosate exposure where practical. Given the accumulating evidence reviewed in Chapter 4, a precautionary approach is warranted. Buy and grow organic grains, legumes, and oilseeds when possible. If you bake, use organic flour or mill your own from organic berries. Be attentive to conventionally grown oats, wheat, and chickpeas, which are among the crops most commonly treated with preharvest desiccants. Jill regularly sources Italian durum or einkorn wheat pasta and flour, which are subject to different regulatory requirements than their American equivalents. These are not guarantees. They are reductions in a cumulative exposure whose long-term consequences we do not yet fully understand, and where the asymmetry of risk clearly favors caution.

The next section of the book is titled “practical starting points,” and for that, we direct you to the book itself, and now the audiobook version (personally recorded by Robert) which is sold from many bookstores and digital distributors listed below, for those who want to listen instead of reading.

Homesteading for Health is available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Target, Walmart, independent booksellers, and other retailers in the U.S. and internationally.

• Amazon - hardcover, Kindle and Audio currently listed at $29.99. The shopping listing shows it as in stock.

• Barnes & Noble — hardcover, currently listed at $29.99. The shopping listing shows it as in stock.

• Target — hardcover, currently $22.99, discounted from $29.99.

• Walmart — hardcover, listed at $22.99, sold and shipped by Walmart.

• Books-A-Million — hardcover, listed at $22.99.

• BookPal — hardcover, particularly interesting for bulk purchases. They advertise quantity discounts beginning at 25 copies and going up through 1,000+.

• Skyhorse Publishing — the publisher’s page has direct purchasing plus links to several retailers.

There are also digital editions through Apple Books, as well as Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and Kobo

AUDIO VERSION:

Robert and I got married when I was 18, and he was 19. We were high-school sweethearts, and by today’s standards that sounds somewhere between quaint and clinically inadvisable. We had very little money. We had no established careers, very few assets, and we were renting a converted garage to live in. Basically, we were dirt poor. When we got married, we were so poor that the priest offered Robert a job sweeping floors in the church. Robert had started college; I hadn’t. Graduate school was still somewhere in the distant future, and neither of us had finished becoming the people we would eventually become. By most of the conventional measures used today to determine whether a young couple is “ready” for marriage, we probably weren’t. And yet, almost five decades later, here we are.

For most of my adult life, I have heard the conventional wisdom about couples like us: marry too young, and you are far more likely to divorce. Plenty of research appears to support that conclusion. In American observational studies, people who marry in their teens and very early twenties have historically had higher divorce rates than people who wait until their mid-to-late twenties. The finding has been repeated often enough that it has become received wisdom. Finish your education. Establish a career. Become financially independent. Figure out who you are. Then marry. Young marriage, we are told, is a risk factor, and delaying marriage is one of the things young adults can do to improve their chances of making it last.

But when I started digging into the actual literature, the story became considerably more complicated. The first problem is the one that comes up over and over again in science: correlation is not causation. People are not randomly assigned to marry at 19 or 29. Particularly in contemporary America, people who marry at 19 are a very unusual subset of 19-year-olds, and they differ from those who marry at 29 in ways that may independently affect their likelihood of divorce. Income, education, religion, family structure, geography, unintended pregnancy, cohabitation, previous relationships, attitudes toward marriage and divorce, and probably a host of personality and cultural factors that are difficult to measure are all tangled up with the age at which people marry. When a marriage that began at 19 fails, it is surprisingly difficult to determine how much of the risk stems from being 19 and how much from everything else that statistically accompanies marrying at 19.

Researchers have tried to get around this problem, with some fascinating results. One particularly clever American study used the Vietnam-era draft as a natural experiment. In 1965, married men received preferential treatment in the military draft until President Lyndon Johnson abruptly changed the rules, creating a temporary incentive for some young men to marry sooner than they otherwise would have. If marrying earlier were itself a major cause of divorce, those marriages should have been more likely to fail. They weren’t. A similar quasi-experimental study in China used a government policy change that altered marriage timing and likewise found no evidence that marrying somewhat earlier increased divorce among young adults.

That does not mean age is irrelevant, and it certainly does not mean that child marriage or marriage in the very early teens is harmless. Those are very different populations, often involving coercion, interrupted education, poverty and enormous power imbalances. Nor does this research prove that everyone should run out and get married at 19. What it suggests is something narrower, but much more interesting: once we are talking about young adults rather than children, the simple claim that delaying marriage by several years causes a more stable marriage becomes surprisingly difficult to demonstrate.

The picture becomes even less tidy when researchers stop defining marital success simply as “not divorced.” Norval Glenn, Jeremy Uecker and Robert Love examined five American datasets and considered both marital stability and the quality of the marriages that survived. They did not find a steady improvement in marital success as age at marriage increased. Instead, the highest estimated probability of being in an intact, high-quality marriage occurred among people who first married at roughly 22 to 25. Later marriages had good survival rates, but marital quality did not continue improving simply because marriage was postponed. Their conclusion was not that 22 is some magical age for marriage, but that there was little evidence for the increasingly common assumption that deliberately postponing marriage beyond the mid-twenties necessarily improves the chances of marital success.

Which leaves us with a rather different question. Instead of asking simply whether people who marry young divorce more often, perhaps we should ask why the people who marry young divorce more often. Those are not the same question. If age itself is the cause, then Robert and I were fortunate exceptions to a fairly predictable rule. But if age is partly a marker for the people who marry young, the circumstances under which they marry, the partners they choose, and the ideas about marriage they bring with them, then perhaps the number 18 or 19 tells us considerably less than we have assumed.

Another side of the equation receives far less attention. People who form a good marriage in young adulthood and sustain it for decades appear to have an unusually favorable life trajectory. Long, stable marriages are associated with greater life satisfaction, economic and social stability, better health and greater longevity. The strongest signal may therefore not be early marriage at all. It may be a long, good marriage. That sounds like a small distinction, but it changes the question considerably. If you meet the right person at 22 and are still happily married at 72, you have accumulated fifty years of marriage: fifty years of building a home, pooling resources, raising children, surviving illnesses and financial setbacks, creating friendships and community, and eventually watching children become adults and perhaps grandchildren arrive. It is also fifty years of having another human being who knows when something is wrong, notices when you are sick, has a stake in your health and survival, and shares an enormous portion of your history. Those years are an asset in their own right, and they cannot be accumulated retrospectively.

Of course, causation is just as difficult here. A couple who has remained happily married for fifty years is already a highly selected group. The qualities that helped them stay married, such as conscientiousness, emotional stability, loyalty, religious commitment, financial responsibility, the ability to compromise and perhaps simply good judgment in choosing a spouse, may also help explain why they are healthier and happier. We cannot look at a healthy 75-year-old who has been married for half a century and simply declare that marriage caused the outcome. People capable of sustaining good marriages may be different in important ways.

But that caveat cuts both ways. For decades, our culture has discussed delaying marriage almost entirely in terms of its advantages. Finish your education. Establish your career. Become financially independent. Travel. Find yourself. Date widely so you know exactly what you want. Only then, once everything else is safely in place, should you consider settling down. There are perfectly sensible reasons behind some of that advice. What we almost never discuss is what we may lose by postponing marriage. Years inside a good marriage are themselves something of value, and they cannot be recovered later.

And that brings me to something the marriage literature makes very difficult to ignore: marriage itself appears to run in families.

Marriage Runs in Families

Robert and I did not come from families in which marrying young was particularly unusual. More importantly, we came from families in which marriage lasted. Looking back through the generations we know about, younger marriage was common, and divorce was rare. That pattern extends back at least two or three generations in both of our families. It turns out that this may matter considerably more than I had realized.

One of the most interesting studies comes from Paul Amato and Danelle DeBoer, who used national longitudinal data covering two generations to examine the transmission of divorce from parents to children. Parental divorce approximately doubled the odds that the children’s own marriages would eventually end in divorce. But the more revealing finding came when the researchers looked at the quality of the parents’ marriages before divorce. Children whose parents had troubled marriages but stayed together did not show the same elevated divorce risk. Even more surprisingly, the intergenerational transmission of divorce was strongest when parents who divorced had reported relatively low levels of marital discord beforehand (indicating a lack of commitment to the marriage in the first place). That led the researchers toward an explanation that goes beyond simply learning good or bad relationship skills from our parents. What may be passed from one generation to the next is also the level of commitment to marriage itself, including what we believe marriage requires of us when it becomes difficult and where we place the threshold at which leaving becomes acceptable.

That does not mean children should be taught that every marriage must survive violence, abuse or truly intolerable circumstances. It does suggest that children learn something profound from watching what their parents do when a marriage is merely difficult, disappointing or unhappy for a period of time. They learn whether marriage is understood primarily as a source of personal fulfillment or also as an obligation extending across decades, through circumstances that neither spouse could have anticipated on the wedding day. Perhaps most importantly, they learn whether unhappiness itself is considered sufficient reason to leave. That understanding of marriage may be every bit as important as the communication skills and conflict-resolution techniques that receive so much attention in modern relationship advice.

Marriage timing itself also appears to travel through families. A large multigenerational Dutch study found that parents’ ages at marriage predicted when their children married, and even grandparents’ marriage ages independently predicted those of their grandchildren. That should probably not surprise us. Families transmit culture. They teach children, explicitly and implicitly, when adulthood begins, what constitutes readiness for marriage, whether marriage should precede children, what qualities matter in choosing a husband or wife, and what obligations come with making that choice. What travels through generations may therefore be much more than an age at marriage. Families transmit whether people marry, when they marry, whom they marry, what they expect from marriage, and perhaps how readily they are willing to leave it.

There is an interesting political echo of this in contemporary America. Republicans are considerably more likely than Democrats to be married, a difference that persists even after accounting for age, education, race and some measures of religion. A much larger divide is over whether people marry in the first place. Democrats tend not to marry compared to Republicans.

Gallup has also found striking differences in attitudes toward the institution itself: Republican parents were much more likely than Democratic parents to say that marriage strengthens commitment and to strongly hope that their children eventually marry. I don’t think the interesting conclusion is that Republicans are somehow inherently better at marriage. The data don’t show that. What they do suggest is that belief in marriage itself is culturally transmitted, and today that belief is distributed differently across American political and social groups.

This begins to make Robert’s and my ages at marriage look somewhat less like outliers. We were 18 and 19, but we were not two young people inventing marriage from scratch. Both of us came from families where people married young and stayed married, and from generations in which marriage was understood as a normal part of becoming an adult rather than something to be postponed until every other part of life had been completed. We each brought that history into our own marriage. The number 18 tells you how old I was. It tells you almost nothing about the culture of marriage that came with me.

Israel and why that matters

This was one of the things I found myself thinking about during our recent trip to Israel. Israel is an unusual country in many ways, but what struck me was not simply that Israelis have more children. It was how normal family life still seemed to be. Young couples marry, children arrive, often several of them, and family is not treated as something that begins only after every other personal ambition has been completed. Children were everywhere. So were grandparents, cousins, siblings and extended families. Family was not an interruption of adult life. It was adult life.

The demographic numbers bear out what we saw. Israel has the highest fertility rate in the developed world, at roughly three children per woman, and this is not simply a phenomenon of the ultra-Orthodox. Secular and traditionally observant Jewish Israelis also have considerably more children than their counterparts in Europe or the United States. Israelis also tend to marry and begin families younger. Yet Israel consistently performs very well in international measures of life satisfaction. That does not prove that children, early marriage, or large families cause happiness. But it certainly complicates the modern Western assumption that happiness is produced by delaying marriage and children while maximizing education, career, income, travel and personal freedom.

Nor is Israel some inexplicable cultural outlier. India, despite being vastly poorer and culturally very different, also retains much stronger norms around marriage, children and extended family than most of the West. Marriage generally occurs at a younger age, family obligations remain substantial, and multigenerational relationships still matter. The details are very different, but the larger point is the same: much of the world has not accepted the Western idea that independence from family obligations is necessarily the highest form of adulthood.

What I noticed in Israel was something harder to capture in statistics. Large families require responsibility. Children force adults to stop organizing every decision around themselves. Marriage does the same thing. You have people who depend upon you, obligations that cannot simply be abandoned when they become inconvenient, and a future that extends beyond your own career or happiness at that particular moment. Perhaps some of what we now describe as the burden of marriage and children is actually part of their value.

I came home wondering again whether the United States has the equation backward. We tell young people to postpone marriage and children until they have constructed a satisfying life. But perhaps, for many people, marriage, children, responsibility and the decades spent building something larger than themselves are precisely how a satisfying life is constructed.

The Culture of Marriage

This is why I increasingly wonder whether we have mistaken a cultural variable for an age variable. When researchers find that Americans who marry at 19 divorce more often than those who marry at 27, some portion of that difference may indeed be age and maturity. But “married at 19” also carries information about family background, education, religion, pregnancy, socioeconomic status, attitudes toward divorce, the kind of person chosen as a spouse, and whether the marriage is surrounded by people who expect it to succeed. In a culture where marrying at 19 is unusual, those factors become tangled together. In a culture where marrying young is normal, as it remains in some of the communities we saw in Israel, the meaning of the variable changes completely.

Perhaps the missing variable is something much harder to enter into a spreadsheet: a culture of marriage. It includes the marriages we watched growing up, the values we were taught, the kind of spouse we learned to look for, the expectations we bring about children and fidelity, the role of religion and extended family, and the degree to which we regard marriage as permanent. None of these guarantees a good marriage, and some marriages absolutely should end. But taken together, they create the environment in which a marriage either has roots or does not.

This may also explain why so many predictors of marital stability are interlinked. People tend to marry others with similar religious beliefs, educational backgrounds, family histories, political, and cultural values. A young couple who share those things may therefore be very different from another young couple of precisely the same age who do not. The question is no longer simply whether two people are old enough to marry. It is whether they understand marriage in roughly the same way and whether they have chosen someone who does too.

Perhaps that is what the age-at-marriage statistic cannot tell us. Nineteen tells us when the marriage began. It tells us remarkably little about what that marriage was built upon.

Have We Delayed Marriage, or Delayed Adulthood?

There is a larger cultural question buried in all of this. Over the past several decades, Americans have steadily delayed marriage, but we have also delayed almost every other marker of adulthood. The modern prescription is familiar: finish college, perhaps go to graduate school, establish a career, become financially independent much later, travel, surround yourself with friends of the same gender, discover yourself, figure out precisely who you are and what you want, and only then consider marriage. This rests on an assumption that is rarely examined: that we must become fully formed adults individually before we can successfully become adults together.

Robert and I followed almost the opposite path. At 18 and 19, we certainly weren’t fully formed adults. We didn’t establish two separate lives and then figure out how to merge them. We grew up together. We went through college and graduate school together, struggled financially together, built careers together, raised children together, moved, failed, succeeded, changed direction and changed ourselves. There were certainly disadvantages to starting with so little money and so little experience, but there was also something valuable about building rather than merging our lives. Neither of us arrived with decades of established habits, separate households, financial systems, and expectations that the other somehow had to fit into. We learned how to be adults at the same time that we learned how to be married.

This was one of the things that struck me after our recent trip to Israel. For many young Israelis, adulthood is not organized into a neat series of boxes to be checked one at a time. They serve in the military or national service, study, work, marry and have children, often with those stages overlapping. A 23-year-old Israeli may be young chronologically, but may also have spent several years in an institution where other people depended upon him or her, followed by university, work and marriage. Marriage and children are not necessarily treated as rewards that arrive after every other component of adulthood has been completed. They are part of becoming an adult.

That makes me wonder whether we have been asking the wrong question about young marriage. The question isn’t whether Americans should all start marrying at 19. Obviously, they shouldn’t, and many 19-year-olds are nowhere near ready to make that commitment. The more interesting question is why so many of them aren’t ready, and whether postponing marriage is actually producing that readiness or merely postponing the expectation of adulthood itself. If responsibility, work, service, commitment, and being accountable to other people are part of what makes someone ready for marriage, perhaps those are the things we should be cultivating earlier rather than simply waiting for another birthday.

Maybe a bigger issue is the infantilization of young adults. This cultural practice has led to a whole generation of people who aren’t able to form stable relationships or hold down responsible jobs.

We have spent decades delaying marriage partly on the assumption that more years as a single person will make people better prepared for it. But independence is not the only skill marriage requires. Marriage also requires interdependence: compromise, sacrifice, obligation, patience and the willingness to put another person’s interests alongside your own. Those qualities do not necessarily appear automatically at 27 or 30. Like most adult capacities, they are learned by being expected and practiced. And maybe we need to expect more from our children, not less.

So perhaps the provocative question isn’t “Should young people marry earlier?” It is something more fundamental: Have we delayed marriage because young people are not ready for adulthood, or have young people become less ready for adulthood because we keep delaying the expectation that they become adults?

The Wedding: Community Versus Consumption

There is one small study that fits rather nicely into this larger story. Two Emory economists, Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo Mialon, examined more than 3,000 Americans and looked at whether the amount spent on the engagement ring and wedding was associated with the length of the marriage. The results were almost the opposite of what the wedding industry might have us believe. Spending more on the ring or wedding did not predict a more durable marriage. In fact, the greater the spending, the shorter the marriage duration.

But there was another finding that I find interesting. Having more people attend the wedding was associated with a lower risk of divorce. Marriage has historically been more than a private contract between two people. When parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, churches, and communities are witnesses to the commitment, they remain invested in it long after the cake has been eaten and the photographs have been put away.

Increasingly, young adults are encouraged to think about family relationships in terms of personal fulfillment, boundaries and, when those relationships become difficult, estrangement. Sometimes cutting off a parent is entirely justified; abusive and genuinely destructive families exist. But there is an important difference between escaping abuse and adopting the broader idea that difficult family relationships are disposable.

When adult children sever themselves from parents, grandparents, siblings, churches and the communities in which they were raised, they may also be severing themselves from precisely the support structure that traditionally surrounded a young marriage. A mother-in-law who occasionally drives you crazy may also be the person who takes the children when your marriage is under strain. A father whose advice you don’t particularly want may be the person who tells his son to go home and work things out with his wife. Extended families can certainly create conflict inside marriages, but healthy ones can also provide practical help, perspective, accountability and continuity when two exhausted young people need it most.

Furthermore, if one considers relationships to be temporary or replaceable, then marriage also tends to be seen as temporary.

Perhaps what mattered wasn’t how much money was invested in the wedding, but how many people were invested in the marriage. We have turned weddings into increasingly elaborate exercises in conspicuous consumption (“potlatching” is one anthropologic term applied to this type of behavior), while marriage itself has become increasingly private, and at the same time we have begun weakening many of the family and community relationships that once surrounded it. Yet the evidence we have been looking at keeps pointing in the opposite direction: toward families, shared values, religion, social networks, and communities that reinforce the idea that marriage matters to people beyond the two individuals in it. And that brings me to the question I keep coming back to: if a culture of marriage really can be passed from one generation to the next, how do we make sure we pass it on?

What Do We Teach Our Children?

Which brings me to what may be the most important question of all. Parents spend enormous amounts of time and money preparing their children for college and careers. They help them choose schools, study for entrance exams, write résumés, prepare for interviews, and think carefully about what they want to do for a living. Yet choosing a spouse may have a far greater effect on their happiness, health, finances, children, and ultimately the entire course of their lives. Strangely, we spend remarkably little time preparing them to make that choice.

Perhaps, as parents and families, we need to spend more time teaching our children what makes a good marriage and what to look for in a husband or wife. Attraction matters. Love certainly matters. But so do character, compatibility, shared values, and the ability to make and keep a commitment. Just as importantly, we need to teach our children how to become good spouses themselves: why responsibility matters, why promises matter, why compromise and forgiveness are necessary, and why honoring a commitment can sometimes mean putting another person’s needs ahead of your own.

Young adults also need to know how to evaluate the person they are considering marrying. Do they share the same fundamental beliefs about children, fidelity, money, religion, and family? Is this person honest and responsible? Does he work hard? How does she behave when angry, disappointed, or under stress? Can he admit when he is wrong? Can she forgive? Is this someone whose character you trust enough to build a life with? And what did marriage look like in the family in which this person was raised? These aren’t particularly romantic questions, but they become extraordinarily important once the wedding is over.

And perhaps there is one question young couples almost never ask directly enough: under what circumstances does the person you are considering marrying believe that a marriage should end? Two people can love each other deeply and still enter marriage with completely different definitions of what the promise they are making actually means.

Families also have a role here, and perhaps we have become too reluctant to say so. The modern expectation that parents should politely keep quiet while a son or daughter makes one of the most consequential decisions of a lifetime is rather peculiar. Parents know their children. They have decades more experience watching people make both good and terrible choices, and they can sometimes see character flaws, incompatibilities, or warning signs that someone deeply in love simply cannot. More importantly, parents and grandparents can teach their children, long before that choice arrives, what qualities actually matter in a spouse, and model those qualities in their own marriages.

Ultimately, perhaps that is how a culture of marriage survives. It is not passed down through lectures about marriage nearly as effectively as it is through example. Children watch whether their parents remain loyal when life becomes difficult, whether they forgive, whether they sacrifice for one another, whether they speak about each other with respect, and whether marriage is treated as something larger than the happiness of either person on a particular day. They learn what a husband and wife look like by watching the husband and wife who raised them. And when the time comes to choose someone for themselves, perhaps the greatest gift we can give them is not simply the desire to marry, but the ability to recognize someone who understands marriage in much the same way.

So perhaps the question isn’t “How old should our children be before they marry?”

It is: “Have we taught them what marriage is, and will they recognize someone who was taught the same thing as a potential life partner?”

JGM/RWM

Massachusetts has eliminated its statutory gestational limit on abortion and removed the specific conditions previously required for abortions at or after 24 weeks. Under the new law, an abortion may be performed at any gestational age based on the professional judgment of the physician.

For purposes of this discussion, a late abortion means an abortion performed after fetal viability. In the case of a healthy mother carrying a healthy, viable fetus, the procedure is not simply a means of ending the pregnancy: delivery would also end the life of the unborn child. The distinguishing feature of abortion in that circumstance is that it is intended to end the pregnancy without a live birth.

A labor and delivery nurse for over 30 years described it to me this way:

After 24 weeks, it’s not an abortion. It’s a delivery. At that point, the safest option for the mother is delivery, not an abortion, and many OB/GYNs have said that. An abortion up to 40 weeks is not about the woman’s health or saving her life.

After 24 weeks, they can deliver the baby, and that is the safest way to protect the mom. If she doesn’t want the baby, she can always give it up for adoption. You must have a lot of hate in you to do this. This isn’t about our president or women’s rights. This is about people trying to kill children.

Another part of this story deserves considerably more attention.

Supporters of the new Massachusetts law have emphasized the heartbreaking cases: a wanted pregnancy in which a catastrophic fetal abnormality is discovered late, or a woman who develops a serious medical complication after 24 weeks. These cases certainly exist. They are real, and they deserve compassionate discussion. But Massachusetts already had that law - this was amended to expand access to anyone who can get to the right clinic willing to perform the killing of a viable fetus.

Massachusetts did not amend its statute merely to create a broader exception for catastrophic fetal abnormalities or serious threats to the mother’s health. It removed the statutory conditions governing abortion after 24 weeks altogether. The new standard is the “professional judgment of the physician.”

That is a much larger change.

And here we encounter a remarkably inconvenient problem: we do not actually have good statistics telling us what percentage of abortions performed after 24 weeks are performed because the mother’s life or physical health is threatened, because of a serious fetal abnormality, or for social, economic, or personal reasons.

The CDC cannot answer that question. Its abortion surveillance system reports gestational age, but it does not provide a national breakdown of why abortions are performed at advanced gestational ages. The most recent CDC surveillance data report that 1.1 percent of abortions for which gestational age was known occurred at 21 weeks or later. But “21 weeks or later” is one enormous bucket. It tells us neither whether an abortion occurred at 22 weeks or 32 weeks, nor why it was performed.

The national figure also obscures an important distinction: the CDC aggregates data from states with very different abortion laws, including states where abortion after viability is generally prohibited and states where there is no statutory gestational limit.

Consequently, the national percentage tells us very little about the frequency of abortions after 21 or 24 weeks in the states where they can legally be performed. And in some of those jurisdictions, the underlying data are particularly difficult to obtain. Colorado, for example, does not impose a gestational limit on abortion, yet its publicly reported abortion statistics do not provide the kind of detailed, procedure-by-procedure accounting of later abortions and their indications that would allow the public to determine how many were performed after viability or why. The result is a rather remarkable information gap: the states with some of the most permissive laws are not providing the data needed to determine how those laws are actually being used. Which raises the issue of willful ignorance in data collection.

That absence of data becomes particularly important when legislators justify eliminating a gestational restriction by invoking medical emergencies.

I wrote about this issue in 2024, in an essay titled Human Development and Abortion.

At the time, I noted how extraordinarily difficult it was to determine how many later abortions were actually performed for medical reasons rather than social or economic ones. That remains true today.

But absence of comprehensive statistics does not mean absence of evidence.

One particularly interesting source comes from researchers who strongly support abortion access.

In 2013, Diana Greene Foster and Katrina Kimport published a peer-reviewed study examining 272 women who obtained abortions at or after 20 weeks at 16 facilities around the country.

Here is the important part: the study was specifically examining women obtaining later abortions for reasons other than fetal anomaly or life endangerment.

These women were numerous enough to allow the researchers to recruit hundreds of case studies.

The researchers found that women obtaining later abortions frequently experienced delays associated with discovering the pregnancy late, difficulty deciding whether to have an abortion, difficulty finding a provider, raising money for the procedure and travel, relationship problems, and other circumstances. The authors identified several common profiles, including women raising children alone, women experiencing conflict with a male partner or domestic violence, women who had difficulty deciding and subsequently encountered access problems, and young women who had never given birth.

Put more plainly, these were not all cases involving a dying mother or a fetus with a lethal abnormality. The researchers documented later abortions sought for reasons involving money, transportation, relationships, delayed recognition of pregnancy, difficulty deciding whether to keep the child, and difficulty obtaining the procedure earlier. By 24 weeks, we are talking about a fetus that is most likely viable; later still, the probability of survival outside the womb rises dramatically. The truth is that at this age, these are people who feel pain, cry, are conscious, can smile, and, in every aspect we consider human, are human beings. Premature infants born at this same gestational age are treated as patients in neonatal intensive-care units, where medical teams may fight desperately to keep them alive. In these cases, therefore, a medical team intentionally ended the life of a viable human for reasons that had nothing to do with the fetus being unable to survive or the mother’s life being in danger.

A viable fetus is a child with an independent right to life; there is a much less clinical way to describe that. A living, viable child was killed because the mother discovered the pregnancy late, had difficulty making a decision, could not raise the money sooner, could not find a provider, or could not arrange transportation.

Then came an even more directly relevant study.

In 2022, Kimport published Is third-trimester abortion exceptional? Two pathways to abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy in the United States.

This time the threshold was not 20 weeks.

It was after 24 weeks, precisely the gestational boundary Massachusetts has now removed.

Kimport interviewed 28 women who had abortions between 24 and 35 weeks of pregnancy. She identified two principal pathways to third-trimester abortion.

The first was receiving “new information.” Sometimes that meant discovering a serious fetal abnormality. But new information could also mean something much simpler: the woman had only recently discovered that she was pregnant.

The second pathway was encountering barriers that prevented an abortion from occurring earlier. These included the cost of the procedure, difficulty finding a provider, and stigmatization. Some women had wanted abortions earlier but did not obtain them until the pregnancy had progressed into the third trimester.

This distinction matters enormously.

A third-trimester abortion performed because a woman will otherwise die is one ethical and medical question.

An abortion at 30 weeks because a lethal fetal abnormality was discovered at 29 weeks presents another terribly difficult question.

But an abortion at 30 weeks because the pregnancy was discovered late, because money could not be raised earlier, or because the woman had difficulty finding an abortion provider presents an entirely different ethical question.

Yet the Massachusetts statute does not distinguish among them by enumerating specific post-24-week conditions.

This is precisely the uncomfortable issue I raised two years ago. The mainstream (liberal) rhetoric surrounding late abortion frequently creates the impression that these procedures overwhelmingly involve catastrophic medical circumstances. But the research literature itself documents third-trimester abortions occurring for reasons that are not maternal medical emergencies or lethal fetal abnormalities. What we cannot responsibly say, because the necessary reporting does not exist, is what percentage each category represents.

That uncertainty should argue for better data, not for pretending that the inconvenient cases do not exist.

There is another biological reality that makes the Massachusetts decision different from an argument about abortion at six or twelve weeks.

At 24 weeks, we are no longer discussing an embryo or an early fetus.

We are discussing a living human organism approaching, and in some circumstances already possessing, the capacity to survive outside the uterus.

Neonatal medicine routinely attempts to save infants born around this stage of development. With every additional week, survival generally improves substantially. By the late second and third trimester, the central and peripheral nervous systems are extensively developed, the fetus responds to sensory stimuli, and the ethical questions become correspondingly harder.

This is one of the points I tried to make in 2024. Whatever one’s position on abortion, human development does not stop because the subject makes us uncomfortable.

Colorado has one of the broadest abortion laws in the United States. Under the state’s Reproductive Health Equity Act (RHEA), enacted in 2022, abortion is a legally protected right, and Colorado imposes no statutory gestational-age limit on when an abortion may be performed.

That means Colorado law does not establish a cutoff at 20, 24, 28, or even 36 weeks, nor does it impose a separate post-viability requirement that the mother’s life or health be threatened or that the fetus have a serious or lethal abnormality. The decision is left to the pregnant woman and her healthcare provider, subject to ordinary medical regulation. Colorado voters strengthened this protection in 2024 by placing a right to abortion in the state constitution.

So what does that mean? Below are screenshots from just one Colorado clinic that appears to specialize in late-term abortions. Note that there is absolutely no mention of these abortions being needed for the health of the mother, and in Colorado, minors do not need the consent of a parent, even in the case of a late-term abortion, where the killing of a grandchild is involved.

As of 2026, KFF counted nine states plus Washington, D.C. with no gestational limit.

Those states are:

• Alaska

• Colorado

• Maryland

• Michigan

• Minnesota

• New Jersey

• New Mexico

• Oregon

• Vermont

• Washington, D.C. (not a state)

And Massachusetts is now effectively joining this group:

There are over 54 million people living in these states. Using ChatGPT, we have dug into the actual numbers of late-term abortions in those states, but the states and the CDC have relentlessly hidden those statistics. After many attempts to locate the data, this is what Chat could come up with:

And that leads directly back to Massachusetts.

If the purpose of changing the law was simply to protect physicians treating catastrophic maternal emergencies or pregnancies involving lethal fetal abnormalities, the legislature could have written those protections into the statute precisely. It could have broadened the medical exceptions. It could have defined circumstances in which a physician could act without fear of prosecution.

Instead, Massachusetts removed the statutory post-24-week conditions and replaced them with the physician's professional judgment.

It is entirely possible to believe that women facing catastrophic pregnancies deserve compassion, privacy and excellent medical care while simultaneously asking whether a viable fetus has any independent moral interest that the law should recognize.

Those are not mutually exclusive positions.

And perhaps the most revealing fact surrounding this debate is how little information government actually collects about the very abortions being used to justify the change.

If abortions after 24 weeks are overwhelmingly performed because of catastrophic fetal abnormalities and genuine threats to maternal health, then collect the data and demonstrate it.

If they are not, then the public deserves to know that too.

Because once the legislature removes the gestational boundary altogether, the question is no longer merely whether a tragic medical exception should exist.

The question becomes whether there should be a boundary at all.

There is one final aspect of this story that I find difficult to get past.

They celebrated.

Look at the photographs from the bill signing.

Governor Maura Healey sits at her desk surrounded by legislators, physicians and abortion-rights advocates. They are smiling. They are applauding. They pose together for photographs commemorating the occasion.

Massachusetts had not just increased funding for prenatal care. It had not expanded neonatal intensive-care units or created additional support for women facing catastrophic pregnancies.

It had removed the state’s existing legal restrictions on abortion after 24 weeks.

The previous law said that after 24 weeks an abortion could be performed when necessary to preserve the life or physical or mental health of the mother, or because of a lethal or grave fetal diagnosis incompatible with sustained life outside the uterus without extraordinary medical intervention.

The new law deletes those requirements.

In their place are twelve words:

“an abortion may be performed when based upon the professional judgment of the physician.”

That is what was signed.

Healey herself described the cases used to justify the legislation as involving “devastating, heartbreaking” diagnoses. Advocates repeatedly presented the legislation through stories of parents discovering catastrophic abnormalities in desperately wanted pregnancies.

If that were all this law did, perhaps the celebration could be understood as relief that families experiencing terrible medical tragedies would no longer have to leave Massachusetts for treatment.

But that is not what the legislature wrote.

• It did not add another exception for fetal abnormalities.

• It did not broaden the definition of a maternal medical emergency.

• It did not create an expedited process for physicians confronted with catastrophic pregnancies.

• It removed the conditions.

The organization that championed the legislation, Reproductive Equity Now, did not hide this. Its campaign was explicitly titled “Expanding Abortion Access Throughout Pregnancy.” It argued that Massachusetts should remove restrictions on abortion after 24 weeks and reported polling asking voters whether they supported abortion access “throughout pregnancy” based upon physician judgment.

Those words matter.

Because at 24 weeks we are no longer discussing an abstract possibility of human life sometime in the distant future. We are discussing a living, viable baby. At the gestational ages permitted by this law, premature infants are simultaneously being treated in neonatal intensive-care units, where physicians and nurses employ extraordinary skill and enormous resources trying to keep them alive.

That is what makes the photographs so unsettling.

There is no requirement in the new statutory language that the fetus have a lethal abnormality. There is no requirement that the mother’s life be endangered. There is no statutory gestational ceiling at 28 weeks, 32 weeks or 36 weeks.

And, as we have discovered while trying to answer the most basic questions for this article, Massachusetts cannot tell us how often abortions after viability involve healthy fetuses, because the surveillance data necessary to answer that question simply do not exist in adequate detail.

Colorado offers some indication of why the question matters. In that state, where abortion likewise has no statutory gestational limit, 137 abortions were reported at 28 weeks or later in 2023 alone. Clinics there openly advertise abortion well into the third trimester. And those clinics make it plain: no reason need be given.

Share

The government has removed the boundary of killing an innocent life - a person who feels pain, who can smile, who is fully human.

And then there are those videos and photographs of Governor Healey signing the legislation. The ghoulish nature is chilling. These women look like they are having the best day of their lives.

The smiles bother me.

Where is the acknowledgment that at 28 or 30 weeks there may be a perfectly recognizable, potentially viable human being involved?

None of that is in these photographs.

There are politicians and activists grinning around a desk because Massachusetts has eliminated one of the last statutory boundaries regarding the termination of a human life, late in pregnancy.

And this was no narrow, reluctant decision. The Massachusetts House voted 119–33 for the legislation, with roughly 78 percent of those voting supporting it; the Senate subsequently passed it without a recorded roll-call vote. Massachusetts legislators overwhelmingly chose to remove the specific statutory protections that had restricted abortion after 24 weeks, including the requirements involving maternal health and grave fetal diagnoses, and replace them with the professional judgment of the physician.

Whatever euphemisms one prefers, the legislature knowingly voted for a legal framework that can permit the intentional killing of a viable, living fetus without a statutory requirement that the mother's life be endangered or the fetus be fatally impaired. That this passed overwhelmingly, rather than at the margins after anguished debate, says something deeply unsettling about how far Massachusetts politics has moved on the question of human life after viability.

A civilized society might sometimes conclude that a terrible thing has just happened.

What troubles me is not only the killing of a conscious human being, but the fact that the left actually celebrates that loss.

JGM/RWM

Please consider signing LifeSite’s petition urging Archbishop Richard Henning to formally declare Gov. Healey of Massachusetts excommunicated for her signing of this bill into law:

Work-life balance…

The moral of this story is that this BS doesn’t end with high school.

Think group projects are bad now? FAFO. Get a corporate job.

Group projects never die. They just become Zoom meetings where six people get together to discuss how you are going to do the work.

And then schedule another meeting to discuss your progress.

JGM

Audio Version:

Something very strange has happened to journalism. I do not mean that reporters have political opinions. They always have. Newspapers were often viciously partisan throughout American history, and anyone imagining Walter Cronkite descending from Mount Sinai carrying two stone tablets labeled Objectivity probably needs to read more history. What changed is more fundamental.

A large part of the mainstream press no longer seems to believe that its primary responsibility is to report what happened, present competing arguments fairly, investigate the powerful and allow readers to reach their own conclusions. Increasingly, journalists have assigned themselves a different job. They aren’t merely reporting on society. They are helping society move toward what they believe it ought to become.

“Protecting democracy” is the polite phrase usually attached to this mission, particularly since Donald Trump's election. But it goes considerably deeper than protecting elections or constitutional government. Modern advocacy journalism has increasingly attached itself to a collection of moral and political causes: climate activism, transgender ideology, racial equity, DEI, expansive immigration, abortion rights, hostility toward traditional religious morality, suspicion of nationalism, and enthusiasm for international institutions and technocratic government. These positions differ from newsroom to newsroom, and certainly not every journalist subscribes to all of them. But taken together, they form a remarkably consistent worldview.

The problem isn’t that journalists hold these beliefs. They are entitled to them. The problem is that many journalists have ceased to recognize them as political beliefs at all. They have been elevated into moral truths. Climate policy isn’t a political dispute; one side is “denying science.” Gender ideology isn’t a political or scientific dispute; one side is attacking “trans rights.” Mass immigration isn’t a legitimate disagreement over national interest, labor, culture and sovereignty; opposition becomes “anti-immigrant.” Traditional Christianity isn’t simply another moral framework; increasingly it becomes “Christian nationalism.” National sovereignty becomes “nationalism.” Populism becomes a “threat to democracy.”

Once you have classified your own political preferences as morally correct rather than politically contestable, objectivity becomes almost impossible. Why would you give equal consideration to people who are wrong? Worse, why give a platform to people whose ideas you believe cause harm?

There is an arrogance buried inside advocacy journalism that rarely gets discussed. It assumes that the journalist is not merely better informed than the reader, but morally better equipped to determine which political outcomes are acceptable. The reader becomes less a citizen to be informed than a subject to be guided.

That is not journalism.

It is social engineering with a press credential.

Share

And that is precisely where the intellectual justification for advocacy journalism enters. The old journalistic aspiration toward objectivity has increasingly been attacked as “bothsidesism,” false balance or the “view from nowhere.” Prominent journalists and journalism scholars have argued instead for “moral clarity,” an explicitly “moral voice,” and journalism committed to defending an egalitarian conception of democracy and confronting structural inequities.

The transformation of journalism into something closer to organized advocacy did not occur in a financial vacuum. The Gates Foundation openly operates a “Global Media Partnerships” program, funding news organizations specifically to expand coverage of health, development, climate and gender issues. Its own grant database documents millions flowing to The Guardian, including $3.6 million in 2023 to continue its Global Development operation and its “positive influence on priority audiences on key foundation strategic topics,” following earlier multimillion-dollar grants; Gates has also funded NPR's Goats and Soda, Africa Check, Bhekisisa and the Solutions Journalism Network, including grants explicitly intended to promote the “solutions journalism approach.”

George Soros's Open Society Foundations has pursued a parallel model, explicitly funding “independent journalism,” journalists and media organizations while simultaneously defining its institutional mission around advancing rights, equity, justice and democratic practice. Open Society has funded journalism programs addressing racial justice, criminal justice, and inequality, including the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, Soros Justice Media Fellowships, and 31 investigative media grants specifically intended to stimulate discussion about racism and inequality after Hurricane Katrina.

This documents something much larger than philanthropic institutions simply supporting journalism. These NGOs have an ulterior motive. They are helping shape journalism before reporters ever enter the newsroom, funding programs and curricula that teach students to regard advocacy journalism not merely as acceptable, but as a moral obligation.

These progressive colleges and universities are teaching progressive political and economic frameworks, including expansive government intervention, central planning, redistribution, socialism, and related ideological priorities.

At the same time, these foundations finance journalism around subjects they have already identified as social priorities, helping determine which issues get covered by reporters, dedicated desks, fellowships, travel budgets, institutional prestige, awards, and years of sustained attention. The result is not simply funding journalism. It is funding the formation of journalists, the framework through which they are taught to understand their profession, and the subjects they are subsequently paid to cover.

Notice what has happened. The journalist is no longer merely an observer of the political argument. The journalist has become a participant in it, while retaining the institutional authority of someone who claims merely to be telling you the news.

That is a very powerful position.

And it creates an equally powerful temptation. If MAGA threatens the society you believe ought to exist, opposing MAGA isn’t partisan journalism. It is “protecting democracy.” If Germany’s AfD party threatens the European project, opposing AfD isn’t political advocacy. It is combating “extremism.” If parents object to gender ideology in schools, taking the other side isn’t activism. It is protecting a marginalized community.

Advocacy disappears by being reclassified as morality.

That may be the central trick.

And advocacy journalism, stripped of the polite terminology taught in journalism school, has another very old name: propaganda.

We wrote about this extensively in PsyWar. Edward Bernays, of all people, once rested part of his defense of propaganda on the assumption that an independent press would serve as a check on it. Newspapers, editors and reporters were supposed to act as gatekeepers precisely because the propagandist could not completely control them. That assumption now seems almost quaint.

By the twenty-first century, journalism schools were openly discussing and teaching advocacy journalism. Objectivity was increasingly portrayed not as an ideal that human beings imperfectly attempt to achieve, but as an impediment. Reporters were encouraged to understand that neutrality might itself perpetuate injustice. Giving both sides a hearing became derided as “bothsidesism.”

There are circumstances in which that criticism is perfectly reasonable. A reporter covering whether the Earth is spherical does not need to find a Flat Earth Society spokesman for balance. But politics is not geometry.

Whether immigration levels are too high, whether biological sex matters in women’s athletics, whether national sovereignty should supersede decisions made by unelected transnational institutions, whether energy policy should favor nuclear power, whether parents should have greater authority over schools, whether marriage and family deserve special protection, or whether a nation’s government owes a greater duty to its own citizens than to people who arrived yesterday are political questions. They are supposed to be debated.

Instead, an extraordinary number of these questions have migrated from the category of political disagreement into the category of extremism. That migration may be one of the most consequential stories American journalism has failed to cover, perhaps because journalists themselves helped make it happen.

Consider Germany. Pick up almost any Reuters or Associated Press story about Alternative für Deutschland and you do not merely encounter the party’s name. You encounter “the far-right Alternative for Germany.” Again and again. Reuters used the formulation this month while reporting that AfD is polling around 41 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and 36 percent in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The label arrives before readers learn what the party actually proposes. (reuters.com)

Think about what that language tells an American reader before he or she learns anything else about the party. Germany. Far right. Rising rapidly. You do not need a degree in neurolinguistic programming to understand the association being planted. AfD becomes associated first with extremism, and only afterward with policy.

When Reuters calls a political party “far-right” in virtually every article, most readers are not reaching for Cas Mudde’s academic definition of the European populist radical right. They hear something much simpler: extremist.

And then something remarkable happens. Policies that would have been recognizably conservative, or even mainstream, within living memory now serve as evidence for the label. Now, policies such as reducing mass immigration, deporting people who are in the country illegally, protecting the traditional family, restoring nuclear power, resisting further transfer of national sovereignty to the European Union, preserving German culture, and putting German national interests first all become “far-right.”

These positions may be right or wrong. They may be practical or impractical. They are open to criticism. But exactly when did believing that the German government should put the interests of Germans first become presumptive evidence of extremism? Apparently somewhere around the same time that believing the American government should put Americans first did.

And this isn't history. We can watch the same model operating around the second Trump administration today. Coverage of Kennedy's restructuring of ACIP frequently began not with what the new members had actually done professionally, but with ideological labels telling readers how they should be understood: vaccine critics, vaccine skeptics, Kennedy allies, misinformation figures. When newly released Fauci texts raised legitimate questions about what officials privately discussed concerning vaccination during pregnancy, FactCheck.org immediately framed the story as Republicans reviving a “false miscarriage statistic” and “twisting” Fauci's texts. And when Kennedy challenged CNN's vaccine coverage last week, Dana Bash finally dispensed with the pretense altogether: “I'm not debating nonsense.” There, in four words, is advocacy journalism's central conceit. The journalist is no longer merely responsible for asking difficult questions, testing competing claims and giving the public enough information to decide. She has become the boundary keeper, deciding which questions are legitimate enough for the public to hear in the first place.

The same linguistic trick has been performed on Donald Trump and MAGA. “Far-right.” “Extreme right.” “Christian nationalist.” “Authoritarian.” “Threat to democracy.” The vocabulary has become so familiar that people barely notice it anymore.

Yet many of the supposedly radical positions associated with MAGA would have been utterly unremarkable in American politics twenty or thirty years ago. Bill Clinton campaigned against illegal immigration. Barack Obama deported enormous numbers of illegal immigrants. Democratic politicians opposed same-sex marriage. The existence of two biological sexes was not a controversial political proposition. Flying an American flag did not require a political explanation. Wanting American industry located in America was not fascism. Skepticism toward China was not xenophobia. And the proposition that the United States government has a special obligation to United States citizens was essentially the reason for having a United States government.

The people who still believe these things did not necessarily move. The journalistic reference point moved. The political center of American politics shifted - “we are all far-right now.”

That distinction is almost entirely missing from mainstream coverage. If the political and cultural establishment moves substantially left over twenty years while you stand still, you eventually find yourself on “the far right” without having gone anywhere. Convenient trick, that.

For some people, the hardest part is admitting that the political ground beneath them has moved. They still cling to the identity of being Democrats while embracing positions that are now routinely labeled far right. The cognitive dissonance is simply too great a distance to cross. The political left has been remarkably effective at using Trump as the ultimate moral barrier: question the prevailing narrative and you are told that you are siding with a “rapist,” a “dictator,” a “pedophile,” or whatever accusation happens to be circulating that week. It creates a powerful social and psychological trap. Changing your mind about an issue is no longer treated as changing your mind. It becomes an admission that you have joined the enemy. For many people, that makes acknowledging that they no longer believe the mainstream narrative almost impossible.

Journalists themselves tell us that their profession has changed. Pew Research Center surveyed nearly 12,000 American journalists in 2022 and asked whether journalists should always strive to give every side equal coverage. Only 44 percent said yes. A majority, 55 percent, said every side does not always deserve equal coverage. The American public saw the issue very differently. Roughly three-quarters of Americans continued to say journalists should strive to give all sides a fair hearing. (pewresearch.org)

Again, proportionality matters. Journalism is not obligated to pretend that every fringe theory has equal evidentiary support. But who decides when a political view no longer deserves equal coverage? The reporter? The editor? The owner? The journalism professor? The NGO that has labeled an organization extremist? The government agency supplying the reporter with information?

This becomes particularly dangerous when journalists overwhelmingly inhabit the same political, educational and cultural ecosystem. They cease to recognize their worldview as a worldview. It simply becomes reality. Everyone else has an ideology. They have facts.

The year 2016 broke something.

Two events happened that the transatlantic political and media establishment clearly did not expect: Brexit and Donald Trump. Millions of ordinary people rejected policies endorsed by nearly every prestigious institution available to instruct them. The newspapers told them. The economists told them. The universities told them. The celebrities told them. The NGOs told them. The intelligence establishment told them. The European establishment told them.

And the voters said no.

That should have produced a period of intense institutional introspection. Why don’t these people believe us? Why don’t they want what we are selling? What are we missing?

Instead, much of the establishment settled on another explanation. The voters had been manipulated. Russian disinformation. Facebook. Cambridge Analytica. Fake news. Misinformation. Disinformation. Malinformation. Algorithms. Populism. Extremism.

Suddenly, the problem was not that citizens had looked at establishment policies and rejected them. The problem was that citizens had been exposed to the wrong information.

This distinction matters enormously. Once the political problem is defined as bad information causing bad democratic choices, information control begins to look like defending democracy. Journalists become natural partners in the project.

In PsyWar, we argued that this was the period in which techniques developed for combating foreign propaganda and influence increasingly migrated inward, toward Western populist movements. Brexit, Trump and AfD all came to be treated not merely as political challenges, but increasingly as information-security problems. The book describes how post-2016 institutions began speaking openly about protecting democracy from populist movements and how media, technology companies, NGOs and government actors increasingly operated inside the same information ecosystem.

The change in language is impossible to miss. Protecting democracy increasingly came to mean protecting institutions from the choices voters might make. There is a rather large philosophical problem hiding in there.

Trump accelerated another change. During his first administration, journalists began talking openly about whether traditional objectivity was adequate for covering someone they considered uniquely dangerous. The argument went something like this: Trump lies, Trump violates democratic norms, Trump attacks the press, therefore ordinary journalistic neutrality is not sufficient. Treating Trump like a normal politician “normalizes” him.

And we now have enough distance from recent political events to see just how consequential this transformation became. Russia really did attempt to interfere in the 2016 election, including hacking Democratic targets, conducting influence operations on social media and probing election infrastructure.

What never happened, however, was the much larger story subsequently embedded in American political consciousness: that Trump and his campaign had conspired with Russia to steal the presidency. And the government officials who supplied oxygen to that story were not anonymous bureaucrats. CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok, FBI attorney Lisa Page and others occupied key positions as the Trump-Russia investigation and narrative developed.

Brennan briefed President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Comey and other senior officials in August 2016 on intelligence alleging that the Clinton campaign itself intended to vilify Trump by tying him to Russian election interference.

The FBI nevertheless proceeded with Crossfire Hurricane, with Strzok opening the investigation under McCabe's direction, and later used reporting from former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, whose work had been commissioned through Fusion GPS for the Hillary Clinton campaign, to support surveillance of Trump adviser Carter Page. Durham subsequently found that investigators could not corroborate the substantive allegations in Steele's reporting.

The FBI relied heavily on Steele's reporting even though it had not corroborated its substantive allegations, knew the same information was being circulated to journalists, and later learned from Steele's own primary sub-source information that substantially undermined the reliability of the dossier. Despite that, Steele's allegations continued to support surveillance applications, while reporting derived from the same information stream helped give the allegations the appearance of independent public corroboration.

Journalists then amplified a torrent of allegations, leaks and intelligence claims, often with remarkably little skepticism. This was the feedback loop: political opposition research entered the intelligence and law-enforcement system, government investigations gave the allegations institutional credibility, leaks and official statements carried them into the press, and press coverage then made the underlying allegations appear independently corroborated. That is a very different history from the false story that courageous journalists uncovered a Russian conspiracy inside the Trump campaign.

The Steele dossier became part of the evidentiary basis for surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser despite serious reliability problems later documented by the Justice Department inspector general. The resulting Trump-Russia narrative did not prevent Trump from winning in 2016, but it helped define his presidency and taught government, intelligence agencies, technology companies and journalists how effectively the language of foreign interference could be used to shape domestic political information.

Four years later, the machinery worked differently. When the New York Post published material from Hunter Biden’s laptop weeks before the 2020 election, former intelligence officials publicly suggested that it bore the hallmarks of Russian information operations, social-media companies restricted its circulation, and much of the institutional press treated the story as suspect. The laptop itself was authentic.

This was far more consequential than the failed effort to shape perceptions in 2016 because this time the information intervention occurred immediately before voting and concerned authentic material damaging to one of the candidates.

In my worldview, the Biden administration stole this election, although that depends on what one means by stealing. There is no evidence that ballots or vote totals were altered, and we cannot know with certainty how people would have voted in a counterfactual election with unrestricted coverage. But voters were deliberately deprived of politically consequential, authentic information immediately before they chose a president, in substantial part because the information-security establishment had conditioned journalists and technology companies to treat inconvenient information as a potential foreign operation. That is election interference of a different kind, and this time it came from inside the system supposedly protecting the election.

The truth is that if the public had known that Hunter Biden's laptop was authentic and had been free to examine what was actually in it, many voters might well have viewed Joe Biden very differently. Probably enough to swing the election in Trump’s favor.

The material raised legitimate questions about Hunter's lucrative relationships with foreign interests in Ukraine and China, his repeated invocation of the Biden family name and access, and communications surrounding proposed Chinese business arrangements, including the now-famous reference to “10 held by H for the big guy.”

Subsequent congressional testimony added important context: Hunter's former business partner, Devon Archer, described Joe Biden as “the brand” Hunter brought to these relationships and testified that Hunter put his father on speakerphone in the presence of business associates roughly 20 times. If the press had done their job, these facts would have come out before the election.

But that was precisely the point of journalism: voters were entitled to see the authentic evidence, hear the competing explanations, and decide for themselves whether it mattered. Instead, immediately before an election, much of the press and social-media establishment helped turn the question from “What does this evidence show?” into “Is this Russian disinformation?” and were told by the deep-state, 51 former intelligence officers, that it was fake. The voters made their decision without the scrutiny the story deserved.

There was a legitimate issue buried inside this. Journalists should call a demonstrably false statement false. They should not pretend facts are evenly divided merely because two political parties disagree about them. But the principle metastasized.

Soon it was not merely false factual statements that required special handling. It was Trump’s politics. Then his supporters. Then MAGA Republicans. Then Christian nationalists. Then parents protesting school boards. Then people questioning COVID policies. Then people questioning vaccine mandates. Then people questioning immigration.

The distinction between reporting on a political movement and opposing that political movement began disappearing. The press became part of “the resistance.” And somehow the resistance continued calling itself journalism.

This is where I refuse to use the euphemism. If you enter a story having already determined which political outcome is socially desirable, and you select facts, experts, adjectives and context to move the reader toward that outcome, you are not practicing objective journalism. You are practicing advocacy.

If your objective is to change the reader’s political attitude or behavior, you have crossed another line. That is propaganda.

Propaganda does not have to consist of lies. This is one of its most misunderstood characteristics. Some of the best propaganda is factually accurate. It simply selects certain facts, excludes others, repeatedly associates particular words and images, invokes trusted authorities and guides the audience toward the desired conclusion.

Call AfD “far-right” in the first sentence. Call its immigration policy “anti-immigrant,” rather than immigration restriction. Call sovereignty nationalism. Call traditional views of sex anti-LGBTQ. Call opposition to supranational government Euroscepticism. Call populist distrust of institutions anti-establishment. Call skepticism toward the media misinformation.

Eventually, an entire political worldview is communicated through adjectives. The reporter barely has to make an argument. The nouns arrive pre-contaminated.

Germany makes this particularly potent because it has the nuclear weapon of political analogies sitting permanently in the room: Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust. No sane German wants those horrors repeated. Precisely because of that history, allegations of right-wing extremism carry extraordinary power in German society. The domestic intelligence service can monitor political organizations suspected of threatening the constitutional order. Parties can, under extraordinary circumstances, actually be banned.

That historical structure deserves serious treatment on its own. But American media often take the German government’s classifications and political language and transmit them to American readers with remarkably little skepticism.

The German state says AfD is extremist. Therefore AfD is extremist. Germany’s established parties build a Brandmauer, a firewall refusing cooperation with AfD. Therefore cooperation with AfD would normalize the far right. AfD gains support. Therefore Germany has a growing far-right problem. AfD reaches 41 percent. Therefore 41 percent of voters are supporting the far right.

There is another possibility. Perhaps a large percentage of Germans genuinely oppose the policies being imposed upon them.

Reuters’ own current reporting shows AfD at roughly 41 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and 36 percent in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. (reuters.com)

At what point does a journalist have an obligation to reconsider the calibration of the label? If five percent of voters occupy the “far right,” perhaps they are a fringe. If forty percent do, we have at least two possibilities. Forty percent of the electorate suddenly became extremists, or the political establishment’s definition of the acceptable center no longer corresponds particularly well to the population it supposedly represents.

Only one of those explanations receives much attention.

This is why language matters. The modern censorship and propaganda apparatus does not always need to delete your words. It can simply classify them. Misinformation. Extremism. Far-right. Conspiracy theory. Anti-vaccine. Election denier. Climate denier. Christian nationalist.

Put a sufficiently powerful label around a person or an idea and millions of people will stop examining the underlying evidence.

We described this in PsyWar as a battle over the information environment itself. Control the framing, and you do not necessarily have to censor the argument. People learn to censor it themselves.

That is much more efficient. And much harder to see.

There is one little problem with all of this. The public noticed.

Gallup began measuring American trust in mass media in the 1970s. In 1976, roughly seven in ten Americans said they trusted the mass media a great deal or a fair amount to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. By 2025 that number had fallen to 28 percent. Among Republicans, it was 8 percent. (news.gallup.com)

Eight percent.

Journalists can blame Donald Trump for that. They can blame Fox News, social media, Elon Musk, podcasters, misinformation, Russian bots, declining education or the alignment of Saturn and Jupiter. At some point, they might want to consider another possibility.

Maybe people stopped trusting journalists because journalists stopped behaving like people who deserved their trust.

Pew reported in 2026 that a majority of Americans have little or no confidence that journalists act in the public’s best interests. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning Americans, distrust is dramatically higher. (pewresearch.org)

That is not a healthy information system. It is certainly not one that journalists should celebrate as evidence that the public needs more guidance.

The purpose of a free press is not to ensure that citizens reach the correct political conclusion. It is to give citizens the information they require to reach their own conclusions.

If you believe people are entitled to vote only after receiving information curated to produce an acceptable result, then what you actually believe in is something quite different. You believe in managed democracy.

The institutions decide the acceptable boundaries. The media enforce them. The fact-checkers police them. The algorithms amplify them. The public gets to choose from what remains. Then everyone congratulates themselves for having saved democracy.

This is exactly backward.

A free society requires a press willing to offend its own political tribe, investigate the institutions it instinctively trusts and accurately explain the arguments of people its reporters may personally despise. That includes MAGA. It includes AfD. It includes populists. It includes nationalists. It includes progressives, socialists and communists. And yes, it includes genuine extremists.

That used to be the job.

JGM/RWM

The Miscarriage Texts

What Fauci and Walensky discussed privately in January 2021, and what pregnant women were told

This essay is written for both a general audience and for expert scientists and physicians interested in this topic. I have been trained as a pathologist and taught pathology, as well as molecular biology, to medical students for many years, and so it should be no surprise that some of the language here is rather technical.

For this I apologize to and empathize with general-interest readers, and ask that you bear with me so I can communicate precisely with the experts and policy specialists who may also read the essay. Keep in mind that until he left the federal government, even Fauci or one of his minions used to open and read some of our essays, and on occasion our work reaches and affects policymakers at the highest levels of government.

What was found in the placenta

In March 2026 a group at the University Hospital of Wuerzburg published what they had found in 106 term placentas collected between November 2020 and October 2022. Thirty-one were positive for SARS-CoV-2 spike protein by immunohistochemistry. The staining sat predominantly in Hofbauer cells, the fetal macrophages inside the chorionic villi, and in syncytiotrophoblast, with the trophoblast layer and the endothelium of villous capillaries also involved. Eleven of those positive placentas came from women who had been vaccinated and who reported no infection of any kind during the pregnancy.

No viral RNA was detected in any sample tested. Vaccine RNA was. A Comirnaty probe lit up cells of the decidual surface in one placenta. A Spikevax probe lit up the endothelium of villous capillaries in another, from a woman whose last dose preceded her pregnancy (Bartmann et al. 2026).

That study carries severe limits. It is descriptive work on fixed tissue and cannot establish mechanism. The cohort was drawn from uncomplicated births at term, and the authors state plainly that women with miscarriages were not included, so the study cannot speak to pregnancy loss at all. The RNA findings rest on two samples out of nine tested. And the literature is split. Santos and colleagues reported no spike glycoprotein in placentas after mRNA vaccination, and Prahl and colleagues excluded vaccine traces in twenty placentas by Western blot and PCR.

The finding establishes that the question is real, answerable by experiment, and answerable in human tissue. The compartments where the staining appeared are the compartments that express ACE2, the receptor for the protein being stained. ACE2 is a carboxypeptidase. It degrades angiotensin II to angiotensin 1-7, and in the placenta that reaction governs vasodilation, oxidative balance and the vascular remodeling on which perfusion depends.

None of this was known when the federal government moved from telling pregnant women they could choose vaccination to telling them they should have it. Nor had anyone looked. The pivotal trials excluded pregnant women, the preclinical biodistribution work was done in nonpregnant rats, and the reproductive toxicity studies measured outcomes rather than tissue distribution.

What did exist, in January 2021, was a conversation

On January 25, 2021, five days after the inauguration, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Biden’s nominee for Surgeon General and a senior adviser to the incoming administration’s COVID response, texted Anthony Fauci and newly installed CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. He asked whether any data or theoretical reason favored vaccinating early or late in pregnancy, and when more robust data on risk might arrive. He added that he had been telling pregnant women no concerning outcomes had appeared in the trials, while noting that the number of pregnant subjects was probably limited (The Hill 2026).

Walensky answered first, describing a thin evidence base and pointing to the V-safe pregnancy registry, which by then had enrolled more than 15,000 pregnant women (Tampa Free Press 2026). Fauci replied that there were “no data or theoretical reason” to prefer early over late vaccination (The Hill 2026). He added that some people, including female health care professionals, were uneasy about a genetic vaccine early in pregnancy, and that the concern about effects on genes was a misperception.

Roughly two hours later he wrote again. He had asked around further, and another issue had come up that the others needed to know about. Because many people experience significant cytokine response and fever after the second dose, this “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester” (CNN 2026). Walensky replied that it was a good point, especially after dose two (Forbes 2026).

Israel had reached the same caution six days earlier and acted on it. Its Ministry of Health recommended vaccinating pregnant women on January 19, 2021, restricted to the second and third trimesters, and extended the recommendation to all stages of pregnancy on February 1 (Guetzkow et al. 2025). A national health authority held a first trimester restriction in force during the week of that text exchange, then dropped it.

The affirmative federal recommendation that pregnant women be vaccinated was issued on August 11, 2021. Nothing in that exchange, and no equivalent of it, reached the public in the intervening seven months.

That is what makes these texts consequential.

The scandal is not that scientists discussed uncertainty privately. Scientists are supposed to discuss uncertainty.

The scandal is that the uncertainty may have disappeared from public view not because the science had answered the question, but because someone judged that the public health message required certainty.

Pregnant women deserved to know the difference. And they deserved to know it before they rolled up their sleeves.

What the public heard in the same weeks

On January 26 Murthy flagged the World Health Organization’s recommendation against routinely administering the Moderna vaccine to pregnant women. His stated concern was not whether WHO was correct. It was what the recommendation might do to pregnant women’s confidence in vaccination.

Fauci’s answer set out the standard he was applying. Where data are lacking in pregnant women, one must weigh potential risks against benefits. COVID can be serious in pregnancy. More than 10,000 pregnant women had been vaccinated with no issues reported. FDA, the CDC advisory committee and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists all left the decision to the individual (CBS News 2026).

That position was defensible and it matched CDC’s clinical guidance, which held that a pregnant woman in an eligible group may choose vaccination. It is also not what he said in public a week later. Speaking with Howard Bauchner, then editor of JAMA, Fauci reported that FDA had found no red flags among the pregnant women vaccinated to that point, and said he would rather take his chances with the vaccine than with infection while pregnant (The Hill 2026).

The private discussion included a plausible mechanism for harm, specific concern about the second dose, and an acknowledgment that the necessary data did not yet exist. The public discussion emphasized the absence of red flags and offered a personal endorsement.

A week earlier Fauci had privately identified a theoretical risk of miscarriage. When he spoke publicly, that part of the risk-benefit calculation was gone. The uncertainty had not disappeared. It had disappeared from the message.

One mechanism, two registers

Fever is the clinical expression of cytokine release. The mechanism Fauci described privately in January was therefore not a private discovery, and that makes the sequence worse.

CDC’s clinical guidance in December 2020 already advised that pregnant women who develop fever after vaccination may be counseled to take acetaminophen, on the stated ground that fever has been associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes (Newsweek 2020). The agency had accepted the causal premise in print before the first pregnant woman was vaccinated. Fauci’s January text restated the same pathway in mechanistic language and added two specifics: that the response concentrates after the second dose, and that the outcome at issue is loss in the first trimester.

So the agency was not unaware. It published the countermeasure in December, discussed the mechanism privately in January, and by August had dropped the subject. The August 11 statement contained no fever caution of any kind. A risk CDC had acknowledged in its own guidance eight months earlier stopped being mentioned precisely when its recommendation became universal.

Evidence ran the other way too. The April 2021 registry analysis found that pregnant participants reported fever, chills, headache and myalgia less frequently than nonpregnant women of the same ages. Of the whole inflammatory pathway, reactogenicity was the one element CDC measured, and the measurement was reassuring. That finding belonged in the public conversation as much as the caution did, and neither appeared in August.

Since these texts became public the mechanism has been misdescribed in both directions. Post-vaccination fever is a finding consistent with a cytokine-mediated systemic response. In most recipients that response is transient reactogenicity and nothing more, and anyone claiming these vaccines routinely produce cytokine storm is misusing a term that names a defined pathological syndrome.

A pathologist asks a different question, and that question does not appear to have been asked at all.

Any biological insult applied across a large population produces a distribution of host responses. Clinically important events often occur in the tails of that distribution rather than at its mean. A reassuring average cannot by itself exclude an uncommon susceptible subgroup.

The relevant question was not whether the average pregnant woman experienced a cytokine storm. She plainly did not. The question was whether the inflammatory response following vaccination could become sufficiently pronounced in some subset of pregnant women to alter pregnancy risk, particularly during the first trimester, and if so whether those women could be identified in advance.

A woman with an underlying inflammatory or thrombophilic tendency, a history of recurrent pregnancy loss, or some other susceptibility is not the modal recipient. Her risk cannot be inferred from the modal result.

That was the safety question hiding inside Fauci’s January text, and before the recommendation became universal it deserved an answer.

Why there were no data

Pregnant women were excluded from the pivotal trials of both mRNA vaccines. That exclusion followed a convention in vaccine and drug development long predating 2020. Its consequence was unavoidable. At the moment of authorization there was no randomized evidence for pregnancy outcomes, and once mass vaccination began that missing randomized evidence could not be recreated after the fact.

What largely replaced it was V-safe, CDC’s voluntary smartphone-based surveillance system, with a pregnancy registry attached. Participants enrolled and reported their own outcomes. A registry of that design can be useful for detecting a large safety signal quickly. It is not a randomized trial. It cannot by itself establish a population rate without an appropriate denominator, it has no contemporaneous unvaccinated control group, and it necessarily reflects the women who enroll and continue reporting.

Those limitations do not make the data worthless. They define what conclusions the data can support.

On August 11 CDC told pregnant women the vaccines were safe and recommended vaccination. Twelve days later FDA approved Pfizer’s vaccine while still requiring the company to conduct the pregnancy study necessary to characterize pregnancy and infant outcomes.

That distinction matters, because much of the reassurance offered about vaccination during pregnancy between December 2020 and September 2021 rested on this kind of observational surveillance. The government was not reassuring pregnant women on the basis of evidence generated in pregnant women before authorization. It was vaccinating them first and accumulating the pregnancy safety evidence afterward.

A distinction has to be drawn here, because it is the first one a critic will reach for. The Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki and the Belmont Report govern research on human subjects. A public health recommendation to use an authorized product is not a clinical trial, and invoking those instruments as though it were invites the reply that the categories do not match.

That reply is fair as far as it goes. It does not reach the actual problem.

Both products were under emergency use authorization for the entire period in question. Pfizer’s biologics license did not issue until August 23, 2021, twelve days after the pregnancy recommendation. And the emergency use statute carries its own disclosure duty. Section 564 of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, codified at 21 U.S.C. 360bbb-3, requires as a condition of authorization that individuals receiving the product be informed of the significant known and potential benefits and risks of that use, and of the extent to which such benefits and risks are unknown.

FDA’s own guidance explains why the clause exists. Informed consent as generally required under its regulations does not apply to an authorized product, so section 564 supplies conditions to ensure recipients are informed instead. Congress wrote that provision because a population receiving a product before its evidence base exists occupies a position the ordinary approval pathway does not contemplate. The ethical instruments are the reason the clause is in the statute. They are not being asked to do the work themselves.

The recipient fact sheets did note that data in pregnancy were limited. That is not the same disclosure. A general statement that evidence is thin conveys something quite different from the specific concern these officials exchanged privately: a named inflammatory mechanism, concentrated after the second dose, bearing on loss in the first trimester. The statute asks that recipients be told the extent to which the risks are unknown. That extent was known to them with some precision, and it was set down in a text message rather than conveyed to the women being vaccinated.

Suspending the default

Pregnancy medicine has traditionally operated from a precautionary default. When adequate evidence of safety is absent, exposure to a new drug or biological product is approached cautiously. Thalidomide and diethylstilbestrol helped build that posture, and modern federal labeling rules preserve the underlying principle by requiring labels to state when human pregnancy data are unavailable. The reason is obvious. Pregnancy is precisely the circumstance in which controlled experimentation is difficult and the cost of guessing wrong may fall on someone who never consented.

Fauci identified the principle that could override that default. Where data are lacking in pregnant women, he wrote on January 26, potential risks must be weighed against potential benefits.

That is the correct standard. Performing such a calculation requires both sides of the equation.

The harm term was largely unquantified because the pivotal trials had excluded pregnant women. The benefit term rested principally on the risk COVID posed to the mother, and CDC had attempted to measure that.

Zambrano and colleagues, reporting in November 2020 on 409,462 symptomatic women aged 15 to 44, found that pregnant women were more likely than nonpregnant women to be admitted to intensive care, at 10.5 versus 3.9 per thousand; to receive extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, at 0.7 versus 0.3 per thousand; and to die, at 1.5 versus 1.2 per thousand. The adjusted risk ratios were 3.0, 2.4 and 1.7 respectively.

Their own summary captured an important distinction. Although the absolute risks of severe outcomes were low, pregnant women were at increased relative risk for severe illness.

Both statements were true. Only the second travelled.

Consider mortality. The observed difference was 0.3 deaths per thousand symptomatic infections, or three additional deaths per ten thousand. CDC’s earlier June 2020 analysis had found mortality among pregnant women statistically indistinguishable from nonpregnant women of the same ages, with an adjusted risk ratio of 0.9.

The November report contained another comparison that received considerably less attention. Citing the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, its authors noted that the absolute risks of severe outcomes among pregnant women during H1N1 exceeded those then being observed with COVID-19.

There was another curious feature in the COVID data. The relative risks diminished as the endpoints became harder. ICU admission carried an adjusted risk ratio of 3.0, ECMO 2.4, and death 1.7. In the earlier June analysis death had carried a ratio of 0.9 and had not reached statistical significance.

That pattern does not prove bias. It should have raised an obvious question about how much of the apparent elevation reflected biology and how much reflected clinical decision-making.

ICU admission is not purely a biological endpoint. It is also a clinical decision, and obstetrics has long maintained a lower threshold for escalating care because the physician is managing two patients and fetal monitoring may be easier at higher acuity.

ECMO introduces another selection problem. Candidacy favors younger patients without major underlying disease, characteristics disproportionately represented among pregnant women. A higher rate of receiving ECMO does not translate directly into an equivalent increase in underlying disease severity.

The clinical environment could reinforce these effects. Throughout 2020 and 2021 physicians were repeatedly told that pregnancy was a high-risk condition for COVID-19, with these same surveillance figures offered as evidence. That creates the possibility of a feedback loop. Clinicians expecting greater risk may admit or escalate pregnant patients sooner, and those admissions then enter surveillance datasets as evidence of greater risk.

CDC acknowledged a version of this problem one level down. Its data could not reliably distinguish hospitalization because of COVID deterioration from hospitalization for another reason, including delivery. The COVID-NET hospitalization surveillance report from September 2020 illustrates it. Among 598 hospitalized pregnant women with laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection, 54.5 percent were asymptomatic on admission. Many had entered the hospital for obstetric care and were discovered to be infected through testing.

Two further limitations appear in the November report’s own footnotes. Death information was missing for 22.0 percent of pregnant women and 17.2 percent of nonpregnant women, with those missing outcomes assumed to represent survival. ECMO information was missing for roughly 78 percent of both groups, with missing values assumed to mean ECMO had not occurred. The missingness on the mortality variable differed between the groups.

None of this establishes that pregnancy carried no additional COVID risk. There were sound biological reasons to suspect that it might. Pregnancy reduces functional residual capacity, elevates the diaphragm, increases oxygen consumption, produces a hypercoagulable state, and alters immune function. Influenza had already demonstrated that respiratory infections can behave differently during pregnancy. Zambrano also restricted the analysis to symptomatic women, reducing part of the ascertainment problem.

The subsequent literature was not uniform either. A prospective single-center comparison of obstetric and non-obstetric COVID cohorts in India found no difference in ICU admission, length of stay or mortality, and significantly less need for ventilatory support among pregnant patients, although differences between the cohorts limit what can be inferred from that comparison (Kumari et al. 2022).

The point is not that CDC had demonstrated there was no additional maternal risk. The point is that it had not measured that risk with anything approaching the precision implied by the public message. Its estimates rested on endpoints partly determined by clinical judgment, were generated within a clinical environment already primed to regard pregnancy as high risk, and carried important missing-data and ascertainment limitations. Yet those estimates supplied the benefit side of the calculation used to overcome the precautionary default.

Those qualifications persisted into the September 2021 advisory. Its 161 deaths among more than 125,000 confirmed cases corresponds to roughly 1.3 deaths per thousand, broadly consistent with the absolute mortality Zambrano had reported a year earlier. Its more striking figure, that approximately 97 percent of hospitalized pregnant patients were unvaccinated, included hospitalization for COVID illness or for labor and delivery, as the advisory itself acknowledged.

What reached the public were principally the counts and the relative risks. The absolute rates, the uncertainties, the endpoint problems and the confounders remained largely buried in the underlying literature.

Meanwhile the other side of Fauci’s equation remained poorly characterized. The mistake was not literally assigning vaccine risk a value of zero. It was allowing an absence of adequate evidence of harm to function, increasingly, as evidence of safety.

That distinction is especially important in pregnancy. A risk-benefit calculation can tolerate uncertainty when uncertainty exists on both sides, but it cannot manufacture a missing quantity. If the potential benefit is estimated from imperfect observational evidence while the potential harm cannot yet be reliably measured, the result is not a conventional risk-benefit calculation. It is a decision made under profound uncertainty.

Profound uncertainty is precisely why the precautionary default exists. Invoking risk-benefit analysis to override a precaution designed for circumstances in which one side of that analysis cannot yet be measured turns the purpose of the precaution on its head.

There is an uncomfortable parallel in Fauci’s own public assessment of COVID risk. On February 8, 2020 his diary recorded a denominator-adjusted case fatality estimate of 0.2 to 0.3 percent. On February 28, writing with H. Clifford Lane and Robert Redfield in the New England Journal of Medicine, he suggested that the overall clinical consequences of COVID-19 might ultimately resemble those of a severe seasonal influenza, with a case fatality rate perhaps near 0.1 percent. Less than two weeks later, on March 11, he told the House Oversight Committee that COVID-19 mortality was approximately one percent and that the virus was therefore roughly ten times more lethal than seasonal influenza.

Those numbers were being generated from a rapidly evolving epidemic with an uncertain denominator, so changing estimates were inevitable. That is precisely the point. Uncertainty was treated as grounds for precaution when estimating the danger of the virus. When estimating the danger of vaccination during pregnancy, uncertainty increasingly became a reason for reassurance.

The paper, the denominator, and the correction

On April 21, 2021, Shimabukuro and colleagues published preliminary V-safe pregnancy findings in the New England Journal of Medicine. Among 827 participants whose pregnancies had reached a recorded outcome, 104 had experienced spontaneous abortion before 20 weeks. The paper presented that as 12.6 percent and described the proportion as similar to the background rate in the general population. In the accompanying table the authors placed a published incidence range of 10 to 26 percent beside it.

There was a serious denominator problem.

A footnote to the same table disclosed that 700 of those 827 women had received their first eligible vaccine dose during the third trimester. By definition those women had already passed 20 weeks of pregnancy and were therefore no longer at risk of an event defined as spontaneous abortion before 20 weeks. Including them in the denominator necessarily drives the apparent miscarriage proportion downward.

Put simply, the calculation asked how often an event occurring before 20 weeks happened in a group dominated by women who were already beyond 20 weeks when they entered the analysis. The resulting 12.6 percent was not a valid estimate of miscarriage risk following vaccination in early pregnancy.

Hong Sun raised this objection in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology on August 3, 2021. On September 8 three of the CDC authors responded in the New England Journal of Medicine and agreed with the essential point. Eight hundred twenty-seven completed pregnancies was not an appropriate denominator for estimating the risk or rate of spontaneous abortion, and such an estimate needed to be based on women vaccinated before 20 weeks of gestation (Meaney-Delman, Ellington, and Shimabukuro 2021).

On October 14 the journal formally corrected the article. The 10 to 26 percent background comparator beside the spontaneous abortion figure was replaced with “Not applicable,” removing the comparison that had made the original 12.6 percent figure appear directly comparable with the expected population rate.

There is an important arithmetic trap here, because the opposite error has circulated ever since.

If the 700 third trimester pregnancies are simply removed from 827, that leaves 127 completed pregnancies. Dividing 104 miscarriages by 127 produces approximately 82 percent. That number is also invalid.

It fails for the mirror-image reason. The March 30 cutoff preferentially captured early pregnancies that had already ended, while many women vaccinated early in pregnancy were still pregnant and therefore had no completed outcome to enter the denominator. Miscarriages occur earlier than live births, so counting only pregnancies that had already finished at an early cutoff inevitably overrepresents losses.

The original calculation diluted the numerator with women who could no longer miscarry. The 82 percent calculation does the opposite, excluding many pregnancies that had not yet had time to reach a successful outcome. Neither 12.6 percent nor 82 percent is a valid miscarriage rate.

The scientifically defensible conclusion from the April dataset was simpler and much less reassuring than the headline number suggested. At that point the registry did not yet contain enough appropriately followed early pregnancy exposures to calculate a reliable miscarriage rate.

August 11

CDC announced its affirmative recommendation on August 11, 2021, under the headline “New CDC Data: COVID-19 Vaccination Safe for Pregnant People.” The agency cited an analysis of roughly 2,500 women who had received at least one vaccine dose before 20 weeks of pregnancy. It reported no increased risk of miscarriage, with a rate near 13 percent, within the expected background range.

This was in substance the corrected calculation. It restricted the analysis to women who had actually been vaccinated during the period in which spontaneous abortion could occur, precisely the denominator problem critics had identified in the April paper. Its central finding has held up. Published as Zauche and colleagues on September 8, 2021, the analysis estimated a cumulative spontaneous abortion risk of 14.1 percent, or 12.8 percent after age standardization, among 2,456 participants. Subsequent studies encompassing more than a million pregnancies have likewise found no overall increase in miscarriage following COVID-19 vaccination.

The picture is not uniform, and honesty requires saying where it is not. A group working with Maccabi Healthcare Services in Israel examined 226,395 singleton pregnancies and reported that first doses given during gestational weeks 8 to 13 were followed by roughly 13 fetal losses per hundred exposed pregnancies against about 9 expected, an excess of 3.9 with a confidence interval of 2.55 to 5.14 (Guetzkow et al. 2025). Their design addresses the exact problem raised here about the V-safe cohort. Women vaccinated for influenza during pregnancy showed consistently fewer losses than expected, which the authors read as healthy vaccinee bias made visible, and women vaccinated before pregnancy came in at or below expectation.

It also carries real weaknesses. It remains a preprint fourteen months after posting, unpublished and not peer reviewed. The expected values come from a regression model trained on 2016 to 2018 data rather than from a concurrent control group, so pandemic-era differences in behavior, care and reporting sit outside the model. The authors themselves note that the registry cannot separate elective from medically indicated terminations, and that women vaccinated early may have been more likely to report a loss. Two of the authors now hold federal positions, Retsef Levi on the immunization advisory committee and Tracy Beth Hoeg at FDA, which will be used to discount the work.

One internal control in that paper deserves separate attention. Exposure to SARS-CoV-2 infection during pregnancy produced no significant excess of fetal losses over expected in the same dataset, including among unvaccinated women.

That evidence matters, on both sides. So do the limits of what each side can establish.

The cohort underlying a universal recommendation is therefore worth examining. Of the 2,456 participants in the CDC analysis, 88.8 percent were health care personnel and 78.3 percent were non-Hispanic white. More than one quarter reported at least one previous spontaneous abortion. Thirty-five women who reported a loss before six completed weeks were excluded from the analysis. That is a methodologically defensible choice, given how frequently very early pregnancy losses go unrecognized in the general population, but it is still a choice that belongs in any description of what was measured.

Composition determines more than whom a study represents. It also affects what the study is capable of detecting. A cohort composed overwhelmingly of working health care personnel is not necessarily representative of the entire pregnant population to whom a universal recommendation will apply. More importantly, a study of approximately 2,500 pregnancies can provide useful reassurance about a substantial increase in overall miscarriage risk while remaining poorly equipped to identify a smaller increase confined to an uncommon susceptible subgroup. Those are different questions.

The timing presents another problem. CDC announced the conclusion four weeks before the analysis was published, meaning the public received the answer before outside scientists could examine the methods and the data underlying it. The announcement also arrived while the April New England Journal paper still stood uncorrected, with its inappropriate denominator and population comparator remaining in print until October 14.

Walensky’s August 11 statement urged all pregnant people, those considering pregnancy, and those breastfeeding to be vaccinated, describing COVID-19 vaccines as safe and effective during the urgency of the Delta wave (CDC 2021a).

Notice the distance between the evidence and the claim. The new analysis addressed one outcome, spontaneous abortion before 20 weeks, in one voluntary self-reported surveillance cohort. The public conclusion was that COVID-19 vaccination was safe in pregnancy. Those are not equivalent statements.

On September 29 CDC followed with a health advisory, CDCHAN-00453, calling for urgent action. Its summary stated that CDC “strongly recommends COVID-19 vaccination either before or during pregnancy because the benefits of vaccination outweigh known or potential risks” (CDC 2021b). The advisory reported more than 125,000 laboratory-confirmed cases in pregnant people, more than 22,000 hospitalizations and 161 deaths as of September 27, with 22 of those deaths in August alone, and noted that roughly 97 percent of pregnant people hospitalized with confirmed infection were unvaccinated. Those figures are serious and they are the strongest part of the case CDC made. The advisory now carries a retired designation in the agency’s own document archive.

The question that was not asked

Fauci’s concern ran from cytokine response and fever to first trimester loss. Fever in early pregnancy is a recognized risk, so the pathway is real, and it is the pathway an immunologist reaches for. It was also the only pathway anyone in that exchange raised.

The antigen these vaccines instruct cells to produce carries biological activity of its own. Spike is a receptor-binding protein, and its receptor had already been mapped to the tissue at issue. Li and colleagues, publishing in PLOS ONE in April 2020 from a preprint that February, reanalyzed roughly 65,000 cells from placentae of six to fourteen weeks and found ACE2 expressed in decidual stromal cells, decidual perivascular cells, villous cytotrophoblast and syncytiotrophoblast. Ashary and colleagues reported that July that syncytiotrophoblast carried the highest proportion of ACE2-expressing cells in the first trimester placenta, and noted that extravillous trophoblast, which acquires ACE2 expression later, is the population that invades the maternal decidua and remodels the spiral arteries.

That map was not new even then. Valdes and colleagues had localized ACE2 and angiotensin 1-7 to syncytiotrophoblast, cytotrophoblast, villous endothelium and vascular smooth muscle, and to invading trophoblast and decidual cells in the maternal stroma, in Placenta in 2006 (Valdes et al. 2006).

The two-proline modification does not change any of this. The substitutions sit at the junction of heptad repeat 1 and the central helix, in the fusion machinery. The receptor-binding domain is untouched. What 2P prevents is the transition to the postfusion state, and receptor engagement occurs upstream of that transition. Wrapp and colleagues established the point in the paper that defined the antigen. Their cryo-EM structure showed the predominant state of the stabilized trimer with one receptor-binding domain rotated up in a receptor-accessible conformation, and their surface plasmon resonance measured ACE2 binding at roughly 15 nanomolar, some 10 to 20 fold tighter than SARS-CoV spike (Wrapp et al. 2020). Both measurements were made on the 2P construct. Corbett and Graham of the NIAID Vaccine Research Center are authors on it. The canonical statement that this spike binds ACE2 with high affinity is a measurement of the vaccine antigen.

Spike binding drives ACE2 into the endocytic pathway and lysosomal degradation, an effect mapped to both the receptor-binding domain and S2, and one that tracked with clinical severity across variants. A physiology review of ACE2 in pregnancy states the consequence directly. Downregulation of placental ACE2, whether by inhibition or by spike protein binding, produces placental inflammation and oxidative stress, limits fetal growth, and generates the classical picture of preeclampsia.

Whether the antigen reaches that tissue at concentrations approaching its affinity is the operative question, and the arithmetic constrains the argument. Ogata and colleagues measured circulating vaccine antigen after mRNA-1273 and found S1 detectable from day one, peaking on average near 68 picograms per millilitre (Ogata et al. 2022). At roughly 76 kilodaltons that is about 0.9 picomolar, some four orders of magnitude below the 15 nanomolar dissociation constant. In bulk plasma receptor occupancy would be negligible. The question lives in local tissue concentration, not in blood.

The Wuerzburg placentas are not the only place investigators have found the material since. A team at NYU Langone reported, in a research letter funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, vaccine mRNA in human placental tissue by in situ hybridization, with signal in the decidua and in the villi from recipients of both products (Lin et al. 2024). In pregnant mice given intramuscular mRNA-1273, the construct crossed the placenta within an hour, reached fetal circulation, accumulated in fetal tissue and was translated into spike protein there (Chen et al. 2025). Lipid nanoparticles resembling those in the vaccines transfect placental trophoblast, endothelium and immune cells, which is why an entire field now engineers them deliberately for placental delivery.

The decidua and the villi are where the mRNA was found. They are also where ACE2 sits. What the antigen does to decidual stroma, decidual perivascular cells, villous cytotrophoblast and syncytiotrophoblast has not been characterized, and it was not characterized before pregnant women were told the vaccines were safe for them. The receptor map dated to 2006, the affinity measurement to February 2020 from the antigen’s own designers, and the experiment joining them to the tissue has still not been done.

The same receptor distribution ties together presentations that were handled as separate topics. Decidual stromal and perivascular cells express ACE2. The decidua governs menstrual bleeding, sheds whole in decidual cast shedding, and fails in early pregnancy loss. Through the spring of 2021 women were reporting all three. Kate Clancy and Katharine Lee gathered roughly 130,000 accounts of menstrual disturbance in the same months the pregnancy registry was being assembled. The menstrual reports went to content moderation and to a survey run by two anthropologists. The pregnancy question went to a registry. No federal analysis treated them as observations on one organ.

Redfield

Robert Redfield left the CDC directorship on January 20, 2021, five days before that text chain, and is not a participant in it. He is the third author on the February 2020 New England Journal editorial with Fauci and Lane, and he ran the agency when ACIP voted in December 2020 and when the permissive guidance issued.

On August 11, 2026, responding to the released texts, he said he never thought pregnant women should be vaccinated, described it as a policy recommendation he had not favored, and called it an error in judgment (NewsNation 2026). He said he has seen no data establishing a link between the vaccine and miscarriage. His objection was to the risk-benefit reasoning and, more sharply, to the absence of the open discussion that would have let women decide for themselves.

Redfield’s current positions on mRNA vaccines contradict the account that academic public health and the obstetric professional societies still promote, and that CDC and FDA officials promoted through 2024. That makes it easy for critics to dismiss his 2026 comments as retrospective dissent.

But there is a contemporaneous record against which his claim can be tested. When Redfield left CDC on January 20, 2021, the agency he had been running did not recommend COVID vaccination for all pregnant women. It explicitly left the decision to them. Five days later Fauci privately raised the theoretical possibility of first trimester miscarriage. Seven months later CDC recommended vaccination for every pregnant woman.

What the record supports

No one concealed a known harm. The mechanism Fauci raised has not been borne out as a miscarriage signal, and the large studies that followed have not found an overall increase in miscarriage after COVID-19 vaccination.

It does not dispose of what the documentary record shows.

Three of the most influential officials shaping the federal COVID response privately acknowledged that pregnancy data were inadequate. Fauci raised a specific theoretical concern about first trimester miscarriage following the inflammatory response to vaccination, particularly after the second dose. Walensky immediately recognized the point. That specific concern was never communicated to pregnant women.

The reassurance offered in the months that followed rested in part on a miscarriage calculation that the agency’s own authors later acknowledged used an inappropriate denominator. The corrected analysis was considerably more reassuring and its central finding has held. But CDC announced its affirmative recommendation four weeks before that analysis was published, and therefore before independent scientists could examine it.

And the headline went considerably further than the evidence beneath it. “New CDC Data: COVID-19 Vaccination Safe for Pregnant People.” The new data addressed one outcome, miscarriage before 20 weeks, in a voluntary surveillance registry heavily composed of health care personnel. It did not establish the absence of every potential pregnancy risk, nor could a cohort of that size exclude a risk concentrated in a small susceptible subgroup. A limited and reassuring finding about one outcome became a categorical statement about safety in pregnancy.

The studies that were supposed to fill the evidentiary hole did not fill it. Pfizer announced a randomized pregnancy trial in February 2021 with a planned enrollment of approximately 4,000 women. Enrollment was terminated on October 25, 2021 with roughly 350 participants, and the label records 346 in the maternal safety population. Dosing occurred at 24 to 34 weeks of gestation, so the first trimester concern Fauci had raised privately was never tested at all. In the limited data that trial did produce, Pfizer reported congenital anomalies in 8 of 156 vaccinated participants against 2 of 159 in placebo, a numerical imbalance in a sample far too small to interpret in either direction.

Pfizer attributed the early termination to the difficulty of enrolling into a placebo-controlled study once universal vaccination of pregnant women had been recommended. The recommendation issued in the absence of randomized evidence became the reason the randomized evidence could no longer be generated.

It is also unclear whether ACIP ever voted to recommend COVID-19 vaccination specifically for pregnant women in 2021. No corresponding 2021 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report recommendation has been identified, and the pregnancy guidance instead appears in CDC’s Interim Clinical Considerations, a staff document that changed repeatedly over time. An inquiry by Malone.News is now with CDC and the agency has said it is looking into the question.

The answer matters. If ACIP did vote on the pregnancy recommendation, the record should be straightforward to produce: the meeting, the motion, the vote, the evidence presented, the conflicts disclosed, and the resulting recommendation. If it did not, then CDC appears to have moved from individual choice to a universal recommendation for a population excluded from the pivotal trials without a specific vote of the independent advisory committee normally expected to examine vaccine recommendations in public. That would mean the most consequential change in pregnancy vaccine policy during the pandemic occurred without the public deliberation, recorded vote, conflict disclosures and recusal procedures the advisory process exists to provide.

Redfield identified the deeper failure correctly. Government scientists will discuss uncertainties privately, and they should. Medicine advances because scientists argue about mechanisms, challenge assumptions, worry about signals, and ask questions for which they do not yet have answers.

The ethical failure is not that Fauci had doubts. It is that pregnant women were not permitted to share in those doubts while being asked to bear the consequences of the decision.

They were entitled to know that the pregnancy data were limited. They were entitled to know what was reassuring. They were entitled to know what remained unknown. And they were entitled to know that the government’s own senior scientists had discussed a theoretical risk that had not yet been resolved.

That is informed consent. It does not require government scientists to know every answer. It requires them to say so when they do not.

RWM/JGM

References

Ashary, Nancy, Anshul Bhide, Priyanka Chakraborty, et al. 2020. “Single-Cell RNA-seq Identifies Cell Subsets in Human Placenta That Highly Expresses Factors Driving Pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2.” Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology 8: 783.

Bartmann, Catharina, Vanessa Schmidt, Michael Moerz, Michael Schwab, Monika Rehn, Bettina Blau-Schneider, Achim Woeckel, and Ulrike Kaemmerer. 2026. “Detection of Spike Protein in Term Placentas of COVID-19 Vaccinated and/or SARS-CoV-2 Infected Women.” PLOS ONE 21 (3): e0344185.

CBS News. 2026. “Fauci Discussed Potential Risks, Benefits of COVID Vaccine for Pregnant Women in 2021 Texts Released by GOP Senators.” August 11.

CDC. 2021a. “New CDC Data: COVID-19 Vaccination Safe for Pregnant People.” Media statement, August 11.

CDC. 2021b. “COVID-19 Vaccination for Pregnant People to Prevent Serious Illness, Deaths, and Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes from COVID-19.” CDC Health Alert Network, CDCHAN-00453, September 29.

Chen, J.-C., M.-H. Hsu, R.-L. Kuo, L.-T. Wang, M.-L. Kuo, L.-Y. Tseng, et al. 2025. “mRNA-1273 Is Placenta-Permeable and Immunogenic in the Fetus.” Molecular Therapy Nucleic Acids 36 (1): 102489.

CNN. 2026. “Republican Senators Release Fauci’s Text Messages Discussing Safety of Covid Vaccine and Pregnancy.” August 11.

Delahoy, Miranda J., Lindsay Whitaker, Alissa O’Halloran, et al. 2020. “Characteristics and Maternal and Birth Outcomes of Hospitalized Pregnant Women with Laboratory-Confirmed COVID-19, COVID-NET, 13 States, March 1 to August 22, 2020.” MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 69 (38): 1347-54.

Ellington, Sascha, Penelope Strid, Van T. Tong, et al. 2020. “Characteristics of Women of Reproductive Age with Laboratory-Confirmed SARS-CoV-2 Infection by Pregnancy Status, United States, January 22 to June 7, 2020.” MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 69 (25): 769-75.

Fauci, Anthony S., H. Clifford Lane, and Robert R. Redfield. 2020. “Covid-19: Navigating the Uncharted.” New England Journal of Medicine 382 (13): 1268-69.

Forbes. 2026. “Republican Senators Release Fauci Texts on Safety of COVID-19 Vaccine for Pregnant Women.” August 11.

Guetzkow, Josh, Tal Patalon, Sivan Gazit, Tracy Beth Hoeg, Joseph Fraiman, Yaakov Segal, and Retsef Levi. 2025. “Observed-to-Expected Fetal Losses Following mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination in Early Pregnancy.” medRxiv preprint 2025.06.18.25329352, posted June 20. Not peer reviewed.

Kumari, Anupama, Latika Chawla, Anissa Atif Mirza, et al. 2022. “Impact of Pregnancy on Susceptibility and Severity of COVID-19: A Hospital-Based Prospective Observational Study.” Cureus 14 (4).

Li, Mengmeng, Lin Chen, Jing Zhang, Chunlin Xiong, and Xi Li. 2020. “The SARS-CoV-2 Receptor ACE2 Expression of Maternal-Fetal Interface and Fetal Organs by Single-Cell Transcriptome Study.” PLOS ONE 15 (4): e0230295.

Lin, X., B. Botros, M. Hanna, E. Gurzenda, C. M. De Mejia, M. Chavez, et al. 2024. “Transplacental Transmission of the COVID-19 Vaccine Messenger RNA: Evidence from Placental, Maternal, and Cord Blood Analyses Postvaccination.” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 230 (6): e113-16.

Meaney-Delman, Dana M., Sascha R. Ellington, and Tom T. Shimabukuro. 2021. Reply, “On Preliminary Findings of mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine Safety in Pregnant Persons.” New England Journal of Medicine, September 8.

NewsNation. 2026. “It Was a Mistake to Vaccinate Pregnant Women: Dr. Robert Redfield.” Katie Pavlich Tonight, August 11.

Newsweek. 2020. “COVID Vaccine and Pregnancy: What You Need to Know.” December 17, quoting CDC clinical guidance then in force.

Ogata, Alana F., Chi-An Cheng, Michael Desjardins, et al. 2022. “Circulating SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Antigen Detected in the Plasma of mRNA-1273 Vaccine Recipients.” Clinical Infectious Diseases 74 (4): 715-18.

Pfizer. 2021-2024. Protocol C4591015, “A Phase 2/3 Study to Evaluate the Safety, Tolerability, and Immunogenicity of BNT162b2 Against COVID-19 in Healthy Pregnant Women 18 Years of Age and Older.” NCT04754594, with final clinical study report synopsis.

Prahl, Mary, Yarden Golan, Arianna G. Cassidy, et al. 2022. “Evaluation of Transplacental Transfer of mRNA Vaccine Products and Functional Antibodies during Pregnancy and Infancy.” Nature Communications 13: 4422.

Santos, Ana, Meredith Sauer, Alexander J. Neil, et al. 2022. “Absence of SARS-CoV-2 Spike Glycoprotein Expression in Placentas from Individuals after mRNA SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination.” Modern Pathology 35 (9): 1175-80.

Shimabukuro, Tom T., Shin Y. Kim, Tanya R. Myers, et al. 2021. “Preliminary Findings of mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine Safety in Pregnant Persons.” New England Journal of Medicine 384: 2273-82. Correction published October 14, 2021.

Sun, Haiyan. 2021. “Adjustment Is Required to Calculate the Risk of Early Pregnancy Loss with COVID-19 Infection or Vaccination.” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, August 3.

Tampa Free Press. 2026. “Newly Released Fauci Texts Reveal Internal Early Discussions on COVID Vaccines and Pregnancy.” August 11.

The Hill. 2026. “Paul, Johnson Release Fauci Texts.” August 11.

Valdes, Gloria, L. A. A. Neves, L. Anton, et al. 2006. “Distribution of Angiotensin-(1-7) and ACE2 in Human Placentas of Normal and Pathological Pregnancies.” Placenta 27 (2-3): 200-207.

Wrapp, Daniel, Nianshuang Wang, Kizzmekia S. Corbett, et al. 2020. “Cryo-EM Structure of the 2019-nCoV Spike in the Prefusion Conformation.” Science 367 (6483): 1260-63.

Zambrano, Laura D., Sascha Ellington, Penelope Strid, et al. 2020. “Update: Characteristics of Symptomatic Women of Reproductive Age with Laboratory-Confirmed SARS-CoV-2 Infection by Pregnancy Status, United States, January 22 to October 3, 2020.” MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 69 (44): 1641-47.

Nigel Farage beats the establishment. Again.

There is something wonderfully British about the Nigel Farage situation.

MP Farage recently resigned his Clacton seat, forcing a by-election and effectively asking voters to elect him all over again. Britain’s major political parties then faced the obvious question: Who were they going to put up against him?

Their answer: Nobody.

Labour, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Greens all declined. Officially, they said that Farage had created a “farce,” a “circus,” a “vanity project,” and serious politicians simply wouldn’t dignify it.

How terribly principled.

There is another possibility: they were afraid he would beat the pants off them.

Rather than send a candidate into the electoral woodchipper, Britain’s political establishment discovered a sudden respect for staying home.

Farage, you see, is simply too far right to run against.

Apparently the proper way to defeat the dangerous far right is not to stand against it and persuade voters to reject it.

It is to hide from it.

Fortunately, democracy found someone much braver to run:

Count Binface":

Binface is a 5,900-year-old intergalactic space warrior who wears a rubbish bin on his head and campaigns to make 99 Flakes cost 99p and ban speakerphones in public.

Compared with Westminster, something of a moderate.

So Britain’s major political parties left the job of confronting Nigel Farage to a man dressed as household waste.

Then it got better

.

Farage won with roughly 63 percent.

Count Binface came second with about 27 percent. And yes, Binface was actually financed, backed and supported by the other major Parties and still roundly beaten.

The man wearing a rubbish bin was willing to do something Labour, the Conservatives, Lib Dems and Greens were not: stand against Nigel Farage. Perhaps the establishment isn’t frightened that Farage is too extreme. Perhaps it is frightened that he is too popular. So popular, that they could only put up a trash bin as a candidate.

But Farage does seem extraordinarily unlucky around British institutions. First he was debanked by Coutts, the 300-year-old private bank synonymous with Britain's wealthy and well-connected establishment, producing a scandal serious enough that regulators had to “remind” banks not to discriminate on political grounds. But of course, charges against the bank were never brought.

Now the Metropolitan Police are investigating Reform donations, while the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards resumed yet another investigation into Farage upon his return to Parliament. Sound familiar?

Nothing seems to sharpen the institutional microscope quite like a conservative becoming inconveniently popular. Pure coincidence, naturally.

Perhaps Farage should try wearing a rubbish bin on his head. It appears to attract considerably less institutional concern.

Either way, British politics has achieved perfect symbolism:

The establishment refused to take out the rubbish.

So the rubbish took them out.

Cheers!

(I can’t resist finishing this essay up with an old favorite!)

WOKE 1.0 VERsUS WOKE 2.0

Woke 1.0: Change the Culture

• DEI everywhere

• Critical Race Theory

• “Equity” over equality

• Identity politics

• Intersectionality

• Pronouns in the bio

• Gender as self-identification

• “Latinx”

• Defund the Police

• Abolish the Police

• Cancel culture

• Safe spaces

• Trigger warnings

• Microaggressions

• Speech is violence

• Silence is violence

• Words are violence

• Men can get pregnant

• Biological sex is a spectrum

• Drag Queen Story Hour

• Remove statues

• Rename schools

• Rename military bases

• Rewrite curricula

• Decolonize everything

• Reparations

• Corporate DEI departments

• Racial preferences in hiring/admissions

• Mandatory diversity training

• ESG

• “Anti-racism”

• “White privilege”

• “Whiteness”

• “Heteronormativity”

• “Lived experience” over inconvenient statistics

• Censorship rebranded as “content moderation”

• Disagreement rebranded as “hate”

• And, naturally, a land acknowledgment before the quarterly sales meeting, because apparently the entire United States is stolen land, private property is a colonial construct, and the rightful owners are whichever Indigenous people occupied it at the historically convenient moment.

Woke 2.0: Change the System

Now the ambitions get somewhat larger.

• Abolish ICE

• Decriminalize illegal border crossing

• Sanctuary cities and states

• Mass amnesty / pathway to citizenship

• Expand voting access to noncitizens in some local elections

• Abolish the Electoral College

• Make Washington, D.C. a state

• Make Puerto Rico a state

• Expand the Supreme Court

• Impose Supreme Court term limits

• Restrict presidential control over executive agencies

• Strengthen the independence of the federal bureaucracy

• Weaken or eliminate the Senate filibuster

• Abolish the Senate, or radically restructure it

• Replace equal state representation with population-based representation

• Lower the voting age to 16

• Expand federal voting-rights legislation

• Universal voter registration

• Restore voting rights to felons

• Reparations through government policy

• Wealth taxes

• Expand federal administrative power over climate, labor and civil-rights policy

• National gun-control measures

• Restrict or eliminate qualified immunity

• Federalize abortion protections

• Constitutional amendments guaranteeing various positive rights

• And when an inconvenient constitutional structure gets in the way, explain that the Constitution itself is the problem.

Or, put another way: the revolution has moved on from the HR department, to governance.

JGM

Well, two weeks ago we were in Israel, and yesterday, for just one day, we were in Florida so Robert could be on Russell Brand’s podcast, Stay Free.

Now, Russell Brand’s podcast - “Stay Free” is always fun and this was a excellent gig, as Russell had a live audience and a full studio - which Robert really responds to.

But back to the farm and our busy lives:

Last night, the Delta plane was delayed in Atlanta, so we didn’t want through the front door until 1:30 AM, after spending five hours hanging around the Atlanta airport, after a long day of being on air. The night before, flying in, our plane was also delayed for five hours - you guessed it, on another Delta flight and in Atlanta too. Not fun. Generally, we avoid the Atlanta airport - because bad stuff always happens when we fly through there.

Last week, we had a film crew of eight people at the farm for three days, all of whom needed feeding. This weekend, we have a group of UAP whistleblowers coming to the farm for a retreat. Then we have another group the following week, and finally, Robert and I will be attending the Polyface/Brownstone event at the end of August.

So yes, August is apparently our quiet month.

Meanwhile, about three weeks ago, just as we were trying to pack for Israel, lightning struck the ground near our main house and blew out the buried electrical cable. Completely. Which required a new buried line be placed in the ground from the electrical panel, about a 100 feet away from the house, to the house. This was not a cheap date… and it took time, a lot of time, with rented equipment breaking down and the electrician trying to work this huge emergency job around his already scheduled work.

We had to move up to the guest house, which immediately created a rather elaborate game of musical beds as we figured out where all the various people coming to the farm were going to sleep.

Then, since the main house was already out of commission, I started looking at the carpeting. It is about a decade old and has survived four dogs for most of that time. It has served honorably. But it was time. OK - it is past time.

So we, meaning I, decided to replace it with LVP flooring.

And, of course, if you are going to put in new flooring, you really ought to paint first.

And if you are already painting and replacing floors, well, there are a few things in the kitchen that really ought to be done....

You can see where this is going.

So, on top of having no electricity in the main house for three weeks, we now have painters, followed by flooring installers, followed by some kitchen work. Which meant that I suddenly had to pack up much of our belongings, empty rooms, move furniture, take art off the walls, and generally dismantle the house.

Basically, we are living in the guest house for the next two months.

Because apparently we didn’t have enough going on.

And yet, here we are in mid-August, and somehow the vegetable gardens are actually doing pretty well.

We have yellow squash and cucumbers that were planted late and are only now starting to bear fruit.

The tomatoes have finally decided to get serious about producing, which means I need to start freezing the harvest before the kitchen disappears under a mountain of tomatoes

Some of the weird varieties that self-seeded this year from last year’s plants are doing just fine and producing black tomatoes of various hues.

The peppers are coming on strong. I grew some tiny little peppers from seed this year, “tear drop peppers,” because I had some jarred ones in a salad last winter at a restaurant and loved them. I now have hundreds of the little things in three varieties: yellow orange, and red.

They can certainly be frozen for cooking, but if I want them for salads and want to preserve that wonderful crunch, they need to be pickled. So this week is officially micro-pepper pickling week. Since I am using a properly acidified vinegar brine, I can use a water-bath canning method rather than pressure canning for shelf-stable storage.

We also have a good crop of Anaheim peppers. Those I want to let ripen a little longer, ideally getting some more red on the fruit before harvesting. Then Robert will fire-roast them on the barbecue, before I peel chop and freeze them.

And yes, botanically speaking, peppers are fruits. I know. It still feels wrong.

The kale, meanwhile, has turned into a monster and needs to come out. Which means it is already time to start thinking about the fall garden: more kale, lettuce, greens, and other cool-weather crops. I will cover those beds with netting, both to keep the bugs out and to provide a little shade while we are still dealing with the August heat.

And of course, the citrus is citrusing. As many of you remember, I have a number of lemon and lime plants which produce copious amounts of fruit. I do have to bring them all into the greenhouse each winter. Tip: if you don’t have a greenhouse, they can be overwintered in the house.

One of my more interesting garden experiments this year, though, involves garlic.

Last month, I harvested all of our garlic, which was a huge job. I pulled it all, lightly rinsed it, even though you aren’t really supposed to wash garlic intended for long-term curing because damaging that papery outer skin can make it more vulnerable to rot and pests.

But I hate peeling garlic when everything is covered in dirt.

Since my plan was to dry it for about a month, clean it, separate the cloves, and freeze them whole anyway, I decided to live dangerously and wash the dirt off.

A month later, I put on a podcast and started peeling.

And peeling.

And peeling.

One thing you discover when processing that much garlic is that garlic juice is surprisingly hard on your skin. After enough exposure, your fingertips start cracking, and it actually becomes fairly painful.

Which reminded me of something I had seen in a documentary about garlic processing in China. China supplies a very large share of the world’s garlic, and there have been documented cases of Chinese prison labor being used to peel garlic. Former prisoners have described losing fingernails after prolonged hand-peeling and eventually resorting to their teeth when their fingers became too damaged to continue.

That image has stuck with me.

I don’t particularly want to contemplate what may be getting onto peeled garlic under those conditions. China also bleaches their garlic and farming is often done with sewer water, as clean water is in short supply.

More reasons, in my opinion, to grow your own garlic when you can, or buy American-grown garlic from a source you trust. Again, the whole cloves can just be put into jars and then taken out as needed.

But this year’s garlic produced another surprise.

When I harvested it, some of the scapes had been allowed to mature and flower. They were so pretty that I collected them, thinking the dried blossoms might make an interesting flower arrangement.

Over the next month, however, they began dropping hundreds of tiny little bulblets

It turns out these aren’t true garlic “seeds” at all. They are bulbils, tiny vegetative clones that form in the flower head. And suddenly, as I stripped the garlic flowers of these micro-bubils, I had thousands of miniature garlic cloves.

Which, naturally, meant I need another project.

Growing garlic from bulbils takes patience. Plant them in the fall, and the first year generally produces small single bulbs, or “rounds.” Those can be left or replanted, and in another growing cycle they can develop into the familiar multi-clove garlic bulbs.

So now I know exactly what I am going to do with them.

Around our wellhead, I always plant something because I don’t want to mow too close to it. We also have rocks strategically placed around the area, which makes mowing there a nuisance anyway.

Last year, I planted pumpkins there and ended up with roughly 300 pounds of pumpkins.

This year, I planted squash and what was advertised as a “micro” marigold.

The “micro” marigold apparently did not read the seed packet.

It turned into a monster and completely outcompeted the squash. From a food-production standpoint, the bed was something of a disaster.

So this fall, I am going to scatter-plant my thousands of little garlic bulbils in that bed, as in other places on the farm that we let go wild and basically leave them alone for two years.

I am ridiculously excited to see what happens.

If this works, by 2028 I may have enough garlic not only to feed ourselves, but to donate tens of pounds to the local food bank and give garlic to virtually everyone we know for Christmas.

Friends and family, you have been warned.

Meanwhile, the three filly foals are growing like weeds. With three of them on the ground, we finally had to make the difficult decision to sell one. We are keeping the black filly and the buckskin and will be offering the beautiful bay filly for sale. I have been so busy, that I have hardly had time to work with them, let alone take photos. In order to sell a horse in today’s market, one needs good photos and video - so I guess that is another job for another day soon.

And, of course, breeding season continues.

So far, we have one mare confirmed pregnant. Unfortunately, the first round of artificial insemination on our buckskin mare, Quieta, a repeat of last year’s breeding, did not take. We are now well into round two.

Each round costs roughly $3,500.

So, if this second attempt is successful, we will already have about $7,000 invested in that foal before it has even been conceived successfully, much less born, fed, handled, registered, trained, or done anything useful whatsoever.

People sometimes wonder why horses are so expensive.

There is a reason.

So that is August on the farm: international travel, film crews, UAP whistleblowers, lightning strikes, electrical excavation, house renovations, hundreds of tiny peppers, mountains of garlic, monster marigolds, growing foals, expensive horse reproduction, and a guest house that has unexpectedly become our permanent residence.

And it isn’t even September yet. And now, my periodic and slightly shameless plea for subscriptions.

JGM

Homesteading for Health is now available at Amazon and other booksellers.

Last week, our book Homesteading for Health was finally published. Writing it took us three years.

Unfortunately, we are having some difficulty getting our publisher to do much (any?) marketing for the book, which is disappointing. There are political reasons for this that I probably shouldn’t get into in a public forum.

But I will say this: apparently, if you piss off the right people at HHS by being a truth teller, there can be consequences elsewhere. Particularly when your publisher is a big fan of MAHA-gov.

Let’s put it this way. The words “MAHA Books”, found on the title page, will apparently be disappearing from the next print run.

Oh well.

So we are going to have to do a little more of the heavy lifting ourselves.

Below is an excerpt from Homesteading for Health, along with a shameless plea: please buy the book, and please leave a review on Amazon. And I sincerely thank the seven people who have already taken the time to leave five-star reviews on Amazon. That means more to me than I can say.

This is not simply a book about chickens, gardens, livestock, and growing your own food. There is a lot of important information in it about health, food, self-reliance, and taking back some control over the things that directly affect our lives. It is also, in places, something of a memoir, telling the story of how and why we ended up doing all of this in the first place.

And by all accounts so far, people are really enjoying it.

So, since the marketing department apparently has other priorities, we are counting on you.

In the meantime, I am having increasing difficulty wrapping my head around using a traditional publisher for future books. The profit per book for the author is almost nonexistent, and if a publisher isn’t going to put meaningful effort or resources into marketing, it becomes increasingly difficult to see what, exactly, the benefit is.

It may be time to develop our own publishing imprint through Malone Media. At some point, cutting out the middleman stops being an ideological statement and simply becomes good business.

But that is a discussion for another day.

For now, below is an excerpt from Homesteading for Health, available through Amazon and other booksellers. I hope you enjoy it.

JGM

Amazon: Homesteading for Health

Our deeper dive into historic farming practices began in 2003, when we purchased two Amish Percheron draft horses, Annie May and Katie Sue. Annie came first. She was a stout, no-nonsense mare who had done it all. Plowing. Tedding hay. Driving down quiet country roads. Carrying children on her back. Nothing fazed her.

Annie Became Our Greatest Teacher

There is nothing better than a draft horse that has already lived a working life. She was powerful, gentle, and consistent, producing beautiful foals for us year after year. Over time, our farm became a haven for young people, and Annie seemed to understand that role. We discovered the Maryland Draft Horse and Mule Association and began attending workshops and events. We bought books on harnessing and work horses, and we learned slowly, the only way such skills are truly learned. Earl Nicholson, an old Maryland dairy farmer, took us under his wing. We spent countless hours on his farm, helping him and being helped in return.

Many of the farmers who were preserving these skills over twenty-five years ago (when we got involved in this part of our journey) had grown up using horses from before the Great Depression through the 1950s. They learned from their parents and prior generations how to keep soil alive long before modern chemical inputs became standard. Of these, many ran small dairy farms, a farming model that is extremely demanding but enables independence.

Robert had spent a few summers on his aunt and uncle’s small family dairy farm in eastern Oregon as a teen, and so had some understanding of the life and culture involved in dairy farming.

In the early 2000s, a small group of older farmers, along with a handful of newcomers like us, still practiced these methods. We absorbed knowledge wherever we could. We attended draft horse shows and farm auctions.

Robert learned the craft of horseshoeing. He likes to say that there are farriers and there are physicians, but there are not many who are both. Slowly, we built our skill set and a community. Eventually, we found ourselves passing knowledge along, hosting driving clinics, and participating in old farm days in Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia.

Many of those older farmers are now gone. Each year, that knowledge base shrinks as the old-timers pass away. Fortunately, the Amish and Mennonite communities continue to preserve these traditions, and a new generation has begun to rediscover them.

Our Journey

We learned how farming was practiced at the turn of the twentieth century. We learned to rest land, rotate pasture, build organic matter, plant winter cover crops, and use legumes to fix nitrogen. We learned to plow, ted, bale, and harvest hay with horses. We learned that horses compact soil far less than modern tractors. We learned to harness drafts and maintain horse-drawn equipment, much of it built before 1940. Over time, we assembled a working collection of implements, wagons, and carriages.

As our horse-drawn farming skills grew, we were also breeding, raising, and training Percherons, those magnificent black-and-gray draft horses with feet the size of dinner plates.

We taught others to hitch and drive. We took on interns, mostly teenagers, who learned to work horses and show them at local and state fairs. Our community expanded. We developed a niche market in all of this, which is something many homesteaders turn to in order to make the finances of a small farm workable.

Our farm neighbor in Maryland had two hundred acres of beautiful orchard grass pasture, as good as one could ever hope for. Robert once asked how he had achieved it, because our fifty acres with hard red clay for soil could not grow grass pasture like that. The farmer explained that his family had farmed the land for over a century and always kept cattle, rotating them through the pastures. The cattle grazed broadleaf weeds. Invasive weeds were mowed. Orchard grass grew in clumps and, when managed properly, crowded out weeds.

Over time, we learned which grasses make for sustainable pastures and how to manage them. Our neighbor had never needed to use Roundup or 2-4-D herbicides. Learning from our neighbor and so many others, we used mowing, sometimes horse- drawn, to cut invasive weeds before they seeded. We planted winter cover crops to build nitrogen and suppress weeds. And we learned to tolerate a certain percentage of broad-leaved weeds in our pasture. The truth is, we have been farming, growing vegetables, and tending fruit for as long as we have been together. Composting, building organic matter, and choosing crops wisely were already part of who we were.

The transformation to the present was when we began learning how to apply those same techniques at scale.

On our farm, we compost horse manure along with plant waste and chicken litter, turning the piles occasionally to introduce oxygen and keep the process active. Composting is aerobic. It depends on oxygen. Without turning, piles compact and go anaerobic. Turning redistributes moisture and heat, allowing all material to break down evenly and helping kill weed seeds and pathogens. We do not contain our piles. We build them, let them work, and start new ones when needed. After about six months, when a pile no longer steams, it is ready.

Regenerative agriculture is simply a farming and grazing approach focused on rebuilding soil health, enhancing biodiversity, and restoring damaged ecosystems. That means rebuilding organic matter, improving water retention, increasing plant and animal diversity, and reducing reliance on synthetic inputs. A farm with mixed livestock, diverse pastures, gardens, and fruit trees is the key to restoring depleted land. When you see worms flourishing, you know you are on track to success!

These practices include reduced tillage, cover cropping, crop rotation, minimizing chemical inputs, and rotational grazing. In other words, exactly what we learned from old farmers and the Amish, just repackaged.

We need to stop thinking of regenerative farming as something only professional farmers should do. Every suburban yard, urban plot, and small acreage can contribute. Victory gardens, kitchen gardens, and community plots all serve the same purpose.

We all need to become farmers again.

We all need to tend the garden.

JGM/RWM

Read more at:

Amazon: Homesteading for Health

A few of the images from the Book:

JGM

Democracy in Israel

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

A note on what follows. Alexis de Tocqueville spent nine months in America between 1831 and 1832, ostensibly to study its prisons, and produced instead the most penetrating account of the American character ever written by a foreigner. He was thirty-two when he sailed and had no particular affection for democracy. What made the book last was that he neither flattered his subject nor condemned it, and that he insisted the decisive facts about a people are not its laws but its habits.

We have imagined him landing at Ben Gurion instead of Newport, and have written this analysis in his manner. The observations are drawn from the six essays preceding this one and from the sources listed at the end. The topical approach and judgments are aligned with what his might have been, which is to say ours, offered in his voice and style.

At least for now, this framework and essay provide the conclusion to this series. It has generated considerable engagement, which is the term X uses to describe both hate-posting and active debate, and predictably we have been subjected to a barrage of defamation. We knew that was likely, and we dove into the analyses and published our findings anyway. Publishing this series has cost us about three thousand general unpaid subscribers, though our paid subscriber count has held. We knowingly accepted that price for countering actively promoted misinformation, which is a key part of the Malone News mission.

The Israeli and US militaries are not merging into one; the relationship is far more complicated and nuanced than that. Israel does not control the White House. The Palestinian homeland settlement narratives are considerably more complicated than the versions printed in the New York Times. The spitting on Christians is real, and it is wrong, and it comes overwhelmingly from radicalized young men raised in a small number of very specific religious communities. And the Mossad is not only not all-powerful, but has a long history of serious intelligence failures.

We hope that those who have taken the time to read and think for themselves have developed a deeper understanding of these issues, as we have, and have become more resistant to the cloud of promoted and sponsored material (and hate) that currently surrounds them. As usual, we do not wish to tell you what to think. We strive to provide information that will help you think more clearly and draw your own conclusions.

Of the point of departure, and its influence upon all that follows

The Israelis have a point of departure also, and it is not the one a stranger expects.

They did not begin with a covenant. They began with a conclusion, drawn from evidence, and the conclusion was this: that respectability confers no protection whatever. Israel’s founders had watched a people make themselves useful, learned, prosperous, and indistinguishable from their neighbors, and had watched that make no difference at all when the knock came at the door. Pinsker wrote it down in 1882 and Herzl after him, and the century then supplied the proof (Pinsker 1882; Herzl 1896).

From that single conviction nearly everything else descends. A people who believe that virtue will be rewarded build institutions to display their virtue. A people who believe it will not build institutions to survive without it.

And so the second act of this state, within weeks of its founding, was to fire on a ship carrying arms to one of its own armed factions, and to dissolve the most distinguished fighting force among its founders. Jews shot Jews off the beach at Tel Aviv in June of 1948 in order that there should be one army and one flag. The Americans, whose republic was assembled out of militias, wrote the militia into their fundamental law. The Israelis, whose republic was assembled by liquidating its militias, hear the word and think of Beirut.

An observer who does not grasp this will misread everything he sees here, and will in particular misunderstand why a people so heavily armed have so little of what an American would call a right to arms.

Of the extraordinary propensity of these people to associate

In Israel this habit exists in a degree I have not seen elsewhere, and it exists because the state, for all its centralizing temper, cannot arrive in time.

Every agricultural settlement near a hostile border maintains a body of its own neighbors, chartered and armed by the state, who are expected to fight until soldiers come. On the morning of the great massacre of October seventh, these bodies were, in many places, the entire defense. At one settlement nine such men faced some hundreds of attackers and four of them died. Off-duty soldiers drove south on their own authority. Volunteer ambulance corps assembled without orders.

I observed the same faculty afterward in stranger applications. When it emerged that Christians were being insulted and assaulted in the old quarter of Jerusalem, it was not the ministry that began counting the incidents. It was a Jewish scholar of Christianity and a corps of Jewish volunteers, who drive to churches to stand beside people they have never met.

When the hostages were taken, the families did not petition. They occupied a public square, erected a clock, and remained there for two years and three months until the last body came home.

The American forms associations because he is free and has time. The Israeli forms them because the alternative is to wait, and he has learned what waiting costs. The result looks similar and proceeds from an opposite premise, which is the sort of thing a traveler ought to notice before he congratulates a people on resembling his own.

Of the army as a school, and of those it does not admit

Here the army is not a difficulty but the principal school of the nation. Nearly the whole of the population passes through it at eighteen, and continues to be summoned back for decades afterward. It is where a man from a development town in the south meets a man from north Tel Aviv, and where both acquire the habit of speaking to a superior as though he were a cousin.

I have never encountered an army in which so little deference is shown and so much obedience is obtained. An officer is addressed by his given name. An argument with a commander is not insubordination but procedure. Some part of the Israeli temper that a European finds abrasive is simply the residue of this: a nation of people who have all been shouted at by a sergeant and have all shouted back.

But an institution that makes citizens also marks those it does not make.

Roughly sixty-nine of every hundred Jewish men were inducted in a recent year. Among the ultra-Orthodox the figure is very nearly nothing, and some sixty-three thousand of their young men are eligible. In June of 2024 the whole bench of the Supreme Court, nine justices, ruled unanimously that no legal basis for their exemption existed, that the arrangement was unconstitutional, and that the government had gravely undermined the rule of law and the principle that all persons stand equal before it. No statute governing the matter has since been enacted (Israel Supreme Court 2024).

The Arab citizens are exempted also, though by the army’s own policy rather than by law. The Druze are not exempted, and enlist at above eighty in a hundred, frequently into combat. Bedouin men volunteer in numbers greater than other Arabs and smaller than the Druze.

Here, then, is a nation whose principal instrument of equality is an institution that a fifth of its citizens may not enter and another eighth decline to. I do not know how such an arrangement is sustained indefinitely, and neither, so far as I can determine, does anyone here.

Of equality in manners, and inequality in condition

The Americans had achieved an equality of conditions unknown in Europe, and their manners followed from it. Here the manners have run ahead of the conditions, which is a different and less stable arrangement.

I know of no country where a stranger is so quickly addressed as an equal. There is no honorific that survives the second sentence. The taxi driver instructs the minister. The queue is a suggestion. A European mistakes this for rudeness, and it is not; it is the refusal of a people who were subordinate for eighteen centuries to perform subordination for anyone ever again.

Yet a short drive from this rough equality one encounters conditions no American township ever contained. Two populations occupy the same hills. One is tried in civil courts and the other before military tribunals. One builds with permits and receives roads, water mains, and a legal address; the other applies for permits which are granted at a rate near zero and builds anyway, under demolition orders that sit in a file (Bimkom 2021).

The manners are democratic. A portion of the conditions is not. A people may live with such a contradiction for a long while, and I have observed that they generally do so by not looking at it.

There is one exception to the levelling, and it is not the one a European expects.

In the countries I know, dress announces rank. A man’s coat declares his income and his station, and in an aristocracy any observer reads it at fifty paces. Here dress declares nothing whatever about a man’s fortune and a great deal about his convictions.

A black hat of a particular brim. A fur hat worn only on the Sabbath and the festivals, and cut differently by each Hasidic court. A knitted skullcap, whose size and colour a stranger cannot read and every Israeli can. Fringes worn outside the trousers or tucked within them. A married woman’s wig, or her headscarf, or her hat, each carrying its own meaning. None of these signals wealth. All of them signal what a man believes and which authority he obeys, and the knitted skullcap in particular has become very nearly a ballot.

I know of no other country whose visible code is at once so precise and so entirely detached from money. The taxi driver and the minister dress as equals. The believer and the believer of another sort do not, and neither wishes to.

Of the piety of a people who call themselves secular

I must correct an impression every visitor arrives with, and which the Israelis themselves encourage.

They will tell you the country is divided between the religious and the secular, and they will give you proportions. Something under a tenth are ultra-Orthodox. Something near a tenth again are religious in the national manner. Near a third call themselves traditional. Four in ten call themselves secular (Pew Research Center 2016).

Those last two words do not mean in Jerusalem what they mean in Paris.

The secular Israeli fasts on the Day of Atonement. He circumcises his sons. He sits at the Passover table and reads the whole account through. He will not bring pork into his mother’s house. He knows the liturgy well enough to be bored by it, which is a wholly different relation to a religion than never having learned it. The Frenchman who calls himself secular has generally departed. The Israeli who calls himself secular has generally only stopped attending.

And the traditional category, which is the largest single body of them and for which I know no equivalent in any Western language, describes a man who keeps what he keeps, on his own authority, without system and without apology. He drives to the beach on the Sabbath and will not eat leavened bread at Passover. A European would call this inconsistency. It is not inconsistency. It is a man who has never accepted that the choice is between all of it and none.

From this soil grows the one conviction I found in every quarter of Israeli society, held as firmly by the man in the fur hat as by the man on the sand at Tel Aviv, and it explains behavior that appears to foreign observers to be madness.

The Mishnah holds that whoever saves a single life is accounted to have saved an entire world (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5). The principle they call pikuach nefesh holds that the preservation of a life overrides very nearly every other commandment, the Sabbath included, and the Sabbath is the most heavily defended institution in the whole of their law (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 85b). A physician may drive upon it. A sick man must break the fast, and it is an offense to refuse. This is not a concession wrung from necessity. It is a ranking, and life sits at the head of it.

Now consider what the foreigner sees here and calls irrational.

This nation exchanged one thousand and twenty-seven prisoners for a single soldier. It has repeatedly traded the living for the dead, and negotiated for years to recover remains. There is a corps of volunteers who go to the sites of atrocities and gather fragments of bodies with tweezers, so that a whole man may be buried. Its hospitals treated some five thousand citizens of a state formally at war with it. Its surgeons have opened the hearts of children sent from countries that do not concede that Israel exists.

An economist would call every item on that list a mistake, and part three of this series sets out in colder terms what the exchanges have cost. I do not withdraw that analysis. But a traveller who reports the arithmetic and stops there has failed to describe the country. The arithmetic is bad because these people are operating a ranking in which one life outranks a great many other goods, and they did not invent that ranking in the last century. They have been arguing about it since the second.

Of religion, and of what an establishment costs a faith

The Israelis have not done this, and the consequences are legible.

Marriage, burial, and conversion are administered by an official rabbinate, which is a department of state. A citizen who wishes to marry outside its rules flies to Cyprus. The religious schools receive public funds while their students decline the conscription that binds their neighbors’ sons.

An establishment of religion produces two effects wherever I have seen it. It makes the faith an object of political resentment among those who do not share it. And it relieves the faith of the necessity of persuading anyone.

The second effect is the graver one. There is a small number of young men in the old quarter of Jerusalem who spit upon Christian clergy and describe the act as a religious duty. Their numbers are counted, as I have said, by Jews. The count has risen from one hundred seven incidents in a year to one hundred eighty-one in the next, and higher since (Religious Freedom Data Center 2026). Of twenty-five complaints laid before the authorities across a decade, nineteen were closed without a suspect or without an offense (Israel Religious Action Center 2026).

A minister who once defended this practice in public now superintends the police. That is not a coincidence but a mechanism, and it is the same mechanism I observed on the American frontier, where the sheriff’s sympathies determined which crimes were crimes.

I would say to the Israelis what I said to the Americans about their own religion, and they will like it no better: that a faith which requires the state’s protection has already begun to doubt itself, and that the harm an establishment does is chiefly to the established.

Of the single opinion which could not be doubted

The Israelis argue more loudly than any people I have encountered, and I supposed at first that they were exempt. They are not. They have merely concentrated the effect into a single object.

They had an opinion about their enemy which everyone held. It was that he had been deterred, that he had property and office to lose, and that he would therefore not do the thing he had said for thirty years he would do. They gave it a name, which is always the sign that an opinion has hardened into a wall.

Young women watching the fence reported what they saw and were instructed to stop. A plan was found in the enemy’s own hand and judged aspirational. A junior officer had written the identical warning fifty years before, about a different enemy, and had been filed away by his superior.

The remedy had been devised after the first catastrophe. An office was established whose entire function was to compose the contrary opinion. It existed on the morning of the second catastrophe, staffed and mandated, and it did not fire.

I take from this what I took from America. The danger to a free people is not that it will be forbidden to think, but that it will not think of thinking, and that the office it establishes to do the doubting will attend meetings.

Of the peoples of this land who are not Jews

There are three conditions here, and a stranger who conflates them will understand none of them.

The first is that of the Arab citizens, who number some two million and one hundred thousand, or better than a fifth of the state. Four in five are Muslim; the remainder are Christian and Druze in nearly equal parts. They vote. They sit in the parliament. A Muslim sits upon the Supreme Court, and is not the first to do so.

Their advance in the healing professions is the fact most often cited to me, and it is worth stating precisely rather than as the round numbers that circulate. Two scholars examined the licensure series of the health ministry and found that in 2023, among employed Israelis under sixty-seven, Arabs were a quarter of the physicians, better than a quarter of the nurses and the dentists, and very nearly half of the pharmacists, against twenty-two in a hundred of the working population. In 2010 the figure for physicians had been eight (Rosen and Miaari 2025).

That is a remarkable ascent in thirteen years, and I do not diminish it. The same study obliges me to record two things which the round numbers omit.

Much of that licensure was earned abroad. A great many Arab physicians, dentists and pharmacists took their training outside the country, because the places at home were not available to them. In the academic year 2022 and 2023, Arabs were seventy in a hundred of the first-degree pharmacy students in Israeli institutions, a third of the nursing students, a quarter of the dentistry students, and nine in a hundred of the medical students. That last figure had been eighteen a decade earlier (Rosen and Miaari 2025).

A people is advancing in a profession while its share of the domestic pipeline into that profession is falling by half. Both statements are true, and a traveler who reports only the first has flattered his hosts rather than described them.

I record also that their towns receive less; that their rate of poverty is higher; that criminal violence within their communities is severe and the state’s response to it has been widely judged inadequate; that infant mortality among Arab citizens stands above four times the Jewish rate, at some five deaths in a thousand live births against rather more than one (Israel Ministry of Health 2025); and that in 2018 the parliament removed Arabic from the status of an official language, which is the sort of act that costs a state nothing in law and a great deal in affection.

A traveler must hold both halves. A people is not oppressed which fills half the medical faculties. A people is not equal whose language has been demoted by statute.

The second condition is that of the Palestinians of the territories, who are neither citizens nor foreigners and who live under the authority of a state in which they cannot vote. Of this I will say only what the frontier taught me in America, which is that such arrangements are always described as temporary and are never temporary, and that the question is never whether they will end but in which of three ways: by admission, by subjection, or by departure. My American hosts used all three and were not proud of any.

The third condition is one no American of my century would have recognized and every American of this one will. There are foreigners here who do the agricultural labor, chiefly from Thailand, some tens of thousands of them, and on the morning of the massacre they died alongside the farmers and were carried into captivity with them. A Bedouin citizen of this state hid twenty-four of them, with eight Jewish young people, beneath his house, and went out to lie to armed men in Arabic to keep them alive.

I set that story down because a theory of this country which cannot contain it is a theory that should be abandoned. The categories offered to me by advocates on every side, settler, colonist, native, occupier, each explained a portion of what I saw and none explained that man.

Of a bargain struck in an hour of danger, and of what such bargains cost

I observed in America that a people may be governed for generations by a compromise it made in a single season, and that the compromise is nearly always struck when the danger is greatest and the future least legible.

The Israelis made theirs in 1949.

An assembly was elected to write a constitution and did not write one. The religious parties would not accept a secular instrument, the country was newly at war, and the man who governed it judged that unity was worth more than a document. The question was deferred by resolution, and the deferral is now seventy-seven years old. This nation has no constitution because it needed its quarrelsome factions in the same room during a war of survival, and it has needed them in the same room ever since.

From the same hour comes the exemption I described earlier. Some four hundred students of the Talmud were released from military service on the reasoning that they were the last remnant of a scholarly world destroyed in Europe and would not persist. They persisted. The number is now above sixty thousand, and the arrangement that was to expire with a generation has instead acquired a parliamentary constituency, two political parties, and a veto. Part five of this series sets out what that veto has cost the Christians of the old city, and by whose hand it is exercised.

I know this bargain. It is not Israeli.

The men who framed the American constitution in 1787 required the southern states, because a union of thirteen quarrelling provinces faced three empires on its frontiers and could not afford to lose four of them. They paid with a clause counting an enslaved man as three-fifths of a person, a clause obliging free states to return the escaped, and twenty years in which the traffic in human beings could not be touched. Several who signed it believed the institution would decay of its own economic weakness. Three years later a machine was invented for separating cotton from its seed, and it did not decay.

Both compromises were reasonable in the hour they were made. Both rested on a prediction about the future. Both predictions were wrong in the same direction, which is to say that the exempted thing grew rather than withered. And both, having been made under external pressure, could not afterward be revisited, because the pressure never let up long enough.

That is the mechanism, and it is the one I would have Americans understand before they pronounce upon it. It is easy to say that a nation which will not conscript an eighth of its young men has a self-inflicted difficulty. So it has. What is less easy to say, and truer, is that the difficulty is inflicted anew every year by the same circumstance that produced it. No first minister will bring down his government in a season of war, and there has been no season here that was not one. Each year of postponement enlarges the population postponed.

I have heard Americans propose that two parties would cure this, as they have at home. I doubt it, and I doubt it on American evidence.

Your Senate seats the smallest of your western territories equally with the largest of your states, an arithmetic settled on your own frontier for reasons of party advantage that nobody now defends and no amendment may alter. Your legislature has more than once been halted by a faction of some thirty men out of four hundred and thirty-five, and in one recent instance that faction removed the presiding officer of the chamber, a thing never done before. No elector was ever asked to approve the arrangement.

The difference between your system and theirs is not that yours lacks a hinge. It is that in Israel the bargain is struck after the election, written down, and published, so that a citizen may read what was traded for what. In America it is struck inside the parties, before the election, and never written down at all.

I do not say the Israeli arrangement is the better one. I say that a people which counts its own factions honestly is further along than a people which has hidden them, and that both are living inside decisions taken in a hurry by frightened men who thought the emergency would end.

Of the arithmetic that forbids the remedy

I said in the preceding chapter that the second condition here, that of the people who are neither citizens nor foreigners, is always described as temporary and never is. I did not say why the obvious remedy is withheld, and I ought to, because the reason is not wickedness. It is a sum, and the Israelis do it among themselves constantly and in front of strangers rarely.

Set it out plainly.

Within the borders this state actually governs as a state, Jews are near four fifths of the population, and the best demographer in the country expects them to remain about there. Add the territory of the hills and the fraction falls to something near three fifths. Add the strip on the coast as well and the two peoples arrive at parity (DellaPergola 2026).

Now consider how this parliament is constituted, because the arithmetic passes directly into it. There are no districts here. There is no man whose name appears upon a ballot. A citizen chooses a list, and seats are apportioned to the whole nation in proportion to the whole vote. What a population is, the chamber becomes, once every part of it votes at the same rate.

Two fifths of a hundred and twenty is forty-eight. That is not a government. It is a permanent hand upon the throat of every government thereafter.

I am told, and it is true, that matters do not presently work that way. The Arab citizens are a fifth of the state and their parties hold something nearer a tenth of the seats, because they vote in smaller proportion than their neighbors, because their parties quarrel and divide, and because no coalition has been willing to seat them except once, briefly, and at great cost to the men who did it.

A traveller ought to say what that means rather than repeat it approvingly. It means the present majority rests in part upon the other man’s abstention. A people may govern for a long while on such a foundation. It cannot call the arrangement settled.

Their own statesmen have said this more bluntly than I would dare to. A prime minister of the party of the right declared that if the separation of the two peoples failed, his country would face a struggle for equal suffrage after the South African manner, and that on the day such a struggle began the State of Israel was finished. That is not the complaint of an enemy. It is the reason five successive governments, of opposed parties and bitter mutual contempt, all pursued some form of partition.

Of the hope that time will do the arithmetic for them

There is an answer to all this which I heard more than once, and it deserves examination rather than dismissal, because the facts underneath it are real and are not widely known.

The birth rates have crossed.

In this country the Jewish woman now bears more children than the Muslim woman, and this is a recent and remarkable inversion. Twenty years ago the Muslim rate stood near four and a half and the Jewish near two and a half. The lines met about a decade ago and have since separated in the opposite direction, the Jewish rate rising to near three and the Muslim falling to near two and a half (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics 2025). Of all the developed nations I know, this is the only one whose birth rate has gone up.

From which some conclude that the question need not be answered at all. Defer it. Let the cradle settle what the treaty cannot.

I do not think it will serve, for four reasons, and the last is the one that ought to trouble them most.

The advantage is not general. It belongs almost entirely to the ultra-Orthodox, whose women bear six and a half children while the secular bear fewer than two. A nation adopting this strategy wins its count by enlarging precisely the community that does not serve in its army, that works in smaller proportion than any other, and whose parties hold the exemption I described earlier. It would solve the problem of numbers by deepening the problem of the bargain.

The advantage is also temporary. Every projection I have seen has all these rates declining together, the secular toward one and seven tenths, the religious toward two and a third, the ultra-Orthodox toward four and a third (Taub Center 2025). What they are looking at is not a plateau. It is a summit.

And the sum begins at parity, not at four fifths. A slight advantage compounding from an even division does not restore a governing majority within any span of years a statesman may plan for. It moves a point in a generation.

Then the fourth. Waiting does not shrink the population that cannot be enfranchised. It enlarges it. Every year the question is deferred there are more people to whom the answer must eventually be given.

But here is the objection I would put to them if they would sit still for it.

They have made this wager once already, and lost it inside a single lifetime.

The exemption from the army was granted in 1949 to four hundred students of the Talmud upon an explicit prediction about the future: that they were the last of a world destroyed in Europe and would not persist. They persisted. There are now above sixty thousand, they possess two parties and a veto, and the whole government of this country presently trembles upon the question.

To propose now that the question of citizenship be deferred until the birth rates resolve it is to make the identical instrument serve a second time, in a state that has direct and painful knowledge of what befalls a demographic forecast that runs the wrong way.

I know this instrument from my own reading of the Americans, and they used it longer and worse.

Several of the men who framed that constitution believed the institution of slavery would decay of itself, and they built accordingly. The clause counting an enslaved man as three fifths of a person was nothing other than a demographic accommodation, a device for weighing in the legislature a population that could not vote in it. And for forty years afterward the whole business of that republic, its compromises over Missouri, its admission of states in matched pairs, its arrangement of 1850, was the management of an arithmetic which everyone understood and no one would name aloud.

That management was skilful. It was conducted by serious men. It postponed the reckoning for two generations, and the reckoning when it came cost six hundred thousand of their young men.

I do not predict such a thing here, and I would not be believed if I did. I observe only that a people which has resolved to wait for numbers to relieve it of a decision has chosen the one course whose precedents are all bad, and that they of all peoples have the evidence in their own recent history.

Of the frontier which has not closed

The Americans had a frontier and believed it made them. I thought at the time that they overstated it, and I have since come to think they understated it.

Israel has a frontier still, and it is the last one in the developed world worth the name. Overlapping jurisdictions occupy the same ground. Title rests upon an Ottoman code of 1858 which rewards cultivation and forfeits land left three years untilled. Water is allocated by a committee in which each party holds a veto, which is to say by no one. Both peoples plant trees, because a tree is a claim, and both have understood that the survey decides what the soldier cannot.

That frontier is now closing, by registration rather than by cavalry, and it will close in favor of the party holding the stronger legal apparatus, as frontiers always do (Crisis Group 2025).

What I could not obtain from anyone here, and I asked, was a description of the closed condition. Every man I put the question to answered with the security case, which is strong, and none proceeded to the second half.

Of what I fear, and of what I do not

I do not fear that this people will be destroyed by its enemies. I have seen its soldiers and its scientists and its argumentative crowds, and I judge that a nation which can be summoned from its offices to its tanks in a day, and which produces more of certain useful arts than states forty times its size, will not be extinguished by neighbors who are poorer, less educated, and less united than themselves.

Nor do I fear, as some of my countrymen affect to, that it is a nation of fanatics. I met fewer fanatics here in a week than I meet in a Paris season, and the ones I met were counted and catalogued by their own neighbors, which is more than most nations do.

What I fear is what I feared for the Americans, and it is not what either people fears for itself.

I fear the effect upon a free people of governing another people who are not free, and I observe that this effect falls upon the governor before it falls upon the governed. I fear the habits that eighty years of emergency deposit in a state, and the difficulty of removing them once the emergency admits of no end. I fear the office established to do the doubting, and the certainty that it will attend meetings. And I fear the day when the sons of that shouting, arguing, unbowed people discover that they have grown accustomed to a condition their grandfathers would have found intolerable, and can no longer remember when it began.

The Americans were warned of this and did not attend, and the reckoning came to them in the fourth decade after my visit, and it cost them six hundred thousand of their young men.

I do not predict such a thing here. I say only that the question was posed to me in America by a country that would not look at it, and that it is posed to me again in Israel by a country that looks at it constantly and has not yet answered.

That is a considerable improvement. It is not a solution, and the difference between them is the subject of everything I have written.

RWM/JGM

References

Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 85b.

Bimkom. 2021. Building Permits in Area C: Data on Palestinian Applications 2016 to 2021. Jerusalem.

Crisis Group. 2025. Sovereignty in All but Name: Israel’s Quickening Annexation of the West Bank. Middle East Report 252. Brussels, October 9.

DellaPergola, Sergio. 2026. The Jewish People in 2126: Demography, Identity and the Future of a Global Minority. Jerusalem.

Herzl, Theodor. 1896. Der Judenstaat. Vienna: M. Breitenstein.

Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 2025. Population of Israel: Selected Data. Jerusalem.

Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 2025. Fertility Rates by Population Group. Jerusalem.

Israel Ministry of Health. 2025. Health Inequality and Coping with It. Jerusalem, June.

Israel Ministry of Health. Various years. The Health Care Professions (report series). Jerusalem.

Israel Religious Action Center. 2026. Complaints Concerning Harassment of Christians, 2012 to 2021. Jerusalem, June 4.

Israel Supreme Court. 2024. Judgment on the Conscription of Yeshiva Students. Jerusalem, June 25.

Jewish Virtual Library. 2026. The Status of Arabs in Israel. Chevy Chase, MD: American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise.

Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5.

Ottoman Land Code of 1858. Translated by F. Ongley. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1892.

Pew Research Center. 2016. Israel’s Religiously Divided Society. Washington, DC, March 8.

Pinsker, Leon. 1882. Auto-Emancipation. Berlin.

Religious Freedom Data Center. 2026. Documented Incidents Against Christians in Israel. Jerusalem, June 4.

Rosen, Bruce, and Sami Miaari. 2025. “Arab Representation in Israeli Healthcare Professions: Achievements, Challenges and Opportunities.” Israel Journal of Health Policy Research 14. doi:10.1186/s13584-024-00663-3.

Taub Center for Social Policy Studies. 2025. Israel 2025: A Demographic Fork in the Road. Jerusalem, December.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1835. Democracy in America, vol. 1. Paris: Gosselin.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1840. Democracy in America, vol. 2. Paris: Gosselin.

As previous speakers have indicated, this is going to establish essentially a new vaccine schedule that is fully informed by the research and data that we have from HHS and NIH and other aspects of the government.
It also takes a very hard line on some of the more paternalistic issues that we’ve been talking about here, sir, in terms of infringing on parents’ religious liberty or really just parents’ ability to make decisions for their children.
So as Heidi said, this is a very big deal. We’re not waiting for anyone else to take action as you do so often, sir. We’re just going ahead and doing the right thing based on all of the best available research to ensure that America’s parents and children are being as best protected by the federal government as they can be.

One doesn’t have to evoke autism for there to be a very good reason for this change.

But first, one must acknowledge that the US government doesn’t track vaccine injury well (that is an understatement). Unless there is a self-report/physician report to VAERS, it never shows up.

Over the past five years, since we began speaking out about the mRNA vaccine, we have met countless parents who have children with severe vaccine injuries. Permanent injuries. Sure, there are those with autism, and I am not discounting that, but there are so many with children who had swelling on the brain that caused permanent brain damage, others who trace developmental delays to febrile seizures or hypotonic-hyporesponsive episodes after vaccination.

So, even if we take the issues of vaccines and autism off the table, acute vaccine injury in young children is not rare and not uncommon.

I got Chat-GPT to do a VERY conservative estimate of severe adverse events from vaccines each year. Below is the analysis:

Share

From CHAT:

If we restrict ourselves to reasonably well-supported vaccine-attributable acute events and avoid double counting, one birth cohort could plausibly experience approximately:

~900–1,200 MMR febrile seizures
~90 MMR-associated ITP cases
~1,600 DTaP-associated HHE episodes
~70–110 anaphylactic reactions across the core vaccine series

That gets us to roughly 2,700–3,000 clinically significant vaccine-attributable events per 3.6-million-child birth cohort, before adding rotavirus intussusception, influenza-associated seizure risk, COVID-associated myocarditis, or other shared-decision vaccines.

If rotavirus vaccination were universal, add roughly 36–180 intussusceptions. If one also includes the attributable infant febrile-seizure signal, perhaps another ~140, although I would want to inspect overlap before putting it into the final total.

So a reasonable first-pass estimate becomes approximately:

~2,800–3,300 identifiable acute vaccine-attributable reactions per U.S. birth cohort, or roughly 1 child in 1,100–1,300.

If that number can be reduced by spreading out the vaccine schedule, then why not?

JGM

The data from CHAT (Again, these are very conservative estimates - references follow):

“The anaphylaxis number depends on how combination vaccines are counted and which optional vaccines a child receives. The VSD estimate is 1.31 confirmed vaccine-triggered cases per million doses, with no significant age difference.

The MMR seizure estimate is quite strong. CDC’s Pink Book gives approximately one febrile seizure for every 3,000–4,000 MMR doses, normally 6–14 days after vaccination. Applied to 3,606,400 first doses, that’s about 902 to 1,202 vaccine-attributable febrile seizures in one birth cohort.

ITP is also reasonably well quantified. A Vaccine Safety Datalink study concluded that MMR causes approximately one case of immune thrombocytopenic purpura per 40,000 doses, with 76% of ITP cases occurring in 12–23-month-olds during the risk window attributable to MMR. That gives approximately 90 cases per fully vaccinated U.S. birth cohort.

DTaP produces an interesting number

A much less frequently discussed outcome is the hypotonic-hyporesponsive episode, or HHE. The child becomes pale or cyanotic, limp and poorly responsive after vaccination. It is generally transient, but it is exactly the sort of event a parent would reasonably describe as a severe vaccine reaction.

An active-surveillance study found approximately 22.8 HHE cases per 100,000 acellular-pertussis vaccine doses, corresponding to about 45 episodes per 100,000 vaccinated children in the population studied. Applied to one contemporary U.S. birth cohort, that is approximately 1,623 children.

That number deserves a qualifier: HHE generally resolves without permanent neurologic damage, so I would classify it as an acute serious reaction, not a permanent vaccine injury. CDC also lists collapse or a shock-like HHE following DTaP as a recognized post-vaccination clinical event.

Rotavirus gives us another genuine hospital-level event

This one is unusually clear because the outcome, intussusception, is an intestinal obstruction frequently requiring hospitalization and sometimes surgery.

CDC estimates approximately one additional intussusception case per 20,000–100,000 vaccinated infants, usually after the first or second rotavirus dose.

If all 3,606,400 children received rotavirus vaccine, that mathematically becomes:

36–180 excess intussusception cases per birth cohort.

CDC’s empirical national estimate, accounting for actual vaccination patterns, is about 40–120 U.S. infants annually.

Interestingly, the January 2026 HHS review itself describes the current rotavirus vaccines as carrying an intussusception risk of roughly 1–2 per 100,000 vaccinated children, somewhat toward the low end of CDC’s older range.

Febrile seizures are probably around 1,000+, not dozens

I would revise my earlier rough estimate downward somewhat if we are talking about the current 2026 universal schedule, because influenza is no longer universally recommended.

For routine MMR alone, we’re at approximately:

902–1,202 attributable febrile seizures per birth cohort.

There is also evidence of febrile seizure attributable to vaccination during infancy. A VSD study examining children 3–5 months old identified an attributable risk of 3.92 febrile seizures per 100,000 vaccination visits, which corresponds to about 141 cases in a cohort this size if every child had such a visit.

However, I would not simply add those figures blindly, because some studies examine vaccine combinations and different age windows, and double-counting is possible.

If influenza vaccine is added, CDC reports that giving inactivated influenza vaccine simultaneously with PCV or DTaP can increase febrile seizure risk. CDC says the excess risk from these combinations is at most about 30 per 100,000 children vaccinated.

MMRV is especially revealing

CDC now recommends giving first-dose MMR and varicella separately in children 12–47 months rather than routinely using the combined MMRV vaccine.

The reason is measurable.

The febrile-seizure rate is approximately:

8.5 per 10,000 after MMRV

versus

4.2 per 10,000 after separate MMR + varicella.

That amounts to about one additional febrile seizure for every 2,300–2,600 children given MMRV instead of the separate shots.

Applied to our hypothetical 3.606-million-child cohort, universal first-dose MMRV would therefore generate approximately 1,400–1,570 additional febrile seizures compared with separate vaccination.

That is probably one of the clearest demonstrations that vaccine formulation and simultaneous administration matter. It is also why simply saying that “vaccines cause febrile seizures at X rate” isn’t particularly informative.

What about encephalitis, encephalopathy and “brain swelling”?

Here the analysis hits a hard scientific boundary.

CDC recognizes encephalopathy within seven days of a pertussis-containing vaccine as a contraindication to subsequent pertussis vaccination, which means the clinical syndrome is certainly recognized.

But modern DTaP studies have generally not demonstrated an increased population risk of neurologic disease or seizures from DTaP itself, apart from the known interaction involving simultaneous influenza vaccination.

Older studies of the whole-cell DTP vaccine, which is no longer used routinely in U.S. children, found attributable serious neurologic-event rates around 1 per 110,000–140,000 doses. Those figures should not be applied to today’s acellular DTaP vaccine.

So I cannot defensibly turn “brain swelling” into something such as “37 American children per year.” The evidence simply does not support that precision.

That is itself an important finding.

One qualification to the above answer: I would not yet cite the ~1,623 HHE figure as confidently as the MMR, intussusception, ITP and anaphylaxis numbers. I want to go back to the underlying HHE study and verify that the 45/100,000 figure can legitimately be extrapolated to an entire modern U.S. birth cohort before treating it as part of the ~2,800–3,300 subtotal. The other estimates above have much cleaner primary-source support.”

Primary studies

1. France EK, Glanz J, Xu S, et al. “Risk of Immune Thrombocytopenic Purpura After Measles-Mumps-Rubella Immunization in Children.” Pediatrics. 2008;121(3):e687–e692. DOI: 10.1542/peds.2007-1578.
   This is the Vaccine Safety Datalink study underlying the MMR-associated ITP estimate.
   PubMed record

2. McNeil MM, Weintraub ES, Duffy J, et al. “Risk of Anaphylaxis After Vaccination in Children and Adults.” Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. 2016;137(3):868–878. DOI: 10.1016/j.jaci.2015.07.048.
   Among 25,173,965 vaccine doses, investigators confirmed 33 vaccine-triggered anaphylaxis cases: 1.31 per million doses (95% CI 0.90–1.84).
   PubMed record

3. Duffy J, Hambidge SJ, Jackson LA, et al. “Febrile Seizure Risk after Vaccination in Children One to Five Months of Age.” Pediatric Neurology. 2017;76:72–78. DOI: 10.1016/j.pediatrneurol.2017.08.005.
   Vaccine Safety Datalink study finding an attributable risk of 3.92 febrile seizures per 100,000 vaccinated infants aged 3–5 months.
   PubMed record

4. Duffy J, Weintraub E, Hambidge SJ, et al. “Febrile Seizure Risk After Vaccination in Children 6 to 23 Months.” Pediatrics. 2016;138(1):e20160320.
   The study estimated a maximum excess risk of 30 febrile seizures per 100,000 children when influenza vaccine was administered concomitantly with PCV and a DTaP-containing vaccine rather than separately.
   Full study

CDC sources

5. CDC. “Prevention of Measles, Rubella, Congenital Rubella Syndrome, and Mumps, 2013.” MMWR Recommendations and Reports.
   CDC estimates approximately one additional febrile seizure per 3,000–4,000 MMR doses, usually 6–14 days afterward. CDC also notes that these febrile seizures have not appeared to produce long-term sequelae.
   CDC MMR recommendations

6. CDC. “Use of Combination Measles, Mumps, Rubella, and Varicella Vaccine.” MMWR. 2010.
   Also gives the MMR estimate of approximately one excess febrile seizure per 3,000–4,000 vaccinated children.
   CDC MMWR report

7. CDC. “Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Varicella (MMRV) Vaccine Safety.”
   Current CDC summary: first-dose MMRV produces approximately one additional febrile seizure for every 2,300 doses compared with giving MMR and varicella vaccines separately.
   CDC MMRV safety page

8. CDC. “Update: Recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices Regarding Administration of Combination MMRV Vaccine.” MMWR. 2008.
   This is useful historically because CDC explicitly states that MMR causes approximately one additional febrile seizure per 3,000–4,000 children and discusses the increased risk with MMRV. It also reports that 16% of the identified post-vaccination febrile-seizure cases with hospitalization information were hospitalized.
   CDC MMWR report

9. CDC Pink Book, Chapter 19: Rotavirus.
   Post-licensure U.S. surveillance estimates one excess case of intussusception per 20,000–100,000 vaccinated infants following rotavirus vaccination.
   CDC Pink Book: Rotavirus

10. CDC. “Contraindications and Precautions.”
    This is the source supporting my discussion of encephalopathy. CDC lists encephalopathy such as coma, decreased consciousness or prolonged seizures within seven days of DTP/DTaP, when not attributable to another cause, as a contraindication to subsequent DTaP vaccination.
    CDC contraindications and precautions

Birth-cohort denominator

11. Hamilton BE, Osterman MJK, Gregory ECW. “Births: Provisional Data for 2025.” National Center for Health Statistics, Vital Statistics Rapid Release, Report No. 43, April 2026.
    The provisional 2025 U.S. birth count was 3,606,400, based upon 99.95% of birth records received by NCHS. That’s the denominator I used to construct the hypothetical annual birth cohort.
    NCHS report

2026 schedule

12. CDC. “CDC Acts on Presidential Memorandum to Update Childhood Immunization Schedule.” January 5, 2026.
    This documents the 2026 federal schedule revision I used when distinguishing universally recommended vaccines from vaccines handled differently under the revised schedule.
    CDC 2026 schedule announcement

Israel’s Closing Frontier

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

On the morning of Friday, July 24, 2026, six people were killed on the edge of the Palestinian village of Tell, southwest of Nablus.

There are two accounts of what happened, and they cannot be reconciled.

The Israeli military says a group of Israeli civilians hiking near the village came under attack. The civilian security coordinator from the nearby outpost of Havat Gilad drove to the scene, where, according to the IDF, a Palestinian seized his rifle and opened fire.

Palestinian residents and the village council tell a very different story. They say Israeli settlers entered Tell first and attacked homes on the eastern edge of the village. Residents drove them back, only for them to return accompanied by Israeli soldiers.

What both sides agree on is how it ended. Master Sergeant Benayahu Mellet, 32, and Major Yuval Ezra, 27, were killed. So were four members of the Ramadan family, two brothers and two cousins. Israeli forces sealed off Tell and Nablus, raided a hospital, and recovered the rifle. In the days that followed, settlers burned homes and vehicles in the nearby village of Sarra. Israeli newspapers also reported that army officers appealed to settler leaders to calm the situation, but were ignored.

Six people dead. Two irreconcilable accounts. No authority trusted by both sides to establish what actually happened.

That is not a border incident.

It is a frontier incident.

A Word About the Name

I have used West Bank throughout this essay. Israelis we met pointed out that the term is not neutral.

It is also relatively recent. Jordan captured the territory in 1948, formally annexed it in 1950, and called it the West Bank to distinguish the western bank of the Jordan River from the East Bank, which is Jordan proper. The land is named for its position relative to a country that controlled it for just nineteen years before renouncing all claims in 1988.

Israel’s official term is Judea and Samaria. Those names are far older. Judea derives from the Kingdom of Judah, and Samaria from the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel. Both remained administrative names under Rome until Emperor Hadrian renamed the province Syria Palaestina after the Bar Kokhba revolt, a history discussed in Part Three of this series.

Those names are not neutral either. They embody the very historical claim they are meant to support. That is precisely why the Israeli government uses them, and why much of the rest of the world does not.

The United Nations generally uses Occupied Palestinian Territory. The legal conclusion is embedded in the very first word.

There is no politically neutral vocabulary here. Every name carries history, legal assumptions, and competing claims of sovereignty.

I use West Bank because it is the term most American readers immediately recognize. It is a matter of clarity, not endorsement. Anyone who insists that one of these names is simply the correct one is usually making a political argument while presenting it as an objective fact.

A second disclosure belongs alongside the first.

This delegation to Israel that we participated in was organized by the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), an American nonprofit; the itinerary was theirs. The people we met were Israeli jews, Arabs, Bedouins, Palestinians, and Americans.

It means the observations in this essay may reflect a selection bias, while the documentary material does not. Where I describe what we saw and what we were told, the reader is getting the Israeli side of a frontier. Where I cite permit approval rates, demolition figures, court rulings, and the Ottoman land code, those come from published sources, including Israeli government data, Israeli courts, Israeli newspapers, United Nations reporting, and European Union policy documents. Those do not depend on who hosted our lunch.

Readers should weigh the two differently. One week is not enough time to develop a comprehensive personal understanding of a very complex cultural and political situation. Jill and I can only report our personal impressions during that brief window of time. We do have a way of asking pointed questions that get to the heart of key issues, and the cited facts are facts. We have tried to keep them visibly separate.

Bordered Land and Borderland

Historians Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron drew a distinction that is often lost in discussions of this conflict. A borderland is a place of overlapping and incomplete sovereignty, where multiple armed actors operate, populations intermingle, and no single authority holds an unquestioned monopoly on force. A bordered land is what emerges after that frontier hardens into an internationally recognized border, with one sovereign authority on each side (Adelman and Aron, 1999).

Before October 7, the Israel-Gaza boundary had largely ceased to be a frontier. It had become a bordered land. There was a fence, a clearly defined line, and a governing authority on each side that exercised effective control over organized armed force within its own territory. For one morning, that order collapsed. Gaza briefly became a frontier again, which is why the raid economics discussed in Part One explain October 7 far better than conventional political geography.

The West Bank is different. It has never really ceased being a frontier.

In the West Bank, Areas A, B, and C divide the same landscape among competing authorities. Israeli settlements and Palestinian villages often lie within sight of one another. The Palestinian Authority governs some places but not others. Israel retains overriding security authority throughout much of the territory, but exercises it unevenly. Armed civilians, local security forces, militants, and soldiers all operate within the resulting gaps.

This is the classic borderland condition. Sovereignty overlaps. Jurisdictions compete. Authority is contested. Force is dispersed rather than monopolized.

That is why comparisons with the historic American frontier are so illuminating here. They fit the West Bank in ways they never really fit Gaza.

The Jurisdiction Stack

Americans often picture the frontier as a line moving steadily westward. A more useful way to think about it is as a stack of overlapping legal authorities occupying the same ground at the same time.

A rancher in New Mexico Territory in 1885 might find himself subject to territorial law, federal law, military authority, tribal jurisdiction, and the lingering claims of Spanish or Mexican land grants still being contested in court. Which law applied often depended on who you were, exactly where you stood, and who had the power to enforce an answer.

The Oslo Accords built the same type of stack deliberately in the West Bank, as a transitional arrangement, and it has now lasted more than thirty years.

• Areas A, B, and C divide the same landscape according to different allocations of civil and security authority.

• Area A is nominally under Palestinian civil and security control, with Israelis barred from entering.

• Area B combines Palestinian civil administration with Israeli overriding security authority.

• Area C is Israeli for both civil and security. An Israeli civilian in the West Bank is tried under Israeli civil law. A Palestinian in the same territory is tried under military law. Two legal systems, one piece of ground, membership determined by nationality.

Beneath all of this lies an even older layer. The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 survived the British Mandate, survived Jordanian administration, and remains the foundation of much of the territory’s land law today. Palestinian land administration in Areas A and B still rests largely on Jordanian law, itself built upon the Ottoman code after decades of amendment.

What Areas A, B, and C divide is not the underlying property law so much as the machinery of government: who registers title, who issues building permits, who hears disputes, who enforces regulations, and who has the authority to declare land to be state land. Much of that authority ultimately resides in Area C, making it the center of the territory’s most consequential legal and political disputes.

None of this was intended to be permanent. The Oslo process, which was never ratified, envisioned a temporary arrangement that would give way to a negotiated final settlement. Instead, the interim system hardened into a decades-long reality. Neither Israelis nor Palestinians accept the present division as the final answer, although they profoundly disagree about what should replace it. The American frontier accumulated similar layers of overlapping jurisdiction until one sovereign authority finally displaced the others. Frontiers do not remain frontiers forever. Eventually they close.

Title, and Who Adjudicates It

The deepest parallel concerns paper, and almost nobody draws it.

When the United States acquired the northern half of Mexico in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised to respect existing property rights. Much of that land was held under Spanish and Mexican grants, some communal, many defined by landmarks rather than surveys, and a considerable amount never formally registered because registration had not been required.

Congress eventually created tribunals to adjudicate those claims, culminating in the Court of Private Land Claims in 1891. Those courts applied American evidentiary standards to documents produced under a very different legal tradition. Claimants had to prove ownership in a language many did not speak, before tribunals funded by the government that stood to gain the land, and at legal costs many could not afford. Enormous tracts ultimately passed out of the hands of the original grantees, much of it through procedures that were legally valid under American law (Ebright 1994).

That older layer is where the categories live. Among the several the Ottoman code recognises, two are especially important here. Miri land is owned by the state but cultivated by private users who hold rights of use. Mewat, literally “dead land,” is uncultivated and considered unclaimed.

The popular image of the West Bank is of a uniformly inhabited landscape. It is not. The central mountain cities, such as Nablus and Hebron, have been continuously populated for centuries. By contrast, much of what is now Area C, especially the Jordan Valley and Judean Desert, has historically been thinly settled, with permanent villages concentrated around water sources and large expanses used for seasonal grazing by Bedouin and other pastoral communities rather than intensive agriculture. Both characterisations come from organizations sharply critical of Israeli policy, which is worth knowing given what the Ottoman categories then do with uncultivated land (B’Tselem 2017; Institute for Palestine Studies 2020).

Since 1979, Israeli authorities have surveyed land, identified tracts considered uncultivated under the Ottoman standard, and declared them state land available for allocation. Palestinian claimants may challenge those declarations before Israeli military appeals bodies, often relying on evidence from a legal tradition based on continuous use rather than formal registered title.

Formal land settlement, the process that converts claims into registered title, began under the British Mandate and continued under Jordan. Israel suspended that process by military order in December 1968, when roughly one-third of the West Bank had been formally registered (Israel Defense Forces 1968). The remaining two-thirds were left with ownership unresolved, precisely the condition in which disputes over mewat status become possible because no registered deed exists to settle the question.

Eleven years later, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in the Elon Moreh case that privately owned land could not be requisitioned for civilian settlements on grounds of military necessity (HCJ 390/79). State land declarations under the Ottoman categories quickly became the preferred legal mechanism because they did not depend on military necessity at all.

I am not arguing that these two histories are morally equivalent. They are not. I am arguing that they share the same institutional logic. In both cases, a conquering legal system inherited a property regime it was not designed to interpret, evaluated claims according to its own evidentiary rules, and adjudicated them in its own courts. The result need not be fraud or bad faith. It is a legal system functioning as designed while judging rights that originated in a very different legal tradition.

Israel’s February 2026 decision to resume systematic land registration across the West Bank employs the same kind of instrument that the United States used with the Court of Private Land Claims. Registration sounds like an administrative exercise.

On a frontier, it is one of the most consequential acts a government can undertake.

Water

Behind title, and ultimately more important than title, sits water.

Donald Worster argued that control of water, not ownership of land, determined who held power in the arid American West (Worster 1985). The comparison is immediately recognizable to anyone who has farmed in dry country. In places where rainfall is uncertain, land without water has little value. Whoever controls the water decides what the land is worth.

The mountain aquifer beneath the West Bank supplies both Israelis and Palestinians. The Oslo interim agreement allocated its use for what was supposed to be a five-year transition ending in 1999. That temporary arrangement still governs today. Israeli and Palestinian drilling permits pass through a joint committee in which each side holds a veto. Development, agriculture, and even the ability to remain on the land all begin with permission to drill.

The Ottoman Land Code had almost nothing to say about water. Water belonged to a different legal tradition, embodied in the Mecelle, the Ottoman civil code compiled between 1869 and 1876. Wells, irrigation, drinking rights, and protective zones around water sources were governed separately from ownership of the surrounding land.

That distinction disappeared almost immediately after 1967. Military Order 92 transferred authority over all water resources in the territory to the Israeli military commander. Military Order 158 required military permits for new Palestinian wells and water installations, with unauthorized works subject to confiscation. The land law remained. The water law did not.

America followed much the same sequence. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised to respect existing property rights, and courts spent decades construing those promises. Traditional Hispanic acequia systems gave way much more quickly to the American doctrine of prior appropriation: first in time, first in right. Whoever first diverted water and put it to productive use established a legal claim that often proved more valuable than the land itself (Rivera 1998). Land could wait. Water could not.

That is not an accident. Whoever controls the water determines who can cultivate the land.

I learned that long before I understood any of the politics behind it.

Jill and I both grew up in California, and we both worked her father’s avocado and lemon ranch on the Central Coast. It paid my way through two years of college. A well permit there was the difference between productive orchards and dead trees.

California has spent more than a century building institutions to fight over groundwater. Adjudicated basins. State agencies with authority to reduce pumping. Courts willing to hear disputes even when neither side is happy with the result.

None of that bureaucratic machinery exists in the West Bank.

The joint water committee gives each side a veto. In an overdrawn aquifer, paralysis favors whoever is already pumping.

Although between 80 and 90 percent of the aquifer’s recharge occurs beneath the West Bank, most extraction takes place on the Israeli side. Israel now produces most of its municipal water through Mediterranean desalination, reducing its dependence on the aquifer without changing who controls inland permits.

The Mediterranean is only about fifty kilometers away, and Israel now produces more desalinated water than it consumes. Why not simply pump it uphill into the West Bank?

The engineering is no longer the obstacle. Mekorot, Israel’s national water utility, spent four years and roughly a quarter of a billion dollars building a system that carries desalinated water from five Mediterranean plants across the watershed into the Sea of Galilee. Delivering water to Hebron would be technically straightforward by comparison. Pumping it uphill roughly doubles the cost of the water, making it economical for drinking and municipal use, though generally too expensive for most field crops. High-value orchards and vineyards can justify the cost. Wheat cannot.

So why not solve the problem that way? Because the dispute is no longer primarily about water. It is about control. An aquifer beneath your feet is a resource you possess. A pipeline is infrastructure controlled by someone else. Whoever owns the valves decides when water flows, how much it costs, and under what conditions it is delivered. The technology exists. The obstacle is not engineering. It is sovereignty.

The lesson is familiar to anyone who knows the American West.

The Newlands Act, Hoover Dam, and California’s Central Valley Project did not eliminate disputes over land. They made previously worthless land valuable, creating a century of litigation that continues today.

Water changes the value of land. It does not settle who controls it.

That matters because Ottoman land law rewards cultivation rather than mere possession.

Miri land belongs to the state. What the cultivator acquires is tasarruf: a possessory right that can be inherited, sold, mortgaged, and defended in court. To almost everyone standing on the ground, it looks exactly like ownership.

But it is not. The underlying title always remains with the state.

That right survives only while the land remains in productive use. Ten years of uncontested cultivation strengthens the claim. Three consecutive years without cultivation can return the land to the state.

• Anyone who has owned an oil lease understands this principle.

• Anyone who has owned a western water right understands it even better.

• The right exists only while it is being exercised.

• Water keeps the clock from running out.

You cannot leave an olive grove untended and unwatered for three years. Orchards and vineyards are twenty-year investments. Once planted, they require dependable water every year. Failure means losing decades rather than a single harvest.

The trees also become evidence of tasarruf, the right of usage. Under Ottoman law, cultivation strengthens a possessory claim. Mature trees are among the clearest evidence that cultivation has occurred continuously.

Planting an olive grove therefore does three things at once.

• It is a water claim.

• It is a title claim.

• It is a real estate possession claim.

Executed through a single act that ripens over decades.

That is why olive groves and vineyards are contested far out of proportion to their economic value. A man planting olives on a disputed hillside is doing considerably more than farming.

By the time water arrives, the opportunity to establish cultivation, and therefore strengthen or register the legal claim, has already passed. The orchards that establish cultivation should already be standing. If they never had the water to plant them, the title has already been shaped.

Both sides understand that.

Nobody plants sentimentally here. Every olive tree is a crop, a water claim, a title claim, and a statement about who expects to be here when the frontier finally closes.

The Race to Possession

Every frontier eventually produces the same race.

American settlers occupied and improved public land long before they held legal title, betting that possession would eventually become ownership. They were usually right. Congress repeatedly rewarded occupation through preemption statutes culminating in the Preemption Act of 1841 and later the Homestead Act of 1862 (Gates 1968). On the American frontier, possession often came first. Title followed.

As Jill and I drove through Area C, we kept encountering something unexpected: substantial new buildings, basically high-rise, low-income housing, standing nearly empty in a landscape that otherwise felt more like a frontier than a settled country. To our eyes, these looked like vast housing complexes – unfinished and largely unlived in.

Large concrete apartment blocks stood on hillsides overlooking the valleys. Some appeared finished, others nearly so. Yet many seemed almost entirely empty. No laundry hung from balconies. Few cars were parked outside. Little suggested that anyone actually lived there.

At first glance they looked like failed developments.

Then we began asking why.

One explanation is straightforward. Israeli approval for Palestinian construction in Area C is extremely rare. Between 2016 and 2021, Palestinians submitted 2,550 permit applications and twenty-four were approved. Since October 2023, hundreds more have been filed and none approved (Bimkom 2021; Norwegian Refugee Council 2025). Most Palestinian construction therefore proceeds without permits and carries the constant possibility of demolition. Moving a family into a building under a standing demolition order is a decision many people would postpone.

Emptiness may not be a failure of the project. It may be the design. American settlers understood this perfectly. The Homestead Act required residence and improvement, and an industry promptly developed in satisfying the requirement without meeting it. Claim shanties went up across the plains, some of them portable and hauled from one entry to the next. One story that entered the folklore has a claimant swearing his house measured twelve by fourteen and declining to specify inches. Paul Gates treated fraudulent and token entry as a structural feature of the federal land system rather than an aberration (Gates 1968). A building on a frontier does not have to shelter anyone to do its work. It has to be standing when the surveyor arrives.

Another explanation is more strategic.

In 2009, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad proposed building the institutions of a future Palestinian state before any final peace agreement, creating facts on the ground rather than waiting for negotiations to succeed (Fayyad 2009). European governments and the UN embraced that approach. Through the West Bank Protection Consortium and other programs, they have funded planning and construction projects in Area C while arguing that Israeli restrictions threaten the viability of a future Palestinian state (Norwegian Refugee Council 2024). That objective is openly stated in European policy documents. It is not a conspiracy. It is declared policy.

This is not a symbolic effort. Over the past fifteen years, European governments and institutions have committed hundreds of millions of euros to planning, infrastructure, legal assistance, humanitarian projects, and construction in Area C through a web of EU programs, member-state initiatives, and international NGOs. The dedicated Area C development program itself has funded dozens of projects in scores of communities, while much larger humanitarian budgets have supported roads, water systems, schools, clinics, legal representation, and housing. The scale reflects a sustained strategic commitment rather than isolated aid projects.

The largest strategic funding for Area C development has come from the European Union and individual European governments (Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc.). The UN’s role has generally been to implement, coordinate, map, and sometimes administer projects funded by those donors.

European governments supplied much of the money. The United Nations supplied much of the institutional legitimacy. Through its agencies, the UN has mapped, coordinated, implemented, and publicly documented many of these projects, embedding them within the broader framework of international humanitarian and development policy. That reflects the longstanding position of the United Nations, supported by influential Muslim and African voting blocs that together command a majority in the General Assembly, that Area C should become part of a future Palestinian state. Israel, however, increasingly operates from a different premise. After October 7, much of its political leadership no longer believes a negotiated two-state settlement is a realistic security outcome.

The consortium also makes little effort to disguise its legal position. It builds without Israeli permits because it considers the permit system fundamentally illegitimate. Israel takes the opposite view. Unpermitted construction remains unlawful regardless of who paid for it, and demolition orders follow accordingly.

The Israelis who hosted our visit interpreted those empty buildings differently from the European documents that helped finance some of them. Their argument was that construction itself changes the political landscape. A building does not have to be occupied to establish a presence. Enough buildings eventually alter the map, surround neighboring communities, and shape whatever political settlement ultimately emerges.

The Palestinian argument is different. It is that many of these buildings remain empty because families cannot safely move into structures living under the constant threat of demolition. On that account, the vacancy reflects legal uncertainty rather than political strategy.

Both explanations are probably true in different places. Neither can be confirmed from a car window. What struck me was not which explanation was correct.

It was that both sides were operating from exactly the same frontier logic.

On every frontier, possession comes before sovereignty.

Recognition

On a frontier, possession matters.

Recognition matters more.

An Israeli settlement is built with permits issued by the governing authority. Roads arrive. Water mains are connected. Power lines follow. Schools receive budgets. Municipal councils form. Addresses appear on maps. The settlement becomes part of the ordinary machinery of government.

A Palestinian building in Area C begins from a different legal position. Permit applications are approved only rarely, so much construction proceeds without them. Without a permit there is no occupancy certificate, no guaranteed utility connection, and often a demolition order waiting in a government file.

Any American who has fought a county planning board understands the difference. You are not looking at two kinds of builder. You are looking at one builder the sovereign recognizes and another it does not. Recognition is worth more than capital. It is worth more than determination. On a frontier, recognition eventually becomes title.

The American West followed the same pattern. Homesteaders who obtained legal recognition received roads, rail spurs, post offices, schools, and eventually counties. Mexican grantees whose claims failed in the land courts often received none of those things. Native American reservations developed under an entirely different legal framework. The difference in outcome was not a difference in character. It was a difference in which claims the government chose to recognize.

That is why Israel’s February 2026 decision to resume systematic land registration matters so much. A frontier exists because ownership remains contested. Registration is the process by which the state decides, parcel by parcel, whose claim becomes the official one. Once that process is complete, today’s possession becomes tomorrow’s title.

Registration is not simply bookkeeping. It transforms possession into recorded title. It records the landscape as it exists on the day the surveyor arrives, preserving decades of cultivation, permitting, infrastructure, and legal recognition in a form that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.

The European strategy reveals the same understanding from the opposite direction. Long before the registration decision, European-funded programs emphasized mapping, planning, and documenting Palestinian communities throughout Area C. Both sides reached for the same instrument because both understand the same historical lesson.

Every frontier ends with a survey.

Only afterward does it become a map.

One final caution applies to every statistic in this debate. Advocacy organizations on both sides publish aggregate counts of the other side’s illegal structures, compiled according to their own methodologies and rarely subjected to independent audit. Those numbers circulate as though they were census data. They are not. Readers should approach advocacy statistics with the same degree of skepticism.

The frontier eventually closes.

When it does, the surveyor’s notebook often matters more than the soldier’s rifle.

What the Frontier Predicts

What the analogy predicts here is uncomfortable for Israelis.

Weak-sovereignty zones reliably produce armed civilian violence. Not because the people are uniquely violent, but because the institutional incentives are different. When the state cannot provide security or resolve disputes quickly enough, private actors begin supplying both. Justice becomes private, and private justice is usually indistinguishable from vigilantism.

The American West produced this on schedule. The Texas fence-cutting wars of 1883 pitted open-range men against ranchers enclosing water and grass, and the state responded by criminalizing the cutting after the fact. The Johnson County War of 1892 saw the Wyoming Stock Growers Association hire fifty gunmen to kill men it accused of rustling, and it took federal cavalry to stop it (Davis 2010). Vigilance committees operated across the mining West with the tacit consent of communities that had no other law.

The pattern in every case is the same. Economic conflict over land and access, an enforcement vacuum, armed men on one side with the sympathy of local officials, and a legal system that arrives late and prosecutes little.

Israeli police data show cases opened over offenses by Israeli civilians against Palestinians in the West Bank rising from 139 in 2019 to 779 in 2025, with 6.6 percent producing an indictment, as reported by the Israeli daily Haaretz (Haaretz 2026). Those figures are the police force’s own, using its own categories.

The number gets used carelessly. Databases compiled by advocacy organizations aggregate physical assault, arson, trespass, stone-throwing, crop damage, and harassment into a single count, so a reader who sees a four-figure annual total pictures four figures of assaults. That is a fair criticism of how the figure gets deployed.

What survives the criticism is the prosecution rate, because it counts only cases Israeli police themselves decided to open. Critics read the gap as tolerance. The government’s answer is evidentiary difficulty where complainants will not testify. Both can be partly true. Neither side says the third thing. A low prosecution rate in a weak-sovereignty zone is the expected reading rather than an anomaly requiring malice to explain.

The same structure runs the other direction and gets less attention in the American press. Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians in the West Bank are continuous, and the geography that makes settlements vulnerable is the same geography that makes villages vulnerable. Road ambush is the characteristic frontier crime, and Route 60 through the central highlands functions as such roads have always functioned.

Neither population can rely on a sheriff. Both arm themselves. That is not a moral observation about either of them. It is what the structure produces, and it is why part three’s argument about the absent sheriff lands hardest here rather than in Gaza.

The Frontier is Closing

If the frontier analogy holds, then it makes one final prediction.

Frontiers do not remain frontiers forever.

Eventually one sovereign authority prevails. The overlapping jurisdictions disappear. Competing legal systems give way to one. Surveyors replace soldiers. Registration replaces uncertainty. What had been a frontier becomes an ordinary part of the state.

Frederick Jackson Turner declared the American frontier closed in 1893 after the Census Bureau concluded there was no longer a continuous frontier line (Turner 1893). What disappeared was not empty land. It was legal ambiguity. The overlapping jurisdiction stack resolved into states, counties, courts, and citizens governed by a single sovereign.

Something remarkably similar now appears to be happening in the West Bank.

The changes are not dramatic. They are administrative.

In July 2025, the Knesset adopted a non-binding resolution declaring that Judea and Samaria are an inseparable part of the Land of Israel by a vote of 71 to 13. During 2025, Israel approved a record number of new settlements and advanced the long-frozen E1 corridor. Authority over planning and land administration has increasingly shifted from military to civilian ministries. In February 2026, the Security Cabinet extended Israeli administrative authority over construction, environmental regulation, water, and heritage beyond Area C into Areas A and B, while also approving systematic land registration (Crisis Group 2025; Israel Policy Forum 2026).

None of those decisions, considered individually, resolves the conflict.

Taken together, they point in one direction.

Roads are increasingly separated by license plate. Administrative systems that once differed only in Area C are extending into other parts of the West Bank. Registration is replacing uncertainty. Military administration is gradually giving way to civilian administration.

Whether one supports these changes or opposes them is a separate question.

Structurally, they are the markers of a frontier that is beginning to close.

Not through a declaration.

Through jurisdiction.

Through registration.

Through the slow replacement of overlapping authority with a single sovereign.

A Tomato Farmer and a Surfer

Jill and I spent part of an afternoon with three young Americans working in a vineyard in Samaria. That sentence would have made almost no sense to me a year ago. Why were Americans pruning grapevines on a contested hillside in the middle of the West Bank?

Their answer had very little to do with politics. It began with a verse from the Book of Jeremiah.

The three men worked for an American nonprofit called HaYovel. Its story begins with two people who, at first glance, had almost nothing in common.

One was Tommy Waller, a tomato farmer from rural Tennessee. He came from generations of Baptists. He and his wife, Sherri, raised eleven children, homeschooled them all, and for years lived in a self-supporting community without electricity. The other was Nir Lavi, an Israeli who had spent his younger years surfing and backpacking around the world before returning home to plant vineyards in the mountains of Samaria, where grapes had not been commercially grown for centuries. He would later establish the Har Bracha Winery.

The two met in the summer of 2004. Lavi walked Waller to the edge of the vineyard, opened a Bible, and read Jeremiah 31:5: “You shall again plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria.” Waller later said that he realized he was standing inside the verse itself. He asked a simple question.

“What can I do to help?”

The following year the Waller family returned for the harvest. In 2007 they founded HaYovel so other Christians could do the same. Since then, more than three thousand volunteers from over thirty countries have worked alongside Israeli farmers throughout Judea and Samaria (The Israel Guys 2026). Joshua Waller, who met with us, was one of those eleven children. Today he leads the organization his father started.

His brother Nate told us how the story looked from a child’s perspective. He was nine years old, homeschooled, paging through an old Encyclopedia Britannica when he stopped at a photograph of the Dome of the Rock. He asked his mother what it was. She explained that it stood where Solomon’s Temple had once been, that the Temple had been destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed again, and that one day it would be rebuilt. He made his first trip to Israel the following year for the grape harvest and has been returning ever since.

Luke Hilton’s story follows much the same pattern. He grew up in Virginia Beach and first came to Israel at sixteen with his mother. His family eventually joined HaYovel, and today four Hilton brothers help lead the volunteer program. Their mother, Kathryn, died of cancer in 2023. The family now sponsors volunteers in her memory.

Listening to these stories, I noticed something they shared. Neither began with geopolitics. Neither began with Zionism. Both began with a child asking a question and a mother taking the time to answer it. Everything that followed grew out of that conversation.

These young men are unapologetic Christian Zionists. They believe they are participating in biblical prophecy. Gideon Elazar, the Israeli anthropologist who studied HaYovel, argues that they are better understood as part of the Hebrew Roots movement than as a conventional political organization. I think that is the more accurate description.

Politics found them anyway.

Nate carried a rifle. So did the other men working that hillside. They carried them the way another farmer might carry a chainsaw or wear a tool belt. Nobody remarked on them. Nobody posed with them. They were simply part of the day’s work.

The rifle itself was familiar. It was an AR-pattern rifle, one that many Americans would recognize immediately. Everything else about it was different. It had been issued by the government rather than purchased over a counter. It came with a legal obligation to defend the community rather than simply a right to own it. Under Israeli law, even the ammunition issued with it is counted.

He wore it the way Israeli soldiers wear their rifles. The sling crossed his chest, the rifle rested across his back, muzzle down. That is not how a man expects to shoot quickly. He was not standing guard. He was pruning grapevines with a rifle on his back because, on that hillside, nobody leaves it in the truck.

The magazine told a different story. A second magazine was taped alongside the first, inverted for a rapid reload.

Those two details disagreed.

The way he carried the rifle said he expected never to use it.

The second magazine said that if he did, thirty rounds might not be enough.

An official in Israel’s firearms division later explained the decision to increase civilian ammunition allowances after October 7 by pointing to people who had fought with a single magazine and run dry. That lesson was hanging from Nate’s rifle.

He mentioned, almost in passing, that an improvised explosive device had recently been found near his home.

This single photograph, above, produces two entirely different stories.

A critic sees an armed foreign volunteer cultivating disputed land. It looks like the settler-colonial thesis brought to life.

A defender sees a farmer who recently found a bomb near his home and was handed a rifle by his government because nobody else would arrive in time.

Both are describing the same morning.

That is because this is still a frontier.

The sovereign arms one population and not the other. Israeli civilians living in the West Bank may carry rifles issued under Israeli law. Palestinian civilians generally may not possess firearms legally under the military legal regime governing the territory, apart from authorized Palestinian Authority security personnel operating under specific arrangements.

That is not a scandal. It is what sovereigns have historically done on frontiers they intend to control. The United States followed the same pattern. Federal policy armed settlers and disarmed tribes. The asymmetry was not an accident of frontier closure. It was one of the mechanisms by which the frontier closed.

These young Americans force an uncomfortable question.

An American reader who has known homeschooling families, attended conservative churches, or grown up in rural America will recognize them immediately. They are not exotic. A tomato farmer from Tennessee met a surfer on a hillside, heard a verse from Jeremiah, and spent the next twenty years bringing Christians to prune vineyards because he believed he was participating in biblical history.

They are also, in the plainest descriptive sense, foreign volunteers helping cultivate disputed land.

Both statements are true.

That is why I have become increasingly skeptical of explanations that rely on a single label.

• Settler.

• Colonizer.

• Occupation.

Each captures part of the reality.

None captures enough.

Where the comparison breaks

No historical analogy is perfect, and this one breaks in important ways.

American territories eventually became states. Their residents became citizens, voted in the governments that ruled them, and ultimately stood under the same law as everyone else. That is what frontier closure meant in the United States.

Israel is different in one important respect. Roughly one-fifth of Israel’s citizens are Arab, and they vote, serve in the Knesset, sit on the Supreme Court, practice medicine, teach at universities, and participate in every level of Israeli civic life. That is not the question here.

The question is the West Bank.

No comparable path to citizenship is currently on offer for most Palestinians living there. On that point, the Israeli government and many of its critics agree, even if they disagree about almost everything else. A frontier that closes without extending political membership leaves behind a permanent population living under the authority of a state in which it cannot vote. That is where the American analogy begins to break down.

The people living on this land also refuse to fit neatly into America’s historical categories. Both Israelis and Palestinians claim to be indigenous, and both claims have substance. Jewish continuity on this ground stretches back three millennia and is supported by an extraordinary archaeological record. Palestinian families can point to centuries of continuous residence in the same towns and villages. The American frontier presented a much clearer distinction between settlers and native peoples. Importing that binary here explains neither side particularly well.

There is another irony.

The frontier analogy itself was largely developed by scholars arguing the opposite of the point I am making. Patrick Wolfe’s influential 2006 essay, famous for describing invasion as “a structure, not an event,” used the American West as the template for understanding Israel as a settler-colonial society (Wolfe 2006). Anyone reaching for the American frontier is therefore borrowing a framework that many advocates use to reach precisely the opposite conclusion.

I think the comparison survives, but for a narrower reason.

The settler-colonial literature uses the American frontier primarily to establish moral categories and historical intent. I am using it to understand institutional mechanisms. Overlapping jurisdictions, contested title, competing water rights, uncertain sovereignty, and private violence where the state cannot reliably enforce the law are recurring structural features. They appear whenever those conditions exist, regardless of the motives of the people involved. Explaining a pattern as the consequence of institutions is not the same thing as excusing it, nor does it answer the moral questions that inevitably follow.

Historian Patricia Nelson Limerick revised Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis in much the same spirit. She argued that the American frontier is better understood as conquest carried out through a legal apparatus than as peaceful settlement, and that the traditional American story had itself become a political narrative (Limerick 1987).

That insight cuts both ways.

It challenges comforting versions of American history.

It also challenges comforting versions of this one.

What Closure Cost, and What it Bought

The American frontier closed. It produced a country governed by a single legal order, and it did so at a price paid overwhelmingly by people who had little or no political voice in the process. Removal, reservation, and the destruction of indigenous economies were among the mechanisms by which that legal order was established. Nobody is proposing to repeat that history, and nobody serious argues that Israel is attempting to do so.

What the American experience does demonstrate is something simpler.

Frontiers do not remain frontiers forever.

Eventually the overlapping jurisdictions disappear. One legal system prevails. The survey is completed. The maps stop changing.

The West Bank increasingly appears to be moving in that direction. The instruments are different. Registration instead of homesteading. Administrative law instead of cavalry. Roads, permits, and jurisdiction instead of land offices and railroads. Less dramatic, perhaps. Almost certainly more durable.

History, however, leaves one question unanswered.

Every frontier I have examined ultimately produced one of three outcomes.

• The resident population became full members of the sovereign political order.

• The resident population remained inside that order without equal political membership.

• Or the resident population left.

The American frontier produced all three, in different places and at different times.

Israelis we met understood this dilemma better than many Americans writing about it. After October 7, the security argument for controlling the Jordan Valley and the central highlands is neither abstract nor difficult to understand. What I did not hear, from anyone, was a convincing description of the political end state that avoided the same arithmetic history presents.

That is not uniquely an Israeli problem.

It is the problem every closing frontier eventually confronts.

History explains remarkably well how frontiers close. It is much less helpful in explaining how democracies reconcile frontier closure with a permanent population that remains outside full political membership.

That is the question the frontier analogy cannot answer.

RWM/JGM

References

Adelman, Jeremy, and Stephen Aron. 1999. “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History.” American Historical Review 104 (3): 814 to 841.

B’Tselem. 2017. The Jordan Valley. Jerusalem.

Bimkom. 2021. Building Permits in Area C: Data on Palestinian Applications 2016 to 2021. Jerusalem.

Crisis Group. 2025. Sovereignty in All but Name: Israel’s Quickening Annexation of the West Bank. Middle East Report 252. Brussels, October 9.

Davis, John W. 2010. Wyoming Range War: The Infamous Invasion of Johnson County. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Ebright, Malcolm. 1994. Land Grants and Lawsuits in Northern New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Elazar, Gideon. 2020. “Plowmen and Vine-trimmers: Hebrew Roots and Jewish Restoration in Samaria.” The Christian Nation Project.

Fayyad, Salam. 2009. Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State. Ramallah: Palestinian National Authority.

Gates, Paul W. 1968. History of Public Land Law Development. Washington, DC: Public Land Law Review Commission.

Institute for Palestine Studies. 2020. “Bedouin Communities in Greater Jerusalem: Planning or Forced Displacement?” Washington, DC.

Haaretz. 2026. “Jewish Nationalist Crime in West Bank Up by 560 Percent Since 2019, Police Data Shows.” July 8.

HCJ 390/79. Dweikat v. Government of Israel (Elon Moreh). Israeli Supreme Court, October 22, 1979.

Israel Defense Forces. 1967a. Military Order 92: Concerning Powers for the Purpose of the Water Provisions. West Bank Area, August 15.

Israel Defense Forces. 1967b. Military Order 158: Amendment to the Law Concerning Supervision over Water. West Bank Area, November 19.

Israel Defense Forces. 1968. Military Order 291: Concerning Settlement of Disputes over Land and Water. West Bank Area, December 19.

The Israel Guys. 2026. Our Story. Har Bracha: HaYovel Inc. theisraelguys.com/our-story.

Israel Policy Forum. 2026. “Israel’s New Escalation of West Bank Annexation.” February 11.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. 1987. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: W. W. Norton.

The Mecelle (Ottoman Civil Code). 1869 to 1876. Translated by C. R. Tyser et al. Nicosia: Government Printing Office, 1901.

Norwegian Refugee Council. 2024. West Bank Protection Consortium. Oslo.

Norwegian Refugee Council. 2025. “West Bank: Record Number of Demolitions over Building Permits.” October 1.

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. 2025. Demolitions and Displacement in the West Bank. Jerusalem.

Ottoman Land Code of 1858. Translated by F. Ongley. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1892.

Rivera, Jose A. 1998. Acequia Culture: Water, Land, and Community in the Southwest. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1893. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin: 79 to 112.

Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387 to 409.

Worster, Donald. 1985. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Pantheon.

“There’s an App for That”

Remember when you could just do things?

Check into a hotel. Board an airplane. Park your car. Order lunch. Buy a ticket. Enter a museum. Pay a bill. Turn on the television. Apparently those days are over.

Now there’s an app for that.

• Checking in for a flight on an obscure foreign airline you will almost certainly never fly again? Download the app.

• Parking for 37 minutes in a small town in Virginia? Download the app.

• Want to look at the menu? Scan the QR code. Actually, no, download the app.

• Want to pay for the parking meter? App.

• Charge the car? Different app.

• Open the hotel room? App.

• Use the hotel Wi-Fi? Create an account, verify your email, accept 46 pages of terms and conditions, then download the app.

And naturally, every app would like to get to know you better.

Please provide your full legal name, date of birth, home address, email address, mobile number, two forms of identification, emergency contact, name and phone number of your closest living relative, credit card, billing address, location permissions, Bluetooth access, camera access, microphone access, contacts, notifications, and apparently a small vial of blood.

Then create a password containing 14 characters, one capital letter, two numbers, a hieroglyph, a Sanskrit character, and the name of your third-grade teacher.

Excellent.

Now verify your identity with a six-digit code we have sent to the phone you are currently using to read the six-digit code.

Whoops! The password has expired, create a new password. Be sure it doesn’t contain anything related to the last password. Oh, now verify your identity again.

All because you wanted to park the car.

There may indeed be an app for everything.

Unfortunately, there does not yet appear to be an app for leaving me the hell alone.

JGM

Audio Version:

Who Is Spitting on Christians in Israel

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

Earlier this month, a group of Israeli teenagers knocked on the door of the Armenian Apostolic Church headquarters in Jerusalem’s Old City. They asked whether there were Christians inside.

They wanted to spit on them.

The boys told a reporter that it was a mitzvah, a religious duty, to humiliate Christians, whom they called idol worshipers.

That account appeared in the Wall Street Journal on August 3 under the headline, “Spitting Attacks Show Rise of Anti-Christian Hate in Israel.” Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the piece a distortion of reality disguised as reporting, saying it had taken radical voices and extreme cases and turned them into the face of an entire country. The American ambassador, Mike Huckabee, said the paper should have called him.

The story is now being weaponized against the country it is about. But simply dismissing the reporting as distorted does not answer the underlying question.

Who is actually spitting on Christians in Israel?

What is Documented

The spitting is real, it is increasing, and the people counting it are Jews.

The Religious Freedom Data Center runs a hotline for Christians in Israel who have been harassed. It was founded and is directed by Yisca Harani, a Jewish Israeli scholar of Christianity, and is staffed by Jewish Israeli volunteers who provide documentation, accompaniment, and a protective presence for victims.

The center documented 107 incidents in 2024 and 181 in 2025. By early June 2026, it had logged more than 88 incidents, with 63 in the second quarter alone, putting this year on pace to exceed last year’s total (Religious Freedom Data Center 2026).

The incidents include spitting, verbal abuse, vandalism, desecration of graves, tombstones and crosses, stone-throwing, trespassing, garbage dumping, and arson. Most occur in the Old City, on Mount Zion, and along the route past the Armenian Patriarchate leading to the Jewish Quarter. Some have occurred at Christian sites in northern Israel.

A separate Israeli organization, the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue, which works on relations among the country’s religious communities, documented 111 cases in its 2024 annual report, including 46 physical attacks and 35 attacks on church property (Rossing Center 2025).

These are two independent Israeli organizations, counting separately and documenting the same problem.

Datasets that combine unlike things into a single number and then circulate that number as though every incident were equivalent deserve skepticism. I have made that argument about other datasets, and the same standard applies here.

But it does not make this problem disappear. Throw out every ambiguous case, and the trend remains. Christians are still being spat on, harassed, and their churches and religious sites vandalized.

Who is Doing the Spitting

The reporting is more specific than the headlines, and two communities appear repeatedly. They are not the same community.

Most documented incidents involve Haredi youths and men. CNN obtained video of two young ultra-Orthodox men spitting at, swearing at, and kicking Father Nikodemus Schnabel near Zion Gate. One told bystanders he did it because Schnabel was a Christian (CNN 2024). The Times of Israel documented Haredi men and boys, some of them children, spitting at a Christian procession after watching an adult do it first. Channel 12 aired footage of young men in black hats and suits, several carrying prayer shawls.

One community inside the Old City comes up again and again. Participants at a forum on the problem placed much of the blame on the Zilbermans, a Lithuanian Haredi community of roughly three hundred families whose approach to Torah study incorporates right-wing Zionist ideas. Tammy Lavi of the Jerusalem Intercultural Center told the same forum that at least half of the Friday Armenian processions are disrupted by spitting, cursing, or people deliberately walking through the ceremony. A right-wing city councilor and a deputy mayor went to speak with the Zilberman rabbis about their students, apparently to little effect (Times of Israel 2023a).

But it is not only Haredim. The Jerusalem Post describes offenders as both ultra-Orthodox and National-Religious youths. The Religious Freedom Data Center’s surveillance footage attributes attacks to ultra-nationalist and ultra-Orthodox Jews. And when five people were arrested in October 2023, Channel 12 reported that some were students of Rabbi Natan Rothman, brother of Religious Zionism Knesset member Simcha Rothman. That is a Religious Zionist yeshiva, not a Haredi one (Times of Israel 2023b).

Two things need to be said immediately.

First, the numbers are small. Three hundred families and a scattering of yeshiva students are not a country. And the Christians being spat on are overwhelmingly Armenian and Arab, not American.

Second, the leadership of the Haredi world has not defended this behavior. When the October 2023 video circulated, Haredi politicians joined in condemning it and rejected the claim that spitting on Christians is either a Jewish tradition or a religious duty. Netanyahu condemned it as well.

The question is whether anyone will actually be charged.

The Minister Who Defended It

In 2017, when an earlier wave of harassment against Christians made the news, a settler activist and lawyer named Itamar Ben Gvir gave a radio interview defending the practice of spitting at Christian monks and churches. He called it an ancient Jewish tradition, said he did not think it constituted a violation, and asked why anyone would turn the matter into a criminal one (Washington Post 2026).

That has essentially remained his position for nearly a decade.

In 2015, Jewish extremists set fire to the Church of the Multiplication on the Sea of Galilee, where the Gospels place the feeding of the five thousand. Nikodemus Schnabel, now abbot of Dormition Abbey, attended the trial. What stayed with him was the attorney defending the arsonists.

The attorney was Ben Gvir.

Ben Gvir is now Israel’s Minister of National Security, and the police answer to him.

He has not revised his position since taking the portfolio. After five men were arrested in October 2023 for spitting at Christians and churches, the police minister said publicly that the offense was not criminal.

His own Jerusalem District contradicted him on the radio. Chief Superintendent Assaf Harel told Army Radio that spitting on somebody is certainly assault, and that seventeen such incidents had been reported in the preceding six months (Times of Israel 2023b).

A sitting police minister telling the country that an offense is not an offense, while his own district commander publicly says that it is, gets very close to the heart of the problem.

Nothing about this requires inference. A man who publicly defended the conduct in 2017 now holds the portfolio responsible for policing it. The record of enforcement is not encouraging.

The Israel Religious Action Center is the legal and advocacy arm of the Reform Jewish movement in Israel. Of twenty-five complaints it filed between 2012 and 2021, nineteen were closed because the suspect could not be found, no offense was deemed to have been committed, or the case was considered unsuitable for investigation (Israel Religious Action Center 2026).

Harani puts the consequence plainly. If there is no enforcement, it is a green light to do it again.

That distinction matters. A small number of people committing these acts is not evidence of some general Israeli hostility toward Christians. But when the state repeatedly fails to enforce its own laws, and the minister responsible for the police has himself defended the conduct, it becomes more than a story about the people doing the spitting.

It becomes a story about whether the government is willing to stop them.

Why Nobody Stops It

An American reader will reasonably ask why a government that condemns this behavior does not simply prosecute it. To understand the answer, you have to understand how Israeli coalition politics works.

Israel has 120 Knesset seats and no electoral districts. There are no constituencies, no primaries in the American sense, and no individual candidate whose name appears on the national ballot. Voters choose a party list, seats are allocated roughly in proportion to the national vote, and any party clearing the 3.25 percent threshold enters the Knesset. It takes sixty-one seats to form a government.

No party has ever won sixty-one. Not once in seventy-eight years. Every Israeli government has therefore been a coalition, which gives smaller parties enormous influence when neither major bloc can govern without them.

Two of those parties represent the Haredi world. United Torah Judaism is Ashkenazi, an alliance of the Hasidic Agudat Yisrael and the Lithuanian Degel HaTorah, and holds seven seats. Shas is Sephardi and Mizrahi, led by Aryeh Deri, and answers to a Council of Torah Sages. Together, the Haredi parties have typically controlled fifteen to eighteen seats.

Several things give those seats considerably more political weight than the numbers suggest.

Historically, Haredi parties have been willing to join governments of both the left and the right. They joined Ehud Barak’s government in 1999, for example, although United Torah Judaism later resigned over electrical work on the Sabbath and Shas left amid disputes with Barak’s government. The ability to negotiate with competing blocs gives a small party considerably more leverage than one permanently attached to a single side.

Their political demands are also relatively concentrated. Foreign policy and the peace process have traditionally mattered less to them than yeshiva funding, rabbinic authority over marriage and conversion, Sabbath observance, and, above all, exemption from military conscription. These are the issues on which their participation in a coalition is negotiated.

They are also remarkably disciplined voting blocs. Their Knesset members generally follow party and rabbinic leadership, which gives a prime minister a degree of certainty that is much harder to obtain from a less cohesive coalition partner.

And they are growing. Haredim make up roughly an eighth of Israel’s population and have a fertility rate substantially above the national average. Their political importance is therefore unlikely to diminish.

The Haredi exemption from military conscription dates back to the founding years of the Israeli state. Ben-Gurion granted exemptions in 1949 to about four hundred yeshiva students, partly out of concern for preserving a world of Torah scholarship nearly destroyed in Europe. What began as an accommodation for a few hundred men grew enormously over the following decades. Roughly sixty-three thousand young Haredi men are now eligible for conscription, and the exemption has become one of the most consequential disputes in Israeli coalition politics.

The nearest American comparison is imperfect, but useful. Imagine a religious voting bloc representing roughly an eighth of the country, represented by parties that vote with extraordinary discipline and can determine whether a governing coalition survives. Now imagine that the issue its leadership cares about most is an exemption that successive governments have struggled for decades to resolve.

That begins to explain the political leverage.

It also begins to explain why a problem everyone publicly condemns can remain remarkably difficult to stop.

The Last Two Years

In June 2024, all nine justices of Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that there was no legal basis for exempting yeshiva students from conscription, that the arrangement was unconstitutional, and that the state was gravely undermining the principle that all persons stand equal before the law. The court ordered conscription to begin and funding to be withdrawn from noncompliant yeshivas (Israel Supreme Court 2024).

The coalition has spent the two years since trying to legislate around that ruling.

In July 2025, United Torah Judaism resigned from the government over the delay, and Shas followed the next day, leaving Netanyahu with sixty-one seats. Both parties continued supporting him on critical votes, allowing them to distance themselves from the government without immediately bringing it down.

In January 2026, Shas announced that it would oppose the budget unless an exemption bill passed (Times of Israel 2026). In May, the spiritual head of Degel HaTorah said he had lost confidence in Netanyahu and instructed his members to work toward dissolving the Knesset (Al Jazeera 2026). In June, the party boycotted coalition votes altogether while police arrested draft evaders and Haredi protesters blocked roads in Bnei Brak (Jerusalem Post 2026). Israel votes in October.

This matters to the question of Christian harassment because the young men responsible for many of the documented incidents come from a community whose exemption from military service has consumed Israeli politics for the past two years and may yet bring down the government.

The ministry responsible for policing them belongs to a different partner in the same coalition, whose leader has said publicly that spitting on Christians is not a criminal offense.

That does not require a conspiracy or an explicit agreement to look the other way. It requires only a coalition government with almost no room to lose votes, dependent upon small religious parties whose support is necessary for its survival.

That is the political environment in which these cases are being handled. The prime minister condemns the behavior. Haredi leaders condemn it. Police officials acknowledge that spitting on someone can constitute assault. Yet complaints continue to be closed without suspects identified or charges brought.

The problem is not that Israel has decided spitting on Christians is acceptable. The problem is that condemnation has not been followed by consistent enforcement. This is the reason a country that condemns an offense at the level of the prime minister still has nineteen complaints out of twenty-five with no suspect found.

The Ambassador’s Letter

Huckabee wrote a letter a year ago that reads rather differently from his response to the Journal.

On July 16, he wrote to Israel’s Interior Minister, Moshe Arbel, about the treatment of Christian organizations by the Israeli visa department. The letter later leaked to the Israeli press. In it, Huckabee described discrimination against Christian ministries since the start of 2025, naming the Baptist Convention of Israel, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and the Assemblies of God among the groups placed under investigation. He wrote that these organizations felt they were being treated as adversaries.

Huckabee went considerably further than expressing concern. He threatened to announce publicly throughout the United States that the State of Israel was no longer welcoming Christian organizations, to tell American Christians that their contributions were being met with hostility, to issue travel advisories, and to pursue reciprocal treatment of Israelis seeking American visas.

That is the same ambassador now saying the Journal should have called him.

I do not read that contradiction as dishonesty. I read it as the behavior of a friend who applies pressure privately and defends publicly, which is hardly unusual in diplomacy.

But the letter matters. Huckabee himself was sufficiently concerned about the treatment of Christians in Israel to threaten public criticism, travel advisories, and reciprocal visa restrictions. His criticism of the Journal does not erase what he wrote to the Israeli government a year earlier.

The Other Side of the Ledger

Everything above is true. So is everything below.

Israel’s Christian population stood at roughly 184,200 at the end of 2025, about 1.9 percent of the country, and it has grown from about 34,000 in 1948. The country counts around 300 churches, roughly double the number at independence (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics 2025; Fox News 2026).

The situation in the rest of the Middle East is the complete opposite. Christians were something on the order of twenty percent of the Middle East a century ago and are now under two percent. Iraq’s Christian community has been reduced to a remnant. Syria’s has collapsed. Lebanon’s has emigrated. Turkey’s was destroyed.

Against that history, Israel stands apart. Its Christian population has grown rather than disappeared.

In April 2026, Israel created a new post, Special Envoy to the Christian World, and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar appointed George Deek to it. Deek is an Arab Christian from Jaffa, a veteran of eighteen years in the foreign service, and previously Israel’s first Christian ambassador, serving in Azerbaijan. His father chaired the Orthodox Christian community of Jaffa (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2026). No other country has created an equivalent diplomatic position.

Deek’s own summary of why the job exists is the regional one. He describes the ethnic cleansing of the Middle East of its Christians, and says the places that once held thriving Christian communities have been reduced to nothing.

And then there is the government’s response to the harassment described earlier. Israeli officials have repeatedly condemned these incidents when they occur. Police have made arrests, including after the recent incident at the Armenian church. When police blocked Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and the senior Roman Catholic authority in the Holy Land, along with other senior clergy, from a Palm Sunday service at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher under wartime restrictions, Netanyahu intervened personally to grant full and immediate access. When an Israeli soldier took a sledgehammer to a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon, he and the soldier who filmed it were pulled from combat operations and jailed for thirty days.

None of that is the behavior of a state hostile to Christianity. It is the behavior of a state with a problem it is handling unevenly.

Both Things Can Be True

The Foreign Ministry’s response was that the Journal had distorted the situation, sought out Christians most willing to condemn Israel, and presented their experiences as representative of the country. It pointed to Israel’s nearly two hundred thousand Christians as evidence of a very different reality.

There is truth in that response. But it does not answer the teenagers at the door.

When documented harassment occurs, arguing about whether the reporting fairly represents Israel is not a substitute for dealing with the people responsible for it. The government can object to the framing of the Journal article and still acknowledge that enforcement has been inadequate.

The people using the story against Israel make the opposite error. They take the conduct of a small and identifiable group of extremists and present it as evidence of how Israelis, or Jews more broadly, treat Christians.

The evidence does not support that conclusion either.

What it does support is more specific. A relatively small number of religious extremists have repeatedly harassed Christians, particularly in and around Jerusalem’s Old City. Israeli political and religious leaders have condemned the behavior, but enforcement has been inconsistent. And the minister ultimately responsible for the police has himself publicly questioned whether spitting on Christians should be treated as a criminal offense.

That is a serious indictment of the way this problem has been handled, and particularly of the minister responsible for policing it.

It is not an indictment of Israelis as a people.

That distinction is largely missing from what is now circulating on American podcasts and social media.

Who is Actually Being Spat On

The people being harassed in the Old City are overwhelmingly Armenian and Greek Orthodox clergy, along with Arab Christians who are Israeli citizens. Seventy-nine percent of Israel’s Christians are Arabs. These are not American evangelicals.

American Christian Zionists are, if anything, among the most welcomed foreign Christians in Israel. Jill and I spent an afternoon this summer with young Americans who have been pruning vines in Samaria for twenty years. The state gave them rifles, and the Knesset gave their organization an award. I will have more to say about them on Monday.

So when an American Christian reads about Christians being spat on in Jerusalem and takes the hostility as directed toward Christians like themselves, an important distinction is being lost. The person on the receiving end is much more likely to be an Armenian monk whose community has been in that quarter for sixteen centuries, or an Arab Christian whose family has lived there for generations.

That does not make the harassment any less ugly. But it does matter if we are trying to understand who is doing it, who is being targeted, and why.

The Case Tucker Carlson is Making

Carlson has been building this argument for two years, and by now the specifics are on the record.

On April 9, 2024, he interviewed Munther Isaac, a Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem, in a conversation that attributed the collapse of Bethlehem’s Christian population largely to Israeli persecution. On February 4, 2026, Carlson interviewed Hosam Naoum, the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem, under the title “The Shocking Reality of the Treatment of Christians in the Holy Land by US-Funded Israel.” He has since interviewed a Palestinian-American minister from Beit Sahour, a largely Christian town beside Bethlehem, and pressed Ambassador Huckabee directly on Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Christians. In February, Carlson also said he had been detained at Ben Gurion Airport, an account Israeli officials disputed and which the Orthodox Jewish outlet Aish contested in detail (Aish 2026).

Some of what Carlson is reporting is true. Palestinian Christians in the West Bank face real hardships. Bethlehem’s Christian community has declined dramatically over decades. Huckabee’s own letter, quoted above, shows that the Israeli visa bureaucracy treated American Christian ministries badly enough for the American ambassador to threaten the Israeli government with travel advisories and reciprocal visa restrictions.

Carlson did not invent those facts.

The problem is what he does with them.

There are three problems with the case he is building, beginning with his method.

The February interview was filmed in Jordan. Carlson produced an hour-long program about the treatment of Christians in the Holy Land from another country. The Christians whose treatment was supposedly being investigated live in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Beit Sahour, Ramallah, Nazareth and elsewhere in Israel and the West Bank. Yet the program was not reported from those communities.

That is an odd way to investigate a claim this serious.

The second problem is more consequential because it goes to the substance of Carlson’s argument. He repeatedly blurs the distinction between Palestinian Christians living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Christian citizens of Israel. Those are two populations living under fundamentally different legal systems and political circumstances.

This criticism does not come only from defenders of Israel. Mondoweiss, the American news site founded by journalist Philip Weiss and explicitly hostile to Zionism, has made essentially the same point. Carlson frequently drops the word “Palestinian” and speaks instead about “Christians in Israel,” merging populations whose legal circumstances are profoundly different. The grievances he cites concerning Palestinian Christians are largely the same grievances made by Palestinian Muslims living in the same places, subject to the same checkpoints, permits and restrictions (Mondoweiss 2026).

That distinction changes the argument.

If Palestinian Christians are being subjected to the same restrictions as their Palestinian Muslim neighbors, then the discrimination at issue is based on nationality and territorial status, not Christianity. One can condemn the occupation, the checkpoints, the permit system, settlement policy, or Israeli control of the West Bank as harshly as one wishes. Those are legitimate subjects for argument.

But they are not evidence that Israel is persecuting Palestinians because they are Christians.

Carlson turns one argument into the other, and in doing so makes the issue personal for millions of American Christians. The message becomes: Israel is persecuting your fellow Christians.

The evidence he presents does not establish that.

The third problem is the population itself. If Israel were systematically persecuting Christians because they are Christians, one would expect some evidence of that persecution in the demographic trajectory of Christians who actually live as Israeli citizens.

Instead, Israel’s Christian population stands at roughly 184,000 and increased again in the most recent year. Meanwhile, the Christian share of the broader Middle East has fallen from roughly twenty percent a century ago to under two percent today.

Open Doors, an international Christian organization that publishes an annual ranking of the fifty countries where Christians face the most extreme persecution, placed eight Muslim-majority countries in its 2026 top ten. Israel does not appear on the list (Open Doors 2026; Media Line 2026).

None of this excuses the spitting in Jerusalem. It does not excuse Ben Gvir’s statements, failures of police enforcement, problems with visas for Christian organizations, or legitimate Palestinian Christian grievances. Those facts should be reported, and I have spent much of this essay reporting them.

But they do not establish the case Carlson is making.

He is taking documented abuses involving different people, different jurisdictions and different causes, combining them under the heading of Christian persecution, and presenting the resulting picture to an overwhelmingly American Christian audience.

A theory that predicts Israeli Christians should be fleeing, in a country where they are increasing, and that ignores the countries where Christians actually are fleeing, is not a theory about Christians.

Christian Antisemitism: When it Stops Being About Israel

On April 15, 2026, Carlson was criticizing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism when he came to its treatment of the ancient charge that Jews collectively killed Jesus.

“It also tells us that the suggestion that Jews killed Jesus is, quote, ‘classic antisemitism,’” Carlson said. “So there goes the New Testament. The whole New Testament is antisemitic too.”

He then added: “Read the Gospels and see if they fall under that definition. They do.”

The issue is not whether particular Jewish authorities appear in the Gospel accounts of the events leading to the crucifixion. They plainly do.

The deicide charge is something much broader: the claim that Jews collectively, as a people and across generations, bear responsibility for killing Christ.

That accusation has been used for centuries to justify persecution and violence against Jews. It is the oldest engine of Christian violence against Jews there is. Christian churches have spent decades repudiating collective Jewish guilt for the crucifixion. The Catholic Church did so formally in Nostra Aetate in 1965.

And this is where Carlson’s argument crosses a very different line. Criticizing the Israeli government, including its treatment of Palestinian Christians, is not antisemitic. Documenting harassment of Christians by religious Jews is not antisemitic. Neither is condemning Ben Gvir or the failure of Israeli police to prosecute offenders.

But invoking collective Jewish responsibility for the death of Christ belongs to a long history of Christian antisemitism. Whatever Carlson intended by the remark, that history does not disappear because the comment occurs in the middle of an argument about Israel.

I do not know whether Carlson understands the history of the claim he is repeating. His audience evidently includes a great many Christians who may not understand it either.

What Would Actually Fix It

Arrests, prosecutions, and a minister who wants them.

The Israeli organizations documenting this problem have been quite clear about what they need, and it is not another statement of sympathy. Harani and her volunteers want complaints filed, investigations opened, suspects identified, and charges brought. Without consistent enforcement, there is little reason for the people doing this to stop.

This is, ultimately, a police problem. And it is a problem Israel is entirely capable of solving.

The difficulty is political. Enforcing the law against members of a community whose political representatives can determine whether a government survives is considerably harder than condemning their behavior in a press release. That does not excuse the failure to enforce the law. It helps explain why the failure has persisted.

American Christians who care about this should demand enforcement. Ask the question publicly and in writing, as Huckabee did privately. Ask how many complaints were filed, how many investigations were opened, how many suspects were identified, and how many people were actually charged. Do not accept another statement about Israel’s respect for religious freedom as an answer to a question about whether someone who spits on a Christian monk will be prosecuted.

But American Christians who are being told that Jews hate them should also pay attention to who is documenting these attacks.

The most complete record of anti-Christian harassment in Israel is being compiled by a Jewish Israeli woman and Jewish Israeli volunteers who document the incidents, accompany victims, and provide a protective presence at Christian churches and processions.

They are Jews protecting Christians from other Jews.

That fact rarely makes it into the podcasts.

It may be the most important fact in this story.

RWM/JGM

References

Al Jazeera. 2026. “How Ultra-Orthodox Recruitment Could Unseat Netanyahu in Israeli Elections.” May 16.

Anti-Defamation League. 2026. Tucker Carlson. Backgrounder. New York, May 5.

Aish. 2026. “Tucker Carlson’s Lies About Jews and Israel.” February 19.

CNN. 2024. “Ultra-Orthodox Man Seen Spitting at Christian Priest in Jerusalem.” February 4.

Fox News. 2026. “Meet the Man Israel Chose to Be Its First-Ever Ambassador to the Christian World.” June 21.

Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 2025. Christians in Israel: Selected Data on the Occasion of Christmas. Jerusalem, December.

Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 2026. Appointment of Special Envoy to the Christian World. Jerusalem, April 23.

Israel Religious Action Center. 2026. Complaints Concerning Harassment of Christians, 2012 to 2021. Presented to the Religious Freedom Conference, Jerusalem, June 4.

The Media Line. 2026. “Fact-Checking Tucker Carlson’s Portrayal of Christians in the Holy Land.” February 12.

Mondoweiss. 2026. “Tucker Carlson’s Criticism of Israel Misses the Point.” February 27.

Israel Supreme Court. 2024. Judgment on the Conscription of Yeshiva Students. Jerusalem, June 25.

The Jerusalem Post. 2026. “Ultra-Orthodox Party Holds Knesset Hostage over Draft Exemption Bills.” June 29.

Open Doors. 2026. World Watch List. Santa Ana, CA.

Religious Freedom Data Center. 2026. Documented Incidents Against Christians in Israel. Jerusalem, June 4.

Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue. 2025. Annual Report on Attacks Against Christians, 2024. Jerusalem.

The Times of Israel. 2023a. “Old City Spitting Videos Underscore Troubling Reality for Christian Clergy.” April 17.

The Times of Israel. 2023b. “5 Arrested for Spitting at Christians in Jerusalem; Police Minister: It’s Not Criminal.” October 4.

The Times of Israel. 2026. “Israel Appoints First Special Envoy to Christian World After Scandals Strain Ties.” April 23.

The Times of Israel. 2026. “Shas Vows to Oppose 2026 Budget Unless Coalition Passes Haredi Draft Exemption Bill.” January 4.

The Wall Street Journal. 2026. “Spitting Attacks Show Rise of Anti-Christian Hate in Israel.” August 3.

The Washington Post. 2026. “As Christians Are Attacked in Israel, Government Shows Little Concern.” July 5.

Israel Is Trying to Stop Taking Our Money

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

Before getting into part four, a quick word to those of you who have stayed with me through this series. I know that six essays examining Israel, its security problems, its history, and its relationship with the United States are not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. This has turned into a deeper examination than I originally anticipated, and I appreciate your patience with it. There are two more installments after this one, and then I promise we will move on to other subjects.

But having spent time in Israel, Judea and Samaria, and along the Gaza border, I wanted to follow the questions wherever they led rather than reduce what I saw to another argument about whether one is “pro-Israel” or “anti-Israel.” The answers have often been more complicated than I expected. This installment is about one of those complications: the widespread belief that Israel wants, needs, and intends to remain dependent on American military aid.

It may be that Israel increasingly wants exactly the opposite.

*The short version, for readers who do not spend their days on Capitol Hill.*

In May 2024, the United States paused a weapons shipment to Israel in an effort to change an Israeli military decision.

That is what leverage is for. And it worked exactly the way leverage works.

It also taught Israel something that will not easily be forgotten: American military aid has an off switch, and an American president can throw it.

Israel is now negotiating its way out of that arrangement.

The current U.S.-Israel military assistance agreement expires in 2028. Rather than simply asking Washington for another decade of checks, Israel is proposing something quite different: gradually reduce American grant aid and replace at least part of it with joint investment in weapons research, development, and production.

Both countries put money in. Both countries get something out.

That may sound like a technical change in defense procurement.

It isn’t.

It is a transfer of power.

Aid carries conditions. Congress can attach them. Administrations can interpret them. Committees can investigate them. Presidents can delay weapons already approved in order to influence what Israel does next.

A jointly funded weapons program, particularly one containing substantial Israeli money, sits on different legal and political ground. The old tools of leverage may not disappear entirely, but they become considerably harder to use.

Four terms will carry you through the rest of this essay.

Foreign Military Financing, or FMF, is the main American military aid program for Israel. Despite the way it is usually described, this is not simply Washington handing Israel a check. Most of the money must be used to purchase American defense products, from American companies, employing American workers.

The Memorandum of Understanding, or MOU, is the ten-year political agreement that establishes the framework and anticipated level of assistance. It is not a treaty. It does not bind Congress. Congress still has to appropriate the money.

The Leahy Laws restrict American assistance to foreign security-force units when there is credible information implicating them in gross violations of human rights. The important word here is assistance. How those restrictions would apply to jointly developed and jointly financed programs is considerably less straightforward, and that distinction may become enormously important.

Qualitative Military Edge, or QME, is the requirement embedded in American law that Israel maintain the ability to defend itself against credible military threats from neighboring states and coalitions while possessing superior military capabilities. QME does not disappear if Israel takes less American aid.

Now we can get to the argument.

Washington spent decades and hundreds of billions of dollars building a system that did two things at once. It strengthened Israel militarily while giving the United States extraordinary influence over how that strength could be supplied and, when Washington chose, constrained.

Then Washington demonstrated the constraint.

And Israel noticed.

In April 2024, the Biden administration began reviewing proposed transfers of particular weapons to Israel. By early May, it had paused a shipment containing 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs. Thousands of JDAM guidance kits were also caught up in the broader debate over transfers.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed the bomb shipment pause before Senate appropriators on May 8.

That same day, President Biden made the policy explicit. If Israel launched the major Rafah operation his administration opposed, he told CNN, the United States would not supply certain weapons Israel might use in that operation.

There is no need to speculate about Washington’s purpose. The United States wanted Israel to make a different military decision, so the administration used Israel’s dependence on the American weapons pipeline as leverage.

Whether you believe Biden was right or wrong to do that is almost beside the point. Because Israel learned something much larger than the immediate lesson of Rafah. It learned that a weapons supply chain controlled by another country is not merely a supply chain. It is a veto waiting to be exercised.

The most important consequence of the 2024 weapons pause, therefore, may not have been what happened in Rafah at all.

It may be what happens in 2028.

Israel is now negotiating the agreement that will replace the current MOU, and the structure being discussed points toward a very different relationship: less dependence on American grants, more Israeli financing, more joint development and production, and eventually much greater Israeli freedom to build what it needs without asking Washington for permission.

For sixty years, American military assistance to Israel bought the United States something far more valuable than gratitude. It bought leverage.

In the spring of 2024, Washington used it.

Israel’s response is to make sure Washington cannot use that kind of leverage against it again.

The Instrument, Precisely

Since 1999, the U.S.-Israel military relationship has been organized around ten-year Memoranda of Understanding. Clinton’s was worth $21.3 billion, George W. Bush’s $30 billion, and the current agreement, signed by Susan Rice and Jacob Nagel on September 14, 2016, provides for $38 billion across fiscal years 2019 through 2028. Of that, $33 billion is Foreign Military Financing and $5 billion is for cooperative missile defense, roughly $3.3 billion and $500 million per year, respectively (Congressional Research Service 2026b). Those are the numbers everyone quotes, but three features of the arrangement matter considerably more than the headline number.

First, an MOU is not a treaty. It requires no Senate ratification, appropriates no money, and does not legally bind a future president or Congress. It is an executive commitment that Congress has historically chosen to honor, and the money still has to be appropriated each year. Israel can therefore plan around ten years of American assistance, but Washington retains the machinery to delay it, condition it, withhold it, or simply stop providing it.

Second, Israel gave up something significant in exchange for that predictability. In a side letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed that Israel would return any money Congress appropriated above the agreed MOU levels for fiscal years 2017 and 2018. Israel also agreed not to lobby Congress for additional military assistance during the MOU period except in the event of a regional conflict, and even then only with the administration’s prior consent (Washington Institute 2016). The restriction was not theoretical. In September 2017, Senators Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio wrote Secretary of State Rex Tillerson objecting after Congress appropriated an additional $75 million and the administration moved to enforce the agreement. Congress wanted to give Israel more money, and under the agreement Israel had negotiated with the executive branch, Israel had effectively promised not to take it.

Third, the portion of American aid that once directly supported Israel’s own defense industry is disappearing. Historically, Israel enjoyed an unusual privilege known as Off-Shore Procurement, which allowed it to convert roughly a quarter of its American Foreign Military Financing (FMF) into shekels and spend that money with Israeli defense companies. The 2016 MOU phases that privilege out entirely, reaching zero in fiscal year 2028 (Congressional Research Service 2026a).

That changes what the familiar phrase “$3.3 billion in aid to Israel” actually means. By the end of the current agreement, essentially all American FMF provided to Israel must be spent purchasing American defense goods and services. American taxpayers provide the money, Israel uses it to purchase qualifying military equipment, American defense companies receive the orders, American factories build the weapons, and American workers are paid to produce them. Israel gets the military equipment, certainly, but much of the money itself never really leaves the American defense-industrial economy.

Put those pieces together, and the arrangement looks rather different from the political slogan. By 2028, the system is designed to provide Israel with American military assistance that is spent almost entirely inside the American defense-industrial base, under a ten-year political commitment that legally binds neither Congress nor the president, while Israel itself is constrained in seeking assistance beyond the negotiated amount. Call it foreign aid if you like, but economically much of it functions as a directed procurement program for American weapons manufacturers. Strategically, it purchases something considerably more valuable for Washington: influence over an ally whose military depends heavily on an American-controlled supply chain.

That influence remained largely theoretical as long as Washington and Jerusalem agreed on what Israel should do. In May 2024, they did not. The Biden administration demonstrated that the supply chain could also be used as an instrument of American policy, and Israel discovered that the price of American military assistance was not simply the conditions written into an MOU. The price was dependence on a weapons pipeline another government ultimately controlled.

Israel is now calculating whether that price is still worth paying.

How It Compares

The scale question is where most public discussion goes wrong, usually in both directions. Israel is routinely described as the largest recipient of American foreign aid, which is true historically, but that statement tells you surprisingly little about either the size of the current flow or Israel’s dependence on it.

Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of American foreign assistance since the Second World War. From 1951 through 2022, the United States provided roughly $318 billion in inflation-adjusted assistance, about $225 billion of it military (USAFacts 2023). But that is the accumulated total across more than seventy years. Under the current MOU, the normal annual commitment is $3.8 billion, consisting of $3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing and $500 million for cooperative missile defense.

FY2024 was an exceptional year because of the war that followed October 7. Israel received approximately $6.8 billion in U.S. foreign assistance, temporarily pushing the annual figure far above the normal MOU level. By FY2025, disbursements had fallen back to roughly $3.3 billion. Ukraine, by comparison, received about $6.7 billion in FY2025, making it the largest recipient of American foreign assistance that year, with Israel second.

The comparison becomes more striking when the entire period since Russia’s 2022 invasion is considered. Congress has appropriated roughly $174 billion to $183 billion for the Ukraine response, depending on which programs and regional expenditures are included in the calculation. Direct American military assistance committed to Ukraine has exceeded $65 billion. Israel also received substantial emergency military assistance following October 7, but the scale and speed of the Ukrainian effort were of a different order. In only a few years, Washington committed military assistance to Ukraine equivalent to decades of Israel’s normal annual FMF allocation.

Other major recipients provide some perspective. Egypt has received approximately $1.3 billion a year in FMF for decades as part of the security architecture that followed the Camp David accords. Jordan receives several hundred million dollars annually in military assistance within a broader American assistance package of roughly $1.5 billion to $1.75 billion. These are significant sums, but simply ranking countries by dollars obscures the more important question.

The number that matters is the size of American assistance relative to the recipient country’s own ability to finance its defense. American FMF currently represents roughly 15 to 16 percent of Israel’s defense spending, depending on the year and which expenditures are included (Congressional Research Service 2026b). Israel pays for the large majority of its own military, maintains a sophisticated domestic defense industry, exports advanced weapons systems, and possesses the economic capacity to replace at least some American assistance with its own spending.

Ukraine has occupied a fundamentally different position. Since 2022, American and allied assistance has not merely supplemented an otherwise self-sufficient Ukrainian defense budget. It has supplied a substantial portion of the weapons, ammunition, air defense, intelligence support, and financial capacity required to sustain the war. When American assistance stalled during the congressional appropriations fight of 2023 and 2024, Ukraine could not simply replace the missing supply from domestic production. Ammunition was rationed and shortages appeared at the front.

Israel watched that happen.

Then, in May 2024, Washington demonstrated that the same basic mechanism could be used against Israel. The circumstances were different and Israel was far less dependent, but the lesson was impossible to miss. If another government controls an important part of your weapons supply, that government possesses leverage over the decisions you make with those weapons.

This is why the raw dollar figure is such a poor measure of dependency. Israel may be the largest cumulative recipient of American foreign assistance in modern history, but the United States finances only a minority share of Israel’s defense establishment. More importantly, Israel has the industrial base, technological capacity, and national wealth to reduce that share further.

Ukraine demonstrated what extreme wartime dependence on foreign military supply looks like. Israel appears to have drawn the obvious conclusion: do not wait until you are in the middle of a war to discover who controls your ammunition.The choke points

The vulnerability is structural, not partisan, and the Israeli analysis I heard treats it that way.

Three separate actors can interrupt the flow. The executive can slow-walk obligation, notification, or delivery. Appropriators can attach conditions or decline to fund. And the coalition politics of either party can shift within a single cycle, which the Arab Center notes is already making routine appropriation more uncomfortable for members (Arab Center Washington DC 2026).

Congress appropriated $3.5 billion in FMF in the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act and then spent months disputing whether the executive was obligating and notifying it (Congressional Research Service 2024). The money was voted. Delivery was a separate question, decided elsewhere.

From Aid to Joint Venture

The Israeli position going into the FY2029 negotiation is considerably more interesting than most of the coverage suggests, because Israel is not asking for more American money. It is discussing how to need less of it.

Netanyahu has publicly argued that Israel has reached the point where it should begin phasing out American military aid, and has even raised the possibility of forgoing assistance already committed for FY2027 and FY2028. In January, he argued that Israel’s economy could reach $1 trillion within a decade and that the country’s growing defense industry could support the transition (American Jewish Committee 2026). Israel is also reportedly seeking a much longer framework, potentially twenty years and extending to 2048, centered not on annual grants but on joint research and development, defense technology, artificial intelligence, and Israeli participation in Golden Dome (Congressional Research Service 2026a; Quincy Institute 2026).

The right way to understand this is not as an aid reduction. It is a change in the business model.

FMF is fundamentally a donor-recipient arrangement. The United States appropriates the money, Israel receives the purchasing authority, and most of that money is then spent with American defense manufacturers. Because Washington supplies the money and controls the program through which it moves, Washington also retains considerable control over the terms.

What Israel is proposing would move the relationship toward co-investment. Both countries would contribute capital and technology to programs in which both have a direct interest. The important negotiations would increasingly concern intellectual property, production rights, cost sharing, technology transfer, export rights, and where the resulting systems are manufactured. The relationship would move away from grant administration and toward joint program management.

This is not an entirely new model. Pieces of it already exist inside the U.S.-Israel defense relationship. Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow have all involved combinations of American funding, Israeli technology, cooperative development, and American production. RTX, through Raytheon, has long participated in Iron Dome production with Israel’s Rafael, and the two companies have expanded American manufacturing capacity for the system. What Israel is proposing, in effect, is to take a model previously used for selected weapons programs and make something much closer to it the foundation of the relationship.

For Washington, the practical consequences are substantial. Cost sharing begins to replace grants. Intellectual property and production rights become as important as the size of the appropriation. The question shifts from how much money Congress will give Israel each year to how much each country will invest, what each contributes, what gets built, where it gets built, and who owns the technology that emerges.

None of this would eliminate American leverage. The United States would still control American technology, export licenses, components manufactured in the United States, and whatever money Congress continued to appropriate. But it would change the nature of that leverage. With FMF, Washington can impose a cost on Israel by withholding something Washington is giving it. In a genuinely co-funded program, withholding cooperation can impose costs on both countries because American money, American companies, American technology, and American military requirements are tied to the same project.

That is a very different negotiating position.

Israel is not proposing to end its defense relationship with the United States. Quite the opposite. It is proposing to make the relationship more transactional while making the dependency smaller.

The distinction matters because the exchange runs in both directions. Israel wants access to American technology, manufacturing capacity, and the enormous scale of the American defense industry. But the United States also wants Israeli technology, battlefield experience, research, innovation, and weapons systems that Israel has become exceptionally good at developing. The proposed relationship recognizes that reality. Instead of one country writing the check and the other receiving it, both countries bring something valuable to the table, both invest, and both have something to lose if the relationship is disrupted.

That does not eliminate American leverage. It does something more important. It makes the leverage mutual.

The Mechanism Nobody is Discussing in Public

The Congressional Research Service describes the most consequential part of the proposed change in characteristically dry language. If the next agreement phases down Foreign Military Financing and replaces it with jointly funded Defense Department programs, the money does not simply move between accounts. The rules and congressional oversight move with it.

FMF is foreign assistance, putting much of the relationship under the State Department and congressional foreign affairs committees, where conditions on aid are traditionally attached and enforced. Joint defense programs fall increasingly under the armed services committees and defense appropriators, whose focus is procurement, weapons development, military readiness, and whether the program works.

The legal consequences may be even more important. CRS notes that, under the executive branch’s interpretation, Leahy restrictions may not apply to certain transactions financed entirely with the purchasing country’s own money (Congressional Research Service 2026a). If Israel pays with Israeli funds, or jointly develops a system with the United States rather than receiving an American grant to purchase it, some of the existing human-rights conditions may no longer attach in the same way.

In Washington budget language, this is partly a shift from the 150 account, which covers international affairs and foreign assistance, toward the 050 account, which covers national defense. Congress does not lose its authority. It can still impose restrictions, and American export controls and arms-transfer laws remain. But the existing machinery of conditionality was built around foreign assistance. Change the funding structure and some of those legal hooks change with it.

Whether you see that as Israel securing greater freedom of action or shedding legitimate American restraint depends on your view of Israel. But the mechanism is the same. Israel is trying to replace a relationship in which Washington supplies the money and therefore writes many of the conditions with one in which both countries invest and both expect to benefit.

The argument in Washington is about how much aid Israel should receive. The more consequential question may be whether the next agreement is “aid” at all.

The Constraint Israel Cannot Wish Away

The rhetoric of Israeli self-reliance runs ahead of the balance sheet, and CRS has identified the problem. Israel and the United States have agreed to tens of billions of dollars in arms sales since October 2023, much of it financed through cash-flow financing, which allows Israel to commit future FMF payments against contracts signed today. Some of those payment schedules extend beyond the current MOU.

That means Israel cannot simply reach 2028, refuse another MOU, and walk away. Without continued FMF or some replacement arrangement, Israel would have to pay existing obligations with national funds, arrange alternative financing, renegotiate contracts, or terminate them, potentially creating liabilities for both governments (Congressional Research Service 2026b). That gives Washington considerable leverage over the transition. Israel may want out of the existing aid structure, but it first has to unwind obligations built around it.

Nor does paying with Israeli money remove Washington from the relationship. The Qualitative Military Edge requirement remains in law, requiring the administration to consider Israel’s military advantage when approving certain arms sales to other Middle Eastern countries. The Arms Export Control Act also continues to subject major American weapons sales to congressional notification and review regardless of who pays for them.

So the proposed transition does not eliminate American leverage. It narrows it. Washington would still control the sale and export of American weapons and technology. What Israel is trying to eliminate is the additional leverage that comes from Washington also supplying the money used to buy them.

Israel can stop depending on the American check. It cannot keep buying American weapons and stop depending on American permission.

What Washington trades away

This cuts against both standard positions, which may explain why neither camp talks about it very much.

If you regard American conditionality as an essential brake on Israeli governments, the same problem runs in reverse. Israel is trying to reduce the power of that brake, and the 2024 weapons pause is part of the reason why. Using leverage does more than influence the immediate decision. It reminds the other party that the leverage exists and gives it a reason to reduce its exposure to it.

There is also an American industrial consequence. FMF has functioned for decades as a subsidy to American defense manufacturers, paid through a foreign aid program. As Israel’s ability to spend FMF domestically disappears, nearly all of the $3.3 billion annual grant returns to American companies. Replace that system with greater Israeli self-financing and domestic production, and some of those American orders disappear with it. That argument will matter in areas where weapons are made, such as Fort Worth and Camden, long before most Americans notice it, because defense contracts mean factories, jobs, and congressional districts.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has proposed one plausible middle ground: a Strategic Partnership Agreement under which Israel commits to sustained defense spending of roughly 4.5 to 5 percent of GDP and a specified level of American procurement in exchange for a longer and more predictable framework (Foundation for Defense of Democracies 2025). It would preserve much of the industrial and strategic relationship while gradually retiring the donor-recipient model.

Something along those lines may be where this ends. Washington keeps a major defense customer and strategic partner. Israel keeps access to the American defense industry. What disappears, or at least diminishes, is the part both sides are increasingly uncomfortable admitting exists: dependency.

The Cost of Using Leverage

A relationship built partly on dependence remains stable only while both sides believe the arrangement is worth preserving. Once the dependent party concludes that the dependency itself has become a strategic risk, it begins looking for a way out.

That is what changed in May 2024. Before the weapons pause, Israeli planners could reasonably treat American resupply as a dependable feature of the strategic environment. Afterward, they could not. Washington had demonstrated that weapons already in the American pipeline could be withheld in an attempt to change an Israeli military decision. No subsequent assurance can erase the fact that it happened.

The United States spent decades and roughly $318 billion building a defense relationship that gave Washington considerable influence over Israeli decision-making. In 2024, it exercised that influence in a way that gave Israel a powerful reason to reduce it. Whether withholding those weapons was justified is a separate question. The larger question is whether influencing one Israeli operation in Rafah was worth changing Israel’s calculation about a military relationship both countries expect to continue for decades.

I doubt anyone in Washington consciously made that trade. The administration was trying to affect an immediate decision in an immediate war. But governments rarely get to choose only the immediate consequences of the tools they use. Israel learned that American military assistance could be withheld when Washington and Jerusalem disagreed over how Israel should fight a war.

Now it is trying to make sure that the next time they disagree, Washington has less to withhold.

RWM/JGM

References

Al Majalla. 2025. “Israel and Ukraine Top US Foreign Aid Recipient List.” London.

American Jewish Committee. 2026. What Every American Should Know About U.S. Aid to Israel. New York.

Arab Center Washington DC. 2026. “Section 224: US-Israel Defense Integration Beyond Military Aid.” Washington, DC.

Congressional Research Service. 2024. U.S. Review of an Arms Sale to Israel: Issues for Congress. IN12359. Washington, DC.

Congressional Research Service. 2026a. Possible Changes in U.S. Military Aid to Israel: Considerations for Congress. IN12695. Washington, DC, June 4.

Congressional Research Service. 2026b. U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel: Overview and Developments since October 7, 2023. RL33222. Washington, DC.

Foundation for Defense of Democracies. 2025. Beyond the U.S.-Israel MOU: The Case for a Strategic Partnership Agreement. Washington, DC, December 19.

Jerusalem Post. 2026. “The Sixth Eye: Reframing US Security Assistance to Israel.” July 2.

Kiel Institute for the World Economy. 2026. Ukraine Support Tracker. Kiel.

Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. 2026. The Disappearing Aid Check: The Future of US-Israel Defense Support. Washington, DC, June 5.

United States and Israel. 2016. Memorandum of Understanding on U.S. Security Assistance. Washington, DC, September 14.

USAFacts. 2023. How Much Aid Does the US Give to Israel? Seattle.

Washington Institute for Near East Policy. 2016. Israel’s New MOU: The Money and the Message. Washington, DC.

Bioethics, Fauci Style

Well, this is rather perfect.

Christine Grady, Anthony Fauci’s wife and one of the most powerful bioethicists in the United States for nearly three decades, apparently has a new method for communicating with the American public.

She flips them off.

On Thursday, hours after the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 8-5 to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress, Fauci emerged from his $2.4 million Washington home looking decidedly unhappy and wheeled the recycling to the curb.

It had been a rough day.

Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times during congressional questioning. The committee then voted along party lines to hold him in contempt.

Then came Mrs. Fauci.

Fauci climbed into the passenger seat of a vehicle driven by Grady. As they pulled away, the NY Post photographer outside their home received an unmistakable one-finger salute from the former chief of the NIH Clinical Center’s Department of Bioethics.

Yes. Bioethics.

You really cannot make this stuff up.

Grady is not some obscure academic who happened to marry a government bureaucrat. She began working at NIH in 1983, joined its Department of Bioethics when it was created in 1996, became chief in 2012, and spent decades writing and lecturing about informed consent, human-subject protections, vulnerability and research ethics. She also served seven years on the President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

All while married to Anthony Fauci, who ran NIAID from 1984 through 2022 and became arguably the most powerful public-health bureaucrat in America.

To be precise, Grady did not approve Fauci’s research protocols or clear his financial conflicts. NIH says she had no such authority.

Which raises the more interesting question.

Who did?

Fauci was a government inventor who received royalty payments. Yet under federal ethics rules, those government royalty payments are not, by themselves, legally considered a financial conflict of interest. NIH does concede that conducting research involving your own royalty-generating invention can create an apparent conflict requiring review.

Only Washington could construct an ethics system in which receiving money from an invention connected to your government work is not necessarily a financial conflict. It may merely look exactly like one.

And that leads to questions worth answering. Who wrote and approved those policies? What role, if any, did Grady or her bioethics department have in developing or defending them? Who reviewed Fauci’s royalty interests, and where are the recusals, waivers and conflict reviews?

There is another question worth pursuing. Fauci’s own journal documents that he had staff devoted to identifying prestigious prizes and awards for which he might qualify, including awards from institutions with financial relationships with NIH. If so, who authorized that use of federal staff, and were those relationships ever subjected to ethics review?

For decades, Washington had Anthony Fauci presiding over one enormous corner of the federal biomedical research establishment while his wife occupied one of the country’s most prestigious positions devoted to the ethics of biomedical research.

Nothing to see there.

And now, after her husband invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination 111 times rather than answer congressional questions, America’s longtime grande dame of bioethics apparently decided that the appropriate response to public scrutiny was to extend her middle finger toward a camera.

Rand Paul supplied the inevitable punchline:

“Is that how you plead the Fifth in sign language?”

At least this time, the communication from the Fauci household was remarkably clear.

The Guardian is into doing satire now!

Who remembers this classic?

“People will die!”

JGM

The Protein Panic

How a Review Paper Became a Dietary Guideline in Three Days

Within hours of publication, headlines around the world confidently declared that eating less protein could help people live longer:

• “Protein Restriction Improves Metabolism and Longevity”

• “Rethinking Protein: Less may be more…”

• “Eating less protein could slow aging.”

• “Less protein may be more for healthy aging.”

• “Eat less protein, age better, live longer.”

• “Eating too much protein could age you faster.”

• “Protein Restriction May Promote Healthy Aging and Longevity”

The news aggregator, Ground.News tracked more than fifty news organizations carrying some version of the story, with many of the top headlines, even in scientific magazines, making outrageous claims. To the average reader, the message was unmistakable. Science had spoken. The advice was simple: eat less protein.

There was only one problem. That is not what the paper actually demonstrated.

The publication was neither a clinical trial, a systematic review, nor a meta-analysis. It presented no new human outcome data. Instead, it was a narrative review, one that assembled existing research into a proposed biological framework the authors called the “hallmarks of protein restriction.”

That distinction matters.

Narrative reviews are designed to generate hypotheses, organize emerging evidence, and stimulate further research. They do not establish clinical practice. Yet within days, an interesting scientific hypothesis had been transformed into what sounded like a new dietary guideline. A guideline that became an article in almost every major news organization in America.

The review contains no long-term randomized human trial showing that reducing protein intake increases lifespan, prevents dementia, reduces fractures, lowers all-cause mortality, or preserves independence in old age. Most of the human studies discussed lasted only a few weeks and measured metabolic biomarkers rather than the outcomes people actually care about: living longer, remaining stronger, and staying healthy.

Even the review itself acknowledges that we still do not know the optimal protein intake for humans across different ages, lifestyles, and health conditions. Yet the lead scientist, Dudley Lamming, stated: “…many people are likely consuming more protein than they actually need, which probably has negative health consequences.”

So that uncertainty virtually disappeared from the headlines. Readers were left with a far simpler message.

“Eat less protein. Live longer.”

Scientific papers do not exist in a political vacuum. They are published into ongoing policy debates, and timing often shapes how they are received. These headlines appeared just as Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new Dietary Guidelines placed renewed emphasis on consuming adequate amounts of high-quality protein, particularly for maintaining muscle mass and metabolic health. While the administration was rolling out these new guidelines, the headlines rapidly turned a speculative scientific hypothesis into what could understandably be interpreted as a rebuttal of the administration’s new nutrition policy.

Whether by coincidence or not, a review suggesting that eating less protein might also increase longevity fits neatly into existing climate and sustainability narratives that encourage reducing consumption of animal-source foods. That context almost certainly made the paper more newsworthy. It also helps explain why a hypothesis-generating review received far more attention than dozens of studies emphasizing the importance of adequate protein intake in older adults.

The truth is that this is hardly the first time the mainstream media has mistaken scientific consensus for scientific certainty. Over the decades, readers have been confidently told to avoid eggs because of cholesterol, to embrace low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets built around the food pyramid, and that statins represented an almost universal solution to cardiovascular risk. During COVID, the same pattern repeated itself as masking, lockdowns, school closures, and other public health interventions were frequently reported with far greater certainty than the underlying evidence justified. In each case, the science continued to evolve while the headlines projected confidence that often exceeded what the data could actually support.

That does not mean every recommendation was wrong. It means the public was repeatedly presented with provisional scientific judgments as though they were settled fact. The lesson from those episodes should have been humility. Instead, we continue to see the same pattern repeated. A provocative hypothesis becomes a confident headline, and the caveats that define good science quietly disappear along the way.

That should concern all of us.

This is how nutritional myths are often born. An intriguing biological hypothesis becomes a review article. The review becomes a press release. The press release becomes dozens of nearly identical news stories. Many such stories are being promoted and paid for by big pharma (ref). At every step, the caveats shrink while the certainty grows. By the time the story reaches the public, a scientific question has become settled wisdom.

That is not how science is supposed to work.

The irony is that the review itself ends on a note of scientific humility. The authors acknowledge that we still do not know the optimal protein intake for humans and that considerably more research is needed. That may be the paper’s most important conclusion.

Unfortunately, it was also the one almost nobody read.

Digging Into What the Paper Actually Proves

Once I sat down and actually read the paper, the disconnect between the headlines and the science became obvious.

The authors are not presenting new clinical evidence. They are proposing a biological framework for thinking about protein restriction and aging. That is a perfectly legitimate scientific exercise. New ideas have to begin somewhere. But a framework is not proof, and a hypothesis is not a clinical recommendation.

The first thing that stands out is where most of the evidence comes from.

Again and again, the review returns to experiments in flies, worms, mice, and rats. Those studies are fascinating. Laboratory animals allow scientists to manipulate individual nutrients, alter specific metabolic pathways, and observe the effects over an entire lifespan. Much of what we know about aging biology began in exactly this way.

But laboratory animals are not people. In fact, rodents have a completely different digestive physiology. They rely heavily on hindgut fermentation, derive more nutrition from microbial metabolism, have dramatically faster metabolic rates, and possess different nutrient-sensing responses.

As a result, a protein-restricted diet that is well tolerated by a mouse cannot simply be assumed to have the same effects in humans, particularly older adults, for whom adequate dietary protein is essential to preserve muscle mass, strength, immune function, and recovery. This is one reason findings from rodent studies should be interpreted cautiously when making dietary recommendations for people.

Nor are they eating anything remotely resembling a human diet.

Many of these experiments rely on highly purified laboratory feeds in which protein or individual amino acids are manipulated to extremes that bear little resemblance to how free-living humans eat. Demonstrating that a genetically homogeneous strain of mice lives longer on one artificial diet than another does not establish that a seventy-year-old woman should eat less fish, eggs, or chicken.

When the discussion turns to humans, the evidence becomes much less convincing.

Most of the intervention studies lasted only a few weeks. They measured fasting glucose, insulin sensitivity, body composition, circulating growth factors, or other metabolic markers. Those are useful biological measurements, but they are surrogate endpoints. They do not tell us whether people actually live longer, remain independent, avoid dementia, suffer fewer fractures, or reduce their overall risk of death.

Modern medicine is filled with treatments that improved laboratory measurements while ultimately failing to improve patients’ lives. Sometimes they even made outcomes worse. Biomarkers help us understand biology. They do not, by themselves, establish clinical benefit.

Another subtle but important problem is that the review often treats several very different interventions as though they were interchangeable.

Reducing total dietary protein is not the same thing as restricting methionine. Restricting methionine is not the same thing as restricting isoleucine or valine. Changing the ratio of amino acids is different again. Comparing plant and animal proteins introduces another entirely separate set of variables. Each of these interventions may influence metabolism differently. Yet by the time the findings are summarized, they frequently become compressed into a single public message: eat less protein.

That is a much broader conclusion than the underlying evidence supports.

There is another issue that receives surprisingly little attention.

Protein never simply disappears from the diet. If calories remain constant, eating less protein means eating more of something else, usually carbohydrate or fat. Any observed benefit could therefore reflect the replacement nutrient as much as the reduction in protein itself. Untangling those effects is one of the central challenges in nutritional science, yet it receives relatively little discussion in the review.

This paper uses observational studies, such as the protein restriction diet of the Okinawa people in Japan, as primary evidence that protein restriction increases lifespan. From the paper:

A quote from the paper: “The hallmarks of protein and amino acid restriction in aging and longevity”:

“…it has been hypothesized that the long lifespan of the Japanese population of Okinawa is due to their diet, which contains about 9% protein and is strikingly similar to that of protein restriction laboratory studies. The Okinawan diet also derives 80% of its calories from plant sources, and individuals generally consume fewer calories overall, making it difficult to assign all of the benefits to the lower protein intake. Nevertheless, these observations support the possibility that protein restriction may promote healthy aging in humans.”

The Okinawan story has often been simplified into “eat very little protein and you’ll live longer.” But the evidence does not support such a straightforward conclusion.

Rather, Okinawan longevity appears to have resulted from an entire lifestyle: remaining lean without chronic undernutrition, being physically active every day, maintaining close social ties, eating mostly minimally processed foods, and benefiting from favorable genetics. Protein intake was one feature of that lifestyle directly after WWII, but there is little evidence it was the primary reason Okinawans live so long. Indeed, the balance of evidence today suggests that adequate protein becomes increasingly important as people age to preserve muscle and function, rather than being something older adults should deliberately restrict

The same caution applies to other observational studies.

People who consume higher-protein diets differ from those who do not in many other ways. They exercise differently, smoke at different rates, have different body compositions, eat different foods, and often differ in socioeconomic status and underlying health. Statistical adjustment can account for some of those differences, but it cannot eliminate them all. Observational studies are valuable for generating hypotheses. They are much less reliable for proving causation.

Perhaps the paper’s greatest weakness, however, is not what it includes, but what it largely leaves in the background.

Protein is not simply another source of calories. For older adults, it is the primary nutritional defense against the progressive loss of lean muscle mass.

That matters because sarcopenia is far more than a cosmetic problem. Loss of muscle increases the risk of falls, fractures, frailty, hospitalization, disability, and death. Muscle also serves as a critical metabolic reserve during illness, surgery, and recovery. Any recommendation encouraging older adults to broadly reduce protein intake must confront those risks directly. This review largely does not.

None of this means the paper lacks value. On the contrary, it highlights several genuinely important questions. Protein quality matters. Individual amino acids may influence aging differently. Nutrient-sensing pathways such as mTOR, IGF-1, and FGF21 deserve continued investigation. The optimal protein intake may well differ according to age, activity level, metabolic health, and disease.

Those are worthwhile scientific questions.

They are simply not the same thing as demonstrating that reducing protein intake will help humans live longer.

That remains a completely unanswered question.

The Bigger Failure

There is nothing inherently wrong with publishing a provocative hypothesis.

Science advances by asking difficult questions, challenging established assumptions, and proposing new ways of thinking about old problems. If this review encourages more rigorous research into how specific amino acids influence aging, then it will have made a valuable contribution.

The failure came afterward.

Somewhere between peer review and the evening news, a hypothesis became a conclusion.

The review became a journal press release. The press release became dozens of nearly identical news stories. At each stage, uncertainty diminished while confidence increased. Caveats quietly disappeared. By the time the story reached millions of readers, a paper exploring biological mechanisms had become what sounded like a new clinical guideline.

Prestigious journals occupy a unique position in public life. Their influence extends well beyond the scientific community. That influence carries responsibility. Publishing an interesting hypothesis is one thing. Allowing it to be promoted as though it had rewritten clinical nutrition is something else entirely.

Authors share that responsibility. Scientists should be enthusiastic about their work, but they also have an obligation to distinguish between what their research demonstrates and what it merely suggests. The review itself is appropriately cautious in its conclusions. The public messaging surrounding it was considerably less so.

The media completed the transformation.

Modern science reporting has increasingly become an exercise in amplifying press releases rather than critically evaluating evidence. The hierarchy of evidence quietly disappears. A narrative review becomes “new research.” Animal experiments become dietary advice. Biomarkers become clinical outcomes. Before long, an interesting biological hypothesis is presented as though it had already rewritten clinical practice.

We have seen this before.

During COVID, mechanistic studies, observational analyses, computer models, and laboratory experiments were repeatedly reported as though they carried the same weight as randomized clinical trials. The distinction between generating a hypothesis and proving one gradually disappeared. We were promised that the scientific community would learn from that experience.

Instead, here we are again.

• Different topic.

• Same pattern.

• A review article proposes an intriguing hypothesis.

• A journal press office emphasizes the most provocative interpretation.

• Dozens of news organizations repeat it with little independent scrutiny.

• Within days, the public is told that “science says” something the underlying paper never actually demonstrated.

The timing makes this story even more consequential. Only days earlier, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had unveiled one of the most significant revisions to federal dietary guidance in decades, placing renewed emphasis on consuming adequate amounts of high-quality protein, particularly for preserving muscle mass and metabolic health as Americans age.

Against that backdrop, headlines proclaiming that eating less protein could help people live longer can be interpreted as mainstream media’s rebuttal to the administration’s new nutritional guidance. Is this due to journalists and editors having an extreme case of TDS, which has morphed into a hatred of Secretary Kennedy and MAHA? Or is it due to the influence of Big Ag and Big Pharma on mainstream media? You decide.

Ironically, the paper’s most important conclusion was the one almost nobody read. Near the end, the authors acknowledge that we still do not know the optimal protein intake for humans across different ages, lifestyles, and health conditions. More research is needed. That is exactly the kind of scientific humility readers should expect from a review article.

Unfortunately, humility does not generate clicks.

The real lesson here has very little to do with protein. Next month it will be another nutrient. Next year it will be another supplement, another observational study, another review article. The pattern remains remarkably consistent. A hypothesis becomes a press release. The press release becomes headlines. The headlines become conventional wisdom, even scientific “fact.” Only years later, after better evidence accumulates, does the public discover that the original story was never nearly as certain as it sounded. We should have learned that lesson during COVID. Apparently, we are still learning it.

That should concern every scientist.

It should concern every physician.

And it should concern every person who still believes medicine ought to be guided by evidence rather than headlines.

JGM