Month: August 2025

Big Balls and the boys opened up millions of Americans to identity fraud. They might as well have just put it on the dark web:

A whistleblower says that a former senior DOGE official now at the Social Security Administration copied the Social Security numbers, names and birthdays of over 300 million Americans to a private section of the agency’s cloud. That private cloud environment is accessible by other former DOGE employees at the SSA and is lacking adequate security, potentially putting an enormous amount of private information at risk to being revealed and possibly used by identity thieves.

In a written complaint filed through the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, Charles Borges, the chief data officer at the Social Security Administration, claims that senior Trump appointees at the SSA who were recently part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team made the copy in a way that “constitute[s] violations of laws, rules, and regulations, abuse of authority, gross mismanagement, and creation of a substantial and specific threat to public health and safety.”

Borges says that career cybersecurity officials within the SSA described the decision to copy the data as “very high risk” and even discussed the possibility of having to reissue Social Security numbers to millions of Americans in the event the cloud server was breached.

This is what comes when you give access to Americans’ most important private information to arrogant little boys who know or care nothing about the world.

What ever happened to Elon, by the way? He’s the one who did this. And he seems to be hiding. Why is that? I suppose it might be because he’s busy using all that sweet government data to train his LLM. He got what he came for.

David Frum reminds us that there was a time when conservatives lost their minds over a war games power point they believed meant that the Obama administration was sending in the military to take over Texas. Ten years ago:

“In terms of Jade Helm, can you say clearly, is the U.S. military planning to take over Texas as is being asserted by certain presidential candidates?” asked a reporter.

“I’ll take the second one first. No,” said Defense Secretary Ashton Carter. (Video via C-SPAN)

With that, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter acknowledged a growing conspiracy theory flowing out of the Lone Star State — that a military exercise called Operation Jade Helm 15 planned for this summer in Texas and other states is actually an attempt by President Obama to impose martial law.

The theory gained traction on blogs and conservative websites after this unclassified powerpoint about the operation showed a map with some parts labeled “hostile,” including Texas. So take the Obama takeover theory, throw in a couple ideas about underground tunnels and closed Wal-Marts as guerrilla warfare staging areas and you have a run-of-the-mill Internet conspiracy theory.

“So, you wanna see treason folks? We’ve known about it for a long time, but this is it,” said conservative radio host Alex Jones. But what’s not run-of-the-mill about this one is the Texas governor and other political leaders have given it some legitimacy.

Last month, Texas governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to oversee the training exercise. “We’re playing a pivotal role of government and that is to provide information to people who have questions,” said Abbott.

Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas said in a statement, “Once I observed the map depicting ‘hostile,’ … I was rather appalled that the hostile areas amazingly have a Republican majority, ‘cling to their guns and religion,’ and believe in the sanctity of the United States Constitution.”

And even 2016 Presidential Candidate Ted Cruz said he understands the concerns people have. “You know, I understand the concern that’s been raised by a lot of citizens about Jade Helm. … We have seen for six years a federal government disrespecting the liberty of the citizens, and that produces fear,” said Cruz.

It was a huge deal. As you can see by the video, the press was all over it and the White House and the Pentagon had to go to great lengths to to calm the furor.

How about today?

“The Pentagon has for weeks been planning a military deployment to Chicago … The use of thousands of active-duty troops in Chicago also has been discussed” https://t.co/jwcASEjt6o

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 24, 2025

Needless to say, they’re all for it. They know that crime is down. They understand that this is all a ploy to create a crisis that Trump will then “solve,” sweep the midterms for the Republicans and win the Nobel Peace Prize… In the meantime the disgusting fascist will have destroyed yet another piece of the constitution and created a police state for JD Vance to use for his own (and Peter Thiel’s) nefarious purposes.

Trump said during the campaign that he wanted to make ads against fentanyl so that people would stop using it. He seemed to think people don’t understand that it’s bad for you.

Here’s the first one which, of course, mentions Trump:

Once again, he believes he’s invented the wheel:

I suspect it will work as well as those did. And, by the way, the “this is your brain on drugs” ad is much more creative than that cheap “Walking Dead” ad they came up with.

Meanwhile:

The Trump administration has delayed and may cancel roughly $140 million in grants to fund fentanyl overdose response efforts, according to four staff members with close knowledge of the process at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The staffers shared detailed information with NPR about the funding disruption and potential cuts on the condition of anonymity, saying they don’t have permission to speak publicly about their concerns and feared retribution from the Trump administration if identified.

“These are lives at stake,” said one CDC staffer, who has a role administering the addiction grant program, known as the Overdose Data To Action program, often referred to as OD2A. “The announcement [of delays] alone could trigger layoffs and program shutdowns. It could really start a chain reaction that’s hard to come back from,” the CDC staffer said.

State and local public health departments fighting to lower overdose deaths from fentanyl, methamphetamines and other drugs across the U.S. describe the funds as crucial to their efforts.

The last time a major national interruption of addiction care occurred, during the COVID-19 pandemic, drug deaths soared.

Don’t worry, the minute people see that fabulous ad they’ll realize that fentanyl is bad and they’ll stop using it. Easy peasy.

He’s getting people used to the idea of dictatorship. Here he is today, saying it again.

Trump on deploying the National Guard to Chicago: "I have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-08-26T19:25:32.377Z

Trump: "The line is that I'm a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, 'You know, if that's the case, I'd rather have a dictator.'" pic.twitter.com/YZlFDZs9lq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 26, 2025

Don’t worry. He says he isn’t one. It’s just that people want him to be one. So it’s all just fine.

I just watched Politico reporter Rachel Bade say on CNN that he’s right. Yeah it’s true that the statistics are down and all but the vibe is that crime is up so they’d rather have him behave like a dictator than feel unsafe. (Of course the vibe is up with Trump’s voters — who mostly don’t live in cities — because he’s telling them it is and sending in military troops!)

FFS.

The press is helping to spread the vicious lie that people in cities are hiding under their beds because they are so terrified of all the crime — just as Trump wants them to do. In the process they are creating the vibe that they then say is driving our politics even though it’s total bullshit.

This really is one of Trump’s superpowers. He knows exactly how to get the press to be his accomplices. He always survives any onslaught of bad news (with their help) which makes him appear to be invincible and then creates a myth about the country being in a catastrophic decline which they go along with because they’re just “reporting” what “people are feeling.”

This time it is helping him turn the country into a police state. Because of “vibes.”

Crack National Security analyst Joe Cirincione has written a piece for his Substack with a perfect headline:

The Idiotic, Incoherent, Incompetent Foreign Policy of Donald J. Trump
The man playing at being president has no idea what he is doing.

Thank you. That is refreshingly direct —- and absolutely true.

Here’s the opening. The piece is free and you should click over to read the rest. It’s spot on:

For fifty days, Donald Trump insisted that Putin had to agree to a ceasefire in his war on Ukraine. He said that he would be very unhappy if Putin refused. He warned of “severe consequences,” including tough new sanctions on Russia.

He then announced a “summit” with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Alaska with one week’s notice. He literally rolled out the red carpet for an accused war criminal, applauded him, couldn’t keep his hands off of him, had a private meeting with him in the presidential limo, talked with him for a couple of hours, then canceled all the other events of this summit, held a 12-minute session with the press where Putin spoke first and spoke longer, then completely dropped any talk of ceasefires, sanctions, criticism and seemed to say that ending the war was now up to Ukrainian President Volodymyer Zelensky.

“Even in the annals of Mr. Trump’s erratic presidency,” wrote Peter Baker on the front page of the Sunday New York Times, “the Anchorage meeting with Mr. Putin now stands out as a reversal of historic proportions.”

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, often called the Trump of London, was even more blunt, calling it “just about the most vomit-inducing episode in all the tawdry history of international diplomacy.”

There is lots to say about the debacle, this propaganda victory for Putin, and many people have already said it. I had a long interview with journalist Bill Press on his podcast last week. I told him that “this has got to be the most jarring failure of any American president in U.S. history when dealing with a foreign leader.” And that was just the beginning. You can hear “The Tale of Two Summits” in its entirety here.

Even beyond the fawning treatment of a brutal dictator, the near-betrayal of U.S. allies and the lasting damage done to U.S. standing in the world, it is what this summit and the emergency meeting with Europe’s top leaders in Washington three days later revealed: Trump has absolutely no idea what he is doing.

He has purged or sidelined most of the seasoned national security experts in the government. He relies on a very small circle of loyalists who are singularly lacking in foreign policy experience, including Vice President JD Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and right-wing lunatic Laura Loomer. He sets up major meetings on a whim, with zero preparation, agency coordination or clear goals. He seems to believe his own hype that he is a master negotiator who alone can get deals done.

It is time that we all recognized that this is complete nonsense. We have to let go of the idea that he might have some grand strategy in mind. Or a master plan. Trump’s attempt to show some results from the two meetings — that he would set up a meeting between Putin and Zelensky to hammer out a peace deal — was a complete scam. Russia announced this weekend that no such meeting is planned.

He’s just dancing as fast as he can, as usual. But he’s slower and more distracted (demented?) than he was even in his first term when he really was just winging it. Now it’s just possible WWIII on a whim.

Now what?

After considering where we are today, two videos readers may need this morning. First, this one:

Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, “Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?” Instead, I say, “Mr. President, do not come to Chicago.” — Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker

A transcript follows via CBS News Chicago:

I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in this city, and as a state, and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.

Over the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning, for quite a while now, to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country’s founders warned against, and it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances.

What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American.

No one from the White House or the executive branch has reached out to me or to the mayor. No one has reached out to our staffs. No effort has been made to coordinate or to ask for our assistance in identifying any actions that might be helpful to us. Local law enforcement has not been contacted. We have made no requests for federal intervention. None.

We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did: We read a story in The Washington Post.

If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor, or the police?

Let me answer that question: This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals.

This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections.

There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no inter- insurrection. There is no insurrection. Like every major American city in both blue and red states, we deal with crime in Chicago. Indeed, the violent crime rate is worse in red states and red cities.

Here in Chicago, our civilian police force and elected leaders work every day to combat crime and to improve public safety, and it’s working.

Not one person here today will claim we have solved all crime in Chicago, nor can that be said of any major American metro area. But calling the military into a U.S. city to invade our streets and neighborhoods and disrupt the lives of everyday people is an extraordinary action, and it should require extraordinary justification.

Look around you right now. Does this look like an emergency? Look at this. Go talk to the people of Chicago who are enjoying a gorgeous afternoon in this city. Ask the families buying ice cream on the Riverwalk. Go see the students who are at the beach after school. Talk to the workers that I just met taking the water taxi to get here. Find a family who’s enjoying today sitting on their front porch and ask if they want their neighborhoods turned into a war zone by a wannabe dictator. Ask if they’d like to pass through a checkpoint with unidentified officers in masks while taking their kids to school.

Crime is a reality we all face in this country. Public safety has been among our highest priorities since taking office. We have hired more police and given them more funding.

We banned assault weapons, ghost guns, bump stocks, and high-capacity magazines. We invested historic amounts into community violence intervention programs. We listened to our local communities, to the people who live and work in the places that are most affected by crime and asked them what they needed to help make their neighborhoods safer.

Those strategies have been working. Crime is dropping in Chicago. Murders are down 32% compared to last year and nearly cut in half since 2021.

Shootings are down 37% since last year, and 57% from four years ago. Robberies are down 34% year over year. Burglaries down 21%. Motor vehicle thefts down 26%.

So in case there was any doubt as to the motivation behind Trump’s military occupations, take note: 13 of the top 20 cities in homicide rate have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago.

Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.

Memphis, Tennessee; Hattiesburg, Mississippi have higher crime rates than Chicago, and yet Donald Trump is sending troops here and not there? Ask yourself why.

If Donald Trump was actually serious about fighting crime in cities like Chicago, he, along with his congressional Republicans, would not be cutting over $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants nationally, including cutting $158 million in funding to Illinois for violence prevention programs that deploy trained outreach workers to deescalate conflict on our streets. Cutting $71 million in law enforcement grants to Illinois, direct money for police departments through programs like Project Safe Neighborhoods, the state and local Antiterrorism Training Program, and the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative, cutting $137 million in child protection measures in Illinois that protect our kids against abuse and neglect.

Trump is defunding the police.

To the members of the press who are assembled here today, and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is.

This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see, where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president’s actions.

Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidence, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.

Look at the people assembled before you today, behind me. This is a full cross-section of Chicago’s leaders from the business world, the faith community, law enforcement, education, community organizations, and more. We sometimes disagree on how to effectively solve the many challenges that our state and our city face on a daily basis. But today, we are standing here united, in public, in front of the cameras, unafraid to tell the president that his proposed actions will make our jobs harder and the lives of our residents worse.

Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, “Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?” Instead, I say, “Mr. President, do not come to Chicago.”

You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.

Most alarming, you seem to lack any appropriate concern as our commander-in-chief for the members of the military that you would so callously deploy as pawns in your ever-more-alarming grabs for power.

As a governor, I’ve had to make the decision in the past to call up members of the National Guard into active service, and I think it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on how seriously I take that responsibility, and on the many things that I consider before asking these brave men and women to leave their homes and their communities to serve in any capacity for us.

As I’ve said many times in the past, members of the National Guard are not trained to serve as law enforcement. They are trained for the battlefield, and they’re good at it. They’re not trained to arrest people and read them their Miranda rights. They did not sign up for the National Guard to fight crime. And when we call them into service, we are reaching into local communities and taking people who have jobs and families away from their neighborhoods and the people who rely upon them.

It is insulting to their integrity and to the extraordinary sacrifices that they make to serve in the Guard to use them as a political prop, where they could be put in situations where they will be at odds with their local communities, the ones that they seek to serve.

I know Donald Trump doesn’t care about the well-being of the members of our military, but I do and so do all the people standing here.

So let me speak to all Illinoisans and to all Chicagoans right now.  Hopefully the president will reconsider this dangerous and misguided encroachment upon our state and our city’s sovereignty. Hopefully rational voices, if there are any left inside the White House or the Pentagon, will prevail in the coming days. If not, we are going to face an unprecedented and difficult time ahead.

But I know you Chicago, and I know you are up to it. When you protest, do it peacefully. Be sure to continue Chicago’s long tradition of nonviolent resistance. Remember that the members of the military and the National Guard who will be asked to walk these streets are, for the most part, here unwillingly. And remember that they can be court martialed and their lives ruined if they resist deployment. Look to the members of the faith community standing behind me today for guidance on how to mobilize.

To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your National Guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people, you would be failing your constituents and your country. Cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.

The State of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever at our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.

Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: we are watching and we are taking names.

This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf.

You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.

As Dr. King once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Humbly I would add, it doesn’t bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.

You are called to meet them.

Melissa Ryan of Ctrl Alt-Right Delete this morning posted video from her August 8 Netroots Nation panel, “How to Organize in an Authoritarian State.” She writes:

Something shifted between last week and this one. Almost overnight, a growing chorus of political elites became comfortable calling America under Trump a fascist state or an authoritarian state. Trump’s escalation is terrible, but it’s an objectively good thing to see more elected officials and public figures acknowledge what’s happening and sound the alarm. I welcome it.

The panel already feels “quaint,” as Ryan puts it. But even as at this late hour we seem ill-prepared to combat a fascist dictator, they provide examples of what’s worked in the past and what’s working now.

This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. Give unengaged friends who feel like road kill something simple to empower them. Consider the ladder of engagement. Maybe it’s too soon to ask them to canvass or call. So make your first ask simple, a group action where they’ll feel safer and not stick out. Build community. Yes, this is serious, very serious, but make resistance fun. I do.

* * * * *

Have you fought dicktatorship today?

50501 – Labor Day events
May Day Strong Labor Day Events
No King’s One Million Rising movement
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink – Search on Labor Day events near you
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

“It will never be the same again.”

It feels as if a dam has broken. But that dam is not American outrage at seeing the country turned into a fascist dictatorship. Nor is it public disgust with their elected leaders sitting on their hands as it happened, although that outrage is growing.

Constituent to Lawmaker: “I am pissed, and I am pissed at you. The man is a dictator. He knows nothing about what he talks about. You need to take your head out of Trump’s ass.” @Acyn
pic.twitter.com/Z0ORSoxROK

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) August 26, 2025

Historian Garrett Graff believes we have turned a corner:

The United States, just months before its 250^th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism. In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here. The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed.

People with their eyes open have posted lists of actions the Donald Trump administration has taken recently to indicate a tipping point passed. If it looks like a duck, etc. Still, people have not taken to the streets in protest en masse. The press refuses to call it what it is, leaning as usual on euphemisms, Graff complains:

They will presumably for some period of time — perhaps even a long period of time — stick to euphemisms (with lines like “No president has asserted such direct and sweeping control over the nation’s capital” and “Through immigration crackdowns and cultural purges, President Trump is wielding government power to enforce a more rigid, exclusionary definition of what it means to be American.”) and continue to give voice to “both siders,” but the reality is that only one political party is responsible for this moment. They will say that Trump’s motives are inscrutable or unclear — but the effect of Trump’s governing style is undeniable.  

American fascism looks like the president using armed military units from governors loyal to his regime to seize cities run by opposition political figures and it looks like the president using federal law enforcement to target regime opponents.

American fascism looks like the would-be self-proclaimed king deploying the military on US soil not only not in response to requests by local or state officials but over — and almost specifically to spite — their vociferous objections. 

The echoes are obvious even to those with only grade-school history:

Just months short of the nation’s 250^th birthday, Donald Trump is close to batting a thousand at speed-running the very abuses of power that led to the Founders to write the Declaration of Independence in the first place. Does any of this sound familiar:

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments
• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
• He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
• He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
• For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world
• For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent
• For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury
• For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

Even as history repeats itself, Congress and the Supreme Court have rolled over and played dead, Graff argues. Yes, blue-state governors Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker have stepped up where party members inside the Beltway remain effectively supine. But the Congress and the courts have failed to hold the line, either unwilling or too cowardly to stop what Bill Kristol calls “a march toward despotism.”

Trump declared in one of his Truth Social rants on Monday that he has fired Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook. The same Trump found guilty of 34 felonies for falsifying business records and who lost a civil fraud lawsuit in New York (an appeals court threw out the fine as excessive) cites unsubstantiated allegations of mortgage fraud by Cook as justification for firing her:

In a statement, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, called the move “an authoritarian power grab that blatantly violates the Federal Reserve Act, and must be overturned in court.”

Trump knows or suspects that. This action will go to court. But he knows that the gears of justice grind slowly and, even if he loses, Dear Leader will have made his point: to instill fear in any officials who might dare cross him.

Experts like Warren believe Trump lacks the authority to discharge Cook. She refuses to resign. Whether Trump eventually wins or loses, the question now is whether he will dispatch police-state agents willing to physically and illegally remove her.

Read the entire Graff commentary that ends with this:

Where America goes from here is a story yet to be written. It will surely get worse — Trump’s push now is clearly focused on locking in an illegitimate claim to power. Whether we can come back from this moment is a story yet unknown. But it’s clear today America is different and, even if we fight our way back, it will never be the same again. 

* * * * *

Have you fought dicktatorship today?

50501 – Labor Day events
May Day Strong Labor Day Events
No King’s One Million Rising movement
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink – Search on Labor Day events near you
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

They want to ban the COVID vaccines altogether:

The Trump administration will move to pull the COVID vaccine off the U.S. market “within months,” one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s closest associates has told the Daily Beast.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who has repeatedly claimed in the face of scientific consensus that the vaccines are more dangerous than the virus, told the Daily Beast that Kennedy’s stance is shared by “influential” members of President Donald Trump’s family. Like Kennedy himself, no Trumps hold any scientific qualifications.

Malhotra is a leading adviser to the controversial lobby group Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Action, which is seen as an external arm of Kennedy’s agenda as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary.

He told the Beast that many of those closest to RFK Jr. have told him they “cannot understand” why the vaccine continues to be prescribed, and that a decision to remove the vaccine from the U.S. market pending further research will come “within months,” even if it is likely to cause “fear of chaos” and bring with it major legal ramifications.

Not just “fear and chaos.” Hospitalization and death. And it will make older people and those who are immunocompromised have to withdraw from the world against when the virus surges in order to protect themselves.

But that’s just fine. Brain worm addled weirdos, snake oil salesmen and quacks are running out public health now and they think that 75 year olds should just drink organic orange juice and lift weights like Bobby (also slam steroids apparently) and they will be fine. No biggie. And if they die prematurely it will save the country some money so it’s all good.

The only upside is that Trump might get it again. He’s 79. But I have a sneaking suspicion they’ll have a nice stash tucked away for him.

The attack on the Smithsonian isn’t just about DEI and slavery. Apparently, this has been a right wing obsession for a long time. And it couldn’t be crazier:

With the president declaring the Smithsonian “out of control” on Truth Social, the shape and scope of the growing threat to America’s premier public museum from the right wing is rapidly coming into view. And that shape is increasingly that of an internet fever dream of conspiracy, one that has been fomenting distrust of the Smithsonian for decades in service of a deeply conservative and religious agenda that sees both history and science as its ideological enemies.

For most of the nation’s history, the Smithsonian has served as symbol of national unity, receiving praise from members of both political parties and the public at large. Intermittent efforts to challenge the museum, such as Christian radio host Dale Crowley Jr.’s 1978 federal lawsuit demanding the Smithsonian cancel an exhibition on human evolution, have largely failed to materialize. That all changed in 1994, when veterans’ groups and conservative politicians, including Patrick J. Buchanan, vocally criticized the National Air and Space Museum for highlighting the Japanese casualties of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings in a proposed exhibit tied to the fiftieth anniversary of the Enola Gay. They considered any questioning of the decision to drop the A-bomb as dishonoring veterans, and thus anti-American. It was, in Buchanan’s words, “a sleepless campaign to inculcate in American youth a revulsion toward America’s past.”

“We’ve got to get patriotism back in the Smithsonian,” conservative Texas Congressman Sam Johnson said, on being appointed to the museum’s Board of Regents shortly afterward to provide so-called ideological “balance.” “We want the Smithsonian to reflect real America and not something that a historian dreamed up.”

The year-long media and political firestorm, and the attacks on historians as unpatriotic fantasists, helped fuel the politicization of the Smithsonian, but they did so in tandem with a development occurring on the nascent internet.

A year before the Enola Gay controversy, in 1993, future Ancient Aliens star David Childress, then a self-described “world explorer,” introduced the world to his new conspiracy theory, that the Smithsonian was actively trying to suppress the “truth” about various lost races of white giants, ancient Egyptians, and assorted what-have-you that allegedly occupied prehistoric America. He wrote about this in his self-published magazine, World Explorer, and in the New Age Nexus New Timesthat year. He dubbed the conspiracy with the not-so-original moniker “Smithsonian Gate.”

Childress gathered a passel of unconvincing evidence and wrapped it up in a sort of homage to the 1981 Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark, whose final scene showed the U.S. government secreting away the fabled Ark of the Covenant in a warehouse, never to be seen again. “To those who investigate allegations of archaeological cover-ups,” he wrote, “there are disturbing indications that the most important archaeological institute in the United States, the Smithsonian Institute [sic], an independent federal agency, has been actively suppressing some of the most interesting and important archaeological discoveries made in the Americas.”

The “evidence” is rabbit hole conspiracy stuff, of course. But get a load of this:

The most important part of Childress’s conspiracy, though, was the specific claim that John Wesley Powell, the director of the Smithsonian in the late 1800s, orchestrated a cover-up of evidence for giants who were part of a lost race that had been in contact with Europe and built pyramids and mounds across America. The most spectacular of these mounds, Monk’s Mound at Cahokia near St. Louis, has a base as large as the Great Pyramid at Giza’s.

Powell wanted to disprove the popular notion that Native Americans erected these mounds, on the grounds that they were too stupid and lazy to create these features—something that nineteenth-century scholars assumed only white people or Bible giants could do. Childress implied that Powell suppressed the truth because he was too sympathetic to Native Americans and had chosen to improperly aggrandize their cultures by suppressing evidence of (imaginary) ancient European colonists that would have connected ancient America to the country’s current Caucasian population. He called this the Smithsonian’s “official dogma.”

Idiocracy was a documentary.

Read the whole thing. It gets even more bizarre.

“Maybe people LIKE a dictator…”

Trump: I have a slob, like Pritzker, criticizing me. They say he's a dictator, he's a dictator. A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense. I'm a smart person pic.twitter.com/a7z8iJVDhL

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 25, 2025

Trump’s press avail today is was a doozy. He’s gone completely around the bend. Some highlights:

Surrounded by all his henchmen, over the top sycophancy, of course:

Trump is presented with an honorary badge by a sycophant who talks to him like a toddler pic.twitter.com/Hkc94tDgX9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 25, 2025

Bidens pardons are null and void? (Yea, I know. The irony…)

Trump: That means that all those pardons he gave to some very bad people, very unpatriotic people, very evil people, it looks to me like those pardons are worthless. pic.twitter.com/xIkf8FMEpQ

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 25, 2025

How’s that Nobel Peace Prize campaign coming along Trumpy?

Trump: Department of war sounded better. I don't want to be defense only. We want defense but we want offense, too. As department of war, we won everything. We won everything. I think we'll have to go back to that. pic.twitter.com/B4g60YkODW

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 25, 2025

Trump: "They call me the president of Europe. Which is an honor." pic.twitter.com/3cVmlEvgUU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 25, 2025

Uhm, No. He’s hallucinating again. On the other hand, I can totally see one of his toadies telling him this to soothe him during an afternoon tantrum. Or maybe one of the European leaders whispered it in his ear to try to get him not to destroy the world economy. Who knows? But I think it’s pretty clear that nobody on this planet actually believes that.

He’s always had trouble with names but it’s getting worse:

Trump calls Gretchen Whitmer "Kristi — uh, Kristi Whitman. Whitmer." pic.twitter.com/AlclQN3pPM

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 25, 2025

Innumerate moron has ideas:

Trump: "I'm going to be reducing drugs prices by 1,400, 1,500 percent." pic.twitter.com/4u10FGkGKA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 25, 2025

Aaaaand:

Over an hour of questions today. None about this. pic.twitter.com/qLNNySHYEn

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 25, 2025

I have a piece coming out tomorrow about this. Trump is clearly in Mad King territory, living in a bubble, believing whatever he wants to believe and being fed whatever phony facts will make him feel better in the moment. Once in a while he’ll tune in to CNN or, rarely, MSNBC and see something that threatens to penetrate his bubble and he fires off an angry tweet to self-soothe. His minions take note and make sure to follow up.

You can see the dissonance when he speaks for long periods as he did today. He’s coming apart.