After 21 years at my dream job, I’m very sad to announce my early retirement from the National Institutes of Health.
My life’s work has been to scientifically study how our food environment affects what we eat, and how what we eat affects our physiology. Lately, I’ve focused on unravelling the reasons why diets high in ultra-processed food are linked to epidemic proportions of chronic diseases such as diabetes and obesity. Our research leads the world on this topic.
Given recent bipartisan goals to prevent diet-related chronic diseases, and new agency leadership professing to prioritize scientific investigation of ultra-processed foods, I had hoped to expand our research program with ambitious plans to more rapidly and efficiently determine how our food is likely making Americans chronically sick.
Unfortunately, recent events have made me question whether NIH continues to be a place where I can freely conduct unbiased science. Specifically, I experienced censorship in the reporting of our research because of agency concerns that it did not appear to fully support preconceived narratives of my agency’s leadership about ultra-processed food addiction.
I was hoping this was an aberration. So, weeks ago I wrote to my agency’s leadership expressing my concerns and requested time to discuss these issues, but I never received a response. Without any reassurance there wouldn’t be continued censorship or meddling in our research, I felt compelled to accept early retirement to preserve health insurance for my family. (Resigning later in protest of any future meddling or censorship would result in losing that benefit.)
Due to very tight deadlines to make this decision, I don’t yet have plans for my future career. The NIH has been a wonderful place because it allows scientists to take risks, form unique collaborations, and do studies difficult to conduct elsewhere. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished and I’m fortunate to have had such wonderful colleagues and scientific collaborators.
I hope to someday return to government service and lead a research program that will continue to provide gold-standard science to make Americans healthy.
This scientific brain drain is so depressing.
I recommend reading this fabulous piece by Rick Perlstein from before the election discussing science and politics, specifically the way the right sees it, in light of the unprecedented Scientific American endorsement of Kamala Harris. Let’s just say that any reticence among scientists to speak out in service of some norms that they should remains apolitical is misplaced. (Also read what he says about norms in general, pointing out that liberal resistance or advances almost always requires the destruction of certain norms that serve as obstacles to liberal governance. Very interesting.)
“We are all afraid,” Murkowski said, taking a long pause. “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m often times very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”
Gee Lisa, imagine how the people who aren’t powerful U.S. Senators feel.
Sen, Ted Cruz: "I can also assure you that were this a Republican president, a Republican Attorney General, and a Republican IRS that were targeting Democrats, I at least would speak out just as vigorously against it because if we are going to respect rule of law, the apparatus… pic.twitter.com/LgEIifUkkY
The Internal Revenue Service is making plans to rescind the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, according to two sources familiar with the matter, which would be an extraordinary step of retaliation as the Trump administration seeks to turn up pressure on the university that has defied its demands to change its hiring and other practices.
A final decision on rescinding the university’s tax exemption is expected soon, the sources said.
The administration already has blocked more than $2 billion in funding from the nation’s oldest university, which is fighting the White House’s policy demands, citing the constitutional right of private universities to determine their own teaching practices.
President Donald Trump in recent days raised the idea of punishing the Ivy League university for not complying with what the administration has sought to portray as a campaign to fight antisemitism.
“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday.
"This is about whether we have functional constitutional government in this country. If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we'd no longer live in a free country.“ pic.twitter.com/fBD4y5V4OS
The Trump administration has significantly dialed up its pressure on Harvard University, not only freezing $2 billion in federal funding but now threatening its eligibility to host international students after school leaders refused to make key policy changes the White House also is demanding of other elite US colleges.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sent Harvard “a scathing letter demanding detailed records on Harvard’s foreign student visa holders’ illegal and violent activities by April 30, 2025, or face immediate loss of Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification,” her agency said Wednesday in a news release that refers to antisemitism but does not detail specific incidents.
It accuses Harvard of creating a “hostile learning environment” for Jewish students. “It is a privilege to have foreign students attend Harvard University, not a guarantee,” reads the letter, which a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson gave CNN after some of its details first were reported by the student-run Harvard Crimson.
Here’s the thing. This is all easily solved by simply bending the knee to give Donald Trump big juicy blowjobs on a regular basis. Just give him everything he wants. Easy-peasy.
Joseph Goebbels in 1934 (via Wikipedia and Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-17049 / Georg Pahl / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de). This guy would have loved social media.
An item from Brian Stelter’s newsletter sets one aspect MAGApublican behavior in shaprer relief:
Disinformation dangers
Disinformation has completely destabilized global politics, from the Oval Office to the town council level. Deliberate lies and disinformation campaigns make it much harder for neighbors to relate to one another and share the same reality. But – as if to prove the point – conservative thought leaders decided several years ago that the real danger was “censorship.” Ergo, “Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced the closure of the agency’s hub for fighting foreign disinformation campaigns,” Politico’s Maggie Millerwrote. Rubio’s announcement was titled “Protecting and Championing Free Speech at the State Department.” >> Eileen Guo, who broke the news for MIT Technology Review, said it’s “a win to foreign governments like Russia, Iran, and China — and the office’s mostly conservative critics.” >> In a more constructive political environment, we’d be able to hold two thoughts in our head simultaneously: That free speech must be protected and that disinformation must be recognized as a danger. Alas…
It’s no accident that the White House now uses preventing antisemitism as cover for clamping down on free speech and academic freedom. Debunk disinformation and this administration will call it censorship.
Spin is a long-recognized tool in both major parties’ campaign toolbox. (You’ve got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive | E-lim-i-nate the negative, as Johnny Mercer wrote in1944). But that’s not what we see nowadays from a radicalized right wing. It’s outright, bald-faced, relentless lying.
In the case of the MAGA king, it’s often unclear whether he believes the nonsense he extracts his ass or not. But that’s not the point. The lies are, and the fact that the press refuses to challenge them in real time, if at all.
What left my mouth agape this week was White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller completely misrepresenting the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Even Reason magazine rolled its “eyes”:
“The Supreme Court said the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9-0 unanimously,” Miller told Trump.
The term misinformation has become somewhat overused in recent times. But it seems applicable here. Miller egregiously misrepresented what the Supreme Court actually said in its order. Was he lying? Did he fail to correctly read the Court’s order and is now publicly operating based on his erroneous understanding? Either way, it was a disgraceful performance.
For her part, AG Pam Bondi stands by DOJ claims and Miller’s, citing court documents for Abrego Garcia’s 2019 arrest based on heresay, “Gang Field Interview Sheet” (GFIS) statements by a Prince Georges County detective, and his wearing a Chicago Bulls hat. Abrego Garcia has no criminal record. But the detective does … now:
When Mr. Abrego’s lawyers in 2019 went to interview the detective and find out more about this supposed informant, they were unable to talk with him because they were told he was suspended. What they couldn’t know at the time was that he had been suspended less than two weeks after making the accusation against Mr. Abrego for the crime of trading police secrets to a sex worker in exchange for sex. The detective wasn’t publicly indicted until June 2020, after Mr. Abrego’s case had already concluded.
At his bond hearing, ICE submitted that GFIS document as evidence of his membership in MS-13 — and nothing else.
But I digress.
What I see clearly is that the MAGAfied Trump cult has, following Dear Leader’s cues, adopted lying as company policy. Not spin. Not misinformation. Lying.
They’ve adapted “Fake it till you make it.” It’s now accepted practice to lie about “it” until the public accepts the lie as true. Until they’ve broken reality and the republic. Goebbels had nothing on these guys.
North Carolina’s state Supreme Court soap opera continues
Judge Jefferson Griffin (left) and Justice Allison Riggs.
There was promising election news from North Carolina on Tuesday. Project 2025’s predations continue apace, DOGE continues its Long March through government agencies, and President Donald Trump may appear any day with a generalissimo’s epaulets atop his ill-fitting suits. But prospects for stopping a Republican election theft of a Supreme Court race in North Carolina brightened (WFAE):
The North Carolina Board of Elections said in a court filing Tuesday that only 1,675 voters will be impacted by Republican Jefferson Griffin’s challenge against Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs for a seat on the state Supreme Court.
The board said it will require 1,409 overseas voters in Guilford County to provide photo ID within 30 days for their ballot to count. Griffin had challenged Guilford voters, as well as overseas voters in three other Democratic-leaning counties.
But the Democratic-controlled state elections board said it will only require Guilford voters to provide ID, since Griffin’s challenge of that county’s overseas voters was his only protest completed in time, as required by state law.
Griffin will appeal the Board’s following black-letter state law on the filing deadline. But win or lose, consider this GOP election-stealing effort a shakedown cruise for challenging election losses near you. If you live in a red or purple state with a GOP-majority state Supreme Court, you could see this in coming elections.
To recap, after two recounts, Riggs led Griffin by 734 votes. Griffin refused to concede. He filed challenges to over 60,000 votes, alleging based on the digital records that most were from improperly registered voters, another 5,500 military and overseas absentee votes were invalid for not including photo IDs, and another couple of hundred were invalid votes from so-called “never residents.” Griffin challenged votes from four of North Carolina’s largest, bluest counties.
Last Friday, the state Supreme Court dismissed the 60,000 registration challenges, but instructed the appeals court to work out the details on the remainder with the state Board of Elections.
Now the Board has informed the U.S. District Court that the remaining federal challenges will be limited to the only county where Griffin filed his challenge by the deadline. This leaves only 1,675 votes in question: 1,409 overseas and military votes from Guilford County, and the votes (statewide) from perhaps 266 “never residents.”
But wait. Popular Information and Anderson Alerts researched the “never resident” votes and published a report on Monday that many voters on Griffin’s challenge list actually live or lived in the state. Some previously voted in person in North Carolina:
Overall, Popular Information and Anderson Alerts identified 29 people — through voting records, publicly available information, and interviews — whose votes were discarded who have lived or currently live in North Carolina. There were numerous others who also appear to be erroneously included on the list, but whose history could not be definitively established. These errors are particularly harmful because the North Carolina Supreme Court did not give impacted voters any opportunity to prove their eligibility.
How would these people end up on a list of people who never resided in North Carolina? According to Gerry Cohen, a member of the Wake County Board of Elections, the people ended up on Griffin’s list by filling out a Federal Post Card Application for an absentee ballot and checking the box that read, “I am a U.S. citizen living outside the country, I have never lived in the United States.”
It is possible that some voters checked that box in error. (In an interview, one voter confirmed they had checked the box by mistake.) In other cases, there could be an error in the records kept by the North Carolina Election Board. But either way, it does not make these voters “never residents” or invalidate their ballots.
The Board in its filing Tuesday referenced these reports and pledged to replicate its procedures for validating “never resident” absentee voters. The Board will instruct county boards to review submitted forms to verify that voters did indeed check the “never lived” box. Next, they must “review the voter’s registration record and voter history record to ensure that the voter in question does not have a record of registering previously or voting previously under a claim of residency in the county.”
Having voted in person or absentee before or before would “show that the challenged voter attested, under penalty of perjury, to having resided within the county during a prior election.” They would thus fall outside the scope of Griffin’s “never resident” challenge. Local Boards will mail remaining voters to inform them of the challenge and give them 30 days “to submit a sworn affidavit stating that they have resided in the county and identifying their prior residence address.”
This filing will, of course, infuriate Griffin. He will challenge the Board’s proposed course of action. But his late filing on the other counties is not a mistake other GOP losers will make next time, perhaps in your state.
But the clock is ticking on the current makeup of the State Board of Elections. The lame-duck legislature moved authority over elections from the governor to the (Republican) state Auditor. The Auditor’s authority to appoint new Board of Elections members begins on May 1. If the current Board’s plan for limiting the scope of Griffin’s challenges somehow gets rejected, it could be a different Board with a Republican 3-2 split that will reformat the plan.
Riggs has already appealed the order by her state Supreme Court colleagues to federal court. She had recused but remains on the court until the election dispute is settled. This isn’t over.
Republicans are relentless.
Update: I want to repeat for those who missed it, Griffin has provided no evidence of anyone voting illegally. His challenges are based on mere allegations backed up by the kind of shoddy digital data scrapings common among proponents of voter fraud. Popular Information and Anderson Alerts showed that up as garbage. Instead of Griffin having to back up his illegal voting charges (as required by law, IIRC), he demands that thousands of voters he’s challenging prove they voted legally.
The NY Times reports that the big law firms didn’t know they were being turned into indentured servants. Have they met Donald Trump?
When some of the nation’s biggest law firms agreed to deals with President Trump, the terms appeared straightforward: In return for escaping the full force of his retribution campaign, the firms would do some free legal work on behalf of largely uncontroversial causes like helping veterans. Mr. Trump, it turns out, has a far more expansive view of what those firms can be called on to do.
Over the last week, he has suggested that the firms will be drafted into helping him negotiate trade deals. He has mused about having them help with his goal of reviving the coal industry.And he has hinted that he sees the promises of nearly $1 billion in pro bono legal services that he has extracted from the elite law firms — including Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher — as a legal war chest to be used as he wishes.
“Have you noticed that lots of law firms have been signing up with Trump: $100 million, another $100 million for damages that they’ve done,” Mr. Trump said at an event last week with coal miners, without specifying what he meant by damages.
None of the firms have acknowledged any wrongdoing. They were targeted with punitive executive orders or implicit threats for representing or aiding Mr. Trump’s political foes or employing people he sees as having used the legal system to come after him.
[…]
But now that nine firms have agreed to deals and committed to nearly $1 billion worth of pro bono legal work, some Trump advisers have started having discussions about a range of options for what the firms’ lawyers can be deployed to work on, according to two people briefed on the matter. That work could include sending the lawyers to help Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or deploying them to aid the Justice Department, they said.
White House officials believe that some of the pro bono legal work could even be used toward representing Mr. Trump or his allies if they became ensnared in investigations, according to the two people.
Are they just going to go along with this? I don’t kniow but I think this accurately describes what’s going on:
“They thought they made one-shot deals which they would fulfill,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor of international law at Yale Law School who was an author of a paper that called executive orders targeting the firms unconstitutional retaliatory measures. “But the administration seems to think that they have subjected these firms to indentured servitude.”
Of course he does. But why wouldn’t they know this? Have they met Donald Trump?
This is the reason I don’t wake up every morning hoping that Trump died peacefully in his sleep last night the way I did in the first term. I certainly didn’t love Mike Pence. But he wasn’t a total psychopath.Rolling Stone’s Nikki McCann Ramirez at Rolling Stone reports:
In a lengthy X post published on Tuesday, JD Vance wrote: “To say the administration must observe ‘due process’ is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors. To put it in concrete terms, imposing the death penalty on an American citizen requires more legal process than deporting an illegal alien to their country of origin.”
It’s a nonsensical interpretation of due process rights. At their core, rights are not supposed to be negotiable based on how much resources the government has, or the amount of people they’re looking to deport. The Constitution includes legal protections to ensure the system is as fair and unbiased as possible. Is this always the case? No. Does the executive get to do away with these protections because they run counter to his political platform? Usually only in crumbling fascist regimes.
“Here’s a useful test: ask the people weeping over the lack of due process what precisely they propose for dealing with Biden’s millions and millions of illegals. And with reasonable resource and administrative judge constraints, does their solution allow us to deport at least a few million people per year?” Vance added. “If the answer is no, they’ve given their game away. They don’t want border security.”
He’s a sick piece of work. This country is totally capable of dealing with immigration in a humane fashion. It is also not an emergency, they have made that up out of whole cloth. Arresting students and detaining them in prisons far from where they lived for their political views, turning border crossings into dystopian hellscapes for travellers, deporting people without notice and putting them into foreign gulags is completely beyond all imagining in the past. Now they are talking about doing this to American citizens.
And then there’s this:
Vance is not the only White House official defending the administration’s attempts to skirt the rule of law. During a Fox News interview on Tuesday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller argued that Kilamar Abrego Garcia — a migrant living in Maryland who the Trump administration admitted was sent to a gulag in El Salvador due to an “administrative error” — was not entitled to due process.
“He’s an illegal alien from El Salvador with a deportation order from the United States. He is not legally even allowed to be in our country,” Miller said. “Under due process that these Democrats so venerate for illegal invaders, it is legally impermissible for him to have one more minute in this country. So we honored the law and obeyed the law by getting him out of the country.”
He’s lying, of course, He was here legally through a judicial order that gave him protection and they snatched him up and threw him in a Salvadoran gulag without even getting a hearing. It’s pure fascism.
Ramirez concludes:
It’s never been about securing the border, as Vance claims, it’s about a consolidation of authority in the presidency that would allow the executive to abuse the powers of his office with impunity. Undocumented migrants, legal immigrants, and green card holders have already been used as test subjects. There’s no telling what comes next.
Oh I think we can see where this is going. His attacks on higher education, science, expertise of all kinds shows that he is already using the power of the federal government to intimidate and deconstruct all liberal institutions all across society. His order to go after Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, who he believes betrayed him in the last election was the first shot at explicit political vendettas being carried out by the Department of Justice. His enthusiastic hatchet woman Pam Bondi is happy to oblige.
If Trump does shuffle off his mortal coil and Vance takes the reins I think it’s possible he might even be worse. There’s something purely evil in him.
The Wall St Journal with a closer look at Elon’s seed spreading:
Musk has had at least 14 children with four women, including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink. Multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk’s children is much higher than publicly known.
In Musk’s dark view of the world, civilization is under threat because of a declining population. He is driven to correct the historic moment by helping seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence, according to people familiar with the matter.
His businesses are set up to serve the idea: The main objective of SpaceX is to build a rocket ship capable of getting to Mars, and his other companies, including electric-car maker Tesla, help finance the plan.
Musk refers to his offspring as a “legion,” a reference to the ancient military units that could contain thousands of soldiers and were key to extending the reach of the Roman Empire. During St. Clair’s pregnancy, Musk suggested that they bring in other women to have even more of their children faster. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he said to St. Clair in a text message viewed by The Wall Street Journal, “we will need to use surrogates.” He has recruited potential mothers on his social-media platform X, according to some of the people.
Musk has used his wealth to buy the silence of some women who have his kids, according to St. Clair as well as other people, text messages and documents reviewed by the Journal.Nondisclosure clauses are part of some of the payment agreements. If the mothers push back or seek outside counsel, Musk’s advisers, including Birchall, have threatened financial retribution, according to the documents and people.
Birchall described Musk’s expectations to St. Clair: “Privacy and confidentiality is the top of the list in every aspect of his life, every aspect, and his entire world is set up to be, like, a meritocracy.” Benefits flow, he said, when “people do good work.”
A meritocracy??? Seriously??? What an egomaniac.
Jerod Birchall, by the way, is Musk’s “fixer” who makes all these deals for Musk. Ugh.
Brian Beutler raises the alarm about something we don’t want to think about but should: will our elections be safe? As he points out there is every reason to believe that Trump and the Republicans are going to deploy every trick in the book to limit their losses in 2026. He writes:
I don’t know if the effort will be diffuse and disorganized or choreographed from on high like Donald Trump’s failed 2020 coup. I don’t know if Republicans will abuse power to ratfuck Democratic candidates (as Trump attempted when he tried to extort Volodmyr Zelensky in 2019) or try to overturn elections they lose (the way Trump attempted in 2020, and North Carolina Republicans are attempting right now, with a state Supreme Court seat on the line). Some combination of the two would be a safe bet.
I confess that this is one of the things that’s keeping me up at night too. It’s not so much that I think they can rig elections themselves but that I’m almost certain that they will not acknowledge losses in red states where we might see some upsets in a wave election. We are going to have to start thinking about how to respond to this.
Beutler runs down the ways they may do this in more detail but also helpfully points out the ways in which Democrats have some advantages:
Republicans can’t just snap their fingers and steal elections, and Democrats aren’t totally powerless. If anything, at the moment, Republicans are drunk on hubris, and Democrats are recalibrating to the existence of an existential threat:
Notwithstanding the slow start, and some missteps, Democrats have not been entirely complacent, and seem to grow less so each day.
We have a strong tradition of elections in the U.S. This is not to say we had a perfect democracy before Trump (far from it) or to say that enough Americans take their civic duties seriously (they don’t). But even on the right—and notwithstanding Trump’s efforts to subvert faith in elections—most people treat basic democratic ideas as truisms: “It’s a free country.” “One person one vote.” “We settle our differences at the ballot box.” People who disagree with these assertions represent small minorities. Even Trump understands this. The narrative basis of his plot against America isn’t (as his tech-world loyalists say) that democracy is outmoded; it’s that democracy is sacred and Democrats are the real election stealers.
Notwithstanding Trump’s obvious contempt for the courts, he still tries to fabricate narratives of compliance with the courts. To some extent this is just trolling, but it also suggests he’s uncertain what would happen (to America and his presidency) if he dropped the ruse and told John Roberts to fuck off. Even in wiping his ass with the 9-0 Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, he and his aides have maintained an artifice of compliance—lying about what the ruling says, stonewalling—while appearing before and responding to the lower-court judge overseeing the case on remand.
A real and durable protest movement appears to have awakened.
Trump really is misgoverning himself into toxic unpopularity.
Elections in the U.S. are decentralized so even a top-down effort to cheat in 2026 can’t really be too systematic.
Democratic litigators have lots of experience defeating Republicans in frivolous election cases.
Special elections so far have been mostly uneventful, except insofar as Democrats have dramatically overperformed.
Beutler’s comment above about the Supreme Court is particularly well taken. Trump is certainly not dealing with the Court’s orders in good faith but he mostly has been at least paying lip service to the idea that he will follow its orders. When they stop lying and come out saying they don’t have to follow the court orders, we’ll be in a different world.
I assume Democrats are very aware of this election year danger. Let’s hope they are planning accordingly.
