The Compression

In 2022, a Stanford-trained physician who’d quit her surgical residency to start a continuous-glucose-monitor company was largely unknown outside Silicon Valley wellness circles. Her brother, a Harvard MBA who’d worked in food and pharma consulting, was less known than that.By 2024, Casey and Calley Means had co-authored a bestselling book, advised a presidential campaign, helped flip RFK Jr. into Trump’s coalition, and become the public faces of “Make America Healthy Again.” In May 2025, Casey was nominated for Surgeon General. In April 2026, the nomination was withdrawn.Two years from obscurity to a cabinet-adjacent appointment. Then a collapse.This is not unusual. It’s the defining political pattern of the last five years, and the Means siblings are one of at least a dozen clean examples. Understanding the pattern: what produces it, what it cannot do, and what comes next, is the project of this essay.The patternA previously low-profile figure with credentials adjacent to (but not fully inside) an established institution adopts a single repeatable phrase aimed at a clearly named villain. They feed the phrase into a long-form podcast circuit. An army of clippers, sometimes paid, sometimes ideological, sometimes both, chops the long-form into hundreds of short videos. A monetization layer runs in parallel, ensuring virality converts to income before the moment passes. Within roughly two years, the movement produces an institutional outcome that would have taken a decade in the pre-algorithmic era.A short tour of the dataset:Andrew Huberman, a tenured Stanford neuroscientist, launched a podcast from a closet studio in January 2021. Two years later it was the world’s #1 health podcast. His “protocols” vocabulary — cold plunges, morning sunlight, dopamine stacks — is now standard wellness language.Liver King(Brian Johnson, no relation to the next one) hit six million followers in a year promoting “ancestral lifestyle” raw-organ content, built a $100M supplement business, and collapsed in late 2022 when leaked emails showed his physique was steroid-built.Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur who sold Braintree to PayPal, founded Project Blueprint in 2021. By 2025 it was a Netflix documentary, a longevity company with $60M in venture funding, and a “Don’t Die” community movement.Christopher Rufo, a Manhattan Institute fellow, used a 2020 Tucker Carlson appearance and a sustained Twitter campaign to take “critical race theory”, a niche legal term, and turned it into Rufo-aligned education laws in over twenty states.Andrew Tateaccumulated 11.6 billion TikTok views in 2022. That July, he was Googled more than Trump and COVID-19 combined.Zohran Mamdanientered the 2025 NYC mayoral primary polling in single digits. A viral content operation: bodega videos, food-truck interviews, a Coney Island polar plunge to dramatize a rent freeze, won him the primary 56 to 44, then the mayoralty.Jonathan HaidtpublishedThe Anxious Generationin March 2024. Within months, “phone-based childhood” was being cited in school-board meetings, state legislatures, and national policy across multiple countries.The Mahsa Amini protests, the Canadian Freedom Convoy, the Means siblings, all variations on the same engine.The mechanism is technically indifferent to ideology. The same playbook elected a Democratic Socialist mayor of New York and amplified a misogynist influencer in Romania. The same infrastructure that pushed Haidt’s school-phone reforms drove Rufo’s curriculum bans, turning critical race theory against itself. Treating the playbook as politically neutral is the only honest analytic posture, even if its consequences obviously aren’t.The floor problemHere’s the part nobody talks about.Every successful figure above had to clear a threshold first. Call it the floor: the noise level beneath which content is functionally invisible. It’s not zero engagement. It’s the condition where the algorithm registers your post, declines to push it past your existing followers, and moves on. The single-digit-view post isn’t a failure of effort. It’s the default state of communication on these platforms.The floor exists because every platform optimizes for retention. Your post gets shown to a small test audience. If they don’t pause, like, comment, or watch through, you don’t get promoted further. A post can travel from two hundred followers to twenty million, but only if it survives a series of compounding tests, each of which the median post fails. The platform isn’t hostile to new entrants. It’s statistically indifferent, which produces the same outcome.The floor has gotten higher over time. In 2018, consistent posting on Instagram could build a real audience over a year or so. By 2024, the same effort produced negligible results because the supply of creators had multiplied while attention consolidated around figures who broke through earlier. Same pattern on TikTok, YouTube, and X.This is the practical problem every aspiring movement faces, and it’s the part most strategy advice gets wrong. The successful figures didn’t clear the floor by being more diligent or authentic than the thousands of contemporaries posting similar content into the void. They cleared it through one of five mechanisms.Borrowed audience.Almost every breakout figure since 2021 cleared the floor by appearing on a program with a pre-existing audience large enough to dwarf platform-level discovery.The Joe Rogan Experienceis the single most consequential floor-clearing venue of the era. The Means siblings didn’t become MAHA leaders by posting to TikTok. They became MAHA leaders by going on Rogan and being clipped from there. Casey Means’s first Rogan appearance reached more people in three hours than her social presence had reached in years.Paid amplification.Tate’s “Hustler’s University” paid affiliates a 48% commission to repost his clips. Thousands of accounts pushed the same source material into the algorithm simultaneously, and the algorithm read coordinated posting as engagement signal. It’s ethically fraught and increasingly attracts platform enforcement, but it works.Single viral artifact.One moment that generates an engagement signal far above floor and produces enough algorithmic momentum to carry the creator above the threshold for everything after. Liver King eating raw testicles. Mamdani jumping into the ocean. Greta Thunberg’s “smalldickenergy” reply to Tate, retweeted 570,000+ times. The Mahsa Amini footage. These artifacts are nearly impossible to manufacture deliberately. Most attempts fail. Treating it as a strategy is closer to gambling than planning.Institutional accelerator.A think tank, publisher, campaign, or media organization with existing distribution lends its infrastructure. Rufo at the Manhattan Institute. Haidt at NYU and Penguin. The Means siblings at Avery and through the RFK campaign. Mamdani through DSA’s organizing infrastructure. This mechanism is the least visible from outside but probably the most replicable. A movement without a borrowed audience, without paid amplification, and without a viral artifact can still potentially clear the floor by attaching to an existing institution that distributes for it.Permission structure timing.The 2021–2025 wave was enabled by post-pandemic institutional distrust and a rapid shift in the Overton window. Movements aligned with the dominant cultural anxiety cleared the floor more easily than movements working against it. A health-skeptical movement launched in 2018 would have struggled where MAHA succeeded in 2024, not because the messaging was different, but because the Overton window had not yet moved.The uncomfortable conclusion: most movements that fail to break through don’t fail because their messaging is wrong. They don't succeed because they lack access to these five mechanisms and are relying on organic posting strategies that no longer work at the scale the platforms have reached.“Create good content and be consistent” is advice that produces visible results only when at least one of the five mechanisms is also operating in the background.The “book”One of those five mechanisms deserves its own section, because almost every successful movement in the dataset used one, and most people misunderstand what it’s actually doing.The misconception is that a book is a vehicle for ideas. Write something serious, get reviewed in serious places, and gradually accumulate intellectual authority. That model still works for academic careers. But it does not clear the algorithmic floor, nor does it build movements.What a book actually does is integrate the five functions above that no other mechanism integrates at once.It launders credibility. A figure with a Penguin or Simon & Schuster spine becomes “the author of,” and that credential travels into venues that podcasts and tweets cannot reach. It doesn’t need to sell millions of copies to perform this function. It needs to exist with the right imprint.It provides a six-to-twelve-month tour structure. Publishers run book launches as campaigns: pre-orders, embargoed media, podcast tour, op-eds, and festival keynotes. This is the single most reliable way to generate the long-form content that short-form clippers can mine. Without the book, the tour wouldn’t exist.It supplies the single repeatable phrase.Good Energy.The Anxious Generation.Don’t Die.The Let Them Theory.Hillbilly Elegy. Titles aren’t titles; they’re the phrases that travel. The book forces the phrase into existence and then pays for its repetition across hundreds of venues.It produces a citable artifact. Legislators, journalists, and policy organizations need something to point at. A podcast episode is hard to cite. A tweet is embarrassing to cite. A book is unambiguously citable, and the citation further launders the movement into legitimacy.It creates a financial floor. The advance funds the months of work required to do the tour and build the next product, before the supplement company, the Substack, or the speaking fees come online.The books that work as movement vehicles share a recognizable profile. The title is a phrase, not a description (Good Energyworks;Metabolic Health and the American Chronic Disease Crisisdoesn’t). The argument compresses to one sentence. The chapters are modular, so clippers and journalists can quote from anywhere without context. The voice names villains directly. There’s at least one counterintuitive statistic that anchors media coverage. And the book is short or feels short, 250 to 350 pages, because length signals to gatekeepers whether it can be summarized in fifteen minutes, which is the actual constraint on whether it gets booked.The books that fail share an opposite profile. Books written to defend professional reputation in front of disciplinary peers don’t break through. Books that try to be both academic and popular usually achieve neither. Self-published books almost never serve as movement vehicles, because the imprint laundering function doesn’t occur.A book is one of the most powerful instruments available to a movement that already has the other elements in place, and one of the least useful instruments to a movement that doesn’t. The figures who used books most effectively understood what the book was actually doing and deliberately built around those functions. The figures who treated the book as an end in itself mostly produced books that no one outside their existing audience read.What the pattern can’t doThe list of successful examples is long. The list of durable ones is short. This is the part of the analysis most often skipped.Liver King collapsed in eighteen months. Tate is in a Romanian courtroom. Bryan Johnson is fightingNew York Timesinvestigations. Casey Means’s nomination was withdrawn. The Freedom Convoy dissolved within weeks of being cleared from Ottawa. Even Huberman has absorbed sustained scientific criticism that has measurably dented his credibility with the audience he most needs.The pattern produces founder-dependent movements. The clip economy rewards a face, a voice, a phrase, and when the face takes damage, the movement takes damage. The few cases that have outlasted their founders did so by converting attention into institutional infrastructure within a roughly eighteen-month window.Rufo’s CRT campaign survived because it was institutionalized into more than twenty state laws. Haidt’s school-phone reforms survived because they crossed party lines and produced legislation in multiple jurisdictions, including Australia’s under-16 social media ban. The Mahsa Amini movement persisted because it tapped a pre-existing dissident network rather than relying solely on the viral footage that started it. The cases that didn’t make this conversion dissipated when their principal figures took damage.The strategic question for any movement of this type is whether it can convert viral capital into an institutional position before the principal’s vulnerabilities are exploited. The Means siblings appear to have understood the question. The Surgeon General nomination was an attempt at exactly this conversion, and the fact that it failed tells us how narrow the window is.The deeper structural problem: the same mechanics that produce an explosive rise produce explosive scrutiny. Every successful figure accumulates enemies in proportion to the attention they receive, and the platforms that amplified them on the way up amplify their critics on the way down. Because these platforms monetize both the rise and the fall of said individuals.SaturationThe 2021–2025 wave is now visibly saturating.The “credentialed-adjacent renegade with a podcast and a phrase” template is no longer novel. There are hundreds of figures running it across health, fitness, masculinity, longevity, education policy, and urban affairs. Audiences calibrate. Marginal returns drop.Saturation also raises the floor. As the supply of credentialed-adjacent podcasters has multiplied, the engagement signal required to break through has risen with it. A 2021 Huberman appearing in 2026 wouldn’t break through on the same content. The book market shows the same compression; by 2026, the calendar of new health and longevity titles is so crowded that the book-as-floor-clearing-instrument is itself becoming less reliable.This is the condition under which the next wave forms. New movement structures consistently emerge from formats the previous wave’s practitioners consider too cringe, too informal, or too amateur to take seriously. The political consultants of 2019 wouldn’t have advised a candidate to spend their time on TikTok. The health-policy professionals of 2021 wouldn’t have advised a Stanford-trained physician to go on Joe Rogan.The breakthrough format is, by definition, the one currently being dismissed.Where the next wave is formingThis is the speculative part. None of these is a confident prediction. Together, they suggest the rough shape of what comes next.AI companions and the loneliness substrate.Per Pew Research’s October 2025 survey, roughly two-thirds of American teenagers now use AI chatbots, with about three-in-ten using them daily. Parents underestimate this by thirteen points. A meaningful share of these interactions aren’t homework, they’re companionship. Custom-built personas, sustained parasocial relationships, often experienced as romantic. The current discourse is moral panic: wrongful-death suits against Character.AI and OpenAI. There is legislation in California and Australia, and proposed bans in Manitoba to counter this wave. The political development underneath the panic: a generation is forming its first intimate relationships with corporately-owned tunable entities. The assumptions about love, attention, and selfhood that result will not map onto any existing political vocabulary. The first movement that learns to speak to that cohort in its own language — probably from inside the cohort itself — will look completely illegible to current observers when it appears.The transpartisan anti-platform coalition.Australia banned under-16-year-olds from social media at the end of 2025. The UK, Singapore, and multiple Canadian provinces are moving in similar ways. State-level school phone bans now have bipartisan support in the U.S. Read as moral panic about screens, this looks like a passing concern. Read as political development, it’s the early formation of a coalition with the structural features of a successful movement. There is a clear villain (the platforms), a repeatable phrase (”phone-based childhood”), a foundational book (The Anxious Generation), and a policy pipeline that already runs. Whether this coalition stays narrowly focused on youth protection or expands into broader anti-platform politics: antitrust, Section 230 reform, or regulatory restructuring, is the open strategic question.Livestream as the new long-form.Kai Cenat. IShowSpeed. Adin Ross. Streamers who pull in viewerships dwarfing those of most podcasts and political programs combined. The 2024 male youth electoral shift was substantially mediated through this layer. The next breakthrough political figure is more likely to emerge via livestream than through podcast appearances alone. Political strategists are under-investing because the format comes across as juvenile. The floor on livestream platforms is currently lower than the floor on TikTok or YouTube precisely because adult institutions haven’t flooded the space.The migration to semi-private organizing.Discord, Telegram, Substack chats, private group chats. Public-facing social media has become a performance. The actual coordination has moved to spaces journalists can’t easily cover, researchers can’t easily scrape, and platforms can’t easily moderate. The next major movement may form substantially out of public view and become legible only after it’s already cohered. This is a different epistemic situation than the 2021–2025 wave, which was at least partly trackable through public metrics. It also represents a different solution to the floor problem: rather than clearing the public floor, organize beneath it.The public floorrefers to the minimum level of social, institutional, and cultural acceptability required for an idea or movement to exist openly in mainstream public space without being immediately dismissed, censored, ridiculed, or professionally punished.It is closely related to the concept of the Overton window, but slightly different. The Overton window describes the range of ideas considered publicly acceptable. The “public floor” is the threshold that determines whether a movement can gain traction openly at all.A populist anti-AI politics.The current AI conversation is fragmented across existential risk, labor displacement, and corporate ethics. None has produced a mass political constituency. A fourth frame is forming around personal harm — chatbot-induced delusions, parasocial AI relationships, AI-generated impersonation, deepfake harassment, the accelerating sense that something about this technology is destabilizing minds and relationships. The first political figure who credibly speaks to this frame, in language that doesn’t require technical fluency, will likely build a constituency that crosses the existing left-right axis. The book that crystallizes the frame — theAnxious Generationequivalent for AI — hasn’t been published yet. Its publication will probably mark the moment the movement becomes legible to mainstream observers.Post-influencer aesthetics.Audiences fatigued by the obvious commercial layer of the 2021–2025 wave are migrating toward creators who perform unmonetized authenticity, deinfluencing, and explicit rejection of the supplement-and-sponsorship economy. This is the same impulse that produced the original wave, recalibrated against the new establishment that the original wave became. The recursion is part of the pattern.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareSix predictionsHeld loosely. Forecasting is the part of analysis where confidence should be lowest.One.The political-movement structure described here will continue producing new formations through at least 2028, with marginal returns declining and half-lives shortening. Expect the next cohort to rise faster, monetize harder, and collapse sooner than the 2021–2024 cohort.Two.The floor will keep thickening on major platforms. Successful new movements will increasingly bypass the public floor entirely, building first inside Discord, Telegram, livestream chat, and email lists, surfacing publicly only after they’ve cohered. The era when a movement could be tracked through hashtag analysis is closing.Three.The durability question will become more important than the breakthrough question. Movements that successfully convert viral capital into institutional position: laws, organizations, infrastructure, candidates, books that become legislative reference material, will increasingly be distinguished from movements that don’t. Many figures currently prominent will be largely forgotten by 2030. The ones who institutionalize won’t.Four.A transpartisan anti-platform politics will emerge as a major axis of political conflict by the 2028 cycle. It will produce legislation that the current free-speech consensus on both left and right is not prepared to defend, and the resulting realignment will be one of the more consequential political developments of the late 2020s.Five.AI companions will produce a generational cohort whose assumptions about intimacy, attention, and selfhood diverge from those of prior cohorts in ways that current political vocabulary does not capture. The first movement to articulate this divergence in its own terms, not as moral panic, will achieve outsized influence with that cohort.Six.The breakthrough format of the late 2020s is currently being dismissed as cringe, juvenile, or unserious by almost everyone qualified to write essays like this one. This isn’t a paradox. It’s the structural condition. The honest analytic posture is to flag the dismissals, watch what teenagers and twenty-year-olds are doing in spaces where adults aren’t paying attention, and accept that the most important developments of the next five years will be visible to insiders before they’re visible to observers.What this means for youIf you’re trying to build a movement, an audience, or a public-facing project, the operative question isn’t “how do I create good content” or “how do I build my brand.” Those questions assume the floor doesn’t exist.The operative question is: which of the five floor-clearing mechanisms do I have access to, and how do I sequence them?If the answer is none, the honest move is to stop and find one before doing anything else. The movements that succeed aren’t the ones with the best ideas. They’re the ones whose principals correctly identified the mechanism available to them and built around it.If the answer is one or more, the next question is whether you understand what each mechanism actually does. Most people misunderstand the book. Many underestimate the institutional accelerator. Almost everyone overestimates organic posting.And if you’re not trying to build a movement, if you’re trying to understand the political and cultural landscape of the next five years, the operative question is which of the formations forming right now, mostly out of public view, will surface as durable forces by 2028. The answer isn’t in the legacy media coverage. It’s in the spaces where the coverage hasn’t arrived yet.— — —If this was useful, forward it to someone who’s been confused about how the last five years happened. Subscribe for the next one.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.This article may be shared, reposted, and republished  with appropriate credit to the author (Robert W. Malone, MD, MS).

Summary: How movements form, win, and fade in the algorithmic era — and what comes next


The Architecture Built While You Weren’t Looking

While the political class spent the last three years arguing about whether the World Health Organization was secretly trying to take over the world, the WHO did something far more interesting and far more consequential: it built, in plain sight, a complete architecture for managing the next pandemic. And then it ran a dress rehearsal.The dress rehearsal had a name: Exercise Polaris II. It took place on April 22 and 23, 2026. Twenty-six countries participated, along with 600 health emergency experts and over 25 partner organizations. The scenario was a fictional novel bacterium that had spread across 27 countries and been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.1Countries activated their emergency coordination structures, mobilized workforces, aligned policies across borders, and (this is worth pausing on) explored AI-enabled tools for workforce planning.2If you only read the press release, this looks like a tabletop exercise. A drill. A useful one, even, given that the last pandemic killed millions and exposed real coordination failures. Who could object to practice?But Polaris II is not a standalone event. It is the visible surface of something much larger that has been assembled, piece by piece, since 2023. And once you see the structure, the structure is hard to unsee.Four Layers, Three YearsWhat has actually been built is a tightly interlocking, four-layer system that has matured at remarkable speed:Layer 1: The Treaty Layer.On May 20, 2025, the 78th World Health Assembly adopted the WHO Pandemic Agreement by a vote of 124 in favor, zero against, and 11 abstentions.3It is only the second legally binding treaty ever negotiated under Article 19 of the WHO Constitution.4The first was the 2003 Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and most people have never heard of it because tobacco is unpopular and the treaty was uncontroversial. This one is different. The Pandemic Agreement establishes a Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing system, a Global Supply Chain and Logistics Network, and a new financial mechanism.5It enters into force 30 days after 60 ratifications, pending completion of the PABS annex now being negotiated through 2026.6Sitting alongside the treaty are the 2024 amendments to the International Health Regulations, which came into force in September 2025. Among other changes, they introduced a new “pandemic emergency” alert level, a tier above the existing Public Health Emergency of International Concern designation.7The IHR has been binding on member states since 2005. The amendments expand its operational reach.Layer 2: The Framework Layer.The Global Health Emergency Corps was launched at the May 2023 World Health Assembly.8Its own framework document describes it as “more than a workforce framework; it is a commitment to global solidarity, prioritizing sovereignty and equity.”9In practice, it is a standing global network of national emergency workforces with mechanisms for surge deployment across borders. It was first activated in October 2024 in response to the mpox outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.10In October 2025, the WHO published the National Health Emergency Alert and Response Framework.11This document tells countries how to structure their domestic emergency response: detection, notification, risk assessment, activation, intervention, review. It embeds the 7-1-7 performance benchmark: seven days to detect an outbreak, one day to notify authorities, seven days to complete early response actions.12It integrates more than 300 recommendations drawn from COVID-19 reviews into a single national doctrine.13Layer 3: The Program Layer.HorizonX is the umbrella program that turns simulation exercises from one-off events into a permanent, recurring test regime. It was launched in October 2024 as a multi-year initiative for “multi-sectoral emergency zoonotic disease preparedness.”14Polaris is just one strand. The WHO ran approximately 50 simulation exercises in 2025 alone.15The phrase used in WHO’s own materials is telling: preparedness is meant to become “a continuous investment” rather than “a periodic effort.”16Layer 4: The Exercise Layer.Polaris I in April 2025, with 15+ countries.17Polaris II in April 2026, with 26.1Future iterations planned indefinitely under HorizonX. Each exercise stress-tests the layers above it and generates an after-action report that feeds back into framework refinement.18This is not an accident of bureaucracy. It is a designed system. Each layer reinforces the next. The treaty provides legal authority. The frameworks provide operational doctrine. The program institutionalizes practice. The exercises generate the empirical justification for further build-out.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.What the WHO Says About ItThe WHO is not secretive about any of this. The Director-General said it plainly after Polaris II concluded: “Exercise Polaris II showed what is possible when we act together. It demonstrated that global cooperation is not optional; it is essential.”19Read that sentence again. Not optional.That is not the language of voluntary international coordination among sovereign equals. It is the language of moral obligation backed by institutional architecture. The Director-General is saying (correctly, from his perspective) that the WHO has spent three years building a system in which non-cooperation is no longer a serious option for any country that wants to remain inside the global health order.A peer-reviewed article in the National Library of Medicine database makes the connection between layers explicit. The Pandemic Agreement, it notes, “reinforces the importance of the GHEC by emphasising that each country should ‘develop, strengthen, and protect a skilled and adequate workforce to prevent, prepare for, and respond to health emergencies, including during pandemics.’” The article continues: “GHEC, with its mandate for rapid response and global health expertise, serves as an operational arm of the Accord. It translates the high-level commitments of the Accord into action.”20There is no ambiguity here. The framework is the operational arm of the treaty. The exercise tests the framework. The program makes the testing permanent. The treaty makes the whole thing legally durable.The Sovereignty Question, Honestly StatedThe standard establishment response to concerns about this architecture is to point at specific clauses and say: see, the treaty preserves sovereignty. The text explicitly states it does not authorize the WHO to direct, order, or alter national laws. UK ministers have stated that under no circumstances will the WHO have power to mandate lockdowns.21WHO spokespeople dismiss the sovereignty concern as misinformation.These statements are technically accurate. They are also somewhat beside the point.Sovereignty in the modern administrative state is rarely surrendered by a single dramatic act. It erodes through the accumulation of soft commitments, technical standards, performance benchmarks, peer pressure, funding conditions, and informational dependencies. A country that has signed the Pandemic Agreement, restructured its national emergency workforce per GHEC guidance, adopted the National Alert and Response Framework’s 7-1-7 timelines, integrated its surveillance with the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, and committed to participate in HorizonX exercises has not formally surrendered any sovereignty. It has merely made dozens of practical choices that, in aggregate, mean its pandemic response will be functionally indistinguishable from what the WHO would have prescribed.This is not a conspiracy. It is the normal mechanism by which international technocratic systems operate. The European Union works this way. The IMF works this way. The OECD works this way. What is novel is the speed and scope of the WHO version, and the fact that it is being built specifically around emergency powers, a domain where domestic publics historically grant enormous deference to whoever is identified as the legitimate authority.When the next pathogen emerges, the question will not be whether national governments retain the legal right to chart their own course. They will. The question will be whether any government, in the heat of an emergency, with its own institutions plugged into WHO frameworks, with its workforce trained on WHO doctrine, with its data flowing through WHO networks, will find it politically possible to deviate. The architecture is being built precisely so the answer is no.The Funding QuestionThere is one detail in the WHO’s own Polaris II materials that deserves more attention than it has received. Buried in the WHO Western Pacific feature story on the exercise is a sentence acknowledging that work under the GHEC Initiative is funded by the Gates Foundation and the Institute of Philanthropy.22This is not a minor footnote. The GHEC is the operational backbone of the entire pandemic response architecture: the standing workforce framework that Polaris exercises, that the Pandemic Agreement reinforces, and that gets activated in real outbreaks. A significant portion of that architecture’s design and implementation has been underwritten by a single private foundation.Now, you can have two reactions to this. The first reaction, which much of the establishment press takes, is that private philanthropic funding for global health is a longstanding practice, that the Gates Foundation has done genuine good in vaccination and disease eradication, and that pointing this out is the first move in a conspiracy theory. The second reaction is that a global emergency response architecture, with treaty-level legal backing, that operates according to doctrines partly funded and shaped by a single private foundation, raises legitimate questions about democratic accountability that have nothing to do with conspiracy theories.Both reactions can be true at once. The Gates Foundation’s contributions to global health are real. So is the fact that no electorate anywhere voted for Bill Gates to be a co-architect of the institutional response to the next pandemic. In a constitutional system that takes accountability seriously, “this private actor has good intentions and useful resources” is not a sufficient answer to “who is this person and by what authority does he co-design this.”What Polaris II Actually TestedLook closely at the operational details and the implications come into focus.In Brunei, the Incident Management Team within the national CDC tested airport-linked surveillance and rapid response procedures, then reviewed cross-border traveler monitoring with neighboring countries.23In Malaysia, the Crisis Preparedness and Response Centre tested activation of the national Incident Management System and coordinated with ASEAN partners.24Across the exercise, partner organizations contributed to a “global partner mapping survey used in real time during the exercise to simulate the matching of country surge needs with available partner capacity.”25What is being practiced here is not just medical response. It is integrated, cross-border surveillance of human movement; real-time matching of national needs to international partner capacity; standardized incident management activation across radically different political systems; and the use of AI tools to allocate emergency workforce. These are governance capabilities. They have applications well beyond bacterial outbreaks.The exercise was framed as a fictional bacterium. The capabilities being rehearsed are agnostic to scenario.The Honest Defense, and Why It Falls ShortThe honest defense of all this goes roughly as follows: COVID-19 killed millions of people and exposed catastrophic failures in international coordination. Surveillance was fragmented, vaccines were hoarded, information flowed unevenly, poor countries got the worst of it, and nobody was in charge. The current architecture is an attempt to fix exactly those failures. Practice exercises are standard. Treaties are how international cooperation works. The 7-1-7 metrics are reasonable performance benchmarks. The whole thing is overdue.There is real force to this argument, and a serious conservative or libertarian critic should acknowledge it. The COVID response was a disaster. International coordination was bad. The instinct to fix it is not malign.But the conservative and libertarian objection is not that nothing should be done. It is twofold.First, the lessons of COVID-19 are contested, and the architecture being built reflects only one set of conclusions. Many serious analysts concluded that the COVID response failed because oftoo muchcentralized authority acting on incomplete information, not too little. Lockdowns of unprecedented severity, school closures, vaccine mandates, the suppression of dissent on lab-leak hypotheses, the discrediting of natural immunity, the politicization of early treatment debates; these were failures of centralized authority, not of decentralization. A genuine after-action would weigh both directions of failure. The WHO architecture is being built almost exclusively around the “more coordination” lesson and almost not at all around the “less overreach” lesson.Second, the speed and scope of the buildout outpace any normal democratic process for evaluating it. Three years from launch of GHEC to a binding treaty, an aligned national framework, an institutionalized exercise program, and two global drills. No national legislature seriously debated the implications. No election anywhere turned on this. The Pandemic Agreement was adopted by consensus at the World Health Assembly with 11 abstentions and no objections, which sounds like overwhelming consensus until you remember that most member state populations have no idea any of this happened.What to WatchThe PABS annex is being negotiated through 2026 and goes to the 79th World Health Assembly.26Once adopted, the Pandemic Agreement opens for signature and ratification. After 60 ratifications, it enters into force.6National parliaments will have a constitutional moment when ratification arrives at their door. In most countries this will receive minimal media attention, and ratification will be treated as a technical formality. In others (and the United States is the most important of these), ratification will be politically contested and may not happen at all. The U.S. position under the current administration on WHO matters generally, and on the Pandemic Agreement specifically, will be one of the more consequential variables in whether this architecture becomes the universal default or a regime that some major countries opt out of.For now, the structure is built. Polaris II proved it works. HorizonX guarantees it will keep being practiced and refined. The treaty layer is awaiting its final ratifications.The honest summary is this: between 2023 and 2026, in front of everyone, with full press releases at every stage, the WHO and its partners assembled a four-layer global pandemic governance system more comprehensive and more operationally integrated than anything that has existed before. Whether you think this is overdue progress or quiet overreach depends on what you believe about centralized authority, technocratic governance, and the lessons of the last pandemic.But the architecture is real. It is not a conspiracy. It is a project. And the project is largely complete.* * *If you want to verify any of the facts above, every one of them is sourced from official WHO press releases, the published framework documents, the World Health Assembly resolution, and peer-reviewed analyses. None of it is hidden. That, in a way, is the most striking part.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareBibliography1. World Health Organization Western Pacific. “Countries showcase global health emergency response and coordination capacities through a WHO-led multi-country simulation.” April 2026.https://www.who.int/westernpacific/newsroom/feature-stories/item/countries-showcase-global-health-emergency-response-and-coordination-capacities-through-a-who-led-multi-country-simulation2. World Health Organization. “Practicing today for tomorrow’s emergencies – WHO convenes countries and partners to simulate response to major disease outbreak.” 27 April 2026.https://www.who.int/news/item/27-04-2026-practicing-today-for-tomorrow-s-emergencies-who-convenes-countries-and-partners-to-simulate-response-to-major-disease-outbreak3. UN News. “Nations adopt historic pledge to guard against future pandemics.” 21 May 2025.https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/05/11634514. Global Biodefense. “What the WHO Pandemic Agreement and IHR Reforms Mean for the Future of Pandemic Preparedness.” 23 July 2025.https://globalbiodefense.com/2025/07/23/what-the-who-pandemic-agreement-and-ihr-reforms-mean-for-the-future-of-pandemic-preparedness/5. UN News, “Nations adopt historic pledge to guard against future pandemics,” 21 May 2025.6. World Health Organization. “WHO Pandemic Agreement.”https://www.who.int/health-topics/who-pandemic-agreement7. World Health Organization. “Stronger together — milestones that mattered in 2025.” 23 December 2025.https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/stronger-together-milestones-that-mattered-in-20258. World Health Organization. “Global Health Emergency Corps Framework.” Publication B/78043.https://www.who.int/publications/b/780439. International Association of National Public Health Institutes. “WHO Global Health Emergency Corps Framework” (PDF).https://ianphi.org/_includes/documents/sections/tools-resources/ghec-highlights/who-ghec-framework.pdf10. World Health Organization. “WHO and partners activate Global Health Emergency Corps for the first time in response to mpox outbreak.” 29 October 2024.https://www.who.int/news/item/29-10-2024-who-and-partners-activate-global-health-emergency-corps-for-the-first-time-in-response-to-mpox-outbreak11. World Health Organization. “National Health Emergency Alert and Response Framework.” Publication 9789240113893. 23 October 2025.https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/978924011389312. World Health Organization. “WHO launches new country guidance for health emergency coordination.” 23 October 2025.https://www.who.int/news/item/23-10-2025-who-launches-new-country-guidance-for-health-emergency-coordination13. WHO, “WHO launches new country guidance for health emergency coordination,” 23 October 2025.14. World Health Organization. “WHO launches new Horizon X Programme for One Health emergency preparedness.” 13 October 2024.https://www.who.int/news/item/13-10-2024-who-launches-new-horizon-x-programme-for-one-health-emergency-preparedness15. WHO, “Stronger together — milestones that mattered in 2025,” 23 December 2025.16. WHO, “Practicing today for tomorrow’s emergencies,” 27 April 2026.17. World Health Organization. “WHO brings countries together to test collective pandemic response.” 4 April 2025.https://www.who.int/news/item/04-04-2025-who-brings-countries-together-to-test-collective-pandemic-response18. WHO Western Pacific, “Countries showcase global health emergency response and coordination capacities,” April 2026.19. WHO, “Practicing today for tomorrow’s emergencies,” 27 April 2026.20. “Sovereignty, equity, solidarity: progress on the Global Health Emergency Corps.” National Library of Medicine, PMC12374631.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12374631/21. UK House of Commons Library. “What is the proposed WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty?” Research Briefing CBP-9550.https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9550/22. WHO Western Pacific, “Countries showcase global health emergency response and coordination capacities,” April 2026.23. WHO Western Pacific, “Countries showcase global health emergency response and coordination capacities,” April 2026.24. WHO Western Pacific, “Countries showcase global health emergency response and coordination capacities,” April 2026.25. WHO Western Pacific, “Countries showcase global health emergency response and coordination capacities,” April 2026.

Summary: In three years, the WHO has assembled a four-layer pandemic governance system. Polaris II was the dress rehearsal.


Well Being: Joint Health

By: JGMYour joints are not failing simply because you are getting older. They are failing because they carry excess weight, experience chronic inflammation, and face metabolic consequences increasingly associated with a sedentary lifestyle and the American diet.For decades, we were told that joint pain, eventually leading to arthritis, was simply “wear and tear.” That creaky knees and aching hips were inevitable. Just part of aging. But that explanation never fully made sense. Plenty of older farmers, ranchers, and tradesmen who worked their bodies hard their entire lives stayed mobile well into old age. Meanwhile, younger Americans now limp around in their forties with inflamed knees, swollen ankles, and backs that feel twenty years older than they are.Something changed.Obesity is the obvious culprit. Every extra pound of body weight translates into several pounds of force across the knees and hips with every step. A person carrying fifty extra pounds is not just heavier. Their joints endure thousands upon thousands of pounds of additional mechanical stress every single day. The body can compensate for a while. Then one day it cannot.But the real story goes deeper than simple weight.Fat tissue is biologically active. It is not just stored energy. Excess fat pumps out inflammatory chemicals that circulate throughout the body. This creates a low-grade chronic inflammatory state that quietly damages cartilage, tendons, ligaments, and the tiny structures inside joints. In many ways, metabolic disease ages the joints faster than time itself.This is why joint disease tracks so closely with diabetes, insulin resistance, fatty liver disease, and the cluster of problems now called metabolic syndrome. High blood sugar damages collagen. Chronic inflammation disrupts repair mechanisms. Poor circulation reduces nutrient delivery to cartilage, which already has a limited blood supply. The body becomes trapped in a cycle of inflammation, degeneration, pain, inactivity, and more weight gain.Then comes the cruel part. Pain discourages movement. But movement is exactly what joints need to stay healthy.Human joints were designed for motion. Walking, squatting, lifting, climbing, stretching. Cartilage depends on movement to circulate nutrients and lubricate the joint surface. Sedentary lifestyles starve the system. Then we add ultra-processed diets loaded with seed oils, refined sugars, and nutrient-poor calories, and we wonder why so many people feel broken before retirement age.Aging matters, of course. Collagen production slows over time. Muscle mass declines. Recovery takes longer. But aging alone is not the smoking gun. Frailty is not synonymous with age. We have simply normalized poor metabolic health.The good news is that joints often improve dramatically when inflammation and metabolic dysfunction improve.Weight loss alone can significantly reduce knee pain. Blood sugar control matters. Strength training matters. Muscle acts like biological armor for joints. Walking matters. Sunlight matters. Sleep matters. Real food matters.And yes, certain supplements may help.Glucosamine and chondroitin remain controversial in the literature, but many people report meaningful improvement, particularly when used consistently over time. Collagen peptides are increasingly popular and may support connective tissue health. Omega-3 fatty acids can help dampen inflammation. Curcumin, derived from turmeric, has shown anti-inflammatory effects in some studies comparable to over-the-counter pain relievers, without the same gastrointestinal risks. Magnesium matters for muscle and nerve function and is chronically deficient in many Americans.Vitamin Ddeserves special mention. Low vitamin D levels are strongly associated with musculoskeletal pain, weakness, and poor bone health. Many people who spend most of their lives indoors are running chronically low.None of these supplements are magic bullets. There is no capsule that can fully overcome obesity, inactivity, poor diet, and metabolic disease. But they can support recovery when combined with lifestyle changes that address the root cause rather than simply masking symptoms.Adequate proteinintake is one of the most overlooked foundations of joint health, particularly as people age. Joints do not function independently. They rely on strong muscles, healthy tendons, ligaments, cartilage, and ongoing tissue repair, all of which require sufficient dietary protein. Without enough protein, the body struggles to maintain muscle mass and connective tissue integrity, leading to weakness, instability, slower recovery, and increased stress on the joints themselves. Aging adults are especially vulnerable because muscle loss, known as sarcopenia, accelerates with age and contributes directly to joint pain, falls, and loss of mobility. Protein also supplies the amino acids needed for collagen production and tissue healing while helping regulate metabolism and maintain healthy body composition. In many cases, improving protein intake alongside resistance exercise does more to preserve long-term mobility and function than relying solely on joint supplements.Resistance trainingis one of the most effective long-term strategies for preserving joint health, mobility, and independence as we age. Strong muscles act as natural shock absorbers and stabilizers for the joints, reducing mechanical stress on the knees, hips, spine, and shoulders during daily movement. Regular strength training also helps maintain bone density, improve balance, enhance metabolic health, and reduce the chronic inflammation associated with obesity, insulin resistance, and aging. Contrary to popular belief, properly performed resistance exercise does not usually “wear out” healthy joints. In many cases, it actually reduces pain and improves function by strengthening the muscles and connective tissues that support joint stability. Even modest, consistent strength training can help slow sarcopenia, preserve mobility, and improve overall resilience, making it one of the most powerful tools for healthy aging and long-term musculoskeletal health.Hormone replacement therapymay help joint health in both women and men, particularly when hormone levels have declined with age.In women, falling estrogen during menopause is often linked to increased joint pain, stiffness, and inflammation. Estrogen helps support cartilage, collagen, bone density, and overall joint function, so some women experience meaningful improvement with HRT.In men, low testosterone can contribute to loss of muscle mass, increased body fat, frailty, and reduced physical activity, all of which place greater stress on joints. Testosterone replacement may improve strength, recovery, and mobility, which can indirectly reduce joint pain.Hormones are not a magic fix, but they play a much larger role in musculoskeletal health than many people realize.Modern medicine often approaches joint pain like an orthopedic engineering problem. Replace the knee. Inject the joint. Prescribe the anti-inflammatory. Sometimes those interventions are necessary. But too often we ignore the biological terrain that created the problem in the first place.The body is not a machine with interchangeable parts. It is a living metabolic system.Healthy joints are built in the kitchen, in the pasture, in the garden, on the walking trail, and under the barbell long before they are repaired in the operating room.Perhaps that is the real lesson here. Joint health is not just about joints. It is a mirror reflecting the overall health of the body itself.In my own case, I was never sedentary, but I did gain weight over the years. Yeah, I am not so young - at 65 years of age, I have worked my body hard.  So, while I was horseback riding, gardening, farming, walking, and feeding livestock daily, my joints slowly became swollen, my fingers just a bit misshapen, and my back ached more often than not.  My knees began to give me problems.  I also experienced arthritis, particularly in the winter when working outside and from bucking hay. Nothing major, nothing to stop me from working my body.  Just what I thought was the normal wear and tear from working hard each and every day.At the beginning of 2022, I lost 50 pounds. I removed most sugar from my diet, stopped being a vegetarian, increased my protein intake significantly, and began a heavy-duty supplement regimen. Since then, I have kept that weight off. Slowly, the chronic joint pain has largely resolved. This, in some ways, seems like a small miracle.People ask what supplements and brands I recommend for joint health.  I don’t have a single brand - but I do try hard to buy American-made, GMP, third-party tested products.Below is a list and description (along with a few photos) of what I take:Read more

Summary: Don't settle for chronic pain, if you can help it.


Hantavirus and Psychological Bioterrorism

Fear is one of the most powerful drugs ever invented.Unlike antibiotics or antivirals, it requires no FDA approval, no manufacturing plant, and no cold-chain shipping. Fear spreads itself. All it takes is a headline, a few experts on television, ominous music behind a news segment, and suddenly millions of people begin scanning their bodies for symptoms they did not know they had ten minutes earlier.Psychological Bioterrorism is the weaponization of fear about disease in order to manipulate individuals, populations, markets, and governments. Sometimes the objective is political. Sometimes financial. Sometimes bureaucratic. Often, it is all three at once.This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a recognized form of psychological warfare. We have written about it extensively in our bookPsywar.In that book, we write about Dr. Alexander Kouzminov, a former Soviet-Russian intelligence officer with deep experience in biological espionage and biosecurity operations, who in 2017, described how fear of infectious disease can be strategically amplified to shape public behavior, influence governments, and create opportunities for those positioned to benefit from the panic. That process is called psychological bioterrorism.Once you understand the framework, you start seeing the pattern everywhere.A virus or some other pathogen emerges somewhere in the world. The media shifts into apocalyptic mode. Experts appear to be predicting catastrophe. Computer models project millions dead, if the right circumstances coalesce. Politicians declare emergencies. Pharmaceutical companies announce new products. Social media turns into a digital panic attack. And ordinary people, who just wanted to buy eggs and walk the dog, suddenly feel like civilization is one cough away from collapse.Wash. Rinse. Repeat.The latest example is the current media frenzy surrounding Hantavirus.Now, to be clear, Hantavirus is a real disease. It can be serious. It deserves appropriate medical attention and surveillance. Rodent control around homes and barns matters, particularly in areas where the virus is endemic. Nobody sensible is arguing otherwise.But if you watched the recent media cycle unfold, you would think half the country was moments away from dying in a cloud of mouse droppings drifting through the HVAC system at Tractor Supply.The reality is far less cinematic.Hantavirus infections in the United States remain extremely rare. Most cases occur in very specific geographic regions and involve clear exposure risks, typically in enclosed areas contaminated with rodent waste. Yet suddenly, every media outlet behaves as though sweeping out your old feed room or poking around your basement is equivalent to starring in a Hollywood outbreak movie.This is how psychological bioterrorism works. The pathogen itself matters less than the emotional payload attached to it.Fear scales faster than facts.The reason these campaigns work so well is simple. Human beings are biologically wired to fear invisible threats. A wolf outside the cave is frightening. But an invisible virus floating through the air? That activates something much deeper in the human nervous system. You cannot see it. You cannot smell it. You cannot negotiate with it. Every stranger becomes a potential threat. Every cough becomes suspicious.That loss of control is the point.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.SharePsychological bioterrorism succeeds because it simultaneously creates four powerful emotional conditions.First, speed. Modern communications allow fear to spread globally in real time. One dramatic headline in New York can trigger anxiety in Nebraska before breakfast.Second, vulnerability. Most people feel helpless against infectious disease. They do not know what is true, what is exaggerated, or what actually works. That uncertainty creates dependency on authorities.Third, confusion. During outbreaks, conflicting information floods the public sphere. Models change. Predictions fail. Definitions shift. Recommendations reverse. In the fog of uncertainty, populations become easier to steer.And fourth, social pressure. Once fear takes hold, compliance becomes a kind of tribal ritual. Masks, distancing, endless boosters, disinfecting groceries, standing on little floor stickers six feet apart like contestants in a strange game show. Many of these behaviors become symbols of belonging as much as they do of actual disease mitigation.Humans are social creatures. We want to belong to the protected group.That instinct can be manipulated.Suddenly, every dusty shed becomes a potential death trap. Sweep out the feed room, and apparently, you now require the courage of a Navy SEAL entering Fallujah.This is where the psychology becomes more important than the pathogen itself. The actual risk matters less than the emotional framing. Invisible threats produce a unique type of anxiety because people cannot easily assess danger with their own senses. You can see smoke from a fire. You can hear a tornado siren. But you cannot see a virus particle. That uncertainty creates fertile ground for fear amplification.And once fear takes hold socially, it becomes self-reinforcing. People constantly scan for danger signals. Every cough becomes suspicious. Every news alert feels urgent. Social media feeds become giant feedback loops of anxiety. One frightened person shares alarming information with ten others, who then amplify it further. Before long, the emotional reaction has become detached from the actual statistical risk.We watched this dynamic unfold repeatedly during COVID. We are now seeing smaller replay versions with avian influenza, Hantavirus, measles outbreaks, and whatever pathogen dominates the next media cycle. The script rarely changes. First comes the alarming headline. Then come the predictive models. Then the expert panels. Then the declarations that “we must act now.” Soon, politicians, bureaucracies, corporations, and media organizations all become economically and institutionally invested in maintaining public attention on the threat.Fear becomes infrastructure.One of the more fascinating aspects of these cycles is how often speculative language is transformed into emotional certainty. Watch closely, and you will notice the repeated use of phrases like “could spread,” “may mutate,” “might become severe,” or “has pandemic potential.” Scientifically, these statements may be technically true. Almost anything in biology is possible. But psychologically, the public often processes those phrases as though catastrophe is inevitable. That shift in language matters enormously.Most people do not have the time, scientific background, or emotional distance to continuously evaluate evolving risk claims. They rely instead on emotional tone and institutional trust. If every headline sounds urgent, the brain assumes there must be urgency. This is one reason why psychological bioterrorism is so effective. The campaign does not require outright fabrication. It only requires selective amplification, strategic framing, repetition, and emotional saturation.Historically, governments and institutions have always understood the political utility of fear. Fear justifies emergency powers. Fear accelerates funding streams. Fear increases media consumption. Fear also creates social cohesion around compliance behaviors. During COVID, entire rituals emerged around masking, distancing, sanitizing groceries, vaccination, and public displays of “doing the right thing.” Some interventions may have had a partial benefit. Others bordered on theater. But all served an additional social purpose by signaling membership in the morally protected group.Humans desperately want to belong to a protected group.That instinct is ancient. And it is easily manipulated.None of this means infectious diseases are imaginary, nor does it mean all public health officials are malicious actors. Real outbreaks happen. Surveillance matters. Preparedness matters. Basic hygiene matters. But proportionality matters too. A society permanently trapped in hypervigilance eventually loses the ability to distinguish genuine emergencies from manufactured panic.And that may be the greatest long-term danger of all.When populations are conditioned to exist in a constant state of biological anxiety, they become psychologically exhausted. Trust erodes. Critical thinking deteriorates. Some people become permanently fearful. Others swing toward reflexive cynicism and stop believing anything at all, including legitimate warnings. Both outcomes are destructive.An even bigger danger is the use of prolonged national health emergencies by those in charge to seize power. Election processes are manipulated or deferred. Medical practitioners who don’t comply or speak out lose their licenses permanently. Small businesses are shuttered, while large transnational corporations with ties to the government grow ever bigger. More “safety” regulations that benefit big ag are incorporated. Rules tighten, and freedoms become more restrictive.The challenge moving forward is not to become fearless. The challenge and opportunity is to become harder to manipulate.That requires perspective, resilience, and the willingness to ask calm questions during moments of manufactured urgency. Who benefits from the panic? What evidence actually exists? What is known versus speculative? Are we responding proportionally to the actual level of risk?Most importantly, we must learn to recognize when fear itself has become the product being marketed.Because once societies accept perpetual emergency as normal, freedom begins to erode one anxious headline at a time.Authors: JGM/RWMMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.“Houston, we’ve have a problem.”