A Nation Perfectly Divided Over Anthony Fauci

It is not that I despise men. If I did I should have no right, and no reason, to try to govern. I know them to be vain, ignorant, greedy, and timorous, capable of almost anything for the sake of success, or for raising themselves in esteem (even in their own eyes), or simply for avoidance of suffering. I know, for I am like them, at least from time to time, or could have been.  . . .I see an objection to every effort toward ameliorating man’s condition on earth, namely that mankind is perhaps not worthy of such exertion. But I meet the objection easily enough: so long as Caligula’s dream remains impossible of fulfillment, and the entire human race is not reduced to a single head destined for the axe, we shall have to bear with humanity, keeping it within bounds but utilizing it to the utmost; our interest, in the best sense of the term, will be to serve it.—The Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar,Out for a walk this evening with one of my oldest friends, he asked (in a gentle and sincere way):“Why did those Republican Senators insist on humiliating Fauci in the Senate? Don’t you think it’s cruel and unbecoming to put a frail old man through a struggle session like that?”“Well,” I said, “In addition to wanting their questions answered for the Senate record, they believe—I suppose—that a Senate hearing with public shaming is the best that can be done in their legislative branch to bring Fauci tosome kindof justice”“Justice for what?” my friend asked. “What laws did he break?”I replied by asking my friend if he was aware of Fauci’s role in the lab creation and the fraudulent concealment of the origin of SARS-CoV-2. He confessed that he’d never heard anything about it, and wanted me to tell him about it.I relate this story not to criticize my old friend, of whom I am extremely fond. I mention the anecdote because I believe that he (who receives most of his information from theNew York Times)is representative of about half the country.While I have been preoccupied with this story since 2020, he’s never evenheard ofmost of it, nor had he heard of RFK, Jr.’s book,The Real Anthony Fauci. TheNew York Timesdid a thorough job of not mentioning it.The situation reminded me of a brief romance I had on the Greek island of Paros in the summer of 1993 with a charming girl from Glasgow, Scotland. She was great fun, always laughing, and always in a good mood, but her Glaswegian accent was so thick that I couldn’t understand half of what she said.Sometimes at dinner she would muse about something. I would nod along, smiling, pretending to understand, but would then be caught out as an imposter when she would suddenly ask, “What do you think?”“Uh, well, I think that I, uh, totally agree with you.”The great Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously pointed out that most arguments are between two people whothinkthey are speaking the same language, but are actually attributing different meaning and significance to the same statements.And so, it seems that to be human is, to a large degree, to be unable to arrive at a mutual understanding of the world with many of one’s fellow men and women. In matters that are important to us, we are often separated from others by a chasm of mutual incomprehension.As Hadrian pointed out, we must strivenotto be irritable and impatient, but to bear with humanity.I knew the Senate hearing would be gratifying for those who believe that Fauci is a villain and infuriating for those who believe he is saint.As I stated in a recent interview with Alex Newman, the existing documentary evidence is sufficient to prosecute Fauci in federal court. The Attorney General should challenge President Biden’s ridiculous preemptive pardon and get on with it.Subscribe nowShare

Summary: Half the country saw a proud, dishonest man justly humbled; the other half saw an old and vulnerable man cruelly and distastefully humiliated.


The Protein Panic: How a Review Paper Became a Dietary Guideline in Three Days

Audio Version:The Protein PanicHow aReview PaperBecame a Dietary Guideline in Three DaysWithin hours of publication, headlines around the world confidently declared that eating less protein could help people live longer:“Protein Restriction Improves Metabolism and Longevity”“Rethinking Protein: Less may be more…”“Eating less protein could slow aging.”“Less protein may be more for healthy aging.”“Eat less protein, age better, live longer.”“Eating too much protein could age you faster.”“Protein Restriction May Promote Healthy Aging and Longevity”The news aggregator, Ground.News tracked more than fifty news organizations carrying some version of the story, with many of the top headlines, even in scientific magazines, making outrageous claims. To the average reader, the message was unmistakable. Science had spoken. The advice was simple: eat less protein.There was only one problem. That is not what thepaperactually demonstrated.The publication was neither a clinical trial, a systematic review, nor a meta-analysis. It presented no new human outcome data. Instead, it was a narrative review, one that assembled existing research into a proposed biological framework the authors called the “hallmarks of protein restriction.”That distinction matters.Narrative reviews are designed to generate hypotheses, organize emerging evidence, and stimulate further research. They do not establish clinical practice. Yet within days, an interesting scientific hypothesis had been transformed into what sounded like a new dietary guideline. A guideline that became an article in almost every major news organization in America.The review contains no long-term randomized human trial showing that reducing protein intake increases lifespan, prevents dementia, reduces fractures, lowers all-cause mortality, or preserves independence in old age. Most of the human studies discussed lasted only a few weeks and measured metabolic biomarkers rather than the outcomes people actually care about: living longer, remaining stronger, and staying healthy.Even the review itself acknowledges that we still do not know the optimal protein intake for humans across different ages, lifestyles, and health conditions. Yet the lead scientist, Dudley Lamming, stated:“…many people are likely consuming more protein than they actually need, which probably has negative health consequences.”So that uncertainty virtually disappeared from the headlines. Readers were left with a far simpler message.“Eat less protein. Live longer.”Scientific papers do not exist in a political vacuum. They are published into ongoing policy debates, and timing often shapes how they are received. These headlines appeared just as Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new Dietary Guidelines placed renewed emphasis on consuming adequate amounts of high-quality protein, particularly for maintaining muscle mass and metabolic health. While the administration was rolling out these new guidelines,the headlines rapidly turned a speculative scientific hypothesis into what could understandably be interpreted as a rebuttal of the administration’s new nutrition policy.Whether by coincidence or not, a review suggesting that eating less protein might also increase longevity fits neatly into existing climate and sustainability narratives that encourage reducing consumption of animal-source foods. That context almost certainly made the paper more newsworthy. It also helps explain why a hypothesis-generating review received far more attention than dozens of studies emphasizing the importance of adequate protein intake in older adults.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public, so feel free to share on social media, notes, X, crosspost, or even email it to a friend!ShareThe truth is that this is hardly the first time the mainstream media has mistaken scientific consensus for scientific certainty. Over the decades, readers have been confidently told to avoid eggs because of cholesterol, to embrace low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets built around the food pyramid, and that statins represented an almost universal solution to cardiovascular risk. During COVID, the same pattern repeated itself as masking, lockdowns, school closures, and other public health interventions were frequently reported with far greater certainty than the underlying evidence justified. In each case, the science continued to evolve while the headlines projected confidence that often exceeded what the data could actually support.That does not mean every recommendation was wrong. It means the public was repeatedly presented with provisional scientific judgments as though they were settled fact. The lesson from those episodes should have been humility. Instead, we continue to see the same pattern repeated. A provocative hypothesis becomes a confident headline, and the caveats that define good science quietly disappear along the way.That should concern all of us.This is how nutritional myths are often born. An intriguing biological hypothesis becomes a review article. The review becomes a press release. The press release becomes dozens of nearly identical news stories. Many such stories are being promoted and paid for by big pharma (ref). At every step, the caveats shrink while the certainty grows. By the time the story reaches the public, a scientific question has become settled wisdom.That is not how science is supposed to work.The irony is that the review itself ends on a note of scientific humility. The authors acknowledge that we still do not know the optimal protein intake for humans and that considerably more research is needed. That may be the paper’s most important conclusion.Unfortunately, it was also the one almost nobody read.Digging Into What the Paper Actually ProvesOnce I sat down and actually read the paper, the disconnect between the headlines and the science became obvious.The authors are not presenting new clinical evidence. They are proposing a biological framework for thinking about protein restriction and aging. That is a perfectly legitimate scientific exercise. New ideas have to begin somewhere. But a framework is not proof, and a hypothesis is not a clinical recommendation.The first thing that stands out is where most of the evidence comes from.Again and again, the review returns to experiments in flies, worms, mice, and rats. Those studies are fascinating. Laboratory animals allow scientists to manipulate individual nutrients, alter specific metabolic pathways, and observe the effects over an entire lifespan. Much of what we know about aging biology began in exactly this way.But laboratory animals are not people. In fact, rodents areNor are they eating anything remotely resembling a human diet.Many of these experiments rely on highly purified laboratory feeds in which protein or individual amino acids are manipulated to extremes that bear little resemblance to how free-living humans eat. Demonstrating that a genetically homogeneous strain of mice lives longer on one artificial diet than another does not establish that a seventy-year-old woman should eat less fish, eggs, or chicken.When the discussion turns to humans, the evidence becomes much less convincing.Most of the intervention studies lasted only a few weeks. They measured fasting glucose, insulin sensitivity, body composition, circulating growth factors, or other metabolic markers. Those are useful biological measurements, but they are surrogate endpoints. They do not tell us whether people actually live longer, remain independent, avoid dementia, suffer fewer fractures, or reduce their overall risk of death.Modern medicine is filled with treatments that improved laboratory measurements while ultimately failing to improve patients’ lives. Sometimes they even made outcomes worse. Biomarkers help us understand biology. They do not, by themselves, establish clinical benefit.Another subtle but important problem is that the review often treats several very different interventions as though they were interchangeable.Reducing total dietary protein is not the same thing as restricting methionine. Restricting methionine is not the same thing as restricting isoleucine or valine. Changing the ratio of amino acids is different again. Comparing plant and animal proteins introduces another entirely separate set of variables. Each of these interventions may influence metabolism differently. Yet by the time the findings are summarized, they frequently become compressed into a single public message: eat less protein.That is a much broader conclusion than the underlying evidence supports.There is another issue that receives surprisingly little attention.Protein never simply disappears from the diet. If calories remain constant, eating less protein means eating more of something else, usually carbohydrate or fat. Any observed benefit could therefore reflect the replacement nutrient as much as the reduction in protein itself. Untangling those effects is one of the central challenges in nutritional science, yet it receives relatively little discussion in the review.This paper uses observational studies, such as the protein restriction diet of the Okinawa people in Japan, as primary evidence that protein restriction increases lifespan. From the paper:A quote from the paper: “The hallmarks of protein and amino acid restriction in aging and longevity”:“…it has been hypothesized that the long lifespan of the Japanese population of Okinawa is due to their diet, which contains about 9% protein and is strikingly similar to that of protein restriction laboratory studies. The Okinawan diet also derives 80% of its calories from plant sources, and individuals generally consume fewer calories overall, making it difficult to assign all of the benefits to the lower protein intake. Nevertheless, these observations support the possibility that protein restriction may promote healthy aging in humans.”The Okinawan story has often been simplified into “eat very little protein and you’ll live longer.” But the evidence does not support such a straightforward conclusion.Rather, Okinawan longevity appears to have resulted from an entire lifestyle: remaining lean without chronic undernutrition, being physically active every day, maintaining close social ties, eating mostly minimally processed foods, and benefiting from favorable genetics. Protein intake was one feature of that lifestyle directly after WWII, but there is little evidence it was the primary reason Okinawans live so long. Indeed, the balance of evidence today suggests that adequate protein becomes increasingly important as people age to preserve muscle and function, rather than being something older adults should deliberately restrictThe same caution applies to other observational studies.People who consume higher-protein diets differ from those who do not in many other ways. They exercise differently, smoke at different rates, have different body compositions, eat different foods, and often differ in socioeconomic status and underlying health. Statistical adjustment can account for some of those differences, but it cannot eliminate them all. Observational studies are valuable for generating hypotheses. They are much less reliable for proving causation.Perhaps the paper’s greatest weakness, however, is not what it includes, but what it largely leaves in the background.Protein is not simply another source of calories. For older adults, it is the primary nutritional defense against the progressive loss of lean muscle mass.That matters because sarcopenia is far more than a cosmetic problem. Loss of muscle increases the risk of falls, fractures, frailty, hospitalization, disability, and death. Muscle also serves as a critical metabolic reserve during illness, surgery, and recovery. Any recommendation encouraging older adults to broadly reduce protein intake must confront those risks directly. This review largely does not.None of this means the paper lacks value. On the contrary, it highlights several genuinely important questions. Protein quality matters. Individual amino acids may influence aging differently. Nutrient-sensing pathways such as mTOR, IGF-1, and FGF21 deserve continued investigation. The optimal protein intake may well differ according to age, activity level, metabolic health, and disease.Those are worthwhile scientific questions.They are simply not the same thing as demonstrating that reducing protein intake will help humans live longer.That remains a completely unanswered question.The Bigger FailureThere is nothing inherently wrong with publishing a provocative hypothesis.Science advances by asking difficult questions, challenging established assumptions, and proposing new ways of thinking about old problems. If this review encourages more rigorous research into how specific amino acids influence aging, then it will have made a valuable contribution.The failure came afterward.Somewhere between peer review and the evening news, a hypothesis became a conclusion.The review became a journal press release. The press release became dozens of nearly identical news stories. At each stage, uncertainty diminished while confidence increased. Caveats quietly disappeared. By the time the story reached millions of readers, a paper exploring biological mechanisms had become what sounded like a new clinical guideline.Prestigious journals occupy a unique position in public life. Their influence extends well beyond the scientific community. That influence carries responsibility. Publishing an interesting hypothesis is one thing. Allowing it to be promoted as though it had rewritten clinical nutrition is something else entirely.Authors share that responsibility. Scientists should be enthusiastic about their work, but they also have an obligation to distinguish between what their research demonstrates and what it merely suggests. The review itself is appropriately cautious in its conclusions. The public messaging surrounding it was considerably less so.The media completed the transformation.Modern science reporting has increasingly become an exercise in amplifying press releases rather than critically evaluating evidence. The hierarchy of evidence quietly disappears. A narrative review becomes “new research.” Animal experiments become dietary advice. Biomarkers become clinical outcomes. Before long, an interesting biological hypothesis is presented as though it had already rewritten clinical practice.We have seen this before.During COVID, mechanistic studies, observational analyses, computer models, and laboratory experiments were repeatedly reported as though they carried the same weight as randomized clinical trials. The distinction between generating a hypothesis and proving one gradually disappeared. We were promised that the scientific community would learn from that experience.Instead, here we are again.Different topic.Same pattern.A review article proposes an intriguing hypothesis.A journal press office emphasizes the most provocative interpretation.Dozens of news organizations repeat it with little independent scrutiny.Within days, the public is told that “science says” something the underlying paper never actually demonstrated.The timing makes this story even more consequential. Only days earlier, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had unveiled one of the most significant revisions to federal dietary guidance in decades, placing renewed emphasis on consuming adequate amounts of high-quality protein, particularly for preserving muscle mass and metabolic health as Americans age.Against that backdrop, headlines proclaiming that eating less protein could help people live longer can be interpreted as mainstream media’s rebuttal to the administration’s new nutritional guidance.  Is this due to journalists and editors having an extreme case of TDS, which has morphed into a hatred of Secretary Kennedy and MAHA? Or is it due to the influence of Big Ag and Big Pharma on mainstream media? You decide.Ironically, the paper’s most important conclusion was the one almost nobody read. Near the end, the authors acknowledge that we still do not know the optimal protein intake for humans across different ages, lifestyles, and health conditions. More research is needed. That is exactly the kind of scientific humility readers should expect from a review article.Unfortunately, humility does not generate clicks.The real lesson here has very little to do with protein. Next month it will be another nutrient. Next year it will be another supplement, another observational study, another review article. The pattern remains remarkably consistent. A hypothesis becomes a press release. The press release becomes headlines. The headlines become conventional wisdom, even scientific “fact.” Only years later, after better evidence accumulates, does the public discover that the original story was never nearly as certain as it sounded. We should have learned that lesson during COVID. Apparently, we are still learning it.That should concern every scientist.It should concern every physician.And it should concern every person who still believes medicine ought to be guided by evidence rather than headlines.JGMIf you’ve made it this far, thank you.One of the reasons we started writing on Substack was because we became convinced that the most important stories are often not the headlines themselves, but what lies beneath them. Reading the original papers, checking the references, separating evidence from interpretation, and following the science wherever it leads takes time. It is work that many newsrooms no longer have the resources, or sometimes the inclination, to do.That is what we try to provide here.If you value independent analysis that goes beyond the press release, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscriptions make this work possible. They allow us to spend days digging into the primary literature, filing FOIA requests, traveling to interview the people at the center of these stories, and publishing without advertisers or corporate sponsors dictating what can and cannot be covered.Subscribe nowIndependent journalism survives only because readers decide it is worth supporting.If you believe careful analysis still matters, I hope you’ll join us.JGM/RWM

Summary: And what this all actually means


Will Anthony Fauci's Pardon Hold Strong?

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHPlease enjoy this brief panel discussion where I am joined by two legal experts discussing the validity of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s preemptive pardon for potential crimes he committed for ten years.  Amir Beno is a former prosecutor and a constitutional law attorney and Grace Reilly is the host of Restoring America with Grace Reilly Podcast.Of, note on the ethics of Fauci using NIH resources to apply for and receive cash prizes during the pandemic, his wife, Christine Grady should be questioned.  She was the person responsible for breaches in NIH ethics during this time and technically would have either direct or have assigned oversight over her now disgraced husband.Dr Christine Grady was the chief bioethicist at the NIH Clinical Center — meaning she literally ran the ethics department for the nation's premier research hospital. Her husband, Anthony Fauci, was simultaneously raking in cash prizes during the pandemic, some approaching $1 million from foreign foundations. Rand Paul's committee released emails showing NIH staff — taxpayer-funded employees — helping assemble nomination packages and navigating ethics reviews for Fauci's awards. Grady's position created an obvious conflict: the chief bioethicist's spouse was enriching himself (and her) through prizes vetted by the very ethics apparatus she oversees.  She is currently enjoying a cushy job as senior advisor and professor at Georgetown.FOCAL POINTS (Courageous Discourse™) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth.AlterAImay be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHPresident,McCullough Foundation

Summary: NEWSMAX panel of experts McCullough, Beno, and Reilly weigh in


BREAKING--Dr Anthony Fauci Only Third Physician in History Held in Contempt of Congress

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHIt is very rare for physicians to conceal information from Congress.  Most doctors who are called to testify give veracious statements to the best of their ability.  Fauci is only the second doctor to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights before Congress and only the third physician to be held in contempt.🏛 Invoking the Right to Remain Silent🩺 Dr. Kevin O’Connor — July 2025Biden’s own White House physician. OnJuly 9, 2025, Dr. Kevin O’Connor appeared before the House Oversight Committee under subpoena for their investigation into Biden’s mental fitness during his presidency. He pled the Fifth and refused to answer questions — including whether he ever believed Biden was unfit for office and whether he was ever asked to lie about Biden’s health.His repeated line during the deposition:“I must respectfully decline to answer based on physician-patient privilege and the reliance of my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.”The committee had subpoenaed him after he declined a voluntary interview. His lawyer, David Schertler — who, incidentally,also represents Fauci— said O’Connor had “no choice” but to invoke the Fifth given the committee’s refusal to limit the scope of questioning. The deposition lasted about 20 minutes, with O’Connor sticking to his script the entire time.  There was no contempt vote and no consequences.🏛 Held in Contempt of Congress⚕ Dr. Edward Barsky (1947) — Physician by TrainingAnother case, though less direct:Dr. Edward Barsky, a surgeon, was convicted in 1947 under the criminal contempt statute (2 U.S.C. § 192) for refusing to produce subpoenaed documents to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He servedfive months in federal prison. New York then suspended his medical license for six months on the basis of that conviction — a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court (Barsky v. Board of Regents, 347 U.S. 442).The Supreme Court upheld the license suspension. Justice Black dissented, noting that Barsky’s offense involved “no moral turpitude whatever” and that he’d been exercising what he believed were constitutional rights. Sound familiar?🏛 The Most Direct Precedent: Dr. Miles Jones (1999)In 1999, the House of Representatives heldDr. Miles Jones, a pathologist by training, in contempt of Congress. He ran a company calledOpening Linesthat procured and sold human fetal tissue to researchers. The House Commerce Committee, then chaired by Rep. Tom Bliley, subpoenaed him to testify about whether fetal body parts were being bought and sold in violation of federal law (42 U.S.C. § 289g-2(a), which makes it a felony to knowingly acquire or transfer human fetal tissue for valuable consideration).Undercover video had captured Jones admitting to making up to$40,000 in a single weekbuying and selling fetal tissue, and explicitly stating that “market forces” — not actual costs — determined his prices. He was served a lawful subpoena and simplyrefused to appear. The House adopted a contempt resolution, and the case was referred for prosecution.  What Jones was facing — The statute carried a sentence of no less than one month and no more than one year in prison, plus fines up to $100,000.The Speaker’s certification was delivered to the U.S. Attorney General, but the DOJ did not take up action.🔬 How Fauci’s Case DiffersA few things make Fauci’s situation unusual:The pardon complication.Biden’s preemptive pardon in January 2025 covers federal prosecutions from 2014–2025, but contempt of Congress occurringafterthat date falls outside its scope. Rand Paul explicitly noted this during the hearing. Fauci’s lawyer called the whole thing a “crude political stunt.”Fifth Amendment invocation.Fauci pled the Fifthover 100 timesduring his testimony last week. That’s his constitutional right, but it also means he gave the committee nothing. The committee’s position is straightforward: a witness who’s already received a blanket pardon can’t credibly claim fear of self-incrimination for matters covered by that pardon, yet he refused to answer anyway.Party-line vote.The Homeland Security Committee voted8-7along party lines. Democrats filed five motions to delay the vote, all of which failed on identical party-line splits.The full Senate hurdle.Normally, contempt resolutions go to the full Senate and require 60 votes. Republicans hold 53 seats. Rand Paul bypassed the full Senate vote procedure, calling it a waste of time — but that may create procedural challenges if the DOJ decides to prosecute.📊 The Big PictureContempt of Congress prosecutions are genuinely rare. Before Bannon and Navarro got convicted and jailed in 2024, the last successful contempt convictions were back in the 1980s. Congress has asserted its contempt power since1795, but actual prosecutions leading to jail time are few and far between.Whether the DOJ under the current administration pursues charges against Fauci remains an open question. The committee referral is one thing — actual prosecution is another matter entirely, and historically, the Justice Department has been reluctant to act on congressional contempt referrals, especially in politically charged cases.Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth.AlterAImay be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHPresident, McCullough FoundationFOCAL POINTS has partnered withAlterAIto defend your medical freedom. Subscribe toAlterAItoday and get a discount on unbiased and accurate AI!

Summary: Implications of Fauci's action far more significant to Americans than his predecessors


Things Will Change Only When the People Learn to Recognize How Power Actually Works

For how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation. —Machiavelli,The PrincePerusing reader comments to my post this morning,Can a State Attorney General Successfully Prosecute Anthony Fauci?,it appears that many readers somehow (by some miracle of misinterpretation) managed to interpret the post as me stating that a State Attorney General should not prosecute Anthony Fauci.The point of the post is not to elucidate whether a state AGshouldprosecute, but the reality that doing so will face enormous hurdles, and that the proper venue for prosecuting him is federal court.The comments reminded me of the above passage fromThe Princein which Machiavelli touched on a key element of his (perfectly accurate) understanding of human nature.We suffer enormously in life from our expectation that people—and especially politicians—be steadfast, faithful, and virtuous in their conduct. A better way to live is accept that people are self-serving, hungry for gain, and avoidant of principled conduct that comes at a personal cost or impediment to the gain they seek. This isn’t cynicism—it’s absolute realism. In my opinion, Machiavelli was not a wicked man, but one of the wisest men who has ever lived.The US government is NOT in the business of serving the interests of We the People. It IS in the business of protecting and advancing the interests of the powerful oligarchs—the great lords of this earth—that it serves and enriches.For a decade I was under the mistaken impression that Donald Trump had arrived a point in his life in which he genuinely wanted to serve and to protect “We the People”—that is, the working and middle classes of this country who are not represented by a lobby or interest group in Washington.Since he was reelected for his second term, he has revealed himself to be—without a doubt—what you might call the “Oligarchian Candidate” or the “Epstein Class Candidate.” The fact that the Democrats challenged him with the raving imbecile Kamala Harris should be regarded as strong circumstantial evidence that they are in on the act.Kamala played a key role in the “race to the bottom” drama that led us to believe that Donald Trump was ouronly hope. Now that he is in office for his second term, we are facing major wars on multiple fronts, a doubling of the federal money sent to the military-industrial complex, accelerating national debt, unqualified support for the Great Lords of Tech who are rolling out AI with reckless abandon, and still no removal of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines from the market.Anthony Fauci’sentire missionduring the pandemic was to serve as the midwife of bringing mRNA technology into use on a global scale. This was theentire pointof Operation Warp Speed in all of its wild extravagance.Until President Trump publicly revises his assessment of Warp Speed and declares that it was the work of an organized crime syndicate (of which Fauci was the public face), there is no way his administration could even consider bringing Fauci to justice.This is the way thingsare, not how theyshould be, and until people recognize this, they will remain confused about how the US government actually works.Subscribe nowShare

Summary: The naive public remains in the dark because it insists on viewing Washington as it should be, and not how it actually is.


FDA APPROVES MODERNA’S FIRST-EVER mRNA FLU SHOT DESPITE 75.3% ADVERSE REACTION RATE

byNicolas Hulscher, MPHIn a dark day for MAHA, the FDA has approved Moderna’s mFLUSIVA for adults 50 and older, making it the first seasonal mRNA influenza injection authorized in the United States. Adults ages 50–64 received traditional approval, while adults 65 and older received accelerated approval based largely on antibody responses.TheFDA’s own briefing documentreveals that75.3% of senior mRNA-vaccine recipients experienced at least one solicited adverse reaction within seven days, compared with 49.3% of those receiving Fluzone High-Dose.Even more concerning,severe (Grade 3) systemic reactions occurred in 6.7% of mRNA recipients versus 1.7% with the traditional high-dose flu vaccine—nearly four times as frequently.Even worse, the pivotal efficacy trial containedno placebo group. Instead, Moderna compared mFLUSIVA against traditional flu vaccines.A novel mRNA injection produced adverse reactions in three out of four recipients, induced severe systemic reactions nearly four times as often as the traditional high-dose vaccine, lacked a placebo-controlled pivotal efficacy trial, and the FDA approved it anyway.Our regulatory agencies remain CAPTURED.Nicolas Hulscher, MPHEpidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough FoundationSupport our mission:mcculloughfnd.orgPlease consider following both theMcCullough Foundationandmy personal accountonX(formerly Twitter) for further content.FOCAL POINTS (Courageous Discourse™) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Summary: According to the FDA briefing document, severe systemic reactions were 4× MORE COMMON with the mRNA flu shot than with the traditional flu shot.


Can a State Attorney General Successfully Prosecute Anthony Fauci?

I woke up to a lot of texts and emails about Florida AG James Uthmeier’s announcement that he is launching a criminal probe into Anthony Fauci’s conduct. Instinctively, my first thought was that this is another species of the “Circus” component of the proverbial “Bread and Circus” means of distracting the plebs from the abuses of their ruling oligarchy.At the outset of this essay, I would like to reiterate my belief that Anthony Faucishouldbe prosecuted, and that federal court is the proper venue. In my recent interview with Alex Newman, I attempted to present my argument in the rhetorical style of a federal prosecutor’s summation of what I believe are the main elements of the crime. If the reader has not yet watched this interview, he will, I believe, find it compelling.A State Attorneys General has limited authority to prosecute Anthony Fauci for alleged state-law crimes allegedly committed during his tenure as NIAID director. State AG authority is subject to strict requirements of jurisdiction, a valid state offense, evidence, and the absence of Supremacy Clause immunity. This being the case, success in this matter faces substantial practical and legal hurdles.To be sure, Biden’s ridiculous “preemptive presidential pardon” covers only federal offenses and does not bar state prosecutions for distinct violations ofstate law.Under the dual-sovereignty doctrine, the same conduct can theoretically violate both federal and state law, allowing independent state action. Several state attorneys general (notably in Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana, with earlier interest from a broader group of Republican AGs) have publicly announced or joined investigations into possible state charges related to Fauci’s COVID-19 statements, funding decisions, or testimony (including depositions given to states). No charges have been filed as of the available information.State AGs possess standing to enforce their own criminal laws within the state’s territory. They cannot prosecute pure federal crimes such as lying to Congress under federal statutes.Any case requires identification of a specific state criminal statute (for example, perjury in a state deposition or proceeding, fraud, or other offenses under state law), admissible evidence of a violation, and personal jurisdiction over the defendant.Personal jurisdiction requires that the alleged offense occurred in the state or that the defendant has adequate minimum contacts with it.Purely federal policy advice or public statements originating from Washington, D.C., present significant jurisdictional challenges unless tied to concrete state-specific acts or harms that a court would recognize as establishing venue and jurisdiction.Even where a state offense and jurisdiction exist, federal officials enjoy Supremacy Clause immunity for actions that were authorized by federal law and “necessary and proper” to the performance of their official duties.This doctrine, rooted in the Supreme Court’s decision inIn re Neagle(1890) and subsequent case law, prevents states from using criminal prosecution to obstruct legitimate federal functions.Immunity is not absolute or blanket: it does not shield conduct outside the scope of federal duties, actions that violate federal law, or behavior that is unreasonable or egregious.Courts—often federal courts after removal of the case—decide these questions, frequently resolving factual disputes about reasonableness or authorization.Applied to Fauci, prosecution would require showing that particular acts constituted state crimes rather than discretionary federal public-health judgments, scientific communications, or congressional testimony.Allegations centered on disputed scientific advice, funding oversight, or statements about origins, masks, or lockdowns face high evidentiary and legal barriers.Claims of perjury based on “I do not recall” answers are notoriously difficult to sustain. Overcoming Supremacy Clause immunity would demand proof that the challenged conduct fell outside authorized federal responsibilities or was not necessary and proper—an uphill showing for actions taken in an official capacity during a purported national emergency.Procedural realities compound the difficulty: some state AGs lack unilateral charging authority and must coordinate with local prosecutors; any indictment could be removed to federal court; and statutes of limitations, evidentiary rules, and defense challenges would apply.To reiterate, I fear that all the hurly burly about Anthony Fauci in theForum Americanumis a distraction from the salient fact the Trump’s Attorney General isn’t doing it, and from the equally salient fact that Trump still touts the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines as one of the great achievements of his first term.Subscribe nowShare

Summary: I fear that Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier's publicized investigation of Anthony Fauci is a distraction from the fact the Trump's Attorney General isn't doing it.


BREAKING: SENATE COMMITTEE VOTES 8–5 TO HOLD ANTHONY FAUCI IN CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS

byNicolas Hulscher, MPHIn a major victory, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted8–5to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress. The vote followed Fauci’s refusal to answer more than 100 questions while testifying under subpoena, repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment despite receiving a sweeping autopen pardon from President Biden.Committee Chairman Rand Paul intends to send the committee’s criminal contempt recommendation and legal brief directly to the Department of Justice. Paul is pursuing this route rather than allowing the case to be buried by a likely filibuster or failed 60-vote battle on the Senate floor. The referral is expected to be reviewed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.If convicted of contempt of Congress, Fauci could face between one month and one year in prison.Contempt of Congress is only one small aspect of Fauci’s illicit activities. He forced deadly mRNA shots on millions through illegal mandates, suppressed life-saving treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, promoted lethal hospital protocols involving remdesivir and ventilators, imposed country-destroying lockdowns that devastated millions, oversaw the destruction of federal records, and funded gain-of-function experiments that contributed to the pandemic… before working to cover it up with the CIA.Nicolas Hulscher, MPHEpidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough FoundationSupport our mission:mcculloughfnd.orgPlease consider following both theMcCullough Foundationandmy personal accountonX(formerly Twitter) for further content.FOCAL POINTS (Courageous Discourse™) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Summary: Rand Paul will send the criminal contempt recommendation directly to the Department of Justice for potential prosecution.


Friday Funnies: People Will Die!

Bioethics, Fauci StyleWell, this is rather perfect.Christine Grady, Anthony Fauci’s wife and one of the most powerful bioethicists in the United States for nearly three decades, apparently has a new method for communicating with the American public.She flips them off.On Thursday, hours after the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 8-5 to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress, Fauci emerged from his $2.4 million Washington home looking decidedly unhappy and wheeled the recycling to the curb.It had been a rough day.Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times during congressional questioning. The committee then voted along party lines to hold him in contempt.Then came Mrs. Fauci.Fauci climbed into the passenger seat of a vehicle driven by Grady. As they pulled away, the NY Post photographer outside their home received an unmistakable one-finger salute from the former chief of the NIH Clinical Center’s Department of Bioethics.Yes.Bioethics.You really cannot make this stuff up.Grady is not some obscure academic who happened to marry a government bureaucrat. She began working at NIH in 1983, joined its Department of Bioethics when it was created in 1996, became chief in 2012, and spent decades writing and lecturing about informed consent, human-subject protections, vulnerability and research ethics. She also served seven years on the President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.All while married to Anthony Fauci, who ran NIAID from 1984 through 2022 and became arguably the most powerful public-health bureaucrat in America.To be precise, Grady did not approve Fauci’s research protocols or clear his financial conflicts. NIH says she had no such authority.Which raises the more interesting question.Who did?Fauci was a government inventor who received royalty payments. Yet under federal ethics rules, those government royalty payments are not, by themselves, legally considered a financial conflict of interest. NIH does concede that conducting research involving your own royalty-generating invention can create anapparentconflict requiring review.Only Washington could construct an ethics system in which receiving money from an invention connected to your government work is not necessarily a financial conflict. It may merely look exactly like one.And that leads to questions worth answering. Who wrote and approved those policies? What role, if any, did Grady or her bioethics department have in developing or defending them? Who reviewed Fauci’s royalty interests, and where are the recusals, waivers and conflict reviews?There is another question worth pursuing. Fauci’s own journal documents that he had staff devoted to identifying prestigious prizes and awards for which he might qualify, including awards from institutions with financial relationships with NIH. If so, who authorized that use of federal staff, and were those relationships ever subjected to ethics review?For decades, Washington had Anthony Fauci presiding over one enormous corner of the federal biomedical research establishment while his wife occupied one of the country’s most prestigious positions devoted to theethics of biomedical research.Nothing to see there.And now, after her husband invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination 111 times rather than answer congressional questions, America’s longtime grande dame of bioethics apparently decided that the appropriate response to public scrutiny was to extend her middle finger toward a camera.Rand Paul supplied the inevitable punchline:“Is that how you plead the Fifth in sign language?”At least this time, the communication from the Fauci household was remarkably clear.The Guardian is into doing satire now!Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareWho remembers this classic?“People will die!”JGMMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: Fauci's pathos


Who Is Spitting on Christians in Israel?

Audio Version:Who Is Spitting on Christians in IsraelThe wolf at the door, part five: notes from the Israeli frontierEarlier this month, a group of Israeli teenagers knocked on the door of the Armenian Apostolic Church headquarters in Jerusalem’s Old City. They asked whether there were Christians inside.They wanted to spit on them.The boys told a reporter that it was a mitzvah, a religious duty, to humiliate Christians, whom they called idol worshipers.That account appeared in theWall Street Journalon August 3 under the headline, “Spitting Attacks Show Rise of Anti-Christian Hate in Israel.” Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the piece a distortion of reality disguised as reporting, saying it had taken radical voices and extreme cases and turned them into the face of an entire country. The American ambassador, Mike Huckabee, said the paper should have called him.The story is now being weaponized against the country it is about. But simply dismissing the reporting as distorted does not answer the underlying question.Who is actually spitting on Christians in Israel?What is DocumentedThe spitting is real, it is increasing, and the people counting it are Jews.The Religious Freedom Data Center runs a hotline for Christians in Israel who have been harassed. It was founded and is directed by Yisca Harani, a Jewish Israeli scholar of Christianity, and is staffed by Jewish Israeli volunteers who provide documentation, accompaniment, and a protective presence for victims.The center documented 107 incidents in 2024 and 181 in 2025. By early June 2026, it had logged more than 88 incidents, with 63 in the second quarter alone, putting this year on pace to exceed last year’s total (Religious Freedom Data Center 2026).The incidents include spitting, verbal abuse, vandalism, desecration of graves, tombstones and crosses, stone-throwing, trespassing, garbage dumping, and arson. Most occur in the Old City, on Mount Zion, and along the route past the Armenian Patriarchate leading to the Jewish Quarter. Some have occurred at Christian sites in northern Israel.A separate Israeli organization, the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue, which works on relations among the country’s religious communities, documented 111 cases in its 2024 annual report, including 46 physical attacks and 35 attacks on church property (Rossing Center 2025).These are two independent Israeli organizations, counting separately and documenting the same problem.Datasets that combine unlike things into a single number and then circulate that number as though every incident were equivalent deserve skepticism. I have made that argument about other datasets, and the same standard applies here.But it does not make this problem disappear. Throw out every ambiguous case, and the trend remains. Christians are still being spat on, harassed, and their churches and religious sites vandalized.Who is Doing the SpittingThe reporting is more specific than the headlines, and two communities appear repeatedly. They are not the same community.Most documented incidents involve Haredi youths and men. CNN obtained video of two young ultra-Orthodox men spitting at, swearing at, and kicking Father Nikodemus Schnabel near Zion Gate. One told bystanders he did it because Schnabel was a Christian (CNN 2024). TheTimes of Israeldocumented Haredi men and boys, some of them children, spitting at a Christian procession after watching an adult do it first. Channel 12 aired footage of young men in black hats and suits, several carrying prayer shawls.One community inside the Old City comes up again and again. Participants at a forum on the problem placed much of the blame on the Zilbermans, a Lithuanian Haredi community of roughly three hundred families whose approach to Torah study incorporates right-wing Zionist ideas. Tammy Lavi of the Jerusalem Intercultural Center told the same forum that at least half of the Friday Armenian processions are disrupted by spitting, cursing, or people deliberately walking through the ceremony. A right-wing city councilor and a deputy mayor went to speak with the Zilberman rabbis about their students, apparently to little effect (Times of Israel2023a).But it is not only Haredim. TheJerusalem Postdescribes offenders as both ultra-Orthodox and National-Religious youths. The Religious Freedom Data Center’s surveillance footage attributes attacks to ultra-nationalist and ultra-Orthodox Jews. And when five people were arrested in October 2023, Channel 12 reported that some were students of Rabbi Natan Rothman, brother of Religious Zionism Knesset member Simcha Rothman. That is a Religious Zionist yeshiva, not a Haredi one (Times of Israel2023b).Two things need to be said immediately.First, the numbers are small. Three hundred families and a scattering of yeshiva students are not a country. And the Christians being spat on are overwhelmingly Armenian and Arab, not American.Second, the leadership of the Haredi world has not defended this behavior. When the October 2023 video circulated, Haredi politicians joined in condemning it and rejected the claim that spitting on Christians is either a Jewish tradition or a religious duty. Netanyahu condemned it as well.The question is whether anyone will actually be charged.Malone News is reader-supported. No advertisers, no institutional funders, and nobody to tell us which facts are inconvenient. If you want more work like this, a paid subscription is the entire business model.The Minister Who Defended ItIn 2017, when an earlier wave of harassment against Christians made the news, a settler activist and lawyer named Itamar Ben Gvir gave a radio interview defending the practice of spitting at Christian monks and churches. He called it an ancient Jewish tradition, said he did not think it constituted a violation, and asked why anyone would turn the matter into a criminal one (Washington Post2026).That has essentially remained his position for nearly a decade.In 2015, Jewish extremists set fire to the Church of the Multiplication on the Sea of Galilee, where the Gospels place the feeding of the five thousand. Nikodemus Schnabel, now abbot of Dormition Abbey, attended the trial. What stayed with him was the attorney defending the arsonists.The attorney was Ben Gvir.Ben Gvir is now Israel’s Minister of National Security, and the police answer to him.He has not revised his position since taking the portfolio. After five men were arrested in October 2023 for spitting at Christians and churches, the police minister said publicly that the offense was not criminal.His own Jerusalem District contradicted him on the radio. Chief Superintendent Assaf Harel told Army Radio that spitting on somebody is certainly assault, and that seventeen such incidents had been reported in the preceding six months (Times of Israel2023b).A sitting police minister telling the country that an offense is not an offense, while his own district commander publicly says that it is, gets very close to the heart of the problem.Nothing about this requires inference. A man who publicly defended the conduct in 2017 now holds the portfolio responsible for policing it. The record of enforcement is not encouraging.The Israel Religious Action Center is the legal and advocacy arm of the Reform Jewish movement in Israel. Of twenty-five complaints it filed between 2012 and 2021, nineteen were closed because the suspect could not be found, no offense was deemed to have been committed, or the case was considered unsuitable for investigation (Israel Religious Action Center 2026).Harani puts the consequence plainly. If there is no enforcement, it is a green light to do it again.That distinction matters. A small number of people committing these acts is not evidence of some general Israeli hostility toward Christians. But when the state repeatedly fails to enforce its own laws, and the minister responsible for the police has himself defended the conduct, it becomes more than a story about the people doing the spitting.It becomes a story about whether the government is willing to stop them.Why Nobody Stops ItAn American reader will reasonably ask why a government that condemns this behavior does not simply prosecute it. To understand the answer, you have to understand how Israeli coalition politics works.Israel has 120 Knesset seats and no electoral districts. There are no constituencies, no primaries in the American sense, and no individual candidate whose name appears on the national ballot. Voters choose a party list, seats are allocated roughly in proportion to the national vote, and any party clearing the 3.25 percent threshold enters the Knesset. It takes sixty-one seats to form a government.No party has ever won sixty-one. Not once in seventy-eight years. Every Israeli government has therefore been a coalition, which gives smaller parties enormous influence when neither major bloc can govern without them.Two of those parties represent the Haredi world. United Torah Judaism is Ashkenazi, an alliance of the Hasidic Agudat Yisrael and the Lithuanian Degel HaTorah, and holds seven seats. Shas is Sephardi and Mizrahi, led by Aryeh Deri, and answers to a Council of Torah Sages. Together, the Haredi parties have typically controlled fifteen to eighteen seats.Several things give those seats considerably more political weight than the numbers suggest.Historically, Haredi parties have been willing to join governments of both the left and the right. They joined Ehud Barak’s government in 1999, for example, although United Torah Judaism later resigned over electrical work on the Sabbath and Shas left amid disputes with Barak’s government. The ability to negotiate with competing blocs gives a small party considerably more leverage than one permanently attached to a single side.Their political demands are also relatively concentrated. Foreign policy and the peace process have traditionally mattered less to them than yeshiva funding, rabbinic authority over marriage and conversion, Sabbath observance, and, above all, exemption from military conscription. These are the issues on which their participation in a coalition is negotiated.They are also remarkably disciplined voting blocs. Their Knesset members generally follow party and rabbinic leadership, which gives a prime minister a degree of certainty that is much harder to obtain from a less cohesive coalition partner.And they are growing. Haredim make up roughly an eighth of Israel’s population and have a fertility rate substantially above the national average. Their political importance is therefore unlikely to diminish.The Haredi exemption from military conscription dates back to the founding years of the Israeli state. Ben-Gurion granted exemptions in 1949 to about four hundred yeshiva students, partly out of concern for preserving a world of Torah scholarship nearly destroyed in Europe. What began as an accommodation for a few hundred men grew enormously over the following decades. Roughly sixty-three thousand young Haredi men are now eligible for conscription, and the exemption has become one of the most consequential disputes in Israeli coalition politics.The nearest American comparison is imperfect, but useful. Imagine a religious voting bloc representing roughly an eighth of the country, represented by parties that vote with extraordinary discipline and can determine whether a governing coalition survives. Now imagine that the issue its leadership cares about most is an exemption that successive governments have struggled for decades to resolve.That begins to explain the political leverage.It also begins to explain why a problem everyone publicly condemns can remain remarkably difficult to stop.The Last Two YearsIn June 2024, all nine justices of Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that there was no legal basis for exempting yeshiva students from conscription, that the arrangement was unconstitutional, and that the state was gravely undermining the principle that all persons stand equal before the law. The court ordered conscription to begin and funding to be withdrawn from noncompliant yeshivas (Israel Supreme Court 2024).The coalition has spent the two years since trying to legislate around that ruling.In July 2025, United Torah Judaism resigned from the government over the delay, and Shas followed the next day, leaving Netanyahu with sixty-one seats. Both parties continued supporting him on critical votes, allowing them to distance themselves from the government without immediately bringing it down.In January 2026, Shas announced that it would oppose the budget unless an exemption bill passed (Times of Israel2026). In May, the spiritual head of Degel HaTorah said he had lost confidence in Netanyahu and instructed his members to work toward dissolving the Knesset (Al Jazeera 2026). In June, the party boycotted coalition votes altogether while police arrested draft evaders and Haredi protesters blocked roads in Bnei Brak (Jerusalem Post2026). Israel votes in October.This matters to the question of Christian harassment because the young men responsible for many of the documented incidents come from a community whose exemption from military service has consumed Israeli politics for the past two years and may yet bring down the government.The ministry responsible for policing them belongs to a different partner in the same coalition, whose leader has said publicly that spitting on Christians is not a criminal offense.That does not require a conspiracy or an explicit agreement to look the other way. It requires only a coalition government with almost no room to lose votes, dependent upon small religious parties whose support is necessary for its survival.That is the political environment in which these cases are being handled. The prime minister condemns the behavior. Haredi leaders condemn it. Police officials acknowledge that spitting on someone can constitute assault. Yet complaints continue to be closed without suspects identified or charges brought.The problem is not that Israel has decided spitting on Christians is acceptable. The problem is that condemnation has not been followed by consistent enforcement. This is the reason a country that condemns an offense at the level of the prime minister still has nineteen complaints out of twenty-five with no suspect found.The Ambassador’s LetterHuckabee wrote a letter a year ago that reads rather differently from his response to theJournal.On July 16, he wrote to Israel’s Interior Minister, Moshe Arbel, about the treatment of Christian organizations by the Israeli visa department. The letter later leaked to the Israeli press. In it, Huckabee described discrimination against Christian ministries since the start of 2025, naming the Baptist Convention of Israel, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and the Assemblies of God among the groups placed under investigation. He wrote that these organizations felt they were being treated as adversaries.Huckabee went considerably further than expressing concern. He threatened to announce publicly throughout the United States that the State of Israel was no longer welcoming Christian organizations, to tell American Christians that their contributions were being met with hostility, to issue travel advisories, and to pursue reciprocal treatment of Israelis seeking American visas.That is the same ambassador now saying theJournalshould have called him.I do not read that contradiction as dishonesty. I read it as the behavior of a friend who applies pressure privately and defends publicly, which is hardly unusual in diplomacy.But the letter matters. Huckabee himself was sufficiently concerned about the treatment of Christians in Israel to threaten public criticism, travel advisories, and reciprocal visa restrictions. His criticism of theJournaldoes not erase what he wrote to the Israeli government a year earlier.The Other Side of the LedgerEverything above is true. So is everything below.Israel’s Christian population stood at roughly 184,200 at the end of 2025, about 1.9 percent of the country, and it has grown from about 34,000 in 1948. The country counts around 300 churches, roughly double the number at independence (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics 2025; Fox News 2026).The situation in the rest of the Middle East is the complete opposite. Christians were something on the order of twenty percent of the Middle East a century ago and are now under two percent. Iraq’s Christian community has been reduced to a remnant. Syria’s has collapsed. Lebanon’s has emigrated. Turkey’s was destroyed.Against that history, Israel stands apart. Its Christian population has grown rather than disappeared.In April 2026, Israel created a new post, Special Envoy to the Christian World, and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar appointed George Deek to it. Deek is an Arab Christian from Jaffa, a veteran of eighteen years in the foreign service, and previously Israel’s first Christian ambassador, serving in Azerbaijan. His father chaired the Orthodox Christian community of Jaffa (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2026). No other country has created an equivalent diplomatic position.Deek’s own summary of why the job exists is the regional one. He describes the ethnic cleansing of the Middle East of its Christians, and says the places that once held thriving Christian communities have been reduced to nothing.And then there is the government’s response to the harassment described earlier. Israeli officials have repeatedly condemned these incidents when they occur. Police have made arrests, including after the recent incident at the Armenian church. When police blocked Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and the senior Roman Catholic authority in the Holy Land, along with other senior clergy, from a Palm Sunday service at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher under wartime restrictions, Netanyahu intervened personally to grant full and immediate access. When an Israeli soldier took a sledgehammer to a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon, he and the soldier who filmed it were pulled from combat operations and jailed for thirty days.None of that is the behavior of a state hostile to Christianity. It is the behavior of a state with a problem it is handling unevenly.Both Things Can Be TrueThe Foreign Ministry’s response was that theJournalhad distorted the situation, sought out Christians most willing to condemn Israel, and presented their experiences as representative of the country. It pointed to Israel’s nearly two hundred thousand Christians as evidence of a very different reality.There is truth in that response. But it does not answer the teenagers at the door.When documented harassment occurs, arguing about whether the reporting fairly represents Israel is not a substitute for dealing with the people responsible for it. The government can object to the framing of theJournalarticle and still acknowledge that enforcement has been inadequate.The people using the story against Israel make the opposite error. They take the conduct of a small and identifiable group of extremists and present it as evidence of how Israelis, or Jews more broadly, treat Christians.The evidence does not support that conclusion either.What it does support is more specific. A relatively small number of religious extremists have repeatedly harassed Christians, particularly in and around Jerusalem’s Old City. Israeli political and religious leaders have condemned the behavior, but enforcement has been inconsistent. And the minister ultimately responsible for the police has himself publicly questioned whether spitting on Christians should be treated as a criminal offense.That is a serious indictment of the way this problem has been handled, and particularly of the minister responsible for policing it.It is not an indictment of Israelis as a people.That distinction is largely missing from what is now circulating on American podcasts and social media.Who is Actually Being Spat OnThe people being harassed in the Old City are overwhelmingly Armenian and Greek Orthodox clergy, along with Arab Christians who are Israeli citizens. Seventy-nine percent of Israel’s Christians are Arabs. These are not American evangelicals.American Christian Zionists are, if anything, among the most welcomed foreign Christians in Israel. Jill and I spent an afternoon this summer with young Americans who have been pruning vines in Samaria for twenty years. The state gave them rifles, and the Knesset gave their organization an award. I will have more to say about them on Monday.So when an American Christian reads about Christians being spat on in Jerusalem and takes the hostility as directed toward Christians like themselves, an important distinction is being lost. The person on the receiving end is much more likely to be an Armenian monk whose community has been in that quarter for sixteen centuries, or an Arab Christian whose family has lived there for generations.That does not make the harassment any less ugly. But it does matter if we are trying to understand who is doing it, who is being targeted, and why.The Case Tucker Carlson is MakingCarlson has been building this argument for two years, and by now the specifics are on the record.On April 9, 2024, he interviewed Munther Isaac, a Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem, in a conversation that attributed the collapse of Bethlehem’s Christian population largely to Israeli persecution. On February 4, 2026, Carlson interviewed Hosam Naoum, the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem, under the title “The Shocking Reality of the Treatment of Christians in the Holy Land by US-Funded Israel.” He has since interviewed a Palestinian-American minister from Beit Sahour, a largely Christian town beside Bethlehem, and pressed Ambassador Huckabee directly on Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Christians. In February, Carlson also said he had been detained at Ben Gurion Airport, an account Israeli officials disputed and which the Orthodox Jewish outlet Aish contested in detail (Aish 2026).Some of what Carlson is reporting is true. Palestinian Christians in the West Bank face real hardships. Bethlehem’s Christian community has declined dramatically over decades. Huckabee’s own letter, quoted above, shows that the Israeli visa bureaucracy treated American Christian ministries badly enough for the American ambassador to threaten the Israeli government with travel advisories and reciprocal visa restrictions.Carlson did not invent those facts.The problem is what he does with them.There are three problems with the case he is building, beginning with his method.The February interview was filmed in Jordan. Carlson produced an hour-long program about the treatment of Christians in the Holy Land from another country. The Christians whose treatment was supposedly being investigated live in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Beit Sahour, Ramallah, Nazareth and elsewhere in Israel and the West Bank. Yet the program was not reported from those communities.That is an odd way to investigate a claim this serious.The second problem is more consequential because it goes to the substance of Carlson’s argument. He repeatedly blurs the distinction between Palestinian Christians living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Christian citizens of Israel. Those are two populations living under fundamentally different legal systems and political circumstances.This criticism does not come only from defenders of Israel. Mondoweiss, the American news site founded by journalist Philip Weiss and explicitly hostile to Zionism, has made essentially the same point. Carlson frequently drops the word “Palestinian” and speaks instead about “Christians in Israel,” merging populations whose legal circumstances are profoundly different. The grievances he cites concerning Palestinian Christians are largely the same grievances made by Palestinian Muslims living in the same places, subject to the same checkpoints, permits and restrictions (Mondoweiss 2026).That distinction changes the argument.If Palestinian Christians are being subjected to the same restrictions as their Palestinian Muslim neighbors, then the discrimination at issue is based on nationality and territorial status, not Christianity. One can condemn the occupation, the checkpoints, the permit system, settlement policy, or Israeli control of the West Bank as harshly as one wishes. Those are legitimate subjects for argument.But they are not evidence that Israel is persecuting Palestinians because they are Christians.Carlson turns one argument into the other, and in doing so makes the issue personal for millions of American Christians. The message becomes: Israel is persecutingyour fellow Christians.The evidence he presents does not establish that.The third problem is the population itself. If Israel were systematically persecuting Christians because they are Christians, one would expect some evidence of that persecution in the demographic trajectory of Christians who actually live as Israeli citizens.Instead, Israel’s Christian population stands at roughly 184,000 and increased again in the most recent year. Meanwhile, the Christian share of the broader Middle East has fallen from roughly twenty percent a century ago to under two percent today.Open Doors, an international Christian organization that publishes an annual ranking of the fifty countries where Christians face the most extreme persecution, placed eight Muslim-majority countries in its 2026 top ten. Israel does not appear on the list (Open Doors 2026; Media Line 2026).None of this excuses the spitting in Jerusalem. It does not excuse Ben Gvir’s statements, failures of police enforcement, problems with visas for Christian organizations, or legitimate Palestinian Christian grievances. Those facts should be reported, and I have spent much of this essay reporting them.But they do not establish the case Carlson is making.He is taking documented abuses involving different people, different jurisdictions and different causes, combining them under the heading of Christian persecution, and presenting the resulting picture to an overwhelmingly American Christian audience.A theory that predicts Israeli Christians should be fleeing, in a country where they are increasing, and that ignores the countries where Christians actually are fleeing, is not a theory about Christians.Christian Antisemitism: When it Stops Being About IsraelOn April 15, 2026, Carlson was criticizing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism when he came to its treatment of the ancient charge that Jews collectively killed Jesus.“It also tells us that the suggestion that Jews killed Jesus is, quote, ‘classic antisemitism,’” Carlson said. “So there goes the New Testament. The whole New Testament is antisemitic too.”He then added: “Read the Gospels and see if they fall under that definition. They do.”The issue is not whether particular Jewish authorities appear in the Gospel accounts of the events leading to the crucifixion. They plainly do.The deicide charge is something much broader: the claim that Jews collectively, as a people and across generations, bear responsibility for killing Christ.That accusation has been used for centuries to justify persecution and violence against Jews. Christian churches have spent decades repudiating collective Jewish guilt for the crucifixion. The Catholic Church did so formally inNostra Aetatein 1965.That is the deicide charge, and it is the oldest engine of Christian violence against Jews there is. Churches have spent sixty years repudiating it. The Catholic Church did so formally in 1965.And this is where Carlson’s argument crosses a very different line. Criticizing the Israeli government, including its treatment of Palestinian Christians, is not antisemitic. Documenting harassment of Christians by religious Jews is not antisemitic. Neither is condemning Ben Gvir or the failure of Israeli police to prosecute offenders.But invoking collective Jewish responsibility for the death of Christ belongs to a long history of Christian antisemitism. Whatever Carlson intended by the remark, that history does not disappear because the comment occurs in the middle of an argument about Israel.I do not know whether Carlson understands the history of the claim he is repeating. His audience evidently includes a great many Christians who may not understand it either.What Would Actually Fix ItArrests, prosecutions, and a minister who wants them.The Israeli organizations documenting this problem have been quite clear about what they need, and it is not another statement of sympathy. Harani and her volunteers want complaints filed, investigations opened, suspects identified, and charges brought. Without consistent enforcement, there is little reason for the people doing this to stop.This is, ultimately, a police problem. And it is a problem Israel is entirely capable of solving.The difficulty is political. Enforcing the law against members of a community whose political representatives can determine whether a government survives is considerably harder than condemning their behavior in a press release. That does not excuse the failure to enforce the law. It helps explain why the failure has persisted.American Christians who care about this should demand enforcement. Ask the question publicly and in writing, as Huckabee did privately. Ask how many complaints were filed, how many investigations were opened, how many suspects were identified, and how many people were actually charged. Do not accept another statement about Israel’s respect for religious freedom as an answer to a question about whether someone who spits on a Christian monk will be prosecuted.But American Christians who are being told that Jews hate them should also pay attention to who is documenting these attacks.The most complete record of anti-Christian harassment in Israel is being compiled by a Jewish Israeli woman and Jewish Israeli volunteers who document the incidents, accompany victims, and provide a protective presence at Christian churches and processions.They are Jews protecting Christians from other Jews.That fact rarely makes it into the podcasts.It may be the most important fact in this story.RWM/JGMYou can get the flattering version of this story free in a dozen places, and the hostile version free in a dozen more. The version that concedes what is true on both sides is the more difficult one to produce, and paid subscribers are why it exists. Malone News takes no advertising and answers to no institution.ReferencesAl Jazeera. 2026. “How Ultra-Orthodox Recruitment Could Unseat Netanyahu in Israeli Elections.” May 16.Anti-Defamation League. 2026.Tucker Carlson. Backgrounder. New York, May 5.Aish. 2026. “Tucker Carlson’s Lies About Jews and Israel.” February 19.CNN. 2024. “Ultra-Orthodox Man Seen Spitting at Christian Priest in Jerusalem.” February 4.Fox News. 2026. “Meet the Man Israel Chose to Be Its First-Ever Ambassador to the Christian World.” June 21.Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 2025.Christians in Israel: Selected Data on the Occasion of Christmas. Jerusalem, December.Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 2026.Appointment of Special Envoy to the Christian World. Jerusalem, April 23.Israel Religious Action Center. 2026.Complaints Concerning Harassment of Christians, 2012 to 2021. Presented to the Religious Freedom Conference, Jerusalem, June 4.The Media Line. 2026. “Fact-Checking Tucker Carlson’s Portrayal of Christians in the Holy Land.” February 12.Mondoweiss. 2026. “Tucker Carlson’s Criticism of Israel Misses the Point.” February 27.Israel Supreme Court. 2024.Judgment on the Conscription of Yeshiva Students. Jerusalem, June 25.The Jerusalem Post. 2026. “Ultra-Orthodox Party Holds Knesset Hostage over Draft Exemption Bills.” June 29.Open Doors. 2026.World Watch List. Santa Ana, CA.Religious Freedom Data Center. 2026.Documented Incidents Against Christians in Israel. Jerusalem, June 4.Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue. 2025.Annual Report on Attacks Against Christians, 2024. Jerusalem.The Times of Israel. 2023a. “Old City Spitting Videos Underscore Troubling Reality for Christian Clergy.” April 17.The Times of Israel. 2023b. “5 Arrested for Spitting at Christians in Jerusalem; Police Minister: It’s Not Criminal.” October 4.The Times of Israel. 2026. “Israel Appoints First Special Envoy to Christian World After Scandals Strain Ties.” April 23.The Times of Israel. 2026. “Shas Vows to Oppose 2026 Budget Unless Coalition Passes Haredi Draft Exemption Bill.” January 4.The Wall Street Journal. 2026. “Spitting Attacks Show Rise of Anti-Christian Hate in Israel.” August 3.The Washington Post. 2026. “As Christians Are Attacked in Israel, Government Shows Little Concern.” July 5.