The Court Physician of the Therapeutic State

A note before the reckoningI have been asked many times what to read to understand how American biomedical science was captured. People expect me to recommend a virology textbook, or perhaps a regulatory primer. I do not. I tell them to read Murray Rothbard.Rothbard, the late Austrian-school economist and libertarian theorist, never wrote about Anthony Fauci. He died in 1995, when Dr. Fauci had been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for only eleven years and was still mostly known to those of us inside the AIDS-research community. But Rothbard had spent his career describing, with unusual analytical clarity, the precise machinery that would, over the following three decades, produce the figure of Fauci, and the catastrophe of 2020. He gave us the diagnostic vocabulary before we knew we needed it.I write this essay as a participant-observer. I was there at the Salk Institute in the late 1980s. I conceived of the underlying mRNA platform technology that was eventually deployed, against my warnings, in the Operation Warp Speed countermeasures. I sat in NIH working groups during the early COVID response. I watched colleagues I had known for decades reinvent themselves as compliance officers for a narrative. And I watched, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has documented exhaustively inThe Real Anthony FauciandThe Wuhan Cover-Up, the deliberate construction of a pharmaceutical-biosecurity apparatus that has now metastasized through every organ of the federal research enterprise.Rothbard would not have been surprised. He would have been grim, but not surprised. What follows is my attempt to read these two manuscripts (the public record they assemble, and the half-century of institutional decay they describe) through the lens he handed us.I. Scientism is not scienceRothbard drew a distinction that almost no one in our public conversation can hold in their head for more than a sentence at a time.Science, in the older sense ofscientia, correct knowledge, is the human activity of inquiring honestly into the structure of reality.Scientismis the use of the prestige of science to compel obedience. The first is a method. The second is a posture. The first proceeds by conjecture, falsification, and replication. The second proceeds by accreditation, gatekeeping, and excommunication.For most of his career, Dr. Fauci was the most powerful working practitioner of scientism in the world. I want to be precise about this charge. I am not saying he was uneducated, or that he never did legitimate science as a young clinician. I am saying that the role he occupied for thirty-eight years at NIAID, and the manner in which he occupied it, was structurally incompatible with science as a free inquiry. The role was a priestly one. The famous formulation, “attacks on me are really attacks on science,” was not a slip of the tongue. It was a precise statement of his self-understanding, and an unintentionally perfect illustration of Rothbard’s distinction. A scientist welcomes attacks; that is what a scientistis. Only a priest of scientism can find a personal critique to be a sacrilege.The Kennedy manuscripts document this priestly posture in extraordinary granularity: the suppression of repurposed therapeutics during the COVID period; the campaign against any clinician (Kory, McCullough, Risch, Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and yes, myself among many others) who proposed alternative hypotheses; the orchestration of theLancetandNature Medicinestatements on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 to short-circuit a debate that had not yet happened. This is not how science behaves. This is how a magisterium behaves.Rothbard’s contribution was to insist that scientism is the natural product of a particular institutional arrangement. Wherever you place a single bureaucracy in charge of allocating research funding for an entire scientific field, you will, eventually, get scientism. You will not get it because the bureaucrat is wicked. You will get it because the incentive gradients of the position itself reward conformity, public-relations management, and the suppression of paradigm-threatening lines of inquiry. The institution selects for the disposition. Fauci is what the chair he sat in produces.II. The political economy of NIAIDHere is the part of Rothbard that mainstream commentators have never been able to absorb, and that Kennedy’s books finally make legible to a broader public: the National Institutes of Health is not a neutral funder of the scientific community. It is amonopsony. It is the dominant (in many subfields, the only) buyer of biomedical research labor in the United States. And like all monopsonies, it sets the terms.A word on the term, because it is unfamiliar to most readers and indispensable to what follows.Monopolyis the condition in which a single seller controls a market and can therefore set the price at which goods are sold.Monopsonyis its mirror image: a singlebuyercontrols the market and can therefore set the price at which goods, services, or labor arepurchased. The word comes from the Greekmonos(single) andopsōnia(purchasing of provisions). The classical examples are a coal-mining town with one mining company that hires every available miner, or a defense ministry that is the only legal buyer of fighter jets. In each case the buyer is not constrained by competition, because there is no competition; the seller, whether a worker or a manufacturer, must accept the buyer’s terms or exit the field entirely. NIH, and within NIH the NIAID Fauci built, occupies precisely this structural position with respect to American biomedical researchers. There is, for most subfields and most career stages, no realistic alternative funder. A young virologist who wishes to do virology in the United States either receives an NIH grant or finds another line of work. The buyer dictates not only price but the substantive direction of inquiry: what may be studied, what may be published, and what conclusions may be safely reached.Rothbard’s analysis of state R&D was elementary: when the price system is replaced by political allocation, you do not get a better outcome than the market would have produced. You get a different outcome: one that reflects the preferences of the political allocator rather than the preferences of the patients, clinicians, and curious investigators who would have constituted the market. State science does not fail because bureaucrats are stupid. It fails because their feedback signal is wrong. They are graded by Congress, by the press, by the pharmaceutical lobby, and by their own professional networks. They are not graded by whether the research they fund actually heals anyone.Run this analysis through the Fauci-era NIAID and the picture is devastating. Kennedy documents (and the inventories of NIH grants confirm) that under Fauci’s tenure the agency’s portfolio shifted decisively toward two priorities: vaccines (especially novel-platform vaccines with patent protections) and “biodefense” (especially gain-of-function work on potential pandemic pathogens). It shiftedawayfrom chronic-disease etiology, toxicology, environmental medicine, nutrition, and the hard work of asking why the post-1986 American child is so much sicker than the pre-1986 American child. Kennedy’s marshalling of the data on this point is unanswerable: the explosion of allergic, autoimmune, neurodevelopmental, and metabolic disease in the cohort that grew up under Fauci’s NIAID is a public-health catastrophe whose causes the responsible agency has shown no interest in investigating. Rothbard would have predicted this exactly. The chronic-disease question has no patentable answer; therefore the institution has no incentive to ask it.The shift toward biodefense is the more sinister half of the story, and Kennedy’sWuhan Cover-Upis the indispensable text. After the 2001 anthrax letters (a domestic event whose attribution remains contested, and whose immediate political effect was to install the biosecurity faction at the commanding heights of public-health policy) Project BioShield (2004) and the subsequent Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act (2006) re-routed roughly a third of NIAID’s annual budget into work that was, for all functional purposes, a continuation of the offensive bioweapons program that Richard Nixon had ordered shuttered in 1969. The fig leaf was that this work was now “defensive”: that one builds enhanced pandemic pathogens in order to study how to defeat them. Rothbard would have laughed bitterly at this. He understood, as anyone who has studied the history of arms races understands, that there is no operational distinction between an offensive and a defensive bioweapons program. The molecular biology is identical. The distinction lives entirely in the press release.What we got, in exchange for the abandonment of the chronic-disease research mission, was the construction of a sprawling network of BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities; a research pipeline that (as the Kennedy manuscript shows in painful detail) funneled American taxpayer money through EcoHealth Alliance to coronavirus gain-of-function work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; and a single man, sitting at the top of a chain of command no one had ever explicitly authorized, with personal decision-making authority over the trajectory of a globally consequential research program.This is what Rothbard meant by thepartnershipof state and corporate power. Not a conspiracy, not a smoke-filled room, but the slow accretion of overlapping interests until the regulator and the regulated and the funder and the contractor and the journal editor and the press officer have become, functionally, a single organism with a single appetite.III. Agency capture, invertedRothbard’s most-cited contribution to the political economy of regulation is the observation that regulatory agencies, over time, almost always come to serve the industries they were created to constrain. The classic case is the Interstate Commerce Commission, captured by the railroads it was built to regulate. The mechanism is straightforward: the regulated industry has concentrated, intense, persistent interest in the agency’s decisions; the public has diffuse, episodic, weak interest. The industry hires the staff, supplies the expertise, funds the conferences, and offers the post-government employment. Capture is not a moral failure. It is a thermodynamic inevitability of the institutional design.What Kennedy documents (and what I can confirm from the inside of the system) is that NIAID under Fauci represented a particularly advanced form of capture. The agency captured the industry as much as the industry captured the agency. The traffic of personnel, intellectual property, and money among NIH, the major pharmaceutical houses, the Gates philanthropies, the academic medical centers, and the rotating Defense-Department-adjacent biosecurity consultancies was so dense and so reciprocal that the language of “capture” almost understates the case. There was no longer an agency and an industry; there was a single ecosystem with multiple feeding stations.The royalty arrangements alone would have ended Rothbard’s patience with the entire arrangement. The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, and the subsequent Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986, created the legal infrastructure by which federal scientists, including those at NIH, could collect royalty payments on patents derived from research conducted on the public dime. By the COVID era, dozens of NIH scientists were named on patents associated with vaccine technologies their own agency was simultaneously evaluating and promoting. Fauci himself, according to the documentation Kennedy assembles, was a co-inventor on multiple HIV-related patents and stood as the most highly compensated employee of the entire United States federal government: better paid than the President, the Chief Justice, and any general officer of the armed forces. None of this is hidden. None of it is illegal. All of it is exactly what Rothbard described: the formal apparatus of the state being repurposed, lawfully and transparently, into a private rent-extraction mechanism for a credentialed elite.IV. The court intellectualRothbard inherited from Bertrand de Jouvenel and Albert Jay Nock a piece of vocabulary that is indispensable for understanding the Fauci phenomenon: thecourt intellectual. Every regime, throughout history, requires a class of credentialed apologists whose social function is to translate the regime’s interests into the language of disinterested truth. In feudal Europe these were the scholastics; under absolutism they were the royal historians; under Soviet Marxism they were Lysenko and his peers; in the contemporary American imperium they are, predominantly, certain figures within the public-health bureaucracy, the major-university health-policy faculties, and the prestige science press.Anthony Fauci is the apex specimen of this archetype. He was not, let us be honest, a serious bench scientist for most of the period of his greatest cultural authority. His function was to incarnate the prestige of science in service of the state’s preferred narrative, and to deploy that prestige against any dissenter who threatened to disrupt the narrative. Consider the fifty-eight honorary degrees, the named buildings, the Saturday Night Live impersonations, the bobblehead dolls. None of these are the trappings of a research scientist. They are the regalia of a court intellectual. Even his post-government appointment to a distinguished professorship at Georgetown, with a joint posting in a school of public policy, makes the role transparent: he is being installed where court intellectuals are properly housed, in an institution that produces the next generation of regime explainers.This matters because court intellectuals are not, in the relevant sense, replaceable. Once installed, they become load-bearing. Their displacement requires more than the election of a new administration; it requires what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift, and what Rothbard, drawing on his own historical study, called ade-legitimation. Whether one is underway right now (in the small but growing number of state attorneys general willing to sue, the federal indictments of former Fauci advisers for concealment of communications, the rescission of his personal security detail, the slow erosion of public trust in the institutions he came to symbolize) is for the historians to judge in twenty years. I am not optimistic. The court intellectual class is deep and self-reproducing. Replacing one Fauci produces another.V. Crisis is the health of the stateRandolph Bourne’s line (“war is the health of the state”) was absorbed by Rothbard and updated for the modern security era. Rothbard understood that the state’s natural condition is to seek out, and where necessary manufacture, crises that justify emergency expansions of its authority. The Cold War filled this role for half a century. The War on Terror filled it from 2001 to roughly 2015. The biosecurity paradigm, formalized at the international level by the Obama administration and the WHO in 2009-2010 and retrospectively ratified by the COVID emergency, is the third great post-war crisis architecture.Kennedy’sWuhan Cover-Upis most clarifying when it is read as the chronicle of how the biosecurity faction, beginning with the post-anthrax-letters environment of 2001-2002, built, over twenty years, a system of legal pre-authorizations (the Emergency Use Authorization, the PREP Act liability shields, the centralized declaration of “public health emergencies”) that allowed almost every constitutional and pharmaceutical-safety norm to be suspended on the say-so of a small number of officials, the most powerful of whom was Anthony Fauci.I want to be careful to distinguish two claims here. The first claim, which I do not make, is that the COVID pandemic wasitselfdeliberately engineered as a pretext for an authoritarian power grab. The evidence I have seen is consistent with a research accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, of a kind whose probability was raised (perhaps to near-certainty) by the funding and structure of the gain-of-function research program that Fauci and Peter Daszak collaboratively built. That is a serious enough indictment without inflating it.The second claim, which I do make, and which Rothbard’s framework makes available to us: once the crisis arrived (by accident or design) the system that had been pre-built to exploit it executed exactly as designed. The countermeasures were ready before the pathogen. The communications strategy was ready before the science. The censorship infrastructure, jointly operated by federal agencies and the major social-media platforms, was ready before the dissent. The mass vaccination campaign was ready before the safety data. None of this had to be conspired by anybody in 2020. It had been conspired, in the proper Rothbardian sense, over the preceding two decades, by the slow co-evolution of every institution involved.This is what makes the Fauci role so consequential and so generalizable. He was not the architect of the crisis; he was the most visible administrator of a crisis-management apparatus that had been waiting, fully provisioned, for a sufficient occasion. When such a system exists, an occasion will eventually arise. That is the Rothbardian point.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareVI. What was destroyedI want to close on the cost, because this is the part where my participation in events compels me to write rather than analyze.The American scientific enterprise, as I encountered it in the 1980s, when I was working at Salk, and in the early 1990s, when I held my first faculty positions, was an imperfect but serious thing. Its failure modes were known and discussed. Peer review was clubby and conservative. Funding favored the well-connected. Fashions in research methodology came and went with cycles of grant-program priorities. None of this was admirable, but it was tolerable, because the underlying culture still held: a culture in which a young investigator could, in principle, falsify a senior figure’s hypothesis, publish the result, and be respected for it. The orthodox term for this culture wasorganized skepticism, and it was the only thing standing between the scientific community and its conversion into a clerisy.What Fauci did, which the institutional pressures of his role forced him to do, and which his particular temperament made him exceptionally effective at doing, was to dismantle organized skepticism within the biomedical sciences. The dismantling proceeded by means that Rothbard would have recognized perfectly: control of grant money, control of publication venues, informal coordination with credentialing bodies, deployment of the press, mobilization of social-media platforms in the COVID period, and, most importantly, the creation of a culture in which young investigators learned, very early, that certain questions were career-ending and certain answers were career-protecting.We will be a generation rebuilding what was destroyed. The next mRNA controversy, the next gain-of-function debate, the next pandemic-response decision will be made by clinicians and researchers who came of age under the Fauci regime, who absorbed its norms, and who learned from its enforcers what happens to those who dissent. The damage is in the bones of the profession.Rothbard, writing in the 1960s about an analogous capture of the social sciences, observed that the way out is neither reform nor reorganization but the slow, patient cultivation of independent institutions outside the captured apparatus. I believe he was correct. I believe the only way back to genuine biomedical science is through independent journals, independent funding, independent clinical-research networks, and independent training programs for the next generation. None of this is romantic. All of it is necessary.The Fauci era ended, as a matter of personnel, in December 2022. The Fauci system did not end then and has not ended now. It is still funded. It is still credentialed. It is still in the chairs. The most useful thing one can do for a person who wants to understand why this is so is hand them Murray Rothbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and ask them to read the two together.They illuminate each other. They illuminate, between them, what happened to us.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.BibliographyA note on this bibliography.The essay is structured around two bodies of source material: (1) the two Kennedy manuscripts that supply most of its empirical claims, and (2) the Rothbardian intellectual tradition that supplies its analytical framework. The bibliography is organized accordingly. A third section lists primary documents and contemporary news coverage relevant to specific claims; a fourth lists representative counter-sources.I. The Kennedy manuscripts (primary source material for the essay)Kennedy, Robert F., Jr.The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2021. ISBN 978-1-5107-6680-8.Kennedy, Robert F., Jr.The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2023. ISBN 978-1-5107-7398-1.II. The Rothbardian frameworkRothbard, Murray N. “The Mantle of Science.” InScientism and Values, edited by Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, 159–180. Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1960. The locus classicus of the Rothbardian distinction between science and scientism. Cited in Section I of the essay.Rothbard, Murray N.Science, Technology, and Government. Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2015 (manuscript composed circa 1959, published posthumously). Rothbard’s sustained critique of state R&D allocation. Cited in Sections II and VI.Rothbard, Murray N.Anatomy of the State. Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009 (essay first published 1965). Source for Rothbard’s adaptation of the Bourne thesis on crisis and state power. Cited in Section V.Rothbard, Murray N.For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan, 1973; revised edition, Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2006. Contains Rothbard’s general theory of regulatory capture.Bourne, Randolph S. “The State.” Unfinished essay, 1918. Reprinted inWar and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915–1919, edited by Carl Resek. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964. Source of the “war is the health of the state” formulation. Cited in Section V.Nock, Albert Jay.Our Enemy, the State. New York: William Morrow, 1935. The intermediate source through which Rothbard inherited the court-intellectual concept. Cited in Section IV.de Jouvenel, Bertrand.On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth. Translated by J. F. Huntington. New York: Viking, 1949 (French original 1945). The deepest historical treatment of the court-intellectual function in Western political thought.Hayek, F. A.The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1952. The complementary Austrian-school analysis of scientism that Rothbard drew on directly.Kuhn, Thomas S.The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Source for the paradigm-shift concept invoked in Section IV.Merton, Robert K. “The Normative Structure of Science.” InThe Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, edited by Norman W. Storer, 267–278. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973 (essay first published 1942). The classical statement of the “organized skepticism” norm invoked in Section VI.Stigler, George J. “The Theory of Economic Regulation.”Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science2, no. 1 (1971): 3–21. The Chicago-school formalization of regulatory capture, parallel to Rothbard’s. Cited in Section III.III. Primary documents, statutes, and contemporary reportingStatutes and federal directivesBayh-Dole Act, Pub. L. No. 96-517, 94 Stat. 3015 (1980), codified at 35 U.S.C. §§ 200–212. Established the framework permitting federal grantees to retain title to inventions developed with federal funds. Cited in Section III.Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986, Pub. L. No. 99-502, 100 Stat. 1785, codified at 15 U.S.C. § 3710. Authorized royalty payments to federal scientist-inventors. Cited in Section III.Project BioShield Act of 2004, Pub. L. No. 108-276, 118 Stat. 835. Created the Emergency Use Authorization framework and authorized $5 billion over ten years for stockpiled medical countermeasures. Cited in Section II.Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, Pub. L. No. 109-417, 120 Stat. 2831 (2006). Successor legislation that further consolidated federal pandemic-response authorities.Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, Pub. L. No. 109-148, div. C, 119 Stat. 2818 (2005), codified at 42 U.S.C. § 247d-6d. Source of the liability-shield mechanism invoked in Section V.Homeland Security Presidential Directive 10 / National Security Presidential Directive 33: Biodefense for the 21st Century. The White House, April 28, 2004. Available via the George W. Bush Presidential Library archive. Cited in Section II.Origin-of-COVID statements referenced in Section ICalisher, Charles, Dennis Carroll, Rita Colwell, et al. “Statement in Support of the Scientists, Public Health Professionals, and Medical Professionals of China Combatting COVID-19.”The Lancet395, no. 10226 (March 7, 2020): e42–e43. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30418-9. The 27-signatory letter, organized by Peter Daszak, that characterized lab-leak hypotheses as “conspiracy theories.”Andersen, Kristian G., Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry. “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.”Nature Medicine26 (March 17, 2020): 450–452. doi:10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9.“Addendum: Competing Interests and the Origins of SARS-CoV-2.”The Lancet397, no. 10293 (June 21, 2021): 2449–2450. The journal’s subsequent disclosure of Daszak’s undisclosed EcoHealth/Wuhan Institute of Virology relationships.Bloom, Jesse D., Yujia A. Chan, Ralph S. Baric, et al. “Investigate the Origins of COVID-19.”Science372, no. 6543 (May 14, 2021): 694. doi:10.1126/science.abj0016. The 18-signatory letter that called for re-opening the origins inquiry.Gain-of-function debateFauci, Anthony S. “Research on Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Influenza Virus: The Way Forward.”mBio3, no. 5 (2012): e00359-12. doi:10.1128/mBio.00359-12. Fauci’s defense of gain-of-function research, including the “hypothetical scenario” passage cited in Kennedy,Wuhan Cover-Up, ch. 17.Inglesby, Thomas V. Statement before the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), Bethesda, Md., January 7–8, 2016. Available via the NIH Office of Science Policy archive.Lipsitch, Marc, and Alison P. Galvani. “Ethical Alternatives to Experiments with Novel Potential Pandemic Pathogens.”PLOS Medicine11, no. 5 (2014): e1001646. The leading peer-reviewed challenge to the GOF research agenda.Investigations and indictments cited in Section IVUnited States Department of Justice. “Former Senior NIAID Official Indicted for Concealing Federal Records During COVID-19 Pandemic.” Office of Public Affairs press release, April 28, 2026. Indictment of Dr. David M. Morens. Cited in Section IV.U.S. House of Representatives, Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.After Action Review of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward. Final report. Washington, D.C., December 2024. Source for the Morens email correspondence and the EcoHealth/NIAID grant trail.Compensation, patents, and post-government appointmentsAndrzejewski, Adam. “Dr. Anthony Fauci: The Highest Paid Employee in the Entire U.S. Federal Government.”Forbes, January 25, 2021. Source for the salary claim in Section III.Georgetown University. “Dr. Anthony Fauci to Join Georgetown Faculty as Distinguished University Professor.” Press release, June 2023. Source for the post-government appointment cited in Section IV.IV. Counter-sources and contrary perspectivesFauci, Anthony S.On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service. New York: Viking, 2024. Fauci’s own memoir; the most comprehensive first-person rejoinder to the Kennedy / Malone account.Specter, Michael. “How Anthony Fauci Became America’s Doctor.”The New Yorker, April 10, 2020. The most-cited mainstream profile, sympathetic to Fauci.Hotez, Peter J. “Mounting Antiscience Aggression in the United States.”PLOS Biology19, no. 7 (2021): e3001369. A systematic argument that critics in the Kennedy / Malone tradition are a public-health threat. Direct opposition to the essay’s thesis.Goodman, Jack, and Flora Carmichael. “Coronavirus: The Misleading Claims about Anthony Fauci.” BBC Reality Check, December 2021. Representative of the mainstream fact-checking response to the Kennedy book.Office of the Director of National Intelligence.Updated Assessment on COVID-19 Origins. Washington, D.C., October 2021; updated June 2023. The Intelligence Community’s formal position: insufficient evidence to confirm either zoonotic or laboratory origin. The single most important counter-data point for any strong claim about the Wuhan Institute’s role.Carpenter, Daniel, and David A. Moss, eds.Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. The leading recent academic volume on regulatory capture; argues against the strong Rothbard/Stigler thesis on empirical grounds.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: A Rothbardian Reading of the Fauci Era


The "Kill" Switch

In 2021, Congress passed an infrastructure law, and inside it sits a requirement that future vehicles include technology capable of detecting impaired driving. The stated goal is simple. If a driver is drunk or clearly unsafe, the vehicle should be able to prevent operation. That is the mandate. It does not authorize remote control, and it was signed by Joe Biden, not Donald Trump.The way this shows up is not as a single device but asa stack of systems that already exist. Cameras inside the cabin track your eyes, your face, your attention. Sensors read steering inputs, braking patterns, and lane position. Newer systems are being built to detect alcohol passively through breath or even through your skin on the wheel. The car is no longer just a machine you operate. It is a system that watches you, evaluates you, and increasingly decides whether you are fit to use it.Call things by their proper name. This is not a switch someone flips from afar. This is a shift from mechanical control to software governance. The car becomes an intermediary between you and your own mobility.At first, it arrives quietly. It starts in higher-end vehicles and works its way down. It is marketed as safety, convenience, and common sense. Insurance companies offer discounts if you agree to monitoring. Most people say yes. Why not save a few hundred dollars? Over time, the discount becomes the baseline. Opting out starts to cost you. Driving an older car, free of monitoring devices, will cost you, or maybe even make you uninsurable. The “choice” remains on paper, but in practice it fades.This is a slow ratchet. The frog put in a pot of water as the heat is slowly turned up. Before he knows it and can jump out, he has been boiled alive. Control does not have to be imposed directly when it can be engineered through incentives. If your premiums, your financing, and eventually your access to services and cars depend on how a system scores your behavior, then the system does not need a kill switch. It already has leverage.Private companies are central to this. Insurers like Progressive Corporation and Allstate are already building models around continuous driver monitoring. Today, it is framed as a discount program. Tomorrow, it becomes a pricing standard. You are free to opt out in the same way you are free to pay significantly more. That is not coercion in the legal sense, but it is pressure in the real world. Is it just a matter of time before “vintage” cars require higher premiums or are even uninsurable?This is where the constitutional layer matters, and also where many people misunderstand it. The United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights were designed to limit government power, not the reach of private corporations. If a manufacturer installs monitoring in your vehicle and you agree to it through a contract, you are not dealing with state action in the traditional sense. That means many of the Constitutional protections people assume are there do not apply in a straightforward way.The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. It does not shield data that you have allowed a company to collect. That becomes especially important if that data is later accessed by law enforcement.Courts have pushed back on warrantless tracking in some contexts, but the boundary between private data and government access continues to be eroded by Congress and the courts.The Fifth Amendment raises a different issue. If your own vehicle is recording behavior that could be interpreted as impairment or unsafe driving, and that data is later used against you, the line between observation and self-incrimination begins to blur. Again, not settled law, but not a trivial question.There is also a quieter risk that has nothing to do with policy and everything to do with data. Once you normalize continuous in-cabin monitoring and behavioral scoring, you create a stream of highly personal information that has value well beyond safety. That makes it a target. If that data is hacked, leaked, or sold, it does not take much imagination to see how it could be misused. Detailed records of where you drive, how you behave, and even how you look or react behind the wheel could be exposed publicly or used to pressure, embarrass, or coerce.Even without a breach, interpretation is not neutral. A medical event, a panic response, or a real threat, such as a carjacking, can appear to an algorithm as impairment. Stress, confusion, or erratic movement under duress may be flagged as unsafe driving.The deeper problem is not any single amendment. It is the gradual erosion of autonomy through systems that operate just outside the traditional constraints of the Constitution. You do not need a new statute to restrict behavior if you can shape incentives or even mandates, so that companies can get people to restrict themselves.A great deal can happen through contracts, pricing models, and industry standards. Private actors can create a system where monitoring is technically voluntary but practically unavoidable. Where opting out carries a real cost. Where data collected for safety quietly becomes data used for pricing, for liability, for access.The space between direct government control and pure private choice is wide, and it is in that space that this system is likely to evolve.The fork in the road is still ahead. In a constrained version, these systems stay focused on clear impairment, and the data remains tightly limited.In the more likely version, the data layer expands because it is valuable, and once something is valuable, it is rarely left unused or monetized.The mistake is to look for a dramatic moment when control arrives. It does not work that way. It accumulates. A discount here, a requirement there, a default setting that most people never change. Over time, the relationship between you and your vehicle is no longer direct. It is mediated by software, data, and incentives.The real question is not whether someone can flip a switch and stop your car. It is whether you still meaningfully control the terms under which you are allowed to drive it.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Representative Thomas Massie moved to force the issue directly, not with rhetoric or a direct overhaul of the bill, but with a funding cutoff. In January 2026, he introduced an amendment to the federal spending bill (H.R. 7148) that would haveprohibited any federal funds from being used to implement or enforce the impaired-driving technology mandateburied in the 2021 infrastructure law. In plain terms, it was a defunding effort. No money, no rollout. The amendment failed, 164–268, which means the mandate continues forward on its current path.What makes that vote politically revealing is not just that it failed, but who helped defeat it.Fifty-seven Republicans joined 211 Democratsto vote against Massie’s amendment and keep funding in place. Among the Republicans who voted no were names that span the party’s establishment wing, including Mark Amodei, Don Bacon, Stephanie Bice, Ken Calvert, Tom Cole, Mario Diaz-Balart, Brian Fitzpatrick, Andrew Garbarino, John James, Mike Kelly, Jen Kiggans, Mike Lawler, and Frank Lucas, among others. You can see the full official roll call here:House Roll Call Vote 43 (H.R. 7148 Amendment)That vote tells you everything you need to know. The fight is not hypothetical. It is happening in appropriations bills and procedural votes, where programs live or die. And when push comes to shove, a nontrivial bloc of Republicans is willing to keep the funding stream intact, even for a program that is a step toward expanded monitoring inside privately owned vehicles.The word RINO gets thrown around too easily. But here the line is not rhetorical. It is clear. Those Congresscritters who stand in the way of personal freedom are the same ones who treat the Bill of Rights as a relic instead of a constraint.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public, so feel free to share it.ShareJGM

Summary: When software and the government control our daily lives


The Cancer We’ve Been Looking For in All the Wrong People

There’s a particular kind of book that arrives at exactly the right cultural moment, and Shira Boehler’sOne Scan Saved My Lifeis one of them. A healthy, forty-three-year-old mother of four — a runner, a never-smoker, the daughter of a pulmonologist — gets blindsided by stage I lung adenocarcinoma. The only reason she’s alive to tell us about it is because her husband nagged her into a preventive scan that wasn’t covered by insurance, wasn’t recommended by any guideline, and wouldn’t have happened at all if she’d left her care entirely to the system. If that doesn’t crystallize the case for taking your health back into your own hands, nothing will.For readers sympathetic to the Make America Healthy Again movement, this book is going to land with unusual force, and the reasons are worth spelling out plainly.The story itself is the argument.Boehler did everything “right” by the conventional playbook. She ran six miles a day. She ate well. She avoided cigarettes — her dad, a pulmonologist, drilled that into her. She kept up with her annual scans for the cancers women aretoldto worry about. And a tumor was still growing in her lung that, on the trajectory she was on, would likely have killed her by the time symptoms appeared. The federal screening guidelines — the USPSTF criteria that gatekeep insurance reimbursement — would never have caught her, because they were built around a 20-pack-year smoker stereotype that increasingly fails to describe who is actually getting this disease. A full quarter of lung cancer deaths now occur in never-smokers. Two-thirds of newly diagnosed lung cancer patients don’t qualify for screening under current rules. Boehler quotes a Northwestern study showing exactly that, and the implication is unavoidable: the system isn’t catching the people it’s killing.That’s a deeply MAHA-resonant indictment, and Boehler makes it without political theatrics. She isn’t picking a fight — she’s just telling the truth about what the data show.On environmental causes, the book is better than most.Conservative and MAHA readers who’ve grown weary of the pharmaceutical-industrial framing of every illness will appreciate that Boehler takes radon seriously as the second-leading cause of lung cancer and theleadingcause in never-smokers — a fact most Americans have never heard, and one the public health establishment has been remarkably quiet about. She walks readers through home testing, mitigation systems, and the patchwork of state disclosure laws. She covers occupational and household exposures: asbestos, silica, vinyl chloride, cooking-fume aldehydes, particulates from unventilated stovetops. She raises the unanswered question of why Asian-American never-smoking women are getting lung cancer at higher rates than their cigarette-smoking male relatives — a genuine mystery that suggests something environmental, hormonal, or genetic that mainstream research has been slow to chase. This is the kind of curious, root-cause thinking MAHA has been calling for, and it’s a welcome change from “take this pill, don’t ask questions.”The endorsement page tells you who’s paying attention.This isn’t a partisan book. Tony Robbins is on the praise page next to Andy Slavitt (Obama’s CMS head) next to Dr. Mehmet Oz (Trump’s CMS administrator). In her acknowledgments, Boehler thanks Secretary Kennedy and Stephanie Spear directly, writing that they showed her “prevention is not a partisan issue, it is an American issue.” That sentiment is the whole game. When a 43-year-old never-smoking mother of four walks into a fight for early detection and finds RFK Jr., Dr. Oz, the previous administration’s officials, and CEOs all picking up the phone, that’s a coalition worth noticing. Skyhorse Publishing — RFK Jr.’s longtime publisher and one of the few houses willing to put out heterodox health and policy titles — putting this book out is itself a small data point about where the energy is in this conversation.What conservative readers will love most: she trusts patients.The book’s spine is the conviction that you, the patient, have to advocate for yourself — and that the spouse, parent, or friend who pushes you toward a scan you don’t want may be the person who saves your life. Boehler’s husband is the hero of the opening chapters precisely because he refused to accept her “I’m fine, leave me alone” pushback. There is something deeply countercultural about a book that says: doctors miss things, guidelines are years behind, and your family’s instincts about your body matter. That’s the kind of common sense the medical establishment has spent decades training out of people, and it’s refreshing to see it championed by someone who grew up in a house full of physicians.The book also takes the stigma issue seriously in a way that should resonate with anyone who’s watched the public-health apparatus moralize at ordinary Americans. Boehler is candid that lung cancer is treated as a “deserved disease” — the assumption being that anyone who gets it must have brought it on themselves through bad behavior. Her friend Donnita Butler, an Air Force and Navy veteran who battled smoking addiction while raising two boys alone in rural Maine (a radon hot zone, no less), offers some of the most honest writing in the book about how that contempt actually plays out for working-class Americans. Conservative readers who have been watching progressive public-health culture lecture rural and lower-income communities for a decade will recognize this dynamic immediately.Now, the harder part — where MAHA readers may want to apply healthy skepticism.The book’s policy ask leans heavily toward expanded federal screening programs and insurance mandates, holding up Australia’s centrally administered national lung-screening program as the model. This is where instincts will diverge. Universal screening genuinely does save lives — the data on stage-I detection are overwhelming — but a reader committed to medical freedom and limited government will want to ask: do we get there by expanding CMS coverage and leaning harder on USPSTF rules, or by lowering the cost of cash-pay scans, deregulating mobile imaging, and letting the market deliver $200 LDCTs the way it delivered urgent-care clinics? Boehler raises both possibilities but is more comfortable with the centralized solution than some readers will be.There’s also a tension worth naming around the wellness-tech angle. The story begins with a $1,000-to-$5,000 full-body Prenuvo-style MRI, and the praise page features the CEO of Function Health — companies whose business model depends on bypassing insurance and selling preventive scans directly to people who can afford them. For MAHA readers, this cuts both ways. On one hand, it’s a beautiful illustration of what happens when patients can pay cash for the care the system denies them — a free-market success story embedded in a memoir about institutional failure. On the other, the book sometimes blurs into something close to advertising for premium concierge medicine, and an honest reader has to acknowledge that the same scan that saved Shira Boehler’s life is financially out of reach for the rural single mother she’d most like to help. Boehler clearly knows this — she comes back to access and equity repeatedly — but the resolution she offers (have insurance cover it) is one path, not the only one.A few smaller notes. The radon and environmental chapters are strong but could go further; readers attuned to broader environmental-health concerns may wish she’d dug into air pollution, particulate exposure from gas stoves, and indoor air quality more aggressively. The chapter on biomarker and blood testing is genuinely exciting — Galleri-style multi-cancer early detection assays really are coming, and they may eventually do for cancer what home pregnancy tests did for obstetrics — but readers will want to keep an eye on how the FDA approval pathway and insurance mandates around these tools shake out, because that’s where bureaucratic capture tends to happen.The bottom line.This is a brave, well-reported, and uncommonly readable book about a disease most of us have been quietly assuming we don’t need to worry about. Boehler is an unusually likable narrator — funny, self-deprecating, openly terrified, pragmatic — and she’s done the homework: dozens of interviews with surgeons, radiologists, epidemiologists, and survivors, with citations to back it up. For a conservative or MAHA-aligned reader, the most valuable takeaways are not the policy recommendations but the underlying convictions: that prevention matters more than treatment, that early detection should be normalized for everyone (not just smokers), that environmental exposures like radon deserve far more public attention, that patients and their families need to advocate aggressively because the system won’t, and that the federal screening guidelines we’ve inherited are badly out of date for the disease as it actually presents in 2026.If you take one thing from this book, let it be the practical one: get a radon test for your house this week, ask your doctor about a low-dose CT if you have any reason at all to be concerned, and don’t let an outdated guideline talk you out of a scan you can afford to pay for out of pocket. As Boehler herself puts it, cancer doesn’t care about your demographics, your lifestyle, or your assumptions. The least we can do is stop pretending it does.Recommended, with the caveats above, for anyone who believes American health policy is overdue for a rethink — and for anyone with lungs.Available for purchase on Amazon at this link.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: Why a forty-three-year-old runner’s near miss is the lung cancer story you didn’t know you needed to hear—a review of "One Scan Saved My Life" by Shira Kupperman Boehler


Clouds: A Neglected Reservoir of Pesticides

While perusing the medical literature this morning, two newly published papers stood out as very important.I have written a synopsis explaining why each is important, followed by the abstract itself.Are Clouds a Neglected Reservoir of Pesticides?Environ Sci Technol . 2025 Oct 14;59(40):21579-21588.doi:10.1021/acs.est.5c03787. Epub 2025 Sep 8.Synposis: This paper takes a step back and asks a deceptively simple question. Where do pesticides actually go after we spray them? The answer, it turns out, is not just soil and water. The authors point to clouds as an overlooked reservoir. Pesticides can evaporate, hitch a ride on atmospheric particles, and end up in cloud water, where they persist and undergo chemical changes. From there, they do not just disappear. They can be transported long distances and eventually fall back to earth in rain, effectively redistributing agricultural chemicals far beyond where they were originally applied.What makes this important is the implication. We tend to think of pesticide exposure as local and controllable. This work suggests it is far more diffuse and dynamic. The atmosphere is not just a passive conduit. It is an active chemical environment that can transform these compounds and extend their reach. In practical terms, that means ecosystems and populations far removed from direct agricultural use may still be exposed. It is a reminder that once these chemicals are released, they do not respect boundaries, and our current models of exposure may be underestimating both the scale and the persistence of the problem.Abstract (from the paper)Pesticide contamination is a growing and alarming concern for both the environment and human health. Widely used in agriculture to control pests and disease carriers, pesticides undergo extensive long-range atmospheric transport in the gas phase, in aerosols, and, as shown here, in clouds. We measured the concentration of 32 pesticides at the puy de Dôme observatory (France) in the sub μg L-1to μg L-1range in cloud water, largely arising from regional to long-range transport that also involves pesticides currently banned for agricultural use in France. Half of the samples showed a total concentration of pesticides of over 0.5 μg L-1, which is the European drinking water limit. If 2,4-dinitrophenol, which can also be produced by photochemical reactions, is excluded, two samples still present a total concentration of over 0.5 μg L-1. The frequent detection of pesticides in rainwater may thus depend on their presence in clouds as well as atmospheric washout. Estimates of pesticides’ quantity in clouds over France, ranging from 6.4 ± 3.2 to 139 ± 75 tons, suggest that their amounts in the cloud aqueous phase are potentially high and that these compounds would affect areas that are not directly impacted by agricultural activities.Modifiable risk factors and risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder across severities of genetic riskJ Affect Disord. 2026 Apr 13:407:121800.DOI:10.1016/j.jad.2026.121800, Online ahead of print.Synopsis: This study tackles a question that comes up again and again in psychiatry: how much of serious mental illness is “genetic destiny,” and how much is influenced by the way we live? The authors looked at schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and instead of treating genetics as all-or-nothing, they stratified people by genetic risk using polygenic scores. Then they asked a very practical question. Do modifiable factors still matter if your genetic risk is high? The answer, in short, is yes. Across the board, lifestyle and environmental factors such as metabolic health, substance use, and other behavioral risks were associated with increased odds of developing these disorders, and that relationship held even in people with higher genetic susceptibility.What makes this work important is that it pushes back on a fatalistic narrative. Genetic risk is real, but it is not a fixed sentence. The data suggest that modifiable exposures can either amplify or mitigate that baseline risk. In other words, the trajectory toward schizophrenia or bipolar disorder appears to be shaped by an interaction between biology and environment, not dictated by DNA alone. For clinicians and patients, that is a meaningful shift. It implies that prevention and risk reduction are not theoretical. They are actionable, even in those who carry a heavier genetic load.Abstract (from the paper)Background:Schizophrenia (SCZ) and bipolar disorder (BD) are severe, globally prevalent mental illnesses, influenced by genetic and modifiable risk factors. The brain care score (BCS) is a validated tool comprising 12 modifiable factors across physical, lifestyle, and social-emotional domains, each linked to brain health. This study examines how BCS relates to SCZ or BD risk across different genetic risk levels, quantified by polygenic risk scores (PRS).Methods:Using UK Biobank data, we calculated BCS and PRS scores, and identified incident SCZ and BD cases. Cox proportional hazards models evaluated associations between BCS and SCZ or BD risk. Interaction and stratified analyses assessed how this association varies across genetic risk levels. Contributions of BCS domains were also evaluated.Results:Among 299,665 participants, 331 SCZ and 787 BD cases were identified over a median 13.7-year follow-up. In low-PRS individuals, higher BCS significantly reduced SCZ risk, particularly in lifestyle (HR = 0.87, P = 0.027) and social-emotional domains (HR = 0.47, P < 0.001). In high-PRS individuals, no overall BCS-SCZ association was observed, though the social-emotional domain remained protective (HR = 0.56, P < 0.001). For BD, low-PRS groups showed stronger BCS protection, especially in lifestyle (HR = 0.91, P = 0.017) and social-emotional domains (HR = 0.44, P < 0.001). In high-PRS groups, BCS protection was attenuated, but remained significant in the social-emotional domain (HR = 0.50, P < 0.001). Sensitivity analysis supported these findings.Conclusion:Improving lifestyle and social-emotional health can significantly reduce SCZ and BD risk, with effects influenced by genetic risk. Enhancing social emotional health provides protective effects across all genetic risk levels, highlighting it as a key preventive measure.JGMMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.Share

Summary: and other trending science


Why Substack Hates Malone News

Why Substack hates Malone News … and meThere is a simpler explanation than most people want to admit, and it has very little to do with subscriber counts, writing quality, or even real-world influence.It has everything to do with signaling.Over the weekend, Substack hosted its high-profile “New Media Party” during White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend. This was not just another cocktail gathering. It was a carefully curated room. A statement about what “new media” is supposed to look like when presented to Washington, to legacy press, and to power.And that is where the disconnect begins.The Malone Newssubscription base is large by any reasonable metric. Hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Deep engagement. A loyal readership that does not just skim headlines but actually reads, shares, and acts. By the numbers, it sits comfortably in the upper tier of the platform.But that is not the currency being spent in a room like that.The real currency is legibility to the system.The invite list tilted toward a specific type of writer. Former legacy and mostly journalists who migrated to Substack but still speak the language of institutions and don’t advocate too strongly for conservative principles. Who was invited? Policy and tech commentators who circulate comfortably in think tanks, venture circles, and media panels. Creator personalities who bring energy without bringing risk. And, perhaps most importantly, people who are already embedded in the Substack social network, cross-promoting, collaborating, and showing up in the same rooms, over and over again. Promoted substackers that feature a familiar frame of reference over content.I am not alone in being isolated from Substack promotions.  Jeffrey Tucker, Alex Berenson, and I are three accounts that two independent AI analyses identified as outside the inner circle and not receiving amplification from the Substack leadership. This is just another form of shadow-banning of those who speak truth to power. So, what else is new?Image from CHAT-GPTThis is not accidental. It is brand construction.Substack is trying to tell a story about itself. Not as a rebellion, but as an evolution. Not as a break from the system, but as its next iteration. The platform wants to be seen as the future of journalism, not its adversary.That story requires a certain kind of protagonist.Writers who challenge institutions incontrolled, acceptable wayscan be featured. Writers who question assumptions whileremaining inside the bounds of polite discoursecan be elevated. Even contrarians are welcome, as long as they remainwithin a rangethat does not disrupt the room.But there is a line.AndMalone Newssits on the other side of it.The publication is not just “heterodox.” It is openly adversarial to major public health narratives, to pharmaceutical industry practices, and to the institutional frameworks that dominated the COVID era. Whether one agrees with those positions or not is almost beside the point. What matters is how they are perceived in a high-visibility, mixed-audience environment.In that context, the issue is not reach. It isrisk.A curated event tied to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is not the place where organizers experiment with reputational ambiguity. The goal is a room that feels coherent, controlled, and aligned with the image being projected outward. That means minimizing the chance of friction, controversy, or uncomfortable conversations that could spill beyond the venue’s walls.So the filtering happens quietly.Not through public criteria. Not through transparent standards. But through network pathways, personal connections, and an unspoken understanding of who fits the narrative and who does not.There is another factor that matters more than most people realize. Thesocial graph.Substack is not just a publishing platform. It is a network. Invitations tend to flow through that network. Writers who collaborate, who appear on each other’s podcasts and broadcasts, who share audiences and relationships, naturally end up in the same physical spaces. Those who operate outside that web, even if they are larger or more influential in absolute terms, often remain invisible when lists are made.Malone.Newshas a large audience, but it is not deeply interwoven with the Substack-to-Substack ecosystem or the Washington media circuit. It operates in a parallel lane. That independence is a strength in one sense, but it comes with a cost in environments that are driven by proximity and familiarity.  In other words, the insider club.Put all of that together, and the outcome is predictable.It is not that Substack “hates”malone.newsin any literal sense (they apparently just hate their politics). That framing is emotionally satisfying, but analytically incomplete. What is really happening is more structural.The platform is curating a version of “new media” that is:Connected to existing power centersAcceptable within institutional frameworksNetworked within its own internal ecosystemSafe enough to showcase in front of WashingtonBasically, they are recreating the old media, just on a newer, more hip social networking platform.Malone Newsdoes not check those boxes. Not because it lacks influence, but because it represents a different kind of influence. One that is less dependent on institutional validation and less interested in maintaining alignment with it.And that kind of independence does not translate well into curated rooms designed for signaling.The irony is that exclusion from that room does not indicate weakness. It indicates the opposite. A different audience. A different network. A different center of gravity.In the end, the question is not whyMalone Newswas not invited, we all know why.The question is what kind of media ecosystem requires that kind of filtering in the first place?The new media ecosystem. Same as the old media ecosystem.Did you expect anything different?Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareRWM/JGM

Summary: (and me)


Well Being: Source Your Food More Deliberately

Not everyone can grow their own food, and even committed gardeners and homesteaders cannot produce everything they need. Sourcing is the bridge: the set of choices you make when you buy rather than grow.Below are some concrete ideas for improving your and your family’s diet and living a higher-quality life:Find your local farmers.Farmers’ markets are the obvious starting point, but they are not the only ones. Many farms sell directly through CSA arrangements, roadside stands, on-farm stores, or informal networks of regular customers. Buying directly from a farmer you know and can ask questions of is categorically different from buying a product with a label that claims “farm fresh.” We buy a quarter of a cow at a time from a neighboring farmer whose practices we know and trust. The animal is grass-finished, processed locally by a small-scale butcher, packaged and labeled. A quarter cow lasts us nearly a year. The per-pound cost for high-quality, pasture-raised beef is lower than what we would pay for equivalent cuts at a specialty grocery store, and dramatically richer in terms of what we know about the animal.Understand what the labels mean and do not mean.“Natural” has no regulatory definition in the United States and conveys nothing about how an animal was raised. “Free range” for poultry requires access to the outdoors but does not specify how much access or what the birds ate. “Grass fed” without “grass-finished” may describe an animal that grazed early in life and was fed grain for the last months before slaughter, which is when the fat profile of the meat is largely determined. “USDA Organic” prohibits synthetic pesticides and antibiotics and requires outdoor access for livestock, but does not mandate a particular diet or stocking density. None of these labels are worthless, but none should be mistaken for guarantees. The closer you can get to knowing the farmer, the less you need to decode the label.Build a pantry that reduces dependency on convenience food.Much of what drives ultra-processed food consumption is not preference but logistics. People reach for a box of cereal or a bag of chips not because they want it more than real food, but because it is there and the alternative takes effort they do not currently have. The solution is changing what is in the house. A well-stocked pantry centered on whole ingredients (dried legumes, organic grains, canned tomatoes, quality olive oil, nuts, frozen vegetables, meat in the freezer) eliminates most of the scenarios in which processed food is the path of least resistance.Buy organic for the highest-risk categories.If a full organic diet is not financially feasible, prioritize the items where the case is strongest, given glyphosate use patterns. Conventionally grown oats, wheat, chickpeas, and lentils are among the crops most routinely treated with pre-harvest desiccant applications. Conventionally grown soy and corn are almost universally from herbicide-tolerant varieties and carry correspondingly higher residue profiles. For these categories, the cost premium for organic is worth paying.A note about Stevia:Robert and I rarely use sugar these days, but we do love sweet, iced tea.  I use stevia as a single-ingredient sweetener:“Micro Ingredients Pure Organic Stevia Powder,"which I buy on Amazon, since most grocery shops don’t carry it. As it is pure, it takes about an 1/8th of a teaspoon to sweeten a cup of liquid.Why you might ask, does this matter?Most of what is sold as “stevia” these days is not a crushed leaf fromStevia rebaudianabut a highly refined extract blended with other ingredients so it looks and behaves like sugar in a teaspoon. That is where the story gets interesting. To tame the intensity and bitterness, manufacturers bulk it out with things like erythritol, dextrose, maltodextrin, or fibers such as inulin. In other words, you are not really buying a plant, you are buying a formulation. None of these additives are there by accident. They are there to make it pour, measure, and taste like sugar, because pure stevia extract on its own would have you wondering what just happened to your coffee.Now, from a regulatory standpoint, these additives generally clear safety thresholds. But that does not make them metabolically irrelevant. Dextrose and maltodextrin can raise blood sugar, which is a bit ironic for a product marketed as a sugar alternative.Sugar alcohols like erythritol have been treated as the “clean” option for years, but more recent data have raised questions about potential links between higher circulating levels and cardiovascular risk, including clotting pathways. That is not settled science, but it is enough to make one pause before dumping it into everything from morning coffee to evening dessert. And for some people, erythritol also comes with the less glamorous side effect of gastrointestinal distress, which tends to be a fairly reliable teacher.Another ultra-processed product wearing a health haloSo the issue is not that stevia is inherently dangerous. It is what we call stevia that has often become another ultra-processed product wearing a health halo. If your goal is to avoid blood sugar swings and reduce reliance on processed inputs, many of these blends work against you in subtle ways. As with most things in nutrition, the dose, the context, and reading the label matter. If it looks like sugar, pours like sugar, and tastes like sugar, there is usually a reason, and it is not because it is just a leaf.A final note about Stevia: I do have the gene that causes me to experience a bitter aftertaste.  But over time, I have developed a tolerance for it, or maybe I have just had COVID one too many times and have lost much of my ability to smell...Still, even I can taste that this particular brand ofSteviamentioned above truly has a milder aftertaste than most.It does require a bit more mixing and definitely mixes better in hot liquid than cold. Still, having to mix it a bit more, is a small price to pay for ingesting a single-use ingredient, rather than an ultra-processed look-alike.JGMMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareA few photos of the farm from yesterday:The one-year-old peaboys have been let out of the coop and are now enjoying the big, bad world.Oso, the protector of all things avian, finds them great company.Oso, the Australian shepherd, four bachelor guinea fowl and the two peaboys, currently named Frick and Frack.“Frick” and “Frack”Prince Caspian, - papa of the above birds - in all his finery.I will be spending the afternoon doing one last round of edits of our new book, as the publisher’s editor has now completed her edits.Our big news is that the book will be for for Amazon pre-sales on Monday!JGM

Summary: Small choices add up to big changes.


Friday Funnies: Behind the Mask

We live near Charlottesville, and were deeply affected by the rallies/marches and riots there.  The car ramming into a crowd, causing the death of the young college student, was profoundly disturbing. I can still see that video in my head.Yet, it was the lies they told about President Trump and his remarks regarding C-ville, being edited by almost all mainstream media, that raised more questions about how truthful the MSM really is.Then came the SPLC indictment this week.So, if you are already red-pilled, as we are, about what happened, reading Steve Cortes’ account below of his time at CNN during this period and how they managed to silence him regarding the Charlottesville incident takes it a step further.From the article:So…the end result is that America endured years of propaganda that convinced a large segment of the population – in contravention of the facts – that their president supported violent hate merchants. Even worse, masses of unskeptical Americans, who consume only legacy media content, believed that the entire America First populist movement was based on bigotry, rather than patriotism.Now, nearly a decade later, the truth is revealed about the deception that lay beneath that grand lie. There was a layer of duplicity here that is almost difficult to fathom. Only true Marxists could excuse this level of propaganda. The SPLC created hate groups and activities like the Charlottesville rally, and the complicit media then weaponized these concocted offenses by spreading outright lies about Trump’s reaction to the staged events.I myself played a role in this saga regarding Charlottesville, best explained by a timeline:March 2019– After more than a year serving as a contributor on CNN, I grew tired of the near-nightly lies told about Charlottesville during the primetime hits when I was on-air. I tried my best to debunk the myth, but was routinely shouted down, and even “benched” for short periods for daring to tell the truth. So…I wrote acolumn at RealClearPolitics with the exact Trump transcriptand precise citations.April 2019– Joe Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaignbased entirely upon the Charlottesville lie, claiming that the “bulging veins” of the racists convinced him to run for the White House.August 2019– Dennis Prager had read my RealClearPolitics article and had me on his radio show repeatedly to discuss what we branded as the “Charlottesville Hoax.” He also asked me to narrate a five-minutevideo for his online platform, PragerU, debunking the hoax, which went mega-viral, with well over 10 million total views.September 2019– CNN removed me from the air. Rebecca Kutler, now the head of MSNOW and then the director of talent at CNN, expressly told me that the permanent “benching” was because of the Charlottesville video, even though I was clearly allowed to make such online videos, per the terms of my contract. I asked to be released so that I could do TV elsewhere, and she refused. In other words, they paid me to be silent, to stay on the sidelines.December 2019– I was released from CNN.June 2024– Supposedly objective “fact-checking” siteSnopes finally admits the clear reality of the full transcripts and video evidencethat Trump never praised bigots at Charlottesville.April 2026– The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted for millions of dollars in secret payments to racists to foment and organize racial unrest and events, including the Charlottesville event itself.This entire sad saga matters. First, it unveils the systemic duplicity of the left in America. Because their demand for “hate” far exceeds the actual supply, they had to pay to manufacture bigotry, so that they then could oppose it. Second, the record reveals that lies build upon lies, while the truth remains, inherently, emancipating.Whatever any citizen thinks of Donald Trump, the entire madness of Charlottesville represents a preventable and despicable tragedy. The actions of the SPLC were criminal and mafia-like. A young woman, Heather Heyer, lost her life because of this mayhem. More broadly, millions of Americans bought into an insidious lie and believed it for years, doing grave damage to the cohesion of our society. Only a full accounting, now, can begin the process of healing and truth-telling.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareNext month,  will be heading out to Louisiana for Robert to speak at aCitizens for a New Louisianaevent on May 11th.Please consider joining us - the organizers of this group include people who have fought hard against mandates and for vaccine choice.  These are the people that convinced Bobby and myself to fly out to Baton Rouge on multiple occasions in 2021 and 2022 to speak truth to power in the state house. Their and all of our work changed the minds of state legislators on these issues, helped get Gov. Landry elected and so much more.EVENT TICKETSChampions of Change Baton RougeHow Policy Really Gets MadeFeaturing Dr. Robert Malone & Noah WallFrom scientific authority to statehouse policy—discover how ideas move, who shapes them, and why it matters.JGM

Summary: SPLC...


Sunday Strip: "Maximum Warfare" -

I glanced at the headlines this morning on Google and saw a pattern - not a single MSM "news" outlet called this an assassination attempt or even an "alleged" assassination attempt.Instead, this is what is in the headlines:  "alleged" gunman, "shooting suspect," "shooter," and "dinner gunman."The propaganda and spin never end.Case in point - The Washington Post is still evil.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareIs that a paper or a cloth mask on Taylor Lorenz?  It makes a difference, as one is so much better than the other, right?Cause we all know that cloth looks so much classier when wearing formal attire - paper just looks cheap. (snigger).Christopher A. Wray), former Director of the FBICredit where credit is due, President Trump won the battle of the genders for us…Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.“Murder chicken” -  well, we had a rooster like that once.Robert flew out from Dulles Airport on Friday, spoke at the Autism conference in San Diego and flew back on a red-eye, arriving here at 6:30 AM today.  Thirty-six hours of stress - and if anyone asks, no he doesn’t usually get paid for doing events. It is his way of being a good citizen and giving back.When he wasn’t involved in the conference, he was putting the finishing touches on a manuscript.As I write this, he is now out feeding the farm family.For being an “old-man” - his stamina is amazing. But then he never stops pushing himself. Staying busy, mentally engaged, and active are important elements to staying young in the heart and mind.Anyway, super glad to have him home.  Feeding the horses, cattle and poultry in the rain by myself yesterday was a b*tch!With gratitude for him and all of you - my community in the comments section,JGM

Summary: Three strikes against them.


Kitty's Key West Adventure

By JGMSo, a few weeks ago, Robert and I went to Key West for our traditional get-out-of-jail (Virginia), wedding anniversary vacation. By mid-February, the cold in Virginia starts to get monotonous, so pairing our anniversary with a little warm R&R over the years has worked out well.Just to say it, our wedding anniversary is always celebrated as a “big” holiday.  More so than most others.  It's the day about us - and we take great pride in our marriage.I have always had a hankering to go to Key West, ever since 1990, when the Key West reefs became a marine sanctuary, and I learned about the connecting bridges that run down the string of Islands just south of Miami.  Key West is one of the larger islands and is the southernmost.However, the truth is I had an ulterior motive. I had this little dream of bringing Kitty, the Pomeranian terrorist, with us. The island of Key West has become known as the most dog-friendly and accommodating, to dogs that is, place to vacation in the USA.  And they are not wrong.Mexico or?When we visited Key West, something struck us almost immediately. All the sandy beaches seemed to be on one side of the island. It wasn’t our imagination.Key West sits between two very different bodies of water. To the north is Florida Bay, which is shallow and full of seagrass and mangroves. To the south is the open Atlantic. The Atlantic side gets waves and currents that push sand towards the shore. The bay side does not. So most of the island’s sandy beaches end up on the southern and southeastern side.There is also a funny truth about Key West. For a place famous for turquoise water, it is not really a classic beach destination. The island is built on coral rock, not sand. That means long, natural sandy beaches are rare.People come for other things. Boats. Fishing. Diving the reef. Wandering around Old Town. Watching the sunset with a drink in hand and pretending they do not have a return flight.If sandy beaches are the priority, the south side of the island near Smathers Beach is the best place to stay. If the goal is restaurants, music, and wandering around historic streets, Old Town wins. If snorkeling is where you are at - and you don’t mind going out to sea to get to the best reefs, Key West is a great choice.The other thing is, Key West is a safe, friendly place at a time when a lot of the world is falling apart - where Mexican cartel members don’t wander about openly.The Health CertificateKitty has become attached to my feet, so to speak.  As in, no matter where I go, there she is.  Room to room, outside or in - she never misses a step.  It pains her greatly that for an hour or so each day, she gets locked in the house when I go riding.  I think she still worries that she will get left permanently. But she is also a bit bossy, and likes to be in charge - Robert thinks that one day she will be alpha dog in the house.  I don’t - just cause she knows how small she is, and gives the other dogs lots of berth and respect.  But they are all very tolerant of her and of the fact that she has colonized me to such a large extent. So, Kitty gets to vaca - while the rest of the crew stays home.Now, to fly to an island with a dog, even in the Caribbean, requires a veterinary health certificate - showing the paperwork to the airlines, etc.  A major hassle and a little risky, as you are under the thumb of an arbitrary and capricious system, where each airline interprets the USDA rules and regulations differently.With United, flying domestically is a breeze.  No paperwork required.Road TripSo, the plan. Fly into Miami.  Rent a car.  Drive the 3.5-hour trip down the causeway to Key West for a five-day getaway from Virginia’s snow and ice.  We decided on a hotel with a Cuban theme, called Havana Cubana, which was advertised as dog-friendly and has a nice pool and hot tub.I often tease Robert about his inability to multitask.  When he gets involved in a project, whether it be working on a project car (vintage cars are his secret passion - but don’t let him know I told you) or writing an article, he gives it 200% effort.  I, on the other hand, tend to be doing ten things all at once and juggling a three-ring circus. The truth is, we complement each other’s work styles very well.  But we work very different than each other.However, here he is in the airport - texting, walking, and holding Kitty all at the same time.  Proving that yes, if he put his mind to it, he actually is capable of multitasking.Anyway, other than a few little miffed barks, Kitty settled down on the plane and went to sleep.  We had a reservation with Herz Rental Cars because they are very lenient about having a dog in the car. But it turns out that Herz has a little issue at the Miami branch. At the Herz check-out counter, the line zigzagged around like a popular ride at Disney or the TSA line during a DHS government shutdown.  I did line duty, while Robert had kitty.  It took an hour and a half to rent the car. When I finally reached a clerk, I empathized with his situation - dealing with long lines, and he replied that this was a normal day!  Whelp, I knew there was a reason I tend to rent with Alamo.Photo credit: saltwaterseafari.comThe drive down to Key West was interesting.  A bucket list thing to see all those coral reef islands, and I am glad we did it. But all in all, it was one long straight drive over a concrete causeway to the next small island, then the next, then the next, which were all a claptrap of touristy shops and restaurants, protected areas - fenced off, with some, mostly hidden, residential areas.   But still, a fascinating drive.Next time, we will probably fly into Tampa or Fort Myers, then get passage on the ferry from Fort Myers to Key West.  Which we have been told is a lot of fun and also takes pets. The one downside to this plan is that a car is always a nice thing to have, and although there are scooter and golf cart rentals in Key West, traffic is a little brutal.  Although I am sure there are plenty of Uber drivers around.We left home early in the AM, and arrived at the hotel at about 6:00 PM. A long day for Kitty and us.Bar sitting - Kitty styleSo, Robert and I rarely, if ever, sit at bars to eat.  As neither of us drinks much, we travel or work together, and we don’t tend to socialize with people we don’t know, so we just don’t do it.  As strange as this sounds, up until this trip, I don’t think I have ever sat at a barstool at a bar.Anyway, we started joking about it and decided to eat some of our meals at the hotel bars.  It turns out that Kitty is a very experienced bar sitter. For that matter, stick her on a restaurant chair, and she is as happy as a pig in mud.But the best laid plans... Back to work!There was crisis after crisis in the capital city of Oz, which kept Robert in meetings for most of the first and second days of the trip. Still, we managed to swim, relax, and take it easy for at least a couple of hours each day. Plus, we got to sit on barstools, Kitty’s favorite sport.It also turns out Kitty is pretty sure dogs sometimes get fed just for looking cute while sitting on barstools.  Who knew?At nearby restaurants, everyone was very accommodating to Kitty. Yes, Key West truly is dog-friendly. And family friendly too.On the third day, we took a beautiful walk at the Key West Tropical Forest & Botanical Garden, a 15.2-acre, frost-free tropical forest and botanical garden. Being winter, this was not the best time to stroll through the forest, as the butterflies weren’t out, a highlight of this garden, but still… It was a lovely walk, and the number of native plants there was a delight.After an exquisite dinner at the Dorada restaurant, we headed out for a beach walk by the moonlight.  This culminated in a stroll along a completely empty, beautifully maintained pier clearly used by hotel guests arriving by boat from faraway places, such as Miami.Snorkeling in Looe Key ReefI did some research before the trip and booked us a four-hour chartered boat trip withSaltwater Seafarito go snorkeling off the Looe Key reef. That reef is about five miles from Big Pine Key island, just north of Key West, and the only way to reach it is by boat. When Jill made the reservation, she asked if it was okay to bring a small Pomeranian. Jennifer, the friendly person on the phone line and co-owner, said no problem; they just don’t advertise that they allow dogs because not all dogs are suitable, especially large, unruly ones.Well, obviously -  we have never actually taken Kitty on a boat, so we had a little trepidation. Hence, we came armed with a carrier, doggy lifejacket, and harness.  Turns out Kitty took to boating like a duck takes to water.  It also turns out thatSaltwater Seafariis a family-owned business, and the owners, Jennifer and Matt, also own a Pomeranian! So, while we snorkeled, Kitty had a doting babysitter in Matt, our captain! I think Kitty was quite smitten!Spending time with Matt on the boat was a delight, and knowing that this is afamily-owned businesswith strong values made the trip all the more special.As we sped off in a flurry toward the reef, with water splashing on both sides and the wind whipping around us, Kitty just cuddled up between Robert and me on the front deck of the boat. Totally happy and content in her extra-small life jacket.Well, the snorkeling was spectacular!  As in way better than just about anywhere we have been before.  At places, the water was only a few feet deep, yet there we were in the middle of the ocean. The diversity of fish was incredible.About Looe Key ReefLooe Key is a vibrant underwater haven teeming with over 150 fish species! Spanning about a tenth of a mile wide and a half mile long, there is a lot to explore. The water was clear, with fantastic visibility. We were able to see everything we wanted just by snorkeling. The tropical fish species were vibrant and fascinating to watch. Matt also took us to a different area where turtles, rays, and hammerhead sharks live - although we didn’t see any.  Frankly, I came for the tropical fish, as I have seen plenty of turtles and sharks, and honestly, even little sharks, make me nervous.The CoralThe reef is bursting with dozens of colorful coral varieties, which are truly breathtaking.The reefs around Key West are part of theFlorida Keys Reef Tract, the third-largest living coral barrier reef in the world and the only such reef in the continental United States. Stretching over 360 miles from Key Biscayne to the Dry Tortugas, this reef system lies just 5 to 8 miles offshore and supports over 1,400 species of marine life, including 40 species of stony coral and 500+ tropical fishCoral reefs are often called the rainforests of the ocean. They cover a tiny fraction of the seafloor but support an enormous amount of marine life. Fish, crustaceans, and all sorts of strange little creatures depend on them.But reefs are under stress. Although many blame climate change, it is more likely that pollution and the resulting diseases are causing widespread coral bleaching. The petrochemical fertilizer (nitrogen) runoff into the ocean is a major issue (ref). When corals bleach, they lose the tiny algae that live inside them and provide most of their food. If the stress continues, the coral dies.Because reefs are disappearing so quickly, scientists are experimenting with ways to help corals survive. One idea that gets a lot of headlines is genetically engineered coral. Using gene editing tools, researchers are trying to identify or modify genes that might help corals tolerate higher temperatures or resist disease. The hope is that more resilient corals could eventually be planted on damaged reefs.That said, much of what people call “GMO coral” is actually something simpler. Scientists are also selectively breeding corals that naturally survive hotter water. In other words, they are accelerating evolution rather than inserting new genes.The law of unintended consequencesSupporters argue this may buy reefs time. But the risk of unintended consequences is also real. Change the genetics of an organism that builds entire ecosystems, and you had better be sure you understand what you are doing. Furthermore, remember that there are 40 coral species in this area alone.  And various fish species depend on different coral species to survive.  What happens to the diversity of fish when one species of coral becomes more or less dominant?For now, most reef restoration still relies on old-fashioned coral farming. Small coral fragments are grown in underwater nurseries and then transplanted back onto reefs.Island HopingOnce we were done snorkeling, mostly because I started to feel slightly seasick, as there was wind, which caused a swell at the reefs,  Mat took us to a little island, where we jumped out of the boat and waded in - then hung out for a while.  Yep - with Kitty being held, we waded right on in to the sandy-covered islet. She never batted an eye or worried that we might drop her. Once there, she amused herself checking out under the shrubs and vigorously digging in the sand, looking for the entrance to China, while Robert and I hung out in a little hammock situated nearby.We then toured other islands by boat and did some bird watching.  Notable were the white pelicans, frigates, and osprey.Back to realityThe next day, we headed home.  The drive back to Miami was pleasant, and the flight home uneventful.Robert is already talking about returning. The fact that Key West is both warm in winter and very accessible, and, yes, there is an airport, are key factors. But the truth is that the little downtown area and marina are darling, the restaurants are outstanding, and the ambiance is relaxed and friendly.  We might even make it a family vacation, rent an Airbnb, inviting the kids and grandkids along.And here we are, three weeks out from the big trip and already planning another.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.Share

Summary: The Sea dog


Friday Funnies: Trump, You Magnificent Bastard!

With all our travels, we have encountered more than one bathroom that should have been shut down as a biohazard.Frankly, all this fear-baiting about backyard chicken eggs and raw milk by the government is a little absurd, given the state of many public restrooms…Seems like, once again, they are going after the wrong targets.Nothing screams patriotism more than an Indian call center…The dialog below is what you call based (it was also the best comedy routine on CSPAN in a long while)Q: "Why didn't you tell U.S. allies…about the war before attacking Iran?"President Trump: "We wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”Have a listen:Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.Share”This AI lady is going to live forever.”The truth is that whether of not this lady is real, the messages still resonates.Spring showed up this year right on schedule, which is more than we can say for most things in life.The first day of spring is today, as it lands on Friday, March 20, and it arrives with the vernal equinox. That is the official, astronomical way of saying winter is finally done overstaying its welcome.At exactly 10:46 this morning Eastern time, the sun crosses the celestial equator, moving from the southern half of the sky to the northern.What makes this day a little special is that the Earth is not leaning one way or the other. For a fraction of a moment, is it suspended equally. The result is that day and night are almost perfectly equal all over the world. Twelve hours of light, twelve hours of dark, give or take a few minutes, but just for this one day.From here on out, the days start stretching longer, the sun climbs higher, and everything on the farm begins to wake up, whether we are ready or not.Today is the official start of astronomical spring, and it will run straight through until the summer solstice on June 21. After that, we start sliding the other direction again, but there is no sense worrying about that just yet.For now, the light is coming back, the ground is softening, and the long list of things we said we would do “when it warms up” is about to come due.For me, April and May are my favorite months.  It is the time when life renews.  I treasure every moment of spring.  For me, it is like Christmastime every day.The temperature is forecasted to be 73 degrees today in Virginia - time to get myself outside!JGM

Summary: Surprise, Surprise...