Supporting Cardiovascular Health and Recovery: What the Evidence Actually Shows

When I first wrote about recovering from a cardiovascular injury in 2022, many readers were searching for practical ways to support recovery from cardiovascular and vascular injury associated with COVID-19 infection and vaccination. The question people kept asking was simple:“What can I do to help my body heal from CVD or cardiac injury or to improve cardiac health?”Four years later, the foundational answer remains largely unchanged. There is still no magic pill. There is still no government-funded Manhattan Project focused on helping people recover from long-term cardiovascular injury. And there are still remarkably few large clinical trials evaluating inexpensive, unpatentable nutritional interventions, despite the scale of need.Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States, claiming nearly one million lives each year, and NIH spending specifically targeted toward heart and vascular disease research is about $2.1 billion annually. That may sound like a large number until one considers the scale of the problem: roughly one American dies from cardiovascular disease every 34 seconds.We spend billions studying heart disease, yet devote comparatively little effort to implementing many low-cost interventions for which substantial evidence already exists.Despite the government’s limited interest in rigorously evaluating many inexpensive approaches that could reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease, the evidence supporting several of the supplements discussed below has continued to accumulate. Looking back four years later, I am more confident in many of these recommendations than when I first wrote them. The data are stronger, the biological rationale is clearer, and the need for practical prevention has only become more apparent.I have also expanded this essay beyond the specific context of COVID-related cardiovascular injury, because the underlying biology is not unique to that insult. Endothelial dysfunction, coagulation dysregulation, mitochondrial stress, and chronic inflammation are common pathways in cardiovascular disease broadly defined, whether the triggering event was a viral infection, a vaccination-associated adverse event, metabolic syndrome, or simply decades of aging under suboptimal conditions.The core supplements remain: Vitamin K2-MK7 for vascular health and calcium regulation; magnesium for endothelial function, blood pressure, and metabolic resilience; and taurine, which has emerged as an increasingly important nutrient for cardiovascular function, glucose regulation, mitochondrial health, and healthy aging.In this updated version, I add several additional agents whose evidence base has matured sufficiently to warrant serious discussion.Why the Evidence Looks DifferentBefore proceeding, it is important to understand a structural problem in cardiovascular research. Many of the compounds discussed below will never be evaluated in the kind of massive, multi-center, randomized clinical trials that dominate modern medical evidence. The reason is not scientific. It is economic. These compounds cannot be patented. There is no realistic opportunity to generate the financial return required to justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a Phase III clinical trial of magnesium, taurine, vitamin D, or berberine.That does not mean the evidence is weak. It means the evidence comes from a different place. Instead of a handful of blockbuster clinical trials, it is assembled from smaller randomized studies, epidemiologic observations, laboratory research, physiological understanding, and decades of clinical experience. None of these sources of evidence are perfect. Neither are large clinical trials, for that matter. Each has strengths and limitations.The absence of a funded Phase III trial does not mean the absence of evidence. It means we must examine the available data carefully, weigh the totality of the evidence, and remain honest about the limits of our knowledge. Throughout this review, I will try to distinguish between what is well supported, what appears promising, and what remains genuinely uncertain.For more than four years, one of the most common questions I have received has been simple:“What can I do to help my body heal?”It is a reasonable question. Millions of people have experienced cardiovascular and vascular problems associated with aging, metabolic disease, COVID-19, or, in some cases, vaccine injury. Yet remarkably little effort has been devoted to studying inexpensive interventions that might support recovery.The discussion below is not based on pharmaceutical marketing, government guidance, or internet folklore. It is based on a careful review of the scientific literature, clinical experience, and years of conversations with physicians and researchers grappling with these issues.No pharmaceutical company sponsored this work. No government grant paid for the hours spent reviewing the evidence. Independent scientific analysis only exists because readers choose to support it.In the full article below, I review what has held up over the last four years, what has not, and which supplements have accumulated the strongest evidence for supporting cardiovascular and vascular health.If you find value in independent research and reporting that follows the evidence wherever it leads, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.Read more

Summary: 2026 Update: Four Years Later


FORTIFYING RIGHTS AT THE EDGE OF A NEW WORLDNatural Persons, Bodily Sovereignty, and the Frontiers of Rights Law in the Digital, Biological, and Spatial AgeGuest Author Sofia KarstensA single word separates freedom from exploitation:persons. Not humans, not homo sapiens, not citizens… persons. This distinction, quietly embedded in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by Eleanor Roosevelt and the drafting committee, was not semantic housekeeping – it was a legal firewall erected against a pattern of abuse the world had already witnessed in its most grotesque form.Today, at a juncture when biotechnology rewrites the genome, artificial intelligence surveils every transaction, corporations mine asteroids, and digital identity systems determine access to society, that firewall is being tested again. And we are running out of time to reinforce it.The architecture is neither accidental nor arbitrary. The Declaration does something quietly decisive in Article 6, which establishes the status on which every other right depends:“everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.”Read quickly, it scans as procedural housekeeping, but notice the load-bearing word isperson– not human, not citizen, not subject. Personhood is the gate through which every other protection in the Declaration must pass, and the drafters knew it.That gate did its hardest work over property. When the General Assembly adopted the UDHR in 1948, the most contentious terrain was not speech or even the prohibition of torture; it was the right to own. Article 17 provides that“everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others”and that“no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.”The language sounds benign. It is not. Property was the very instrument through which personhood had been denied: to make a person ownable, the law first had to place them outside the class of those entitled to own.The pre-existing international legal order had previously operated on a bifurcated concept of personhood:natural persons(human beings) andlegal persons(corporations, states, and chartered entities). Colonial powers had exploited this bifurcation brutally, reclassifying enslaved Africans, indigenous peoples, and colonial subjects as property rather than persons — or as a legally inferior subcategory of person not entitled to the same protections as European natural persons. The body itself became a unit of commerce. The question before Roosevelt’s drafting committee was: how do you write a right to property that protects the dispossessed without simultaneously legitimizing the mechanisms by which bodies are owned?Roosevelt’s solution was precise and radical. First, she fixed the operative legal status as that ofnatural persons– notnatural humans. The wordhumancarries a biological and historically racialized weight. The wordpersonis a legal status – one that, critically, cannot be subdivided by race, ancestry, or cognitive modification. Second, she added the phrase“alone or in association with others,”which formally acknowledged collective property rights – protecting indigenous communal land ownership that had been systematically denied under frameworks requiring individual titling. A tribe, a community, a collective – they too are associations of natural persons, entitled to property protections that no state can arbitrarily strip away.The distinction betweenhumanandpersonis not philosophical abstraction – it’s a live legal weapon. Colonial law did not need to call indigenous peoplesnon-human; it was sufficient to definehumanso narrowly – through civilization, Christianity, property ownership, or literacy – that entire populations fell outside its protections. Courts upheld the dispossession of Native Americans not by declaring them animals but by ruling that their social organization did not constitutecivil societycapable of holding recognized title.This is precisely what the Declaration’spersonsframework was designed to prevent. Any being who is a natural person, regardless of cultural practice, genetic modification, technological augmentation, or planetary location, holds inalienable rights. But the danger returns. As genetic engineering advances and as the definition ofnormal humanshifts toward augmented baselines, we risk recreating the same bifurcation: those who meet the new standard ofenhanced humanand those – including unmodified indigenous communities, those who opt out of medical intervention, or the geneticallyunimproved– who are reclassified by implication as lesser persons. Articles 3 and 5 of the UDHR – security of person, and freedom from cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment – are the Declaration’s nearest safeguards for physical and mental integrity, and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples bridges the gap between collective cultural identity and individual bodily safety. These frameworks must be the floor, not the ceiling.There is a definitional trap when considering trafficking, consent, and the body as property. Under international law, the concept that the body is property – even your own property – is formally rejected to prevent opening legal doors to human trafficking and slavery. Articles 3 and 4 of the UDHR are unambiguous: Article 3 guarantees the right to life, liberty, and security of person, explicitly prohibiting non-consensual interference with the physical body. Article 4 outlaws slavery and the slave trade in all their forms, establishing that the physical frame can never be treated as property owned by another entity. Thebody as propertyframework is, by design, excluded from standard international human rights law.Yet a philosophical tension persists. When we rejectyour body belongs to you as property, we simultaneously erode the legal vocabulary to preventyour body being claimed by others. The UN’s trafficking definition, set out in the Palermo Protocol, requires three elements together: an act (the recruitment, transfer, or receipt of a person), a coercive means, and a purpose of exploitation – a category the Protocol confines to forced labor, servitude, slavery, and the removal of organs. Coerced medical or technological intervention does not slot cleanly into that frame, but it presses on the principle the trafficking regime exists to protect: that a person’s body is not a resource others may conscript. The squarely applicable law isthe law of consent. The Nuremberg Code, written after the coerced experimentation of the war, made voluntary consent absolutely essential to medical experimentation, and the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (UNESCO, 2005) makes autonomy and informed consent foundational – not optional – principles of any intervention. When medical or technological interventions are administered without full, informed, uncoerced consent – in institutional settings, military contexts, technological integrations, or under vaccine mandates – it is these instruments, not an expansive reading of trafficking, that they most clearly offend.The COVID-era vaccination debates acutely surfaced this tension. Whatever one’s view of the interventions themselves, the application of state coercion – employment termination, movement restrictions, social exclusion – as leverage to compel biological modification raises precisely the consent and autonomy questions these instruments exist to answer, and international law must grapple with them honestly. If we do not resolve this definitional gap, it will be exploited and, indeed, it already has been.The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides equal protection under the law and guarantees due process before deprivation of life, liberty, or property. The inclusion ofpropertyas a protected interest creates a specific and underexplored conflict when applied to children’s bodies, particularly when mRNA technologies or other novel interventions are added to mandatory childhood vaccine schedules.Children are simultaneously rights-holders and legal dependents whose decisions are made by guardians – themselves operating within a state framework that can mandate medical treatment and compel compliance. The question is not merelywhat age constitutes consent, butwhether age alone is the right standard. A rights framework grounded in natural persons rather than humans opens a different premise: that theimmutable baseline of the body’s natural state is the legal default, and any permanent or irreversible biological intervention must be delayed until the natural person can give meaningful, informed, uncoerced consent – with the narrow exception of genuine emergency, defined by specific, objective, legally reviewable criteria.Leaning into the Article 17 lens – that natural persons hold property rights over their own biological matter – actually reduces the constitutional conflict between the 1st and 14th Amendments on this issue. Under the 14th Amendment’s due process clause,propertycannot be taken without due process. If a child’s unmodified genome is understood as their foundational biological property, then any non-emergency permanent modification without consent requires a constitutionally cognizable justification, and a procedure. This is not radical reading but rather a direct application of existing framework to emerging reality. Article 12 of the UDHR reinforces this, protecting individuals against arbitrary interference with their privacy — including, by natural extension, their genetic and biological privacy.There is an urgent property debate that cannot be avoided around biopiracy and interestingly returns to the indigenous DNA debate. International law’s formal rejection of the body-as-property concept has an unintended consequence: it leaves indigenous peoples legally exposed to biopiracy. Corporate and scientific entities have patented genetic sequences and biological material sampled from indigenous populations without consent for decades. Because the body is not legally property, Article 17’s strong protections against arbitrary deprivation cannot be directly invoked to prevent this extraction.The Native American experience with eugenics programs – including forced sterilizations carried out under state authority well into the 1970s – illustrates that the theoretical rejection of body-as-property does nothing to prevent state and institutional actors from treating indigenous bodies as resources. The security-of-person guarantee in Article 3 is clear, but enforcement mechanisms remain weak. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples makes progress, but its non-binding character limits its teeth.A controlled, carefully bounded application of the body-as-property principle through Article 17 offers a pathway: ancestral human remains, genetic codes, biological tissue, and DNA data belong strictly to the natural person and the community from which they originate. No external entity – state, corporation, or scientific institution – may arbitrarily deprive them of commercial or medical rights to their own biological material. Article 17’s second clause, prohibiting arbitrary deprivation of property, functions as a shield: without legally recognized due process (consent, compensation, tribal authority approval) no extraction of genetic material is legally permissible. This framework stops the commodification of indigenous bodies while avoiding the dangerous generalization that all bodies are tradeable property.In true fashion, the overlap of potentially conflicting language and interests again becomes an exposure point:Maritime law – the body of law governing conduct on international waters – has long operated as a parallel jurisdiction that interacts uneasily with land-based human rights frameworks. Ships in international waters exist in a sovereignty gap. The law of the flag state technically applies, but enforcement is often nominal, and the persons aboard have limited access to national court systems. This creates structural vulnerability: workers aboard factory ships, fishers held in conditions of forced labor under flags of convenience, and migrants rescued at sea routinely fall between national jurisdictions – protected in theory and abandoned in practice.A second sovereignty gap runs through investment arbitration. The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a World Bank body, was built to resolve disputes between states and foreign investors; it was never designed for natural persons. The gradual expansion of who qualifies as aninvestor– together with treaty-shopping and dual-nationality structures used to manufacture jurisdiction – has produced a forum in which commercial interests can challenge and override domestic regulation before tribunals answerable to neither electorate nor constitution. Two different gaps, one lesson: where ordinary courts give way to fora built for commercial parties, natural persons lose standing. That logic is now being eyed for space. Both the flag-of-convenience model of the high seas and the investor-first model of arbitration are being repurposed to manufacture property and extraction rights beyond Earth for entities that no planetary treaty authorizes to hold them.As crazy and science fiction as it may sound… space rights are the frontier of person’s law. The Outer Space Treaty (OST) of 1967 – the supreme treaty authority governing human activity beyond Earth – states in Article II that outer space and celestial bodies are not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by use or occupation, or by any other means. Its intent was to prevent a Cold War land grab from extending off-planet. Its effect on natural persons is severe: because no nation may claim sovereign territory in space, no nation can grant traditional property deeds or real estate titles in space. An individual’s property rights under Article 17 are acutely constrained; you may own your landed spacecraft or habitat module, but you cannot legally own the lunar or Martian land beneath it.This legal gap is already being exploited. Through a combination of maritime law precedents, nationality frameworks, dual-national constructs, and domestic legislation – most notably the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 – private corporations are being granted extraction and resource rights that functionally constitute property rights in space, despite the OST’s prohibition on national appropriation. The mechanism is elegant in its cynicism: anationcannot own the asteroid, but acorporation chartered by the nationcan own the minerals extracted from it. Natural persons, meanwhile, have no pathway to the same rights.The highest protection available to natural persons in this space operates across three tiers. The supreme authority is jus cogens – peremptory norms of international law that sit at the apex of the global legal system and bind all actors regardless of treaty. No space colony, corporation, or nation-state may enforce property or living arrangements in space that violate jus cogens: the prohibitions on forced labor, human trafficking, slavery, and arbitrary deprivation of life are absolute. They extend to the universe. Any rule – whether aboard a private space station, a Martian colony, or a lunar mining operation – that constitutes forced labor or arbitrary confinement is automatically void under jus cogens, regardless of whatever contractual, corporate, or flag-state framework purports to authorize it. Below jus cogens sits the OST itself; and below that, the emerging domestic legislative frameworks that fill jurisdictional gaps. Natural persons must be explicitly written into all three tiers… or they will be written out.Whatever new enclosure we come up with, perhaps the most critical inclusion must be digital identity and surveillance. The digital domain has become the frontier where rights are most actively eroding in real time. Digital identity systems – government-issued or corporate-administered – now control access to banking, healthcare, employment, travel, and social participation. Biometric tracking systems map faces, gaits, voices, and behavioral patterns without consent. Digital censorship – whether by state mandate or by platform policy – suppresses political speech, medical dissent, and cultural expression in ways that would be facially unconstitutional in any physical public square. Technological surveillance of the depth now routinely deployed would, if conducted by police on a street corner, require judicial warrants in most democratic legal systems.The natural person framework is essential here. The same Article 12 protections against arbitrary interference with privacy; the same Article 19 protections for freedom of expression; the same Article 17 protections against arbitrary deprivation of property – including, critically, your digital property: your data, your biometric profile, your behavioral model, your genetic record – all must be explicitly extended into the digital domain. The concept of digital rights is not a novelty to be addressed later… it is the governing question of this decade. Without explicit extension of natural persons’ rights to the digital sphere, we will have created an enormous sovereign-free zone… just as maritime law created one on the ocean and space law threatens to create one beyond the atmosphere, where entrenched power operates without constraint, and weaponizes every available tool in its arsenal – including the one most capable of destroying us – to remain entrenched.Self-governance and territorial autonomy have become entangled in the sovereign quagmire. The concept of sovereignty as it applies to individuals – sometimes called territorial autonomy or personal sovereignty – has been systematically delegitimized in legal and political discourse. Over recent years, the association of ideas around individual sovereignty, self-governance, and opt-out rights has been treated as inherently extremist. A pattern developed in which any written or read notion linking these concepts – regardless of whether the actual language of sovereignty was even used – was flagged as conflicting with state authority. The ideas themselves became suspect, without regard for their legal pedigree, which extends through the entire lineage of Enlightenment philosophy and international human rights law.This pattern is not incidental. The delegitimization of individual sovereignty language serves a structural function: it preemptively forecloses the legal arguments that would most effectively challenge overreach. When natural persons cannot invoke their right to bodily self-governance, territorial autonomy, or opt-out from institutional compulsion without being classified as fringe actors, the rights themselves atrophy. The chilling effect is constitutional erosion by stigma. The UDHR framework of natural persons – with its roots in anti-colonial, anti-slavery, and anti-fascist legal history – is thelegitimatevocabulary of individual sovereignty and personal integrity all all levels. Reclaiming it is not radical; abandoning it is.The enclosure is coming… the question is whether we see it. Every historical instance of systematic rights deprivation has followed the same pattern: first, the definition of personhood is narrowed or bifurcated; then, the excluded group is subject to extraction – of labor, of land, of biological material, of identity. The tools change. The logic does not. We are now at a moment when the same bifurcation is being prepared across multiple simultaneous dimensions: biological (enhanced vs. unmodified persons), digital (verified identity holders vs. the uncredentialed), spatial (licensed resource extractors vs. unrepresented natural persons on other planets), and financial (those inside the programmable currency system vs. those outside it).Artificial intelligence will be the primary instrument of enforcement. Not because AI is malevolent, but because AI systems trained on existing legal and economic frameworks will replicate and accelerate existing power asymmetries at a speed and scale no human bureaucracy could match. The optimization function will run. The question is what it is optimizing toward, and on whose behalf. If the answer is entrenched capital, state authority, and corporate persons, then natural persons – all of us – will find ourselves the subjects of a form of administered servitude more comprehensive and more inescapable than any that preceded it, precisely because we will not have a word for it.The word is persons.Natural persons. The framework is already written. Eleanor Roosevelt and her colleagues drafted it in 1948 because they had just watched the world nearly destroy itself by forgetting it. We do not have the luxury of forgetting it again – not with bioengineering rewriting what bodies are, not with digital systems rewriting what identity is, not with space law rewriting what territory is, and not with AI rewriting what governance is. The time to explicitly fortify the rights of natural persons – in bodies, in data, in space, in law – is now. Not because the crisis has arrived. Because it is being quietly assembled, component by component, and most of us do not yet see the whole.Update: The UN meeting held in mid-June 2026 ended with a clear attempt to slip the no-property natural-persons clause from the Moon Treaty verbatim into the General Assembly Report.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.


America’s Birthday Does Not Need Fixing

As the United States approaches its 250th birthday, a familiar chorus has emerged. We are told that the celebration must be “reimagined,” “broadened,” “corrected,” or “fixed.” The argument is that America’s history has too often been viewed through the lens of its achievements, with insufficient focus on its failures. Left-leaning media and academics argue that the nation’s anniversary should become an exercise in national self-flagellation rather than national celebration.I disagree.A quarter millennium is not the moment for a nation to apologize for its existence. It is the moment to remember why that nation exists at all.A USA Today article published yesterday, titled “A growing movement aims to fix America’s big birthday celebration,” tells the story before the argument even begins. We are informed that “a growing movement aims to fix America’s big birthday” and that activists are “pushing back” against “splashy celebrations” of America’s 250th anniversary.Of course <sarcasm>, Phaedra Trethan, the author of the article, had this to say about the 250th celebration on her Facebook page this week:The Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC) is a Philadelphia-based activist group. The organization pressured the National Park Service to create a slavery memorial at the site of George Washington's presidential residence in Philadelphia, arguing that the role of slavery in the nation's founding had been overlooked. ATAC seeks to reinterpret American history by placing greater emphasis on the country's historical injustices rather than its achievements and founding ideals.Cultural MarxismThe 1619 Project, launched by The New York Times Magazine in 2019, seeks to reframe American history by arguing that the arrival of the first African slaves in Virginia in 1619 should be regarded as the nation’s true founding. The project contends that slavery and its legacy are not peripheral features of American history but are central to understanding the country’s institutions, economy, culture, and politics.  The thesis is that the founding of the nation was actually when the first slave was imported into the British colonies in 1619.The project represents a revisionist interpretation of American history. It elevates America’s “original sin” above its founding ideals and presents a distorted picture of the nation. It minimizes the significance of 1776, the Declaration of Independence, and the constitutional principles of liberty, self-government, and individual rights that have inspired reform movements throughout post-Enlightenment history. In this view, the project seeks to teach younger generations that the United States is fundamentally defined by oppression rather than by the continual expansion of freedom and opportunity.  A twisted example of progressive activist evil.So, evidently, the USA Today article was written from the perspective of a true believer of the 1619 Project. USA Today argues that we need to “fix” our history.Fix it?America’s birthday does not need fixing. It needs remembering.There is something revealing about a class of people who look at the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and see, not a miracle of human liberty, but another opportunity for correction, scolding, and grievance management.This is the exhausted tone of the modern managerial left: America as a problem set, the Founders as suspects, patriotism as embarrassment, and the celebration as something requiring adult supervision.  Well, because someone might actually believe that the history of our nation is worth defending.  And clearly, that can’t be allowed to happen <sarcasm again, for those that missed it>.But the next generation deserves better than this sour inheritance.The Founding Fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor against the greatest empire on earth. They created a republic based on the radical proposition that rights come from God, not government. They built a constitutional system designed to restrain power because they understood, better than today’s experts, that human beings are fallen and governments are dangerous.That is not something to “fix.” That is something to celebrate and teach.The Founding Fathers themselves understood human imperfection better than most. That is why they built a constitutional system designed not around the fantasy of perfect rulers, but around the reality of flawed human beings. They assumed power would be abused. They assumed governments would overreach. They assumed liberty would always be under pressure. Their genius was not in creating a perfect country. Their genius was that they created a government structured to enable self-correction through a system of checks and balances.The American Revolution was one of the most extraordinary political achievements in human history. A group of farmers, merchants, lawyers, printers, and soldiers challenged the most powerful empire on earth and won. Then, instead of crowning a king, they wrote a Constitution. That was the miracle.The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were not mere attention-seeking influencers. They were not activists. They were not seeking social approval. They risked hanging from a British gallows. Many lost property. Some lost family members. Several died in hardship. And out of their sacrifices, they built a nation whose principles would inspire abolitionists, suffragists, civil-rights leaders, dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, and freedom movements around the world.That is worth celebrating.Increasingly, young Americans are taught to view their inheritance primarily through the lens of grievance. They learn about the sins but not the achievements. They learn about the failures but not the courage.The result is predictable. A generation raised to believe its country is fundamentally oppressive will not feel much obligation to preserve it.Patriotism is not blind worship of government. In fact, America’s founders would have been deeply suspicious of that idea. Patriotism is gratitude for an inheritance received and stewardship of that inheritance for those who come after us.Every nation has dark chapters. What makes America remarkable is not that it escaped them. What makes America remarkable is that its founding principles contained the tools needed to overcome them.One of the oddities of modern America is that we increasingly seem determined to teach our children to view their national inheritance with suspicion. Travel across Europe, and you will find statues of kings, generals, emperors, explorers, and statesmen standing largely where they have stood for generations. Their histories are debated, their failures acknowledged, but the monuments remain because those nations understand that a civilization cannot survive if it treats its own past as a crime scene.Yet in the United States, a movement has emerged that views nearly every founder, monument, symbol, and national celebration as an opportunity for indictment and special interest self-promotion.The same impulse is now reaching across the Atlantic, where activists demand apologies and reparations from the British Crown, aristocratic families, and European governments for historical involvement in the slave trade that occurred hundreds of years ago. But there is a profound difference between studying history and putting an entire civilization perpetually on trial. A nation that teaches each generation to regard its founders as villains should not be surprised when fewer citizens feel any obligation to preserve what those founders built.The question facing the next generation is not whether America has flaws. The question is whether the principles of 1776 remain worth defending.The answer is self-evident.A nation that recognizes rights as coming from God rather than government is worth defending.A nation built on individual liberty, free speech, due process, private property, and limited government is worth defending.A nation that has done more than any other in history to advance the cause of human freedom and dignity is worth defending.America’s 250th birthday should not be a seminar on national guilt. It should be a celebration of an extraordinary experiment in self-government that, despite every prediction of failure, remains standing two and a half centuries later.That is an achievement worth defending and celebrating.The republic stands. Let’s keep it that way.JGM/RWMIf you believe America's story is worth preserving, sharing, and teaching to the next generation, please consider supporting Malone News. Subscriptions help us continue publishing independent analysis that challenges fashionable narratives and defends the principles that made this nation exceptional.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.Share


The DOJ’s Medicare Fraud Takedown Is About More Than Fraud

Audio :TheDepartment of Justice recently announced what it describes as the largest healthcare fraud takedown in American history. Federal prosecutors charged 455 defendants across the United States in connection with more than $6.5 billion in alleged fraudulent claims involving Medicare, Medicaid, and other government healthcare programs. That amounts to over $ 14 million bilked from the Federal government per defendant. The perpetrators include physicians, pharmacists, healthcare executives, marketers, and individuals linked to organized criminal enterprises. They involved scams that not only harmed patients, but in at least one case, actually killed a patient. Authorities seized hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, luxury assets, and other proceeds tied to the schemes.The numbers alone are remarkable. Healthcare fraud has long been understood as a significant drain on public resources, but even seasoned observers were surprised by the scale of this operation. U.S. healthcare fraud has become a major focus of international cartel activities, akin to the illegal drug and human trafficking sectors.  Yet the arrests themselves may not be the most important aspect of the announcement. What caught my attention was the growing role of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in developing new tools to identify and prevent fraud before taxpayer dollars leave the Treasury, and the implications of this approach in future applications across the entire Federal funding enterprise.For most of Medicare’s history, fraud investigations were largely retrospective. Claims were submitted, payments were made, and investigators attempted to identify fraudulent activity months or years later. In effect, trying to close the barn door after the horse is already loose.  As you might imagine, that approach was never particularly efficient. By the time a scheme was uncovered, much of the money was often gone, routed through offshore banks and distributed through various criminal networks. Recovering those funds was difficult, and in many cases impossible.  The “follow the money” approach created a license for innovative fraudsters and grifters to bilk the government (and taxpayer) and then quickly slip into international obscurity.  Much like all other forms of internet and data fraud, the cat-and-mouse game resulted in criminals constantly probing for the weakest link in the Government’s reimbursement practices.The Justice Department’s announcement suggests that this reactive model is changing. Which means that the criminal models will need to adapt and they will adapt, they always do. But in the meantime, CMS has increasingly invested in advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence-driven systems designed to identify suspicious billing patterns in near real time. And so, not surprisingly, the bad guys are also employing the same data analytics and AI toolkit to identify and exploit systemic reimbursement weaknesses, for instance, by using AI-generated videos of fake telemedicine interactions.  Another sort of ongoing “mutually assured destruction” dynamic, where both the cat and the mouse seek to exploit emerging data technology.One example is the agency’s new WISeR initiative, short for Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction. According to CMS, the program combines machine learning, artificial intelligence, and human clinical review to identify potentially fraudulent or medically unnecessary claims before payments are made. The goal is straightforward: stop improper payments before they occur rather than trying to recover them after the fact.There is another lesson buried in this story, and it has less to do with healthcare fraud than with modern journalism.Most “journalistic” coverage to date has focused on the easiest, most salacious aspects of the case. Readers were treated to photographs of luxury cars, yachts, expensive jewelry, and beachfront property allegedly purchased with fraudulent proceeds. The headlines emphasized the $6.5 billion figure, the number of defendants, and the more colorful individual schemes. Those details are certainly newsworthy. They help readers grasp the scale of the operation and provide the kind of compelling narrative that modern media naturally favors.What received far less attention was the mechanism that made the operation possible.The process is the story.This represents a significant evolution in how government oversight is conducted. Modern healthcare systems generate enormous amounts of data. Every claim, prescription, referral, diagnostic code, supplier relationship, and reimbursement transaction leaves a digital footprint. When data silos are broken down, and these data streams are integrated and analyzed together (the CIA calls this “data fusion and analysis”), patterns emerge that would be impossible for individual auditors or investigators to identify on their own. A criminal network operating through dozens of shell companies and multiple states may appear invisible when viewed on a claim-by-claim basis. Viewed across millions of transactions, however, the pattern becomes obvious.  A key technical challenge has been crafting approaches that enable different databases and database structures to find common ground.  Of course, that challenge pales in comparison to the challenge of overcoming bureaucratic inter-agency turf wars over who owns and controls what.The international component of this operation deserves particular attention. Among those apprehended were suspects arrested in Cyprus, Estonia, and the Philippines who were allegedly connected to fraud schemes totaling more than $15 billion. Those numbers are difficult to comprehend. We are no longer talking about a dishonest physician inflating bills or a small clinic gaming reimbursement codes. These are industrial-scale financial operations that span continents, exploit modern communications and banking systems, and target one of the world's largest public payment programs. In many respects, Medicare has become a global target, attracting the same caliber of transnational criminal organizations that once focused primarily on banking fraud, illicit drugs, money laundering, human trafficking, and cybercrime.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareThe involvement of CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz warrants particular attention because this takedown appears to reflect a broader strategic shift within the agency. For decades, CMS functioned primarily as a reimbursement organization. Its core mission was to process claims, distribute payments, and administer some of the largest healthcare programs in the world. Fraud investigations occurred, but they were often treated as a separate activity rather than a central organizing principle.Under Oz, CMS appears to be evolving into something different. Since taking office, he has repeatedly emphasized fraud, waste, and abuse as existential threats to the long-term sustainability of Medicare and Medicaid. Rather than focusing solely on reimbursement policy, eligibility rules, or provider payment schedules, his leadership has centered on program integrity, advanced analytics, provider verification, enrollment oversight, and the use of artificial intelligence to identify suspicious claims before payments are made.The agency’s new WISeR (Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction) initiative, which combines machine learning, artificial intelligence, and clinical review to identify potentially improper claims, is perhaps the clearest example of that shift. CMS itself describes the effort as a way to bring Medicare into the twenty-first century while protecting beneficiaries and taxpayers from unnecessary services and fraudulent billing.This focus also helps explain why Dr. Oz appears to enjoy significant support within the White House. The administration has made clear that it wants to preserve Medicare without pursuing politically unpopular benefit reductions. And that it wants data silos broken down.  And that it wants to expedite the implementation of AI-based solutions.  Fraud prevention is one of the few areas where large savings can be achieved without cutting services to legitimate beneficiaries. A triple win, and Oz gets the administrative leadership gold star for driving this forward.Dr. Oz has argued publicly that addressing fraud and waste could substantially extend Medicare’s financial life. Recovering billions from criminal enterprises is a far easier message to sell than reducing benefits for seniors.Viewed in that context, the 455-defendant takedown is more than a law-enforcement success. It may represent an early demonstration of a new governing model in which CMS becomes not merely the nation’s largest healthcare payer, but one of its most sophisticated data-analysis and fraud-detection organizations. If that transformation succeeds, its influence is unlikely to remain confined to healthcare for long.What is particularly interesting is that Medicare may be serving as a testing ground for a broader transformation that extends far beyond healthcare. The same analytical tools used to identify fraudulent billing patterns could be adapted to detect tax fraud, procurement fraud, disability fraud, money laundering, and other forms of financial abuse. The underlying technology is not specific to medicine. It is a general capability based on large-scale data integration and pattern recognition.This real-time, forward-looking approach will undoubtedly be extended into all sectors of government-related contracting, billing, and reimbursement.  Likely examples will include Department of War contracts, the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Transportation construction and maintenance contracts, all the way down to research grants and contracts issued to academic institutions and their notorious “indirect cost”-derived subsidies.  At first, the big money programs will be targeted.  As the technology (and legal framework) evolves, expect this to reach down into the daily lives of all of us.This observation leads to a larger question. For the past several years, public discussion about artificial intelligence has largely centered on chatbots, image generators, social media, and consumer applications. Meanwhile, some of the most consequential uses of AI may be quietly developing within government agencies. The ability to continuously analyze enormous datasets and proactively identify suspicious patterns fundamentally changes how large institutions operate. Medicare fraud detection may be only the beginning.There is also an interesting media dimension to this story. According to Ground News, coverage of the announcement was concentrated in center and right-leaning outlets, while relatively few left-leaning publications devoted significant attention to it. That disparity is worth noting because a $6.5 billion fraud case involving hundreds of defendants would seem, at first glance, to be a major national story.The pattern is consistent with a broader criticism leveled against both legacy media and major news aggregators. Recent analyses have documented that story selection itself may be skewed, with achievements, reforms, modernization efforts, and successful implementation of government programs receiving less attention when they reflect positively on the Trump administration. Whether that reflects editorial priorities, audience preferences, newsroom culture, or simple news judgment is open to debate. What is harder to dispute is that a historic Medicare fraud takedown involving more than 300 defendants, billions in alleged losses, new AI-driven enforcement tools, and major reforms in federal data-sharing received surprisingly limited attention relative to its significance.Whatever the reason, the relative lack of coverage seems disproportionate to the importance of the announcement. If a federal program had suffered a newly discovered $6.5 billion failure, it is difficult to imagine the story receiving so little attention. A government success story, particularly one involving fraud prevention and administrative modernization, appears to generate far less interest.Viewed narrowly, this is a story about criminals stealing from taxpayer-funded healthcare programs. Viewed more broadly, it is a story about the emergence of a new model of governance. The federal government is increasingly relying on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analytics to identify problems before they occur. Most Americans will welcome the use of these tools when they are directed at organized criminal enterprises. The more difficult questions will arise later, as these capabilities mature and expand into other areas of public administration.This aspect leads straight to the dark side to this story, and the easiest way to think about this is to recall the plot of the pre-crime movie “The Minority Report”, which was loosely based on Philip K. Dick's 1956 novella by the same name.The film explores themes of free will versus determinism, featuringprecogs(psychic individuals) who predict crimes before they occur.  Substitute real-time proactive AI screening for precogs, and you get the picture.The modernization story also deserves to be viewed with a measure of caution. The same tools that can identify billion-dollar fraud schemes can also identify ordinary citizens, physicians, hospitals, or businesses as statistical outliers. Once government agencies begin relying heavily on predictive analytics and artificial intelligence, the temptation is to assume that unusual patterns are inherently suspicious.Most people already have some experience with this phenomenon. Anyone who has received a traffic citation generated by an automated camera system understands the basic dynamic. The system flags an event, a notice arrives in the mail, and the burden shifts to the citizen to challenge the government’s conclusion. The process may be efficient, but efficiency and accuracy are not always the same thing.That concern is particularly relevant in medicine, where legitimate practices often look unusual when compared against averages. A physician who specializes in difficult cases, a rural practice serving a unique population, or a clinic using innovative treatment approaches may generate billing patterns that differ substantially from their peers. Statistical anomalies can be valuable clues for investigators, but they are not proof of wrongdoing. Courts have repeatedly recognized that unusual billing patterns alone do not establish fraud.There is also an ongoing debate about how far these tools should be allowed to reach. Identifying fraud after the fact is one thing. Using artificial intelligence to delay, deny, or pre-authorize care before services are provided is another.Some physician organizations and hospital groups have expressed concern that systems designed to prevent waste and abuse could eventually create barriers to legitimate patient care, particularly if algorithmic decision-making begins to replace clinical judgment.None of these concerns negates the importance of stopping organized criminal enterprises that steal billions from taxpayer-funded healthcare programs. The challenge is the same one that accompanies every powerful new technology. How do we preserve its benefits while preventing it from becoming overly intrusive, overly bureaucratic, or overly confident in its own conclusions? How do we stop the surveillance state from taking over our civil liberties, as it becomes more powerful and adept at monitoring our lives?That question extends far beyond Medicare fraud. It may ultimately become one of the defining governance challenges of the AI era.The largest Medicare fraud takedown in American history, therefore, tells us more than the fact that hundreds of people have been charged with crimes, and that they spent their ill-gotten gains like drunken sailors (or recently minted tech gazillionaires). It offers a glimpse into how government itself is changing under the influence of Presidential directives aimed at eliminating data silos and implementing AI solutions.The immediate result may be better protection of taxpayer dollars. The longer-term significance may be the emergence of a new era in which algorithm-assisted oversight and processes that echo the “precrime” detection envisioned by mid-century futurist Philip K. Dick become a routine feature of the administrative state.  Take a moment to ponder the proliferation of massive data centers worldwide.  Good luck to all of us maintaining any sort of autonomous personhood and sovereignty in that world.History suggests that once such capabilities are developed and proven effective, they rarely remain limited to their original purpose.  Which is why we need effective legislation put in place now to protect what civil liberties we have left.Otherwise, be careful what you wish for.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.RWM/JGM

Summary: Audio :


Friday Funnies: Crooked Lies and Temporary Status

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 our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Silly me, I thought theducks in the reflecting poolwere getting killed by algae.But let’s be honest, the liberal media making a BFD over a few dead ducks has got to be one of the funniest news stories yet.News flash: we eat animals. Americans eat billions of animals a year, and they even eat ducks.Furthermore, a pair of ducks has about a zillion babies a year because baby ducklings usually don’t survive to adulthood.  It has nothing to do with the quality of water, everything to do with what terrible parents ducks are- and that is why they have about 20 ducklings at a time.So, then why are they running these stories? Is it really about making President Trump look bad? Of course it is.JGM

Summary: Thanks for reading Malone News!


When "Gay" Identification Becomes a Fad

AsPridemonth draws to a close, it is time to reflect on just where that movement has taken America over the last decade. Because it has strayed far from acceptance and equality.Gallopput out a poll  in February on “gay identification.” Gallup estimates that 9% of U.S. adults now identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual, which is almost triple that of 2012.What is kind of creepy is that the rise of identification is primarily in younger cohorts,with 23% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 now identifying as LGBTQ+.Democrats are much more inclined than Republicans to have an LGBTQ+ identity, with 14% of Democrats, compared to 1.9% of Republicans, considering themselves LGBTQ+. Gallop attributes this trend to likely being from LGBTQ+ individuals aligning with the Democratic Party, given the two parties’ stances towardsame-sex marriageand other gay rights issues.City residents are more likely than those living in suburban or rural areas to identify as LGBTQ+.Grooming 101An alternative explanation for the rise in self-identification as LGBTQ+ among young people is that advertising and content on TV, streaming, music, social media, and in corporate messaging are promoting a gay lifestyle as superior and being pushed on children. That campaign is working. Children are drawn to bright, rainbow colors; the pride flag is designed to be attractive to kids. They are exposed to attractive TV characters who have gay relationships and lots of friends, cartoons promoting gay characters, toys, and then there are the gay movie stars as well as musicians.  This is all about the marketing. These advertising campaigns aim to capture children early. And it is working.Hence, a huge rise in LGBTQ+ individuals in such a short time frame supports the thesis that this increase is cultural, due to a national campaign to encourage kids to become gay and transgender. This was and is a grooming campaign.More evidence of cultural conditioning:Misandry (cultural lesbianism)The Reddit thread below cannot establish the prevalence of misandry among the young women - particularly lesbians, but it can provide insight into how members of a community debate these issues among themselves:So, for some - and the percent is unknown- being LGBTQ+ is clearly cultural and has much to do with a hatred or fear of men rather than anything involving genetics. Unfortunately, although this is often debated in lesbian and gay communities, it has not been studied much."Situational lesbians"is a term used to describe women who, due to traumatic experiences with men, reject heterosexual relationships and may express animosity toward men.  Unfortunately, there has been little scientific study of this type of psychological response.  In fact, it is considered one of those taboo subjects in the social sciences.Yet, within certain communities, it is acknowledged openly that for many, that being a lesbian is a choice."Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice."“Lesbianism as a Political Strategy”FromGenderWatchKrebs, Paula M.Off Our Backs; WashingtonVol. 17, Iss. 6, (Jun 30, 1987): 17.Lesbianism is essential as a political strategy of the women’s movement. It’s time to remind ourselves of that. When we recognize what Adrienne Rich and others have pointed out, that heterosexuality in our society is compulsory, necessary to maintain the hierarchies that oppress women, peoples of color, those of different physical abilities, and other people who are not heterosexual white men, we understand that resistance to heterosexuality brings liberation from that aspect of institutional sexism.We can never remind ourselves enough that lesbianism is a political choice; it is never enough that lesbianism be seen as a “lifestyle.”What about grooming for transgender transitions?Annotated BibliographyLittman, L. (2018; corrected 2019).Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria.PLOS ONE, 13(8): e0202330.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202330This paper introduced the hypothesis ofRapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD)based on survey responses from256 parentswho believed their adolescent or young adult child had developed gender dysphoria suddenly during or after puberty.The parents were recruited primarily from websites for families concerned about youth gender transition.Littman observed recurring parental reports of several features: an apparent absence of childhood gender dysphoria, increased identification with transgender peers, extensive use of social media, and a high prevalence of pre-existing mental health conditions.She proposed that, for some adolescents, peer influence, online communities, parent-child conflict, and maladaptive coping mechanisms might contribute to the emergence or expression of gender dysphoria.Although many major corporations have reduced the scale of their Pride marketing since the backlash to the 2023 Bud Light campaign featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, transgender-themed advertising has by no means disappeared. In 2025 and 2026, companies including Levi's, Converse, Adidas, Abercrombie & Fitch, Old Navy, and other consumer brands continued Pride campaigns featuring transgender models, influencers, and messaging centered on gender identity.Outside traditional corporate advertising, the ACLU launched its national "More Than A Game" campaign in 2026, purchasing television advertising around women's sports broadcasts to advocate for transgender youth participation in girls' sports and featuring athletes, celebrities, and transgender youth. The result is that, while corporate America has become more cautious, prominent advertising campaigns that normalize and affirm transgender identity continue to appear in both commercial marketing and advocacy campaigns.Pride Month is no longer simply a grassroots or private-sector observance. Over the past two decades, it has become an institutional project actively promoted by local, state, and, until recently, federal governments. Through official proclamations, taxpayer-funded events, educational initiatives, public displays, and partnerships with advocacy organizations, government at multiple levels has played a significant role in normalizing and celebrating LGBTQ+ identities. The extent of that promotion has varied by jurisdiction and political leadership, but the overall trend has been toward greater official involvement.At the local and state level, governments frequently organize community Pride celebrations, issue formal proclamations, fund educational programming, and display Pride flags and banners on public property. The Village of Wilmette, Illinois, for example, sponsors Pride booths at community markets, hosts library events, installs Progress Pride banners throughout its business district, and issues annual proclamations recognizing Pride Month. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has likewise issued annual Pride Month proclamations since 2020. Or there is the advertising campaign by Colorado:Federal policy has been more dependent on the administration in power. Beginning with President Bill Clinton’s proclamation in 1999, successive Democratic and Republican presidents generally recognized Pride Month in some form, although the scope of federal engagement expanded considerably during the Obama and Biden administrations. President Biden issued annual Pride Month proclamations, illuminated federal buildings in rainbow colors, hosted White House Pride events, and signed the Respect for Marriage Act.That changed following the beginning of President Trump’s second term. Federal agencies largely ceased official Pride Month observances after executive orders dismantled diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and dissolved many employee affinity groups. While members of Congress, including the Congressional Equality Caucus, continue to recognize and celebrate Pride Month, the executive branch has largely withdrawn from the extensive federal sponsorship and promotion that characterized previous administrations.Many of us intuitively knew these campaigns were wrong. When Target put out an advertising campaign for transgender baby clothes, I never went back to  shop there. Then it turns out thatTarget released a line of queer and trans-inclusive undergarments, including chest binders, with what appeared to be teenage models.So, where am I going with all of this?Sexual FetishesHuman sexual development is neither completely innate nor entirely learned. Like many aspects of human behavior, it appears to emerge through an interaction between biology, temperament, hormones, experience, and learning. One area where there is substantial evidence is that sexual interests can, in some cases, be shaped through conditioning.Classical conditioning is the best-established learning mechanism. A neutral object, behavior, or circumstance that repeatedly becomes associated with sexual arousal may itself eventually become sexually arousing. This process is believed to contribute to the development of at least some sexual fetishes. Most experts, however, do not believe conditioning alone explains all fetishes. Genetic predisposition, personality, novelty seeking, and other developmental factors almost certainly also play important roles.Childhood and adolescence appear to be particularly important periods in the formation of adult sexual interests.Researchers generally agree that experiences during puberty and the years surrounding it can influence later patterns of attraction and arousal.This is sometimes described as “sexual imprinting,” although that term comes largely from animal behavior research and is not considered an established model for human sexual development. Human sexuality is considerably more flexible and complex than the fixed imprinting observed in some animal species.This raises an uncomfortable but important question. Can children be groomed toward particular sexual interests or fetishes?The answer is yes. The clinical literature on child sexual abuse and grooming documents that repeated sexual exposure, reinforcement, normalization, and manipulation during childhood can alter aspects of later sexual development. Offenders often deliberately pair affection, approval, secrecy, or rewards with sexual behaviors. Those learned associations can persist long after the abuse has ended.When one views these advertising campaigns through the lens of sexual imprinting, there is no question that their sexual orientation and preferences can be manipulated.So, what happens when little boys are taken to drag queen story hour, with an attractive young trans reading his favorite children’s books, at the library each week, with a great big rainbow flag proudly displayed on the wall? Certainly, routinely going to a drag queen story hour each week might include repeated sexual exposure (provocative clothing and behavior), reinforcement, normalization, and manipulation. Could that not trigger a sexual fetish among some children?That does not mean grooming reliably creates a specific lifelong fetish. Human outcomes are remarkably variable. Some victims later develop atypical patterns of arousal, compulsive sexual behavior, or trauma-related sexual responses. Others develop sexual avoidance or experience no obvious alteration in adult sexual interests. Biology, resilience, subsequent life experiences, and psychological recovery all influence the eventual outcome.Sexual interests develop through an interaction of biology and experience. Conditioning can contribute to the formation of some fetishes and preferences. Childhood and adolescence are important developmental windows during which lasting associations may form. Grooming and sexual abuse have the potential to alter aspects of sexual development, although they do not produce predictable or uniform outcomes.And certainly, there are people who biologically are on one end of the spectrum - who were “born that way”, and all the endocrine disrupting chemicals floating through our environment and our food may also influence sexual orientation.  I don’t dispute that.I am not someone who condemns anyone for identifying as LGBTQ+, but I just don’t believe that having 23% of young adults identifying as such is healthy for our nation.  The historically low birth rates are just one reason.There are longterm health issues. Compared with heterosexual populations, LGBTQ+ individuals, particularly bisexual and transgender people, have substantially higher rates of depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, and suicidal behavior. Physical health differences are generally smaller but include higher rates of certain chronic diseases and health-risk behaviors. Mortality also appears to be higher overall, with particular adverse health signals including elevated deaths from suicide, overdose, and alcohol-related disease.For transgender people, the rates climb exponentially.  These disparities are well documented across many countries.No parent in their right mind would encourage, even push their child into adopting a lifestyle that is so unhealthy.  Likewise, corporations, governments, NGOs, medical professionals, etc. should not be in the business of encouraging children to self-identify as such.  What the Gallop polling teaches us, as well as the medical literature on fetishes, is that for most young adults, identifying as LGBTQ+ isn’t just about biology, it is about grooming. Early childhood can experiences matter.So, as parents and grandparents, it is our job to protect our youth. Particular the most vulnerable, the very young. So, let’s all work to keep the Pride Month messaging as far away from our families as possible.By: 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.ShareThese are examples of what our kids are watching on mainstream media:From CBS Kids:“Nickelodeonis the number-one brand for kids with original cartoons, sitcoms, movies, award shows, products, and more!”CBC Life:

Summary: As Pride month draws to a close, it is time to reflect on just where that movement has taken America over the last decade.


The Supreme Court Puts the EPA Between Patients and the Jury

Audio Version:Much of the reactionto the Supreme Court’s recent Roundup decision has focused on politics. Many supporters of the Make America Healthy Again movement viewed the decision as a profound betrayal. During the campaign, Donald Trump promised to clean up America’s food supply, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. built much of his public career questioning the safety of glyphosate and other agricultural chemicals. Then, in one of the administration’s first major Supreme Court cases involving pesticide regulation, the federal government supported Bayer’s legal position. To many, that appeared to be the end of the conversation.I think it is actually the beginning.The more I have studied the Court’s opinion, the Solicitor General’s brief, and the broader legal framework, the less I believe this case is really about glyphosate. Nor is it simply about Bayer. It raises a much larger question, one that should concern conservatives, libertarians, environmentalists, trial lawyers, physicians, and anyone who cares about the relationship between science and government.Who decides when science has changed?That may sound like an odd question. After all, don’t scientists answer scientific questions?Not entirely.Science produces evidence. Regulators decide whether that evidence justifies changing policy. Courts decide how the law applies. Juries determine disputed facts. For most of American history, those institutions operated as overlapping checks on one another. None possessed complete authority over the others, and that was largely by design.The Roundup decision may have shifted that balance in ways that extend far beyond one herbicide.The legal issue before the Supreme Court was not whether glyphosate causes cancer. The justices did not weigh competing epidemiological studies or review animal experiments. They did not decide whether the International Agency for Research on Cancer or the EPA had the better scientific argument.Instead, the Court answered a much narrower legal question: when EPA approves a pesticide label under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, can state courts later conclude that the manufacturer should have included stronger warnings?The Court’s answer was largely no.For years, individuals who developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma after repeated Roundup exposure brought failure-to-warn lawsuits in state courts. Their argument was straightforward. Regardless of what EPA concluded years earlier, Bayer knew or should have known that newer scientific evidence justified stronger warnings. Juries heard expert testimony, evaluated the evidence, and in many cases agreed.Those lawsuits did more than compensate injured plaintiffs. They became one of the few mechanisms outside the federal regulatory system through which emerging scientific evidence could be tested in public. Discovery compelled companies to produce internal documents. Experts were examined under oath. Regulators, manufacturers, physicians, and scientists all found themselves defending their conclusions in an open courtroom.The Supreme Court has now dramatically narrowed that pathway.State failure-to-warn litigation has historically been one of the most important mechanisms for updating the public's understanding of environmental and health risks. Tobacco, asbestos, pharmaceuticals, lead paint, PFAS, and countless other products all illustrate the same pattern. Scientific evidence evolves. Regulators often move slowly. Litigation forces disclosure of internal documents, exposes competing scientific opinions to public scrutiny, and sometimes reveals risks that regulators either overlooked or underestimated.The Roundup decision potentially changes that dynamic for pesticides and maybe for other products, outside of the EPA's purview. If EPA-approved labels largely preempt state failure-to-warn claims, then one of the principal mechanisms by which new scientific evidence historically entered the public record becomes substantially narrower. That may produce a more uniform regulatory system, but it will delay or even stymie recognition of emerging risks, and is one of the most important criticisms raised by the Court’s decision.This decision does not eliminate every state warning law. California's Proposition 65, for example, is a separate statutory warning system and raises different legal questions. The issue before the Supreme Court was much narrower, but arguably more significant. It involved the traditional state-law failure-to-warn lawsuit, one of the principal ways new scientific evidence has historically been tested in court. By largely preempting those claims for EPA-approved pesticide labels, the Court shifted far greater responsibility to the federal regulatory process. The end result being that there are now fewer opportunities to challenge outdated science.The practical consequence reaches far beyond the thousands of Roundup cases that may now disappear. If EPA’s approval of a warning label largely preempts state-law failure-to-warn claims, then EPA effectively becomes the gatekeeper for deciding when evolving science is sufficient to justify new warnings. That authority no longer belongs primarily to juries hearing new evidence in individual cases. It rests with the federal regulatory process.Science does not stand still. It never has. Regulatory decisions are made using the best evidence available at a particular moment in time. Five years later, ten years later, twenty years later, the scientific landscape may look very different. We have seen that happen repeatedly with pharmaceuticals, tobacco, asbestos, PFAS, endocrine disruptors, lead, and countless other environmental exposures. Glyphosate is simply the latest example.The question, then, is not whether EPA once reached the correct conclusion. The question is what happens when the evidence evolves faster than the regulatory process.If federal law now prevents state juries from hearing that newer evidence, and EPA chooses not to revisit its earlier conclusions, who protects the public?That question extends far beyond glyphosate. Tomorrow it may involve atrazine. Or PFAS. Or microplastics. Or another chemical we have barely begun to study. Every regulatory decision is made with incomplete information. That is the nature of science. Knowledge accumulates. Hypotheses are refined. Consensus changes. Good regulators understand that today’s conclusions are always provisional.The legal system has traditionally recognized that reality. The Supreme Court’s decision suggests a different model, one in which the federal agency increasingly becomes the institution responsible for deciding when the science has changed enough to justify new warnings.That is an extraordinary concentration of authority, and it raises a question that deserves far more discussion than it has received.Can Congress constitutionally create a regulatory system in which one federal agency becomes the exclusive gatekeeper for whether evolving scientific evidence ever reaches an American jury?So How Did We Get Here?If this decision has such sweeping implications, how did the federal government end up supporting Bayer’s position?The answer is more complicated than many headlines suggest.The legal dispute centered on the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), the federal law that gives EPA authority to evaluate pesticides, approve their labels, and regulate how they are sold and used in the United States.Under FIFRA, pesticide manufacturers must submit extensive scientific data to EPA demonstrating that a product can be used without causing “unreasonable adverse effects on the environment” when used according to its label. If EPA approves the product and its labeling, manufacturers are generally prohibited from changing that label without EPA approval.The Trump administration, through Solicitor General D. John Sauer, argued that allowing state-law failure-to-warn lawsuits to proceed would undermine the federal pesticide labeling system created by Congress under FIFRA. The brief repeatedly emphasized that EPA had concluded glyphosate was “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans” and had repeatedly approved Roundup’s label without a cancer warning. If juries in fifty states could effectively require different warnings through tort law, the administration argued, manufacturers would be caught between conflicting state requirements and a federally approved label. For readers interested in how the scientific evidence has evolved beyond EPA’s earlier reviews, we examine the more recent literature inHomesteading for Health.That argument ultimately prevailed.Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, concluded that Missouri’s failure-to-warn lawsuit conflicted with the federal regulatory system established by FIFRA. EPA had repeatedly approved Roundup’s label without a cancer warning after determining that glyphosate was “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” The Court reasoned that if a state jury could nevertheless hold Bayer liable for failing to include a cancer warning, it would effectively require Bayer to place a warning on its label that EPA had declined to require. In the Court’s view, that conflict meant federal law preempted the state-law claim.Importantly, the Court did not conclude that glyphosate is safe or that it cannot cause cancer. Nor did it decide which side has the stronger scientific evidence. The decision turned on a legal principle: when Congress creates a federal labeling system and gives EPA authority to approve those labels, can individual states use tort law to impose different warning requirements? The Court answered that question largely in the negative.The practical effect, however, is far broader than the legal reasoning. EPA’s determination that glyphosate did not require a cancer warning now carries extraordinary legal weight. Thousands of failure-to-warn lawsuits challenging that determination are expected to disappear, leaving many plaintiffs with little or no meaningful recourse through the courts. In effect, EPA’s scientific judgment has become the gatekeeper for whether these claims can even be heard.What makes this particularly interesting is that the federal government’s position changed.The Biden administration did not embrace Bayer’s broad preemption argument. The Trump administration did. That reversal has received remarkably little public explanation beyond the legal arguments contained in the Solicitor General’s brief.Ironically, the Biden administration’s position aligned more closely with several principles that have defined the modern conservative legal movement. Leaving these claims in state court preserved the traditional role of juries, respected state common law, and avoided expanding the federal administrative state. The Trump administration instead argued for national regulatory uniformity under FIFRA, placing EPA’s regulatory determinations above conflicting state-law claims for warning labels.That makes this decision difficult to reconcile with two of the Supreme Court’s most celebrated recent opinions,DobbsandLoper Bright.InDobbs, the Court returned abortion policy to the states because the Constitution did not create a federal right. InLoper Bright, it rejected Chevron deference and reaffirmed that courts, not administrative agencies, determine the meaning of statutes. Both of these cases were celebrated by constitutional conservatives, including myself, as returning power to the people and to the states.Yet in the Roundup case, EPA’s scientific determination became the foundation for preempting state-law warning claims. The legal doctrines are different, but the practical effect is striking. The Court limited agency authority in one context while giving extraordinary practical force to an agency’s scientific determinations in another.That raises another obvious question.Why did the administration decide this was the right case in which to defend EPA’s authority?What we do know is that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has consistently framed pesticide regulation as a matter of following the Administrative Procedure Act, respecting existing scientific review processes, and ensuring that agency actions survive judicial scrutiny. When asked publicly about glyphosate, he has repeatedly declined to declare it either safe or unsafe, instead saying that EPA will “let the scientists do the science” and follow the law.We also know that Zeldin met with Bayer’s chief executive while the litigation was pending. Internal EPA planning documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act indicate that Bayer intended to discuss its litigation, Supreme Court strategy, and labeling issues. EPA has characterized the meeting as a routine discussion with a regulated company and has denied that it was intended to influence the litigation.Reuters has also reported that Administrator Zeldin later met repeatedly with leaders of the grassroots MAHA movement to discuss glyphosate, pesticides, PFAS, plastics, and other chemical exposures. Coincidentally, just last Monday, I attended a private MAHA Action event where Administrator Zeldin spoke. Throughout his remarks, he carefully avoided expressing any opinion about whether glyphosate or other agricultural chemicals present significant health risks. Instead, he repeatedly returned to one theme: EPA would follow the science and follow the law.It was a lawyer’s answer, not a public health answer.The audience noticed. During the reception afterward, the conversations in the room made it clear that many longtime MAHA supporters were deeply dissatisfied. One male attendee, whom I had never met, walked up to Jill and I and said loudly, “That man is full of shit.” Whether one agrees with that assessment or not, it reflected a broader frustration that EPA appeared more interested in defending its existing regulatory framework than seriously confronting the growing scientific debate surrounding these chemicals.If you believe this analysis raises questions that deserve a broader public discussion, please help us get it in front of more people.Share it on X. Cross-post it to Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, and other platforms. Email it to friends, attorneys, physicians, scientists, farmers, journalists, and policymakers. Send it to anyone who cares about public health, regulatory policy, or the future of the American legal system.ShareThis article is not really about glyphosate. It is about who gets to decide when science has changed, and whether Americans should still have access to the courts when new evidence emerges. Those questions deserve far more attention than they have received.Independent journalism grows one reader at a time. If this article made you think differently about the issue, the most valuable thing you can do is help someone else read it.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. approaches these questions primarily through the lens of public health and precaution. Lee Zeldin approaches them as an administrative lawyer charged with defending the integrity of the EPA’s regulatory process. Those perspectives will almost inevitably produce different priorities when litigation reaches the Supreme Court.What is troubling is why the administration concluded that preserving EPA’s existing regulatory position was more important than preserving the traditional role of state juries in evaluating evolving scientific evidence.Even more troubling is what this decision implicitly asks the public to accept. It assumes that EPA’s previous scientific determinations remain sufficiently current to justify closing the courthouse doors to thousands of plaintiffs, despite more than a decade of additional research and an expanding scientific literature. If EPA is going to become the effective gatekeeper for when evolving science may be considered by the courts, then the agency assumes an extraordinary obligation to revisit its conclusions promptly, transparently, and without institutional bias.That is a remarkably high level of trust to place in any federal agency.The FDA has been subjected to years of public scrutiny over concerns about regulatory capture, revolving-door employment, industry influence, and the pace at which it responds to emerging scientific evidence. The EPA, by contrast, has largely escaped that same level of public examination, despite making decisions that affect virtually every American through our food supply, drinking water, and environment.This case changes that equation.If the courts are now saying that EPA’s scientific determinations effectively foreclose many state-law failure-to-warn claims, then EPA’s scientific independence is no longer simply a regulatory issue. It becomes a constitutional issue affecting access to the civil justice system itself. The agency’s scientific reviews, conflicts of interest, advisory committees, interactions with regulated industries, and willingness to revisit earlier conclusions deserve the same level of public scrutiny as the FDA.If the agency is going to become the nation’s principal gatekeeper for determining when evolving scientific evidence may reach a jury, then the public has every right to demand complete transparency, rigorous independent review, and confidence that regulatory decisions are being driven by science rather than institutional inertia or the interests of the industries being regulated.Congress assumed that EPA would continually revisit pesticide registrations as science evolved. FIFRA requires registration reviews at least every 15 years, but the EPA also has the authority to require label changes much sooner when new evidence demonstrates they are warranted. The agency has exercised that authority repeatedly for other pesticides, including dicamba, paraquat, chlorpyrifos, and several neonicotinoids.Glyphosate presents a very different picture.Glyphosate entered EPA's current registration review in 2009. The agency issued an Interim Registration Review Decision in 2020 reaffirming its conclusion that glyphosate was "not likely to be carcinogenic to humans."In 2022, however, the Ninth Circuit concluded that EPA had not adequately explained portions of its human-health analysis and had also failed to satisfy several environmental review requirements, including its obligations under the Endangered Species Act. Rather than defend the decision, EPA withdrew it and began revising its analysis. More than fifteen years after the review began, the agency is still working toward a final determination.In other words, one of the world’s most widely used herbicides has remained under regulatory review for well over a decade and a half, while the scientific literature has continued to expand.The Supreme Court’s decision rests on an implicit assumption: that EPA will revisit labels whenever new scientific evidence warrants it. EPA unquestionably possesses that authority. The question is why it hasn’t used its authority to do so quickly enough. If federal preemption now prevents state juries from considering whether warnings should have changed, the public becomes almost entirely dependent upon EPA’s willingness to reconsider its own earlier conclusions. That places extraordinary importance on the transparency, independence, and timeliness of EPA’s scientific review process.There is another aspect of this case that has received remarkably little attention.The Supreme Court’s analysis, like much of the public debate, focused primarily on whether glyphosate causes cancer. That was understandable because the underlying lawsuits involved plaintiffs diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But cancer is no longer the only scientific question surrounding glyphosate, and many researchers would argue it is no longer the most important one.Over the past decade, the scientific literature has expanded dramatically. Researchers are now investigating endocrine disruption, alterations of the gut microbiome, chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, metabolic disease, reproductive and developmental toxicity, neuroinflammation, possible effects on autism spectrum disorder and ADHD, chronic low-dose exposure, cumulative exposure to multiple agricultural chemicals, and whether commercial glyphosate formulations behave differently than glyphosate alone.Whether each of these findings ultimately proves causal remains an active area of scientific investigation. That is not the point.The point is that the scientific questions themselves have changed.EPA’s earlier reviews focused primarily on whether glyphosate posed an unreasonable carcinogenic risk. Today’s science is asking a much broader set of questions about chronic disease, metabolism, neurological development, endocrine signaling, the microbiome, and cumulative environmental exposures. Those are fundamentally different questions from the ones the agency was asking twenty years ago.If federal preemption now means EPA becomes the effective gatekeeper for whether evolving scientific evidence may support new warnings, then EPA’s responsibility extends beyond periodically revisiting yesterday’s conclusions. It must also continually ask whether it is investigating the right questions in the first place.Otherwise, the legal system freezes not only yesterday’s scientific conclusions, but yesterday’s understanding of what health risks deserve investigation. That is a dangerous place for both science and public health.But this is the direction this Supreme Court decision has led to, and, frankly, this ruling does not bode well for the health of America.By: JGM/RWMIf you found this analysis valuable, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.Articles like this are not written from press releases or headlines. They require days of reading Supreme Court opinions, agency filings, scientific papers, regulatory documents, and historical records to understand not only what happened, but why it matters.The question raised by this case extends far beyond glyphosate. It reaches into how government evaluates science, how federal agencies exercise power, and whether ordinary citizens retain meaningful access to the courts when scientific understanding evolves.Those are not easy stories to report, and they are rarely covered in depth by legacy media.Your paid subscription makes this work possible. It allows us to follow the documents instead of the narrative, ask uncomfortable questions regardless of where they lead, and produce the kind of long-form investigative analysis that simply does not fit into today’s news cycle.If you believe this kind of independent scholarship and investigative journalism matters, I hope you’ll consider supporting our work by becoming a paid subscriber. 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Summary: and this may change every future chemical exposure case